NASA's vision lost on Web generation
Joe Bednorz
CNN: "NASA's vision lost on Web generation"
"Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision
of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to
Mars, recent surveys show."
Perhaps significantly, these "high levels" are not quantified.
Full story here:
<http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/12/28/space.youth.apathy.ap/index.html>
Closer to the raw data, a report from Dittmar which actually
performed the surveys the report is based on.
<http://www.dittmar-associates.com/Market%20Study%202006%20Update~web.pdf>
Among individuals between 18 and 25 years of age:
A little over two-thirds (68%) described themselves as "Neutral" or
"Not excited or interested" in human missions to the Moon. With
regard to human missions to Mars, fully 80% were either "Neutral" or
"Not excited/interested."
"Support for the Space Exploration program is also slightly less
than in 2004, while opposition appears greater. In 2004, 55% of young
Americans endorsed the plan, with 30% opposed. In 2006, 45% of
respondents reported support for the plan, and 40% opposed it."
--
Index to free SF: <http://www.mindspring.com/~jbednorz/Free/>. The
Thunder Child's SF links to Project Gutenberg, Baen Free Library and
CDs, the Sci-Fi Channel's archive of classic & original SF & more.
All the best, Joe Bednorz
Hop David
>
> CNN: "NASA's vision lost on Web generation"
>
> "Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision
> of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to
> Mars, recent surveys show."
I have reservations myself. If there is no return on investment, any
moon bases will ultimately be more flags and footprints.
Personally I favor sending many unmanned "prospector" probes to the
moon, Mars, Phobos, Deimos and near earth asteroids. When we have an
good inventory of the most accessible space resources, we might be in a
position to establish enduring space settlements.
Hop
William December Starr
Joe Bednorz <inv...@invalid.invalid> quoted:
> <http://www.dittmar-associates.com/Market%20Study%202006%20Update~web.pdf>
>
> Among individuals between 18 and 25 years of age:
>
> A little over two-thirds (68%) described themselves as "Neutral"
> or "Not excited or interested" in human missions to the Moon.
> With regard to human missions to Mars, fully 80% were either
> "Neutral" or "Not excited/interested."
>
> "Support for the Space Exploration program is also slightly less
> than in 2004, while opposition appears greater. In 2004, 55% of
> young Americans endorsed the plan, with 30% opposed. In 2006, 45%
> of respondents reported support for the plan, and 40% opposed it."
Did the study ask similar questions about _unmanned_ exploration?
That is, is the apathy about anything that involves off-planet
stuff, or is it just with regard to canned-meat missions?
--
William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
Peter
Hop David <ho...@cunews.info> wrote:
Aren't the 18-25 year olds part of a generation that saw SciFi on TV
where we already travel at warp speed and we have met aliens, etc. How
could they possibly be excited about going to Mars? Despite the fact
that human individuals grow more mature when they age (at least some) I
wonder if the exposure to this 'effortless' kind of space travel at an
impressible age sticks with you - just as watching the Apollo missions
in my teens left a mark on me.
Personally I think if people are asked about their opinion on NASA's
plans there also should be questions about their general knowledge of
science. There is so much mis-information out there (Area 51, UFOs, and
a whole bunch of other fakes) and for the uncritical individual it just
blurs with real science into one mix of strange and foreign 'facts'.
For most people (of all ages) I know, space exploration is of so little
interest that it's almost shocking, Even, or especially, if they are SF
fans, most of them are exposed to TV series or movies (Star Trek,
Galactica, Stargate... whatever) and there is hardly any connection with
the real world (although I am sure there are people who believe that a
black branch of the US government has a Stargate).
Having a 7 year old in 1st grade I keep thinking about how to influence
her to be interested in science. It seems at that age they are
interested in everything cool and new. Doing hands-on things, building
stuff. I am not sure how much of this interest is channeled in a
positive, scientific direction in school.
For older folks the threat of an asteroid impact might raise awareness.
Oh, I forgot, humanity already dealt with that successfully in a bunch
of moderately entertaining movies. It's like the bird-flu or global
warming - some believe in it and some don't.
Personally I applaud NASA to make so much material available to ordinary
people via their website. When my daughter and I browse the internet she
usually wants to stop at some Star Wars websites and we often end up on
the NASA or related site to look up the 'real' stuff.
I apologize to bring this rather unscientific opinion to this thread.
Peter
Paul F. Dietz
> I wonder if the exposure to this 'effortless' kind of space travel at an
> impressible age sticks with you - just as watching the Apollo missions
> in my teens left a mark on me.
Those depending on irrational exhuberance to sell space shouldn't
be surprised if some other group came up with a more attractive
form of irrationality.
Paul
Joseph T Major
news:pmkienle-F92310...@news.isp.giganews.com...
I'm thinking of the Congressman who wound up a debate on a proposal to
fund a SETI program by waving a tabloid and saying something on the order of
"Why are they bothering when it's happening already?" One hopes he was only
using it as a means of ridiculing SETI.
There was a discussion going on the message board for Phil Plait's Bad
Astronomy website (http://www.badastronomy.com and
http://www.bautforum.com/) -- and by Klono's gadolimum guts and carballoy
claws worth every electron of it -- about the Moon Hoax. The poster
supporting it, who ominously used the name "Spock", said that his generation
had YouTube and other immediate accesses to knowledge, so they were too wise
and well-informed to be fooled by this Moon landing story. Perhaps not
surprisingly, he trotted out one debunked conspiracy theory after another,
never bothering to cite any evidence in support of them, and was
contemptuous of these so out of touch, so not with it, like ancient types
who wouldn't take his word.
There is an erosion of critical thinking ability, and those with the
loudest mouths and the smallest brains now have the means, provided by those
with the opposite qualities, to trumpet their ignorance throughout the
world, and by having this ignorance passed through a vast intelligent
machine, have it rebranded as spectacular wisdom.
Joseph T Major
Damien Valentine
>From the Dittmar Associates report: "72% believe that money would be
better spent elsewhere: jobs; defense." From my own observations, that
seems like a solid concern across the board, no matter your age.
Also of note: "61% of respondents indicated that 'new space' endeavors
such as the flight of Space Ship One and the possibility of space
tourism are relevant to their lives -- the primary reason cited was
that 'regular people can get to go'." Bears some thinking about,
especially when exploration -- as opposed to tourism or complex
manufacturing -- can be much cheaper and safer with robots.
- Damien Valentine
Michael Ash
>
> There is an erosion of critical thinking ability, and those with the
> loudest mouths and the smallest brains now have the means, provided by those
> with the opposite qualities, to trumpet their ignorance throughout the
> world, and by having this ignorance passed through a vast intelligent
> machine, have it rebranded as spectacular wisdom.
As far as I can tell people are no dumber (or smarter) than they ever
were. The only significant change is that a moron is now able to send his
opinion around the world as long as he has access to some relatively cheap
equipment. However, I don't see this causing any added weight to be added
to his opinions. It's just that now people have the opportunity to believe
in the crazy UFO conspiracy theorist in Elbonia instead of the one who
lives three doors down.
I think I might just be a touch too old to be in the target demographic
(born in 1980) but I can't say I'm surprised. I missed out on most of the
good and interesting bits of the Space Race but was fully exposed to two
shuttles blowing up and twenty five years of spinning around in LEO. I
have no confidence in NASA or anything that even slightly resembles a
NASA-like program to do anything worthwhile. I don't know how this poll
was worded, but if it had any association with NASA-style space activity
then I would have ended up on the side of the naysayers had I been polled.
This doesn't mean I'm not interested in doing good and useful things in
space, and if that's the case than the poll results don't mean the "iPod
generation" (truly a more condescending name for a generation has not been
seen) is against it either.
--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software
Hop David
> There was a discussion going on the message board for Phil Plait's Bad
> Astronomy website (http://www.badastronomy.com and
> http://www.bautforum.com/) -- and by Klono's gadolimum guts and carballoy
> claws worth every electron of it -- about the Moon Hoax. The poster
> supporting it, who ominously used the name "Spock", said that his generation
> had YouTube and other immediate accesses to knowledge, so they were too wise
> and well-informed to be fooled by this Moon landing story.
Sounds like an uninventive troll using tried and true devices to rile
his audience. I hope the folks at that forum aren't feeding him.
Hop
Joe Bednorz
<pmki...@acmerecords.com.invalid> wrote:
>In article <12pflt8...@corp.supernews.com>,
> Hop David <ho...@cunews.info> wrote:
>
>> Joe Bednorz wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > CNN: "NASA's vision lost on Web generation"
>> >
>> > "Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision
>> > of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to
>> > Mars, recent surveys show."
>>
{Ruthless editing.]
>There is so much mis-information out there (Area 51, UFOs, and
>a whole bunch of other fakes) and for the uncritical individual it just
>blurs with real science into one mix of strange and foreign 'facts'.
>
"A cute web comic on YouTube Moon landing comments you might
appreciate". Link and comment from <http://www.nasawatch.com/>, which
is also where I found the story that started this thread.
Ord...@aol.com
IMHO it comes down to the quite rational belief amonst most people,
including SF fans, that they personally have no chance of going into
space. When you add that we have already explored, via probes, the
planets of this solar system and found there is nowhere interesting to
go and nothing worth digging up and bringing back, the lack of
enthusiasm is quite rational.
What people tend to forget is that people went to sea -to make their
fortune- not just for the heck of it; that there is very little in the
way of the European ship-based exploration of the world that wasn't
generated by a profit motive that is clearly lacking in space.
Science Fiction, or at least the major media branches of it, has leaned
on and analogy to European exploration/colonialism for a very long
time. Problem is that the analogy has now been shown to be false, or at
least false as long as space travel remains so bloody expensive. It
will take a serious paradigme shift in technology to reduce the cost of
space travel to a profitable level, especially since there is nothing
out there to bring back that is worth enough money (check the periodic
table, cross check against commondity prices) to turn a profit.
Where space -can- be used to make a profit, communications sats of
various kinds, it is being exploited quite well.
So, Ordover, what would you do instead?
I would put powerful sensor sats in orbit around every interesting body
in the solar system. If they see something interesting enough, send a
rover. If the rover finds something interesting enough (like life),
send a robotic recovery mission. If, and only if something turns up
that is vital and can -only- be done by humans, then and only then send
people.
