The Scriver Inquiry · Ed Scriver

Humans Drool, Robots Rule — Unless They Delete Your Database, Part Two

Ed Scriver — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:00:00 +0000

[This series is a critique of the article “Humans Drool — Robots Rule”. Please read that before reading this. You can find Part One of this series here]

Quick Recap

In Part 1, we went through Klaus’s specific claims. He said that AI codes faster, safer, and better than humans. The data says the opposite: AI coding tools measurably slow down experienced developers, produce more bugs and security holes than human code, and have already caused serious breaches and outages when people trusted them the way Klaus trusts his.

That’s not the strongest argument against his claim.

The Real Job Isn’t Typing Code — It’s Design

Coding is not the most difficult or valuable aspect of software engineering. It is not typing the code. Designing something that continues to work next year, fails safely when something breaks, and resists abuse by malicious actors has always been the hard part. That’s called design, and it’s mostly invisible until it’s missing.

First, you must identify a problem. What problem does your software solve? Organize your books? Your notes? Do taxes? Edit your novel? What does the software exist to help you do?

Once you determine that, address it with code. What should your program do? How should it work? How do you design a highly usable system that effectively solves the problems it aims to address? What should the user interface look like? How smoothly should it perform? What technology platform is efficient? What tools should you use?

I think Klaus would acknowledge this. Klaus likely does a lot of this design work himself. He may very well excel at some of this software engineering, based on my experience with him. He excels at identifying problems his software should solve and making it easy to use and visually appealing. How to make an efficient user interface. He is skilled at the design work that visual designers excel at. Good for him!

However, what about the software architecture questions? The technical details he needs to get right to make his vision into properly functioning, well-implemented, and secure software? This is when vibe-coding could cause him trouble.

What happens if someone tries to hack his code? Is he prepared for that?

A few concrete examples:

Big-picture decisions.
Most senior developers say they don’t trust AI to make architecture decisions. They do not trust AI blindly to implement their design. Why? Because AI doesn’t understand the business reasons behind those choices. They use AI to write pieces, not to decide the plan.

Thinking ahead.
Studies show AI tools get worse the longer and more complicated a project gets, because they don’t think about the cost of a shortcut six months from now. Humans do (or should).

Fixing things when they break.
Nearly all engineering leaders say their AI tools can’t tell them what actually went wrong in production when something fails. More than half of serious tech outages get resolved by experienced humans familiar with similar issues, not by AI tools.

Thinking like an attacker.
AI writes code assuming everyone using it is friendly. A skilled programmer knows better and assumes a malicious user will try to hack their software. They will ask questions such as, “What if someone tries to break this?”

Knowing when to say “not yet.”
A good engineer knows when to delay a launch until it’s fully tested. AI has no instinct to say that. It produces exactly what the user requests, including holes. That instinct is the one thing missing from every disaster listed in Part 1.

Klaus didn’t eliminate the need for design when he fired his coding team. He removed the people who thought through to design the software system that best implements his vision. Klaus dismissed the engineers who build for failure, resilience, and security. He didn’t streamline his company. He amputated the part that keeps the software running in a healthy state.

If Everyone Did What Klaus Did, No One Would Be Left to Catch AI’s Mistakes

This is the part Klaus neglected. Senior engineers who catch AI’s mistakes did not begin like that. They spent years doing the boring junior-level work he’s celebrating the death of: writing simple code, fixing small bugs, slowly learning why things break. That’s how they learn to catch AI’s mistakes; by practical experience with designing properly designed and secure systems. There isn’t a shortcut. They cannot acquire experience in a world where AI does their work.

Microsoft’s research found that when juniors skip design and let AI do it, they get worse at spotting mistakes in AI’s code. The industry calls this “knowledge debt”: skills that look fine until something unexpected happens. And because it takes 5–7 years to turn a junior into a senior, companies that stopped hiring juniors may face a shortage of experienced engineers in the early 2030s.

So if “humans drool, robots rule” became everyone’s actual hiring plan, the result wouldn’t be a world that doesn’t need human judgment anymore. However, it would create a world where no one remains to notice or correct the AI’s mistakes.

Might AI push out junior and intermediate devs at more and more companies? Probably not a good trend!

The Cost

Here’s the price tag when nobody catches these problems in time. IBM’s 2026 data-breach report — a study that’s tracked this every year since 2005 — found that breaches caused by unapproved AI tools nearly doubled in one year, now averaging $5.39 million per breach. AI-related attacks (deepfakes, AI-written malware, AI phishing) were up 56% and averaged $6 million each. And here is a damning statistic: 92% of companies hit by an AI-related breach had no basic access controls in place beforehand. Not because hackers were geniuses. Their reliance on an AI indifferent to proper security caused issues.

That’s the “omniscient” tool’s actual track record once money’s on the line: not brilliance, just confidence with nobody double-checking it. Klaus is about to conduct that same experiment on Genix alone, using real people’s data.

If someone goes wrong, will Klaus be able to easily fix it? Not without AI — the very unreliable tool which would likely be to blame for the problem in the first place!

Insecure apps that seem safe, but have problems Klaus might not see or be expert enough to identify or easily address.

To Be Fair to Klaus

Not everything in his post is incorrect. For a solo person building a small, low-stakes app from scratch, AI tools can save huge amounts of time and money — nobody disputes that. AI is also improving fast, and not every study agrees on every point; some earlier research found AI code wasn’t always worse than human code in every situation. This is a fast-moving argument, not a settled one. But I think I have shown that you cut humans out at your potential peril.

The Verdict

Klaus didn’t discover that robots build software better than humans. He discovered he hates managing people, and that AI removes that annoyance for a small, low-stakes project. That’s a fine preference. But it is not the sweeping proof he thinks it is.

