Neil DeGrasse Tyson Urges America To Challenge China To a Space Race 275
An anonymous reader writes: According to a Tuesday story in the UK edition of the International Business Times, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the celebrity astrophysicist and media personality, advocates a space race between the United States and China. The idea is that such a race would spur innovation and cause industry to grow. The Apollo race to the moon caused a similar explosive period of scientific research and engineering development. You might prefer the Sydney Morning Herald piece on which the IB Times article is based.
instead of space race (Score:5, Insightful)
How about collaboration, a team can do more than single entity
Re:instead of space race (Score:5, Insightful)
And it creates a shit ton of overhead, bureaucracy and finger pointing. Look at ITER. If one country had the will to carry it out, it would actually be built by now. Instead a decade gets spent trying to agree on a site. And the main qualification of the guy running it is that he is able to deal well with the political bullshit, but even he is tired of it.
Bottom line, cooperation would be a royal detriment to progress.
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To be fair, they now understand the initial design would not have worked.
Jumping in with both feet doesn't always work out. They were right to keep it in the lab and not just start prototyping.
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How about collaboration, a team can do more than single entity
How about we focus on different goals? The Chinese are focused on establishing a human presence on the moon. America is focused on robotic exploration of Mars, the outer solar system, and asteroids. That seems like a good division of resources.
Close collaboration can be a victim of political friction caused by, say, your partner invading one of your allies.
The moon race is not a good model for success. It squandered huge amounts of resources, while having few long term goals beyond "winning". The glory
Re: instead of space race (Score:4, Insightful)
China's leaders are not 'bat-shit crazy'. They want to rule. They have different limits on rule than you and I might think are appropriate or reasonable or fair, and we may consider these limits dangerous to us, but they intend to rule.
Mr. Tyson thinks we should challenge China to a space race? They have already challenged us. Did he miss that by as much as it appears?
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We already do, if you count stealing business and science data "collaborating." In most other accounts China is a hotbed for faked scientific information gathering. Every single "new science discovery" from China is just some fake data popped up by a corrupt government and their tightly controlled media.
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A big part of the reason why this won't happen is that space-related technology tends to be inherently dual-use, i.e. much of it has military purposes. In fact, that's probably the single biggest reason why there was a space race at all in the 1950s/1960s. Since China is already known to be developing military capabilities specifically to counter the US navy/naval air, and has ongoing territorial disputes with at least five neighboring countries that I can think of offhand (several of which are close US a
Competition works better (Score:3)
How about collaboration, a team can do more than single entity
Because it won't work. There is a reason we have competitive markets instead of collaborative markets. Collaboration works on a small scale but you need to harness competition to really push the boundaries quickly. Not to say collaboration is a bad thing but it simply will not make things happen. Sad but true.
NdGT makes a very good point [youtube.com] that the only technologies that are really expensive (like space travel) that get funded are either in response to existential threats (i.e. nuclear war, etc) or for ta
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Except he gets his facts completely wrong. For example, Columbus' Voyage was privately financed, and the risk of such voyages was generally privately insured.
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And where do you think Queen Isabella got that money? She wasn't a tech billionaire. The funding came from the Spanish Royal Treasury. That means Spanish peasants paid for it and spoils of war paid for it and outright theft paid for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You think that solid gold throne Queen Elizabeth sits on when she's wearing her Imperial Crown that contains 2,868 diamonds, 273 pearls, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, and 5 rubies was paid fo
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In fact, China just explicitly asked for space cooperation:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/28/... [cnn.com]
Re: instead of space race (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah we sure helped employment in Iraq
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If you want to go that route, you would claim there were never any commie nations.
Of course it's bullshit. The police state is baked into the philosophy. Too much concentration of power in 'communism' makes the outcome inevitable.
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Cuban communism will vanish within a year now that the country has opened up to trade. First the long-suffering peasants will sell their carefully preserved classic Fifties cars for half a million each to Stateside collectors, the they'll plow the money into restaurants, AirBNB hostels and Uber cabs for the onrushing tourist trade.
That leaves two remaining Commie countries. Venezuela will run out of bullets and toilet paper this summer, while North Korea will fold as soon as China gets tired of making excu
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Thanks comrade!
