The things preventing us from reaching other star systems isn't physics. It's economics, psychology, and sociology. Given the money and the will, generation ships are perfectly viable. That's not to say that they are likely, but to say interstellar travel is impossible due to physics is flat out wrong. Hell, use something like Project Orion and you might not even need a generation ship.
We haven't evolved to live outside of tropical climates by your argument, because we can't live in Northern latitudes without artificial clothing and shelter.
Technology is evolution. We now direct our own adaptation to the environment and use technology to live in places that couldn't otherwise sustain us. Living on another planet is no different.
Yeah. All you need is a "slightly larger" rocket to settle Mars. To hold the excavator. And plants. And something that can make water and Co2. And concrete. And iron. And...
You will be dead from the radiation before you even get halfway there.
Don't be so dramatic. The cancer risk from radiation is lower than that of smoking. Making CO2 is unnecessary because it's already in the Martian atmosphere. For the same reason, you can bring a ton of Hydrogen and make yourself 13 tons of rocket fuel (and/or water if you want) using the oxygen and carbon from the CO2. In many ways, Mars is actually an easier challenge.
We've got no evidence to suggest that low gravity will be a dealbreaker, and there are easy ways to deal with it if there are prolonged problems (centrifuges, etc).
Radiation is a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. Very advanced technology, known as a hole in the ground, would be suitable to address risk from solar events, and outside of those events there is acceptably low risk from the background radiation - the risk is lower than that of smoking, for instance, or the risk of the launches that we freely send astronauts on.
It's only common sense to someone who doesn't understand orbital mechanics very well. Mars is many times farther in terms of distance, but in terms of Delta-V it isn't much more difficult to reach. What's more, resources on Mars are much easier to take advantage of because we can pull them right out of the atmosphere, rather than having to process regolith or solid ice.
So, stopping at the moon as a cost-saving measure is completely misguided. There's also not a lot of scientific interest there. If Mars is where we want to be, the most efficient thing to do is go straight there. Building a base on the moon to go to Mars is like building an underwater city to cross the Atlantic.
So the important question is: Do we want to just send some people to walk around on Mars, and then quit all manned space exploration after that? Or do we want to be able to send manned missions all over the solar system?
I agree that your questions are the right ones to be asking. I disagree that they point to moon operations, though.
The decision that will enable travel all over the solar system isn't moon or Mars - it's commerce or government. We need high-volume space access with a profit motive included. This is happening with SpaceX and others (Blue Origin, SNC, Virgin Galactic) but NASA is still holding on to the old way of doing things.
The biggest win would be if NASA would abandon SLS entirely (they could keep Orion if they want) and start architecting missions exclusively around COTS launch providers. Instead of one SLS launch you get 7 or 8 Falcon launches, or 4 or 5 ULA launches - adding that kind of volume to the launch market would help development happen faster and help bring costs down more and more.
Once that approach is taken, then the moon or Mars is just a detail - there are mission profiles that could get us to a sustained presence on either one in a handful of launches on EXISTING commercial vehicles. Get us to Falcon Heavy in a few years and the case is even more clear cut.
I can't stand the thought of being taxed to give money to JimBob or Laqueshia to pay their way, if they are happy to exist on that level of life with no other effort required.
Why? I really don't understand. It doesn't bother me if poor people are given financial assistance, even if they've done nothing to earn it. And I'm an advocate of it when it benefits society as a whole. Look at Utah, providing free apartments for the homeless - it has been a success along just about every metric, it has reduced poverty and homelessness, and it has actually SAVED taxpayer money because an apartment is cheaper than the ER visits and jail expenses associated with each homeless person.
Supposing it works (not saying it's likely), this would be a big problem for catching plagiarists. Copy somebody's text, run it through this, and then hand it in: boom, you're done. You could certainly have anti-plagiarism software that runs this in reverse (or you take your database of comparison docs and run them all through the obfuscator, something along those lines) but if they do it right and there's some degree of randomness, it introduces a massive dose of plausible deniability to any plagiarism case even with these efforts.
