China launches first module of new space station | Hacker News Reader

China launches first module of new space station

bbc.co.uk

46 pointsClewza31361 comments

I am disappointed that as always politicians blocked the collaborations between scientists - it would have been nice to at least in space to have less nationalism and politics. Hopefully the 3rd world war prediction in Trek is not needed before we can get over this.

The exclusion of China from the ISS was really a terrible mistake both in a moral sense and also in a strategic sense. Russia has announced its withdrawal from the ISS, so now the world is really gearing up for an absurd and completely avoidable cold war 2.0 in outer space.

This comment is downvoted but nonetheless true: US congress essentially excluded China from cooperating with NASA in 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_exclusion_policy_of_NASA

I think most people know, I made my comment referring at humanity in general, like looking back in history and all the wars and suffering and realizing that collaboration would have resulted in more riches then all those costly wars.

I wholeheartedly agree, but before humans set aside our childish “my rocket is bigger than yours” thing, humankind will need to stop being childish.

After sciences , space could be the next thing. I am curious if we can find any downsides of the collaboration on the international space station, was some super secret leaked? From what I see without the Russian rockets the space station could not have been supplied anymore , so I only see the positives.

Absolutely, I was replying in agreement (and read throwaway4good's comment in the same way). My intent wasn't to pass blame, but rather highlight the man-made decision behind this, as that also means a more cooperative decision could be made in the future.

Cold war in space is an outgrowth of cold war on Earth, not an independent development. People do not want to share important know-how with other people who may plausibly use the same know-how against them.

And having a new Space Race may actually be good for our capabilities. The stagnation in space technology after the USSR disintegrated looks like a bad case of winner complacency.

>People do not want to share important know-how with other people who may plausibly use the same know-how against them.

Won't mathematics and sciences contradict this? If we stop antagonizing each other and create doom scenarios and propaganda we could avoid the "use against each other part". Also in a few years China will have a space station(and nobody else) and then you will want they share information with the science community .

I am wondering is some older US citizen that reads this and also played Fallout, was US such a paranoid and propaganda filled country? do they see communist everywhere?

I still hope that the number of paranoid and nationalistic people will go down. world wide (I am not accusing any specific country, so no need to defend )

Most Americans I know in the same age group as me grew up thinking Communism is a political model, not an economic one, and to conflate democracy with capitalism. And to think only the extremes can exist.

We don’t need to look further than China to see clearly capitalism works a lot better without a democracy holding it back.

Well, I am a Czech and we had a Communist regime here in practice, people being hanged for thoughtcrimes or forced to process uranium ore with their bare hands as a punishment.

I am aware that in US discourse, anti-Communist paranoia serves as an example of stupid panic, but I must say that it wasn't entirely unfounded. Early 1950s were very bad behind the Iron Curtain. Very, very violent and unjust times.

The regimes mostly tamed themselves once Stalin was dead, that is true.

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"If we stop antagonizing each other and create doom scenarios and propaganda we could avoid the "use against each other part"."

People will never stop antagonizing one another, just visit Twitter and look at the hostile bubbles that emerge there. If anything, Twitter revealed just how much hate for the other is in hearts of men. Removing it is equivalent for a major redesign of human beings as they are.

That said, antagonism does not have to lead to violence and war, most Twitter opponents do not bash their heads in reality either. But the fundamental game theory is against your wish. You need everybody on board for lasting peace. You need just one defector from the peace contract to create a need for military for everyone else.

This is a classical hawk vs. dove game.

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/game-theor...

I am from Romania so I know what communism was about. I don't know how was on the other side, things like "do you want to do X ? are you a communist?", "don't read that book, it will make you a communist".

Thought he main point is if you grabbed regular people from all those different systems and put them on an island on a village they would find a way to collaborate and survive, you just need to not have an extremist with good manipulation skills in there.

Do you guys consider Russia of today communist? Are you sure that communism as practiced today in China is the same thing as it was back in Warsaw pact Romania or Czechoslovakia?

Can't speak for the rest of the country, but I see Russia as a power hungry state that just exchanged some of the less relevant attributes for a new mix.

Communism practiced today in China is rather different from the Czechoslovak version.

Czechoslovak Communist Party was, after the 1968 failed liberalization, very orthodox and "sinning" against the basic principles, like allowing more private businesses, met a very tough opposition from the ideologues. As a result, the country stopped being able to compete economically, which greatly contributed to the downfall of the regime.

