Users often expend considerable effort to build social networks and such based on such created expectations. That can create greater liability than merely the ad views.
Let us not forget that paying customers often spent money based on these same expectations. If I'm advertising to some ideological block, and Twitter cuts them off, that affects my revenue as well.
For example, the handedness of molecules in Earthly life is related to CP violation of physics,
I strongly doubt that. I would suggest instead that handedness is a result of it being more efficient to have key molecules of one handedness rather than both. Then it becomes random chance which handedness becomes dominant, assuming there was ever a competition in the first place rather than handedness manifesting from the beginning.
All of a sudden you want to enforce "truth in advertising" laws? Do you love Big Government that much?
It's contract enforcement which is not "Big Government".
Second, the people who are being "censored" on Twitter are not the customers of Twitter. Nobody pays to post on Twitter. So, I don't see how the "advertising" even matters in regard to Twitter users.
It's quite irrelevant to the discussion what role a user plays in the business model.
While what Twitter is doing may be broadly defined as "censorship", there is absolutely no law against what they are doing. Not in the Constitution, not in the legal statutes, and not in case law. It still comes down to, "if you don't like the way Twitter works, don't use Twitter".
I already cited a counterexample which if you recall, you dismissed on the grounds that it was "Big Government", not that it was incorrect.
Subject to the rules they must follow. Let us keep in mind that if they portray themselves in public, for example, as being the place where you can write what you think, and they censor you for writing what you think, then that's violating truth in advertising laws which a number of countries, including the US, have.
The tiny little ISS in low orbit cost in excess of 100 billion, and you're telling me you can build a 44 thousand mile tall geosynchronously orbiting building for 10 billion?
The ISS was put with the Space Shuttle. That alone added tens of billions of dollars to the cost. Meanwhile most of the launch cost of the tether (which would be using a much cheaper launch vehicle from the future rather than one of the most expensive vehicles of the past) would be the initial tether, with future tethers riding off of the cheap launch costs of the first tether.
Second, the ISS is comprised of a bunch of really expensive, custom-made, one-off pieces. Meanwhile most of the tether is a cable which only differs along its length in width. That allows you to apply substantial economies of scale since you're making 44k miles of the thing.
The earlier poster meant SLS, but it applies to the Shuttle as well. It was always about making sure considerable public funds makes it way to the right campaign donors and the right congressional districts.
coming up with physics-breaking technologies [...] Dyson spheres
Aren't physically impossible. When Dyson first proposed the Dyson sphere he was talking about what is now termed Dyson swarms, clouds of satellites absorbing the light of a star. That is physically possible though a difficult relativistic traffic routing/fluid flow problem.
There's much more room for improvement with AI than there is with energy storage via chemical batteries. The latter is strongly constrained as you noted:
and the scientists will describe the energy and chemical constraints of the laws of physics that make that prediction ridiculously wrong
Where's the corresponding constraints on AI? We're nowhere near most of the physical constraints on computation. More relevantly, our computer and software systems have experienced enormous bloat over the decades of Moore's law. Getting the same results out of a factor of 50 fewer CPU cycles is not an unreasonable expectation. A strong AI might be able to get a lot more work than that out of the same number of CPU cycles.
But in this case, as opposed to violent crimes and the like, there is no benefit in removing this guy from society for a bit, other than making an example out of him.
Which let us note, is a considerable benefit. I'm not seeing the cause for complaint here. The operator did act in a way that was likely to cause injury. That's one of the big reasons why violent crimes are punished as well.
And I say that it's your party's fault too. Year after year of republitard cuts killed NASA.
You do realize that SLS exists in the first place only because of republitard senators? My view is that SLS will probably fail utterly, not because of the republitards, but because SLS is based on really stupid economics. Even if it successfully launches some point in the future, it'll be many times more expensive than commercial alternatives.
The point I was making was that game devs of the time weren't even trying to build a intelligent, learning system that would adapt to player behavior or environmental changes, but they simply took the lazy/easy path of just peeking at player input and using asymmetrical information to appear to be smarter than they actually were.
In other words, when you slightly change the rules about how AI is supposed to work, the problems turned out so easy that the developer didn't need to bother with any formal AI approaches.
