It feels like the longtermist believers got involved in this (those are the people obsessed with garage-engineered designer viruses who have a very tenuous grasp on how biology research actually works).
Fiber optic are currently so cheap that they are being used in expendable, single use applications in the Russia/Ukraine war in spools of 50+km.
You're talking about achieving highly marginal gains in product quality at the expense of having to launch into space literally every single part of the production process and recover it from space.
Which includes things like "ruggedizing what you launch so it can survive the launch" and "also ruggedizing it to survive the landing".
Space is cool to nerds like me, but what do I really need from it? I've got all the navigation satellites I could want (which I don't pay for) and the best satellite imagery I use is still hyperspectral airborne imagery.
Now, of course that's not the full story but the use cases get rather specific beyond that: the launch market just isn't actually very big (afaik $30 billion a year).
> For example, what happens when we get to the point where we need to use the scientific method to test if the gene editing was successful and didn't cause negative outcomes for the child's entire existence perhaps?
Well that would be an entirely different line of research, which is not this research here, and a large expansion of the question which we could debate and discuss thoroughly on its own merits at such a time as the issue arises.
Aka this is just the slippery slope fallacy of argument.
The level which means you keep doing it is the right level.
For me that's 20 minutes a day on a rowing machine plus some body weight strength exercises.
Which is about a YouTube video long and as a result I basically only watch YouTube content when I'm doing it (hey I'd like to watch this -> I should go start rowing) is a surprisingly good motivator.
This is in theory not a problem: getting an oxygen sensor to 700 degrees if it's a tiny spec on a chip is not necessarily hard or would even require a lot of power.
But...oxygen concentration is essentially indepedent of CO2. We measure CO2 at part per million levels, whereas O2 is 20% of the air.
(In that context CO2 is surprisingly toxic given that 1000 ppm can impair mental acuity).
The most absolutely infuriating thing about fertility rate discussions is the conclusion everyone draws of "obviously people aren't having enough sex".
I was sexually active for over 15 years before having exactly 1 child when I decided to.
The limiting factor in the number of children I have has at no point been the frequency of intercourse itself.
The seized device scenario is starting to get very specific though: in the actual cases it's relevant like the Silk Road take down the device was intercepted while open.
It's of some frustration to me that more security devices don't have a "pull pin to destroy" function available in them for this reason if you have any type of threat model where this applies: e.g. when I thought about using a Yubikey to secure remote access, a core problem is you can't quickly wipe a Yubikey in your possession - and while they're fragile in daily use, they're also surprisingly hard to intentionally destroy quickly.
In the grim darkness of the AI boom everyone is watching high profitability industries move into areas characterized by having few providers due to incredibly poor margins and high expenses and declare it business genius.
You don't know it won't work if it's not actually tried and as noted there's no particular reason to think it can't work.