Prometheus

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.

8 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Communications looks like the exception that has developed a commercial foundation and can generate sufficient income to pay it's own way. But the entire industry outside of communications and observation is propped up one way or another by taxpayers and even those mostly are too, so it becomes a question of the goals of those space agencies and their governments and what they ought to be supporting.

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.

8 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Mars is not a commercial opportunity but servicing government contracts to go to Mars can be, if governments can be induced to support it; the private money invested in developing SpaceX capabilities included capabilities that overlap with Mars ambitions, but always depended on getting rockets that can service governments to be a viable business. I think that expectation of taxpayer funding helping, if not outright paying them to go to Mars was always there.

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. 

8 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Even more so than most government contract servicing businesses, that may have significant commercial business outside contracting, these "private" space ventures depend on taxpayers. What looks clear to me is there is zero chance of private enterprise going to the moon or Mars without it being mostly if not fully government supported. And I do not think there will be any tangible benefits to Earth or even to advancing Grand Space Dreams in these Mars ambitions.

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? 

8 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

An order of magnitude reduction in launch costs is an astonishing achievement and will benefit Near Earth (Earth oriented) space activities (which we can hope will not be weaponising near Earth space) but it is not nearly enough to make the moon or Mars viable for colonisation. Another one or two orders of magnitude might get us commercially viable asteroid mining, but still leave Mars colonies as unviable. Which colonies I believe will require a substantial Mars economy and population - with no way to pay their way during establishment and facting extinction level dangers on a constant basis.

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.

8 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Optimising current rocket technologies to achieve another 10 fold cost reduction looks a lot harder than the first time around and there aren't any promising exotic new technologies that look capable of bringing space shipping costs down anywhere near shipping costs within the main economy. Earth based open ended R&D - that works just as well without a specific space colonisation focus is where that will come from, if that is actually possible. Ultimately understanding the depths of the challenges and limits of materials and technology can tell us if we are wasting efforts on unreachable goals - we will know that throwing yet more effort into it in "obstacles are opportunities" style won't work.

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? 

9 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

SpaceX income and commercial viability depends heavily on government contracts and it is a long way short of beng fully funded privately; it receives a lot of government funding, which comes tied to particular projects and outcomes. I am not sure what it is but it is not "private enterprise" as it is usually understood. Even Starlink is getting funding. By operating a business which has the US government as the principle customer SpaceX can't just do as it pleases - and without the strong US government support I think current SpaceX capabilities would be much more modest and big ambitions like Mars missions look a lot less likely. Not that I think colonies will be possible even with strong government commitment.

 

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).

9 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Will the Lunar lander they are being funded to develop be the prototype for the Mars landers that don't yet exist?

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.

9 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

I think they will keep up the science fiction inspired Mars Colony hype but with a timeline reminiscent of Zeno's Paradox, whilst hoping that sufficient popular support leads to a crewed Mars mission as a government funded venture, like with the moon.

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.

On 5/2/2021 at 6:09 PM, kingdom said:

Prometheus, what is the difference between an agent and a publishing house? Is it the same thing or are there gradations again? Where are the differences? As I see, however, an editor is necessary anyway... which is totally logical…

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.

On 5/2/2021 at 6:09 PM, kingdom said:

I tend to write novels and short stories... I have no experience with science fiction. Why do you ask?

 

You're asking these questions on a science forum. You'd be better off on a writing forum.

On 5/2/2021 at 6:09 PM, kingdom said:

Who of you has ever read a book that was self-published and you were very satisfied when you read it?

The Martian is the best self-published book i've read. It soon got snapped up by a publisher though.

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?

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.

Are you OK with negative numbers? Do they exist in nature?

2 hours ago, iNow said:

The real question here is how many orders of magnitude safer these driverless cars will need to be before our primitive ape minds accept them as 1) a significantly safer alternative to our status quo of driving ourselves (minus the still remaining technical challenges like driving in snow and off-road terrains), and 2) what it will take for us to overcome the repulsion felt when thinking that software controlled vehicles will still experience occasional tragedies regardless of how advanced we build them. 

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.

1 hour ago, Ken Fabian said:

We are exploring and better than ever. 21st century humans do space exploration from swivel chairs in front of computer monitors on Earth - it is the in-person explorer thing that is anachronistic.

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.

