Charlie Stross

@mountainriver Also of note: the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster. (Loaded 737 crashed, everybody killed … because of a locked cockpit door: plane depressurized and pilots’ oxygen failed, cabin crew—inc. a pilot—were unable to gain cockpit access in time to save the plane before it ran out of fuel and crashed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

@Soyweiser You’re assuming the first Starship to Mars has a cargo of canned primates. Rest assured, it can’t and it won’t. (Also, I doubt Starship will be ready for Mars—extended duration in space, remember—in time for the 2026 launch window. Although a robot probe as a payload launched atop Starship is entirely possible in that time frame: you don’t need reusability, just a bloody big payload bay and the ability to reach orbit once, which Starship achieved as of OFT-3.)

@gerikson @techtakes

Anyway, if I was going to go mining 3He in space I’d bear in mind it’s in the regolith because it’s part of the solar wind and gets trapped there. Is it possible to collect it more cheaply using a really huge solar sail (with station-keeping as a side-purpose) made out of a membrane that traps it directly and can be reprocessed to outgas the stuff? That way you’re not grinding up gigatons of fucking rock to extract an incredibly rare volatile.

@gerikson @techtakes Ian is a *very* good writer—but for those books he uncritically adopted the American colonialist ideologues’ idea of an good reason for space colonization: and sure, his Lunar colony is a capitalist hellscape, but that’s not the point. (The P + 11B aneutronic fusion pathway was already known about at the time.)

/1

@gerikson @techtakes The thing about Lunar 3He mining is … it presupposes you can build aneutronic fusion reactors (a 3rd generation fusion reactor: not simple!). But if you can fuse 3He, you’re almost certainly able to run a P + 11B reactor (which is also an aneutronic reaction), and hydrogen and boron are readily available on Earth. Thereby removing the entire incentive to strip-mine the moon at vast expense.

TLDR: Lunar 3He is a non-working economic justification for space colonization.

@mattblaze@federate.social If you’re ever in Scotland you might want to visit the Secret Government Bunker attraction in Fife, just over the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. It’s a former ROTOR nuke-hardened air force control centre turned continuity of government HQ, and it’s run as a cold war museum. Up top, it’s disguised as farm buildings. Underground? Three levels of accommodation for a couple of hundred military and civil servants in event of nuclear war.

@CliftonR @V0ldek @dgerard No, Curtis was a weirdo as far back as the early-to-mid-90s when I knew him

@froztbyte @techtakes Speaking as a working writer: she’s a hobbyist writer. At this point she’s so rich she could spend £100K/week of her capital and still be a multimillionaire when she dies aged 100+. A novel typically takes a year to write and even JKR is unlikely to make significantly more than £100K from a book (unless it gets filmed). So she keeps writing for ego/self-esteem but not from necessity (to stop writing would leave a hole in her life).

@V0ldek You missed maintenance and logistics. Military gear is typically amortized over a 30 year period, so a £3M missile might actually cost something like £0.3M to build then a bit under £100K per year to keep in working order (new batteries and motors, regular inspections and refurb, cost of the leak-proof warehouse it’s stored in, etc).

@o7___o7 (Checks …) you may like “A Conventional Boy” (coming next January 7th)? And if I ever get “Ghost Engine” (the space opera) done, that has a happy ending.

@gerikson @techtakes I think you’ll find Boris Johnson pioneered that one in the early 1990s.

@dgerard Moldbug didn’t get radicalized at Berkeley in the early 90s but his elder brother was definitely a libertarian back then. Curtis was just chilling with hallucinogens and a room full of giant lizards in his geek house.

@Soyweiser Why not make pykrete out of neoreactionaries?

@barsquid Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)

@skillissuer The younger generation in the US is secularizing rapidly, though—increased radicalization of the evangelicals (and association with white supremacism/neo-nazis) is driving an exodus from churches.

@YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM It goes back to the mid 19th century. In an era where battlefields were controlled by massed infantry with rifles, railways revolutionised the process of mobilizing for war—they who ran the tightest timetables got to the battlefields first. But as a result, frontiers moved around and the networks fractured. And shit like the Russian Empire deliberately choosing a different track gauge to stop German and Austrian troop trains running on their tracks during an invasion.

@carlitoscohones @techtakes See also Frank Tipler, “The Physics of Immortality” (or: Astrophysicist goes cray-cray, tries to prove TESCREAL bullshit only takes a left turn into evangelical Christianity by way of the fine structure constant)

@self He hasn’t even caught up with what Vernor Vinge was talking about in his 1993 paper on the Singularity, which the current crop of starry-eyed singularitarians seem not to have read: https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity

@gerikson Heh. Am waiting for the next Apple ads—“It’s a bit like Microsoft’s ARM laptops, only better and there’s no spyware.”

@V0ldek NoNoNo, Excel is *sometimes* useful. For ultimate uselessness, try PowerPoint.