Regardless of whether the work is done in your own country or offshore, outsourcing has issues in terms of quality control, responsibility for non-delivery or other problems (like this one), and whether it makes as much financial sense as is often claimed.
Because we're the world experts in free-market capitalism. We're the ones who made it work when everyone else failed. Our economy is by far the most liberal of the industrialized countries. In those respects, at least, everyone in the world wants to be like us.
No, actually, Australia (and New Zealand) have more open economies than you do.
If by average you are talking about the artihmetic mean, if the distribution is skewed it's quite possible to have 80% of people having a below-average size. Consider a group of 10 men, 8 of whom measure 13 cm, and 2 who measure 20. Voila, 80% of our group have a smaller-than-average member. By contrast, it would be logically impossible for 80% of men to have a penis smaller than the median.
In practice, many, many natural statistics are normally distributed, and it would be a reasonable guess that penis length is. Therefore, the mean and the median will be the same.
Basically, the problem is that there's not enough water in the Venusian atmosphere to support those microbes.
A more workable approach, very long-term, is likely to be shielding Venus from some solar radiation using massive sunsails. The place would still be very short of water, though.
It's not the level of actual crime that makes little old ladies to frightened to leave their houses in the evening to go to the bingo, it's fear of crime. Sticking up cameras does not reduce the number of little old ladies who are mugged on their way to bingo (because this crime is pretty well non-existent to start with) but it does make the old ladies feel confident to go out, which is a significant improvement in their quality of life.
Look, if you're a local councillor, I suppose to some extent it's your responsibility to deliver what the people want. But if you're putting them up to calm people's irrational fears surely there has to be cheaper and less invasive methods of doing so.
They're not involved in vote collection for civilians. What are are involved in is collecting the votes of members of the armed services. Given that they may be deployed overseas in hard to get at and possibly secret places, the Pentagon has to be involved in collecting votes somehow.
It's true. Casinos are also notorious for having bright, constant artificial lighting, and lots of noise. Keeps the punters awake...
In Victoria (the state of Australia where I live), they recently passed a law that says pokie venues have to be smoke-free. Funnily enough, pokie turnover dropped quite a lot, because the gambling addicts were all heavy smokers as well, and making them go outside and stop for a minute was a great circuit-breaker...
Also in the past fourty years haven't we seen the demise of the single-income family?
To a large extent, yes. Dual-income families spend what they can afford on housing, pushing real estate prices up to the point where single-income families can't buy housing in desirable areas.
Hasn't the price of goods, services, taxes etc all outpaced the increase in income?
No. Some goods (health, education) cost more, but overall the average person can buy a lot more stuff with their income than they used to. Why doesn't it feel like that? Because of continually rising expectations.
Don't Americans have the least time off and the worst hours in the industrialized world?
Yes. However, Americans have the highest salaries in the industrialized world. Would you like to trade off a wage increase for more vacation time and/or shorter hours?
There may be no tariffs on passenger cars, but there is a 25% duty on pickup trucks (not sure about SUV's). Pickups and SUV's have been the source of most of the domestic profits of American car companies through the 1990's.
This is entirely understandable, because from all reports there's not a single American passenger car that would be competitive on the world market.
Assuming your energy calculations are correct, 8.8e14 Joules is about 2.44e8 kiloWatt hours. If we could use terrestrial electricity for this purpose (at 100% efficiency - obviously that's impossible), at 6 cents per kilowatt (ballpark figure for current costs) it works out at about 14 million USD. The energy costs are reasonable (even if we're out by a factor of 10, it's still not outrageous) - it's just a matter of figuring out how to push a spacecraft with it.
That's why I suggested a laser-pushed lightsail to do the job for the purpose of this handwaving exercise - as I've shown, that amount of energy is large but not unprecedented (and presumably will become much more manageable in the future if we get large-scale fusion power). To figure out how to build a laser array that puts out that much power with enough accuracy to keep it focussed on the craft is quite a challenge, to say the least. Finally, the light sail would want to reflect a very high proportion of the energy or it would melt real fast...
This raises an interesting question - how fast could a trip to Mars possibly be?
Assuming we don't get something really weird like a drive that can accelerate every atom on a craft simultaneously, or some kind of space warp, the ultimate limit to spacecraft speed in the solar system is the acceleration that the human body can cope for extended periods, which presumably isn't much above 1 g. Given this, you build a craft that accelerates at 1 g until it's half way to Mars, turns around, and decelerates so that it's at zero velocity (relative to Mars, at least) when it gets there. One conceivable way to do this might be a lightsail powered by a really big laser, but anyway, that's kind of irrelevant, we're seeking boundary values.
