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Comment by sobiolite | Hacker News Reader

New Constructs takes a similar position on all mega IPOs. Sometimes they're right, but sometimes they're wrong. For example, they insisted Uber's IPO valuation was too high due to unsustainable losses, hidden liabilities, etc. Initially they were proved right when the post-IPO stock price plummeted, but in the long term Uber has performed well, become very profitable, and now trades well above its IPO valuation.

I'm expecting a similar story to play out with Anthropic: The stock price will come down significantly after the IPO, resulting in lots of headlines about the AI bubble bursting. But in the long term it'll climb up again and investors who stick around will do very well.

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“Now trades well above the IPO valuation” does not mean something would have been a good investment at the IPO price given opportunity cost and the time value of money. Additionally, the current price could equally not represent good value.

Yeah. Look at SpaceX. Dropped to $108 from an Ipo price of $135, but it's currently at $162 which is... fine?

I suspect SpaceX is going to be the opposite of what will happen with Anthropic. With SpaceX I think the overwhelming majority of people didn't initially understand what Starship is, how far along it is, or what it even means in terms of its impact on the pathway of getting humans to be a multiplanetary species. So it was greatly undervalued and zoomed upward.

With Anthropic I think a lot of people haven't really realized the trend line of cost of "AI" (both in literal $ terms, and compute costs for local operation) or what open weight systems will do to the market in the "long run", where long run in this case means the next year or two. I don't think any LLM company is going to come out a winner in the longrun, because the price for LLM output is going to approach $0 with no chance for a moat whatsoever.

> the pathway of getting humans to be a multiplanetary species

I am afraid that you're suffering from Flavor-Aid poisoning here. We need a reality check about "multiplanetary colonization".

I've been following human spaceflight since I was born. I've actually participated in robotic spaceflight. And I'm here to say that it is robots who are destined to be a multiplanetary species. The robots have already successfully escaped our solar system and extensively explored the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

Many unscientific people believe that it's harder to colonize the Moon or Mars because they are farther than Africa or Rio de Janeiro is from Rome. But mere distance is not really your biggest obstacle.

I've also been following the ISS since its inception, and they have empirically disproven the feasibility of colonizing planets. If we succeed in establishing a crewed Moon base, it will be an ultra-Herculean effort, and it's on the edge of feasibility.

But Mars? Venus? Asteroids? Europa? You really think humans are going to live there?

The reasons that ISS has disproven this are manifold, but I'll point out two key points:

Their supply-chain is only about 8-48 hours, and they can stash large amounts of provisions up there. Their escape route is also only 8 hours and they're back on Earth in a jiffy. None of this is true for any body outside of Earth orbit. The Apollo missions arrived on the Moon and returned safely, by burning, jettisoning, consuming, and abandoning nearly everything they started with!!

A 15th-century expedition to Africa or Brazil means that you can fish in the ocean, breathe the air, drink rainwater along the way. An expedition to the Moon puts you in an airtight bubble with no stops, no rescue, no resupply, and most importantly, no breathing on the way, nor once you get there.

The ISS has also demonstrated the severe toll on the human physique in microgravity conditions. Watch astronauts who land or splash down. They are carted off in gurneys. They are literally unable to walk unassisted. NASA restricts returnees from driving or even jogging. The astronauts describe having to "relearn gravity" activities like brushing your teeth and showering. Any astronaut arriving on Mars would be as helpless as a toddler! Do you want to colonize Mars with toddlers? Because all the treadmills and workouts along the way won't make them fit for purpose on arrival.

So between here and Mars it's minimum six months, no escape, no rescues, no takey-backsies. We could send humans to Mars if we didn't want them to survive or return. I mean, no problem. There's no air to breathe on Mars; no water to drink; no fuel to burn; no fish to fish nor deer to hunt; no steel to build a shelter. You pack it all into the spacecraft, newbie?

But NASA and the rest of the world has amply demonstrated just how capable robots are where humans fail. Robots are going to inherit the solar system. Robots are in 2026, the de facto interplanetary species, sine qua non. My heart is warmed by these human achievements. I, for one, am happy to live and die on Earth. I think that every American should be grateful for Earth, and not permit our oligarchs to cheat and lie to us with fairytales of escaping our Earth.

