When reading these program announcements, it's important to keep in mind that the (unofficial?) mandate for a DARPA program officer is to fund proposals that lie in the boundaries of [Doesn't at face violate laws of physics, P(Success) = 0.2]. A program where the vast majority of aims were clearly successfully delivered would be a program that should have been funded by other government agencies.
Of course, with R&D currently on the chopping block, we'll see if the same people that complain about NSF/NIH start coming for DARPA also...
I started my career at a DARPA contractor. Part of the DARPA ethos also is that it’s lean and mean. Program managers have a ton of discretion, but they’re not lifers. IIRC they get a 4 or 8 year stint then are expected to leave. Office space is leased from the private sector, etc. Complete mission-oriented and non-ideological, at least it was 20 years ago.
I misremembered, the terms were 2 years or 4 years: https://www.darpa.mil/careers/program-manager (Maybe they shortened it.) Sometimes you can stay longer than that, but yes, you’re pushed out. The organization is highly decentralized: much of the substantive authority to decide project direction is invested in program managers. There’s a deliberate effort not to have a central vision which, the reasoning goes, could lead to inertia and stagnation.
PMs tend to be ambitious young PhDs who want to go into industry or start their own companies. The PM on the project I worked on is now principal wireless architect at Google Fi.
This is very interesting. I know obsessing over Roman history is seen as somewhat fascist-adjacent, especially emanating from tech spaces, but I keep wanting to run a company along the lines of the Republic’s mixed constitution. No king with centralised power (CEO) but elected Consuls with term limits, who have the power to kick off and deliver big projects, aligning teams however they need to. Give every tribe (product, design, engineering, platform etc) a tribune with some degree of veto power. Create a senate with every Senior, who elect the consuls and approve new wars (projects). Employ quaestors across the company to do finops. At the end of your period you get a big triumph if you were victorious, or you get dumped in the Tiber if you abused your power.
I also believe that certain aspects of the Roman Republic were superior to those of any of the so-called Republics that exist today, all of which do not observe the fundamental rule of the Roman Republic, which was that, there must exist no major management function occupied by a single human, like a president or a prime minister, but in all such roles there must be at least 2 humans, equal in the granted authorities, so that they will control each other, and this rule could have exceptions only in truly exceptional situations, i.e. wars or calamities, when dictators could be appointed.
Despite the fact that the modern republics are supposed to have some "checks and balances" to limit the power of the leaders, I have seen too many cases of presidents or prime ministers who, after being elected using various lies, begin to act like absolutist kings and nobody seems able to stop them, because they claim that they "represent the majority of the people who have elected them" and nobody may limit their power, because nobody is equal to them.
It's true there were usually pairs of consuls and censors, but there were powerful magistracies that were awarded to individuals, like pontifex maximus and the tribune of the plebs, the former being a lifetime appointment. Either way, the Republic collapsed into violence, and was hardly blameless in its own fall. Ultimately whatever checks and balances you have, it's very hard to stop power and wealth accumulating, and thus enormous constituencies feeling disenfranchised.
This is (sort of) how many defense contractors already are run. Ones like Booz Allen, which are more like 500 small businesses (each one generally, but not always, mapping to one gov contract) and where the leadership work together but have a lot of self-determination to grow their unit. More like an organism with multiple ecosystems but one forest (like one payroll, IT, and financial system and similar resources) to tie them together.
It had some interesting effects, like how different teams would compete for candidates and give counter offers, all coming from the same company though.
My reference point, the DARPA self driving challenge was in 2004. AlexNet was a sea change in image processing, which did not happen for another eight years.
SpaceX started off based on a DARPA proposal/challenge too right? Or at least the DARPA challenge for re-usable rockets aligned well with SpaceX's demonstrable success.
They wanted to go to mars and tried buying russian rockets first, but they were too expensive so they started building them.
Nothing to do with Darpa, at least I dont find any relations.
>In a post-accident report, NASA's Brand Commission blamed the accident on a burnt-out field crew who had been operating under on-again/off-again funding and constant threats of outright cancellation. The crew, many of them originally from the SDIO program, were also highly critical of NASA's "chilling" effect on the program, and the masses of paperwork NASA demanded as part of the testing regimen.[citation needed]
>NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been "shamed" by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.[citation needed] Its continued success was cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their "home grown" Lockheed Martin X-33/VentureStar project. Pete Conrad priced a new DC-X at $50 million, cheap by NASA standards, but NASA decided not to rebuild the craft in light of budget constraints.[16] Instead, NASA focused development on the Lockheed Martin VentureStar which it felt answered some criticisms of the DC-X, specifically the airplane-like landing of the VentureStar, which many NASA engineers preferred over the vertical landing of the DC-X. Just a few years later, the repeated failure of the Venturestar project, especially the composite LH2 (liquid hydrogen) tank, led to program cancellation.[19]
They already came for NSF and the NIH, how can they not also come for DARPA?
Most republicans don't believe in defense or anything like that, they believe in returning money to their investors...I mean campaign contributors who are defense contractors. A contractor makes money selling contracts, whether they affect the actual defense capabilities of the country or not.
From what I understand, the funding cuts are primarily related to DEI initiatives. And, generally the administration is trying to align activities with its goals, so it’s understandable that funds will be adjusted. DEI is a target because its goals are steeped in Marxist philosophy, which is antithetical to their own.
Also, Republicans (of whom I’m not one) believe that spending should be controlled by the states. It’s not that they don’t believe in defense - they realize it’s more effective to invest in drones and use nuclear deterrence. Those are more effective and cheaper in terms of lives as well as money. This aligns with the US’s new isolationist strategy as it withdraws from the world.
Do you have any idea of the breakdown? Because everything I've see is that no one knows, and the limited government publications are full of bullshit.
Like, if a project studying biodiversity is cut, is that because it is "related to DEI initiatives" because it shared the word "diversity"?
How many of the laid-off VA staff were DEI? The laid-off forest rangers?
How much of USAID was DEI? The Trump administration says the cut was due to wasteful spending and fraud, not DEI.
How do the cuts in DEI initiatives compare to the massive cuts to indirect grant monies?
If the Republicans believe spending should be more controlled by the states, they have a majority and can, you know, change the law. We have a representative democracy to help balance national interests, rather than the interests of a king.
I don't think we can regard threats to annex Greenland, Canada, or the Panama Canal as part of an isolationist policy. Such threats are more closely aligned with expansionism. An isolationist government would not be involved in international negotiations involving Ukraine, or providing support to Israel, to start.
FWIW, DEI is no more steeped in Marxist philosophy than the Freedman's Bureau, public libraries, or the FDIC. As far as I can tell, "Marxism" when used this way is a boogieman term used to scare off any critique of capitalism or its effects, little different than how Republicans sneered that Dukakis was an "L word", castigating the word "liberal." Both terms are used as rhetorical propaganda.
