Bitcoin Forum

I have been in informal talks with pioneer one and they have begun accepting bitcoin! Let's all show them this is a worth while endeavor!

hash: 19SEkQBQUomfSAo7tcAcJRPrCRUgxUUUkh

I just donated 5 bitcoins to Pioneer One.

http://pioneerone.tv/
http://vodo.net/pioneerone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One

I am a big fan of Pioneer One and Vodo.net. This is an alternative distribution model for creative content (film, music, literature, are, whatever) which, if we consumers support it, will end the traditional model. It works like this: a creator produces something good, makes it available as a free download, and those who like it donate something to permit creators making a living with their creative work.

Pioneer One (2 episodes so far, a third coming) has been made with tens of thousands of dollars instead of tens of millions of dollars like 24 or Lost. Of course is not yet as good as major TV series, but I found it a solid and professional work.

If it is good, I am going to reluctantly donate 1 BTC.

Just donated 1 bitcoin. It will be nice if that bitcoin donation address will be on their website too.

No you didn't. Only 3.56 BTC have been donated so far.

hmm I donated 2.50 and lzsaver donated 1, I am not believing that number unless someone donated .06...

+1 BTC, and probably some more when new episodes will come out!

+1
I am going to wait to donate until their official B address is on their donation pages.

+1

yet I enjoyed the pilot and I'm about to dl 1x02

PS.  I've changed my mind and I donated 1 BTC.  I'll give more if I enjoy the second episode too.

http://blockexplorer.com/address/1CQcavqNsXkm6x2osFrfS8TFFrFUTZ9YC2

blockexplorer is missing about 40 blocks.

Details?

that intro vs the senate committee is not fiction and actually happened. that character is based off Robert Zubrin.

The real version is far more dramatic,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5uImXbhQM8

His plan named Mars Direct (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct) has been adopted by NASA for their Mars Design Reference mission by the mid 2030s and can be done within NASA's current budget over 10 years.

This is a video of how such a mission would look (Mars Direct),
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ4KIB4GqEA

Lol  great we're going to have this debate about space colonisation again.

I like the part when Zubrin says:


Well, yes!  I'm pretty sure that, if Colombus, when arriving in America, found only a deserted dangerous place, with very little resource, only rocks and a deadly solar radiation, then I guess he would have say exactly this.

Instead, he found a luxurious country with gold everywhere and indigeous people who were offering their topless wives as a welcome gift.  No wonder he wanted to establish there!

The Colombus comparaison is just ridiculous.  To me, the first men on Mars should be compared to Tenzing and Hillary, the first men who climbed the Everest, not to Colombus.

Mars is a distant place that we know it exists, we know what it looks like, but we can't go there.

America was a place we didn't know it was there, we didn't know what it looked like, but where we were able to go.

Dreaming of establishing on Mars is just as serious as dreaming of establishing cities in Sahara or farms under deep oceans.

It is just *not a place designed to sustain human life*.

We could be building space hotels and perhaps habitable colonies within the earth orbit. Mine any asteroid that come near us and get rich(or even just the moon).

The Earth is no more designed for us then we ourselves fit to it. The difference between man and the other animals is that we don't spend millions of years evolving to adapt to our environment, we fit our environment to us. Shaping Mars for habitation is not incredulous, and places well within the bracket of extremes people experienced through history.

The issue here is your own mind, not our abilities.

Yeah, I should have written this the other way around: we are not designed to live on Mars.  Nor are we designed to live under the ocean, in Antartica or at the top of the highest mountains.  Pretending the opposite is just silly.

Yeah adapting our environnement is cool.  But there is a limit to that.  We don't live in deserts on earth.  We don't even live on water, although we technicaly could, I guess.  There is just no benefit in doing so.

Now, maybe you can talk about terraforming Mars, but this is a very different topic.  It is just basically a very, very long term investment.  Who would finance this?  Why?   Why should I work to finance something I will never personnaly benefit from??   It is just an economic non-sense.

Let me make something clear: there is no designing going on. You are the result of millions upon millions of years of trial and error. Possibly, in millions of years from now, humans will have evolved into being capable of living on Mars or other planets with no type of life supporting technology (like we are able to here on Earth, breathing oxygen and such). What's stopping evolution from enabling us to live in space, with no space suit or anything?

Well, maybe the fact that those millions of years of evolution you describe all occured ON EARTH !

Evolution is a gradual process.  Going and flourishing suddenly out of earth in a totally different environnement is something that has just never been done.

Also, evolution is contingent.  You see only what has succeeded.  For one success, many failures.  So there is no reason why humans should succeed in everything they try to achieve.

Seriously, you can try to go and live on Mars if you want, I don't mind if you do that by your own means.   But I will try my best to prevent you from funding this crazyness with tax money.