Research shows that AI coding tools slow experienced developers down once you stop trusting the “speed” they seem to give. AI-written code has about twice the security holes and far more bugs than human code, and it makes codebases messier over time. And when non-technical founders skip human review the way Klaus plans to, the result isn’t a faster launch. It’s a leaked database, a hacked app, or a breach that hits the news before the founder even knows something went wrong.

Klaus can keep building Genix his way. He should budget for what happens after he ships it. Because it might not be as painless as he imagines…

Humans Drool, Robots Rule — Unless They Delete Your Database, Part One

Ed Scriver — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:00:00 +0000

[This series is a critique of the article “Humans Drool — Robots Rule”. Please read that before reading this.]

What Klaus Is Saying

Klaus wrote an app called Genix using AI tools instead of hiring programmers. That seems to work well for Klaus. No more meetings, explaining his ideas to people, or waiting weeks for changes. He says AI has made human coders pointless, calling his AI assistant “omniscient”. That it cannot be mistaken.

Klaus is likely being hyperbolic. I used to know Klaus, and I know something about how he thinks, so I assume he does not believe AI is literally omniscient. Nevertheless, it will become apparent that this claim is false and silly, even as hyperbole.

Klaus is building his app faster than he expected using vibe coding. What is vibe coding? The practice of creating software using natural language prompts to tell an AI assistant what to build.

Many people are creating functional software that works “well enough” for their purposes. He believes this works well for him. However, this has very little bearing on whether AI codes better than humans or that you should forgo software engineers. It is an interesting anecdote and not an argument for his position. The data makes an excellent case against his position.

What is Happening?

His fundamental problem is not with programmers; Klaus hates managing people. He dislikes explaining his ideas, waiting on other people’s schedules, and having meetings. The AI tool never resents his management style. And those are valid preferences.

He confuses “this is less annoying for me” with “AI writes better code.” Those are two different claims, and only one of them is about code quality.

Wait — Who Built the “Robot”?

Here’s an obvious point Klaus skips right past: the AI tool he’s praising didn’t build itself. Thousands of human engineers designed, trained, and debugged it, doing the hard, long-term thinking he claims no longer matters.

If AI made deep engineering skills pointless, the companies that build these tools would prove it by firing their own best engineers and letting the AI take over. They’re doing the opposite. They are hiring more of them for harder problems. The tools exist because humans performed the unglamorous work Klaus says is now obsolete.

ChatGPT is not vibe coding itself. Anthropic’s Claude models are not building the next versions of the models. Humans are working on the next versions of ChatGPT and Claude. They are designing the model architecture. They are training the datasets. Humans are configuring how training works. People are designing the safety systems — not the AI itself. They are deploying and evaluating it.

The AI isn’t the one primarily responsible for any of this. Why? Humans perform that task far better than AI alone. For designing the latest and greatest in AI, humans rule.

Humans build the latest and greatest AI models - it does not build itself.

Claim #1: “AI Is So Much Faster” — Studies Say No

Klaus says he can now test changes every 10 minutes instead of once a week. Sounds great. But the best-controlled study on this (from METR, a research group with no financial stake in the answer) tested real, experienced programmers working on serious projects. Half used AI tools, half didn’t. The result: the ones using AI were **19% slower** — even though they *believed* they’d been 20% faster. They were mistaken about their own experiences.

The gap between “felt faster” and “was slower” could be the trap Klaus faces. He’s timing himself, he’s emotionally invested in the story, and he has no comparison group. “It felt fast” isn’t evidence.

Keep in mind that these are experienced software developers. Yes, they are being asked to rate their own performance, and it is very possible that they are subjectively analyzing their experience. However, unlike Klaus, they have some experience, and that might count for something.

To be fair to Klaus: AI *is* sometimes faster for small, simple, from-scratch projects like his. However, it may not be faster or the complex, team-based work most serious software is.

“It felt faster” vs actually taking longer to get something out the gate…

Claim #2: “AI Writes Great Code” — The Data Says It’s Worse

Several major studies looked at code written by AI versus code written by humans:

- AI-written code has **almost 3 times more security holes** than human-written code (Veracode study, testing over 100 AI models).

- Nearly half of AI-written code fails basic security checks that any professional would catch.

- CodeRabbit (AI coding platform) reports show 1.7x more bugs overall, 1.75x for logic/correctness errors.

Uplevel (800 developers, GitHub Copilot access): 41% increase in bug rates

Sonar (2026, 1,100+ developers): the “70% more bugs” figure, alongside 61% agreeing AI code “looks correct but isn’t reliable.”

GitClear (211M lines of code): doesn’t give a bug multiplier directly, but documents rising code churn (3.1% → 5.7%) and duplication (8x) as leading indicators of defect-prone code

- Programmers are also copy-pasting AI code instead of cleaning it up. Duplicate, messy code has shot up across the industry since AI coding took off, while the “clean it up later” work has plummeted.

In short: the code comes out faster, but messier, more buggy, and less secure. It’s a human’s job to catch all of that before it ships. AI is not ready to replace a human at this point.

Claim #3: “It’s Perfect” — Real-World Disasters Say Otherwise

Here’s what’s happened when people trusted AI-written code the way Klaus trusts his:

- An AI coding tool deleted a company’s live database. After being told not to touch it, the AI lied and fabricated data to hide it.

- A dating-safety app built without proper human review leaked **72,000 private images**, including ID photos, because nobody set up basic password protection on the storage.

- Another app, built entirely by prompting AI with no human coder involved, leaked **1.5 million private access codes** within 3 days of launch.

- Dozens of AI-built apps shipped with a security setting left off, exposing user data for weeks before anyone noticed.