Douhe...@gmail.com
Seeing the endless $$$$$ vacuum of the ISS (50-100 B$ and counting...),
and the 2 shuttle losses, I really don't think we need to goof off
anymore with manned spaced flights in the near future. Maybe us ol'
fogeys don't realize that, but if the iPod generation realizes that
they don't to send up any meat, all the better for them.
Contrast ISS/shuttle/moon mission with the better, cheaper, faster
motto Nasa kinda used a few years back, only to get skewered when one
of the somewhat-too-cheap gizmos ended up getting lost. That's just
the point, it was cheap enough to lose it.
The ISS is a scientific and budgetary abomination, because it displaces
money better used elsewhere in space. The moon mission will be the
same. Well, at least it's not my tax $ (I live in Canada).
Robots, robots, robots. And not using Ebay-sourced 8086 processors
like the shuttles' either (wonder if that particular rumor is true -
wouldn't surprise me). Spend more money in space, but only use
astronauts where there is a real benefit to doing so.
Contrast also the X-prize/SpaceShipOne cost and innovation to NASA's
manned spaceflight management since the shuttle...
Ord...@aol.com
> Contrast also the X-prize/SpaceShipOne cost and innovation to NASA's
> manned spaceflight management since the shuttle...
See, I don't see Space Ship One as particularly interesting or
innovative; all it provides is a quick joyride to the edge of space -
so what? It's not a travel device, it's a roller coaster, at best an
amusement park ride. And the cost of its development was lowered
because of what NASA had already done, and was still pretty darn high.
If it's an advance that, if you have multiple billions at your
disposable, you can privately build a joyride that hits the edge of
space, fine, but i don't see it.
Be that as it may, where would you go with it?
Howard Brazee
>See, I don't see Space Ship One as particularly interesting or
>innovative; all it provides is a quick joyride to the edge of space -
>so what? It's not a travel device, it's a roller coaster, at best an
>amusement park ride. And the cost of its development was lowered
>because of what NASA had already done, and was still pretty darn high.
>
>If it's an advance that, if you have multiple billions at your
>disposable, you can privately build a joyride that hits the edge of
>space, fine, but i don't see it.
>
>Be that as it may, where would you go with it?
If extreme recreation pays for new technology - so be it.
It's interesting that for a long time, front-line medicine was very
innovative. Nowadays, it is mostly first aid - with people flying
out to more standard operating rooms. But there is new medical
technology designed to quickly repair damage done on the front lines
of the NFL.
The bigger variety of people wanting to go into space - the better. I
like the concept of wealthy geriatrics wanting to live in a
micro-gravity - or better yet, on the moon. But we aren't there yet.
Douhe...@gmail.com
> innovative; all it provides is a quick joyride to the edge of space -
> so what?
I agree that the planned use for SpaceShipOne is frivolous. However,
from Wikipedia:
"Development costs were estimated to be $25-million, funded completely
by Paul Allen."
I would argue that getting somebody up in near space, using a reusable,
quick-turnaround vehicle (the original shuttle goal) for < 100 million
$ is innovative in its own right. It shows that space is accessible to
entities other than big governments and within the reach of talented
engineering teams.
>And the cost of its development was lowered
> because of what NASA had already done, and was still pretty darn high.
Kudos to NASA for laying the groundwork. I like NASA, I just don't
like the politicians saddling it with expensive white elephants.
Again, I am not arguing that SpaceShipOne, in itself, is a particularly
useful vehicle by itself. Just that the fact of its success has
captured much more imagination than the ISS. The ISS recently made the
news because of the gourmet meals that have been served on it. Nothing
wrong with the guys and gals eating well. Just sad that this seems to
be its big contribution to the common man's interest in space for the
last 6 months. And that is what the OP was talking about - the common
man's interest in space.
>It's not a travel device, it's a roller coaster, at best an
> amusement park ride.
Lastly, I am somewhat concerned by global warming and the impact of
aviation transport on it. Multiple SpaceShipOne++ flights to get
tourists up there is not really my cup of tea - though the impact would
presumably remain much less than regular air transport.
Ord...@aol.com
> I agree that the planned use for SpaceShipOne is frivolous. However,
> from Wikipedia:
>
> "Development costs were estimated to be $25-million, funded completely
> by Paul Allen."
The accurate figure is somewhat closer to 250 million. Still fairly
cheap. 25M wouldn't pay the salaries of the eningeers plus the cost of
building the offices, let alone the ship. :)
>
> I would argue that getting somebody up in near space, using a reusable,
> quick-turnaround vehicle (the original shuttle goal) for < 100 million
> $ is innovative in its own right. It shows that space is accessible to
> entities other than big governments and within the reach of talented
> engineering teams.
>
But that's already true. Comsats, including GPS sats, are a corporate
product. SS1 doesn't show that space is accessible, since it just
-barely- got to space, and didn't do anything while it was there
-because there is nothing to do-. The point I'm making about comsats
is that if you show a profit motive, business jumps all over it. The
energy used in building SS1s or whatever should be put into figuring
out, say, a profit motive, bird in the hand, for going to the Moon.
> Again, I am not arguing that SpaceShipOne, in itself, is a particularly
> useful vehicle by itself. Just that the fact of its success has
> captured much more imagination than the ISS.
The ISS is being used unimaginatively. If it were me, I'd use it for
peace conferences - there's that effect all the astro/cosmo nauts have
mentioned about looking down at Earth and feeling that the problems
seperating us are petty. We could use that feeling among our leaders.
But even if that didn't help, geez, the publicity from it would be
HUGE. :) In comparisson, I only see the SS1 stirring the imagination
of the unreasoning space junkies.
Douhe...@gmail.com
> product. SS1 doesn't show that space is accessible, since it just
> -barely- got to space, and didn't do anything while it was there
> -because there is nothing to do-.
Ah, but comsats and satellites, are not launchers. They are payload.
There is no doubt that private entreprise can find useful things to do
with stuff in space.
Getting the stuff up there in the first place has generally been the
responsibility of governments and their agencies. SpaceShipOne, as
well as some other launching companies, show that it might be possible
to change that. As someone who believes in the inherent inefficiency
of most government endeavors, I welcome private space launchers.
Government involvement is often necessary, if the private sector can't
do the work, or can't be trusted to do it in a responsible fashion.
There is no such reason for a government monopoly on space launches
anymore.
The GPS network infrastructure is not private technology at all. Its
users can be corporations or individuals, but its satellites are Uncle
Sam's.
>The energy used in building SS1s or whatever should be put into figuring
> out, say, a profit motive, bird in the hand, for going to the Moon.
That's for SS1's sponsors to decide, not you or me. We didn't pay for
it. Somebody else may agree with you and do what you suggest. I would
like that. That's also the nice thing about opening up space to
private companies - many more things might be considered.
Going to the Moon might be worthwhile, if we could use it to
manufacture stuff in its lighter gravity well rather than lifting
everything from Earth's. That would probably require figuring out more
about self-managing, self-healing, self-extending robotic assembly
lines. Putting some dudes there before that is done, in another
ISS-on-the-moon, nope.
>The ISS is being used unimaginatively. If it were me, I'd use it for
>peace conferences - there's that effect all the astro/cosmo nauts have
>mentioned about looking down at Earth and feeling that the problems
>seperating us are petty. We could use that feeling among our leaders.
Wow, most of our leaders are too geriatric to get out there. Nor would
the huge $ waste be useful to achieve anything if they could. The ISS
is pointless, period. It was a showcase for post-Cold War cooperation
and a sop to keep shuttles and Russky scientists busy. Most people
aren't even aware it is operational. Or is it? I dunno and I don't
really care. Does it do anything for Western-Russian relations? I
doubt it.
My point is that many people cared a lot more about SpaceShipOne, even
if I agree with all your remarks about its lack of direct usefulness.
It got people excited. The ISS didn't, doesn't, and won't. The same
thing will happen with the Mars and Moon missions - they are just
flag-waving hubris as someone else already said. Being so costly, they
may never happen at all and their budget would be better spent
elsewhere. If kids understand that, all the better.
Suzanne Blom
"Howard Brazee" <how...@brazee.net> wrote in message
news:jp3lp2dccj31gfdbs...@4ax.com...
Um, actually it turns out that the best thing for people is higher gravity
rather than lower. Lower gravity nicely mimics some of the effects of old
age even in the young. Not recommended for oldsters.
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>> The bigger variety of people wanting to go into space - the better. I
>> like the concept of wealthy geriatrics wanting to live in a
>> micro-gravity - or better yet, on the moon. But we aren't there yet.
>
>Um, actually it turns out that the best thing for people is higher gravity
>rather than lower. Lower gravity nicely mimics some of the effects of old
>age even in the young. Not recommended for oldsters.
High gravity doesn't work when you're weak and brittle. Low gravity
isn't to make them better able to survive on Earth - it is to allow
them to live with what they have.
Joseph T Major
news:12pj0qm...@corp.supernews.com...
He kept on participating in the thread, which at least as I understand
the definition, puts him outside the borders of trolldom. In fact, he was
arguing in one or two other threads at the time -- when he wasn't being
banned for a day.
Joseph T Major
Graham Woodland
[Followups trimmed to rasfw only]:
>
> Um, actually it turns out that the best thing for people is higher gravity
> rather than lower. Lower gravity nicely mimics some of the effects of old
> age even in the young. Not recommended for oldsters.
>
>
Now that's an interesting one, and I haven't come across it before.
Would you happen to have any cites handy? Could be some good
world-building in there, or at least some interesting points of departure.
(H'mmm... wonder how long this data has been out there? I always *did*
wonder what wall Mr Brin got the Embrace of Tides off!)
Cheers,
Gray
Ord...@aol.com
> Personally I favor sending many unmanned "prospector" probes to the
> moon, Mars, Phobos, Deimos and near earth asteroids. When we have an
> good inventory of the most accessible space resources, we might be in a
> position to establish enduring space settlements.
>
> Hop
What could prospectors expect to find that's not on the periodic table?
Dilithium? :) compare the periodic table to the commodity prices and
you'll see there's nothing that would pay back the cost of going to get.
