Posted by Astronommy 4 years ago Report

Wonderfully detailed snapshot of a small town America modest entertainment scene! Addieville would do well to hire someone like you to do a blurb on their town for some inland tourist orientation online service; the description of Merci Me alone is a poem.

Kudos for integrating the waiter lady into the date's proceedings so firmly, yet unobtrusively! The linoleum floors and the city person-stupefying frankness of address in those out of the way places would probably sound familiar to anyone who's made a lengthy enough stop driving between larger human hives in the temperate zones.

The round of motive-probing poker between Claire and Black is fittingly stand-offish, given their differences in habitats, similarity of assertiveness levels, and the prejudices needing to be defused, even though the sparks are jumping between the two all the way through.

Can't wait to see how differently will Adam behave in private; Foursi's way of pushing back was passive-aggressive obstinance, and this gentleman seems to be a good deal more headstrong. An interesting take on the usual binary gender dynamic in romance, too.

Thank you for sharing this here! Hope it will enjoy a greater audience response on other public access platforms!

Posted by 4ofSwords 4 years ago Report

I don't know how much an Addieville would appreciate the cynical Claire-veil. I'm a lot more fond of little towns myself, so maybe I could do a little better through my own eyes. Then again, I might not be as up front as Claire about my prejudices. I stayed with a great aunt and uncle for a little more than a month in a town sort of like this, but without the draw of a large used bookstore. Once upon a time it had been a mining town, but these days it's one shaky breath away from being a ghost town.

There are a lot of reasons not to move someplace like that, but I don't know that, absent other responsibilities and with the advent of Starlink, I wouldn't pick a little town like that to wallow in my work-at-home introversion. :)

Posted by Astronommy 4 years ago Report

I don't think they would commission you to diss their town in-character as a Santa Barbarian epicurean, no; then again, there was that "Honestly, It's Not For Everyone" campaign that Nebraska ran, so you never know.

A game released a few years ago called Night In The Woods was a great and exhaustive exploration of that duality of small towns as both cradles of nostalgic coziness, and depressive graveyards of dreams that no one is eager to move into.

And I've heard that Starlink is a blessing and a curse, what with polluting the night sky for the astronomers.

Posted by 4ofSwords 4 years ago Report

>And I've heard that Starlink is a blessing and a curse, what with polluting the night sky for the astronomers.

I might be misinformed, but personally I don't have too much sympathy for the astronomy argument, being an amateur astronomer off and on myself. My thoughts:

I believe they specifically follow the ecliptic, and the only time they're super-visible is right after launch - i.e. they're mostly avoidable and really only a problem at the outset. The most serious astronomy is being done off the ecliptic for the most part (or in space!)

Anything that gets people to look up more is good. Ish. Maybe not everything. Space billboards aren't great.

They are the one of the pieces in the 'colonize Mars' package, both in terms of technology development and paying for it. I'm all for that!

That's my two cents on a very tangential topic, anyway.

Posted by Astronommy 4 years ago Report

I am definitely misinformed on the topic, and don't have the benefit of a personal stake and experience in the stargazing field (cheers for the sights you've seen and charts you've drafted!), so I'll just concede that newer versions of the satellites will be less shiny, as the people at SpaceX have promised they will be.

Don't mean to start a fight over this, but could you explain some of the benefits of the 'colonize Mars' initiative? I thought it was just a wildly dangerous and cost-inefficient PR-serving concept, outside of the pretty cool prospect of at least helping NASA plop a research geodesic down there.

Posted by 4ofSwords 4 years ago Report

'Wildly dangerous' isn't so far from the truth, though it's likely to be considerably less dangerous than ships crossing the Atlantic to the West (or being a native during that same period).

The main benefit of colonizing other planets is diversification. Similar to how monocultures on Earth tends to mean that catastrophes are more likely to be species-threatening, having all of our eggs in this one basket as we globalize (which I am generally for, if that matters!) means that we move toward a monoculture we increase our danger. Perhaps even more significantly, planetary-level events (massive temperature changes, asteroid impacts, etc) are that much more likely to wipe us out, as a species.

Starlink is part of a suite of technologies that are critical for interplanetary colonization. Along with the other companies Musk owns, they're pushing forward: satellite/global communications (so we wouldn't need to wire colonies together), deep rock drilling (the Boring Company, since any viable colony on a planet without a significant magnetosphere is likely to start underground to avoid all the radiation), solar power generatin/storage (Tesla is more famous for batteries, but there's some solar power wing in his big chain of companies), mass production, and of course cheaper, reusable rockets.

I'm not among them, but there are tens of thousands of people willing to take a dangerous, no-returns-planned trip to Mars just to be one of the first colonists.

Think of it kind of like Tesla itself. Trying to establish a new large automobile manufacturer, focusing on expensive, arguably low-quality vehicles that have the selling point of being some of the first real viable commuter electric cars was CRAZY. But it's working. People have an appetite for this kind of dream, which governmental agencies have largely abandoned. Whether or not they get colonists to Mars in our lifetime, people are massively excited by the possibility of it, and are willing to go for broke on the path there.

