With New Years Coming up, everyone is always excited about the “Ball” Dropping in New York’s Times Square at the Stroke of Midnight..
But for Elon Musk and his crew at SpaceX, Last Nights Launch and Landing recovery of the FIrst stage of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, made the cheers at Time Square Pale by Comparison..
If you think I’m joking, the Video says it all, (Oh and if you do not want to lose your hearing with all that Cheering, My advice is.. Turn down the volume.. cause believe me, This will be a new direction IN spaceflight in almost 50 years…
But imging taking a 12 story tall building
So here we go.. And Like I said, Volume down, you have been warned.
yea yea, space-x, tesla, solar city, all have 1 thing in common, GIANT government subsidies. I know Elon did give us paypal, which is only stealing vs losing rocket stuff, still I call BS on the whole thing.
Whats the point anyway, where would you go on a rocketship? Mars? You are on the Mars mission list aren’t you?
This is such a enourmous leap in innovation that it is probably to early to even see all the advantages this will bring yet one thing that is certain though is that they dropped the price of space travel by a mindblowing amount.
Im definitly not a “going to Mars” kind of person i prefer the warm beaches, alcohol supply and all other amenities our wonderful earth has to offer but i don’t think you have to be of the mindset to colonize space to appreciate how big this is.
Space is the final frontier.. and we plan to go where no one has gone before..
Well, I’m going to star with the dissenter, the guy who thinks that everyting is a Waste of money".. and go from there and I’m going to answer all the questions that this one person has to offer..(So Strap yourselves in This is gonna be an “E-Ticket Ride..”
Actually they’ve tried this.. 4 times and of those, 1 was a failure (Got to the barge, didn’t quite end up , upright (The "Close but No Cigar), One actually did make it to the barge, landed hard, and tipped over… The third, didn’t even get to the barge because the second stage of the Rocket exploded some 2 minutes and 19 seconds after liftoff (Nothing wrong with the first stage, it was the upepr stage that exploded not the part that was going to land..
And then.. There’s this.. A Succ3essful landing caue ELon Musk had the intelligence and the Logic that said, LEt’s try a Real landing, this ting was not meant to land on a barge.. and well you saw the result..
So yeah, 1 out of 4 tires is till not a bad track record.. and it’s something that they learned from each failure.. Heck any and all innovations from the Lightbulb to the comptuer has always been steeped in failures.. (And yes SPace flight has been no differnt.. Check your history, and look at the American track record.. IN the 50 years since we went into space, we’ve only had 17 people die (3 on the gorund, due to a fire, 14 in actual space flight (During launches and landings, the most dangerous parts of the flight..)
Then take a look at the Russians, you want to see Failure? They’ve had 500 people die, and a vast majority of those were during a static firing of a rocket that had volatile fule..
And yet everyyear in the United Sttes, 50,000 people die ineither Vehicular Accidents, or Pediestrian and vehiclular impact.. Now then, if you do the numbers, well 17 people dying in over 150 clights is not a bad track record.. The thing is, Space Travel is somewhat safe (in fact nothing you do wheter it’s showing in the bathtub to going to the local grocery store is in fact safe.. heck even the food we eat kills us..) But Space Travel is in fact one of the safest forms of trravel.. Now moving on to your second comment.
Come to Arkadia, Do the Missions, You’d find out.. Oh.. and IFN stands for Imperial Fleet Navy (The guys who run the show over on Arkadia.. and well the Navy has an ASrmy it’s called the Marines.. It’s these guys who put their keesters out on the line every time we have a war.. or a police action or wahtever you want to call it.. but that’s what I am.. a Marine.. and yes I have the Access carre that shows I’m a full sargent.. so eah come to Arkadia.. Or.. are ou fafraid to leave Calypso.. After all Space travel may be saft, but in game, Space is a harsh and cold environment.. Just ask the guys who get shot down each day, trying to make money on other worlds in game..
But then I’ve said enough about that topic.. Moving on..
It’s funny you make this comment, and in fact without space travel , you might as well take that computer that you are writing these words on and chuck it out the window.. and in fact if you want to denouce 50 years of space flight, that’s your opinion on this, but to me without the risk the innovations that make us what we are today, the technologically advanced society we live in, wouldn’t have come about without some sort of risk.. and that includes space flight (Heck if Edison didn’t experiment, fail, try again and kept failing until he found a solution, well, You’d be sitting in the dark.. or wriing this without electricty.. on a pen and paper.. (Or do you know how to pick up a pen and paper? After all I’m just pointing this out.. Now as for hte final point..
