Jon Goff has some follow-up comments to Grant Bonin’s HLLV critique.
[Update at 11:30 AM]
Sorry, that was Ken Murphy, not Jon Goff.
Supine
Robin Burk has a disturbing story from France. They are at war, from without and within, and don’t even realize it. They watch the barbarians violently ravish their women, and they do nothing.
Which somehow brings to mind Lileks’ latest screed:
It goes without saying that selling anti-Christian iconography to European fashionistas is a brave an act as reducing the food pellet allotment to your pet hamster; a true act of bravery would be yanking the dead wildebeest out of a lion
What Do Our Youth Know?
A very disturbing (at least to me) article on the state of higher education:
To be sure, the current crop of students is the most educated and affluent ever. Their enrollment rates in college surpass those of their baby-boomer parents and Generation X, and their purchasing power is so strong that it dominates the retail and entertainment sectors. Credit-card debt for 18-to-24-year-olds doubled from $1,500 in 1992 to $3,000 in 2001, much of it due to the new array of tools, such as BlackBerries, that keep them up to date with contemporaries and youth culture. Students have grown up in a society of increasing prosperity and education levels, and technology outfits them with instant access to news, music, sports, fashion, and one another. Their parents’ experience
A Gruesome Find
…but an interesting one. A mass graveyard from one of history’s most famous and monumental military disasters.
The stunned, frozen and starving spectres who had managed to stagger to Vilnius, many of them to end their days there, had come from all over French-occupied Europe. Eventually, at most some 20,000 soldiers – of the 400,000 who’d marched into Russia at midsummer – finally recrossed the Niemen into Poland. They were meant to rejoin Napoleon, but he’d already gone ahead to Paris to give the news of the catastrophe, and to raise new armies. Men could easily be replaced, but not horses. Tens of thousands of soldiers had died in Russia, but it was because of his lack of cavalry that Napoleon was eventually defeated by Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia, in 1813.
It’s grisly, and sobering reading for those who act as though our casualties in Iraq are anything but trivial on any rational historical scale (though of course devastating, as are all such, to the affected families and loved ones). By any historical measure, Iraq is in fact a dramatic success, considering the accomplishments and relative loss of life of both our own troops and innocent civilians.
Up Too Late
…last night watching that weird bowl game. You know, they have the cliche about “no one deserved to lose,” but I think that in that game, both teams deserved to lose. They certainly both tried hard enough to do so. It was like watching Michigan play itself.
Year 21 A.D.?
Jay Manifold has some thoughts on potential different calendars.
If Current Trends Continue
In researching The Tragedy of the Commons, reading Freeman Dyson’s autobiography Disturbing the Universe, and checking out today’s NY Times (subscription required–at least intermittently), I reached the following epiphany. If current trends continue, the world will either be empty or full. We will each live forever or die out because our life expectancy will go to zero. The Tragedy of the Commons was coined back in 1833 by Malthusians. Dyson quipped, “we all thought that energy was going to run out in 1937” and today’s Friedman column worries that social security and medicare will eat up all the budget.
I think that it is good to have social security eat up the budget. As people start to live forever, the only way to get them to cede the good jobs is to offer them a life of leisure. Inflation will take care of any pesky budget infinities. With the right subsidies, the federal budget can be hundreds of percent of GDP. You have to recycle the subsidy dollar and tax it back multiple times per year. That brings up another thing. Taxes will either go to infinity or zero (or maybe negative infinity).
In Joe Haldeman’s Late Twentieth, society has to deal with immortality. I think that there won’t be a radical shift like he extrapolates. If you think of age as a percent of life expectancy, long lives are the same as short ones. Even with clinical immortality, there are always accidents and violence (as he proves in Forever Peace). But suppose we achieve RAID integrity and deaths could hit zero for a good length of time. If trends continued, to update Keynes, in the long run, we will all be dead–or alive.
Still Time To Change Your Mind, NASA
Over at the first issue of The Space Review for the new year, Grant Bonin writes the essay that I would write if I wasn’t swamped with proposals and other work, on the wisdom of building a heavy-lift launcher. He provides a good overview of the economic considerations, and the myths surrounding them.
As he points out, the cost of NASA’s proposed new Shuttle-derived vehicle will be very high, and since development isn’t planned to start for several years, there are many events that could occur between now and then to forestall it. It is a shame that NASA has essentially ended any further architectural analysis (unless they’re continuing such activity in house), because we ought to be thinking about more innovative ways of getting propellants and hardware into orbit, and storing them and assembling them. That is much more of a key to becoming a space-faring nation than building bigger (and more expensive) rockets.
7500 Launches
is the midpoint between the high and low scenario numbers that FAA chose for the Proposed Rule for Human Spaceflight Requirements for Crew and Spaceflight Participants to calculate how much of a burden the regulation would be. 7500 flights over ten years with one paying customer paying $200,000 would be $1.5 billion. Rocketplane is building a 4-seater expected to enter testing in 2006. Masten has a 5-seater on their product roadmap for some time after 2008. XCOR Xerus is a two-seater. The Spaceship Company has an operator who says they have $10 million in deposits for flying in a 7-9 seater. 7500 times 4 passengers would be $6 billion over ten years or $600 million/year.
Likely there will be higher prices early and more flights at lower prices later as operations become more routine, more suborbital vehicles get built and competition takes hold. If flight rates grow linearly from zero, we would get 1425 flights in year ten and even if the price drops to Futron’s predicted 2015 price of $80,000 per passenger, we would substantially exceed the demand forecast by Futron if this prediction holds up. $500 million per year was a number they did not think would get hit until 2018.
If we double the Futron price estimates (they anticipated $100k prices at the start), we might double revenues, but that requires that all those launches have willing purchasers. (As I’ve said when Futron first released the study in 10/2004) since Futron doesn’t include demand from games, this may be reasonable.
Put another way, reconciling Futron’s passenger numbers with the FAA flight numbers, we get an average passengers per flight over ten years of only 2 passengers per flight.
The high estimate for suborbital flight rates by FAA was 10142 and the low 5081 with a 50% probability attached to each. These include test flights and non-passenger flights.
–Update 2006-01-04 04:56:00 CST–
And non-government orbital passenger flights.
Oxymoron?
A “knee-jerk militant agnostic“?
If someone is of sufficiently strong opinion on a matter to be militant or knee jerk about it, it’s hard to imagine that they’re “agnostic.”
In any event, as a skeptic, I can’t imagine being upset about Narnia (which I’d actually like to see, based on reviews). Or the Passion of the Christ, for that matter, though I’ve no intention of seeing it. I wasn’t even bothered by the gay shepherd movie, though I’ve no intention of seeing that, either. I was simply amused by the utterly predictable media reaction to it, in which if it isn’t a box-office success, it’s because we’re all homophobes, and if it is, it means that the nation is now all-accepting of gays, and ready to metaphorically walk down the aisle with them, sexuality notwithstanding.