DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures
sam.gov
sam.gov
Of course, with R&D currently on the chopping block, we'll see if the same people that complain about NSF/NIH start coming for DARPA also...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-budget-deficit-tops-18...
Most republicans don't believe in defense or anything like that, they believe in returning money to their investors...I mean campaign contributors who are defense contractors. A contractor makes money selling contracts, whether they affect the actual defense capabilities of the country or not.
Also, Republicans (of whom I’m not one) believe that spending should be controlled by the states. It’s not that they don’t believe in defense - they realize it’s more effective to invest in drones and use nuclear deterrence. Those are more effective and cheaper in terms of lives as well as money. This aligns with the US’s new isolationist strategy as it withdraws from the world.
Like, if a project studying biodiversity is cut, is that because it is "related to DEI initiatives" because it shared the word "diversity"?
How many of the laid-off VA staff were DEI? The laid-off forest rangers?
How much of USAID was DEI? The Trump administration says the cut was due to wasteful spending and fraud, not DEI.
How do the cuts in DEI initiatives compare to the massive cuts to indirect grant monies?
If the Republicans believe spending should be more controlled by the states, they have a majority and can, you know, change the law. We have a representative democracy to help balance national interests, rather than the interests of a king.
I don't think we can regard threats to annex Greenland, Canada, or the Panama Canal as part of an isolationist policy. Such threats are more closely aligned with expansionism. An isolationist government would not be involved in international negotiations involving Ukraine, or providing support to Israel, to start.
FWIW, DEI is no more steeped in Marxist philosophy than the Freedman's Bureau, public libraries, or the FDIC. As far as I can tell, "Marxism" when used this way is a boogieman term used to scare off any critique of capitalism or its effects, little different than how Republicans sneered that Dukakis was an "L word", castigating the word "liberal." Both terms are used as rhetorical propaganda.
Given the influence Marx had on studying "class relations, social conflict, and social transformation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism), it's all too easy to say that any study of those topics must be Marxism, and therefore fomenting a communist revolution.
I've looked through it a few times to answer the same curiosity you have (I want more specifics, not just the stuff that fits in a tweet). But it still leaves me with questions because I don't know how much of these claims is actually accurate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...
> The Department of Government Efficiency, the federal cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk, published on Monday a list of government contracts it has canceled, together amounting to about $16 billion in savings itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.
> Almost half of those line-item savings could be attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But the DOGE list vastly overstated the actual value of that contract. A closer scrutiny of a federal database shows that a recent version of the contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.
or from https://abcnews.go.com/US/doge-now-saved-65b-federal-funds-i...
> DOGE says it's now saved $65B in federal funds, but that's still impossible to verify
> It only provides records for $9.6 billion in savings from contract terminations
as well as:
> The official also said they're using a conservative methodology of calculating savings because they're subtracting the contracts' obligated dollars from the ceiling amounts. However, for many contracts the ceiling dollars are much higher than what is actually expected to be spent.
You'll note that there's no information about how much was specifically DEI, while saying the total amount was due to a "combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings."
Every step taken by the current administration has undermined the safety and current position of the US both domestically and on the international stage. The only people that I see profiting from the current situation are Russia and then China.
Regardless of opinions on Diversity Equity and Inclusion, one has to look at the current situation with pragmatism: Firing all probatory employees is just insane. Firing the people responsible of your nuclear Arsenal is insane Firing competent workers because of their skin colour or they do not have the genitalia you prefer is insane. Sending an emai, on the weekend, requesting 5 accomplishment or risk getting fired is insane.
Let's see it from a different perspective, let's say you have a large company operating on international scale with many stakeholders, you get a consultant tasked with streamlining and optimising operation. Within less than a month, they start arbitrarily firing people based on aggregated numbers from random collection of papers lying around in the office. Would you trust the fact that they would streamline and make things run better or would you assume they just started slashing left and right to justify "optimising". You can tell by my phrasing what my opinion is on the matter but there is no way that you can optimise, let alone understand, those agencies inner working and essential moving parts within less than a month...
Now I will refrain from making any political/legality statements, but from a pure practical standpoint it is, to put it mildly, nuts.
First, if you look up progressive academic theorists [1] you will see that they are largely inspired by Marxist philosophy either directly or indirectly. The right are diametrically opposed to Marxism because it relies on an assumption that Man can rise above his Animal instincts. But, man can't, even with best intentions (i.e. ethics professors do not behave more ethically than non-ethicists) [2][3].
There is a belief by the right that the great majority of people working in government and government related industries (e.g. NGOs) have come out of liberal arts programs that were inspired by the academics listed. They also believe that progressive ideology has steeped into the sciences.
I believe the right's goal is total dismantling of the executive branch. The point is really to destroy any power that the executive has down to the bare minimum so that the risk of a king is eliminated. It's interesting that they put a group of potential tyrants in charge of all of this - it's almost as if they want to show everyone how bad of an idea it is for the president to have so much control.
They generally believe that differing cultures are a good thing but because of Human nature integration cannot work. Therefore, in a state system, they believe one should be allowed to move to the state of their choice and enjoy whatever culture they want given the constraints of the constitution.
Furthermore, they believe the constitution is the only way for lasting peace. It sets the bare minimum for a social contract that works across cultures and people. It gives a framework where people can be culturally different but equal. And, they hope to expand the US to other countries voluntarily (we hope) so that those countries may also share in its glory.
[1] Achille Mbembe, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Cheryl Harris, Cornel West, David Graeber, Derrick Bell, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Gayle Rubin, Herbert Marcuse, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, Mariame Kaba, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Naomi Klein, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Patricia Hill Collins, Peggy McIntosh, Richard Delgado, Robin DiAngelo, Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Piketty, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Clastres, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Sherry Ortner, Ferdinand de Saussure, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, David Harvey, Murray Bookchin, Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James, Paulo Freire
[2] Schwitzgebel & Rust (2014), etc.
[3] This is also why many Christians align with conservative thinking because in Christianity Jesus is the only Good thing of this world, and every person is equally sinful.
As I wrote, Marx's critical analysis of capitalism touched on many social topics. You should not be surprised that his work had merit in later social research. You should not be surprised that others who criticize capitalism have overlapping beliefs.
Though do note that "Marxist philosophy", quoting the Wikipedia entry for Marxism, has "branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive "Marxist theory".
Just like there isn't a single, definitive "liberalism."
> The right are diametrically opposed to Marxism because it relies on an assumption that Man can rise above his Animal instincts.
I ... what? I have no idea what that means. Where does Marx talk about that? How does that have anything to do with class struggle?
> but because of Human nature integration cannot work
What?!?!? English, Welsh, and Scottish cannot integrate? What about Presbyterians and Anglican? Men and women? People with blue eyes and people with brown eyes? Bourgeoisie and proletariat? Gen X and Gen Y?
What does it mean to not integrate when there are different classes in a shared society? They certainly aren't calling for the abolition of class distinction, which is Marx's Communist solution.
> so that the risk of a king is eliminated
Right, so Communism? Otherwise, when there is a power vacuum, something fills it, and without the consent of the people, that's a king, dictator, strongman, or the like.
As it stand, it looks more like the dismantling of the legislative and judicial branches, with all power in the executive.
> given the constraints of the constitution.
I'm pretty convinced the current government does not at all feel itself constrained by the constitution.
> they hope to expand the US to other countries voluntarily
History shows the US has a long history of not expanding voluntarily. What's changed? How has this new right de-fanged itself from the tendencies of the old right, like Andrew Jackson, that they seem to admire so much?
Many Christians also align with liberal and even radical thinking. Integration is possible because everyone is a child of God, and "When God’s people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality.” ... “The foreigner who resides with you must be to you like a native citizen among you; so you must love him as yourself, because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
However, you are right about Marxism in that it influences a lot of things. Ironically, the accelerationist movement also even has influence from Marx. A lot whom I talked to have disdain for "academia" - I do know that.
I'm guessing here (and a lot of this is guess work) - that integration is difficult because they view "social control" as impossible outside of a cultural context. That is, within a culture, everyone learns all of the subtle rules and order of things - things that you can't codify in law. But, integration requires a lot of frontal lobe activity which is difficult to maintain and is fragile when it fails.
"Right-wing Marxism, aligned with the autonomization of capital [...], has been an unoccupied position. The signature of its proponents would be a defense of capital accumulation as an end-in-itself, counter-subordinating nature and society as a means." [0]
Tell me which parts of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” you disagree with, then tell me how those things tie to Marxism?
I think DARPA projects often are not what they say they are. Admittedly this project is quite out there.
> P(Success) = 0.2
They themselves admit it's lower than this, which is not 'success' but successful outcomes to limited specs.
If they refuse to leave they get fired?
>>Part of the DARPA ethos also is that it’s lean and mean. Program managers have a ton of discretion, but they’re not lifers.
Curious what kind of people are hired? Without overarching long term leadership its hard to chart out a continuous direction.
PMs tend to be ambitious young PhDs who want to go into industry or start their own companies. The PM on the project I worked on is now principal wireless architect at Google Fi.
It had some interesting effects, like how different teams would compete for candidates and give counter offers, all coming from the same company though.
Despite the fact that the modern republics are supposed to have some "checks and balances" to limit the power of the leaders, I have seen too many cases of presidents or prime ministers who, after being elected using various lies, begin to act like absolutist kings and nobody seems able to stop them, because they claim that they "represent the majority of the people who have elected them" and nobody may limit their power, because nobody is equal to them.
>NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been "shamed" by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.[citation needed] Its continued success was cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their "home grown" Lockheed Martin X-33/VentureStar project. Pete Conrad priced a new DC-X at $50 million, cheap by NASA standards, but NASA decided not to rebuild the craft in light of budget constraints.[16] Instead, NASA focused development on the Lockheed Martin VentureStar which it felt answered some criticisms of the DC-X, specifically the airplane-like landing of the VentureStar, which many NASA engineers preferred over the vertical landing of the DC-X. Just a few years later, the repeated failure of the Venturestar project, especially the composite LH2 (liquid hydrogen) tank, led to program cancellation.[19]
We're literally talking moonshot projects here and nowhere does the brief mention specifically trees, or aerobic respiration/processes, there is plenty of room for using Chitin, Spider silk, keratin or a combination of biopolymers to form resilient composite structures.
There's already been videos of people using these as doping agents or additives for bulletproof armor, to middling success. The synthesis via yeast or e.coli for most of these are partially solved problems, its more texturing them or using bio-mechanical processing to form thread or ply or load bearing panels that seems to be the major hurdle. Also, being able to reliably source component and materials from near vacuum or whatever asteroid that happens to wander by that makes this a much more difficult problem to even define.
I for one love things like this. I wish we used a little more of our colossal production power to try manifesting the wilder things from our imagination. Maybe they can contract out how to make society have a better handle on balancing compassion for self and others. Or we could be realistic and get back to making a philosopher stone. ;)
Hope I live long enough to go on a modestly priced moon vacation up the H.R. Geiger space tentacle
But this isn't a matter of "let's spend more" because the pool of people that can see an absolutely insane idea, and ones that can actually work on them, are the vanishingly small number of nearly eccentrics. So there is an upper limit on how much money can be spent if you're at the absolute tip of the iceberg.
I go back and forth with this. The further along the path I go, the more I weight good faith and sincere will to make a thing over ability-at-start. (drive + moxy + curious + perceptive - ego) is a better function to optimize for than buzzword count on a resume.
I think there's a lot of people who can do crazy things in a good faith kind of way that advances the wave front of humanity. It's possible that it's everyone, and it's all about conditions. "all about conditions" is doing some heavy lifting, but maybe you see what I'm trying to articulate.
ASML is the only company that can do EUV lithography, right? NVDA and AMD are the only game in town for high performance graphics cards.
So how many people are going to be able to move quantum computing forward? Theory, hardware, investment, etc.
Same with, say, supersonic and hypersonic flight. Only 2-3 governments have been able to build them.
It’s a combination of mostly money but also the talent. Only google has got as far as they did with autonomous driving.
Although a counterpoint to my above point would be autonomous driving. Seeing the number of teams that succeeded the first time in the DARPA grand challenge vs years later, shows that a whole ecosystem was able to build up with the right encouragement.
