A major problem is that if we structurally limit what technologies do, we are still not in control. Now whoever we empowered to control and limit the technology is in control. Who keeps them accountable?
You’ll probably get one of three outcomes: regulatory capture by monopolies, self dealing by bureaucrats to enrich themselves or gain power, or regulatory capture by self absorbed ideologues who halt all progress or force it down some ideologically approved path.
In none of those scenarios is anything aligned with the best interest of the people.
Any time the headline is gamblers making millions the reality is 90% of gamblers losing, maybe 9% breaking even or making small wins, and a few making millions.
2.4% is not bad given how new this still is and how extreme the speeds and energies are.
Note that all the fatalities have been launch or landing related, not in space itself. Clawing out of this gravity well is tough. Make Earth a bit larger and you’d never get off it without something like NERVA or nuclear pulse Orion.
I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket. Many rocky planets might be much more massive than Earth. On one with 3X our gravity a space program might never get going.
NERVA as envisioned had terrible thrust to weight ratio, not really usable to launch from a Super Earth. Nuclear lightbulb, orion or heck NSWR would likely work though. And bonus points for not having to think about landing systems for the return trip. ;-)
In that case aliens from a super Earth would be unable to get off it unless they decided to salt their biosphere with fissile waste. NERVA is at least contained if it works properly.
So no space program from a super Earth until they figure out not just fusion but compact high density fusion that could fly. You’d need stuff like in The Expanse, or at least in that rough ballpark.
Using fission is something they probably wouldn’t do unless they faced an existential reason forcing them to go to space, like deflecting an asteroid.
I’m a little obsessed with Orion though. The fact that the math works on that lunacy. The good old devil’s pogo stick.
If you could make pure fusion bombs it would be maybe politically viable, especially if you also use superconducting magnets to make it less just brute force. You’d still induce a little radioactivity from neutrons but it would be short lived and not even close to fissile fallout bad.
To see that thing launch. From somewhere very remote though, probably Antarctica. And from many miles away, and probably with welders glass. But damn. That would be epic.
Yeah the more I learn the more I buy the rare Earth explanation.
Life may not be that unusual but it might be mostly just goo: little extremophile type bacteria and maybe very tiny creepy crawlies living in deep seas, underground, in liquid mantles in ice moons, etc.
But to get stuff even as sophisticated as frogs and bunnies, let alone something that can try space flight, requires a place that is all of: big, stable, with abundant energy, with high enough metallicity, and in an environment well shielded from flares and impacts.
You might enjoy reading about theorized “Superhabitable” planets. A super earth with about twice the mass of Earth would likely have plate tectonics and even more internal heat. Plus, if it orbits a K-type star that’s about 85% of the mass of the Sun, it could remain habitable for tens of billions of years.
By comparison, Earth may be barely habitable. It is amusing to think that we may be living on the galactic equivalent of Australia.
Perhaps the upside is that our gravity well is low enough to make routine spaceflight possible.
Stability is definitely good but excessive stability leads to stagnation. A perfect example of this is what's been coined as the "boring billion"
"In 1995, geologists Roger Buick, Davis Des Marais, and Andrew Knoll reviewed the apparent lack of major biological, geological, and climatic events during the Mesoproterozoic era 1.6 to 1 billion years ago (Ga), and, thus, described it as "the dullest time in Earth's history"
> I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket
Here we are, half a century after the first moon landing, doing a flyby of the moon in preparation for landing and supposedly for establishing a base there that makes no sense. We’re not even close to being able to send humans to the nearest planets, and even if we did send people to Mars, in one of the most pointlessly dangerous and expensive missions in history, it’d be extremely unlikely to lead even to a base, let alone a settlement.
Yet with all that, people still talk about the Fermi paradox as though it’s a mystery.
It makes me think we’re really dealing with a kind of religious belief. Religion backfills reality with comforting fantasies, like life after death. In this case, the fantasy that there are much more advanced, interstellar spacefaring civilizations than ours elsewhere in the galaxy. This implies that humans too could one day become an interstellar species (with enough grit and determination and pulling back on the control stick and yelling, I suppose!) But somehow, mysterious effects prevent us from ever observing any evidence of this belief.
