Microsatellite launch options available to OECD countries

Space and Aerospace

This is a web page designed to provide a brief overview of microsatellite launch options available to OECD countries. If the information is outdated or incomplete, please use the contact form to let me know and it will be updated.

 

AUSTRALIA 7 June 1971
AUSTRIA 29 September 1961
BELGIUM 13 September 1961
CANADA 10 April 1961
CHILE 7 May 2010
CZECH REPUBLIC 21 December 1995
DENMARK 30 May 1961
ESTONIA 9 December 2010
FINLAND 28 January 1969
FRANCE 7 August 1961
GERMANY 27 September 1961
GREECE 27 September 1961
HUNGARY 7 May 1996
ICELAND 5 June 1961
IRELAND 17 August 1961
ISRAEL 7 September 2010
ITALY 29 March 1962
JAPAN 28 April 1964
KOREA 12 December 1996
LATVIA 1 July 2016
LUXEMBOURG 7 December 1961
MEXICO 18 May 1994
NETHERLANDS 13 November 1961
NEW ZEALAND 29 May 1973
NORWAY 4 July 1961
POLAND 22 November 1996
PORTUGAL 4 August 1961
SLOVAK REPUBLIC 14 December 2000
SLOVENIA 21 July 2010
SPAIN 3 August 1961
SWEDEN 28 September 1961
SWITZERLAND 28 September 1961
TURKEY 2 August 1961
UNITED KINGDOM 2 May 1961
UNITED STATES 12 April 1961

Predictions about Self-Driving Cars in Tasmania

Autonomous Vehicles, Predictions

The following entry is a collection of predictions, considerations and open-ended exploration about the nature and speed of arriving Self-Driving Car technology in Tasmania, Australia.

Conjoined consideration with adoption of electric based car and truck fleets in Tasmania to vary future modellings of carbon output.

  • Frequency of use and scale of use of current Tasmanian vehicular consumption
  • Modelling truck use in Tasmania
  • Carbon output in present terms – from Australia Bureau of Statistics
  • Use % of cars in Tasmania
  • Autonomous Car Summoning efficiency increase %’s
  • Amelioration of inner-city car clustering – modelled from time-spent-hunting-for-parking
  • Length and purpose of trip data
  • Critical car%-as-part-of-population tipping points – Metcalfe’s Law
  • Rideshare acceptance %
  • Incidences of abuse
  • Cost of electricity and storage

Predictions:

Adoption of self-driving cars as fleet vehicles

Reallocation of taxi economy

Transport of elderly, disabled

Overnight travel

Love in the Transhumanist Era

Transhumanism

Or, How The Amount Of Fuckbots Surprised Nearly Everyone

By Pip Foweraker

(Editor’s Note – this is a draft work in progress that, like all drafts, may never be finished. Read at your own peril.)

One of the consistent defining experiences across the broadest possible range of human circumstance is the enjoyment of, passion for and desire for an increase in fucking.

People fuck for the basest and most noble of reasons, and love and lust are so intertwined in our minds that separating them is considered an act of high moral and intellectual virtue – something that requires unusual levels of cerebral run-time. The asexual and sexually weird aside, generally speaking people tend to want to fuck people they love, and tend to develop feelings of love for people they repeatedly fuck.

The same is true of sex toys.

The same is already true of fuckbots, and will continue to become more so over time.

Shifts in social constructs

Robin Hanson in his outstandingly provocative and excellent book, The Age of Em, highlights some of the potential societal shifts that will inevitably arise from having agents acting in our economies whose attentions are splittable, not limited to human metabolic rates of consideration and action, and who we will hopefully ascribe some level of moral agency.

Traditional social constructs have, in many if not all ways, been delineated by scarce resources – time, attention, wisdom, calories, hydrocarbons, etc.

Gender roles are certainly going to be increasingly interesting – the Gibsonian trap – and to a greater or lesser extent, re-negotiated as part of the flow-on effects from increasingly erotically charged social environments.

Kim Stanley Robinson most effectively explores the idea of marriage contracts with an acknowledgment of fulfillingly-ended relationships, notably (spoilers!) in the closing passages of 2312.

