Darksyde has an interesting post up about the future of NASA. We’ve got a new president coming who has promised change — let’s see if one of the changes he will make is to kick the space program out of its rut. I don’t know if he can promise more money to every science program we’ve got, but he could at least put effective, principled administrators in place who will use their budgets more appropriately.
We do have a list of Obama’s promises on science and technology. They do include more investment in the space program, as well as opening up stem cell research, more money for science education, and lots of green energy research. We now have to wait and see if and how he fulfills them.
Those damn astronomers. You can’t trust ’em as far as you can throw ’em.
Well, I can throw them pretty far. I’ve been practicing.
Plus a better-funded NASA could throw them way out into space.
The US economy is now at risk of losing between 7 and 13 million jobs by the end of 2009 (ie possibly more than 16% unemployement rate by the end of next year).
This is not a joke.
For a very detailed analysis, sector by sector, please read :
http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=59666#post59666
This means Obama’s #1, #2, and #3 priorities will have to be to stop the bleeding.
n ths context, a very large govt well structured subsidised program in Science and Technology, both in the public and private sectors, is an absolutely obvious choice. It needs to be started immedately after the new administraton takes office.
It is URGENT !
Just believing in reality based on evidence and reason will be a good start.
In ths context, a very large govt well structured subsidised program in Science and Technology, both in the public and private sectors, is an absolutely obvious choice. It needs to be started immedately after the new administraton takes office.
Oh yes, of course. The perfect solution to economic woes is always to have more government bureaucracy. I mean, who needs a competitive business economy with competitive tax rates and a flexible market, when we can have a massive bloated public sector employing millions of civil servants? I mean, it’s worked so well for socialist countries in the past. Never mind that Reagan and Thatcher managed to rescue their respective countries’ failing economies by cutting taxes and promoting a business-friendly climate. That was clearly just a fluke. The best thing is to go back to the great policies of the 1970s.
In seriousness, science and technology are great things – but they should be done primarily by the private sector. Scientific research is not a job-creation programme, nor is it a form of social welfare. Research should only be funded by the taxpayer if it is shown that the specific research (1) has the potential to bring major economic or social benefits to the country, and (2) cannot or will not be done by the private sector acting individually. Anything else is a criminal waste of the taxpayer’s money.
“Research should only be funded by the taxpayer if it is shown that the specific research (1) has the potential to bring major economic or social benefits to the country, and (2) cannot or will not be done by the private sector acting individually. Anything else is a criminal waste of the taxpayer’s money.”
Walton, I could not agree with this less. Basic research will never be done by the private sector and can never be shown to bring major economic or social benefits until after the fact, not before. Such economy-based research would spell the end of scientific progress, or at least severely hamstring it.
I can has overhead projector?
It will.
It won’t.
Obama has a lot of problems that need to be dealt with immediately, so I think we need to have patience. That said, if he believes in the benefit of basic research, he will bring people to implement that, not just with NASA, but also programs to power our economy by renewable resources. These two go hand in hand.
Walton: you were not serious with your Thatcher comment, right? Britain is still suffering of her heroic changes to this day. And reading a couple of chapters of “The Shock Doctrine” would do you well before hailing Thatcher, Reagan and generally the “free-market” as the solution, and painting failures of socialist states (especially South American) as their own only.
It looks like he’s committing to reviewing/overturning all, or almost all, of Bush’s “executive orders”, so stem cell research will hopefully be given some new life (sorry – couldn’t help myself).
As for the rest of it, we’ll have to wait and see – but I feel a lot better about researcher’s chances under President Obama than I would have under President McCain.
Humanity is a cosmic experiment testing whether ‘life’ can survive ‘intelligence.’ The jury’s out, but the null hypothesis is not yet disproven.
I’m not all that fond of NASA, since it has become more and more a tool in the militarization of space.
I really hope the whole “trip to Mars” crap Bush was pushing is dropped in favor of unmanned satellites and other technology — which, I understand, is where the serious scientific discoveries take place. We don’t need any expensive and useless Cowboys in Space. We’re learning far more from other NASA programs, and they’re hurting for funding.
I think Bob Park stated the situation well in his book Voodoo Science a few years back.
God damn it walton.
Those scientist types, with their heads in the stars
With their dreams of the moon or a mission to mars–
Don’t they realize what government spending is for?
Not science, or progress… but going to war!
Learning how to put people in space isn’t useful?
The worrying thing to me is that during the primaries (and right after I voted for him, too!) he presented a plan to push back the new space missions for five more years to help fund education. Clinton rightly jumped on this and pointed out that without the interest in space exploration that will be gained by getting back to the moon and on to Mars, there won’t be any young astronomers getting excited for NASA no matter how much money you put in. Schools need much more funding, yes, but there are other things that don’t need nearly as much funding. I can think of a few unnecessary wars…
Here is a critical dose of factual info about the dark-dark side Washington lawyering as well as Obama’s lawyering past.
It is highly probable that Obama will apply his lawyerly rhetoric to issues both scientific and political.
Micheele Obama is another Harvard lawyer, as is Obama.
Obama & Michelle met while whoring for Sidley Austin, the 9th largest corporate whorehouse in the world, but only 5th in LawyerNation.
Sidley Austin boasts more than 1800 trained lawyers with offices worldwide..
Some relevant poop on Sidley Austin from Wiki.
Sidley & Austin was among many law firms stung by the Savings & Loan Crisis and was forced to pay $7.5 million to settle legal malpractice claims stemming from its representation of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. Such legal work was profiled in the book by Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith, No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America.
Lincoln S&L was commanded by super whore lawyer and renown smutfighter, Charles Keating.
Keating personally stole more than a cool billion plus from his unsuspecting but depositing flock – some of whom committed suicide after lawyer Charlie wiped them clean.
Bush’s chief lawyer whore for PROTECTING the environment is James Connaughton – a PARTNER at Sidley Austin.
Connaughton has routinely demonstrated that DALAW trumps science every time.
Joe Biden, our new veep, is a the undisputed champion of corporate legal whoring in the Senate.
Joe Biden is licensed to represent, and has the Zionist/Israel Lobby as his number one client,
Joe appropriately sings; “I am a Zionist.”
Hilarious and Bill are Yalie lawyers.
Tricky Dick Nixon got his license to steal from Dook Law, but still made it to the top albeit temporarliy.
Twenty one of the twenty three Watergate conspirators were trained lawyers.
Out of one hundred Senators – 62 are lawyers.
Neither Obama or Biden has a shred of scientific sensibility or training.
[burns]
egggggggggcelent
[/burns]
Amen Rev.
I’ll be willing to put some e-ducats on the proposition that in five years Walton will be a good run-of-the-mill Tory. As I have said, he minds me of the radicals from my college days. Most gave up radicalism and became mainstream conservatives within five years of graduation.
Maybe we can get over this, “let’s send people to mars,” idea for a while. There are a lot of great things we can do with the space program, but people planting flags on other planets in our solar system isn’t that exciting to me.
We should put more research satellites in orbit, looking both up into space and down on earth. How about planning Hubble’s successor? How about closer monitoring of our atmosphere etc…
As far as the other planets go, keep going with the rover type robots. They have been greatly successful.
That’s just my $0.02
spezio
you forgot their connections to the Illuminati
Never mind that Reagan and Thatcher managed to rescue their respective countries’ failing economies by cutting taxes and promoting a business-friendly climate. – Walton
Up to a point, Lord Copper. We’re seeing the outcome of Reagan/Thatcher policies now. Even before the credit crunch, they had led to huge rises in unemployment (disguised in the UK by putting people on incapacity benefit, in the US by putting them in prison), vast trade deficits, and a dangerous dependence on financial services. And of course enormous rises in inequality, but I know that’s a plus as far as you’re concerned.
Walton
“Research should only be funded by the taxpayer if it is shown that the specific research (1) has the potential to bring major economic or social benefits to the country, and (2) cannot or will not be done by the private sector acting individually. Anything else is a criminal waste of the taxpayer’s money.”
I don’t know how it is that you’re so off base, but I also cannot disagree with you more. A huge amount of basic research is funded (I would say the vast majority) only because of government grants and support through institutions like the NSF which are, in the end, funded by John Q. Taxpayer. I would also wager that many researchers would be extremely hard-pressed to prove that their research will have a direct and positive impact on society. Basic research is payed for and subsidized by tax-payers precisely because private companies don’t want to fund something that isn’t certain to turn a profit. To cut off public funding would relegate science to product development and limited (more like timid) steps forward instead of really pushing the boundaries of knowledge that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the universe/world at whole.
In your system CERN, Tevatron, and virtually all astronomy would be completely scrapped as they could never possibly turn a profit and all of them are made possible through governmental support.
Why is it taken as a given that in order to be a science enthusiast, you have to be strongly in favour of increased spending on space exploration?
I think there are much better ways to spend money on science, and I don’t see how NASA is nearly as important as it’s cracked up to be.
Now the teacher is going to think I copied Sastra’s paper… really I didn’t! I just type too slow.
I will have to look into the book voodoo science.
tsg@17,
How is learning to put people into space useful – to an extent commensurate with the immense costs, compared to that of using machines?
I would love to see NASA reinvigorated as a scientific institute. I visited Johnson space center in Houston and felt like I was in an oversized McDonalds, complete with playground and screaming toddlers. Kennedy space center was better but still more about trapping tourist then expanding minds.
edit:
…instead of really pushing the boundaries of knowledge
with work/experiments
that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the universe/world at whole.
I remember NASA funding was pretty much the only thing I agreed with Bush about when he ran for reelection (and it most certainly was not enough to get my support)… and then he flatly failed to follow through with his promises.
Walton, that’s the most sensible thing you’ve ever said. Too bad you meant to be sarcastic.
The 60s and 70s were among the most technologically prolific decades in all of US history. We could go to the moon then; now we rely on Russia for heavy-lift rockets. More to your point, the NASA of those days provided many thousands of jobs for its subcontractors, many of which were private companies.
I rather get the impression that you would have opposed rural electrification if you’d had the chance.
wait… i thought manned space travel was the point. isn’t the objective to find a way off this rock before we destroy it?
I like NASA and all, but isn’t it really an agency we should focus on in happier times? I’m not suggesting we cut science spending – quite the opposite, I think increasing science spending is in order, but that we’d be better off spending our federal dollars on biotechnology and energy. I’d rather see money go to people studying cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and alternative energy sources than getting a person to Mars.
Are we just supposed to never leave this planet?
Machines don’t teach us how to send people into space. Machines can be designed for the environment, people can’t. And machines don’t have to come back.
tsg,
Your answer to “How is learning to put people into space useful?”, seems to be “So we can learn to put people into space!”
“Machines can be designed for the environment, people can’t. And machines don’t have to come back.”
Exactly.
Change from yuppie Lawyerman Obama?
Lawyering is the most powerful & lucrative MONOPOLY in Supernation.
Lawyering extracts more money from the national economy than the entire medical establishment.
In Supernation everything is for sale.
Ohbama, his lawerlady, and his vicey president Biden learned their career whoring well.
Go Ivy league, go Harvards, and help the poor and downtrodden.
Don’t forget to whup up good on those filthy starving Palestinians in the Zionist Concentration Camp in Gaza.
Israel has the money, and lawyers go for the money.
Fashion conscious lawerlady Michelle prefers Oscar de la Renta.
Both Michelle and hubby say that science is just another opinion – which is reasonable if you are trained in DALAW.
Law school is the way to move up.
What a credential!
Spezio, your pseudo-factual anti-legal rants got tired a few years ago. Try finding a new bit of nonsense. I suggest the lizard people. You can invent all the rubbish you want and also not come across as some failed paralegal student.
@37
…huh?
The best think Obama could do would be to call an end to manned spaceflight.
The Big Lie of the Shuttle program was that remote controllers on the ground could not operate equipment 90 miles up, which is why NASA forced Canada to disable remote control of its equipment arm. At the same time, controllers on the ground have been flying all the Shuttle flights after the first one, where they learned a pilot can’t fly the thing reliably.
Today we have controllers on the ground flying aircraft in real time on combat missions half the world away.
There is nothing a human can do in space that a machine cannot do as well, and the cost of putting humans up there, keeping them safe, and bringing them back dominated the cost of spaceflight.
We have robots on Mars. Cassini is exploring Saturn, Messenger is going studying Mercury, Ulysses gave us our first polar views of the Sun, and the Voyagers are returning science data out at the heliopause.
There is no need to risk human lives to explore space. Every Shuttle launch costs about $500 million, and the crew isn’t needed.
Here’s an interesting quote from Richard Dawkins:
“Justifying space exploration because we get non-stick frying pans is like justifying music because it is good exercise for the violinist’s right arm.”
If you’re trying to develop useful technology, it’s clearly not optimal to send probes into space and hope for the best. Especially in these days of global warming and energy crisis.
Rev. BigDumbChimp, KoT, OM at #23 posted:
Fnord!
IYKWIMAITYD.
No kings,
Robert
Partly yes. You didn’t answer my question: are we just supposed to never leave this planet?
Yes, they are useless for teaching us how to send people into space.
Why is PZ even asking the question as to whether Obama will fulfill his election promises re. science? Call me a skeptic, but only a very naîve person takes seriously what any politician says to get elected, and Obama is a politician par excellence. Obama is brilliant at telling people what they want to hear so that they will vote for him, but I see nothing in his track record to indicate he’s a fan of science. He’s all about social change. I’m afraid that science is going to take a very back seat to social issues during his term. He’ll be pouring the bucks into social issues like funding mortgages for people whose eyes were way bigger than their pocket book or work ethic, launching a federal medicare system, etc. Obama couldn’t care squat for science, but he’ll poor billions into social needs.
Oh I know, and Exactly.
