For those who are wondering why their net connections are having problems today, I just talked to my web host, who told me that denial of service attacks are rampant today, and hitting everybody. I know that Earthlink has been having problems, because I couldn’t get to their news server for several hours this morning, and packets are dropping all over the place.
I’m wondering if this is pranksters, or something more nefarious, perhaps from the Middle East…
Citizen space traveler Mark Shuttleworth achieved orbit today on a Soyuz launch. He’s on his way to the International Space Station, approximately one year after the Tito flight. He is expected to get a much better reception than did Tito.
Cole Porter knew what people want, in his song “Don’t Fence Me In.”
Professor Reynolds and Mark Whittington have beaten me to this, but for those three or four people who come here for the space stuff, I want to point out a very worthy initiative by Alan Wasser (current head of the National Space Society) to provide economic incentives for space settlement. This may free up more private investment for it, both reducing the need to rely on the taxpayer, and ensuring that the money is spent on (gasp!) actual space settlement activities, as opposed to simple job (but not wealth) creation.
In brief, he proposes the establishment of a regime for property rights in space via legislation which would result in the U.S. recognizing same. The perceived lack of such rights is one (though by no means the only) barrier to raising investment funds for off-world ventures. When investors can’t be sure they’re going to hold clear title to their investment, it makes it that much harder to persuade them to invest.
I haven’t read the proposed legislation in detail, but I certainly concur with the spirit of it.
Humankind is a pestilence–an unhealthy malignant growth, ravaging and destroying everything that it touches. For the sake of the rest of the universe, we must confine the vile infection to the single planet that it now inhabits.
That’s the attitude of surprisingly many people (though not of your humble weblogger).
I got an email this week from one of them–a “Lori M.”:
Forget “practical and affordable”- space travel is not ethical. Let’s face it: We cause problems here and we would just take them somewhere else.
Humankind consistently demonstrates a strong lack of the integrity for such a venture. History foreshadows the cyclical injustices of the past played out anew on some poor, unsuspecting ecosystem. Space travel/colonization would be irresponsible and sadly consistent with the thinking that got us to the state of informed depravity we are in now.
I’m not saying we should trash space travel- just table it until human societies show more promise. We do best to spend more time and effort developing character before technology.
“Space travel is not ethical.”
My, my, where to begin?
I don’t know where my correspondent was when she sent me the email, but I’ll bet it wasn’t the African savannah. I wonder if she thinks that the human race had the “integrity” to leave that place where we evolved and expand into what is now Europe? Or that those who had spread further east, into Siberia, should have had second thoughts before crossing the Aleutian land bridge and thus despoiling the Americas?
Is she of the school of thought that those descendants of the Africans, having developed the technologies of sail and navigation, should have then stayed in Europe, until they had attained some kind of societal perfection, by her (no doubt lofty) standards? Well, perhaps she is, though, of course, had they done so, she probably wouldn’t be here to so helpfully (if not specifically) point out to us our myriad failings. And wouldn’t that have been a tragedy?
Human beings “cause problems here…”
Indeed we do. Of course we cause lots of other things as well.
We often cause solutions to those same problems.
We also cause scientific theories. And symphonies, and majestic works of art, and gardens, and laughter, and joy. But apparently she would insist that all non-terrestrial existence remain empty of these things, because we’re too “depraved” and insufficiently “ethical” (by whatever unexplained standards of ethics she uses). To paraphrase the kid in West Side Story, as he told Officer Krupke, she wants to “make the universe deprived on account of we’re depraved.”
And she’s concerned that we will attack some “unsuspecting ecosystem.” Here’s a newsflash, Lori–not only are ecosystems off the earth “unsuspecting”–they’re non-existent, as far as we know. There is no solid evidence for life in the universe anywhere other than on our planet (which isn’t to say with any certainty, of course, that it doesn’t exist).
