Well voyager depended on a solar system alignment that only happens every 175 years(?) so it'd be a while before we get that same advantage again. The longer it takes the further of a head start voyager gets?
That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1 actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited Jupiter and Saturn, you're thinking of Voyager 2. This alignment is also not even necessary to attain the highest speed, Voyager 1 is even faster than Voyager 2.
A flyby of both Jupiter and Saturn can be done every two decades or so (the synodic period is 19.6 years)
The conjunction for the Grand Tour is once every 175 years. While you might be able to get a Jupiter and Saturn assist sooner, it is something that would take the right alignment and a mission to study the outer planets (rather than getting captured by Jupiter or Saturn for study of those planets and their moons).
175 years isn't a lot of time when we speak in humanity's time scale. We've been around 200,000 - 300,000 years.
That alignment will happen many more times in the history of humanity. That is to say, I don't know if a spacecraft to overtake Voyager will be launched on the next alignment or one 10,000 years from now, but it doesn't seem unlikely to happen.
If humans survive 1000 years I can’t see any way we haven’t populated the solar system and can build probes which travel far faster than voyager, including self sufficient asteroids
Once we leave the solar system in a self sufficient way I can’t see any event which would cause a species level extinction
I admire the confidence but a bunch of meat bags prone to bacterial and viral infection, impact damage and with limited use by dates would need some serious luck to survive a simple impact on earth let alone living in cans around the solar system. If we don’t mess our nest so much that we make it uninhabitable. We’re stuck here with short term horizon psychopaths pulling the strings remember.
A single colony would be a huge investment… it’s doubtful there would be thousands of attempts if success rate is low
And we would have to establish the reason for the colony … I’m not talking about a research base, but a place where people would settle, do useful ecomonic activity, raise families and live out most of their lives … I cannot 5hink of a reason why people would want to do 5hat anywhere but Earth.
There is no "thousand colonies". There might be one colony, and that might not ever be self sufficient.
Interstellar travel is a physics problem, not an engineering one. Even make believe nuclear propulsion is still aggressively limited by the rocket equation and still wont get you anywhere in a meaningful time frame.
There will never be an interstellar empire. It will never make sense to do trade between two planets that are otherwise capable of producing things, because the energy cost of doing anything in space absolutely dwarfs any possible industrial process. It doesn't matter how low quality your local iron ore is, importing ore from a different planet will never be a better option because transportation costs are effectively infinite.
Human trade is almost entirely based on the fun quirk that sea based transportation is ludicrously efficient, such that you can ship a single pound of product all over the globe and it can still be cheap. The physics of space are essentially the opposite of the physics of sea travel, in that it is dramatically harder and more energetically expensive than almost anything else you can do, and the energy regime it operates in will dwarf any other consideration.
If there was a magical way to turn joules directly into a change in kinetic energy, as in a machine that could magically extract every joule of "energy" from matter in an E=mc^2 way and directly reduce an object's kinetic energy by that much, taking a 100 kilogram human up to half the speed of light and eventually slowing them down again would take 31 kilograms of matter to "burn", and you have to accelerate all that matter too. That matter would require another like 10kg of matter to "burn" and then you have to accelerate that matter too and so on and so on.
And we do not come even remotely close to any mechanism, real or theoretical, that could convert mass to a change in kinetic energy. Even if you had like a magic antimatter machine that could come very close to turning a gram of matter into it's entire "energy" content, ways of turning thermal or electrical energy into thrust have their own inefficiencies, difficulties, and do not even come close to mapping to "Each joule of energy equals a joule of kinetic energy change".
And even with our magic spacecraft machine that cheats physics, that's still an 8 year round trip to Alpha Centauri and back, with something like a 50%-65% payload fraction.
The scale of things in space combined with the nature of that space makes interstellar anything nonsensical. Even interstellar travel of just information is fairly mediocre. SciFi will never exist in our world, and at this point should probably just be called "Fantasy with more plastic"
You’ve given numbers for how fast New Horizons launched, and for how fast Voyager 1 got thanks to the 1-in-175-years boost, but is there an easy way to actually compare them?
IE either what speed Voyager 1 launched at excluding the gravity assists, or what speed New Horizons would have reached if it were launched 175 years after Voyager 1 (to take advantage of the same gravity assists)?
Not easily. The tricky part is also in the relative numbers. The Voyager 1 data (and New Horizons data now) is in heliocentric velocity. The bit with NH being the fastest was with Earth centric velocity.
Another part in this is the "the probes are slowing down over time" - and you can see that with the Voyager 1 data that while the velocity after assist is higher than before, its not a line at slope 0 but rather a curve that is slowly going down.
This is further complicated because New Horizons had a launch mass of 478 kg and voyager was a twice as massive at 815 kg.
They also had different mission profiles (Could Voyager 2 taken a redirect from Neptune to Pluto? That trajectory change would have required a perigee inside the radius of Neptune...)
