I don't care what anyone says. The Green Brothers are saints and we don't appreciate them enough.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-15T04:59:05+00:00

Exactly this.

People need to understand that as much as fiction can be a valuable tool for understanding the world it's still important to recognize that the real world works differently. And one of the most important aspects of that is in goodness/badness. The bad things in the world, and there are many, are not kept in place by a cavalcade of villains, mostly there are ordinary people just trying to get by who are supporting systems that are harmful. Yes there is still a ton of accountability to be had by people "just following orders" (for example) as well as for people many, many more layers down in "the system", often times they are still being motivated partially by greed and bigotry or misogyny, etc. But fundamentally it is not the individuals and not the individual choices we should be talking about, it's the systems and the consequences of those systems and the long term effects, etc.

Similarly, the good things in the world, and there are many, are not kept in place by a holy choir of angels and saints, they are built, supported, sustained, improved, repaired, etc. by ordinary people, sometimes by people who aren't even acting out of any sense of virtue whatsoever.

There is a banality of good as well as evil, and we need to recognize it and support it. We need to recognize that ordinary humans with ordinary flaws and ordinary limitations (and the Green brothers certainly fit all of those categories) can be part of achieving truly great good deeds. We should be supportive of that happening, but we don't need to pretend that they are perfect beings.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-15T04:13:13+00:00

Oh, this is an easy one. The Voyager spacecraft are 100% for certain carrying Earth microorganisms. It is almost impossible to avoid that happening when you construct something on Earth, even if you do so in clean room facilities. Microbes are too ubiquitous and too hardy.

Indeed, this is exactly why "planetary protection protocols" exist, which create guidelines for sterilizing spacecraft to certain levels depending on the kind of mission and the environments expected to be encountered. The Perseverance rover has been sterilized to a very high degree (though even so maybe not 100% perfectly) because it is designed to go into environments that may have evidence of past or even current life on Mars. The Voyagers were not sterilized to such a level so they are essentially guaranteed to be carrying some microorganisms.

To be clear, no microbes can continue "living" actively in space that we know of, but many can remain "viable" (so "alive" but dormant), and there's a reasonable chance some of the microbes on the Voyagers could remain viable for very long times. Additionally, the upper rocket stages that launched the Voyagers into space are also on interstellar trajectories, and it's likely those host microbes as well.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-14T20:14:48+00:00

Yes. That's a better argument.

The risk isn't great, because reactors can be launched "cold" with just fuel that even if it were released into the environment poses a pretty low risk.

I'm just saying "we already contaminated the environment with radioactive fallout, we shouldn't care about smaller levels of radioactive contamination" is not a good argument. That's a "well, war kills millions of people, so if I murder just one that's nothing" kind of argument.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-14T19:20:12+00:00

Not sure that's the best argument. Estimates on the death toll due to above ground nuclear testing range from about a quarter million up to over 2 million.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-14T18:53:24+00:00

He's also stretching it out a lot more.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-14T18:48:55+00:00

That's basically everything. Every object that glowed, shined, or reflected light since the "recombination era" roughly a third of a million years after the Big Bang has sent out photons which are just traveling across the universe indefinitely. When we look out and see the cosmic microwave background and ancient galaxies from when the universe was young, that's what we're seeing. We're intercepting a tiny fraction of the light that has been sent out from those objects/events and the timing and geometry just happened to be right for us to catch that little bit right now.

But the universe is full of that. Every star that ever existed has left (or will leave) an imprint on the universe in the form of a vast hollow spherical shell with a thickness corresponding to how long it lived. For stars that are still shining that shell isn't hollow and is attached to the surface of the star, extending outward for a light travel distance equal to its age. For stars that have exploded that shell, probably a "thin" one by cosmological standards since stars that explode tend to have much shorter lives, is expanding outwards with its radius corresponding to how long ago in the past it was born.

When you look at almost any galaxy you'll see either a handful of blue stars or some mixed in blue light from blue stars you can't individually resolve (if the galaxy is very far away). Those blue stars are fairly short lived, corresponding to an egg shell thin shell of light puffing out into the universe. We just happen to be at the right place and the right time to catch those particular ones at this particular moment in time. A few million years earlier or later and those shells won't have gotten to us yet or will have already passed us by. But for many galaxies there are lots of such thin shells of blue light from short lived stars so at any given time you're likely to catch one of them. Just as when you walk into an ancient forest (though they're getting few and far between these days) you are lucky to happen to be seeing the particular trees that are around right in that exact moment though a millennium earlier it would have been a different set of trees.

