No, I'm saying if you're really concerned about waste, there are bigger things with less value to go after. If Mars has no paybacks you're being ineffectual, stepping over dollars to pick up nickels. If Mars does have paybacks, you're being downright counter-productive.
Scale would be different I agree - I'm more after the base technologies. Some technologies don't scale, some do. Some will be radically different ideas that came up because Mars is completely outside the box - perhaps not directly usable, but would suggest things that could be done here.
The one thing I can think of offhand is "no landfills, only temporary storage depots." We're quick to throw things away on Earth, into the landfill. Some things (iron, aluminum, glass, paper) we recycle, some incredibly valuable things (high-strength exotic magnets) we don't. We don't even explore the idea, because the landfill is just so easy, and we're only beginning to be worried about the supply. It doesn't have to be developed on Mars, but because we're lazy here on Earth, we won't do it here.
Beyond that, if my crystal ball were good enough to hand you certainties I wouldn't be wasting my time with you on Slashdot.
To start, I also don't think the Mars Colony idea is without value to others besides space nuts. (like me) In order to work, it's going to be the Gonzo leading edge of recycling, conservation, and environmentalism. What they learn there can help make things better here.
(below assumes you're a US taxpayer) Are you conscious of spending $300-400 billion each year subsidizing oil exploration by highly profitable companies?
Are you conscious of spending more than the rest of the world put together for defense, for what is probably not the largest standing military in the world, let along bigger than all combined? I know it's higher tech, but it's also more finicky. There are also weapons systems being developed that the military doesn't want, that keep on because the work is being done in the district of a powerful Congress-critter. Yes, it's a good military, but I strongly suspect that we're paying something above top dollar for it.
Are you conscious of the extent to which we subsidize transportation in the US, to the point that big outfits that ship everything all over the Earth not only can exist, but can out compete smaller more efficient companies? Cheap transportation helps make BIG better, and taxpayers are paying for at least some of it.
Speaking of Wal Mart, are you aware of your "Wal Mart subsidy" coming out of your tax dollars. Something like half of their employees are on food stamps, because they don't really pay a livable wage. Our taxes at work.
Space is merely an easy, visible target. Even if it were to be considered a waste, which upon careful examination it never is, it would be a drop in the bucked compared to other wastes in the budget - noise that shouldn't be the first thing to go after.
Yes. Making it go with a "maker-culture" requires some redundancy to begin with, and some resupply from Earth. I'm not talking totally self-sustaining, I'm talking sufficiently self-sustaining.
I suspect one unmanned mission to Mars a year - a big can full of what they can't make themselves could sail under the radar. It would be much cheaper than trying to bring them back - which is the ultimate argument. It would be interesting to see a "Let the Mars explorers and their children all die!" initiative put on the ballot.
I think the first part of the issue would be how quickly the new Martians could begin sourcing their own consumables. For a start, all of the organic matter available comes with them, and they've got to recycle to a fault. Presumably power is a tractable problem, once you get some infrastructure up there, and the NIMBY problems will be much smaller.
Obviously technology and manufactured goods are a bigger problem, but those are a longer-term problem. Again, part of the solution will be fanatical recycling, part of the solution will be a strong maker-culture. Probably the biggest problem is semiconductors, but fortunately those are generally small, light, and one of the lesser lifeline-to-Mother-Earth problems.
Difficult, yes. Impossible, I don't think so. Again, if they can solve the consumables problem, I think with a decent inital outlay they can become "nearly" self-sustaining, at least to the level where the taxpayers won't gripe too hard.
I find it odd/annoying that they call this a "suicide" mission rather than a "colonization" mission. The real essence here is that it's a one-way trip. I haven't seen anything to suggest that they're abandoning the colonists, or sending them to any more certain a death than we'd all see here on Earth.
There is one problem with calling it "colonization", in that we're generally thinking of post-reproductive-age people, and at some point any viable colony is going to need kids for its future. But given the assumption of a second wave, sending older people on the first wave probably is a good idea. Get the basics nailed down before worrying about kids.
