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The recent loss of Columbia is a sad thing, and it lends yet more support to a hypothesis which, I think, the evidence for is already very developed. This is that the primary function of NASA, rather than to explore space in a way which benefits humanity (or even the US) as a whole, is to act as a subsidy for large aerospace and related corporations, the method of choice being the funding of very expensive projects in which output is only a marginal priority.
Now a lot of people have talked about NASA administrators trying to build empires, and I think there's some merit to that hypothesis as well, but we should be asking: who has the most to gain? NASA adminstrators or corporate stockholders? And who has the most power? A NASA administrator operates under fairly stringent controls ; corporate stockholders can do anything they want. So it seems reasonable to conjecture that although empire building is a priority for the people running NASA, it's a much larger one for the people running large corporations. Government agencies may have several factors driving them toward greater spending and power ; in a corporation that's just the stated goal. Of course, it should be kept in mind that in many places these organizations are virtually fused together, which is not suprising.
The grip of wealth on the decisions of Congress is doubtless large by any sane measurement ; it is no suprise that this wealth is rewarded with money that ought to be going to public programs. The integration of many parts of NASA, Lockheed and Boeing is often virtually complete as a bureaucracy.
As for confirming evidence, the picture for the past two decades has been rather bleak, as most of us are generally aware, I think. The space shuttle is not cost effective, nor will it ever be. Nor is the ISS--from the perspective of actual science it would, as far as I know anyway, be better used as a place to store experiments and visit periodically, sort of like Hubble, than as a constantly manned outpost. Science missions have often been bloated needlessly, lending more support to the corporate welfare hypothesis, and even then the work is often shoddy, as from the perspective of short term corporate profit it makes no difference whether the spacecraft actually works or not. Around the edges of the mainstream, small things sometimes crop up where science is the main priority, and this is where most of NASA's productive work gets done.
"How can you call the Joint Strike Fighter "corporate welfare" ? By my definition, "corporate welfare" is unjustified government spending for the purpose of unfairly bolstering certain corporations."
Well, I don't see why corporate welfare should have to favor some corporations needlessly over others. I mean, there are certain criterion that are probably going to need to be satisfied here--you couldn't hand a $200 billion contract off to say, Kistler, that wouldn't make any sense. So, I hear what you're saying about this being a pretty competitive contract by DoD standards, and I think that's probably true from what I can gather, but I don't really think it matters, ultimately. Look, I mean, the purpose of corporate welfare isn't to benefit any selective corporation--it doesn't matter what the name of the company is. The purpose, as far as I can gather, is to maintain certain key interests. Keep companies afloat while they pursue R&D (especially long term R&D), that is, as far as I can see a big issue. Sometimes it is done directly by government order, sometimes it is done by the company itself, but in many cases the company wouldn't be able to do it without the extraneous DoD contracting.
I mean, the airline industry in the 30s was in its infancy really, and it would have gone bankrupt during the depression except for military contracts. Similiarly, nobody was going to pursue research into computers, but the government did, for WWII, and then eventually companies took it when they could make a pretty short term profit out of it, and developed it a lot further. I don't understand as well as I'd like to, why the so-called "free market" lays waste to a lot of these long term interests, but there are a few pointers which I think generally head in the right direction. First of all, I guess what is most obvious to me is that there are several things that the market system really just doesn't take into account--I mean, if you say to people, whoever pollutes the most makes the most profit and gets the most power, and if you don't pollute then you'll go out of buisness, well, of course, you're going to get pollution everywhere, because people are afraid of going out of buisness. Anyway... second of all, I guess the same thing applies to space, really: nobody is going to go looking out for long term human interests in colonizing space, they're all going to be looking out for making the best airplane or something to beat the competition, or, (more generally) sell people some piece of crap that isn't worth very much so they can make a lot of money. That's what the system is all about, remember. You're not supposed to be concerned with human interests, really--you're supposed to make profit, profit, profit. And if you don't, if you do look out for human interests, you'll start losing profits, and you'll be gone.
