But that's not how rot works. It's the exposure to oxygen that counts. If I leave an iron rod in water, it's not actively pursuing oxygen, but it sure will rust.
You misunderstand economics. Economics is all about opportunity cost. If we didn't send people into space, what's the next best thing we could do with that money? Is it a better use of that money than manned spaceflight? Weinberg says yes. So does anyone who looks at the numbers. It's people who get caught up in the emotional appeal that want to send people into space.
Another poster compared these experiments to grade school science fairs. I think the comparison is apt. They're not really doing important scientific work; they just need to come up with an experiment because someone is forcing them to. They end up taking some dubious experiment and repeating it under some dubious conditions. "Do mice learn mazes faster while I'm playing music?"
The problem with Tough Crowd is that Quinn (a) isn't really all that funny; and (b) uses the show to argue a conservative point of view against his guests, who are typically much funnier and more liberal than him. The show can be funny when he lets his guests speak long enough to deliver their punchlines, but too often it's just him trying to make a point about something.
I mean, it's obvious that Comedy Central wanted a show with a conservative bent to follow the generally liberal Daily Show. There's nothing wrong with that, but the man they chose for it takes it as his personal mission. If it weren't so cheap (any comic with career issues will come on, and lots of comics owe favors to Comedy Central), I'm sure they'd just cut it. What kind of ratings can it get anyway?
They do the same thing today with HDTV. They love to show you a bunch of tiny old TVs next to a huge new HD screen so the disparity is as great as possible. Of course, they try to show you the "quality" of the new system. I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to judge a higher-resolution screen as viewed through my low-resolution screen. Yet sometimes they show a HD screen by itself and say "look at the quality!" as if they think it's somehow going to show through to me. I think it's pretty funny actually.
Remember how cheesy color support was on the first color Macs? (The Mac II was the first to be available with color, IIRC.) Pretty much none of the applications had any color. The OS didn't have much either--they added on a Color menu (to the right of the Special menu IIRC). You could select an icon in the Finder and use the Color menu to give it a color. Since the icon was B&W, you were really just replacing black with the chosen color.
When System 7 was released, they cleaned up the Color menu by calling it the Label menu. Basically, they gave the colors names, and allowed you to change those names from a Control Panel. Luckily it was no longer the only use of color in the OS, and most apps supported color by then.
So remember the next time some Mac zealot tells you that Apple always has great UI design and they've never gone wrong: they once had a Color menu.
The DoJ brings antitrust cases on behalf of the federal government. They tend to have an opinion on which companies are violating antitrust laws and which ones aren't.
(You're right that in theory, the State Department (foreign ministry) should be the one engaging in diplomacy, but there are so many facets of foreign relations that other departments like to handle their own little parts of the pie--assuming the subject is not too sensitive. Trade is generally under the aegis of the Commerce Department, but again this is an antitrust issue rather than a trade issue.)
I tend to browse with lots of tabs. I want tabs to open quickly. Nothing loads faster than about:blank. If I want to visit a site often, I'll make a bookmark.
Why does the modern Soyuz have a better safety record than the Shuttle? Why did our old ballistic missiles have a better safety record than the Shuttle? Even the enormous Saturn V rockets never had an accident in flight.[1]
Why does the Shuttle have such a terrible safety record relative to other rockets that attain orbit?
I'll tell you why: because it was over-ambitious. Congress was sold on the idea of a re-usable (read: cheap) launch vehicle that can do cool stuff like repair satellites. The truth of the matter is that if we had stuck with traditional launch vehicles (fire-once rockets), the money we saved over the long run would have allowed us to just replace failing satellites rather than repair them. (How many satellites have we repaired anyway?) We could even have built the space station for less. (Look at how we launched Skylab. Surely we could have repeated that a few times to get as large a space station as we wanted.) The legacy of the Shuttle is that of an overpriced, underperforming safety hazard.
All manned spaceflight is dangerous. The Shuttle is just more dangerous that most.
[1] The Apollo capsule had two serious accidents, one on the ground and one on the way to the moon.
On the other hand, I believe it to be a part of the healing process to convince the general public that they are, in fact taking the Columbia disaster extremely seriously, and want to show progress in the inspection and faliure-cathing procedures that obviously did not work for Columbia.
Why didn't they do this after Challenger? Are they so thick they needed two disasters in order to get serious about safety?
The suttle program has a remarkable safety record, Challenger and Columbia no matter.
I have a car to sell you. It has a great safety record. Oh, of all the cars of this model ever built, 40% were destroyed in catastrophic accidents that killed all the passengers. But cars of this model have been taken on trips over one hundred times! What a great safety record that is! You couldn't be safer than to buy this car.
