Engineer working on next-gen satellite navigation at Xona Space Systems. I write about effective-altruist and longtermist topics at nukazaria.substack.com, or you can read about puzzle videogames and other things at jacksonw.xyz
Jackson Wagner
Karma: 1,322
Why does anime often feature giant, perfectly spherical sci-fi explosions?? Eg, consider this explosion from the movie “Akira”, pretty typical of the genre:
These seem inspired by nuclear weapons, often they are literally the result of nuclear weapons according to the plot (although in many cases they are some kind of magical / etc energy). But obviously nuclear weapons cause mushroom clouds, right?? If no real explosion looks like this, where did the artistic convention come from?
What’s going on? Surely they are not thinking of the spherical fireball that only occurs for a handful of milliseconds after a nuclear detonation?? Is it just that spheres are easy to draw??
The answer seems to be that large explosions in humid air (like, say, Japan) cause exactly this sort of rapidly-expanding spherical pulse, as shockwaves cause a pulse of condensation. Check out these videos of the (non-nuclear) 2020 Beirut explosion; it’s a dead ringer for the matching scene in Akira. Here is an especially far-away view of the Beirut explosion where you can see how the shockwave interacts with nearby clouds in an interesting way.
The USA’s cultural image of nuclear explosions comes mostly from early nuclear tests conducted in sunny Nevada, which only generates dry mushroom clouds. (Hence also, perhaps, our cultural associations of a post-nuclear-war world as a dry, desiccated wasteland like those of Fallout or Mad Max?) In Japan, I imagine the more salient reference points would have been 1. eyewitness descriptions of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which happened on partly cloudy & overcast days and presumably looked more like the Beirut video (but bigger), and 2. the later tests of hydrogen bombs at Bikini Atoll, which became somewhat of an international incident regarding the deaths of some Japanese fishermen, and whose explosions similarly had an “expanding white sphere” look to them.
(For a particularly HD, live-action hollywood representation of the spherical-anime-explosion motif, see this scene from Pacific Rim, which interprets the anime motif through a kind of confused mix of vacuum cavitation in water, the back-and-forth wind effects seen in lots of nuclear test footage, and the first-few-milliseconds spherical fireball of a nuclear explosion.)
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Non-zero, of course, in the same sense that credit card companies tolerate a non-zero amount of fraudulent transactions as part of doing business. And I agree that the right amount of resources to spend on fare enforcement will be different for each transit system, depending on all kinds of particular circumstances. But I would guess that for most transit systems, “let’s help the poor by cutting back on fare evasion” would overall be a much worse use of marginal resources than “let’s help the poor by offering free or discounted fare cards or giving them fare credits”, or perhaps “let’s help everyone by slightly expanding service frequency / coverage”.
Eg, grocery stores tolerate some amount of “shrinkage” (people stealing the food) according to whatever maximizes profits. If grocery stores were run by the government and were willing to run at a loss in order to promote greater overall social welfare, I wouldn’t support a policy of “let’s just roll back our shrinkage enforcement and let people steal more food”. I would instead support giving poorer people something like expanded EBT food stamp credits. (And, per kelsey, signing up for such a program should be made simpler and more rational!)
Tolerating a high amount of fare evasion also means letting some very disorderly people into the system, which makes the experience worse for all the actual paying users of the system. So it is not always “near zero marginal cost” to let other people free-ride (even outside of busy, congested times).
For an example targeting rich people instead of the poor: I think we should lower income and corporate taxes (which discourage productive work) and replace the lost revenue with pigovian taxes (ie a carbon tax, sin taxes, etc) plus georgist land taxes. And, for the purposes of this conversation, say that I support lowering taxes overall, in a way that would disproportionately benefit rich people and corporations. But I am totally against severely rolling back IRS enforcement against tax cheats (as is currently happening), because this runs into all kinds of adverse selection problems where you’re now disproportionately rewarding (probably less economically productive) cheats, while punishing (probably more productive) honest people.
Surely the most important distinction is that normal price discrimination is usually based on trying to infer a customer’s willingness to pay (based on how wealthy they are, how much they want the product, etc). Versus fare evasion is also heavily based in how willing someone is to lie / cheat / otherwise break the rules. So, tolerating fare evasion is a form of “price discrimination” that’s dramatically corrosive to societal trust and other values, much moreso than any normal kind of price discrimination—effectively a disproportionate tax on honorable law-abiding people. See Kelsey piper’s article https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-honesty-tax
The impression I got from Ngo’s post is that:
assorted varieties of gradual disempowerment do seem like genuine long term threats
however, by the nature of the idea, it involves talking a lot about relatively small present-day harms from AI
therefore gradual disempowerment is highly at-risk of being coopted by people who mostly just want to talk about present day harms, distracting from both AI x-risk overall and even perhaps from gradual-disempowerment-related x-risk
Oh, I think they probably try to adapt in a variety of ways to be more hospitable & compatible with me when I’m around. (Although to a certain extent, maybe I’m more weird (less “normie”) than they are, plus I’m from a younger generation, so the onus is more on me socially to adapt myself to their ways?) But the focus of my comment was about the ways that I personally try to relate to people who are quite different from me. So I didn’t want to dive into how they might find it difficult or annoying being around me and how they might deal with this (though I’m sure they do find me annoying in some ways—another reason to be grateful, have humility, etc!).
I think this is a real phenomenon, although I don’t think the best point of comparison is the Baumol effect. The Baumol effect is all about the differential impact on different sectors, wheras this would be a kind of universal effect where it’s harder to use money to motivate people to work, once they already have a lot of money.
I think a closer point of comparison is simply the high labor costs in rich first-world nations, compared to low labor costs in third-world nations. You can get a haircut or eat a nice meal in India for a tiny fraction of what it costs to buy a similar service in the USA. Partly you could say this is due to a Baumol effect of a sort, where the people in the USA have more productive alternative jobs they could be working, because they’re living in a rich country with lots of capital, educated workers, well-run firms, etc. But maybe another part of the equation is that even barbers and cooks in the USA are pretty rich by global standards?
As a person becomes richer, it’s perfectly sensible IMO for them to become less willing to do various menial tasks for low pay. But of course there are still some menial tasks that must get done! Imagine a society much richer than ours—everyone is the equivalent of today’s multimillionares (in the sense that they can easily afford lots of high-quality mass-manufactured goods—they own a big home, plus a few vacation homes, a couple of cars, they can afford to fly all over the world by jet, etc), and many people are the equivalent of billionaires / trillionaires. This society would be awesome, but it would’t really be quite as rich as it seems at first glance, because people would still have to perform a bunch of service tasks; we couldn’t ALL be retired all the time. I suppose you could just go full-Baumol and pay people exorbitant CEO-wages just to flip burgers at mcdonalds. But in real life society would probably settle on a mix of strategies:
Making jobs more enjoyable, so people /want/ to do them more, and you don’t have to pay them so much to incentivize them. Things like providing a comfortable work environment, trying to have a positive social vibe in the workplace, finding ways to make the work more fun or satisfying than it would normally be (even if this comes at some cost to efficiency).
