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Neil deGrasse Tyson Touches Off Debate With Remarks On Commercial Space (theverge.com)
MarkWhittington writes: In an interview published in The Verge, celebrity astrophysicist and media personality Neil deGrasse Tyson touched off a firestorm when he suggested that commercial space was not going to lead the way to open up the high frontier. Tyson has started a live show that he calls "Delusions of Space Enthusiasts" in which he touched on, among other things, why the Apollo program did not lead to greater things in space exploration such as going to Mars. Tyson repeats conventional wisdom about Apollo and the Cold War. In any case, it is his remarks on commercial space that has caused the most irritation.
Right now, the barrier to increasing use of space is the cost of launch. It's indeed true that, with launch costs at their current levels, utilization of space resources isn't likely to be commercially viable (at least, not for applications other than the ones already being done, such as observation and communication.)
The critical question is, can the cost of getting to space be reduced? And if so, by how much?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
used to be they were only for governments and large corporations. now the military is buying the same tech as everyone else because it's better than their custom made stuff. same thing with commercial space. there will be a lot of investment which will drop the costs of launches and it will get ahead of NASA
From TFA: (...) Only after that, only after Christopher Columbus comes back and says, ‘Here are the people that I found, here are the foods, and here are the trade winds,’ only then does the Dutch East India Trading Company come in and make a buck off of it.
Maybe Elon Musk's company IS the new East India Co.
I've listened to NdGT talk about this topic a fair bit and I agree with his basic thesis that private companies will not lead the way to Mars or even the Moon. You simply cannot make a credible business case for a private company to do it. I'm an engineer but I'm also a certified accountant. I've pitched investors on projects and the problem is largely an economic one. Paraphrasing his arguments the risks are large and substantially unquantifiable, the ROI is unknown and will take many years if not decades and the amount of money required for large exploration projects is huge. The only institution which is in a position to spend large amounts of money on something with big risks, huge costs and completely uncertain payoffs are governments. Once some of the risks have been quantified and enough information becomes available to make a reasonable guess at an ROI and time frame for the investment, THEN private enterprise can jump in.
We largely admire companies like SpaceX but SpaceX isn't doing anything wildly outside what NASA has already done. They're not sending probes to Mars, they are just improving the economics and a bit of the technology for chemical rockets - a technology we've had for 60+ years. People talk about mining asteroids but no private body is funding the exploration to go find them much less developing the technology to actually do something economically useful. The cost is too big, the returns too uncertain and the risks are still largely unknown. It's why we still need NASA out there on the frontier. Leave the launches to SpaceX and others and get NASA out into the solar system doing the cutting edge research and exploration we so desperately need. We don't need NASA building rockets, we need them figuring out how to get us permanently more than 200 miles from the surface of the Earth.
Some people think "the market" is the solution to all problems. What they miss is that often the market's "solution" to a problem is that it isn't financially worth solving, and there's no concept of public interest involved in that decision making. You don't need to look as far afield as space exploration, just look at pharmaceutical companies and the drugs they choose to invest in; we're almost out of effective antiobiotics right now, and yet the big pharmaceutical companies invest little or nothing in new antibiotics, because they can make much more money from things like antidepressants and treatments for chronic diseases like diabetes that people just have to keep taking. So yeah, if you expect private companies to lead the way into space, show me the money.
If anything, it seems like deGrasse came closer to giving team Space!!! what they wanted to hear than I would have expected, in that he left open the implication that nation states might develop serious interest in colonizing nearby rocks and would then very likely find themselves in need of contractors for various purposes; and enable some more fully private side activities.
The ROI of getting things into earth orbit is well established; and it has a correspondingly robust market, with more outfits clamoring to enter it. Satellites are all sorts of useful and need more or less continual replacement, repair, and so on. Nobody doubts that.
The technical feasibility of snagging asteroids and chopping them up is still in the more speculative stages; but that also has an obvious possible ROI if the technical challenges can be overcome.
The case for the moon or mars, though, isn't just a matter of corporate shortsightedness, it's a matter of "Please, tell me about the ROI, within, say, the next 250 years...". Planetary colonization would undoubtedly be cool; and might be something that a nation state would get interested in as part of a prestige contest(like, say, the last time we were at all serious about the moon); but nobody ever seems to have any plans, aside from vague references to Helium 3, for what would make lunar or martian living more cost effective than some sort of aggressive colonization of underutilized desert regions or something similarly unsexy. The bounteous iron mines of mars? The endless plains of razor-sharp, static-clinging, vitrified silicates of the moon?
In the very long run, probably. But I think there's probably a route to increasing space exploration and utilization by explicitly avoiding the cost of Earth-to-orbit transport costs. The plan I've seen that has some promise goes as follows:
1. Find some metal-rich and volatiles-rich asteroids and comets (not exactly rare in the Asteroid Belt). Tow these asteroids into a near-Earth orbit and begin extraction and smelting. ....
2. Set up manufacturing facilities in Earth orbit to build spacecraft and satellites.
2a. We could even "grow" plastics with bacteria or genetically-engineered plants.
3
4. Profit!
In all seriousness, if you created a parallel space-based economy whose sole purpose is to make transporting anything but humans into space, then the whole question of how to make Earth-to-orbit transport cheaper ceases to be an issue. Obviously the startup costs and R&D for such a project are monumental, but in the long run, the rewards would be huge. The whole point of commercial spaceflight is to find a way to make it economically feasible, and this is about actually creating a space-based economy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We seem to have gotten away from this in recent years but space exploration is a perfect example of what government SHOULD be doing. These kinds of exploration programs are not economically viable for commercial enterprises. Government needs to pave the way first. This is something at JFK understood all too well.
During the age of Columbus, any schmuck with a ship could go out exploring.
Not the big voyages. Those required the resources and backing of governments. A large sailing vessel in those days was equivalent to a SpaceX rocket rocket today. Hugely expensive and state of the art technology. Columbus could only do his voyage because he was backed by the crown. It wasn't until centuries later that "any schmuck with a ship" could set sail for wherever. People didn't sail across the Atlantic until a government backed expedition (Columbus) proved that there was something out there worth going to see.
Private companies getting in the game are just a necessary natural evolution of the technology.
Private companies are NOT the ones doing the exploration. They are building the equipment used by those doing the exploration. SpaceX is building rockets not much different from those used 40 years ago. They aren't building a moon base or any of the equipment needed to go to Mars. They are building what amounts to the Model T of chemical rockets to get the cost down. NASA is the one sending probes to Pluto. NASA is the one doing experiments on the space station. Private companies only get involved when there is something they can see a way to profit from. It's a good thing but pure exploration of the frontier is simply something they cannot do because the risk/reward ratio is off the charts bad.
Bringing a giant asteroid made of gold to earth would make gold worthless. Basically the same reason DeBeers locks up half of all diamonds ever mined.
The practical current function of commercial space co's should be to provide routine transfer of staff and supplies to and from a station or base. That makes perfectly good sense. When something becomes a semi-commodity, private enterprise, with competition*, is usually more efficient.
If and when space does become profitable, such as asteroid mining, such commercial co's will already have some of the infrastructure and knowledge to pursue that market.
