El Queso
07-25-09, 22:12
Or instead of socialism, even the status quo.
This is a subject I have brought up at dinners and get togethers a few times, and the most common reaction is to think of it as science fiction, the stuff of dreamers for hundreds of years in the future, or just plain silly and unworkable.
I'll present a couple of links to set up the subject matter and if you don't want to read all the way through due to lack of interest or what-have-you, cool. But it's germaine to back up some of the arguments I am presenting.
First, a link about a news article on the recent awereness of an impact on Jupiter from a large object in space, as well as how Jupiter is as dangerous to us as it is a protector:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/weekinreview/26overbye.html
Second, a link to some general comments about asteroids and space colonization.
http://www.nss.org/settlement/asteroids/key.html
One key quote from the second link:
"Professor John Lewis has pointed out (in Mining the Sky [there's a link in the article I linked to]) that the resources of the solar system (the most accessible of which being those in the NEAs) can permanently support in first-world comfort some quadrillion people."
I say that instead of our government throwing trillions of dollars that we don't have into bail-out money for financial institutions, become stockholders in private-sector companies, ensure that government employees have jobs, get into the healthcare business, et al, it should rethink the target of that money to developing a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) access system.
There are two major things that creating such a system will do: Allow us access to an incredible amount of easily-accessed wealth in minerals, gases and zero gravity (excellent for manufacturing many, many things) and allow us (the human race) to defend ourselves from the millions of very large objects orbiting the Sun with us and coming from outside the solar system, any one of which that if it were to hit the Earth would cause an extinction event equal to or worse than what wiped out the dinosuars 65 million years ago.
To me, either one of those ideas is worth spending the money on much more than what it is currently being spent on. If Obama were to propose something like this, he may be laughed at; but if he could pull it off, he would be remembered for probably thousands of years as the visionary that saved the human race from its confinement on an isolated ball of mud, fighting amongst all of the different inmates.
Immediate benefits would be a quick rise in the general edutaion level of our country as people began to train more for high tech jobs which are suddenly in demand. This is something many times the size of the everything done so far to orbit the Earth or go to the Moon, or build a space station put together. Jobs would be created from menial workers through clerks, secretaries, doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, technical tradesmen, astronomers, rocket scientists, you name it. That's just direct relationships. It would spread through the economy to lower sector industries as well.
But don't let the government do the work. The government will fund it, but let private industry do the planning and the work. Get the government to provide a framework within which space access should operate. New laws to make it easier to get into space to begin with, get NASA out of active roles in space exploration and let them act as a liason to private industry and as an advisor and overseer, but with limited powers to interfere. Work out how property rights in space should work. Start working with the world leaders to get real about things like owning property on the Moon, which right now is regarded as international property like Antarctica. How is the access going to be shared to make it fair for all, and at the same time the powers that put in the investment get a return.
Get other countries to pitch in some of their bailout monies and share in the wealth and planning. Once other countries saw we were serious about it, they would jump to be included somehow if they were smart, because whoever goes to space gets rich.
Damn people - what else is there to lead in? We need a new frontier. The human race is stagnating because there's not much more to do here, really, except the same old game that's been played for the last five hundred years or so, since the colonization of the New World.
The United States of America rose out of that colonization. It ended up leading large parts of the world into the 21st century, through a lot of crap that overall, I think, made the world a better place.
Why not lead the world into space? Why sit here fighting over the same scraps, figuring out how to share the limited wealth that exists on our planet, with so many poor people barely living while normal people live in luxury that a king of five hundred years ago never even approached in many regards.
As far as extinction events go: the dinosaurs, or whatever other creature that may have been running around some 65 million years ago, did not evolve high enough to prevent their own extinction, thereby cancelling their evolution. In fact, there is a long cycle of such extinction events in the history of our planet.
One of the extinction cycles is actually 65 million years and has happened many times over the life of Earth. Which means that we are due for one sometime soon on the cosmic scale, but that could come any time. The object that hit Jupiter is unknown. No one has ever seen it, but there are literally millions of objects that we HAVE catalogued; and yet we didn't see something that was large enough to make a Pacific Ocean-sized hole in Jupiter's atmosphere.
What hit Jupiter would have made the current popular concern about global warming a moot point. The most likely result of such an impact would be the death of all life on Earth above the microbe level, turning the planet into an iceball for thousands of years until it thawed out again.
Nothing has evolved the ability to protect its home planet in our solar system, until now. We can spend money on stupid things, or we can grow up and figure out how to make every person who desire it to be rich and also get some of our eggs out of the same basket.
Do I think it likely that anyone would ever do something so smart, as far as breaking with tradition and leverage our ability to borrow money into real wealth instead of continuing to do the same ineffectual stuff? Hell no. But space colonization will happen at some point, even though it could be decades before we get started. If we COULD get started now, we would bring ourselves and the world out of a depression where everyone is suffereing, into a new world.
