I see lots of parents driving their children around to all these activities with little thought to important childhood experiences such as play and fun.
I think part of the issue is that "play and fun" usually just means sitting in front of the teevee, playing GTA, or shopping at the mall.
I've mentioned this company before, but I'm really hoping that t/Space will get a contract for the Vision for Space Exploration. t/Space is an exciting company which includes people like Burt Rutan (of Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne), Elon Musk (of SpaceX), Red Whittaker (of the Red Team, which constructed an autonomous vehicle which competed in DARPA's Grand Challenge), and several of the new companies in the budding space industry.
According to their page: Our core mission requirement is to enable prompt, affordable, safe and sustainable lunar exploration and development by the largest possible number of Americans, both in person and via telepresence.
Under our approach, government incentives focus exclusively on top-level goals, with technology and operational choices left to the private sector. The government incentives will be matched to specific top-level needs, but the "invisible hand" of market forces will shape choices as they flow down multiple supplier chains. Incentives will be structured so that several companies in each major area have an opportunity to win this support. With this competitive industrial base, two major processes become possible:
* Market forces will continually launch new products that replace established goods and services (the "creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter [Austrian economist 1883-1950] identified as the key element of capitalism). Poorly performing systems will be killed off quickly via competition rather than via burdensome NASA reviews or Congressional intervention. * Capability gap analyses will be performed by dozens and ultimately hundreds of companies on a continuous basis. As happens now in all competitive industries, the successful companies will be those who listen closely to their customers and accurately predict their future needs - in other words, capability gap analysis by multiple independent profit-seekers.
Commercial firms will create and own infrastructure that offers services that overlap in many cases. The overlaps found in a competitive private space economy will provide the resiliency now lacking in single-string solutions such as the Space Shuttle and Space Station, for which there are no ready alternatives. While functional overlaps are viewed as inefficiencies in centrally-planned systems, in a market-based system they drive costs lower (by reducing monopoly power and spurring innovation) and accelerate schedules (by eliminating single-point bottlenecks among suppliers and spurring competition).
If I understand correctly, tSpace's plan is to design an overall space architecture, and have companies compete for different components, whether they be launch vehicles, space station life support modules, or lunar landers. Many of these components will also be available commercially, keeping the price down and the reliability high.
I highly recommend reading through their presentation. The things they show in their are incredible. Here's a few of their points:
Safety results from design choices, not oversight * Attempting to produce safety by inspection, quality control, documentation, meetings, etc., is ineffective and costly * The right choices include a robust and resilient concept, vehicles with ample margins and reserves, and high flight rates using smaller vehicles Flight history determines if a vehicle is "human rated" * Requires hundreds of flights for statistical validity * "Determination-by-analysis" is just an estimate Cost is an object * Expensive systems have too few units built to give resiliency to the architecture, and/or high operating costs lead to unsafe low flight rates.
Cunningham [an astronaut on Apollo 7] departed from most current critics of NASA in criticizing the agency for becoming too risk-averse -- like our society, he opined. NASA is more afraid of failures than it's interested in attaining success in its missions. Abandonment of Hubble servicing was given as an example, and he criticized NASA's rationale for taking this action because of "higher risks" in placing a crew in the Hubble orbit by noting that NASA has put crews in that or similar orbits on no fewer than 90 prior occasions.
When astronauts place themselves in harm's way to accomplish such a mission, they do so with foreknowledge and willingly accept the risk, he said. Cunningham termed abandonment of the Hubble particularly galling because of its popularity with the public. He observed that since we reached the Moon, only two things that NASA has done have stirred public imagination: the Hubble and the Mars rovers.
Do you actually know anything about the Buran? It successfully launched and landed autonomously. Several aspects of the design were superior to the US Space Shuttle, and I'm fairly certain it had a lower cost-per-flight.
The primary reason we don't have Buran's zipping around today is because the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing down many of its pet projects. That, and the head of the Buran project was part of an attempted coup of Boris Yeltsin.
