[HN Gopher] Charles Stross: Oh, 2022
___________________________________________________________________
Charles Stross: Oh, 2022
Author : elkos
Score : 187 points
Date : 2022-01-09 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.antipope.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.antipope.org)
| elkos wrote:
| Charlie Stross is a hard science fiction author, I believe his
| works (like Accelerado) have been quite influential and inspiring
| for many hn users. I believe it could be interesting to discuss
| his (pessimistic) take on this year.
| eu wrote:
| programmer in a former life
| jodrellblank wrote:
| He's also a HN user:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
| maxerickson wrote:
| He'll block you on twitter for politely quibbling with his
| presentation of facts.
| tptacek wrote:
| More people should block on Twitter. Blocking is far
| preferable, in an environment like Twitter, to pointless
| hostile misunderstanding. It's a bad look to dunk on
| someone for blocking you; just let them block and get on
| with your life. Pay it forward when someone pokes you on
| Twitter with a question you can tell is going to pull you
| into a time-wasting cortisol spike.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I don't think I was dunking. Griping at the most (and
| I've made the block vs mute point). I agree that it's
| time wasting and I've tried to pull out of this thread so
| as to not waste more time of other people.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I'm not a twitter user, but this is the equivalent of "I'm
| not interested in being notified if this person contacts me
| again" right?
|
| Like me putting a Gmail rule in place to move messages from
| a specific source, say a specific mailing list thread that
| I'm not interested in out of my inbox.
|
| Is this considered taboo on Twitter?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| It also prevents you from reading their tweets
|
| It's basically twitter's fault/design choice that
| choosing not to see someone's replies to you also blocks
| them from seeing anything you post [0] (of course,
| cleverly circumvented by simply logging out)
|
| > Blocking helps people in restricting specific accounts
| from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following
| them.
|
| There were some court cases [1] to this effect since
| politicians would block annoying trolls/constituents, but
| this apparently violates the blocked users' first
| amendment rights to access the public information. I
| don't know, never made much sense to me, point is,
| blocking someone is, I wouldn't say taboo as it's quite
| normal, but it's also very annoying to be blocked.
|
| [0] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/someone-
| blocked-me...
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/can-government-
| officia...
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I block a lot of popular accounts I've never interacted
| with just because I get tired of seeing them retweeted
| into my timeline. A lot of political rage accounts, for
| example.
|
| I block them then even if people I follow retweet I never
| see them.
|
| For me, it makes twitter infinitely more pleasant.
| tptacek wrote:
| It is both a primary, first-class feature of Twitter and
| something a lot of people feel should be a taboo.
| maxerickson wrote:
| That's mute.
|
| Block prevents the blocked user from seeing your tweets
| from logged in contexts and ability to reply to any of
| your tweets and so on. That it sort of curates a feed by
| limiting replies can go in both directions of course.
| noah_buddy wrote:
| Is there a deeper meaning to take from this? Some people
| block anyone negative on Twitter. He's free to use the
| platform as he pleases, I see no reason why someone should
| feel obligated to have or present an externally valid
| reason for blocking others.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| because free expression is increasingly confused with a
| "right to be in your face" by a certain segment of the
| population. People confuse the right to speak with the
| others having the obligation to host or listen to them.
|
| Personally, strongly curating something like Twitter with
| all the tools they give you is pretty much the only way
| to keep somewhat high quality of conversation.
| bigiain wrote:
| And hardly surprisingly, the "I have an inalienable right
| to get in your face" crowd are also very much in the
| overlap of the Venn diagram with the "dog pile this guy,
| he has different opinions to us" crowd.
|
| There are tools that are even more powerful than Twitters
| kinda lame (we'll give you just enough control so you
| can't reduce our engagement metrics" ones. A certain
| Mozilla founder who you can't link to from here blogged
| about being dogpiled by the cryptobros, and mentioned
| https://megablock.xyz/ as a useful tool.
|
| Way too many people think they have some right to the
| time of other people. They don't. I can choose to never
| hear from you or anybody else at any time, there's no
| legal or moral or ethical or even politeness problems
| with me doing that. The way you choose to use Twitter has
| zero impact on the way I choose to use Twitter, and if I
| want to be Blocky McBlockface for any reason at all,
| that's just fine. You can go and r random stranger nit
| picky arguments with someone else. I wouldn't put up with
| it in person, and I don't have to put up with it online.
| And if you're behaving in a way that even slightly annoys
| me, I will block not only you, but all the people who
| seem to be your friends or entourage. Sucks to be them if
| they actually wanted to talk with me, but you know what,
| I get to choose who I'm friends with, and if you hang out
| with people who are annoying to other people in public,
| you get tarred with the same brush. If your friend is a
| jerk in a bar, expect the bouncers to eject the whole
| group. Especially if it's a certain SF SOMA nightclub...
