I fail to see how climate change is an absolute truth, other than the painfully obvious observation that a particular climate is always in flux and is at best an average over a given period of time for a defined location or region. When that window changes, the interpretation of that climate has also changed. That isn't a scientific fact, that is a postulate and indeed the very definition of the terms involved. It doesn't help that sometimes the area under review also changes in time, and other factors that should be considered even for the raw measurement of the data isn't taken into consideration either.
Asserting a postulate as a theorem is perhaps one of the problems with this debate, and one of several fallacies that are involved in the debate.
I'll go so far as to suggest that climate science has improve significantly over the past several decades, and testable hypothesis have been put forth and some very useful predictive models have been developed as a direct result of that study and the creation of those theories. Predictions of hurricanes and other weather systems, particularly over the relatively short term, is something that has improved to the point that it is indeed saving lives and making positive contributions to society as a whole... including helping those who are poor and the most needy.
The question that is being raised here, however, if this hypothesis of AGW is something that exists at the same standards as predicting where a given hurricane system will land over the course of the next week. I assert that it does not, but that it certainly is something useful to bring up in terms of general trends and at least raising some alarm about the topic. Alarm, however, doesn't mean to hit the panic button and claim that civilization as we know it is doomed to failure and that we as a species need to do something today or we will be extinct within a generation. THAT isn't science, that is fear mongering and using "science" as a tool to gain political advantage, perverting both the political process and the science along the way.
There may be rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The question, however, is what can be attributed as the source, what is the cause and what are the consequences of that CO2 rising?
BTW, in terms of the algorithms being used and looking for the "hidden data"..... you had better believe I've gone looking for it, and yes I've had some climatologists at a loss for explaining why some numbers have been changed on the electronic versions of the data which are simply missing from the hand-written records of earlier time periods.... particularly when the data was computerized at a much later date. I'm not necessarily saying that the warming trends are completely fabricated, but there has been tampering of the climate data for some time, a sort of "thumb on the scale" that has been distorting the data for political purposes rather than working with it as a science.
As somebody who was involved with inputting at least some of the raw climate data that is currently being used, I will assert as a fact and expert witness to that effect if called upon to testify that some of the climate data has been falsified. Not all of it, but enough to at least throw off some climate models as using invalid or even false data and making a mockery of those who think they have the whole world wide average temperature down to a fraction of a degree. The algorithms being used to manipulate that data have not been published either, as the data was "sanitized" and asserted to be the original source data when in fact it wasn't
For myself, I'm holding out hope for the good folks at the Emc2 corporation to get Robert Bussard's Polywell reactor to work, or that one of the other fusion technologies can get into production within the next decade or two. If that happens, the need to push for acres of solar panels plastered all over will no longer be an issue except for relatively small power needs in isolated environments (aka a very rural area far from any power grid). Solar power is one of several approaches we should be taking, but it doesn't have to be the only one.
There are applications of petroleum that go beyond simply burning it up as a fuel, so it won't completely stop all petroleum production even if some magic pill comes along and eliminates the need for gasoline powered automobiles.
BTW, once you get that 1 barrel of oil out of the tar sands of Alberta, do you realize how much energy it takes to get a gallon of gasoline? The electrical power consumption at an oil refinery for processing one gallon of gasoline is actually more energy in general than the total amount of energy, if consumed at 100% efficiency, that the gallon of gasoline can possibly produce. In this regard, gasoline and petroleum isn't really an energy source, but rather an energy storage medium. Adding in the energy expended to extract oil from the tar sands, it makes the gasoline even less of an energy source.
BTW, I also agree.... +1 insightful for the AC post I'm responding to!
Where I have a huge problem with those promoting "anthroprogenic global warming" is the complete and total denial that any other mechanism might be in play, and that other sources of that climate change may be happening. I've listed those on other/. posts, and I still assert there are other factors beside CO2 production we should be concerned about. Even the more recent "concerns" about the impact of smoke and dust (or lack thereof now that we have environmental regulatory agencies like the EPA eliminating that form of pollution from traditionally smoky industries) only begin to scratch the surface of what may be causes of climate changes around the world.
I've discussed in more formal forums concerns about these "missing variables" in climate models, and the response for why they are not included is usually rather lame.... mostly that they need to simplify to be able to make any sort of prediction and then wonder why their models no longer make good predictions.
BTW, I agree that we need to be better stewards over the things we are responsible for in this world, and that we should make some significant headway with some of the major issues you mention here too. I would even go so far as to suggest if we were to be more responsible with our environment and it resources, that the other issues like AGW and CO2 production would be put back into balance and be much more effectively dealt with rather than creating whole new levels of government bureaucracy to deal with one or two narrow issues that are oh so easy to overdo.
The problem with "AGW" is that it is bad science and mostly public relations, not necessarily actual science. I can name numerous sorts of problems with those who are pro-AGW just as those who are blatant deniers are equally out to lunch.
A great part of the problem is that head smacking obvious issues like what caused the medieval global warming (hint, it had almost nothing to do with human impact on the environment) and the subsequent cold period that sort of peaked some time around the period of the American Revolution in the late 18th Century are certainly not satisfactorily explained with the current climatological models, and how anybody can measure the temperature of the whole of the Earth down to a fraction of a degree is something that I think is equally bogus.
I'm not one to suggest that we need to completely ignore the effects of human civilization upon the global climate or even on a regional basis, but some balance does need to get back into the debate.
Where the real problem comes in is not just the deniers who want to pop off a bunch of oil wells similar to what Saddam Hussein did in Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War and deliberately try to pollute the Earth and cause as much CO2 production as possible to prove that the AGW hypothesis is incorrect, but those who are of the opposite extreme and essentially wish to kill off the whole of human civilization and go even so far as advocating mass genocide as obviously mankind is a virus that needs to be exterminated.
It is precisely the politics that has invaded science, as evidenced by this letter too, that is causing many of the problems. Those sitting on committees who are funding this kind of science are seemingly systematically killing off even modest questioning of basic concepts, and worse still is the suggestion that one and only one form of activity is solely responsible for any warming that the Earth may have had over the past couple of decades.
These who would be honest scientists ought to decry and distance themselves from activists who do really bizarre things like claiming extreme blizzards and heat waves are "evidence" of global warming, as are floods and droughts. Heck, any time there is any sort of weather of any kind and there is some story that says "Oh.... that was caused by global warming". Even ordinary temperate and fair weather is attributed to global warming.... thus making a farce of the whole notion in the first place.
Can reasonable steps be done to reduce pollution in the environment in all its varied forms, and ought we be reasonable stewards over those things we are responsible for? Absolutely! At the same time, massive economic overhaul that causes mayham to almost everything we hold dear and turns folks like Al Gore into billionaires is not necessarily something I wish to advocate either, and certainly would be willing to call those who support crazy ideas like carbon tax credits without following the money and realizing what harm such a policy and concept causes is also just as silly.
I, for one, am very concerned about carbon sequestration and the potential long-term pollution problems that sort of technical solution might cause, and even go so far as to argue that some of the methods of sequestration might end up causing more problems than simply letting it pipe out into the atmosphere. It is one thing to run the exhaust of a coal plant through a greenhouse to promote biomass production. It is another to shove the CO2 into the ground and pretend that it has no long-term impact if that is done for a century or two. I really worry about CO2 dumping into oceans and what sorts of long-term impacts that may have on the aquatic ecosystems.... yet those are schemes that are going to be given a carbon tax credit as it won't be going into the air. Yeah, put off the problems for a couple millenia when we are going to be compost ourselves. That sounds like a good idea, I suppose.
This isn't a cut and dried issue, and there is some horrible science being done, and others claimin
The problem with this way of thinking is the whole concept of software patents in the first place. I'd have to agree that on at least some level you are thinking that you are actually buying a piece of equipment and that all of the components to that equipment also belong to you as well. If you use that camera as a door stop, drop it in a cement mixer or juice blender, have it open cans of food, or use it to make movies.... that should be what you as a person are doing and that a manufacturer should have no possible say in how it is used.
I happen to agree with you here, and it really does boil down to the use of software patents here to pervert the whole process. If this was a film camera, there wouldn't be any issue at all as you can have some completely different company or process to be developed to actually view whatever it was that you shot with your camera. But with software patents, the licensing applies to anybody who uses the algorithm, even if the software code itself was completely original and had nothing at all to do with the patent holder.
Importantly, video can be considered after a fashion to be computer software as well, where licensing is required to distribute that software from the patent holders of that software.
I agree this is stupid, and from a political viewpoint this is something that shouldn't be allowed. Courts shouldn't be allowing this kind of behavior, and more importantly our elected representatives shouldn't be passing laws that recognize software patents and especially shouldn't be preventing ordinary people from sharing video expressions with each other... however that sharing happens. This is particularly true if those video expressions are original.
Let your elected representatives know you feelings about this matter and that it is something you consider important to you. Now the real trick is to get others to agree with you.
The problem is that most people don't really take licensing issues seriously, and the MPEG-LA tries to lull you into thinking that "everybody" is using their product so they go out of their way to push the standard onto companies who really don't know what is going on. For those folks who are CEOs or middle managers with a business rather than an engineering degree, they have a hard time trying to grasp why all of this licensing is a problem or how it might impact the ability for their company to make a profit. These managers certainly could care less about their customers if they can push off any licensing requirements to the end-users as long as they don't have to pay for it themselves.