Given the influence Marx had on studying "class relations, social conflict, and social transformation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism), it's all too easy to say that any study of those topics must be Marxism, and therefore fomenting a communist revolution.
Just to answer your question (not lend any legitimacy), https://doge.gov has been publishing all the details.
I've looked through it a few times to answer the same curiosity you have (I want more specifics, not just the stuff that fits in a tweet). But it still leaves me with questions because I don't know how much of these claims is actually accurate.
> The Department of Government Efficiency, the federal cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk, published on Monday a list of government contracts it has canceled, together amounting to about $16 billion in savings itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.
> Almost half of those line-item savings could be attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But the DOGE list vastly overstated the actual value of that contract. A closer scrutiny of a federal database shows that a recent version of the contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.
> DOGE says it's now saved $65B in federal funds, but that's still impossible to verify
> It only provides records for $9.6 billion in savings from contract terminations
as well as:
> The official also said they're using a conservative methodology of calculating savings because they're subtracting the contracts' obligated dollars from the ceiling amounts. However, for many contracts the ceiling dollars are much higher than what is actually expected to be spent.
You'll note that there's no information about how much was specifically DEI, while saying the total amount was due to a "combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings."
The hard truth is that they have no clue about what they are cutting and they mainly do not care because the initiative is not to make things better it is to break a currently working system in favour of God knows what.
Every step taken by the current administration has undermined the safety and current position of the US both domestically and on the international stage. The only people that I see profiting from the current situation are Russia and then China.
Regardless of opinions on Diversity Equity and Inclusion, one has to look at the current situation with pragmatism:
Firing all probatory employees is just insane.
Firing the people responsible of your nuclear Arsenal is insane
Firing competent workers because of their skin colour or they do not have the genitalia you prefer is insane.
Sending an emai, on the weekend, requesting 5 accomplishment or risk getting fired is insane.
Let's see it from a different perspective, let's say you have a large company operating on international scale with many stakeholders, you get a consultant tasked with streamlining and optimising operation. Within less than a month, they start arbitrarily firing people based on aggregated numbers from random collection of papers lying around in the office. Would you trust the fact that they would streamline and make things run better or would you assume they just started slashing left and right to justify "optimising". You can tell by my phrasing what my opinion is on the matter but there is no way that you can optimise, let alone understand, those agencies inner working and essential moving parts within less than a month...
Now I will refrain from making any political/legality statements, but from a pure practical standpoint it is, to put it mildly, nuts.
To be clear, I'm not a republican or a conservative. If it matters, I'm a modern liberal (i.e. what existed before progressivism but after classical liberalism). I'm just trying to distill what I believe the right says and what I observe. Also, this is my take on modern American conservatism, in general - individual cases vary.
First, if you look up progressive academic theorists [1] you will see that they are largely inspired by Marxist philosophy either directly or indirectly. The right are diametrically opposed to Marxism because it relies on an assumption that Man can rise above his Animal instincts. But, man can't, even with best intentions (i.e. ethics professors do not behave more ethically than non-ethicists) [2][3].
There is a belief by the right that the great majority of people working in government and government related industries (e.g. NGOs) have come out of liberal arts programs that were inspired by the academics listed. They also believe that progressive ideology has steeped into the sciences.
I believe the right's goal is total dismantling of the executive branch. The point is really to destroy any power that the executive has down to the bare minimum so that the risk of a king is eliminated. It's interesting that they put a group of potential tyrants in charge of all of this - it's almost as if they want to show everyone how bad of an idea it is for the president to have so much control.
They generally believe that differing cultures are a good thing but because of Human nature integration cannot work. Therefore, in a state system, they believe one should be allowed to move to the state of their choice and enjoy whatever culture they want given the constraints of the constitution.
Furthermore, they believe the constitution is the only way for lasting peace. It sets the bare minimum for a social contract that works across cultures and people. It gives a framework where people can be culturally different but equal. And, they hope to expand the US to other countries voluntarily (we hope) so that those countries may also share in its glory.
[1] Achille Mbembe, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Cheryl Harris, Cornel West, David Graeber, Derrick Bell, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Gayle Rubin, Herbert Marcuse, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, Mariame Kaba, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Naomi Klein, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Patricia Hill Collins, Peggy McIntosh, Richard Delgado, Robin DiAngelo, Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Piketty, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Clastres, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Sherry Ortner, Ferdinand de Saussure, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, David Harvey, Murray Bookchin, Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James, Paulo Freire
[2] Schwitzgebel & Rust (2014), etc.
[3] This is also why many Christians align with conservative thinking because in Christianity Jesus is the only Good thing of this world, and every person is equally sinful.
> they are largely inspired by Marxist philosophy either directly or indirectly
As I wrote, Marx's critical analysis of capitalism touched on many social topics. You should not be surprised that his work had merit in later social research. You should not be surprised that others who criticize capitalism have overlapping beliefs.
Though do note that "Marxist philosophy", quoting the Wikipedia entry for Marxism, has "branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive "Marxist theory".
Just like there isn't a single, definitive "liberalism."
> The right are diametrically opposed to Marxism because it relies on an assumption that Man can rise above his Animal instincts.
I ... what? I have no idea what that means. Where does Marx talk about that? How does that have anything to do with class struggle?
> but because of Human nature integration cannot work
What?!?!? English, Welsh, and Scottish cannot integrate? What about Presbyterians and Anglican? Men and women? People with blue eyes and people with brown eyes? Bourgeoisie and proletariat? Gen X and Gen Y?
What does it mean to not integrate when there are different classes in a shared society? They certainly aren't calling for the abolition of class distinction, which is Marx's Communist solution.
> so that the risk of a king is eliminated
Right, so Communism? Otherwise, when there is a power vacuum, something fills it, and without the consent of the people, that's a king, dictator, strongman, or the like.
As it stand, it looks more like the dismantling of the legislative and judicial branches, with all power in the executive.
> given the constraints of the constitution.
I'm pretty convinced the current government does not at all feel itself constrained by the constitution.
> they hope to expand the US to other countries voluntarily
History shows the US has a long history of not expanding voluntarily. What's changed? How has this new right de-fanged itself from the tendencies of the old right, like Andrew Jackson, that they seem to admire so much?
Many Christians also align with liberal and even radical thinking. Integration is possible because everyone is a child of God, and "When God’s people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality.” ... “The foreigner who resides with you must be to you like a native citizen among you; so you must love him as yourself, because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
I don't know, man. You'll have to go talk to some of them to get a better answer. This is my distilling of 8 years of conversations with average, everyday conservatives as I tried to figure out what they were even talking about. Interestingly, the all seem to have a strong intuition of what they want but seem to stumble on articulating it, they get frustrated, and lash out. I had to do a lot of socratic method and ask a lot of questions to come to these conclusions.
