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Prometheus

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Everything posted by Prometheus

  1. Maybe check the original bitcoin paper. Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym for the still unknown creator of the most famous blockchain - having no credentials didn't seem to hurt so you should OK if your idea has substance.
  2. Apparently the US Air Force gave SpaceX $40 - 85 million to help develop the raptor engine. It's not money to prop up speculative adventure - the US air force wants something tangible out of it. In this case they want an American supply chain so they can stop relying on Russian made rockets. Sounds sensible for an Air Force. I think we're using a different definition of private company so i had to look it up. I got this: The private sector is the part of the economy that is run by individuals and companies for profit and is not state controlled. Therefore, it encompasses all for-profit businesses that are not owned or operated by the government. It doesn't mention whether government is a customer or not (which makes sense to me, else every pharmaceutical company in the UK is not private industry either as the NHS is by far their biggest customer. By this, or another definition you know, is SpaceX misrepresented as a private company? What numbers are looking at to make you think this? Just US tourism (pre-pandemic) trade was worth $2.9 trillion per year. If space tourism can nab just a fraction of that they'd be doing OK. What's flowing back to the US in this case, other than tourists? By tangible do you mean raw or processed goods? This article speculates that the space tourism industry will be worth $23 billion a year by 2030 - most of that from disrupting the long-haul flight market.
  3. Unless it's hard sci-fi (which it doesn't sound like) i don't think readers will question a spaceship surviving 5000 years. Unless you need it to remain functional and /or in good condition?
  4. In the UK the average annual wage for a scientist is about ~40k. The national average is ~31k, so scientists are making above average, but not by a huge margin. In London that might just be enough to buy a crummy flat depending on how you manage your finances. Like many industries these things follow a pareto distribution in which just a very few make the big money.
  5. And those communications would not have developed without significant government investment for a few decades. It's a tried and tested method of creating new industries. Besides, Starship has so far been entirely privately funded. If the company makes some money from government on the side, what's so wrong with that? The company is just navigating the business ecosystem as it currently exists. Other than government, i think you might be underestimating the potential size of the space tourism sector. We don't know how much Yusaku Maezawa will be charged for a lunar flyby, but he did sell ~$2.8 billion of assets soon after announcing the trip. The estimate for the entire development of Starship is ~$5 billion. Always is a very long time. Selling services to a government isn't quite the same as taxpayer funding is it? NASA spent $200 billion over the lifetime of the Space shuttle - performing activities the US government clearly want to pursue. If a company can provide most of those activities for a fraction of the cost, isn't it a win-win situation? I guess i don't understand why you have such a big problem with industries with government as a customer. Again, SpaceX is going to the moon with or without NASA in the form of dearMoon, i.e. space tourism - it was planned before the Artemis contract, and is independent of it. It still might not happen for whatever reason, but zero chance? Seriously? And the order of mag improvement would not have happened so fast without the ambition of going to Mars - it's the reason SpaceX was founded. So what if they fail in that long term goal? If they've made asteroid mining viable then that's a pretty impressive failure. Starship is aiming to get payload costs to $10 per kilo against the current $1000. So that's two more orders of magnitude anticipated in the next 3-5 years. I'm not an engineer, but from what i understand it's considered a realistic target. We won't have long to wait to see - this thread will probably still be going then. It's not so much rocket tech improvements that are driving down costs. Thus far the biggest gains are in re-usability. The shuttle program had some re-usability, but apparently it cost loads to refurbish it for each flight, and only a part was re-usable. Even Falcons 9s/heavy only reuse the lower stage (the rocket that got cost down to $1000/kilo). Starship aims to reuse lower stages and the ship itself, i.e. everything. Other cost savings take the form of launchpad optimisation, the sheer size of the ship (Shuttle ~27 tonnes, Starship ~100-150 tonnes) and rapid deployment. Do you have any links/data on how much money Starship has received from government and how much has been raised privately?
