That Buck Rogers Stuff

Friday, March 02, 2007

Stairway to Heaven

That Buck Rogers Stuff

A while back – too long, to be honest, I posted the first part of my interview with Brian Dunbar of the Liftport Company (where you can now buy a one ounce ticket to space) - those magnificent crazies who are attempting to build a Space Elevator.  Part one just got us started, so without any sort of further ado, here is the balance of the interview:

Beyond the technical issues, some other questions:

What obstacles do you see in the way of building a space elevator, assuming a technical solution is available – what legal, bureaucratic and safety issues will have to be overcome before we see a beanstalk?

We’ll need to assure ourselves and whatever government agencies that evolve to regulate us that the thing is safe for normal operation and that when it fails it does so in a safe and controlled manner.

There are legal and bureaucratic issues that encumber a launch operator.  These are probably evolved to deal with an industry that pokes along with a low launch rate; the appropriate agencies are going to have to perk up and move faster or that will be a bottleneck.

If I invented a strong enough material this evening, how quickly could your company build a beanstalk?

If you do that you should contact us soonest.  We can offer you a heckuva deal.

About twenty years.  It’s not just about the material - we need to evolve an organization, design the power delivery system, the lifters, the platform, run tests to make sure this all works in the Real World.  The good news is that the further down this track we go the more work we’re doing that back fills the effort so when the ribbon is done ..

Think of it this way.  You’re at work, waiting for a lengthy process to finish so you can get busy.  You can just sit around playing Solitaire or you can be productive and get other stuff done in the meantime.  We’re doing other stuff right now.

Do you see some sort of threshold for large scale access to space (via rocket) or experience in space construction that needs to be crossed before we can consider constructing a beanstalk?

It would be nice if we had massive experience with construction and assembly in orbit.  We do have MIR, ISS and the lessons learned there are valuable but the work there is somewhat odd in that it’s not being done by ‘construction’ guys but by middle-aged PhDs.  This isn’t bad but what we (as a culture) need are a lot of young guys with experience in
orbit.

We don’t have that.  We’ll have to hire the guys from NASA who have ISS experience and think hard about our choices.

But now - no threshold for heavy lift rockets - the initial seed ribbon can get there using the rockets we’ve got.


Posted by Buckethead on 03/02/07 at 12:27 PM
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Thursday, March 01, 2007

Not a simplicity of compromised performance

That Buck Rogers Stuff

Of all the commentary on the iPhone that I’ve read over the last couple months, this is probably one of the better ones.  A sample:

In the same way, it seems to me that designers are always adding additional direct ways of doing things in a hope of making the device easier to use. The first IBM PC had “function keys” across the top of the keyboard … they are still there today! The belief is that extra specific keys is a way for people to be more efficient.

But in most human based interactions we find a finite set of learned primitives and then we combine them to achieve what we want – language, gestures, alphabets. By adding more and more keys and having combinations of keys cntl + shift + F3 for example, we end up having to memorize something that is only relevant here and from which we cannot springboard to a wider arena.

The use of gestures is the opposite. For example, on the Macintosh today you can do “2 finger dragging” to scroll a window up and down. If you are reading some text, like this essay, and what you are reading is at the bottom of the page on your laptop screen, you place 2 fingers instead of one down on the pad and slide them down and the window scrolls up. What do you think you do to get it to move left or right or up? See?

The second radical aspect of the iPhone is the introduction of a new set of gestures that the user makes with her fingers on the screen to accomplish most of the intended functions of the device. There are gestures (that we know from the iPhone demo) to magnify, fast scroll. My guess is there will be others. The approach that Apple is taking is no buttons, rather a flexible touch screen with high graphical resolution. Ultimately flexible and open to a variety of gestures.