Re: No thanks (Score:2)
So did the Russians. We did alright.
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"No thanks. They steal."
And for all that good American technology that we refuse to develop for ourselves, wouldn't the whole world be better off if we just gave it to them?
Just break the moon. (Score:2)
Nothing brings a species together like breaking the moon into lots of tiny bits and dropping them on the planet we live on.
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Nothing brings a species together like breaking the moon into lots of tiny bits and dropping them on the planet we live on.
"Blessed are the chee-
Oh shit!
Run for your lives!!"
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You bought SEVENEVES too huh?
Being Number 1 may = less progress. (Score:3)
If you are competing to be #1 there are two strategies.
Make sure you perform better than the rest.
Make sure the rest performs worse than you do.
If your goal is to be #1, the easier strategy will be the one taken.
If say the US is more focus on just advancing then being #1 then our efforts will be to build up other countries, and at the same time we will grow much further.
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Perhaps you are right but the spirit of NdGT's (are those the appropriate initials) are most certainly for advancement of everyone.
The race is already on we're just not in it (Score:5, Interesting)
If he hasn't noticed China is already racing ahead. We've rested on our laurels for too long.
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Bullshit, guy. China is just got it together to get to the moon in 2013; fucking 40 YEARS later and without any live crew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing#Chang.27e_3_.28China.29)!
And they did that with the many plans they stole to build their knock-off rocket tech. Get a clue before you spew, buddy.
You might want to look up this while you're getting new clues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]
Now, tell us again why getting to the moon 40 years late is "racing ahead"? Idiot.
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Except they got to the moon for real. We staged our landing.
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I know he's a troll/humorist, but I maybe some denialist will answer.
I've always wondered about this. Were all the Apollo missions faked? Because, beforehand, there were the Ranger and Surveyor missions. Were those faked, too? What about the Apollo missions that didn't land on the Moon? Was Apollo 7, which just hung out in Earth orbit, faked? How about Apollo 8, which orbited the Moon? Apollo 9 stayed in Earth orbit with a LEM and Apollo 10 went to the Moon but didn't land. Were those faked, too?
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yes I've also heard that the Earth is flat too so they must have faked the round blue ball thingy that we all saw.
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Yes, because aliens on the moon told us to. We know this because when Neil Armstrong saw the aliens on the moon /in space, they brainwashed him. If this seems contradictory or paradoxical its because that is what the aliens want you to think!
It's aliens all the way down.
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Does China even have a man rated launcher yet? The US Launcher(s) aren't terribly far off, so that may be a bigger deal than who is spending more money.
How to find out (Score:3)
Does China even have a man rated launcher yet?
There is this thing called Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] that is just chock full of answers to questions like that.
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You might want to ask these people [wikipedia.org] if China has a man-rated launcher.
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In fairness, a country can have lots of astronauts without having the ability to launch them itself. After all, right now, the *USA* doesn't have a man-rated spacecraft, yet we still routinely send astronauts to the ISS. We just use Russian launches for it.
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We are not in it, because without the Chinese engineers, who would do the math necessary to get it done? :)
Why stop at a space race... (Score:3)
If a space race would spur innovation through rivalry, why stop there? A full cold war would really get the rivalry juices flowing... Rah, Rah, go Team America and defeat the communist yellow man. [/sarcasm]
This idea is very childish. The heated passion of rivalry does not make for good policy and planning decisions. As great as Apollo was for tangible technology spin offs, from a space policy perspective it was disaster. It did long term damage and did much to keep man in low orbit for following 50 years or longer. Another "space race" would just be a repeat of one step forward, two steps back that epitomized Apollo. Instead, if we are to venture into space, lets do it soberly and with calculation required to actually start long-term exploration and colonization efforts. Or, at least step out of the way and encourage those who want to explore and colonize space in an adult manner.
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"It did long term damage and did much to keep man in low orbit for following 50 years or longer." -- I have not yet seen a convincing argument which backs this fairly common assertion up. I have seen arguments that the missile based spacecraft crowded out the "space planes" which were under development in the 50's, but those aren't even technically achievable now. Maybe, just maybe, the argument can be made that a stretched out program of going to the moon would have kept the public interested for longer
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Imagine the innovations on both sides if we went full world war instead!
