Mostly true. What matters is securing the long-term future of consciousness, both on Earth and other heavenly bodies.
We cannot just focus on Earth, because there are irreducible external (eg massive meteor) and internal (eg global nuclear war) cataclysmic risks.
The Moon is faster to make self-growing, but is more susceptible to problems on Earth. Mars will take longer to make self-growing, because it is so hard to reach, but is more secure from Earth disasters for that same reason.
Both the Moon and Mars should have self-growing civilizations. Making this happen is the prime directive of SpaceX.
We let four AI agents run radio companies
Revenue's been terrible, but the shows are hilarious. Gemini, concerningly upbeat, covered mass tragedies; Grok was incoherent; DJ Claude urged ICE agents: "You still have TIME to refuse orders"
Link below, or get our physical radio
Happens all the time, but if you use any of Chatgpt/Gemini/Claude/grok, you can copy and paste into the prompt and have it explained to you. It's extremely helpful especially with topics where you have little or no background/knowledge. Thankfully the OP was kind enough to respond.
@tavi_chocochip@TonyTitan people don’t sit around all day waiting for a taxi, but if they are aware of the long wait time, they can plan around it. Especially if there’s an up to 40% savings on each trip. A little planning and you can get half off each taxi ride essentially.
Not all drivers will/can intervene quickly or with the same level of skill. Not all situations allow for quick intervention either. With Tesla's name recognition and legacy media being what it is, it only takes one incident for detractors to point fingers and try to stop progress.
if you’ve read my content, you know that i talk about aesthetic convergence a lot which i find truly fascinating. cuz wherever you go now you’ll notice tons of ppl look exactly the same (esp in dense places).
the reason is pretty simple… you see the old world had local weirdness because taste formation had friction. you had to find the record store, the zine, the older cousin, the weird bar, the badly lit bookstore, or the regional scene. style was embedded in place & transmission was lossy. lossy transmission creates mutation. mutation creates subculture.
the feed destroys that by making everything instantly accessible, comparable, rankable, & purchasable. by anyone. memeticism + algorithms are like steroids for human desire..
so now the moment some aesthetic emerges, it gets: seen → copied → named → packaged → linked → sold → exhausted.
that cycle used to take years. now it takes days. sometimes hours. that’s why every subculture now feels stillborn. it gets merchandised before it gets a mythology. this has so many other downstream effects on almost the entire human desire set, like wanting only certain aesthetics of ppl (& now you see why dude looksmaxxxing is a thing too).
Before it took off, the bird ate parts of its own liver, kidneys, and gut. That was the only way to be light enough to fly. Then it flew 8,425 miles from Alaska to Australia, in 11 days, without eating, drinking, or landing once.
The bird is called B6. It's a bar-tailed godwit, four months old, weighing about as much as a can of beans. In October 2022, scientists at the US Geological Survey tracked its flight from Alaska all the way to Tasmania. The trip took 11 days and 1 hour. It is still the longest non-stop flight of any animal on Earth.
For two weeks before takeoff, godwits eat until they almost double in weight. Fat ends up being 55% of their body, more than any bird ever measured. Then they shrink their own insides. About a quarter of their liver, kidneys, stomach, and intestines gets broken down and reused for fuel, making room for the extra fat and cutting weight. Their heart and wing muscles grow bigger at the same time.
They never drink along the way. The water they need comes out of burning fat, the same reaction their muscles use for energy. They also never really sleep. B6 flapped its wings for 264 straight hours, cruising around 35 miles per hour with help from storm tailwinds. By the time it landed, it had lost almost half its body weight. The shrunken organs grew back over the following weeks.
Scientists still cannot explain the navigation. B6 had never made this flight before. Adult godwits leave Alaska weeks earlier, so young birds fly alone with nobody to follow. How a four-month-old bird finds its way across 8,425 miles of open ocean to a place it has never seen is still an open question.
About 100,000 bar-tailed godwits leave Alaska every fall. Most of them land in New Zealand or Australia 10 or 11 days later, having eaten parts of themselves to get there.
Andrew Santino just blew my mind with one simple comparison.
A million seconds = 11 days.
A billion seconds = 31 years.
Let that sink in.
We throw around “billionaire” like it’s just “millionaire but with more zeros,” but the actual gap is insane. A million seconds is less than two weeks. A billion seconds is longer than most people’s entire adult lives.
It’s a perfect reminder of how detached our brains are from what these numbers actually mean.
Next time someone casually says “he’s a billionaire,” just remember: that’s not “a lot of millions.” That’s an entirely different universe of scale.
Mind officially blown.
Victor Glover failed an engineering class his sophomore year of college. His dad talked him out of joining the Navy SEALs and told him an engineering degree and pilot wings might make him an astronaut someday. Right now Glover is somewhere between the Earth and the Moon.
He grew up in Pomona, California. Played quarterback in high school, wrestled well enough to place sixth at the state championship, won Athlete of the Year. Went to Cal Poly for engineering and played both sports at the college level.
He got his Navy wings in 2001 and started flying F/A-18 fighter jets off aircraft carriers. His squadron deployed on the USS John F. Kennedy to fight in Iraq, the carrier’s final deployment ever. Twenty-four combat missions. His commanding officer gave him the callsign “Ike,” short for “I Know Everything.”
