“The output constitutes many terabytes of data and requires a high-performance computing system to run,” co-author Pawlok Dass, a SICCS research associate, said in the release.”
The largest zip file I see on the zenodo link is 404 MB in size, I’d be surprised if it unzips into anything more than a few gigabytes.
I'd be happy for someone to find more data. I just followed the links: the article links to the release [1] which contains the same quotes. That release links to the paper, published yesterday [2]. The paper contains a section "Data availability" which links to the dataset [3], and it also explains in detail what is inside, unambiguously referring to that dataset. The gizmodo article also directly links [2], so there isn't much room for ambiguity there.
I think the clue is in the sentence "this map is actually a high-level visualization of the data Vulcan provides". The source data is terabytes of data, they boiled it down to a couple of maps with 1 square kilometer resolution. Maybe the next data releases will contain more.
I don't have a clue how we go from this dataset to "down to every city block, road segment and individual factory or power plant". I guess some refineries can be measured in square kilometers, and it's a pretty good resolution for looking at highways, but other than that it seems like an exaggeration.
As a project manager, it sounds like you're making excuses. Just give me a number, trust your gut!
We have a fundamental failure to communicate, what we're doing. The game project managers and finance believe we're all playing is a regression towards the mean, where everything is additive and rounds up to nice consistent formulaic sums. Whereas software development follows power law distributions. A good piece of software can deliver 10x, 100x, or 1000x the cost to produce it (ex: distribution, cost of delivering another copy of software is near 0 once written). You don't get that sort of upside with many other investments. Finance is happy with an NPV 8% above what they invest in. This means that when software people talk, everything they say sounds foreign, and everyone assumes it's because of jargon. It's not. The fish don't know they're swimming in water. When the fisherman comes, everyone is caught off guard.
So we get what the author talks about
> The estimates stopped being estimates. They became safety railings against being held accountable for unreasonable expectations.
We. Pad. Like. Crazy. Yes this is inefficient. Some project managers recognize this. We get theory of constraints. But rather than cull the layers of hierarchy that lead to the padding in the first place, all the blame for failure goes back to developers. Get hit on the head enough and you will stop acting in good faith and pad to save your ability to feed and cloth yourself.
Padding ties up capital, it reduces credibility, it delays deployment, it adds costs through delay. It is bad for organizations. However, it is a great solution if you're a worker in a bureaucratic environment that can tolerate large costs, but is intolerant of 1-day of schedule slips. It's a great solution for complacent management, who are confused about the game they're playing and wants to report that they're "on track", which means "not late".
The agile solution of incremental value delivery is a compromise, and can produce good outcomes for functional changes. But agile has unacceptable failure modes when working on infrastructure and satisfying system constraints. Agile can work okay for programmers, but it's not a solution for engineers. Acknowledging, owning, and managing risk is more scalable, but you have to have leaders who acknowledge that they exist and have the maturity to take on that responsibility.
> Padding ties up capital, it reduces credibility, it delays deployment, it adds costs through delay.
Well done timelines are a negotiation between the stakeholders and engineers. The stakeholders need something done for the business, the engineers give a timeline. If that timeline works for everyone, great. If it doesn't, then the stakeholders will ask if it can be done in a faster time.
A timeline that lands on time, or early, is good. The point of timelines is that teams outside of engineering are resourcing their projects based on your timelines. They may have made outside commitments to customers, they may be lining up marketing, they may have embargoed PR, it may be delivered by someone at a conference, etc.
A project running late can be catastrophic. Bad customer relations, wasted marketing spend, pulling back stories from PR, delays for dependent teams, etc.
You pad to make sure your timelines aren't overly optimistic, because we're all bad at estimating, and it's possible our dependencies are too. By padding, when it comes time to negotiate for shorter timelines, you also have some wiggle room.
Bureaucratic environments tend to be larger companies and they care about schedule slips, because they have more teams being impacted, and those teams are handling larger numbers of overall projects. Schedule slips can lead to cascading failures.
This is very fascinating and a photogenic demonstration of what is possible via gene editing. My hope is that this research leads to cures of genetic diseases that have previously been incurable.
I doubt the efficacy of creating mammoth like creatures, or elephants that have mammoth traits. We’re talking about recreating an ice age creature that, ostensibly we hunted into extinction. But with climate change and a warming planet, even if we were successful in recreating mammoths, where would such a creature live? James Hansen, who testified to congress in 1988 and informed the public about climate change, recently said that the Paris goal of keeping warming under 2 degrees Centigrade is pretty much dead. At 2 degrees we’ll be seeing ice free arctics at-least once per decade. With that future, there’s simply not going to be any habitat for these creatures to live in.
So... Mammoths are elephants. Asian elephants are more closely related to mammoths than African elephants. They were likely genetically compatible. You could probably achieve a passable mammoth phenotype with selective breeding.
Also, Proboscideans existed in many climate zones through various climactic periods. They're not narrow specialists.
Mammoths just happen to capture the imagination, representing the ice age. Megafaunal extinction. Ancient hunters. Rewilding. Etc.
There's still an enormous number of edits they need to make. I don't remember the exact number they said but I believe it was in the several hundred to low thousands range. Meanwhile the rest of the world is mostly focusing on "an edit". It's not impossible, but it'll be quite an undertaking.
Enormous number of edits needed to achieve what specifically? Hairiness?
OOH... any hairy elephant they produce will be "mammoth enough" for most. Elephant + Hairy = Mammoth. It won't be the same species/subspecies as extinct mammoths, but it'll be a mammoth.
OTOH, any number of edits will be insufficient for others. It won't be the extinct species, just an artificial hybrid.
IMO... this is one that's best left as a fantasy. The moment there a little herd of resurrected mammals exist in a zoo as real life animals is the moment the mystique will dissipate.