Timothy, spezio’s been posting that basic rant on SciBlogs for ages. The names, insults, and pseudo-facts change, but it always seems to boil down to “Lawyers are the cause of all the world’s evils”. And is often only marginally on-topic. Whether shehe’s deranged, had a bad run-in with the legal system, or is simply a failed legal student, has been speculated on without resolution. Whether or not ignoring the twit will make it go away is unknown (albeit I haven’t seen him infesting Orac’s blog for a while, implying there is some way to make him go away).
It would be rather amusing to see someone like Peter Irons take him on…!
The Clown at #44 posted:
I object to the implication that science and social needs are opposed, or unrelated, or somehow necessarily exclusive. Neither is a component in a zero-sum game.
No kings,
Robert
This is related to my earlier post about Johnson, but one of NASA’s biggest problems is how it markets itself to the public. In my opinion they are far to reliant on appealing to the boomer generation’s nostalgia about the Apollo program. As impressive as that feat was, it is not seen as relevant by the younger generations and they need to stop clinging to the rapidly weaning notoriety of the work of generations past. They need to place current research and exploration projects front and center in the public view and push the old exhibits off to the side. NASA’s legacy should not be forgotten but for the world’s premier space agency to still be dependent upon a program that ended thirty years ago as its primary public attraction tells me that their PR department is in severe need of modernization.
Context is everything: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLctxRf7duU
The beneficial side effects of manned space flight is not the primary reason for doing it.
Re my #49:
The pertinent part of the Dawkins video is about 3:50 in.
The physics of a manned trip to Mars demands that it would be much more than an Apollo-like “plant the flag and run” type mission. The team would have to be there for at least a year. If you like what the rovers have been doing, imagine “real” vehicles that could travel at reasonable speed to cover much more area under human control making realtime decisions about what is interesting and to be explored more deeply. A Mars program would have to be structured more like a colonization program and not just a “trip to Mars”.
And while robots and satellites are much more cost effective at collecting science, I doubt they are as capable at generating PR and raising revenue. Robots and satellites do a lot very cheaply, but if your goal is not just to collect science but also to stimulate the economy by building a high tech industry and inspire education, a manned program is the way to go.
Back in the ’60’s when we were going to the moon, I happened to see figures both for the NASA budget and for the cost of cleaning up litter on the nation’s highways. At the height of the space program we were spending more on cleaning up litter than on going to the moon.
Don’t forget the Jews.
Desert Son (47) social needs and science are not opposed, but given how the federal government is strapped for funds, and given that Obama is off the scale when it comes to his passion for social issues, it don’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where the funding is going to go. The go ahead for stem cell research is a freebie, but coughing up the money to fund those expensive science promises …. ha! I have about as much respect for politicians as I do for scam artists.
Ignore the Clown. Obama is already preparing to allow federally funded stem cell research. He wants to invest in alternative fuel research and technology.
Whatever he does in respect to science will be better than Bush.
I’m all for industrializing the Moon, freeing Earth to become a biological green zone, but the glibertarians don’t want to launch all their tax dollars into space.
China is in a position to colonize the Moon using Apollo/Soyuz era technology, the construction contracts for the base will have been handled by the Japanese employing Honda and Asimo robots. Americans will be watching the action with our Walmart toy telescopes.
You didn’t answer my question: are we just supposed to never leave this planet? – tsg
I didn’t answer it because I took it to be a rhetorical question. Apologies.
Here’s my answer:
1) “Supposed” by whom? You seem to imply that there is some preordained purpose to human existence.
2) Who is “we”? If our civilisation survives, it will undoubtedly construct intelligent, self-aware machines. These machines spreading beyond Earth is just as much “we” leaving Earth as biological humans doing so.
3) “Never” is a long time. The question is, how can we maximise the scientific, economic and environmental benefits of space technology at a give cost? As far as I can see, the answer for the forseeable future is: by sending machines, not people.
Off what scale?
Off what scale?
The one used to compare witches and ducks?
if your goal is not just to collect science but also to stimulate the economy by building a high tech industry and inspire education, a manned program is the way to go. – SteveM
How about a programme to halt anthropogenic climate change and solve other environmental/resource crises? Plenty of high tech, and what better inspiration than “Become a scientist – save the world”?
By you, that’s why I asked you the question.
Humans living on planet earth.
If not now, then when?
Basic research will never be done by the private sector and can never be shown to bring major economic or social benefits until after the fact, not before
This turns out not to be the case. Does the name “Bell Labs” ring a bell?
-jcr
“””This means Obama’s #1, #2, and #3 priorities will have to be to stop the bleeding.
In ths context, a very large govt well structured subsidised program in Science and Technology, both in the public and private sectors, is an absolutely obvious choice. It needs to be started immedately after the new administraton takes office. “””
Stop the bleeding?
Dude. The US is BROKE. If we were a business or a family, we’d have filed for bankruptcy already. The only reason we’re still functioning is because we have a printing press that makes money. That’s fine, and has been fine, as long as th eworld soaks up all of the extra dollars to keep inflation away from home.
But the world just got a taste of how broke the US is, and are actively looking for new and better ways to store wealth than the US dollar and US investment paper.
That means the US can’t “spend” its way out of trouble without printing up more money, which is gonna rob the piss out of people like me who were smart enough to stay out of debt and save money, not ot mention all of th eold folks and soon to be retired folks going on fixed incomes.
If you need this made even more simpler, the US is like a large family where all its members were given credit cards, and then more credit cards to pay off their credit card debts… The family is now in trouble so what is the plan? Give more credit cards to the teenaged daughter and send her shopping…
If you want money for science, you really should be advocating for an end to the military empire we have created, bringing our ships and bases home and leaving other countries to live without a US shovel poised over their heads.
If you want money for science, you really should advocate for an enormous reduction in the size of Washington, and an end to all of these nonsensical “bailouts”, where we borrow money from other, more productive countries and give it to failing US businesses.
If you want money for science, you should recognize that money comes from producing wealth, not by borrowing the wealth of nations who are wising up to the fact that you are, indeed, broke, and are becoming increasingly reluctant to loan it to you…
@#51
I couldn’t agree more, and I would also add that one often overlooked factor in this debate is the long-term survival of the human species. Whether as a result of a toxic/uninhabitable environment, the exhaustion of natural resources, an impending natural disaster such as an asteroid impact, or simple overpopulation, we will need to leave Earth eventually, and the sooner we learn to do this effectively, the better.
In terms of the more general argument about why funding space science is useful:
“Applications on Earth of technology needed for space flight have produced thousands of “spinoffs” that contribute to improving national security, the economy, productivity and lifestyle. It is almost impossible to find an area of everyday life that has not been improved by these spinoffs. Collectively, these secondary applications represent a substantial return on the national investment in aerospace research. We should be spending more.” -(http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html)
tsg,
Even I don’t have sufficient arrogance to think I can decide what the future of humanity should be. However, I’ve made it clear that as far as I’m concerned, human-designed self-aware machines (or bio/machine hybrids) would be just as much part of humanity as biological humans; and if we survive, it is these I would expect to spread beyond Earth. As for “If not now, when?” – when we’ve ensured the survival of our civilisation and avoided the various traps it could fall into. I think that’s going to be quite enough of a challenge for this century.
Joe Biden is not an Ivy leaguer.
Joe scribbled for a law degree at Syracuse, and has made it close to the top so far.
As a trained lawyerman, Joe is committed to helping his paying clients.
Joe wants to zealously represent Israel’s Zionist plan to exterminate the Palestinians and secure all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates for the chosen people.
Yes, murder posta be illegal, but …
Iraq is destroyed, and the Balkanization of the Muslim world proceeds.
If science came up with the big bucks, Joe would whore for science, too.
Bama, Michelle, & Joe have been sworn to subscribe to the legal monopoly’s Code of professional ethics.
The CODE states that when setting THE fee, a lawyerperson must simply consider; “THE AMOUNT INVOLVED IN THE CONTROVERSY AND THE RESULTS OBTAINED.”
Lawyers have their ethics, right?
Re: private sector funding science
I just wanted to point out that even if a company thought funding basic research could be profitable, they couldn’t afford the manpower. As a grad student researcher(engineering), I was paid $1400/month, for a hypothetical 20 hours/week of work. In reality, I worked about 50 hours/week on average. If all the grad students on my project had insisted upon a typical industry salary for the work we were doing, the grant would have supported 3 of us instead of the 10.5 that were funded through our grant. Which means significantly less work would have been accomplished, and our possibly profitable stuff wouldn’t have gotten done at all because it needed the results of earlier tasks. And this doesn’t address the cost of the equipment we used, the software licenses, and the database memberships. We had many companies come in over the two years I was there to use our wind tunnel for a couple days, because it wasn’t economically feasible for them to build their own. You don’t want to have to build a multi-million dollar facility so you can run three tests to demonstrate the safety of your product. And there aren’t enough industry products requiring wind tunnel testing to make a business that just does wind tunnel testing viable, unless that business is science oriented and doesn’t need to produce profits. Like, say, a publically funded university.
Or, to summarize;
Science is hella expensive. Companies with shareholders, owners, and employees can’t take those sorts of risks.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html
Hey! Bush administration was cool! We landed a bunch of stuff on Mars!
spezio
You better shut your windows, the black helicopters are flying over.
The problem I have with space travel is that we have pressing concerns on Earth at the moment. We have been entrusted as stewards and yet we seem quite happy to go gallivanting off to find new planets and then salivate when we discover something like ancient ice. This is not productive, we should be cleaning up the oceans for example. I know that NASA has given us some useful stuff, (e.g. teflon, bedding..), but we must steel ourselves against, say, the beauty the Hubble Telescope transmits back and be more pragmatic, although such a project like the Hubble Telescope seems reasonable and may even prove to be profitable when you consider calenders, postcards, mouse pads etc. But absurd adventures to Mars provide no good, indeed the recent Phoenix probe has just gone dead wasting all that money.
The Phoenix probe functioned 2 months longer than planned. It didn’t waste any money.
Yeah, Hubble was all about the calendars, postcards and mouse pads.
Consider this a postcard from outside the airlock, Pete; it says, “Wish you were here!”
Bell Labs is an interesting example for John C. Randolph to choose:
1) It came into existence because AT&T Corporation’s monopolistic position allowed it such extravagance.
2) It had major links with the Federal government, which was an important source of funding.
3) Its pure research function has dwindled almost to nothing since telecommunications deregulation.
I see Pete Rookey is back spamming as I predicted. And wrong again, as he seems to imply that the Pheonix probe died because of some type of unpredicted failure. Never mind that the mission objectives were accomplished a month ago, and everyone knew the cold and lack of sunlight due to the tilt of Mars would eventually do in the batteries. A dust storm covering the solar panels just terminated the mission a few days earlier than expected.
The Phoenix probe also cost less than 1 military stealth fighter.
#68, sounds like The Very Big Stupid.
“THE VERY BIG STUPID is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department.”
And now, for all you Spezio fans, I give you his obvious muse – paranoid looney and religious maniac Christopher Smart:
Reverend, Blackwater’s black helicopters are so busy putting it to hapless Iraqi women & chillun, that they care not for powerless key puncher bloggers.
No money in it, either.
More Merican copters are zapping hapless Afganis at their weddings.
The Israeli helicopters made in Merica & bought with four billion yearly in U.S. foreign aid are busy controlling the inhuman Gaza Concentration Camp for the starving and dying Palestinians.
As you may recall the Palestinians are the original owners of Palestine, but they have been rounded up into an Israeli Concentration Camp.
Yes… we really should dumb all lawyers into the sea. It’s not as if a convoluted legal system is an inevitable bi product of any form of government. And it’s not as if lawyers use their legal expertise to, i dunno, ensure that non experts aren’t butt raped by a legal system they cannot hope to understand in any reasonable amount of time. It’s not as if, if we didn’t have lawyers the government could claim any random declaration as being law and arbitrarily remove rights and revise statutes to suit any political or personal agenda.
The important thing is, it’s totally illegal for me to say that…
WE SHOULD KILL ALL LAWYERS
It’s completely illegal to suggest..
THAT WE SHOULD KILL JOE BIDEN BECAUSE HE’S A LAWYER.
yes. that would be totally illegal and I know because I consulted with my lawyer.
CRM-114 @ #40:
I notice you didn’t include Hubble in your list of robotic success stories. Because of course Hubble would never have worked at all without on-orbit repairs and upgrades performed by human astronauts.
Nick Gotts @ #65:
Surely one of those traps is keeping all our eggs in one basket when we could fairly easily spread them around the solar system for greater survivability.
the US can’t “spend” its way out of trouble without printing up more money,
Actually, the US can’t spend its way out of trouble, period. Inflation can’t be remedied with more inflation. If such a thing were possible, Zimbabwe would be the richest country on earth.
The US government has overtaxed, overspent, and overborrowed for generations, and the only remedy is to cut spending, stop inflating, and encourage savings.
There’s a reason why Americans don’t save money, and it’s not because of some kind of national character flaw. The sad fact is, saving dollars means taking a loss, because the fed inflates the dollar at a higher rate than you can get in interest on CDs or money market funds.
There are several things that Obama could do, that would have a major positive impact on the country’s finances, but I doubt that he has the courage to attempt them. The first one would be to bring US troops home from the 130 countries where they are deployed today. That much the president alone can do, without needing legislation to allow it.
Now, if he can get the congress to take our situation seriously enough to give up some major campaign contributions, there are several other massive expenditures that we can well do without, such as:
Cancel most of the cold-war weapons programs that we maintain today. The Joint Strike Fighter sure is a spiffy airplane, but it’s not too useful for picking out which donkey is loaded with sacks of rice, and which one’s got fifty pounds of C4.
End agricultural subsidies. They were sold to us as ways to save family farms, but the truth is that the lion’s share of that money gets paid out to the ADMs and Cargills of the world. Also, by paying agribusiness to restrict food supplies, we get a double hit: taxed for the subsidies, and then we pay higher prices for food.