Of course, all of NASA's budget doesn't go straight into corporate welfare, but probably a majority of it does. Of course, you're right, there are other functions of the US federal government which are much larger, and by far the biggest corporate welfare agency is not NASA but the DoD. See, for example, the $200 billion ( ! ) contract which was just given by the DoD to Lockheed Martin for the design of a new fighter aircraft.
Well, what is NASA's job? I mean, officially, sure, NASA's job is to explore space, do all this stuff, whatever. But what does NASA actually do and what do politicians expect it to do? That's what I mean. As far as I can see, most of what NASA does is not really concerned with science or serious exploration--mostly it is concerned with corporate welfare, aka "pork barrel spending".
http://arxiv.org/html/cond-mat/9812070
Especially note possible applications. The physics establishment has said this is probably not going to work, but oh well.
Well, it would seem to me that the big reason why the American space program is not excelling is because that, as of right now, is simply not the point. The American space program is not designed to do serious interplanetary exploration. It is not designed to do pioneering work in space. Rather, it is designed to function as a huge corporate welfare engine, as is the Department of Defense, which around thirty times larger in terms of dollars. Of course, the DoD does perform some useful function with all that money, because the function that it happens to perform--imperialism--is useful to ruling class planners. Doing manned interplanetary missions is simply not a priority, as far as I can see because it doesn't serve the percieved interests of the current ruling class. That's not to say that even from an imperial standpoint the colonization of space isn't useful--in fact it could be tremendously useful, but only in the long run, after some decades. No leader as yet has been able to recognize that, however. However, looking back on previous imperial exploratory phases of human history, I'm inclined to say that an imperial style colonization of space, with resources used to subjugate other Terran powers, is far less preferable from a human standpoint than one which is based around the interests of the society as a whole, and one that is open to international cooperation when this is reasonable.
"Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the rest would do just fine without public funding from NASA. I'd even bet they could susrvive without their defense business because the companies are so diversified."
Well, the Department of Defense is almost thirty times bigger, dollar for dollar, than NASA. I mean, I suppose it would be possible that the companies themselves could survive if the so-called pentagon system was dissolved, but under a "free market" as it is called, they would pursue a lot less activity that was productive for colonizing space, and doing other things which are related to NASA and the DoD, then they do now.
"Congress will be at every turn in NASA's decision-making process because NASA is a federal organization which receives federal dollars."
This may be--and I agree with you, that's very unfortunate. But the same thing applies to the current corporate system we have now--stockholders will be at every turn in a private company's funding, because the company is controlled by them and recieves their dollars. So who would you rather have--extremely wealthy people dictating what the organization does, or elected officials dictating what the organization does? I mean, ideally, we don't want anybody dictating what the organization does, we want the people who make up the organization to decide how they want to operate themselves--that's the most productive arrangement, as far as I can see.
I guess from the standpoint of colonizing space you can use both. When the goals of short term private profit and sound colonization interfere, I suppose it is better to use government planning. When they don't--when people looking to make a profit find that they can do that easily by going into space--then there isn't any need.
I can't really see any simple answer here--there isn't any sort of organization which currently exists in our society which is clear cut that I think you can just turn to and say "this is the kind of organization we want". There are various organizations which combine some aspects, and others which combine other aspects. I guess it just depends on the situation.
I mean, ideally what I'd like to see is an organization where people can just come and work and talk about what they want to do, rather than having everything dictated by a superior with corrupt goals. Sort of like this society, actually--but unfortunately there are a lot of things in our current system which make it difficult to get very big without serving the useless interests of power.
Well, I agree with you that exploration has been unprofitable for NASA--I mean, if NASA was a private corporation, it would go bankrupt almost immediately.
However, what NASA does do is provide a free flow of funds to numerous corporations, in make it a lot easier for them to be profitable and carry out research. If NASA wasn't there to do that, then companies wouldn't carry out nearly as much R&D as they do now--because R&D, although it may benefit society a long ways down the road, is in many cases unprofitable in the short term, especially to one corporation.
But why are we allowing companies to exist simply off of a flow of public funding? I mean, even from a capitalist perspective, that doesn't make any sense.
