Jump to content

ModZero

Members
  • Posts

    545
  • Joined

Posts posted by ModZero

  1. On 11/9/2017 at 4:31 PM, radonek said:

    But most damning is that you need smart people to handle stuff without blowing themselves up, pretty much opposite to idiots gravitating  to extremist groups.

    By "idiots" you mean engineers? Because they're overrepresented in right-wing extremist groups. Perhaps luckily (unless you're trying to build a new nuclear power plant or something) nuclear engineers are rather uncommon amongst engineers to begin with, though.

     

  2. Historical interest? The motivations of hobbyists with too much money don't have to make sense, I mean, just look at Hyperloop. Also, I just spent a few hours playing Car Mechanic Simulator 2018, and my friends just bought a Fiat Panda from, as far as I can tell, 1812. I can definitely see the appeal of trying to rebuild a historical capsule, even if I think people pursuing it aren't taxed highly enough.

    It couldn't be an exact replica - I doubt it would be even vaguely legal to fly it in 2017 - but matching it visually?

     

  3. 8 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

    Is it much bigger, it speaks to the ground control, flies on schedule, and follows its official route

    No it doesn't, because the only customer willing to pay for the service is the army.

    EDIT:

    28 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

    Musk presented this for its clickbait value, and a lot of people are focusing on it as if it was the big news of the presentation. It wasn't. It's just an afterthought.

    Well, it was a high-point of the presentation from the humorous perspective.

    I think you can put the barge in the Zurich lake?

  4. 7 hours ago, magnemoe said:


    And no you would not build without an archaeological survey, if you get an significant find, say an well preserved temple or village the spot is off limit. Smaller stuff you will move. 

    Look. The *people* here consider it of a high cultural value for them. That's enough for any decent person. And this has nothing to do with archeology.

    7 hours ago, magnemoe said:

    Notre Dame is an failed analogue, roadside shrines you see a lot in Catholic countries and also in Asia is an closer match


    Oh no you didn't.

  5. 18 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

    Read one comment from one native Hawaiian,

    This is known as "happy like Daily Mail after finding an immigrant who hates black people."

    Look, they're not some weird odd people. I mean, I don't know about the US, but in Europe there is plenty of places where you will not be let to build stuff, and culture is going to be one large reason. And yes, some of those are going to be nature. Every time you try to do logging in what little forest we have, or digging for shale gas under historic towns, you get huge protests.

    But when non-white people do the same, you all start dismissing it as "religion." Much of the protected buildings in Europe are churches. I'm not sure the idea of converting the Notre Dame into lofts would go down very well.

  6. 19 minutes ago, Nibb31 said:

    Yeah, I wonder how you land on an off shore barge in London, Paris or Berlin.

    Well, London is viable, for certain values of "viable" — you'd have to fly over populated areas in both directions, and the trip to the barge would be a bit on the long side compared to the hopeful things. Oh, and find people willing to spend hilarious amount of money to regularly commute from NYC to London in less than 2h.

    I'm sure any noise regulations won't be much of a problem. I mean, Concorde was such a roaring success.

  7. 3 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    That's insulting, and based on nothing but your disliking what I have to say.  *I* am a published biologist with a graduate degree, like most biologists intimately familiar with ideas like "Carrying Capacity" and ecological niches.

    Well, that's too bad, because I would expect that biologists would be acquainted with ideas such as "non sequitur," and "not guesstimating nonsense about things that aren't really biology on public forums." But maybe math schools are just better at this, though I'd note other biologists I read seem to get it.

    3 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    Most estimated the planet could only sustain 10 billion people.

    If you said that _first_ then I might even believe that biology thing, though tbh, next to claims that colonizing the solar system would substantially change that number makes me doubt it anyway. Not that it matters at all

    3 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    Your credentials to argue Biology with a Biologist are, what, exactly?

    I have access to the Internet, a degree in claiming I have degrees, knowledge of the difference between biology, ecology and economics, a short temper and a button to shut out the replies.

    EDIT: this reminds me of the time when several geologists from the Polish PAN decided to make a public statement that "they're geologists and they know about earth and there's no global warming."

  8. 9 minutes ago, WinkAllKerb'' said:

    true there a is a strong paradox , between darwin "law of the strongfull or more able to do this or that @ delta t & @ lamba environnemental condition" and the "noah ark gardener metaphor"

    Just because something is "law of nature" doesn't mean it's an ethical guideline, or a true "law". It's easy to figure out if you use evolution as an example — evolution is a "law of nature" (however imperfect that expression is), but if someone told you they want to "help the evolution", you'd probably back away slowly, and start running as soon as you turned the corner.

  9. 26 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

    That comment, when taken literally (ignoring the quotes) sums up the entire spirit of your post.

    It should be taken literally. I consider what people like Elon Musk and the entire silicon valley venture capital crowd "enterpreneurs", in quotes. It's a pyramid scheme.

