Comment by chasil
20 days ago
Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.
Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).
We also do not yet have the technology for a complete survey of nearby habitable planets.
It is not an encouraging line of thought.
>Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.
This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time.
It rarely has to do with the possibility of the genre actually happening in reality. A story is good because it is riveting and the backdrop (whether sci-fi or fantasy) is just icing on the cake. Look at Harry potter and practically every fantasy story out there.... none of those stories have any chance of happening in our current reality... yet they are popular.
I think the answer for as to why there's less interest in sci-fi is pretty mundane. It's like genetic drift, but this one is cultural. For no reason at all our interests just shift because of luck. There happened to be more good stories written in the fantasy genre and that's the direction everything shifted.
Tbf though the MCU was more sci fi than anything and that every genre out of the water in every medium all the way up until endgame. Say what you want about it but the popularity of that universe dwarfed everything else in the last decade... which goes to show that it's likely mostly just drift.
> >Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. > >This makes for more epic story telling though. I've seen sci-fi stories span eons due to the vast distances limited by speed. Even at light speed it still takes a huge amount of time.
Here's one such example: [The Destination Star by Gregory Marlow](https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-destinatio...)
Also great on the same topic - The Forever War by Joe Holdeman[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War
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That was fantastic thanks for sharing.
> and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way).
Well, that could be worked around in the world building. My favorite SF-friendly scenario would be if life originated in the Sun's natal cluster (perhaps not around the Sun itself), with tens of thousands of star systems, and spread between them before the cluster dispersed. Presumably panspermia would be much easier in such a situation because the stars are closer together and because maybe residual gas could help particles get trapped near other young systems. In this case all the "infected" systems could have the same coding.
A nice consequence of this scenario is it's compatible with the Fermi argument: even if origin of life is unlikely, it just had to happen once here, and so it not happening elsewhere in the galaxy (or even visible universe) is not a problem.
Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?
Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
Science Fiction doesn't have to be fantasy, it can be speculative. But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.
Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
"But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real."
No, it just has to be grounded in something consistent and if the book starts by explaining the mechanics of the world(or is in a world with known mechanics), a detective story very well can work.
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FTL starships in an SF story don’t need a detailed explanation, just a new invention.
It’s the exact same thing as a speculative story in the 1920s discussing supersonic flight, even though the jet engine hadn’t been invented yet.
For instance “Tunnel in the Sky” bypassed the whole issue in the 50’s, later imitated by “Stargate”…
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> But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative.
Agreed but only because "some effort" could be as little as a single paragraph.
> But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects.
If you only change a tiny bit, this isn't a major issue.
> The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
That specific story falls apart but you could have lots of thematically similar stories with FTL. No need for "serious justification" unless you're trying to pull it out of nowhere halfway through the plot. If it's there from the start, there's no problem.
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30s to 60s, sci-fi wasn't just driven by the "makes for great stories", but by the optimism for scientific advacements and the idea that these could get within reach in the future.
It was "science fiction" and not merely "space fiction".
Presumably these are equally likely because you could build a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing though)?
Dragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.
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These two examples are not equally unlikely. They are of different orders of unlikelihood, the one is extremely unlikely, the other simply impossible.
Genetically engineering and then riding a dragon actually sounds easy in comparison to creating FTL travel.
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> Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon
No, because one is theoretically impossible while the other is theoretically possible.
Creating some sort of genetically-engineered dinosaur-derived ‘dragon’ may be more plausible than actually reaching another star system. It’s not going to breathe fire though.
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> Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?
No, but we've become increasingly superstitious, and cultish. A lot of the day to day parts of sci-fi (screens everywhere , instant communication) have become reality so it's not as exciting anymore. Sci-fi no longer serves as escapism. Anymore, it reminds us of our limitations.
With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets.
A species with that kind of capability would be able to visit another solar system in 10,000 or so years but might care less to mess around with dry little solar system bodies like the Earth. The case against "grabby" aliens is that Ceres and Pluto are still here, not that we can't find evidence of them on Earth.
I like to imagine that if that kind of interstellar traveler were to visit Earth it might take them a few decades to perfect a "reverse space-shuttle" because they'd gone 10,000 years without doing anything like that... And they can't just 3-d print one out of 10,000 year old plans because they've improved their 3-d printers to print the stuff they've been printing all that time better.