End energy subsidies. If Ethanol ever makes sense economically, it won’t take tax money to get it into our cars. If windmills are worth building, they’ll get built without government grants.
Quit rewarding failure. If we simply fork over tens of billions of dollars to Ford and GM, they get to keep on doing what they’ve been doing. The “auto industry” isn’t on the brink of collapse, three particular companies are. If they go under, we’ll still be able to buy American-built cars, only they’ll be coming from Honda plants in Ohio, where they have competent management.
Stop enabling financial industry consolidation with the taxpayer footing the bill. JP Morgan has no intention of using the bailout money to “free up the credit markets” as Paulson pretends. They’ve admitted it internally that they plan to use that money to buy up weaker competitors. If they’re “too big to fail” now, why in the world should the taxpayers help them to get bigger?
There are plenty of things that could be done to help our economy recover from its current predicament. Just tossing on another trillion bucks of inflation every few months isn’t one of them, no matter which politically-favored groups get the money.
-jcr
I agree with all of Mr Randolph’s suggestions above, except the one about cancelling weapons programmes.
It came into existence because AT&T Corporation’s monopolistic position allowed it such extravagance.
And yet it persisted for many years after AT&T was broken up. The claim was that the private sector never invests in basic research, which only takes a single counterexample to refute.
-jcr
Somehow I knew that my comment #4 would provoke the typical Libertarian response : we would be much better off if the govt did nothing.
I sincerely hope for the USA that these voices of unreason, those who claim that the invisible hand and the free market will sort things out by miracle, are ignored by this new administration. Rest assured that Europe and China will gladly ignore them.
In such a severe and protracted recession, investments in research and development by the private sector will come tumbling down. Sources of private funding for new innovative ideas, equity or debt, will become increasingly more difficult to find for new ventures. We’re not ready to see the next saga of IPOs for a quite a while.
There will be no alternative than to increase monumentally Govt funding. The necessary consequence will be of course an increase of the national debt, from 70% of GDP to closer to 100% of GDP, and that’s what it is, because deflating the debt should be done (and should have been done) in periods of growth, not the other way round.
As it will become increasingly difficult to get China, Japan, the Middle East to buy US debt, inflating the debt will correspond necessarily to a forced saving for American households. And there will be no way around it.
It is absolutely critical that Govt funding in Science and Technology not only be channelled to the public sector (longer term return), but also the private sector (shorter term return).
I think it’s safe to say that this whole global financial crisis has put a serious dent in the future prospects of libertarianism.
I hear tin foil works spezio
Walton,
The weapons programs I mention function primarily as corporate-welfare schemes. Osama Bin Laden isn’t going to be coming at us with MiGs, so spending a hundred million bucks per airplane just doesn’t make any sense. War production isn’t wealth. We can’t eat fighter jets, and we can’t live in nuclear missiles.
If the USA cut back military spending by 1/2, we’d still be outspending Europe, Russia and China combined.
-jcr
Y’know, I really liked someone’s suggestion a few days ago that a “Market Fundamentalism. Discuss” thread be set up so the blithertarians’ wanking could be confined to one place, leaving the rest of the threads for intelligent discussion (much like the “Posting While Plastered” thread at the Chronicle offers a site for incoherent babbling). Indeed, I thought (and hoped) that thread might be turning into something of the sort, but here they are again, having at it.
Gag.
And btw, I completely support the idea that Obama needs to make a really bold and Kennedyesque move on the space exploration program. First man on Mars seems to be an obvious response.
(Nota : technology-wise Mars will necessarily be a completely new challenge)
It will create jobs, there will be plenty of trickle down effects in the private sector (exactly as the Apollo program did), and most importantly, it will have huge motivational impact on the American psyche. And that’s very much needed, because an Economic depression is not only Economic, but also psychological.
Now if there are other other bold ideas that meet those criterias, let’s have them !
jcr@84,
Conceded – the “never” claim was unjustifiable.
jcr@82,
Oddly enough, I agree with about as many of these as I disagree with. Yes to withdrawing US troops, scraping weapons programmes and ethanol subsidies, halting financial industry consolidation. Agricultural subsidies should be redirected toward environmentally sustainable agriculture; subsidies to renewable energy should be increased, and a major programme of energy conservation implemented, paid for by a carbon tax. There’s absolutely no way an unguided market can reduce greenhouse gas emissions – but my guess is jcr will have concluded from this that climate change science is necessarily wrong.
Rev, yessir tin foil works as does cardboard.
The Palestinians in the Gaza Concentration Camp routinely use both to put in the gaping holes where their windows used to be – after the Israeli bombs and rockets have blown them out.
Ditto for many bombed out hungry and freezing Iraqis and Afganis.
I daresay you’re right, Nerd. At least that way, though, he probably wouldn’t be trying anymore to hijack every thread into yet another episode of The Sorrows of Young Walton.
Howdy, Walton (@6):
Well, when you put it that way…. Seriously, your language around this issue presupposes your conclusion: Bureaucracy… massive… bloated…? I know your ideology tells you that government programs must be all these things, but do the facts bear that out? I think not.
Technically it’s probably correct to call any government program a “bureaucracy,” but technically that’s a neutral term, and not the automatic pejorative you apparently mean it to be. As for massive and bloated… well, I know it’s libertarian/right-wing orthodoxy to assume that “government work” is inherently inefficient, but real-world examples such as the Veterans Administration and Medicare point in another direction (note that I’m talking about efficiency here in terms of portion of overall budget spent on administrative costs; whether these organizations are sufficiently funded or solvent in the long-term is subject to external politics, rather than their inherent efficiency).
Finally, as the son of a career civil servant (my father was a NASA engineer), I take distinct, personal offense at your dismissive use of that term. Civil servants are every bit as well trained, well educated, and (in my personal experience) hard working as their counterparts in the private sector. I defy you to demonstrate otherwise. Yes, civil servants often enjoy better job security than their private-sector equivalents, but typically at the cost of lower direct compensation (and, of course, no bonuses, stock options, etc.). Some make this trade in their own self-interest (and why shouldn’t they act in their own rational self-interest?), but in many cases, a sense of public service is also part of the equation. In any case, I think you’ll have a hard time proving that fear of job loss is the main reason people work hard (except, perhaps, and the lowest-wage, most menial jobs), or that job security and/or job satisfaction is any sort of demotivator. In know for sure that my father was not some lazy featherbedder just because his check came from NASA instead of Boeing (where he worked before joining NASA).
I can’t speak to Thatcher’s legacy, but the ideological and political groundwork for the current financial crisis in the U.S. (and around the world) was laid by Reagan and his followers (please go read The Wrecking Crew). And I say this as someone who, when I was not too far from the age you are now, actually voted for Reagan (<python>I go’ better…</python>).
Hmmm… why not? I’m not suggesting that worthless research should ever be undertaken “merely” for the purpose of supporting jobs in science. But public investment in science and technology should consider not only specific projects, but also the public infrastructure for research… which includes maintaining a current, well trained, experienced professional research workforce, and the institutions in which they work. You talk as if “job-creation programme” inherently means some sort of casual giveaway that returns no value to society, but that’s not the case.
If we’re talking about basic research, it’s almost always impossible to predict exactly what the specific “economic or social benefits” will be… but, broadly viewed, investment in basic research always pays off. This, BTW, is why we can’t afford to leave basic research to the private, for-profit, sector: The investment will almost always pay off in big ways, but often in ways that can’t be reliably predicted and profitted on.
This includes almost all fundamental science research, and quite a large swath of basic technology R&D as well. You’d be shocked to know how much private-sector advanced technology research and product development depends heavily on publicly funded research that for-profit concerns could never have justified to stockholders.
Sastra (@14):
Yeah, too bad they didn’t have robots in the 1830s, so Darwin could’ve just stayed home and analyzed the data, right?
Robotic probes are excellent for answering questions you already know to ask; even our tremedously flexible new probes are not so great for having real-time insights and asking new questions based on things you didn’t expect to find. I think the best science data will be returned by a robust and highly integrated program combining both robots and human explorers.
Of course, that presumes that science is the only reason for space exploration… a presumption I do not share. IMHO, expanding human presence is and end in itself, complementary to, but ultimately distinct from, doing science. Looking over the next hill — and then building a house over there — is just what we do. I see no reason that should change just because the next hill is the moon or Mars or Ceres or Ganymede. YMMV, of course.
But humans themselves shouldn’t go?
In other words, never.
I hear tin foil works spezio
Only against the space ray guns that blew up the towers in New York a few years back. For black helicopters (which, b.t.w., spezio, are UN, not blackwater), lawyers, and so forth, there’s two options: A deep bunker, or a looong vacation someplace without lawyers, black helicopters, and so on. Two places spring to mind: eastern Congo (lovely this time of year), and the local asylum. Putting all four together, an asylum in a bunker in Congo with lots of tinfoil, sounds like just the ticket for our friend gerald.
Well, there’s Nick Gotts’s @ #60, for example. When I was in my school’s gifted program (many) years ago as a child, there was a big focus on solar energy and ecological urban design, for example. It got a lot of smart kids excited about science/technology and thinking about creative solutions to social problems that were seen as pressing then and are again now.
negentropyeater@90,
You don’t think saving our civilisation could be presented as a worthwhile goal?
That would be true IF we could expect the American people to behave rationally in the future.
Unfortunately, I’m not entirely ready to make that prediction.
BradD:
Done. Most of your other examples of things we ought to be doing instead of manned spaceflight are also things we’re already doing. So, can we get on with it now?
As a lifelong space enthusiast, I get soooo tired of these humans-versus-robots debates. It’s like saying you don’t need to leave your bedroom because you’ve got a Roomba that’s perfect good at cleaning the living room without you going there. [sigh]
Going there is the real point!
Sending people is just way too expensive. Sending a robotic mission to Mars is 1% of the cost (or less) of sending people to Mars and it pushes the technology envelope in robotics and automation.
I doubt if Ohbama’s admin will cut back on military spending.
Rahm Emanuel’s Zionist policy paper directly endorsed by Bama calls for an increase of 100,000 more U.S.troops to advance the war on the Palestinian people, Iraq, & Afghanistan.
Bama says that he wants to capture Osama Bin Laden and give him a good dose of legal due process as per Saddam and Jesus.
Rahm is an Israeli citizen but it does not affect his judgment
Although Rahm’s Dad was a henchman with Menachim Begin’s Zionist Irgun assassins & murderers, it does not affect Rahm’s judgment.
Sure, but only if you can show it on TV !
Investments in Green energy etc… are a must have, but it’s necessarily going to be a much more distributed effort, I really think we also need a really bold highly motivational and visible program on top of.
My guess, if the US doesn’t do it, China will.
@102: When you were ranting about lawyers and someone said “What about the Jews” that was what we on Earth call “irony”.
Jello:
Unless you have some sort of connection (i.e., you do business with NASA, or someone you know works there), all you see when you visit one of the NASA centers is the visitors’ center. That’s designed for tourists, and at least in the cases of JSC (Houston) and KSC (Florida), operated under contract by for-profit private contractors (happy now, Walton?). I happen to enjoy those places, but if you don’t, don’t go; in any case, don’t judge what’s going on at the center by what’s going on at the visitors’ center.
But that’s precisely the point.
One other thing that the government could do to aid recovery, is to make it much easier for smaller businesses to raise equity funding. The barriers to private investment today stack the deck in favor of bigger companies. Going public makes no sense at all if you’re trying to raise less than ten million dollars or so.
Imagine what would happen to the allocation of capital in this country, if our options included investing in local businesses where we knew the owners? I could see hundreds of billions of dollars being transferred from mutual funds and money-market funds to create jobs in thousands of new ventures. The banks wouldn’t like it, but that’s their problem.
A big part of the reason why the banks wanted a central bank was so that they could lend money at low enough rates that businesses wouldn’t simply save their own money to fund their expansion, or seek equity funding. The more businesses have to depend on lines of credit, the more interest they pay to the banks. If they just retain enough of their revenues to cover their ordinary operating needs, they’re not paying a bank.
-jcr
Bill Dauphin@94,
I have two very different responses to your comment. I wholeheartedly agree with most of it, particularly your defence of civil servants. My Dad was one too, Walton, in the Prison Commission all his working life except for the six years in the Navy in WW2 – he was dedicated, hard-working, compassionate, and a lifelong Conservative (though in the USA he’d probably have been an independent).
On the other hand: “Looking over the next hill — and then building a house over there — is just what we do.” – that’s just the Hollywood version of the frontier mentality. Sentimental bilge.
tsg,
I’m not in the least bothered whether biological humans ever live off the Earth or not; I think it unlikely they will, because of the obvious advantages of creatures/machines designed for the purpose. And I’m pretty certain that if our civilisation survives, then it will indeed design such entities and send them off Earth. So “In other words, never” is a complete distortion of what I’ve been saying.
John C. Randolph:
Bell Labs? Oh, you mean that old place that used to do great R&D when it was part of a monopoly, and in some ways functioned as a de facto government lab, but which sank into irrelevancy when AT&T was thrown into the free market? It proves a point. Just not the one you think it does.
Nick Gotts:
Yup, and I think tsg’s got it just about right: Learning to put people into space — and then doing it — is an end in itself. Or do you think we should just settle for never leaving this FSM-forsaken mudball?
And what stops people from doing it ?
Don’t you know that FFF (family, friends and fools) still constitute the vast majority of first round equity financing for most new ventures ?
jcr@107,
That may be a good suggestion, but it has precisely fuck-all to do with the topic of this thread. Do you think you could get down off the hobby-horse just this once?
Bill Dauphin,
Well, you could try reading what I’ve written on this thread.
this FSM-forsaken mudball
You may call it that. I call it an astonishingly beautiful planet that we evolved to live on. And if too many people have your attitude, it’s only too likely to turn into what you call it through human greed and stupidity.
The “well meaning fool” wrote:
The biggest PR blunder NASA ever made was to identify particular products as “spinoffs” of the Apollo program. The real “spinoffs” were entire industries and technologies, not calculators and teflon.