BTW, any typos, grammatical peculiarities, or other abnormalities with my post are due to my text obfuscation software. Don't blame me!
Basically, at this point, having asshole employees is an unnecessary risk with severe repercussions and no tangible benefits.
Fixed that for you. Because surely you aren't implying that ~50% of the work force is worthless?
And, really, it's about the assholes. Asshole women that falsely accuse men of harassment and asshole men that actually do harass women. The gender doesn't really matter, it just adds an extra and particularly charged dimension for asshole-ism to occur.
I agree about the bad decisions... like the lowering of taxes in the 1980's to create both a massive U.S. debt and further concentrating wealth in the hands of the few.
Thanks for the link - it is true that this is happening globally. It is also true that social mobility in the U.S. is decreasing, and that middle class wages have been flat for decades.
You can't claim that all of this stuff is so unusual that it is newsworthy and then a paragraph afterwards say that it's so common that men everywhere are actively avoiding women. Pick a story and stick to it.
My own anecdote, btw, says that mild forms of discrimination happen relatively often in male-dominated professions (jokes, phrases, or inappropriate conversation) but that serious harassment is relatively rare (I've never seen it). On the other hand, most women I've worked with have been competent and reasonable - and a number of them tell dirtier jokes than the guys and nobody minds. The main rule seems to be Don't Be an Asshole and things will most likely work out fine unless you're fantastically unlucky.
It's not quite that simple, though. Relying on appreciation to make a mortgage pay off isn't investing - it's speculating. Real estate prices can and do go through periods of decline, and so you happened to luck out over the period of your ownership.
Renting out a property also pays you money, but assume that the mortgage just stays even with inflation (I.E. not speculative investment). You get regular monthly payments from people, but you also have to do the work of finding renters, maintaining the property, etc. So you are essentially working a part time job to get that money - maybe you make a great hourly rate, but you are still putting time in.
Over long time periods, it's also generally a depreciating asset - the land may tend to appreciate depending on what the market does, but a 20 year old home right now will be considered outdated if there are no renovations done - so you need periodic infusions of cash and/or labor to maintain the value of the home.
You also have lots of risk... floods, fires, total market upheaval, hail storms wrecking the roof, meth-head renters, etc.
And finally... if you paid cash, you have a ton of capital tied up in that home. You could just as well have that invested in an index fund with an average 8% annual return, or sit it somewhere like REIT funds that would pay a sizable dividend.
So, the point is, you can certainly make money in real estate, but depending on the circumstances it's possible that you could make as much or more in the long term through investment in a low-maintenance index fund, especially if you count the cost of your time investment.
And the great incongruity of your post is that the actual quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history happened after the period of time you mention. It is happening now, not in the 1950s. Now is the time of increasing real wages, creation of a global large and financially secure middle, relatively high social mobility, etc. What happened in the developed world then is now happening everywhere. But I guess all those people are kind of hard to see from whatever podunk country you're from.
Citation needed. Social mobility is decreasing. Wages are flat for the middle class since the 70's. Your assertions are wrong.
The panic happens because half the people in the stock market are speculators, not investors. The original idea of the stock market was buying company stock and getting a dividend... you are part owner of the company and get part of the profits. If the company does well, with a promise of higher dividends in the future, the stock price goes up.
Now, though, many stocks don't even provide a dividend, so the coupling of stock price to reality is weak and more based on the whims of legions of day traders (and the even more frenetic HFT algorithms). It's just gambling on a massive scale.
I think you're right, but I think it also might end up being a self-correcting problem (to some extent). My first home went upside-down almost immediately after purchasing it. I'm kicking my ass financially right now to get out of student loan debt. Thanks to that, I'm never again going to buy a house on a 30-year term (currently on a 15-year and so much better off for it) and there's no way my kids are going to be taking on loans for university - they will either get scholarships or do it the cheap way, living at home and going to a community college as much as possible.
Whether this is a trend that actually registers on an economic scale, I don't know, but anybody who does have the sense to live without loans will leap ahead of the pack pretty quickly. So regulation may very well be part of the answer, but education and shifting cultural attitudes about debt could do the job as well.
