You and I could argue all day long about which government boondoggle is better than the other. Frankly, if I were going to move toward authoritarianism, I would more likely move toward socialized health care than toward socialized space travel. At least with health care, it wouldn’t be the case that only a privileged few get to make the journey to a hospital.
But if this is, as Wolfstu says, an argument about moon bases, then how they are financed is as critical an aspect as any, despite the tendency of socialists to believe that money is both worthless and magical — i.e., it can be taken from people on a central planner’s whim and it is the answer to every problem. Therefore, it doesn’t make any difference what you find to be the most romantic or noble use for the pillaged loot. What matters is that you feel like, because it is for something you like, it’s okay for you to take it.
As I said, what my wife and I need is a new car. What we paid last year to the Great Behemouth would have more than covered it. What you need, as far as I’m concerned, is your business. But damn you if you trivialize our needs with puffery about your own, and feel yourself entitled to deprive us of ours. I don’t give a shit how unpopular our position is. A gang rape is not mitigated by the enjoyment of the vast majority in attendance.
That’s a pretty fucking dramatic way to say “waaaaaah, I don’t want to pay taxes!” Seriously, comparing paying taxes to gang rape? Can’t you just make an argument without throwing such obvious bullshit around?
Why not? The enjoyment of the rapers doesn’t make it right, for several perfectly good and practical reasons, but their enjoyment is a mitigating factor in the equation.
In other, metaphorically similar cases, however, it could be that the overall gain in utility does occasionally justify coercion of a minority by the majority. I think you’d be on much more solid ground arguing that government coercion leads to bad outcomes, as opposed to arguing that even if it leads to generally good outcomes it is still immoral.
That’s not what he’s saying – he’s making a statement about ethics, not a selfish desire to buy a new car. If you don’t read his (or others’) posts more charitably than that, you’re going to be a hindrance to useful discussion.
As many of the above that can be coaxed into signing a treaty. Y’know, like Kyoto. And if Kyoto is ‘flawed’ (not saying it isn’t), let’s fix the flaws and get moving. Time’s a-wasting.
Ummm, no. You see, Earth has this big advantage over Mars, or any planet orbiting another star that we’re likely to find: it’s already terraformed.
All we have to do is keep it that way.
No, I’d point out that for the medium-term future, our eggs are in one basket, like it or not.
Between now and 2050, how many of the (currently) 6.5 billion people on this planet will leave this planet in order to settle somewhere else? Probably none. Even if we devoted the collective energy of the entire planet to that endeavor, it would be a miracle if we could find a prospective planet, verify that human beings could survive there, and get a few thousand people into a space ark by then.
Meanwhile, a much smaller collective effort could slow global warming to a standstill by then, preserving the habitability of this planet for its 8-10 billion residents in 2050.
I’m all for space exploration. But time is hardly of the essence with respect to reaching the stars - they aren’t going away, and meanwhile, we’re growing in the knowledge that will enable us to eventually undertake such a mission.
OTOH, time IS of the essence with respect to global warming. Once the polar icecap melts, global warming will accelerate, and the problem will become much more challenging.
Thanks. The ethical point, of course, is that if central planners have the authority to use the money for X, then they have the same authority to use it for Y. If the society were to shift ever so slightly, such that the pet cause du jour were to spend billions trying to reach the inner consciousness through crystal pyramids, those who pretend not to understand my argument would be making it themselves.
Indeed. I’m not totally on board with your political philosophy because I think it’s just too practical to have an instrument like government to make collective (and occasionally coercive) decisions, but I’m very sympathetic to this sort of concern.
Incidentally, on the SDMB I’m something of an anti-government loon, but on the 2+2 Message Board Politics forum, which is primarily populated by anarcho-capitalists, I’m a statist thug. Can’t seem to please anyone. . .
I take your point, but Kyoto turned out pretty impotent and from what I’ve read, too little too late. The thing is, you say “we” and “let’s” like the world is going to come together. I don’t think it is, not soon enough. This isn’t Star Trek and there are no Vulcans to help. Sorry if that sounds too sarcastic, but I just don’t see “us” working out all our differences very soon.
Well, no, earth isn’t terraformed anymore than any other planet is terraformed. We didn’t do it. It is already habitable, for now.
I think what you mean is we’ve already proven we can terraform because we’ve already fucked up our climate. Is that what you mean? I get it, but don’t agree. Well, agree we can fuck up our climate, but I don’t agree at all that we can terraform, except in polluting, harmful ways. Frankly, I’d rather be on the moon living in a nice safe dome than be on earth when we decide to try a few of our terraforming ideas out.
Yes, they are. But what’s so wrong in working now, to put a few eggs elsewhere? Working on climate change and building moon & Mars bases aren’t mutually exclusive, and I’d say the sooner we get on that, the better. Both things.
We’re not going to colonize another planet in 50 years, nor are we going to do much of anything about climate change in 50 years, except make it worse.
