And there are more people in EACH of China, India and Africa living on $1 per day or less, than the entire population of the US. In toto somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people worldwide live on $1 per day. Percentage wise, that's a huge improvement over the last 20 years, compliments of those $3 per day jobs. Walmart has brought more people into the global middle class than any other institution in history. Globalization has brought billions of people from starvation-level subsistence out of poverty. The whole thrust of institutions for the last 60 years has been to bring the world out of poverty while trying not to 'break' the first world in the process. Fortunately digital technology has been a very effective tool for improving everyone's standard of living. (that's what technological advance does - it's the only thing that improves the standard of living in a mature economy - government is at best a slight drag on standard of living.)
The World Bank's Poverty Threshold is now $1.25 per day. 42% of people in India are below that, while the US Poverty line (in 2006 $11,161 for a single person) is greater than the median income in almost every country in the world. In India the poverty line is $12 per month (urban) or $7.50 per month (rural) - that (27%) would be about 300 million people.
Also good point about the jeans. Back in the 1970s I paid $13 for a pair of Levi's. Today I pay $13 for a pair of Costco or Walmart jeans (actually better quality than some of the Levi's.) My 25 inch flat panel TV about $250 IIRC; the TV my parents bought when I was a kid cost over $300 in the 1960s. That $300 would be about $2000 now. A Fender Esquire electric guitar cost about $300 in 1956 (I heard about in on Antiques Road Show) - you can buy an equivalent Fender for under $300 today.
Indeed, but unfortunately I think history has probably made that impossible, at least for existing languages. Thus my solution of deprecating, and eventually requiring the {} structure. And even that will be objected to by the 'programming without a net' types. Actually IMHO the advantage of allowing assignment inside if statements is so minimal that disallowing it entirely would be reasonable. There are some cases where it is useful inside a while(), but it is not necessary there either, and it definitely encourages naive writers to write slower code. For example using PHP:
$lnum = 0; while ($lnum < sizeof ($myarray)) {...}
It is better to remove the sizeof() function from the while, so it doesn't get evaluated every time through the loop. But it seems simpler because you've saved one assigned variable. This is the kind of less-than-perfect code encouraged by the present syntax.
Yes. I realized a while back that every program we write is defining a language. It may be a language of mouse gestures, or button pushes, or typed input, etc. but it is a tiny (or large) language. This has informed everything I do since then. When I write a program, I try to make the language with which the program interacts with the user as coherent and rational as possible. (The user may well be another program, but the principle applies.)
That's good. I haven't written C/C++ for a long time. I foresee a future version of the languages that require code blocks, with dire 'deprecated' warnings. "if ({$foo = $bar})..." is not that much more to write than "if ($foo = $bar)..." and definitely shows one's intentions.
It's not a matter of knowledge, it's a fat-finger issue, and an ambiguity issue. I've seen many problems where coders have inadvertently left off one of the equal signs - I think typing too fast is the most common cause, probably because when we are typing = it is usually in an assignment statement and our fingers get used to typing only one.
Because it is not easily spotted when scanning a large piece of code, the problem can be hard to find and debug, especially when the normal path through the statement doesn't cause significant problems. Some of these errors have to my knowledge sat unrecognized in published code for years, even decades. It may just be that the block in mind is never, or always, executed. To make it worse, when debugging others' code it may require close and careful reading and a good understanding of the code to even recognize there is a problem. How does one know whether the original writer meant to do that, and was depending on some externally-defined state of the variables involved.
When the ten-year-old code (which has a bug that only appears every third blue moon) says "if ($foo = $bar) { do something($foo); }" how do you know (if neither $foo nor $bar are modified anywhere nearby) whether this is intended as it is? Whereas, if the language required such assignments to be enclosed in a block "if ({$foo = $bar}) { do something($foo); } then the language parser could always catch and prevent the problem trivially. IMHO modern languages should be designed to prevent trivially ambiguous structures, especially ones that involve tiny typos.
