Elon Musk's Neuralink says this monkey is playing Pong with its mind

[Master Disaster]

Just now, Bombastinator said:

So the complaint is the test isn’t useful for some problems.  This could be true.  If this is the only test that could be a valid point.  I don’t know whether it is or not.

I'm not complaining at all.

 

Musk is doing Starlink in the only way he possibly can. He has to start small and incrementally increase service area over time, that's the only way he can possibly do it.

 

All I am saying is that you shouldn't be surprised if SL ends up having higher latency than it has right now. Once/if users go into the millions, tens of millions and beyond things might start to clog up and then we'll see if his solution actually works.

[Master Disaster]

17 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Could be done if it’s satellite cluster goes over cities and there are enough people in a small enough space trying to connect.  It is still just testing after all.  This has always seemed to me to be more about rural connection than urban connection though.  Cables are still more efficient in urban environments.  It’s the rural stuff where there are a lot fewer connections per area that matter.  It seems to me to be more a “this might not work very well” than a “this is impossible and is clearly a scam” though which fits with star link claims.   The entire testing system isn’t even all up yet though so there is gonna be some time.

Sorry, I missed this post yesterday...

 

My understanding is his intentions are to have at least 2 and preferably 3 satellites covering any area, since they're geostationary orbiters that don't move relative to the Earths rotation he can, theoretically at least, target high traffic areas with more satellites.

 

Starlink will probably have a more significant impact on US broadband than anyone is really expecting it to. It will bring something to the market that is totally absent right now... Competition.

 

Suddenly hundreds of millions of Americans will now have an alternative to their current (only only option) provider. That should hopefully force the current ISPs to loosen their grip and actually compete. The last thing they want is the customers jumping ship to Starlink.

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Sorry, I missed this post yesterday...

 

My understanding is his intentions are to have at least 2 and preferably 3 satellites covering any area, since they're geostationary orbiters that don't move relative to the Earths rotation he can, theoretically at least, target high traffic areas with more satellites.

 

Starlink will probably have a more significant impact on US broadband than anyone is really expecting it to. It will bring something to the market that is totally absent right now... Competition.

 

Suddenly hundreds of millions of Americans will now have an alternative to their current (only only option) provider. That should hopefully force the current ISPs to loosen their grip and actually compete. The last thing they want is the customers jumping ship to Starlink.

True.  Even a not-so-good competitor can make a big difference in a badly abused monopoly.  What it may do is make starlink a minimum standard where there is still a monopoly on really fast high bandwidth internet but even starlink level connection if starlink turns out to not work very well is still vastly higher than what is available in many areas currently.  It’s not whether starlink will be successful in some areas but how successful and how far reaching will it be. There are whole states in the US that still have more sheep than people. What is interesting politically is these areas are almost exclusively red.  For several years now the US political breakdown is cities are predominantly blue and rural areas are predominantly red.  What changes is the size of the blue dots in the sea of red. 

[FakeATF]

17 hours ago, Kisai said:

My view is that if deployed properly, it could quite literately replace the internet. Imagine a network that is out of reach by rogue nations, can’t ever be turned off, and can be supremely anonymous if you will it, since the it addressed will not be geographical.

 

But private interests will likely prevent any of that.

Yikes, Elon Musk having total control over the networks? Big red flag for me.

[Bombastinator]

Just now, FakeATF said:

Yikes, Elon Musk having total control over the networks? Big red flag for me.

Any one entity regardless of who it is does that I think.  This represents one extreme of possibilities.  Right now it is unknown how effective starlink will be.  Right now it’s pretty unlikely for starlink to be able to match hard lines for speed, reliability, and bandwidth.  Breaking rural monopolies though could possibly give him the leverage to take the urban hardline networks though.  Wouldn’t be fast.  Something to look out for. 

[dalekphalm]

For people claiming that Musk is just a front man - whether you want to trust him or take his word on it or not, he's stated many times in Interviews that he only spends about 20% of his time doing "business administration" type stuff. He has CFO's and the like for SpaceX and Tesla that do most of the day to day business operations.

 

He says that he spends 90% of his time with the engineers, helping them. He might not be an accredited engineer, and he might not be the expert in the various systems (eg: the Raptor engine), but he knows the engineering way more than an average person would. He understands most of the individual components and how they work, and how they function in a larger system - particularly with regards to SpaceX.

 

So you can claim that he's lying about that, but I don't think he is. The man really is a genius, in terms of his intellect. I personally fully believe that he does learn and dive into the engineering aspects of SpaceX (and to a lesser degree, Tesla).