But the sooner we get good at living in space, the better. I’ve said this in other threads and I’ll say it again. 100 years ago no one was flying in planes. Today, 1 billion people fly per year. A lot can happen in 100 years.
This isn’t GD, I’m not going to ask you for a cite. I’m just going to disagree. A “smaller collective effort” isn’t going to slow global warming. Nope. Not gonna happen. I’m not planning on turning off my electricity, are you?
Time is of the essence if you believe some of the global warming = doom advocates.
Yeah, and I don’t see what we can do, quickly enough. Global climate change is reality, it’s happening, and there isn’t much realistically I can see to do about it. “We” as in the US, can’t do it alone. We, the US, can build a moon base, all by ourselves if we want to.
Ben Bova’s Grand Tour series envisions a future in which human exploration, industrial development and colonization of the Solar System are already fairly well along by the time Earth is suddenly devastated by a cataclysmic “Greenhouse Cliff.” That catastrophe kills millions but does not utterly destroy Earth’s states and civilizations; and the mineral and energy resources just beginning to be made availabe from outer space are invaluable to rebuilding. (Of course, nothing is simple, and personal, corporate and political agendas always obstruct and complicate the process.)
This is a silly argument. NASA provides the inspiration, the DoE provides the actual education, so NASA should get 1/3 of the budget? Seems like the inspiration should be a lot cheaper than teaching 50 million kids for 9 months of the year.
And I will acknowledge that the DoE budget is closer to four times NASA’s budget, but I’d expect you to acknowledge that NASA’s budget would have to grow substantially for a permanent moon-base.
In any case, I see later in the thread you make the argument that NASA’s 16.8 billion is a small piece of the overall US budget. If the issue is reducing waste, then we really should spend time first on the heavy-hitters. This is an argument I can get behind and I think it is strong enough that we don’t need to confuse the issue by trying to compare two completely unrelated departments.
I’ve seen a couple of people make the eggs-in-one-basket argument. Do a lot of people feel it is important to save part of the human race in case of a natural or man-made super-disaster? How come? It seems like the ultimate long-term decision in a society bent on making only short-term decisions.
Ah, yes: the ol’ ‘deny global warming is real, until you can claim it’s too late to do anything about it’ gambit.
Nuts to that. I may live another half-century on this dirtball spinning through space. I’m sure I’ll never set foot on another planet. I’m for fixing this one.
Last time I checked, the main holdout was “us” as in the U.S. We put what, a quarter of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?
Well, if we didn’t do it, then it wasn’t done, and none of us are here.
Geez. Did you read what I wrote? Looks like you just spewed stuff onto the page. I’m sure you read the word ‘terraformed’ but I doubt anything else - looks like you latched onto that one word, then went spinning off in a galaxy of your own.
Because I don’t have much faith in the ability of our leaders to tackle many things simultaneously. One of the arguments I made against invading Iraq, four and a half years ago, was that our involvement there would distract our leaders from other important issues, such as nonproliferation. That’s turned out to be true.
If you want some big things done, you’d better focus on them, not divide your attention several ways.
I agree. So why the rush?
IYHO. You might be right, but I’m not ready to throw in the towel quite yet.
That analogy would work for practically anything, which makes it silly. If a lot can happen in 100 years, we might find ways to keep our economy booming without overheating our atmosphere!
It’s gonna be doom for a lot of people living in equatorial zones, whose subsistence will become impossible. Where are you going to move a couple hundred million starving people to? Your moon base gonna be that big?
Which (if generally applicable to early-stage sentients of a Type I civilization on the Kardeshev Scale – and we ain’t even at Type I yet . . . ) might explain the failure, heretofore, of SETI . . . and provide one of the crucial missing variables in the Drake Equation . . .
But I hold out some small hope that H. sapiens is different. One of the cosmically chosen very-few. Otherwise . . . Otherwise, no future species on this planet will even wonder why we died out, because none will have the mental capacity to wonder.
Uh, I said Kyoto was impotent, I didn’t say global warming wasn’t real. Do you read, or is your nanny reading to you?
Well goody for you. I’m not going to set foot on another planet either, but part of me would like the human race to continue after I’m gone.
Oh, well then I’ve single-handedly figured out how to save the world. Hey, America, turn off your lights! There, global warming problem solved. Psst, ignore China, Russia, India, those insignificant places.
We didn’t terraform earth! You get that? It was here before we evolved!
Geez, I was responding to your smilie. When learn to use words, please use.
Well I think we are pretty good at doing several things at once. World leader and all that.
IMO, we aren’t going to do anything about global warming, and IMO, we can do something about learning to live in space. Let’s see, how much have we learned about space… think… think… oh, yeah been to the moon. Check. Sent probes to Mars & other planets. Check. Got an ISS. Check. Solved global warming… bzzzzzt! Sorry. No.
The analogy, if that’s what it was, was the transportation advancement, not “anything can happen in 100 years.”
