Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V08/V8_372.TXT

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Date: Thu, 22 Sep 88 01:07:16 PDT
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Subject: SPACE Digest V8 #372

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 8 : Issue 372

Today's Topics:
        Wealth of mature spacefaring societies
       Grim outlook for shuttle launches, manned flight
              Re: Why no aliens
         Re: RE space expoitation/exploration
         Re: Are we ready for terraforming???
         Re: Are we ready for terraforming???
      Re: Devolution (Was discussion on overpopulation)
                Chix in Space
          Re: Wealth of mature spacefaring societies
          "It's because of all those satellites..."
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 2 Sep 88 21:37:27 GMT
From: oliveb!amdahl!drivax![e-mail]  (MacLeod)
Subject: Wealth of mature spacefaring societies

In article <[e-mail]: [e-mail]
(Henry Spencer) writes:

:In article <[e-mail]: [e-mail] (Paul F. Dietz) writes:

::A spacefaring society, even one restricted to a single stellar system,
::could have many trillions of members (but technology may make the concept
::of an individual obsolete), and each member could have a productivity orders
::of magnitude greater than 20th century Americans.  I would be very careful
::when proclaiming limits on what technological advances such a society might
::accomplish given millions of years.

:I second this comment.  Consider:  There are people alive today who remember
:a time when radio did not exist, man could not fly, and the total electrical
:generating capacity of the world was measured in megawatts.  Today...  We
:get live TV from Halley's Comet.  There is never a time, day or night, when
:FEWER than a hundred thousand people are airborne.  And one gigawatt is a
:single power plant, and not a really big one at that.

:Our own world, and our own society, has changed beyond recognition in a
:single human lifetime.  Never mind the millions of years; extrapolating our
:capabilities a measly *thousand* years is quite impossible.

Let me add my endorsement.  Two thousand years ago (and much more recently
in some cultures) the Roman soldier's daily pay brought him the price of
a quart or two of wheat.  Today I make enough daily to buy a small home
computer.  This is what wealth is all about.  In less than 100 years
we have gone from no automobiles to a point where virtually anybody can
own one.  The infrastructural support for spacecraft will be steeper,
but not more than an order of magnitude, and there are no mysteries to be
solved.

In one of my stories there is a race that has had a basically
libertarian spacefaring civilization for about 800 years.  They are organized
into clans, large extended families, and are so rich that clans typically
own hundreds of planets.  The technological base is such that an average-
sized spaceship - with hyperdrive capability - costs the equivalent of about
15 minutes of labor.  It's important to realize, my friends, that there is
*no limit* on how good things can get!  The range of wealth to poverty
between the most wealthy and the !Kung bushmen is neglible compared to the
wealth just over the horizon.

If we can get there.  Lift up thy head, Earthman.

Michael Sloan MacLeod  (amdahl!drivax!macleod)

------------------------------

Date: 2 Sep 88 20:59:22 GMT
From: oliveb!amdahl!drivax![e-mail]  (MacLeod)
Subject: Grim outlook for shuttle launches, manned flight

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Ken Josenhans) writes:

:In article <[e-mail]: [e-mail]
:(Henry Spencer) writes:

::Then we'll have to ground the shuttle permanently.  There is no way to
::fly it without risking loss of another orbiter.  The NRC report on
::shuttle frequency put it even more strongly:  if the shuttle continues
::flying, another orbiter *WILL* be lost eventually.

:Unfortunately, in the wake of the Challenger explosion, no one has done
:the necessary *political* work to get the message out to the US public
:and Congress that spaceflight entails risks, and there are reasons for
:taking these risks.  Instead, we've been fed a steady diet of "Safety
:first!" messages, and the public has been led to believe that there
:will be no more shuttle accidents.  What I fear this means is the next
:shuttle accident will be the *last* US manned spaceflight, at least for
:several decades.