Since 1972, we’ve not been back to the moon, and there’s a lot of material we can sue there, same with Mars (heck you know why Mars is red? It’s simpel.. It’s because it has a lot of Iron..(that red coolor on the planet It’s Ferric Oxide.. Rust.. but even this wtih our current technology can be made into iron, steel, or even new alloys that could be used to produce better things, But then you can’t get from Earth to the moon without Rockets, You can’t get from Here to Mars, without Rockets.. You can’t even get out of the SOlar System without Rockets..(and yes you can not travel the Srars like in this game without rockets..(Your quad and Sleipnir are rockets.. in a sense of the term.. but hey they get you from a to B right?
The end result is without the billions we spent on building rockets to take us to the moon, and the billions we spent to sent probes to Mars, Jupiter and the rest of the Solar System, and without rockets to send probes outside our Solar system, we wouldn’t be able to get the technological leaps and bounds that exist today.. Be thankful there was aand is a space prrogram, because without a lot of it, you’d be doing math in your head rather than doing it on a calculator, you’d be able to not watch TV except for the old Black and white sets that were built before 1968, instead of the High Def that we watch today.. In short. And do you know why we went to spae? It was a bit of pride, and it was the fact we lived in harsher times, where just one nutcase, could hit a button, an destroy us all (now we could have a comptuer do it.. Or should I say, Skynet anyone? After all I hear you have a bot Problem down on Claypso.. at least on Arkadia we have an Alien Problem, and we’re the Aliens…
But i digress.. Let’s move on to other coments.
I think I know why, and it’s the fact that people don’t want to learn and explore.. they want to stay at home, play comptuer games, and in fact do nothing but eat eat pre-made meals.. They want to be Materialistc and jsut want to say that Space is a waste of.. well .. Space.. And yet, here we are the ones who are supposed to be the intelligent ones, the people who can concive new ideas and innovaitons. Heck if it were not for the rwright brothers, you’d still be traveling to antoher country by boat.. Without Sammuel Morse, and Alexander Graham Bell, you’d still be writing on a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. Without Eison, you’d be sitting in teh dark, wondering how you can eat those pre-made foods you can toss in the microwave.. heck without innovators, thee would be no technology today as we know it.. We’d be 300 year.. in the past.. and yet without hte exploration well we wouldn’t have built the world..
I think the problem is.. some people are just scared of change.. I myself, embrace it.. But then agian it takes leaps of innovation , of ideas, and of insight to progress.. of ocurse as of late I think a lot of the Human race is like Congress. and like the Comedian Gallagher once said, “Congress is the Opposite of Progress..”
But being afraind to explore means you like to sit at home to not know what’s out there. seems that some folks need to get out more.. which i do on a daily basis..
But without Innovation, there is no Progress, Only a world devoid of technology..
Now thhere’s an intelligent guy.. an in fact he’s right.. Let me give you an idea..
Back in the 1960’s it cost us 24 billion USD to go to the moon, and by today’s money that’s about 1/3 of the richest man of the world today (considering we have debts that run into the tirllions of dollars)
But it was that first 24 billion dollar leap of faith that got us to ths point, and it took an innovator like Musk who could see the future, and because of it, we couldnow go to the boon for under 1 billion.. (From what I have read, that’s about 1/100th the cost of what the government put out just to go to the moon, and we’re talking Mars.. Not just the moon.. (Though if it wer eme, Id go to the moon, get the resources process them and then go to Mars.. (Little steps people, little steps.)
But yes these innofations that have been put out there actually do over the long run.. and that’s the funny thing about art and life it’s interchangable.. and we can put this into the context of this game..
Some people are materialistic, some just want to get rich, some look at things in the short term. The reality is.. You have to look long erm, you ahve to invest, and know what to do, to be creative and innovaite.. and some of us have to be smart.. and have Imagination.. Something a lot of folks don’t have today…
But sadly a lot of us, Look short term, not long, some of us, rather than looking at the bigger picture look at the small picture. The point is, without imagination, without logic and innovation, without leaps of technology, we wouldn’t be where we are right now..(We’d be living int he 17th centuy, and still spinning woool, and cutting down trees, and we’d be wanting to learn how to hunt for our game.., in short, we wouldn’t progress as a species.. ) (oh and does the hunting and the mining and the craftng and making of clothes and things sound vaguely familiar? It should.. after all this is a game where we do all that , only on a differnt virtual world.. a world that is brought to us by a game developer (who sadly needs some ideas), and by the fact that some of the folks sit on the comptuer and wihtout the internet we wouldn’t be having oru conversation right now..
In short, we’ve become a global neighborhood, and as (The late) Carl Sagan once said, we’re all made out of star stuf, we are children of the stars.. Which then brings us to the final point..
Space is bigger than most people think.. IN fact thanks to leaps in science and science thories, some folks think there’s more than one universe.. Heck like you said, Colonizing space is one thing, actually going outt here and epxloring it is another..
After all Everyone here loves Star Trek.. (or Star Wars or wwhatever favorite Sci-Fi movie there is out there..)
but you know.. Some of the science fiction, has become science fact.. Heck The PDA folks play with comes from an old Idea called "The Tricorder.. " The Taser? The phaser..Meidcal diagnostics? Hmm does that Examation table they had in sickbay count?
