If there is a self-sufficient colony there, and it consists of people from a single nation, it will be targeted. Only a non-political, mixed-heritage colony of scientists and farmers might be overlooked.
An antarctic base/colony would not solve a number of issues:
1. A meteor strike can be big enough to obliterate anything on what was once the surface. It can heat the entire globe to 100 degrees Celsius due to tektites bombarding the surface.
2. Due to millennia of snow and ice covering it, the surface of the continent is just bare rock. Nothing will grow there without significant amounts of soil moved to it. Yes, this is also a problem for Mars, and a boat is more proven tech than a spaceship, but the removal of all ice off the surface will not change Antarctica into a bountiful oasis. Making a self-sufficient colony there is going to be extremely hard.
Musk is using SpaceX to drive down the cost of sending things into space. This greatly reduces obstacles for going to space, and makes a self-sufficient Antarctic base a bit obsolete.
Still mars colony will not be a colony, it will be an outpost.
I dont think we are even close to be able to make it self sufficient.
Self sufficient sounds nice in principle but is way more complicated. You need industry for every single part used to build colony - that is replace everything you rely on.
Soil enrichment, material wear, silicon chips... you need to have uranium mine and processing to sustain energy production.
The scale of the operation is massive. And all done underground.
Not impossible, just unlikely we will ever get there.
> You need industry for every single part used to build colony - that is replace everything you rely on.
That's actually much, much harder than it sounds, and this is the key part that everyone just hand-waves away.
On Earth, it is already unaffordable to move to many places for even relatively rich westerners. As in, your own personal economic output is unable to pay for the cost of moving the materials there, setting up a habitable abode, and then keeping you alive until the age of retirement. That's with normal-ish housing in normal-ish conditions.
We can only afford our current lifestyles with the "cheat codes on": free oxygen, free water, free temperature control, and free energy growing out of the sky[1].
On Mars, you have two compounding challenges:
1) Every aspect of staying alive is harder. Housing has to be air-tight. Instead of a mere air conditioner, you need a life support system. Instead of just food, air and water also need to be made. Space suits are needed to go outside. Etc...
2) Productivity itself is lower. The supply chain is tiny, raw materials are much harder obtain, cooling water and air is not available in bulk, and so on. Just think about how dependent modern technology is on plastics, which are made from oil. Mars has no oil!
The combination of both lower productivity multiplied by higher cost of living and ridiculous supply-chain issues for the first century (or more!) means that self-sustainability will be out of reach well past all of our lifetimes.
Fair point on #1 but I imagine the probability of a meteor strike that literally boils the planet is a lot lower than a strike in general.
Regarding #2, the solution for self-sufficient agriculture in Antarctica and on the Moon/Mars is the same: hydroponics.
Only it's much easier to do hydroponics in Antarctica. You can melt that ice for fresh water. You can harvest all kinds of nutrients from the ocean. The Antarctic seas have huge oil deposits to provide limitless energy. An Antarctic colony pretty much just needs lots of weather-hardened infrastructure, it's tough, but well within reach of current tech.
Self-sufficient Moon/Mars hydroponics is way harder. Water is far more scarce. Where do you obtain the nutrients for plant life in situ? Not sure it will all require exotic systems that haven't been invented.
My premise is basically that the political will for a self sufficient colony that "backs up" human society doesn't exist. If it did we would just have some countries agree to amend the Antarctic treaty and do it. It could probably even pay for itself by exporting oil. But no one genuinely cares so we just write scifi stories on the Internet instead.
The X account BitNorbert has livetweeted most what was said during the court proceedings. Wright babbled about how external systems that hosted his files had changed the metadata in an attempt to extricate him from the mess he left himself in when forensic experts noted how his evidence contained timestamps from 2024 or 2023.
Wright extensively modified files, including iteratively modifying a latex file containing the whitepaper to make it layout similarly to the original whitepaper (which was written in openoffice btw). Wright is a narcissistic fraud that continued doubling down upon doubling down on his own lies.
Rightfully so. Wright has a grating personality, with an obnoxious air of superiority. He claims to have coded up bitcoin v0.1 while simultaneously being unable to explain to a judge what an unsigned integer is.
The trial was a complete win for COPA, who can use the litigation to prevent/win the multiple other cases Wright has started with developers and bitcoiners over the years, like McCormack, Hodlonaut, and others.
> being unable to explain to a judge what an unsigned integer is.
Plus the bulk of the article focused on his forgery of documents allegedly predating Bitcoin paper release, detected because he used an new version of Latex and his failed attempts to mimic the document metadata to be like Satoshis metadata.
The Bitcoin whitepaper was created with OpenOffice.
Wright tried to create forgeries with both Word and OpenOffice, but he was unable to reproduce the illustrations as vector art and the bitmaps were noticed. He also got burned over and over again by hidden data in Word (and OO) documents revealing things like the fact that the document was started off as a copy and paste of Satoshi's and then edited to look like a precursor.
