This program has cost nearly $100 billion to date. Yesterday's launch alone accounted for $4.1 billion in direct costs.
Saying "it was either this or that" doesn't make sense at these magnitudes. They could have hired a professional aerospace filming team for a ridiculously overpriced $10 million and it would be an _actual_ rounding error.
Agreed. There was high quality alternative streaming from other sources, how come NASA couldn't get their shit together? The spectacle is important for public support!
I still don't understand why they didn't show the final 10 seconds countdown, basically the most iconic moment of any launch. They literally hid the clock! I was hoping to count it down with my family.
If they were scared of accidents they could have streamed it with a delay.
What is the current best way to watch the take off? I was out of town and want to watch it with family this weekend in fake/pretend real time, so would love a good YouTube or otherwise source :)
The most likely explanation for the Loch Ness Monster, of course, is that it's entirely made up and didn't require an actual sighting or a real physical phenomenon, ever, to trigger people's imaginations.
My daughter likes most games as long as I'm willing to play with her. She dislikes excessive gore/violence (but has a good threshold anyway... she can watch me play Left 4 Dead 2 even though she finds it scary).
She likes relaxing sandbox games such as "Tiny Glade", story/puzzle oriented games like "Planet of Lana" or "Cocoon", racing games like Mario Kart 8 and Need For Speed (she's awful at it, but she likes it), platformers like "Princess Peach: Showtime!", and will gladly watch me play Space Marine or even help me with XCOM Enemy Unknown (by pointing out enemies). We're currently having a hoot playing "It Takes Two", which is a coop split-screen puzzle platformer.
I think pretty much her only requirements are: "not too scary" and "I can play next to daddy". That's it. Not necessarily just "Girl Games".
One thing I discovered with her is that we both have very low tolerance for "talkie" games with lots of cutscenes where you must skip through all the pointless dialogue. They are very kid-unfriendly (kids want to just play the game and read very slowly anyway, if they can read at all) and, if I'm being honest, also adult-unfriendly. Most games have crap storylines anyway, just give us the gameplay and imply the larger plot briefly, much like Planet of Lana does.
As an explanation of Fermi's Paradox it fails to explain why, if all these dead civilizations are detectable enough to get destroyed, we haven't detected any. Even if they are now extinct, their emissions must have been great enough to get them killed. So where are they?
It's very, very unlikely all of them went quiet because they learned of this out of pure theoretical reasoning. So where are their "corpses" so to speak?
And if they cannot be detected easily, because they are too far apart or emissions are near impossible to detect or recognize as evidence of intelligent life (the more likely actual explanation of Fermi's Paradox other than the simpler "they just aren't there"), then there's no risk of destruction.
Exactly. I think it's popular because it takes a difficult question and answers it with a conceptually elegant answer that has an evocative and spooky nature metaphor. Unfortunately, since it's so poorly grounded, any second order imagery built off it doesn't really add an explanatory power and usually just winds up as a tortured metaphor.
For example, Yancey Strickler's The dark forest theory of the internet blog post (which he later spun into a book) that made it so popular in think pieces like this completely misunderstands even the dark forest theory metaphor itself.
> Depends on the context. We certainly knew nobody else had nukes.
You wouldn't be able to know this over the vast distances of the universe.
People are arguing two contradictory things: these are unfathomable alien civilizations with motivation and timescale we cannot comprehend, but we would perfectly understand their tech level, location, and capability of striking back.
It doesn't add up. It's a scifi premise needed for interesting plot conflict.
The laws of physics apply to the civilization of alien fish too, it's not a human specific timescale.
They have nothing to fight over with us, no reason to spend effort developing weapons to reach us, if they do have weapons they'd have a much higher probability of wiping themselves up first, and no way for their weapons to reach us within a time boundary that makes sense for any sentient race.
Dark Forest seems to be based on a scifi/fiction need to have conflict with "the other", which is thrilling but doesn't necessarily reflect the real cosmos.
That's still making assumptions based on our human understanding of the cosmos. Our "laws of physics" could be a localized understanding in our region of space, and much, much, much more powerful entities could operate outside of that, where our perception of time and scale does not meaningfully apply. It would be near-zero cost to destroy potential threats, so they might as well. It's like humans eliminating pests and pathogens. It's standard hygiene, a low cost preventative practice. Nobody is targeting a single bacterium, they're just wiping down dirty spots.
It's an interesting concept in the book because of how imaginative it gets with scaling.
I don't think it gets the scale right, and I don't think it's low cost or even sensible for a civilization to do. I think it's mostly a scifi book's plot device, at best a non-serious thought experiment.
Except I added in this and other comments why it's not a very convincing explanation for Fermi's paradox either.
In other words,
> answer: because they're all dead, or in hiding
I understand this is what the Dark Forest theory argues, but it works because it's meant for a scifi book; it's just not a very good explanation for the real universe.
reply