> Meanwhile, Congress sat on it's hands and did almost nothing to help > deal with the costs which were spiraling out of control.
So NOW what can we do? Kick the ineffective Democrats out? Last I heard, and I'm only being mildly partisan here, the Republican plan was to remove restrictions on medical and insurance industries. I can agree that some regulations are getting in the way of doing things more cheaply, but I don't think that's the real reason we don't have universally affordable health care.
When it comes right down to it, you get what you measure. The positive measurements in our society are things like GDP, the Dow, and the NASDAQ. Statistics of unemployment, poor health, etc are bad measurements, and for those you do a combination of "shoot the messenger" and hide the statistics. A decade or two back, my brother said that outside of its military, the USSR looked more like a third-world country. Sometimes it seems that the US is aspiring to the same goal.
I agree with wanting infrastructure up there. I also agree that business doesn't do well putting its own money into infrastructure, and this IS something that government can do well.
But launching stuff to LEO ought to be Business As Usual by now. NASA and the government shouldn't need to be in the business of developing LEO launch vehicles. OTOH, they should be one of several customers of private enterprise LEO launch capacity. Putting infrastructure into LEO is certainly a good thing for government to be doing with purchased launch capacity. NASA using that infrastructure as a springboard toward deeper space, both unmanned and manned, is also a good thing.
Makes me think a little of "Snow Crash" and some of his Stephenson's other books. Some of it was poor, some cheesy, but he threw so many great ideas at you so fast that you just didn't care about the bad parts, because the good parts were so much fun.
Stephenson's books were just plain fun, though once I saw the names "Shaftoe" and "Waterhouse" turning up in "The Baroque Cycle" I just skipped the whole series. Another just plain fun book, for some of the same reasons, was "The Algebraist" by Iaian Banks. (of Culture fame)
Don't forget one of Asimov's characters, early in the Foundation years, with that immortal line, "The galaxy's going to pot!" Maybe this choice of writer is a good thing.
Two immediate responses are prompted by this article...
First is to call to mind the fate of the Muslim civilization in the second millennium. The Muslims kept the lights on during the Dark Ages. They're the reason we know about the ancient Greeks. In those days, science was considered good, because it was discovery of God's world and ways. Somewhere about the middle of the second millennium the Muslim civilization encountered other pressures (like invasions) and turned their backs on science in favor of religious dogma. (Don't know if there was cause and effect there, coincidental timing, or some other relationship.) They've never been at the forefront of civilization since. We're starting to do the same thing here in the US. One key part of science is to face the world truthfully, whatever it tells you, and deal with it. Religion can help you deal with it. But when you impose religion as a "truth filter" between you and the real world, you've lost it.
Second, a more tactical response, is to quit following Texas' lead on textbook purchases. Is there any reason we have to let them set the standard, or is it a combination of laziness and their purchasing power?
My guess is that for Google, people will hem and haw, decide they'd be inconvenienced, and finally decide that if Google failed they could get by.
Linux/Mac/other-alternative users aside, I'm guessing that for the bulk of society, Microsoft IS too big to fail. The stuff wouldn't stop running, (or would it, how does WGA/activation/etc really work, these days?) but imagine the security situation after a month of no patch Tuesdays.
Next try Comcast, Verizon, ATT, IBM, Oracle, etc. The real question here is if the affected products would run long enough and safely enough on "inertia" to permit migration. Think of the side effects of some of the L3 snits in the past.
I think some of the "good old days" of NASA were the nostalgia of imperfect memory. Even were I to grant your point during Apollo, that era didn't last much beyond Apollo 11 - the program was mostly on inertia by that point. Apollo 13 was a fantastic triumph yanked from the jaws of failure, and I'm really glad that Apollo 17 made it, so we could actually watch lift-off from another world. But 18-20 were all canceled, and Skylab/ASTP basically used the spare parts.
The way I heard it, Nixon really disliked Apollo, because it was Kennedy's vision. So your "changed every 4 years or so" really started when Nixon delegated to Agnew to outline the new mission, "Mars is next, but there's no hurry."