It's also worth noting that the developer solved the problem. Excessive problem description and feature creation is a notorious killer of many academic projects not just in the AI world. The business world occasionally falls prey to that as well, but as we see here, not always.
I am a little confused though, on how either of these points leads you to the conclusion that 'Academic Techniques' aren't adequate for real world problems. Some of the best and most exiting work in the 'real world' being done by big companies is built solidly on academic techniques. Go read about Google's machine translate work, for example. It is built on a neural net model, and is making some pretty amazing progress.
First, on your machine translation example, "amazing progress" compared to what? Both neural nets and machine translation have been around for decades. The "wow" factor of Google's efforts comes from the infrastructure that has been built up (being able to copy/paste something something to be translated over the internet effortlessly and throw orders of magnitude more CPU cycles at it) rather than the algorithm.
What I consider a more relevant case of doing something new with neural networks is Google's Deep Dream where one uses a neural network trained on finding certain images (say like images of buildings) to iteratively perturb images (like a mundane landscape photo) to bring out those patterns (ending up with a weird, psychedelic image with lots of buildings crammed into every part of the image).
Unfortunately, there's not a lot of academic precedent for that. The related research articles heavily emphasize classification and detection improvements not the wow of turning a boring image into piles of buildings or whatever. Going to the games genre, this would be an excellent way for a neural network to create on the fly themed maps and art for a game. Train a neural net to spot the desired sort of maps or artwork and then starting with a sufficiently simulating pile of mush, bring out the desired patterns iteratively in the mush.
Finally, if you hope that using my own opinions about the state of AI will somehow shore up your opinion of academic AI techniques, I will be the first to claim that I am a talented amateur at best. Build your arguments on my thoughs on the topic, and you are truly building a house on sand!
You made the claim that academics are at least a century out from building anything resembling human or higher level AI. That says right there that you don't think they have much to say about the subject now. This brings up my second point, Your beliefs are inconsistent. We don't need to care about any validation of my beliefs when the conflicts in your beliefs are more than ample to defeat your assertions.
The most obvious source of any AI development is completely missed here. It's not academics, CEOs, or secretive government agencies. It's computers. Once you've completely automated the creation of human or better level AI, then it's not going to need a century to get there. You might not even need a day.
Bootstrapping more sophisticated algorithms from existing one that have sufficient power to improve themselves is the great missing step here, I think. And modern AI research simply isn't going that way at present. I think at some point that will change, then we'll come up with more relevant concerns than how many more centuries we'll wait till humanity does this thing.
I love how CEOs like this guy and Elon (idiot) Musk are predicting the future of AI development. As opposed to say, leading AI researchers that are attending conferences and writing papers on the state of the art.
What do AI researchers have to do with AI? Let's recall some things you've said before:
Ten years out? As a veteran programmer and AI enthusiast, I'd say it was more like a century. We cannot build a computer that can model a bug's brain activity, let alone something a million times more complicated like a human brain. And that doesn't even get us to the 'superhuman intelligence' category that people are afraid of.
In other words, AI researchers are in your opinion a century out from having a relevant opinion on AI. Then there's your discussion with a MS game developer:
I was having a conversation with a guy who was working on AI algorithims, and I asked what sort of schemes he used, fuzzy-logic, Genetic learning, or weighted neural nets? He told me that they didn't bother with academic AI techniques, because he could already write an AI that could beat the player every time without them.
I was completely at a loss for words, so I just thanked him and ran away.
Yet another indication that the "academic AI techniques" might not be up to snuff for dealing with real world AI creation and consequential issues.
Taking away said energy OTOH is a different matter. That's something that thrusters at the far end of the space tether can do.
Again, not a freshman-physics pendulum. We're not talking spherical cows uniformly radiating milk here. The upwards and downwards payloads would be in different places on the tether (except momentarily) and so would each be doing there own thing to complicate the system.
But in a matter that is significant less worse than your original problem.
You might find it entertaining to watch some youtube videos of 2- and 3-section pendulum, elastic pendulums, and so on. They don't work and play well with others.
So what? We know how to control stuff a lot more complicated than that.