I don't get it--what is there on Mars that's so complicated? Every place we've looked we've found rocks (to be analyzed) and... a pretty sky. What specific tasks are these humans going to be doing? You speak in generalities about the flexibility of humans, but the only example you give is drilling.
That's right, you say we need to raise the mission cost several fold in order to send humans, so that they can drill on Mars. And the reason a robot can't drill? Because there might be macroscopic fossils there. There's a very simple solution. Only have the robot drill where we tell it to drill. We can use cameras on the robot to pick out those locations. Wait a minute--that's exactly what we're doing right now! This isn't far-future technology here.
Seriously, do you have any other specific things to do on Mars that humans are needed for? Not philosophical qualities, but actual tasks.
Oh, I understand all that. I just don't see why my money should be used to further it. I have nothing against you running a marathon or climbing a mountain--more power to you. But that's because you don't ask me to pay for those things. (It may be different where you live, but where I live the big annual marathon needs sponsorship to pay for the police to cordon off the route.)
Not all of us can afford vacations and mountain climbing. Some of us have to deal with the real world. For us, the triumph of imagination doesn't pay the bills.
We should have stuck to the original five. Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Earth doesn't count, since all these revolve around it.
The original seven, actually. The sun and the moon were planets. And yes, they all revolved around Earth. Church "scientists" were the first to add to this system; they put Heaven above the planets.
Your message will be 100% correct when a robot on the ground can do as much as a human being there. In order for this to be true we need (besides advances in power storage and all the technologies involved in robotics) instaneous communications at least throughout the solar system, or true artificial intelligence. Since neither of these technologies are likely to be discovered in the near term, it is arguably worth sending humans on such journeys. You could also make the argument that we would do better to spend our efforts on exploring our own world, but the benefits of the space program to date have been enormous, and there is so much more to be done that I think equivalent strides can yet be made in its pursuit.
What exactly is there that a human could do on Mars that a robot couldn't do? Look at what our astronauts did on the moon: planted flags, walked around, and picked up rocks. They hit golf balls, dropped feathers to prove that Newton was (grossly) right, and commented on how pretty the Earth looks from a distance. Oh, later on they drove around. Out of all those things, two were useful: they moved around, and they picked up rocks to bring back to Earth. A robot can do that too. We can point out which rocks it should pick up and it will do that. We can even have robots that launch back to Earth so we can analyze those rocks properly, something even humans can't do without machine assistance. I just don't see the "killer app" for humans that makes them more compelling than robots.
Other than, of course, sentimentality. If you want to spend your money on that, fine, but I don't see why governments should pay for a big "feel good" mission.
From things as simple as velcro and dehydrated food, to sophisticated electronics, there are huge benefits to everyone that are never mentioned when people bitch about the costs.
I don't know where the ridiculous myth that velcro was a byproduct of space exploration started. Electronics were used in space, but not developed for space. They were developed for commercial and military applications. Even rockets were developed for the military: the first Americans in space were flying on converted ballistic missiles. Space exploration just kind of tagged along for the ride.
Manned space travel will continue to be necessary if we wish to explore further out or in more detail. Robots can only do things you planned on, and going into the unexpected is the whole point of exploration. The communications lag will also increase. The 8 minute lag to mars limits the speed and manuvuerability of the rovers. While this is fine for now, eventually we will reach a point where further research requires closer to realtime action. The further out you go, the less feasible remote-control exploration becomes.
People can also only do things you planned for them to do. If astronauts on Mars decide they want to do something, they damn well better have brought the necessary equipment. And today's remote control robots on Mars don't work like the old Soviet moon landers worked, i.e. like RC planes work. Rather, they're given a set of loose instructions and the computers on board figure out how to execute them best. Unless the Mars landers are going to be involved in hostage negotiations, the delay is perfectly acceptable.
So suppose it's "only" $100 billion. Why, exactly, is it justified? We can do the science far more cheaply with robots, and if a robot burns up on entry, no one has to attend any funerals. The typical arguments I see on slashdot boil down to:
Space is cool. Yeah, and so are lots of things. Doesn't mean we should spend government money on it.
We can't stay on Earth forever. True, in billions of years the sun will swallow up the inner planets. More realistically, if we keep trashing the environment life will eventually be very uncomfortable for us. But space technology right now can send up a handful of astronauts at a time. We're not about to migrate overcrowded populations to the moon. (Human migrations in the past have all been much cheaper, even in relative terms.) The solutions to our problems on Earth should involve fixing our behavior on Earth, not giving up on it and fancifully migrating elsewhere.
Space exploration leads to technological spin-offs. Give me a break. If we want to sponsor scientific or technological research, we can do that much more efficiently by giving grants directly. Space research really hasn't produced much anyway, per dollar, compared to defence spending. It was the military, and not the space program, that drove the development of the microchip. The space program has given us... Tang. The "science experiments" done on the Shuttle nowadays are mostly nonsense anyway; the real ones could be done far more cheaply by robots anyway.
