Private commercial spaceflight is already happening and is a multi-billion dollar industry in terms of annual revenue.
But it's entirely unmanned, and isn't that mostly communications satellites in LEO?
Private commercial spaceflight will happen eventually. I just don't know if it will happen in America or somewhere else like China or India. It would be a sad day if socialism is so entrenched in America that private companies can't succeed to access the resources of space.
So far I haven't seen any indication that China or India is taking a less socialistic route to space - they're basically following the militaristic/nationalistic path blazed by the US and Russia. China has two big advantages over us in this respect: they don't have democratic accountability, which in the US results in structural inefficiencies being propagated by influential politicians (i.e. "you must use solid fuel booster rockets for the next launch vehicle"), and a huge chunk of their economy is still controlled by the government, which probably gives them more leverage than if they were dealing with nominally independent contractors. (There are other economic and technological factors too, but I'm focusing on the issue of capitalist versus socialist development here.) Very little happens in China without an explicit go-ahead from the CCP.
The real reason why private commercial spaceflight hasn't advanced very far, IMHO, is that it has historically required relatively huge up-front capital costs, and because anything beyond communications satellites has been too expensive and too unprofitable for companies to pursue. A secondary reason, I suspect, is that the US was never very motivated to pursuing inexpensive spaceflight - efficiency was less important than "winning the space race" and the perceived military and technological advantage this implied. Russia, on the other hand, was relatively poor and their national development in the first half of the 20th century couldn't have been more different from America's. The perverse result is that the country with an economy that was relatively primitive (and riddled with structural inefficiencies) ended up with a more sustainable space program. If the US had been poorer, and less fixated on the strategic aspect of space travel, maybe we'd have abandoned the shuttle early on in favor of something cheaper and more useful. But ultimately, it would have simply been a different variety of socialism at work.
And it's not about just privatizing a lot of space stuff.
It's arguably not about privatizing at all - it's about doing it in such a way that NASA actually saves money. The launch vehicles have already been privately built for a long time now, but under "cost-plus" contracts where NASA guarantees a profit, and with significant political interference from Congress (and, to be fair, top-down design decisions). It was easy to forget this because programs like the space shuttle were not run competitively, and what we ended up with was a tangled mess of NASA and private companies - the military-industrial complex in action. The launch costs were insanely expensive in part because there was no incentive to keep them down. Space-X (and at least one other company - Orbital Sciences, maybe?) wants to be competitive for fixed-price contracts.
Note that if in ten years, NASA is using companies like Space-X for all of its launches, the space program will not be "privatized" to a significantly greater degree than it already has been for decades. The question that remains to be seen is not whether the new paradigm will result in cheaper launch costs (it will), but whether the success rate and safety record will be equal or better.
I'd be happy with just a 10-person interplanetary spaceship more along the lines of the NAUTLUS-X
I agree completely - I think the central premise of this article is insane.
The counter argument I have for that is opening up similar scale mines here on the Earth costs a similar amount of money. It certainly isn't out of the question for a large scale open pit mine to cost several billion dollars up front before it starts to turn a profit, and similar capital outlays toward off-short oil drilling platforms are fairly common as well.
Okay, but that actually makes me more pessimistic - those aren't being constructed in the middle of a vacuum and bombarded by hard radiation. The production of the open pit mine is also going to be directed towards terrestrial applications, e.g. consumer goods and construction. The only justification for space mining right now would be to avoid having to launch crude resources up a gravity well for space-based projects, which also aren't profitable.
Building a spaceship to go out and grab a 1m asteroid is not necessarily going to cost billions of dollars. There is certainly "low hanging fruit" which can be grabbed that would have some significant value and can be obtained cheaply.
Sure, but what can you do with a 1m asteroid in orbit? You still need to build infrastructure to process these rocks and turn them into something else, which is where the real money sink is. I'm sure it's possible to build a spacecraft capable of towing a much larger asteroid into high orbit for not too much money, but building an orbital refinery to extract useful materials will be a huge task, even if we optimistically assume that Space-X, Bigelow, etc. succeed in making orbital travel affordable for a private company. To be fair, I haven't thought through the logistics very thoroughly (which I'm sure the backers have), but I still don't see where this becomes profitable. At best I can see it being sustainable through the incomes of a group of interested billionaires who aren't expecting to make anything back - which, granted, would be a huge improvement over the current situation.
Sorry, my typo: I should have written "orbital infrastructure". Even if they contract out for launches (which I agree would be the logical thing to do), and even assuming that the launch costs come down significantly, getting all that hardware into orbit is a shitload of money. They're talking about moving industrial production into space, something that has never been done before. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to make it more efficient than what NASA does, but I can't see how this isn't going to cost billions of dollars in up-front expenses by the time they actually get around to asteroid mining. I'd certainly love to be wrong, and I'm glad someone is trying this - however, it's an incredible leap to go from what they're doing now to being able to support building a 1000-person interplanetary spaceship.
