SunlitZelkova

Dimension, universe, and reality are used interchangeably in sci-fi and it’s really annoying.

China has been pretty good at doing things on time, both in the field of crewed and robotic spaceflight. I would expect a delay to 2035 at most, similar to how Tianwen-1 got pushed from 2018 to 2020.

I’m amazed this thread has died. It seemed like it got updated at least once a week in 2021-2022. So here’s a new one: Fallout (2024), Terminator: Genisys (2015), The Wolverine (2014)-

I’m two episodes in too. I have never played the games but I became really interested in the lore in middle school after a War Thunder YouTuber I watched started doing Let’s Plays of it. The show really hit the mark: it has the same disturbing, yet captivating qualities that hooked me on the lore.

The only issue I would see with Starship is the contamination issue. You can’t perform planetary protection measures on a vehicle that large. Of course, NASA could always rule that out in the interest of time. But that’s the current requirement. Red Dragon is a one way lander and thus probably can’t do it.

Cancellation is probably not the only danger. In both the 2040 deadline and your proposed early/mid 2030s target, China will possibly end up returning the first samples ahead of the US, as their mission launches in 2031. Good on them for accepting the challenges instead of pushing through an expensive and drawn out proposal. I feel like this kind of reflection wouldn’t have happened in the 1990s or 2000s.

I’m a little bit fed up with the climate crisis. So back in October of last year I wrote that I had an “epiphany” that resulted in me no longer being afraid of climate change. Well, I’d like to speak about this “epiphany” for posterity and report why I no longer believe it. In 2022 I found out I had a mental disorder. I started taking medication for it, and it immediately alleviated the acute effects, but deeper issues remained. At the time of October 2023, I believed an omniscient force was in control of the fabric of reality, and while it made climate scientists see warning signs of disaster, it would “retcon” them around the 2030s and onward and nothing bad would happen. So for anyone who read about my change of opinion in the sea levels thread and thought I was making a rational decision, well, you’re wrong. The only way I was able to reject the evidence pointing to CC, unfortunately, was by believing elements of reality are illusions. I like to think of myself as someone who isn’t swayed by opinions and tries to find the facts, but this time, I failed. Thankfully, I’ve began to return to reality. I have to say though, journalists and activists are doing a pretty poor job of educating on the crisis. It took me opening a Wikipedia article to realize the majority of the articles posted in the climate change thread (“The Analysis of the Sea Levels”) thread happen to constitute climate change denial. You may roll your eyes at Wikipedia, but I did check the references and they come from either independent publications and in a couple cases scientific journals. A list of incidents: 1. One person attributed recorded temperature increases to urban heat islands. 2. An article was once posted challenging anthropogenic causes of climate change, asserting it was natural. 3. Widespread impact skepticism. 4. Consensus denial has been seen, with assertions there are “many” scientists who question aspects of climate change. 5. A long time ago there were assertions from a few insinuating that climate scientists publish alarmist work to get funding. 6. Playing up uncertainty in climate models. It is implied by many on this forum that this uncertainty means we can’t make any predictions about the future with good probability. This is a tactic of climate change deniers, although all members of this forum are skeptics rather than deniers. 7. Criticism of the IPCC process. This form of denial originates in politicians, not in scientists as has been claimed on this forum. 97% of scientists agree climate change is happening, is human caused, and will have negative effects on the world. The only three sources I found challenging the 97% consensus were: 1. A Forbes article written by a “lecturer in the Department of Construction Management” at a university. 2. An NHS paper from 1998. 3. An article from a think tank with questionable background. I like to theorize as well as look at facts. So I ask “What if these claims of denial are generated by people with an ulterior motive of suppressing true dissent?” Well, to that, I’d ask a question many on this forum seem reluctant to ask: “What if these scientists skeptical of climate change have ulterior motives?” We know the history of organized denial of the harmful effects of smoking. We do not know of any instances where 10,000+ scientists had ulterior motives to get funding, or misinform people, or whatever, a key part of the argument that climate science is flawed and can’t be trusted. It’s really hard to imagine thousands of people and government organizations all either conspiring to misinform or simply somehow be blind to flaws in their data and present it as surefire. Given the past history of big tobacco trying to challenge the facts about how smoking is harmful, it’s not too hard to imagine big oil funding a campaign to challenge the facts about climate change. But there’s a devil’s advocate in the back of my head saying “maybe the science is just flawed.” The points raised by people on this forum do sound convincing. That’s why I’m fed up with it. As much as the medication is helping me to avoid from going to one extreme or the other, it’s hard to find the truth. Even if there is a consensus and logic dictates it can be taken seriously, the flaws pointed out by climate change skeptics nonetheless make sense. They track logically, at least the ones posted on this forum do. Except the urban heat island thing. That one was debunked pretty hard by myself and others. I often use the analogy of a coin to describe a lot of things in the world. The discourse is so vicious, the two sides in an argument may appear different but in reality are one entity. That’s the quagmire I find myself in a lot nowadays. It’s just a huge turn off from partaking in any discussion with other people about these serious topics. And ironically this is a big issue! It’s called “bothside-ism.” It might as well be another side of a coin. Making it a three sided coin. What am I to believe? How am I supposed to ascertain the true reality? This is why I ultimately find myself falling back into the “false reality” philosophical/religious belief. Of course there are things that can hurt me in this world. Maybe climate change will hurt a lot of people, maybe it won’t. I’ll take things as they come and not worry about the future. But then I think “Hey, that’s the exact belief oil companies and climate change deniers would want me to have.” And I enter another side of the coin, making it a 4 sided coin. It’s as if you can’t actually be neutral or have your own opinion on it. Whatever you do, you’re falling into a camp and being swayed by what others desire. Your attempt to find the truth works to someone’s advantage no matter what. Why can’t it be like, quantum physics? Where believing one theory or another and weighing the merits has no impact on daily life and can remain squarely within science? What I do in the end is hide behind my mental disorder, which is incurable, and just smile and play without a care in the world. Neither side probably cares for the endorsement of someone with a mental disability like mine, so it doesn’t really matter what I say. Outside of family, I doubt anyone would take me seriously anyways. So I’m free to decide what I want to without being drawn into one side of the conflict, because neither side would want me. Is this a fifth side of the coin? Or simply the ramblings of a madman with a science flavor? Who knows.

