DARPA To Sponsor R&D For Interstellar Travel 364
Apocryphos writes "The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars. In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years."
cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FTFY (Score:4, Insightful)
DARPA To Flush More Taxpayer Money Down the Toilet
FTFY.
I have a crazy idea. Instead of flushing this money down the toilet, why don't we use it to pay the government's debt instead?
The time it would take for the water to swirl down is longer than it takes the federal government to rip through a lousy 500K. Here's a tip: the federal government's spending habits need drastic fixes, not penny ante items like this. No, it isn't a good start because it's so incredibly miniscule. 500K isn't even a rounding error. You trivialize government debt problems by commenting this amount of spare change should go towards fixing that problem.
Re:FTFY (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you did say it was flushing money down the toilet, which was a pretty unfounded claim considering you spouted it on an invention that was funded by DARPA.
The whole POINT of DARPA is to throw money at projects that aren't likely to succeed right away, because if DARPA doesn't do it, no one will and it will never get done.
The internet never would have happened if DARPA hadn't flushed money down the toilet for it, because when the internet/arpanet was first being assembled, no one saw any sort of profitability in large networks of computers - and in fact when the idea first started being looked at in 1968 no one saw profitability in consumer computers at all.
Re:FTFY (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:FTFY (Score:4, Insightful)
If the research is useful and worthwhile, it should be defended on its own merits[...]
Ok, how about this. In order to even begin to think about starting to build an interstellar ship there are many, many problems that need to be solved. Each and every one of them has potential benefits to the people right down here on planet Earth.
Cheap transit to LEO.
Orbital mining for metals and volatiles.
Artificial intelligence and other computer science areas.
New energy storage and generation technologies.
Genetic engineering.
Advanced hydroponics.
Yep, nothing in there worth researching at all.
Re:WHERE ARE THE PRIVATE INVESTORS? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are two basic problems with what we would call private investment today.
First, there is the question of returns. OK, so we are absolutely assured of there being something that is needed out in space - we just have to find it, figure out exactly how to exploit it, and get it back here. None of these are trivial problems but neither are the rewards. Let's talk about exactly how much a big chunk of asteroid that is 50% gold and 50% platinium would bring on the open market. Or, a big chunk of "rare earth metals".
But these returns are not really certain within a given time period. Nobody can say they are going to be able to bring back 100 billion dollars in gold in two years. However, it is a dead certainity that you would be able to have that 100 billion in gold in a vault in 100 years.
That brings us to the other problem. Today, the world pretty much runs on an annual basis if not quarterly. The government talks about saving 400 billion dollars over 10 years - with the assumption that nothing will change for 10 years. Companies are comparing last year's revenue to this year;s and that is about it. The best investment you can get is one where the investor is demanding a nearly certain return in five years at at least 10 to 1.
Nobody on the planet is making investments for ten years and we are talking about requiring investments on the order of 50 or 100 years. The thinking has been that only a government can think that far ahead and make plans that far out. Well, that may have been true in 1492 to some degree but even then they were looking for gold on the table within a few years.
Today it is doubtful that any democratic government could get away with making an investment that wouldn't pay off for 100 years. The people just wouldn't stand for it. Hugo Chavez might be able to, but even he doesn't think he will be in power in 100 years. No, I don't see the human race making any long term comittments or long term plans. Not at all.
Re:FTFY (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps you'd like to look at the ROI that [D]ARPA gets from its research. For example, take a look at ARPANet. A few million of up-front investment gave the US government all of the tax revenue that every company in the .com boom paid, and the ongoing tax paid by companies like Amazon, ISPs, and so on. That tax income alone is enough to finance all [D]ARPA projects of this nature.
Your analogy would be more accurate if you said 'I owe $12,000 to the credit card company, I'll save my $2 bus fare by not going to work today'.
Re:WHERE IS YOUR CAPS-LOCK KEY? (Score:4, Insightful)