Feels like the probability of getting grabbed by a space pirate within the next hundred years should be fairly high. Or maybe a space archeologist, just like modern day archeologists digging up graves intended as vessels for the eternal afterlife.
If there was a way to collect on it, I'd bet good money there won't be space pirates in the next hundred years. Without some sort of fundamental (and I do mean fundamental) advance in propulsion technology, the notion of humans being a multi-planetary species is a joke.
100 years seems like a very long time to humans, but each century has seen continued exponential progress in transportation technology. Where you see a joke, I see a certainty -- barring of course some unforeseen massive catastrophe.
The whole point of post 1970s technology is that despite all the predictions of flying cars, jetpacks, vacations on Mars, etc. they didn't happen. Transportation is done. If anything, we've gone backwards -- we used to have things like the Concorde, and now we don't. It isn't that technology has stood still, of course, but the whole advance in communications means that the need for transportation is reduced. Videoconferencing between New York and London is better than a Concorde flight sending people across.
Do you actually, literally mean this? Or did you mean to say that the next big change won't happen for a very long time?
I get your point -- it's a very good one, if said much more moderately. Communication tech can be a replacement for transportation tech, and the next big change in transportation tech may be quite difficult to achieve. But the absolute statements drive me bonkers...
P.s. self driving cars may be mainstream in a few decades or less.
Self driving vehicles make sense as the next major change, akin to the jetliner, mass production car, steam train, and steamship.
Until something along the lines of antigravity is discovered, I can't see any major modal change in aerospace. Fundamentally there's little different from today's 787 or a380 than a 747 or 707. As was pointed out, you used to be able to cross the Atlantic 3 times in a single day. The major change to open up Europe-far east travel wasn't high speed planes, it was the opening of Russian air space.
Aside from some modest range improvements there's little change in 50 years on long haul travel. The only things on the horizon would be antipodal non stop flights, but those distances tend to be uneconomic due to having to carry the fuel. High speed trains are slightly faster than they were in 1980 but not by an order of magnitude, things like the Shanghai maglev seem doomed to be one off curiosities.
There's not much in today's transport world that would shock someone from 60 years ago.
There are quite a lot of predictions for the future that didn't work out -- living rooms which the housewife would be able to hose down every day, holograms, self-tying shoes (yeah, I know, somebody made a pair as a gimmick). Many of them are rooted in fashions which didn't survive long enough for the technology to get there, or in cost-benefit issues. The Concorde's demise had a variety of factors that can't be summarised as, "we haven't made any improvements to transportation since then".
Promising technology always, eventually, reaches a dead-end, sometimes before something better comes along, yet technology as a whole keeps progressing. The steam engine, for instance, far outperformed internal combustion engines even after ICEs became more common (https://www.conceptcarz.com/vehicle/z11210/stanley-steamer-r... the electric car "revolution" that's happening now also happened a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Electric_Truck
I see interplanetary travel as inevitable because we have nowhere else left to go. There are humans on every continent now, humans under the ocean, even humans full time in space. Although there are numerous members of our species who don't now (and never have) seen any reason to leave their own backyard, our species has made it to all of these places because of the members who just can't stand to be wherever everyone else already is. For that reason alone, we will eventually become interplanetary.
It's not exponential, it's sigmoidal. Technological progress is slowing down and becoming more specialized. Most of what we have today we also had 25 years ago, if you ignore electronics.
And materials science.
And medical science.
And probably several other things I'm not thinking of right now.
The truth is that the electronics you mentioned are a force multiplier. It's like saying 4,000 years ago, we had everything we had in the immediate pre-renaissance. The math was the enabler that gave us the ability to exceed what we had.
Electronics (and the things that go along with it, such as the software to run it) are what allow us to move vast swaths of other tech forward.
We are still limited by physics, and we won't ever find ways to circumvent physics, but we'll find ways to not have to circumvent physics.
the problem with exponential growth is that it can't last given finite resources or finite space. the question is when the inflection point to the second part of the sigmoid is.
This is why we will most certainly expand out into the solar system in the coming centuries. There are immense energy sources and resource deposits available.
I also agree that space pirates are not a next-hundred-years problem...but disagree that with existing propulsion technology (or incremental, ordinary improvements on it in the next hundred years) we cannot become multi-planetary in the next hundred years.
Space piracy implies a rogue individual or group grabbing stuff in space and selling it on the black market for profit. I completely agree that's next to impossible. 17th-century piracy on the high seas relied on widely shared seafaring expertise, many potential customers and victims, and an ease of entry that's just not present in space.
But we've had people in space on the ISS continuously for more than a decade now, we landed on the moon half a century ago, and it's all getting constantly cheaper and easier.
I would be shocked and disappointed (moreso than I already am in our abandonment of the moon) if we didn't have a Mars base in a century.
I can't imagine a Mars base being useful in any meaningful way (aside from _maybe_ some sort of esoteric scientific utility) without reducing the transit time between the planets to at most a few days.
