While I'm a GNU/Linux user myself, I can't understand all those people who insist on pitting Linux vs. BSD, Debian vs. Redhat, or Gnome vs. KDE. If opensource Solaris is as free as Java is now, I doubt it will make much headway. But if Sun licenses Solaris the way it licensed OpenOffice, then I guess Linux is in danger. But who would care then, but the few Linux überzealots? Redhat is already packaging OpenOffice into their OS offerings. I fancy in the future, they might come up with a co-branded Redhat Solaris. Maybe we could even hear of Linus contributing patches to make sure free Solaris interoperates well with legacy Linux.
Memorials make sense only if they remind us of things that exist today. Vietnam war memorials make sense because wars are still being waged and young faceless men are still being killed. The Pyramids make sense because massive construction projects (whether for practical or vain purposes) are still being undertaken today.
Since nobody's visiting the Moon nowadays (except in virtual form), the Apollo launch tower doesn't have anything to recommend its preservation as a memorial to anything but space exploration. As a piece of historical space hardware it's no different from the Gemini space capsule or the International Space Station (which is shaping up to be the most expensive space memorial ever). It enabled American astronauts to enjoy the thrills of freefall.
For my sci-fi fare, I trust more the judgement of real readers than of professional reviewers or editors. I go to a used books store and look for the most dogeared sci-fi novel. A sci-fi novel might be stylish, but is it readable beyond the brooding first chapter? (It's okay for a "short" story to be unreadable.) If I want a "literary" novel, I'll just reread James Joyce (or any of the Booker Prize winners). I want my sci-fi novels to be readable rather than simply reviewable.
It would even be cooler if the sample would be returned to the ISS rather than Earth proper. You hit two birds with one stone. You put to use the money pit that's the Internationaly Space Station, and you limit the possibility of a microspic Mars attack. If there's an alien viral outbreak, the fatalities would be limited to the two to seven crew members of the ISS. This assumes that the crew will be kept up there for months after the receipt of the alien cargo
The cool factor is undoubtedly high, kind of like catching a speeding racing car to find out what's under the hood. The risks are high, and the payoff is worth its weight in journal articles. Maybe it's time for missions that try to justify thier cost in kind.
The so-called great voyages of discovery of the past were never undertaken for the sake of idle science all. Always there was that search for the elusive El Dorado or that secret shortcut to the spice capital of the world. While most voyages failed to recoup the wood and slave labor invested on them, enough returned with if not the silver and gold then things that would prove more valuable, like coffee, cannabis or the claims to a "New" World.
The pure science mission ("Is there life on Mars?") is a modern invention. While the altruism is admirable, the only way to justify to taxpayers the continued exploration of space is to turn these missions into hunts for precious metals and minerals. Follow not just the water (a valuable space resource in its own right) but also the platinum.
One thing's for sure. The won't be any software flame wars over which crappy OS is running the Mars show. Hint: it's from neither Washington (state) nor Finland.
While Robert Zubrin might not approve of the idea, the cost
benefit of marooning the research crew can be approximated by
having the crew just orbit Mars or touch down on either Phobos or
Deimos. This way you do away with the excess baggage of having
human quality landing gear and a liftoff vehicle sufficient for
Mars gravity.
The technical advantage of having humans orbit
Mars over purely Earth-based mission control is that, the speed
of light being as it is, you get the capability of operating your
Mars rovers near realtime. With a VR kit (supplied by say game
developers eager for the "Made for Mars" seal of approval), you
could get the feeling of humans being actually on the surface of
Mars.
Of course, you also miss the benefits of having the crew
land on Mars, like gravity and the possibility of living off the
land. I suspect the glorified asteroids, Phobos and Deimos,
might have enough frozen gas resources to provide the modest
thrust needed for artifical gravity. A side mission to one of
the satellites could be made just for the purpose of mining ice.
The main crewed orbiter itself stays a safe distance away.
But more like the one in Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth?
