New Mars Forums

Well, given that this thread has nothing to do with Mars, I suppose I'll chime in a bit.

"the ability of other countries to spend on social welfare programs while the US takes care of their defense needs"

What countries would be included here? I assume you mean Europe. I frankly don't know enough about the Soviet-European situation to say how much US power was necessary to keep out Soviet incursions into, say, West Germany. But this has little to do with third world debt, because Western Europe was the world conquerer for many centuries and has never been third world. And in all the other regions of the world, on balance, in the past half century the threat of US attack has been a more pressing threat than Soviet attack (let alone talking about taking care of people's defense needs).

The US does consistently rank quite low in terms of per capita foreign aid. Your statements that per capita is irrelevant are rather absurd. We are discussing the US' moral status.

However, I would note that foreign aid is actually quite a bit less important than the status of the world financial system. It would make much more difference to set up a fair and reasonable world financial system, with adequate protections for poor countries, than it would to triple the amount of foreign aid that the US gives. With the rise of neoliberalism in the past couple of decades, the average growth rate of the non-China third world has slowed considerably (as has the growth rate of the US, though to a somewhat lesser extent) compared to the few decades following WWII. Though neoliberalism and slow growth may not be correlated 100%, to me it seems impossible that the correlation is very low. Combined with other factors it seems inevitable to conclude that the US and world financial system is sick, and growing even more unbalanced.

Well, a number of basic points here I think are worthy of consideration about aliens. Its very difficult to know what kind of form an alien intelligence would take. This is because any time a group of life forms becomes aware of its enviornment and itself and the laws of physics and so on, a short time later, assuming they haven't destroyed themselves, they'll gain the capability to modify their own intelligences. Intelligence is very complicated, but it isn't so complicated nobody can ever hope to understand it.

Now, once you start modifying intelligence, and I think humans will begin doing this within the next twenty years due to neuropharmacology and so on [though that is a low level of modification], then in a time that is pretty quick compared with the lifetime of the civilization, it gets transformed into something extremely different. Nobody has too much idea what. But chances are it would look nothing like ET. You might find that the natural sizes of the "individuals" in such a system would be very large, so you would have one "person" operating huge numbers of bodies doing all sorts of tasks at the same time. Its very hard to tell what these "people" would be like. Guessing is probably sort of like a chimpanzee trying to guess human motives, perhaps about bananas.

I tend to think that aliens would be so far advanced that any attempt to disguise ourselves would fail utterly [although being cautious is not a bad idea anyhow]. If I was an alien civilization, the first thing I'd probably do with my huge resources is build a truly enormous telescope using interferometry and start mapping the universe to see what was going on.

Well, lets see I thought that episode of late where they had Starbuck with the new cadets was weak. Starbuck acted like a complete idiot. I mean, characters can have faults but really, it was over the top.

Lets see... oh, the woman in Boltar's head, is that from a chip that the Cyclons put in his head or he just nuts?

Also what happened to Odama's son, we haven't seen him for more than 2 min in the last, like, 3-4 episodes

It seems to me to be a reasonable point to make that you cannot seriously call for a humanitarian intervention, unless you want everyone to laugh hysterically, while you are carrying out aggression and breaking the UN charter left and right. The UN is of course mainly a tool of the powerful countries; and the most powerful country is the US.

It is indeed hard to take an organization very seriously which has its charter broken in the most ridiculous ways and, nevertheless, has a leader (Annan) who, at the time of the transgression, cannot even bring himself to admit that it is real.

First the US must cease breaking international law. Then, after those responsible have been put on trial, it can talk about helping to stop any crimes of others that are occuring(through the UN, of course, not unilaterally).

I might note, while we are having this discussion, that world economic growth is considerably slower in recent decades than in the "Golden Era" of 1945-73. It's true more for the third world (though one may need to except China from calculations) than the first world. But US growth has also slowed, and the growth of wages has been pathetic. In fact, for the bottom 80% of the population, as far as I can interpret the statistics, wage growth in the US has been negative adjusting for inflation. China at present is an interesting exception to all the rules. That's because it has a quite different system than most of the rest of the world. A relatively well regulated authoritarian state is by no means necessarily less efficient than a poorly regulated, neoliberal capitalist system.

Of course, it is rather pointless at this point to make a direct comparison between China and the US, since they're at totally different stages of development; but comparing China with other third world countries is probably pretty interesting.

The political direction of the world in the past few years, with the US excepted from consideration, seems to be more than not toward the left. If anyone has any informed comments I would be interested

I am also curious why people continue to say that NASA's chief task is a jobs program rather than corporate welfare. Not that jobs necessarily has nothing to do with it, but you could employ engineers just as well if 85% (or whatever the exact figure is) of NASA's money didn't flow through contractors, which are largely giant corporations. The idea that top people in the aerospace corporate world and top people in the government bureaucracy are not closely allied at the highest levels strikes me as very strange on the face of it and, given the evidence, quite absurd.

There isn't much question that the large aerospace companies have more ties with the Pentagon than with NASA; but without government subsidy and protection as a whole they would probably collapse outright, and NASA is a part of that, if not the biggest part.

In any case, as far as I know, something like http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=nasa+c … rs+85%]85% of NASA's money passes through contractors and so, it is really more a state corporate bureaucracy rather than a state bureaucracy.

I might note that Zubrin is quite aware of all this, although he doesn't use those terms.

"Oh but your wrong, the ISS definatly did have a purpose to begin with, which is has fulfilled beyond NASA's expectations, it just isn't the one (science) thats advertised... The little tinker-toy space station(s), which later became ISS, was conjured up as a project to keep Shuttle busy and ISS construction engineers working for as long as possible in such a fasion that the project could not be axed without grevious political expense. In this role, the ISS has been spectacularly sucessful."

