* a ton of private investment in nuclear power [1]
* AI models performing at PhD-level on some tasks [2]
I know it can feel low-status to admire these accomplishments -- it feels like we're aligning with/submitting to the people behind them -- but I perceive technological growth to be accelerating across a bunch of fields that matter to me.
I admit, this is very impressive: "AI models performing at PhD-level on some tasks" but it remains to be seen as to whether all this intelligence actually leads to greater productivity and whether that "productivity" even translates into higher earnings in a meaningful way.
the way I see it, virtual goods (games, digital goods, etc) will continue to be ever more free and lower cost, while nothing much changes in the real world.
Did you notice how closed captions generated from videos became really good? Did you notice that machine translation became usable for everyday tasks? Did you notice that you can direct your phone at an inscription in a language unknown to you, and get a translation put at the same spot on the picture, and an explanation of it read aloud to you? Does it make your very real life easier?
All this stuff used to be high-end research with unstable and hardly usable results like 10 years ago.
> Did you notice how closed captions generated from videos became really good?
I've noticed the exact opposite over the last year or so. They've become riddled with errors of the sort that actively mislead people about what was actually said.
> Does it make your very real life easier?
So far, generative AI has not made my very real life any easier. It has made it more uncertain, though, and has made it harder to trust anything I am not seeing/hearing in person.
What is the actual significance of the booster catch is ? Re-usability is obviously part of it, but do we really think that thing will just be refueled and sent straight back off in the near future?
It seems to be an incredible feat of engineering, no doubts there, but how significant are the practical implications?
I found this from Musk, which is his usual over the top optimistic self:
In an interview to YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut, Musk said that his vision is that Mechazilla will one day be able to turn around and set a rocket back on the launchpad, perhaps as little as 30 minutes after touchdown.
Heavy Booster is 232 feet tall, and 29.5 feet across, and weighs something like 275 tons
and that's precision engineering - multiple pressurised chambers, flared and clean flowing pipes for fluid routing, nozzles, etc.
These things are no easy build, they take time, high skill levels, resources, etc.
30 minutes turn around on reuse is BS for now, they'll take weeks of fine toothed retesting and examination to clear them for reuse - but that'll still be a considerable saving of time, money, and resources compared to a complete new build from scratch.
Yeah I see, but also all of that shifting of weight, heat, acceleration and deceleration must be pretty stressful on that structure and on the materials, I feel like it would be best to wait and see what these things look like after one or two uses before claiming the wins.
I dare say that's why they'll take weeks of fine toothed retesting and examination to clear them for reuse and they'll bed a few in before setting long term procedures in stone.
What's your Engineering background? Civil, Mechanical? Ever worked on any of those 380+ metre tall North Sea Oil and Gas platforms?
I have never worked on a 380+ tall North Sea Oil platform :)
I work in Software but I'm a massive tinkerer and have done a lot of work wit my hands. I'm not a structural or mechanical engineer. Most of my knowledge is just things I've picked up doing renovations, fixing my car etc.
>do we really think that thing will just be refueled and sent straight back off in the near future?
The Falcon 9s have been landed, checked out, refueled and flown again for a while now. The record is currently 23 flights from a single booster. I don't see how this is fundamentally different - reusing the booster that is. The upper stage is a different matter.
Are we just going to ignore the negative externalities of AI? From my perspective, the main product of AI is bots spamming social media with misinformation - largely with a goal of swaying elections.
I'm not saying that AI is inherently evil and has no potential, but just ignoring the cost is misleading. It's like saying oil is wonderful and pretending global warming isn't a thing.
The tech may be "hard" but that doesn't mean it's a net positive for society, which to me is what really matters. Of course this is all subjective and nobody can predict the future, but I just find this blind optimism to be self-destructive.
OP never said they liked spaceflight. They also didn't say anything about addressing human needs. They just said "hard tech golden age". So I think you are looking for a fight that isn't there.
But anyway; let's take it at the best case curiosity. I do like spaceflight. Is it a problem to you what people like? Does everything you like specifically address human needs? I find this confusing.