As far as pie-in-sky commercial endeavors like a one-way Mars mission, let investors waste money if they want. Who knows, maybe they'll stumble on an unforeseen way to make a profit. Surprises happen. If somebody discovers how to tame anti-gravity particles to get cheap launches, for example, existing space companies will have a big leg up. It's not irrational to devote some of one's investment portfolio on high-risk/high-reward stocks.
And even if they fail, humanity as a whole will be smarter for it, learning from their mistakes. Failure is experience.
* NASA does use lots of private contractors for current missions. But, they are mostly custom one-off products.
Table-ized A.I.
During the age of Columbus, any schmuck with a ship could go out exploring.
No they could not unless they had the backing of someone wealthy to pay for the ships, equipment and salaries needed. However they were willing to pay for it because while it was expensive and dangerous they were motivated by a variety of things: hope of treasure to plunder, land to lay claim to and knowledge of distant peoples and creature to learn about.
It's a bit sad that someone who calls themselves a scientist thinks that the only reason anyone will ever do anything is purely for money. The ability to make money will certainly be what causes space exploration to take off in a big way but, as with any frontier be it in knowledge or on the map, the first explorers are often motivated by things other than how much money they will make...that tends to follow later.
While some may dream of using Earth's energy resources to acquire extraterrestrial mineral resources, it won't happen until the spacers become self-sufficient in energy, and maybe even export a little back to the home world.
Here's the problem:
NASA's budget is $15-20 Billion.
The richest person in the world can only match that for five years without getting some revenue from the project. Which means the first multi-bnillionaire who actually tries to pay for a probe all the way to Mars is gonna get a bunch of really promising projects started, and then canned when he runs out of cash. Is the second billionaire gonna take an ex-billionaire's research and use it? Why would he share the glory? If he doesn't mind sharing, how does he access it?
Patents? How much would you insist on for that patent portfolio?
So for this to work, particularly for guys like Musk who barely hit the two-figures billion$, the private market has to be orders of magnitude more efficient then NASA, which does not seem terribly likely because the private market has had years to get beyond the ISS and still has not done so.
Plutocrat-Wins-Darwin-Award-In-Space-Day? I'll dig it.
Deserves two days if it's Trump. Three if his hair jams the airlock.
Table-ized A.I.
I've tried but I cannot respect this guy. Seems that everything he does drips of condescension.
That's not quite accurate. I mean the bit about Columbus is, but remember Columbus was not the first person to cross the Atlantic. Eric Thorvaldsson (Eric the Red) reached Newfoundland without the backing of the crown and did it long before Columbus was conceived.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Sensitive much? There was nothing anti-business about what NDT said. He stated simply as fact, the exact same rational that pundits on the right-hand side of spectrum have used repeatedly when explaining why business-oriented individuals are better candidates to run the government: businesses are results oriented, and generally risk averse. If they are publicly traded and their principal business is not risk, then they are required to be by law.
Tyson wasn't making a qualitative statement about business competence or capability, he was talking about the fact that there is not even the teeniest tiniest business case that can be made for building a human spaceflight program to Mars. None. No CxO could present such a proposition to their board without running the very real risk of receiving a vote of no-confidence. This is fact, not the bias of a left-wing statist (though ad hominem is clearly the appropriate mechanism through which to debate your point and win people to your position).
Now, could a counter argument be made to NDT's point that perhaps a single, very rich, individual might be able to accomplish such a feat without having to worry about the ROI implications, perhaps even more nimbly and efficiently than governmental bureaucracy would allow? Sure, and I believe that Elon Musk is exactly that type of individual. Though I suspect that even he doesn't have the resources to pull it off alone, and will need outside investment. Which brings us back to challenges faced by business that Tyson identified.
Argue your position. Stop with the my team/your team red vs. blue bullshit and engage in an honest debate. If we don't find a way to do this as a society, to step away from demagoguery and ideological obstinence in order to find consensus, or at least rational, well-reasoned disagreement, then we have much, much bigger existential problems to address than the challenges presented by a manned mission to Mars.
In the 15th Century every early exploration of any note was government sponsored to some degree.
Although, it is important to note that at that time, there was a fuzzier line between the "government" and the people who had capital to send voyages. Queen Isabella provided money of her own for the voyage, as opposed to money raised directly in a tax and budgeted for the exploration.
However, as Queen, her jewels and her personal wealth were effectively derived from her position as a ruler.
Prince Henry the Navigator was in a similar position. He was rich, but mostly rich because he was a royal who had estates and money derived from his position related to the government.
There was no commercial interest, or any individual ship which was involved in the exploration of the Americas at that time.
You would likely have been better off discussing the Viking voyages, which is more of a scenario where voyages of relatively small ships fitted out for trade and raiding eventually got to North America.
Quick fix. Sorry it was Leif Erikson, his son that made it to Canada.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
All you have to do is tell someone that there's money to be made in space.
That's great but until you do some exploring there isn't a single company in the world that is going to go there to find out. First you have to explore to get enough information to find out IF there is money to be made in space and if so, where it can be made. Private companies aren't going to do that bit on the frontier. They cannot except on comparatively small scales. Governments pretty much have to be the ones to do the initial exploration so the risks and rewards can be determined.
As others have pointed out, the gravity well makes launch costs prohibitive. It also makes getting that load of ore from a captured meteor back down without another dinosaur extinction difficult.
Even with a few dozen engineering hurdles completely unsolved, a tethered station on a space elevator is really the only way to lift mass (you know, people and equipment) with any kind of reasonable energy-to-mass ratio.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
You don't understand just how overwhelmingly expensive it is to get to space. Suppose the Moon was made of diamonds. Just big piles of diamonds, easy to pick up and bring back home.
Large, pure, high quality diamonds are worth about $65,000/gram. Someone did the math on the total cost to get us all the moon rocks we have... the cost in today's dollars to return those rocks works out to $281,000/gram.
Your business case doesn't even come close to breaking even. You lose over $200k for every gram fictional lunar diamond you bring home. That isn't to say that there will never be a business case to be made, but if things were as easy as you claim them to be, people would have been doing this long ago.
So, if people want to ever make money in space, it needs to become cheap. The right combo to get us there might be SpaceX working to make it inexpensive, combined with NASA providing the megabucks. Governments on their own haven't made any real progress on lowering the expense of access despite multiple serious attempts.
Not true, asteroids could be brought near earth by incredibly cheap process that merely would be time consuming. A little nudge in the right place at the right time
Diamonds are a bad example because they are common and worthless. If you think they have value, it's due to marketing and artificial supply constraints. You might as well mine asteroids for water based on a $10 bottle of Fiji at the airport.
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And you also can't make a credible business or scientific case for government to finance manned space travel to the Moon or Mars at this point.
Sure I can. It's actually pretty easy to make that argument. But it probably won't happen until one of two things occurs - either there has to be an economic incentive or an existential threat. That's part of what NdGT talks about. We went to the moon to beat the Russians during the Cold War - an existential threat. Once that threat was confirmed to not be an issue anymore we stopped going to the Moon and haven't been back since. We hadn't figured out a way to profit from going there yet and so the government funding went elsewhere. If it looks like China is going to the Moon I guarantee you that the US will find the money to do it too - just in case...
We do need research and exploration, but that can be done most efficiently using robot probes.
Some exploration can be done efficiently with probes. Some cannot be done at all with probes. There are a wide variety of topics for which exploratory probes are quite useless, not the least of which is studying human physiology and life support away from Earth. There is plenty of benefit in probes but the notion that nothing will be gained by sending people is absurd and short sighted. That's like thinking that we can explore the ocean using nothing but satellites and ROVs. They're useful tools but they aren't a replacement for going yourself.