 

Is he an ass, on a personal level? Probably. But that doesn't take away from his achievements, it just makes him an ass. Lots of smart and/or famous people are asses. And yes, the COVID bullshit was him spouting off about stuff he's not an expert in. That was wrong. But that doesn't take away from, for example, the achievements of the Falcon 9 or currently the progress with Starship.

[bcredeur97]

On 4/9/2021 at 9:36 AM, BuckGup said:

Absolutely amazing but I want to see it without the banana feeder as I can see the monkey grabbing it and moving it's arm and hand as if it was the joystick. This probably makes it much more effective and it would be more impressive if they strapped the monkey down or put him in a straight jacket

the problem with this is the monkey prob would be too distracted from being tied down rather than focusing on the task at hand. 

 

 

22 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Well, no.  He’s a business executive. So was jobs. Or basically every other executive of every other company on the planet. (A single or few exceptions does not disprove the rule)  You seem to be linking him with authoritative behavior without consulting the people that ARE experts. We’ve seen that happen in American politics and it’s a big mess, but that doesn’t mean that is happening here.   Doesn’t NOT mean it too, but it’s not indicative.  

 

What I find odd about Musk is his lack of missteps.  Edison had more missteps than Musk has.  Edison had a reputation as an inventor but he was really just a businessman too.  Look at the interaction between him and Tesla for proof of this.  
Tesla WAS an actual inventor, but that didn’t go very well in the end. 

He has called himself "simply an engineer" in the past. He does know business though from experience, but i'd say he's mainly a visionaire with the skills and funds to hire other people to bring his ideas to life.

[dalekphalm]

12 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

the problem with this is the monkey prob would be too distracted from being tied down rather than focusing on the task at hand. 

Indeed, when using non-sentient animals (or animals that cannot communicate complex subjects) as part of the tests, there are limitations that are difficult to overcome.

 

How do you "tell" the monkey to just use their mind to "try" and control the game?

 

A human would be able to intuitively understand the purpose of the experiment. A monkey cannot (that we know of, anyway).

12 minutes ago, bcredeur97 said:

He has called himself "simply an engineer" in the past. He does know business though from experience, but i'd say he's mainly a visionaire with the skills and funds to hire other people to bring his ideas to life.

His greatest skill is building a good team. Which is definitely an underrated skill.

 

But he also does contribute at least some things to the more complex problems that the "real" engineers have to solve.

[Bensemus]

23 hours ago, Beskamir said:

PayPal wasn't even called PayPal when Elon was there and the company was very different and way less functional than the PayPal we know today.

Tesla was bought out by Elon using money he got for leaving PayPal (yea, from my understanding they basically paid him just to get the fuck out of there) and soon afterward he completely replaced the original founders of Tesla kicking them out of the company. Oh and there was a plan for the original founder to get the first Tesla Roadster off the assembly line but of course Elon kept it for himself and later sent it up into space.

StarLink seems like a company that was actually founded by Musk so that's good.

Same with SpaceX, although I'd still consider the engineers and scientists at those companies to be the main reason for those companies success as those companies are doing actually really cool stuff that doesn't need to be over hyped yet for some reason Musk always feels the need to over hype everything and make painfully obvious lies like Starship being able to carry 100 people or it being used for earth to earth transportation.

NeuroLink was founded by Musk (or rather his money) and 7 other actually useful individuals and given Elon's track record of being hell to work with, I wouldn't be surprised if most of those founders aren't there anymore.

You got like nothing right. 
 

first Must founded Zip2 with his brother and some other people. That company was later sold for over 100 million. Musk used that money to found X.com. X.com offered online banking. Another company called Confinity started around the same time and the two directly competed. They eventually decided to merge. Musk was made the CEO of the new company and he was the largest shareholder of it. It was called X.com. One of the products offered by X.com was PayPal which was originally under Confinity. There was disagreements within the company and about a year after the merger Musk was forced out while on Vacation. He was still the largest shareholder, just not a majority. The company remained to PayPal and focused just on that one product. They sold to EBay and Musk made the most off the sale. 
 

