Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Common Sense Skeptic" channel.

  1. As an aerospace engineer with 30+ years in automation, robotics and control systems across multiple industries I am sick and tired of trying to explain Elon's PR & BS campaign. The worst part of it is a couple of his companies have had extraordinary success. We can have all sorts of arguments over details but he's managed to get an electric vehicle into mass production. I've worked in the automotive sector and that's an Olympic Gold medal like achievement. We can have all sorts of arguments about SpaceX but that too has managed to develop to the point where they send real astronauts into space to do real astronaut work. Considering their launch costs are significantly lower than Boeing (with all their history) is another Olympic Gold medal like achievement. BUT THEN the list of stupidity is tragically long (if not longer). - Driverless cars, taxis and trucks which was never realistic (for all sorts of reasons) that's now directly contributing to the supply issue. There's a shortage of delivery drives for both small and large vehicles driven by the fact over the last decade people either left that industry or didn't train as truck drivers because they were told there was no future for people in those industries. - Starlink. Go look up Iridium the first space based communications system that was going to change the world. Yeah its still around but its 2019 income was NEGATIVE $162 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications - Starship. Where do we start. Basically Elon says it will take 100 people to mars each trip. According to NASA it does NOT have enough space for 20. - Mars colony. Other than the facts that nobody has even flown there and back yet and Other than the fact Starship can't get the people he claims it can get there, then there is the not very small issue of HOW they stay alive when they get there considering NONE of the technology required has yet been proven to work. - Hyperloop. Other than its an idea that's over 100 years old and been dismissed many times there is only a single thing Elon got right about it and that's the first 4 letters of the name "HYPE". It will end up being studied along with things like Theranos as ANOTHER example of Techno Hype. *AND those are just for starters.
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  2. Yeah I don't think Common Sense Skeptic has done anything for his reputation by going on a channel like this. MAYBE if it was to reach out to people on that side of political divide and get them to start questioning what they hear and see then I'd flip and give him a well done on at least attempting to reach out. BUT I will say I have found the CSS (or at least some of his staff) don't like being corrected themselves. Back on the Video "Of Rockets, Shuttles and Planes" I picked up on a mistake regarding air launched systems. I happen to have a degree in aerospace engineering. Towards the end of that video they implied that for air launched systems you had to spend (of development money) 50% on the carrier and 50% on the rocket. That's NOT TRUE and never was. In most cases companies and agencies doing air launching used available aircraft an dmodified them. CSS used the Stratolauncher as an example and that's one of the very few cases where a specialised air launcher was developed. Its the exception not the norm. I simply corrected their implication. NOT ONLY did I a very rude and snide reply from CSS but they have since deleted my comments and their own. I now reserve my right to be Skeptical of the Skeptic and his motivations. I think he's right on many many things but he's also NOT perfect.
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  3. Sorry to burst the bubble but I am an aerospace engineer and Star Raker was NEVER GOING TO WORK AS PLANNED or SHOWN in this video. The only credible person I ever heard say he could actually make an SST work was Kelly Johnson (lead engineer for the U2 & SR71) but he was ignored by congress in the late 80s. I'm normally a huge fan of CSS but before they posted this they really should have asked the right people. Elon's Starship is nonsense but its not the only nonsense that's been put forward for spaceflight. The most obvious thing to me (because we worked this out in the 1970s) are that its wings are far to large for a spaceplane. Those stubby looking wings on the Space Shuttle are actually very large for a space plane. If you look at many of the pater SST variants like the X30, X37 they have tiny wings. And lets NOT FORGET that the X-37 actually works. It actually took lessons from the Space Shuttle and there are a lot of ENGINEERS who think that it was a step in the right direction. After the giant wing its the pointy nose which is great for supersonic flight and the worst thing possible for re-entry. The reason the Space Shuttle and X-37 have very blunt noses is to create a massive bow shock wave that not only slows the vehicle down but protects the rest of the spaceplane from the re-entry heat. So that big wing and point nose might look good but they AREN'T. After that the list of issues just adds and adds.
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  4.  @commonsenseskeptic  I agree with the basic premise ajr993 puts forward. Angry Astronaut gives way too much credence to Elon Musk's ambitions without critical scrutiny. But we all need to be careful on what we come back with. Your slide/powerpoint list at 10:45 has a fundamental mistake. For a Mars colony to be self sufficient DOES NOT require terraforming, it requires the capability of engineering self sustaining biologic systems. Anybody whos considered the terraforming issue honestly gets answers ranging from its impossible to it'll take many 1000s of years. So any Mars colony in the meantime will live in domes. So putting a terraforming requirement on a Mars colony isn't valid, but the bio-engineering is a must. As you pointed out on you vid in the Musk series (which I am binge watching) you went over the disaster that was bio-dome. I call it a disaster in that it totally failed to achieve any of its basic goals. What it did do was provide a mountain of information on how much WE DON'T KNOW and how far from being successful we actually are. As I mentioned in another comment in that series. Dr. Jonathan Trent one of the worlds leading brains on engineering complex bio-systems pointed that out just after he left NASA. He's coined a term call upcycling. Recycling is where you just take something back to its raw material state and remake the same or similar product. Upcycling is where you use processes to take the waste from the bottom and upcycle it back tot he top. Simple example is water. The rain and other processes are the down cycle as it moves down through process. The evaporation is the upcycle. The planet we live on does this naturally for everything all powered by the sun. What JT is working on is taking waste and using natural &/or modified natural processes to up cycle waste into useful things. There's also a 2nd 1/2 mistake in that list. If they were to terraform Mars the problem with an atmosphere starts with where is it coming from. After that that there's how are you going to hold it. For sure the lack of a magnetosphere is an issue, but the lack of gravity to hold an atmosphere down is a bigger issue. What gives the Earth a sea level pressure of 14.7lbs (101,325kpa) isn't the magnetosphere its the gravity. You do need the magnetosphere to help prevent the solar wind stripping it away but without the gravity its a lot easier to strip away. I told you in another comment about the Alumni from NASA who did a guest lecture when I was an undergrad. These are more of the things he told us about. He's a basic calc. Mars has a surface Area of 144,370,000 km^2. If you wanted an earth breathable layer just 1km thick on the surface you have to find 144,000,000 cubic kilometers of AIR. Fine we could crash some comets and make some water break it down and get some oxygen but air is ~80% nitrogen where's that coming from? Terraforming is a pointless argument because its such an unrealistic topic with no valid answers to ay of the problems. The real issue of ANY off-world colony (ANY WHERE) is how do you keep the people alive and that means water, oxygen, food, waste processing and THAT MEANS and engineered bio-logical upcycling systems. When the top guy on the subject says we can't do it, then all the other arguments are pointless.
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  5. NBN started at $20B then went to $30B and has so far cost $51B but is sitting on a $1B contingency. Then there's the issue that chunks of it are now heading toward obsolescence and will need replacing. Then there's the 5G networks and who is going to END UP PAYING for that. The guy in Charge of Telstra's 5G roll out claimed it was "game changer" the catch cry of the technology scammer. He claimed people would be able to download a 2 hr high def movie in 10 seconds to their phone. Funny how nobody actually asked him "Who actually needs that?" Just like somebody should have asked Elon about Starlink "Who actually needs it?" Just like somebody should have asked Suckerberg about Meta "Who actually needs it?" I am an engineer and there's a lot of technology sold for no other reason than to wow people who are too stupid to realise they are being techno scammed.
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  6. I am an aerospace engineer with 30+ years in automation & control systems. The basic problem is that rocket engines are highly strung systems where you only need to be a tiny bit off and its a major hassle. With respect to Raptor, out side of the team working on it, nobody actually knows the problems. That's for the simple reason we haven't been there through the process and heard about all the problems they have so far overcome. What I can try an explain is what its like working on highly complex systems with simplistic managers. One of the problems with highly strung systems is that even the tiniest fault can be catastrophic. I have worked around race car mechanics and they get the concept because every part of a race car is being pushed to the limit and small things can be huge problems. At SpaceX you have a guy like Elon Musk who dismisses every problem with "We'll just do." He's a lot like the racecar driver and I've met them. They don't care about details, just make the car go faster. You only need to watch one of his interviews for a few minutes to realise he can't handle details. I have worked with managers who are exactly the same and they are nightmares. They don't give a damn about solving any problem or what it will take and they quite often heap loads of pressure and stress onto people. They're a nightmare for people like me who have to deal with the details and SOLVE THE PROBLEMS. I can't tell you or anyone what the actual issue with the Raptor is. It could be something simple that appears trivial and just isn't. It could be a bunch of things. What I can say is that working with managers like Elon Musk makes the process of getting ANYTHING working very difficult and very stressful.
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  7. I'm an aerospace engineer. I work in industrial automation, control systems and robotics. Like so many people Elon relies on people confusing what they see coming out of Hollywood and what's actually feasible. He's not the first, Elizabeth Holmes copied the 1 drop blood testing in Gattaca. David Icke copied his lizard people from the original TV series 'V.' Musk just copies what ever is convenient at that moment. Some of the water from air scammers copied Uncle Owen from Star Wars. As an engineer its incredibly frustrating these days to see what so many people do. I'm grateful to the debunkers for at least trying to set the record straight. Even when the debunkers get something wrong (and they do sometimes) they are at least trying to properly inform people. On one hand YouTube and the rest of social media are great on the other they are a curse that's plaguing society with so much crap and garbage its now almost impossible to fix what needs fixing.
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  8. I'm also an Australian but I did aerospace engineering in America in the late 80s. One Friday we had a visiting alumni do a special lecture. He'd just finished a project at NASA on the feasibility of terraforming Mars. We were pretty exited to hear from somebody who'd actually done the math on making Mars habitable. This was just BEFORE Challenger and when Space Station Freedom was being designed, so at that time we believed that over the next 10-20 years we were going to build a space station, then a moon base before going further. This wasn't a sales pitch to a pack of space junkie clowns, this was a serious talk to serious students and professors. We were shattered to find it WASN'T going to happen. He wasn't even looking at the technology required, just the math of what it would take to raise the temperature 70-90C and then add billions of tons of oxygen and nitrogen to make a breathable functioning atmosphere. His summation was "As well as planets being massive they don't like being changed." Planets are very complex semi-stable systems and such systems with their own cycles that fight back against disturbances. Remember when Jupiter got hit by the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 and the big giant black spots. Jupiter just absorbed that and went back to being Jupiter. That talk never got to the technology because NASA had stopped the project once they realised the scope of the task. Its easy in science fiction but near impossible in reality without god like powers. 30+ years later I was discussing this very concept with a climate expert after a space conference. He'd said in his talk that if we hit a certain temperature point we would have to start geo-engineering. I told him we don't know how to geo-engineer and he confirmed that was true but then added we'd inadvertently done it. So you really are right to call it 'Marstubation' and it still is. Its a bunch of charlatans picking bits out of sci-fi and flogging the ideas to idiots via crowdfunding. Its the old adage of "a fool is easily parted from his money." So what of "maths/engineering/science" or what we now call STEM did you end up doing?
