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Mark Zuckerberg: President of the Universe

https://www.thenewatlantis.com...

I'm getting old and can't remember shit (CRS) , I use a search service when I can't remember something, or am curious about something I don't know.

I don't use google search though...

No, it's the other way around. According to Johns Hopkins study on sexuality and gender there is zero evidence homosexuals are born that way.

Your political beliefs about sexuality have no basis in science.

Try telling a gay teenager that is struggling with bullying and ridicule that he/she made a choice to be gay.

Just because someone wasn't born that way doesn't mean they made a choice. Culture and conditioning matter, too. But you cannot say homosexuals were "born that way" because they were not. In fact homophobia is more heritable than homosexuality.

So basically he favors the state of law in the US more or less as it was circa 2005? . . . Wow,... that is "terrifying".

Hmmmm ..... Sexuality and Gender

It's really too bad that hyrdogen is such a ludicrously impractical fuel.

It's a lot more ludicrous than you describe. Between production, distribution, and usage, the hydrogen economy is a complete non-starter (like your fuel-cell car after taking its first sniff of atmospheric O2).

Thanks for the link. I'm interested in checking out the underlying sources,

Well, if you want numbers for the US, you can go to the NSF:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/...

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...

I wasn't aware that so much research was funded by the private sector and I'll honestly still be a bit suspicious of the numbers

What you should really question is on what grounds you are "suspicious". You apparently had no data to base opinions on before I pointed you at those statistics, so your "suspicions" must be based on your political and/or economic preconceptions; ask yourself where those came from.

Spending on research has been constantly growing over the past 50 years, and private spending is well ahead of Government spending. There really isn't a "cutoff" in funding, unless a cut from a 5% increase to a 2% increase is construed as a cut (in a time when inflation is running around 2%).

According to this site converting from methane to hydrogen is around 70% efficient. You then lose another 20% of your efficiency compressing the hydrogen to 5000PSI. When you calculate the well to wheel efficiency you're better off with a hybrid car rather than a fuel cell car.

Tesla is addressing the "duck curve" by installing grid storage at their charging locations in order to even out the power draw. Even with hydrogen storage, producing hydrogen by cracking water is horribly inefficient and will require four power plants for every power plant needed to charge an EV.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...

Hydrogen just makes no sense.

You really have no clue how scientific research is funded in this country do you?

And no, there is no reason skepticism.
We aren't talking about a salesmen pushing a sale.
It's not a product being sold.
We are talking about research where there is a question and an effect to find an answer.

Do try to correct your ignorance by reading this: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...
It's a pretty decent primer.

On a related note, it's been shown again and again that you can't really do more than one higher-level brain task at once. So even the people that are very very good at switching rapidly between operating a cell phone and driving are still not really doing both at the same time.

So they aren't actually performing the task of driving while they are preoccupied with their cell phone. They may as well be asleep during those periods.

Currently there are far more superchargers than hydrogen filling stations and they are expanding very rapidly. On top of that, there are tens of thousands of public charging stations at shopping centers, parking garages and elsewhere. Electricity is everywhere. A supercharger is estimated to cost under $200K. A hydrogen filling station cost a minimum of between 2 to 4 million to build and the cost of hydrogen will never be competitive with gasoline, especially if made from cracking water water.

The cost of a battery swapping station is still far less than the cost of a hydrogen filling station. Most of the time the only thing that is needed for the battery swap is electricity and periodic restocking of batteries, which may not be all that often since the cost of swapping includes swapping again for your original battery. For one thing, the hydrogen filling station will need to be manned when it's open for safety, the battery swap does not need that since it is fully automated. Second of all, the cost of a hydrogen filling station will be far higher. If hydrogen is not made on site then a LOT of trucks will be needed to transport the hydrogen since a truck can typically only carry enough hydrogen to fill around 200 vehicles due to the heavy high pressure tanks involved. Regular pipelines cannot transport hydrogen due to embrittlement and leaks. High pressure pumps are also required. The equipment to make hydrogen on-site is also very expensive, and if it is made from water then a tremendous amount of electricity is required. Most likely it would be made from natural gas through steam reforming which also releases CO2. It takes several times as much electricity to make hydrogen to power a single hydrogen fuel cell car as it does to power an EV. In fact, 20% of hydrogen's energy content is used just to compress it.

Furthermore, you will need far more filling stations since EVs typically do most of their charging at home. With hydrogen this is not really possible. The only time I need to use a supercharger is during long trips. I have no need for most of my driving which is within the range of the battery. I spend 5 seconds plugging in at night and 5 seconds unplugging in the morning. Superchargers are typically needed along long distance routes, not in every town like gas stations or hydrogen filling stations.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...
http://www.teslamotors.com/sup...

because the conclusions of Silent Spring are somehow invalid and pesticides are so safe you could just gobble them up willy nilly?

Don't be stupid. There's a profound difference between using something responsibly and being a complete moron. Drinking too much water can kill you. Mercury can kill you, but we put it in CFL fluorescent lamps. Many cleaning products are toxic. Do you have a hard time not drinking or eating them?

