Aside from safety, there's another insurmountable obstacle to space disposal: cost. You may not appreciate just how much spent fuel there is. I did the math once. Launch cost per pound, times number of pounds of waste, came out to over $1 trillion. Orders of magnitude away from feasibility, even with advancements in launch technology.
I notice the strong demand on HN for empowerment literature. Personal productivity, existential self-determination, etc.
People write with a sense of being illuminated, of knowing something that others don’t. A thinking person should not trust such things. All the same, it can be hard not to check it out--give it some eyeball-time.
I won't lie: I read this crap all the time when it comes up on HN. (One might speculate as to why.)
Anyway, I notice the patterns these things follow.
- Laying claim to an illuminated or gnostic truth. Someone who “gets” it, while others don’t.
- Hinting that you will benefit if you accept the claim as true.
- Lastly (optional), appealing to the ego, to the desire to feel superior.
This article was not so bad, in comparison. It stuck to its thesis without playing too much dirty pool. Its thesis was simplistic (essentially, "take risks"), which did not interest me that much.
I honestly think people should look more carefully at the rhetoric they feed on.
Today's outage took down our website, our computing grid, everything. And this afternoon, when Microsoft said "the majority" of Azure clients were back up and running, we were still in the dark. Dammit.
