Yeah, and the engagement metrics are massive. This reaching people. Heck, I wonder if more eyeballs see this than the actual NYT article.

God, anyone, please send some meteors to Twitter data centers. And Facebook while you’re at it…

Posts/comments aren’t sorted and hidden by a ML model optimizing for engagement though.

That’s the key. That’s what makes the environments so toxic and addictive.

Maybe sorting by upvotes isn’t perfect, but it’s still leagues away.

TBH that would sell well.

Way in not the onion territory, heh.

Social media isn’t a network, it’s a set of siloed attention farms.

That’s a very important distinction to make IMO. We’ve treated Big Tech like they’re the stewards of the internet for way too long. Facebook, Twitter, Discord, TikTok… those are the villains eating everyone’s attention.

Lemmy isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely more in the bucket of the “old internet” and more network like. I love it! And I love were chatting. But a tiny fraction of the population is engaging like that these days.

I dunno. It’s not like brillant work isn’t done now, but it really feels like the “average person’s” attention is totally consumed by the hype of social media and influencers, at least from my perspective in the United States. And now that includes high profile politicans and institutional leaders heavily influenced by their feeds.

This is a great microcosm: https://lemmy.world/post/28290391

Look at all that engagement, for what are basically instagram influencers taking a high altitude selfie ride! It utterly dwarfs any kind of “real” space missions now, much less women that have gone up before. That couldn’t have happened in the 70s; the information environment simply wasn’t condusive to it.

And that has very real ramifications for scientists that need public funding.

Urgh, imagine how the world would react if hard proof of life on another planet was found now. This second.

The internet would be filled with disinformation and clickbait on it in an instant. Your aunt/uncle and much of your social circle would totally misunderstand it and spread fud they think they know all about. There would be conspiracy theories broadcast by world leaders. Somehow, it would get politicized. Scientists who dedicated their life to this would be drowned out. And on the whole… After a few weeks, most people wouldn’t even care and scroll down to the next controversy.

Contrast this vs, like, 1970. Daily life would stop dead. People would huddle around TVs and radios, hanging on every last world of anchors and scientists… it would be a shared existential moment. It would start a new era.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t meant to romanticize the Apollo era with all its racism, sexism, poverty, rivalry, abuses and so on, but on aggregate its reaction would be so much less shit.

Yeah, I read some, and I am worried about it being a little barebones. Runescape nostalgia is a huge draw though.

Is it any fun?

The escape velocity of the moon is 8,600 kilometers per hour. That would be a big, very expensive gun to set up and achieve that velocity. But yeah, if the “shells” and guidance could be manufactured on the moon, it would be an efficient system once its operational.

Again, the emphasis is that everything is several orders of magitude cheaper if you do it on Earth, especially if its something with a lot of mass. For the price of a single lunar space gun, one could build many enormous orbital guns on Earth.

Hilariously, it’s theoretically practical for lobbing “durable” loads to space.

The US already shot a shell high into the atmosphere with a gas gun. Some startups are pursuing the “orbital gun” idea now, to decent success on shoestring budgets.

You’re looking for the SABRE hybrid engine! It’s super cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)

It flash freezes air to liquid using a mad heat exchanger, until the atmosphere is thin enough to warrant switching to liquid oxygen. It’s better than what you describe, as it saves a tone of weight over separate jets and rockets! It was tested, and seems to work!

…But out timeline sucks, hence it was canceled in 2024 :(

https://www.flightglobal.com/aerospace/reaction-engines-to-close-as-cutting-edge-sabre-fails-to-advance/160565.article

Aerospike engines are awesome, but I’m skeptical of the X-33 TBH. It would’ve been cool if it had worked out.

Where you should be looking now is the “gun launch” startups. Once that’s figured out, it’s so much cheaper to launch “sturdy” payloads that way. Nuclear upper stages are a good option, too (with fission fragment drives being my personal favorite: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#fissionfragment)

They seem to love writing cities and fantasy-tech too, going by some of the stuff in BG3.

Looks like Shadowrun’s licensing is a complicated mess though, with Microsoft at least involved, so I guess it’s unlikely :(

Yeah, low volume space tourism is fine. Bezos and such are funding quite a bit.

What I was getting at is the meme that “mass” space flight (much less interplanetary colonization) is in any way practical. It is not. It will not be, at least not until civilization is more along the lines of Orion’s Arm or similar sci-fi. KSP is a fantastic illustration of that, as (even with a much smaller planet than Earth) one pays for every ounce that has to move in space.

Oh man, imagine if they did a Shadowrun game. Take their fantasy credentials/writing and mix it with cyberpunk…

Awesome!

I wonder if things will organize around a “unofficial” modding API like Harmony for Rimworld, Forge for Minecraft, SMAPI for Stardew Valley, and so on? I guess it depends if some hero dev team does it and there’s enough “demand” to build a bunch of stuff on it. But a “final” patch (so future random patches don’t break the community API) and community enthusiasm from Larian are really good omens.

Skyrim and some other games stayed more fragmented, others like CP2077 just never hit critical mass I guess. And the format of the modded content just isn’t the same for mega RPGs like this.

How is the modding scene these days? Seems like there’s a lot in the patch addressing that, but are things still more aesthetic?

China discovers the secret to life:

Don’t feed the trolls.

So, you’ve never heard of asteroid mining?

Per the point above, setting development/equipment costs aside, it would be like needing an oil tanker of fuel to bring back a small mass of ore.

…Can you do it? Sure. It’s already been done for scientific return missions, and that makes total sense.

…Is it economical? Hell no. Mining the ocean floor, a volcano, or under the antarctic ice sheet would be orders of magnitude cheaper, much less just prospecting new suface deposits.

Space travel is not the same.

Strictly considering low earth orbit, one needs to accelerate a payload to 25,000 km/h and like 500km above the ground. This is not computation or atmospheric flight. There’s no shortcut, no engineering to work out, the physics dictates this is a hard problem. Solutions:

• You go up with a chemical rocket, where almost all the launch mass is fuel. To get the ratio in your head, think the liquid in a coke can vs the can that holds it… that’s the mass/fuel ratio we’re dealing with, and tricks like hybrid engines or booster returns barely soften the MASSIVE cost for even the tiniest things you send up.

• You assist it from the ground. “Gun” launches, as some are developing (and that I’m quite enthusiastic about), can’t launch humans. Stratolaunches (from planes) only get you partway there, more like a booster.

• You go nuclear. This is the only way to increase energy density vs. chemical rockets enough to make a difference. Needless to say, there are significant environmental/safety concerns when doing this on the ground, and I’m as pro-nuclear as anyone you’ll find. Check out Atomic Rockets for more on this, with concrete theoretical designs that are still batshit crazy: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php

• You develop a space elevator or some analogue. No commercial launch research is even pretending to develop this, and it would require massive materials science breakthroughs.

…That’s it. That’s how you get to space. This isn’t a “Wright Brothers vs modern jets” thing, that kind of cost optimization is just not physically possible. And whenever Musk lies through his teeth about practically colonizing Mars, people need to understand that…