Many of the conclusions in Silent Spring are questionable, at best I'm sure there is validity to some, or even much of it. But that's how you make a good lie, isn't it? I'd like to think that Rachel Carson had the best of intentions with this book. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

you can try to impugn one side by saying bias, and defend the other by again claiming bias, but that's irrelevent. the science says what it will, and if you follow the science, that's all that matters.

Science doesn't say anything. It's our, as a race, interpretations of what we observe. It doesn't take sides or have opinions. If the observations are wrong, then most of the time the conclusions are also wrong.

in the case of evolution, global warming, or vaccines the science says "its real", "its happening" and "they work". end of story.

There is no "end of story". Yes vaccines work. But that doesn't mean we should stop. They can always work better, or be improved. Some vaccines have had terrible side effects in the past. We should keep working to improve them.

Obviously AWG is occurring. But if it's "end of story" we should stop spending money on proving it further, shouldn't we? But it's a very complex problem, and all of the politics and money involved on both sides has clouded this issue almost beyond comprehension. As if it wasn't difficult enough without all the noise.

Scientific theories are disproved, revised and improved upon all the time. That's the very nature of science. There is no "end of story". It's a journey, not a destination. How many scientific theories have lasted 500 years? 100 years? Or even 50 years?

B) I can refuel my EV in my garage. Every morning I have a full battery. Most of the time I spend less time "refueling" my tesla than most people spend at a gas station (5 seconds to plug in at night and 5 seconds to unplug in the morning, I've timed it). Fast charging makes long trips quite doable. As for the charge/discharge limit, the Tesla battery is rated for 3000 charge/discharge cycles while still maintaining 70-80% capacity. That works out to 600,000 miles if I assume only 200 miles of range per full charge (EPA says 265 and I easily get at least 240 with my inefficient sticky tires).

C) What recycling issues? There are already programs in place to recycle lithium batteries.

D) The HFC membrane breaks down over time and is very costly since it contains platinum.

E) Most of that "lost" energy comes back when the batteries warm back up.

Then there are all the downsides of hydrogen:
1. Hydrogen is explosive when mixed with air between 4 and 74%. Safety is a major concern. The argument has been made that the risk is low because hydrogen rises in the air. This is true if the vehicle is parked outdoors, but many times vehicles are parked in parking structures or garages. The hydrogen will pool at the highest point. It only takes 4% hydrogen in air for it to be explosive.
2. Hydrogen can be ignited by sunlight and requires extremely little energy to ignite.
3. Hydrogen embrittles metals. It also leaks through the tiniest of gaps. It diffuses through metal.
4. It takes 20% of the energy contained in the hydrogen just to compress it for refueling. Liquifying it is not feasible due to the extreme amount of energy needed to cryogenically cool it and keep it from boiling off.
5. Most hydrogen is generated through steam reforming of methane, a process that is at best around 70% effecient.
6. Hydrogen will rise if it leaks, in any enclosed environment, i.e. a garage or other structure, this makes it extremely dangerous. You cannot add an odorant like you can natural gas since it will foul the PEM in the HFC.
7. The membrane of the HFC wears out over time and is very expensive since it relies on platinum.
8. HFCs must never be subjected to freezing or they will be destroyed.
9. The cost of a hydrogen fueling station is very expensive and likely will never be allowed to be done at ones home due to safety issues. There is a hydrogen filling station for buses in my county that has already experienced one fire. Hydrogen will generally have to be generated on site. (see 10)
10. It is not economically feasible to transport hydrogen for filling vehicles in trucks because the energy density of hydrogen is so low and the tanks for storing it will need to be quite heavy.
11. Existing pipelines cannot be used for transporting hydrogen (see 3).
12. HFCs are at best less than 70% efficient.
13. The cost of hydrogen will not be competitive with fossile fuels for a very long time.

The only advantage a HFC vehicle has over a BEV is that it can be refueled quickly. The problem is that you still have to frequently go to the filling station to refill it. A BEV can be charged at night in the garage where the time to recharge is no longer an issue.

BEVs make a lot more sense in most cases. A charging station can be built any place electricity is available and can be quite cheap (for a non-fast charger). Maintenance and overhead is also quite low.

Now it looks like you might just be better off burning the natural gas or diesel than running a HFC vehicle.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/... has some good arguments about hydrogen. Though some elements have been improved since it was written, like new techniques for electrolysis and more efficient and cheaper HFCs much of it still applies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

The problem with hydrogen is not just electrolysis being 80%. You lose another 20% just compressing the hydrogen. Then comes safety. Hydrogen leaks and tends to rise so parking a hydrogen vehicle indoors (i.e. a garage) is not safe. It is explosive under an extremely high range of mixtures. It burns with a nearly invisible flame. It can spontaneously combust. It embrittles metal. Unlike CNG you can't just add an odorant either since it will foul the fuel cell.

There is a hydrogen filling station in my local county for filling experimental HFC buses. They've already had one fire at the facility which is not used by the general public.

Hydrogen filling stations are also going to be far more expensive than gasoline stations. The equipment to generate hydrogen is very expensive. You can't transport hydrogen in the quantity needed by truck in a cost effective manner unlike gasoline and diesel and existing pipelines cannot be used due to embrittlement.

