I agree that this is the right team. But what's just as delightful, and make no mistake, delight is an understated way to describe what I think of this news, is that they're clearly thinking of this not as a "mission" but as a task set to bootstrap a business able to pay its own way. I particularly like that they're not using the oh-so-annoying sop of "space tourism". Afaic, "space tourism" is pretty much like twenties barnstorming. Iow, "we've got this amazing technology that we aren't using seriously at the moment so while we get our act in gear we'll kill time, keep ourselves busy, and make beer money giving people rides on our cool vehicles".
What I can't understand is why it's taken this long for somebody high profile to say this. Or has it? Hasn't Lessig raised this point? And if not, why not? How about all those other legal folks who have been fighting this? Seems to that we're missing something here since everything in TFA seemed entirely obvious to me and everybody I talked about this with from the time that the legislation was proposed. What makes this news? Is is something new in his analysis? Doesn't look that way. Is it something about his having more of an ability to get it addressed? And if so, something more concrete that "he's a lawyer at Harvard" is needed. Is this case an unusually good one to make a stand on, and if so why?
This is a fun chance for ranting and all but why should we care?
The biggest thing keeping me from buying an iPhone/iTouch is that dimwitted virtual keyboard that covers half the screen. Do you cover half your screen with an indicator bar or other utility on your desktop? No. You set things up so that you can see more than two lines of type at a time in your app. So why should I want such a thing on my mobile?
My broader point is that this leverages perhaps the most offensive thing about the iPhone, the Apple-controlled app store, which has shown that they will refuse to sell anything that they, in their imperial wisdom, decide overlaps with an Apple-provided or even Apple-blessed app.
Personally, I would prefer a tablet device about one inch bigger than the iPhone in both width and length but in truth, give me a device with good hardware and the ability to actually write stuff and I'm there.
Firstly, ICANN doesn't do all that they should now to "manage" domains and if they're going to add more, then they should do a more honest job of determining the level of service they will commit to for what is, let's face it, a discretionary option. Nobody NEEDS their own TLD. This is about things that are optional. That being the case, isn't it long past time that ICANN committed to having some sort of effective system to address, for example, claimjumping? I lost a domain a few years back because I was in the hospital for two months, in and out of conciousness for several weeks of that, and yet some fucker has been able to come in and take my domain, use it only to get traffic on the subjects I used it for, and my host provider and everybody else I talk to says that basically I'm screwed. Where the hell is ICANN at a time like this?
Afaict, from the first ten pages or so of TFA, the only costs they assess are those of reviewing and processing the application, which is not how any rational organization would approximate them, Even after the application, there will be costs of some sort to maintain the damned thing and afaic, for something this discretionary they should set the bar higher and commit to providing better service, service that costs money, services like domain ownership arbitration, and then estimate the total costs to incorporate that level of service.
In another point, from spagetti suppers at smalltown churches to sale of air rights by private schools, there is nothing unusual about a non-profit treating sale of non-essential goods as a profit opportunity. The term "non-profit" is an oversimplification, as anybody who has gone around selling candy for their sports team knows. We know that some people would pay tens of millions for their own TLD and we know that nobody NEEDS their own TLD so why shouldn't they charge at least a few million each?
Hey, man, don't you rag on Mr. Universe. A geek with his own moon and a power setup right out of Forbidden Planet? A guy who can crack the codes of the Alliance, broadcast to the entire coretex, and live in his little lovenest just as he pleases? Excellent. Anyway, I would like him if there were no more to him but his being one of the only good looking Jews under fifty in the entire history of science fiction movies. But, let's face it, what it's really about is that Joss gives him more than enough of the great lines to make him worthwhile.
"From here to the eyes and the ears of the 'Verse, that's my motto, or it might be if I start having a motto."
A.) You were promulgating a bit of disinformation that gets stronger every time it gets repeated in a public place.
B.) You were creating an implied equivalancy between two "equally ridiculous", "equally false" public statements. Which isn't so nice when one of those statements not only isn't equivalently false but was, in fact, used as a key part of a still ongoing and successful campaign to establish and maintain the larger and equally false supposed equivalency between the level of lying and overall fraud between Democrats and Republicans.
