9 ms·

This sounds like one of the typical Google X "problems" that's more or less a fun experiment with no real concrete sensible applications. Can you make electric

This sounds like one of the typical Google X "problems" that's more or less a fun experiment with no real concrete sensible applications. Can you make electricity with kites? Maybe. Probably. Should you? Probably not. If you look at the Goole X website (https://x.company/ https://x.company/), the problem is stated thusly: "How can kites be used to generate electricity in unexpected places?" Any sensible person's first reaction to that should be: Why would you want to do that in the first place? You want to generate energy in "unexpected places"? Why? I think you want to generate energy in places that need energy, no? And why would you want to constrain the problem to use kites? What about all other energy sources? Is kites the best one? The most economical? Or is it just some engineering porn stuff? Other problems seem to suffer from the same nonsensical approach: "How can beams of light support the rapidly growing global demand for data?" Uh, what? "How can balloons deliver the Internet to rural and unconnected places?" Who cares? How can paper airplanes deliver the internet to urban places? That's just a thought experiment with no motivation. Etc. etc.

ggm 7y ago
You went too Far. Loon (the balloon project) has done real work which people are benefitting from, in rural and remote areas which cover 5b people. Also, their design ideas for inter-device communication are popping up in spaceX and other places. The space-X inter-satellite communication is photonics: beams of light. So thats two things you pontificated on, you don't actually understand. Loon is not 'blah, who cares' -Loon is 'wow: this is working, lets get this deployed' joined to 'we can re-purpose your model in LEO sats' Do you seriously think "rural and unconnected places" is a who cares response? Here's a hint: go read the iridium story. People (with money) care a LOT about these spaces.
- davidivadavid 7y ago
  I think you're missing the point. The point isn't that they're not doing "real work" or that what they're building doesn't work at all. The point is about the approach which consists in engineering a "hard problem" by adding unnecessary constraints/hypotheses to a real (although often ill-defined) problem, and then claiming it's a marvel of engineering when a half-functional, non-viable solution is completed. It's the XY problem applied to startups. Instead of trying to solve the problem (energy, connectivity, etc.), they start from a given technology, and try to shoehorn it into a problem. That's bad design, and probably bad engineering in most cases.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    No, they started from a problem "how do you get internet into rural/low infra areas" and settled on balloons after iteration. You just didn't see the rapid prototype part, because at that point the company was "5 people fucking around in X" and not "Loon".
  - starpilot 7y ago
    Numerous companies in the airborne wind turbine market, Makani, Joby: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-beginners-guide-to-the-airborne-wind-turbine-market https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-beginners-gui... Numerous proposals, including from Lockheed, for balloon satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_balloon#Geostationary_balloon_satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_balloon#Geostati... These aren't just "because we can" frivolous projects, these approaches have serious advantages over others, such that many are racing to commercialize it.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      I'll bet that plenty of these exist as copycat clubs that would have never been funded if Google had not funded Makani. At least some of them seem to sidestep some of the most obvious problems.
  - tazjin 7y ago
    This exchange reminds me of the Illuminatus! trilogy[0] in which the Discordians at some point introduce the idea of dividing humans into "neophobes" (who dislike new things and the exploration of random unknowns) and "neophiles" (who dislike sticking to established, stable paradigms and want to do new things instead). The former end up in a stable equilibrium with slow (if any) progress, the latter fail often but are important for fast-paced progress. In other words, whenever you (the reader generally, not davidivadavid in particular) write "probably", imagine a Wikipedia editor adding [citation needed] after it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy
    - 7y ago
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Do you mean that Loon is operation in areas that cover 5 billion people? Or that 5 billion people live in rural and remote areas?
  - ggm 7y ago
    The latter. Loon won't solve the 5b problem. They help some of it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
munificent 7y ago
This is a fun sort of Madlibs game to play: * How can stem cells fight climate change? * How can we use waste heat from nuclear reactors to promote gender equality? * How can echidnas cure cancer? The challenge is that many revolutionary products sound equally nonsensical at the time. * How can we generate power homes using giant propellers? * How can monkey viruses cure blindness? * How can adding impurities to a conductor let it perform mathematics? We don't seem to have a way to tell which crazy sentences will pan out until we try and see.
- reissbaker 7y ago
  > We don't seem to have a way to tell which crazy sentences will pan out I think you're missing the OP's point: the point is that the sentence should read: "How can we cure blindness?" If it happens to be via monkey viruses, so be it. But you shouldn't start from "How can monkey viruses cure blindness" — it's not monkey viruses that are the reason to do research, it's blindness that's the reason.
  - leoedin 7y ago
    "How can we provide clean energy as cheaply as possible" seems like a pretty big problem we need to solve. Maybe kite power isn't the answer, but it certainly looked like it could be at one point. It wasn't unreasonable to investigate it.
    - davidivadavid 7y ago
      And I wouldn't have made that comment had they stated it that way. The problem with those phony problems is that the success criteria are binary, and not tied to metrics that allow for comparisons with alternatives. If you problem is to generate power with kites, and you have built power-generating kites, then you won. But how good a power source is it in the grander scheme of things? Is it going to move the needle when it comes to CO2 emissions? Again, I don't mind the high school science fair stuff, but I don't think this has a high chance of being the ticket based on fundamentals.
- 7y ago
tehlike 7y ago
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
- sdenton4 7y ago
  We do what we must because we can.