Of course they capture the imagination... I mean... imagine wooly mammoths roaming the boulevards of Paris... or having wings and perching on top on the Eiffel Tower... sadly no cure for cancer in sight.
I was jesting, but only so. I think we are going to see weird DNA experiments in the wild, because people will do it for shits and giggle (or social media engagement).
We’re going to lose economic growth because of climate change, “Staying under the 2C threshold could limit average regional income loss to 20 percent compared to 60 percent" [1]. Whether it will be significant amount, or a devastating amount is still to be determined. US GDP is $20T, and the difference between low warming and high warming is 40% loss! This means we could spend up to $8T a year to address climate change and it would still make economic sense.
The Inflation Reduction Act authorized $370B of spending over 10 years on climate and energy [2]. This is about 0.1% of annual GDP and about 0.4% of what we could be investing to address this. If we spent even a fraction more, we could rapidly convert housing and transportation to electric, make electrical grids renewable, and decarbonization manufacturing, we have the technology to do this. We can do this, the most important thing is to tell others we can, and particularly people with power and influence.
As much as I'm in favor of moving towards renewables, we are still destroying our biosphere, and the resources needed for renewables are not renewable ...
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
Humanity needs to let go of the fantasy of endless growth, which permeates through our cultures, economies and politics. Life on this earth is a co-op, you can't win by being the last species alive, or at least your wining will look very sad and be short lived. If you think endless growth is a viable strategy, go and ask your neighborhood slime mold in a petri dish what it thinks.
Do you mean that "Before [economic] growth became a thing, [life] was a zero sum game?". I'm genuinely unsure what you mean by that. By any measure, the history of life on earth has seen many ups and downs in biodiversity. So the flourishing of one species often coincided with the flourishing of many other related species. A well-known example would be various pollinating insects and birds and the flowers they pollinated in the early cretaceous.
If you mean "eat or get eaten", then there's a few early red flags that the pursuit of growth and decarbonisation concurrently may well lead us back to that idea. There's a strong correlation in politics worldwide of extreme xenophobia with climate change denial, and growth-focus with "others pollute more than us".
If you think "carbon budget" then it's compelling to grow yours at the expense of others.
We are not confined to Earth. Currently something like 99.9999999% of the energy radiated by the sun is emitted into empty space, where it is completely wasted. That can all be harvested.
To put that into perspective, our civilization could use 20 trillion times more energy than it does now if it harvested the sun's entire output.
A couple of humans can go to space in that they can go up for short stints. The rest of us are confined to earth for the foreseeable future. Even if we weren’t, I’d like the place kept nice.
I respectfully disagree. There are vast opportunities, even on Earth, to expand energy generation without overloading the environment — such as utilizing arid lands for large-scale solar farms and expanding nuclear power, among other solutions.
That said, I believe a robust space economy is imminent, not some distant uncertainty. Starship has already had partially successful test launches, and if it follows the same trajectory as the reusable Falcon 9, we will soon have a fully reusable vehicle capable of delivering 150 tons to low-Earth orbit per launch.
If Musk follows through on his ambition to develop a fleet large enough to transport the materials needed for a self-sustaining Martian civilization, we could see an explosion in lift capacity within the next decade or two, radically transforming the scale of human expansion into space.
Even a post-ww3 nuclear wasteland Earth with climate catastrophe is orderS of more habitable than anything else in the Solar system.
Musk is a scammer and is dumb as a rock on any technological question.
Also, energy is useless if it's not where you actually want to use it, and transporting it is expensive/lossy.
The cheapest energy is one which doesn't have to be used up to begin with, and we could optimize the existing workflow much more, over some child-dream Martian scam.
That is simply not true. A post-World War III nuclear wasteland would be subject to attack and pillaging by roving human bands, whereas a deep space colony would not be. And energy transportation being lossy is not a deal breaker when you can generate massive amounts of energy out in space. Even if you lose 90% of it, 10% of an enormous number is still an enormous number.
It will get more affordable as the amount of infrastructure that is outside of Earth's gravity well — and any other steep gravity well — increases. The thing with the Starship is it allows us to expand that infrastructure rapidly, so we can soon have a sizable industrial base that can access low-gravity resources like asteroids and moon regolith.
Anywhere we can get to at the scale necessary to make significant power, there's not much stopping humans, or at least automated robots, from also going there to attack and pillage.
--
The most habitable place in the solar system, outside of Earth, is Mars.
Mars has 50% of the sunlight that Earth. Owing to the lower sunlight level, it is colder than Antarctica.
The atmosphere is equivalent to taking ours, then systematically deleting every molecule that isn't carbon dioxide without replacing it with anything else.
Owing to the combination of low partial pressure and low temperature, half the atmosphere condenses into the polar caps each Martian winter.
The ground is more toxic than an actual, literal, superfund cleanup site.
It is drier than the actual, literal Sahara.
The lack of oxygen in the atmosphere means there's no ozone layer.
The lack of ozone layer, the thin remaining atmosphere, and the lack of magnetosphere, means it's a high-radiation environment.
PV there also gets regularly covered in dust.
Our moon is even less hospitable, owing to no atmosphere at all and being tidally locked with Earth.
Venus has an atmosphere so dense that it has gone beyond the critical point where gas and liquid cease to be distinguishable, so you could reasonably also describe it as an ocean. An ocean of 465°C supercritical CO2 in which lead occasionally condenses onto mountaintops.
--
There's three currently achievable ways to transport power through space at scale. Optical, microwave, or kinetic.
Optical is either a bunch of mirrors or a laser on the sending side, with a normal PV system on the receiving side. Usual caveats apply, Earth spins so it has a relative night, doesn't work through clouds, maximum power density before PV systems overheat etc.
