Then what’s the deal with “reionization”, when later the first stars began shining? Was that an era of cosmic transparency or opaqeness?
Cosmic transparency began with the last scattering an estimated 380,000 years after the BB. Over a period of hundreds of millions of years after that, the first generation supermassive stars began to shine, and the intense radiation once again ionized hydrogen atoms. But by this time the universe had expanded immensely, and was less dense by more than four orders of magnitude, so the free electrons had little effect in once again scattering photons, and the universe remained transparent.
ETA: I hate it when Discourse, in its infinite wisdom, edits out a quote to a preceding post so that I have to edit it back in!
There’s a workaround:
If instead of “Reply” you select what you want to quote and click “Quote” once the option appears, the quote gets added to your post.
In the “+” menu in the post editor there’s the option to “Quote whole post”.
There is. I used it on your post that this post is in direct reply to.
And although your post text appeared inside my edit box, Discourse automatically deleted it when I hit [save].
That auto-deletion is the issue being side-whined about.
Discourse can be snotty about posts that are more quote than new comment.
test
ETA: my system seems to work, select all the post and choose “quote”.
It doesn’t work if you’re quoting the most recent post.
NM
test2
@Pleonast is right, it doesn’t work for the most recent post
The workaround is to delete the last punctuation in the quote or add a non-breaking space. As long as the quote isn’t exactly the entire post, it will keep it.
Yup, that’s what I used to do but I thought it was no longer necessary.
Just ran across a YouTube that offers a pretty good explanation of what SpaceX is hoping to do with Starship and orbital data centers. Basically if Starship works and if orbital data is a valid concept (which the presenter acknowledges isn’t a given yet) SpaceX hopes to become the 21st century space equivalent of 19th century railroads or 20th century container shipping.
It’s interesting to note that some of the most egregious robber barons of the original Industrial Age were railroad magnates.
I haven’t watched the video, but is this based on anything other than Elon Musk’s current say-so?
I ask because Starship has been in development for something like 20 years, and officially was named in 2018 around the same time the first transformer-based LLMs were getting off the ground. It seems evident, then, that the original purpose of Starship had nothing to do with datacenters in space, since nobody was predicting the LLM boom that would come 4 years later with GPT 3.5. And if they had been predicting it, companies would have started locking down GPUs in 2018.
That seems like a silly question. I think it’s safe to assume that what Elon Musk’s company wants to do is based at least partially (if not fully) on what Elon Musk says.
That doesn’t mean that it’s in any way feasible, or that it isn’t something that changed in the last few years after its original purpose failed, and it’s trying to justify its existence and not scare off investors by admitting that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.
It’s about as meaningful as a kid with a lemonade stand who wants to be a billionaire someday. Okay, that might be your dream, but I’m not interested until there’s a chance it could actually happen.
On brand since an Elmo go-to is trying to reinvent the train, only much shittier (Hyperloop, Boring Company).
The railroads were a set of local monopolies that had the economy of the day by the 'nads. Which is how their tycoon owners became insanely rich & powerful relative to the GDP of the day.
A tycoon & company w a monopoly on low cost orbital access, on high speed global satellite internet, and has mostly won the AI wars will make Vanderbilt or Rockefeller look like peons.
That is musk’s dream. I can’t quite dignify it with the label “plan”. But he sure hopes he can pull it off.
If only he had something he could use as leverage, like a bunch of data for people and organizations all over the country. Too bad for him he has never had that opportunity.
He’s stuck on “I Remember Babylon” by Arthur C. Clarke."
Wiki synopsis:
The story takes the form of a non-fiction article by Clarke in which he warns the United States that the People’s Republic of China is planning to, using a Russian rocket, launch a communications satellite in geostationary orbit to broadcast directly to Americans. The satellite will offer an uncensorable mix of heterosexual and homosexual pornography (using the Kinsey Report as market research), gore (such as details of bullfights and photographic evidence from the Nuremberg trials), and communist propaganda. The American ex-ad man and Communist sympathizer that reveals the plan to Clarke thanks his influential 1945 article on satellite transmission for giving China the idea, and boasts that “History is on our side. We’ll be using America’s own decadence as a weapon against her, and it’s a weapon for which there’s no defence”.
One of the pornographic films in the story is described as depicting the erotic sculptures of the Konark Sun Temple in Odisha (Clarke uses the variant spelling of “Konarak”).
One thing not mentioned is that the American ad-man is doing it for the money. One of the Konark temple sculptures that will destroy America:
