Posted on 05/20/2005 8:41:38 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
Here's an answer to your question from L. Neil Smith.
In a way, you can't blame the government. Being what they are, politicians and bureaucrats, they have a very unhealthy tendency to project their own ethical and psychological shortcomings onto others, especially members of the unwashed public. Even before September 11, 2001 — and before Luis and Walter Alvarez discovered what it really was that killed the dinosaurs — someone in government read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (individuals are paid to do that; see James Grady's Six Days of the Condor, in which penal colonists on the Moon ultimately achieve their independence by threatening major cities on Earth with boxcar-sized rocks, launched from an electric catapult.
Like politicians who push victim disarmament (erroneously known as gun control), they're afraid they're going to get what they deserve. So if you ever want to see Saturn's rings (or any other astronomical wonder) up close, you must absorb the following truth and never forget it: given their way, governments will never let ordinary people into space.
Never.
Quite aside from the question of boxcar-sized rocks, think of the historically unprecedented savagery with which the Union prosecuted the War between the States. Think of similar savagery at Waco. Think about the War on Drugs — and recall why many folks use drugs to begin with.
You're not allowed to escape.
Governments will do anything — absolutely anything, no matter how violent or morally repulsive it happens to be — to prevent anybody from getting out from under their authoritarian thumb. If you don't shut your mouth, sit up straight, fold your hands, look at them when they're lecturing you, and spit that gum out this minute, they'll kill you.
This is one of the reasons that in my musings on another thread, I surmised that we would need to establish a national identity of our own. I'm accepting contributions for the purchase of the Northern portion of Manitoba.
I used to think that way. It is immature politically and needs some mature reality input beyond Mills, Rousseau, Bentham, and Spencer. As far as the "national identity of our own" is concerned, we need to work on the America idea before we go splintering off.
The question remains: what is the problem?
So then you assume it is not too late to excite the American public with the ideas and promise of the final, (and unlimited), frontier?
Or, to more directly answer your question, the problem is that NASA is a government-created, government-funded, and government-directed entity -- in other words, inadequate.
What is needed is the entrepreneurial spirit of a Burt Rutan coupled to the aggressive profit-driven desires of a hard-nose tycoon in the pattern that Donald Trump likes to pretend he has been molded.
My impressively direct and eminently engineerable scheme to bring irrigation to the deserts of Earth would appear to have some kind of potential profitable payoff, but who would be willing to risk a few thousands to make a few mere trillions?
I'd rather excite the public with dreams of avarice - it tends to work.
NASA is not the problem. Piranha-like contract bidders who smell money 12,000 miles away within minutes is not the problem [a fully-developed space program of private entrepreneurship would automatically dwarf any economy we have ever seen]. One viable candidate for being the problem is the public school system that does not teach how to think. But, that isn't it.
I suppose if you are so well-prepared to say what the answer is not, then you must have your own idea of what the answer is.
Pray tell, what then is the answer?
I already said and have been saying since I signed up. The problem is how to convince FedGov that they need to withdraw from the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty. All the truckloads of technology is going nowhere until then.
"Article XVI
Any State Party to the Treaty may give notice of its withdrawal from the Treaty one year after its entry into force by written notification to the Depositary Governments. Such withdrawal shall take effect one year from the date of receipt of this notification."
Yes, it is impossible and that was mentioned in the President's Commission Report on Moon, Mars and Beyond which lays out Pres Bush's new space program. It is not that FedGov is unaware of the problem.
We could:
1. Use space-based mirrors to warm cold regions of the Earth and to create more yields from crops and more pleasant to live in.
2. We could use some type of shading to cool regions of the Earth that are too hot.
3. We could build large levys around our coasts or throughout the ocean to control tidal waves.
4. We could alter moutain ranges that inhibit rainfall to certain areas of continents so more rain falls there.
There is nothing of these 4 things that are beyond our current engineering capabilities. It's just that it would be enourmously expensive and very difficult politically. The expense part of the equation is beginning to be solved by men like Rutan, but the political part is a very difficult hurdle to overcome, but we could engineer the planet if we truly had the will to do so.
My suggestion of using a mass-driver to deliver loads of ice from Antarctica to deserts on Earth, and to Mars to terraform it, would eliminate the principle danger of global warming on Earth, the rise of oceans.
At the same time, it would permit the global warming of Mars, and in only hundreds of years, we would have a second planet for the human race.
Note that all of the space activity piggybacks on the launching of loads of ice electrically, rather than with rocket fuels. It is all a matter of scale.
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