The astronauts are experts in 1) piloting the spacecraft, or 2) tending to the payload ("mission specialists"). I guarantee that (probably with rare exceptions) they do not have the skills to do the kind of failure analysis that would be required to really understand the risks involved. You would need significant background in aerospace and safety engineering to be able to conduct such a thing, and most of these folks are not. And my impression is that NASA has not done such a great job of doing this analysis even with people who should be qualified to do it.
In this analysis, Simberg asks, what happens when we take the risk out of space travel?...
IAASE (I am a safety engineer). This is a silly question to even ask. It's not possible to "take the risk out of space travel". It's not possible to take the risk out of anything - getting out of bed is risky (you might slip and fall) but so is staying in bed (you might get bedsores). The best we can hope for is to 1) identify the risks involved in space travel, 2) mitigate the ones we can, and then 3) decide whether the remaining risk is worth taking. And there are a whole lot of people in this thread advocating for taking these risks with other people's lives, or volunteering to take these risks themselves in spite of the fact that they don't really understand their severity or probability.
People on slashdot need to get a realistic understanding of what we get out of space travel. The benefits consist of 1) scientific progress - which for the most part can be obtained just as successfully and more cheaply with automated systems, and 2) glory and adventure. I submit that glory and adventure in themselves are not a very good reason to get people killed, especially people who haven't been able to provide actual informed consent to the risks.
The premise of this is sort of stupid. In practice, no one is always right, no one is always wrong, no one is always nice, no one is always a jerk. Asking people to choose among two polar opposites that would never actually be seen in the wild doesn't tell you much about anything in particular.
In the Navy, we have the dreaded NMCI... in which no one but EDS has admin rights, and even Portable Firefox won't run (well, it'll start up, but it's blocked from getting a network connection). Not that it would be terribly practical to try, as you can't even insert a flash drive into your system (per policy).
Also, letting people know that there's a sub somewhere within X km (where x is a fairly large number, the sub could hear a 200+ dB signal for a long way) is less useful than you might think. A circle several kilometers in radius is still a pretty big place to look for a sub, if you even happen to have a platform within range that could do the searching.
The NASA line in your budget is their current expenditures. We ain't colonizing Mars for $15.9B/year... their budget would have to look like the DOD. Probably more. And that, we really CAN'T afford.
You can really tell the institutionalised city dwellers when it comes to these sorts of topics. You don't *need* a huge monolithic society to feed a few people. All you need are minerals, carbon dioxide, sunlight and water and you can grow food hydroponically.
Ok, then, we'll just drop you off on Mars naked - after all, Mars has all the stuff you need, right? Actually, of course, you need a whole bunch of, you know, equipment, to do hydroponics. All of which would have to be shipped there, at great expense. You also need life support, food, shelter, water, etc, while you're getting started.
Mars has extremely humid air at night (nearly 100%), that humidity can be drawn out and turned into water which can the be used to water plants.
The relative humidity is sort of irrelevant - sure, the atmosphere is holding almost all the water it can - but that's just because it's quite cold and low pressure, and can't hold very much. You wouldn't get very many grams of water out of the atmosphere. There may be water ice you could tap into, but that's not a sure thing.
Plants for food, plants for oxygen. Once you have oxygen "generators" (plants) in large greenhouses you can start to expand the colony, you can compress the air and use it to power simple and reliable air tools and equipment.
This problem is a lot harder than you make it sound too. We still don't know how to maintain a completely closed artificial ecosystem. The only time we've tried (Biosphere 2), we had significant problems maintaining oxygen and CO2 levels within healthy limits.
I could go on and on, but you get the point. People vastly underestimate the difficulty of getting a colony set up and running. The first three or four attempts on the North American continent failed, and you didn't even have to worry about breathable air or liquid water.
However, it would be possible for Mars to become substantially self-sustaining, imho.
Probably technically possible. Not economically possible, though.
I think the cost would be worth it.