Or have I got this all wrong, and made assumptions myself? Are they planning on sending people on a one-way, fixed-duration mission, and there is no surviving past that duration?
Because ddr4 is coming, and about a year after that it will be at price parity with ddr3, and about a year after that the ddr3 prices will start rising while ddr4 prices are still falling. Old-standard memory becomes premium all too quickly.
I've done it a few times. Last time was a few years ago when I found a mild speed kicker for my old socket 939 system at a flea market. Not much boost - but it was only $5. But I generally buy far enough apart that sockets change as often as I buy.
Do we really want that? People are generally BAD at security. If we actually had secure email, people and businesses might actually start to TRUST it. At that point the encryption keys become a much more valuable target than email accounts and passwords are today. I'm guessing that general identity theft and stolen key problems would be FAR worse than stolen password problems are today.
I suspect lack of trust is much better than erroneous trust.
I run Gentoo on my desktops, so I'm used to building it all.
On this, or on any other tablet, can I do the same? (Obviously I'd cross-compile on one of my desktops and move the code over.)
I'd like a tablet where there's not an arms/obsolescence race, where getting true ownership (root) isn't an escalating battle until the maker decides its obsolete and not worth the trouble any more. I'd like to not have my ebooks disappear on me when the company goes, "Oops!"
AFAIK, that leaves the Vivaldi, the zTablet from zaReason, and this PengPod. I've had indications that the hardware is lackluster on all 3 and perhaps downright shoddy on the PengPod. Furthermore the zTablet is the only one that might be on the market, now.
IMHO, the issue is whether the machines are sentient. If they're not, then they can't be slaves. But I think it a necessary ethical step to insure that they stay below some line. I know we're not even close to that line yet, but at some point it should become ethically necessary to figure out what that line is, and how to keep machines comfortably below it.
But it makes you wonder, what would a sentient machine think of such an arrangement. Harry Harrison wrote a book, "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers," which was mostly satire, but in one of his jokes was a real question. There was a planet with 2 species significant to the story line. The "Ormloo" looked like us, but were about as smart as cows. The other species, name forgotten, looked like cows but were as smart as us. They enjoyed their Ormloo-burgers. What do we think of that?
We certainly could. But there would be that desire to have the robots program themselves, if only to save the cost of paying robot programmers. We've been slave-owners in the past, and I suspect that some would see no ethical dilemna in A.I. slaves.
I would add "today" somewhere in your first sentence. I'm sure that at some point there will be a growing desire for a "learning robot" that doesn't need all of that pesky detailed programming. So very likely robots will "evolve" to become automatons, though most likely non-anthropomorphic. (At some point it wouldn't even surprise me to see a decidedly non-human automaton sporting a face somewhere, for the comfort of the humans. Or how about a red hemisphere in a black rectangular panel?)
Regardless of the shape, I'm sure our wants will drive our robots toward automatons, whereupon we're on the slippery slope - assuming we find some way to stay on Moore's Law.
Doesn't this seem that we still have this desire for slavery?
Once upon a time, we out-and-out had slaves. Then we freed them, sort of, and rehired them at almost-subsistence wages as sharecroppers. Then we moved to off-shore workers, currently in a practically nonexistent standard of living, happy to have any sort of job. Around the same time we also started in with illegal immigrants, again happy to have any sort of job, and more importantly, no ability to complain. (Sometimes I think there's a movement afoot to push US workers into that last group - happy to have any sort of job, no ability to complain. That certainly seems to be the direction we've been headed, even without any sort of conspiracy.)
So aren't robots simply the next step in that kind of progression?
With this in mind, the real question becomes, how smart does the robot have to become before we achieve true artificial intelligence, and it really is a slave, at which point the only ethical thing to do is to free it.
I know my earlier mumblings were US centric, and these robots are in China. But I don't think the US is unique in this kind of progression, and given the fact that we've moved our robot-capable workload offshore, that makes it logical that this kind of thing would be done offshore first.
> What happens when giving up that information becomes the default cultural norm, and so > choosing NOT to do becomes an inconvenience or barrier?