I support unmanned space exploration designed to further the pursuit of science. But manned space flight is incredibly expensive in comparison, doesn't really do much for us, and sucks resources away from real science.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's not how rot works. It's the exposure to oxygen that counts. If I leave an iron rod in water, it's not actively pursuing oxygen, but it sure will rust.
The water keeps out oxygen? How do the fish breathe?
You misunderstand economics. Economics is all about opportunity cost. If we didn't send people into space, what's the next best thing we could do with that money? Is it a better use of that money than manned spaceflight? Weinberg says yes. So does anyone who looks at the numbers. It's people who get caught up in the emotional appeal that want to send people into space.
Exploration? The future of mankind depends on exploration of space? You know, if we take care of the Earth we can live here for billions of years.
Another poster compared these experiments to grade school science fairs. I think the comparison is apt. They're not really doing important scientific work; they just need to come up with an experiment because someone is forcing them to. They end up taking some dubious experiment and repeating it under some dubious conditions. "Do mice learn mazes faster while I'm playing music?"
Is it just me, or would The Fedora Affair be a great title for a cold war spy novel?
The problem with Tough Crowd is that Quinn (a) isn't really all that funny; and (b) uses the show to argue a conservative point of view against his guests, who are typically much funnier and more liberal than him. The show can be funny when he lets his guests speak long enough to deliver their punchlines, but too often it's just him trying to make a point about something.
I mean, it's obvious that Comedy Central wanted a show with a conservative bent to follow the generally liberal Daily Show. There's nothing wrong with that, but the man they chose for it takes it as his personal mission. If it weren't so cheap (any comic with career issues will come on, and lots of comics owe favors to Comedy Central), I'm sure they'd just cut it. What kind of ratings can it get anyway?
Yeah, some cars come with TVs in the dash. But it's kinda dangerous to watch that while you drive, isn't it?
They do the same thing today with HDTV. They love to show you a bunch of tiny old TVs next to a huge new HD screen so the disparity is as great as possible. Of course, they try to show you the "quality" of the new system. I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to judge a higher-resolution screen as viewed through my low-resolution screen. Yet sometimes they show a HD screen by itself and say "look at the quality!" as if they think it's somehow going to show through to me. I think it's pretty funny actually.
Remember how cheesy color support was on the first color Macs? (The Mac II was the first to be available with color, IIRC.) Pretty much none of the applications had any color. The OS didn't have much either--they added on a Color menu (to the right of the Special menu IIRC). You could select an icon in the Finder and use the Color menu to give it a color. Since the icon was B&W, you were really just replacing black with the chosen color.
When System 7 was released, they cleaned up the Color menu by calling it the Label menu. Basically, they gave the colors names, and allowed you to change those names from a Control Panel. Luckily it was no longer the only use of color in the OS, and most apps supported color by then.
So remember the next time some Mac zealot tells you that Apple always has great UI design and they've never gone wrong: they once had a Color menu.
The DoJ brings antitrust cases on behalf of the federal government. They tend to have an opinion on which companies are violating antitrust laws and which ones aren't.
(You're right that in theory, the State Department (foreign ministry) should be the one engaging in diplomacy, but there are so many facets of foreign relations that other departments like to handle their own little parts of the pie--assuming the subject is not too sensitive. Trade is generally under the aegis of the Commerce Department, but again this is an antitrust issue rather than a trade issue.)
I tend to browse with lots of tabs. I want tabs to open quickly. Nothing loads faster than about:blank. If I want to visit a site often, I'll make a bookmark.
Why does the modern Soyuz have a better safety record than the Shuttle? Why did our old ballistic missiles have a better safety record than the Shuttle? Even the enormous Saturn V rockets never had an accident in flight.[1]
Why does the Shuttle have such a terrible safety record relative to other rockets that attain orbit?
I'll tell you why: because it was over-ambitious. Congress was sold on the idea of a re-usable (read: cheap) launch vehicle that can do cool stuff like repair satellites. The truth of the matter is that if we had stuck with traditional launch vehicles (fire-once rockets), the money we saved over the long run would have allowed us to just replace failing satellites rather than repair them. (How many satellites have we repaired anyway?) We could even have built the space station for less. (Look at how we launched Skylab. Surely we could have repeated that a few times to get as large a space station as we wanted.) The legacy of the Shuttle is that of an overpriced, underperforming safety hazard.
All manned spaceflight is dangerous. The Shuttle is just more dangerous that most.
[1] The Apollo capsule had two serious accidents, one on the ground and one on the way to the moon.