Trying to “pay people” in appreciation and (ever-scarce) social status instead of (abundant, ineffective) cash where possible, et cetera. But of course, overall, social-status is somewhat of a zero-sum game, so idk how much juice you could squeeze there...
Trying to simply minimize the amount of unnecessary service work—lots more automation wherever it’s feasible, even in situations where this creates a slightly downgraded experience for the consumer.
And then, indeed, just paying people a ton more.
I think strategies like these are already at work when you look at the difference between poor vs rich nations—jobs in rich countries not only pay more but are also generally more automated, have better working conditions, etc. It’s funny to imagine how the future might be WAY further in the rich-world direction than even today’s rich world, since it seems so unbalanced to us (just like how paying 30% of GDP for healthcare would’ve seemed absurd to preindustrial / pre-Baumol-effect societies). But it’ll probably happen!
Agreed that the ideas are kind of obvious (from a certain rationalist perspective); nonetheless they are :
1. not widely known outside of rationalist circles, where most people might consider “utopia” to just mean some really mundane thing like “tax billionares enough to provide subsidized medicaid for all” rather than defeating death and achieving other assorted transhumanist treasures
2. potentially EXTREMELY important for the long-term future of civilization
In this regard they seem similar to the idea of existential risk, or the idea that AI might be a really important and pivotal technology—really really obvious in retrospect, yet underrated in broader societal discourse and potentially extremely important.
Unlike AI & x-risk, I think people who talk about CEV and viatopia have so far done an unimpressive job of exploring how those philosophical ideas about the far-future should be translated into relevant action today. (So many AI safety orgs, billion-dollar companies getting founded, government initiatives launched, lots of useful research and lobbying and etc getting done—there is no similar game plan for promoting “viatopia” as far as I know!)
”The religious undertones that there is some sort of convergent nirvana once you think hard enough is not true.”—can you argue for this in a convincing and detailed way? If so, that would be exciting—you would be contributing a very important step towards making concrete progress in thinking about CEV / etc, the exact tractability problem I was just complaining about!! But if you are just asserting a personal vibe without actual evidence or detailed arguments to back it up, then I’d not baldly assert ”...is not true”.
bostrom uses “existential security” to refer to this intermediate goal state IIRC—referring to a state where civilization is no longer facing significant risk of extinction or things like stable totalitarianism. this phrase connotes sort of a chill, minimum-viable utopia (just stop people from engineering super-smallpox and everything else stays the same, m’kay?), but I wonder if actual “existential security” might be essentially equivalent to locking in a very specific and as-yet-undiscovered form of governance conducive to suppressing certain dangerous technologies without falling into broader anti-tech stagnation, avoiding various dangers of totalitarianism and fanaticism, etc… https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NpYjajbCeLmjMRGvZ/human-empowerment-versus-the-longtermist-imperium
yudkowsky might have had a term (perhaps in his fun-theory sequence?) referring to a kind of intermediate utopia where humanity has covered “the basics” of things like existential security plus also some obvious moral goods like individual people no longer die + extreme suffering has been abolished + some basic level of intelligence enhancement for everybody + etc
some people talk about the “long reflection” which is similar to the concept of viatopia, albeit with more of a “pause everything” vibe that seems less practical for a bunch of reasons
it seems like it would be pretty useful for somebody to be thinking ahead about the detailed mechanics of different idealization processes (since maybe such processes do not “converge”, and doing things in a slightly different way / slightly different order might send you to very different ultimate destinations: https://joecarlsmith.com/2021/06/21/on-the-limits-of-idealized-values), even though this is probably not super tractable until it becomes clearer what kinds of “idealization technologies” will actually exist when, and what their possible uses will be (brain-computer interfaces, nootropic drugs or genetic enhancement procedures, AI advisors, “Jhourney”-esque spiritual-attainment-assistance technologies, improved collective decisionmaking technologies / institutions, etc)
Okay, yup, that makes sense!
I guess personally:I am often dismayed and annoyed by how other people seem to lack particular virtues that I prize, or abilities that I have. Like being not very truthseeking, being interested in stuff that seems dumb and pointless to me, etc.
But it helps to remember that other people have a lot of virtues that I don’t have—for instance, I’m pretty lazy, but a lot of people I know are incredibly hardworking and diligent even when working miserable, difficult jobs. A lot of people are very empathetic, or have good social awareness, or are good at being pleasant and sociable , which (as I’ve mentioned) are departments where I’m lacking.
In particular it helps to remember that many people kind of construct a self-serving moral system that overweights the virtues they themselves possess—eg, an athelete might tend to think “wow, look at these weaklings who can’t even take care of their own health!”, while a contrarian nerd will think “I can’t believe how much ordinary sheeple go along with convention and don’t think for themselves”, somebody who appreciates opera and is good at analyzing literature will think “it’s criminal how many people go through life consuming whatever entertainment Netflix and Tiktok puts in front of them, without exerting any effort or agency trying to seek out and appreciate the richness that human culture has to offer”, and so forth. In my view, taking care of your health, thinking for yourself, and seeking to become cultured are all good virtues! But it’s easy to over-index on the virtues you yourself possess and know best, while ignoring the ones that you’re weak on. So I try not to judge people too harshly when they fall short in the areas where I’m strongest.
One way that I notice this self-serving bias is when it shows up around things that are totally unrelated to objective virtues. Like, I notice myself taking pride in the fact that I have good taste in videogames, and I tend to inwardly scoff at how much time other people spend watching prestige-TV shows (I love movies, but generally find the meandering plots of TV shows to be tedious and unsatisfying). But from an external perspective I can recognize that videogames are (in most senses) even more tedious than TV shows, so what the hell am I talking about? Yet I sometimes still have a weird sense of superiority for being the kind of person who knows a lot about The Witness and Kerbal Space Program, instead of the kind of person who knows a lot about Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or whatever.
Maybe this is weird/stupid, but to a certain extent, it’s almost nice that other people tend to lack some of my virtues, because then I can have something where I can feel special and distinctive. If everyone was really rationalist, I think that would be hugely better for society / the planet overall, but at least on this non-rationalist planet we can have the consolation prize of feeling cool and unique. (Similarly, christians might wish the whole world was christian, but given that it isn’t, they can at least take pride in being the few people who manage to keep the faith.)
In particular I’ve spent a lot of time lately hanging out with my wife’s family, who are pretty dumb and always making stupid decisions on a practical level, misprioritizing things in their life, have bad bland populist politics, are totally uninterested in philosophy except insofar as they’re religious and really strongly believe-in-belief, and so on and so on. (I hang out with them so much because they live nearby, help watch our toddler daughter, plus they recently let us live with them for a couple months while we moved out of an apartment but hadn’t yet bought a house, etc.)