It’s a logical extrapolation if you think life is a natural phenomenon. It would be exceedingly weird to see no evidence for it, but of course we have not been looking long or far.
And yes, space flight is brutally hard. Look up the history of sailing. Look up the Polynesian indigenous peoples and how long that took, through multiple waves of exploration, or the people who walked across a land bridge to North America during the ice age. Space flight is easier and safer than some of those feats, given the tech they did it with at the time.
If there is a fantasy it’s the idea that we’d have bases on the Moon and Mars by now. What we are doing today is the equivalent of early Polynesians hollowing out some logs and going fishing.
It goes deeper than that. What happened was a hugely tiny minority of very loud people festered in Tumblr and Reddit, and Reddit became the single most censored site on the internet, eclipsing China. The number of censorship actions individually in 2012 to 2016 eclipsed China, just on Reddit alone. And nobody wants to say that or even acknowledge it or even look at it, and we're on an internet site about communications on the internet, and not a single person has ever stated that fact. They destroyed Reddit; that's the dead internet theory. Reddit is back to faking it, but there's never going to be a chance to kickstart something like Reddit. That's why they're actually trying to resurrect other websites now.
So this tyrannical mob of minorities destroyed Reddit, and now they have to metastasize and they have to go to other places. So they ironically started using other websites, but actually that's just because they found new ways to get that dopamine hit of controlling other people's behaviors and actions through censorship, and that's what drives them. So you're right; people quit, but wherever they go on any site, basically, there's no safe spaces left for free speech; there's only safe spaces left for censorship.
Brain rot and content don't even come into the equation. That's just throughput. I think we hit peak conversation around about 2017, and I think the well-known surface area where people can actually write coherently in a way that gets read got erased, and now it's balkanized in substacks and short-form video, and everything that used to be comment is now commentary, and you have to talk, you have to listen to some bobblehead talking, and then the comment section is nothing; nobody reads it; there's no conversation happening anymore. And that was deleted by the tyrannical minority who took every surface they could and destroyed it.
I agree about tiny loud minorities, but would also add the 4chan incubated fash stuff alongside Tumblr and parts of Reddit.
As far as censorship goes, it’s clear that the deeper problem is that mega social media doesn’t scale. When the aforementioned loud obnoxious minorities invade, it becomes totally untenable.
If you don’t censor you end up with either a Nazi bar or a Tumblr struggle session. If you do censor you end up with either a boring milquetoast platform or a censored echo chamber that just reflects the beliefs of the people running it. None of those things are appealing to most people.
As a medium for real communication it just doesn’t scale. Places like HN are tolerable because they’re small enough to be actually moderated and to self police. This is also why real discourse has moved to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Signal, and private sites.
Maybe brain rot is the platforms attempt to fill the void left by the fact that discourse doesn’t scale. This might alter my view slightly. My take has been that platforms push brain rot to be addictive, and there may be truth in that, but maybe that was more a later move to try to save the platform’s user numbers after the collapse of social media as a productive discourse medium in the late 20-teens.
My impression back then from those profs was that it (fusion) would be inevitable but you do have to think long term, really long term. I'm old enough now (55) to understand that mentality.
I'd put money on something useful fusion related happening within the next 10 years or perhaps 20. I'm not up on the current state of experiments etc but it will happen.
AFAIK superconductors are a major limiting tech. But we are slowly getting better ones, both by discovering more and by learning to mass produce superconducting wire.
With superconductors you can make magnetic bottles.
There’s also some interesting inertial confinement work happening. There the limiter is both confinement and the efficiency of the driver. Look up MagLIF for a hybrid magnetic inertial approach under study.
... and room temperature superconductors! If only we could sort out the feasibility, interdependencies, and priorities, but we just don't know, or well, I just don't know haha.