Presumably, we'd launch more of them, *if* we wanted to go back to the Moon.
Hasn't been the case in practice. Saturn V, Shuttle, Constellation, and now SLS have all sucked oxygen out of the room for actual exploration and development of the Moon and elsewhere. They've never achieved the launch frequency, reliability, or cost savings to justify their use. And aside from the Saturn V era, we've never had the need for the capabilities (particularly, the large payload and fairing size) these rockets bring,
For example, this blog post discusses an alternate past where the Shuttle wasn't built and NASA instead continued on with the Saturn 1B and a small reusable manned vehicle (say 3 people plus cargo, a bit better than the Apollo capsule in payload).
They could have still flown everything that the Shuttle flew for 30 years and have a demonstration of a reusable vehicle at a small fraction of the cost of the Shuttle.
Another alternate past. Consider that we knew after the Challenger accident that the Space Shuttle would never achieve a launch frequency that would be economical. Discontinue the Shuttle in 1990. From that point on, there was only one thing that ever required the features of the Shuttle, the Hubble Telescope repair missions which simply weren't valuable. Instead, hustle the development of the EELV (Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle) program (which built the Delta IV and AtlasV rockets) so that it was developed a decade earlier in the early 1990s instead of the early 2000s.
Then everything that was done with the Shuttle could then be done with EELVs, such as building the ISS or launching space telescope replacements for Hubble, with the use of EELVs, saving tens of billions of dollars over the 20 year period through 2010 and boosting commercial space flight in the process. And when Falcon 9 was developed, it would easily slide into this NASA strategy where everything is launched on rockets of that size.
It doesn't really make sense to start with a factory on the Moon to produce things that we don't need yet.
Depends on the lead time and the need. There already is some need for propellant in space at costs less than a few thousand dollars per kg.
We can launch everything from Earth, until we need such large quantities that it becomes cost effective to produce them on the Moon. I expect we'll never reach that point.
Depends on what inputs are needed for activity on the Moon. If everything coming from the Moon has to come from Earth first, it'll never make sense. If it just takes a few tens of millions of dollars initial input, plus a few hundred thousand dollars per year in telepresence work to deliver hundreds of tons of liquid oxygen propellant to low Earth orbit, then it'll pay for itself fast.
Because there's not much need for lifting giant payloads right now. But *if* we wanted to go back to the Moon, it would make sense to build another one.
*If* we wanted to go back to the Moon, we could have done it right after halting the Saturn V with one of the many 20-25 ton launchers that has been kicking around for the past 50 years. What's ignored here is that you can buy a lot of lunar presence on existing rockets with the funds that have been spent on big rockets from the Shuttle up to the SLS.
I never said you couldn't build stuff in orbit. it just adds extra complexities and cost.
Big rockets might be a little less complex, but they are more expensive due to the terrible launch frequency.
SLS is up to 2.5 times the LEO capacity of a Falcon Heavy, which SpaceX has never actually launched. SLS is in a different class. SpaceX might launch a Heavy in 2017, but I personally doubt it; SpaceX has never hesitated to push back dates and they've done exactly that with each new development phase. That's not a knock; they've done well and should continue their pattern. But SLS goes up in 2018 and even that first launch will achieve greater lift capacity than anything SpaceX or its competitors are actually building, never mind the SLS scale out to 130,000kg.
In other words, NASA might launch an SLS variant this decade, but they probably won't. Funny how your personal doubt fails to extend to NASA which is even more notorious than SpaceX for delaying launches and failing to deliver on a launch vehicle.
It's easier to make a bigger rocket than to assemble stuff in LEO.
Then why is the US the only one to have ever made this "bigger rocket" (Saturn V and Shuttle). And currently doesn't make it?
Meanwhile we have a fair number of countries who have assembled things in orbit (US, Russia, China, all separately and the ISS group).
The problem here is that there's no rocket so big that you don't need to assemble things in orbit. You need to learn how to assemble things no matter how big your rocket is.
Meanwhile once you've learned how to assemble things in orbit, you don't need that expensive big launcher. You can put all your stuff up on the cheapest, high launch frequency launcher instead, greatly reducing the cost of such missions.