Certainly a valid issue - really yet another Tragedy of the Commons. Almost as applicable as a car analogy.
> Really simple example - do you have health insurance? If you do, then there is a large insurance > company out there that has your entire medical record. You gave up your right to medical privacy > (between just you & your doctor) when you agreed to purchase health insurance.
A tradeoff, not entirely happy, but unfortunately financially necessary.
> Or if you drive on the toll-roads around Chicago -- if you use the iPass, you pay a lower toll than > if you pay with cash. But of course, they can electronically track you then, as well (with much less > effort than processing photos of your license plates at the cash toll booths).
I don't live or drive near Chicago, though I used to use the New York State Thruway several times a year - and I never got a SpeedPass.
> What about if auto insurance companies began offering a discount to people who could > prove safe driving habits with GPS data recorders in their cars? Seems reasonable enough -- if > I never drive more than +10mph over the speed limit, maybe I'd take that deal to get a nice discount. > And what if many people started doing that -- such that you now pay a substantially higher rate if > you do NOT want the insurance company monitoring your driving habits?
Also a good question, another Tragedy of the Commons. Car analogy even more applicable.
> It's a tricky situation -- where do we draw the lines? And WHO draws the lines? Today with health > insurance, there's a lot of heavy regulation such that insurance companies can't completely segment > their customers (some would say "discriminate"). So does industry draw the lines? Does > government? There are no clear & simple answers, just trade-offs & compromises.
Perhaps looking for clear and simple answers is like looking for "security in the long run." Offhand there has always been a tension between government and business. Back to analogies, there is also the elephant and the tiger. Which would you rather be tied to while sleeping. I tend to look at government as the elephant - it might roll over on you and crush you, but it's not generally seeking to harm you. The tiger, on the other hand, is prone to look at you as a meal, and maybe as long as you ALWAYS wake first, it's OK.
I don't try to dictate how others live, and I with for the same from them - that they don't dictate how I live.
OTOH, some regulation is necessary, because we all live on this planet together. Your right to pollute air and water indiscriminately stops at my nose, mouth, and generally the rest of my body. Kind of like your right to swing your fist stops at my face.
I also believe that society has a general responsibility to protect children - the future of that society. But what you want to do with another consenting adult is none of my business. I don't particularly like the idea of gay marriage - so I'm not going to do it. But I also believe that that's your business.
As for "voluntarily give up certain personal info," the key word in that phrase is "voluntarily." As long as *I* get to choose to give up - or retain - that information, I'm find with that. If giving up some information improves my life, I may choose to do so. I'm a bit of a privacy bug, but I also recognize that I'm one of those "boring people," and if anything, my "privacy hobby" raises my profile some.
To a certain group of people, that's not a problem, it's a feature. That same group of people is certainly a lot more capable of influencing legislation than you or me, so it's likely to be "enhanced" in the future.
People keep saying that "one is just as bad as the other" when referring to US elections. But I would suggest that while Obama may not be effective at fighting income inequality, Romney is a poster-boy for it.
The real problem here is that most people seem to treat income inequality as an annoyance, not a real problem. As previously mentioned, some treat it as a feature to be furthered. But, and here it becomes My Opinion, you can't have the kind of high-energy economy the US had in the last half of the 20th century with the kind of income inequality we have not. A high-energy economy requires an engaged and enabled middle class.
Beyond that, economically speaking, a society with an engaged and enabled middle class will a feudal society, any day, hands-down. Think about the Cold War, for instance. That the US is systematically and deliberately destroying it's middle class reveals the actions of its "job creators" as being motivated by pure greed, rather than "enlightened self-interest by a group of very capable people."
But Saturn's rings are dust - because bigger pieces ground themselves down to that. It has also taken a looong time to get that way, and we don't know what the intermediate states were. I'll agree that "graveyard orbits" are simply something higher than geosync, but in fact EVERY TIME we think we've had an "infinite garbage heap" we've made it into a problem. I'd feel a whole lot safer if we began by conserving our graveyard orbits. For instance, when we send stuff out on Earth-escape paths.