A true spaceborne civilization, assuming anti-gravity isn't in there bag of tricks, probably wouldn't bother with the gravity well planets.
I feel like for this reason we should be focused on colonizing asteroids rather than the moon or mars. We can do various tricks to get artificial gravity via centrifugal force. For example if the asteroid is solid enough, we can consider putting it into a spin. If it's not solid enough, we can consider laying a track around the circumference and/or boring a tunnel around the circumference and essentially having the habitat(s) constantly rotating around the asteroid.
Exactly. Those kind of people could support much larger populations than the Earth with a lifestyle they find comfortable in interstellar space and would look at living on Earth at best the way we look at living on Mars.
There is a scene in Pirates of the Carribean where captain jack is stuck in a void surrounded by duplicates of himself. It is his hell. As we have biult better and better telescopes we realize that as we expand into space we will be stuck talking only to ourselves, at least for a few thousand generations.
When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment. When areicebo fell and was not immediately rebiult, i realized that most people just dont care about ever meeting another civilization. Even if we did find one it wouldnt change much here on earth. Most people dont care about climate change. They dont care about anything beyond their own lifetime. What matter will aliens be if they are a thousand lightyears away? So people dream now about other things, about grimy politics and alternative history.
>When they turned LIGO on i wanted to see warp drives whipping around. But all we saw was distant black hole mergers; interesting but not exactly a star trek moment.
• The LIGO methodology is to look for hyper-specified patterns in voluminous reams of apparent 'noise'. It wouldn't be unfair to call it an extensively aggravated search for what one is looking for. That's okay, so long as they provide the stats to back up the non-noisiness of what they turn up. (I'm not a stats person and can't debate that, and. I trust their caliber enough that I don't feel the need to). But to your point, if there are other signatures lurking in LIGO data _that they don't know already how to look for_, then there is no reason why a paper would have gotten produced describing it since the first GW detection in 2015.
• Now, take this for what it's worth in terms of fragmentary information relaying - But at the first Sol Symposium in 2023 at Stanford, I can tell you that in podium-level banter between talks (perhaps it was Q&A and the like IIRC) it was asserted that the LIGO consortium was not allowing studies (read: not allowing access to its data) where the investigator's intension was related to UFO / UAP phenomena (like, extrapolating here, looking for signatures correlated with external reports of UAP sightings). If that claim was borne out, than perhaps the LIGO consortium is just doing preemptive reputation protection in not allowing such studies to kick off with its name associated with it. (One could attempt to follow up with astronomer Beatriz Villaroel for a lead on who said that or if there's substance to that research policy claim)
But my point is, between these two bullet points, you are afforded a complete 'empty set' - and decidedly not a 'negative result' - on whether or not LIGO has detected signatures of a 'warp drive' or other some such non-prosaic phenomenon.
If LIGO can detect mergers at billions of lightyears, i doubt they could ignore the "sound" of the NCC-1701 passing through our solar system. Proper access or not, there are enough scifi geeks with access to LIGO data that someone would get the word out.
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The Chinese built a much larger spherical telescope, so what was the point of rebuilding Arecibo?
I visited Arecibo a decade before it collapsed. It was impressive and of great historical value, but could repair be cost-effective?
Edit: It did have some unique features.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
Rebuilding it would cost maybe half a billion dollars. Give ICE an unpaid week off and job done. Maybe not the absolute best way to spend that money on science, but I fear the actual outcome is “it’s not cost effective so we’re not going to spend it on any science.”
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> the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology.
Spoken like someone who's never read Tau Zero
Stephen Baxter's short story "Pilot" is another good one:
https://www.stephen-baxter.com/stories.html#pilot
Nothing about Tau Zero refutes what the parent wrote. It reinforces it.
Plus, even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream.
> even Tau Zero's initial premise is a pipe dream
You mean Sweden as a world superpower? :P
Have you read the book?
They travel across the known universe in less than the span of a human lifetime.
OP said "tens of thousands of years of travel".
Or are you being deliberately obtuse about relativistic time dilation?
Spoken like someone who’s never read the Relativistic Rocket: https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/...
I really find it hard to understand how people confuse science fiction with reality. I love Tau Zero - I first read it over 40 years ago - but it’s fiction, ffs.
