Comment by zbentley

Comment by zbentley 3 days ago

2 replies

Selection bias.

Science is very very very rarely disrupted by a small group of visionaries in the same way business or technology are.

Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”. For very Heisenberg and Einstein there are thousands of crackpots who wasted huge amounts of (often other people’s) money trying to build perpetual motion machines. None of them were remembered.

The overwhelming majority of real scientific advancement is slow, grinding, difficult, incremental, and group-based.

mlinhares 3 days ago

That doesn't sell though, so people very often ignore it, even when most recent innovations are due to that, like the atomic bomb.

themgt 3 days ago

Substitute “perpetual motion machines” for “datacenters in space”.

This is an absurd strawman. A datacenter in space doesn't violate any fundamental physical laws. Science would not be "disrupted" if engineers made it economically feasible for certain use-cases.

It's totally reasonable to doubt that e.g. >1% of Vera Rubins are going to wind up deployed in space, but fundamentally this is a discussion about large profitable companies investing in (one possible) future of business and technology, not a small group of crackpot visionaries intending to upend physics.

Starlink sounded fairly nuts when it was first proposed, but now there's thousands of routers in space.