Repeatedly I have told multiple customers and clients that I've worked with, that if you are trying to specify a video codec or standard, to stay away from MPEG as if it was a viral plague ready to eat you alive. Even more interesting, if you read the fine print from the MPEG-LA themselves when you go through the formal process of licensing these codecs, you essentially sign a waiver that you understand that you haven't really licensed anything at all. All they have agreed is that certain patents from certain companies that have come together with the MPEG-LA are licensing the use of that specific list of patents for any product you are using. If some other patented process is being used with the MPEG codecs, you explicitly (it is right there in the contract) must seek out and gain other license from other patent holders. Indeed, they flatly assert that there are other patent holders of MPEG codecs that they were unable to get to join the MPEG-LA, so buyer beware. If you like to real legal prose that promises absolutely nothing and tries to part some money from your wallet for what is obviously a scam, reading the fine print of these licensing contracts is quite interesting.
Another interesting group is Dolby Laboratories.... where they have three lawyers for every engineer on their payroll. That should say something about their business model, but at least they have engineers you can work with that will tell you how to use some of the stuff they've worked on.
The real pity is that if more people actually paid attention to licenses for video codecs, there would have been in the past and there would be now a greater push to develop free as in speech and beer codecs. However awful, Ogg Theora at least is there to fall back on.
Yeah, but the difference is how it used to be that the manufacturer paid for a license, sold you the product (cost of license built-in), and you used it for whatever you wanted.
Nowadays, they want to control not just how the product is made and sold, but how it is USED. That's just plain too much power.
This is new? Didn't C compiler vendors used to demand royalties on the sale of products made with their compilers, at least until the advent of GCC?
They still do... read the ELUA from Microsoft for the use of Visual Studio and some of their other compilers if you think differently. Microsoft is actually pretty decent about it, but I have seen some rather draconian restrictions on the end-products from a compiler. One of the most offensive of those companies I ever worked with was Macromedia, the original developer of Flash and Authorware. They had some rather steep fees (per copy distributed) if you wanted to engage in commercial distribution of products made with their software development tools.
The legal precedence goes back to the 1960's, where even more interesting is that potential claimants to software copyright can including nearly every person or company that has a device that is used for storing that software and the developers of software (including the operating system) used for its creation. That would include the company who wrote the operating system, the file system, the compiler, the BIOS firmware developers, and literally hundreds if not thousands of companies. It makes it a wonder that computer software ever gold sold on a commercial basis in the first place if you look at everybody who potentially can demand royalties and payment for developing some software.
As a practical matter, as you've pointed out, with compilers like GCC running on Linux using hardware reverse engineered in China, there is some pretty stiff competition out there to keep real jerks from gouging the system too hard and keeping software from generally being developed. I've bumped into some really stupid licensing requirements over the years that has made significant changes to how I've developed software, including avoiding certain file formats and dumping certain vendors in terms of using them for products or services I've provided for my employer or clients I've worked with.
The problem I have with most video codecs, at least those that become a significant issue, is when it reaches the point that it becomes enshrined in law through regulations or even defacto standards. Several video formatting standards have now become law because they are in use for broadcasting (HD-television) or are used in official publications (court evidence and government hearing records... to give some examples).
For myself, any such standard that has the force of law can and ought to be also in a freely distributable format that has no other "intellectual property" hangups to keep citizens from using that material for any possible legitimate use. Ultimately, if you really want to be blunt, every single possible use should be allowed for content coming from official sources in government as that provides necessary transparency to allow the citizens to know what, exactly, our government is doing and to act as responsible citizens ourselves. When as a citizen I am prevented from informing other citizens about a key aspect of our government due to some sort of silly patent or some other "digitial rights management", it adversely impacts the ability for citizens to make well informed decisions about those who should hold public office and in fact makes a mockery of the basic concepts of democracy in general.
Dovetailing back to the main point of this/. post, I certainly should be able to take a camera to a political rally like one of the Tea Party gatherings or perhaps even more significant going to a government meeting like a city council meeting and record some of what I saw there.... using that video as the most significant and important part of what free speech is all about: informing other citizens about what is happening in their government. There shouldn't be any sort of restriction on how that video is then subsequently used as it is essential to the basic tenants of free speech to engage explicitly in political speech to make your point.... whatever that political view you may hold. Restrictions like are imposed here can be used as political tools to repress speech at a most fundamental level, and can also be used to selectively repress speech so only a particular viewpoint can be expressed using this "technology".
Patent law was certainly never intended to restrict free speech in any form, and that is where I think these lawyers are likely going way over the top.... and may even bite off more than they can chew by trying to take people on who might be using cameras "for commercial gain".
I'm reading this post, and I don't know what to even think of it. Edwards AFB as an American spaceport of choice?
I've heard somewhat recent reports about the commercial spaceport in Mojave, California; on Wallops Island, Virginia; Kodiak Island, Alaska; Burns Flat, Oklahoma; Cape Canavaral, Florida; and the big one that is being financed almost exclusively with state money in southern New Mexico. Vandenburg AFB, also in California, has been mentioned a few times although the military keeps things pretty well locked up there. In nearly all discussions of commercial spaceflight I have never even heard a peep about Edwards. It may be something that NASA has been using for quite some time and certainly has been the landing site for many Space Shuttle landings, but as a commercial spaceport, it is not merely missing, it is completely off the radar for any company doing private commercial launches. Quite a bit is even happening on the Kwajalein island in the Marshall Islands with American companies.
If there is something to point out, seriously, I'd love to see it. Perhaps during the Reagan administration some bureaucrat tried to turn Edwards into something more commercial, but whatever has been happening along those lines has been a complete flop.
This image from the FAA shows a map of all licensed spaceports in the USA, and I see that Edwards is listed on there. Perhaps the proximity to the Mojave airport is what really is the key factor, as Edwards offers almost no other significant benefits and in fact lacks some of the infrastructure necessary for private commercial projects. It would be a great place for a classified military project, but not for something that would carry passengers or commercial cargo. Really, the Mojave airport is more like how Silicon Valley was back in the late 1960's to early 1970's as the happening place to be right now for private spaceflight.
Dig deeper? Did you really read my post here? It is becoming increasingly more expensive and much more damaging to the environment to get much deeper. There certainly will reach a threshold that extracting minerals from space will be no just sort of cheaper but an order of magnitude cheaper than going down further. It sure isn't cheap to extract a pound of ore from a couple of kilometers underground, and takes a tremendous amount of capital to get that to happen. I've even heard that most mines expect it to take decades to recover the often billions of dollars that are spent on opening a mind before they finally break even from a fiscal standpoint.
Again, there is not "nothing" in space. I stand in my back yard and see a universe filled with stuff, of which I am standing in just one minor little corner.
Right. So where is the commercial supersonic passenger transport on Earth? We can't even do that. What makes you think we'll do it in space? *Regular* airlines are constantly going broke.
Regular airlines are going broke because there is massive competition going on between them. They dare not raise fares because by doing so a competitor will undercut them. That still doesn't stop others, perhaps foolishly, from trying to start a new airline and trying to make a profit from this industry that the other airlines are going broke in.
Frankly, this isn't even a good argument at all, and certainly it can be shown that the commercial airlines are working with billions of dollars in revenue. Yes, I know that revenue is not the same as profits, but those airlines that figure out how to improve efficiency and are willing to offer customers those services which are requested at a reasonable price that those same customers are willing to pay for those services will make a profit... or they will go bankrupt like happens in any capitalistic society.
This is how capitalism works. The "too big to fail" argument simply falls flat for me and is something stupid as well, and a foolish place to throw government money to buy out those companies who fall flat on their face. I say let them fail, and let those who are smart to pick up the pieces afterward! It might be nice for a couple of major airlines to go bankrupt, as it might inspire a new round of entrepreneurial activity instead.
As for why there isn't supersonic passenger transport, there are a whole bunch of problems including how the government really screwed up the development of supersonic travel. Too much money was thrown at the problem back in the 1960's where it drove out private capital from even researching the problems involved in making that practical. It relied upon a monolithic solution that would work for everybody in exactly the same way.... just as all socialistic projects with government money end up. Rather than an incremental solution where minor problems could be tweaked and solutions found, the whole thing had to be built all at once and work correctly the first time it was tried. That is not a way to develop a technology, that is a way to kill off a technology.
BTW, I can name nearly a dozen different companies who have various levels of sub-orbital spaceflight projects capable of carrying passengers. Most of these are being built with private capital and are following an incremental approach to vehicles which will travel higher, faster, and carry more cargo or passengers safely. If you are really interested in supersonic transport, it is a sub-orbital vehicle that really is the solution, where you don't have to plow through all of that air to get to your destination. Hopefully the time will be quite soon when FedEx will start to promise that they can deliver a package to a spot yesterday with a 12 hour guaranteed delivery (for a premium price). I think that day is sooner than you think.
I'll be the first to admit that the cost of getting into orbit needs to drop substantially. That is really one of the major limiting factors for getting into space, where shipping up a 1-liter bottle of water costs $100k when it is delivered to one of the astronauts on board the ISS.
Unfortunately that is not something NASA has been actively trying to resolve either, except to drive that cost up. The folks appropriating money for this are more interested in the jobs for their states/congressional districts rather than trying to make access to space more affordable for the rest of us, and they'd rather keep the cost of spaceflight high to justify the billions being spent on those space industry jobs. The more people it takes to get somebody into space simply means more people have jobs that can get those congressmen re-elected. This also explains why the "replacement" vehicle to the Shuttle ends up costing nearly twice as much to fly with 1% of the cargo capacity and half of the astronauts. Yeah, that sounds like something improving the economics for getting into space, but perfect for "make work" projects that are just people running in circles not really doing anything but wasting government money.
As far as bringing something down from space, I would love to see how you determine those costs. While I know of some rocket developers who are making vertacle take-off and landing rockets, but I don't know of anybody who is seriously considering having a powered rocket that brings something from Earth orbit and landing it on the surface. You certainly don't see the Space Shuttle getting outfitted with a new refueled external tank just to land back on Earth.
