> People will say, “Well, I’m not the founder. I’m not being paid enough to care.” Actually, you are: The knowledge and skills you gain by developing a founder mentality set you up to be a founder down the line; that’s your compensation.
Basically what I understand is that I should care as much as the founder even though I don't get paid enough. It's about other skills I gain by doing this. I highly disagree. No matter what I'll do it's all about the short-term compensation when working for others because I can get other skills both if my pay is low or high. And I prefer having a high pay and also getting soft skills. This guy sounds like he's a founder and tries to convince readers to be a good employees and care about others' businesses.
I get excited every time I hear about a possible habitable planet, but after 10 seconds I remember that this means nothing and will mean nothing for a few centuries as we won't be able to reach any other planet that's billions of kilometers away.
LUVOIR can provide up to about 25 km imaging resolution in visible light at Jupiter
The planet is ~10,000 times further away. Back of envelope puts the resolution at 250,000km. The earth is 12,000km in diameter. At 5.8x Earth mass and assuming similar density it would be a bit more than twice as wide and 25,000km diameter is easy to work with giving the planet a width of 1/10th of a "pixel". That's not nothing. In fact it's quite a lot relative to nothing. But it's still a long way from a well resolved image.
Also the ELT (claimed to be operational starting in 2025) [1] will already allow study of the atmospheric composition of extrasolar planets (I guess that means spectroscopy).
Fortunately we can send emails at the speed of light!!!
(of course, the alien race living on Proxima will have to be fluent in english, ASCII, TCP/IP, SMTP and a few other prerequisites in order to receive our messages in proper conditions).
Dear beloved Friend, I know this message will come as a surprise to you, but my desire is to have business relationship with you. I'm a daughter of late Sultan of Proxima B. My father left with with 5 tons of fine gold here, on this cold planet. I'm here seeking the way to transfer funds to you and your lovely green planet into your account for investment purpose. Please answer me and provide me with your account # and routing #.
anyway given that their network was 100% switched, and "time to connect to a
lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
incidental router delays."
I'm thinking it doesn't apply to email delivery to Proxima Centauri or basically most places.
on edit: though with a long enough distance to the destination it would be pretty close to speed of light as the various times to respond etc. would be negligible.
The speed of light in fiber optic cable is about 2/3 the speed of light, which is why SpaceX's Starlink will have a potential latency advantage over oceanic fiber optics.
It also gives good perspective on what's being thrown away when you add a single ms of latency through a router or a display. 186 miles at the speed of light. Many on HN don't get this, but this is why cloud gaming is perfectly feasible if we're running with low latency displays and inputs, low distance to the edge compute, and few routing hops.
Didn't know about about this project but I read more in the past hour and it seems reachable. Too bad it already has a destination. Hope I live to see the message it comes back from this.
some novel much have been written about two civilisations multiple light years apart, communicating using messages that have latency of years...any examples ?
I'm currently reading the Engines of Light trilogy by Ken MacLeod. In that universe, there is no FTL travel nor communication, but starships can travel literally at the speed of light. There are "spheres of influence" spanning some tens of lightyears, and the information delay between worlds is indeed a plot element.
Vernor Vinge predicted a future galactic usenet - unreliable messages that might take a while to arrive, or need to go via multiple possible paths, are what usenet was built for.
But the Square Kilometer Array will probably be operational in your lifetime. That instrument will be powerful enough to tell us a lot about such near objects.
Even with that I hope we get to see missions where they send unmanned craft in that direction in my lifetime. I mean it's still only Voyager and New Horizons (afaik) that have been sent on a trajectory out of our own solar system on purpose. (faux edit: looking up the wiki page, it's the 5th to escape the solar system).
An unmanned mission would probably have to go even faster, and probably has to be a bigger craft with better on-board power supply (with backups) and a big communications array. Maybe it would even need similar craft following it after a while to form a chain of communications relays on their way out.
Nitpick: 5th to reach solar escape velocity. New Horizons, Pioneer 10, and Pioneer 11 have not passed the heliopause yet, which is usually considered the "boundary" of the solar system.
Yeah I've got a few projects that would make good use of an eInk screen (simplified UI, no colour or fast refresh needed, running off of batteries) but... I built the entire project with a backlit LCD touchscreen for $250. Over five hundred dollars kinda blows a big hole in the project budget.
This is good, keep up the good work.
Also, from the creator:
>I'm working on adding more content, more detail, more examples, and really just more everything. Please give me any and all feedback, I've already followed some advice given in the comments on this post. It's really appreciated
Basically what I understand is that I should care as much as the founder even though I don't get paid enough. It's about other skills I gain by doing this. I highly disagree. No matter what I'll do it's all about the short-term compensation when working for others because I can get other skills both if my pay is low or high. And I prefer having a high pay and also getting soft skills. This guy sounds like he's a founder and tries to convince readers to be a good employees and care about others' businesses.