My wife and I indeed do look down on them in a lot of ways, and spend a good amount of time complaining about them—it’s hard not to be annoyed by all the various little things they do that we would do differently, since little examples are constantly coming up as we go about our lives, rather than it just being an abstract difference in life philosophies or whatever.
But again, they have a lot of virtues that help make up for their shortcomings—most notably they are very family-oriented (for instance they have ben incredibly generous to us re: watching our toddler and letting us live with them for a bit!), do a decent job looking out for each other, et cetera. So, I’ve gotta respect that in general, and in particular be grateful for the specific helpful things they’ve done for me.
They’re also sympathetic insofar as their shortcomings are somewhat downstream of challenging life circumstances. They grew up much poorer than I am, in rural Yukon, without even many books around and certainly this was way before rationalist internet communities, etc—all of this is less conducive to developing a sophisticated worldview, correct takes on epistemology, whatever. Plus they’re just 1-2 generations older than me, which makes people less mentally sharp, more set in their ways, etc. So I kinda feel like “there but for the grace of god go I”.
Going further than just ordinary sympathy for overcoming adverse life circumstances, the philosopher Spinoza was the original guy who came up with the “stop believing in free will --> cultivate compassion for your fellow man” concept, and I think there’s a lot to recommend that approach. (Some aspects of Buddhism have a similar vibe: at the end of the day, the universe is just a bunch of physics playing out as part of a long chain of dependent origination, so from a certain perspective it seems foolish to get too mad or worked up over it!)
Finally, although being around them is in some ways aggravating (because it involves regularly watching them make dumb/suboptimal decisions on all different scales), in other ways it’s fine and perfectly enjoyable to simply chill out with someone, even if they’re dumber than you or whatever. My usual preferred mode of social interaction is, like, intellectual conversation, talking about the news, writing long introspective comments on LessWrong, et cetera, and these approaches don’t work well with them. But I can always watch a movie with them, make snacks, have fun playing around with our joyful toddler, go for a walk, talk with them about what I’ve been up to so far that day and hear what they’ve been up to, do some joint activity (like doing christmas together or just assembling some ikea furniture or cooking dinner with them), et cetera. It’s not the most fun thing ever, but it can be reasonably pleasant.
I suppose this ability to just chill out is enabled by recognizing that I shouldn’t engage with them in my usual most-comfortable / most-preferred way, but should expend a bit of effort making sure to engage with them in a way that works for them. And in a possibly weird/stupid way, it might even be somewhat helpful for me to have a strong sense of my own intellectual superiority in these interactions, similar to how some people (such as in the tumblr SJW space!) talk about people with a “secure sense of masculinity” as opposed to people with an anxious, insecure sense of their masculinity who might be tempted to act really macho and constantly seek social validation of their maleness. My default most-preferred way of interaction can almost be like an intellectual duel or tennis match (or something a little more cooperative than that, but still with competitive aspects): bouncing ideas back and forth, moving fast and making correct intellectual moves, trying to come up with good insights that will be impressive and helpful for the other person. I don’t think this is bad, or mostly/entirely motivated by status anxiety or etc. But it’s nice to be able to shift out of that “intellectual sparring” mode and interact with people in other ways too. So being able to comfortably think to myself “yeah, this person is not a great intellectual sparring partner” is perhaps useful.
I think you had this experience in the philosophy meetup and found it horrifying and depressing—which is very understandable because you literally went to a group that has a giant “THIS CLUB IS FOR DOING TRUTHSEEKING” arrow above the door, and then realized that actually you should switch away from engaging people based on truthseeking to instead just shooting the shit and making jokes!! But in other contexts that don’t have a giant “THIS ACTIVITY IS ABOUT TRUTHSEEKING” arrow above the door, I think that a similar technique of “engaging with people on the level that works for them” would seem less horrifying-and-depressing, and more just an application of pragmatism / good social graces / what Buddhists would call skillful means / etc.
Totally unrelated aside, but I wonder if maybe some of the jokes you were making might have been lampooning some of the contradictions in peoples’ thought / making fun of philosophical word-games / generally expressing some of your thinking style and worldview. So although I can see how it felt depressing to shift modes like this, possibly it might not have been as intellectually counterproductive as you’re telling it. (More people were converted to rationalism by reading HPMOR than by reading the Sequences, right?) But of course idk, I wasn’t there.
Personally I’d advise against randomly hitting up a sports bar (unless you happen to like sports!), but it could be interesting to pick some random non-intellectual hobby you have (like hiking or videogames or anime or board games or whatever) and meet some folks based on that shared interest.
I enjoyed reading this post. But I feel like you are making a mistake by being too manichaean about this. You talk as if your soul is split in two, with an evil “edgelord” half battling a good “raised by tumblr SJW” half. You think of yourself as fighting a doomed rearguard battle to defend the tumblr SJW values of “equality and social justice” against an encroaching army of elitist, misanthropic sentiment.
To me this feels bizarre—you’re writing your “bottom line” first (ie that tumblr SJW ethics and tumblr SJW like… tone of how it’s acceptable to talk about people… are correct) (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line), then putting yourself into contortions (imagining two inner personalities, using “arguments as soldiers”, etc) to maintain your belief in this bottom line.
It feels kind of like a socialist learning more about economics and being like “no!! if I start believing that markets and price signals are often the best way to distribute scarce resources, i’ll become the same kind of callous, selfish evildoer I’ve sworn to destroy!!”. Wheras instead they should probably just keep learning about economics, and remain a good person by combining their new economics knowledge with their preexisting moral ideas about making the world a better and fairer place for everyone (perhaps by becoming a georgist, an Abundance dem, a pigouvian-taxation guy, or whatever).
If I were you, I would simply accept that it’s possible to be very elitist (believing that some people are smarter than others, better than others, even more morally valuable than others) without necessarily transforming into an evil “edgelord” misanthrope. I myself am pretty elitist in various ways, am sort of introverted and arrogant similar to how you describe yourself, etc—but I still consider myself to really love humanity, I work for effective altruist organizations, I often enjoy hanging out with normies, etc. In fact one of the things I find inspiring about EA is its emphasis that being a good person isn’t about having your heartstrings pulled all the time and being really emotionally empathetic (i’m just not a very emotional kind of guy, and previously I thought this somehow made me a bad person!), rather it’s about working hard to improve the world, taking ideas seriously, actually acting on your moral beliefs, etc.
Then, instead of fighting a cartoony battle to stop yourself from believing in elitism and thereby becoming elitist “edgelord” (which, you imagine, would turn you evil and be a betrayal of all that is good), you could just neutrally explore what’s actually true about the external world (how much do people vary in their abilities? are you just being self-servingly arrogant, or mistakenly shy and insular, to think there’s no value in hanging out with normies, or is this actually correct? is “elite persuasion” generally a better way of influencing politics than mass activism? etc etc) without weirdly tying the outcome to a sense of whether you yourself are good or evil.
