The impact of Starship is underestimated beyond measure

Certainly some were paying attention and saw that one engine off center was able to bring that heavy prototype mass up, levitate it and then bring it back down very gracefully. And apparently the next landing strut system will be able to land the ship on uneven ground. Think of the PR impact of just launching the Roadster into space. But this is way, way, way beyond just disrupting the telecom industry that can't even handle neutrality or the Airline industry that pollutes the sky. There is a sense in which this step with Starship, with the first one that goes into orbit seems to guarantee Mars. Not minimizing at all the challenges but that is how it really seems. The former atmosphere of Mars isn't gone just displaced and not actually displaced by that much time, space or energy. Micho Kaku a decade ago said: why aren't we already teraforming Mars? We apparently need only to nudge some comets and rocks into precise slowly degrading Martian orbit where they will slowly heat and dissolve their content to the surface as they interact with the remaining Martian atmosphere while warming it. No way around this nudging method that lets the pent up energies in astronomical trajectories do the work. Its not like we've found a dinosaur ICE vehicle and we're going to restore it by making it someone how run correctly with 1% of the ancient fluids still left in it. No, we're going to put the fluids back in. Our tech and governmental cooperation will be used to make sure that this revived relic doesn't pollute again. Restoring the Martian magnetosphere also seems to have the same type of aspects in our favor, incredibly, per some of the writing either at L1 or on the planet's surface it doesn't seem to take much material (at L1 it may be 3 rocket loads worth of material) nor a huge amount of energy nor tech that we don't already have a lot of experience with and can already build now- again it turns out in the L1 case to be nudging or deflection operation where gravity keeps your splitter in place and a comparatively not that powerful strategically place field umbrella does the splitting or deflection. It also doesn't seem to be a one shot problem because it doesn't seem to preclude redundant, resilient, segmented, fail-safe systems by cost or unique placement or time scale. Finally it seems possible the percolate in the soil problem may be mitigated or solved by the effects of nudging the material atmosphere back into place (total conjecture on my part) or through microbes.

The point of all this is that it will be obvious to us on an unconscious level just by the appearance of the Starship that in a sense all of this is already done. Its seeing a 74 that we see fly from LA to Sacramento but also know can fly around the world. Moreover unmanned missions will help build out the critical infrastructure of Mars. Unmanned missions have been the whole history of mars exploration. All sorts of stuff will pop- maybe mid point stops that are more regularly stocked up and make flights safer and easier.

Lets make a point about autopilot. There is a sense in which being able to slow down and avoid pot holes is crossing a threshold. City streets yes of course. But people miss I think that the tech so far was deaf, dumb and blind and reading tea leaves weaving disconnected signs or pictures together and still doing 10x better than humans because it had 1000 years per second of human time to chess master each move out. But adding the time 4th d or the time dimension to weave those images into more concrete patterns or streams and adding an exaflop is giving Master Po sight. The Dragon capsules if I am not mistake auto-piloted up and down. Some of this might be part of why Musk said the impact of AI (general or not) is less than 5 years away and by implication reality will start to be come more pliable more dream like. What it also means is the build out of Mars will be highly automated. To me that means at a speed we will find unimaginable. Things like MAD made sense but we're going to move beyond bipolarity and the tech moratorium to survive, its like a weening process.

One wonderful thing about Starship is that while Tesla and Starship never do "retro" the Starship looks a little like Buck Roger's ships or some of the early sci fi visions so its really tapping in to that thing where prophets a thousand years ago were looking into Hollywood Movie theaters and looking into the imagination that later to an extent became concertized in theater but here in a vehicle. Like the old Spanish Caravels Columbus used Starship has some striking similarities. The journey to the moon will be 1/5 to 1/8 as long as Columbus coming to the New World (negative connotations aren't lost on me) journey to Mars about 3x as long as his longest trip across the Atlantic or 2.5x the time of the trip of the Mayflower. Starships holds about the same cargo as one his ships but has 2x the crew or passenger capacity. Seems like the Pinta could fit in the Starship's cargo hold. Its like the patterns never change we leave the old world behind as boat drivers as river crosser as raft riders. David Gray's "Sail Away" describes our meandering, our stumbling ever on. As does Audioslave's "I am the Highway," and Kansas' "Dust in the Wind" and Looking Glass's "Brandy"