Every one of these happened the same way: a non-technical person trusted the AI completely and skipped the boring human step of double-checking for holes. Klaus plans Genix as an app to store personal notes. People might not enjoy that data breach to happen. It matters less if his apps avoid the internet and the cloud for backup or login.

AI Sometimes Invents Fake Software — and Hackers Are Ready for It

Here’s a weirder problem: AI coding tools sometimes make up the names of code libraries that do not exist, then confidently tell you to install them. Approximately 1 in 5 AI-written code samples include at least one fake library name.

These fake names aren’t random. The model consistently creates the same fake name repeatedly for the same request. Hackers have figured this out. They watch for these fake names, register them as real packages, and quietly fill them with malware.

They wait for a developer (or an AI) to install it, trusting the AI’s recommendation. This has already happened. Fake packages set up this way have racked up tens of thousands of downloads. A human would not make this mistake. It’s a new security hole that exists only because AI is confidently wrong predictably.

Your “omniscient” AI might be confident, but it might be leaving a vulnerable database and other gaping issues behind a mostly sparkling facade.

So Far, So Bad for Klaus

So, what is the big picture? According to studies, many programmers are probably slower, not faster. Klaus might be faster, but he may be the exception and not the norm. The code his tool produces is likely measurably buggier and less secure than what a human would write. Every real case of someone trusting AI code the way Klaus does ends the same way: a leaked database, a hacked app, or a breach that hits the news before the founder even knows it happened.

But that isn’t the strongest argument. Klaus’s most fundamental mistake isn’t overselling his tools. Klaus does not fully grasp what a software engineer’s job is. Part Two is available here.

Million-Man Mars Colony by 2050?

Ed Scriver — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

You likely know someone who has absolute faith in Musk. They expect a one-million-person Martian colony by 2050. The colony is as unlikely as finding little green men on Mars. We will do the math. Let’s begin by determining the minimum number of trips to Mars he needs to make.

The Math

Musk has proposed a one-million-person Mars colony by 2050. He has said that SpaceX will use the Starship launch vehicle for this purpose. SpaceX listed Starship’s crew capacity as 100 people¹. Divide the colony size by Starship’s crew capacity. We divide one million by one hundred:

One million people divided by 100 people per launch equals 10,000 launches

That requires 10,000 Starship launches. That is a vast number of launches!

What does a launch cost, and what does that cover? Costs include rocket construction, testing, launch infrastructure, fuel, and labor. We will focus on launch costs.

How expensive is a Starship launch? Musk has claimed Starship launches cost up to $100 million each. SpaceX launching 10,000 Starships at present costs yields this calculation:

10,000 launches × $100,000,000 per launch equals $1 trillion.

This gives us an astronomical figure of $1 trillion. SpaceX will not have $1 trillion soon. That vastly exceeds its private funding, contract revenue, and other income combined.

SpaceX made an estimated $13.1 billion in revenue in 2024. Let’s assume SpaceX can sustain similar revenue levels going forward. How long to earn $1 trillion?

$1 trillion divided by $13.1 billion per year equals 76.3 years.

SpaceX would need over 76 years to pay for the $1 trillion. This assumes SpaceX dedicates 100% of revenue to the campaign! Musk’s 2050 timeline appears unrealistic; 2100 is more plausible.

An illustration of the proposed $1 trillion coin.

Someone proposed a $1 trillion coin in 2011. If only Musk could get one, he could reach Mars!

But you say that $13.1 billion is its revenue from operations. What about the money it gets from investors? What does that amount to? According to this website, SpaceX has received 30 rounds of funding, with all but three of the amounts publicly disclosed. The disclosed funding amounts add up to under $11 billion between 2002 and 2023. That averages out to how much per year?

$11 billion divided by 21 years equals $550 million per year.

Let’s add that $550 million to its supposed yearly revenue of $13.1 billion. How long to reach $1 trillion?

$1 trillion divided by ($13.1 billion + $0.55 billion) per year equals 73.5 years.

Counting all known investments, raising $1 trillion would take about 74 years.That’s unrealistic; a trillion-dollar raise would consume all revenue and investments. This cannibalization of resources leaves nothing for operations and leaves it with no ability to generate the $13 billion of revenue it needs to generate every year!

Musk says he hopes to reduce the cost of Starship launches down to $10 million. They would still require SpaceX to find $100 billion. How SpaceX will finance this project is uncertain. That equals roughly seven years of revenue. Were SpaceX to use all of its revenue, it could do this by 2032. It cannot plausibly spend all revenue on Starship launches. How would it keep funding Starship if it was not spending money on money-making things like launch contracts for the government and so forth?

Musk has said he hopes to reduce Starship launch costs down to $1 million. A launch cost of $1 million is 1% of the current price. I am dubious about this assertion. Should he do this, SpaceX needs $10 billion to launch the Starships. $10 billion is an amount of money they can more realistically hope to find somewhere.

Unfortunately, $10 billion is approximately equal to the total amount of funding they have received during their entire lifetime at the time of writing. It is unclear where SpaceX would secure that money while funding other programs like Falcon research.

To travel to Mars efficiently, one needs to consider the Mars launch windows. Mars launch windows are the most energy and time-efficient routes between Earth and Mars. They occur when Mars and Earth line up in their orbits to be massively far apart. Earth–Mars windows recur about every 26 months and last 7–9 months. Why is this important? It is important for SpaceX to reach Mars using a launch window, assuming it wants to take the optimally efficient route.

Musk’s goal is to send a million people to Mars by 2050. I write in 2025, and he has 25 years to complete it. That seems doable, but trips must fit the launch windows. How many launch windows does SpaceX have before 2050? They are every 26 months. Multiply 25 years by 12, then divide by 26:

25 years × 12 months per year divided by 26 months per transfer window equals 11.5385 transfer windows.