For some examples of people who are elitist in various ways but who still seem to have much empathy and goodness, and you want further examples beyond “practically the entire EA & rationalist community”, you can consider the philosophies of Richard Hannania and Matthew Yglesias as described here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
Sorry if some of this comment was harsh, it kind of paints an exaggerated picture for dramatic/pedagogical effect and for brevity. The theme of the post is grumpy misanthropy so I figured this would be acceptable! :P
lilkim isn’t speculating about the cause of anti-immigrant politics; he’s saying that there’s less desire to automate truck, driving, because truck-driver wages have decreased in recent years (because lots of people have recently decided to go into truck driving, apparently).
For anyone considering niplav’s offer, the most obvious tax-deductible-in-Germany donation options for EAs / rationalists is probably Effektiv Spenden’s “giving funds”:
“Safeguarding the Future”, which seems to essentially clone the decisions of Longview Philanthropy’s “Emerging Challenges Fund” (which focuses on mitigating x-risks), but with German tax deductibility.
“Ensuring Safe AI”, which is the same thing but focuses 100% on the AI-related recommendations from Longview’s Emerging Challenges Fund.
Their animal welfare fund, which is “guided by specific recommendations from the EA animal welfare fund”
A poverty-reduction fund modeled after Givewell’s All Grants Fund
A climate-change mitigation fund, guided by close consultation with “partner organizations such as Founder’s Fund and Giving Green”
A “defending democracy” fund that apparently follows the recommendations of an organization called Power For Democracies
Lots of good options! (Personally, I won’t be itemizing my US taxes this year, so I won’t benefit from charitable deductions even to the US-based Manifund. So, in the name of maximum tax-efficiency, ideally somebody who does itemize their US donations should take niplav up on their offer!)
The 100 − 150 ton numbers that SpaceX has offered over the years are always referring to the fully-reusable version launching to LEO. I believe even Falcon 9 (though not Falcon Heavy) has essentially stopped offering expendable flights; the vision for Starship is for them to be flying full-reusable all the time.
That said:
I forget where I got this impression (Eric Berger reporting, possibly?), but IIRC right now they’re not on track to hit their goal numbers; the first reliably-working version of Starship might be limited to more like 50-70 tons, because the ship came in heavier than expected (all those heat tiles! plus just a lot of steel.) and the Raptor engine, while very impressive, has perhaps not fully achieved the nigh-miraculous targets they set for themselves.
if you want to take 100 tons, not to LEO, but to Mars (which is the design goal of the system) then you have to use many starships to ferry fuel to refuel other starships, gradually boosting their orbit until you have a fully-fueled ship in a highly elliptical earth orbit, and then you can finally blast off to Mars. For the moon it’s even worse, you need maybe 20 refueling flights to land 1 starship on the moon with enough fuel to come back.
Agreed with you that the heat shield (and reusable upper stage in general) seems like it could easily just never work (or work but only with expensive refurbishment, or only from returning from LEO orbits not anything higher-energy, or etc), perhaps forcing them to give up and have Starship become essentially a big scaled-up Falcon 9. This would still be cheaper per-kg than Falcon 9 (economies of scale, and the Raptor engines are better than Merlin, etc), but not as transformative. I think many people are just kind of assuming “eh, SpaceX is full of geniuses, they’ve done so many astounding things, they’ll figure out the heat shield”, but this is an infamously hard problem (see Shuttle, Orion, X-33...), so possibly they’ll fail!
Some other tidbits:
Raptor’s claimed vacuum ISP is 380; I don’t think they’re just, like, making this up (they have done lots of tests, flown it many times, etc—it’s not a hypey future projection like “Starship will cost $4m per flight”), but I also don’t know where I’d go if I wanted to prove to myself that the number is legit (wikipedia just cites an Elon tweet...).
Apparently those Starlink mass simulators actually weigh about 2 tons each?? So flight 7, which carried 10 Starlink simulators, actually put 20 tons of payload in orbit.
The first reliable version of Starship will very likely fall short of its intended 100 ton goal (i mean… unless it takes them a really long time to make Starship reliable, lol). But they also plan to stretch the rocket, refine the engine, maybe someday make the whole thing wider, etc. So I expect that they’ll eventually hit 100 tons. (The first version of Falcon 9 could only lift 10.4 tons to LEO; the current version can lift 17.5 tons AND land the first stage on a drone ship for reuse!) But of course if you make the whole ship bigger, some of your launch costs are gonna go up too.
Personally I’m doubtful that they ever hit the crazy-ambitious $20/kg mark, which (per Thomas Kwa) would require not just a reusable upper stage (very hard!) but also hyper low-cost, airline-like turnaround on every part of the operation. But $200/kg (1 OOM cheaper from where Falcon 9 is today, using the rumored internal cost of $30m/launch and 17.5 ton capacity) seems pretty doable—upper stage reuse (even if somewhat ardurous to refurbish) probably cuts your costs by like 4x, and the much greater physical size of Starship might give you another almost 2x. Cheap materials (steel and methane vs aluminum and RP1) + economies of scale in Raptor manufacturing might take you the rest of the way.
Ex-aerospace engineer here! (I used to work at Xona Space Systems, who are working on a satellite constellation to provide a kind of next-gen GPS positioning. I’m also a longtime follower of SpaceX, fan of Kerbal Space Program, etc) Here is a rambling bunch of increasingly off-topic thoughts:
Yup, SpaceX is a big deal:
yup, Spacex is a totally off-the-charts success compared to basically any other aerospace company. (Although maybe historically comparable to the successes of early NASA?) It’s not just that their rockets are good; their Starlink satellites are also very impressive in a variety of ways—basically no other satellite company can match them on cost-vs-capability, the uniquely efficient flat-pack design, etc. And they do other stuff well too, like developing their Dragon spacecraft that certainly does a better job than Boeing’s Starliner or Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser.
It’s correct IMO to pay a lot of special attention to SpaceX when analyzing the aerospace industry and even perhaps the big-picture future of space exploration over the next few decades. (I presume you are thinking about SpaceX in the context of researching how space exploration might go in various “AI 2030” singularity scenarios?) Although SpaceX probably isn’t a totally unstoppable juggernaut—it’s totally plausible that Starship might continue to see troubles & delays, while Blue Origin’s “New Glenn” and RocketLab’s “Neutron” and other rockets might manage to beat expectations and scale up quickly, creating a more competitive world rather than a monopolistic Starship-fueled continuation of the famed “SpaceX steamroller”.
“SpaceX brought costs down by an OOM already and this unlocked Starlink already”—yeah, people don’t realize that Starlink constitutes 75% of all satellites in orbit (8,800 / 11,700). This is maybe not a totally fair comparison insofar as Starlink satellites are a little smaller (and in lower-energy orbits) than the big honking GEO satellites of yore, but still—in a certain sense, Starlink versus all the traditional satellite industries is a little bit like Uber versus the taxi market. It’s not just that SpaceX has captured a large percentage of the preexisting launch market; they’ve made the market way bigger.
