New Mars Forums

The H2M has been put into other topics in the past I think from a former Mars society previous person that formed his own group, I want to say Christin or something like that was the name ….
will see if I can fine the posts later...

Looks to me like the regulatory hurdle is still unsurmounted.  I told y'all that would be a tough one.  Not a peep out of anybody in some weeks now.

Plus,  there is a tropical storm headed for the vicinity of Brownsville.  Spacex is going to have to put all its "precious" indoors till the storm passes. 

GW

HAHAHA as a Californian I find the comments here humorous. We are the most populous state. We have an economy that dwarfs the rest of the individual states. We are forward thinking, open, and progressive. We export culture, technology, agriculture, and a promise of a better future. We don’t have everything right, but we have more going for us than not. Stick with TX and wear a burka. Live in FL and die from poor education in science.

Wildfires are largely due to federal failures. We can’t manage what we don’t own. If anyone wants to outline where state land is burning down I’m happy to concede.

Given the current climate issues and the persistent nature and cadence, technology is going to quickly catch up with some solutions simply because there is a dollar to be made.

The drones don't necessarily need to extinguish the fire.  If they can pinpoint it rapidly and slow its rate of growth, then ground based forces with much greater capacity can move in.  Firefighting is often staged.  There is a first response, second response, etc.  The principle is to mount a rapid and continuous aggressive attack.  The more rapid the first response, the more successful the second response will be.  If a fire gets beyond a certain size, it will be beyond the capacity of a fire engine and hydrant to extinguish.

Fires tend to grow on a t-squared basis.  That is to say, heat output increases with the square of time since flaming ignition.  Some fires involving vertically stacked combustible materials will grow of a t-cubed basis.  For most fires, if the fire crew takes ten minutes to respond instead of five, then they will be facing a fire with four times the heat output.  That is a huge difference in severity.  If drones can pinpoint fires early, allowing fire crews to arrive just a few minutes earlier in the fire growth sequence, the difference in success rate will be quite dramatic.  If they can deploy water mist to reduce fire temperature and retard growth, better still.  Sometimes, small things can make a big difference, especially when severity is more than a linear function of time.

For Louis ... modern neural networks have nothing to do with step-by-step programming that originated in the dawn of the computer age.

Here is a web site that offers a simplified explanation of the technology, and gives a bit of history.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/deep- … n-english/

(th)

tahanson43206,

It's not that China doesn't have the potential to be a great nation, but communists focus on people.  Only small minds do that.  Great minds focus on ideas.  Their system of governance is a failed retread of an idea that was a failure from its inception, that has succeeded in bringing about prosperity nowhere on planet Earth, for so long as people have attempted to implement it.  The only reason China still exists as a nation is their adoption of capitalist economics principles, because had they continued on with communist economics principles, China would've greatly resembled sub-Saharan Africa.

Apart from that, as Peter Zeihan noted, China is an old folks home with a terminal demography.  25 years after their government's 1 child policy, it takes another 25 years to produce a new batch of 25 year olds.  Their children will be taking care of the vast sea of elderly people now, else that impressive population stat will cease to exist inside of 10 years, although that may be inevitable now.  Half the population there is near or over the age of 50.  Look at the crude birth and death rate per 1,000 for their 2020 census.  In the next 10 years, their population growth rate will be negative, since well over 50% of their population will be at or near retirement age, and the other 700 million will either be making robots like mad to take care of mom and dad so they can work, or that population stat will be half of the number of people in India 20 years from now.  The same is true of Russia nowadays.  They're more of a threat to themselves than anyone else.

China's continued existence is now predicated on exports to foreign countries, because if they stop doing that then their wealth evaporates, both their national economy and military atrophies into uselessness, and they basically go back to living the way they did before they adopted capitalism.  The Chinese people send their money abroad, especially to the US, because they realize that they're only one more currency manipulation away from financial ruin if they reinvest into their own country.

Controlled chaos is normalcy over here in America, especially for our military.  We wrote the manual on modern military operations, but never read it, because we've been at war for so long now that constant fighting is all we've ever known.  Remember that Russian special forces gaggle that tried to attack a Marine artillery unit in Syria?  That didn't go so well for them, did it?  Everyone else, including our allies, freaks the hell out whenever things are the least bit chaotic, from their own point of view.  The only form of stability that America has ever had, has been constant change, which is what we thrive on.  Whenever we begin to stagnate, then we're really screwed, but nothing of the sort has happened since the founding of this nation.  Nobody who has bet against America has ever left the game with their shirt on their back, so it's probably not a good idea to re-test that theory after 200 years of history all running in one direction.

Not relying upon centralized authority is why America can be presided over by a senile old man surrounded by evil clowns, but nothing materially changes.  There's no real power invested in that person, because our founders were so very wary of one person having unlimited authority.

One thing's for sure though, and that's that nobody is desperate clamoring to get into communist China.  In contrast, everybody and their dog still wants to come to America, because we still do new ideas and big ideas, such as taking humanity to Mars.  If our system of chaos were ever to befall China, there would be a revolution in a heartbeat, because that's how much the people living over there detest their living conditions.  We worry about cheeseburgers being $1 or $1.50.  They worry about importing enough pork and chicken and legumes to prevent millions of their people from starving to death.  That's a pretty stark contrast.  We still import oil because part of our national strategy is to consume everyone else's oil first.  None of our food is imported, except by choice, to provide an even more bewildering array of meaningless choices to people who can't figure out that they're being terrorized by a bunch of evil clowns hiding behind the dark curtain.  My old boss, a Canadian man living in America, told me you know that you're successful when you can have a bunch of idiots working for you, but still manage to make money hand-over-fist.

Are things any less desperate for some people in America?  No, but people here wear their troubles as a badge of honor, rather than a mark of hopelessness.  I wouldn't trade any of the economic, health, or other issues I muddled my way through as a young man.  It's how I became who I am, and I don't look down on those experiences, because they were necessary.  How can you know what success looks like if you never experience a failure?  Moreover, how can you ever learn and grow without failure?  That's the part that zips right over the heads of people living in societies like communist China.  Rather than putting the brush down after painting themselves into a corner, they keep hoping that someone else will come along to remove them from their corner.  The only people who can do that are them.  That's what they still don't get.  That is why people still come to America.  Those are the people who realize that it's time to put down that stupid brush.  The ones they left behind will never "get it".  If they did, then people would no longer feel the need to come here.

China's fixated on taking a piddly little island off their coastline, filled with their fellow Chinese people, as if that will change the situation they've created for themselves.  That is akin to America worrying about how to take over Cuba or Haiti (who for all intents and purposes may as well be Americans)- because that would solve our problems, right?  Meanwhile, entrepreneurs in America are well on their way to figuring out how to take over an entire planet tens of millions of miles from home.  Just think about that for a moment.  A nation with more than triple our population wants to invade Alcatraz while the richest men and women in America want to invade an entire planet... to both provide a second home for humanity and, as always, to make that next almighty dollar.  If that's what China is betting the farm on, then yeah, I'm still betting on America, because the alternative is pure idiocy.

Artificial intelligence but we know its got to be broken to make it work