Ord...@aol.com
Graham Woodland wrote:
> Suzanne Blom wrote:
>
> [Followups trimmed to rasfw only]:
> >
> > Um, actually it turns out that the best thing for people is higher gravity
> > rather than lower. Lower gravity nicely mimics some of the effects of old
> > age even in the young. Not recommended for oldsters.
> >
> >
> Now that's an interesting one, and I haven't come across it before.
> Would you happen to have any cites handy? Could be some good
> world-building in there, or at least some interesting points of departure.
>
Whether people can survive really long term outside of Earth's
environment is still, no pun intended, up in the air. Between the
radiation levels and the bone density and muscle loss due to
microgravity (which is not much helped, it turns out, by exercise
regimes) whether humans can really survive five, ten, or 15 years in
space is an unresolved question.
So if you have -already- lost a lot of muscle mass and bone density,
being put into an environment that has been proven to cause rapid loss
of bone density and muscle mass might not be the best choice. Since
exercise has been shown to improve both in the elderly, one could argue
that yes, higher gravity, which would result in automatic exercise,
would be better for you (depending on the general state of your health,
of course).'
Of course if you never intend to return to a 1G environment, who knows?
Another question would be how someone with brittle bones and low muscle
mass would withstand the G-forces of take off.
Joe Jefferson
The periodic table? You must be joking. Why would prospectors in space
limit themselves to looking for pure elements?
--
Joe of Castle Jefferson
http://www.castlejefferson.org
Site Updated November 25th, 2001
"Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the
poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the
hand of the wicked." - Psalm 82:3-4
Paul F. Dietz
> The periodic table? You must be joking. Why would prospectors in space
> limit themselves to looking for pure elements?
Because combinations of elements that exist on Earth can be made
on Earth, and a heck of lot more cheaply?
Paul
Ord...@aol.com
> The periodic table? You must be joking. Why would prospectors in space
> limit themselves to looking for pure elements?
They may not be looking for them, but that's a lot of what is out
there. Pure elements and common compounds. Again, what on the
commodities price list would pay back the cost of going to get? It's
not like we'll be trading for manufacutured items (even if there was
another civilization, it would be cheaper to trade the plans). What do
you imagine could be found in the solar system that could be worth the
cost of going to get?
Ord...@aol.com
The number of posts in this thread dropped, for me, from 31 to 26, and
a particular poster vanished from the thread along with my replies to
him; I didn't kill file him and I assume there is no way to delete
posts from USENET?
Odd.
Daniel Silevitch
Helium-3 is the perennial favorite. Vanishingly rare here on Earth, and
made via a rather expensive process. If (big if) it ever becomes useful
as a fusion fuel, somewhere Out There is the only plausible source.
Probably cheaper in the long run to get proton-based or deuterium-based
fusion to work, though.
-dms
IsaacKuo
You're using Google Groups, right? Threads which are posted
to more than one newsgroup will look different depending on
which newsgroup you're reading from when not all articles
are all posted to the same newsgroups. With Google Groups,
this is particularly confusing.
Also, posts get "deleted" all the time when they expire.
On Google Groups, the only articles which expire are ones
where the author has explicitely set the article to not be
archived. Presumably, none of your articles were set to
expire--so your confusion is likely from viewing it from
rec.arts.sf.written vs rec.arts.sf.science.
Isaac Kuo
Joe Jefferson
In the very distant future, perhaps. At present, we don't know all the
chemical compounds that are even possible, let alone how to make them
all. Even on Earth new mineral species of significant economic value are
still being discovered.
Also, even if you can make something more cheaply, that does not
necessarily mean that there will be no market for the more expensive
"natural" version.
Joe Jefferson
To start with, the experience of being in space. Even at current prices,
the demand for space tourism significantly exceeds the availbility of
launch vehicles: the Russians are fully booked up until 2009, and at
least 100 people have already paid deposits to fly with Virgin.
In terms of valuable materials, I'd expect to find significant deposits
of rubies and saphires on the moon. Probably some alexandrite as well.
More mundanely, I also expect that in the very near future it will be
cheaper to get construction materials on the moon to support space
tourism than to bring it all up from Earth.
Hop David
> "Hop David" <ho...@cunews.info> wrote in message
> news:12pj0qm...@corp.supernews.com...
>
>>Joseph T Major wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> There was a discussion going on the message board for Phil Plait's
>>>Bad Astronomy website (http://www.badastronomy.com and
>>>http://www.bautforum.com/) -- and by Klono's gadolimum guts and carballoy
>>>claws worth every electron of it -- about the Moon Hoax. The poster
>>>supporting it, who ominously used the name "Spock", said that his
>>>generation had YouTube and other immediate accesses to knowledge, so they
>>>were too wise and well-informed to be fooled by this Moon landing story.
>>
>>Sounds like an uninventive troll using tried and true devices to rile his
>>audience. I hope the folks at that forum aren't feeding him.
>
>
> He kept on participating in the thread, which at least as I understand
> the definition, puts him outside the borders of trolldom.
Me thinks you're confusing trolling with spamming. Trolls often take
pride in snaring responders into long back and forth exchanges.
"...responding encourages a true troll to continue disruptive posts —
hence the often-seen warning 'Please do not feed the troll'"
from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
Hop David
>>Personally I favor sending many unmanned "prospector" probes to the
>>moon, Mars, Phobos, Deimos and near earth asteroids. When we have an
>>good inventory of the most accessible space resources, we might be in a
>>position to establish enduring space settlements.
>>
>>Hop
>
>
> What could prospectors expect to find that's not on the periodic table?
Common materials placed higher in earth's gravity well could make space
more accessible.
Hop
David Johnston
<pmki...@acmerecords.com.invalid> wrote:
>In article <12pflt8...@corp.supernews.com>,
> Hop David <ho...@cunews.info> wrote:
>
>> Joe Bednorz wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > CNN: "NASA's vision lost on Web generation"
>> >
>> > "Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision
>> > of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to
>> > Mars, recent surveys show."
>>
>> I have reservations myself. If there is no return on investment, any
>> moon bases will ultimately be more flags and footprints.
>>
>> Personally I favor sending many unmanned "prospector" probes to the
>> moon, Mars, Phobos, Deimos and near earth asteroids. When we have an
>> good inventory of the most accessible space resources, we might be in a
>> position to establish enduring space settlements.
>>
>> Hop
>
>Aren't the 18-25 year olds part of a generation that saw SciFi on TV
>where we already travel at warp speed and we have met aliens, etc. How
>could they possibly be excited about going to Mars? Despite the fact
>that human individuals grow more mature when they age (at least some) I
>wonder if the exposure to this 'effortless' kind of space travel at an
>impressible age sticks with you - just as watching the Apollo missions
>in my teens left a mark on me.
I think a bigger issue than the effortlessness of spacetravel, is
knowing that in the end, all that's out there is rocks. Rocks which
aren't even all that different from our rocks.
Suzanne Blom
I understand the theory but so far have seen no evidence that it's true.
It's quite possible that putting the frail in low gravity would make them
completely unable to function while judiciously upping the gravity would
improve their physical health.
Michael S. Schiffer
news:12pr06i...@corp.supernews.com:
That does seem to be the case for microgravity. I'd think the
jury's still out on fractional gs, though, a la a Lunar or Martian
environment. Has anyone spent longer in such an environment than
the Apollo astronauts? And they had days of microgravity on either
side to confound the issue. (It would presumably be possible to do
animal experiments on a space station using a centrifuge, though I
don't know if they've been done on Mir or the ISS.)
Mike
--
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
msch...@condor.depaul.edu
George W Harris
wrote:
Yeah. Going someplace to find stuff that makes
going there easier isn't really a strong motivation.
:
:
:Hop
--
Never give a loaded gun to a woman in labor.
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.
Ord...@aol.com
Ord...@aol.com
> In terms of valuable materials, I'd expect to find significant deposits
> of rubies and saphires on the moon. Probably some alexandrite as well.
> More mundanely, I also expect that in the very near future it will be
> cheaper to get construction materials on the moon to support space
> tourism than to bring it all up from Earth.
First, why would you, and second, have you checked the prices on rubies
and saphires compared to the cost of -finding and mining them on the
moon-? Why woud you be building anything on the moon in the first
place?
Let's put this "lunar materials for construction" thing under the
microscope. First, of course, we would have to survey and find the
material we're looking for; then we would have to refine it, mold it
and shape it, in an airless, waterless environment, where spare parts
for the machines are quite a ways a way.
Btw, we don't even know -how- to refine material in an airless,
waterless environment, or smelt it, or shape it. And for what motive
would we be doing this in the first place? All the customers are on
Ord...@aol.com
cheaper to bring them up from Earth, and far, far faster.
> Hop
Ord...@aol.com
> I think a bigger issue than the effortlessness of spacetravel, is
> knowing that in the end, all that's out there is rocks. Rocks which
> aren't even all that different from our rocks.
Exactly.
Ord...@aol.com
> Yeah. Going someplace to find stuff that makes
> going there easier isn't really a strong motivation.
Exactly
Hop David
> Hop David wrote:
>
>>Ord...@aol.com wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>Personally I favor sending many unmanned "prospector" probes to the
>>>>moon, Mars, Phobos, Deimos and near earth asteroids. When we have an
>>>>good inventory of the most accessible space resources, we might be in a
>>>>position to establish enduring space settlements.
>>>>
>>>>Hop
>>>
>>>
>>>What could prospectors expect to find that's not on the periodic table?
>>
>>Common materials placed higher in earth's gravity well could make space
>>more accessible.
>>
>
> ...and you want to go way out into space and bring them back?
"way out into space"? In terms of delta vee many asteroids come quite
close. Also in terms of distance.
Hop David
> :Common materials placed higher in earth's gravity well could make space
> :more accessible.
>
> Yeah. Going someplace to find stuff that makes
> going there easier isn't really a strong motivation.
Crossing a river to build a bridge could give ROI.
Hop
Ord...@aol.com
Yes, but you're not building the bridge just to build the bridge;
you're building it because you're motivated to go to the other side
because there is something there worth getting. What's worth gettting
in space?