That kinda gives me a vibe of Germany converting barges into landing craft for Operation Sea Lion because they had no experience in amphibious warfare beyond Norway. Oh how American shipbuilding has fallen...

I once had a dream JWST's Ariane V exploded during launch. This was before the launch so I was nervous it would actually happen. Thankfully it didn't.

Idk, but that concept vaguely reminds me of the MGM-166 LOSAT's rocket propelled long-rod penetrators.

Nice, I haven't been there since 2016 unfortunately. When I eventually get around to going again I'm excited to see the B-52, which wasn't there the last time I visited.

I think this is a flawed way of thinking about the future. It's naive to think the same trends we see now and in the recent past will continue forever. People thought there would be flying battleships based on the development of airships in the early 1900s as a "natural" continuation of the technology, and it never happened. People thought there would be no more capital ships after torpedo boats made them "obsolete," also during the early 1900s. And people thought the adoption of nuclear power in the US in the late 1950s meant that by 1990 there would be a small nuclear reactor in the basement of every home in America. When thinking about this stuff, its important to think about the economy of it. Based on the size of airline fleets and number of total employees, I have seen estimates that it takes about 50-100 employees to maintain a single aircraft. How many employees does it take to maintain a single rocket? How much extremely specialized labor when compared with maintaining aircraft? Where is SpaceX going to get this army of ground staff to support their launch of 1000 Starships during each transfer window? In my state it costs about $300,000 to build a new home right now, minus permits and land costs etc. This is very close to the average US cost of 298,000 in 2023. For lack of alternative ideas, I'm going to assume SpaceX uses the "normal buildings in domes" design they have in the artwork on their website. Musk wants to house 1 million people on Mars. Let's say there are 4 people to a home. So $75 billion to build the habitats. This doesn't include the expensive domes, complete with life support on a scale never seen before. The domes will need to be even bigger because there will need to be room for the other aspects of the city. It won't just need more buildings, but a sewage system, schools, farms, the power source, and so on. So the dome will be enormous. The ISS has about 1000m cubed of pressurized volume and cost $100 billion or so in total. I'm going to be very generous and cut that in half, assuming use of robots will help cut costs, but then I'm going to add $5 billion for those robots. So let's say 1000m cubed of volume on the Mars base will cost $55 billion to build. The city of Portland, which is probably smaller than what the Mars city will be due to lack of farmland, is 233km squared area. I'm going to treat the volume of the dome as if it were a cube, and the extra volume that wouldn't be there on account of shape will go to the farmland. So let's just say to have good circulation and allow birds to live in it, it will need to be a generous 1 km tall (the artwork shows it higher). So, the volume is just 233km cubed. So, it would cost $233 billion dollars to build a pressurized dome for the city. From r/theydidthemath Let's be generous and use the lower estimate. About 250 sq km for 1 million people. Cost of dome + homes (minus maintenance, services, sewage, transporting dirt for farming, etc.): ~$488 billion. The article from Payload Space that estimated SpaceX's revenue I found put operating costs in 2022 at $3 billion. They launched 61 rockets in 2022, rounding that down to 60, we get $50 million to launch one rocket. How many Starships will it take to build the city? Way more than Musk theorizes. An interesting Seattle Times article did the calculations and the weight of a home came in at about 300 tons. So 300 million tons of material need to be moved to Mars for the housing alone. Starship 3 can bring 200 tons to LEO, and with 4-5 refueling flights could bring that to Mars. So 1,500,000 Cargo Starship launches would be required to send the materials, ignoring things like volume restrictions and what have you. Add 4 tanker flights per launch, and that would be 7,500,000 Starship launches. Thus SpaceX's operating costs including the launch of these rockets, in total, would amount to $375 trillion. This doesn't include the 10,000 Starships needed to launch the million colonists, nor the cost of launching the dome, dirt for farmland, robot