We can send small probes to image the moon in incredibly high resolution. It's a big place I'm sure there is a perfectly flat rock somewhere they can use.
Have you ever seen a perfectly flat rock anywhere on earth? One capable of supporting a large rocket? Also, the moon doesn't have the various navigation systems (GPS/radar) that is used when bringing rocket stages back the pad.
The US is the world's largest domestic economy. Trade with all nations around the world is 24% of the USA's GDP. You could shut it all down and the country would probably enter a mild recession while the rest of the world would face complete economic collapse. For example, 67% of Canada's GDP is reliant on the United States in some way.
The US has an insane amount of leverage. Leaders in Canada, Europe, etc talk a big game but then ultimately talk to an economist and realize they have to come to the table. That's why these leaders keep announcing things and then walking them back.
Also, according to Peter Zeihan (I know) a significant part of that trade consists of the US's exporting the light sweet crude oil produced by fracking, which is easy to refine, and importing heavy sour crude oil, which the US has a comparative advantage in refining. Clearly, the US could switch to refining the crude oil produced in the US with very little disruption.
How does this account for the different classes of things that go into a GDP?
The US imports a lot of goods because we can't or don't want to make them here. Meanwhile, the bulk of US GDP is services done by knowledge workers...
I am certainly not an economist but it seems like it would be a hell of a lot harder for the United States to build a bunch of factories and learn how to run them compared to the effort other countries would have to go through to import knowledge workers to build their own local services.
24% of US GDP divided by US GDP is a larger number than 24% of US GDP divided by non-US GDP. Any changes to US foreign trade affect the US more than the rest of the world.
When we start talking about 24% of the GDP we gotta go more specific into what industries depend on to understand the impact. Agricultural industry as a whole (imports, local production, etc.) represents much less than 24% of USA's GDP but if it disappeared it would be cataclysmic for the nation.
And 24% of GDP is a whole fucking quarter of the whole economic production of the largest economy in the world, it's not a "mild recession"...
The current situation is the result of decades of free trade and reliability.
There will likely be a shift if the market forces pull in a different direction.
Not today right away but in the timescale of years.
GDP fell 29% during the Great Depression. 80% of the way to the Great Depression is not a "mild" recession!
I agree that it would be less severe for the US than for other countries. It's essentially saying, economically, "Do what I want or I'll kill you." It's a mafia-style negotiation. I despise it when others do it, and I despise that the US is doing it.
I don't understand this argument. Every negotiation between countries should end in "do what I want or I'll kill you". Yes, executing those threats is only possible if the country threatening destroys itself in the process, but countries certainly can destroy almost anyone they're negotiating with if they disregard the cost to their own citizens.
Now what has kept Europe stable was the US having a bigger economy, good intentions (as in the intention was to increase ALL trade, not just US' immediate advantage), an unbeatable army and a nuclear armed threat to fight. Perhaps ironically, this approach made the US the most powerful country in the world, when countries that directly pursued their own interests faded, or outright failed (most famously USSR).
This appears to be ending. And every country has politicians just salivating to do what Trump is (or appears to be) doing: getting themselves what they want at any cost to their own country's citizens. Sooner or later they'll come to power and ...
So how do you negotiate as a country, really? If the country you're negotiating isn't a psychotic aggressor at the moment ... the time will come when they are. Doesn't this make war the inevitable outcome?
> Isolating the US by driving investment and allies away
Foreign government's have an easy solution to solve the problem.
Don't unfairly advantage your goods and services against American products and we won't do the same. Free trade shouldn't mean "Free trade for one side". Free trade should be contingent on reciprocity, both in terms of social and economic alignment.
...as mediated by individual buyers and sellers deciding whether they'll pay a price based on the quality of the goods. Not based on some kind of dick waving contest that's happening in the corridors of power.
By now it's clear that "fair" in this administration is defined by whoever is the biggest bully in the room, so
> unfairly advantage your goods and services against American products
is just a fancy way to say: "let us push you around."
I own one, it's a $300 Gamma Spectrometer that fits in your pocket. Closest thing I own to a real life Tricorder.
I've tested it out on a smoke detectors. Successfully identified AM-231 and its decay chains from like a foot away. Tested it out on my dad's basement, and it was able to pick up the whole radon decay chain (Thorium, Polonium, Lead, etc.)
It's not a laboratory grade tool. You can point it at radioactive stuff and the spectra lines up perfectly if you Google the charts. There is a community of folks who walk around with them to identify radioactive deposits. I own a GM counter and it's not even in the same league in sensitivity or capability, it would be like comparing a flip phone to a smartphone.