2) No one has a trillion dollars to spend on this.
You forgot:
3) No way this is going to cost only $1 trillion.
If you read studies by people who actually do this kind of thing for a living, it's obvious that these programs are vastly more expensive than this engineer thinks. His budget estimate is probably made assuming that there will never be any unexpected technical, political, or economic obstacles, that cost overflows will always be zero, and everything will work the first time. I'd guess this means that it's off by an order of magnitude. (Note that the total cost for Apollo was estimated to be $170 billion in 2005 dollars, and Apollo is child's play compared to this.)
A secondary problem is that he's put all of his eggs in one basket, creating one impossibly complex system that has too many points of failure just because it looks cool. The ISS is tiny compared to this and runs on technology we understand and mostly have lots of experience with, and it still cost $150 billion and is a pain in the ass to maintain. We would do far better to design a smaller ship - say, a crew of 10 - powered by a single nuclear reactor, and build a half-dozen of these. I'd bank on it being significantly less expensive than his Enterprise, more sustainable, and far likelier to succeed. But even this would be a massive undertaking; in another couple of decades it might look more realistic.
Other than the fact that Planetary Resoruces is already turning a profit
Only because they're just doing technology development with a budget in the millions to tens of millions, and not actually doing any of the messy stuff yet, like orbital launches. I wish them the best of luck, because it would be a huge advance if they can make their business plan work, but let's wait and see how they're doing after spending billions of dollars on launch infrastructure before we break out the triumphalism, okay?
We're gonna spend a lot more than a trillion dollars on the F-35
Right, and if the F-35 program cost us that much, what makes you think this guy's estimate is anywhere close to what it would actually cost to build this ship?
Our guys have been asleep at the wheel for the last 10 years. I'm pretty sure at this point that most of the U.S. Justices don't even know there *is* a 4th Amendment, much less what it says.
Actually, to the surprise of quite a few observers (myself included), the Supreme Court just unanimously ruled that law enforcement agencies can't simply slap a GPS tracker on your car without a warrant. The majority's ruling was actually relatively limited, but was based on 4th Amendment grounds. Alito and several of the liberals actually pushed for an even broader decision. God knows the SC tends to favor the government in too many cases, but this was about as clear a victory for protection against unreasonable search and seizure as we've seen in a long time.
You mean kind of like the way the USA is spending beyond its means on all sorts of things while many are homeless?
I don't approve of my country's budget priorities either, but there's a couple of crucial differences:
1. It's not illegal for the homeless to seek gainful employment in the private sector.
2. It's not illegal for the homeless to leave the country and find another with less craptastic public policy.
In North Korea, everyone is completely at the mercy of the government for every need, all the time. Complaining means getting thrown into prison camp. Trying to escape the country means getting thrown into prison camp. Trying to make money to support your family because your government job stopped paying you two years ago could also mean getting thrown into prison camp, except from what I've read NK stopped enforcing that rule because it's the only way most of the country is still alive.
The people of North Korea are serfs - there's simply no other word for it. When the majority of the USA is burning garbage to stay warm, the entire population is several inches shorter than Canadians, and the border to Mexico is blocked by barbed wire and guard towers to keep the Americans from emigrating, then you can make simplistic comparisons.
Are you really clueless enough to take the language of the bill at face value, or are you just feigning ignorance again? Do you really not know the history of science education in this country, or what interest groups are supporting the bill? Do you really believe that the bill is anything other than an attempt to allow teachers to raise "intelligent design" as a valid scientific criticism of evolution (which it isn't)? Or any of the other standard bullshit in the creationist repertoire, such as "evolution contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics"?
Don't put words into my mouth. Of course the strengths and weaknesses of any theory should be debated. But we all know this won't actually happen, because the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory have nothing to do with the reason why it's "controversial" outside of the scientific community. The law is an opening to push intelligent design (if not outright young-earth creationism), which, in contrast to evolution, is not a valid scientific theory because it requires supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. Everyone knows this is the purpose (well, that and questioning global warming). What is it with creationists being deliberately obtuse?
many folks (not necessarily you) seem to be pushing for is to censor the discussion rather than engage in open debate about theories that we simply don't know to be fact.
I don't see anyone pushing for censorship of frank and open scientific discussion. What we don't want is to see blatantly unscientific explanations, such as creationism, presented as science. Which is exactly what the law is designed to promote, behind all of the noble language about open discourse and scientific inquiry.
What we should teach in schools is that a fact is distinguished from a theory in certain ways, that facts and theories both provide meaningful aids in understanding our world but that they are not equivalent. Further, when we teach a theory in school, we should teach it as a theory not as a fact. Student should know what we know for certain and what we have had to derive from the facts available to us.