laborers, and so on. And of course the associated tankers. Nor the actual cost of the materials themselves. These would be internal launches and thus generate no revenue. In contrast, the Earth's GDP in 2022 was about $100 trillion. Starlink had 2.3 million subscribers in 2023, and generated $4.2 billion in revenue. If Starlink somehow rose to 32 million subscribers and beat out Comcast to become the biggest ISP in the US, they'd have, very roughly, $63 billion in revenue each year. This doesn't take into account inflation. SpaceX alone could not pull this off. $375.5 trillion for the Mars city, and that estimate is low balled. And it won't even turn a profit when it is complete. It will just be a regular old city, but costing $50 million to send stuff to and fro on a good day. Contrast with how sending a 20 ft shipping container to Japan costs about $1,200 dollars. A Mars city will, in all likelihood, never turn a profit. And remember those failed predictions about technology in the early 20th century? Let me introduce you to some more bad projections. In the 1920s, people predicted the end of poverty, infinite growth, and even declines in culture because people were becoming so wealthy they wouldn't want to do anything. Then after the crash of '29, people were predicting permanent damage, endless poverty and unemployment, and no hope of recovery ever. So even though Goldman Sachs predicts the global GDP being $227 trillion in 2050, which maybe could put it at $1 quadrillion by year 2300- at which point the US GDP might be about $300-400 trillion (all at a rate of growth of $100 trillion every 25 years), that would still require a company with the ability to invest an amount equivalent to the US GDP in something they will get no return on investment in. All that assumes there is no Second Great Depression, no nuclear war, no AI disruption to the economy, and no disastrous damage from climate change. I really dislike the idea of things being inevitable. If we want something to happen in the future, we have to work for it, we can't assume it will just come to us. No one is really working towards anything right now, and I feel like that's just going to allow another bad cascade of events that will lead to great damage and set humanity back 50 years. Every generation has talked about something being inevitable, then had things turned on their head and started saying the other way around was inevitable. There is great collateral in the process. I wish for once we would recognize the future is unknown and try to shape it by our own will, instead of letting it take the trajectory set by people who are either in retirement homes or dead. Because it isn't a trajectory at all, just feeling our way through the dark with no interest in our existence beyond the present. ------ Okay, now for fun let's see when a company might have the wherewithal to fund its own Mars colony, based on these unchanging linear projections that I simplified. SpaceX's total revenue was about $8 billion according to that same Payload Space estimate. So 3/8 of that was operating costs. Assuming SpaceX's revenue can grow with the economy: maybe SpaceX and Tesla merge into one mega corporation, along with Twitter, maybe it produces the world's best mac and cheese, who knows. I'm going to use that trend as the GDP. So SpaceX's total revenue will be $16 billion in 2050, and $32 billion in 2100. I'm gonna round it up to $10 billion in 2023 so this is easier. So $40 billion in 2100. $64 billion in 2200, $128 billion in 2300. By the year 3000, it will be $400 billion. $800 billion in 4000, but let's bump that to a trillion. So it will be $3 trillion dollars by the year 8000. After that, it would take about 200,000 years for SpaceX's operating costs to reach $300 trillion dollars. The extra 75, also rounded up, to 100, would take another 667 years or so to gain. So SpaceX will have enough money to build a city on Mars starting in 208,667 A.D. By this time, two moons of Uranus will have collided, the Arecibo message will have reached its target, and Pioneer 10 will have passed within about 3 light years of Ross 248, a red dwarf, which circa 60,000 A.D. will have become the closest star to Earth for a brief period of time (10,000 years). Disclaimer: This is half serious attempt to calculate the cost of a Mars colony, half tongue in cheek criticism of statements that say things like "All we need to do is send some software engineers to Mars and the colony will be profitable." I did not check my math. The only really serious thing is my critique of making predictions about the future by assuming current trends will last forever.

