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Did Fisheries and Wildlife finally figure out the areal density of whales in the ocean for impact probability estimation? https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742 h

Did Fisheries and Wildlife finally figure out the areal density of whales in the ocean for impact probability estimation? https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742 https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742

iandanforth 3y ago
I recommend the above link because it gets even weirder than you might surmise from the parent's comment.
- rkagerer 3y ago
  Seconded, definitely need to watch or listen to a few minutes of that link.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    I loved the bit where Fisheries and Wildlife refused to provide the shark density information because they didn't trust their own department with it! Apparently SpaceX must wait patiently to take humanity to the stars because sharkfin poachers have infiltrated spies into a wildly unrelated government agency. I feel like SpaceX should just launch the damned rocket and then if anyone from the government takes issue just demand a public explanation. As in, literally, get the busybody bureaucrat from Fisheries and Wildlife to stand up behind a podium and explain themselves on live, national television. "Err... you see, Mr Musk was clearly in the wrong here because... umm... we couldn't... umm... share information internally to complete the appropriate paperwork, so... umm..." It would be glorious.
    - philwelch 3y ago
      If it turned out the federal government was just dicking around out of some unrelated grudge towards Elon Musk, half the country would still support them. Some days most of HN would too.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        philwelch 3y ago
        Beside the point. I don’t think Fish and Wildlife is doing anything other than being annoying obstructionist bureaucrats, but even if you interpreted their obstruction in the least flattering way possible, which I agree is unfair and uncharitable, it still wouldn’t win any sympathy for SpaceX.
        underseacables 3y ago
        It is really insane how much government bureaucracy and regulation has needlessly impeded progress. From rockets to solar farms, activist environmentalism and the government have thwarted and held back so much human progress, not for any legitimate threat, but rather paranoia, fear, and the bitterness of single individuals.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The problem with Hanlon's Razor is that Grey's Law turns it into just "never attribute anything to malice" which is invalid unless you're willing to assume that no act of malice ever occurs.
        rbanffy 3y ago
        Only when incompetence is also a credible explanation.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        Hence Grey's Law.
    - junofan 3y ago
      I mean that’s kinda working with regulators sometimes… you just get lists of random questions every once in a while for several months. It’s fun when the employee turns over and you get to go through the same thing again with random questions that go off a slightly different tangent. What else could they possibly do? Some dude at the Fish & Wildlife Service isn’t gonna bust out COMSOL. I don’t really know what people expect.
    - melagonster 3y ago
      I sure sapceX don't have department of wildlife. we don't have enough research on this issue, I don't know why it is OK to do anything before we do not have information. maybe just like old Big oil companies, just do it before people found what do they do?
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        I wonder if NASA launches are held up for months waiting for information about how many sharks might be directly hit by their rockets. And then I wonder if they would have to cancel multi-billion dollar missions to deep space if the answer is non-zero. People really need to get a grip and use their common sense for a bit. A hundred workers — humans — died in the construction of the Hoover Dam, and that was considered acceptable. The Starship test could literally bomb the ocean with a nuclear weapon and the ecological consequences would still be worth it considering the benefits to the human race. PS: The US government routinely nuked delicate ecosystems like the Bikini Atolls and I bet they never had to fill out the shark, whale, and seal paperwork. PPS: any individual modern fishing trawler will kill more endangered wildlife daily than Starship might annually in a worst-case scenario. Tell me again why this paperwork is more important than our ascendancy to the stars. Be specific.
        maxlin 3y ago
        This. A thousand times this. Even for just US itself, the Spaceship program might well have a chance to prove to be as existentially important as the Bikini Atoll tests (if we consider that it increased the believability of MAD and prevented nuclear holocaust). If not that, it will likely still make US have an incredible lead in mass to orbit capability which might lead to dibs on, well, whole stellar objects like moons to mine, planet to realistically colonize ...
