Between Elon Musk's description of global thermonuclear destruction (he advocated... more as a joke but it was a semi-serious suggestion... that the polar icecaps of Mars could be nuked to release atmospheric gasses to terraform the planet), building tunnels under cities, having orbital space lasers under his control (with the Skylink satellites), and a forgotten island retreat under his control (Kwajelin Island)..... does that make him into a Bond villain?
It is merely a matter of perspective, but billionaires like him certainly seem like they have the potential to be a supervillain as much as a superhero.
What these dudes making AI with a PhD are doing instead is a new level of bullshitting with fancy words that impresses people with money and of course legislators who are about as clueless regarding computer technology. They think manipulating a URL to look at the image directory of a server is "hacking".
Machine learning isn't all that complex and it sure isn't even new either. I agree with others here that this is just an ignorant journalism major spouting off buzz words.
If you want to see a really nice GUI designed AI interface? Grab Scratch from MIT and then look at some of the AI experiments that have been done in that programming environment. They aren't necessarily all that fast and certainly some other programming environments would make them work more efficiently, but it isn't even all that new.
Also.... the other shoe dropped when they got into the "app store" business model the developers of this "Cortex" programming environment started to explain what they were doing. It is a scam to separate you from money in your wallet where the author bought into the buzz words to make this seem like a cool thing.
SpaceX set a company record for the most flights in a calendar year, but not quite a global record for any company/organization. They are doing some good though and are definitely a competitor in the global launch market and having a significant impact upon launch prices right now.
And I agree with you that any company which can send aloft a piece of equipment which functions at all while in orbit is pretty damn impressive. Getting into space is just barely possible and has almost no room for excuses or lazy engineering. Virgin Galactic is an example of a company who has tried and failed with unfortunately several deaths associated with their efforts too.
What you are describing is what is called a test pilot. The crews have even already been announced and are among some of the most experienced pilots you could ever imagine existing and veterans of several shuttle flights too I might add along with years of experience being test pilots with aircraft and many other accomplishments.
That is how you do a crewed test flight. A test pilot is somebody who is both an engineer and an accomplished pilot and gives detailed engineering analysis both during and after the flight based upon actual experiences.
As a side note, every aircraft ever made commercially has a test pilot which flies that aircraft for the first time before it is handed over to a customer, sometimes it is flown several times. That doesn't happen much with spacecraft other than most pilots and commanders of space missions in the past have traditionally been test pilots anyway including usually a thousand hours+ of experience operating multiple kinds of aircraft and spacecraft.
While space-based factories might be useful a century from now, the infrastructure needed to get one built simply doesn't exist right now.
I'm sure Elon Musk has heard every crazy idea you can think up and more, 99.99% of which he legitimately ignores as a waste of his time and even has hired multiple assistants to filter out the cranks and scam artists who try to give him such suggestions. It is a bit harder to filter out ideas from actual SpaceX employees, but then they tend to be a bit more grounded because they are producing actual spacecraft doing things in space.
There is zero reason for Elon Musk to be reading any of these comments, and little if any reason for any of those assistants who filter the crap like this to bother reading either.
That perfectly describes air traffic at Heathrow or O'Hare. A "collision" in this case is multiple aircraft trying to take off or land at a given airport where there is a priority scheduler which decides what "packet" or aircraft will enter the "airstream".
On rare occasions though, actual collisions do happen. It can be a fatal error too. It is mainly an issue of the proper "software" being "installed" or taught properly to avoid those errors.
The first flight of the Space Shuttle (STS) was incredibly risky. So much so that the astronauts actually sat in ejection seats (which were removed in later flights) and only two astronauts flew in what was arguably a test flight without any cargo at all... other than the two crew members and food for about a day. It didn't spend that much time in space either, but was mostly a flight up, a few orbits to evaluate systems in actual spaceflight, and then an incredibly risky landing.
It should be pointed out also that there were nearly a dozen landing tests prior to STS-1.
The Shuttle flew without major problems and did not blow up on the pad on the first flight (that happened later). The truth be told, the Shuttle was an experimental vehicle on all 135 flights, and on the last flight it was evaluated that the odds of survival (literally.... the odds of the crew living after the flight) was less than 90%. That is less than a Sigma 1 reliability... hardly something of any kind of praise.
I agree. The Falcon Heavy isn't a successor. It is an additional launch vehicle which can put up payloads that the Falcon 9 simply can't do.
