It may surprise you but using a micro-controller and some servos is today often an easier and simpler solution than building a complex mechanism using cams and clockworks.
30,955 karma · joined September 22, 2009
To blithely say "oh well, military planes do X so X must be fine for civilian aviation as well" is either intellectually dishonest or fundamentally naive.
Also, the FAA makes precautionary changes before it knows everything, it has routinely issued emergency airworthiness directives before investigations have been complete.
SpaceX has been driving not just innovation but a much faster pace of innovation. Landing rockets, reusing rocket stages of orbital launchers, developing crewed spacecraft on a budget roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than the way government procurement works. Etc, etc, etc. Ten years ago there had been zero Falcon 9 launches. Today the Falcon 9 makes up the majority of commercial orbital launch traffic, has flown over 60 times, has been landed over 20 times, and has been reused nearly 20 times. And the pace is accelerating. They're working on new engines, new vehicles, new ideas. All of which has dramatically shaken up spaceflight and opened up the possibility of a new space age where access to space is a lot cheaper and more routine than it has been.
Additionally, it DOES. NOT MATTER. Whether the section of road was well lit or not. Does not matter. Because the pedestrian was already well into the road when the Uber vehicle hit her. Cars, as many people familiar with them may be aware, have headlights, which are suggested to be used while driving at night. If you can't stop fast enough to avoid hitting something at the farthest limits of your headlights, then you are driving too fast for conditions, whether a human or computer is driving. As I said, this isn't the case because the dashcam footage is deceiving, but even if it were accurate, it is immaterial for this particular case.
This isn't a situation where laissez-faire is a good idea. If we want autonomous vehicles to be safer than human drivers then we need to ensure that is the case with proper regulation, audits, standards of testing, and liability.
We who work in the software industry should know better. Yes, you can make software to a very high standard, even high enough to bet your life on it. Is all software made that way? Will software be made that way without some sort of pressure to do so? No, of course not. Every shortcut will be made, technical debt will be piled like cord wood until it reaches the sky. And people will die.
If autonomous vehicle technology is real, and if it can improve on human drivers, then let it be set to that standard from the start.
Video of the section in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0
In contrast, rocketry seems practically easy, it's just an engineering problem in comparison. You exercise literally trillions of transistors just to send an emoji to a friend, and yet the modern world we've built makes all that seem trivially easy. Not because it is easy, but just because we've invested a ton of effort into building and optimizing every bit and piece of it. We're already on some Nth generation of smartphones (retina displays, quad-cores, GPUs, LTE, etc, etc, etc.) whereas we're really not on that many generations of rockets, certainly less than a dozen, maybe only half a dozen depending on how you count. Once we get rolling with reusable rockets the iterations on development will speed up and we'll progress faster. And we'll get to a place where what seems like an adventure into the barren wilderness today will become merely routine and ubiquitous. Just as today using computers or flying on a jet aircraft thousands of miles seems routine and ubiquitous.
As for the benefits of space exploration and colonization I expect a lot of them will come in ways that people won't expect. A greater appreciation for what we take for granted here on Earth, for example. A tree on Mars is a treasure to be protected and revered, as is clean air and water. On Earth it's not much different, but we don't take care of the gifts we have to the degree they deserve. We dirty our air and pollute our water, we overfish our oceans, etc. Similarly, advanced off-Earth habitats are going to need to seriously invest in things like renewable energy, energy storage, recycling, end-to-end stewardship of the "CHON-cycle", and all that stuff. Here on Earth we can be reckless and treat topsoil, groundwater, and phosphorous as practically unlimited resources we abuse and discard all too readily. We kill our bug populations indiscriminately, etc. On, say, Mars they will need to be very thoughtful and careful about every single one of those things. They'll need to treat their resources as the precious and limited things they actually are. Which is true of here too (we're draining our aquifers like there's no tomorrow, but there is a tomorrow). Those habitats will drive development of technologies and solutions which will be incredibly valuable here on Earth as well, and may help drive us toward a more mature relationship with our environment and our use of resources.
Also, increasing the diversity of crew transfer vehicles is very helpful. Right now there are 4 different varieties of cargo vehicles that visit the station (Progress, HTV, Cargo Dragon, and Cygnus). This diversity means that delays or periods of downtime with any one of the cargo delivery systems can be made up for via the others, as has happened in the past. The same resiliency has not existed for some time in regards to crew transfer vehicles. Given that there was a failure during an attempt to launch a Soyuz capsule last year which put a serious strain on the station (potentially putting it in jeopardy of being left uncrewed for some time) you can see that this is a serious issue.
