A few nights ago, over a liberal quantity of beers, my friends and I came up with our latest nonsensical conspiracy theory. Google was started by some of a group of time travelers who were sent back in time from an apocalyptic future bringing advanced technology with them. They would use <i>just</i> enough of the tech to make vast sums of money, then use that money to invest in the tech that destroyed their future world.<p>By investing in tech they already know would work, they would vacuum up all the resources and talent around that technology so that nobody else would bother (because who could come in cold and compete against a titan like google?) and then some time later kill all of the projects very publicly in order to make us all think that these technologies were nonviable.<p>Except instead with every piece of world changing technology they killed, they were buying their future Earths freedom from the apocalypse they were fleeing from, even if that future they were creating destroyed their own and left humanity in a just post-agrarian stage of development.<p>This group has been infiltrating our timeline for decades, first with blimps, then Atari, then Xerox, now Google.<p>Their motto is "save us before we destroy us"
This article has a few details that are very different than the way I heard it. What follows are rumors, but I work in this industry so I have a few sources that I trust.<p>Google did not win the bidding over Facebook. Facebook actually won the bidding with a bid of about 60 million dollars. Facebook pulled out during the due diligence phase. Google swooped in and picked it up for about 20 million after Facebook pulled out. (Rumors remember, I can't find sources for these numbers right now)<p>Internally, Google was very quickly disappointed in their purchase. They found out that they had pretty much bought a nice PowerPoint slide deck and not much else. Titan still had a <i>long</i> way to go before they had a viable drone.<p>Anyway, that is the rumor that I heard.<p>I'm only somewhat envious of the drone companies that are selling out for tens of millions of dollars, while I sit here and work my butt off to keep making a product.
<a href="https://youtu.be/b7SjOOuTct0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/b7SjOOuTct0</a>
At this rate people will soon use "alphabet" as a verb the same way they made "google" into a verb:<p><i>"we were doing steady progress but 3 months before release the management decided to alphabet the project and send everyone home."</i>
I think what's sad is not that they shut down the project soon after acquiring Titan Aerospace, but that they kept it quiet for almost a year. That sort of PR practice makes me worry about their internal culture.<p>Edit: It concerns me because I wonder how many other projects they've announced and shut down without telling us, and what that must be like for the employees who are no doubt under NDA who are shuffled around and unable to talk about it. Imagine if your company were acquired by X, and then you get fired, and you can't even tell your friends or potential employers it's because X axed the project.
Interesting. Though I wish someone pursued this particular tech (solar-powered drones) further - high-altitude, long-duration drones could be a good replacement for many things we use <i>satellites</i> for, and drones would be <i>much</i> cheaper to launch...
They're leaving the market to Airbus Zephyr, which was in the lead already?<p><a href="https://airbusdefenceandspace.com/our-portfolio/military-aircraft/uav/zephyr/" rel="nofollow">https://airbusdefenceandspace.com/our-portfolio/military-air...</a>
Much like aircraft-delivered nuclear weapons, are these being quickly replaced by impending low orbit micro-satellite constellations under development now?
Oh yeah, Loon is going to be so much more feasible. Loon makes the spatial economics of providing internet so much worse since it has to cover the 3/4 of the world that is ocean plus all of the places that are deeply uninhabited.<p>To get fiber into rural places you just have to parallel the electric lines. Except there is something ritually unclean about wires and we can't do it.
Cached version to counter HN effect: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dtWSiWi8N-AJ:pascaleggert.de/macpro.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=za" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dtWSiWi...</a>