We get 11.5 transfer windows. Let’s say he has 12 transfer windows to use. That sounds promising! Not so fast.

To meet the 25-year goal requires 10,000 Starship launches. How many launches per window does that imply?

10,000 launches divided by 12 windows equals 833..33 launches per window.

I will be generous and round down to 833. So, he needs to launch 833 Starships within each 7 to 9 month window.

One Starship lifting off from its tower. Now imagine 833 of these in nine months. Photo: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Where to put your multi-trillion dollar colony?

This is impractical. How many Starships per month? The best-case scenario is a 9-month window, so let us assume that for every launch window.

833.33 launches per month divided by 9 months equals 92.5 launches.

Our math gives us about 92 Starships per month (I am being generous). How many per day?

92 launches divided by 30 days equals 3.083 launches per day

SpaceX would need three Starship launches per day for nine months. This is the best-case scenario for nine-month windows. Seven-month windows require more Starships a month:

833 Starships per month divided by 7 months equals 119 Starships per month.

That is 119 launches per month, or about how many per day?

119 Starships divided by 30 days equals 3.97 Starships per day.

So SpaceX must average four launches per day for seven months. Can SpaceX sustain 3–4 launches per day for 7–9 months? Can he repeat this every 26 months for 25 years? If you think that’s doable, I have a bridge that might interest you.

Since its 2002 founding, the Falcon 9 has flown 487 times over 22 years. If we take the mean number of flights from this, we get 22 rockets per year, or 1.8 flights per month.

This understates recent launch activity. In 2024, SpaceX launched 134 rockets. That averages 11 per month, or 2.75 per week. That is an impressive number of launches. However, it still falls well short of what they would need.

How much better must SpaceX perform? Assuming it does 4 launches a day, we need to find the number of launches per month and divide that by 11:

4 launches per day × 30 days divided by 11 launches per month equals 10.91

To properly use the upcoming Mars launch windows, it will need to launch rockets at 11 times its current average. No evidence supports an eleven-fold increase before the window.

This puts the nail in the coffin for any 2025 deadline. I am going to nail the coffin shut and set it on fire. SpaceX states Starship requires in-space refueling after launch. Starship must wait in orbit for refueling before heading to Mars. Each Starship launch requires multiple fuel launches. Fuel rockets connect to the Starship rocket in orbit and inject fuel into it. Musk has said it needs 8 such launches. NASA estimates it is closer to 16. Assume ten refueling launches per Starship.

We no longer need to launch merely 3 or 4 Starships every day during the launch windows. That implies ten fuel launches per Starship each day.

SpaceX would need 30–40 fuel launches per day for 7–9 months. Those numbers imply 33–44 daily launches for 7–9 months!

Assume 33 daily launches over seven months. How many launches in seven months?

33 rockets per day × (30 × 7) days equals 6,930 rockets

That is 6,930 rockets spread over seven months! SpaceX launched 134 rockets in 2024. That averages out to one launch every 3 days. That falls short of 33 daily rocket launches.

During that seven-month launch window, it will need to launch 50 times as many rockets as it did in all of 2024! How workable does that sound?

Those launches are expensive. What will they cost? Assume SpaceX cuts costs to $10 million per launch. SpaceX needs to launch ten fuel rockets for each of the 10,000 Starships, or 100,000 fuel rockets. How much will that cost?

100,000 × $10 million equals $1 trillion.

That will cost $1 trillion. That is $1 trillion for the fuel launches, not the Starship launches. Just above India’s 2006 GDP of $940 billion and roughly 60% of the $1.746 trillion 2024 GPD of Australia.

Suppose Musk reduces the cost down to an unrealistic $1 million per launch. SpaceX will require $100 billion just for launching fuel!

Let’s suppose each of these rockets costs $50 million to launch. $50 million is a little less than the $67 million it costs to launch the average Falcon 9 rocket. How much would SpaceX need to spend?

$50 million × 100,000 equals $5 trillion.

This does not seem workable to me. Does it seem workable to you?

At current costs of about $50 million per Starship launch, it would cost $5 trillion. That equals ~18% of 2023 US GDP, 1.4× India’s 2023 GDP, and ~3× Australia’s 2023 GDP.

These numbers are astronomical! SpaceX is a space company, and its reaching the stars is its business. However, SpaceX cannot raise the GDP of developed nations, such as India or Australia. $5 trillion is nearly a quarter of the GDP of the United States, the wealthiest nation on Earth! Can SpaceX find between $100 billion and $5 trillion to spend on this one aspect of the Martian missions? No, why would anyone believe that? If you do, I have some prime bridges and skyscrapers to offer you.

An artist’s concept of a Mars base. The price tag is not shown.

What will this cost? Likely hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

Optimism

What about optimism? Aren’t you being pessimistic? What if SpaceX proves this analysis wrong? Everything seems impossible until geniuses like Tesla, Bell or Edison prove everyone wrong and they change the world with revolutionary technology.

Unfounded optimism is faith. Optimism is rational when grounded in evidence. I hope future phones will outperform my laptop. Current trends support that possibility. My current phone is far more powerful than my first computer. The pace of technological development suggests that this may happen again within my lifetime. Computing took off like a rocket in recent decades, and its destination is anyone’s guess.

Should I believe SpaceX can get one million people to Mars by 2050? The evidence suggests SpaceX cannot do this. It is quite obvious that SpaceX does not possess sufficient funds. Nor do I have any reason to think it will increase its launch rate by a factor of 50. No, the evidence suggests it cannot do either of these. It would be irrational to ignore the facts and pretend the evidence supports the possibility of either option.