After years as a policy guy trying to change behavior through reason I came to the sad conclusion that behavior is, in fact, largely determined not by fact but by perception and that many of the most destructive false perceptions are those spread mostly under the cover of "I'm just joking", which is no different from the frat boy who hits one of the "nerds" in the face, knocking him down, and then claims that the nerd has no legitimate grounds to be angry, let alone fight back. After all, "I was just messing with you".
Sorry, I have no opinion of nor much interest in your intent; I post in response to expected consequences./. is still one of the biggest fora on the web and I reserve the right to cut down the damage that you'll do rather than limiting myself to only what *you* consider accountable behavior.
the smart guys in any room are always low key and in the back, not attention whores
Citation needed.
Or I could just start talking about the "low key" personalities of Franz Liszt, Amadeus Mozart, Richard Feynman, Esther Dyson, F. Scott Fitzgerald . . .
Those "unrealistic" utopian colonies got a lot more done than people give them credit for. Specifically, the movement you link to created, among other things, the Amana corporation, founed by the residents of, you guessed, the Amana colonies. Who also, by the way, made kickass furniture and sold it in mass quantities. You know, like the Quakers? Maybe you've heard of them or of a few of the many products they invented and commercialized. Or, instead, maybe you're more a "free love" kinda elitist. In which case drop by your local Target or Nordstrom's and buy some Oneida flatware, a product of the Oneida communities.
I could go on and on.
I've researched this a bit and given the primitive tech they were working with and the chowderheaded "social sciences" they had to do their best to unlearn, some of those colonies did quite well. And with the hundred plus years that have now been put into analysis and of creating more efficient setups like the hundred-plus ecovillages, most of which are thriving, we're far better positioned to try again.
Seems to me that the *really* smart thing to do would be to recruit more kinds of smart people than just scientists. Out here in Portland some of the smartest people I know doing some of the most innovative work are working at cafes and creating new vegan food that actually tastes good, doing funky little magazines, and otherwise finding ways to make all sorts of work intellectually challenging and fun.
I've been in some of the most famous concentrations of smart people in the world and I see no reasons to believe that a "city of smart people" would also need to have some sizable population of dimwits. If anything, if living expenses were cheap, healthcare provided, and "low status" jobs were normally flextime and twenty hours a week or less, plenty of smart folks would flock there for a chance to live in a way that they could pay their bills and still be able to pursue their other projects. Not only could you fill all of your janitor jobs with smart people who would respect the job and be able to talk to the other people there, you would have to bloody near barricade the walls to keep too many people for applying.
I'm not so sure about birth rates but I would genuinely worry about rates of Aspergers and related syndromes. I get the distinct impression that Aspergers rates are significantly higher in the towns where IBMers live, in parts of Silicon Valley, and other places where certain kinds of "smart people" live.
Me? I consider myself legitimately a genius by some standards (gawd, I hate that word) and I know that part of my anomolous abilities to focus and to internally run very complex simulations of reality are inextricably interwoven with the things that make me socially awkward and prone to what is thought of as ADD. And none of this even begins to get into what kids would be like raised in such a place. I am well aware that there, too, my childhood environment is part of what alienates me from just about everybody.
So, low birth rates? Don't sweat it. Increasingly
"freak"-like children? Bet on it.
Not a bad design, even if it is thirty years old. Distributed systems. Fault tolerant. Designed to be able to disperse and have the citizens stay connected through encrypted channels. Amazing social dynamics. I would certainly consider moving there if it existed.
This whole "Gore claims to have invented the internet" is not only one of the most effective pieces of disinformation I've ever seen (yes, promulgation of this was funded by Richard Mellon-Scaife, among others of his repellant ilk), it is also one of the most absurd since, as it happens, Gore DID play quite a serious role in the creation of the internet.
The truth can be found here. A briefer version is here.
Oh, and for the record, not too long *after* the election was over, a statement was jointly issued by various politicians, most notably Newt Gingrich, stating their gratitude to Gore's longtime leadership on this issue and to how huge a role he had played in creating our current high tech world.
