See this is what gets me, people ask "what on earth would you do with 125 tons of launch capacity" As long as it's a cheap enough 125 tons (i.e. cheaper than 125 1 ton launches) then what couldn't you do? Most of the economy runs on what trucks ship around, now in the UK they're limited to 40 tons, (don't know about other countries) but pretty much everything civilisation needs is transported on those things and once you have enough of them moving stuff cheap enough... What I'm not sure of is if this Falcon X is the cheapest way to get payload into orbit or are they just a way to get as much into orbit at once. It will be interesting to see if the Falcon 1's, 9's or X's end up being the space truck.
Correct me if I'm wrong but we do have factory factories. Name me pretty much anything in a modern automobile factory that wasn't made in a factory. Right, the people. So to me if we want to advance humanity and get towards the post scarcity society we need to get people out of menial jobs like the factories and farms and mining etc. More automation in these jobs would increase quality of life and reduce costs of goods. Yet you try and help people like that and they go and form unions and strike and generally get annoyed at your attempts to improve society.
So I ask, how can any technology that improves people's quality of life not be met with hostility because it gets rid of people's jobs. If we assume that it is not possible to improve quality of life without putting people out of work which they will resist bitterly (look at coal miner's strikes, car worker unions or NASA and the shuttle program) and I really want to understand how can we make it better when it seems most people want to have boring drudgery jobs. Or at least they want to do the same job they've always done and they'll often choose to do the same job their parents did.
What you miss is that launches have to work because satellites are expensive. However because launches are so unbelievably expensive, then the satellites also have to work. So you end up with spiralling costs. Conceptually what most satellites do is very simple - take a comms satellite or a GPS sat as an example - far simpler than what your mobile phone has to do.So if getting one to orbit cost no more than getting a truck from one city to another then you can be certain that they would be orders of magnitude cheaper themselves. So even if only 20% of them made it you've still won.
Now as soon as you talk about man rating the rockets then yes, we really need to have high reliability, but even then I still believe most pioneers would be happy with a 95% success rate and if it was go with 95% or maybe go at some point in the future possibly with 99%, then I bet you'd find enough people saying, "I'm not waiting for 99%, get me to Mars now with a 5% chance of death!" I don't think gold plating your rockets is as important as most people make it out to be. And yes before you ask I would go in a 90% success rate rocket if it was taking me to the moon or Mars.
You've reminded me of something about Concorde - told to me in a pub conversation, so likely rubbish - and I've since tried to get some proof for it but failed however maybe it is of interest: Apparently the Concorde could cross the Atlantic faster than the much faster attack fighters because it did not need to do in air refuelling. i.e. there is no point going at mach 5 if you need to keep slow ingconstantly to in-air refuel. This meant that it actually scared quite a few military planners because under standard catch and follow procedures for terrorist threats that although they could easily catch it they quickly had to chose to shoot it down or let it carry on because they couldn't keep up supersonic flight in their fighters for the long distances that Concorde did.
You raise an interesting point. If I own my body I can surely mutilate it. I can get a tattoo I can pierce my ear I can cut off a finger I can cut off an arm I can cut off a leg Or can I? But what if I get one of the attempts wrong and bleed to death? When does it stop being artistic and become attempted suicide?
The point was they you can't prove that they don't! Look at how the neutrino detectors work that rely on a neutrino transforming chlorine into argon and you have proof that they can transmute matter! You can't deny it, you can't disprove it! So fear the fusion reactors. Wait you say that there's a big neutrino source in the sky so we shouldn't worry? Well there's background radiation and yet people fear the small amount of extra radiation that nuclear plants emit.
See the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide for similar logic...
Nope I meant neutrinos, I know full well the sun produces trillions of them, I know that they are harmless. I also know that CERN is harmless because cosmic radiation produces far higher energy collisions in the atmosphere every second, but some people still fear it. I know that my local nuke plant produces gamma radiation that you cannot 100% shield against, yet people object to them because they "emit deadly radiation". I carry a tritium keyring that has a half life and lights up my pocket with it's radioactive decay. I use a mobile phone and don't worry about the fact that you can't prove that it doesn't do me harm.