If you think robots should do everything then you might as well retire the human race. Why even bother to live. Why explore the stars when you can get a robot to do it for you?
If the goal is "put man on Mars" then that's what you gotta do. It's harder to make the argument that you need to do that in the service of science, or even offworld colonies, given the unsuitability and impracticality of those both.
Colonies on Mars are what drove the founding of SpaceX. Elon was looking up NASA's plans about sending humans to Mars and found that they simply didn't exist. He wanted to send a greenhouse to Mars while streaming its growth to get people inspired and thinking big again. NASA wasn't interested, Russia wanted too much $$$, so SpaceX was born. A colony doesn't mean you live there forever - it simply means a permanent human establishment. Some people will want to go back to Earth, some will want to stay on Mars indefinitely.
This is a big part of their obsession with lowering costs to space. When the launch costs are not such a huge economic factor, you have much greater leverage with doing things like building, resupplying, or even engaging in interplanetary commerce.
His main motivation was about making humanity a multiplanetary species, largely as a means of ensuring humanity's continuation. It sounds hyperbolic, but Earth has gone through multiple mass extinction events and we're rather overdue for another. And while those mass extinction events were all natural, there's also endless ways you can imagine us all managing to kill ourselves off. And, critically, all of these hyperbolic scenarios will seem extremely improbable up to the very day that one does inevitably happen. So the best time to start would be 50 years ago. But the second best time would be right now.
So the most logical place to start for this sort of 'humanity guarantee' would be Mars, which shares an oddly large amount in common with Earth. There's a verbose (and rather entertaining read) with lots of first party commentary here. [1]
This has been covered before but saying that Mars would be a “humanity guarantee” is actually extremely illogical, not the most logical. Short of the Earth getting blasted to tiny pieces in some way there is no scenario where Mars is more habitable than Earth. This is the sort of sci-fi Utopianism that this sober article is standing in opposition to. Mars may be the second most habitable place in the solar system and it’s infinitely less habitable than a nuked-out fallout-ridden earth or an overheated green house earth. There is no magic scenario where Mars suddenly ends up with a magnetosphere and an atmosphere.
Mars not having a magnetosphere isn't as short term a need. The atmosphere stripping away is on geologic timescales, not human ones. Even then, we could put a superconducting ring between Sol and Mars and get the same effect as far as solar wind stripping the atmosphere. It would be a big project, but not impossible. It's also a project that won't possibly start until people live there permanently.
Worrying about the atmosphere stripping away is akin to worrying about the smaller of Mars two moons being on a path that will impact in 100,000+ years with the surface of mars.
In many problem domains mars is an easier target for long term habitation than the moon, the biggest challenge is getting there. The retorts from people here about farming miss that we don't need 'soil' to farm, there are techniques that mostly just need water and vitamins that can dissolve into it. At Epcot they have a system to breed fish and use the fish waste for feeding plants to grow. Throw in mycelium for handling human waste and you have an efficient system for augmenting food production.
A serious effort for mars will have as many or more spinoff technologies as Apollo gave us. The computers we are using today are further along in development from the massive influx of effort to make computers that could fit in space capsules. With the acidification we are causing in the ocean, a reliable way of converting C02 to oxygen at scale might be needed here on earth to prevent an oxygen collapse within decades. Climate change is a bitch, and it could give an excuse to start charging people for breathable air here on earth so the cynics may be right about that eventually happening. That possible disaster just isn't on even most climate scientist radars yet.
There will be other spinoff technologies we just don't see yet. The large rocketry needed to get there also opens up resource extraction from near earth objects. There's massive material wealth just barely outside our present grasp. It would be nice for materials like platinum and gold to follow in the footsteps of aluminum in becoming common enough to be usable for trivial items. Aluminum was a precious metal just a few hundred years ago in its refined form. Gold nanoparticles look like a candidate that could make current GLP-1 drugs obsolete, it works in animal studies but not tested in humans yet. Manufacturing in space is also on the verge of practicality. Metal foams, ultra low attenuation glass and optically transparent aerogels can be made in microgravity that are superior to the versions that can be made here on earth. Metal foams would be ideal for making ships, cars and planes that are much lower weight than we can make now without loss of strength, less weight means fewer watts per mile and less material needed.
The people whining about the idea always seem to miss the secondary effects of making the effort and always see to paint the optimistic take as naive, really they are just demonstrating short sighted thinking.
