not really OT: The Coming Software Apocalypse

[Bob Sneidar]

No, I am sure we put men on the moon. But we didn't stay there and there are no plans to actually colonize it. And the resources just to do that were "astronomical" (pardon the pun). There was of cource some redundancy, but some things cannot be repaired, as we learned with Apollo 13. Oh we patched it up enough to get them back, but they almost didn't make it even then, and all they had to do really was slingshot around the moon and get back. 

Imagine now you are hurtling towards your next stop, Mars, and something serious goes bad. How do you repair it? If you can't, how do you turn around? You cannot exactly make a right turn at the speeds you are going, and there are no planetary bodies to slingshot around. You have to burn an inordinate amount of fuel to stop, then turn around, then burn an extraordinary amount of fuel to get back, and the Earth isn't standing still during all this. Did you bring the fuel to do that? 

The hardware alone for that kind of space travel would make the moon launch look like a paper airplane. And the software for such a trip had better damn well be bug proof, because dead programmers don't write good code. 

Bob S


> On Oct 3, 2017, at 07:31 , Lagi Pittas via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
> 
> And since you brought it up  what are are you saying? We have gone  to the
> Moon or Not, or that programming and engineering is too complex to do
> create the particular software system that Bret Victor envisages?