Starship and a Human city on Mars

[Comrade 86]

7 minutes ago, Stive Pesley said:

Christ - I skipped through that, he's a terrible public speaker, and clearly deranged 😂

 

I was just waiting for him to full on k-hole and fall off the stage 😵 

Think back to the early days of him launching the Tesla range and how lucid and charismatic he was. He's like some rambling old pisshead these days. It's nice that he'd like to meet an alien though, though not the illegal type, obviously! 

[Ram-Alf]

Wow that's some distance away, 1 light year is 6 trillion miles.

The explosion was detected by telescopes in October 2022. It came from a distant galaxy 2.4 billion light-years away, 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68787534

[Carl Sagan]

Been in America for a few days, including a bit of work at the Carl Sagan Institute - even got to sit at the desk in his Cornell University office. They're searching for Earth-like worlds beyond the solar system, which we might one day travel to. The hardest step is this first one, becoming a multiplanetary species, building a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. Once we've done that it will have led to so many new technologies, especially around automation, life support and terraforming, that the next steps become far easier.

[TigerTedd]

1 hour ago, Carl Sagan said:

Been in America for a few days, including a bit of work at the Carl Sagan Institute - even got to sit at the desk in his Cornell University office. They're searching for Earth-like worlds beyond the solar system, which we might one day travel to. The hardest step is this first one, becoming a multiplanetary species, building a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. Once we've done that it will have led to so many new technologies, especially around automation, life support and terraforming, that the next steps become far easier.

I know FTL travel is pure sci fi, but I guess with enough progress in automation tech, would it be possible to shoot off an unmanned ship full of frozen embryos and hundreds of years later have that ship populate a new colony light years away.

i wonder what the ethics would be in that. 

[Carl Sagan]

22 minutes ago, TigerTedd said:

I know FTL travel is pure sci fi, but I guess with enough progress in automation tech, would it be possible to shoot off an unmanned ship full of frozen embryos and hundreds of years later have that ship populate a new colony light years away.

i wonder what the ethics would be in that. 

Fascinating stuff, isn't it? I'd say FTL (faster than light for those who don't know it) is probably scifi, but there's a chance. Failing that, there's time dilation from relativity, so you can make the journey by travelling *very* fast, even if thousands of years would pass on Earth. I guess your question about the ethics of sending embryos is related to the ethics of generational ships, but my thought is none of us choose the circumstances of our births. 

Coming back from America I rewatched Interstellar on the plane, which of course ends with Anne Hathaway's Dr Brant beginning the process of developing the embryos at the end. Which is a lovely twist, with Humans branching to form different civilizations across space.

I'm also publishing a book on brain preservation at the moment and, while not discussed in the book, the author and I have talked separately about the applicability of it for long-duration spaceflight. It could well be an "ethical" method to seed the stars in the future. 

[TigerTedd]

19 minutes ago, Carl Sagan said:

Fascinating stuff, isn't it? I'd say FTL (faster than light for those who don't know it) is probably scifi, but there's a chance. Failing that, there's time dilation from relativity, so you can make the journey by travelling *very* fast, even if thousands of years would pass on Earth. I guess your question about the ethics of sending embryos is related to the ethics of generational ships, but my thought is none of us choose the circumstances of our births. 

Coming back from America I rewatched Interstellar on the plane, which of course ends with Anne Hathaway's Dr Brant beginning the process of developing the embryos at the end. Which is a lovely twist, with Humans branching to form different civilizations across space.

I'm also publishing a book on brain preservation at the moment and, while not discussed in the book, the author and I have talked separately about the applicability of it for long-duration spaceflight. It could well be an "ethical" method to seed the stars in the future. 

I’m just thinking if you don’t have a friendly Anne Hathaway because there is no option other than to send the space ship on a red dwarf style journey spanning thousands of years (unless you had like one generational family of in bred caretakers on the ship), then you’d need to work out a way of automatically raising embryos into a civilisation of children, without it descending into lord of the flies. That’s going to be a pretty shitty childhood at best. And with absolutely no way for us sending the ship to know how it would turn out. Seems like it would be theoretically possible, but it all seems a bit unethical. Stupid ethics getting in the way of a good bit of science. If nothing else I’ve come up with the plot of a decent sci fi book. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my study. 