The reason “ideas don’t get funding” is usually (but not always) true is that usually a good idea alone doesn’t mean much. So usually you have to have good idea plus something else the investor feels is a proof point or evidence you can execute.
The clearest of these is that you have already built it, or an MVP of it that is more than just smoke and mirrors, and there’s users and customers.
If you have excellent proof points and actual revenue growth, you could show up with no pants smelling like weed and somebody might fund you. Then they’d call their press people to do an “eccentric genius founder” piece about the person who showed up stoned with no pants and their pitch was that good. That’s cause if your graph goes up and to the right you’re not crazy, you’re “eccentric.”
If you don’t have any proof they fall back on secondary evidence, like credentials and schools and vibes. The latter, yes, often overlaps with cronies.
And unfortunately that by necessity includes most ideas that cost a lot to prototype, which means credentialism and croneyism tends to gate keep fields with a high cost of entry.
Ideas shouldn’t get funding - ideas are just mere results of thought that haven’t been played through in depth.
Do you need a working product to get funding? No. But you do need a compelling investment thesis - which takes months and even years of deep thought to come to fruition. Of course you can shortcut this process by smooching but only a select few can pull that off.
I upvoted because I didn't know the short film existed and it's interesting.
I think the short film completely misses the mark if both entities are there in human form, in a diner. (Of course, budget constraints, and the adaptation cannot just be two inorganic beings talking, but still...)
If they exist, they're probably currently placing bets whether we will manage to destroy ourselves (or at least set our civilization back by centuries) with our nuclear weapons, our climate change or our social media...
I like the idea we live inside the Veil of Madness (A sort of galactic bermuda triangle that drives inhabitants insane, so all spacefaring civilizations stay away).
There was a time not long ago when reportedly looking at the emails being exchanged around the world one would think the most pressing matter, discussed at length, was how to "enlarge your penis".
Making outrageous demands is normal in these negotiations. You can just look at what Hamas demanded during the ceasefires. What usually happens is no strong concessions from either side and hostilities just end. The regimes get to survive just in a badly degraded state.
Most importantly Iran can't afford to keep the strait closed to enforce this. If they block shipping their own will be blocked as well - which hasn't yet happened, they were still allowed to ship oil. Iran was already in terrible financial shape before the war and they aren't negotiating from a strong position of power to take those risks.
> Most importantly Iran can't afford to keep the strait closed to enforce this. If they block shipping their own will be blocked as well - which hasn't yet happened, they were still allowed to ship oil.
Why do you say this? During the war they set up a checkpoint system so their ships and ships they allowed to pass could still pass through.
this would be a worse crisis than we've just had; it'd put China (if not all of Asia) directly against the USA and would put Australia in a very peculiar spot.
Iran charging a massive toll would also cause a crisis with the gulf states and they aren't going to tolerate it. This is much bigger than Iran vs US, and the idea they hold the cards for such a claim is mostly propaganda.
Just pointing out that for the volume of these ships, it's not really a massive toll. It's honestly a bargain, paid for in a really easy to stomach way by the people who allowed this to happen: Everyone else.
Doesn't explain why UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrian, and Saudis would tolerate a fee transiting the strait. Let alone why America would agree to that in negotiations given they have little incentive to agree to any large demands.
If that is agreed upon it's going to come with some concessions by Iran which is even less likely.
They'd tolerate it because they all poked a giant in the eye and it didn't go down. It's by far the cheapest route to peace any of them have.
USA could agree to it because it's not particularly dependent on that fuel supply and therefore would only pay the costs indirectly via market forces, which as the thief-in-chief pointed out, does (the parts he cares about of) their economy no harm as a net petroleum-product exporter, and above all else, they are losing the war.
You’ll probably get one of three outcomes: regulatory capture by monopolies, self dealing by bureaucrats to enrich themselves or gain power, or regulatory capture by self absorbed ideologues who halt all progress or force it down some ideologically approved path.
In none of those scenarios is anything aligned with the best interest of the people.
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