Taken at face value, I don't think any scientist, in biology or otherwise, would disagree with you. But like so many others in this thread, you're being disingenuous. We both know the reason for this emphasis on "theory" versus "fact" is to raise doubts about evolution, etc., and to imply that scientists could easily be mistaken. The purpose of the bill isn't to encourage critical thinking about modern science, it's to discourage critical thinking about a specific worldview (one which has nothing to do with science). Stop hiding behind pedantry.
You're basically holding biology to an impossible standard. By your logic, we also can't make any claims about geological processes or stellar evolution, because they happen on time scales we can't deal with. (At this point I'm guessing that you don't believe the mainstream scientific theories in these fields either.) But we'd like to think we know an awful lot about these phenomena, because we repeatedly observe many intermediate forms. In many other fields the evidence is equally indirect - much of particle physics is based on analyzing what happens when particles decay, because we can't observe or measure their properties directly. The best we can do is make informed theories based on the available scientific evidence - theories which explain our observations without introducing additional external factors, like omnipotent deities.
So, if you want to be pedantic about "theory" versus "fact", go ahead. It doesn't change anything as far as science is concerned: the theory of evolution is supported by all available scientific evidence, and no one has come up with a plausible, non-supernatural alternative explanation for the data biologists and paleontologists have collected over the last 150 years. What exactly should we teach in schools, then?
Stop being disingenuous. The law specifically mentions the theory of evolution as being controversial. They're not pushing this legislation because it allows teachers to critique the strengths and weaknesses of Gould's hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium - it's an opening to attack the last 150 years of life sciences research.
Congratulations. You are more open minded than the educated majority
Don't be too quick to pat me on the back. I said we (scientists) don't know the answer, and our best guess is no more than that, but this doesn't mean that we support any of the superstitious bullshit that's been put forth as alternative explanations. The distinction is whether it does science harm to admit when we don't know something; I think it's more damaging (intellectually speaking) to make unsupported claims, no matter how scientifically sound, even as an alternative to blatantly unscientific claims. I suspect a lot of scientists would disagree with me from the perspective of public relations - because they think that admitting we don't know the answers to everything would simply be further ammunition for creationists and other naysayers. Sadly, they're probably correct.
I suspect that most of the folks engaged in this discussion are thinking of the theory of evolution as the set of ideas that provide a description of how life began on Earth and how the various more complex species evolved from a single celled organism.
I don't think this is the case at all; I think a few people are trying to blur the issue by combining something we don't understand at all (origin of cellular life) with something we understand very well (evolution of modern life). The latter is indeed what is under discussion here, and I repeat, there is nothing controversial about it except among the lay public.
The creationist view also suggests common descent from a universal ancestor, most creationists (though not all) would argue that common ancestor was in the same species.
Sigh... that's not what "common descent" means in biology. There's an essential phrase that I left out because it is implicitly assumed in this context: "all modern lifeforms".
Of course there is no controversy among the scientists. They want the grant money gravy train to continue.
Inevitably, this is always where any debate over "controversial" science heads - someone will claim that there's a massive conspiracy of scientists to keep the truth from the public. What amuses me is how perfectly this is mirrored on the nuttier fringes of both the Left and the Right: the Left claims that greedy scientists are conspiring with Big Pharma to hide the truth about vaccines, AIDS, and alternative medicine, while the Right claims that greedy scientists are in cahoots with Big Government to hide the truth about evolution, global warming, and the age of the Earth. Never mind that there are far, far better ways to make money than wasting most of your youth trying to start an academic career and groveling to the NIH. If the scientific evidence doesn't support your pre-determined worldview, then of course, it must have been doctored!
How many times has evolution been shown to be accurate? The last time I checked the conditions under which life supposedly evolved have not been recreated a single time. No "live" organisms have been synthesized from primordial ooze even once.
I think you're missing the distinction between "theory of evolution" and "hypothesis of abiogenesis". The latter does indeed lack firm scientific evidence; the best we have right now without recourse to the supernatural are guesses. The theory of evolution, i.e. common descent from a universal ancestor, is about as well-proven as anything in modern biology.
Ergo, until that is done repeatedly under laboratory conditions, atheists, your theory of the origin of life remains exactly that.
True. But unlike creationism, it's a theory that is consistent with the scientific evidence and scientific method, in that it does not resort to supernatural explanations. I don't have a problem with science teachers telling students "frankly, we don't have a clue how life started", because that's the truth. The problem is that this law is opening the door for them to say "we don't know how life started, therefore it must have been created by a supernatural being." And more importantly, the goal isn't just to question abiogenesis - the entire concept of common descent is a target.