[Carl Sagan]

2 hours ago, TigerTedd said:

I’m just thinking if you don’t have a friendly Anne Hathaway because there is no option other than to send the space ship on a red dwarf style journey spanning thousands of years (unless you had like one generational family of in bred caretakers on the ship), then you’d need to work out a way of automatically raising embryos into a civilisation of children, without it descending into lord of the flies. That’s going to be a pretty shitty childhood at best. And with absolutely no way for us sending the ship to know how it would turn out. Seems like it would be theoretically possible, but it all seems a bit unethical. Stupid ethics getting in the way of a good bit of science. If nothing else I’ve come up with the plot of a decent sci fi book. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my study. 

I think this underestimates AI and how it will advance. Soon it will be able to bring up children here, so in decades/centuries it would be far more capable of doing this for a new space colony. If Human and machine minds work together, we'll be able to start spreading across the Galaxy (and beyond according to some work).

[And, on one weird evening, a very friendly Anne Hathaway pulled me out of the audience in her one-woman New York Theatre play (she was playing a remote drone pilot in the USAF) and we had simulated sex before she went on to be pregnant and then had our baby! Very happy to oblige 😂😂 Maybe there'll always be a friendly Anne Hathaway to bring up children?] 

[Carl Sagan]

It's time for Test Flight 4. Road closures have been approved for June 1st. The main goal will be to improve on Flight 3. Hopefully that means:

SuperHeavy booster "soft lands" in the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Starship performs a deorbit burn while in orbit. 

Starship makes it through the bulk of the atmosphere, ideally all the way to sea level. 

Here's a real video (not a render) of Starship being "stacked" by the "chopsticks" above SuperHeavy to test all the systems in the Wet Dress Rehearsal earlier in the week. 

If they meet these objectives, Flight 5 will likely see the chopsticks try to catch SuperHeavy on the launch tower as it returns from space (which would be wild!). In case that destroys the launch tower, they're quite far advanced in building a backup elsewhere on the Starbase site. 

[Carl Sagan]

Musk's SpaceX is what is known as a "New Space" company, completely disrupting and revolutionizing the industry, while Boeing is the epitome of "Old Space". Back in 2014 NASA made history with the award of its first Commercial Crew Contracts when, for the first time ever, private companies and not national space agencies would send astronauts into space, all the way to the International Space Station. They awarded $4.2bn to Boeing to build a spaceship called Starliner, and $2.6bn to an upstart company called SpaceX to build a spaceship called Dragon. Both were to take four astronauts at a time to the ISS. Boeing were seething. They said it was ridiculous for NASA to give money to SpaceX, and all of the pot should have gone to them.

Ten years on, Dragon is the first 21st-century spaceship, with touchscreens and ethernet, lots of space for its astronauts and a large cargo capacity to boot. Nowadays there are four Dragons in operation which, between them, have so far taken 50 astronauts into space, mostly to the Space Station. Ten years on the Boeing Starliner still hasn't flown anyone into space. It is much more like the 1960s Soyuz capsule, or what the Americans did with their early space programme, with rather cramped conditions and lots of knobs and levers. And the reason I am writing about it here, is in honour of our very own B4/Daniel - because it has a flange. And a flange that has gone wrong.

The latest attempt to try to fly test pilots aboard Starliner went wrong with this leak, and the date for it has gone back and back. And today it was announced the will try to fly it on June 1st, the very same day that SpaceX are attempting their next Starship test! It's an  amazing juxtaposition of old vs new space. Get your scraves and flanges out to celebrate!

[TigerTedd]

On 23/05/2024 at 20:48, Carl Sagan said:

Musk's SpaceX is what is known as a "New Space" company, completely disrupting and revolutionizing the industry, while Boeing is the epitome of "Old Space". Back in 2014 NASA made history with the award of its first Commercial Crew Contracts when, for the first time ever, private companies and not national space agencies would send astronauts into space, all the way to the International Space Station. They awarded $4.2bn to Boeing to build a spaceship called Starliner, and $2.6bn to an upstart company called SpaceX to build a spaceship called Dragon. Both were to take four astronauts at a time to the ISS. Boeing were seething. They said it was ridiculous for NASA to give money to SpaceX, and all of the pot should have gone to them.

