timschmidt

I checked the publicly released stats over Starship's development, and this is what I found: compared with the initial ~5,000 t / ~73.5 MN concept, the latest V3-class Starship/Super Heavy is trending toward roughly 35%+ more loaded propellant mass and about 40% more maximum liftoff thrust if you use the FAA’s ~103 MN figure. Payload capability has also moved upward from the early 100+ t reusable LEO baseline to SpaceX’s current public claim of up to 150 t fully reusable and 250 t expendable.

When I plug those numbers into https://www.aerovia.org/tools/rocket-equation I get Delta-Vs in the 28k km/hr range right where I'd expect for orbit.

You got a different rocket equation?

I don't see any reason a non-renewable Starship upper stage would kill the economics of the vehicle. No one else has a renewable upper stage yet, so there's no competition in that space until someone else does. Stoke have an interesting design but it hasn't flown yet and is only about the size of Falcon.

If they do manage to reuse the upper stage, then they should have no problem exceeding falcon launch cadence. Starship is much easier to build than Falcon. Welding is simpler and less expensive than the carbon composites used on Falcon upper stages.

The 160 launches figure includes falcons. Seems like Starship fuels and flight tests faster than Falcon though. And if they manage to reuse second stages, then that eliminates a significant manufacturing bottleneck.

They've been approved for 44 Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and are aiming for 160 total launches in 2026. They've recently purchased a giant tract of land in Louisana to build a third starport. 222/year is looking doable.

They seem to have constructed a rocket with 10x the payload to LEO of the one they used to put those 10k satellites in orbit, and even demonstrated payload deployment. So I'd say 100k looks do-able for them today.

10x that seems aspirational, but not comically so. Folks hate Musk, but that seems to cause them to not see the engineering going on in front of them.

SpaceX has consistently launched ~90% of the mass to orbit for the whole planet Earth over the last several years[1][2]. There's no one else who could more credibly make such a claim.

1: https://officechai.com/stories/spacex-launched-85-of-all-glo... 2: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/05/spacex-launching-87-90...

It's really amazing how much more connected the world was not very long ago. Take a look at 24k years ago here: https://sea-level.vercel.app/ Nearly every continent is one connected landmass. And all the most prime real estate is now under water.

I hear you. I think we are already seeing some middle ground with agentic systems using RAG, skills.md files, etc. It's a sort of disassociated card catalog memory. An engineer's notebook. Not the integrated, correlated, pre-processed set of relationships in the model. How to go backward from the notebook -> model cheaply without tanking performance is definitely one of those billion dollar questions.

They can form new associations between concepts via their input prompts and thinking text. That is a form of learning. Just not very durable. I liken it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia

It's been pretty clear in my experience that experts tend to be capable of working with the same ideas in many different forms. That's what I would call mastery. It implies "complete" knowledge, which probably means several interrelated encodings with loci in different parts of the brain. Those interrelated encodings will be highly associated, and discerning in an expert. Which implies a high degree of usefulness and specificity in communication. This matches my experience.

No, it really doesn't presume anything about brains or information encoding. Just points out that there is a level of mastery in which all the techniques and all the forms have names or adequate descriptions. Teachers often attempt to achieve this, to facilitate education.

I think there's a level above that where the words to describe such structure are familiar and readily available and hey guess what? The model understands those too. Just about every pattern has a name. Or a shape. Or an analog or metaphor in other languages or codebases. All work as descriptors.

It turns out an awful lot of precision (plenty for many things) lives in library and web APIs, documentation, header files and dependency manifests. Language can literally just point at it without repeating it all. Avoidance of mistake through elimination of manual copying in things like actuarial and ballistics tables was what the original computers were built for.

Here's a review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02773...

More:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1411762111

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08769-7

https://www.academia.edu/9737879/Land_Beneath_the_Waves_Subm...

https://pure.york.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/under-the-sea...

