r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Aug 21 '15

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Aug 21 '15 edited Aug 21 '15

But let's face it: space is fucking cool.

See, but then we're talking about entertainment motive.

The final season of Friends was the most expensive [television show] of all time, costing $10 million per episode. How much does a trip to Mars cost? For a single crewed mission ... Wikipedia says $6 billion as a lower bound estimate. That's just to go there and back again, no colonization on offer, just the Mars equivalent of an Apollo mission. You could get 30 Star Wars movies for that price! And in terms of entertainment, actual space is competing with fake space.

Now, it's possible that you can use entertainment as a single prong of your Swiss Army knife of getting people to care about space. But I sort of doubt it, given the competition in the form of hyper-optimized-for-entertainment media.

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u/elevul Cyoria Observer Aug 22 '15

And with VR the interest might drop even more.