However, you are right about Marxism in that it influences a lot of things. Ironically, the accelerationist movement also even has influence from Marx. A lot whom I talked to have disdain for "academia" - I do know that.
I'm guessing here (and a lot of this is guess work) - that integration is difficult because they view "social control" as impossible outside of a cultural context. That is, within a culture, everyone learns all of the subtle rules and order of things - things that you can't codify in law. But, integration requires a lot of frontal lobe activity which is difficult to maintain and is fragile when it fails.
Correct - Nick Land, often regarded as the father of Accelerationism, affirms Marx's fundamental insight that "the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative" [0], though his interpretation aligns itself with capital and its autonomization:
"Right-wing Marxism, aligned with the autonomization of capital [...], has been an unoccupied position. The signature of its proponents would be a defense of capital accumulation as an end-in-itself, counter-subordinating nature and society as a means." [0]
Find it disappointing that even on HN people seems to blindly parrot manufactured outrage. Do you really think, nay have you ever tried to look a little deeper than surface to see just how preposterous all around the idea is in terms of actual intents and relative numbers that it would be meaningful to "cut" them? US Republicans are not about states rights, its just the excuse they use when they are trying to dismantle or challenge systems.
Things already are that bad, you’re standing an inch beyond where the previous wave washed up to and saying “well if it gets here in the next few waves then suddenly we become in deep shit’ while all around people are shouting at you about the existence of a concept called ‘the tide’. This is happening right now. fight back.
Come on. Even if all of Darpa is shut down, it will hardly matter. Come back in 4 years and see that the world is still turning but you've used up your hyperbolic panic on a big nothing-burger.
Just because the world keeps turning doesn't mean it's unaffected. Small shifts today can have huge consequences down the line, and brushing everything off as a 'nothing-burger' is exactly how real damage gets ignored. I wonder-what would actually have to happen for you to stop calling it that? This situation is, at the very least, unusual.
For the past 25 years, there have been consistent small shifts towards more government deficit [1]. Aren't those the problem that has to be stopped? I don't know enough about economics but can this really continue forever or is it just exacerbating some painful problem in the future if it's not reversed now? Maybe non-essential for-the-future work like Darpa isn't the best thing to spend money on when you're trying to reduce spending as fast as you can? It can always be re-instated in more prosperous times.
Looking at the comments, most people are approaching this as 'grow, like trees'.
We're literally talking moonshot projects here and nowhere does the brief mention specifically trees, or aerobic respiration/processes, there is plenty of room for using Chitin, Spider silk, keratin or a combination of biopolymers to form resilient composite structures.
There's already been videos of people using these as doping agents or additives for bulletproof armor, to middling success.
The synthesis via yeast or e.coli for most of these are partially solved problems, its more texturing them or using bio-mechanical processing to form thread or ply or load bearing panels that seems to be the major hurdle.
Also, being able to reliably source component and materials from near vacuum or whatever asteroid that happens to wander by that makes this a much more difficult problem to even define.
You gotta forgive people. We've all been a little eroded by regular assertions that a safe underhand throws, like turning a webpage into an electron app or whatever, are moonshots.
I for one love things like this. I wish we used a little more of our colossal production power to try manifesting the wilder things from our imagination. Maybe they can contract out how to make society have a better handle on balancing compassion for self and others. Or we could be realistic and get back to making a philosopher stone. ;)
Hope I live long enough to go on a modestly priced moon vacation up the H.R. Geiger space tentacle
Exactly, I am totally fine with us spending some tax dollars to try out these absolutely insane ideas.
But this isn't a matter of "let's spend more" because the pool of people that can see an absolutely insane idea, and ones that can actually work on them, are the vanishingly small number of nearly eccentrics. So there is an upper limit on how much money can be spent if you're at the absolute tip of the iceberg.
> because the pool of people that can see an absolutely insane idea, and ones that can actually work on them, are the vanishingly small number of nearly eccentrics.
I go back and forth with this. The further along the path I go, the more I weight good faith and sincere will to make a thing over ability-at-start. (drive + moxy + curious + perceptive - ego) is a better function to optimize for than buzzword count on a resume.
I think there's a lot of people who can do crazy things in a good faith kind of way that advances the wave front of humanity. It's possible that it's everyone, and it's all about conditions. "all about conditions" is doing some heavy lifting, but maybe you see what I'm trying to articulate.
> If aerobic organisms or mechanisms are
required (grown in space and then desiccated by exposure to vacuum when growth is complete), the methods and support equipment required to preserve key aerobic variables (e.g., atmosphere, pressure, temperature) must be part of the biomechanical assembly system design. Anaerobic organisms or mechanisms may allow for less support hardware but may require other controls to support continued growth in the space environment (e.g. pressure, temperature, humidity)
I saw this at a DSO* presentation ("Darpa's Darpa") back in ~2018. Hope they've gotten some early traction, that was some of the least wild crap that was being presented.
My company was pitching holographic cameras, and we weren't scifi enough. The investigator wanted to know if we could do hyperspectral 3D imaging from something the size of a sugar cube. ("Uh, no?" was our response.)
Whichever one used sensory deprivation tanks. I don't remember the specifics.
High salinity solutions make wizards more buoyant. It's immediately self evident to me how this helps one telepathically view the inside of missile silos on the other side of the planet.
> Some examples of structures that could be biologically manufactured and assembled, but that may be infeasible to produce traditionally, include tethers for a space elevator, grid-nets for orbital debris remediation, kilometer-scale interferometers for radio science, new self-assembled wings of a commercial space station for hosting additional payloads, or on-demand production of patch materials to adhere and repair micrometeorite damage.
I almost wrote a short story about colonising Mars by firing radioisotope bullets with genetically engineered fungi coatings into the surface. These would metabolise the radiation and use the minerals in the crust to grow into large habitat volumes thick enough to retain atmosphere and insulate against radiation and thermal losses. Maybe it can be real one day!
Somewhat similar and probably easier to achieve would be trees floating in open ocean, and some kind of plant capable to bring nutrients up from the large depth.
Currently most of the ocean is a lifeless desert, with most of life concentrated in the places where upwelling occurs. This kind of floating trees would add enough biomass to compensate for all of the human produced CO2 and even more.
The more refined version of this are intentionally created algal blooms, ala the red tide. Then you would somehow capture the CO2 dissolved in ocean water that the algae concentrates.
In this way you'd use the ocean itself as your carbon capture "filter" and "clean the filter".
The issue is that since there just isn't enough nutrients for life, and adding fertilizers costs more carbon than it sequesters. The deep ocean usually gets its nitrogen from life dying above, decaying downwards then getting pushed upwards again. I don't know of any deep ocean reserves of nitrogen that just needs brought to the surface.
