> But what kind of cargo will the submarine be carrying? "That's what we're going to figure out over the next few months," he told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme.
Is this something we could plan and manage to launch an orbiter/lander to in time? Has anyone thought about the possibility of slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?
If you launch your telescope on a spacecraft and get it to match speed with the dwarf planet (which is necessary for a soft landing), there's not much point in actually attaching it to the dwarf planet. That just blocks the view of half the sky.
Also, there will be nothing to see out there other than the dwarf planet itself.
Is that really true? If we manage to get a spacecraft get captured by the dwarf planet's gravity and orbit it, would that not be a lot less delta-V compared to if we made the spacecraft achieve the dwarf planet's orbit around the sun just by itself?
Yes, this is an aspect of orbital mechanics that people find unintuitive before they study it. You can't be captured by a planet's gravity alone. If you come in from infinity (i.e., not already captured) you will escape to infinity (remain not captured). The basic idea can be seen from the fact that gravitational dynamics are time-reversible, so if gravity could capture you like this you could also start in orbit around a planet and spontaneously be ejected.
Now, something like this can work if you use an irreversible interaction like aerobreaking, but this dwarf planet has negligible atmosphere. You could also use the dwarf planet for a gravitational assist (basically bouncing off it like a billiard ball), but I think gravitational assists from the other planets are almost always more convenient and effective.
It can reduce the delta-V requirements, though - by the same principles as a gravity assist, a capture burn (especially into a loosely-bound planet-centric orbit) often takes less work than burning into the equivalent heliocentric orbit on your own.
> by the same principles as a gravity assist, a capture burn
Note to the audience: these mechanisms don’t violate the conservation of energy because you aren’t tapping the object’s gravitational energy per se but instead its orbital energy around the sun. Put another way, you can’t do a gravity assist or capture burn in any direction.
The usual way I explain it is as a transfer of kinetic energy and momentum from the large body to the small one. The interaction is through gravity, rather than the mix of electrostatic, degeneracy, and strong/weak forces involved in collisions; but the equations are more or less the same.
(Usually textbooks use a baseball bouncing off a semi truck to illustrate.)
> Oberth effect from fast flyby of a body with low gravity would be negligible.
Pretty sure the problem would be, rather, that a flyby of a body with low gravity would be negligibly fast (relative to your speed when not flying by). Oberth effect is because of high speed (a given increase in momentum gives more kinetic energy at higher speed than at lower speed) - it's just that dipping deep into a gravity well is the obvious way to get that speed.
I came here to reply to the parent comment's remark about "irreversible interaction like aerobreaking, but this dwarf planet has negligible atmosphere." by mentioning lithobraking because it's been consuming my thoughts for the past couple of months.
Like, imagine a collapsible rod about a kilometer long sticking off the end of a space probe, lined up so it hits the surface as close to perpendicular as possible, each segment made of appropriate material for its impact speed. (I think once you go past the speed of sound in a material, you can't transfer any more force)
With the far end of the rod, which impacts first and with the most force probably vaporizing/creating a crater on the surface (useful to align the rest of the rod), and later sections crumpling in on themselves predictably, like a highway crash barrier or car hood. With a certain max amount of Acceleration, Jerk, Snap, etc... that the probe can survive.
I would very much like someone to explain why decelerating a spacecraft like this is infeasible/inefficient so I can stop thinking about it.
Failing that, I wish to devote the next few years of my life to jamming a massive spear into the moon.
First off, mass. Mass is everything in spaceflight. A rod like that would weigh thousands of kg at the very minimum, likely much more than the rest of the spacecraft combined. Spending the same mass budget for propellant and a big rocket engine would be much more efficient, never mind being useful for arbitrary velocity changes rather than just deceleration.
Second, shape and volume. How would you even launch a km-long rod to space? Not going to fit onto any launch vehicle ever devised. Besides, even at 1g it would collapse under its own weight. Making it telescoping would just increase total volume besides adding complexity – and mass, did I mention mass? Never mind that a collapsible rod is going to have a vastly lower compressive strength than a solid one, making it nigh useless for the intended purpose.
Third, moment of inertia. A long, massive rod stuck to your spacecraft is going to make orientation changes really difficult. And orientation changes are pretty important in spaceflight due to heat management, course corrections, and, well, being in the exact right orientation for your braking maneuver.