—
Nick Gotts asked what could be more inspiring than “become a scientist save the planet”? While I agree that the environment and man’s impact on it is vitally important, you have to admit it is not as “sexy” as space exploraation. Its like the choice between cleaning the house and going for a drive, what do you think a teenager would choose? I expect that environmental engineering and technology to reduce our impact would be a necessary “spinoff” of an interplanetary mission since it will require a lot more than just taking a few bottles of air with them in order to survive.
Those aren’t human.
Only if you redefine “human”.
Since there seem to be some pretty knowledgeable people about, I have a question. Are NASA (or anyone else) working on robots that could replicate themselves with locally mined metal and build their own spaceships and such, without direct human instruction?
Perhaps it would help if it were presented more realistically: helping to put out a fire at your building and saving your entire family and your neighbors or going for a drive. :)
SteveM@144,
SC pointed out @97 that “save the planet” technologies did indeed inspire many of her contemporaries; so no, I don’t admit that they are “not as sexy” as space travel. Nor am I opposed to space science, which is both fantastically exciting and itself environmentally very important.
tsg@115,
I guess I’m just not as emotionally tied to human biology as you are. I think it inevitable that artificial or semi-artificial intelligences will eventually far exceed the cognitive capacity of individual humans, unless our civilisation collapses. We can regard this as a threat, or as a new stage in humanity’s development.
Matt Heath@116,
I haven’t heard of anyone doing so, but I’d be surprised if no-one is thinking about it. I’d guess it might be possible in 50-100 years.
All spaceflight outside of Earth orbit is going to be about basic exploration for the foreseeable future and most likely beyond, and manned spaceflight is probably the least cost-effective form of basic exploration. We get far more bang for the buck by using unmanned probes. Consider that for a while we were exploring three separate areas of the Martian surface concurrently (Phoenix has apparently reached the end of its mission). Consider that we were able to do that for less than the cost of a single manned mission.
The only reason we ever sent human beings to the moon was to beat the Russians at something. You can’t base a program on that forever.
Colonization is as much an economic enterprise as anything else, and there’s no economic justification for colonizing Mars or Venus or any other body in the solar system. There are no resources that we need so badly that trucking it across the solar system would ever be more cost effective than exploiting terrestrial sources (or making do without).
And forget about building an ark to preserve humanity in the event of some planetary disaster. To preserve humanity you need to save more than humans; you’d need to save all the plants and animals we rely on directly, along with all the plants and animals they rely on. We rightly question the idea of Noah keeping two (or seven) of every animal alive for a year in a box floating on the water; we’d be doing roughly the same thing for far longer, in far less hospitable conditions. And finding a planetary Ararat to land on would be its own set of challenges.
Seed ships? Please. Again, where would you land, and if you did find a place, what are the odds that the existing biochemistry would be compatible?
For information, the cummulative spending of the US on NASA over its past 50 year history (adjusted to real current dollars, so that there is no mistake) has been $592 billion (and that includes Apollo…)
Just about the same as one year of military spending.
Nick,
Who died and made you pope?
-jcr
Are NASA (or anyone else) working on robots that could replicate themselves with locally mined metal and build their own spaceships and such, without direct human instruction?
No they are not.
Bill Dauphen @105
I appreciate that NASA is still s state of the art scientific facility and as I discussed in my post at #48 my problem is with how NASA presents itself to the public. This is exemplified by the shallow presentation I found at Johnson. It seems to me like the PR folks at NASA are far more interested in promoting NASA’s past legacy then its current research to the public and I think this is in part why the public views the organization as outdated. I can think of no better place to go to explore the history of America’s space program and it was excellent in that regard, but I was also disappointed by the relatively little information presented about current programs. For me it was like going to an aquarium with no fish tanks and old videos of Jacques Cousteau on a TV. Informative, but far removed from the living science.
#94 Bill:
Are you seriously citing the VA and Medicare as examples of efficiency?
-jcr
Oh, please.
That’s a hell of a basket to be keeping all your eggs in.
Matt @ #116:
Self-replicating robots have been studied in principle by NASA and others, but as far as I know nobody has seriously tried to build one. The problem is that electronic control systems require a multibillion-dollar industrial infrastructure to produce. You can’t just dig up silicon and turn in into computer chips in a portable furnace. So macroscopic robots are generally thought to be the wrong sort of technology for this. What you need is molecular nanorobots that can reproduce themselves directly from raw materials by cutting and pasting individual atoms. Such self-replicating nanorobots can then team up to build whatever macroscopic machinery you need. People are working on designs for this sort of technology, but actual implementation is still probably decades away.
John Bode @ #119:
You mean there are no resources we need on Earth that would be worth the trouble of importing from space. This is clearly true. But the converse is also true: resources needed in space for space-based industry are much more cheaply obtained (in the long run) from almost anywhere but Earth’s surface.
Nick,
still, how do you show a “saved planet” on TV ?
You need a visible goal.
I agree that ultimately, for long-term survival of the human species, we should look into space colonisation, but we are at the very beginning of the space era and the money now would be better spent on actually finding out what’s out there first, before throwing humans out there. We need to know more about the longer term risks of space travel or we’ll just be sacrificing people to our ignorance. Robots are a very cost effective method of exploration and data collection.
Ultimately, if we can live through the economic/social/environmental effects of peak oil, peak most other resources, environmental degradation and climate change, I think the best we’ll ever achieve (baring a huge advance in energy technology or scifi-like technology) is manned research colonies & embryo/seed banks on the moon, a space station and/or mars, that would be used to reseed earth after a disaster (comet/asteroid strike, supervolcano, nuclear war). I very much doubt humans will ever leave this solar system. We’ve wasted too many resources over the last 100 years growing like a cancer.
CRM-114:
Yeah, because nothing says “Hope!” like “go to your room, and stay there!!”
Nick:
No, you’re confusing me with some sort of John-Wayne-loving, rugged-individualism-veneratin’ proto-libertarian. But that’s not me: When I say exploration is “just what we do,” by “we” I don’t mean a mostly disconnected collection of gon-totin’ curmudgeons who can barely stand each other’s company (a la the Hollywood vision of our western frontier); I mean it in a good old anti-Thatcherite collectivist sense. To me, “we” are our society, at a minimum, if not our species.
I won’t argue about whether there are pragmatic justifications for expanding humanity beyond this one planet — I think I already know we disagree on that — but I do believe a certain restlessness and curiosity is part of our collective constitution as humans. Disagree with me if you will (and I’m sure you will), but please don’t mistake my position for any sort of “every man for himself” BS.
Do I understand that you’re imagining some sort of nonbiological surrogates to do our off-world living for us? I suppose it’s possible, but it’s farther-out, more SF-like scenario than any space colonization hopes I have. Personally, I think humans will always want to do their own living (notwithstanding all the things we do enjoy vicariously), and not surrender to some sort of extraterrestrial Matrix.
While it’s true that manned space flight is much more expensive than automated missions, the lack of human intervention has also doomed many a mission. Everyone is now happily mentioning the last three successful Mars missions – and not the three craters of the three before that. The Hubble repair mission has been mentioned – the guys running Cassini so wish they’d had someone to go up and wiggle out that stuck pin that’s preventing the main antenna from opening. So, in retrospect, that might have been a blessing, half of the original research into digital picture compression algorithms was inspired by the need to get data from Cassini with it’s little low bandwidth emergency antenna.
Walton, why not check out Somalia? It has a VERY limited government. You’d LOVE it there.
And I don’t agree with your William-Proxmire assessment of basic research. Yes, William Proxmire of the infamous Golden Fleece awards.
But, Mu @#130–
The trick is that the three craters on Mars, for the purpose of wiggling out a stuck pin, might otherwise be three graves, or sets of graves. That is the price people are so far unwilling to contemplate.
We need planned one-way trips. Everybody’s gotta die some time and some place– surely there are some around who would welcome the chance for that to be Mars, or Jupiter (after an excruciatingly boring several year trip to get there, once we have figured out how to recycle shit into astronaut ice cream and piss into Tang).
Nick:
I have been, every word. But this thread has been expanding faster than I can compose my comments (which, I’m afraid, I rather worry over)… with the result that I’ve gotten behind, and have been posing questions/comment to you without knowing that you’d already addressed them. Please don’t think I’ve just been casually blowing off your contributions.
Oh, no, I’ve said too much; I haven’t said enough…
I couldn’t agree more that the Earth is astonishingly beautiful, and a wonderful home for us to live on; I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. But I have in mind the whole vast panorama of the Solar System, and of the galaxy and universe beyond… and against that backdrop, any planet may seem like a trivial mudball, no matter how lovely and hospitable it is. (BTW, I can already hear you dismissing this as romantic hyperbole, and you may be right… but I don’t plan to apologize for any of it.) My comparison wasn’t meant to diminish the Earth, but to emphasize the grandeur of everything else.
That said…
…I agree that my carelessly flippant locution (which doesn’t properly reflect my actual attitude) might have an unintended bad effect (on those twos or threes of people who actually listen to me [g]), so I apologize.
I must say, though, that no matter how much care we invest in good stewardship, I think we will one day use this planet up (and, FSM willing, before we kill our ownselves off). We’ve had this conversation before, you and I, and IIRC you imagine a future in which human population is not only static, but content to remain so indefinitely. I respect your prognostication, but I find that future hard to credit, myself. I do think one way the Earth’s population might remain static would be to move human growth off-planet (and no, I’m not suggesting we could physically move enough of the extant population to make the difference… but by moving the human frontier, we could locate future growth off the Earth).
But you and I are speculating about the future of humanity on a grand scale; that’s a whole different conversation than the lack of imagination behind the “robots are a cheaper way to poke rocks” position taken by some space advocates who oppose human exploration.
Walton, desperately searching for relevance, says:
You mean when the lowest tax bracket was 14% and the top bracket was 71.5% for incomes over $200,000? Bring it on, Comrade Walton!
Uh, the 30-mile high club? Hello? Hello?
@ “robots are a cheaper way to poke rocks”
Those scientist types, with their frets about cost,
With their dreams shot to hell if a robot is lost–
Don’t they realize that people are cheap as tin foil?
We spend them by thousands while fighting for oil!
Federal Grant Money, does that ring a bell?
Or how about this:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html
Anon (@132):
Or not: At least one of those craters was the result of a math/navigation error made before the spacecraft was ever launched. A crew onboard would almost certainly have caught and corrected such a simple error.
Since when? Read any account of polar exploration or mountaineering or early aviation or…. Opponents of human spaceflight always claim the public won’t tolerate risk… but if you check the airshow schedule, you’ll note that the (government-operated) Blue Angels and Thunderbirds stubbornly continue to exist, despite having lost more than a few members in an enterprise orders of magnitude less grand than the conquest of space.
Meant to add this to my last:
I’m intensely honored to have, in whatever tangential way, inspired a stanza’s worth of Cuttlefish (OM) ink.
One thing gets me – all discussions about NASA seem to focus on Space, yet Aeronautics is the second word in the acronym.
(my emphasis)
When I was in my school’s gifted program (many) years ago as a child,
How sad that you peaked so early. Is that why you’re so bitter and spiteful today?
-jcr
We need planned one-way trips. Everybody’s gotta die some time and some place– surely there are some around who would welcome the chance for that to be Mars, …
I think Buzz Aldrin has starting advocating one-way missions; not as “suicide missions” but as migration, if the idea is to establish a permanent colony then why not permanat residents.
Federal Grant Money, does that ring a bell?
Sure it does. Bell Labs got a fair bit of it, but they spent far more of their own funds.
-jcr
Yeah, well before I got my doctorate.
Zinger FAIL.
Thanks everyone that put an answer to my questopn
At least she peaked. From what I’ve gathered from your comments each passing day is a new low for you.
Some of the commentors here have advocated scaling back the manned space program. Both Bob Park and Steven Weinberg have been advocating this for years, but of course, according to Prof. Myers pal Dr. Phil Plait, they don’t know what they are talking about. The fact is that the payoff in terms of scientific advancement of manned space flight, as a function of funds expended, is minuscule compared to unmanned flight. No astronauts on Cassini! No astronauts on the Mars landers! I have posted numerous comments over at Dr. Plaits challenging him and his readers to name some scientific advancements achieved with manned space flight that could not have been achieved with a robot mission. So far, the good folks over there haven’t been able to come up with one.
Re Gerald Spezio
Gee, Mr. Spezio is all bent out of shape because the Government of Israel is being beastly towards the Palestinians. The Palestinians are just fortunate that the Prime Minister of Israel is not the late and unlamented dictator of Syria, Hafaz Assad. The application of Hama Rules to the Palestinians would really give Mr. Spezio something to complain about.
Cry me a river. It’s not that hard at all to raise private equity. I had a cell-phone client raise $250,000, or so, off an interim compilation two years ago. Another client, a manufacturer, pulled in about $500K equity off a reviewed forecast three or four years ago.
Right now I’m working on take a Sound & Lights Company from regional to national. We’re looking for $2.4 million through a private investor equity buy in. The potential investors (there are three groups) are not even looking for financial statements as the Company has been in business since 1996. They just want five years worth of tax returns and access to the accounting records.
But beyond those small offerings I’ve dealt with in the past few years, I’ve fielded many more on behalf of my clients. Most of them between $1million and $3million.
Some of those businesses had good plans and they worked. Some didn’t and they lost. I was fortunate enough that none of my “thumbs down” succeeded so I didn’t have to hear that… And that none of my “thumbs up” failed, so I didn’t have to hear that… Which, of course, doesn’t mean my clients did well. Some passed on the good stuff, others bought the bad. I can talk, but I can’t make them listen.
Also, as you can see from this post, you can issue securities without the SEC involvement. And there are a TON of ways you can do that without running afoul of the law or breaking the bank in legal and accounting fees. If I tried to describe them all, this post would be unmanageably long.