But there's certainly visionairies with money out there, and I suspect they'll be doing great things in the near future. For example, before he was "distracted" by starting up SpaceX, PayPal founder Elon Musk was engaged in plans to launch an experimental greenhouse to place on the surface of Mars. I suspect he'll get back to that later on, once companies like SpaceX succeed in dramatically lowering launch costs.
It's interesting that you didn't address the Air Force's crossrange requirement, which indeed was wasted. It's never been used, but still takes a significant toll in terms of weight, cost, complexity, and safety.
Coincidentally, the outside of the CRV was constructed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, the same company which constructed SpaceShipOne.
It'd be interesting to see if simply putting on better thermal protection (perhaps like that used on the Soviet Buran) would be enough to allow a SS1-like craft to withstand orbital reentry.
We have the technology to put a mission on Mars within ten years, for a fraction of NASA's current budget. Why don't we? No vision. The politicians don't hear the people screaming that this is the Right Thing to Do, because by and large, the people aren't screaming that.
In that case, why don't a couple of billionaires get together, pool their money, and get themselves a prominent spot in the history books?
An undoubtedly, those scenarios will be tested in follow-up studies. MRI time is expensive, though, and to maximize the statistical power of their results they limited the number of scenarios in this particular study. It's still interesting enough to merit a publication.
I wonder how accurate a "lie detector" made using this would compare to, say, a more standard polygraph test.
Also, I wonder what differences would be observed if you tested somebody who is more used to lying in a convincing manner, such as a a politician or undercover cop.
An armed populace allows for the overthrowing an oppressive government, and helps act as a safeguard against such a tyranny from forming in the first place. Not that the US has ever had to overthrow a government before, or anything...
And don't think that just because businesses are starting to get into the space business that things are going to change for the better. The problem isn't going to go away just because you've changed who is going into space. It doesn't work like that. You are still going to have people dying up there if you send them up there. You just will have more of them dying at one time. Just like in an airplane crash.
So every time there's a fatal car accident, we have national days of mourning and convene investigation boards involving hundreds of people?
Re:Swiss Internet voting built on two-factor authe
on
Buggy Voting Machines
·
· Score: 1
How does public-key encryption prevent me from intimidating someone into voting for who I want them to while they're sitting at their computer?
I agree, starting small is the better way to do things. Unfortunatel, I get the feeling that using a small nuclear plant would run into anti-proliferation problems -- maybe something like powering off ocean temperature differences or geothermal vents would work better.
I imagine that people would use whatever method gives them the best cost/benefit balance, given the technologies of the day. I imagine people would start off building small domes (which could probably done with current technologies), then scaling up to larger things as technology progresses.
And thanks for sharing the railroad analogy -- that's an interesting way to think of things.
This page calculates the 1.18 billion gallons figure from average gas consumption and the number of miles travelled. I think it'd mean that the average person uses 4 gallons of gasoline per year, which does indeed seem absurdly low.
The question is - which makes more sense economically? Terraforming the entire planet, refusing to colonize it altogether, or building biodomes all over its surface? Right now, the third option is pretty much out of the question, so we have a long-term decision to make about whether Mars is more valuable as the red planet, or as a green one.
Remember, time is literally money. If one spends money on something, one doesn't just need to pay for the direct costs, but one also has to take into account the number of years which elapses for the investment to pay off, based on whatever the interest rates are.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the third option you mention, which wikipedia refers to as paraterraforming:
Also known as the "worldhouse" concept, paraterraforming involves the construction of a habitable enclosure on a planet which eventually grows to encompass most of the planet's usable area. The enclosure would consist of a transparent roof held one or more kilometers above the surface, pressurized with a breathable atmosphere, and anchored with tension towers and cables at regular intervals. A worldhouse can be constructed with technology known since the 1960s.
Paraterraforming has several advantages over the traditional approach to terraforming. For example, it provides an immediate payback to investors; the worldhouse starts out small in area, but those areas provide habitable space from the start. The paraterraforming approach also allows for a modular approach that can be tailored to the needs of the planet's population, growing only as fast and only in those areas where it is required. Finally, paraterraforming greatly reduces the amount of atmosphere that one would need to add to planets like Mars in order to provide Earthlike atmospheric pressures. By using a solid envelope in this manner, even bodies which would otherwise be unable to retain an atmosphere at all (such as asteroids) could be given a habitable environment. The environment under an artificial worldhouse roof would also likely be more amenable to artificial manipulation.
Really, being able to "build-and-pay-as-you-go" seems much better -- one could even see private industry doing this on its own. With traditional terraforming, I couldn't imagine private industry doing it. Heck, even with governments, what're the chances that the government will still be around a few hundred years down the road, when the project is actually completed?
FYI, there's been some interesting activity over on NASAWatch about the APS report. Basically, Keith Cowing (who runs NASAWatch) criticized the APS's report and said they had a long history of opposing human spaceflight, and the APS threatened to sue for slander.
The most radical experiment, still not conducted, would be to inject human stem cells into an animal embryo and then transfer that chimeric embryo into an animal's womb. Scientists suspect the proliferating human cells would spread throughout the animal embryo as it matured into a fetus and integrate themselves into every organ.
Such "humanized" animals could have countless uses. They would almost certainly provide better ways to test a new drug's efficacy and toxicity, for example, than the ordinary mice typically used today.
But few scientists are eager to do that experiment. The risk, they say, is that some human cells will find their way to the developing testes or ovaries, where they might grow into human sperm and eggs. If two such chimeras - say, mice - were to mate, a human embryo might form, trapped in a mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
I see lots of parents driving their children around to all these activities with little thought to important childhood experiences such as play and fun.
I think part of the issue is that "play and fun" usually just means sitting in front of the teevee, playing GTA, or shopping at the mall.
Does anybody know how the global emissions from volcanos compare to human emissions?
I'm not be trying to be a troll or anything -- I actually don't know and am curious.
Does anybody know overall how global volcanic emissions compare to human output?
How does the teen suicide rate compare to other nations?
I've mentioned this company before, but I'm really hoping that t/Space will get a contract for the Vision for Space Exploration. t/Space is an exciting company which includes people like Burt Rutan (of Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne), Elon Musk (of SpaceX), Red Whittaker (of the Red Team, which constructed an autonomous vehicle which competed in DARPA's Grand Challenge), and several of the new companies in the budding space industry.
According to their page: Our core mission requirement is to enable prompt, affordable, safe and sustainable lunar exploration and development by the largest possible number of Americans, both in person and via telepresence.
Under our approach, government incentives focus exclusively on top-level goals, with technology and operational choices left to the private sector. The government incentives will be matched to specific top-level needs, but the "invisible hand" of market forces will shape choices as they flow down multiple supplier chains. Incentives will be structured so that several companies in each major area have an opportunity to win this support. With this competitive industrial base, two major processes become possible:
* Market forces will continually launch new products that replace established goods and services (the "creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter [Austrian economist 1883-1950] identified as the key element of capitalism). Poorly performing systems will be killed off quickly via competition rather than via burdensome NASA reviews or Congressional intervention.
* Capability gap analyses will be performed by dozens and ultimately hundreds of companies on a continuous basis. As happens now in all competitive industries, the successful companies will be those who listen closely to their customers and accurately predict their future needs - in other words, capability gap analysis by multiple independent profit-seekers.
Commercial firms will create and own infrastructure that offers services that overlap in many cases. The overlaps found in a competitive private space economy will provide the resiliency now lacking in single-string solutions such as the Space Shuttle and Space Station, for which there are no ready alternatives. While functional overlaps are viewed as inefficiencies in centrally-planned systems, in a market-based system they drive costs lower (by reducing monopoly power and spurring innovation) and accelerate schedules (by eliminating single-point bottlenecks among suppliers and spurring competition).
If I understand correctly, tSpace's plan is to design an overall space architecture, and have companies compete for different components, whether they be launch vehicles, space station life support modules, or lunar landers. Many of these components will also be available commercially, keeping the price down and the reliability high.
I highly recommend reading through their presentation. The things they show in their are incredible. Here's a few of their points:
Safety results from design choices, not oversight
* Attempting to produce safety by inspection, quality control, documentation, meetings, etc., is ineffective and costly
* The right choices include a robust and resilient concept, vehicles with ample margins and reserves, and high flight rates using smaller vehicles
Flight history determines if a vehicle is "human rated"
* Requires hundreds of flights for statistical validity
* "Determination-by-analysis" is just an estimate
Cost is an object
* Expensive systems have too few units built to give resiliency to the architecture, and/or high operating costs lead to unsafe low flight rates.
Are you saying we should borrow money to do all of those wonderous things leaving future generations to pay for what we did?
Yes, we should if the expected benefit is greater than the amount borrowed plus interest.
I would love to hear from an American astronaut what they think about increased risk.
From here:
Cunningham [an astronaut on Apollo 7] departed from most current critics of NASA in criticizing the agency for becoming too risk-averse -- like our society, he opined. NASA is more afraid of failures than it's interested in attaining success in its missions. Abandonment of Hubble servicing was given as an example, and he criticized NASA's rationale for taking this action because of "higher risks" in placing a crew in the Hubble orbit by noting that NASA has put crews in that or similar orbits on no fewer than 90 prior occasions.
When astronauts place themselves in harm's way to accomplish such a mission, they do so with foreknowledge and willingly accept the risk, he said. Cunningham termed abandonment of the Hubble particularly galling because of its popularity with the public. He observed that since we reached the Moon, only two things that NASA has done have stirred public imagination: the Hubble and the Mars rovers.
Do you actually know anything about the Buran? It successfully launched and landed autonomously. Several aspects of the design were superior to the US Space Shuttle, and I'm fairly certain it had a lower cost-per-flight.
The primary reason we don't have Buran's zipping around today is because the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing down many of its pet projects. That, and the head of the Buran project was part of an attempted coup of Boris Yeltsin.
But there's certainly visionairies with money out there, and I suspect they'll be doing great things in the near future. For example, before he was "distracted" by starting up SpaceX, PayPal founder Elon Musk was engaged in plans to launch an experimental greenhouse to place on the surface of Mars. I suspect he'll get back to that later on, once companies like SpaceX succeed in dramatically lowering launch costs.
> The shuttle's capabilities are wasted
Completely and utterly wrong.
It's interesting that you didn't address the Air Force's crossrange requirement, which indeed was wasted. It's never been used, but still takes a significant toll in terms of weight, cost, complexity, and safety.
Coincidentally, the outside of the CRV was constructed by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites, the same company which constructed SpaceShipOne.
It'd be interesting to see if simply putting on better thermal protection (perhaps like that used on the Soviet Buran) would be enough to allow a SS1-like craft to withstand orbital reentry.
We have the technology to put a mission on Mars within ten years, for a fraction of NASA's current budget. Why don't we? No vision. The politicians don't hear the people screaming that this is the Right Thing to Do, because by and large, the people aren't screaming that.
In that case, why don't a couple of billionaires get together, pool their money, and get themselves a prominent spot in the history books?
I think there's been around 7 cabinet-level resignations, which isn't too far above the average.
Of course, the CIA is a different story...
An undoubtedly, those scenarios will be tested in follow-up studies. MRI time is expensive, though, and to maximize the statistical power of their results they limited the number of scenarios in this particular study. It's still interesting enough to merit a publication.
I wonder how accurate a "lie detector" made using this would compare to, say, a more standard polygraph test.
Also, I wonder what differences would be observed if you tested somebody who is more used to lying in a convincing manner, such as a a politician or undercover cop.
An armed populace allows for the overthrowing an oppressive government, and helps act as a safeguard against such a tyranny from forming in the first place. Not that the US has ever had to overthrow a government before, or anything...
