This is the kind of breakthrough we will need for deep-space missions.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Good Night, Moonshot
Matt Welch has some thoughts on the mission creep of the “If we can put a man on the moon” analogy. It’s also an introduction to this month’s issue of Reason magazine, which is focused on space. It’s on the stands and in the mail now, and other pieces in it, including my own, and contributions from Greg Benford and Bob Zubrin, will be going on line over the next couple weeks.
[Update a while later]
I have some related thoughts over at Open Market.
Average Women
…are quite attractive. I have to say, though, that my faves are Israeli, Peruvian and Russian.
[Evening update]
Comments would indicate the age-old aphorism that there’s no accounting for taste.
Moore’s Law
…defies quantum mechanics. This is pretty encouraging.
One-Way Trips To Mars?
It’s actually the only way that makes sense right now:
The hard part, he says, isn’t subsisting in a hostile environment millions of miles from home but changing the Space Shuttle-era culture of timidity.
It would be easier to just ignore NASA than to change it. I’m working on an issue paper on risk aversion and reward, and how we have to stop fretting so much over killing people if we want to open up space.
January Games
How the players and fields stay warm. College is smart enough to play all of its January games in warm climates.
Google+
Is it breaking the Internet?
Mitochondrial Aging
…is particularly important in stem cells:
Stem cells are needed to create replacements for damaged cells that die off or cease to do their jobs. Damaged stem cells are unable to perform their function. So less repair gets done as our stem cells accumulate damage and become dysfunctional with age. Biotechnology that would enable us to replace our old stem cells with younger ones would go far to slow and partially reverse aging.
Faster, please.
Postenvironmentalism
…and technological abundance.
Space is going to play an increasing role here, I hope.
The Shale Revolution
Is going to have long-term geopolitical effects:
“So far this century, this is the biggest innovation in energy, in terms of scale and impact,” according to U.S. analyst Daniel Yergin, author of a classic history of the oil industry, “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power”, who emphasised that one-third of all the gas produced in the United States is already extracted from shale gas reserves.
…In Ramírez’s view, “the abundance and new distribution of reserves of shale gas and other non-conventional fossil fuels will affect predictions about the relationship between energy and the economy, and will have major geopolitical effects.
“An initial effect is that the largest and best discoveries are outside the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),” which will see its influence on the global energy market diminish in the long run, the expert said.
At the same time, Ramírez said, Russia will embark on the race to consolidate its position as a major global actor on the basis of its energy resources; Canada will emerge as a world oil power; and the United States, its supply secure, could feel freer from the vagaries of Middle East conflicts.
Can’t happen soon enough.