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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   16445 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Starship bet update

A few years ago I made a series of bets about Starship making it to orbit with other posters, last rounded up here:

The last one is a real nail-biter. When I heard about the SpaceX IPO I first thought it's time to call it a day. My model for my predictions about Elon was that he has a hype-compulsion, making wilder and wilder promises to get money out of investors, and as it becomes clear he won't be able to reach the hyped up goal, at some point they will get fed up with him. So when the news of the $85.7 billion came out, I figured that even if I do win, it will be on a technicality - maybe they won't pull it off by end of this year, but this sort of money will surely be enough to get them over whatever humps they run into on the road.... Then again maybe not! It also turned out that they have $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since their founding, and have burned $4.3 billion on AI in Q1 2026 alone, so maybe I will lose on a technicality instead, where they will indeed get to orbit by end of year, but will be dragged down by the unprofitable parts of the company.

I now believe that such a "loss on a technicality" is a pretty likely outcome, precisely because of the IPO. Like I said last year, if my bet was with Elon, he probably could have ordered the damn rocket to be put in orbit, just to prove a point, and while I'm lucky enough to have made my bet with internet randos instead, the IPO changes the dynamics such that he will be very tempted to do such things just to prove a point. Currently 95% of SpaceX stock held by insiders is locked up and it will be gradually released over the course of the year. Stonks are largely guided by hype, hype is generated with media articles (such as "SpaceX makes history with Starship orbital launch!!!11"), so while a frivolous orbital launch would make little sense before, it could make a lot of sense now. There's already talk of Starship 14 being orbital, and I fully expect them to schedule it just before one of these unlock dates.

That said, it's not over until it's over! Just because they might want to do it, doesn't mean they'll pull it off. This whole bet is starting to feel like an episode of Wacky Races.

This post gets to the heart of what my problem with the space colonization hype train that seems to be popular on this site. What exactly is the profit motive? Starlink seems very useful and profitable. Colonizing Mars? Not so much, unless investors are willing to eat losses for many decades.

What exactly is the profit motive?

Notionally, space colonization removes the shackles of terrestrial resource limits for mineral resources, energy, and space. The long-term possibilities seem open-ended, but you're not wrong that capitalizing on those within a reasonable time frame from a finance perspective seems questionable. Can corporate structures handle payoff periods longer than a human generation? Maybe some of the closer-term prospects (asteroid mining, space data centers), which are all still not close, can make it viable sooner.

There are economic use cases for space, but they’re for ‘oil rig in the ocean’ human presence, not building full scale colonies.

There are civilizational reasons for expanding off earth- dark forest hypothesis, manifest destiny, etc- but even if you agree with them, earth simply doesn’t care. In another age, we’ll care more, when western civilization rebirths itself once more. But that might be in centuries, only this time with mature technology.

The dark forest hypothesis isn't true, but if it was the aliens would just kill us on Mars too.

If I remember correctly, the canonical dark forest theory assumes an attack on the scale of supernovae or larger, eradicating entire solar systems anyway.

Your comment kicked off a near day-long scrounging through my local files and online search in order to find the actual goddamn source of my mental recall. This is coming in late, but as I have suffered, so you must suffer with me.

The core of 'The Dark Forest Theory' has been around much longer than Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy. They just gave it a fancy name.

Charles Pelligrino in 'The Killing Star' was postulating such scenarios as far back as 1995, and I doubt he was the first;

The great silence (i.e. absence of SETI signals from alien civilizations) is perhaps the strongest indicator of all that high relativistic velocities are attainable and that everybody out there knows it.

The sobering truth is that relativistic civilizations are a potential nightmare to anyone living within range of them. The problem is that objects traveling at an appreciable fraction of light speed are never where you see them when you see them (i.e., light-speed lag). Relativistic rockets, if their owners turn out to be less than benevolent, are both totally unstoppable and totally destructive. A starship weighing in at 1,500 tons (approximately the weight of a fully fueled space shuttle sitting on the launchpad) impacting an earthlike planet at "only" 30 percent of lightspeed will release 1.5 million megatons of energy -- an explosive force equivalent to 150 times today's global nuclear arsenal...

I'm not going to talk about ideas. I'm going to talk about reality. It will probably not be good for us ever to build and fire up an antimatter engine. According to Powell, given the proper detecting devices, a Valkyrie engine burn could be seen out to a radius of several light-years and may draw us into a game we'd rather not play, a game in which, if we appear to be even the vaguest threat to another civilization and if the resources are available to eliminate us, then it is logical to do so.

The game plan is, in its simplest terms, the relativistic inverse to the golden rule: "Do unto the other fellow as he would do unto you and do it first."...

And, later on, as he puts it;

We ask that you try just one more thought experiment. Imagine yourself taking a stroll through Manhattan, somewhere north of 68th street, deep inside Central Park, late at night. It would be nice to meet someone friendly, but you know that the park is dangerous at night. That's when the monsters come out. There's always a strong undercurrent of drug dealings, muggings, and occasional homicides.

It is not easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. They dress alike, and the weapons are concealed. The only difference is intent, and you can't read minds.

Stay in the dark long enough and you may hear an occasional distance shriek or blunder across a body.

How do you survive the night? The last thing you want to do is shout, "I'm here!" The next to last thing you want to do is reply to someone who shouts, "I'm a friend!"

What you would like to do is find a policeman, or get out of the park. But you don't want to make noise or move towards a light where you might be spotted, and it is difficult to find either a policeman or your way out without making yourself known. Your safest option is to hunker down and wait for daylight, then safely walk out.

There are, of course, a few obvious differences between Central Park and the universe.

There is no policeman.

There is no way out.

And the night never ends.

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