And I bet someone will manage to force it in backwards, breaking three other parts in the process.
Why didn't they do this after Challenger? Are they so thick they needed two disasters in order to get serious about safety?
I have a car to sell you. It has a great safety record. Oh, of all the cars of this model ever built, 40% were destroyed in catastrophic accidents that killed all the passengers. But cars of this model have been taken on trips over one hundred times! What a great safety record that is! You couldn't be safer than to buy this car.
I don't get it--what is there on Mars that's so complicated? Every place we've looked we've found rocks (to be analyzed) and... a pretty sky. What specific tasks are these humans going to be doing? You speak in generalities about the flexibility of humans, but the only example you give is drilling.
That's right, you say we need to raise the mission cost several fold in order to send humans, so that they can drill on Mars. And the reason a robot can't drill? Because there might be macroscopic fossils there. There's a very simple solution. Only have the robot drill where we tell it to drill. We can use cameras on the robot to pick out those locations. Wait a minute--that's exactly what we're doing right now! This isn't far-future technology here.
Seriously, do you have any other specific things to do on Mars that humans are needed for? Not philosophical qualities, but actual tasks.
I should point out that the canonical historical inflation rate of the US dollar is 3%. That makes it slightly less profitable.
If they're as good at renewing hot.mail as the rest of their domains, you'll be able to do that 3 or 4 times.
Oh, I understand all that. I just don't see why my money should be used to further it. I have nothing against you running a marathon or climbing a mountain--more power to you. But that's because you don't ask me to pay for those things. (It may be different where you live, but where I live the big annual marathon needs sponsorship to pay for the police to cordon off the route.)
Not all of us can afford vacations and mountain climbing. Some of us have to deal with the real world. For us, the triumph of imagination doesn't pay the bills.
The original seven, actually. The sun and the moon were planets. And yes, they all revolved around Earth. Church "scientists" were the first to add to this system; they put Heaven above the planets.
What exactly is there that a human could do on Mars that a robot couldn't do? Look at what our astronauts did on the moon: planted flags, walked around, and picked up rocks. They hit golf balls, dropped feathers to prove that Newton was (grossly) right, and commented on how pretty the Earth looks from a distance. Oh, later on they drove around. Out of all those things, two were useful: they moved around, and they picked up rocks to bring back to Earth. A robot can do that too. We can point out which rocks it should pick up and it will do that. We can even have robots that launch back to Earth so we can analyze those rocks properly, something even humans can't do without machine assistance. I just don't see the "killer app" for humans that makes them more compelling than robots.
Other than, of course, sentimentality. If you want to spend your money on that, fine, but I don't see why governments should pay for a big "feel good" mission.
I don't know where the ridiculous myth that velcro was a byproduct of space exploration started. Electronics were used in space, but not developed for space. They were developed for commercial and military applications. Even rockets were developed for the military: the first Americans in space were flying on converted ballistic missiles. Space exploration just kind of tagged along for the ride.
People can also only do things you planned for them to do. If astronauts on Mars decide they want to do something, they damn well better have brought the necessary equipment. And today's remote control robots on Mars don't work like the old Soviet moon landers worked, i.e. like RC planes work. Rather, they're given a set of loose instructions and the computers on board figure out how to execute them best. Unless the Mars landers are going to be involved in hostage negotiations, the delay is perfectly acceptable.
So basically, if the US weren't sending people into space it would be killing people? But it seems quite capable of doing both, even at the same time.
Because of course, punctuation marks are totally useless when coding.
So suppose it's "only" $100 billion. Why, exactly, is it justified? We can do the science far more cheaply with robots, and if a robot burns up on entry, no one has to attend any funerals. The typical arguments I see on slashdot boil down to:
Yeah, and so are lots of things. Doesn't mean we should spend government money on it.
True, in billions of years the sun will swallow up the inner planets. More realistically, if we keep trashing the environment life will eventually be very uncomfortable for us. But space technology right now can send up a handful of astronauts at a time. We're not about to migrate overcrowded populations to the moon. (Human migrations in the past have all been much cheaper, even in relative terms.) The solutions to our problems on Earth should involve fixing our behavior on Earth, not giving up on it and fancifully migrating elsewhere.
Give me a break. If we want to sponsor scientific or technological research, we can do that much more efficiently by giving grants directly. Space research really hasn't produced much anyway, per dollar, compared to defence spending. It was the military, and not the space program, that drove the development of the microchip. The space program has given us... Tang. The "science experiments" done on the Shuttle nowadays are mostly nonsense anyway; the real ones could be done far more cheaply by robots anyway.
I support unmanned space exploration designed to further the pursuit of science. But manned space flight is incredibly expensive in comparison, doesn't really do much for us, and sucks resources away from real science.