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Requiem for the Once-Imagined Future
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The underwhelming Discovery mission has the Wall Street Journal Online's Real Time columnists lamenting the space program's failure to realize the sort of intergalactic exploration they once imagined as kids through the works of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. Considering the Viking landers were digging around Martain soil back in 1976, 'we figured the place would be necklaced with orbiters and cris-crossed by rovers by now. Maybe there'd even be astronauts (or cosmonauts or taikonauts) tracing the courses of unimaginably ancient rivers.' Instead, we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles.' At this rate, the columnists fear the innovations of the future won't be much more exciting: 'Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn when they're not getting their financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build more backpack nukes.'"
Transhumanism goes far beyond most science-fiction (there are a few transhumanist sci-fi materials coming up now). But the key is to think beyond the human before fun space stuff. We'll be powered by lithium-ions, and thus need no oxygen. As we will be engineered machines, the whole terraforming things will be moot.
Those backpack nukes won't be much of a problem. Tanks for example are quite protected against nukes, and our vastly superior engineered bodies will not have much problems with nukes unless one goes off right by you (get better implanted radar!). Of courses finances will go quickly as we become self reliant machines travelling in space (hard to trade when the speed of light is limiting you). It seems like there is a lot of money going to space schemes. That's good--but transhumanist organizations deserve more as it is a far more pressing goal.
Not saying space science is bad or counterproductive--not at all. But the promise of transhumanism defies the english language to come up with superlatives. There really are no words for it.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
I dunno, maybe part of the problem is that progress just outran the global society's ability to adjust at some point -- that definately seems to be the case with a lot of the more disaffected people both in the US and overseas. IMO, the crazed religious zealot in Iran and the crazed Kansas schoolboard member have a lot of root causes in common. Those wackos are extreme examples, granted, but it seems like they're also symptomatic of larger societal problems.
I'm ready to pick up and keep moving, though, and I think a lot of people of my generation are. We never saw a moon landing; it happened before we were born and, frankly, even if we went back it would seem like old hat. "Yeah, Earthrise. Great, never seen that before". We read about this shit in the *history* books, man. But that's not a bad thing: I suspect a lot of us wouldn't find the concept of, say, mining asteroids as exotic as the Boomers would, and maybe that's all we really need. And hey, if that's possible, if that improves our lot, maybe it'll finally be that human advance where, once it starts, it just continues on and on.
Of course, speaking of the Boomers, I fear that my generation (I'm 28) might be one of those unlucky historical examples of one which didn't get to do jack shit because they were so busy catering to the needs of their wealthy elders while trying to patch up the disasterous debts they left us. By the time they start to croak en masse it'll be too late to do anything all that interesting -- we'll be too old and too unimaginative, left only with the shadow of the dreams we once entertained.
Honestly (and sadly), I'm pretty sure that's the direction we're headed in. Happily, however, I also believe it's not too late to change that. That's why I support ideas like the Space Elevator; it's the sort of kick that might get us out of this funk and allow us to overcome the fate of being a generation the just paid too much for their houses.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
You want to talk about the short commings of the predicted future then forget space where is my ROCKET CAR!
Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn
Bah! If it doesn't have full tactile neural input, then I'm not interested.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I, for one, am heartened by how much the shuttle has come to resemble the Millenium Falcon. At least in the reliability department.
I was promised flying cars by 2000!
Project Orion would have made all these dreams come true. It still can, though we'd probably have to build one of these suckers in space.
Frankly, for travel in the solar system any other form of propulsion is misguided at best and outright stupid at worst!
Simon.
One must consider however that NASA is burdened with political and commercial pressure. However to say that space exploration is hitting a speed bump is quite stupid and incorrect. We are now in the time where personal and commercial space flights are nearing possible. I believe that commercial space flights are where the real adventure is. Sure, they don't have the capabilities that NASA does, however they are advancing their technology, and to have an adventure with one of these companies is a lot easier than becoming a NASA astronaut. If I remember one thing from my childhood, it is watching the movies where the hero jets around in his own space ship, and not having to listen to a governing body as to when and where he could fly.
do.what.promptcmds
When we haven't even done much with the Moon? I say start smaller then work our way up. Establish a base on the moon; grow plants in a contained greenhouse, get some population on the moon, make it a place that can sustain life for some time.
From there, with we'd have better understanding and experience in exploration and cultivation, and thus we could more easily work out our grander visions of Mars exploration.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
Lest we forget c.)Took out the trash.
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The things that "transhumanists" describe simply will not be possible? It has nothing to do with technology: it's resources. We're seeing oil prices soar right now. With oil and other basic resources that we need for a modern society quickly dwindling: breathable air, drinkable water, etc. society as we know it will collapse long before most of these pie-in-the-sky ideals are reached.
I don't respond to AC's.
It seems to me that the "next big thing" that has to happen is that the *nauts need to be able to survive/last the journey to distant places. Currently, places other than the moon, take a really long time to get to. This alone makes human travel infeasible for the near future.
Anyone know what, if any, inroads are being made in this area?
Sigh...
It seems that some time ago in my past, I read on the the back of a cereal box that by the time I was grownup I would be driving one of those nifty Jetsons cars that hoover and fly. Do I really have to grow up to get one?
I lost my sig...
We're not paying for space travel, or even space exploration. We're paying for programmes. We get a space programme, then another one, then another one.
When we start paying for results, we'll get space travel and space exploration.
Deleted
Urgh, link here
Simon.
Like it not, but without the chance to profit, no great adventures can be sustained...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Seriously, we need a new power source. As long as we're burning shit to get into space we're never going to be able get anywhere.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
The future is not what it used to be.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
all those people in china and india have similar hopes and dreams. While our low population gen X may not realize these dreams i guarantee you other countries will. We'll be pulled to the stars on the backs of third worlders.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Sadly, it appears most sci-fi writers and buffs were somewhat lacking in the taste of reality department. Economics, i.e. business potential are more likely to drive space exploration than scientific interest. While we're seeing fledgling efforts, it's still a pretty iffy thing to leave a perfectly good planet behind to build a house on the Moon or Mars.
Seems much of the Sci-fi I've read was more a vehicle for another story, i.e. it's not about the lasers stupid, it's the exploration of man's inhumanity to man, sorta thing.
Looking at how ultimately fragile our space crafts are, and the terrific amount of stored energy it takes to escape the Earth's surface, the one thing that should come home to people who expect Buck Rogers is this isn't as easy as putting pen to paper and scribbling up interplantetary travel.
Sadly, the real drama of what has transpired to get this far isn't as entertaining (although The Right Stuff and Apollo 11 took a stab at it) as Star Wars.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
NASA 2005 AD: to boldy go where John Glenn went 43 years ago...
I too grew up on the hard sci-fi, and most of the future has not lived up to my junior high expectations. Now I know that if you want to know what the world will be like in ten years, look back ten years and compare that technology to what you have. Add 5-10%. Adjust interval accordingly.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Wasn't it Larry Niven who suggested using Venus as a garbage dump? I think the story was "Flash Crowd".
It's not what I expected, but then, what ever is? No, we don't have flying cars or Martian vacations. What we do have is real-time access to vast reams of knowledge for most of the developed world. Communicate with anyone, anywhere. Watch any one of hundreds of thousands of movies with inexpensive devices found in most homes. Get almost any book you would care to read delivered to your home. Fly anywhere in the US - afford ably. Hunger has been eliminated in the developed world. People are healthier, live longer. The list is endless.
Unfortunately, there are large portions of the globe that do not have access to these modern miracles, but it will come... it will come.
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Really now, did anyone EXPECT to be able to fly to the moon for lunch? Until some sort of antigravitational device is made, it will always be very expensive. Did you really think we would colonize Mars unless we HAD to? All those things are cool and all, but what really matters? The most important things I see in the future are improved energy sources (efficient, low environmental impact, small, cheap, and/or reliable), more capable computing, and possibly a change in the mindset that cool == good.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
Today, we are obsessed with our own personal wealth. Sure, we think, it would be nice if we could "afford" to do basic research, to spend serious money on exploration -- but no, we can't afford it, because it's more important to be able to buy more fancy cars (or boats or airplanes) than anyone else.
Reading sources from the '50s and '60s, I get the impression that there was much more concern (possibly driven by the race with the Soviets, but who cares?) for the advancement of knowledge for its own sake. People were much more willing to sacrifice a little bit of wealth for the long-term future of the society.
I wish people would think less about whether they can afford the electronic seat cooler in their new Benz and more about what kind of society they want to live in over the long term. And, no, I'm not trying to take away anyone's "freedom" -- I'm just exhorting them to think less shortsightedly.
What put us in space in the first place was the Soviets (remember them). If it hadn't been for them, we might not have bothered.
:-)
The uses of space that have an economic benefit are being exploited. We have GPS, communications and remote sensing. The stuff that is strictly of scientific interest takes a back seat.
If we want to see some real 'progress' in space, we need the Chinese to force us into it.
This just in! As a way to get into space, the space shuttle sucks! Wow, that's amazing. Do you mean that all of those glowing reviews of it I've heard for as long as I can remember (I'm 23) were bull?
Seriously though, a lot of science fiction writers have been warning us about just what is happening. If we focus on "solving all our problems on the ground first" then we'll never move into space properly. The same will happen if we're too pussyfooted to accept the occasional death due to space travel. It's already safer than any major frontier exploration in history. (I'm not saying we should waste astronauts, but that doesn't mean we should quit going into orbit for 2+ years just because a few die either.) If we don't go out and build something semi-permanent beyond Earth (the Moon or the asteroid belt, maybe Mars) pretty soon, we're going to end up screwing things up on Earth badly enough (economic collapse, ecological disaster, evil killer robots, whatever) that we can't go to space. In the long run, having groups of humans separated by a few million miles is probably the best way to keep us from killing each other all the time.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
I think this highlights the fundamental difficulty we face in getting elsewhere in the universe, namely the difficulty of getting enough energy to move stuff around. This is not an easy nut to crack, and despite optimistic predictions it is quite possible that it is one that is insoluble. Yes, we have had many scientific breakthroughs throughout human history. Yes, naysayers are frequently proven wrong. But "past success is no indicator of future performance", as the disclaimer says, and I think this is no different.
Until we are able to get bodies of non-trivial mass to speeds that are an integer percentage of light speed we will for all practical purposes be stuck on this zealot-infested rock. Getting men and women into space and having them survive is extremely difficult even for the short periods of time the STS is in orbit. This shows that allowing them to survive for months on end is a nigh-impossible task without some fundamental advances, and there are no areas in physics that we can look to for hope in this regard.
Yes, it's possible we may one day colonize Mars, Kim Stanly Robinson style. But I doubt it. Just because it is wished for and can be imagined does not mean it is physically possible in any real sense.
Sheesh, what a bunch of whiners.
"Kids these days are so lazy."
"Ooooh, scary hackers! We must be thinking!!"
"Ooooh, scary terrorists! We must be thinking even harder!!!"
If these guys want a better future, they should get off their collective butts, stop bullying the government and everybody else to give them a guaranteed return on their investments and do it themselves. I mean, isn't that their philosophy?
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
The only reason we ever made it into space was competition with the Russians. Technology has never been the limitation, only social interest and drive.
It is hard to justify the cost of "the future" when there is still so much turmoil and suffering on the surface of our own planet.
I usually try to avoid politics and social debates, and I'm all for space exploration, but can you really tell me people in the USA or the world should go hungry or go without health care while we spend billions on sending people to space?
no comment
If you substitute "the rich" for "we", you dont sound so crazy:
The rich will be powered by lithium-ions, and thus need no oxygen. As the rich will be engineered machines, the whole terraforming things will be moot.
Come, now. You wouldn't have to go too far back before you'd have said the same thing about refrigeration, anti-biotics, and tiny little devices that you could hold up to your ear and use to talk to other people, almost anywhere in the world. I'm not rich, but I've got things that my great grandparents would have considered essentially magical.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If in the future there are 'cyper jihadists' you can instanly infer why the once imagined future has again not come to pass. The countries with the money will have been spending all their time and cash on war and imperialism instead of space exploration.
There would be no jihadists anywhere were it not for the ambitions of the USA, who would do well to spend all their excess money on new types of propulsion and space exploration, rather than getting eveyone in the world to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken and watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
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NASA should be moved to a think tank model like DARPA. :-) are the future of Space Exploration...
Private Industry pioneers like Burt Rutan and Zefram Cochrane
might I remind people of the recent success of the private funded experiments? http://www.xprizefoundation.com/about_us/default.a sp
They were able to do in a short time what has taken the Gov'ts of the world well over 40 years to do.
Not that the government is all bad, its just once beaurocrats and sue happy people are done we have a highly ineffecient machine for innovation.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Like it not, but without the chance to profit, no great adventures can be sustained...
Well... Unless you happen to what to start your own country free from Earth rule. Of course being rich also helps, but then you are usually the one doing the ruling on Earth.
On the serious side, when Explorers came to the Americas in the 1500's they'd thought they find riches to bring back with them (and some did), but most of the found nothing but native americans and lots of land and it was the settlers that got the most of this situation and even started their own nation or two after a century or so.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The sad truth is that we are not meant to live on other planets. Our bodies are naturally designed to live without any protection from radiation, breath the air without filtration, drink the water without purification, eat the vegetation and animals. Wouldn't it be easier to fix the relatively minor problems with air pollution and global warming here (a few degrees of tweak) than dreaming of living on a planet or spacestation in the vacuum and intense radiation of space.
