Saying "We will never colonize space because only the extremely rich and elite go there now" is like saying "The sun will never burn out because right now it looks really bright." It's absurdly shortsighted.
You really should consider a political career. I didn't say what you quote, although I grant that it allowed you to gracefully segue into your pious and orthodox rant.
Historically, new technologies have never broken the laws of thermodynamics. Never ever. In order to fulfill these childish dreams of mass space travel, escaping earthly cataclysm, terraforming and colonizing Mars, etc. you need to assume that some currently unsuspected technology can harness vast amounts of energy that in any case are not present on earth, or that the laws of thermodynamics will be broken or bent beyond recognition. It is sappy to believe that "just because we are ignorant today doesn't mean we will remain so tomorrow," or something similar is somehow an acceptable and rational stance. Your belief in the eventual appearance of the mystery technology and its vast implicit energy pool is a magical-religious belief akin to faith in the eventual arrival of a god-like figure and the subsequent salvation of the world in some way. It is ridiculous.
More to the real point, you and your fellow believers are hell-bent in ignoring the real driver of manned space exploration, the Wizard of Oz none of you really want to see. That is the political lobby of the defense industry, in particular the aerospace sector. Manned space exploration is government pork. You should read that last phrase the way "Soylent Green is people!" was recited in the movie, way back when. Manned space exploration is a lie, a swindle, a scam. Stop holding your eyes tightly closed to avoid seeing this reality. It is there, and it is at the root of some terrible other truths that are putting our world in danger. I'm sure I lost you by now, but here is another verdisoylentian tidbit: the War on Terror is also a lie, also pork for the defense industry as well as the energy/petroleum industry. I know, you think that is a bizzare, unfounded, and crazy statement. Well, you have been duly informed. There are very few credible international terrorist groups, most are splinter groups of deranged, powerless fanatics. Occasionaly, they are given both money and professional assistance by intelligence/SpecialOps types (from where? by whom? why? those are the pertinent questions), and they are able to mount truly threatening projects, such as the 9/11 attacks.
Here's a trick: tally up all of the dead and maimed Americans due to international terrorism in the past 10 years, including 9/11. Now tally the same thing for those who have died fighting in Iraq, ostensibly the "front line in the War on Terror." Interesting, eh? Now tally all of the people worldwide who have died at the hands of terrorists in the past 10 years. Do it twice, first excluding those in Iraq, then including them. Then compare that to the number of Iraqi civilians that were killed or maimed by our hand in the first three years of the invasion of Iraq. Use any and all data sources you can find. Oh oh, nasty! Bad dog! Bad!
You have now seen the Wizard, and should be very, very disconcerted. Think about it next summer, as you pump $4/gal gasoline into your car. Think whether this has to do with those who benefit from manned space exploration. Think also about who profits financially from maintaining the belief that we are constantly threatened by terrorists, and that the threat is intimately associated with access to petroleum. Think about "supply and demand." Think.
I wholeheartedly agree with you! If you dig out my past posts on the subject, you will see that I tirelessly promote robotic exploration instead of the pointless and wasteful manned exploration. I am a total unmanned space exploration booster, believe me!
You are using a tired old argument that is just not true. Polynesia was settled thousands of years ago using small watercraft that are quite primitive by our standards. No laws of physics were there to stop them, no need for vast amounts of fuel to move miniscule masses from one place to another. They traveled thousands of miles under dangerous conditions. There are many other historical examples of such migrations, large and small. Shipping large amounts of people to Mars or even into orbit faces physical limitations that cannot be overcome with mere words.
I thought you were being serious until I read "If you take the total energy potential of 100 kg object on Earth, and then compare it to a 100 kg object on Mars, do you know what you get for a difference?" What precesiely are you asking? How about "what is the cost of a 5 gal jug of water on earth, and the same one on Mars?" I will let you do the homework. Don't try to weasel out by claiming that lots of water is on Mars, etc. You would then have to transport not merely a 5 gal jug, but sufficient equipment and supplies to get the water out of the ground, purify it, and bottle it, along with the infrastructure to support the process. That is an even more daunting and expensive task.
The argument that "in the old days who would have believed blah blah blah" is empty of explanatory power, is a tired and tiresome cliche, and is little more than a rhetorical black box.