    26 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

    When Mars is self-sufficienct,

    ...when pigs fly.

    28 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

    Eventually we are going to hit a hard population-cap (my knowledge of Bioligy leads me to guesstimate somewhere between 12 and 24 billion people, depending on how much of the environment we are willing to sacrifice).

    My knowledge of biology leads me to a guestimate of  your knowledge of biology to be about nil. That's fine, this is a "science, spaceflight, and pretending it's not politics" subforum on a vidya game forum, but, uh, you know that we're actually unlikely to "hit the cap"? We're going to slow down our breeding before that. Also, sending a few people to Mars helps nothing.

    30 minutes ago, Northstar1989 said:

    At that point, colonizing Mars and the Moon will be the ONLY way to increase the humssn population sooner.  

    Why would we want to increase the population further? This is not a game with a score depending on how much you BREEEEEEEED. Even if it _was_ (which is isn't) the capability of the solar system outside of earth to sustain human life is minuscule (you need fertile soil, you know? And a bunch of other things, but fertile soil. That means volcanoes, btw. No, really, you literally need volcanoes for sustainable fertile soil). But, that's irrelevant, because no, we don't need to increase human population into infinity. We don't even need to "preserve the species" at all cost. There is no high authority that somehow forces us to do that, and sacrifice the happiness of the actually living to do that.

    In fact, both those ideas — the "species preservation" and "increasing the population" are repulsive, and elevating them above all others is what's at the very core of some of the worst things that happened in the 20th century. Let's not do that again, shall we?

  10. No recycling until we have a propulsion system that's at once cheap, high dV, and has a decent thrust. Right now that's a bit of a "pick one" situation. VASIMR people tried to "advertise" their thingie as a potential "space junk cleaner" engine (totally worth watching for music that somehow makes me feel like I'm watching a truck advertising. That might be intentional. Also, extremely KSP-ey spacecraft), but, uh, they don't really have anything to show for it, and considering the power needs, I don't think they'd get past "pick two" if they somehow succeed.

  11. 4 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    Nothing is a "proven" benefit until it's actually been done.

    That's utterly untrue. Most of the time people actually do have some evidence the thing they're trying will be useful — and the bigger the thing is, the more reason they need before they try. While things people do "for fun" may seem an exception, they're not — fun is a benefit, and yes, sometimes the evidence turns out wrong.

    5 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    By that logic, nobody should ever go out to socialize with friends,

    There's so much evidence for wide-ranging benefits of socializing with others that I think you must be kidding.

    5 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    or apply to a better job, or attend college- because none of those are PROVEN benefits, for that particular person, before they happen...

    Aaaaah, I get it. You don't know what evidence or "proven" means outside of some relatively narrow parts of mathematics.

    No, in all those cases people have strong evidence that what they are going to attempt has a good chance of delivering good results. That it sometimes doesn't isn't enough to invalidate the proof, because we're not talking the Pythagoras theorem.

    5 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    There are however many extremely valuable SPECULATIVE benefits that we can be almost completely certain of.  Any colony on Mars will eventually become self-sustaining (it may take a couple hundred years, but it WILL hapoen).  

    No. Too few people, for example, the friends thing you mention is actually the reason why it wouldn't work on small scale. On large scale, we know how much an individual impact outstrips their land use on Earth in countries with great soils. So a Mars colony has zero chance of being big and not a famine.

    5 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    And when it does, Earth will no longer need to send anything to Mars (that doesn't mean it shouldn't- commerce is generally beneficial to all) and in return will receive one extremely important product that is likely to be the only thing Mars ever exports...

    KNOWLEDGE.

    It already does that in the best way it can: robots. We should send more robots there, by the way.

    5 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    For a few hundred Billion dollars or less, if done efficiently, Earth should be able to set up an entire new self-sustaining civilization that will eventually produce more scientific breakthroughs than the entire United Ststes and Europe combined (Martians will HAVE TO- life will be hard on Mars, even after 2 centuries of colonization- and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics will be the ONLY ways to make it easier.  Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention)  Right now, the US spends $31 Billion annually on the NIH and $7 Billion annually on the NSF.  Mars could probably be colonized for less than $300 Billion with SpaceX at the helm, and will eventually (600 or so years down the line and 400-500 years after self-sufficiency) produce just as much science as all the scientists in the USA and Europe combined every year with no additional.  Do the math.

    You first. Those are fantasies, and comparing health services to monorails is insulting. We actually know why those are useful. Meanwhile you're here apparently counting science in kilograms.

    5 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    A global crisis of apathy.  Americans, in particular, have become dangerously myopic and focused only on living a comfortable life.  Going to Mars could change that, and inspire MILLIONS to become scientists, engineers, or entrepreneurs...