Also they have trouble stopping in Tau Zero so they have no choice going further than they planned. It's one of the best sci-fi novels of all time, read it!.
That Bussard Ramjet, though, is thoroughly discredited. It can't possibly work. Hydrogen hydrogen fusion is a terribly slow nuclear reaction and if you had to stop the gas to give it enough time to react, you'd end up stopping the rocket not accelerating it. In fact, the most credible use of that kind of magnetic scoop is as a brake!
That's true, but stop to consider all the things we ARE doing...
* Space Station that lasts 25 years
* 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service
* Mars rovers that run for 10+ years
* Flying helicopters on Mars
Stop to consider them for what purpose? Thinking they're cool? Yeah they're cool. But they have very little to do with interstellar travel, in the way that a canoe has little to do with investigating deep-sea vents.
We call it a "space" station. It's a glorified LEO station.
It's more like a laboratory, and less like a ship/bus/train "station".
> Space Station that lasts 25 years
A small station, hosting a small number of people, orbiting very close to the surface of the Earth.
> 3,000 satellites providing Internet Service
…very close to the surface of the Earth.
> Mars rovers that run for 10+ years
On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on. Notably, we have nothing but melted slag on Venus.
> Flying helicopters on Mars
On the closest planet to Earth that our equipment can survive on.
I don’t mean to detract from the achievements of our space programs. But we have to be realistic: we’re exploring the easiest bits of our local neighborhood, that’s all.
The Kurzgesagt video on teraforming Venus is interesting. It only takes a thousand years, assuming perfect execution.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WO-z-QuWI
This is motivated pessimism. We knew in the 50s that breaking the speed of light was highly unlikely. We dreamed of the stars anyway. Now we refuse to dream, or to even attempt to solve the problems (a common pattern when discussing spaceflight is people who are blatantly searching for problems, rather than solutions), because we are pessimistic, devoid of imagination, and seek to legitimise our collective depression through scientific and engineering arguments.
You don't need to break the speed of light to get to the stars. Time dilation and space contraction mean that you can get there in as little time as you desire.
Everyone you knew on earth would be dead by the time you got back, but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all. (The rocket equation, however, presents stupendous engineering challenges.)
Time dilation and space contraction only matter if you can reasonably achieve speeds of a significant portion of the speed of light. AFAIK nobody has even come up with a reasonable way to achieve this for lightweight probes, let alone for hundred-ton ships capable of carrying humans. And let's not forget the practical problems like all photons incoming from the front being blueshifted into ultrahard radiation that would make a point blank nuclear bomb seem like a small candle.
Realistically even getting to the nearest star in less than 400 years experienced time is way way WAY out of reach for now.
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>but if it's just about you, the speed of light is no limitation at all
It's a huge limitation, even just getting propelled to "big enough speed", say 1/10 the speed of light.
We barely do 1/1500 the speed of light, in unmanned probes, and only because we sling shot on Solar gravity, not as propulsion or anything, and at 1400 o Celcius, plus deadly radiation, not to mention any micro-meteor as big as a particle of dust could kill someone there).
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> Time dilation and space contraction mean that you can get there in as little time as you desire.
This is confusing science fiction with physical reality. See e.g. https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/... for a reality check.
Don't even need to do time dilatation - just make you lifetime longer by techjlnical means (ideally almost infinite) and you will be in the next star sumystem before you figure out how to exit your VIM session.
I don't think it's motivated pessimism so much as a shifting tastes and changes in media. There are tons of SF stories with starships in movies, games and streaming platforms. It just happens to be the case that fantasy is more popular then SF at the moment where books are concerned.
That would only rule out stories based on interstellar travel, which is a tiny subset of what you can do in space. After all, you'll just end up inside another solar system that won't be much different from ours. The planets will be in different orbits but there will most likely be an asteroid belt and the effects of temperature will remain the same even if the planets are in different temperature ranges from our planets.
If earth is big enough for fantasy, then the solar system is plenty big enough for science fiction.
If you wanted to watch hard science fiction I would recommend watching anthrofuturism on YouTube who focuses exclusively on the moon.
Our astrophysicists don't even know why the universe is expanding, don't know that Lambda CDM is correct, don't know if things are universally consistent, yet we're so damned sure this is it.
We don't even know that this isn't a simulation. Not non-falsifiable, sure. But we're convinced we're bound to this solar system with our crude tools and limits of detection.
