roystgnr
1d ago
Technologically, almost surely building a self-sufficient base on the sea floor would be easier than doing so on the Moon or Mars
It depends on where on the sea floor you're considering. Even the continental shelf is under 10atm of water pressure, though that's relatively tolerable. The sea floor is much more difficult than space when you're instead looking at oceanic crust away from continents. Lower pressure differences are much easier to deal with than higher ones, and structures in tension are much better behaved than in compression. When the ISS hull has a failure at 0atm, they just need to replace a couple pounds of air per day while they analyze it, and "drill through the hull in front of the crack to stop propagation, then quickly epoxy it all" was a serious (well, Russian serious) scheme to fix the problem. When the the Titan hull had a failure at ≈300atm, it probably killed everybody within milliseconds.
roystgnr
1d ago
Honest conversations about Hemingway's vision of masculinity and life cannot ignore the suicide.
You could perhaps pin his father's prior and brother's later suicides on the same memes, but his sister's and granddaughter's later suicides probably weren't because of a malformed conception of their masculinity. There might be some genetic mental health factors and/or suicide contagion here too.
roystgnr
1d ago
It's a huge gamble. In 20 years everyone will either agree that it was a huge bubble or that it was a huge opportunity, but without hindsight it's really a huge gamble. I would have been thrilled to buy in during most of their previous private fundraising, but by IPO time the huge upside possibilities they have were clear to everyone, and IMHO that upside is now more than adequately priced in. I'm not planning to directly buy any shares unless there's a big unwarranted dip, and even then my motivation would likely be "I want to help ensure their employees' options are worth what they deserve" more than "I'm using the Kelly criterion to maximize expected utility of my portfolio".
Man, I wish I had the slightest idea about investments.
Lesson 1 is very short and yet very effective: "Diversify". Get a NASDAQ-tracking index fund, and you'll have a small piece of SpaceX, but you'll also have enough other weakly-correlated-with-SpaceX stocks that you won't have to worry about losing big if things go bad for SpaceX in particular, just about downturns in tech as a whole or the stock market as a whole.
There's something to be said for the fun of wild gambles over sensible investments, of course. I made my first ETrade account around age 20, picked two stocks, and was so excited by the one that quadrupled that I didn't feel too bad when the other went bankrupt. (And even that was a mini-lesson in diversifying! Imagine if I'd bought the same two in serial rather than in parallel!) Just remember that high-variance gambles, even positive-expected-value ones, are the sort of thing you want to do with disposable income when you're 20, not with base retirement savings or the kids' college funds when you're 40.
roystgnr
1d ago
any serious nation already can or soon will be able to strike assets in LEO all the same
SSO, but you're still correct.
it's at least fairly plausible to me that the engineering challenges can be overcome while NIMBYism gets ever more dysfunctional and terrestial power generation remains a bottleneck
The bear case for data centers in space is that the engineering challenges need to be overcome in the right order. I know the anti-data-center craze is literally crazy right now, but earth-bound solar+battery-powered passively-cooled centers are probably no more likely to be strangled by red tape than orbital centers. The orbital centers may look cheaper in back-of-napkin calculations right now, but only because battery prices haven't yet crashed as far as solar panel prices have and chip prices are so high that you want to run everything on a 100% duty cycle. If battery supply improves enough, or chip supply does (or if chip demand falls), the numbers change.
roystgnr
1d ago
Would you be shocked if President grab-her-by-the-pussy is outed as a rapist tomorrow? And would you be shocked if those allegations were then found to be fabricated next week?
No, and no, respectively, and that's the fault of his brag-about-sexual-assault behavior and of his attackers' throw-mud-and-see-what-sticks behavior, so neither of my "no"s is wrong in either the positive or normative sense.