Of course you do... you're talking about spending other people's money, for one thing, and you don't have a firm grasp on much of it you're talking about, for another. Doing a project like this would soak up a significant portion of the GDP of the United States until the self-sustaining point was reached. If you don't believe me, read the industrial process stuff required above again. And what would the benefit to the US taxpayer be?
Let's take these one at a time. Tourism: the infrastructure will never be in place, because given the costs of getting to Mars, there's no way that more than 1 or 2 people a year could afford it. You couldn't afford to build a hotel on earth if only a few guest per year were going to show up, and building one on Mars? Forget it.
Remote data centers: putting them on Mars has no advantages and lots of disadvantages. Of course, there would be an absolutely freakin' enormous cost involved in bringing servers to Mars, building a data center, and staffing it. You'd have a really huge latency in communications with them. And you get... the lack of fires? Data centers rarely burn on earth, and in any case, you could burn down your data center every year and build a new one for what operating a single data center on Mars for a year would cost you.
Homesteading: that all sounds very romantic, but I've got news for you - the bit about adventure and taming the wide-open frontier were at best, secondary benefits to the pioneers. Their main purpose in moving out west was to... make a damn living. How exactly would you do that on Mars? A family plot of land is great, but when there's no air, no water, and no arable soil, it doesn't do too much for you. The only way around that is (extremely expensive and technologically infeasible) terraforming.
Reading your last sentence: "the 'final frontier' thing has to start somewhere..." - there's your trouble. Here's the thing - it doesn't actually have to start at all. You can argue that it ought to happen, but so far everyone seems to be starting from the assumption that it just will happen, and looking for justifications why. My own opinion is that space colonization is too expensive, too risky, and too low payoff to ever actually happen. Sure, our descendants will ultimately be doomed if something happens to earth... but we as a species are just not real good about planning for such long-term problems.
First: before we launch into a mission to find profitable materials on Mars, we need to have some sort of a plan for what those things might be and how we intend to recover them economically. It's not good enough to say "who knows what there might be".
Second: he didn't actually claim there was nothing in the entire solar system that could be profitably exploited - his claim was limited to Mars. However, I'll be happy to step into the breach here - no, there's nothing in the solar system that we could profitably exploit. The solar system is made of the same stuff the earth is made of: silicates, carbonates, iron, nickel, etc. To be able to profitably exploit resources out there, you'd have to identify some material that is 1) incredibly useful on earth, and 2) in such short supply on earth that it would be worthwhile to expend all the resources required to identify/locate, mine, process, and return to earth in quantity. I have never heard anyone mention any substance that even remotely meets these criteria.
There is quite simply no economic reason to be mining anything in space... or we'd be doing it already.
There are lots of potential profitable products out in the solar system right now -- there will be even more if we are indeed running out of resources [slashdot.org] here at home.
Ok, name one. Your product of choice can't be something that we don't have any earthly use for (pun intended) - so stuff like He3 is out. It also can't be something that would be prohibitively expensive to 1) develop and launch mining equipment for, 2) smelt/refine/process in space, and 3) return to markets on earth in salable condition (i.e. it can't burn up in the atmosphere).
The Slashdot crowd is big into proclaiming that there's this huge untapped market out there for materials from space... but if that's true, why aren't we already mining, or even planning to mine? The answer: there's no way to do it profitably.
IAASE (I am a safety engineer), and I think this argument is nuts.
When the Apollo program was in full swing, monkey bars of rusty steel stood on fields of asphalt.
Yeah, and lots of kids were cracking their skulls when they fell off of them. Our society made the choice that the risk of kids getting brain injuries was not worth the benefit of monkey bars surrounded by asphalt... so they surrounded them by mulch beds instead.
Cars had lap belts but nobody used them. Babies rode on their parent's lap, bigger children rode on the parcel shelf, and nobody wore a helmet on a bicycle or knee pads while skating.