The objective of such nationalization wouldn't be to bring engineers and other people who want to help develop space under the control of Congress--it would be to free from the unproductive, corrupt, hierarchial system we have right now which is based on corporations. The role of Congress ought to be minimized. The whole point is autonomy.
I'm not an expert on NASA's policy to corporations, and I would like to answer your questions about the structure of exactly what goes on, but I really need to do some research first. It should be pretty useful to know these things. Sort of an interface between between science and politics.
I don't have any particular objection to private enterprise participating where it is useful under the existing system--but generally I think that we should try to create a network of decentralized, voluntary organizations whose purpose is to colonize space (and a vast number of other goals which the people making up the organizations feel is important--as opposed to what the CEO or stockholders or Congress does), and ultimately I think that means getting rid of capitalism entirely. But I mean, you have be flexible, I think--because you get to a certain point where you can't really push any farther without making major changes on a national level.
I suppose I'll just add one more thing, also--I think there was some message that Mark was talking about how NASA's role is create jobs--well, that's true, but I think what is more important is that NASA is creating profits.
Well, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. I mean, a lot of the "commercialization" that NASA has done in the past basically works like this--companies make the profit, while NASA takes the risk for them. You hear a lot of stuff about "working with the private sector", in the past that has basically translated into the above. It seems to me that this is the case because private companies are simply not willing to take this kind of risk, because private companies have something really bad which can happen to them if such a risk fails: bankruptcy. From the point of view of just straight profit, it is a lot easier to basically just remain where you are and not worry about things like that. This might also interact with the fact that there are only a few big conglomerates capable of sending a man into space, even if they wanted to.
It seems to me that if our objective is to build societies and colonize new worlds, we should create organizations whose focus is actually doing that--not simply getting the most power for the least effort, as corporations do in our present system.
I don't know all that much about the NASA administration, but from what I can gather it seems to me that the main problem lies the corporate-state partnership which has characterized NASA virtually ever since it was created. Instead of focusing on doing things which actually benefit science, NASA is instead focused on pursuing projects which reward private corporations at the expense of the public. In fact, within the resources of NASA, the more it can spend, the better, because the contracts grow fatter as the money gets larger, and the more profits go into the hands of the corporations. Look, things like SEI didn't just drop out of nowhere--they were created for a reason.
It seems to me that we really ought to just cut corporations out the deal entirely--just get rid of the whole thing, nationalize it. I mean, 80% of DoD contracts are reportedly made without any serious competition between companies, and I don't expect NASA to do be much better. So plainly, even if there should be something to it in the first place, the idea that competition would be eliminated from this is just not true--there really isn't much competition anyway. In fact, if we nationalized the resources that NASA needs to do its missions, we'd cut out a huge amount of waste and needless bureaucracy.
Another thing which is really needed inside NASA is: more autonomy. There should be less interference from Congress and more ability for the organization--especially the people at the bottom of the organization who really understand what is going on at the technical level--to make more decisions. Congress has interfered countless times in the past to make various proposals less workable and with a point. The ISS is a case in point: Al Gore deliberately intervened at one point to scrap a much more efficient design because he wanted it to be an international mission, which incidentally wasn't possible with that design (it was too simple). Remember the part in the Case for Mars when Zubrin says, yeah, we were presenting Mars Direct, and the old engineers in the place who remembered Apollo started saying..."Wow this is something we could actually do". Those are the people who need to be more empowered to make decisions, not government bureaucrats who have an agenda of power.
Well, I don't work at NASA, and I don't claim to know nearly as much about how it works as people who actually do, but these are my thoughts on the matter as of now. If anyone would like to comment, that would be appreciated.
