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Phil Metzger Profile picture
@DrPhiltill
Sep 18, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Three scenarios how industry may develop in space. "Civilization Fully Revolutionized" means offloading industrial footprint from Earth to save the planet, all humans benefit from developed economies (health care, etc..."Post Scarcity"), vastly greater horizons for science...1 Image
2/...reaching to the stars. The Slow Growth Scenario means only government space agencies like NASA invest pre-economically in off-Earth industry, and we leave commercial businesses to slowly develop profitability and new business cases. Because space is hard, this is slow.
3/ The Rapid Bootstrapping Scenario means there are actors motivated to make it happen faster than the market forces will do. They may be visionary individuals with means, citizen-led movements, or governments that see the long-term benefit of getting beyond our planetary limit.
4/ Because rapidly bootstrapping a full supply chain in space is beyond the means of even the wealthiest individuals, and because it is hard to convince people of the benefits of something so abstract, we are not (yet) on the rapid pathway. So...
5/ at the present I think the third path, the middle-speed, is the most likely. That's where we have a combination of space agency investment, some visionary pre-economic investment, and some commercial growth. Eventually the progress they collectively produce proves the case...
6/...then politicians finally realize there is a looming revolution only decades away, and it could be very very good, or very very bad, depending how it goes down. I think that's when national governments go all-in to shape it according to their own visions of the future.
7/ It MAY or may NOT be a great outcome, depending who wins the race to shape the future and how enlightened they are. When they reach "ignition", they will be in a position to abandon negotiation and to never again dilute their equity in this off-Earth industry. So...
8/...now is the time to shape the future of industry in space. It is a limited time between now and "ignition", and the stakes are huge. Let's work together to make the world of our children and grandchildren just, healthy, safe, and amazing. One way to do that is.... Image
9/...to create a movement that puts us into the Rapid Bootstrapping Scenario, to create a coalition of likeminded citizen movements and enlightened governments committed to a good future so we reach the "ignition" point first by being fast. Can we do this? I think we can.

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More from @DrPhiltill

Phil Metzger Profile picture
May 6
Here is something that hints strongly at how human scientists and engineers are already doomed by AI. 🧵

I noticed this tonight while using Grok for technical research. I asked it a complex question and Grok understood it completely and gave a sophisticated and highly believable answer, but when I asked for specific references so I can write it into a paper for a journal, none of the references Grok provided exactly support the answer it gave me. Instead, they hint at something deeper.

In this case, I am quantifying the loss of signal margin in a Moon-Earth communications link as a function of how many times you landed near the communication system so the rocket plume sandblasted the electronics' thermal coatings, causing them to operate hotter than designed. There is a real cost to sandblasting your hardware on the Moon, and I am trying to quantify it.

Grok gave me many quantified effects, including that the frequency oscillator will drift about 10 to 50 ppm per deg C of temperature rise outside its operating range and that the Signal to Noise Ratio of the overall communications link will drop about ~0.1–0.5 dB for small drifts (<10 kHz) in particular modulation schemes. This is a great result that I can use to quantify sandblasting damage on the Moon, and the result is totally plausible, but it doesn't appear in ANY reference that Grok provided. Nothing discusses this.

So I suspect Grok actually derived that relationship itself during the LLM training. I think the relationship is probably correct, because the many references hint around the edges of this relationship in the right magnitude. I think Grok noticed the patterns of many performance metrics including temperature, input power and frequency, outputs, etc., for many devices and how they are connected in typical systems, and it stored as a higher-level symbol the result that you get 10 to 50 ppm per deg C performance loss. I think it solved that during training as it sought the higher-order symbols to store everything it had learned. IOW, its learning process included a heckuva lot of valid inference on these technical issues, and it now knows more about the performance of communications equipment than even the published literature knows.

I asked Grok if this is true, and it says it is correct (screenshots).