        rbanffy 3y ago
        > I wonder if NASA launches are held up for months waiting for information about how many sharks might be directly hit by their rockets. NASA has been actively involved in wildlife preservation since the beginning. By doing that they are effectively in control and can design it into their mission operations. https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/07/the-wild-side-of-kennedy-space-center https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/07/the-wild-side-of-... https://www.fws.gov/refuge/merritt-island/about-us https://www.fws.gov/refuge/merritt-island/about-us
- pests 3y ago
  The seal story is amusing as well. Isn't there some other way to figure that out besides a real test? Does no one know the hearing ability of seals before?
  - mtsr 3y ago
    I think the effects of noise on sea mammals is a fairly recent area of research. I know of a researcher who has been working on this as part of research into offshore wind environmental impact. But they were already researching porpoises and this was just a new thing to keep track of.
    - tim333 3y ago
      I was wondering after playing a recording of a boom to the seal how they figured out if it was distressed by that, as opposed to being stressed by being strapped to a board. Also how they figured the effect on it's romantic life. The mind boggles.
      - pests 3y ago
        I believe the romantic life parts were just in the yearly observed population counts increasing over the last X years.
aaron695 3y ago
It would be about the same chance of hitting a shark or whale when driving a boat for about 10 meters. Footage of a boat hitting a shark - https://youtu.be/yYuh_TNLThg?t=332 https://youtu.be/yYuh_TNLThg?t=332 this unusual event being .1% of their trip for the day.
- maxlin 3y ago
  I bet the chance would be low even if Starship somehow "flew" on the surface of the water for the whole boost period. And even then it should be ridiculously easy to determine it is more beneficial for humanity to revolutionize mass/cost to orbit even if one or a few animals get hurt during many years of operation. If the US government truly cared this crazy much about sharks and whales we would have sent a carrier battle group to sink all Japanese whaling vessels already for example, or at least funded some black ops guys to sink them while keeping deniability.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Navy submarines regularly deafen all sorts of animals with their sonars and are implicated in whales beaching themselves to escape the noise. But let’s make Elon Musk put headphones on seals (plural) because it’s funny to make the billionaire jump through hoops. If I was in Musk’s position I would simply threaten to pack up everything and take all Starship development over to China. I bet a lot of the “essential” paperwork would magically be made to go away.
    - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
      > If I was in Musk’s position I would simply threaten to pack up everything and take all Starship development over to China. I bet a lot of the “essential” paperwork would magically be made to go away. Yeah good luck with that one. ITAR doesn't work that way. The worst threat they could realistically make is to make their IP 100% public domain (in the ITAR sense which is a bit different from the copyright/patent sense) and the US probably would not care in the slightest since that would be a massive whale fall for the domestic launch system industry.
maxlin 3y ago
Didn't even realize there already was a comment for this. Pointed out the exact same timestamp independently in another comment. Talking of the more reasonable bureaucratic hoops, SpaceX has done quite a job filling all of FAA's requirements they landed on the program from the previous attempt. In a way I hoped that SpaceX would operate outside US to not have to abide by all the crazy laws they have (even with hiring!) but this seems to be the only way. Overall, Starship isn't being given a fraction of the coverage it should be. This is the Apollo of our time, but without the dependency of hyper-inefficient and unstable government funding. But this time, Moon will be just a bus stop.
rdtsc 3y ago
That's incredible. It's not really about whales and sharks, they know the probability is 0%, those agency people can't be that stupid. What they are really saying is they'll shove all the sticks they have in his spokes. If it was in some other country, I might have guessed they are just plainly asking for a bribe, but here I think they just really don't like the Musk and his company. When some random person interacts with the bureaucracy, and hits these catch-22 scenarios, it's often not personal, they just fall under the wheels of the bulldozer, so to speak, and nobody notices or cares. But with something like Space X it's a bit more political, and it seems whoever drives the bulldozer was turning it towards Musk a bit to get him on purpose.
- kcplate 3y ago
  Little wannabe tyrants with their little fiefdoms with big political axes to grind.

