November video

One more thought on: doing the Schroedinger video or not. Your channel is the first time that I personally heard that Schroedinger was a pedophile. I'm 50 and I've been interested in science my whole life, and I'm even (according to my friends) a hardcore feminist. So. I wanted to say that it would definitely increase awareness, imo.

Regarding your concerns about making a Schrödinger video ... I think it will be a loooooooooong ass time until there is no need anymore to talk about any form of SA. You and I won't see the day, basically.

The Latin plural vs. singular again ... I'm sorry but *words are important*. You can talk about radii (plural), but if you talk about a single star and say "it has a big radii" instead of "radius", that's like saying "this is a children". You wouldn't talk like that about mundane things, so why wouldn't you care about it when talking about the subject that is your passion as well as your profession?

Regarding your thoughts at the end about what kind of content patrons would like to see, like a Q&A etc. - what I want to say is: that's really nice of you, but I think you shouldn't create this expectation of yourself that you need to, sort of, re-earn the patronage of the patrons. I certainly didn't sign up with the thought "she better be doing more and better stuff, otherwise I'll be disappointed!". I signed up because I wanted to see more of you talking in depth about topics you feel passionately about. Just follow your heart and talk about it, and it will make my day whenever a new vid from ypu pops up.

I think microscopic devices to like "clean your arteries" and such are already under development. Yep: https://www.techradar.com/news/researchers-build-living-robots-using-cells-scraped-from-frogs

If we knew there was intelligent life or habitable environment conditions on a planet at proxima centauri, I believe humans would at some point in the future build a ship that can accelerate up to about .3 - .5 c, taking a few years to reach that speed, and then switch to decelerating at the same speed, so several years of braking. Why do you think this will *never* happen? Sure, it's a long time before we could take this on, technologically, but never? Ever ever ever? Why? Did you watch Babylon 5? In the episode "Infection", the station's commander at the time, Jeff Sinclair, is quizzed by a reporter who tries to get him to agree that running this space station as a peacekeeping tool, connecting former war enemies etc., is not worth it and that Earth should again focus more on itself [kinda like US isolationism or the MAGA craze about hurting everyone else]. This is the Quote: Mary Ann Cramer: Is it worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home. ### Sinclair: No. We have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes...[and] all of this...all of this...was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars. ### And since I discovered the "Rare Earth Hypothesis" (which might be true or not, it's just the possibility), I think it's our duty to make sure we don't crash this ship. And this means we have to try, in the very far future, to find at least one other, new planet to live on. As long as we dont have proof of other intelligent life out there, we're the only bit of the universe that is becoming conscious of itself. It's almost a perfect example of transcendence. And it's our duty to protect this gem.

Good video 👏

It's a really beautiful background picture. It looks like marble, or an enhanced-color height-map. Can I ask what it is?

Is it cynicism though? It comes across as disappointment in humankind. It looks like misanthropy, but is it really a question of unmet perceived potential? Welterschöpfung? I think I'm a lot worse, not a cynic, but a pessimist even. The brightest future is the one where we bring out the guillotines. The alternative is 800 years of slavery and feudalism held up by total surveillance, or maybe apocalyptic upheavals because of climate change. That'd be more fun . . .

Ray Brad bury 8n Fahrenheit 451 had the "screen room" to a "T" (well, an "m" I guess)

...but you are the best! See there, I disagreed with you.

I am also marvelling about the progress in biology and medicine. I remember reading a late-seventies sci-fi novel around 2010. In the novel, humanity on Earth is reaching out to its "forgotten" colonies after something like a century. The mission is to help the colonies with biological-adaptation problems with a novel technology that enables the creation of artificial viruses. About a month later I saw a talk by Craig Venter reporting on the creation of an artificial cell! So, there we were, about three decades after the novel's publication and we already did biological stuff that was advanced than the creation of artificial viruses, but for space rockets we still used chemical propulsion (instead of the novel's hyperdrive). That really brought home the idea to me about the marvellous speed of medical/biological invention.

