Predicting Starman’s Return to Earth
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Space piracy implies a rogue individual or group grabbing stuff in space and selling it on the black market for profit. I completely agree that's next to impossible. 17th-century piracy on the high seas relied on widely shared seafaring expertise, many potential customers and victims, and an ease of entry that's just not present in space.
But we've had people in space on the ISS continuously for more than a decade now, we landed on the moon half a century ago, and it's all getting constantly cheaper and easier.
I would be shocked and disappointed (moreso than I already am in our abandonment of the moon) if we didn't have a Mars base in a century.
But how about hacking of satellites built with insecure off the shelf components? The IoT. In space. This gets even more interesting once someone builds an insecure satellite tug. The first group to hack one can threaten other satellites within the tug's reach.
We've got technology that's making it borderline cost effective to survive in space.
... we're only missing in-space mining and manufacturing (at least of the basics). The cost of launching all of the above from the Earth's surface is what's killing the economics.
And ironically, there's a fairly accurate parallel to the resource- and legal- 16th century Caribbean.
100 years ago, we had this: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2u1lGwe_Jf8/TwW1lxbBrtI/AAAAAAAAJ7... [Ford Model T]
100 years before that, was: http://animalpetdoctor.homestead.com/1800horsebuggy.jpg [1800s horse and buggy]
100 years before that, was: https://i.pinimg.com/236x/b5/46/5b/b5465bb591ec882f187d5b3d8... [horse]
100 years before that, was: [horse]
100 years before that, was: [also horse]
etc.
100 years seems like a very long time to humans, but each century has seen continued exponential progress in transportation technology. Where you see a joke, I see a certainty -- barring of course some unforeseen massive catastrophe.
And materials science. And medical science. And probably several other things I'm not thinking of right now.
The truth is that the electronics you mentioned are a force multiplier. It's like saying 4,000 years ago, we had everything we had in the immediate pre-renaissance. The math was the enabler that gave us the ability to exceed what we had.
Electronics (and the things that go along with it, such as the software to run it) are what allow us to move vast swaths of other tech forward.
We are still limited by physics, and we won't ever find ways to circumvent physics, but we'll find ways to not have to circumvent physics.
Do you actually, literally mean this? Or did you mean to say that the next big change won't happen for a very long time?
I get your point -- it's a very good one, if said much more moderately. Communication tech can be a replacement for transportation tech, and the next big change in transportation tech may be quite difficult to achieve. But the absolute statements drive me bonkers...
P.s. self driving cars may be mainstream in a few decades or less.
Until something along the lines of antigravity is discovered, I can't see any major modal change in aerospace. Fundamentally there's little different from today's 787 or a380 than a 747 or 707. As was pointed out, you used to be able to cross the Atlantic 3 times in a single day. The major change to open up Europe-far east travel wasn't high speed planes, it was the opening of Russian air space.
Aside from some modest range improvements there's little change in 50 years on long haul travel. The only things on the horizon would be antipodal non stop flights, but those distances tend to be uneconomic due to having to carry the fuel. High speed trains are slightly faster than they were in 1980 but not by an order of magnitude, things like the Shanghai maglev seem doomed to be one off curiosities.
There's not much in today's transport world that would shock someone from 60 years ago.
Promising technology always, eventually, reaches a dead-end, sometimes before something better comes along, yet technology as a whole keeps progressing. The steam engine, for instance, far outperformed internal combustion engines even after ICEs became more common (https://www.conceptcarz.com/vehicle/z11210/stanley-steamer-r... the electric car "revolution" that's happening now also happened a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Electric_Truck
I see interplanetary travel as inevitable because we have nowhere else left to go. There are humans on every continent now, humans under the ocean, even humans full time in space. Although there are numerous members of our species who don't now (and never have) seen any reason to leave their own backyard, our species has made it to all of these places because of the members who just can't stand to be wherever everyone else already is. For that reason alone, we will eventually become interplanetary.
???
A rocket just landed itself after boosting its payload to orbit. Again. (this time 2 by 2)
Hell, as I recall, a simple buffer of several feet of water surrounding the living quarters would do the trick.
I feel that some material and energy collection will be able to be automated, and the corporations will be able to steal from each other and so will do so given the opportunity.
The reason for going to all this trouble is that no one will put their expensive satellite on a test launch, but you’ve still got to do the test launch. Traditionally, one launches a block of solid concrete or steel.
For what it’s worth, the spot was offered to both NASA and the Air Force. Both wisely declined.
You're HN as much as any other member. If you find articles that you find interesting, submit them! Help make HN the place you want it to be.
To respond to your calls of clickbait, yes, I do have a habit of writing articles that are picked up on Hacker News. I see that you have submitted a total of zero items to HN, how about submitting a few other articles from Hackaday (sparing myself, of course) to HN? I'm sure they'd appreciate it.
That said, I just glanced through your more recent HAD articles to offer up some examples and they don't seem anything like that anymore, so I'll give your stuff another shot. I guess your style's changed since a little less than a year ago when I noticed and decided to filter out all your articles from the RSS feed (in particular because you were telling people who offered corrections to your articles that they're "shitting up the comments").
As to my zero submissions... I'm just not a submitter. shrug