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Why can't they cooperate instead of compete? It's not like they don't already have all the money they'd ever need or could use, and wouldn't the world be bette
by pmoriarty 5y ago
Why can't they cooperate instead of compete?
It's not like they don't already have all the money they'd ever need or could use, and wouldn't the world be better off if they worked together than against each other?
- thrill 5y agoNo.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- krapp 5y agoThese companies are run by billionaire sociopath narcissists who live to crush and dominate the competition and who want all of the glory (and money) for themselves.
- joshsyn 5y agoCall them what you want. They pushed the world forward, period.
- krapp 5y agoThey pushed the world, certainly. Whether they pushed it "forward" is debatable.
- tayo42 5y agoGoing to the moon again is pushing the world forward? Why? Humans got there and there's been no reason to go back
- jhgb 5y ago"Why? Humans got there and there's been no reason to go back" -- Europeans in 1493 about the Americas...not!
- medstrom 5y agoThey might have said it if the Americas had even worse living conditions than Antarctica. We're not colonizing that either.
- jhgb 5y ago> We're not colonizing that either. That might largely be explained by the fact that doing so would be illegal as per international law to begin with.
- AngryData 5y agoIt isn't like anybody is going to really stop you from living there. There are multiple land disputes over Antarctica and nobody has given a shit about those. Plus all the research stations which provide permanent habitat if someone wanted to keep shipping in supplies. You expect if you built a greenhouse or power generation source for indoor gardening that some government would spend the effort to send in troops or bomb you?
- jhgb 5y ago> It isn't like anybody is going to really stop you from living there. ...are you sure about that? Have you tried violating the international treaties?
- skissane 5y ago> You expect if you built a greenhouse or power generation source for indoor gardening that some government would spend the effort to send in troops or bomb you? Well, if you are a US citizen, it is illegal to do that in Antarctica without a permit from the NSF (under the Antarctic Conservation Act). If you do it anyway, expect to be prosecuted, and the US will send agents to arrest you, even if you are in Antarctica. The FBI has made an arrest in Antarctica before (due to a fight at McMurdo Station). All state parties to the Antarctic Treaty have similar laws, which (generally speaking) apply to their nationals worldwide. If you were a sole citizen of a country which is not a party to the Antarctic Treaty – such as, Andorra or Afghanistan or Costa Rica or Cyprus or Ireland or Malta or Nigeria or Uzbekistan – then you'd have somewhat more chance of getting away with it. But surely your act would cause an international incident and they'd look at ways of shutting you down – the country of which you are citizen might suddenly decide to sign the Treaty as well, and shut you down. If the country of citizenship lacks the resources to shut you down, it may give permission to another country which does have those resources (e.g the US) to act against you on its behalf.
- cratermoon 5y agoThey have certainly pushed the world. Whether the direction we're going is 'forward' is extremely debatable. It certainly might look that way from certain positions, but not all points of view agree, and there's no clear way to determine which should be privileged.
- systemvoltage 5y agoIt's one thing to disagree, another to call them sociopaths. If what they're doing is debatable - let's debate then. With respect for each other and with civility.
- bigbob2 5y agoSo it's civil to engage in anti-competitive behavior which arguably sets back the progress of humanity ("pushing the world forward"), but not civil to use the word 'sociopath' in reference to such actions? I was always taught that actions speak louder than words.
- cratermoon 5y agoThe word you're looking for is not sociopath, it's 'psychopath'. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-642-28036-8_128 https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3...
- joshsyn 5y agoExactly most of the complaints I find are simply out of jealousy of their accomplishments and the need for power among people who want to put limits on their achievements. Can we revert back to its none of your business what they do?
- oh_sigh 5y agoDo you think bezos was a psychopath in 1999?
- kiba 5y agoElon Musk gave Jeff Bezos advice on building rockets, which Bezos flatly rejected. He also hoped that Bezos work on Blue Origin or otherwise Bezos will die before he gets anywhere. Of course, Musk also mocks Blue Origin.
- nickik 5y agoIf Bezos had been clever he would have just said 'oh you have rockets covered, amazing, let me invest any my company faces on in space infrastructure'. With the billions and billions BlueOrigin spend they could have done amazing things in space. But instead they are building inferior version of rockets.
- breakfastduck 5y agoBecause there's no ego benefit there. That's all these companies exist for.
- marcinzm 5y agoSpaceX is a functioning business that actually launches things into space at a lower cost than competitors. Basically every successful company has a massive amount of ego behind it but the question is if they actually achieve anything tangible and, eventually, profitable.
- pmoriarty 5y ago"SpaceX is a functioning business that actually launches things into space at a lower cost than competitors." This might actually lead to a greatly increased risk of creating an impenetrable field of space junk if the thousands more satellites that SpaceX launches collide in to one another. If that happens expect SpaceX supporters to start singing a different tune.
- marcinzm 5y agoSpaceX is launching its own internet satellites into low orbit so their satellites will only burn up in a decade without boosting. If your argument is "don't progress or change in any way because something bad might happen" then I suspect you'll find few takers on this site.