Does anybody else out there find the state of space travel to be totally absurd? On the one hand, we're dealing with a task that is inherently very dangerous and complex. Going into space and back ain't exactly easy (it's rocket science, y'know). And then we're talking about sending guys to Mars in about 15 years - into environments that we barely understand. Yet, at the same time, we're grounding shuttles that only go up a few hundred miles until we can make them totally foolproof and 100% safe. Risk-taking is all part of the game. I agree that we should try to take as many precautions as possible. But doing so to the detriment of the goal is simply counterproductive. Until the bureaucrats that are running the show realize this, we're not going anywhere...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
In my opinion it's because society as a whole have stop caring. Right now this generation cares about one thing. ME
I don't really think this is right or wrong for various reasons but it's very sad...
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
I suppose that I would disagree with that assessment. I do agree with your fundamental idea, that more $ is required, but I think that this could be subsidized by entrepreneurs, rather than being asked to shovel more money into the Leviathan.
The other point to consider is that the govt is gutless - look at the fear among the people that "OMFG, something is going to happen!" - this was the story of the flight. Not to minimize the impact of the death of astronauts, but there is invariably risk involved in strapping yourself to a kerosene tank and flying into space. However, how else do we learn? Someone takes the risks, it has to be done that way.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Tanks for example are quite protected against nukes, and our vastly superior engineered bodies will not have much problems with nukes unless one goes off right by you (get better implanted radar!).
I can think of a few downsides to having a metal, indestructable body. For example, the sex probably wouldn't be as good.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
This should be pretty obvious, but works of fiction and our imaginations are generally a lot more interesting than what actually ends up happening.
You want to know why we don't have a space program like the one you're imagining? Because you and the idiot businessmen you write for decided it was too expensive, and pushed your pet politicians to cut funding for it and dump productive space programs in exchange for pork, business pay-offs, tax cuts, and other corrupt practices. Now you've realized that to expand, your economy needs to go into orbit, and that you needed to fund these things 20 years ago for them to be ready now, and are trying to find someone else to blame for the predicament your greed caused, so as not to risk your grossly overinflated salary.
Of course, I doubt you'll learn anything from this, as you and said businessmen have, as a collective, the recall and adaptation ability of the average peanut. But on the off-chance that you do, in fact, remember something, I'd like it to include the phrase:
"Payback's a bitch, ain't it?"
If I remember one thing from my childhood, it is watching the movies where the hero jets around in his own space ship, and not having to listen to a governing body as to when and where he could fly.
It wasn't movies, it was cartoons.
Now let's look at real history books : the Columbus expedition was a government program.
The Norse/Viking expeditions where "private initiatives".
Which one succeeded in finding and opening a new world?
Tell it to Odysseus.
"Wall Street columnists are lamenting." Well, this explains why they JUST TALK about making money: Early in their careers, they speculated big money on HAL Industries (TM). Now, it's not looking good.
Human space exploration is fun to think about. Migrating tribes colonizing distant planets in other solar systems, and all that. But maybe our early successes have blinded us to the realities. Space is *big*. Human life support systems are expensive (in terms of overall resources including time, not just money).
NASA's current thinking on space seems to be like dreaming about a fairy land, with chocolate rivers and peppermint trees. Just because we can manufacture candy and we can make a place like Disneyland, doesn't mean that fairylands are going to become real.
We are doing cargo cult Star Trek.
And wasting a lot of money on it. Our money would be much better spent on robotic missions, which have a far bigger bang for the buck. And by the time we are ready for a human Mars mission, robots will probably be quite capable of the autonomous thinking and initiative that humans bring to the table. So what purpose is served by spending the extra overhead for human exploration, and doing 1/100th of the science that we could be doing for the same money? None, other than perpetuating a fairyland fantasy.
Exploration of yore was based on the promise of riches, influence and/or power available in the unknown. Corporations and countries today are no diffent from the past from which they came. Everyone bases their ventures on the possible returns. Until there is economic benefit, we will be regulated to Rovers on earth only (Available to you for only $36,000!!!).
ceci n'est pas un sig
The high school mathetmatics teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), came up with the idea for liquid oxygen fueld rockets more than 70 YEARS AGO!!! Almost everything in our space program is based on liquid fueld rockets! If we had invented and implemented a better space travel technology, perhaps we would have colonized the solar system by now.
There would be no one against mining mars ... until they find those damn Martian Artifacts. Next thing you know your mutant mining crew is rebelling, they are calling for unions, higher wages, shirts with more sleeves, etc.
(-1, phantasmagoric)
The problem i see with space exploration is that at this stage it's done entirely for it's own sake. The Cold War sparked the moon landings and our first steps into space, and now that's over there's no competitive ethos to give us any reason to return there. Besides, research and development in these areas cannot continue while companies profit in the inefficiency of current technology. Why are we still using the internal combustion engine, developed over 100 years ago? Simply, because there's profit in the fact that it's hopelessly inefficient. The same applies to space travel, if we give it a competitive or commercial context it will grow, and that's the only reason man went to the moon
Check this link for statistics (with sources) - some 30 million people in the US itself experience some level of hunger.
I've been there; when I was a kid, there was a period of time when my parents had no food in the house, and my mother baked corn meal and water because we had absolutely nothing left. We were the recipients of the local church "feed a needy family" that year, and that wasn't really fun.
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I for one do feel somewhat cheated by the lack of real manned space exploration in the last 25 years. I am one of those guys who used to read Heinlein and Clarke back when it was not popular to do so (we're talking about ancient history here). However, I'm still optimistic about the future. While we haven't been sending any people to explore the Moon or Mars (or other destinations), the technology we need for practical human colonies on the Moon or Mars has been developing and is just around the corner (told you I was an optimist). Materials science is coming up with remarkable advances monthly. Computer capability is advancing daily. Robotics, genomics, data mining, space propulsion, etc., etc. Nanotechnology promises to bring about disruptive breakthroughs in all of these areas within 10 years. These days if you don't read about a major breakthrough in some tech area daily, it's a slow news day.
I think it's right for business to get into the business of near Earth space exploration. Real competition between businesses will produce advances. And business competition will be paid for by those who have money, instead of tax dollars that could be better spent solving some of our real problems on this planet. What we need is a framework for that competition (government regulation or the lack of, tax incentives, public discussion, etc.). NASA should concentrate on away-from-Earth space and on developing new technology, or in other words those things that are too risky for business to tackle.
Just for fun, here's a link to one of my favorite (but weird) space launch development efforts.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
The stated goal of the mission was to be a test flight to gather data for future flights. while they were there, they restocked the ISS. Im not sure why the heavy criticism post flight.
Sure, there is something to be said maybe about "wasting" a mission like that, but they did exactly what they said they would do, and now its a suprise?
The next flight doesnt have much more of a goal, so why not rip on that instead of the (admittedly low-goaled) extremely successful flight?
Here's a clue: you won't get anywhere until you stop being such a fucking racist asshole.
Which is why, for what little it's worth, I was disappointed to find that 2004 MN4 was going to miss the Earth in 2038.
Because 35 years is just about the right length of time, not just to develop the technology to deflect the thing, but also to generate a new generation of kids - who won't merely value science and engineering as career paths, but who will see them as essential survival tools for the species.
Instead, we've got a dumbed-down educational system that would make Harrison Bergeron cringe, and the mentality that the only careers worth having are those of criminal/thug, celebrity/whore, or lawyer/lobbyist/politician.
Fuck it. We deserve to have that rock hit us.
We have a different paradime today. With the moon landing a few people risked their life for science and exporation, while thousands of other backed them up and millions maybe billions sat back watching. All while a war raged in a little known country of Vitenam.
Now everybody can risk their name, job and reputation by putting up a webpage and saying what they think to the entire world. You can effect change, run a business, and perhaps get killed for it. Now is the time where the small guy can have a voice, and with luck the powers that be wont stomp on us.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
NASA seems to have lobbied to stop other launch systems. To keep job security and their empire at maximum size.
All the space money went to the shuttle (and to the brutally expensive space station). It costs literally a couple of orders of magnitude more to send a lbs to orbit than NASA promised. (They promised hundreds of dollars/lbs to orbit.)
All other projects in human history with that kind of failure has been shut down. Often the responsible people were buried alongside, while still breathing.
To protect the shuttle, NASA (and their allies) murdered the Dream; they fscked our (as in humanity's) future. For job security and kickbacks. This can arguably be called a crime against humanity.
If you just shrug and say that it doesn't matter, it will keep happening.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Something that any one who is concerned that we didn't meet the goals of "golden era" science fiction should consider. Not a single one of those authors envisioned cheap, ubiquitous, and unspecialized computer hardware and software. Not one. The closest was Heinlein and he didn't get very close. See Heinlein's The Rolling Stones or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I grew up on science fiction in the 70s and recognized around 1977 that things were not going to be like in the books. Just because we didn't meet one goal doesn't mean that we should be pessimistic about the future. What the future holds is unpredictable.
Repugnant. Emotional knee-jerk reaction. I suppose it's a sin too.
As for repugnant, I happen to think that staying as human is severly repugnant.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Two words: Virgin Galactic
Vintage science fiction filled peoples' heads with all kinds of dreamy notions of the human race fanning out to the stars and whatnot, but these pie-eyed imaginings had little understanding for the internia of global identity and the hard realities of applied, long-term space travel -- a domain in which hard radiation reigns supreme.
Of course, I'm overshooting the topic at hand (Mars), but this is the undercurrent beneath our greatly protracted exploration of our environment. Complicating the fact is that Mars appears to be an essentially dead planet, in which case it's difficult to get people to pay attention when you want to spend (from their perspective) a billion dollars to study rocks on another planet. There is no real, juicy carrot at the end of the stick.
Meanwhile, our future is mapped by Asimov, Bester, Heinlein, Stephen Baxter, et al... most of whom were scientists. So I find myself amused at their dismissal of the soft sciences, from which I believe they could have drawn some temperament. There's just no way, in my opinion, that the human race is going to spread its wings just because it can. Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I don't think we'll get our asses of this rock until we've almost completely ruined it. And by then, it may be too late.
Because in our community, we take intelligence for granted. No, we really do. How many times a day do you find yourself extremely aggravated at the sum of stupidity you deal with on a daily basis? That's because you're encountering the general public, which on the whole is a pretty average bunch of people. But it is this group that holds the reins of the future, for better or worse, primarily through the buying decisions they make and how they choose to conserve, either through recycling or not leaving the tap on when they brush their teeth.
These people are slow to gather around a movement. They aren't into science fiction. As long as the Right Now is good enough and doesn't give them too many problems, the seductions of gadgetry and possibility aren't quite strong enough to get them on the bandwagon.
So, how many editorials has the WSJ published crying about the expense and wasteful nature of Nasa and the space program? Now that we're running launches on a shoestring (also known as the "Quicker, cheaper, faster" policy)things are bound to be slower, less spectacular and more dangerous.
My answer? Say fuck off to these semi literate journalists who cant remeber past their last bowel movement. I'm tired of listening to these op-ed managers put a timetable on science and invention. They act like cost overruns at NASA are big news. These are the same people who vote down school budgets and then act surprised by large class sizes.
Stupidity, my dear editorialist, DOES invalidate your opinion.
I don't know who will make the next great human acheivment, but I do know this : it has nothing to do with space travel
ITER or NIF will lay the seeds that will one day free humanity from oil dependence.
Why a manhattan style project is not launched immediately to break the energy gridlock is beyond me. It's the most crucial issue facing humanity.
Space is great, but when this dude was a kid, oil was cheap and plentiful. Deal with the big problem first, I say.
Other replier as well. We'll simulate it later. It's not needed right now.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Have you read it recently? It promotes creationism, is virulently antiscience or antilifescience and has never seen a space program it couldn't poke fun at. It's being written by people too fundamentalist to get a job at the National Review.
Seriously, the WSJ Op-Ed is just this side of insane white mullah
We've spent the last thirty years not getting much farther than LEO and not able to do a whole lot when we're lucky enough to get there, then breath a massive sigh of relief when we get back down.
Not only that but we're trapped down here with a bunch of right wing pseudo-christian democracy jihadists spending all our research money for generations to come on war that can't be won trying to spread democracy in a part of the world that doesn't respect the institution. Yeah, great f'ing future we've got to look forward to from here.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
From the WSJ columnist:
we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles.'
From NASA:
Several elements will be carried in Discovery's payload bay for delivery to the Station. These include the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello, containing racks of supplies, food and water, and the Human Research Facility-2 rack. Also, the External Stowage Platform and a replacement Control Moment Gyroscope will be carried in Discovery's payload bay.
Excuse me for doubting the infinite wisdom of a whiny journalist, but I think I just saw a spaceship take food, water, supplies, and new equipment to a fucking space station. I apologize for not taking that accomplishment for granted. I don't know if I will ever get used to that being a simple, common occurence.
As for the astronaut who made repairs to the spaceship in fucking space, one has to wonder if the same whiny journalist changes the oil in his own car... on Earth.
Check my name. Yep.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
What about witnessing the birth of the Internet, the first ever global web between people on Earth? A revolution doesn't need to be a spectacular effort, it can be a technology that changes society as a whole.
theefer
It would help if government didn't waste $350 billion demolishing another country with absolutely no returns, instead of investing that much in the space program.