Look at how hard it is to stop all these gasoline engine fires. There's dozens every day. Gasoline doesn't spontaneously combust and requires a good spark or heat source to ignite it. It also is not explosive except under a rather limited range of mixtures. If hydrogen starts leaking in a garage it won't slowly combust like gasoline tends to do, if it ignites it will likely explode. With all those poorly maintained vehicles on the road how do you think things will fare with hydrogen? Unlike a gasoline car which only explodes in Hollywood movies, hydrogen is extremely explosive at a mixture between 4 and 74% in air. It will rise so it if leaks in an enclosed space it will rise to the ceiling. Hydrogen requires extremely little energy to ignight. It can spontaneously ignight from a leak or be ignited by sunlight.

Fuel cells are also only 42-53% efficient. Combine that with the losses from compressing the hydrogen (20% loss) and creating the hydrogen (25% loss under the best case). Also, almost all hydrogen manufactured today comes from natural gas and at least 20% is lost due to the endothermic reaction. You then have the same losses you would have with an electric vehicle and the losses of a battery, since HFC vehicles also need a battery for regenerative braking and to handle acceleration since the HFC will likely not handle peak load.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...
While some things have improved since it was written, others have not and are limited by the laws of physics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Hydrogen is actually a terrible solution for cars for a number of reasons.

1. Creating hydrogen from water is very inefficient and prohibitively expensive for transportation.
2. Creating hydrogen from natural gas is at best around 70% efficient due to the laws of physics, then there's all that CO2 left over.
3. Compressing hydrogen consumes at least 20% of the energy contained in the hydrogen. Cryogenically cooling it is far more energy intensive.
4. Fuel cells such as the type used in cars are at best around 40% efficient. Fuel cells also must maintain a certain temperature range, even when not in use. They must never freeze or they will be destroyed. They also must maintain a certain internal humidity level.
5. Transportation of hydrogen is expensive. For pressurized hydrogen the tanks are quite heavy. A truck carrying enough hydrogen for around 200 cars will weigh around 13 tons due to the tanks.
6. Existing pipelines cannot be used. Hydrogen embrittles metal so the pipes must be specially lined.
7. Safety is a concern for refueling. The Alameda County hydrogen filling station for the fuel cell busses already had one fire due to a failed valve and this refueling station is not open to the public.
8. Hydrogen is extremely flammable and burns with an almost invisible flame. A hydrogen leak in an indoor area could be catestrophic. Hydrogen also will leak through virtually any joint. Hydrogen is also explosive over a very wide range of mixtures with air, more so than even natural gas.
9. A diesel powered car is more efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell and will produce less CO2 since virtually all hydrogen comes from cracking methane.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...

Well, a difficulty is the lagging of the Islamic world in science and technology-- they are very short in the skilled people needed for making a credible nuclear technology infrastructure, although Iran possibly slightly less than much of the rest of the middle East. Religious fundamentalism doesn't serve well as a way to educate scientists and engineers (...and that should be a lesson for the US, not just Iran.)

There was a good article "Why the Arabic World Turned Away From Science" recently:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science

(Yes, I know that Iran is not Arabic, but Persian. The article title is somewhat misleading; it discusses Persian science as well as Arabic.)

Meh, just have one of the major clerics suddenly reinterpret a key religious text to indicate nuclear weaponry is divine will and then silence anyone who questions this. Hey presto, you've got yourself a country dedicated to develop nuclear weaponry!

Incidentally, that's also the answer to the article's headline: "One reinterpretation of a religious text away".

Well, a difficulty is the lagging of the Islamic world in science and technology-- they are very short in the skilled people needed for making a credible nuclear technology infrastructure, although Iran possibly slightly less than much of the rest of the middle East. Religious fundamentalism doesn't serve well as a way to educate scientists and engineers (...and that should be a lesson for the US, not just Iran.)

There was a good article "Why the Arabic World Turned Away From Science" recently:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science

(Yes, I know that Iran is not Arabic, but Persian. The article title is somewhat misleading; it discusses Persian science as well as Arabic.)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance used to be a bit of a cult favorite. I think for me it was my Marshal McLuhan watershed.

From Alan Jacobs' superb distillation Why Bother with Marshall McLuhan?

First, that McLuhan never made arguments, only assertions. Second, that those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong they are highly debatable. Third, that McLuhan had an uncanny instinct for reading and quoting scholarly books that would become field-defining classics. Fourth, that McLuhan's determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed. And finally, that once one has absorbed that example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote.

Alan Jacobs single-handedly proves there is intelligent life in the humanities after all, even if he did wrap his fine meditation in three layers of compatibility cloak. His thesis is that McLuhan made an immense contribution by giving people permission to speak about media in a different way, without sounding like complete idiots (in comparison to what McLuhan got away with himself).

This lumps McLuhan in with Pirsig and Freud.

As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!

You're one of those. I'm on the opposite side of the fence. I regard the Apple-branded wedding dress as a Symbiote spider skin. Your GF would probably think that totally rocks as a wedding dress, if it comes in white. Don't forget your first anniversary, she might have a temper.