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So much innovation that WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones...
Competition works, like it or not (Score:2)
The heated passion of rivalry does not make for good policy and planning decisions.
Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. What is certain is that competition gets results. Our entire economy is based on it. The ONLY reason we went to the moon was because we were at (cold) war with the Soviets. Take away that driver and the Apollo missions simply would never have happened. Once it was clear the Soviets weren't going to the moon, the Apollo program was folded like a cheap tent and we haven't been back since.
As great as Apollo was for tangible technology spin offs, from a space policy perspective it was disaster. It did long term damage and did much to keep man in low orbit for following 50 years or longer.
I have seen no compelling argument or evidence to support this assertion
We Are Aleady in a Space Race (Score:5, Informative)
China asked to join in on the ISS and we vetoed it. China said that they would launch their own space station. This is scheduled for 2020. We have already started a space race and are quite simply, waiting for the Chinese to catch up. They just got to a person into space in 2003 and landed something on the moon in 2007. Their proposed time table has them returning moon rock to earth in 2017, launching a space station in 2020, and a moon walk in 2024. So arguably, in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost two decades ago. Still, China proposes lots of things and fails to come through on them. If they actually get a space station launched and the ISS is retired with no replacement in the works, then I expect that the US will pay attention and start running again rather than walking.
Personally, I expect Musk to have his own space station up sooner.
Sapce Race Followup (Score:2)
Something else [spacenews.com] to passively aggressively show that the US is thinking about separating from Russia and having a possible three way space race, or even giving China some aid.
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We have already started a space race and are quite simply, waiting for the Chinese to catch up.
What the hell kind of race do you wait for the opponent to catch up?
Races must be competitive by definition (Score:2)
What the hell kind of race do you wait for the opponent to catch up?
If the opponent can never catch up then it isn't a race. A race is a competition by definition. If one side can never win then it was never actually a competition in any meaningful sense of the word.
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ISS is worthless. Proponents of the status quo (democrats) want a program that looks down at our warming, miserable planet. George W. Bush wanted a program to explore space, the Moon, asteroids, Mars. Today's democrats are a far cry from Kennedy. They choose to do things because they are easy.
Bush wanted a plan to explore space, the Moon, asteroids, and Mars when it was a nice speaking point on his state of the Union addresses, but he never even allocated any money to NASA to begin such programs. Year after year, he said we were going to Mars but had nothing but words to back that up. Their budget had a hard time keeping up with inflation. Additionally, if we were really going to Mars, not only would we need the ISS, we'd probably have to build another one to do all additional research needed fo
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Who allocated funds in the budget? You overestimate the worth of the president if you think he wrote the budget. The president gives the overall goals, congress funds them, and the agencies do them.
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A budget? How quaint.
No thanks (Score:2)
The original space race was a lot more about nuclear weapons fears and saber rattling than I think Neil appreciates. It may have been publicly perceived as a fun thing, but behind the scenes it was about military paranoia and a Cold War that came all-too-close to becoming VERY hot.
Space race is not what it used to be (Score:5, Insightful)
I still find the Apollo Program amazing and audacious considering the technology of the time. Now a race would be just a question of political will and funding, not nearly as exciting.
Sure, only pick the prizes for the race carefully. (Score:2)
For example, China and the US could have a bet -- loser's premier/president has to sing the national anthem of the other on international television. Or they could bet a really nice dinner in Paris. Or maybe they could bet, I dunno, world domination and possession of all lunar resources in perpetuity. I know which one The Brain would pick...
Waste of Time & Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Manned missions are expensive, risky, and provide very little of value for the money other than knowledge of space's impact on the human body.
Manned missions also take money away from robotic missions, which have proven to be far more scientifically valuable per dollar spent. I'd rather see a Titan boat probe and a Europa submarine probe than a manned near-orbit asteroid sampling mission.
