Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

It starts well, and then it shows a fundamental problem: not everyone agrees on what a good quest is.

The first image shows a graph where the best quest is "Colony on Mars". It goes on with:

> The quintessential example of successful founders using their social capital for good are the billionaire space cowboys — Musk, Branson, and Bezos.

This to me is complete nonsense. The best quest would be "Survive on Earth", and the resources put into going to Mars are actually counter-productive in that sense. The modern space business is accelerating our big problems on Earth, which are biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy (all of which have a single common cause: abundant energy and our use of it).

Yes, Silicon Valley faces a crisis of nonsense, I agree. But the first step would be to realize what a good quest is. It feels like it should not be too hard (our entire civilization may well collapse in less time than it took to go from the space shuttle to SpaceX), but obviously it's not clear at all.

> The modern space business is accelerating our big problems on Earth, which are biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy (all of which have a single common cause: abundant energy and our use of it).

Earth observation satellites are incredibly useful for monitoring sea levels, tracking atmospheric CO2, identifying methane emissions, measuring deforestation, levels of sea ice, etc.

Sure rocket launches are dirty, but their environmental impact seems pretty minimal; whilst the benefits for monitoring and model-calibration are huge.

Sure rocket launches are dirty, but their environmental impact seems pretty minimal; whilst the benefits for monitoring and model-calibration are huge.

So this argument is kind of made about everything? "x isn't really that bad, so many benefits...". What we would benefit from is an understanding of absolute necessities and things with immense benefit to our quality of life, and then work back from there. Probably tax usage appropriately. Then we can judge how far from the mark "x" is and maybe consider if it's worth polluting or whatever for.

Starlink, very cool tech, is it really required? I'd say no. Save that for once we've decarbonized 95% of the economy by 2030, for example, then we can go launch a thousand rockets maybe.

Another one is driving the kids to soccer practice in an ICE powered SUV, absolute lunacy given where we are with the climate crisis and a great way to contribute to a shit future for your children.

> Starlink, very cool tech, is it really required? I'd say no.

Come back and say this after spending a year living in rural Africa, the Outback in Australia, fighting the war in Ukraine, or countless other places with very unreliable internet. Your whole comment reeks of "I've got mine, so why does anyone else need this stuff?"

Starlink has been revolutionary in rural communities to allow them to access educational/informational opportunities and is only growing in useful and popularity around the world.

Get out of your bubble. It's massively hypocritical to only live in places with great internet and disparage the tech providing it to others who don't live there.

> Come back and say this after spending a year living in rural Africa

Sure. And what will Starlink do for them when climate is so bad they cannot eat?

Er, I'd say it's the opposite, I'm saying Musk probably doesn't need the profits and people in remote areas of the world need a working climate to survive more than they need Twitter access provided to them by burning a massive load of fossil fuels to make it happen?

Which is more useful for the people living in rural Africa: Starlink receivers that cost as much as a village's entire disposable income, or a government which prioritizes education and health?

Ukraine used to have pretty good Internet based on wires and fiber. Which would be better in the long term: more Starlink, or the end of the Russian invasion?

Re: Africa. One costs a couple pennies per day per person, the other dollars per day per person. The latter is more useful, but given the cost difference I'd certainly hope so.

You can provide the Starlink receiver for a set cost and receive a fairly stable return on that investment for this village, you cannot buy a stable government which prioritizes education and health with any amount of money. This is not a fair comparison.

Re: Ukraine, again, Starlink had a fairly significant positive impact, both as a military asset and as humanitarian aid. Ending the Russian invasion? That's something that half the world wants right now and billions have been spent towards that goal. It's an even more ridiculous comparison. If you want a fair comparison compare Starlink to actual competing types of aid.

> What we would benefit from is an understanding of absolute necessities and things with immense benefit to our quality of life, and then work back from there. Probably tax usage appropriately. Then we can judge how far from the mark "x" is and maybe consider if it's worth polluting or whatever for.

