Ars Technica loses its mind

There is a huckster named Skyler Chan who is raising money from the tech bros in Silicon Valley to build a chain of hotels…on the moon. He has ambitious plans.

Those first two steps are just tests, delivering expandable modules to the moon. However, he is talking about building a habitat on the moon in six years, with even more extravagant plans for the future.

I’m sorry, but this is fucking insane. It’s just a grift to suck money out of techno-optimists who are already unmoored from reality. So why is Ars Technica posting an optimistic review of the idea? It’s not April First.

It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.

All of this could therefore be dismissed as a lark. But I must say that I am a sucker for these kinds of stories. Chan is perfectly earnest about all of this. And despite all of the talk about lunar resources, my belief is that the surest long-term commercial activity on the Moon will be lunar tourism—it would be an amazing destination.

So when I interviewed Chan, I did so with an open mind.

If you’re a sucker for these kinds of stories, you shouldn’t be writing them. Has Ars Technica no editors?

To think that lunar tourism is a hot prospect for the commercial development of the moon is ludicrous. Why would anyone want to go there like it’s a trip to Bali? Popular tourist destinations here on Earth tend to require a large support staff — there are deep infrastructure demands that you don’t see on the vacation brochures, like the small non-luxury houses of the staff, and the buses to transport them to your glamorous accommodations, and an extensive supply source for the gourmet meals. Who builds the more elaborate structure on the right? Why does it look like it has huge glass windows?

Also unreal: he explains that space travel is currently supported on two economic legs, government funding and the largesse of billionaires. He thinks he can provide a third leg by building tourist hotels that will cost people a half-million dollars per night, not including travel expenses. Who’s going to stay there? Your average middle-class college professor?

There is something wrong with people who look at the white paper put out by the promoter and think it is a serious document. I mean, this is their “master plan”.

  1. Build the first hotel on the Moon. GRU solves off-world surface habitations.
  2. Build America’s first Moon base (roads, mass drivers, warehouses, physical infrastructure on the Moon).
  3. Repeat on Mars.
  4. Once the Overton window increases and this moves from non-consensus to consensus, GRU owns property on the Moon and Mars (i.e., The Hudson’s Bay Company owning Rupert’s Land).
  5. Use the money to re-invest in resource utilization systems on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and beyond that are fed into the growing economies and civilizations in space. Reach our final form — Galactic Resource Utilization.
  6. Humanity reaches Kardashev scale Type III.

Put the comic books away, kid. That’s fantasy from step 1. But hey, Ars Technica promoted it, so that’ll help con some dim-witted venture capitalist out of some cash, which will allow Skyler Chan to live the high life for a while until reality pops his bubble.

You will not be surprised to learn that Chan graduated from college in May, 2025, and that he interned at Tesla.

Here’s a fanciful artist’s imagining of the GRU Hotel.

Artists rendering of a lunar hotel

Why does it have big windows directly to the exterior? Why is it warmly lit like a Thomas Kinkade painting? Why is there a conventional door to the outside?

Why would anyone go in or out of that fucking door, Skyler?

Why is genetics hard?

First day back in the classroom, teaching genetics, and I speculate for a bit about why so many people find the subject difficult. I’ve had smart students who struggled with the concepts. I think the answer is that many people don’t get the whole idea of chance and probability and the statistical nature of inheritance.

The autofocus on my camera was a bit goofy. Someday I’ll get this all figured out.

Use it or lose it

I’ve been away from the habit of delivering long orations, so today in my first class returning from a long break, I suffered from wobbly knees, and worst of all, I only made it halfway through lecture before my voice started to rasp and fade. Uh-oh. I have many more hours of talking ahead of me.

After class, I ran out and bought some chamomile tea, and also some honey lemon ginseng tea. I think I’ll bring a cup to my classes so I can lube up partway through. Does anyone have recommendations for habits/chemical reagents that I should use to strengthen my voice and to help me get through hour long lectures on very dry topics?

Chaos continues

Never trust Facebook, but this account of what’s happening in Minneapolis aligns with what I’m seeing on the news and hearing from friends. We are being occupied; DHS has flooded the city with thousands of poorly trained masked thugs who outnumber the local police, and unfortunately the police union has declared their alliance with them. I’m not visiting Minneapolis/St Paul anytime in the near future, but let me emphasize: it’s not the citizens of my state that I’m afraid of, it’s Trump’s Gestapo that worry me.

Friends outside of MN please read. Im sharing a post written by a personal friend and medical doctor:

Friends outside MN, you need to know what is happening here. Everyone knows that ICE shot and killed a woman here on Wednesday. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on:

  • ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses, and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. Yesterday they abducted two US citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him to go get his passport to show them.
  • ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking residents where their immigrant neighbors live. Read that again. If it sounds like something out of your high school history textbook, that’s because it is.