Except it doesn't. The "controversy" is manufactured by religious pressure groups; among actual scientists, while there certainly are controversies about the mechanisms of evolution, the fact of evolution is not disputed, save for a handful of professional cranks. We shouldn't have to be sensitive to their views, any more than flat-earthers, moon hoaxers, 9/11 Truthers, or Birthers.
In the meantime, the rest of the World - even die hard theocratic countries - are pushing science educatoin
True, but apparently many Muslims (in both the Middle East and Europe) are just as militantly against the theory of evolution as evangelical Christians in the US. Moreover, it's not like many of these developing countries don't have their own pathologies; China still officially endorses Marxism, which as far as I'm concerned is as nutty as any religion. And everything I read about the Chinese government and their education system makes it sound like it's designed to crush independent thought and initiative. Our own godawful education system often does this more or less by accident, of course, but nearly every country - especially in the developing world - has struggles between modernizers and reactionaries, and the role of religion is complicated. (In China, for instance, the liberals endorse religious freedom, while the conservatives are militantly atheist.)
What's really depressing to me is that in a country which still has the world's largest economy - the country that started the biotech industry and the Internet - the state whose mean income is 44th in the nation thinks this is a worthy cause. But Tennessee isn't exactly Silicon Valley.
the problem is we aren't working seriously on any of these things.
Actually, we are, but probably not with as large a budget as you (or I) would like. The National Ignition Facility isn't too dissimilar in concept from the Daedalus engine, and it may have a chance of generating surplus power. For the space elevator, we simply need much better materials, and there is an awful lot of research (public and private) in that area.
The timeline for this probably isn't decades, though - centuries would be more realistic. It's true that rapid unexpected advances in technology are possible, but it's also true that you can pour a massive amount of money into something and end up no further than you were before. (Case in point: the space shuttle.) Additionally, there is a real problem with scale - the advances in technology that you mention result from electronics becoming miniaturized and more efficient. But mega-projects like the LHC or ITER are still extremely expensive. Quite a bit of time and effort is required to make those helium-cooled superconducting magnets, and economies of scale don't seem to apply.
The technology isn't that hard really, it's the political will. Creating that technology and building things at the scale needed for success requires massive funding
But that's exactly why the technology is hard. Given unlimited sums of money, there are many scientific and technological endeavors that become technically feasible or even trivial: fusion power, Mars colonies, cancer cures, eliminating dependency on fossil fuels, etc. The problem is that we don't have unlimited sums of money, and we don't know in advance of any shortcuts of miraculous developments that would make something like interstellar travel affordable (let alone profitable).
Some actual numbers are required to really understand how far away we are. The best study of interstellar travel that I'm aware of is Project Daedalus from the 1970s. The hypothetical spacecraft - unmanned - would have been powered and propelled by D/He3 inertial confinement fusion, and would take 50 years to reach Barnard's Star, where it would release several probes. The fuel would be obtained by siphoning He3 out of Jupiter's atmosphere over a 20-year period. Estimated cost was $100 trillion. This is for an unmanned probe that would take most of a human lifetime to reach a very close star. To give you some perspective, the annual US budget is $3.6 trillion, and the entire global GNP is around $70 trillion. We do not actually know how to build most of this technology (although ICF may be almost within reach) - we only know that it is probably technically possible. More importantly, we do not know how we might build it cheaply.
I'm all for continuing research into nuclear fusion, new propulsion systems, industrial automation, exoplanets, etc. But the idea that we could have an interstellar spaceflight program if only we found the "political will" is utterly detached from reality. The problem isn't that people in general are stupid: the problem is that people don't want the government to redirect a massive portion of their economic output towards a project that we don't know how to build, won't be completed in their lifetime, and won't improve their lives on Earth. (And still wouldn't ensure the survival of the species, for that matter.) That's not stupidity, that's common sense.
The dinosaurs showed what happens when you don't invest in a space program. They had hundreds of millions of years to do so, yet they didn't bother (for obvious reasons), and then a giant asteroid wiped them out.
This comes up in every single thread on this topic, and the response is always the same: if we suffered a similar impact, Earth would still be a vastly more hospitable environment for humans than anywhere else that we know of, including Mars. It would undoubtedly result in mass extinction, and a large fraction of the human race would probably die from starvation, but we could still sustain millions (if not billions) of lives indefinitely, albeit at a greatly reduced standard of living. The dinosaurs died out because they lacked technology and food cultivation altogether.
The more I learn about Watson the more I'm inclined to believe he was a dick.
I've never met him, but I've heard quite a few people - including some old-school molecular biologists, the kind that enjoy humiliating grad students during discussion sections or qualifying exams - express this opinion. Edward O. Wilson's autobiography, Naturalist, is also pretty uncomplimentary (they were faculty at Harvard together when Watson won the Nobel prize). Watson managed to piss off a great number of people during his scientific career.
Crick, on the other hand, seems to have been almost universally liked and respected.