And don't think that just because businesses are starting to get into the space business that things are going to change for the better. The problem isn't going to go away just because you've changed who is going into space. It doesn't work like that. You are still going to have people dying up there if you send them up there. You just will have more of them dying at one time. Just like in an airplane crash.
So every time there's a fatal car accident, we have national days of mourning and convene investigation boards involving hundreds of people?
How does public-key encryption prevent me from intimidating someone into voting for who I want them to while they're sitting at their computer?
I agree, starting small is the better way to do things. Unfortunatel, I get the feeling that using a small nuclear plant would run into anti-proliferation problems -- maybe something like powering off ocean temperature differences or geothermal vents would work better.
FYI, here's another project I ran across: http://seastead.org/
I imagine that people would use whatever method gives them the best cost/benefit balance, given the technologies of the day. I imagine people would start off building small domes (which could probably done with current technologies), then scaling up to larger things as technology progresses.
And thanks for sharing the railroad analogy -- that's an interesting way to think of things.
Freedom Ship
Official site
This page calculates the 1.18 billion gallons figure from average gas consumption and the number of miles travelled. I think it'd mean that the average person uses 4 gallons of gasoline per year, which does indeed seem absurdly low.
The question is - which makes more sense economically? Terraforming the entire planet, refusing to colonize it altogether, or building biodomes all over its surface? Right now, the third option is pretty much out of the question, so we have a long-term decision to make about whether Mars is more valuable as the red planet, or as a green one.
Remember, time is literally money. If one spends money on something, one doesn't just need to pay for the direct costs, but one also has to take into account the number of years which elapses for the investment to pay off, based on whatever the interest rates are.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the third option you mention, which wikipedia refers to as paraterraforming:
Also known as the "worldhouse" concept, paraterraforming involves the construction of a habitable enclosure on a planet which eventually grows to encompass most of the planet's usable area. The enclosure would consist of a transparent roof held one or more kilometers above the surface, pressurized with a breathable atmosphere, and anchored with tension towers and cables at regular intervals. A worldhouse can be constructed with technology known since the 1960s.
Paraterraforming has several advantages over the traditional approach to terraforming. For example, it provides an immediate payback to investors; the worldhouse starts out small in area, but those areas provide habitable space from the start. The paraterraforming approach also allows for a modular approach that can be tailored to the needs of the planet's population, growing only as fast and only in those areas where it is required. Finally, paraterraforming greatly reduces the amount of atmosphere that one would need to add to planets like Mars in order to provide Earthlike atmospheric pressures. By using a solid envelope in this manner, even bodies which would otherwise be unable to retain an atmosphere at all (such as asteroids) could be given a habitable environment. The environment under an artificial worldhouse roof would also likely be more amenable to artificial manipulation.
Really, being able to "build-and-pay-as-you-go" seems much better -- one could even see private industry doing this on its own. With traditional terraforming, I couldn't imagine private industry doing it. Heck, even with governments, what're the chances that the government will still be around a few hundred years down the road, when the project is actually completed?
FYI, there's been some interesting activity over on NASAWatch about the APS report. Basically, Keith Cowing (who runs NASAWatch) criticized the APS's report and said they had a long history of opposing human spaceflight, and the APS threatened to sue for slander.
From the article:
The most radical experiment, still not conducted, would be to inject human stem cells into an animal embryo and then transfer that chimeric embryo into an animal's womb. Scientists suspect the proliferating human cells would spread throughout the animal embryo as it matured into a fetus and integrate themselves into every organ.
Such "humanized" animals could have countless uses. They would almost certainly provide better ways to test a new drug's efficacy and toxicity, for example, than the ordinary mice typically used today.
But few scientists are eager to do that experiment. The risk, they say, is that some human cells will find their way to the developing testes or ovaries, where they might grow into human sperm and eggs. If two such chimeras - say, mice - were to mate, a human embryo might form, trapped in a mouse.