/1Image
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2/ I then asked Grok to derive this relationship the same way it probably did during the LLM training, and it did. So now, if I want to use this key result in my paper, I have to use the many references that Grok used when it derived the relationship, and I have to show the derivation explicitly in the paper, or I can't publish it per the rules of scientific publishing (which of course were created in the days before reliable AI, and we still don't have totally reliable AI, but we can see it is coming fast).Image
3/ So here is the derivation, which it says replicates the process it did during its LLM training, which led it to believe in the quantified relationship between frequency shift and signal to noise ratio. I'm including this just to show its character. Image
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Read 4 tweets
Phil Metzger Profile picture
Mar 14
I think it’s likely the Outer Space Treaty will be voided within the next few decades as nations will claim (effectively) national territory on the Moon and Mars.

Here’s why I think this…

/1 Image
2/
 The OST is part of the International Rules-Based Order that emerged post-WW2. The IRBO was originally multipolar with the US-led NATO and Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The collapse of the latter left the US as the main power wanting to keep the IRBO. China/the CCP hates this.
theguardian.com/world/2023/oct…Image
3/ The CCP claims the rules-based order was set up when China was weak so it is unfair and needs to be replaced. They are aggressive at claiming territory in their national interest, disregarding the existing rules-based order by rejecting rulings of the international court. lowyinstitute.org/the-interprete…
Read 10 tweets
Phil Metzger Profile picture
Mar 5
I’d like to reemphasize this. The dust you see is not settling. It is still going uphill when it flies over the horizon and out of view. It is like a rocket that has curved below the horizon but is still climbing. If you get this, it makes sense why it clears the view so fast. /1
2/ It has so much grandeur when your mind can see it for what it is. It is not a humble cloud sinking to the ground. It is a vast, high energy phenomenon covering hundreds of kilometers in just a few seconds. In the vacuum of space nothing impedes its flight.
3/ I know some will object to the idea of regolith flying so fast that it escapes completely off the Moon, but the finest dust does. In fact, you can only see dust finer than about 1 micron in this video, and rocks bigger than a centimeter or so. >99% of the mass of the flying regolith is actually invisible in this video.
Read 5 tweets
Phil Metzger Profile picture
Mar 4
This is superb! Will be a treasure for quantifying plume-surface interactions during lunar landing. There are some things I don't understand yet and will take a while to unpack. (Note: I'm not supporting the mission so this is just my private musing.) 🧵/1
2/ I don't understand three things about the shadows.
First, there is a huge upward flow up the centerline. The plume itself should be clear and invisible, since it cools as it leave the engine and without an atmosphere to collimate it the shock structures in the plume are... Image
3/ greatly reduced. So when I look at this, I think that central shadow up the center is not the plume but is dust, what we call "fountain flow". Now the lander has only one main engine, so if it was firing then there shouldn't be any fountain flow... Image
Read 40 tweets
Phil Metzger Profile picture
Feb 6
One time testing the Space Shuttle landing strip at White Sands, NM, the thought of this happening really scared me. We had just flown from Florida to Holloman Air Force Base in NM, which is 1.25 km above sea level. I asked the pilots about the barometric altimeter setting… 🧵/1
2/ because “0 feet” altitude above the runway in New Mexico is a lot lower barometric pressure than 0 feet at Cape Canaveral where we took off. The pilots explained how it is set whenever they are at a new airport. I was just wondering and thought no more of it till that night. Image
3/ We were scheduled to fly out of Holloman at midnight to perform landing tests on the Shuttle runways repeatedly until dawn, two nights in a row. The flights were at that dark shift to avoid conflict with Air Force flight traffic. It was home of the F-117A stealth fighter. Image
Read 21 tweets
Phil Metzger Profile picture
Dec 14, 2024
Great question. I don’t think the Moon can have solid sheets or lenses of ice like the Earth and Mars have. The absence of an atmosphere means everything on the lunar surface gets pummeled by meteorites and broken into granular material to 10s of meters depth. /1
2/ We saw evidence of this at the NASA LCROSS mission’s impact into Cabeus crater in 2009. The target soil was so soft that the spacecraft apparently buried into the soil 2-3 meters deep before meeting much resistance. This caused three observable:
3/ First, the visible flash that we expected to result from the impact was entirely suppressed. I remember watching it in realtime. It was a big disappointment because the satellite images in the visible spectrum showed absolutely nothing at impact. Image
Read 14 tweets

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