Fourth, the concept of a hypervelocity rod falling from space reminds me of something… yeah, kinetic bombardment, aka "rods from God" [1]. The rod and whatever it's going to hit are not going to behave like solid objects crumpling like a crashing car. Stuff at the point of impact is just going to instantly vaporize and result in an explosion likely in the kiloton range, a fried spacecraft, and a big crater on the surface.
Fifth, even if you first decelerate to more reasonable speeds by other means (which is going to take a lot of fuel because of the extra mass (see, again the m word)), a rod much longer than its diameter is not going to nicely crumple into itself under compression. It will buckle, and then snap, like a piece of spaghetti, failing to decelerate much at all but sending your spacecraft tumbling out of control.
~ ~ ~
All that said, there are instances where crumple zones have had a small role in spaceflight, including the the Apollo Lunar Module which included crushable honeycomb shock absorbers in the landing gear struts.
Seriously, the tandem failures of the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Observer missions were probably something NASA as an organization needed at the time. A reminder that Space Is Hard, and you can only pick two of "faster", "better", and "cheaper". Since then, NASA's Mars program has grown in both scope and ambition, yet remarkably has had zero loss-of-mission failures during that whole time!
After Pathfinder someone from NASA wrote a book about their new "faster, better, cheaper" approach to missions. Usually you can't have all 3 but they managed to get lucky. That made it particularly amusing when the book and concept were getting popular as the next 2 missions were failing.
Most of the velocity of Pathfinder was shed using aerobraking and parachutes. The crash-balloon landing system just shed the last tiny sliver of velocity after cutting the chutes.
Ah, yeah, you could call airbags lithobraking. I thought you referred ironically to the Mars Polar Lander, but it of course flew in the 1999 launch window rather than 1997.
It's a cool idea, but seems super sci-fi. Might need some wonder materials to make it feasible, even then that would be a really big crumple zone. Or flubber. Another crazy idea: latch on to the planet from the side, like a skateboarder hitching a ride by hanging on to a truck. Again, wonder materials required.
NASA and the Soviets didn't need any wonder materials, just airbags. (Though they did a lot of braking first - either with the atmosphere for NASA at Mars, or with thrusters for the Soviets at the Moon.)
> You can't be captured by a planet's gravity alone
Technically, this isn't completely true. There are gravity assist techniques that will allow you to dump speed by essentially adding your momentum to the object you are trying to orbit. The is basically an anti-slingshot manuever.
In practice, I believe the range of scenarios when this is possible with a dwarf planet is so small as to be practically useless.
In a two-body system it doesn’t matter what you do; gravity is a conservative force so conservation of energy demand that you leave the body’s SoI at the same speed you entered it (in the body’s frame of reference).
You can lose speed or alter course relative to another body in a single encounter, and those changes can reduce speed in future encounters, but if you’re on an escape trajectory heading in you stay in one (without forces beside two-body gravity, which is a pretty safe assumption 11 AU out of Saturn doesn’t come close).
> In a two-body system it doesn’t matter what you do;
Two-body systems do not exist in reality.
Energy is also conserved in 3 body problems. When you utilize the slingshot effect, some of the energy of the orbit of the body you are swinging around orbiting is transfered to you. The transfer of this energy does not depend on the closeness of the sun, but rather on how deeply you descend into the gravity well of the object you are slingshotting around.
> which is a pretty safe assumption 11 AU out of Saturn doesn’t come close
No, it really isn't. The "safeness" of the assumption entirely depends on your margin for error. The existence of the naturally captured saturnian satellites clearly indicates that you are simply wrong about the relevant margins for error.
Saturn's captured satellites might also be the result of incidental aerobraking or whatever you want to call smashing into a bunch of very tiny satellites during a close periapsis, no?
You need some sort of subsequent acceleration to raise the perigree out of the atmosphere so the orbit doesn't continue to decay. This could happen due to a slingshot effect, but atmospheric braking alone is not enough to allow you to establish a stable orbit.
> gravitational dynamics are time-reversible, so if gravity could capture you like this you could also start in orbit around a planet and spontaneously be ejected.
I don't have a strong background in physics, and perhaps this is splitting hairs, but is this true if we consider gravitational radiation? Over a very long time a body's orbital energy will be lost to gravitational waves.
