You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook | Hacker News Reader

You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

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221 pointsrahimnathwani223 comments

I’m surprised this article is so upvoted.

1. The author took this nearly word for word from Thiel/Eric Weinstein, who have both discussed this point extensively, most recently on Weinstein’s podcast.

2. The author is using this click bait headline to discuss his own industry/company, and this looks like some content marketing piece.

It is a marketing piece. I liked the article because it did not go on complaining how we wasted our time on building useless things like facebook, but suggested possible reason why innovation in engineering things is slower than in engineering programs. And also suggested possible solution.

Agreed. It's actually a worse version of the Thiel/Weinstein framing, because the author posits the divide between "connection driven" and "applied science" innovation, which is a less useful distinction than the "bits" v "atoms" distinction.

The "bits" v "atoms" distinction is better because software as a whole has seen dramatic innovation that is not confined to "networks".

Feels like a marketing piece for the author's company TBH.

> and this looks like some content marketing piece.

Seeing that it's on linkedin, there's no need to read the article to know that's exactly what this is.

Link?

Plus, the clickbait headline is merely a copycat of one Thiel's own words, except it was with flying cars and Twitter

Please post the Thiel article

"We wanted flying cars - instead we got 140 characters."

Quote is from the article, "What happened to the future?"

https://foundersfund.com/the-future/

Thank you!

I think it's great that there's a renewed discussion about the nature of productivity and growth and that people are starting to become aware that economic profit or consumer demand are not the same as progress on long term fundamental science and manufacturing. For way too long now we have all operated on the mainstream economic view that productivity growth is somehow like manna from the heavens and that we only need to let market forces play it out.

I wholeheartedly recommend reading Dan Wang's piece on the issue: https://danwang.co/how-technology-grows/

What we need is progressively stricter tariffs paired with looser immigration laws. We need to force companies that want to efficiently compete for our consumer demand to in-source process knowledge and manufacturing.

This is a novel take that I have not heard before. Thanks.

Dunno if we is U.S. or someone else, but the U.S. could at least loosen up its immigration policy a little bit. We're literally putting Mexicans in fucking camps.

"You get what you measure" - talk to VCs that could finance your idea and then weep when you see what ideas do they actually select. Quick boring ROI + veiled scams are the way to go these days if you want to get external funding.

VCs have investors too. Want to change VC behavior? You need to change LP behavior. And if you think VCs are unoriginal with herd mentalities then LPs are 10x more so. If we want Mars colonies we need firms like Sequoia—-who effectively have the financial equivalent of tenure—-to step up, or it will come from billionaire entrepreneurs who have the risk tolerance and vision to think differently. Let’s hope all these tech unicorns are successful because it will be that generation that goes on to fund meaningful innovation, not University endowments or pension funds.

I think the bigger lie is that you absolutely need VCs to finance your idea.

What do you think is a better way to fund a manned mission to Mars? It's hard to argue with the progress that SpaceX has made - and that wouldn't exist without VC funding. Meanwhile NASA continues to operate at the whims of Congress. It's doing fine, but it's not looking for any moonshots like it was 50 years ago.

While agree they are at the whims of government, they literally have a moonshot in planning.

Sure, but it's obviously going to fail to meet its deadline. It's politics completely disconnected from reality. Let's see how much Congress is willing to increase NASA's funding to actually make it a success, especially as they continue to miss deadlines.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/another-nasa-moonshot-nope-you...

> "If NASA is not currently capable of landing American astronauts on the moon in five years, we need to change the organization, not the mission." -Mike Pence

I actually think this is a thinly veiled plan to defund NASA in the long run.

The goal of NASA is scientific exploration, not human colonization. Robots and satellites are much cheaper and safer than trying to make Mars a viable place to live, and you can explore many more places.

I agree, but the title of the article we are commenting on is "You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I got Facebook"

I didn't mean to say NASA is failing (although they are a political entity and have a lot of ups and downs as a result), but literally to say "how else could you possibly fund this if NASA isn't going to do it?"

If NASA is meant for exploration and we don't need VC funding (the point of the original comment I responded to), what do you consider the best way to fund a Mars colony?

This raises some interesting questions about why the-future-seen-from-1970 included so many developments that failed to materialize. Unfortunately, I think it provides mostly wrong or irrelevant answers.

One thing that made the 20th century so amazing was the discovery of scientific phenomena that were easily translated to industrially and commercially relevant technologies. We're still mining the rich vein of technological possibilities opened up by quantum mechanics. The major features of the field were well established before World War II. There has been nothing so technologically fruitful discovered since. It's possible that amazing scientific breakthroughs in cosmology or particle physics will be made this century, yet fail to have anything like the technological impact of quantum effect devices, if the time/length/mass/energy scales are not amenable to building products and factories usable on Earth.

The other big headwind since 1970 has been the price of fuels. In every year of the 21st century, inflation adjusted global crude oil prices have remained above where they were in 1970. The one modern bright spot [1], the shale revolution, has spectacularly failed to make its investors prosper [2]. Nor is its continuance assured enough for airlines and aircraft manufacturers to decide that the time has come again for faster rather than thriftier passenger service. Airframes last a long time. Want faster-than-Concorde passenger air service for the 21st century? You need new vehicles and a stable, low priced [3] energy source for them to consume.

[1] For oil and gas prices. Not for the climate.

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shale-pioneer-fracking-unmiti...

[3] Including climate externalities. I wouldn't bet on those remaining unpriced over the airframe's life either.

The future acording to Ford Perfect: just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air. Douglas Adams was a visionary, as many writers before him. That's why we need literature and human sciences - because we lose focus otherwise.

Almost all "visionaries" are wrong, and it's impossible to tell in advance which ones aren't.

> That's why we need literature and human sciences - because we lose focus otherwise.

Non sequitur: neither part of that sentence follows from the rest of your post.

NASA hasn’t been actively trying to drive down the cost of space. If the had it would of unlocked space for all of us decades ago.

It took SpaceX investing their own profits into building a reusable booster. And now they’re doing the same for the entire vehicle with Starship. NASA does pay SpaceX for flights to the IIS, but most of that money goes into building Dragons and the rockets to support them.

What if NASA actually invested in truly low maintenance fully reusable vehicles decades ago? You might actually have Mars colonies today. But what do we have? Continued investment in SLS when the writing has been on the wall for years now.

NASA projects are endangered by politicians. The difference is that SpaceX funded reusability on their own, instead of depending on fickle funding from Congress that killed the original STS (leaving us with the one that flew and costed as much as Apollo per launch).

And sometimes it wasn't Congress zit was president - like Nixon deciding to kill nuclear space propulsion for no known reason.

The cutthroat politics of inter-OKB competition in Soviet Union Post Korolev's death sometimes appear milder than the indecision left after Kennedy in actually funding NASA.

Nixon killing nuclear space propulsion for no known reason? You mean the Orion project and thousands of nuclear bombs in space? I’d say keeping space nuclear weapons free in the face off with the Soviet Union counts as a known reason.

The nuclear propulsion project was unrelated to Orion. And yes, the reason is unknown, because in giving his Executive Order there was no reason attached.

It was nuclear thermal engines, similar were being developed in Soviet Union in fact. IT was even tested for safety in case of crashing on Earth (and could run on earth, though the target was using it in space).

Nixon killed nuclear propulsion because there was no mission on the horizon to justify it. It was the right decision, although developing the shuttle was not.

Under pure "will this bring immediate profit", both were wrong decisions. Building the STS as it actually flew was a wrong decision, but that wrong came out of political pressures that resulted in NASA begging USAF for money, and USAF requiring features that were never used but which killed the reusability benefit and arguably stopped US launcher R&D for better part of 30-40 years.

As for no mission - the missions on the horizon are locked by available launchers and bus systems available, with NERVA engines opening significant options. Despite Congress actually voting the money into budget Nixon killed it with Executive Order, and so far I haven't seen any real explanation why, except possibly internal politics and some people's ego.

How on Earth (see what I did?) would NASA drive down the cost of space?

“I don’t care if it’s not real science - Go there and do that, you burden on the taxpayer” - Every administration official in charge of NASA’s budget ever, probably.

I love me some NASA but I don’t envy the people asking for funding one iota.

Also, For All Mankind is terrific.