Re:... baxter ...
on
Coalescent
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Ya, I found the astrosquid to be over the top too. What I don't like most in sci-fi is anachronistic technologies. I don't mind worm holes and warp drives, even if we don't have the physics yet to support their existence. But I find it ludicrous at best that a novel where a species can hop galaxies will also show them as suffering from ailments like old age, disease and even death. In my book the cure for death will be found before somebody figures out how to build the first warp drive. Technologically it's far far easier to cheat death (at least until the universe itself runs down) than to beat the speed of light.
By the time we figure out how to "enhance" a creature's IQ, we'd have found out how to create an autonomous enough artificial intelligence. Perhaps Baxter was just trying to counterpoint Clarke's HAL. I still find machines (or robots) to be the best substitute for a crewed mission to (put your favorite space exploration destination here).
Don't lump together flying cars and trips to Mars. Vacations on Mars may yet become a reality. Maybe it's an idea a couple of hundred of years ahead of its time, but there's nothing in human nature or economics that prohibits the long distance, long duration voyage. Think of a trip to Mars as the interplanetary equivalent of a luxury cruise around the world. All we need is a cheap and reliable means of Earth to Earth orbit transport and within a decade or two we'll have Survivor Mars.
"Flying cars" on the other hand is a brain-damaged idea from the start. Except as off-road vehicles, the private motorized transporter was a brain-damaged idea from the start. Imagine the chaos of your usual rush-hour traffic jam. And multiply that by N levels of virtual roadways.
Morever, on a high-G world, flying is a terribly energy inefficient means of transport. Ever wonder why nature didn't invent flying elephants?
If you're caught in a jam, you can at least turn off the engine of your car to save fuel. If you turn off the motor of your flying car, you fall. Well, maybe a private airship wouldn't be a bad idea.
The next advancement in personal transport won't be a flying car or a flying Segway but teleportation. Fax me up, Scotty.
Achieving orbit isn't the most difficult part. It's getting back in one piece. If all you want is to go to orbit and never come back (or at least don't mind burning up on reentry), just strap yourself onto any modest satellite launcher.
Space tourism is already here. It just depends on how you define it. As a paying passenger, Dennis Tito fits the bill as a space tourist. And the X-Prize contest is bound to turn up a winner and a loser or two who could bring you to the edge of space and back. But such space tourism would be in the same category as x-treme sports, an experience to be shared by a select few. So maybe you're right. There probably won't be space tourism of the "book the next flight to Miami" variety. Space travel, I suspect, will be a one-way trip for the average Joe and Jane of the distant future, something of the American immigrant experience. "Hon, I've lost my job. I hear there's an opening on Mars!"
There's not much you can do with the technology being developed for the X-Prize, which focuses on suborbital "space" flight. What you get is basically a glorified theme park ride, not real space "travel". You can get much of the same experience just strapping yourself onto a high-tech simulator or riding one of those Russian zero-g space training planes.
The biggest problem with achieving orbital space flight isn't getting there but getting back (as the Columbia shuttled disaster demonstrated) in one piece. If stuff like heat shielding weren't a concern, Elon Musk's satellite launchers would probably be enough to rocket a suicidally minded space nut into outer space.
I don't know of any private entity seriously attempting a crewed orbital class spacecraft.
It will make far more sense if we begin with the Moon. The Moon's greater distance from the asteroid belt might be a disadvantage. But not in the short and medium term. Any asteroid mining in the near future is likely to involve just an asteroid or two. A carefully selected asteroid would have more metals and minerals than what all the mining companies on Earth process today. The expense of towing our first asteroid into near-Moon orbit would be minimal compared to the expense of shuttling the extracted raw materials or half-processed goods from Mars to Earth orbit where they'll be most useful.
I don't expect any off-Earth facility to be totally independent of the Earth for the next half century after it's first established. So expect our miners to want some R & R. Or do you expect our space miners to make out with the local population?