Well, one idea is to place large floating structures in the gas giants' atmospheres which would be supported by the density of the gas beneath them. These structures could regulate their position in the atmosphere by taking in or letting off ballast, and could rely on the atmosphere for many essential elements. Power could be provided for by fusion reactions, which would be even better assuming we had He3 fusion, as He3 is very cheap to come by in the giants' atmospheres. There are many layers in a gas giants atmosphere, and each contains many interesting materials. By regulating the relative density of the station by taking on ballast, the station could shift to each level somewhat like an elevator, collecting the materials it needed, and then shifting back to some optimum position. Of course, there are several alternatives-- perhaps it would be more economical to simply use shuttles to pick up materials, or smaller stations. We'd have to develop this concept more to see which makes more sense, and how much this would cost at all. I don't really see why it would be prohibitive, though.
More speculatively, it seems possible that eventually, if this proved to be economically feasible, the stations could be joined into some sort of planetary scale network, perhaps a ring of some sort. For many reasons, however, that might prove to not make sense: for example, the winds might wreak havoc structurally, or mabye it would just be uneconomical. On second thought it seems like a large station would make more sense than a ring, as why would one want that?
So, um, getting back to reality...
I think today, what we need to focus on is dismantling these institutions which claim illegitimate control over people's lives. Take, for example, the corporation. The corporation is a structure which can effectively dictate people's lives as long as they have no alternative, which is often the case, and when there is an alternative, it is usually very similiar to the prior one. Encorporated society, then, is rather like a collection of warring, military dictatorships ; you might have an "alternative" in moving to a neighboring dictatorship, but don't expect any real difference in how life functions. For real change, you'll have to change the very structure of society, transforming these warring dictatorships into cooperative, libertarian societies. And that is effectively what has to be done with corporations, except applied differently, of course. The corporation is, in Western society, the most obvious example of such an institution ; thankfully, military dictatorships are not in general part of the West right now.
I think if we colonize Mars, there is certianly potential for real change, but that real change doesn't have to happen if people don't demand it. And, actually, demanding it on Mars may well be harder than on Earth, because of all the physical ties to Terran institutions, which are likely to be basically immovable in thier stance toward Mars, at least in the short term. Of course, on Mars, there may also be greater impetus for change, because of all the ideological shakeups that are probable when creating a new society. So we'll see what happens. I don't think anyone is really in a position to make any specific predictions about the outcome ; I think the outcome of Mars colonization could in principle be anything from military dictatorship to a kind of libertarian socialism, which are to me something of extremes of what is undesirable and desirable respectively. I like military dictatorship is probably very unlikely, but it conceivably could happen ; one never knows with these things. There are just too many unknown variables. We'll just have to wait and see.
This is amazing... this has truly awesome potential for the whole terraforming gig. I mean, if this is true, it means we can terraform Mars, no doubt about it. There may be some deficincies-- nitrogen being the most obvious-- but if there is that much water, there is no question that we could get some kind of biosphere there given the right techniques.
Clark, what do you mean by society?
It seems to me that most of these arguments are rather meaningless, really.
"Liberty is maintained therough the rule of law- the rule of force limits liberty becuase you are only as free as your available force"
I do not think that the only options are either the 'rule of force' or the 'rule of law'. People don't need laws to keep force at bay. In fact, it seems that one is really just a somewhat toned down version of the other.
"what is wrong with having people agree to the rules upon which they all wish to live?"
And dissent?
Ok, that was a late April fools joke. Now, actually, there is something called gravito-magnetism that is predicted by general relativity. It is the effect produced by a moving mass, in much the same way as a moving electric field produces a magnetic field. So, a moving gravitational field will produce this gravito-magnetic field. But the field is so tiny that it is not possible to observe at present. Actually, it is just another manifestation of gravity, not really a new force of nature. So it isn't a "fifth force". Otherwise, we'd already have five forces: magnetism and electricity would be different!
No, I think the idea of property is totally unnecessary for the creation a society, and is actually a detriment to society, making it more uncivil rather than the other way around. People should be able to distribute resources how they want to, as individuals. If I want to build a house, I can ask some people to help me build it or I can try to do it all by myself. But there should be no central authority saying "You have a right to this, and you to this, etc". Then liberty is decreased. Your liberty is not increased by having such an arrangement in any concievable way. So, people should be able to distribute property as individuals, not as automatons of the state, acting as it tells them to.