Ten years on, Dragon is the first 21st-century spaceship, with touchscreens and ethernet, lots of space for its astronauts and a large cargo capacity to boot. Nowadays there are four Dragons in operation which, between them, have so far taken 50 astronauts into space, mostly to the Space Station. Ten years on the Boeing Starliner still hasn't flown anyone into space. It is much more like the 1960s Soyuz capsule, or what the Americans did with their early space programme, with rather cramped conditions and lots of knobs and levers. And the reason I am writing about it here, is in honour of our very own B4/Daniel - because it has a flange. And a flange that has gone wrong.

The latest attempt to try to fly test pilots aboard Starliner went wrong with this leak, and the date for it has gone back and back. And today it was announced the will try to fly it on June 1st, the very same day that SpaceX are attempting their next Starship test! It's an  amazing juxtaposition of old vs new space. Get your scraves and flanges out to celebrate!

Seems weird that they would even persist with star liner then. Even if they successfully conduct this test, space x are light years ahead and pretty much proven their concept, so what’s the point of star liner. It’s just a massive waste of money at this point. 

[Carl Sagan]

5 hours ago, TigerTedd said:

Seems weird that they would even persist with star liner then. Even if they successfully conduct this test, space x are light years ahead and pretty much proven their concept, so what’s the point of star liner. It’s just a massive waste of money at this point. 

Yes, but there are reasons. One is the question of redundancy. At this stage it's unlikely, but should a problem arise with the Dragon, Americans would still have a ride into space, when for ten years their only means of going was on the Russian Soyuz, such was the state of the American space industry before Space X. And in the multi-billion contract NASA commissioned (I think) six flights, so those will probably happen - but after that it's very likely Starliner will be retired. Boeing claims it's lost billions on it, and no one wants to fly Boeing nowadays anyway. And...

There was a third bidder back in the day, and many were disappointed they didn't get a slice of the pie, but now they have. And this is the Dream Chaser spaceplane, a sort of mini space shuttle. But Sierra Space were able to keep working on it, and ever though NASA can't yet give out new Commercial Crew contracts it has recently awarded it a cargo contract which allows some development funds, meaning an uncrewed cargo version will fly to the Space Station later this year (and is already at NASA facilities for testing). As the company continues to develop a crewed version. It looks pretty cool:

 

[Carl Sagan]

In the unlikely event anyone's setting calendar reminders for Test Flight 4 (though you all should!), SpaceX is now saying "no earlier than June 5th", meaning that's the planned day. And the company has set out the two key objectives, which are to do with landings.

1. As expected, they want to be able to perform a "soft" ocean landing in the Gulf with the SuperHeavy booster.
2. They want to demonstrate controlled reentry of Starship itself.

Although the intention for the Space Shuttle was to be reusable, the technology, engineering and ideas weren't there back then. Brilliant machine though it was, each launch cost billions and it took six months to repair the heatshield after reentry, before it could fly again. In contrast, SpaceX are trying to install a reusable heatshield not needing repaid. The controlled descent will test how far they've come and show what needs to be done.

This means they're no longer going to attempt a deorbit burn when in orbit, as that comes with an element of risk. If the heatshield works, they can fairly easily solve any deorbit problems in future. But if they lost the vehicle because of testing a deorbit burn this time, they still wouldn't have tested the heatshield properly. Everything about this program is to solve the hardest problems first - for instance there's no point working on the ship's life-support systems yet, because there's always the chance it will need a radical redesign before it can fly Humans.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-4

 

.

[TigerTedd]

@Carl Sagan this isn’t to do with space travel, but it’s probably not worth it’s own thread, and I bet we can shoe horn it in somewhere. 

my daughter just showed me her chemistry homework, and she’s learning about the atomic bonds that make graphene and nanotubes. 

I told her, this is something we didn’t learn about in school, because it never existed. Graphene, and the potentials of graphene, fascinate me.

i feel like the 21st century has taken a while to kick into gear. At the turn of the millennium, we all felt like on January 1st we should all be wearing tin foil clothes and living in a jetsons world.

change has been gradual, like watching your kids grow, so you don’t notice, but it starting to believe that if you transported a person from the 90s to today, they would would say wow!

certainly I think in the next 5-10 years we’ll all be wearing graphene clothes, be using quantum computers, and space travel will be pretty regular. Self driving cars will be more than just fancy cruise control, ai will be Star Trek level computer assistants, and robots round the home will be mean than just a rumba.

i feel like it’s all starting to kick into gear, like the first 25 years have been a testing phase, with everything in its beta, and the 21st v1.0 is about to launch.

having said that, as much as I have optimism that the next 10 years will see a lot of movement to a jetsons style utopia, I have equal anxiety that we’re also bang in the middle of a slow and undramatic apocalypse, which means we might not get to see any of these things come to fruition cos we’ll be smashed back to the Stone Age pretty soon. That would be a shame. 

