Because billionaires love the attention

Yes, our disagreement is that "an exact replica of earth" is possible without the exact universe we have.

I do not dispute that in an infinite universe anything that can happen has happened.

I just don't think that an exact replica is one of the things that can happen.

Let me put it this way, when does exact earth stop being exact? Light from 14 billion years ago is reaching the earth just now to inform our astronomers about the early universe, if that history is not a part of your 'copy' of earth, then your earth's astronomer is different than the ones here, your earth is different. So our observable universe is necessary to copy earth. But to copy our observable universe, everything that universe can observe is necessary, and so on.

You say Andromeda is irrelevant, but our history is filled with usages of Andromeda to inform ourselves what our galaxy may look like, the pull from our galaxy on Andromeda informs us of the mass of our galaxy, Andromeda contains several important stars we use as standard candles... So yes, I think life happened, humans probably happened, a moon, a 8/9 planet solar system happened, but not an exact replica.

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Orbit launches satellites while Galactic is space tourism

Why is there a Virgin Orbit and a Virgin Galactic?

They try to push that british model too much. She's the same now in that series with Orlando Bloom.

There's a dozen of these smallsat launch companies, it was always obvious that, including competition with SpaceX rideshares, the market can't support that and that a shakeout was inevitable.

Rocketlab and maybe one other will come through.

The Satellite companies are a better investment IMHO.

Even Branson didn't give the company money without a stipulation that he gets dibs on liquidation. Who's going to sign up for a rescue funding round with that kind of axe hanging over the company? It's probably over.

Ok, well, I think you're wrong about a lot of that.

A recreation of just the solar system would do. What Andromeda is doing, or any other galaxies, or hell, most of the milky way, is kind of irrelevant to the Earth. Nothing happening in one of the other spiral arms is making a difference here.

And it has nothing to do with pi. That's... I don't know where you're getting that. Pi is for the geometry of circles.

It's dead simple. The odds of recreating the entire solar system is 1 / an unimaginably huge number. Whatever that unimaginably huge number is, it still fits into infinity an infinite number of times. In an infinite universe, therefor, you get an infinite number of identical solar systems, be they earth's or literally any (every) other solar system.

This isn't my idea or conclusion, either; this is a generally accepted consequence of infinity. In a truly infinite universe, every event, no matter how improbable, HAS TO happen an infinite number of times. They can be separated by great distances of space and time, but they do happen, they never stop happening, they're infinite too.

Getting lost in the symbolism or the examples is, forgive me, kind of pointless. They're only value is in helping illustrate, and any flaws in those metaphors is kind of irrelevant to flaws in the actual nature of infinity. Pi is just that, relative to this conversation, an example, a way to explain how infinity works, it's not at all relevant otherwise.

That’s not off the table. Nothing is. The only reason it’s in the news right now is because Biden set aside money specifically for NASA to start working on a finalized plan.

NASA’s existing plan is pretty much putting some undecided propulsion system somewhere near the middle of the truss. It’s a whole lot of nothing.

You can control the landing area and deorbit the station using a modified upper stage, the kind that are constantly flying upto the station, canada arm it to the station and then have station residents finish the system. This should be a quick cheap demolition, not an excuse to design a mission vehicle from the ground up as a "deorbit tug".

Yeah, but we won’t be able to control where it lands.

I don’t want a solar panel crushing me in the night, but that’s just me.

You are saying earth (the variables that brought about earth, etc.) are a piece of the infinite universe, and so can be found in multiple places. I'm arguing that what set the earth in motion was not in fact a separate piece, but is the entire thing. If the moon had slightly more or less mass, the tides would have been different, if Jupiter was not exactly where it is, the meteors that created the moon would have impacted differently, if our neighboring stars had a different make up, the heavy elements necessary for life would not have been prevalent in this part of the galaxy, if our neighboring galaxy was drifting away instead of gravitationally locked with ours the spin of our galaxy would be altered and we may have been in the wrong part of space to gather the elements necessary... Earth is not one of an infinite number of unrelated 5s in an endless string of random digits, earth is a 5 in the 6728th position and any alteration anywhere along the string of digits alters every adjacent digit and propagates through the entire string. So in order to find a second earth, you would need an exact copy of the entire universe, you would need pi to repeat.