The largest advantage of the Falcon Heavy is that it shares a great many components with the Falcon 9, including the engines and the internal tank design. That is also the reason why it has taken so long to get built, as the Falcon 9 design kept shifting and getting rolled onto the Falcon Heavy. As a matter of fact, the Falcon 9 is currently capable of sending the same tonnage that was anticipated for the Falcon Heavy when it was originally unveiled at the National Press Club so many years ago.
That whole thing is moot anyways as both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy are slated to be retired as a design in the next 5-10 years and factory production may even be slowed down or stop altogether in the next couple of years in favor of the BFR. The only thing that will keep them coming out of the factory is due to the fact that the BFR is by necessity going to be built in another factory as the City of Hawthorn has refused to give permits to move the BFR through city streets. And yes, SpaceX asked.
What testing would a Tesla Roadster need to go through that hasn't been already done by the U.S. Department of Transportation, given that the vehicle has already a mountain of test data simply to put the vehicle into serial production?
It would be far more expensive to certify a block of concrete than to take a vehicle which already has the data needed for evaluation available. It isn't like this is the first automobile that the FAA has needed to certify for flight worthiness before.
The other choice is to do something like the RatSat spacecraft which flew on the Falcon 1 Flight 4. That was basically a big hunk of Aluminum which had the names of the SpaceX employees who were working for the company at the time go up into space (and it is still in orbit BTW).
Oddly enough, sending up a Roadster is actually cheaper than the custom made spacecraft even if it is just a hunk of metal. A bill of materials can even be quickly sent to the FAA-AST for clearance and review in a format that they can evaluate as well.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, Space is big. Very big. You really can't comprehend just how large the Solar System is on a human scale, where something which is very definitely on a human scale in the form of a Tesla Roadster really is an insignificant hunk of nothing that won't even get in the way for the next billion years, won't even hit the Earth in that time frame nor even get to Mars.
Well before it becomes an object to be concerned about (which it isn't even if it was filled with swamp water and the deliberate goal was to infect Mars with life... of which some swamp water from the K-T Event on the Earth likely hit Mars a long, long time ago doing the same thing), this particular Tesla Roadster is going to be "rescued" or "salvaged" by some future team of archaeologists who are going to be drooling over the unique preservation of early 21st Century automobiles in this fashion.
I give it under 10k years before it is salvaged from a deliberate effort to locate this Roadster in the future. In that time frame, it won't even be a hazard at all and can't possibly hit Mars.
You mean an untested rocket like the original maiden launch of the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule that currently hangs above the cafeteria in the SpaceX Headquarters?
Having the ashes of James Doohan (yes.... Mr. Scott from Star Trek) scattered all over the South Pacific instead of in space due to mishaps and rocket failures is not the kind of publicity anybody wants. That is precisely what happened with the Falcon 1.
SpaceX could give somebody (maybe a university) a free launch though.
They have. The first Falcon 1 launch had a satellite built by the students at the U.S. Air Force Academy. While there was practically no chance to get that satellite to fly as there was no budget to make it happen without this "free" launch, it was sort of sad to see literally years of effort on the part of the academy cadets blow up on the launch pad and have parts and pieces of that satellite scattered across the South Pacific in an explosion.
I can appreciate that SpaceX would rather not see that happen. Again. If there is going to be a "free" launch, it will be on a much better flight proven vehicle on a space available basis where the primary customer is happy to see them come along for the ride. There is room on the SpaceX Dragon capsules (and the Orbital ATK Cygnus capsules I might add) for university experiments where funding is even available including from any ISS participating country to help build the experiment.
This is just too risky of a flight even for a supposedly "throw away" space craft.
It should be pointed out that these subsidies were in place well before Tesla existed as a company and were intended to encourage companies like GM, Ford, and Chrysler (as well as foreign companies) to try an invest in "green" automobiles. If the government is pouring so much money around that it is raining cash everywhere, you would be an idiot if you didn't pick up a bucket and start collecting that cash where it might do some good.
It also turns out that even with those subsidies they did almost no good. General Motors made the infamous EV-1 that turned out to be so expensive they wouldn't even offer the vehicles to be sold. The purpose of that vehicle really was to kill the subsidy and to in particular get the California Air Resources Board (the California equivalent to the EPA but operating at the state level) to stop making electric automobiles any sort of big deal. I guess that blew up really well.
Other automobile companies have tried to take advantage of those same subsidies. GM started the Volt literally right as it was going bankrupt and that was the only vehicle which survived the bankruptcy as a major engineering project. The Fisker Karma was actually built depending almost exclusively on those subsidies, and of course you have the Nissan Leaf.