It's not clear yet that intelligence is a survival trait. At best it's worked for about a million years, and it's not clear how much longer it will continue. Large size worked for hundreds of millions of years - maybe it's better for survival. Again in SciFi, I once read a story, title forgotten, where in order to get an edge in biological weapons, one faction visited a hive creature that lived in an asteroid. While the protagonists were there, the hive creature finished growing an "intelligent mobile" to figure out how to deal with us. On an earlier encounter it had figured out that intelligence was going to be necessary, so did the right things to grow some. The intelligent critter spoke with the protagonists, outlining its responses to the threat we represented. In the conversation, it revealed that it had a lifetime of about 5000 years, which so far had proven to be more than enough time to deal with intelligent races, before they generally killed themselves off. Then it would go back to being a dumb hive creature - simply surviving.
As for "ending mainstream economics as we know it," it could well be either that or human life. At one end of the spectrum we have a group of people who struggle to feed and maintain themselves, with not enough time to get the basics done. At the far end, we have one man who owns, "the machine that does everything," and nobody else has a job because there's nothing left to do. In the latter case, if you keep "mainstream economics as we know it," that man sells all goods and services to everyone else, until they have no money left. Then they die, not the least because the one man also owns all of the land and other resources, so they can't go back to being the former primitive group I mentioned.
But really, is the wish for AI simply the wish for a return to slavery? If we really created an AI, would we be morally obligated to free it? If we granted AIs the right to vote, wouldn't it be the ultimate "packing the ballot box," because they could clone either onto as much hardware as they could buy, or as many instances as they could run on their current hardware?
But "fast" is an interesting item. Though a GHz CPU can certainly rip through the calculations, we've only gotten recently to the point where computer-driven machinery can hop on one leg. My kids could do that with measly kHz organic brains after less than 1/2 dozen years. Of course the organic models are a stunning model of parallelism and distributed processing. Even Kurzweil doesn't think we're at parity, yet.
I would agree that once you've "trained" and AI and have it doing useful interactions, you could checkpoint its state, and use that to preload a new copy. Do they both get to vote? Talk about packing the polls.
They don't do spit when you first turn them on - that takes a few days, and then it smells like sour milk.
It takes about 2 years to start getting intelligible words out of them.
It takes between 10 and 20 years before you can start consistently having an adult-level conversation with them.
I have no idea when one of the could have really passed a Turing test. (FYI, they both passed that point many years ago.)
I'm being a little facetious, but not entirely. Let's assume we're building these neural nets, modeled after real brains. Why should we expect them to spring like Athena from Zeus' head, fully adult and fully Turing-capable. There's a phrase, "only a mother could love." I have a gut-feel that any AI that takes too much after organic brains, is going to take the long path to being recognizable as Intelligence, just like us. Maybe not as long as us, but clearly not at power-on time, either. Maybe longer, even. My wife spent hours playing with and talking to our infant children, even before they were equipped to return it. But it was part of what gave them something to model, part of their learning how to be like us. Who is going to do that with a hardware/software experiment? Will the software have the right hardware to let them experience it? Will it be more like an intelligence in a state of sensory deprivation?
The biggest camp is the "Every decision NASA makes is wrong" - The Shuttle is the biggest boondoggle ever, we never should have dropped the Apollo-era Big Dumb Booster. - Dropping the Shuttle is the dumbest idea ever, we've set our technology back 40 years. - Etc, with every decision NASA makes
Then we have the closely related camp, "Everything the government does is wrong, and the private sector can do it better and cheaper."
Now that we're about to test that theorem, at least with LEO access, a new camp has emerged, saying that by dropping LEO access, NASA has abandoned human space travel for the US. Interestingly enough, it has taken Aries from "can't possibly work" to "can't do without it" status.
This of course is closely related to the "Obama (and Democrats, in general) is ALWAYS wrong" and "Bush (and Republicans, in general) is ALWAYS wrong" camps.
I prefer to belong to none of the above camps. Through my career I've noticed in general that killed projects tend to develop a sunny afterglow, problems forgotten. Projects that are killed before ever being tested in the real world get a particularly sunny afterglow.
Go try Heretic or Hexen - the originals based on Doom, and then make your call. Doom restricted things so you couldn't look up or down, and simplified the perspective issue. Heretic (followed by Hexen) added the ability to look up and down, and showed pretty bad perspective distortion.
I went to a University whose perhaps biggest contribution to science and mankind was a failure. Case Western Reserve University was where the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiments took place - the failure to find the aether that launched Special Relativity. Einstein once came there, "to see where it all started."
Me too, and for some illogical reason in the back of my mind, I've blamed him for the Challenger explosion ever since. I know it makes no sense - it's just an odd association.