If it's a tourist destination it's not really a colony. Tourism involves going and coming back.

Okay, so today I had a conversation with a person in which they defined a free market as follows. "They are about voluntary exchange of goods and services. The pricing is whatever the parties involved negotiate and the fact it is voluntary means that both are "profiting" from their respective points if view otherwise they would not make a deal." To me, this sounded like barter, as I was taught a free market was the following: "an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses." -Definition from Oxford Languages. I tried to offer my opinion to this person on the definition of "free market." But we couldn't really get across to each other. I was honestly confused about their definition. I'd simply never heard "free market" defined that way. It sounded more like barter. See the definition of barter: "to trade by exchanging one commodity for another : to trade goods or services in exchange for other goods or services" -Definition from Merriam-Webster online. At first this person talked about price, but then insisted money had nothing to do with a "free market" and that it was all about "value." So even someone exchanging 1 pound of salt for 1 pound of milk could be considered an exchange within a "free market," under this person's definition of a free market. But that sounds like barter, right? I had no intention of making the conversation unpleasant. Whether I was stonewalling him or they were stonewalling me I can't tell. Maybe we mutually refused to understand each other. In any case, I was told I was "trying very hard to misunderstand." Can someone define what a free market is for me? Was I in the wrong here?

Happy Cosmonautics Day! ハッピーロシアの宇宙の日！ С днем* космонавтики! *I was today years old when I learned that the umlaut is optional like the acute accent mark. Here's hoping by the 100th anniversary of his flight the Russian space program will be in a better shape than now.

It was my understanding that the thrusters on the upper half of the vehicle were meant to be used for final descent and thus avoid problems with spewing regolith everywhere. In any case, they'd still probably want to park behind a hill just in case of the lander exploding or something.

I highly doubt this even without all the declassified records disproving it. China and the USSR were still halfway between allies and total confrontation in 1961, and China probably would have been willing to return a cosmonaut. Or at least they would certainly make noise about it.

A simple and comical alternate history might have Gagarin being detained by security forces temporarily after landing, due to being suspected as a U-2 pilot on account of his orange suit and all white helmet with no markings on it.

But wars did occur inside the Roman Empire. I would say the division of Rome and China is abstract, and that Octavius vs. Cinna, when names are ignored, could be equated to Britain and Spain vying for power in Europe and the Americas over a thousand years later. The tools may change but the practice/activity (farming) is the same.

When I have more time I’ll PM you. This no longer applies solely to the City on Mars discussion.

