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SciameriKen » February 7th, 2018, 3:43 pm wrote:Am I understanding this correctly? Musk just launched a car with a dummy in it into space?
And we thought the Humanity star was a horrible idea:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/ ... story.html
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zetreque » February 7th, 2018, 7:13 pm wrote:I am not a fan of Musk one bit. I have been following him for the past 20 years. He is just another self-indulgent opportunist capitalist and doesn't deserve all of the environmentalism credit people give him.
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someguy1 » Thu Feb 08, 2018 8:33 am wrote:zetreque » February 7th, 2018, 7:13 pm wrote:I am not a fan of Musk one bit. I have been following him for the past 20 years. He is just another self-indulgent opportunist capitalist and doesn't deserve all of the environmentalism credit people give him.
Agreed. But he's no capitalist. He's a crony capitalist. His products and companies are heavily subsidized by the government. Socialized losses, privatized profits. He's exactly what's wrong with our system.
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toucana » February 7th, 2018, 3:12 pm wrote:
Never mind. Another eccentric enthusiast did manage to get their rocket aloft the other day. Elon Musk the head of SpaceX fired his trusty old red colour Tesla Roadster into orbit atop of the new Falcon Heavy rocket with a dummy dressed in a spacesuit at the wheel.
The plan was to carry out a sequence of burns to break earth orbit and place the Tesla in a parking orbit around the general vicinity of Mars. Unfortunately, the latest orbital correction went slightly pear-shaped, and the dummy is now on its way to the asteroid belt and Jupiter instead.
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toucana » Wed Feb 07, 2018 11:01 pm wrote:The first test of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy composite rocket was deemed to be a high-risk launch.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/spacex-launch-tesla-roadster-car-mars-elon-musk-asteroid-orbit-trajectory-missed-a8199186.html
Elon Musk himself believed there was barely a 50% chance of anything other than a spectacular fireball on the launchpad once the ignition button was pressed. Given those odds, no-one wanted to risk a payload of any real value on the maiden flight, so Musk opted for a token joke one instead
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toucana » February 8th, 2018, 10:49 am wrote:On the general subject of flying cars, did you see this item about the EHANG 184 AAV ?
The EHANG corporation based in Guangzhou (Canton) in southern China first demonstrated this technology abroad at the CES tech conference in Las Vegas in 2016. It has been developed some way since then, and is now a fully-fledged people carrying autonomous flying drone system.
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According to the poll, which took responses from 8,215 people, around 2 percent of Americans believe the Earth is flat.
On top of that, 5 percent of those surveyed have always thought the world was round, but now have doubts.
These numbers alone are pretty eye-opening, but even more remarkable is the correlation between those who believe that the Earth is flat and religion: around 52 percent of self-proclaimed flat Earthers say they are "very religious."
This makes sense, according to psychologist Michael Wood: according to him, many flat Earth YouTubers and videos explicitly say that "they find it more appalling to believe in the universe as a huge, uncaring place, and that it seems more reasonable to imagine Earth was made for humans like a perfect snow globe."
For anyone who graduated high school, the religious anxiety over the flatness or roundness of Earth seems to echo what happened when Galileo challenged the geocentric model of the solar system back in the 1600s—faced with evidence that the Earth wasn't the literal and symbolic center of creation, the Catholic Church realized that the information might cause a crisis of faith and tried to suppress it. It seems that the flat Earth movement represents a lot of those old fears, just dressed in new clothes.
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