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Space is becoming a religion for atheists, with SpaceX serving the role of the church and Elon Musk in charge of it as the techno-utopian Pope. No wonder reall

by GDC7 5y ago

Space is becoming a religion for atheists, with SpaceX serving the role of the church and Elon Musk in charge of it as the techno-utopian Pope. No wonder really smart people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros are staying out of it. The amount of mass that we have to bring up there to live and thrive and be happy is so enormous that Nobel astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Christopher Nolan had to essentially cheat their way into the epilogue of Interstellar. The hero of the movie finds the answer to the problem of how to lift humanity off the Earth into the Gargantua Black Hole, which by definition is the place where all the rules are off, and there is no knowledge of what really happens in there, so that Kip Thorne could, in good conscience, allow it in the script. People who love space should work on mind uploading and laser transmission of the aforementioned upload. That's the only way we can manage to lift ourselves.

panick21_ 5y ago
I got news for you buddy. Neuralink is being researched and lasers that communicate in space that are already on Starlink sats.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
You have an SF novel in you, you just need to write it!
oxplot 5y ago
Even if a religion, sure as heck the best out there, by a large margin: 1. Got the best miracles (two building sized Falcon 9 boosters landing side by side after an orbital launch). 2. Promises exciting future, full of explosions, adventures and memes. 3. Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence (already delivers the cheapest and slickest rides to space).
- GDC7 5y ago
  > Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence What about the promise that you'd be able to have your present day quality of life on Mars? That's basically the equivalent of "if you pray enough and donate X money to the church , you'd go to Heaven". Ironically the same people who stand behind the concept of "the big lie" and categorically deny the "lab leak theory" , have no problem believing in the above nonsense, even though the probabilities of that happening is many orders of magnitude lower than an election being stolen or a viral agent being accidentally released in the external environment. Curious. Nothing in the entire world is more dangerous than a person with lots of book smarts but zero street smarts When lots of book smarts people with zero street smarts are being recruited by a cult leader the most terrible things happen.
rakejake 5y ago
+1. Greg Egan's novels Permutation City and Diaspora actually explore this very well. I am not opposed to space exploration and generally support SpaceX but reading about doing 100,000 launches makes me slightly wary, especially with our track record on climate and Musk's general penchant for breaking laws. Unless we develop anti-gravity or something which would make space travel energy-equivalent to flight travel, I don't know how you would ever scale this without wrecking the environment. Reading between the lines, you get a sense that the average citizen should be "willing to take the hit for the greater good". Yeah, right. Musk has an immense amount of goodwill today and for good reason but I don't imagine this will play well with any crowd. Even assuming that Musks's Marsshot comes through and a Mars colony is established in 50 years (which would be optimistic going by the current pace of development), what are the odds that I (or the average SWE on HN, let alone average human) would ever end up on Mars? I imagine a 70-80 year old is probably not very high on the (tentative)waitlist? It is looking more and more likely that Earth's climate and politics would necessarily have to take a backseat if we were to go all in on Mars. I see the wisdom in Kim Stanley Robinson's opinion that fixing Earth climate/politics should take priority. I am in support of AGI research and biotech. Training even GPT-scale models is not really comparable to rocket launching. If it is possible to clone yourself to a digital form, or even train an NN model to think like yourself, there may be a way for the average denizen to get to Mars and extend one's life while keeping energy consumption low.

by GDC7 5y ago

panick21_ 5y ago

I got news for you buddy. Neuralink is being researched and lasers that communicate in space that are already on Starlink sats.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

You have an SF novel in you, you just need to write it!

oxplot 5y ago

Even if a religion, sure as heck the best out there, by a large margin: 1. Got the best miracles (two building sized Falcon 9 boosters landing side by side after an orbital launch). 2. Promises exciting future, full of explosions, adventures and memes. 3. Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence (already delivers the cheapest and slickest rides to space).

GDC7 5y ago
> Doesn't require you to believe it based on bad evidence What about the promise that you'd be able to have your present day quality of life on Mars? That's basically the equivalent of "if you pray enough and donate X money to the church , you'd go to Heaven". Ironically the same people who stand behind the concept of "the big lie" and categorically deny the "lab leak theory" , have no problem believing in the above nonsense, even though the probabilities of that happening is many orders of magnitude lower than an election being stolen or a viral agent being accidentally released in the external environment. Curious. Nothing in the entire world is more dangerous than a person with lots of book smarts but zero street smarts When lots of book smarts people with zero street smarts are being recruited by a cult leader the most terrible things happen.

rakejake 5y ago

+1. Greg Egan's novels Permutation City and Diaspora actually explore this very well. I am not opposed to space exploration and generally support SpaceX but reading about doing 100,000 launches makes me slightly wary, especially with our track record on climate and Musk's general penchant for breaking laws. Unless we develop anti-gravity or something which would make space travel energy-equivalent to flight travel, I don't know how you would ever scale this without wrecking the environment. Reading between the lines, you get a sense that the average citizen should be "willing to take the hit for the greater good". Yeah, right. Musk has an immense amount of goodwill today and for good reason but I don't imagine this will play well with any crowd. Even assuming that Musks's Marsshot comes through and a Mars colony is established in 50 years (which would be optimistic going by the current pace of development), what are the odds that I (or the average SWE on HN, let alone average human) would ever end up on Mars? I imagine a 70-80 year old is probably not very high on the (tentative)waitlist? It is looking more and more likely that Earth's climate and politics would necessarily have to take a backseat if we were to go all in on Mars. I see the wisdom in Kim Stanley Robinson's opinion that fixing Earth climate/politics should take priority. I am in support of AGI research and biotech. Training even GPT-scale models is not really comparable to rocket launching. If it is possible to clone yourself to a digital form, or even train an NN model to think like yourself, there may be a way for the average denizen to get to Mars and extend one's life while keeping energy consumption low.