Given the success of the Perseverance and Tianwen-1 rovers, I'm upping my estimate to the chances of success. Last time I calculated rover success rates over the past 20 years, that included the Mars Polar Lander, but it's now long enough in the past that I'm ignoring it. Additionally, the Tianwen-1 demonstrates that someone besides NASA can land on Mars successfully (basically hadn't been done since the 70s). There's also been a successful demonstration of Starship high altitude landing. Of course, this is all based on SpaceX actually trying to laun...

Taking the outside view, the only space agencies to successfully land something on Mars are the Soviets and NASA. Both took over 10 years after their first attempt to send any probe to Mars, lander or not. ESA has not had a successful lander on Mars in 15 years of trying. However, it's unclear if this question would have deemed the Beagle 2 a success; it did not transmit any data, but later satellite images indicated it landed while failing to deploy its solar panels. Additionally, since 1999, there have been 9 rover or lander missions, with 5/9 succee...

If you look at Our World in Data's info for US vaccinations in the last 3 months, percentage points vaccinated each month are: | Month| Percentage Point Change| | ----------- | ----------- | | Sept | 2.6pp | | Oct | 2.1pp| |Nov | 3.4pp| An exact repeat would give us 8.1pp from the ~70.6 vaccinated today, resulting in 78.7. The rate should decay over time. I would guess the increase in vaccinations for November was for children aged 5-12 who were newly allowed to get the vaccine starting October 28. Unless something like that happens again, I would gu...

Yeah this [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo#Robo-taxis) has stated for 6 months that "By November 2019, the service was operating autonomous vehicles without a safety backup driver, the first autonomous service worldwide operating without safety drivers in the car". This sounds like L4 autonomy. And looking at [Waymo's safety report](https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/documents/safety/2021-12-waymo-safety-report.pdf), it repeatedly references that they have SAE level 4 technology in their autonomous vehicles. I t...

Really impressive ambition here from SpaceX, trying to get 1 starship per week by the end of 2020.

Be warned, this is an Elon Musk timeline, so probably not accurate.

— edited by postlibertarian

@gordonfierce Yeah although according to the question we have to wait 10 months from the edit. Looks like this was first added to Wikipedia on an Aug 17th edit. So 10 months after that is June 17th 2022

@(frxtz) Definitely agree. Finding the right reference class is important. We might want to say the reference class is how long it's taken SpaceX to do unprecedented things in the past. SpaceX first said they would send a rocket to Mars in 2022, humans in 2024. Of course, SpaceX has almost always delayed new breakthroughs beyond their initial estimate. So how long will these be delayed? SpaceX has to launch by Jan 2029 and then successfuly land on Mars before this question resolves (no more transfer windows until 2031). So is 7 years past the super ini...

Outbreak in South Korea associated with a weird church. South Korea may now have the largest number of cases outside China (depends on if you count the cruise ship in Japan).

@postlibertarian Actually I think this is showing year-to-date at each month as the years go on. Which is not what this question is asking.

How many electoral college votes will Donald Trump get on December 14 when the electors cast their ballots (including faithless electors)? Not sure how to phrase this, but while we've had a question about how many electoral college votes were won by a candidate, that's a separate question from what the electors will actually do. 2016 saw several faithless electors. Several Republican talking heads have called for state legislators to pass legislation ignoring popular results in their states (due to what they term as electoral fraud) and instead just cer...

@(isinlor) These are interesting points, although they wouldn't affect the initial outside view assessment that most space agencies haven't landed on Mars successfully, and when NASA did, it took a while. As well as the overall base rate, given you are launching anything to Mars. Now taking into account the inside view idea that SpaceX will start with a bigger rocket instead of a probe; shouldn't this adjust our expectations to be even lower than the outside view base rate? There has never been a larger rocket sent to Mars, so presumably there may be e...

Why was this question set to close so early? It seems like it would be very helpful to know right now when people predict a concession?