All EM systems, microwave and optical, share a constraint about focussing: minimal size of target depends on the size of the antenna and the wavelength used. Because microwaves are so much longer (no much freedom to choose a different wavelength as there's a limited atmospheric window), the normal suggestion for ground stations is a 10 km diameter receiving rectenna — that's contiguous, you don't get PV's advantage of being able to split it up.
Kinetic currently means an RFG — launch it e.g. electromagnetically towards a similar coil on the ground that decelerates it to extract the energy. This is theoretically possible and would totally work, but to be clear: it's shooting a bullet into the barrel of another gun, and this is not something we have a lot of experience doing, certainly not at scale or for the purposes of power generation.
There's little advantage in raiding a colony six months away if you then have to spend another six months returning with the stolen goods before you can even use them.
Defending a settlement where the nearest potential aggressor is 50,000,000 km away is also a much easier task than defending one where the closest adversary is 1,000 km away.
With respect to space-based solar power and EM power transmission: my first thought is that a 10-kilometre diameter receiving antenna is totally doable, especially considering how much energy can be sent from space to this one rectenna. Such a rectenna can also double as a PV station.
> There's little advantage in raiding a colony six months away if you then have to spend another six months returning with the stolen goods before you can even use them.
First: If it otherwise takes a year to build them, no difference.
Second: If they're useful for you in-situ, they're useful for anyone else in-situ. Don't need to move an object to take control of it, for exactly the same reasons that the British didn't want to physically relocate the Suez Canal during the Suez crisis.
> Defending a settlement where the nearest potential aggressor is 50,000,000 km away is also a much easier task than defending one where the closest adversary is 1,000 km away.
False. Whether attacker or defender has advantage is not distance dependent, it's tech-dependent. Absolute stealth in space is only becomes impossible when you've already got something around a K1.5 civilisation in the vicinity, before that you can fairly easily hide passive IR signatures, deflect/absorb/otherwise minimise active EM scans, and the defender doesn't have the resources to saturate volume with gravity sensors to spot attacker's mass. Even with Starship, the current state of the art passive and active scanning of the entire planet Earth still has trouble — most recent news-worthy item is 2024 YR₄ which we know so little about that it could be anywhere from 40 to 90 metres. Even just painting that rock black would have meant it never got spotted because nobody wants to waste effort on active radar — and even if we did all start using active radar that too could be fairly easily defeated until it was too late, using even just the relatively primitive cross-section stealth reduction tech of the 1980s, because the scale of space itself makes radar less effective (radar bounces have a double inverse square).
On the ground, you absolutely can saturate with CCTV even now, sufficient for banditry; military-quality stealth is much harder to defeat at scale. Close-in surveillance still available in space, but then you're back to a few kilometres, no distance advantage. Actually it's worse than that, because outside an atmosphere you can do a hard-gee deceleration in the last few seconds, but also you can just let go of some plastic ball bearings before decelerating and have your approach preceded by a deadly shower of hypervelocity radar-invisible shrapnel hitting whatever bits you didn't want to keep, e.g. the existing defence systems. Heck, if it's a military action, they can perform the attack years in advance and with almost total plausible deniability.
> With respect to space-based solar power and EM power transmission: my first thought is that a 10-kilometre diameter receiving antenna is totally doable, especially considering how much energy can be sent from space to this one rectenna. Such a rectenna can also double as a PV station.
Contiguous. And that's per ground station, not total, you'd need in the order of 250 for the default proposal just to reach current Terran electrical power usage levels, or 2000 if you add in non-electrical power usage levels. Name an existing artificial 10 km diameter contiguous surface. Closest I can think of is "an entire city", but even those are not usually contiguous. Well, touching, but not fully filled in, not fully wired up. Not even the concrete and tarmac, let alone the plumbing or wiring.
If you're building stuff at this scale, the resources requirements for the ground stations alone, let alone the space elements, are enough to seriously consider a low-resistance high-current DC global planetary grid as an alternative, and then you just put PV plants in antipodal deserts and get 24/7 PV from ground mounted PV without storage. And the political problems which prevent that being built starting today and over the next five years, are trivial in comparison to the political issues from any significant space based beamed power system, even one which is sincerely and openly designed in a peaceful fashion (which is hard to prove).
The overall power density isn't even much different than PV for a bunch of reasons, including safety, it just gives the possibility of getting powered in what is to our eyes darkness. If you could see RF, it would be like a time-averaged equivalent of a slightly cloudy day, 24/7 — lower peak, higher average, than PV in the same place.
Consider the converse: if you were to design a system that is capable of having an arbitrarily high power density, it's no longer just a power source, it's a death ray. Other governments take a dim view of such things, and will likely cause aforementioned years-in-advance attacks with almost total plausible deniability.
But even then, this is the wrong usage. Use power locally in space for things, don't beam it.
If/when humanity gets to a full K2, suborning that much power generation capacity and pointing it at Earth doesn't look like a grape in a microwave, it looks like Alderaan every 14 days or so.
We're not even politically ready for this kind of change, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons as ancient Athens would not have been politically ready for the sudden availability of Tsar Bomba during one of their fights with Sparta — but that only makes it fortunate that Starship is orders of magnitude too small to cause such an industrial change.
For all the reasons I gave in the previous comment, if you consider Apollo to be analogous to a Kon-Tiki raft, Starship is a carrack, an orbital ring is a highway network, and even if we had one of those we're still orders of magnitude short of K1.
>First: If it otherwise takes a year to build them, no difference.
This overlooks a couple factors. First, a raid requires building and launching a fleet of vehicles — a massive investment in logistics and capital. Second, most materials targeted for raiding take less than a year to produce. Spending enormous resources to steal something that can be manufactured more cheaply on Earth or in situ is economically unsound. In nearly all practical scenarios, the costs and risks associated with long-distance raids vastly outweigh any marginal benefits. So yes, and colony on Mars would be safer from raids than one on Earth.
