X-Andrew-Authenticated-as: 7997;andrew.cmu.edu;Ted Anderson
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Subject: Precious metal prices (was Re: The Magellan analogy)
In article <1990May31.185637.26263@watdragon.waterloo.edu> jdnicoll@watyew.uwaterloo.ca (Brian or James) writes:
> Problem is that gold and the other 'precious' metals don't
>have an intrinsically high value. Drop a megatonne of gold on the
>market, and you'll be hearing the crunch of sidewalk diving aurophiles
>soon after.
> I always wondered how the nations who specialise in raw material
>export would survive a hypothetical 'third industrial revolution'.
Here's an early view on space (sort of) resources:
"I suppose your men are loading the platinum, Dunark."
"Yes. They're filling Number Three storeroom full."
"Good work, Seaton," DuQuesne said. "I've often wished there was
some way of getting platinum out of jewelry and into laboratories
and production, and your scheme will do it. I don't think much of
your judgement in passing up the chance to make a million bucks or
so, but I'll be glad to see the jewelers drop platinum. I wonder
how they'll put it across that platinum isn't the thing for jewelry
any more?"
"Oh, they can keep on using it, all they want of it," Seaton said,
innocently, "at exactly the same price as stainless steel."
"Who do you think you're kidding?" DuQuesne's reply was not a
question, but a sneer.
- E. E. Smith, _The Skylark of Space_
--
Jon Leech (leech@cs.unc.edu) __@/
``One never knows... Deacon now wants to conduct population
explosion tests *underground*.'' - Molester Mole
------------------------------
Date: 1 Jun 90 03:12:42 GMT
From: uokmax!rwmurphr@apple.com (Robert W Murphree)
Subject: Bruce Murray's Journey to Space
I thought I'd start a rucus by describing Bruce Murray's New Book.
To begin with, I'm more of unmanned enthusiast than most so if that offend you
then stop here. It was the best book on space politics I had read since
McDougall's " The Heavens and the Earth". It had amusing incidents on within
JPL politics, Booster politics within NASA, and national politics of Space
One amusing incident he relates concerned the communications capacity
of Mariner 10. The imaging team wanted very much to get real time data.
This would allow them to transmit tens of thousands of pictures rather than
the usual several hundred from their target, Mercury. The bit rate before
Mariner 10 was 256 bits/second. The communications group at JPL was rather
tight knit and claimed there was no way to increase it to real time (100kbits/sec). But Murray suspected they were holding out on him so they'd make no
mistakes, take no risks, etc. But he didn't have anything to prove it.
Finnally, some poor unsuspecting engineer on the communications team sent him
a memo mentioning some hithertoo unmenmtioned safety margins. At the next
meeting with the communications section Murray pulls out the memo and says
"put out", which they did and went on to get real time imaging data from the
1975 Mercury encounter.
There were several reviews of it in the various technical magazines.
Sky and Telescope panned it. Walter McDougal pointed out that Murray's
obsession with working on world peace with manned missions to mars rested
on a misreading of the Apollo-Soyuz (75) flight. McDougal said murray got the
arrow of causality wrong. Detente caused the Apollo-Soyuz not the other
way around. This article was in Technology Review..
Norman Horowitz pointed out that by backing THE MISSION TO MARS
(in a review in The Sciences) he made himself a sort of Ahab pointed towards
the White Whale. In Bruce Murray's 70's book, "Navigating the Future" which
was another great book, he makes it plain that in the Chapter "A Future Elswhere?" that he doesn't think a manifest destiny colonization of the solar system
is very reasonable. He said it was easier to live on the antarctic ice cap than
on mars and so the right time to think about colonizing mars was when the human
population density of Antarctica reached that of iowa. Needless to say in
Journey to Space (and as leader of the Planetary Society) he changed his tune.
I have very mixed feeling about Dr. Murray. When I was an undergraduate
at Caltech (70-75) I met him and was very impressed. He pointed out then that
many people go into the Sciences and technology to avoid the complexities of
human life. He seemed wise and he was almost a hero of mine when heros were hard to find. After collecting all the reviews of his book and reading it throughj
h carefully twice, I decided that he had some tough decisions to make in his
life and maybe he hadn't done so bad. It seems to me that most of us have only one or two careers in our lifetime. Murray has had 3 or 4. Petroleum geologist, Caltech Professor, Instrument Team Head, Chief of JPL, Politician with the
Planetary Society. My experience with Military retreads has been that its really tough to make the transition from the service to science and technolgy. I
think Murray went from geology to Global politics and got garbled somewhere along the way. But I won't damn him by labeling him a technocrat, which was my first impulse. Hope my book review is worth the Bandwidth.