And again, our society (being run by adults and all) decided that the awesome benefits of being able to let your kids roam free in the car didn't justify the risks of permanent injury or death, so we banned that whole practice. I could go on and on, but I'll stop. But the idea that making life safer for people makes us somehow less "grown up", is quite frankly stupid.
... signing up for virtually guaranteed premature death is something else entirely. Fewer people than you think would be willing to sign up for a suicide mission for the greater glory of science.
The point isn't that no one wants to fund NASA to go to Mars. The point is that no one wants to fund a trip to Mars period. Going to Mars would be really, really expensive, and it's not clear how any potential investor could ever recoup the initial investment, much less make a profit. This is borne out by actual experience... we've had the technology to go to Mars since, what, the 60's? So why hasn't anyone gone? The answer: it's too expensive for what you'd get out of it.
Presumably, there would be a mechanism for extracting a tolerable atmosphere for breathing and for growing food, and equipment for turning Martian dirt into agrochemicals.
We've never successfully maintained a closed, artificial environment for any length of time. Some of the attempts were not completely closed systems, and others experienced huge problems in maintaining a liveable atmosphere. So the bottom line is that you'd either have to bring enormous quantities of life support material (oxygen, water, food, etc) with you, or have some reliable method of manufacturing them on site. The first is obviously out of the question for a mission of any length. And we don't really have the technology down to do the second.
The primary component is the devaluation of human labor due to computers and robotics
Devaluation of human labor is certainly the problem, but it's not due to computers and robotics. Computers and robotics have not really replaced people in very many jobs. The real issue is that as a society, we've decided to allocate most of our new wealth to people who were already rich to begin with. The US economy has grown by some enormous amount since the 70's, but wages have been essentially flat. Where did the money go? For starters:
In the 80's, we "fixed" Social Security by significantly boosting payroll taxes, which are primarily borne by the working class. This resulted in a huge surplus in the Social Security account. Meanwhile, various administrations (most notably GWB), enacted huge tax cuts for rich people, and financed the resulting deficits by borrowing from Social Security trust fund. Bush proposed to solve the problem he created by just not paying the trust fund back. Luckily, this plan was stopped, but the net result was still a huge transfer of wealth from working people to the rich.
Corporate friendly government policy - favoring the interests of management over workers, turning a blind eye on mergers and acquisitions, and lax regulation of areas such as personal finance providers, was a further drain on the income of ordinary people. Workers found they had a choice between accepting pay and benefit cuts, or having their jobs moved overseas. Excessive merger activity, much of which had no particular purpose other than to inflate the CEOs salary (HP/Compaq, we're talking about you here), exacerbated this. People also were subjected to usurious interest rates (payday loans, anyone?) and various other dirty tricks to separate them from their money.
Finally, wars. From the perspective of the average person, the Iraq war was so useless that you might as well have just burned the trillion dollars it's cost (so far), but... increased stability in the Middle East is very profitable to oil and private security businesses, among others. I'm sure that's just a coincidence. But again, that is money that could and should have been either a) spent on programs that actually benefit the American people or b) not spent at all.
Try Google News for "recission" - it's quite easy for health insurance companies to rescind your coverage for any reason or no reason at all (although it's almost always couched in terms of a pre-existing condition that you failed to disclose). And frequently, when signing up for insurance, you waive your rights to a trial, agreeing in advance to go to arbitration - with an arbitration company that's picked and paid for by... your health insurance company. Surprisingly, these arbitration outfits find for the plaintiff something like 99% of the time. Who would have guessed.
I don't think the Cignas and Blue Crosses of the world are doing much quaking over individual policyholder suits.
This post is consists of 100% pure recycled right-wing talking points, most of which have nothing to do with the topic at hand. What do congressional rules for bill approval and the number of so-called "czars" have to do with the presentation of contractual data (to say nothing of the fact that these criticisms are stupid in themselves)? Who rates this stuff?