You and the other responders are wildly optimistic. There needs to be mass tourism for it to be attractive as a large-scale tourism development project. This spaceport will be a small luxury attraction, hardly a huge tourist attraction. In any event, I agree that the locals need the jobs. It is sad that in their desperation they can only clutch at straws like this. It is far from clear that 200,000 people can become prosperous within the first 10 or 20 years from this project.
Get real. This is hardly "commercial space flight," it is an extremely elitist amusement park for the very wealthy. Good luck getting your 15 min ride any time soon. No doubt you believe we will soon colonize the solar system, travel to distant stars, escape from the cataclysmic asteroid, terraform Mars and move populations there, etc. Get real. Those things will not happen, ever. A few people may eventually make it out there, but at great cost and nothing that can be called "colonization" or "humanity's escape from cataclysm." If an asteroid hits earth, we are in deep shit.
There are not enough resources to evacuate a significant amount of people. Not now, not ever.
Physical limitations, energy and mass balances and the like don't give a crap about your sappy dreams. We need to save the planet, not continue to give money away to aerospace industry swindlers and the pimps of the very rich.
Why would 200,000 impoverished people pay extra sales tax to build a "spaceport" for the usual crowd of international super-rich assholes? Beyond that, how much money can this possibly raise, enough to build part of the parking lot? They must be desperate for even menial, servile employment.
More dipshit ideas from corrupt businessmen and politicians, and the SciFi fanboys who support them.
You are making a classic mistake, the rational analysis of the benefits and liabilities to average citizens of a fundamentally political question, as well as the practicalities of actually making it work. This has nothing to do with whether this or that is better for society or for children, or whether pornographers will benefit or lose from it (porn will continue its current dynamics regardless), or who will decide what is porn and what is not (good luck to the poor bastards). It is a pure distillation of political bullshit, an equation which has more to do with maintaining the flow of political contributions and winning future elections than anything else. If you apply your rational analysis to that, you will get somewhere.
I suspect ICANN will once again nip it in the bud because politicians will merely shout hysterically and lecture piously and pass the hot potato on to someone else. ICANN does not even want to start figuring out the things you mention, and it is unclear who would. Therefore, bam! goes the gavel again: rejected!
"...the religious groups worried it would make access too easy and allow porn to expand even further onto the Internet."
Yow! There is a physically possible act that has not yet been carried out that can allow porn to expand even further onto the Internet! What can this mysterious act be? Does it involve high energy particles from some monstrous new accelerator? Have aliens finally arrived from a distant galaxy, ready to share their vast and incomprehensible technologies? Is there now a 5th dimension, aside from space and time, that we mere mortals will soon perceive as easily as we drink a glass of water or click on URLs with our mice? Is some sort of perverse rapture imminent, wherein we shall all ascend into some terrifying multidimensional pornographic spiritual plane?
No! It is the dire threat of yet another TLD for which spending countless man-hours and obscene sums of money making new porn sites will be clearly more compelling than merely forwarding web surfers to the same old sites available now. A possibility so horrendous, so heinous, so depraved that ICANN has rightly gaveled it away twice before. No sir, our world is not ready for another TLD, particularly one devoted to porn. Why, what if my teenage children are exposed to the use of sexual images for filthy lucre? Unthinkable. Damn them! Damn them all to Hell!
The sad fact is that so many of our fellow citizens, easily half of them, still support the current Federal government. Many or most still believe we are fighting for our freedom and/or against tyranny in the Middle East, that the Patriot Act and its amendments make us more secure, that DMCA is acceptable, that $3 and up per gallon of gas is an unavoidable fact of life, that politicians who claim to be Christian and occasionally babble pseudo-biblical gibberish are indeed Christians, that the "checks and balances" envisioned by the founding fathers are still operational or even relevant, that political discourse needs to be understood and endlessly parsed and analyzed (but the actual damage done by politicians tolerated or just ignored), that The War on Terror is a legitimate response to international terrorism, that there are huge numbers of terrorists champing at the bit to attack us (an unsubstantiated belief, by and large), that it matters greatly whether top level politicians are Republican or Democrat, that personality cults are really important, etc. etc. etc.