Sometime I think Bob Zubrin's Mars activism is misplaced. Our only hope for a self-sustaining space future is in the commercialization of space beyond the comsat and space tourist stage. And the moon is the better, if not the best, place to start a base for off-Earth mining, either in itself or as the transit point for mining the minor planets. A grandiose mission to Mars will serve nothing but the egoes of a few intrepid space cowboys.
(For a sci-fi novel on asteroid mining, I recommend Stephen Baxter's Manifold Time. He actually prefers a direct asteroid to Earth orbit approach: mine the asteroid and dump the raw materials, encased in gigantic plastic bags, onto Earth orbit.)
The human body is simply too costly to transport. It requires too much insulation and for the amount of work it does (like listening to the same old mp3s over and over) requires too much fuel. Why not just transport the brain, say by transplanting it into an artificial body that is able to go on a space walk without a space suit. The artificial body becomes the space suit.
I see the perfection of evolution as the encoding of the human brain onto an Nth generation processing and storage system. For sociological and perhaps aesthetic reasons the system could be housed in the familiar human bipedal form but at a much smaller form factor. A two-foot high android with a human's memories and thought processes is exponentially more transportable than placing the same human in deep freeze.
In 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke saw the Chinese as being the third country to send a piloted mission to Jupiter, and becoming the second to reach it (after the Americans because of the psychotic HAL botched their date with the Monolith). The Chinese, in a mission cloaked as an attempt to build a space station, manages to outrace the joint Russian and American mission to Jupiter.
Clarke didn't forsee the end of the Cold War, but he was years ahead of everybody (except perhaps for the Chinese themselves) in predicting China's great leap upward.
The greatest value isn't the propaganda but the focusing of resources. A space program lets a governments wastes a country's resources more efficiently than a similar program to create a million Playstations. Japan's tragedy is that it didn't do it first, when it had the resources for the last two decades.
But cosmonaut (after the word "cosmos") is just as accurate a term
as astronaut for a space explorer! If we look at the defintion of "astro-" in The Collaborative
International Dictionary of English v.0.48,
astroanut is actually further from the truth: "The combining form of
the Greek word 'a`stron, meaning star."
Now have any English-speaking astronauts actually reached Proxima
Centauri? The Russians are more honest in claiming only to be
explorers of the cosmos, which could begin at end of your nose.
Aside from its ideological or propaganda value, does the Chinese
manned space program make sense? Most critics are likely to
point out that the money could be spent more "wisely," ignoring
the simple fact that governments aren't households.
I suspect the Chinese space program has a very utilitarian
objective. The leaders of China don't want China to become
another Japan, a country whose growth rate was once the envy of
the world but is now stumbling from recession to recession.
Floundering in a sea of Playstations and Pokemons, Japan has
turned into a leisure society.
Since the middle of the last century there have been two ways a
country can jumpstart its economy or, in the case of China,
maintain its high growth rate. One is war, or rather, the
preparation for war (and its corollary, the recovery from such a
fiasco). A dramatic example is the post World War I economic
miracle that was Hitler's Germany.
But this is a route that China, addicted unlike the former Soviet
Union to world trade, cannot take. It seems that only the U.S.,
in its inertial role as the sole surviving superpower of the Cold
War era, can undertake a massive military build-up without the
threat of a trade embargo being raised.
So China is left with the only other modern path to continued
progress. And that is in the glorious waste of natural resources
that is a space program. In the end maybe the only way humanity
is going to reach Mars is via some enhanced version of the Long
March rockets of Chairman Mao.
What the X-Prize and the whole low-cost access to space race need is an M$-class war chest. If Bill Gates and Co. started spending their research billions on the development of space technologies, rather than on selling the next pathetic version of Windows, we'll have a permament moon base in five years. Now, imagine if the other infotechnology companies started spending their billions, too.
Unless we see massive leaps in nanotechnology (or perhaps psychokinietic research), information technology isn't going to lead us anywhere but The Matrix, a dystopian, jack-me-in future.
Do we really need more manned explorations? If all we want to know is whether there's life on Mars, all we need to do is to send a next-generation AIBO to do the diggin'. What we need is the colonization and commercialization of space (beyond the satellite business).