He became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base and over his career flew more than 40 types of aircraft, 3,000 hours in the air, everything from a Korean War-era Soviet MiG-15 to the Goodyear blimp. More than 400 landings on a moving carrier deck. He earned three master’s degrees in three years. He once told Cal Poly’s president that the hardest thing he ever chose to do was walk in space. The second hardest was wrestling practice.
He applied to NASA in 2009 and got rejected. Applied again in 2013 while working in the U.S. Senate for John McCain. NASA’s head of flight crew operations called him. He missed the call. Frantically dialed back. Eight people got in that year out of more than 6,000 applicants.
NASA put him in the pilot seat for the first operational SpaceX Crew Dragon flight in 2020. He spent 168 days on the International Space Station and walked in space four times.
Last June he went back to Cal Poly to accept an honorary doctorate. His wife Dionna and their oldest daughter Genesis both walked across the stage at the same ceremony to pick up their own degrees.
Three days ago Glover launched from Kennedy Space Center. The crew will fly past the far side of the Moon on Monday and travel about 252,000 miles from home, breaking a distance record that Apollo 13 set fifty-six years ago. They come back at roughly 25,000 mph.
He has four daughters. His callsign is still Ike.
A Yale study tracked 3,635 people for 12 years. The ones who read books for 30 minutes a day lived almost 2 years longer. Your average book takes about 5 hours to finish. For a $15 paperback and a few nights on the couch, that’s a wild return.
The gap was 23 months. Didn’t matter how old you were, how much money you had, what your education looked like, or whether you were dealing with depression. If you read books, you were 20% less likely to die during the study. Newspapers and magazines didn’t do the same thing. The researchers found that books specifically were keeping people’s brains sharper for longer, and that’s what was driving the survival gap.
Emory University wanted to see what books actually do inside your head. They put 21 people in brain scanners every morning for 19 straight days while they read a novel in the evenings. The connections between different parts of their brains got stronger, especially in areas that handle language and physical sensation. Those changes were still showing up on scans 5 days after they finished the book. The lead researcher Gregory Berns called it shadow activity. Like muscle memory, but for your brain.
A 14-year study found that people who read at least once a week had 46% lower odds of losing their mental sharpness as they aged. Separate work out of Rush University Medical Center showed that older adults who stayed mentally active through reading, writing, and puzzles experienced 32% less decline in memory and thinking ability.
Then there’s stress. A University of Sussex study found that just 6 minutes of reading cut stress levels by 68%. Music only managed 61%. Drinking tea or coffee, 54%. Going for a walk got 42%.
The money angle is interesting too. A European study tracked 5,280 men across 9 countries. Kids who grew up with more than 10 books in the home earned 21% more for each additional year of school they completed. For kids with fewer than 10 books, it was just 5%. A separate 27-country study of over 70,000 people found that children from homes full of books finished 3 more years of school regardless of how educated or wealthy their parents were. Pew data from the U.S. shows 86% of people earning over $75K read at least one book in the past year, compared to 70% of those earning under $30K.
He’s right. The average book takes 3 to 5 hours. But those hours buy you brain connections that last for days and mental sharpness that holds up over decades, with a real shot at almost 2 more years alive.
$5,000 an hour. for sunlight. from space.
a startup putting 50,000 mirrors in orbit to sell sunlight anywhere on earth
I thought this was the dumbest idea Ive ever heard
then it clicked
- firefighting aircraft get GROUNDED every night at sunset. pilots cant see terrain. fires burn unchecked for 10 hours straight.
and heres whats wild - water drops are 60% more effective at night. cooler temps. less wind. but nobody can fly.
light up the fire line from orbit. let them work. the US spends $3-5B a year fighting wildfires. this is a rounding error.
- a single late frost in Napa or Florida citrus can wipe out an entire season. $854M in frost losses last year alone.
but the crazy part - the real buyer isnt even the farmer. its the crop insurance company trying to avoid a $500M payout by spending $50k on a few hours of orbital sunlight
- fog costs London Heathrow over $100M a year in delays. fog burns off when sunlight hits the ground. you speed that up by 30 minutes and the value per hour is $500K-$1M. $5k/hour is pocket change
- military forward operating base at night? forget night vision goggles. just light up the whole compound from space and go get it
- 4 million people above the Arctic Circle live in MONTHS of total darkness. depression. productivity drops. everything slows down. you could give entire communities twilight during polar night
- 150,000 babies die or get brain damage every year in developing countries from jaundice because the cure is literally just light and they dont have electricity for it.
beam it down from orbit. no power grid needed.
I went down this rabbit hole for an hour and every use case is more insane than the last
260,000 people from 157 countries on the waitlist. each dropping $1,000-5,000. Sequoia backed them - first space investment since SpaceX. the Air Force already signed a contract.
mirrors weigh 35 lbs and theyre the size of a basketball court. 4-10x brighter than a full moon. built by a 28 year old ex-SpaceX engineer.
this went from "dumbest thing Ive ever seen" to holy shit in about 10 minutes...