I'm a contractor for a DoD R&D organization. Like many science and technology organizations within the DoD, my customers are on a so-called "experimental" (although it's been in place forever) payscale (not the GS scale that many people are familiar with), that allows them a large amount of flexibility in what they pay people. While it's not quite as much as folks can make on the outside, it is enough that when combined with the higher degree of job security offered within the gov't, they have no trouble recruiting and retaining people. The really good ones can make considerable amounts of money - certainly into the six figures, and that's for those below the SES equivalent grades.
I will never, as long as I live, understand the Slashdot readership's fascination with the idea of offworld mining. So here's a challenge: name something, anything, that can be mined in space and delivered to customers on earth more cost-effectively than we can just mine it on earth. Don't bother telling me that mining space minerals would be great for building stuff in space, because we don't have any reason to build stuff in space... except maybe more space mines. Hopefully the circular nature of that argument is self-evident. Nobody lives there, remember? Neither does anyone have any reason to live there (economically speaking).
Also don't bother bringing up any materials that have no earthly use (example: He3), or are used in such small quantities that it's unlikely anyone would finance such a mining operation in view of the risks involved.
Look, do really think that if there were such vast amounts of money to be made in space, the US government would be able to STOP private companies from getting involved? The Lockheed Martins and Boeings of the world would just buy them a few senators, and they'd be in business. The fact that no such thing has happened speaks volumes. Private industry is not going into space because there is quite simply no money to be made in space.
Yes, they will almost certainly do a hotel for tourism.
Teh stupid! It burns me! No, they almost certainly will not. Based on even wildly optimistic estimates for drops in space travel costs, there's no way you could count on more than a few space tourists per year. You couldn't build a hotel on freakin' earth with that kind of occupancy rate, and of course a space hotel is going to cost unimaginably much more.
Hopefully, this time, president and congress will push a balanced budget amendment.
This is the biggest non-sequitur that I, personally, have ever read.
Slashdot space economics fan-boyism: I'll never understand it.
In which we take dirty water from a river, clean it, shit in it, half-clean it, and put it back in the river for the next city to clean and drink and shit in and put back in the river? Not working out so well in the USA right now. More and more people are finding their tapwater unsafe to drink and having to resort to bottled water.
[Citation needed]
Honestly, this is ridiculous. While obviously not perfect, our sanitation systems today do a pretty damn good job of preventing epidemics of cholera, etc, that used to be quite common (and deadly). If you have trouble accepting this, try traveling to Africa or rural India or somewhere else where they don't have such systems.
So, to sum up - sanitation: has saved, without exaggeration, millions of people from horrific deaths. Space program: we got to thumb our nose at the Russians, bring back some moon rocks, and made (admittedly very important) scientific progress. I don't think you've made your case that the space program trumps sanitation as humanity's greatest achievement.
1. I find it absolutely impossible to believe that there's no cost-effective, technological solution to this problem. People upstream have mentioned the idea of putting remote cameras on the windmill towers, which seems quite reasonable.
2. Even if we can't, um... so freakin' what? It's not like false-alarm tornado warnings are such a big problem - what's the worst-case scenario? People spend more time in their basements than they really needed to? Note that I'm not buying any argument that this could lead to a "boy who cries wolf" scenario... tornado warnings are pretty routinely ignored anyway - because the false alarm rate is already kind of high. I seriously doubt that false alarms caused by wind farms would increase this by any significant amount.
Slashdot Mirror
The astronauts are experts in 1) piloting the spacecraft, or 2) tending to the payload ("mission specialists"). I guarantee that (probably with rare exceptions) they do not have the skills to do the kind of failure analysis that would be required to really understand the risks involved. You would need significant background in aerospace and safety engineering to be able to conduct such a thing, and most of these folks are not. And my impression is that NASA has not done such a great job of doing this analysis even with people who should be qualified to do it.