Chinese Communist Party took note of this development and allowed special economic zones etc., so the state of the private market is absolutely incomparable to the Czechoslovak one of the 1980s.

What is similar, though, is the vigorous effort to prevent undesirable ideas from spreading, especially any kind of mockery towards the big wigs.

I think most of the issues with communist countries was the supreme leader, this guy always think he is the father of the people, the smartest and the greatest dude in the country(I am wondering if they actually believe it and if most of us if placed in such a powerful position we end up with a giant ego - similar like some present day GEOs/billionaires) ,

I do not see Russia as communist, just an authoritarian state , there might be some in the population with some extremist view but I am sure I could make great friends with most of the regular Russians,Chinese or North Korean citizens.

My grandfather lived in the monarchy before communism, the communism and the current regime and he prefers the communism , I do not agree with him but I understand his perspective and from that point of view makes sense.

We in the west have a romantic and cavalier attitude towards the cold war but we are forgetting that the planet was brought to the brink of complete nuclear destruction several times and millions were killed in proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam etc.).

I was a kid in the 1980s and the threat of planetary doom was omnipresent. The radio would broadcast news about new deployments of American (never Soviet) cruise missiles and militarization of space every few days. We even had a very basic "intro what a nuclear war means" in our kindergarten. Nightmarish stuff for 5 y.o.s. Part of the regime propaganda that was ostensibly very much on the side of peace, even though maintaining a huge army.

That said, the technological developments that we reaped were absolutely massive. Samuel Johnson once said that nothing concentrates someone's mind as a perspective of being hanged. That applied population-wise in the Cold War.

Nowadays, talented people spend their time and mental stamina on selling ads with 0,01 per cent more efficiency; from a purely economic point of view, it might make sense, but I wonder if it really counts as technological progress.

"Nowadays, talented people spend their time and mental stamina on selling ads with 0,01 per cent more efficiency ..."

I rather have them doing that than have their time spent on how to make a hydrogen bomb more poisonous.

Friendly trade and competition works. The idea we need war or war-like circumstances to perform our best is a foolish idea (or something worse).

"The idea we need war or war-like circumstances to perform our best is a foolish idea (or something worse). "

I do not like that idea either, but denying its plausibility seems like a bit of wishful thinking to me.

As you mention, competition works. Competition between corporations is not friendly, it is a fight to the death (of the corporations), and governments spend a lot of energy to prevent the participants from crossing multiple red lines - that were established precisely because earlier bouts of competition had destructive side effects. Competition is a business equivalent of a Cold War.

And yes, it works, threat of being wiped out is a strong motivator. Multiple corporations that failed to compete no longer exist (does anyone remember DEC?), which is the equivalent of a country losing war so badly that it disintegrates. Much like the old Habsburg empire did.

Is cold war really a 20th century invention? Posturing and proxy wars were going on forever between the then-superpowers, they just didn't have nuclear ICBMs.

Unless somehow weapons get less effective with time, or we reenter a unipolar world, I should imagine cold war of varying intensity is the Nash equilibrium for all time to come. Better get used to it.

As terrible and inefficient as it is, humans are primarily motivated by competing with each other at every level: international, national, local, interpersonal.

United Earth would necessarily be a terrible, repressive thing going agains everything that our monkey brain stands for. That is, unless some more remote out-group appears, say United Colonies of Musk, or Lunar Robot Empire.

As anyone who works with open source software can tell you, cooperation beats competition in the long run. Or, as the old saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”

> cooperation beats competition

It would. A civilisation of intelligent ants would be unstoppable. But there is (currently) no way to make monkey-people cooperate at scale.

Cooperation is literally why we are humans. Individualism doesn't require the complex brains we have. Our brains are this complex because we evolved as a highly social species.

We didn't hunt the megafauna as individual superwarriors, we hunted them as a group. If prehistoric megafauna was shown a zombie movie, it would recognize us as the zombies: there's too many of us and we never tire. They tried to sprint away but we jogged after them, hurling a dozen spears at them like death from a thousand paper cuts.

Yes, we value excellence, but only because it brings us forward as a group. The goal of competing for being the best isn't to find out who's best but to encourage us all to be better.

> Cooperation is literally why we are humans.

Cooperation within the tribe. (Often violent) competition against the others.

And the evolution of human intelligence was driven largely by the need to deceive, out-compete and achieve domination over others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligenc...