For the most part I concur. The idea was to have a stable source of activities and, therefore, profits for the large aerospace corporations which feed off of NASA and, in the larger scheme of things, the Pentagon. These are powerful political interests.

Well, I don't know if we really lose anything by de-emphasizing SSTS and ISS. They're financial black holes, and they take away from projects that are actually useful. Frankly I would rather have SSTS and ISS dead and the money put into more useful projects, even if they are purely robotic, although of course I'd prefer there was a manned portion. At present we are more or less throwing our money down a toilet.

I think a lunar base is a good idea, not as a front end for human colonization, which surely makes no sense there on a large scale, but for scientific projects like large, networked telescopes (perhaps grav wave detectors also make sense?)

I find it a sign of how power operates in Washington that the potentially quite useful superconducting supercollider was cancelled in the early 90s while stuff like the SSTS and ISS have been allowed to keep going. The main difference is apparently that unlike particle accelerators, the latter projects provide stable and continuing subsidy for large corporations. The same goes for what is fiscally a much larger array of Pentagon projects.

I do agree, and I don't think this will happen under Kerry, is that what is needed for someone to basically force the large corporations into a more streamlined system of production that is oriented toward a goal, like colonizing Mars, for instance. That is basically what Zubrin advocates and it seems to have worked reasonably well in other state capitalist enviornments (take WWII for a great example).

We should realize of course that the Bush plan is probably just a lot of hot air, exactly the same as what Zubrin calls the "90 day report". The great likelihood seems to be that the large majority of this will never actually be implemented.

To close, I do think the public reaction to Bush's space initiative is pretty understandable. In the first place, NASA has been very wasteful many times in the past, and I think that is felt. Bush's initiative is also very likely a lot of hot air, judging from the past. Thirdly the public is being robbed and stolen from, and in this (state created) atmosphere of crisis, "war on terror", etc. people are apt to be more critical of long term projects with little tangible short term benefit (or, to most people, long term benefit either). In more decent times I would guess that people would be more tolerant.

I tend to think that what the US space program needs desperately is someone to "shake things up", as Zubrin said at least paraphrased in his book. Zubrin talks about extremely wasteful corporate welfare which has been going on for a long time, the ISS is basically designed to enrich aerospace profits at the expense of doing useful science, etc. All this is basically obvious from what Zubrin says, though he isn't a leftist and he doesn't actually use the term corporate welfare. What the space program needs is someone to reprioritize useful science and force the state-corporate NASA bureaucracy to align itself in a way suited to that task. The current system and goals are quite disgusting, and I think a lot of people more or less realize that. I remember a prominent astronomer saying it was "very corrupt". Indeed it is.

Now I for one do not think it is likely that Kerry will do this. My impression is that the space program will not be a priority. Whether it will be more of a non-priority than it is now is questionable. What I suspect will happen is that less of a priority will be payed to incredibly wasteful projects like ISS, Shuttle etc. With regards to more useful projects like the rovers and other robotic missions, I suspect priority for that will remain at least constant, and perhaps increase. Whether there is a net loss here of anything really useful is at least questionable IMO. Frankly, if less priority was payed to useless pork welfare projects, we might well stand to gain, because it might open up more funds to maneuver into useful stuff.

I have to admit that I've grown increasingly less of a gung-ho humans-to-Mars-quick advocate and have become to some extent more interested in the pure space sciences. One reason for this might be that I think humans will probably merge with their own technology some time in the next century (assuming some disaster does not occur) and so all Zubrin's talk about a Martian civilization will not be relevant. Instead things will take a quite different turn.

Well, to try and answer your question,

Certainly there are extreme problems within NASA regarding corporate welfare or "pork" as it is more neutrally called. The decision making over which contracts go to whom, what kinds of projects will be funded, are dominated to a totally unacceptable degree by political considerations, as opposed to the scientific. Any number of programs illustrate this bountifully, X-33, Shuttle, ISS. Zubrin has written quite a bit about "cost plus" subsidy systems and their decadence.

Its understood in the aerospace community (and in many others) that government subsidy is a crucial method of keeping large corporations competitive and afloat. So for instance I was reading the Financial Times yesterday, the lead story in their money section (or whatever it is called, I forget) was, roughly, "Some guy in the Pentagon says more contracts might go to European firms", this was big news, although they did note that actually implementing the policy would be difficult because of "political considerations". You can find this sort of thing in the Wall Street Journal often enough as well. 

So in my view the evidence in favor of the general outlook I'm putting forth here is just massive.

As to what should be done, it is not an easy thing. Zubrin has suggested that we need to re-start the fire in the space program, get things moving, put a priority on it and so on, force the bureaucrats or whoever into action.

What I think that means is to discipline the giant corporations and put science first, to not give in to everything they desire. It has often been noted that this "giving to everybody" is what makes NASA inefficient. That is why the "90-day report" of Bush I was such nonsense.

So I think that should be done, insofar as it is possible, and I think you could really do some great projects, put men on Mars and so on, if it was done. The process worked reasonably well during Apollo and I don't really see why it can't be made to work like that again.

Ultimately however, I tend to think that the best solution lies in an overthrow of the corporate system as a whole, and the restructing of these huge organizations according to the dictates of the engineers and people working in them. That is a much bigger goal. It is far beyond the scope of space advocacy groups.

The issue with regards to NASA contracting to large corporations is that these corporations make a profit, and they would go under without the massive public subsidy they recieve, not just from NASA of course. Particularly, from the Pentagon, and probably most importantly from the fact that most of them pay about zero taxes.

If you want to employ people, you should use public programs, which will be more efficient. In fact, I think the biggest source of the inefficiency in NASA that is so often talked about is the bureaucratic structures imposed by the present system.