Posted by Astronommy 4 years ago Report

Thank you for the thorough rundown of all the projected boons of that cluster of dreams! I've heard of the people registering as potential volunteers for Mars missions even knowing the severe risks, and I have huge respect for them, ditto for the engineers and developers responsible for some of that beautiful new tech!

I used to be an admirer of Elon Musk's brand of techno-optimism, but as a superficial person with no time of skill for intensive research of such issues, one plausibly sounding outlook is much the same as another to me, and I've heard some unflattering breakdowns of Musk's stellar-sounding legacy, namely that the degree of innovation SpaceX/Tesla products are fairly hyped up (although even popularizing tech like that is a net good, I loved watching those reusable rockets land tail-first, like in old cartoons!), and those are currently impossible to scale down towards the mass consumer base, or scale up to allow for something like an interplanetary colonizing program, and given that the preventing factors for that are the same that are preventing governments and NGO's from focusing on those areas of development, instead of a worldwide transitioning to cell-powered cars it's unlikely we'll get more than a niche vanity toy for the wealthy, and instead of space exploration there is just renting the Earth's orbit to the large IP companies; some of the Elon's projects have been less than successful, particularly the Boring Company.

I can't say I don't find the sci-fi Space Age branding of those companies and their products alluring, and I do have a boyish romantic soft spot for the likes of Howard Hughes and the bigger-than-life dream projects like the same's Spruce Goose, my fear is that modern day industry captains tend to prove themselves Donald Trumps if you scratch past the surface sheen.

And while I'm fully on board with the necessity of making space and other planets habitable to humanity for the reasons you listed, and acknowledging that baby steps towards a distant goal like that can and should be made at the same time as tackling more pressing issues (like fighting for animal rights while the situation with the human rights is still dire in places), I still can't wrap my head around agitating for getting brave, driven people into an irradiated, glitch-and-you're-dead environment at a converted cost of thousands of dollars per pound when we haven't colonized the oceans yet; I don't think we as a species can have a snowball's chance in heck for making extraterrestrial spaces habitable if we can't do it here on Earth where the conditions are immeasurably more forgiving.

Ask me for to volunteer for a 10% survival chance mission to Venus, Europa or Titan once Mommy Terra is 90% green-powered and at ~0% critical poverty, housing shortage and white supremacy, and I'd jump into that crew module in a heartbeat!

I know, it's entirely unsurprising for someone as envious and purposeless as myself to be leaning left this hard, rejecting the big heroic call to action and trying to downplay the accomplishments of great men.

Posted by 4ofSwords 4 years ago Report

I'm not really a Musk apologist, either, to be honest. My father is, and so I draw a lot of the above from conversations with him. I also lean left pretty hard, and while I have a healthy appreciation for the idea of history being written by the winners, that people like Ford and Washington and Bill Gates are largely lauded while their individual histories are more complex, I'd like to think that I would have antagonized against them appropriately, too.

I think in this particular case where I fall is that Musk's vision is an admirable one, but it's appropriate to also ensure there is a constant vocal reminder of the human costs along the way, both for himself and for his admirers.

With that said, I think Donald Trump is a special breed. If you mean that Musk is a narcissist, quite possibly. I don't really know or have reason to firmly believe one way or the other. But through his efforts - whether innovative, cheerleading, brilliant, or incremental - a number of major technologies are inarguably much further along than we'd have reason to believe otherwise. In that sense, I think he's more in that category with Ford or Gates than Trump.

Posted by Astronommy 4 years ago Report

My congratulations on having a tech-friendly person for a living progenitor! My own father is a born (smallish) businessman, whose sheer determination has been a highly convincing case for the greater bootstrap theory throughout my life, but I'm still holding on.

As far as possible manifestations of Trump-like qualities in powerful people go, narcissism concerns me much less than charismatic demagoguery, which has been known to lead people to do terrible things, to others and to themselves. Widespread public enthusiasm for something can be a great thing, but it also indicates susceptibility to a certain type of rhetoric, and I don't trust anyone who's been designated the spokesman of that interest to avoid the temptation of abusing their position, especially if the people they're answerable to above all else are the shareholders.

That's a general rule, of course; there's plenty of irresponsibly fanned pie-in-the-sky hype going on across the political spectrum. And I don't have anything in the way of incriminating evidence besides the too-much-of-a-good-thing paranoia and class prejudice.

I am grateful for the hastened advent of all that technology, of course! In sciency-spacey games like Master of Orion and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, where scientific discoveries form a consistent sequence of liner or branching breakthroughs, there is ever a burning desire to skip ahead past the intermediary stages to the near singularity-level technology and eliminate some infrastructural issues like pollution and food shortages altogether, instead of struggling with managing them.