There's always nebulous "signs" that seem obvious in hindsight
Are there, though? Politician is a pretty awful job for people who aren't attracted to power, which might correlate with sexual force kinks and probably correlates with being willing to lie for power, but even vague signs aren't "always" there. It's not a wacky coincidence that we've been talking about Platner pretty exclusively before this final straw. Cory Booker might be a contributor to federal gridlock, but do you think he might be a rapist? John Cornyn might lie about how partisan his Supreme Court confirmation behavior was, but do you think he'd lie to frame someone for rape?
In this case in particular, we're in theory talking about a candidate who was head-hunted by party insiders, not somebody whose drive to power led him to start a campaign on his own initiative. If we're already widening the search that proactively, couldn't we just have found someone with no Nazi tattoos, no public statements of bloodlust, no reports of abuse from exes, no violations of wedding vows, and no accounts on creepy sites famed for underaged sexting? This is not actually a big ask! There are loads of normal people out there, some of whom would probably agree to run for Senator anyway!
roystgnr
1d ago
Well, they've definitely delivered payload to the moon; even the major lander failures still hit the moon and would have done so regardless. But Musk's "I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact." joke comes to mind; getting to the moon is only like 75% of the problem.
roystgnr
1d ago
Race+gender+class+sexual orientation gets you most of the way there.
My kids are mixed race. Do they count as my race for purposes of power, or their mom's, or "mixed race", or the particular combination of races? Does it matter whether they're half-and-half or 1/32 and 31/32?
How do we define race objectively to begin with? Cluster analysis at least sounds like a good idea, if we could do it without any subjective or arbitrary assumptions, except that that turns out to be mathematically impossible.
Do all 72 genders get equal representation? That page seems like it'd have to be a parody, but it was the top 1 Google result for "how many genders are there"! This is a bit of a political hot topic already; imagine how much hotter it would be if a determination of "you folks are all the same gender" gives the subjects a tenth as much political power as "you folks can be divided into these ten genders".
In my country (and, I thought, most of them) we haven't had any titular nobility or legal castes for quite a while if ever, and right now our best definition of "class" is a set of arbitrary numbers that vary from location to location and from time period to time period, a subjective partitioning of continuous data into discrete subsets, each of which necessarily end up with members which are much more similar to members of neighboring sets than to their own sets' medians. There are no joints here to cleave at!
Sexual orientation has the same problem as gender in terms of definition (if I'm attracted to ciswomen but not transwomen, is that the same orientation as someone attracted to both? as someone attracted to only particular subsets of ciswomen?) and most of the same problems of verification (my wife is pretty good evidence I'm not gay, but am I bi? Root through my history long enough and you'll find I've never dated a man, but that's just evidence, not proof).
roystgnr
2d ago
they can definitely claim credit and blame for the lunar mission if they want
I'm a huge SpaceX fan, but you're being more generous now than I would be! Beresheet crashed. Hakuto-R 1 and 2 crashed. IM-1 tilted. IM-2 tipped over. Yay for Blue Ghost (and for IM-1, honestly, and for the survivors of the similarly mixed lunar lander record with other launchers and countries), but the success of any full lunar lander missions is clearly resting in large part on the success of a very difficult mission phase that SpaceX has yet to attempt themselves and can't claim credit for. SpaceX can only claim credit for their own (also difficult!) contributions to those missions. SpaceX does have a pretty amazing record these days with vastly larger autonomous rocket-powered landers, ones that are fighting 6 times the gravity and infinity times the wind, but looking at those Intuitive Machines results I still worry about the future. I hope we'll see the uncrewed Starship HLS land perfectly before we try putting any humans on such a tall lander aimed at an unprepared landing site.
I hadn't seen SpaceX talking about orbits higher than GTO
I thought that was pretty much all Falcon Heavy turned out to be good for, after Falcon 9 payload growth ate its lunch from below. Looking at the FH launch list, I guess I'm wrong, and there were a few GTO launches (for satellites that would have been too heavy to use its upper stage for the apogee burn while still recovering boosters? simply for conservative customers?), but otherwise there's a bunch of GEO, plus the asteroid belt and Jupiter, with Earth-Sun L2 and the moon slated for later this year. Aside from the moon, Falcon 9 has already done Earth-Sun Lagrange points and the asteroid belt. It's just that LEO/GTO/GEO are where the money is for now.
roystgnr
2d ago
Otherwise Platner would be able to say he found God and it's all good now.