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  9. I'm an aerospace engineer (U. Illinois) and Dr. Jonathan Trent commented a while back that people are not paying attention to just how harsh of an environment Space and particularly Mars actually is. He's also commented that NOBDY is even close to a functioning self supporting closed loop bio-logical system. As a doctor you'd have a more detailed grasp of what it actually takes to sustain life. Beyond water and oxygen there's food and that means DIET. It seems that the space cadet family have just ignored that human beings EAT, PEE and POOP or as I call it the EPP problem. Your an ER doc. Does the human body stop EPP when you put it into an induced coma? And yes I know what its like to come out of an IC. People generally have no idea of going into IC but they sure do remember coming out. I'll never forget the doctor saying "Relax. Congratulations you made it!" What amazes me is that the space cadet family have as a core belief that we must become an interplanetary species to survive, because we have basically broken the life support system on the planet we live on. They then proceed to ignore the issues of life support which are at the core of their beliefs. As doc you might also have better knowledge on the psychology of cults. But my understanding is that all cults have people who CHOOSE to WILLFULLY IGNORE basic facts that are right there to be clearly seen. These are people who can look at something and then deny or dismiss it. Feel free to comment further on that.
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  10.  @commonsenseskeptic  I did aeronautical & astronautical engineering at Illinois in the late 80s. So far love your channel. The fact you are using simple basic math to prove points is fantastic. I totally empathize with your frustration with the "space cadet family" (SCF). I'll call them that instead of a cult. Irrespective of what we call them the point is there is too much of public discussion about technology (across all industries) being presented by people with no technical training or those with technical training who have just thrown away all they were taught. A while back Dr. Jonathan Trent (who is without doubt one of the smartest people I've ever encountered) commented that NOBODY is even close to being able to deploy a fully self sustaining closed loop biological system for off world use. So at the most fundamental basics we don't yet have the technology for long term off world self supporting habitation. That's not to say its impossible but the actual science (both R &D) hasn't been done to where we have a deployable system. Put it this way: If we only had a partial system that was deployable and could recycle SOME air, SOME water and provide SOME food, then why isn't that module already attached to the ISS. Even if it only provided a few cubic meters of Oxygen, few liters of water each week and few kilos of food each month, then that's a huge cost saving because that's supplies that DON'T need to be lifted to orbit. Go back an look at the ORIGINAL Space Station Freedom concepts that merged into the ISS. That was all being done while I was an undergrad. Those concepts called for 6-8 people stationed in space NOT 3. The simple reason why it was quickly scaled back was food, water and oxygen COSTS. Going back to basic math. Look at the next planned lunar mission. The Apollo LM had 75hours for 2 men that's 150 (2 x 75) man hours of life support. When Trump announced 4 people for 2 weeks that became 4men x 24hours x 14days or 1344 man hours. That means you need to land on the moon 9 times as much water, food, oxygen, CO2 filters, etc. and al the hardware to use it. Reducing that mission profile to 3 people on the moon for 10 days brings that back to 720 man hours, almost halving the life support requirement. Basic math is a great tool. Its also something people who like spinning daft ideas hate. In space discussions the ridiculous spin masters are the terraforming people. Way back when I was in college we had a guest lecture from an alumni who had just done a study for NASA on terraforming Mars. He basically told us to forget it. To change a planet that much was technically impossible and he gave us a list of reasons. The number one reason he gave is that planets are massive STABLE systems. For sure at the detailed level they are incredibly chaotic, but at the planetary level they are hyper stable. Otherwise they'd be falling apart. Planetary systems are like mob psychology. Its impossible to predict details like what individual members of a mob will exactly do. Yet you can predict a mobs overall behavior with incredible accuracy. That's one of the basic tenements of Isaac Asimov's psychohistory, which is now a genuine scientific field of study and we see every day in both commercial and political advertising. Its part of why public understanding of climate change is so poor. This entire concept of terraforming mars was DISMISSED by NASA over 30 years ago as folly. This is just a discussion on space. If we start going into other areas of technology like energy, water, agriculture, the ocean systems and the insane public discussions on them we'll be here for weeks. I you want to have a discussion on this stuff let me know.
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  11.  @seemlesslies  Thanks mate. Its not just an aerospace thing. I'm seeing it everywhere with technology reporting. I'm Australian but did my degree in America so I watch a lot of what's going on there as well as other parts of the world and its the same everywhere. All I see are journalists and media clowns dropping buzz words like "AI" and "hypersonic" as some way of saying "What I am saying is 100% accurate." I just heard it this morning. We're having a huge debate over submarines and yet again a journalist was using the "AI" buzzword. Last week it was "hypersonic missiles" and the week before that "space lasers"_ 🤦‍♂🤦‍♂ The other thing I hate are the people who take highly polarised stances without using common sense. I like channels like CSS but damn they get arrogant if they get called out on anything. I started another thread about some things in this video that are just plain wrong. Towards the end they insinuate that air launching requires a 50-50 split in labor and that's just nonsense. Go and look at the response I got from CSS. Do I think Elon is generally a clown who speaks nonsense? ABSOLUTELY YES and he deserves to be outed, but that doesn't mean he hasn't done a couple of decent things even if he lucked into them. Yeah he lucked into Tesla and yeah he's done some stupid things but he's also managed to kick the auto industry out of its shell and got them moving on electric and hybrid drive systems. Yeah SpaceX has some issues but damn its also kicked the US space industry out of its lethargy. That last Soyuz seat cost NASA $80 million. Crew Dragon costs NASA $70 million for 4 seats. SpaceX has broken the strangle hold that Boeing, Rockwell, Lockheed,... etc. have had on the US Space Program. Breaking that stranglehold is arguably the best thing to happen to manned spaceflight since Apollo. The risk is that in his pursuit of attention Elon will send it right back to where its been. I don't know when you graduated, but I graduated in 87/88 and I've watched 2 generations lose their hopes and dreams on the BS of those few companies. We should have built Space Station Freedom in the 90s and been back on the moon by 2001 AS WAS PLANNED. We've lost almost 30 years on the hamster wheel going nowhere fast. My great fear is that Starship is just another hamster wheel. Sorry for the rant.
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  12. Not certain which brand of engineer you are. I did my degree in aerospace and have spent 30+ years in industrial control systems, automation and robotics. Back in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17). Nice guy and I wanted to talk to him about satellite maintenance he that's nice but go look at Helium-3. I did and since I'm Australian I went off to our mining industry because I though if I ever had to chance to fulfill that dream of doing what he did I'd need RELEVANT experience. I thought I knew stuff, but damn I got dozens and dozens of eye openers. During the 2nd 1/2 of the 2000s and 1st 1/2 of the 2010s we built dozens of new mines to feed the Chinese beast. Most of it was in remote locations some of it was near towns and the difference between construction in remote areas is staggering. Really basic construction stuff like concrete, scaffolding, cranes all become exercises in logistics and planning. Then there is the basic thing of accommodation and services that support the people who work there. On more than a few occasions people couldn't understand why I wanted to work on the stuff around the accommodation camp. Things like the water, sewerage, domestic power and entertainment systems. Guess what if we build a Moon base or Mars base people are going to eat, pee & poop and want to be entertained. Someone has to know about that stuff and even in companies that do this stuff every day there are head office geniuses who IGNORE what they get told. I got a monster reality check on supporting infrastructure and its way more involved than people think. Despite all that people DO KNOW from real experience across all sorts of fields of science and engineering there's always people who think they know better. What CSS is showing is that Angry is just armchair expert who knows nothing about doing real world science and engineering.
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  13. Yeah its like an less gross but more icky version of Event Horizon.
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  14. Yeah I don't think Common Sense Skeptic has done anything for his reputation by going on a channel like this. MAYBE if it was to reach out to people on that side of political divide and get them to start questioning what they hear and see then I'd flip and give him a well done on at least attempting to reach out. BUT I will say I have found the CSS (or at least some of his staff) don't like being corrected themselves. Back on the Video "Of Rockets, Shuttles and Planes" I picked up on a mistake regarding air launched systems. I happen to have a degree in aerospace engineering. Towards the end of that video they implied that for air launched systems you had to spend (of development money) 50% on the carrier and 50% on the rocket. That's NOT TRUE and never was. In most cases companies and agencies doing air launching used available aircraft an dmodified them. CSS used the Stratolauncher as an example and that's one of the very few cases where a specialised air launcher was developed. Its the exception not the norm. I simply corrected their implication. NOT ONLY did I a very rude and snide reply from CSS but they have since deleted my comments and their own. I now reserve my right to be Skeptical of the Skeptic and his motivations. I think he's right on many many things but he's also NOT perfect.
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  15.  @paulpinecone2464  I'll pay that. 👍👍👍👍👍👍🤣😅🤣😅😂
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  16.  @skylarkesselring6075  DON'T LECTURE PEOPLE WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT I have over 30 years of automation, robotics and control system experience. I have a degree in aerospace engineering and the second highest qualification for safety engineering available anywhere. I have also worked with vision guided robotics, but only in a limited way. I ACTUALLY KNOW what I am talking about and you are just repeating PR. I'm tired of trying to explain how clowns like you who have caused disasters like the Boeing Max-8 because people like YOU refuse to listen to answers you don't like. If the software systems you claim are so good then how did the Max-8 crash and crash TWICE? Its infuriating to be lectured by yet another moron who has no grasp of the difference between the fantasy world of gaming and the real world of flesh and bone where there's NO reset button. In my work we don't get 2nd chances and we have NO TOLERANCE for fools - they get people killed. I can tell you're not an engineer because you're repeating garbage PR. You certainly know NOTHING about real time sensor & evaluation systems let alone safety related systems. Learn to think and reason in future.