But beyond those private offerings, the truth is that there are many ways you could raise a lot of capital in your $10,000,000 range while complying with the law. One is a full-out SEC small-business filing for PUBLIC issuance.
There are two different ways in this small, public offering. One way requires three years of audited financials in SEC reporting format.
The next easiest way (which has a higher limit) requires just two years and no SEC-specific disclosure requirements.
OTOH, if you’re a big “small business,” like the small bank a friend of mine did some work for in the 1990’s, it’d be more. But it’s not like the bank couldn’t afford it.
Anyway, in both cases, the forms required to be filed are simple and avoid legalese. Sure, I recommend your attorney look at them. But, honestly, if you have a brain and an accountant, you’ll be able to do them by yourself.
So, with or without the attorney, it’s not difficult. Hell, I bet Nolo Press sells a book on it. They sell one on just about everything else. The big cost unless you’re too lazy to do it yourself, are the financials. And that’s just a sunk cost of doing business. If you can’t afford them, you’re not ready.
The hardest part is finding investors that don’t want to rape you. Most of these guys want a big return on their investment. And the option of screwing you over if you succeed.
But blaming the SEC for the difficulty… BS. ESPECIALLY as you’re complaining about PRIVATE EQUITY funding which is far, far less regulated.
Please. Join the real business world someday. The cost of doing business is the cost of doing business. And the reason we have these laws is because way too many dirt-bags game the system. Just ask Barry Minkow and the people he ripped off:
Minkow, BTW, was why my grandfather fired Price Waterhouse and went with a much smaller, cheaper local CPA. He wasn’t paying for quality. He was paying for some partner to make a lot of money while playing audit roulette.
jcr@121,
Just exercising my right to free speech. I’ll exercise it again to call you a crashing bore with a one-track mind.
tsg@125,
Since I can’t even make sense of your latest effusions, I’ll wait until you have something substantive and coherent to say before taking the discussion further.
SLC @ #147:
We know quite a bit about human physiological responses to microgravity (e.g. bone loss) that we couldn’t possibly have learned from robots. The point of putting humans in space is not to do planetary science. It’s to learn about how humans can live and work in space long-term. Sooner or later we’ll need to know that.
Jack Bode@119,
The resources I’ve seen seriously suggested are satellite solar power (beamed down by microwave), and helium, from the Moon (not much left on Earth apparently). Possibly also lithium-6, which would be needed for nuclear fusion plants if they ever became viable, IIRC. I’ve wondered whether solar power in space could be used to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, for transport to Earth as fuel. Some Earth-crossing asteroids might also be worth mining for various metals, if they occur in high enough concentration. none of this requires human spaceflight.
SLC,
I can come up with something, and it seems to me the most obvious benefit of all.
If you really want to change the direction this country has been heading for over the past 30 years, reactivate the taste of a whole new generation for Science and Innovation, there’s nothing better than setting yourself a bold, highly visible and motivational goal such as putting the first man on Mars.
Even if we were to assume that a robot mission would generate the same direct scientific advancements as a manned mission (which is not yet self-evident), it would not have the same impact at all on the overall level of interest of this entire nation for Science and Innovation.
It’s the Galileo spacecraft that had the stuck-antenna trouble, not the Cassini spacecraft, but the principle was correct.
The trouble with sending people into outer space is that these people need a *lot* of structure and supplies to go with them — air, food, enough habitable volume for them to move around in, a suitable temperature, etc. Stuff that we either get for free or for much less cost than in outer space.
Fans of freak coincidences might enjoy how the WMAP team was about to release the results of a year of work at the time of the Columbia disaster — the Columbia’s science efforts were not much more than high-school science projects compared to WMAP’s looking back to the origin of our Universe.
how do you show a “saved planet” on TV ? – negentropyeater
I think wildlife documentaries can be pretty good – particularly if we can clone David Attenborough. Currently, there’s often a bit where the presenter says “Sadly, this species/habitat is now under serious threat…” Wouldn’t it be nice if that could be replaced by: “Happily, thanks to publicly-funded science and conservation programmes, this species/habitat is one again flourishing…”? Bear in mind also that a programme such as sending people to Mars will generate a lot of opposition, from people like me who’d see it as a ludicrous and irresponsible waste of resources.
Bill Dauphin,
Despite what you say, I think all the “Man Has Always” and “frontier” stuff is rather telling. Ask the Native Americans about the romance of the frontier. Or the buffalo, if they could speak. Actually you’re wrong, I don’t see the future as a perpetual steady state: if our civilisation survives, I think we’ll be sending out von Neumann probes in a few centuries – but it won’t be unmodified humans doing it. I disagree that post-biological people are further off than serious space colonisation. Actually, I don’t know about you, but I’m seriously handicapped these days without my spectacles, and I’ve got quite a lot of metal and ceramic in my mouth. Hearing aids, pacemakers and artificial hips and knees are pretty routine, artificial limbs and communication aids for non-speakers (my wife’s specialism within speech and language therapy) improving all the time. I’d guess artificial hearts and kidneys will be around in a decade, livers and eyes in two or three, the first “thinking cap” cognitive prostheses probably not much later. A century or two from now, doctors will find that some patient is brain-dead, but very obviously still there. At the same time, artificial intelligences not built around a human core will also be around – and some of them will be conducting scientific research throughout the solar system. All, I would guess, before there are near-natural humans any further away than the moon (and only dozens or at most hundreds there), unless there’s been some fantastically wasteful junket to Mars. In the near term, I don’t really think there’s any doubt that robotic probes give far better value for money than human spaceflight. Notice that at present, we have less ability to send humans into space than we did forty years ago. Compare that to the advances in computing, robotics and biotechnology over that time.
TSG
You’re implication that manned space flight as we practice it is a step toward future deep space exploration, colonies, and so forth.
That is simply not the case. Running around the solar system in clunky chemical rocketsdoesn’t accomplish anything toward space exploration, and nothing could be more wasteful and meaningless than a Mars program whose aim is to take video of spome clown jumping around in a space suit, or planting a flag and picking up rocks.
It’s like saying that people should learn how to swim, so that they can someday get from San Francisco to Tokyo. Swimming has nothing to do with crossing the Pacific.
Nobody is going anywhere until there are four or five major revolutions in theoretical and applied physics. The work that is going on which might lead to space travel is over at the Hadron Collider, not at NASA.
I read this and was reminded of a well known Kelly Freas poster.
Scooter. You are full of beans.
“It’s like saying that people should learn how to swim, so that they can someday get from San Francisco to Tokyo. Swimming has nothing to do with crossing the Pacific. ”
What you are saying is that people shuldn’t learn to walk. they should lay in the crib untill some one invents a teleportation device.
There is much to do and much to exploit in out own solar system. We need to get cracking.
Also, I think we got more to fear from “killer asteroids” that from “Global Warming” or “Global Cooling.”
Money? I think we are spending about $200,000,000.00 on the war on drugs. Drugs aren’t a good idea, but they’ve kicked our collective asses, so surrender terms should be considered. We could buy all the cocaine in Columbia directly from the farmers, burn it or even better, give it away and kill the market.
While there’s something to be said for Robert Anton Wilson’s desire to get the hell off the planet of the apes and try again someplace else, it’s not happening very soon.
(I was listenin the other day to one of my favorite artifacts of San Francisco rock, Paul Kantner’s 1970 Blows Against the Empire, and was struck again by the optimism and lack of prescience in lyrics like “You know – a starship circlin in the sky – it ought to be ready by 1990 / They’ll be buildin it up in the air ever since 1980…”)
In the meantime, we’re all stuck here on this Spaceship Earth, and I for one would much rather my tax money go to improving our general lot down here than to exploring the Final Frontier.
Posted at #159:
I think that global warming is a condition about which we can actively do something, right now.
Someday, we may be able to actively do something about “killer asteroids” (doing something starts with detecting them in time).
Furthermore, unless I’m misunderstanding the astrophysics involved, a given instance of a “killer asteroid” is finite (should we have the technology to do something about it). Once the asteroid is gone, the system in place must wait until another asteroid threatens. Global warming is the kind of thing that requires constant attention, by contrast, as the system itself is constantly being acted upon by conditions that create the threat in the first place.
No kings,
Robert
NASA didn’t give us teflon. It was “invented” by Du Pont in 1941 and its first wide spread use was in the Manhattan Project as a material to coat valves and seals in the pipes holding highly reactive uranium hexafluoride in the enrichment process of uranium.
Nick Gotts @152, He3 on the Moon is not unimportant.
Moses at #134: Evidently you couldn’t tell that I was being sarcastic. I apologise, I should have made it clearer.
In response to both Bill Dauphin and Nick Gotts: I’m not denigrating civil servants (in fact I’m considering a career in the civil service). They’re no better and no worse than the people in any other economic sector.
But government operations are inherently less efficient than those of the private sector, because of the lack of competition, the lack of accountability to stockholders, and (as John Randolph keeps cogently pointing out) the fact that a sovereign government can get itself out of a financial hole simply by mucking around with the money supply.
The 60s and 70s were among the most technologically prolific decades in all of US history. We could go to the moon then; now we rely on Russia for heavy-lift rockets. More to your point, the NASA of those days provided many thousands of jobs for its subcontractors, many of which were private companies. – Yes, pork-barrel spending does create jobs, some in the private sector. However, like all government action, it consists of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Going to the moon was in itself pointless; the only legitimate reason for doing it was to intimidate the Soviet Union, and there were less expensive ways of doing that. Money was taken from the productive private sector – which, of course, since it produces consumer goods, is responsible for the high standard of living that we all enjoy – and pumped into an unnecessary and profligate exercise in national one-upmanship.
Your argument is rather akin to saying “Well, we should spend the taxpayers’ money building a giant seven-mile-high statue of George Washington in every major city. It might be completely pointless, but it would create lots of jobs for American workers – think of all the stonemasons, truckers, quarry workers etc. who’d be employed. And it would intimidate the Russians.” Of course, where this falls down is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The money for your statue of Washington – or your trip to the moon – has to come from somewhere. Either you extract it by squeezing productive businesses and taxpayers harder, or you increase the public debt (which, as we all know, is a bad policy in the long run).
I rather get the impression that you would have opposed rural electrification if you’d had the chance. – Yes, I oppose, and would in all historical contexts have opposed, any government initiative to provide electricity (or any other consumer good) to anyone. No one has a “right” to electricity. If it is profitable for the private sector to supply a particular community with electricity, then they will do so. If they don’t, then it isn’t up to government to do it. If the denizens of a particular locality want access to electricity, but it isn’t cost-effective for the private sector to supply the infrastructure, then they can just move.
In the end, all government spending, however beneficial, has to come from somewhere – which means, ultimately, that someone is squeezed harder somewhere down the line. The way to create a successful economy is to allow individual enterprises to grow and flourish, free from encumbrance; if left to their own devices, they will compete, innovate and produce more wealth and a higher standard of living. Government spending might create jobs; but it’s rather like Bastiat’s famous satire – the candlemakers who petition the government to block out the sun, on the grounds that this would increase demand for candles, therefore increasing employment in the candlemaking industry and all its associated activities.
Nope, because everybody with half a brain knows that for such a Keynesian stimulus to be efficient, it needs to act simultaneously on 3 levels :
1. create jobs.
2. create domino effects (eg, new discoveries technological or otherwise that will create new products and services and thereby more jobs and wealth, or productivity gains with large useful infrastructure projects eg transport or increased tourism, etc…)
3. create psychological motivational effects, reinstore confidence in a broken economy, etc… which affect overall productivity gains and creation of wealth.
Your statues might be nice, but they only work on 1., and therefore would indeed be a very inefficient use of public spending.
Walton @166,
Politics and economics generally bore me, and I know very little about them. But this is so vacuous I’m commenting on it.
Off the top of my head, then:
0. This is your claim.
1. You’re implicitly assuming competition is necessary for efficiency, rather than being one factor affecting it. Further, “efficiency” can relate to any number of factors (e.g. efficient at using resources, efficient at achieving a specified goal, efficient at providing employment, etc) and you provide no metric.
2. Government operations may not have stockholders, but they certainly have stakeholders, and are most certainly accountable to them.
3. This is a non-sequitur to your claim [0]. Further, it’s not at all clear that “mucking around with the money supply” in fact gets Governments out of financial trouble.
So, your argument is based on an assertion, an obfuscation, and a non-sequitur.
btw Walton, do you have maybe anything a little bit more modern to support your Liberterian dogma than Frédéric Bastiat or Thomas Jefferson (both early 19th century, a time which you still seem to consider relevant for today’s world) ?
That’s not what your heroes Reagan and Thatcher preached. Their dogma was that lowering taxes would increase revenue by stimulating growth, so that government could spend more by squeezing less. (We’re seeing now how well that worked.)
More realistically, government spending on basic research and infrastructure (such as roads and electricity grids) can create opportunities for economic growth and yield a net benefit to everyone, including those whose tax dollars pay for it. It’s not a zero-sum game, “robbing Peter to pay Paul”. As mentioned previously, the lasting benefit of the space race isn’t Teflon, it’s the microelectronics industry.
Nick:
I think you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree. I must say, I mildly resent your linking my desire to colonize currently empty planets with historical genocide, but I doubt I can talk you out of that position.
This, however, I know something about, since it’s the industry I work in:
Not true. In fact, the Space Shuttle is a vastly more capable spacecraft than Apollo in terms of crew size, versatility, and (despite the high-profile accidents) even inherent reliability, and Soyuz is arguably as capable, while having vastly more flight experience than all the pre-Shuttle crewed spacecraft put together. Not to mention that we have a functional and continuously crewed space station.
It’s true we couldn’t duplicate the Apollo missions with current hardware, but that’s owing to political decisions, not a lack of technological capability. The technological base for human spaceflight is hugely better than it was 40 years ago.