How save is the graveyard orbit, really? It'll be even less likely to decay than geosync, but isn't it then a "fixed size trashcan?" At some point won't you start getting collisions, and some of the pieces might get enough delta-V to get in the way. Certainly the graveyard orbit is cheaper than de-orbit, but for the long run, have our repair satellite tow them out there and attach them to the junkyard. (The other dead satellites, all "tied" together.)
More likely, the most valuable thing up there is not the satellite, it's the position it's occupying. Once upon a time, we tried to keep 2 degrees of separation between geosync satellites - meaning that there were 180 "slots" where one could be placed, and obviously fewer than that that could service any one location. The separation keeps dropping, but that makes the need for stationkeeping more precise, probably calling for more fuel, etc.
So the best thing here is to keep those geosync slots in use, and not chewing up an empty slot with a dead or useless satellite. I'll have to agree with what someone else said - that de-orbit should be a published option, as well.
Personally, I believe the best option is a big, gravity-gradient-stabilized boom, with some serious solar panel capacity on the outer side, battery capacity to match, and standardized electrical and mechanical hookups. Then rather than sending up complete satellites, lease hookups on the boom, and just send up an electronics package. In this case, the "service satellite" carries the package up, anchors and connects it, and does initial checkout.
This is Slashdot - I was just being lazy, and this is one place to do it. Besides, on other sub-threads there was such amazement at one-engine-down operation, and incorrect statements like, "We haven't been able to do that since the Saturn V."
I'm surprised to see that the Falcon can complete the entire mission on 8 engines from any point. That says that they've paid a significant weight penalty to achieve that redundancy. NASA vehicles have only been able to declare an engine (or two) redundant after a certain point in the flight profile.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm saying if you're really concerned about waste, there are bigger things with less value to go after. If Mars has no paybacks you're being ineffectual, stepping over dollars to pick up nickels. If Mars does have paybacks, you're being downright counter-productive.
Scale would be different I agree - I'm more after the base technologies. Some technologies don't scale, some do. Some will be radically different ideas that came up because Mars is completely outside the box - perhaps not directly usable, but would suggest things that could be done here.
The one thing I can think of offhand is "no landfills, only temporary storage depots." We're quick to throw things away on Earth, into the landfill. Some things (iron, aluminum, glass, paper) we recycle, some incredibly valuable things (high-strength exotic magnets) we don't. We don't even explore the idea, because the landfill is just so easy, and we're only beginning to be worried about the supply. It doesn't have to be developed on Mars, but because we're lazy here on Earth, we won't do it here.
Beyond that, if my crystal ball were good enough to hand you certainties I wouldn't be wasting my time with you on Slashdot.
To start, I also don't think the Mars Colony idea is without value to others besides space nuts. (like me) In order to work, it's going to be the Gonzo leading edge of recycling, conservation, and environmentalism. What they learn there can help make things better here.
(below assumes you're a US taxpayer)
Are you conscious of spending $300-400 billion each year subsidizing oil exploration by highly profitable companies?
Are you conscious of spending more than the rest of the world put together for defense, for what is probably not the largest standing military in the world, let along bigger than all combined? I know it's higher tech, but it's also more finicky. There are also weapons systems being developed that the military doesn't want, that keep on because the work is being done in the district of a powerful Congress-critter. Yes, it's a good military, but I strongly suspect that we're paying something above top dollar for it.
Are you conscious of the extent to which we subsidize transportation in the US, to the point that big outfits that ship everything all over the Earth not only can exist, but can out compete smaller more efficient companies? Cheap transportation helps make BIG better, and taxpayers are paying for at least some of it.
Speaking of Wal Mart, are you aware of your "Wal Mart subsidy" coming out of your tax dollars. Something like half of their employees are on food stamps, because they don't really pay a livable wage. Our taxes at work.
Space is merely an easy, visible target. Even if it were to be considered a waste, which upon careful examination it never is, it would be a drop in the bucked compared to other wastes in the budget - noise that shouldn't be the first thing to go after.
