A Mars settlement has the long-term ability of self-sustaining. And that same benefit means that it is much easier than the Moon to make it while not fully self-sustaining, involve a lot less maintenance and resource. One can likely more easily grow food, obtain water, and do many other things. The higher gravity also means that the health issues for humans in a low gravity environment are likely going to be lower.

Ok.. This is a reasonable list in part. The gravity well point is a pretty reasonable one; if one does want to build large structures in space, then having the much lower lunar gravity to start with is reasonable, and mining there doesn't come with the same environmental damage it does on Earth. The telescope point also makes sense, especially for radio telescopes which would be in the lunar shadow. I'm not at all convinced by your last point; it has a pre-existing fixed orbit which severely limits when observations and communications can occur, and that would require much larger systems for Earth observation since the moon is far away, and would add really not good latency for communications due to the moon being about a light second away from the Earth. But your point about resource extraction/processing and telescopes is enough to make a strong case that there's a reasonable goal set here. So, yeah, my statement there was wrong.

Seems like a suboptimal use from a military standpoint. Sure, it works in Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but in practice, the travel time from the moon to Earth means it will be a minimum even with very high acceleration of about 6 hours to hit a target on Earth. Much more effective to have satellite based weapons in closer orbits.

Trip time is a valid concern and ability to get home quickly in an emergency is also valid. Another issue with distance is the ability to send emergency supplies is very limited. Radiation issues are not really that bad though (and that seems like more of a problem). The radiation level is high https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11814067/ https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20240009831/downloads/NAS%20BPS%20Simonsen%20v4%20strives.pdf but manageable. A 6 month (comparably long) trip to Mars adds around 300 mSv which is slightly over half a year of time on the ISS. For comparison, if one looks at some of the most intensely naturally radioactive places in the world that people live, like Ramsar, Iran, one gets around 150-250 mSv.

If there's no goal of making an eventually long-term self-sustaining colony, it isn't clear what goals there are here that are a reasonable use of resources on this scale.

Not really relevant. That's a canonical example of a bubble. It is incidentally, an exaggerated bubble in many respects. See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-006-9074-4 and https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51311368 (although I find some of the arguments in the second of those not completely persuasive.) But the real key is this isn't relevant: tulips weren't a tech. The point is that tech bubbles can be very different than other bubbles because the underlying good can still turn out (and often does turn out) to have real value and continue to expand. Tulips are like gold or other nice shiny things, (or bitcoin which is like gold or tulips but doesn't even have the advantage of having something to look at) not really the same sort of bubble.

Previous tech bubbles have ratched up prices and caused all sorts of issues. The rail boom outcompeted other transport types, increased the cost of coal and iron( vital resources), and completely took away a lot of sources of wood. In parts of the American West, rails took up needed limited water for the steam engines, probably in a way far more serious than that of data centers (which does take up water but is largely exaggerated). The rail boom also prompted tens of thousands of Native Americans to be kicked off their land to make way for rail infrastructure. In the American South, freed slaves were functionally reenslaved and forced to build rail lines. A lot of this is discussed in for example, Wolmar's excellent book "The Great Railroad Revolution." The internet bubble of the late 1990s was in comparison pretty mild in terms of its negative knock-on effects.

This is pretty similar to the "dot com" bubble of the late 1990s, or the railroad boom of the late 1860s early 1870s. Both bubbles had people investing with minimal justification. Businesses which were "Normal thing X but on the internet" got insane amounts of money. And both bubbles popped in ways which were very harmful to the economy. However, at the same time the underlying techs stuck around and became far more common than they were at the height of the bubble. The 1873 collapse took the US about a decade to recover from, but by multiple metrics, such as number of train engines being used, number of passenger miles traveled per a year, tons of freight moved, rail continued to grow with just a small set of blips. Similarly, the internet now is far more extensive and used than even many starry-eyed optimists or hype-obsessed would have predicted in 1998. A tech can be part of an irrational bubble and still be a game-changing technology.

Mars is a much better destination for long-term habitation. The moon's gravity is much lower and doesn't have the benefit of even a thin atmosphere. The moon also has very little water and has little in the way of most of the CHNOPS humans need to survive. Mars has all those resources. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8227854/ A self-sustaining colony on Mars may be possible but is very, very difficult. A self-sustaining colony on the Moon is essentially impossible. Also, actually getting to Mars is not that much harder than getting to the moon. Once aerobraking is allowed, many launch profiles use only a bit more Delta-V to get from Earth to the Mars than going from Earth to the Moon. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273117725002406 https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2023-72854.

There's also sometimes an argument made that the moon would be a good learning place for eventual Mars missions. But the environments are drastically different with not even the same major risk factors in many respects, so only learn a little bit from a base on the moon. The best way to learn how to live on Mars is to go on Mars.

Finally, there's a decent chance that we'll learn really neat stuff on Mars, including possibly finding extinct life or even current life. There's no likelihood at all that that's going to happen on the Moon.