Bill @172, I’m butting in (sorry), but I think the first sentence in your last paragraph implicitly acknowledges Nick’s point.
Nick’s “[The] ability to send humans into space” and your “The technological base for human spaceflight” are different concepts, so in a sense you’re arguing against a straw man. As an analogy, consider Australia’s ability to use nuclear weapons vs. its technological base for making nuclear weapons.
Would sending a robot to Mars be more exciting if it were a ninja robot? Or perhaps a pirate robot monkey?
John, all Bill is saying is that the Shuttle isn’t built to fly to the Moon. But the capability to build a Moon ship does exist. It’s just that nobody in Washington has ordered one yet. Once you have a mission planned and funded, then you build the hardware, not the other way round.
Gregory, I posted to quibble the quibble. Yes, Bill was saying that, but wasn’t only saying that.
Further, the merits of manned vs. unmanned space travel are subjective, but insofar as NASA’s mission statement (refer #140 above) goes, surely unmanned exploration is far more likely to achieve it using far fewer resources and time.
Yes, and that is why that is not what a mars mission would be. It would be much more like the bases in Antarctica. It would be real scientists doing real science, not test pilots picking up rocks.
Eric, I know teflon was not developed by NASA for the Apollo program, but it is commonly cited as such. In fact most of the spinoffs cited were previously developed for other reasons, but were adopted for Apollo and thus popularized by it.
Moses,
You start out by denying that raising equity funding is difficult, and then you prove my point:
The hardest part is finding investors that don’t want to rape you. Most of these guys want a big return on their investment.
Yeah, those guys are what we call “accredited investors.” They get to be sharks, just like the banks do because government stacks the deck in their favor.
If you want to raise a fairly small amount of capital from people who aren’t sitting on seven-figure quantities of ready cash, you quickly run into the limit of 35 people who aren’t “accredited”.
Check out the brief description of rule 505 here:
http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/qasbsec.htm
Join the real business world someday.
I joined it back in 1982, sunshine. I’ve worked at JP Morgan, Phibro energy, Salomon Brothers, KPMG, UBS/Warburg, and many smaller companies as well.
-jcr
government operations are inherently less efficient than those of the private sector, because of the lack of competition, the lack of accountability to stockholders,
Well, inefficiency happens in the private sector too, but the key difference is that in the private sector it’s punished, and in the public sector it’s rewarded (or at least that was the case before the government got into the bailout racket).
as John Randolph keeps cogently pointing out) the fact that a sovereign government can get itself out of a financial hole simply by mucking around with the money supply.
I’ve never said that a government can get itself out of a hole that way. I’ve said exactly the opposite, on several occasions. Inflating the currency never works as a remedy for previous inflation.
-jcr
I got my doctorate.
All that prestige, and yet you’re too embarrassed by your behavior here to post under your full name?
Zinger FAIL.
I struck a nerve that prompted some defensive bragging on your part. I’m satisfied that my zinger did what I intended.
BTW, shouldn’t you be out assassinating an archduke or something? You are the one who claimed to be an anarchist, right? Anti-property and all that sort of thing?
-jcr
I’ve never said that a government can get itself out of a hole that way. I’ve said exactly the opposite, on several occasions. Inflating the currency never works as a remedy for previous inflation.
Yes, sorry I wasn’t clear (it was late last night when I was writing). I meant that, as you have pointed out, governments do use that method when faced with financial difficulties, albeit that it screws up the economy in the long run – and, of course, that it isn’t a method open to a non-sovereign entity.
#158
Ha! Eric Atkinson agrees with the manned-flight crowd. I consider my opposition completely vindicated.
#159
Atkinson, there is no connection between manned spaceflight and protective measures against asteroid strike, halfwit. You’ve been watching too many Bruce Willis movies.
jcr, Walton,
Because of course in the Libertarian fantasy world, inflation of money supply is going to be a critical issue right now !!!!
With the amount of deleveraging that’s taking place, the negative growth forecasts of GDP for at least the next two years, the slashing of commodity prices, the phenomenal downward pressures on Labour costs due to rising unemployement, it’s deflation that’s a the big issue, not inflation !
Geebus, are you guys dreaming or what ?
But government operations are inherently less efficient than those of the private sector, because of the lack of competition, the lack of accountability to stockholders
Oh good grief, the usual “libertarian” tosh. No, they are not, because competition generates its own inefficiencies: the competitors divert resources to advertising, poaching and retaining customers and key staff, and dividends. You cannot say a priori that these inefficiencies are less than any due to the slack that lack of competition can generate (which can itself have benefits: a system without any slack is more vulnerable to shocks). Moreover, accountability can be to democratically constituted outside bodies. Thus, for example, it’s my view that the BBC’s Board of Governors should be directly elected by all licence payers.
Thus, for example, it’s my view that the BBC’s Board of Governors should be directly elected by all licence payers.
Good God, no… a board full of elected party hacks, who would promptly use the BBC to advance their own partisan interests.
Not that the present situation is good either. The licence fee is an indefensible tax. We should scrap the licence fee and sell off the BBC’s assets to the private sector. TV can be provided perfectly effectively by private companies as a consumer service, so why do we need a tax to fund it?
Bill Dauphin@172,
Sorry, I didn’t intend to imply you approved of killing Native Americans – only that the romanticisation of “the frontier” goes very deep in American psychology, even among those who know and deplore its bad side, and is in my view an irrational driver of the desire for manned spaceflight.
On the capabilities of the shuttle, I’d have thought it was pretty obviously a wrong turning, and NASA appear to agree. And I meant precisely that we can’t do what could be done 40 years ago – send people to the moon. of course we could if the mission were ordered – although it seems this would take at least until 2020, longer than the period from Sputnik to “One small step”. I do regret that the Apollo programme was ended just when serious scientific dividends were in sight – IIRC the first geologist went of the last Apollo mission – but given the advances in automation since then, I’d now go with a completely unmanned programme. The moon is even close enough that you can use remote control of equipment by human operators. As for the Space Station – other than repairing Hubble, what has it contributed to science? We could have had a fleet of Hubbles for its cost.
Would be fun to compare the efficiency of the French railway system with the British or American one…
Walton@185,
Why do you assume party hacks would be elected, other than your loathing of democracy? I’d vote for people with relevant expertise. The BoG of course has a supervisory role, they don’t run the corporation day-to-day.
All that prestige, and yet you’re too embarrassed by your behavior here to post under your full name? – John C. Randolph
Bit of a shit on the quiet, aren’t you Randolph? I notice you don’t aim this attack at your “libertarian” cronies (Walton, SfO). There are many good reasons for preferring to use a pseudonym on a blog, particularly for a woman. I think SC’s too smart for you, so you resort to this kind of crap. Yuk.
…so that it quickly becomes the same debilitating crap as the rest…
Walton, fyi, in France, the Sarkozy govt has decided to cut all advertising on publicly funded channels, (similar model as BBC) we’re moving in the opposite direction as you suggest.
negentropyeater@187,
Come, come, it follows from the axioms of Austrian economics that the UK and US railways must be more efficient! Any experience we may have to the contrary can be dismissed, since empirical evidence cannot test economic theory, but only illustrate it.
Walton,
You’re too young to remember when the UK had only 2, 3 or 4 TV channels (I’m too young to remember when there was 1). There was far more good TV then than now, when competition has driven almost all programming down to the cheapest and tackiest. For the commercial channels, the viewer is not the customer – the viewer is the product, delivered to the real customers, the advertisers.
Walton,
how do you explain that the French healthcare system (100% controlled by govt) is ranked #1 in the world (by the WHO), costs 40% less per capita as the American one, yet we still have some of the world’s best medical research organizations, and several world class pharmaceutical private corporations.
That must be a complete mistery for Libertarians, no ?
Let’s talk about electricity generation and distribution if you want more examples…
Walton,
Further to electing theBBC’s BoG. People have a very direct interest in the kinds of programme that appear, which do not correlate well with political affiliation. THus, I’m sure you would get “sport” candidates”, “drama” candidates, “science” candidates, “reality TV” candidates, etc. This is actually a way of reducing the power of government, as it would give the BBC its own democratic legitimacy. The only reason you’re against it is because it’s not weighted in favour of the rich.
Gee, I really wonder how it’s possible that the private sector includes corporations whose failure could cause such systemic risks, tremendous domino effects on the overall economy and wellbeing of the people, that the govt has to bail them out ?
How could this possibly have happened in the banking, insurance and automotive sectors ?
Libertarian response : oh because these sectors were far too regulated. If they had been really operating under the simplistic assumptions of our free-market model, nothing of the sort would have happened. We have absolutely no evidence to substantiate this, but it doesn’t matter, that’s one of our necessary axioms.
Methinks this is going to be fun ! So the American govt is going to bail out these “too big to fail” corporations, and then, when everything will be back to normal, they’ll privatise them again so that their shareholders can reap the profits of the bonanza. And then we’ll continue that way, socializing losses and privatizing profits, until maybe one day, the tax payers start getting really pissed off with this, and ask, if there are really sectors of the economy that are so systemic, why the hell let them in the hands of the private sector ?
Walton:
Good God, no… a board full of elected private-sector hacks, who would promptly use the BBC to advance their own corporate interests.
Epikt, Epikt, you don’t understand! The Invisible Hand ensures that although corporations act in their own interests, the result is always beneficial for everyone!
The Invisible Hand giveth,
And the Invisible Hand taketh away.
Blessed be the Invisible Hand.
Nick’s already responded to this.
Defensive bragging? Get a grip. Actually, your pitiful attempt at a jab looked more like a exercise in projection to me. Just as this response from you screams of reluctant admiration. You’re giving away your hand with every post, Randolph, and I’m greatly enjoying it.
Defensive bragging? Get a grip. Actually, your pitiful attempt at a jab looked more like a exercise in projection to me. Just as this response from you screams of reluctant admiration.
That “pitiful attempt at a jab”, as you call it, has you squawking with indignation for a second time, I see.
-jcr
“””Libertarian response : oh because these sectors were far too regulated.”””
Actually, no. The response would be to let them fail, take the pain that the market doles out to those who are bad at what they are doing, and continue on. They failed because they took bad risks or as in the auto companies, they had bad management and unions that over-ran the market.
Two things will happen. People will be leery of doing business with “too big to fail” corporations. Better and more capable hands will fill it the void in the economy left by the failed establishments.
“””if there are really sectors of the economy that are so systemic, why the hell let them in the hands of the private sector ?”””
Wrong. They’ll ask, why is the government getting involved in the private sector? Failure is part of success in a capitalistic system. You reward success and let failure disappear…
What’s wrong with your brain?
Hey, Randolph, that’s a great tactic. Insult someone, and if they don’t respond, then clearly they don’t have an answer; if they do, then clearly you’ve hit a nerve. Now I understand why you’re a “libertarian”: mean, stupid, spiteful people like you are naturally drawn to mean, stupid, spiteful ideologies.
Hey, Randolph, that’s a great tactic. Insult someone,
Nick, I wouldn’t expect you to know this, but SC has been tossing barbs my way for rather longer than I’ve been returning them.
mean, stupid, spiteful people like you
Same to you, I’m sure.
mean, stupid, spiteful ideologies.
No, I’ve never been a socialist.
-jcr
They failed because they took bad risks or as in the auto companies, they had bad management and unions that over-ran the market.
BTW, despite the dire predictions being peddled by their lobbyists, the auto industry isn’t in danger of collapsing. Three particular companies with untenable cost structures are in danger of collapsing, and if they do we’ll still be able to buy cars from any number of other suppliers. Even if one insists on buying an American-made car, there’s a lot them being built in the USA by Toyota, Honda, and several other competently-managed businesses.
-jcr
I’ve never been a socialist. – jcr
I know – as I said, your type are naturally drawn to mean, stupid, spiteful ideologies like “libertarianism”. Additionally, if you had ever been a socialist, you’d have some idea what socialism is.
Nick Gotts:
Nick, thanks for correcting my simple-minded misconception. I fear I lack sufficient faith to see the invisible hand. This is truly a mystery, because I’ve prayed and prayed at the Shrine of the Holy Rand, and yet the best I can do is to see dim images of The Invisible Raised Middle Finger.
Nick,
Socialists have a body count in the neighborhood of a hundred million, between the holocaust, Stalin’s gulags, and Mao’s “great leap forward”.
If you had ever read The Gulag Archipelago, then you’d know what socialism is.
-jcr
SfO #201,
Yet one more axiom of ultra-simplistic Libertarian ideology.
Can you begin to understand what would be the situation like right now in the US if the govt had let AIG, a few large banks, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, possibly General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, fail ? Any idea of the repercusions ?
Do you at all think about this, or just “assume” that everything would start growing beautifully again, kind of sorting itself out by magic ? Oh yeah, of course, America is the promissed land, the land of the “free”, such an exceptional country, it’s in the blood of its people, they are so entrepreneurial and endowed with such a formidable fighting spirit that they will always bounce back : for instance, a fresh new automotive sector will develop itself, and will rapidly overtake those giant competitors from Europe, Japan and China. Because that’s what we “believe” in, David vs Goliath, the underdog, the challenger, that’s how we will succeed.
Yeah, God bless America, we’ve seen hard times before and we’ve always left it to the free-market to sort things out, govt never had to intervened, that’s the way we did business in the USA when the founding fathers were around, the world hasn’t changed, so it will work out fine that way !
Randolph,
You’re a moron. Or you’d know that democratic socialism, anarchist socialism and Leninism are very different things.
if the govt had let AIG, a few large banks, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, possibly General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, fail ? Any idea of the repercussions?
The effects of the failures you list are massive and dire, but by bailing them out, the government allows them to continue the mistakes they made to get into this mess. Every postponement of liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment compounds the problem.
At this point, we’re facing the prospect of not just a number of large companies collapsing, but the collapse of the dollar in a hyperinflationary spiral.
-jcr
Or you’d know that democratic socialism, anarchist socialism and Leninism are very different things.