If a compelling economic reason arises, travel times under current technology aren't unreasonable. In the age of sail, whalers and merchants routinely went on even multiyear voyages. There are other life-support challenges to surmount, but then again, we'll probably end up with robotic spacecraft anyway doing long haul routes, and that becomes more moot.
We've got plenty of people willing to risk their lives for a chance at riches.
We've got technology that's making it borderline cost effective to survive in space.
... we're only missing in-space mining and manufacturing (at least of the basics). The cost of launching all of the above from the Earth's surface is what's killing the economics.
And ironically, there's a fairly accurate parallel to the resource- and legal- 16th century Caribbean.
17th century piracy with people boarding spaceships or capturing satellites? Probably not.
But how about hacking of satellites built with insecure off the shelf components? The IoT. In space.
This gets even more interesting once someone builds an insecure satellite tug. The first group to hack one can threaten other satellites within the tug's reach.
I think it depends what you want to call a "pirate".
I feel that some material and energy collection will be able to be automated, and the corporations will be able to steal from each other and so will do so given the opportunity.
Sorry, what? There are obviously a lot of massive challenges to overcome, but how is today’s propulsion technology specifically a limiting factor to being a multi-planetary species?
There are additional planetary bodies in the solar system and it is probably easier (relatively speaking) to build a sustainable habitat on one than building a completely self-sustaining inter-stellar spaceship.
On the contrary, he's apparently descending on a cloud as we speak - the last five years have really ramped up "Well, shit...guess Stallman might have been right" comments here.
The Japanese space agency did something similar a few years ago. They sent a probe to an asteroid that was passing near our planet, and collected some samples back to Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa
Hayabusa was an active probe that had working thrusters capable of changing its orbit. Elon Musk’s car is an inert hunk of plastic and metal at this point, without as much as a communication link back to Earth.
I'd say Mars. Having it already in Earth orbit would make it more cost effective to hook it to a Mars mission. Also, being 100% electric I'm sure they would find a way to make it useable on Mars. Just imagine watching some pilot doing stunts in a reduced gravity.
Did the Tesla/starman have any sensors/camera/telemetry objects on board? Or was it literally just space litter (I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but if it’s not reporting anything, why go to all that for a device in space that doesn’t report anything at all(aside from a successful falcon launch))
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men and women to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (inspirée)
Yes - you can find the camera feed on YouTube! The batteries are long dead, but there is little useful telemetry left to transmit. The value was in the data from the rocket itself.
The reason for going to all this trouble is that no one will put their expensive satellite on a test launch, but you’ve still got to do the test launch. Traditionally, one launches a block of solid concrete or steel.
For what it’s worth, the spot was offered to both NASA and the Air Force. Both wisely declined.
The same reason they didn't put any other kind of valuable payload on the rocket. They didn't know if it would blow up on launch or not, so didn't invest in fitting anything. Most test launches like this (all?) just use a steel block for the dummy payload.
As a side note, doesn't anyone else find ironic that the edge technology car with autopilot is sent in space with the "driver" having both hands (glued) on the steering wheel?
I think it will fun to have a contest to find and bring back the starman alive to Earth. Whichever country or whoever does it should get a major bounty.
If The Expanse has taught me anything, it'll probably end up retrieved someday by a robotic ion-propulsion craft and put on display in the corporate lobby of Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile's Luna HQ.
For a second I also had a mental image of a flying Stallman tearing his shirt open and leaving the planet at super-speed. At least I wasn't the only one :-)
I can one up that. From the headline alone, I was pretty confident that it was going to be a fun pseudo-scientific attempt to predict this guy's return.
Hence, the Outer Space Treaty. Not a coincidence that this was signed shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, and while Soviet and American space programs were in full swing.
I wish HN would link to any other author's posts on hackaday other than Benchoff. His articles are very clickbaity for a site that rarely does clickbait, and he's frequently been openly hostile to commenters and to readers in general. I sincerely believe HAD would be a better site without him, and I wish his posts weren't also popping up on HN.
Hey Joemi, Benchoff here. Glad to see my work is at least noticed.
To respond to your calls of clickbait, yes, I do have a habit of writing articles that are picked up on Hacker News. I see that you have submitted a total of zero items to HN, how about submitting a few other articles from Hackaday (sparing myself, of course) to HN? I'm sure they'd appreciate it.
I'm not calling your HAD articles clickbaity because they get picked up by HN... I meant they had titles that were actual clickbait, like you were goading people into clicking out of anger because you'd say something inflammatory or because you phrased something in a certain way so that it sounded wrong. (And then you'd continue the goading in the articles.)
That said, I just glanced through your more recent HAD articles to offer up some examples and they don't seem anything like that anymore, so I'll give your stuff another shot. I guess your style's changed since a little less than a year ago when I noticed and decided to filter out all your articles from the RSS feed (in particular because you were telling people who offered corrections to your articles that they're "shitting up the comments").
As to my zero submissions... I'm just not a submitter. shrug