That’s pretty much what struck me about the iPhone.  It’s not merely that it has all these functions, or a touchpad - all of which have appeared one place or another before.  It’s the integration, and the simplification of the interface - making something that despite its complexity is elegant in its use.  My cellphone has internet, email, text messaging and other features.  However, they are painful enough to use that I don’t typically, ever use them.  I only use the camera to take the occasional picture of my kids, so I can show them to people.  Emailing those photos is a pain in the ass.  The UI on my phone doesn’t make me ever want to use anything except the most simple and basic feature - calling.  The iPhone will make using the complete features of the phone reasonable.  Once I started using google, and then google maps on the computer, I never looked back.  I imagine that looking things up on google maps on the phone will be no different, and in fact even more compelling, seeing as I have often complained to my long suffering wife that not being able to consult google maps en route is a serious crimp in my lifestyle.  In a couple months, it won’t be any longer.


Posted by Buckethead on 03/01/07 at 10:37 PM
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Lead me to the promised land

Just So You KnowThat Buck Rogers Stuff

Justin Long and John Hodgeman have invaded my brain, and I have decided that over the next several months I will be migrating my home IT infrastructure to the Mac platform.  This is not without precedent - in the dark days before the new millennium, I once was a mac user.  I had a pre-PowerPC Quadra, running OS 8.  And I was happy.  (That computer still works, by the way, as does my 91-vintage Mac laptop.) In the late nineties Windows, despite its manifest (and still lingering) flaws, was ever present and prospects for Apple looked grim.  Buying another mac computer seemed at the time a very bad idea indeed.  Compatibility with the Windows world was nonexistent, Macs were overpriced and underpowered, and as I launched my career in tech writing I needed to have a system that would allow me to run the same software I used at work.

So, I bought a PC – an HP pavilion as I recall.  Over the last ten years, I’ve purchased and built several PCs.  And I’ve also spent a lot of time managing and fixing those systems.  Though at the time it didn’t seem so, the breaking point, the straw to my humpy back, was last fall.  I spent two weekends doing slash-and-burn reinstalls of XP on my computer, my wife’s computer and the laptop thanks to a particularly ah, virulent, virus infestation.  My frustration with windows peaked about 11:00 pm on the second Saturday, while reinstalling for the third time a suite of anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-badness software.  I came to the painful realization that at my billable rate, I had just blown well north of $2000 of time getting my computers back to where they had been a fortnight earlier.

Pissed off, frustrated, tired and angry, I did what every man faced with this dilemma does.  I bitched and moaned like a little girl and didn’t do a damn thing.

Now, sometime earlier, I had bought myself a nice 30GB iPod – the one that came out right before the even nicer video iPod.  This little device, as is well known, is a wonder of preternaturally slick design, easy to use interface and tight integration with an equally well designed iTunes software.  I dig it.  It holds all my Perry Como and Dean Martin music, with 30GB left over for files, photos, and even other music.  For weeks after I got it, the wife and I marveled at how well thought out the iPod was, and wistfully remembered our old Quadra.  But nothing clicked.

When we, by which I mean my wife, were pregnant with child #2, we got another iPod, a nano, so that she could conveniently and stylishly listen to her hypno-birthing CDs without lugging around an antediluvian Walkman-like cd player that would skip every time the baby kicked.  Again, we were stunned to (near) speechlessness by the impressive design that condensed all the features of our (now seeming clunky and Godzilla-sized) older iPod into a form factor a quarter the size and an eighth the weight.

Wow, thought we, those Apple geeks really know their stuff.

Then, the life changing moment.  Apple announced the imminent arrival of the iPhone.  I posted on that here earlier, and there has been voluminous coverage elsewhere.  I know, because I’ve read most of it.  The iPhone is the iPod on crack, steroids and espresso.  The multitouch interface is brilliant (even if, like with the original Mac, they didn’t invent it – they did implement it.) It makes my up to that very moment cool Motorola Razr phone look like chipped flint on a stick.  It occurred to me, as it must have to the design team at Apple two and a half years ago, that no one had ever really made any effort to design an efficient and clean interface for a phone. 

Looking at the iPhone and marveling at the seamless design, it finally occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, there was actually an alternative to Windows.