I'm editing this post. I might actually decide to add some substance to it later. I deleted everything on here because everybody had already read it.
You know what, I'm sick of this. I'm sick of constantly comparing the American frontier to the Martian frontier. They may share some qualities, but so do China and America, and they aren't exactly the same. I think this is all ridiculous. In two words, I quit.
I would like to make the following comments on Zubrin's idea of the social effects of the frontier.
1. It is fraught with illusions and a general misconception of the real powers behind the American frontier, although makes some points which are at least partially true, such as the frontier being an inspiration to freedom
2. It is correct to say that Mars will give humanity a chance at starting a new, better system, but seems to miss the point that whether this occurs or not is wholly dependent on who colonizes Mars and for what purpose
Hey everybody I just stumbled over an anarchist literature collection... http://flag.blackened.net
It's dedicated to Proudhon.
Oh and Josh I like that idea of not having voting on a term by term basis in a direct democracy. Clearly that is what makes the most sense ; if you need a vote, do one.
Well, then what are you are advocating is a republic, not a monarchy, because a monarchy implies ruler by one, which is not what you are talking about if it is to be a ceremonial position.
In any case the best government is one which is by and for the people, and that one is not an electoral "democracy", since such a system is open to abuses. Democracy, rule by the people, is only really in place when people get to actually decide important issues. Deciding upon who is to decide is simply not satisfactory because, it is awefully hard to put someone in place who will decide anything not influenced by corruption, as the past hundred years demonstrate in the United States.
I wonder what would happen if the masses ever actually got control of their own political system. The consequences are so unbearable for those in power [that is, equality and honest government] that they must always work to keep the forces of true democracy forever unrealized.
I think that ultimately, a monarchy is a foolish kind of government to deliberately enact. The reason is simple. The interests of a monarch differ from the interests of the people. Furthermore, because the people have no say in what goes on, they are reduced to mere spectators. Why pay attention to the political situation if you really have no reason to? Why listen when you cannot act? It is pointless, unless you plan on revolution. And if you plan on revolution, then is not a representative system a better one, where you can revolutionize peacefully? The only way for the interests of the people to be heard is through, in a monarchy, a revolution. The stability that monarchy offers, is, therefore, a false kind of stability. What monarchy really offers is oppression, and people often rebel against oppression. There is much historical evidence for this.
Besides, stability is not desirable anyway. If a government is stable, that implies it is not open to change. But if it is not open to change, then what are we to do, when, inevitably, the monarch becomes corrupt? The best kind of government is one that isn't stable, one that is open to change, and for Mars this will, like many things, hold much more as a principle than here. In the initial few hundred years of colonization, Mars will be undergoing a period of rapid and enormous changing. The last thing you want is a government not open to change.
Yes, anything produced on Mars will necessarily be a bit more expensive than that produced on Earth. But that in itself will make it somewhat desirable to the rich, at least assuming no drastic changes in human society by then. Martian wine! Martian rocks! Etc. And in items which are truly expensive for their mass, requiring large amounts of advanced manufacturing, the cost of shipping need not be so much a detriment as to make Martian goods uneconomical. After all, if you are paying thousands of dollars for a few pills to heal you, do you really care about a $10 shipping cost from Mars? After all, a bunch of medicine and its container is not likely to weight more than a twentieth of a kilogram.
It depends on how you are launching the materials. On Mars, getting stuff to orbit is very cheap compared to here on Earth, so the best plan is to go for SSTOs. The ideal would be some kind of nuclear rocket using the Martian atmosphere as propellant [I assume this would work by first sucking up Martian atmosphere, compressing and liquifying it, then heating it using the nuclear reactor and shooting it out]. Such a system could easily manage some economical exports. Combine it with technologies like cyclers, or solar or magnetic sails, or fusion, or whatever else you would care to throw in, and you've yourself some sort of profit that can be used to feed the colony.
No, Mars will never be a second Earth, but that dosen't mean it can't be a second home. And if it is our home, I suggest we make it comfy. Bring on ecopoesis!