The Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach yet to the Sun

> Now, you might naively think that it's the easiest thing in the world to send a spacecraft to the Sun. After all, it's this big and massive object in the sky, and it's got a huge gravitational field. Things should want to go there because of this attraction, and you ought to be able to toss any old thing into the sky, and it will go toward the Sun.

Yes, yes, speak orbital dynamics to me!

> The problem is that you don't actually want your spacecraft to fly into the Sun or be going so fast that it passes the Sun and keeps moving. So you've got to have a pretty powerful rocket to get your spacecraft in just the right orbit.

What?! No! I mean, yes, you don't want your spacecraft going right into the sun itself, but that's not the major reason why it's difficult! It's that at launch, the spacecraft is already in orbit around the sun - since it came from the Earth. And left to its own devices, it won't want to "fall" into the sun any more than it already is, any more than the Earth is falling into it. Changing orbital parameters that much is expensive in terms of delta-V!

As I recall, the "cheap" way of getting into a low-enough orbit to get that close to the sun is to counterintuitively first expand your orbit massively, and then do a retrograde burn at the highest point. (But I'm guessing the Parker Solar Probe used gravity assists.)

I wonder if some editor cut a large part of this paragraph.

I absolutely hate that AI is the first thing I think of whenever I see things like this now.

Yes, innocent mistakes happen in writing and editing all the time. But look at that whole paragraph you're quoting. It does exactly what sloppily-guided AI does: It's using words in an order that sounds relationally intuitive, but taken as a whole it's ping-ponging across completely unrelated concepts. It can't have come from a human, unless, like you said, parts were removed in editing without re-reading the result.

I disagree. I have encountered tons of humans who do exactly that - Use "words in an order that sounds relationally intuitive, but taken as a whole it's ping-ponging across completely unrelated concepts". It's not unique to AI, it's fairly common across bullshitters of all stripes. But perhaps more tragically, it often happens to actually big thinkers whose brain is connecting dots so fast that they're eliding a bunch of important hops along the way, and while the former is more common, it's easy to confuse for the latter.

Hey, sometimes you get called on in standup when you're trying to do some work, and you just have to glue some words together. I'm just glad nobody's writing those words down and publishing them!