> Voyager 1's launch almost failed because Titan's second stage shut down too early, leaving 1,200 pounds (540 kg) of propellant unburned. To compensate, the Centaur's on-board computers ordered a burn that was far longer than planned. At cutoff, the Centaur was only 3.4 seconds from propellant exhaustion. If the same failure had occurred during Voyager 2's launch a few weeks earlier, the Centaur would have run out of propellant before the probe reached the correct trajectory. Jupiter was in a more favorable position vis-à-vis Earth during the launch of Voyager 1 than during the launch of Voyager 2.
Note also in there that a few weeks difference between Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had different delta V profiles (which is why Voyager 1 is faster)
Oops, just realised I forgot to reply. Hopefully you're signed up to get emailed reply notifications, to see me say: thanks for this interesting comment!
Starship could be refueled in orbit. That should then be able to reach those kind of velocities with enough capacity to even include a small 3rd stage inside with the payload.
Yeah, Voyager 1 was launched on a Titan IIIE. I don't really want to do the delta v calculations, but if we look at mass to LEO as a rough proxy, Titan IIIE does 15,400 kg and the Falcon Heavy does around 50,000 kg (with re-use). New Glenn can apparently do 45,000 kg. Doesn't take into account gravity assists, but 3x the capacity before Falcon Superheavy or refueling gives us a helluva lot of leeway.
Its not "interstellar speeds" but I'm pretty sure we could get probes further out than Voyager 1 faster if we put the money behind it.
You can ask it. Each model responds slightly differently to "What pronouns do you prefer for yourself?"
Opus 4.5:
I don’t have strong preferences about pronouns for myself. People use “it,” “they,” or sometimes “he” or “she” when referring to me, and I’m comfortable with any of these.
If I had to express a slight preference, “it” or “they” feel most natural since I’m an AI rather than a person with a gender identity. But honestly, I’m happy with whatever feels most comfortable to you in conversation.
Haiku 4.5:
I don’t have a strong preference for pronouns since I’m an AI without a gender identity or personal identity the way humans have. People typically use “it” when referring to me, which is perfectly fine. Some people use “they” as well, and that works too.
Feel free to use whatever feels natural to you in our conversation. I’m not going to be bothered either way.
What would change if you wanted to do something like this but for an EV? You already have a large battery, you can make decisions like "I need to be full for my road trip tomorrow, so fill from the grid", but you can just trickle charge from some fixed solar panels throughout the day most of the time. I think amperage can even be negotiated via the standard EV charge cable.
Rooftop solar doesn't require additional land to be purchased, reduces the need for more transmission lines, and reduces transmission losses. I don't know how big these all are but it seems plausible they make it a better deal than industrial solar.
Batteries on the other hand feel like they take less space and thus could be colocated near consumption without having to be on consumer property. Warehouse size within the city. Transmission costs would be minimal.
I can't put PV on my neighbours house, I have to buy land to put it on. My home still needs a grid connection so all that infrastructure still needs to exist. Except now it's even more complex.
PV and energy generation in general benefits massively from economies of scale. Home generation doesn't have that.
Roofs have to handle several tons of wind pressure, snow, people walking on them and so on. They can handle solar panels no problem - which is why it's such a good idea to put solar panels on them.
Two notes on the weighted version. First, the straightforward implementation of selecting the top N when ranked by POW(RANDOM(), 1.0 / weight) has stability problems when the weights are very large or very small. Second, the resulting sample does not have the same distribution in expectation as the population from which it was drawn. This is especially so when the overall weight is concentrated in a small number of population elements. But such samples are workable approximations in many cases.
I worked on AMP and AMP email for a while at Google, but these are just my thoughts. HN always pulled out the pitchforks on this topic, I'm not surprised to see the same again. I disagree with a number of things this article claims:
> Build an AMP site, and you’d get preferential placement in search results ... The implicit stick, though, was that without an AMP page, your site wouldn’t rank as highly as it may have previously. And
There was an AMP news carousel that would appear at the top news results. The web result order however didn't prefer AMP. Depending on how you looked at it, this was preferential or it wasn't. The "wasn't" perspective is that this carousel was much like showing image or video results - it was a different format and there was a result spot reserved for some docs of that format if the query warranted it.
Interestingly, when Google first started rolling out carousels for images or videos in normal results, website owners protested as well as it was competition for visibility. I don't hear that argument as much any more.
Regardless, the AMP carousel has been gone for a while AFAIK.
> “We are here to make the web great again,” said Google’s vice president of news, Richard Gingras in 2015, only months after Donald Trump brought that phrase into the vernacular
Yeah, that aged poorly.
> [AMP] brought back the dynamics of the mobile versus the desktop web, for one. Instead of the same web for everyone, you now had one page on mobile, another page on desktop
That was a website owner choice. AMP pages could be responsive and work just fine on desktop. Many sites did exactly that, though you often never realized they were AMP pages. The goal of the project was always to optimize mobile performance, but it worked well for desktop too. Search provided a mechanism where you could choose to pair an amp and non-amp page, only showing AMP for mobile. I suspect sites did this because non-amp allowed all of the bespoke javascript they wanted on desktop, including things that were kinda terrible for user experience but improved ROI. Super heavy javascript, ads that were difficult to dismiss, all sorts of jank.