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  17.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  On your comment about specialised vehicles. Sorry but there are so many examples of specialised vehicles outperforming general vehicles in their specialised role that its barely worth considering. There are literally 100s of examples of cars, boats, airplanes, tools, machines,... etc. Here's the simplest I can think of - the spork (a combination fork and spoon). Its not as good of a fork as a real fork or as good of a spoon as a real spoon but then forks are almost useless as spoons and spoons are almost as useless as forks wile a spork can do both well enough that campers use them because it saves space and weight in their rucksack.
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  18.  @zpettigrew  Go look up Patrick Boyle here on YT. He's a fund manager who does a channel and listen to what he says about Musk. He's as monotone bland as a person can be but his assessment is as hilarious as it is brutal.
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  19. Go and have a look at the Russian Moon Rocket the N-1. See what happened when they tried and you'll understand that people who know have known for a long time that starship was going to have these issues.
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  20.  @GunSmoker  Well said 👍👍😂😂🤣🤣
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  21. Lets look at one of the real tragedies here. Chris Anderson has taken his creations TED & TEDx which were (past tense) brilliant and trashed it. Here's some examples of what I mean by brilliant. These are very intelligent highly skilled people giving us introductions into their work. FYI - I am an aerospace engineer and the first 4 are all STEM people. Jonathan Trent (formerly of NASA). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8lWDmz7wVU Emily Calandrelli - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9haKpJakU4 Bill Crawford - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF5hDwZa7-0 Don Pettit - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWjdnvYok4I Nick Hanauer on Plutocrats - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8 Cassie Jaye on Men's issues - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WMuzhQXJoY Lera Boroditsky on language - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k These are all amazing talks by amazing people and we'd normally never get to hear what these people have to say or what they are doing if it wasn't for TED & TEDx. I am Australian and had never heard of the that tribe in Australia with no concept of Left & Right before seeing that unless I heard Lera Boroditsky's talk. What Chris Anderson has done to his own creation by sucking up to Elon Musk is a tragedy.
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  22. I'm an aerospace engineer and that's about the best layman's description of the situation I've seen in a while.
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  23.  @brindlebucker4741  I was actually referring to the comment by DancingCactus. As an engineer (and I am not alone) I'm tired of trying to explain why Mars is unrealistic and why we haven't been back to the moon and why a moon base right now is almost impossible because we really are missing a number of key technologies. Most of all I am tired of uneducated social media clowns making great pronouncements. I do actually like the fact that SOME of them are standing up and calling out the (what I call) the Space Industrial Complex (Boeing, Rockwell, Thiokol,.... etc.) who have sucked up billions to NOT deliver. There's plenty of examples. BUT I hate with a passion the ignorance many of them then spout often in the next breath. Angry Astronaut is a perfect example of people who do this. He'll call out companies like Blue Origin for not delivering and in the next breath BS on about Mars colonies as if they were a finger click away. Almost 20 years ago I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) who told me to check out Helium-3. So I went off to the Australian mining industry to learn about mining. I get a hell of a reality check on just how difficult it is. Better still I got a monster reality check that would scare Godzilla on what it takes to support a workforce in a remote location. I can tell you from what I know has been published that NASA has no clue on remote construction or that kind of remote operations. A while back I was sent the official notes from a lunar conference hosted by NASA. Out of 170+ pages there was 1-1/2 pages on maintenance. I can tell from real experience that if there was 170 page compendium on potential lunar bases it SHOULD have at least 120pages on maintenance. For every 1 page on what you might deploy would need at least 4 pages on how you intend to maintain it. Anybody who has ever really been on a mine would know that. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️
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  24.  @michelforever6301  All 3 of your points are invalid for the simple reason they IGNORE other factors or facts. - Starlink needs a customer base, which is rule number 1 of any product or service. Go watch a few episodes of Dragons Den and you'll get that. So WHO actually NEEDS Starlink? NOT who wants to feel cool about having there phone link to a satellite but who ACTUALLY needs it AND will WILL PAY for it. Go ask Iridium how their business is going with a 2019 profit of NEGATIVE $162 million. 5G mobile is going to hit the same wall. Who ACTUALLY needs those download rates to a phone. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ - Vertical farming. Not certain why you have even mentioned this but just go do some real investigation into the subject and you'll find the people doing it have actually done their market research. Water & power aren't just an issue for vertical farming they are an issue for EVERY business going forward. Water & power are one of my pet subjects to beat the crud out of people with economics degrees and greenie brain-space clowns who haven't a clue what it takes to make modern societies actually function. - Hyperloop, just don't bother. It was bullshite when Elon started claiming it as an original idea and its been bullshite ever since. The fact you tired to argue the temperature expansion issue at all shows you're NOT an engineer. Maybe your a physicist like that Romanian moron Sebastian who thunderf00T exposed. That clown has to be the most embarrassing failure the entire physics profession has had in decades. He publicly confused the formulas for thermal expansion (a material effect caused by a temperature change over TIME) with thermal conductivity (energy transfer caused by a temperature differential across a medium).
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  25.  @theultimatereductionist7592  Yeah I get that more than most. The entire concept that we "must become a multi-planetary society to survive as a species," is as much of a fantasy as claiming the earth is flat. Its not based on anything factual. Its just a claim made to justify something certain people WANT not what we the human species NEEDs.
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  26.  @michelforever6301  Now your getting even dumber because you clearly have NEVER BEEN on a farm. A whole slab of my mothers family are farmers. 1) Of those 570 million about 500 million of them are subsistence farmers in the 3rd world. So they aren't going to be clients ANYTINE soon. So that a BS argument and plenty of people have pointed that out. 2) Most of the farmers in the developed world are close enough to mobile services so they DON'T need it either. 3) You just admitted your NOT an engineer. So just stop lecturing a person who is. Because in your ignorance you fail to realise that continuously welded rail systems which are used extensively in the Australian mining sector where I have worked need CONSTANT maintenance from the effects of expansion & contraction due to environmental heating & cooling cycles. YES - YOU REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT
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  27. That's a great answer on predicting all the scenarios. I'm an engineer who works in industrial control systems, automation and robotics. There's so many misconceptions among the general population about technology and its because of clowns like Elon Musk and the media people who over-hype technologies. And some of it is truly ridiculous. On your point My way of getting people to see how ridiculous Elon Musk is about FSD is to ask them how many objects they can see as they drive like just down a suburban street with trees and houses. There's basically millions and millions of objects. Think of leaves and bricks and other stuff. This is the truly amazing thing about the human brain. It can almost instantly discard millions of objects by grouping them into irrelevant clumps and then discarding those clumps. We don't care about the leaves they are part of the trees and the tress aren't moving. The same with the bricks - they are part of the houses. Its actually an amazing ability that every human being has. We can discard millions of items by clumping them together and bring our attention down to a few and do it dozens of times each second. if you've ever wondered what makes some sports stars do amazing stuff, this is part of it. Its this ability to eliminate useless information and process the important information, but they do it faster than the rest of us. This is what your talking about with scenarios. A human brain can not only consider scenarios but consider scenarios its never seen before through intuition and interpolation. This is why the Tesla's do stupid things at times like trying to turn left through a van. The can't adapt to through intuition and interpolation the same way a human brain can to new situations.
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  28.  @classydave75  Skylon is an interesting one. The idea that they could cool that much air that quickly always struck me as a bit odd. There was something not well explained about that engine.]io890 A pointy nose really is a bad thing for re-entry type flight. A blunt nose produces a detached or bow shock wave and it effectively produces a protective layer. The vehicle still cops a hammering but its just not as bad as as pointy nose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_shock_(aerodynamics) A pointed nose has the shock attached and that means the tip gets the full blast of re-entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_wave
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  29.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  You're partly right and definitely on the right thinking process. If you look at the basic tasks for going to the moon or mars. You have 3 basic tasks. Get up and back from the Earth. Get to and from the Moon or Mars. Get up and back from the Moon or Mars. You don't need to be an engineer to realise those are 3 fairly different tasks. That's why Apollo worked, they actually broke the mission down to manageable tasks. You are quite right Star Raker (if it can work) would be great for one task but lousy for almost everything else.
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  30.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  That's not a bad thought except that starship itself is a compromised design that's trying to do too much in the first place. That's the real problem with Starship its trying to be too many things. This is a common trait with almost everything in engineering. Here's an example. One of the fundamental criticisms of the F35 is that its trying to be so many aircraft that it simply fails in certain aspects. In ground attack and close in support of ground troops its Ok but compared to the A10 its hopeless because the A10 is dedicated to that role. I am no SpaceX fan but its why Crew Dragon is such a success. I know CSS wont agree but it simply is a success. The last US seat on a Soyuz mission cost $80 million. Currently crew Dragon costs $70 million for 4 people or $17.5 million per seat. That's better than a 75% saving. But then what else can Crew Dragon do other than get people up to the ISS and back down from the ISS? Not much. What's needed then is a vehicle that just goes to and back from the Moon or Mars and then another to get down and back from the Moon or Mars. Because if you try and combine those tasks you start making compromises and in the end that wont work as well.
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  31.  @AdrieKooijman  My bet would be they tried to do too much. In B2 they tried to create a complete micro world with all sorts of climates and conditions. My bet is we'll actually go with a much narrower focus on the environment and accept at the start it will need constant monitoring and maintenance. Think about a garden even a small one or somebody with a few plants. They need constant monitoring and maintenance. Evn on the most modern farm the farmer has to watch the crops and do maintenance as needed. In biosphere 2 they just expected things to work and nature to find its own balance. That's maybe its one great addition to out knowledge base. We need to be simpler and we need to maintain it.