Eberhard and another were wanting to create an EV. They initially tried to get a team who were working on this project electric car to partner with them and make it into a commercial product. They were rejected so they started thinking about making their own company. Musk ran into that same team and also tried to get them to make it a commercial product but they said no and pointed him in the direction of Eberhard. At this point Tesla was three guys with an idea. Musk was the fourth to join and a fifth guy joined soon after. Musk co-lead the first ever investment round and put in $7.5 million of 9 million raised. Musk was made chairman of the board and appointed Eberhard CEO of the new company. Eberhard left in ~2006/7 due to large issues that had come to light with the Roadster’s development. An intern CEO stepped in who was a large shareholder of the company and oversaw the final development and launch of the Roadster. Musk became CEO in 2008. About a year after leaving Eberhard tried to sue Tesla end Musk over Musk calling himself a founder of Tesla. Much of the case was tossed out and Eberhard settled. There are legally five founders of Tesla. 
 

SpaceX was acutely created before Tesla. Musk tried to buy old ICBMs from Russia but was laughed out of the country. He apparently spent the flight home working on an outline design for the Falcon 1 rocket. Despite what people love to say he’s heavily involved in the design and engineering of the products his companies make, mainly Tesla and SpaceX. Idk how involved he is with his other companies. Many employees have been quoted as saying such.

 

Starlink isn’t a company. It’s a constellation being built by SpaceX. There are many rumours that it will be spun off as its own company once its close to being finished.

 

I don’t see how you can call claims about Starship lies already when it’s still in development. Crazy maybe but not yet lies. 
 

You definitely don’t have to like Musk as a person or the cult of followers but being a blind hater makes you just as bad as those you act better than. And for the record everyone who keeps attaching Hyperlook to Musk actually look it up. Besides some test track SpaceX offered he has no involvement with it. Instead multiple independent companies are working on trying to make it or something very similar to it a reality. The closest Musk comes is what The Boring Company is doing but it’s nothing like Hyperloop. 

[Master Disaster]

6 minutes ago, Bensemus said:

You got like nothing right. 
 

first Must founded Zip2 with his brother and some other people. That company was later sold for over 100 million. Musk used that money to found X.com. X.com offered online banking. Another company called Confinity started around the same time and the two directly competed. They eventually decided to merge. Musk was made the CEO of the new company and he was the largest shareholder of it. It was called X.com. One of the products offered by X.com was PayPal which was originally under Confinity. There was disagreements within the company and about a year after the merger Musk was forced out while on Vacation. He was still the largest shareholder, just not a majority. The company remained to PayPal and focused just on that one product. They sold to EBay and Musk made the most off the sale. 
 

Eberhard and another were wanting to create an EV. They initially tried to get a team who were working on this project electric car to partner with them and make it into a commercial product. They were rejected so they started thinking about making their own company. Musk ran into that same team and also tried to get them to make it a commercial product but they said no and pointed him in the direction of Eberhard. At this point Tesla was three guys with an idea. Musk was the fourth to join and a fifth guy joined soon after. Musk co-lead the first ever investment round and put in $7.5 million of 9 million raised. Musk was made chairman of the board and appointed Eberhard CEO of the new company. Eberhard left in ~2006/7 due to large issues that had come to light with the Roadster’s development. An intern CEO stepped in who was a large shareholder of the company and oversaw the final development and launch of the Roadster. Musk became CEO in 2008. About a year after leaving Eberhard tried to sue Tesla end Musk over Musk calling himself a founder of Tesla. Much of the case was tossed out and Eberhard settled. There are legally five founders of Tesla. 
 

SpaceX was acutely created before Tesla. Musk tried to buy old ICBMs from Russia but was laughed out of the country. He apparently spent the flight home working on an outline design for the Falcon 1 rocket. Despite what people love to say he’s heavily involved in the design and engineering of the products his companies make, mainly Tesla and SpaceX. Idk how involved he is with his other companies. Many employees have been quoted as saying such.

 

Starlink isn’t a company. It’s a constellation being built by SpaceX. There are many rumours that it will be spun off as its own company once its close to being finished.

 

I don’t see how you can call claims about Starship lies already when it’s still in development. Crazy maybe but not yet lies. 
 

You definitely don’t have to like Musk as a person or the cult of followers but being a blind hater makes you just as bad as those you act better than. And for the record everyone who keeps attaching Hyperlook to Musk actually look it up. Besides some test track SpaceX offered he has no involvement with it. Instead multiple independent companies are working on trying to make it or something very similar to it a reality. The closest Musk comes is what The Boring Company is doing but it’s nothing like Hyperloop. 

I find it very sad that anyone who ever posts criticism on an individual, no matter how valid it is, is branded a hater.

 

Criticising & hating are not the same thing. I can be critical of his actions since I know what they are, I cannot hate him as I don't actually know him.