A classic example in FORTRAN that is similar enough to be relevant involved a rocket that had to be destroyed after it went up (IIRC) 70 miles and 'turned left'. The navigation code had a loop that looked through the sky, searching for the Gemini twins Castor and Pollux. In the code was a statement "DO 100 I=1.100". (Can you see the problem?) Note that FORTRAN ignores spaces entirely, and the code was being viewed on green and white line printer output. After months of analysis, it was discovered that this was the problem line. It should have been "DO 100 I=1,100", which ran a loop 100 times. The bad code assigned 1.1 to the variable DO100I and went through the loop once. Now imagine trying to spot that bug on a line printer listing (not the fancy laser printer stuff we have now, but smudgy typewriter-looking text) in a program of 100,000 lines or so.
Ahh, write-only programming. I still think APL is one of the best languages out there, even though I never achieved proficiency (though I might have if I'd actually used it for more than just personal experimentation.) For the problem space that it addresses, it truly does eliminate almost all need to consider the idiosyncrasies of computers and languages, and allows the user to think purely in the framework of transforming an the input data set to the output data set, via a simple symbolically defined transform. The problem is that most of us (including me) find it difficult to think of a problem in these abstract, wholistic terms, so we work better by nibbling off small bits until the whole problem is gone. Perhaps it's best viewed as the most concise functional programming language, although it does not force a pure functional model.
the "line noise" code people complain about. Which is really all about regular expressions
Funny thing - I never liked Perl because it looked like someone sneezed on the screen while eating alphabet soup. But now I use the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions library (motto: "You have a problem, and decide to solve it with regular expressions - now you have two problems") almost daily. Irony...
I'll just add that there is a fatal (for me) flaw in Python, which is that the indent=>block means that there is no 'parity check' in the syntactic structure. This leaves an ambiguity in the code - if a line is indented more or less than the previous one, in certain circumstances the compiler can not tell whether the line is contained in the block or not. Languages that use a syntactic element at each end of a block such as {do something;} do not have this ambiguity, and can correctly post an error when the start and end block elements do not match.
In fairness, C and many languages with syntax derived from C have a related flaw, in allowing the operations inside an 'if' or similar elements without any special wrapping, such as 'if (foo = bar) {do something;}'. This is only one character different from 'if (foo == bar) {do something;}'. To correct this, these languages could require operations to be enclosed in braces, like this: 'if ({foo = bar}) {do something;}'. Then the compiler could correctly flag as an error a missing equal sign when comparison is meant.
I suspect that these two syntactic faults are among the most common causes of hidden bugs in these respective language groups.
When I was a high school freshman I applied feedback theory to a comparison of capitalism and Marxist communism for a social studies term paper on the Soviet Union - caused quite an uproar! The conclusion of course was that communism can not work because the feedback loop is broken - no system can remain stable without positive and negative feedback. I.e. 'To each according to his needs, from each according to his means" results in two unlimited, disconnected feedbacks.
Later I saw that in practice, the feedback loops, not being able to join through the economy, are routed through the political system in the form of forced labor, bribes, black markets, nepotism, and many other characteristics of totalitarian systems. Thus one has the leaders of communist countries living lives of luxury - they have 'bought' goodies with power instead of money.
[This strongly shows that power and money are duals, at least. Both are measures of trust and can be equated to energy in a flow model of the system.]
One can make an argument that the degree to which those faults are observed in an political/economic system is a reasonable measure of the degree to which the economy has been made into a 'socialist utopia'. But I haven't really thought this particular bit through, so I won't stand by it yet.
See, that's the thing - we don't really want 'jobs' - what we want is happy, healthy, fed people. Presently we assume that requires a job but that's just historical. Also we are conflating all sorts of things with the issues that surround bringing the majority of the people out of starvation in a mud hut or a tarp on a Kolkata sidewalk into a middle-class lifestyle, while minimizing the impact on the lifestyle of an average first-world individual.
Yes. Back in my hippie days (get off my lawn, etc.), I proposed a new political party. The justification went like this - the promise of the Industrial Revolution was that nobody would have to work and we could all live like kings. But the flip side of that is that there are no jobs. So obviously the thing to do is to make unemployment not the problem, but the objective - let's work ourselves ALL out of a job, and enjoy the result!