If this remains the case, our role in expanding into the universe will not be to ravage ecosystems, but to create them. We can, and will, make our dead solar system flower, filling it with life (and not just human life), and love, and beauty, and laughter.
And unfortunately, because we’re human, we will indeed take along many of the uglier things that our emailer deplores. But we will do it regardless, and we won’t wait to develop the “character” that she demands–to do so would, I suspect, postpone the next step of our evolution forever. Because I suspect that that’s how long it will be before the “Lori M”s of the world finds our flawed race up to their hypercritical and unrealistic muster.
Fortunately, the decision will not be hers. She is welcome to stay behind. As the old tee-shirt says, the meek will inherit the earth–the rest of us will go to the stars, and do so with a clear conscience.
I’ve added a new feature to Blogspot Watch. Now, in addition to telling you whether it’s up or down, I’m logging the ups and downs, and using them to calculate the percentage of down time for the past twenty-four hours. I display this at the bottom of my link list, just above the “Moveable Type” ad. As I type this, Blogspot just came back up after a twelve-minute outage. The percentage downtime over the past twenty four hours is 16.3%.
For those who are interested, the log itself can be viewed here.
[Update at 11:09 AM PDT]
Per popular request (i.e., one person asked me, and no one has objected), I’ve moved all the Blogspot status stuff to the same place, just to the left (until this message scrolls down). I’ve also added a permalink to the log.
I should also note, that if you see a 0.0%, that’s not because Ev magically healed it. That’s the default number in the template, which appears whenever I do a page update (adding or editing posts). Note that the default traffic signal is green also, so a 0.0% means that blogspot isn’t necessarily up, even though the signal says it is (the way it’s been lately, maybe I should make the red signal the default…)
Any, just check back in a minute or so, and you’ll see the right number, with the correct blogspot status, after the background script does its update. Another way to check is to view the log, and see what the last entry was (up or down).
A researcher at Stanford has come up with a way to do kidney transplants from non-related donors, an without the lifetime anti-rejection drug regimen. It uses adult stem cells.
Is Orrin Judd opposed to this research, too? After all, it promises to extend life for millions. We just can’t afford to have so many people alive…
[Via Geek Press, as usual]
Megan McArdle has written another entry–an instant classic.
For weeks I walked around the site trying to appreciate it. I wanted, as in the movies, a single moment when it all came crashing over me and I finally understood in my heart all that had been lost. I never got it. I had many, many moments when I cried — the worst was when I saw those thousands “Missing” flyers papering Union Square, and every single flyer had a picture of a victim on one of the happiest days of their lives, looking radiant and expectant and utterly unable to imagine the kind of tragedy that had ended their lives. The oddest was when I was riding on the subway one night, and I was tired, and after Fulton Street the conductor said “Next Stop, Chambers Street” and I wondered, for a split second, why he wasn’t stopping at the World Trade Center — and realized for the first time that nothing would ever, ever be the same again.
So I still haven’t comprehended it, in the sense of the word that means to develop full understanding. But I keep having these moments, like when I realize that I am sitting in a trailer, in a hole that contains nothing but the absence of two buildings, and that entirely unfamiliar objects in my line of sight are in fact the skeleton of a place that I did not particularly love when it was still around, but which was part of the fabric of my every day.
Over at the More than Zero site, Mindles H. Dreck has one of the best satirical skewerings of Paul Krugman yet.
The headline of this Reuters story is Palestinians in Hebron Kill Suspected Collaborators. Note that there are no quote marks on the word “collaborators.” They probably ran out, after using them all up on the word “terrorist.”
Unlike terrorists, there’s no danger that anyone might equate collaborators with freedom fighters, I guess.
The headline of this Reuters story is Palestinians in Hebron Kill Suspected Collaborators. Note that there are no quote marks on the word “collaborators.” They probably ran out, after using them all up on the word “terrorist.”
Unlike terrorists, there’s no danger that anyone might equate collaborators with freedom fighters, I guess.