It would be like saying all the school children exercises and train timetables are invalid because they don't take into account relativistic effects that obviously are still present at 60mph.
Technically? Yes! Incoming gravitational radiation of precisely the correct shape will in fact un-decay a orbit under exactly the same (modulo appropiate symmetries) circumstances as a orbit would decay by emitting (the reverse of) that radiation. (The same applies to thermal radiation cooling things off - see Liouville's Theorem.)
For practical purposes, that'll never happen, but for practical purposes gravitation radiation doesn't matter anyway.
Over a very long time, we are all very dead. From what I understand, the loss in gravitational energy would be so tiny, the length of time required for it to eventually matter in any way would be way beyond the lifespan of the sun. So it's only a finite duration if you have infinite time, which you don't.
That's pretty cool. It's wildly counterintuitive, but if it weren't the case, the planets would be orbited by lots of captured asteroids and debris, instead of/in addition to being covered in craters. The only explanation for why that doesn't happen is that it can't happen.
> The presence of natural satellites indicates this can indeed happen
No, it doesn't, because natural satellites are generally not captured, and for those that are captured, the process involves interactions with other bodies.
One of the criteria for planethood is an assumption that the body clears its own orbit. Moons don't just come hurtling out of the cosmos; they either result from a collision of some other body with the planet, as with our Moon, or they're already close to the planet's orbit at the time they are captured.
>One of the criteria for planethood is an assumption that the body clears its own orbit.
Is that so?
"The generic definition of a centaur is a small body that orbits the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune and crosses the orbits of one or more of the giant planets"
There are tens of thousands, so perhaps the definition of a planet is even more abstruse than people let on.
And apparently at least dozens have been identified as probably of interstellar origin, while it is thought that a centaur can become a moon, (e.g. Phoebe) so I wonder if we can really rule out that moons "come hurtling out of the cosmos":
"Being able to tell apart interstellar asteroids from native asteroids born in the Solar System has long eluded astronomers, but the team’s results identified 19 asteroids of interstellar origin. These are currently orbiting as part of the group of asteroids known as Centaurs, which roam the space in between the giant planets of the Solar System."
Yes, it is. The definition of "clearing an orbit" isn't precisely defined, but it doesn't have to be since there appears to be a large natural gap in how much orbit clearing an planet does vs. a dward planet.
> A large body that meets the other criteria for a planet but has not cleared its neighbourhood is classified as a dwarf planet. That includes Pluto, whose orbit intersects with Neptune's orbit and shares its orbital neighbourhood with many Kuiper belt objects. The IAU's definition does not attach specific numbers or equations to this term, but all IAU-recognised planets have cleared their neighbourhoods to a much greater extent (by orders of magnitude) than any dwarf planet or candidate for dwarf planet.[0]
It's a dwarf planet of ~ 200 km diameter. The thing has a miniscule gravity well, it won't matter much compared to launching from earth and matching orbits with it, i think...
For comparison, that's about 10% of the Moon's diameter, i.e. 0.1% of its volume. (The mass ratios are probably within that 0.1% ballpark, but can't tell for sure until we know more about its composition.)
Interestingly, the images came from the Dark Energy Survey [1], which for entirely different different reasons is running a very sensitive and high-resolution scan of the sky in visible and near-infrared. This just happened to show up in a frame where they were looking for distant galaxies and events, and the Minor Planets Center noticed the thing.
Could a probe have a long tethered anchor, so as it does it's flyby the friction of the anchor dragging the surface would shed more delta-V than the weight of the system (in comparison to just loading up on more propellant)?
> there's not much point in actually attaching it to the dwarf planet.
I've been thinking that attaching a sabatier reactor to a probe and sending it to land on an extra solar body such as Oumuamua that contains the ingredients that the sabatier needs to produce fuel would be a great way to get a probe that sends signals back to Earth well after a nuclear battery has died.
Just launch a deep-space telescope; it would be easier.
Soft-landing the telescope on an airless body would be harder (in delta-V terms) than just launching it into an equivalent solar orbit. And the body would block about half your view of the sky at any one time.
No, that's not how gravity boosts work. If you match speeds with an object you actually get zero boost.