Simple, by putting out contacts for reusable, low maintenance vehicles. NASA is in the position to define the requirements for bidders.

why would NASA want to drive down the cost of space? I mean, they would want to drive it down in order to go farther in space, but their mission is to explore space, not be the uber for space

the criticism of their research budget is valid though, they need to be more ambitious and driven

Then NASA should completely give up being the uber for space, instead of spending gobs of money on SLS. But if you are going to get into the launch business, then do it right.

i mean, they also want a cheaper kind of flight, but for different reasons

I'm sure there are NASA engineers who want it, but the tangled mess of NASA/ULA/Congress is doing nothing to achieve it.

I think you answered your own question. You can’t go further in space to explore if the costs are high. NASA has the funding and power to shape requirements that make those Uber rides for their probes much much cheaper.

Well then there would be less money for things like PACE, ICE-SAT, ICE Bridge. They've been building earth satellites to improve fisheries management and inform earth conservation efforts. PACE will be particularly helpful for me as an oceanographer because of they've got those neato optical plankton sensors onboard.

Also, NASA allocates funding based on decadal surveys of the scientific community, so they have really considered doing as you propose.

Or, there would be less money for SLS. NASA has been spending $2 billion annually for SLS development for a while now, and all they'll get is a disposable rocket the size of Starship that costs at least a billion dollars per launch, or $10,000/kg payload.

Meanwhile SpaceX is spending less than one billion dollars total for Starship/Super Heavy, and at scale it'll launch payload for $20/kg. How much more money would NASA have for observation satellites with $20/kg launch?

Probably even more than you'd think because when launch is cheap, you can also afford to make your satellite cheaper. If it fails, it's not so expensive to launch another one.

That's strange. Why is NASA doing sls instead of just contracting SpaceX? From your comment it sounds like SpaceX is much more efficient at launching things into space than NASA, and I'd like to know how that came to be the case.

Various reasons:

Good: NASA started SLS years ago, and had no idea that SpaceX would be so successful. They also didn't know SLS would take as much time and money as it has.

Bad: NASA is at the mercy of Congress and SLS has a lot of political support. It spreads jobs over a lot of districts and pays big money to major defense contractors. At this point it's a huge sunk cost and embarrassing to cancel.

Ugly: Those contractors work on cost-plus contracts so they have little incentive to make a cheap launcher. To illustrate, the SLS uses Space Shuttle main engines, which cost several times as much per unit thrust as the Saturn V's engines. That was worthwhile for the Shuttle since it reused them. Naturally, NASA's contractors thought they were perfect engines to throw away on every flight.

It's not called the Senate Launch System for no reason.

By funding science they’ve actually held science back because the costs of access to space have not decreased. You can do a lot more science when the costs are low.

Why do you personally want to go to space?

How many billions upon billions upon billions did NASA waste on the Space Shuttle. NASA would be able to fund a hundred times their current projects if they’d simply kept the Saturn, never mind if they’d invested in reusable vehicles.

NASA could not do that decades ago because then we didn't have good enough computers to model the process of burning in the engine, or to control the engine to land vertically.

So i don't think that effort spent on facebook and other computer related things was a waste.

If you were right then NASA and every other country would be doing it now. But you’re not right. There’s nothing about the computers or engines that couldn’t of been done decades ago.

There is a big difference between "the only thing preventing development of better rockets" and "one of things". NASA and every other country would be doing it now if better computers were the only thing needed for reusable rockets.

There is no sharp line dividing computers that made spaceX possible and slow ones, and with a little bit worse computers spaceX could develop the rocket after more failed attempts, spending much more money and time. But with the technology of 80's they'd end up with something very expensive and not very reliable similar to shuttle/buran.

The decade doesn't matter. NASA is making poor decisions today with SLS, just as it did with the shuttle in the 80s.

The reality is it was possible to build cheap reliable reusable space vehicles with 70s technology.

Have you worked on any task related to modeling physical processes, based on my short experience modeling parts of airplane, i believe building something comparable to falcon with 70s technology would have been multiple orders of magnitude harder.

The fact that NASA makes poor decisions today doesn't prove that SpaceX would have been able to create and implement the good plan 40 years ago.

Multiple orders of magnitude? Do the rockets/engines today look anywhere close even to a single order or magnitude better than before?

The computers are much better yes, but not good enough yet to obviate the need for real engine testing and wind tunnels for aerodynamics. Computers in the 70s were already capable of landing autonomously on other planets - as demonstrated multiple times.

> NASA could not do that decades ago because then we didn't have good enough computers to [...] control the engine to land vertically.

Autonomous propulsive landing isn't something SpaceX invented. Besides the DC-X in the mid-90s which is often cited in these discussions, there are the Soviet Luna probes. In 1966 the Luna 9 lander used retrorocket thrusters to arrest its descent to the lunar surface to 6 m/s at 5 meters above the lunar surface (airbags handled the rest.) This is not quite as impressive as what SpaceX does today for a few reasons, but it seems to me that a concerted effort to iterate on this tech could have been a lot more successful decades ago than you think.

(I believe in 1970 Luna 17 landed on the moon with no airbags, but I don't know much about Luna 17)

Landing rocket on low gravity lunar surface, or test rockets that did not go to space is a much easier task, which is evidenced by multiple failures of early spacex rockets, despite grasshoper landing every time.

The author works for a HPC company and is probably using this article for recruiting. I would’ve preferred the article to have more than a couple measly paragraphs on that subject, rather than he pander to the ‘futurists’

Seems like we don't get Mars colonies and supersonic jets for good economic reasons? These are luxuries at best. It's a nostalgic idea of progress only tenuously related to actual progress.

More relevant questions might be why the cost of housing hasn't improved and why we haven't cured cancer yet.

Cancer's a really tough problem, and we're only now getting the mass of detailed information about its biology (in all its forms) that allows targeted therapies.

We don't have a market for commercial supersonic jets (given present technology) because they are an environment-clobbering indulgence even worse than private jets. And its consumers would no longer be as comfortably private with their consumption being sprayed all over IG and the like.

> “Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems”

I think it may partly be because most of human civilization is still basically slave labor.

You indenture some people and you tell them what to build.

People don't care about problems they're not supposed to take care of. It's a detriment to them if they do.

This kind of makes it tricky to take on tasks like say, space elevators or arcologies or extraterrestrial colonies. You need expertise and constant collaboration from so many different domains it's hard for a single organization to have enough musclepower and brainpower for, even with contractors.

Then there's the tribalism. Governments may have the resources to take on global/space-scale projects but they generally try to hinder other governments, even within the same nation.

I agree with this. A basic income program could have an unexpected dividend of a new innovation boom.

I think the article points out the main reason. It is more profitable to build Facebook than put a man on mars.

Connectivity-driven innovation is cheaper. Science is becoming harder and is getting less bang for its buck. We saw great progress in AI over the past few years but even this has taken far more effort and money than building social networks. Perhaps connectivity-driven innovation could help to speed up applied science innovation if power of the crowd is more efficiently utilized?

I don't agree that connectivity and applied science are two separate things. We don't get to netflix without applied sciences: encryption, compression, networking, neural networks. I don't know why the author said that. He has a degree in computer science

Maybe that’s not true, in the long term? But certainly easier and more profitable in the short.

I doubt it would be any more profitable in the long run. A Mars colony would have extremely high barriers to trade. It's like a permanent trade embargo. Countries don't do well without trade. An entirely self-sufficient, technically advanced community hasn't been done, even on Earth.

Antarctica would be much easier and cheaper in comparison.

I don't understand why some people say they want to live on Mars. They'd be confined in small metal boxes, surrounded by things that would kill them in a moment. The cost of everything would be enormous, if it was available at all.

If you want that experience, you can get it now on Earth in places we call "prisons".

Forget mars colonies, i just want robots that can do household chores that don't cost more than a vacuum cleaner (and i think roombas are overpriced), where's Rosie?! That's hard, let's build the 10000th chat app instead, e.g. why did this cost $120 million https://qz.com/1194939/the-us-government-just-gave-someone-a... ? Can't we do better now with 3d printing? I dunno, i think we're getting there : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6xqTcLXXC8

Thought: is the migration of manufacturing away from western countries part of the problem? Lots of innovation in software in the US or UK, but less in manufacturing - perhaps because the skills aren’t there?

Is there really a lack of innovation in manufacturing? 3D printers (hyped though they are) are improving rapidly. Nanoscale stuff (not just graphene and chips, but also those) are seeing a lot of progress.

I’m not in hardware though, so I can’t tell if that’s part of a trend or not.

Oh, sorry, I mean - as in innovation in hardware products rather than the manufacturing process itself.

