Next Big Future

If anyone is about to watch this video, I want to warn you before you do that saying this guy "has an agenda" is like saying that a flat earther "has an agenda" in that they will absolutely be giving you "facts" and whenever the "facts" disagree with reality they will give you "facts" that are designed to make you abandon reality.

If I were to state my actual opinion on him on Hacker News, I would be downvoted. If I were to try and express how I feel about someone else finding him at all reasonable, I would be downvoted. So in the kindest possible way let me direct your attention to the kind of techniques he uses.

At 7:16 in that video he posts a screen capture of an article headline. It is a screen capture? Honest right? Great data. Not so fast. The screengrab was photoshopped. He edited out part of the title. In particular, he edited out the price for SpaceX to launch a satellite to orbit. Why, you might wonder, would he do something like that? Well... he was lying about the price just before that, so it would be kind of inconvenient to let people see the truth, wouldn't it? Here is the article whose title he photoshopped: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/12/spacex-starlink-satellites-cost-well-below-500000-each-and-falcon-9-launches-less-than-30-million.html

This isn't an uncommon thing for this liar. He regularly and willfully does things like this all throughout the video. You should be taking every number he gives with an enormous amount of salt. Dump the entire…

> Perhaps space travel isn't easy or fast at all

Except we have excellent knowledge about lower bounds on how easy and fast space travel can be. And its plenty fast enough to explore the entire galaxy on geological timescales. Voyager 1 is traveling at 17 km/s which would take it 1 light year every 17,700 years. Given that the galaxy is 100,000 light years across, that means that Voyager 1 could travel across the galaxy in 1.7 billion years. A spaceship built for that purpose would take vastly less time.

Voyager weighed less than 800 kg. Using the [rocket equation](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/ideal-rocket-equation) and a realistic exhaust velocity for methane/oxygen of 3280 m/s, you can see that you could accelerate a voyager 1 sized craft to 3000 m/s with about 1200 kg of fuel, which is less than $1 of fuel, no joke (https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/02/spacex-reusable-rocket-costs-versus-airplanes.html). Of course it takes a lot of money to just get that fuel into orbit: $1500/kg with a falcon heavy. But that means you could send a voyager-1-sized craft to space with the fuel it needs to achieve 3000 km/s for a mere $3 million (not including the cost of the craft itself). And harvesting methane and oxygen on smaller planets would bring down that cost by a lot.

At that speed, the craft could cross the entire galaxy in 9.6 million years. A blink of an eye on geological timescales. And if we really cared enough to spend more than a couple million dollars on…

if 20 milliseverts per year is the correct level for evacuation then why do we not evacuate Kerela in India, Ramsdar in Iran. Kerela has radiation levels 3 times higher than 20 milliseverts per year. Denver has higher background radiation than most places in the US. Higher altitude and higher radon levels. They are not quite to 20 milliseverts per year unless they have more radon in their house which some do.

Flight crews get 3.1 milliseverts per year. About 50 days worth of Fukushima exposure.

Air pollution causes 7 million deaths per year. 4 million from outdoor air pollution. The hospitalization rate increases on the bad air days. The effect is immediate for many elderly and asthmatics. Air pollution levels in some cities in India, China and other parts of Asia is like forcing everyone (including babies and the elderly or asthmatics) to smoke 6+ cigarettes a day.

Being barely able to breath is very unpleasant and scary.

12,000 people died over 2 weeks in 1952 during the London Fog air pollution event. Atmospheric inversion trapped air pollution. People dropped dead with blue lips and their last few minutes to hours were spent gasping for breath.

144 people were killed in 1966. During the Aberfan disaster. Millions of tons of coal mine waste were left in piles on a mountain. A heavy rain caused the mine waste to slide down the mountain and into the town of Aberfan. It buried a school. 117 children…

I think the answer is that they are, because there aren't that many infrastructure deaths.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448087/ says that in the US, where the statistics are best, "electrical injuries cause approximately 1000 deaths annually. Of these, around 400 result from high-voltage electrical injuries, while lightning accounts for 50 to 300 deaths." That's 400 deaths per year from high-voltage transmission lines and substations, and from other high-voltage sources such as CRT televisions being repaired or ion-implantation voltage sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States says the USA's utility-scale electricity generation was 4230.723 TWh in 02022.

So that's ballpark 100 nanodeaths per megawatt hour from transmission wires and the like. Or 0.1 deaths per terawatt hour. By contrast, https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html claims that rooftop solar claimed 0.44 deaths per terawatt hour at the time; possibly that has improved since then, but I doubt that it has changed that much. Brian Wang returned to the question in 02021 in https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/07/2020-fatalities-for-us-roofers-increased-15-as-solar-roof-installations-increase.html and estimated almost 1 death per terawatt hour.

So it seems clear that the infrastructural deaths are much lower than the deaths from falling off roofs.

Boeing's market cap is $132 billion, so it's not obviously crazy. They're already the world's cheapest launch provider by a significant margin, and currently the only human-rated private launch company.

They've started launching the second-generation Starlink sats, which transfer data directly between each other by laser. If they get approval for the full network, they'll have total bandwidth about equal to the entire internet today.[1] It won't be competitive in cities but it'll be great in lower-density areas, exactly where cable/fiber are expensive. That alone is worth a lot of money.

If Starship with anything close to the turnaround they're claiming, they'll multiply the world's launch capacity by several orders of magnitude, drop launch costs by a couple orders of magnitude, and open up all sorts of applications in space that aren't affordable today.

There's risk of failure but altogether I'd say all that's worth as much as Boeing. If these things succeed, they'll be worth a lot more.

[1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/version-2-starlink-with-lasers-and-gen-2-spacex-starlink-bigger-and-faster.html#more-173281

Tesla doesn't have anything to do with Starship launch prices. Let's look at costs to SpaceX for launches, since those are the most relevant numbers:

Reused Falcon 9 launch: $15M[1] in the best case, but let's double it just to ballpark the average, so $30M. Falcon 9 can loft around 50 satellites per launch. 30M/50 = $600k/satellite.

Starship: Aspirational goal of $2M cost to launch. Let's just round that up to $10M for whatever might be more expensive than expected. Starship has been predicted to be able to launch around 400 Starlink satellites at a time, the last figure I saw was that Starship launches would carry "100 plus" Starlinks[2]. $10M/100 = $100k/satellite. This is assuming Starship is launching v2.0 satellites though, rather than the current v1.5, which are way heavier (1 metric ton vs ~290kg)[3].

1: https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-elon-musk-falcon-9-economics

2: https://spacenews.com/ksc-to-study-potential-new-starship-launch-pad/

3: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/version-2-starlink-with-lasers-and-gen-2-spacex-starlink-bigger-and-faster.html