SpaceX’s Starship V3—still a work in progress—mostly successful on first flight

SpaceX has more to prove before flying Starship all the way to low-Earth orbit.

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[The Lurker Beneath]

Because being reasonable and cleaning your room is haaaaaaard, but playing space cowboy is fuuuuuun.

The Arsian population is generally pretty concerned about climate change, ecosystemic collapse and technofascism, but there is a portion whose boner for space colonization is so strong that it seems to deprive their brain of oxygen.

And don’t tell me this isn’t the time and place to talk about this, or that these rockets have nothing to do with those issues. It is always the time and place, because the situation is so dire that we can’t afford the carelessness, and those rockets are a part of the problem.

Cars might be a bigger issue than rockets if that's where you're going...

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

I'm pretty sure that ensuring it sank was on the checklist. They don't want it recovered.

At least one of the early Falcon 9 recovery experiments floated after landing in the Pacific, and SpaceX had to arrange the use of weaponry to sink it.

You're going to either retrieve or scuttle any floating hulk, regardless of informational security considerations - it is a danger on the high seas.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

Humans are not descended from mammals. Humans are mammals.

Also, I hear a hedgehog can be arbitrarily fast - just depending on how hard you toss it.

I am a human and a mammal - I am also descended from the same.

Among the many meanings of descend: "To come down, as from a source, original, or stock; to be derived; to proceed by generation or by transmission; to fall or pass by inheritance; as, the beggar may descend from a prince; a crown descends to the heir."

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

I mean you aren't wrong in the technical sense, but only because the person you are responding to talked about the earth being enveloped.

The earth has (cosmic scale) very little time left of being inhabitable but complex life. We are closer to the end of complex life than we are the beginning of the dinosaurs. 150 million years maybe 500 at most before complex life can't exist here in any quantity.

I'm not sure that changes how relevant today's time frame is lol, but I think it's interesting because the planet is toast way before red giant phase.

That seems a low figure. If technologically advanced successors to humans are living at that time, they should surely be able to sequester enough CO2 to put the runaway greenhouse nearer to its old estimate of a billion years or so - if they even have to. Of course it's unlikely that anything can be done about the Sun. Without a runaway greenhouse, life should at least be tolerable at high latitudes.

A more fanciful option would be arranging asteroid fly-bys in such a way as to boost Earth's orbit further from the Sun, but a species capable of this would probably also be capable of colonising distant planets and moons.

As you say, even 150 million years has no immediate relevance.

[Edit: space parasols are another cooling option that aren't outside the bounds of credibility.]

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

There is a fundamental distinction between digital and analog, being the same distinction between integers and reals and countable vs uncountable infinities. A digital system cannot accurately emulate an analog one. It's a mathematical impossibility.

There is no distinction between a digital computer and an emulation of same. That's fundamental to the concept of a digital computer. A digital computer is an emulation. What you describe is an analog computer, which, by definition, is not a digital computer.

There are no reals or infinities (even countable ones) in the physical world. [Edit: every integer is of course a real - but they are a subset of measure zero.]

As for the microwave controller, it has no internal model of itself and is not conscious in any model. I do not think consciousness can be ruled out for any system on the basis of whether it is analogue or digital - or whether its embodiment is electronic, biological, or clockwork.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

Wait until you hear what Europeans did to cultures they thought were inferior to their own or what Europeans did to other Europeans for not believing in the same religion.

Let me guess... same as other sometimes imperialistic or proseltysing cultures?

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

Any sane person doesn't just cheer for their home team, they cheer for the Humanity team. And only football hooligans care less about the play and their team than people actually enjoying the play and its achievements, from whatever team managed it, even if their own home team craters...

The people who watch football matches entirely for the skills on display are a cohort about as large as those who drink for the taste or those who gamble to contemplate the vagaries of RNG.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

Yes, but amplified to whole new levels of genocide with the aid of guns, germs, and steel.

Europe certainly had unique success with technology (and this was long before the Industrial Revolution) and the germs came along for the ride - with the supercontinent being mostly spared as the relative load of new germs was so much less. But the imperialism and proselytisation were not that special.

On the plus side, they eventually pretty much abolished the official slave trade world wide - though you could argue that this abolition was yet another example of European cultural and economic imperialism.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

Logic and mathematics are properties of the physical universe. The physical world is analog and thus Real. Finite state systems exist within it, thus Integers exist, counting is possible, and digital computers are therefore able to exist. If these things were not true then it would be possible to define a contradiction as non-contradictory without itself being a contradiction. They aren't just made up.

The microwave controller* is Turing Complete. That means, given sufficient time and space, it can do everything any other digital computer can do via emulation. That's what Universiality means: No digital computer of any kind can have any capability or property not present in Turing's Tape Machine, and every Turing Complete computer is equivalent to a TTM. Universiality is fundamental to the concept of a digital computer. Even if you argue that the physical machine is sapient (such as a human with a pencil and paper) that cannot affect the operation of the machine in any way or else it isn't a digital computer.

