darthgently

I was thinking in regards to fantastical notions of an intelligent native species prior to humans, but yes, humans are riverine and coastal critters generally and our deeper history is mostly under water now

Aside from common sense anyway. The national motivations for redundancy don’t change simply because the destination is leased

Stuck in traffic? Is saving time worth the money of calling a carry-all? Just use the app! The carry-all from the novel Dune comes to mind, but smaller, for a “flying car” solution for when you need your car at the end of the journey. An automated flying hauler could be hailed that would carry your car to its destination. Why rage on the road when you can sigh through the sky? For a nominal fee.

With plate tectonics recycling any civ prior to some time point would be invisible to our archeology at this point. But I read something recently that seemed to rule out the possibility of a previous civ but can’t remember the specifics

Agreed. The reason we don’t see flapping wings on aircraft is more related to the infancy of our materials science combined with the fact that you won’t likely ever see a flapper flying as fast as a prop plane much less supersonic. There is a speed threshold where rotary jet or rocket engines would completely outpace. Then there is surface to weight ratio and ambient air pressure. Flappers would be limited in size to probably about the same neighborhood as the most massive flying organisms. Consider that when pterodons were a thing, iirc, ambient air pressure is thought to have been a bit higher

Grok3 search and analysis of the MATECH claims and related info about the material. Will be interesting to see what pans out: (I verified all the key citation links. The second to last citation link is the only one that 404s and this looks like a news feed that likely purges old news and grok referred to an old cache perhaps. Or hallucinated)

So, Boeing appears ready to follow through on Starliner. I find the statement about it only being useful until the ISS is decomm’d strange as isn’t the point that NASA would be sending astronauts to a commercial station after the ISS? I’d think they’d still want redundancy for that https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/nasa-to-put-starliners-thrusters-through-an-extensive-workout-before-next-launch/

Not sure if a full black swan, but this will disrupt the compute and related markets like a benestrophic earthquake if it pans out. Catastrophic for some players certainly Wow. It’s like the Moteys from Niven’s and Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye made chips in their own image

If you are going with an octopus as an example then neural signals could be transferred optically s as they can both detect and effect colors at the skin, right? What is that vid game character that flies spinning its tail? Bandicoot? No, it was Tails the Fox from the Sonic the Hedgehog game (thx grok3)

I’ve thought about this before, out loud in these forums iirc, and pondered that for larger organisms the separate rotor and stator “parts” would need to be separate organisms in a symbiotic relationship. Not likely to happen naturally but plausible as an engineered organism maybe. Not that that should be done. That is beyond my philosophical and ethical pay grade, perhaps. Not sure honestly

Not sure where to put this so here it goes

Was going to bring this up. Truly amazing stuff

This tracks my experience. Fun for ballparking something and fascinating to watch its process in “think” mode. Grok 3 is currently the leader in LLM analytical math but it can error in surprising ways especially if the prompt leaves it room to do so. Sometimes making the answer more complicated than necessary as your plane change experience showed. It is good at detecting problematic input. I had specified kt instead of mt for weight units and it quickly decided that kilotons was ridiculous for the problem and assumed I meant metric tons after also quickly determining knots made no sense at all. So that was interesting Grok 3 in “think” mode is pretty far above that bar.

Ballutes! Suspend the cargo inside. Slow down up high with lower weight penalty. The driving design rule being to maximize blunt surface area using as little mass as possible. Keep it pressurized enough above Q all the way down to retain shape. If big enough to keep temps low enough maybe even silicone rubber would work. Might take a 60m radius sphere of 5 mil silicone rubber for a 15 metric ton payload according to grok3, fwiw. 4 to 5 m/s terminal velocity (!). It lands where it lands, lol Color it piebald like a big spherical cow. What’s not to like?

For those who don’t think SpaceX is thinking very far ahead on this Mars thing, 2 years ago from the man who brought us Merlins and Raptors…

Physics and control theory. Let me know when Boston Dynamics, Tesla, or the other robotics ventures crack this level. They will, but not soon

Texas Tea on Mars?

Almost more of a bomber-fighter with the drones flying cover. And I doubt a pilot in cockpit is strictly necessary so the entire formation could be deployed with much higher g restrictions. Perhaps flown remotely or then again how many GPUs could fit in the cockpit area?

Sports science on the ISS

Imagine this in lunar or Martian gravity

Maybe get out more and seek broader news sources. Literally torching things

That isn’t how the sequence works. You only see the ones that survived the processes to production. The others fell away. Mostly. There is some lack of sequence

Not stupid question to me. I wondered if these are the drones that are designed to team with the F-47. Seems to fit. Who knows?