Getting to LEO isn't rocket science, any more. We've been doing that for over 50 years, now.
By now it's rocket engineering, and appropriate for the private sector.
Keep NASA in the rocket science business - deep space, new technologies, etc. The goal here is for the private sector to do it faster and cheaper, enabling other things to piggyback on top - like even further out rocket science. Too much of NASA's attention is spent on that first 100-200 miles.
You forgot about the environmental problems caused by mining coal.
Things like this are called "externalized costs." The fun thing is being a champion at externalizing your costs, then protesting the taxes needed to fund cleaning up the mess you just shoved under the rug.
People who make their money on scarcity fear the onset of plenty.
Everyone suffers from the, "What's good for me is good for America," syndrome, even me.
Put those two together, and you get your friend from Texas - or the MafiAA.
There's no shortage of science fiction that examines the impact of the "replicator" on society, sometimes as a side-item. I know a co-worker who is uncomfortable with ST:NG because it was "too socialistic". The way I looked at the series, the basics of life were so cheap that under normal circumstances they could be taken for granted, most of the time. Everyone had moved beyond that on the hierarchy of needs, and their concerns were much more sophisticated.
Or for another example I would suggest Joe Haldeman's "The Forever Peace". It's not a sequel to "The Forever War" - that's "Forever Free", but it's an excellent book in its own right, and touches on some fascinating topics.
I might feel the same as you, but I like the idea of privatization more.
Try it on this way, there's nothing *visionary* at all about LEO launches. There's not even much *visionary* about high-orbit launches, or even escape launches. The time for launching from Earth to be *visionary* was long ago, and it's long over.
If we want to do anything *visionary* out there, we need to be doing final assembly in orbit and launching from there. Launching the kinds of *visionary* things you and I both want to see from Earth is like folding up a covered wagon in England, tucking it into a ship that can barely hold it, and sending it to America. Then when it reaches shore it deploys its wheels, unfolds the top, unships the horses from the hold, and starts on the trail to California.
We need rich tycoons in LEO, I hate to say. We need Bigelow's hotel in LEO. Once we get enough of that garbage into LEO, costs will come down. THEN we can afford a real space station instead of the budget butchery called the ISS. At a real space station we can build real spaceships and send them for some real *visionary* stuff. I share your annoyance and bitterness, but I also think we're at the awkward point right now. If we can just make LEO cheap, the rest can come a lot more simply.
Now for another thought about sending people beyond cislunar space... The big problem is radiation - a lifetime's worth on the simplest Mars mission. One of the better radiation shields is polyethylene - odd but true. I could envision a veritable blimp on its way to Mars - with minimal inflation between layers of polyethylene - the gas selected for its radiation shielding properties. Maybe even an inside-out spacecraft at the center of that blimp with the crew compartment central, surrounded by water (or what else?) tanks for additional shielding. That would be built along some sort of truss with VASMIR engines at the ends, as well sensors, anchor points for the inflated shielding, etc. Now THAT's something you'll never fold into a 33ft diameter payload and launch from Earth.
More near-term thought... Space probes begin with "the standard truss", available in several lengths and load ratings. Attach one of several standard engines, standard ion or VASMIR, with the "LEO departure chemical booster" being optional. There would be several solar panel options, based on electricity needs and how far out it's going, in addition to several RTG options. Ditto for communications subsystems, rated on distance, bitrate, etc. Finally you start bolting your scientific packages onto the truss. There are the stock mechanical attachment points, the stock power connectors, and the stock data connectors. The ONLY part you really have to worry about is your scientific package. The rest is standard - out of a catalog. Then when something even more *visionary* comes up, that the catalog parts can't meet, for one reason or another, design a new part and add it to the catalog, for the next guy. Now that's *visionary*!
Works is a matter of degree - it's not binary. My employer is "rich", they give me a job, and compared to many parts of the world, or even other parts of the US, I'm "rich". On the other hand, my employer is moving practically every possible job out of the US. I feel that the only reason my job hasn't been moved is that it isn't growing. There's a cost (both in time and money, and time IS money.) to move jobs, and the job is small enough and not growing, there's not a lot of reason not to leave it here.
So yeah, the "rich" spend money and they employ people - and globalization takes people less lucky than me and turns them from "rich" to "poor", generally making "rich" people even "richer". If you want to say that that's the way of the world and the way of the Free Market, go ahead. But realize that as a side-effect, its moving the US downscale from a first-world nation, and/or preventing parts of it from climbing up to first-world nation status. Take a look at any recent statistics, and the US is at the bottom of the first-world, even below the top emerging and third-world nations, in some respects.
