Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Lex Fridman: "I'm going to do a deep dive on Ancient Rome. Turns out it was a land of contrasts"
(xcancel)
Elon Musk in the replies:
Isaac Asimov:
(From a 1968 letter quoted in Yours, Isaac Asimov.)
Also, the whole point of the foundation series (one of them) was that overconfidence in psychohistory is bad, actually. Like, foundation and empire opens with a pretty clear allegory for Bellisarius and Justinian, but the whole rest of the book is about "actually it turns out that there are circumstances outside of our model that can fuck shit up because we didn't predict that psychic powers would be a thing and now it's all fucked!"
For someone who supposedly read a lot of sci-fi I don't know that he actually read them.
@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.
Point taken. I still think the Luna series is great!
@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
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.