1 hour ago, Ken Fabian said:

There are some worthwhile taxpayer funded goals in space beyond Earth orbit, eg meteor defense - but Mars colonisation is a poor one. It isn't the spirit of adventure that will carry space enterprises over the line into self supporting viability but commercial viability and Mars doesn't have any.

If a few billionaires want to try, why blow raspberries at them?

58 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

Mars is interesting if you are a planetologist or we want to look for evidence of life apart from planet Earth but it's a terrible place for people and I do think sending crewed missions there is pointless as well as extraordinarily wasteful. Also very high risk.

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.

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.

1 hour ago, greeneye12 said:

Only solution to me is carbon tax. Tax high carbon activities
It's tough for low income households as everything will have to make efforts. But if the price of a car and the price of gas does not factor in pollution, it's flawed to give an easy access to it, as it should not have been in the first place (IMO) 

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.

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?

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.

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.

2 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:

Following Occam's razor, the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis is the most logical explanation for the origin of Covid 19 at this point.  More and more scientists are going on record in support of this hypothesis.  There was a great piece in Politico back in March about it.  The WHO will never be truly objective, due to political influence from China, and it seems somewhat of a taboo subject in the scientific community writ large (due in large part to the politicization of the hypothesis and other conflicts of interest).  It's entirely logical that a respiratory pathogen with this level of infectiousness might accidentally find its way out into the surrounding area.    

Pandemics are replete throughout human history - occam's razor in this context would be that this is another natural pandemic.

Not read it. Any AI involved?

On 3/26/2021 at 3:18 PM, Arete said:

3) While I see the benefits of preprint servers, and I really do like the fact that money isn't changing hands when you publish an article on one, I don't believe they replace the peer review process.  The explosion of really crap COVID19 studies being submitted to preprint servers highlights the problems with omitting peer review to speed up the publication process. 

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.

On 3/23/2021 at 4:00 PM, iNow said:

The only way to do this correctly IMO is to proactively filter said dataset... to implement certain guardrails and rules... and ensure a different future path is taken. We need to install various dams and levies on the data since a truly representative past sample isn’t representative of our future preferred selves. 

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.

On 3/21/2021 at 1:42 PM, iNow said:

The AI tends to pick up and amplify past biases humans have shown and will do things like ignore females or more heavily sentence blacks, etc. In these cases, it becomes required that we DO proactively codify more neutral approaches into the AI simply to overcome how codified bias has been historically in our culture. 

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.

On 3/21/2021 at 1:59 PM, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

I'm doing my best to caution you against over-reductionism . . . . . . 

I wasn't aware i was doing so. Does that mean you advocate for more flat architectures?

5 minutes ago, iNow said:

Fair points, but a single lone example is better described as an anecdote, not as evidence nor something indicative of trends requiring rule changes. 

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 minutes ago, zapatos said:

In her professional career she had a grand total of five wins.

As I said, I'm having trouble finding any transgender athlete who has had even modest success at the professional level.

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.

On 3/14/2021 at 2:33 AM, iNow said:

To me, it’s less about how much computation power we throw at it, and is more about how we/it use that power. I suspect quantum computing will add to the flops data these neural learning models go through. 

I agree, but the counter argument is that so far the biggest improvements have simply been bigger models, not more structured models. There was a more subtle point at the end of the article suggesting that we shouldn't be trying to inject human knowledge directly into AI because the mind is complex beyond our understanding and if we don't know how knowledge is codified in the brain, we don't have a basis to codify it in AI.

On 3/14/2021 at 4:27 PM, Prof Reza Sanaye said:

Your respectable "instinct" adjudicates that universal complexity has to be parsed and divisible for it to be(come) understandable  ,,,, Simply because your "instinct" has been reared in the reductivistic rut    ;;;;;;;;;;   Hhhmmm  ??

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

9 hours ago, zapatos said:

Why not? I'm having trouble finding any transgender athlete who has had even modest success at the professional level.

I gave this example early on in the thread; it raised questions in MMA.

I agree that Curious laymen was unfairly set upon in this thread. 

I learnt classical stats so i'm in no position to defend Bayesian approaches, but i'm not sure we need to dump Bayesian techniques. They are both tools and some jobs may be better suited to one or the other. I know there are a lot of physicists on this site so i wonder what they would make of a Bayesian approach to something like quantum theory.

Also, something i've never understood: both approaches are consistent with the Kolmogorov axioms, so in what sense are they really different at a fundamental level?

I'm surprised this topic hasn't reared its head on this forum before.