So yeas, you can say the system works in PRACTICE, but remember that extremely imbalanced wealth distribution tends to be a defining characteristic of third-world nations. Then call yourself a CHRISTIAN and a PATRIOT.
> And what is social security? A mild form of socialism.
The last administration tried to do away with (privatize) social security. One of my pet fears is that the new 2012 administration with same-party Executive and Legislative branches will enact the "Fiscal Responsibility and Recovery Act" that will sunset social security, medicare, medicaid, and who knows, maybe even the FDIC/FSLIC in order to undo the last traces of "Socialist FDR". Of course that *might* correct the deficit problem, if it weren't followed almost immediately by the "Economic Stimulus and Recovery Act" that removed the top tax bracket and sunset capital gains and inheritance taxes - pushing the deficits back up to where they were prior to the two "recovery acts". Except by this time, the federal government would be so small that you could snuff it out with a blanket, or whatever the phrase was.
> I believe that we've slowly warmed up to the idea that the best economic > system lies somewhere between pure capitalism and pure socialism.
I'm there, and I'll agree that states are moving along the spectrum. But there are strong forces pushing the nation toward pure capitalism - savage, green in tooth and claw. Personally I think/fear it's really heading toward feudalism, not capitalism or socialism.
> Decentralization of power back to the states is good.
In theory I can agree with that. The problem in practice is that corporations wield much more economic power relative to the states. Ever watch the states start lifting their skirts whenever a corporation says, "We want to build a new plant." The real problem is the concessions the states make, and there's no guarantee that all of those new jobs won't get outsourced and the plant shut down a few years later.
Slashdot Mirror
> Meanwhile, Congress sat on it's hands and did almost nothing to help
> deal with the costs which were spiraling out of control.
So NOW what can we do? Kick the ineffective Democrats out? Last I heard, and I'm only being mildly partisan here, the Republican plan was to remove restrictions on medical and insurance industries. I can agree that some regulations are getting in the way of doing things more cheaply, but I don't think that's the real reason we don't have universally affordable health care.
When it comes right down to it, you get what you measure. The positive measurements in our society are things like GDP, the Dow, and the NASDAQ. Statistics of unemployment, poor health, etc are bad measurements, and for those you do a combination of "shoot the messenger" and hide the statistics. A decade or two back, my brother said that outside of its military, the USSR looked more like a third-world country. Sometimes it seems that the US is aspiring to the same goal.
I agree with wanting infrastructure up there. I also agree that business doesn't do well putting its own money into infrastructure, and this IS something that government can do well.
But launching stuff to LEO ought to be Business As Usual by now. NASA and the government shouldn't need to be in the business of developing LEO launch vehicles. OTOH, they should be one of several customers of private enterprise LEO launch capacity. Putting infrastructure into LEO is certainly a good thing for government to be doing with purchased launch capacity. NASA using that infrastructure as a springboard toward deeper space, both unmanned and manned, is also a good thing.
Makes me think a little of "Snow Crash" and some of his Stephenson's other books. Some of it was poor, some cheesy, but he threw so many great ideas at you so fast that you just didn't care about the bad parts, because the good parts were so much fun.
Stephenson's books were just plain fun, though once I saw the names "Shaftoe" and "Waterhouse" turning up in "The Baroque Cycle" I just skipped the whole series. Another just plain fun book, for some of the same reasons, was "The Algebraist" by Iaian Banks. (of Culture fame)
It didn't just have the movie title, it had "Susan Calvin, Action Hero!"
Don't forget one of Asimov's characters, early in the Foundation years, with that immortal line, "The galaxy's going to pot!" Maybe this choice of writer is a good thing.
Two immediate responses are prompted by this article...
First is to call to mind the fate of the Muslim civilization in the second millennium. The Muslims kept the lights on during the Dark Ages. They're the reason we know about the ancient Greeks. In those days, science was considered good, because it was discovery of God's world and ways. Somewhere about the middle of the second millennium the Muslim civilization encountered other pressures (like invasions) and turned their backs on science in favor of religious dogma. (Don't know if there was cause and effect there, coincidental timing, or some other relationship.) They've never been at the forefront of civilization since. We're starting to do the same thing here in the US. One key part of science is to face the world truthfully, whatever it tells you, and deal with it. Religion can help you deal with it. But when you impose religion as a "truth filter" between you and the real world, you've lost it.