So, I went to the local Apple store and played with an iMac.  And I was impressed.  I read up, and it’s pretty clear that the new world of Mac is much different than the one I left behind a decade ago.  All the basic concerns about switching are, on deeper analysis, not really reason to be concerned.  As I see it, the main worries are compatibility, power and price.

On compatibility, you have three options.  For things like office documents, you can just use the mac version, and the documents it makes work just fine on windows versions.  For where you have need to run actual windows software, thanks to the recent shift to Intel chips in newer macs, you can either boot in XP (or Vista) and use them just like you always did.  Or, you can run a virtual windows installation on software like Parallels, which will run your windows apps at almost native speed.  You can copy and paste between the OSes, too.  And with the newest version of Parallels, you can even run Windows apps straight from the dock, without having to futz around with the Windows window at all.

On price and performance, there’s no longer an issue.  Apple is using intel chips, so you can make a direct comparison – and the price difference between a 24” iMac and a comparably equipped model from, say, Dell, is minimal – less than a couple hundred.  Comparing a mac to a entry level $200 mcComputer isn’t really a valid comparison – though you can get a mac mini for $600.  If you’re willing to fork out the cash for a high end PC, there’s no reason not to get a Mac, where you get the same performance – plus unparalleled Apple design.  The iMac looks better than any other PC, flat out.

And on top of all that, you get OS X, which, after playing with it at the Apple store, I find to be as slick and well designed as the iPod and iPhone, which didn’t really come as a surprise.  OS X, both because of its design and its relatively small market share, is relatively immune from virus and malware attacks.  Which means that my experience of last fall will not be repeated, and the $2000 worth of time can beused to justify the cost of a new Mac.  At least, in my mind it can.

Surprisingly, though, the wifey is remarkably cool with this whole risky Mac conversion scheme.  She’s even more frustrated than me with the flaws of Windows PCs, seeing as she doesn’t have my experience in fixing them.  She has to wait for me to get things working again, and she certainly doesn’t get even the minimal enjoyment I get from fixing Windows cock-ups.  So getting something that is beautifully designed, easy to use, and, as the Apple website says about ten thousand times, “Just Works™” is alright with her.

Rumor around the playground has it that the new version of OS X, Leopard, will be coming out in the spring, and that there may be a hardware refresh on the iMac line at about the same time.  As soon as that happens, I think I’ll be getting me a 24” iMac.  In the meantime, maybe I can convince the home finance minister that the wireless router is going south, and we need a Mac Mini and an Airport.  You know, just to start the migration.


Posted by Buckethead on 03/01/07 at 07:42 PM
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Friday, January 19, 2007

Rockets are wrong

That Buck Rogers Stuff

As impressive as they are to watch, rockets are a dangerous and in the end inefficient means of getting to orbit.  Burning tons of liquefied oxygen and hydrogen and throwing away the rocket every time you want a satellite is not what your average beancounter would call sound economically.  Imagine if, to fly from New York to Los Angeles, you built a brand new 747, flew it across the country, and jumped out over LAX for a parachute landing and let the plane crash into the Pacific.  Getting a airline ticket would face a few more difficulties than just avoiding TSA’s watchlist.

This is a sound argument for reusable spaceships.  But it is an even better argument for taking a step away from rockets altogether.  Instead of rockets, why not have an elevator?  Walk through the doors, take a seat, and ride into space with as much fireworks and commotion as getting on the express elevator in the Empire State Building.  Building a physical structure that extends from the surface of the earth to orbit and beyond seems fantastical, but the idea actually has an extensive pedigree.

The idea for space elevators goes back to the misty dawn of the space age.  Russian space theorist Konstantine Tsiolkovsky first proposed the idea of an orbital tower in his 1895 paper “Day-dreams of Heaven and Earth.”

On the tower, as one climbed higher and higher up it, gravity would decrease gradually; and if it were constructed on the Earth’s equator and, therefore, rapidly rotated together with the earth, the gravitation would disappear not only because of the distance from the centre of the planet, but also from the centrifugal force that is increasing proportionately to that distance. The gravitational force drops ... but the centrifugal force operating in the reverse direction increases. On the earth the gravity is finally eliminated at the top of the tower, at an elevation of 5.5 radii of the Earth (36,000 km).

