By someone who is both a Star Trek fan and a brilliant writer. Yes, at least one exists.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Space Transport Conundrum
Clark Lindsey has a useful essay on the two approaches to reusability, and prospects for the near future.
Light And Scattered Posting
I’m heading out to Colorado in the morning for the NRSC. I’ll check in when I get settled in.
Molecular Bonds
Imaging them at an atomic level.
When I took chemistry, I always wondered if the structural diagrams that chemists came up with were accurate depictions, or just a conceptual model. Now we know.
Leviathan Fail
Jonah Goldberg reviews Kevin Williamson’s new book:
Williamson offers a wonderfully Nockian tutorial on how all states — and nearly all governments — begin as criminal enterprises, while acknowledging that not all criminal enterprises are evil. Criminals — whether we’re talking Somali warlords, Mafia dons, or the Tudors of England — often provide vital goods and services, from food to security. Often what makes them criminal is that they are competing with the State monopoly on such things.
Sidestepping the distinction between State and government, Williamson instead identifies what causes the Dr. Jekyll of government to transform into the Mr. Hyde of the State. He calls this elixir “politics.”
Williamson’s core argument is that politics has a congenital defect: Politics cannot get “less wrong” (a term coined by artificial-intelligence guru Eliezer Yudkowsky). Productive systems — the scientific method, the market, evolution — all have the built-in ability to learn from failures. Nothing (in this life at least) ever becomes immortally perfect, but some things become less wrong through trial and error. The market, writes Williamson, “is a form of social evolution that is metaphorically parallel to biological evolution. Consider the case of New Coke, or Betamax, or McDonald’s Arch Deluxe, or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo. . . . When hordes of people don’t show up to buy the product, then the product dies.” Just like organisms in the wild, corporations that don’t learn from failures eventually fade away.
Except in politics: “The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.” While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,” he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.” Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.”
Read the whole thing, and buy the book.
What We Need To Get To Mars
Over at Wired, Adam Mann has a piece on the technical requirements. I’d take issue with this:
NASA estimates it would need to fire at least seven of its new SLS rockets to deliver to orbit the people, supplies, and ships necessary for a Mars mission. While no cakewalk, that’s a great deal easier, faster, and cheaper than what we could do today.
There is no evidence to substantiate this statement, and a great deal of counterevidence, from NASA’s own internal studies.
Elon’s “Hyperloop”
Is this what he’s proposing?
Crowdfunding A Space Telescope
Planetary Resources has kicked off a Kickstarter to raise a million dollars for the project.
The Bioethics Of Mars One
With apologies to Bernie Taupin, Mars ain’t the kind of of place to raise your kids. And I put in a pitch for the Gravity Lab.
A Lunar Colony
Can one be crowdfunded?