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While I'm a GNU/Linux user myself, I can't understand all those people who insist on pitting Linux vs. BSD, Debian vs. Redhat, or Gnome vs. KDE. If opensource Solaris is as free as Java is now, I doubt it will make much headway. But if Sun licenses Solaris the way it licensed OpenOffice, then I guess Linux is in danger. But who would care then, but the few Linux überzealots? Redhat is already packaging OpenOffice into their OS offerings. I fancy in the future, they might come up with a co-branded Redhat Solaris. Maybe we could even hear of Linus contributing patches to make sure free Solaris interoperates well with legacy Linux.
Since nobody's visiting the Moon nowadays (except in virtual form), the Apollo launch tower doesn't have anything to recommend its preservation as a memorial to anything but space exploration. As a piece of historical space hardware it's no different from the Gemini space capsule or the International Space Station (which is shaping up to be the most expensive space memorial ever). It enabled American astronauts to enjoy the thrills of freefall.
For my sci-fi fare, I trust more the judgement of real readers than of professional reviewers or editors. I go to a used books store and look for the most dogeared sci-fi novel. A sci-fi novel might be stylish, but is it readable beyond the brooding first chapter? (It's okay for a "short" story to be unreadable.) If I want a "literary" novel, I'll just reread James Joyce (or any of the Booker Prize winners). I want my sci-fi novels to be readable rather than simply reviewable.
The so-called great voyages of discovery of the past were never undertaken for the sake of idle science all. Always there was that search for the elusive El Dorado or that secret shortcut to the spice capital of the world. While most voyages failed to recoup the wood and slave labor invested on them, enough returned with if not the silver and gold then things that would prove more valuable, like coffee, cannabis or the claims to a "New" World.
The pure science mission ("Is there life on Mars?") is a modern invention. While the altruism is admirable, the only way to justify to taxpayers the continued exploration of space is to turn these missions into hunts for precious metals and minerals. Follow not just the water (a valuable space resource in its own right) but also the platinum.
One thing's for sure. The won't be any software flame wars over which crappy OS is running the Mars show. Hint: it's from neither Washington (state) nor Finland.
The technical advantage of having humans orbit Mars over purely Earth-based mission control is that, the speed of light being as it is, you get the capability of operating your Mars rovers near realtime. With a VR kit (supplied by say game developers eager for the "Made for Mars" seal of approval), you could get the feeling of humans being actually on the surface of Mars.
Of course, you also miss the benefits of having the crew land on Mars, like gravity and the possibility of living off the land. I suspect the glorified asteroids, Phobos and Deimos, might have enough frozen gas resources to provide the modest thrust needed for artifical gravity. A side mission to one of the satellites could be made just for the purpose of mining ice. The main crewed orbiter itself stays a safe distance away.
But more like the one in Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth?
By the time we figure out how to "enhance" a creature's IQ, we'd have found out how to create an autonomous enough artificial intelligence. Perhaps Baxter was just trying to counterpoint Clarke's HAL. I still find machines (or robots) to be the best substitute for a crewed mission to (put your favorite space exploration destination here).
"Flying cars" on the other hand is a brain-damaged idea from the start. Except as off-road vehicles, the private motorized transporter was a brain-damaged idea from the start. Imagine the chaos of your usual rush-hour traffic jam. And multiply that by N levels of virtual roadways.
Morever, on a high-G world, flying is a terribly energy inefficient means of transport. Ever wonder why nature didn't invent flying elephants?
If you're caught in a jam, you can at least turn off the engine of your car to save fuel. If you turn off the motor of your flying car, you fall. Well, maybe a private airship wouldn't be a bad idea.
The next advancement in personal transport won't be a flying car or a flying Segway but teleportation. Fax me up, Scotty.
Achieving orbit isn't the most difficult part. It's getting back in one piece. If all you want is to go to orbit and never come back (or at least don't mind burning up on reentry), just strap yourself onto any modest satellite launcher.