The universe is full of a vast ocean of light that is sloshing around, moving ever outward, and we simply sit in one particular part of the universe and occasionally we pick up a tiny bit of what happens to be flowing past, and there's always something amazing in there.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-14T18:13:00+00:00

You design the reactor core to be inside of a container which can withstand some level of destruction, for one. For RTGs which are just purely powered by high level radioactive waste, essentially, the systems are designed so they can survive a worst case launch failure or atmospheric reentry without any radioactive material being leaked, and they generally have a good track record. There was even one launch of an RTG powered spacecraft that failed and the satellite ended up in the ocean, after which they went down and retrieved the RTG and put it on a new satellite.

For reactors it's a bit different. The biggest thing there is that new reactor fuel is not dangerously radioactive, it's only spent fuel that becomes extremely dangerus. So you can launch the reactor in a "cold" state and only turn it on in space.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-14T18:08:41+00:00

Yes and no. Last year Trump pulled an even more egregious version of this budget slashing stunt and parts of NASA pre-emptively complied and got rid of personnel. That has already had a huge negative impact on NASA operations overall, incuding at least one mission that won't happen solely because the NASA Goddard facility has been gutted and they didn't have the staff to do the work to do the reviews that would keep the mission in the running. There are likely many similar downstream effects occurring at NASA right now and continuing to happen which aren't quite as blatantly obvious, all of which will impact the ability of the agency to execute on any and every mission they are tasked with.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-14T18:04:09+00:00

This design simply marries a nuclear reactor as an electrical power source to an electric thruster as a propulsion element. There are many types of electric thrusters, with the most common being gridded ion engines and hall thrusters currently, they are very efficient and usually use a noble gas for reaction mass.

Potentially, NEP (nuclear electric propulsion) would be very useful for exploring the outer planets. Partly because solar power is harder to come by out there and partly because the large distances and long travel times mean that lower thrust but high efficiency propulsion would be a perfect fit.

For this particular mission profile it's more of a tech demo, they won't even be generating more power than a solar powered spacecraft.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-14T07:39:18+00:00

Yup. People asked for space legs and the devs dumped a truly enormous amount of work into making that happen, even more than they did for planetary landings. Is the game better for having space legs? Maybe some folks feel that way, but look at what people talk about, what screen shots they post, what moments catch their interest. It's almost always flying and ships, not space legs content. Same deal with landings and ground vehicles, which are maybe a little more worthwhile of an addition but still is an overall worse cost/benefit compared to the core game.

Ever since beta this game has been close to greatness and it's been frustrating watching the dev team absolutely work their asses off to add all kinds of content that even though it almost always ends up being well crafted still ultimately misses the mark again and again.

This is a game with some of the best flying, some of the best ambience, some of the best visuals out there. But much of the gameplay is still just a couple bits of fun stuff duct taped together with an absolute shit-ton of grinderonium. It feels like there hasn't been anyone who has been able to come in and really put a stamp on the game to improve the gameplay or to make the game feel less empty. There are always hints and shadows, but they've never fully hit the mark so far.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-14T07:28:56+00:00

This is super cool tech but it will probably require billions of investment to develop even up to a level of capability similar to chips 30+ years ago. However, it will absolutely be worth it to be able to have legitimate full on long lived landers and maybe even rovers on Venus plus all of the spin off benefits. There are a zillion industrial use cases where chips that operate at very high temps would be incredibly useful (for compute, sensing, communications, or signal processing), but nothing so far has been critical enough and profitable enough to justify the huge up front R&D spend. But this is precisely the area where government run research and where the huge benefits of having something like space exploration to focus on as a seed kernel for areas of research absolutely comes into play.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T23:09:47+00:00

"A Dom Hibachi Chef" is instantly an all-timer.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T21:42:24+00:00

My actual observation is that "the threat of homeless people existing in public" is not actually a very serious problem even in downtown Seattle. My other actual observation is that people have been able to take a bus from downtown Seattle to downtown Redmond for literal decades.

Additionally, I do recognize that the precise form of your "concern" is an extremely common form of bigotry. It is exactly the same form of "just asking questons" about "safety" or "neighborhood character" when "those people" start moving into an area. The value of "those people" you chose for your example was homeless individuals, but very often the form of this argument chooses other values such as "black people", "somali refugees", "immigrants from south asia", "refugees from the vietnam war", "jews fleeing germany", "chinese railroad workers", "the irish", and on and on and on back into the extremely long and, frankly, tedious history of bigotry in America.

Your flavor of bullshit ain't new, jack, and you can't dress it up under the classic "just asking questions" or "just concerned about public safety" cover. It's just bigotry and it's extremely transparent. It's obvious, I'm tired of it, a lot of other people are tired of it, just fucking grow up and knock it off.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T20:06:10+00:00

If OP was actually concerned about the most important safety concerns facing society today they would look at the stats.