Yes, tribal rivalries and fragmentation escalate when resources become scarce. Luckily we've solved that problem: housing, food and even luxury goods exist in abundance.

It's important to keep in mind that even the "alpha wolf" phenomenon was only observed in captivity, while wolf packs roaming freely had a much more egalitarian dynamic.

The reason we see ruthless competition everywhere is not that humans are naturally antagonistic, it's that we've created a superstructure that perpetually creates artificial scarcity and "hacks" our stress response.

We know that this is true in the small: "limited offers", countdowns and "exclusive deals" are widely understood cheap marketing gimmicks. We even came up with a catchy acronym for this: FOMO, emphasis on "fear".

We're less ready to acknowledge this exists in the large. We've become so accustomed to the so-called Great Man Theory and a Capitalist Realism lens of history that we struggle to even imagine a different version of prehistory than the violent struggle for survival we proposed under colonialism to justify our subjugation of the "savages" _for their own good_.

> that we've created a superstructure that perpetually creates artificial scarcity and "hacks" our stress response.

Capitalism extracts work from material scarcity gradients the same way a Stirling engine extracts it from temperature gradients.

There are competing projects (gcc, clang) and there is competition within individual projects.

If competition ceases or is discouraged, projects often morph into mindless corporate sponsored churn and unoriginal rewrites.

>If competition ceases or is discouraged, projects often morph into mindless corporate sponsored churn and unoriginal rewrites.

Not true, this is some recent thing. KDE goes strong with few corporate support, the issue would be if some other projects gets unfair advantages so you get something with worse architecture and quality more popular.

And with open source you do not see 10 kernels competing, you have a few and all the other kernels are toys or experiments.

Why did US and Russia and the other worked together on the ISS? are they insane? would make more sense that each country creates it's own rocket, it's own space station , it's own telescopes and not collaborate ?

Could be cases where cooperation can solve something and competition would be incapable of solving or would solve it but with much more costs (maybe human lives)?

>monkey brain

That is the issue, we need to kick down the "monkey brain" leaders. We need better education, we need better collaboration. Tribalism is stupid and wrong. I lve in a village, as an child I was told a lot of idiotic things like"people from X are Y..." and when I left for university and meet people from X I seen that they are not different then us, and I seen people from my region acting like idiots making me feel shame.

Monkey brain is a problem, as a politician, CEO or sociophat you can exploit it on your advantage but as the whole humanity we need to admit is bad, is history and we are not wild beasts anymore, we need to have better expectation for ourselves.

> That is the issue, we need to kick down the "monkey brain" leaders.

I think you completely misunderstand the post you are replying to. It's not just the leaders, it is everyone. Even me, even you. There are heaps and heaps of research papers showing that this affects every single human and that the more you think you are immune from it, the bigger its impact on you.

I understand that, but humanity changed, like most of us now understand that race or nationality is irrelevant and you can't rank them. This is progress. Most of us understand that we can ignore religious differences and that is idiotic to kill the others because their religion differs in less then 1%, so from my point of view we can't use the excuse that we always were and we always be the same wild beasts, we can push against this, educate people, and shame the racists,nationalists and extremists.

You are already defining new tribes of "us reasonable people" versus the racists, nationalists and extremists though, unintentionally showing how hard it is to ignore the human tendency to divide people into groups.

What is hard, you can split people by race or nationality. What is important is why you would antagonize the groups against each other? The reason I antagonize the nationalists and extremists (I am not from US so I am not talking about reds or blues) is because I see what they are saying and is close minded and evil" we are the best nation,race, religion and the only reason we are not on top is because of the other nations, races and religions, we need to get rid of them" (again I talking in general so it might not apply perfect to your local situtaion and experiences)

And in a democracy where every monkey-brain can vote we're all to blame. It's not like we all want to get rid of monkey brain leaders, the problem is that we humans actually quite like leaders who promise to help our in-groups at the expense of our out-groups.

Not all of us vote like that, until recently nationalistic candidates were not that popular, but it depends, if your favorite party was in power for say 8 years and did a terrible job then they have to find a group to blame. blaming the opposition does not work all the time, especially if opposition was weack or changed a lot, so the party and it's fans will blame the others , the neighbors, the immigrants, the international interferance, EU, US, China but most voters find it hard to think that maybe his favorite party is as shitty as the other and did a terrible job because many reasons but probably same incompetence and corruption as always.

Please read “Human Kind: A Hopeful History” by Rutger Bregman. Excellent book that may cure your negative view of your fellow humans. I for one get motivated by collaboration.

