I'm just a space fan who likes writing and drawing. Frontier, my spaceflight discord server: https://nitter.gq/t.co/lwZkXMN09Z
Orion Spur of the Milky Way
Joined May 2020
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ALT The SpaceX Starship rocket stacked next to its launch tower, as the sun low in the sky illuminates it in orange light. Clouds condensation form around the lower part of the rocket.
Translation: "Human beings who have been looking out at space with telescopes for only about 400 years claim once again that they've literally figured everything out."
THE FERMI PARADOX HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED
for sixty years you have been sold a mystery. the universe is huge, the stars are old, somebody should have called by now, and the silence demands an explanation.
three researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford went to check the arithmetic under the product.
what was in the old packaging: one number plugged into each slot of the Drake equation. a single value for the share of planets where life starts, a single value for the share where intelligence appears. point estimates.
the trouble is that our knowledge of those quantities is smeared across orders of magnitude. you cannot be uncertain by a factor of a billion and then write down one number for it.
so Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord fed in the whole spread of the uncertainty instead. they ran it twice, once from their own reading of the science, once from the range of published estimates in the astrobiology literature.
the output:
> probability we are alone in the Milky Way: from about half to near certainty
> probability we are alone in the observable universe: from about 40 to 85 percent
at those numbers the silence stops being strange. nothing is missing from the sky. no paradox left to explain, and no Great Filter needed to explain it.
i went in expecting to find the trick, because a paper that deletes a famous problem usually has one. what i came out with is a complaint about method. one number written where a range belongs, repeated for sixty years.
the fine print, and i am the one insisting on it. these are probabilities under the distributions the authors picked, so change the assumptions and the numbers move. the paper measures how little we know and it does not prove that nobody is out there. what it takes away is your right to be surprised that nobody has called.
link in the comments
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I'm glad that cowboy space has come around. I feel like the space enthusiast community needs a designated thing everyone agrees is ridiculous to diffuse tension.
We have disagreements on SLS, Starship, etc, but we can all agree the yee haw AI rocket ain't happening.
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The only ones who win the space race are those who are still in the race - because the race never actually ends. America is in the space race. China is. So is India, Japan, and Europe.
Russia is lagging behind, and no amount of former glory will save their present decline.
To other space fans - growing up did you sink to the bottom of the swimming pool and then try to hold your breath long enough, so that you could jump and sink back down and feel like you were an astronaut on the Moon?
The conclusion I draw from the roadster reveal is that we need to send a bunch of these to the Moon and do real life Mario Kart races
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To call yourself a sensible spaceflight enthusiast, you should be able to properly answer the question "who is better, NASA or commercial space?"
I think responses to this serve as a good litmus test.
This video will always be hilarious to me. At the time Rocket Lab released it I thought it was really cool, but in hindsight - at what point are rockets getting smacked with swinging I-beams?
What matters are the actual forces a rocket's structure faces in flight conditions.
The internet is getting really weird.
Someone created an AI influencer just 2 days ago — and it already has 26K followers, 2.2M likes, and apparently made $13.7K from a single video.
The crazy part?
There was no real influencer behind it.
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As it was with Falcon 9. They laughed, they mocked. Then their laughter became nervous, and they denied. Then they had a moment of stunned silence. Only then in embarrassement did they begin trying to catch up.
Dang it I can't believe my beloved commercial spaceflight is going commercial
Blue Origin is likely to pursue an IPO within the next several years, after raising billions of dollars in its first outside funding round, billionaire founder Jeff Bezos said bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Yeah Europe "wants" all these things. Is it going to actually do them?
ESA wants a European-led space station, strengthen its position in human and robotic exploration of low-Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars through developing competitive capabilities, including crew transport.
Martijn Luinstra overviews:
nasaspaceflight.com/2026/10/…
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It's going to be terrible when the incredible accomplishment of landing humans on the Moon again is going to be slightly tarnished by people doing this nonsense to the Artemis IV astronauts too.
Please touch grass, don't act creepy and parasocial towards astronauts.
>Beautiful bright and colorful Florida launches
> Evil and intimidating Vandenberg launch
Three Falcon rockets vertical at three of our launch pads in Florida and California → spacex.com/launches