Wright appears to have decided to try to solve both problems by declaring that the whitepaper was really created with LaTeX-- since tex files don't have hidden metadata and he could use an online conversion tool to convert the vector illustrations.
Too bad he seems to have been unable to get LaTeX running locally, so he used overleaf--an online LaTeX editor-- which recorded his every revision creating his forgeries.
He tried to claim overleaf did not store any such data, too bad it's substantially open source and his opponents included actual software developers.
You can see him incrementally twiddling the spacing trying to get the line wraps in the same positions from the beginning of the document down to the end.
Our barrister's cross examination after running this video was quite stunning. :)
I've recently been looking into the natron theory, which I also like. Instead of chiselling out big granite blocks and moving them long distances, you use a bucket of powder and a lot of wood ash to chemically form rocks.
Interesting to see the credits of Sky Travel at the end and having an item "pagetable.com" which is currently a C64 dedicated page. It must be one of the longest running pages on the internet...
It's a common and fun way to make a noob angry that you're breaking the rules before you google it in front of them. I've had tough times "proving" it before Google though!
Also had that happen in a school tournamen when I was young! Nowadays, over the board I try to force it in a first game with a new person to see if they know it and if they don't take my piece, I'll bring it up to prevent it being a problem later :)
While a part of the standard chess rules for over a century, it's common for people who learn to play with their family as kids don't learn it. I didn't learn it, either, and only found out about it when I started playing chess programs online.
This is common enough that "Google en passant" is a meme in some circles.
That would be very difficult to say since we've never really been in an Austrian economic system. Austrians will point out that the knob twiddling done by Keynesians is a method of postponing or spreading out the pain of a recession over a large number of years. You can only do that so often before this creates a self-reinforcing mother-of-all-recessions where the accumulated debt and unhealthy investment comes crashing down.
We have pushed our debt forward to our grandchildren since 1971. This is morally repugnant and hardly humane.
Given how heterodox the Austrian school is: what would it even mean to have an Austrian economic system and how would it differ (and some Austrian ideas are part of "mainstream" economics anyway)?
> what would it even mean to have an Austrian economic system and how would it differ
It’s difficult to know exactly, but you would have an unmanaged system. No reserve bank, no stimulus, no regulation, minimum to no restraint on trade depending on how anarchist the Austrian Economist happens to be.
People could decide privately on banking regulation, but then it's quite close to a meaningless distinction between government and people as both would effectively coerce holdouts.
For stimulus the current sizes are just beyond any other organization. Could perhaps be some distributed system, but then why would it be better than delegation?
> societies tend to put some limits and controls in place.
It’s not just a tendency, societies always have limits and controls in place. The anarcho-capitalist wing of Austrian Economics would propose limits and controls too, but not centrally controlled involuntary limits and controls. There’s no real world government, nations relate to each other in a more or less anarchic manner where the limits and controls are voluntary but the consequences short of war are being sanctioned ie not being traded with. Anarcho-capitalists would probably propose a system like that for individuals. Would that require a different kind of person? Maybe, my own views certainly differ with them.
mother-of-all-recessions where the accumulated debt and unhealthy investment comes crashing down.
that happened in the U.S. was before Keynesian principles were used. It was the use of Keynesian principles that helped FDR win 3 elections.
Im not an economist so anyone with a moderate amount of training will run circles around me in a discussion about economics. So I’ll just say two more things. Your comment about Austrian economics never having been implemented reminds me of leftists who say communism has never been implemented so we can’t say communism doesn’t work. Secondly, before Keynesian economics recessions and depressions occurred much more frequently in the U.S. The data seems to clearly point to at least some level of success of Keynesian economics.
> Secondly, before Keynesian economics recessions and depressions occurred much more frequently in the U.S. The data seems to clearly point to at least some level of success of Keynesian economics.
Having some recessions and depressions are healthy. There needs to be a mechanism to punish people who persist in allocating capital in wealth-destroying ways.
The US has real problems with capital allocation. All the manufacturing capital seemed to be invested and created in Asia and there is a retirement crisis because a generation didn't prepare appropriately for old age. There isn't a way to run a counterfactual, but the US has been on the warpath to protect people from having to recognise that they keep giving their money to charlatans. That means it all gets wasted, instead of just some of it being wasted.
>a generation didn't prepare appropriately for old age
This will have a snowball effect because their children will need to support them and save less for their own retirement, then their children's children and so on.
In all fairness, it's tough for most people to save with massive recessions/depressions with mass layoffs every 10 years and near zero interest rates on savings accounts for 20+ years now. Add to that wage pressure from offshoring and things like NAFTA and 2-3% regular inflation targets.
Also, the government won't keep social security payments up with inflation and they tax it. Just more ways to keep the people down. If only we spent the $34T we now have in debt since the 80s on something less frivolous.
> There needs to be a mechanism to punish people who persist in allocating capital in wealth-destroying ways.
But the cost of recessions, especially pre-Keynsian ones, falls most heavily on workers?
