meanderingexile @meanderingexile@schelling.pt

rereading the early parts of Stross' Accelerando and it's interesting to see fifteen years on

makes me realize how much the cloud killed a lot of conversations about copyright that were a big deal when I was a kid

someone just "liked" an email I sent out earlier

since when does Outlook have reacts

also, why

closer

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RT @meanderingexile
If we can bootstrap lunar water and metals into a resource base for the cislunar economy, we can drum up enough support to build a lunar elevator

If we can build a lunar elevator we can get bulk metals to orbit cheaply

With bulk metals we can build the Ring
https://twitter.com/meanderingexile/status/1357193786862964737

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RT @meanderingexile
we could put the materials for a lunar space elevator in orbit with ten starship flights

life at a civilizational bifurcation point is wild
https://twitter.com/meanderingexile/status/1255458396750389248

40 tonnes for a tether

we can do that

I'd missed this up util now, but someone (well, two someones) ran the numbers a couple of years ago on a lunar elevator, and it's looking better than ever:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09339

space engineering is hard, but so is governance, and cheap launch lets you swap a coordination problem for an engineering one

there is a tipping point in launch-cost and throughput where building a gigawatt of solar power is cheaper and faster than going through the process of building it on Earth

your competitive edge is regulatory bypass. with some exceptions (like the Moon, which is both a clear coordination point and culturally significant, or LEO, which becomes congested) I expect a lot of activity in space to remain relatively less-regulated than Earth

the last one is potentially the most interesting, because that's where you're taking things that could be done on earth and starting to do them in orbit instead

I used to think this was a really, really long way off, but now I'm not so sure

novel space stuff would be something like in-space manufacturing of exotic materials, or semi-routine orbital tourism. There's probably more opportunities here than we realize, but that's unknown-unknown until people start to experiment

existing space stuff is things like telcom and remote sensing. This is getting commodified fast, but as launch costs continue to fall, it's going to open up new opportunities- either for very niche sensors/payloads or trying to use new capabilities to displace somone like Planet

some musings on this- there's essentially three classes of activity I see this facilitating, in roughly chronological order: existing stuff, novel space stuff, and stuff we transfer from earth
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RT @mattparlmer
This is a must read, reposting for the evening crowd

I kinda thought people had grokked this already, I guess not

Starship means open season on offworld hardware, launch costs are now drastically lower and a much wider set o…
https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1453953615949811719

The industrial robotics systems I've used before were really set up to replace steps in an assembly line

I want, like, Bash for the physical world

Do it once, neat, now do that 1000 more times

Like, I get that isn't too useful for a lot of tasks, but it still seems like a start

Are there good options for very low-cost teleoperated robot arms? I haven't come across any

Grappling gym reopens on monday

Hype

Assuming the demand is there, what are the tradeoffs between a lunar elevator and a mass driver for large-scale lunar mass export?