The point of a gravity boost is to come in pretty hot (relative to the body you're boosting off of) and then go out pretty hot in a different direction. So you take your relative velocity vector at the point of the encounter and twist it around. By doing that you change your orbital energy around your central body (the sun) by a lot, and the other object will lose a similar amount to keep the bookkeeping equal.
If you have zero relative velocity compared to the thing you want a gravity assist off of you can't get an assist. It isn't like drafting a semi.
Interesting, do you mind explaining how the "other object will lose a similar amount"? I find orbital mechaics fascinating and understand the concept of a slingshot, but I can intuitively understand how if we launched a rocket and slingshotted it around the moon, the moon would be affected by that
Could there be some energy advantage to being in orbit around it? I'm thinking of a scenario where you spend a large amount of energy once get into orbit around the object, but then gain a small amount of energy continuously through something like tidal forces.
Everything else is going to be small and average out over time. And if you manage to pick up a bit of energy orbiting a tiny object you'll quickly just get ejected at its (small) escape velocity. Whatever that gives you, it won't be worth the cost of matching orbits to start with. Better to come in hot and slingshot.
Solar wind / radiation pressure is probably the next best free ride since that adds up over time continuously and is everywhere.
I think the point is that in order to follow it, you need to (at some point in time) be at the same place and with the same velocity. Then you'll follow it.
But the energy required to do that is almost the same as what it would be if the dwarf planet wasn't there. You could get onto exactly the same orbit for roughly the same amount of energy, and if you relax the requirement that there be a dwarf planet nearby, you can choose superior orbits.
For the best gravity assist you want to have a large delta V, and you want to come in on a hyperbolic orbit that causes you to turn by 90 degrees.
This object has all of the delta V that you could want, but for an object of that mass, the hyperbolic orbit would require going through the planetoid which you can't do. And if it was dense enough that you could (for example a miniature black hole), the tidal forces during the turn would be insane.
So no, this object cannot give a decent slingshot.
The magnitude of the slingshot boost increases with the mass of the planetary body. This thing is smaller than any of the planets so you’d get a much smaller boost. The best planet for slingshotting from is Jupiter because it’s the most massive.
The easiest way to think about this is as perfectly elastic collision between the spacecraft and the planet (mediated by gravity, but this is an unnecessary detail already).
It's probably more interesting to study the object itself.
I assume its orbital period is long enough that it won't be back near the central solar system for a very long time. But similar objects could have interesting uses.
One thought experiment is to consider what it would take to be able to live on such an object, perhaps even a rogue planet just floating between the stars.
It would be very cold. Presumably you'd be reliant on nuclear fission or fusion for power, so you'd need a significant fuel supply that could effectively last indefinitely. And you'd want to have a ready supply of all the basic elements you need. Which seems more realistic the bigger the object is. Like, an Earth or Mars-sized rogue planet might be ideal.
Like till it gets closer we dont even know if it would be suitable to put something like that on it.
Although it does seem like interesting idea.
However, we have sent probes much further than this object (aka the voyager missions).
So it would mainly be useful for studying this object. So a telescope would be less than ideal since we could always in theory deploy a telescope much deeper into space if we wanted.
Interestingly, the voyager missions were also timed-events -- they were launched when they were because JPL realized it was a 1-in-175-year alignment of the outer planets that made it feasible to launch just a few crafts to visit the outer planets all in one go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
Landing a telescope on it would only make sense if orbits around it are highly unstable (like our moon) and if the dwarf planet was geothermally active so energy on the surface would be "easy" to extract (which comes with it's own set of headaches). Orbiting it with a "big for space probes" camera would most likely give us more interesting data.
Using the plant as a Coronagraph if orbiting far out is another interesting idea, but using a near earth astroid would be a better idea as the telescope could be powered by solar panels they.
> slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?
While this object will eventually orbit pretty far away in a solar system context, I suspect that additional distance may not be vast enough to make a meaningful improvement in observations of targets at interstellar distances.
I'd love to learn if I'm incorrect but I've always assumed for interstellar observation, larger sensors and more sensors has better ROI than a more distant sensor, at least short of some substantial fraction of a light year. If we're going to dedicate a 100 ton Starship payload to interstellar observing I imagine going much farther out than the Moon's shadow may not be a good trade (eg fuel mass vs payload mass).