There are limits to everything, and my opinion, much as I dislike it,
is that the political attitudes, values, and attention span of the US
public simply will not support the sort of manned space program we need
to be a presence in space.  I remember how galvanized the country was
in the early sixties; now US space exploits are trated as if they were
one more Olympic event, one in which the USSR is getting all the gold medals.

There's an old phrase, "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations",
which is a commentary about how a family can fail to pass on the qualities
that enabled generations one and two to wear suits and ties.  I think something
like this is true of cultures as well.  A mature culture like the USA
becomes jaded and cynical, incapable of strong feelings about anything,
and certainly incapable of the exertions its forefathers made.

This is why I am continually ranting about anarchism and libertarianism
and the need for frontiers.  It's almost a circular notion, but I believe
that the *unprecedented* lack of an Earth-based frontier society has
left the more or less statistically constant percentage of dreamers,
Lazarus Long - types, anarchists, adventurers, and so on to ferment and
seethe in their parent cultures, causing friction and division.  Worse,
when such people are dispersed in a democracy like the USA, they will
be checked by the inertia of the masses.  To be really effective, there
must be a (basically) lawless frontier society to repair to.

The poster above fears that the next shuttle disaster will halt the
US manned space program for many years.  I think that it will probably
end it permanently, unless you count guest rides on Soviet craft.

Michael Sloan MacLeod   (amdahl!drivax!macleod)

------------------------------

Date: 6 Sep 88 19:15:32 GMT
From: silver![e-mail]  (Lucius Chiaraviglio)
Subject: Re: Why no aliens

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Ralph Hand) writes:
[About how to kill an alien]
>Why bother trying to kill it.  We just land, one of our diseases goes
>rampant through their population presto we have control of our first
>new world.  [. . .]

    It is just as likely, on the average, that one of their diseases could
go rampant among our population.  Of course, what is a disease is even more
likely to be different for two species of different origin than for two groups
of humans:  something that is completely harmless to us/them could find
them/us to be an excellent growth medium, and also be wierd enough for
their/our immune systems to have a hard time with.  This is, of course,
assuming that organisms of one origin are able to grow upon material
composing/synthesized by organisms of the other origin, which might not be
possible if the biochemistries were too divergent, although keep in mind that
mutants on either side capable of living in environments provided by the other
side could be selected for by continued exposure even for fairly divergent
environments.  (The list of things that terrestrial microrganisms can
metabolize is quite long, and even things as specialized as mammalian cells
are capable of a few things as profound as oxidation or other metabolism of
aromatic compounds and conversion of D-valine to L-some-other-amino-acid --
have to be able to in order to live in a world containing plants and bacteria
and industries which make such nasty chemicals.)

    -- Lucius Chiaraviglio
       [e-mail]
       [e-mail]    (in case the first one doesn't work)
    Better active today than radioactive tomorrow. . .
    . . .but better radioactive today than inactive tomorrow.
    :-)

------------------------------

Date: 3 Sep 88 01:33:38 GMT
From: oliveb!amdahl!drivax![e-mail]  (MacLeod)
Subject: Re: RE space expoitation/exploration

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Peter Nelson) writes:

>  One of the (many) reasons why our space program is going nowhere fast
>  is that we have too many romantic dreamers who spend their time reading
>  Omni and watching reruns of Star Trek and too few pragmatists.  Do you
>  have any idea what it costs to even put a *handful* of people into
>  space for a few days and keep them there safely?  Do you have any concept
>  of what would be required to create even a *small* self-sustaining colony
>  of even a few hundred people?  Lots and lots of money and an enormous
>  technological, industrial and academic base.  Do you really think they're
>  going to waste those resources and training putting 'misfits' up there?

Dead wrong, of course.  The program needs people who will not be deterred
by >anything<; there will always be "good" "reasons" to flop back into
the tide pool rather than breath that nasty oxygen.

The problem, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, is not those who dream, but those
who can >only< dream.

In talk.politics.misc Mr. Nelson recently recommended that the US surrender
to the USSR if the latter >threatened< to start an atomic war.   This
illustrates exactly what I am talking about when I ramble on about freedom
versus security and about the character of pioneers versus couch potatoes.

