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DARPA To Sponsor R&D For Interstellar Travel
Apocryphos writes "The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars. In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years."
It's nice to see that there is still at least some ambition left in our society.
Well, you did say it was flushing money down the toilet, which was a pretty unfounded claim considering you spouted it on an invention that was funded by DARPA.
The whole POINT of DARPA is to throw money at projects that aren't likely to succeed right away, because if DARPA doesn't do it, no one will and it will never get done.
The internet never would have happened if DARPA hadn't flushed money down the toilet for it, because when the internet/arpanet was first being assembled, no one saw any sort of profitability in large networks of computers - and in fact when the idea first started being looked at in 1968 no one saw profitability in consumer computers at all.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
The private investors are investing in things like non-orbital launch systems (Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites); orbital launch systems (SpaceX); and orbital space stations/hotels (Bigelow Aerospace). All of these private ventures would never have happened if it weren't for almost half a century of government funding of NASA and the Air Force before that.
There are whole classes of radical advancements that, simply, can't happen without significant initial investment without a guarantee of success. Examples of such things include space travel and the nuclear bomb. Historically, some of these kinds of discoveries have been made because an individual monarch was willing to take a gamble (ex. Queen Isabella funding Columbus) but modern business structures are designed to work against such things because they are often wastes of money (ex. the search for El Dorado and the fountain of youth).
When it comes to traveling to other stars, there are obvious advantages to be had to science as well as humanity as a whole. On the other hand, even if it works in the end, there are no obvious profits to be made on it with our current understanding of science. Any resources we find in a distant solar system would be so hard to transport back to Earth that it'd be cheaper to just manufacture it (atom by atom) in a particle accelerator (which we could do with present technology). In such cases, governmental spending is the ONLY way for it to get done.
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irony (n) 1. using the Internet to trash government spending on DARPA projects
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!