The biggest problem with achieving orbital space flight isn't getting there but getting back (as the Columbia shuttled disaster demonstrated) in one piece. If stuff like heat shielding weren't a concern, Elon Musk's satellite launchers would probably be enough to rocket a suicidally minded space nut into outer space.
I don't know of any private entity seriously attempting a crewed orbital class spacecraft.
I don't expect any off-Earth facility to be totally independent of the Earth for the next half century after it's first established. So expect our miners to want some R & R. Or do you expect our space miners to make out with the local population?
Sometime I think Bob Zubrin's Mars activism is misplaced. Our only hope for a self-sustaining space future is in the commercialization of space beyond the comsat and space tourist stage. And the moon is the better, if not the best, place to start a base for off-Earth mining, either in itself or as the transit point for mining the minor planets. A grandiose mission to Mars will serve nothing but the egoes of a few intrepid space cowboys.
(For a sci-fi novel on asteroid mining, I recommend Stephen Baxter's Manifold Time. He actually prefers a direct asteroid to Earth orbit approach: mine the asteroid and dump the raw materials, encased in gigantic plastic bags, onto Earth orbit.)
I see the perfection of evolution as the encoding of the human brain onto an Nth generation processing and storage system. For sociological and perhaps aesthetic reasons the system could be housed in the familiar human bipedal form but at a much smaller form factor. A two-foot high android with a human's memories and thought processes is exponentially more transportable than placing the same human in deep freeze.
In 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke saw the Chinese as being the third country to send a piloted mission to Jupiter, and becoming the second to reach it (after the Americans because of the psychotic HAL botched their date with the Monolith). The Chinese, in a mission cloaked as an attempt to build a space station, manages to outrace the joint Russian and American mission to Jupiter. Clarke didn't forsee the end of the Cold War, but he was years ahead of everybody (except perhaps for the Chinese themselves) in predicting China's great leap upward.
The greatest value isn't the propaganda but the focusing of resources. A space program lets a governments wastes a country's resources more efficiently than a similar program to create a million Playstations. Japan's tragedy is that it didn't do it first, when it had the resources for the last two decades.
Now have any English-speaking astronauts actually reached Proxima Centauri? The Russians are more honest in claiming only to be explorers of the cosmos, which could begin at end of your nose.
I suspect the Chinese space program has a very utilitarian objective. The leaders of China don't want China to become another Japan, a country whose growth rate was once the envy of the world but is now stumbling from recession to recession. Floundering in a sea of Playstations and Pokemons, Japan has turned into a leisure society.
Since the middle of the last century there have been two ways a country can jumpstart its economy or, in the case of China, maintain its high growth rate. One is war, or rather, the preparation for war (and its corollary, the recovery from such a fiasco). A dramatic example is the post World War I economic miracle that was Hitler's Germany.
But this is a route that China, addicted unlike the former Soviet Union to world trade, cannot take. It seems that only the U.S., in its inertial role as the sole surviving superpower of the Cold War era, can undertake a massive military build-up without the threat of a trade embargo being raised.
So China is left with the only other modern path to continued progress. And that is in the glorious waste of natural resources that is a space program. In the end maybe the only way humanity is going to reach Mars is via some enhanced version of the Long March rockets of Chairman Mao.
What the X-Prize and the whole low-cost access to space race need is an M$-class war chest. If Bill Gates and Co. started spending their research billions on the development of space technologies, rather than on selling the next pathetic version of Windows, we'll have a permament moon base in five years. Now, imagine if the other infotechnology companies started spending their billions, too.
Unless we see massive leaps in nanotechnology (or perhaps psychokinietic research), information technology isn't going to lead us anywhere but The Matrix, a dystopian, jack-me-in future.
Do we really need more manned explorations? If all we want to know is whether there's life on Mars, all we need to do is to send a next-generation AIBO to do the diggin'. What we need is the colonization and commercialization of space (beyond the satellite business).