Michael Sloan MacLeod   (amdahl!drivax!macleod)

------------------------------

Date: 7 Sep 88 00:19:27 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (Jim Giles)
Subject: Re: Are we ready for terraforming???

From article <[e-mail]>, by [e-mail] (Jim Giles):
> [...]
> latitudes, decreasing the albedo of the planet as a whole.
             ^^^^^^^^^^
I meant 'increasing' of course.

J. Giles

------------------------------

Date: 7 Sep 88 00:14:30 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (Jim Giles)
Subject: Re: Are we ready for terraforming???

From article <[e-mail]>, by [e-mail] (Knudsen):
> In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (P Douglas Reeder) writes:
> This reminded me to post my own theory on Nuclear Winter.
> After a year or so of freezing weather caused by
> all the particulates, the particles would settle out of the
> atmosphere.  Then the excess of CO2 from all the burning cities,
> exacerbated by the lack of growing plants during the cold and
> cloudy "winter," would take over, and we'd go from the deep freeze
> into the oven.  This overheating would continue until Earth
> recovered her pre-war balance, if ever.

Not only that, part of the particulate matter (soot) would settle
out on the permanent snow fields near the poles.  The resulting
reduction in albedo of the snow would cause increased warming.  The
offset to these effects would be the fact that during the nuclear
winter interval, the permanent snow fields would have expanded to lower
latitudes, decreasing the albedo of the planet as a whole.

Actually, no long term post nuclear winter scenario is more likely
than any other.  No one knows what would happen.

J. Giles

------------------------------

Date: 6 Sep 88 15:29:40 GMT
From: steinmetz!nuke![e-mail]  (Dennis M. O'Connor)
Subject: Re: Devolution (Was discussion on overpopulation)

An article by [e-mail] (Michael R Hall) says:
] In <[e-mail]> [e-mail] states
] >In fact, we may have a problem with the size of our gene pool.  There is a
] >fine line about when a population's gene pool is large enough and diverse
] >enough to continue advancing genetically.

  250,000,000 is a plenty large gene pool. 100,000,000 is as well.
  Even 1,000,000 is. You don't have to worry until you get down
  to a few thousand or tens of thousands of individuals. Cheetahs
  apparently were at some recent time down to a few hundred closely-
  related individuals.

] If you stop and think for a moment, you will conclude that we are NOT
] advancing genetically; rather we are devolving ...

  [... rest of article deleted, since it is founded in a totally
   ( by definition ) fallacious assumption ...]

] Michael Hall

  Here's a news flash for armchair biologists : nothing EVER "devolves".
  Period. There is no such thing as "devolution". It's impossible.

  A population tries to adapt to it's environment : that's evolution.
  Sometimes the adaptation doesn't go the way YOU think it should.
  Maybe in the current environmnt, being poor is a survival advantage.
  Maybe, as was Hamlet's case, being too smart is a handicap.
  If the "marching morons" will indeed take over the world, then
  they are obviously more "fit" ( better adapted ), are they not ?

  People who use the BS term "devolve" are usually committing the
  phalacy of judging adaptations. There's only one measure of
  an adaptations success : survival.

  And if the human race dies out, so what ? So did the dinosaurs.
  The universe doesn't revolve around us humans, you know. Besides,
  the human race won't die out till after I and everyone I know
  are dead ( by definition ), so it hardly matters to me, does it ?  :-)

  But keep it out of sci.space, eh ?
--
 Dennis O'Connor   [e-mail]  ARPA: [e-mail]
    "Never confuse USENET with something that matters, like PIZZA."