Ord...@aol.com
Yes, only a few tens of thousands of miles. Straight up. And made up
of nickel and iron, neither of which we're short on.
IsaacKuo
> > > Yeah. Going someplace to find stuff that makes
> > > going there easier isn't really a strong motivation.
> > Crossing a river to build a bridge could give ROI.
> Yes, but you're not building the bridge just to build the bridge;
> you're building it because you're motivated to go to the other side
Or maybe you're building the bridge because others are motivated
to go to the other side.
> because there is something there worth getting. What's worth gettting
> in space?
There are other reasons why people go somewhere. Think
of all the travel that takes place today...how much of it is
motivated by "getting something"? No, most travel has to
do with WHO is somewhere, rather than WHAT is somewhere.
Nowadays, the main reason why someone builds a house
somewhere is simply because it's a spot where there isn't
already a house. There's a limited amount of real estate on
Earth. Someday in the far future, the only place to build
more housing may be in space.
Far earlier than that, I expect people will move into space
more because of who is NOT there rather than who IS.
In the past, I've posted in half-jest that people will want to
move off-world simply to get some decent light-speed
delay between them and their parents. More seriously,
ubiquitous wireless connectivity and networked cameras
practically everywhere makes planet Earth feel more and
more crowded. Some people will want to escape it,
and if future technology has advanced sufficiently,
escaping off-world may be inexpensive enough.
Isaac Kuo
Michael Stemper
>Ordo...@aol.com wrote:
>> Hop David wrote:
>> > George W Harris wrote:
>> > > Yeah. Going someplace to find stuff that makes
>> > > going there easier isn't really a strong motivation.
>
>> > Crossing a river to build a bridge could give ROI.
>
>> Yes, but you're not building the bridge just to build the bridge;
>> you're building it because you're motivated to go to the other side
>
>Or maybe you're building the bridge because others are motivated
>to go to the other side.
That doesn't eliminate the question of "what's the motivation?", it
just moves it from you to them.
>> because there is something there worth getting. What's worth gettting
>> in space?
>
>There are other reasons why people go somewhere. Think
>of all the travel that takes place today...how much of it is
>motivated by "getting something"? No, most travel has to
>do with WHO is somewhere, rather than WHAT is somewhere.
Again, this is just moving the motivational question. If somebody comes
to see me, they come to Minnesota. Why? Because I live here. Why? Because
it's where I have a job.
>Nowadays, the main reason why someone builds a house
>somewhere is simply because it's a spot where there isn't
>already a house.
No, that's a requirement[1] rather than a reason. People generally build
a house somewhere either because it's close (in some sense) to where they
work, or because it's close (in a similar sense) to where many people work,
one of whom they expect to buy it.
> There's a limited amount of real estate on
>Earth.
Sure. Like Will Rogers almost said: "Buy land -- they're not making
any more of it." Right now, we're already down to about 600,000 square
feet of land for each person on Earth.
> Someday in the far future, the only place to build
>more housing may be in space.
Shortly after the Sahara and the Canadian tundra get too crowded.
>Far earlier than that, I expect people will move into space
>more because of who is NOT there rather than who IS.
Why did the first set of people move there? To get away from it all?
How are they going to feel when their groupies follow them?
[1] Although I know of two families who have built their houses where
there were previous houses. Haul off the old one, put up the new one.
It must be nice to be rich.
--
Michael F. Stemper
#include <Standard_Disclaimer>
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
IsaacKuo
Michael Stemper wrote:
>IsaacKuo writes:
>>Ordo...@aol.com wrote:
>>>Yes, but you're not building the bridge just to build the bridge;
>>>you're building it because you're motivated to go to the other side
>>Or maybe you're building the bridge because others are motivated
>>to go to the other side.
>That doesn't eliminate the question of "what's the motivation?", it
>just moves it from you to them.
It demonstrates a hole in sloppy thinking. It demonstrates
an important distinction between the people participating
and profiting from space travel vs the people actually
doing the travel.
As for the motivation for the travel, have a little
patience, and read on...
>>>because there is something there worth getting.
>>>What's worth gettting in space?
>>There are other reasons why people go somewhere. Think
>>of all the travel that takes place today...how much of it is
>>motivated by "getting something"? No, most travel has to
>>do with WHO is somewhere, rather than WHAT is somewhere.
>Again, this is just moving the motivational question.
It's part of an argument. Have patience, and read on...
>If somebody comes to see me, they come to Minnesota.
>Why? Because I live here.
Yes, and yes. That's part of my argument. Why travel
somewhere? To visit someone who has colonized that
area.
>Why? Because it's where I have a job.
Well, that's the reason you live in Minnesota, but
it's not the only reason why people choose to live
where they live. There are a lot of people who don't
even have a job.
>>Nowadays, the main reason why someone builds a house
>>somewhere is simply because it's a spot where there isn't
>>already a house.
>No, that's a requirement[1] rather than a reason.
>People generally build a house somewhere either
>because it's close (in some sense) to where they
>work, or because it's close (in a similar sense)
>to where many people work, one of whom they expect
>to buy it.
All the best spots which are close have already
been taken. That leaves places to build which
aren't already occupied. That'll work, for now.
We've got plenty of room to develop, for now.
>>There's a limited amount of real estate on
>>Earth. Someday in the far future, the only
>>place to build more housing may be in space.
>Shortly after the Sahara and the Canadian tundra
>get too crowded.
Oh, long after that! I expect the Sahara and
Canadian tundra to have been developed into
crowded cities before we get into serious
ocean real estate utilization. There's three
times as much surface area available in the oceans
than on land, but it's a less convenient place
to build stuff. Earth's oceans are still more
convenient than outer space.
>>Far earlier than that, I expect people will move into space
>>more because of who is NOT there rather than who IS.
>Why did the first set of people move there?
>To get away from it all?
Yeah.
>How are they going to feel when their groupies follow them?
Annoyed.
Isaac Kuo
George W Harris
wrote:
Not if the only reason to cross the river is to
build the bridge, unless you're a senator from Alaska.
:
:Hop
--
"The truths of mathematics describe a bright and clear universe,
exquisite and beautiful in its structure, in comparison with
which the physical world is turbid and confused."
-Eulogy for G.H.Hardy
Paul F. Dietz
>>Because combinations of elements that exist on Earth can be made
>>on Earth, and a heck of lot more cheaply?
>
>
> In the very distant future, perhaps. At present, we don't know all the
> chemical compounds that are even possible, let alone how to make them
> all. Even on Earth new mineral species of significant economic value are
> still being discovered.
New minerals are discovered in microscopic quantities these days.
Also, understand, minerals are things you get when ordinary glop is heated
and allowed to cool, or precipitates out of solution. It's not
magical rare impossible to make stuff. (High pressure is required
in some cases, but you're not going to be finding that in space
very easily, since everything reachable is either at the surface
of a body or was close to it. I omit shock pressure, since that can
be replicated just as easily on Earth.)
If you want exotic, hard to produce chemicals, there's a great place
to look: Earth. We have this thing called 'life' that specializes
in making them, and most of the tens of millions of varieties of it
here haven't even be catalogued yet, much less had their chemistry
examined in detail.
Paul
Hop David
& platinum group metals which could enjoy high demand if hydrogen fuel
cells become common.
& water. Water can provide good rocket fuel (with electrolysis),
radiation shielding, life support and reaction mass. Water in LEO could
make it much less expensive to leave LEO. If that came to pass it could
become profitable to bring in platinum group metals and other
commodities from space.
philos...@yahoo.com
>Far earlier than that, I expect people will move into space
>more because of who is NOT there rather than who IS.
>In the past, I've posted in half-jest that people will want to
>move off-world simply to get some decent light-speed
>delay between them and their parents. More seriously,
>ubiquitous wireless connectivity and networked cameras
>practically everywhere makes planet Earth feel more and
>more crowded.
Branching off from the above, posted in "NASA's vision lost on Web
generation", what do people think future space societies might be like
if communication between planets is limited to slower than light
speed, but planets can have modern-day internet capability? Heck,
I'll even allow for some sort of hyperspeed mail service, but the
basic idea is that people could communicate almost instantaneously
with anyone on planet, but communication between planets will take
some time... longer than a week, up to years, depending on what kind
of allowances you want to make. Will it affect people if you could
make a dinner date with someone across the world in half an hour, but
planning to have your parents over for Christmas takes months of
planning to allow time for the invitation to get to them and their
response to get back to you? And how would it affect people if the
parents couldn't get there at all physically, and that time delay
meant that by the time mom got the message that you'd met "the one",
you'd already gotten married and had a baby (assuming that you were
old-fashioned, and that took several years)? And I'm really wondering
how society would change if the mail could go by hyperspace vessel.
Would that make people actually sit down and write a letter, or would
you upload an email into the ship's databank?
Rebecca
--
I've moved!
Formerly r.r...@thevine.net
Ord...@aol.com
> Oh, long after that! I expect the Sahara and
> Canadian tundra to have been developed into
> crowded cities before we get into serious
> ocean real estate utilization. There's three
> times as much surface area available in the oceans
> than on land, but it's a less convenient place
> to build stuff. Earth's oceans are still more
> convenient than outer space.
So your thought is that people will move into outer space because all
the room has been used up on Earth? That will be quite a while from
now, and I gotta tell you, it'd be a lot cheaper to just kill people
for their space on Earth. That's been done a whole lot already, and
we're not even that crowded.
Ord...@aol.com
> cells become common.
At the price it will cost to bring platinum back from space, we'll
figure out something cheaper to get power from. Where is all this
platinum, btw?
>
> & water. Water can provide good rocket fuel (with electrolysis),
> radiation shielding, life support and reaction mass. Water in LEO could
> make it much less expensive to leave LEO. If that came to pass it could
> become profitable to bring in platinum group metals and other
> commodities from space.
I hate to point this out, but there is no water in LEO, nor can you
hand-wave it into existence there. The cost of every ounce of water
you bring to LEO will have to be figured into the final cost of
whatever you bring back from space. TANSTAAFL.
Jack Tingle
I'm not sure quite what you're describing. Within any solar system,
almost all (i.e., everything but the very largest messages) will go at
light speed. We already do that today out to the orbit of Neptune or
so (where are Pioneer and Voyager now?). The mail arrives from Saturn
daily, and Mars is downright chatty. Sure they're robots, but hell, no
one's perfect. And their vacation pix are dynamite.
