Well, how inefficient does the process have to be before it doesn't make sense? Transportation generally is a high value use of energy and this battery pack would fill an important niche, enabling electric cars to travel more than a few hundred miles a day.
I think we can solve problem 1 right now. I suggest having lots of sex. I'm sure someone here has worked out the necessary procedures.
As to point 2, I believe we need to create and maintain an international network of education facilities - I'll call these "colleges" - to carry the educational load needed for your second imaginary problem.
Rereading your post, I realize that you are actually claiming that SpaceX would be unable to get to Mars on $177 million per year indefinitely given to them just for that purpose. That's a lot of money for a company that developed their current launch workhorse, the Falcon 9 from scratch for a bit under two years of such funding.
Talking of demand, if everybody's been replaced by robots then where are the customers? Nobody's got a job, nobody's got any money.
A situation which never materialized in the real world, let us note. If you're right about automation, then surely we should be seeing the effects of it now and in the past, not just in some indefinite future. Your model is broken.
First- we disagree here. At least over the last 36 years generally and the last decade specifically, this has not been the trend and the trend is accelerating- not decelerating.
You do realize that the trend here is to higher employment in manufacture? It has been both on the time frame of recent decades and on the time frame of centuries.
Again, no ecological issues have been mentioned here.
And there is no such thing as "unrestrained industrial forces" in space. Space treaty already constrains the activities you discuss. If debris from my mining operation wipes out your satellite, then I and my backing government are already financially responsible for that damage.
Yes. SpaceX is a classic example of privatising profits and socialising costs.
And your post is a good example of speaking before thinking.
All the tech was essentially hard won through government spending, 'big science', and 'big engineering'.
We don't have to take an anonymous coward's word for it. When NASA studied what SpaceX had done through November 2010, including access to SpaceX's internal records, and asked "How much would it have cost?" for NASA to contract out the same effort (here, developing the Falcon 9 and two initial launches of that platform, plus development of several rocket engines), they found that they would have required a contract of almost $4 billion dollars (revising it to $1.4 billion after access to internal SpaceX information) while SpaceX actually did it for $300 million.
It is NASA's own determination that they would have taken at least ten times as much money (not counting cost overruns!) by the usual means that NASA employs (contracts of cost plus fees) to match the feat of SpaceX's development of Falcon 9. That's the facts which you ought to learn about.
The real tragedy of the commons here is that we continue to burn huge sums of public money in known, deeply flawed approaches to doing anything. SpaceX didn't "privatize profits and socialize costs" here. It make gold out of stuff that the US had discarded and ignored. SpaceX made somewhat more useful those many decades of vast squandering of resources and people.
Extend that across the economy and that means that 10% of the populace produces everything needed by 100% of it. The only way to address the imbalance is if everyone starts consuming 10x as much stuff.
I guess that makes sense, if you think the only measure of a standard of living or number of jobs is how much coal you burn or steel you put in a car or house. But it's an idiotic premise in the real world. I don't live ten times better or have ten times as much job merely because there are ten times as many iron ingots sitting in my living room.
But with widespread automation there's absolutely no reason that *everyone* couldn't be capital, with those high-demand artists and robot technicians working for supplementary income and/or the joy of the work.
Ability to work is effectively capital. What has happened in recent decades is that with globalization, the supply of labor has greatly increased and hence, it has less pricing power. So of course, the US has noticed that non-labor capital has grown in value with respect to labor.
And capital generally is something which can be used for productive purposes with monetary value. If you don't have labor or own something which is considered capital, then you don't really have much in the way of capital, maybe organ or blood donation.
There simply is no viable plan nor adequate budget to come up with a viable plan.
Maybe the problem is that we need a new organization that can come up with a viable plan on the very ample budget NASA receives. It always amazes me how low expectations are for NASA and similar organizations.
Industrializing space may sound like a meaningful thing, but industrializing areas of our own earth hasn't been the most ecological of pursuits.
OTOH, what sounds to me to be a particularly meaningless thing is ecologizing sterile space. Completely taking apart an asteroid for its resources is just as ecological as leaving it alone.