The primary plank of the Technical Party (the name I came up with back then), was that we should move to a society where everyone might get drafted for two to 10 years of 'service' working, then could 'retire' to a life of retirement doing the things one wants to do.
Since most people (I think/hope) actually like being productive, during those many years of retirement we could all be writing that book we all want to write, painting, sculpting, volunteering in schools etc. Some folks might like to continue doing engineering, or working in a restaurant - but that would be because they want to, not because they have to. Retirement is when we transition from working on others' terms to working on our own terms.
We are life. When we go, life goes. When we colonize, we are/carry the seeds of life. Life is greedy, selfish, etc. - that's what Life is. It concentrates resources in order to maintain its living state. Compared to a wolf or an amoeba, we have a pretty high level of altruism within tribes, within the species, and with respect to all other Life and even inanimate resources. The fact that we complain about how greedy and selfish we are illustrates the fact that we care at all about such things. Most Life doesn't give a whit, except in so far as it affects its self-interest.
Life carries within it the imperative to live, to grow, to expand, to adapt. We are just the first component of Terran Life (that we know of) that has the ability to carry our Life beyond this planet. As such we may be the critical seed for the Universe. If Life has arisen only on Earth, who are we to prevent that expansion? Even if Life exists elsewhere, our own expansion will eventually be critical to survival of the Terran strain of Life.
An interesting conundrum, explored by many SF writers back in the day. For me the answer might well be, "That's OK, because if you hadn't taken that first step we wouldn't have made the progress that allowed us to get where we are now." One additional idea that has been explored is for the newer, faster ship to overtake the original and re-power it to go fast the rest of the way. Assuming that any interstellar ship would have been built in space in the first place, there's not much difference (other than the distance to a full-fledged shipbuilding facility, tools, etc.) between a ship traveling at (say) 300,000 km/hour (about 0.00028 lightspeed) and one in orbit around a planet. So within some limits reconstructing the power system in flight wouldn't be that big a deal, if it's possible to bring the parts with you. Of course, at that speed it will take 5*3600=18000 years to get to a nearby star.:P I think interstellar travel, even of probes, is going to wait until we can get some kind of vehicle above 0.01 lightspeed. If we can get to a significant fraction of lightspeed, say 0.1 to 0.25, then we can actually ponder sending living people there on a one-way trip. By then I expect we will have built interferometers big enough to image the target exoplanet in some detail, and have a very good idea about the prospects for existing life and for colonization.
Various people have studied the economic impact of a million (or billion tons of nickel-iron moved within the earth-moon system and available for construction of whatever. It is unlikely to be 'dropped' onto Earth in any significant amount for multiple reasons (economic and safety in particular), but it would make the cost of manufacturing space equipment in space cheaper than shipping it up from the surface. So the items shipped uphill would be consumables, maybe electronics and specialty materials not already found outside the Earth gravity well.
Asteroid mining will be a major component of any space-based habitation beyond the initial colonization. And (as others have noted) those who make that work will be the first $trillionaires. Unless there is a big supply of aluminum and other non-ferrous materials that I haven't read about, the availability of mass quantities of nickel-iron will IMHO result in a lot of steel spacecraft.
Sure they can. At some impressive energy cost (remember the gravity well, it sucks pretty hard). It would be much easier to make floating / submerged habitats than ones in outer space.
The problem with floating habitats is that the ocean is a very tough place - it's amazingly corrosive (I've been refitting an ocean cruising sailboat and learning more about metallurgy and materials science than I ever imagined), it has currents that will take you where you don't want to go, it's got an equally amazingly adaptable biology that really, really wants to either eat or live on whatever is immersed in it, it's constantly expressing the effects of storms both near and 1000s of miles away.
Almost nothing humans build survives very long in the ocean - a 20 year old boat is almost always OLD. By contrast, as we have seen, most of the entropic forces in space are much more limited, much more constant and predictable - and therefore _mostly_ can be dealt with one way or another. Look at Voyager - still operating after decades.