If you're talking about _interstellar_ communications, (assuming FTL
travel) probably we'd will be sending low priority data at light
speed, but it will be limited in range to a few dozen light years.
Greater distances than that will have to go by spacecraft. If you're
postulating slowish FTL spacecraft, the system would be similar to
most of the world before the telegraph. You wrote a letter, which took
weeks/months/years to get to its destination, so you wrote long
complete missives. Nowdays we dash off 2 line e-mails, since if anyone
wants more info they can ask.
The classic situation has always been posed as the opposite of yours.
The world can watch in real time, living color as a disaster 60
million km away unfolds that no one can do anything about. And the
disaster takes days to happen, so Katie Couric can do four interviews
with the victims as they're contemplating their own deaths. And the
soon-to-be-widows/orphans can talk to their daddy as he's dying.
Lovely.
Sadly,
Jack Tingle
philos...@yahoo.com
wrote:
>If you're talking about _interstellar_ communications, (assuming FTL
>travel) probably we'd will be sending low priority data at light
>speed, but it will be limited in range to a few dozen light years.
>Greater distances than that will have to go by spacecraft. If you're
>postulating slowish FTL spacecraft, the system would be similar to
>most of the world before the telegraph. You wrote a letter, which took
>weeks/months/years to get to its destination, so you wrote long
>complete missives. Nowdays we dash off 2 line e-mails, since if anyone
>wants more info they can ask.
>
This is exactly what I was thinking of. But I'm also wondering how it
would affect society if there was a large divide between "close,
almost instantaneous communication" and "distant, slow communication."
Lets face it, in most SF people seem to communicate almost entirely by
telephone, vidscreen, networks, etc. It's a big switch to go from
texting your friends to invite them to dinner tonight to sitting down
to write page three of your letter to mom, by hand, on paper, to keep
her up-to-date on how the grandkids are doing. Will the art of letter
writing revive, or will people just not talk that much to folks far
away, leading potentially to isolating affects between different
planets?
>The classic situation has always been posed as the opposite of yours.
>The world can watch in real time, living color as a disaster 60
>million km away unfolds that no one can do anything about. And the
>disaster takes days to happen, so Katie Couric can do four interviews
>with the victims as they're contemplating their own deaths. And the
>soon-to-be-widows/orphans can talk to their daddy as he's dying.
>Lovely.
Yep, which is why I got to pondering what the opposite situation would
be like. How would widows and orphans take it, for example, if the
letter saying that dad's dead took 10 years to get to you? Or, even
worse, if the first letter just said he was doing poorly, and it took
a few more months for the letter sent the next day saying he died to
get to you?
Michael Ash
>
> Branching off from the above, posted in "NASA's vision lost on Web
> generation", what do people think future space societies might be like
> if communication between planets is limited to slower than light
> speed, but planets can have modern-day internet capability? Heck,
> I'll even allow for some sort of hyperspeed mail service, but the
> basic idea is that people could communicate almost instantaneously
> with anyone on planet, but communication between planets will take
> some time... longer than a week, up to years, depending on what kind
> of allowances you want to make. Will it affect people if you could
> make a dinner date with someone across the world in half an hour, but
> planning to have your parents over for Christmas takes months of
> planning to allow time for the invitation to get to them and their
> response to get back to you? And how would it affect people if the
> parents couldn't get there at all physically, and that time delay
> meant that by the time mom got the message that you'd met "the one",
> you'd already gotten married and had a baby (assuming that you were
> old-fashioned, and that took several years)?
If you limit things to within the solar system, then your round-trip times
won't become that extremely huge.
All of the below assumes effectively infinite bandwidth between the
bodies. This has stayed mostly true on Earth where long-haul links tend to
cope fine and the bottleneck is the last-mile connection to the user, but
it may not hold for space. It also assumes that computing technology stays
familiar while extremely large advances in space technology occur. Given
the past century or so, this is probably a very stupid assumption.
If it's just the Earth and Moon (presumably what would happen first), then
you have local networks on both and approximately 3-4 seconds delay
between the two. This is enough to make interactive things like web
browsing noticeably slow and will probably prompt the development of
latency-hiding caches and proxies for that. It won't affect e-mail, and
will barely be noticeable with text-based instant messages. Using the
phone would be a pain but it's entirely doable. Real-time interactive
games go right out the window, so there's a large segment of networking
use which becomes completely segmented.
Go out to asteroids or Mars and suddenly you're on the order of an hour.
Web sites which aren't locally cached will have a significant wait. Given
the cost of storage (low), large local caches would probably be developed
so that popular sites always appear instant. Obscure sites that don't have
local storage will have to be requested specially, and then actually read
later. Interactive sites with things like commenting or collaborative
editing require a redesign to be used across the long-distance links and
are still difficult to use even so. Telephone use becomes impossible, and
text-based instant messages become like e-mail. E-mail is not hugely
affected, although obsessive personalities who expect replies within half
an hour will have to adjust. Video and audio e-mail takes over some of the
function of the telephone.
Colonize the oort cloud and now your round trip times are days.
(Particularly if colonization goes in all directions and you're talking to
another oort cloud object on the opposite side of the system.) Local
caching is extremely aggressive. Accessing something not in the cache is
cheap but takes a great deal of advance notice. Interactive sites become
effectively impossible. Sites such as Wikipedia probably have a human or
intelligent agent accept change proposals by e-mail (or a similar system)
which are then merged into the existing article, taking into account
changes made since the submitter was last able to retrieve the page.
It should be noted that large portions of internet precursors operated
under latency constraints like this. Both usenet and e-mail commonly
operated in networks of individual systems without permanent links between
them. Messages were stored locally, then forwarded to adjacent systems
over telephone modems. Since the calls were often long distance, they
were done sparingly and during off-peak hours when rates were cheaper. It
could take a week or more for messages to get from one poorly-connected
system to another. Remote interactive use was impossible, but both usenet
and e-mail were popular even with this sort of time lag.
> And I'm really wondering
> how society would change if the mail could go by hyperspace vessel.
> Would that make people actually sit down and write a letter, or would
> you upload an email into the ship's databank?
Unless these hyperspace vessels are unbelievably cheap, I can't see
anybody but the extremely wealthy writing letters. Electronic storage will
take up literally a factor of billions or trillions times less space and
weight than paper.
--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software
Ord...@aol.com
all colonists until very recently. What happens is that the lives of
the people back where you came from simply become less important as you
make new friends and create new families.
chorned...@hushmail.com
Ord...@aol.com kirjutas:
be anybody to write letters to. In order for colonies to be founded in
the first place, there must exist an affordable, if expensive, way of
carrying the physical human bodies of colonists, food, water and air
for long trips, food for surviving to first harvest, a plenty of
manufactured tools and equipment...
Letters would make up a relatively small part of payload. Any data
about the actual weight of mail, compared to the other goods, carried
across oceans?
Anyway, if you do carry databanks, just why do you think that it would
be more effective to pack large amounts of blank paper and ink and
print the letters at destination? It should take up just as much
space/weight and less organizational difficulties to write the letters
back home so that at the destination, they are ready for unpacking.
If you do get paper manufacturing started at the colony so that paper
is cheaper to produce locally than carry blank, then the first things
that are cost-efficient to print locally should be books in large
numbers of copies. Individual letters would still be easier to send as
hard copies...
As for local systems of fast communications, those did exist shortly in
19th century. Morse telegraphs spread fast from 1830-s, but it took
longer to establish long-distance links. First transatlantic cable that
kept working was laid in 1867, by which time both North America and
Europe had extensive systems. Hawaii got mainland link only in 1902.
What about India, Far East, Australia, New Zealand...
So, how did the telegraph operate on the social level?
Michael Ash
>> >
>> > Unless these hyperspace vessels are unbelievably cheap, I can't see
>> > anybody but the extremely wealthy writing letters. Electronic storage will
>> > take up literally a factor of billions or trillions times less space and
>> > weight than paper.
>> >
> be anybody to write letters to. In order for colonies to be founded in
> the first place, there must exist an affordable, if expensive, way of
> carrying the physical human bodies of colonists, food, water and air
> for long trips, food for surviving to first harvest, a plenty of
> manufactured tools and equipment...
Very true, however there are levels of "unbelievably cheap". I'm fairly
sure you can have cheap enough to start colonization while still making it
ridiculous to send physical letters for routine correspondance.
> Letters would make up a relatively small part of payload. Any data
> about the actual weight of mail, compared to the other goods, carried
> across oceans?
Small part of a hugely expensive payload is still hugely expensive, and if
the essential fact of communication could be carried out much more cheaply
with electronic media, it would be done.
Interestingly, I'm 99.9% sure that letters make up a *larger* fraction of
the payload of our current more expensive long-distance transportation
systems (airplanes) than the cheap ones (trains, ships). This is mainly
because even the expensive ones are pretty cheap, and letters tend to be
time-sensitive.
> Anyway, if you do carry databanks, just why do you think that it would
> be more effective to pack large amounts of blank paper and ink and
> print the letters at destination? It should take up just as much
> space/weight and less organizational difficulties to write the letters
> back home so that at the destination, they are ready for unpacking.
>
> If you do get paper manufacturing started at the colony so that paper
> is cheaper to produce locally than carry blank, then the first things
> that are cost-efficient to print locally should be books in large
> numbers of copies. Individual letters would still be easier to send as
> hard copies...
Uh... what? Why would you put the letters onto paper *at all*? I certainly
didn't print your message onto paper just so I could read it. I put it on
my monitor.
> As for local systems of fast communications, those did exist shortly in
> 19th century. Morse telegraphs spread fast from 1830-s, but it took
> longer to establish long-distance links. First transatlantic cable that
> kept working was laid in 1867, by which time both North America and
> Europe had extensive systems. Hawaii got mainland link only in 1902.
> What about India, Far East, Australia, New Zealand...
>
> So, how did the telegraph operate on the social level?
