It's been proposed that what would make the franchise interesting again is a total reset. Abandon the existing continuity and timeline, and go back to the early exploration of an unknown universe rather than politics and war in a well-settled part of the timeline. Do realistic extrapolation of technology this time, instead of (a) bringing in super-technologies and never mentioning them again and (b) assuming that real technologies like robotics and biotech barely advance over the centuries. Consider redesigning the premise of the Federation, taking into account the critique that it's basically a fascist state. Keep the theme of space exploration and adventure.
If people object to using MS-based robotics software, then let's find and/or build free alternatives. I know of one: Pyro, written in Python (which is itself free/OSS and easy to use). I haven't used it myself, but it seems to support both real robots and virtual hardware. What other systems exist?
How about building a simple I/O system ported to several languages, with a standard set of functions, suitable for commanding several brands of real robot as well as virtual models?
The problem is the fundamental difference between pumping oil from the ground and building a network of hydrogen-producing power plants. With oil, you get the energy "for free" in the sense that it's already in the form of energy-rich sludge. With hydrogen, you need to capture the energy yourself. "We have to first charge the battery" as you put it, rather than finding pre-charged batteries in the ground. That's why hydrogen itself isn't all that useful; it's a storage method rather than a power source in its own right.
I think the idea is that if we're producing hydrogen as an energy carrier at many locations, rather than doing it on the beach and transporting the hydrogen inland, we have to deal with the scarcity of water inland. If that's the case, the hydrogen-makers have to compete with other users of rivers, lakes and underground aquifers. Transporting hydrogen from a coast probably involves substantial costs and losses, although I saw a cool proposal to carry hydrogen and electricity in a network of combined pipes. Incidentally, if a large facility like a factory is ever powered by hydrogen, it could collect the resulting water to supplement the local water supply.
I agree that improving efficiency and recycling (especially for agriculture) is also important, but if we can do it efficiently, I still say desalination is a valuable tool. Unlike those other methods, it increases the actual supply of freshwater, and adds the advantage of "creating" this water at any coastal location, some of which are hard to reach efficiently with pipes from an existing river. Even the use of aquifers, when near a seacoast, can lead to contamination of groundwater supplies with salt, because the inland groundwater level falls and then saltwater seeps in from the coast. So, by providing an alternative water source, desalination helps avoid that problem of "salting the soil." Depending on how and where the water from desalination is used, it could even be added to rivers to increase their flow for some distance, for aesthetic and environmental benefit and use by multiple users.
As for disposing of the salt, I don't have an easy answer, but (1) some amount can be sold, and (2) to the extent that the water makes it back into the sea, there's no net effect on the ocean even if there's salt poisoning in specific regions. There may be some convenient way of storing salt or converting the many extracted tons of it into something useful besides popcorn seasoning, or we might just find some way of dealing with it as a pollutant. It might be a lesser evil than destroying a river ecosystem or calling for mass emigration of a city.
Another alternative to desalination is to gengineer plants for salt tolerance, so that we can irrigate them with seawater. Realistically that'd be hard even for a master gengineer, because where does the salt go? The best I can think of here is, "have the plants stuff all the salt into the parts of themselves that aren't eaten."
I'm particularly interested in desalination technology in the context of ocean colonization, where there's "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink." There you have an interesting legal situation because instead of the land-based systems of "riparian" and "appropriation" rights, you're almost literally creating every drop of drinkable water there is. I wonder how compatible a desalination plant would be with nearby aquaculture, though. (OTEC power generation is at least compatible with "artificial upwelling," a fertilization system.)
Nearly 70% of the world's capacity for desalination is currently in the Middle East (with 27% in Saudi Arabia), where water is scarce and oil to power the desal plants is plentiful. But even there, it makes up less than 1% of the total water supply! [Nachmani, Amikam. Water Jitters in the Middle East. Studies In Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan-March 1997). Page 85.] Unfortunately, that region also has severe waste from corruption, bad equipment, and mutually homicidal neighbors, though the inefficiency is lowest in Israel by far. [Nachmani, at 71]
From studying water law and some related technology a little, it seems to me that massive expansion of desalination capacity is one of the best things any engineer could do for the world right now. There are lots of people suffering from lack of safe drinking water; agriculture is one of the biggest consumers of water, and is subsidized beyond an economically justified capacity for various reasons (in the US, nostalgia, food security, and disproportionate power of agricultural states); legal disputes over water and increasing demand for it are draining aquifers and literally causing rivers to not reach the sea.