However, it was soon realized that no material could withstand the compressive stress of the weight of the tower.  Half a century and more down the road, another Russian, Yuri Artsutanov, proposed what we now think of as the space elevator.  Artsutanov suggested using a satellite in geostationary earth orbit (GEO) as a construction base, and extending a cable downward while simultaneously paying out a counterweight upwards to maintain the center of gravity in GEO.  Artsutanov also described using a tapered tether to reduce the stress on the cable.

Over the last several decades, many people have examined the idea.  Charles Sheffield and Arthur C. Clarke both used the idea as the central focus of their novels Fountains of Paradise and The Web Between the Worlds in the late seventies.  And more thorough research has established many of the engineering requirements for a working space elevator.  Most of these problems are solvable by a suitable application of engineering or politics – for example, building a working elevator car for the cable would be a straightforward, if difficult, application of the principles currently used in maglev trains.

But the biggest obstacle is the creation of a structural material for the elevator cable.  Our strongest materials until recently fell short of the required tensile strength by a large margin.  At a minimum, beanstalk cable material should have a tensile strength of 65 GPa (gigapascals, a measure of stress), and a density on the order of graphite.  (Too much weight, and it doesn’t matter how strong the cable is.) The strongest steel is at about 5 GPa.  Kevlar hits about the same, but is much lighter.  We’re off by at least an order of magnitude.  Quartz fibers and diamond filaments would reach up to the twenties.  But then, in the nineties, came carbon nanotubes.  Their theoretical tensile strength is in the range needed for a beanstalk. 

But, the strongest actual observed GPa was only in the fifties, and the tensile strength of a cable would likely be less than that of its nanotube components.  There are also difficulties with making bulk quatities of nanotubes and making them into suitable strands.  Cost is also a factor, as nanotubes run about $25 a gram.  But there is hope – carbon nanotubes have applications far beyond making space elevator cables, and someone, sometime, will for his own purposes invent a cable that is suitable for our beanstalk.

These developments in materials science put a working beanstalk in sight.  And one company has formed to pursue the creation of a space elevator.  I ran into Brian Dunbar of the Liftport Company in the comments section over at Murdoc Online, and asked him if he’d do an interview.  He graciously agreed, and below, part one of our interview:


Posted by Buckethead on 01/19/07 at 08:00 AM
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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

So far, all we can make is breast implants

That Buck Rogers Stuff

And while you’re waiting for the iPhone to be released in June, build your own home fabricator.


Posted by Buckethead on 01/10/07 at 03:22 PM
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Friday, January 05, 2007

Conversations with my son

Just So You KnowThat Buck Rogers Stuff

I’m not one to make a habit of endless posts about the cuteness of my children.  I mean, they are cute and all.  I just don’t want to belabor the point.  But yesterday, the boy and I were in the car and had some interesting conversation.

the boy: There are good aliens, and bad aliens.
me: really?
the boy: Yes!  And if the bad aliens come, we’ll be in trouble.
me: I should think so.
the boy: But when the bad aliens come, the good aliens will come and fight them.
me: That’s reassuring.  What will we do when this happens?
the boy: Well, if our car breaks down and we get a flat tire, the good aliens will help us fix it
me: An Alien Auto Club?
the boy: Yes!  That’s true.

A little later, we drove by an accident scene, with four or five fire trucks, plus an assortment of police cars, ambulances and the like.  Couldn’t see what actually caused the ruckus.  That led to this:

the boy: Can you sing the fire truck rescue song?
me: I don’t know that one.  How does it go?
the boy: [tuneless hum, then...] Why are you up on that house, anyway?

Always a good question.  But then back to the aliens:

the boy: Where are the aliens, Daddy?
me: if there are aliens, they’re probably on a planet around another star.  Or in Hollywood.
the boy: They’re on their way here.
me: Okay.  When will they get here.
the boy: They’ll get here tomorrow.
me: We should get ready then.
the boy:  Yeah!