| cwmma wrote:
| Stross just blocks nazis and terfs even when they are
| polite about it. This pisses some people off who see JUST
| ASKING QUESTIONS!
| [deleted]
| maxerickson wrote:
| No, I'm just petty and small minded.
|
| On the other hand, when someone confidently opines about
| a lot of things and then rejects mild corrections (I
| literally just said something like "thing isn't part of
| B, it's owned by the same parent company"), you wonder
| what facts are feeding into those opinions.
| toyg wrote:
| Some people also have a quixotic definition of "facts",
| and figuring out if that's the case can be exhausting for
| popular users with thousands of followers.
| bigiain wrote:
| And you know, from random strangers, who gives a fuck
| even if their facts are correct? You owe them precisely
| nothing for their "contribution" to your discussion. If
| you block them, it means you don't want to hear from them
| any more. They can go butt into someone else's discussion
| and see if they are more receptive to "corrections".
| astrange wrote:
| Good. You should block everyone who replies to you on
| Twitter. It's the best way to use it.
|
| (This includes compliments. They're bad for you.)
| evgen wrote:
| maxerickson wrote:
| I don't really understand your tone. I think you are
| mocking me, but I'm not sure why you think you have the
| necessary context to do that in an effective way.
| tome wrote:
| It doesn't read as mockery of you (or anyone) to me. It
| seems like criticisms of "random nobodies" on Twitter.
| legutierr wrote:
| I don't know. Personally, I don't think that anyone
| should be referred to as a "random nobody", whether they
| be Twitter users or not.
| tptacek wrote:
| We're all randoms to some people (most people, in fact).
| It's the notion that people have an obligation to pay
| attention to us that I find more alarming.
| dijit wrote:
| This is _literally_ the thing twitter was designed
| around.
| tptacek wrote:
| The design you're referring to includes the block button.
| dijit wrote:
| Which is _prominently_ displayed in the _tucked away_
| kebab menu.
|
| Linux was designed to run hardware but can be configured
| to block hardware. (Not cpus or ram, but you get my
| point)
| chongli wrote:
| I say: don't bother trying to talk to minor celebrities on
| Twitter. If you want discussions, HN (and other well-
| moderated forums) are the place to go. Twitter is just the
| Internet version of that scrolling celebrity soundbite bar
| on cable TV.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| user982 wrote:
| 'I am forever advising people, "Why hit Reply when the
| Block button is right there?"' - jwz
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I've seen this going around lately.
|
| https://twitter.com/mrfilmkritik/status/99544657653653094
| 4
|
| > When someone disagrees with you online & demands you
| prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a
| logically sound defense, u can save a lot of time by not
| doing that.
|
| > Dude, I've known u for ten seconds & enjoyed none of
| them, I'm not taking homework assignments from you.
| ska wrote:
| That may be a bit harsh, but nobody owes you a conversation
| and people with a ton of followers have to do something to
| manage the SNR. It's not obvious what the right answer is,
| and almost anything you do will have false positives.
| maxerickson wrote:
| There's nothing in my comment that implies I think
| anybody owes me a conversation.
|
| I can see hitting mute on accounts that make
| uninteresting comments, I'm not sure why you'd block
| someone that comments on ~1 tweet and isn't being
| persistent or otherwise antagonistic (I suppose it can be
| better curation to block).
| fragmede wrote:
| Because it's not one tweet. Or at least, it's one tweet
| from you, but a popular author like cstross probably gets
| hundreds a day from randoms.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This?
|
| https://twitter.com/maxerickson/status/685506107695972352
|
| Anyone with that many followers is likely going to
| disengage with low-effort replies of that nature. It adds
| nothing of consequence to the lengthy post it is
| correcting.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Mute though.
|
| And I learned something about his concern over accuracy.
| For instance, reddit hasn't quite lived in the shadow of
| Conde Nast in the meantime.
| tome wrote:
| Yes, muting seems far less aggressive than blocking to
| me. For one thing the mutee doesn't even know it has
| happened. I don't quite understand why some Twitter users
| seems to take delight in announcing they have blocked
| someone.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Muting saves you from the annoyance, but still subjects
| your followers.
| eproxus wrote:
| Blocking on Twitter is such a meaningless feature. You
| can just log out to access the content someone who
| blocked you. It's like the feature only exists to make
| people feel good about signaling their actions to the
| blocked party.
|
| Muting fulfills all the goals those features are supposed
| to solve. Does blocking actually add anything sensible on
| top that I missed?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I guess it prevents them from participating in the
| replies to your tweets, so it prevents your access to the
| parent's audience. A tweet is kind of like a stage, you
| might have a million followers, everyone who replies is
| also seen by your audience. Blocking is like preventing
| people from getting up on your stage.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's clear you should have blocked each other just from
| this conversation on HN. You weren't messaging him to
| have a conversation; you were looking for some kind of
| gratifying acknowledgement of your disagreement. I'm not
| saying you were wrong (I can't imagine spending the
| energy to even figure out what it is you disagree with
| him about); I'm saying _it doesn 't matter_, _shouldn 't
| matter_, and the block was a favor _to both of you_.