I think your point on changes in medicine being almost sci-fi like is very on point. The speed at which medicine is progressing is dizzying. Crispr/cas9 editing of eukaryotic cells was first described in 2013, and now you can use it to genetically modify your own T-cell which will kill your tumour. Not as experimental therapy but as “standard treatment” for refractory haematolymphoid cancers. And even more incredible is that it has been accepted to the point that it is being covered by public sector health care systems (like the NHS) who find it so successful despite the cost. It’s a treatment that would have sounded like sci-fi maybe even 20 years ago.

I think the metaverse is so popular in novels at least in part because it's just plain convenient. You've got some character and they need to interact with some system or person (by means of a system). First option, easiest thing in the world: describe that interaction the exact same way you'd describe any other interaction. Those all happen to take place in the physical world, and you're really good at writing interactions like that. Second option, design a user interface (that's an entire job you're not trained in), then describe that interface which the reader is wholly unfamiliar with over text. It's a pain in the ass. (Option 1.5: appropriate the mechanics of another common form of interaction: email, texts, phone calls...)

Never apologize for cancelling a pedophile. Ok so I usually think of the world as big objects that newton’s laws can mostly explain, and tiny stuff that quantum quantum quantum quantum. What happens in between those extremes? Where do we find that conflict in technology? I’m thinking about maybe coatings or sensors or stuff like that. :) I love your videos! Thanks!

I just finished hte three body problem series and now I really need the three body problem video

for a 1000 bonus, do you have a discord server? could do live Q&A there, could open a series of threads asking about various topics in science, "When is nuclear gonna happen?" "Is AI gonna kill us?" "Let's talk about climate change" "Who's gonna be the the first to step foot on Mars?" "CAN we step foot on Mars?" "What's with all these satellites junking up our exosphere?" "NASA dropped ANOTHER tool bag, this kind of thing can't be acceptable" "HOW do we feed approaching 10 billion ppl on a planet?" "Why did an IP like Zelda lose to an IP like Baldurs Gate at the Game Awards?" the important questions 😂

Schrodinger was a... oh. well now I hate him. damn, he had some good theories there, but I kinda wanna dismiss anything he's ever done. kinda wanna punch his teeth in too. wtf? .. what's with these ppl

this is so rad! i didn't know GPS worked backwards of intuition. it's just like a video game! rather than actively pinging and asking for a position, it passively just has positions and you might find yourself in one of them. just like a game in the sense that much game programming requires such backward thinking, like the framerate rule of Super Mario 1 waiting for the player rather than the player determining their own time. speedrunners will know what I mean. and HOLY! we are definitely in the 'future' and it's both amazing and scary. I've wanted to seek a career in infosec at this point lol

again a great video. I am amazed how good you are at explaining the most complex topics in such a free form and it all seems spontaneous. Are you using a script?

Amazing content, as always. I just subscribed, loving the more informal vibe on these videos. As for content (as I said, all of it is great) but I think the deepdives (e.g. spooky spider story, the part describing allegations of sexual harassment, in the two hour long video) and the rants (e.g. AI) are two incredible strengths of yours. At 1000 subs a QA is really cool, or we vote on subjects for you to give a series of micro-rants about ;)

Hi! New patreon here! I am a phd student (why did i do this to myself) in cancer immunology and I’m completely engrossed with the whole physics field. But your comment about the advancements of medical research made me fall in love a little bit with my field again :) Maybe if I think about it as long youtube video essays I will be passionate about my work again haha

Re: holograms - similarly, why do all the depictions of the future people have transparent monitors and screens. That seems like it'd make it really hard to read!

The lighting looks great. In 2018, I sent a high weather balloon into the upper atmosphere. I tracked it with GPS and a radio transceiver. I can confirm 20 miles up, the GPS could tell me the latitude, longitude, and altitude. As it came down, we drove in the family minivan to intercept it. We spotted it in the air and watched it land in the top of a tree. It was one of the coolest Saturdays ever. GPS is amazing. (Documentation here: https://jonw0224.weebly.com/hab.html)

Regarding how antimatter spacecraft will work… I went to the article and clicked on the new author's name. It went to her personal site, where she says, "I’m an editor, copyeditor, proofreader [...] and freelance content marketing writer", and "I specialize in Latinx culture, entrepreneurship and social justice issues." Despite copyedit issues on her own page, I'm not sure how she's qualified to contribute to the antimatter spacecraft article.

