Comment Re:Like little children (Score 1) 360
irregardless of what others want?
Um... yes. Wait, no! Damn, I suck at answering questions posed with made-up words.
At some point, all words are made up. Irregardless is a perfectly cromulent word.
irregardless of what others want?
Um... yes. Wait, no! Damn, I suck at answering questions posed with made-up words.
At some point, all words are made up. Irregardless is a perfectly cromulent word.
If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.
How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.
Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.
The lust for power and status, the will to survive, and the desire to procreate, are all emergent behaviors of Darwinian evolution. Computer programs do not evolve through a Darwinian process, so there is no reason to expect them to behave like humans, unless they are specifically programmed to do so.
I'll go one further than that. I believe that the human manifestation of intelligence and emotion requires a particular physical state that is achieved by neurons and cannot be replicated by current computer architecture. But I'm fairly sure we will be able to architect human type sentience and intelligence because it is a physical state that will eventually be understood and surpassed--but yeah, it will have to be intentionally designed, based on what came about through evolution.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.