[Beskamir]

18 hours ago, Bensemus said:

You got like nothing right. 
 

first Must founded Zip2 with his brother and some other people. That company was later sold for over 100 million. Musk used that money to found X.com. X.com offered online banking. Another company called Confinity started around the same time and the two directly competed. They eventually decided to merge. Musk was made the CEO of the new company and he was the largest shareholder of it. It was called X.com. One of the products offered by X.com was PayPal which was originally under Confinity. There was disagreements within the company and about a year after the merger Musk was forced out while on Vacation. He was still the largest shareholder, just not a majority. The company remained to PayPal and focused just on that one product. They sold to EBay and Musk made the most off the sale. 
 

Eberhard and another were wanting to create an EV. They initially tried to get a team who were working on this project electric car to partner with them and make it into a commercial product. They were rejected so they started thinking about making their own company. Musk ran into that same team and also tried to get them to make it a commercial product but they said no and pointed him in the direction of Eberhard. At this point Tesla was three guys with an idea. Musk was the fourth to join and a fifth guy joined soon after. Musk co-lead the first ever investment round and put in $7.5 million of 9 million raised. Musk was made chairman of the board and appointed Eberhard CEO of the new company. Eberhard left in ~2006/7 due to large issues that had come to light with the Roadster’s development. An intern CEO stepped in who was a large shareholder of the company and oversaw the final development and launch of the Roadster. Musk became CEO in 2008. About a year after leaving Eberhard tried to sue Tesla end Musk over Musk calling himself a founder of Tesla. Much of the case was tossed out and Eberhard settled. There are legally five founders of Tesla. 
 

SpaceX was acutely created before Tesla. Musk tried to buy old ICBMs from Russia but was laughed out of the country. He apparently spent the flight home working on an outline design for the Falcon 1 rocket. Despite what people love to say he’s heavily involved in the design and engineering of the products his companies make, mainly Tesla and SpaceX. Idk how involved he is with his other companies. Many employees have been quoted as saying such.

 

Starlink isn’t a company. It’s a constellation being built by SpaceX. There are many rumours that it will be spun off as its own company once its close to being finished.

 

I don’t see how you can call claims about Starship lies already when it’s still in development. Crazy maybe but not yet lies. 
 

You definitely don’t have to like Musk as a person or the cult of followers but being a blind hater makes you just as bad as those you act better than. And for the record everyone who keeps attaching Hyperlook to Musk actually look it up. Besides some test track SpaceX offered he has no involvement with it. Instead multiple independent companies are working on trying to make it or something very similar to it a reality. The closest Musk comes is what The Boring Company is doing but it’s nothing like Hyperloop. 

I agree with most of what you said. Although from my understanding Zip2 was kind of trash and massively overvalued. It was a project from the dot com era after all and a lot of people made off with insane amounts of money for absolute shit from that bubble. Thanks for elaborating on the whole PayPal thing, I wanted to keep it brief so I glossed over a lot of the details in addition to straight up forgetting or simply not being aware of some of them.

 

I think Eberhard is the wronged party in the entire Tesla situation but of course I wasn't there and am going off just who's version of the story seems more likely.

 

SpaceX, I agree is a cool company that's doing really good stuff but I don't think Musk can take as much credit for it as he does. However thank you for the corrections there! I heard Musk talk about how he designed the first few SpaceX rockets but I'm not sure I can believe him anymore given how often he says stuff that's exaggerated or incorrect.

 

I separated Starlink and Starship cause the comment I was quoting listed them separately. It was mainly a formatting choice coupled with thinking that Starlink was already it's own company instead of just a SpaceX project that's supposed to become it's own thing. As for Starship being terrible, there's no way it can carry 100 people to Mars (Musk claimed it would but it could at best fit about 20 people), there's no way it can be used for Earth to Earth transportation (Musk claimed it would but such a thing would be impractical and incredibly damaging to our environment by creating insane amounts of noise), once it's fully filled with fuel it'll be the biggest non-nuclear and privately funded explosion to date cause it's not a matter of if it goes boom but rather when it goes boom.