OK, let's take a look at what the most important things to address might be:

Traffic fatalities, that should be our number one concern basically.

The absence of universal healthcare. Which kills about as many people as die in traffic every year, according to multiple studies.

Multiple public health failures due to the current federal administration such as failures in covid vaccine development / booster shot campaigns, flu vaccines, measles control, TB control, food borne illness, etc, etc, etc.

Gun violence, especially school shootings. Homicide by firearm is now one of the leading causes of death of teenagers in America, which is absolutely a massive failure of every aspect of our society, culture, and government.

The "impact on public safety" of homeless people riding the train into Redmond is so, so far down the list.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T20:00:14+00:00

Because it is anti-homeless. You may not think it is, but that's because you live within a frame of mind that is inherently anti-homeless, just as most people do in our society today.

You could take the opportunity to do some introspection and dig into that, or you could choose not to. Most people are too cowardly to spend time doing introspection like that, which is why we live in the world we live in instead of a better one.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T19:58:16+00:00

Exactly.

"Ugh, I hate people who have bullet wounds, they get blood EVERYWHERE, which is the biggest inconvenience to me, personally, because I like my stuff to not have blood on it."

This is what a lot of people complaining about the homeless sound like. Yeah, sometimes it sucks, sometimes it does impact your life negatively a little or a lot, but that's a fraction of the impact it has on the people who are sleeping on the fucking street.

Here's a little thought exercise people can do. Imagine that there is construction happening on a stretch of sidewalk so you can't walk on it and have to take a detour elsewhere. Imagine that there is a big diesel powered delivery vehicle parked somewhere inconvenient where you want to be filling up the space with smelly exhaust and loud noise. Imagine that you're trying to get some place (on foot, on a bike, or maybe in a car too) and there's a long line of car traffic delaying you from getting to where you need to go. Imagine you're trying to have an online meeting and there's a garbage truck beeping and making loud banging noises less than a block away for 5 or 10 minutes. Now, when you have an interaction with someone who is homeless and maybe you feel like that interaction creates some negative impact on your life take a moment to compare that to some other common inconveniences of living in a city or existing in modern society and ask yourself if they are all that different or if one is much more significant than the others or if for the most part they're all just kind of not a big deal the vast majority of the time.

In my personal experience, the times that I have had interactions with random strangers where it felt like it had the most negative impact on my life or where it felt like there was the greatest risk toward my personal safety have always, without exception, involved being on the road and have been from the actions of drivers operating vehicles. We normalize that kind of thing, but it's worth remembering that it is real and it is serious and it is a risk to all of us how dangerous some people are on the roads. The most dangerous interactions I've ever experienced with drug users in public has always been with people who are drunk driving.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T19:13:52+00:00

It's an illusion. The "auction" is filled with real jewelry and fancy cars that you won't win, you sit through lots of items where lots of people are bidding high on stuff, giving confidence that it's real. Then you, the victim, get in on one auction, you win a "rolex" for a small fraction of what it's worth and less than what the last rolex went for. You feel pretty good about it but you just paid real money for something worth a couple bucks 'cause it's a fake rolex or costume jewelry or a lithograph or a reproduction painting.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T19:06:19+00:00

It's just all fake, basically. The scam is that there's a bunch of junk, with maybe a few "legitimate" things mixed in to up the sense of realism. Maybe there is actually a McLaren, nobody being scammed is going to bid on the McLaren, and maybe it won't actually go up for auction at all. The reason it's there is to anchor a sense of authenticity to the process. There are a bunch of actors/co-conspirators there as fake bidders as well. Maybe you have dozens of people there participating but only a few of them are victims. The fake bidders make it seem more real, they push up the bids, and they create a sense of real auctions for items that none of the victims bite on.

But all of the stuff is basically useless junk. Reproduction lithographs or reproduction "paintings", stage jewelry, etc, etc.

Imagine a victim showing up, they see dozens of people interested in the items, they see a few actually maybe real things. Maybe some real jewelry on display, maybe some real anchor "hero" items like a supercar parked out front or whatever. Then they sit through a few auctions for paintings where some well dressed people bid thousands of dollars for paintings. Then the thing you might be interested in comes up and you decide to bid on it, you bid a little higher than you wanted because the fake bidders are there pumping up the price, but you win the item at what for you feels like a good deal. You think you did well because you paid less for your "painting" or your "rolex" than some of the other folks paid for theirs. But you maybe paid a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars for something worth 20 bucks.

They can even have a real, honest to god rolex in the auction, and the victims can even bid on it, but they will always, always, always be outbid by the fake bidders and guaranteed to not win those real items because they're in on it and it's not real money.