Nitrogen is easy, it can be captured from air, iron is the main thing missing in surface water that must be brought up by upwelling.
But having real trees above the water is much more useful than simple carbon capture, they would serve as wavebreakers for seasteading settlements too.
You're right, there seems to be iron rich deep sea currents in some places that could be good opportunities for upwelling, especially if you had a carbon neutral way to do it.
There is also emerging technology for nitrogen fixing that could work - Electrocatalytic Nitrogen Reduction.
All this being said, if the goal is carbon sequestration building a viable business is going to be next to impossible.
The easiest way would be to use your renewable energy to pull bicarbonate out of the ocean directly with electrolysis, reverse-osmosis, whatever magic tech the wizards in MIT are cooking up.
Only then you've got the problem of what to do with it all once you've got it on hand.
Carbon sequestration is merely a side effect, the main goal is to have a wavebreaker and a park and a place to grow fruits, for a floating city.
To bring nutrient rich water up and to generate energy in the process temperature difference between surface and deep water can be used [1]. So if this kind of tree is created, living on open sea can become cheaper and more pleasant than even living on a beach.
> Currently most of the ocean is a lifeless desert
Where can I read more about that? My understanding was that it is teaming with microorganisms or near-microorganisms, and of course there are many fauna and flora and protista and other life forms.
For water to team with life, you need materials for building cells in the same place where the light is, and in most cases there is not enough iron on the surface
if you think industrialized society should give up oil without alternatives then you should be honest and say that you believe we that the industrial revolution was a mistake and that we should by-and-large go back to an agrarian society where most people subsistence farm.
you can have that belief, that everyone should give up what oil gives us and live in a pre-modern way that most people would, today, consider poverty, because the alternative is (I assume you believe) extinction.
A few years ago an oil selling dictator, used his oil money to attack and occupy my friends country, killed my friend, and forced all the population to flee without ability to take anything with them.
So if you think that i like the situation where everyone supports dictatorships like Azerbaijan by buying their oil, you are very wrong.
But what we want and what is going to happen is often very different. Cutting fossil fuel use will not happen until there are better alternatives. And at that point most likely there will be enough CO2 in atmosphere to trigger melting of permafrost which will produce its own CO2. So "these schemes" will be needed one way or another.
That said my main interest here is seasteading, and increasing ocean biomass. Reducing atmospheric CO2 is merely a curios side effect.
First question I have is what kind of nutrient base conditions can we expect to start from? Should it be like Earth, or somewhere a bit more resource constrained (and how would it be constrained)?
I’d like to imagine solar reactors mimicking primordial goo to synthesise the essentials for these materials.
"A key unknown in creating such bio-mechanical structures in space is how the structure would be assembled. Feedstock must be provided (and relocated if necessary) to the growing edge, or to the area from which biological materials are being extruded. If aerobic organisms or mechanisms are required (grown in space and then desiccated by exposure to vacuum when growth is complete), the methods and support equipment required to preserve key aerobic variables (e.g., atmosphere, pressure, temperature) must be part of the biomechanical assembly system design."
Lots of nuanced details around your question in the doc! EDIT: I stupidly copy and pasted my local link to the PDF -- it appears this listing has been removed since posted. Here's another link to it https://govtribe.com/file/government-file/darpa-sn-25-51-dot...
Seems they're interested in precisely the question you pose, but coming at it from a few different directions
Anything you want and can launch into space. The program goal is being able to grow large structures. The intent seems to be using biology as a means to more efficiently transform launched mass into big structures.
It doesn’t sound so crazy to grow fibrous vines and wood in a habitat, dry them and reclaim the water, and then use them in construction. Growing them in place in space sounds a little crazy.
Step 1 would be to see if a nonporous wood holds up to the vacuum of space with enough durability. The biggest issue would be reclaiming moisture from the wood as it dried rather than losing it to space. Things like corals or molluscs would be too heavy (though that idea spawned a wonderful series of 16 bit side scrolling video games).
Without some sort of easy orbital exit/entry, it's unlikely that being "in space" will be a feasible permanent option.
Yeah this seems crazy to just throw out into the public. How do they decide what and when is worth funding? Does there have to be some kind of shining light of progress... or is it just moonshot after moonshot of blind hope?
DARPA Program Managers have a lot of leeway to write these sorts of requests.
PMs are typically experts in their field and often come from an academic, industry, military, or government research lab. DARPA gives them a budget for grants, autonomy, and 3-5 years to fund interesting work. Many fail, many have mixed success, and a small number revolutionize their field.
(Source: worked on a few DARPA-funded projects decades ago.)
the threshold to beat i think would be simple robots-3d-printers which could potentially 3d print any material using say laser or electron beam into pretty much anything of any size in space.
When reading these program announcements, it's important to keep in mind that the (unofficial?) mandate for a DARPA program officer is to fund proposals that lie in the boundaries of [Doesn't at face violate laws of physics, P(Success) = 0.2]. A program where the vast majority of aims were clearly successfully delivered would be a program that should have been funded by other government agencies.
Of course, with R&D currently on the chopping block, we'll see if the same people that complain about NSF/NIH start coming for DARPA also...
I started my career at a DARPA contractor. Part of the DARPA ethos also is that it’s lean and mean. Program managers have a ton of discretion, but they’re not lifers. IIRC they get a 4 or 8 year stint then are expected to leave. Office space is leased from the private sector, etc. Complete mission-oriented and non-ideological, at least it was 20 years ago.
>>IIRC they get a 4 or 8 year stint then are expected to leave.
If they refuse to leave they get fired?
>>Part of the DARPA ethos also is that it’s lean and mean. Program managers have a ton of discretion, but they’re not lifers.
Curious what kind of people are hired? Without overarching long term leadership its hard to chart out a continuous direction.
I misremembered, the terms were 2 years or 4 years: https://www.darpa.mil/careers/program-manager (Maybe they shortened it.) Sometimes you can stay longer than that, but yes, you’re pushed out. The organization is highly decentralized: much of the substantive authority to decide project direction is invested in program managers. There’s a deliberate effort not to have a central vision which, the reasoning goes, could lead to inertia and stagnation.
PMs tend to be ambitious young PhDs who want to go into industry or start their own companies. The PM on the project I worked on is now principal wireless architect at Google Fi.
This is very interesting. I know obsessing over Roman history is seen as somewhat fascist-adjacent, especially emanating from tech spaces, but I keep wanting to run a company along the lines of the Republic’s mixed constitution. No king with centralised power (CEO) but elected Consuls with term limits, who have the power to kick off and deliver big projects, aligning teams however they need to. Give every tribe (product, design, engineering, platform etc) a tribune with some degree of veto power. Create a senate with every Senior, who elect the consuls and approve new wars (projects). Employ quaestors across the company to do finops. At the end of your period you get a big triumph if you were victorious, or you get dumped in the Tiber if you abused your power.