Probably some of the issue, yes. I will say this is chiefly a company-side problem. Lot's of companies still have manufacturing jobs in the US, but they are typically high-skill manufacturing, like Boeing or Tesla.

I have talked to VCs who told they love to fund "deep tech", but when they realize that basic research is binary result, they get surprised, and say it's too risky. And sometimes the VCs who evaluate this are people who are young enough to never lived on their own during a recession.

Why is it always space? Space technology requires lots of energy and our society is currently in the middle of realizing that our current way of getting energy is going to kill us. Of course we're not making large-scale investments in energy-intensive exploration.

I wish EDS maglev, fusion power or quantum computing generated so much excitement, to say nothing of grid batteries, magnetocaloric heat pumps, or electric impedance tomography. I guess QC has done well lately.

> Why is it always space?

For the same reason it's always flying cars, despite how comically inefficient such vehicles are. The masses have an extaordinarily simplistic notion of what futuristic or advanced technology is or should look like. There are only a few well-trodden idols linked to what the future is supposed to look like. Hollywood has told them so; they've been told for many decades that it most certainly involves a space thing and or flying thing.

Cracking the human genome was a thousand times more interesting and important than flying cars could ever be and yet the masses can't let go of flying cars as somehow representative of magic futureness. It's nothing more than cultural brainwashing, equivalent to being projected on by media & advertising for decades that smoking cigarettes is cool (and that worked just the same, people bought into it fully).

They do what they're told. They believe what they're sold.

>They do what they're told. They believe what they're sold.

But you don't. You're not one of the tomatoes, you're a real person, huh?

> Why is it always space?

Two words: Star Trek

Why is it always space?

Good question. The best off-earth real estate in this solar system is worse than the worst on-earth real estate. It's easier to build colonies in Antarctica or underwater on the continental shelf than on Mars. Mars is small, cold, and nearly airless.

We're not short of low-value real estate, after all.

"Hell is other people". It's not possible to escape the state on Earth anymore. It's a pure question of travel time. Underwater continental shelf or Antarctica, it's all trivially accessible and indefensible. It's not possible to start a new way of living somewhere, like the Amish or Mormons did. What's needed is at least the equivalent of travel time and cost between Europe and Americas before steam ships.

Space is not that hard assuming some basic human upgrades. Nothing scifi needed (like mind uploading), just an engineering problem - things that today take a factory but would have to fit into a human sized body.

Wherever we go, there we are. Humanity can't run away from itself. If we could go to Mars, we'd take our problems there with us.

This is so much hyperbole, typical of manifest destiny escapists.

You start with a pop-interpretation of an edgy existential statement. The point of Sartre's "No Exit" was not to glibly quote the punch-line, it's to think about the logical implications. Probably something about learning to live together despite our flaws/sins.

About escaping the state, the Book of Genesis figured it out long ago: humans behave badly (aka sin) and were thus cast out of the only place they could live in peace--in other words, some people ruined it for all the others. And because of bad behavior, humans need to follow laws; and who makes the laws is what has created (and continues to create) history. So it was never possible to escape the laws/state ever.

To dream of running far enough away to a mythical place where you alone get to make the laws is just futile escapism. The Amish and the Mormons just moved with their laws to a new place, and if you didn't agree with their laws, you still got kicked out.

Now for the hyperbole: the "underwater continental shelf" and Antarctica are not "trivially accessible", they are some of the most unexplored and hostile environments on Earth. You'd have lots of trouble establishing a livable base there.

Why does it have to be defensible? Is this some sort of Fort Laramie you have to steal from someone else? Leave society, live off only what you can make or grow, have no contact with the outside world. Find a lake in some remote mountains or an island in some remote sea, sneak out there and never come back! What? You still want the amenities, energetic resources, trade, and communication with the rest of the world? Then you're going to have to deal with other people and THEIR laws.

"basic human upgrades" "just an engineering problem" fit a factory in a human-sized body??? Why that should be as easy as a CRUD app on a virtual server with some rented storage.

Face it: for all intents and purposes, the world is full, nobody is escaping anywhere, and we all have to learn to live together.

>To dream of running far enough away to a mythical place where you alone get to make the laws is just futile escapism. The Amish and the Mormons just moved with their laws to a new place, and if you didn't agree with their laws, you still got kicked out.

Strawman. I literally wrote "like the Amish or Mormons did" yet you describe living alone in a hidden hut somewhere, Theodore Kaczynski style.

>Why does it have to be defensible?

Even in the XIX century, Mormons were eventually subjugated by force. They only managed to last several decades under their own laws. Today under the "Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act" it's a federal crime to operate a submersible vessel without nationality in international waters. The claimed jurisdiction is global. So no, it's not possible to move away anywhere on Earth anymore. The moment anything substantial would be created, some state would claim it as their own.

>Why that should be as easy as a CRUD app on a virtual server with some rented storage.

What's the point of this hyperbole? The difference between an engineering problem and scifi is that the former can already be done, but is expensive or otherwise impractical, while scifi problem like mind uploading can't be done for any money today. Engineering problems, like making rockets cheaper, are solvable by throwing money at the problem as long as general physical laws permit improvements.

>the world is full, nobody is escaping anywhere

Which is exactly why developing space travel technology is so important.

I agree with you about Antartica, but I think the pressure underwater at even quite shallow depths makes it harder to build any large-scale inhabitance there than on any of the bodies in this solar system that we'd want to go to, which have (I think) lower atmospheric pressure than earth. Of course, resupplying an oceanic habitat is much easier than resupplying anything off-planet, but besides that, I wouldn't be surprised at all if we have space colonies well before oceanic colonies.

Isn’t it usually flying cars?

Another reason: no imminent threat from the rival superpower. Though , the rise of china may change that

There's also a factor of iterativeness. I think everyone here will appreciate the value of designing something you can do step by step, with value at each step of the way. You don't have to go zero to 100 immediately. You can course correct. You can revise. You learn from 0-50 to do 51-100 better.

Facebook can be built that way. Google too. SpaceX, maybe not so much. It's simply a harder and more expensive and riskier investment to do something that has so much startup cost before you start to get any value or pivotal learnings back.

In a way, FB is more useful than Mars colonies could ever hope to be. How the hell do you even survive on a planet without a magnetic field to repel cosmic radiation? A few kamikaze will go, but it's lunacy to expect some kind of massive and growing settlement there. It'll likely be an extremely expensive counterpart of the ISS or an arctic research station. You aren't ever going to get it to more than a few hundred people. Inspiring? Hell yeah. But beyond that also pointless.

I'm writing a book on future thought tentatively titled

The Soul of Tomorrow

A futurist's construction kit

A field manual for how to think about and create "future stuff", stepwise advances for a continuous world.

I'm about 25,000 words in. It's currently being developed on github. If this really interests anybody, I'd really love to talk to them about things.

The chapters are starting to come together, but honestly this is 15 years of thinking and currently only 15 days of writing (November novel writing)

I intend to eventually get this to a publishable academic state with careful citations. I've even taken a week off work to travel around to libraries and do research for it.

I'm looking at how visions of possible futures operate, how they change, get communicated, materialize, and often collapse.

I've developed a number of frameworks that I'm currently trying to validate and falsify by looking at many classes of future from things like biblical second coming theology to socialist theory to technological dreams to even white nationalism. I'm trying to figure out how the dreams of a different tomorrow operate at fundamental levels.

Please reach out and contact me if you want to talk about this. I'm really passionate about this study.

My email address is in my bio. If you replace the domain of Yahoo with Gmail I'll probably see it quicker.

Have you checked out Shell’s scenario writing? They used to publish some very good how-to guides for futures research. I didn’t see as much how-to content the last time I visited the website. https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-futur...

Syd Meade is also an interesting person to study for a book about envisioning the future. He designed a number of cars and is famous for Blade Runner. I talked with him & his key insight was that he always drew a car in a world. A car needs a world (context) in order to make sense of its design. http://sydmead.com/

I'll just mention there are a bunch of privately-funded fusion reactor projects, including TAE, General Fusion, Commonwealth, Tokamak Energy, LPP, Helion (funded in part by YCombinator), and others.

There are also lots of companies working on molten salt reactors. In theory that's easier than fusion, but governments are more prickly about letting you work on fission.

TAE: it was explained to them 20 years ago why their idea didn't work, even theoretically.

General Fusion: acoustic compression was shown to be unworkable, so they pivoted to a slower scheme with a central conductor down the middle of the chamber. Good luck getting that conductor to survive 100T magnetic fields and orders of magnitude higher neutron loading than in conventional reactor concepts.