Too far out from the sun and it wouldn't be able to re-charge using solar panels. Could put some kind of nuclear power plant on it though. And as others has pointed out, you would need to match the speed, so you could just as well use that power plus gravity assists to get far out. Landing on such a body would be really interesting though.
Let's send some boosters out there, redirect it to earth, and make a second moon. Come on people, what ever happened to doing shit cause its fuckin' rad, do you know how cool another moon would be?!
Then again, global warming is going to flood huge coastal areas, killing or displacing millions, which is a pretty uncool thing we're doing to ourselves, so maybe Second Moon will counter-act that? There's literally no way of knowing until we try. And worst case scenario, we ruin a bunch of earth and we've got a second moon to move to. Its a win-win.
Bringing a large celestial body close to Earth would be just as smart as trying to let the aliens know that we are here. (The humanity may not be able to survive either one.)
Again with buying a product and having to pay extra to rent/lease capabilities already baked in? Is there some parallel here to the right to repair arguments with John Deere?
"Deru kugi wa utareru" I believe? This is something cultural that continues to surprise me in the ways it manifests in society. Speaking as an American though I really can't be throwing stones.
I think you might misinterpret the meaning of this phrase if you think the U.S.A.-man should not be the one to criticize it.
It has nothing to do with race; there are many similar North-West European proverbs that describe a similar tendency that advise against attempting to be exceptional.
U.S.A. society is opposite; it is known to celebrate and encourage exceptionalism and to reward those that have achieved it, or were simply born so.
And even if your interpretation were true, I see no reason why your country of residence would præclude you from criticizing something you disagree with. — the man who feels responsible for the actions of other by association, I find is is also very often the man who assigns responsibility to the innocent by association.
"The analysis found evidence of some kind of procedure, possibly a surgery, performed on the woman when she was alive. The team posits that someone applied a red ocher pigment around the injury, possibly for therapeutic or symbolic purposes."
I will never cease to be amazed by these ancient examples of assumed surgeries. However, it would be nice if the article expanded more on that or left a key to accompany the photo of highlighted areas on the skull.
They talk about a lot of manual manipulation on the skull. Muscles removed. Then talk about lack of variety in diet. Makes you wonder if they are not alleging something else without saying it.
de-fleshing leaves characteristic marks on bone. I believe contemporaneous animal bones show both de-fleshing and bone breaking for marrow. Brains have fats. If you're eating a person, you'd eat the brain (yes, I know ...) if you already ate marrow.
De-fleshing for ritual might not be distinguishable from de-fleshing for food. Except, maybe food would show signs of heating because, 5000 years ago I think they had fire, and fire makes protein yummy.
Lots of cultures in time past (and present?) leave bodies and then collect the bones, clean them up, do ritualised things with them. I think fewer cultures eat their dead, its not unknown, its less common.
Would you mind elaborating on your first sentence a bit more? I personally feel that the tools we create and lessons we learn to be able to live on Mars could be a tremendous benefit to us and Earth.
Not OP, but I feel similar way - these lessons can be learned here on earth(colony on the bottom of the ocean?) Or simply on the moon, without going all the way to mars. It looks like due to radiation anyone living in mars would have to live underground anyway, so what's the difference between that and a habitat on the moon? Except for the moon being infinitely easier to get to and back.
>Not OP, but I feel similar way - these lessons can be learned here on earth(colony on the bottom of the ocean?)
Except we DIDN'T learn them. We've only developed these technologies when necessary and not before.
Look at space power sources. Sure, Earth could have been using solar power for longer than it has (and we could've started the process cost improvement curve much earlier), but we didn't. We pretty much used fossil fuels. But for space, we've been using almost exclusively solar power nearly from the beginning. Space provided a critical early demand for improving solar power.
Also, Mars has a CO2 atmosphere that (at likely altitude) shields from all micrometeorites and virtually all solar flare radiation. At Curiosity's site, an astronaut could spend 35 hours a week unshielded on the surface (which is much more than a typical American spends outside in a week) without exceeding terrestrial radiation limits. Mars also has lots of free iron in the form of iron nickel meteorites spotted by rovers and just sitting on the surface. It has water all over the surface in the soil and even in the air (not to mention vast glaciers). And the air provides CO2, which can be split into Oxygen plus CO fuel. In addition, the atmosphere provides nitrogen and Argon. The geology of Mars has been greatly impacted by hydrology, like on Earth, so you have similar concentrations of ores. And the gravity is significantly higher. So there are all sorts of advantages of Mars over the Moon.