What of electronic codebook with salt versus cipher block chaining without salt? Both approaches were FIPS 140-compliant last I checked.

Hm. I’d swear I’d seen the “tyranny” line attributed to tsiolkovksy or one of the early rocket scientists (early here being, people involved before 1939 or wherever you want to draw the “prewar” line). But I can’t find evidence of that in 3 minutes of Wikipedia so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Look up the Varian Ethos radiation therapy machine. Artificial intelligence (AI hype lol) augmented adaptive, personalised radiotherapy machine. Pretty cool, and commercially available. Beats a damn space elevator.

Two videos in such short time, we gonna be used to it lol

I would highly recommend reading both "the day of the triffids" and "The Chrysalids".

Is that actually how GPS works, though? I thought it was about flight time rather than "what part of the surface of the Earth the satellite can see", i.e. occlusion. Like, what I thought they were doing was sending out pulses, like these expanding spherical shells (should I be talking about light cones here?), and based on flight time of the signal and your own clock and relativity and all that you could find a some spherical surface +/- some error where you know you must reside, and then the multiple satellites provide multiple shells that you can compute the intersection of to narrow down your location... or something like that. I mean it works in the air as well, you don't actually have to be on the surface, so that kind of triangulation as shown wouldn't work, would it?

Great video. Lighting is great. Thank you for saying interplanetary space travel for humans is a bad idea. I’ve been saying it’s a bad idea for decades now and it’s never been a popular view to espouse. I guess there’s money in the grift, or maybe not because Elon seems to be into it big time. Ho hum. I also thought you might like to know some woo cult called Gaia got ad space of your antimatter drive video - 30 seconds of total bullshit about water capturing a group of scientifically illiterate marks having happy thoughts in its “resonance” or some such hogwash (don’t quote me on exactly what their terminology was - I only let the ad play to find out who these clowns were). Your video being largely about critical thinking hopefully made their ad spend somewhat misplaced but damn the fact that these parasitic goons get platformed at all is as annoying as hell (and it makes me miss the late James Randi’s takedowns of these fools), so please keep up the great work. :)

Fun fact about GPS, they have to account for frame dragging in the time calculations. Checkmate Newtonians!

"…space is very very very very big…" "…when I'm thinking about space travel I think it's impossible…" "…we don't live in Star Trek…" "…we can never travel space…" Preach! It seems like so many Elmo fans think we do live in ST. BTW, the lighting is great!

When you were talking about pulsars it made me realize I have a question that I never bothered to find the answer to: what's the mechanism that gives a neutron star a magnetic field? If it's made up of particles with no charge or magnetic fields of their own, where does its magnetic field come from?

The video looks ok, the audio is not as nice though. Probably due to the new small space you are in. In this case, the closer you are to the microphone, the better you will sound. Other solutions usually involve buying things.

1) did not really know that about Schrodinger but I did read "when we cease to understand the world" by Labatut which is.... interesting (pretty good first chapter?); 2) could be fun if you wanna talk about a movie for 1k. My vote is "something chill that you want to discuss", but if that's a book or game or fun technology or something else then that!

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is very good, especially if you've read stuff like Le Morte d'Arthur, which it parodies very well.

Every time I tell my fellow physics undergrads that we are not ever traveling the universe it gets met with disbelief.

Also, congratulations on 1x10^3 subscribers! Accurate to 1 significant figure :) My (somewhat selfish) idea for you is creating private patreon comment sections for your public videos so I don't have to hang out with the mean people on youtube who shout about space elevators. However, if I were you, I wouldn't want to deal with moderating two comment sections, so maybe this is not a good idea.