Again, where is the cost for bringing stuff from orbit to the surface on the Earth? You may have to be creative in terms of how you get it down, but I would argue that it doesn't cost nearly as much as you think it does to take something already in orbit and to bring it down. The expense is getting it up there in the first place, not trying to figure out how to bring it back. I would dare to say that it may be possible to find a way to deliver cargo cheaper from low-earth orbit to a major space port cheaper than you can send a package from Los Angeles to New York. Please explain this if you think I'm wrong here, and I'm not talking the expense of getting something into orbit in the first place, which is a completely different issue. The engineering requirements is quite different for the two kinds of tasks.
As for the trillions of dollars worth of investment necessary to get the infrastructure set up in space, I'd say that sort of money will come when the trillions of dollars worth of income from that investment can happen. Again, it takes some creativity here, and it will take getting cheaper access to low earth orbit too so that it will bring down the initial capital requirements in the first place.
BTW, I'm with you in terms of what it is that is the "killer app" that can justify going into space in the first place. Space tourism certainly seems like at least one reason to put some people up there in the first place, and it has been proven that there are millionaires willing to part with a substantial fraction of their wealth to have the chance to spend some time in space and to literally "go where nobody has gone before". That at least provides a source of some income to sell stuff to somebody already up there as it puts somebody up there in the first place, but other sorts of projects in space do seem to be mostly uneconomical at the moment or the product of dreamers not grounded in reality. Space-based solar power sats are not economical at all with current launcher prices, and we certainly don't have the infrastructure necessary to drive that price down with materials mined from the Moon or asteroids. Helium-3 extraction sounds wonderful until you realize that fusion research is still decades to centuries away from a practical reactor that can use the stuff once you get it. I just don't see a sound reason other tha
I don't get this one at all. Where in the solar system are you going that you live for a total of three seconds once you get there, and how do you get there in the first place? And you are saying that all places in the solar system other than on the Earth are this inhospitable? If most astronauts died three seconds after launch, there wouldn't be many folks who would be willing to make the trip in the first place. For many, they wouldn't have even cleared the launch tower if that was the case.
BTW, so far as I've seen, the Earth does not have a monopoly on Gravity, and it is there in rather abundant quantities if you really need to have it. What possible use do you have with gravity anyways, and why is it strictly necessary to your line of thinking?
Food: There is this amazing thing you might want to look at. They are called "plants" and take things from something called "soil" and turns it into "food". BTW, soil can be produced from the end products of the growing process and can be made into a closed cycle. All that is needed is energy..... which can be harvested from all that radiation you are complaining about. Plants do that directly from the radiation BTW, in the form of "sunlight". Maybe that is something you've never heard about either. I also wasn't aware that when you went to the dark side of the Moon that everything stayed in perpetual darkness there either.
Water: This is "out there" in massive quantities. Water is one thing that is certainly not lacking elsewhere in the Solar System, although it may be in lesser quantities than can be found in the middle of the ocean. The two elements that make up water, both oxygen and hydrogen, are the two of the most common elements in the universe and are found literally everywhere. Again, using all of this "dangerous radiation" to make a solar-powered furnace releases quite a bit of oxygen and hydrogen. Finding ways to combine those elements back together again isn't really all that hard of a problem, and the energy resulting from that recombination also has considerable uses. I should also note that on both the Space Shuttle and with the Apollo flights, water was a by-product from the fuel cells used to generate electricity. Most of the time astronauts are busy spending their time trying to get rid of the stuff rather than trying to find water in the first place. Shortages of water are certainly not a problem.
Air: I mentioned refining ore to release oxygen. Oxygen is incredibly abundant elsewhere in space and can be obtained through multiple means. In fact on the Earth one of the problems with most metal refinement is that the metal manufacturers want to get rid of the oxygen, where the oxygen in the atmosphere keeps interfering with the refinement process. Oxygen reduction is basic to most mineral extraction methods. So why not keep that oxygen instead if you need it to breathe? Seriously, I don't think this is a problem in space either. As for the other elements in the air, why are they needed? I'll admit that plants need nitrates in order to grow, so some nitrogen might be useful as well, and over time those of us made out of meat also end up producing carbon dioxide that can over time end up becoming poisonous. Oh, did I mention plants before? They do a pretty good job of removing CO2, and produce some useful stuff called food with it too.
The problem here isn't that these items can't be found or made when you get "there" elsewhere off the Earth, but that you have to be more creatives about how you get them when you arrive.
This comment makes as much sense as somebody living in Africa about 100,000 years ago and complaining that you can't find zebras or lions to eat if you travel elsewhere. That sure didn't stop people from trying to get to other continents.
Entire cars can be produced on an assembly line with no human intervention.
I would love to see this supposed assembly line with my own eyes. I don't think it can be done, at least not without some humans working to maintain those machines which are making the cars. And who came up with these "machines" you are talking about? Is this some other machine?
I think not. Creative energies have to be expended, and these things are not happening on the Earth contrary to what other fantasies of watching Terminator or The Matrix that you have been watching lately.
Even when it is possible to fully automate a process, often there are people involved either because it takes time to automate a process, the automation equipment is only going to be used occasionally so is not purchased, or because people happen to like hand-crafted products. There is a certain quality to hand crafted items that can't be made by a machine no matter how hard you try.
I'm not saying there is no place for an automated factory, but please, give a good example next time and try to explain why people no longer are needed in this universe in some fashion that makes sense before you spout off this drivel.
I agree that when people start getting out into space there will be a high degree of automation for nearly everything that happens there. Labor shortages alone are going to require automated equipment, but I don't see an argument here that makes sense in terms of a complete prohibition of sending people into space, or that there will be zero need for having somebody on the ground on Phobos to take care of some machinery that can be repaired or dealt with easier there rather than having to have a team of several dozen try to come up with the programming necessary for the remote manipulator that is also broken down to repair that machine. Saying there is no need for people in space is just as nutty as saying everything will be done by hand and that we can walk to the Moon.
Proxima Centauri is closer than a round trip to Cleveland.
You had me, then you lost me right there.
This is somebody who clearly doesn't get it. What is being said is that from a pure energy standpoint, sending a kilo of "stuff" into space; in other words like leaving the gravity of the Earth and in a position to go somewhere else like the Moon, Mars, or one of the asteroids; and then ploping it back onto the ground where you got that "stuff" in the first place is actually cheaper to ship it to another star like Proxima Centauri than it is to ship it back to the Earth.
In other words, Proxima Centauri is closer than a round trip to Cleveland. This is a true statement if you study celestial mechanics and understand the energies needed to get around and being able to do anything. It may take a century or two for whatever you are sending that way, but eventually it will get there and the energy requirements aren't all that great compared to simply getting away from the Earth in the first place.
This is also why "in-situ" resource development is so important for the development of space, as you get the materials where they are much more accessable rather than trying to bring things from a generally inaccessable place, like the Earth.
You have no concept of the scale and energy needed to get things done in space either. The problem is really a fundamental factor of getting out of the basic gravity well that we call the Earth, as once you are in space life gets much, much easier. Sending up blueprints and data from the ground to space is trivial. Moving stuff around once you get into space is comparatively trivial. Seriously, do you know how much energy it takes to ship something from Austrialia to the UK? I would dare say that you can move a ton of freight from Mars to the Earth for a similar kind of energy in a roughly comparable time frame as well. I'm talking putting something from say Phobos to low-earth orbit in terms of energy costs.
The problem we are facing is really one like the chicken or egg question, when neither have been created yet. How do you make the initial leap to put the equipment into space and why build that stuff when there isn't a use for it yet? Once somebody makes the leap of the imagination and gets into space on a permanent basis, there will be a reason for others to follow and do likewise.
More importantly, who died to make you King of the Earth to dictate that nobody could head off into space on their own dime if that is where their heart wanted to go? This is a freedom issue too, where people should be allowed to follow whatever dreams they may have, no matter how nutty they may be. I would agree that spending tax money for such a foolish end might be argued, but that doesn't seem to be the argument here. This is more like sending a team of federal agents raiding would be rocket builders and making the construction of a space port much less building a rocket to be a felony instead. To me, that sounds even more nutty than trying to shut down those who would go into space and tell the people of the Earth to eff off.
I don't think that the AC poster really has thought through his comment very well. Nice comment there about the role meteors have played in terms of mining.... which offers some excellent thoughts on the topic.
One of the problems with heavy metals is that most of them have sunk into the center of the Earth over time, and that it is only rare exceptions.... usually due to volcanism or meteor landfalls mentioned above.... that you find deposits of the heavier elements in even modest quantities. Going to an asteroid you don't have to worry about trying to dig down a couple of miles or more to get at the ore.... because going a couple of miles you have already shot past the center and are coming out the other side.
Also not mentioned..... there is a reason most mines only go at most a couple miles down: There is this pesky thing called "gravity" that we constantly have to fight here on the Earth. Trying to push up a couple miles of pure rock at 9.8 m/s^2 constant acceleration is an incredibly difficult task if you are trying to squeeze under that rock to get at a vein or ore body that happens to lay underneath that rock. The engineering requirements for keeping that rock suspended for at least the duration you are extracting the minerals is an incredible accomplishment that has spawned its own engineering discipline: mining engineering. If you have ever heard of some of the famous "A&M" schools around the country, notable a school like Texas A&M, the "M" comes from the mining engineering school that was the very purpose for the establishment of the university (with biology programs related to agriculture being the other). I can point to a couple dozen universities across the USA that were established explicitly for this purpose. It isn't easy, and even today there are dozens of people in 1st world countries that die from mining accidents each year.... many more in developing countries like China where they die not by the dozens but by the hundreds or even thousands each year.