  6. They won those contracts on merit, and that money would have gone somewhere else (Russia or another telecoms company) if not SpaceX. SpaceX charge NASA about $55 million per astronaut to LEO. This compares favourably to ~$90 million (and steadily rising) the Russians were charging, and the predicted $90 million the Boeing's Starliner will charge. The FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund has been awarded ~$20 billion to help improve rural internet access. This will go anywhere the money is deemed useful. Starlink has been awarded less than $1 billion of that. It seems money well spent on what has become vital infrastructure. It's a priority for many governments -in the UK Labour pledged to spend £20 billion rolling out more fibre optic in the last election, most of which would have gone to BT (a telecoms company). SpaceX a private industry with the US government as it's current primary customer at the moment. Companies like Lockheed Martin for instance, or any pharmaceutical company in the UK (NHS). The Lunar lander was already being developed before the contract was awarded, and will still be developed even if the contract is lost (Boeing and Dynetics have challenged the award. If successful one of those companies will get the money, though apparently they were asking for a lot more than $3 billion). It's part of the the Starship project, which is what will try for Mars. As far as i can tell it's funding has thus far been entirely private. If you have info on it do share because it's hard to find any data on this. It already has a commercial award in the form of dearMoon - a billionaire has paid for a lunar flyby. Maybe, but they would have made access to LEO several orders of magnitude cheaper (they have already achieved one order of magnitude). Again, where would you rather this money go? NASA and the FCC are spending this money whether SpaceX exists or not.
  7. An agent acts on your behalf to negotiate with a publisher. They will likely know the professional landscape far better than you. You can work directly with a publisher but it's rare. You're asking these questions on a science forum. You'd be better off on a writing forum. The Martian is the best self-published book i've read. It soon got snapped up by a publisher though.
  8. As iNow pointed out, SpaceX is privately funded. If it turns out to be a colossal waste of money, it's mostly his so he can piss it away any way he sees fit. Would we rather Musk put his money into diamond encrusted yachts and buying football clubs?
  9. I don't understand why it's considered a paradox. If you take something like the Drake equation, there are lots of parameters we have little idea about, such as fraction of planets suitable for life on which life actually appears or fraction of intelligent life that develops detectable technology. It's quite possible that these parameters are such that a technological civilisation on average only appears, say, 0.7 times in the entire life a galaxy.
  10. Are you OK with negative numbers? Do they exist in nature?
  11. It won't help that the way AI fails is very different to the ways humans fail, leading to headlines such as 'how can driverless cars be so stupid', regardless of overall safety records.
  12. It's not so much Mars we want to explore, but the limits of human ingenuity and bravery. Mars is currently the ultimate test. There is a reason people still climb mountains rather than a helicopter up. If we do make it to Mars, the asteroid belt would probably be the next thing the intrepid among us would eye up. If a few billionaires want to try, why blow raspberries at them?
  13. It's not pointless as it's done the spirit of exploration and curiosity - it is its own reward (though a good case can be made for humans being better than rovers for scientific discovery). Even if SpaceX fail in their Mars objective they would have made LEO far more accessible to humans. Waste is a matter of perspective. The estimated cost of sending humans to Mars was ~$500 billion. That's about what the development cost of the F-35, or 5 years worth of haircare products.Given those 3 options, i wouldn't be picking a Mars mission as the wasteful option - but that's just me. And that estimate was made before private companies started to reduce costs. Mars One had an estimated of $6 billion. SpaceX are estimating $10 billion for development then $1/2 billion per passenger. Also, billionaire's are the ones sinking money into this - so who cares? Surely it's better than buying diamond encrusted yachts or football clubs. It's very risky - but so was trying to circumnavigate the globe, fly across the atlantic, even learning to control fire probably burnt more than a few of our ancestors. Some humans are willing to take those risks. Not only would I not try to stop them, i would cheer them on.
  14. SpaceX have just been awarded ~$3 billion to land humans on the moon for NASA some time after 2024. It will be a version of the same ship that is planned to go to Mars. I imagine they will use that as a test run for longer term missions. But an unmanned version? Quite possibly. They plan to get the vehicle to LEO this year, run commercial missions by 2022, human lunar orbital missions (dearMoon) by 2023. They could attempt an unmanned Mars mission in the 2024, but I think the current 2026 goal of manned flight is optimistic - they might know enough physics, but i don't think enough is known about the medical effects to risk it. Fun to watch them try though.
