Thanks!

Brian Webb isn't listing this on his Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule yet. I think he's going to wait until someone official tells him a date.

With some optimism that might only be thousands of years rather than hundreds of Millions.

But it's only necessary for Earth to be uninhabitable for a short time to end the Human race. And that can happen due to man or nature, today. If people aren't somewhere else during that process, that's the end.

- wrong. 2 things are necessary for free markets to exist:

1. equal application of all laws to all individual regardless of their individual circumstances.

2. protection of ownership and operation of private property against the government intrusion, against the mob and the collective.

A feudal system does not treat all people the same under the law. Neither does any of of the current socialist / fascist systems. As an example the so called 'progressive' income tax increases tax rates on a smaller and smaller percentage of the population relative to their greater income. This is unequal application of the law, as it creates a gigantic divide between people who run businesses, own assets and the rest, who want to steal from those who run businesses and own assets.

- actually this is one of the worst forms of government, since it creates oppression that cannot be eliminated by taking down any one particular individual. A dictator can be shot, even a single party system (like what we had in the USSR) can be stopped, but a hydra that is 'democracy' cannot be simply shot or stopped because it pretends that it exists on the voluntary participation of the electorate, which is nonsense and it does not give power to any one particular governer, instead it provides power by proxy to the most connected individuals (companies) and it keeps a puppet in the spot light.

You can go ahead and shoot that puppet but not the puppeteer, and the puppeteer is intelligent enough to give you the impression that you are in control of the government.

Democracy is a horrendous system, where few in power (the puppeteers) use the mob to keep the power structure going by setting up the useful puppets that promise to keep the mob happy by stealing from the minority (employers, 1% or whatever) and handing the stolen goods to the majority (electorate).

Of-course the reality is that the mob gets crumbs, the money is stolen from everybody and the puppeteers have direct access to the actual reigns of power and to the fake money printing presses.

- wrong. Every time humanity actually did get to experience freedom (free economy means economy not centrally planned, economy built by people without government meddling with it) the people built the biggest economies, which later were crashed by the mob, which set up government to steal from the fruits of labour of people who built the economy.

As for 1000 years of feudalism - the feudalist system is a system of government that destroys freedom. Free market requires that people are free from regulations and from government, you can't be born into slavery and call that a free market.

- wrong, freedom is the exact opposite of coercion, which is what communism entails, given that no free person would stay in a communist system on his or her own volition unless they were ruling it somehow.

Actually I was thinking nuclear power rather than magic.

I agree with the other commenter, there will be lots of people living in space if they can only get there. Mars is a good start.

Obviously I am missing something, then. Please fill me in on your better information sources. Email to bruce at perens dot com if you don't want to put them on Slashdot.

It's time to start planning another trip to Lompoc. The Motel 6 was sort of yukky last time. Maybe I'll try something else. There was an official visitor observation site that I found and got into last time, but that was for the Delta, and it was on Pad 4 if I remember correctly. This one is all the way on the other side of the base on Pad 7 or 8, isn't it? There are some farm roads that might be good observation sites if they are open.

Those inflation numbers are hogwash, do not buy into the agenda that government is pushing, the interest rates are at 0% and have been at 0 for 6 years. Never before has this actually happened, never before has anybody tied their economy to 0% interest rates for such a long time. It is not going to be possible to get off the 0% interest rates without an economic collapse (which is inevitable and actually required to fix the issues that have accumulated in the economy since the creation of the Federal reserve and switch to the paper money and paper debt).

As to prices, they are going up, not down. There are no prices that are going down, actually even oil had a steady growth this year, what prices are going down? The only thing that is going down is real employment and productivity.

Also the fake negative inflation rate was used to adjust the GDP in a way that makes it look bigger, all of this is complete propaganda.

AFAIC deflation is not a problem, inflation is. Inflation is what has been killing modern paper money based economies, deflation is a bogeyman that never materialised. The only reason the so called mainstream 'economists' are scaring people with deflation is because there was deflation during the Great Depression, which government fought with gigantic amount of money printing (and farming output purchases with printed money that was ploughed straight into the ground to try and keep prices up rather than allowing people to eat cheaper at lower prices during a depression). Depression was not caused by deflation, deflation was a natural consequence of a post-inflationary collapse and it was proper and necessary but it was fought against with fake money printing the same way they did with QE1, 2, 3 and the next one and the one that will come after, the QE infinity.

There will be no rising interest rates coming out of the Fed, they can't do it, not without crashing the economy and Fed will not be crashing the economy on purpose any time soon (especially not before the coming elections).

Again, the inflation is not negative, it is very much positive and way higher than 2% that the Fed says it wants. 2% inflation rate to be a target.... that's a joke. 2% interest rate target was introduced decades ago in New Zealand I think as a CEILING target, once they hit it, they were supposed to raise interest rates to fight inflation.

Anyway, if you truly believe the government nonsense after decades of lying they have perpetrated upon the people, the false pretences for wars, the false economy, the false money, then I don't think I'll be getting through to you in this comment, but I had to write this as a response at least for myself.