They’re all flavors of the same mistaken belief system. They all preach that it’s OK to destroy individuals for the benefit of the collective.
-jcr
“””Can you begin to understand what would be the situation like right now in the US if the govt had let AIG, a few large banks, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, possibly General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, fail ? Any idea of the repercusions ?”””
Pay attention to the last part of video two–
jcr@211,
The usual lie.
Oh yeah, of course, America is the promissed land, the land of the “free”, such an exceptional country, it’s in the blood of its people, they are so entrepreneurial and endowed with such a formidable fighting spirit that they will always bounce back : – Strawman. Human beings are by nature entrepreneurial – yes, it does differ greatly from culture to culture, but in general terms it’s true – and if they are given the freedom and opportunity to do so, people will compete and succeed.
…for instance, a fresh new automotive sector will develop itself, and will rapidly overtake those giant competitors from Europe, Japan and China. – If America creates a more business-friendly climate by cutting tax rates and promoting a more flexible labour market, then there’s no reason why this shouldn’t happen.
And this is even better…
John Morales:
No need to apologize; this is a public form, not a private chat between me and Nick.
No I’m not. The distinction you seem to think I’ve missed (or worse, willfully ignored) is actually precisely the point I was trying to make: Nick seemed to be saying (although it’s possible I misunderstood his intent) that human spaceflight technology had failed to advance over 40 years, as opposed to his counterexamples of robotics, computing, and biotechnology. My response was (is) that the apparent failure of spaceflight technology to advance, as supposedly evidenced by our lack of current capability to duplicate the Apollo missions, is actually the result of political choices, not underlying technology. In fact, all of the enabling technologies for human spaceflight (which, BTW, include all of Nick’s supposed counterexamples) are vastly advanced over the Apollo era. We currently lack the capability to send humans to the moon; we do not lack the ability.
To that point…
Nick:
You could fill a whole BBS with arguments about the long, strange trip that has been the Space Shuttle’s history (I know, because I’ve participated in such fora), but whether or not it was “obviously a wrong turning” depends entirely on your goals and priorities. The Shuttle’s real problem lies in the fact that, owing to the political and budget realities of the era in which it was developed, it tried to support every space launch mission for every space launch customer, all in one vehicle. It was hamstrung from the start… very much a “horse designed by committee.” But even so, it’s a feckin’ brilliant piece of technology, if you really look at it, notwithstanding all the din of criticism.
NASA’s current path — retiring the Shuttle and developing a new launch architecture — is the result of (soon to be ex) President Bush given the agency new marching orders. Shuttle has its adherents and its critics within NASA, but it would be a mistake to assume the Constellation program represents some sort of NASA repudiation of Shuttle.
Sure, that’s how I understood it… but my response is that it’s really incorrect to say we can’t; it’s more accurate to say we have chosen not to. And that being the case, you can’t necessarily draw any conclusion about the inherent value of the enterprise. The choice may have been a bad one… or (again, depending on your goals) the choice not to go to the moon again may have been a good one for the time without it meaning that going to the moon is an inherently bad idea. The fact that we, as a culture, have done more with computing or robotics technology than we have with go-to-the-moon technology does not prove (as you seem to be saying) that going to the moon is an intrinsically inferior enterprise.
Given the same level of resources and political committment, there’s no question in my mind that we could duplicate the Apollo timeline, and with missions orders of magnitude more capable. The long timeline for Constellation isn’t related to capability; it’s related to an entirely different political and social environment. To wit: We no longer think going to the moon is a critical element of Beating the Commies™.
Well, first, the Space Station (ISS) has nothing to do with repairing the Hubble. In fact, ISS competes with Hubble for Space Shuttle resources. As for ISS, if you don’t count collecting data on how humans live in space as science, I’ll agree that its science value has been oversold. But then, I’m the one who thinks science isn’t the sole, or even primary, reason for doing space exploration. I think exploration is the reason for doing space exploration, and science is a cocurricular endeavor. Finally, if by “we” you mean the world, we have built a “fleet of Hubbles” over the years: The skies are full of all sorts of space telescopes performing a huge variety of space-based research in astronomy, astrophysics, and observational cosmology… and plenty more are in the pipeline. The idea that human spaceflight and space-based science represent a zero-sum game is, IMHO, false. It’s the antics of those “space cowboys” you deride that generates quite a significant fraction of the public (i.e., taxpayer) support for all space exploration, including robotic science missions. Arguably what we need to support space science is not less human spaceflight, but more human spaceflight that’s less boring.
One final bit:
Forget American psychology; what I have in mind is more like whatever it was that made the earliest humans leave their little valley in Africa and walk over the hill into the next piece of land. The entire history of our species has been one of migration and expansion; that’s not some uniquely American pathology.
jcr,
Who talks about bailing them out ? Me ?
I’d nationalize them entirely, fire the executive management (eliminating of course the current BoMgt), recapitalize it, and start newly with the rest of the employees who are not responsible for the strategic mistakes of their Exec. Mgt and BoMgt.
And I wouldn’t reprivatize them once they are profitable again, what for, just to make sure a few rich speculators can enrich themselves for doing nothing ? I’d sell a minority stake on the markets, and retribute all employees with an equity participation system.
But I wouldn’t let them fail !
SfO, Walton, #212, #216,
Jim Rogers ? You mean the guy who’s been taunting nothing else over the past two years that commodities are one of the best investments to put your money in ?
Sure, I’m going to listen to an ignorant moron like this one.
You can’t possibly be serious ? Now I understand where you get your economic education from…
It’s a bit as if someone had linked me to a video of Ken Ham to support his creationist views !
ooops, sorry comment #219 was only directed at SfO.
(I admit that so far, Walton has been more knowledgeable and intelligent than this !)
I don’t pretend to have any in-depth understanding of economics, so I suppose this is more of a question…From what I do understand, it was allowing the banks to fail on a massive scale in the late 20s that precipitated the great depression. It took the New Deal and a huge increase in the military/industrial complex during WWII to get us out of that, more than 10 years. So, in terms of what is going on right now, wouldn’t it make sense to prevent *most* of the banks from collapsing while at the same time investing heavily in the development of infrastructure, basic research, etc. to spur job creation and innovation?
what I have in mind is more like whatever it was that made the earliest humans leave their little valley in Africa and walk over the hill into the next piece of land. – Bill Dauphin
Well “whatever it was” may have been pressure of population, local failure of resources, or just random drift.
But even so, it’s [the Shuttle] a feckin’ brilliant piece of technology, if you really look at it, notwithstanding all the din of criticism. Bill Dauphin
This must be some strange use of the term “brilliant” I’m not familiar with. 40% of the fleet has blown up or disintegrated, killing all on board. Would you get on a plane or ship with that record?
Well, first, the Space Station (ISS) has nothing to do with repairing the Hubble. In fact, ISS competes with Hubble for Space Shuttle resources.
Sorry, my error.
“””Jim Rogers ? You mean the guy who’s been taunting nothing else over the past two years that commodities are one of the best investments to put your money in ?
Sure, I’m going to listen to an ignorant moron like this one.”””
I suppose you could go the other route and listen to “The economy is sound” Bernanke or “We are seeing an impressive economy” Paulson…
Truth is truth. Rogers is simply telling you what reality is. Listen or not, it really won’t stop cards from falling off your house…
Another decent argument–
Nick:
I probably wouldn’t get on any plane or ship that wasn’t part of a mature, learned-out transportation system… but that doesn’t mean risky, experimental planes and ships are bad technology.
Look at the fatality rates of the early Wright airplanes and their contemporaries. Look at the fatality rates of early submarines and submersibles. Would you argue that those were not “brilliant” technological achievements, human cost notwithstanding?
And look at all the Shuttle statistics. 123 flights totalling 1137+ days in space and 830 person-flights. 113 EVAs supported, 66 satellites deployed, and 32 visits to crewed space stations (many of which were instrumental in building one of those stations). This machine has functioned as a laboratory, extended-term habitat, construction machine, and two-way cargo truck, all in an environment that no other vehicle can do more than barely visit… and it has done so with crews more than twice as large as any other spacecraft.
Nobody ever claimed — certainly I haven’t — that space travel wasn’t risky… but the Space Shuttle is like a modern ship in the age of sail compared to any other crewed spacecraft.
Of course, if you start from the position that human spaceflight is inherently worthless, none of this will matter to you. But that doesn’t mean Shuttle isn’t an awesomely capable machine.
I don’t think human spaceflight is worthless; I think it’#s an awesome achievement. But I’m not totally convinced that it’s a valid use of taxpayers’ money. Space exploration is not an essential; if the very wealthy want to fund it, that’s up to them, but as a fiscal conservative I object to any unnecessary government spending.
If we’re going to put public money into space, we should concentrate on things that have a clear short-term beneficial objective – including those with defence applications. Since a truly effective space-based weapons system would essentially bring an end to the threat of major war (since the nation or nations controlling it would have unrivalled and unmatchable power to obliterate their enemies, making it, effectively, suicidal to even consider war between nations), it would be the greatest boon to world peace since the atomic bomb (which, of course, through the threat of MAD has saved us from a third, and probably a fourth, world war since 1945).
Ummmmmm SfO,
How can you suppose that pointing out the stupidities of Bernanke and Paulsen is an adequate defence of a moron like Rogers?
Bill Dauphin@226,
The Shuttle is not a first-generation machine like the Wright brothers’ planes: it was launched 16 years after the first manned spaceflight.
“”Ummmmmm SfO,
How can you suppose that pointing out the stupidities of Bernanke and Paulsen is an adequate defence of a moron like Rogers?”””
Because it goes to the very obvious argument that government gets filled with people who know nothing and make huge blunders, which is all Rogers was saying…
Rogers is a very wealthy moron, and like myself, took the time to criss cross the planet to see first hand the differences in political systems.
He also came to the same conclusions I did by what he saw.
Enterprise trumps government for human beneficence.
The evidence is plain if you go see.
Since a truly effective space-based weapons system would essentially bring an end to the threat of major war – Walton
Sometimes I despair of you Walton. Ignoring the fact that no such systems is even remotely technically feasible, let’s say you, the benign libertarian leader Walton, at the head of your coalition of the rich, have established “a truly effective space-based weapons system”. I, as the mad dictator Vladimir bin Hitler, wish to cause trouble. What I don’t do is launch missiles. Instead, I send nuclear weapons into your ports inside shipping containers, or smuggle genetically engineered pathogens into your capital and pour them into your reservoirs. Even after I have struck, you don’t know it was me. I might even plant evidence pointing to my rival mad dictator, Adolf bin Lenin.
He also came to the same conclusions I did by what he saw. – SfO
Well if I didn’t have nay other reason to believe it, this would be strong evidence he’s a moron.
Enterprise trumps government for human beneficence.
Yeah, yeah. That’s why everyone in Sweden is starving.
You call that returning them? How sad for you. I suppose next you’ll be asking me about my SAT scores.
And that will continue on my part, as your market fundamentalism is at once absurd and dangerous, and your evangelizing on this blog is boring as all hell.
However, some of that will have to wait, as I’m currently packing for about a week in the Virgin Islands. Maybe I can get in a few more hooks before I leave in the morning, but I’m not making any promises.
(And thanks, Nick.)
‘Twas a pleasure, SC. Enjoy those Virgins!
SfO,
if you want to hear an economist I trust, listen to Nouriel Roubini, you might get somethng out of it :
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=924183570&play=1
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=924188328&play=1
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=924206516&play=1
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=924203681&play=1
The Shuttle is no more similar to previous spacecraft than the Wright Flyer was to the Montgolfiers’ hot air balloon. We can both have our opinions about the worth of human spaceflight, but if you say the Space Shuttle is anything less than a technological marvel, I’m bound to say you’re simply objectively incorrect.
But now I have said it, and I won’t bother you by saying it any more.
Bill,
Technological marvel, OK. But would anyone have even considered building it if they’d suspected there would be two disasters during its lifetime? It’s not even just the loss of lives – but because the fleet was so small, each loss meant cutting large parts of the programme.
Not every technological marvel is a good idea. I’d say the fundamental mistake was to attempt a reusable takeoff and landing craft. These are the points at which enormous forces act on a spacecraft – and quite different ones on launch and landing. Much better to go for simple, robust and relatively cheap use-once launchers and landers, as with Apollo, Soyuz, and Constellation, if you must go in for manned spaceflight at all.
Walton:
Here’s a succint example of the (unintentional, I’m sure) poverty of your worldview:
The market will always focus on the short term; if you restrict the public sector as well to short-term benefits, how will we ever achieve any long-term goods? Do you simply not admit that there are desirable activities whose payback is over a longer term (or in a different currency) than the market can support?
Thanks! Really looking forward to it.
Bill,
For another example of a technological marvel that should never have been built, consider Concorde. Never paid its way, finally scrapped after a disaster.
Nick:
[sigh]
Blockquote FAIL! (..speaking of “D’OH!!”)
Bill@241,
Well, engineering is undoubtedly an area in which you’re far more knowledgeable than me, so I concede you may be right on reuseability.
Do you simply not admit that there are desirable activities whose payback is over a longer term (or in a different currency) than the market can support?
Yes, there are. And where those things are essential for the future survival of human beings (medical research into rare diseases, for instance, or protection of certain finite natural and environmental resources), it is legitimate for the state to intervene. But where, as with space exploration, there is no clear objective in sight, I submit that it is not legitimate to spend taxpayer funds. As far as I can tell, the main objective of sending a man into space is to send a man into space. While this might be good for national pride and one-upmanship, I don’t see what this achieves in terms of raising the standard of living of the average man on the street (who, of course, you are forcing to pay for it).
Walton:
So the internet, whose impact nobody anticipated, was an illegitimate expenditure of government funds?
“[N]o clear objective in sight” is practically a definition of long-term basic research. Take away all the things discovered by publicly funded projects that had “no clear objective in sight” when they began, and we’d live in a pretty sadly diminished world.