Commonwealth and TE: overall volumetric power density of their concepts will be very poor compared to fission reactors, even if every other problem is avoided.

LPP: there is a serious disconnect between accomplishment and hype. Also, pulsed approaches with very short bursts of fusion output make wall engineering much harder, and it's already very hard in continuous fusion reactor concepts.

The only one I cannot immediately dismiss is Helion, although that may be because I know less about them. The goal of direct conversion is admirable if they want to have a chance of being cheaper than fission, but the demands on that seem formidable. The high current, high voltage, billion reps over the lifetime of the reactor switching requirements seem extreme.

I'm not trying to claim that these particular projects will succeed. I'm just saying that some VCs are in fact funding the sort of high-risk breakthrough physical technologies that the article claims are not being funded.

But a nitpick on LPP: wall engineering isn't really an issue for them since they're attempting boron fusion. Like Helion they're also planning direct conversion, since the output is a pulsed beam of charged particles. I once asked Lerner why they don't start with D-T and he had an argument that their concept actually works better with boron (don't remember why).

Of course wall engineering is going to be a problem with boron fusion. Any very hot plasma will emit photons, and H-11B plasmas will emit them even more than DT plasmas (because the rate of emission increases rapidly with the charge of the nuclei). In fact, a H-11B plasma will normally emit photons faster than it can reheat itself from fusion. LPP makes noise about making tiny knots of plasma that are so dense and ultramagnetized that this doesn't happen -- but as those knots expand, the supposed effects that suppress radiation would die away, and out would pour the photons.

The reactor would only be about 5MW, and the wall of the reactor core can be however far away it needs to be to not get melted by x-rays. It's not like it's surrounded by superconductors or breeding blanket, it's just vacuum containment. Generally it's neutron radiation that's considered difficult to deal with, and there'd be little of that.

And the reactor won't produce net power at all unless they're right that bremsstrahlung will be suppressed long enough by the plasma's magnetic field. If it is, then most of the energy will go into the alpha particle beam.

The reactor is described to be 5 MW average output. But if it's very bursty the instantaneous power will be far higher. Damage to the wall will be determined by heating of the surface by these flashes (and possibly mechanical damage from shocks induced by vaporization in that surface layer). Keeping the instantaneous power low enough to avoid damage could make the reactor unacceptably large.

So your criticism is that maybe, possibly, the reactor will be too big. I'll take it.

That is a central problem with fusion: the volumetric power density of fusion reactors sucks. It's not a trivial criticism, it's an economic showstopper.

LPP's concept has other problems, of course, like the aspirational physics of those putative 1000 T plasma knots, and direct conversion by Handwave Engineering.

I dunno why ppl keep saying all we got is facebook. We got vxlan, 100gbe, SSDs,nvme SSDs,and soon non-volatile memory, GPUs, dpdk, segment routing, containers, config management, nosql, json, bittorrent, blockchain, eliptical curve crypto, totp, letsencrypt/acme, raft consensus..and more!

I somewhat agree. Facebook may not appeal much to people interested in let say space exploration or self-driving cars, but amount of engineering lessons learned by deploying a software at that scale is still invaluable. We are so much better at distributed systems, machine learning than we were, and that knowledge can be applied to other problems (and it is).

>[...] nosql, json, [...]

Those are not like the others.

What is tough about this problem is how hard it is to communicate. We all know something is wrong, even if we don't really realize it. Like the article says, we've been promised all of these incredible things by the advancements we've seen, but we have gotten very few fundamental improvements. I live in the US, so I'm going to speak from that point of view.

We work more than every, are poorer than any time in recent memory, have a broken healthcare system, we're seeing decreases in life expectancy, epidemic levels of suicide, etc. and all of this at a time when the market is at ridiculous highs. There are very few people talking about this in highly coherent ways, one is Eric Weinstein on his podcast The Portal, which focuses on this. What we have seen in the past 50 years is that physics has hit a wall in delivering meaningful real world improvements for people's lives, biology has largely done the same, and chemistry pushes forward at a snails pace in the form of pharmaceuticals. The saving grace that makes everyone feel as though we're progressing is technology, which seems to have hit the same wall in recent years since most of the easy problems to solve with computer science have been solved.

In the soft sciences, economics has some deeply troubling problems down to the fundamentals, our politics/government/public policy is damaged and decaying at the root, academia has exploded in cost with little payoff for most, and has entrenched itself as a inescapable shadow that looms over young people for the rest of their life, all while cannibalizing those who speak out against it.

Many great advancements are threatening to become meaningful, but many more have been doing that for decades. It really seems like we are running out of easy problems to solve, and the systems that we have in place are remarkably bad at solving hard problems, while being remarkably good at concentrating wealth

I often think of the first few lines of a poem by Allen Ginsberg:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz..."

I'm seeing the best minds of my generation destroyed trying to sell ad space, starved of connection, posting selfies looking for a hollow fix.

Am I the only one who feels weird reading this article on LinkedIn?

I watch what NTT Research is up to, and frankly, how many startups even know anything about how to fabricate a superconductor, let alone have the facilities to create them? They have the tools to make websites and little computers with sensors made in Shenzhen, so that is what they make.

https://www.ntt-review.jp/archive/ntttechnical.php?contents=...

Humans are notoriously terrible at predicting how technology with develop over decades. It’s humorous to look at what people a hundred years ago thought technology would be like.

[1]https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2014/05/victorian...

Well. Complexity kills. This is true on so many levels. Whatever was promised by futurists or science, is most of the time a marketing blurb. But it almost always adds complexity. Maybe it is a good idea to avoid easy gains. You get born, you have to learn the ropes and use your skills. You always build on the knowleadge of others. But you have to learn it first. That's something other than reciting.

And he doesn't even touch on the inefficiency of public research spending which has ballooned since 2000 with disappointing returns

Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff notwithstanding. The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades through tax cuts.

If the author would take off his (it's always a he) blinkers of technocracy he might see that profitability is not the only measure of "why." Some things are not profitable, yet are still worth doing. Andrew Yang-lite doesn't account for this at all (see "blinkers" above), which is pretty much par for the course for the "Facebook is the be-all end-all" attitude.

To paraphrase JFK, we pay taxes for public benefit not because it is cheap, but because it is expensive.

>Mars colonies don't come from the private sector, Elon and Jeff notwithstanding

Exploration has a long history of rich benefactors and private interests. Monarchs, Dutch East India Corporation, etc., are closer to Musk and Bezos than a modern democratic state

>The problem is that public science has been starved of funding for decades through tax cuts.

This graph suggests otherwise? In current dollar terms, R&D spending is double what it was in the 1970s.

https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/DefNon.png

I am skeptical of the success rate of rich benefactors for a technology with only a century of practice, vs. boats that have been used for thousands of years.

>In current dollar terms, R&D spending is double what it was in the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File:NAS...

And there are more budgets to be involved than just these two.

There's a certain irony in Buzz Aldrin complaining that he didn't get Mars Colonies and simultaneously hating on Elon Musk for not being the US Government.

It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources. The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances and has been self-sustaining from a profitable perspective. Sure, the worlds' governments could have spent billions / trillions building bases on Mars or even terraforming it. But for what purpose? And for how much misery would earth have to endure for all that effort?

Also would like to add, sheer advances in compute and software lead by Facebook and others has enabled much cheaper space travel than what was possible in 1970's - 80's. This type of stuff is getting cheaper every day, so why be selfish because you "want to see it in your lifetime?" It'll happen. I don't care if it happens in 20 years, 200 years, or 2000 years.

Facebook (and other web advertising companies) isn't leading most of the advances in computing power. Moore's law is much older than Facebook.

And they certainly aren't developing the software that space agencies and companies are using. If anything they're likely diverting talent away from more beneficial work towards selling ads.

There are maybe 2 projects on this list that could possibly be beneficial for space exploration, and they aren't groundbreaking.

https://opensource.facebook.com/

Haven't you heard of react.js or GraphQL? Not sure about space agencies, but companies for sure use them.

Hah, react.. I'm sure that fancy GUI framework will solve climate change and make us an interplanetary species. /s

No one is using either of those directly in aerospace applications. And I can guarantee you that an aerospace company using React instead of Rails or a desktop app for a marketing page or internal app isn't significantly driving down the cost of space travel.

>It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources.

Facebook is not the internet. This problem was solved long before 2005.

Depends where you live. https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/facebook-is-the-internet-f...

You can also argue that Facebook was the death of local communication and socialisation and thus a step back for that goal.