I also believe that certain aspects of the Roman Republic were superior to those of any of the so-called Republics that exist today, all of which do not observe the fundamental rule of the Roman Republic, which was that, there must exist no major management function occupied by a single human, like a president or a prime minister, but in all such roles there must be at least 2 humans, equal in the granted authorities, so that they will control each other, and this rule could have exceptions only in truly exceptional situations, i.e. wars or calamities, when dictators could be appointed.
Despite the fact that the modern republics are supposed to have some "checks and balances" to limit the power of the leaders, I have seen too many cases of presidents or prime ministers who, after being elected using various lies, begin to act like absolutist kings and nobody seems able to stop them, because they claim that they "represent the majority of the people who have elected them" and nobody may limit their power, because nobody is equal to them.
It's true there were usually pairs of consuls and censors, but there were powerful magistracies that were awarded to individuals, like pontifex maximus and the tribune of the plebs, the former being a lifetime appointment. Either way, the Republic collapsed into violence, and was hardly blameless in its own fall. Ultimately whatever checks and balances you have, it's very hard to stop power and wealth accumulating, and thus enormous constituencies feeling disenfranchised.
This is (sort of) how many defense contractors already are run. Ones like Booz Allen, which are more like 500 small businesses (each one generally, but not always, mapping to one gov contract) and where the leadership work together but have a lot of self-determination to grow their unit. More like an organism with multiple ecosystems but one forest (like one payroll, IT, and financial system and similar resources) to tie them together.
It had some interesting effects, like how different teams would compete for candidates and give counter offers, all coming from the same company though.
My reference point, the DARPA self driving challenge was in 2004. AlexNet was a sea change in image processing, which did not happen for another eight years.
SpaceX started off based on a DARPA proposal/challenge too right? Or at least the DARPA challenge for re-usable rockets aligned well with SpaceX's demonstrable success.
They wanted to go to mars and tried buying russian rockets first, but they were too expensive so they started building them. Nothing to do with Darpa, at least I dont find any relations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX
>In a post-accident report, NASA's Brand Commission blamed the accident on a burnt-out field crew who had been operating under on-again/off-again funding and constant threats of outright cancellation. The crew, many of them originally from the SDIO program, were also highly critical of NASA's "chilling" effect on the program, and the masses of paperwork NASA demanded as part of the testing regimen.[citation needed]
>NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been "shamed" by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.[citation needed] Its continued success was cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their "home grown" Lockheed Martin X-33/VentureStar project. Pete Conrad priced a new DC-X at $50 million, cheap by NASA standards, but NASA decided not to rebuild the craft in light of budget constraints.[16] Instead, NASA focused development on the Lockheed Martin VentureStar which it felt answered some criticisms of the DC-X, specifically the airplane-like landing of the VentureStar, which many NASA engineers preferred over the vertical landing of the DC-X. Just a few years later, the repeated failure of the Venturestar project, especially the composite LH2 (liquid hydrogen) tank, led to program cancellation.[19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
If they come for DARPA then we are all in deep shit because that means things are far worse than we could have imagined.
They already came for NSF and the NIH, how can they not also come for DARPA?
Most republicans don't believe in defense or anything like that, they believe in returning money to their investors...I mean campaign contributors who are defense contractors. A contractor makes money selling contracts, whether they affect the actual defense capabilities of the country or not.
From what I understand, the funding cuts are primarily related to DEI initiatives. And, generally the administration is trying to align activities with its goals, so it’s understandable that funds will be adjusted. DEI is a target because its goals are steeped in Marxist philosophy, which is antithetical to their own.
Also, Republicans (of whom I’m not one) believe that spending should be controlled by the states. It’s not that they don’t believe in defense - they realize it’s more effective to invest in drones and use nuclear deterrence. Those are more effective and cheaper in terms of lives as well as money. This aligns with the US’s new isolationist strategy as it withdraws from the world.
> DEI is a target because its goals are steeped in Marxist philosophy
Tell me which parts of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” you disagree with, then tell me how those things tie to Marxism?
Do you have any idea of the breakdown? Because everything I've see is that no one knows, and the limited government publications are full of bullshit.
Like, if a project studying biodiversity is cut, is that because it is "related to DEI initiatives" because it shared the word "diversity"?
How many of the laid-off VA staff were DEI? The laid-off forest rangers?
How much of USAID was DEI? The Trump administration says the cut was due to wasteful spending and fraud, not DEI.
How do the cuts in DEI initiatives compare to the massive cuts to indirect grant monies?
If the Republicans believe spending should be more controlled by the states, they have a majority and can, you know, change the law. We have a representative democracy to help balance national interests, rather than the interests of a king.
I don't think we can regard threats to annex Greenland, Canada, or the Panama Canal as part of an isolationist policy. Such threats are more closely aligned with expansionism. An isolationist government would not be involved in international negotiations involving Ukraine, or providing support to Israel, to start.
FWIW, DEI is no more steeped in Marxist philosophy than the Freedman's Bureau, public libraries, or the FDIC. As far as I can tell, "Marxism" when used this way is a boogieman term used to scare off any critique of capitalism or its effects, little different than how Republicans sneered that Dukakis was an "L word", castigating the word "liberal." Both terms are used as rhetorical propaganda.
Given the influence Marx had on studying "class relations, social conflict, and social transformation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism), it's all too easy to say that any study of those topics must be Marxism, and therefore fomenting a communist revolution.
Just to answer your question (not lend any legitimacy), https://doge.gov has been publishing all the details.
I've looked through it a few times to answer the same curiosity you have (I want more specifics, not just the stuff that fits in a tweet). But it still leaves me with questions because I don't know how much of these claims is actually accurate.
Yes, that's the bullshit I was talking about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/upshot/doge-contracts-mus...
> The Department of Government Efficiency, the federal cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk, published on Monday a list of government contracts it has canceled, together amounting to about $16 billion in savings itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.
> Almost half of those line-item savings could be attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But the DOGE list vastly overstated the actual value of that contract. A closer scrutiny of a federal database shows that a recent version of the contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.
or from https://abcnews.go.com/US/doge-now-saved-65b-federal-funds-i...
> DOGE says it's now saved $65B in federal funds, but that's still impossible to verify
> It only provides records for $9.6 billion in savings from contract terminations
as well as:
> The official also said they're using a conservative methodology of calculating savings because they're subtracting the contracts' obligated dollars from the ceiling amounts. However, for many contracts the ceiling dollars are much higher than what is actually expected to be spent.
You'll note that there's no information about how much was specifically DEI, while saying the total amount was due to a "combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings."