That led into a long rambling discussion about the difference between talking and non-talking, and good and bad aliens.  He broke them down into the four possible combinations, and - I think - analyzed our proper reaction to the presence of each.  But it’s hard to tell.


Posted by Buckethead on 01/05/07 at 11:48 AM
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Friday, November 24, 2006

Stealth for the common speeder

That Buck Rogers Stuff

If shooting femtosecond blasts of laser energy turns the surface of any metal into a radiation sucking blackness, I’m thinking that a really, really black car wouldn’t be all that vulnerable to state trooper radar. 


Posted by Buckethead on 11/24/06 at 05:00 PM
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You hide.  I’ll go find my sledgehammer.

That Buck Rogers Stuff

Teaching robots to play hide and seek may seem cute now, when robots are clumsy and stupid.  And, for the most part, unarmed.  But hide and seek isn’t so cute when you’re hiding, and the seeker is smarter than you, armed with plasma cannon, and thinks you are vermin.


Posted by Buckethead on 11/24/06 at 04:56 PM
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Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Astro didn’t have dogtags this advanced

That Buck Rogers StuffWar

The ubiquitous “dogtag” is getting a makeover.

Matter of fact, several thousand improved identity tags are already downrange.  The new tags are more than just a visual display of name, ssn, blood type, and religious preference stamped on a flimsy splinter of aluminum.  Oh no.  These babies will be all electronical and whatnot, and record every med you’re taking, all your allergies, all your ow-ies, every injury and sickness you were ever treated for, and could probably archive every time you beat off too, ‘cept that where soldiers are concerned no device yet conceived has the memory capacity to store that much data.

But the real clever bit is that field medics will have electronic readers, somewhere between PDAs and medical tricorders, that can read the data on e-tags just by proximity.  Medics will not have to dig around a wounded servicemember to plug the new tags into their reader, and gone will be the days where that medic or corpsman had to find the old tags before he could see bloodtype or that he’s allergic to such-such med.  Taking it a step further, those med readers will tie into your permanent health records, maintained at your post or base of origin, the hospital where you were (or are about to be) treated, or presumably your civilian health system or the VA after you get out.

I think there’s alot that can be weird and kludgy with such a system, particularly with all the vagaries of wireless data transmission that have to occur without fail.  I might also be unsure about power use/supply/resupply to those readers, particularly with forward units or SOF far away from reliable energy supply or logistics trains. 

But I’m not skeptical of the overall program concept, and I think it’s a tremendous advantage.


Posted by GeekLethal on 10/24/06 at 03:47 PM
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Monday, October 23, 2006

Warnings we can use

Just So You KnowThat Buck Rogers Stuff

It is perhaps overstating the obvious to say that advancing technology will bring new dangers.  What is less obvious, is that advancing technology will require advances in the state of the art of warning signs.  Before there were lasers, there was no need for the “Do not look into laser with remaining eye” signs.  A hundred years ago, there was no need for the radiation trefoil, the biohazard sign, and so on.  When we finally get around to inventing self-replicating nanosystems, devices to modulate spacetime, artificial intelligences and, to be sure, giant fighting robots - well, the humble warning sign will need some upgrades as well.

But fear not!  Someone has done the work for us.  And that someone is Anders Sandberg.

Mr. Sandberg has thoughtfully and carefully designed a panoply of warning signs for the singularity.  Here are some of my favorites: (You can see all of them here.)

Memetic Hazard

The black light bulb for ideas that aren’t just bad, but contagiously bad, is effing genius.  Likewise, this image just screams that something ominous and desirous of personally introducing you to a naked physical singularity, and not some nerdly rapturous technological singularity.

Nonstandard Spacetime

This sign is fantastic, Sandberg really captures the ominous potentiality of something that isn’t merely self-replicating, but remorselessly self-improving.  Think hordes of nanoscale Tony Robbinses, getting leaner, meaner, more numerous and more fuck-fuck positive every second.