What appears to be happening in part here is that Trump has a particular interest in going back to the moon because he imagines things the United States did in the past, especially things from when he was a child, as the greatest things ever.

All of that said, this is better than the idea for the in lunar orbit "Gateway" which was an absolute disaster of an idea where it would take extra Delta-V to get too and then more to go then leave and land on the moon. It . Gateway was based on that they had to do something that could justify the SLS even if it made no sense aside form that. So there's that at least.

Because there are both. We need to do a better job tracking people down like this and making it clear that this is not acceptable behavior, since functioning societies rely in a large part on trust of people not being assholes. But there's also a bug in the car here since human bad behavior is probably never going to end: in particular, there should be a manual driving override option so a human can get out of a seriously dangerous scenario. Unfortunately, elsewhere on the internet, there are already some anti-self driving car people who are seeing this as functionally a win for them.

The Guardian is hardly "deep red" but if you want, a basic Google search will find you many other references with the same essential details. This is not a situation where the basic facts are remotely in dispute.

Instead of sarcasm, insults, and strawmen, it might help to read what people write, and when they give a link click through it. Do you want to go and read the link about Trump's FCC threatening to remove broadcast liscences?

That Bari Weiss doesn't buy into some of the most extreme ideas of the modern right doesn't make her not right wing, it just shows how utterly off the walls the American right has gone. As for the idea that free speech is a right-wing approach the last year of the Trump administration should make it very clear how much of the right cared only about free speech when it was useful for them. Trying to do things like take away broadcast licenses because one doesn't like what channels have to say https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c626ye5gq16o is not remotely free speech. And Weiss herself has shown that same hypocrisy which I find particularly, disappointing because she was someone who I disagreed with on some issues but seemed 2 or 3 years ago as a genuine advocate for free speech. And you'll find that I'm someone on Slashdot who had a history of saying that the left had serious free speech issues. But much of her behavior, including her time at CBS, but also her actions at the University of Austin, showed that her support of free speech was only a fig leaf for when she was not in power. Censorship is coming far more from the right right now than the left. Most of the rest of your comment is essentially a strawman of what people on the left generally believe (and I say that as a pretty center-left person who finds much of the left pretty aggravating).

I thought the phrase was "Get woke, go broke" but apparently CBS is suffering terrible trouble after it became right-wing. Wow, I guess it wasn't accurate either. And before anyone questions: Yes, CBS has gone drastically right wing since Bari Weiss took over. And this hasn't just been a subtle level of editorial slant but things like pulling a 60 Minutes episode that was critical of the Trump administration https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/cbs-editor-in-chief-bari-weiss-pulls-60-minutes-piece-on-trump-deportation-policy-hours-before-air and they killed Colbert's show right after he had an episode critical of Trump and CBS's connection https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/22/stephen-colbert-trump-cbs-bribe. In fairness to CBS leadership, this may not be as much about their own political beliefs, and about trying to get antitrust approval for the Skydance and Paramount merger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merger_of_Skydance_Media_and_Paramount_Global.

Yeah, that jumped out at me also. Given how unpredictable LLMs can be, I would think anything one wanted to stay secure would have no capability of posting on its own to a forum unless that forum was very tightly locked on who could see it, which it sounds like from this, was not the case.

Oops ,I forgot to link to the Quanta article https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-cryptography-pioneers-win-turing-award-20260318/.

Yes, as this Quanta piece discusses, they were at a large conference but had not personally met before. The Quanta piece is a good one and worth reading.

Almost everything about this is just wrong. Let's break it down and discuss each claim.

So to start off, this is not an accurate statement about parrots. Parrots can recognize individual objects, individual people, and make requests for specific things. African Grey parrots are the most studied in this regard but they are not the only such. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11196360/. Alex, one of the first African Greys to be systematically studied, had to even be removed from the room when other parrots were being tested because he would sometimes correct them if they got an identification wrong. So, if you are not estimating what parrots can do in the first place, this should already be a pretty large warning sign.

This is accurate. This is also what humans do the vast majority of the time. Prediction based on existing data is incredibly powerful.

I'm not sure what content this has, but in so far as it has content it ignores the vast improvements in benchmarks which certainly look like gaining more methods. The degree to which models today are better than early models is just massive, to the point where many types of tasks which were on standard benchmarks 3 years ago are not even being used on benchmarks today because models match 99% on those routinely. Now, some of that is due to questions leaking, but others are not. For example, one standard thing to use for a benchmark for a bit was the AIME, a standard high school math competition. Using each year's AIME was reasonable because one could be confident it wasn't in the training data. The AIME competition is an invited competition in the US to students who perform well on the ACM competition. The easiest AIME problems should be solvable by any student who is confident with algebra 2 and they get progressively harder. There are 15 problems on a test. For example, here is problem 1 from 2023:

By the time one gets to problem 15, one has things like the following: