Woah! I never at all said that man-years were equal. All I said is that the going rate for a man-year, on average, is somewhere between $20k and $100k. I didn't say how much could be done in that man-year at all. And I actually am a firm believer that all "man-years" are not equal. And that, even for expensive man-years, the amount of "effort" in some thousands of man-years is pretty significant - especially considering we already have "shovels".
Being generous and assuming the cost of a person's labor for 1 year to the company is $100k, this means $4 billion would purchase 40,000 man-years of labor. Considering the world per-capita income is actually closer to around $20,000 (which is still high, mind you, but it makes for simpler math), that would be 200,000 man-years of labor.
What the heck are these guys doing that's going to require somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 man-years of effort? (Remember, the cost of everything turns back into man-years of effort.)
You're just comparing nominal terms... how's that price compare to average annual salary (that is, percent of disposable income)? That's the only way to really determine how "expensive" something is in a given area - not by looking at nominal price.
Actually, laws don't tell you what you can and cannot do. Laws simply state agreed-upon consequences for certain actions.
Nasty little caveat there...but it means that you are actually free to ban certain folks from entering your store or killing every third customer; but, if you choose to do that, people can either shut down your store, take all your assets, lock you up, and/or execute you (depending on the laws to which your particular society adheres).
You have several options: 1. Don't shop at (those) stores at all. 2. Don't use dressing rooms and measure the clothing with some other means. 3. Buy clothes, take them home and try them on, then return them if they don't fit. 4. Make your own clothes. (This could even lead to "profit!!!") 5. Hire a tailor to make clothes for you.
Too bad I cannot moderate my own thread - you display some good insight here.
I was actually trying to stay a bit clear of the non-physical aspects of how people can choose to follow a set of rules which is what I think you mean by the sociological aspects. I definitely agree that most social systems work because of shared beliefs. That's not really surprising, and because of the fact that populations with similar beliefs tend to congregate, it's not suprising that extensive force is not required to maintain that system. Force becomes necessary when people try to mix groups with materially differing beliefs, especially on things like ownership of property and conflict resolution, and they do not have the will to compromise.
The reason I tried to keep the self-will aspect out of things is that it falls outside the realm of control mechanisms. After all, if someone tells me to do something I would do on my own, am I under their control or my own? At times this distinction is difficult to make.
What you mention in the scenario when a government "in power" cannot enforce its rules simply indicates that government is not really in power at all. But what happens in the hypothetical totalitarian state if the "ruling party" is strong enough to contain the population?
I would agree that "economics" is more powerful than soldiers, but only in the sense that it is a "force" that prevents people from acting (see my above post) by way of starvation or lack of other life-sustaining resources and services. Incidentally, extreme lack of "necessities" is one method of force that generally does result in action.
"Rule of law" depends on force; by itself it has no teeth, but I don't want to dwell on that here any more than I have already.
As far as compound interest goes, I'm not sure how that can be described as a force. Geometric progressions in physical things are powerful, but in terms of monetary measures, it's an artifice of humanity. Compound interest is some combination of inflation and increases in real wealth in the underlying economy. In physical systems, "compound interest" is just positive feedback; I'm not sure that compound interest in a financial sense is isomorphic with this phenomenon.
This wasn't a troll at all, just an observation. Let me clarify.
Your use of the horse and water analogy is not appropriate here because of a misunderstanding of the capabilities of force. Force cannot be reliably used to cause someone to do something. Force can only reliably be used to prevent someone from doing something (and by 'something' I mean something over which the subject has direct physical control). All uses of force to cause an action may or may not fail, but if an action is attempted it is always possible with sufficent force to stop that action. If I punch you in the gut and say "punch me!", you may or may not punch me. I could attach your arm to a machine that punches me I suppose, but then that's not you doing the punching. However, if you punch me, I can always (assuming I'm strong enough and fast enough, or I shoot you, or put a wall between us, etc.) forcibly prevent your fist from causing me harm. I hope this makes the distinction clear.