About the article itself: how close is this technology to really becoming available? I've heard of a type of "solar tape" that's low efficiency (something like 1%), but cheap and able to be layered onto/into building materials and gadgets. I want a cape made of this stuff!
Is it feasible to build a laptop from scratch, or rather, from individual parts? (Starting with a pile of sand wouldn't be so good.) I've looked into buying individual desktop parts like hard drives and CPUs, but having bought a laptop a few years ago, I like its convenience and the concept of using up a small fraction of the power.
It's also worth looking at MIT's RoboTuna and RoboPike, robotic fish, and the penguin boat Proteus. These projects demonstrate that fish-like fins or flippers substantially improve propulsion efficiency vs. propellers, because they generate vortices of water that actually push a vehicle forward. MIT sees these vortices as the answer to Gray's paradox, which said that a dolphin would have to be stronger than it is to swim as fast as it does. (That article disagrees.)
A flapping drive would also have the advantage of looking cool.
First of all, thanks for presenting that opinion. It was worth saying, and you should not have been called a troll.
I accept that most of the politicians involved in installing these new security systems have Good Intentions. Unfortunately, as they become more and more intrusive, they give us good reason to be afraid of the people running them. Rather than being transparent systems (see Brin's "The Transparent Society"), they're one-way windows on us citizens. Imagine that someday soon, some vast technological system tracks your every movement from the moment you leave your house, watching for any sign not just of crime, but of what Brits call "anti-social behaviour." And that with terrorism as a constant threat, dissent and nonconformity are considered anti-social. Democracy is damaged when people can't so much as discuss politics in a pub without knowing that they're being spied on. Would you agree that it's dangerous to let politicians listen to our every conversation, without us being able to know who's watching or why?
Or, we could play the absurd-extremes game. Can you describe a hypothetical surveillance system that you would oppose on the grounds that it's too extreme, too oppressive? (Conversely, can people who oppose these systems describe one they do support as reasonable?)
Hopefully Americans will recognize this before we merrily join the UK and strap video cameras to every public park, building, and employee.
Oh, we'd never go that far. We'll just put up cameras for traffic enforcement. And law enforcement. And then link them up. And upgrade the software to do face/gait recognition and look for "suspicious behavior." And require private cameras at bars, and link those to the police. Then for good measure have the cameras bark orders at people. By then we'll have found other creative uses for the technology, and implement that by little steps.
I just got through writing a science-fiction story combining all of the above with a looming uber-AI trying to prevent crime. Somewhat farfetched and paranoid, but scary, and except for the AI part we do seem to be building that sort of surveillance society, one piece at a time. I shudder to think of the UK's "anti-social behavio(u)r" rules being used to watch people wherever they go and even yell at them through the one-way glass.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Exactly. I'll not comment here on the underlying scientific debate, but it's suspicious to me that the political aspect of the global warming issue is, "We need to give governments more power." An expert says that collectively "we" should be forced to give up our wealth and freedom (while acknowledging that an elite will be able to keep them) because of a global emergency. Conveniently the emergency is also perpetual, which justifies a permanent power grab. One of the above posts even says that such rules should be imposed over the objections of voters.
I'm not saying this is the Real Secret Motive behind global warming regulations, but it's frustrating that the automatic answer to every problem is more laws, less freedom. If we're to protect the environment, let's focus on free-market solutions wherever possible.
The problem with that argument is that there's a difference between theoretically being visible to some bystander, and being watched all the time wherever you go. To take the argument to its logical conclusion, would you object if the police decided to park outside your house and follow you personally throughout the day, on the theory that you have no expectation of privacy?
Is there any knowledge out there about obtaining desalinated water using some sort of nanotech filter, other than the high-pressure blasting method used today?
Presumably it can't be used for cooling, though -- can't simultaneously equip the Wave Beam and the Ice Beam. 8)
As I understand it, about half the world's desal capability is located in the Middle East, mostly in Saudi Arabia, and there it's oil-powered, done by high-pressure sprays against a grating. Even in the Middle East it makes up only maybe 3% of the water supply.
Long-term, we should be looking at greatly reducing the need for freshwater by making irrigation more efficient -- it makes up about half of our demand -- and that means drip-irrigation systems and maybe gengineering of plants for salt tolerance.
What seems to be neglected in this discussion -- and I won't even touch the global warming part of it, having been modded Troll for politely questioning it before -- is aquaculture.
