We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The other night I attended a talk by Tara Smith, a philosopher from the University of Texas who has written a number of good books, such as this one. Her talk was at a private event so I am not going to relate the exact details of what was said, but one thing that struck me during the Q&A session was when a guy in the audience, who clearly disagreed violently with Prof. Smith’s views, began to state that she “did not get” certain ideas (which he presumably agreed with).
I really dislike this verbal tactic, although I occasionally find myself lapsing into it, and I should not. When we say that someone does not “get” something, such as not “getting” rock music, or clothes fashions, or a political creed, or whatnot, what they really are trying to say is that “X does not like or agree with this because he or she is an idiot or is blind to the wonderfulness of it.” I remember, back in the days when he was cheerleading for George W. Bush, Andrew Sullivan was a particularly bad offender, writing about how X or Y did not “get” the threat posed by Saddam/etc and so forth. Even if Sullivan was right at the time, this tactic smacked of saying that smart, clever people like him understood what was going on but those who did not were in some ways deficient in their reasoning.
Jamie Whyte, about whom I have written before, has a great book debunking these lazy ways of thinking and arguing. Well worth the read.
“Groupthink was a major factor in the buildup of risk in the financial system in the decade preceding the recent crisis. Top bank executives and regulators ignored dissenting voices from both ends of the political spectrum which were questioning the excesses that were building up in the system. What was once a comfortable consensus about the strength of our regulatory structure has now been replaced by an equally comfortable and equally flawed consensus about how to fix it.”
Arnold Kling, libertarian-leaning economist, giving a long report on the problems with how the US administration has sought to deal with the crisis, and why he thinks those moves will make future problems more, not less likely. My fear is that for now, such warnings will continue to go unheeded not just in the US administration of The Community Organiser, but in the UK and parts of Europe, as well.
Bill Whittle has a video report of his visit to XCOR on Pajamas TV. If you enjoyed my future history of yesterday, you will enjoy this vision of the current and the near future of New Space.
In Britain, you probably are.
Both the Shetland Islands Council (101) and Corby Borough Council (90) – among the smallest local authorities in the UK – have more CCTV cameras than the San Francisco Police Department (71)
– BBC Report Pretty pictures here.
That’s nothing, it seems. We learn today that a single school in Stockwell, south London, has 96.
House of Dumb is as sympathetic as ever to film director Steven Soderbergh.
It seems that the viewers of Soderbergh’s latest biographical work were indeed inspired to follow the example of the subject of the movie:
The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped for a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn’t get off the watch tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: “Yank it off, boy, what does it matter.” I did so and his possessions were now mine.
Dominic Lawson tears into the moral cant and dubious economics of those who want to festoon the UK with windmills as a solution to so-called man-made global warming. As he says, other countries, such as Germany, have spent large sums on such alternative technologies but have not, yet, been able to retire conventional power stations at all.
I am quite a fan of tidal power, as alternatives go (although I think that no serious energy policy that sidelines nuclear power is worth considering as a practical one). Unlike the wind, which is dependent on weather, tides are as regular as the orbit of the Moon. Reversible turbines could be powered by the regular, big currents that sweep to and fro in the coastal waters of countries such as the UK, France, Germany and Spain. And unlike windmills, they would not, hopefully, create a bloody great eyesore or hazard, either.
The New Space conference has been in progress all weekend and runs through tonight. Some idea of how the world has changed is that a bunch of free-market entrepreneurs are welcome at NASA Ames. This is partly because so many of the high positions in NASA are now taken by people who (mostly) agree with us, or at the very least see no other way NASA can continue to function. They need cheap access to space too and the ‘big boys’ are not delivering it.
My associate in space ventures, Rand Simberg, is there live blogging the event so please go take a look at what he has to say.
I am going to go very far out on a slender limb and tell you my thoughts on how things might play out over the next few decades.
First, NASA is in deep trouble. The Ares 1 is well behind schedule and the gap in their ability to take cargo and passengers to the space station has widened into a chasm. Ares 1 was pushed ahead by former NASA director Mike Griffin for two reasons. It was an effort to train younger engineers on a smaller manned vehicle design before all of the old folk retired and as a means to get to the space station when shuttle retired. Building Ares 5 as a first effort was correctly thought to be a bad idea. The problem is, Ares 1 seems to have become less an interim vehicle and more of a goal in itself. This is something one less enamoured of government would have predicted. I do not think Ares 1 will fly before 2015 and 2017 would not much surprise me.