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  32.  @commonsenseskeptic  On another note I'd love to help you do a debunk of space mining. I did a degree in aerospace (late 80s). I've worked mainly in automation, robotics and controls systems. In 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt who was here in Oz to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Apollo 17. I wanted to discuss with him satellite maintenance. Everything from my background said it was an industry waiting to boom. He quashed that quick by getting me to answer why nobody has done it? He then told me look up Helium-3. That meant mining and by chance Australia was just starting a mining construction boom to feed the Chinese beast. It too some time but I got into mine site construction and operations. Unlike all the fanbots and schemers I actually have worked on mines and helped build them and get them running. I can tell from basic numbers just how ludicrous some of the proposals are. Forget the money the tonnage is the reality. For example I worked at the Tom Price Iron Mine at one point. It produces 20MTA (million tons per annum) and its perfect for the basic numbers. Good iron ore is about 70% iron content. Lower grades are 55-60% and the really high grades are up to 95% (basically iron filings with some dirt thrown in). So for every 20 tons of iron ORE we get about 14 tons of iron. Which just so happens also is the landing capacity for the Space Shuttle. So it would basically take 1,000,000 Space Shuttle flights to handle the what just 1 iron mine does each year. Australia doesn't produce 20MTA it produces over 800MTA of ORE and China produces over 1,200MTA of ORE. Other than for incredibly rare and hyper value substances that the entire world demand is under 100tons per year will ever be feasible. Your mate Angry Astronaut just last week just pointed out the potential to mine nickel from the moon. One of my construction projects was Nickel mine. Global production of Nickel in 2020 was 2.5 million MTA (of metal). Which if we got from the moon would require about 178,000 space shuttle flights to land it here on Earth. What about Copper that's about 20MTA a year (of metal). In a way I like Anrgry because he stands up and calls out a lot of things that need calling out. BUT THEN he states some idiotic garbage and does it regularly. People can scream and yell all they like AND THEY DO. The fanbots scream at me all the time. Even if we suddenly got a Space Shuttle with 10x the capacity it still doesn't make sense. Except for incredibly rare ultra-high value substances NOBODY will be space mining anything anytime soon. So if you do want to do a debunk on the whole space mining thing let me know.
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  33. I am an aerospace engineer and I am fed up with the clowns who call themselves "science communicators." Most of them have utter zero STEM education and next to zero STEM literacy. Most just regurgitate the published PR as their script. One of the best I know for "dramatic regurgitating" is the channel Dark Skies. I was watching one vid and checked the Wikipedia page and he was just reading straight off the Wikipedia page like a high school clown from drama class. I don't think any of them actually deliberately mean to do wrong or cause confusion, but that is what they so often do. Neil De Grasse Tyson did a great explanation of what can happen a few minutes into this -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S58vlJwhwDw
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  34. As another Australian I second that motion and request it be tabled in the official notes.
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  35.  @caked3953  Great point and it why the Elon fanbots (what I now call his fanboys and fan girls) dismiss the food, water and oxygen discussion with "we'll just use hydroponics or aquaponics" without any understanding that NOBODY yet knows how to make it work. There is actually an obscure corner of the aquarium hobby brigade who specialize in these minimal input tanks. I don't think they have an actual solution for taking to space because it does not involve food production but they have a sound understanding of what it takes to maintain those sorts of systems. But as for creating actual soil to grow things and create a functional environment - these fanbots are truly ignorant of reality. If you try and discuss these things with them they think you're barking mad and start howling. Elon has done a great job of creating a personality club around himself. Its going to get very interesting when that bubble bursts.
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  36.  @Ragnaroz6000  I could easily be price dumping and it could just as easily be that Boeing and friends who have had a stranglehold/monopoly/cartel on access to space have been over charging for decades. I suggested in another thread the other day that possibly Elon lucked out with who he first got into SpaceX. Someone came back with 3 names and when I checked their bios they were seriously impressive. So at least at one point Elon attracted a lot of talent to SpaceX. Falcon 9 is now man rated. Boeing have had how long to get their system ready? With all of Boeing's history, experience, knowledge and resources they should easily beaten SpaceX. Instead Starliner is YET to do even a single successful flight. I don't like Elon Musk very much. I think he's an opportunist who's very good at hype & PR. BUT SpaceX (or at least the Falcon program) is first class. Starship is another matter entirely.
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  37.  @grahamstrouse1165  Exactly and its what drives real tech people crazy. We end having to explain why its garbage again and again and again. Watch for the clowns who call themselves "futurists" I am yet to see or hear one of them with an actual technical background AND they all speak Elon type garbage. Unfortunately the media seems to think they are all tech savvy.
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  38.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  This is in reply to your nuclear thermal engines comment. They were first proposed back in the 1960s and this is a classic case of people looking back at old ideas who don't ask the most important question: "Why didn't it work back then?" Yes there is the possibility NT engines will offer an improvement, but nobody has even proven they can actually work. Its a classic case of people confusing ideas with reality. Sometimes even great ideas just don't work. Proverbially speaking 99.99% of all technology ideas never go anywhere for one or more basic reasons. When engineers do projects they generally look at dozens of solutions and end up dismissing all but 1. Its not that the other ideas were bad or would not work they just choose the best option for that CIRCUMSTANCE. Here's one of the best examples I know of. Its a 2011 TEDx Talk by MIT postgrads Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie about Waste Annihilating nuclear reactors. At the time it was genuine 1000% game changing technology and it wasn't from some flunky amateur. These were 2 super smart MIT kids with a brilliant idea. Here's their 2001 TEDx talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAFWeIp8JT0 When I checked where they were at a couple of years ago they had folded the company after spending over $100 Million in funding. They made all their research and development free for the world to use. Way back at the very start they had missed a very basic item that they had taken for granted and their method was NEVER GOING TO WORK in the way they conceived it. Its a lesson for all the people who dig up technologies from the past. You MUST ASK: "Why didn't it work?"
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  39. ​ @ivannoreland5656  And which one has FLOWN. NOT a test on a stand but an actual flight. Yeah dude anyone can look up and find they built Kiwi, Phoebus, NRX/EST, NRX/XE, Pewee, Pewee 2, and the Nuclear Furnace BUT they never got close to an actual engine that could be flown. If you want to claim its yet ANOTHER "what might have been if we hadn't wasted money on dumb stuff!" Then I will back you any day of the week. If you want to complain about some of the programs that were never followed through on. Then even better. I'll lead the protest march on that. Go look at the X-planes for the number of projects that were cut right when they started to produce results. 2 of my favs are the X-33 and X-38. Do you know they had 3 more X-15 variants on the drawing board. There was a 2 seater, a delta wing and a scramjet powered version of the delta wing. They'd already proven by that stage they could do supersonic combustion. I read and quoted the paper by Billig on the first successful SSC experiments in my masters thesis. If you look through the list of lost opportunities it gets pretty frustrating.
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  40. To All - just to give a different perspective on a person mentioned at one point in this. Jeff Greason is mentioned several times in this video. He was a founder of XCor which has CSS rightly points out went bankrupt. Anyone can check that on XCor's history on Wikipedia. I'd just like to point out something that anyone can also check on Wikipedia. You'll see that XCor was closely associated with Burt Rutan who designed and built the X-Prize winning Space Ship One. Yes XCors entrant in the X Prize (the Lynx) failed to fly but then so did all of the other contestants. Peter Diamandis the person who ran the X-Prize also tried to get the Rocket Racing League started. He chose XCor to build the prototype for the Rocket Racing League. That prototype not only flew but once flew 7 times in a single day and to the best of my knowledge that has never been equalled or surpassed by anyone, government or private. I just wanted people to know that in his day Jeff Greason was one of the top aerospace engineers in the world. FULL DISCLOSURE - I had some limited contact with Jeff regarding his rocket motors circa 2018. I've had no contact with him since. At that time he seemed a reasonable person and very knowledgeable, which makes my quite surprised to see him associated with these people. If he does reply to CSS I hope that CSS will give him a fair opportunity.
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  41. And for anyone who's interested. As an engineer I agree 100% with CSS's summation of the NASA assessment of OAC's CLD proposal. My bet it took more time for someone at NASA to write up the assessment than it actually took to reject the proposal. Also CSS's assessment of the docking issues are spot on as are the balance issues he points out. This is exactly the sort of thing I wished more people in the media would point out regarding space subjects. My pet subject for unrealistic space issues is space mining and here's the basics of why. I'm Australian but did my degree in America. After meeting Harrison Schmitt in 2002 who spoke about mining the Moon for Helium-3 I went into the Australian mining industry to learn how to build and operate remote mines. I have over 15 years of first hand on site experience building and operating mines and I can state in all honesty that even the boffins at NASA haven't got a clue. I written to several people who have done TEDx talks on space mining and the one who did reply was actually an architect. He is actually a decent person who did the TEDx as a public speaking exercise. He was quite honest that he didn't know the subject that well. He sent me the main source of material for his talk which was the published papers from a NASA Conference on future lunar activities. It included quite a bit on mining and I can tell you all the NASA people need to actually spend some REAL TIME on mine sites seeing how they actually work. The biggest giveaway for anyone interested is to look at how they plan to do maintenance. If they say nothing then that shows they know nothing about mining and if they say robots then they know nothing about maintenance of heavy duty machinery. At its most basic mining is about getting what you want out of rocks. Just digging rocks and dirt out of the ground puts wear and tear on the machinery. After that you smash those rocks into smaller rocks and in some cases into powder. Yeah - at its most basic mining is about smashing rocks and that is incredibly hard on all the machinery. Anyone who thinks there's no maintenance is delusional and anyone who thinks it can be done with robots is ignorant of heavy duty machinery. And if CSS wants me to help on a "Why space mining is bunk!" video - then YES I WILL HELP IF HE ASKS.
