I guess that photos of the surface of other celestial bodies is cool or something but think of how many PlayStations you could buy with the money you saved if you just took a bunch of worms-eye-view photos of Antarctica and ran them through a neural net
-
Show this thread
-
Like, sorry, but this does not make my heart sing, especially when I think about the price tag, especially when I think about the labor that went into putting something into space we'll never get back I pretty much already guessed that Venus looked exactly like thispic.twitter.com/jKbnkx2UFi
9 replies 0 retweets 15 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @Nymphomachy
I mean yeah but it's not that big a deal Like to put it in perspective the total cost of the Perseverance rover over the planned 11-year mission ($2.75 billion) is still significantly less than the check Disney wrote George Lucas to buy Star Wars ($4 billion)
3 replies 0 retweets 27 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect
That's true But I could conceivably imagine the price of Star Wars being seriously deflated, like in terms of material considerations Star Wars is probably not $4 billion worth of content and making one man happy doesn't cause that much either Space costs are not so overblown
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
-
Replying to @joegross @arthur_affect
I'm saying Star Wars is capable of being deflated. i.e., it absolutely does not necessarily cost four billion dollars in material expenses at fair value to bring a movie into existence. It is UNnecessarily expensive compared to space investigation, which is NECESSARILY expensive
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @Nymphomachy @joegross
Well sure But if you try to cut out the money people in our society generally spend for bullshit capitalist market reasons that's a tremendous amount of money, arguably almost all of it
2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes -
I guess if you mean the relevant thing isn't the amount of money spent (because the value of money is a highly cooked book) but the genuine underlying scarce resources (including human labor) - I mean measuring that is really hard but space is still a tiny chunk of that
1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes -
Like how much metal and manufacturing capacity and human ingenuity went into flooding the nation's car lots with PT cruisers during the disastrous fad in the mid-2000s
2 replies 0 retweets 6 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @joegross
well, sure, but we can still conceivably recycle old PT Cruisers into something less offensive shit we threw up into the sky just stays there
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
That doesn't really matter The reason "recycling" is mostly a sham in the real world is that the Earth is pretty physically big and raw materials for the most part are much much less valuable/irreplaceable than energy (which the 2nd law of thermodynamics says you never get back)
-
-
And even energy/fuel, which is the actual crisis we're fighting over these days, is itself in principle not all that scarce either (the sun blasts us with immense amounts of it every day) The real scarce resource is human effort and labor That's what Marx was all about
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
And however inconsequential you may find the joy sparked by space stuff among space geeks, it's still totally dwarfed by the amount of human labor that goes into projects that never gave anyone any kind of joy at all (most of the military in peacetime)
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes - Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.