I don’t think Apple would want to duplicate anything meta is doing.

Astronomy is very ancient. Certainly older than civilization itself. They didn’t know anything about the Earth orbiting the sun, but they did notice a cycle of the sun tracing a lower to higher path in the sky over the course of a year. It is trivial to set up a line of stones to mark when the sun rises at its lowest and highest points and that gives a way to detect the winter and summer solstices.

If you ask “what is the chance I roll a 6 on this one die roll?” That never changes at 16.7%.

But if you were to ask ‘what if I roll twice and get at least one 6?” That’s 30%

Chance on 3 rolls? 42%

6 rolls? 67%

But if you rolled 5 times and didn’t get a 6 yet, the chance your last roll is a 6 remains 16.7%.

At some point the realization will dawn that it’s not going to be the breakthrough technology and funding will dry up. A few researchers will continue to putter on with a much reduced budget at a much slower pace. And nothing will still come of it until a fundamentally different engineering approach is found.

Putin was facing a west-friendly Ukraine controlling their southern pipeline and bringing their own LNG production online. The longer he waited the worse it would get for Russia. Trump being the first incumbent to lose in a long time really hurt his plans. In the end he decided the damage done to western solidarity was more permanent than it turned out to be.

The lesson is - don’t fuck with the US’s geopolitical and economic interests.

In the long term, it’s the right decision. Nuclear was the right option to get off coal/LNG/oil 20-30 years ago. But now the right option is renewables. They are cheaper than nuclear and can come online far faster. Ironically, the oil and gas industry is pushing for nuclear over renewables because it will buy them more time to extract profits.

The collapse of Russia will be very dangerous. Lots of internal beefs to be settled. I expect Yugoslavia but on a larger scale.

My macs generally last about 8 years before becoming too obsolete. While I’m excited to get an M2, I don’t have a need just yet. I’m guessing I’ll be getting an M4 or M5.

Gotta get that VC money somehow, am I right?

We have a very accurate mathematical model of the universe and it does not have anything in it that requires negative mass.

It’s a bit more well known than that. There is a maximum speed at which anything in the Universe can travel based on the constraints of General Relativity. Things with no mass must travel that speed. Anything with mass is slower. So the only way something could be faster, is if it had negative mass, which does not exist.

Before the Sun goes red giant, its temperature will rise enough for Earth to be out of the goldilocks zone. Currently estimated at 1 billion years.

The Sun is heating up. In 1 billion years the Earth will no longer be in the Goldielocks zone. So we probably have about 500 million years before it becomes a real issue for humans. Hopefully by then we should be able to either move the Earth as the zone moves, or build space habitats.

That’s my question. Who the hell has a rusty razor?!?

You forgot to mention that it’s looking like asteroids are more like gravel than actual rock. So you can’t build anything inside them or spin them without them flying apart.

Too bad we’re finding out that asteroids are really just accumulations of gravel. Also we couldn’t spin them at the needed speeds for artificial gravity without them tearing themselves apart.

Me Skeletal’s Law: “Every Fusion Power article will have someone comment ‘it’s only 30 years away’”.

Fewer than 600 people have been to space. Colonization requires a whole new level of heavy lift capability and a destination worth going to. We are going to have nothing but government funded temporary staffed outposts for the forceable future. For people to permanently move, there needs to be a reason for them to go.

As for the resources, the issue it you have to have a customer for them. The only customers are on Earth and no space-based ore extraction can compete on price. On the flip-side, no Earth based extraction can compete for space construction, but that market will be minuscule in comparison. So it can be profitable- but not if we’re talking ‘benefit to Earth’

Colonizing space requires a compelling reason for the colonists to endure the hardships required. Since the resources can’t be profitably repatriated to benefit Earth, there must be some other reason found.

And just because Earth still has vast resources doesn’t make it ‘post-scarcity’ which requires advances in power generation, automation and social structures that have nothing to do with resource availability.

I really doubt we are even close to a post-scarcity society, and even more that space will help get us there. We already have far more resources than we need here on Earth. There is little value in mining and bringing down additional ores from space.

Also minus the insanely efficient drives. Real propulsion would make most of that society infeasible.

The first company to make a general purpose humanoid robot that’s reasonably intelligent will become a trillionaire. I think we’re still quite a ways off however as there are still lots of engineering and software problems to solve.

That depends. There are some material science aspects of this that might not have a room temperature solution. I doubt We’ll be carrying around super-cooled computers.

They’re no longer extending your free subscription even buying Apple products so I ended up canceling rather than start paying after 2 years of free service.