Another issue is that mining is an incredibly destructive process that causes incredible environmental damage, wiping out whole habitats and even ecological niches. One mine that is close to my house grew to the point it took out a whole city and even an entire mountain in the quest to dig ever deeper down to obtain the ore. In this case, to avoid problems with the overburden of the rocks, the mine has simply moved the entire mountain down the road in an attempt to get at the minerals in the mine. Why not move this environmental damage to a place that has no "environment" to damage? Mining asteroids sounds pretty good to me on this issue too, where streams aren't filled with toxic metals or even entire climate zones are left alone. Heck, once a good asteroid has been hollowed out, it might just make a new environment that we could put stuff into to develop new environmental niches that until now have simply not existed.
Recycling is also never 100% effective as much as some people would have you think otherwise. You always need to have at least some input from raw sources to maintain any sort of supply of an element no matter how effective you have become at reusing the material.
Getting back to the AC poster above:
So dig in the planet, my friend, it's all there. I know, a shovel is not as sexy as a rocket.
No, it isn't all there, at least as easy as those would have you think. Easy spots to dig and extract ore from has pretty much disappeared from the Earth. On a rare occasion you might hear about another gold rush due to a mineral deposit in a generally previously unexplored area, but where exactly are the new frontiers for humanity right now? Oh, that is right, in space! As I tried to explain above, getting down to deeper and deeper pockets of minerals is an incredibly difficult task. Modern mines that operate on the scale of current productio
Too late. The FAA is already heavily involved with commercial space travel through the Office of Commercial Space Transportation. They've been doing this since 1984 under the Reagan administration, although this particular commercial spaceflight office has jumped around between several different agencies before finally getting put under the head administrator of the FAA. The FAA-AST head reports directly to the chief administrator of the FAA, who in turn reports directly to the President. That is a rather short chain of command and not bad in terms of a federal program.
For myself, I sort of like having the FAA involved here as it sort of diffuses the authority over regulating what goes one in space into many more hands and keeps the authority over who actually runs operations in space as a committee reporting to many people who have different objectives and goals in mind. Ideally I would love to see a complete elimination of any government oversight on spaceflight as well, but if you have to have something to satisfy the statists who love to control all aspects of our lives, you could do much worse than the FAA running the show.
For a government agency, at the moment they are very small and lean, as well as fiercely protective of their turf (as most agencies are). More significantly, the FAA-AST (the AST because of historical roots for that acronym) looks after the commercial interests as their number one priority and have been known to move heaven and earth to get the other branches of the federal government to go along with some commercial spaceflight project.
The other alternative is to leave this to NASA and let NASA run commercial spaceflight activities.... something NASA has a truly abysmal record of supporting and indeed can be said that repeatedly NASA has been involved with explicitly killing off commercial spaceflight ventures in the past as they have been perceived as direct competition to NASA rather than something to cooperate with. Better yet, should this be something done via the military, such as having it become part of the Air Force or worse yet the National Reconnaissance Office? By treaty (signed by all of the current and near-term potential future space faring nations on the Earth) it is the responsibility of the national governments to regulate how their citizens get into space and the consequences of interactions with other vehicles that may happen in space or what happens when the stuff starts to come back down to the ground.
Again, if not the FAA, what branch of the federal government should be involved here?
So this is more like an automobile that has a recall and the manufacturer (via the dealer) removes the spare and replaces it with a doughnut when they do the other repairs (aka fixing the gas/brake pedals or whatever is in the recall). I'd still like to see somebody successfully sue the manufacturer if that happens. Arguably this might even be considered something critical by some convoluted environmental standards. I've seen similar kinds of "upgrades" in other products.
I'm not saying I agree with Sony here, but I am saying that the analogy to an automotive manufacturer can find similar kinds of tinkering with your car and it is more of a source of precedence than as an example for why Sony shouldn't be doing this. It is making the case for Sony, not the other way around.
My bet is he will lose. Sony will find some loophole, the judge will allow it because the removal of this function affects a very small part of the userbase.
Car analogy time. My car comes with a spare tyre in the boot (trunk for you Yanks).
One thing that I have hated about automotive manufacturers is that they are removing the spare tire from their vehicles... in a mis-guided attempt to improve fuel economy (it saves about.1 miles per gallon perhaps due to reduced weight) and to increase trunk space. Oh, they have something in there that can be used in "emergencies", but it isn't a spare tire any more. Commonly referred to as a "doughnut" in the USA, it is the emergency tire that is often smaller and certainly less reliable than standard tires and often rated at only holding out for about 30-40 miles while your car is lop-sided and wiping out any sort of alignment that your car may have when the flat happened in the first place, if that is the only damage it may cause to your vehicle if it is put into actual usage. It also isn't rated for the same speeds as normal traffic, so you may have to leave limited access highways (aka an "interstate highway" or something like the Autobahn) if it is installed as well.
While I like the analogy, this is one that shows Sony can get away with this sort of action explicitly because automobile manufacturers have been getting away with a similar loss of functionality for some time. Other similar issues involve how these same car companies are weakening bumper standards to the point that a toddler kicking the front of the car leaves a nasty dent. Those used to be rated for a 5 mile per hour collision without damage beyond scratching some chrome. They don't even have chrome on the bumpers any more.
It is pretty easy to forget exactly how big that the Earth really is. If you take all of the objects in the inner Solar System (inside the orbit of Jupiter) beside the Earth and mash them all together into one new body.... including Venus, Mercury, Mars, the Moon, and all of the asteroids, you would still end up with an object smaller than the Earth by both mass and volume.
Earth-size objects are rather significant bodies, where the last object larger than the Earth in the Solar System was discovered in 1846 (Neptune). I wouldn't completely dismiss finding something Earth-sized in the Oort Cloud, but most objects found in the Solar System are now incredibly far away (like Makemake, which is incredibly dim due to its distance from the Sun) or very tiny.... on the order of just a few hundred meters in diameter for most of the newer asteroids being discovered. I think we can comfortably say we have identified all objects in the solar system that aren't gas giants (aka less than 50% of its mass is atmospheric gasses... perhaps less than 10% as the threshold?), but have a significant atmosphere (1000x or more than the gaseous pressure of the solar wind). That certainly is a tiny list of "terrestrial planets".
Efforts to identify terrestrial-sized objects is indeed in its infancy in terms of exoplanets, but it is something just at the cusp of being done. The question will remain, however, if they fit into the Goldilocks zone of being not too hot nor too cold when they are discovered too. Due to the proximity of the "just right" planets to its parent star, it shouldn't be overly difficult to detect an Earth-sized object in that habitable zone, presuming that they can be detected at all.
It is just a matter of time before improvements in planet detection will cross that threshold to get there.
To wipe out a potential competitor. Yeah, that sounds like at least a fair and reasonable excuse, and one that certainly has been used in the past to commit acts of genocide.
The only thing that may indicate how common or rare that "M-class" planets (to use the Star Trek term) might be is the already extensive body of exoplanets that have already been observed in terms of trying to come up with structures in various solar systems. Admittedly earth-sized bodies haven't really been observed, but the variety and positions of the various gas giants (Jupiter/Saturn sized bodies) is sufficient to at least show that the configuration that we have found here in our local neighborhood is actually unusual rather than common place.
It will be interesting to see just how common or rare that a habitable planet really is, for example how many Earth-like planets can be found within 100 light years of here? There certainly a a couple dozen potential candidate stars that are Sun-like to choose from, so it isn't a completely outlandish question, and I hope it is a question that will be answered in a rather definitive manner in the next thousand years or so (hopefully sooner than later).
Even finding one other planetary body with a liquid ocean and a "thin" gaseous atmosphere would be incredible and be beneficial to settle this argument. All this said, there are at least 3 other bodies in the Solar System that at least have the potential of harboring life: Mars, Europa, and Enceladus. If these other worlds harbor life, and in particular if Europa may have substantial numbers of life forms or better yet multi-cellular life, it would have huge implications for how common potential life bearing planets may be elsewhere in the universe.
My bet, however, is that planets like the Earth are in fact quite rare indeed.
While I'm not necessarily disputing the argument here, I would like to know what possible resource we might have on the Earth that can't be found much, much more abundantly and in a form much easier to obtain elsewhere that can only be found on the Earth? Here are some common favorites in science fiction stories:
Water - Only the most abundant chemical compound in the universe, made up of two of the most common elements in the universe. Even in our own solar system, there are whole worlds made up of mostly water ice and major bodies, like comets, that literally announce their existence with a massive display of water. There may be "local" shortages of water (however you may define it), but it is incredibly common and easy to find this stuff. You certainly wouldn't need to engage in an interstellar or better an intergalactic journey just to get some extra water from little ol' Earth. There is enough water ice in the solar system (in chunks movable with human technology) to completely submerge the surface of Mars with a massive ocean, including Olympus Mons and not even touch the oceans of the Earth. Studies of other stellar planetary systems seem very likely to have the same quantity of free ice and perhaps even more than our relatively older solar system.
Meat - This is an argument that simply defies logic.... that somehow the aliens are going to "eat" us. Particularly given that we live in an industrial society, modern humans is one of the worst possible sources of protein that you can come from. We are top predators with a lifetime of accumulated chemicals, heavy metals, and parasites that would be and are lethal to anybody eating that kind of flesh. If an aliens society simply needed the protein for survival, I'm sure there are several rather large food processing corporations that would gladly provide domestic livestock in sufficient quantities to more than satisfy their needs anyway. How many McDonald's Hamburgers do these aliens really want and why is that not sufficient to be sold by.... McDonald's?
