The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet ended its unsuccessful mission about three hours ago when, in the final moments of flight and barely five hundred feet from the lunar surface, it lost communication with earth and crashed on the moon. What would have been an enormous achievement for Israel and for private space exploration ended in disappointment, but nonetheless demonstrated that the era of private space travel is tantalizingly close.
Good effort, SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries.
A few weeks ago I wrote this post about Israel’s efforts to soft-land a spacecraft on the moon and become only the fourth nation to do so successfully.
Today, the Beresheet spacecraft successfully completed a critical maneuver, establishing its orbit around the moon with a greatest distance from the moon — an apolune — of 466 miles, and a perilune (closest distance) of 285 miles.
It is expected to complete its journey this week, as planned, when it lands, on Thursday the 11th, in the Mare Serenitatis — the Sea of Serenity.
Dave Sussman of Whiskey Politics interviewed George Gilder recently, and that interview is the latest Whiskey Politics podcast here. I was eager to listen, both because Dave is a terrific interviewer and Gilder a fascinating visionary, and also because I’d read Gilder’s latest book, Life After Google, and found it unsatisfying. I hoped that Gilder would offer something that I missed in his book, and that would make sense of what I thought was a rambling and unconvincing work.
If anything, my opinion of Life After Google is lower now than it was prior to this interview. Far from supporting his various and vague assertions, I think Gilder has doubled down on what increasingly seems, to me, to be nonsense.
Gilder undoubtedly knows all sorts of things I don’t know; he lives his life in communion with deep thinkers and profoundly successful entrepreneurs, futurists, and inventors. He is not a trivial man, which leaves me wondering why this latest work is, in my opinion, a trivial book. I will be watching closely as his next book comes out, to see if he’s again hit his stride.
It has been observed that one can read an article in a newspaper on a topic with which one is familiar and scoff at the ignorance of the author, and then turn the page and read an article on a topic of which one knows little and comfortably assume that that author knows his stuff. I know math and computing pretty well. I don’t know fractional reserve banking or foreign trade or monetary theory or corporate finance, but math and computing, that I’ve got.
Let’s start with a quick note about the zettabyte, a quantity which Gilder says “preoccupies me these days.” Gilder claims (about 12:30) that the zettabyte is “about as big as it gets, two to the three hundredth, it’s more than all the atoms in the universe.” Gilder then goes on to claim that it approximates all of the data currently connected to the internet.
That should throw a flag, as it did with me, in that it suggests that we are somehow storing vast quantities of data per atom; otherwise, it would be impossible to have more data connected to the internet than there are atoms in the universe. So obviously Gilder misspoke, either about the size of a zettabyte or the amount of data connected to the internet.
In fact, a single cup of water contains 16 thousand zettabytes worth of hydrogen atoms. No one really knows how many bytes of data are machine-accessible in the world; no one can even make a very good guess. That’s okay, as that’s irrelevant to any coherent argument about the future, or about pretty much anything other than the future market for storage devices.
But it isn’t irrelevant to Gilder, who somehow sees a significance to his estimated one zettabyte of global storage and the interconnectedness of the human brain, which he also claims is on the order of one zettabyte. From that, he leaps to his conclusion — and here the lack of both logic and humility frustrate me — that the human brain is more efficient than the global internet, and that therefore artificial intelligence will never achieve the dreams of its proponents.
There are other odd bits thrown in as well: comments about machines being deterministic and so incapable of true learning (I think the jury is actually still out on whether or not the universe is deterministic.); the suggestion that blockchain and cryptocurrencies would somehow prevent investment bubbles and bad government policies; the fanciful idea that blockchain is immune to the security vulnerabilities of other computer architectures (It isn’t, as cryptocurrency thefts demonstrate.); and a bizarre nonchalance about the extraordinarily inefficient energy demands of blockchain and cryptocurrency compared to traditional architectures, even has he attempts to compare the computation efficiency of the human brain to the global electrical demands of the internet.
Finally, Gilder touches on what seems, to me, to be the only truly topical issue, given the title of his book: the vulnerability of Google to competition. In the book, Gilder’s descriptions of Google’s vulnerabilities seem more metaphysical than financial, strange comments about the company’s structure being antithetical to some kind of ultimate philosophy of data and its ownership. In the interview, he focuses on the real prospect of foreign competition — specifically, Chinese competition — to the search/advertising juggernaut. I think he’s right that Google is vulnerable: history teaches us that every business, however apparently entrenched and powerful, is vulnerable to competition. Gilder’s own examples of the dramatic shift, over the past decade, in the ranking of global enterprises, and of the ascendency of Apple, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, and Amazon, should suggest that the one constant truly is change. We don’t need George Gilder to tell us that.
I can’t speak for Dave, but I thought I heard a hint of reserved skepticism in his tone. If so, I think it was well warranted. I have long enjoyed Gilder’s work, and I hope he recovers from his infatuation with “blockchain” and its vague and improbable promises, and returns to the more clear-headed futuristic vision that has typified most of his writing. Unfortunately, I did not find his performance in this interview encouraging.
The moon’s distance from Earth varies from approximately 225,000 miles to about 250,000 miles. Because the moon is much smaller than Earth, and so has a weaker gravitational field, most of the trip to the moon — the first 200,000 miles or so — is up hill: Earth is still trying to pull you back, albeit with an ever-diminishing attraction as you get farther away.
It’s hard to get there, and even harder to land once you do. Several countries have crashed objects on the moon, but to date only three — the old Soviet Union, the United States, and China, and in that order — have managed to achieve soft landings on the moon.
The Soviets were the first to actually land a spacecraft on the moon, back in 1966; the United States was just a few months behind them. The United States, of course, was the first to land a man on the moon, in July of 1969. Though a dozen American astronauts have walked on the moon, no other nation has sent a man (or woman) there.
China, the third country to soft-land a spacecraft on the moon, took a long time to do it: it wasn’t until 2013 that they joined the exclusive club of lunar-landing nations. China can claim, however, to be the first and only nation to land — as opposed to crash — a vehicle on the far side of the moon, the side we never see from Earth. They did that in January of this year.
The moon will be about 225,000 miles away in early April when the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft is scheduled to arrive there. The trip will require the craft to make three orbits of Earth, each a little more distant than the last, until it finally breaks free of Earth’s gravity and establishes an orbit around the moon. The Beresheet will then, if successful, make Israel only the fourth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing.
It will also be the first time that a private concern, as opposed to a government, has landed a vehicle on the moon. In that sense, the Beresheet — which means “genesis” or “in the beginning” in Hebrew — will live up to its name, as it ushers in the age of private, albeit unmanned, lunar travel.
The Beresheet was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 21st, and is scheduled to land on the moon on April 11th. The spacecraft is flying on a shoestring, without the budget for the normal backup systems and redundancies of a normal big-budget space flight. Everything will have to go right for it to successfully complete its mission.
But if it does, Israel, this tiny and beleaguered nation, will once again demonstrate its exceptional ability to stand with the biggest and most powerful nations.