Comment by heymijo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heymijo | Hacker News Reader

After reading Part I yesterday I got to thinking about SpaceX.

In his biography, Ashlee Vance describes how Musk built a knowledge base about rocket construction after his exit from Paypal. Both the "how to" and a first principles approach to the economics of it.

Musk knew the calculus that he could attempt to build rockets for far less than his competitors before he ever put a dime into SpaceX.

In contrast, vertical farming sounds more like the computer engineer equivalent of "I built a thing, isn't it shiny and cool" without understanding the industry, economics, or competitive landscape.

Vertical farming seems to be taking an ahistorical approach. With both both vertical farmers and VCs ignoring industry knowledge [0,1]

Sticking with Musk, he took an ahistorical appraoch to Tesla's Fremont factory with automation. He learned a very expensive and wasteful lesson that other auto manufacturers had known for decades.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23633298 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634030

> Sticking with Musk, he took an ahistorical appraoch to Tesla's Fremont factory with automation. He learned a very expensive and wasteful lesson that other auto manufacturers had known for decades.

Sometimes things change and the lesson everyone learned is no longer valid. Fools sometimes get lucky.

And sometimes they don't. In case of automation, Tesla really ignored decades of experience just because. And it wasn't even slightly related with anything tesla really inovated on. Not sure these "maybe we are lucky" initiatives are a wise thing to do.

The allure of vertical farming also seems to lie in the "urban vs. rural" culture war, in that farming in cities claims to obviate rural existence

Thank you for pointing this out and making the implicit explicit for me.

There is a lot of economies of scale to be achieved by more growing cycles, better customization of growing conditions, improvements in LED in the future.

The bottleneck will always be cheap energy. However the industry will progress from non calorific high value foods like lettuce and leafy greens (they may be low calorific but have a lot of value in terms of nutrients etc. and are expensive) to stuff like cherry tomatoes, cucumber as renewable energy starts getting cheaper.

The fundamental difference between SpaceX and Farming is that the latter actually provides direct utility to humans.

I still don't understand why we need to go to space. I know I'm going to get roasted here for saying this. And yes, I know that "space tech improves earth tech" -- cool, so let's just make better earth tech in the first place. Better farms, schools, transportation. We only have one earth.

"I built a thing, isn't it shiny and cool" -- sweet rocket Musk, what are you going to do with it? Study space worms? Let rich people travel in space? Build a mars colony (lolol). That's not going to happen on any meaningful scale. Put down the sci-fi and open your eyes. We need help, here, now.

You've probably already read it, but I'll link it anyway for those who haven't:

## Letters of Note: Why Explore Space?

[+] https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/

Why go to other countries? Europe+Africa has all the space we need.

1. There is an unimaginable number of resources in space. Asteroid mining, if we crack it, would make space a far better place for manufacturing.

2. It was originally rich people flying on planes and sailing on boats. If it's technically possible and valuable, economics will optimise the cost away.

People were traveling on boats already and traveling on boats wasn't as hazardous as sending people on a controlled exploding vehicle. Plus on earth, existing tech in europe/africa was going to work in most places of discovery on earth. Everything in space will have to be re-invented, without the thousands of years of iteration (like ag). Have people really even figured out how to farm on Mars? No because no one has farmed on mars. And farming on mars, that tech may likely not be useable on earth, because we've spent the last thousands of years optimizing for our planet. Utilizing the soil the sun and existing manufacturing. We'll build tech for mars, and then what next? What is the next uninhabitable planet we'll visit and rebuild entire infrastructure, while abbandoning the 1 good planet we have. I don't disagree that space travel is important and finding planets is important, but i think those things pale in comparison to the problems of our only guaranteed hospitable planet.

edit: I think pushing limits of human achievement is important, but understand that we haven't even solved stupid obvious problems like feeding every child in this world. Think about that. There are hundreds of millions of children who don't eat. You want to talk about scale and talk about solving problems, think about all the minds that could be the geniuses that get us to mars. There is so much lost potential just because of malnourishment. Yes going to space will get us better manufacturing, but the potential of having entire generations that are well fed and thinking optimally, we could be squandering countless einsteins, simply because we are spending money trying to get to mars. I think that's what gets me about the way we spend money. Human output is random, and the people who change the world, it is random where they are born and so is their upbringing. We should be taking care of every single new born that enters this world because one of them, could change the world in unimaginable ways. Sorry I don't htink you asked for this comment, but your comment about why people traveled to new countries just sparked a thought dump. Sorry :)

Provide low latency broadband internet to the entire surface of the Earth (Starlink). To me that's a good enough benefit to justify it.

Musk is serious about building a Mars colony. Of course if you dismiss the possibility offhand with a "lolol" then you won't agree with what he's doing. But personally I think it would be beneficial to have space colonies, and we eventually will have them in the far future if we don't blow ourselves up first, and accelerating the timeline for that is a fine thing to work on. SpaceX is not zero-sum with farming.

No practical reason. Same with understanding cosmology or studying dinosaurs - all of these things have zero effect on our day to day lives.

Space exploration gets such a small fraction of our resources as it is.

I agree we can invest and function better in other domains also. It's just not a choice we have to make; we easily have the bandwidth to do all of it.

And the practical benefit to space exploration or readiness is non-zero right now. Satellites, defense (from others but also celestial objects), climate science. The future hypotheticals, your "Sci fi", may one day be added to this list.

To get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect !

> And yes, I know that "space tech improves earth tech" -- cool, so let's just make better earth tech in the first place.

If you threw a bunch of money at just "try to replace common pieces of earth technology" I don't think you'd get much.

Having both specific problems to solve and new and difficult constraints spurs creativity in a way that just "how would I make a better fastener" wouldn't. It's too open-ended otherwise. What does "better" even mean there?

The GPS that your automated combine uses to guide itself is space tech, not earth tech.

> I still don't understand why we need to go to space.

I'm sure you don't need GPS. Or care about researching the Climate. Or care fundamental research on physics. Or want to use the internet on planes. Or care about defense. Or ever use earth imaging made from satellites. Or care about people in disaster situations find a route to flee the region. ...

We should probably get to space one day. Doesn't mean we can't solve earth problems too.

Modern farming is heavily dependent on positioning and weather satellites. The quality of these services scale with density and SpaceX lowers launch costs which allows more satellites which in turn will create more efficient harvesting and help prevent crop losses due to unexpected weather events.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com