I first learned that GPS is passive when I accidentally noticed that you can use your phone's GPS... while it's in airplane mode... on an airplane. (It helps to be in a window seat.) I'm sure anyone who was looking at me at the time could have seen the gears turning in my brain trying to work out what was happening. Now I use it all the time. It's so much better than the terrible app they build into the planes, but it does get funny looks because everyone else thinks GPS is active and that you're violating the sacred no phone rule. In defense of XNAV: Even though the pulsars have millisecond periods, the waveform is predictable at a much finer time scale (microseconds? nanoseconds? I don't know). And by comparing the phase shifts of enough pulsars, the error could be reduced. Apparently there are 3000 known millisecond pulsars. If a typical pulsar is consistent to 1 microsecond that gives you an error of 300 m, and dividing by sqrt(3000) gets you to GPS levels of accuracy. I'm not sure how you would record waveforms from 3000 millisecond pulsars but I guess that's why this is science fiction.

I've quoted your "AI doesn't exist" video enough that not giving you $3 felt gross

You mentioned your negative world view, so maybe it's from that, but I'm (for real) interested why you have so strong conviction on things humanity "will never do"? I don't think we get to sending interstellar probes (let alone humans) for quite some time, but after enough generations without us killing ourselves I don't see why not. Drone taking 50 years to reach a star? That's not that long of time. Same with "metaverse"; I, for one, would be ready to upload my consciousness into computers if it ever became a possibility. Again, I wouldn't expect that to happen in my life time, but I don't see why that *couldn't* be possible in some distant future (our brains are material objects too anyway). TL;TD: Why so sure "we will never X", instead of "I can't see us X in the next couple generations, so don't get your hopes up"?

rocket nerds are masters of not reading the room lol. I have zero doubt you could derive the rocket equation from newton's laws.

I didn't know about Schrodinger. Gross.

My mind is still kind of boggled every time I use GPS on my phone. *And* I met a retired digital cartographer last week and most of our conversation was about how sci-fi GPS is. Some people are talking about it.

as a molecular biologist I think novel biotech will change what it means to be human in frighteningly unpredictable ways. imagine if we ended aging, like that'd be dope but a lot of people will keep having kids, and no one wants to die but the planet won't be getting any bigger. Imagine instead we can build whole species for our needs through directed or evolution or manual cloning--we could make organisms do almost anything, and some humans might build 'specialized' humans, and/or enslaved worker bee-like humans, godlike humans or monstrosities.

Lighting looks fine! Curious what you think about space-based manufacturing + space elevator. Can make very good fiber optics, interesting for all sorts of biology work (mixing of fluids works different), even some cool chip manufacturing stuff (wake shield facility). Of course, none of it really makes sense now with the high per kg launch cost, but, bring that down.. maybe?

The thing I like about this channel is that acollierastro calls them as she sees them, and I hope that never changes. I'm sure that brings a lot of negativity her way. As they say, if you're taking flak you must be somewhere near the target. And as the great visionary Sylvester Stallone once said, you can't drive looking through the rear view mirror. Her posts have been thought-provoking and worthwhile, and if I disagree I can always say so. If someone feels threatened by her posts, I would say go do a better job selling your ideas, and let acollierastro sell her ideas. Let's make it about ideas and not go all ad hominem.

Now I know... hhmmm.

life is too short to make creepy Schrodinger videos.

For 1000 subscribers, my vote is for you to just keep being you. That's why we're all here in the first place. Your content is accessible and relatable.

Also maybe I am missing something, I don't like having tons of apps on my phone, so I don't have the patreon app on my phone, when you release new videos, do we get early access?

I am part of Joe Scott's channel and some members in a specific tier gets to do a zoom call w/ him. I like that, I would vote for that.

Another thought towards the growth your channel deserves: I hope Google/YouTube's current adblocker and huge premium price increases are not noticeably affecting your viewership.

Got to the end, had no idea that Schrodinger was so awful! Read his Wikipedia bio, totally sickening. I'm no longer adhering to his wave equation. :( Also increased my sub, you absolutely deserve it for your amazing work, please keep it up!

Bonus videos that might be cool are a show & tell of you doing your work, especially if telescopy is involved. Kind of like Career Day at SNL: https://youtu.be/t7HD2xG92-0. Just kidding, not like that.

Bonus videos are always welcome. Q&A probably wouldn't work for me because other people's questions might make my head want to explode. That's why I watch/listen to acollierastro and not them.