If Tesla is able to make a business case for electric automobiles, I would dare say it is in spite of those subsidies instead of because of them. Yes, a thumb is on the scale in Tesla's favor, but they weren't really enough to make other companies profitable and there have been some spectacular failures and bankruptcies resulting from people other than Elon Musk trying to grab that same cash.
I also don't think the switch to electric automobiles is necessarily inevitable either. There are other "alternative fuel" sources which in theory could work out better as well. What makes electric vehicles work isn't the subsidies, but rather the energy density due to somewhat recent developments in energy storage technologies (aka batteries). It is also interesting that Tesla is now putting some significant money into basic R&D for that technology too and not simply waiting for some other company to come up with the next best thing.
That aspect of scientific research wasn't really the point of Sputnik though. The radio signal was simply to announce that the USSR had sent something up into space and something that could be used to verify that it was indeed up there and in orbit around the Earth.
That some scientific value could be gleaned from the simple instrumentation was really a side benefit... not that I'm complaining.
Explorer I, on the other hand, was purpose built to carry on several experiments, and was the key item that was used to discover the Van Allen Belts... named in honor of one of the scientists who put together the instruments on that satellite.
I wouldn't say it was a foolish insistence and in many way letting Russia launch the first satellite was a brilliant move on the part of the Eisenhower administration. The most significant thing is that by having Russia send a satellite over America, it established the overflight principle that low-Earth orbit was a separate domain in international law similar to international waters in the oceans.
A legitimate concern was that if America sent a satellite up into space, that any time it traveled over the Soviet Union that it would be treated as invading Soviet airspace. In theory that could be considered a casus belli for some sort of significant response that would provoke military action.
You could say ditto for even sending a crew member in orbit.
As a result of the Soviet Union sending the first satellite and then sending Yuri Gagarin over the USA at orbital altitudes, the USSR had no justification and reason to be objecting if the USA did the same thing over the USSR. IMHO that was utterly brilliant.... and at the same time making the USSR prance around like some sort of victory was achieved when in fact they gave up a major diplomatic point of order in international law. It really didn't cost the USA much of anything other than temporary prestige that is largely irrelevant today... and was completely made up for anyway with Neil Armstrong's landing on the Moon.
The goal of the Eisenhower administration was to send spy satellites over the USSR, something that happened not too much longer after Sputnik. Unlike what happened with Gary Powers and the U-2 plane getting shot down over the USSR, they had no reason to complain about satellites.
How is that foolish that Eisenhower waited to have the Explorer satellite launch few weeks after Sputnik?
The fear is that somehow an enemy could use that positioning data to target a U.S. Navy ship and use it in a preemptive attack.
I agree with you in terms of a navy ship in the middle of a major shipping channel when they aren't in the middle of a war operation though. Sort of akin to a police car that shouldn't have his lights on or doing other thing than simply being an ordinary commuter in ordinary traffic when they are traveling from one point to another.
A similar situation happens with air traffic, where military jets often don't turn on transponders to indicate position or other normal transponder information if they are on a war footing. Yes, it is dangerous and something they need to deal with as well. On the other hand, the USAF does have times those military jets do turn on transponders if they want to have civilian aviation stay out of the way or if the military jets are trying to play nice and friendly with civilian air traffic.
Perhaps the last couple of decades of being in a continuous global war is something that is getting out of hand.
I agree that Jerry Pournelle was not of the camp that presumes God made the world and there is nothing we as humans can do to possibly screw it up. He was more of the camp that suggested actual science needed to be followed instead of automatic kneejerk reactions and pressing the panic button as soon as you find some sort of theory (regardless of if it is tested or not) to justify some political action.
He understood actual science, and condemned justifiably sloppy science and incompetence among those professing to be following the scientific method. While not all climate science is awful, there are plenty of problems with how the science is evaluated and seemingly political motives for how some of it is done.
I did quite a bit of development in Visual BASIC, and saw that you could certainly develop powerful complex pieces of software in that language that would be as efficient and powerful as any C++ development environment. While there were certainly some shitty things about the specific Microsoft implementation of the language, it worked out pretty well.
In my case I've done extensive development in multiple languages on multiple computer platforms. Over the years I've really grown to detest C development primarily because it is really good at obfuscation and if you are a mediocre developer in it the code goes from awful to hideous in a real hurry. Trying to pick up the pieces from a low quality C programmer and trying to fix stuff is a big pain in the behind that I found to be much easier in other languages. Something else that as a general rule I've found is that a typical C/C++ program that has been sitting on a back burner for awhile that I haven't been doing active development upon takes me a whole lot longer to get back into working on. Switching to something in that language that I haven't worked on actively for over a year takes me about 2-3 days to really get back into the groove of development.... something that for my Pascal code usually only takes me a couple of hours at most. BASIC is sort of in between for my experience but definitely easier than the C code to get back into the swing of development.