Second, a more tactical response, is to quit following Texas' lead on textbook purchases. Is there any reason we have to let them set the standard, or is it a combination of laziness and their purchasing power?
Then, "Is Microsoft too big to fail?"
My guess is that for Google, people will hem and haw, decide they'd be inconvenienced, and finally decide that if Google failed they could get by.
Linux/Mac/other-alternative users aside, I'm guessing that for the bulk of society, Microsoft IS too big to fail. The stuff wouldn't stop running, (or would it, how does WGA/activation/etc really work, these days?) but imagine the security situation after a month of no patch Tuesdays.
Next try Comcast, Verizon, ATT, IBM, Oracle, etc. The real question here is if the affected products would run long enough and safely enough on "inertia" to permit migration. Think of the side effects of some of the L3 snits in the past.
I think some of the "good old days" of NASA were the nostalgia of imperfect memory. Even were I to grant your point during Apollo, that era didn't last much beyond Apollo 11 - the program was mostly on inertia by that point. Apollo 13 was a fantastic triumph yanked from the jaws of failure, and I'm really glad that Apollo 17 made it, so we could actually watch lift-off from another world. But 18-20 were all canceled, and Skylab/ASTP basically used the spare parts.
The way I heard it, Nixon really disliked Apollo, because it was Kennedy's vision. So your "changed every 4 years or so" really started when Nixon delegated to Agnew to outline the new mission, "Mars is next, but there's no hurry."
It's not clear yet that intelligence is a survival trait. At best it's worked for about a million years, and it's not clear how much longer it will continue. Large size worked for hundreds of millions of years - maybe it's better for survival. Again in SciFi, I once read a story, title forgotten, where in order to get an edge in biological weapons, one faction visited a hive creature that lived in an asteroid. While the protagonists were there, the hive creature finished growing an "intelligent mobile" to figure out how to deal with us. On an earlier encounter it had figured out that intelligence was going to be necessary, so did the right things to grow some. The intelligent critter spoke with the protagonists, outlining its responses to the threat we represented. In the conversation, it revealed that it had a lifetime of about 5000 years, which so far had proven to be more than enough time to deal with intelligent races, before they generally killed themselves off. Then it would go back to being a dumb hive creature - simply surviving.
As for "ending mainstream economics as we know it," it could well be either that or human life. At one end of the spectrum we have a group of people who struggle to feed and maintain themselves, with not enough time to get the basics done. At the far end, we have one man who owns, "the machine that does everything," and nobody else has a job because there's nothing left to do. In the latter case, if you keep "mainstream economics as we know it," that man sells all goods and services to everyone else, until they have no money left. Then they die, not the least because the one man also owns all of the land and other resources, so they can't go back to being the former primitive group I mentioned.
But really, is the wish for AI simply the wish for a return to slavery?
If we really created an AI, would we be morally obligated to free it?
If we granted AIs the right to vote, wouldn't it be the ultimate "packing the ballot box," because they could clone either onto as much hardware as they could buy, or as many instances as they could run on their current hardware?
But "fast" is an interesting item. Though a GHz CPU can certainly rip through the calculations, we've only gotten recently to the point where computer-driven machinery can hop on one leg. My kids could do that with measly kHz organic brains after less than 1/2 dozen years. Of course the organic models are a stunning model of parallelism and distributed processing. Even Kurzweil doesn't think we're at parity, yet.
I would agree that once you've "trained" and AI and have it doing useful interactions, you could checkpoint its state, and use that to preload a new copy. Do they both get to vote? Talk about packing the polls.
I've had a share in the creation of two N.I.s
They don't do spit when you first turn them on - that takes a few days, and then it smells like sour milk.
It takes about 2 years to start getting intelligible words out of them.
It takes between 10 and 20 years before you can start consistently having an adult-level conversation with them.
I have no idea when one of the could have really passed a Turing test. (FYI, they both passed that point many years ago.)