Slashdot Mirror
Private commercial spaceflight is already happening and is a multi-billion dollar industry in terms of annual revenue.
But it's entirely unmanned, and isn't that mostly communications satellites in LEO?
Private commercial spaceflight will happen eventually. I just don't know if it will happen in America or somewhere else like China or India. It would be a sad day if socialism is so entrenched in America that private companies can't succeed to access the resources of space.
So far I haven't seen any indication that China or India is taking a less socialistic route to space - they're basically following the militaristic/nationalistic path blazed by the US and Russia. China has two big advantages over us in this respect: they don't have democratic accountability, which in the US results in structural inefficiencies being propagated by influential politicians (i.e. "you must use solid fuel booster rockets for the next launch vehicle"), and a huge chunk of their economy is still controlled by the government, which probably gives them more leverage than if they were dealing with nominally independent contractors. (There are other economic and technological factors too, but I'm focusing on the issue of capitalist versus socialist development here.) Very little happens in China without an explicit go-ahead from the CCP.
The real reason why private commercial spaceflight hasn't advanced very far, IMHO, is that it has historically required relatively huge up-front capital costs, and because anything beyond communications satellites has been too expensive and too unprofitable for companies to pursue. A secondary reason, I suspect, is that the US was never very motivated to pursuing inexpensive spaceflight - efficiency was less important than "winning the space race" and the perceived military and technological advantage this implied. Russia, on the other hand, was relatively poor and their national development in the first half of the 20th century couldn't have been more different from America's. The perverse result is that the country with an economy that was relatively primitive (and riddled with structural inefficiencies) ended up with a more sustainable space program. If the US had been poorer, and less fixated on the strategic aspect of space travel, maybe we'd have abandoned the shuttle early on in favor of something cheaper and more useful. But ultimately, it would have simply been a different variety of socialism at work.
And it's not about just privatizing a lot of space stuff.
It's arguably not about privatizing at all - it's about doing it in such a way that NASA actually saves money. The launch vehicles have already been privately built for a long time now, but under "cost-plus" contracts where NASA guarantees a profit, and with significant political interference from Congress (and, to be fair, top-down design decisions). It was easy to forget this because programs like the space shuttle were not run competitively, and what we ended up with was a tangled mess of NASA and private companies - the military-industrial complex in action. The launch costs were insanely expensive in part because there was no incentive to keep them down. Space-X (and at least one other company - Orbital Sciences, maybe?) wants to be competitive for fixed-price contracts.
Note that if in ten years, NASA is using companies like Space-X for all of its launches, the space program will not be "privatized" to a significantly greater degree than it already has been for decades. The question that remains to be seen is not whether the new paradigm will result in cheaper launch costs (it will), but whether the success rate and safety record will be equal or better.
I'd be happy with just a 10-person interplanetary spaceship more along the lines of the NAUTLUS-X
I agree completely - I think the central premise of this article is insane.
The counter argument I have for that is opening up similar scale mines here on the Earth costs a similar amount of money. It certainly isn't out of the question for a large scale open pit mine to cost several billion dollars up front before it starts to turn a profit, and similar capital outlays toward off-short oil drilling platforms are fairly common as well.
Okay, but that actually makes me more pessimistic - those aren't being constructed in the middle of a vacuum and bombarded by hard radiation. The production of the open pit mine is also going to be directed towards terrestrial applications, e.g. consumer goods and construction. The only justification for space mining right now would be to avoid having to launch crude resources up a gravity well for space-based projects, which also aren't profitable.
Building a spaceship to go out and grab a 1m asteroid is not necessarily going to cost billions of dollars. There is certainly "low hanging fruit" which can be grabbed that would have some significant value and can be obtained cheaply.
Sure, but what can you do with a 1m asteroid in orbit? You still need to build infrastructure to process these rocks and turn them into something else, which is where the real money sink is. I'm sure it's possible to build a spacecraft capable of towing a much larger asteroid into high orbit for not too much money, but building an orbital refinery to extract useful materials will be a huge task, even if we optimistically assume that Space-X, Bigelow, etc. succeed in making orbital travel affordable for a private company. To be fair, I haven't thought through the logistics very thoroughly (which I'm sure the backers have), but I still don't see where this becomes profitable. At best I can see it being sustainable through the incomes of a group of interested billionaires who aren't expecting to make anything back - which, granted, would be a huge improvement over the current situation.
Sorry, my typo: I should have written "orbital infrastructure". Even if they contract out for launches (which I agree would be the logical thing to do), and even assuming that the launch costs come down significantly, getting all that hardware into orbit is a shitload of money. They're talking about moving industrial production into space, something that has never been done before. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to make it more efficient than what NASA does, but I can't see how this isn't going to cost billions of dollars in up-front expenses by the time they actually get around to asteroid mining. I'd certainly love to be wrong, and I'm glad someone is trying this - however, it's an incredible leap to go from what they're doing now to being able to support building a 1000-person interplanetary spaceship.