At the moment I still think Scratch is by far the best introductory programming language, and is definitely better than LOGO or BASIC for that job (and so far better than Java or Javascript I can't begin to say how lousy those are for new programmers). Yes, BASIC did start out as a simplified programming language intended for introducing programming concepts, but I think it is that simplicity which gives it a whole lot of advantages.... assuming that those who graft on extra features are already familiar with the flavor of the language and what makes it powerful.
Still, in spite of Jerry Pournelle perhaps not having a whole lot of experience with C, there is something to be said about how as a language... even as a compiled language (where there definitely exist some pretty decent compilers following in the tradition of the original Dartmouth variant), BASIC is a useful and powerful language that can be used to create complex and useful pieces of software and I dare say can even be used to create operating systems if anybody cared. In terms of the raw machine code produced, the language is sort of immaterial other than how you as a developer can comfortably get the ideas out of your head and into the computer in an efficient manner.
In terms of a theory like Newton's laws of motion that can give a ten digit accuracy assessment, you are correct. Still, if there is a 10^-90 probability and 10^100 "experiments" going on in a given galaxy, that is still some room to suggest a high likelihood of occurring on a galactic scale even if it is almost impossible to have happen on a given single world.
I would hope it would be more likely than that extreme level of improbability, and given how artificial eukaryotes have been created in a laboratory from a completely abiotic initial state there is at least a pathway for it to happen. Yes, creation of life from raw elements has occurred with nothing more than a couple biologists simply willing it to happen (and a whole lot of interesting chemistry with a fully functioning organic chemistry lab). Designing a minimalist DNA strand was particularly impressive.
One thing that panspermia does address is to maximize the likelihood of life to seed a planet that has life supporting characteristics and make the Drake equation have at least one variable that is near 100% in terms of probability.
It is unlikely that panspermia has impacted only the Earth and perhaps a couple other planets that passed through one part of the Galaxy.
It also provides a mechanism to explain how something extremely unlikely to happen in one particular spot could still be virtually universal, for the same reasons. In other words it turns the watchmaker arguments of creationism on its head as a sort of cosmological "Infinite Number of Monkeys" theorem applied to the creation of the Prokaryotes and their appearance on the geological record.
I still remember him arguing that Basic was a superior language over C
I can make arguments that at least some forms of BASIC are superior to C. Language holy wars are something that has existed since Grace Hopper created the first compiler. With object-oriented COBOL, it is hard to suggest that any particular language is necessarily good at everything.
C just happens to have a good code base and was taught to many CS students as something to create compilers... which made a plethora of compilers available to pick from and for a whole lot of the awful compilers to disappear into oblivion from sheer Darwinian competition. BASIC was in a similar position though, which is why a certain Bill Gates happened to already know how to code a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 CPU by simply dusting off his lecture notes.
Most of what he has written in the past twenty years is mostly on his blog. He wrote quite a bit on politics (a pretty staunch libertarian but with Republican leanings) and climatology (where he was definitely in the "skeptic" camp).
One of his largest accomplishments was being on the President's Space Council where he was one of the backers and political supporters of the DC-X. He personally got into the lobbying effort to get funding for that project through Congress... something that as a project developed many of the theories and ideas for VTOL orbital spacecraft. Without the DC-X it is unlikely that SpaceX would have been able to their their Falcon 9 to land the way it did.
His largest political failure was a proposed lunar exploration prize program similar to the X-Prize but on a larger scale. He got the Republican House leadership (including the then-speaker Newt Gingrich) to accept his idea of basically appropriating $10 billion toward the first three companies that would successfully send and return astronauts to the Moon in the 1990's. After getting the House leadership on board including the minority ranking members (Democrats) of the Science and Space committees, Newt got into his own political mess that ended up killing the whole idea. I can only imagine what might have been had that proposal actually gone forward.
Mr. Pournelle knew Dan Quayle too (through the Space Council), but he pretty much dropped out of politics in such a direct manner after Bill Clinton was elected except through commentary like I mentioned above.