Seeing as how the lead investigator is the Alcoa Professor of..., I think that it's a safe bet that broader concerns about more energy-thrifty processes were in mind. Aluminum manufacture being, after all, one of the most energy-hungry processes in the world. Also I can't help but notice that yet again I'm seeing state of the art biofuels work from North Carolina, source of the best biodiesel book done yet, source of some of the best and earliest work on switchgrass as fuel, source of no small amount of work on biomass (as in lumber waste) conversion to fuel, and so on. Afaict, North Carolina has, without much of anybody noticing it, already become the Silicon Valley of biofuels.
At this point, given what I've seen in these fields, I'm ready to proclaim Rustin's Corrollary to Moore's Law, that computer-based research and development on microorganisms will typically yield even faster increases in productivity than are experienced in silicon-based systems themselves. In some cases it may even be valid to dump the "computer-based" though I doubt it. In other words, if you think that Moore's Law has improved things fast, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
All the more reason to A.) use inflatable modules, and B.) not ship things assembled. If (and this is admittedly a big "if") a good robotic "mule" is brought along or is there already, then it should be pretty straightforward to move components/materials a mile or less. And, frankly, given how little we know about things like Martian microclimates and ease of digging into whatever they land near, we would want the humans there to be making those final placement decisions anyway.
But to me this is yet another reason to get a robotic mission on the way ASAP with some kind of device that will start making bricks or digging a tunnel or otherwise get the job of shelter and materials well on the way while the work for a human mission continues. Even if the final settlement ends up being hundreds of kilometers from the site of the initial shelter building, far better to have supplies and a hidey-hole a few hundred miles away than all the way back at Earth.
On top of everything else, this allows a more efficient division of labor. Have NASA promise a certain minimum guaranteed minimum price for bricks or water or shelters of specified characteristics and give organizations permission to do whatever seems best to them to get those things there for delivery. No materials, no cost to NASA. Not to mention that this frees NASA from management distractions, micromanagement by legislators, and so on.
And that's the point of my plan. Offer to "bury" people by having their bodies shipped to Mars. The bodies can launch on low-fuel, high-g rockets and get there by equally low-fuel slow trajectories. Let's say delivery to Mars orbit within five or six years, depending on launch time. Then, when they get there, the bodies get dropped into a row on top of which lots of microorganisms are dropped and used to kickstart a soil supply. One that we then *know* will have the right balances of nutrients, have a decent amount of water, and a wide range of microorganisms. Add fifty or sixty pounds per body of biodegradable packing material (i.e. a coffin that will become part of the resulting biomass) and you'll really be in great shape. Include a translucent outer case with some insulating properties and you don't even need much of a greenhouse waiting at your destination. A job for Aerojel, seems to me.
Betcha it would work, too. Get the cost down to two or three million dollars each and you'll have to barricade the doors to keep rich, elderly techies from signing up too fast. I figure, what, a hundred million in development costs. About the same as the Indian moon mission. If costs can be brought down to two million per corpus and the charge kept at, say, three million, it shouldn't take more than fifteen years or so at worst to be in the black and, by the way, have developed a kickass set of launch expertise, facilities, and rights to tens of thousands of pounds of rich biomatter, all already delivered to Mars. If necessary, it could even be initially delivered to a Martian parking orbit to wait in deep freeze for an optimal location to be chosen.
Just think of the variations. Pet burial. The same technique delivered to a greenhouse on the Moon. And so on.
In fact, it was addressed pretty well at Universe Today back in March. They focused on a proposal called "Spirit of the Lone Eagle" by NASA engineer Jim McLane. I could say more but I'll leave it at RTFA.
Slashdot Mirror
We already know that Earth is our only hope for sustaining the human race inside the solar system.
Citation needed.
Seriously. I know that this is /., but try. You might enjoy it.
I agree that this is the right team. But what's just as delightful, and make no mistake, delight is an understated way to describe what I think of this news, is that they're clearly thinking of this not as a "mission" but as a task set to bootstrap a business able to pay its own way. I particularly like that they're not using the oh-so-annoying sop of "space tourism". Afaic, "space tourism" is pretty much like twenties barnstorming. Iow, "we've got this amazing technology that we aren't using seriously at the moment so while we get our act in gear we'll kill time, keep ourselves busy, and make beer money giving people rides on our cool vehicles".
