>NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been "shamed" by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.[citation needed] Its continued success was cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their "home grown" Lockheed Martin X-33/VentureStar project. Pete Conrad priced a new DC-X at $50 million, cheap by NASA standards, but NASA decided not to rebuild the craft in light of budget constraints
"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit." - Oscar Wilde
Altman is riding a new tech wave, and his team has a couple of years' head start. Musk's reusable rockets were conceptualized a long time ago (Tintin's Destination Moon dates back to 1953) and could have become a reality several decades ago.
Not that those who challenge the status quo can also turn into bullies later in life, once their paradigm is established.
This is well exposed in the first part of America Before (one of Hancock's book)
>At the outset of the twentieth century many scholars took the view that the Americas had been devoid of any human presence until less than 4,000 years ago.
>[...]
>the most influential figure in disseminating and enforcing the view that the New World had only recently been populated by humans was a frowning and fearsome anthropologist named Aleš Hrdlička
>[...]
>throughout the 1920s and 1930s compelling evidence began to emerge that people had reached the Americas thousands of years earlier than Hrdlička supposed. Of particular importance in this gradual undermining of the great man’s authority was a site called Blackwater Draw near the town of Clovis
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>The Smithsonian sent a representative, Charles Gilmore, to take a look at the site but—perhaps unsurprisingly under Hrdlička’s malign shadow—he concluded that no further investigation was justified.
>[...]
>Anthropologist Edgar B. Howard of the University of Pennsylvania disagreed.He began excavations at Blackwater Draw in 1933, quickly finding quantities of beautifully crafted stone projectiles with distinctive “fluted” points
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>Before and after 1943, the year in which both Howard and Hrdlička died, further discoveries of fluted points of the Blackwater Draw type—increasingly referred to as “Clovis points” after the nearby town of that name—continued to be made. This ever-accumulating mass of new evidence left no room for doubt and even the most stubborn conservatives (Hrdlička excepted) were eventually forced to agree that the Clovis culture had hunted animals that became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age and that humans must therefore have been in the Americas for at least 12,000 years.
>[...]
>a consensus soon began to emerge that no older cultures would ever be found—and what is now known as the “Clovis First” paradigm was conceived. We might say, however, that it was not officially “born” until September 1964. That was when archaeologist C. Vance Haynes, today Regents Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and a senior member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a landmark paper
>[...]
>because of lowered sea level during the Ice Age, much of the area occupied today by the Bering Sea was above water, and where the Bering Strait now is, a tundra-covered landscape connected eastern Siberia and western Alaska. Once over the land bridge, however, it was Haynes’s case that the migrant hunters could not have ventured very far before confronting the daunting barrier of the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets
>[...]
>Tom Dillehay, professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, began excavations at Monte Verde in southern Chile in 1977 and found evidence that humans had been present there as far back as 18,500 years ago.
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>Tom Dillehay’s most dogged and determined critic, perhaps predictably, has been C. Vance Haynes, whose 1964 paper launched the Clovis First theory and who by 1988 had used his influence, and his outreach in the scientific journals, to dismiss every case thus far made for supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas.
>[...]
>Indeed by 2012 the bullying behavior of the Clovis First lobby had grown so unpleasant that it attracted the attention of the editor of Nature, who opined: “The debate over the first Americans has been one of the most acrimonious—and unfruitful—in all of science. … One researcher, new to the field after years of working on other contentious topics, told Nature that he had never before witnessed the level of aggression that swirled around the issue of who reached America first.
And archeologists limit their picture of the past to the evidences they have at a given point in time, although they know what they have is a very limited and degraded record of what actually happened.
See for instance the argument put forth by Hancock about network of ancient "highways" connecting cities in the amazon. Nonsense until lidar expose them:
I cancelled my mobile phone subscription, and this a problem I'm facing. What workarounds are available for people who have no mobile phone number when they want to so sign in to a service that requires a phone number for validation ?
There are ways around this problem, mainly clearing context and re-prompting. But as "alignment" gets more precise/accurate in the future, I wager these workarounds will remain available for tasks that justifiably need moderation (for instance engineering of biological warfare materials). This segmentation of LLM agents and their context will be assimilated to project compartmentalization on the basis of need-to-know, and as a result genuine full context clearing will be rendered impossible: the AIs will be designed in such a ways as to remember every interaction you've had with them, and they'll use this activity log to moderate the replies they feed you.