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  42.  @commonsenseskeptic  Case 2 of Space BS: Mining Asteroids Part 2 - Maintenance Iron Ore is about the simplest thing we mine. Dig it up crush and screen it down to size and put it on the train to send to port. If its a poor grade or you want to value add then you put a wash plant between the crushing & screening and the stockpile. A wash plant is pretty simple. You mix the ore with water and let gravity separate the iron from the dirt because iron is heavier than clay and dirt. So you have diggers, truck, crushers, screens, conveyors, stackers that make stockpiles, reclaimers that reclaim ore form stock piles and train load outs. No mater how well you blast it (or not) just digging up iron ore puts wear and tear on the digger. No matter how hard and tough the teeth and leading edge of diggers are they will wear and they will need replacing. If you are drilling for blast patterns then those drills will wear and need replacing. Having 100s of tons of rock and ore dumped in the back and then sliding it all out at the crusher puts wear and tear on the trucks. Plus they go through a set of tires every 3-4 months. Plus they need fuel, oil and general maintenance. Conveyor belts wear and need replacing water pumps, slurry pumps all wear. Even if you are mining with space lasers things will still wear out, because there will always bee some sort of processing. Even if you start chasing after rare low volume high value resources you will then need even more complex processing equipment will require even more maintenance. The moment you start dealing with rock things start wearing, because rocks have this one quality - they're hard. No matter how large or how small they are hard. It will never matter were you go the moment you start mining for resources is the moment you start wearing out equipment that will need replacing and or maintenance and that leads to the NEXT PROBLEM. Go an ask any mechanic if any 2 engines were identical in what they needed to repair or maintain? Go ask any electrician if any 2 machines with wiring issues were identical in what they needed to repair or maintain? Go ask a plumber if any 2 pipes were identical in what they needed to repair or maintain? Go ask any carpenter if any 2 pieces of wood are identical? Robots are exceptional if the task is REPEATABLE. Maintenance is never exactly repeatable because every maintenance task has its own unique differences. IT CAN BE similar but NEVER identical. I have worked in industrial robotics in the past and its hard trying to explain to people that robots excel at doing the same thing a million times in a row. They do not handle a million similar tasks well, because every time a variation that's outside the norm happens they crash, they stop or they crash and stop. One of my bosses used to say "automated machines are great at finding bad parts and lousy at handling them." The origin of this issue is that NASA does not do maintenance except for stuff they have on earth or for software. Once they lite the rocket fuse there is NOTHING any NASA engineer can do to except software. So there is almost zero experience in off world maintenance except from things like the MIR Space Station, The ISS and the Hubble Space telescope AND NOEN of that involved smashing rock. Basically if any of the space mining people don't mention maintenance then they are delusional and if the claim they will use robotic maintenance they are ignorant.
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  43. What's also in this is how much of a complete suck up Chris Anderson the Founder of TED & TEDx and how much brand damage that's doing. if you go a few years back there were some great TED & TEDx talks but I haven't seen a lot lately. I have these bookmarked for reference. 2013 Don Pettit's "The tyranny of the rocket equation" 2014 Nick Hanauer's "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" 2017 Lera Boroditsky's "How language shapes the way we think" 2018 Emily Calandrelli's "Making science nicer, stupid" One of my favourite speakers Dr. Jonathan Trent has a bunch of TED/TEDx talks going back over decade but NONE for over 5 years. Go look at some of the stuff they now do. It comes across as a techno-hippie convention.
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  44.  @SergeantSarge  Yep, who can forget crusty the space captain.
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  45. I am an aerospace engineer and I can explain in detail all the stuff that they have simply not bothered to think about. Its not simply Musk or his fanbots, NASA aren't exactly innocent. There's a staggering amount og science fiction PR garbage in the space industry at the moment. Back in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and at that time he was talking up the Helium-3 opportunity on the moon. As an Australian at that stage there was no easy way into NASA or even their programs. So an independent project with credibility was possible. At that time Australia was just starting a mining construction boom to feed the Chinese beast. It took a couple of years but I snuck my way into remote mine site construction and the analogies to setting up anything on the moon become fairly obvious after some time doing that work. 1) EVERYTHING needs to be thought ahead. When you are in the middle of the desert nothign is just down the road because the road is 1500km long. Prior to that time I worked in our manufacturing sector and 90% of everything was at worst an hour away. On a remote mine site, even if airplanes come regularly you have to consider everything is at least 3 days away. Its a giant non-stop logistical exercise that never ends. 2) Everything you take for granted in a city like water and power has to be treated very seriously. Most people never consider what happens when they flush the toilet. On a mine site that's a serious consideration along with all other waste. Most of all the food has to be trucked or flown in, then stored, then cooked, then eaten and then cleaned up. Humans eat, shit, pee and breath. Spaceship earth is great for cleaning our mess and we take that for granted. 3) Mine sites are primarily dirt and rock crushing & grinding plants. That means wear and tear on everything. I got hold of the papers for a NASA conference on the moon (well over 200 pages). The total commentary on maintenance was less than 1-1/2 pages, 1/2 of which was a diagram and all they said was we'll do it with robots. That told me that NONE OF THEM had ever spent any time on a mine site. When I see clowns talking about mining asteroids I can tell NONE OF THEM had ever spent time on a mine site. When I hear Jeff Bezos talking about taking all the iron ore processing off planet I know he's not done any of the basic math hon that.
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  46.  @daphnedherbert  No need for the lecture that's why I said I'd agree with CSS that this was a good thing IF THEIR INTENT was to reach more people. But as I also said I have reservations over CSSs intent at times. I don't disagree with most of what CSS says but there've been times CSS has acted like an obsessed maniac with Elon Musk. Do I think Elon deserves harsh scrutiny? ABSOLUTELY and at times in detail, but it also requires balance. I am an aerospace engineer and I can't stand Elon Musk, but that doesn't mean that SpaceX hasn't done anything good. Without Crew Dragon there would be no Western manned Space program at all. There'd just be Russia and China, because Boeing have failed so badly with Starliner. On the flip side Starship and going to Mars is so ridiculous and the money and time is so wasteful it deserves all the scorn it gets. Balance.
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  47.  @daphnedherbert  Ok. I'm just trying to have balance and I don't think enough of that happens these days on any form of media. I really do like CSS but at times I think he loses sight of the forest because of the tree he's focused on.
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  48.  @RanEncounter  Ok then name the OTHER WESTERN launch system that can take people to the International Space Station. Come on SHIT-4-BRAINS name the alternative system. Because since the demise of the Space Shuttle the only way for Western Nations to get to the ISS was via Soyuz and sorry but Soyuz is NOT part of the Western Space programs.
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  49.  @commonsenseskeptic  As I indicated on a couple of other things Elon, Jeff and others have fans CANNOT DO BASIC MATH and they rely on those people NOT BEING ABLE TO DO BASIC MATH.
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  50.  @starofjustice1  Its more than that as several of the videos that are on this channel show its about making money from selling pipedreams. Bas Lansdorp made around $10 million from the utter BS he pitched for Mars One. As Snake oil salesmen learnt decades ago the bulk of society are ignorant of reality no matter how well we try and educate them and they are easily fooled into handing over money. Think about all the Nigerian money scams that were prevalent in the late 90s early 2000s that we got in our emails and THEY CONTINUE TO THIS DAY no matter how many news stories are told. Think about the flat earth promoters. None of them believe its flat but they all know there are people stupid enough to buy merchandise and books and videos about it.
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  51.  @illsaveus  Your very right on all that, but do try and remember that Elon has also lucked into a couple of things where he was blessed with some superb engineers. He's also one of the best ever marketers of other peoples technology. First at PayPal - his code might have sucked and they wanted nothing to do with him but he was smart enough to make money out of it. Second with Tesla - his input to the car and development is a joke. I'm an aerospace engineer who works in industrial control and safety systems. Anyone who understands even the basics of vision guided systems knows how full of shite the driverless car stuff was. Have you notice that not even Uber mentions that stuff anymore. Third with SpaceX where he got blessed with Gwynne Shotwell and her team on the Falcon series. Yes they've had issues, but when you compare them to Boeing Starliner or SLS they actually have things that work including a man rated rocket. Yes I have seen some of the criticism of Gwynne Shotwell regarding some of her comments, but if you actually listen to what she's said there's no issue except for who she works for. As far as Starship and Starlink go. They are both Elon fantasies that will end in tears. Just like the hyper-inflated ridiculous valuations of Tesla shares will end in tears. Its one of those things with Elon Musk, at times you need to untangle some of the things he's into from the garbage he claims. If Jeff Bezos asked me the quickest way to go to the moon. I'd tell him to buy that chunk of SpaceX with the Falcons. Use Falcon Heavy to launch an Earth-Lunar transfer vehicle, a Lunar orbit transfer station and a Lunar lander. Use Dragon to take the crew up & down. Development time 2-3 years. Its call breaking the problem into manageable chunks. But then Elon isn't into manageable chunks he's into fantasy ships to Mars.
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  52.  @anirudhmitra4232  I don't know who "spacefanboy" is or what he's claiming. At its most basic the idea of us becoming an "interplanetary species" within this solar system its pretty ridiculous as there's so few places with even the right gravity for our bodies to function properly. It doesn't matter if you believe in god or mother nature our bodies work best in 1g and 14.7psi of air that's about 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen. The moment you start getting away from that human bodies don't do so well. Remember above a certain height on Mt Everest you start to die no matter how well conditioned you are. Its not fundamentally wrong to think we'll live on other planets, but the proponents overlook so many basic facts. Its easy to do and we've all done it at some point, but then you also need listen to people who have expertise and experience, which so many of the clowns these days just won't do. Back around 2000 I got into an argument with a friend who was at NASA on the ISS construction. Like many others I wanted it finished so we could get on with stuff. When we'd been in college in the late 80s we all expected to build the next space station in the 90s and be back on the moon circa 2001. Then we got the rudest wakeup when Challenger blew up one morning. So by the year 2000 a lot of us just wanted the ISS finished so we could get on with stuff. At that time I wanted to go into fixing satellites. Instead of just dumping them when they ran out of fuel I wanted to refuel them. I was was just 1 of 100s wanting to do that. This friend of mine just slapped me down with the fact of the basic fuel and life support requirements for a mission like that. Her and others at NASA were tired of complaints on how long the ISS was taking. She'd had enough at that stage and told me to do some basic math or never bother her again. SHE WAS RIGHT and I apologised when I worked out what she and others at NASA already knew. There were a bunch of technologies that weren't ready and most still aren't ready. There were decisions made way back in the 1970s before me and my friend were even out of grade school, let alone out of college, that have had some very negative consequences we are still living with. Its one thing I do agree with the Angry Astronaut about. Right after Apollo we were betrayed. Some stupid decisions were made and the big aerospace companies stepped in and started milking NASA by the billion. I honestly don't know how far we'd be if smarter decisions had been made. I like to think we'd at least have a lunar base but can't say for certain because its just damn difficult. I heard claims just last week on one podcast about plans for being on Mars by the mid 80s, Saturn by the 90s and Alpha Centauri by 2000. It was just a ridiculous and stupid remark and yet its the sort of stuff people latch onto. Its very frustrating being an engineer these days because there are so many people saying things in bad faith. The person who made the claims about Mars in the 80s,... etc is doing a book promotion tour. He's not saying these things because they are true he's saying these things to get people to buy his book. And that's so common with so many people. They are trying to sell something.
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  53.  @camhunt7310  Fair arguments but the biggest by far is serviceability. If a cable gets broken or cut then it can be replaced. It might not be easy but it can be fixed. I am an aerospace engineer and once a satellite is launched that's it. It flies and works or it fails. Other than the space stations the only object ever put in space that was serviced or repaired was Hubble.
