Replacing an international publicly-funded institution for the advancement of science with pods for Silicon Valley psychos to do coke and jack off in. We are in the bad timeline.
Maybe, but if capitalism does in fact rely on a pool of excess and disposable labor to keep bargaining power down, it’s more likely that we’ll have slums in space, tenement stations that capitalists will point to as evidence of the beneficence of the system and as an implicit warning to anyone thinking of asking for something beyond their station. Maybe earth will be the slum.
Cyberpunk dystopia but without any of the cool stuff.
So you are telling me they are gonna have davos in a place without oxygen built by the lowest bidder? Comrade bezos gonna do thr revolution for us
I know it’s a joke, but the real answer is that if you wanted to destroy something in orbit, it would be very, very difficult. This goes out the window if you want to send up a well-timed nuke that blows up in the general area of your target, but this is still very difficult and not advisable.
Apparently it was a modified df21 missile that can do exactly that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test
The fun part about all of these short sighted uncoordinated private space venture is that a single disaster have the potential to start a catastrophic chain reaction that’ll destroy everything in orbit and locks humanity away from space for centuries.
Ideally none of this would be necessary and the ISS could have been placed in an orbit high enough that it would stay up for decades without boosts and other precautions, but the ISS had to be placed into an orbit reachable by both Soyuz and the space shuttle. Neither of those are/were capable of going much higher in altitude.
I’d thought it would be ideal beyond technical limitations since the trade-off for the occasional boost is that it is *much * easier to reach the ISS in LEO.
Brian Cox said he’s in favour of this because it means in the future everyone will do it and not just billionaires, which ignores everyone in the 3rd world and the fact that by then they’ll have moved on to something even more ridiculous
Oh and also that’s really not how it works at all anyways so
Ugh I hate that man. Brian Cox is a right wing wanker that was in the band that wrote Blair’s election theme tune. Of course he’d be down for building Slough in space, it’d make his fucking day.