So what I was trying to do was parody those who would pray on the fact that you can't prove a negative and other bits of lack of joined up thinking to sell their particular political cause. Still you can't please everyone...
That was supposed to be the joke! I'm well aware neutrinos pass through matter harmlessly in fact a light year of lead would still allow the vast majority to pass through. The point is that a minuscule percentage do happen to interact with matter very occasionally and so therefore everything I said was true. It's supposed to be taking the piss out of those who would stop nuclear plants because of their radiation and scientists can't deny that you can't 100% shield against radiation, and you can't test on all possible effects and you can't prove a negative. Meh, this is why I'm an engineer not a comedian...
It's dead easy to kill fusion: Explain to the Luddites about neutrinos. A fusion plant produces massive quantities of them that are free to radiate into the environment and no attempt is made to shield them. Not only that but there have been studies that show that neutrinos can transmute matter and therefore are a possible cause of cancer. No studies have been conducted about the effects of neutrinos on young children's development and so far all subjects exposed to neutrinos have later died or showed effects of cell degradation.
Not really no From the disagreement of theory with observed data we can propose a number of theories: * Maybe we're listening on the wrong frequencies * Perhaps an advanced civilisation built some mega-structures we can look for with astronomical observations * Are there any local unexplained phenomena that could be explained by past intelligent life * Are our current observations correct? * Are our theories about how life are formed correct, can we refine any of the assumptions by local experiment etc
All of these things are very scientific and not very philosophical. Now there may be a number of other answers that are philosophical too, but the correlation of data to theory and correction and refinement of models and assumptions is science not philosophy.
It's an old thought experiment of mine that you need a goldilocks zone of interacting civilisation size. Take Europe as an example: If Europe had been much bigger then it was worthwhile being more bloodthirsty in order to get to the top of the political food-chain. A bigger connected continent encourages more war and in medieval times I'm fairly sure war stood in the way of technological progress. the bigger the connection/continent the more likely you'll get the next Ghengus Khan coming rampaging through your city burning it back to the stone age. Make the continent too big too many resources are spent on the war and empire building and previous little is left for advancement. Without quality of life improvement you don't get technological advancement and vice versa. Likewise make that continent too small and there aren't the resources to develop the technology either. You need the cradle of technology advancement to be just big enough to support it, but not too big so that war is the best way for the bullies to get powerful. You also need other continents to expand to as your technology improves. See the continent of America as well as an idea of this where the natives were locked in battles with each other so that their technology didn't change for thousands of years. However that then made great colonising space for the next technological rung on the ladder. Hopefully we'll see this again now as technology and wealth flows back into China and the dormant Dragon gives humanity the next rung of advancement again. The reason many planets don't become space faring could be that they weren't lucky enough to have something as simple as the right mix of land masses
I disagree, the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation are the result of the very valid question: "all the scientific knowledge we have suggests X and that is in conflict with observation Y, therefore what have we got wrong?" Now this may be impossible to answer at the moment like we cannot answer what caused the big bang, but only by supposition experimentation and analysis do we get answers.
I liken the Fermi paradox to a pair of savages in an isolated jungle postulating the same thing. They know that life should exist elsewhere, they just have never met any in any of their long history. Still they have carefully checked their records and their is no recorded history of meeting any other civilisation. They conclude that they are alone on the world and tell tales of fantastic far off lands. Just as they are pondering this a Spanish galleon sails over the horizon and the priest and slavemaster in particular have a few words ready for them...
Which is when we find our civilisation is in that matrix shared virtual reality and we're about to wake up to our jobs as colony members set to be forced onto that cold barren world we have to turn into a utopia for future generations to use. And we're about to have this brutal and wrenching experience in 5, 4, 3, 2,...