What else will longevity do to us and our basically-insatiable horniness? If the actual evidence is to be believed, then there should be no real diminishing of sexual desires in an ageing population, particularly if that population is ageing well.

Further consider Steinmetz’s treatment of enhanced physical eroticism in his short works. An explosion of sexual enhancement unlike those since the invention of the vibrator and the synthesisation of cocaine is likely to happen. Given the depths of weirdness mathematically predictably contained within our collective futures, it’ll be surprising indeed if we’re all going about things the same old fleshbag-to-fleshbag ways in thirty years’ time or fewer.

This is neither the time nor the space to delve into the ethics of fuckbots – something that is frankly a little tedious of a distraction, not because of its moral importance, but because horny people will do whatever possible things they can with whatever they can stimulate themselves with. Given that the entire gamut of Human sexual interaction also includes, consensual or not, sex with other species, it can be safely assumed that Humans will fuck whatever robots, semi-robots, unincorporated entities, semi-sentient blood-and-drug-sharing-hookay-bots, or whatever other monstrous entities await us in our consensually tentacular sexual futures.

The existence of empathy-altering drugs and hormones – particularly the MD families, oxytocin and other blood-brain barrier shifting nootropics – is memetically aligned with contemporary, neodymium-balls-to-the-wall Let’s Go Try This Shit Transhumanism. The Venn diagrams overlapping people who consciously fiddle with the settings of their consciousness – Bayesian inference down (or is it up?)  and those who are willing to see their bodies as clay that is morally theirs to mold is quite large. And those on the outside edges can often empathise or recognise the urges to do so in others, even if it is outside their particular ambit.

There will inevitably be people engaging in abusive relationships with non-human actors, regardless of the level of sentience/moral equivalence/value-recognition granted at large by society.

Defining relationships is also about to get a lot messier. There may evolve a continuum of accepted degrees of ‘realness’ –

  • Your Virtual Friend is not real,
  • Your Virtual Friend is semi-real,
  • Your Virtual Friend is embodied, but semi-real,
  • Your Virtual Friend is embodied and real,
  • Your Virtual Friends’ state of embodiment is irrelevant.

Care and Feeding

The end state of the Tamagotchis does not bode well for early generation Fuckbots.

One thing that they have going for them, though, is the same impulse that causes many of us to hold onto technologies embedded in objects of affection long past the point a strictly rational agent would have disposed of them. I think in these instances of laptops, vacuum cleaners, cars, wetsuits, lawn mowers, antique china sets and warranties for media playing devices. Where on the emotional attachment scale these more personified and embodied sexual partners will fall is as yet unclear.

Humans are actually doing really bloody well on Climate Change

Environmentalism

One of the easy traps to fall into as someone with even a slight understanding of the global climate situation – particularly when it comes to human-accelerated system change – is that of despair.

It’s important to take some time to step back from all the horrendous news and acknowledge that, in the grand scheme of our observations so far, Humans are also the only race to even be able to try to escape Malthusian traps that are still forming. Not to rip on the Club of Rome too hard, but there are – to the best of my knowledge – no examples of organisms pre-emptively limiting their consumption of resources in order to avoid a problem of scarcity.

Admittedly, thanks to the Molochian tendencies of resource consumption problems, humans are presently pretty much sucking ass at dealing with Climate Change, we’re at least making the effort.

Given that even the worst scenarios of climate change as projected by the UN and other reputable bodies are unlikely to cause the complete destruction of the human experience and noosphere, this can give us some hope for the near to medium term if our goals in the continuation of conscious life in the local environment.

The Inevitably Disappointing Hello-World Post

Administrivia

There are an unfortunate number of blogs that tail off after some small number of entries, this is mathematically likely to be one of them. Standing in my slight favour is that I’ve published others that have, in their times and spaces, served interesting purposes on the Internet, and been of at least some value to others.

This blog is started in the manner they were – with boundless optimism and a determination to iteratively improve over time.

Let’s begin.

Pip Foweraker,

4:28PM, 21/05/02017