Walton @244:
How are developing space technology and scientific discovery not clear objectives?
Safe trip, SC! Have fun, and we’ll look forward to hearing from you when you’re back.
I’m arguing on the same side as Walton… Time for a fundamental reassessment of my position ;-)
Thanks, thalarctos.
I’m so sorry to read about your kitten. Very sad. Take good care.
SC
Walton @244,
Q: How can plausible hard SF ideas become reality? A: Via technological and scientific progress.
For an example of what was SF and is now unurguably beneficial science, consider satellites:
Take note that it took State intervention to realise this vision.
Now consider solar power satellites, space habitats/farms or asteroid mining for example. You wish humanity to be restricted to the infinitesimal resources of one planet, when there’s a whole solar system’s worth of resources to exploit and lebensraum?
We won’t have access to that without developing space technology, the which was pioneered by States, not private enterprise.
There. Fixed.
:o)
i agree with scott at 63. very good points
@ 90: and while “we’re goin’ to Mars!” might be rousing, we’re a long way from making it happen. Can you say ‘cabin fever’? They would be in a liitle tin can in space for months without any contact or room to stretch out. Besised, it might catastofically fail, and that would do wonders for the psyche of america i’m sure
i was watching a program on the science channel that dealt with energy, and the topic came up about the moon. Apparently there are large amounts of a rare isotope of helium there. using this isotope, the can use fusion to produce immense amounts of energy. I’ll be back with a link hopefully.
I think colinization to be important to the survival of our species in the long term. based purely on population growth, we may need to spread out in the solar system by 2200, barring some global disaster or WWIII. But even so, WWII was in concludsion, one of the biggest factors to our growth in population! scary stuff
wow that was easy!
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_000630.html
SfO,
if you want to hear an economist I trust, listen to Nouriel Roubini, you might get somethng out of it :
I was lucky and got woken to the mortgage market by a conversation with my brother. I came to the same conclusion on my own that Peter did, and I made a few moves and am sitting on a pile of silver and no debt.
Check out this look-back video, and see who makes sense and who doesn’t.
I like Roubini, when he’s not talking about burgers…
Bill@#217, as a longtime hard SF reader, I’d *like* Niven et al to be right, and our medium-term future to be filled with people beetling around the Solar System, and I wish Heinlein et al had been right when they said that we’d colonize the solar system because Man had always gone to new places and colonized them. And to a degree the naysayers that said ‘they only do that when there’s an economic return’ are wrong: humans *have* gone to live in some very odd and inhospitable places, like inland Australia.
But Heinlein, Niven et al are still wrong. The essential thing about prehistoric human colonization is that we were always spreading into somwhat-habitable territory: we could always live there without resupply from other habitable zones. We never colonized Antarctica, and nobody is proposing that we can or should: a year without resupply for the Antarctic bases would be a major disaster for them. We never colonized the ocean floor, or even the floor of the North Sea, a place where unknown generations lived only ten thousand years ago, when it was dry land. We didn’t colonize them because if the technological infrastructure there fails, *everyone dies*. And the technological infrastructure always fails, if just because *building* it requires an enormous technological base in itself, and you can’t ship that technological base out. (How do we build chip fabs on Mars? If we build a base there, and want it to be self-sufficient, we’ll need them: and if we don’t care if it’s self-sufficient, we are still dependent on Earth for survival, and thus indirectly dependent on the Terrestrial ecosystem.)
Hell, we can’t even keep ecosystems stable enough to keep them running without being part of the greater terrestrial ecosphere. Biosphere 2 suffered catastrophic CO2 variations and mass extinctions. The ISS is suffering a mould invasion that’s leading the poor sods up there to come back with damaged health and forcing them to spend half their time scraping gunk off everything. And that’s not even a self-contained ecosystem!
When we’ve managed to make a self-sustaining ecosystem that lasts more than a few months without external resupply: when politicians are seriously proposing solving housing shortages by building on the continental shelf: when zero gee no longer cripples people, or we have magic 1G-for-weeks fusion drives a-la Niven: *then* come back and say solar system colonization is practical. But not before then.
Of course, this is the *easy* part, Mars-colonization-level stuff. Interstellar colonization, Venusian colonization, Plutonian colonization, living on gas giants and living in the Sun require *much* higher tech (effective magic in many of these cases, although I have seen speculation even about mechanisms for living in the Sun. Personally I suspect if it’s possible and we get there, we’ll find ourselves faced with a customs delegation from the existing inhabitants!)
(Kudos to Charlie Stross for many interesting discussions on this and related subjects over the years. I used to be a believer too, but beating Charlie in arguments is hard. He thinks things through.)
Rickr0ll @254,254:#152,#164,#250.
Coming back into this rather late, but here goes:
Bill and Nick: The “something” that made early humans spread out from their homeland in Africa is called natural selection. Those who stayed home are still there, while those who left home are everywhere. With the exception of equatorial Africa, the entire habitable world was colonized by home-leavers from a long line of home-leavers. It therefore seems reasonable to expect that the solar system will likewise be colonized by home-leavers as soon as it becomes feasible for private citizens to do so. This has nothing to do with manifest destiny or the romance of the frontier; it’s an observation that any genetic tendency toward expansionism will be rewarded as long as there are new habitats to colonize.
Nix @ #256: Survival in the high Arctic requires technology too, of a portable, cottage-industry variety. So while Heinlein and Niven may have been wrong about the specifics, Varley’s vision of humans in symbiotic spacesuits living off the land in the rings of Saturn may be closer to the mark. If space-survival tech can be made portable, self-replicating, and independent of large-scale planet-based industry (see post #126), then the barrier to colonization falls and nothing can stop people from migrating out into the solar system.
Gregory @258, in the first part of your comment, you seem to be implying that some sort of genetic wanderlust is a major factor towards colonisation; that’s a pretty hard thesis to sustain (you don’t think environmental and social pressures would be of far more significance?).
And I hope you’re trying to suggest that the population of, for example, Australia is more genetically prone to adventure and exploration than that of England.
But if neither, then what are you saying?
John, I’m saying that if there is such a genetic tendency, then it will have been amplified by our history of expansion. This doesn’t preclude environmental/social pressures (although I’d argue that they’re less constant over evolutionary time than genetic pressures). But it seems to me we have to at least entertain the possibility that we’ve been genetically selected for expansionism before dismissing the idea of off-Earth expansion as irrelevant to our future as a species.
Gregory, thanks for the clarification. If you come up with some credible evidence for your supposition, I’ll be interested to read up on it.
PS you might find this interesing.
Nix (@256):
I won’t go point-by-point, because I’m loathe to turn this into a space colonization forum, but I’ll just say that your objections sound more like developmental hurdles than fundamental obstacles.
As for…
Yeah, but “habitable” is a moving target, and prehistoric human populations lacked the technological base to make large-scale modifications to the habitability of a location, either in terms of building habitats or modifying the natural habitat. (Think Kim Stanley Robinson more than Niven or Heinlein.)
Nick was suggesting (if I understood him correctly) not that “we” won’t colonize space, but that the “we” that will do so will be nonbiological surrogates. My position is that we’ll see humans conforming extraterrestrial environments to our reqirements sooner than we’ll see humans conforming themselves (or their vicarious selves) to extraterrestrial environments. Your position seems to be that neither will happen because the barrier to entry for either enterprise is too high to make it competitive with the status quo. Only time will tell which (if any) of us is correct… but it’s going to be fun watching.
Finally, even if we never colonize space, it doesn’t mean that in corpus exploration is pointless: Nobody wants to colonize the summit of Everest, either; doesn’t mean people don’t want to go there… and that desire can’t be satisfied by robotic surrogates!
you guys are idiots. argue the task at hand. NASA, space travel, hellooo? why hasen’t anyone even mentioned the energy crisis fixes mile me, John and Nick have mentioned?After all, the only real industry in the future is the energy industy. if america capitalizes on the giant hole in this market of unexploited energy, we can regain our economic dominance and prestige. Has anyone here seen invention nation on the science channel? i highly recommend it becasue it would be the same type of thing to what Tim Lovins was saying on Bill Maher a while back (i’m not sure it was him though, i tried to find out), and that this energy producing nation would end up with the most money. if we develop the technology and sell it to other countries, that will put us on the right track to eliminating all this debt
sorry, my last post was garbled at the end. Invention nation is about these three guys who go on a roadtrip through the US(in thier little bus fueled by used cooking oil) and take a look at all the green technologies that have been invented. It’s a great show, and shows that we Do have the ability to compete in an energy hungry world market.
Rickroll:
One of the “idiots” here, weighing in to let you know that if you’re interested in our energy future, you should pick someone other than space enthusiasts to fight with. Specious “spinoffs” arguments are usually about stuff that NASA alledged (but usually not actually) invented (i.e., the usual cant about tang, velcro, etc.)… but the real spinoffs have more to do with technologies NASA needed than things it invented. Recall that at the time solid-state semiconductors were invented, almost all users of electronic computers were large institutions — banks, universities, etc. — who really didn’t care that computers took up whole rooms (if not whole buildings); nobody was seriously thinking about desktop (nevermind laptop or palmtop) computing devised. NASA, OTOH, really needed compact, lightweight, highly sophisticated (for their time) computers for spacecraft, and became the lead customer (some might say the “angel investor”) for the nascent microelectronics industry. I’m not saying we wouldn’t have gotten the vast array of current microelectronics devices without NASA; I am saying we got a lot more of ’em, and a lot quicker, than we would have without the space program.
As for energy… there’s almost nothing a spacecraft — and especially a crewed spacecraft — needs more desperately than the ability to both generate and use power efficiently (take another look at Apollo 13; the real heroic saving moves on that mission were all about managing and conserving electrical power)… and to do so without a logistics trail that leads back to a wellhead or a stripmine. Huge swaths of today’s alternate energy technology have roots in space exploration: Fuel cells? Photovoltaics? Advanced battery technology? Smart power management systems? AFAIK, NASA didn’t invent any of this stuff, but spacecraft requirements have been major drivers in all of these technologies.
There’s always been a certain tension, if not outright antipathy, between environmentalists and tech geeks, but I actually think greens and space advocates naturally ought to be allies. Personally, I think we need an “Apollo program” to address energy issues… but I think a lot of the answers will ultimately have their roots in the actual Apollo program.
OT, but related to space exploration: This just in! Exoplanets have been directly imaged for the first time! For people who think sending robots to (for examplte) do spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere of Titan is the ultimate goal of space exploration, please ‘splain me why the things that get the most rapt attention from the public are the search for extraterrestrial life and the search for exoplanets. IMHO, it’s because, in virtually everone’s imagination, “space” is a place to live. YMMV, of course.
D’Oh!!
alledged should have been allegedly
[blush in shame]
so what you are saying is that entire industies have been formed by the necessity of NASA. You’re right, those ‘spinoffs’ are complestely useless.
Oh, and does anyopne know what happened to the Space Elevator?
Posted by: SteveM #114
The “well meaning fool” (and Bill Dauphin) wrote:
I know that NASA has given us some useful stuff, (e.g. teflon, bedding..),
The biggest PR blunder NASA ever made was to identify particular products as “spinoffs” of the Apollo program. The real “spinoffs” were entire industries and technologies, not calculators and teflon.
—
Nick Gotts asked what could be more inspiring than “become a scientist save the planet”? While I agree that the environment and man’s impact on it is vitally important, you have to admit it is not as “sexy” as space exploraation. Its like the choice between cleaning the house and going for a drive, what do you think a teenager would choose? I expect that environmental engineering and technology to reduce our impact would be a necessary “spinoff” of an interplanetary mission since it will require a lot more than just taking a few bottles of air with them in order to survive.
By the way, YAY EXOPLANETS! I’ve always been sortof struck by the exceedingly high number of planets in our solar system (something like 10 or 11 if you count “Rupert” way out yonder and Pluto/charon, even though they are dwarves), but seeing a planet with three gas giants is very provacative.
I expect that environmental engineering and technology to reduce our impact would be a necessary “spinoff” of an interplanetary mission since it will require a lot more than just taking a few bottles of air with them in order to survive. – RickrOll
This is just a statement of faith. What we most urgently need is ways of reducing energy demand for everyday activities, which is unlikely to be a key constraint of an interplanetary voyage. Even if there were such a spinoff, it would come much too late. How about we wait and see if technology for an interplanetary mission emerges as a spinoff of saving our civilisation on this planet? I’d be delighted if it did.
The “sexy” point has already been discussed above, but it’s also worth noting that if you rely on this, you have to keep coming up with more and more extravagant feats. That’s basically why the Apollo programme was ended: once astronauts had landed on the moon, there was no other motivation sufficient to keep it going.
isn’t progress of our civilization one of those things that “keeps getting more and more extravagant”? Nanotech is one such example of this mentslity, and i do not doubt that this will directly be applied to space- exploration, colonization, ect.
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Nick Gotts asked what could be more inspiring than “become a scientist save the planet”? While I agree that the environment and man’s impact on it is vitally important, you have to admit it is not as “sexy” as space exploraation. Its like the choice between cleaning the house and going for a drive, what do you think a teenager would choose? I expect that environmental engineering and technology to reduce our impact would be a necessary “spinoff” of an interplanetary mission since it will require a lot more than just taking a few bottles of air with them in order to survive– SteveM, not me.
i know, the dashes at the middle are confounding, and then i went and added my 2 cents at the bottom. I tend to be sloppy. a thousand apologies (i’m sure i’ll use them up lol). The energy point was also discussed heavily
(Posted by: John Morales
Rickr0ll :#152,#164,#250.{see sloppy. Whoops, only 998 to go lol}), but i’m afraid many people lost interest and moved on to the other posts, and this topic is quite wanting of more discussion i think. But i can’t control the others, oh well. Che Sirrah Sirrah
so no one thinks this is important huh? :{ *sob*