Comment Humans in space? don't we know better now? (Score 1) 384
I am not a fan of human space travel. The symbolism of going out into
space never really excited me much, since I tend to think I wouldn't
like it, and I never really understood why someone would want to go
up.
Would any of you? Like at least a few other slashdot readers, I lead a sedentary existence, sometime emerging into the outdoors for a few hours here and there(so few I am pasty faced and open to jibes from my dark-toned girlfriend) . But I wouldn't want to give those few hours up. I don't want to wear space suits, or work on a space station on mars which would be like a small claustrophobic village, though less fun since there are no outdoors. As for orwellian nightmares...well, forget about privacy in any of these places, or even freedom. Ultimately, who has the freedom to do as s/he pleases when you could kill everyone around you just by opening the wrong door. The pioneers who go out will be, well visionary, but then that's often just another word for stupid and deluded.
As to whether I should pay as a taxpayer for people to go up into space, well, then my opinion is quite clear: no. The arguments for human space exploration are 1) all the eggs in one basket theory. Well, aphorism-based policy is tricky, since there are quite a few aphorisms around. Rather than go through an exhaustive list against foolhardiness, let me quote/paraphrase two: A bird on earth is worth two on Mars. Put all your eggs in the one basket and--watch that basket! Does anyone seriously believe that building a station on Mars has a better survivability than building a deep biodome bomb shelter in Colorado? The latter is significantly cheaper, and no need to worry about bone density loss, just the usual pastiness factor for white folk. :-)
As an aside, I don't want to give up on Earth. And I don't want anyone else to have that option either. ie. if the elite of the world decide merely living in America isn't safe enough from the teeming hordes anymore, and go off into space, can you imagine the consequences for those of us still leaving down here? Absentee ownership will take on a whole new meaning. ie. I like having all the eggs in one basket. Perhaps we've already doomed the earth with our profligate ways. It's still cheaper to build shelters on Earth. It's much easier to make a go of it in apocalyptic earth than to survive on a mars colony with earth in collapse.
2) Encouraging young people into science. Or is it encouraging young people into space science that will then think that going into space is a worthy goal. I seem to have always thought going into space was foolish. Why not colonize the undersea while you're at it! oh not sexy enough.
Well science doesn't need the sex. America's society is pretty sick now, more concerned with getting a hit single or becoming a parasitic business contract lawyer who does IPOs (or whatever they do when they aren't sucking the life juices of positive life force) than with understanding how the world works... Science is not about going to mars. It's about understanding new things. Try understanding how the human brain works or how life works or countless other things....now that's science.
Encourage people into engineering...well engineering is always about balancing the forces of nature against the forces of man, including his/her pocketbook. Figure out how to store energy efficiently so that one can ride out power demand surges when everyone turns on the dishwasher....now that's a challenging science and engineering problem. Figure out how to REDUCE the amount of fertilizer while still obtaining good growth results (aside: what kind of agricultural engineering policy is it to develop plants that resist fertilizer and pesticide excess rather than finding ways to reduce susceptibility to pests and encourage growth? agricultural engineering run by pesticide companies, obviously.)
Encourage people into the sciences and engineering domain? well in a way, sure. It creates jobs for high tech types. (well like me. :-) )
Now that even chip design is being offshored, the only real
engineering work in the US is soon going to be NASA and the defence
industry? Great! (Well it'd be greater for me if I were an American
citizen!) In a way, perhaps that explains why some many science/tech
types are so pro-space. Look where the money is, as they say.
As detailed further in the next point, the human space race is expensive. Why be indirect about it? You want to encourage people in engineering and sciences? Encourage those kind of businesses, those kind of schools. Discourage complicated tax codes (rich accountants); highly skewed medical staff market (very expensive to become a doctor in the US. You obviously are way too tight on the supply since you need to import from all over the world. Tight supply of doctors = rich doctors); winner-take-all business climate, focus on financial dealings, CEO glorification (What does a CEO do of real value? talk to rich investors? Golf? attend board meetings of other companies where they hike up one another's salaries.), entire derivatives markets (Go into money: it's way easier to understand than the effect of Maxwell's Equations at the nanoscale chip level, and once you learn, you're done! money's money. Derivatives are new but they're a joke, a very lucrative joke, so the joke's on me for becoming an engineer.) crazy tort and criminal system (rich lawyers). I repeat: the joke's on me for becoming an engineer. Sure engineering is hard work, when you try to do it right. But hell, stockboy at costco is hard work too--I know. And McDonald's is hard, and ad writing can be hard (though sometimes you have to wonder whether hard work goes on for some of these ads!) and brain surgery is hard. Heart surgery is also hard, but is better paid than brain surgery. More clogged arteries around than clogged brains...I find that hard to believe. Oh right, people don't mind having clogged brains (I know I know, brain surgeons don't deal with intelligence, even less with clear, honest thinking. Damn shame.) . ie. what you get paid only indirectly depends on how hard you work. And it's not just education...some smart hardworking PhDs in biosciences aren't raking in the dough either. Our society just values certain things more than others, and actually doing stuff ranks at the bottom of the barrel these days.