The nearest approach from Earth to Mars in the past 50,000 years was about 55 million kilometres, so we'll use that figure as our distance.
So, the trick is to figure out how long, when accelerating from rest at 1 g, it takes to get to the halfway point, and then double that travel time. My calculations give about 75,000 seconds for the halfway point, so about 150,000 seconds total travel time. That works out to about 4 days and eight hours.
As a sanity check, I made sure that the peak speed isn't relativistic (in which case the Newtonian calculations I have used don't work). That turns out not to be an issue, with the peak speed about 0.2% of the speed of light.
So, we'll never have airline flights to Mars. It'll always be an ocean voyage.
A while ago, I heard some Aussie comment that he was glad that Australia got all the criminals and America got all the religious people.
It's a very common sentiment here, if not entirely accurate. The majority of immigrants to Australia in the 19th century were free settlers, just like the US.
Might I suggest that there's plenty of other places where the US budget could be cut to give NASA the extra funding it deserves. For instance, this Slate article suggests some places where the defence budget could be cut. I don't agree with all of it, but what the hell point is there in deploying a missile defence system that isn't going to work? While you're at it, did you realize American taxpayers subsidise their farmers to the tuns of upwards of 20 billion dollars a year? Europe's agricultural subsidies are even higher - around 50 billion USD per year.
NASA's budget really is insignifcant in that kind of context.
I don't think much of Safire, either, and it's clear he doesn't know much about computers, but the story is slightly more plausible than you make it out to be.
The claim is that, as well as the designs for VAXen and the like, the Soviets stole some oil pipeline control software from the Canadians. The West was forewarned with the aid of those cheese-eating surrender monkeys whom Safire and his fellow wingnuts love insulting, the French. Therefore, before the software was stolen, somebody was able to arrange to put a trojan horse in the software that caused the system to malfunction, and, voila, a massive explosion occurred.
Now, it's certainly conceivable for the US to insert a trojan horse in the software. I would find it surprising that such a trojan horse would be enough to cause such a massive explosion on its own, though. Catastrophic failures almost always result out of a complex chain of events happening, and trying to orchestrate that in a system for which you don't have details of how it's going to be configured and is probably going to include a lot of fail-safes sounds awfully difficult to do - and, then again, how did the CIA know they weren't going to kill hundreds in the process of pulling this off?
In any case, the point of the exercise seems to be to make the Soviets of using stolen Western technology. This seems like an awfully cavalier way to go about it, and thus still implausible.
I think you mean, "information on it is that it has to have NEVER been published somewhere else".
No, I meant what I originally said. Wikipedia is a secondary source which summarises information published elsewhere. I didn't say that we copy verbatim stuff from somewhere else (though we do that too, sometimes, when there is content we can legally copy - it then usually needs editing though). This is no different to other encyclopedias.
As far as depth of coverage or choice of topics I never understood this complaint.
It's not a complaint, it's an observation. In other encyclopedias, there is an assumption that topics given extensive coverage are somehow "important", while topics not covered or only sketchily covered are less so. You can't make that assumption with Wikipedia, and it's one thing readers need to understand.
I have contributed quite a lot to Wikipedia already. However, the areas where the Wikipedia is weak at the moment are areas where I don't have a great deal of expertise.
As far as your first point goes, in a lot of scholarly publication you are expected to cite primary sources. Wikipedia, by design, will never be a primary source - one of the criteria for placing information on it is that it has to have been published somewhere else. Therefore, while scholars may use it as a starting-off point for further research, and the verification of tangential points, it's never going to be, and was never intended to be, the kind of thing that an archaeologist cites on archaeology.
As to the underlying question, whether it's recognised as a valid source of accurate information, journalists cite the Wikipedia all the time these days. Its credibility will be improved when the sifter project, working title, "Wikipedia 1.0", gets going. While the code has not actually been implemented yet. Ultimately, the sifter project will involve Wikipedia articles being reviewed and approved, with the special credentials, if any, of the reviewers being recorded.