Why are manned flights part of your criteria for space progress in the near future? Smarter to probe for now rather than waste money prematurely, while we can develop useful tech for moving and sustaining humans in space: e.g. bioengineering, efficient solar panels, ion engines and other thrusting systems, nanotech, etc.
Tyson makes the mistake of assuming Musks goals are the same as other commercial space ventures. From the very beginning - as in PayPal - Elon's stated goals were to prove that spaceflight could be much cheaper thereby forcing NASA into using its dollars better and getting humans to be viable on Mars. Period. He has stated these goals in speeches, books, talk shows and most importantly in investors meetings. All the people financing SpaceX when its not Musk's own money - share his goal. They are not in this for profit anymore than he is (yes, profit is desirable but only as it advances the other goal). His investors are eyes wide open when it comes to profitability. Its disappointing that Tyson either doesn't understand that or dismisses it.
Elon Musk's goal is to create a self-sustaining colony on Mars. In order for that to happen, he decided that he would have enough people volunteering to immigrate to Mars to make that happen if he can bring the cost of a ticket to Mars down to $500,000. And in order for that to happen, he needs to find a way to severely bring down the cost of launching rockets.
SpaceX's goal is not the usual corporate goal of making quarterly profits for the shareholders. He is keeping SpaceX private because he knows his goals would never be reached if he were to make it a publicly-owned company.
So while NdGT is probably correct, I think the only reason he will be correct in this case is that Elon Musk will die of old age before SpaceX gets far enough along to make a Mars colony a reality. But I'm really, really hoping that Musk can pull this off.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
So for this to work, particularly for guys like Musk who barely hit the two-figures billion$, the private market has to be orders of magnitude more efficient then NASA, which does not seem terribly likely because the private market has had years to get beyond the ISS and still has not done so.
We are still relatively early in the Space Age, particularly in comparison with human history. I don't think it is right to say that just because we haven't done it in 50 years that commercial players will never do it. We're still doing things like figuring out reusable launch systems, but we are making progress on those fronts.
Admittedly, there will have to be a point where the businesses do have to make some money, and satellite launches and space tourism are unlikely to advance the profit as much as you'd want. My best bet for such a profitable enterprise would probably be space based solar power. While such a project has significant hurdles that have yet to be overcome, energy production is something we need to have increasing amounts of, and it is incredibly important to make that a renewable, "green" source as our energy requirements grow.
If they are publicly traded and their principal business is not risk, then they are required to be by law.
Cite?
I'm fairly certain there is no such law. What publicly-traded businesses are required to do is to do what they say they'll do in their articles of incorporation and their prospectus. For most, these documents state that their focus is to generate a responsible return on investment (language varies, but that's what it boils down to). However, it is perfectly acceptable for them to include other goals, and even to prioritize those goals over making money.
Were SpaceX to go public, they could specify that their primary goal is to get to Mars, for example, rather than to make money. That would probably lower their valuation, but there would be nothing at all illegal about it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Columbus' voyage was already predominantly privately financed. Furthermore, Queen Isabella contributed nothing like a modern government to the exploration effort, she merely acted as another investor with money that she pretty much had sole control over. If Queen Isabelle she hadn't paid for it, Columbus could well have found the balance of the funding from other private investors, or simply scaled back the voyage a little (after all, one or two ships might have sufficed). Furthermore, the risk of those voyages was privately insured, not born by Queen Isabelle or any government.
In addition, Columbus worked out the business plan and the voyage independently before seeking funding, and he decided on the spending like a private business man. That is nothing like the space programs that deGrasse-Tyson favors, which involve decades-long government programs, subject to Congressional spending choices and political meddling.
Your story is the same argument deGrasse-Tyson keeps making, and it falls apart when you look at historical facts.
Private companies make high risk/return gambles all the time; high risk per se isn't a deterrent. The problem with manned space travel to Mars is that it is high risk/low return. That is, even in the best case scenario, if you succeed traveling to Mars, there is going to be little return from that because there is nothing on Mars that we want or need right now.
However, government funding is low risk/high return for the companies that actually receive the funding. NASA's manned programs have been nothing but huge subsidies to US aerospace and defense contractors, plus some politically expedient handouts to politicians in important states.
I think the problem here is that NDT is just not keeping up to date on the 'New Space' sector. Investors are just starting to realize that space is an option. You can invest $10b now on a copper or gold mine, with an eight year payout, or you can invest $6b on an asteroid mission with a 15~20 year payout. To a big-ticket investor, these two opportunities look very similar.
I wonder what he'll say in a few weeks (or months) after SpaceX 'sticks the landing' on their first booster recovery, which will forever change the economics of space flight.
My guess is he just spends too much time rubbing elbows with 'establishment' types in the space business, and doesn't fully appreciate the revolution taking place below the 'mainstream' radar.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
> Google?
Hmm, direct and indirect government funding basically got the internet off the ground, but without any scalable organizational system. Perhaps there are some hidden subsidies as well, I don't really know the details of Google's early days, but I think Google might actually be that rarest of breeds, an actual self-made success story. Of course it benefited from the fact that it solved an (economically) easy problem. It doesn't cost much to get a "dot com" style business started, and there was a massive demand for a decent search engine. Google stepped in with a search algorithm that blew everything else out of the water (some government funding there maybe? Scholarships? Probably not enough to be worth mentioning compared to their revenue stream.) Once they had that, harnessing an advertising revenue stream was easy - lots of companies had paved the way beforehand.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
He didn't say anything remotely controversial or anything that isn't obvious. A for-profit corporation figuring out how to get to Mars or doing any expensive basic research? No. Of course, not. Just won't happen.
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he was talking about the fact that there is not even the teeniest tiniest business case that can be made for building a human spaceflight program to Mars
Rich billionaire is willing to spend X to get to Mars for a tourist trip. Cost is Y where Y
You can do the same calculation for more customers. The problem here is that Y>X. Bring the cost down and the business cases appear.
And their colony failed. The Spanish, Portuguese, English and French colonies in the New World succeeded because the governments that ran those colonies backed them financially and militarily. At least in the case of the English, owners/shareholders of colonials often received economic monopolies, giving them substantial impetus to make colonies economically viable in fairly short order.
And even though colonies could obviously become self-sustaining in pretty short order, they still required a significant amount of protection from the colonial power, and the colonial powers served as the route to accessing markets.
The Vikings experiments in colonization as private endeavors were mixed successes at best, and ultimately only Iceland survived as a successful colonial enterprise by the early Modern era, with the North American and Greenland colonies failing (though the Greenland colony did manage to hang on for several centuries).
There are probably any number of reasons; less than hospitable sites for colonization that were vulnerable to climactic changes at the top, but also the more limited means of making such colonies economically viable. At least in the North American attempts, the native peoples may have played a roll as well. The Norse simply didn't have the resources at their disposal that the Colonial Powers could bring to bear when they started seizing the New World. The Norse were hardly better equipped than the Inuit and Native Americans they encountered, whereas the Spaniards, French and English had firearms and much larger numbers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You can't masturbate a person. A person masturbates themselves.
