| Friday, January 16, 2004 |
15:43 - Jazz to Moonbase Two
http://corsair.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_corsair_archive.html#107417533753814167
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Corsair the Rational Pirate seems to think he can't compete with the likes of Lileks on the matter of being eloquent about the space initiative. But with all respect due to Lileks, I think he's selling himself short.
We have always had sick people, poor people, bad people, and uneducated people. And when I say always, I mena for the last 100,000 years of so. Do you really think that closing up space to future exploration is going to change any of that? No! We have always had these problems and we are always going to have these problems. We spend hundreds of billions on education in this country every single year and yet there are still people out there who can't read. Want to know why? Because they are stupid or lazy or both. We spend further hundreds of billions on health care and yet people continue to get sick and die, the ungrateful bastards. Should we put on hold everything not health care related until we have conquered death and disease? Don't be a frigging maroon!
This country has proved that it can do more than one thing at the same time. we can fight terrorists (which are never really going to go away so you can quit holding your breath), protect the environment, try to make people's lives easier, educate the educateable and go to the moon and beyond. Will it be worth it? We can't know until we try it, can we? Will all the money spent on health care stop people from dying from a variety of horrible diseases? Probably not but we can still make life better while we try. Going to the moon is in the same category.
Yeah. And as Lance and I discussed last night, the moon isn't just a black-hole expenditure. What it amounts to, in the sense it's used in the business world, is a shifting of capital. If you're a company, you're not spending $6,000 to buy that new Cisco switch-- you're converting $6,000 of liquid assets into $6,000 in physical assets. Money changes form into equipment and people and all sorts of things all the time, often for no better reason than that it can do more work more efficiently (and develop more profit) in one form than in another. $80K can make a certain amount of money sitting in an interests-earning fund; but think how much value it can net your company if you give it to a person for a year's worth of his expertise. Maybe more, maybe less. But the question must be asked. And if half a trillion dollars is better spent taking us back to the Moon than floating in low-Earth orbit in slowly decaying shuttles, then wave that magic wand.
(As an interesting aside-- isn't it weird how the most vibrant developments in technology and wealth-creation come from a massive imbalance in capabilities between two parties? That's what trade is all about: A can produce X more efficiently than B, but B can produce Y more efficiently than A. So A trades X for B's Y, and both are richer in their own local contexts for it. And, perversely, the farther apart A and B are in their production capabilities, the faster wealth gets created. The same goes for space. We'll develop more and better miracle technology by trying to get that much further away from the pack in technical space supremacy, trying always for the overwhelming edge rather than the subtle one, than we ever would have if the whole world were operating on a cooperative and level playing field where nobody was particularly motivated for their own nation to be head and shoulders above the rest. Competition works in some types of markets, but in others-- like space, where the players are governments with budgets the size of planets-- a monopoly isn't a stagnation, it's a positive feedback loop.)
Space, as Bush has pitched it, is what amounts to a public works project (which ought to appeal to the socialists in the audience, if not to the nationalists-- heaven forfend the twain should meet). It's a tax-funded national effort which engages every citizen and gives him something of value for his money: pride, and hope. It creates jobs, it pumps money into private contractors, it stimulates visions of destiny and greatness when we need something to focus on. And it gives the country something of lasting physical value. In the New Deal, that thing of value was dams. Our task lies in making sure that we can get something of similar value from space.
And we will. If the first space push (and all its attendant infrastructure) gave us everything from DARPA to microwaves to ICBMs, this next one will give us things we can barely imagine today. If we play it right. If the money to pay for Bush's plan comes largely from cutbacks in the existing thumb-twiddling that NASA's been doing, then the bill we and our children pay will be as inconsequential to history as the bill we paid to get NASA moving in the first place, in the 1950s. Notice how much grousing we hear about that use of money these days? Didn't think so.
So, bring on the moonbases, and plant an American flag there bigger than the one at Guantanamo Bay. We can only hope that the technological plateau to which it brings us is a sustainable one, one that we won't have to abandon once the initial fervor dies down, because it will have found a way to pay for itself.
You know what I want to see? A sci-fi story in which humans have developed into a spacefaring species-- but have not achieved faster-than-light travel. Gimme a futuristic dystopia in which we've nuked ourself off the planet's surface, or in which the planet has greenhoused itself to the point where the only part of the surface that's habitable is in the polar regions, which are now temperate (minus ozone) while the middle latitudes are flooded and parched deserts too hot to support life. Give me a world where humans still forlornly orbit the planet, living now on floating cities in space, ferrying the way between autonomous moonbases and Mars bases and the Earth, carrying water between them, and where the future of humanity-- rather than out in the depths of interstellar space, which nobody any longer thinks it's feasible to reach-- is back on the Earth, on which we're practicing the nascent art of terraforming, just to get the surface back to a habitable state.
Do it without excessive preachifying, and I'll read the whole checkout-lane series.
Unless, of course, it's already been done, a hundred times over. In which case forget it.
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Brian Tiemann