We've yet to prove that the same doesn't happen in our society. Those who don't use contraception could very easily outbreed those who do. We could be in for the same fate as the Moties
I'm fairly sure it was Alistair Reynolds (or maybe it was Stephen Baxter?) who already made the point that maybe we are in fact surrounded by the evidence that alien civilisations have been to this solar system. Maybe the reason Venus and Mars are so barren and hostile are because they have been mined for resources already (the method of mining used on Venus explains its odd day/year cycle that we observe) Perhaps the is evidence of left over mining facilities in the asteroid belt? Maybe some who came through here didn't want to come down into a steep gravity well and hundreds of millions of years ago came through here already.
I just like the idea that the evidence could be all around us and we don't yet have the technology to see that evidence for what it is. Just as a caveman would not understand the evidence of the remnants of our civilisation in that strange cave where his eyes flash with strange lights like fireflies even when his eyes are closed.
I think you're confusing a few vocal individual's opinions with accepted scientific knowledge.
The ancient greeks new the earth was round. Every sailor knew about the horizon and therefore could not be flat. Yet the vocal religious zealots shouted their opinions, but the evidence existed for a spherical earth and the greeks even calculated it's diameter very accurately simply from looking into water wells. A few generals dismissed heavier than air flight, but you'll have to show me evidence that it was believed scientifically impossible. No-one ever said that it was physically impossible to go faster than the speed of sound, just that we didn't have the technology to do so. Jules Verne talked of going to the moon and described methods to do so before people dismissed it as not possible, but again noone said it was physically impossible just that we can't do it.
Now I grant you that we could be missing something, but your assertions about what people thought and what was at the time accepted scientific knowledge are not correct.
Part of the fermi paradox assumes that a planet that is suitable for life will develop life. Therefore any planet we would want to live on will already have life there. If it doesn't have life on it then it's not suitable for us. Add to this there will probably be other planets that aren't suitable for us that have life on them as well and that's a lot of competition for resources. Now I personally don't buy that we would want to live on planets when if we have the technology to build spaceships we have the technology to build orbital colonies that have many advantages to the upwardly mobile space civilisation. Now all of this is unless it is easier to devastate than it is to build those orbital colonies. My hunch is that humans like to hunt and would view the natives similar as how we view lions at the moment - there are plenty of people who'd love to hunt them given half a chance provided they see them as inferior life forms. So yes I see that contact with an alien species would probably end badly for one of the parties; but it will only be so if it is easy and convenient or religiously necessary. And that is all without the military mindset classifying them as a risk and therefore exterminating them for "our own long term protection".
I said great grandparent, that was not a typo. But these were kids whose ideal jobs were "To become a hairdresser so I can talk to my mates and cut hair all day" and who wanted to get pregnant by an unknown man so that they could get a decent house - the younger you were the quicker you could get to the top of the list and the more children you had, the bigger house you got. This wasn't one or two this was about half of the class each year!
Considering my mother taught a few Great grandchildren of children she taught in the school she worked at since she had me (her second child) I can confirm that 35 year old great grandparents are indeed possible. It was when it got to the stage where there was a great grandchild of one of her original students in every year that she decided it was time to retire...
You know I always wondered how hard it would be to make a gadget that syphoned off blood, metabolised the sugar and then popped the blood back into the body. Instant slimming aid and heat pack! No-one need ever be overweight again. What could possibly go wrong?
For anyone here who promotes the expansion of copyright law I ask a question: What if Shakespeare was still in copyright? Or Beethoven, or Bach or Chaucer or Gilbert and Sullivan. Would society be better if such intellectual legacies were allowed? Without a constant updated public domain isn't society suffering?
(Not understand quite how the American government works here)
So I get you need checks and balances and that you therefore need the president and congress to be on the same page when it comes to policy, but if you can have the situation above how come you don't get it more often where the right hand ties up the left hand from doing anything?
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See this is what gets me, people ask "what on earth would you do with 125 tons of launch capacity"
As long as it's a cheap enough 125 tons (i.e. cheaper than 125 1 ton launches) then what couldn't you do?