Perhaps some engineers feel it's just right that some money come their way finally. I'd prefer to have a business climate where making a 20% profit on a gidjet sounds like a good project. Oh sure, in today's climate, investors claim they'd be happy with that...but they're just biding their time for the next speculative bubble to make the real dough.
So after all this meandering let me summarize this point: the human space race is a poor means to encourage young people into science. For it confuses the goal of science, understanding, with sexy and symbolic gestures. Perhaps the money does encourage some engineering and science by creating a reserve of government employees and subcontractors, but better means of encouraging engineering and science as professions exist, and the money could be used for other tasks, which brings me to the next point.
3) Better than spending it down here on earth! A previous poster on slashdot said there would always be poor and hungry people, and one shouldn't stop doing things because of this. Furthermore, he states that the symbolism of searching and the research spinoffs are essential. Well, how much research could Africa churn out, if people could eat and live comfortably? And wasn't the eradication of smallpox one of the greatest real achievements of the human race? Would the elimination of hunger and abject poverty not be THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT EVER, engineering and otherwise. I apologize for the allcaps, but come on! Going to mars is nothing! We get there and SO WHAT! spinoffs!? Why wait for spinoffs!? how about we research smaller sources of power right now? Better solar panels! So NASA came up with miniaturization. That was years ago. And the non-spacefaring among us would have come up with that one sometime along the way. ie. if there had been no NASA there would have been no research? ridiculous. If that had genuinely been true, the US would have deserved its fate, but seeing the size of the American defence research commitment, one does tend to think that the US research field would have done all right. And perhaps without the fat high margin government contracts for space, America's researchers could have focussed on efficient manufacturing techniques.
4) The nature of pioneering is to lose a few lives. Let us consider the expansion of America into the west. The first pioneers had it pretty rough. Still, it wasn't really that rough to decide to pioneer. Life in the east was pretty miserable, and those that found pioneering too rough probably didn't last long enough to... get onto CNN to tell those back east they should stay home. Oh right no CNN! Well, relative to those early pioneers, we are better informed about the risks of space travel. And even if we were as uninformed, we can just up and go (otherwise you know some people would be looking for gold on mars! just on the offchance right!). Well, if the west of the US was completely uninhabited today, it would take very little time to settle. Our tech is just so much better now. Cars that can drive across the country, trains, planes, speedboats, (wagons=minivans?). What's the rush to do it now? in 60 years, when america finally recovers from the babyboom generation, well things will be different.
5) What about our parents' cojones! A slashdot poster pointed out that we have to do this for our parents and our children. Well, I hope my grandchildren will actually have a world to live in, not a bomb shelter nor a mars colony.
But what about our parents? According to the poster, his parents had the balls to dream of the moon...well my parents are in the baby boom generation...their parents paid for this space business. well, to be frank, my grandparents had pretty miserable lives back then. During the 50-60s, they were true corporate slaves and they were fighting for union rights. Not because they wanted to particularly, since they didn't want to rock the boat. They had no choice in the matter. Corporations were just so plain evil there was no choice really. Most of this kind of stuff is offshore now, so it's not in our faces but that wasn't a world very tolerant of people expressing their opinions. Yet, when we read about that time, we hear of great economic prosperity. Of course, old people died then. Now they linger, and the baby boom is going to linger for decades. They had it pretty good...creating pension plans, medicare (Canada), welfare (Canada) but now is the time to pay for that. They were too busy paying for space to pay for their own expenses so now I'll pay. Great.
As for their moral courage...the employer was always right. The government was nearly allpowerful. Cops could beat anyone. Parents could beat their children. Well, people in that time did what they were told. We're going to the moon. Great! let's do it! Only when confronted with many thousands of bodybags did Americans question their view of Vietnam. Sure there are exceptions but if it weren't for truly egregious conditions, the common man wouldn't have gone on strike. Now, we've gone to the other extreme. Well, I like this extreme, having rights and and wanting my money spent as I see fit.
So finally, the notion of a space-race was a bit odd at its origin, but at least, we didn't know any better. Now, we know its tough and lethal. It should emphasize to reasonable people the importance of life down here on earth.