ggm 7y ago

You went too Far. Loon (the balloon project) has done real work which people are benefitting from, in rural and remote areas which cover 5b people. Also, their design ideas for inter-device communication are popping up in spaceX and other places. The space-X inter-satellite communication is photonics: beams of light. So thats two things you pontificated on, you don't actually understand. Loon is not 'blah, who cares' -Loon is 'wow: this is working, lets get this deployed' joined to 'we can re-purpose your model in LEO sats' Do you seriously think "rural and unconnected places" is a who cares response? Here's a hint: go read the iridium story. People (with money) care a LOT about these spaces.

davidivadavid 7y ago
I think you're missing the point. The point isn't that they're not doing "real work" or that what they're building doesn't work at all. The point is about the approach which consists in engineering a "hard problem" by adding unnecessary constraints/hypotheses to a real (although often ill-defined) problem, and then claiming it's a marvel of engineering when a half-functional, non-viable solution is completed. It's the XY problem applied to startups. Instead of trying to solve the problem (energy, connectivity, etc.), they start from a given technology, and try to shoehorn it into a problem. That's bad design, and probably bad engineering in most cases.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  No, they started from a problem "how do you get internet into rural/low infra areas" and settled on balloons after iteration. You just didn't see the rapid prototype part, because at that point the company was "5 people fucking around in X" and not "Loon".
- starpilot 7y ago
  Numerous companies in the airborne wind turbine market, Makani, Joby: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-beginners-guide-to-the-airborne-wind-turbine-market https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-beginners-gui... Numerous proposals, including from Lockheed, for balloon satellites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_balloon#Geostationary_balloon_satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_balloon#Geostati... These aren't just "because we can" frivolous projects, these approaches have serious advantages over others, such that many are racing to commercialize it.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    I'll bet that plenty of these exist as copycat clubs that would have never been funded if Google had not funded Makani. At least some of them seem to sidestep some of the most obvious problems.
- tazjin 7y ago
  This exchange reminds me of the Illuminatus! trilogy[0] in which the Discordians at some point introduce the idea of dividing humans into "neophobes" (who dislike new things and the exploration of random unknowns) and "neophiles" (who dislike sticking to established, stable paradigms and want to do new things instead). The former end up in a stable equilibrium with slow (if any) progress, the latter fail often but are important for fast-paced progress. In other words, whenever you (the reader generally, not davidivadavid in particular) write "probably", imagine a Wikipedia editor adding [citation needed] after it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy
  - 7y ago
TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Do you mean that Loon is operation in areas that cover 5 billion people? Or that 5 billion people live in rural and remote areas?
- ggm 7y ago
  The latter. Loon won't solve the 5b problem. They help some of it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

munificent 7y ago

This is a fun sort of Madlibs game to play: * How can stem cells fight climate change? * How can we use waste heat from nuclear reactors to promote gender equality? * How can echidnas cure cancer? The challenge is that many revolutionary products sound equally nonsensical at the time. * How can we generate power homes using giant propellers? * How can monkey viruses cure blindness? * How can adding impurities to a conductor let it perform mathematics? We don't seem to have a way to tell which crazy sentences will pan out until we try and see.

reissbaker 7y ago
> We don't seem to have a way to tell which crazy sentences will pan out I think you're missing the OP's point: the point is that the sentence should read: "How can we cure blindness?" If it happens to be via monkey viruses, so be it. But you shouldn't start from "How can monkey viruses cure blindness" — it's not monkey viruses that are the reason to do research, it's blindness that's the reason.
- leoedin 7y ago
  "How can we provide clean energy as cheaply as possible" seems like a pretty big problem we need to solve. Maybe kite power isn't the answer, but it certainly looked like it could be at one point. It wasn't unreasonable to investigate it.
  - davidivadavid 7y ago
    And I wouldn't have made that comment had they stated it that way. The problem with those phony problems is that the success criteria are binary, and not tied to metrics that allow for comparisons with alternatives. If you problem is to generate power with kites, and you have built power-generating kites, then you won. But how good a power source is it in the grander scheme of things? Is it going to move the needle when it comes to CO2 emissions? Again, I don't mind the high school science fair stuff, but I don't think this has a high chance of being the ticket based on fundamentals.
7y ago

tehlike 7y ago

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

sdenton4 7y ago
We do what we must because we can.