So I think that floating habitats will happen - I've been toying with an SF story about one based in one of the gyres - but they will require actually more money than space habitats, because to survive the rigors and variance of the oceans they will have to be _BIG_ and will have to incorporate a range of complex dynamic systems to keep afloat and alive. And I don't know if they will ever be self-sufficient in the way space habitats will have to be.
In some sense the modern cruise ships are a small non-self-sufficient version. There are a few people who have moved onto cruise ships and live on them all year around, and a Swedish group has proposed a huge version that would be a condo city of 50,000 people that would never come to port (it would be too big), but be tended by a range of smaller vehicles. But the problem remains - at present every floating vessel has to come in to port to have the hull cleaned and repainted every few years, and the corrosion and other effects mean that few commercial vessels last over 20 years - it's cheaper to buy a new one than to fix the old one.
And besides - ships won't get us off this big 'ship' that we are presently restricted to. In the long term, we really need to 'move on up' and end our dependence on this single point of failure - and bring the rest of our biome with us.
Back when I was a kid, I read a science fiction novel called "Bubbles in the Sky", probably written in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I have tried many times in the last 10-15 years to find this story without success but I still remember the cover of the book. I also recall the author as Frederick Pohl but I haven't found it in any list of his work.
The gist of this story was that the construction crew that was required to build the big space station (this was before the modern era of robotics and such, so the job required hundreds of crew, just like building a skyscraper) lived in self-healing bubbles. Over the many years of construction they got better and better at making their own oxygen in algae tanks, most of their own food (algae mostly), etc. The construction managers allowed folks to stay because it was much cheaper than sending people down and up. And a number of them had gotten injured or had other problems where they could no longer survive the trip back down to earth, or survive in 1G any more. They also had a semi-pirate radio station that (of course) could be heard all over the world when overhead. The powers that be decided it was time to eliminate this messy, unprofessional 'shanty town' and send everyone back to Earth. So the story was about how they used the radio to get the public sentiment on their side, to allow them to stay permanently and encourage efforts to become more fully self-sufficient.
That story inspired me when I was maybe 10 years old, before Yuri Gagarin had been launched into space. And I think that, while the details are way out of date and the schedule is probably 100 times faster than real life, we will - maybe even in my lifetime - have permanent habitation of some kind off planet - maybe the moon, maybe in orbit, maybe at the Earth-Luna L5 point.
One of the nice things about the moon is that an 'orbital' vehicle can come very close to the surface - so it wouldn't be too difficult to 'toss' refined materials up high enough for a big orbiting "catcher's mitt" to catch as it swoops by 10 miles up - maybe less (it's probably feasible to have the orbit come within less than 1000 feet in some places, so it actually could be done with a tower and a "mail bag" like the railroads did 100 years ago - but much more dangerous). So it wouldn't be necessary for the materials to be launched at Luna's escape velocity. This would only make potential dangers for the area downrange of the launch site. Folks on Earth would be completely safe.
In addition to supply and demand, a big factor is the existence of college loans themselves. College loans have greatly reduced the price sensitivity of the customers - students. Students now basically say "It's too expensive - BUT I HAVE TO GO ANYWAY and just pay the loan off eventually." As a result, colleges that used to run on a shoestring with students mowing the lawns and professors living just above the poverty level now pay the professors 'as they should be paid' (conflating an illusory form of justice with economics) and have lots of equipment, nice buildings, etc.
Interestingly, getting a PhD has never been the income path. I think it was 15 years ago I saw a study that found that people with PhD averaged significantly less income than those with an MS. This is because the one with the PhD was likely to become a teacher or researcher - it's all about the knowledge, where the one with the MS tended to be in the business environment - it's about having the knowledge to get ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
And there are more people in EACH of China, India and Africa living on $1 per day or less, than the entire population of the US. In toto somewhere between 1 and 2 billion people worldwide live on $1 per day. Percentage wise, that's a huge improvement over the last 20 years, compliments of those $3 per day jobs. Walmart has brought more people into the global middle class than any other institution in history. Globalization has brought billions of people from starvation-level subsistence out of poverty. The whole thrust of institutions for the last 60 years has been to bring the world out of poverty while trying not to 'break' the first world in the process. Fortunately digital technology has been a very effective tool for improving everyone's standard of living. (that's what technological advance does - it's the only thing that improves the standard of living in a mature economy - government is at best a slight drag on standard of living.)