Yes. Making it go with a "maker-culture" requires some redundancy to begin with, and some resupply from Earth. I'm not talking totally self-sustaining, I'm talking sufficiently self-sustaining.
I suspect one unmanned mission to Mars a year - a big can full of what they can't make themselves could sail under the radar. It would be much cheaper than trying to bring them back - which is the ultimate argument. It would be interesting to see a "Let the Mars explorers and their children all die!" initiative put on the ballot.
I think the first part of the issue would be how quickly the new Martians could begin sourcing their own consumables. For a start, all of the organic matter available comes with them, and they've got to recycle to a fault. Presumably power is a tractable problem, once you get some infrastructure up there, and the NIMBY problems will be much smaller.
Obviously technology and manufactured goods are a bigger problem, but those are a longer-term problem. Again, part of the solution will be fanatical recycling, part of the solution will be a strong maker-culture. Probably the biggest problem is semiconductors, but fortunately those are generally small, light, and one of the lesser lifeline-to-Mother-Earth problems.
Difficult, yes. Impossible, I don't think so. Again, if they can solve the consumables problem, I think with a decent inital outlay they can become "nearly" self-sustaining, at least to the level where the taxpayers won't gripe too hard.
I find it odd/annoying that they call this a "suicide" mission rather than a "colonization" mission. The real essence here is that it's a one-way trip. I haven't seen anything to suggest that they're abandoning the colonists, or sending them to any more certain a death than we'd all see here on Earth.
There is one problem with calling it "colonization", in that we're generally thinking of post-reproductive-age people, and at some point any viable colony is going to need kids for its future. But given the assumption of a second wave, sending older people on the first wave probably is a good idea. Get the basics nailed down before worrying about kids.
Or have I got this all wrong, and made assumptions myself? Are they planning on sending people on a one-way, fixed-duration mission, and there is no surviving past that duration?
Because ddr4 is coming, and about a year after that it will be at price parity with ddr3, and about a year after that the ddr3 prices will start rising while ddr4 prices are still falling. Old-standard memory becomes premium all too quickly.
I've done it a few times. Last time was a few years ago when I found a mild speed kicker for my old socket 939 system at a flea market. Not much boost - but it was only $5. But I generally buy far enough apart that sockets change as often as I buy.
Do we really want that? People are generally BAD at security. If we actually had secure email, people and businesses might actually start to TRUST it. At that point the encryption keys become a much more valuable target than email accounts and passwords are today. I'm guessing that general identity theft and stolen key problems would be FAR worse than stolen password problems are today.
I suspect lack of trust is much better than erroneous trust.
I run Gentoo on my desktops, so I'm used to building it all.
On this, or on any other tablet, can I do the same? (Obviously I'd cross-compile on one of my desktops and move the code over.)
I'd like a tablet where there's not an arms/obsolescence race, where getting true ownership (root) isn't an escalating battle until the maker decides its obsolete and not worth the trouble any more. I'd like to not have my ebooks disappear on me when the company goes, "Oops!"
AFAIK, that leaves the Vivaldi, the zTablet from zaReason, and this PengPod. I've had indications that the hardware is lackluster on all 3 and perhaps downright shoddy on the PengPod. Furthermore the zTablet is the only one that might be on the market, now.
IMHO, the issue is whether the machines are sentient. If they're not, then they can't be slaves. But I think it a necessary ethical step to insure that they stay below some line. I know we're not even close to that line yet, but at some point it should become ethically necessary to figure out what that line is, and how to keep machines comfortably below it.
But it makes you wonder, what would a sentient machine think of such an arrangement. Harry Harrison wrote a book, "Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers," which was mostly satire, but in one of his jokes was a real question. There was a planet with 2 species significant to the story line. The "Ormloo" looked like us, but were about as smart as cows. The other species, name forgotten, looked like cows but were as smart as us. They enjoyed their Ormloo-burgers. What do we think of that?
