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[SirQuiamus]

My takeaway from Musk's latest announcement is that he's lost his last shreds of sanity and credibility, and is well on his way to becoming a crazed hermit like Howard Hughes. I'm really looking forward to the next great firework display, provided that no people get hurt in it.

[Radio Controlled]

My takeaway from Musk's latest announcement is that he's lost his last shreds of sanity and credibility, and is well on his way to becoming a crazed hermit like Howard Hughes. I'm really looking forward to the next great firework display, provided that no people get hurt in it.

Wait, so you want his rockets to blow up and his projects to fail?

[SirQuiamus]

My takeaway from Musk's latest announcement is that he's lost his last shreds of sanity and credibility, and is well on his way to becoming a crazed hermit like Howard Hughes. I'm really looking forward to the next great firework display, provided that no people get hurt in it.

Wait, so you want his rockets to blow up and his projects to fail?

That's a bit like asking whether I want a certain presidential candidate to fail in his daring attempt to MAGA. Trump says he's going to alter reality to make it more favorable to white middle-class Americans, Musk says he's going to stuff a hundred people in a tin can and send them on (what amounts to) a one-way suicide mission to Mars, all funded by "kickstarter, profit, and underpants," according to himself. I'll grant that SpaceX may still contribute to stuff like re-supplying the ISS, but this Mars twaddle is a clear sign that Musk has finally gone off the deep deep end, and is about to crash his company in a blaze of glory.

[andrea]

If this makes Musk crazy, then he has been crazy for a long time, since this has been his stated goal for many years. It is not a recent thing.

[Max™]

Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty hard on the "Mars is a stupid goal" side, because it's just a stupid target, but I don't think Musk is going to Spruce Goose this, and stupid goal or not we'll get cheaper superlift capacity.

[LordBaal]

Yeah I don't think he's going the Howard Hughes way either. It's far more complex than putting people in a tin can on a one way trip and it certainly wouldn't start like that. I think he's simply pushing mankind in the rigth direction to expand our limits.
I would point the rigth steps would be bigger orbitals stations first, then the moon and then mars. But meh, "aim higher" or shoot for the stars or whatever.

[Max™]

My hope is that before the Mars stuff fizzles out we wind up with an established heavy lift capacity that is completely unconnected to the whims of a bunch of old shitbags in DC or Moscow or Beijing.

[x2yzh9]

Okay, so, was playing a game today and(yes, I play games more than I read books. I should do the opposite, yes, but this is where I learn things from! ) I thought about string theory and methods
of possible warp travel, however far off they may be.

In the game stellaris you are given FTL technology off the bat. I'm playing with a mod where you have to actually research it before hand. I eventually am now at this moment researching hyperlane theory, but no more about the game and more about the idea:

String theory is a popular theory that everything in the universe is woven or inter-woven together. Following this theory, if you will, I refer to a verse I heard from one of my elder relatives;Basically,
"the stars sing to each-other". If you look at a popular Let's play of aurora on Something Awful(Yes, I used to be a goon but I got banned a long time ago) there was basically the idea that as they spread out, humanity figured out that stars, and even celestial objects, could communicate by some sort of consciousness. Now, follow me if you will:If the stars sing to each other, and IF string theory is true, then perhaps we could figure out how to go about FTL travel in a faster, more efficient way. Travelling along 'hyperlanes' in the sense that we can only reach stars that are connected to one another cosmically and consciously. This would allow for a far more faster, accessible form of FTL travel. There is only one downside I can think of however.

The ships could get stranded in deep space if they veer off course too much. Someone would have to be manning some sort of navigation console to be able to safely transition from Point A hyperlane to point B hyperlane. These anomalys would likely be beyond our gravity well, near the gas giants or at or past the Oort Cloud. So, when I say space is dangerous in that sense, I do mean it. It's cutting costs to be able to reach FTL for soon, but if it was mastered it would likely be the best way of going about it.

Disclaimer:I'm a high school dropout with his GED. Take everything I say in this post as a grain of salt.

[i2amroy]

But so long as we get an ideal saturation point, and the planet isn't oversaturated to the point of toxicity, or saturated to the point where the planet is a big fire cracker that could potentially burst into flames, which is what happened to Earth at one point and is in fact one of largest mass extinction events in our history.