  15. I think dim is alluding to the abuse of tax credit systems and i'm inclined to agree just based on Goodhart's law. That doesn't mean some form of top down approach isn't viable though, especially in societies such as China where the population will trust government rules so long as it can validate that trust. America on the other hand i'm not so sure about. Europe might be a mixed bag. The pandemic has been a good way of seeing how different societies react to a crisis, and America seems to be fracturing under an assumption of 'if the government told me to do something, they must be trying to manipulate me'. Unless the pandemic just happened to hit at a time when America was already dividing? - but i'm getting off-topic now.
  16. You can't deny human nature. Expecting that humans can be cajoled into greener behaviours is like expecting that the cyanobacterias that caused the oxygen holocaust could have been convinced to do otherwise. You'd hope education would change behaviours, but isn't it the case that the most educated are also the most polluting?
  17. I find a useful way of thinking about evolution is as an optimisation problem - species are 'tweaking' various parameters in order to improve fitness, which is a kind of objective function. However, that objective function is itself subject to change because it is dependent upon the environment and ecosystem which are themselves constantly changing.
  18. No, you just take into account the numerous wet markets in Wuhan which bring together humans and various animals. Then ask, what is the simpler explanation (since you invoked occam's razor) - that a virus mutated naturally or it was lab created. A natural evolution sounds simpler to me.
  19. Pandemics are replete throughout human history - occam's razor in this context would be that this is another natural pandemic.
  20. I think they could replace current peer review. A community much like that at Cross-Validated could provide the peer-review, with a public back and forth between commentors and the authors discussing various points. It would give far more transparency to the process. To prevent spamming could use some machine learning to filter out absolute junk and also have submissions cost a little bit of reputation (rep being earned by getting actually published, usefully reviewing others work, maybe accounts linked to a uni get to start with a few free rep points). Once it's been through the preprint peer-review process a paper can then apply to be published in an official journal. There's probably loads more we could do with current technology 21st century technology. Let's use it.
  21. If you're not proposing a change in architecture to deal with this, i think it's slightly off topic, but it's an interesting tangent. Say you have a language model and you start talking about a doctor and ask the model to complete the paragraph. A fair model might be one that goes on to use male and female pronouns in equal amounts. But how to achieve that end? I don't think filtering the dataset is practical. GPT-3 was trained on words scraped from the internet, something like 300 billion 'tokens' (token ~= word). There's no way even a team of humans could curate that. You could try to gatekeep what goes into the model, but that has a similar problem and the added side effect of excluding (or re-writing) some of the world's greatest literature - it's just baked into the language. Even something as recent as Lord of the Rings would probably reinforce these sorts of gender stereotypes. That leaves adding something to the architecture to try to fix things. Maybe something that changes gendered pronouns such that they occur 50/50 - whilst also ensuring they don't get mixed up - a single person referred to she and he a different times. It seems an inelegant solution, and i'm wary of unintended consequences - the way AI fails is very different to the way humans fail. There is also a question of whether we really want AI to be 'moralising'. These large models are developed by google, facebook, tesla etc... and they don't necessarily want to make their models transparent or optimise for 'fairness'. OpenAI might be a reasonable vendor given their mission statement but they're a minority, but even then it's a tricky technical task - we're essentially talking about training some notion of morality into AI. You might enjoy this video on the topic.
  22. Interesting point. But those biases exist because the training data itself was biased - misclassifying people of minority groups because the data was trained on the majority group. Essentially it was shown unrepresentative training data given tasks it had not be trained on. Additional architecture shouldn't be required to remedy this bias, just appropriate data curation, and thorough testing before deployment. I wasn't aware i was doing so. Does that mean you advocate for more flat architectures?
  23. True enough, but i thought it a good case study - better the Iron Mike anyway. This list has about 40 transgendered sports people. Whether that's enough to ask questions is a judgement call, but i don't think it unreasonable of professional sporting bodies to pose the question to the medical community.
  24. Ronda Rousey is generally considered the best female MMA fighter of all time. Her record was 12 wins from 14 fights. By that metric i'd consider Fox's 5 wins out of 6 at least moderately successful.
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