Self-Evolving System

We are already verging very close to needing this sign, especially in areas of downtown London, and soon in Chicago.

Ubiquitous Surveillance

And of course, the all-encompassing:

Existential Threat

That sort of sums it up, doesn’t it?

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Mr. Sandberg for instantiating our fears in handy, easy to print warning signs.  But he didn’t stop there.  No, indeedy do.  He came up with a further classification scheme to indicate just how dangerous a particular danger is. 

Species Level Threat

A level 0 threat threatens all humanity - imminent danger of species extinction.  The number of individuals descends on a log scale to level nine, where only a few people might be endangered, and then down to level 10, “no humans threatened, but other values (such as unchanged biosphere, aesthetics or economy) threatened.” He speculates that the colors of the warning signs above might be altered, but that might affect recognition.  Instead, you might have the two signs, the warning type sign, and under it a color coded threat level with perhaps some explanatory text.  His example is amusing:

SELF-REPLICATING DEVICE. LEVEL 0 THREAT: GLOBAL DANGER. DO NOT MESS WITH

It seems to me that these warning labels pretty much cover most of the likely dangers - excepting of course Cthulhoid elder creatures, homicidal extraterrestrials, and giant fighting robots.  Of course, none of these would typically allow anyone to affix a warning label to them, nor would that warning label be of any possible help to anyone confronted by these dangers. 

[Wik] Found this on the Blogundershlock, as Sandberg’s post references an early Schlock Mercenary webstrip, by way of Bruce Schneier’s blog.


Posted by Buckethead on 10/23/06 at 11:29 AM
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Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Rutan speaks

That Buck Rogers Stuff

Popular Mechanics has a short interview with Burt Rutan, the man who will build our space armada when the Giant Fighting Robots come.  In the meantime, he is working on a commercial follow-on to the X-Prize-winning and cumbersomely-monikered SpaceShipOne, which he has graced with the inventive name, SpaceShipTwo.  Branson will be buying a boatload of these for his Virgin Galactic spacelines in the near future, so go and check out what the future will hold for us in regard to the spaceships, and other neat stuff.


Posted by Buckethead on 10/11/06 at 08:18 PM
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Tuesday, October 10, 2006

When do I get my vorpal sword?

That Buck Rogers Stuff

There has been of late a continual trickle of developments in the field of nanotechnology.  Some we have covered here at Perfidy - such as the liquid armor developed at the University of Delaware.  For a long time, nanotech was pipe dream, or at best the limited product of extreme efforts at the edge of laboratory experimentation.  We seem to be reaching a turning point, though, where the techniques of manipulating matter at its smallest, along with ever increasing computer power is leaving the labs and becoming well, not industrialized, but certainly within the reach of more than few dozen scientists.  The latest is the invention of a new material that can clot blood almost instantaneously.  This substance

Their work exploits the way certain peptide sequences can be made to self-assemble into mesh-like sheets of “nanofibres” when immersed in salt solutions.

In the course of that research they discovered one material’s dramatic ability to stop bleeding in the brain and began testing it on a variety of other organs and tissues. When applied to a wound, the peptides form a gel that seals over the wound, without causing harm to any nearby cells.

Rather miraculous.  A magical fluid that when applied to a wound, instantly seals it.

And that is the thing about nanotechnology.  It seems magical in its effects, though we know that very practical and sober minded scientists have used logic and research at every stage in the development, and that it obeys all known natural laws.  We will, I think be confronted by this effect more and more, and much sooner than we think.  These things that we are seeing now - potions of healing and +5 magical armor - are just scratching the surface of the potential of nanotechnology.  These materials, while wonderful and amazing in their innate capabilities, are nevertheless still ordinary matter - just very cleverly arranged ordinary matter.  When we get to the point where we can truly begin to add intelligence to matter - nanotech computers embedded in materials that can respond to commands issued by those computers - we will have smart materials that will dwarf the seemingly magical abilities we’ve seen so far.

