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Alistair Young boosted
Chris Pirillo

welcome to my octagon of ambivalence

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Alistair Young

@michaelgemar @SkipHuffman @nyrath @JeremyMallin

Or aircraft, for that matter.

But also, not all optimizations are orthogonal. You can optimize for mass by making a nice aerogel outer hull that is also near-optimal as Whipple shielding, and then using patterned variants of it in your company livery need not add more'n a few grams here and there (molecular weight of dye may vary, but probably not *that* much).

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Alistair Young

@SkipHuffman @nyrath @JeremyMallin

So I wouldn't be at all surprised to see that not-all-that-far-into-the-future Interplanetary Express will happily eat the resulting fuel costs of shaping their Whipple shields into a fastest-rocket-in-space look and painting racing stripes on them _if_ it makes them stand out to people looking out hab windows, standing in boarding galleries, shipspotters, people looking at their brag sheets, etc., etc.

Branders gonna brand.

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Alistair Young

@SkipHuffman @nyrath @JeremyMallin

On the one hand, in the near-future with current-type drives, that's certainly true; on the other hand, as drives get more and more SFnal, it becomes less of a consideration.

On the gripping hand, though, I observe that _even though_ painting an airliner imposes real additional fuel costs to operations, airlines don't choose to save money by flying naked hulls. Even freight-only lines like Amazon Air. Evidently branding gains outweigh fuel costs.

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Alistair Young

@SkipHuffman @nyrath @JeremyMallin

(Sadly for those of us who prefer spheres to cylinders in spaceship designs. Teardrops are right out!)

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Alistair Young

@SkipHuffman @nyrath @JeremyMallin

Same with steel ships. I believe the current standard is to try to keep the percentage of curved hull plates required down to 15% of the total or less; and within that percentage, to strongly prefer simple curves (i.e., those which can be made through line heating and rolling) over complex, multi-dimensional curves, which are much harder technically to achieve.

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Alistair Young

@isaackuo @nyrath @JeremyMallin

It's so nice when technical requirements also give you a great opportunity for branding! 😊

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Alistair Young

@nyrath @JeremyMallin

Side note: one factor in naval architecture is trying to minimize the number of curved hull plates needed, because they're more expensive than flat, and increasing the number of curve dimensions increases the cost disproportionately.

In the , the IN uses sweepingly curved hulls and elaborate brightwork to make a deliberate statement of "If we had budget to spare for *this*, just imagine what the working parts are like."

Naked frames and greebles look cheap.

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Alistair Young

@nyrath @JeremyMallin

Today, for example, we put curved, as anti-industrial/functional-as-possible-looking cases on all manner of things that aren't intended to ever move, because good-looking can sell a million units.

Apple spent _decades_ beating the entire market and turning Everything Is An iPod In The Future into a trope by turning "humans are basically magpies where sleek, shiny things are concerned" into their core marketing strategy.

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Alistair Young

@nyrath @JeremyMallin

Theory: aerodynamic-appearing is strongly correlated with "visually attractive".

It's visual language for "we can spend money on excitingly curved hull plates and unnecessary fairings, etc., just so we don't have to look at a starship that looks like a boiler factory had a terrible accident when attempting to mate with a steamroller".

(Which in turn is symbolic language for "we are rich and have a high culture, unlike you primitive savages from beyond the Marches".)

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Alistair Young

(This is also a commentary on why the is unfilmable.)

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Alistair Young

Of course, it's necessary that it be that way, from the writers' perspective. Largely because if the Doctor ever *did* decide that he was done with people dying on him all the time and therefore, well, _fuck death in the general case_, there is a very good chance that he might actually be able to pull it off.

Which leads to the universe becoming very weird, and not in a cute portrayable way for companions and bystanders to boggle at, in rather short order.

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Alistair Young

So I've been catching up on my Doctor Who ( ; currently in revival series 9), and while I do enjoy the show, as a transhumanist, I am frequently irritated by the pro-death-and-mortality position that the show and the Doctor takes, well, almost every time the subject comes up.

(Death is necessary to give life meaning/make people appreciate life, and anyone who attempts to not die/finds themselves immortal goes horribly, horribly wrong.)

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Alistair Young

So it's not like I have to worry about operationalizing the plan involving wearing a leather posing-pouch as I round people up at rebar-sword-point and force them to walk the treadmill powering my k8s cluster.

But those of you who have children and would prefer them not being slaves or slavers - both being _real_ shitty lifestyles - might consider taking a moment to be appropriately terrified, m'kay?

(Also, build fission plants.)

This message brought to you by the Campaign for an Erg Day.

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Alistair Young

Now, myself, I don't really have to care all that much about this issue. I and my loved ones will be safely dead, and if there's an afterlife, I'll be looking up from some netherworld delivering sarcastic commentary.

(I'm gonna be a big hit down there, 'cause dead people are mostly old, and old people do love bitching about how their descendants fucked everything up by the numbers.)

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Alistair Young

....well, then, we should expect certain other alternative energy sources to come back in a big way.

Yes, I'm talking about the return of slavery. Because the thing about slavery, you see, is that while it's nowhere near as efficient as industrial energy, it requires little complex infrastructure or technical knowledge, and can be practiced effectively on the small scale. All it actually *requires* is ethically-challenged human beings, a resource that has never been in short supply.

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Alistair Young

The conclusion which is fairly easy to reach is that if (a) we fail to adequately manage the energy transition away from fossil fuels in a way that preserves per-capita energy usage and preferably also preserves the ongoing secular increase in per-capita energy usage; or (b) are big enough fools to succumb to degrowth ideology and assume that people will, in fact, be satisfied to replace it with a secular settling for less...

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Alistair Young

Namely, I am going to take a moment to observe that the decline of slavery and the rise of the energy-powered machine roughly coincide in history, and that this is no coincidence.

And we should take this as a very pointed warning for the future.

Because humans do not, by and large, enjoy going gentle into that good night, and because one of the most blatant correlations in all history is that between per-capita energy usage and quality of life.

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Alistair Young

So, today on here I have read a thread concerning the high density of slaves (relative to population) in certain older societies, and contrasting that to, as Buckminster Fuller called it, the "energy slaves" we have today in the form of our per-capita energy usage, having replaced human labor with energy-powered machine labor.

(Primarily fossil-fuel energy, which is a problem.)

Now I don't want to derail that thread in the service of my own point, so I'm going to start my own here.

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Alistair Young

Speaking of which, consider this a reminder that "tax wealth not income" is an idea of the same shape as "burn fossil fuels, don't catch sunlight", and if you can recognize the obvious failure mode of one you should also be able to recognize the obvious failure mode of the other.

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