Nothing about SpaceX except marketing hype has to do with Mars, can we just stop it with the Mars talk? It belittles what SpaceX actually is about, which is amazing in its own right. Launch demand, cheaper LEO/GEO/GTO, and a willingness to push the industry out of the 60’s is almost unbelievable, as is the journey they’ve taken to get this far. Throwing Mars into the mix makes it all sounds like bullshit, because anyone who actually understands the challenges of Mars beyond the big rocket portion rolls their eyes and sighs.
I’d also add that competing with the likes of Comcast and Verizon could be very profitable in the long term. I don’t think we need to assume it doesn’t serve its own obvious purpose of being th first big step in getting that sweet ISP money.
Edit api: It makes sense for a lot of things that a demand actually exists for, like heavy loads, launching a number of different contracts in one reusable rocket to save on overhead, defense contracts, and more. Those will actually make them money, and are all technically feasible today.
Mars is the vision and it is going to take an incredible amount of effort to make that possible. We need to find uses for that technology here and now so that the costs for it can be brought down.
It is not just a matter of having a human put their feet down on Mars and then be done with it. How will we move around (Boring and Tesla btw)? How will we communicate there and back to people on Earth? How will we feed ourselves there? Etc..
IMHO, Starlink (on Mars) is an answer to the communication challenges we will face there. By doing it on Earth, we prove it out, bring the costs down, provide a better internet alternative to what we have now, and have synergies with his other companies like Tesla (communication without needing cell providers) and SpaceX (increase launch demand).
They are building a super heavy lift rocket that makes the most sense for sending humans to the Moon and Mars. Other roles can be served reasonably well by Falcon and FH. Outside manned tourism, exploration, and settlement there is little need for a rocket that big.
Also... marketing hype for who? We think the Mars stuff is cool, sure, but we are not SpaceX's customers. Their customers could care less. They care if their payloads fly to the right orbit.
Jeremy Clarkson really really doesn’t represent the world of “car enthusiasts” or journalists in general. He’s an entertainer, part of a latter day Three Stooges and tarring an entire branch of journalism with his brush is like saying that because Sean Hannity is a fuckwit, so was Walter Cronkite.
It turns out... they're probably right in this case. ;)
eg it does look like Time, Inc owns it, and the new owner of Time, Inc does sit on the board of both a Thai Gas company and some other (Thai?) energy company.
GR was amazing, but it wasn’t well known and accepted until the first measurements confirmed it. Quantum Computing is still very much up in the air, but it’s also weird to bring it up in this context, because QM is one of the most tested theories of all time. QED In particular is tested to the most decimal places of any prediction, ever. It’s also weird to act as though GR and QM started out in a vacuum, instead of what they really were, which was based on centuries of math, theory, and experiment.
Edit: Unrelated, but I see you’re a fellow Greg Egan fan, good to meet you! Planck Dive has to be one of my all time favorites.
We are talking past each other: It is a bit contradictory to say "quantum computing is up in the air" and "QM is one of the most tested theories" as an argument against what I am saying. Yes, both are statements are true, but they are in no ways counterpoints to what I am saying, if anything they support it. QM is a well established and empirically tested theory. Quantum Computing is a purely mathematical construct that emerged from that well established theory without any experimental evidence for it, and only now, 30 years later, we are starting to have a chance to employ this purely mathematical construct in practice.
Same with GR: it was a purely mathematical construct for a while until we could test it, but there were too many theory clues that it must be right.
And this is not selection/survival bias: it is extremely rare for humanity to find a robust mathematical construct for which we can have a high degree of certainty that it describes the universe well. In the few cases where we have had that certainty, due to mathematical proofs in seemingly disjoint fields, we ended up being right.
To push it to stuff like super strings and quantum gravity: few respected scientists would claim that their pet mathematical construct is correct, but many of them will say "the vague commonalities between all these diverse and seemingly unrelated mathematical constructs definitely point to an underlying fundamental construct".
Please just stop. Even your attempt at mitigation through edit is wrong, and it would have been trivial for you to correct your misapprehension. There are an estimated 10 million Catholics in California compared to between 27-58 million in France. Besides, the value of the place as a cultural institution visited by 13m+ a year just to see it isn’t something you should dismiss along with its centuries of cultural significance just because it offends your religious sensibilities.
It’s also a miserable stance to take while the place is still literally on fire.
I googled this, and was very very sorry that I did. Suffice it to say this terminology is specific to a subculture of people who dress up as animal mascots. Booping snoots apparently means touching the nose, I think? I also ran across something called “cub porn” and now I need a shower so hot it can melt glass.
fwiw, after reading this post, i searched "boop snoots" (with quotes) on both duckduckgo and google, and came up with nothing disturbing in the first page of results for either search. nothing that even indicated a connection to furry subculture, far as i could tell.
maybe other variations on that search come up with much more risque results?
I didn’t just google “boop snoots;” I googled that, googled “furries” and went down the rabbit hole a bit.
...A decision I now heartily regret. The two major things I found is that some people are very weird, and some other people hate the weird ones disproportionately considering their prevalence and general demeanor.
ah, yeah, well, sorry. maybe don't chase that rabbit like that next time?
also i find the "rabbit hole" metaphor and a username beginning with "dbased" to be pretty "on the nose" in the context of this thread (sorry, i couldn't resist any of that, and i only realized i ended with a pun after typing it out).
Cub porn is generally frowned upon among furries. Don't judge a group of tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people by a glance at a few dark corners.
Ummm if cub porn is what I think it is and it is frowned upon which it sounds like it is then imho I suggest not using a community-specific euphemism as the euphemism implicitly grants it a place and status within your community.
Adding to Tomalpha’s list (I especially endorse The News Quiz, and the new host Miles Jupp is hysterical)
I’d add Victoria Coren-Mitchell’s run of ‘Heresy’,
‘Cabin Pressure’ (John Finnemore is a genius, and Cumberbatch does a great comedic turn),
‘It’s Not What You Know’ (more Miles Jupp excellence),
‘The Unbelievable Truth’ (Many seasons of comedic brilliance hosted by David Mitchell),
and to a somewhat lesser extent ‘The Rest Is History’ hosted by Frank Skinner, ‘Fags, Mags and Bags’ (helps to actually have spent some real time in the UK to appreciate), and for long car journeys ‘Just A Minute’ can be fun.
I’d also add that competing with the likes of Comcast and Verizon could be very profitable in the long term. I don’t think we need to assume it doesn’t serve its own obvious purpose of being th first big step in getting that sweet ISP money.
Edit api: It makes sense for a lot of things that a demand actually exists for, like heavy loads, launching a number of different contracts in one reusable rocket to save on overhead, defense contracts, and more. Those will actually make them money, and are all technically feasible today.