Oh come now, cut the sappy theatrics. What scares you? That I don't buy into the simple-minded notion that humans must be physically present at every stage of space exploration? What for? Do you want to do a lot of ambitious exploration with robotic equipment, or are you satisfied with a ridiculous low earth orbit ferris wheel? Do you want space science, or just bright, noisy rocket launches?
Do you seriously hope or believe that someday we will leave the earth as a species and "colonize space"? Do you think that is a viable way to avoid a cataclysmic asteroid impact? People who are that unable to guesstimate the costs, natural resources, and intrinsic injustice of sending a few elitist nitwits on such gambits scare me. You need to sit down and estimate the practical, social, and political costs of your juvenile superstitious beliefs. I don't want to waste my tax dollars on such rubbish.
Interesting reasoning. You have just justified unmanned missions over manned.
It would have been vastly cheaper to have designed for partial earth assembly and partial automated and remote controlled assembly in orbit. No food, water, oxygen and pressurization, toilets, sleeping areas, human instrumentation interfaces, etc. In fact, the ISS would have been far smaller and cheaper, easily offsetting the R&D and manufacturing costs you claim. The ISS has cost a fortune largely because humans need to survive in it. Eliminate that requirement and it is an altogether different situation.
To say nothing of the technological achievements that could be rampantly applied throughout our economy.
The Chinese will do no such thing because it would be a moronic and purposeless waste of huge amounts of money. As to private enterprise not being able to come up with innovative space technologies, a recent news item indicates otherwise.
What about those knives in the kitchen? The crowbar integrated into your lug nut wrench? The computer on your desk which can very easily be used to plan terrorist attacks? The dozen gallons of highly flammable, and under the right conditions explosive, liquid you carry around in a tank under your car?
That's right, my friend, you are walking on thin ice at the moment. We'd best start keeping tabs on you, filling our vast databases with data about you, use flawed software to tirelessly, ruthlessly find links between you and terrorist cells in your city, or terrorists who's names begin with the same letter as yours, or whose social security numbers share more than two digits with yours.
Let's not even get into your lack of judgement and your very evident gullibility, which might easily be exploited by terrorists to help them carry out some heinous act. Or by politicians. Whatever.
A risky assertion, my friend. I can assure you that if a young woman wants to conceive with your seed, your opinion will be of primarily academic interest. To say nothing of the hallowed human tradition of carelessness with regard to birth control.
Cowtown, Iowa, October 17, 2006 (UP) - Animal husbandry industry scientists announced a revolutionary system for industrializing the cultivation of all types of commercially important mammals from single cells. The process is claimed to approach 100% reliability and uses no hazardous laboratory materials of any kind. It is so simple, elegant, and powerful, scientists claim, that deployment even in Third World countries should be practical and economically viable.
The process consists in using live animal tissue to host single cells derived from animals that have been shown to have desirable commercial properties. Such cells are available in the live tissue samples as part of natural cyclical biochemical events and processes. The tissue sample itself need not be removed from the host animal. It can be left in situ, thus taking advantage of the natural, complex milieux of nutrients and biological messenger molecules that are present within the host organism.
In order to trigger the events necessary for whole-animal generation, the cell must be placed in contact with a special bath containing certain unique triggering cells, all most all of which are lost after the process is complete and do not contaminate or interfere with subsequent nascent animal specimen development. For a variety of genetic and biochemical reasons, these cells must be obtained from a different animal from the host, and this donor animal must also be carefully screened for desirable commercial traits. Fortunately, the cell suspension is largely or wholly produced within the donor animal naturally, and transfer of the cell suspension is readily performed under conditions that can be orchestrated in most or all animal husbandry facilities. A special transfer probe for the cell suspension can usually already be found on some part of the donor animal.
Once the cell suspension has been transferred to the tissue sample within the host animal, scientsits claim, an enormously complex series of biochemical events ensue. Most of the complexity occurs after the suspension comes in contact with the hosted cell, and later dissipates harmlessly. The donor cells induce changes in the hosted cell, which immediately result in cell division and growth. The cell is typically left within the host animal, where it adheres to nearby mucosal tissue and continues a lengthy process of cell division and tissue differentiation, lasting weeks or months if the process is successful.