Why does the next $200/week have to go untaxed? Everybody gets their basic income, and then everything beyond the mincome is taxed at a flat rate. If my basic needs are met and I want more money, I'm going to work for it even if it is taxed. The key thing is that working doesn't reduce your basic income, because that would provide a disincentive for working.
It ends up being a welfare system that's completely fair and a progressive tax policy that's also completely fair. It's also better than existing welfare because there is no disincentive to working.
Maybe you have a 99.999% chance, but that's not a guarantee. I'm guessing you just took 1/the chance of abduction. That actually tells you the time interval over which the expected value of abductions is one. Which is very different from saying it will happen. On average, you expect to find one tails when you flip a coin twice but of course you aren't guaranteed that result.
It saves money, but it's not a simple matter of recovering the spent SRBs from the ocean, checking a few things, buffing the paint and repainting anything that needs it, and casting a new propellant grain into them.
It's debatable too whether it actually saves money. Maybe if the launch rates ever reached the projections it would have, but as it is they just about broke even.
How come this time around SpaceX had the cajones to return the vehicle to Florida?
Because the only real danger with something like that is that you can't make it to the landing site. If you make it to the landing zone and explode, nothing gets hurt except a big concrete pad. SpaceX has shown that they can hit a target reliably.
At that point, bringing a rocket back is actually less dangerous than launching it in the first place because it then has far less fuel and destructive potential. There are also explosives armed and ready to blow the thing to oblivion. If anything goes pear-shaped at any point in the operation, there's someone at the range who's ready to pull the trigger at a moment's notice (assuming that the autonomous self-destruct failed to recognize the anomaly).
I think the point is that it's stupid to complain about such trivialities. People spend a truly absurd amount of effort and money to avoid even the suggestion of inconvenience, and so noting it as a "First World Problem" is an easy way to remind yourself that this thing barely qualifies as a concern if you actually consider how most of the species lives.
It isn't about telling people to donate to charity. It's about telling people to stop whining.
If you allow municipal broad band it will choke out terrestrial ISPs.
That's just nonsense. Wherever the municipal ISP shows up, the commercial ISPs have lots of options - offer a cheaper and slower plan, offer a more expensive and faster plan, or try to compete on customer service or plan features. Think about it: a municipal ISP is like the credit union to the big telco's bank. No profit motive, locally focused, better customer service. If you oppose municipal internet you oppose competition, plain and simple.
For reference, Longmont, CO is rolling out municipal fiber to the home. 1Gbps up and down for $99 a month. Comcast and CenturyLink can continue to compete since they offer lower cost plans ($30-$80 from what I've seen) but people who are dissatisfied with either now have a new option. Additionally, people who wanted or needed 1Gb speeds were SOL previously, since the incumbent ISPs offer 50Mbps tops - now they'll have the option.
I think there's something else at play here. Specifically, people are intentionally doing things that are inconvenient.
It's a reaction against the consumerist war on effort. Every single part of life gets gradually streamlined and polished until there is nothing resembling physical exertion or concentration required for any task whatsoever. It's considered painful to spend a single moment without being entertained and coddled. If something has a learning curve longer than 30 seconds, it's abandoned immediately. The modern consumer is impatient, stupid, and cowardly and so any technology that places a burden of any kind on the user is verboten.
Some backward types, however, believe that there are worse things in life than inconvenience. What's more, these people would dare to suppose that it is worth expending effort if you gain greater focus, quality of outcome, or simple pleasure thereby.
I'll admit, I'm a weirdo. I do have an old typewriter (a Royal, weighs about 60 lbs and cost me $7 at a garage sale if you're curious). I like fountain pens. I own a record player, and shave with a single-blade safety razor. I like using older tech as a simple Eff You to our consumerist culture, but also because I find that spending a bit of extra time to do things slower is often more enjoyable than treating every task in life as a nuisance to be done away with as quickly as possible. What are people so busy to get to, anyway? TV, Facebook, Slashdot? It seems to me that the people who are the most desperate to avoid inconvenience are also the least happy...
Slashdot Mirror
The things preventing us from reaching other star systems isn't physics. It's economics, psychology, and sociology. Given the money and the will, generation ships are perfectly viable. That's not to say that they are likely, but to say interstellar travel is impossible due to physics is flat out wrong. Hell, use something like Project Orion and you might not even need a generation ship.
We haven't evolved to live outside of tropical climates by your argument, because we can't live in Northern latitudes without artificial clothing and shelter.
Technology is evolution. We now direct our own adaptation to the environment and use technology to live in places that couldn't otherwise sustain us. Living on another planet is no different.
Yeah. All you need is a "slightly larger" rocket to settle Mars. To hold the excavator. And plants. And something that can make water and Co2. And concrete. And iron. And...
You will be dead from the radiation before you even get halfway there.
Don't be so dramatic. The cancer risk from radiation is lower than that of smoking. Making CO2 is unnecessary because it's already in the Martian atmosphere. For the same reason, you can bring a ton of Hydrogen and make yourself 13 tons of rocket fuel (and/or water if you want) using the oxygen and carbon from the CO2. In many ways, Mars is actually an easier challenge.
We've got no evidence to suggest that low gravity will be a dealbreaker, and there are easy ways to deal with it if there are prolonged problems (centrifuges, etc).
Radiation is a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. Very advanced technology, known as a hole in the ground, would be suitable to address risk from solar events, and outside of those events there is acceptably low risk from the background radiation - the risk is lower than that of smoking, for instance, or the risk of the launches that we freely send astronauts on.
It's only common sense to someone who doesn't understand orbital mechanics very well. Mars is many times farther in terms of distance, but in terms of Delta-V it isn't much more difficult to reach. What's more, resources on Mars are much easier to take advantage of because we can pull them right out of the atmosphere, rather than having to process regolith or solid ice.
So, stopping at the moon as a cost-saving measure is completely misguided. There's also not a lot of scientific interest there. If Mars is where we want to be, the most efficient thing to do is go straight there. Building a base on the moon to go to Mars is like building an underwater city to cross the Atlantic.
So the important question is:
Do we want to just send some people to walk around on Mars, and then quit all manned space exploration after that?
Or do we want to be able to send manned missions all over the solar system?
I agree that your questions are the right ones to be asking. I disagree that they point to moon operations, though.
The decision that will enable travel all over the solar system isn't moon or Mars - it's commerce or government. We need high-volume space access with a profit motive included. This is happening with SpaceX and others (Blue Origin, SNC, Virgin Galactic) but NASA is still holding on to the old way of doing things.
The biggest win would be if NASA would abandon SLS entirely (they could keep Orion if they want) and start architecting missions exclusively around COTS launch providers. Instead of one SLS launch you get 7 or 8 Falcon launches, or 4 or 5 ULA launches - adding that kind of volume to the launch market would help development happen faster and help bring costs down more and more.
Once that approach is taken, then the moon or Mars is just a detail - there are mission profiles that could get us to a sustained presence on either one in a handful of launches on EXISTING commercial vehicles. Get us to Falcon Heavy in a few years and the case is even more clear cut.
FYI: Bernie only accepts individual funding, subject to the limits, etc. No corporate donors at all.
This conversation is becoming quite mercurial.
I can't stand the thought of being taxed to give money to JimBob or Laqueshia to pay their way, if they are happy to exist on that level of life with no other effort required.
Why? I really don't understand. It doesn't bother me if poor people are given financial assistance, even if they've done nothing to earn it. And I'm an advocate of it when it benefits society as a whole. Look at Utah, providing free apartments for the homeless - it has been a success along just about every metric, it has reduced poverty and homelessness, and it has actually SAVED taxpayer money because an apartment is cheaper than the ER visits and jail expenses associated with each homeless person.
Supposing it works (not saying it's likely), this would be a big problem for catching plagiarists. Copy somebody's text, run it through this, and then hand it in: boom, you're done. You could certainly have anti-plagiarism software that runs this in reverse (or you take your database of comparison docs and run them all through the obfuscator, something along those lines) but if they do it right and there's some degree of randomness, it introduces a massive dose of plausible deniability to any plagiarism case even with these efforts.