In Christianity genuine repentance means it's all good with God now, but one of the things the genuinely repentant want to do is to reduce future temptation to sin for themselves and others, which makes "and so there don't need to be any secular consequences for my actions either!" a huge red flag suggesting non-genuine repentance.
Secular decision theory isn't much different here. It might be possible to rewrite your own mental hardware to be more virtuous from that point onward, but it's rare enough that you can't expect others to trust it's not a fake unless you're putting out signals whose cost exceeds the benefit to you of that trust. Donations are particularly tricky, because donees who don't trust you might just make the signal backfire by returning your money; some of Harvey Weinstein's attempts come to mind.
roystgnr
2d ago
on the basis that SpaceX successfully got them as far as LEO.
TLI. (and a precise high-apogee high-efficiency TLI, not just something like the interplanetary YOLO of Falcon Heavy's first test) You're right that this isn't the same and isn't as impressive as being responsible for a soft-landing stage in a lunar mission too, but it's still a little more impressive than LEO. There are four or five launch vehicles operational today that have put payloads in LEO but no higher.
Sorry about whoever was downvoting you, and I wish they'd bug off.
how eighteen year old boys feel about fourteen year old girls I can't comment
I vaguely recall thinking "she'll probably be really cute in a few years, but it'd be gross to say so" about a fourteen year old girl when I was seventeen. I don't think I was an outlier. In the OKCupid data, there was a cutoff for both sexes at 18, but the male lower limit for the ages represented was a pretty linear W >= M * .5 + 6.5 (slightly more creepy than the "Seinfeld rule"!), and if we (dubiously) extrapolate that back to 18 that would give us 15.5 as a lower limit.
Nineteen and twenty-three isn't quite so bad, but still a gap.
No, but what throws a wrench in semi-logical explanations is that for both typical men and typical women it's a gap that is considered to be much more significant in just one direction. 23 year old men in the OKCupid data were generally interested in 18-27 year old women, and 19 year old women were interested in 19-25 year old men; 23 year old women were interested in 22-29 year old men, and 19 year old men were interested in 18-23 (probably 16-23, extrapolating) year old girls+women. Apparently "I'm dating the peer of my younger brother" gives The Ick, and "of my older sister" is Ick-adjacent, but "of my younger sister" and "of my older brother" are (or at least were; I'm sure Age Gap Discourse has had its ups and downs over the decades after this data was created) much more accepted.
roystgnr
2d ago
French still does that? I only recently learned that English used to have those distinctions, between "yes/no" and "yea/nay".
roystgnr
2d ago
A hostile administration could launch these sort of investigations more often
"More often" from a future FAA would stick out like a sore thumb. FAA investigations into SpaceX failures are already done as often as reasonable, out of a proper abundance of caution. A year ago they grounded Falcon briefly after a booster landing burn failure, not because there was any possible danger from that, but because seeing anything unexpected with a rocket engine at any point suggested the possibility of something unexpected happening in the future at an actually-dangerous point.
and slow-walk them
But this could be pretty damaging. IIRC that Falcon grounding only lasted days. The difficulty with slow-walking is that in these cases it's SpaceX itself doing the real investigation work and the FAA reviewing the findings when they're done, and it'd be hard to sell "we need 4 months to read what took you a month to discover and write" as legitimate. They'd have to go all-out and get a hostile legislator to change the system entirely, to sell "They're just investigating themselves!? We need our people doing the investigation if we're going to protect the American People!" Achieve that and you wouldn't even need to give instructions to slow-walk anything; friction and incentives would do it for you.