There will be a sense when the first Starship makes it into orbit that this is the greatest moment in human history (secular- but it is a resurrection like rising from a tomb.) More than if we had recognized the first ships to set off for the new world (loaded as that comparison now is with meaningful baggage,) its like humanity going from ages 1years to 2 years. I don't think it keeps the light of consciousness alive because I think everything is conscious, consciousness is not an aspect it is the entirety but it seems super intelligence, already every where present likes immaturity and hence mankind and babies. This one moment might be enough to drag the US out of its endless depression over having pissed away its future for the last 70 years on total idiot fossil fuels- everything about fossil fuels is dumb. It should generate countless Nobel prizes. Good if Tesla accelerates the implementation of full green on its methox. Neutral will never cut it.

 

What a better vision than the endless bailouts of fossil fuels and the depravity and austerity that has generated. Austerity how funny, impoverish your state and you become impoverished generally. If we ask why we don't have a carbon tax already? A good question because Caltech just generated a process that can efficiently split CO2 by accelerating CO2 atoms at gold foil so we could just make fossil fuel fuel firms pay to clean up their mess (including total historical load) on their way out the door- not by stuffing it in the ground to be possibly belched back out or idiotically be used to get more moronic fossil 'fuels' out of the ground but by creating pure oxygen and solid carbon which can be used of cleaning impurities from water etc. But why don't we have it a carbon tax already? Answer: because fossil fuels aren't profitable to begin and never have been and can't exist at all without literally huge direct subsidies and externalities (fossil rent seeker morons whine about Tesla's polution credits ha!!!- Tesla doesn't need them and they hardly counter act the massive net negative subsides that fossil fuels need) so fossil because they are thermodynamically lean or negative relative to total energy and societal resources into their logistical-use stack and gain out- are radically economically inefficient and unsustainable. Ecologically Buckmister Fuller said 100K in 1980 dollars per gallon of gas true cost might not be far off. The Iraq wars were bailouts of fossil fuels, Enron was a bailout, 911 a bailout, Afghanistan a bailout, TAARP a bailout, corona virus a cover and a bailout because you'll note fossil fuels collapsed again right before corona virus then got bailout monies (with CV as an excuse- instead of being nationalized to be wound down as should have happened countless times) and the tarrifs on solar another bailout and the tariffs generally a fossil fuel bailout. Rex Tillerson wanting to fund (bind) social security to a carbon tax was another attempt at creating a useless mote around fossil fuels so they could say the fossil fuel industries inherent permanent scarcity inducing thermodynamic problems (which are technically and practically insoluble-without a level of tech that would obviate their need with obvious free energy access) were social securities problems or pre-condition of allowing people necessary retirements- more terrorism and hostage taking is what that is. All this became obvious when Goldman let the cat out of the bag by saying when it was fighting with big oil during the 07 collapse

 

@RP:

You're not a greenie- you're clearly an employee for natural gas propaganda (paid lying in forums,) same as Southerndude. BlueKona in that group too? RP, did you miss a single fossil fuel talking point lie? Seems not. Getting rid of NG should be a much higher priority than getting rid of any other kind of fossil fuel because its such a line of utter bs and back peddling placation about not doing anything. Most important thing is to cancel the investors ROI and making them disgorge the ill-gotten gains, should start making them pay for the damage they've done even if it discourages future investments and chills markets.

1. Can't meet Paris if natural gas is allowed to continue to exist. Trying to suggest that NG reduces emissions is a Trump admin talking point- it raises them radically when the money is wasted on dirty NG.

2. Getting rid of natural gas will lower electricity prices fast even when we rip out natural gas infrastructure, can't risk leaving the infrastructure being reactivated, have to lawfully destroy it and make sure its investors foot the whole bill as the price of not looking where they were investing. NG has radically raised prices not reduced them!

3. Getting rid of fossil fuels will lower electricity prices and radically improve the US economy it will make losers of the people who are making the US a loser.

4. Nuclear is welcome as long as it is Thorium

5. Battery backed wind and solar are a thousand times more than needed to completely and quickly
replace all fossil fuels while massively reducing prices.