Personally, I've been pushing the idea of private organizations exploring with clusters of small robotic missions for years now, I've even ranted at my friends about it, so how could I not be pleased?
I wonder how long it will take for the mainstream media and legislators to claim that they've backed this approach all along
on Lost in Space? It even wrapped everything in tidy plastic bundles.
What I can't understand is why it's taken this long for somebody high profile to say this. Or has it? Hasn't Lessig raised this point? And if not, why not? How about all those other legal folks who have been fighting this? Seems to that we're missing something here since everything in TFA seemed entirely obvious to me and everybody I talked about this with from the time that the legislation was proposed.
What makes this news? Is is something new in his analysis? Doesn't look that way.
Is it something about his having more of an ability to get it addressed? And if so, something more concrete that "he's a lawyer at Harvard" is needed.
Is this case an unusually good one to make a stand on, and if so why?
This is a fun chance for ranting and all but why should we care?
It's true, nothing that anybody might ever consider "stupid" could possibly be a law. The very idea!
Idjit.
The biggest thing keeping me from buying an iPhone/iTouch is that dimwitted virtual keyboard that covers half the screen. Do you cover half your screen with an indicator bar or other utility on your desktop? No. You set things up so that you can see more than two lines of type at a time in your app. So why should I want such a thing on my mobile?
My broader point is that this leverages perhaps the most offensive thing about the iPhone, the Apple-controlled app store, which has shown that they will refuse to sell anything that they, in their imperial wisdom, decide overlaps with an Apple-provided or even Apple-blessed app.
Personally, I would prefer a tablet device about one inch bigger than the iPhone in both width and length but in truth, give me a device with good hardware and the ability to actually write stuff and I'm there.
Your points bring up another two.
Firstly, ICANN doesn't do all that they should now to "manage" domains and if they're going to add more, then they should do a more honest job of determining the level of service they will commit to for what is, let's face it, a discretionary option. Nobody NEEDS their own TLD. This is about things that are optional. That being the case, isn't it long past time that ICANN committed to having some sort of effective system to address, for example, claimjumping? I lost a domain a few years back because I was in the hospital for two months, in and out of conciousness for several weeks of that, and yet some fucker has been able to come in and take my domain, use it only to get traffic on the subjects I used it for, and my host provider and everybody else I talk to says that basically I'm screwed. Where the hell is ICANN at a time like this?
Afaict, from the first ten pages or so of TFA, the only costs they assess are those of reviewing and processing the application, which is not how any rational organization would approximate them, Even after the application, there will be costs of some sort to maintain the damned thing and afaic, for something this discretionary they should set the bar higher and commit to providing better service, service that costs money, services like domain ownership arbitration, and then estimate the total costs to incorporate that level of service.
In another point, from spagetti suppers at smalltown churches to sale of air rights by private schools, there is nothing unusual about a non-profit treating sale of non-essential goods as a profit opportunity. The term "non-profit" is an oversimplification, as anybody who has gone around selling candy for their sports team knows. We know that some people would pay tens of millions for their own TLD and we know that nobody NEEDS their own TLD so why shouldn't they charge at least a few million each?
Hey, man, don't you rag on Mr. Universe. A geek with his own moon and a power setup right out of Forbidden Planet? A guy who can crack the codes of the Alliance, broadcast to the entire coretex, and live in his little lovenest just as he pleases? Excellent. Anyway, I would like him if there were no more to him but his being one of the only good looking Jews under fifty in the entire history of science fiction movies. But, let's face it, what it's really about is that Joss gives him more than enough of the great lines to make him worthwhile.
"From here to the eyes and the ears of the 'Verse, that's my motto, or it might be if I start having a motto."
Shiny.
A.) You were promulgating a bit of disinformation that gets stronger every time it gets repeated in a public place.
/. is still one of the biggest fora on the web and I reserve the right to cut down the damage that you'll do rather than limiting myself to only what *you* consider accountable behavior.