On the serious side, when Explorers came to the Americas in the 1500's they'd thought they find riches to bring back with them (and some did), but most of the found nothing but native americans and lots of land and it was the settlers that got the most of this situation and even started their own nation or two after a century or so.
The important bit is what you left out. They found lots of land...chock full of more unused natural resources than they'd ever seen. Colonies in space will require resources from Earth, which is cost prohibitive. There's no equivalent of log cabins, buffalo hunting, fur trapping, or amber waves of grain on Mars. It would be a lot of years before a moon or Mars colony had any hope of being self-sustaining.
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
The whole idea was for the shuttles to be used once or twice a week at a cost of $15 - 20M per launch. Instead problems mean we've used them just over a hundred times total at a cost of 1.3 BILLION dollars per launch. Time to pull the plug on this money sewer, it's producing very little science compared to unmanned probes, and doing nothing to colonize other worlds or mine the riches of space. If the money from just two launches were spent on space elevator R&D, we could actually get somewhere....
Because they really achieved a lot in so many categories.
People in their thirties and older are too busy with marriage, kids, mortgage, and established career to risk public ridicule or their lives to further science.
And I don't think the boomer generation in their twenties would allow so much political corruption and conflicts of interest going on these days.
Kinda amazing what they achieved even without the power of the internet or mobile phones to help them keep in touch and organize.
Too many would rather play MMORPG, watch porn, get drunk, and post on Slashdot than do anything more meaningful with their lives.
And with the continued outsourcing of technology to other countries, I'm not sure how the heck we'll regain our lead once we lose it. Because its only a matter of time before universities overseas are more prized than ours on average.
Soon, the only thing we might be exporting is reality TV shows where we humiliate ourselves for the enjoyment of foreigners who need something to watch during their long trip to Mars.
Wake up and do something useful. Improve your critical thinking skills, learn more math & science, mentor others. Help make America the envy of others once again.
Funny, I thought the free-market system would take care of everything for us. That's what the editorial pages of WSJ have been telling me for the last 30 years. No need for scientists, artists, dreamers, creators, engineers, and all the individual little choices about what is a worthwhile life that lead people to want to create something a bit bigger than themselves. All we need is for our capitalist overlords to set the right priorities and *PooF* - free enterprise will just make it happen!
Right?
Use "interplanetary" for Solar System stuff and "interstellar" for travel betwwen stars within a galaxy.
This article touches on the malaise of the post cold war
USA but is missing the larger point. Despite the bravado
of free-marketers to the contrary, big projects that
do not offer immediate financial windfall simply
wither and die in our global capitalistic system. Where
is IGY 'cheap and clean' energy? Why a heath system
that lines pockets and forgets kids?
Space exploration and space colonization are akin
to cathedrals in the sky. While important in terms of
mass pride they make poor investments (Zubrin's
economic case for Mars is laughable). Bush's
repurposing of NASA is an obvious good idea but is
ultimately doomed unless monies appear (even if
private contractors do the work). Space will ultimately
be colonized by creative imitators, political radicals
or religious dissidents. The USA and Europe no longer
look to the sky.
The first Mars colony will belong to the Scientologists
for the Mormons have taken Utah.
---537
Convince the US government there are "weapons of mass destruction" and terrorists there. Oh ya, and oil. We'll be there by next Christmas.
Giving a rural family access to and education about birth control is FAR more beneficial, both immediately and in the long term, than money spent on space programs.
This is a VERY good point.... Affordable computer hardware was not forseen at all, while affordable space-age hardware (for interstellar flight, flying cars, etc.) was predicted almost universally. It is only because computers are cheap-as-dirt today that we can have them literally everywhere. And until we get the hardware for spaceflight down to a cheap AND safe level such that even a hobbyist, or at least a non-billionare can fund thier own spaceflights, we will not see large-scale spaceflight of the kind we all love to see written about. One other aspect that I have not seen mentioned yet is that space is to us like the ocean was to cultures before affordable sailing ships came into use. The only reason that colonization and exploration happened is that: #1 -- a few rich people could afford to buy sailing ships, and hire for exploration, #2 -- people were firmly convinced that there were fortunes to be made for those brave enough (or stupid enough) to try it, and #3 -- the conditions at home were horrible enough that some people were willing to risk thier lives trying exploration of a strange new place. As a country, we are too well-fed, and too complacent to have many people willing to risk thier lives on space exploration. In the 1400's, it was common for whole ships, and even fleets to go down at sea, be we cannot stomache the loss of 7 astronauts without almost killing the whole space program. We also have to little imagination for the uses of space resources, asteroid mining, etc. We have barely explored the potential for crystal growth in space, and other potential money-making enterprises, and until people see enough $$$$ to be made, we will not really be seeing large scale attemps at non-government space travel (tourism ventures do NOT count). I would love to see our presence in space become ubiquitious, but for the time being, I do not see the conditions being right for it. The x-prize ventures, and tourism ventures will help, if only because they lay the groundwork in technology, but in my opinion, until the conditions for space colonization are right (horrible home conditions, money to be made out there, and cheaper space travel tech), I do not see it happening the way it has been envisioned. But hey, it could suprise us... Again, I would point to the previous posters reference to the unexpected prevalence of computer systems today. If not for a few unexpected breakthroughs in the technology, we would not have this situation, and it is possible that we will see a similar type of breakthrough that will open the door to space travel for us. I just don't plan on holding my breath for it!
The Science Channel was rerunning old Science TV shows, one of which was "The 21st Century" with Walter Cronkite from the late 1960s.
One thing he mentions repeatedly is we will have men on Mars by 1985. That was a whole 15 years in the future.
So just hold yer horses... Oh
It is facinating to see what our time looked like from there. We had just landed on the moon so why would Mars be so hard? The living room of the future is a hoot. It had a wall-sized flat big screen TV with high fidelity stereo sound. TVs for stock quotes, another for the weather, this one let's you talk to the office. They all had knobs almost bigger than today's MP3 players.
We did have men on the moon. We could imagine the rest.
The sad thing is for the last 30 years kids only had a low-performance space truck and a make-work place for it go to think about - all it managed by those who now have to think about how every decision will sound in testimony before a congressional committee.
Those kids got a raw deal. We're all getting a raw deal.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
(munch, munch, eat my words)
I should really have said "starvation" instead of "hunger". Or perhaps "nearly eliminated".
However the definition of hunger has changed in the US. Poor nutrition and malnutrition are much bigger problems than the feeling of hunger. It's common for overweight people to be malnourished because high-calorie / low-nutrition foods are so inexpensive.
Having said all that, it amazes me that you can buy a burger for a buck or less anywhere in the country. That's about one percent of an average day's wages. (Didn't calclulate it, so nobody yell at me.)
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If any extraterrestrials are reading this, please make one of your flying saucers crash (or land, at your option) into a populated area on this planet, so that governments can no longer deny your existence and thus make your technology commercially available to everyone.
On behalf of mankind, I thank you in advance.
First, in Earth orbit a nuclear explosion would at least knock out the power grid of the continent it happened to be above due to the electro-magnetic pulse of the explosion interacting with the Earth's natural fields and secondly, having so many atomic bombs just lying about (each spacecraft would need how many for propulsion?) could very easily lead to some of the charges going "missing".
Shh.
but can you really tell me people in the USA or the world should go hungry or go without health care while we spend billions on sending people to space?
Hmmm. Yes.
In the sense that people going hungry is a result of behaviors that hundreds of billions of dollars won't (and, even as we spend them, can't) fix. Throwing money at social problems doesn't always fix them, and sometimes makes them worse (see the comparitive self-sufficiency of kids born to other kids completely hooked on welfare, etc.). These are generally cultural issues, and it's simply going to take time. Twice the money in schools today won't make parents born 20 years ago any better at raising children right this minute. Those kids aren't going to be hungry at any time during their lives unless it's because they're not participating in the wider economy, and keeping that economy growing, efficient (through technology and its shrewd use), and reaching into new areas, is the best way to make that happen.
Yes, there are going to be circumstances beyond each of some individuals' control, and you can be born to parents that simply don't care whether or not you grow up into a someone who can feed herself. But to the extent that we do put resources into helping out people in those situations, we're not excluding doing the more magnificent things of which we, as a species and especially as an adventuresome culture, are capable.
I usually try to avoid politics and social debates
And, given the breathtakingly adolescent tone saturating most of those conversations (especially on slashdot) I can hardly blame you, but none of the cool nerdy stuff we love happens in a vacuum. Without weaving it into the wider cultural landscape (and the resources therein), the cool nerdy stuff would barely escape a handful of college labs. So fans of all things nerdly need to truly understand the larger societal and politcal contexts in which technology gets funded, used, praised, villified, and considered (too often) mutually exclusive with warmer, fuzzier "humanities" issues.
If you haven't noticed, though, I'd consider the progress of technology on all fronts to be the single greatest contributor to the conditions in which the potentially "hungry" live in the US. By conditions, I mean, as opposed to, say, that of those poor bastards in Niger, literally dropping dead from lack of food. In the US, you pretty much cannot drop dead from lack of food unless you want to, or are so addled/sick that you can't grasp what's being offered to you. Every city in the country at least has a place to obtain a meal for those that ask, and it's only through even grander technological feats that we polish the efficiencies and productivity that make that largess possible.
Besides, it's not like the money spent on space programs is actually packed up in boxes and launched into space. It mostly pays people, all of whom themselves buy houses, hire carpenters, rent videos, take the occasional vacation. Certainly some of their effort, put solely into making, say, an MRI machine so cheap and safe that we wouldn't think twice about using it on everyone with a sniffle, insurance or not, might lower the cost of health care a touch. But for that to happen meaningfully, we've got to take the lawyers out of healthcare first. It's not the lack of healthcare for a family that's really horrible, it's the fact that a lawsuit over someone else's test regimine, or the insistence on the use of fantastically costly drugs can burn up more "healthcare dollars" for one family than basic good care for 50 families would otherwise cost.
Of course, if everyone who owns a Bentley were to sell them, buy a Scion, and use the extra cash to buy 40 Scions for other people, there'd be less complaining about car ownership, either. But we're not a culture that prohibits the Bentley-ables from celebrating their prowess at basketball, charisma as an actor, insight at founding Google, or willingness to risk a lot on commercial space ventures, and nor should we be.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
>> ...we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles...
Ptting aside the fact that coming back deserves to be the highlight of any sapceflight, these spoiled brats don't know what they're talking about.
The Discovery mission objectives were all met, including servicing ISS, fixing its gryro, and collecting the trash. That's what the Shuttle was designed to do. It is a fair to argue that the Shuttle doesn't go anywhere. But it isn't fair to wallow in ignorance and whine that the last mission didn't inpire you.
Checking the tiles and pulling out those little pieces of cloth ought to be seen as simple examples of needed maintenance performed by the crew. We'll need that capability on every future mission. You don't imagine, do you, that 500-day missions to Mars will go perfectly, that nothing unexpected will break? Those crews better damn well fix it, because being 40 millin miles away is a lot diffeerent than being 200 miles away.
Space travel is not a voyeur sport, contrary to the opinions of many. We're not doing it to make to turn 50-7ear-old SF into reality.
People who want to see real space travel ought to busy themselves doing somethig useful, like inventing propulsion systems that can get us to Mars in a few weeks or less.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I wonder how much the advances of the computer age has diverted peoples attention AWAY from space? With the rapid socialogical and technological advances of the last 1/4 century it doesn't suprise me that people are indifferent about space exploration. An astronaut is just a cowboy in a space suit, hence the popularity in the 60's.
Perhaps when we run out of interesting things to do on earth we will look skyward again.
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Check this link for statistics (with sources) - some 30 million people in the US itself experience some level of hunger.
They should really stop taking those polls right before lunch.
And here I thought I'd have to wait until the 31st century to see Nixon in office.
Agreed, but per my childhood experience, actual hunger is not completely gone. I daresay my family wasn't the only one. There is a point at which you make just enough money to be out of the poverty line, so can't qualify for foodstamps - but it's not enough to properly feed/clothe/etc your family. I forget what this point is called, but it's fairly common. You're damned if you work, damned if you don't.
And malnutrition is a pretty huge problem. It's a self-reinforcing cycle to an extent; you eat crappy food because it's all you can afford, so you get overweight and people say it's because you eat crappy food. I had to deal with that too.
Burger = one of those high calorie/not-so-high nutrition foods, unless it's homemade, imo.
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I haven't read all the postings, but I didn't see anyone note that the reason we went to the moon was not for economic or sci-fi reasons: it was for war and politics. We were in a race with the USSR to build better delivery systems for our nuclear warheads, and pouring money and talent into a moon race was far more palatable than the truth. We were also in a political race for the world's approval then, and first to the moon would (and did, I think) win us a lot of PR battles in the minds of the undecided world's teeming millions. Perhaps we need another cold war?
Evil Overlord Rule #86. I will make sure that my doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.
-FL
From the WSJ no less - if you haven't guessed their agenda by now, imagine Fox News in print, so you can't see the sneer.
As Sam Goldwyn said, "Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them."
Since I can't ignore them, IMHO, anyone who believes the high points of (any) shuttle mission is that it came back and bits of fabric were pulled out needs a week of ejection/parachute, survival, altitude chamber, parabolic flight and centrifuge training.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
A related shuttle = useless post from a blog I found yesterday. Yes, the shuttle exists only to serve the ISS - which does no real science, and is merely there as a place for the shuttle to go. "They're a co-dependant waste of money". I agree. http://www.thewils.net/dave/blog/archives/000288.h tml
The Space Age ended in 1972, when we left the moon for good. We live in the Digital Age now. The future's changed.