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  54. Aerospace Engineer: YES because as usual you lawyers will want to stick you noses where they DO NOT BELONG and screw everything up. Isn't it enough that you lawyers have screwed up EVERY legal system in the world with garbage, nonsense and endless circular verbal wankfests. Why can't we hold political leaders like Donald Trump. Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin,... accountable? LAWYERS Why can't we control the money in politics that's made Western Democracy so dysfunctional? LAWYERS Why can't we make any progress on issues with basic justice and climate change? LAWYERS When you lawyers get your own house in order we might be interested in what you have to say.
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  55. ​ @declanashmore  Exactly - it wouldn't matter because either way there'd be a hoard of lawyers scrambling to argue it out and see how much money they could screw out of the mess they'd create. That's not to say all lawyers are money driven greedy sociopaths but I did hear once that the Grand Canyon was NOT formed by the erosion of the Colorado River. It was created when a lawyer dropped a quarter down a rabbit hole. Bizarrely he didn't dig it out to get the quarter back. He dug it out so he could serve the rabbit papers.
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  56.  @commonsenseskeptic  Great point. I did aerospace engineering at U. Illinois where Eberhard went and from an engineering point Musk is a clown. BUT he's also a clown who can identify technology that he can exploit. Occasionally he picks a real genuine winner like he did it at Paypal, did it with SpaceX and did it with Tesla. I know you don't think too highly of Gwynne Shotwell because she works for Elon and a couple of her comments have been Elon like. You pointed out that she made a comment about that rockets won't be considered truly reusable until we can use them like aeroplanes. You were quite right that's totally unrealistic for the types of rockets now in use, but did you know that XCOR built a rocket powered aircraft for the proposed rocket racing league that flew 7 times in one day. I think XCOR was a company a smarter version of Jeff Bezos should have bought for the expertise and experience. So going back to Gwynne Shotwell's comment. Its easy to read it (as her being part of Elon enterprises) as "this is what we'll be doing next week" except she doesn't promise that she's just pointing out what it would mean to be truly reusable. Further if I was grading SpaceX I'd give them a C or C+. They have built Falcon up to man rated and they have got Crew Dragon working. They are resupplying the ISS and swapping crews at the ISS. BUT in reality they have taken 20years to do an upgraded version of Apollo. Is it better than Apollo? ABSOLUTELY. Its reusable carries and extra body and compared to Soyuz at $90M USD per seat to $70M USD for 4 seats its a massive saving in cost. But Falcon is still only a C+ at best. Its got some innovation but its not ground breaking. HOWEVER compare to everyone else is magic. Sierra and others have been doing development for decades, promising the universe and going not much of anywhere. If you consider how much money Boeing has had spoon fed to them by congress they should have, built a moon base, landed on Mars and be ready for the first manned mission to Jupiter by now. On the normal A to F scale Boeing are somewhere south of G. The only reason they might get an F- is that at least the last attempt at Starliner wasn't a complete failure. Don't get me started on SLS, that's going to go down as one of the worst conceived and managed engineering projects in history. The idea of reusing space shuttle tech was sound but NOTHING after that point was sound, sensible, rational, logical, reasonable, justifiable or much anything else.
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  57.  @commonsenseskeptic  If you want to do a debunk of Jeff Bezos claim of moving all of the heavy industry like iron ore processing into Low Earth Orbit. LET ME KNOW. FYI - I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002 and he told me to look at Helium-3. I wanted to discuss satellite servicing and he said no the majors wont let you and go look at He-3. He-3 meant mining on the moon so being Australian I went off to our mining industry for some experience building and operating mines. By chance we were in the process of building lots of new mines to feed the Chinese beast. I have worked in iron ore and metallurgical coal and NOBODY is ever taking that stuff into low earth orbit unless they develop Star Trek matter transportation. Just go and do the basic high school level science math and calculate the kinetic energy of 2 billion tons of iron at 7kilometers per second. Then compare that much energy to Hiroshima and work out how much energy you need to BURN OFF in the upper atmosphere bringing that much down from LEO. Yes it will freak you out, but not as much as some other stuff.
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  58.  @ytzmark  Its worse from my perspective because it does detract from those successes. Instead of being able to celebrate the achievements we are being distracted with garbage. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️
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  59.  @individual1-floridaman491  My father was a maths science teacher. I'd love to tell your kids that the future of engineering is bright but we are at on hell of a crossroads. There was a recent comment on the ABC Drum (I think it was Colin Barnett) and what was said was "we have to stop listening to the economists and lawyers and start listening to the engineers and scientists" I found it a great comment but NOBODY has run with it. Sure both parties are spruiking up manufacturing and technology after almost 2 decades of preaching how manufacturing was a "sunset industry" because we were shifting into a "service based economy." When they announced the Australian Space Agency they held meetings in the capital cities to find out what we should be doing. The mantra was "we are hear to listen" and for every suggestion and proposal we got told "NO we aren't that kind of agency. We're here to promote space industry." I was at the meeting in Melbourne and a professor from Monash stood up at one point and pointed out that EVERY student of his had left Australia for work and then asked what this new agency would do. The answer was straight out of "Yes Minister" and giant long word salad of we don't care because we are not here to do anything other than tell everyone how fantastic we are. They put out a roadmap that actually was pretty good. Its maybe the one thing they ever did right. It was all about the future space industries Australia could benefit from. The single biggest thing identified was advanced space based water management for our agriculture sector but such systems would not be available until the mid 2030s. Considering the droughts and water issues we have my answer to that was why wait 15 years and just get on with it. So I wrote a space program based around delivering that water management. the program was named "Dyaramak" which is an Aboriginal name for the Sacred Kingfisher. In Polynesian culture its a water spirit so I figured it kind of suited. When you consider that both our agricultural sector (at over $155Billion per annum with over 300,000 jobs) and our tourism sector (at over $65Billion per annum with over 550,000 jobs) that a program with its prime mission of delivering the next generation of space based land & water management would have a justifiable business case. WRONG. I took that to both the Libs and Labour and BOTH told me to go away while one handed $7 Billion to the Airforce for a space program and the other one cheered. For $7 Billion there is no plan, no budget and will do nothing for the 850,000 Australians who require our land, forests, rivers and oceans for their jobs. I asked for $720 million over 6 years to lay the foundation that would help protect all those jobs and all the economic benefit that came with it. I'm planning to bash both parties with it again shortly just to see if I can startle them into some action.
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  60.  @jdoe9518  And you clearly have no idea DlCKHEAD. Go take your conspiracy BS and get lost. And yeah I have heard all the conspiracy BS about government weather control. I read about that nonsense back in the 90s. It was garbage then and its still garbage now.
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  61.  @kwyj  No Johnson never did say anything apart from "Don't waste the money on a replacement shuttle. Give it to me and leave us alone to get the job done." Its a stack of questions I have had for 35+ years. "What did he know?" "What did they work out?" I can't conceive that KJ was just mouthing off. Go watch any of the vids about his life. Yeah sure he occasionally shook the establishment with radical designs (P-38, U-2, SR-71), BUT HE DELIVERED and they WORKED. 🤷‍♂🤷‍♂🤷‍♀🤷‍♀
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  62.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  This is in reply to your Mars & Earth atmosphere comment. Yes Mars has an atmosphere but it is completely different to Earth's. The surface air pressure of Mars is 0.00628atm so there might be an atmosphere but there's so little its hard to do anything with it. parachutes only work enough to slow down from very high speed. That little helicopter they tried was on the very limit of actually working. Quoting Wikipedia on Mars under the topic of "Atmosphere": "The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to that found 35 kilometres (22 mi) above Earth's surface." The density of Mars atmosphere is a tiny fraction of Earths and all the equations for lift and drag have the same basic formula of 1/2 x the coefficient x the gas density x times velocity squared. Lift = 1/2.Cf.ρ.V² Drag = 1/2.Cd.ρ.V² So when ρ is so low you either have to be very light, very large wings or going incredibly fast. Mars atmosphere is so low there's almost nothing to generate lift or drag with. It will make getting off the surface a lot easier, but not much else.
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  63.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  And one other thing. Can you and every other unqualified person please STOP repeating the PR blurbs for various technologies as if they are undisputable facts when they ARE YET TO BE PROVEN. Maybe and possibly ARE NOT the same as "Look at these results." Its actually very frustrating having to explain again and again and again ... and 1000 more times that what you are hearing the media is mostly PR aimed at fundraising or lobbying rather than reporting news or facts. I don't mind people asking questions and having discussions and I will take the time to answer peoples legitimate questions as best I can. Its taken me time to read your replies and answer them. Please show me some respect for my qualifications and experience because it gets damn annoying when people start preaching PR fundraising nonsense as if its undeniable fact.
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  64.  @commonsenseskeptic  Fair call. I put together a proposal for the Australian Space Agency and I contacted him via LinkedIn. It was only a few conversations because I was interested in the reusable rocket engines. It didn't go far as he'd not only left XCOR but put it all behind him. Its why I see this as a shame because what he did achieve with the Rocket Racer was pretty extraordinary. If you are interested I'll give you 3 Space subjects below. Pick 1, pick none pick all 3 - your choice.
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  65.  @commonsenseskeptic  Case 1 of Space BS: Mining Asteroids Part 1 - Logistics. Other than the fact nobody has ever brought back to Earth any more than a few grams of space dust there's the simple task of logistics. Most people have no idea how much stuff we actually dig up each year and turn into cars, boats, planes and all the other toys our society wants. Just so you know current world production of iron ore is just over 3,000,000,000 or a 3,000 Mta (million tons per annum) of which China does 1,200 Mta and Australia 825 Mta which accounts for 2/3rds of world supply. According to Forbes: "16 Psyche—a 140-mile-wide/226-kilometer-wide asteroid—could contain a core of iron, nickel and gold worth $10,000 quadrillion." Other than the logistics and for the sake of math we assume that only 50% of that value is iron. At $100 USD per ton of iron ore that's something like 100 Quadrillion tons equivalent of iron ore. When we only need 3 Trillion tons a year a 100 Quadrillion tons is 33,000 years worth. Even if someone at Forbes got there comma in the wrong place and its only $10 Quadrillion in value not 10,000 then its only 100 trillion tons or 33 YEARS of iron ore. Australia has a single deposit called Yandi creek. Its a part of the earth that split open at some point way way back in time and a pile of magma flowed out and formed an ore body that winds it way over 150km across the Australian outback. Its 100s of meters wide and 100s of meters deep. Yandi has more than a century's worth of iron ore and its just one of our major iron ore reserves and NOBODY needs to fly million of kilometers across space to get it. Plus we ALREADY have the train lines and ports to get it out to the rest of the world. Plus NOBODY needs a space suit costing millions for their PPE.