B.) You were creating an implied equivalancy between two "equally ridiculous", "equally false" public statements. Which isn't so nice when one of those statements not only isn't equivalently false but was, in fact, used as a key part of a still ongoing and successful campaign to establish and maintain the larger and equally false supposed equivalency between the level of lying and overall fraud between Democrats and Republicans.
After years as a policy guy trying to change behavior through reason I came to the sad conclusion that behavior is, in fact, largely determined not by fact but by perception and that many of the most destructive false perceptions are those spread mostly under the cover of "I'm just joking", which is no different from the frat boy who hits one of the "nerds" in the face, knocking him down, and then claims that the nerd has no legitimate grounds to be angry, let alone fight back. After all, "I was just messing with you".
Sorry, I have no opinion of nor much interest in your intent; I post in response to expected consequences.
the smart guys in any room are always low key and in the back, not attention whores
Citation needed.
Or I could just start talking about the "low key" personalities of Franz Liszt, Amadeus Mozart, Richard Feynman, Esther Dyson, F. Scott Fitzgerald . . .
Almost every attempt to do it is a failure though.
Citation needed.
Those "unrealistic" utopian colonies got a lot more done than people give them credit for. Specifically, the movement you link to created, among other things, the Amana corporation, founed by the residents of, you guessed, the Amana colonies. Who also, by the way, made kickass furniture and sold it in mass quantities. You know, like the Quakers? Maybe you've heard of them or of a few of the many products they invented and commercialized. Or, instead, maybe you're more a "free love" kinda elitist. In which case drop by your local Target or Nordstrom's and buy some Oneida flatware, a product of the Oneida communities.
I could go on and on. I've researched this a bit and given the primitive tech they were working with and the chowderheaded "social sciences" they had to do their best to unlearn, some of those colonies did quite well. And with the hundred plus years that have now been put into analysis and of creating more efficient setups like the hundred-plus ecovillages, most of which are thriving, we're far better positioned to try again.
Another eight or ten years and these should be "feature-rich" enough for most guy's needs.
Seems to me that the *really* smart thing to do would be to recruit more kinds of smart people than just scientists. Out here in Portland some of the smartest people I know doing some of the most innovative work are working at cafes and creating new vegan food that actually tastes good, doing funky little magazines, and otherwise finding ways to make all sorts of work intellectually challenging and fun.
I've been in some of the most famous concentrations of smart people in the world and I see no reasons to believe that a "city of smart people" would also need to have some sizable population of dimwits. If anything, if living expenses were cheap, healthcare provided, and "low status" jobs were normally flextime and twenty hours a week or less, plenty of smart folks would flock there for a chance to live in a way that they could pay their bills and still be able to pursue their other projects. Not only could you fill all of your janitor jobs with smart people who would respect the job and be able to talk to the other people there, you would have to bloody near barricade the walls to keep too many people for applying.
So, would these interference patterns cause spontaneous creation of doomsday machines at the maxima created by them?
I'm not so sure about birth rates but I would genuinely worry about rates of Aspergers and related syndromes. I get the distinct impression that Aspergers rates are significantly higher in the towns where IBMers live, in parts of Silicon Valley, and other places where certain kinds of "smart people" live.
Me? I consider myself legitimately a genius by some standards (gawd, I hate that word) and I know that part of my anomolous abilities to focus and to internally run very complex simulations of reality are inextricably interwoven with the things that make me socially awkward and prone to what is thought of as ADD. And none of this even begins to get into what kids would be like raised in such a place. I am well aware that there, too, my childhood environment is part of what alienates me from just about everybody.
So, low birth rates? Don't sweat it. Increasingly "freak"-like children? Bet on it.
Not a bad design, even if it is thirty years old. Distributed systems. Fault tolerant. Designed to be able to disperse and have the citizens stay connected through encrypted channels. Amazing social dynamics. I would certainly consider moving there if it existed.
That John Brunner was a pretty sharp guy.
This whole "Gore claims to have invented the internet" is not only one of the most effective pieces of disinformation I've ever seen (yes, promulgation of this was funded by Richard Mellon-Scaife, among others of his repellant ilk), it is also one of the most absurd since, as it happens, Gore DID play quite a serious role in the creation of the internet.