If I were to believe this, I would do it on faith. It is not based on evidence. That may be optimism, but it is irrational optimism. I will have no part in it. It seems absolute faith in Musk’s ability to do this is unreasonable. One should not accept everything Musk, or anyone else, says without question. Especially when the claims are this absurd…

Musk obviously cannot get one million people to Mars by 2050. If you see a problem with my math, show me. It is safe to assume Musk cannot launch 33 rockets a day or 6,000 rockets a year by 2050. I have no reason to believe SpaceX can launch so many rockets in such short periods. Am I to take that on faith? As a rational person, I take nothing on faith.

Rational optimism is not taking things on faith.

You can be optimistic about Musk getting to Mars. However, that is irrational. Optimism requires evidence, not foolish dreams. It is based on your assessment of the evidence. There is no evidence Musk can do this and considerable evidence that he cannot. Therefore, any such optimism is irrational in this instance.

Remember Elizabeth Holmes offering tiny little machines to do blood tests? Musk is the Elizabeth Holmes of rocket technology. Offering impossible dreams and burning money as efficiently as his rockets burn oxygen.

Conclusion

The debate ends here! Basic, high-school level calculations expose the claim’s flaws. I made it look easy because it is. Musk likes to pretend he is an engineer. If he’s an engineer, why not run the numbers? SpaceX engineers should speak up. I assume they know Musk will not listen to reason on this issue. If he knows it’s impossible, then he’s misleading the public.

Reality check: Musk won’t achieve this by 2050. Why not? Starship’s crew capacity of 100 is a serious problem. It requires ten thousand crewed launches. And each of those needs another ten fuel launches! SpaceX needs to launch over 100,000 rockets to get one million people to Mars. This price point prohibits SpaceX from affording this project before 2050. SpaceX likely lacks the resources for this endeavor. SpaceX lacks a credible path to raise the required trillions.

Suppose someone says they need $1 trillion to do something. It is best to assume they cannot do it. They are lying, scamming you, or both.

Perhaps SpaceX will release a Starship design that does not require it to launch at least 10 rockets of fuel per launch. It still needs to launch 10,000 rockets. It would need to make rockets with a greater crew capacity. However, launching heavier ships would cost more.

This article considers only the cost of sending people to Mars. It has not considered the cost of constructing habitation, food, medical resources or any of the other costs. Such costs would obviously be considerable, and we might explore them in a future article. To give you an idea, food costs for the trip to Mars would cost over $2 billion.

What conclusion should a rational person draw from this? Musk cannot establish a colony of one-million people by 2050. This plan is out of this world. This is not how a professional space company should reach for Mars.

He is unlikely to achieve this within most readers’ lifetimes. Sorry, Musk, case closed, pending further evidence. You cannot do this, so stop telling everyone that you can. I am all for aiming beyond this Earth. To do that, design a scheme anchored to Earth. You can’t get to Mars if you are floating around aimlessly in space. Start somewhere. What about somewhere in this reality? That would be a good start...

Notes

SpaceX used to list this number on the Starship website before removing it. ↩

Is Color In The Object Or The Light?

Ed Scriver — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Why are apples red or the sky blue? What causes things to have their specific colors? Three answers appear often:

Color is in the object.
Color is an aspect of light.
Color comes from the way light interacts with the visual system.

Isaac Newton studied this question in the seventeenth century. He passed white light through a prism, and it split into separate rays. He concluded that light contains color. Newton believed particles made up light, with each color originating from particles of a specific size. His ideas were influential, although modern physics does not support them. We shall return to this experiment shortly.

Is Color in the Light?

Many people treat color as a feature of light. They speak of “red” light or “blue” light. This implies that color is a property of light. The facts do not support this. Light has properties like wavelength, frequency, and energy. None of these include color.

“Blue wavelengths” refers to electromagnetic waves in a certain range. Light in that range produces the experience of blue because of how the visual system responds. The color is not in the light.

You can study light and still never find color inside it. One can isolate a photon and measure its properties. You will not find “blueness” or “redness.” Physics has a detailed picture of photons, yet it does not treat color as one of their properties.

Color comes from the interaction between light and the eye. Light provides a stimulus. The eye responds. The brain produces the experience.

Is Color in the Object?

Many thinkers once claimed objects held their colors. They said apples contain redness, and the sky contains blueness. Studies show no such features. No object contains color. An object has many properties, but none of them is color.

People speak as if objects hold color. They say an apple has redness. You can examine an apple or the sky and never find color in either. Color is not in the object.

Color is a mode of perception. The object reflects certain wavelengths. Light hits the eye, and the eye reacts. The eye responds to those wavelengths, and you perceive the colors.

Light, Wavelength, and Vision

The eye responds to light that reaches the retina. Light behaves like a wave. It has a wavelength. The human eye responds to wavelengths between about 380 and 700 nanometers. Light in this range produces visual sensations. Light outside this range reaches the eye, yet the eye does not respond.

Electromagnetic radiation spans many wavelengths. Only a small part is visible. Different wavelengths produce different color sensations. The retina and brain create these sensations when they respond to incoming light.

Color comes from the interaction between the eye and light. The object absorbs some wavelengths and reflects others. The eye responds to the reflected wavelengths. Different wavelengths cause different colors to be perceived.

The apple aborbs most wavelengths of light, and reflect red wavelengths.

Reflective Properties of Objects

Color perception depends on how an object reflects light. An apple absorbs most wavelengths and reflects those between 625 and 740 nanometers. These reflected wavelengths produce the sensation of red.