IAASE (I am a safety engineer). This is a silly question to even ask. It's not possible to "take the risk out of space travel". It's not possible to take the risk out of anything - getting out of bed is risky (you might slip and fall) but so is staying in bed (you might get bedsores). The best we can hope for is to 1) identify the risks involved in space travel, 2) mitigate the ones we can, and then 3) decide whether the remaining risk is worth taking. And there are a whole lot of people in this thread advocating for taking these risks with other people's lives, or volunteering to take these risks themselves in spite of the fact that they don't really understand their severity or probability.
People on slashdot need to get a realistic understanding of what we get out of space travel. The benefits consist of 1) scientific progress - which for the most part can be obtained just as successfully and more cheaply with automated systems, and 2) glory and adventure. I submit that glory and adventure in themselves are not a very good reason to get people killed, especially people who haven't been able to provide actual informed consent to the risks.
The premise of this is sort of stupid. In practice, no one is always right, no one is always wrong, no one is always nice, no one is always a jerk. Asking people to choose among two polar opposites that would never actually be seen in the wild doesn't tell you much about anything in particular.
In the Navy, we have the dreaded NMCI... in which no one but EDS has admin rights, and even Portable Firefox won't run (well, it'll start up, but it's blocked from getting a network connection). Not that it would be terribly practical to try, as you can't even insert a flash drive into your system (per policy).
Also, letting people know that there's a sub somewhere within X km (where x is a fairly large number, the sub could hear a 200+ dB signal for a long way) is less useful than you might think. A circle several kilometers in radius is still a pretty big place to look for a sub, if you even happen to have a platform within range that could do the searching.
Any rational person knows that!
The NASA line in your budget is their current expenditures. We ain't colonizing Mars for $15.9B/year... their budget would have to look like the DOD. Probably more. And that, we really CAN'T afford.
And I can still see that this is nuts.
Ok, then, we'll just drop you off on Mars naked - after all, Mars has all the stuff you need, right? Actually, of course, you need a whole bunch of, you know, equipment, to do hydroponics. All of which would have to be shipped there, at great expense. You also need life support, food, shelter, water, etc, while you're getting started.
The relative humidity is sort of irrelevant - sure, the atmosphere is holding almost all the water it can - but that's just because it's quite cold and low pressure, and can't hold very much. You wouldn't get very many grams of water out of the atmosphere. There may be water ice you could tap into, but that's not a sure thing.
This problem is a lot harder than you make it sound too. We still don't know how to maintain a completely closed artificial ecosystem. The only time we've tried (Biosphere 2), we had significant problems maintaining oxygen and CO2 levels within healthy limits.
I could go on and on, but you get the point. People vastly underestimate the difficulty of getting a colony set up and running. The first three or four attempts on the North American continent failed, and you didn't even have to worry about breathable air or liquid water.
Probably technically possible. Not economically possible, though.
Of course you do... you're talking about spending other people's money, for one thing, and you don't have a firm grasp on much of it you're talking about, for another. Doing a project like this would soak up a significant portion of the GDP of the United States until the self-sustaining point was reached. If you don't believe me, read the industrial process stuff required above again. And what would the benefit to the US taxpayer be?
Let's take these one at a time. Tourism: the infrastructure will never be in place, because given the costs of getting to Mars, there's no way that more than 1 or 2 people a year could afford it. You couldn't afford to build a hotel on earth if only a few guest per year were going to show up, and building one on Mars? Forget it.
Remote data centers: putting them on Mars has no advantages and lots of disadvantages. Of course, there would be an absolutely freakin' enormous cost involved in bringing servers to Mars, building a data center, and staffing it. You'd have a really huge latency in communications with them. And you get... the lack of fires? Data centers rarely burn on earth, and in any case, you could burn down your data center every year and build a new one for what operating a single data center on Mars for a year would cost you.
Homesteading: that all sounds very romantic, but I've got news for you - the bit about adventure and taming the wide-open frontier were at best, secondary benefits to the pioneers. Their main purpose in moving out west was to... make a damn living. How exactly would you do that on Mars? A family plot of land is great, but when there's no air, no water, and no arable soil, it doesn't do too much for you. The only way around that is (extremely expensive and technologically infeasible) terraforming.