Most of the economy runs on what trucks ship around, now in the UK they're limited to 40 tons, (don't know about other countries) but pretty much everything civilisation needs is transported on those things and once you have enough of them moving stuff cheap enough...
What I'm not sure of is if this Falcon X is the cheapest way to get payload into orbit or are they just a way to get as much into orbit at once. It will be interesting to see if the Falcon 1's, 9's or X's end up being the space truck.
Correct me if I'm wrong but we do have factory factories. Name me pretty much anything in a modern automobile factory that wasn't made in a factory. Right, the people.
So to me if we want to advance humanity and get towards the post scarcity society we need to get people out of menial jobs like the factories and farms and mining etc. More automation in these jobs would increase quality of life and reduce costs of goods.
Yet you try and help people like that and they go and form unions and strike and generally get annoyed at your attempts to improve society.
So I ask, how can any technology that improves people's quality of life not be met with hostility because it gets rid of people's jobs. If we assume that it is not possible to improve quality of life without putting people out of work which they will resist bitterly (look at coal miner's strikes, car worker unions or NASA and the shuttle program) and I really want to understand how can we make it better when it seems most people want to have boring drudgery jobs. Or at least they want to do the same job they've always done and they'll often choose to do the same job their parents did.
What you miss is that launches have to work because satellites are expensive. However because launches are so unbelievably expensive, then the satellites also have to work. So you end up with spiralling costs.
Conceptually what most satellites do is very simple - take a comms satellite or a GPS sat as an example - far simpler than what your mobile phone has to do.So if getting one to orbit cost no more than getting a truck from one city to another then you can be certain that they would be orders of magnitude cheaper themselves. So even if only 20% of them made it you've still won.
Now as soon as you talk about man rating the rockets then yes, we really need to have high reliability, but even then I still believe most pioneers would be happy with a 95% success rate and if it was go with 95% or maybe go at some point in the future possibly with 99%, then I bet you'd find enough people saying, "I'm not waiting for 99%, get me to Mars now with a 5% chance of death!"
I don't think gold plating your rockets is as important as most people make it out to be.
And yes before you ask I would go in a 90% success rate rocket if it was taking me to the moon or Mars.
You've reminded me of something about Concorde - told to me in a pub conversation, so likely rubbish - and I've since tried to get some proof for it but failed however maybe it is of interest:
Apparently the Concorde could cross the Atlantic faster than the much faster attack fighters because it did not need to do in air refuelling. i.e. there is no point going at mach 5 if you need to keep slow ingconstantly to in-air refuel. This meant that it actually scared quite a few military planners because under standard catch and follow procedures for terrorist threats that although they could easily catch it they quickly had to chose to shoot it down or let it carry on because they couldn't keep up supersonic flight in their fighters for the long distances that Concorde did.
You raise an interesting point. If I own my body I can surely mutilate it.
I can get a tattoo
I can pierce my ear
I can cut off a finger
I can cut off an arm
I can cut off a leg
Or can I?
But what if I get one of the attempts wrong and bleed to death? When does it stop being artistic and become attempted suicide?
The point was they you can't prove that they don't! Look at how the neutrino detectors work that rely on a neutrino transforming chlorine into argon and you have proof that they can transmute matter! You can't deny it, you can't disprove it! So fear the fusion reactors. Wait you say that there's a big neutrino source in the sky so we shouldn't worry? Well there's background radiation and yet people fear the small amount of extra radiation that nuclear plants emit.
See the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide for similar logic...
Nope I meant neutrinos, I know full well the sun produces trillions of them, I know that they are harmless.
I also know that CERN is harmless because cosmic radiation produces far higher energy collisions in the atmosphere every second, but some people still fear it.
I know that my local nuke plant produces gamma radiation that you cannot 100% shield against, yet people object to them because they "emit deadly radiation".
I carry a tritium keyring that has a half life and lights up my pocket with it's radioactive decay.
I use a mobile phone and don't worry about the fact that you can't prove that it doesn't do me harm.
