We promised ourselves Mars Colonies, and instead we settled for...
ElectricAye
Posts: 4,561
Can't we solve the big problems anymore?
An interesting article in Technology Review:
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-cant-solve-big-problems/
From the author of the article: "people say there is a paucity of real innovations. Instead, they worry, technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys."
Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal: "We wanted flying carsinstead we got 140 characters."
Bruce Gibney: "In the late 1990s, venture portfolios began to reflect a different sort of future ... Venture investing shifted away from funding transformational companies and toward companies that solved incremental problems or even fake problems ... VC has ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances."
Comments
And yes most tech advances are a joke meant for entertainment and mass consumerism. Ipods/Ipads are just toys. All that tech gets used for watching dirty pictures, you tube videos of pets, etc. The last 10 years of computer tech could be flushed down the toilet and no one would miss it, except some hipsters.
That said, a lot of the changes are generational. The big aerospace companies have changed, the buyouts in the 90's just wiped out a lot of organic knowledge and IP that really can't be replaced. The old corporate guard replaced by MBA's and other assorted human paper clips who know nothing and can't see beyond the next quarter. These are the first people to kill off R&D efforts, The Skunk Works exists only on paper today. Lockheed is more Martin Marietta, Rockwell only exists as a PLC company. The Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich types are gone and never to return.
Boeing got greedy and outsourced most of it's production and with it their design talent because some MBA's thought is was smart.
By the late 90's we failed at designing the next generation shuttle. Boeing and Lockheed blew it real bad. The engineers they hire are credentialed buffoons.
Now they're forced to contract out to Burt Rutan's company for about everything from drone designs to space vehicles. Nobody with talent wants to work for the big firms. Their culture strangles creativity.
NASA has changed has changed as well. This isn't the NASA of Apollo, Skylab or the early Shuttle program. They've become another hide bound government agency obsessed with credentials and political correctness.
What is needed are robust research labs like Bell Labs and ORNL that do all sorts of basic research. Fund them well over decades and then watch the innovation happen. Of course we won't do that. Research isn't sexy or has a political constituency.
And de-fund NASA, they screwed up horribly, bet the farm on the rickety shuttle and let the rest of their launch assets rot. Now we can't even reach the space station on our own and had to abandon the Hubble. The outfit deserves the death sentence. Retire that bloated astronaut corp. It's doubtful in this economic climate that we will ever mount a serious manned space effort if ever.
If this is true, I'd say we got a damn good deal! I could take on an army of "morally bankrupt geek in his underwear eating captain crunch in some cube farm at Google", where as one or two dozen jack-booted thugs would disrupt my day substantially.
Todays dreamers dream of reality TV, sports stars,pop singers, and a socialist government to give them free phones and pay their way so they can play.
I've become so disgusted that I'm ready to pack up and go home.
C.W.
They're also missing that technologists work with the technology they have to build things people want to use. If people collectively want Google, Facebook, and World of Warcraft, then that is what gets created. Technology people don't want ends up forgotten. So to me it looks like collectively people don't want to send other people to the Moon, but sending machines to Mars is fine.
Personally I think trying to send people to Mars at this point is somewhat silly - we can get so much more bang for our buck out of little disposable robots. But I would argue we should have such robots all over the place by now, soaking up information like a sponge. By now, for example, the bottom of our own oceans should not be a mystery any more, and we should have little submarines looking around under the ice sheets of Enceladus. But I think the spirit of the article hits pretty close to the mark. Our culture seems to have settled for interactive fantasy games rather than using fantasy as inspiration to move on toward real goals. Our venture capitalists have pumped too much money into escapist technology rather than actually doing something, and it really shows in the attitude kids have toward doing anything these days. "OMG, old man, why build a real rocket when I can fly over ice-zombies on Halo 89 and bomb them on my Xbox? Awwwsome!" It's the difference between giving somebody a pill to cure their disease vs. giving them an injection of morphine and telling them everything's going to be okay.
http://www.syntegration.com/ short video explanation on syntegration http://www.syntegration.com/_flash/player_2.swf?scale=noscale
for more info http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDRudRhNgy4
I want to explain why I'm convinced that this is right: If you analyse living systems in nature you will find again and again the same cybernetic principle
the viable system model. If nature has evolved in milltions of years and millions of variations to the same basic principles this must be the BEST principles to control systems that is ever possible.
I have chosen the word principle carefully. It includes that the WAY how the control is realised in real world systems will be adapted to the actual circumstances and actual environment again and again
evolving too.