Unobtainium - More to the point, some sort of rare convergence of ultra rare elements that somehow made the formation of the Solar System unique, and some super-heavy element that also happens to be radioactively stable is found in our Solar System in quantities sufficient to send a massive mining party out to wipe out a species to get that mineral. Again, what possible mineral might this be? I admit that detailed geologic surveys of the whole solar system have yet to be done in significant quantity, but I think we got a pretty good idea of what elements are "out there" and based on stellar spectra we are quite confident that those same elements... at least to Uranium... are in fairly significant quantities.
Labor - Sort of back to the meat argument, but this time the aliens are needing "thinking" meat to get everything accomplished. Presuming that these aliens got into space starting from a planet somewhat like the Earth (why else are they coming here?) implies a certain minimum industrial base. More to the point, slavery generally has not been economical and there are usually significant alternatives to slavery even in those human civilizations where it was tried... where ultimately automated machines in some fashion ended up improving the productivity far better than what a slave could produce. When a horse can plow a field for less grain than you can feed a team of people to till and cultivate the same acreage, you use a horse. Again... these aliens are traveling incredible distances... for this?
The Earth itself - I'll admit that a planetary body with a liquid water ocean and sufficient atmosphere for prolonged habitation is a rather rare thing, so there may be some desire to seek for habitable planets. Still, for a civilization to send not just a single explorer or representative, but to send a massive invading army, are planets like the Earth really all that r
We can simply pass a United Nations resolution and sign a treaty to keep nukes or for that matter all weapons from space. Doesn't that work? Won't all spacefaring civilizations have such a similar attitude?
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I fail to see how climate change is an absolute truth, other than the painfully obvious observation that a particular climate is always in flux and is at best an average over a given period of time for a defined location or region. When that window changes, the interpretation of that climate has also changed. That isn't a scientific fact, that is a postulate and indeed the very definition of the terms involved. It doesn't help that sometimes the area under review also changes in time, and other factors that should be considered even for the raw measurement of the data isn't taken into consideration either.
Asserting a postulate as a theorem is perhaps one of the problems with this debate, and one of several fallacies that are involved in the debate.
I'll go so far as to suggest that climate science has improve significantly over the past several decades, and testable hypothesis have been put forth and some very useful predictive models have been developed as a direct result of that study and the creation of those theories. Predictions of hurricanes and other weather systems, particularly over the relatively short term, is something that has improved to the point that it is indeed saving lives and making positive contributions to society as a whole... including helping those who are poor and the most needy.
The question that is being raised here, however, if this hypothesis of AGW is something that exists at the same standards as predicting where a given hurricane system will land over the course of the next week. I assert that it does not, but that it certainly is something useful to bring up in terms of general trends and at least raising some alarm about the topic. Alarm, however, doesn't mean to hit the panic button and claim that civilization as we know it is doomed to failure and that we as a species need to do something today or we will be extinct within a generation. THAT isn't science, that is fear mongering and using "science" as a tool to gain political advantage, perverting both the political process and the science along the way.
There may be rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The question, however, is what can be attributed as the source, what is the cause and what are the consequences of that CO2 rising?
BTW, in terms of the algorithms being used and looking for the "hidden data"..... you had better believe I've gone looking for it, and yes I've had some climatologists at a loss for explaining why some numbers have been changed on the electronic versions of the data which are simply missing from the hand-written records of earlier time periods.... particularly when the data was computerized at a much later date. I'm not necessarily saying that the warming trends are completely fabricated, but there has been tampering of the climate data for some time, a sort of "thumb on the scale" that has been distorting the data for political purposes rather than working with it as a science.
As somebody who was involved with inputting at least some of the raw climate data that is currently being used, I will assert as a fact and expert witness to that effect if called upon to testify that some of the climate data has been falsified. Not all of it, but enough to at least throw off some climate models as using invalid or even false data and making a mockery of those who think they have the whole world wide average temperature down to a fraction of a degree. The algorithms being used to manipulate that data have not been published either, as the data was "sanitized" and asserted to be the original source data when in fact it wasn't
For myself, I'm holding out hope for the good folks at the Emc2 corporation to get Robert Bussard's Polywell reactor to work, or that one of the other fusion technologies can get into production within the next decade or two. If that happens, the need to push for acres of solar panels plastered all over will no longer be an issue except for relatively small power needs in isolated environments (aka a very rural area far from any power grid). Solar power is one of several approaches we should be taking, but it doesn't have to be the only one.
There are applications of petroleum that go beyond simply burning it up as a fuel, so it won't completely stop all petroleum production even if some magic pill comes along and eliminates the need for gasoline powered automobiles.
BTW, once you get that 1 barrel of oil out of the tar sands of Alberta, do you realize how much energy it takes to get a gallon of gasoline? The electrical power consumption at an oil refinery for processing one gallon of gasoline is actually more energy in general than the total amount of energy, if consumed at 100% efficiency, that the gallon of gasoline can possibly produce. In this regard, gasoline and petroleum isn't really an energy source, but rather an energy storage medium. Adding in the energy expended to extract oil from the tar sands, it makes the gasoline even less of an energy source.
BTW, I also agree.... +1 insightful for the AC post I'm responding to!
Where I have a huge problem with those promoting "anthroprogenic global warming" is the complete and total denial that any other mechanism might be in play, and that other sources of that climate change may be happening. I've listed those on other /. posts, and I still assert there are other factors beside CO2 production we should be concerned about. Even the more recent "concerns" about the impact of smoke and dust (or lack thereof now that we have environmental regulatory agencies like the EPA eliminating that form of pollution from traditionally smoky industries) only begin to scratch the surface of what may be causes of climate changes around the world.
I've discussed in more formal forums concerns about these "missing variables" in climate models, and the response for why they are not included is usually rather lame.... mostly that they need to simplify to be able to make any sort of prediction and then wonder why their models no longer make good predictions.
BTW, I agree that we need to be better stewards over the things we are responsible for in this world, and that we should make some significant headway with some of the major issues you mention here too. I would even go so far as to suggest if we were to be more responsible with our environment and it resources, that the other issues like AGW and CO2 production would be put back into balance and be much more effectively dealt with rather than creating whole new levels of government bureaucracy to deal with one or two narrow issues that are oh so easy to overdo.
The problem with "AGW" is that it is bad science and mostly public relations, not necessarily actual science. I can name numerous sorts of problems with those who are pro-AGW just as those who are blatant deniers are equally out to lunch.
A great part of the problem is that head smacking obvious issues like what caused the medieval global warming (hint, it had almost nothing to do with human impact on the environment) and the subsequent cold period that sort of peaked some time around the period of the American Revolution in the late 18th Century are certainly not satisfactorily explained with the current climatological models, and how anybody can measure the temperature of the whole of the Earth down to a fraction of a degree is something that I think is equally bogus.
I'm not one to suggest that we need to completely ignore the effects of human civilization upon the global climate or even on a regional basis, but some balance does need to get back into the debate.
Where the real problem comes in is not just the deniers who want to pop off a bunch of oil wells similar to what Saddam Hussein did in Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War and deliberately try to pollute the Earth and cause as much CO2 production as possible to prove that the AGW hypothesis is incorrect, but those who are of the opposite extreme and essentially wish to kill off the whole of human civilization and go even so far as advocating mass genocide as obviously mankind is a virus that needs to be exterminated.
It is precisely the politics that has invaded science, as evidenced by this letter too, that is causing many of the problems. Those sitting on committees who are funding this kind of science are seemingly systematically killing off even modest questioning of basic concepts, and worse still is the suggestion that one and only one form of activity is solely responsible for any warming that the Earth may have had over the past couple of decades.
These who would be honest scientists ought to decry and distance themselves from activists who do really bizarre things like claiming extreme blizzards and heat waves are "evidence" of global warming, as are floods and droughts. Heck, any time there is any sort of weather of any kind and there is some story that says "Oh.... that was caused by global warming". Even ordinary temperate and fair weather is attributed to global warming.... thus making a farce of the whole notion in the first place.
Can reasonable steps be done to reduce pollution in the environment in all its varied forms, and ought we be reasonable stewards over those things we are responsible for? Absolutely! At the same time, massive economic overhaul that causes mayham to almost everything we hold dear and turns folks like Al Gore into billionaires is not necessarily something I wish to advocate either, and certainly would be willing to call those who support crazy ideas like carbon tax credits without following the money and realizing what harm such a policy and concept causes is also just as silly.
I, for one, am very concerned about carbon sequestration and the potential long-term pollution problems that sort of technical solution might cause, and even go so far as to argue that some of the methods of sequestration might end up causing more problems than simply letting it pipe out into the atmosphere. It is one thing to run the exhaust of a coal plant through a greenhouse to promote biomass production. It is another to shove the CO2 into the ground and pretend that it has no long-term impact if that is done for a century or two. I really worry about CO2 dumping into oceans and what sorts of long-term impacts that may have on the aquatic ecosystems.... yet those are schemes that are going to be given a carbon tax credit as it won't be going into the air. Yeah, put off the problems for a couple millenia when we are going to be compost ourselves. That sounds like a good idea, I suppose.
This isn't a cut and dried issue, and there is some horrible science being done, and others claimin
The problem with this way of thinking is the whole concept of software patents in the first place. I'd have to agree that on at least some level you are thinking that you are actually buying a piece of equipment and that all of the components to that equipment also belong to you as well. If you use that camera as a door stop, drop it in a cement mixer or juice blender, have it open cans of food, or use it to make movies.... that should be what you as a person are doing and that a manufacturer should have no possible say in how it is used.