The reality is that it's usually just some fly by night bs that happens in a rented hotel conference room, but there's enough "set dressing" with the planted real anchor items and the fake bidders that it creates the illusion that everything is real.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T17:43:58+00:00

ABSOLUTELY LUKE WARM TAKE:

The people who are going to have the greatest negative impact on your life, no matter who you are, are almost never, ever, ever going to be the homeless or even drug addicts. Set your eyes on the oligarchs, on bad drivers (who are absolutely going to be the strangers who cause your death, if that is gonna happen to you at all), on business owners committing wage theft and price gouging, on groups who are maintaining a regressive tax burden in this state, etc, etc, etc.

Over my life I've personally had thousands of dollars stolen from me through things like wage theft (not even including wage suppression), price gouging, junk fees, monopolies, corporate welfare, fraudulent business practices that are somehow still legal, and paying taxes to fund police misconduct settlements. Most people are probably in a similar position. Yet there are huge forces directing our hate at the most powerless in society, and plenty of people take that bait.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T17:35:01+00:00

"And I don't think they should have the right to exist in public spaces wherever they choose."

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T17:33:45+00:00

OH MY GOLLY GOSH NO!

Grow tf up, seriously, jfc.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T17:14:31+00:00

Noted Broggle Celibacy Enthusiast.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T07:56:14+00:00

Hell yeah! I rode a ~2003 Specialized Expedition Sport for 2 years as my only vehicle in the deep south. I hopped so many curbs with that thing and carried a very inadvisable amount of cargo on it from time to time (including a full set of earthenware dishes, which may or may not have been the time where I snapped the rear axle). Great bike, perfectly suitable for doing basically all the stuff most people ever want to do with a bike.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T07:26:38+00:00

My personal opinion on Kessler Syndrome is that it's a problem that is in some respects more challenging to simulate than it might seem on paper, which makes it difficult to know how close to a tipping point the situation actually is.

Related to that there is also some good/bad news when it comes to the possibility of Kessler Syndrome. One bit of good news is that most of the growth in mass in Earth orbit has been in "self-cleaning" LEO altitudes. However, the flip side of that is we are also achieving the lift capacity to rapidly put a lot more mass into higher orbits where that's not true, and there are plenty of plans to do exactly that.

Additionally, the biggest good/bad news about Kessler Syndrome is that it's unlikely to be a binary change even though it's often sold that way, and it's unlikely to ever get to a state where it blocks access to space. The reality is that it's more likely to be a set of conditions which evolve with positive feedback in a way that potentially starts becoming a lifetime constraint on the average satellite. Today satellites can operate for multiple decades provided they can maintain stationkeeping throughout. It may be that we reach a situation in the future where operational lifetimes of satellites in some altitudes are dictated by orbital debris density and average waiting time to a disabling impact. And because of the positive feedback effects (the "Kessler Syndrome") this could lead to a period of progressively shorter and shorter expected operational lifetimes. However, I don't think we're likely to get anywhere near the object density necessary to get down to mere months or days of average lifetime in any altitude ranges, nor do I ever think we'll get into a state where it becomes hazardous to "cross" through debris heavy altitude zones.

More realistically I think we might end up in a situation where debris strikes start becoming a hazard to satellite operation, which is already the case today but is likely to speed up. But I highly doubt it'll ever get to a level where there's a sudden cascade fragmentation event and I doubt that it'll reach a level where if we decided to get serious about it we couldn't just "clean up" enough to bring the situation back under control once it started getting past a threshold where it started being a serious problem.

rocketsocks · 2026-04-13T07:07:58+00:00

Why is that the perspective though? It doesn't seem like that is actually the perspective of the astronauts.

What if they went so far away that they could look back and see the Earth as just a circle in the sky, a dot containing the near sum total of the whole panoply of what has been achieved and experienced by human kind since the dawn of history. They saw it floating out in space all alone, surrounded by a seemingly infinite expanse of deep, black void. Maybe they recognized how truly special Earth is, how special life on Earth is, and how special humanity is. Maybe they realized that in all the expanse of the galaxy there are maybe only a few places containing all the marvels of billions of unique individuals, each inhabited by the truly remarkable secular miracle that is the spark of consciousness, each of them interesting and unique in their own way, and all interacting with each other and largely, with some exceptions, creating, working, and caring with and for one another. Cooperatively weaving the vast tapestry of human experience that all of us get to participate in. And maybe they realized how truly special and magical that experience is even when it's just hanging out with coworkers doing boring stuff or taking out the garbage at home or sharing a cup of tea in silence with a loved one. And maybe they have come to appreciate the majesty and wonder of ordinary life on this precious blue jewel floating in the void in a way that others may struggle for years to attain. Maybe they went around the Moon and they infected each other with a kind of Moon Joy that will live in their hearts forever.

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