I do not think humans will get into expanding our civilization past Earth's atmosphere until there is a single global government. Currently the nation-states divert too many resources against each other (arms, trade wars), that instead could be used into expanding us beyond Earth.
That point of view only makes sense, if governments are the only source of industry and innovation. They aren't.
People have this strange idea that NASA hates private businesses and doesn't want to compete with them,
This "strange idea" is called "experience". For example, prior to the days of contracting with private firms for launch services, it was illegal for US payloads to go up on anything other than a Shuttle. Even afterward, NASA would still price their launches well below cost. NASA isn't the only cause of such problems (for example, the aerospace businesses are not above using US regulation and bogus safety concerns to mess each other up), but they haven't helped.
SpaceX has done well with LEO launches because that's a 50 year old problem.
No, SpaceX has done well because they have a very good solution to that 50 year old problem. NASA doesn't have and never had a good solution that same problem.
But perhaps more to the point: we have learned that construction in microgravity is intolerably slow and tedious.
No, we haven't learned that at all. And construction on Earth is tedious too. I suppose stuff can some day magically build itself overnight. But in that case, it'd be able to do that in space as well.
So if we ever DO manage to harness resources from space, where should they go to maximize further space exploration?
I have applied for EU finding and I can tell you that there is a lot of work that goes into proving that they got their money's worth.
So what? What fraction of this budget is that again? How many parts in a million? I get that you think you're doing science or whatever, but there's a better term for your role: hostage. Pay us all this money or the guy in the lab coat gets it.
I think it's the result of massive innumeracy, particularly of economics, from the public all the way up into the supposedly educated elite. The successful publicly funded parasite knows they need to show something (or more accurately have a lab coat hostage do that), but it doesn't need to be much. Money spent and shiny thing gained. Who cares about the zeros on the check?
At least consider the possibility that big research projects produce side effects that are beneficial but difficult to measure (say, WWW was invented initially for use in CERN).
And the WWW would have been invented for some other purpose, if CERN wasn't there. Nor is that development particularly expensive. It was done originally by a single person with some spare time. You never needed billions of euros to develop the most valuable thing ever to come out of CERN.
And my complaint is not that big projects don't occasionally produce something of value, but rather that they spend an unusually large amount of money in order to do so. The act of considering only part of the consequences of an action, namely just the benefits not the costs, is a classic example of economic innumeracy.
I cannot convince you of the validity of this claim, but true science is a high-risk and long-term endeavor of the kind that does not appear favorably in quarterly financial statements.
It's interesting how proponents always go immediately to the absurd extremes. But I used a term in my previous post, "centuries" which I think adequate describes my time horizon here. That's a bit longer than the next quarter, don't you think?
Nor can you "convince" me of the validity of your claim because it isn't falsifiable within a human lifetime. Shouldn't a justification for scientific research be at least a little bit scientific?
How about you try to get that "easy" money. Have a look at the requirements for application in the Horizon 2020 EU research program. You need several AAA laboratories (ideally, with multiple Nature/Cell/Science publications) in order to stand a chance.
What is easy for a large corporation or research organization is not necessarily easy for a person or small group due to economies of scale. I doubt Volkswagen or Bayer have the same trouble navigating this morass as you do.
Also, it's classic status signalling by the political elite who have reason to make it hard to obtain funding. Our research must be awesome - look at all the bullshit we put our scientists through! The thing is, just how much science are you really doing when you're spending so much time merely acquiring grants?
I think a huge part of the problem here is the capture of a portion of the most creative and industrious part of Europe into this web. In addition to the raw cost of just squandering massive amounts of public funding, we also have a lot of people jumping through hoops and otherwise engaging in near meaningless activity rather than doing something productive.
It is a distraction which encourages people to go into near useless occupations and pursuits (even then forced to spend a considerable part of their professional life not doing that). I think we will see a huge generational decline (or rather the continuation of this trend, to be honest) in the global effectiveness of scientific research as a result.
if you feel that basic research is not "productive"
And I do believe that "basic research" as used in the scientific community is not productive because it is explicitly not productive (for example).
Is there an alternative way of stimulating research in a specific field for the public good?