I happen to agree with you here, and it really does boil down to the use of software patents here to pervert the whole process. If this was a film camera, there wouldn't be any issue at all as you can have some completely different company or process to be developed to actually view whatever it was that you shot with your camera. But with software patents, the licensing applies to anybody who uses the algorithm, even if the software code itself was completely original and had nothing at all to do with the patent holder.
Importantly, video can be considered after a fashion to be computer software as well, where licensing is required to distribute that software from the patent holders of that software.
I agree this is stupid, and from a political viewpoint this is something that shouldn't be allowed. Courts shouldn't be allowing this kind of behavior, and more importantly our elected representatives shouldn't be passing laws that recognize software patents and especially shouldn't be preventing ordinary people from sharing video expressions with each other... however that sharing happens. This is particularly true if those video expressions are original.
Let your elected representatives know you feelings about this matter and that it is something you consider important to you. Now the real trick is to get others to agree with you.
The problem is that most people don't really take licensing issues seriously, and the MPEG-LA tries to lull you into thinking that "everybody" is using their product so they go out of their way to push the standard onto companies who really don't know what is going on. For those folks who are CEOs or middle managers with a business rather than an engineering degree, they have a hard time trying to grasp why all of this licensing is a problem or how it might impact the ability for their company to make a profit. These managers certainly could care less about their customers if they can push off any licensing requirements to the end-users as long as they don't have to pay for it themselves.
Repeatedly I have told multiple customers and clients that I've worked with, that if you are trying to specify a video codec or standard, to stay away from MPEG as if it was a viral plague ready to eat you alive. Even more interesting, if you read the fine print from the MPEG-LA themselves when you go through the formal process of licensing these codecs, you essentially sign a waiver that you understand that you haven't really licensed anything at all. All they have agreed is that certain patents from certain companies that have come together with the MPEG-LA are licensing the use of that specific list of patents for any product you are using. If some other patented process is being used with the MPEG codecs, you explicitly (it is right there in the contract) must seek out and gain other license from other patent holders. Indeed, they flatly assert that there are other patent holders of MPEG codecs that they were unable to get to join the MPEG-LA, so buyer beware. If you like to real legal prose that promises absolutely nothing and tries to part some money from your wallet for what is obviously a scam, reading the fine print of these licensing contracts is quite interesting.
Another interesting group is Dolby Laboratories.... where they have three lawyers for every engineer on their payroll. That should say something about their business model, but at least they have engineers you can work with that will tell you how to use some of the stuff they've worked on.
The real pity is that if more people actually paid attention to licenses for video codecs, there would have been in the past and there would be now a greater push to develop free as in speech and beer codecs. However awful, Ogg Theora at least is there to fall back on.
Yeah, but the difference is how it used to be that the manufacturer paid for a license, sold you the product (cost of license built-in), and you used it for whatever you wanted.
Nowadays, they want to control not just how the product is made and sold, but how it is USED. That's just plain too much power.
This is new? Didn't C compiler vendors used to demand royalties on the sale of products made with their compilers, at least until the advent of GCC?
They still do... read the ELUA from Microsoft for the use of Visual Studio and some of their other compilers if you think differently. Microsoft is actually pretty decent about it, but I have seen some rather draconian restrictions on the end-products from a compiler. One of the most offensive of those companies I ever worked with was Macromedia, the original developer of Flash and Authorware. They had some rather steep fees (per copy distributed) if you wanted to engage in commercial distribution of products made with their software development tools.
The legal precedence goes back to the 1960's, where even more interesting is that potential claimants to software copyright can including nearly every person or company that has a device that is used for storing that software and the developers of software (including the operating system) used for its creation. That would include the company who wrote the operating system, the file system, the compiler, the BIOS firmware developers, and literally hundreds if not thousands of companies. It makes it a wonder that computer software ever gold sold on a commercial basis in the first place if you look at everybody who potentially can demand royalties and payment for developing some software.
As a practical matter, as you've pointed out, with compilers like GCC running on Linux using hardware reverse engineered in China, there is some pretty stiff competition out there to keep real jerks from gouging the system too hard and keeping software from generally being developed. I've bumped into some really stupid licensing requirements over the years that has made significant changes to how I've developed software, including avoiding certain file formats and dumping certain vendors in terms of using them for products or services I've provided for my employer or clients I've worked with.
The problem I have with most video codecs, at least those that become a significant issue, is when it reaches the point that it becomes enshrined in law through regulations or even defacto standards. Several video formatting standards have now become law because they are in use for broadcasting (HD-television) or are used in official publications (court evidence and government hearing records... to give some examples).
For myself, any such standard that has the force of law can and ought to be also in a freely distributable format that has no other "intellectual property" hangups to keep citizens from using that material for any possible legitimate use. Ultimately, if you really want to be blunt, every single possible use should be allowed for content coming from official sources in government as that provides necessary transparency to allow the citizens to know what, exactly, our government is doing and to act as responsible citizens ourselves. When as a citizen I am prevented from informing other citizens about a key aspect of our government due to some sort of silly patent or some other "digitial rights management", it adversely impacts the ability for citizens to make well informed decisions about those who should hold public office and in fact makes a mockery of the basic concepts of democracy in general.
Dovetailing back to the main point of this /. post, I certainly should be able to take a camera to a political rally like one of the Tea Party gatherings or perhaps even more significant going to a government meeting like a city council meeting and record some of what I saw there.... using that video as the most significant and important part of what free speech is all about: informing other citizens about what is happening in their government. There shouldn't be any sort of restriction on how that video is then subsequently used as it is essential to the basic tenants of free speech to engage explicitly in political speech to make your point.... whatever that political view you may hold. Restrictions like are imposed here can be used as political tools to repress speech at a most fundamental level, and can also be used to selectively repress speech so only a particular viewpoint can be expressed using this "technology".
Patent law was certainly never intended to restrict free speech in any form, and that is where I think these lawyers are likely going way over the top.... and may even bite off more than they can chew by trying to take people on who might be using cameras "for commercial gain".
I'm reading this post, and I don't know what to even think of it. Edwards AFB as an American spaceport of choice?
I've heard somewhat recent reports about the commercial spaceport in Mojave, California; on Wallops Island, Virginia; Kodiak Island, Alaska; Burns Flat, Oklahoma; Cape Canavaral, Florida; and the big one that is being financed almost exclusively with state money in southern New Mexico. Vandenburg AFB, also in California, has been mentioned a few times although the military keeps things pretty well locked up there. In nearly all discussions of commercial spaceflight I have never even heard a peep about Edwards. It may be something that NASA has been using for quite some time and certainly has been the landing site for many Space Shuttle landings, but as a commercial spaceport, it is not merely missing, it is completely off the radar for any company doing private commercial launches. Quite a bit is even happening on the Kwajalein island in the Marshall Islands with American companies.
If there is something to point out, seriously, I'd love to see it. Perhaps during the Reagan administration some bureaucrat tried to turn Edwards into something more commercial, but whatever has been happening along those lines has been a complete flop.
This image from the FAA shows a map of all licensed spaceports in the USA, and I see that Edwards is listed on there. Perhaps the proximity to the Mojave airport is what really is the key factor, as Edwards offers almost no other significant benefits and in fact lacks some of the infrastructure necessary for private commercial projects. It would be a great place for a classified military project, but not for something that would carry passengers or commercial cargo. Really, the Mojave airport is more like how Silicon Valley was back in the late 1960's to early 1970's as the happening place to be right now for private spaceflight.
Dig deeper? Did you really read my post here? It is becoming increasingly more expensive and much more damaging to the environment to get much deeper. There certainly will reach a threshold that extracting minerals from space will be no just sort of cheaper but an order of magnitude cheaper than going down further. It sure isn't cheap to extract a pound of ore from a couple of kilometers underground, and takes a tremendous amount of capital to get that to happen. I've even heard that most mines expect it to take decades to recover the often billions of dollars that are spent on opening a mind before they finally break even from a fiscal standpoint.
Again, there is not "nothing" in space. I stand in my back yard and see a universe filled with stuff, of which I am standing in just one minor little corner.
Regular airlines are going broke because there is massive competition going on between them. They dare not raise fares because by doing so a competitor will undercut them. That still doesn't stop others, perhaps foolishly, from trying to start a new airline and trying to make a profit from this industry that the other airlines are going broke in.
Frankly, this isn't even a good argument at all, and certainly it can be shown that the commercial airlines are working with billions of dollars in revenue. Yes, I know that revenue is not the same as profits, but those airlines that figure out how to improve efficiency and are willing to offer customers those services which are requested at a reasonable price that those same customers are willing to pay for those services will make a profit... or they will go bankrupt like happens in any capitalistic society.
This is how capitalism works. The "too big to fail" argument simply falls flat for me and is something stupid as well, and a foolish place to throw government money to buy out those companies who fall flat on their face. I say let them fail, and let those who are smart to pick up the pieces afterward! It might be nice for a couple of major airlines to go bankrupt, as it might inspire a new round of entrepreneurial activity instead.
As for why there isn't supersonic passenger transport, there are a whole bunch of problems including how the government really screwed up the development of supersonic travel. Too much money was thrown at the problem back in the 1960's where it drove out private capital from even researching the problems involved in making that practical. It relied upon a monolithic solution that would work for everybody in exactly the same way.... just as all socialistic projects with government money end up. Rather than an incremental solution where minor problems could be tweaked and solutions found, the whole thing had to be built all at once and work correctly the first time it was tried. That is not a way to develop a technology, that is a way to kill off a technology.
BTW, I can name nearly a dozen different companies who have various levels of sub-orbital spaceflight projects capable of carrying passengers. Most of these are being built with private capital and are following an incremental approach to vehicles which will travel higher, faster, and carry more cargo or passengers safely. If you are really interested in supersonic transport, it is a sub-orbital vehicle that really is the solution, where you don't have to plow through all of that air to get to your destination. Hopefully the time will be quite soon when FedEx will start to promise that they can deliver a package to a spot yesterday with a 12 hour guaranteed delivery (for a premium price). I think that day is sooner than you think.