It'll happen yet. The technology to make it affordable was just a little behind the dream. Nothing unusual there. I'm hoping to get off this rock before I'm too old to care.
"A Logic Called Joe"
first published in 1945.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
...the friend of the people. They are just another schill of big business anymore, and the crap they publish is corrupting out minds and the minds of our young people. Every parent should make sure to educate their children to know exactly what the popular big news media is all about, who owns and controls them, and what their real agenda is.
Here's a thought: commercial advertisements should be taxed at 100% to help pay down the national debt.
I am glad to say that Burt Rutan, Scaled Composites and Transformational Space are already working on for the LEO successor to SpaceShipOne and it looks to be a really promisign start if they can put together the funding. They are working on a shoestring budget from NASA for the CXV program, a lesser known counterpart to the CEV program. CXV is intended to develop a low cost, reliable, safe, launch vehicle to get crews to and from the ISS or elsewhere in LEO.
Like SpaceShipOne this vehicle is air launched though from a much larger mother ship so there is no expensive launch complex. The capsule is derived from the Discover/Corona capsules used to return film from spy satellites and is a very well understood design. It has an innovative new heat shield, will deploy parachutes and water land like Apollo. The capsule is reusable. It is very focused on safety, reliability and low cost which is exactly what we need at the moment for a manned vehicle.
They've dropped tested a 23% scale model of the launch vehicle in Mojave and a week or two did a first drop test of the parachute system off Crescent City, CA.
@de_machina
Sometimes technology development is harder than we think it ought to be, sometimes it's easier. The harder stuff is just naturally going to be slower; the easy stuff (like electronics has been the past couple of decades) makes us impatient in other areas. Science fiction's generally rosy portraits of future advances are probably also part of the problem.
On the other hand, maybe Huebner is right - we're about to enter an inevitable period of slowdown and even loss, similar to the dark ages after the Greeks and Romans. The parallels between the US and the Roman empire are pretty interesting...
Luckily we do have some competition in space that might revive things again...
Energy: time to change the picture.
As long as we're talking about the shuttle, here, it's interesting to remember that it was the Nixon administration that essentially cooked the numbers to make the shuttle program seem cost-effective, and that got the thing through congress. Meanwhile the Dems, Walter Mondale prominent among them, regarded the shuttle program as wasteful high-tech socialism. (Can you say "enormous federal boondoggle"?
With respect to the particular program, Mondale's argument had a big measure of truth. The "productive" space program in terms of science is pretty clearly the low(er)-cost uncrewed probes now, isn't it? On the other hand the engineering involved in crewed exploration has a different set of challenges, and the ISS and the shuttle are more about those.
Maybe we think the shuttle's an example of the sort of corrupt, pork-laden process you're talking about. "Military industrial complex" and all that. (Please, where is Mr. Eisenhower when we need him?) But the lines involved aren't nearly as clean as our more doctrinaire partisans would think. The Republicans were all for the enormous spending program, and the Democrats were extremely skeptical about whether it was cost-effective.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Er, "A Logic Named Joe," and published in 1946.
Well, I believe this near-rant is really pointless.
The fact that you and me are not going anywhere in space on our life times, does not mean that advancement is stalled,
or that the promised future was "stolen" from us. It's your fault if you believed what you saw in the Jetsons in your childhood,
not NASA's.
Unfortunately, we are part of a generation that grew up looking sci/fi, and believing that space transportation was only a refinement of
current technologies, and that in some time years we will have the means. Well, we didn't, live with that.
It seemed easy, cheap and ready, but reality has widely disproved that. It is difficult, expensive and dangerous, and
despite all that, there have been some really impressive advancements indeed. In my personal opinion, the Mars Rovers, the Mars Express and the Casini mission
are far more impressive that anything a sci/fi author could write, because they are REAL, they really happened.
The authors are neither realistic nor giving the space programs the credit they deserve. It is understandable that it's disappointing
to realize that you are not going to live enough to see your geek-dreams come true, but to involuntarily belittle what has been done
is still unfair in my opinion.
one of my first books was an old "Boys Book of Jets" from about 1959. It said electricity would soon be free because of nuclear power, and showed artists impressions of where we'd all be living by 1975: Zero-gee space hotels being served by robots apparently designed by Emporor Ming.
Man I couldn't wait.
The bourgeois are perfectly happy to sit on their arses, doing nothing but watch the money pour in their pockets.
Whatever will sit (or is deemed to sit) between the money and their pockets will mercilessly be fought by all means possible.
For example, watch the greedy record companies in the face of new technologies, such as the MP3.
Bourgeois are risk-adverse, and thus they will stenuously oppose any new progress unless it can be demonstated that such progress will only enhance the amount of money pouring in their pockets.
For the last 25 years, we have seen the bourgeois relentlessly lead a formidable onslaught against States, which is viewed as yet another barrier between money and their pockets, mostly because of various countries throughout the world, with their various "trade barriers", such as tarrifs and different cultures and customs.
Through clever propaganda, they are slowly subverting Democracy by letting more and more people believe that governments are bad and should be curtailed, to the eventual point where they will be able to have "one dollar, one vote vote".
The Space Race was brought forward by competition between two large powers; the annihilation of the other power has left the USA with a monopoly in power, and monopolies are never innovative.
I think either there was too much waste and too little thought/research put into the orbiting space stations and therefore, much else was never funded. You really would have thought we'd be so much further along with regard to space travel and exploration considering what was done so many years ago, yet we couldn't even keep ourselves in orbit for any length of time. And to think that they've still not even designed a better shuttle system after all these years of knowing the current system was pretty fragile...
IMO, we should have built a great automatic delivery system in the image of the Russian system and then used a capsule-like system(the old way) for sending up the humans. Done right, the capsules could be mounted on the automatic system or even dock in space with them for manned payload delivery or repair.
Heck, we can't even go BACK to the moon in less time it took to create the space program and go there the first time. It's probably taking longer because Haliburton needs $100 billion and 10 years just to look at the moon and pick out the landing spot. It'll be interesting to see if the Russians are the first to RE-orbit the moon now they there are plans for paying passengers for such trips.
My confidence isn't very high with regard to seeing trips to Mars in my lifetime. Take a look at the inside of the International Space Station to see how far we've come. It just doesn't LOOK very well planned. And do you remember the crews having to build their own lunch table out of duct-tape? What was that all about?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
In my opinion what has caused us to stall so much is Big Business. Yes they have led to some great innovations, just think how much they have stifled by having people sign contracts that "any innovations and ideas you come up with during your course of working here belong to said business" This is why I love google and their pet projects idea. While we have come a long way, we could have gone so much further if not for Big Business shutting out ideology. Look how many times the oil industry has shut out innovation due to their "investments". I sincerely believe that it is due to the oil industry why we are not using cleaner and more efficient cars today. We see articles such as the car getting 250mpg, yet an industry with millions of workers could not come up with this first. We must let imagination be free, and must get big business out of politics before we can see innovation change!
~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
As I see it are the two things limiting advancements in the space program. It's all well and good for Bush to say that he wants to see people on Mars soon, but unless he funds the department who's job it is to make that happen, it's just not realistic. When we are spending billions upon billions of dollars fighting ill-advised wars, and only spending a miniscule fraction on expanding mankind's space future, hollow words spoken during a campaign mean nothing. When he turns around and mandates the retirement of the current shuttle fleet, without providing the immensely increased funding necessary to support the design and development of a new vehicle, then all we're going to get for our efforts is another flawed shuttle that was pushed out the door on a shoestring budget. Until the money matches the ambition, nothing will come of it.
The other thing limiting our success is blind paranoia. People need to realize that accidents happen. When you strap people onto a gigantic tank full of hydrogen and oxygen, controlled by a myriad of complex (and aging, see above) systems, and then light the damn thing, occasionally something is going to go wrong. This is reality, and the astronauts are well aware of this. They accept the risk that they take, and they know the possible consequences of that risk. Unfortunately, this is unacceptable for the people sitting at home in their armchairs watching the launch on television. They simply can't accept that one out of every hundred of these launches is naturally going to end in disaster. When you think of all the things during a launch that could go wrong, it's damned impressive that every other shuttle launch doesn't blow up on the pad. Until the general public can learn that sometimes failure is part of success, then we will have countless hours of mission time consumed by petty things like astronauts pulling pieces of fabric out of tiles, which would have come out on their own. Push the scared little know-it-alls out of the way, and let the risk takers make some advancements.
A Logic Named Joe
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
not Apophis...
First, we defined success in 'space' as humans travelling to a place. Comparisons to Columbus and all that.
Second, there's some serious physical realities constraining all that. Imagine we live in a very small house in the middle of the American prairie hundreds of miles from anything. Going to the moon was like finding our way out to the back porch, pretty exciting stuff since we'd never been out of the house before but once we'd arrive there wasn't really anything there except us. And on the moon, we discovered physically... rocks.
Now, to step outside the solar system is (how many?) orders of magnitude more difficult than going to the moon. The two things are just not comparable in terms of difficulty and likelihood of happening any time soon so that's where the dissapointment comes from. The moon was achievable, the next step isn't as far as we can practically see.
Re. Mars: So what? We send people there to gather some more rocks, maybe some lichen... at incredible cost.
The journalist is right- the highest priority for this mission was seeing whether or not anybody died and everything else was secondary to that. That is not healthy; we won't have a real presence in space until it's safe to automatically make the assumption that that won't happen, the way we do with air travel today. If we don't have equipment that can give us that freedom, we won't get anything else done.
Also, everything else about the mission was about keeping the station operational and its crew alive- there wasn't even any real science involved. Again, we have to establish a strong enough base of equipment and techniques that that sort of thing is routine and not worth paying special attention to, or we aren't really accomplishing anything with our space activities.
Walter Mondale was a staunch critic of the space program in general. He wanted to kill the Apollo program after the Apollo 1 fire. His ultimate goal was that the money spent on NASA should be directed into social services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mondale
He was probably right about the shuttle, but his bias against NASA was well known which ultimately weakened his position rather than strengthening it. (IMHO)
The Republicans were all for the enormous spending program, and the Democrats were extremely skeptical about whether it was cost-effective.
Which, oddly, seems typical of today's politics as well.
The lines haven't just blurred -- on some issues the parties seem to have traded places.
A good opportunity here to remind Slashdot of this interesting summary of the state of NASA (a +5 article from not long ago, not one of mine).
mt
Contrary to the "War drives advancements theory" I think military is exactly what's holding us back. We spend SO much money on our military that we dwarf the ammount spent on space advancements. Maybe if the world got along we could combine our efforts to reach some of these far-fetched goals.
Put the shuttles in a museum!
The Earth is set up so that chemical rockets and just barely escape the Earth's gravity. If the Earth were just a bit more massive, we wouldn't have any space program at all. The point is, rockets are only marginally workable.
There are two ways we can go on space: One is the utilitarian way, which means satellites to do useful things for us Earthlings. The other way to go is space exploration where we expand our understanding of the solar system and our presence within it.
The utilitarian view of space is something we can achieve easily with chemical power sources. We have done some great things with chemical power for exploration, but it is also becoming a handicap.
If we want to do much more than the utilitarian use, we need to work on nuclear propulsion. There are so many ideas, including ion thrusters, gas core reactors and many others, with advantages and disadvantages.
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in one episode of Stargate, the Goa'uld Apophis tried chucking a giant asteroid at Earth to deal with those uppety Humans without makeing a direct strike
How stupid are they?
MacGyver could just build an asteroid deflector with a couple of inner tubes.
"Ensure" balanced nutrition in a bottle for eating. No fuss, no work, no problem. Sleeping I despise. Love-making--check my name. Transhumanism is all that matters to me right now.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
A rapidly growing energy source per capita. In there case Oil.
Er, pardon my tedious and boring insistence on grounding discussions in reality, but doesn't that clause just say it all? I mean, _I_ had lots of wild imaginings as a kid, but guess what? I knew fuck-all about astrophysics at the age of 7! Could someone explain how this is news?
Side note to the nutters who will be posting about FTL, Martian terraforming, mining asteroids or whatever: for heaven's sake, either grow up , or piss off back to watching your Star Trek DVDs. It's almost as depressing to see you wasting your resources thinking about such nonsense as it is to meet an apparently intelligent person who turns out to believe in god.
I had a bad day dealing with morons at work... does it show?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
If we base our desires on sci-fi, we might as well base them on the Jetsons..I mean, they had flying cars that became briefcases, a huge computerized workforce, robots, trips to other planets, etc.
... "things". Meanwhile, the reality, when it arrives, is that Susan and Joe MarsPioneer are screaming at each other about her infidelity and his drinking and threatening divorce while Buddy is downloading pr0n and Sis is hanging out with a bad crowd by airlock #2.
Sci-fi creates a world that suits the creator, and if done well, draws the user in. But the creator would never finish the thing if s/he had to also talk about how the plumbing works. The fact is there are so many details left out that even Blade Runner, in all its anti-glory, is idealized (how exactly did Decker *pay* for his noodles?)