One new instrument could upset our grand understanding and models. Maybe we should wait until they get better hardware to marry ourselves to their prognostications of the end of time.
During the postwar years of plenty, people stopped dreaming. We had bold dreams before WWII, but people stopped looking at how far we'd come and started comparing themselves to everyone else. We had no mortal enemy, tremendous wealth, and "keeping up with the Joneses" became the new operating protocol.
We have more than we did in the past. The manufacturing wealth of 1940-1970 was a fluke. The trade wealth of 1980-2020 was a fluke. We were upset over an unfair advantage that won't last forever. Even today we're still better off than a hundred years ago, yet everyone focuses on how bad things are.
Maybe a return to hardship will make us dream again.
We do know why the universe is expanding. That's due to general relativity. That's well attested to high confidence.
We don't know why the expansion is accelerating. For that we have only speculation.
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I have upvoted you, and perhaps you are right that there are shades of pessimism in this perspective.
The 2020s have not been known as reasons for great optimism. The pandemic and AI culling clades of the job market have been traumatizing experiences.
If you think this is something that started in the 2020s you need to review the chart.
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I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now. There would have to be considerable R&D, and willpower, and it would be very expensive but I think it is within our powers. Humans would have to live underground and deal with dust, maybe microbes in the case of Mars, but we could do it. The spaceships to go to Mars would have to be big but they could more easily be built on the Moon due to the lower gravity.
> I believe we already have the resources to colonise the Moon and maybe Mars right now.
That is or was essentially the mission of the US government's Artemis program, as I understand it. Some elements of the plan are (or were):
'Civilize' (my word) the Moon - build PNT, situational awareness, communication infrastructure, bases, permanent human presence etc. Bring it within a normalized region of operations, like Earth orbit (though obviously much more expensive and less utilized). A benefit is developing plans for infrastructure and operations on Mars, in a much more friendly and less expensive environment. What does it take to support humans efficiently and reliably on another body?
Also conduct experiments and develop technology for Mars in cislunar regions - again, much friendlier and less costly.
It's easy if you can build some kind of machine like what Eric Drexler talked about that could manufacture absolutely everything. Otherwise it's impossible.
The best hope for that is to send the one thing to Mars that people absolutely refuse to send to Mars which is bacteria and yeast and microbes. That could be a synthetic biology platform that could make pretty much all the molecules you need and then you assemble them with 3D printing or something like that.
We could send ten thousand workshop machines, a thousand huge forges and presses and reactors, and enough people to run them and all the farms and chemical vats they use those machines to build. Is that not enough manufacturing capability?
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You don’t need to go faster than light. Once you approach anywhere near the speed of light, time slows down so much that journey time becomes irrelevant.
Interstellar space contains neutral hydrogen atoms. Hitting a spaceship, they would produce electromagnetic radiation. When the collision speed goes past about 0.25c, the radiation becomes hard gamma rays which are dangerous to living things, and cannot be efficiently shielded against.
At this speed, the time dilation is slightly above 3%, so you're still not going to reach even Alpha Centauri in one human lifetime, or maybe you barely can.
Alpha Centauri is only 4.2 light years away. 0.25c is definitely enough to reach it. You could even do a round trip in only your adult years.
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Right, we are never leaving. We should get comfortable here, and take better care of the only habitable planet, rather than doing insane things and justifying that as "Don't worry, we'll make Mars habitable" and other silliness.
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Not if you want to go back home to the place you once knew though
> Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible
I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL? I've no doubt there's a handful of works but this is hardly a plausible explanation for a _recent_ decline in these topics.
> I'm confused at what speculative fiction exists from before the 1910s (or thereabouts) which involves FTL?
I bet very little. We didn’t really know how enormous the universe is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax: “Being very difficult to measure, only about 60 stellar parallaxes had been obtained by the end of the 19th century”), and we hadn’t known for long that the speed of light is an absolute speed limit.
The weird thing about this is that interstellar space ought to actually be very hospitable to cold, highly efficient computational substrates. (This is for standard thermodynamic reasons: reliable computation must be free of noise, and low-temperature means low noise.) So there might be 'life' of a sort in interstellar space that's extremely smart and naturally long-lived compared to humans or even ordinary room-temperature AIs, but just can't do all that much in the outside world (i.e. has very low agency), except very slowly and with exceptional effort.