roystgnr
2d ago
goofy stuff like autonomous cars, robo taxis, electric trucks of various sizes, and humanoid robots, got absolutely nowhere with either of these things
Autonomous Tesla robo taxis started operating unsupervised in Austin last December, and in like 3 more cities this year, though I think they're at least delayed in 4 others, and in indefinite "you must ring a bell in front of your auto-carriage so as not to spook the horses" supervised status in California. I also wouldn't categorize prototypes as "absolutely nowhere", but at the very least the phrase "lalaland sci-fi prediction" should not be used to describe literal, physical things that I look out my car window and see driving past, don't you think?
but this sort of money will surely be enough to get them over whatever humps they run into on the road...
Yes, but how fast? Money can be spent to reduce failure probability (even if just by taking more iterations to fix failures), but it can't always be spent to reduce time to success. SpaceX had $24B cash on hand at the end of 2025, but still spent 7 months in between the last Block 2 and the first Block 3 launch, roughly the same as after the Test 1 launch pad debacle, probably because the regressions between the last Block 1 and the first Block 2 weren't a cycle they wanted to risk repeating. Even after that delay we still saw some regressions, albeit not such serious ones: an upper-stage engine-out, though it was compensated for and left them on target, also left them paranoid enough that they skipped a planned engine relight test; a wildly overpowered boostback burn attempt led to mass engine failures, though that was in their first attempt at something envelope-pushing and non-mission-critical.
I think it all depends on two things:
-
what kind of cadence can they keep up with Block 3 this year? It looks like they'll only have a couple months between the first and second launches of it, which is a good start. If nothing goes wrong and we get Flight 15 this year too then I'd bet at least that goes orbital.
-
what do they want to "spend" this years tests on?
On the one hand, though I don't yet know if they've hit their engineering goals (only ≈44 metric tons payload in that last test, and although in prior tests they've only launched 20-60% of their claimed max to LEO, I'd bet their max is still under 100, their goal for fully-reusable launches) block 3 is at least impressive enough (compare to ≈17 tons for Falcon 9 reusable; Falcon Heavy's same-as-9 fairing means it's only been useful to launch stuff farther, not to launch more stuff) that they'll be tempted to use it operationally while tweaking the design, same as they did with Falcon 9 (originally ≈9 tons and expendable). This would mean going to orbit ASAP, except:
On the other hand, their political goal is "put a manned lander on the Moon before China or Blue Origin can", and refueling a lander of Starship scale requires a serious combination of payload and cadence. Even if they can launch 90 or 100 tons to LEO soon, only doing that every month or two won't cut it. They need some combination of more infrastructure (which they're working on, with multiple additional pads and much bigger factories, but this itself is a timeline risk), more payload (not as crazy as it sounds; Gross Lift-Off Weight is over 5000 tons, and small fractional improvements in dry mass have outsized effects), or rapid reusability (which seems achievable with the booster at this point, but the upper stage still has me worried). The latter two options both would benefit from risky testing, not just gradual tweaking, but the trouble with risky testing is that you don't want to leave any test failure in orbit if you aren't absolutely certain you can get it down safely, which means that they're going to want to stay suborbital with any test that includes a major system upgrade or a major flight profile change. That wildly overpowered boostback burn attempt in Flight 12 might have been born from a hope to shave off many tons of extra boostback fuel that get expended in a more gradual burn, and although they're not getting too wild (e.g. upper stage engine-out compensation capability is another extra expense and it's a good thing they didn't risk forgoing it), they're at least still in "major testing" mode, not "fine-tuning" mode.
I do think they'll be in orbit by the year's end, but it's nowhere near a guarantee at this point. One sufficiently nasty explosion in the next test, and that's that.
Since last year I have added a bet with @roystgnr, that SpaceX will make it to Mars by 2029. That one will obviously take a while to resolve, but since SpaceX has officially deprioritized Mars in favor of the Moon, it looks like my chances are looking good.