I'm being a little facetious, but not entirely. Let's assume we're building these neural nets, modeled after real brains. Why should we expect them to spring like Athena from Zeus' head, fully adult and fully Turing-capable. There's a phrase, "only a mother could love." I have a gut-feel that any AI that takes too much after organic brains, is going to take the long path to being recognizable as Intelligence, just like us. Maybe not as long as us, but clearly not at power-on time, either. Maybe longer, even. My wife spent hours playing with and talking to our infant children, even before they were equipped to return it. But it was part of what gave them something to model, part of their learning how to be like us. Who is going to do that with a hardware/software experiment? Will the software have the right hardware to let them experience it? Will it be more like an intelligence in a state of sensory deprivation?
So the number of "Space Camps" is increasing...
The biggest camp is the "Every decision NASA makes is wrong"
- The Shuttle is the biggest boondoggle ever, we never should have dropped the Apollo-era Big Dumb Booster.
- Dropping the Shuttle is the dumbest idea ever, we've set our technology back 40 years.
- Etc, with every decision NASA makes
Then we have the closely related camp, "Everything the government does is wrong, and the private sector can do it better and cheaper."
Now that we're about to test that theorem, at least with LEO access, a new camp has emerged, saying that by dropping LEO access, NASA has abandoned human space travel for the US. Interestingly enough, it has taken Aries from "can't possibly work" to "can't do without it" status.
This of course is closely related to the "Obama (and Democrats, in general) is ALWAYS wrong" and "Bush (and Republicans, in general) is ALWAYS wrong" camps.
I prefer to belong to none of the above camps. Through my career I've noticed in general that killed projects tend to develop a sunny afterglow, problems forgotten. Projects that are killed before ever being tested in the real world get a particularly sunny afterglow.
Likely most people don't install Silverlight any more than they install Windows.
Go try Heretic or Hexen - the originals based on Doom, and then make your call. Doom restricted things so you couldn't look up or down, and simplified the perspective issue. Heretic (followed by Hexen) added the ability to look up and down, and showed pretty bad perspective distortion.
I went to a University whose perhaps biggest contribution to science and mankind was a failure. Case Western Reserve University was where the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiments took place - the failure to find the aether that launched Special Relativity. Einstein once came there, "to see where it all started."
No, I still believe the ISS is still interesting - we may all want a Von Braun wheel, but the ISS is a necessary step to getting there.
But you hire a vehicle to get there.
Me too, and for some illogical reason in the back of my mind, I've blamed him for the Challenger explosion ever since. I know it makes no sense - it's just an odd association.
Getting to LEO isn't rocket science, any more. We've been doing that for over 50 years, now.
By now it's rocket engineering, and appropriate for the private sector.
Keep NASA in the rocket science business - deep space, new technologies, etc. The goal here is for the private sector to do it faster and cheaper, enabling other things to piggyback on top - like even further out rocket science. Too much of NASA's attention is spent on that first 100-200 miles.
You forgot about the environmental problems caused by mining coal.
Things like this are called "externalized costs." The fun thing is being a champion at externalizing your costs, then protesting the taxes needed to fund cleaning up the mess you just shoved under the rug.
Just remember... a coal-fired powerplant releases more radioactivity into the atmosphere than a nuclear plant. (except Chernobyl, I guess.)
Bingo... I saw this thing about loan guarantees for new construction, and was hoping Entergy wasn't on the list.
Yankee replacement - by a competent company, would be a good idea. But from all appearances, that plant's had the radish.
People who make their money on scarcity fear the onset of plenty.
Everyone suffers from the, "What's good for me is good for America," syndrome, even me.
Put those two together, and you get your friend from Texas - or the MafiAA.
There's no shortage of science fiction that examines the impact of the "replicator" on society, sometimes as a side-item. I know a co-worker who is uncomfortable with ST:NG because it was "too socialistic". The way I looked at the series, the basics of life were so cheap that under normal circumstances they could be taken for granted, most of the time. Everyone had moved beyond that on the hierarchy of needs, and their concerns were much more sophisticated.
Or for another example I would suggest Joe Haldeman's "The Forever Peace". It's not a sequel to "The Forever War" - that's "Forever Free", but it's an excellent book in its own right, and touches on some fascinating topics.
I might feel the same as you, but I like the idea of privatization more.
Try it on this way, there's nothing *visionary* at all about LEO launches. There's not even much *visionary* about high-orbit launches, or even escape launches. The time for launching from Earth to be *visionary* was long ago, and it's long over.
If we want to do anything *visionary* out there, we need to be doing final assembly in orbit and launching from there. Launching the kinds of *visionary* things you and I both want to see from Earth is like folding up a covered wagon in England, tucking it into a ship that can barely hold it, and sending it to America. Then when it reaches shore it deploys its wheels, unfolds the top, unships the horses from the hold, and starts on the trail to California.