Wikipedia already gets more traffic than Brittanica's website, as best we can tell (and probably more than/.). So, ultimately, I suspect Encarta and Brittanica will be in trouble. Is this a disaster? Not really. In most fields, our real knowledge infrastructure is the research institutions (universities and industrial research institutions) and the scholarly publications they produce. Encyclopedia articles come out of that. In other fields (say, cooking, for example) there are other institutions and publications that serve similar functions.
I should point out that Wikipedia does have some problematic areas - for instance, articles on the Israeli-Palestine situation tend to provoke endless edit wars. Undoubtedly while browsing you'll find any number of inaccuracies. Another thing that is different to traditional encyclopedias is that the depth of coverage of an area in Wikipedia can't be taken as an indication of its importance to the world.
When one crashed, sure it was a human disaster, but at the same time people understood the guy made the choice of living dangerously as a career.
Everyone who goes on a space mission is making a conscious and informed choice to take a risk, whether they used to wear a military uniform or not. Are you saying that "civilians" are somehow not capable of understanding the risks of space flight and shouldn't be sent?
I suspect that underlying this view is the attitude that women dying in a space craft is somehow more tragic and less acceptable than men. If so, that's horribly patronizing.
The question is, are you going to let the machines sit there on Mars for a year as your crew is trying to get there. Remember that the Martian environment is incredibly dusty, and that nothing from earth has spent more than 90 days up and running on Mars. Now, are you going to be able to monitor the machines well enough to be able to say that they'll still work when the crew gets there? Actually, monitoring isn't even a problem since once you've launched your crew, you can't recall them no matter what happens during the year that it'll take them to get there.
As I understand the plan, propellant production will have ceased by the time the crew ship has launched. The return rocket just has to sit there for six months, not do anything. Yes, it is a concern that it might break down in the interim, but surely it's easier to simply batten down the hatches for six months than active conduct a scientific mission like the unmanned missions are doing.
Personally, I like the idea of sending two return vehicles and propellant plants on the first mission as a safety backup.
As for radiation, there's an estimated cosmic-ray dosag, and then there's the worst case scenario. You could hope for fair space weather, but how likely are you to get storms that will seriously harm the crew? With solar storm activity at record levels in the past year, basing crew protection around some average expected dosage doesn't sound so good. As for spinning the craft, that's just one more potential point of failure.
Manned mission advocates claim that their designs have adequate "storm shelters" for solar storms. I'm not qualified to assess that claim.
For a two year mission, you'll have to take a lot of stuff with you if you're not going to recycle everything and you want some margin of safety in case propellant production doesn't go as planned. You might be able to take enough raw materials, but where does that leave the instruments you need to do good science?
Again, the plan is to produce all the propellant, oxygen, and water you need on Mars before the crew leaves Earth. As I understand it, the logistic needs have been worked out quite carefully, and the mission plans proposed so far have left several tonnes spare for science gear.
Chicago and Washington DC banned handguns. New York has almost done so. Those places don't seem to have a shortage of armed criminals though, do they? So who, I ask you, is really affected by the law? The good guys, or the bad guys?
You make the typical gun advocate claim that all gun crimes are committed by "criminals", by which you mean habitual criminals. I don't know what the statistics are in the USA, but in Australia a lot of the murders committed with guns were by people who didn't previously have criminal records - basically, people who flipped out for one reason or another. The common thread in these was that self-loading rifles made it too easy for such people to kill a lot of people at once. We restricted their ownership to the few people who actually need them for professional reasons. Voila, no more spree killings since.
The missions are incredibly complex. If any part of the mission fails, the chances of survival for the crew will be slim. Given the 50% success rate of Mars missions to date, this doesn't look so good.
That's not true. The key trick with these plans is that you send the return vehicle first, and let it land and produce the propellant for the return trip before you ever launch the human crew. If you lose the return vehicle as it lands on Mars, it's a setback for the program, but nobody dies.
The combined effects of low gravity and inadequate radiation shielding (space craft can't carry the extra mass requred) may mean that astronauts will be physically very weak or even ill by the time they reach Mars.
Solar storms are a real concern, but best as I understand things there's little risk of prompt radiation sickness from the cosmic ray dosage on a Mars mission. Zero-g is a concern, but they could always use artificial gravity by spinning the craft.
A two year mission to Mars will require that astronauts recycle almost all of the resources aboard, including oxygen, food, and human waste. To date, such technology has never worked well enough for a two year mission. Biosphere 2, for example didn't work for still undetermined reason and it was right here on Earth.