But good luck getting Elon Musk to focus on the practical and eminently desirable target of the Moon. He isn't interested. It's only Mars for Elon.
He's interested in paying customers. Maybe someone who is interested in lunar development should buy some Falcon 9 or Heavy launches and just make it happen?
The energy stored in the system would increase with every payload until it destroyed itself, because there's no way to shed that unwanted energy - minimal friction, trivial air resistance, and so on.
There are a couple of approaches for dealing with that. First,use an extremely efficient propulsion system like electric propulsion to shed said energy and provide the mundane control needed for the system.
Second, you can run payloads down the tether at the same time as your run them up the tether. That would keep the energy balance stable.
A ban on murdering people? Hmmm, might be a good idea.
Oh wait, you mean a ban on drones because someone might attempt to kill people with one? How about we ban cars then? After all, we know that people deliberate kill other people with cars.
In what way is giving away some "freedoms" you never really needed anyway for the good of the community a bad thing? Society is more important than individuals, we Europeans know that.
A society that doesn't protect "unnecessary" individual freedom is not one worth living in. There are two things to note here. First, it's easy to define any sort of freedom as unnecessary. North Korea has done so, for example. Similarly, the idea of primacy of society has justified all sorts of abuses against people by powerful parties who can convenient align the interests of society to fulfill their own interests.
Second, it is better to black list proven harmful action and behavior (I would go for a much more stringent sort of harm, substantial harm against innocent parties who aren't "coming to the nuisance" or otherwise engaging in behavior that deliberately and expectedly exposes themselves to the harm by choice) rather than white list proven harmless or necessary action and behavior. I shouldn't have to prove to society or government that my desired actions are necessary to me. It simply shouldn't be the business of society or government to make that determination, particular since neither has ever shown any competence or impartiality in doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Users often expend considerable effort to build social networks and such based on such created expectations. That can create greater liability than merely the ad views.
Let us not forget that paying customers often spent money based on these same expectations. If I'm advertising to some ideological block, and Twitter cuts them off, that affects my revenue as well.
For example, the handedness of molecules in Earthly life is related to CP violation of physics,
I strongly doubt that. I would suggest instead that handedness is a result of it being more efficient to have key molecules of one handedness rather than both. Then it becomes random chance which handedness becomes dominant, assuming there was ever a competition in the first place rather than handedness manifesting from the beginning.
You don't pay to use Twitter, so where's the contract?
Advertising is a contract. And users do pay to use Twitter, it's just in ad views instead of money.
All of a sudden you want to enforce "truth in advertising" laws? Do you love Big Government that much?
It's contract enforcement which is not "Big Government".
Second, the people who are being "censored" on Twitter are not the customers of Twitter. Nobody pays to post on Twitter. So, I don't see how the "advertising" even matters in regard to Twitter users.
It's quite irrelevant to the discussion what role a user plays in the business model.
While what Twitter is doing may be broadly defined as "censorship", there is absolutely no law against what they are doing. Not in the Constitution, not in the legal statutes, and not in case law. It still comes down to, "if you don't like the way Twitter works, don't use Twitter".
I already cited a counterexample which if you recall, you dismissed on the grounds that it was "Big Government", not that it was incorrect.
They can do as they please.
Subject to the rules they must follow. Let us keep in mind that if they portray themselves in public, for example, as being the place where you can write what you think, and they censor you for writing what you think, then that's violating truth in advertising laws which a number of countries, including the US, have.
Something like NASA's asteroid capture would be adequate to get a counterweight of the necessary size on that other end.
The tiny little ISS in low orbit cost in excess of 100 billion, and you're telling me you can build a 44 thousand mile tall geosynchronously orbiting building for 10 billion?
The ISS was put with the Space Shuttle. That alone added tens of billions of dollars to the cost. Meanwhile most of the launch cost of the tether (which would be using a much cheaper launch vehicle from the future rather than one of the most expensive vehicles of the past) would be the initial tether, with future tethers riding off of the cheap launch costs of the first tether.
Second, the ISS is comprised of a bunch of really expensive, custom-made, one-off pieces. Meanwhile most of the tether is a cable which only differs along its length in width. That allows you to apply substantial economies of scale since you're making 44k miles of the thing.