It's probably easier to go the other way: identify the largest problems, and try to tackle those. No point trying to fight hundreds of entrenched behaviours and industries to prevent only a fraction of a percent of emissions. Better to make a dent in the big boys (electricity generation, transportation, land use, etc.)

> Starlink, very cool tech, is it really required? I'd say no.

It's certainly debatable. A handful of geostationary satellites can provide basic connectivity; starlink's only purpose is speed.

> Another one is driving the kids to soccer practice in an ICE powered SUV, absolute lunacy given where we are with the climate crisis and a great way to contribute to a shit future for your children.

Right: this is higher-up the list of things that can make a difference. It's only lunacy from a distance: it's often a local optimum, due to problems like car-dependency, suburban sprawl, low fossil fuel prices, gameable emission standards, oil subsidies, under-funded mass transit, vehicle-size arms race, etc. Improving those will change the cost landscape, and give local optima that are less pathological (e.g. kids transporting themselves to soccer practice).

> It's probably easier to go the other way: identify the largest problems, and try to tackle those. No point trying to fight hundreds of entrenched behaviours and industries to prevent only a fraction of a percent of emissions.

Unfortunately, I think we're passed that point. We need all of it. We need to change our society in a much more fundamental way than most are willing to accept. It's not "just" getting rid of aviation and meat, it's much more. We need to rethink society, and we need to do it now.

You've put "just" in quotes, but I don't see anyone making that claim. I agree we need radical changes to our behaviour, societies, economies, etc. The most effective way to do that is to tackle the biggest problems first; that's the best use of time, political capital, activist enthusiasm, news attention, etc.

(I say this as a vegetarian with no kids, who doesn't know how to drive and has spent the last few years working in the public transport sector; knowing none of these small actions will offset even a tiny fraction of the destruction being inflicted by oil companies, their paid-for politicians, etc.)

Sure. My point is that there are not only a couple of biggest problems that can be solved independently. There is one big problem: we rely too much on energy.

Which means there is one solution: we need to reduce drastically our dependence on energy. Everywhere. It's not a simple optimization problem where you can "profile" and solve the biggest problems in order. The only way this works is if we start fundamentally changing society.

Following that logic, do we really need anything? Let's just regress 1000 years?

For all the talk about only doing things that help the climate, I assume you're not in computers and are actually working for some environment focused NGO full time, never taking a flight to anywhere, avoiding driving unless absolutely necessary, not relying on food and goods that aren't locally produced. Practicing what you preach and all?

> Following that logic, do we really need anything? Let's just regress 1000 years?

I think we can agree that we need peace, food, shelter. The thing is that for most people on Earth, it's really not clear that they will keep that in their current life. And it's not just a "only poor countries will be in a bad situation". We're talking global instability now. What happens when you have famines in Europe?

> Earth observation satellites are incredibly useful for monitoring sea levels, tracking atmospheric CO2, identifying methane emissions, measuring deforestation, levels of sea ice, etc.

And we already have them, don't we? SpaceX is making a business out of space, never forget that.

Humans being what they are, this seems like it was bound to happen anyway. We may as well exploit space for profit! Hopefully regulated well (ha ha).

Actually, that's the case for every species. If ants could work around natural regulatory mechanisms (like predators and diseases), they would probably destroy the Earth as well.

The question now is: are we humans capable of controlling ourselves, or are we just too primitive for that, waiting for nature to solve our problem (by killing most of us)?

> And we already have them, don't we?

We have some, yes. More are in development, and launching all the time. For example, this schedule shows many going up later this year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_launches_i...

> SpaceX is making a business out of space, never forget that.

Yes. What's your point? If you want some sort of gotcha about the externalities of capitalism, you'd perhaps do better by choosing a company that's not the only one to re-use their rockets.

> We have some, yes. More are in development, and launching all the time.

But do we need them? We know what we need to do for climate change. The thing is that if we can send more satellites, we will. That's the rebound effect.

> you'd perhaps do better by choosing a company that's not the only one to re-use their rockets.