I dunno about oxygen and water, but as I understand they plan to take all their food with them. While on Mars, there will be surplus oxygen available from the propellant production, so air recycling shouldn't be an issue there, and you can take a little extra hydrogen along to make lots of water.
Whilst Mars can apparently get windy, it's hardly likely to blow the tent over. The atmosphere is only about 1% as dense as our own, so the force on the dome will be correspondingly reduced.
I've personally had no trouble with 2.6 since 2.6-pre. While a sample size of 1 isn't much use, the lack of hasty releases of new 2.6 versions, and the lack of bitching about showstopper bugs in 2.6, suggests it's not in too bad shape, IMO.
When you say "CS", do you mean "I'd like to become a computer programmer", "software engineer", or "computer scientist?"
Computer programming is something you can learn to do adequately well in your spare time, sufficient to build small but very useful systems.
Software engineering is (or should be, the term is widely bandied around but not very meaningfully sometimes) the process of building large software systems on time, on budget, and to specified levels of quality and reliability - at least in theory.
Computer science is the theoretical study of computing - what they can and can't do, how long it takes to do it, and trying to make them do the things they can't current do very well! It's conducted at universities and research labs, mostly by people with or seeking PhDs. Much of it is almost a branch of mathematics.
If you're already a practising physician, 5-10 years from now it will be a little late for you to be considering becoming a full-on computer science researcher in a field that doesn't take advantage of your background.
You could certainly learn to become a competant programmer in your spare time, but it would take another degree and more professional experience to become a fully-fledged software engineer. As you've heard, there's a lot of doom and gloom at the moment about job prospects in that field, mainly because of the outsourcing boom. Who knows what the demand will be like in 10 years. However, demand for doctors is virtually guaranteed to increase over the next decade or two as the population ages, so I wouldn't be considering the move if job security is at all important.
If you are serious about a career change, I'd be exploring the possibilities of working on medical technology. From what I hear, doctors are notoriously clueless when it comes to information technology, so somebody who can translate between medical jargon and IT jargon is going to be enormously valuable and have a very interesting career, no matter what side of the fence they sit on.
The beginning of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second book in the five-volume trilogy, is as follows:
The Story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizeure.
The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel....
It goes on in this vein, but even funnier, over the five volumes (well, Mostly Harmless was probably more depressing than funny, but anyway)...
While others can point to the romantic reasons for crewed missions (points I agree with, by the way), there are IMO good scientific reasons to send crewed missions.
Basically, a human crew, even with the disadvantage of space suits, could work a lot faster, cover a lot more territory, and try a far greater variety of scientific techniques than any robot probe, or large set of robot probes, could do.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of whether the work is done in your own country or offshore, outsourcing has issues in terms of quality control, responsibility for non-delivery or other problems (like this one), and whether it makes as much financial sense as is often claimed.
No, actually, Australia (and New Zealand) have more open economies than you do.
In practice, many, many natural statistics are normally distributed, and it would be a reasonable guess that penis length is. Therefore, the mean and the median will be the same.
A more workable approach, very long-term, is likely to be shielding Venus from some solar radiation using massive sunsails. The place would still be very short of water, though.
Look, if you're a local councillor, I suppose to some extent it's your responsibility to deliver what the people want. But if you're putting them up to calm people's irrational fears surely there has to be cheaper and less invasive methods of doing so.
They're not involved in vote collection for civilians. What are are involved in is collecting the votes of members of the armed services. Given that they may be deployed overseas in hard to get at and possibly secret places, the Pentagon has to be involved in collecting votes somehow.
In Victoria (the state of Australia where I live), they recently passed a law that says pokie venues have to be smoke-free. Funnily enough, pokie turnover dropped quite a lot, because the gambling addicts were all heavy smokers as well, and making them go outside and stop for a minute was a great circuit-breaker...
To a large extent, yes. Dual-income families spend what they can afford on housing, pushing real estate prices up to the point where single-income families can't buy housing in desirable areas.
No. Some goods (health, education) cost more, but overall the average person can buy a lot more stuff with their income than they used to. Why doesn't it feel like that? Because of continually rising expectations.
Yes. However, Americans have the highest salaries in the industrialized world. Would you like to trade off a wage increase for more vacation time and/or shorter hours?
This is entirely understandable, because from all reports there's not a single American passenger car that would be competitive on the world market.