- tsimionescu 5y agoCollisions in LEO launch debris in all orbits, they are not limited to LEO. I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX will turn out to be the reason we won't be able to explore space at all for a few hundred years.
- marcinzm 5y ago>Collisions in LEO launch debris in all orbits, they are not limited to LEO. How often? You'd need a pretty lucky collision to knock something into a higher stable circular orbit.
- PhileinSophia 5y agoBecause competition is how innovation is born.
- ImprobableTruth 5y agoSpace is expensive. Bezos is pumping 1 billion per year into the company and the blue origin proposal was for 13 billion. Even for Bezos that's not chump change.
- pmoriarty 5y agoAll the more reason to cooperate and pool resources instead of duplicating effort.
- kelnos 5y agoI'm not so sure, though. I think there's still an argument to be made for multiple approaches and different technology, which you're not likely to get if everyone works together. I'm not sure that "avoiding a monoculture" is important for this sort of thing, but maybe it can't hurt? Another problem when multiple independent orgs pool resources and work together is you either end up with design-by-committee (which leads to overengineering and extra expense, both of which are anti-goals for SpaceX and BO), or deadlock when the parties can't agree. And you'd better believe personalities like Musk and Bezos would clash a lot if they ever did a joint venture on something.
- pmoriarty 5y ago"you'd better believe personalities like Musk and Bezos would clash a lot if they ever did a joint venture on something" If they clash a lot it's proof they're not good at cooperating. So maybe the answer is that Musk and Bezos are good at competing, but not good at cooperating. That doesn't mean that cooperation is a losing strategy, but just that one has to be good at cooperating in order to succeed at it.
- Meandering 5y agoPeople like to romanticize market competition as a epic battle of great minds and ideas that we all benefit from... but, in all honestly, it allows for comparative testing of diverse ideas while keeping pricing honest. Cooperation might lower the "cost" of producing similar products but, then we are producing similar products. A major goal of competition is to prevent us from putting all our eggs in one basket. I mean what if all the space companies decided to use one company's rocket engine and they failed to delivery...
- jexe 5y agoHaving some competition is probably the best way to make space companies work efficiently, cheaply, and reliably, so these two egomaniacs fighting it out in a space race might be the best possible thing for progress in the industry.
- yissp 5y agoAt least to some extent, competition was the reason for the first moon landing, right?
- WalterBright 5y agoThey're no more egomaniacs than, say, whoever wins a gold medal at the Olympics. You've got to be an egomaniac to think one deserves to be the fastest runner in the world, a completely pointless honor, but we celebrate them anyway. Pointless as in I, an old man and an uncoordinated complete failure at athletics, can ride my bike faster than any of them can run.
- krapp 5y agoPerhaps, but at least athletes put in the work themselves, rather than exploiting and taking the credit for the work of others.
- WalterBright 5y ago> exploiting Employing > credit Credit always goes to the leader. Without Bezos, none of Blue Origin would have happened. Olympic athletes rely on uncredited trainers and usually a dedicated family to financially support them.
- krapp 5y ago>Without Bezos, none of Blue Origin would have happened. Anyone with the means could have founded Blue Origin, hired the same people, and gotten the same result. Jeff Bezos' money was necessary to the company's success, he was not. >Olympic athletes rely on uncredited trainers and usually a dedicated family to financially support them. Olympic athletes credit their trainers and family all the time. And, again, they do the actual work.
- inglor_cz 5y agoWould it be better if C, Java and Rust were integrated into a single überlanguage with one central committee to drive further development? From a layman's perspective, an idea like that would make superficial sense; they are all programming languages, after all. From a programmer's perspective, that would be a nightmare. I think the companies are so far apart that extensive technical cooperation would slow them both down. Maybe they could share a weather service or even a drone ship fleet for landings, but not the core products and their parts.
- Kinrany 5y ago> Would it be better if C, Java and Rust were integrated into a single überlanguage with one central committee to drive further development? Yes! They need different runtimes, but there's a lot of infractructure they could have been reusing. It's a shame we have a couple dozen language silos that have to reinvent everything.
- hobofan 5y agoYou mean like Rust (and Zig initially) building on top of LLVM? Or like the dozen languages that coexist on top of the JVM? Rarely does a new language build everything from scratch, and the parts they build new are often progress.
- Kinrany 5y agoYes, but also build tools and package management. I'm not blaming the authors. It's not any one language's responsibility to make tooling stacks modular and interoperable.
- simcop2387 5y agoFor an example of this, see the Parrot VM from the Raku/Perl 6 development.
- lizmat 5y agoPlease note that the Raku Programming Language currently has 3 backends (MoarVM, JVM and Javascript) and that Parrot was dropped as a backend target in 2015.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoIt seems like ULA's team-up with BO hasn't been going well
- nickik 5y agoBecause BlueOrigin has nothing to offer SpaceX other then if they want to simply give money to SpaceX.
- dev_tty01 5y agoWhat motivation does SpaceX have to cooperate? SpaceX is way ahead on any metric that matters. Nothing to gain.