The World Bank's Poverty Threshold is now $1.25 per day. 42% of people in India are below that, while the US Poverty line (in 2006 $11,161 for a single person) is greater than the median income in almost every country in the world. In India the poverty line is $12 per month (urban) or $7.50 per month (rural) - that (27%) would be about 300 million people.
Also good point about the jeans. Back in the 1970s I paid $13 for a pair of Levi's. Today I pay $13 for a pair of Costco or Walmart jeans (actually better quality than some of the Levi's.) My 25 inch flat panel TV about $250 IIRC; the TV my parents bought when I was a kid cost over $300 in the 1960s. That $300 would be about $2000 now. A Fender Esquire electric guitar cost about $300 in 1956 (I heard about in on Antiques Road Show) - you can buy an equivalent Fender for under $300 today.
Indeed, but unfortunately I think history has probably made that impossible, at least for existing languages. Thus my solution of deprecating, and eventually requiring the {} structure. And even that will be objected to by the 'programming without a net' types. Actually IMHO the advantage of allowing assignment inside if statements is so minimal that disallowing it entirely would be reasonable. There are some cases where it is useful inside a while(), but it is not necessary there either, and it definitely encourages naive writers to write slower code. For example using PHP:
It is better to remove the sizeof() function from the while, so it doesn't get evaluated every time through the loop. But it seems simpler because you've saved one assigned variable. This is the kind of less-than-perfect code encouraged by the present syntax.
The Epson problem reminds me of Whitespace :D
Yes. I realized a while back that every program we write is defining a language. It may be a language of mouse gestures, or button pushes, or typed input, etc. but it is a tiny (or large) language. This has informed everything I do since then. When I write a program, I try to make the language with which the program interacts with the user as coherent and rational as possible. (The user may well be another program, but the principle applies.)
That's good. I haven't written C/C++ for a long time. I foresee a future version of the languages that require code blocks, with dire 'deprecated' warnings. "if ({$foo = $bar}) ..." is not that much more to write than "if ($foo = $bar)..." and definitely shows one's intentions.
It's not a matter of knowledge, it's a fat-finger issue, and an ambiguity issue. I've seen many problems where coders have inadvertently left off one of the equal signs - I think typing too fast is the most common cause, probably because when we are typing = it is usually in an assignment statement and our fingers get used to typing only one.
Because it is not easily spotted when scanning a large piece of code, the problem can be hard to find and debug, especially when the normal path through the statement doesn't cause significant problems. Some of these errors have to my knowledge sat unrecognized in published code for years, even decades. It may just be that the block in mind is never, or always, executed. To make it worse, when debugging others' code it may require close and careful reading and a good understanding of the code to even recognize there is a problem. How does one know whether the original writer meant to do that, and was depending on some externally-defined state of the variables involved.
When the ten-year-old code (which has a bug that only appears every third blue moon) says "if ($foo = $bar) { do something($foo); }" how do you know (if neither $foo nor $bar are modified anywhere nearby) whether this is intended as it is? Whereas, if the language required such assignments to be enclosed in a block "if ({$foo = $bar}) { do something($foo); } then the language parser could always catch and prevent the problem trivially. IMHO modern languages should be designed to prevent trivially ambiguous structures, especially ones that involve tiny typos.
A classic example in FORTRAN that is similar enough to be relevant involved a rocket that had to be destroyed after it went up (IIRC) 70 miles and 'turned left'. The navigation code had a loop that looked through the sky, searching for the Gemini twins Castor and Pollux. In the code was a statement "DO 100 I=1.100". (Can you see the problem?) Note that FORTRAN ignores spaces entirely, and the code was being viewed on green and white line printer output. After months of analysis, it was discovered that this was the problem line. It should have been "DO 100 I=1,100", which ran a loop 100 times. The bad code assigned 1.1 to the variable DO100I and went through the loop once. Now imagine trying to spot that bug on a line printer listing (not the fancy laser printer stuff we have now, but smudgy typewriter-looking text) in a program of 100,000 lines or so.