I’m not going to move them. No one is likely to. We’ve already doomed x number of people. Nothing to be done about that. What can we do? Learn to live in space, which won’t effect most people on earth now, and certainly isn’t going to detract significantly from your global earth cure efforts, but just might teach us how to keep part of humanity alive, somewhere else after we fuck this place up.
How come that is important enough to prioritize over so many other more pressing needs or immediate wants? It is easy to see logic behind the short-term decision to save one’s family and friends, and the medium-term decision to save their descendants. I can even see (abstractly) a desire to ensure that mankind lives on. But I can’t see why I would want to prioritize ‘getting some humans off Earth in case of a disaster’ over ‘putting that work into making life better for the rest of us left behind’. Sure, if I thought mankind on Earth was already doomed, then I might be more motivated to off-shore humans – much in the same way an aging man starts considering his legacy. But I can’t see making a policy decsion on something so long-term. I’d rather us change our mindset and make policy decsions on several medium-term returns instead.
The DoE does not provide the funding for education. The Federal Government only provides 8.3% of the spending on K-12 education in the United States. Under the Constitution, the responsibility for education lies with the states. And they in turn put much of the burder on municipalities.
Actual funding of schools is only a small fraction of the DoE’s budget (federal grants to schools is about 12-13 billion, or about a fifth of the DoE’s budget). The DOE mostly acts as a way to help ‘level the playing field’ by setting national standards, helping poor and disadvantaged students, running schools for military children, going around ‘educating’ schools on proper pedagogy, doing education research, and in general mucking about on the periphery of the education system. The DoE has had its mandate and budget expanded dramatically over the past 20 years, and there is no evidence that any of it has done any good in terms of educational outcomes. And there’s evidence that it acts as a brake on innovation and imposes major bureaucratic costs on schools.
Programs like No Child Left Behind impose demands on schools but force them to fund it. It’s basically central planning for education. If it didn’t exist, and the tax revenue returned to local school districts instead, they could be more innovative and respond more directly to the needs of their particular students.
In addition, federal funding always comes with massive amounts of red tape and necessary bureaucracy. The Office of Management and Budget found that No Child Left Behind alone increases the paperwork costs due to federal education programs by 6,688,814 hours, or $140 million.
Imagine if even half of the DoE’s budget went instead to NASA. The local schools would probably be better off, and NASA’s budget would be tripled.
Probably. But not by that much. Remember, the Shuttle stops flying in 2010, which will save NASA about 4 billion a year. And their commitment to the ISS ends in 2016 or something like that, which will save another 8 billion. That’s 2/3’rd of NASA’s budget that will be freed up over the next 8 years. NASA is planning to use that to fund the initial moon mission. Knowing NASA, they’ll probably go over-budget somewhat, so I’d expect a budgetary increase from that.
But don’t forget that many of these costs are R&D costs for new lifters that are expected to be in use for a long, long time. Once that work is done, the incremental costs of missions is actually pretty low. NASA is estimating a total program cost all the way to the first moon landing of $121B. Spread out over 15 years, that’s about 8 billion a year. It’s also about the cumulative savings from ending the shuttle and ISS programs to that date. So any increase in NASA’s budget will be due to scope creep, cost overruns, and the like.
And that shouldn’t be too bad, since a lot of the technology they are using is off the shelf and of well known parameters. No aerospike engines or fancy materials required. So I don’t think the budgetary errors will be big compared to say, the Shuttle’s original budget errors, or the bloat of ISS.
I actually agree with this. But size aside, I’ll bet you that NASA is one of the most efficient departments in the government in terms of value for dollar spent, for one big reason: NASA has well-defined goals, and has to work in a very open fashion. And its failures are spectacular when they happen. So in a lot of ways, NASA operates under a lot of the same pressure that private corporations do. As compared to a Department like the DoE, which has very vague goals and success measures, and is never held particularly accountable for its mistakes. When NASA screws up and blows a billion or two on a bad design or screws up a telescope, millions of people wring their hands and think about whether NASA should be de-funded. Debates occur on the house floor. But if the DOE spents 20 billion on No Child Left Behind, and it appears to make zero difference to education outcomes, everyone just shrugs and increases their budget. Or they blame the President for proposing the program, but don’t consider taking the money back away from the DoE.
On a technical issue, does the world currently have a mature enough launch capacity to support either regular expeditions to or a semi-permanent base on the moon? One reason Apollo tanked in the early 1970s was that we were still using things like converted Atlas boosters for our routine satellite launches of a few thousand pounds payload. And then we had this huge, gigantic 150,000+ lbs to orbit launcher, that we used for moon missions and nothing but moon missions (other than Skylab). For a brief time in the early 1960s it was thought we actually needed Saturn V’s for national strategic purposes (Gary Seven put an end to that). Once we’d scapped the Saturns the largest booster we kept on hand was the Titan 3 (~30,000 lbs to orbit) and the Soviets had the Proton (~40,000 - 45,000 lbs). We’re not going back to the moon to stay until there’s enough of a demand for heavy payloads to support the size launcher manned missions will require. Are we at that point yet?
