Thank you! I don't know why I had so much trouble finding that.

Why is this labeled as the first time a US mission returns an asteroid sample?

I looked around a bit and it looks like nobody has done that yet. Was there a previous one I couldn't find?

The headline kind of implies that someone else did it first but I can't find anything to support that.

Haha. That thing will outlast you.

They have a world record for driving a bunch of trucks over it.

~~People have shot them and they keep going. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4G1wFLVgcc ~~

And tried to explode them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2NMhP-utCY

Edit: The bullet one is a hoax. Dumb on me for not double checking. There are still plenty of legit videos of people subjecting the watch to damage that would maim or kill anyone wearing it. I think it's still safe to say the watch will outlast you :)

Those things are beasts.

My dad bought gave me one before I went on an exchange program to the USSR (back during Glasnost when absolutely nobody predicted they were going to spectacularly collapse a few years later). When we got there the black market guys all tried to trade for hard currency.

The common items for sale/trade were crappy rabbit fur hats and cheap Komandirskie "military" watches. They asked to trade one of those for my G-Shock.

I told them I'd trade but only for a sable hat. They didn't think it was worth it so I took off the G-Shock and threw it on the concrete as hard as I could. One strap popped off and they laughed at me. Then I put the strap back on and asked if they wanted to put their watches to the same test. They just walked away.

It's got a few more scratches but it still works as well as it did when it was brand new.

That all makes sense and I did expect that there were some practical limits I hadn’t thought.

It sounds like there are but they may be higher than I had first guessed.

Yeah. I'm wondering how scalable that is.

I had initially assumed that the sort of infinite scalability you see in video games is just for video games and that in an actual space station you would run into some practical considerations that keep you from just adding modules indefinitely.

Now I'm starting to doubt that assumption.

Just how modular is this thing actually?

I initially imagined some small space station with a few interchangeable parts.

Then I read, "The multi-functional expansion module will host six docking ports". That's just 2 short of what ISS has. Is this something that can just keep growing like some video game space station simulator?

China has been the dominant force in the region for around 2000 years. For long stretches of that time many countries had formal suzerainty treaties with China, sometimes even direct vassalage.

Chinese characters were in use in Korea, Japan and Vietnam for centuries before anyone they were exposed to anything Western.

Confucianism is much more of a moral philosophy than a religion. It doesn't focus on origin myths, the afterlife, gods or spirits. It's a set of philosophies around the relationships of people. Much closer to Plato's Republic than the Bible.

Confucius lived over 2500 years ago. Jesus' teachings made it all over the world in less time than that. Indonesia is pretty far from Mecca and it's become the largest Muslim country in the world just 1300 years after Muhammad. It's not at all surprising to see significant cultural diffusion to nearby neighbors after all that time.

And people move around too. Over thousands of years there are many factors that make people pick up their stuff and check out the neighbors; wars, natural disasters, famines, rumors of new opportunities. China has had a very large population for a long time. There have been a lot of Chinese people moving to neighboring countries. So to a large extent Chinese culture extended throughout Asia because so many Chinese people wandered around Asia.

No reasonable economists claims that GDP will grow steadily but there are good reasons to think it will grow over the long term.

GDP is the total output of a population. There are basically two ways it can change; you can change the number of people or you can change the output of those people.

In the long run, populations go up. People have been talking about variations of the Malthusian trap for centuries but the world population has increased by nearly 100x since then and growth seems to be accelerating rather than slowing down.

Individual productivity also seems to be on a firm upward trajectory. This is primarily driven by technological advances. A modern combine can harvest 200,000 pounds of corn an hour, that's about a 2000x improvement over working by hand. I have a 3-d printer on my desk that can build arbitrary shaped objects in a few hours rather than taking months to build prototypes. And we're all aware of the blistering rate at which electronics improve. There's no obvious reason to think this technological advance will slow down any time soon.

An other factor in individual output is hours worked. That's gone up a little but nowhere near as much. A few people are able to sustain 80 hour weeks but most people work 27-50 hours per week There's a lot of opposition to working 60+ hours per week and many people argue that we shouldn't even be working 40 hours per week but very few adults reasonably expect to work less than 20 hours per week. So we're unlikely to get much productivity reduction out of change in hours worked.

Is this desirable? Absolutely. Increased output means that we can get more of the things we want and need. For many people on earth that still means basic things like food, clothing and shelter. Many others require things like improved transportation, healthcare and childcare. Even the rich have desires that they can't meet yet.

The bigger questions are if we can support sustainable growth and how we distribute that increased output. If we could get infinite economic growth with no pollution, resource depletion or other externalizations it's hard to imagine why we wouldn't but that's not the real world. We absolutely have to deal with these issues. Either we deal with them preemptively or we wait until we're forced to deal with the effects after the fact. It looks like we're on a course to do a little of both. Resource distribution is also a very difficult problem. Nobody has proposed a system that everybody agrees with. We'll probably keep trying new systems indefinitely in the vain hope that we can find such a system.