BTW, any typos, grammatical peculiarities, or other abnormalities with my post are due to my text obfuscation software. Don't blame me!
Basically, at this point, having asshole employees is an unnecessary risk with severe repercussions and no tangible benefits.
Fixed that for you. Because surely you aren't implying that ~50% of the work force is worthless?
And, really, it's about the assholes. Asshole women that falsely accuse men of harassment and asshole men that actually do harass women. The gender doesn't really matter, it just adds an extra and particularly charged dimension for asshole-ism to occur.
I agree about the bad decisions... like the lowering of taxes in the 1980's to create both a massive U.S. debt and further concentrating wealth in the hands of the few.
Thanks for the link - it is true that this is happening globally. It is also true that social mobility in the U.S. is decreasing, and that middle class wages have been flat for decades.
You can't claim that all of this stuff is so unusual that it is newsworthy and then a paragraph afterwards say that it's so common that men everywhere are actively avoiding women. Pick a story and stick to it.
My own anecdote, btw, says that mild forms of discrimination happen relatively often in male-dominated professions (jokes, phrases, or inappropriate conversation) but that serious harassment is relatively rare (I've never seen it). On the other hand, most women I've worked with have been competent and reasonable - and a number of them tell dirtier jokes than the guys and nobody minds. The main rule seems to be Don't Be an Asshole and things will most likely work out fine unless you're fantastically unlucky.
It's not quite that simple, though. Relying on appreciation to make a mortgage pay off isn't investing - it's speculating. Real estate prices can and do go through periods of decline, and so you happened to luck out over the period of your ownership.
Renting out a property also pays you money, but assume that the mortgage just stays even with inflation (I.E. not speculative investment). You get regular monthly payments from people, but you also have to do the work of finding renters, maintaining the property, etc. So you are essentially working a part time job to get that money - maybe you make a great hourly rate, but you are still putting time in.
Over long time periods, it's also generally a depreciating asset - the land may tend to appreciate depending on what the market does, but a 20 year old home right now will be considered outdated if there are no renovations done - so you need periodic infusions of cash and/or labor to maintain the value of the home.
You also have lots of risk... floods, fires, total market upheaval, hail storms wrecking the roof, meth-head renters, etc.
And finally... if you paid cash, you have a ton of capital tied up in that home. You could just as well have that invested in an index fund with an average 8% annual return, or sit it somewhere like REIT funds that would pay a sizable dividend.
So, the point is, you can certainly make money in real estate, but depending on the circumstances it's possible that you could make as much or more in the long term through investment in a low-maintenance index fund, especially if you count the cost of your time investment.
And the great incongruity of your post is that the actual quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history happened after the period of time you mention. It is happening now, not in the 1950s. Now is the time of increasing real wages, creation of a global large and financially secure middle, relatively high social mobility, etc. What happened in the developed world then is now happening everywhere. But I guess all those people are kind of hard to see from whatever podunk country you're from.
Citation needed. Social mobility is decreasing. Wages are flat for the middle class since the 70's. Your assertions are wrong.
The panic happens because half the people in the stock market are speculators, not investors. The original idea of the stock market was buying company stock and getting a dividend... you are part owner of the company and get part of the profits. If the company does well, with a promise of higher dividends in the future, the stock price goes up.
Now, though, many stocks don't even provide a dividend, so the coupling of stock price to reality is weak and more based on the whims of legions of day traders (and the even more frenetic HFT algorithms). It's just gambling on a massive scale.
I think you're right, but I think it also might end up being a self-correcting problem (to some extent). My first home went upside-down almost immediately after purchasing it. I'm kicking my ass financially right now to get out of student loan debt. Thanks to that, I'm never again going to buy a house on a 30-year term (currently on a 15-year and so much better off for it) and there's no way my kids are going to be taking on loans for university - they will either get scholarships or do it the cheap way, living at home and going to a community college as much as possible.
Whether this is a trend that actually registers on an economic scale, I don't know, but anybody who does have the sense to live without loans will leap ahead of the pack pretty quickly. So regulation may very well be part of the answer, but education and shifting cultural attitudes about debt could do the job as well.