 

I hope I'm not a blind hater of Musk. For one, while I clearly don't like him, I hope it's reasonably well justified as there are definitely way better people that should be getting the spotlight. Often times those people are actually working under Musk with him taking all (or most of) the credit. And secondly, at least to me, hate is a much stronger word than just dislike so I hope I'm not stepping into hatred towards Musk and just have critical dislike of him? My main thesis is that Musk should be much nicer to his employees, partners, friends, and lovers. Give credit where credit is due and actually mention the lead engineers and scientists who's work he's presenting instead of presenting it as his own genius while they sit quietly beside him. Have enough humility to not overhype and exaggerate the capabilities of his projects often times with straight up lies or half truths. Actually look into and learn about the things he's talking about before talking about them so he doesn't make factual errors or say things that are very likely never going to be possible let alone in the timelines he dreams up.

[Bombastinator]

5 minutes ago, Beskamir said:

I agree with most of what you said. Although from my understanding Zip2 was kind of trash and massively overvalued. It was a project from the dot com era after all and a lot of people made off with insane amounts of money for absolute shit from that bubble. Thanks for elaborating on the whole PayPal thing, I wanted to keep it brief so I glossed over a lot of the details in addition to straight up forgetting or simply not being aware of some of them.

 

I think Eberhard is the wronged party in the entire Tesla situation but of course I wasn't there and am going off just who's version of the story seems more likely.

 

SpaceX, I agree is a cool company that's doing really good stuff but I don't think Musk can take as much credit for it as he does. However thank you for the corrections there! I heard Musk talk about how he designed the first few SpaceX rockets but I'm not sure I can believe him anymore given how often he says stuff that's exaggerated or incorrect.

 

I separated Starlink and Starship cause the comment I was quoting listed them separately. It was mainly a formatting choice coupled with thinking that Starlink was already it's own company instead of just a SpaceX project that's supposed to become it's own thing. As for Starship being terrible, there's no way it can carry 100 people to Mars (Musk claimed it would but it could at best fit about 20 people), there's no way it can be used for Earth to Earth transportation (Musk claimed it would but such a thing would be impractical and incredibly damaging to our environment by creating insane amounts of noise), once it's fully filled with fuel it'll be the biggest non-nuclear and privately funded explosion to date cause it's not a matter of if it goes boom but rather when it goes boom.

 

I hope I'm not a blind hater of Musk. For one, while I clearly don't like him, I hope it's reasonably well justified as there are definitely way better people that should be getting the spotlight. Often times those people are actually working under Musk with him taking all (or most of) the credit. And secondly, at least to me, hate is a much stronger word than just dislike so I hope I'm not stepping into hatred towards Musk and just have critical dislike of him? My main thesis is that Musk should be much nicer to his employees, partners, friends, and lovers. Give credit where credit is due and actually mention the lead engineers and scientists who's work he's presenting instead of presenting it as his own genius while they sit quietly beside him. Have enough humility to not overhype and exaggerate the capabilities of his projects often times with straight up lies or half truths. Actually look into and learn about the things he's talking about before talking about them so he doesn't make factual errors or say things that are very likely never going to be possible let alone in the timelines he dreams up.

I never heard that musk claimed to have personally designed anything for spaceX.  I don’t hear much though.  He likely Okayed stuff.  This may be a telephone situation not unlike those Al Gore claims.   With the Al Gore stuff. all I ever heard was paraphrases made by others of his statements.  Also it does not follow that if a person says a stupid thing everything he ever said or did must also be stupid. Or the reverse for that matter.  Smart people say stupid things and stupid people say smart things all the time.

[WolframaticAlpha]

On 4/9/2021 at 2:32 PM, Drama Lama said:

give me 10 bitcoin or I'll make your brain go poof

brain go brrrrr.....

 

But seriously I am thankful that ea is not leading this. Then it would be 10 bucks for every thought and 2000 bucks for algebra dlc etc.

[Drama Lama]

44 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

brain go brrrrr.....

 

But seriously I am thankful that ea is not leading this. Then it would be 10 bucks for every thought and 2000 bucks for algebra dlc etc.

Do you live in the 20th Century?

People don't want single time purchases! they want subscribtions

 

Unlock your Full Brain Potential for just 69,69€ per monthl

Edited April 12, 2021 by Drama Lama

[FakeNSA]

On 4/10/2021 at 4:25 AM, Master Disaster said:

My understanding is his intentions are to have at least 2 and preferably 3 satellites covering any area, since they're geostationary orbiters that don't move relative to the Earths rotation he can, theoretically at least, target high traffic areas with more satellites.

Sorry to jump in here unsolicited, but this isn't quite accurate.

 

What makes Starlink special, along with its future competitors in Kuiper and Oneweb, is that they propose a non-geostationary constellation.

What does that mean, and why does it matter?