Ahh, write-only programming. I still think APL is one of the best languages out there, even though I never achieved proficiency (though I might have if I'd actually used it for more than just personal experimentation.) For the problem space that it addresses, it truly does eliminate almost all need to consider the idiosyncrasies of computers and languages, and allows the user to think purely in the framework of transforming an the input data set to the output data set, via a simple symbolically defined transform. The problem is that most of us (including me) find it difficult to think of a problem in these abstract, wholistic terms, so we work better by nibbling off small bits until the whole problem is gone. Perhaps it's best viewed as the most concise functional programming language, although it does not force a pure functional model.
the "line noise" code people complain about. Which is really all about regular expressions
Funny thing - I never liked Perl because it looked like someone sneezed on the screen while eating alphabet soup. But now I use the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions library (motto: "You have a problem, and decide to solve it with regular expressions - now you have two problems") almost daily. Irony ...
I'll just add that there is a fatal (for me) flaw in Python, which is that the indent=>block means that there is no 'parity check' in the syntactic structure. This leaves an ambiguity in the code - if a line is indented more or less than the previous one, in certain circumstances the compiler can not tell whether the line is contained in the block or not. Languages that use a syntactic element at each end of a block such as {do something;} do not have this ambiguity, and can correctly post an error when the start and end block elements do not match.
In fairness, C and many languages with syntax derived from C have a related flaw, in allowing the operations inside an 'if' or similar elements without any special wrapping, such as 'if (foo = bar) {do something;}'. This is only one character different from 'if (foo == bar) {do something;}'. To correct this, these languages could require operations to be enclosed in braces, like this: 'if ({foo = bar}) {do something;}'. Then the compiler could correctly flag as an error a missing equal sign when comparison is meant.
I suspect that these two syntactic faults are among the most common causes of hidden bugs in these respective language groups.
Wal*Mart loses access to most of it's stock
- that would be ... interesting. Good basis for a movie! Don't know if the SF or the comedy approach would be better though.
Haha - it was tongue in cheek even back then. :D
When I was a high school freshman I applied feedback theory to a comparison of capitalism and Marxist communism for a social studies term paper on the Soviet Union - caused quite an uproar! The conclusion of course was that communism can not work because the feedback loop is broken - no system can remain stable without positive and negative feedback. I.e. 'To each according to his needs, from each according to his means" results in two unlimited, disconnected feedbacks.
Later I saw that in practice, the feedback loops, not being able to join through the economy, are routed through the political system in the form of forced labor, bribes, black markets, nepotism, and many other characteristics of totalitarian systems. Thus one has the leaders of communist countries living lives of luxury - they have 'bought' goodies with power instead of money.
[This strongly shows that power and money are duals, at least. Both are measures of trust and can be equated to energy in a flow model of the system.]
One can make an argument that the degree to which those faults are observed in an political/economic system is a reasonable measure of the degree to which the economy has been made into a 'socialist utopia'. But I haven't really thought this particular bit through, so I won't stand by it yet.
Thanks, I'll check it out. :)
... Skynet ...
See, that's the thing - we don't really want 'jobs' - what we want is happy, healthy, fed people. Presently we assume that requires a job but that's just historical. Also we are conflating all sorts of things with the issues that surround bringing the majority of the people out of starvation in a mud hut or a tarp on a Kolkata sidewalk into a middle-class lifestyle, while minimizing the impact on the lifestyle of an average first-world individual.
Yes. Back in my hippie days (get off my lawn, etc.), I proposed a new political party. The justification went like this - the promise of the Industrial Revolution was that nobody would have to work and we could all live like kings. But the flip side of that is that there are no jobs. So obviously the thing to do is to make unemployment not the problem, but the objective - let's work ourselves ALL out of a job, and enjoy the result!