I think it's too expensive to be an effective model. The interesting thing
is contemplating something like today's internet (indeed, even better,
since it won't stand still in the intervening time) with all of its
trappings like real-time interactive games, unlimited amounts of
pornography from all the strange corners of the world, the ability to
telephone nearly anyone for nearly free, etc. but with extremely slow (as
in latency) long-distance lilnks thrown into the mix. The telegraph was
fast for its day but wasn't used for anything like the same variety of
things.
Jack Tingle
>On Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:57:48 -0500, Jack Tingle <wjti...@hotmail.com>
>wrote:
>
>>If you're talking about _interstellar_ communications, (assuming FTL
>>travel) probably we'd will be sending low priority data at light
>>speed, but it will be limited in range to a few dozen light years.
>>Greater distances than that will have to go by spacecraft. If you're
>>postulating slowish FTL spacecraft, the system would be similar to
>>most of the world before the telegraph. You wrote a letter, which took
>>weeks/months/years to get to its destination, so you wrote long
>>complete missives. Nowdays we dash off 2 line e-mails, since if anyone
>>wants more info they can ask.
>>
>This is exactly what I was thinking of. But I'm also wondering how it
>would affect society if there was a large divide between "close,
>almost instantaneous communication" and "distant, slow communication."
>Lets face it, in most SF people seem to communicate almost entirely by
>telephone, vidscreen, networks, etc. It's a big switch to go from
>texting your friends to invite them to dinner tonight to sitting down
>to write page three of your letter to mom, by hand, on paper, to keep
>her up-to-date on how the grandkids are doing. Will the art of letter
>writing revive, or will people just not talk that much to folks far
>away, leading potentially to isolating affects between different
>planets?
That was the normal state of affairs up until the telegraph was
invented. I would imagine both would happen. Friendships certainly
become less important as distance increases, but letters that take a
week to write, which you send every six months would probably be the
bulk of the long distance personal traffic. Business traffic would be
different, of course.
There's probably an sf story here, similar perhaps to (mind blanks -
classic 1950?s story done as letter by ditzy woman to friend) but
tracing longer periods of time. There was a recent, beautiful anime
along these lines, "Voices from a Distant Star". Although the
information was conveyed electronically, the effect was the same.
I doubt anyone will use paper, but letter length or form isn't
dependant on medium. Most of the formal communications I get at work
are in the form of Word documents. It's just no one prints them out;
you simply attach them to a blank e-mail and hit send. I was quite
discombobulated by a FedEx the other day that contained an actual,
long, printed document I had to sign, notarize, and FedEx back. It
took me a while to find a notary, and a FedEx drop box.
I don't imagine we'll see flowery, overblown prose come again (thank
the gods), but a more descriptive style than "cu l8r @pty 10p xoxo ;)
brit" will probably dominate.
Yr Most Humble & Obedient Servant,
Jack Tingle
Ord...@aol.com
ships but not FTL communication. If you can move mass, you can move
energy, since they are the same things.
Peter D. Tillman
Jack Tingle <wjti...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> The mail arrives from Saturn
> daily, and Mars is downright chatty. Sure they're robots, but hell, no
> one's perfect. And their vacation pix are dynamite.
Postcards from Mars:
<http://www.amazon.com/Postcards-Mars-First-Photographer-Planet/dp/052594
9852>
Pretty entertaining book, though the photos get a bit repetitive. But
then, like you said, they *are* robots....
Happy reading--
Pete Tillman
--
PODKAYNE OF MARS .... attacked the mighty mechanical men
with a strange, overpowering blast of highly explosive
SEX APPEAL! -- back cover blurb, Avon pb, 196?, 50c.
jack tingle
<sound of mind unblanking>
Clingerman, Mildred, "Letters from Laura"
Equally Ditzily,
Jack Tingle
philos...@yahoo.com
>This situation, being too far away for simple contact, was standard for
>all colonists until very recently. What happens is that the lives of
>the people back where you came from simply become less important as you
>make new friends and create new families.
>
Well, yes, and eventually have revolutions as the colonies find being
ruled by people they have effectively cut off from to be less than
ideal. But most SF seems to eschew that vision in favor of huge
galactic empires with FTL correspondence. Unless you do "lost colony"
stories, where the old world is merely a fragment of legend. I'm
really wondering what a civilization would be like that combines the
old "colony" meme with the current "everyone's connected all the
time, faster is better" meme. Which one would win out? I'm inclined
to think that, as stated above, contact with the old world would lose.
But that seems to imply that star-spanning empires are not that likely
unless you have some way of doing FTL communication.
philos...@yahoo.com
So assume that we don't have FTL ships. Colonies get established by
the good-old-fashioned cryogenic sleep ship or generation ships. In
which case, I guess that we wouldn't probably even try to stay in
touch with the old world. Although you could have STL ships that go
_almost_ C, which would make communications between the nearer stars
possible, but very slow. Which is probably the best example. There
are at least 20 stars within 12 light years of us, so it would take a
message about 13-14 years if the ship was going at .9C. So, sending a
message is technically possible. But would you? Actually, I could
see it starting a new trend... keeping "life journals", so that you
could send large chunks of information at a time. You know, sending a
letter every 5 or 10 years, saying "this is everything important
that's happened since the last time I wrote." In which case, you
probably do want electronic, so that you can send video as well.
Luke Campbell
Well, technically, general relativistic tricks like the Alcubierre warp
metric and wormhole geometries only allow for slower than light travel
(or, for wormholes, as fast as light communication). At no point is
matter or information locally exceeding the speed of light in vacuum.
Of course, they are shortcuts across spacetime, so while you have to
traverse some 4+ light years to get from earth to the closest star
taking the flat-spacetime route, you could get to the same place by
traversing less than a kilometer in a wormhole or just sitting pretty
in a warp bubble not moving at all as the spacetime rearranges itself
around you to hook up with the Alpha Centauri colony. Technically all
STL, but it seems like FTL to everyone who uses it.
Luke
IsaacKuo
Ord...@aol.com wrote:
> > Oh, long after that! I expect the Sahara and
> > Canadian tundra to have been developed into
> > crowded cities before we get into serious
> > ocean real estate utilization. There's three
> > times as much surface area available in the oceans
> > than on land, but it's a less convenient place
> > to build stuff. Earth's oceans are still more
> > convenient than outer space.
> So your thought is that people will move into outer space because all
> the room has been used up on Earth?
No...as I explained below that, I expected other factors
would result in space colonization before that ever happened.
In particular, I gave the example of wanting to put
some light-speed delay between yourself and your
parents. This may seem a silly reason to move
to space, but as future technology makes the move
less expensive, sillier reasons will be sufficient
economic justification.
> That will be quite a while from now,
Which I explicitely stated.
> and I gotta tell you, it'd be a lot cheaper to just kill people
> for their space on Earth. That's been done a whole lot already, and
> we're not even that crowded.
It may be cheaper to kill your neighbors, but it's not as
safe to kill your neighbors. Imagine, why spend millions
of dollars on a small house in L.A. when a bullet to kill
your neighbors only costs a few cents?
Most people would rather spend their entire lives
peacefully paying the market rate rather than killing
people to get what they want.
Alternatively, let's assume that your lovely theory
is true and people will start killing each other for
space all over the place. Earth has become a
warzone where everyone kills everyone else
simply because it's cheap to do so. I imagine that
LOTS of people will colonize space, even at great
expense, just to escape such a horrible dystopia.
Isaac Kuo
George W Harris
:
:Ord...@aol.com wrote:
:> > Oh, long after that! I expect the Sahara and
:> > Canadian tundra to have been developed into
:> > crowded cities before we get into serious
:> > ocean real estate utilization. There's three
:> > times as much surface area available in the oceans
:> > than on land, but it's a less convenient place
:> > to build stuff. Earth's oceans are still more
:> > convenient than outer space.
:
:> So your thought is that people will move into outer space because all
:> the room has been used up on Earth?
:
:No...as I explained below that, I expected other factors
:would result in space colonization before that ever happened.
If colonization of space is ever to happen, it will
probably be by a small, wealthy, ideologically-driven
group. Imagine an analogue of Christian Scientists
starting up in the 22nd century.
--
Real men don't need macho posturing to bolster their egos.
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.
Michael S. Schiffer
news:dkgvp2tk2ulcm9ped...@4ax.com:
> On 5 Jan 2007 23:27:30 -0800, Ord...@aol.com wrote:
>>This situation, being too far away for simple contact, was
>>standard for all colonists until very recently. What happens is
>>that the lives of the people back where you came from simply
>>become less important as you make new friends and create new
>>families.
> Well, yes, and eventually have revolutions as the colonies find
> being ruled by people they have effectively cut off from to be
> less than ideal.
I'm not sure about that. Off the top of my head, it seems that
independence movements become more common as communications get
better in modern history. Possibly because that makes it easier
and more tempting for the center to micromanage the colony, and
also allows the colony to learn what's going on in other parts of
the world more easily. (The American Revolution was the
inspiration for a number of other independence movements and
revolutions over the next fifty years, post-WWII colonial
independence movements influenced one another, etc.) Possibly
being the distant possession of someplace that provides expensive
infrastructure (say, hyperspace liners) that's hard for the colony
to duplicate is easier to take than being closely regulated by
Earth is.
But most SF seems to eschew that vision in
> favor of huge galactic empires with FTL correspondence.
Though the correspondence is often not real-time. Lots of authors
like the model where messages travel with ships (albeit augmented
by lightspeed communications within star systems).
Unless
> you do "lost colony" stories, where the old world is merely a
> fragment of legend. I'm really wondering what a civilization
> would be like that combines the old "colony" meme with the
> current "everyone's connected all the time, faster is better"
> meme. Which one would win out? I'm inclined to think that, as
> stated above, contact with the old world would lose. But that
> seems to imply that star-spanning empires are not that likely
> unless you have some way of doing FTL communication.
That seems almost certain. Running an interestellar colony with
communication lags that start at eight years and quickly ramp up
into decades strikes me as unmanageable (pace Cherryh's pre-Jump
history for the Union-Alliance series). Even the largest
terrestrial empires have never been that far-flung, and they've
often had significant cases of "The mountains are high, and the
Emperor is far away" in the less-connected bits.
Mike
Ord...@aol.com
> If colonization of space is ever to happen, it will
> probably be by a small, wealthy, ideologically-driven
> group. Imagine an analogue of Christian Scientists
> starting up in the 22nd century.
