Robotbeat

Imagine a civil engineer that refuses to use a computer of any kind for his work. How much do you trust scribbled long division?

Edit: what about a civil engineer that refuses to use steel. Or Arabic numerals. Or a construction worker that refuses to use power equipment. A delivery man who swears off wheels.

Twice the rocket fuel or half the payload. Again, regular rockets can do this today, like the Atlas V 551/2.

? Do you think a Lambo is a particularly practical car? Obviously it’s a stunt car. It’s doing stunts! And no, it’s not legal to drive around shooting huge supersonic jets around the car; that’s hardly a criticism.

That would be impressive.

You’d want to dry the water beforehand, like is usually done in such things.

Then don’t make the deposit?

Yeah, you can sell fighter jets to private US citizens, if the guns and stuff are removed.

Hydrogen is 1/14th the density of air.

It had 4700kg of downforce. It would’ve been quite a feat to make a vehicle (or prop, call it whatever you like) like that less than 1 tonne.

That is a totally different topic. We’re talking about a hypothetical, where Earth is 20-30% larger, not whether an identical copy of Earth but 20-30% larger actually exists nearby. We know such roughly similar exoplanets are common, though. In that size range and in habitable zone.

And again, 30% greater escape velocity just isn’t a challenge. Existing rockets could be used to reach LEO, like Atlas 551 (well, probably want 552 to reduce the gravity losses). And then you can use electric thrusters (which don’t have a hard Isp limit) to reach wherever.

Heck, we could probably reach LEO even if escape velocity was twice what it is. Even 3 times, if you include more exotic propulsion methods that we’ve done some testing for (nuclear thermal, etc). With staging, etc, it’s just a matter of a worse and worse mass fraction, not really whether it’s possible or not. And once you get to low orbit, electric propulsion allows much better scaling as you can adjust Isp higher (although reduces thrust and means it takes longer to do your mission).

There are a bunch of exoplanets in that size range, and we could probably contrive chemical rockets with over 20km/s delta-v if necessary. Nuclear rockets 30km/s.

This isn’t accurate. 20-30% larger diameter with a constant density would mean about 20-30% greater escape velocity (mass is radius cubed but gravity is inverse radius squared, etc). So instead of 11km/s escape, it’d be 13-14km/s. And instead of ~9km/s to reach LEO, it’d be about 11km/s. This is not at all a showstopper. Even in the 60s and 70s, we built rockets with enough stages to go land on the moon and return to Earth, which is a round-trip delta-v of like 14-15km/s, and the Soviets did this mostly with low Isp hypergolic propellants, not even hydrolox let alone an exotic propellant like nuclear thermal hydrogen or electric thrusters. We often just launch stuff directly to GTO or GSO instead of bothering with electric propulsion, so even today’s rockets (many of which also have high enough thrust to weight ratio, like an Atlas V 551) you could do it (and then probably rely more heavily on electric thrusters). Even with higher gravity losses.

It’d be more expensive, sure, but the idea that it’d be almost impossible is just not true at all. It’s a very common thing that even a lot of fairly smart people often say, though.

They're also useful for analytical purposes.

It's possible to do this with digital methods, too, but the lower spatial resolution of most digital LCDs and most digital camera sensors (compared to film) limits it somewhat. But I think it'd be more practical than the analog film based analytical holograms.

I don’t blame OpenAI for that. There’s a ton of weirdly politically motivated denial of AI being useful for solving problems that require new answers. This is one of the very few possible ways to objectively prove that AI can do that.

Impossible to know without either more information about the actual occurrence or a deep understanding of the person making the claims. Just as OpenAI could easily be acting improperly, researchers who (understandably) feel deeply attacked by their problem getting solved right from under them might not be the most unbiased, either.