Additionally, Crew Dragon is the first new crewed spacecraft to visit the station that was designed within the last decade, or, indeed that was designed this century. Soyuz is reliable but it has a great many constraints and shortcomings, many of which can't be alleviated without moving to a new design. It's refreshing to see that we as a species still have the capability to build new crewed vehicles with new capabilities and new designs rather than simply shuffling about as custodians of legacy vehicles designed and built by previous generations.
Even more excitingly, the Crew Dragon was launched by a vehicle which landed the first stage, and will have its first stage be reused on a future flight. The Soyuz rocket/capsule is a remarkably inexpensive way for crew to get to orbit, but those low costs are due mainly to sticking with an old design (all the R&D has long been amortized) and reliance on inexpensive Russian labor. Falcon 9 is already cost competitive with the Soyuz and has the potential to be even cheaper as Falcon 9 first stage reuse becomes more common. As reusable rockets become more common and familiar, and as their design improves with increasing use and follow-on generations (Blue Origin's New Glenn, SpaceX's BFR/Starship, etc.) costs will continue to fall and access to space will open up. Which will bring about a new space age where many more people visit orbit per year, space stations become much larger and more advanced, and our capabilities in spaceflight are in general much greater than they are today.
There may also be lots of sub-surface groundwater, we just don't have solid evidence of that yet.
Also, this is a reminder of the degree to which the modern world is utterly dependent on science and technology and yet at the same time vastly under-invests in critical research. Half a dozen people cracked this mystery. Imagine how much progress we could make if we had better funding for science and research across the board.
That's especially obvious today when we have huge debts in terms of infrastructure building and city development. Or just general stewardship. There are so many waste disposal problems in the developed world that are currently in a holding pattern. For non-nuclear waste there are very clear routes toward remediation and disposal, for example. And yet all these projects languish on the back burner because we just can't afford them. Consider just one example, Seattle is currently in the process of installing sidewalks throughout the entire city, at present rates of progress it will take 1800 years to finish. Think about that for a moment and then consider that a lot of basic infrastructure and urban development projects in other cities are in similar shape.
And this doesn't even include new jobs that don't exist currently. In 1850 there were no movie stars, no TV advertising studios, no e-sports players, no vloggers, and there were vastly fewer and less well paid professional actors, musicians, and writers. Also, people in 1850 didn't have toilets, showers, dishwashers, refrigerators, televisions, instant pots, smartphones, or insulin. The amount of labor needed to supply the standard of living of 1850 in 2019 is vastly less than the labor that was used to supply it in 1850. The same trend will continue in the future. By 2050 the labor needed to supply a 2019 standard of living will be less than what was used in 2019. There will be jobs that don't exist today in 2050, and 2040, and 2030, and even 2020, that's how the economy works. That's been true throughout the entire holocene.
The problem is not fundamentally about the size of the well of labor to be done, that well is bottomless. The problem is rather one of economics and monetary systems. And this is not a new problem either. When wealth is hyper concentrated it actually reduces economic activity (which, remember, has nothing to do with money and everything to do with goods and services) because it shunts a huge percentage of the population out of active participation in the economy.
Imagine an alternate world with different money systems in circulation, for simplicity let's just imagine two sets: rich and poor people money. Imagine that it is illegal to trade one for the other (meaning you cannot use rich people money to buy up poor people money), imagine that you take all of the money as it exists today in the developed world and you label it "rich people money". Then, you introduce a new set of currency, the only thing special about it is that people in the top 1/4 by income (of rich people money) are legally prohibited from owning it or using it. Now you have this entire sub-economy of the bottom 3/4 who are isolated from the rest. Will people do jobs, provide services and make goods only for "poor people money"? Of course they will, because ultimately the money is just a medium for exchanging labor and value. People whose labor isn't valued in the rich people money economy will likely still be able to sell their work in the poor people money economy. And, as I said, there is an effectively infinite pool of work to be done so there will be jobs for people to do. Everyone in the developed world today has needs that aren't being met currently, all an economy is is a way for people to meet each others needs through labor via a medium of exchange.
Now, you can get to a state of having just one set of money and one whole economy where everyone is fully participatory but you need to bring up the wages and decrease the inequality in the system. If the wage floor in the US were closer to the $20/hr norm from the mid 20th century instead of the $7/hr it is today then there'd be a lot more money in the hands of those in the bottom 3/4 of the economy. And those people would be able to build their wealth, employ others, spend more money on more goods and services, etc. and result in a more fully participatory economy. We've spent the last nearly half century practically wrecking our own economic system, raiding it for the benefit of the hyper-elite. This is not a natural nor necessary development, it has been a choice. And we can just as easily choose other things to do.