Blah, with nuclear energy, anything is possible for the next several billion years. The only problem is a political one.

There ARE fringe people who live in the sea and in deserts!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rrd81/Human_Planet_Oceans_Into_the_Blue/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rrd85/Human_Planet_Deserts_Life_in_the_Furnace/

(worth watching those documentaries btw- one of the best documentaries I've ever seen)

- Nomads who navigate by means of sand dunes in the Sahara for 2 weeks to find tiny water wells.
- Men digging 10m underground linking km's of tunnels to get flowing water.
- People who live on boats their whole lives. Some boys even have eyes more adapted to see underwater than on land.
- A man that hunts deep underwater for up to 5 mins.

Now tell me that the human race isn't the best race and capable of anything!

What is so crazy about wanting to move to Mars? Even Stephen Hawking said the future of humanity lies in colonizing new planets. You don't really think humans can continue to destroy Earth while at the same time increasing in population size forever, do you? At some point, we will have to move to other planets or , for example, that ice moon of Saturn or whatever planet it is a moon of. Starting the development of the means to get to those planets as soon as possible, I think, would benefit mankind as a whole much more than waiting until we are bursting at the seams here on Earth to start the process.

How we're destroying the earth?

The earth can support much more than 6 billion human beings in my opinion. We just need moar nuclear reactors!

The giant trash island floating around in the ocean, the many land fills that will eventually need to be taken care of, nuclear waste that lasts thousands of years and must be buried underground which could leak into the water supply, I could go on... :'(

Landfill can be valuable resource. Trash islands are a result of tragedy of the common, but one way to fix this is to have biodegradable plastics. There are proposals on way to recycle nuclear waste.

State an example of how landfills can be a resource. You cannot fix the problem of the trash island by creating even more plastic, biodegradable or not. It will float on until we go out and somehow clean it up.

The problem with plastics is that they enter the food chain as poison. I was proposing we should make them harmless. My solution is to merely change the type of plastic, not increase the amount of trash thrown into the ocean.

Landfill can be used to create methane gas.

Yes, creating new plastics that are not harmful is definitely a step forward. But, what about all the plastic out there now that is harmful? It degrades over hundreds, possibly thousands of years. We are stuck with it. It does get into the food chain and because of that, we most likely have trace amounts of BP-A in our blood. There's no plastic on Mars......yet.

Human population won't increase forever.    We're not rabbits, and we have contraception.  Developped countries have shown than when women have the choice of the number for their offspring, they make less children than what is necessary for renewing generations (2.1 children).  Overpopulation is only a short term problem.  We should rather fear the demographic crash that will follow.


This is just science fiction.

It is also a weird point of view.   You're advocating for a goal that you will never witness.  Who does that?

Why should I wake up in the morning and go to work in order to finance something that only humans in several centuries will enjoy?  This is a ridiculously huge social abnegation.  Just as silly as an ant which sacrfices itself for its queen.   I dare say that I'm not as silly as an ant.

If you want to work for mankind, I advise you at least do it for present mankind, not for the mankind of a very hypothetical distant future.

We use bioengineering to fix whatever damage occurs. If we can go to mars, we can fix problems on earth too.

Several century? Naw. All it requires is the judicious use of nuclear power plants and we have all the energy we need to launch colonization effort. Then it's mostly an engineering challenge.

Then I guess it can be privately funded, right?  If so, I have no problem with it.  I may even buy a few shareholdings.

Problem to building nuclear power plants is mostly political. If is done, energy cost is much cheaper. That also mean manufacturing costs are cheaper. That translate to cheaper everything, making space flight much more feasible.

Also, you can buy a share in SpaceX, a space firm that's making rocket launcher cheaper and regular. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

It is not a weird point of view. It is a logical point of view. When medicine reaches a point where we live much longer than we do now, overpopulation will eventually occur, even when limiting offspring. When food sources and energy sources become abundant for everyone, not just those who are born into the right time and place, there will be overpopulation. Why does living on another planet = fiction? Look at the device you are using to communicate with me at this moment. 1/100000th of that computing power took us to the moon. People now have ocular and auditory implants. Today's science fiction = tomorrow's reality.

My personal guess is that the earth can support at least a trillion human beings. If it become too much, just use the sun.

Also, we can build more efficient bodies for ourselves, making it easier for earth support more trillion human beings. Colonization of Mars is unnecessary. By the time we need to, we have all the technological means to do so or we just end up building a dyson sphere.

If there's an asteroid coming our way, we just use cheap rockets made by SpaceX to knock them out of the sky. Or just mine them.

It is not what show empirical facts.  Longevity does not compensate for decreasing natality.  This is called "Demographic transition" and so far it has never led to an increase of population.