    • 

  • ICE is targeting schools and school buses. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff members at the high school up the street from me on Weds. Police are literally escorting school buses to ensure children can get to school and home safely. The Minneapolis Public Schools have moved to virtual learning for the next 4 weeks because it’s unsafe for children or teachers to physically come to school.

    • They are targeting hospitals and clinics.

Patients are scared and are canceling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc.

  • They are smashing windows in cars and homes.
  • ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans-again, targeting folks based on skin color alone.
  • They are arresting and beating legal observers.

A friend of a friend had her arm broken yesterday. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism of injury reported by ICE. (Think: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious, while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.)

I can’t emphasize enough that these ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents here and they are simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later.

But the community is fighting back.

  • Protests are happening every day.
  • Community groups have been leading know-your-rights sessions for months, often to packed venues.
  • Whistles are being distributed by the thousands, carried on keychains and worn on coat zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted.

    • 

  • Drivers are following ICE vehicles, blaring their horns in warning.

    • 

  • Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait formy takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business.

    • 

  • Anti-ICE signs are posted everywhere. The community is making it crystal clear that ICE is not welcome here.

    • 

  • Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools, and escorting kids to and from school on foot.
  • Parents of kids in Spanish-immersion daycare (there are a LOT of these daycares here!) are keeping their kids home so the teachers don’t have to take the risk of coming to work.
  • Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home.

    • 

  • Mutual aid money is going out to folks who can’t make rent because they can’t work or because a breadwinner was abducted, or who need a warm place to stay after their home’s windows were smashed.

THAT is what is happening here. This fight is ongoing and it’s horrifying to watch. But we are not backing down. To my friends in other cities and states, don’t think for a minute that this won’t happen in your town. It will. Be ready.

Learn from us, as we have learned from Portland and Chicago and New York. Fight back. Don’t let us get to the last line of Martin Niemoller’s poem.

Personally, I live three hours away from Minneapolis, so the turmoil isn’t affecting me directly yet. While I was standing in a protest line on Saturday, though, I heard that ICE agents have been spotted sniffing around the poultry farms and the immigrant workers employed there, so they’re creeping up on us.

One final note of irony: the man who murdered Renee Good, Jonathan Ross, has a legal defense fund on GoFundMe, and certain people are making a novel argument for supporting him.

I am big believer in our legal principal [sic] that one is innocent until proven guilty, wrote hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman on X after donating a reported $10,000 to Ross’s cause.

I can’t even…

He’s gone now, but he launched an industry that continues on

I remember this old battered paperback that was passed around my father’s family — I think it was my uncle who got it first, and eventually it settled down on a bookshelf at my house. I read it, because I read every book that found its way to my home, but I disliked it rather thoroughly. It contained nothing but glib superficial explanations of the behavior of human cultures rooted in a belief that we couldn’t possibly have done anything. Everything was given to us by godlike alien beings. Every great accomplishment by non-European societies was in service to creatures in flying saucers who bestowed their technology on all the brown people who were otherwise helpless.

It annoyed me. Also the fact that the author based everything on the most superficial, biased analyses.

My father ate it up with a spoon, though, so I can sympathize a little with all those people who made his books so popular. Erich von Däniken had hit a sweet spot in the zeitgeist; trigger a little curiosity with odd phenomena and exotic places, and then satisfy it with pseudo-scientific explanations that sounded persuasive, it you’re most sophisticated analyses were the kind of thing you’d hear from a church pulpit. He’d tickle, then pretend to scratch the itch. It has become a familiar strategy for con artists who want to get rich off normal human curiosity, but who didn’t want to do the hard work of actually studying something in depth. Graham Hancock is the latest parasite to glom onto the game.

Well, von Däniken is dead. His hustle lives on, unfortunately, as long as there are inquisitive, gullible people who are satisfied with answers that are wrong, but that fit into an existing bias.

I didn’t get shot

It was a bad day for a protest: -10°C (what is that in F? about 15,16°), 40km/hr winds, blowing snow, near blizzard conditions, roads slick and icy, yet there they were, a dozen brave individuals standing out there in Cyrus, Minnesota, getting frostbit to protest the criminal regime of corrupt murderers and liars in this country.

Yikes, but it was cold.

We had a few assholes in pickup trucks drive by and make rude gestures, and a few people just stared stonily straight ahead to avoid acknowledging us, but the majority of the passers-by would wave or honk their horns for the cause.

And then I had to drive home and struggle to keep in my lane while the wind tried to push me into a ditch. Worth it, though.