And the world was connected long before the internet. Instant intercontinental comms have been around since intercontinental telegraph cables were laid in the late 19th century.

The advent of radio, television, and telephone added more modes of instant very long distance comms. The internet was just the next layer of that.

In the future, cheap satellite internet will further reduce geographic isolation.

This sounds a bit too much like "Facebook invented the Internet".

There were plenty of tools available for sharing and communicating in real time before Facebook existed. The actual innovation was the Internet and personal computing.

This seems to be the core of what this poster is trying to express as far as I understood.

What exactly has this given us? People have smart phone addiction. Studies have shown that people feel more isolated than before, because the coherence of local communities is dissolving.

The Internet has brought us much. A kid somewhere can learn a lot of things that you could not easily learn before in a small town in the middle of nowhere. We have FLOSS software and people that cooperate on large, open, projects.

But to me Facebook and other advertising-based have been a net loss. Of course, there is community and communication, but they existed before Facebook in Usenet, e-mail lists and forums. However, now all the communication is spoiled by advertisments, people being driven subconsciously to get likes, and numerous attempts to induce dopamine shots. I really liked the internet more from 1995-2008 (before Facebook got very big in Western Europe) than from 2008-now.

I'd argue that the decline of religion and the implementation of this Darwinian style of capitalism in the West is a large contributor towards this. The large increase in the number of non-working people (pensioners) also plays a roll.

In America I'd give television - especially Fox News. That channel is like WWF - it's basically a scripted soap opera written to be extremely compelling to the viewers. Only unlike WWF it's portraying itself as a true representation of the real world.

If anything the internet increases the amount of community: you can always find like-minded people.

i m not against facebook , but no, the world was "more" connected before facebook and mobile (which i think both represent a shift in the way internet was used). People were connected in open pseudonymous platforms and engaging in continuous explorative mystery with each other, everyone, not just their friends. It's fair to say i haven't read radical ideas online in a decade, and a lot of the edgy stuff of the old internet has been censored / outlawed. Real names BS and phone numbers turned the internet to a phonebook.

> People were connected in open pseudonymous platforms and engaging in continuous explorative mystery with each other.

This also had the effect that most people were way more respectful towards each other because you didn't have an instant "ego comparison" trough shined up social media profiles.

Nowadays most discussions quickly turn ad-hominem because all the needed information is readily available: "You said this nasty thing 4 years ago! A horrible person like you can't have any valid opinions!".

Yet somehow to this day, some people keep peddling this myth that "anonymity breeds toxicity", when Facebook sits there as one of the biggest and most glaring counter-examples collective humanity could ever produce.

Imho the web was way nicer and more productive pre-social media mass adoption.

"Anonymity breeds toxicity" is propaganda pioneered by Facebook whose founder believes in radical unprivacy.

It was not pioneered by Facebook at all. Before the web was even a thing, there was a split between dialup BBSes. In my area it was WWIV vs. Wildcat.

The WWIV boards were all pseudonymous, open and welcoming. There was pretty much no discrimination there (because no one knew your gender, age, religion, skin color, or class unless you told them). They were typically run by a mix of ordinary people, including those who would be discriminated against in real life.

The Wildcat boards in my area were all real-name only, enter your address and phone number to register an account and the sysop will call to verify. Those were the ones who claimed to be more civil, but were rife with discrimination, bullying, and snobbery. They were typically run by the more wealthy and powerful, who never faced discrimination.

The early internet, with IRC, usenet, web forums, and even some way into the blog phase, seemed to have followed the WWIV path, and it was good. But then the wealthy and powerful wanted more control and more data to discriminate on, and they resurrected the old real-names policies.

What misery is Earth enduring now, because we built Facebook instead of building next-generation mass transit to link continents and cities? Instead of optimizing food and water logistics, so less food is wasted and more of the world were fed? Instead of taxing petro and plastics companies for the externality of destroying the climate? My point being that if you or most people really gave a damn about human misery, there would be far fewer people tolerating the kind of unfettered capitalism that exists today.

I don't completely demonize Facebook's general concept. I appreciate and advocate for the idea of a federated Internet with single identity and no central authority on content. I'm not attacking that. I am challenging your idea (and the article's) that profit should be that important, or that the existence of Facebook is mutually exclusive to costly research/welfare/exploration.

I live without Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc.

Still very much connected to the people. No problem finding information either.

The problem is Intellectual Monopoly laws.

Imagine you have 8 billion processors but you only provide 8 million of them with disk access.

Very few people have access to the information necessary to build innovative products. Instead of waiting for BillG to solve the energy crisis and healthcare delivery and new kinds of toilets for everybody, let's abolish Intellectual Monopoly laws and unleash the power of all 8 billion processors on solving these hard problems.

#intellectualfreedom #scihub

To provide an edgy answer, we live in a rather peaceful time...

We haven't had a good old fashioned War to accelerate our technological advancements. As humans were rather adept at finding new and creative ways to kill each other and then ultimately repurposing it for good later on...

I hope tech will be used to hack universe not people eventually

Facebook is addictive. There's nothing addictive on Mars. If we discover space crack then we will have a real space program.

Remember: Back to the Future?

All of these articles and ways of thinking always miss the bigger, more fundamental shift in human society — we now know there is literally no place we can access in any meaningful amount of time where the “grass is greener” than the places we’ve already been.

This is profound, semi-depressing, and enlightening at the same time. Rather than seeking something new somewhere else, our new obsession is in improving what we’ve got, where we are right now.

I know a lot of you are going to make hand-wavy claims about space mining and things like that, but our population curve seems to indicate a very minimal benefit to all of that. If anything, the fastest-growing environmental concern seems to be space and sky pollution. Starry-eyed young engineers have been sold on the idea of interstellar space travel, when the reality of the commercial application of their work is that it’s more likely to lead to an over-proliferation of satellites and help rich people get to places faster via space plane.

The final argument someone’s inevitably going to make is, survival of the race. Yeah, okay. You might want to self-reflect on our existence as deeply terrestrial beings that are intrinsically connected to the Earth. Even if you spend all of your day hidden in a bedroom, you can’t escape your bond with this planet. Instead of trying to find a mistress in the form of another moon/planet, we need to spend more time working on the marriage.

I think space technologies are fun, and that rich people obsessed with suicide missions to other planets should be able to do what they want, but let’s not kid ourselves on the moral superiority of these sorts of things. There is no shame, and no inferiority, in working to optimize our Earth-bound existence.

I try to imagine humanity a thousand years from now, still bound to the same increasingly inhospitable planet, paying for the sins of our generations but nowhere to escape to. With probably an abandoned Mars or moon colony. Just nothing to explore. Even the boundaries of natural science would be mostly understood by that point. It would be so depressing. Our only salvation would be if we still have enough resources remaining for computers to run virtual worlds for us to explore. Basically video games, that's our best hope.

Should those humans, along the way, do the work to exist here more harmoniously, the planet would not be increasingly inhospitable.

Starting that work now is a huge economic opportunity too.

There is no need to continue to squander resources.

There are a lot of wants to do that. Understandable too. No judgement.

We have a global priority conversation coming. The sooner the better.

I don't think there is any chance we make it a thousand years without either reaching technological singularity or destroying ourselves. In the 80 years of transistor technology we went from string manipulation via pneumatic tubes to real time ray tracing.

Though to be fair, both outcomes basically end biological human life - a technological singularity obsoletes carbon based biology and any rational successor species wouldn't keep living humans around when they can trivially archive our genetic code and reproduce us at will if ever needed - which is also then unlikely to happen. Its that or nuclear annihilation.

Paul Davies (head of SETI) has a fantastic book called "The Eerie Silence". It was the first time in years that I had read a good science book written for the layman that taught me not only a lot of new scientific ideas, history I didn't know about, and made me think about humanity in a new light. I really can't recommend it enough.

Ok, so he makes an argument that made me put down the book (ok 17 year old me) and really ponder the statement. It was his belief that "all biological life is transistory". Of course we have no other intelligent life outside of earth to compare against, but it kind of makes sense in a completely unproven kind of way. A species develops as biological and eventually transcends to machine. At that point, you would be far more intelligent (maybe) and the only requirement for society would be lots and lots of energy. You would essentially be a mind floating around in infinite cyber space experiencing everything there is to experience. You could travel to the stars if you would like (no cryogenics or food necessary), but honestly...why would you want to?

The book mostly sticks to scientific fact and covers a lot of SETI history, but there are many additional topics like this that are thought provoking.