Of course, there are. Donations, for example, are a better way. The people who have an interest in the research are also the ones giving the money.
And why wouldn't the proposed approach work?
Because the funding source doesn't have a clue nor would it have any interest in spending the money efficiently or effectively. Just because there are more zeroes on the check doesn't mean that more science is being done.
The fact is, if you want basic research, government funding is extremely important.
How about useful research? Government funding isn't so extremely important, when you want research that actually pays for itself within a few centuries.
And, for what it's worth, getting EU research funding is often so hard and competitive that if you manage to obtain it, it becomes a key item in your resume. Sort of like a prize. So, I fail to see how a highly specialized research program with high barriers to entry will result in pork barrel jobs.
I don't see why it's so hard to see that. "Hard and competitive" doesn't mean anything of value happens. All those people striving for easy money when they could be doing something productive for society?
And that's why we should count the three trillion dollars spent over the last decade to protect oil interests.
And why should we do that? If oil companies had to pay for their own security, they'd spend a lot less than that. I doubt it would be more than a few tens of billions collectively.
The reality is, automation has about the same effect as off-shoring on productivity
I find it amazing that no one has yet pointed out the huge flaw in your argument, namely, that off-shoring actually has a huge positive effect on productivity and a massive increase in jobs. They "go away" in the sense that someone not in the developed world does that job - as well as a few new ones that came about due to the transfer of jobs to a lower cost region.
Overall globally, there has been a massive increase in manufacturing labor and the productivity of that labor. The only people complaining about job loss are from the developed world where it doesn't make economic sense to employ people to make a lot of stuff due to the high costs of employment and regulation. Everyone else is doing fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I did say the niche was important. And cost isn't the only factor.
Well, how inefficient does the process have to be before it doesn't make sense? Transportation generally is a high value use of energy and this battery pack would fill an important niche, enabling electric cars to travel more than a few hundred miles a day.
I think we can solve problem 1 right now. I suggest having lots of sex. I'm sure someone here has worked out the necessary procedures.
As to point 2, I believe we need to create and maintain an international network of education facilities - I'll call these "colleges" - to carry the educational load needed for your second imaginary problem.
There's huge sums shoveled at STEM today. It's not funding that's the problem here, but the remarkably poor returns on that funding.
Rereading your post, I realize that you are actually claiming that SpaceX would be unable to get to Mars on $177 million per year indefinitely given to them just for that purpose. That's a lot of money for a company that developed their current launch workhorse, the Falcon 9 from scratch for a bit under two years of such funding.
And China's current economy is larger than the US's was in 1960.
Talking of demand, if everybody's been replaced by robots then where are the customers? Nobody's got a job, nobody's got any money.
A situation which never materialized in the real world, let us note. If you're right about automation, then surely we should be seeing the effects of it now and in the past, not just in some indefinite future. Your model is broken.
First- we disagree here. At least over the last 36 years generally and the last decade specifically, this has not been the trend and the trend is accelerating- not decelerating.
You do realize that the trend here is to higher employment in manufacture? It has been both on the time frame of recent decades and on the time frame of centuries.
Human nature is clear on how the wealth will be distributed.
A clarity which is not actually reflected in the real world. In the real world, nobody works for slave wages.
Again, no ecological issues have been mentioned here.
And there is no such thing as "unrestrained industrial forces" in space. Space treaty already constrains the activities you discuss. If debris from my mining operation wipes out your satellite, then I and my backing government are already financially responsible for that damage.
Yes. SpaceX is a classic example of privatising profits and socialising costs.
And your post is a good example of speaking before thinking.
All the tech was essentially hard won through government spending, 'big science', and 'big engineering'.
We don't have to take an anonymous coward's word for it. When NASA studied what SpaceX had done through November 2010, including access to SpaceX's internal records, and asked "How much would it have cost?" for NASA to contract out the same effort (here, developing the Falcon 9 and two initial launches of that platform, plus development of several rocket engines), they found that they would have required a contract of almost $4 billion dollars (revising it to $1.4 billion after access to internal SpaceX information) while SpaceX actually did it for $300 million.
