tectonic

Seeing both the Starlink mass simulators deploy and the camera view from the last simulators looking back at Starship was really cool.

Really needs sort by distance.

Of course: https://m.xkcd.com/2977/

The level of negativity in these comments is surprising. We can certainly debate whether billionaires should exist at all, but given that they do, here’s one who’s putting his money towards advancing cutting edge science instead of buying a third mega yacht. I am strongly in favor.

Cool, congrats on all the work you’ve put into this!

My laptop has stickers, one of which is a photo of my previous laptop and its stickers. One of those is a photo of the laptop before that…

This is cool!

VIPER lives again!

Yes

That was made by Erik Wernquist, he's awesome. https://vimeo.com/erikwernquist

I agree, soon systems of agents will be trained with good engineering practices not just locally-good code. Already when I work with current SOTA agents I find myself basically pair programming with them, providing senior guidance and cutting off directions of development that will be dead ends while they type all the actual code.

(Hey fizx!)

The first orbital launch attempt from continental Europe, and the first of Europe’s batch of newspace commercial launch startups. I hope they figure out what happened and iterate quickly!

Why is this flagged?

Me too! I learn so much about coding from that server in high school, it was definitely a formative experience, learning to code with other teens all over the country.

One likely source of FRBs are magnetars, which are just absurd objects. We wrote about them in Orbital Index a little while ago (https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2023-03-15-Issue-210/#magne...):

These highly magnetized neutron stars—objects only ~20 km in diameter—have magnetic fields that may reach up to 1015 Gauss, a quadrillion (thousand trillion) times our Sun’s pitiful 1 Gauss. The energy density of just these magnetic fields (via E=mc2) is 10,000x the mass density of lead. Magnetars are a likely source of Fast Radio Bursts and can also emit giant gamma-ray flares—one flare, GRB 200415A, was seen to emit the same amount of energy as our Sun does over 100,000 years, but in only 0.016 s. We don’t really know how these flares form, but if they involve large mass motions, they could also produce gravitational waves, something LIGO and other gravitational wave observatories are watching for. Near a magnetar, “X-ray photons readily split in two or merge. The vacuum itself is polarized, becoming strongly birefringent, like a calcite crystal. Atoms are deformed into long cylinders thinner than the quantum-relativistic de Broglie wavelength of an electron (pdf),” resulting in a breakdown of anything resembling what we think of as chemistry. It’s believed that their magnetic fields decay relatively quickly over about 10,000 years, so magnetars are a transient state. We know of about 30 magnetars so far. Oh, and they may also have volcanoes (sort of).

I think they are more drawing an analogy between the atom one or more black holes with a cloud of particles around them. Black holes are quantum mechanical and so the resulting system could behave much like an atom, including having things that look like energy levels. The universe rhymes.

Memorize your blockchain private key, promise to give half to whoever wakes you.

It’s why we have many tiger’s eyes gemstones and banded iron deposits.

This is more or less why I created Huginn. Excited to see more people thinking about systems that let you set complex triggers to know when the world changes.

NIAC awards are so fun. We write about them frequently in Orbital Index because they're crazy and weird and speculative. Here are some recent favorites:

- https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-05-15-Issue-269/#nasa-...

- https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-01-24-Issue-253/#anoth...

"A proposal for a beam of microscopic hypervelocity (>120 km/s) particles propelled by laser ablation to push spacecraft on fast transit interstellar precursor missions" is fairly representative of these types of awards. :)

We'll be covering this in detail in this week's Orbital Index. https://orbitalindex.com

One thing that's unusual about this mission is that it required a loitering communication satellite orbiting beyond the far side of the Moon to relay communications to Earth. https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-03-13-Issue-260

China's progress and this accomplishment are very impressive, the more the merrier. But NASA does have two nuclear powered humvees driving on Mars at the moment.

Glad you’re a fan! It shouldn’t, unless it was 6+ months I think.

Super cool! We have been tracking this mission in Orbital Index for a while. https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-03-13-Issue-260/#chang...

This mission required a communication satellite that loiters on the far side of the Moon as well to relay communications back to earth. https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-03-13-Issue-260/#queqi...

Slightly longer term, I think the real threat is from synthetic biology + AI.

The number and scale of data centers around Dulles is just crazy. The power consumption must be absurd.

This is false, if your SBSP conversion efficiency on the ground is better than solar panels on the ground then you will add less energy to earth by collecting the power in space and transmitting it to the ground then by changing the reflective albedo of desert to a very nonreflective material like solar panels.

Thank you for summarizing!

Came here to post the same thing, The Story of Earth is excellent!

That’s horrible, I’m sorry for your loss.