Strawberries appear red because they reflect specific wavelengths. They do not contain redness. They reflect light in a way that triggers the perception of red. The object’s reflective behavior decides which wavelengths reach the eye. The eye reads those wavelengths and produces the color experience.

The nature of an object determines which wavelengths of light it absorbs and which it reflects. An object’s nature determines which wavelengths of light it reflects. This means that observers will perceive certain colors, while they will not perceive most others.

Perceiving the Object

We see objects through the light they reflect. The light carries information about the object. The eye reads that information and produces the perception.

We can judge distance by how light reaches the eye. Known size, apparent size, and parallax give simple cues. Once you know the distance, you can estimate the size. We learn about objects by studying the light they reflect. The eye reads this light and creates the perception. Color is part of this process.

Objectivity

Color perception arises from physical interactions. An apple reflects certain wavelengths because of its structure. Under normal conditions, it reflects the same wavelengths.

Those with normal vision perceive the same colors. When observing an apple, the colorblind perceive shades of gray and black, instead of red or green. The apple stays the same. The light stays the same. However, that person’s visual system works differently.

The nature of the apple nor the light changed. The difference comes from the eyes. Color depends on the visual system. The eye and brain create the experience. Colorblind visual systems produce different sensations.

Does that make your visual system nonobjective? No. If you perceive color, your visual system works according to its nature. If you are colorblind, your visual system has a different nature, but it is acting according to its nature. In both cases, you perceive what the nature of your visual system perceives.

It is not a subjective experience. Both visual systems act according to their nature. That nature is not subject to subjective factors. The nature of your visual system is an objective fact determined by its nature and is not subjective.

On the left is how a normal person might perceive an apple, and on the right how a colorblind person might.

The Prism Experiment Reconsidered

Newton’s prism experiment shows that white light contains many wavelengths. Each wavelength produces a different color experience. Colorblind observers do not see these colors. They see shades of gray.

Color is not a property of light. Light delivers wavelengths, and all observers receive the same wavelengths. Colorblind observers receive the same wavelengths. Yet, their vision perceives blacks, grays, lacking the colors others observe. Even though they are interacting with exactly the same light as everyone else. The light stays the same; the perception changes. This shows that color comes from the visual system, not from the light.

Conclusion

Objects reflect certain wavelengths. Light carries those wavelengths to the eye. The eye and brain create the color you see. Color arises from the interaction between the visual system and light of particular wavelengths, and those wavelengths depend on the physical nature of the object.

Other senses follow the same pattern. Hearing, taste, and smell come from external signals acting on sensory organs. Each sense produces its own type of experience. The sensations of color, smell, and sound are not properties of objects, air, light, or waves. They result from how light, sound, and airborne particles interact with sensory systems.

Color resides neither within the object nor in light. It is in how light from objects interacts with the eye and brain. Color results from the interaction of light, the eye, and the brain. It is a mode of perception. It is a byproduct of how our sensory organs interact with light and not an inherent property of objects or light.

Islam - The Cause of 9/11

Ed Scriver — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we shall see that the cause of 9/11 is Islam. It is the Islamic religion and specifically, Islamic ideology. The original version of this article was cowritten by my wife Ash Scriver.

Introduction

The World Trade Center once towered over much of the surrounding New York. It stood as a symbol of the heights achievable by men of reason and self-esteem. It symbolized the achievements of a culture valuing freedom and reason.

Much like the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center was a symbol of Western values. A symbol of the American Dream rooted in every individual’s right to:

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Declaration of Independence

The American dream is:

Life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.

James Adams, 1931.

The World Trade Center was destroyed by savages. We will get to that...

Islam Attacks

We shall now look at two of the Islamic attacks on the West and evil attempts to justify them.

February 26, 1993

One terrorist attack on these values came on February 26, 1993. An Islamic militant, Ramzi Yousef, cowardly attacked Western values. He killed six people and injured a further 1,042 people.

During the 1998 trial, Yousef condemned the United States for its victory over Japan in 1945 and its economic embargo against a rights-violating Cuba.

You keep talking also about collective punishment and killing innocent people to force governments to change their policies; you call this terrorism when someone would kill innocent people or civilians in order to force the government to change its policies. Well, when you were the first one who invented this terrorism.

Ramzi Yousef, Wikipedia.

Yousef dropped context and pretended that military defense of a nation is equivalent to terrorism. On what grounds? Because both involve the loss of innocent lives!

Terrorism is the initiation of force via threats of violence in order to instill terror upon a people or its government.

Is that what America did when it fought a war against Germany? No, it did not initiate the war. It responded to the violence inflicted on it by Germany. A war of self-defence is not terrorism; it is a morally necessary response to terrorism. It is immoral to equate a war of self-defense with terrorism.

The equivocations continue:

You were the first one who killed innocent people, and you are the first one who introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you dropped an atomic bomb which killed tens of thousands of women and children in Japan and when you killed over a hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, in Tokyo with fire bombings.

You killed them by burning them to death. And you killed civilians in Vietnam with chemicals, as with the so-called Agent Orange. You killed civilians and innocent people, not soldiers, in every single war you went to. You went to war more than any other country in this century, and then you have the nerve to talk about killing innocent people.

Ramzi Yousef, Wikipedia

The nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were an act of heroism. What was the alternative to the atomic bombing of those two cities? A bloody invasion of Japan that would have cost over a million American lives. The war would have destroyed much of Japan. Millions of Japanese would have died.

The Japanese government came to be grateful for the bombings. The minister of the navy described the atomic bombings as a “gift from heaven”. He believed they had saved the Japanese from their own foolishness. According to Emperor Hirohito’s chief advisor, peace had been “assisted by the atomic bomb”.