When we don't have continents of sick, starving people, and when our technology has advanced sufficiently, perhaps we, the government and private companies, can then go into space. When all of earth is well-fed and we've figured out how to make our industry into closed systems, well, then we'll need new frontiers and probably have the means to achieve them, though even then, with difficulty. For now, we've got more work down here than any reasonable person could possibly want to think about. I would like to focus on that.
Would any of you? Like at least a few other slashdot readers, I lead a sedentary existence, sometime emerging into the outdoors for a few hours here and there(so few I am pasty faced and open to jibes from my dark-toned girlfriend) . But I wouldn't want to give those few hours up. I don't want to wear space suits, or work on a space station on mars which would be like a small claustrophobic village, though less fun since there are no outdoors. As for orwellian nightmares...well, forget about privacy in any of these places, or even freedom. Ultimately, who has the freedom to do as s/he pleases when you could kill everyone around you just by opening the wrong door. The pioneers who go out will be, well visionary, but then that's often just another word for stupid and deluded.
As to whether I should pay as a taxpayer for people to go up into space, well, then my opinion is quite clear: no. The arguments for human space exploration are 1) all the eggs in one basket theory. Well, aphorism-based policy is tricky, since there are quite a few aphorisms around. Rather than go through an exhaustive list against foolhardiness, let me quote/paraphrase two: A bird on earth is worth two on Mars. Put all your eggs in the one basket and--watch that basket! Does anyone seriously believe that building a station on Mars has a better survivability than building a deep biodome bomb shelter in Colorado? The latter is significantly cheaper, and no need to worry about bone density loss, just the usual pastiness factor for white folk.
As an aside, I don't want to give up on Earth. And I don't want anyone else to have that option either. ie. if the elite of the world decide merely living in America isn't safe enough from the teeming hordes anymore, and go off into space, can you imagine the consequences for those of us still leaving down here? Absentee ownership will take on a whole new meaning. ie. I like having all the eggs in one basket. Perhaps we've already doomed the earth with our profligate ways. It's still cheaper to build shelters on Earth. It's much easier to make a go of it in apocalyptic earth than to survive on a mars colony with earth in collapse.
2) Encouraging young people into science. Or is it encouraging young people into space science that will then think that going into space is a worthy goal. I seem to have always thought going into space was foolish. Why not colonize the undersea while you're at it! oh not sexy enough.
Well science doesn't need the sex. America's society is pretty sick now, more concerned with getting a hit single or becoming a parasitic business contract lawyer who does IPOs (or whatever they do when they aren't sucking the life juices of positive life force) than with understanding how the world works... Science is not about going to mars. It's about understanding new things. Try understanding how the human brain works or how life works or countless other things....now that's science.
Encourage people into engineering...well engineering is always about balancing the forces of nature against the forces of man, including his/her pocketbook. Figure out how to store energy efficiently so that one can ride out power demand surges when everyone turns on the dishwasher....now that's a challenging science and engineering problem. Figure out how to REDUCE the amount of fertilizer while still obtaining good growth results (aside: what kind of agricultural engineering policy is it to develop plants that resist fertilizer and pesticide excess rather than finding ways to reduce susceptibility to pests and encourage growth? agricultural engineering run by pesticide companies, obviously.)
Encourage people into the sciences and engineering domain? well in a way, sure. It creates jobs for high tech types. (well like me.
As detailed further in the next point, the human space race is expensive. Why be indirect about it? You want to encourage people in engineering and sciences? Encourage those kind of businesses, those kind of schools. Discourage complicated tax codes (rich accountants); highly skewed medical staff market (very expensive to become a doctor in the US. You obviously are way too tight on the supply since you need to import from all over the world. Tight supply of doctors = rich doctors); winner-take-all business climate, focus on financial dealings, CEO glorification (What does a CEO do of real value? talk to rich investors? Golf? attend board meetings of other companies where they hike up one another's salaries.), entire derivatives markets (Go into money: it's way easier to understand than the effect of Maxwell's Equations at the nanoscale chip level, and once you learn, you're done! money's money. Derivatives are new but they're a joke, a very lucrative joke, so the joke's on me for becoming an engineer.) crazy tort and criminal system (rich lawyers). I repeat: the joke's on me for becoming an engineer. Sure engineering is hard work, when you try to do it right. But hell, stockboy at costco is hard work too--I know. And McDonald's is hard, and ad writing can be hard (though sometimes you have to wonder whether hard work goes on for some of these ads!) and brain surgery is hard. Heart surgery is also hard, but is better paid than brain surgery. More clogged arteries around than clogged brains...I find that hard to believe. Oh right, people don't mind having clogged brains (I know I know, brain surgeons don't deal with intelligence, even less with clear, honest thinking. Damn shame.) . ie. what you get paid only indirectly depends on how hard you work. And it's not just education...some smart hardworking PhDs in biosciences aren't raking in the dough either. Our society just values certain things more than others, and actually doing stuff ranks at the bottom of the barrel these days.