It could be argued that Jerry Pournelle also pioneered the idea of a blog on the web and was one of the first to do that where he entered some of his first entries as hand written HTML.... definitely doing that well before the word itself was coined. He did it as a way to continue his Chaos Manner series even post Byte, but went in different directions as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Between Elon Musk's description of global thermonuclear destruction (he advocated... more as a joke but it was a semi-serious suggestion... that the polar icecaps of Mars could be nuked to release atmospheric gasses to terraform the planet), building tunnels under cities, having orbital space lasers under his control (with the Skylink satellites), and a forgotten island retreat under his control (Kwajelin Island)..... does that make him into a Bond villain?
It is merely a matter of perspective, but billionaires like him certainly seem like they have the potential to be a supervillain as much as a superhero.
What these dudes making AI with a PhD are doing instead is a new level of bullshitting with fancy words that impresses people with money and of course legislators who are about as clueless regarding computer technology. They think manipulating a URL to look at the image directory of a server is "hacking".
Machine learning isn't all that complex and it sure isn't even new either. I agree with others here that this is just an ignorant journalism major spouting off buzz words.
If you want to see a really nice GUI designed AI interface? Grab Scratch from MIT and then look at some of the AI experiments that have been done in that programming environment. They aren't necessarily all that fast and certainly some other programming environments would make them work more efficiently, but it isn't even all that new.
Also.... the other shoe dropped when they got into the "app store" business model the developers of this "Cortex" programming environment started to explain what they were doing. It is a scam to separate you from money in your wallet where the author bought into the buzz words to make this seem like a cool thing.
SpaceX set a company record for the most flights in a calendar year, but not quite a global record for any company/organization. They are doing some good though and are definitely a competitor in the global launch market and having a significant impact upon launch prices right now.
And I agree with you that any company which can send aloft a piece of equipment which functions at all while in orbit is pretty damn impressive. Getting into space is just barely possible and has almost no room for excuses or lazy engineering. Virgin Galactic is an example of a company who has tried and failed with unfortunately several deaths associated with their efforts too.
What you are describing is what is called a test pilot. The crews have even already been announced and are among some of the most experienced pilots you could ever imagine existing and veterans of several shuttle flights too I might add along with years of experience being test pilots with aircraft and many other accomplishments.
That is how you do a crewed test flight. A test pilot is somebody who is both an engineer and an accomplished pilot and gives detailed engineering analysis both during and after the flight based upon actual experiences.
As a side note, every aircraft ever made commercially has a test pilot which flies that aircraft for the first time before it is handed over to a customer, sometimes it is flown several times. That doesn't happen much with spacecraft other than most pilots and commanders of space missions in the past have traditionally been test pilots anyway including usually a thousand hours+ of experience operating multiple kinds of aircraft and spacecraft.
While space-based factories might be useful a century from now, the infrastructure needed to get one built simply doesn't exist right now.
I'm sure Elon Musk has heard every crazy idea you can think up and more, 99.99% of which he legitimately ignores as a waste of his time and even has hired multiple assistants to filter out the cranks and scam artists who try to give him such suggestions. It is a bit harder to filter out ideas from actual SpaceX employees, but then they tend to be a bit more grounded because they are producing actual spacecraft doing things in space.
There is zero reason for Elon Musk to be reading any of these comments, and little if any reason for any of those assistants who filter the crap like this to bother reading either.
That perfectly describes air traffic at Heathrow or O'Hare. A "collision" in this case is multiple aircraft trying to take off or land at a given airport where there is a priority scheduler which decides what "packet" or aircraft will enter the "airstream".
On rare occasions though, actual collisions do happen. It can be a fatal error too. It is mainly an issue of the proper "software" being "installed" or taught properly to avoid those errors.
The first flight of the Space Shuttle (STS) was incredibly risky. So much so that the astronauts actually sat in ejection seats (which were removed in later flights) and only two astronauts flew in what was arguably a test flight without any cargo at all... other than the two crew members and food for about a day. It didn't spend that much time in space either, but was mostly a flight up, a few orbits to evaluate systems in actual spaceflight, and then an incredibly risky landing.
It should be pointed out also that there were nearly a dozen landing tests prior to STS-1.
The Shuttle flew without major problems and did not blow up on the pad on the first flight (that happened later). The truth be told, the Shuttle was an experimental vehicle on all 135 flights, and on the last flight it was evaluated that the odds of survival (literally.... the odds of the crew living after the flight) was less than 90%. That is less than a Sigma 1 reliability... hardly something of any kind of praise.
I agree. The Falcon Heavy isn't a successor. It is an additional launch vehicle which can put up payloads that the Falcon 9 simply can't do.