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  66.  @commonsenseskeptic  Case 3 of Space BS: Star Wars - the Ronald Regan Type. Just a week ago an Australian journalist warned that we need these new AUKUS submarines because China was building a new high tech military including SPACE LASERS. Only a week before that at a military conference and trade show the head of Australia's military space program said "they were looking at satellite soft kill systems" So you know I did my degree in aerospace in the late 80s when Ronnie Brainspace Reagan was spending huge on space lasers and anything else anyone could suggest that might knock an ICBM out. Other than all the ridiculously hard classes in math, aerodynamics, propulsion,... etc the hardest class I had was one of my electives. Most people did orbital mechanics but a few of us did "Space Craft Dynamics" because we thought controlling how space craft flew about would be "cool." We were so very very wrong. 3/4 of the class were post grads and they struggled. Its applied maths at a level that is staggering high. BUT, One of those post graduates was easily the smartest engineering mathematician I have ever seen and that includes the guys who were doing the funky Computational Fluid Dynamics on the Cray Supercomputer. His specialty was being able to get a space craft turn, point and track WITHOUT wobbling. ALL spacecraft FLEX when they roll, pitch, and yaw or are under thrust and that flexing results in wobbling. Most of the time that's irrelevant, but if you are trying to hit an ICBM that's several 100km (at best) to several 1,000km away with a speed differential measured in kilometers per second its required to point very accurately. Laser, microwave of projectile is irrelevant - you have to point accurately. This postgrad worked out how to cancel out wobbles with counter moves. Don't aske me to explain that math its on the verge of insane. Its involves simultaneous partial differential equations in 3-D polar coordinates with transformations into the cartesian Roll/Pitch/Yaw/translate of the vehicle. Then it has the anti-wobble dynamics on top of that, which is another set of 3-D simultaneous partial differential equations. Yes I spent 4 months in a class with the one guy and his professor who could make space based weapons POINT well enough to be on the fringe of feasible, but even after that there's some very basic problems. ISSUE 1 - Space Lasers. Despite the fact we might be able to make a space laser point where it needs to point and we might even be able to give it enough power to do something at range, there's 2 very simple counters to a space laser. 1) be shiny because light reflects off shiny surfaces. 2) roll slowly because lasers need time to burn through which means they need to be very much on the same spot NOT just on target. ISSUE 2 - Microwave & EM interference with onboard electronics. Despite how snazzy this sounds people forget that space is already an environment needing lost of shielding from EM and other radiation. So trying to punch through with Microwaves or EM is like trying to punch through a tank with a bow and arrow. ISSUE 3 - Hard Kill also known as the dumbest thing anyone can do. Yeah not going to happen unless you want to make Space unusable for everyone for decades. Been tried and can work but also has disastrous consequences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome#Anti-satellite_missile_tests
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  67. Case 4 of Space BS: Off World Heavy Industry a Jeff Bezos favorite. Yeah good old jeff sayin he wants to move things like iron smelting off world where there's unlimited solar power and nobody has to worry about pollution. Remember the Tom Price mine a mentioned a couple of chapters back?? 20Mta (million tons per annum) is a great easy number to use because thanks to the Space Shuttle it makes the math so easy an economist could get it. Reasonable quality iron ore is about 60-65% iron content. Good quality is around 70% really high grades are above that. 70% makes the math easy because 70% of 20 is 14. The Space Shuttle could take off with a payload of 30tons, but it could only land with 14tons of payload. So it doesn't matter how many flights it takes to get the the 20Mta from a mine like Tom Price up to a processing facility in LEO (low earth orbit) its how many it takes to get the 14 Million tons back down. 14,000,000 tons divided by 14 tons per flight = 1,000,000 flights. Now sure we could have something 10 times better or even 100 times better than a space shuttle but that's irrelevant because even at 100 times better than a Space Shuttle its still 10,000 flights or about 200 flights per week and considering in 30 years the Space Shuttle only did 135 flights that's kind of difficult. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. Tom Price is 20 Mta and Australia exports over 820 Mta so Tom Price rounds to about 1/41st of Australia's output. So those 10,000 flights with the imaginary super shuttle is actually about 410,000 flights and the rest of the world almost quadruples that number. Cos trying to bring back around 2 Billion tons of iron isn't easy. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. If you do the kinetic energy calculation of 2 Billion tons of processed iron in orbit doing 7.5 kilometers per second. Its 5.625 x 10E16 Joules or the equivalent of around 950 of the Hiroshima bomb. To Bring that back down all that Kinetic Energy has to be dissipated. That's currently done with Air Friction and its burned off as HEAT. Yeah Jeff Bezos idea to save the planet from CO2 Emissions from iron ore production is to take iron production off planet and then effectively NUKE the upper atmosphere on a daily basis. Yeah - Sorry Mr. Bezos but that's NOT going to work.
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  68. ​ @commonsenseskeptic  Case 5 of Space BS: Terraforming Mars. Back in college we had an alum who worked at NASA one day give a guest lecture on terraforming Mars. We were pumped and then he dumped on us some reality. He introduced us to what I now call "planetary mechanics" which is basically calculating how much stuff is present. Making a planet actually work is what I call "planetary dynamics" and involves making things like gas cycles, water cycles and ocean currents work so that life can be supported. Thankfully planetary mechanics is math anyone can understand. One thing that is very easy is to take the surface area of a planet in km² and then simply say the first km of atmosphere above the surface is the same number by km³. Yes you can calculate the volume of 2 spheres 1 with a radius 1km larger than the other and get an answer that's less 1% different. But the real point is to give people an idea of what is the volume of the gas that is in that 1km just above the surface. So Mars where one of your favorite clowns Elon Musk wants to go has a surface area of 144,370,000 km² That volume 1 km above the surface of Mars is 144,370,000 km³. 1 m³ of Earth Standard air is 1.2kg so 1km³ is just 9 zeros on that for kilos or 6 for tons. Either way 144,370,000 km³ of Earth Standard Air is 173,244,000,000,000 tons. So if Elon wants to terraform mars he's gonna need 173 Trillion tons of air and that's only for the first kilometer. Who knows what he will need if someone wants to climb up over the edge of Valles Marineris? I actually had one clown claim Elon would only need the Oxygen and none of the Nitrogen so I asked where Elon was going to get 36.4 Trillion tons of oxygen? I'm still waiting.
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  69.  @commonsenseskeptic  I hope you like those 5 things. There are more and they aren't hard to find because as you keep showing time and again the basic math does not lie. Sure there are those who yell what about this or what about that and it might move the goal posts, BUT IT NEVER changes the outcome. Best to you. I love the channel. Keep doing what you are doing.
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  70.  @timothyblazer1749  have you listened to any of Jonathon Trent's vids. He's quite likely the worlds best at these complex biological systems people are trying to develop. Having listened to him and chatted via LinkedIn I think the breakthrough IF IT COMES will be with systems that are not designed to be 100% self supporting, but simpler systems that can do what's needed. Sort unrelated are the vertical farming systems people have developed. They aren't meant to replace bulk farming and provide everything humanity needs, but they DO THE JOB they are designed for. When you consider what they tried to do with Biodome it was always going to fail. 🤷‍♀🤷‍♂🤷‍♀🤷‍♂ (edit) But it is good to here that someone else has picked it up and is making progress.
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  71.  @timothyblazer1749  I'm actually Australian but went to college in America on a sports scholarship and did aerospace engineering. One of my class mates is very high up in the ISS program. About 20 years ago she told me that NOBODY was going beyond LEO until 2 problems were solved - Life Support and Propulsion. In the last 20 years neither of those problems has been solved. YES ABSOLUETLY there have been people working their asses off working on these problems but none of it is ready to be used. One of the tragic outcomes of the shuttle and ISS programs was they starved other programs of resources of which the biggest resource was money, but it also starved those projects of people. Yes both the shuttle and ISS have been incredible technical achievements. They actually made a reusable spaceplane work. They made, launched and assembled an incredibly complex machine weighing hundreds of tons IN SPACE. BUT AT THE SAME TIME they starved other projects and that's hindered manned space flight. FYI - I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) back in 2002 and he told me to check out Helium-3. He was trying to get a mine built on the Moon. So I went off to the Australian mining sector to learn how mines got built and how they operated. Right now I have more practical hands on experience building and operating mines in remote places than all of NASA combined. Do you know it still comes back to the same 2 questions, but they're phrased differently? Transportation and Supplies (food, water, fuel, spare parts,....). The biggest 3 tasks are: 1) Getting people, their food, and what they need to and from the mines. People need food and water and a place to sleep. They also shit, shower and shave and all that has to be dealt with. 2) Getting the product from the mines. That might mean a few kilograms (like for gold) or millions of tons like iron ore. Either way it has to be done or what's the purpose of having the mine. 3) Maintenance as in how to you keep several billion dollars of stuff working in the middle of a hostile environment and there's not many places more hostile than the Australian desert. A lot of people think I have wasted my time. I haven't. When I ask them how are you going to do A, B, C,... none of them have answers because they've never asked the questions. They all assume its been done. This is the problem with people like Angry and Elon Musk and so many others. Their hearts are in the right place, but they all assume that some of the very basic things have been done and they haven't. All these clowns talking about mining asteroids have never been near a mine site. I can tell that immediately. I have the papers from a NASA conference (~180pages) on Moon operations and it had 1 and a bit pages on maintenance because they think maintenance will be done using remote robotics. THAT'S GARBAGE. If you ever want to be called an idiot just tell anyone who's ever done maintenance on a mine site that it can be done by remote controlled robots.