We need rich tycoons in LEO, I hate to say. We need Bigelow's hotel in LEO. Once we get enough of that garbage into LEO, costs will come down. THEN we can afford a real space station instead of the budget butchery called the ISS. At a real space station we can build real spaceships and send them for some real *visionary* stuff. I share your annoyance and bitterness, but I also think we're at the awkward point right now. If we can just make LEO cheap, the rest can come a lot more simply.
Now for another thought about sending people beyond cislunar space... The big problem is radiation - a lifetime's worth on the simplest Mars mission. One of the better radiation shields is polyethylene - odd but true. I could envision a veritable blimp on its way to Mars - with minimal inflation between layers of polyethylene - the gas selected for its radiation shielding properties. Maybe even an inside-out spacecraft at the center of that blimp with the crew compartment central, surrounded by water (or what else?) tanks for additional shielding. That would be built along some sort of truss with VASMIR engines at the ends, as well sensors, anchor points for the inflated shielding, etc. Now THAT's something you'll never fold into a 33ft diameter payload and launch from Earth.
More near-term thought... Space probes begin with "the standard truss", available in several lengths and load ratings. Attach one of several standard engines, standard ion or VASMIR, with the "LEO departure chemical booster" being optional. There would be several solar panel options, based on electricity needs and how far out it's going, in addition to several RTG options. Ditto for communications subsystems, rated on distance, bitrate, etc. Finally you start bolting your scientific packages onto the truss. There are the stock mechanical attachment points, the stock power connectors, and the stock data connectors. The ONLY part you really have to worry about is your scientific package. The rest is standard - out of a catalog. Then when something even more *visionary* comes up, that the catalog parts can't meet, for one reason or another, design a new part and add it to the catalog, for the next guy. Now that's *visionary*!
Works is a matter of degree - it's not binary. My employer is "rich", they give me a job, and compared to many parts of the world, or even other parts of the US, I'm "rich". On the other hand, my employer is moving practically every possible job out of the US. I feel that the only reason my job hasn't been moved is that it isn't growing. There's a cost (both in time and money, and time IS money.) to move jobs, and the job is small enough and not growing, there's not a lot of reason not to leave it here.
So yeah, the "rich" spend money and they employ people - and globalization takes people less lucky than me and turns them from "rich" to "poor", generally making "rich" people even "richer". If you want to say that that's the way of the world and the way of the Free Market, go ahead. But realize that as a side-effect, its moving the US downscale from a first-world nation, and/or preventing parts of it from climbing up to first-world nation status. Take a look at any recent statistics, and the US is at the bottom of the first-world, even below the top emerging and third-world nations, in some respects.
So yeas, you can say the system works in PRACTICE, but remember that extremely imbalanced wealth distribution tends to be a defining characteristic of third-world nations. Then call yourself a CHRISTIAN and a PATRIOT.
> And what is social security? A mild form of socialism.
The last administration tried to do away with (privatize) social security. One of my pet fears is that the new 2012 administration with same-party Executive and Legislative branches will enact the "Fiscal Responsibility and Recovery Act" that will sunset social security, medicare, medicaid, and who knows, maybe even the FDIC/FSLIC in order to undo the last traces of "Socialist FDR". Of course that *might* correct the deficit problem, if it weren't followed almost immediately by the "Economic Stimulus and Recovery Act" that removed the top tax bracket and sunset capital gains and inheritance taxes - pushing the deficits back up to where they were prior to the two "recovery acts". Except by this time, the federal government would be so small that you could snuff it out with a blanket, or whatever the phrase was.
> I believe that we've slowly warmed up to the idea that the best economic
> system lies somewhere between pure capitalism and pure socialism.
I'm there, and I'll agree that states are moving along the spectrum. But there are strong forces pushing the nation toward pure capitalism - savage, green in tooth and claw. Personally I think/fear it's really heading toward feudalism, not capitalism or socialism.
> Decentralization of power back to the states is good.
In theory I can agree with that. The problem in practice is that corporations wield much more economic power relative to the states. Ever watch the states start lifting their skirts whenever a corporation says, "We want to build a new plant." The real problem is the concessions the states make, and there's no guarantee that all of those new jobs won't get outsourced and the plant shut down a few years later.