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20 Oct, 4 tweets, 1 min read
It would be hard to overstate the scientific return on investment from missions like New Horizons, which cost taxpayers less than the dining room on the International Space Station. It's enormously frustrating that we don't do ten of these a year.
To pick one egregious example, we visited Uranus exactly one time, in 1974, and discovered the planet is really weird, colder than any planetary model predicts but with a strangely hot corona, a bizarro magnetic field, and... that's it. No plans to go back. Just dads to the Moon.
(Sorry, got my dates wrong. The one Uranus flyby took place in 1986, with 1974 hardware.)
Why can't we have even one space billionaire who is obsessed with flying in a wingsuit on Titan instead of just cosplaying Project Mercury, or promoting a Fyre Festival on Mars? Why do they all have to be so basic? America needs better billionaires.

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Pinboard Profile picture
20 Oct
I really like this question and the challenge of answering it. I believe what makes NFTs different is a transformative vision of a future that true believers find inspiring and achievable. In their eyes, the current speculative bubble is a mechanism for growing something enduring
A good analogy to NFT believers are the people who are really into colonizing Mars. You can argue with them on the technical demerits of their project (no air, far away, all our stuff is here, slow internet), but you're not really getting to the heart of their belief system.
People want to colonize Mars because they (pick one) want to live out a libertarian fantasy, have deep anxieties about human extinction, want humanity to take over the galaxy, want a fresh start in Year Zero without all the baggage that comes with life on Earth, you name it.
Read 14 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
20 Oct
This is a fun paper that shows there's a decent chance we don't have to go to Mars, because Mars may eventually come to us (thanks to instabilities in Mercury's orbit). We'd only need to put landing gear on the ISS. perso.imcce.fr/jacques-laskar…
The authors ran a general relativity model on the Solar System extrapolated 5 billion years out. For each run, they changed the initial size of Mercury's orbit by a few millimeters. Since the Solar System is chaotic, this is enough to produce some spectacularly different outcomes
The upshot is—don't trust Mercury, especially when it's in retrograde. In many of these scenarios it gets pulled into a highly eccentric orbit by Jupiter, and then crashes into Venus or into the Sun. Add this to your list of anxieties if you feel optimistic about life extension.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
18 Oct
Okay, I think there's an Apple event? Let's do this. God help us all.
The Apple Music guy has some thoughts on R.E.M.'s uneasy embrace of mainstream success Image
The new AirPods have a thing called spatial audio, which will make it sound like you're listening to a band playing somewhere even though in reality you're on a bus
Read 27 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
17 Oct
The political messaging here from Wyden is *chef's kiss*. "We've been waiting years to raise taxes on the middle class!" Image
The fact that Democrats' Plan B for "let's build out abundant clean energy" is "here's a tax to make you all drive less and wear a cardigan" does not fill me with confidence. Image
Looking forward to whatever creative way the Democrats find to screw up the messaging around free universal pre-school Image
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
15 Oct
The part west of the mountain chain is Transylvania, where the Hungarians hid after they decided to stop marauding. They even hired Germans to build cities in the mountain passes to protect them from the next set of nomadic steppe raiders to get a gleam in their eye and head west
The strategy held until the first Mongol invasion. By that point the settled Hungarians had gotten soft and forgotten how to steppe nomad, so the Mongols ate their goulash. After that, Hungary doubled down on the "make Germans come and build fortified cities" strategy. It worked!
These fortified Saxon cities built as Mongol repellent are the reason Transylvania is called "Seven Cities" in many languages. The point of all this is that you should visit Transylvania if you can, because you can eat Hungarian food in lovely Saxon cities with Romanian wine.
Read 6 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
14 Oct
CO2 is a settler gas colonizing the atmosphere.
Here's the actual chart when you're not trying to make a ridiculous point. The key lesson in the chart is that the future of climate mitigation depends on either convincing 2/3 of humanity to stay poor, or orchestrating a massive global clean energy development program.
Put another way, we can continue to sell climate mitigation as "the good times are over" in the rich countries, or make it into a decarbonization gold rush that makes a lot of people rich (and hated on this site) while electrifying the poorest and most populous countries.
Read 5 tweets

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