Take Star Trek: only the Ferengi talked about money, but apart from hoarding it, it didn't seem like it got used a lot. I seem to recall some talk of "credits", whatever those are, but the real *believable* sci fi has Riker wondering how he's going to pay for that special trip he and Troi have been thinking about, especially based on a military salary.
"The devil's in the details"...well, they got that one right. The problem is that we dream of a details-free world where men and women live in harmony on Mars doing
Space exploration doesn't sound so appealing anymore.
Think of the way air travel advanced. From the first flights measured in seconds aloft, to longer flights and even daring flights across oceans, air travel had a vision for cicumnavigating the globe. That vision came to pass because people saw it, and worked toward it.
Space exploration thus far has lacked any serious vision. The U.S.'s forays to the moon and back, while technologically admirable, were not viewed in the context of a larger vision, but only as singular achievements. If the pioneers of air travel had been so short-sighted, we'd still be flying short distances over land.
So, we got to earth orbit, made it to the moon, and no one had the vision to see what the next step would be. The next step, of course, is manned exploration of our own solar system, followed by exploration of other systems. Don't flame me--I know we don't know how to do this now. Neither could the Wright's conceive of flying out over the ocean to Europe.
Unfortunately, the U.S. space program is so ill conceived, that we launch a huge craft, incapable of achieving more than a low-earth orbit, and in doing so, chunks of debris fly off and we can't even explain why. This program has lacked meaning and purpose since 1969.
We should either have a complete vision (without time-dated milestones!) for space exploration, or spend the considerable greenbacks on other things.
...for loosing the cold war. The space race was (IMO) a pissing contest between the USA and USSR. When the USA threatened to raise the stakes in the arms race (SDI, star wars) the USSR's economy couldn't keep up and they surrendered. Without the propeganda and military incentive it wasn't worth the USA's time to continue the expansion into space.
With China getting into space travel we may see a revival within the next decade or two simply because the USA won't want to let the Chinese get ahead in the new space race. Of course humanity's continued existance depends on someone building self sustaining non-terrestrial colonies as we are gonna wreck this planet in the next century ot two.
I like the more positive spin: "Any significantly advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic"
Oooh, a spaceship?!? A SPACE STATION?!?!? IN SPACE!!!!
I'm sorry if that gets you too excited. To me, that's all old, old news. I remember reading in history books about guys who would blow themselves to the moon, and once had to figure out how to get a crippled capsule back to earth.
Now our great space achievements include "astronauts" - barely on the fringe of our atmosphere - doing variations of things that are by now "simple and common" against the backdrop of the space exploration that happened going on half a century ago.
You can fantasize about space stations if you want. Compared to past achievements, our space program today is junk. We've stepped backwards in many ways. All of this great new technology, and look what we're doing with it: hanging it a couple of hundred miles (or less) above the ground. Space indeed. Pfah.
"The main problem is that technological development is sufficiently slow that it tends to lag behind need. By the time the price of oil and gas is high enough to encourage investment in development of alternative energy sources, we can't wait another ten or twenty years for the technology to mature. So we have to be investing in basic energy research all along, and building the infrastructure a bit before it is really cost-effective."
This is exactly the point most free marketers miss. Of course higher prices of fossil fuels will push development of replacement energy solutions, but waiting for those signals before you do anything is like heading towards a brick wall and waiting for the sound of your car's engine buckling from the impact before you start turning the steering wheel.
Great post.
The problem is that there is no business case for space.
Which is actually untrue. There is a great business case for geosynchronous communications satellites, and new ones are going up all the time, having gone from C-band to Ku-band and now to Ka-band with small spot-beam "cells" for enhanced frequency re-use that will deliver many more channels of HD video.
But outside of geosynchronous satellites, there isn't much business to be done. I suspect that sub-orbital and LEO space tourism will come about slowly, but that market will remain tight for quite a while due to a limited pool of of risk-taking rich people.
Many scientists were talking about and forseeing computers, the media just wasn't paying attention.
As We May Think, Norbert Weiner.
"Soviet Cybernetics" was a vision of a Soviet Internet and the "New Soviet Man" was envisioned to be a Cyborg. It scared the hell out of the Americans, and inspired DARPA.
Nukes give off more then just radiation, they give off an EMP burst that will fry anything electrical. In fact, both US and Russian millitary uses hardend chips and other electronics to function in the event a nuclear war.
Here is a scary though. A small yeild nuclear bomb by a terrorist will cause more electrical property damage then the explosion itself. Just imagine 10.000+ cars on a city highway system all shutting down at ONCE!. It's not like your going to tow them off the road in one day. Because, that's exactly what you will have to do once the ECU in every car gets fried.
Life is not for the lazy.
The Russians always seem to get more done with a given amount of money. And at this point, they have a better safety record too.
Your fucking post is full of fucking bold f*** words, but in all your fucking rage you missed the fucking point. Which is that we haven't progressed a fucking bit in the fucking space at least since the fucking eighties.
We're getting bogged down by energy requirements. Oil is going through the roof, batteries are barely crawling along in improvements, fuel cells still cost a fortune, and everyone is still afraid of the nuclear boogeyman.
What does that leave? Geothermal? Fat chance of seeing that go wide spread. So that leaves solar.
Why the hell is the moon not coated with solar cells? I mean, seriously. Ok let's say we don't want to change how it looks. The bitch is tidelocked! Just put them on the back! Oh but we'll have to go up there and it'll take forever to build! No it won't. Robots, people! I remember reading in Discover around 1992-93 or so about a new all-electrical process someone had developed for extracting materials from sand. He had a bunch of little robots running around the desert building solar cells out of the raw silicon. The moon's got that in spades, and aluminum for the connections. Yeah the efficiency won't be great but who cares when you have an entire MOON (or even half a moon) of them?
How do we get the robots there? Send some. But it won't be enough! Self-replicating. Is this really such a hard challenge? We're seeing basic steps towards it today. Tell me it would cost more than a major space program like a Mars trip to get it working and on the backside of the moon.
How does the power get back? "Laser". But won't it cook the earth? Not if you lock the depression angle so it can only hit geosynchronous orbit and not cross the earth.
But won't people abuse it and fight over it? Declare the moon array itself public domain. Make all the receiving sattelites privatized to create competition and prevent government death rays. Make all the ground stations government owned to prevent slum-shopping for placements by over-greedy immoral corporations. There, you have a case for competition and a nice construction project for all those 3rd world equator countries with the best views of orbit.
What would that get you for your hundred billion or so invesment? UNLIMITED POWER! We wouldn't NEED oil, or fusion, or anything else with that running. Want to use it to go into space? Point the lasers the other way and use them with sails or to power ion drive systems. We'd be mining the asteroid belt with Mark 2 replicating robots in no time. Then we have unlimited energy AND unlimited resources.
Then the real fun starts. Want to end world hunger? Desalinate the ocean and irrigate the entire sahara desert. It'd be cheap. Want to end pollution? Electrochemical reclamation. With virtually free power, post-problem pollution fixes are cheap enough to work. Want to educate everyone? What kind of network can you run when you don't need to worry about electrical losses? Want to cure cancer? There's some promising work with antimatter. Build accelerators to produce it, more efficient ones than the general-purpose kind we have now. Don't want them on earth? Put them on the moon too, make a bigass one around the equator, ship the people there on vacation. Want to get rid of that threatening asteroid headed for earth? Zap it with a petawatt or two before it passes Mars and watch the vapor pressure push it away. Maybe into a nice orbit where we can strip mine it.
All that aside, biotech is going to be the next kick ass field. Read Wired in the last couple years? We can just about cure f'ing BLINDNESS! Eat that you boomer fossils! We're going to see fixes for spinal injuries, better transplants, a doubling of life span, improved prosthetics or maybe even regrown parts. Think some religious-based policies will stop that? Maybe in the US, that's just going to open the door for someone else to take the lead. We're going to be 130 and bitching our great grand kids want tails and wings for xmas and how immoral it is and back in our days we just hijacked cars on playstation and hacked virtual sex in, and that was fine for us!
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
good thing our ansesctors weren't as pragmatic as you huh?
the highest priority for this mission was seeing whether or not anybody died and everything else was secondary to that.
No, I believe that's why the media (WSJ, included) covered this particular mission so closely and the general population was more interested in the mission and results than usual. Another loss so soon would be a media circus and would take NASA PR decades to recover from.
We've lost two shuttles... out of 114 missions. Both were horrible tragedies and we would never accept a 1.75% catastrophic failure rate in a consumer vehicle, but we're talking about space flight. The flights had become so routine to most people that the media coverage was non-existent between the disasters. On top of that, the astronauts are all extremely bright people and I doubt they would accept a mission if anyone involved believed the main purpose was just to see if they could make it back.
there wasn't even any real science involved
We used to do the scientific work on the shuttle because there was no other location. Now, we do the scientific work on the space station and the shuttle supports it. I would still rate that as being "involved" in the science, even if the connection isn't immediately apparent.
Gimme my orgasmotron!
I'd like to have a retirement, but a nerd on Mars will keep me warm instead. I'd like to buy medicine for my wife, but just raise my taxes to put a nerd on Mars. I'd like to buy a house that is safe, but instead you can raise my taxes for a nerd on mars and I'll be lickity-split happy and do you a little jig in my thread-bare overalls. Weee-doggy! A robot or man on Mars! NASA looks funded the same way China and Russia funded their space programs. Good thing we is the land of the free and home of capitalism and frown on socialism.
. Throwing money at social problems doesn't always fix them, and sometimes makes them worse (see the comparitive self-sufficiency of kids born to other kids completely hooked on welfare, etc.).
And sometimes makes them better: Project Head Start, AFDC, WIC, public education, need-based and academic scholarships, EITC, etc. Tell the whole story.
In the US, you pretty much cannot drop dead from lack of food unless you want to, or are so addled/sick that you can't grasp what's being offered to you. Every city in the country at least has a place to obtain a meal for those that ask, and it's only through even grander technological feats that we polish the efficiencies and productivity that make that largess possible.
Only? You are saying that the *only* reason that the poor are fed is because of technology? Gen. George Marshall once said "amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics." You are limiting your view to the tactics in producing food, but fail to take into account how that food or other aid is paid for and distributed, or the logistics. Technology plays a part, but only a part, and a small one. Eventually it requires people with the ability to organize it and fund it.
But for that to happen meaningfully, we've got to take the lawyers out of healthcare first.
Legal urban legends. Most of the stories you hear are lies perpetuated by those with an interest in doing so.
Your version is Clarke's 3rd law. Benford's is his corollary to Clarke's 3rd law - a simple reversal of terms. Both are insightful, though Clarke's more so.
That was new. Everything else I've seen says that NASA knew that the cost estimates was ... unrealistic. They used those to sell the Shuttle project.
But you have a point; I doubt that NASA really had the guts to plan for that large cost overruns. :-(
All other projects that was totally fouled up by NASA like NASP (and even insisting on taking over DC-X and fucking that up, too) was pure incompetence?You really think that is better?! :-(
Ah, OK. It doesn't matter why they wasted all those billions of dollars using a ridiculously expensive launch system -- when designing a cheaper rocket would have costed at most two or three years of launches with the shuttle. (If you didn't give the job to Burt Rutan; then you'd probably also get a moon base for that kind of money.)
We are here. Decades with no serious money for R&D into launchers while wasting billions every year on a ridiculously expensive system. People have learned and won't let NASA handle that kind of system again. Hopefully.
I just wonder what we could have had. There has long been lots of plans for how to build cheap launcers (Big Dumb, etc).
The private space changes is a reaction to NASA. You can't claim it is new tech that makes it possible; check what Carmack is doing! It's interesting, but will hardly generate doctor's thesis in material science.
Something like FOSS. I doubt that Linux and BSD would have grown so fast without Microsoft, which cut the oxygen supply to all normal competition.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
And if you believe that, I have a War to sell you!
the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello,
Please tell me that Raffaello is some acronym or something and not an american bastardisation (notice not spelt bastardization) of the name of the Italian Renaissance painter.
When will the septics stop imposing their inability to spell long and complicated words on the rest of the world? No wonder half the world (or to the americans, the few raggedy headed weirdos who were not lucky enough to be born american and therefore must be devil worshipping baby buggering camel jockeys) want to drive planes into buildings full of americans and even bomb the London tube system in the hope of picking off a few yank tossers who were bright enough to realise that New York has nothing that London doesn't do better (and for centuries longer).
And it is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Be nice, sponsor me: http://jailbreak.ragabonds.org.uk
You make me laugh! You obviously haven't seen War of the Worlds, or you would know that a little advice from Tom Cruise and you could fix your car post-EMP in a matter of minutes, so the majority of the cars could fixed in a couple hours I would guess.
... that the world could successfully rally to protect the planet from an asteroid in 35 years.
First, as you say, new technology would have to be developed and perfected. Not impossible but it's very difficult to predict the pace of such things. If, in fact, it took 36 years we'd still be screwed. Almost making the deadline [pun intended] wouldn't cut it.
The biggest problem would be mustering the needed level of international cooperation. No doubt the cost of the program would be too much for even the richest nations to go it alone. How many years would go by before enough nations could get together and decide on a plan of action? What would the USA do if 20 years down the road more accurate estimates of the impact point proved that the asteroid was going to impact on the other side of the globe? Would the USA withdraw its participation? I'd like to think not but I've lost much of my faith in American largess. Anyway, balancing an enormous economic drain versus the morality of allowing a serious disaster to occur to someone else (possibly an enemy) would be a serious quandary for any nation.