The hard truth is that they have no clue about what they are cutting and they mainly do not care because the initiative is not to make things better it is to break a currently working system in favour of God knows what.
Every step taken by the current administration has undermined the safety and current position of the US both domestically and on the international stage. The only people that I see profiting from the current situation are Russia and then China.
Regardless of opinions on Diversity Equity and Inclusion, one has to look at the current situation with pragmatism: Firing all probatory employees is just insane. Firing the people responsible of your nuclear Arsenal is insane Firing competent workers because of their skin colour or they do not have the genitalia you prefer is insane. Sending an emai, on the weekend, requesting 5 accomplishment or risk getting fired is insane.
Let's see it from a different perspective, let's say you have a large company operating on international scale with many stakeholders, you get a consultant tasked with streamlining and optimising operation. Within less than a month, they start arbitrarily firing people based on aggregated numbers from random collection of papers lying around in the office. Would you trust the fact that they would streamline and make things run better or would you assume they just started slashing left and right to justify "optimising". You can tell by my phrasing what my opinion is on the matter but there is no way that you can optimise, let alone understand, those agencies inner working and essential moving parts within less than a month...
Now I will refrain from making any political/legality statements, but from a pure practical standpoint it is, to put it mildly, nuts.
To be clear, I'm not a republican or a conservative. If it matters, I'm a modern liberal (i.e. what existed before progressivism but after classical liberalism). I'm just trying to distill what I believe the right says and what I observe. Also, this is my take on modern American conservatism, in general - individual cases vary.
First, if you look up progressive academic theorists [1] you will see that they are largely inspired by Marxist philosophy either directly or indirectly. The right are diametrically opposed to Marxism because it relies on an assumption that Man can rise above his Animal instincts. But, man can't, even with best intentions (i.e. ethics professors do not behave more ethically than non-ethicists) [2][3].
There is a belief by the right that the great majority of people working in government and government related industries (e.g. NGOs) have come out of liberal arts programs that were inspired by the academics listed. They also believe that progressive ideology has steeped into the sciences.
I believe the right's goal is total dismantling of the executive branch. The point is really to destroy any power that the executive has down to the bare minimum so that the risk of a king is eliminated. It's interesting that they put a group of potential tyrants in charge of all of this - it's almost as if they want to show everyone how bad of an idea it is for the president to have so much control.
They generally believe that differing cultures are a good thing but because of Human nature integration cannot work. Therefore, in a state system, they believe one should be allowed to move to the state of their choice and enjoy whatever culture they want given the constraints of the constitution.
Furthermore, they believe the constitution is the only way for lasting peace. It sets the bare minimum for a social contract that works across cultures and people. It gives a framework where people can be culturally different but equal. And, they hope to expand the US to other countries voluntarily (we hope) so that those countries may also share in its glory.
[1] Achille Mbembe, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Cheryl Harris, Cornel West, David Graeber, Derrick Bell, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Gayle Rubin, Herbert Marcuse, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, Mariame Kaba, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Naomi Klein, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Patricia Hill Collins, Peggy McIntosh, Richard Delgado, Robin DiAngelo, Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Piketty, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Clastres, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Sherry Ortner, Ferdinand de Saussure, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, David Harvey, Murray Bookchin, Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James, Paulo Freire
[2] Schwitzgebel & Rust (2014), etc.
[3] This is also why many Christians align with conservative thinking because in Christianity Jesus is the only Good thing of this world, and every person is equally sinful.
> they are largely inspired by Marxist philosophy either directly or indirectly
As I wrote, Marx's critical analysis of capitalism touched on many social topics. You should not be surprised that his work had merit in later social research. You should not be surprised that others who criticize capitalism have overlapping beliefs.
Though do note that "Marxist philosophy", quoting the Wikipedia entry for Marxism, has "branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive "Marxist theory".
Just like there isn't a single, definitive "liberalism."
> The right are diametrically opposed to Marxism because it relies on an assumption that Man can rise above his Animal instincts.
I ... what? I have no idea what that means. Where does Marx talk about that? How does that have anything to do with class struggle?
> but because of Human nature integration cannot work
What?!?!? English, Welsh, and Scottish cannot integrate? What about Presbyterians and Anglican? Men and women? People with blue eyes and people with brown eyes? Bourgeoisie and proletariat? Gen X and Gen Y?
What does it mean to not integrate when there are different classes in a shared society? They certainly aren't calling for the abolition of class distinction, which is Marx's Communist solution.
> so that the risk of a king is eliminated
Right, so Communism? Otherwise, when there is a power vacuum, something fills it, and without the consent of the people, that's a king, dictator, strongman, or the like.
As it stand, it looks more like the dismantling of the legislative and judicial branches, with all power in the executive.
> given the constraints of the constitution.
I'm pretty convinced the current government does not at all feel itself constrained by the constitution.
> they hope to expand the US to other countries voluntarily
History shows the US has a long history of not expanding voluntarily. What's changed? How has this new right de-fanged itself from the tendencies of the old right, like Andrew Jackson, that they seem to admire so much?
Many Christians also align with liberal and even radical thinking. Integration is possible because everyone is a child of God, and "When God’s people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality.” ... “The foreigner who resides with you must be to you like a native citizen among you; so you must love him as yourself, because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
I don't know, man. You'll have to go talk to some of them to get a better answer. This is my distilling of 8 years of conversations with average, everyday conservatives as I tried to figure out what they were even talking about. Interestingly, the all seem to have a strong intuition of what they want but seem to stumble on articulating it, they get frustrated, and lash out. I had to do a lot of socratic method and ask a lot of questions to come to these conclusions.
However, you are right about Marxism in that it influences a lot of things. Ironically, the accelerationist movement also even has influence from Marx. A lot whom I talked to have disdain for "academia" - I do know that.
I'm guessing here (and a lot of this is guess work) - that integration is difficult because they view "social control" as impossible outside of a cultural context. That is, within a culture, everyone learns all of the subtle rules and order of things - things that you can't codify in law. But, integration requires a lot of frontal lobe activity which is difficult to maintain and is fragile when it fails.
Correct - Nick Land, often regarded as the father of Accelerationism, affirms Marx's fundamental insight that "the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative" [0], though his interpretation aligns itself with capital and its autonomization:
"Right-wing Marxism, aligned with the autonomization of capital [...], has been an unoccupied position. The signature of its proponents would be a defense of capital accumulation as an end-in-itself, counter-subordinating nature and society as a means." [0]
[0] https://retrochronic.com/#right-on-the-money-2
Find it disappointing that even on HN people seems to blindly parrot manufactured outrage. Do you really think, nay have you ever tried to look a little deeper than surface to see just how preposterous all around the idea is in terms of actual intents and relative numbers that it would be meaningful to "cut" them? US Republicans are not about states rights, its just the excuse they use when they are trying to dismantle or challenge systems.
In the words of Han Solo “I don’t know I can imagine quite a bit.”
Things already are that bad, you’re standing an inch beyond where the previous wave washed up to and saying “well if it gets here in the next few waves then suddenly we become in deep shit’ while all around people are shouting at you about the existence of a concept called ‘the tide’. This is happening right now. fight back.
Come on. Even if all of Darpa is shut down, it will hardly matter. Come back in 4 years and see that the world is still turning but you've used up your hyperbolic panic on a big nothing-burger.
Just because the world keeps turning doesn't mean it's unaffected. Small shifts today can have huge consequences down the line, and brushing everything off as a 'nothing-burger' is exactly how real damage gets ignored. I wonder-what would actually have to happen for you to stop calling it that? This situation is, at the very least, unusual.
For the past 25 years, there have been consistent small shifts towards more government deficit [1]. Aren't those the problem that has to be stopped? I don't know enough about economics but can this really continue forever or is it just exacerbating some painful problem in the future if it's not reversed now? Maybe non-essential for-the-future work like Darpa isn't the best thing to spend money on when you're trying to reduce spending as fast as you can? It can always be re-instated in more prosperous times.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-budget-deficit-tops-18...
like even more far-worse than the current far-worse?
> When reading these program announcements,
I think DARPA projects often are not what they say they are. Admittedly this project is quite out there.
> P(Success) = 0.2
They themselves admit it's lower than this, which is not 'success' but successful outcomes to limited specs.
Yeah, wouldn’t P(success) = 0.2 be pretty fantastic for any highly experimental/speculative/moonshot research entity?
Looking at the comments, most people are approaching this as 'grow, like trees'.
We're literally talking moonshot projects here and nowhere does the brief mention specifically trees, or aerobic respiration/processes, there is plenty of room for using Chitin, Spider silk, keratin or a combination of biopolymers to form resilient composite structures.
There's already been videos of people using these as doping agents or additives for bulletproof armor, to middling success. The synthesis via yeast or e.coli for most of these are partially solved problems, its more texturing them or using bio-mechanical processing to form thread or ply or load bearing panels that seems to be the major hurdle. Also, being able to reliably source component and materials from near vacuum or whatever asteroid that happens to wander by that makes this a much more difficult problem to even define.
You gotta forgive people. We've all been a little eroded by regular assertions that a safe underhand throws, like turning a webpage into an electron app or whatever, are moonshots.
I for one love things like this. I wish we used a little more of our colossal production power to try manifesting the wilder things from our imagination. Maybe they can contract out how to make society have a better handle on balancing compassion for self and others. Or we could be realistic and get back to making a philosopher stone. ;)
Hope I live long enough to go on a modestly priced moon vacation up the H.R. Geiger space tentacle
Exactly, I am totally fine with us spending some tax dollars to try out these absolutely insane ideas.
But this isn't a matter of "let's spend more" because the pool of people that can see an absolutely insane idea, and ones that can actually work on them, are the vanishingly small number of nearly eccentrics. So there is an upper limit on how much money can be spent if you're at the absolute tip of the iceberg.
> because the pool of people that can see an absolutely insane idea, and ones that can actually work on them, are the vanishingly small number of nearly eccentrics.
I go back and forth with this. The further along the path I go, the more I weight good faith and sincere will to make a thing over ability-at-start. (drive + moxy + curious + perceptive - ego) is a better function to optimize for than buzzword count on a resume.
I think there's a lot of people who can do crazy things in a good faith kind of way that advances the wave front of humanity. It's possible that it's everyone, and it's all about conditions. "all about conditions" is doing some heavy lifting, but maybe you see what I'm trying to articulate.
The PDF discusses this more.
> If aerobic organisms or mechanisms are required (grown in space and then desiccated by exposure to vacuum when growth is complete), the methods and support equipment required to preserve key aerobic variables (e.g., atmosphere, pressure, temperature) must be part of the biomechanical assembly system design. Anaerobic organisms or mechanisms may allow for less support hardware but may require other controls to support continued growth in the space environment (e.g. pressure, temperature, humidity)
[dead]
I saw this at a DSO* presentation ("Darpa's Darpa") back in ~2018. Hope they've gotten some early traction, that was some of the least wild crap that was being presented.
My company was pitching holographic cameras, and we weren't scifi enough. The investigator wanted to know if we could do hyperspectral 3D imaging from something the size of a sugar cube. ("Uh, no?" was our response.)
* Defense Sciences Organization: https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/dso
> Seeing (sensing) the unseen
I'm reading this as a soft signal that there's still a market for marinating wizards in salty brine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_un...
Can you explain what specific experiment your excellent imagery refers to?
Whichever one used sensory deprivation tanks. I don't remember the specifics.
High salinity solutions make wizards more buoyant. It's immediately self evident to me how this helps one telepathically view the inside of missile silos on the other side of the planet.
> Some examples of structures that could be biologically manufactured and assembled, but that may be infeasible to produce traditionally, include tethers for a space elevator, grid-nets for orbital debris remediation, kilometer-scale interferometers for radio science, new self-assembled wings of a commercial space station for hosting additional payloads, or on-demand production of patch materials to adhere and repair micrometeorite damage.
I almost wrote a short story about colonising Mars by firing radioisotope bullets with genetically engineered fungi coatings into the surface. These would metabolise the radiation and use the minerals in the crust to grow into large habitat volumes thick enough to retain atmosphere and insulate against radiation and thermal losses. Maybe it can be real one day!
Somewhat similar and probably easier to achieve would be trees floating in open ocean, and some kind of plant capable to bring nutrients up from the large depth.
Currently most of the ocean is a lifeless desert, with most of life concentrated in the places where upwelling occurs. This kind of floating trees would add enough biomass to compensate for all of the human produced CO2 and even more.
> Floating trees in the open ocean.
The more refined version of this are intentionally created algal blooms, ala the red tide. Then you would somehow capture the CO2 dissolved in ocean water that the algae concentrates.
In this way you'd use the ocean itself as your carbon capture "filter" and "clean the filter".
The issue is that since there just isn't enough nutrients for life, and adding fertilizers costs more carbon than it sequesters. The deep ocean usually gets its nitrogen from life dying above, decaying downwards then getting pushed upwards again. I don't know of any deep ocean reserves of nitrogen that just needs brought to the surface.
Nitrogen is easy, it can be captured from air, iron is the main thing missing in surface water that must be brought up by upwelling.
But having real trees above the water is much more useful than simple carbon capture, they would serve as wavebreakers for seasteading settlements too.
You're right, there seems to be iron rich deep sea currents in some places that could be good opportunities for upwelling, especially if you had a carbon neutral way to do it.
There is also emerging technology for nitrogen fixing that could work - Electrocatalytic Nitrogen Reduction.