Yes, polar regions are reliably colder than equatorial regions. Lytton, BC hit the temperature you cite for one day on Tuesday, June 29, 2021. That's a sign of warming, and we should expect more warm days than in the past at any given lattitude. But it is not evidence against the general case that polar regions have colder climates than equatorial regions.

Here's a citation demonstrating that over the last 95 million years if you need one: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2111332119

One more just for fun: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/12/4/1520-04...

It's a problem anywhere that temperatures reach that high. Higher latitudes have colder climates. Hence, not a problem. If it becomes a problem, people move toward the poles. No longer a problem.

Earth would have to experience > +35 to +50C for the poles to be uninhabitable due to heat.

> Our bodies won't be able to handle a temperature regime that hot overall. The factor to research is Wet Bulb Temperature Effect.

That's a problem at the Equator, but not at the higher latitudes.

Certain investment firms purchased cold-weather ports which were iced in 8 months a year, 20 years ago, which now operate nearly year-round.

No doubt the transition period would likely involve more death than most catastrophes in history. In part because there are simply more people. Available sunlight is also less nearer the poles, which already affects agriculture in places like Greenland. Crops would shift. We'd be more dependent on energy and supplemental light for certain crops. Adjustment would be difficult. But quite a bit of land would still be habitable.

No reason not. It would push human habitable zones into the high mid-latitudes and subpolar regions though. 55–65° N/S would be closest to comfortable temperatures. So, northern Canada and Russia, Greenland, Antarctica.

The mad rush to get there would likely extract a heavy toll.

You're right, and here's a graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level#/media/File:Pos...

It's possible the sea level rise could have initiated the cooling. But there is much disagreement as to what exactly initiated the de-glaciation which caused the sealevel rise.

The Cambrian and Eocene reached around +14C compared to today[1]. Two of the warmest periods in Earth's history, granted. But life thrived. Governments, private property ownership, civilization, not as battle tested.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...

> look up any random day and see a meteor streaking across the sky

That's happened rather more times in Earth's history than most folks are comfortable admitting. Tunguska would have leveled any major metropolitan city on the planet. I still think an impact is one of the more likely initiators of the Younger Dryas abrupt cooling and worldwide ~100M sealevel rise ~12,000 years ago. Conspicuously aligned with the oldest surviving traces of city living, agriculture, etc. It's increasingly accepted that a large portion of human history is 100M underwater on the continental shelves, estuaries, and other coastal areas where humans would have liked to live.

Global cooling could be worse. But the danger from either comes from the speed with which it happens, and inflexible sociopolitical structures, more than the absolute difference in temperature. Rapid change doesn't permit gradual adaptation like relocation to more habitable areas. The danger from the current global warming trend comes from it's incredible rapidity compared to historical trends.

Given time, humans and other animals will move toward the poles or toward the equator to find habitable zones. Put that on a rush schedule and everyone suffers.

It hits different when the bureaucracy's job is to collect and exploit secrets, and act in the shadows.

I would push back against the idea that intelligence agency behavior changes administration to administration. Looking through history, it's the intelligence agencies which have superior continuity of leadership. Which suggests things about who's directing who.

People need to know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction as well. The technique is used to shield these secret programs by laundering the information they collect through plausible evidentiary chains.

There's a reason J. Edgar Hoover held power for 48 years.

Kennedy wanted to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces"[1] and had a trusted brother as Attorney General to help with the task. And we learn 70 years later that Oswald was a CIA asset[2]. It's enough for even a President to sit up and take notice.

1: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/2025-03/2025-0...

2: https://www.newsweek.com/new-documents-shed-light-cias-conne...

Rumors of their exit from dGPU predate Battlemage. So I wouldn't put a ton of credence to them. But Intel's is quite talented at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

He just told you. Because overwhelming public evidence supports the claim. Especially the pricing of open weight model inference. Why do you allow a prejudice to overshadow evidence?