The problems are certainly surmountable; in theory. The world's track record regarding other crises is spotty at best. How much progress have we made at:
eliminating controllable diseases,
controlling global population growth,
controlling greenhouse gas emissions?
The list goes on and doesn't even address the more important but tougher issues like war and poverty. I'm sure someone will come up with a good example where the world got together and solved a problem but overall history shows little that it's rare and difficult.
So I don't think 35 years is really enough time. I'd say more like 300 years. At least in that much time one could hope for salvation from radically new technological advances such as anti-gravity or really really frickin powerful lasers in space.
-scsg
Hubble fucking Telescope
I could list several lesser-known missions, but their significance (or existence) is apparently lost on anyone who doesn't get to see green cheese or aliens. No progress, my ass.
Seriously, it's a perfect kick start, ocean current changes will probably only affect small, but highly populated bits of the 1st world; the bits that are most likely to drive innovation quicktime.
Where's my flying car, dammit!?
We apologize for the inconvenience.
If you mean Raffaello Sanzio, the Italian Renaissance painter, then, no, Italian Space Agency did not get it wrong when they named the module.
If you mean Rafael, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, then NASA probably screwed up.
No, you saw a national defense contractor welfare program bring food, water, supplies and new equipment to a massively expensive international defense contractor welfare program that will never be completed.
The point of the WSJ editorial is simple: the difference between what we could be doing and what we are doing is enormous, and when you step back and look at what we are doing, its not very impressive or useful in the first place. Whoopty-do. An astronaut left his ship and did a "repair" in space. Repairs orders of magnitude more complicated have been done in the past (Hubble?), space stations have been supplied for two decades now (space stations that were FAR more useful, and FAR cheaper).
If you can't get used to that being a common occurance, or see that its really rediculous that we're impressed by that these days, that shortcoming is your own, not the parent poster's.
You insensitive clod.
>Contrary to the "War drives advancements theory" I think military is exactly what's holding us back. We spend SO much money on our military that we dwarf the ammount spent on space advancements.
Exactly.
What the "War drives advancements" (or "War drives economy") people neglect to mention is, it's not the WAR that drives progress... it's the management of the economy that makes the difference. The irony is that price controls, nationalization of industries, 5 year plans, and other central planning run COMPLETELY against the ideology of those spouting "war = wealth".
Usually, a wartime economy pleases no one, but is instead designed for survival. Today, however, we have war but the economy is designed to please foreign investors, and people with "mobile capital" (who could give a rats ass about their country of birth).
And sometimes makes them better: Project Head Start, AFDC, WIC, public education, need-based and academic scholarships, EITC, etc. Tell the whole story.
You'll notice I said, specifically, "doesn't always fix them" and "sometimes makes them worse." It goes without saying, as part of that statement, that the flip side is also sometimes true. Please take a little context into consideration, and recognize that I was responding to someone who said, essentially, that we should not be doing things like space research while there are hungry people. I find that to be a false dichotomy, and further find that if we waited on doing anything "technological" until everyone had a large plate of food, well, there would be all sorts of people that would never get there. A good example might be the huge logistical efforts and success our military had in the initial relief efforts surrounding the recent tsunami disaster. High-tech aircraft, space-based communications, imaging satellites, computer and communications networks, IT-based epidemiology tools... all of those fantastic tools came into play and made a big, immediate difference in a lot of lives. But without the sort of R&D we do in the technologies that were used, we wouldn't have them at our disposal, whether it's floating supplies right up to impacted villages, or tracking freighters as they enter our own harbors with un-announced cargos (hey, we're still working on that, but you get my drift).
Specifically as it regards public education: I happen to live the DC suburbs, and have a regular chance to see what different jurisdictions are doing with their tax dollars, school-wise. The most appalling statistic is the $10k+ that is spent per student in the DC public school system, and which delivers frightful results. Essentially illiterate "graduates," huge drop-out rates, complete unfamiliarity with the structure and nature of our civil society (beyond that which is gleaned from music videos and Grant Theft Auto, etc). Of course there are success stories, many of them. But the resources that are going in are delivering terrible results, relative to neighboring school systems. The difference is political and cultural. I'm sure you get my point, which is that, indeed, money, per se, is not the yardstick for "support" of students and their communities that many would say that it is. That same per-capita edcuational expenditure, used in any of a lot of excellent private school settings, as an example, would have a huge impact on such students that were allowed to attend. For the record, I can't abide religious schools, so I'm not including those - regardless of how effective they may be in academic discipline.
You are limiting your view to the tactics in producing food, but fail to take into account how that food or other aid is paid for and distributed, or the logistics. Technology plays a part, but only a part, and a small one.
No, I'd say that second to the culture nurturing it, technology is the single largest determiner of sustainable agriculture and its use by devloping countries. It's the difference between slash-and-burn in rainforest areas as opposed to thoughtful crop rotation and market timing. It's the difference between livestock pulling carts of coffee beans (and cutting down rainforest so you can feed the livestock), and efficient rail transportation, etc. It's the difference between losing and saving a crop that's being impacted by a fungus or parasite. It's the difference between a crop that can resist a drought, and one that can't. But if you don't have the right cultural framework for all of that (i.e., a corrupt Sudanese Islamo-fascist theocracy that would rather exterminate villages than hash out the logistics of letting them trade productively with one another), none of it matters.
Most of the stories you hear are lies perpetuated by those with an interest in doing so.
The single greatest impediment to tort reform are the trial lawyers that profit so immense
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
We all looked twords these scientific advancements with great hope. Now we see that the truth of the matter is that it's the human factor holding us back. The idealogy that we should set forth and explorer even at the cost of (willing) human lives is dead.
Holographic porn you say? Yeah, that probably sums it up. People have little interest in technology unless it directly effects their lives. Few people see the value in space travel even tho tons of great technology came from it. Most claim we'd be at the same level of technology without the space program. Mind you, this is the popular opinion from Joe NASCAR.
But who knows, if private space flight takes off (no pun intended) perhaps there is still a future out there for the geeks and the brave souls willing to risk it all in the name of science and adventure. I know I'd be willing to work at it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The problem is that the sudden appearance of development of technology during the past 60 years created an illusion of the reality of our technological capability.
Remember it was the chinese who first built fireworks centuries ago that are basically small objects powered by explosives that fly into the air. Now some countries have vastly more engineered versions of the same thing that fly into space carrying robots or people. This is a long step from having interplanet transportation....
The bottom line, we are not as advanced as we think we are. How are wall street finance Tools qualified to make any comment on technology, and isnt everyone looking forward to holographic porn!
That goes for you too Hedonism-bot!"
-Bender
As the saying goes, Necessity is a mother.
In the 60s, we faced a geopolitical adversary that claimed the tide of history was on its side. Demonstrating, as a nation our technological superiority was a way of disproving this. Maybe going to the moon wasn't necessary before, but it when Kennedy threw down the gaunlet, the world was measuring us on our ability to follow through.
We don't have anybody we need to prove anything to anymore. Going to the moon will be a huge leap in credibilty to China; going to Mars is not going to make much difference at all to our national prestige. If you've ever coached an athlete, you'll know the best training resource you can have is a rival. It will take more than a moon shot to get us to look at China as a serious technological rival. It will take the emergence of a China that can extend its will across the globe in the same way we can, and that's going to be more than ten, possibly twenty or more years out.
In short, what I'm saying is forget about the US doing any kind of high cost, high profile space exploration anytime in the next couple of decades. There'll be talk about it, but talk is cheap.
I'm not against manned space flight. And I commend the president for increasing federal R&D to the highest levels since the early 90s. But there's no money for anything that looks like a start for a real Mars effort any time in the next five years, and I don't see why this would change in the five or ten years after that. What I'm against is sacrificing real goals we might actually be willing to pursue for the fiction of pursing more glamorous sounding ones. The worse case is that we continue what we've been doing with the shuttle program -- funding enough to keep our manned space flight program treading water, but not enough to make real progress.
Better to phase out the manned program as our ISS commitments wind down, than to spend just enough money to maintain a stagnant program. Stagnation is a waste of time, and dangerous. Long term human space exploration would be better served by actual scientific and technological progress, even if it is less dramatic than biting our nails watching astronauts flying inadequate spacecraft.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
>Legal urban legends. Most of the stories you hear are lies perpetuated by those with an interest in doing so.
Whoa! Just because legal urban legends exist doesn't mean the malpractice litigation system isn't broken.
If you're a practicing OB/GYN (a physician specializing in births and women's care) in Miami, FL, do you know how much you paid last year, just for required insurance in case something goes wrong? If you're an average doc, you paid $277,000. FOR ONE YEAR. If you lived in Chicago, you paid $230,000. In Detroit, you paid $194,000.
Now, do you suppose the physician just eats the extra cost, or do you suppose it gets passed on to the consumer (like every other business does with extra costs)?
Here's another thing. The states with the lowest malpractice premiums have the lowest rate of malpractice suits and also lower average awards in those suits. OB/GYNs in Oklahoma, for example, typically pay $17,000 a year.
Here's a good article to start reading up on how much insurance costs and lawsuits really are driving up the costs of medicine.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
That's a first at Slashdot that I've noticed, but then I'm pretty new. Maybe if we want a different future, some other future where people don't seek to use backpack nukes against us, then we ought to not allow our government to act, completely contrary to the public interest, against sovereign nations on behalf of our many beligerent corporations. Yeah we've got a future to choose, but let's look at it with a little context, and not just imply that the backward jihadists want to kill us "because".
Moderation -1
100% Offtopic
TrollMods: the topic is the WSJ bitching about the future, which they have mortgaged. Drop your bowtie and grab your ass, because BOHICA runs this town.
--
make install -not war
The problems we have are purely technological ones: space is totally different than anything we have encountered on Earth. Going from the age of bronze to exploring the seas and flying jets was relatively easy. Taming space requires a truly quantum leap in physics: artificial gravity, anti-gravity, antimatter propulsion, faster-than-light travel, etc.
Personally, I am not at all optimistic. If it took humanity 7,000 of civilization to cross oceans, it will take maybe 70,000 years or 7,000,000 to cross space. Humanity will not exist then, because self-destruction will catch us faster than we think.
I think one of the problems that the United States is facing is the fact that private enterprise is not the solution to every problem. The system has failed notably in health care. It turns out that providing health care is not a very profitable venture, for whatever reason. People complain about government waste (in the space program, the military, etc) when the government is spending money that money is going into the economy, so it isn't exactly being wasted. I am not opposed to government spending, but I would like to see us change our priotities. If we want to funnel billions into the economy in a Keynsian way I think the half trillion we spend on defense is more than a little excessive. The NASA budget is miniscule compared to defense. If we have to subsidize aerospace companies we should do it in a way that is exciting and satisfying, that makes us feel good about humanity rather than killing people. I think that the space program should have more money and more freedom to spend it how they see fit.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
I don't know much on this subject but I always understood the EMP was a whole seperate part of a Nuke Attack.?? As in, an EMP was set off within a few minutes before the atomic warhead went off. Anyone?
Karma: Bad
And it is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Come now, this may turn out to be the single best publicity stunt ever. Without changing the title to "Sorcerer's", the book might not have enflamed the anti-magic Christian nutjobs, who then went on to ban the book, catapulting it on to the national stage. It's likely that name change launched a billion-dollar franchise. Kids fantasy novels are a dime a dozen, but get one banned and you might have something!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I recall reading somewhere that the project theory saw unbelievably low cost to payload ratio, but that was for a CITY SIZED payload.
I vote Milton Keynes goes up first.
I think agree with you even though I think you may be a libertarian and I am a rank liberal. Government waste is not the same as individual or corporate waste. The money the government "wastes" still goes into the economy. Those who defend the absurd amount of money this country spends on defense frequently point to the economic benefits of this spending.
Spending that half trillion dollars will help the economy no matter how we spend it, so why not do things that uplift the spirit (to be cheesey)? The benefit to mankind of developing newer and more efficient ways to kill each other is negligable, but space exploration actually does something good for humanity. Lets cut defense by 90% and stop fighting foreign wars. Lets invest in researching better technological and logistical solutions to the world's problems. Lets invest real money in spaceflight. What we are doing know is spending too much on NASA for what we get. We should give up or commit to space exploration. Give NASA a big budget and let scientists decide how to spend it. We have lots of tax dollars, lets spend them on things that matter (or bridges to nowhere and more pointless wars).
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Then there's this one: "Magic is just technology we don't understand". Sorry, I don't remember where I heard it, so I can't attribute it.
How about looking at the history of flight in general and applying similar timelines.
The first manned flight (in the form of a glider) happened in the 1880s.
The first powered flight, in the 1890's.
The first manned powered flight we all know was in 1903.
Pan Am (arguably the first real airlines focused on tranporting people and not cargo) started in 1925.
Jet technology didn't occur until the late 1930s and wasn't used commercially until the 1950s.
If our dream was for all of this to become commonplace, then perhaps we should temper our expectations. It took us from 1880 to 1925 (45 years) to get to commercial use, albeit on a limited level). It took another 25-30 years to get us to the current commerical jet based system we have today. So essentially we are talking about nearly 75 years.
The space program realistically started in 1957 with Sputnik being our first "glider" so to speak. We are a mere 48 years out. With the first real passenger focused private space companies (Virgin Galactic being one) starting to come on the scene.