The primary plank of the Technical Party (the name I came up with back then), was that we should move to a society where everyone might get drafted for two to 10 years of 'service' working, then could 'retire' to a life of retirement doing the things one wants to do.
Since most people (I think/hope) actually like being productive, during those many years of retirement we could all be writing that book we all want to write, painting, sculpting, volunteering in schools etc. Some folks might like to continue doing engineering, or working in a restaurant - but that would be because they want to, not because they have to. Retirement is when we transition from working on others' terms to working on our own terms.
We are life. When we go, life goes. When we colonize, we are/carry the seeds of life. Life is greedy, selfish, etc. - that's what Life is. It concentrates resources in order to maintain its living state. Compared to a wolf or an amoeba, we have a pretty high level of altruism within tribes, within the species, and with respect to all other Life and even inanimate resources. The fact that we complain about how greedy and selfish we are illustrates the fact that we care at all about such things. Most Life doesn't give a whit, except in so far as it affects its self-interest.
Life carries within it the imperative to live, to grow, to expand, to adapt. We are just the first component of Terran Life (that we know of) that has the ability to carry our Life beyond this planet. As such we may be the critical seed for the Universe. If Life has arisen only on Earth, who are we to prevent that expansion? Even if Life exists elsewhere, our own expansion will eventually be critical to survival of the Terran strain of Life.
I'm hoping for something equivalent to this: WWI Game Parody. (Caveat - I don't think this was the original version).
Coming in at a significant fraction of lightspeed and hitting the atmosphere? That would be exciting - somewhat like a thousand-ton cosmic ray.
Actually we're in de Klein, looking for the spout. :P
An interesting conundrum, explored by many SF writers back in the day. For me the answer might well be, "That's OK, because if you hadn't taken that first step we wouldn't have made the progress that allowed us to get where we are now." One additional idea that has been explored is for the newer, faster ship to overtake the original and re-power it to go fast the rest of the way. Assuming that any interstellar ship would have been built in space in the first place, there's not much difference (other than the distance to a full-fledged shipbuilding facility, tools, etc.) between a ship traveling at (say) 300,000 km/hour (about 0.00028 lightspeed) and one in orbit around a planet. So within some limits reconstructing the power system in flight wouldn't be that big a deal, if it's possible to bring the parts with you. Of course, at that speed it will take 5*3600=18000 years to get to a nearby star. :P I think interstellar travel, even of probes, is going to wait until we can get some kind of vehicle above 0.01 lightspeed. If we can get to a significant fraction of lightspeed, say 0.1 to 0.25, then we can actually ponder sending living people there on a one-way trip. By then I expect we will have built interferometers big enough to image the target exoplanet in some detail, and have a very good idea about the prospects for existing life and for colonization.
Various people have studied the economic impact of a million (or billion tons of nickel-iron moved within the earth-moon system and available for construction of whatever. It is unlikely to be 'dropped' onto Earth in any significant amount for multiple reasons (economic and safety in particular), but it would make the cost of manufacturing space equipment in space cheaper than shipping it up from the surface. So the items shipped uphill would be consumables, maybe electronics and specialty materials not already found outside the Earth gravity well.
Asteroid mining will be a major component of any space-based habitation beyond the initial colonization. And (as others have noted) those who make that work will be the first $trillionaires. Unless there is a big supply of aluminum and other non-ferrous materials that I haven't read about, the availability of mass quantities of nickel-iron will IMHO result in a lot of steel spacecraft.
Sure they can. At some impressive energy cost (remember the gravity well, it sucks pretty hard). It would be much easier to make floating / submerged habitats than ones in outer space.
The problem with floating habitats is that the ocean is a very tough place - it's amazingly corrosive (I've been refitting an ocean cruising sailboat and learning more about metallurgy and materials science than I ever imagined), it has currents that will take you where you don't want to go, it's got an equally amazingly adaptable biology that really, really wants to either eat
or live on whatever is immersed in it, it's constantly expressing the effects of storms both near and 1000s of miles away.
