Category Archives: Technology and Society

Space, Technology and Society

Landers, Schmanders

21 Comments

Could we get back to the moon with an elevator?

It’s certainly a lot easier problem, and one more within current tech, than one from earth. This is the kind of innovation that NASA should have been pursuing, instead of redoing Apollo.

Of course, an interesting question is how you’d get to other locales on the moon, so you’d still need a hopper of some kind (pretty much functionally equivalent to a lander, except for total impulse requirements), but if you could manufacture fuel at the base of the elevator, you could deliver it to orbit with the elevator, and to the rest of Luna with the hoppers/tankers, really opening up the whole planet, while dramatically reducing costs of operating in cis-lunar space. For example, whether it made more sense to get to the south pole by going down the elevator, and then hopping, or direct descent from the Lagrange point using lunar propellants would be a function of the relative economics and propellant prices in the two locations. These are the kinds of studies that it would be nice to see out of an architecture revisit. It begs the development of scenario simulation tools (that would make for interesting sim games for the general populace as well…).

[Update a few minutes later]

It seems entirely possible that it would be cheaper to deliver propellant from the moon to LEO via elevator/high-Isp-tanker than from the surface of the earth. That would be a real game changer, but it would wipe out much of the new market for launchers. On the other hand, in-space transportation might become so cheap that it would open up vast new markets for other things. For instance, vacation cruises to the moon become much more affordable.

[Link via Clark]

Business, Economics, Technology and Society

Some Thoughts On Trust

4 Comments

This piece kind of jumped out at me, because of this post the other day:

…my Comcast cable service crashed yesterday afternoon at 4 p.m. That not only means my Internet access is down on all five of our family computers, but my cable television is down as well. In fact, the only service still working in our house in the landline phone – and that’s only because, when Comcast offered that service as well, my wife replied, “I don’t trust you people not to screw that up as well. I need something in this house I can depend on to work right.”

And, in fact, she used that phone to call Comcast to report the outage. And I took off for Peet’s to file this column.

As someone noted in comments at the landline post, during Florida hurricanes, he lost everything, and his POTS phone line fell down on to the ground, but it never quit working. My experience during Frances and Jeanne five years ago was the same — no power, no cell, but I never lost phone, including DSL. I was blogging right after the storm, using a laptop and modem plugged into a power inverter running off the car battery.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Facebook Etiquette Question

30 Comments

OK, I’m an antique. I’ve got a Facebook account, but I still haven’t figured out why, other than as another phone book for contacts with people that I want to contact. I was told by Burton Lee that I had to have an account to be in the 21st century but (again) he never quite explained why.

I can understand that it’s sort of a way to blog and have your own on-line community if you don’t have a real…you know…blog. And because I do have a real blog, and one fairly highly rated on Technorati, among other places, I don’t have time to build Facebook pages.

Anyway. What is the protocol for having Facebook Friends? What is a Facebook “Friend”? Because I get a lot of requests from people I haven’t met, and have never heard of, and don’t even have friends in common with, to become their Facebook Friends. I have several pending “friends” both with and without mutual Facebook Friends, and I just don’t know what to do with them.

I may be old fashioned, but in my day, the word “friend” meant something. Has it lost that meaning?

[Update a few minutes later]

You know, if someone of whom I had no previous knowledge requested to be my Facebook “Friend” with an explanation of who they were, and why, I’d be more inclined to at least consider it, but when it’s just a response from a click on a button that says, “Become a friend,” I’m not very inclined to say, “Great!” “More Facebook Friends.”

Is collecting FFs some kind of weird status symbol?

Business, Economics, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Landline Problem

19 Comments

I’ll give up my landline when they pry the receiver from my cold dead hands, but many people are just fine going cell-only, which could cause big problems down the road for the telecom industry.

I think that we have a generation of people who have no experience with quality phone service, and think that when calls get dropped, or you have trouble hearing the other person, that’s just the way it is, so they don’t know what they’re giving up. It’s going to be interesting to see how we continue to improve broadband if there is no cross subsidization from voice.

General, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Every Man

5 Comments

“…would give up his brain for a decent size.”

That was the subject of one of the myriad spam emails I get encouraging me to enhance…something or other. I have to believe that women get them, too.

Anyone who responds to such idiocy had no brain to give up in the first place. It’s as stupid as the ones that tell me that no one can resist buying a new watch. Watch me.