Why are Ariane & other legacy launch companies even still alive, lol:
To your question of “why are ULA / Ariane still getting business; is this just nepotism / corruption?”—I think the situation is more accurately described in terms of national security concerns.
For Ariane, national governments want to maintain sovereign access to space—Germany, the UK, etc, don’t want to have to hand over their spy satellites to Russia or America or any other major powers for launch! But the “European military/intelligence satellite launches” industry isn’t big enough to really sustain an entire launch company like Ariane. So, Europe pressures its own commercial satellite companies (including a lot of the broadcast & communication companies operating GEO satellites, who have always launched on Ariane all through the 1980s / 90s / 00s when Ariane really was the cheapest and best option) to keep buying Ariane contracts so there’s enough European launches happening to support a European launch company. (The pressure / implied threat being that if those GEO satellite operators defect to launching on SpaceX, Europe might cut them off from contracts / subsidies / whatever other kind of industrial-policy support they’re currently providing.)
One reason why this works alright is that rocket launches are often cheaper (like $100m - $200m) than the satellites they’re launching (which can be many hundreds of millions for GEO commsats, or billions for fancy military / science missions). So the rocket launch is only a minority of the overall cost.
In ULA’s case, they are mostly propped up by the Pentagon being (reasonably IMO) concerned that they don’t want American space launch to become a monopoly because then SpaceX could charge very high prices, so they do stuff like giving 60% of their launches to SpaceX and 40% to ULA according to a big contracting process. In the future, Blue Origin might surpass ULA and mostly take over their role in the industry.
The continued existence of SLS is totally just corruption though, lol… (combined with extreme bureaucratic inertia, unwillingness to do proper decisionmaking under uncertainty / take certain perceived risks, while ignoring the risks like that you might spend tens of billions of dollars just to develop a way-more-expensive-than-the-competition rocket...)
Also, some satellite-constellation companies that think they’re “competing with SpaceX” (more like losing to SpaceX, amirite?) refuse to launch on SpaceX vehicles. Mostly I’m thinking of Amazon’s Kuiper satellite internet constellation (which wants to mostly launch on Bezos-owned Blue Origin), and the european-ish OneWeb. Also, like a more extreme version of the situation with Europe and Ariane, obviously China doesn’t let Chinese companies just buy Falcon 9 launches.
Another important factor in “why is anybody still buying these expensive-ass non-SpaceX rockets??” is that the DID prefer buying SpaceX rockets, but then SpaceX raised their prices (from $70m some years ago to about $100m today, IIRC), and then SpaceX got booked solid and ran out of rockets (despite their impressive scaling over the years), so if you’re in a big hurry to launch soon, you need to start looking at other more expensive companies (indeed, even many of these companies are booked out for many years, scaling up as fast as they can manage, etc).
Will Starship make a house in space cheaper than a house in SF? No:
House-in-Berkeley versus house-in-space is of course a weird comparison, but I very much doubt Starship could singlehandedly make it cheaper to live in space even if we used all Starship capacity for building a giant space station. An orbital space station needs a lot of complex expensive stuff to make it work (thrusters, momentum wheels, batteries, solar panels, life-support equipment for recycling water and air), plus stuff in space breaks down a lot more quickly than stuff on Earth which would increase the cost through faster depreciation. (The ISS is made of fancy aluminum pressure vessels and micrometeoroid shielding and stuff, but—despite the fact that its 7-person crew spends a huge portion of their time doing fixes & maintenance—it’s springing all kinds of weird leaks and is gonna have to be deorbited soon, even though most of the station is less than 25 years old. Contrast this with the house where I live in Colorado, built a whopping 35 years ago, which still basically does fine with just minimal home maintenance, occasional new appliances, etc.)
Plus obviously your house will need lots of supplies (food, amazon packages, but also stuff like air and thruster fuel), and transporting these supplies into orbit will be much more expensive than going to the grocery store in Berkeley.
Obviously if it was just one little house in space, then it would be SUPER expensive (since you’d need all those subsystems just for your one little house) and there would be no feasible way to do regular (like monthly) deliveries since you don’t eat a Starship full of groceries every month. But what I’m saying is that it would still be expensive even if you wanted to save money by aggregating all the houses together into one giant space station to cut down on subsystem & resupply costs.
Perhaps a more interesting point: the reason why Berkeley is expensive is because the land is expensive. But as launch gets cheaper and cheaper thanks to Starlink, the most valuable orbits will start becoming very crowded, and we’ll probably start charging for them. Right now, spots in orbit are basically given away for free (although before you launch, you’ve gotta get an FCC license to operate your satellites, which is a paperwork-intensive process, almost like the space version of getting a pharma drug approved by the FDA). But in the future, I suspect we’ll probably implement some kind of “space Georgism” to prevent kessler syndrome and properly allocate the most valuable orbital slots. (Where “we” is ideally some kind of international agreement, but in practice will probably just be, like, the USA’s department of commerce, and then China does their own similar thing, and no other country launches enough satellites to be relevant.) Under such a system, valuable spots in orbit might be auctioned off a la elaborate electromagnetic spectrum auctions. So, if you want to live in Space-Berkeley (a valuable, crowded orbit like sun-synchronous LEO), most of your cost might soon be space-land (some complicated notion of orbital crowdedness + making credible promises to maneuver around debris and de-orbit your satellite at the end of its scheduled lifetime) instead of just the construction cost. Unless you want to live in some random radiation-filled MEO orbit not really useful for anything, like Space-Rural-Oklahoma.
Will it really be cheaper to build factories in space?? Probably not pre-ASI, but possibly, idk:
You’re probably right to focus on “high cost-of-kg” operations as things that are most likely to be done in space. Lots of people talk about this dumb zombie idea of putting solar panels in space, even though it has only become less sensible over time. People are like “omg, space launch is cheaper now, maybe now it finally makes sense to implement the techno-optimist 1970s dream of solving the oil shock by putting solar panels in orbit!!” But solar panels have gotten cheaper much faster than space launch has gotten cheaper, so the trend is actually in the other direction—don’t even bother mounting the panels on a basic single-axis tracking system to follow the sun over the course of the day; just drop them directly on the freaking dirt to save on installation + mounting costs.
Obviously in an ASI-singularity scenario (or even, just, the long-term trajectory of a non-AI human civilization growing at 2% per year), we are eventually going to use up all the land, and then the natural next thing to do is to start launching lots of solar panels into space. But it doesn’t make much sense to start doing this now.
I doubt that factories is a winning idea either:
Factories are usually defined by needing lots of input material and producing lots of output material. Shipping this stuff to space and back would be expensive, so it only makes sense IMO if either the inputs are coming from space already, or the outputs are destined to stay in space.