 

To answer, we have to look to standard satellite providers. Today, satellite internet is provided from the geostationary band, much in the same way that you described above. However, it incurs massive latency, as the geostationary band is more than 22,000 miles above the earth, and even traveling at the speed of light, that has a guaranteed minimum of close to 300ms of ping. Once overhead is added, speaking from personal experience, the effective ping is closer to 400-500.

 

 

So how does a non-geostationary constellation solve this? By reducing the distance! In Starlink's case, the entire constellation will be orbiting below 550 miles, with satellites actually orbiting around the earth continuously, at a 53° inclination (which can be visualized in this video). This means that theoretically, your latency to a nearby ground station could be as low as 30-50ms of latency, at much higher speeds.

 

Plus, since each satellite is at such low altitude, they only handle a small geographic area, so (in the rural areas they are intended for), they are less likely to become seriously congested, and more satellites can be added to the chain to support a greater customer base as time goes on.

 

Overall, while it isn't even close to fiber's ability to serve a dense customer base, it will be massively important for rural customers, and potentially open proper internet access to entire nations that otherwise might not ever be able to afford it (IE, africa), and increasing access to information and potentially education for the entire world.

 

I hope this rant was somewhat informative! Sorry, I've been meaning to write something like this for a while, and you finally gave me an excuse to do it.

[ZuppaSalata]

I think that the criticism against this project is coming from people who doesn't actually need this product. If I had problems with walking or other stuff I would pray for this to work and to get one. 

[Master Disaster]

8 minutes ago, FakeNSA said:

Sorry to jump in here unsolicited, but this isn't quite accurate.

 

What makes Starlink special, along with its future competitors in Kuiper and Oneweb, is that they propose a non-geostationary constellation.

What does that mean, and why does it matter?

 

To answer, we have to look to standard satellite providers. Today, satellite internet is provided from the geostationary band, much in the same way that you described above. However, it incurs massive latency, as the geostationary band is more than 22,000 miles above the earth, and even traveling at the speed of light, that has a guaranteed minimum of close to 300ms of ping. Once overhead is added, speaking from personal experience, the effective ping is closer to 400-500.

 

 

So how does a non-geostationary constellation solve this? By reducing the distance! In Starlink's case, the entire constellation will be orbiting below 550 miles, with satellites actually orbiting around the earth continuously, at a 53° inclination (which can be visualized in this video). This means that theoretically, your latency to a nearby ground station could be as low as 30-50ms of latency, at much higher speeds.

 

Plus, since each satellite is at such low altitude, they only handle a small geographic area, so (in the rural areas they are intended for), they are less likely to become seriously congested, and more satellites can be added to the chain to support a greater customer base as time goes on.

 

Overall, while it isn't even close to fiber's ability to serve a dense customer base, it will be massively important for rural customers, and potentially open proper internet access to entire nations that otherwise might not ever be able to afford it (IE, africa), and increasing access to information and potentially education for the entire world.

 

I hope this rant was somewhat informative! Sorry, I've been meaning to write something like this for a while, and you finally gave me an excuse to do it.

Absolutely excellent explanation. Thanks for the correction.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

brain go brrrrr.....

 

But seriously I am thankful that ea is not leading this. Then it would be 10 bucks for every thought and 2000 bucks for algebra dlc etc.

Naw.  They’d sell some sort of wooden nickel currency that you used up bit by bit.

[Bombastinator]

I kept waiting for someone to make a comment about how brains are squishy and don’t bounce very well even when hit by paddles.  Never happened though.

[CarlBar]

19 hours ago, Beskamir said:

As for Starship being terrible, there's no way it can carry 100 people to Mars (Musk claimed it would but it could at best fit about 20 people), there's no way it can be used for Earth to Earth transportation (Musk claimed it would but such a thing would be impractical and incredibly damaging to our environment by creating insane amounts of noise), once it's fully filled with fuel it'll be the biggest non-nuclear and privately funded explosion to date cause it's not a matter of if it goes boom but rather when it goes boom.

 

Depends what assumptions you make with starship on the seating capacity. Musk may have made that statement whilst considering a scenario of use that more detailed analysis would show is poor in some critical way. There's absolutely the volume inside to fit 120 people, (it';s got more total volume than any jet airliner). But weather there's enough to do that in a useful way whilst have enough life support and fuel is another matter. I wouldn't rule it out, but i do suspect it would be scuppered on technical grounds that wouldn't necessarily  occur in an off the cuff estimation.