It is NASA's own determination that they would have taken at least ten times as much money (not counting cost overruns!) by the usual means that NASA employs (contracts of cost plus fees) to match the feat of SpaceX's development of Falcon 9. That's the facts which you ought to learn about.
The real tragedy of the commons here is that we continue to burn huge sums of public money in known, deeply flawed approaches to doing anything. SpaceX didn't "privatize profits and socialize costs" here. It make gold out of stuff that the US had discarded and ignored. SpaceX made somewhat more useful those many decades of vast squandering of resources and people.
Extend that across the economy and that means that 10% of the populace produces everything needed by 100% of it. The only way to address the imbalance is if everyone starts consuming 10x as much stuff.
I guess that makes sense, if you think the only measure of a standard of living or number of jobs is how much coal you burn or steel you put in a car or house. But it's an idiotic premise in the real world. I don't live ten times better or have ten times as much job merely because there are ten times as many iron ingots sitting in my living room.
But with widespread automation there's absolutely no reason that *everyone* couldn't be capital, with those high-demand artists and robot technicians working for supplementary income and/or the joy of the work.
Ability to work is effectively capital. What has happened in recent decades is that with globalization, the supply of labor has greatly increased and hence, it has less pricing power. So of course, the US has noticed that non-labor capital has grown in value with respect to labor.
And capital generally is something which can be used for productive purposes with monetary value. If you don't have labor or own something which is considered capital, then you don't really have much in the way of capital, maybe organ or blood donation.
There simply is no viable plan nor adequate budget to come up with a viable plan.
Maybe the problem is that we need a new organization that can come up with a viable plan on the very ample budget NASA receives. It always amazes me how low expectations are for NASA and similar organizations.
The alternative would have been to remain complicit in keeping such crimes secret. That's even more lawless and arbitrary.
Industrializing space may sound like a meaningful thing, but industrializing areas of our own earth hasn't been the most ecological of pursuits.
OTOH, what sounds to me to be a particularly meaningless thing is ecologizing sterile space. Completely taking apart an asteroid for its resources is just as ecological as leaving it alone.
I do not think humans will get into expanding our civilization past Earth's atmosphere until there is a single global government. Currently the nation-states divert too many resources against each other (arms, trade wars), that instead could be used into expanding us beyond Earth.
That point of view only makes sense, if governments are the only source of industry and innovation. They aren't.
People have this strange idea that NASA hates private businesses and doesn't want to compete with them,
This "strange idea" is called "experience". For example, prior to the days of contracting with private firms for launch services, it was illegal for US payloads to go up on anything other than a Shuttle. Even afterward, NASA would still price their launches well below cost. NASA isn't the only cause of such problems (for example, the aerospace businesses are not above using US regulation and bogus safety concerns to mess each other up), but they haven't helped.
SpaceX has done well with LEO launches because that's a 50 year old problem.
No, SpaceX has done well because they have a very good solution to that 50 year old problem. NASA doesn't have and never had a good solution that same problem.
So you really think that 17.7 billion is enough for NASA to fly anyone to Mars? Seriously?
Or, we could just fund NASA, they are quite competent.
Yea, their successor to the Space Shuttle is quite the amazing vehicle, especially for being made of paper.
But perhaps more to the point: we have learned that construction in microgravity is intolerably slow and tedious.
No, we haven't learned that at all. And construction on Earth is tedious too. I suppose stuff can some day magically build itself overnight. But in that case, it'd be able to do that in space as well.
So if we ever DO manage to harness resources from space, where should they go to maximize further space exploration?
Earth orbit is a more obvious location.
becasue
" All they need to do is spend their budget."
that will go away.
... at the end of the fiscal year.
I have applied for EU finding and I can tell you that there is a lot of work that goes into proving that they got their money's worth.
So what? What fraction of this budget is that again? How many parts in a million? I get that you think you're doing science or whatever, but there's a better term for your role: hostage. Pay us all this money or the guy in the lab coat gets it.
I think it's the result of massive innumeracy, particularly of economics, from the public all the way up into the supposedly educated elite. The successful publicly funded parasite knows they need to show something (or more accurately have a lab coat hostage do that), but it doesn't need to be much. Money spent and shiny thing gained. Who cares about the zeros on the check?