Working in zero gravity + vacuum tends to make most things more difficult, not easier. Lots of factory processes designed on Earth will break in space. So, doing anything with moving parts in space is probably way more of a hassle than doing the same thing on earth, unless there’s some amazing special advantage to working in vacuum or zero-gravity. Some proposed special advantages I’ve heard mentioned:
People used to talk about doing pharma research in space, because proteins crystallize much more easily in zero gravity?? But I think the reason people were so hyped about crystallizing proteins is because we hadn’t solved the protein folding problem yet! (You can work out the folded structure of individual proteins by exhaustively studying protein crystals.) Now that we have AlphaFold, I think that use-case has sailed...
Nowadays people talk about doing semiconductor manufacturing in space, on the grounds that semiconductor manufacturing is extremely afraid of dust (so it might actually help to do in vacuum), and the machines are all so high-precision that they might as well be aerospace-grade anyways. Maybe there’s something to this idea?? But if you need vacuum so much, you could probably just build a vacuum-sealed assembly line, or even build an entire vacuum-sealed wing of the TSMC factory (with employees walking around in pressure suits and everything) for cheaper than building an orbital factory. (The vacuum quality of low-earth-orbit isn’t even especially great compared to what you can get pretty easily on the ground!) Semiconductor manufacturing is infamously one of the most difficult, complicated things that human civilization does; I’d be surprised if you could just move it all into space without a million little things going wrong.
Something about optical fibers, carbon nanotubes, and other advanced materials potentially being easier to manufacture in low gravity?? I don’t know much about this—mostly I’m just remembering the plot of Andy Weir’s book “Artemis” and hoping that the optical-fiber McGuffin plot-point was based on plausible background research. You could imagine an AI angle here too, if we need tons of super-high-quality optical fiber to make the interconnections between our vast datacenters full of TPUs or photonic chips or however we multiply matrices in the year 2040.
One entertaining niche application of space manufacturing is to produce “extinct polymorphs”—chemicals like the HIV drug Ritonavir, which once were easily manufactured on earth but have since become nearly-impossible to create, thanks to a bizarre ice-nine-style process where they get “infected” by misfolded versions of the same molecule! Varda Space is an aerospace startup which actually produced some Ritonavir in space precisely to make this point. But I hardly expect “bringing back extinct polymorphs” to become a major portion of GDP in the future; it seems intrinsically niche. (Barring, perhaps, some mirror-life related catastrophe such that we are only able to grow crops and preserve natural necosystems in pristine space environments, a la the sci-fi stories Interstellar, Silent Running, and Speaker for the Dead.)
If you have AGI / ASI, then maybe you can simply have the AI redesign all your manufacturing processes from first-principles to work well in the space environment. Maybe in some objective sense, space is actually a better place to do most manufacturing! But in that case you do need the AGI, and you also need some time to bootstrap the entire alternate manufacturing ecosystem. This might face some of the same pros & cons as Carl Feynman’s concept of creating an alternate manufacturing system of self-replicating automated/miniaturized machine shops (see my comments here), although of course I’d expect a true ASI to power through the various troublesome issues of transitioning over to a whole new industrial base pretty quickly.
Putting datacenters into space is a little more plausible IMO, because you don’t have to worry about tons of moving parts and manufacturing processes, and your input is just energy while your output is just heat + information.
But you do need energy, which you can either beam up from earth via some kind of microwave laser (but this hasn’t been tested IRL, has some pretty serious efficiency losses even just in theory, etc), or manufacture locally with solar panels or nuclear power (but this is gonna drag down your cost-per-kg launching random solar panels).
I will say that, compared to the idea of space solar power, space-datacenters is a big improvement because you’re increasing the cost-per-kg of what you’re launching (all those GPUs), and instead of beaming back lossy microwave radiation energy, you’re beaming back information, which seems easier.
But I’m doubtful that you could do AI training in space very easily, since you’d have to formation-fly a ton of satellites close together (thus spending a lot of fuel?? unless you want to do something ridiculous and experimental like electrostatic-based formation flying), connect them all with extremely high-bandwidth laser links (dunno how this compares to the bandwidth Starlink already achieves...), etc. My impression is that if you don’t have high-bandwidth interconnects, you’re probably limited to AI inference instead of training? (idk that much about AI training though...). I’d also be worried that both training and inference would require lots of data to be transmitted to and from the ground, except then I remembered that the whole point of Starlink is to put the whole planet’s internet infrastructure in space, and it seems to be working fine—so at least bandwidth won’t be a problem!
And you do need to get rid of all the heat, which in some ways gets a lot harder in space (there’s no air to do convection, nor a ready supply of cheap water), although in some ways it gets easier (space is really cold, so you can cool down by just blocking the sun with a big mylar mirror and radiating in every other direction).
I’m not sure, but I’d be worried that radiating heat doesn’t scale well (due to square-cube-law) while piping cold water around scales better. (Until, of course, you cover the entire planet in datacenters and solar panels and fusion reactors, melt the icecaps and boil the oceans, and you’re forced to resort to radiative cooling because you’ve run out of places to convect to!)
And this is very different from the berkeley house case, because (at least at the moment) there’s still a vast amount of basically dirt-cheap useless desert land on which to build datacenters, power infrastructure, etc. People complain about regulation and permitting, but:
Space will also feature regulation & permitting obstacles, around things like space-debris mitigation, electromagnetic spectrum for beaming vast amounts of information back to earth (unless you can figure out space-to-ground laser comms, perhaps?), and power generation. Whether you are launching nuclear reactors into space, constructing gigawatt-scale microwave lasers that hostile superpowers will perceive as anti-ballistic-missile defenses, or even just building a mass-catapult on the moon so you can hurl hundreds of tons of lunar-manufactured solar panels towards the Earth, somebody is probably going to want to submit some comments during the 30-day public notice period...
My impression is that datacenters could route around much of the most severe permitting issues (such as around transmission lines and energy interconnect queues) if they were willing to go off the grid and build all their own power + battery storage. Datacenter builders don’t want to do this because that’s more expensive. But building datacenters in space also means going off-grid, plus you have to do a ton of other stuff! (Yes, I get that space-based solar is 4x more effective and cuts down on your need for batteries, but space launch isn’t the only thing allowed to reduce in price over time—batteries and other kinds of energy-storage technology are also getting cheaper all the time.)
So, what are we gonna use all those Starships for, if not in-space manufacturing or datacenters??
Right now, the biggest and most-valuable use of space is for communications (like Starlink internet, but also military communications, television broadcasts from GEO, specialized connections to airplanes and ships, etc), navigation (like GPS), taking photos of the earth (mostly for military intel, but this also has applications in agriculture, finance, etc), and assorted military applications. So, in the immediate future, I’d expect us to just keep massively scaling those applications rather than using Starship to do wacky new stuff:
You kind of only need one navigation constellation (although it’s due for an upgrade, re: Xona’s plan), so this won’t be a huge number of satellites.
With satellite internet, more & bigger satellites = more internet bandwidth, so I’d expect this to grow a lot. Claude says that Starlink today only represents “perhaps 1–3% of international backbone capacity—and international traffic is itself only a subset of total internet traffic”. Surely it would be profitable to scale this up such that satellites are providing as much internet bandwidth as all existing ground-based infrastructure combined (ie, +100% instead of +2%), and we could still find reasonably productive ways to use that bandwidth? So that would be like 50x all the Starlink satellites that have been launched so far.