I fully agree with your points: the hard, unyielding reality which most Trekkie fanatics refuse to acknowledge, except for one: "severe toll on the human physique in microgravity conditions."

That's easily fixed!

Spinning a space station for gravity is straightforward, it's just that the ISS wasn't designed for it, and NASA didn't have the budget to build a second, bigger space station with "extra engineering challenges" on top.

It's definitely practical though, it's just a matter of launching enough mass to orbit.

Like you said, Starship is going to change a lot of things, starting with space station design.

> spinning ... for gravity

Yeah, I mean, I get that the spinning has long been a viable proposition. Perhaps if we send a spinning expedition to Mars, the astronauts won't be toddlers when they arrive on a barren, hostile, resource-free world. Yet, that is a lot of extra mass; that is non-zero extra fuel; that is a lot of extra "stuff goes wrong" risk inherent in that design.

But it's unprecedented, untried, and not currently in any pipeline, AFAIK. I believe there were a few experimental spinning crewed flights, during the original Space Race. But does Starship spin and simulate gravity? Is there any crewed spinning spacecraft extant, in production, or even being designed?

They don't need to spin their way to the Moon, so it would be unlikely that any Artemis or future crewed Moon mission spins at all. But if spinning our way to Mars will solve an otherwise intractable set of problems, I suppose we'd better get started on proving it.

Everything you’re saying is true but it’s nevertheless going to happen anyway.

The whole caring oh so much about humanity simply doesn't pass the smell test for me. I don't want to go into details and individuals, but I just don't buy it; what I do buy is wanting to get a foot into space to get even more leverage over the humans on Earth, and not for our benefit. That actually fits their actions and their aura, so to speak. But "preserving the light of human consciousness" and such? Now I know it's a scam and an agenda. And the more flowery the language, the more sinister I expect the actual designs to be.

There is one core reason that Machiavellianism is naive. It's because the grand long-term ends people seek to create with all of their sinister deeds in the short-run rarely ever comes to pass. Yet all those sinister deeds absolutely do come to pass and are what we all get to live through.

So the most well intentioned person doing awful things? In my mind he's an awful person. But this also goes the other way as well. Imagine you're right, and the idea of getting humans into space is some elaborate scheme to somehow get more leverage over humanity. Awesome! Because it's highly unlikely such schemes will come to pass in any sort of remotely realistic way, but we'll be left with the means of humans actually meaningfully expanding into space.

I'd love to see as sharp increase in the number of evil people plotting to do good things to further their evil ends. All the 'good' people doing evil deeds in the name of some grand end that never happens is quite tiresome.

Do look up CG Jung and the concept of the shadow and its projection.

There are many people who believe the opposite, btw. Earth has a disease. And the disease is called man. The world would be better off without humans, etc. Say that in a pub - you’ll get nods. But say you want humanity to populate the universe, and people will think there’s something wrong with you. Says less about the speaker and more about those who listens, if you ask me…

This has nothing to do with the idea of "going to other planets" and the motivations and issues of certain people pushing for it. The idea that we need to go to Mars or whatnot to "survive", considering the treatment of humans and resources on Earth by these people is just spam from Nigeria to me, at best.

I love going to the beach, but I wouldn't hop into a car with no wheels and blood trickling from the trunk, just because the guy wears a hat saying "I love the beach! That's where I'm driving! No detours, no tricks." and makes grunt noises at me because he never had the patience to even learn to properly mask and come up with a coherent ruse. To make that about "beach haters" is as expected as it is off the mark.

We're not escaping Earth nor seeking to replace it. The entire idea of becoming a multiplanetary species is exactly that. Ostensibly we all started in Africa, and plenty of us are still in Africa. The same will be true on a planetary level, and eventually on a star system level. You said a lot and I don't want this to turn into a wall of zig-zagging tit for tat nonsense, so I just want to speak briefly and holistically. The first missions to Mars will be fully dependent upon supplies we're bringing. The goal of self sustainability is aspirational and long-term. At best it will take decades. In reality, it may never happen much in the same way that no country in the world today is fully self sustainable in practice, even if many could be in theory.