I have to agree with your chances now, but do note I said "sending an unmanned (save for Optimus androids) one-way ship or two in the 2029 launch window, albeit probably to crash on arrival", which is not quite the same as "make it to Mars". Mostly the distinction is "probably to crash on arrival", but there's also a finer distinction where, if they actually do make an attempt but miss the launch windows on the "nice" side of the porkchop plot, it's not impossible that they'd launch a later-starting longer trajectory that only reaches Mars entry (or failure-of-entry) in 2030.
It wouldn't be too crazy for them to make such an attempt, in the admittedly-unlikely event that the rest of their timelines are going perfectly at that point. Counter-intuitively, a trajectory to Mars is much cheaper (under 3 km/s ΔV at the best times) than HLS (≈3 km/s just to get to the Moon, then another ≈5 km/s for descent and ascent under the current plans). Yeeting an upper stage interplanetary might be worth it just to get Mars-entry-with-Starship-heat-shield data a couple years earlier, even if they're not ready to land or do anything useful if they do.
This whole bet is starting to feel like an episode of Wacky Races.
And that's even before you get into the other racers. There's probably an effortpost worth of new detail out there about the New Glenn static fire explosion, and their dedication to repair the wrecked pad and launch again before the year is out, and/or about RocketLab/China/etc, if I only found time to write it up.
roystgnr
3d ago
he was one of the early rationalist adjacent that likely filters a lot of people here
I feel like this understates it, if only a little. Hanson's blog, Overcoming Bias, was originally a group blog by him and Yudkowsky, and the posts that seeded LessWrong came from there. Slate Star Codex was where Scott Alexander put those of his posts that didn't seem appropriate for LessWrong. Then we got /r/slatestarcodex for the users who preferred Reddit as a discussion platform, then /r/themotte when Scott wanted further distance from culture war arguments (or, less charitably to us, from many of our arguers), and finally TheMotte when our mods worried about the subreddit possibly becoming too censored or even banned. "Great-great-great-blog-grandpa" isn't really a close relation, but it's interesting trivia that it's a direct relation.
Hanson's always been the sort of person who will put out half-baked taboo ideas for discussion, for a number of reasons, but I think one of the stronger reasons is that he's got a streak of high-decoupling contrarianism that's both a direct and a close relation to the culture here. There's a certain kind of mind, still probably very over-represented here, who sees "here's why your idea is stupid" as a potentially-friendly-and-helpful source of hopefully-new thoughts but also sees "here's why you can't talk about your idea" the way a bull sees a waving red cape.
roystgnr
6d ago
When I looked at the OKCupid data (so long long ago that OKCupid was an independent site, good for dating, and publishing good data!), there was a surprisingly sharp and linear relationship between ages and "allowable match" cutoff ages. For women the lower cutoff was roughly M >= W * 0.8 + 3.6. A typical 18W would just barely be interested in an 18M, and a typical 23W wouldn't be eager to go below 22M, certainly not 4 years below.
roystgnr
17d ago
I'm often pretty moronic. That doesn't make me more in favor of restrictive government, though. The average representative there seems to be even dumber than me, and we may be unable to choose better ones, because the median voter seems to be even dumber than them! I'll take my chances with my own decisions, thanks.
roystgnr
21d ago
IMHO the Foundation trilogy gets much more humanized halfway through, and even for the first half "sterile" is an overstatement, but you're at least directionally correct, I must admit.
I'd agree his non-fiction was better than his fiction, it's just harder to recommend because there's so much to choose from! Hundreds of books instead of dozens, in so many fields that it's hard to say that a fan of one subject would equally appreciate the others. "Asimov's Guide to the Bible" was perhaps the most in-depth example I can think of to recommend, but by far my favorites were (the anthologies of) his pop-science essays.
The original "Foundation" trilogy is the place I'd start, if you're okay with the old-sci-fi "Sense of Wonder, Big Ideas, What's Characterization?" style. For the first whole book the plot jumps from generation to generation fast enough that when he does give you a fascinating character you have to resign yourself to soon saying goodbye and at best hearing about that character again later as a historical figure.
