Mars: One Way

[Undertoad]

I am taking a step back

feel free to adopt my approach

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by traceur

So... I am sorry BigV and xoxoxoBruce for doubting you guys. Thank you for trying to warn me anyway.

Traceur, you should have seen us trying to get TW to admit that Vise-Grips are a hand tool...

[it]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

Traceur, you should have seen us trying to get TW to admit that Vise-Grips are a hand tool...

....I don't even....

I kind of want to see that if you have a link. What was even the counter argument? Are they the mandibles of robotic amputees?

[BigV]

loving this thread almost more than a trip to mars.

[it]

The ISS has had some of the most disappointing scientific discoveries of the century. Like finding that chicken hatched in space are born normal.

I had high hopes for this when I was a kid, but seems they did not pan out: No problems forming a skeleton, no embryo-like legless chicken or difficulties breathing, just... Normal freaking chicken. Screw you nature.

[tw]

Originally Posted by traceur

The ISS has had some of the most disappointing scientific discoveries of the century.

We had two choices - each for $8 billion. A Super Collider in TX or the ISS. As more politicians become less knowledgeable, more emotional and more driven by rhetoric, then glory was in an ISS. So people who advance science had to go to France and Switzerland to perform science.

The LHA is not as powerful as the Super Collider would have been. But one of the great discoveries occurred there - Higgs Bosom. Meanwhile the ISS can do no science until a fourth person is deployed. By that time, the US no longer had any vehicles to carry men into space - due to myopic and extremists rhetoric that pushed Orion, Ares, and Constellation - all examples of bad science.

An $8 billion ISS has cost more than $80 billion. In part, because its purpose was glory - an emotion; not science.

When I was growing up, a transistor was clearly the future for everyone. As the car, light bulb, and electric motor was the future for everyone in 1900. Today, everyone's future is in quantum physics. When a Tevatron in Fermilab in IL closed in 2011, the US no longer had any major quantum science machines. The contempt for science has grown that large. Stanford Linear accelerator is only used for other low power experiments. So who will see the jobs generated by fundamental science (invention)? The transistor developed in 1948 created massive jobs in the 1970s and 1990s because America was driven by science - not profits.

Today, great sources of innovation (and wealth, jobs, power, etc) such as the RCA Sarnoff Labs, HP labs, Xerox Palo Alto Research, Bendix labs, and of course the most famous Bell Labs were sold off for profits. Because what creates jobs and profits does not appear on spread sheets for ... well how many decades did it take for transistors, lasers, communication satellites, fiber optic communication, Shannon's communication theory (that make digital communication possible), PCM, C programming language, etc to finally create jobs and products? According to business school graduates, those were all costs - not profitable.

It is not foolishly spending money on ISS or Mission Accomplished that created problems. It is what got quashed and driven out of America that resulted from directing our resources towards emotional (extremists) and much less productive activities. At the expense of what actually made America great.

ISS is simply another example - created at the expense of the Super Collider.

Well the ISS does one useful experiement. AMS was canceled when extremists canceled much science to redirect funds to Mission Accomplished. The AMS, that could have been carried by most unmanned science vehicles, was finally mounted outside of the ISS.

[it]

For the most part I agree with that.

I don't think "contempt to science" is quite the right description of that - while that does exist as a growing social trend on it's own right (Currently believing that the entire scientific community has met one Monday to coordinate their conspiracy plans to lie about environmental data and fighting against the teaching of evolution in schools), but I doubt how much weight that has on those in power. I think the actual problem is the weight placed on a short term gain model at the expense of long term gains, which are - as you expressed yourself - a lot more difficult to model on a spreadsheet.

As of right now, the industries that stand to gain the most out of scientific progress have the difficult problem of, well... Not existing yet, which makes it very difficult for them to form a strong lobby.

[xoxoxoBruce]

.

[it]

So I've given that some thought Bruce - and I am not sure it applies when its not about a specific innovation or even set of innovations, but about the drive to innovate in general.

Nobody is saying that we should all replace our ovens with the next thing that can heat stuff for no other reason then the fact it's the next thing, we're just saying that we need to drive forward to find what the next thing might be. There is only so much juice you can squeeze from a basket of fruit before having to go back to the tree and reach higher, or at least start planting new fruit trees for the future.

[tw]

Electric motor, demonstrated about 1880, saw no real value until after the 1900s. Transistor in 1948 finally started making its real value apparent in the mid 1960s. Laser was a wonderful invention that has no real purpose until well after 20 years later. Newton's calculus and others of his time (in and after 1600s) did not have appreciable value until the 20th century.

Some inventions result in innovation almost immediate - same decade -especially when it is a solution to an existing problem. Others can have no apparent value for generation or even centuries. Especially when it is a solution looking for a problem to solve.

In the 1800s, experimenters discovered a charge inside a glass jar could be discharged by applying ultraviolet light. A solution to a late 1960s problem - eraseable computer memory chip or EPROM.

Einstein's equations were revealed 100 years ago. Resulting jobs, wealth, economic power, industries, markets, and innovations are only just beginning to exist.

[lumberjim]

Impressive!

[fargon]

glatt, you must be so proud. I'm proud just knowing you.

[glatt]

Yeah. I'm super proud. He's had lots of unique ideas over the years and they have been mostly ignored or failed to work out. He designed a lunar habitat and submitted it for a NASA grant but didn't get it. He designed an underwater hotel and abandoned the idea when he realized the safety issues for untrained guests were insurmountable. (A few underwater hotels are being built in other parts of the world where safety standards are more lax.)

Article about him in my hometown paper. It's good because it goes into more detail about the design and has a picture. But there are a few typos. Small town journalism.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Not what I pictured from the description. It says artists rendering, but I wonder if it's his vision, or the artists?

[glatt]

It's basically his version. An acquaintance of his made that rendering for him.