Ah, but "billions and billions" only implies a minimum of 4 billion: 2 billions and 2 billions, possibly as few as 2 depending on your pluralization rules (is 1,000,000,001 "billions" or only "billion"?), substantially less than your half-dozen billion either way. 2 billion might even be vaguely realistic, though I would be kind of surprised if that many people even knew of him to have a well-formed opinion, what with most people in the world having little if any access to modern media.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
His thesis does not appear to considers current political and economic realities. The current situation is that governments (esp. the US gov) cannot spend another dime on fanciful spaceflights until everyone is fully insured, police brutality is stamped out through omnipresent surveillance of police, the terrorist state is pacified, females have equal access to STEM training and jobs, soc sec and medicare are fully funded, and any manner of other social welfare institutions are fully operational and ready for battle. Until then, a trip to Mars is only available to people or corporations or the founders of corporations who have a dream and enough money to make it happen. If asteroid mining ever yields precious metals or unlimited energy (could you steer asteroids to impact earth in a specific place and generate net energy gains??), then you'll see governments going to war over the rights to mine them. The Social Justice crowd has fully convinced me (and pretty much everyone else) that we (the US people/government) don't have a dime to spare on anything that isn't directly going to the eradication of social injustices. Maybe someone gets creative and funds an all female/minority version of NASA to go to Mars, thereby creating opportunities that alleviate a few situations and still goes to space. But I don't see that as the path of least resistance for solving those problems, with nearly all the resistance being political. None of this should surprise anyone for whom /. is a primary source of news.
Cows and Bulls go MOOOO.
APK goes "whine whine whine, eat your words, whine whine whine".
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
You burned up on reentry?
Are you going to miss me tomorrow when I am eating turkey and ignoring the computer? I know you are secretly in love with me, I'm just too nice to break your heart.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Not true, asteroids could be brought near earth by incredibly cheap process that merely would be time consuming. A little nudge in the right place at the right time
Bringing asteroids "near" Earth (that is in an Earth crossing orbit, nearly intersecting the Earth) can be accomplished with a little nudge for some small set of asteroids - but this will NOT bring the asteroid "to Earth" (as the OP said) unless you are planning on causing a cosmic bombardment that will vaporize the asteroid in a spectacular explosion (good luck getting the people of Earth to buy into that plan).
Asteroid mining requires bringing the asteroid into an Earth orbit, which involved a very large change in velocity, not a "little nudge" and won't be cheap no matter how it is arranged.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
He gave an example of a type of diamond that is really rare. I concur that diamonds shouldn't be used as an example of inherent value, though.
Platinum and gold are around 30 dollars a gram.
Rhodium peaked at around 28,000 dollars a gram.
His example was exceptional because it used something that would trivially devalue if it came to Earth in large quantities as well. His point is that there's no known substance that could possibly justify 281,000 dollars per gram of transportation costs- the few you could point to or hypothesize are only so valuable because they are rare, such as unique quality gems, extremely short lived radioactive materials, etc. It's too expensive period- at the moment.
Sorry, no, they were using old maps. And cocaine from South America has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs. There was cross-Atlantic trade long before anybody wrote down the details, because those who had the details considered them to be trade secrets. It was only in the modern age when there were already large vessels in every corner of the seas (going "somewhere" but don't ask where) that so many people held the "secrets" that it became more valuable for some percentage of them to make and sell maps to capitalize.
Notice for example that international products were already in local markets in an age where there were no world maps, or even text descriptions, that could tell you where the places actually were that the products were from. That was the case from thousands of years ago, right up to the era of Columbus. Very few explorers were trying to "discover" things in the romanticized sense that modern school history units phrase things in, but rather they were trying to develop their own private maps and routes. When somebody would sponsor an expedition, that is what they were mostly paying for; the ship logs and maps that would be created on the voyage, and that can be used to send additional ships to the same places in the future.
Which is silly, because the Apollo mission was primarily oriented around the physics of getting a bunch of large mammals into space, keeping them alive on the way to the moon, landing them on the moon, keeping them alive down there while they explore, and then doing all of that in reverse. If they hadn't brought a single rock back the total change to the mission cost would have been almost unnoticeable.
Furthermore, who's focused on mining the moon? Most mining proposals focus on mining NEOs. It's way easier to get material from a NEO to Earth aerocapture. You could do it with a coilgun with no expenditure of consumables, again and again for years on end. They're also far more rich in interesting materials - much better than the best mines on Earth, and with no overburden.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
I think his job is more "ticking large numbers of people off". For example, he was one of the leaders behind the "Pluto, Eris, Ceres, etc aren't planets" movement - he had references to Pluto being a planet removed from the Hayden Planetarium years before the IAU vote. He's not exactly popular among those who felt that hydrostatic equilibrium was the relevant constraint and that the "cleared the neighborhood" definition is fundamentally flawed.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
As the person credited for the first law commercializing space launch services (credited by the law's sponsor, Ron Packard during his introduction of my Congressional testimony on space commercialization) there truly _is_ a problem with privatized space and it is a capital market failure.
This capital market failure systemically suppresses technology investment and it derives from something that should be obvious to anyone in venture finance:
Economic activity is taxed rather than liquidation value of net assets.
A venture financier, or angle, or anyone else who takes dollars out of a bank account and puts it into a high risk venture, is rendering their capital illiquid. If you cease taxing economic activity (income, capital gains, sales, value added, inheritance, gifts, etc.) and instead tax only the liquidation value of net assets, for all practical purposes high risk investments cease being taxed.
This is why, the year after I testified before Congress on the initial legislative direction for companies like SpaceX, I wrote a white paper titled "A Net Asset Tax Based On The Net Present Value Calculation and Market Democracy" wherein I proposed a shift away from centralized government provision of technology development and, at the same time, a shift away from politically biased government delivery of social goods (ie: the welfare state), by taxing net assets at the rate of interest on the national debt and distributing tax revenues as an unconditional citizen's dividend. Later I clarified the assessment mechanism to be liquidation value as well as some of the further aspects of government to be privatized.
Its obvious why so-called "liberals" don't want this since by-passing the welfare state without regard to any politically defined criteria other than citizenship, it would gut their political base.
Conservatives, in particular neo-libertarians of the Austrian School, on the other hand, have much to answer for here. A net asset tax, so assessed, is a big step toward the anarchocapitalism of the American school of libertarian thought exemplified by Lysander Spooner in his definition of "legitimate government" as "a mutual insurance company". Protecting property rights is according to the American school of libertarian philosophy (as contrasted with the Austrian school), the primary role of government and it is entirely legitimate to charge for that service just as it is legitimate for a property insurance company to charge a premium that is approximately proportional to the value of the property being underwritten. Moreover, it is entirely legitimate for any company to pay dividends and a mutual company would pay dividends to its members -- members who, quite reasonably, could be called on for service in times of emergency such as war and could, therefore, quite reasonably be assigned one share and exactly one share each.
Indeed, I view it as a moral responsibility for men like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg -- particularly as beneficiaries of network externalities aka network effects that could not exist in the absence of government protection of those monopolistic property rights -- to at the very least lend their vocal, if not material, support to such a capital reform.
It would be smart for risk investors like Elon Musk to do so.
Seastead this.
Man who has spent his life as an academic or government functionary claims the only way something will be accomplished is...through the government.
News at 11?
-Styopa
You would likely have been better off discussing the Viking voyages, which is more of a scenario where voyages of relatively small ships fitted out for trade and raiding eventually got to North America.
