Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. -- MaxedOutMama

I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. -- Kim du Toit

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them.-- Moshe Ben-David

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. -- Sultan Knish

All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war. -- Billy Beck

Friday, June 16, 2006

Hey! You Kids! Get Off the Planet!


(Blogging from work again. Left last night at 7:00PM, back again at 6:15AM.)

Physicist Stephen Hawking recently declared that humans must go into space if we want to survive as a species. I'm pretty much with him on that one. I'd hoped (since I grew up on Florida's Space Coast during the race to the moon) that we'd already have colonies on the moon and a significant presence in space.

Two guys floating around Earth in a Greyhound Bus is not a "significant presence" in my book.

There are two hurdles that have to be overcome for this to happen, though. One: we have to have the will to do it. Two: we have to have the money. To some extent will equals money, but even if the ready cash was on hand, if you're not willing to spend it on getting out of here, then it might as well not exist. Leaving the planet is expensive - or at least it will be until we develop technologies that reduce the cost.

Right now it costs (officially) about $5-10k to put one pound into low Earth orbit. The real cost, when you add in the expense of the support infrastructure behind a launch and ground support during a mission, is probably more on the order of $40-50k. Assuming your average buck-naked human being weighs 150Lb (obviously we're not talking about your average American here) and you're looking at between $1.5 and $75 million dollars just to put someone into a not-too-stable orbit around the Big Blue Marble. Getting to escape velocity costs a lot more. (The $1.5M price tag obviously ignores things like life-support.)

There are other ways to get into space. Glenn Reynolds thinks that a Space Elevator is a good idea, and the idea of a gigantic magnetic-induction catapult has been floating around for decades, but both are multi-billion dollar investments with engineering, safety, environmental, and materials problems of their own.

I'm not sure the United States has the political will to do the job. At this point, I'm not sure we have the political will to defeat the forces of Islamism. I've written before that it's possible that China may be the country that first succeeds in colonizing off-planet. Dictatorships don't have as much of a problem with "political will" as democratic forms do, and they can wring the money out of the rest of the world, so long as we keep buying from what are largely State-owned industries.

In the same speech, Hawking said,
We are getting closer to answering the age-old questions: Why are we here? Where did we come from?
That's great, but I'm more interested in "Where are we going, and how will we get there?"

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