I believe other technologies have to catch up to make humans-in-space practical, such as automated dwelling construction and mining, and automation of space-based manufacturing and repair. It requires a lot of labor to make a self-sustaining colony, and space-suits make such impractical and risky. We need better helper robots first. Otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels. These problems will NOT be solved by yet more manned missions alone.
Robotic probes are highly effective and efficient, while humans-in-space is currently very clunky, wasteful, risky, and expensive at this point in time. We are doing it wrong. Let other tech catch up first.
Re:Waste of Time & Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Robot science missions are great, but they're not the end goal in space exploration (and they shouldn't be). If all we did was launch Voyager and Mars Rover type missions every few years, there would be no need to develop anything beyond the ULA Atlas rocket. There would be no Saturn V, no Falcon HR etc.
Humans *want* to step on the moon and Mars and other places, so that gives us an incentive to develop the means to get there.
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I don't think the GP was limiting the scope to science missions - instead, we should also be developing robotic missions to prepare for eventual humans. And more than just robots; even stuff as relatively trivial as 3D printers will make the difference between sustainable human presence versus short-term missions that won't last. There are many other components: better radiation shielding, genetically optimized plants, improved solar cells, and so on.
Remember, ISS is only a few hundred feet up and it's st
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One major problem of "getting there" involves going to places that are about as inhospitable to human life as one can possibly imagine and doing much to destroy the one livable planet we have. The other is that most of the "there" is so far away, that even if we develop rockets that are 1,000's of times faster than those currently available, what we already know about human biology clearly indicates without any doubt whatsoever that no one would survive the trip, which should we leave the solar system wou
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We are doing it wrong. Let other tech catch up first.
And what better way to "catch things up" than with a space race!
Technology Race, not Space Race (Score:2)
Our current gap is not really in space-specific technology. An "AI race" and/or 3D-printer/replicator-race would probably better serve the goal of living in space than a "space race" that only focuses on space-specific technology. We should focus on the bottlenecks, and those bottlenecks so far appear to NOT be space-specific.
Think of how difficult it would be to do space exploration in general without compact computers. Computer technology is not space-specific, but computer technology miniaturization happ
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Yup, and it is actually much more difficult than that. We're talking really exotic stuff in terms of technology. Centuries off from anything that we have today probably.
You need lifeforms, or self replicating machines, that can survive in places like Mars and make useful byproducts for the colonizers, like oxygen, nutrients, etc. Either that, or some sort of replicator machine that could make anything, including copies of itself.
Agree and disagree here (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the things that people seem to not realize is that, even though they are trade partners, there is another Cold War going on. It's not the nuclear kind, but it's definitely there in the form of Chinese state policy vs. the US's policy. China is willing to pour any amount of money into infrastructure and other projects to keep its economy growing...look at all the spending that is happening post-2008. (Google "ghost cities".) China is also able to do whatever it wants regardless of public opinion, which is directly opposed to the US way of doing anything. For example, they are literally picking up and moving millions of people from the countryside into the cities they have built to improve service delivery...try that here and see how far you get. These things, combined with a population advantage, guarantee China's success long-term absent any other forces.
The only thing that could tip the balance is ideology-driven races like this. The Apollo program was similar to current Chinese policy -- pour anything and everything into it as long as we win. Same went for all the Cold War spending, because people were convinced we would be destroyed otherwise. You can argue the military buildup was a waste, but look at the employment and technology transfer it enabled. It also hammered home the need to educate scientists and engineers, and real dollars were put behind that (see the 50s-70s buildup of the national labs and state university systems as an example.) In the current US political climate, funding education and fixing roads is evil socialism and money should never be spent on public projects. Focusing people's limited attention spans on an external power might be a good thing.
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These things, combined with a population advantage, guarantee China's success long-term absent any other forces.
Only up to a point. Part of the reason why China has been enjoying enormous rates of economic growth is that it had so far to go. Once their economy and standard of living starts to get much closer to that of the existing advanced industrial economies, and they lose their advantage of cheap labor, all they're left with is the population advantage. And they'll be busy strip-mining the third worl
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And they'll be busy strip-mining the third world
They are also strip-mining their own country. Its easy to sustain a lot of growth as long as you can mobilize ever larger amounts of resources. This is in fact how the soviet union was able to compete for so long, but eventually it could not keep increasing the amount of resources that it mobilized.