The largest advantage of the Falcon Heavy is that it shares a great many components with the Falcon 9, including the engines and the internal tank design. That is also the reason why it has taken so long to get built, as the Falcon 9 design kept shifting and getting rolled onto the Falcon Heavy. As a matter of fact, the Falcon 9 is currently capable of sending the same tonnage that was anticipated for the Falcon Heavy when it was originally unveiled at the National Press Club so many years ago.
That whole thing is moot anyways as both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy are slated to be retired as a design in the next 5-10 years and factory production may even be slowed down or stop altogether in the next couple of years in favor of the BFR. The only thing that will keep them coming out of the factory is due to the fact that the BFR is by necessity going to be built in another factory as the City of Hawthorn has refused to give permits to move the BFR through city streets. And yes, SpaceX asked.
What testing would a Tesla Roadster need to go through that hasn't been already done by the U.S. Department of Transportation, given that the vehicle has already a mountain of test data simply to put the vehicle into serial production?
It would be far more expensive to certify a block of concrete than to take a vehicle which already has the data needed for evaluation available. It isn't like this is the first automobile that the FAA has needed to certify for flight worthiness before.
The other choice is to do something like the RatSat spacecraft which flew on the Falcon 1 Flight 4. That was basically a big hunk of Aluminum which had the names of the SpaceX employees who were working for the company at the time go up into space (and it is still in orbit BTW).
Oddly enough, sending up a Roadster is actually cheaper than the custom made spacecraft even if it is just a hunk of metal. A bill of materials can even be quickly sent to the FAA-AST for clearance and review in a format that they can evaluate as well.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, Space is big. Very big. You really can't comprehend just how large the Solar System is on a human scale, where something which is very definitely on a human scale in the form of a Tesla Roadster really is an insignificant hunk of nothing that won't even get in the way for the next billion years, won't even hit the Earth in that time frame nor even get to Mars.
Well before it becomes an object to be concerned about (which it isn't even if it was filled with swamp water and the deliberate goal was to infect Mars with life... of which some swamp water from the K-T Event on the Earth likely hit Mars a long, long time ago doing the same thing), this particular Tesla Roadster is going to be "rescued" or "salvaged" by some future team of archaeologists who are going to be drooling over the unique preservation of early 21st Century automobiles in this fashion.
I give it under 10k years before it is salvaged from a deliberate effort to locate this Roadster in the future. In that time frame, it won't even be a hazard at all and can't possibly hit Mars.
You mean an untested rocket like the original maiden launch of the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule that currently hangs above the cafeteria in the SpaceX Headquarters?
Having the ashes of James Doohan (yes.... Mr. Scott from Star Trek) scattered all over the South Pacific instead of in space due to mishaps and rocket failures is not the kind of publicity anybody wants. That is precisely what happened with the Falcon 1.
They have. The first Falcon 1 launch had a satellite built by the students at the U.S. Air Force Academy. While there was practically no chance to get that satellite to fly as there was no budget to make it happen without this "free" launch, it was sort of sad to see literally years of effort on the part of the academy cadets blow up on the launch pad and have parts and pieces of that satellite scattered across the South Pacific in an explosion.
I can appreciate that SpaceX would rather not see that happen. Again. If there is going to be a "free" launch, it will be on a much better flight proven vehicle on a space available basis where the primary customer is happy to see them come along for the ride. There is room on the SpaceX Dragon capsules (and the Orbital ATK Cygnus capsules I might add) for university experiments where funding is even available including from any ISS participating country to help build the experiment.
This is just too risky of a flight even for a supposedly "throw away" space craft.
It should be pointed out that these subsidies were in place well before Tesla existed as a company and were intended to encourage companies like GM, Ford, and Chrysler (as well as foreign companies) to try an invest in "green" automobiles. If the government is pouring so much money around that it is raining cash everywhere, you would be an idiot if you didn't pick up a bucket and start collecting that cash where it might do some good.
It also turns out that even with those subsidies they did almost no good. General Motors made the infamous EV-1 that turned out to be so expensive they wouldn't even offer the vehicles to be sold. The purpose of that vehicle really was to kill the subsidy and to in particular get the California Air Resources Board (the California equivalent to the EPA but operating at the state level) to stop making electric automobiles any sort of big deal. I guess that blew up really well.
Other automobile companies have tried to take advantage of those same subsidies. GM started the Volt literally right as it was going bankrupt and that was the only vehicle which survived the bankruptcy as a major engineering project. The Fisker Karma was actually built depending almost exclusively on those subsidies, and of course you have the Nissan Leaf.
If Tesla is able to make a business case for electric automobiles, I would dare say it is in spite of those subsidies instead of because of them. Yes, a thumb is on the scale in Tesla's favor, but they weren't really enough to make other companies profitable and there have been some spectacular failures and bankruptcies resulting from people other than Elon Musk trying to grab that same cash.
