The Deep End #18
China vs Starlink, Google's AI for doctors, and how sci-fi predicted Oppenheimer
🌌 Hi everyone, Robert here. I hope you’re enjoying The Deep End, a subsection of the Airframe newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed, join the aerospace executives, investors, and deep tech operators who read Airframe and The Deep End weekly.
WSJ: China, Elon Musk and the Space Race to Launch Thousands of Satellites
China plans to launch thousands of broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit to bring hundreds of millions online and sell connections across the globe. But doing so will pit it against SpaceX’s Starlink.
Wild stat: of the roughly 8,000 functioning satellites currently in orbit, about 55% belong to Starlink. Watch the full video here.
Google’s AI for Medicine Shows Clinical Answers More Than 90% Accurate
The paper contains some surprising results. When the model was posed medical questions, a pool of clinicians rated its responses to be 92.6% in line with the scientific consensus, just shy of the 92.9% score that real-life medical professionals received, according to a statement from Nature, though the clinicians’ evaluations of Med-PaLM weren’t based on it being deployed in hospital settings with real-life patient variables. The study also found that just 5.8% of the model’s responses could cause harm, besting the 6.5% rate achieved by clinicians.
Read more here.
How an H.G. Wells sci-fi novel predicted Oppenheimer and atomic bombs
A notable example that combined both themes was H.G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free, which was written the previous year and dedicated to Soddy’s work on radium. This book describes a catastrophic world war (initiated by Germany in the 1950s, as it happens) that ultimately leads to the creation of a harmonious world state. What is most relevant for our purposes is that the war involves what Wells called, coining the term, “atomic bombs” that pilots fling from their cockpits on urban centers below, destroying entire cities. However, these are not like the “atomic bombs” dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; rather than producing a sudden massive explosion, they utilize a fictional radioactive element called “Carolinum” to generate “a blazing continual explosion” that “is never entirely exhausted,” and which would create “puffs of luminous, radio-active vapour drifting sometimes scores of miles from the bomb centre and killing and scorching all they overtook.”
Read more here.
When are we getting an Oppenheimer review?