>Second: If they're useful for you in-situ, they're useful for anyone else in-situ.
This is totally different than the Suez Canal, because it would require the raiding party to want to completely relocate for those resources to be useful. There's no meaningful trade between Mars and Earth due to logistics, so they cannot economically utilize those resources of Mars on Earth.
> False. Whether attacker or defender has advantage is not distance dependent, it's tech-dependent. Absolute stealth in space only becomes impossible when you've already got something around a K1.5 civilization in the vicinity, before that you can fairly easily hide passive IR signatures, deflect/absorb/otherwise minimize active EM scans, and the defender doesn't have the resources to saturate volume with gravity sensors to spot attacker's mass.
Irrespective of the level of technology available, distance imposes inherent logistical constraints. A nearby attacker can maintain sustained pressure, rapid resupply, and repeated engagements at lower cost, while a distant force must overcome long transit times and a vulnerable supply chain.
As for stealth, sven assuming near-future stealth and tracking advancements, proximity still affords defenders longer reaction times and more thorough surveillance.
>Contiguous. And that's per ground station, not total, you'd need in the order of 250 for the default proposal just to reach current Terran electrical power usage levels, or 2000 if you add in non-electrical power usage levels. Name an existing artificial 10 km diameter contiguous surface.
2,000 city-sized rectennas to power all of Earth seems like a great deal.
This 2002 study models a 5 GW SBSP system with a 12-km rectenna that is transparent enough to allow vegetation to grow underneath. This mitigates land-use concerns while allowing high efficiency for power collection:
Starship is only a breakthrough compared to the status quo; compared to the scale needed to unlock even a full K1 power consumption it's about as close as the 25m swimming certificate I got as a kid is to swimming across the Atlantic from Lisbon to Miami… 276,400 times.
K2 is 10 orders of magnitude harder than K1.
Using rockets at all for K2 is a terrible idea, as you are forced to start treating oxygen as a mineral to be extracted from rocks, because there isn't enough in Earth's atmosphere… by 8 orders of magnitude.
It's clearly a stepping stone. If we can transport 15,000 tons of mass to low earth orbit per day, we can set up an extraterrestrial industrial infrastructure for harvesting and refining building materials, so that we don't need to overcome Earth's gravity well to acquire material for space-based construction.
A stepping stone in the way that the Pesse canoe was the stepping stone to the creation of the modern USA.
Actually, not even that.
15,000 tons of mass to low earth orbit per day isn't nothing, but at the same time, rockets cannot ever scale to K2. Can barely scale to K1, but only if you don't mind catastrophic climate change from burning order-of one percent of Earth's atmospheric oxygen.
K2 requires a VN replicator. If you have one of those, you only need one successful rocket launch. Not one per day, one total. Just so long as the rocket is big enough to fit the replicator, that's it.
Hmm. 15000 tons, so 100 Block 2 Starship+Booster, per day. Accounting for fuel-rich engines and methane's greenhouse factor, launching that with rockets is ~150 million tons of CO₂-equivalent per year.
Seems small, but even all by itself that's 3x the maximum sustainable level of emissions — even if absolutely everything else, everywhere in the planet, was completely and perfectly greenhouse-neutral, it's too much.
Shame, really. Mars missions only work if SpaceX gets a Sabatier plant that fits in a Starship, masses less than 150 tons including power systems (or 200 tons on Block 3), and can produce 330 tons (for Block 2) in two years while on Mars, yet no talk from them about work on this because Musk is too busy Muntzing his government.
Your argument is short-sighted. It assumes that success must be measured by immediate scalability to a K2 civilization. The Pesse canoe wasn’t the final product — it was an early, rudimentary tool that eventually enabled modern seafaring and global commerce. Similarly, Starship and current rocketry aren’t expected to instantly create a K2 civilization; they are necessary stepping stones that lay the foundation for future, transformative technologies.
Even if rockets can barely scale to a K1 civilization without severe environmental consequences, that doesn’t diminish their value. Affordable, frequent access to space is exactly what we need to build the infrastructure for later breakthroughs — such as Von Neumann replicators — which could then accelerate the expansion of space-based industry exponentially. Without the ability to reliably launch materials into orbit, we wouldn’t even get close to the point where self-replication becomes feasible.
Regarding environmental concerns, while launching 15,000 tons per day might sound like a lot, the estimated 150 million tons of CO2-equivalent per year is only about 0.3% of current global emissions. Moreover, if we shift industry into space, Earth’s overall emissions could eventually drop, making the trade-off much more acceptable. And that's completely putting aside the potential to synthesize rocket fuel using carbon sequestration, which would make the launches carbon neutral.
And on Mars: criticizing SpaceX for not yet having a Sabatier plant misses the point. SpaceX is trying to solve the biggest pain point of Mars colonization: the immense cost of launching mass to orbit. They can solve the other pain points later or leave it to others to do that.
I think they'd be very helpful for anything involving an airless body, e.g the moon. At least as a bootstrap — when we get going, we might want to do megastructure-scale electromagnets so humans can survive the gee-forces.
(We can't do megastructure-scale electromagnets right now: while they would work and China has a big enough industrial base, nobody on Earth is in the mood for anyone talking about building a 1000km diameter electromagnet significantly stronger than Earth's magnetic field).
Yes, and also there is a limit to what we accelerate within Earth's atmosphere, as it tends to burn up from friction.
So yes, the simpler machines on Earth are mainly useful at first as a bootstrap, and after that it would rather be from the Moon or Mars as a hub, with huge electromagnetic railguns.
Between Earth and low orbit, maybe some version of a space elevator could finally see the light?