Not at today's prices and lack of land. You can't pull a Pilgrims or a
Mormon's in space.
Hop David
> platinum group metals which could enjoy high demand if hydrogen fuel
>
>>cells become common.
>
>
> At the price it will cost to bring platinum back from space, we'll
> figure out something cheaper to get power from.
Hydrogen fuel cells aren't a source of power. They're a way to store it.
I don't know if they will become commonplace nor do I know if platinum
group metals from space will be prohibitively expensive.
Where is all this
> platinum, btw?
Typical iron meteorites contain platinum group metals as well as iron
and nickel. It's a good bet metallic asteroids also do.
>
>
>
>>& water. Water can provide good rocket fuel (with electrolysis),
>>radiation shielding, life support and reaction mass. Water in LEO could
>>make it much less expensive to leave LEO. If that came to pass it could
>>become profitable to bring in platinum group metals and other
>>commodities from space.
>
>
> I hate to point this out, but there is no water in LEO,
I didn't say there was.
nor can you
> hand-wave it into existence there.
Nor did I handwave it into existence.
You snipped context.
You said asteroids were made of nickel and iron.
To that I added platinum group metals & water.
Asteroids are made of nickel, iron, platinum group metals & water. and
other things. There are many asteroids with a variety of compositions. I
believe water will be one of the most valuable asteroidal resources.
Michael Ash
> On 5 Jan 2007 23:27:30 -0800, Ord...@aol.com wrote:
>
>>This situation, being too far away for simple contact, was standard for
>>all colonists until very recently. What happens is that the lives of
>>the people back where you came from simply become less important as you
>>make new friends and create new families.
>>
> Well, yes, and eventually have revolutions as the colonies find being
> ruled by people they have effectively cut off from to be less than
> ideal. But most SF seems to eschew that vision in favor of huge
> galactic empires with FTL correspondence. Unless you do "lost colony"
> stories, where the old world is merely a fragment of legend. I'm
> really wondering what a civilization would be like that combines the
> old "colony" meme with the current "everyone's connected all the
> time, faster is better" meme. Which one would win out?
Vernor Vinge's _A Deepness In The Sky_ gives a fairly convincing
description of what an interstellar civilization would look like with no
FTL travel or communications, but with good (but expensive) STL transport.
If you haven't read it, it shows individual solar systems tending to
become single political units, but with almost no multi-system
governments, as interstellar conquest and interstellar control is just too
slow and difficult. Instead, travel and communications between systems are
mostly used for trade of high-value items and information like advanced
medical technology, interesting and unique biologicals, etc. The traders
tend to lose a lot of crew every time they arrive in an advanced system,
as the lure of billions of people all connected in to a high-speed network
is just too much.
William December Starr
Ord...@aol.com said:
[ David Johnston <rgo...@block.net> said: ]
>> I think a bigger issue than the effortlessness of spacetravel,
>> is knowing that in the end, all that's out there is rocks.
>> Rocks which aren't even all that different from our rocks.
>
> Exactly.
Proposition: What NASA et al need is a *really good* "Alien
Artifact Found!" hoax...
--
William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
David Johnston
>
>Hop David wrote:
>> George W Harris wrote:
>>
>>
>> > :Common materials placed higher in earth's gravity well could make space
>> > :more accessible.
>> >
>> > Yeah. Going someplace to find stuff that makes
>> > going there easier isn't really a strong motivation.
>>
>> Crossing a river to build a bridge could give ROI.
>>
>> Hop
>
>Yes, but you're not building the bridge just to build the bridge;
Well I can think of one recent counter-example.
Eivind Kjorstad
> It does not take very much imagination to see many reasons that you
> could send a ship through but not a message:
>
> 1) It might require a certain minimum amount in transit to keep a
> wormhole open/maintain a pocket of subspace/whatever. A message laser
> capable of creating a pulse which is the energy/mass equivalent of a
> 1,000 ton mail shuttle just isn't going to be built.
>
> 2) FTL travel might be "corrosive" -- a thick outer hull of
> sacrificial material might protect a ship, like an ablative layer, but
> a message beam cannot be shielded from interference.
>
> 3) You might have to navigate while in FTL, and making a beam of light
> turn 90 degrees isn't easy.
So ? There's no law saying that communications *have* to be encoded as a
stream of photons. There's no reason communications cannot be sent as
physical objects. Indeed that was overwhelmingly the norm up until a few
years ago.
If a live person can get from A to B in a short time, then a message can
too.
Eivind Kjørstad
philos...@yahoo.com
>On 4 Jan 2007 21:48:23 -0800, Ord...@aol.com wrote:
>
>>> In terms of valuable materials, I'd expect to find significant deposits
>>> of rubies and saphires on the moon.
>>
>>First, why would you, and second, have you checked the prices on rubies
>>and saphires
>
>That's a ridiculous premise.
>
>Man-made diamonds are, for use as gems, absolutely no different from
>the natural ones, yet their price is significantly lower.
>
>Rubies or sapphires from the moon would command prices several orders
>of magnitude higher than ones found on Earth. By controlling the
>amount released to the public, just as is done to keep the price of
>diamonds artificially high, it would be easy to establish a very
>profitable business to help support a mission/colonization.
Not necessarily. Diamonds are expensive, man-made diamonds are
cheaper but look the same. You are now proposing moon-diamonds, that
are more expensive than natural Earth diamonds. The diamond cartel is
already worried that people will migrate to the cheaper man-made
diamonds. There will be a market for your expensive moon-diamonds,
but by your own admission, it's going to be a luxury item. There's a
market for multi-million dollar homes, but the brokers aren't
depending on that to make their living.
So, you may be able to establish a luxury market in moon gems, but,
sort of by definition, it's going to be a small high-end market, so
may not develop all that much profit for you.
Or, in simpler terms, you may make much more money selling a whole lot
of items at $50 than by selling one item at $50,000.
Michael S. Schiffer
news:c4a2q2llvvndusb5n...@4ax.com:
> On Sat, 06 Jan 2007 23:48:07 -0600, Wildepad <noreplies> wrote:
>...
>>Man-made diamonds are, for use as gems, absolutely no different
>>from the natural ones, yet their price is significantly lower.
>>Rubies or sapphires from the moon would command prices several
>>orders of magnitude higher than ones found on Earth. By
>>controlling the amount released to the public, just as is done
>>to keep the price of diamonds artificially high, it would be
>>easy to establish a very profitable business to help support a
>>mission/colonization.
> Not necessarily. Diamonds are expensive, man-made diamonds are
> cheaper but look the same.
>...
Last I heard, it's not yet possible to produce synthetic blue-white
diamonds that can pass for natural. (Unlike rubies and sapphires,
where the synthetics are effectively marked by the producers because
otherwise it would be difficult to tell, or amethysts, where no one
is even sure how much of the market is now synthetic.) Synthetic
diamonds were for asle as gems, but they were yellow "specialty"
stones. That may have changed in the last few years, since there
were companies working on the problem, but does anyone have a link?
Mike
Ord...@aol.com
Wildepad wrote:
> On 4 Jan 2007 21:48:23 -0800, Ord...@aol.com wrote:
>
> >> In terms of valuable materials, I'd expect to find significant deposits
> >> of rubies and saphires on the moon.
> >
> >First, why would you, and second, have you checked the prices on rubies
> >and saphires
>
> That's a ridiculous premise.
>
> the natural ones, yet their price is significantly lower.
Because they are smaller and their quality is much lower.
>
> Rubies or sapphires from the moon would command prices several orders
> of magnitude higher than ones found on Earth. By controlling the
> amount released to the public, just as is done to keep the price of
> diamonds artificially high, it would be easy to establish a very
> profitable business to help support a mission/colonization.
Nonsense. But even at, say, 100 times their current cost, it -still-
wouldn't be profitable to mine them -on the moon-.
> --
Ord...@aol.com
I was thinking that if a billionaire "seeded" the moon with, say, 20B
in Krugerands, it would be worth going up to get them. :)
philos...@yahoo.com
<msch...@condor.depaul.edu> wrote:
Here's a brief overview. According to the article, colored diamonds
are rarer in nature (and thus more expensive than comparable clear
diamonds), while the situation is reversed in cultured diamonds. So,
if you want nice colored diamonds, cultured is a really good idea.
But there are some clear gem-quality ones as well.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/SavingandDebt/P97816.asp
Sea Wasp
I'm waiting for the synthetic gemstones, especially diamond, to reach
the same prices as, oh, standard cheap fake gemstones -- say, oh, 30
bucks for a stone the size of an almond.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/seawasp/
Ord...@aol.com
> >Nonsense. But even at, say, 100 times their current cost, it -still-
> >wouldn't be profitable to mine them -on the moon-.
>
> one profit-center for a more comprehensive project.
>
> (And it would be at least 1,000 to 10,000 times, not 100 -- look at
> the price of moon rocks on the black market compared to similar rocks
> from your backyard.)
> --
The cost of moon rocks is one of the standard inanities that come up
when talking about profit from the moon, right alone with H3. Moon
rocks aren't legal to own, and are rare. So is it worth bringing back
1,000 tons of moon rock? Nah, because with that much on the market the
price would crash.
Let's total up the costs of mining rubies on the moon, shall we?
1) Getting to the moon and providing supplies while we try and find the
rubies. How long do you figure that will take? They aren't going to
be lying around on the surface waiting to be picked up.
2) Mining them once we find them. This will involve 1) developing
mining techniques for working in an airless, wateress environment and
2) maintaining the equipment which will require a constant presence of
humans on the moon and a) a huge supply of spare parts for -everything-
because things break down and you can't just have a new part fedexed.
3) Finally, you have to return them to Earth and sell them. If you
bring them back in any quantity, the price will crash. If you bring
only a few back, you're not going to find many people willing to shell
out 1,000 times the regular price of a ruby. For that matter, what
makes you think anyone will -care- that the ruby came from the Moon?
Count up the -real- costs. Its not worth it.
Ord...@aol.com
> >Nonsense. But even at, say, 100 times their current cost, it -still-
> >wouldn't be profitable to mine them -on the moon-.