Once the process is complete, and the newly fashioned animal is ready to be harvested, additional biochemical events cause the expulsion of the product animal from the host. This can be done safely enough for the host animal to be reused, often repeatedly, be proper location of the cell, its host tissue sample, and the donor animal's cell suspension deposition probe. None of this process requires any further equipment or materials than the biological structures and materials that are typically already present in commonly available barnyard animals.
The researchers, and in particular their corporate sponsors, are convinced that the process is scalable and highly marketable. Animals produced by means of this process are essentially indistinguishable from those that are found in the wild in all genetic, biochemical, physiological, and anatomical traits evaluated so far, although further research is ongoing.
Marketing staff are currently developing literature for the general animal husbandry market, although an initial campaign centered around "Making Animals Fuck And Have Babies" has been discarded.
I agree, especially with your second paragraph. Stupid? Promotes even more crap? Cynical, greedy, and exploitative? Yes. Unfortunately, that's the driving force, and it is naive to think in more noble terms, as most of the other posters appear to have done.
Business is business, and for its practitioners everything else is secondary.
You missed the point of the "Bleat, bleat, bleat" post. The revewer examined the book from the point of view of a software developer, when the book is plainly intended for a non-technical lay public. For a SW developer the book is evidently inadequate. I doubt that the same could be said for the general public.
Also, books don't fall out of the sky in final form. They are products developed at companies that wish to make a net profit from them in a fiercely competitive book market. The author of a book intended for the lay public is usually closely managed by the editor in charge of the project in order to insure that the target market is well-served. You need only watch a few hours of prime time TV to glean an idea of how to approach that market. To provide a book that passes muster with SW developers would be a blunder. To hype up pre-conceived stereotypes and stroke the lay reader would very likely prove useful. To drop famous names and quote from their writings, implying agreement with the book's theses, would also be a good idea.
They are trying to sell books, not philosophize at an intellectual café.
Slashdot Mirror
You really should consider a political career. I didn't say what you quote, although I grant that it allowed you to gracefully segue into your pious and orthodox rant.
Historically, new technologies have never broken the laws of thermodynamics. Never ever. In order to fulfill these childish dreams of mass space travel, escaping earthly cataclysm, terraforming and colonizing Mars, etc. you need to assume that some currently unsuspected technology can harness vast amounts of energy that in any case are not present on earth, or that the laws of thermodynamics will be broken or bent beyond recognition. It is sappy to believe that "just because we are ignorant today doesn't mean we will remain so tomorrow," or something similar is somehow an acceptable and rational stance. Your belief in the eventual appearance of the mystery technology and its vast implicit energy pool is a magical-religious belief akin to faith in the eventual arrival of a god-like figure and the subsequent salvation of the world in some way. It is ridiculous.
More to the real point, you and your fellow believers are hell-bent in ignoring the real driver of manned space exploration, the Wizard of Oz none of you really want to see. That is the political lobby of the defense industry, in particular the aerospace sector. Manned space exploration is government pork. You should read that last phrase the way "Soylent Green is people!" was recited in the movie, way back when. Manned space exploration is a lie, a swindle, a scam. Stop holding your eyes tightly closed to avoid seeing this reality. It is there, and it is at the root of some terrible other truths that are putting our world in danger. I'm sure I lost you by now, but here is another verdisoylentian tidbit: the War on Terror is also a lie, also pork for the defense industry as well as the energy/petroleum industry. I know, you think that is a bizzare, unfounded, and crazy statement. Well, you have been duly informed. There are very few credible international terrorist groups, most are splinter groups of deranged, powerless fanatics. Occasionaly, they are given both money and professional assistance by intelligence/SpecialOps types (from where? by whom? why? those are the pertinent questions), and they are able to mount truly threatening projects, such as the 9/11 attacks.
Here's a trick: tally up all of the dead and maimed Americans due to international terrorism in the past 10 years, including 9/11. Now tally the same thing for those who have died fighting in Iraq, ostensibly the "front line in the War on Terror." Interesting, eh? Now tally all of the people worldwide who have died at the hands of terrorists in the past 10 years. Do it twice, first excluding those in Iraq, then including them. Then compare that to the number of Iraqi civilians that were killed or maimed by our hand in the first three years of the invasion of Iraq. Use any and all data sources you can find. Oh oh, nasty! Bad dog! Bad!
