Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Defector: Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars
My heuristic is basically: until we can easily control the environment of earth, terraforming will not be on the horizon. Given that we are hell-bent on driving off of as many cliffs as we can, I’m pretty happy to continue thinking that we’ll never get off this rock proper within the ol’ lifespan
And this is optimistic, assuming you start asking when the launch window is correct, and there is a rocket available. (stuff like this is why seeing Musk talk about his plans is so funny, he wants to send 1 ship the next launch window to test the rocket landing on mars and then 2 the next, etc etc. But all this assumes nothing goes wrong, because if anything goes wrong there now is about a year to analyze what went wrong, test the fixes, add it to the rockets, etc (and even if something goes wrong/right, how would you know? There are no camera people on mars, nobody who can notice the issue and aim the camera a that, if you want something like that, you will need to deploy that first (and, then we are back to the first issue, this can fail) Can't believe we are doing move fast and break things for space travel while ignoring the climate change issue. (ow wait, that is the breaking things, ffuuuu).
And most of the issues here are just planning/analysis problems, I have not even talked about the actual engineering issues (which might not even be solvable, the difference between science fiction and engineering is that the later at least knows there are limits). And the financial issues, Musk pockets, while deep (and mostly on paper) are not unlimited, and he already has had to ask other billionaires for help. Sometimes with bad results.
@Soyweiser You're assuming the first Starship to Mars has a cargo of canned primates. Rest assured, it can't and it won't. (Also, I doubt Starship will be ready for Mars—extended duration in space, remember—in time for the 2026 launch window. Although a robot probe as a payload launched atop Starship is entirely possible in that time frame: you don't need reusability, just a bloody big payload bay and the ability to reach orbit once, which Starship achieved as of OFT-3.)
No I assumed the first starship was just a test to see if the landing there would work (that was Musks new plan), and he would send the first loads of [whatever (but not people)] 2 years after that first step worked/didn't work but they fixed the issues. The actual people come 2 years after that in 4 shuttles. (According to Musks latest ramblings I heard, and yes he loves exponential functions (I'll edit in a source if I can find it, but not sure if I will, he talks a lot about a lot of different things, and finding anything about him is hard, so I'm going to have to retrace my steps. Here, he also references reusable rockets, which seems to me like one of those thing which will not be useful re mars for a long long time. Unless we start mining helium on the moon (I'm kidding I saw your earlier post on that). And I think messed up a bit, as he doesn't talk about the ??? step here, so my mind either made that up, or he mentioned that in the past, sorry about that)).
~~My problem is with the whole plan of sending the first rocket there to test if the landing works in 2 years. Which seems like a total waste and a bit useless, and the crazy timeframes after that, the year to fix any problems which come up in the landing before he starts sending cargo. (which is also already strange, I don't think he has really gotten plans what to send, so his six year plan is : test landing, send ???, send people. All while up-scaling the building of more ships). I'd expect him to actually have a plan for the ??? part, and not have the weird rushed timeframes.~~
~~I hope that all this is just because the people at SpaceX just keep him very far away from any real decisions and just distract him with dances and jumping around when he finally is there. Because this sending of an empty rocket first can't be the plan.~~ Seems, I misread his post, as my source doesn't back up my statements, sorry about that. (so it is even dumber, but in different ways than I mentioned).
E: I also wonder if we are even capable of hitting the same place twice on mars, I'm sure it is possible technically, not sure if we can do that yet. How close did the other mars projects hit their targets?
You could build a whole library of articles like this: here's one from early last year
this is a fun read
another I ran into earlier (via an outfit from these parts) is this piece from The Conversation. I wish I could get as irked about linear extrapolation as I usually do, but in lieu of guardrails arresting (and clawing back!) all that shit from all these ghouls...