I'm studying this topic now for a substantial research paper. Instead of focusing on hunting and gathering over the earth's oceans as we do now, wouldn't it make more sense to farm the seas? To some extent various cultures have been artificially breeding aquatic plants and animals for millennia. We could do the same with our more advanced technology as a way of increasing the world's food supply without destroying the marine environment. From what I'm reading so far, the obstacles seem to lie more in excessive and confusing regulations than with innate feasibility.
Similarly, when NASA reported that it had lost certain footage from the moon landings due to some combination of old data formats and Ark-of-the-Covenant-style warehousing, someone pointed out that we'd still have the footage if NASA had simply put it on the Web. Many private individuals and impromptu organizations would've pounced on the data and "automatically," from NASA's perspective, kept its format up to date. Not to mention doing various analyses and remixes of it, and maybe shutting up the conspiracy theorists.
Sure, there are legitimate uses -- but where are we hearing that we're going to have access to them? So far all I hear (and I could just be paying too little attention) is story after story about governments and corporations watching us, with no transparency in the other direction because we want "privacy." David Brin's book "The Transparent Society" presented a society with ubiquitous monitoring activities like "Is the pub busy? Is there someone in that alley?" as a reasonable alternative to the entirely-one-way monitoring we seem to be heading towards.
Wow, "I remain skeptical" and "We may be erring," then attempting to explain why, qualifies as trolling? I think of "troll" as the first post I saw, the one that consisted of one line full of ethnic slurs. Or several of the replies here, not including yours or those of the people who explained intelligently why they disagree. Whatever.
I'm not ready to leap on the "we're all gonna die" bandwagon.
I remain skeptical of the global warming arguments, and divided on what to think of the whole issue. I've seen evidence both for and against the reality and human cause of global warming (see eg. Crichton's propagandistic but informative bad novel State of Fear). It seems as though claims of global warming, even if they're accurate, are an excuse to grant governments even greater power over the economy in the name of Saving the Planet. Because taxation and regulation are undesirable in themselves, I see this movement to create some massively expensive global regulation treaty as a definite harm to the world, being offered as a possible, partial remedy for a problem we're not even sure exists.
We may also be erring on the side of pessimism in judging the effects of global warming (again, assuming it's real). We know there will be problems, but aren't we overlooking some opportunities it will create? In various sources I've heard claims about Scotland's destiny as a premier wine-growing region; easier ice-free shipping lanes through the Arctic Ocean; greening of the Sahara Desert due to increased ocean evaporation; and greater practicality of mining Antarctica's undiscovered resources. Even as we hear about polar bears in trouble, there are also increasing news reports of wolves, manatees and other wildlife flourishing in surprising places. This "crisis" could actually work out better than we think.
I'm reminded of theprodukkt, a coding group that released a first-person shooter that takes up about 96 kilobytes. If this is possible, it's amazing that comparable games tend to take up gigabytes.
that is soo messedup... capitalizing on what is not ours... unfortunately it's the American way... but not the EARTH's way!
Um... What is the Earth's way, and how do you know it? And what's "gross?"
"capitalizing on space" means trying to do something useful with it, as opposed to taking some photos and going home. I see the first option as a good thing.
The 3 goals he wishes to achieve on the trip: advance civilian spaceflight, assist space station research, and involve kids in space sciences.
That's what struck me most about the post: our focus on putting Humans In Space doesn't actually accomplish anything in terms of getting us to Mars, or even back to Luna, other than "raise awareness." In other words, it's just a publicity stunt.
I applaud all the private space flight ventures, but where is the exploration? I don't mean we should be focusing on robotic probes either. Right now we've got some missions that gather data about distant planets, and some that involve actual humans -- with no overlap!
[Messed up and submitted just the first sentence; here's the rest.]
On a floating colony in international waters, of course! (Yaar. =) ) I'm in the middle of researching a long paper on aquaculture and wading through the murky legal aspects of it, making me think it'd be best to operate an aquaculture facility as a seasteading project outside the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone claimed by the US and signatories to the current UN Law of the Sea Treaty. I'm also influenced by having read an unpublished SF novel series by a friend about an uber-libertarian sea colony.
Realistically, if I were in a position to work in such a place I'd consider it, but I wouldn't want to give up my citizenship.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been proposed that what would make the franchise interesting again is a total reset. Abandon the existing continuity and timeline, and go back to the early exploration of an unknown universe rather than politics and war in a well-settled part of the timeline. Do realistic extrapolation of technology this time, instead of (a) bringing in super-technologies and never mentioning them again and (b) assuming that real technologies like robotics and biotech barely advance over the centuries. Consider redesigning the premise of the Federation, taking into account the critique that it's basically a fascist state. Keep the theme of space exploration and adventure.