If we follow this kind of blueprints, prioritizing electromagnetic tech instead of fossil fuels, we can successfully bootstrap some amount of space-based industry without trashing too much Earth's liveability.
1) "Opportunities on earth" will always be more efficient in many aspects. Cost, waste, energy demand, reliability, throughput to provide for the 99% remaining on earth, the ones we actually try to solve problems for. You are ignoring cost-benefit analysis, scaling factors and side effects.
2) You are betting on space industries to compete and replace earth bound processes but only give launch capabilities as an argument. I think there are vast uncertainties and unknowns to overcome. Even if it plays out as you imagine, it will probably neither happen in your lifetime nor in next generations. All the while we continue to damage your foundation because we chase a pie in the sky.
3) Shooting for mars is idiotic. Going for the moon yields similar results and is much "easier". From there the rest of the solar system gets closer to us but please keep in mind, I am still not talking about self sustaining colonies or industries. Given that our earth still provides plenty, shooting for space in general is idiotic imo. If I had to bet on a technical long shot solution, I would go for nuclear fusion instead of bezos/musk, who I suspect to be equally delusional.
Please read closely. Id like to tell you something about population dynamics.
Maybe you have heard about the malthusian point of crisis, where food demand overshoots supply and a population starts to decline/collapse. This picture is incomplete.
Every species faces 3 categories of destabilizing threats: resources/nutriment, waste products and selective factors (a general term for internal/external stressors like predators, war, diseases, catastrophes, etc). All of our man made problems fit into one of these categories! In the long run, every species has to solve these problems!
Pointing at the potential resources and space for landfills beyond earth will not free you from these constraints, it just extend your grace period and enables you to pretend to have solved anything. An actual self sustaining colony means producing _and recycling_ everything, from the vital technology stack down to every day products. If any tech billionaire ever reaches that awareness of the problem and a solution for it, then why build it in space?!
What we need is a circular, sustainable econmy, which is also a big moonshot, unfortunately. But either way, the realization of the problems we face is the first step. CO2 is just one our urgent waste products. Can you name a second one with global implications?
I agree with your points, which I could summarize as "my 1) is very difficult".
May it be more accessible with mechanical systems instead of humans working outside of Earth?
Anyway, I hope you understand and agree with my main point: to continue economic growth in our biosphere will just destroy this biosphere, quicker than we realize.
Well, its difficult to break our entire civilisation down into a binary destructive: yes/no. On the one side you have the majority not caring to actually solve problems and on the other you have small genetics research teams maybe revolutionizing our waste management.
Going fully sustainable / having recycling rates of 100% / having zero impact on our environment ... is impossible I think. But I absolutely dont need to measure against that hard goal to conclude how much we are f'ing things up. So yea, I generally agree with you, even though i wouldnt put it on economic growth alone.
I agree that Earth’s problems should always be a priority, but I think there’s a tendency — especially in today’s political climate — to be overly skeptical of space exploration, particularly when the private sector is involved. It’s worth asking whether that skepticism comes purely from a neutral assessment of the facts or if it’s influenced by a broader narrative that frames space expansion as a distraction rather than an investment in the future.
The thing is, we already have a real-world example of how a large space program benefited Earth: the Apollo program. It wasn’t just about getting to the Moon — it led to a wave of new technologies that had nothing to do with space travel but ended up shaping industries back on Earth. That’s what happens when you push engineering and science to their limits. Space missions are, by their nature, some of the most ambitious and disciplined blue sky projects we undertake. They force researchers and engineers to tackle extreme challenges, and in doing so, they produce breakthroughs that spill over into everyday life. That kind of well-funded, high-stakes R&D has historically driven progress in ways that aren’t always obvious at first but turn out to be game-changers.
Now, when people talk about space expansion as unrealistic or too difficult, what they’re often really saying is that it’s too expensive. And historically, they’ve been right — cost has always been the biggest obstacle. But that’s exactly what’s changing. Before SpaceX, launching anything into orbit cost around $15,000 per kilogram. That meant sending a single astronaut into space could cost nearly a billion dollars. At those prices, space wasn’t an option for anything beyond government-funded prestige projects.
But we’re already past that era. Falcon 9 proved that launch costs can be dramatically reduced, and we’ve seen the direct impact of that—Starlink is a perfect example of a space-based system that’s already providing real-world benefits. With Starship, the cost of going to orbit could drop by another order of magnitude. If that happens, access to space will go from being a rare, ultra-expensive event to something routine. That completely changes what’s possible.
I think it’s shortsighted to assume space won’t provide massive benefits to Earth. Just like how early computing looked niche and impractical until it took over everything, space development is on that same trajectory. The same people who dismissed reusable rockets a decade ago are now watching them land on drone ships in the ocean.
I just think it’s worth taking a step back and asking: is this skepticism really coming from a place of objective analysis? Or is it just part of the broader push to downplay space exploration, especially when it’s coming from the private sector? Because if history has shown us anything, it’s that ambitious, long-term projects often look like distractions — right up until they change the world.
> It’s worth asking whether that skepticism comes purely from a neutral assessment
My point of view comes from the other side. I am asking how species/societies fail and land on the 3 categories of failure, call it the great filter if you like. I should have pointed them out more clearly, that resources, waste products and selective factors are what we need to solve in the long term. CO2 is just one waste products of the many, that is in public awareness.
I am not downplaying the advances in space flight. I am also not ignoring, that there are limited benefits along the road for the general population. I strongly do object to the hype, framing it as a solution to societal problems though. I hope I made my self clear now.
Calling me shortsighted is the wrong word, I am pessimistic. Shortsightedness would imply that there are actual things to see. I am pessimistic about the competitiveness of orbital solar energy and about the cost-benefit of bulk deorbiting of resources – which still would be unsustainable. I am also pessimistic about upper atmospherical pollution, space debris and even more detached/delusional and politically way overrepresented billionaires on an ideological doomed mission to mars, while earth burns out.