So maybe I’m also going back and forth on this one like you. :-)
> If aerobic organisms or mechanisms are required (grown in space and then desiccated by exposure to vacuum when growth is complete), the methods and support equipment required to preserve key aerobic variables (e.g., atmosphere, pressure, temperature) must be part of the biomechanical assembly system design. Anaerobic organisms or mechanisms may allow for less support hardware but may require other controls to support continued growth in the space environment (e.g. pressure, temperature, humidity)
My company was pitching holographic cameras, and we weren't scifi enough. The investigator wanted to know if we could do hyperspectral 3D imaging from something the size of a sugar cube. ("Uh, no?" was our response.)
* Defense Sciences Organization: https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/dso
I'm reading this as a soft signal that there's still a market for marinating wizards in salty brine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_un...
High salinity solutions make wizards more buoyant. It's immediately self evident to me how this helps one telepathically view the inside of missile silos on the other side of the planet.
Currently most of the ocean is a lifeless desert, with most of life concentrated in the places where upwelling occurs. This kind of floating trees would add enough biomass to compensate for all of the human produced CO2 and even more.
The more refined version of this are intentionally created algal blooms, ala the red tide. Then you would somehow capture the CO2 dissolved in ocean water that the algae concentrates.
In this way you'd use the ocean itself as your carbon capture "filter" and "clean the filter".
The issue is that since there just isn't enough nutrients for life, and adding fertilizers costs more carbon than it sequesters. The deep ocean usually gets its nitrogen from life dying above, decaying downwards then getting pushed upwards again. I don't know of any deep ocean reserves of nitrogen that just needs brought to the surface.
But having real trees above the water is much more useful than simple carbon capture, they would serve as wavebreakers for seasteading settlements too.
There is also emerging technology for nitrogen fixing that could work - Electrocatalytic Nitrogen Reduction.
All this being said, if the goal is carbon sequestration building a viable business is going to be next to impossible.
The easiest way would be to use your renewable energy to pull bicarbonate out of the ocean directly with electrolysis, reverse-osmosis, whatever magic tech the wizards in MIT are cooking up.
Only then you've got the problem of what to do with it all once you've got it on hand.
To bring nutrient rich water up and to generate energy in the process temperature difference between surface and deep water can be used [1]. So if this kind of tree is created, living on open sea can become cheaper and more pleasant than even living on a beach.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
Ocean thermal energy conversion - I hadn't heard of this, this is awesome.
Using some genes from mangroves it should be possible to develop a plant that would grow in open sea.
People really will pretend to believe any old nonsense rather than accept we have to cut fossil fuel use.
you can have that belief, that everyone should give up what oil gives us and live in a pre-modern way that most people would, today, consider poverty, because the alternative is (I assume you believe) extinction.
But you should be honest about it.
So if you think that i like the situation where everyone supports dictatorships like Azerbaijan by buying their oil, you are very wrong.
But what we want and what is going to happen is often very different. Cutting fossil fuel use will not happen until there are better alternatives. And at that point most likely there will be enough CO2 in atmosphere to trigger melting of permafrost which will produce its own CO2. So "these schemes" will be needed one way or another.
That said my main interest here is seasteading, and increasing ocean biomass. Reducing atmospheric CO2 is merely a curios side effect.
Where can I read more about that? My understanding was that it is teaming with microorganisms or near-microorganisms, and of course there are many fauna and flora and protista and other life forms.
For water to team with life, you need materials for building cells in the same place where the light is, and in most cases there is not enough iron on the surface
I’d like to imagine solar reactors mimicking primordial goo to synthesise the essentials for these materials.
Lots of nuanced details around your question in the doc! EDIT: I stupidly copy and pasted my local link to the PDF -- it appears this listing has been removed since posted. Here's another link to it https://govtribe.com/file/government-file/darpa-sn-25-51-dot...
Seems they're interested in precisely the question you pose, but coming at it from a few different directions
https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/life-in-the-extreme-radia...
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/31420...
Without some sort of easy orbital exit/entry, it's unlikely that being "in space" will be a feasible permanent option.
The program director has a background in planetary science [1] and I assume they will evaluate proposals.
PMs are typically experts in their field and often come from an academic, industry, military, or government research lab. DARPA gives them a budget for grants, autonomy, and 3-5 years to fund interesting work. Many fail, many have mixed success, and a small number revolutionize their field.
(Source: worked on a few DARPA-funded projects decades ago.)
FYI, hydrogels were part of the "recent vaccine" components.