 

As far as radiation. Don't let anyone fool you, nobody's proposals for a mission have adequate shielding, they're all taking calculated risks of some kind because no one has the launch capability to avoid that. I don't personally like it and i agree Musk is pushing the limits on the risk side, but don;t give NASA or anyone else a free pass.

 

As for the use as intercontinental transport, my only real question is: How long. Where planning to build a large long term lunar base to help with future mars missions and beyond. Thats going to entail shipping people to the moon and beyond in job lots at some point. Yes one or more of those rockets is going to go boom. Comes with the nature of the things. but in the process they're going to squash more and more of the bugs till someone gets a safety record good enough it actually becomes safe enough for commercial passenger use. Rockets are dangerous and prone to going boom because they're an extreme performance technology that sees very limited use. The reality is with anything this far out on the bleeding edge you only find out about failure modes when somthing goes horribly wrong.The history of safety rules and regulations in commercial aviation is largely written in accidents and deaths. I don't see the history of rocketry following a different path, and their use as high speed intercontinental transport systems makes a great deal of sense. So sooner or later it's going to happen. Probably won't be starship, but it might well be one of it's successors.

[Beskamir]

19 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

As far as radiation. Don't let anyone fool you, nobody's proposals for a mission have adequate shielding, they're all taking calculated risks of some kind because no one has the launch capability to avoid that. I don't personally like it and i agree Musk is pushing the limits on the risk side, but don;t give NASA or anyone else a free pass.

The only reason why those guys are fine is cause earth's magnetic field still protects them. Once you leave it (like idk, when you're going to another planet) most of your dna will get wrecked within a few months.

 

32 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

As for the use as intercontinental transport, my only real question is: How long. Where planning to build a large long term lunar base to help with future mars missions and beyond. Thats going to entail shipping people to the moon and beyond in job lots at some point. Yes one or more of those rockets is going to go boom. Comes with the nature of the things. but in the process they're going to squash more and more of the bugs till someone gets a safety record good enough it actually becomes safe enough for commercial passenger use. Rockets are dangerous and prone to going boom because they're an extreme performance technology that sees very limited use. The reality is with anything this far out on the bleeding edge you only find out about failure modes when somthing goes horribly wrong.The history of safety rules and regulations in commercial aviation is largely written in accidents and deaths. I don't see the history of rocketry following a different path, and their use as high speed intercontinental transport systems makes a great deal of sense. So sooner or later it's going to happen. Probably won't be starship, but it might well be one of it's successors.

At that point an orbital ring would make a lot more sense than a fleet of reusable rockets. As for casualties being expected with space travel, that's fair but what isn't expected is the launch facility not existing afterward. The soviet's N1 rocket was comparably sized to starship and only about 15% of the fuel exploded when it's launch failed resulting in about a 7kt TNT equivalent explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_artificial_non-nuclear_explosions#N1_launch_explosion for context, the 2020 Beirut explosion was only about 1kt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion#Yield So yea, a fully fueled starship will be absolutely devastating if it explodes anywhere near the ground.

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, Beskamir said:

The only reason why those guys are fine is cause earth's magnetic field still protects them. Once you leave it (like idk, when you're going to another planet) most of your dna will get wrecked within a few months.

 

It's nowhere near that bad in terms of background radiation, (it's not nice but from technical perspective it's survivable with no immediate major issues). The issue is solar flare activity. And not even NASA's proposal can cope with the more serve forms of that. And if you get caught in one of those you'll get a fatal dose in minutes.

 

If you want to read up on it i recommend this: https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-chapter-12-the-shell-of-the-torus/

 

There has been some advancements in our understanding but AFAIK the core basics are still solid.

 

1 hour ago, Beskamir said:

At that point an orbital ring would make a lot more sense than a fleet of reusable rockets. As for casualties being expected with space travel, that's fair but what isn't expected is the launch facility not existing afterward. The soviet's N1 rocket was comparably sized to starship and only about 15% of the fuel exploded when it's launch failed resulting in about a 7kt TNT equivalent explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_artificial_non-nuclear_explosions#N1_launch_explosion for context, the 2020 Beirut explosion was only about 1kt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion#Yield So yea, a fully fueled starship will be absolutely devastating if it explodes anywhere near the ground.

 

I'm fully aware of how big the bang could get. That said i expect that they've factored that into the design of everything. It's a basic rule of any high performance tech that you learn by failing. Like i said the history of air, (and anything else for that matter) safety regulations is written in the lessons learned from when things went catastrophically wrong.