I also don't think the switch to electric automobiles is necessarily inevitable either. There are other "alternative fuel" sources which in theory could work out better as well. What makes electric vehicles work isn't the subsidies, but rather the energy density due to somewhat recent developments in energy storage technologies (aka batteries). It is also interesting that Tesla is now putting some significant money into basic R&D for that technology too and not simply waiting for some other company to come up with the next best thing.
What is your point? While not gourmet food of a 5-star restaurant (it is still fast food), it is definitely better tasting than McDonald's.
It is also California culture you are talking about. They have weird names for everything.
That aspect of scientific research wasn't really the point of Sputnik though. The radio signal was simply to announce that the USSR had sent something up into space and something that could be used to verify that it was indeed up there and in orbit around the Earth.
That some scientific value could be gleaned from the simple instrumentation was really a side benefit... not that I'm complaining.
Explorer I, on the other hand, was purpose built to carry on several experiments, and was the key item that was used to discover the Van Allen Belts... named in honor of one of the scientists who put together the instruments on that satellite.
I wouldn't say it was a foolish insistence and in many way letting Russia launch the first satellite was a brilliant move on the part of the Eisenhower administration. The most significant thing is that by having Russia send a satellite over America, it established the overflight principle that low-Earth orbit was a separate domain in international law similar to international waters in the oceans.
A legitimate concern was that if America sent a satellite up into space, that any time it traveled over the Soviet Union that it would be treated as invading Soviet airspace. In theory that could be considered a casus belli for some sort of significant response that would provoke military action.
You could say ditto for even sending a crew member in orbit.
As a result of the Soviet Union sending the first satellite and then sending Yuri Gagarin over the USA at orbital altitudes, the USSR had no justification and reason to be objecting if the USA did the same thing over the USSR. IMHO that was utterly brilliant.... and at the same time making the USSR prance around like some sort of victory was achieved when in fact they gave up a major diplomatic point of order in international law. It really didn't cost the USA much of anything other than temporary prestige that is largely irrelevant today... and was completely made up for anyway with Neil Armstrong's landing on the Moon.
The goal of the Eisenhower administration was to send spy satellites over the USSR, something that happened not too much longer after Sputnik. Unlike what happened with Gary Powers and the U-2 plane getting shot down over the USSR, they had no reason to complain about satellites.
How is that foolish that Eisenhower waited to have the Explorer satellite launch few weeks after Sputnik?
The fear is that somehow an enemy could use that positioning data to target a U.S. Navy ship and use it in a preemptive attack.
I agree with you in terms of a navy ship in the middle of a major shipping channel when they aren't in the middle of a war operation though. Sort of akin to a police car that shouldn't have his lights on or doing other thing than simply being an ordinary commuter in ordinary traffic when they are traveling from one point to another.
A similar situation happens with air traffic, where military jets often don't turn on transponders to indicate position or other normal transponder information if they are on a war footing. Yes, it is dangerous and something they need to deal with as well. On the other hand, the USAF does have times those military jets do turn on transponders if they want to have civilian aviation stay out of the way or if the military jets are trying to play nice and friendly with civilian air traffic.
Perhaps the last couple of decades of being in a continuous global war is something that is getting out of hand.
I agree that Jerry Pournelle was not of the camp that presumes God made the world and there is nothing we as humans can do to possibly screw it up. He was more of the camp that suggested actual science needed to be followed instead of automatic kneejerk reactions and pressing the panic button as soon as you find some sort of theory (regardless of if it is tested or not) to justify some political action.
He understood actual science, and condemned justifiably sloppy science and incompetence among those professing to be following the scientific method. While not all climate science is awful, there are plenty of problems with how the science is evaluated and seemingly political motives for how some of it is done.
I did quite a bit of development in Visual BASIC, and saw that you could certainly develop powerful complex pieces of software in that language that would be as efficient and powerful as any C++ development environment. While there were certainly some shitty things about the specific Microsoft implementation of the language, it worked out pretty well.
In my case I've done extensive development in multiple languages on multiple computer platforms. Over the years I've really grown to detest C development primarily because it is really good at obfuscation and if you are a mediocre developer in it the code goes from awful to hideous in a real hurry. Trying to pick up the pieces from a low quality C programmer and trying to fix stuff is a big pain in the behind that I found to be much easier in other languages. Something else that as a general rule I've found is that a typical C/C++ program that has been sitting on a back burner for awhile that I haven't been doing active development upon takes me a whole lot longer to get back into working on. Switching to something in that language that I haven't worked on actively for over a year takes me about 2-3 days to really get back into the groove of development.... something that for my Pascal code usually only takes me a couple of hours at most. BASIC is sort of in between for my experience but definitely easier than the C code to get back into the swing of development.