------------------------------

Date: 6 Sep 88 10:39:32 GMT
From: mcvax!enea!erix![e-mail]  (Howard Gayle)
Subject: Chix in Space

From the 10 June 1988 issue of Science, p. 1411:

   Has the franchising of space begun?
   When the space shuttle Discovery lifts off next January, it
will carry aboard 32 fertilized chicken eggs in a special
incubator as part of an experiment to see if embryos can
develop normally in space.  The experiment is funded by a
$50,000 grant from Kentucky Fried Chicken---the fast-food
corporation's first research effort.
   The project---part of NASA's Shuttle Student Involvement
Program---is the brainchild of 22-year-old John Vellinger, a
junior mechanical engineering major at Purdue University.
Vellinger developed the experiment as a junior in high school,
and NASA first scheduled it for the ill-fated flight of
Challenger in January 1986
   The eggs will rest in a heated and humidity-controlled
cradling carrier inside a locker aboard the space shuttle.  The
cradle is designed to reduce the effects of g forces and
vibration during lift-off.  After return, the egg[s] will be
compared with a control batch on Earth at the Kennedy Space
Center in Florida.  Vellinger will mother hen the Earth-bound
eggs by turning them five times a day, simulating the movement
of a chicken incubating her eggs.  Some of the eggs from both
batches will be hatched and the offspring observed through
their life cycle.
   On Earth, gravity pulls the heavier yolk to the bottom of
the egg.  Vellinger thinks that under weightlessness the yolk
will hang suspended in the middle of the egg, resulting in more
efficient embryonic development and a better chicken.  And,
presumably, in better fried chicken and chicken nuggets.
   It may also offer clues as to how human embryos may one day
develop in space.
   Colonel Sanders would be proud.

Howard Gayle
TN/ETX/TX/UMG
Ericsson Telecom AB
S-126 25 Stockholm
Sweden
[e-mail]
{mcvax, uunet}!enea!ericsson.se!howard
Phone: [phone]
FAX  : [phone]
Telex: 14910 ERIC S

------------------------------

Date: 7 Sep 88 02:20:48 GMT
From: thorin!tlab1![e-mail]  (Jonathan Leech)
Subject: Re: Wealth of mature spacefaring societies

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (MacLeod) writes:
>It's important to realize, my friends, that there is
>*no limit* on how good things can get!  The range of wealth to poverty
>between the most wealthy and the !Kung bushmen is neglible compared to the
>wealth just over the horizon.

    The speed of light places a limit on how much mass and energy are
available to us. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if, as automation & AI
develop, human labor becomes worth practically nothing. There could be
exceptions - truly great thinkers, artists, etc. - but the average
person might well have no skills worth *anything*. Immense surpluses
such as may be produced in future societies might exacerbate the
range of wealth to poverty to a far greater degree than Donald Trump
vs. a Kung! bushman.

    People may argue that just the solar system provides enough for
everyone to be wealthy. Maybe so, but I suspect that as in most other
cases, human population will rapidly grow to the point that most
people are just barely surviving, rather than keeping it down to a
level where everyone has more than enough. I don't think that
fertility rates in the developed world are a very good predictor as
yet. Maybe with a few centuries more data.

    Don't take this as my being a neo-Luddite. I'm eagerly looking
forward to the future. It's just that I expect it to be every bit as
screwed up as things have been for the last few millenia, as well as
to be many of the wonderful things the optimists expect.
--
    Jon Leech ([e-mail])    __@/
    ``After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be
      resting yourself as to see all the other fellows busy working.''
    - Kenneth Grahame, _The Wind in the Willows_

------------------------------

Date: 7 Sep 88 06:51:29 GMT
From: [e-mail]  (Don Speck)
Subject: "It's because of all those satellites..."

This last weekend my Mom mentioned to me that the weather where
she lives is unusual this summer (it is here too), and she posited
that global weather is messed up "because of all those satellites".

Although I hastened to explain that it's caused by pollution,
I wonder how prevalent this misperception is among U.S. voters?

Do you suppose that one could get that idea by seeing the conspicuous
smoke and fire of solid rockets?

Don Speck   [e-mail]  {amdahl,ames}!cit-vax!speck

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V8 #372
*******************