* Unless your microwave is too ancient to contain a microcontroller.

What I said was that the microwave controller does not contain an internal model of itself, and thus doesn't fall into any category of being that may be considered conscious, unless you extend the property of consciousness to rocks and stones etc.

If you add extra computer equipment and software to it, I guess it could in principle become the nucleus of a conscious machine. But then it's not really a microwave controller any more...

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

“Mostly spared”? Are we whitewashing the epidemics the indigenous population went through due to European contact?

For example, the Mexican native population has been estimated anywhere between 23 to 30 million people before Cortés invaded. Within 50 years, that number plummeted to somewhere around 1.2 and 3 million people due to multiple epidemics from European pathogens. And that’s just one of a myriad of peoples that were decimated by the introduction of European pathogens.

Also, are we ignoring the technological successes that the likes of the Chinese empire had long before the Europeans did?


You mean after helping perpetuate it for many years? They aren’t to be lauded for that.

As two posters have pointed out, I was clearly referring to the supercontinent comprising Europe, Asia and Africa. I said "with the supercontinent being mostly spared as the relative load of new germs was so much less." If neither the Old World nor the Americas had been affected by unfamiliar germs I would have said that.

The Chinese had many technological successes, but were less imaginative in their military use of gunpowder.

As for lauding Europe for eventually abolishing slavery, that's fine if you don't want to - but most places had slavery and didn't abolish it.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

TLDR: I agree that pi is irrational and therefore can never be perfectly expressed as a ratio of two numbers (all decimals are effectively a ratio of a number and a power of ten) and so cannot be perfect described/stored in a discrete/finite system like a computer. However, that doesn't mean pi doesn't exist in "physical world." The value of pi can be seen in many physical world relationships beyond just the ratio of the radius of a perfect circle to its circumference (or the radius of a perfect sphere to its volume or surface area). Lookinof the be perceived a value within in how the physical world works (going to the more general reference of irrational numbers, √2 exists in the physical world, albeit we cannot precisely measure or exactly express it in a discrete non-symbolic way).


There are lots of relationships that involve pi in the physical world that don't require you to have a physical perfect circle or sphere (it usually involves some type of circular/spherical relationships, but you don't need a physical circle/sphere for it to exist). The period of a pendulum just requires the length of the rope, the value of gravity... and pi.

Most things that involve a sinusoidal wave will involve pi (e.g. alternating current, capacitors), the diffusion of heat through a material, the intensity of light fridge in diffraction when passing through a slit.

heck even the chance of a dropping a needle onto a wooden floor and having it cross a tile line involves the length of the needle, the width of wooden tile, and pi (since the chances of the needle touching the tile line is dependent on it's rotation and that involves pi)

You make a point along the sphere and then measure how much it ground it covers in one revolution. Or you can measure the length of a string that equals the circumference of a perfect circle and then straighten it and measure it. Are you having an issue with the fact that no physical measurement is perfect so no measurement can perfectly express pi - that might be true, but that doesn't mean just we can't measure it perfectly, that doesn't mean it doesn't exists in the physical world. Going back to your broader statement about irrational numbers like pi (or tau which is just 2 times pi) or Euler's number e do show up when we describe/measure/calculate things/relationships in the physical world.

Even if you restrict it to physical objects - irrational numbers do actually show up. For example, the length of the the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle with 1 and 1 as the sides, the length of that physical object is √2 which is also irrational. Again, we cannot precisely directly measure and define it using our finite decimal measurement system, but that doesn't mean that the number doesn't exist in the physical world.

I would argue that everything you have described is mathematical modelling rather than Nature per se. Pi is a logical consequence of certain useful models that describe observed regularities in the wave function of the universe (and also of other math that probably describes nothing at all.)

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

No... you originally said "Europe". You said nothing of Asia and Africa. Europe is certainly not a "supercontinent", nor is Eurasia. You don't get to shift the goalposts when being called out.

The point is that Europeans had encountered germs from Europe, Asia and to some extent Africa. That's a large region, and no doubt there were also relevant historical factors differentiating it from the Americas in terms of population movements, city size, trade etc. So the effect of the bugs went mostly one way (syphilis is often touted as the counterexample, but I believe there is even some doubt about that.)

You do not even disagree with any of that. Consider listening more to what people say and focusing less on opportunities to "call them out".

Okay... and? If all you can do is cherry pick to make your point, it's most likely not a very good point.

You quoted Jared Diamond's 'guns, germs and steel' - and it's gunpowder that empowered the guns.

So... which countries, other than Afghanistan, allow for slavery?

Very few, thanks in large part to abolitionism originating in European thought.