I'll be the first to admit that the cost of getting into orbit needs to drop substantially. That is really one of the major limiting factors for getting into space, where shipping up a 1-liter bottle of water costs $100k when it is delivered to one of the astronauts on board the ISS.
Unfortunately that is not something NASA has been actively trying to resolve either, except to drive that cost up. The folks appropriating money for this are more interested in the jobs for their states/congressional districts rather than trying to make access to space more affordable for the rest of us, and they'd rather keep the cost of spaceflight high to justify the billions being spent on those space industry jobs. The more people it takes to get somebody into space simply means more people have jobs that can get those congressmen re-elected. This also explains why the "replacement" vehicle to the Shuttle ends up costing nearly twice as much to fly with 1% of the cargo capacity and half of the astronauts. Yeah, that sounds like something improving the economics for getting into space, but perfect for "make work" projects that are just people running in circles not really doing anything but wasting government money.
As far as bringing something down from space, I would love to see how you determine those costs. While I know of some rocket developers who are making vertacle take-off and landing rockets, but I don't know of anybody who is seriously considering having a powered rocket that brings something from Earth orbit and landing it on the surface. You certainly don't see the Space Shuttle getting outfitted with a new refueled external tank just to land back on Earth.
Again, where is the cost for bringing stuff from orbit to the surface on the Earth? You may have to be creative in terms of how you get it down, but I would argue that it doesn't cost nearly as much as you think it does to take something already in orbit and to bring it down. The expense is getting it up there in the first place, not trying to figure out how to bring it back. I would dare to say that it may be possible to find a way to deliver cargo cheaper from low-earth orbit to a major space port cheaper than you can send a package from Los Angeles to New York. Please explain this if you think I'm wrong here, and I'm not talking the expense of getting something into orbit in the first place, which is a completely different issue. The engineering requirements is quite different for the two kinds of tasks.
As for the trillions of dollars worth of investment necessary to get the infrastructure set up in space, I'd say that sort of money will come when the trillions of dollars worth of income from that investment can happen. Again, it takes some creativity here, and it will take getting cheaper access to low earth orbit too so that it will bring down the initial capital requirements in the first place.
BTW, I'm with you in terms of what it is that is the "killer app" that can justify going into space in the first place. Space tourism certainly seems like at least one reason to put some people up there in the first place, and it has been proven that there are millionaires willing to part with a substantial fraction of their wealth to have the chance to spend some time in space and to literally "go where nobody has gone before". That at least provides a source of some income to sell stuff to somebody already up there as it puts somebody up there in the first place, but other sorts of projects in space do seem to be mostly uneconomical at the moment or the product of dreamers not grounded in reality. Space-based solar power sats are not economical at all with current launcher prices, and we certainly don't have the infrastructure necessary to drive that price down with materials mined from the Moon or asteroids. Helium-3 extraction sounds wonderful until you realize that fusion research is still decades to centuries away from a practical reactor that can use the stuff once you get it. I just don't see a sound reason other tha
I don't get this one at all. Where in the solar system are you going that you live for a total of three seconds once you get there, and how do you get there in the first place? And you are saying that all places in the solar system other than on the Earth are this inhospitable? If most astronauts died three seconds after launch, there wouldn't be many folks who would be willing to make the trip in the first place. For many, they wouldn't have even cleared the launch tower if that was the case.
BTW, so far as I've seen, the Earth does not have a monopoly on Gravity, and it is there in rather abundant quantities if you really need to have it. What possible use do you have with gravity anyways, and why is it strictly necessary to your line of thinking?
Food: There is this amazing thing you might want to look at. They are called "plants" and take things from something called "soil" and turns it into "food". BTW, soil can be produced from the end products of the growing process and can be made into a closed cycle. All that is needed is energy..... which can be harvested from all that radiation you are complaining about. Plants do that directly from the radiation BTW, in the form of "sunlight". Maybe that is something you've never heard about either. I also wasn't aware that when you went to the dark side of the Moon that everything stayed in perpetual darkness there either.
Water: This is "out there" in massive quantities. Water is one thing that is certainly not lacking elsewhere in the Solar System, although it may be in lesser quantities than can be found in the middle of the ocean. The two elements that make up water, both oxygen and hydrogen, are the two of the most common elements in the universe and are found literally everywhere. Again, using all of this "dangerous radiation" to make a solar-powered furnace releases quite a bit of oxygen and hydrogen. Finding ways to combine those elements back together again isn't really all that hard of a problem, and the energy resulting from that recombination also has considerable uses. I should also note that on both the Space Shuttle and with the Apollo flights, water was a by-product from the fuel cells used to generate electricity. Most of the time astronauts are busy spending their time trying to get rid of the stuff rather than trying to find water in the first place. Shortages of water are certainly not a problem.
Air: I mentioned refining ore to release oxygen. Oxygen is incredibly abundant elsewhere in space and can be obtained through multiple means. In fact on the Earth one of the problems with most metal refinement is that the metal manufacturers want to get rid of the oxygen, where the oxygen in the atmosphere keeps interfering with the refinement process. Oxygen reduction is basic to most mineral extraction methods. So why not keep that oxygen instead if you need it to breathe? Seriously, I don't think this is a problem in space either. As for the other elements in the air, why are they needed? I'll admit that plants need nitrates in order to grow, so some nitrogen might be useful as well, and over time those of us made out of meat also end up producing carbon dioxide that can over time end up becoming poisonous. Oh, did I mention plants before? They do a pretty good job of removing CO2, and produce some useful stuff called food with it too.
The problem here isn't that these items can't be found or made when you get "there" elsewhere off the Earth, but that you have to be more creatives about how you get them when you arrive.
This comment makes as much sense as somebody living in Africa about 100,000 years ago and complaining that you can't find zebras or lions to eat if you travel elsewhere. That sure didn't stop people from trying to get to other continents.
I would love to see this supposed assembly line with my own eyes. I don't think it can be done, at least not without some humans working to maintain those machines which are making the cars. And who came up with these "machines" you are talking about? Is this some other machine?
I think not. Creative energies have to be expended, and these things are not happening on the Earth contrary to what other fantasies of watching Terminator or The Matrix that you have been watching lately.
Even when it is possible to fully automate a process, often there are people involved either because it takes time to automate a process, the automation equipment is only going to be used occasionally so is not purchased, or because people happen to like hand-crafted products. There is a certain quality to hand crafted items that can't be made by a machine no matter how hard you try.
I'm not saying there is no place for an automated factory, but please, give a good example next time and try to explain why people no longer are needed in this universe in some fashion that makes sense before you spout off this drivel.
I agree that when people start getting out into space there will be a high degree of automation for nearly everything that happens there. Labor shortages alone are going to require automated equipment, but I don't see an argument here that makes sense in terms of a complete prohibition of sending people into space, or that there will be zero need for having somebody on the ground on Phobos to take care of some machinery that can be repaired or dealt with easier there rather than having to have a team of several dozen try to come up with the programming necessary for the remote manipulator that is also broken down to repair that machine. Saying there is no need for people in space is just as nutty as saying everything will be done by hand and that we can walk to the Moon.
You had me, then you lost me right there.
This is somebody who clearly doesn't get it. What is being said is that from a pure energy standpoint, sending a kilo of "stuff" into space; in other words like leaving the gravity of the Earth and in a position to go somewhere else like the Moon, Mars, or one of the asteroids; and then ploping it back onto the ground where you got that "stuff" in the first place is actually cheaper to ship it to another star like Proxima Centauri than it is to ship it back to the Earth.
In other words, Proxima Centauri is closer than a round trip to Cleveland. This is a true statement if you study celestial mechanics and understand the energies needed to get around and being able to do anything. It may take a century or two for whatever you are sending that way, but eventually it will get there and the energy requirements aren't all that great compared to simply getting away from the Earth in the first place.
This is also why "in-situ" resource development is so important for the development of space, as you get the materials where they are much more accessable rather than trying to bring things from a generally inaccessable place, like the Earth.
You have no concept of the scale and energy needed to get things done in space either. The problem is really a fundamental factor of getting out of the basic gravity well that we call the Earth, as once you are in space life gets much, much easier. Sending up blueprints and data from the ground to space is trivial. Moving stuff around once you get into space is comparatively trivial. Seriously, do you know how much energy it takes to ship something from Austrialia to the UK? I would dare say that you can move a ton of freight from Mars to the Earth for a similar kind of energy in a roughly comparable time frame as well. I'm talking putting something from say Phobos to low-earth orbit in terms of energy costs.
The problem we are facing is really one like the chicken or egg question, when neither have been created yet. How do you make the initial leap to put the equipment into space and why build that stuff when there isn't a use for it yet? Once somebody makes the leap of the imagination and gets into space on a permanent basis, there will be a reason for others to follow and do likewise.
More importantly, who died to make you King of the Earth to dictate that nobody could head off into space on their own dime if that is where their heart wanted to go? This is a freedom issue too, where people should be allowed to follow whatever dreams they may have, no matter how nutty they may be. I would agree that spending tax money for such a foolish end might be argued, but that doesn't seem to be the argument here. This is more like sending a team of federal agents raiding would be rocket builders and making the construction of a space port much less building a rocket to be a felony instead. To me, that sounds even more nutty than trying to shut down those who would go into space and tell the people of the Earth to eff off.
I don't think that the AC poster really has thought through his comment very well. Nice comment there about the role meteors have played in terms of mining.... which offers some excellent thoughts on the topic.