|
| That you'd be wound up about it _five years later_ speaks
| volumes to how unhealthy the exchange between the two of
| you was.
| maxerickson wrote:
| You are imputing a lot of state of mind to my initial
| remark.
|
| I enjoyed reading his books as was certainly disappointed
| when like 2 years after my tweet I realized he had
| blocked me for it. I of course don't recall my state of
| mind when I sent the tweet, but I don't think I paid it
| much attention until years later when I couldn't see a
| tweet someone else was quoting and wondered why.
| zestyping wrote:
| And decade.
| rcarmo wrote:
| He is by far one of the most interesting bloggers on my RSS
| feeds, and I would also recommend reading the comments - in
| which he participates actively.
| 41b696ef1113 wrote:
| For anyone else who went hunting for the feed[0]
|
| [0] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/atom.xml
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Speaking of Accelerando, here's a similar retrospective of his
| about 2018 :
|
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-cra...
|
| (The first chapter of Accelerando is about a two decades in the
| future 2018.)
| ErikAugust wrote:
| "If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade
| earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational,
| if not species-level, extinction by now--SARS1 has 20% mortality
| among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-
| NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If
| SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion
| people within two years."
|
| That's a scary thought.
| redisman wrote:
| Isn't that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved
| how they evolved. I don't see how the decade they emerged in
| makes a difference? It didn't cause a pandemic because of the
| properties of the virus. Not because of the "decade"
| andylei wrote:
| > nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two
| decades we'd be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen
| within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within
| two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later
| redisman wrote:
| Thanks- the site is getting a death hug so I can't read the
| whole article
| ErikAugust wrote:
| "...be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within
| days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two
| weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later."
|
| That wasn't possible in the 90s.
| wk_end wrote:
| The claim seems to be that it's because we're "able to
| sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days [...] or
| design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human
| clinical trials a month later". The latter certainly wasn't
| needed for SARS1, but the former...? At the time I was a high
| school student in Toronto, which was hit relatively hard by
| SARS1, and I remember there was lots of fear and anxiety
| around it, but it didn't affect my daily life in any way. Did
| we do lots of PCR testing and quarantining to keep it from
| spreading? Not sure. That wouldn't have been possible a few
| decades ago, anyway.
| JamisonM wrote:
| It is nonsensical but not because of the way the viruses
| evolved - if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a
| genuine pandemic with their fatality rate then the response
| would have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass
| extinction event! With SARS1 we actually managed to make a
| vaccine - we just didn't end up needing it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > if SARS1 or MERS had been capable of causing a genuine
| pandemic with their fatality rate then the response would
| have been different, so it wouldn't have been a mass
| extinction event!
|
| That depends quite a bit on how rapidly it spreads. If
| COVID had started with Omicron's level of infectiousness,
| it'd have been a dramatically more deadly pandemic.
| ccbccccbbcccbb wrote:
| Absolutely it is. But there really is a difference the past
| decade (I'd say two) made.
|
| It is the quantity and quality of psychological manipulation.
|
| What happened to Germans in 1930s won't repeat again, people
| are more knowledgeable and less susceptible to mass hypnosis
| in the 21st century, right?
|
| And bang, all of a sudden there is a menace which didn't
| exist before. By mere redefinition of what a menace is.
| makomk wrote:
| The problem with that thought is that having such high fatality
| rates is a problem for a virus that hopes to become a pandemic
| - it's hard for a disease to spread silently through the
| population if several out of every ten people infected end up
| in the hospital, even with a delay, and of course pretty much
| all developed countries have contact tracing systems in place
| even if that fact got downplayed after they didn't work so well
| against Covid. (Which is just inherently not a good candidate
| for that tactic.)
| onychomys wrote:
| > is that having such high fatality rates is a problem for a
| virus that hopes to become a pandemic
|
| Somebody forgot to tell that to smallpox, which had something
| like a 25 or 30% IFR before vaccines came around. And there
| were lots and lots of pandemics of that!
| vkou wrote:
| That depends on how long it takes you between the moment when
| you are contagious, and the moment that you drop dead.
|
| If you are contagious on day 2, symptomatic on day 17, and
| drop dead on day 180, such a disease will happily spread
| through a population, despite having a 100% fatality rate.