All this being said, if the goal is carbon sequestration building a viable business is going to be next to impossible.
The easiest way would be to use your renewable energy to pull bicarbonate out of the ocean directly with electrolysis, reverse-osmosis, whatever magic tech the wizards in MIT are cooking up.
Only then you've got the problem of what to do with it all once you've got it on hand.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36992-1
Carbon sequestration is merely a side effect, the main goal is to have a wavebreaker and a park and a place to grow fruits, for a floating city.
To bring nutrient rich water up and to generate energy in the process temperature difference between surface and deep water can be used [1]. So if this kind of tree is created, living on open sea can become cheaper and more pleasant than even living on a beach.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
> Currently most of the ocean is a lifeless desert
Where can I read more about that? My understanding was that it is teaming with microorganisms or near-microorganisms, and of course there are many fauna and flora and protista and other life forms.
E.g. https://www.eodashboard.org/story?id=primary-productivity&pa...
For water to team with life, you need materials for building cells in the same place where the light is, and in most cases there is not enough iron on the surface
Thanks! And that is a great resource.
Unlikely to be any unintended consequences to foresting the ocean, too. Plain sailing.
People really will pretend to believe any old nonsense rather than accept we have to cut fossil fuel use.
if you think industrialized society should give up oil without alternatives then you should be honest and say that you believe we that the industrial revolution was a mistake and that we should by-and-large go back to an agrarian society where most people subsistence farm.
you can have that belief, that everyone should give up what oil gives us and live in a pre-modern way that most people would, today, consider poverty, because the alternative is (I assume you believe) extinction.
But you should be honest about it.
These schemes are only ever a smokescreen to avoid alternatives, which is something you should be honest with yourself about.
A few years ago an oil selling dictator, used his oil money to attack and occupy my friends country, killed my friend, and forced all the population to flee without ability to take anything with them.
So if you think that i like the situation where everyone supports dictatorships like Azerbaijan by buying their oil, you are very wrong.
But what we want and what is going to happen is often very different. Cutting fossil fuel use will not happen until there are better alternatives. And at that point most likely there will be enough CO2 in atmosphere to trigger melting of permafrost which will produce its own CO2. So "these schemes" will be needed one way or another.
That said my main interest here is seasteading, and increasing ocean biomass. Reducing atmospheric CO2 is merely a curios side effect.
Reminds me of that section of Life of Pi.
I don’t think trees and live on saltwater
Mangroves do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove
Plants don't live in open space either, and yet the submitted page wants to research possibilities.
Using some genes from mangroves it should be possible to develop a plant that would grow in open sea.
First question I have is what kind of nutrient base conditions can we expect to start from? Should it be like Earth, or somewhere a bit more resource constrained (and how would it be constrained)?
I’d like to imagine solar reactors mimicking primordial goo to synthesise the essentials for these materials.
"A key unknown in creating such bio-mechanical structures in space is how the structure would be assembled. Feedstock must be provided (and relocated if necessary) to the growing edge, or to the area from which biological materials are being extruded. If aerobic organisms or mechanisms are required (grown in space and then desiccated by exposure to vacuum when growth is complete), the methods and support equipment required to preserve key aerobic variables (e.g., atmosphere, pressure, temperature) must be part of the biomechanical assembly system design."
Lots of nuanced details around your question in the doc! EDIT: I stupidly copy and pasted my local link to the PDF -- it appears this listing has been removed since posted. Here's another link to it https://govtribe.com/file/government-file/darpa-sn-25-51-dot...
Seems they're interested in precisely the question you pose, but coming at it from a few different directions
Anything you want and can launch into space. The program goal is being able to grow large structures. The intent seems to be using biology as a means to more efficiently transform launched mass into big structures.
This is how Zerg starts
Or the Edenists from The Night's Dawn trilogy, with their voidhawk ships.
And the habitats. I came here to say this!
That would be in interesting direction for our tech to go, everything grown organically including space structures.
Hopefully it won't be considered "woke" to manufacture things organically as opposed to using steel and concrete and plastic.
considering organic meat substitutes are, they're going to have to spin it pretty hard for some people to NOT think it's 'woke'
even harder if it wakes up.
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I don't want a bloody meat spaceship. They should try crystallization.
I've got bad news for you: radiotrophic fungi is already a thing.
https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/life-in-the-extreme-radia...
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/31420...
It doesn’t sound so crazy to grow fibrous vines and wood in a habitat, dry them and reclaim the water, and then use them in construction. Growing them in place in space sounds a little crazy.
That is how you end up with gray goo
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo
Step 1 would be to see if a nonporous wood holds up to the vacuum of space with enough durability. The biggest issue would be reclaiming moisture from the wood as it dried rather than losing it to space. Things like corals or molluscs would be too heavy (though that idea spawned a wonderful series of 16 bit side scrolling video games).
Without some sort of easy orbital exit/entry, it's unlikely that being "in space" will be a feasible permanent option.
We're doing step one. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/jaxas-first-wooden-satell...
Cool idea, very ambitious, is there any prior research or feasible testing setup that would support getting from 0 to 1 with this?
I believe this is a program to prototype technology that has already been tried/theorized on Earth and needs an evaluation in Space.
The program director has a background in planetary science [1] and I assume they will evaluate proposals.
[1] https://www.darpa.mil/about/people/michael-nayak
Yeah this seems crazy to just throw out into the public. How do they decide what and when is worth funding? Does there have to be some kind of shining light of progress... or is it just moonshot after moonshot of blind hope?
DARPA Program Managers have a lot of leeway to write these sorts of requests.
PMs are typically experts in their field and often come from an academic, industry, military, or government research lab. DARPA gives them a budget for grants, autonomy, and 3-5 years to fund interesting work. Many fail, many have mixed success, and a small number revolutionize their field.
(Source: worked on a few DARPA-funded projects decades ago.)
DARPA is the one agency that gets shit done and demands results. They are not working on blind hope
Sounds like someone bought into the Dyson tree meme revival that was floating round the internet a month so ago!
Protomolecule comes to mind.
Let's try to find something that doesn't use humans as raw material
Couldn't a self replicating structure grow out of control like vines and weeds?
Space goats.
I am wracking my brain to come up with a "coats to coats" joke that makes sense here.
Cylon basestar here we come
This is how the Zerg from starcraft get created :p
What the frell! This is cool.
Someone at DARPA read Night's Dawn
What? Edenist hawks in the void?
404. Mirror?
> [...] biological self-assembly properties of tunable materials (e.g. hydrogels [...]
FYI, hydrogels were part of the "recent vaccine" components.
complementary
the threshold to beat i think would be simple robots-3d-printers which could potentially 3d print any material using say laser or electron beam into pretty much anything of any size in space.