Category Archives: Technology and Society

Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

More Danger Than We Thought?

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…from asteroids:

To properly explain the crater distribution, Ito and Malhotra say some other factor must have been involved. One possibility is that we simply haven’t seen all the craters yet: the ongoing lunar mapping missions may help on that score.

Another idea is that the Earth’s tidal forces tear Earth-crossing asteroids apart, creating a higher number of impacts than might otherwise be expected.

But the most exciting and potentially worrying possibility is that there exists a previously unseen population of near Earth asteroids that orbit the Sun at approximately the same distance as the Earth. These have gone unnoticed because they are smaller or darker than other asteroids, say Ito and Malhotra.

“More complete observational surveys of the near-Earth asteroids can test our prediction,” they say.

And let’s not waste too much time about it. By some reckonings, asteroid impacts represent the greatest threat to humankind that we are able to calculate.

Even more to the point, it’s not only the greatest one we can calculate, it’s probably the greatest one that we can actually mitigate (short of colonizing the galaxy).

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

I’m One, And Didn’t Know It

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John Bossard coins a useful concept: Exvironmentalism:

…whereas Environmentalism is focused on conservation and improvement of the environment of the Earth, Exvironmentalism seeks to turn the focus outwards, so that the ideas of conservation, and improvements of terrestrial environments are part of much broader and more inclusive notions regarding life not just on Earth, but also of life in our solar system, and out into the Cosmos.

I think that there is another important distinction between Exvironmentalism and Environmentalism. I believe that Exvironmentalism should see human beings as part of the solution, as opposed to being part of the problem. Humans can and must play an important role in enabling the growth of living creatures, plant, animal, and other, in the otherwise sterile exvironments of the cosmos. As such, human life has intrinsic value and worth, like all living and sentient creatures, and therefore is also worthy of respect and should be valued.

Just the opposite of the misanthropic Deep Eeks. I like the logo, too.

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

A Space Program For The Rest Of Us

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I know, you’ve all given up, and just assumed that the piece in The New Atlantis was just another drug-addled Simberg fantasy of grandeur. That when I kept saying it would be Real Soon Now, that it was just vaporware. Well, Now has finally arrived.

As I wrote in an early draft, if extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. Let’s Hope that this can finally Change with the new administration. That (unlike most of the rest of the agenda) would be Hope and Change that I could believe in.

[Late Friday update]

I want to thank everyone for the kudos, but I can’t accept it (did you know that kudos is not plural?) without acknowledging that this was a collaboration. Adam Keiper, the first and only (to date) editor of The New Atlantis, encouraged me to write this piece and, more importantly, played a key role in making it what it was. While we lost some things in editing (that I’ll rectify in a later Director’s Cut, and perhaps expand into a book), he focused it and almost certainly helped make it more influential in getting more to read it now, when we are at such a critical cusp of policy decisions.

But beyond that, he really helped write it. I was tired when I finished, and had a weak ending. The final paragraph, one of the best in it, if not the best (and it may be), is his.

And I’m grateful for the opportunity that he provided to get this message out, not just with The Path Not Taken five years ago (was it really that long?) but this and other pieces. The links in it are his, which indicates to me that he’s been following this topic closely. The most amazing thing is that this collaboration is a result of a snarky criticism by me of his own space-policy punditry, over half a decade ago. Rather than taking umbrage, he opened his mind to new possibilities, and the result is this (so far at least) collaborative magnum opus.

[Bumped]

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

When Do We Die?

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While I was waiting for my mythical piece in The New Atlantis to come on line (Real Soon Now) I was looking over the spring issue, and found this piece on the legal definition of death. His purpose is to define when it’s morally acceptable to harvest organs, but I don’t think that it will work as well for cryonicists (a subject I discussed several years ago). The problem with the legal definitions is the word “irreversible.” It’s not really possible to know prospectively whether or not a given biological state is irreversible, because this is an ever-moving target and a function of available technology, whether in your geographical or temporal location. As I noted in my cryonics piece, many conditions that would have been considered “irreversible” in the past (e.g., cessation of respiration after drowning) can now be routinely reversed, without even special tools–just knowledge of CPR.

The only truly definitive definition of death is the concept of information death, in which the ashes of the brain are scattered to the winds. And the fact remains that death is a process, not a discrete event, and as technology continues to advance it will be possible to reverse it as we go deeper and deeper into the process.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Gaia And Space

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Are environmentalists finally coming to their senses?

ames Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory, said: “I strongly support space travel. The whole notion of Gaia came out of space travel. It seems to me any environmentalist who opposes space travel has no imagination whatever. That gorgeous, inspirational image of the globe that we are now so familiar with came out of space travel. That image has perhaps been of the greatest value to the environmental movement. It gave me a great impetus.

“There are the unmanned spacecraft, which are relatively inexpensive, that I certainly think should continue. The more we know about Mars, for example, the better we can understand our own planet. The second sort, the more personally adventurous sort of travel, offers great inspiration to humans. And, were it not for space travel we’d have no mobile phones, no internet, no weather forecasts of the sort we have now and so on. There’s a lot of puritanical silliness about it.”

And that doesn’t even get into the benefits of moving polluting industry off planet.

Business, Technology and Society, Weird

A Strange Product

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I’m shopping at American for flights from SFO to LAX, and they have a variety of non-stops for fifty-nine bucks. But what’s bizarre is that they offer one-stops as well (e.g., through Seattle, or Dallas). And they only charge four hundred bucks for them. How many people buy one? You have to really want the miles, and like riding in airplanes. I wonder if it’s just an artifact of their reservations software, that no one has bothered to fix? Or if they’ve ever actually sold one?