| There will be no evolutionary pressure for that virus to
| become less lethal, just like how there's no evolutionary
| pressure for people to live to 200.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| The _extinction_ part is hyperbole though - with 7 billion
| humans out there it would need to hit fatality rates of
| 99.9...% for a decent chance of the human species to be
| completely wiped out. And also assuming that it would persist
| and /or spread well enough to also wipe out the various
| uncontacted tribes on 2-3 continents.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Asking because I have no idea - Will other mRNA vaccines have
| short-lived efficacy like the covid one does? Will you need an
| AIDS vaccine booster every six months?
| virgilp wrote:
| My understanding is that "lifetime" is not related to the
| vaccine but to the virus itself (i.e. we can't make more long-
| term-efficient COVID-19 vaccines in any tech; but we might get
| full immunity to other diseases using mRNA tech)
| walrus01 wrote:
| I don't think it's quite accurate to say the existing mRNA
| vaccines are not effective, because the rate of hospitalization
| and rate of ICU admissions per capita for double-vaccinated
| people, vs unvaccinated people is really clear.
|
| The data is showing that the likelihood of severe illness in a
| delta or omicron-infected person who previously had both doses
| of vaccine is significantly less.
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2786039
| evgen wrote:
| This really depends on how quickly the virus in question
| mutates and what components of the virus the vaccine keys on
| for its protective features. HIV evolves quickly (it is a
| sloppy replicator and is a fast reproducer) but if the vaccine
| targets a pathway that all variants use it can end up being
| effective for a very long time, particularly if the pathway
| that the vaccine targets is one that is important in how the
| virus interacts with (or targets in the case of HIV) the immune
| system.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The purpose of all vaccines (including those built with mRNA
| technology, many current day vaccines using a "killed" virus
| and even those using a different but related virus whole like
| the original "vaccination" with cow pox) is to teach your
| body's immune system about something so that it might react
| appropriately immediately when it sees that thing, or something
| very similar in the future.
|
| The _effect_ of teaching the immune system to attack something
| is difficult to predict because it is a natural system and we
| don 't entirely understand how it works, only enough to get
| better at teaching it new things. In some cases it's so good at
| destroying related things that it produces "sterilising
| immunity" - a vaccinated person can't get the disease at all,
| even if directly exposed to it, in other cases, as seems to
| have been the case for COVID-19, you get something useful but
| much less effective.
|
| AIUI There's no reason we know of why the platform (the
| mechanism by which we tell people's immune system about a new
| thing to be attacked) would influence how effective the defence
| put up subsequently is. The vaccine is _not_ in your body when
| you 're attacked weeks or months later by a virus, what's left
| is a "memory" of what should be identified as foreign and
| destroyed. So, it would be expected to depend on how AIDS
| works, and perhaps on exactly what the vaccine is teaching the
| immune system to attack, not on how the vaccine is
| manufactured.
|
| Think about the difference between identifying wanted bank
| robbers with a hand-drawn picture of their faces, versus a
| still from a CCTV camera. It might be harder or easier to
| recognise the CCTV still, but we wouldn't expect them to do
| more or less jail time when identified by one method versus the
| other.
| [deleted]
| supperburg wrote:
| So wrong. "If" sars1/2 had gone pandemic. The reason they didn't
| is because they don't make you infectious in an asymptomatic way
| like cov19. It wasn't an "if." They never will. And also, covid
| 19 is not 1 to 4 percent lethal. It's more like 0.02 percent
| lethal. A Stanford professor said so.
|
| But he could have said we were lucky to not have gotten hit by a
| different virus that kills 80% and travels asymptomatically. The
| real nightmare virus. It's totally possible.
| slg wrote:
| >And also, covid 19 is not 1 to 4 percent lethal. It's more
| like 0.02 percent lethal.
|
| We have had roughly 860k COVID deaths in the US. At a 0.02%
| fatality rate that would equate to 4.3b cases. So are you
| suggesting the US death total is exaggerated or that the
| average American has already had COVID 10+ times?
| supperburg wrote:
| The Stanford professor who I saw on a recent lex Friedman
| podcast confirmed what many people already suspected: the
| death count is exaggerated because the criteria for a Covid
| death is that a person is dead and also tests positive for
| Covid regardless of how the person really died. And also that
| cases were massively undercounted because of the fact that
| many people never have symptoms bad enough to justify any
| concern, testing or a hospital visit. That's what he's
| asserting and it's true.
|
| He said when you sample randomly and follow positive testers
| to their conclusion, the lethality rate is something like
| 0.02%. I'm sorry that it upsets you to hear something you
| don't already agree with
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It's specious to claim knowledge of things unmeasured? Dial
| it back a bit there - maybe 'somewhat undercounted'. And is
| that criteria made up too? Show me.
| supperburg wrote:
| I don't need to show you, go listen to the Stanford
| professor. Lex Fridman podcast in the past week or two.
| Am I an idiot for believing a current Stanford professor?