If you want some actual facts about this issue, it's worth reading this.

Later Marxists were fascinated with(and frequently sought to emulate) to work of industrialist innovators like Ford and Taylor, precisely because they recognized that those guys where on the cutting edge of non-zero-sum transactions and maximal productivity gains from the combination of capital and labor with scientific management techniques.

Or, because said Marxists, like the Taylorists and Ford, were craven materialists interested in maintaining their self-delusion of being scientific. Scientific Socialism. Eugenics. National Socialism. Stalinism. Scientific Management. All variant flavors of Fascist practice. All part of what has evolved forward into what's now called Corporatism.

If you've worked in one of the squeaky new Taylorite operations that are all now the norm in the Corporate World, you know what I'm getting at.

Read this article for a good reference at what I'm getting at. Taylorism is bad news for any creative thinking people.

Forget the moon, that is just going into another gravity well. it is not a "stepping stone" to mars, the asteroids, or the other planets.

I disagree, building a moon base would be a significant stepping stone. There is lots and lots of research that still needs to be done for meaningful long-distance space exploration. For example:

• The Russians and ESA are for example working on the Mars 500 project to see what happens if a group of cosmo-, taiko- and (euro-?) -nauts are locked up in a tin can together for 500 days. Where is the NASA equivalent of that? Is it not exciting enough because no big rockets are involved since the tin can is somewhere near Moscow? Long-distance travel means making sure the explorers are not at each others' throat.
• For both colonization and long-distance exploration missions, you need a life-support system that is robust, repairable, and produces very little waste and waste heat. A moon base would be excellent to test it because, unlike the Mars 500 tin-can, the vacuum outside is real and the micrometeorites, radiation levels etc. are real. I believe there's a really important lesson to be shown to the world, that building a sustainable mini-ecosystem is *hard*. And, that if you fuck up the one you're currently using, the only one we know works for generations, you're *fucked*.
• Manufacturing and autonomous manufacturing. I don't care how hard it is, I think Robert Zubrin is spot-on about its importance for missions to the moon and mars. He talks about a fuel factory here, to be run for 10 months in preparation to the manned mission, but even nicer would be a solar-cell driven factory for crude, low-energy, amorphous silicon solar cells, or maybe even some kind of very slow separator using mass spectrometry that over a period of years collects tiny amounts of pure boron, phosphorus, etc. The versions made this century don't have to be self-replicating :-).

Or was it Apollo-Saturn with its promise of quick and dirty into space before the Soviets what destroyed the progression of the X-15/X-20 spaceplane program and stagnated space exploration for years.

Indeed. If you haven't read it already, aerospace engineer Rand Simberg has a really great piece titled "A Space Program For the Rest of Us" which goes into detail on how the Apollo program, structured to beat the Russians to the Moon at any cost, had the unfortunate side effect of creating a space program which was unable to adapt to making space exploration a sustainable venture once the race (and massive government funding) was over. Unfortunately there's still quite a bit of Apollo nostalgia left, as evidenced by ex-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin structuring his Ares/Constellation program as "Apollo on Steroids" instead of even attempting to make it sustainable. Some quotes:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-space-program-for-the-rest-of-us

Four decades have passed since the first small step on the dusty surface of our nearest neighbor in the solar system in 1969. It has been almost that long since the last man to walk on the Moon did so in late 1972. The Apollo missions were a stunning technological achievement and a significant Cold War victory for the United States. However, despite the hope of observers at the time--and despite the nostalgia and mythology that now cloud our memory--Apollo was not the first step into a grand human future in space. From the perspective of forty years, Apollo, for all its glory, can now be seen as a detour away from a sustainable human presence in space. By and large, the NASA programs that succeeded Apollo have kept us heading down that wrong path: Toward more bureaucracy. Toward higher costs. And away from innovation, from risk-taking, and from any concept of space as a useful place. ...

In the blink of an eye, a subject purely in the realm of science fiction became science fact--and a major cultural phenomenon, not to mention a huge government program. At its funding peak during the Apollo years, NASA consumed over four percent of the entire federal budget. The funding would not have flowed so freely if not for the urgency of the race with the Soviets. Had the Soviets been rushing not up to space but down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (which had in fact just been reached in 1960), the United States would have spent lavishly to get there first. Had Kennedy not been assassinated and had he won a second term, he might well have ended the Apollo program himself as it became clear that we were winning the space race and as the race became less urgent in the face of other national priorities. A couple of months before his death, Kennedy even told NASA Administrator James Webb that he "wasn't that interested in space."

And that has been NASA's fundamental problem ever since. The American people and their representatives in Congress are just not that interested in space, and never have been, going all the way back to Apollo. And it shows in our space policy, which has from the start been confused and contradictory. ...

Apollo inadvertently and quite unfortunately established the paradigm for how the United States would conduct human spaceflight: a government agency would be given a large budget, make plans for the next major steps, determine the single best way to carry them out, and hire contractors to implement the plan. It was essentially the same way the Russians ran their space program, except instead of competing contractors the Soviets had competing design bureaus. ...