You have now seen the Wizard, and should be very, very disconcerted. Think about it next summer, as you pump $4/gal gasoline into your car. Think whether this has to do with those who benefit from manned space exploration. Think also about who profits financially from maintaining the belief that we are constantly threatened by terrorists, and that the threat is intimately associated with access to petroleum. Think about "supply and demand." Think.
I wholeheartedly agree with you! If you dig out my past posts on the subject, you will see that I tirelessly promote robotic exploration instead of the pointless and wasteful manned exploration. I am a total unmanned space exploration booster, believe me!
I thought you were being serious until I read "If you take the total energy potential of 100 kg object on Earth, and then compare it to a 100 kg object on Mars, do you know what you get for a difference?" What precesiely are you asking? How about "what is the cost of a 5 gal jug of water on earth, and the same one on Mars?" I will let you do the homework. Don't try to weasel out by claiming that lots of water is on Mars, etc. You would then have to transport not merely a 5 gal jug, but sufficient equipment and supplies to get the water out of the ground, purify it, and bottle it, along with the infrastructure to support the process. That is an even more daunting and expensive task.
The argument that "in the old days who would have believed blah blah blah" is empty of explanatory power, is a tired and tiresome cliche, and is little more than a rhetorical black box.
You and the other responders are wildly optimistic. There needs to be mass tourism for it to be attractive as a large-scale tourism development project. This spaceport will be a small luxury attraction, hardly a huge tourist attraction. In any event, I agree that the locals need the jobs. It is sad that in their desperation they can only clutch at straws like this. It is far from clear that 200,000 people can become prosperous within the first 10 or 20 years from this project.
Physical limitations, energy and mass balances and the like don't give a crap about your sappy dreams. We need to save the planet, not continue to give money away to aerospace industry swindlers and the pimps of the very rich.
Grow the fuck up for chrissakes.
More dipshit ideas from corrupt businessmen and politicians, and the SciFi fanboys who support them.
I suspect ICANN will once again nip it in the bud because politicians will merely shout hysterically and lecture piously and pass the hot potato on to someone else. ICANN does not even want to start figuring out the things you mention, and it is unclear who would. Therefore, bam! goes the gavel again: rejected!
Yow! There is a physically possible act that has not yet been carried out that can allow porn to expand even further onto the Internet! What can this mysterious act be? Does it involve high energy particles from some monstrous new accelerator? Have aliens finally arrived from a distant galaxy, ready to share their vast and incomprehensible technologies? Is there now a 5th dimension, aside from space and time, that we mere mortals will soon perceive as easily as we drink a glass of water or click on URLs with our mice? Is some sort of perverse rapture imminent, wherein we shall all ascend into some terrifying multidimensional pornographic spiritual plane?
No! It is the dire threat of yet another TLD for which spending countless man-hours and obscene sums of money making new porn sites will be clearly more compelling than merely forwarding web surfers to the same old sites available now. A possibility so horrendous, so heinous, so depraved that ICANN has rightly gaveled it away twice before. No sir, our world is not ready for another TLD, particularly one devoted to porn. Why, what if my teenage children are exposed to the use of sexual images for filthy lucre? Unthinkable. Damn them! Damn them all to Hell!
Bummer, is all I can say.
Do you seriously hope or believe that someday we will leave the earth as a species and "colonize space"? Do you think that is a viable way to avoid a cataclysmic asteroid impact? People who are that unable to guesstimate the costs, natural resources, and intrinsic injustice of sending a few elitist nitwits on such gambits scare me. You need to sit down and estimate the practical, social, and political costs of your juvenile superstitious beliefs. I don't want to waste my tax dollars on such rubbish.
It would have been vastly cheaper to have designed for partial earth assembly and partial automated and remote controlled assembly in orbit. No food, water, oxygen and pressurization, toilets, sleeping areas, human instrumentation interfaces, etc. In fact, the ISS would have been far smaller and cheaper, easily offsetting the R&D and manufacturing costs you claim. The ISS has cost a fortune largely because humans need to survive in it. Eliminate that requirement and it is an altogether different situation.
To say nothing of the technological achievements that could be rampantly applied throughout our economy.