The whole point of the extended stays in LEO are precisely to simulate worse case scenarios for travel to Mars. So for instance the record for the longest time in space is held by Valeri Polyakov. [1] He spent 437 days on Mir in LEO, and then opted to immediately walk upon landing back on Earth. It was all to prove that humans would be physically capable of working on Mars (which has 1/3rd the gravity of Earth) even after absurdly long periods of time in space. In fact his first words upon return from his first (240 day) stay in space were "We can fly to Mars."

Robotics don't really work well for space exploration, because moving parts break. For instance the Curiosity/Perseverance drills are cutting edge yet have a max depth of ~2.7 inches. And traveling is even harder. On average Curiosity ended up traveling about 1 mile per year. It's all because if anything breaks, that's game over. So everything has to be done with the utmost of caution, and even then stuff constantly breaks. Curiosity's drill broke after about a dozen activations and required a team of scientists and months of full-time work to create a passable work-around when it could have viably been fixed on the ground by a human in a few moments.

This is part of the reason that we only learned in 2013 that the soil/regolith on Mars is actually extremely moist, 2-5% water by volume. A cubic foot of soil heated up gets you about 2 pints, a liter, of water. The whole plot-line in "The Martian" about having to jump through hoops to get water was correct based on the latest knowledge when the book was written in 2011. We'll probably learn more in a couple of weeks with people on Mars than we have with 60 years of probes and rovers.

I'm certain every human of sound mind is grateful for Earth. That's not a reason to not seek to expand out as far and as wide as we can.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeri_Polyakov

>empirically disproven the feasibility of colonizing planets

I'm not convinced by your proof. Just send the robots ahead to build the base before humans come.

If you don't specify how long it takes I think the odds of having human basses on the Moon and Mars at some point in the next centuries are high.

See, there is that "simple solution" always proposed in HN comments that solves everything and sweeps away every possible objection. Just send robots.

Look, the GP went beyond "colonizing" into "a multiplanetary species". We have already landed and walked on the Moon, we've established an extremely safe and stable outpost in LEO, but we haven't even colonized Antarctica!

Think about that for a few. We can't colonize Antarctica. It is not far away; it has plenty of breathable air; it's... replete with water, if you will. But still, there are only a few scientific outposts that are unsustainable without constant resupply and staff changes. That's not a colony.

I don't believe we could colonize the Moon. I mean, the astronauts could walk around after landing, and the supply chain isn't absurdly long, but to sustain a Moon outpost you'd need a perpetual supply chain, sending up needed provisions.

I don't know about your definition of "colonize" but, generally on Earth, that means putting down roots and establishing a rather self-sufficient presence that happens to consist of foreigners. How does a colony of ants get established? They find food and resources nearby; they begin mating and reproducing; they build with what they find. The ants are not smuggling in breathable air, food and water over 10 miles away.

The supply-chain to Mars is ~6 months. I mean, you can fly humans there in about 6 months, every 26 months. Now imagine that you have a "colony" or "outpost" on Mars that needs perpetual resupply. Can you launch 26 months' worth of provisions in the short window every 26 months? Can you launch the provisions during the worst-case window, when it will take much longer to arrive? Are you going to send a bunch of provisions up with the robots in advance?

Those resupply logistics are just nightmarish, and they are daunting to envision, even if everything goes right with every single launch and voyage. The margin for error is nil. The opportunity for rescue or emergency escape, is nil. Again, send humans to Mars, but don't expect to get them back in one piece!

So, I contend that even with spinning capsules, and advance-team robots, and even with some magical method of extracting resources for fuel, a Mars colony or self-sufficient outpost is infeasible with current technology, as well as any foreseeable future technology. Sure, set up a "Moon base" but it will always be more difficult than Antarctica, and never self-sufficient. Rescue and escape from the Moon are likewise unlikely.

The thought leaders who are promising "multiplanetary species" are leading you down a primrose path. They're encouraging fantasy scenarios so that young kids will enter STEM programs and pursue science career paths. They solicit donations and support for tech programs that are, ultimately, just part of the military-industrial complex.