So what I was trying to do was parody those who would pray on the fact that you can't prove a negative and other bits of lack of joined up thinking to sell their particular political cause. Still you can't please everyone...
That was supposed to be the joke!
I'm well aware neutrinos pass through matter harmlessly in fact a light year of lead would still allow the vast majority to pass through. The point is that a minuscule percentage do happen to interact with matter very occasionally and so therefore everything I said was true.
It's supposed to be taking the piss out of those who would stop nuclear plants because of their radiation and scientists can't deny that you can't 100% shield against radiation, and you can't test on all possible effects and you can't prove a negative.
Meh, this is why I'm an engineer not a comedian...
It's dead easy to kill fusion:
Explain to the Luddites about neutrinos. A fusion plant produces massive quantities of them that are free to radiate into the environment and no attempt is made to shield them. Not only that but there have been studies that show that neutrinos can transmute matter and therefore are a possible cause of cancer. No studies have been conducted about the effects of neutrinos on young children's development and so far all subjects exposed to neutrinos have later died or showed effects of cell degradation.
Not really no
From the disagreement of theory with observed data we can propose a number of theories:
* Maybe we're listening on the wrong frequencies
* Perhaps an advanced civilisation built some mega-structures we can look for with astronomical observations
* Are there any local unexplained phenomena that could be explained by past intelligent life
* Are our current observations correct?
* Are our theories about how life are formed correct, can we refine any of the assumptions by local experiment
etc
All of these things are very scientific and not very philosophical. Now there may be a number of other answers that are philosophical too, but the correlation of data to theory and correction and refinement of models and assumptions is science not philosophy.
It's an old thought experiment of mine that you need a goldilocks zone of interacting civilisation size. Take Europe as an example:
If Europe had been much bigger then it was worthwhile being more bloodthirsty in order to get to the top of the political food-chain. A bigger connected continent encourages more war and in medieval times I'm fairly sure war stood in the way of technological progress. the bigger the connection/continent the more likely you'll get the next Ghengus Khan coming rampaging through your city burning it back to the stone age. Make the continent too big too many resources are spent on the war and empire building and previous little is left for advancement. Without quality of life improvement you don't get technological advancement and vice versa.
Likewise make that continent too small and there aren't the resources to develop the technology either.
You need the cradle of technology advancement to be just big enough to support it, but not too big so that war is the best way for the bullies to get powerful. You also need other continents to expand to as your technology improves. See the continent of America as well as an idea of this where the natives were locked in battles with each other so that their technology didn't change for thousands of years. However that then made great colonising space for the next technological rung on the ladder. Hopefully we'll see this again now as technology and wealth flows back into China and the dormant Dragon gives humanity the next rung of advancement again.
The reason many planets don't become space faring could be that they weren't lucky enough to have something as simple as the right mix of land masses
I disagree, the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation are the result of the very valid question: "all the scientific knowledge we have suggests X and that is in conflict with observation Y, therefore what have we got wrong?"
Now this may be impossible to answer at the moment like we cannot answer what caused the big bang, but only by supposition experimentation and analysis do we get answers.
I liken the Fermi paradox to a pair of savages in an isolated jungle postulating the same thing. They know that life should exist elsewhere, they just have never met any in any of their long history. Still they have carefully checked their records and their is no recorded history of meeting any other civilisation. They conclude that they are alone on the world and tell tales of fantastic far off lands.
Just as they are pondering this a Spanish galleon sails over the horizon and the priest and slavemaster in particular have a few words ready for them...
Which is when we find our civilisation is in that matrix shared virtual reality and we're about to wake up to our jobs as colony members set to be forced onto that cold barren world we have to turn into a utopia for future generations to use. And we're about to have this brutal and wrenching experience in 5, 4, 3, 2,...
We've yet to prove that the same doesn't happen in our society. Those who don't use contraception could very easily outbreed those who do. We could be in for the same fate as the Moties
I'm fairly sure it was Alistair Reynolds (or maybe it was Stephen Baxter?) who already made the point that maybe we are in fact surrounded by the evidence that alien civilisations have been to this solar system.