It is indeed idealist, not realist. But- I personally haven’t seen anthropological evidence supporting this notion. My understanding it that the idea that capitalism is the end all be all of civilization comes from philosophy rather than a scientific look at the history of the world. It’s still a theory, of course. As I said, I don’t think a collectivist utopia is the answer. That was wishful thinking on my part. But I don’t think a Mars colony is going to survive unless we get creative in ways that haven’t been seen since humans settled on land and began agriculture. Unless there is a corporate entity rich enough to build and sustain the colony all on its own in the initial phases and somehow turn into a city-state with a GDP comparable to a small developed Earth country, which is questionable, exporting Earth societal systems- designed to work in a place where you don’t have to worry about losing breathing gases or losing your food supply to a faulty circuit- will not work. Just my opinion. Not an argument. Now, on the other hand, if we could prove traditional Earth economic systems could work on the Moon before attempting to build a Mars colony, I’d think different. The way I see it is this. European colonists took practices found in Europe (on Earth) and were able to use them successfully in the Americas (on Earth). Human colonists trying to take practices found on Earth and apply them to Mars, to me, sounds like European colonists trying to take practices found in Europe and apply them to living underwater. If European colonists were capable of building massive habitats right off the bat and sustaining them at great expense, sure it’d work, but that isn’t realistic. Neither is trying to run a Mars colony based on Earth metrics like profit. It will take something new and innovative- not the idealist utopia I seemed to describe in my post, reminiscent of a certain 19th century economist and philosophers beliefs, but rather something never before seen in the history of humanity. Just my opinion At the heart of the question of how Mars will be colonized are very old questions that humans have argued over for years. Economics, especially. What drives a society? et al. It’s probably pointless to argue here as we all have our own opinions informed by years of prior learning and experience. But, it is interesting to hear different opinions and get feedback on them.

I can’t post the link because the article contains a mix of space and off topic political news, but CBS News reports Japan and the US have announced that two Japanese astronauts will fly on Artemis missions, and, one of them “will become the first non-American to land on the Moon.” As a Japanese person I’m extremely excited about this. On the other hand, apologies to any European members of the forum who may be disappointed. A single caveat: the Artemis cadence is garbage. If Ars Technica’s prediction of an Artemis III mission in 2028 is correct, and it takes a couple years to fly Artemis IV, it’s somewhat possible China will land people on the Moon before then. I suppose it’s possible a Japanese astronaut would fly on Artemis III, but who knows.

I don’t think the behavior of the Roman Empire is any different from that of our world today. Technology would advance and Rome would rule the Earth. If you give him knowledge of all modern technology that would include surveillance tech and he’d probably be able to stave off any assassination attempt. Apart from certain cultural peculiarities, I’m skeptical there is any difference between humans 2000 years ago and humans today, in terms of say, desire to technologically advance. We’re always looking for more efficient ways to do things. I don’t believe this stuff is limited to “chosen” individuals, and everyone has the potential to invent something innovative and game changing. A Roman Emperor would just as soon take up the opportunity to improve the Empire’s ability to crush its enemies (within and without) as any human would try to improve QOL in their village or learn more about the world around them through science.

I see his point, but I feel like he kinda contradicts himself. If all Mars has to rely on standard Earth commodities, it’s questionable whether these specialists would be enticed to live on Mars. Does the “I wanna be a first generation Martian” group overlap with software and biotech engineers? Unless the Mars colony can be proven to be extremely safe and viable as a long term place to live, I don’t see the kind of people who are ambitious and want to change the world throughout their whole lives flocking to a place where their life might be ended at any moment in an instant. Don't get me wrong, I think SpaceX can achieve their goal at some point in the future, I just think this particular line of logic is a little flawed. And that’s not to say there is some aha moment waiting out there to prove a Mars colony could be profitable. There probably is. I just don’t see it as this. ——— Personal thought: A Mars colony doesn’t need to be profitable to be worthwhile. Enough with the capitalist doctrine of profit, let’s build a colony because society (freaking life, as much as I hate humanity sometimes, if they’re a vehicle to save guinea pig (cavia porcellus) kind than I’ll accept their prosperity at the expense of whatever) has a need to expand to other worlds. I.e. Let’s build based on the needs of society rather than the needs of shareholders and CEOs’ bank accounts. I think David S.F. Portee, the eminent spaceflight historian, has the wrong take when it comes to SpaceX (he thinks it will fail and resembles early Shuttle concepts), but his ethos that “to achieve new heights in space we need to recognize it won’t be cheap and be prepared to pay” can be applied here. Let’s just pay the cost instead of trying to cut corners and turn everything into a business. Final note: colonization of the Americas is a poor comparison here. Colonizing another land mass on the same planet accessed by relatively primitive sailing ships is incomparable to colonizing an inhospitable planet. We cannot have the expectation that the only reason Mars will be worthwhile is if it has its own equivalent to the tobacco plantations and what not.

I’m skeptical this is politicization as much as it is the usual ineptness of media. Interesting tidbits about Teslas. I’ll have to look into it. EDIT- I suggest starting with those tidbits next time instead of just saying something that implies “the media is conducting a witch hunt!” It’s much more compelling than accusatory statements without evidence.