Some of my friends were horrified by this (end of biological humanity assuming it is ever possible), but to me...it is the most logical progression for humanity to become more than what it currently is. These flesh bodies cause us to die far too early and our brains can probably only be enhanced so much.

We are in effect the same tragedy that encompasses Octopoda. They are provably relatively intelligent and emotive creatures but have extremely short lifespans for their mental capacity and thus can never take real advantage of their learning ability.

Humans are still that, just on an order of magnitude longer time scale. Its still hugely limited when compared to orders of magnitude larger time scales than that.

I agree with the first half of your comment: humanity will be (mostly) Earth-bound and energy-bound, trying to deal with a fragile ecosystem in a humanitarian way. However, I disagree with the pessimism in the second half.

To explore the ocean floors will take another 200 years, and probably another 100 for land before we even start. This will be driven by the need to decipher weather and climate, with currents of heat, salinity, nutrients, carbon exchange, and who knows what else through the atmosphere and oceans. Those seem like the priorities we'll need to solve climate stability, including associated tech for renewable energy and feeding whatever population we finally (hopefully) level out at (peacefully).

And then I think we will still have many fascinating frontiers to explore, such as molecular biology, genetics, history, and the big one in my mind: psychology. We know so little about all the different ways our minds work and our studies are so primitive we think all people think alike. Just consider the huge difference between introverts and extroverts, and what it implies for people to be so fundamentally different--science isn't even considering these questions yet.

In a thousand ears, things will just start to get interesting. To retreat into virtual worlds would be premature--though I have no doubt they will be explored in parallel.

Just as much, if you consider what it would be like, who would want to be stuck on a martian mining colony ... without any social networking. Social networking might have it's downsides but it's rather a boon to people stuck in areas of extreme boredom and isolation.

The thing one can regret about the aesthetics of modern life, including social networking, is that it's made the uniqueness of places less (a social network and the Internet generally lets you be everywhere and yet nowhere and makes everywhere kind of the same). But I can't see martian colonies making human places more unique given such colonies would have to have a very uniform structure dictated by a harsh environment.

I'd love to hang out on the martian web. Sounds cool as hell, and a lot healthier than earth web.

you could create one here on earth, and sell connected 'pods' that people could live out of from their parents' basements (only half joking)

Now I want to write a browser extension which simulates earth-mars latency.

Wouldn’t be hard. Just execute every request with a ~20 minute delay.

Naive implementation. Distance flucuates from 3-20 light minutes over time, and would have to double that for a round trip. Plus have to factor in EM interference and line-of-sight.

"social networking" with martians would be a lot like email, light speed is a bitch

You seem to believe that Facebook and other traditional social networking sites are the only way to alleviate boredom and isolation online. Usenet and more traditional web forums also fill this need and don’t need to make billions of dollars, so they aren’t as infested with privacy violations and intrusive ads. I’d take that over all the Facebooks and Facebook wannabes out there in a heartbeat.

>The final argument someone’s inevitably going to make is, survival of the race. Yeah, okay. You might want to self-reflect on our existence as deeply terrestrial beings that are intrinsically connected to the Earth. Even if you spend all of your day hidden in a bedroom, you can’t escape your bond with this planet. Instead of trying to find a mistress in the form of another moon/planet, we need to spend more time working on the marriage.

There's plenty of ways for life to end on this planet that don't require any human interaction.[1] Many have occurred in the past, it's naive to think it won't happen again. There's no reason why anyone has to choose between the stars and not killing ourselves on this planet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events

In the face of all extinction events, the bottom of the ocean would be more habitable than an alien planet.

But there is little to gain living on the bottom of the ocean. Space expansion offers us more than just survival, it bring orbital mining, Low G manufacturing, scientific projects and so on. It's much harder if not impossible to create something self-sufficient underwater than on Mars, since due to huge pressure any mechanical failure of your equipment is much more catastrophic. There are virtually no light or any good energy sources for growing food, you can't mine underwater effectively, and so on. It's a glorified bunker and nothing more. Compare it to mars - structures can be erected from much lighter spacious materials and expand outwards, there is sunlight, a lot of minerals to mine and since everything is pressurised from the inside the repairability is higher.

> But there is little to gain living on the bottom of the ocean.

What? You're surrounded by water, you can produce oxygen through electrolysis and generate hydrogen fuel, there's food living all around you, there are plenty of seamounts to mine.

> It's much harder if not impossible to create something self-sufficient underwater than on Mars

All of you supplies need to live on Mars need to come from elsewhere. All of your necessities from life need to come from elsewhere. If you want to live on Mars for any appreciable amount of time, you need a robust supply chain that'll supply resources to you from Earth.

On the seafloor, you are surrounded by water, sources of oxygen, and food.

> you can't mine underwater effectively,

We've yet to mine anything that isn't on Earth. We may never be able to mine effectively anywhere other than Earth.

> there is sunlight

There is barely an atmosphere on Mars, and it lacks oxygen.

Most of the ocean is just dead water with nothing in it. Life blooms near geothermal sources or near surface. But even there getting the resources that you theoretically have is not easy - electrolysis is like charging a battery - you don't get ANY energy from it, because you would need the oxygen, and hydrogen needs oxygen to react with. And even in that reaction it would release less energy than you've spent separating it from water, it's a thermodynamic dead end. If you don't have sunlight for power (if you are deep enough) the only source apart from nuclear is gas/oil that you would extract from the seabed if you'll be very lucky to get where you'll establish. The food is around you, this is true - microshrimp, jellyfish, algae - non of this is consumable by a human. We tried that already - soviets experimented with algae and krill consumption for astronauts on the space stations - out digestive systems would not be able to handle it.

Compare it to Mars - you get sunlight for crops, you get it for solar panels, etc. There is water on Mars as we know now, so you can use it while also having easier time building. The only downside is how hard it is to get to the Mars compared to the bottom of the ocean. But once we would figure out hurling cargo it's going to be easier. I fully agree that you need supply chain to exist for some time, a long time even, but after a while you would be able to grow food on Mars.

We have places on Earth where you can get close-to-Mars experience, near the poles. There are some entirely lifeless patches of just ice cold land where some of the Martian tech gets tested.

> Most of the ocean is just dead water with nothing in it.

You're closer to life than you would be when you're on any other planet than Earth.

> But even there getting the resources that you theoretically have is not easy - electrolysis is like charging a battery - you don't get ANY energy from it, because you would need the oxygen, and hydrogen needs oxygen to react with

I'm aware of how thermodynamics work, and I bring it up because our nuclear submarines rely on electrolysis to generate oxygen so that they don't have to resurface for long periods of time.

They just release their hydrogen as waste gas, though.

> Compare it to Mars - you get sunlight for crops

There is barely an atmosphere on Mars.

> you get it for solar panels

You can capture wind, solar, tidal or geothermal energy while sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

> There is water on Mars as we know now, so you can use it while also having easier time building

There is a incredibly small amount of water on Mars. Meanwhile in the ocean, you're surrounded by it.

I don't think the bottom of the ocean would be a good place to survive an extinction event, because there are plenty of places on the surface or beneath the surface that are better suited.

I use the bottom of the ocean as an example because it is Earth, our home, yet we still have an extremely difficult time surviving in it. Despite that, it is infinitely more livable than any other planet in our solar system.

> access in any meaningful amount of time

I agree about space constraints, but if we really wanted to, we 'd work to create humans that live long enough to go there , or somehow else send human hybrids frozen in a ship. Biotechnology is amazing but so constrained by premature regulation it's not seeing a lot of progress. I have the feeling that scientists were secretly wishing some rogue scientist would try to apply crispr on humans.

I think it's true that the public's imagination is not much gripped by grand visions anymore but rather numbed and distracted with mindless trivialities

I'm not sure the public's imagination is ever gripped by grand visions for very long. Just look at how quickly Apollo ended once we made it to the moon, and how controversial its budget was at the time.

Going further back, remember that most of the Western settlers we romanticize as "pioneers" with "the spirit of exploration" today were in fact looking for economic profit and an escape from bad working conditions in settled country.

Sure some minority cares about noble action, grand perspectives and super-long-term consequences, but most people just want to drink, watch TV and die with hopefully a few friends and family around. They aren't directly included in the vision, so why should they care?

Necessity is the mother of invention, and sadly there is currently no necessity to birth human space exploration. We'd likely need a bad asteroid hit (bad enough to kill millions but not bad enough to collapse society) or a second cold war where establishing, say, a moon base would be strategically beneficial.