Did Fisheries and Wildlife finally figure out the areal density of whales in the ocean for impact probability estimation? https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742 https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742

iandanforth 3y ago

I recommend the above link because it gets even weirder than you might surmise from the parent's comment.

rkagerer 3y ago
Seconded, definitely need to watch or listen to a few minutes of that link.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  I loved the bit where Fisheries and Wildlife refused to provide the shark density information because they didn't trust their own department with it! Apparently SpaceX must wait patiently to take humanity to the stars because sharkfin poachers have infiltrated spies into a wildly unrelated government agency. I feel like SpaceX should just launch the damned rocket and then if anyone from the government takes issue just demand a public explanation. As in, literally, get the busybody bureaucrat from Fisheries and Wildlife to stand up behind a podium and explain themselves on live, national television. "Err... you see, Mr Musk was clearly in the wrong here because... umm... we couldn't... umm... share information internally to complete the appropriate paperwork, so... umm..." It would be glorious.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    If it turned out the federal government was just dicking around out of some unrelated grudge towards Elon Musk, half the country would still support them. Some days most of HN would too.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - philwelch 3y ago
        Beside the point. I don’t think Fish and Wildlife is doing anything other than being annoying obstructionist bureaucrats, but even if you interpreted their obstruction in the least flattering way possible, which I agree is unfair and uncharitable, it still wouldn’t win any sympathy for SpaceX.
        underseacables 3y ago
        It is really insane how much government bureaucracy and regulation has needlessly impeded progress. From rockets to solar farms, activist environmentalism and the government have thwarted and held back so much human progress, not for any legitimate threat, but rather paranoia, fear, and the bitterness of single individuals.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        The problem with Hanlon's Razor is that Grey's Law turns it into just "never attribute anything to malice" which is invalid unless you're willing to assume that no act of malice ever occurs.
        rbanffy 3y ago
        Only when incompetence is also a credible explanation.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        Hence Grey's Law.
  - junofan 3y ago
    I mean that’s kinda working with regulators sometimes… you just get lists of random questions every once in a while for several months. It’s fun when the employee turns over and you get to go through the same thing again with random questions that go off a slightly different tangent. What else could they possibly do? Some dude at the Fish & Wildlife Service isn’t gonna bust out COMSOL. I don’t really know what people expect.
  - melagonster 3y ago
    I sure sapceX don't have department of wildlife. we don't have enough research on this issue, I don't know why it is OK to do anything before we do not have information. maybe just like old Big oil companies, just do it before people found what do they do?
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      I wonder if NASA launches are held up for months waiting for information about how many sharks might be directly hit by their rockets. And then I wonder if they would have to cancel multi-billion dollar missions to deep space if the answer is non-zero. People really need to get a grip and use their common sense for a bit. A hundred workers — humans — died in the construction of the Hoover Dam, and that was considered acceptable. The Starship test could literally bomb the ocean with a nuclear weapon and the ecological consequences would still be worth it considering the benefits to the human race. PS: The US government routinely nuked delicate ecosystems like the Bikini Atolls and I bet they never had to fill out the shark, whale, and seal paperwork. PPS: any individual modern fishing trawler will kill more endangered wildlife daily than Starship might annually in a worst-case scenario. Tell me again why this paperwork is more important than our ascendancy to the stars. Be specific.
      - maxlin 3y ago
        This. A thousand times this. Even for just US itself, the Spaceship program might well have a chance to prove to be as existentially important as the Bikini Atoll tests (if we consider that it increased the believability of MAD and prevented nuclear holocaust). If not that, it will likely still make US have an incredible lead in mass to orbit capability which might lead to dibs on, well, whole stellar objects like moons to mine, planet to realistically colonize ...
      - rbanffy 3y ago
        > I wonder if NASA launches are held up for months waiting for information about how many sharks might be directly hit by their rockets. NASA has been actively involved in wildlife preservation since the beginning. By doing that they are effectively in control and can design it into their mission operations. https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/07/the-wild-side-of-kennedy-space-center https://www.kennedyspacecenter.com/blog/07/the-wild-side-of-... https://www.fws.gov/refuge/merritt-island/about-us https://www.fws.gov/refuge/merritt-island/about-us
pests 3y ago
The seal story is amusing as well. Isn't there some other way to figure that out besides a real test? Does no one know the hearing ability of seals before?
- mtsr 3y ago
  I think the effects of noise on sea mammals is a fairly recent area of research. I know of a researcher who has been working on this as part of research into offshore wind environmental impact. But they were already researching porpoises and this was just a new thing to keep track of.
  - tim333 3y ago
    I was wondering after playing a recording of a boom to the seal how they figured out if it was distressed by that, as opposed to being stressed by being strapped to a board. Also how they figured the effect on it's romantic life. The mind boggles.
    - pests 3y ago
      I believe the romantic life parts were just in the yearly observed population counts increasing over the last X years.