> but the US has been on the warpath to protect people from having to recognise that they keep giving their money to charlatans
They keep electing them. There's a huge popular demand for charlatans backed up by the charlatan news channel. It's probably going to result in a Liz Truss level financial disaster at some point.
> But the cost of recessions, especially pre-Keynsian ones, falls most heavily on workers?
I dunno, does it? Why do you think that? Who is the cost of bad capital allocation going to fall on? I'm not expecting any millionaires to go hungry or do without in their old age, or lack housing and goods in their youth. The people eating the brunt of it are workers. They can't save money.
> Your comment about Austrian economics never having been implemented reminds me of leftists who say communism has never been implemented so we can’t say communism doesn’t work
Maybe, however the difference being that there are many countries and regions that have claimed to be communist for over a century but none that have claimed to be adhering to Austrian Economics.
> pretty much every country implemented Austrian economics principles
Looking at history I’m seeing pretty much every country having a government controlled and manipulated currency, mercantilist restraint of trade, guilds and unions with government enforced monopolies fixing prices, central banks, pseudo-governmental corporations, and on and on. Those are all antithetical to Austrian economic principles. Can you point me to the overwhelming historical examples you were referring to?
1870 U.S. is one example. There was restraint of international trade but that trade wasn't much and it didn't have the capacity to be much. A continental sized country at a time when transportation was still limited that used a gold standard satisfies the condition of "implemented Austrian economic principles".
They were implemented in the same way one says that communism has been tried and it failed. It wasn't true communism and it wasn't true Austrianism. Government intervention has shortened recession/depression lengths and lengthened the time between them. It's a lot better than Austrianism.
I'm not going to convince you of anything and vice versa. My comment is for anyone who happens to be reading the thread. Hopefully they will have read enough perspective on this to make a semi-informed decision.
> A continental sized country at a time when transportation was still limited that used a gold standard satisfies the condition of "implemented Austrian economic principles".
Merely having a gold standard in a nationally regulated currency where contracts in that jurisdiction must accept payment in that currency in order to be enforceable is not an implementation of Austrian economic principles.
> They were implemented in the same way one says that communism has been tried and it failed.
You say the examples of AE implementation are overwhelmingly numerous, you give one extremely dubious example of a single superficial similarity to back that up. Can you even point to a single country that claimed to be implementing Austrian Economics? I can point to any number of places that claimed to be Keynesian or Communist, and even one or two that were giving Friedman a try but no Austrians. Your comparison to Communism are nonsense.
Hard to claim to have implemented a system before a word for that system was invented. Small groups of people were wildly successful in implementing the idea of shared ownership/responsibility way before the word communism was invented.
Lots of large societies had systems of governance where the vast majority of the economic system was free of government control/safeguards and where the value of the currency was not controlled by the government. As societies grew larger/complicated and concentrated more in urban areas people became aware that government intervention was a good thing if done properly. As with all things if done badly then the intervention is not a good thing.
>Hard to claim to have implemented a system before a word for that system was invented.
You said "pretty much every country" had implemented them, and the name has been around for well over a century, it's actually one of the older active schools of Economics these days, we have hundreds of countries and many more in recent history and none of them have claimed to have implemented Austrian Economics? The comparison remains total nonsense.
> I’m reminded of when Musk had the Ukrainian sea drones disabled in the middle of an attack because they were using Starlink terminals.
The Russian ambassador had contacted him and had told him an attack on Crimea “could lead to a nuclear response,” according to a biography of Mr. Musk by the historian and journalist Walter Isaacson.
Please note that the Ukrainian military heavily relies on starlink for communications, and that Musk thus has an outsize influence on the war. So far as is made public, he doesn't generate any profit doing that, and he's been the target of slam pieces at the slightest hickups in service.
Musk is far from spotless, but your one-sided viewpoint here is in dire need of nuance.
Last I read that story the Ukrainians simply switched to a different
link and successfully re-ran the operation the next day. No nuclear
response. Musk was played. Or rather, Elon Musk is playing at games
above his pay grade. This is a danger of megalomaniac billionaires.
He needs a quiet tap on the shoulder and remind him that his toys can
be taken away.
Just because something obscure was bombed and erased in Ukraine (that you don't really care about) instead of shooting Starlink satellites off the sky, doesn't mean there was no response and that it wouldn't trigger a disastrous chain reaction otherwise.
> This is a danger of megalomaniac billionaires
That is assuming that allowing the use of civilian communications infrastructure for war and high-profile military operations is a norm that should be endorsed, and not just as a megalomanic war profiting as we see with military industrial complex fat purses.
> He needs a quiet tap on the shoulder and remind him that his toys can be taken away.
Can they? And what exactly would be the legal framework behind this threat?
> Can they? And what exactly would be the legal framework behind this threat?
I think it's already happening/happened. Space-X is "working much more
closely with US military from now on" - what exactly that means or
what went down you or I will likely never know. But I am not surprised
at this turn of events.