2) No one has a trillion dollars to spend on this.
You forgot:
3) No way this is going to cost only $1 trillion.
If you read studies by people who actually do this kind of thing for a living, it's obvious that these programs are vastly more expensive than this engineer thinks. His budget estimate is probably made assuming that there will never be any unexpected technical, political, or economic obstacles, that cost overflows will always be zero, and everything will work the first time. I'd guess this means that it's off by an order of magnitude. (Note that the total cost for Apollo was estimated to be $170 billion in 2005 dollars, and Apollo is child's play compared to this.)
A secondary problem is that he's put all of his eggs in one basket, creating one impossibly complex system that has too many points of failure just because it looks cool. The ISS is tiny compared to this and runs on technology we understand and mostly have lots of experience with, and it still cost $150 billion and is a pain in the ass to maintain. We would do far better to design a smaller ship - say, a crew of 10 - powered by a single nuclear reactor, and build a half-dozen of these. I'd bank on it being significantly less expensive than his Enterprise, more sustainable, and far likelier to succeed. But even this would be a massive undertaking; in another couple of decades it might look more realistic.
Other than the fact that Planetary Resoruces is already turning a profit
Only because they're just doing technology development with a budget in the millions to tens of millions, and not actually doing any of the messy stuff yet, like orbital launches. I wish them the best of luck, because it would be a huge advance if they can make their business plan work, but let's wait and see how they're doing after spending billions of dollars on launch infrastructure before we break out the triumphalism, okay?
We're gonna spend a lot more than a trillion dollars on the F-35
Right, and if the F-35 program cost us that much, what makes you think this guy's estimate is anywhere close to what it would actually cost to build this ship?
Our guys have been asleep at the wheel for the last 10 years. I'm pretty sure at this point that most of the U.S. Justices don't even know there *is* a 4th Amendment, much less what it says.
Actually, to the surprise of quite a few observers (myself included), the Supreme Court just unanimously ruled that law enforcement agencies can't simply slap a GPS tracker on your car without a warrant. The majority's ruling was actually relatively limited, but was based on 4th Amendment grounds. Alito and several of the liberals actually pushed for an even broader decision. God knows the SC tends to favor the government in too many cases, but this was about as clear a victory for protection against unreasonable search and seizure as we've seen in a long time.
You mean kind of like the way the USA is spending beyond its means on all sorts of things while many are homeless?
I don't approve of my country's budget priorities either, but there's a couple of crucial differences:
1. It's not illegal for the homeless to seek gainful employment in the private sector.
2. It's not illegal for the homeless to leave the country and find another with less craptastic public policy.
In North Korea, everyone is completely at the mercy of the government for every need, all the time. Complaining means getting thrown into prison camp. Trying to escape the country means getting thrown into prison camp. Trying to make money to support your family because your government job stopped paying you two years ago could also mean getting thrown into prison camp, except from what I've read NK stopped enforcing that rule because it's the only way most of the country is still alive.
The people of North Korea are serfs - there's simply no other word for it. When the majority of the USA is burning garbage to stay warm, the entire population is several inches shorter than Canadians, and the border to Mexico is blocked by barbed wire and guard towers to keep the Americans from emigrating, then you can make simplistic comparisons.
why are you afraid of that?
Are you really clueless enough to take the language of the bill at face value, or are you just feigning ignorance again? Do you really not know the history of science education in this country, or what interest groups are supporting the bill? Do you really believe that the bill is anything other than an attempt to allow teachers to raise "intelligent design" as a valid scientific criticism of evolution (which it isn't)? Or any of the other standard bullshit in the creationist repertoire, such as "evolution contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics"?
Don't put words into my mouth. Of course the strengths and weaknesses of any theory should be debated. But we all know this won't actually happen, because the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory have nothing to do with the reason why it's "controversial" outside of the scientific community. The law is an opening to push intelligent design (if not outright young-earth creationism), which, in contrast to evolution, is not a valid scientific theory because it requires supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. Everyone knows this is the purpose (well, that and questioning global warming). What is it with creationists being deliberately obtuse?
many folks (not necessarily you) seem to be pushing for is to censor the discussion rather than engage in open debate about theories that we simply don't know to be fact.
I don't see anyone pushing for censorship of frank and open scientific discussion. What we don't want is to see blatantly unscientific explanations, such as creationism, presented as science. Which is exactly what the law is designed to promote, behind all of the noble language about open discourse and scientific inquiry.
What we should teach in schools is that a fact is distinguished from a theory in certain ways, that facts and theories both provide meaningful aids in understanding our world but that they are not equivalent. Further, when we teach a theory in school, we should teach it as a theory not as a fact. Student should know what we know for certain and what we have had to derive from the facts available to us.