As far as justice goes, I can't comment on what you mean there without an understanding of what you mean by "just" and "unjust". The evaluation of the merit of the force the US has used is not the intent of my post; I just meant to present the observation that from a pure physical standpoint, force is the only way to ensure certain actions are stopped.
Let's see how your lawyers fare when soldiers use guns on them.
Lawyers only work when everyone agrees to abide by the lawers and judges. People generally only agree to this because some "soldiers" somewhere are willing to enforce what the lawyers and judges say. I only care about lawyers and judges because of the guys with guns behind them.
People in the US in particular seem to forget that the only real way to enforce anything is with force.
I think people are forgetting that a change in market share does not mean a loss in installed base. For instance, if the current total market is 1000 and IE has 900 users and FF has 100, IE has 90% and FF has 10%. Now, let's say the market grows to 2000 and IE has 1850 and FF has 150. The new market shares are 92.5% and 7.5%; FF's market share dropped 2.5%, but their installed base went up 50%.
Simply looking at market share doesn't tell you anything except for relative adoption with respect to the overall market, and that may or may not even be a useful measurement. It depends on if you care about relative share or absolute adoption, really.
What? Of course the climate changes! I don't think anyone ever denied this. The important question isn't even if humans affect change, because we do.
The real question is "Will we be able to deal with the change" My guess is the answer to this is "yes". I doubt that, given human technology, that any global climate change will get bad enough to kill us off, unless: 1) There is a global drought and no food at all is produced, or 2) somehow we change atmospheric concentration to be acutely toxic. The basic condition is: If the general lifespan of people remains high enough to permit reproduction, the human race will continue. It might be a lot smaller than now, or it might not have all the entertaining gadgets we have now, but it will remain. It would be impressive indeed if every single person were killed off.
Now, will your quality of life change? Will you hear of people who die? Will you die? Most likely you will see all of those things. The question is not that they will happen, but how you handle them when they do. I think that all that's going to happen is that people will actually have to work a little harder to obtain their necessities and you won't have people talking in meetings all day. More people will be out there actually working physically to meet their needs, and I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Now, I agree that technology is great and reduces labor, but the environment tends to adjust to mitigate the advantages of technology. It "raises the bar" so to speak...
The Post-It example is bad for one reason: a bunch of people were trying to get something like this to work but either the glue was too weak to be useful or so strong you couldn't peel the sheets apart. The patent, as far as I know (and definitely what I hope) wasn't for the idea of using some sticky stuff to attach a piece of paper somewhere and have it be easily removable, but in the particular type of adhesive used. This to me is novel and unobvious, because it was not obvious what type of adhesive to use.
That's the trick with using the unobvious clause - every function for which someone tries to invent something to perform is inherently obvious: a device to fly, a device to control engine output (governor), a device to make light, a device to sew instead of doing it by hand, a device to agument human senses, etc. It's the device that is the novelty, not the resulting thing. I even will allow for certain medicines, but not the effect they produce (for instance: patent on chemical XYZ, not patent on 'cure for influenza').
I would wager, phiolosophically, that no human has ever invented anything that was not some kind of extension of what exists in the natural world - the universe itself is prior art in my estimation.
I might give you a design patent for the particular layout, but what do you mean by 'novel set of knobs and switches'? In my book, if you have any input device that accepts a force or torque, big whoop. The first guy that came up with the variable capacitance input, sure that was patentable in my book. If you invent something that reads brainwaves, or detects your gravitational distortion, you get a patent. But just making another rotating knob or switch, or a piece of software that acts like a rotating knob or switch, is not unobvious in my book and should be denied on those grounds.
The article indicated "Non Final Rejections" and "Final Rejections" based on prior art. Does anyone know of any patents that have been rejected because lack of usefulness or obviousness? Patents do have three acceptance criteria after all...
Indeed - but as soon as you ask this question, you have to ask yourself, "who decides what is 'moral' in the first place?"
Once you define what is and is not 'morally responsible', how do you enforce that? Any moral system has to have a way to be enforced, or else it's not useful and is probably not correct. For instance, you cannot have a moral system that says you cannot say something is morally unacceptable.
Remember, morality tells you how you should make certain decisions and is therefore 'above' the decision making process. Also note that you have to have freedom in a moral system; if you don't have freedom to make the choice the decision cannot be "right" or "wrong". And often times the thing decided isn't right or wrong in and of itself, but depends on circumstances. For instance, taking food from a starving child might be bad, but taking food from a starving child that is allergic to that food might be good. So you cannot say that "taking food from someone" is either good or bad.
So, how does this apply to weapons? Having a weapon is neither good or bad. How you use that is what matters, and you need something to guide your decisions.
And as far as asking where moral responsibility has gone, I'd say the first step is to see where in our own individual lives we have not been morally responsible and try to correct that. Then we can be in a better position to start evaluating the policies of our societies and have ground on which to stand when challenging policy.
Do you have any references? I've recently started to become quite interested in the details of the origins of life (like I said, I don't like any of my beliefs to be baseless), so if there is documentation of work done into the assembly of self-replicating organic compounds from base components I'd be interested in reading up. I'm not sure if you're talking about the RNA world or something else. My academic background is in aerospace and computer systems, not biology or chemistry; I might not be looking for the appropriate terms.
That is, incidentally, why I stated that I have not come across any information rather than stating that such information does not exist. If it's there and I haven't seen it it's not because I'm avoiding it, but because my search has not yet brought me there.
Interestingly enough, there are certain things that can be unequivocally true, but unprovable. This is kind of a really strange thing, but if you read up on Godel's Incompltentess Theorem, you'll find that there are some truths that are not scientifically provable.
That said, I don't know that ID (or even any theory on the origin of the species) falls in this category, but it seems likely. Personally I don't consider evolution to be a theory on the origin of life, but a theory to describe how life changes over time.
I'm not sure what you mean that matters of faith should not be taught in schools. I think that what needs to be taught in schools is what the matters of faith are for various classifications - for instance, what are the differences between Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, etc.? What are the facts surrounding each faith (for each one does have certain facts - people were alive at such-and-such a time, manuscripts exists, and the like). I think most folks forget that most faith is not really baseless, and teaching that in schools would be valauble. Understanding why certain people hold to beliefs is important in respecting and understanding those beliefs. If you just say "oh it's faith" then you're basically putting someone down by insinuating they are being irrational by having that belief.
As far as the whole intelligent design versus evolution debate goes, I happen to believe that once you have a self-replicating organic machine evolution makes sense and is backed up by observation. I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever in any published literature of how those self replicating organic systems can develop, and that is the part of Creation I ascribe to intelligent design. And to go along with my first paragraph: I have this viewpoint because there is no scientific evidence of how such self-replicating systems can arise in nature without external influence, and there is evidence in just about every human culture that some outside force caused this to happen. The fact that humanity has this idea is evidence (and the fact that this idea exists is provable), and the lack of alternatives is compelling. Probability, to me, is not a convincing argument: probability just tells you what could happen possibly, not what actually happened. And there is even the possibility that an event with a 1/100 chance of occurring will never occur (an interesting facet of statistics).
Amen to that. Reminds me of a quote I read somewhere, probably here on/.:
"A map with a bullet hole through it is still a map. A GPS with a bullet through it is a paperweight."
In a country where "electricity is scarce" I'd rather have a paper book, where if part of it is damaged the rest of it is still usable. Sure, it's more difficult (i.e., you're better to make a completely new one) to change the content of a physical book, but the book has a much higher robustness factor. For instance, think about what happens when you represent the letter 'A' as a single binary number. You change 1 bit out of 8 at random and you can turn that 'A' into a '?' or something. If you have 9 x 5 grid with dark and light spots that makes the glyph 'A', and you swap the same percentage of squares at random from dark to light (6 squares out of 45) and you can probably still recognize that it's the letter 'A'.
Ok, that's similar to, but not exactly the same, as physical books versus electronic books. Perhaps simply recognizing that the book is self-contained, whereas the tablet PC requires media (the binary states of something), the translator (the system and I/O devices), and a power source. Simple reliability classes will tell you that in this instance, more parts is not more reliable, and probably has a lot more hidden cost than for which an account has been made.
Is there any evidence that extraterrestrial life exists? A few people claim to have seen evidence.
Is there any evidence that God exists? Many people claim to have seen evidence.
So, what's the difference between these two claims? In fact, there is more evidence for God than there is for extraterrestrial life. Note that, in neither case, do I use the word "proof". Nor do I even make a statement on the quality of evidence, just that evidence does exist for both claims.
And since when is probability a "force" in the universe?
It's also because some of the radiation from the sun is good for us. I couldn't find the exact study, but there are lots of links that show that there's data that suggests that preventing sun exposure is actually worse than allowing it (the article I coudln't find said something about there being on the order of tens of times more deaths caused by vitamin-D deficiency due to sunblock than the UV-related deaths that would be present without sunblock).
So, you are correct: sunlight has actual physiological benefits!
I'm actually fairly familiar with the intricacies of liquid propellant rockets and, notably, the complex turbomachinery and cooling requirements necessary to run without destroying themselves. Incidentally, part of the SSME complexity is due to the fact that the shuttle is marginally "reusable". One of the (few) advantages of having a background in aerospace. My point is that a lot of the experimental design work has already been done for this type of thing, so the only costs involved are in manufacturing, not research. Considering folks were able to send anything to the moon in 1969 shows that "difficult" does not mean "impossible". Also, how much of the original NASA cost was research versus manufacturing? And, as I said before, how much was administrative?
Incidentally, the "FAQ" to which you linked simply seems to simply and accurately say that "SpaceShip One, or a similar design, is not suited to reaching an orbit at an altitude of 300 km". This doesn't say anything about the feasibility of reaching LEO or the moon. As far as SSO was concerned, it was built for a specific purpose, and it acheived that purpose.
Also, for any interested: the energy required to get to the moon is only about twice that to hit LEO, so once you hit LEO youve got a lot less further to go than from hitting 100km to LEO at 300 km. Hitting 100 km altitude takes about 1000 kJ/kg net; LEO at 300km takes about 32,000 kJ/kg, and escape velocity - basically what you need to get to the moon - is about 62,000 kJ/kg net. Sure, you have to factor in that some of your energy was taken up by atmospheric drag and lifting fuel and tank structure - that's why I have the 'net' there. Consider that H2+O2 has a heating value of about 132,000 kJ/kg and see that it's not unheard of that this is possible.
Just to spite everyone, I think I might build a starship and put the SSO in its observation deck so that, one day, it can actually orbit the earth. *wink*
Remeber, I said that the difficult wasn't so much in technology but in liability. If you keep the design simple and don't try to make the thing do a million extra things, it's not that difficult (requirements: Land on the moon. Get back to Earth. Do it in a way that a human passenger will have a high probability of surviving the trip without irreparable physical harm).
Rocket design is actually fairly trivial: the basic technology was all ironed out last century. Even human environments in space have already had their details hammered out between NASA and the navy (think subs) and those crazy folks at the (ant-)arctic research stations. The hard part, I admit, is construction, but if you hire skilled friends to do it you don't need to pay people $100/hour for simple welding. Again, if you're not trying to optimise or cater to the whims of bureaucracy, it's not that difficult to do things. I will admit, though, that the largest expense is in testing - so good test planning and up-front design work are definitely needed. However, I still don't think you need 2,000 man-years to get a rocket to the moon ($100M at $50k/man-year).
Part of keeping the cost down will also be allowing things to take a while to complete. I don't need to pay someone hideous amounts for H2 and O2; I can build relatively inexpensive tanks and a wind/electrolysis farm and wait for my fuel stores to collect, at a reasonable pace, with only minimal labor costs (okay, probably insurance as well). Part of the high price of things is "We Want It Now!" syndrome. Also, if you don't have to spend time and effort to get and review quotes, but just design stuff and build it, you save a lot right there. There are lots of inefficiencies in any project, and most of them are not techincal.