Besides that, there are military, astronomy and telecommunication usecases (intentionally ignoring geoengineering), which I am also not downplaying, they are just irrelevant to our pressing issues. I kind of agree with one label you threw around: “distraction”.
Just pointing at
> progress in ways that aren’t always obvious at first but turn out to be game-changers.
> cost [drops] by another order of magnitude. [...]. That completely changes what’s possible.
> Just like how early computing looked niche and impractical until it took over everything, _space development is on that same trajectory_
> if history has shown us [...] ambitious projects often look like distractions — right up until they change the world.
does not impress me at all. To me, that is just vague gesturing at the sky. Except Computers, which can digitally model anything, which is why they pushed into every aspect of our lifes, space flight has limited use cases and unique constrains. That is the foundation of my pessimism.
To make myself clear: My point of view comes from the other side. I am asking how species/societies fail and from there I focus on sustainability as a key principle for any attempt of solving things. A cloud-castle as a promise of salvation and source of hope for our future does not work for me. On the contrary, space flight delusion _in a thread about the broken promises of carbon capturing_ – the lack of problem awareness generally – angers me every time. We should have sustainability departments with strong regulatory tools by now, but i think elon would disagre with me on that. I am slowly losing my hope living in this idiocracy. Thanks for questioning my objectivity.
I get that sustainability and long-term survival are critical. But space development isn’t an escapist fantasy — it’s already helping solve real problems.
Take climate science. Without satellites, we wouldn’t fully understand how CO2 moves through the atmosphere. Space tech tracks deforestation, ocean shifts, and extreme weather. Even climate models rely on it. Dismissing space as just billionaires playing with rockets ignores how much we already depend on it.
You say space-based industries — like orbital solar, asteroid mining, and colonies — won’t be competitive. But major tech shifts always start out looking impractical. Aviation was once a luxury. Early computers had "limited use cases". If people had written them off, they would have been wrong. Space is following the same trajectory.
I get the skepticism that lower launch costs alone won’t create large-scale space industries. But history shows that when costs decline, new demand emerges. Starlink already proves this. Starship is designed to push costs even lower, making things possible that never were before. That’s not hand-waving—that’s measurable progress.
Now, about closed-loop sustainability. You’re right that a space colony would need to recycle everything. But that’s exactly why we should invest in it. Perfecting closed-loop systems in space improves resource efficiency on Earth. The better we get at sustaining life in extreme conditions, the better we can solve sustainability challenges here.
Maybe space-based solar and asteroid mining won’t scale soon — maybe they will. But assuming today’s economics will never change is shortsighted. Early solar panels were inefficient and expensive, yet now they’re among the cheapest energy sources. The cost curve changed. Space industries are still young — dismissing them now is premature.
You focus on how civilizations fail, but the best way to prevent failure is through innovation. Expanding our toolkit, not restricting it, is how we solve challenges like sustainability.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic to believe space will be a major part of that.
Starship will reduce the cost to send a kilogram of mass into orbit by ten to a hundredfold, meaning the cost will come down to something in the order of $100 or even down to $20 per kilogram, from its current cost of $1,500. This is not science fiction, this is totally feasible in the foreseeable future.
And then what, you put up a cable to it able to withstand the whole atmosphere? Also, what about space debris hitting it, rotating the panels? Each one will be able to align properly or do they need a way to self-align? Do you think any of that will be able to compete with... A dumb panel here on Earth that itself continues to be cheaper each year, or more efficient production lines requiring less power to begin with?
I can see it happening, compounding growth has a way of doing that.
But, given how we keep rushing into predictable disasters, I now expect to live to experience personally, first hand, a K2-level Kessler cascade from the inside.
When people figure out the missing parts of VN replicators, that all happens over a handful of decades.
cool theory. McKinsey estimates a transition like that would cost $275 trillion and take until 2050. that's a lot of money. not only that, we all know the global south will, true to form, come calling with their hands out, demanding that we pay for their stuff too. which would essentially bankrupt America. we're already tens of trillions in the hole; we can't afford it.
just as importantly, since you're making a practical argument for why we should care, your own linked analysis suggests America will experience very little impact from global warming. impact levels run from a bit below +10 to a bit below -30 with zero as no impact; looks like our projected impact is around -10.
if you were assigning America some vaguely proportional cost, we could do so relative to emissions (giving us a $40T bill) or GDP ($72T). both of those numbers are significantly greater than the current national debt. they would bankrupt the nation, cripple the common man with inflation, and screw us out of any shot at reindustrializing.
as usual, unsaid is the massive downgrade in standard of living people expect us to somehow magically accept to build this bridge to nowhere.
You appear to be aggressively agreeing with the person you replied to with your source.
They said the US could spend 8 Trillion a year and it would still make financial sense.
Your Mackinsey report says the whole world should spend 9.2 Trillion a year to make the transition and that it makes financial sense to do so, both due to avoided costs of climate change and that many of the things needed to transition have a positive return in investmemt anyway.
Your own contribution on top of the report just seems muddled and confused given what you've cited.
Are you saying Mackinsey are wrong and it would be cheaper to do nothing? They're very clear even in the executive summary that is not the case:
> The rewards of the net-zero transition would far exceed the
mere avoidance of the substantial, and possibly catastrophic, dislocations that would result from unabated climate change,
or the considerable benefits they entail in natural capital conservation. Besides the immediate economic opportunities they
create, they open up clear possibilities to solve global challenges in both physical and governance-related terms. These
include the potential for a long-term decline in energy costs that would help solve many other resource issues and lead to a
palpably more prosperous global economy.