If people object to using MS-based robotics software, then let's find and/or build free alternatives. I know of one: Pyro, written in Python (which is itself free/OSS and easy to use). I haven't used it myself, but it seems to support both real robots and virtual hardware. What other systems exist?
How about building a simple I/O system ported to several languages, with a standard set of functions, suitable for commanding several brands of real robot as well as virtual models?
The problem is the fundamental difference between pumping oil from the ground and building a network of hydrogen-producing power plants. With oil, you get the energy "for free" in the sense that it's already in the form of energy-rich sludge. With hydrogen, you need to capture the energy yourself. "We have to first charge the battery" as you put it, rather than finding pre-charged batteries in the ground. That's why hydrogen itself isn't all that useful; it's a storage method rather than a power source in its own right.
I think the idea is that if we're producing hydrogen as an energy carrier at many locations, rather than doing it on the beach and transporting the hydrogen inland, we have to deal with the scarcity of water inland. If that's the case, the hydrogen-makers have to compete with other users of rivers, lakes and underground aquifers. Transporting hydrogen from a coast probably involves substantial costs and losses, although I saw a cool proposal to carry hydrogen and electricity in a network of combined pipes. Incidentally, if a large facility like a factory is ever powered by hydrogen, it could collect the resulting water to supplement the local water supply.
I agree that improving efficiency and recycling (especially for agriculture) is also important, but if we can do it efficiently, I still say desalination is a valuable tool. Unlike those other methods, it increases the actual supply of freshwater, and adds the advantage of "creating" this water at any coastal location, some of which are hard to reach efficiently with pipes from an existing river. Even the use of aquifers, when near a seacoast, can lead to contamination of groundwater supplies with salt, because the inland groundwater level falls and then saltwater seeps in from the coast. So, by providing an alternative water source, desalination helps avoid that problem of "salting the soil." Depending on how and where the water from desalination is used, it could even be added to rivers to increase their flow for some distance, for aesthetic and environmental benefit and use by multiple users.
As for disposing of the salt, I don't have an easy answer, but (1) some amount can be sold, and (2) to the extent that the water makes it back into the sea, there's no net effect on the ocean even if there's salt poisoning in specific regions. There may be some convenient way of storing salt or converting the many extracted tons of it into something useful besides popcorn seasoning, or we might just find some way of dealing with it as a pollutant. It might be a lesser evil than destroying a river ecosystem or calling for mass emigration of a city.
Another alternative to desalination is to gengineer plants for salt tolerance, so that we can irrigate them with seawater. Realistically that'd be hard even for a master gengineer, because where does the salt go? The best I can think of here is, "have the plants stuff all the salt into the parts of themselves that aren't eaten."
I'm particularly interested in desalination technology in the context of ocean colonization, where there's "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink." There you have an interesting legal situation because instead of the land-based systems of "riparian" and "appropriation" rights, you're almost literally creating every drop of drinkable water there is. I wonder how compatible a desalination plant would be with nearby aquaculture, though. (OTEC power generation is at least compatible with "artificial upwelling," a fertilization system.)
Nearly 70% of the world's capacity for desalination is currently in the Middle East (with 27% in Saudi Arabia), where water is scarce and oil to power the desal plants is plentiful. But even there, it makes up less than 1% of the total water supply! [Nachmani, Amikam. Water Jitters in the Middle East. Studies In Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Jan-March 1997). Page 85.] Unfortunately, that region also has severe waste from corruption, bad equipment, and mutually homicidal neighbors, though the inefficiency is lowest in Israel by far. [Nachmani, at 71]
From studying water law and some related technology a little, it seems to me that massive expansion of desalination capacity is one of the best things any engineer could do for the world right now. There are lots of people suffering from lack of safe drinking water; agriculture is one of the biggest consumers of water, and is subsidized beyond an economically justified capacity for various reasons (in the US, nostalgia, food security, and disproportionate power of agricultural states); legal disputes over water and increasing demand for it are draining aquifers and literally causing rivers to not reach the sea.
About the article itself: how close is this technology to really becoming available? I've heard of a type of "solar tape" that's low efficiency (something like 1%), but cheap and able to be layered onto/into building materials and gadgets. I want a cape made of this stuff!
Is it feasible to build a laptop from scratch, or rather, from individual parts? (Starting with a pile of sand wouldn't be so good.) I've looked into buying individual desktop parts like hard drives and CPUs, but having bought a laptop a few years ago, I like its convenience and the concept of using up a small fraction of the power.