The western world also fuels growth in part through resource mobilization, but a non-trivial amount of that growth is also from pure value creation. Most people don't know that gasoline started as a waste prod
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This is in fact how the soviet union was able to compete for so long, but eventually it could not keep increasing the amount of resources that it mobilized.
I almost mentioned Russia in my comment - there was a time in the 1930s, when the US and Europe were stuck in the Depression, many Westerners thought that communism might end up totally eclipsing their (at the time) failed economies. And the USSR did grow from a nation of mostly peasants into an industrial superpower incredibly quickly. China has done
How do we get a space race? (Score:2)
"And the winner loses all" (Score:2)
Neil deGrasse Tyson has another brain fart (Score:2)
From the Sidney Morning Herald:
In the search to find the high-paying jobs and industries of the future, Neil deGrasse Tyson has an idea for a novel solution. How about a militarised space race to Mars?
More specifically, the famed American astrophysicist says that if he could just get China's leaders to leak a memo to the West about plans to build military bases on Mars, "the US would freak out and we'd all just build spacecraft and be there in 10 months".
Ignoring the fact that the US and China (and over 100 other countries) have signed the Outer Space Treaty [slashdot.org], which prohibits establishing military bases on other planets, just who would you be defending from / attacking from a Mars military base? Martians who want a second War of the Worlds [wikipedia.org]?
Or... just hear me out here... (Score:2)
We could challenge them to a dance off.
Better Yet (Score:2)
Instead, let's challenge China to create the most carbon efficient economy on the planet. That way even the looser wins. Wasting precious time on another space race, while the Earth warms at an exponential rate will only produced losers, no matter who "wins" the space race.
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Care to provide some citations to back up your statement that "Earth warms at exponential rates"?
China says, "No ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... thank you."
China is busy going after resources.
The South China Sea is a land grab for oil.
The Moon is a land grab for minerals.
stick to astronomy or whatever... (Score:3)
Neil deGrasse Tyson is the guy who claimed that Columbus was "government financed":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
In fact, he is wrong on numerous accounts. First of all, these voyages were not all that expensive, probably less than $100 million in modern dollars; they were less than 10% of what Spain paid that year to get the Moors out of Spain. And Queen Isabella was a totalitarian ruler who effectively invested her private money in this venture, and she very much wanted a return. Furthermore, the expedition to the new world was insured by private insurers, so it was actually the private sector taking the risk; much of the expense of such exploration was, in fact, for insurance. Finally, about half of the money for the expedition actually came from other private investors.
So, when deGrasse Tyson advocates that we should engage in a government-funded space race with the Chinese, he is guided by numerous wrong assumptions. deGrasse Tyson always sounds like he is very authoritative (it's the voice and the delivery), but his actual knowledge of economics and history seems to be poor. And don't kid yourself, the guy is lobbying in his own interest, because once private space exploration takes off, people like him will become irrelevant.
When he says that it is wrong that "if we had given the money we spent on NASA to the private sector, we would be on the moon and on Mars more cheaply", he is, however, absolutely right. He is right because it makes little difference whether government pays its cronies in the private sector directly or through NASA; the error in both cases is that government takes the money and reallocates it in ways that are driven by lobbying and politics, not efficiency and results.
Opportunity cost (Score:2)
How about a green energy race while we're at it?
No (Score:2)
Re:And who's going to pay for it? (Score:4, Insightful)
We actually cant afford not to. How much longer do you think this planet will be able to support the exponential growth of the human population? Clean water, land, food, they are all going to start costing more soon, and maybe have to be rationed. Just because we may not see it does not mean we should put it off for our descendants to deal with when we know it is coming and we are a major contributor of it. If we could stop starting wars and cut the military we could easily afford it.
Re:And who's going to pay for it? (Score:4, Insightful)
How much longer do you think this planet will be able to support the exponential growth of the human population?
If present population trends continue, including both the first and second derivatives, the population will peak at about 9.5 billion between 2050 or 2060, and then begin to decline.