    Actually they seem mostly focused on white supremacy, but that's a detail. Sorry, but what are people supposed to look for? Honorable death from radiation sickness? Whenever people decided they need something "more" than that, a continent underwent a genocide. There is nothing good in that colonial attitude.

    Also, "enterpreneurs" should be illegal.

    5 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    If Mars experiences a famine (and at some point it will- so will Earth.  Famines are an inevitability given a long enough stretch of time...) it won't harm Earth in any major way.

    I guess after the rest of your post it doesn't seem particularly surprising you'd expect Earth to just sit there and eat popcorn while Mars starves.

  12. 8 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    Nibb, there is a massive opportunity cost to NOT going to Mars.

    Sorry, but what? There's little proven benefit to going to Mars, outside of prestige stuff. Meanwhile there a ton of opportunity lost by not spending the resources  - materials, people's time, money - on pretty much anything else. Opportunity cost is what Mars mission advocates routinely miss. Going to Mars misses other opportunities, like hiring your presumably highly qualified colonists in some actually productive jobs, like, say, teaching. Or manufacturing faucets. Still more productive.

    8 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    You lose a MASSIVE amount of economic development over time just by a tiny delay.

    Huh? That doesn't matter. There's little benefit of this for us here, there's no global crisis this is going to prevent, if anything you're missing out on 2 years of sending rescue missions. From the colony perspective, it doesn't matter at all, because its development *starts* when the thing happens. It's an isolated economy anyway.

    8 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

    Just imagine the economic value of a fully-developed Mars with a population on the hundreds of millions in a *single second*.

    We can have great famines here on Earth, we don't need to go to Mars for that.

    1. Other. US is becoming increasingly unstable, and SpaceX is practically limited by it. I also think that upstart countries like China and India have more motivation to do silly, prestige things like Mars missions. PR requirements of US can be satisfactorily met by launching empty cans on high suborbital trajectories once every five years.
    2. 2030 or later. Mostly when it becomes easy enough that sending a basic, return mission becomes more of a question of "why not" ("because it's expensive", but maybe you want show off how much you can afford) than "why."
    3. Hopefully neither. Or, "domes", because that's least permanent. Frankly, if we survive the next few decades in a shape allowing for flying something heavier than a kite, we'll probably grow up to the point where "terraforming" is considered an atrocity. Because it is one, it's a planetary equivalent of turning everything into a McDonalds and a parking lot. And "bioforming"? Hah, lol, nope, that's fantasy land.

    EDIT: also, use the term "crewed," "manned" is anachronistic.

  13. So, I'm experiencing a similar issue to @terminalmonky, except I don't have Seti configs, or in fact anything that would change the CBK config in a way mentioning the observatory.

    Spoiler

    [ERR 23:57:23.121] Exception handling event onNewGameLevelLoadRequestWasSanctionedAndActioned in class CustomBarnKit:System.ArgumentException: The requested value 'Observatory' was not found.
      at System.Enum.Parse (System.Type enumType, System.String value, Boolean ignoreCase) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
      at System.Enum.Parse (System.Type enumType, System.String value) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
      at CustomBarnKit.CustomBarnKit.LoadUpgradesPrices (GameScenes data) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
      at EventData`1[GameScenes].Fire (GameScenes data) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

    [EXC 23:57:23.123] ArgumentException: The requested value 'Observatory' was not found.
        System.Enum.Parse (System.Type enumType, System.String value, Boolean ignoreCase)
        System.Enum.Parse (System.Type enumType, System.String value)
        CustomBarnKit.CustomBarnKit.LoadUpgradesPrices (GameScenes data)
        EventData`1[GameScenes].Fire (GameScenes data)
        UnityEngine.Debug:LogException(Exception)
        EventData`1:Fire(GameScenes)
        <FireLoadedEvent>c__Iterator6C:MoveNext()
        UnityEngine.SetupCoroutine:InvokeMoveNext(IEnumerator, IntPtr)

    I'm not a C# programmer, but I took a look at both ResearchBodies and CustomBarnKit, and what I see is that there's an enum which amounts to a hardcoded facility list, and a foreach that enumerates all SpaceCenterFacility's, then using System.Enum.Parse to figure out which one in the enum it is. Unfortunately, CBK adds its own here, with the name not in the enum, so the entire thing crashes.

    I'd try submitting a patch, but I don't really do C# (it's just similar enough), and I don't even know how to set up a dev environment for modding this. Sorry if I get things terribly wrong, I've seen the last commit message and don't want to make things worse ;-)

  14. 23 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

    Actually, yes, correct, short explanation why: many who searched education in early / high medieval times (let's say until 1400+/-) entered a monastery, or had to travel far and long (medicine or astronomy/astrology from Muslim countries at these times !).

    If they even were from Europe at all, my entire point was that Europe wasn't all that important.

    Quote

    What was the topic ... a terraforming Mars.No, we still won't :-)

    Insert obvious Monty Python reference here.

×
×
  • Create New...