"The Caves of Steel" (followed by "The Naked Sun", "The Robots of Dawn", and "Robots and Empire") would be option B. Sci-fi/mystery crossovers, maybe not as good overall but not nearly as weak on character development.
There's a two-book prequel series to the Foundation trilogy, which was my favorite of all the fiction he's written, but which I wouldn't recommend reading until after the above 7 books.
I think that covers all the strong recommendations for novels.
His collaborations with Robert Silverberg were good, but they were all just fleshing out earlier novellas, and honestly you could just read the novellas instead to get 90% of the quality in 30% of the time.
He got started with short stories, and some of his best stuff is in them, but any particular anthology is a mix of quality, except that his last couple ("Gold" and "Magic") I found disappointing.
His "Empire" novels ("The Currents of Space", "The Stars, Like Dust", and "Pebble in the Sky"), weren't best-of-the-century things like the Foundation trilogy was, but I did like them better than The End of Eternity.
He had a couple kids' book series. I remember loving "Lucky Starr" and being disappointed by "Norby", but I read "Lucky Starr" in elementary school and I wouldn't dare guess how it would hold up to an adult. Perhaps Norby was just as good but I found it in middle school or high school and had aged out of the intended audience.
Edit: I almost forgot to mention "The Gods Themselves" - I wouldn't even put it above the "strong recommendations" line myself, but in some ways it was one of the most unique and interesting books of his I've read, and I've known other people to say it was his best, and it's perhaps a safer recommendation (stand-alone work, not "you should read these other seven books first!") than my own favorite.
roystgnr
25d ago
I'm a big Asimov fan, but that was one of his weakest. Hopefully if you're there it's just because you ran through all of his good novels first?
roystgnr
30d ago
Just because you can understand something to be "nothing but the truth" doesn't mean it's not wildly misleading.
On a more silly note: my daughter ran across a recommendation for "The Best Policy", a 1950s SF short story by Randall Garrett, and we quickly found a copy online a couple nights ago. It's one of the funniest illustrations of this trope I've ever read.
roystgnr
30d ago
Just because you can understand something to be "nothing but the truth" doesn't mean it's not wildly misleading.
Isn't this what the "whole truth" clause is supposed to be for? If I testify that you have never denied being the serial killer known as the "Scranton Strangler" then I have said nothing but the truth, but if I fail to add that this is because you have never been accused of being the Scranton Strangler then I have not said the whole truth.
We could probably settle that now, despite you being on track to win in a way that makes the question moot. My inclination would be that "they go interplanetary, but not within expected error margins of their initial trajectory, and they can't course-correct with a later burn before the year is out" counts as a win for you, whereas "they start on their expected interplanetary trajectory, under full control, but they fail a normal course correction burn (or plane change burn, attitude control, whatever doesn't get them from a good Mars transit trajectory to a good Mars entry trajectory) after they're out of Earth's gravity well" counts as a win for me. Fair? IMO "heading to Mars but not quite making Mars entry" still counts as "sending" like I said, even if I was imagining burning up in the atmosphere rather than missing it. But since "they make their initial trajectory and afterward have some kind of restart or attitude control issue" has been a problem in 2 or 3 out of 8 flights that did make the intended trajectory, and that's despite trying to restart control after a delay of only minutes rather than weeks, if they do manage to yeet one off on tight timelines then problems with more frozen valves or what have you are surely a significant failure mode risk.
I maintain that the hype is an incredibly important factor for them, just not because of the stock market, rather because it's how SpaceX manages to retain a whole lot of SpaceX employees, despite how many of them could find lower stress or higher pay or both as Blue Origin employees or RocketLab employees or Boeing employees or so on. If SpaceX is managing Moon landings by 2029, though, that might be enough "we're on the way to Mars" hype for more delays on the direct part of the path to be forgiven.
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