

One Giant Leap to Nowhere - ams1
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opinion/19wolfe.html?pagewanted=print

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davi
I've been thinking about this a little bit lately, with all the hoopla around
the 40th anniversary.

The moon landing, in the public mind, was like Lewis & Clark -- it was
exploration, trail-blazing. But the _point_ was that once the trail was
blazed, everyone else could follow, like pioneers going to California in the
early 20th century. There would be space colonies, the West was no longer
West, it was... Up! Out!

But none of that happened. It turned out that space travel was for supermen,
not the everyman. And the everyman turned away. Space was just another place,
like the corner office of a skyscraper, that rich, privileged, educated people
-- _other_ people -- got to go. And with that, and the conquest of the Soviets
that Wolfe describes, we turned away.

The companies trying to do it faster, cheaper, better, and for anyone who
wants to go are the heirs to the original impetus. They may eventually deliver
on the promise that originally attracted the national attention: that this was
a new beginning.

~~~
russell
The Vietnam War killed our spirit for a generation. We had been defeated and
were thrown into inner turmoil. Kennedy died and we got a succession of
presidents with no vision, no spirit of wonder. NASA went from leadership to
mediocrity. Wolfe gives us the metaphor of single combat, but we thought then
that the space race was way better than the arms race. Then Johnson and Nixon
dragged us through the Vietnam mud.

------
Herring
" _I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people
setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as
hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody
ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly
obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's
inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really.
We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach._ "

-Bruce Sterling

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ckinnan
The big mistake was declaring the moon a public commons. Instead it should be
private property, first come, first serve....get there and stake a claim!

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't know that it would have made much difference, given the lack of
harvestables on the moon. We don't even know how much water is up there, and
there's no shortage of its main mineral elements - silicon, iron, calcium,
aluminum - here on earth.

I'm deeply saddened that manned space exploration has atrophied - it was so
inspiring to me as a kid (b 1970), then I grew up and realised that the
spacefaring sci-fi I enjoy most is just not going to happen in my lifetime. I
suspect I'm not alone in feeling cheated out of the promised future. At the
same time, I'm unable to come up with a good economic argument for why we
should go back to the moon or establish a moon base.

>Gloom<

~~~
DaniFong
He3 is a fuel that can be used for aneutronic nuclear fusion -- a type of
nuclear fusion with far less of a radioactive flux putting less demands on the
wall material. The moon is one of the only sources (apart from the solar
wind).

Which is not to say that it's a good idea, just that, were small fusion power-
plants (for military applications, for example) ever achieved technologically,
it may quite possibly require aneutronic fusion, and that a fuel source would
start to really matter.

~~~
anigbrowl
+1 - excellent point.

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robryan
Reading this and a lot of other similar pieces makes you wish you were in a
position to do something. Really though America's the only nation that could
really pull off any real space progress at the moment and even that would be
questionable with the current state of the enconamy.

Really though with a trillion dollar bailout, imagine the jobs that could be
created and the uniting of the people with something like another space race
but to mars.

~~~
kiba
Jobs are not created, only reallocated.

Since we live in a world of scarcity, there would alway be work to do.

The only reason why people don't have jobs is that resource are not
reallocated yet, or worse, something is preventing the reallocation of
resource.

~~~
tom_rath
"Jobs are not created"?!? What nonsense!

There were ~1.7 Billion people on the planet in 1900. Are there only ~1.7
Billion jobs to go around for the ~6-7 Billion people on the planet today?

Wealth is created from industry, which creates jobs to build that wealth. We
do not live in a world of scarcity -- scarcity is imposed by nonsense such as
a command economy's forced reallocation of resources.

~~~
Rexxar
> "Jobs are not created"?!? What nonsense!

Try to understand what Kiba means, even if it is a big simplification. He
probably agree with the rest of what you say.

~~~
tom_rath
What is there to left understand in Kiba's statement? It's nonsense and I'm
surprised it's been up-voted as much as it has.

Jobs are created by wealth. They are not a constant bestowed through the
universe by fate.

We don't live in a world of scarcity. Scarcity is created by artificial
constraints imposed by those who believe wealth (and society's employment) is
a fixed quantity to be allocated by a central force of some sort.

"I'd have plenty if only those who have much more than me would give up their
fair share." That's idiocy.

~~~
kiba
You have totally misunderstood me.

Because we live in a world of scarcity(limited number of t-shirt, computers,
cars, yacht, etc), there is alway enough jobs to go around barring government
regulation and attempt at central planning as well fluxes in the general
economy.

You also got your economic relationship wrong. Jobs are not created by wealth.
Jobs create wealth.(No, digging up holes and filling it in doesn't count nor
do I believe that an object's value is defined by how much work is done.)

I don't know where you got the idea that I believed that wealth is fixed and
that we need central planning to work. Quite the opposite, really. I believe
that the free market system has created unprecendented wealth that men in the
last 200, 100, 50, and 10 years ago never imagine.

~~~
tom_rath
>I don't know where you got the idea that I believed that wealth is fixed and
that we need central planning to work

I'd say the statement "Jobs are not created, only reallocated." did that.
Whatever your beliefs and intended context, your statement is completely
incorrect.

You are describing things backwards: Jobs do not create wealth -- individuals
seeking wealth create jobs.

Individual 'A' hires individuals 'B through n' to realize their vision to
build wealth. Jobs do not spawn themselves spontaneously and seek out
individual 'A' to bestow upon them the wealth generated by the working
individuals 'B through n'.

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vinutheraj
I remember when I first heard of the fact that people have really landed on
the moon, why such missions aren't commonplace now that its been 30 years
since the first moon landing. I think I have never heard of people going to
the moon in the past 2 decades of my living memory, maybe that's one of the
reasons that people have come out with this conspiracy theory that people
haven't really gone to the moon !

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zandorg
Wow, Wolfe writes like a God. Not a dull sentence (I read Bonfire of the
Vanities and it was like stepping into another world).

