>>92239 Are you trolling me with the superfluous e's or what?
The more salient question would be, what do you think will happen that makes you scared for the future? If you can't articulate it, then it's probably just existential angst.
In which case I advise you to just "turn your brain off, bro".
Capacity for violence is still very much concentrated in the U.S., which has more bases around the world than any other country and unmatched military technologies to pursue its interests.
China and India will absolutely continue to grow and change, but unfortunately we might see more conflict as a result of that unless both submit to the current U.S. hegemony. India is already heading down that path, China not so much.
The tech 'entrepreneur' crowd are eccentrics from elite schools with a disproportionate cultural influence because their job (especially Musk) is to play a media role. Musk sells the idea of his companies over specific products or research. I forget the exact figure, but in a recent year, Tesla matched Toyota's profits despite selling 300,000 cars to Toyota's 11 million, mainly through investment and belief in the cult of Musk.
These figures can get enormously rich in their own right, but the majority of the world's wealth is still concentrated in old areas like energy (petrol), the derivatives of military (i.e. publicly funded) research like aerospace engineering and weapons, finance, and so on. People in these sectors don't get as much attention, but I would argue have far more influence than a Bezos or Musk.
If I had to predict the future, I would say that we're going to see increasing social unrest in Western countries as the U.S. clings to its power through force. We'll see increasingly bizarre and unacceptable justifications for violent foreign policy with ever greater advances in surveillance and weapons technologies. It will also become apparent that we'll pay increasing costs for climate change, but action will only be taken when it starts hitting the bottom line for the most powerful in society -- unless there is tremendous public pressure to do more sooner.
I understand the pandemic has shit everyone up and frightened people, but I have to admit to being disheartened by how people react disproportionately to certain things. Climate change and war (especially an all-out conflict; nuclear weapons still exist) are the twin existential threats of our time, but people are talking about the 'upheaval of their lives' due to the relatively short-term circumstances of the lockdown. Even with horrifying government opportunism and mismanagement, the real effect of COVID-19 on daily life for most people will last a few years, at most.
I don't take the pandemic lightly, but there are pressing issues right now that pose far greater risks to us, but media is frightening people with objectively smaller issues.
This sort of talk always gets me thinking - have they fucked the dog with the Doomsday Clock? I think we're just going to have a long, painful slide into oblivion but the clock says we're right on the brink because until recently they've been advancing it in whole minute incremements.
It's mad that the thread of global thermonuclear annihilation never really went away but it's just been overwhelmed by all the other shit going on.
>>92245 >I forget the exact figure, but in a recent year, Tesla matched Toyota's profits despite selling 300,000 cars to Toyota's 11 million, mainly through investment and belief in the cult of Musk.
You forgot the entire fact and substituted nonsense.
I'd be interested to hear the full story, then. And if I have got it wrong, does it fundamentally change what I'm saying about the nature of Musk and his companies?
>>92248 What you meant to say is that Tesla is the subject of a speculative bubble and its stock market valuation surpassed Toyota's. This is also old news, as Tesla now is, on paper, not just the most valuable car company in the world but worth more than the next ten put together.
>>92247 Tesla is making profit because the EU has implemented fines for car makers according to the CO2 output of the cars they sell, so they're all exploiting loopholes where they pay a fee to Tesla to pool their CO2 output together.
Tesla is making more money from this than from actually selling cars, so they're going to be at a big loss if other manufacturers start to catch up to them.
It'll be the best of times, it'll be the worst of times.
Doing things in space is going to take off in a big way over the 2020s and if we don't get fusion by 2050 then at the very least China has stated they expect to see the first commercially viable space-based solar power plant. We'll be at the point of (nearly) free and limitless renewable energy which changes our entire civilisation and means the problem of carbon capture's energy needs doesn't matter.
Assuming China doesn't collapse internally the PRC will end up dominating the world's international institutions but it'll be counter-balanced by the US and chums. China has no allies outside of some very shit fair weather friends and no coherent ideology to build an alliance around. You might see a limited war on the Western Pacific that the US might lose but on the whole the West will pivot to Asia to the detriment of everywhere else so expect to see more regional powers (minus Russia which is fucked). It'll be fine.
Apparently I'll reach state pension age in the 2050s but we'll see how that fucking goes won't we.
>>92246 >It's mad that the thread of global thermonuclear annihilation never really went away but it's just been overwhelmed by all the other shit going on.
China is an interesting one because they never really subscribed to MAD. You don't need thousands to deter attack, just a few hundred to discourage any idea that they can all be taken out in a first strike and a few more in close range of Indian capital just because you can and they can't. A US-China Cold War doesn't look the same as the last one and it doesn't need to as China is still looking to secure a sphere of influence. So in short, we might escape a hot war even if Pentagon war games seem to show that they will be used tactically as soon as things get bogged down:
There are more satellite launches scheduled for this year than every previous year combined. We now have four companies offering commercial launch services (SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Firefly and Virgin Orbit) with half a dozen more companies developing launch vehicles.