| Is it not a reputable source?
| gmuslera wrote:
| Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains
| about things going too fast?
|
| Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and
| start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does
| too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones.
|
| Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change
| that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about
| COVID. That is a general area where things are happening faster
| than predicted, and where we act slower than predicted.
| walrus01 wrote:
| > Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains
| about things going too fast?
|
| that depends, have you recently received any Signal messages
| from lobsters representing the moscow windows NT user group?
| cstross wrote:
| I wrote Accelerando from 1998-2004. That's a third of a
| lifetime ago. It's _normal_ to slow down as you grow older!
| com2kid wrote:
| Through your writings, you helped create a new age religion
| of people who worship non-linear technological progress.
| (Though the transhumanism movement seems to be less active as
| of late)
|
| Its going to be a wild ride! Hopefully it doesn't result in
| anything too crazy going on, I'd hate to involuntarily grow a
| new limb.
|
| Related, your books, and others in the genre, helped bring
| about my own acceptance of people's differences. I realized
| that if I had no objection to a future where people modified
| their own DNA, then it followed that I should have no
| objection to people dying their hair, getting crazy tattoos,
| or making any alterations to their body that they so choose.
| Transhumanist literature was the final stepping stone that
| let me step back from the preconceived notions of ethics and
| morals that society had placed upon me and do a thorough
| analyze and decide what I wanted to keep versus discard.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| I recently read glass house and just started accelerando,
| great work!
| beckingz wrote:
| Must be wild watching the overton window pass you in the fast
| lane.
| aftbit wrote:
| From the linked counterfactuals from 2017:
|
| >Quietly and without any fuss Ruth Bader Ginsberg has had a
| stroke: Pence indicates that her replacement will be a pro-life
| fundamentalist Christian. (Goodbye Roe v. Wade and, quite
| possibly, Griswold v. Connecticut.)
|
| Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Do the rich, a ka "the klept" as he calls them, really suffer the
| most from unchecked immigration? It seems rather doubtful to me,
| as presumably immigrants would compete with and provide cheap
| labor?
| zestyping wrote:
| Ah, "feco-chiropteroid crazy" is my new favourite expression.
| Thank you, Charlie Stross!
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| These predictions are like puzzle pieces that don't fit together.
|
| If 50% of the population are COVID invalids, who's going to be
| doing the (building) work for a new economic boom? You can't
| seriously say "I'm going to make predictions - but let's just
| ignore the most important health event for over a century."
|
| So - mRNA vaccinations. If you can vaccinate against AIDS, flu,
| cancer (being investigated...), and the rest, you get a bimodal
| population where a fair proportion of those born before
| Vaccination Day are cripples, and potentially everyone born after
| is super-immune to many killer diseases.
|
| The important word being "potentially."
|
| Political implications? Just a bit.
|
| If there's a permanent Moon base - so what? Does anything really
| change? How? (What - in practical and economic terms, as opposed
| to symbolically - did the ISS change?) Can you even have a self-
| sustaining Moon base without relying on Earth. (Hint: not for a
| long time.)
|
| Cars: I really don't think many people are going to be thinking
| about cars in 2030-2040. Cars are useless if your roads/buildings
| are flooded/burning.
|
| Robots? Possibly. (See also: economic boom. Kind of)
|
| But behind this the real issues are psychological. The planet
| without toxic media and mad billionaires is a much nicer place
| than the planet with them. Many of the biggest trad-media
| offenders will be dead by 2030. Will they be replaced? Will there
| be a Metaverse Abstinence movement? Can one be engineered?
|
| I'd like to believe we can beat the raccoons yet.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I'm with you 100%. I think Stross is just going for laughs.
| 2031 is way too soon for much of this, when you consider where
| we were in 2011 compared to today. Musk may shoot his load to
| the Moon or Mars for twitter likes, but in terms of funding and
| feasibility, I don't think he'll have the same billions to play
| with in 10 years, and NASA needs a decade headstart. China and
| India seem unlikely to shoot for Mars since they are focused on
| the global production (China) or their own capital boom
| (India).
| maxerickson wrote:
| The "Great Lakes megalopolis" is hundreds of feet above sea
| level and getting wetter with the warming. Lots of people will
| still be worried about cars for a long time.
| gregmac wrote:
| > If there's a permanent Moon base - so what? Does anything
| really change? How? (What - in practical and economic terms, as
| opposed to symbolically - did the ISS change?)
|
| There are a lot of benefits from the ISS:
|
| There's the joint effort between otherwise adversarial
| countries. Even if it's just "symbolic" the most optimistic
| view of this would be it's been a contributor to preventing an
| outright war.
|
| There's also the inspirational aspect that gets people
| interested in STEM with a very concrete and exciting
| application (even little kids find rocket launches exciting).
