>I can't wait until I have a talk with my kids when they realize the significance of this day

https://goo.gl/photos/7rT5rxvsP9AxVZxn6

My four year old daughter, watching the launch with rapt attention.

When we watched the Echostar 23 launch two weeks ago, she asked why it didn't land... Crazy that rockets landing is already totally normal for her.

As a child, I thought it was weird that spaceships didn't land... supported by science fiction covers showing them landing. e.g. Tintin https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7c/The_Adventure...

I mean, a regular ship doesn't discard part of itself to set sail... as a child, I didn't understand the need for multi-stage rockets.

That image is totally iconic for me. Rocket equation be damned, I still think there should be SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit) ships.

Either move to a smaller planet, or invest heavily in nuclear propulsion.

Your backyard is a forest? Looks awesome :)

btw, I suggest disabling sharing geo location of photos (https://photos.google.com/settings - Remove geo location in items shared by link).

Yeah, it's pretty awesome (I actually grew up in the house across the street, and that large wooded area is a big part of why we picked this neighborhood when looking to buy a house).

Fair point about the geo location (I actually assumed Google would have stripped all metadata by default, like any real image sharing service...), I'm not super concerned about it though. I use my real name on HN, my employer and other details are pretty trivial to find. If someone wanted to find me, they wouldn't have to work too terribly hard as it is. If they do... well, I'm an American who likes to spend time in the woods. Draw whatever conclusions from that you will...

Awesome answer.

It made me smile.

My daughters have watched almost all Falcon 9 launches with me, and we still cheer when they land and stay upright. Some fathers watch basketball with their kids who then grow up and aspire to be a basketball star. I hope that your daughter meets my children in the engineering lab!

Priceless :)

I was 4 when the Apollo launches happened and I still remember them today, they're probably my oldest memories (others I can't date so accurately so that may be off by a bit).

Very beautiful picture, thank you for posting.

Wow. That's my first memory too. I was almost 3.

Kudos for Doing Parenting Right.

So many 'parents' dump their kids in front of Cartoon Network, and ignore them for 18 years.

We are very fortunate to be in a position where we have the opportunity to invest in our kids. I don't have a commute, and make enough that my wife is able to focus her efforts on our household full time. However, I am quite proud of the fact that if someone asks her what she wants to be when she's older, half the time it's "a ballerina", and the other half it's "a mommy scientist". If she grows up continuing to believe both of those are valid courses to pursue, _then_ I'll agree we did something right.

Also, Stavros is right, the twins were playing in the other room with Caspar Babypants YouTube videos playing. ;)

You sound like you're living the life my wife and I aim for. We'd like to homeschool full time as well to get the best possible education when we start having little ones.

I'm still in the very early stage of my career (web developer currently), but I'm lucky enough to work remotely most of the time and live in a beautiful forested area of NC. What general field do you work in? If software, where within that?

I'm a senior developer for Silent Circle.

Not shown in the photo: The twins watching Cartoon Network.

Heh, the dangers of an inside joke on a public forum...

For those downvoting, Stavros is a friend, and based on the number of kids songs videos I send him on IM, he is pretty well informed about what my kids watch ;)

Relatedly... Elmo and Ricky Gervais make a great comic pair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc20vMz0V7Q

> Kid: Daddy, you mean people used to be in charge of driving > themselves in cars?

A few generations will pass till this question will be asked. There might be self-driving cars sooner than that, but it will be a looooong time till manual driving is a very rare thing.

Also, why wait for fully self-driving cars to prevent fatalities? Why not to implement collision-avoidance subsystem into the cars which are controlled by humans. In any case, most deaths on the road are because of stupid and deliberate actions by drivers (or pedestrians): insane speeding, overtaking where is limited visibility, crossing on red, etc.

Most everything in capitalist societies is based on economics. If you consider less accidents and fatalities due to self driving cars as an inevitability, then you should consider insurance premiums to reflect that once they're out in the general population. Given enough level 4-5 autonomous vehicles on the roads, you can also eventually expect premiums for non-autonomous vehicles to rise. Then you'll see a shift towards them that continues exponentially.

Thinking the shift towards autonomous vehicles happens linearly is a mistake.

> Why not to implement collision-avoidance subsystem into the cars which are controlled by humans.

It's already seeping into production cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system

"What do you mean, cars were allowed drive faster then 60 MPH, when the speed limits were all 60 MPH?"

"Yes, they were. You could drive a car as fast as it could go."

"Did people ever die from going too fast?"

"Oh, yes."

"And you could start your car without breathing into a breathalyzer?"

"Yes, you could."

"Did people ever die from driving drunk?"

"Oh, yes."

We don't need to wait for the distant future to save millions of lives. Breathalyzers and speed regulators already exist. For some reason, though, they aren't mandated on our roadways...

The real-time streaming made me really excited for the future. Elon is truly a genius... SpaceX will save so much money. I can't wait to see what comes next. Honestly, the rate at which technology is growing is truly absurd if you think about it.

I think a lot of it comes from the fact that (almost) every literate human being can communicate (almost) instantly around the planet with (almost) every other literate human being, and the fact that with machine translation, language is less of a barrier all the time.

Illiterate people can too using Skype and such. Instant planetwide communication between any party of humans sharing a common language is now pretty much a given.

While you are correct for the most part, I would point out that text services have wider distribution even if only for bandwidth reasons. But there are other reasons, there are good (enough) and widely distributed text standards (SMS), but not yet for video.

But maybe we are both over thinking it, does the old voice network reach even further?

Writing is reusable and presumably most of the learning going on behind rapid technological expansion requires literacy. Even just to navigate around Khan Academy.

Audio-only is a little better that way.

You can use Skype and similar services without video.

You can but it doesn't fundamentally change my points. The old analog audio network and the text systems have much larger reach.

Laying out enough digital network fabric to have skype and its kind everywhere is an admirable goal though.

Totally agree on this. I can video and audio chat with my grandma since apps like WeChat are designed for illiterate usage. Photos of participants, easy audio button, inline small videos.

If you think about it, rapidly reusable suborbital rockets are like a physical version of the communication you describe here. It's plausible to physically be anywhere in the world (if you burn enough fuel) within 30 minutes. Ditto up to 10 tonnes of cargo.

I pretty much have this conversation with my students. I love it when a teacher is observing me so I start with 'do you ever remember a time before the internet?' of course none of them do, but the teacher does. Then I ask 'do you remember a time when you couldn't talk to a computer' nope, all of them have grown up being able to talk to computers. Haha. Makes me feel old.

People drove busses?! What? And flew aeroplanes?! With other people in them? What if a pilot went mad and flew one out over the sea? Would it disappear forever?

Which is obviously quite a sad footnote.