[TigerTedd]

And what’s all this I hear about quantum levitation? That sounds sci fi a s***.

3D printing is also very 21st century. 

[silverback]

On 25/05/2024 at 12:50, Carl Sagan said:

Yes, but there are reasons. One is the question of redundancy. At this stage it's unlikely, but should a problem arise with the Dragon, Americans would still have a ride into space, when for ten years their only means of going was on the Russian Soyuz, such was the state of the American space industry before Space X. And in the multi-billion contract NASA commissioned (I think) six flights, so those will probably happen - but after that it's very likely Starliner will be retired. Boeing claims it's lost billions on it, and no one wants to fly Boeing nowadays anyway. And...

There was a third bidder back in the day, and many were disappointed they didn't get a slice of the pie, but now they have. And this is the Dream Chaser spaceplane, a sort of mini space shuttle. But Sierra Space were able to keep working on it, and ever though NASA can't yet give out new Commercial Crew contracts it has recently awarded it a cargo contract which allows some development funds, meaning an uncrewed cargo version will fly to the Space Station later this year (and is already at NASA facilities for testing). As the company continues to develop a crewed version. It looks pretty cool:

 

sponsored by tena?

PMS

[Carl Sagan]

On 25/05/2024 at 23:04, TigerTedd said:

@Carl Sagan this isn’t to do with space travel, but it’s probably not worth it’s own thread, and I bet we can shoe horn it in somewhere. 

my daughter just showed me her chemistry homework, and she’s learning about the atomic bonds that make graphene and nanotubes. 

I told her, this is something we didn’t learn about in school, because it never existed. Graphene, and the potentials of graphene, fascinate me.

i feel like the 21st century has taken a while to kick into gear. At the turn of the millennium, we all felt like on January 1st we should all be wearing tin foil clothes and living in a jetsons world.

change has been gradual, like watching your kids grow, so you don’t notice, but it starting to believe that if you transported a person from the 90s to today, they would would say wow!

certainly I think in the next 5-10 years we’ll all be wearing graphene clothes, be using quantum computers, and space travel will be pretty regular. Self driving cars will be more than just fancy cruise control, ai will be Star Trek level computer assistants, and robots round the home will be mean than just a rumba.

i feel like it’s all starting to kick into gear, like the first 25 years have been a testing phase, with everything in its beta, and the 21st v1.0 is about to launch.

having said that, as much as I have optimism that the next 10 years will see a lot of movement to a jetsons style utopia, I have equal anxiety that we’re also bang in the middle of a slow and undramatic apocalypse, which means we might not get to see any of these things come to fruition cos we’ll be smashed back to the Stone Age pretty soon. That would be a shame. 

Indeed I *love* that we are finally just beginning to live in the future - one promised by Tomorrow's World all those years ago.

Different human Ages have been determined by materials, from Stone to Bronze to Iron, all the way through to now where we're probably living in the Silicon Age. But as the 21st century progresses, we may well live in an  Age of Two-Dimensional materials, begun with graphene and and other 2D structures, then extended by configuring all manner of extraordinary properties by doping, replacing different atoms with other specific ones. It will be fantastic! Great your daughter is studying this at school, TT.

And you're right that when we live through changes, we don't notice them so much and think "wow" if we remember what the beforetimes were like. Connectivity is a big spur and having the world's information at everyone's fingertips has helped. With the double drivers of added computing power continuing to grow exponentially all these years on from when the things were invented, combined with the explosion of digital data - allowing neural nets to be trained for AI. With space the Shuttle and reusability was a great idea, but at that time we weren't able to deliver. We didn't have the materials, the knowhow or the money. Now we have all of that, combined with Musk's personal expertise, drive and vision. 

But you're right, there's many orders of magnitude difference between the dangers posed by natural existential risks, such as befell the dinosaurs, and the anthropic risks we've created. The best quantitative assessment of survival and not reverting to the Stone Age (or worse) is currently 85% per century, explained in Toby Ord's book The Precipice (which I edited for him!). That level of risk is unsustainable in the medium or long term, so we definitely have to change our way of thinking if we're to move smoothly into the glorious future we're building around us. And if it's beginning to get good now, imagine what wonders we'll see twenty years from now!