The earlier poster meant SLS, but it applies to the Shuttle as well. It was always about making sure considerable public funds makes it way to the right campaign donors and the right congressional districts.
coming up with physics-breaking technologies [...] Dyson spheres
Aren't physically impossible. When Dyson first proposed the Dyson sphere he was talking about what is now termed Dyson swarms, clouds of satellites absorbing the light of a star. That is physically possible though a difficult relativistic traffic routing/fluid flow problem.
But he's doing the same thing with AI.
There's much more room for improvement with AI than there is with energy storage via chemical batteries. The latter is strongly constrained as you noted:
and the scientists will describe the energy and chemical constraints of the laws of physics that make that prediction ridiculously wrong
Where's the corresponding constraints on AI? We're nowhere near most of the physical constraints on computation. More relevantly, our computer and software systems have experienced enormous bloat over the decades of Moore's law. Getting the same results out of a factor of 50 fewer CPU cycles is not an unreasonable expectation. A strong AI might be able to get a lot more work than that out of the same number of CPU cycles.
But in this case, as opposed to violent crimes and the like, there is no benefit in removing this guy from society for a bit, other than making an example out of him.
Which let us note, is a considerable benefit. I'm not seeing the cause for complaint here. The operator did act in a way that was likely to cause injury. That's one of the big reasons why violent crimes are punished as well.
And I say that it's your party's fault too. Year after year of republitard cuts killed NASA.
You do realize that SLS exists in the first place only because of republitard senators? My view is that SLS will probably fail utterly, not because of the republitards, but because SLS is based on really stupid economics. Even if it successfully launches some point in the future, it'll be many times more expensive than commercial alternatives.
The point I was making was that game devs of the time weren't even trying to build a intelligent, learning system that would adapt to player behavior or environmental changes, but they simply took the lazy/easy path of just peeking at player input and using asymmetrical information to appear to be smarter than they actually were.
In other words, when you slightly change the rules about how AI is supposed to work, the problems turned out so easy that the developer didn't need to bother with any formal AI approaches.
It's also worth noting that the developer solved the problem. Excessive problem description and feature creation is a notorious killer of many academic projects not just in the AI world. The business world occasionally falls prey to that as well, but as we see here, not always.
I am a little confused though, on how either of these points leads you to the conclusion that 'Academic Techniques' aren't adequate for real world problems. Some of the best and most exiting work in the 'real world' being done by big companies is built solidly on academic techniques. Go read about Google's machine translate work, for example. It is built on a neural net model, and is making some pretty amazing progress.
First, on your machine translation example, "amazing progress" compared to what? Both neural nets and machine translation have been around for decades. The "wow" factor of Google's efforts comes from the infrastructure that has been built up (being able to copy/paste something something to be translated over the internet effortlessly and throw orders of magnitude more CPU cycles at it) rather than the algorithm.
What I consider a more relevant case of doing something new with neural networks is Google's Deep Dream where one uses a neural network trained on finding certain images (say like images of buildings) to iteratively perturb images (like a mundane landscape photo) to bring out those patterns (ending up with a weird, psychedelic image with lots of buildings crammed into every part of the image).
Unfortunately, there's not a lot of academic precedent for that. The related research articles heavily emphasize classification and detection improvements not the wow of turning a boring image into piles of buildings or whatever. Going to the games genre, this would be an excellent way for a neural network to create on the fly themed maps and art for a game. Train a neural net to spot the desired sort of maps or artwork and then starting with a sufficiently simulating pile of mush, bring out the desired patterns iteratively in the mush.
Finally, if you hope that using my own opinions about the state of AI will somehow shore up your opinion of academic AI techniques, I will be the first to claim that I am a talented amateur at best. Build your arguments on my thoughs on the topic, and you are truly building a house on sand!
You made the claim that academics are at least a century out from building anything resembling human or higher level AI. That says right there that you don't think they have much to say about the subject now. This brings up my second point, Your beliefs are inconsistent. We don't need to care about any validation of my beliefs when the conflicts in your beliefs are more than ample to defeat your assertions.