We don’t have any functional space shuttle anymore. They’re all pretty much taxidermied, with the outsides in museums and the fictional parts still with NASA.

Expand that feeling into a packed show, Fall leg of tour. We were waiting for a Dark Star as it was elusive in the 80's. Then on October 9th, 1989, Hampton, we were amongst hundreds of bodies floating mid air expanding into the universe yet caressing the edges of the Now like rubbing softly against the smoothest of silk. Upon the first three notes dropping into our ears from the rail, bathing one in a nucleus of expanding energy, and when they hit that first drop in the bridge after the Grateful man sings: "through the transitive nightfall of diamonds..." I dare anyone find a more transcendent moment in time... it was everything and exactly how it should be. Nothing but magic and bliss.

Definitely on the same page. I wasn’t implying there would be huge salvageable chunks. Guess we will have to do with a replica.

Whatever little chunks survive re-entering at those speeds (which will be very little, it will be mostly powder and little bits of confetti-like pieces of metal falling out of the sky) will hit the water and sink because the kinds of things that would float will probably burn up.

Just to make sure we're on the same page here, that it's understood there isn't a space station touching down.

It did not (it wasn't ready yet). They are planning to use it for Ax-2 though.

I’m not familiar with logistics of surface recovery at Point Nemo, but surely we have to at least try? The prospect of taking such an important milestone, tugging it into the Pacific, and letting debris (if any) sink is disheartening.

By ground based solution I mean you accomplish 99% of the deorbit construction phase of the mission on the ground instead of sending up parts in the cargo missions and slowly building a deorbiter system or whatever you want to call it. Those same missions could siphon off fuel from the resupply mission upper stages, but a ground based solution might be to send a dedicated vehicle, purpose built for this mission. Imagine your going on a camping trip, you wouldnt assemble the tent and then walk it into the woods, you would take the tent into the woods in pieces, and assemble it there. I like the idea of Nasa sending a simply single mission vehicle to solve this problem, I jsut dont like that it would cost a ton of extra money for what basically boils down to a demolition job, demolition should be the cheapest and least reliably type of mission Nasa has ever conducted, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to cheap out.

I mean, it's not just the face, or the body. The whole scenes have no charisma. It means that you also need to redraw Delevigne as if she's actually interested, rather than... what was going on.

It's not Russian, it won't accidentally spin the ISS.

It is a pretty brilliant idea to bootstrap a new space station off ISS instead of starting from scratch.

> which will then spin off

Hopefully not while still attached to the ISS. coughsky coughsky

Alright, there's a bit to unpack here and I apologize if I explain something that doesn't need to be explained.

The digits of pie all repeat, and in fact, as near as we can tell, do so infinitely.
There are an infinite number of 9's in pie. There are an infinite number of 5's.

What they don't have is a pattern. And that's fine. No one said there had to be pattern. But any sequence of numbers, 123, 6845436, 666, whatever, will not only show up eventually, but if pie is truly infinite, will repeat an infinite number of times. Just not in a pattern.

And no one said it had to be a pattern, in fact, it would be weird if it was. Pie is not a pattern, but somewhere in there, or rather an infinite number of "somewhere's" in there, can be found every sequence of digits, of any length. I can rattle off a ten-thousand place number, it's in there, somewhere. Probably.

I'm not a mathematician, and pie might not follow the true rules of randomness that would otherwise govern something like this, so maybe there aren't a thousand 9's in a row in pie because of the rules of the equation from which it's derived, but there are definitely an infinite number of 9's.

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