Perhaps some engineers feel it's just right that some money come their way finally. I'd prefer to have a business climate where making a 20% profit on a gidjet sounds like a good project. Oh sure, in today's climate, investors claim they'd be happy with that...but they're just biding their time for the next speculative bubble to make the real dough.
So after all this meandering let me summarize this point: the human space race is a poor means to encourage young people into science. For it confuses the goal of science, understanding, with sexy and symbolic gestures. Perhaps the money does encourage some engineering and science by creating a reserve of government employees and subcontractors, but better means of encouraging engineering and science as professions exist, and the money could be used for other tasks, which brings me to the next point.
3) Better than spending it down here on earth! A previous poster on slashdot said there would always be poor and hungry people, and one shouldn't stop doing things because of this. Furthermore, he states that the symbolism of searching and the research spinoffs are essential. Well, how much research could Africa churn out, if people could eat and live comfortably? And wasn't the eradication of smallpox one of the greatest real achievements of the human race? Would the elimination of hunger and abject poverty not be THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT EVER, engineering and otherwise. I apologize for the allcaps, but come on! Going to mars is nothing! We get there and SO WHAT! spinoffs!? Why wait for spinoffs!? how about we research smaller sources of power right now? Better solar panels! So NASA came up with miniaturization. That was years ago. And the non-spacefaring among us would have come up with that one sometime along the way. ie. if there had been no NASA there would have been no research? ridiculous. If that had genuinely been true, the US would have deserved its fate, but seeing the size of the American defence research commitment, one does tend to think that the US research field would have done all right. And perhaps without the fat high margin government contracts for space, America's researchers could have focussed on efficient manufacturing techniques.
4) The nature of pioneering is to lose a few lives. Let us consider the expansion of America into the west. The first pioneers had it pretty rough. Still, it wasn't really that rough to decide to pioneer. Life in the east was pretty miserable, and those that found pioneering too rough probably didn't last long enough to... get onto CNN to tell those back east they should stay home. Oh right no CNN! Well, relative to those early pioneers, we are better informed about the risks of space travel. And even if we were as uninformed, we can just up and go (otherwise you know some people would be looking for gold on mars! just on the offchance right!). Well, if the west of the US was completely uninhabited today, it would take very little time to settle. Our tech is just so much better now. Cars that can drive across the country, trains, planes, speedboats, (wagons=minivans?). What's the rush to do it now? in 60 years, when america finally recovers from the babyboom generation, well things will be different.
5) What about our parents' cojones! A slashdot poster pointed out that we have to do this for our parents and our children. Well, I hope my grandchildren will actually have a world to live in, not a bomb shelter nor a mars colony.
But what about our parents? According to the poster, his parents had the balls to dream of the moon...well my parents are in the baby boom generation...their parents paid for this space business. well, to be frank, my grandparents had pretty miserable lives back then. During the 50-60s, they were true corporate slaves and they were fighting for union rights. Not because they wanted to particularly, since they didn't want to rock the boat. They had no choice in the matter. Corporations were just so plain evil there was no choice really. Most of this kind of stuff is offshore now, so it's not in our faces but that wasn't a world very tolerant of people expressing their opinions. Yet, when we read about that time, we hear of great economic prosperity. Of course, old people died then. Now they linger, and the baby boom is going to linger for decades. They had it pretty good...creating pension plans, medicare (Canada), welfare (Canada) but now is the time to pay for that. They were too busy paying for space to pay for their own expenses so now I'll pay. Great.
As for their moral courage...the employer was always right. The government was nearly allpowerful. Cops could beat anyone. Parents could beat their children. Well, people in that time did what they were told. We're going to the moon. Great! let's do it! Only when confronted with many thousands of bodybags did Americans question their view of Vietnam. Sure there are exceptions but if it weren't for truly egregious conditions, the common man wouldn't have gone on strike. Now, we've gone to the other extreme. Well, I like this extreme, having rights and and wanting my money spent as I see fit.
So finally, the notion of a space-race was a bit odd at its origin, but at least, we didn't know any better. Now, we know its tough and lethal. It should emphasize to reasonable people the importance of life down here on earth.
When we don't have continents of sick, starving people, and when our technology has advanced sufficiently, perhaps we, the government and private companies, can then go into space. When all of earth is well-fed and we've figured out how to make our industry into closed systems, well, then we'll need new frontiers and probably have the means to achieve them, though even then, with difficulty. For now, we've got more work down here than any reasonable person could possibly want to think about. I would like to focus on that.