If anything can save the human race from going under it is cybernetics
best regards
Stefan
NASA just dropped a big orbiter with ridiculously complicated process (A sky crane? Really? You needed a SKY CRANE? NOW THAT'S JUST SHOWING OFF) and it all went flawlessly. We are learning stuff, some of it unpleasant, that we did not know in the early days. Space exploration is hard and dangerous. Machines do it really well and safely for the human operators. When we do get to the point of sending humans to far places it will be for better reasons than planting a flag and bragging that we got there first.
I think what we might really miss is the incredibly rapid pace of innovation that we saw in the 20th century. When I think back on those years, I am struck by the stories of great leaps and discoveries made by the Teslas, Edisons and Einsteins of those times. It was a time of extreme wonder as in a single lifetime for many people, they saw their reality literally transformed by electricity. People whose childhoods were lit by oil lamps and candles, grew old by the flickering light of television images of men walking on the moon. It wasn't incremental, it was exponential. And it was visceral.
Today, the pace of our technological and scientific growth and discovery is actually faster, but rather than playing out in such public ways as was seen in the 50s and 60s, it's playing out in labs and universities for one really simple reason - the general public can't even begin to grasp what the hell these people are doing!
Once, discoveries in electronics meant that suddenly your city's downtown was brightly lit at night without fire. It was cause to take the wagon to the town and make a night of looking at the "modern miracle" of electric light.
Now, discoveries in electronics mean that we've found a way to make a multi-layer graphene junction with a tunable band-gap that far surpasses the current characteristics of silicon. This will probably result is a 100 fold or greater increase in speed and circuit density of our computers, but none of that means anything to most people - they're only getting what they expect now - that the computer they buy today will already be an obsolete dinosaur by next Christmas.
We've become jaded to technology. We've come to expect the incredible, in fact, we find the incredible to be quite ordinary and ho-hum now.
The danger in all this is that as the spark of amazement dims, so too does the pool of people who choose to follow educational paths that will lead them to become the next generation of Teslas, Edisons and Einsteins. And then there are the economic constraints that seem impossible to escape. We're all stuck with those. Even myself, I'd rather be just experimenting and building electronic projects that I have a personal interest in, beyond just the curiosity of figuring out how to meet a client's requirements. I'd rather be spending my time developing Cold Fusion and Warp Drive! But economic realities seem to trump all.
So yes, we have iPods and Facebook. But like everything humans come up with, the value of the tool is not inherent in the tool itself, but what we use it for. I use my iPod Touch to research anything and everything I might randomly have a question about while going about my day. I get answers to questions that previous to my iPod I would have NEVER known because the effort to find out would have involved trips to the library and research in outdated books. My iPT goes with me everywhere, so knowledge and learning is always just at my fingertips. It's not a gaming device - for me at least.
And there are many others like that out there. People who, despite becoming accustomed to technology, have never lost the wonder of it all. And a lot of them are discovering things that no one really understands, or even wants to (the intellectually lazy are about 90% of the population, I believe) - and those things ARE leading to somewhere amazing.
Developments in physics are among the most esoteric, with things like string theory, and talk about the "quantum foam", almost immediately causing people's eyes to glaze over. But we're working now on getting - literally - a handle on the very most fundamental non-thing we've ever postulated - the very fabric of space-time itself. And we're VERY close.
So for those who are disappointed that we're not flying around like Kirk and Picard - take heart.
Not that long ago, electricity was something we knew of because we observed it every day - in the static of our clothing, or in great displays of nature's power - it was real, but we didn't have much knowledge of how to do anything with it. Fast forward just a couple of hundred years, and we have cell phones, the internet, and our space shuttles are now museum pieces.
Where we are right now is formally where we were 200 years ago in relation to the electron. We're about to get a handle on something completely new. And our progress forward will now not be by mechanical trial and error because we can leverage our technology to assist us in the process of discovery and utilization.
Yes, we've sort of plateaued on a lot of fronts in science and technology's public rise, but many of us, in our lifetimes, will witness a revolution in technology that will dwarf all of our discoveries in electronics up to the present. And raise issues and concerns the likes of which even science fiction hasn't yet addressed. We're in for an amazing ride.
Remember you heard it here!
OMG, dude, you used more than 140 characters. Awwwwsome!
President Obama Space
Link to the Future
Anyone following the Space Shuttle for example, from concept introduction in the latter 1950s as reported by Weekly Reader, will know it took several decades to realize the dream.