Maybe the reason Venus and Mars are so barren and hostile are because they have been mined for resources already (the method of mining used on Venus explains its odd day/year cycle that we observe)
Perhaps the is evidence of left over mining facilities in the asteroid belt? Maybe some who came through here didn't want to come down into a steep gravity well and hundreds of millions of years ago came through here already.
I just like the idea that the evidence could be all around us and we don't yet have the technology to see that evidence for what it is. Just as a caveman would not understand the evidence of the remnants of our civilisation in that strange cave where his eyes flash with strange lights like fireflies even when his eyes are closed.
I think you're confusing a few vocal individual's opinions with accepted scientific knowledge.
The ancient greeks new the earth was round. Every sailor knew about the horizon and therefore could not be flat. Yet the vocal religious zealots shouted their opinions, but the evidence existed for a spherical earth and the greeks even calculated it's diameter very accurately simply from looking into water wells.
A few generals dismissed heavier than air flight, but you'll have to show me evidence that it was believed scientifically impossible.
No-one ever said that it was physically impossible to go faster than the speed of sound, just that we didn't have the technology to do so.
Jules Verne talked of going to the moon and described methods to do so before people dismissed it as not possible, but again noone said it was physically impossible just that we can't do it.
Now I grant you that we could be missing something, but your assertions about what people thought and what was at the time accepted scientific knowledge are not correct.
Part of the fermi paradox assumes that a planet that is suitable for life will develop life.
Therefore any planet we would want to live on will already have life there. If it doesn't have life on it then it's not suitable for us. Add to this there will probably be other planets that aren't suitable for us that have life on them as well and that's a lot of competition for resources.
Now I personally don't buy that we would want to live on planets when if we have the technology to build spaceships we have the technology to build orbital colonies that have many advantages to the upwardly mobile space civilisation.
Now all of this is unless it is easier to devastate than it is to build those orbital colonies. My hunch is that humans like to hunt and would view the natives similar as how we view lions at the moment - there are plenty of people who'd love to hunt them given half a chance provided they see them as inferior life forms.
So yes I see that contact with an alien species would probably end badly for one of the parties; but it will only be so if it is easy and convenient or religiously necessary.
And that is all without the military mindset classifying them as a risk and therefore exterminating them for "our own long term protection".
Never mind hydrogenation - flour is a remarkably explosive substance as is custard powder and people eat those things!
Bring on the plutonium!!!
it's currently the antagonist in what will be recorded as one of the worst environmental disasters of the 21st century.
There's an awful lot of 21st Century left yet, not sure I'd make that statement quite yet.
I said great grandparent, that was not a typo.
But these were kids whose ideal jobs were "To become a hairdresser so I can talk to my mates and cut hair all day" and who wanted to get pregnant by an unknown man so that they could get a decent house - the younger you were the quicker you could get to the top of the list and the more children you had, the bigger house you got. This wasn't one or two this was about half of the class each year!
Considering my mother taught a few Great grandchildren of children she taught in the school she worked at since she had me (her second child) I can confirm that 35 year old great grandparents are indeed possible. It was when it got to the stage where there was a great grandchild of one of her original students in every year that she decided it was time to retire...
You know I always wondered how hard it would be to make a gadget that syphoned off blood, metabolised the sugar and then popped the blood back into the body.
Instant slimming aid and heat pack! No-one need ever be overweight again.
What could possibly go wrong?
For anyone here who promotes the expansion of copyright law I ask a question:
What if Shakespeare was still in copyright? Or Beethoven, or Bach or Chaucer or Gilbert and Sullivan.
Would society be better if such intellectual legacies were allowed? Without a constant updated public domain isn't society suffering?
(Not understand quite how the American government works here)
So I get you need checks and balances and that you therefore need the president and congress to be on the same page when it comes to policy, but if you can have the situation above how come you don't get it more often where the right hand ties up the left hand from doing anything?