Clean water, land, food, they are all going to start costing more soon
In nominal terms, they will, but not as a proportion of people's total income. So they will cost more, but be more affordable. Resource consumption has increasingly become decoupled from economic growth, as technology improves efficiency.
If we could stop starting wars and cut the military we could easily afford it.
A more realistic option would be to fund space travel by selling ice cream made from unicorn milk.
Re:And who's going to pay for it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Respectfully, I call complete and total bullshit on this.
Even if mankind had the capability to warp off to some other star system capable of supporting life, how many humans would make the journey? Hundreds? Thousands? Consider the energy requirements to lift a significant portion of humanity out of earths gravity well. How many rockets are required to lift just the people into low earth orbit? The reduced headcount of those people who would leave earth would do NOTHING to curb the current population growth! So the remainder of humanity on this planet would still suffer the same fate you predicted if we didn't find another planet. And while we're going through this mental exercise, here's another one for you: What type of person is going to be capable of chartering a flight off this rock? The wealthy, that's who. So in a way, earth will be renamed to "Detroit" where the rich can afford to move away and leave a rotting infrastructure for those unable to escape. Meanwhile New Earth will be populated only by the families and friends of the ultra wealthy, with no reason to look back. Ironically, for all the religious hate that goes on around /. religion has a better chance of saving all of humanity than science does... at least if we're talking about leaving this planet for a better place.
WE are the invading insectoid aliens who have depleted all of the resources of our planet and are invading other planets... there's a reason science fiction has written those kinds of invaders as the villain... because they're assholes.
This is the future that your scenario brings.
Re:And who's going to pay for it? (Score:5, Informative)
This is what people don't seem to get. Even getting people to Mars is a much bigger task than just launching a single rocket. The round trip time for a Mars mission is around 2 years. You have to send everything you need along for the ride. All the food that the astronauts need to eat on the ride will need to be brought along with them. I've seen some numbers (can't find the link now), that even a single Mars mission would require 30 launches of supplies from the earth. There's also no ability to bail out like they did with Apollo 13. Once they are on their way there, there is no possibility of turning around. Even when you get there, you have to wait about 6 months for the planets to get into the right alignment for the trip home.
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Hmm, Apollo 13 "bailed out" by taking advantage of its Earth Return Trajectory (it was launched on a path that would come back here unless there was a burn to put it into Lunar orbit).
Likewise, it's possible to do an Earth Return Trajectory for
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You're still looking at a very long time to turn around and come back. Apollo 13 was only a 5 day mission, and their oxygen system problems happened 56 hours into the mission. They were only 15 hours from the moon when they encountered problems. Turning around was a relatively simple thing to do in this case. When your turn around point is 5 months away and something goes wrong, you have to have the materials on board to fix it. You don't have the option of just aborting the mission early and coming back
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The round trip time for a Mars mission is around 2 years.....
...with present technology. Didn't we get a bunch of cool new stuff out of the last space race? You know, like present technology? Maybe someone will get the ion drive to work at scale and cut the trip time and resources down by 10. Given the time and resources, humans usually get stuff to work.
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Not as far as I'm concerned. The last space race meant we just build very large things that already existed. We basically built really big rockets. Rockets have been around for centuries. We also used computers for navigating the rockets. But computers advanced on their own without the need for the space race to really push them. We developed some pretty interesting materials and technologies to make the rockets lighter, and to make sure they didn't burn up on re-entry. But we didn't actually come up with
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So all those inventions and innovations you listed weren't TRUE inventions and innovations (i.e. cool new stuff) because they had precursors and other applications were found for them? What are you going to say next, no one is TRULY from Scotland? Teleporter or GTFO?
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We don't need to go to some other star system; ours is just fine and full of resources. We could settle the asteroid belt and beyond, and then take things from there.
How expensive is it to get to the asteroid belt? Not very. Once space travel is common and the engineering has been done (even without new technologies), the main cost is fuel. We can bound fuel cost from a
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There is one massive problem with that idea and that is that this planet has all of the habitable land in the solar system and we don't have a clue how to create habitable land elsewhere.