Utter BS to say a carbon tax must raise consumer prices. Absolutely not!!!!. Very easy to see why.
8 Minute Energy battery backed utility scale solar was 1.1 cents a kwh in CA a year and a half ago. Its probably under 1 cent a kwh and that price will drop to 1/1000 cents a kwh in no time. Battery backed roof top solar no matter what they say will be cheaper as we already reached Seba's God point. These rates for battery backed solar don't change much in the coldest states in the country. 4 years ago in snowy clime Germany even brand new natural gas plants were getting shut down and decommissioned there because they couldn't even compete with solar (at 2016 rates) that wasn't yet battery backed. There is no surplus green there is just the idiocy of not immediately voiding existing natural gas contracts and idling their plants to always prefer green and only use fossil fuels as emergency back up if there is not enough green. Natural gas is not only toxic it is totally unreliable speculators paradise on prices (solar is a rock solid flat curve) and it doesn't even have reliable suppliers- look how many just went bankrupt (CV was not the cause it was set in stone prior to CV-CV was a cover) and look in the South Pipelines got canceled just because communities installed heat pumps in their home- that is all it takes even under the Trump admin to nix them.

So lets do the math on the natural gas fraud. Natural Gas coops retail in Kentucky for 6 cents a kwh and that is highly subsidized so the cost is actually higher. Cost in CA for the same damn useless fire starting, black out, gas out inducing product with proceeds going to gouging filching rent seeker frauds of power producers- set to hit 21-24cents a kwh where consumers not using less triggers more of their guaranteed in utterly corrupt law profits when they don't compete in the first place where they get cost of living increases but paying wage earners haven't had them in 50 years. So its easy. You remove the carbon subsidy- which already is a carbon tax that you BlueKona already pay! That reduces what you're paying right off the top but immediately bankrupts and it keeps bankrupting them way beyond the point where they claim their fake profits. Then you stack a carbon tax on top of that for extra millstone. Then you refuse to allow them to raise rates- they don't get to continue to pass fraud onto the citizen- or end consumer. In fact your roll back rates more in line with where we should be at with solar. You also make these frauds self insure- and bar insurance companies and pensions from buying into their obvious fraud. As they go bankrupt you nationalize them and permanently delist them and tear out their infractructure to make sure the fraud can't be reinstated- and you bill them for the cost of demolition. You also begin to prosecute the prostitute legislators who signed onto their frauds selling out the public. See, easy your power bill and consumer bills drop, US economy sores (because we can replace this crap with green in a heartbeat) and we set a great example for anti fraud and the world as we rejoin Paris. But in case BlueKona you weren't paying attention there is a lot of room between 24 cents a kwh and less than 1 cent a kwh but not enough to float the natural gas fraud. Your libertarian bent may have a hard time reconciling this with freedom but I call this the definition of freedom, this is the public's freedom to be free of theft and free of reckless investors who think they can play drunken chicken with locomotives and have the public bail them out every time. Sets an excellent precedent.

 

'Southerndude' To live with yourself given other people own you, you'd have to be a conservative nut job or con-tard right? Listen to any Limbaugh lately? Notice, there was no name calling there just your fun little schizoid game of implication. But nice little ball pass to BK on: those numbers couldn't be real? Of course they're not, the numbers BK proffered are off by orders of magnitude.

BK- more talking points. Ah, no! solar doesn't take up a bunch of land! Spoke to a Fuji solar engineer about 10 years ago on this. It would take covering about %13 of US roof tops with solar (even prior to battery back up and with old panel much lower efficiency rates) to replace all forms of US energy and fuel consumption. Here is your counter factual: Buffet's new distraction from his NG pushing is a 11 sq mile solar and battery installation that will supply 30% of LA City's energy. And its 1 megawatt per acre that falls on average for most of the globe. You're trying to push 1/10 numbers. It is much cheaper to rip out existing natural gas or coal and replace it with solar and battery and the pay off is close to instant and must be passed on to rate payers to help accelerate the bankrupting and permanent replacement of the rest of the hypersubsidized ng rent seeking scam. What you're trying to push is Austrailians paying $600 a month for natural gas for a mobile home on retirement income when it should be $6 a month and zero emmissions solar. Yep. Luckily Tesla has been disrupting that utter bs- AU probably has rolling black outs too as part of energy terrorism- their energy terrorist could have even been setting the fires to distract from their pilfering. See their PM trying to force himself on people while their houses burned while advocating coal? I think even Black Rock didn't have the stomach for that bs- they didn't like watching displaced blonde haired blue eyed whites- not their idea of how climate injustice is supposed to work. Not the group unnecessary rent seeking is supposed to make losers of.