 

As for an orbital ring, where nowhere near being able to build one of those things yet, and we probably won't be for centuries. The material quantities involved in that kind of thing are freaking huge, far more than we can put together in any short period of time, and we still don't have a way of building the tethers despite a lot of claims of companies and people saying they can do it.

[Beskamir]

On 4/12/2021 at 7:42 PM, CarlBar said:

 

It's nowhere near that bad in terms of background radiation, (it's not nice but from technical perspective it's survivable with no immediate major issues). The issue is solar flare activity. And not even NASA's proposal can cope with the more serve forms of that. And if you get caught in one of those you'll get a fatal dose in minutes.

 

If you want to read up on it i recommend this: https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-chapter-12-the-shell-of-the-torus/

 

There has been some advancements in our understanding but AFAIK the core basics are still solid.

 

 

I'm fully aware of how big the bang could get. That said i expect that they've factored that into the design of everything. It's a basic rule of any high performance tech that you learn by failing. Like i said the history of air, (and anything else for that matter) safety regulations is written in the lessons learned from when things went catastrophically wrong.

 

As for an orbital ring, where nowhere near being able to build one of those things yet, and we probably won't be for centuries. The material quantities involved in that kind of thing are freaking huge, far more than we can put together in any short period of time, and we still don't have a way of building the tethers despite a lot of claims of companies and people saying they can do it.

Pretty sure radiation is a major concern once you're away from earth's magnetic field. This seems to list the amount of radiation that an unshielded interplanetary trip would receive but I don't really know how to make sense of the data and don't feel like looking it up right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(radiation)

 

If safety was taken into account, starship would use smaller and spherical tanks for their fuel rather than 2 really large tanks where 1 isn't even spherical.

[Bombastinator]

Just now, Beskamir said:

Pretty sure radiation is a major concern once you're away from earth's magnetic field. This seems to list the amount of radiation that an unshielded interplanetary trip would receive but I don't really know how to make sense of the data and don't feel like looking it up right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(radiation)

 

If safety was taken into account, starship would use smaller and spherical tanks for their fuel rather than 2 really large tanks where 1 isn't even spherical.

All I’ve got is an apocryphal story about an astronaut on the ISS closing his eyes and still seeing light flashes so he attempted to cram his front (because it contained his junk) into a lead lined structure till it stopped.  Ionizing  Radiation is the gift that keeps on giving. Cancer can take a long time to form.  There is a minimum level below which radiation more or less doesn’t matter because it’s not ionizing.  I don’t know how hard radiation is outside the magnetosphere. I suspect it’s been pretty well measured.  My understanding is radiation is only one of the things that makes a trip to Mars one-way only.  It takes a whole lot of radiation to actually cause necrosis, and I would be very unsurprised to learn that the radiation level was below that.  There is a pretty big middle ground below that but above ionization level though.  Part of the issue with cancer is it’s a statistical thing.  You’ve got to roll boxcars a bunch of times.  It becomes a question of how many dice do you roll.

[dalekphalm]

52 minutes ago, Beskamir said:

Pretty sure radiation is a major concern once you're away from earth's magnetic field. This seems to list the amount of radiation that an unshielded interplanetary trip would receive but I don't really know how to make sense of the data and don't feel like looking it up right now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(radiation)

 

If safety was taken into account, starship would use smaller and spherical tanks for their fuel rather than 2 really large tanks where 1 isn't even spherical.

That list does show the expected radiation for a typical round-trip to Mars - around 600 mSv.

 

That's not good, and definitely at the upper range of what a person would want to be exposed to, but for most people, that number won't be lethal (though there could still potentially be long term health consequences).

 

At the end of the trip after they return to Earth, they'd likely be prohibited from any activity with a high radiation risk though.

 

Depending on some factors, they could also probably modify Starship's interior design to implement a water radiation shield (route water around the exterior of the habitation section of the Starship and it acts as a radiation shield - how strong depends on how thick the water wall) - this would obviously cut down on payload capacity and how many passengers it could carry, but certainly for more frequent missions this is probably worth the cost.

 

For the first mission or two, especially if it's Orbital and not a landing mission (or it's a short landing mission), then they can likely proceed without the radiation shield and the astronauts likely won't suffer any serious illness.

 

Future missions might eventually use a different, permanently routed ship (or series of ships) that are constantly just going back and fourth between Earth and Mars, which can be purpose built with that large scale in mind needed for maximum habitation and comfort.