Almost nothing humans build survives very long in the ocean - a 20 year old boat is almost always OLD. By contrast, as we have seen, most of the entropic forces in space are much more limited, much more constant and predictable - and therefore _mostly_ can be dealt with one way or another. Look at Voyager - still operating after decades.
So I think that floating habitats will happen - I've been toying with an SF story about one based in one of the gyres - but they will require actually more money than space habitats, because to survive the rigors and variance of the oceans they will have to be _BIG_ and will have to incorporate a range of complex dynamic systems to keep afloat and alive. And I don't know if they will ever be self-sufficient in the way space habitats will have to be.
In some sense the modern cruise ships are a small non-self-sufficient version. There are a few people who have moved onto cruise ships and live on them all year around, and a Swedish group has proposed a huge version that would be a condo city of 50,000 people that would never come to port (it would be too big), but be tended by a range of smaller vehicles. But the problem remains - at present every floating vessel has to come in to port to have the hull cleaned and repainted every few years, and the corrosion and other effects mean that few commercial vessels last over 20 years - it's cheaper to buy a new one than to fix the old one.
And besides - ships won't get us off this big 'ship' that we are presently restricted to. In the long term, we really need to 'move on up' and end our dependence on this single point of failure - and bring the rest of our biome with us.
Back when I was a kid, I read a science fiction novel called "Bubbles in the Sky", probably written in the late 1950s or early 1960s. I have tried many times in the last 10-15 years to find this story without success but I still remember the cover of the book. I also recall the author as Frederick Pohl but I haven't found it in any list of his work.
The gist of this story was that the construction crew that was required to build the big space station (this was before the modern era of robotics and such, so the job required hundreds of crew, just like building a skyscraper) lived in self-healing bubbles. Over the many years of construction they got better and better at making their own oxygen in algae tanks, most of their own food (algae mostly), etc. The construction managers allowed folks to stay because it was much cheaper than sending people down and up. And a number of them had gotten injured or had other problems where they could no longer survive the trip back down to earth, or survive in 1G any more. They also had a semi-pirate radio station that (of course) could be heard all over the world when overhead. The powers that be decided it was time to eliminate this messy, unprofessional 'shanty town' and send everyone back to Earth. So the story was about how they used the radio to get the public sentiment on their side, to allow them to stay permanently and encourage efforts to become more fully self-sufficient.
That story inspired me when I was maybe 10 years old, before Yuri Gagarin had been launched into space. And I think that, while the details are way out of date and the schedule is probably 100 times faster than real life, we will - maybe even in my lifetime - have permanent habitation of some kind off planet - maybe the moon, maybe in orbit, maybe at the Earth-Luna L5 point.
One of the nice things about the moon is that an 'orbital' vehicle can come very close to the surface - so it wouldn't be too difficult to 'toss' refined materials up high enough for a big orbiting "catcher's mitt" to catch as it swoops by 10 miles up - maybe less (it's probably feasible to have the orbit come within less than 1000 feet in some places, so it actually could be done with a tower and a "mail bag" like the railroads did 100 years ago - but much more dangerous). So it wouldn't be necessary for the materials to be launched at Luna's escape velocity. This would only make potential dangers for the area downrange of the launch site. Folks on Earth would be completely safe.
I think you are correct, it was value.
... exactly! :)
In addition to supply and demand, a big factor is the existence of college loans themselves. College loans have greatly reduced the price sensitivity of the customers - students. Students now basically say "It's too expensive - BUT I HAVE TO GO ANYWAY and just pay the loan off eventually." As a result, colleges that used to run on a shoestring with students mowing the lawns and professors living just above the poverty level now pay the professors 'as they should be paid' (conflating an illusory form of justice with economics) and have lots of equipment, nice buildings, etc.
Interestingly, getting a PhD has never been the income path. I think it was 15 years ago I saw a study that found that people with PhD averaged significantly less income than those with an MS. This is because the one with the PhD was likely to become a teacher or researcher - it's all about the knowledge, where the one with the MS tended to be in the business environment - it's about having the knowledge to get ahead.