This is a subject I have brought up at dinners and get togethers a few times, and the most common reaction is to think of it as science fiction, the stuff of dreamers for hundreds of years in the future, or just plain silly and unworkable.
I'll present a couple of links to set up the subject matter and if you don't want to read all the way through due to lack of interest or what-have-you, cool. But it's germaine to back up some of the arguments I am presenting.
First, a link about a news article on the recent awereness of an impact on Jupiter from a large object in space, as well as how Jupiter is as dangerous to us as it is a protector:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/weekinreview/26overbye.html
Second, a link to some general comments about asteroids and space colonization.
http://www.nss.org/settlement/asteroids/key.html
One key quote from the second link:
"Professor John Lewis has pointed out (in Mining the Sky [there's a link in the article I linked to]) that the resources of the solar system (the most accessible of which being those in the NEAs) can permanently support in first-world comfort some quadrillion people."
I say that instead of our government throwing trillions of dollars that we don't have into bail-out money for financial institutions, become stockholders in private-sector companies, ensure that government employees have jobs, get into the healthcare business, et al, it should rethink the target of that money to developing a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) access system.
There are two major things that creating such a system will do: Allow us access to an incredible amount of easily-accessed wealth in minerals, gases and zero gravity (excellent for manufacturing many, many things) and allow us (the human race) to defend ourselves from the millions of very large objects orbiting the Sun with us and coming from outside the solar system, any one of which that if it were to hit the Earth would cause an extinction event equal to or worse than what wiped out the dinosuars 65 million years ago.
To me, either one of those ideas is worth spending the money on much more than what it is currently being spent on. If Obama were to propose something like this, he may be laughed at; but if he could pull it off, he would be remembered for probably thousands of years as the visionary that saved the human race from its confinement on an isolated ball of mud, fighting amongst all of the different inmates.
Immediate benefits would be a quick rise in the general edutaion level of our country as people began to train more for high tech jobs which are suddenly in demand. This is something many times the size of the everything done so far to orbit the Earth or go to the Moon, or build a space station put together. Jobs would be created from menial workers through clerks, secretaries, doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, technical tradesmen, astronomers, rocket scientists, you name it. That's just direct relationships. It would spread through the economy to lower sector industries as well.
But don't let the government do the work. The government will fund it, but let private industry do the planning and the work. Get the government to provide a framework within which space access should operate. New laws to make it easier to get into space to begin with, get NASA out of active roles in space exploration and let them act as a liason to private industry and as an advisor and overseer, but with limited powers to interfere. Work out how property rights in space should work. Start working with the world leaders to get real about things like owning property on the Moon, which right now is regarded as international property like Antarctica. How is the access going to be shared to make it fair for all, and at the same time the powers that put in the investment get a return.
Get other countries to pitch in some of their bailout monies and share in the wealth and planning. Once other countries saw we were serious about it, they would jump to be included somehow if they were smart, because whoever goes to space gets rich.
Damn people - what else is there to lead in? We need a new frontier. The human race is stagnating because there's not much more to do here, really, except the same old game that's been played for the last five hundred years or so, since the colonization of the New World.
The United States of America rose out of that colonization. It ended up leading large parts of the world into the 21st century, through a lot of crap that overall, I think, made the world a better place.
Why not lead the world into space? Why sit here fighting over the same scraps, figuring out how to share the limited wealth that exists on our planet, with so many poor people barely living while normal people live in luxury that a king of five hundred years ago never even approached in many regards.
As far as extinction events go: the dinosaurs, or whatever other creature that may have been running around some 65 million years ago, did not evolve high enough to prevent their own extinction, thereby cancelling their evolution. In fact, there is a long cycle of such extinction events in the history of our planet.
One of the extinction cycles is actually 65 million years and has happened many times over the life of Earth. Which means that we are due for one sometime soon on the cosmic scale, but that could come any time. The object that hit Jupiter is unknown. No one has ever seen it, but there are literally millions of objects that we HAVE catalogued; and yet we didn't see something that was large enough to make a Pacific Ocean-sized hole in Jupiter's atmosphere.
What hit Jupiter would have made the current popular concern about global warming a moot point. The most likely result of such an impact would be the death of all life on Earth above the microbe level, turning the planet into an iceball for thousands of years until it thawed out again.
Nothing has evolved the ability to protect its home planet in our solar system, until now. We can spend money on stupid things, or we can grow up and figure out how to make every person who desire it to be rich and also get some of our eggs out of the same basket.
Do I think it likely that anyone would ever do something so smart, as far as breaking with tradition and leverage our ability to borrow money into real wealth instead of continuing to do the same ineffectual stuff? Hell no. But space colonization will happen at some point, even though it could be decades before we get started. If we COULD get started now, we would bring ourselves and the world out of a depression where everyone is suffereing, into a new world.