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NASA Funds Sci-Fi Technology
Michael Huang writes "Wired News profiles the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), the $4 million-a-year agency most famous for Bradley Edwards' study of the space elevator. Lesser known studies include weather control, shape-shifting space suits and antimatter-powered probes to Alpha Centauri. Remember, 'if it's not risky, it's not going to get funded'."
It costs more than 250 times their yearly budget to fly one shuttle mission...That is a sad joke, I bet there budget is less than what NASA spends each year to fly the NASA highups around the country.
In society today we all seem to concentrate on short term benefits and ignore the long term consequences, be it government budget deficits, long term research funding, balking at online music distribution, moving jobs off shore or the environment.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
And honestly, space elevators are not as far fetched an idea as they sounded when I first read about them in Kim Stanley Robinsons' Mars series. What it would return when we work out the tech is a solar system of resources at or disposal. With the price of bringing up and down cargo going to dollars a pound, the potential is breathtaking. There are worse pipe dreams to invest in.
Unfortunatly the brute force method to interstellar travel will never work. One sand grain sized particle hitting a craft going 1% of c will end the mission. Then there is the issue of having enough fuel and the multigenerational length of the mission.
Goverments deal in milions, 50 milion there, 20 milion there, the cost of some piece of stupid artwork to stick at the end of a bridge cost a insane ammount of money while another piece of local-goverment artwork is spiraling though milions of dolars while its schedule is pushed furthur and furthur back...
;)
Benifit of this is, a) the costs are fixed, b) we might just get that anti-mater powered probe to aplha-centuri
I'd like to see more research into replicator technology (maybe we will get there after enough nano-research?) If we get replicators, we can solve a lot of problems at once:
- Food, nobody would have to grow hungry again
- Money, nobody would need it ever again
- Fuel, no more dependancies on oil
- Nuclear waste/pollution, easy to clean that up now
- Living forever, refreshing the building blocks of our bodies
- etc.
You're high. Successful nanotech replictors probaly wouldn't solve any of those problems. It does not allow for escaping from the law of conservation of mass and energy. Materials are still going to take resources and energy to manufacture. both are commodities that, even if cheap, will prevent free replication. We'll be able to make our own oil but the energy to do that will have to come from someplace and might not be efficient as simply running electric cars to begin with. In fact, it may still be cheaper to pump the stuff out of the ground and use it. It might even still be cheaper to grow food naturally.
If GE invents superior cabling, then only GE and its licensees get to use it, and they pass the cost on to you, the consumer. If NASA invents superior cabling, then everybody (including GE) can use it to deliver better products (including suspension bridges) at a lower price.
Government expenditure on science is an investment by the people of the US (or whatever country is doing the spending) -- and one which (especially in the case of NASA) has quite often had a rate of return on investment which few if any private R&D operations can match.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The problem with this is the vast majority of people are too short sighted to do this, it takes government (tax) money where an immediate profit is not needed to invest in these type of projects. People were shocked when Honda started getting into jet engines and said that the new division would not turn a profit for more than ten years, and that is just refining old technologies, not ground breaking new ones.
Imagine the investor response if GE said "We are going to build a space elevator, it will take us at least 25 years to complete it and cost the majority of our R&D budget for the whole time frame". That investor money would be voluntarily moved to Microsoft where (relatively) short term growth is much more likely.
Rather than say "a dollar spent on NASA pipe dreams is a dollar taken from the public" I would say "A dollar spend on a NASA pipe dream is a dollar invested in the public's future". Not all investments pan out but many do.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
- Food, nobody would have to grow hungry again
- Money, nobody would need it ever again
- Fuel, no more dependancies on oil
- Nuclear waste/pollution, easy to clean that up now
- Living forever, refreshing the building blocks of our bodies
-Food: We can already fend off hunger, it's socio economic reasons why we don't. Food distribution, international politics cause grain and other excess food goods to be stored/rott instead of eaten, not supply. Replicators would not help this. Chances are they would require electricity to operate and most places with low food levels also don't have electricity.
-money: Money is an idea, its a innovation to quantify the value of "work" or "goods". If replicators worked, they would require power, and then power and base materials would become the basis of a monetary system. Also replicators aren't magic, nanobots would still require base amterials and could only make things according to what is available. It's likly it will make manufacturing moot if it worked exactly liek you think it should.
-Fuel: We will need more, it doesn' solve fuel problems it woudl create it. We dont' yet know the power requirements a replicator would need, but changing matter require energy. If it work just a syou think (ie, make anything you tell it to out of base materials) We'd need a lot of energy. If your thinking of the magical Star trek replicators it's going to need even more energy (and also a major major innovation in physics to overcome the uncertainty principle.)
-Nuclear waste: Again nano machiens aren't magic They might be able to convert 8h2so4 into 8 h2 1 s8 and 16 o2 but it can't make pu-242 into 50 h2o.
-Living forever: It may someday result in this, This is a fairly realistic possibiltity but not for a good long time. Even then you may run into some problems, like memory. IF your 350 can your brain remember enough to keep you functional, will we hae to invent a forgetting machine lest we fill up our brains? This one might happen I doubt the other 4 will.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
If it's scientifically impossible, it's not science fiction - it's fantasy. The space elevator is something that we (meaning humans) pretty much knew would be possible eventually. Hence, the pure sci-fi category is not a bad place to be.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Nothing like waiting for a good meal to materialize in solar powered replicator.
Or, as I like to call them, "plants."
Fundamental science and the development of key engineering concepts do not pay back that soon. It took decades between the discovery of the structure of DNA and when people started making money off it. Top quarks are not paying anyone's commercial salary other than researchers and a few large particle accellerator component manufacturers.... this decade. But who knows.
Doing studies like this tells us what engineering and directed science developments will be useful in the future, by pointing out applications and providing directions for research. Without them, nobody can tell ahead of time what the uses for and payback for new nanotube fibers might be, the uses for antimatter containment, large lasers, etc.
That long term funding lets investors say "Ok, we could see making money at this" and then they may invest.
The rise of technological society has been on the back of publically funded research, often followed by commercial development. The benefits of having some people looking out a ways on the public dime is well demonstrated. TCP/IP anyone?
Disclaimer: I have before, and will again, applied for NIAC project funding.
They can have my dollar. As much as I like to see shit getting blown up, I would rather see a dollar going into some hair brained Nasa scheme than some black hole millitary project. Who's sole purpose is to kill people.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification