And this just after news about how the US is cutting down on NASA's budget and missions like this..
The US federal government cut NASA's budget? Do you have a link for this? The only articles I've seen indicate an increase in NASA's budget, virtually one of the only non-defense sectors of the government to see an increase.
Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society is keeping a running tally of events on the Society's official weblog. In general, the weblog is a great source of space science news. According to her latest post, Venus Express has already reported back to ground control and is in healthy condition.
Without order in society you no longer really have civilization. Government is absolutely required to coordinate a group larger than a family. Even tribes have a cheiftain.
That's the typical view. If I understand anarcho-capitalism correctly, though, it claims that order can also arise as an emergent property of market forces.
I often wonder whether anarchists (and capitalists) realize that both systems mean survival of the fittest rules supreme. Ie, the guys who used to beat you up in high school? They probably should have killed you before your brains kicked in and made you a threat to their brawn.
Whoever patents the five or six storylines that are the basis for virtually all books will become richer then Bill Gates.
This reminds me of something somebody sent me a link to the other day. From here:
We identify the seven original stories. 1. ACHILLES: the flawless person...well...almost flawless! A good example is SUPERMAN, but the Achilles source story can be seen in any story about a person with a fatal flaw, be it literal or psychological.
2. CINDERELLA: the dream comes true. Think PRETTY WOMAN, STRICTLY BALLROOM, even ROCKY.
3. CIRCE: enchantress who casts bewitching spells. Seemingly an innocent, she turned Odysseus' men into swine. Think BASIC INSTINCT, BODY HEAT or DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Of course, we reserve the right to reverse the roles!
4. FAUST: You can sell your soul for success but the Devil will one day have his due. WALL STREET and THE FIRM or, more literally, THE DEVIL'S ADVOVATE and BEDAZZLED.
5. ORPHEUS: who descended into the underworld in search of his dead wife Eurydice. Granted leave to take her back to the land of the living, he broke the rules by gazing back at her, and she was snatched back to Hades. They were later re-united in death. This source story influences all tales concerning a metaphorical descent into hell or the depths of one's own psyche, eg SEVEN or THE SIXTH SENSE and stories about loss or grief.
6. ROMEO and JULIET: the so-called 'foe' love story, eg TITANIC.
7. TRISTAN and ISOLDE: man loves woman...unfortunately one or both are already spoken for. Examples of this story are as diverse as BRIEF ENCOUNTER and FATAL ATTRACTION.
I expect the Moon does pretty well when you're on the dark side, but when you're on the sunny side I don't think it offers any radiation shielding. No magnetic field, no ionosphere.
Please correct me if I'm wrong...
Lunar regolith could potentially be quite useful for radiation shielding.
He wants to do something that is fundamentally complex, which is edit photos. Okay, he wants to remove red eye? He's going to have to tell the program where to remove the red eye from.... Of course it's complex. What does he expect? A miracle? Artificial intelligence?
Not to nitpick, but HP actually has a system which does precisely that:
HP researchers have developed two approaches to detecting and correcting red-eye. The first exploits an earlier algorithm that accurately detects faces in photographs or real-time video. The second is based on a detector trained specifically to find red eyes.
A Labs-based implementation of these algorithms led to HP's In-Camera Red-Eye Removal, which instantly removes red-eye from photos while they're still in the camera, without using a PC and graphics software -- an industry first.
Introduced in May in HP's new Photosmart R707 digital camera, the red-eye removal feature is one of several imaging technologies that originated in HP Labs and are now appearing in a line of new HP cameras.... Beginning in mid-2003, the scientists tested RedBot on about 1,700 photographs submitted by HP employees through a company intranet. The algorithms found and fixed red-eye about 90 percent of the time. "That's a very good success rate," Ulichney says, but researchers want to push the percentages even higher by running their algorithms on a much larger sample.
They have a site where you can upload photos to run the red-eye detector on, but it doesn't seem to load well right now.
And how much nuclear waste would be created as a result?
Not only that, but I'm also curious as to how much waste (both radioactive and chemical) would be released into the air by the equivalent amount of fossil fuels?
The article didn't seem to have a link to the actual report, and judging by the comments I've seen so far, nobody here's read it yet. The RAS's report can be found here:
The main conclusions of the RAS report are as follows:
* The essential scientific case for Human Space Exploration is based on investigations on the Moon and Mars. There are three key scientific challenges where direct human involvement will be necessary for a timely and successful outcome:
- Mapping the history of the solar system (including the young Earth) and the evolution of our Sun by studying the unique signatures left on and beneath the lunar surface; - The search for life on Mars; - Detailed, planet-wide exploration of Mars.
* Scientific missions to the Moon and Mars will address questions of profound interest to the human race. These include: the origins and history of the solar system; whether life is unique to Earth; and how life on Earth began. If our close neighbour, Mars, is found to be devoid of life, important lessons may be learned regarding the future of our own planet.
* While the exploration of the Moon and Mars can and is being addressed by unmanned missions, the capabilities of robotic spacecraft will fall well short of those of human explorers for the foreseeable future.
* Assuming a human presence, the Moon offers an excellent site for astronomy, with the far-side and polar regions of the Moon being shielded from the 'pollution' from Earth. * Medical science will benefit from studying the human physiological response to low and zero gravity, to the effects of radiation and in the psychological challenge posed by a long-duration mission to Mars.
* There appear to be no fundamental technological barriers to sending humans to the Moon or Mars.
* A major international human space exploration programme involving a return to the Moon and the longer term aim of sending humans to Mars is likely to involve the US, Europe, Russia and Japan. There are also growing ambitions in China and India. Under present government policy the UK would not be involved and would look increasingly isolated.
* The cost of the UK playing a full role in an international human space exploration programme to explore the Moon and Mars could be of the order £150M per year, sustained over 20-25 years. It is not realistic for the bulk of this to be taken from the existing Government-funded science budget. Rather, a decision to be involved should be taken on the basis of broader strategic reasoning that would include commercial, educational, social, and political arguments as well as the scientific returns that would follow.
* There is compelling evidence that the outreach potential for human space exploration can be a strong positive influence on the interests and educational choices of children. * Involvement in technologically advanced exploration of the solar system will provide a high profile challenge for UK industry, with consequent benefits in recruitment of new engineers and scientists. Evidence from NASA and ESA surveys have shown a significant economic multiplier from investment in space projects, with an additional overall gain in competitiveness.
Following the Flores case Thompson became prominently involved in First Amendment issues, particularly concerning the possible effects of sexually violent material. The Florida Supreme Court ordered that he undergo psychiatric testing during this campaign, which he successfully passed. He later quipped that this made him one of the few sane lawyers working in the state. The specific reasons that prompted the court to require Thompson to be tested, and on what grounds they compelled him, are unknown.
This question seems to be coming up quite often in the threads here. From their FAQ:
Space Services' spacecraft is carefully designed so as not to create orbital debris. Our spacecraft stays permanently attached to a rocket stage that orbits until it harmlessly re-enters and is completely consumed by Earth's atmosphere - blazing like a shooting star in final tribute to the passengers aboard.
For missions which are launched aboard a commercially purchased launcher, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration issues a license which verifies that the Space Services payload does not contribute to orbital debris. For missions not subject to FAA approval, Space Services voluntarily follows the same guidelines which prevent orbital pollution from its missions.
I spend some time thinking about doing something special with my ashes if I chose cremation. A lot of people seem to like their ashes spread in ocean or in the sky. I thought about my ashes going to space, like Scotty's, but it may not be an option for a chump like me. Unless there is a service that performs this or I get connections, my family won't be able to do this practically.
(Below is a copy of a comment I made the last time this story was posted. If slashdot editors can dupe, I should be able to as well:)
Last year Reason had an interview with Neal Stephenson (author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, and other fine novels), where he was asked about the state of science in America. What he said resonated with me quite a bit:
The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.
For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
A Japanese Internet whiz is tipped to become the world's fourth space tourist - and he wants to orbit the earth dressed as an ace pilot from a hit Japanese animation series.... If he gets Russian approval, Enomoto said he wanted to dress up on the trip as "Char Aznable", a character in the popular "Gundam" hero robot series of animation whose name is inspired by French singer Charles Aznavour.... Enomoto describes himself as a "Gundam otaku (geek)".
Other people might consider that a sacrilege or making space less "dignified," but I think it's actually pretty cool. In any case, it's also humbling to know there are people out there far geekier than me...
Last year Reason had an interview with Neal Stephenson (author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, and other fine novels), where he was asked about the state of science in America. What he said resonated with me quite a bit:
The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.
For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
that China is only interested in Space as a prestige project.
I suspect it's a little more than that. Here's a little blurb from the wikipedia article on the Chinese Space Program:
China's space program has several goals. The first is to increase China's national prestige. The second is to develop China as a low cost satellite launcher. Finally, there is the ambitious goal of mining space for resources, namely the moon.
Why doesn't NASA cooperate with other countries in exploration, technology etc?
Because the last time someone thought that, we ended up with the International Space Station. No thanks.
Seriously, having to deal with the red tape and bureaucracy of one nation's government, and making sure all the state constituencies get the proper allotment of pork-barrel spending, is enough. Problems tend to increase exponentially with the number of governments involved.
Re:OMNI Magazine story on prototype robots in '81
on
Fast Robot Prototyping
·
· Score: 1
I believe you're talking about Mark Tilden and B.E.A.M. robotics. IIRC, he now works (worked?) at Los Alamos with his bottom-up approach.
Nowadays, Mark Tilden actually develops robots for WowWee Toys. He's responsible for that RoboSapien thing you see all the time in toy stores, and he's curently working on a number of robots to succeed it.
I'd imagine a vehicle like this would probably stop cold if surrounded (360 degrees of obstacles) by other vehicles, at which point the abductees could take what's inside, and leave.
Thing is, these autonomous vehicles will probably be transmitting video and position data back to base in realtime. If something like that happened, they could probably just send in a fast-response team or track the abductors' vehicles via satellite. A short while later, you have N fewer potential abductors.
According to the site for Sensors Unlimited (Olsen's company), Dr. Gregory Olsen will be doing a number of live webcasts from the International Space Station, from October 3-7.
Since the Russians are the only country currently capable of bringing crew and cargo to and from the space station, I think they have the right to put whoever they damn well please in their crew.
Slashdot Mirror
And this just after news about how the US is cutting down on NASA's budget and missions like this..
The US federal government cut NASA's budget? Do you have a link for this? The only articles I've seen indicate an increase in NASA's budget, virtually one of the only non-defense sectors of the government to see an increase.
Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society is keeping a running tally of events on the Society's official weblog. In general, the weblog is a great source of space science news. According to her latest post, Venus Express has already reported back to ground control and is in healthy condition.
There's also the obligatory Wikipedia article on Venus Express, which has a nice description of what the craft will be doing.
Without order in society you no longer really have civilization. Government is absolutely required to coordinate a group larger than a family. Even tribes have a cheiftain.
That's the typical view. If I understand anarcho-capitalism correctly, though, it claims that order can also arise as an emergent property of market forces.
I often wonder whether anarchists (and capitalists) realize that both systems mean survival of the fittest rules supreme. Ie, the guys who used to beat you up in high school? They probably should have killed you before your brains kicked in and made you a threat to their brawn.
h e_non-aggression_axiom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism#T
On a totally unrelated note, are you by chance the same Buran that posts the the spacexploration community on lj? If so, aloha!
Whoever patents the five or six storylines that are the basis for virtually all books will become richer then Bill Gates.
This reminds me of something somebody sent me a link to the other day. From here:
We identify the seven original stories.
1. ACHILLES: the flawless person...well...almost flawless! A good example is SUPERMAN, but the Achilles source story can be seen in any story about a person with a fatal flaw, be it literal or psychological.
2. CINDERELLA: the dream comes true. Think PRETTY WOMAN, STRICTLY BALLROOM, even ROCKY.
3. CIRCE: enchantress who casts bewitching spells. Seemingly an innocent, she turned Odysseus' men into swine. Think BASIC INSTINCT, BODY HEAT or DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Of course, we reserve the right to reverse the roles!
4. FAUST: You can sell your soul for success but the Devil will one day have his due. WALL STREET and THE FIRM or, more literally, THE DEVIL'S ADVOVATE and BEDAZZLED.
5. ORPHEUS: who descended into the underworld in search of his dead wife Eurydice. Granted leave to take her back to the land of the living, he broke the rules by gazing back at her, and she was snatched back to Hades. They were later re-united in death. This source story influences all tales concerning a metaphorical descent into hell or the depths of one's own psyche, eg SEVEN or THE SIXTH SENSE and stories about loss or grief.
6. ROMEO and JULIET: the so-called 'foe' love story, eg TITANIC.
7. TRISTAN and ISOLDE: man loves woman...unfortunately one or both are already spoken for. Examples of this story are as diverse as BRIEF ENCOUNTER and FATAL ATTRACTION.
I expect the Moon does pretty well when you're on the dark side, but when you're on the sunny side I don't think it offers any radiation shielding. No magnetic field, no ionosphere.
Please correct me if I'm wrong...