What do you mean "we?" China has not just indicated but incontrovertibly demonstrated that they do not care about carbon dioxide emission targets. They are massively ramping up their oxidative energy production. So as I see it there are two choices.
One: deindustrialize and let China control all industrial production while having massive carbon dioxide emissions or,
Two: reindustrialize and challenge China's industrial production advantage while having massive carbon dioxide emissions.
Low emissions aren't on the table. They're not a possibility. So at this point I'm deeply suspicious of anyone peddling that fantasy. They are, most likely, spreading Chinese misinformation, wittingly or unwittingly.
China is rapidly ramping up everything, including renewables. Biggest CO2 source in China right now is coal, and PV is much cheaper than coal, so them getting cleaner isn't even a question of them playing nice or thinking long-term, it's fully compatible with their own immediate interests.
Chinese wind project developers ordered 228.4GW of wind turbines in 2024 (2023 96.3 GW, +137%)
The average price was
onshore with tower: 1894 Yuan/kW
onshore without tower: 1513 Yuan/kW
offshore with tower: 3307 Yuan/kW
offshore without tower: 2698 Yuan/kW
In 2024, 121GW of wind turbines were connected to the grid worldwide, 80GW of which in China, 41GW worldwide outside China. In 2023, China added 77 out of 112GW
Reindustrialization isn't possible because you cannot reduce your costs to China levels, particularly if you clamp down on immigration as well. The best you can hope for is to diversify the supply by industrializing other, geographically and/or ideologically closer countries that can produce at reduced costs and are also more dependent on your economy or your military might. A suite of vassal countries, if you will.
Do humanoid robots in America have any economic benefit over the exact same robots in, say, Mexico? Or on a lights-out factory on the ocean floor in international waters? Or on the moon?
Even if they're physically in the US, are these robots driven by AI, or remote control? If the former, does this re-industrialisation create any jobs? If the latter, why hire Americans to control the robots rather than much cheaper Cubans or Vietnamese or Salvadorans?
Much sillier to think "reindustrialization" is possible. It is a problem of social metabolism, not a policy issue. Industrialization was a particular historical phenomenon that has now fully passed in the West.
China "won" before the game even began for the simple fact of them being a very late developer. Development is not even guaranteed as a consequence of industrialization anymore; see premature deindustrialization. No misinformation needed, just cold hard historical laws.
While there is a "CO2 fertilization effect" where rising atmospheric carbon dioxide can initially boost plant growth, scientists are increasingly stating that this effect is reaching its limit, meaning plants can no longer absorb as much CO2 due to factors like nutrient limitations and other environmental constraints, effectively capping the potential for further carbon uptake from the atmosphere.
It rose in the 30 years prior to your 2016 article, it's peaked and it is unlikely there will be any further benefical effects of "greening" (not the same as "nutritional") vegetation .. and this is outweighed by the downsides of increased insulation in the atmosphere trapping more of the daily solar influx energy at the land, sea, air interface.
It would be quite odd if the CO2 fertilization effect has already peaked, given that geological history shows periods with much higher CO2 concentrations, during which plant growth was significantly greater.
In the long run, humans cannot indefinitely alter atmospheric composition without risking conditions that could undermine life’s prosperity. At sufficiently high concentrations, CO2 also impairs human cognition, as our physiology is not adapted to the extreme levels that were once common in Earth’s distant past.
That said, we should remain open to the possibility that CO2 emissions have net positive effects in the short to medium term. If that is the case, CO2 mitigation strategies could be adjusted accordingly—focusing on economically efficient transitions rather than rushing to eliminate CO2 emissions at all costs. This would mean prioritizing the replacement of CO2-emitting energy sources where it is already cost-effective, while investing in R&D to lower transition costs in areas where immediate replacement would be prohibitively expensive.
> It would be quite odd if the CO2 fertilization effect has already peaked, given that geological history shows periods with much higher CO2 concentrations, during which plant growth was significantly greater.
The species of plants were at a different evolutionary stage. Further, a lot of bio matter wasn't in the form of human consumables. Algae was by and large the main CO2 absorber of prehistoric periods.
It took millions of years of growth for plants to sequester the carbon we are currently emitting. That's millions of years of adaptation to the ever changing atmosphere composition.
The optimal CO₂ concentration for plant growth in greenhouse farms typically ranges between 800 and 1,200 ppm (parts per million). Some high-intensity commercial greenhouses may use levels up to 1,500 ppm, but beyond that, the benefits diminish, and excessive CO₂ can start to have negative effects.
The current atmospheric CO₂ level is approximately 420–425 ppm as of 2024, which is significantly lower than the optimal greenhouse levels for plant growth but much higher than pre-industrial levels (~280 ppm).
--
Worth noting that at 1,000 ppm, CO2 begins to impair human cognition, and if we really want to be safe, we really shouldn't allow it to even get close to that, e.g. 700 ppm is probably already cutting it too close.
Here's what a university has to say on the matter [1]
The gist of it, CO2 supplementation can be beneficial to some plants (not all plants) IFF you also tweak all other inputs into growth. Not something that happens outside of a greenhouse.
> Plants may not show a positive response to supplemental CO2 because of other limiting factors such as nutrients, water and light. All factors need to be at optimum levels.
Well, plant growth on Earth massively increased in the 30 years up to the 2016 study. It would be quite the coincidence that it stopped right after that study.
On the other hand, higher weather variance reduces average yields to an extent that dwarfs any benefit from higher CO2. Increased yield unpredictability is a much bigger problem for the agricultural supply chain because it increases average unit costs.
Massively increases vegetation cover while reducing farm yields? I find that highly implausible.
One critical impact of higher CO2 concentrations is that drier climates see more vegetation, so you see a lot of greening in previously arid, barren places. And that also has massively positive implications for farm yields.