The most obvious source of any AI development is completely missed here. It's not academics, CEOs, or secretive government agencies. It's computers. Once you've completely automated the creation of human or better level AI, then it's not going to need a century to get there. You might not even need a day.
Bootstrapping more sophisticated algorithms from existing one that have sufficient power to improve themselves is the great missing step here, I think. And modern AI research simply isn't going that way at present. I think at some point that will change, then we'll come up with more relevant concerns than how many more centuries we'll wait till humanity does this thing.
I love how CEOs like this guy and Elon (idiot) Musk are predicting the future of AI development. As opposed to say, leading AI researchers that are attending conferences and writing papers on the state of the art.
What do AI researchers have to do with AI? Let's recall some things you've said before:
Ten years out? As a veteran programmer and AI enthusiast, I'd say it was more like a century. We cannot build a computer that can model a bug's brain activity, let alone something a million times more complicated like a human brain. And that doesn't even get us to the 'superhuman intelligence' category that people are afraid of.
In other words, AI researchers are in your opinion a century out from having a relevant opinion on AI. Then there's your discussion with a MS game developer:
I was having a conversation with a guy who was working on AI algorithims, and I asked what sort of schemes he used, fuzzy-logic, Genetic learning, or weighted neural nets? He told me that they didn't bother with academic AI techniques, because he could already write an AI that could beat the player every time without them.
I was completely at a loss for words, so I just thanked him and ran away.
Yet another indication that the "academic AI techniques" might not be up to snuff for dealing with real world AI creation and consequential issues.
Adding more energy seems unlikely to help.
Taking away said energy OTOH is a different matter. That's something that thrusters at the far end of the space tether can do.
Again, not a freshman-physics pendulum. We're not talking spherical cows uniformly radiating milk here. The upwards and downwards payloads would be in different places on the tether (except momentarily) and so would each be doing there own thing to complicate the system.
But in a matter that is significant less worse than your original problem.
You might find it entertaining to watch some youtube videos of 2- and 3-section pendulum, elastic pendulums, and so on. They don't work and play well with others.
So what? We know how to control stuff a lot more complicated than that.
Presumably, we'd launch more of them, *if* we wanted to go back to the Moon.
Hasn't been the case in practice. Saturn V, Shuttle, Constellation, and now SLS have all sucked oxygen out of the room for actual exploration and development of the Moon and elsewhere. They've never achieved the launch frequency, reliability, or cost savings to justify their use. And aside from the Saturn V era, we've never had the need for the capabilities (particularly, the large payload and fairing size) these rockets bring,
For example, this blog post discusses an alternate past where the Shuttle wasn't built and NASA instead continued on with the Saturn 1B and a small reusable manned vehicle (say 3 people plus cargo, a bit better than the Apollo capsule in payload).
They could have still flown everything that the Shuttle flew for 30 years and have a demonstration of a reusable vehicle at a small fraction of the cost of the Shuttle.
Another alternate past. Consider that we knew after the Challenger accident that the Space Shuttle would never achieve a launch frequency that would be economical. Discontinue the Shuttle in 1990. From that point on, there was only one thing that ever required the features of the Shuttle, the Hubble Telescope repair missions which simply weren't valuable. Instead, hustle the development of the EELV (Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle) program (which built the Delta IV and AtlasV rockets) so that it was developed a decade earlier in the early 1990s instead of the early 2000s.
Then everything that was done with the Shuttle could then be done with EELVs, such as building the ISS or launching space telescope replacements for Hubble, with the use of EELVs, saving tens of billions of dollars over the 20 year period through 2010 and boosting commercial space flight in the process. And when Falcon 9 was developed, it would easily slide into this NASA strategy where everything is launched on rockets of that size.
It doesn't really make sense to start with a factory on the Moon to produce things that we don't need yet.
Depends on the lead time and the need. There already is some need for propellant in space at costs less than a few thousand dollars per kg.
We can launch everything from Earth, until we need such large quantities that it becomes cost effective to produce them on the Moon. I expect we'll never reach that point.