I don't think even that's accurate. Viking ships were indeed relatively small compared to the English or Spanish or whatever ships which came 500 years later, but at the time, the Viking longboats were the largest and most advanced ships made in Europe. Their range extended as far as North Africa, Italy, Iceland, and of course all the way to Newfoundland. These weren't boats that a couple of guys could build, they were financed and built by people who were then the wealthy leaders; it just took too much manpower to do that. Don't forget the cost of sending men and all their equipment and arms. Watch a YouTube video sometime showing how a reproduction Viking sword is made; the amount of labor involved is absolutely ridiculous, plus the raw steel at the time was extremely expensive. I just watched a video last night about a smith forging a Viking sword and it took him 3 months, and that was with the benefit of a lot of more modern equipment (like the big pneumatic hammer used to draw out the sword; back in the old days they had to hammer everything by hand).
The European voyages that came later surely benefited from centuries of improved technology and more developed economic markets.
However, government funding is low risk/high return for the companies that actually receive the funding.
I completely disagree. If this were true, Lockheed Martin, BAE, Northrop Grumman,
etc. would be the most profitable companies around, instead of Apple. Government contracting generally means accepting a limited profit margin, dictated by the government, plus a shitload of overhead to make sure the contractor is meeting the terms of the contract and that everything is accounted for. The reason government contractors do it is because it's low risk and decent return, not high return. It's almost a sure thing basically. Once your company is big enough and established enough in the government contracting space, you just have to keep doing what you've been doing and reliably provide service and you'll get more contracts and have a continuous source of revenue, though it is subject to political dealings and changes. But if you have a multi-year contract in place, you can count on getting continuous revenue for that time, as long as you live up to the contract.
By contrast, a company like Apple can make huge profits by selling overpriced Chinese-made stuff to gullible consumers, but only as long as their marketing convinces them it's fashionable. As soon as consumers, who are known to be fickle, decide something else is more fashionable, or Apple pisses them off somehow, the house of cards can collapse and their profitability disappear. The risk is quite a bit higher for companies which sell directly to consumers, but the potential for profitability is higher.
there is going to be little return from that because there is nothing on Mars that we want or need right now.
There may be mineral resources there. However it's ridiculously far away and it's unknown if it does have any significantly valuable resources. What makes a LOT more sense is near-earth asteroid mining. There's already some billionaires who've set up some venture to work on that. It's quite likely there's very highly concentrated ores in asteroids which pass relatively close to Earth, of very valuable materials like platinum. We already know how to launch probes to stuff within the orbit of the Moon or so (or really, all the way to Pluto), and with anything as close as the Moon, you can even remote-control it in almost realtime (a few seconds' delay), unlike with Mars where you need to wait 30-60 minutes to hear back from your rover.
The surest way to get large scale government investment in space exploration is to have a private company appear to be making progress on establishing off-planet colonies of people that governments cannot credibly exert ownership over.
To that end, I laud what SpaceX is doing as it's seriously freaking out governments and government-pushers like NDT to invest more in space in order to bring star-chasers back under government bootheels.
Governments will of course fail in this effort, but it will push us into space faster.
That is where I said "unless their principal business is not risk". Having said that ...
Stone v. Ritter [Delaware 2006], while the court found on behalf of the company because the issue at hand was whether a failure to institute a particular program of internal corporate espionage to detect malfeasance or malpractice by its employees constituted liability upon its directors (the court found that in the instant case it did not), it did state that under a corporation's fiduciary duties is the duty of loyalty.
Stone v. Ritter cites Guth V. Loft [Delware 1939] in helping characterize that the duty of loyalty
...demands of a corporate officer or director, peremptorily and inexorably, the most scrupulous observance of his duty, not only affirmatively to protect the interests of the corporation committed to his charge, but also to refrain from anything that would work injury to the corporation, or to deprive it of profit or advantage which his skill and ability might properly bring to it, or to enable it to make in the reasonable and lawful exercise of its powers.
So while the courts do give wide latitude to directors to make decisions on behalf of their companies, to include significant propositions of risk, it is clear that there is some threshold at which a reasonable level of risk crosses over into territory that constitutes a violation of the Duty of Loyalty as it posses a likelihood to
... work injury to the corporation, or to deprive it of profit or advantage...
Under that guidance, a corporate officer needs to be able to show that their decisions pose a reasonable likelihood of being profitable to the company (conceding that what constitutes reasonable is generally quite broad).
So you are correct to say, in as much as I can find, that there is no such law, but there is such guiding principal which colors the law and the rulings of the courts and, more importantly to corporate directors, the disposition of shareholders. If you are tossed from your directorate position by a shareholder led initiative, or have to spend months or years fighting to defend a decision that you made because of the same, do the semantics of the process really matter? Does that not work to seriously disincentivize actions that are more likely to fail than to succeed?
Again, you are correct that a company is more tightly bound to abide by its articles of incorporation. Somethings, however, won't fly. You could file as a non-profit (though we aren't talking about non-profits here) but generally you must turn a profit some percentage of years (3 of last 5) or demonstrate that you can turn a profit or basically, show that the business is viable in order to receive tax deductions for expenses. There is a window of opportunity where start-ups can by-pass these requirements, but eventually you will be relegated to hobby status, and my recollection is that some states will rescind your articles of incorporation if you fail to demonstrate viability for X period of time. All this ignores the fact that exactly what kind of IPO or valuation do you think a company is going to have when their 10Ks say they don't intend to make a profit? You drop that valuation too far, particularly in technology rich turf such as space exploration, and you are some other company's lunch, and if you are public there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. So this all leaves you back at the wealthy individual territory which we previously covered.
Lastly, with respect to your example of SpaceX, the regulatory bodies (both public and private) place certain profitability and market capitalization requirements on corporations as a requirement for listing on exchanges. Even if SpaceX makes those requirements (and it looks like they may well be near that) they have to maintain them to some degree after IPO. That means hugely costly efforts that would deplete market c
Have a good Thanksgiving Alex, hopefully you can find something to be thankful for to help you end this needles crusade against the truth, and perhaps help you seek the help you so desperately need. BB on Friday o/
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The return is high relative to the return they would be getting without government funding, which is close to zero.
The value of Apple's products is in what people are willing to pay for it, which apparently is a lot of money. The fact that you (or I) may think that their products are "overpriced" in some sense does not change that.
It does. But, as you pointed out yourself, private companies are getting into the act, and teleoperated and autonomous robotic probes are the drivers there.
Does anyone believe that this is not APK shilling for his fucktarded self?
seems a _lot_ more dangerous. Today I can cross the ocean with near 100% safety if I spend enough money. The biggest danger on a modern cruise ship is the buffet...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And the Polynesian Islands were populated before Europe had boats.
No, they weren't.
"Polynesian ancestors settled in Samoa around 800 BC, colonized the central Society Islands between AD 1025 and 1120 and dispersed to New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui and other locations between AD 1190 and 1290."
http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/ike/...
Your Eurocentric view is blocking you from seeing that explorers predate Columbus and made ocean crossings long before
Yes, that part is right.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In other words, you can't cheat gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. No one seems to listen, but my initial assessment is that the shear amount of energy required to launch a viable space colony is going to be prohibitive.