Taken at face value, I don't think any scientist, in biology or otherwise, would disagree with you. But like so many others in this thread, you're being disingenuous. We both know the reason for this emphasis on "theory" versus "fact" is to raise doubts about evolution, etc., and to imply that scientists could easily be mistaken. The purpose of the bill isn't to encourage critical thinking about modern science, it's to discourage critical thinking about a specific worldview (one which has nothing to do with science). Stop hiding behind pedantry.
You're basically holding biology to an impossible standard. By your logic, we also can't make any claims about geological processes or stellar evolution, because they happen on time scales we can't deal with. (At this point I'm guessing that you don't believe the mainstream scientific theories in these fields either.) But we'd like to think we know an awful lot about these phenomena, because we repeatedly observe many intermediate forms. In many other fields the evidence is equally indirect - much of particle physics is based on analyzing what happens when particles decay, because we can't observe or measure their properties directly. The best we can do is make informed theories based on the available scientific evidence - theories which explain our observations without introducing additional external factors, like omnipotent deities.
So, if you want to be pedantic about "theory" versus "fact", go ahead. It doesn't change anything as far as science is concerned: the theory of evolution is supported by all available scientific evidence, and no one has come up with a plausible, non-supernatural alternative explanation for the data biologists and paleontologists have collected over the last 150 years. What exactly should we teach in schools, then?
Stop being disingenuous. The law specifically mentions the theory of evolution as being controversial. They're not pushing this legislation because it allows teachers to critique the strengths and weaknesses of Gould's hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium - it's an opening to attack the last 150 years of life sciences research.
Congratulations. You are more open minded than the educated majority
Don't be too quick to pat me on the back. I said we (scientists) don't know the answer, and our best guess is no more than that, but this doesn't mean that we support any of the superstitious bullshit that's been put forth as alternative explanations. The distinction is whether it does science harm to admit when we don't know something; I think it's more damaging (intellectually speaking) to make unsupported claims, no matter how scientifically sound, even as an alternative to blatantly unscientific claims. I suspect a lot of scientists would disagree with me from the perspective of public relations - because they think that admitting we don't know the answers to everything would simply be further ammunition for creationists and other naysayers. Sadly, they're probably correct.
I suspect that most of the folks engaged in this discussion are thinking of the theory of evolution as the set of ideas that provide a description of how life began on Earth and how the various more complex species evolved from a single celled organism.
I don't think this is the case at all; I think a few people are trying to blur the issue by combining something we don't understand at all (origin of cellular life) with something we understand very well (evolution of modern life). The latter is indeed what is under discussion here, and I repeat, there is nothing controversial about it except among the lay public.
The creationist view also suggests common descent from a universal ancestor, most creationists (though not all) would argue that common ancestor was in the same species.
Sigh... that's not what "common descent" means in biology. There's an essential phrase that I left out because it is implicitly assumed in this context: "all modern lifeforms".
Of course there is no controversy among the scientists. They want the grant money gravy train to continue.
Inevitably, this is always where any debate over "controversial" science heads - someone will claim that there's a massive conspiracy of scientists to keep the truth from the public. What amuses me is how perfectly this is mirrored on the nuttier fringes of both the Left and the Right: the Left claims that greedy scientists are conspiring with Big Pharma to hide the truth about vaccines, AIDS, and alternative medicine, while the Right claims that greedy scientists are in cahoots with Big Government to hide the truth about evolution, global warming, and the age of the Earth. Never mind that there are far, far better ways to make money than wasting most of your youth trying to start an academic career and groveling to the NIH. If the scientific evidence doesn't support your pre-determined worldview, then of course, it must have been doctored!
How many times has evolution been shown to be accurate? The last time I checked the conditions under which life supposedly evolved have not been recreated a single time. No "live" organisms have been synthesized from primordial ooze even once.
I think you're missing the distinction between "theory of evolution" and "hypothesis of abiogenesis". The latter does indeed lack firm scientific evidence; the best we have right now without recourse to the supernatural are guesses. The theory of evolution, i.e. common descent from a universal ancestor, is about as well-proven as anything in modern biology.
Ergo, until that is done repeatedly under laboratory conditions, atheists, your theory of the origin of life remains exactly that.
True. But unlike creationism, it's a theory that is consistent with the scientific evidence and scientific method, in that it does not resort to supernatural explanations. I don't have a problem with science teachers telling students "frankly, we don't have a clue how life started", because that's the truth. The problem is that this law is opening the door for them to say "we don't know how life started, therefore it must have been created by a supernatural being." And more importantly, the goal isn't just to question abiogenesis - the entire concept of common descent is a target.
the controversy exists
Except it doesn't. The "controversy" is manufactured by religious pressure groups; among actual scientists, while there certainly are controversies about the mechanisms of evolution, the fact of evolution is not disputed, save for a handful of professional cranks. We shouldn't have to be sensitive to their views, any more than flat-earthers, moon hoaxers, 9/11 Truthers, or Birthers.
