He/Him Jack of all trades, master of none

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • My go-to is to just beg them to play Kerbal Space Program

    They argue that, if the moon landing could be done way back then, with modern technology, it should be possible to quickly get back to the moon.

    In the 1960s, getting to the moon was the most important thing in the solar system. The Soviet Union and the US spent ungodly amounts of money and risked uncountable lives in this endeavor. We did the thing, and now we’ve done the thing. We aren’t willing to risk those lives or spend that money anymore. New missions have to be much, much cheaper and much, much safer.

    Technology has definitely improved, but there is a physical limit to the amount of energy that you can pull out of a given mass of kerosene and liquid oxygen. Getting to space hasn’t gotten any lighter, and fuel mass has always been the biggest hurdle. Again, play KSP. It will brand the tyranny of the rocket equation into your soul.

    They also argue NASA could have just reused the same designs as the Apollo missions if they actually went to the moon.

    They could, in the same way that we could start sending children underground to mine for coal again

    To summarise,

    a) Been there, done that. Anything new will involve sending more mass than the Apollo missions had to deal with. Tyranny of the rocket equation: more mass means more fuel means more thrusters means more mass means more fuel…

    b) I could do some research and come back, but there is no answer to this that will satisfy a moon landing denier, because any explanation would require a baseline understanding of chemistry and also trust in the institutions that examine these moon rocks.

    c) The answer to a also applies here









  • I’m going to push back a bit. Ending doesn’t necessitate death. A movie ends. You don’t need an end to have a beginning, either—the positive integers begin at 1. Your second sentence is begging the question. You assert that without death there couldn’t be endings, and change is a kind of ending, so without death there couldn’t be change. But plenty of things change without dying. I used to be a baby. My infancy ended without my infant death.

    If we take OP’s question to include anything that could even metaphorically be compared to death, then there wouldn’t even be such a universe, because any instant in time could be described as the “death” of a prior instant in time





  • I’ve already sent feedback to Walmart about my refusal to buy anything with a digital price tag. The thing is, I believe them when they say that prices are only updated between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. The problem is that that policy could change literally any time.

    Walmart has every inch of their store covered in cameras. They have facial recognition systems so they know who I am the moment I walk in the store. They know I buy graham crackers. They know I’ve put up with price increases in the past. What is preventing them from adding $0.10 to those graham crackers’ price tag the moment I walk down the crackers aisle? Literally nothing. They could, and that’s reason enough for me to boycott