| More people interested in and entering STEM fields means more
| technology advancements. I'd argue this is not just a
| "symbolic" benefit, even in the case of inspiring kids where it
| can take a decade or more for them to graduate and actually
| start contributing.
|
| There are also lots of real,b practical improvements to life on
| Earth. Sometimes it's just another use of technology developed
| for space, which otherwise wouldn't be pursued or funded, such
| as improved ways to grow plants, water purification, and remote
| medical and surgical procedures. It's not that these aren't
| possible to fund purely for Earth-based applications, but the
| trouble is the people with the money and skill don't have the
| need, and vice-versa.
|
| There's also been unpredictable discoveries, such as bone
| density loss in astronauts leading to better understanding
| bones at a cellular level and treatments for things like
| osteoporosis. There's also a bunch of discoveries from
| experiments in zero-gravity: growing microbes, crystal
| structures and in fluid dynamics.
|
| It's a good assumption that being on the Moon will have similar
| technology advances and (currently unknowable) discoveries.
|
| [1]
| https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_...
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > If 50% of the population are COVID invalids, who's going to
| be doing the (building) work for a new economic boom?
|
| This is a good question to raise, and IMHO does not invalidate
| the original piece: Two plausible predictions, but how do they
| interact? Which one gets the short end of the stick? Are the
| able-bodied hard at work throwing up temporary homes for
| invalids?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > The planet without toxic media and mad billionaires is a much
| nicer place than the planet with them. Many of the biggest
| trad-media offenders will be dead by 2030. Will they be
| replaced
|
| I'd like to hope that they won't, but why? The same forces that
| produced the current crop are no weaker, indeed stronger. Past
| performance indicates that there will be more.
| redisman wrote:
| The alternatives popping up are largely even worse than
| traditional media. Full on Fantasy as news. Whatever makes
| people feel enraged/smug. I'm not sure why everyone is
| cheering the death of all these institutions when there are
| no society stabilizing alternatives anywhere
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > will be going into the cocktail of childhood vaccinations that
| Christianist preachers like to rail against, along with HPV.
|
| I think he's being too generous.
| sneak wrote:
| No, he's just taking pot shots at the Other, playing to the
| crowd with jargon and winks.
|
| Doctorow does it so much better, and while keeping it focused
| on the class war instead of the culture war.
|
| It's always a little jarring to see others (who are generally
| good at writing) try to do it in that style and fumble it,
| because Doctorow and Stephenson pioneered that tone so
| skillfully.
| worik wrote:
| Thank you, Charles and the universe (or in this context The
| Multiverse) for the concept of quantum bible changes. It made my
| day!
| j0057 wrote:
| > low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh
|
| And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along
| coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million
| at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within
| the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether
| it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's
| still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a more
| future-proof elevation.
|
| Worst case if Greenland's ice sheet melts, that adds 7 meters to
| sea level, and Antarctica's another 60 meters. I won't see that
| in my lifetime but my children might.
| walrus01 wrote:
| the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is
| one thing to consider
|
| another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil
| war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something
| like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population
| becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with
| syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe
| multiplied by a factor of 50.
|
| and in a theoretical scenario like that happening with
| bangladesh, simultaneously other groups of aggregate hundreds
| of millions of low-income coastal residents from around the
| world also trying to move to safety at the same time.
| mooreds wrote:
| Yup. It's about to get really really bad for refugees. Here's
| a PDF report talking about the challenges: https://www.ipcc.c
| h/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=...
| JetSetWilly wrote:
| > (We don't remember how awful chickenpox was because (a) we're
| generally vaccinated in infancy and (b) it's not a killer on the
| same level as its big sibling, Variola, aka smallpox. But the so-
| called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox
| used to kill infants by windrows. There's a reason public health
| bodies remain vigilant and run constant vaccination campaigns
| against them
|
| Don't understand that line - Chickenpox is _not_ vaccinated in
| the UK, and public health bodies in the UK choose not to do so
| deliberately because of public health. The reason is that older
| adults are vulnerable to shingles - which can be more serious -
| and being exposed to childen with chickenpox on the regular is
| thought to give them an immunity boost and prevent them from
| getting shingles or make it less serious when they do. Charles
| Stross is from the UK so I am quite surprised he doesn 't know
| this.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| I live in the US and got Chickenpox as a child, I think from a
| classic "Chickenpox party". I'm not sure if I was also
| vaccinated against it or not...
|
| I got Shingles at 25 (I'm 30 now). I didn't believe it at first
| because I thought Shingles was an "old person's disease". I
| remember going to the doctor the day it started, and he just
| prescribed me some painkillers. I said, "I don't think I'll
| need those I don't feel too bad." He just looked me in the eyes
| and said, "Oh, you will." It was awful. Some of the worst pain
| I've ever been in. I laid in bed for almost a week basically
| hallucinating.
