Slashdot Mirror
Risk Aversion At Odds With Manned Space Exploration
Several readers including tyghe!! sent in a Popular Mechanics piece analyzing the Augustine Commission's recommendations and NASA itself in terms of a persistent bias towards risk aversion, and arguing that such a bias is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of opening a new frontier. "Rand Simberg, a former aerospace engineer finds the report a little too innocuous. In this analysis, Simberg asks, what happens when we take the risk out of space travel? ... Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough. That might sound harsh to people outside the aerospace community but, as Rutan knows, test pilots and astronauts are a breed of people that willingly accepts certain risk in order to be part of great endeavors. They're volunteers and they know what they're getting into."
According to this article your lifetime chance of dying in a car crash is 1 in 83.
Per-person odds, I'd take a one-time shuttle ride over a lifetime of driving.
>>"I think that western society has correctly reassessed the value of life. When you consider that it costs roughly 200k to raise a child in the United States, trading that human's life for certain goals is not necessarily worthwhile now, while it would have been worthwhile 200 or even 100 years ago. "
If what you write is true, then Western society will be (is?) in decline. Others who make a different valuation will take the risks. They will reap the rewards - as well they should. We'll be the poor spectators.
So a better question is, do the astronauts have a right to hear the CORRECT figures, not the wild wishful-thinking executive estimates?
Do you really think the original badasses who fought hard to be a part of the program were concerned with the executive estimates?
THAT statement is a perfect example of the difference between now and then. They knew damn well that risk was a major part of it; they flew in the face of it anyway. Today, we care more about someone's calculated "risk aversion" numbers than we do about staring in the face of a challenge, albeit it risky, and going for it. If someone's willing to risk it all to meet the challenge, we don't need some desk jockey's numbers stopping him or her.
People need to stop and think a little. Back in the 1400's and 1500's when people were exploring the world, who went out? Was it the candy asses? Did the mama's boys go forth? The fruit cakes who dressed up as dandies to hang around a court yard in some dank castle? Of course not.
I can write paragraphs badmouthing old Chris Columbus, and the conquistadors who put much of Latin America to the torch, raping, murdering, and plundering. Paragraphs? Hell, I could write books! But, despite that, they were badass mofos. Yeah, they had a lot of luck on their side, not to mention some slightly advanced technology, germ warfare was on their side, and they had better warfare strategies and tactics. But, they were badasses, willing to put their lives on the line.
The same goes for all the other settlers who came to the new world. Candy asses and sissies who counted the risk assessment beans stayed at home, or at least waited many years for the real bad asses to create a safe place for them.
Today? Phhht.
I put my faith in SpaceX and places like China to put man into space. The US government has to many bean counters who won't risk losing a few beans.
I've said it before, I'll repeat it here. I'll haul my ass up onto that rocket making a one-way trip to Mars. Light that big bastard off, and send me on my way. You would do better to send a younger man - but if you can't find one with the balls to go, I'm ready. Just send the equipment and supplies necessary for the job, and I'll put in a few years work, trying to find a reason that convinces the candy asses that it is worth sending a colony to Mars.
Don't worry about any silly assed funeral when I finally croak - when the time comes, I'll drop my drawers and lie face down in plain site of the earth. Those who count will remember me - and the rest can kiss my ass.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
>>>The US government has to many bean counters who won't risk losing a few beans.
And yet they spend ~2000 billion on bank bailouts, corporate bailouts, and "stimulus" bills without even reading the fucking laws. I thought it was funny when Conyers said, "People keep saying read the bill. Have you seen the bill? It's over 1000 pages long and requires two lawyers sitting by my side to explain what it means! We don't have time to read the bill. We need to get it passed."
So they just vote "aye" and hope for the best. I'm sure if they can spend all that, without even knowing what they are spending it on, they can spare 0.1 billion for NASA each year.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm not so certain we can extrapolate the future based on what we currently know. It's better to have some practical knowledge of space colonization than have none. In general, it's good to have manned space knowledge and ability. Perhaps a real Bruce Willis in Space moment will come upon us.