No, it is not and the idea that extreme weather would somehow result in more food is laughable on its face. Higher CO2 concentrations also reduce the nutrients in food.
It accelerates plant growth, reducing nutrient concentration per cubic centimeter of food, but increasing the total nutrient yield because the overall boost in biomass outweighs the dilution effect. This is why greenhouse farms pump CO2 into their environments. Your reaction though really demonstrates a close-mindedness about your belief that CO2 is harmful that is anti-science.
But an individual human eats a fixed amount of food. So that fact seems pointless, since people will get less nutrition overall- unless we should all only eat ultra-processed snacks and reserve fresh food for the wealthy?
On what basis do you claim that an individual eats a fixed amount of food?
If you're worried about how artificially elevated CO2 levels affect agricultural products, then you should start taking issue with commercial greenhouses, which regularly pump CO2 in to increase yields. This is a common practice, and only now is it being viewed as something bad or strange because it's not convenient for the climate change narrative that presents industrial emission of CO2 as the apex threat that requires government-enforced collective action to solve.
The build a duplicate distribution grid is effectively what Ann Arbor is doing with its Sustainable Energy Utility, approved by voters in November [1].
The barge company in question is Koch Industries (yes, that Koch Industries). Starting in 1982 they leveraged Deming’s ideas, realized 30% profits, and pushed it far enough to enter the dark side.
> Koch’s dedication to Deming’s ideas eventually led the company into several sticky situations, not the least being targeted in a Senate Select Committee investigation for oil theft in 1988, a direct result of immense internal pressure on employees as part of its continuous improvement program.
[1]
This is powerful stuff. When you empower people and set a goal, they will do anything it takes to hit that goal, including breaking the law.
Half of the point of Deming's books is that you should not set goals. Measure yes, but not goals. Especially not tied to incentives like bonuses or promotions.
This reminds me of a thread posted on HN last week. Someone used LLMs to write cover letters and post on job sites for them. He was able to spam out hundreds of job apps [1].
To me that sounds like a perfectly rational response to fake job apps. When there exists the possibility of 0% chance of a response for a given application, the only rational move is to minimize the investment of all submissions and maximize the number of submissions.
Recruiters and hiring managers spun it as a problem being inflicted on them because of AI tools and the attitude of people applying, with one commentator writing
> Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max… The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews.
On the other side of your argument you have people who see no problem posting ghost jobs, and think it’s a harmless way to boost company morale and increase investor confidence. They see hundreds of “low effort” applications being submitted to them, believe it is a cost being imposed on them, and think it’s 100% a problem caused by the applicants. They see no connection between their behavior and the response they get back from the environment and would see your proposal as absolutely ridiculous.
> The central thread here is collective action by principled people who will use copyleft primarily as a tool for rights of users and for the improvement of copylefted projects.
Joint stock companies are about hierarchy and control. Free software is very much not about that. Free software is a syndicalist movement by software developers. Software developers have taken control over computing infrastructure, we develop it on our own terms. We have settled on a decentralized model, which shares openly, without constraint.
People with the hierarchical mindset hate another party taking ownership because that’s something they don’t have control over. They would be happy to have you hunched over a keyboard desperately typing while they bark orders at you, regardless of whether or not that produces anything of value. Linux and GCC are both inspired products that grew in the cradle of copyleft, they are excellent because of their open development. Meanwhile, large corporations are happy silo themselves into unproductive morasses and play ritualistic political games [1].
Copyleft benefits users because it produces better software. Enforcement is the only card to play to make sure that continues. Unfortunately our reaction to licensing has been immature. When asked about licensing, we’re happy to throw up our hands and say “I don’t care about that” (see WTFPL) and carry on with development as if some helpful person from legal will do the legwork for us in exchange for our wonderful output. The fact is, legal is still in the 19th-century as far as intellectual property is concerned, and are happy to respond in a formal and threatening way to anything that challenges their hegemony. We have to work with our colleagues in the legal community, educate, and give them a place in our decentralized world. Otherwise, we’ll just be workers fighting for our slice of the pie in a rat race, commanded by people who are happy with consistent mediocrity. Users will suffer.
I’ve engaged National, state, and, local officials on climate change. I’ve influenced my congressional representative to co-sponsor legislation, and I’ve influenced my city council to hire a consultant to do a benefit to cost analysis on energy procurement to reduce community wide emissions. I work a full time engineering job, I do my climate work for free on my own time.
Some of my take aways.
* Find your friends and allies on an issue. Got broad agreement on something with your community, adjacent communities, bystanders, and your enemies too! Have lots of meetings, go to other groups meetings. Get meetings with elected officials with your allies. I’d say six people is the sweet spot. Represent as much diversity in those people as possible young/old, rich/poor, etc etc.
* Come to the table with solutions. If you’re seeking the vote of someone for something already in the pipeline, that’s an easier ask than say getting them to introduce legislation. If you need to introduce something, best to adapt similar legislation/ordinances in place someplace else. The more track record a policy has, the better.
* Try to make change as local as possible. You’re much more likely to get meetings with city council members and county supervisors than you are with federal policy makers.
* Build relationships with staff! A lot of elected officials are focused on the connection to constituents, they’re not focused on policy, the staff make things happen, policy advisors are in a pivotal role to advocate. Getting staff on your side is almost required to get policy moving.
* If someone is already doing something, it’s easier to plug in and support their work rather than to duplicate effort. To that end, if you’re looking at advocating on tech issues, my suggestion would be to check out I Am The Calvary [1], which is grassroots public policy advocacy org that grew out of DEFCON.
“The output constitutes many terabytes of data and requires a high-performance computing system to run,” co-author Pawlok Dass, a SICCS research associate, said in the release.”
The largest zip file I see on the zenodo link is 404 MB in size, I’d be surprised if it unzips into anything more than a few gigabytes.