Regarding your idea about a headset blocking seeing undesirable things, John C. Wright's far future posthuman Golden Age trilogy has this idea deepely enmeshed, called "sense filters". I could absolutely see people using that as a real-life filter bubble to avoid seeing and hearing things and ideas they just don't like. Scary to the extreme!

I'm not sure 1000 Patreon members is the right goal. I know little about it, so take this with a truckload of salt. My thought would be to accept Patreon members as icing on the cake, and focus instead on driving up YouTube views and subscribers. Patreon membership should follow. Maybe a rebranding exercise followed by a Google ad campaign.

On the Warp Speed scale, I wonder just how fast Ludicrous Speed actually is.

If we're allocating resources, I would put 80% toward keeping earth safe for humankind, and 20% toward establishing an off-earth foothold just in case.

I found your sexual harassment in Astronomy and physics video to be the most incredible and powerful take on the issue I have ever seen or discussed. It was not an easy topic to tackle. Thank you so so so much for doing that.

I think a space elevator let's you travel fast enough to travel the galaxy. It overcomes the tyranny of the speed of light.

Years ago, I started planning a sci-fi novel that starts with SETI detecting a bunch of signals in a seemingly empty region of space, which quickly snowballs into "ET TV" taking the world by storm. The first half of the story is all fun and games, with people marveling at how similar the aliens are to us. Things take a sudden turn, however, when we remotely witness the aliens "discovering" our own leaked signals, starting with the televised broadcast of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. The vibe of the second half of the story becomes much darker when, after taking stuff like time and distance into account (along with other details), people realize that the aliens are already well on their way to Earth — in fact they'll be arriving in just a few months — and we actually still know very little about them, because alien TV is just as fake, shallow and manipulative as human TV. One reason why I never started actually writing this book is that I wasn't sure if the basic premise of watching TV broadcasts from outer space was even remotely possible. Never got a chance to ask an actual astrophysicist. P.S. I agree with you about VR, but if you haven't yet seen it, check out Lex Fridman's latest interview with Mark Zuckerberg. The tech on display is genuinely impressive, way beyond the cartoony stuff that's easy to ridicule. I still think it's wrong on many levels, and I still can't imagine the average person engaging very much with any tech that requires headgear, regardless of how amazing the experience might be. P.P.S. All I want for 1k is a nice long rant!

Video idea that might be a long shot, but would be fun, chill, low stress and might intersect with a few things you like and resonate: an Outer Wilds playthrough. Might not be the kind of content you think of making, but it's not something you'll have to spend months researching or worry about eliciting weird/gross responses to. I know a lot of people would love to see the specific kind of insight you'd be able to bring to it, it's a really special game. If that's not of any interest, then consider this a whole-hearted recommendation for something to do in your personal time regardless :)

I like the pulsar navigation idea and learning aboot their similarity to lighthouses is good knowledge. Aside from needing the time to calculate the position in space, time will need to be a coordinate of the system. There will need to be 7 spatial coordinates and at least one temporal coordinate. 6 of the spatial locations are pulsars the seventh is the location of the ship. The temporal coordinate is the ship time of the reading. To use the navigation system for traveling an 8th spatial location will be needed. Without the temporal coordinate, the position in space will be hard to find again at a later point. For instance, Apple Maps will not be able to tell me where my space ship is when I leave in my away ship to go to the local Costco on Gemini-prime. There may need to be a temporal measurement for each spatial location, but I do not know enough about space, physics, or math to have any idea about that. Also, did the European Space Agency cite Stargate, 1994 in their research? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqf2_5SwaL8&t=48s Personally, I'm a Captain Kirk guy. I think we do not need maps. Let's just fly around and when we need to know where we are we scan for the nearest planet with intelligent life, beam down, fight with the locals, flirt with their women, then ask them where we are. Your idea about reading Sci-fi to gauge their predictions in relation to their times is brilliant. And without trying to sound like a teacher's pet, you're education and ability would allow you to adjust your prediction process in a meaningful manner. As well, I've mentioned VGA Planets in one of the YouTube video's comments, but I'll mention it here as well. The section of this video covering traveling at warp speed made complete sense to me. This is due to your excellent science communication skills and the sheer number of hours I spent increasing the tech of my warp drives, so my galactic empires would have the necessary logistics to dominate the leader board. I'm not sure I ever won a game, but I definitely get the difference between traveling at warp 1 and warp 9.

also, i'm very glad than an actual real-life smart person backed up a thought i had: we're (probably) not going past the solar system, this is as good as it gets, but while we're here we're doing some very cool sh**.