Depends on what inputs are needed for activity on the Moon. If everything coming from the Moon has to come from Earth first, it'll never make sense. If it just takes a few tens of millions of dollars initial input, plus a few hundred thousand dollars per year in telepresence work to deliver hundreds of tons of liquid oxygen propellant to low Earth orbit, then it'll pay for itself fast.
Because there's not much need for lifting giant payloads right now. But *if* we wanted to go back to the Moon, it would make sense to build another one.
*If* we wanted to go back to the Moon, we could have done it right after halting the Saturn V with one of the many 20-25 ton launchers that has been kicking around for the past 50 years. What's ignored here is that you can buy a lot of lunar presence on existing rockets with the funds that have been spent on big rockets from the Shuttle up to the SLS.
I never said you couldn't build stuff in orbit. it just adds extra complexities and cost.
Big rockets might be a little less complex, but they are more expensive due to the terrible launch frequency.
You're proposing an entire industrial base to be build on the moon, starting empty handed ?
Presumably, it'd start with a seed factory and build out from there. The cheapness oft he project depends on what inputs are required from Earth.
SLS is up to 2.5 times the LEO capacity of a Falcon Heavy, which SpaceX has never actually launched. SLS is in a different class. SpaceX might launch a Heavy in 2017, but I personally doubt it; SpaceX has never hesitated to push back dates and they've done exactly that with each new development phase. That's not a knock; they've done well and should continue their pattern. But SLS goes up in 2018 and even that first launch will achieve greater lift capacity than anything SpaceX or its competitors are actually building, never mind the SLS scale out to 130,000kg.
In other words, NASA might launch an SLS variant this decade, but they probably won't. Funny how your personal doubt fails to extend to NASA which is even more notorious than SpaceX for delaying launches and failing to deliver on a launch vehicle.
It's easier to make a bigger rocket than to assemble stuff in LEO.
Then why is the US the only one to have ever made this "bigger rocket" (Saturn V and Shuttle). And currently doesn't make it?
Meanwhile we have a fair number of countries who have assembled things in orbit (US, Russia, China, all separately and the ISS group).
The problem here is that there's no rocket so big that you don't need to assemble things in orbit. You need to learn how to assemble things no matter how big your rocket is.
Meanwhile once you've learned how to assemble things in orbit, you don't need that expensive big launcher. You can put all your stuff up on the cheapest, high launch frequency launcher instead, greatly reducing the cost of such missions.
But good luck getting Elon Musk to focus on the practical and eminently desirable target of the Moon. He isn't interested. It's only Mars for Elon.
He's interested in paying customers. Maybe someone who is interested in lunar development should buy some Falcon 9 or Heavy launches and just make it happen?
The energy stored in the system would increase with every payload until it destroyed itself, because there's no way to shed that unwanted energy - minimal friction, trivial air resistance, and so on.
There are a couple of approaches for dealing with that. First,use an extremely efficient propulsion system like electric propulsion to shed said energy and provide the mundane control needed for the system.
Second, you can run payloads down the tether at the same time as your run them up the tether. That would keep the energy balance stable.
A ban on murdering people? Hmmm, might be a good idea.
Oh wait, you mean a ban on drones because someone might attempt to kill people with one? How about we ban cars then? After all, we know that people deliberate kill other people with cars.
Might as well ban people with shitty ideas.
In what way is giving away some "freedoms" you never really needed anyway for the good of the community a bad thing? Society is more important than individuals, we Europeans know that.
A society that doesn't protect "unnecessary" individual freedom is not one worth living in. There are two things to note here. First, it's easy to define any sort of freedom as unnecessary. North Korea has done so, for example. Similarly, the idea of primacy of society has justified all sorts of abuses against people by powerful parties who can convenient align the interests of society to fulfill their own interests.
Second, it is better to black list proven harmful action and behavior (I would go for a much more stringent sort of harm, substantial harm against innocent parties who aren't "coming to the nuisance" or otherwise engaging in behavior that deliberately and expectedly exposes themselves to the harm by choice) rather than white list proven harmless or necessary action and behavior. I shouldn't have to prove to society or government that my desired actions are necessary to me. It simply shouldn't be the business of society or government to make that determination, particular since neither has ever shown any competence or impartiality in doing so.