Until then, well I guess we have Elon, and eventually Bezos. Independently wealthy businessmen have been behind more than a few major inventions.

> most people just want to drink, watch TV and die

Religion is a counterexample to this. it has driven people to change their lives

I'd argue it's the other way around, that those seeking to change their lives for the better are a relatively self-driven minority and likely would have succeeded with or without religion, religion was just a convenient vehicle due to widespread availability and approach-ability.

It's anecdotal, but I was raised Baptist and married into a Catholic family (although neither my wife nor I are particularly religious). The people I've met in church over the years are no more or less driven than any other segment of the population I've encountered.

Defense against asteroids is a bad justification for space exploitation. The first thing that would have to be done is telescopic search, and with very high probability nothing really dangerous would be found, and so no further space activity could be justified on the basis of defending against that threat.

Defense against long period comets might be a better bet, as they are harder to rule out.

That's the thing with public opinion, you don't need a good justification to get things done, only a sufficient one.

If a devastating asteroid did hit and NASA/ESA/etc got all the funding they ever wanted to catalog the sky, and announced they'd finished 2 years later, a large slice of Joe Public would respond "you said the chances were 1 in a million last time. Why should we trust you now?" With the right resources that could be leveraged into a Mars colony with actual sustainability in mind.

I think you'd find the threat of asteroids to be a much more relatable and palatable threat than Climate Change. It's an purely external force of nature that no human can claim responsibility for or point fingers over. An asteriod strike would also be the single, short-term-but-devastating situations humans have a evolved to deal with, as opposed to the long-term creeping rot of Climate Change. Likely much easier to get action over asteriods.

Hell, asteroids are already #2 on the list of things NASA should focus on according to a recent PEW survey. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/nasas-priorities-app...

Charless Stross has illustrated this in his novel "Accelerando" (strongly recommended!). In the future, even though interstellar travel is technologically feasible, (almost) no one does it - because why the hell would any of the post-human superintelligences want to venture away from the hyper-connected, inner solar system-spanning Network where all the power, resources and fun are concentrated?

Exactly, Manifest Destiny is over, the world is full now and we recognize we can't just take land from others anymore. Time to learn how to live together without depleting or destroying our biosphere.

It just makes me think we need to invest more into terraforming Mars :D

I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly.

I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero and the attitude is "we're better than the rest of humanity. We deserve all, the rest deserves nothing."

I did an Electrical Engineering faculty. I know how hard it is to do math and physics and all that. But since there's such an easy money to be made from slinging yet another website or a stupid mobile app with these dumbed down languages, the interest in the sciences and anything more complicated slowly wanishes. We'll pay the price eventually. Maybe not now, maybe not in 10 years, but eventually. We're too comfortable.

"There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind — we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge." - Dune

(I'm from Eastern Europe)

> I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly.

What is this in reference to? Where do buying cars and holidays in Greece come into this article? Is there a stereotype of programmers holidaying in Greece?! And tech types mostly hate buying cars don’t they?

In reference to all the money being invested in questionable places.

I think we’re missing some part of your train of thought here.

But fundamentally tech graduates make a lot because the work they do makes a lot. You can’t argue the projects are both over staffed and pay too much at the same time! If there’s enough money coming into the company to pay that many people that much money then good for them? Looks like it is possible. Where should the money go instead? To the investors? That doesn’t sound better for ordinary people.

But I don’t think they use it to go on holiday to Greece, and I’ve never heard anyone talk about normal tech graduates being involved in international tax evasion of all things - they don’t earn that much and I think most of it goes on rent in many places!

You are missing the point, which is that incentives can change society, for better or worse. If we have problems assigning appropriate value to things as a society we go astray. If we place greater value on ad sales than we do in real scientific progress in the long run we all lose.

Doesn't make any sense though. Most people need a car to travel from A to B and a vacation to relax and be able to continue to work properly instead of quitting.

The OP is from Eastern Europe, and those 2 things he's mentioned are probably the local aspirations (Greece being not so far).

He's from Romania, where people don't usually afford vacations abroad, and when they do, Greece is the canonical choice. Also, a lot of people's existences there revolve around car ownership. In addition, IT people have relatively high salaries (they even have an explicit tax exemption).

Last year and this summer Greece was the trendy vacation location for millennials aged 23-30, most of which work in the tech space and thus can afford such vacations (often in lieu of retirement plans/savings though).

“I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero”

This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.

I would say I have seen two.

I would say that there is challenging work out there if you look for it. I’ve studiously avoided the kinds of places described here and it has paid off for me.

Entitled incompetents who are not only highly paid but expect scheduled promotions as if given a sinecure have really run amock in this sad sad industry.

It take a stabilization of the technologies and processes. In the early CG and VFX animation industry it was chaos too, but now many production studios are run tighter than a military operation. Experience in a moderately recent war feature with a good sized VFX budget, the military advisers remarked how the film set and following post production was better run than their real world military campaigns.

"In war everything is simple, but the simplest things are difficult."-Clauswitz. I would trust SNAFU exists for a reason.

I can say I worked on one.

But because it was well managed, small team, everyone listened to each other's areas of respective expertise and authority, we wrapped it up in a year on a 6 digit budget.

Meanwhile, a previous project elsewhere i have experience with, had a team of approx 30 cycle through, 10 to 20 external consultants (some flown in and put up in hotels, but who had no actual experience in the things they were consulting on) , had been running for several years, estimated 8 digit budget, and by the time i left had been running for several years with no discernable output compared to the status quo except reports and presentations taking about how good things would be one day in the indeterminate future.

I'm convinced the later is the norm, and it's even harder to go back to once you've worked on a project that 'just works', but I'm sure several people used the later one to land themselves high paying jobs by putting it on their resume using management speak to make it sound impressive, so I guess success depends on whose point of view you're looking from...

From my experience in consulting and internal, there are two major things you can do.

1) Use objective KPIs + encourage a culture of admitting, taking responsibility for, and being forgiven for failure

Failing to admit failure is incredibly toxic to ongoing corporate functioning, and a culture that doesn't allow for it endlessly moves goalposts until there is success (by some metric) without motion (by objective metrics).

2) Don't allow anyone to overscope sprints

If all the "team" can accomplish is a "Hello World" in the next week, then that's the goal. Better to be honest than slide down the slippery slope of lying to ourselves.

The irony is: how does a company that conducts itself thusly manage to retain people?

To which the answer is: pay well above median wage

The mind boggles.

One of my founding tenants for any company would be "Never assume work done in service of profit is inherently profitable work."

I always wondered whether this phenomenon was something local or whether it holds true outside eastern Europe as well.

I saw that you're from eastern Europe and I checked out your website. You're in the exact same city I am in. I moved here a couple of years ago from western Europe. What a small world.

If these, and others of its kind, are the things that also keep you awake at night, feel free to get in touch. It's hard to openly express them around here (edit: here, meaning the city where I live, not HN) as I always seem to get into trouble for that. Thought police is always on the lookout.

But your original comment in this thread basically amounts to "damn kids these days, they earn too much and don't know shit". Plus random insults about how they think they deserve it all (and nobody else).

It doesn't take a thought police to reject that as almost surely greatly exaggerated and undeservedly disrespectful.

I truly enjoyed reading Saifedean Ammous ‘Bitcoin Standard’. Among other things he explores the relationship between the soundness of a monetary system, the establishment of the gold standard and industrial revolution and technological progress and what he calls ‘zombie industries’ kept artificially alive by loose money policies. Highly recommended.

How much of this is due to venture capital? Like, if it were possible to make a billion dollars by investing in 100 plumbing companies even if 99 of them turn out to have been dumb, would plumbers make $250K out of college?

One can think of VC's as shooting canons full of money into the weeds and hoping they nail a unicorn.

Less flippantly VC funded companies succeed not because they hire more competent people but because they are vastly better funded than more normal competition.

My impression is not much; high salaries are instead driven by Google/FB etc.

Only if you figured out how to sell a self serve $15/month plumbing service or run advertising through the pipes

I think the reason software pays so well is because the world is simply littered with computers.

Today's software developers are earning a fortune from the fertile soil that has been spread around in the form of computers in everyone's pockets. Making those computers x% more useful to y% of their owners scales as a function of the number of computer owners. The fruit keeps hanging lower and lower to the point that it's hard not to step on it.

It's easy money because most of the work is done as the byproduct of investments by other industries, like telecom, but the extra value is unlocked by the software developers.

It's generalizable and something I'm confused they don't teach kids in career counseling.

