
Alphabet Says It Shut Down Titan Drone Internet Project - ghosh
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-11/alphabet-says-it-shut-down-titan-drone-internet-project?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
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bane
A few nights ago, over a liberal quantity of beers, my friends and I came up
with our latest nonsensical conspiracy theory. Google was started by some of a
group of time travelers who were sent back in time from an apocalyptic future
bringing advanced technology with them. They would use _just_ enough of the
tech to make vast sums of money, then use that money to invest in the tech
that destroyed their future world.

By investing in tech they already know would work, they would vacuum up all
the resources and talent around that technology so that nobody else would
bother (because who could come in cold and compete against a titan like
google?) and then some time later kill all of the projects very publicly in
order to make us all think that these technologies were nonviable.

Except instead with every piece of world changing technology they killed, they
were buying their future Earths freedom from the apocalypse they were fleeing
from, even if that future they were creating destroyed their own and left
humanity in a just post-agrarian stage of development.

This group has been infiltrating our timeline for decades, first with blimps,
then Atari, then Xerox, now Google.

Their motto is "save us before we destroy us"

~~~
paublyrne
Well the obvious time paradox would prevent them from taking this approach. By
destroying their own future they would never come back to save it.

There must be another explanation.

~~~
jraedisch
Just assume that every jump back in time is also a jump into a parallel
universe and you don't have a paradox.

~~~
arviewer
Then what would it help to do such a thing?

~~~
freehunter
Experience is subjective. If you teleport to another location you're not the
same person you were before you left, you're a similar set of molecules
reconstructed in the same fashion. In all actuality, "you" died and another
"you" took your place. But to you and everyone around you, it seems like
nothing has changed, so you carry on with your life.

Likewise, if you travel back in time and change the future, you're not helping
the people in the future you left, you're helping the people in the past avoid
that future. But to you, it looks the same. It looks just like the past you're
familiar with, and it develops into some semblance of the future you were
expecting. So for all intents and purposes, from a subjective viewpoint you're
avoiding the paradox and helping your ancestors. It doesn't matter if the
people you left are still suffering, subjectively they don't exist anymore.

~~~
clort
In the Star Trek universe, where the matter is converted to information,
transmitted and then converted to matter, then your statement may be true.
But, in other universes where the matter is actually translated in a dimension
then it will not be. Also, we don't actually know what "you" is and whether it
would be included in the Star Trek mechanism.

My point really, is that there are varying fictional universes but in ours, we
don't currently have a way to do teleportation. So, as you say, experience is
subjective.

~~~
freehunter
Ah I forget that I'm back in the timeline that doesn't have physical
teleportation... I have to start keeping notes on which universe has what.

~~~
webmaven
you're in that superset of worldlines that require an Ellis Drainhole held
open with a counter-rotating exotic matter "collar".

------
asynchronous13
This article has a few details that are very different than the way I heard
it. What follows are rumors, but I work in this industry so I have a few
sources that I trust.

Google did not win the bidding over Facebook. Facebook actually won the
bidding with a bid of about 60 million dollars. Facebook pulled out during the
due diligence phase. Google swooped in and picked it up for about 20 million
after Facebook pulled out. (Rumors remember, I can't find sources for these
numbers right now)

Internally, Google was very quickly disappointed in their purchase. They found
out that they had pretty much bought a nice PowerPoint slide deck and not much
else. Titan still had a _long_ way to go before they had a viable drone.

Anyway, that is the rumor that I heard.

I'm only somewhat envious of the drone companies that are selling out for tens
of millions of dollars, while I sit here and work my butt off to keep making a
product. [https://youtu.be/b7SjOOuTct0](https://youtu.be/b7SjOOuTct0)

~~~
jpm_sd
As an ex-Xer, I can tell you that the PowerPoint presentation wasn't even that
good.

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pawadu
At this rate people will soon use "alphabet" as a verb the same way they made
"google" into a verb:

 _" we were doing steady progress but 3 months before release the management
decided to alphabet the project and send everyone home."_

~~~
pluma
That'd be great because "google" as a verb already has other meanings ("search
with a search engine").

~~~
pawadu
Isn't there a legal name for this (i.e. company name/product becoming a common
word)?

I think it has legal implication for a trademark, but in the case of Alphabet
it was already a common word so it probably has no meaning.

~~~
mattnewton
You could be thinking of
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark)
Or the related term "genericide"

~~~
pawadu
Thats is, thanks!

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jayjay71
I think what's sad is not that they shut down the project soon after acquiring
Titan Aerospace, but that they kept it quiet for almost a year. That sort of
PR practice makes me worry about their internal culture.

Edit: It concerns me because I wonder how many other projects they've
announced and shut down without telling us, and what that must be like for the
employees who are no doubt under NDA who are shuffled around and unable to
talk about it. Imagine if your company were acquired by X, and then you get
fired, and you can't even tell your friends or potential employers it's
because X axed the project.

~~~
HappyTypist
Companies don't typically announce they've shut down a generally unannounced
project. I consider Titan one.