Reading your last sentence: "the 'final frontier' thing has to start somewhere..." - there's your trouble. Here's the thing - it doesn't actually have to start at all. You can argue that it ought to happen, but so far everyone seems to be starting from the assumption that it just will happen, and looking for justifications why. My own opinion is that space colonization is too expensive, too risky, and too low payoff to ever actually happen. Sure, our descendants will ultimately be doomed if something happens to earth... but we as a species are just not real good about planning for such long-term problems.
First: before we launch into a mission to find profitable materials on Mars, we need to have some sort of a plan for what those things might be and how we intend to recover them economically. It's not good enough to say "who knows what there might be".
Second: he didn't actually claim there was nothing in the entire solar system that could be profitably exploited - his claim was limited to Mars. However, I'll be happy to step into the breach here - no, there's nothing in the solar system that we could profitably exploit. The solar system is made of the same stuff the earth is made of: silicates, carbonates, iron, nickel, etc. To be able to profitably exploit resources out there, you'd have to identify some material that is 1) incredibly useful on earth, and 2) in such short supply on earth that it would be worthwhile to expend all the resources required to identify/locate, mine, process, and return to earth in quantity. I have never heard anyone mention any substance that even remotely meets these criteria.
There is quite simply no economic reason to be mining anything in space... or we'd be doing it already.
Ok, name one. Your product of choice can't be something that we don't have any earthly use for (pun intended) - so stuff like He3 is out. It also can't be something that would be prohibitively expensive to 1) develop and launch mining equipment for, 2) smelt/refine/process in space, and 3) return to markets on earth in salable condition (i.e. it can't burn up in the atmosphere).
The Slashdot crowd is big into proclaiming that there's this huge untapped market out there for materials from space... but if that's true, why aren't we already mining, or even planning to mine? The answer: there's no way to do it profitably.
IAASE (I am a safety engineer), and I think this argument is nuts.
Yeah, and lots of kids were cracking their skulls when they fell off of them. Our society made the choice that the risk of kids getting brain injuries was not worth the benefit of monkey bars surrounded by asphalt... so they surrounded them by mulch beds instead.
And again, our society (being run by adults and all) decided that the awesome benefits of being able to let your kids roam free in the car didn't justify the risks of permanent injury or death, so we banned that whole practice. I could go on and on, but I'll stop. But the idea that making life safer for people makes us somehow less "grown up", is quite frankly stupid.
... signing up for virtually guaranteed premature death is something else entirely. Fewer people than you think would be willing to sign up for a suicide mission for the greater glory of science.
The point isn't that no one wants to fund NASA to go to Mars. The point is that no one wants to fund a trip to Mars period. Going to Mars would be really, really expensive, and it's not clear how any potential investor could ever recoup the initial investment, much less make a profit. This is borne out by actual experience... we've had the technology to go to Mars since, what, the 60's? So why hasn't anyone gone? The answer: it's too expensive for what you'd get out of it.
We've never successfully maintained a closed, artificial environment for any length of time. Some of the attempts were not completely closed systems, and others experienced huge problems in maintaining a liveable atmosphere. So the bottom line is that you'd either have to bring enormous quantities of life support material (oxygen, water, food, etc) with you, or have some reliable method of manufacturing them on site. The first is obviously out of the question for a mission of any length. And we don't really have the technology down to do the second.
Luckily, I have karma to burn.
Devaluation of human labor is certainly the problem, but it's not due to computers and robotics. Computers and robotics have not really replaced people in very many jobs. The real issue is that as a society, we've decided to allocate most of our new wealth to people who were already rich to begin with. The US economy has grown by some enormous amount since the 70's, but wages have been essentially flat. Where did the money go? For starters:
Robotics aren't the issue here.