The Chinese will do no such thing because it would be a moronic and purposeless waste of huge amounts of money. As to private enterprise not being able to come up with innovative space technologies, a recent news item indicates otherwise.
Good luck expecting the SciFi fanboys to even read that.
That's right, my friend, you are walking on thin ice at the moment. We'd best start keeping tabs on you, filling our vast databases with data about you, use flawed software to tirelessly, ruthlessly find links between you and terrorist cells in your city, or terrorists who's names begin with the same letter as yours, or whose social security numbers share more than two digits with yours.
Let's not even get into your lack of judgement and your very evident gullibility, which might easily be exploited by terrorists to help them carry out some heinous act. Or by politicians. Whatever.
Here is a good one.
...the Mujahedeen Poisons Handbook poisons you!
You're not looking anywhere near closely enough.
A risky assertion, my friend. I can assure you that if a young woman wants to conceive with your seed, your opinion will be of primarily academic interest. To say nothing of the hallowed human tradition of carelessness with regard to birth control.
The bullshit people buy into sometimes...
It assumes that rich people will stop having sex with poor people. Anybody see any logic flaws here?
The process consists in using live animal tissue to host single cells derived from animals that have been shown to have desirable commercial properties. Such cells are available in the live tissue samples as part of natural cyclical biochemical events and processes. The tissue sample itself need not be removed from the host animal. It can be left in situ, thus taking advantage of the natural, complex milieux of nutrients and biological messenger molecules that are present within the host organism.
In order to trigger the events necessary for whole-animal generation, the cell must be placed in contact with a special bath containing certain unique triggering cells, all most all of which are lost after the process is complete and do not contaminate or interfere with subsequent nascent animal specimen development. For a variety of genetic and biochemical reasons, these cells must be obtained from a different animal from the host, and this donor animal must also be carefully screened for desirable commercial traits. Fortunately, the cell suspension is largely or wholly produced within the donor animal naturally, and transfer of the cell suspension is readily performed under conditions that can be orchestrated in most or all animal husbandry facilities. A special transfer probe for the cell suspension can usually already be found on some part of the donor animal.
Once the cell suspension has been transferred to the tissue sample within the host animal, scientsits claim, an enormously complex series of biochemical events ensue. Most of the complexity occurs after the suspension comes in contact with the hosted cell, and later dissipates harmlessly. The donor cells induce changes in the hosted cell, which immediately result in cell division and growth. The cell is typically left within the host animal, where it adheres to nearby mucosal tissue and continues a lengthy process of cell division and tissue differentiation, lasting weeks or months if the process is successful.
Once the process is complete, and the newly fashioned animal is ready to be harvested, additional biochemical events cause the expulsion of the product animal from the host. This can be done safely enough for the host animal to be reused, often repeatedly, be proper location of the cell, its host tissue sample, and the donor animal's cell suspension deposition probe. None of this process requires any further equipment or materials than the biological structures and materials that are typically already present in commonly available barnyard animals.
The researchers, and in particular their corporate sponsors, are convinced that the process is scalable and highly marketable. Animals produced by means of this process are essentially indistinguishable from those that are found in the wild in all genetic, biochemical, physiological, and anatomical traits evaluated so far, although further research is ongoing.
Marketing staff are currently developing literature for the general animal husbandry market, although an initial campaign centered around "Making Animals Fuck And Have Babies" has been discarded.
You have to admit, it's a topic he knows a thing or two about.
Business is business, and for its practitioners everything else is secondary.
Where did I negate the need to review it? Don't make up phantom claims.
And the reviewer did try and think of how the target audience would benefit, or not from the book.
He did not focus on the target audience, he mentioned it briefly as a secondary issue. He focused on a tangentially related audience.
Also, books don't fall out of the sky in final form. They are products developed at companies that wish to make a net profit from them in a fiercely competitive book market. The author of a book intended for the lay public is usually closely managed by the editor in charge of the project in order to insure that the target market is well-served. You need only watch a few hours of prime time TV to glean an idea of how to approach that market. To provide a book that passes muster with SW developers would be a blunder. To hype up pre-conceived stereotypes and stroke the lay reader would very likely prove useful. To drop famous names and quote from their writings, implying agreement with the book's theses, would also be a good idea.
They are trying to sell books, not philosophize at an intellectual café.