[Malagaram]

18 minutes ago, Carl Sagan said:

Indeed I *love* that we are finally just beginning to live in the future - one promised by Tomorrow's World all those years ago.

Different human Ages have been determined by materials, from Stone to Bronze to Iron, all the way through to now where we're probably living in the Silicon Age. But as the 21st century progresses, we may well live in an  Age of Two-Dimensional materials, begun with graphene and and other 2D structures, then extended by configuring all manner of extraordinary properties by doping, replacing different atoms with other specific ones. It will be fantastic! Great your daughter is studying this at school, TT.

And you're right that when we live through changes, we don't notice them so much and think "wow" if we remember what the beforetimes were like. Connectivity is a big spur and having the world's information at everyone's fingertips has helped. With the double drivers of added computing power continuing to grow exponentially all these years on from when the things were invented, combined with the explosion of digital data - allowing neural nets to be trained for AI. With space the Shuttle and reusability was a great idea, but at that time we weren't able to deliver. We didn't have the materials, the knowhow or the money. Now we have all of that, combined with Musk's personal expertise, drive and vision. 

But you're right, there's many orders of magnitude difference between the dangers posed by natural existential risks, such as befell the dinosaurs, and the anthropic risks we've created. The best quantitative assessment of survival and not reverting to the Stone Age (or worse) is currently 85% per century, explained in Toby Ord's book The Precipice (which I edited for him!). That level of risk is unsustainable in the medium or long term, so we definitely have to change our way of thinking if we're to move smoothly into the glorious future we're building around us. And if it's beginning to get good now, imagine what wonders we'll see twenty years from now!

Who Cares !

[Eddie]

1 hour ago, Malagaram said:

Who Cares !

Philistine

[TigerTedd]

9 hours ago, Carl Sagan said:

Indeed I *love* that we are finally just beginning to live in the future - one promised by Tomorrow's World all those years ago.

Different human Ages have been determined by materials, from Stone to Bronze to Iron, all the way through to now where we're probably living in the Silicon Age. But as the 21st century progresses, we may well live in an  Age of Two-Dimensional materials, begun with graphene and and other 2D structures, then extended by configuring all manner of extraordinary properties by doping, replacing different atoms with other specific ones. It will be fantastic! Great your daughter is studying this at school, TT.

And you're right that when we live through changes, we don't notice them so much and think "wow" if we remember what the beforetimes were like. Connectivity is a big spur and having the world's information at everyone's fingertips has helped. With the double drivers of added computing power continuing to grow exponentially all these years on from when the things were invented, combined with the explosion of digital data - allowing neural nets to be trained for AI. With space the Shuttle and reusability was a great idea, but at that time we weren't able to deliver. We didn't have the materials, the knowhow or the money. Now we have all of that, combined with Musk's personal expertise, drive and vision. 

But you're right, there's many orders of magnitude difference between the dangers posed by natural existential risks, such as befell the dinosaurs, and the anthropic risks we've created. The best quantitative assessment of survival and not reverting to the Stone Age (or worse) is currently 85% per century, explained in Toby Ord's book The Precipice (which I edited for him!). That level of risk is unsustainable in the medium or long term, so we definitely have to change our way of thinking if we're to move smoothly into the glorious future we're building around us. And if it's beginning to get good now, imagine what wonders we'll see twenty years from now!

You know what always frustrates me is when people say ‘we haven’t got the technology yet, but we will in 10 years.’ Always makes me wonder, ‘well if you know what’s required, and you know it’s possible, get on with it, why can’t we have it tomorrow, why do we have to wait 10 years.’

Funny that 60s and 70s were known as the space age. People often beat nasa with the stick that we were on the moon in the 60s and then haven’t been back again for like 50 years. But it’s not like we have never been back to space. We go to space all the time. It’s not about putting men on a rock that we’ve pretty much learnt all we can learn about, but about getting satellites and space stations up there, which we’ve achieved and which has changed the world. 

[Malagaram]

10 hours ago, Eddie said:

Philistine

How many of our keen bloggers will be alive when the starship lands with its payload of humans onto a planet other than Earth,that Eddie is what I meant,how much interest is there on a blog that wont happen in our lifetime,