The Australian aborigines have their "Dreamtime", Americans believe in the their own dreams of exploring vast new frontiers.
But meanwhile, one might look around and see if the rest of the world has similar dreams or conflicting ones. We all need to wake up and find a way to live together now and with what we have. If there is a grand dream to be had, it needs to be all inclusive, not just grand.
Hurricaine Sandy really messed up NYC, but has any one considered that this is the global warming that we have long said would put Manhattan underwater? And has anyone really accepted the fact that while NYC was a disaster and a mess, this happens almost every other year in the Philipenes, but nobody in the newsroom considers that as much more than routine.
In other words, the world has greater new challenges than going to Mars. Besides, much of the space race seems to have been used to provide the US with a superior position in the global arms race more than to provide a new frontier fro mankind. Technology seems to create swords first and plowshares later on. Maybe we all should go a bit slower and live a bit less intensely.
Meanwhile, we need to get going on the Manhattan seawall, and one for the New Jersey shoreline, and yet another for Long Island. Or is everyone going to relocate inland and to higher ground?
The reason we no longer dive under our desks for fear of an A-bomb is that the Russians demonstrated a 50 megaton H-bomb above ground and proved that a desk would be no refuge. To survive, we had to abandon our current ideas (and ideals) of self-preservation and think more comprehensively.... and more realistically.
I guess when it your news room that is under water it gets a bit more newsworthy:)
Plenty of people survived being nearby the nuke hits on Japan. Famously one guy even survived both. Quite possibly hiding under a desk might save you.
In fact you whole post reminds me of the SNL skit "Lowered Expectations." Such a skit isn't so funny when applied to one's country, or to Mankind. I reject the notion. But I'm sure there are those who love the idea. I'd name a few groups, but that would be too political for this forum.
Those were A-bombs. The biggest H-bomb the USA ever tested was 15Mega-tons and I think that was a huge disaster at Bikini Atoll. The Russians were actually trying to do terra-forming with their 50 mega-ton bomb, but the area remains too hot to this day. A desk isn't going to do much good if the whole area is a vast crater. (try Wikipedia about h-bomb testing)
I suppose I am rather geocentric - after all, I live here. Travel always has a certain appeal, but I guess you can say I have been travelling abroad for the past 18 or so years. A bit like Marco Polo.
I do admit there is a certain amount of merit to use space rockets to explore the solar system and probe the universe. But having people survive the cosmic radiation, the extended voyages, the absence of gravity, the limited amounts of water and air seems to be a bit out there when we do have a rather long list of items that need taking care of on Mother Earth.
I do admit that I loved the idea and read a great deal of the science fiction genre that supports ideas of human migration into space.
Meanwhile, I read in the local news today that mainland China hopes to have nuclear armed submarines within the next two years. That is rather disappointing to me. We certainly cannot runaway from this world even if we do travel to others.
It is not about lowering expectations. It is all about being more aware of what the rest of the world dreams of and how it struggles through dire hardships. That awareness will build a better world. Maybe more so than space exploration.
The rest of the world listens to our talk of space travel and just see cruse missiles and CIA drones and wonders what is coming next.
well, i for one want the robots now. i'm actively persuing thm, along with many of the rest of you. they will be. here shortly. we have most of the parts: workstation, microcontroller, cheap steppers and sensors from china, 3D printers, various toolchains. we have very large communitties attempting every permutation of the technoliges, at least a few will turn out interesting.
mars will be next on the list.
Freedom, comfort and worry-wise, the poorest people on earth living in third-world countries would appear to live like kings compared to people living on Mars or the moon. Free access to air, water, open liveable space, and food (hunting or farming) are highly underrated.
OK, this is a hobby horse of mine, so bear with me.
The biggest H-bomb the US ever tested was Castle Bravo, which was also the first "dry" H-bomb. Mike, the first H-bomb, used crygenic liquid deuterium for fuel, which made it a bit awkward to bomb someone with, though they worked on that problem until Bravo succeeded. Bravo was targeted at 5 megatons and the observers positioned accordingly. But Bravo was fueled with lithium enriched to only 40% purity of the active isotope, Lithium-6; it was thought the Lithium-7 would be inert. It wasn't; Lithium-7 can absorb one fast neutron and emit two, leaving it Lithium-6. The bomb ran away to nearly 15 megatons, oops.