One of my favorite things from vintage scifi is the way Asimov wrote the robots series before digital computers were really a thing, so the thinking machines were all conceived as being based on analogue circuitry. Every time people start comparing neurons to bits and consciousness to software now I think "are our brains really anything like computers though or are we just comparing the brain to whatever our most sophisticated technology is again?"

Lighting looks good! I'm not a light scientist, though. I was one of the ''lucky'' 10k today to learn that Schrödinger was a paedo. It's fucky to think about how many people's lives had to get ruined by these Great Men tm for science to progress. /can't-tell-if-it's-sarcasm I am kinda pumped for the AI article video, there's something about science communication gets me jazzed. I'm always excited to watch your new videos. I am also interested in Statistics content so I would love to see a video on the history of (markov-chain) monte carlo methods in physics. I've heard stories about old physics profs chastizing students for not having pages and pages of random numbers with them in order to do some blackboard simulations. This might be really niche, though !

Before Black Mirror, showrunner Charlie Booker had a website called Unnovations with fake As Seen on TV products, one of which was VR goggles that turn homeless people into 1930's cartoon animals so you don't have to look at them. The lighting looks good in this BTW

Sweet Halloween pumpkin blanket! The Man in the High Castle is my favorite Philip K. Dick book and is definitely worth reading.

Is it not a good idea to mine nickel or whatever from asteroids? I always day dream about us getting our poop in a pile and mining useful metals from space for the benefit of all. Is that all just a dum dum idea?

This is my first comment on your Patreon, so I'd like to start by saying hello, and thank you for your amazing videos! In particular, thank you so much for the one on solving the Schrodinger's equations for the hydrogen atom. A long time ago, 1996 to be exact, I took my final required course for my B.Sc., Physics 412, at the University of British Columbia. I remember struggling so hard to just get through the equations for the hydrogen atom, and despairing of ever being able to understand anything more complex. That course had an 80% failure rate and I was taking it for the second time. My interest and joy in Physics was waning rapidly (although passing the course remains one of the achievements I'm most proud of) and I despaired of ever loving Physics again. Your videos have made that possible, so thank you for that. As for today's video, I love the idea of a galactic GPS. I also think the idea of exploring classic sci-fi is fantastic. Please dive into your backlist, and let us know what you think of their predictions.

Thank you for another great video! Would you ever consider doing one about Marie Curie?

Also: I really enjoy the comment section here. Like much more than most other places (except for some very small subreddits) I frequent(ed).

Thank you. Excellent as usual (and light is good). A couple of thoughts regarding classic SciFi. It's been said that Arthur C. Clarke has the best 'predictions' all around, not sure it's quite true, but certainly enough close hits to matter. Also in the predicting category, Brin has built part of his career out of it. I do like 'The Postman', the rest less so. Regarding Philip K. Dick, people tend to forget the soft sciences, they are lot more important in his writing than any androids he can come up with. His 'Do androids dream of electric sheep?' needs to be read in parallel with viewing the first 'Blade Runner'. Both are based and merge serious work in Sociology, Anthropology and Human Geography -- I want to say Wade Davis work on Los Angeles as a vertically tiered/stratified city (unsure of my reference) merging with imagery of the old Kowloon.

A silly hook for thousand patrons video: multiple instances of “oopy goopy plasma”, please! 😉

Lighting is good. A pretty common sci-fi thing is wealthy people get to either put themselves in permanent connection to some internet system where their body is looked after or even "upload" themselves into a virtual reality. "Firefall" has this in a state where it is treated matter-of-factly as part of normal reality.