Okay, I will admit that I don't know how much it would really cost to get a moon-mission going, but I still think I could get a lot more done with $100M than the average government or corporation.
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Woah! I never at all said that man-years were equal. All I said is that the going rate for a man-year, on average, is somewhere between $20k and $100k. I didn't say how much could be done in that man-year at all. And I actually am a firm believer that all "man-years" are not equal. And that, even for expensive man-years, the amount of "effort" in some thousands of man-years is pretty significant - especially considering we already have "shovels".
Being generous and assuming the cost of a person's labor for 1 year to the company is $100k, this means $4 billion would purchase 40,000 man-years of labor. Considering the world per-capita income is actually closer to around $20,000 (which is still high, mind you, but it makes for simpler math), that would be 200,000 man-years of labor.
What the heck are these guys doing that's going to require somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000 man-years of effort? (Remember, the cost of everything turns back into man-years of effort.)
You're just comparing nominal terms... how's that price compare to average annual salary (that is, percent of disposable income)? That's the only way to really determine how "expensive" something is in a given area - not by looking at nominal price.
Nasty little caveat there...but it means that you are actually free to ban certain folks from entering your store or killing every third customer; but, if you choose to do that, people can either shut down your store, take all your assets, lock you up, and/or execute you (depending on the laws to which your particular society adheres).
You have several options:
1. Don't shop at (those) stores at all.
2. Don't use dressing rooms and measure the clothing with some other means.
3. Buy clothes, take them home and try them on, then return them if they don't fit.
4. Make your own clothes. (This could even lead to "profit!!!")
5. Hire a tailor to make clothes for you.
I was actually trying to stay a bit clear of the non-physical aspects of how people can choose to follow a set of rules which is what I think you mean by the sociological aspects. I definitely agree that most social systems work because of shared beliefs. That's not really surprising, and because of the fact that populations with similar beliefs tend to congregate, it's not suprising that extensive force is not required to maintain that system. Force becomes necessary when people try to mix groups with materially differing beliefs, especially on things like ownership of property and conflict resolution, and they do not have the will to compromise.
The reason I tried to keep the self-will aspect out of things is that it falls outside the realm of control mechanisms. After all, if someone tells me to do something I would do on my own, am I under their control or my own? At times this distinction is difficult to make.
What you mention in the scenario when a government "in power" cannot enforce its rules simply indicates that government is not really in power at all. But what happens in the hypothetical totalitarian state if the "ruling party" is strong enough to contain the population?
"Rule of law" depends on force; by itself it has no teeth, but I don't want to dwell on that here any more than I have already.
As far as compound interest goes, I'm not sure how that can be described as a force. Geometric progressions in physical things are powerful, but in terms of monetary measures, it's an artifice of humanity. Compound interest is some combination of inflation and increases in real wealth in the underlying economy. In physical systems, "compound interest" is just positive feedback; I'm not sure that compound interest in a financial sense is isomorphic with this phenomenon.
Your use of the horse and water analogy is not appropriate here because of a misunderstanding of the capabilities of force. Force cannot be reliably used to cause someone to do something. Force can only reliably be used to prevent someone from doing something (and by 'something' I mean something over which the subject has direct physical control). All uses of force to cause an action may or may not fail, but if an action is attempted it is always possible with sufficent force to stop that action. If I punch you in the gut and say "punch me!", you may or may not punch me. I could attach your arm to a machine that punches me I suppose, but then that's not you doing the punching. However, if you punch me, I can always (assuming I'm strong enough and fast enough, or I shoot you, or put a wall between us, etc.) forcibly prevent your fist from causing me harm. I hope this makes the distinction clear.
As far as justice goes, I can't comment on what you mean there without an understanding of what you mean by "just" and "unjust". The evaluation of the merit of the force the US has used is not the intent of my post; I just meant to present the observation that from a pure physical standpoint, force is the only way to ensure certain actions are stopped.
Lawyers only work when everyone agrees to abide by the lawers and judges. People generally only agree to this because some "soldiers" somewhere are willing to enforce what the lawyers and judges say. I only care about lawyers and judges because of the guys with guns behind them.