This logic does not necessitate Mars ever being more habitable than Earth. Imagine one of the countless doomsday scenarios - a large asteroid impact. What kills you is not necessarily the asteroid, but it flinging debris into the sky that blots out the sun, not only creating a massive cold, but also rapidly killing all plants which starts a rapid series of extinction events on up the food chain.
If that happened Earth itself would still, even during the extinction event, be a dramatically more pleasant place than Mars. But nonetheless that event would kill off the overwhelming majority of people on Earth, and very possibly 100%, because it's such a significant change from the status quo we expect to continue on Earth. But having a parallel society or societies would ensure that even in the 100% scenario, life could get back up and organized relatively quickly. And even in the "only" 99% of people killed scenario, the outside help could help to reestablish order and kickstart society.
You could build a better 'colony' on earth to survive that event for way less money/effort/risk than a colony on mars. You aren't going to have a colony on Mars contributing back to the home planet in any meaningful way, and 1% of people left on Earth is still 80,000,000, many more than will be in a Mars colony.
> You could build a better 'colony' on earth to survive that event for way less money/effort/risk than a colony on mars.
How though? Not in terms of engineering, but in terms of politics and economics. The biggest charter city in the world just got ruled illegal and Honduras is about to take their stuff. Building colonies in Antarctica is forbidden by treaty. And much like Thoreau's cabin in the woods, if you try to make a self-sufficient colony somewhere that's not actually isolated, you might think you've succeeded but actually have been cheating all along.
Yes, objectively there are better options, just as e.g. ITER could have been built a lot more efficiently if most of the countries had agreed to pay one country to make it, instead of making precision parts in a bunch of different countries and having to assemble them together. But engineering and politics are the art of the possible.
Building colonies in-planet that could survive all possible scenarios would probably be impossible. But even if it were you'd face a pretty simple problem - who would ever want to live for there? You'd likely end up living in conditions that would make life on Mars look pleasant, without any of the upsides that might take people to Mars - adventure, ideology, commercial aspirations, perhaps even religious (you know the Mormons will want a planet or two), and of course 0.3g!
And who knows what the future holds in terms of population sizes? I also strongly disagree on the colonies not being able to engage in exchange. For a silly but very practical example sports in 0.3g are going to be insane. Jordan could jump something like 11ft and stay airborn for several seconds on Mars. That's going to be just be stupidly awesome to watch and play. MMA will look like a something out of a Chinese martial arts movie. For more mundane things, as the price of shipping cargo decreases the number of things available for trade increases. For example wine made in 0.3g will taste very different. Whether that's better or worse is yet to be discovered, but obviously such ideas will have no difficulty finding a market.
For better or for worse Mars (or the Moon) will also probably make amazing retirement places, especially if we can work on the scenery a bit. Taking that load of old bones might not only provide comfort but even increase longevity enabling a weaker heart to keep pumping a bit longer. And so on endlessly.
For me first logical step is to ignore the getting there part. And prove that we can actually build colony here. In suitable location say for example Sahara or Antarctica. After those technological challenges are solved next step is to see how to get it to orbit or make same in orbit. And then we can start thinking how to get all the stuff over there.
There's not really a plausible path to colonies on other planets (or on moons of Jupiter or Saturn) that needs to send humans there soon. Establishing such a colony and getting it working well enough to actually last would be a long term project, and it would be decades before it got to sending people.
Before that there would be a lot of work off Earth, including manned work, but it would be in space or on the Moon.
They key is Lagrange points. Each pair of bodies (Sun/Earth, Earth/Moon, Sun/Jupiter, etc) have 5 points where the gravitational forces from the two bodies balance out in a way that makes it possible for something to orbit that point, even though there is no massive body at that point.
Two of the Lagrange points are stable, meaning that if something in orbit around them is disturbed it still stays around that point. The other three are unstable. Disturbing something there will cause it to get farther and farther away.
You can use this to move things from Lagrange points of one pair (Sun/Earth for example) to Lagrange points of another pair (Sun/Jupiter say) very cheaply. Get it to the starting point, and then nudge it into an unstable orbit that will have it getting farther and farther away. We can calculate these unstable orbits well enough to pick one that at some point is nearly tangent to an orbit of the destination Lagrange point that moves toward that point rather than away. A little nudge them can move our ship into that latter orbit.
The catch is that this is slow. It might take decades or more to make the trip.