Orbital velocity is about 7.8 km/sec, so the energy cost of getting into orbit is 1/2mv^2 = 30 MJ/kg, or about 8.5 kW-hr/kg. At an energy cost of 10 cents per kilowatt hour, that would be an energy cost slightly under a dollar a kilogram.
Energy cost, in and of itself, is not the problem.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The return is high relative to the return they would be getting without government funding, which is close to zero.
No, it isn't. They could do some other commercial work and potentially get higher profits, but with higher risks. They do government contracting because it's low risk, not because there's a lot of profit in it.
You seem to be implying that without government funding, corporations would simply go belly-up. That's ludicrous in the extreme.
How many Robber Barons can you name? Who was the first Europen to set foot on north america?
If they hadn't brought a single rock back
Bringing a rock back was not the goal of Apollo. In fact, there were many at NASA who opposed doing so because it added risk to the mission. The first astronauts were prohibited from talking to any of the scientists because it might give them ideas. The core of Apollo was focused on Kennedy's challenge and little else.
Oh, it's classic AlecStaar, all right--always evoking violent imagery--"smashed", "totalled", "beat", "destroyed". And always coming back an hour or two later pretending to be a different AC who just happens to agree with him, and just happens to use the same kind of phrasing. He's been following the exact same pattern for at least ten years. In part he's still trying to get even with Ars Technica and numerous other forums for banning him and his sockpuppet accounts.
Now you know why, whenever anybody else happens to voice agreement with anyone critical of him, he immediately accuses them of using sockpuppets. And why he goes to such great pains to make real sure everyone knows it's him, while posting AC (unless, of course, he's following up by trying to pretend to be some random helpful AC who just happens to... well, you get the idea).
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Maybe the way to get someone to fund a manned mission to Mars is to announce that an unmanned mission has found oil on Mars. Hey, it worked for Iraq... :)
Companies like Lockheed Martin are specialized in areas that are of interest only to governments. They have neither the management, nor the patent portfolio, nor the facilities, nor the employees to successfully compete in other areas. That is, their resources are substantially misallocated, and that misallocation requires substantial amounts of money and time to fix.
A nominally average return at low risk is actually a high return. Furthermore, I'm not sure why you think that their profits are low. Perhaps you are looking at profit margins, but that's not really a useful number for defense contractors, since they are probably inflating their costs; you need to look at other numbers. Lockheed-Martin's return on equity, for example, is an obscene 125%.
Paraphrasing the movie _Interstellar_:
TARS: I deleted the automatic airlock subroutine.
Brandt: What? Mr. Trump, do NOT open the airlock!
Cooper: Did you say "Trump"?
Brandt: Right.
Cooper: Mr. Trump, it's the big red handle on the right hand side. Pull it really fast!
Furthermore, who's focused on mining the moon?
The point of the example wasn't to say that Apollo was focused on profit, or that the Moon is a good business proposition - it's to point out the fact that there are very few substances that are valuable enough, per gram, to make retrieval from space financially viable. It's not that a business case has been there all this time and everybody is too dumb to see it - it's that the business case hasn't been there because launch costs are too damn high.
Still the cost of platinum per pound is about $1500. The cost to put anything in space is ~$10k/lbs without even returning anything. Say that you need at least 2000lbs of mining material and people going up and down on a regular basis (and you whittle the cost down to a cool $1M/launch) to mine 500lbs of platinum, your .5M worth of platinum would have to cost 1M before profits. In addition, if you sold at market prices hoping to improve your profits in the future by technological advances you would pressure the market cost of platinum due to excess availability so your platinum would be as worthless as gold or silver and cost you a pretty penny.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The thing is, you're not going to mine 500 lbs of platinum, it's quite possible you're going to mine millions of pounds of it, along with other valuable metals. Yes, you wouldn't be able to dump that on the market too fast, but you would put all the existing platinum mines out of business quickly. And with lower prices for platinum, more uses would be found for it, increasing the demand. More people would want it for jewelry and aesthetics probably, but also it's quite likely new industrial uses would be found for it which were previously unexplored due to its extremely high cost. You have to think more long-term about these things, which it doesn't look like you're doing with your analysis. An endeavor like this isn't going to be something small, it's going to be absolutely huge, and mining a single asteroid will span for decades most likely.
Finally, look at the environmental aspect: mining is terrible ecologically. Wouldn't it be better to do as much mining in space as we can, so we aren't digging giant holes in the ground, polluting groundwater and rivers, shearing the tops off mountains, etc.? We just had a bad incident with river pollution in one of the western states (CO I think), and mining always has problems with environmental opposition in advanced nations (and in backwards nations causes all kinds of problems, like fueling conflicts as with coltan). Environmentalists won't care if you break up asteroids for mineral resources.
Except that your cost examples are based around the price of rocks brought back as a "oh and we're going to do this too" mission add-on. It would be like as if I flew to America to visit my grandmother for Christmas via purchasing a $700 plane ticket and while I was there I bought a $15 sweater and brought it back, and you said, "See, she paid $715 to go to America and buy a sweater - American sweaters are unjustifiably expensive!" You simply cannot take the cost of the Apollo mission, divide by the mass of rocks returned, and pretend that that's anything even remotely close to the cost of retrieval per gram.
What's the actual cost of space mining? It's too early to say. But the mining of NEOs could be as little as *zero* dollars per gram (excluding capital costs and maintenance), insomuch as it would be possible to fire sintered minerals (using solar power) via a coilgun onto an aerocapture trajectory. You don't actually have to have a rocket to bring them back. What would the capital costs be like? That we don't know - again, it's too early to say. But it's normal for large mines on Earth to cost billions of dollars, and what one can do with a large mine on Earth one could do with a vastly smaller mine on a NEO due to the superb mineral concentrations on some of them. There are a number of peer-reviewed papers putting forth that it could work out to be economical (I was reading one from the USGS just the other day) as a result of this.
But time will tell. It's going to take a lot more basic research and engineering before we can get a good sense of just what it would cost to get what sort of throughput of what sort of minerals.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
I would be significantly more impressed (and scared) if he had actually destroyed the planet(oid) Pluto.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
But he didn't
This reminds me of libertards like roman_mir who continue to insist that without DARPA and the NSF, private parties might have built the Internet. The point is, when the time came, they didn't. Counterfactuals are nice and all, but we only have one history, and that says you're wrong.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
My argument doesn't rely on "counterfactuals". deGrasse-Tyson's argument is that private investors are unwilling to take the risk of exploration. When more than half of his funding came from sources that were unquestionably private, his argument is obviously wrong: that is, private investors clearly are willing to take that risk, both because more than half of the voyage was financed by private investors, and because the risk was entirely insured by private insurance companies. To make that point, it doesn't matter whether 50% or 100% of Columbus's voyage was privately financed, any large percentage of private financing illustrates the point. With that observation, it isn't necessary to even argue the point that Queen Isabelle was acting like a private investor (which she did) and not like a modern government.
Even if we were going to take Columbus' voyage as an exact model for space exploration, then NASA should not start any project until such a project is at least 50% financed through private investors and 100% privately insured again failure. What Columbus's voyage clearly does not support is anything like the current NASA funding model, or any model in which US tax payers act as an insurer for space launches, which is what deGrasse-Tyson is arguing for. That is, 0% private financing and 0% private insurance is clearly "counterfactual".