~~~
hydrogen18
On the contrary. Blizzard cancelled a project also called Titan which they had
never actually publicly announced.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Blizzard_Entertainment_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_\(Blizzard_Entertainment_project\))

~~~
freehunter
Also Microsoft's unreleased booklet PC, Microsoft Courier. Never officially
announced as anything other than a concept, but they did offer an official
notice that the project was canceled.

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ClassyJacket
Apple's car

Blizzard's game

Google's drone

Lesson: if you want your project to be cancelled, call it Titan.

~~~
stichers
TitanDB - today forked to become JanusGraph [https://blog.grakn.ai/janus-
launch-22be6ac3b197#.q9pme0jfd](https://blog.grakn.ai/janus-
launch-22be6ac3b197#.q9pme0jfd)

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TeMPOraL
Interesting. Though I wish someone pursued this particular tech (solar-powered
drones) further - high-altitude, long-duration drones could be a good
replacement for many things we use _satellites_ for, and drones would be
_much_ cheaper to launch...

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
There are _lots_ of companies working on light solar-powered drones, and in
fact some of them call them pseudo-satellites. Airbus, Boeing, NASA, DARPA...
the list goes on and on. This really isn't a setback for the field in general.

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startwhat
Google starting to resemble Xerox

~~~
bpicolo
And yet they still have a huge money faucet.

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baq
my guess is they realized a LEO constellation is simply a better idea. google
invested $1B in spacex after all.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's what I don't understand. If they pushed this technology further (high-
altitude, solar powered drones) it seems it could take over a big chunk of
satellite industry. If you don't _actually_ need space, then solar drones seem
like so much better option - significantly cheaper to make, significantly
cheaper to launch, etc.

~~~
Grue3
Maybe it's easier to keep things orbiting in space than floating in the air?
The earth atmosphere is not as predictable.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's easier to keep things in space, but it's much more difficult to _get_
them there because you have to use a huge rocket to make the thing go fast
enough to _stay_ on orbit. If you don't need that speed and the ability to
circle the whole globe, high-altitude planes seem like much cheaper options.

~~~
rtkwe
You'd also need a much larger number of the solar powered drones to cover the
same area as a satellite. They don't make it clear but I'd guess one of the
main issues was getting the radio and networking gear light, small, and low
power enough to work in their drone design with enough throughput to make the
network vaguely acceptable while covering a large enough area to make the
number of drones required reasonable.

~~~
TeMPOraL
OTOH having to have more drones gives you benefits of economies of scale when
you move past testing phase; you can mass-produce a platform and drop the
price significantly. Satellites, on the other hand, are mostly one-of-a-kind
constructions, produced in single or double-digit numbers.

(Also with a fleet of drones, failures are cheaper and less dangerous.)

There are lots of factors affecting economics of both solutions. I guess one
of these days I'll have to make a spreadsheet with back-of-the-envelope
calculations to sort this all out, but my gut feeling for now is that solar
drones are a viable replacement for a lot of current satellite uses.

~~~
rtkwe
Making more would help but there's still limits on how far down it could
possibly drive down the price on this large complex drone.

To me the largest issue is simply power, these drones need to store a lot of
energy just to fly overnight. Add in the power requirements for all the radio
gear, it'll need to operate overnight too to make the service particularly
useful, and battery weight can quickly spiral outside of what can reasonably
be done by a small company trying to build a small plane. There's also 2 hard
competing design goals solar panel area and aerodynamics. The first wants
broad flat surfaces to place as many panels as possible on while the second is
pushing you towards long thing wings and bodies to reduce drag.

I'm not saying these are impossible things to build but I do think it's more
in the realm of large aeronautic companies rather than a small division of
google.

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Gravityloss
They're leaving the market to Airbus Zephyr, which was in the lead already?

[https://airbusdefenceandspace.com/our-portfolio/military-
air...](https://airbusdefenceandspace.com/our-portfolio/military-
aircraft/uav/zephyr/)

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bsn54
Free internet for all remains a dream forever I guess!sad indeed!

~~~
whiskers08xmt
SpaceX's cubesat project might get it done.

~~~
shpx
My impression is that Titan and Loon are meant to work with phones, whereas a
receiver for SpaceX's thing would be the size of a pizza box. No way it's
gonna be free.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJD0MMP4nkM&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJD0MMP4nkM&feature=youtu.be&t=50m5s)

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sidcool
I guess Project Loon would live on

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fdsaaf
Never hire executives from Wall Street. Not even once.

~~~
wpietri
As Wilde had it: "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of
nothing."

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nickhalfasleep
Much like aircraft-delivered nuclear weapons, are these being quickly replaced
by impending low orbit micro-satellite constellations under development now?

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PaulHoule
Oh yeah, Loon is going to be so much more feasible. Loon makes the spatial
economics of providing internet so much worse since it has to cover the 3/4 of
the world that is ocean plus all of the places that are deeply uninhabited.

To get fiber into rural places you just have to parallel the electric lines.
Except there is something ritually unclean about wires and we can't do it.

~~~
euyyn
Why would you need the balloons flying over the ocean? They can control their
longitude.

Plenty of rural places in third-world countries without an electric grid too.

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pgt
Cached version to counter HN effect:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dtWSiWi...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dtWSiWi8N-AJ:pascaleggert.de/macpro.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=za)

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iplaw
So the Titan Project got Alphabit?

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yousry
I can assure you that a time travel longer than 0.00125 seconds into the past
is not possible for the near future.