> what's the difference between that and a habitat on the moon?
Gravity and the hope of terraforming.
You’re underestimating the power of inspiration. Saving the planet is dreary business. Colonising a new one is exciting. Those callings motivate different people in different ways. Constraining us to one problem means those who might have been inspired to study chemistry to terraform Mars find it more attractive to go into finance.
I don't know if the Moon is really "infinitely" easier to get to and back - in a real sense the Moon is "most of the way there" - getting to Mars surface is only 25% more delta-v than the Moon, and that's without considering that aero-braking is available when you're landing on Mars.
The round trip is harder, sure, but we're talking maybe a factor of 10 rather than infinity.
Habitat design wise, sure. But a lot of problems would be similar, especially if you were aiming to make it self sustainable. Growing food, living in close proximity to other people, only occasional resupplies....and benefits would be similar too. Technologies to maintain life in an environment absolutely deadly to humans, whatever tech we come up with to combat loneliness and proper nutrition.....
My point is - I feel like fixating on Mars is doing more harm than good in terms of our progress as a species. But you're right - it's not my money being spent.
Living in space is not fun, it is not natural, it is physically and mentally demanding which is why so much training goes into creating professionals which do it full time - there is no leisure, it is at best eustress, and I think space gets romanticized by the individual in ways which don't track with the actual work required to get us to be a species with two homes.
And the act of terraforming Mars to be Earth-like is nothing less than a titanic feat. The ways in which our world are fine-tuned to be bountiful would take more than several decades worth of missions - at least! - to even be mostly tractable on small segments of Mars, even with internal habitation. There will be failures. We will occasionally overextend like we do in every large project on Earth. What resources these projects? What's our buffer when they fail, even temporarily?
Meanwhile the physical means exist now to regenerate the Earth's environment and live sustainable yet happy lives. But the move from here to there requires decades long initiatives with little in the way of immediate profit. Things like safe nuclear power, permaculture and forest farms plus directed soil renewal, scalable water filtering, plastic substitutes; or scaling back conspicuous consumption and eliminating planned obsolescence in favor of efficient use of existing products along with the repair and maintenance of older ones.
Yet the reason why these problems are intractable is collective action, not unknown means. Dealing with Mars is both a longer term project than rejuvenating the Earth, and its perceived tractability stems from the way it looks conceptually simpler from a coordination standpoint if you ignore the civilization that makes it possible - just NASA and Elon right?
I had absolutely no idea this was part of the dress code.
"The ostensible reason for the rule is that almost all Japanese people have naturally black hair, and so they’ll only have non-black hair if they’ve chosen to dye it a different color."
Are there any children currently enrolled in Tokyo public schools that are of say european ancestry with blonde hair that needed to follow this rule?
A German friend of mine, who did high school I think in Osaka encountered this. If I remember it right one teacher wanted to enforce this and dye his hair so that he wouldn't stand out, but the principal overruled him and he didn't end up with black hair.
So pairing this with a quote from the article “Students are encouraged to have black hair to serve as a visible signal that they are willing to adapt to society,” makes it feel like accepting societal norms isn't just encouraged it's almost a fascist doctrine? I'm assuming then that phrases like "celebrate diversity" are frowned upon.
Edit: I just wanted to add that having not grown up in a non-individualistic society these things feel very unusual to me. My comparison to fascism is a bit hyperbolic and not meant to offend, apologies all round. I'm leaving it instead of deleting purely for the sake of discussion.
Japan is extremely racist, but generally in that "clueless Uncle" kind of way, not the "actual malicious dislike" way of say, China right now.
Societal acceptance is an enormous aspect of Japanese society. It isn't "fascism", its their culture. Japanese people like diversity in the same way extremely wealthy American liberal people like diversity. Its a great idea that almost everyone will openly back... right up until you tell them you're going to re-locate a lot of diverse peoples around their homes. Then you see the backpedaling.
I have long blond hair and blue eyes, and every time I go to Japan I get stared at with the intensity of a thousand suns. It is a nearly homogeneous culture and most Japanese people are conformists.
I'm not sure how much you know or don't know, so it might be hard to know where to start.
