Hello Friends,
And happy Friday!
I have 2 great reads for you today.
An essay as I love them. I nearly threw it into the bin upon reading the first 2 paragraphs because it felt too obvious. But I trust Astral Codex Ten for solid content, so I pushed through a bit. And it delivered: beautiful conceptual thinking on how true libertarianism should increase social antifragility:
More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship
In an area with frequent catastrophes, where the catastrophes have externalities on people who didn’t choose them, you want to lower variance, so that nothing ever gets bad enough to produce the catastrophe.
In an area where people can choose whatever they want, and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones, you want to raise variance, so that the best thing will be very good indeed, and then everybody can choose that and bask in its goodness.
That second point is a bog-standard libertarian argument. You want there to be as many things as possible, as different from each other as possible, so that there can be at least one that's good. You can apply the argument to freedom of speech (you want to hear as many opinions as possible to maximize your chance of hearing the true one), charter cities (you want as many different political regimes as possible so you can figure out which one maximizes human flourishing, and then you either move to that one, or take advantage of the scientific and economic goods it produces), charter schools (you want as many different kinds of school as possible, so you can find out which one educates kids best and go there), et cetera.
But maybe it’s not bog-standard enough. People tend to get surprised whenever libertarians differ from the most strawmannish version of Ayn Rand. But I find my disagreements with her map pretty closely to this idea of “diversity libertarianism”. I'm less likely to object to things like taxing the rich, redistributing wealth, or removing externalities on carbon - none of those decrease diversity very much. And I’m more likely to care about conformist pressures from religions or mobs, even though technically those don’t involve government.
Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.
If you're an anti-government libertarian, I'm not sure there's much you can do besides shrug and say that religion isn't government, so this kind of thing is fine. In fact, I think some paleolibertarians think of this as a feature rather than a bug; they want government out of the way so (their) religion can rule the roost. But if you're a diversity libertarian, you're worried that religions can decrease variance of options the same way governments can. The evangelical Christian town where nobody will tolerate gay people may not have laws against homosexuality, but gay people still won't be able to find a church, community, or business that meets their needs.
Second: Casey Handmer, the space exploration guru. An insightfully pragmatic assessment of how SpaceX’s Starship can also disrupt NASA’s plan for permanent moon settlement… besides Elon’s permanent MArs settlement. Unskippable if you want to read now what the space industry will be like in a decade from now:
Artemis can succeed using Starship
It is no secret that SpaceX intends Starlink to revolutionize internet access, thereby generating enormous economic value and profit that can be directed towards the goal of building a city on Mars.
Implications of Starship for the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon as part of a sustainable, extended exploration program.
Since the dawn of the space age, every space mission designer has sought endlessly to save mass. Instrument sub-components on Perseverance were tracked to within a tenth of a gram, the weight of a postage stamp, on a rover that weighs more than a tonne.
Starship is different. It has more in common with the logistics of D-Day or the Berlin Airlift. SpaceX recognizes that there is no way to build a self-sustaining city with payloads measured in tenths of grams. Starship lands cargo on any solid surface in increments of 100 T.
The Perseverance Mars rover cost $2.4 billion, which works out to a few thousand salaries for just under a decade. Thousands of people are needed to build this rover because landing stuff on Mars is so hard that subsystem masses must be tracked to a tenth of a gram, on a system that weighs a tonne. The whole thing is meticulously handcrafted from custom silicon, PCBs, titanium tubes, motors, cameras, and other awe-inspiring instruments. Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what? How can NASA feed a team that makes one feather-light rover per decade for a billion dollars if the demand just jumped by a factor of a thousand and the unit cost fell by the same amount? Set up a production line? Work out how to make them with a team of ten? Build one every two weeks?
Assuming $10m per launch and 10 launches per Lunar landing for LEO refilling, $1b could transport 1000 T of cargo to the Moon per year. Each Starship could carry dozens of astronauts to and from the Lunar surface, without any need for Gateway or Lunar ISRU. Of course, if Lunar oxygen was available, each Starship could deliver more like 500 T of cargo per landing, and total annual up mass could near 10,000 T of cargo, once GTO refilling and TEI aerocapture becomes standard practice.
The entire ISS weighs about 400 T and took three decades to build. In contrast, $1b/year with Starship could land a station the size of the ISS on the Moon in about 2 months, and rapidly build out a Lunar base comparable to McMurdo Antarctic Station, with space for hundreds of researchers to live for extended periods.
Finally, a bonus chart to put the above in perspective: we are still in our first steps.
Thanks for reading, and make this weekend a disruptive one,
V