There are a couple problems with your line of reasoning.

1) Even if it's true that humans are primarily motivated by competing with each other, this doesn't put any constraints on what the nature of the competition could be. There are constructive forms of competition, and there are destructive forms. There are useless forms and productive forms. So if it really is purely about competition, there's no reason why societies can't put constraints on what kinds of competition are acceptable.

2) There are unified institutions that internally have high competition. In fact, that's more of a rule than an exception. E.g., every professional sports organization, every company with competitive incentive structure, etc.

> Even if it's true that humans are primarily motivated by competing with each other, this doesn't put any constraints on what the nature of the competition could be.

I would say the competition is necessarily unconstrained. Even full-scale nuclear war is on the table in the service of one-upping one another. You could say I'm conflating competing with survival and other values, but that would be incorrect since the whole international tension has competition for various things at its source.

To structure the world differently would require lots and lots of tyranny. Empires to that, and may achieve great things, at a cost.

> 2) There are unified institutions that internally have high competition. In fact, that's more of a rule than an exception. E.g., every professional sports organization, every company with competitive incentive structure, etc.

Or the Communist Party of China. To have United Earth government fashioned in the like of FIFA, Amazon, or USA Gymnastics is as dystopian as it gets.

I will disagree, my village is not competing with the neighboring village, we are not making plans how to fuck them over, there is no zero sum game. Then I personally I do not see a competition with our neighboring countries (I am from Romania), there might be some bad history but only idiots will bring this up, so I can say that from my point of view we are not trying to screw with our neighbors or the reverse.

Now if I try to go up a level we get the EU and this is where politics shoves it's ugly head, there are people that are not happy and some politicians that just want to blame the incompetence of their 8+ years reign to others .... but do a major number of regular citizens want to screw over the other group ? do they wish bad things for the other EU members ? I don't think so, people are selfish and want the best for their own but I don't think they actually want bad things to the others, for sure nobody sane wants a conflict. Sorry but my opinion is if you want a war you are not sane(I know at least one dude here wants for a war to start with Russia, we need to find a way to keep this insane people in check)

Probably your village is competing with neighbouring villages to some extent, but to the extent that it is not, that is because there is a much larger, centralized entity (the Romanian state) that has a monopoly on violence and which is responsible for keeping the peace in the land.

History shows that without a strong central power, towns and cities do compete with one another and will even go to war against one another.

I know this, but I think that most of the time the cause of the war is an psychopathic individual/group that will sacrifice others lives for some bullshit reason. We are all easy to manipulate or do stupid things when we react hot-headed.

My point is that the average person is not thinking and calculating on how to risk his children lives in some war because some piece of land somewhere is strategic , or some guys somewhere are persecuted so let's sacrifice ourselves for some vague reason, what I think always happens this ideas are implanted in people or most of the time you have no choice, you are forced into a conflict with no option to not participate.

> my village is not competing with the neighboring village

Aren't they? My village in Poland competes with neighbouring villages in at least the following zero-sum games:

- each village has a football club competing in the local league

- compete in competitions for the region's best decorated

- compete for local government funds for some projects

- during elections, villages compete to put their local candidates in local gov

Within the village, there is noticeable tribalism within groups centered around the Church, the German minority, and the volunteer fire brigade.

These are mostly positive things. I'm not saying competition is always bad. I'm saying that it's at the core of being a monkey-person.

> I don't think so, people are selfish and want the best for their own but I don't think they actually want bad things to the others, for sure nobody sane wants a conflict.

Willingness to go to war is a property of the collective, even if no single person would choose to do so in isolation.

> but do a major number of regular citizens want to screw over the other group ? do they wish bad things for the other EU members ?

Actually, I think so, I'm afraid. A certain single-digit % would like to actively do harm given an opportunity, an even larger % would not oppose it.

About local election, I seen just a bit of this village vs village thing, but 99% of voters blindly vote the same party since they could vote (only exception if the party got split or merged then they are forced to may think a bit).

We did not had the issue here of "the other village got our funds so our roads are worse", usually the complaints are something like "the party in power does not like our mayor because is a different party so this is the reason , or if you do not like the mayor then the reason is because he is a thief".

As an example a house burned down in the next village and people from neighboring villages donated funds for the poor family(empathy)

Now you're just not making any sense. If you define competition as being necessarily unconstrained, then any competition with rules is not competition. A foot race where you have to stay within your lane isn't competitive. A football match where you're not allowed to maim your opponents is not competitive. Weight classes aren't competitive. I don't understand your reasoning.