Well, Saturn V was not reusable, but they could not afford sending thousands of them. The very fact that SpaceX can re-use their rockets allows for a huge rebound effect, making many SpaceX launches much worse than a few one-off launches.

Same goes for 5G: if you use it exactly the same way, it's more efficient than 4G. But we can use it more, so we do. So 5G emits more than 4G globally.

We need to count with rebound effects: do not build new technology that you don't depend on today, because you will depend on it later and it will emit more.

Everybody has its own view on what a good quest is, the space quest can be seen as a way to save humanity, which might on the long term ? When the wright brother were working on a flying machine, people thought it was crazy and useless. But I agree that right now we would prefer to see our top talents working on how to reduce carbon emission, build new alternative of consumption and living.

> Everybody has its own view on what a good quest is, the space quest can be seen as a way to save humanity, which might on the long term ?

I kindly disagree. Nobody wants to live forever on Mars (if you do, you may as well go live in a bunker and never go out, no need to go there). Nobody wants to live forever in a spaceship (for the same reason).

What does that mean? The goal, what people actually want with the "space quest", is to find another planet. Check how far the closest star is (that's more than 4 light years away): we cannot even theoretically go there in any kind of meaningful way, even in the long term.

If your quest is to become a multi-planetary species, you should do theoretical physics on Earth and try to find a way to go that far. No need to solve the engineering problems first, let alone in a resource-intensive and counter-productive way (w.r.t. our survival on Earth).

I find it amazing that engineers don't find it insane to do all the engineering work for something that is, currently, theoretically impossible. It's like building public transportation all over the world based on the idea that we will discover telekinesis ("it doesn't work right now, but as soon as you have telekinesis, it will be great"). Yes it would be cool, but the only sane way to look at it today is that telekinesis is not a thing.

> Nobody wants to live forever on Mars (if you do, you may as well go live in a bunker and never go out, no need to go there). Nobody wants to live forever in a spaceship (for the same reason).

> What does that mean? The goal, what people actually want with the "space quest", is to find another planet.

I highly disagree. After fighting our way out of one gravity well, we shouldn't be quick to jump straight down another (although Mars is certainly easier to get off than Earth).

I don't understand your point. So you want to live your whole life in a spaceship? Is there a reason that would be better than living in a bunker and never going out?

Sure, the whole point is that it's easier to go out!

The spaceship we're currently on makes very inefficient use of material: its shape gives the least surface/livable area; and its density is the highest in the solar system. The resulting gravitational pull makes it very hard to leave: chemical rockets will just about work, but need multiple stages.

In contrast, a more efficient design, like a spin-gravity cylinder inside a hollowed-out asteroid, is much easier to leave (in fact, we'd be flung away, if the floor weren't accelerating us inwards; say, by stepping over a trapdoor!). Whilst such a ship would certainly be more maneuverable than the Earth, it would probably be easier to leave in a convenient orbit (e.g. as a cycler), and use smaller, leaner ships for bespoke travel around the solar system (no point wasting fuel to keep accelerating/decelerating all the gardens, farms, factories, schools, etc. if they're not needed en-route!)

If you can't realize that we won't make it to that kind of science-fiction idea before we manage to survive on Earth (if ever), then I don't know what to say :-).

I assume you mean "survive sustainably on Earth"? That's certainly our most important issue; we'll all be long dead before any off-world settlement could be self-sustaining, either planetary or space-based.

Those things aren't mutually-exclusive though.

> Those things aren't mutually-exclusive though.

Well space research is not a problem, as long as it is research. My problem is that it is becoming a business ("we want to launch a lot of rockets and make money out of it") behind the excuse of "saving the human species and making colonies on Mars".

The space business is a problem for our objective of "surviving sustainably on Earth" (which at this point is synonymous with "surviving on Earth".

This guy Dyson spheres

We need to first figure out aging, to be able to become a space faring civilization. Aging is the hardest quest and I don't think it would be possible because it might be a fundamental thing within the system.

Personally I’d rather we have a populace of people who are healthy fed educated and housed so that more people than the elite can participate in the progress of humanity.

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