With the end of Apollo, NASA had a problem. It had established a vast infrastructure for conducting human spaceflight, with lots of jobs in politically sensitive congressional districts and

Or was it Apollo-Saturn with its promise of quick and dirty into space before the Soviets what destroyed the progression of the X-15/X-20 spaceplane program and stagnated space exploration for years.

Indeed. If you haven't read it already, aerospace engineer Rand Simberg has a really great piece titled "A Space Program For the Rest of Us" which goes into detail on how the Apollo program, structured to beat the Russians to the Moon at any cost, had the unfortunate side effect of creating a space program which was unable to adapt to making space exploration a sustainable venture once the race (and massive government funding) was over. Unfortunately there's still quite a bit of Apollo nostalgia left, as evidenced by ex-NASA Administrator Michael Griffin structuring his Ares/Constellation program as "Apollo on Steroids" instead of even attempting to make it sustainable. Some quotes:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-space-program-for-the-rest-of-us

Four decades have passed since the first small step on the dusty surface of our nearest neighbor in the solar system in 1969. It has been almost that long since the last man to walk on the Moon did so in late 1972. The Apollo missions were a stunning technological achievement and a significant Cold War victory for the United States. However, despite the hope of observers at the time--and despite the nostalgia and mythology that now cloud our memory--Apollo was not the first step into a grand human future in space. From the perspective of forty years, Apollo, for all its glory, can now be seen as a detour away from a sustainable human presence in space. By and large, the NASA programs that succeeded Apollo have kept us heading down that wrong path: Toward more bureaucracy. Toward higher costs. And away from innovation, from risk-taking, and from any concept of space as a useful place. ...

In the blink of an eye, a subject purely in the realm of science fiction became science fact--and a major cultural phenomenon, not to mention a huge government program. At its funding peak during the Apollo years, NASA consumed over four percent of the entire federal budget. The funding would not have flowed so freely if not for the urgency of the race with the Soviets. Had the Soviets been rushing not up to space but down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (which had in fact just been reached in 1960), the United States would have spent lavishly to get there first. Had Kennedy not been assassinated and had he won a second term, he might well have ended the Apollo program himself as it became clear that we were winning the space race and as the race became less urgent in the face of other national priorities. A couple of months before his death, Kennedy even told NASA Administrator James Webb that he "wasn't that interested in space."

And that has been NASA's fundamental problem ever since. The American people and their representatives in Congress are just not that interested in space, and never have been, going all the way back to Apollo. And it shows in our space policy, which has from the start been confused and contradictory. ...

Apollo inadvertently and quite unfortunately established the paradigm for how the United States would conduct human spaceflight: a government agency would be given a large budget, make plans for the next major steps, determine the single best way to carry them out, and hire contractors to implement the plan. It was essentially the same way the Russians ran their space program, except instead of competing contractors the Soviets had competing design bureaus. ...

With the end of Apollo, NASA had a problem. It had established a vast infrastructure for conducting human spaceflight, with lots of jobs in politically sensitive congressional districts and

I propose that the primary goal be to learn[1] about space colonization, and a perm moon-base is a good place to start. They would be space pioneers, and everyone knows pioneers risk arrows in their backs. This is a role Americans can relate to and would accept risk for because our ancestors faced the same situation. (Even "Native Americans" made a risky migration out of Asia. There are no true "Native Americans".)

I liked what the author of the article had to say about building an Arlington-like space cemetery to emphasize this. Here's a more elaborate version of that from the same author from this piece (which I strongly suggest reading) on making spaceflight more accessible to the rest of us:

http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=21248

There is no such thing as safe. Despite the fantasies of Safety and Mission Assurance (S&MA) types at NASA, âoesafeâ and âoeunsafeâ are not binary conditions. There is no ultimate safety, this side of the grave. All we can do is to make things as safe as reasonable, and that includes reasonable expense. NASA has spent untold billions in an attempt to make things âoesafeâ over the decades, and they killed seventeen astronauts. Maybe they could have spent a lot less money, and perhaps killed a few more astronauts, but made a lot more progress. Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if weâ(TM)re not killing people, weâ(TM)re not pushing hard enough. If our attitude toward the space frontier is that we must strive to never ever lose anyone, it will remain closed. If our ancestors who opened the west, or who came from Europe, had had such an attitude, we would still be over there, and there would have been no California space industry to get us to the moon forty years ago. It has never been âoesafeâ to open a frontier, and this frontier is the harshest one that weâ(TM)ve ever faced, but fortunately, we have sufficiently advanced technology to allow us to do it anyway, and probably with much less loss of life than any previous one. But people die every day doing a lot less worthwhile things than opening a frontier.

Before Mercury, the test pilots who flew in that program used to attend funerals of their colleagues, who had made smoking craters in the desert, on a frequent basis. But no one else knew about them, or cared much. They were just doing their jobâ"developing the technologies and weapons that we needed to win an existential war. When they got out of their test aircraft and climbed into a Mercury capsule, they knew it was risky, but it was a lot less so than their previous job.