And the nuclear earthmoving debacle was also us. That was in the days when some people were rather desperate to show "peaceful" uses of the atom, so with one example being quickly digging a new Panama canal they made a try at nuclear earthmoving; the result is called Sedan Crater and their cool theory that the most dangerous fallout products would stay safely buried turned out to be tragically in error and the experiment was not repeated. Today the crater is relatively safe and you can tour it but radiation levels were lethal for years.
It turns out that even with radiation fallout H-bombs are little more than hot pinpricks compared to a hurricane. Katrina knocked out power over an area of more than 40,000 square miles. We're still figuring out just how much damage Sandy did. You would be hard pressed to melt an entire ice cap with H-bombs (Kim Stanley Robinson's account in Blue Mars notwithstanding), or to start a noticeable tsunami with them, or spin up a tornado. Space 1999 notwithstanding you'd be hard pressed to alter the course or disrupt the body of even a small asteroid, much less a world the size of the Moon.
I'm sure Castle Bravo was impressive if you were lucky enough to be stationed too close to it, but even those energies are minor things compared to the currents which course through the atmosphere and mantle of the Earth on any given day. Weather is, of course, nuclear powered and it might seem convenient that that reactor is safely situated 93,000,000 miles away -- but let's talk about the Sun's safety record in another five billion years.
I think that we need something collectively to shoot for...something that inspires us. It may not be Mars, but it's got to be something more than mere 'awareness.' I'm aware of a whole lot of things, for what good it does.
Actually, we might need to review the Sun's employment record long before that. From wikipedia:
"...The increase in solar temperatures is such that in about another billion years the surface of the Earth will likely become too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life...."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
Yeah, I think the "colonies on Mars" thing Buzz Aldrin was talking about isn't necessarily a colony on Mars. I think it's just an attitude or cultural thing he's bringing up. We're capable, as a species, of doing a heck of a lot more than what we're doing right now. We've overcome a lot of obstacles and beat a lot of odds. It seems such a shame that we now spend so much time and money squabbling over so much BS and escape into the twitterverse (which ironically I'm sorta doing right this second) instead of working toward our big, human problems. I'm not yearning for some government program to prod us toward some gleaming horizon, but it's such a shame we're being led around these days by a bunch of pencil-necked geeks on Wall Street who've got us all mooing down a cattle chute lined with flat-screened baubles and wireless trinkets. Quick. Somebody Like Me before I die.
Hot dog!!! A new environmental trumpet to blow......what! You're worried about global climate change??? Man, I'm talking about SOLAR climate change....kinda puts your local problem in perspective. No matter what you do locally, there's a giant gas ball just around the corner coming to get you!!!!!
Well, if you want to export your products globally - some sort of awareness of what the rest of the world is like is going to have to enter the business plan. The days of everyone loves Coka-Cola are gone.
Okay, if we created a new economy and jobs on the basis of going to Mars, what happens when we get there? Do we just decide to go to Io? Is that your economic engine for the future of mankind? It all sounds a bit like make work projects.
We do have a real need to get something in place for climatic disasters right away. And building seawalls around the large major Eastern seaboard cities would demand quite a few workers for quite a few years. California is building a high speed railway that is going to help it economically for several years and is good for the environment.
I do think we went to the moon because there was some concern that the Russians might of claimed it all to their own and put nulcear missiles there. But nobody is really going to shoot at us from Mars. And other than scientific data, there is nothing that we really need to bring back.
Collectively shooting for a better world is not a bad thing. And we have one one atmosphere, we might consider taking care of that. We have a very large list of items right in front of our nose that really need doing.
What are we going to do with a colony on Mars anyway? Send criminals there? Grow tea and opium? Mine for diamonds?
When is he running for President?
Putin-Aldrin 2016!
Don't despair. Consider it Darwinism Electricayeism* in action.
*get-off-your-butt-or-die
Actually, Newtonian is commonly used. And Newtonianism is considered a perspective of sorts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtonianism
I've edited my original comment so as not to offend, I hope.
We have Newtoniam Mechanics as in a theory with experiment and maths to back it up.
Then we have Newtinianism which is more philosophical in nature.
Which maybe answers my question. As far as I know Darwin had no maths behind his theory and the experiments are a bit hard to do so we have the "ism".
You can use Darwinian if you so choose.
But I fear that as long as the world behaves like an African watering hole, it won't matter if we are on Mar, Io, or Earth.
Besides, the more I study economics, the more I get the feeling that it is a mythology rather than a science. If it really provided the kind of management we thing it should, capitalist would called it all a fascist planned economy. Got give the greedy a chance to pull wool over the eyes of sheep and to get rich.