In the meantime, the rest of the World - even die hard theocratic countries - are pushing science educatoin
True, but apparently many Muslims (in both the Middle East and Europe) are just as militantly against the theory of evolution as evangelical Christians in the US. Moreover, it's not like many of these developing countries don't have their own pathologies; China still officially endorses Marxism, which as far as I'm concerned is as nutty as any religion. And everything I read about the Chinese government and their education system makes it sound like it's designed to crush independent thought and initiative. Our own godawful education system often does this more or less by accident, of course, but nearly every country - especially in the developing world - has struggles between modernizers and reactionaries, and the role of religion is complicated. (In China, for instance, the liberals endorse religious freedom, while the conservatives are militantly atheist.)
What's really depressing to me is that in a country which still has the world's largest economy - the country that started the biotech industry and the Internet - the state whose mean income is 44th in the nation thinks this is a worthy cause. But Tennessee isn't exactly Silicon Valley.
the problem is we aren't working seriously on any of these things.
Actually, we are, but probably not with as large a budget as you (or I) would like. The National Ignition Facility isn't too dissimilar in concept from the Daedalus engine, and it may have a chance of generating surplus power. For the space elevator, we simply need much better materials, and there is an awful lot of research (public and private) in that area.
The timeline for this probably isn't decades, though - centuries would be more realistic. It's true that rapid unexpected advances in technology are possible, but it's also true that you can pour a massive amount of money into something and end up no further than you were before. (Case in point: the space shuttle.) Additionally, there is a real problem with scale - the advances in technology that you mention result from electronics becoming miniaturized and more efficient. But mega-projects like the LHC or ITER are still extremely expensive. Quite a bit of time and effort is required to make those helium-cooled superconducting magnets, and economies of scale don't seem to apply.
The technology isn't that hard really, it's the political will. Creating that technology and building things at the scale needed for success requires massive funding
But that's exactly why the technology is hard. Given unlimited sums of money, there are many scientific and technological endeavors that become technically feasible or even trivial: fusion power, Mars colonies, cancer cures, eliminating dependency on fossil fuels, etc. The problem is that we don't have unlimited sums of money, and we don't know in advance of any shortcuts of miraculous developments that would make something like interstellar travel affordable (let alone profitable).
Some actual numbers are required to really understand how far away we are. The best study of interstellar travel that I'm aware of is Project Daedalus from the 1970s. The hypothetical spacecraft - unmanned - would have been powered and propelled by D/He3 inertial confinement fusion, and would take 50 years to reach Barnard's Star, where it would release several probes. The fuel would be obtained by siphoning He3 out of Jupiter's atmosphere over a 20-year period. Estimated cost was $100 trillion. This is for an unmanned probe that would take most of a human lifetime to reach a very close star. To give you some perspective, the annual US budget is $3.6 trillion, and the entire global GNP is around $70 trillion. We do not actually know how to build most of this technology (although ICF may be almost within reach) - we only know that it is probably technically possible. More importantly, we do not know how we might build it cheaply.
I'm all for continuing research into nuclear fusion, new propulsion systems, industrial automation, exoplanets, etc. But the idea that we could have an interstellar spaceflight program if only we found the "political will" is utterly detached from reality. The problem isn't that people in general are stupid: the problem is that people don't want the government to redirect a massive portion of their economic output towards a project that we don't know how to build, won't be completed in their lifetime, and won't improve their lives on Earth. (And still wouldn't ensure the survival of the species, for that matter.) That's not stupidity, that's common sense.
The dinosaurs showed what happens when you don't invest in a space program. They had hundreds of millions of years to do so, yet they didn't bother (for obvious reasons), and then a giant asteroid wiped them out.
This comes up in every single thread on this topic, and the response is always the same: if we suffered a similar impact, Earth would still be a vastly more hospitable environment for humans than anywhere else that we know of, including Mars. It would undoubtedly result in mass extinction, and a large fraction of the human race would probably die from starvation, but we could still sustain millions (if not billions) of lives indefinitely, albeit at a greatly reduced standard of living. The dinosaurs died out because they lacked technology and food cultivation altogether.
The more I learn about Watson the more I'm inclined to believe he was a dick.
I've never met him, but I've heard quite a few people - including some old-school molecular biologists, the kind that enjoy humiliating grad students during discussion sections or qualifying exams - express this opinion. Edward O. Wilson's autobiography, Naturalist, is also pretty uncomplimentary (they were faculty at Harvard together when Watson won the Nobel prize). Watson managed to piss off a great number of people during his scientific career.
Crick, on the other hand, seems to have been almost universally liked and respected.