I hope, though, that we don’t see a trend of naming new nanotechnological wonders after D&D magic items.  Even though I do want a vorpal sword.


Posted by Buckethead on 10/10/06 at 10:54 PM
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Thursday, September 28, 2006

I’ll have a side of lobster

That Buck Rogers Stuff

Virgin Galactic unveiled a mockup of the interior of their upcoming sub-orbital craft, the SpaceShipTwo being designed as we speak by visioary aerospace genius but terrible nomenclator Burt Rutan.  This is sweet.  Eight people on a ballistic shot, several minutes of weightlessness for $200k.  Test flights are scheduled to begin in the spring of 2008, with commercial flights beginning in 2009.  What’s that, ten years for a small company to go from drawing board to successful prototype to commercial full rate production?  NASA should be hiring these people.  And, Brickmuppet should be buying me dinner soon.


Posted by Buckethead on 09/28/06 at 08:05 PM
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Look at me, I’m sooper sekrit

It'll Be a Cold Day in HellThat Buck Rogers Stuff

This will make some in the national security apparat have a quiet, secretive coniption fit.  Void Communications has designed itself a brand new, totally secure, self erasing communications system - one that will allow any two people to have a secure conversation that leaves no trace whatsoever of its existence.

Key to Void’s Web-based VaporStream service is the fact that at no time does the body of the message and the header information appear together, thus leaving no record of the interaction on any computer or server. The message cannot be forwarded, edited, printed or saved, and, once it’s been read, it disappears; nothing is cached anywhere. No attachments allowed.

Responding to questions about the service’s utility for terrorists and other malcontents, DEMO Executive Producer Chris Shipley said,

“Good guys need confidentiality, too.”

While this has geek credibility, is certainly an impressive display of cleverness, and no doubt lots of powerful people with guns will be very pissed off - it’s kinda pointless, considering that maintaining any sort of anonymity or privacy in the coming age will be nigh on to impossible without extreme measures that will be indistinguishable from paranoia, or dropping off the grid entirely.  Neither course will be conducive to living a normal life, or getting dates, and therefore will be rarely followed.


Posted by Buckethead on 09/27/06 at 11:52 AM
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Tuesday, September 26, 2006

I’ll have the prime rib

That Buck Rogers Stuff

I meant to respond to this a while ago, but several factors have delayed my response.  (For those who are interested, they are, in order: laziness, work, children, getting ip banned from my own domain, and preparing the Epic New Jersey Post.) But late is often better than never.

So, Ken over at Brickmuppet blog now believes that he’ll be buying me dinner soon.  We made a bet some time ago that commercial manned spacecraft would be orbiting the Earth before NASA pulled its collective head out of it’s many-orificed nether regions.  He has changed his tune thanks to the announcement last week that Bigelow Aerospace will be orbiting a full-size habitat before decades’ end, and is working to ink three separate deals with Lockmart, Kistler and SpaceX to provide manrated launchers to move passengers to his new orbital hotel.  (Do you think it’ll have hourly rates?)

As Ken notes, this is big.  It does in fact solve the chicken-egg problem of having a destination to which manned, commercial launchers can fly to.  I would add that it is ironic that NASA’s nearly complete ISS notably did not solve this problem.  There is a space station in orbit as we speak, but it isn’t a destination.  Remember the hissy fit NASA threw when the Russkies were about to launch the first space tourist?  They don’t want grubby tourists stinking up their pristine space station.  No matter how much they may be forced by higher powers to encourage private space, they are at heart against the development of commercial space endeavors.

By spreading out the love on the launch contracts, Bigelow is (hopefully) preventing a commercial launch monopoly.  I really didn’t consider that to be a problem, considering the sheer numbers of .com billionaires in the game, but still good news.

One of the biggest things that will fall out of space development of this kind is that it levels the playing field to a large degree.  “God created man, but Colt made them equal.” When space is no longer the domain of the super, or near-super powers, things will change to a very large degree, and quickly. 


Posted by Buckethead on 09/26/06 at 02:00 PM
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