One of the problems with heavy metals is that most of them have sunk into the center of the Earth over time, and that it is only rare exceptions.... usually due to volcanism or meteor landfalls mentioned above.... that you find deposits of the heavier elements in even modest quantities. Going to an asteroid you don't have to worry about trying to dig down a couple of miles or more to get at the ore.... because going a couple of miles you have already shot past the center and are coming out the other side.
Also not mentioned..... there is a reason most mines only go at most a couple miles down: There is this pesky thing called "gravity" that we constantly have to fight here on the Earth. Trying to push up a couple miles of pure rock at 9.8 m/s^2 constant acceleration is an incredibly difficult task if you are trying to squeeze under that rock to get at a vein or ore body that happens to lay underneath that rock. The engineering requirements for keeping that rock suspended for at least the duration you are extracting the minerals is an incredible accomplishment that has spawned its own engineering discipline: mining engineering. If you have ever heard of some of the famous "A&M" schools around the country, notable a school like Texas A&M, the "M" comes from the mining engineering school that was the very purpose for the establishment of the university (with biology programs related to agriculture being the other). I can point to a couple dozen universities across the USA that were established explicitly for this purpose. It isn't easy, and even today there are dozens of people in 1st world countries that die from mining accidents each year.... many more in developing countries like China where they die not by the dozens but by the hundreds or even thousands each year.
Another issue is that mining is an incredibly destructive process that causes incredible environmental damage, wiping out whole habitats and even ecological niches. One mine that is close to my house grew to the point it took out a whole city and even an entire mountain in the quest to dig ever deeper down to obtain the ore. In this case, to avoid problems with the overburden of the rocks, the mine has simply moved the entire mountain down the road in an attempt to get at the minerals in the mine. Why not move this environmental damage to a place that has no "environment" to damage? Mining asteroids sounds pretty good to me on this issue too, where streams aren't filled with toxic metals or even entire climate zones are left alone. Heck, once a good asteroid has been hollowed out, it might just make a new environment that we could put stuff into to develop new environmental niches that until now have simply not existed.
Recycling is also never 100% effective as much as some people would have you think otherwise. You always need to have at least some input from raw sources to maintain any sort of supply of an element no matter how effective you have become at reusing the material.
Getting back to the AC poster above:
No, it isn't all there, at least as easy as those would have you think. Easy spots to dig and extract ore from has pretty much disappeared from the Earth. On a rare occasion you might hear about another gold rush due to a mineral deposit in a generally previously unexplored area, but where exactly are the new frontiers for humanity right now? Oh, that is right, in space! As I tried to explain above, getting down to deeper and deeper pockets of minerals is an incredibly difficult task. Modern mines that operate on the scale of current productio
Too late. The FAA is already heavily involved with commercial space travel through the Office of Commercial Space Transportation. They've been doing this since 1984 under the Reagan administration, although this particular commercial spaceflight office has jumped around between several different agencies before finally getting put under the head administrator of the FAA. The FAA-AST head reports directly to the chief administrator of the FAA, who in turn reports directly to the President. That is a rather short chain of command and not bad in terms of a federal program.
For myself, I sort of like having the FAA involved here as it sort of diffuses the authority over regulating what goes one in space into many more hands and keeps the authority over who actually runs operations in space as a committee reporting to many people who have different objectives and goals in mind. Ideally I would love to see a complete elimination of any government oversight on spaceflight as well, but if you have to have something to satisfy the statists who love to control all aspects of our lives, you could do much worse than the FAA running the show.
For a government agency, at the moment they are very small and lean, as well as fiercely protective of their turf (as most agencies are). More significantly, the FAA-AST (the AST because of historical roots for that acronym) looks after the commercial interests as their number one priority and have been known to move heaven and earth to get the other branches of the federal government to go along with some commercial spaceflight project.
The other alternative is to leave this to NASA and let NASA run commercial spaceflight activities.... something NASA has a truly abysmal record of supporting and indeed can be said that repeatedly NASA has been involved with explicitly killing off commercial spaceflight ventures in the past as they have been perceived as direct competition to NASA rather than something to cooperate with. Better yet, should this be something done via the military, such as having it become part of the Air Force or worse yet the National Reconnaissance Office? By treaty (signed by all of the current and near-term potential future space faring nations on the Earth) it is the responsibility of the national governments to regulate how their citizens get into space and the consequences of interactions with other vehicles that may happen in space or what happens when the stuff starts to come back down to the ground.
Again, if not the FAA, what branch of the federal government should be involved here?
So this is more like an automobile that has a recall and the manufacturer (via the dealer) removes the spare and replaces it with a doughnut when they do the other repairs (aka fixing the gas/brake pedals or whatever is in the recall). I'd still like to see somebody successfully sue the manufacturer if that happens. Arguably this might even be considered something critical by some convoluted environmental standards. I've seen similar kinds of "upgrades" in other products.
I'm not saying I agree with Sony here, but I am saying that the analogy to an automotive manufacturer can find similar kinds of tinkering with your car and it is more of a source of precedence than as an example for why Sony shouldn't be doing this. It is making the case for Sony, not the other way around.
My bet is he will lose.
Sony will find some loophole, the judge will allow it because the removal of this function affects a very small part of the userbase.
Car analogy time. My car comes with a spare tyre in the boot (trunk for you Yanks).
One thing that I have hated about automotive manufacturers is that they are removing the spare tire from their vehicles... in a mis-guided attempt to improve fuel economy (it saves about .1 miles per gallon perhaps due to reduced weight) and to increase trunk space. Oh, they have something in there that can be used in "emergencies", but it isn't a spare tire any more. Commonly referred to as a "doughnut" in the USA, it is the emergency tire that is often smaller and certainly less reliable than standard tires and often rated at only holding out for about 30-40 miles while your car is lop-sided and wiping out any sort of alignment that your car may have when the flat happened in the first place, if that is the only damage it may cause to your vehicle if it is put into actual usage. It also isn't rated for the same speeds as normal traffic, so you may have to leave limited access highways (aka an "interstate highway" or something like the Autobahn) if it is installed as well.
While I like the analogy, this is one that shows Sony can get away with this sort of action explicitly because automobile manufacturers have been getting away with a similar loss of functionality for some time. Other similar issues involve how these same car companies are weakening bumper standards to the point that a toddler kicking the front of the car leaves a nasty dent. Those used to be rated for a 5 mile per hour collision without damage beyond scratching some chrome. They don't even have chrome on the bumpers any more.
It is pretty easy to forget exactly how big that the Earth really is. If you take all of the objects in the inner Solar System (inside the orbit of Jupiter) beside the Earth and mash them all together into one new body.... including Venus, Mercury, Mars, the Moon, and all of the asteroids, you would still end up with an object smaller than the Earth by both mass and volume.
Earth-size objects are rather significant bodies, where the last object larger than the Earth in the Solar System was discovered in 1846 (Neptune). I wouldn't completely dismiss finding something Earth-sized in the Oort Cloud, but most objects found in the Solar System are now incredibly far away (like Makemake, which is incredibly dim due to its distance from the Sun) or very tiny.... on the order of just a few hundred meters in diameter for most of the newer asteroids being discovered. I think we can comfortably say we have identified all objects in the solar system that aren't gas giants (aka less than 50% of its mass is atmospheric gasses... perhaps less than 10% as the threshold?), but have a significant atmosphere (1000x or more than the gaseous pressure of the solar wind). That certainly is a tiny list of "terrestrial planets".
Efforts to identify terrestrial-sized objects is indeed in its infancy in terms of exoplanets, but it is something just at the cusp of being done. The question will remain, however, if they fit into the Goldilocks zone of being not too hot nor too cold when they are discovered too. Due to the proximity of the "just right" planets to its parent star, it shouldn't be overly difficult to detect an Earth-sized object in that habitable zone, presuming that they can be detected at all.
It is just a matter of time before improvements in planet detection will cross that threshold to get there.
To wipe out a potential competitor. Yeah, that sounds like at least a fair and reasonable excuse, and one that certainly has been used in the past to commit acts of genocide.
The only thing that may indicate how common or rare that "M-class" planets (to use the Star Trek term) might be is the already extensive body of exoplanets that have already been observed in terms of trying to come up with structures in various solar systems. Admittedly earth-sized bodies haven't really been observed, but the variety and positions of the various gas giants (Jupiter/Saturn sized bodies) is sufficient to at least show that the configuration that we have found here in our local neighborhood is actually unusual rather than common place.
It will be interesting to see just how common or rare that a habitable planet really is, for example how many Earth-like planets can be found within 100 light years of here? There certainly a a couple dozen potential candidate stars that are Sun-like to choose from, so it isn't a completely outlandish question, and I hope it is a question that will be answered in a rather definitive manner in the next thousand years or so (hopefully sooner than later).
Even finding one other planetary body with a liquid ocean and a "thin" gaseous atmosphere would be incredible and be beneficial to settle this argument. All this said, there are at least 3 other bodies in the Solar System that at least have the potential of harboring life: Mars, Europa, and Enceladus. If these other worlds harbor life, and in particular if Europa may have substantial numbers of life forms or better yet multi-cellular life, it would have huge implications for how common potential life bearing planets may be elsewhere in the universe.
My bet, however, is that planets like the Earth are in fact quite rare indeed.
While I'm not necessarily disputing the argument here, I would like to know what possible resource we might have on the Earth that can't be found much, much more abundantly and in a form much easier to obtain elsewhere that can only be found on the Earth? Here are some common favorites in science fiction stories:
We can simply pass a United Nations resolution and sign a treaty to keep nukes or for that matter all weapons from space. Doesn't that work? Won't all spacefaring civilizations have such a similar attitude?