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  72.  @wyrmofvt  You pretty much have it nutted out, because it comes down to some very basic numbers and basic reality. I got bluntly put in my place about 20 years ago by a former classmate who was working on the ISS construction She's now a senior ISS manager and basically without her signature your stuff isn't going to the ISS. I had put it to her, as others had that we should use Shuttle-C and just get all the stuff up there. The whole thing was just dragging out and the shuttle itself was incredibly inefficient for bulk hardware launching. Just pack all the truss modules into 1 launch. She pointed out that I had no idea of the logistics involved in each of those modules and bluntly told me to shut it until I knew what I was talking about. I argued back that while the ISS plodded on we weren't moving forward with manned exploration. We'd been in college when Challenger happened. Up until that morning we all EXPECTED to build Space Station Freedom by the mid 90s and back on the moon circa 2001. That argument was happening circa 2002 and we weren't close to finishing the ISS and people were getting frustrated at the lack of progress. Then she hit me with the slap of slaps. Nobody was going anywhere until we solved the propulsion and life support issues. When I asked what? She said do the basic math and then ask how you get that done. The Apollo LM had 75 hours for 2 men of life support. That's 150 mh (man hours) of life support. A 4 man 14 day (as was the plan at one point) is 4 x 24 x 14 = 1344 mh (basically 9x) That can be basically halved with 3 man 10day lunar surface is 3 x 24 x 10 = 720mh. Irrespective of crew and duration, how do you get that much stuff there just to keep them alive. All that oxygen, food, CO2 filters, waste handling,... has to be lifted off mother earth, flown across the 384,400km gap and landed there on the moon AND THAT'S before you even begin to deal with anything else. Its part of why the Russian lunar program failed. The basic numbers drove them to the N-1 which was too complicated to work. This is what Elon Musk and his cadre of clowns don't get. Just the basics of keeping people alive is a giant task. Adding that 1 extra person and/or staying that bit longer can double that task in a blink and that compounds into a whole pile of other logistics issues which themselves keep compounding the problem. It was a blunt lesson I got from that classmate and yeah it sucked, but I needed it then and a lot of other people need it now.
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  73.  @wyrmofvt  On that ag issue its all a matter of what you are producing from that land. If its for direct human consumption its one set of numbers and if its for animal feed its another. There's actually a great lesson in complex systems and compounding effects and consequences regarding the Colorado River right now. The river plan that was put in place 100+years ago DELIBERATELY overestimated the amount of water available, because that was what certain politicians wanted. That was compounded with a "use it or lose it" clause. So a lot of farmers need to use their water allocation or lose it. Many grow alfalfa for animal feed BECAUSE its a high water usage crop. If they change to low water crops they can lose their water allocations. So the land and water usage issue is way more complex than most people realise and the causes of that complexity are some really basic stupid decisions. The bigger problem is that people are looking at the problem as "what do I lose" (as in my water rights) instead of "what do we gain" which is food (as in that stuff we all need to survive). And so you know water and land mismanagement is a major problem EVERYWHERE. Where China grows most of its food is where they have major climate change issues. They have also damaged or destroyed over 20,000 rivers and waterways. Or you can look at what the Russians did to the Aral Sea. Or you can come here to Australia and see what we have done with cotton, rice and nut farming.
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  74. Not all crypto is a scam Some of them are Ponzi schemes, while others are just simply fraud,
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  75.  @FilipCordas  WTF are you kidding? Sure Stock exchanges are dodgy and get manipulated all the time, but at least there are rules for stock exchanges and every so often the regulators actually punish someone who breaks those rules. Crypto has NO standards, NO rules, NO regulations, NO governance, NO oversight, NO protections from scammers, NO enforcement agencies, AND MOST OF ALL NOTHING backing it up or anything else resembling basic common sense. Like SBF its was a 16,000,000,000% scam from the very beginning.
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  76.  @FilipCordas  Berkshire Hathaway has NEVER done anything with Crypto. Both Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger have made no secret they think Crypto is garbage and explained why. GO WATCH THE 3rd PART Its towards the end.
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  77. There's also Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, who called Bitcoin "hyped up fraud" Its in parts 3 just after Buffet and Munger.
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  78.  @FilipCordas  It wasn't a billion you IDl0T and Nubank IS NOT A CRYPTO. You people are so ignorant. Its no wonder you get taken by scammers.
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  79. I am an aerospace engineer and I can explain in detail all the stuff that they have simply not bothered to think about. Its not simply Musk or his fanbots, NASA aren't exactly innocent. There's a staggering amount og science fiction PR garbage in the space industry at the moment. Back in 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and at that time he was talking up the Helium-3 opportunity on the moon. As an Australian at that stage there was no easy way into NASA or even their programs. So an independent project with credibility was possible. At that time Australia was just starting a mining construction boom to feed the Chinese beast. It took a couple of years but I snuck my way into remote mine site construction and the analogies to setting up anything on the moon become fairly obvious after some time doing that work. 1) EVERYTHING needs to be thought ahead. When you are in the middle of the desert nothign is just down the road because the road is 1500km long. Prior to that time I worked in our manufacturing sector and 90% of everything was at worst an hour away. On a remote mine site, even if airplanes come regularly you have to consider everything is at least 3 days away. Its a giant non-stop logistical exercise that never ends. 2) Everything you take for granted in a city like water and power has to be treated very seriously. Most people never consider what happens when they flush the toilet. On a mine site that's a serious consideration along with all other waste. Most of all the food has to be trucked or flown in, then stored, then cooked, then eaten and then cleaned up. Humans eat, shit, pee and breath. Spaceship earth is great for cleaning our mess and we take that for granted. 3) Mine sites are primarily dirt and rock crushing & grinding plants. That means wear and tear on everything. I got hold of the papers for a NASA conference on the moon (well over 200 pages). The total commentary on maintenance was less than 1-1/2 pages, 1/2 of which was a diagram and all they said was we'll do it with robots. That told me that NONE OF THEM had ever spent any time on a mine site. When I see clowns talking about mining asteroids I can tell NONE OF THEM had ever spent time on a mine site. When I hear Jeff Bezos talking about taking all the iron ore processing off planet I know he's not done any of the basic math hon that.
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  80.  @commonsenseskeptic  To both you and Mr. Clem the word "engineer" is NOT protected under any law anywhere the sam eas words like doctor and dentist are. I can't explain the history across the world but I can explain what happened in Australia. I started in Mech. Eng at RMIT (Melbourne Australia) in 1983. On day 1 we had the Institute of Engineers Australia talk to us about becoming student members. During that they discussed a couple of legal issues. They went all through the subject of people using the word "engineer." At some point in Australian History just before or just after WW2 several professions were offered the right to claim exclusive legal use of the word that labels their profession. I know of 3, accountants, architects and engineers. Engineers and Accountants opted out because it would take about 50 years to completely retire out all the unqualified people already calling themselves engineer or accountant. The Architects said yes and they'd deal with the unqualified. The institutes for engineers and accountants opted for post graduate certifications and we now have the legal terms "chartered accountant" and "chartered engineer." It usually requires 4 years of practice after graduation to be come eligible to get chartered. I don't know the exact process because for engineers These days anyone can draw a house or building up in CAD or on paper and submit it to planning authorities. They can do it for other people and charge money. BUT if they use the word "architect" to describe themselves in any way and they are NOT degree qualified they can get charged with fraud. For accountants and engineers there are certain specific tasks where being a "chartered accountant" or "chartered engineer" is required. In engineering the only 2 places I know it matters are for civil engineers doing structural work and electrical for power grid/distribution, and then only the civil structural where there's actual legal requirements. Civil Structural engineers get licensed, but then they are the guys who say the bridges and buildings wont collapse. 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ An odd area where I know the word "engineer" is strictly controlled is in aircraft maintenance. We call aircraft mechanics LAME (pronounced lay-mee) for Licensed Mechanical Airframe Engineer. They are NOT degree qualified. They are the aircraft equivalent of a motor mechanic. So the word engineer is not a controlled word and that's common. I know it sucks but Elon is free like any other person to declare himself an engineer. I totally effing hate it, but that's how it is. Great vid.
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  81.  @commonsenseskeptic  We now have terms like "registered professional engineer" BUT NONE of it means squat. So long as LAWYERS & PR protect the CEOs and their sneaky slimy disgusting economists, accountants and HR - the QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE of engineers wont matter. Boeing Max-8 should have FINALLY changed things and been the end of fake and false engineering practices. It certainly should have ended interference from the uneducated over the educated. They killed over 300 people for money and so far NOBODY has been held accountable. Elon will never be held to account for his bad engineering. He could stack 100 dumb fanbots into Starship tomorrow, light the fuse and blow them into confetti without any worry. Kyle Rittenhouse shot 2 people and it was FILMED. The whole world saw it and in any other place EXCEPT America he'd be in jail. When powerful people with vested interests are involved CEOs KNOW they can get away with stuff. There are too many powerful people with money in Tesla. For sure as you pointed out in another vid its monstrously over valued. Its insane how overvalued it is. That doesn't matter squat. Until Elon does something they can't ignore he's free do to whatever he likes. I'm not certain of your qualifications but your clearly smart enough to understand that.
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  82.  @commonsenseskeptic  I know its a year late but you haven't been totally clean with the issues of NASA, Falcon and Soyuz. *YES you are absolutely right SpaceX was late delivering Crew Dragon, and that Starship is a disaster in the making, but: You didn't put Falcon and Crew Dragon in perspective against other programs. Look at how many other projects that were put forward NONE of which delivered anything. Boeing in particular has so far TOTALLY FAILED with Starliner and Starliner is costed at millions more per launch. You did put up the costs of Shuttle but didn't mention that if even 5 of those American crews had been done using the Space Shuttle that would have cost over $2.2 Billion. I did my degree in aerospace and along with my class mates watched our dreams go up with Challenger in January 1986. I was in a minority but was further disheartened when NASA announced a replacement (Endeavour). I agreed with Kelly Johnson (lead engineer for the SR-71) who said that money needed to go to a replacement and with his background should have been listened to. IMHO I think Gwynne Shotwell and the Space X team that works on the Falcon series including Crew Dragon have done an incredible job DESPITE the presence of Elon Musk. This is even more evident when compared against Boeing's Starliner and the Ares/Constellation and SLS programs none of which have yet successfully flown. In fact it might be a good question to where they might be IF Elon Musk wasn't sapping them of resources on his fantasy clown stupidity of Starship. Yeah mate IMHO Starship will be a bigger failure than the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle was an incredible technical achievement in that they made a reusable space plane work, BUT it was a total failure in how much it cost in resources (both financial and manpower) and STARVED other programs of those resources. What's Starship doing at the moment? I know you have done vids on other parts of Musk's space programs but if you want some technical input on doing any more I'd be happy to help.
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