It's also worth looking at MIT's RoboTuna and RoboPike, robotic fish, and the penguin boat Proteus. These projects demonstrate that fish-like fins or flippers substantially improve propulsion efficiency vs. propellers, because they generate vortices of water that actually push a vehicle forward. MIT sees these vortices as the answer to Gray's paradox, which said that a dolphin would have to be stronger than it is to swim as fast as it does. (That article disagrees.)
A flapping drive would also have the advantage of looking cool.
First of all, thanks for presenting that opinion. It was worth saying, and you should not have been called a troll.
I accept that most of the politicians involved in installing these new security systems have Good Intentions. Unfortunately, as they become more and more intrusive, they give us good reason to be afraid of the people running them. Rather than being transparent systems (see Brin's "The Transparent Society"), they're one-way windows on us citizens. Imagine that someday soon, some vast technological system tracks your every movement from the moment you leave your house, watching for any sign not just of crime, but of what Brits call "anti-social behaviour." And that with terrorism as a constant threat, dissent and nonconformity are considered anti-social. Democracy is damaged when people can't so much as discuss politics in a pub without knowing that they're being spied on. Would you agree that it's dangerous to let politicians listen to our every conversation, without us being able to know who's watching or why?
Or, we could play the absurd-extremes game. Can you describe a hypothetical surveillance system that you would oppose on the grounds that it's too extreme, too oppressive? (Conversely, can people who oppose these systems describe one they do support as reasonable?)
Hopefully Americans will recognize this before we merrily join the UK and strap video cameras to every public park, building, and employee.
Oh, we'd never go that far. We'll just put up cameras for traffic enforcement. And law enforcement. And then link them up. And upgrade the software to do face/gait recognition and look for "suspicious behavior." And require private cameras at bars, and link those to the police. Then for good measure have the cameras bark orders at people. By then we'll have found other creative uses for the technology, and implement that by little steps.
I just got through writing a science-fiction story combining all of the above with a looming uber-AI trying to prevent crime. Somewhat farfetched and paranoid, but scary, and except for the AI part we do seem to be building that sort of surveillance society, one piece at a time. I shudder to think of the UK's "anti-social behavio(u)r" rules being used to watch people wherever they go and even yell at them through the one-way glass.
Exactly. I'll not comment here on the underlying scientific debate, but it's suspicious to me that the political aspect of the global warming issue is, "We need to give governments more power." An expert says that collectively "we" should be forced to give up our wealth and freedom (while acknowledging that an elite will be able to keep them) because of a global emergency. Conveniently the emergency is also perpetual, which justifies a permanent power grab. One of the above posts even says that such rules should be imposed over the objections of voters.
I'm not saying this is the Real Secret Motive behind global warming regulations, but it's frustrating that the automatic answer to every problem is more laws, less freedom. If we're to protect the environment, let's focus on free-market solutions wherever possible.
The problem with that argument is that there's a difference between theoretically being visible to some bystander, and being watched all the time wherever you go. To take the argument to its logical conclusion, would you object if the police decided to park outside your house and follow you personally throughout the day, on the theory that you have no expectation of privacy?
With these schematics, will the 4004 be a good test case for the proposed circuit printers?
Is there any knowledge out there about obtaining desalinated water using some sort of nanotech filter, other than the high-pressure blasting method used today?
There have been several attempts to develop electricity generators using the tide, such as these:s /main2153298.shtml 2 -7.html;jsessionid=E3647E0B96B907DE7AF07B7FC3B0361 4 e an-energy/ .
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/04/busines
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040322/full/04032
http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-05/features/oc
I'm skeptical of the original article's device because it apparently is from "New Scientist," which recently reported on an Amazing Antigravity Device (not that I trust Discover much these days). But the wave energy gadgets have been proven to generate electricity (11kV for the third one), and you can use that for conventional desalination. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
Presumably it can't be used for cooling, though -- can't simultaneously equip the Wave Beam and the Ice Beam. 8)
As I understand it, about half the world's desal capability is located in the Middle East, mostly in Saudi Arabia, and there it's oil-powered, done by high-pressure sprays against a grating. Even in the Middle East it makes up only maybe 3% of the water supply.
Long-term, we should be looking at greatly reducing the need for freshwater by making irrigation more efficient -- it makes up about half of our demand -- and that means drip-irrigation systems and maybe gengineering of plants for salt tolerance.
What seems to be neglected in this discussion -- and I won't even touch the global warming part of it, having been modded Troll for politely questioning it before -- is aquaculture.