I agree there is no single reason to justify it, but there are 5 pretty-good reasons that weighed as a sum, favor a manned colony:
1. Colonization learning curve
2. Bruce-Willis-like emergency readiness.
3. Science
4. National prestige and inspiration factor
5. Side technological benefits (new materials, etc.)
Perhaps we as a nation are confused because we cannot find a single good reason. But that may be a mistake.
You raised some good points, though, that help us clarify this.
Table-ized A.I.
The fruit cakes who dressed up as dandies to hang around a court yard in some dank castle? Of course not
It was the disinherited - the landless - the second and third sons of the nobility - who ventured out.
The eldest son would have been nailed to the floor if he tried.
The Admiral of the Ocean Sea intended to set up shop somewhere off the Chinese coast and become the funnel for all trade with the West.
The conquisitor was going for the gold.
In 1624 Captain John Smith published a bill of particulars - a shopping list for the prospective colonist. It makes interesting reading:
John Smith's Bill: Then & Now
Capt. Smith was at heart a bean counter and his profession, survival:
At one point, when Newport returned a second time with seventy settlers, among them a perfumer and six tailors, Smith, never one to keep his opinions to himself, penned a Rude Reply to his London superiors:
"When you send againe I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardiners, blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees, roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have. For except we be able to lodge and feed them, the most will [be lost therough] want of necessaries before they can be made good for anything."
Was John Smith a Liar?
So your argument is we need to artificially raise the cost of energy. That sounds like an economic winner.
That's not artificial. There is a real cost that SOMEONE will have to pay eventually. These are called externalities. You cannot allow an industry to externalize the expense associated with their product to the point where there's no competition.
>What does "hegemony" in the Middle East have to do with the price of a gallon of gas? The bulk of our imported oil comes from friendly Western hemisphere sources. Europe and China are much more reliant on Middle Eastern oil than we are -- perhaps we should let them try their hand at stabilizing the region?
Well, there are several political realities here. First is that we are in the middle east precisely to have veto power over other nations. It's a political power play that's been going on since the British navy switched from steam to diesel.
However, if you cut out the availability of Middle East Oil, you would see prices as they were in the 70s. The simple fact that we are reliant on an external entity for our cheap transportation means it isn't cheap. It's just cheap right now.
All countries that don't have to pay the full cost of their own national defense, by virtue of being under the American umbrella. How much would England, Germany and France have spent on defense in the latter half of the 20th century if they had to build up the forces on their own to deter the Warsaw Pact?
They may have spent more. I doubt they would have refused to defend themselves. It's difficult to extract the guns and butter question from the Cold War, I can agree, but that ended 20 years ago. If the cold war was really the driving force behind our military expenditure, whey didn't it dramatically fall after the CCCP collapsed?
The market can value every one of those things just fine if people would stop interfering with it. The reason we have a piss poor last mile telecommunications infrastructure in this country is because of Government granted monopolies.
It's because corporations were handed the keys at all. If they have 95% coverage in an area, they do not give a shit about the last 5%. The only entity that would sanely care about 100% saturation would be a highly regulated non-profit or county level telco. If there were no regulation, the US would look just like Latin American countries where the rich suburbs are wired, sewered, watered, and the rest of the country is left to their own devices.
One of the reasons our health care system is in shambles is because a huge health care customer (Uncle Sam, via Medicare) pays below-market rates for services rendered, thus leading to the rest of us being charged more to make up the difference. I want to scream at the TV every single time somebody mentions Medicare as a model because it has "lower costs" -- it's easy to have "lower costs" when you don't even pay a break-even price to the provider of the services you receive.
America pays 16% of GDP for it's healthcare. The rest of Europe pays less than 10% of GDP, and they are just as healthy, and they all have coverage. You're going to have to overcome that fact before you have a persuasive argument.
Medicare is an interesting example. It works so well that when they allowed private corporations to compete, they couldn't. Private Medicare providers receive government subsidies just to stay in business. I don't see any reason to create a profit motive where the need for one doesn't exist.
Transportation would also work better if Government would stop picking winners and losers. Why don't trucks have to pay full price for the damage they do to the roadways? Perhaps if they did other methods of moving goods around (trains, waterways, etc) would be more competitive. Instead we effectively subsidize the trucking industry with our taxes that