Regardless, all life on Earth is going to die. I see it as a "major human need" to avoid death of our civilization and all other life we know of in the whole universe, if it becomes possible. And it does seem more possible now - because of the advances SpaceX has made with hard rocket tech in the last few years, specifically.
I would say that space flight is cool as a potential experience -- I hope that it's safe and cheap enough one day that I can go -- and I also think that life is good [0], so if we can spread life to more planets, that's good.
Even if you don't enjoy the science/exploration angle, asteroid mining should be incredibly good for human needs.
Any metal you can think of exists in phenomenal abundance there, and should be able to be exploited at minimal cost in the long run. Having huge supplies of cheap platinum, gold, nickel, cobalt etc would be extremely good for humanity. It also means we don't need to have dirty and ugly mines on earth.
There is also the military angle. If the west lets China control orbit, we're in big trouble.
Asteroid mining is wildly uneconomical. There is no material to be found in large quantities on any asteroid in the solar system whose value justifies the development and installation costs of the infrastructure needed to get that material back to Earth.
If you're building a megastructure in space, that's a different story. But please understand that mining gold or platinum from asteroids, at (literally) astronomical cost, will not do anything to advance the state of life on Earth except, at best, reduce the price of gold and platinum, which are not societal bottlenecks.
It is 100% guaranteed that, at some point in the (geologically) near future, humanity will need to leave Earth permanently, or move the planet or something to that effect if we really want to.
We should be beyond ready by the time that comes. It's not an immediate or daily human need, but it IS a human need.
The sun is heating up, and Earth is going to become too hot. I’m not sure on the timeline; might be a few hundred million years. Might be more. It depends on how the atmosphere reacts.
On that timescale we could use a gravitational tractor to fix it, if we insist keeping the planet around.
250 million years is an estimate for when the formation of a new supercontinent results in sufficient volcanic activity to drastically increase CO2 in the atmosphere and probably kill off all large mammals. 500 million is when C3 photosynthesis stops being possible and virtually all plants are gone, which would collapse all terrestrial ecosystems and leave behind very little animal life, probably none. There seems to be a very high likelihood of extinction level asteroid strikes happening well before either of these.
But we're talking here about a span of time that is a thousand times longer than anatomically modern humans have existed up to this point. Given how far we've come since then, I don't know how you can possibly speculate what kinds of capabilities we might have by then to synthesize breathable air and food from raw disintegrated atoms of anything. If you look billions of years into the future, then it's going to get hot enough to sterilize the planet of any life whatsoever, which we probably can't overcome. If we can terraform other planets, we can terraform Earth itself, which would seemingly overcome any other challenge short of triple the heat that is eventually coming.
It seems maybe a bit premature to think this is something currently living humans should worry about figuring out how to escape from.
We might also note that, given the compartively short time it took humans to come about after the K-Pg event, it's probably reasonable to expect there is more than enough time before these "possibly all life killer" type far future things happen for some other kind of intelligent life that develops civilization and technology to replace humans if we go extinct by some means other than the planet being totally destroyed.
ok, so we have a loooottt of time to do that. for now, i think humanity already has waaaayyyy tooo many problems to deal with before we need to worry about that.
That's what dinosaurs thought and then the asteroid hit the Earth.
And, personally, I want a space telescope a thousand times bigger than James Webb. That's my biggest need after food, shelter, health and human connection.
a) It's not a major advance in spaceflight. It's a notable step but the last major advance was when Nasa enabled the private/public partnership and started to allow companies like SpaceX to exist in the first place.
b) There is not a ton of private investment in nuclear power. It is a handful of LOI that history has shown usually doesn't translate to much.
c) AI models do not perform at PhD level. They can solve some PhD level tasks but as Apple showed in their research the minute you swap out variables or add irrelevant information they fall apart. So clearly not evidence of intelligence.
Not to be negative on anything because I do think we are in an incredible era but these aren't what I would consider the best examples.
* A major advance in spaceflight [0]
* a ton of private investment in nuclear power [1]
* AI models performing at PhD-level on some tasks [2]
I know it can feel low-status to admire these accomplishments -- it feels like we're aligning with/submitting to the people behind them -- but I perceive technological growth to be accelerating across a bunch of fields that matter to me.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41827362
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858961
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03169-9