Try Google News for "recission" - it's quite easy for health insurance companies to rescind your coverage for any reason or no reason at all (although it's almost always couched in terms of a pre-existing condition that you failed to disclose). And frequently, when signing up for insurance, you waive your rights to a trial, agreeing in advance to go to arbitration - with an arbitration company that's picked and paid for by... your health insurance company. Surprisingly, these arbitration outfits find for the plaintiff something like 99% of the time. Who would have guessed.
I don't think the Cignas and Blue Crosses of the world are doing much quaking over individual policyholder suits.
This post is consists of 100% pure recycled right-wing talking points, most of which have nothing to do with the topic at hand. What do congressional rules for bill approval and the number of so-called "czars" have to do with the presentation of contractual data (to say nothing of the fact that these criticisms are stupid in themselves)? Who rates this stuff?
I'm a contractor for a DoD R&D organization. Like many science and technology organizations within the DoD, my customers are on a so-called "experimental" (although it's been in place forever) payscale (not the GS scale that many people are familiar with), that allows them a large amount of flexibility in what they pay people. While it's not quite as much as folks can make on the outside, it is enough that when combined with the higher degree of job security offered within the gov't, they have no trouble recruiting and retaining people. The really good ones can make considerable amounts of money - certainly into the six figures, and that's for those below the SES equivalent grades.
I will never, as long as I live, understand the Slashdot readership's fascination with the idea of offworld mining. So here's a challenge: name something, anything, that can be mined in space and delivered to customers on earth more cost-effectively than we can just mine it on earth. Don't bother telling me that mining space minerals would be great for building stuff in space, because we don't have any reason to build stuff in space... except maybe more space mines. Hopefully the circular nature of that argument is self-evident. Nobody lives there, remember? Neither does anyone have any reason to live there (economically speaking).
Also don't bother bringing up any materials that have no earthly use (example: He3), or are used in such small quantities that it's unlikely anyone would finance such a mining operation in view of the risks involved.
Look, do really think that if there were such vast amounts of money to be made in space, the US government would be able to STOP private companies from getting involved? The Lockheed Martins and Boeings of the world would just buy them a few senators, and they'd be in business. The fact that no such thing has happened speaks volumes. Private industry is not going into space because there is quite simply no money to be made in space.
Teh stupid! It burns me! No, they almost certainly will not. Based on even wildly optimistic estimates for drops in space travel costs, there's no way you could count on more than a few space tourists per year. You couldn't build a hotel on freakin' earth with that kind of occupancy rate, and of course a space hotel is going to cost unimaginably much more.
This is the biggest non-sequitur that I, personally, have ever read.
Slashdot space economics fan-boyism: I'll never understand it.
... but I'll limit myself to this one:
[Citation needed]
Honestly, this is ridiculous. While obviously not perfect, our sanitation systems today do a pretty damn good job of preventing epidemics of cholera, etc, that used to be quite common (and deadly). If you have trouble accepting this, try traveling to Africa or rural India or somewhere else where they don't have such systems.
So, to sum up - sanitation: has saved, without exaggeration, millions of people from horrific deaths. Space program: we got to thumb our nose at the Russians, bring back some moon rocks, and made (admittedly very important) scientific progress. I don't think you've made your case that the space program trumps sanitation as humanity's greatest achievement.
Note that "NOx" also includes NO2, or nitrogen dioxide. Good point, though.
1. I find it absolutely impossible to believe that there's no cost-effective, technological solution to this problem. People upstream have mentioned the idea of putting remote cameras on the windmill towers, which seems quite reasonable.
2. Even if we can't, um... so freakin' what? It's not like false-alarm tornado warnings are such a big problem - what's the worst-case scenario? People spend more time in their basements than they really needed to? Note that I'm not buying any argument that this could lead to a "boy who cries wolf" scenario... tornado warnings are pretty routinely ignored anyway - because the false alarm rate is already kind of high. I seriously doubt that false alarms caused by wind farms would increase this by any significant amount.