|
| Apparently, Shingles can come up multiple times in your life. I
| wonder if getting exposed to Chickenpox again would decrease
| the odds... I don't spend any time around children, so I don't
| think that's likely to happen to me haha.
| aerovistae wrote:
| Personally, I stopped reading after this:
|
| > If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade
| earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational,
| if not species-level, extinction by now--SARS1 has 20% mortality
| among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-
| NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. I
|
| It felt sensational to me to the point the I could no longer take
| the author's view seriously as something worth reading. We
| survived the bubonic plague and the author himself quotes these
| diseases as having far lower mortality rates than that, yet then
| extrapolates it to the extinction of humanity. Huh.
| pja wrote:
| The bubonic plague killed a third of the population of Europe.
| I imagine that felt pretty apocalyptic at the time & it had a
| long term impact on the entire region.
|
| A plague that killed a third of those infected spread by modern
| international travel would be catastrophic. Medieval Europe got
| to spread the impact out over decades. Killing a third of the
| population in a year or two would be much worse.
| [deleted]
| woodruffw wrote:
| I think that's what they meant by "civilizational" extinction,
| which they specifically mention in your own quote instead of
| species extinction. Maybe a little dire, but a disease with a
| 20% fatality rate in 2021 would have _very_ different
| transmission characteristics than the bubonic plague in the
| 14th century.
| counters wrote:
| It might well be on the hyperbolic side, but I'm not sure your
| counter-example is really apples-to-apples. It isn't totally
| reasonable to compare the current pandemic to communicable
| disease outbreaks pre-globalization; in the 1300's, someone
| exposed to plague couldn't hop on a plane and be in a global
| transportation hub with millions of people passing through in
| just a dozen or so hours.
|
| Furthermore, the plague had a catastrophic impact on population
| - in just a few years it killed upwards of 50% of Europe's
| entire population! I wouldn't call that "extinction level" but
| it's really not something to shirk at so cavalierly. What would
| be the impact on civilization of losing half the world's
| population today over just a few years? Whether or not it would
| lead to a decline into extinction is kind of academic;
| undoubtedly, it would lead to a fundamental shift in society
| and civilization.
| elihu wrote:
| > "Looking further afield: it seems likely that the end of
| internal combustion engines will be in sight. Some countries are
| already scheduling a ban on IC engines to come in after 2030--
| electric cars are now a maturing technology with clear advantages
| in every respect except recharge time. Once those IC cars are no
| longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of
| extraction and distribution industries for petrol and diesel
| fuels, leading to a complete phase-out possibly as early as
| 2040."
|
| At this point the proposed bans are on the sale of new vehicles
| that run on fossil fuels. As far as I know, no one is planning to
| outright ban ICE vehicles yet. Headline writers consistently get
| this wrong, because making the policy sound more extreme than it
| is attracts ad views.
|
| > "As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport
| of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is goin to have
| impacts far beyond the obvious."
|
| Huh, that's a lot. If that's correct, it's a lot more than I
| would have guessed.
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| > _Apologies for slow load time: this blog runs on an ancient,
| slow Athlon box and this entry is currently being hammered by
| Hacker News readers._
|
| It is always surprising to me to see apologies on websites for
| them going slow under load. There is a cheap and easy solution to
| such things that has been around for ages.
| [deleted]
| Plaastix wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220109192632/http://www.antipo...
| walrus01 wrote:
| Regarding spacex in this, my starlink terminal recently hit a
| milestone of 0.00% ICMP loss to terrestrial ISP things in the
| pacific northwest. Averaged over 5, 6 hour periods. 20 icmp pings
| every 60s, basically a default smokeping install set to once a
| minute.
|
| Previously it was running somewhere around 0.15% to 0.60% which
| was still totally usable... if you put a similar test setup on a
| noisy/oversubscribed coaxial cablemodem DOCSIS3 segment in a
| randomly chosen house in a suburb somewhere, you might also see
| an average of 0.50% loss in many cities.
|
| For anyone who has seen packet loss, jitter and transfer quotas
| on deeply oversubscribed consumer geostationary services, this is
| amazing.
|
| The next big thing will be to see if they can really get
| satellite-to-satellite laser links working so that starlink
| service area and coverage is not limited by having multiple
| moving LEO satellites in line of sight of both the CPE and a
| regional spacex earth station at the same time. for instance if
| people wanted to put a working starlink terminal somewhere really
| difficult to reach like socotra, yemen.
| arka2147483647 wrote:
| Do you know if this based on some technical aspect, or simply
| that has Space X not yet to saturated their network capacity?
| walrus01 wrote:
| there was a 1-hour full outage at 0200 immediately preceding
| it. without inside info into what they're doing, I believe
| it's a combination of new cpe terminal firmware, satellite
| firmware/software loads, and more of the recently launched
| satellites being put into use at their intended orbits, so
| there's greater simultaneous satellite coverage over my area
| now.