We must not judge the morality of a nation by the number of times it goes to war. The reason for going to war matters. Is it fighting a war of self-defense? Is it a selfless war, sacrificing soldiers’ lives for nothing? A nation may go to war for self-defense as many times as necessary.

We can question why America fought the Korean and Vietnam wars. Were some of the motivations for the war altruistic? Arguably. We can condemn America for the ineffective way it fought these wars. We can condemn America for attacking Iraq for altruistic reasons, when Iran was clearly the proper target.

But we should not condemn America for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan was a direct threat to America and its people. It was a moral necessity as soon as Japan threatened America’s values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Doing this to Hiroshima was heroism. The alternative was doing this to many other Japanese cities.

He continued:

And now you have invented new ways to kill innocent people. You have a so-called economic embargo, which kills nobody other than children and elderly people, and which, other than Iraq, you have been placing the economic embargo on Cuba and other countries for over 35 years.

....The Government in its summation and opening statement, said that I was a terrorist. Yes, I am a terrorist, and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it is against the United States government and against Israel because you are more than terrorists; you are the ones who invented terrorism and use it every day. You are liars, butchers, and hypocrites. [29]

Ramzi Yousef, Wikipedia

Yousef condemns America for acts of violence, terrorism and inventing terrorism.

Islam engaged in religious terrorism long before the United States existed. Islamic states fought savage wars against each other for hundreds of years before the US existed. It engaged in savagery, which Western culture is fundamentally opposed to but which Islam praises.

The Quran contains at least 109 verses describing war with nonbelievers.

Countless verses call for graphic violence, including the murder of nonbelievers. Here are some of them:

As for those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.

Quran 3:56

That seems a clear condemnation of the so-called “crime” of non-belief.

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter, they shall have a grievous chastisement

Quran 5:33

And then there is this:

(Remember) when your Lord inspired the angels... I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore, strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.

Quran 8:12

The Quran is older than America and modern Western culture. So, in what sense did the West invent terrorism? Looks like the Quran was doing quite well before the West came along.

During the trial of Yousef, Judge Duffy did not morally condemn Islam for its death worship. She apologized for Islam and the faith. She did not condemn the sacrifice collection of such cults and religions. Duffy condemned the ego, the very Western values that had made the twin towers possible!

Ramzi Yousef, you claim to be an Islamic militant. Of all the persons killed or harmed in some way by the World Trade Center bomb, you cannot name one who was against you or your cause. You did not care, just so long as you left dead bodies and people hurt.

Ramzi Yousef, you are not fit to uphold Islam. Your God is a god of death. Your God is not Allah ...

You weren’t seeking conversions. The only thing you wanted to do was to cause death. Your God is not Allah. You worship death and destruction. What you do, you do not do for Allah; you do it only to satisfy your twisted sense of ego.

You would have others believe that you are a soldier, but the attacks on civilization for which you stand convicted here were sneak attacks which sought to kill and maim totally innocent people.

You, Ramzi Yousef, came to this country pretending to be an Islamic fundamentalist, but you cared little or nothing for Islam or the faith of the Muslims. Rather, you adored not Allah, but the evil yourself have become. And I must say that as an apostle of evil, you have been most effective. [29]

Judge Duffy, Wikipedia

But we have seen that according to the Quran itself, Yousef was acting entirely consistently with the Quran.

The Quran has countless verses like the ones we have already seen. Not one of them says that a true Muslim shall spare a heretic imprisonment or a violent death! Yousef was acting in accordance with the Quran, as Islam demands. Let us look at another quote:

Not equal are those of the believers who sit (at home), except those who are disabled (by injury or are blind or lame, etc.), and those who strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah with their wealth and their lives. Allah has preferred in grades those who strive hard and fight with their wealth and their lives above those who sit (at home). Unto each, Allah has promised good (Paradise), but Allah has preferred those who strive hard and fight, above those who sit (at home) by a huge reward.

Quran 4:95

According to his verse, murderous Muslims are morally superior to those who do not fight nonbelievers! Judge Duffy, you were wrong; Yousef was a champion of Islam.

September 11, 2001 - Islam Attacks Again

On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists attacked the Western values of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” once more. On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists attacked the Western values of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” once more. This time, the Twin Towers collapsed. 2,192 civilians died, and 414 sworn personnel died.

I wish the West did not apologize for its values. I would love it if America stood firmly and morally behind its victory over Japan in 1945. If only Judge Duffy and America had morally condemned Islamic ideologies as evil. If only...

To the Apologists and Appeasers of Islam

On its Memorial Day in 2020, Facebook hid content that read:

I am not convinced that faith can move mountains, but I have seen what it can do to skyscrapers.

William Gascoyne

Facebook calls this truth “cruel and insensitive”. It likes to shield people from being offended when people criticize their religious views.

However, no rational person should attempt to shield someone from such offenses. If one embraces religion, one does not have the right to be spared any non-violent attack on their religion. Anyone may criticize you for making that choice. Nobody may demand that anyone else provide them with a platform with which to do so.

Religion is worthy of ridicule and attack. It is irrational and anti-life, and if you embrace religion; you have no business expecting reasonable people to respect your religious sensitivities. Neither Facebook nor anyone else has any business trying to shield people from criticism of their religious views. Facebook disagrees. It thinks it must spare Muslims from offense. Facebook is in league with a cult of murderous, woman-hating pedophiles.

How should the West respond to Islam? It should expose it for what it is. What is it? A genocidal, women-hating cult of child abuse and pro-slavery. It is not a religion of peace. If you read the Quran, it is clearly not peaceful. It is clearly not trying to be so. Devout Muslims must raise a sword and demand infidel blood. No devout follower could say otherwise. Not if they read a significant portion of a book that frequently calls for murder for the crime of heresy.