I'm studying this topic now for a substantial research paper. Instead of focusing on hunting and gathering over the earth's oceans as we do now, wouldn't it make more sense to farm the seas? To some extent various cultures have been artificially breeding aquatic plants and animals for millennia. We could do the same with our more advanced technology as a way of increasing the world's food supply without destroying the marine environment. From what I'm reading so far, the obstacles seem to lie more in excessive and confusing regulations than with innate feasibility.
Similarly, when NASA reported that it had lost certain footage from the moon landings due to some combination of old data formats and Ark-of-the-Covenant-style warehousing, someone pointed out that we'd still have the footage if NASA had simply put it on the Web. Many private individuals and impromptu organizations would've pounced on the data and "automatically," from NASA's perspective, kept its format up to date. Not to mention doing various analyses and remixes of it, and maybe shutting up the conspiracy theorists.
Sure, there are legitimate uses -- but where are we hearing that we're going to have access to them? So far all I hear (and I could just be paying too little attention) is story after story about governments and corporations watching us, with no transparency in the other direction because we want "privacy." David Brin's book "The Transparent Society" presented a society with ubiquitous monitoring activities like "Is the pub busy? Is there someone in that alley?" as a reasonable alternative to the entirely-one-way monitoring we seem to be heading towards.
Wow, "I remain skeptical" and "We may be erring," then attempting to explain why, qualifies as trolling? I think of "troll" as the first post I saw, the one that consisted of one line full of ethnic slurs. Or several of the replies here, not including yours or those of the people who explained intelligently why they disagree. Whatever.
I'm not ready to leap on the "we're all gonna die" bandwagon.
Poster #1 should be banned.
I remain skeptical of the global warming arguments, and divided on what to think of the whole issue. I've seen evidence both for and against the reality and human cause of global warming (see eg. Crichton's propagandistic but informative bad novel State of Fear). It seems as though claims of global warming, even if they're accurate, are an excuse to grant governments even greater power over the economy in the name of Saving the Planet. Because taxation and regulation are undesirable in themselves, I see this movement to create some massively expensive global regulation treaty as a definite harm to the world, being offered as a possible, partial remedy for a problem we're not even sure exists.
We may also be erring on the side of pessimism in judging the effects of global warming (again, assuming it's real). We know there will be problems, but aren't we overlooking some opportunities it will create? In various sources I've heard claims about Scotland's destiny as a premier wine-growing region; easier ice-free shipping lanes through the Arctic Ocean; greening of the Sahara Desert due to increased ocean evaporation; and greater practicality of mining Antarctica's undiscovered resources. Even as we hear about polar bears in trouble, there are also increasing news reports of wolves, manatees and other wildlife flourishing in surprising places. This "crisis" could actually work out better than we think.
I'm reminded of theprodukkt, a coding group that released a first-person shooter that takes up about 96 kilobytes. If this is possible, it's amazing that comparable games tend to take up gigabytes.
that is soo messedup... capitalizing on what is not ours... unfortunately it's the American way... but not the EARTH's way!
Um... What is the Earth's way, and how do you know it? And what's "gross?"
"capitalizing on space" means trying to do something useful with it, as opposed to taking some photos and going home. I see the first option as a good thing.
The 3 goals he wishes to achieve on the trip: advance civilian spaceflight, assist space station research, and involve kids in space sciences.
That's what struck me most about the post: our focus on putting Humans In Space doesn't actually accomplish anything in terms of getting us to Mars, or even back to Luna, other than "raise awareness." In other words, it's just a publicity stunt.
I applaud all the private space flight ventures, but where is the exploration? I don't mean we should be focusing on robotic probes either. Right now we've got some missions that gather data about distant planets, and some that involve actual humans -- with no overlap!
From "The Onion": Mars Rover Beginning To Hate Mars. "And the thousand or so daily messages of 'STILL NO WATER' really point to a crisis of purpose."
How sad! We should send some humans there to play with it.
[Messed up and submitted just the first sentence; here's the rest.]
On a floating colony in international waters, of course! (Yaar. =) ) I'm in the middle of researching a long paper on aquaculture and wading through the murky legal aspects of it, making me think it'd be best to operate an aquaculture facility as a seasteading project outside the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone claimed by the US and signatories to the current UN Law of the Sea Treaty. I'm also influenced by having read an unpublished SF novel series by a friend about an uber-libertarian sea colony.
Realistically, if I were in a position to work in such a place I'd consider it, but I wouldn't want to give up my citizenship.