If women make less than 2.1 children, unless people become immortal, then there is just no way this can not result in a dramatic collapse of population, possibly extinction.  It is just a pure mathematical law.  The number of fertile women will decrease geometrically, and noone can know how much it can lower until women start to decide to make more children.


Population dynamics is much more complex than you seem to think.  Things have changed since Malthus, you know.

Do you know for instance the chaotic behavior of the logistic sequence (u_{n+1} = \alpha u_n * (1 - u_n)) ??

This equation is a basic model of a demographic evolution.  Basically it states that the future population number is proportionnal to the present one (which is logic since there are more fertile women), but with a proportionnal factor that tends to decrease when this number reaches a limit (which can happen for instance when people are afraid of overpopulation, as you seem to be).

I am not afraid of overpopulation. I am just aware of the fact it is more possible than you think. When there is an abundance of food, medicine, energy, and renewable resources, there will inevitably be an abundance of humans. By abundance in terms of resources, I mean 99% of the Earth's population can live a complete and healthy life instead of how it is today. There would be no need to kill for food or shelter. Everyone is well fed. When that is achieved, I believe there will be overpopulation because what else would you do besides have sex?

No. Most of the misery on earth is the result of poor political institutions.


Make yourself infertile so you don't have to worry about overpopulation.

western population is decreasing. that's why governments import clever brown people (immigration). most growth estimates for humans place a cap. where the cap lies differs according to various risk estimates,

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/World-Population-1800-2100.png/587px-World-Population-1800-2100.png

there's an interesting effect that newly urbanised countries shop drops in fertility and more as they become developed. many western countries are still shrinking far below 2.1 children per family which is the replacement rate.

so overpopulation is not a worry for me. esp since no government agency finds it a worry either.

also the UN predicts that famine will in a few decades disappear... currently most food shortages in the world today are the result of dictators and war.

as to what else people will do:
participate in a knowledge economy where everybody gains instead of competing in a zero-sum one.

Since there is efficient contraception, sex has very little to do with reproduction nowadays.

Sure I did. The transaction does not show as confirmed yet though.

Edited: I just checked that I sent the coins to the correct address mentioned on Twitter. But the Status column still says "0/not confirmed", which is not the usual behaviour.

Just sent one more BC, same thing. "0/not confirmed"

You may have made the transaction while you had no peers connected.  Then the software has to wait about 30 minutes to resend the transaction.  Don't ask me why, I don't know.  Ask on IRC, to theymos for instance.  They know these kind of stuffs.

Now the second donation of 1 BC is confirmed, and the first donation of 5 BC is "5/not confirmed". I guess it will appear as "n/confirmed" when n is sufficiently high.

Edited: both donations confirmed. To the Pioneer One folks if they are here: keep on the good work, and release Ep. 3! I posted a blog and sent to Twitter FB etc.
http://giulioprisco.blogspot.com/2011/02/donate-bitcoins-to-pioneer-one.html

Weird that it didn't get confirmed for so many blocks. My apologies for calling you out.

Blah. I need subtitling to enjoy the story. For some reason, I can't understand English speaking movies these days.

http://www.addic7ed.com/serie/Pioneer_One/1/1/Episode_1

+1 btc to 1CQcavqNsXkm6x2osFrfS8TFFrFUTZ9YC2

I found the S01E01 torrent on VODO site (I guess this is the pilot), but it mentions also a second episode, where could I find that?

http://vodo.net/assets/torrents/Pioneer.One.S01E02.720p.x264-VODO.torrent

that is the direct link.
It comes from the page: http://vodo.net/pioneerone
Click on Download, and both should appear.

Ah. Thank you. I just did a right click->save when I saw the URL that it links to.

http://vodo.net/theyesmen

I am amazed at this one... absolutely priceless and only half way through-

they are going to get a few more coins soon;

Do they take Bitcoin too? I thought it was only PioneerOne.

they don't actually... but will donate some fiat money at least.
I really enjoyed that movie; they just rock in my opinion;

I'm actually in favor of trading vote rights, which is mentionned at around 8'10'' in the movie.

I'm not sure those guys would like the bitcoin idea.  Just as I'm pretty sure those guys don't like gold or money in general.

+ 1 BTC for the new episode (Episode 3)

I must say I didn't quite liked this episode #3.  The new character is weird and I disliked the "emotionnal" input they tried to give to the serie.

I'll wait for next episode to see if it's get better, before I make an other donation.

Donated!

Sorry to be a sour puss but...

I will donate 5 btc when they add the bitcoin logo and link to the donation page at make the logo a similar size to the paypal one.

I wish I would have known about this earlier. It seems they did not promote it as much as I hoped they would.