So far there have been over 350 Falcon 9 launches full of Starlinks (and US-military-branded Starshields) -- assume that you want to launch 50x that amount, but also that Starship can launch 5x as much mass (90 tons instead of 17.5 tons). That comes out to 3,500 Starship launches to achieve that goal. If you look at the 11 launches they’ve done so far, pretend they were all successful and all happened this year (they were not and did not), and assume they’ll double their number of launches each year (22 in 2026, 44 in 2027...) and launch nothing but Starlinks (NASA will want a word with them about their Artemis lunar mission contract, which involves up to 20 starship launches per moon visit...), it would take them eight years to clear that backlog.
Taking photos of the earth probably scales more than navigation but less than internet—Planet’s fleet of cubesats already take 3m-resolution photos of the whole earth every day. How much more valuable would it be to have 30cm-resolution photos every hour? Or continuous video?? idk, but maybe once adding more satellite internet capacity hits diminishing returns, this becomes the next most valuable thing to scale up.
Earth-observation is also probably the place where it makes the most sense to be putting GPUs in space right away, since the satellites are already very bottlenecked on bandwidth for beaming images down to earth. If you put a GPU on all your spy satellites, you could do image-classification analysis locally (and immediately!) and only beam down the most interesting stuff. Plus you could maybe even make dynamic decisions like “oh, that’s really interesting, let’s take some more photos of that spot”—usually these kinds of decisions are delayed by the time it takes for a satellite to pass over a ground station, download an image, get the image analyzed, and then for commands to be uploaded later, so it might be a big deal to make these decisions locally & immediately.
Military expenses are dictated by adversarial / arms-race logic, so the amount we’ll spend on military stuff in space is perhaps kind of a wildcard driven by how intense the overall military competition with China gets, multiplied by how many advantageous military-stuff-in-space ideas we can dream up.
Are there any huge economic markets (besides already-discussed manufacturing, solar power generation, and datacenters) that might open up besides orbiting satellites beaming down information?
At some point, maybe asteroid mining becomes a thing? This has all the disadvantages of “moving parts in space”, plus you’re dealing with very messy inputs, but it has the advantage of the fact that certain asteroids have very high concentrations of metals that are rare on earth.
My guess is that doing an expensive space mission to bring back very valuable, rare metals (like gold, iridum, etc) is a better business plan than the zombie idea of doing an expensive space mission just to launch solar panels and simply beam back power via lossy microwave laser—beating dirt-cheap earth-based solar panels sounds impossible, but beating earth-based mining sounds a little less impossible. The business case for “solar power in space” probably only closes once you have finished covering all of earth’s deserts in solar panels. The business case for asteroid mining probably closes earlier, though I bet you’d still need pretty immense scale (like “over the next decade we’re aiming to bring back an amount of gold equivalent to 10% of all gold ever mined in history”) to amortize the huge cost of a gigantic deep-space mission and bring the whole project below the cost of earth-based mining.
An even better business plan would be if we could manufacture something even more difficult to make on earth (maybe semiconductors, optical fibers, or some other advanced material??), which would probably also have to be very high value-per-kg (to minimize the cost of transporting the inputs and outputs). But who knows if we can actually figure out anything that fits that criteria. And whatever we figure out might not be scalable to trillions of dollars (like, Ritonavir definitely isn’t) in the way that asteroid mining clearly is.
You can also mine asteroids to melt ice and make hydrogen + oxygen rocket fuel, but of course this requires some customer who’ll buy a lot of rocket-fuel for going beyond low-earth orbit (like colonizing mars?) or who has other reasons to be maneuvering all the time (like military satellites that want to constantly change their orbit to stay unpredictable?).
Melting ice is probably a lot easier than processing ore, so probably the first demonstration asteroid-mining missions are about water. But to scale up, they’d need customers (and customers high above low-earth-orbit, since their product has to be cheaper than just launching extra rocket fuel on Starships!).
Other than satellites, I think space-based industry & exploration is going to be heavily debt-financed in a really big way for a really long time.
Satellites are profitable and normal; we are obviously gonna blot out the sky with immense numbers of very large, high-powered, super-Starlink satellites (mostly for internet, also for taking photos of the earth).
But asteroid mining maybe only pays off once you scale up to some preposterous level, like bringing back a trillion dollars’ worth of gold.
I am recalling all those debates about whether Amazon or Uber were really sustainable businesses—they’re pouring billions of dollars of investors’ cash on infrastructure build-out or user subsidies; are they REALLY gonna flip to profitability and turn this all around someday?? Or the current debates about the even vastly-larger sums being invested in datacenters for training AI models. If asteroid mining for precious metals ever happens, it is gonna be that kind of situation all over again.
What about using Starship for its intended purpose of settling Mars??? IMO, nobody has thought up any plausible reason to think that a Mars city would ever return significant capital—settling another planet would be a gigantic money-sink basically forever. Yet, in some abstract sense it seems obviously likely to be worthwhile (in terms of cultural influence on humanity’s future, if not literal investment returns) to be at the forefront of colonizing the solar system! In this respect it feels similar to some parts of European colonial history—what was the ROI of Britain starting colonies in North America? In a certain sense, somewhere between low (you spend decades building it up, finally get a little bit of stamp tax, and then they go and fight a revolution against you) and extremely negative (start a Jamestown or Roanoke, almost everybody dies, then the town straggles on pointlessly for decades, consuming resupply ships but not figuring out anything to export). But in another sense, extremely high (insofar as Britain got to put their thumbprint on what later became the mighty USA).
So this is kind of like the asteroid-mining issue or datacenter-buildout issue, but on steroids—a venture so vast and so uncertain (a lot of European colonial empires, like Germany’s scramble for Africa, were bad ideas that paid off neither literally nor metaphorically!) and requiring so much debt-financing that it leaves the realm of traditional investing, or even the realm of economic booms / bubbles and instead has to be coordinated through the mechanism of national/societal greatness, competition, and prestige.
But even though doing Mars settlement is way more expensive and speculative and uncertain than even doing asteroid mining, the perceived expected-value (or perceived cost of missing out) might be higher. So I think it’s actually likely that we choose to do something closer to satellites + mars colonies, rather than satellites + in-space manufacturing/mining.
It’s also worth noting that Starship has been explicitly designed for settling Mars (the methane fuel, the Space-Shuttle-like upper stage that would be a reusable SSTO on Mars, etc). Sending many Starships to Mars and back (where they can hope to use aerobraking for landing, and locally-manufactured fuel for launch back to earth) is probably much cheaper than sending the same number to the moon and back!
And in a similar way, a LOT of potential space activities are more like Mars colonization than satellite internet—“squatting on areas that might eventually be profitable someday in the future” rather than making actual profit today.