The way you would use this in a colonization program is to build a series of unmanned cargo ships. Say a new cargo ship is completed every year. It would be stuffed full of supplies the colony will need, send to an appropriate Sun/Earth Lagrange point, and nudged onto its journey.
Let's say these ships take 30 years to reach the destination. After we've been doing this for nearly 30 years then we'd send a ship with the colonists. That ship uses a fast but expensive orbit. It would only need to carry the colonists, the supplies they need during the trip, and fuel and supplies for an emergency return trip in case when they get there they find some reason that they cannot stay.
Note that it doesn't need to carry any material to actually build the colony, or food and water for the colony. All that is in the cargo ships that are now arriving yearly. (If we are sure that the cargo ships are making it the human transport ship could even omit food, water, and fuel for an emergency return. Those can be on the first cargo ship).
You'd want to build the cargo ships on the Moon, or build them in space using resources from the Moon, because getting from the Moon to Lagrange points takes a lot less energy than getting from the Moon to Lagrange points.
The most plausible path then is to greatly expand industrialization of the Moon and the space near Earth. Probably then expand that to include space bases at some of the Lagrange points.
Then it is time to start working on colonization.
Unfortunately we'd probably not do Mars this way. If I recall correctly the low energy Lagrange transfer orbits to Mars are particularly slow--over a thousand years if I remember correctly.
The author puts a Mars mission into a realistic perspective but also, I think there are people who are wired differently than they are.
I'm not a test pilot but I'm a licensed pilot and I'd sign up for a Mars mission in a heartbeat, even if there was a 70% chance of success.
We send people under the ocean for years at a time to live on nuclear submarines in arguable more dangerous and isolated circumstances and they don't blink at the opportunity. To be the first person on another planet? What an incredible, fantastic opportunity. I feel like we will need to return to a place (As a society) where we accept risks that push the boundaries of the human race. Something we had a lot of in the 1960s but not a lot of today.
I don't think any single crew deployment reaches a year.
> more dangerous and isolated circumstances
I think Mars is massively more dangerous and isolated. A submarine can plausibly return to port or surface to breathable air. There is no such option on Mars. Nuclear submarines are much larger than spacecraft and have much more room for comfort options. They have a much larger crew, and the knowledge that this happens all the time from many nations must be of some comfort.
Bases in the interior can get -80 Celsius and lower during the polar winter. The British base is IIRC on the coast, so it might be less, but still very deadly if you end up outside of the base without proper equipment and supplies for any duration.
How so? A submarine on Mars would work just as well as a submarine on Earth. Both lack breathable atmosphere and can support crews for months on end with zero exposure to the outside. In what way is sitting on the surface of mars different from sitting on the floor of the ocean?
You can go to the surface when something goes wrong with the submarine. You can make oxygen from water. In general, you have plenty of water. You can be rescued. On Mars, when even the slightest thing goes wrong, you are done.
You can sometimes surface. Thousands have been killed in submarine accidents. You're under massive pressure and flying near blind in a domain where a impact could easily mean everybody dies. On Mars water will not be an issue. Settlements will likely be near areas with abundant water ice, but even in the extreme scenario it turns out the Martian soil is oddly 'moist.' It turns out that the Martian soil ranges from 2%-5% water by weight! This is something "The Martian" got accidentally wrong, since that discovery was made after the book was written.
> arguable more dangerous and isolated circumstances
I guess technically anything is arguable, but this seems absurd. Sure there's pressure and cold, but a submarine can hold 100+ people and surface in 10 minutes.
Mars is 10 months away with maybe 10 people. There's no surface. You can't scrub oxygen from the water, hell there's almost no water at all. You won't be crushed by pressure but you'll be bombarded by radiation.
Yeah sure you're technically correct, but consider the context here... we're comparing a Mars vehicle to a vessel that's literally submerged in an ocean. Getting drinkable water on Mars isn't nearly as straightforward as it is on a submarine.
Drop a submarine on Mars and you could be hundreds of miles from easily usable ice. You have to be careful about perchlorates and it's either soil- or ice-locked.
The thing about Charleston's fence is you don't know why the fence was erected. But we do. The government created it, and the government can remove it.
A wild and ruthless cut would mean that the US Government would revert to a similar relative size it was in say, 1990. Back then Debt to GDP was about 60%, now it's over 120%, for measurably worse outcomes, wage stagnation, housing costs, healthcare, education, etc. One vocal group seems to think that we could solve it by spending more money and creating more programs. You know what they say about repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting different results.