People in the US in particular seem to forget that the only real way to enforce anything is with force.
Simply looking at market share doesn't tell you anything except for relative adoption with respect to the overall market, and that may or may not even be a useful measurement. It depends on if you care about relative share or absolute adoption, really.
That's nothing. I've seen a movie given its rating for "Thematic Elements." If I could only remember which movie...
What? Of course the climate changes! I don't think anyone ever denied this. The important question isn't even if humans affect change, because we do.
The real question is "Will we be able to deal with the change" My guess is the answer to this is "yes". I doubt that, given human technology, that any global climate change will get bad enough to kill us off, unless: 1) There is a global drought and no food at all is produced, or 2) somehow we change atmospheric concentration to be acutely toxic. The basic condition is: If the general lifespan of people remains high enough to permit reproduction, the human race will continue. It might be a lot smaller than now, or it might not have all the entertaining gadgets we have now, but it will remain. It would be impressive indeed if every single person were killed off.
Now, will your quality of life change? Will you hear of people who die? Will you die? Most likely you will see all of those things. The question is not that they will happen, but how you handle them when they do. I think that all that's going to happen is that people will actually have to work a little harder to obtain their necessities and you won't have people talking in meetings all day. More people will be out there actually working physically to meet their needs, and I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. Now, I agree that technology is great and reduces labor, but the environment tends to adjust to mitigate the advantages of technology. It "raises the bar" so to speak...
That's the trick with using the unobvious clause - every function for which someone tries to invent something to perform is inherently obvious: a device to fly, a device to control engine output (governor), a device to make light, a device to sew instead of doing it by hand, a device to agument human senses, etc. It's the device that is the novelty, not the resulting thing. I even will allow for certain medicines, but not the effect they produce (for instance: patent on chemical XYZ, not patent on 'cure for influenza').
I would wager, phiolosophically, that no human has ever invented anything that was not some kind of extension of what exists in the natural world - the universe itself is prior art in my estimation.
I might give you a design patent for the particular layout, but what do you mean by 'novel set of knobs and switches'? In my book, if you have any input device that accepts a force or torque, big whoop. The first guy that came up with the variable capacitance input, sure that was patentable in my book. If you invent something that reads brainwaves, or detects your gravitational distortion, you get a patent. But just making another rotating knob or switch, or a piece of software that acts like a rotating knob or switch, is not unobvious in my book and should be denied on those grounds.
The article indicated "Non Final Rejections" and "Final Rejections" based on prior art. Does anyone know of any patents that have been rejected because lack of usefulness or obviousness? Patents do have three acceptance criteria after all...
I'd say that the space program is much less of a "waste" of money than the things on which the general public spends its money on its own.
Once you define what is and is not 'morally responsible', how do you enforce that? Any moral system has to have a way to be enforced, or else it's not useful and is probably not correct. For instance, you cannot have a moral system that says you cannot say something is morally unacceptable.
Remember, morality tells you how you should make certain decisions and is therefore 'above' the decision making process. Also note that you have to have freedom in a moral system; if you don't have freedom to make the choice the decision cannot be "right" or "wrong". And often times the thing decided isn't right or wrong in and of itself, but depends on circumstances. For instance, taking food from a starving child might be bad, but taking food from a starving child that is allergic to that food might be good. So you cannot say that "taking food from someone" is either good or bad.
So, how does this apply to weapons? Having a weapon is neither good or bad. How you use that is what matters, and you need something to guide your decisions.
And as far as asking where moral responsibility has gone, I'd say the first step is to see where in our own individual lives we have not been morally responsible and try to correct that. Then we can be in a better position to start evaluating the policies of our societies and have ground on which to stand when challenging policy.
That is, incidentally, why I stated that I have not come across any information rather than stating that such information does not exist. If it's there and I haven't seen it it's not because I'm avoiding it, but because my search has not yet brought me there.