A frequent commenter on my blog has suggested that to avoid future national sob parties, such as occurred after Challenger and Columbia, we should set aside a special cemetery like Arlington, in a well-publicized ceremony, and declare that this was where all those who would lose their lives in our planned opening of the solar system would be laid to rest. And to make it big, just to make the point. There is in fact an astronaut memorial mirror at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center, with the names of those lost so far, and plenty of squares for more. A visionary president would point that out with the announcement of the new policy.

SpaceX is going to fly people on its Dragon, and itâ(TM)s going to make it as safe as it can afford to and still have a market for it, but I doubt that they will âoehuman rateâ it, and I see no need for ULA to do so with its launcher, either. No one, after all, âoehuman ratesâ an airplane. What ULA needs to do is to modify the design to make them reasonably safe, and contra the recent Aerospace Corporation report Iâ(TM)m confident that they can do that for a lot less than thirty-five billion dollars and in less than seven years, which is a pretty low bar to beat Ares I. If

Oh geeze, I knew I shouldn't have waited to submit a story on this, as the Guardian article linked is pretty crappy, which isn't a surprise considering how opposed the Guardian usually is to manned spaceflight in general. It doesn't even list the options the Committee is presenting to the White House. Here's some better sources:

The actual presentations from the meeting: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/meetings/08_12_meeting.html
http://www.space.com/news/090812-nasa-spaceflight-options-refined.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302244.html
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/08/13/show-exploration-the-money/

Basically, the Augustine Committee concluded that you can't do too much with the $10B budget spaceflight currently has, but a number of interesting options open up if you increase that by $3B. Basically, there's two main types of scenarios which have been outlined:

• Lunar focus: Similar to the current plan, focusing on lunar exploration and settlement with a mind towards future Mars exploration
• Deep space: Exploration of Lagrange points, near-earth asteroids, and Phobos, with an emphasis on building the in-space infrastructure which will make it easier to explore the Moon and Mars

Some items of interest regarding both scenarios:

• Most of the scenarios don't include the Ares I, which suggests that the problem-ridden program is quite likely to be cancelled
• Just about all the scenarios will have a big boost to commercial spaceflight to low-earth orbit, with the goal of making commercial providers the primary way to get to LEO by 2016
• Most of the scenarios place an emphasis on in-orbit refueling, which is something the previous administration avoided for some fairly dodgy reasons. Refueling is a major enabler when it comes to spaceflight, and helps you do a lot more with existing boosters. It also provides a market for promoting the growth and cost-efficiency of new rockets.
• Most of the options include restoring technology development funding at NASA, which was largely scrapped to help pay for the Ares I development

Mr. Masnick's techdirt post is a welcome call for calm and even optimism. It is a reminder of the importance of perspective, the sort of wisdom encapsulated in the expression "This, too, shall pass" -- that is, just as most joy and glory is transient, so will the troubles and woes of today eventually vanish.

That said, his post is revealingly presumptuous. He writes about people trying to "hold back progress" and describes his frustration at not being able to convince them "of just what opportunities moving forward provides." But perhaps the reason he is so frustrated is that he misses a basic truth: that the people he describes aren't actually seeking to "hold back progress" -- they just have a different understanding of what is progress and what isn't, of what counts as "moving forward" and what doesn't. People do not agree on what is in the public interest; they do not agree about what is best for society, for the state, for the family.

Persuading those who disagree with you is not always a matter of marshalling facts or, as Mr. Masnick puts it, "clearly paint[ing] a picture." Often the people who disagree with you already understand the facts full well and already see the picture clearly -- they just disagree about whether what you call progress is indeed progress. This disagreement might well be rooted in a vision of the future that is fundamentally in conflict with your own. (See, for example, Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and Yuval Levin's Imagining the Future .)

This, incidentally, is why the book that Mr. Masnick approvingly cites, Robert Friedel's excellent A Culture of Improvement, deliberately eschews the term "progress". You might think human cloning or nuclear weapons or Windows Vista are all examples of unambiguous progress; your neighbor might well disagree.

Hydrogen fuel cells are way less effective and emits *more* CO2 in total than the usual road cars. It's no way a zero-emission technology. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoax

Bioalcohol is much greener and usable today, and IRL series were racing on methanol for 40 years already.

"So if we put aside the spectacularly improbable prospect of fueling our planet with extraterrestrial hydrogen imports, the only way to get free hydrogen on Earth is to make it. The trouble is that making hydrogen requires more energy than the hydrogen so produced can provide. Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy. And it is, as we shall see, an extremely poor one.

The spokesmen for the hydrogen hoax claim that hydrogen will be manufactured from water via electrolysis. It is certainly possible to make hydrogen this way, but it is very expensive--so much so, that only four percent of all hydrogen currently produced in the United States is produced in this manner. The rest is made by breaking down hydrocarbons, through processes like pyrolysis of natural gas or steam reforming of coal.

Neither type of hydrogen is even remotely economical as fuel. The wholesale cost of commercial grade liquid hydrogen (made the cheap way, from hydrocarbons) shipped to large customers in the United States is about $6 per kilogram. High purity hydrogen made from electrolysis for scientific applications costs considerably more. Dispensed in compressed gas cylinders to retail customers, the current price of commercial grade hydrogen is about $100 per kilogram. For comparison, a kilogram of hydrogen contains about the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline. This means that even if hydrogen cars were available and hydrogen stations existed to fuel them, no one with the power to choose otherwise would ever buy such vehicles. This fact alone makes the hydrogen economy a non-starter in a free society."