Why does the next $200/week have to go untaxed? Everybody gets their basic income, and then everything beyond the mincome is taxed at a flat rate. If my basic needs are met and I want more money, I'm going to work for it even if it is taxed. The key thing is that working doesn't reduce your basic income, because that would provide a disincentive for working.
It ends up being a welfare system that's completely fair and a progressive tax policy that's also completely fair. It's also better than existing welfare because there is no disincentive to working.
Maybe you have a 99.999% chance, but that's not a guarantee. I'm guessing you just took 1/the chance of abduction. That actually tells you the time interval over which the expected value of abductions is one. Which is very different from saying it will happen. On average, you expect to find one tails when you flip a coin twice but of course you aren't guaranteed that result.
It saves money, but it's not a simple matter of recovering the spent SRBs from the ocean, checking a few things, buffing the paint and repainting anything that needs it, and casting a new propellant grain into them.
It's debatable too whether it actually saves money. Maybe if the launch rates ever reached the projections it would have, but as it is they just about broke even.
How come this time around SpaceX had the cajones to return the vehicle to Florida?
Because the only real danger with something like that is that you can't make it to the landing site. If you make it to the landing zone and explode, nothing gets hurt except a big concrete pad. SpaceX has shown that they can hit a target reliably.
At that point, bringing a rocket back is actually less dangerous than launching it in the first place because it then has far less fuel and destructive potential. There are also explosives armed and ready to blow the thing to oblivion. If anything goes pear-shaped at any point in the operation, there's someone at the range who's ready to pull the trigger at a moment's notice (assuming that the autonomous self-destruct failed to recognize the anomaly).
I think the point is that it's stupid to complain about such trivialities. People spend a truly absurd amount of effort and money to avoid even the suggestion of inconvenience, and so noting it as a "First World Problem" is an easy way to remind yourself that this thing barely qualifies as a concern if you actually consider how most of the species lives.
It isn't about telling people to donate to charity. It's about telling people to stop whining.
That's just nonsense. Wherever the municipal ISP shows up, the commercial ISPs have lots of options - offer a cheaper and slower plan, offer a more expensive and faster plan, or try to compete on customer service or plan features. Think about it: a municipal ISP is like the credit union to the big telco's bank. No profit motive, locally focused, better customer service. If you oppose municipal internet you oppose competition, plain and simple.
For reference, Longmont, CO is rolling out municipal fiber to the home. 1Gbps up and down for $99 a month. Comcast and CenturyLink can continue to compete since they offer lower cost plans ($30-$80 from what I've seen) but people who are dissatisfied with either now have a new option. Additionally, people who wanted or needed 1Gb speeds were SOL previously, since the incumbent ISPs offer 50Mbps tops - now they'll have the option.
I think there's something else at play here. Specifically, people are intentionally doing things that are inconvenient.
It's a reaction against the consumerist war on effort. Every single part of life gets gradually streamlined and polished until there is nothing resembling physical exertion or concentration required for any task whatsoever. It's considered painful to spend a single moment without being entertained and coddled. If something has a learning curve longer than 30 seconds, it's abandoned immediately. The modern consumer is impatient, stupid, and cowardly and so any technology that places a burden of any kind on the user is verboten.
Some backward types, however, believe that there are worse things in life than inconvenience. What's more, these people would dare to suppose that it is worth expending effort if you gain greater focus, quality of outcome, or simple pleasure thereby.
I'll admit, I'm a weirdo. I do have an old typewriter (a Royal, weighs about 60 lbs and cost me $7 at a garage sale if you're curious). I like fountain pens. I own a record player, and shave with a single-blade safety razor. I like using older tech as a simple Eff You to our consumerist culture, but also because I find that spending a bit of extra time to do things slower is often more enjoyable than treating every task in life as a nuisance to be done away with as quickly as possible. What are people so busy to get to, anyway? TV, Facebook, Slashdot? It seems to me that the people who are the most desperate to avoid inconvenience are also the least happy...