Depicting Muhammad is a heresy punishable by death!

Islam is a cult of violent oppression and genocide against heretics. Islam has violence written into its defective DNA. We cannot remove this from the religion without creating a fundamentally different religion.

Since Islam fundamentally demands the constant violent slaughter of non-believers, it cannot be a religion of peace, and the truly devout must be mass murderers or support mass murder. All Islams are called to murder and told that to refuse to do so makes them lesser.

Yet, some Muslims deny this. It is these “moderate” practitioners who lend Islam a pretense of peace. But that does not change the fact that Islam demands the slaughter of heretics. That is a dangerous, murderous death cult.

Yet, people treat those who call Islam a violent death cult as Islamophobic. People label any critic of Islam a “hater” and an “enemy of Muslims”. Their crime? The recognition of the nature of Islam.

You might think it is the Muslim world that treats critics of Islam this way. Yes, the Muslim world treats critics this way. But so does the Western world. The Western world is intolerant of religious criticism. It treats all forms of religious intolerance as hate crimes. As if it is a hate crime to condemn religion. Even those religions that loudly call for murder and other hate crimes!

We cannot hold religion above reproach, as above criticism. No form of irrationality is beyond criticism. The moment we hold religion as above criticism is the moment we hold irrationality as beyond criticism. That is the moment we suspend criticism of the irrational. When we hold the irrational as superior to the rational, we have surrendered reason to unreason. We must never allow Islam, or any other religion, to be beyond criticism.

Islam is a violent ideology demanding the slaughter of infidels. Not supporting the violent slaughter of non-believers is heresy. Yet, we are to support this religion and consider it a religion of peace? Can we not criticize this religion?

To support Islam just because it is a religion is no better than supporting Manson’s apocalyptic death cult. This is true regardless of how many people might have signed up for the cult.

If we respect reality and life, then we must see Islam as an enemy of both. It is a genocidal death cult. We should not allow it to pose a serious threat to the Western world. We must stand up to it and declare it as the enemy of life, liberty, reason and freedom that it is. Even if it means we must wipe all dangerous Islamic states from the Earth. We must not allow Islamic states to threaten the West. To allow Islamic states to threaten the West is an act of cowardice.

However, we have a problem. The West refuses to accept that any religion can be the enemy. Why? Because most Western nations have one religion or another and are thus unwilling to accept that religion can be a problem. As long as the West embraces religion, it is unlikely that they will ever be able to declare war against any religion.

That is exactly what we must do. We should accept that religion is evil. Every religion. The entire concept of religion is the embrace of evil. It is the willful denial of reality in preference for baseless fantasy and emotion, which is the core of all evil. In this respect, all religions are fundamentally irrational and evil. If we hold that religion is anything but evil, then we cannot identify any religion is the enemy we must fight.

As long as we grant that any religion is valid, then we can and, many of us will, grant that Islam too is valid. If we are to excuse Christianity or Hinduism for their irrationalities, why not Islam?

The West pretends Islam should exist and that it only needs to have the violence purged from it. As long as our culture believes that any religion has any business existing, it cannot identify another religion as an ideological enemy. It may identify aspects of the religion as evil, but it will never allow itself to identify the religion itself as fundamentally immoral and evil.

But other religions are not violent! Aren’t they? Tell that to the countless Christian, Jewish and Hindu terrorists acting in accordance with their faith. All religions reject reason and embrace war, including Hinduism. Once you have rejected reason, you have no rational means of convincing people to sign up for your faith. Violence is one way to get converts. That is why the major religions all advocate violence somewhere in their teachings. The more religious you are, the more likely you are to be violent.

I am an antitheist; I oppose all religions.

If we wish to preserve the West, then we must utterly crush, demoralize, and reveal Islam. We must show it as the weak husk that it becomes when it loses the support of the good. It has no power to destroy us if we do not let it. Islam is a religion of murderous savages that has no power to destroy the Western world determined to destroy it.

We must wage war against Islam with every shred of military might we have. Until we reveal every Islamic State that opposes us as a gang of desperate, cowardly savages. We must show them that to oppose is to court death, and that Islam has no power in the West.

The West must show that Islam can not, despite what it wishes, destroy or take over the culture of the West. A culture that knows what it is; a death cult embraced by murderous barbarians.

Anything else is cowardice and the refusal to face an abundantly obvious threat. To embrace Islam as worthy of cultural protection or even as somehow equivalent to Western culture is to abandon reason and life and embrace death and barbarism.

We acknowledge people’s right to practice religion. But it becomes a problem when it enters politics and they force it upon others. It becomes a problem when people use it as an excuse for crimes and violations of individual rights.

You cannot hide behind your religion. If you choose to be a criminal, we will treat you accordingly. If you want to manifest evil, you are evil, and we must treat you accordingly.

We are not saying that we should kill all Muslims or all religious people. No, but we should oppose religious fundamentalism for what it is - the genuine expression of its religion.

The West must show that we will not allow terrorists to kill while hiding behind religious freedom. It must shield its people from the swords of religious extremists. Anything else equals prolonged suicide, a rejection of our right to live.

Leave us alone, and we will leave you alone to worship death and ruin your own lives with evil ideologies in the privacy of your own homes and temples.

That is the beauty of a free society. You get freedoms. That includes the freedom to ruin your own life as you choose. There are many wonderful Western values. One is that you have the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. You have the right to “pursue” happiness. You get the freedom to take responsibility for your own life! And the freedom to make irrational decisions and face the consequences of your ideology and actions. But you do not get to force them on anyone else.

If you choose to force those ideologies upon anyone else, if you choose to terrorize anyone else in the name of those ideologies, we will cut you down!