This isn't a drawback, it's a feature! Built-in purging of any and all native lifeforms as well as self handling of the overabundance of your oxygen producers!

[Strife26]

Any super smart experts in natural/artificial around? I've embarked on a class project where step one is "Become an expert in orbital mechanics"

[redwallzyl]

Any super smart experts in natural/artificial around? I've embarked on a class project where step one is "Become an expert in orbital mechanics"

play kerbal space program? not a bad option really.


also in relation to the mars discussion: http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html

[mainiac]

Any super smart experts in natural/artificial around? I've embarked on a class project where step one is "Become an expert in orbital mechanics"

Step 1: Buy Kerbal Space Program.

edit: ninja'd

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Okay, so, was playing a game today and(yes, I play games more than I read books. I should do the opposite, yes, but this is where I learn things from! ) I thought about string theory and methods
of possible warp travel, however far off they may be.

In the game stellaris you are given FTL technology off the bat. I'm playing with a mod where you have to actually research it before hand. I eventually am now at this moment researching hyperlane theory, but no more about the game and more about the idea:

String theory is a popular theory that everything in the universe is woven or inter-woven together. Following this theory, if you will, I refer to a verse I heard from one of my elder relatives;Basically,
"the stars sing to each-other". If you look at a popular Let's play of aurora on Something Awful(Yes, I used to be a goon but I got banned a long time ago) there was basically the idea that as they spread out, humanity figured out that stars, and even celestial objects, could communicate by some sort of consciousness. Now, follow me if you will:If the stars sing to each other, and IF string theory is true, then perhaps we could figure out how to go about FTL travel in a faster, more efficient way. Travelling along 'hyperlanes' in the sense that we can only reach stars that are connected to one another cosmically and consciously. This would allow for a far more faster, accessible form of FTL travel. There is only one downside I can think of however.

The ships could get stranded in deep space if they veer off course too much. Someone would have to be manning some sort of navigation console to be able to safely transition from Point A hyperlane to point B hyperlane. These anomalys would likely be beyond our gravity well, near the gas giants or at or past the Oort Cloud. So, when I say space is dangerous in that sense, I do mean it. It's cutting costs to be able to reach FTL for soon, but if it was mastered it would likely be the best way of going about it.

Disclaimer:I'm a high school dropout with his GED. Take everything I say in this post as a grain of salt.

You SURE that's what string theory is? Sounds kind of sketchy to me.

[Wolfhunter107]

Any super smart experts in natural/artificial around? I've embarked on a class project where step one is "Become an expert in orbital mechanics"

This series might be helpful, though you probably need to know at least a little bit to understand it.

[Max™]

String Theory is beautiful mathematics that kinda produces something that might resemble reality if certain conditions which are damn near impossible to test hold. There aren't any possible outcomes from a string theoretical framework which produce plausible FTL that are exclusive to that framework. Compactified extra dimensions and silliness like expanding them briefly for a rotation to a different location depends on there being other dimensions at small length scales, might be true, can't say yet, can't even say if we would be able to test for it, much less if we would be able to capitalize on it somehow.

Supersymmetry emerges naturally from various stringy frameworks but isn't exclusive, and we can test for it possibly with the LHC, but so far we've gotten the low-hanging fruit there excluded. Larger colliders and such will let us test for heavier superparticles.

Magic tech might allow neat tricks with superpartners, ultramagic tech might let you perform transforms into and back from sparticles, we're not sure what that will entail, but Baxter used it as a neat idea for a beyond-hyperdrive which included a soul crushing sense of ennui, even for one of his novels, since you kinda got smeared out across the span of the universe you were crossing, so you could feel how freaking insignificant you usually are by comparison.

Hard sci-fi is hardly "testable predictions", it's more like "fun extrapolations" of ideas, and Baxter is crunchy hard if you're interested. The Xeelee Sequence is where the susy drive above came from, along with lots of other fun toys, I still want Nightfighter wings and a Starbreaker badly.

The Manifold series include some of the most beautifully depressing settings and conclusions I've ever seen, though there are parts which kinda resemble stuff Musk is doing with his Big Dumb Booster plan.