Commonplace trips to space IMHO are still a good 25+years off. But that would be consistent with the timelines of aviation.
Private space companies are more likely to spur the innovation than NASA is at this point.
Sadly nobody is looking back at history to put all of this into perspective. We are about where we should be... shame on the folks back in the 60s that assumed we'd be farther along.
In the firt 48 or so years we have done a hell of a lot. We will only speed up that process.
We are runing out of time and like the foresight institute said, what we need is a project similar to the atom bomb manhattin project: a Nanhattin project (run by nerds) to race to develop working nano machines (assemblers and cell repairing machines and the complicated software to run them).
We are running out of oil faster now, because of china and india new growing demand and all our excessive SUV's here in north america (we had small, fuel-efficient cars 30 years ago, we just gave into hollywood and the car manufatures cultural brainwashing propoganda about how you needed bigger vehicles just like they did in the early 60s to middle 70's with giant buics and cadillacs etc.
Well we are experiencing global warming, bad water (the oceans are getting more acid from the acid rain, and warmer too (fish die, plankton die, we die because we can't eat or breath anymore), we need to stop waisting $$$$$ on wars, new cold wars with china and all the mini cold/hot wars that will spawn out of these future cold wars and we need to ALL get together and use our nerd brain power to develop really advanced nanotech in the next 5 to 10 years otherwise we could find ourselves in a very messy future with, say more terrorism due to people running out of resources, more wars (china could have a standing army of 150+ million because of past male sex selection, this could happen in say, 30+ years....they will want women and will want to be successfull, and they will not stop at old super-powers like europe and USA gettin in the way.
(thats how hitler got everybody to work after the great depression building weapons so to compete for world domination (by mystical propoganda) so that the ordinary person could find a stable job).
We have a choice, either zoom ahead and change the world with nano to save it, or not and watch it spiral down into chaos using our exsiting primitive tech and pollitics/religions that damages the world etc.
We could choose to use nano to save it and also to aviod blowing it up with cool new nanoweapons (we will have to control the development and use of really bad nano weapons...a lot of societies seem to have a lot of macho-oriented people who like blowing up things and people and build whole cultures and religions around these memes/concepts).
Now!
And where is my air car? And my meal in a pill?
They lied to me dammit!
What are you talking about? Seems a little off topic. What people need is to see results in THEIR lifetime. that's the beauty of the space program. We are always just one mission away from finding a revoloutionary new truth about physics, chemistry, or the nature of existance. The first man in space, the moon landing, there is a huge list of advances we have actually seen over the past generation Thats is what will inspire dollars to be spent and credible researchers to persue it. If you want this "Transhuman" theory to fly, stop wasting my time with pointless day dreaming, and show me something tangible, that will forever change my life. Not the lives of my children, or great grandchildren, My Life. The kind of evidence I'd need t jump on that bandwagon would have to be a some type of useful mechanical, electrical, or genetic alteration designed for "optional" use, rather than just life or death medical, or purley cosmetic situations. Then see it accepted on the mass market, at a resonable price. When people begin upgrade the functionallity of their bodies like they would upgrade a computer or car, then I'll be sold.
You seem to have picked up some urban legends about Soviet tactical aircraft and don't understand how badly they really worked. Those aircraft were never designed to be reliable because Soviet tactical doctrine didn't call for much pilot training. Instead they built fragile aircraft that could only be flown occasionally in peacetime. They planned to make up for the low qualities of their aircraft and pilots by having huge quantities. Fortunately that theory was never tested on a large scale, although the Arab/Israeli wars were similar on a small scale (the Soviet aircraft lost almost every time).
The biggest problem is with the engines. How many hours can the typical MiG engine go between major overhauls? The equivalent US designs can go at least twice as long, with less risk of catastrophic failure (better metallurgy). Soviet/Russian avionics are also flakey, at best.
Look up the history of what happened to the Serbian air force MiG-29s. By the time NATO attacked those MiGs were completely useless; some couldn't fly at all and those that could didn't have operational weapons or radar.
If you want another example look at the Indian air force and the problems they have had with MiGs. The damn things just keep breaking and falling out of the sky, often killing the pilots. Unlike the Serbs, the Indians are able to buy all the spare parts they need, yet the aircraft still keep falling apart. That's why they are being replaced with European and locally designed alternatives.
In 1905, we had steam, coal, and electricity in major cities. Electricity was DC and was generated locally. Internal combustion engines were just starting to work, Cities were still full of horses. Cars were rare. The first big power plants were only a few years old. The Wright Brothers had just flown their first aircraft.
In 1955, jet aircraft were zooming around. The sound barrier had been broken. Hundreds of thousands of airplanes were flying. Cars were everywere. Electricity was everywhere in the developed world. Power grids were nationwide, and high-tension lines carried gigawatts. Gas turbines worked. The first nuclear reactors were just starting up. The A-bomb and H-bomb had been conclusively demonstrated, and fusion power seemed within reach. Oil and natural gas had been discovered in many places, and coal was starting to be phased out. Rockets were reaching into space, and the ICBM was very real. The first solar cells had been made.
In 2005, it's about like 1955 in the high-power world. We have all the stuff we had in 1955. in slightly better versions, and that's about it. Fusion didn't work. Nuclear power was more hazardous than expected. Solar cells got only slightly better. Nothing really new came along. And now, the oil and natural gas is running out.
Science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s assumed that new power sources would be developed, as they had been in the previous century. Didn't happen.
That's why we're not in space. Chemically fueled rockets just barely have enough energy density to do it at all, and not enough to do it well. We need more power!
We are runing out of time and like the foresight institute said, what we need is a project similar to the atom bomb manhattin project: a Nanhattin project (run by nerds) to race to develop working nano machines (assemblers and cell repairing machines and the complicated software to run them).
I don't see nanotech as an area where we need to be pumping in large amounts of public funds. The economic potential for nano-based materials science is so great that it is attracting lots of private investment. And I don't think that nanotech is anywhere close to a level at which a big push to build assemblers and nanobots would bear fruit. It would be like trying to set up a project to develop robotic assembly lines back in the 18th century.
No, EMP happens instantly. In fact, it happens the moment of flash. That's what happens when you convert mass into energy. You get a nasty "flash" of all sorts of light, radio and X-rays all at once. It just so happens that a strong burst of EMR damages silcon chips.
Anyone want to guess how integrated our society is with modern silcon chips?
Creepy!
Life is not for the lazy.
...the 1985 vision of the year 2015 had us in flying cars and the Cubs finally winning the World Series.
I don't think either one will happen by then...
What kind of world did our parents and grandparents inherit from their parents ?
Got it in one. Our grandparents rebuilt the world after World War 2. They wanted a better life their children than they had. It was this will towards improvement and love for their children that caused them to build our welfare states. They were also very much the people who put us into space. The baby boomers have taken their free ride and are now dead set on on making that a once-only generational opportunity. The current POTUS is a post-child for this mentality.
Our parents did blame everything on their parents (presumbaly you were around in the 1960s if you don't remember them...ahem) but fortunately in this at least their mewlings were ignored.
Don't lump our great WW2 generation in with the boomers, they have left completely different legacies for their offspring.
well, I always heard the USSR stayed with the tube technology in plan and ship electronics for that same reason.
Karma: Bad
Not necessarily for a deflection project, but a massive earthmoving project might be doable in 35 years. Further, knowing the dead-date of 35 years, There would be no reason to put artificial limits on materials used for space travel. i.e. freon based foam or more usefully, nuclear rockets. How much of the population could you transplant to..say the moon if you had 35 years of heavy-lifting NERVA or better rockets to work with? IIRC, NERVA lunar systems would only need roughly 50% fuel mass, putting them closer to the order of airliners in terms of haulage and safety.
(the new world was populated by people travelling on similarly cramped conditions for months at a time:
Mayflower: 180-ton, 90 - 110 feet in length and about 25 feet in width. Roughly 130 passengers and crew.
Boeing 737: 174,200 lb 129.5 ft length, ~13' width roughly 100 passengers.
so imagine an airliner twice the width of a 737 and twice the weight and it would be just about in spec with the Mayflower. Imagine staying that beast for 2 months.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Its probably not over. Its certainly too expensive to do much right now but the cost comes down as technology advances. You also have to leave room for the possibility that someone will figure out how to make lots of money by going into space. Once that motivation is there and technology makes it cheap enough then things will happen very fast. The real indicator of when humans have really arrived in space is when there are rats in the cargo holds. If I know rats it'll happen soon enough.
It'll all happen soon enough. It just won't be exciting in the way that it is on TV. In the first century space travel will be boring and dangerous. Boring and dangerous looks like excitement and adventure in a two hour movie but when your the star on reality-space-travel-TV it will just be boring, dangerous and uncomfortable. Instead of cheap airline seats you'll have cheap seat-beds, cheap air seals, cheap radiation shields and recycled slop for food.
Even in space we will still be hairless apes. When you get enough people in space then it will be boring, dangerous, uncomfortable and politically complex. When the Martian and Moon colonies declare independence for reasons of taxation without representation you might want to visit your earth relatives on the side of earth facing away from the moon until the conflict glows over. The phrase "moon rocks" will take on a whole new meaning.
NASA has gotten soft and complacent, just like humanity as a whole and Western society in particular. Since beating the Soviet Union to the moon, there's no CHALLENGE left. What drove NASA there in the first place was simply the threat that someone else would do it first. Why spend TRILLIONS of dollars to go to Mars when noone else will get there first and we can do it at our leisure?
:)
60 years of (nominal) world peace has meant fundamentally less competition and made it easier for existing societal structures - governments, corporations, values, ideas - to entrench themselves against any challenges, and for Western society the collapse of the Soviet Union further ingrains that these methods are correct.
This fits the trend we see in almost every facet of society today - from NASA to IP legal issues to politics to the war in Iraq.
I point the finger for this problem squarely at the baby-boomer generation. People born after the Second World War (our parents, largely) who have simultaneously consumed more resources, generated more frivolous waste and either contributed less or actually detracted more from society and humanity than any generation in history. After 60 years of getting what they want when they want it, they don't want to give that up - but if someone else threatens to do it first or better, well something had better be done about it!
Sure we've got great toys - at what cost in political, social, economic and environmental terms? It's amazing that society can consume resources at its current rate yet generate so little progress in fields which could fundamentally better itself. Where is our moonbase or Mars base? How come we still have homeless, hungry people in our own countries? Where's our solar-powered electrical grid? How come we still can't eradicate TB? Where's my flying car?
Give it time
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Spending that half trillion dollars will help the economy no matter how we spend it, so why not do things that uplift the spirit (to be cheesey)?
It's certainly not cheesy to think that the actions (and expenditures) of the government should, when possible, be uplifing and even inspiring. After all, the government must build bridges and buildings (which should be beautiful, or at least not ugly), must produce material in all sorts of media (which should be compelling and esthetically pleasing, and well written), and so on. There's no question that the space program, for example, is an opportunity for a wee bit of drama, and adventure.
That being said, there are people (I'm one of them, for example) that routinely find the duties, and actions of our miliary men and women to by inherently uplifting. Witness their tremendous performance in the wake of the recent tsunami disaster - no other entity could have been on site that quickly, with that much materiel, logistical support, communications, peace keeping professionals, medicine, food, instant bridges, and so on. Likewise, the millions of Muslims living in the middle of the travesty that was the ethnic cleansing in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia were probably very "uplifted" when their lives were saved by NATO, principally through the actions of the US and UK military.
I'm likewise inspired by the fact that women in Afghanistan that were being shot at lunchtime in what used to be town soccer fields for daring to go to work outside the house, or their sons that were having hands chopped off for daring to, say, fly a kite or play music, are no longer under the thumb of the Taliban. That mysgonistic, cruel little boys' club of medeival-minded theocratic punks (remember, the ones that destroyed the ancient Buddha statues and other Afghani artistic treasures for not being Islamic enough?) was not going to be stopped through any application of NASA's considerable talents. And of course, there's good old Saddam, he of the daily target practice at the aircraft patrolling over the areas he agreed to vacate after invading a neighboring country and killing off whole villages in the north and south of his country. Again: that wasn't going to stop through economic pressure (as we can now plainly see, looking at the nature of the UN's best shot at that pressure - in the form of a completely corrupt oil-for-food program). I'm actually delighted that he didn't turn out to have the WMDs that even he thought he had (you can't hire honest WMD scientists in the middle east these days, even when you kill their family members... sheesh!). It's unfortunate that he shipped most of what was left off to Syria, but Syria at least does see the US military as the deterrent that it is. As did Libya - not a shot fired. And it's nice to know what it is that's keeping China from rolling over the so-far free island of Taiwan (the US Navy).
This will devolve into a gigantic discussion, but I'll wrap up this branch of it thusly:
benefit to mankind of developing newer and more efficient ways to kill each other is negligable
Our capacity to do so surgically, and to know when and where we should apply such force, is practically magical compared to only a few decades ago. Just the other day one of our Predators, hovering invisibly and silently above the outskirts of Baghdad, watched (in real time) as a truck load of insurgents set up a mortar firing position in a schoolyard. They arbitrarily lobbed a few mortar shells in a residential area (classic terror - indiscriminate death-dealing), and then packed up their truck and took off. The Predator's remote flight crew watched them slip back into the building from which they were operating, and after a quick chat with commanding officers, the Predator used a highly accurate weapon to strike the building. Substantial secondary explosions showed that the insurgents had lots of weapons stashed there, and 14 of them were taken out. In an earlier time
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The fact is that, aside from scientific concerns (which don't concern most people), there's no real reason to explore the solar system. We've established that there's no civilization anywhere else in currently reachable space (unless they're visiting - no, I'm not going there).