That's why I suggested a laser-pushed lightsail to do the job for the purpose of this handwaving exercise - as I've shown, that amount of energy is large but not unprecedented (and presumably will become much more manageable in the future if we get large-scale fusion power). To figure out how to build a laser array that puts out that much power with enough accuracy to keep it focussed on the craft is quite a challenge, to say the least. Finally, the light sail would want to reflect a very high proportion of the energy or it would melt real fast...
Assuming we don't get something really weird like a drive that can accelerate every atom on a craft simultaneously, or some kind of space warp, the ultimate limit to spacecraft speed in the solar system is the acceleration that the human body can cope for extended periods, which presumably isn't much above 1 g. Given this, you build a craft that accelerates at 1 g until it's half way to Mars, turns around, and decelerates so that it's at zero velocity (relative to Mars, at least) when it gets there. One conceivable way to do this might be a lightsail powered by a really big laser, but anyway, that's kind of irrelevant, we're seeking boundary values.
The nearest approach from Earth to Mars in the past 50,000 years was about 55 million kilometres, so we'll use that figure as our distance.
So, the trick is to figure out how long, when accelerating from rest at 1 g, it takes to get to the halfway point, and then double that travel time. My calculations give about 75,000 seconds for the halfway point, so about 150,000 seconds total travel time. That works out to about 4 days and eight hours.
As a sanity check, I made sure that the peak speed isn't relativistic (in which case the Newtonian calculations I have used don't work). That turns out not to be an issue, with the peak speed about 0.2% of the speed of light.
So, we'll never have airline flights to Mars. It'll always be an ocean voyage.
It's a very common sentiment here, if not entirely accurate. The majority of immigrants to Australia in the 19th century were free settlers, just like the US.
NASA's budget really is insignifcant in that kind of context.
The claim is that, as well as the designs for VAXen and the like, the Soviets stole some oil pipeline control software from the Canadians. The West was forewarned with the aid of those cheese-eating surrender monkeys whom Safire and his fellow wingnuts love insulting, the French. Therefore, before the software was stolen, somebody was able to arrange to put a trojan horse in the software that caused the system to malfunction, and, voila, a massive explosion occurred.
Now, it's certainly conceivable for the US to insert a trojan horse in the software. I would find it surprising that such a trojan horse would be enough to cause such a massive explosion on its own, though. Catastrophic failures almost always result out of a complex chain of events happening, and trying to orchestrate that in a system for which you don't have details of how it's going to be configured and is probably going to include a lot of fail-safes sounds awfully difficult to do - and, then again, how did the CIA know they weren't going to kill hundreds in the process of pulling this off?
In any case, the point of the exercise seems to be to make the Soviets of using stolen Western technology. This seems like an awfully cavalier way to go about it, and thus still implausible.
No, I meant what I originally said. Wikipedia is a secondary source which summarises information published elsewhere. I didn't say that we copy verbatim stuff from somewhere else (though we do that too, sometimes, when there is content we can legally copy - it then usually needs editing though). This is no different to other encyclopedias.
It's not a complaint, it's an observation. In other encyclopedias, there is an assumption that topics given extensive coverage are somehow "important", while topics not covered or only sketchily covered are less so. You can't make that assumption with Wikipedia, and it's one thing readers need to understand.
I have contributed quite a lot to Wikipedia already. However, the areas where the Wikipedia is weak at the moment are areas where I don't have a great deal of expertise.
As to the underlying question, whether it's recognised as a valid source of accurate information, journalists cite the Wikipedia all the time these days. Its credibility will be improved when the sifter project, working title, "Wikipedia 1.0", gets going. While the code has not actually been implemented yet. Ultimately, the sifter project will involve Wikipedia articles being reviewed and approved, with the special credentials, if any, of the reviewers being recorded.
Wikipedia already gets more traffic than Brittanica's website, as best we can tell (and probably more than /.). So, ultimately, I suspect Encarta and Brittanica will be in trouble. Is this a disaster? Not really. In most fields, our real knowledge infrastructure is the research institutions (universities and industrial research institutions) and the scholarly publications they produce. Encyclopedia articles come out of that. In other fields (say, cooking, for example) there are other institutions and publications that serve similar functions.
I should point out that Wikipedia does have some problematic areas - for instance, articles on the Israeli-Palestine situation tend to provoke endless edit wars. Undoubtedly while browsing you'll find any number of inaccuracies. Another thing that is different to traditional encyclopedias is that the depth of coverage of an area in Wikipedia can't be taken as an indication of its importance to the world.