But it's all borne on the wings of sci-fi imaginations and not gritty reality. I was just chatting with my parents about how the ISS smells, and how chaotic it is. It's worse than a submarine. It's sending our best & brightest to camp in a hoarder house. They've got a chance of survival if things go wrong up there. On the Moon or Mars, they wouldn't. They won't be smiling, and they won't be growing potatoes.

I looked up where "primrose path" came from and it was a Shakespeare character saying you should be dutiful rather than partying. But I mean you die at the end whichever path and partying can be fun. Similar with space stuff - it may not be that practical but is maybe kind of fun.

Re potatoes you can grow them indoors https://offgridworld.com/growing-potatoes-in-thin-air-with-a...

> the overwhelming majority of people didn't initially understand what Starship is, how far along it is, or what it even means ... So it was greatly undervalued

I don't think anyone was undervaluing the "space" segment of SpaceX. It's the clear leader in launch frequency and cost-to-orbit among the new wave of space firms, and shows no sign of losing that position.

Where the IPO raised a bunch of red flags was SpaceX suddenly acquiring Elon's AI firm, which had a significantly more nebulous basis for its valuation...

> pathway of getting humans to be a multiplanetary species.

We must send our best people to represent Earth. Lets send a trillionaire and the next 300 richest billionaires.

I always wonder: How is it that wanting to deport billionaires to cleanse society of their power is “left”, wanting to deport jews to cleanse society of theirs is “right”, and that those are to be considered not the same (say, scapegoating), but opposites?

Where is the profit in becoming a "multiplanetary species"? How does it make anybody money, besides the rocket man's company?

On a board where many people still think AI is a gimmick and a bubble that will pop, explaining where the economic value of expanding humanity's reach beyond low Earth orbit is, is going to be impossible.

It's possible to believe that AI will revolutionize humanity and that AI is a bubble that will pop. I suspect that this is the more typical view than believing that AI is a gimmick.

Trillions of dollars are being dumped into companies when frontier level open weight alternatives that are able to be run on ever more reasonable hardware already exist. It feels reminiscent of how everybody certainly knew that tulips could just be planted, but people operate under their own assumptions about the world and its future, and sometimes it can lead to quite odd outcomes.

Right. But then frankly, who ever cares about those trillion dollar valuations? That's just rich people doing rich people's silly things with numbers. Meanwhile, the technology is there, useful on the ground, and will not disappear even if the bubble pops.

I tend to frame this as beneficiary vs. investor perspective. I'm a beneficiary of AI, not an investor. I couldn't care less about whose name is on the model, it doesn't affect the way the technology transforms my life, or the world around me.

Think about what you're speaking of at the most fundamental level. Humanity starting to set foot permanently into the cosmos means you're opening the door practically infinite resources, land, and potential for expansion. And the first nation to start claiming territory and expanding outside of Earth will see its overall influence on the future of this species begin to grow exponentially, which will likely turn such into a race. You can already see the outlines of this forming today, but of course we're all still just lining up at the starting line. And this time the finish line will almost certainly be rather more remarkable than flags and footprints.

There are plenty of resources, land, and potential for expansion right here in earth. The reason it's not done is because it isn't economically viable. If it's not economically viable here, how could it possibly be so on another planet?

There is literally no unclaimed/unrestricted land left on Earth. Every single inch of this planet, no matter how barren, has been claimed or restricted from claims.

And I don't think the reason things aren't done isn't because they aren't economically viable, but because there's no interest in doing them. Could somebody start a megacity out in the middle of nowhere? I mean probably, and it might even be a good idea, but things like this require a visionary to get them going. Electric cars prior to Elon were glorified go-karts for virtue signaling hipsters. It's not that they were inherently viable, but nobody had really shown the path forward yet.

And here there's already major interest and money behind it, so getting started won't be a problem. And from that point, the path forward will become ever more clear.

While I think SpaceX is still horribly over-valued they at least have a diverse line of businesses that are very hard to copy.

Anthropic is a one trick pony and the world is discovering lots of other cheap ponies that do the same trick.

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