What it boils down to is this: until we have relatively cheap and SAFE transport for tripping around the local celestia, the costs outweigh the benefits, sci-fi dreaming be damned.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
In fact, its been happening for a long time now.. The net result, within our lifetimes, will be what we make of it.. Either we will have a world where hunger and the hatred that comes from extremes of poverty and affluence will be a memory, or we will have a very horrible world indeed.. We don't know.. But we do know that computers and Moore's Law are unavoidably making strides that will make all scriptable jobs redundant. That is most jobs.. 90% of all jobs.. How are we going to deal with this.. I wouldn't in a million years be able to tell you how.. Do you?
Only one chapter, is that the whole short story?
It looks like it comes pretty close but it is still the same vision as far as I can see. Self-aware robots. The description of, "They're still findin' out what logics will do, but everybody's got 'em." That is the closest I've seen to predicting ubiquitous computing and when you add in the centralized information service it is pretty remarkable for 1946.
Thanks.
Come on, people.
> 'financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build more backpack nukes.' only some american capitalist could think that you need money to get nukes. in some ex-soviet-union-states you can get them for a song (or if female: for a fuck). or what#s with stealing them? if you're a big jihat organization this should be no big problem. and if it is, just talk to the religious exremists in your country that follow you, or the religious extremists in the usa that are your friends... no problem... ;P
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Sorry, which golden age are you referring to? Isaac Asimov certainly predicted widespread use of highly intelligent robots performing general tasks within middle class homes. In that world, the robots weren't "cheap", but they were certainly affordable and used widely. They were also far less specialized than personal computers today.
The United States needs to get its priorities straight. If we were not spending $177,000,000 per day on the war in Iraq, maybe we'd have a few billion dollars in spare change to do something that would:
a) inspire people to strive for a *better* world
b) provide technological benefits for the future
We can't spend all this money on the war *and* spend it on useful things (though with Bush's accounting methods, we might be able to swing it).
The thing that is really blocking our future in space is the same thing that threatens to block it (soon, and worse) on Earth: a source of energy. Space travel is always going to be expensive, but it would be a whole lot more achievable if we had a more practical means of propulsion than huge tanks of chemical fuel. Very few of the inspiring SF stories of the past assumed we'd still be burning kerosene and artificial rubber in our space ships by now.
Are we forgetting the X-prize project?
I'd agree generally. Its a pity that "The Shockwave Rider" by Brunner just misses out considering its 1975 vintage it is an extraordinary view of the future. Or if you want another kind of view the first chapters of "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon if you want your prescience in toxic concentrations. Stapledon's 'Other Men' battle with the addiction of widely available virtual reality (a minor part of the story compared to galactic wars, terraforming, artificial planets etc). Not quite computers yes, but there is something eerie about it nonetheless, especially for 1937.
Bitter and proud of it.
It's going to be a time of great adventure, change and danger.
It's going to have apocalyptic events like global climate shifts and giant cometary strikes. It's going to have futuristic soldiers oppressing the populace. --Some even with ray-guns! It already has alien invaders, (UFOs and crop circles, abductions, cattle mutilations, etc.). It's got tons of bio-engineering. It's got ultra-powerful computers which span the world in a global communication web. It's got huge populations of dumbed-down, tagged and numbered worker drones living in a fog of nervous denial and state-installed 'reality'. It even has Jedi-like powers available to anybody who is aware and brave enough to explore them.
Man, our current reality has it all! Right here, right now!
The people who are bored with their lives, zoned out on television and drugs and video games and dumb jobs, those who are plugged into the bogus 'official culture', those who are fearful of looking beyond their cages are simply the mindless backdrop to this astonishing reality. Think, Blade Runner. --The backdrop to that world was one of misery and drudgery for the average person.
The question each person needs to ask is, "Am I the average person or am I an active participant in the most amazing show on Earth?"
There is so much cool stuff going on right now, it takes my breath away.
-FL
Pulling up communism? Yeesh.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
We are transhuman nerds here and have little need for backwards christian (yeah, redundant) types.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
"Any marketing distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced"
It used to be that technology invariably described some new and impossible idea, like flying or walking on the moon or cloning. But, the dirty secret is that few people can tell the difference anymore between a truly new idea and just clever repackaging of an old one. So, it is possible to make money on "technology" without creating anything new by supplying hyped-up buzzwords, as long as enough people remain oblivious to the marketing magic.
The Times should not be surprised if some of us are becoming underwhelmed by technology. Less and less can a term be equated to magic while new ways to dilute it are being legitimized.
At some point, you notice your capabilities reduced from what they were and even the fancy buzzwords don't stop you from questioning if you're really getting this year's equivalent of a moon ride.
Slashdot sucks these days...
The article seems to forget that a huge resupply mission almost two years overdue and a brand new ham radio "satellite" were completed while at ISS.
Saying that the mission was "underwhelming" while the Shuttle went and did what Shuttle was designed to do is catering to the mass media who doesn't find such important missions interesting.
Sorry folks. Logistics and supply are part and parcel of living in space. Whoever thinks that's boring while doing it in Low-Earth Orbit is just a flat out moron, considering the current state of our technology.
What Discovery did was fly a successful resupply mission to ISS while having to deal with the mass-hysteria of the general public by examining every square inch of the orbiter for launch damage while on orbit, and actually going outside and repairing some.
Seems like a lot more than a "underwhelming" job to me. NASA is in fully-reactive mode trying to placate an increasingly uneducated and risk-averse TV-watching couch-potato public.
+++OK ATH
You're largely correct in saying that Heinlein got it right - see "The Door into Summer", where he predicts drafting being done with relatively inexpensive electronics.
Heinlein also did a much better job than most SF writers in predicting the future - the timing of the first moon landing was almost nailed in "The Man Who Sold the Moon". His description of a Nuclear power plant in "Blowups Happen" covers a surprising number of details of an actual N-plant - the biggest omission was delayed neutrons.
If the shuttle really had costed a few hundred $/lbs, NASA could have done an incredible number of more science missions of all kinds. Hell, lots of universities would have paid to get instruments all around the solar system.
This is a failure of the most important parameter with between one or two orders of magnitude. And you defend that with that the resulting craft is neat?!
It is like trying to sell someone a car that uses a gallon/mile because it has neat wheels!
You're a troll or not intellectually honest.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
You mean the highest priority for the media and general public, who also accord a high priority to NASCAR racing and Janet Jackson's nipple.
Actually the EMP happens when the expanding plasma hits the atrmosphere. Ground and low level nukes cause relatively minor EMP effects.
To get serious damage you need a megaton (H-Bomb) explosion just outside the atmosphere. Best altitude depends on the size of the bomb, but between 100 - 400 km is usual. Too much above that and you will still get the gamma/xray flash, but not the current inducing EMP, which is what blows circuits.
Gamma/xray have very limited penetration in atmosphere, so if you're close enough for them to hurt you the blast would get you anyway.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
This is a sad myth that gets put forward a lot. I've discussed this with some friends who were in similar situations (extremely poor, working long hours, living in a single room that didn't even have a stove) and the primary problem seems to be one of knowledge and/or planning. It clearly isn't actual pickiness (because eating cornmeal and water doesn't sound so great).
When asked, my friends would say they spent $4-7 per day on food ($30-50 per week). I've worked it out myself, and I know that foods like rice and beans can be made for around $2-3 per day. And I'm talking about a lot of food, like 2 pounds of rice and a pound of beans (dry not prepared) per day. Totals around 2500 calories, 90 grams of protein, etc. It isn't great, but the rice is enriched (coated with vitamins) so it is relatively healthy. I even stuck in some spices and green peppers in that cost, since I figured it would be too bland to eat often without them.
It does not require even a stove, though it would require an electric slow cooker and maybe a rice cooker ($20 each from sears, as of today). This also provides the advantage that the stuff can be poured into the cookers in the morning before work, and everything is warm and ready to eat by dinner time.
This is well within the available budget of basically anyone in the US. If you couldn't afford this, then you'd be on welfare, in which case you could afford this.
http://www.newpath4.com/forsalespacecraftenginecon stantpowertheory.htm . All you have to do is write an equation for perpetual motion http://www.newpath4.com/formulaeperpetual_perpetua ltimeperpetualspaceperpetualpowerperpetualmomentum perpetualmotion_3plus4equals5.gif . Thanksgiving Week, 2005. Here's a hint: The same engine that makes cars fly also goes uhm very fast in Space, once clear of planet gravity. Two birds, one stone: Fifth Element.
Transhumanism isn't a universal mandate. When the technologies arrives, there will be those who dive in, those who want nothing to do with it, and those who will embrace certain aspects and shun others. While I can't begin to wrap my brain around your response, I fully support your right to opt out of whatever technology you or any other intelligent being finds unacceptable. (I'm reminded of the Amish.) Further, I think that it should be a mandate for all transhumans and posthumans to take an active role in protecting those rights. I don't think it's unreasonable to hold beings which are inherently superior to a higher ethical standard. It's important that this idea becomes culturally engrained before it becomes needed.
On the other hand, I think it's equally important that those who choose not to take advantage of life-extending, life-enhancing technologies not be permitted to hold the rest of us back, as they so often seem to want to do. We can see a clear example of this mindset with the current debate over stem cell research, but the struggle has been going on for as long as we've had medical science.
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
What they seem to miss is that we've had most of the last 25 years of (Republican) presidents who didn't care about civilian space, or anything that didn't benefit their corporate friends.
NASA's budget sucks. Up until late under Clinton, never mind that the military budget was half (or more) of the federal budget, *NASA* had to eat the costs for "secret" military launches.
Big companies did the "Japanese" management thing, of flattening management structures. NASA is bloated with overpaid managers who don't want to risk their jobs by signing off on *anything*. But then, some of them don't even have scientific or engineering degrees! (Fact: there is at least one manager in the Q/A/Safety chain of command, high up, who "brags" that he has a "degree in typing".)
Stop privatizing, hire technical people, and stop holding them back. We'll be gone.
mark
That's a convienient way of dismissing the entire post.
A serious consultant has to say "no" when it is needed. If you don't, you're not blameless.
Also, you more or less glorified the shuttle. Can you mention any other transport system that costs ca 50 times more to use than promised and is considered a success?? That
That is a total catastrophe. Any way you look at it.
And you obviously don't want to talk about the incredibly large cost overruns.
(-: after all that, you call me a fan boy... :-)
(Btw. How many times did the space station overrun costs and development time? More than 10 times higher than promised?)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
That story impressed me especially, because it was different (of course, by then I could go home and use my Atari 800 to log on to Compuserve, so it didn't seem as prophetic to me as it would have for someone of my Dad's generation). I loved stories about robots. I think that in the 40's especially, you were far more likely to read a story in which cheap, household robots were common than cheap, household computers.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
And they are all small, with less than 20 million people together. That's like two or three major cities in Japan or USA.
Sadly NASA has become extremely risk adverse. This is understandable after Columbia, but it is unlikely that any exploration mission can be run in such a risk adverse manner. Also being this risk adverse would make sex boring. I believe that the whole future of NASA turns on the concept of buy-in. Buy-in is the process by which people hear a new idea, accept the idea as their own, envision themselves succeeding with it, get into action, and say in action. Buy-in is the foundation of all project work and is dear to the hearts of all technical people. Modern NASA was founded on President Kennedy's great skill at generating buy-in for the Apollo mission. Recently NASA has been in denial that buy-in even exists and has thereby lost contact with the great buy-in the American people have for space exploration. NASA must find it relevance to the 21st century if it is to survive. I have studied buy-in as a management tool for about a decade. There is a surprising large amount of information available, but you have to search for it. Most technical people simply have a gut feel for buy-in and run with that. An effective procedure to generate buy-in is available and it provides clear incite into how the process works. A number of recent breakthroughs in the science of the human brain and in advanced mathematics can be directly applied to the process of buy-in and look very exciting. These involve huge instruments that use incredibly powerful magnetic fields to generate copious amounts of data which is then turned into pretty pictures (fMRI), and should therefore be very attractive to this group. I worked very hard to apply this research to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) process, but was stone walled. After 9/11 it became very clear that this buy-in information is directly applicable to the problem of disempowering terrorists. I have been working in that direction for the last two years. I have a paper on this concept on the Web (Google "Disempower Terrorist Riley"). I would very much like to correspond with technical people in Great Britain on the application of new science to the problem there. Time is critical, but the complex technical arguments we need to develop are not amenable to discussion by two idiots yelling at each other on cable TV. Thanks,
Most common sense /. post ever - thank you
yo guys,
/. in the past months,
i've read all 4 and 5 posts here and I have to admit it's one of the best discussion I've read in the science section of
cool,
That's not quite correct.
The issue is that above a certain level (I believe $19,000 annual total family income when I was a kid), you no longer qualify for food stamps/welfare.
In my parents' case, my sister died of meningitis, and my second sister had massive problems with pneumonia; like many people in the US, they had no health insurance, which left them with massive medical bills. Paying off the medical bills and rent and utilities most months left precious little for anything else, including fuel for the car, basic food supplies, etc.
So I don't think calling this a "myth" is accurate.
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