>
Alan Petrillo
> +1 for a rational response.
>
> Seeing the endless $$$$$ vacuum of the ISS (50-100 B$ and counting...),
> and the 2 shuttle losses, I really don't think we need to goof off
> anymore with manned spaced flights in the near future. Maybe us ol'
> fogeys don't realize that, but if the iPod generation realizes that
> they don't to send up any meat, all the better for them.
And we'll just let them cede the high ground to China? I hate to seem
jingoistic, but that's what is happening.
> Contrast ISS/shuttle/moon mission with the better, cheaper, faster
> motto Nasa kinda used a few years back, only to get skewered when one
> of the somewhat-too-cheap gizmos ended up getting lost. That's just
> the point, it was cheap enough to lose it.
But they're not cheap enough to just throw away, and that is what
happened, through incompetence and lack of communication.
There was in joke running around NASA during the Dan Goldin
administration.
"Faster/Cheaper/Better: Pick any two."
Goldin was one of the best chearleaders NASA ever had, and did good
things for the organization, but FCB was not one of them.
> The ISS is a scientific and budgetary abomination, because it displaces
> money better used elsewhere in space.
I disagree. ISS gives us important experience in building and
maintaining a manned station in space, as well as maintaining humans in
a long term microgravity environment. Just because you don't see the
benefit don't assume there isn't any.
> The moon mission will be the
> same.
Depends on how you look at it.
> Well, at least it's not my tax $ (I live in Canada).
Fortunately.
> Robots, robots, robots. And not using Ebay-sourced 8086 processors
> like the shuttles' either (wonder if that particular rumor is true -
> wouldn't surprise me). Spend more money in space, but only use
> astronauts where there is a real benefit to doing so.
Define your terms.
> Contrast also the X-prize/SpaceShipOne cost and innovation to NASA's
> manned spaceflight management since the shuttle...
This is one thing I can agree with you on. While in the US Army I came
to the realization that if anything anywhere is being done right by
anyone it's probably NOT being done by the US Guvmint.
Where are D. D. Harriman and Leslie Lecroix when we need them?
AP
Joe Jefferson
> > More mundanely, I also expect that in the very near future it will be
> > cheaper to get construction materials on the moon to support space
> > tourism than to bring it all up from Earth.
>
> First, why would you,
If you mean about the rubies, etc., because the lunar highlands are
largely composed of an anorthosite which is significantly higher in
Al2O3 than terrestrial basalts. If you mean the construction material,
becuase launch costs from Earth aren't likely to drop enough to make
bulk shipment of things like cement and gravel attractive anytime soon.
> and second, have you checked the prices on rubies
> and saphires compared to the cost of -finding and mining them on the
> moon-?
The prices of gemstones are highly variable, depending upon size,
quality, and rarity.
> Why woud you be building anything on the moon in the first
> place?
Note the phrase "to support space tourism" in my previous post, which
you quoted.
> Let's put this "lunar materials for construction" thing under the
> microscope. First, of course, we would have to survey and find the
> material we're looking for;
Geologic survey and analysis of the moon is ongoing as I write this.
There is a continuous stream of new data being published.
> then we would have to refine it, mold it
> and shape it, in an airless, waterless environment, where spare parts
> for the machines are quite a ways a way.
Not quite. We COULD do those things in an airless, waterless
environment. We wouldn't HAVE to. If the outdoor environment is too
harsh, they can always be done indoors.
> Btw, we don't even know -how- to refine material in an airless,
> waterless environment, or smelt it, or shape it.
I refer you to several of the presentations made at the 2006 Space
Resources Roundtable.
> And for what motive
> would we be doing this in the first place? All the customers are on
> Earth.
Again, see above. This is first of all for customers in space and on the
moon, although it could certainly be expanded beyond that.
Frankly, though, given current trends in space business development, I
would not be at all surprised if the first actual products exported from
the moon (as opposed to services available there) were gourmet foods and
high-end souveniers.
--
Joe of Castle Jefferson
http://www.castlejefferson.org
Site Updated November 25th, 2001
"Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the
poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the
hand of the wicked." - Psalm 82:3-4
Alan Petrillo
[snip]
> I think a bigger issue than the effortlessness of spacetravel, is
> knowing that in the end, all that's out there is rocks. Rocks which
> aren't even all that different from our rocks.
But the only way to tell whether or not they're different from our own
rocks is to _go out there_ and look at them.
I think the bigger problem with the iPod generation is that when they
want something they WANT IT RIGHT NOW! And if they can't have it RIGHT
NOW then their attention span fades away in about a week.
Of course, there are notable exceptions, but the observation remains.
They want Star Trek today, and aren't willing to invest the many decades
of development it will take to develop such technology, if it's even
possible.
AP
Michael S. Schiffer
news:45A19846...@sgeobviousinc.com:
>...
> I'm waiting for the synthetic gemstones, especially
> diamond, to reach
> the same prices as, oh, standard cheap fake gemstones -- say,
> oh, 30 bucks for a stone the size of an almond.
I think that the lower-end synthetic rubies and sapphires (made of
corundum like the natural stones, but with a crystalline structure
different enough that a jeweller can tell them apart relatively
easily) are at or near that point now. (One web source says
$5/carat-- a Froogle search gives a bunch of eBay sellers selling 60+
carat flame fusion synthetic rubies for much less than that, though I
have no idea if any of them are reliable.)
Synthetics from the processes a step or two up from that cost another
order of magnitude or two more, though still much less than
comparable mined stones. (Especially for the larger ones, where the
fact that they're marked to fluoresce more than natural stones
probably matters less than the fact that a gemologist would probably
have *heard* of a similarly flawless natural stone.)
Mike
Alan Petrillo
>> In terms of valuable materials, I'd expect to find significant deposits
>> of rubies and saphires on the moon. Probably some alexandrite as well.
>> More mundanely, I also expect that in the very near future it will be
>> cheaper to get construction materials on the moon to support space
>> tourism than to bring it all up from Earth.
>
> and saphires compared to the cost of -finding and mining them on the
> moon-?
As someone else has pointed out, the difference is Provenance.
Gemstones certified to originate on the moon would command HIGH prices
on the collector market. Wealthy people are always looking for Bling.
> Why woud you be building anything on the moon in the first
> place?
>
> Let's put this "lunar materials for construction" thing under the
> microscope. First, of course, we would have to survey and find the
> material we're looking for; then we would have to refine it, mold it
> and shape it, in an airless, waterless environment, where spare parts
> for the machines are quite a ways a way.
>
> Btw, we don't even know -how- to refine material in an airless,
> waterless environment, or smelt it, or shape it. And for what motive
> would we be doing this in the first place? All the customers are on
> Earth.
Well, no, that's not really correct. The customers for this particuar
venture would be in earth _orbit_. For that customer base, the
harvesting of resources from the moon would be advantageous because of
the cost of boost. It would be considerably less expensive to lift
building materials out of Luna's gravity well than out of Earth's
considerably deeper well. Books have been written on this subject.
AP
Joe Jefferson
>
> Joe Jefferson wrote:
>
> >>Because combinations of elements that exist on Earth can be made
> >>on Earth, and a heck of lot more cheaply?
> >
> >
> > In the very distant future, perhaps. At present, we don't know all the
> > chemical compounds that are even possible, let alone how to make them
> > all. Even on Earth new mineral species of significant economic value are
> > still being discovered.
>
> New minerals are discovered in microscopic quantities these days.
I can see my fiancee's Tanzanite just fine without a microscope.
> Also, understand, minerals are things you get when ordinary glop is heated
> and allowed to cool, or precipitates out of solution. It's not
> magical rare impossible to make stuff.
Minerals can be synthesized only after you've figured out the precise
process, which is a non-trivial task. And there's no guarantee that the
process, once determined, can be economically scaled up.
> (High pressure is required
> in some cases, but you're not going to be finding that in space
> very easily, since everything reachable is either at the surface
> of a body or was close to it. I omit shock pressure, since that can
> be replicated just as easily on Earth.)
Actually, high-pressure minerals are quite common and easily reachable
on the surface of all the rocky planets and moons. They got there the
same way they got to the surface of Earth.
> If you want exotic, hard to produce chemicals, there's a great place
> to look: Earth. We have this thing called 'life' that specializes
> in making them, and most of the tens of millions of varieties of it
> here haven't even be catalogued yet, much less had their chemistry
> examined in detail.
Very true, but not particularly relevant to the present topic.
Alan Petrillo
Why not?
AP
Ord...@aol.com
> Again, see above. This is first of all for customers in space and on the
> moon, although it could certainly be expanded beyond that.
Here we go round and round with the chicken-and-egg problem. There
-are- no customers in space. There won't -be- customers in space
unless there's a reason for people to go live in space. And the reason
you give that they will go into space is to provide prodcuts for the
people who live in space - round and round....
If you can't provide a product for the people of Earth you won't get
anywhere. Note that space is doing quite well, thank you, wherever it
can provide services people on Earth want.
Ord...@aol.com
Because both the Pilgrims and the Mormons used existing,
general-purpose technology and headed for places that were so habitable
that guess what, people were already habitting there. An analogy today
would be something on the order of renting out a 747 to fly you to
another planet with livable environment.. Good luck with that. :)
Ord...@aol.com
> Well, no, that's not really correct. The customers for this particuar
> venture would be in earth _orbit_.
There are no customers in Earth orbit.
Ord...@aol.com
> But the only way to tell whether or not they're different from our own
> rocks is to _go out there_ and look at them.
Which we have in fact done, and are currently doing in great detail on
Mars. There's no reason we have to look at them -in person-.
Alan Petrillo
[snip]
>>> http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca
>>
>>
>> Yes, only a few tens of thousands of miles. Straight up. And made up
>> of nickel and iron, neither of which we're short on.
>>
>
> & platinum group metals which could enjoy high demand if hydrogen fuel
> cells become common.
>
> & water. Water can provide good rocket fuel (with electrolysis),
> radiation shielding, life support and reaction mass. Water in LEO could
> make it much less expensive to leave LEO. If that came to pass it could
> become profitable to bring in platinum group metals and other
> commodities from space.
Especially if you can find some method of refining the respective metals
before bringing them back.
AP