(Of course, these same constraints apply in a relative sense to the outer regions of planetary systems.)
Optimistic views of the future see those as problems that can be solved, which helps the consumer engage with the story.
Pessimistic views see those as insurmountable problems that shouldn't be bothered with, making the stories seem more ridiculous.
Maybe, but the most compelling scifi to me personally is the generation ship stuff, like Ring by Steven Baxter.
And then there’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. (Anthony Doerr)
> the vast distances to other habitable planets
We won't be crossing interstellar distances to look for habitable planets — we'll do it to mine material to build more of our own habitats, to spread further. We don't need to find planets to live on.
> we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible
Would any of the stories about the characters’ relationships with people not traveling with them be entertaining given the effects of time dilation?
Acceleration at 1g lets you get to another galaxy in a single human lifetime (although earth will have been swallowed by the sun by the time you arrive). Relativity is pretty counterintuitive.
This is a very strange argument.
Are you seriously saying that people realizing that FTL travel is impossible makes people more interested in stories about magic?!?
And yet we still have a solar system, empty of life other than Earth, we can expand to. Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river?
Two things baffle me:
1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.
2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
2. I’m a big fan of the guy, except he went completely off the rails on political stuff… It’s hard that both can be true at the same time.
There are a lot of ethical issues surrounding Neuralink and how it would be used. It might be good for certain medical stuff but I can see how it can be abused.
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I remember Musk being much more popular hereabouts and in my IRL circles 10 years ago.
That things moved from that to outright vilification is entirely due to how he behaved since then.
>Why try to cross an ocean when everything we could want is across the river?
That "river" is still vast and nothing we want is on the other side.
>1. The idea that Terran life is toxic and must not be allowed on other planets in the solar system.
It's less the idea that Terran life is toxic and more that we're still hoping to find some forms of primitive life elsewhere in the solar system, and don't want those efforts thwarted by cross-contamination. You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
>2. The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds is routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.
Suffice to say that owning a rocket company doesn't absolve a person of their sins to everyone, even on Hacker News.
> nothing we want is on the other side
Wow.
> You decided the rest of the solar system is dead, not the scientific community.
The odds are heavily stacked against other life existing, and get worse with every probe. Of course, nobody can prove there is no other life. And it's not very credible that Terran life will out-compete locally evolved life.
And the idea that preserving some slime mold on Pluto justifies us constraining ourselves to Earth is just sad.
> If you really can't comprehend the reason why Elon Musk is villified by people then there's no point in trying to explain it to you.
I once asked another Musk-hater on HN why? All he could come up with is Musk called a diver a pedo-boy. I pointed out that Musk only did that because the diver went on national TV and told Musk to shove his submarine up his backside.
If you've got a better reason, I'd love to hear it!
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1) There may well be other biospheres in the solar system. There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking and Venera, as well as more recent research. Earth life could be destructive to native life in these places, and vice versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.
2) Musk is putting a lot of money into these things but he is still heavily subsidised by US government money and facilities (a loophole in the Outer Space Treaty allows individuals and corporations to claim other planets but not countries.)
> There is some indirect and inconclusive evidence of microbial life on Mars, and even in the Venusian atmosphere. This dates back to results from the Viking and Venera, as well as more recent research.
Yes, I've been hearing that forever. Every probe shrinks the envelope on the possibility.
> Earth life could be destructive to native life in these places,
Better us than slime mold.
> and vice versa (since they would likely be extremophiles) resulting in invasive species.
Perhaps. If anyone was transporting things back from there, there'd be a long space voyage where any such toxicity to the astronauts would be pretty clear.
2. Musk is not getting subsidies. He does get government contracts, where he exchanges rockets for money. That is not a subsidy, like if I make boxes and sell them to the government I am not getting a subsidy.
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I don't really see anyone complain about Jeff Bezos these days?
1. It is, until proven otherwise
2. Which guy?
> The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds
The overwhelming amount of the work is done by NASA, ESA, CNSA (China, going to the Moon), and other space agencies. Musk has built orbital rockets.
> routinely vilified and excoriated on HackerNews.
That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims?
> Musk has built orbital rockets.
Musk has built lots of cheap orbital rockets. That changes everything.
> That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims?
See the other responses in this thread.
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