At the moment I still think Scratch is by far the best introductory programming language, and is definitely better than LOGO or BASIC for that job (and so far better than Java or Javascript I can't begin to say how lousy those are for new programmers). Yes, BASIC did start out as a simplified programming language intended for introducing programming concepts, but I think it is that simplicity which gives it a whole lot of advantages.... assuming that those who graft on extra features are already familiar with the flavor of the language and what makes it powerful.
Still, in spite of Jerry Pournelle perhaps not having a whole lot of experience with C, there is something to be said about how as a language... even as a compiled language (where there definitely exist some pretty decent compilers following in the tradition of the original Dartmouth variant), BASIC is a useful and powerful language that can be used to create complex and useful pieces of software and I dare say can even be used to create operating systems if anybody cared. In terms of the raw machine code produced, the language is sort of immaterial other than how you as a developer can comfortably get the ideas out of your head and into the computer in an efficient manner.
In terms of a theory like Newton's laws of motion that can give a ten digit accuracy assessment, you are correct. Still, if there is a 10^-90 probability and 10^100 "experiments" going on in a given galaxy, that is still some room to suggest a high likelihood of occurring on a galactic scale even if it is almost impossible to have happen on a given single world.
I would hope it would be more likely than that extreme level of improbability, and given how artificial eukaryotes have been created in a laboratory from a completely abiotic initial state there is at least a pathway for it to happen. Yes, creation of life from raw elements has occurred with nothing more than a couple biologists simply willing it to happen (and a whole lot of interesting chemistry with a fully functioning organic chemistry lab). Designing a minimalist DNA strand was particularly impressive.
One thing that panspermia does address is to maximize the likelihood of life to seed a planet that has life supporting characteristics and make the Drake equation have at least one variable that is near 100% in terms of probability.
It is unlikely that panspermia has impacted only the Earth and perhaps a couple other planets that passed through one part of the Galaxy.
It also provides a mechanism to explain how something extremely unlikely to happen in one particular spot could still be virtually universal, for the same reasons. In other words it turns the watchmaker arguments of creationism on its head as a sort of cosmological "Infinite Number of Monkeys" theorem applied to the creation of the Prokaryotes and their appearance on the geological record.
I can make arguments that at least some forms of BASIC are superior to C. Language holy wars are something that has existed since Grace Hopper created the first compiler. With object-oriented COBOL, it is hard to suggest that any particular language is necessarily good at everything.
C just happens to have a good code base and was taught to many CS students as something to create compilers... which made a plethora of compilers available to pick from and for a whole lot of the awful compilers to disappear into oblivion from sheer Darwinian competition. BASIC was in a similar position though, which is why a certain Bill Gates happened to already know how to code a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 CPU by simply dusting off his lecture notes.
Most of what he has written in the past twenty years is mostly on his blog. He wrote quite a bit on politics (a pretty staunch libertarian but with Republican leanings) and climatology (where he was definitely in the "skeptic" camp).
One of his largest accomplishments was being on the President's Space Council where he was one of the backers and political supporters of the DC-X. He personally got into the lobbying effort to get funding for that project through Congress... something that as a project developed many of the theories and ideas for VTOL orbital spacecraft. Without the DC-X it is unlikely that SpaceX would have been able to their their Falcon 9 to land the way it did.
His largest political failure was a proposed lunar exploration prize program similar to the X-Prize but on a larger scale. He got the Republican House leadership (including the then-speaker Newt Gingrich) to accept his idea of basically appropriating $10 billion toward the first three companies that would successfully send and return astronauts to the Moon in the 1990's. After getting the House leadership on board including the minority ranking members (Democrats) of the Science and Space committees, Newt got into his own political mess that ended up killing the whole idea. I can only imagine what might have been had that proposal actually gone forward.
Mr. Pournelle knew Dan Quayle too (through the Space Council), but he pretty much dropped out of politics in such a direct manner after Bill Clinton was elected except through commentary like I mentioned above.
It could be argued that Jerry Pournelle also pioneered the idea of a blog on the web and was one of the first to do that where he entered some of his first entries as hand written HTML.... definitely doing that well before the word itself was coined. He did it as a way to continue his Chaos Manner series even post Byte, but went in different directions as well.