The US government could easily fund outposts all over the solar system, but separated from habitable land and the natural services that such land provides, like air, potable water, topsoil, nutrients, etc, none of the outposts would survive without continuous supplies from Earth.
Even if we could come up with a magical techn
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One of the big reasons for a manned space program has been so-called technology "spin-offs" resulting from the program, but I think that they pale in comparison to the list of spin-offs that we receive from military technology. Here's a short list off the top of my head:
The Internet (Eisenhower created DARPA, and packet-switching was created as a way to maintain communications during a nuclear attack)
Electronic Computers (Alan Turing's "Bomb", ENIAC for ballistics tables, etc)
Rocketry and Jet Propulsion (T
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The human population isn't growing exponentially anymore. In fact, it's going to stabilize at around 11 billion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
No, actually the opposite is true: we'll be taking land out of production and it will be idle.
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Say our 747s were space capable.
I think you mean DC-8s [wikipedia.org]. :)
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There has been no instance of settlement to relieve surplus population on Earth either. The number of Italians living overseas may exceed the number who stayed home, but Italy and each of its "colonies" had to manage the population/resources question anew in each place.
Ultimately we will settle the solar system for maintainability, to assure that no imaginable calamity could wipe out all humans.
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Materials science has progressed to the point that a space elevator is a matter of "when" and is no longer wild-eyed sci-fi.
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If you can't afford kids, don't have them in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
steal money from WIC
Yeah, its a shame. My 7 year old was just looking at her paycheck from the sneaker factory and complaining about how much the government takes out.
Re: (Score:2)
53% of children on WIC? Holy shit, what are we doing wrong if that many parents can't afford children?
Re:Who is this jerk? (Score:5, Funny)
Who is this jerk?
No, no, it's, "Oh yeah, if Neil deGrasse Tyson is so smart, why'd he bite that guy's ear off?"
Re: (Score:3)
off-planet
To Pluto?
Re:astrophysicist? (Score:4, Informative)
You didn't look very hard, did you?
http://www.haydenplanetarium.o... [haydenplanetarium.org]
I count 13 papers.
Would you care to share your publication record for comparison? It might help your credibility since your level of troll is at grade schooler levels at the moment.
Re: (Score:2)
Or hawking video collections about introductory astronomy.
Re: (Score:2)
Or hawking video collections about introductory astronomy.
Do you mean these? http://www.hawking.org.uk/vide... [hawking.org.uk]
They are quite good, I must say. :-p
Re: (Score:3)
Well, thanks for elevating the level of discourse in this thread. I now regret I participated.
Pro tip: If you are going to argue on behalf of science, don't sprinkle your dialogue with expletives and ad hominem attacks. It doesn't cause people to think you're cool, they just dismiss you out of hand as a juvenile crank (and that's an insult to juveniles and cranks).
Raise the level of your game and try again. You seem to have potential, at least.
Best wishes.
Re: (Score:2)
The chinese and americans make too much money off each other to go to war with each other.
Which of course means we are no threat whatsoever to to each other, because on both sides of the relationship the leadership is and is guaranteed continued to be completely rational.
Private enterprise will not push frontiers (Score:2)
But a lot of people don't. I had a high school teacher that had a big sticker on his wall that said "no space cadets"... and he was talking about the space program and how he thought it was a waste of money. He wanted to spend it all on social programs.
His mistake is that he thinks we don't already spend the money on social programs. Our government expenditures on social programs outpace our expenditures on NASA something like 50 to 1. It's not even close. Sounds like your "science" teacher was a clueless fool.
What we need to do is take it out of the politician's hands. the government is if anything backsliding on space.
Ok, how do you propose to do that? Private enterprise isn't going to do basic research and exploration - not at a meaningful scale anyway. Exploration of the frontiers of knowledge and basic research is almost entirely government funded. Don't
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Uhm, wat?
Stop smoking the anti-religion defeatist crack and get up and do something. Or is it too hot outside and mommy's basement is so nice and cool and dark?
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know about that...maybe "Our Chinese factory workers are better than your Chinese factory workers". Chinese intellectual jobs have been taking quite a bit of flack recently for cheating/faking/stealing things instead of actually doing things.