Though "paid liar" may be the most charitable thing I could call you.

If we'd listened to that butterfly collector back in the early 70s, we'd have put lamp black across the north and exacerbated whatever situation we seem to now be finding ourselves.

Except that we never saw any hint of an imminent ice age. Advancing glaciers, later spring thaws... none of these things showed themselves.

We see all the signs of global warming, from temperature anomalies to the northward shift of plant hardiness zones. It's the difference between a theory having no basis, and a theory being irrefutably correct in the basics. This debate is exactly analogous to the scientific issues vs. political controversy over evolution: the scientists are talking about selection mechanisms and evidence of gene co-option, and the pols are listening to the cranks demanding that the science classroom discussions include "GODDIDIT".

Your role in this is to be an extra in the mob of cranks.

The current manmade global warming stuff is also a media driven thing - this time with some 'scientists' jumping on board the gravy train.

The cooling and contraction of the stratosphere is not a media-driven thing. It is a greenhouse-gas driven thing, as more and more IR radiation is filtered out of the windows where the gases of the stratosphere can absorb them. You might note that this is itself absolute proof that the surface warming is not driven by the sun; greater solar input would warm the stratosphere, not cool it.

And this rhetoric is typical of you propagandists. It's always "gravy trains" and "alarmist industries", without the slightest attention to the evidence. Evidence is the difference between alarmism and warning of a real threat, and it's the evidence that you cannot debate or even allow yourself to look at.

I guess that makes you an amateur and a true believer who knows even less than the professional you attacked at the beginning of your post. Knowing that which is incorrect is paramount to knowing less than nothing.

While you have been relentlessly attacking me for several posts (without linking to, or even mentioning, a single verifiable fact - for reasons which are no mystery anymore) you have never named the professional I allegedly attacked. Well, you won't find anyone named, or even referred to, in it. To borrow a phrase, it appears that every word you've written is a lie, including "and" and "the".

(aside before I end this: even Robert Zubrin is with me on the merits of hydrogen. He has a strong record in aerospace research; all you have is bald assertion.)

Let's talk about consequences here. If the scientific models are wrong but we act on them anyway, we might lose GDP equivalent to a small recession. Or we might show overall gains; most anti-GW measures are "no regrets" actions which have benefits beyond climate, such as reduced pollution and consequent improved public health. The march of technology makes this outcome highly likely - and it's the GW denialists (such as TXU) who want to build dozens of poorly-scrubbed coal plants which will dump particulates in the air and mercury in the food chain.

If the scientific models are right and we fail to act on them, we will lose GDP equivalent to a major global recession. We will also lose coastal cities around the world, and entire ecosystems along with millions of species. We'll lose all the fertile land in the world's river deltas which winds up under salt water. And the billions of people who lived on that l

"Some 17,000 attendees of the protest voted for the nation they believed is most in need of greater Internet freedom, and China came in second, with 4,100 votes. Myanmar, under the militaristic regime of the Junta party, was believed by 4,500 participants to present its citizens with the greatest threat to freedom of press on the Internet. The remaining nations, in descending order of votes received, were Belarus, Iran, Tunisia, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, North Korea, Syria, and Uzbekistan. "

In a related story representatives from China, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have petitioned the ITU and the UN to force the US to give up control of the internet root domain servers. The EU has for some unknown reason sided with these oppressive governments.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/11/soa/unint ernet.htm
http://bildt.blogspot.com/2005/10/european-union-i ran-saudi-arabia-cuba.html

The problem with predicting human evolution is that we are rather more in control of it than is the case for other animals. Genetic failures can be fixed up by medicine such that genes that would have been fatal (and thus eliminated from the pool) are now viable if the symptoms they produce are treatable.

Consider this: if there were a strong reproductive bias for taller men - then genetically shorter men would come to be considered 'abnormal' by our society. This would cause them to be treated with growth hormone at a tender age - hiding their genetic predisposition and thus allowing the gene for 'shortness' be available as procreators of the next generation. This would make genetically induced tallness a hard trait to take hold.

If you doubt this could ever happen - please note that it has already happened:

    http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/7/fox.htm

"In July 2003, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized pharmaceutical companies to promote human Growth Hormone (hGH) for use in children who are very short but not suffering from any specific illness or medical condition. Parents are now using hGH in record numbers, hoping that hormone treatment will give their kids happier childhoods and more prosperous adulthoods."

QED.

"[W]hy are programs so buggy? A general answer has already been given: because it is human nature to push until we get into trouble -- and then blame our tools. We load the elephant with feathers until the elephant collapses, whereupon we conclude that feathers are too heavy for elephants. No matter how amenable software is to our efforts, it can overwhelm us if we pile the code high enough -- and we often do, because it's so fatally easy. But the special reason for software's bugginess is that we almost never demand that it be bug-free (I use "demand" here in the economist's sense: not just desire, but desire backed up by ability and readiness to pay).

