Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 September 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
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I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the conceit of Earth sending convicts and political prisoners to the Moon to grow wheat underground never made much sense to me. I believe Charles Stross got into a good-natured slapfight with Ian McDonald over the latter's use of helium mining in the Luna series but that sounds more likely to me than fucking wheat.
@gerikson @techtakes The thing about Lunar 3He mining is … it presupposes you can build aneutronic fusion reactors (a 3rd generation fusion reactor: not simple!). But if you can fuse 3He, you're almost certainly able to run a P + 11B reactor (which is also an aneutronic reaction), and hydrogen and boron are readily available on Earth. Thereby removing the entire incentive to strip-mine the moon at vast expense.
TLDR: Lunar 3He is a non-working economic justification for space colonization.
Point taken. I still think the Luna series is great!
@gerikson @techtakes Ian is a *very* good writer—but for those books he uncritically adopted the American colonialist ideologues' idea of an good reason for space colonization: and sure, his Lunar colony is a capitalist hellscape, but that's not the point. (The P + 11B aneutronic fusion pathway was already known about at the time.)
/1
Anyway, if I was going to go mining 3He in space I'd bear in mind it's in the regolith because it's part of the solar wind and gets trapped there. Is it possible to collect it more cheaply using a really huge solar sail (with station-keeping as a side-purpose) made out of a membrane that traps it directly and can be reprocessed to outgas the stuff? That way you're not grinding up gigatons of fucking rock to extract an incredibly rare volatile.