As mentioned, asteroid mining is like this—the first company to develop the tech and visit some of the asteroids might do this in the hope of kinda claiming & squatting the opportunity, far in advance of the opportunity actually becoming profitable.
Things like putting datacenters in space or putting solar panels in space also have something like this vibe, insofar as eventually it seems we will want to do them. But what’s the scarce resource being squatted?? With Mars or asteroids, you’re hoping to cheaply stake a claim (in the sense of legal rights, precedent, etc) on scarce physical land / ore in the hopes of expensively developing / mining it later. But launching solar panels & datacenters looks more like “expensively doing something now in the hopes of profiting in the far future”. You should rather aim to be cheaply squatting something now. Maybe this would be:
Space-Berkeley slots in low-earth-orbit?? (but if LEO becomes well-governed via Fully Automated Luxury Space Georgism, this plan is not gonna work out for you...)
Being the debt-fueled leader in some industry (like how SpaceX is the leader in launch), where the industry might 100x in size (and actually become profitable) in the future. Here you’d either be hoarding a technological advantage (doing trial missions to develop your in-space manufacturing processes, but not actually launching a lot since you lose money on each mission), or (more expensively) hoarding an industrial-capacity advantage.
If you believe in AGI right around the corner, this makes trying to squat “space-based power generation / datacenters / semiconductor manufacturing” more appealing, since the applications are more concrete and if the singularity is about to happen then you don’t actually have to wait very many years paying interest on your debt.
But on the other hand, if AGI is right around the corner, surely there are tons of more-profitable things to do here on earth? Like try to invest in humanoid robots, or do normal AI investments in TSMC / NVDA, or etc?
Basically, if you are playing this game of trying to squat the opportunity to do far-future space expansion, then you wanna put yourself in the best possible position to be at the forefront of a grabby-aliens-style expansion into the solar system (from where, presumably, you can steamroll onwards to the galaxy).
But it’s unclear exactly what bundle of technologies / legal claims / industrial capacity / etc will actually be needed for this. (Will controlling a small town on Mars be relevant in any possible way if an ASI singularity occurs in 2050?? Probably not!)
And in particular I’d be very worried that I’d spend all this time going into debt trying to develop a clever portfolio of space-related industrial / technological capabilities, only to get instantly lapped by ASI right off the starting block. Such that maybe the only resource really worth scrambling for is simply “access to ASI”. (Plus possibly launch capacity itself, which is a big capital-intensive heavy-industry that seems less amenable to being lapped software-only-singularity style than something more intricate and design-intensive, like space-based manufacturing equipment or satellites.)
But most people are less ASI-pilled. So, probably we start launching colonization rockets to Mars (and funding lots of doomed little “datacenter in space” / “solar power in space” / “bitcoin in space” startups) anyways.
dunno! some speculation:
You do have to attach a pretty sizeable antenna to the top of your plane, plus whatever accompanying wiring is necessary… maybe maintenance capacity is the bottleneck? It’s a little hard to imagine that airlines are bottlenecked by this, since it seems pretty minor compared to other kinds of maintenance planes commonly undergo (like swapping out an engine)? But quotes from this site saying that some airline “hopes to have units installed in at least 25% of their aircraft by the end of 2025”, or that another “expects to ramp that number up to 40 installations per month” suggest that maybe this is the reason why airlines like United, Hawaiian, etc (which have started but not completed their rollouts) aren’t yet at 100%.
maybe starlink has some kind of interconnection queue where they can only ramp up so many users at a time?? but I’d expect that stuff like airlines and cruise ships would be relatively high-paying customers at the front of the line, at least compared to ordinary consumers (who can currently order starlink antennas online for next-day shipping).
probably the airlines themselves are not that motivated to instantly upgrade their fleets, since most people don’t choose flights based on who has the fastest wifi? in a similar way, other in-flight amenities—legroom, seat material, the quality of meals on international flights, how good the little screen for in-flight movies is, etc, are individually not super-important to people; most important is the flight route + flight timing + ticket price.
especially when you consider the fact that Starlink has a monopoly, and is probably charging airlines a profit-maximizing price, meaning that airlines which adopt the new service might not actually see any additional revenue on net even if they can charge slightly higher ticket prices once they have fast wifi. Other airlines are perhaps thinking they should wait until more satellite-internet constellations (like the aforementioned project Kuiper) get off the ground and prices come down?
maybe some budget airlines like Frontier or RyanAir calculate that most of their passengers are cheapskates who wouldn’t pay for fast wifi (either directly or through higher ticket prices)
it does kinda seem weird, though, that this list of airlines doing / considering starlink upgrades doesn’t even contain some of the US’s biggest airlines, like Southwest, Delta, or American. I’d bet they’re maybe waiting for lower prices, but it’s always possible they’re just asleep at the wheel.
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presumably because to improve airplane wifi, you’d need to launch dozens of rockets to deliver a massive new constellation of orbiting satellites in order to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement over Intelsat or whoever usually provides wifi connections to planes.
The good news is that SpaceX has done this, with their Starlink constellation! (Others like OneWeb, Baidu, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper are also doing similar stuff.) But not every airline / airplane has upgraded to new Starlink recievers yet. So, most planes (and cruise ships, and etc) still have slow Intelsat/Globalstar internet, but others have indeed seen huge upgrades in internet speeds.
But this would make it sound too much like AI-related philanthropy is all they do...
“Coefficient Giving sounds bad while OpenPhil sounded cool and snappy.”—OpenPhil just sounds better because it’s shorter. I imagine that instead of saying the full name, Coefficient Giving will soon acquire some similar sort of nickname—probably people will just say “Coefficient”, which sounds kinda cool IMO. I could also picture people writing “Coeff” as shorthand, although it would be weird to try and say “Coeff” out loud.
This is an inspiring post, so now I’d like to imitate some of the stuff you’ve done! I’d love it if you could post some pictures of what the installed RGB strips look like, in particular. I’m interested in setting up a bunch of smart-home lighting, and these light strips sound pretty cool, but it’s hard for me to picture how exactly these are mounted and how they look when installed.
Do you just, like, double-sided-tape the LED strip to the walls? Or use clips of some kind? How do you install a “diffuser” or “make them face the walls” to spread out the light? How does this all look once installed? It would be great to have amazon links to everything you use for mounting / diffusing / etc. I’d love an “here’s everything you’ll need” list like what’s included in several of the classic posts about “Lumenator” design.
How does it get connected up to power? Presumably you’re running these LED strips along the edges of the ceiling, right? So the wires probably come down in a corner of the room, where they meet the “24V 200W power supply adapter”, which in turn plugs into the wall? How many strips can you power from one power-supply adapter?
Maybe there’s a particular video tutorial (this guy seems to have a whole channel about installing LED light strips, for example) that you used, which covers all these questions pretty well?
But hollywood also depicts lasers in this way. Wheras the spherical-white-explosion motif seems uniquely Japanese; you don’t see it in western media.