The argument you’re making is potentially valid but we can’t know for sure as it depends on numbers you don’t provide - how much government growth there’s been since 1990.
There’s two extra nuances too. First, what’s been the corresponding capability growth; and second, what’s been the growth in population served.
It may be that, controlling for these factors, things are more efficient than back then. And to go back would require removing capability that would be missed by some - or be critical due to today’s more complex world.
Which group is it that spends all the money? From this chart it seems like the line goes up under Democrats and down under Republicans. Since the Clinton years.
To be fair, if you ignore the war, it's not spending that makes the deficit go up under Republicans; it's the tax cuts. It's like announcing you are going to get your household finances together by quitting your job.
And they are doing it again. The latest budget proposal involves ~4 trillion in tax cuts and ~2 trillion in spending cuts. Wild for a group that a few months ago was panicking at how much debt we have.
> The thing about Charleston's fence is you don't know why the fence was erected. But we do. The government created it, and the government can remove it.
Knowing Bob put up the fence is not the same as knowing WHY Bob put up the fence. You've answered the who, not the why.
Humans become reliant on tools all the time. I bet the folks in an average Amazonian tribe know a lot more about lighting a fire, catching and processing wild game, and building an improvised shelter than my excuse for camping skills. They aren’t reliant on electricity or a Bic lighter, that’s for sure.
I missed the boat on the 80s but as a “hacker” who made it through the 90s and 00s there’s something deeply sad and disturbing about how the conversation around AI is trending.
Imaging telling hackers from the past that people on a website called “hacker news” would be arguing about how important it is that the government criminalize running code on your own computer. It’s so astoundingly, ethically, philosophically opposed to everything that inspired me to get into computers in the first place. I only have to wonder if people really believe this, or it’s a sophisticated narrative that’s convenient to certain corporations and politicians.
> Imaging telling hackers from the past that people on a website called “hacker news” would be arguing about how important it is that the government criminalize running code on your own computer.
My understanding is that approximately zero government-level safety discussion is restriction of just building & running AI yourself. There are no limits of AI hacking even in the EU AI regaultion or discussions I've seen.
Regulation is around business & government applications and practical use cases: no unaccountable AI making final employment decisions, no widespread facial recognition in public spaces, transparency requirements for AI usage in high-risk areas (health, education, justice), no AIs with guns, etc.
Who is saying this? Do you have specific comments in mind that you're referring to? I can't find anything anywhere near the top that says anything like this.
I would say the debate currently going on is less about "running code on your own machine" and more about "making sure the thing your are replacing at least a portion of your labor force with is at least somewhat dependable and those who benefit from the replacement are still responsible".
I think management is putting too much hope into this, any negative outcome from replacing a human with AI might result in liabilities surpassing the savings. Air Canada's chatbot was decided just a year ago and I'm sure the hallucinating AI chatbot, from development to legal fees, cost the airline more money than they saved in their call-center.
Is there any source for you claim that any (democratic) government wants to criminalize running code on your own computer? I didn't see it in this declaration from the AI Action summit where the USA and UK are missing from the signatories https://www.politico.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/11/02-11-...
As you mention ethics: what ethics do we apply to AI? None? Some? The same as to a human? As AI is replacing humans in decision-making, it needs to be held responsible just as a human.
AI development is not led by hackers in their garages, but by multi-billion corporations with no incentives other than profit and no care other than their shareholders. The only way to control their negative outcomes in this system is regulation.
If you explained to that hacker that govs and corps would leverage that same technology to spy on everyone and control their lives because line must go up, they might understand better than anyone else why this needs to be sabotaged early in the process.
Get involved in the local AI community. You're more likely to find people with whom you share affinity on places like r/LocalLLaMA. There's also the e/acc movement on Twitter which espouses the same gen x style rebellious libertarian ideals that once dominated the Internet. Stay away from discussions that attract policy larping.
I think you're missing the point. People are saying that government should make sure AI is not weaponized against the people of the world. But lets face it, US and UK governments will likely be the first to weaponized against the people.
As DeepSeek is shown us progress is hard to hinder unless you go to war and kill the people....
This isn't "news for hackers only". Hacker News is more appropriately described as "a news aggregator and discussion board frequented by those in IT and programming". But that doesn't sound so cool, no? "Slashdot 2.0" also doesn't sound so great.
We can send small probes to image the moon in incredibly high resolution. It's a big place I'm sure there is a perfectly flat rock somewhere they can use.
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