Your response to 2) is a non sequitur. If what you really care about is competition, then who cares if the outcome is dystopian? Are you denying that Amazon is interally competitive?

I don't get you either.

My main points were:

1) introducing global governance in space research or in general will go against the primary driver of human motivation, competition.

2) doing it anyway ("United Earth") requires force and results in subpar outcomes

You argued that there can exist large-scale organisations that are internally competitive, like the sports orgs or companies, and that competition can be constrained to its constructive forms.

To which my reply has two parts.

First, competition is necessarily unconstrained in the sense than an entity will do whatever it can to win (a football player won't maim an opponent because he is constrained by the larger entity, while a FIFA official won't bat an eye on thousands of stadium builders dying in order to advance his agenda, and Joe Biden will trigger nuclear war if he needs to). You cannot impose constraints on the largest-scale structures.

Second, if you put groups of people into these large orgs, the results are bad. The sports governing bodies are notoriously corrupt. The UN is notoriously corrupt. All large companies eventually ossify and die.

Can you answer whether you believe that a football player being constrained by rules against maiming his or her opponent is a constraint that "[goes] against the primary driver of human motivation, competition"?

[I rewrote the post at the same time smhost replied to the previous version, apologies]

I get an impression you are trying reduction ad absurdum in a way that might work to sway the audience, but just skims on the surface of actual argument.

Obviously, you can still have lots of competition under constraints (though you cannot have constraints at the highest scale), but that I believe has no bearing on my argument.

I don't think I'm strawmanning at all. You just accepted that unconstrained competition leads to violence. All you're doing when you argue against the principle of having global constraints is privileging one type of violence against another.

And you seem to accept as a matter of fact that "constraints can't be placed on the largest-scale structures". I don't share your confidence. The largest-scale structures are already self-constrained, because in order to reach a certain level of scale, it has to operate according to a certain self-imposed logic.

Even at the individual level, what is discipline other than a form of self-domestication?

I would even go so far as to flip your formula around and say that human motivations at every level of society can only come realized through a series of internal and external contraints.

Is there a scientific utility in orbital space station? We’ve already had MIR and ISS. NASA seems to be focused on Moon and Mars. I don’t understand why Roscosmos is talking about launching new station in 2025. I mean, it’s useful for Chinese since they didn’t do that before, but for others? Maybe if it was used as a space hub for other missions...

the 2025 station they're talking about is the sino-russian moon base[0], not an earth satellite.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-russ...

AFAIK they're building an orbital station [1].

> The Deputy Prime Minister also noted that Russia will be able to cope with the construction on its own, but if anyone wants to take part in the project, they will not refuse.

[1]: https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/20/04/2021/607e83219...

yeah, but the 2025 one is the moon base.

i think the main reason russia wants to build the space station is for arctic surveillance. when global warming opens up arctic trade routes and resources (oil), there's going to be a lot of geopolitical shenanigans. idk if you remember when trump wanted to buy greenland and everyone laughed at him, it was related to this.

Can't you do that with simple satellites?

If you're putting your best quality spy equipment in space, presumably you want to be able to do regular maintenance on it.

The ISS has run many hundreds[1] of experiments, and more are sent up with every launch. It's an invaluable resource, because it's the only (relatively) cheap resource we have for running microgravity experiments which require human input.

They're not the sort of headline-grabbing experiments that most people seem to associate with space (I don't know why they do, most science isn't very exciting), but it's facilitating a lot of science which couldn't reasonably be done without it.

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

In a addition to the purely scientific utility, a low orbit space station is also the perfect place for microgravity manufacturing. The ISS already manufactured ZBLAN optical fibre, and there are other promising applications in optics. I wouldn't be surprised if over the years we find a lot of production processes that benefit from the absence of gravity

Wikipedia has some more detail on what this will look like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st...

Very exciting new chapter!

Soon-ish the only spacestation left says PRC on the side (and maybe RUS) and it is the only place with a space production capability and permanent scientific research in space. I really don't understand the nationalism that causes the US to ban scientists working with China (NASA that is).

I hope we get a booming space race. The innovation and excitement in engineering would be a really refreshing lens to view the world from, albeit a distorted lens no doubt.

Hopefully this will provide a swift kick to the pants to encourage peaceful competition to get out there in space.

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