The truth can be found here. A briefer version is here.
Oh, and for the record, not too long *after* the election was over, a statement was jointly issued by various politicians, most notably Newt Gingrich, stating their gratitude to Gore's longtime leadership on this issue and to how huge a role he had played in creating our current high tech world.
*groan*
;->
It did have to be said, didn't it?
Well, at least we know that they'll get to the bottom of the problem
Seeing as how the lead investigator is the Alcoa Professor of..., I think that it's a safe bet that broader concerns about more energy-thrifty processes were in mind. Aluminum manufacture being, after all, one of the most energy-hungry processes in the world. Also I can't help but notice that yet again I'm seeing state of the art biofuels work from North Carolina, source of the best biodiesel book done yet, source of some of the best and earliest work on switchgrass as fuel, source of no small amount of work on biomass (as in lumber waste) conversion to fuel, and so on. Afaict, North Carolina has, without much of anybody noticing it, already become the Silicon Valley of biofuels.
At this point, given what I've seen in these fields, I'm ready to proclaim Rustin's Corrollary to Moore's Law, that computer-based research and development on microorganisms will typically yield even faster increases in productivity than are experienced in silicon-based systems themselves. In some cases it may even be valid to dump the "computer-based" though I doubt it. In other words, if you think that Moore's Law has improved things fast, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
All the more reason to A.) use inflatable modules, and B.) not ship things assembled. If (and this is admittedly a big "if") a good robotic "mule" is brought along or is there already, then it should be pretty straightforward to move components/materials a mile or less. And, frankly, given how little we know about things like Martian microclimates and ease of digging into whatever they land near, we would want the humans there to be making those final placement decisions anyway.
But to me this is yet another reason to get a robotic mission on the way ASAP with some kind of device that will start making bricks or digging a tunnel or otherwise get the job of shelter and materials well on the way while the work for a human mission continues. Even if the final settlement ends up being hundreds of kilometers from the site of the initial shelter building, far better to have supplies and a hidey-hole a few hundred miles away than all the way back at Earth.
On top of everything else, this allows a more efficient division of labor. Have NASA promise a certain minimum guaranteed minimum price for bricks or water or shelters of specified characteristics and give organizations permission to do whatever seems best to them to get those things there for delivery. No materials, no cost to NASA. Not to mention that this frees NASA from management distractions, micromanagement by legislators, and so on.
And that's the point of my plan. Offer to "bury" people by having their bodies shipped to Mars. The bodies can launch on low-fuel, high-g rockets and get there by equally low-fuel slow trajectories. Let's say delivery to Mars orbit within five or six years, depending on launch time. Then, when they get there, the bodies get dropped into a row on top of which lots of microorganisms are dropped and used to kickstart a soil supply. One that we then *know* will have the right balances of nutrients, have a decent amount of water, and a wide range of microorganisms. Add fifty or sixty pounds per body of biodegradable packing material (i.e. a coffin that will become part of the resulting biomass) and you'll really be in great shape. Include a translucent outer case with some insulating properties and you don't even need much of a greenhouse waiting at your destination. A job for Aerojel, seems to me.
Betcha it would work, too. Get the cost down to two or three million dollars each and you'll have to barricade the doors to keep rich, elderly techies from signing up too fast. I figure, what, a hundred million in development costs. About the same as the Indian moon mission. If costs can be brought down to two million per corpus and the charge kept at, say, three million, it shouldn't take more than fifteen years or so at worst to be in the black and, by the way, have developed a kickass set of launch expertise, facilities, and rights to tens of thousands of pounds of rich biomatter, all already delivered to Mars. If necessary, it could even be initially delivered to a Martian parking orbit to wait in deep freeze for an optimal location to be chosen.
Just think of the variations. Pet burial. The same technique delivered to a greenhouse on the Moon. And so on.
No, no, no. You're getting it wrong. The outlaws get shipped to the moon!
Cobber.
In fact, it was addressed pretty well at Universe Today back in March. They focused on a proposal called "Spirit of the Lone Eagle" by NASA engineer Jim McLane. I could say more but I'll leave it at RTFA.