Kind of like engineering an animal for providing meat that wants to be eaten. (Restaurant at the End of the Universe)
We certainly could. But there would be that desire to have the robots program themselves, if only to save the cost of paying robot programmers. We've been slave-owners in the past, and I suspect that some would see no ethical dilemna in A.I. slaves.
I would add "today" somewhere in your first sentence. I'm sure that at some point there will be a growing desire for a "learning robot" that doesn't need all of that pesky detailed programming. So very likely robots will "evolve" to become automatons, though most likely non-anthropomorphic. (At some point it wouldn't even surprise me to see a decidedly non-human automaton sporting a face somewhere, for the comfort of the humans. Or how about a red hemisphere in a black rectangular panel?)
Regardless of the shape, I'm sure our wants will drive our robots toward automatons, whereupon we're on the slippery slope - assuming we find some way to stay on Moore's Law.
Doesn't this seem that we still have this desire for slavery?
Once upon a time, we out-and-out had slaves.
Then we freed them, sort of, and rehired them at almost-subsistence wages as sharecroppers.
Then we moved to off-shore workers, currently in a practically nonexistent standard of living, happy to have any sort of job.
Around the same time we also started in with illegal immigrants, again happy to have any sort of job, and more importantly, no ability to complain.
(Sometimes I think there's a movement afoot to push US workers into that last group - happy to have any sort of job, no ability to complain. That certainly seems to be the direction we've been headed, even without any sort of conspiracy.)
So aren't robots simply the next step in that kind of progression?
With this in mind, the real question becomes, how smart does the robot have to become before we achieve true artificial intelligence, and it really is a slave, at which point the only ethical thing to do is to free it.
I know my earlier mumblings were US centric, and these robots are in China. But I don't think the US is unique in this kind of progression, and given the fact that we've moved our robot-capable workload offshore, that makes it logical that this kind of thing would be done offshore first.
> What happens when giving up that information becomes the default cultural norm, and so
> choosing NOT to do becomes an inconvenience or barrier?
Certainly a valid issue - really yet another Tragedy of the Commons. Almost as applicable as a car analogy.
> Really simple example - do you have health insurance? If you do, then there is a large insurance
> company out there that has your entire medical record. You gave up your right to medical privacy
> (between just you & your doctor) when you agreed to purchase health insurance.
A tradeoff, not entirely happy, but unfortunately financially necessary.
> Or if you drive on the toll-roads around Chicago -- if you use the iPass, you pay a lower toll than
> if you pay with cash. But of course, they can electronically track you then, as well (with much less
> effort than processing photos of your license plates at the cash toll booths).
I don't live or drive near Chicago, though I used to use the New York State Thruway several times a year - and I never got a SpeedPass.
> What about if auto insurance companies began offering a discount to people who could
> prove safe driving habits with GPS data recorders in their cars? Seems reasonable enough -- if
> I never drive more than +10mph over the speed limit, maybe I'd take that deal to get a nice discount.
> And what if many people started doing that -- such that you now pay a substantially higher rate if
> you do NOT want the insurance company monitoring your driving habits?
Also a good question, another Tragedy of the Commons. Car analogy even more applicable.
> It's a tricky situation -- where do we draw the lines? And WHO draws the lines? Today with health
> insurance, there's a lot of heavy regulation such that insurance companies can't completely segment
> their customers (some would say "discriminate"). So does industry draw the lines? Does
> government? There are no clear & simple answers, just trade-offs & compromises.
Perhaps looking for clear and simple answers is like looking for "security in the long run." Offhand there has always been a tension between government and business. Back to analogies, there is also the elephant and the tiger. Which would you rather be tied to while sleeping. I tend to look at government as the elephant - it might roll over on you and crush you, but it's not generally seeking to harm you. The tiger, on the other hand, is prone to look at you as a meal, and maybe as long as you ALWAYS wake first, it's OK.
Now we're into the right realm...
I don't try to dictate how others live, and I with for the same from them - that they don't dictate how I live.