At least consider the possibility that big research projects produce side effects that are beneficial but difficult to measure (say, WWW was invented initially for use in CERN).
And the WWW would have been invented for some other purpose, if CERN wasn't there. Nor is that development particularly expensive. It was done originally by a single person with some spare time. You never needed billions of euros to develop the most valuable thing ever to come out of CERN.
And my complaint is not that big projects don't occasionally produce something of value, but rather that they spend an unusually large amount of money in order to do so. The act of considering only part of the consequences of an action, namely just the benefits not the costs, is a classic example of economic innumeracy.
I cannot convince you of the validity of this claim, but true science is a high-risk and long-term endeavor of the kind that does not appear favorably in quarterly financial statements.
It's interesting how proponents always go immediately to the absurd extremes. But I used a term in my previous post, "centuries" which I think adequate describes my time horizon here. That's a bit longer than the next quarter, don't you think?
Nor can you "convince" me of the validity of your claim because it isn't falsifiable within a human lifetime. Shouldn't a justification for scientific research be at least a little bit scientific?
How about you try to get that "easy" money. Have a look at the requirements for application in the Horizon 2020 EU research program. You need several AAA laboratories (ideally, with multiple Nature/Cell/Science publications) in order to stand a chance.
What is easy for a large corporation or research organization is not necessarily easy for a person or small group due to economies of scale. I doubt Volkswagen or Bayer have the same trouble navigating this morass as you do.
Also, it's classic status signalling by the political elite who have reason to make it hard to obtain funding. Our research must be awesome - look at all the bullshit we put our scientists through! The thing is, just how much science are you really doing when you're spending so much time merely acquiring grants?
I think a huge part of the problem here is the capture of a portion of the most creative and industrious part of Europe into this web. In addition to the raw cost of just squandering massive amounts of public funding, we also have a lot of people jumping through hoops and otherwise engaging in near meaningless activity rather than doing something productive.
It is a distraction which encourages people to go into near useless occupations and pursuits (even then forced to spend a considerable part of their professional life not doing that). I think we will see a huge generational decline (or rather the continuation of this trend, to be honest) in the global effectiveness of scientific research as a result.
if you feel that basic research is not "productive"
And I do believe that "basic research" as used in the scientific community is not productive because it is explicitly not productive (for example).
Is there an alternative way of stimulating research in a specific field for the public good?
Of course, there are. Donations, for example, are a better way. The people who have an interest in the research are also the ones giving the money.
And why wouldn't the proposed approach work?
Because the funding source doesn't have a clue nor would it have any interest in spending the money efficiently or effectively. Just because there are more zeroes on the check doesn't mean that more science is being done.
The fact is, if you want basic research, government funding is extremely important.
How about useful research? Government funding isn't so extremely important, when you want research that actually pays for itself within a few centuries.
And, for what it's worth, getting EU research funding is often so hard and competitive that if you manage to obtain it, it becomes a key item in your resume. Sort of like a prize. So, I fail to see how a highly specialized research program with high barriers to entry will result in pork barrel jobs.
I don't see why it's so hard to see that. "Hard and competitive" doesn't mean anything of value happens. All those people striving for easy money when they could be doing something productive for society?
And that's why we should count the three trillion dollars spent over the last decade to protect oil interests.
And why should we do that? If oil companies had to pay for their own security, they'd spend a lot less than that. I doubt it would be more than a few tens of billions collectively.
The reality is, automation has about the same effect as off-shoring on productivity
I find it amazing that no one has yet pointed out the huge flaw in your argument, namely, that off-shoring actually has a huge positive effect on productivity and a massive increase in jobs. They "go away" in the sense that someone not in the developed world does that job - as well as a few new ones that came about due to the transfer of jobs to a lower cost region.
Overall globally, there has been a massive increase in manufacturing labor and the productivity of that labor. The only people complaining about job loss are from the developed world where it doesn't make economic sense to employ people to make a lot of stuff due to the high costs of employment and regulation. Everyone else is doing fine.