I guess if you think about it, GPS really is some sci-fi level technology.

I'm not sure sci-fi is a good cure against cynicism. Some of the best sci-fi stories are very, very grim. If one is wondering what would happen if we contacted aliens and then he reads books like Solaris, Eden, Rendezvous with the Rama, Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, well, all of these have grim comments about the chances of humanity in a startreky environment. And if one wants to understand what it is like surviving in a future society while constantly struggling with mega machines and then he reads the books of Phillip K. Dick or Harlan Ellison, again, it's like descending into hell. While a mediocre sci-fi book has the somehow positive subtext of "today's humanity survives and exists in the far future", great sci-fi books go somehow beyond this. But if I think of Yudkowsky's essay Future Shock Levels, I must say most of sci-fi authors (and also their readers) are just too coward to cope with the future. I mean Dune is the most sold sci-fi book ever where people got too afraid of most of their technology so they went back to the Middle Ages to play Game of Thrones in space? What does this tell us about the sci-fi genre?

Lighting seems fine. Traveling in the old days. Stop to buy a map. Stop to use a payphone. Visit AAA before a long trip so they could give you a map and mark it up with areas to be aware of such as speed traps and construction. I might consider going back to the old ways if it meant I didn't have to keep doing two-factor authentication all day everyday.

No thanks necessary, always happy to be here.

I definitely think that spaceship nerds (of which I am, regrettably, one) massively underestimate all the other problems with space travel aside from the simplest "how do we physically move mass around" part.

While working at the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC I wrote Software for a Phase measurement system to upgrade the GPS Ground Segment. See the paper, "GPS Monitor Station Upgrade Program at the Naval Research Laboratory"

The ultimate Schrodinger video, one that may or may not exist.

very cool. also, the lighting looks great, i think. yay closet.

The lighting looks great, maybe a tad on the yellow side but that warmth of light is pleasant to look at so I like it!

i didn't know gps is based on what satellites you can see. i always thought the satellite basically said "my name is X and my current time is Y" and then you find at what time you receive the message, and you could compute your distance from where X was when it sent the message. that way a single satellite would locate you on a circle on earth instead of in a disk. anyway thanks for the vid. love to see your growth as a video creator over time, super inspiring

Lighting is good! Pulsar-based localization is such a good idea that it’s an engineering exercise vs a basic research problem. There are some parallel issues to underwater localization (my day job!). It’s also neat because it’s fairly obvious how improvements in modeling will improve your position+vector solution methods. Fun fact: all kinds of goofball relativity effects happen in underwater localization, just way way slower! 😉

Nice video - the lighting looks fine. One of the potential problems with using pulsars and whatnot are timing variations due to the gravitational wave background. I recently saw some work at a conference that used these pulsar timing variations to measure the gravitational wave background, and from memory, the variations were ~10-100ns compared to the ~ms pulsar flashes(?). It's not my field so I am unsure of the exact numbers, but this would likely add some potentially significant uncertainty to the ship's position using the pulsars as lighthouses. Although I suppose using more pulsars would average this out, or just observing them for a while to average it out. Interesting idea though. Anyway for the thousand video, perhaps go through your PhD dissertation? If you ever want to read that again that is haha.

Your "It's fine. It doesn't matter." is like 80% of the reason I watch your videos. 🤣 Anyway. GPS (and a Milky Way sized system) is trilateration not triangulation, right? And I get constantly annoyed by how it's "tri" for both when actual technical implementations usually break down with less than 4 measurements. Another idea that came to mind: Wouldn't just taking pictures of stars and CVing them suffice for navigation in the Milky Way? We do have a very good portion of the galaxy mapped already. Why would we need to set up beacons? Am I missing something?

I like paper maps for driving. When near-future me is navigating on a starship I'm going to insist on using a paper map and compass

yeah we can't really go anywhere in space on a reasonable timeline. Though I wonder if over the next few thousand years build some kind of generation ship? Like a giant city in an asteroid and blast it off to some other system? maybe after robots get sent there to build other stuff for us? idk. also your 1000 video could be your own take on a Cracking The Cryptic video. Post a puzzle and then solve it in a video.