Things are looking good for a Falcon-9R launch from Vandenberg. I’ll be watching for it from the balcony in Redondo Beach.
[Update a while later]
Looks like everything went perfectly. Just waiting to hear if they had a successful relight and splashdown of the first stage. We didn’t see it from our place, though. Not sure if the house next door was blocking, or what. Next time we’ll go to the beach.
I’m not a huge Bill Gates fan, but he certainly gets this important issue. Cheap energy is the key to reducing poverty. As long as government policies aren’t insane, of course. And we need it for space as well. The lack of progress in space nuclear reactors for the past half century is appalling.
I think it’s a mistake to call the fourth one “immortality.” A better phrase is “indefinite lifespan.” Unless our understanding of the universe is wrong, we’ll all die eventually, when it gets cold. And medical breakthroughs won’t save us from having an ACME anvil dropped on us.
Absent backups, that is. Which is philosophically unsatisfying, from the standpoint of identity.
But we need to start thinking about policy in terms of scenarios three and four, and ObamaCare is a disaster on that front (as is social security, lifetime tenure for academics and judges and popes, etc.). Plus, if people are going to continue to be born, and not die, we will eventually need other places to live than this planet.
As noted over there, this whole mess started with Roosevelt’s wage controls during the war. But did they fix that? No, they triple down on the socialist stupidity.