These are some notes after listening to this podcast that might spark some ideas…
We have not returned to the Moon in half a century.
Physics is law. Everything else is a recommendation.
It’s a brilliant engineering problem, but no new physics is required.
Proof of concept is easy. Production is hard.
As a function of inertia, people will fall victim of familiar methods.
There is no amount of money that can get you to Mars today. Cost per launch is currently not possible.
What if you had to buy a new car every time you went for a drive? That is the equivalent of current orbital launch capability.
Direct democracy over representative democracy on Mars. Laws must be short enough to understand. Absolute transparency.
After a war there were resets on rules and regulations. Without a reset, there is no garbage collection function for rules and regulations that ultimately become counter-productive. you become immobilized like Gulliver. There is a rule against everything.
What if laws auto-sunset after some time, unless publicly defended?
Active process for questioning rules and regulation existence.
It should be easier to remove a law than add one. 60% for a law to take effect. 40% to remove it.
Crypto currency on Mars. At closest approach Mars is 4 light minutes away. Can’t synchronize a 1 minute block chain if Mars is 4 -20 minutes away.
Money today is a bunch of old mainframes running Cobol databases that governments with edit privileges can edit when they want.
Bitcoins store of value. Doje coin accidental success.
Money is database for resource allocation across time and space. If you are stranded on an island, having a trillion dollars is of little value.
When Bitcoin was started in 2008, having a small block size and long synchronization time. Fast forward 10 years, it’s comically low. If a currency is too deflationary or increases value in time it either causes spending or saving.
Nick Szabo is the primary thought leader behind Bitcoin apart from everyone else based on prelaunch publication.
Autopilot. The human brain post processing from the vision signals from your eyes is incredible. The memory is the weakest part of the brain. Memory is expensive and limited, the brain is trying to forget as much as possible, so the brain tries to distill down the signals to the smallest vector space of relevant objects as possible.
Object permanence and tracking objects through occlusion.
Wrote a custom C compiler to compile directly to the autopilot, because C++ has too much overhead.
Self driving will perform with super human abilities and perform maneuvers better than the best James Bond movie best maneuver.
Neural networks are eating software. More matrix based less heuristics based.
The idea of going to the Moon is the easy part. Going is the hard part.
Governments are slow and the only thing slower is a collection of governments.
Nuclear power in a place with few natural disasters.
When you say radiation do you mean photons or particles? Everything is radiating all the time. The sun is a giant thermo-nuclear reactor.
The world is producing far more food than we can consume. Food is extremely cheap. Obesity is the problem now.
Try to be useful. Are you contributing more than you consume? Try to have a positive net contribution to society. Not a leader for the sake of being a leader. Often the people you to be leaders don’t want to be. Live a life worth having lived. Use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly. Don’t have a 0 sum mindset.
42. The universe is the answer. What questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. Ask the right question.
Have you ever tried to search Google for “the answer to life the universe and everything”?
david marcus 