Everyone who goes on a space mission is making a conscious and informed choice to take a risk, whether they used to wear a military uniform or not. Are you saying that "civilians" are somehow not capable of understanding the risks of space flight and shouldn't be sent?
I suspect that underlying this view is the attitude that women dying in a space craft is somehow more tragic and less acceptable than men. If so, that's horribly patronizing.
As I understand the plan, propellant production will have ceased by the time the crew ship has launched. The return rocket just has to sit there for six months, not do anything. Yes, it is a concern that it might break down in the interim, but surely it's easier to simply batten down the hatches for six months than active conduct a scientific mission like the unmanned missions are doing.
Personally, I like the idea of sending two return vehicles and propellant plants on the first mission as a safety backup.
Manned mission advocates claim that their designs have adequate "storm shelters" for solar storms. I'm not qualified to assess that claim.
Again, the plan is to produce all the propellant, oxygen, and water you need on Mars before the crew leaves Earth. As I understand it, the logistic needs have been worked out quite carefully, and the mission plans proposed so far have left several tonnes spare for science gear.
You make the typical gun advocate claim that all gun crimes are committed by "criminals", by which you mean habitual criminals. I don't know what the statistics are in the USA, but in Australia a lot of the murders committed with guns were by people who didn't previously have criminal records - basically, people who flipped out for one reason or another. The common thread in these was that self-loading rifles made it too easy for such people to kill a lot of people at once. We restricted their ownership to the few people who actually need them for professional reasons. Voila, no more spree killings since.
That's not true. The key trick with these plans is that you send the return vehicle first, and let it land and produce the propellant for the return trip before you ever launch the human crew. If you lose the return vehicle as it lands on Mars, it's a setback for the program, but nobody dies.
Solar storms are a real concern, but best as I understand things there's little risk of prompt radiation sickness from the cosmic ray dosage on a Mars mission. Zero-g is a concern, but they could always use artificial gravity by spinning the craft.
I dunno about oxygen and water, but as I understand they plan to take all their food with them. While on Mars, there will be surplus oxygen available from the propellant production, so air recycling shouldn't be an issue there, and you can take a little extra hydrogen along to make lots of water.
Whilst Mars can apparently get windy, it's hardly likely to blow the tent over. The atmosphere is only about 1% as dense as our own, so the force on the dome will be correspondingly reduced.
I've personally had no trouble with 2.6 since 2.6-pre. While a sample size of 1 isn't much use, the lack of hasty releases of new 2.6 versions, and the lack of bitching about showstopper bugs in 2.6, suggests it's not in too bad shape, IMO.
Computer programming is something you can learn to do adequately well in your spare time, sufficient to build small but very useful systems.
Software engineering is (or should be, the term is widely bandied around but not very meaningfully sometimes) the process of building large software systems on time, on budget, and to specified levels of quality and reliability - at least in theory.
Computer science is the theoretical study of computing - what they can and can't do, how long it takes to do it, and trying to make them do the things they can't current do very well! It's conducted at universities and research labs, mostly by people with or seeking PhDs. Much of it is almost a branch of mathematics.
If you're already a practising physician, 5-10 years from now it will be a little late for you to be considering becoming a full-on computer science researcher in a field that doesn't take advantage of your background.
You could certainly learn to become a competant programmer in your spare time, but it would take another degree and more professional experience to become a fully-fledged software engineer. As you've heard, there's a lot of doom and gloom at the moment about job prospects in that field, mainly because of the outsourcing boom. Who knows what the demand will be like in 10 years. However, demand for doctors is virtually guaranteed to increase over the next decade or two as the population ages, so I wouldn't be considering the move if job security is at all important.
If you are serious about a career change, I'd be exploring the possibilities of working on medical technology. From what I hear, doctors are notoriously clueless when it comes to information technology, so somebody who can translate between medical jargon and IT jargon is going to be enormously valuable and have a very interesting career, no matter what side of the fence they sit on.
It goes on in this vein, but even funnier, over the five volumes (well, Mostly Harmless was probably more depressing than funny, but anyway)...
Basically, a human crew, even with the disadvantage of space suits, could work a lot faster, cover a lot more territory, and try a far greater variety of scientific techniques than any robot probe, or large set of robot probes, could do.