Max(salary) = unit_value * number_of_units_impacted

Software generates a high ceiling because number of units impacted can be huge, so unit value can be low.

In contrast, you can only pay teachers / doctors / firefighters / police officers so much, because their number of units impacted has a fundamental cap (the number of people they can physically interact with in a given day).

Which is... unfortunate. Because (IMHO) they deliver a lot more value to society, and work harder, than I do.

Bullshit Jobs includes an interesting section about the IT professions saying that 'noone wants to pay to develop a database that is amazing, but people will pay millions to someone who increases clickthrough on an ad of even a 0.1%.'

Congratulations. You just discovered the Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Hmm. I'd need to see some research to believe that's happening.

It seems like non-software folks are getting paid the same, leading to wider inequality.

> [...] it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing [...]

If there’s something that I’m really really grateful of, growing up in Germany, it’s the dual apprenticeship system. [1] And Germany also does a splendid job at giving students a glimpse of working experience at uni (if you are willing, at least)

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16159943

It's disheartening to read comments like this when I think of the graduates I've worked with over the years and the yearning for betterment and peer recognition I often see.

It’s worth pointing out that things like the Moon Landing, which we now see as the pinnacle of human engineering achievement, was once widely regarded as a “Moondoggle”[1], sucking up billions of dollars with delays and cost-overruns around every corner.

Apollo 11 was probably a few key decisions away from being one of history’s greatest lessons in hubris.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...

Product engineers may be a mess but infrastructure engineers in this industry are capable of incredible works of human achievement.

The product punks, fresh out of college, throw together all kinds of whacky code in the name of front end product — which to their credit becomes incredibly popular with millions of people. It’s usually also incomplete bug ridden nonsense.

The real magic is in seeing infrastructure engineers scale this to thousands of machines running across continents, always up, always connected, with non trivial caching, CDNs, cluster turn up, release engineering with automated testing and performance regression analysis on each diff before it’s even committed, let alone in production, and every other manner of instrumentation and tooling under the sun brought to bear on the product code itself.

When they run out of things to do that are awesome they turn their eye to building their own compilers, languages, hardware, and networking gear, all to maximize productivity and minimize cost.

It’s a zoo, and the zookeepers are some of the smartest people I’ve met.

This is kind of an amusing metaphor. But, if infrastructure engineers are the zookeepers, does that make the front end and mobile engineers the animals? And what about the backend engineers?

> "foo sucks but bar is actually great (btw I'm a bar)"

I'm a product engineer AND an infrastructure engineer in the common job-title sense, and if I had a dollar every time an infrastructure engineer/devops/full-stack introduced a complex service (elasticsearch/kafka/k8s/etc) without understanding how the service should be configured, maintained, or extended, I'd be able to afford a house in the bay!

Good product managers bridge the gap between engineering, sales, and the executive team, and can make a project successful just by managing the decision making process(es) well.

The bottom line however is that most companies have poor product management and poor infrastructure engineering which will lead to many more Theranos and Yahoo style messes in the years to come (and waste untold billions doing it!).

> I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business.

I'm not sure the direction of causality here. Reminds me of "In theory, practice is just like theory, but in practice it rarely is."

I think your ideals are pushing you to great places, but your experience is showing you that it either doesn't exist or at least you haven't found it yet. I've been a part of projects that I'm very proud of that have all kinds of awfulness that I'd rather have not done. Still pretty good work in my opinion, and I'm not sure that good work is fully purposeful and correct at every point.

Some of this rings true, although I know some idealistic people in their twenties (I don't hang out that much in CS circles though).

But I would argue there are also legitimate reasons to choose computer tech over hard science. In the former you have the chance to potentially do some independent, self-directed work or at least achieve financial independence. This means you could do something with your agency. The latter puts you into the bureaucratic machine with fierce institutional, metrics-driven competition. You hardly can do anything without a grant given by some political or commercial interest.

Many people would also be anxious about what our current political and economic system could do with further major breakthroughs - on the scale of nuclear, say. More concentration of power is likely. This is also what the "communications-driven innovation" (per the article) seems to have brought, but this seems trivial compared to impact of biological engineering, tampering with the actual nervous system or whatever.

A lot of really stupid shit is going to happen in 2020, but if Starship makes it to orbit and Crew Dragon successfully launches astronauts, those are the only events anyone will remember in 100 years.

(Come, on tell me with a straight face you remember anything else important that happened in 1903)

Don’t want to sound as a fanboy, but IF (and this is a huge if) Elon succeeds on his mission to make humanity a multi-planentary species, he’ll be remembered as a greatest human who has ever lived for a very long time

I'm no Elon fan, and it's a really really big if, but - you're absolutely correct about that if he succeeds completely he'll go down in the same category as Edison or Napoleon.

Napoleon in most of the English speaking world is much more infamous/loathed than admired.

yes, I’m Russian and, IMHO, napaleon isn’t that far from hitler. Both were mass murderers who valued a lot of silly things above human life

If humanity ever does become a multi-planetary species, it will be because Elon contributed to a process that will still require decades, if not centuries, of effort beyond his death to achieve. He will not in any way be solely responsible, or deserving of that level of recognition, although I don't doubt that his fans will consider him as such anyway.

of course that would be humanity’s effort. But we can only remember leaders

What I'm saying is that, by the time it happens, Elon is going to be a footnote in someone else's story.

maybe, I hope to see two things in my lifetime: 1) organisms (a single cell or similar) evolved not on Earth and 2) human base on Moon and/or Mars

I'd like to see those too, but a base is still a long way from making us a multi-planetary species in any meaningful sense. It's a first step, but it's a first step we've been trying to take since the moon landings. If Elon gets us that far, great... but that doesn't mean he'll be remembered as the greatest human who ever lived, any more than Neil Armstrong or Yuri Gagarin are.

To be a multiplanetary species, we'd need large-scale habitats with stable, complex biomes, and planet-scale geo-engineering. Spam in a can isn't going to cut it.

Replace Crew Dragon with Starlink, and I agree.

I still think the Voyagers 1 and 2 are bigger feats.

Moon landings were cool as an indirect way to develop ballistic missile technology in such a vast scale that nowadays the world's peace relies on this kind of deterrence - Good. And they gave as huge tech advancements as added benefits. Moon landings in 2020s are vanity projects for billionaires with very diminished added benefits. The apollo program was staggering. The N-th moon landing will be 'meh'

You're ignoring the value in making the moon landings routine and instead focusing on the public propaganda value of the nth landing (the "meh" part).

The most important part of a technological adoption process is making a thing routine. That's where most of the value is in fact derived. That is true of all technology that is made far less inexpensive and far more routine.

We're deriving drastically more value out of space now than we did with Apollo and we're spending a lot less money to do it. That will accelerate.

Billionaires perfecting regularly landing on the moon would have a massive benefit of taking a hard-to-accomplish space task and turning it into a common task. It's the exact opposite of being an implied low value vanity project. The ability to then use the moon for manufacturing, storage, basing and experimentation has very large benefits to working on Mars and more broadly in space generally.

>You're ignoring the value in making the moon landings routine

which is?

Build an industrial moon base with a mass driver.

Build a few thousand kinetic impactors in space.

Decommision your nuclear weapons which cost 5*10^10$/year.

Profit.

there is value to space travel for exploration, but space travel is currently promoted for tourist purposes. There is nothing wrong with that, but companies won't offer anything beyond that because going on a 6 month space trip to mars is torture rather than tourism.

Around that time accessible, rider-friendly bicycles that look like today's were just entering the mainstream. Besides being fun in general, they also accommodated women's fashion and benefited women's safe, solo transportation and gave them a big boost of autonomy at the time.

Only 4 more years until Elon Musk puts a $30,000 Tesla on Mars where solar power roofs cost the same as conventional.

I believed it until about 3 years ago, when I realized spaceX is Elon's government subsidized advertisement for his other projects. Also the 30k car is never coming. And the roof price is loaded with astricks to be 'correct".

We really need to wake up to the next gen marketing tactics.

I would argue that compared to status quo (ie either Russia, or Boeing &co) SpaceX saves the government a lot of money...

> the 30k car is never coming

Never is a strong word. We may not get 30k electric cars in 5 years, but we will eventually. We may not get full autonomous vehicles in a decade, but we will certainly have it before the turn of the century.

You mean when global warming will make most of the US a nightmare ? Great.

That's not how marketing works. You don't try to make reusable interplanetary rockets just to sell cars. That would be the worst marketing tactic of all time.

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