What are you talking about? Almost the entire Internet as it exists today is privately built and owned. The original ARPANET and NSFNET were also privately invented and built (albeit with government financing). The primary effect the US government had on the Internet was to delay its widespread adoption by several decades because of the communications monopolies it had granted to companies like AT&T.
It should. I'm a libertarian and I make no excuses about it. I understand your confusion: I used to be a progressive and a believer in government programs myself until I actually bothered to get the facts and read up on the history. Keep at it, you hopefully will figure it out sooner or later.
But the mining of NEOs could be as little as *zero* dollars per gram (excluding capital costs and maintenance), insomuch as it would be possible to fire sintered minerals (using solar power) via a coilgun onto an aerocapture trajectory.
You forgot to exclude operational expenses. And also didn't mention that you can't just lob chunks of metal straight to Earth's surface, and refined minerals in LEO aren't useful to anybody right now or for the foreseeable future. If they are going to re-enter you need at least some sort of return vehicle to control reentry, if they aren't then you need on-orbit factories for those to do any good. By your same logic, the mining of minerals on Earth would be zero dollars per gram if the equipment was solar powered and automated - that isn't the case, because fuel and drivers are a tiny fraction of the total cost of a mine.
There's no question that it will be economical to mine asteroids at some point, but the primary driver of this is launch costs. Planetary Resources exists because they believe the business case will close, and they are giving it a good shot, but given that we have only one small startup pursuing things right now, I suspect that it's still not obvious that the numbers will work out. Part of that is because there is so much uncertainty about the makeup of asteroids, how challenging the material will be to retrieve and what the real mineral densities are. But I guarantee you, if the cost of space access came down by an order of magnitude, as SpaceX is targeting, a lot of marginal business prospects become viable. That said, Planetary Resources might already be banking on that cost reduction, it's hard to say.
It does nobody any good to pretend that the lack of a space economy is because investors are cowards and morons that are just too narrow-minded to see the possibilities of space resources. The real problem is that boondoggles like SLS and the Shuttle before it cost the better part of a billion dollars for each and every launch, and that's been the primary model for space access historically. If people appreciate just how expensive this is, they'll stop advocating what amounts to a private jet to retrieve a $15 sweater, and instead start focusing on finding better transport. Things won't change until access gets cheap.
Yes, people to run robots and comm time on the DSN. We're not talking about massive expenses here. The real expenses are the capital costs.
Actually, you really just can. Even random rocks from space - not shaped for optimal entry shape, not cemented together by anything yet what nature chose to gie them - do this all the time. They have to be between a certain size range (too little and the whole thing ablates; too large and it explodes, either in the atmosphere or on impact), but the random creations of nature do it; delberately shaped and sintered projectiles should have no trouble with it, with (proportional to their mass) relatively little burnoff.
You would, of course, need a rather large area designated as the impact area; even with very precise aiming, by the time they get to Earth and undergo reentry the random variables will spread them out over a sizeable chunk of land. A large salar might be ideal, since they get resurfaced periodically so the impacts wouldn't be damaging the landscape.
It's almost as if I didn't discuss capital and ongoing costs in my above post.
Launch costs really are key to the rate of development at the very least, in that they limit the rate in which funding can be raised for the necessary exploratory and test craft to be launched. Even if the economics for operating a mine on a NEO works out really well at present launch costs, you have to prove that you can do it before you can raise the billions to build it. And to prove that you can do it you have to launch a number of missions while you're still relatively poorly funded. They face the same problem that Bigelow has faced - a probably reasonable business plan but the early phases hinging around factors that they don't control.
I think you need to go back and read my last post again, particularly all of the "it's too early to say"/""we don't know"/"but time will tell"/etc lines. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that there very well could be a compelling case for asteroid mining even without any radical changes in space technologies. But there's a great deal of work to prove that before we can get to that point.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.
Yes. Are you just being argumentative or something?
Have you ever tried to get $2 Billion in financing for private industry?
I haven't, but my stepmom ran debt programs for Goodyear for 5 years or so. Retooling a factory is frequently in the $2 Billion range. Goodyear had proven revenue figures because the factories were already breaking even, and could prove that they had excellent business reasons to believe the retooling would strengthen the business to the point they could pay back the loans. And she still spent much of her time jetting over the globe negotiating the fine points of the mortgages because nobody would lend Goodyear money without really good collateral. These days her job no longer exists, because they're investment rated, and can issue bonds.
So to get two months worth of NASA's funding Musk's SpaceX is gonna need to either convince the finance weenies to give him an AAA rating, or he'll need to mortgage his other assets (like the Gigafactory).
Otherwise he'll have to be an order of magnitude more efficient then NASA.
I think they need a new slashdot achievement. The "Successfully make APK go insane" award.
You have the causal relationship all wrong: Columbus deliberately sought out the support of Fernando and Isabella, without their support he would have no product to sell to his investors; one part of the deal was that he would gain authority over whatever resources he could claim in name of the crown.
And the Internet was developed by State action. To claim it was a private venture before Al Gore took the initiative to bring it to the market is historical revisionism of the highest sort. Anyone claiming that is a libertard indeed.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
In fact, Columbus got the private investments before going to Queen Isabella. You're confabulating facts ("without their support", "part of the deal") to support your erroneous ideas.
What I said is correct: Almost the entire Internet as it exists today is privately built and owned. The original ARPANET and NSFNET were also privately invented and built (albeit with government financing). That's just a fact. Your claim that private parties "didn't build the Internet" is clearly wrong.
Since your original statement was untenable, you now try to obfuscate and put up another straw man by talking vaguely about it being "developed by State action". In fact, the Internet was developed by software and hardware developers, most of them in private employ. Al Gore's 1991 bill just handed out money, mostly to universities and telecoms. Its crowning achievement was that it allowed Andreesen to clone Berners-Lee's browser with government funds, then make a shitload of money on it by taking it proprietary. The results were "brought to market" by Netscape and Microsoft. The original inventors of the technology were left hanging out to dry. Crony capitalism Al Gore style.
who's butthurt by his signatures projecting it.
Since you are the one complaining about my signatures, I am guessing you are the one butthurt by my signatures.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Look, you have been disowned!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That would make me smile. It has been quite the achievement already though.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So if the government pays a private firm to execute some action, it suddenly isn't government action anymore. That is more or less your thesis, stripped from its verbiage. Yeah, I'm going to come right out and say you're an idiot, a real libertard. I'm not going to argue, like arguing with flat-earthers and Young Earth creationists, you are too stupid to waste good arguments on.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Of course the act of government paying a private firm is a government action, just like shooting people, imprisoning people, regulating people, and putting propaganda on TV are "government action". And the government involved can be autocratic, totalitarian, democratic, progressive, fascist, or one of many other forms. And government action can have many motivations and consequences.
Tyson's error is not that he referred to Queen Isabelle's investment as "government action", it is generalize from one government action to another. A monarchical ruler investing a few million dollars (in modern terms) one time with the expectation of making a positive return is a kind of government action, but it is a very different government action from US Congress creating agencies and subsidizing private companies to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year with the stated expectation of making no return at all. You can't justify the latter with the former.
You didn't "strip verbiage", you added meaningless abstractions in order to hide invalid generalizations.
