The crucial missing thing is in-space refueling.
Spacex will start testing on the ground within weeks.
I think it is reasonable to believe that - if there are no blockers uncovered, just steady development and testing - they could be testing it in space by mid-year and have it working by year-end.
Then - as long as fuel storage in space works - I do not know of any other major impediments to launching an unmanned Starship mission to Mars.
Sticking the reentry and landing will be hard, but Starships seem to handle tough reentries well, and Starships have already landed on legs on Earth.
I am a pessimist on a manned Starship landing on the Moon within three years, let alone on Mars.
There are many milestones to go before in orbit refueling is possible, among them
:
1. What efficiency are you expecting without ground-based fuel chilling?
2. Have you solved for lack of gravity? Your fuel is sloshing around weightless.
3. The necessary tempo of refueling flights hasn't been reached with test flights, and is far greater than the maximum tempo reached by Falcon 9, impressive though it is.
These are just the big ones I can think of off the top of my head. Digging into the way that fuel tanks are prevented from crumpling while they rapidly empty of liquid methane probably reveals that that becomes much more complicated in micro gravity in orbit with multiple refueling connections to tanker flights. There are dozens of gotchas like that, and I don't think "they must've already planned for that" is an assumption supported by historical performance.
LLMs have already proven themselves to be economically valuable. At a bare minimum, they can help people develop most low-mid level software considerably faster, at a good enough quality.
They also have proven themselves in other white collar knowledge endeavors as well, as valuable tools that augment human economic output. Marketers can make more copy material, any office worker can improve the quality of their email communications, etc. Easy.
What are humanoids doing exactly? What can they do, that actually makes sense and provides positive economic impact over existing alternatives? Not clear to me.
I like this, it would be exciting (and scary) if it deduced QM, and informative if it cannot.
But I also think we can do this with normal LLMs trained on up-to-date text, by asking them to come up with any novel theory that fits the facts. It does not have to be a groundbreaking theory like QM, just original and not (yet) proven wrong ?
Although these days, asking an AI to do some low-level but complicated task and seeing it done ten times as fast as you could do it by hand is also quite satisfying.
Sounds like David has some time on his hands now and might be interested. If you have any particular ideas he might be open to doing a bit of sleuthing.
I was crushed to hear that Oliver Sacks made up key details of his books. He’s taught in every intro class. Millions of people are carrying around false facts about psychology and brain science.
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