Comment by Zigurd
21 hours ago
Sir I'd like you to step out of the car and breathe into this Kool-Aid detector.
Planets aren't going to be colonized like colonies were on this Earth. Economic growth and prosperity have decoupled not only from fossil fuels, but it's no longer a function of energy consumption in general. Humans simply do not flourish without the Earth ecosystem. The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
> The future you paint here is only credible to 13 year-old boys who just finished their third Jerry Pournelle book.
My mom is in her mid 70s and grew up reading Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as a child in Bangladesh. She still imagines a Star Trek future is inevitable. If anything it’s Gen Z that has a small and narrow vision of what’s possible.
Some of us don't share your faith in technological progress.
And sometimes I think Star Trek did more damage to the world than Das Kapital did.
This is not how people are expected to converse on HN.
We should be able to call out bullshit if we see it.
You are.
There is no incompatibility between "calling out bullshit" and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .
There is, however, an incompatibility between GGP's rhetoric and the guidelines.
It isn't about space travel. The AI boosters use it as a pretext for powering more data centers.
And the nuclear power boosters, especially the SMR fans, are riding in the data center slipstream. All kinds of debunked ideas have seen a chance for revival in the AI bubble.
I'm no fun because I've spent a lot of time doing critical path analysis in projects. A lot of planned data centers will never power up because the lead time for gas turbines is a few years now. You can't expect the first SMR to power a data center to come online with in 10 years. And while Bloom has done impressive work making a credible methane fuel cell, they have only a slim chance of scaling up their production to power the big Oracle data center in New Mexico.
There is an exasperating amount of BS to call out on this planet even before we get to wild promises of what's going to be put into orbit or on the moon or on Mars,