Lunar regolith could potentially be quite useful for radiation shielding.
He wants to do something that is fundamentally complex, which is edit photos. Okay, he wants to remove red eye? He's going to have to tell the program where to remove the red eye from. ... Of course it's complex. What does he expect? A miracle? Artificial intelligence?
m l
...
Not to nitpick, but HP actually has a system which does precisely that:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2004/apr-jun/redbot.ht
HP researchers have developed two approaches to detecting and correcting red-eye. The first exploits an earlier algorithm that accurately detects faces in photographs or real-time video. The second is based on a detector trained specifically to find red eyes.
A Labs-based implementation of these algorithms led to HP's In-Camera Red-Eye Removal, which instantly removes red-eye from photos while they're still in the camera, without using a PC and graphics software -- an industry first.
Introduced in May in HP's new Photosmart R707 digital camera, the red-eye removal feature is one of several imaging technologies that originated in HP Labs and are now appearing in a line of new HP cameras.
Beginning in mid-2003, the scientists tested RedBot on about 1,700 photographs submitted by HP employees through a company intranet. The algorithms found and fixed red-eye about 90 percent of the time. "That's a very good success rate," Ulichney says, but researchers want to push the percentages even higher by running their algorithms on a much larger sample.
They have a site where you can upload photos to run the red-eye detector on, but it doesn't seem to load well right now.
I can't wait for the private sector comes up with a reusable space craft that's more fuel and cost efficient than anything NASA can come up with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
And how much nuclear waste would be created as a result?
Not only that, but I'm also curious as to how much waste (both radioactive and chemical) would be released into the air by the equivalent amount of fossil fuels?
The article didn't seem to have a link to the actual report, and judging by the comments I've seen so far, nobody here's read it yet. The RAS's report can be found here:
t &task=view&id=847&Itemid=1
http://www.ras.org.uk/index.php?option=com_conten
Here's a portion of the summary....
The main conclusions of the RAS report are as follows:
* The essential scientific case for Human Space Exploration is based on investigations on the Moon and Mars. There are three key scientific challenges where direct human involvement will be necessary for a timely and successful outcome:
- Mapping the history of the solar system (including the young Earth) and the evolution of our Sun by studying the unique signatures left on and beneath the lunar surface;
- The search for life on Mars;
- Detailed, planet-wide exploration of Mars.
* Scientific missions to the Moon and Mars will address questions of profound interest to the human race. These include: the origins and history of the solar system; whether life is unique to Earth; and how life on Earth began. If our close neighbour, Mars, is found to be devoid of life, important lessons may be learned regarding the future of our own planet.
* While the exploration of the Moon and Mars can and is being addressed by unmanned missions, the capabilities of robotic spacecraft will fall well short of those of human explorers for the foreseeable future.
* Assuming a human presence, the Moon offers an excellent site for astronomy, with the far-side and polar regions of the Moon being shielded from the 'pollution' from Earth.
* Medical science will benefit from studying the human physiological response to low and zero gravity, to the effects of radiation and in the psychological challenge posed by a long-duration mission to Mars.
* There appear to be no fundamental technological barriers to sending humans to the Moon or Mars.
* A major international human space exploration programme involving a return to the Moon and the longer term aim of sending humans to Mars is likely to involve the US, Europe, Russia and Japan. There are also growing ambitions in China and India. Under present government policy the UK would not be involved and would look increasingly isolated.
* The cost of the UK playing a full role in an international human space exploration programme to explore the Moon and Mars could be of the order £150M per year, sustained over 20-25 years. It is not realistic for the bulk of this to be taken from the existing Government-funded science budget. Rather, a decision to be involved should be taken on the basis of broader strategic reasoning that would include commercial, educational, social, and political arguments as well as the scientific returns that would follow.
* There is compelling evidence that the outreach potential for human space exploration can be a strong positive influence on the interests and educational choices of children.
* Involvement in technologically advanced exploration of the solar system will provide a high profile challenge for UK industry, with consequent benefits in recruitment of new engineers and scientists. Evidence from NASA and ESA surveys have shown a significant economic multiplier from investment in space projects, with an additional overall gain in competitiveness.
It's not an act -- the guy is actually loony.
The Wikipedia article on him also includes this curious tidbit:
Following the Flores case Thompson became prominently involved in First Amendment issues, particularly concerning the possible effects of sexually violent material. The Florida Supreme Court ordered that he undergo psychiatric testing during this campaign, which he successfully passed. He later quipped that this made him one of the few sane lawyers working in the state. The specific reasons that prompted the court to require Thompson to be tested, and on what grounds they compelled him, are unknown.