Over the past few years as China's economic growth has slowed for everyone (but less so for the upper middle class and the wealthy), there's a lot of growing discontent that's turning into outright hostility towards white and black foreigners who poorer Chinese people see as "hurting the Chinese economy" in some way.
This is exacerbated by local Chinese media outlets and party politicians that need a place to put the blame, and so immigrants are chosen. You can't blame the Party. For what ought to be obvious reasons (see: Jack Ma).
Westerners don't really see this because if you read The Economist, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and/or listen to Fox Business, CNBC, Bloomberg, etc., then according to them, China is the land of plenty - a veritable mine full of diamonds and platinum waiting to be extracted. These people aren't stupid by the way - they know that China's economy is a glass house that could be fairly easily cracked. They have the same information you have, they can see the enormous tracts of empty 20-50 story-tall apartment buildings. They just don't care, because they (falsely) think that economic interest is the sole motivator of Chinese policy. I mean, what else could it be, right?? Why would anyone care about anything but profit? So they discard any information that could lead them to different conclusions about the economic prospects of the nation. For the very few that haven't been brainwashed by business school, the promise of 1,000,000,000 future middle class customers is just too much to ignore, but they too are blinded by greed, but they're blind to how China operates. China wants to own it. They don't want their customers using Samsung and Apple phones and LG washing machines and driving Teslas. They want their customers using Huawei and Xiaomi phones, and using Chinese washing machines, and driving Chinese electric cars.
So anyway... because of poor central planning - because unfortunately all central planning is poor by its very nature, you need people to be able to be flexible based upon local circumstances and conditions - the effects are starting to be felt, by the poorest Chinese. And like all poor people, they tend to blame immigrants.
It isn't a critical problem - yet - but many foreign workers (mostly white, Western, educated one) are starting to leave because the climate is becoming hostile.
Agree with everything you said, and wha'ts left unsaid (uygours, the aging issue, the abandonned youths in central China, and many others). But this:
> because unfortunately all central planning is poor by its very nature
Is untrue for a very specific subset of issue: nation-wide infrastructure. W/o central planning, not nuclear plants, no French/Japanese/Italian/Chinese trains. Electricity: the bigger you network is, the easier it is to pilot said network. Central planning is a tool, like the free market is a tool. Hardcore Liberals and Communists will both disagree with me, but it is 2021, i think we're past Marx and can recognize Adam Smith was not always right (even if he was on point on a lot of thing).
You can also have a central-planning thingy along a river that multiple community use to better allocate a really needed ressource that is called water. Not nation central planning, but something in between.
> Is untrue for a very specific subset of issue: nation-wide infrastructure. W/o central planning, not nuclear plants, no French/Japanese/Italian/Chinese trains. Electricity: the bigger you network is, the easier it is to pilot said network. Central planning is a tool, like the free market is a tool.
Hmm... yes. Yes I suppose that is indeed correct. I agree.
I explicitly refrained from mentioning the Uyghurs here because inevitably someone mentions the "violent bomb attacks" that they're conducting against the Chinese government.
I mean, I can't imagine why someone would actively attack a government that was rounding them up and systematically jailing them.
My understanding was that Elon was interested in providing the bus service (so to speak) of getting people and cargo there. Less interested in the colony building aspect? But, I believe The Boring Company tunneling machine will fit inside a launch vehicle and the Tesla truck will function on extraterrestrial world's with a pressurized cabin so I could be completely mistaken.
He's focused on the critical path to colonizing mars. If an sustainable ecosystem becomes the critical path, he'll focus on it. There's so much else that is more important now though, and funding is limited.
Nobody is going to fund it after sustainable transport to Mars is feasible, either. Because there is no path from 'spend billions of dollars on this' to 'make your investment back'.
Which is why IMHO the next logical step is to establish orbital autonomous manufacturing. There’s no way an experimental artificial habitats can be built on Earth by manual labor let alone launched by chemical rockets.
Note that manufacturing anything useful to our technological society currently requires a supply chain of tens of thousands of factories, worked by millions of people, requiring mountains of input ingredients, and producing mountains of waste.
Doing that in orbit would be quite a trick, even if you didn't restrict yourself to only being able to use found-in-orbit resources.
Aren't Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both interested in this and their combined wealth around $200Billion? Seems like they have plenty of money to throw at this company even without outside investors/governments.
Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.