OTOH, some regulation is necessary, because we all live on this planet together. Your right to pollute air and water indiscriminately stops at my nose, mouth, and generally the rest of my body. Kind of like your right to swing your fist stops at my face.
I also believe that society has a general responsibility to protect children - the future of that society. But what you want to do with another consenting adult is none of my business. I don't particularly like the idea of gay marriage - so I'm not going to do it. But I also believe that that's your business.
As for "voluntarily give up certain personal info," the key word in that phrase is "voluntarily." As long as *I* get to choose to give up - or retain - that information, I'm find with that. If giving up some information improves my life, I may choose to do so. I'm a bit of a privacy bug, but I also recognize that I'm one of those "boring people," and if anything, my "privacy hobby" raises my profile some.
That's the best response. The others actually seemed to take me seriously.
Similar development cycles, hopefully E17 won't land with the same *thud* as DNF.
To a certain group of people, that's not a problem, it's a feature. That same group of people is certainly a lot more capable of influencing legislation than you or me, so it's likely to be "enhanced" in the future.
People keep saying that "one is just as bad as the other" when referring to US elections. But I would suggest that while Obama may not be effective at fighting income inequality, Romney is a poster-boy for it.
The real problem here is that most people seem to treat income inequality as an annoyance, not a real problem. As previously mentioned, some treat it as a feature to be furthered. But, and here it becomes My Opinion, you can't have the kind of high-energy economy the US had in the last half of the 20th century with the kind of income inequality we have not. A high-energy economy requires an engaged and enabled middle class.
Beyond that, economically speaking, a society with an engaged and enabled middle class will a feudal society, any day, hands-down. Think about the Cold War, for instance. That the US is systematically and deliberately destroying it's middle class reveals the actions of its "job creators" as being motivated by pure greed, rather than "enlightened self-interest by a group of very capable people."
But Saturn's rings are dust - because bigger pieces ground themselves down to that. It has also taken a looong time to get that way, and we don't know what the intermediate states were. I'll agree that "graveyard orbits" are simply something higher than geosync, but in fact EVERY TIME we think we've had an "infinite garbage heap" we've made it into a problem. I'd feel a whole lot safer if we began by conserving our graveyard orbits. For instance, when we send stuff out on Earth-escape paths.
How save is the graveyard orbit, really? It'll be even less likely to decay than geosync, but isn't it then a "fixed size trashcan?" At some point won't you start getting collisions, and some of the pieces might get enough delta-V to get in the way. Certainly the graveyard orbit is cheaper than de-orbit, but for the long run, have our repair satellite tow them out there and attach them to the junkyard. (The other dead satellites, all "tied" together.)
More likely, the most valuable thing up there is not the satellite, it's the position it's occupying. Once upon a time, we tried to keep 2 degrees of separation between geosync satellites - meaning that there were 180 "slots" where one could be placed, and obviously fewer than that that could service any one location. The separation keeps dropping, but that makes the need for stationkeeping more precise, probably calling for more fuel, etc.
So the best thing here is to keep those geosync slots in use, and not chewing up an empty slot with a dead or useless satellite. I'll have to agree with what someone else said - that de-orbit should be a published option, as well.
Personally, I believe the best option is a big, gravity-gradient-stabilized boom, with some serious solar panel capacity on the outer side, battery capacity to match, and standardized electrical and mechanical hookups. Then rather than sending up complete satellites, lease hookups on the boom, and just send up an electronics package. In this case, the "service satellite" carries the package up, anchors and connects it, and does initial checkout.
Surprising nobody has identified the purchase price in a fraud lawsuit - yet.
This is Slashdot - I was just being lazy, and this is one place to do it. Besides, on other sub-threads there was such amazement at one-engine-down operation, and incorrect statements like, "We haven't been able to do that since the Saturn V."
I'm surprised to see that the Falcon can complete the entire mission on 8 engines from any point. That says that they've paid a significant weight penalty to achieve that redundancy. NASA vehicles have only been able to declare an engine (or two) redundant after a certain point in the flight profile.
That just says that they're going to inject the DNA - it doesn't say that they're going to get viable embryos out of it.