In short Science and imagination take leaps every day, and things like Wbionics, and robotics and even warp and light speed drives are not out of the question.. In short, in the end, we could have whatever we want.. Provvided we have innovation, Imagination, and logic.. without those, well. Like i said, we wouldn’t get out of the middle ages.. We’d be soem back water world, in some distant obscure galaxy, and we’d probably be missed. After all who knows what is out there.. Afte rall The game imitates real life.. (We in game have gone on an colonized worlds.. Birtual worlds we enjoy, but still worlds of fantasy dreams, and what not exist.. all those Laser weapons? They’e possible with a little know how.. Space Flight is also doable in game..
IN short, anything is posible if you put your mind to it..
Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta get out, and go explore.. after all there’s a big universe out there, andI plan to enjoy it.. (Both in Virtual an RL)
(Sgt.) Benjamin Ben Coyote, IFN Marines (The Imperial Fleet Navy’s Navy’s Army),
a.k.a "The Blind Sniper’ (and) “His_Dog_Spot”
I rather they spend in on Tesla, Spacex, etc then on the MIC and just spend money on wars and more wars.
Anyway, as I understand it, Tesla already paid back everything with interest and SpaceX is purely commercial and they had to fight against the established contractors like Boeing and Lockheed which has been making huge loads of money from the government.
At least Musk’s companies got the potential to change our world for the better.
I think that would be because you are focusing on the people instead of the mission.
Here’s 1 mars mission thing, I live in a 1200 sqft space, every 2 weeks or so I have to go out, don’t want to, have to. Mars module, I think would be about 100 sqft per person, for 2 years at best. No smoke breaks. It’s a good goal, it’s nutz for the next 200 years I’m thinking.
I can tell u what u will be thinking should the next global extinction event occur in your lifetime. U would think nothing cuz u would be dead like the rest of the species.
How likely such event is in a foreseeable future? If u look at the referenced wiki page, it lists the last extinction event as “ongoing”. You get the hint…
200 years from now we most definitely won’t be living on Mars trapped in the microscopic living modules.
Question is if mankind manages to survive that long? If so, has the modern civilization also survived? There’s a possibility we’re indeed living in bunkers, 100 sqft per person. Not on Mars but here on Earth.
If we managed to avoid trouble and were able to keep up the current rate of scientific progress? It’s hard to predict what exactly are our abilities 200 years from now but it’s pretty safe to assume that we’ll have a pretty large permanent settlement up on Mars. Most likely we have also started the 1st phase of terraforming process (building up the atmosphere and rising the surface temperature) or at least making preparations for that.
Global Extinction event? You really want me to take that on? I think we should avoid that, now that I’ve done all I can about that…
I think it’s a cost benefit thing, in the end. You pay to go to mars, I’ll play EU how that? Cheaper for me, and the whole solar system could be cleansed by a gamma ray burster thing, or or or … or I could go and complain about the post man that keeps messing up my mail.
end of humanity… fing mail man, end of humanity, fing mail man…
Well, asteroid mining is one thing we could all benefit from, a abundence of raw materials to manufacture the bigger and better in anything that we do. SpaceX figuring out how to cheaply and relatively safely get material and people up into space will help in that regard.
I think spreading the species out into the universe to avoid extinction is a really great thing that in all likelyhood needs to happen and thats one of the reasons i look up to Elon for carrying that torch. That being said i don’t think its a very good argument to get people excited or interested in space.
“Well you better get onboard or your dead” isent the best tag line if you ask me :D.
Knowing myself earth would have to be physically split in two for me to plant my ass in a spaceship and go to Mars before then i’ll weather the storm and make the best of it here on earth. If you are of a different mindset and want to go to Mars thats cool to just not my cup of tea.
Yeah that one will never really work, I agree.
There’s a better one: “and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth”(Genesis 1:28)
If we keep up the current 50% birth rate in the 1st world countries it means after 3 generations there’s only 12% of us left. U might say I’m not a religious person. Fair enough, I absolutely respect that. But this is pure math, if u don’t trust the commandment, trust the math.
So yeah, doesn’t really matter where u coming from. As species we simply have to do it, without thousand questions. No, it won’t be easy. Yes there’s many obstacles and hardships on the way. So what.
Today we have to add - it’s about time to learn how to do it. So far we’ve done it like a virus: kill the host, die with it, try to find a new one. Then again, if we kill off the next generations, all this trouble was for nothing. That’s obviously not what the commandment implied.
Eventually more living space will open up to us. The ancient commandment still applies: be fruitful, multiply, replenish. Doesn’t matter what u believe. This is an imperative. The show must go on. Past the Singularity, right into Infinity.
( …and u frakin’ better start believing into something! )
Absolutely wonderful :)
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