That is exactly what you are: an economic flat-earther and a Young Earth creationist. I've pointed that out to you before, although unlike your parroting of the term, in your case, I justified those terms by relating them to the nature of the errors in your arguments. If you want to criticize my views concisely, come up with something that actually fits.
there are tricks with lagrangian points for changing orbits in the inner solar system with very little energy cost...but the downside is the long time
I would recommend you install real security software such as Adblock Plus and a decent virus scanner. Hosts files cause a serious degradation of any name resolution not found in the hosts file as every single time it has to search the entire hosts file, Windows does not handle hosts files well for the use APK puts it to.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phish
Last I checked, hosts files could not stop spam, and the phising email would still be received, the link could be blocked. That is if you even know about the site in advance, as often these campaigns are directed, which is called spear phishing or whaling. You also can't clock against IP addresses, and you can't block dynamically generated DNS names. That means the hosts file block is easy to get around, a DNS block with *.example.com would work far better as it would block any attempt at the malware domain, this is clearly something hosts files cannot do.
10.) Protect vs. caps
Clearly it didn't protect against your all cap speech, so I am not sure what you mean. It also cannot be used to protect against baseball caps.
13.) Speed up surfing (adblock & hardcoded favs)
Due to the way Windows handles hosts files, this is a carefully crafted lie. Beyond the hard coded favorites, including any subsequent requests caused by your favorites, all other web browsing is dramatically slowed. It would be far faster to hard code everything in your hosts file into a DNS server as they are better at branching tree algorithms which allows for faster name resolution of numerous entries. Your 2 million + line hosts file makes EVERY query run through the entire hosts file before it fails out to DNS, whereas DNS only has to go through a few entries to get to the address (.com, example, www), so it is much faster for all resolutions other than the first three entries in your hosts file.
You also failed to mention, Adblock Plus does something your hosts file will never be able to do. It will block ads served up by the site itself. You can't ever do this, as one connection to www.example.com is the same as another to the hosts file, but to Adblock, it can tell what are ads and what are not.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I wrote up a concise reply to you, but encountered the lameness filter, it just seems the subject of Hosts is too lame for Slashdot. Every one of your replies is incorrect, and you know it. Hosts files cannot stop spam, spear phishing or whaling, just as I replied, but you failed to actually support your assertion.
Bandwidth caps are alleviated just as much by Adblock Plus, so how is this something that hosts files do better?
Hosts files dramatically decrease the performance of computers, the only increased resolution speed is in the first three records of a hosts file, which is why you hard code your favorites. Every other entry is much slower to resolve than a DNS server with the same exact entries.
Ads served from the same site do pay, this is they way the industry will go next to try and get around blocking. The site you are going to can proxy the connection to the ad network and get around every bit of blocking you are attempting.
Bottom line, Adblock Plus with DNS kicks hosts files to the curb and leaves them bloody.
P.S.=> You can't win Coren22 - you don't possess the saavy of networking or programming I do... apk
Says the person who claims to use a Network Bridge and not a Proxy server and doesn't know the difference between the two. Also, how can you claim to be better at programming when you can't even design a decent installer, and don't even use a proper programming language for your software?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I'll just leave this here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
AlmostALLAdsBlocked is crippled by default & adblock doesn't do a FRACTION of what hosts do for FAR LESS no less -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org] from a higher cpu serviced level of operations MINUS addons detectability (& blockability easily by ClarityRAY) in kernelmode vs. less cpu serviced usermode (slower).
Yes, Hosts files is dramatically slower, thank you for agreeing.
DNS has security issues hosts overcome & do better locally resolving for more speed than remote DNS provides (with less complexity by far as well as power & resources consumption) -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
Oh? An up to date DNS installation has security issues? Just like your hosts file? Interesting how that works. DNS is far less complex, and you admit you run it in that very post you link to. Are you saying you run DNS when you "know" it has security issues?
We will see where ad networks go in the future, for now you are speculating, and I am speculating, so complaining that I am in "phantasyland" while you are in reality is quite funny.
Here is an example of Ads hosted on the web site, that apparently don't pay:
https://www.google.com/#q=Wind...
Care to explain how no one does it, when Google clearly does do it?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Reading comprehension for the win!
You fail at reading and life, please go back to start.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Except that I did post exactly what you asked for. Just because you have forgotten your reading glasses today doesn't make my point invalid. You claimed to use bridges, not I. You defended bridges being used as "not proxies" to get around Slashdot's posting limits. You are the one who posted about it, I didn't make it up. You think you are so clever, but I have proved my point.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I linked to a different post where you come out and talk about bridging and how it is one way to do it.
What you fail to realize is that what you are talking about the bridge doing is proxying the connection, that is what it is called. Just because you aren't using a SOCKs proxy does not mean you are not proxying.
So, when did you see me squirm? Do you have a camera in my work!?
I'm not squirming, I'm not the one making shit up, you are. A bridge is a device like a router that connects two networks. In and of itself, it cannot get past Slashdot's AC posting limitations. The 3-4 other ways to do it are all different types of proxying, which you have yourself proven because you are afraid to talk about what they actually are that isn't proxying. You refuse to talk about it because you know I will tear you a new one since you don't know anything about networking.
Keep trying to claim I am misquoting you, while not actually proving me wrong, it is funny seeing you twist and squirm trying to get around your failure of networking knowledge.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Of course you can figure it out, you built it. As you say it isn't a proxy, I say BULLSHIT! The only response to that is that you don't know what proxy means. This isn't my failure here bub, it is yours.
It does not make me stupid to not be able to read your mind over what you are using. It does make you stupid to not understand that you are using a proxy. It doesn't matter what the device is literally called, it is proxying your connection, so it is a proxy.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Which you were choosing to exclude in your analysis - I just don't see the value in saying "the costs approach zero if you neglect the most expensive part of the equation." What does that add to the discussion?
Let's suppose some sort of railgun or other 'material return apparatus' that's worked into some sort of asteroid mining operation. Assume the payload is a solid slug of platinum, or otherwise highly refined and resilient metal. If you fire that straight at the Earth on a re-entry trajectory, sure, you could have it target some benign place in an ocean, or a desert. Regardless, though, this thing will end up having an enormous amount of kinetic energy... just something in LEO will be running greater than 17,000 MPH - these rocks aren't just going to be plopping into the ocean, you're talking about releasing the equivalent energy of a decent sized bomb with each one. There's plenty of space in the Pacific to do such a thing, but then you've got a massive metal slug on the bottom of the ocean floor - a difficult engineering problem itself. A land target seems even more problematic - it doesn't seem likely that something coming in with that sort of speed would hold together well, and even if it did, it would penetrate into the earth a fair way - so you would need a secondary mining operation if that was the case. So sure, you CAN return rocks straight to the Earth's surface, and have them survive (for varying values of 'survive') but the engineering challenges are still of the same order of complexity as on-orbit resource use or a controlled re-entry. I don't think that changes the calculus much.
I agree with you there. Besides the direct impact on profitability of an established space business, there's a huge barrier to entry... it makes it hard for any new business model to get even the opportunity to prove itself.
There certainly could be. Planetary Resources thinks so, and they have some serious expertise on their roster. I don't think we'll see a real "Space Age", though, until launch costs are addressed. I'm hopeful that reuse will be a substantial step in that direction, but honestly even then the complexity, inefficiency, and inherent danger of chemical rockets might never do the job. I for one would love to see a lot more research into alternatives (the Launch Loop is a personal favorite) but the investment problems there are magnified even compared to standard space access.