International Space Station
Article
International Space Station is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 17, 2022 and December 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “similar to the International Space Station”; “We spent $100 billion building the International Space Station, which is basically just a big house in space”. It most often appears alongside Russia, Ukraine, ACX.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: June 17, 2022
- Last seen: December 08, 2022
Appears In
- Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy
- Why I’m Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency
Related Pages
-
- Russia (2 shared issues)
-
- Ukraine (2 shared issues)
-
- ACX (1 shared issues)
-
- Africa (1 shared issues)
-
- Alcator C-Mod (1 shared issues)
-
- Apollo Program (1 shared issues)
-
- ARC (1 shared issues)
-
- ASDEX (1 shared issues)
-
- Astralcodexten Com (1 shared issues)
-
- Ball (1 shared issues)
-
- Best Crypto Exchanges Of 2020 (1 shared issues)
-
- Biggest Cryptocurrencies By Market Cap Of 2020 (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
By the 1970s, it was apparent that making fusion power work is possible, but very hard. Fusion would require Big Science with Significant Support. The total cost would be less than the Apollo Program, similar to the International Space Station, and more than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Department of Energy put together a request for funding. They proposed several different plans. Depending on how much funding was available, we could get fusion in 15-30 years.
The space program has existed for more than fifty years, and mostly succeeded at reinventing things we already have on Earth, only worse. Remember the story of that special astronaut pen that cost $1 million? We already have pens on earth, for like $0.10, and they work better! The lunar rover is just a car, only worse. That robocopter that flew around Mars is just a drone, only worse. We spent $100 billion building the International Space Station, which is basically just a big house in space. But we already have houses on Earth which are cheaper and more comfortable in every way!
In the same way, everything about the crypto economy is worse than the regular economy. The only excuse is that it’s decentralized. This means you can use it for all of those cool things - sending remittances, circumventing corrupt banking systems, resisting authoritarian governments - that are hard to do with regular money. Of course subjecting yourself to a difficult constraint is going to be harder than not doing that! You don’t hate the International Space Station for being worse than houses on Earth. You marvel at the fact that anyone can live in space at all!