That said, I don't know that ID (or even any theory on the origin of the species) falls in this category, but it seems likely. Personally I don't consider evolution to be a theory on the origin of life, but a theory to describe how life changes over time.
As far as the whole intelligent design versus evolution debate goes, I happen to believe that once you have a self-replicating organic machine evolution makes sense and is backed up by observation. I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever in any published literature of how those self replicating organic systems can develop, and that is the part of Creation I ascribe to intelligent design. And to go along with my first paragraph: I have this viewpoint because there is no scientific evidence of how such self-replicating systems can arise in nature without external influence, and there is evidence in just about every human culture that some outside force caused this to happen. The fact that humanity has this idea is evidence (and the fact that this idea exists is provable), and the lack of alternatives is compelling. Probability, to me, is not a convincing argument: probability just tells you what could happen possibly, not what actually happened. And there is even the possibility that an event with a 1/100 chance of occurring will never occur (an interesting facet of statistics).
Ok, that's similar to, but not exactly the same, as physical books versus electronic books. Perhaps simply recognizing that the book is self-contained, whereas the tablet PC requires media (the binary states of something), the translator (the system and I/O devices), and a power source. Simple reliability classes will tell you that in this instance, more parts is not more reliable, and probably has a lot more hidden cost than for which an account has been made.
Is there any evidence that extraterrestrial life exists? A few people claim to have seen evidence.
Is there any evidence that God exists? Many people claim to have seen evidence.
So, what's the difference between these two claims? In fact, there is more evidence for God than there is for extraterrestrial life. Note that, in neither case, do I use the word "proof". Nor do I even make a statement on the quality of evidence, just that evidence does exist for both claims.
And since when is probability a "force" in the universe?
So, you are correct: sunlight has actual physiological benefits!
Incidentally, the "FAQ" to which you linked simply seems to simply and accurately say that "SpaceShip One, or a similar design, is not suited to reaching an orbit at an altitude of 300 km". This doesn't say anything about the feasibility of reaching LEO or the moon. As far as SSO was concerned, it was built for a specific purpose, and it acheived that purpose.
Also, for any interested: the energy required to get to the moon is only about twice that to hit LEO, so once you hit LEO youve got a lot less further to go than from hitting 100km to LEO at 300 km. Hitting 100 km altitude takes about 1000 kJ/kg net; LEO at 300km takes about 32,000 kJ/kg, and escape velocity - basically what you need to get to the moon - is about 62,000 kJ/kg net. Sure, you have to factor in that some of your energy was taken up by atmospheric drag and lifting fuel and tank structure - that's why I have the 'net' there. Consider that H2+O2 has a heating value of about 132,000 kJ/kg and see that it's not unheard of that this is possible.
Just to spite everyone, I think I might build a starship and put the SSO in its observation deck so that, one day, it can actually orbit the earth. *wink*
Rocket design is actually fairly trivial: the basic technology was all ironed out last century. Even human environments in space have already had their details hammered out between NASA and the navy (think subs) and those crazy folks at the (ant-)arctic research stations. The hard part, I admit, is construction, but if you hire skilled friends to do it you don't need to pay people $100/hour for simple welding. Again, if you're not trying to optimise or cater to the whims of bureaucracy, it's not that difficult to do things. I will admit, though, that the largest expense is in testing - so good test planning and up-front design work are definitely needed. However, I still don't think you need 2,000 man-years to get a rocket to the moon ($100M at $50k/man-year).
Part of keeping the cost down will also be allowing things to take a while to complete. I don't need to pay someone hideous amounts for H2 and O2; I can build relatively inexpensive tanks and a wind/electrolysis farm and wait for my fuel stores to collect, at a reasonable pace, with only minimal labor costs (okay, probably insurance as well). Part of the high price of things is "We Want It Now!" syndrome. Also, if you don't have to spend time and effort to get and review quotes, but just design stuff and build it, you save a lot right there. There are lots of inefficiencies in any project, and most of them are not techincal.
Okay, I will admit that I don't know how much it would really cost to get a moon-mission going, but I still think I could get a lot more done with $100M than the average government or corporation.