We're in the early stages of a revolution in space flight, because SpaceX have proved the viability of re-usable launch vehicles and opened the door to unsubsidised commercial orbital projects. As Musk is fond of saying, transatlantic flights would be prohibitively expensive if we just threw away the plane after every trip.
Building and launching a micro-satellite is now a viable final project for a group of determined engineering undergraduates; we're almost at the point where a posh high school could fund a launch with a few bake sales.
>>92260 I know it's just being a miserable cunt but I half wish someone would sneak up a few satellites full of ball bearings just to ruin it for everyone else, except perhaps governments who can afford to protect against them.
I was very attached to the idea as Space as this sort of special, serious place where everything you do is in the common heritage of humanity so even nationalist grandstanding has to take on a bit of seriousness. Now that we're marching into the world of commercial launch services, we've got a car around Mars and some e-girl will have her own cubesat long before the entire world gets satellite internet coverage. Of course the whole idea with all that sort of nonsense is that it's funny, it's cool, it got attention for the people who did it, etc - but those arguments also apply to rendering the entirety of LEO unusable with vast swathes of ball bearings.
Maybe I don't really mean it - it's not so much a thought as a feeling.
I hear by declare this to be the founding of the Britfa space program with its expressed goal of making LEO unusable.
I believe our inagural mission should be the deployment of a 10cm3 cubesat full of ball bearings. Estimated cost for deployment is currently around 100k but that price should come down over the next few years.
There are hundreds of archaic satellites in orbit based on decades-old technology, most of which have little or no encryption protecting their control signals. Non-state actors have taken control of satellites by hacking on at least six occasions. It really wouldn't be a big ask for a small team of amateur radio enthusiasts given the level of expertise in that community - amateur radio equipment is currently flying on over a hundred satellites, making a contact via satellite is a fun project for someone who has just got their license and serious microwave operators are routinely making contacts by bouncing signals off the moon.
I normally hate "they should just" arguments because most things are vastly more complicated than they seem at first glance, but teenage hobbyists are working on stuff that's much more sophisticated than '80s satellite technology. Until we de-orbit a bunch of old satellites that weren't necessarily designed to be de-orbited, the only thing keeping near space habitable is the goodwill of nerds.
We're definitely going to get on top of COVID within the next couple of years, so we should be enjoying crisp refreshing pints in a sunny beer garden by 2023 at the latest. Massive advances in genomics and deep learning will lead to an unprecedented boom in medical technology. Affordable VR headsets with near-perfect visual clarity are in the pipeline and should become mainstream within a few years. When the Chinese finally take over the world, at least we'll have a competent government. WE'RE GOING TO MARS! Weed is inevitably going to get legalised because we desperately need the tax revenues. BoJo is going to die of mega-chlamydia from all the unprotected knobbing.
I'm still half-hoping that we get biological immortality in our lifetimes. Even if it takes 200 years.
I'll settle for a few decades being young again before dronelad drops the ISS on me in a poorly executed plot to close Gatwick.
Interestingly, someone hacked (a system on) the ISS using AX.25 and a fucking bash command injection bug and posted it on twitter so I'm fairly sure that properly weaponised autism is fully capable of hijacking a satellite or two.
>>92280 This is exactly why I should have got a commodore amiga instead of a SNES when I was nine.
>>92272 Life, in general, will get broadly nicer. Crime rates will go down, incomes will go up, diseases will be cured and life expectancy will increase. The only downside is the utter moral outrage against the excesses of the elites will also need to increase, because they're only going to wreck shit harder. And most people won't care, which will be infuriating, same as it is now.
Potentially, possibly, we might see the big technology FAANG companies take a bumming. I'd like to see that happen, and Joe Biden has said he wants to do it. The companies will also fight extremely hard to stop this from happening, so it could be seriously exciting, when Google starts telling you Joe Biden is a paedo and Amazon refuses to deliver to Democratic states. But that's a real best-case scenario; things that awesome tend not to happen.
>>92274 Do those satellites still have functioning engines? Anyone can grab the steering wheel on an old satellite whenever they want, and it won't do anything if they can't actually steer it. I would imagine those satellites are just drifting aimlessly.
>>92571 A lot of them will have small amounts of fuel left which is kept there for position changes and such and they're designed to stay on standby for a very long time. It wont do you much good though, if you were dead set on causing destruction you could probably steer a few old satellites to cross paths with others that'd give you maybe a 0.001% chance of a collision in the next decade if no one spotted it and moved the other satellites out of the way. Space is just that big.