So where does that leave us?
SpaceX has flown two very small expendable rockets of a new design with new engines. By itself that would be fun but not of much use for the long term. What is important is the commercial sense of this vehicle. It is cheap to build and cheap to fly as such things go, and more importantly for our topic today, it was the first step towards a bigger and more interesting expendable, the Falcon 9. This rocket uses a first stage cluster of 9 of the same engines as the Falcon 1 main engine and is big enough to deliver cargo to the space station. Given the clean performance of the most recent Falcon 1 flight, a second success in a row, I am going to predict they have this vehicle working by no later than the 2nd flight. That means a true commercial orbital cargo capacity by 2011, and possibly as soon as 2010.
But wait, there’s more. The cargo carrier is not just an expendable container. It has windows… for a reason. The Dragon capsule was designed and built as a manned craft from the start. After a few cargo flights SpaceX will have the operational data needed to risk placing people in it. That should happen within only a few years of the first successful flight of the Falcon 9. There is also a next generation rocket on the drawing board, the Falcon 9 Heavy, but let us leave SpaceX for now.
Although I know less about their efforts, Orbital Sciences Corporation should not be counted out in this market niche and time frame. It is entirely possible there will be two commercial package and personnel delivery companies operating in the space station environment by 2012.
Let’s look at Bigelow Aerospace. They currently have two inflatable habs in orbit. They have a 100% success rate on their orbital operations and have years of real flight data backing them now. Somewhere in the period of 2010-2012 they will be putting up the full scale unit. That one will contain a goodly amount of rentable pressurized and fully habitable volume in space. Their habitats have shown themselves to be rugged enough to survive years in space… but there is nothing special about them being in orbit. They can provide habitable volume in any low or no pressure environment. → Continue reading: How will it really happen?
Okay, since we are in Lunar mode today, here’s another quotation:
“No event in contemporary culture was as thrilling, here on earth, as three moments of the mission’s climax: the moment when, superimposed over the image of a garishly colored imitation-model standing motionless on the television screen, there flashed the words: “Lunar module has landed” – the moment when the faint, gray shape of the actual model came shivering from the moon to the screen – and the moment when the shining white blob which was Neil Armstrong took his immortal first step. At this last, I felt one instant of unhappy fear, wondering what he would say, because he had it in his power to destroy the meaning and the glory of that moment, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 had done in their time. He did not. He made no reference to God; he did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of the opposite; he spoke of man”. (page 186).
Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason.
For all that I broadly share the sentiment expressed here, I don’t think that any of the astronauts, even if they were religious, would have thought of their faith as somehow undercutting the sheer, grandeur of rational thought that got them up there in the first place. For them, I think, belief in a Supreme Being might even have been strengthened by wondering about how the universe came about in the first place, although cosmology comes in many forms. But still, Rand was right to make the point: in a culture that sometimes denigrates science and reason, the Moon landings were a potent reminder of just how far Man has travelled through the use of both.
Niklas Järvstråt has invested in a simulation of a lunar settlement using an old Swedish mine which he bought some years ago.
Just a short note to mention that the moon-mine inauguration and moon landing 40-year anniversary will take place tomorrow at Storgruvan, Nora, in the middle of Sweden. We will start the pumps and make footprints in lunar regolith simulant FJS-1, donated by Shimizu cormoration. Maria Aldrin, Buzz Aldrins great great great grandfathers great great great great great great granddaughter, will make the first footprint for the mine. We are looking forward to an interesting program of local and national interest, and a recorded well wishing message from the Romanian Space agency. Happy anniversary, all “lunatics” and space buffs!
Niklas is part of a world wide conspiracy to settle the moon and planets. Shhhh. Forget I told you that…
The Moon Society is looking Beyond NASA. While I would prefer a pure free market opening of the moon, the practicalities are that libertarian ideas are not globally influential enough to let us have our way. Peter Kokh discusses ideas that might at least let us get an opportunity to plant and grow the tree of liberty off world.
Today has been declared a space settlement blogging day and Samizdata is one of the participants. We hope you will also check out some of these sites for other stories on this topic.
Ad Astra… and may the high frontier be settled by free men and women, from whence ever they come.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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