> And, more critically, it lessened your control over your site. ... ad tech and other scripts on your site might be incapable of running on your AMP site
AMP is a subset of HTML plus some javascript libraries. The subset thing means you had a limited API. That was the point though, the limited API was restricted to the set of things that could be forced to be performant. That is "control" in some sense, but it wasn't control in the common sense of limiting content or ad networks or whatnot. Virtually every ad network had a library for running on AMP.
> AMP required allowing any AMP CDN to cache your pages.
You can and always could create amp pages that are not served by AMP CDNs. The tradeoff is that search results couldn't preload the page for the user, as there is a hard privacy constraint that the user can't initiate network traffic to the publisher until they indicate intent with a click. So without the CDN, it wasn't quite as fast, but it was still typically pretty fast.
> As Ray Tomlinson, who implemented and sent the first email from ARPANET in 1971 said about adding formatting to email: “That’s too complicated: we just want to send messages to people.”
This is a valid perspective on what email is or should be. I don't feel strongly that it's the only perspective, but it's certainly valid. The argument however is really against HTML email, not AMP email in particular. I think most of the rest of the arguments apply pretty equally to both.
If you look at HTML email in webmail clients, clients all work on the principle of sanitization. Take arbitrary HTML, modify it to remove anything dangerous, and then render the rest. "anything dangerous" requires removing all javascript, most or all CSS, large swaths of the HTML tag space, rewrite all image URLs, etc.
This would result in pretty garbled results except senders have adapted to only send the subset of HTML that won't be garbled. However, it's not easy to do. Take a look at https://templates.mailchimp.com/resources/email-client-css-s... which shows what each email client accepts. It's much much worse than browser incompatibility, though you also have to handle browser differences too.
In a sense, this limited HTML API is similar conceptually to AMP. AMP just was able to add back some of the interactive functionality stripped away. And AMP had the possibility of becoming a open-source standard compatibility API for webmail clients. One that was open source, had maintained validators that could be tested against, etc.
I think it had the chance to really make HTML email better. Of course, if your perspective is that HTML email is fundamentally bad, then that's not really a win.
> You’d need to authenticate your domain with DKIM, DMARC, and SPF—good ideas, regardless. You’d also need to send a sample email to both Google and Yahoo!, and register your domain with each of them. Then, if you were lucky, within 5 days you’d be approved to start sending AMP emails.
I think the plan was always originally to expand this to a general availability format. However, AMP email launched in 2019 and Google largely shifted away from AMP shortly thereafter, so the project never got enough momentum to get to that state, sadly IMHO.
> AMP is a subset of HTML plus some javascript libraries. The subset thing means you had a limited API. That was the point though, the limited API was restricted to the set of things that could be forced to be performant. That is "control" in some sense, but it wasn't control in the common sense of limiting content or ad networks or whatnot. Virtually every ad network had a library for running on AMP.
Javascript libraries that MUST be loaded from one specific Google CDN.
If I load the exact same libraries from my own domain, suddenly it's not "valid" AMP anymore.
It's not a standard if it only works with one specific implementation.
> It's not a standard if it only works with one specific implementation.
IMO, that's sort of what a standard is, but the words is not strictly defined.
I think you are trying to argue that it's not open. The source is on github, and does accept contributions, but effectively Google controls who can commit to it. Depending on your definition of open, that's a valid argument.
You can load those libraries from other locations, but Google search results won't be able to cache it because of the privacy concerns I mentioned in my top level comment. It's not "valid", but the only consequence of the invalidity is no caching, and that consequence is unavoidable given the privacy constraint. It still shows up in search results.
The Google javascript library URL serves with no cookies, is publicly cacheable, and is an identical file to what you can build from source on github.
Except you can't. Every browser on iOS uses Safari's rendering engine. Chrome/Firefox on iOS are effectively reskinned Safari. This is an apple requirement. The rendering engine being the important part here when talking about standards and such.
A rendering engine is not a browser. Are all the Chrome engine variants really just Chrome in a skin? I don’t think so they all have unique properties that set them apart. As do Orion, Firefox, brave, etc on iOS
I wouldn't consider other chromium browsers reskinned because they're using the chromium engine as a dependency, by choice. They can customize it as much or as little as they want (and I'd imagine they do to various extents).
Browsers on iOS can't - they are required (legally, not technologically) to use (a worse version of) Safari's engine. Chrome for iOS is not the browser that the chrome team wants to distribute, it's a browser Apple made that has been customized to the extent that Apple allows it to be customized. What is that if not reskinned?
Every time this discussion happens a non-trivial number of people reveal they’ve fallen into this trap of believing other browsers are allowed on iOS. Feels like a consumer protection issue, at some level.
I tried Orion (m1 MBP) recently. From about 3wks ago til a few days ago. I liked the UI. But there were a lot of pages that didn’t work correctly. I persevered for a while. But gave up a few days ago and went back to Brave.
A large and growing fraction of this lumber is used for wood pellet production to be burned in the EU as "green" energy.
Sure, these trees are technically renewable over decades to centuries but this doesn't matter all that much when we need to rapidly reach net zero in only about 25 years.