aaron695 3y ago

It would be about the same chance of hitting a shark or whale when driving a boat for about 10 meters. Footage of a boat hitting a shark - https://youtu.be/yYuh_TNLThg?t=332 https://youtu.be/yYuh_TNLThg?t=332 this unusual event being .1% of their trip for the day.

maxlin 3y ago
I bet the chance would be low even if Starship somehow "flew" on the surface of the water for the whole boost period. And even then it should be ridiculously easy to determine it is more beneficial for humanity to revolutionize mass/cost to orbit even if one or a few animals get hurt during many years of operation. If the US government truly cared this crazy much about sharks and whales we would have sent a carrier battle group to sink all Japanese whaling vessels already for example, or at least funded some black ops guys to sink them while keeping deniability.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Navy submarines regularly deafen all sorts of animals with their sonars and are implicated in whales beaching themselves to escape the noise. But let’s make Elon Musk put headphones on seals (plural) because it’s funny to make the billionaire jump through hoops. If I was in Musk’s position I would simply threaten to pack up everything and take all Starship development over to China. I bet a lot of the “essential” paperwork would magically be made to go away.
  - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    > If I was in Musk’s position I would simply threaten to pack up everything and take all Starship development over to China. I bet a lot of the “essential” paperwork would magically be made to go away. Yeah good luck with that one. ITAR doesn't work that way. The worst threat they could realistically make is to make their IP 100% public domain (in the ITAR sense which is a bit different from the copyright/patent sense) and the US probably would not care in the slightest since that would be a massive whale fall for the domestic launch system industry.

maxlin 3y ago

Didn't even realize there already was a comment for this. Pointed out the exact same timestamp independently in another comment. Talking of the more reasonable bureaucratic hoops, SpaceX has done quite a job filling all of FAA's requirements they landed on the program from the previous attempt. In a way I hoped that SpaceX would operate outside US to not have to abide by all the crazy laws they have (even with hiring!) but this seems to be the only way. Overall, Starship isn't being given a fraction of the coverage it should be. This is the Apollo of our time, but without the dependency of hyper-inefficient and unstable government funding. But this time, Moon will be just a bus stop.

rdtsc 3y ago

That's incredible. It's not really about whales and sharks, they know the probability is 0%, those agency people can't be that stupid. What they are really saying is they'll shove all the sticks they have in his spokes. If it was in some other country, I might have guessed they are just plainly asking for a bribe, but here I think they just really don't like the Musk and his company. When some random person interacts with the bureaucracy, and hits these catch-22 scenarios, it's often not personal, they just fall under the wheels of the bulldozer, so to speak, and nobody notices or cares. But with something like Space X it's a bit more political, and it seems whoever drives the bulldozer was turning it towards Musk a bit to get him on purpose.

kcplate 3y ago
Little wannabe tyrants with their little fiefdoms with big political axes to grind.