Ok, but look past the initial reaction, what are the next 20 years going to be like past the first shock of a crash? Let's say the dollar and the bond markets collapse, the stock and other asset markets go through the roof as people are fleeing the dollar, but housing market collapses anyway, because almost all of it is borrowed money and almost nobody has real savings to buy a house outright. So money generating ventures gain relative value while money pits (houses) lose value once fiat dies and is displaced by real market money (whatever that may be, but I set my bets in a particular way).

I don't think the next 20 years are going to be about rebuilding socialism, they are going to be rebuilding individual freedoms and thus opportunities, companies will spring out into existence, figuring out ways to help the people that ended up in these conditions, helping them to do something productive and get some payment doing some of those productive things.

I think the next 20 years after the crash are going to be about rebuilding the economy but the only way to do it would be by reducing the role of government to something entirely negligible.

There is no other way to survive when all of the assumptions and basic institutions fall on their face and disappear in the poof of actual logic (can't steal money forever, can't borrow forever, have to pay back at some point).

I think we are going to be moving away from collectivism of all forms (communism, socialism, fascism) and towards freedom again actually, maybe I am a bit premature on this but it is bound to happen in a global economy with at least some entrepreneurial people. The trick is to program the mistakes of the past into machines, who would remember the problems of the past and become certain rule-setters as to what direction any future attempt at setting up a government structure takes.

AFAIC governments should not exist at all, only individuals and their companies should exist and I think the future is going to move in that direction past the inevitable impending self-destruction of the current system.

I think I got modded down at least 2000 times in the last 16 years or so for saying this particular simple thing: capital competes with labour.

Labour and capital are in competition, there is always some price point, where it is cheaper to invest capital to reduce reliance on labour and the opposite is also true, should labour become cheap enough it can win against capital for some time at least.

What are the factors that lead towards labour being more expensive than capital? Well, in the so called 'developed' nations that would be government created inflation (paper fiat printing and interest rate manipulation), business regulations (which are taxes) and other income and wealth taxes.

The price of labour in the free market may or may not in some cases lead to investment of capital in order to displace the said labour but in a non-free market system that the so called 'developed' world is running the price of labour is artificially high, pushed by regulations and laws and taxes high enough for capital to win over and over and over and over.

Companies like Uber and many others will come up with ways to bring down the cost of labour by getting around regulations and laws (and hopefully taxes at some point) in order to make labour competitive again. For now we are not there yet.

Various economic indicators in the USA are showing a significant slow down in the economy, it's systemic but the TV will make you think this is all weather related, which is pure nonsense. Weather happens, so do other things, these things shouldn't cause the so called 'economists' miss their targets all the time by such huge margins. The USA (and some other) economy is dying the death of trillions of cuts administered by the government and various 'progressive' agenda but also by the mix of corporate/state agenda that prevents free market from working. Free market is then blamed, the idiots say: 'free market fails' or whatnot, when the reality is that it is their system of government that fails to protect individual liberties and freedoms required for the free market to exist.

There will be no easy fix for this failure to protect individual liberties, it will be a painful and very expensive crash, the question is what do you do after that crash?

I am not confident that the world will remain a hospitable place for life until we are ready by your standard.

Getting the resources and people there is very close to being within our technical capability. The task ourselves, if we perform it, will take care of the remaining gaps.

Creating a self-sustaining colony outside of the Earth's environment is going to need a lot of work, but it is not work that can ever be achieved on this earth. We have to actually put people in space to achieve this. Our best experience so far is with submarines. Academic research has so far yielded only farcial frauds like Biosphere II.

Technically, making transceivers work when there are 30 of them in vehicles next to each other can get difficult. People wonder why you can buy a dual-band walkie talkie for $60 but the one in the police car costs much more. If it's well engineered, the one in the police car has some RF plumbing that isn't in the $60 walkie talkie.

You are exactly right. One thing though, it's "Ham" or even "ham". It's not an acronym. Thanks!

You do know that science isn't the only reason to go to space, don't you?

There is the issue of continuing the existence of the Human race, and whatever other life we choose to bring with us.

Planets and suns aren't sure things, you know. We sort of take ours for granted, but there is the evidence of the sky around us. And the ominous silence of a galaxy that should be filled with intelligent life...

Is anyone still taking June 7 seriously? And where is it supposed to happen now? Cape Caneveral instead of Vandenberg? I would certiainly drive down if they held it at Vandenberg. I was there for the first try on DISCOVR.

The first test was supposed to come off much earlier than May. There are both commercial launches and government ones in the way, and there was the Helium pressurization issue which put some things off schedule.

It's said that making a mistake in manufacturing work on equipment for the Russian space program could have consequences a lot worse than just being fired.

It's true that we place more value on lives of famous astronauts lost than we place on all of those people inconveniently freezing to death because they have nowhere to sleep but our city sidewalks, etc. Nobody's holding a years-long investigation about them.

And I am totally, totally pissed off at all of the news coverage that goes to a few westerners killed on Everest compared to the 10,000 little people who got buried alive in Nepal.

But I am not sure any of this says a thing about what nation will lead in space.