"Software manufacturers are rational economic actors; if they can sell us software without going to the expense of thoroughly debugging it, they will. The copy of Microsoft Word that occasionally drives me crazy cost around $200; if Microsoft had been forced to debug it thoroughly before releasing it, its price would be closer to $2,000. Would I pay that much for a version that I could be sure would never crash at a critical moment, losing hours or days of my work? Probably not; apparently, I don't value my sanity that highly. I am neither blaming anyone nor apologizing for anything; I am simply reporting Microsoft's behavior and mine, in the belief that they are typical of just about all software developers and computer users. In a word, we have buggy software because we consumers won't pay what effectively bug-free software would cost.

"The reasons why software is almost always buggy are not inherent in the technology and thus inevitable, but spring from human choices and practices that we can understand and could change if there were a compelling reason to do so. Those habits include piling the code on until it overwhelms us, and taking our chances with buggy software in order to get it more cheaply. Both problems could be overcome if we wanted to overcome them badly enough."

[Mark Halpern, "Buggy Software and Missile Defense," The New Atlantis, Number 10, Fall 2005, pp. 47-57.]

As to my own thoughts on the issue of intelligence in the Internet Age, I think it's natural to expect that our conception of intellect, brightness, mental aptitude, whatever will change to one that champions those that can more effectively use the tools available to them. As someone great at fast recall of facts from my brain, it's unfortunate, but I understand that I can't be better than a machine at the task it was designed for- so I should try to be better at using that machine. And indeed, Google isn't a mindreader- knowing how to use it to get relevant answers is just as much a skill as memorizing and recalling those answers yourself. It's going from "how do I do x?" to "how does the thing that does x for me work?"

It's not just anti-nuclear people who don't like this. Robert Zubrin was pretty damning about the way the nuclear electric lobby hijacked JIMO and caused the cost to balloon due to unrealistic program goals, leading Bush eventually to not request any more money for it. It's a cool idea and I'd love to see it tried out, but the nuclear industry's greed has postponed it, at best.

TiVos and iPods will never destroy us. But our romance with technologies of personalization has partially fulfilled Krutch's prediction. We haven't become more like machines. We've made the machines more like us. In the process we are encouraging the flourishing of some of our less attractive human tendencies: for passive spectacle; for constant, escapist fantasy; for excesses of consumption.

And what was I doing writing a book about an 'escapist fantasy' writer like Tolkien. What came over me. Shame on me!

Then again, reading The Lord of the Rings does encourage just the sort of patient, methodical thinking that our TV remote controls discourage. We have to stick to his tale to the very end or we get nothing out of it.

--Mike Perry, Seattle, Untangling Tolkien

I've had good luck with an absolutely bare bones videoblogging setup, using a Sony digital still camera that shoots video with sound. And Adam Keipner did some interesting videoblogging from the Nanotech conference in Washington a couple of weeks ago. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future.

Yes the United States can veto any proposition set before it, but remember it also must and foremost answer to it's citizens. If the United States were to veto something without a decent explanation the American media would be all over it, thus it's citizens would know. The easiest way to not have to answer to the people is to keep things very low brow so not to alert the media to the issue.

It's not the greatest, but at least there is some oversight by the people, the key thing is to get enough of the people to know about the issue and care about the issue.

I'm not even going to go into the possible pseudo-science that many have alleged the Accord was based on. The United States pulled their signature from Kyoto because we couldn't fullfil it. By that I mean, Pres. Clinton signed on the Kyoto Protocol, but in order for it to be effective the legistlator body would have to ratify it. The Senete killed it because it would effect our economy too much with little gain, and by gain I mean that there was nothing in the Accord that showed that it would make more than a minute difference. Not to mention it wasn't uniform in it's requirements. Countries such as the United States, Japan, Russia, Britian and France would have to basically pay for everything while developing nations got except status. Yes I will admit that the developed nations currently do produce the most in the amount of emissions, but it has been widely projected that countries such as India, China and Mexico will far out pass the levels in the timespan that is set in the accord.

So in the United States it was widely (not entirely) believed that because of the reasons stated above (no effect because countries excempt from the Protocol will null out any effects from those that are not excempt, plus it would cost many citizens their jobs (God I wish I didn't close out that tab that gave the number of jobs estimated lost)) Pres Bush pulled the US signature from the accord. I have found some good information about the Kyoto Protocol and the stance on it from the United States (including some measures that have been taken since we where not able to involve ourselves in it) here.

Please reply and give an URL for information about Berna as it doesn't seem to be anything I've heard of any I can't seem to find anything about it in my googling I do wish to know more.

As for your stance against Israel, I agree that Israel has much to stand for, and I for one would love to see sanctions against them. That can be said of the Palistianians. The war between them has gotten entirely out of hand and they are acting like children, dangerous children but children never the less. The bad blood between them will take a long time for each side to recover from, and I am heartened by the (relatively) small steps that each side has taken, and I know it's going to be just that a looong series of small steps. I wish I knew what the best course of action would be to help them in that direction, so that they can be comfortable with each other, sooner than later, and no longer worry about protecting themselves from each other, I want to see them working together, going to school together, eating together, well you get my point.