| gman83 wrote:
| Last time I checked, there were dozens of commercial satellite
| ISPs ramping up their launches. Do these companies have a plan
| to deal with potential collisions and the potential space
| debris that would cause?
| walrus01 wrote:
| personal opinion, space is huge, and the gap between
| companies issuing press release and the number of companies
| actually implementing hardware is huge.
|
| oneweb is just now becoming barely usable above 55 degrees
| north latitude. they have a lot of launches to go before it's
| anything like a real network (and will not be for individual
| end user CPEs, a oneweb terminal is much bigger and more
| costly). other things like telesat LEO network remain in the
| land of vaporware, same as with amazon's.
| moonbug wrote:
| The phrase you are looking for is "Kessler cascade"
| stickfigure wrote:
| "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly
| hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's
| a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just
| peanuts to space."
|
| (RIP Douglas Adams)
| Syonyk wrote:
| _Space_ is hugely, vastly, mind-bogglingly big.
|
| _Useful low orbital shells around the Earth_ are an awful
| lot smaller. They 're still big, like the sky is big, but
| airplanes do manage to, at least somewhat regularly,
| collide with each other "in the middle of nowhere" (most
| midairs are around airports, since there are a lot of
| airplanes heading in and out of them).
|
| Aircraft debris, however, falls out of the sky in short
| order. Orbital debris doesn't.
|
| The probability of an initial collision is fairly low, but
| once you have a few, or someone decides to show off their
| new ASAT weaponry (which is functionally a satellite
| collision, just one of them only having been in space for a
| short while), you now have flak that won't go away, moving
| in all directions at orbital velocity. That, then, has the
| potential to start causing all sorts of problems, and once
| that's taken out a few more satellites with orbital-energy
| impacts, you start having a real problem.
|
| Will it happen? Those invested in littering certain useful
| orbital shells with satellites claim not. We'll see.
| Qub3d wrote:
| Kessler syndrome is definitely a problem.
|
| I've heard SpaceX claims to deal with it by putting their
| satellites in an orbit that requires periodic boosting to
| stay put -- if they don't, satellites decay and de-orbit
| after a few years.
|
| The plan is, I think, to regularly retire (de-orbit) and
| replace these satellites so they can continuously improve
| the design, and as a nice side-effect any collisions or
| otherwise misbehaving objects will at least stop being a
| problem after a known maximum span of time.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Note that this would also be the observable effect of simply
| prioritizing ICMP while dropping other protocols.
|
| Probably a better thing to observe is loss and congestion on
| normal TCP sockets, using retransmit counters, congestion
| window collapse, etc.
| voldacar wrote:
| > Quite possibly the Antarctic ice shelves will be destablized
| decades ahead of schedule, leading to gradual but inexorable sea
| levels rising around the world. This may paradoxically trigger an
| economic boom in construction
|
| this is known as the broken window fallacy
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No, the fallacy is "the economic boom is good, so climate
| change is OK".
|
| Noting the existence of the boom isn't the fallacy. Advocating
| for it is.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think this is the psychology behind a lot of investors.
| Breaking even after an unnecessary loss is seen as good.
| walrus01 wrote:
| comparatively "rich" countries might have a boom in seawall
| construction and coastal related construction, but I'm much
| less optimistic about places like Bangladesh.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I don't think it is at all. It falls under the 'that which is
| seen' in Bastiat's original parable.
|
| > I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason
| justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six
| francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless
| child. All this is that which is seen.
|
| What Stross does _not_ say is that because rising sea levels
| are good for the construction industry they are therefore good
| in general. That would be an example of the broken window
| fallacy.
|
| In most cases broken windows truly are good for glaziers, but
| that doesn't mean that we should break windows.
| voldacar wrote:
| Ok granted, yes. When I read it I thought he meant that an
| economic boom will result from all the new construction, but
| I hope you are right that he merely meant that a lot of
| construction will occur, to the benefit of the construction
| industry.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| No it isn't. The only thing they have in common is something
| being a problem.
| baud147258 wrote:
| > leading to a complete phase-out [of ICE] possibly as early as
| 2040
|
| I have a hard time believing this, if it's something that's
| supposed to happen globally, including for all good
| transportation, which is a category where I don't remember seeing
| much electric vehicles. And as for it happening globally, that'd
| mean everywhere on the globe, there'd be enough electricity to
| supply all the needs for transportation and agriculture.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| > (Apologies for slow load time: this blog runs on an ancient,
| slow Athlon box and this entry is currently being hammered by
| Hacker News readers.)
|
| Lol, and yet it still loads lickety split compared to something
| like cnn.com for instance.
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