This question seems to be coming up quite often in the threads here. From their FAQ:
Space Services' spacecraft is carefully designed so as not to create orbital debris. Our spacecraft stays permanently attached to a rocket stage that orbits until it harmlessly re-enters and is completely consumed by Earth's atmosphere - blazing like a shooting star in final tribute to the passengers aboard.
For missions which are launched aboard a commercially purchased launcher, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration issues a license which verifies that the Space Services payload does not contribute to orbital debris. For missions not subject to FAA approval, Space Services voluntarily follows the same guidelines which prevent orbital pollution from its missions.
I spend some time thinking about doing something special with my ashes if I chose cremation. A lot of people seem to like their ashes spread in ocean or in the sky. I thought about my ashes going to space, like Scotty's, but it may not be an option for a chump like me. Unless there is a service that performs this or I get connections, my family won't be able to do this practically.
I don't know if you poked around the Space Services site much, but their prices are available online.
Here's the breakdown:
$995 - 1 gram of cremated remains into Earth orbit
$5,300 - 7 grams into Earth orbit
$12,500 - 1 gram into lunar orbit or lunar surface
$12,500 - 1 gram into deep space
The first option certainly seems affordable, especially when you consider that funerals often cost several thousand dollars.
(Below is a copy of a comment I made the last time this story was posted. If slashdot editors can dupe, I should be able to as well :)
Last year Reason had an interview with Neal Stephenson (author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, and other fine novels), where he was asked about the state of science in America. What he said resonated with me quite a bit:
The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.
For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
Because humans in space is the most important way (indeed, the only way) to conduct space settlement and eventual colonization.
What happens when rich businessmen are injured while climbing Mt. Everest or riding an airplane?
In Space Daily a few days back, there was an article titled "Japanese Whiz Aims For Space - In Cartoon Uniform". Here's a snippet:
... If he gets Russian approval, Enomoto said he wanted to dress up on the trip as "Char Aznable", a character in the popular "Gundam" hero robot series of animation whose name is inspired by French singer Charles Aznavour. ... Enomoto describes himself as a "Gundam otaku (geek)".
A Japanese Internet whiz is tipped to become the world's fourth space tourist - and he wants to orbit the earth dressed as an ace pilot from a hit Japanese animation series.
Other people might consider that a sacrilege or making space less "dignified," but I think it's actually pretty cool. In any case, it's also humbling to know there are people out there far geekier than me...
Last year Reason had an interview with Neal Stephenson (author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, and other fine novels), where he was asked about the state of science in America. What he said resonated with me quite a bit:
The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world's richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.
For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It's no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you're living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
that China is only interested in Space as a prestige project.
I suspect it's a little more than that. Here's a little blurb from the wikipedia article on the Chinese Space Program:
China's space program has several goals. The first is to increase China's national prestige. The second is to develop China as a low cost satellite launcher. Finally, there is the ambitious goal of mining space for resources, namely the moon.
Why doesn't NASA cooperate with other countries in exploration, technology etc?
Because the last time someone thought that, we ended up with the International Space Station. No thanks.
Seriously, having to deal with the red tape and bureaucracy of one nation's government, and making sure all the state constituencies get the proper allotment of pork-barrel spending, is enough. Problems tend to increase exponentially with the number of governments involved.
I believe you're talking about Mark Tilden and B.E.A.M. robotics. IIRC, he now works (worked?) at Los Alamos with his bottom-up approach.
Nowadays, Mark Tilden actually develops robots for WowWee Toys. He's responsible for that RoboSapien thing you see all the time in toy stores, and he's curently working on a number of robots to succeed it.
I'd imagine a vehicle like this would probably stop cold if surrounded (360 degrees of obstacles) by other vehicles, at which point the abductees could take what's inside, and leave.
Thing is, these autonomous vehicles will probably be transmitting video and position data back to base in realtime. If something like that happened, they could probably just send in a fast-response team or track the abductors' vehicles via satellite. A short while later, you have N fewer potential abductors.
According to the site for Sensors Unlimited (Olsen's company), Dr. Gregory Olsen will be doing a number of live webcasts from the International Space Station, from October 3-7.
Since the Russians are the only country currently capable of bringing crew and cargo to and from the space station, I think they have the right to put whoever they damn well please in their crew.