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The Last 10 Days In The Space Shuttle's Bunker?, Atlantis apparently to be scrapped in 2008
Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Feb 25 2006, 02:58 AM
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QUOTE (dvandorn @ Feb 25 2006, 02:01 AM) *
Because only empires at the height of their powers can *afford* exploration, simply for the sake of exploration. It is only after the fall that anyone ever realizes that their empire could have stood a bit longer if they had just understood that the cost of failing to explore is actually higher, in all senses that make a people *great*, than the cost of continuing their explorations.


In the past, nations have almost never "explored for the sake of exploration". They've explored for the sake of economic development. Columbus, Magellan and the Conquistadores -- and the nations that backed them -- were in it strictly for the money. In cases where national governments have financed plain "exploration for the sake of exploration" -- which is pretty much limited to polar expeditions and the Moon race -- it was as a political Muscle Beach prestige contest with other nations, which makes much less sense in today's age (and those polar expeditions cost a far smaller percentage of their sponsoring nation's GDP than space exploration does).

So: to the extent to which going into space makes economic sense, nations will do it -- just as they "explored" the New World, the East and Africa only to the extent that they had something to gain from it economically. But that's ALREADY happening with space; absolutely nobody questions the worth of communications, reconnaissance, weather and navigation satellites. If -- and only if -- space industrialization makes sense economically will we (and should we) establish a really huge presence in space. A better analogy to non-economic space exploration for purely prestige or artistic purposes is the Pyramids; it would be rather hard to claim that ancient Egypt would have fallen sooner if it hadn't built those.
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David
post Feb 25 2006, 03:46 AM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 25 2006, 02:58 AM) *
In the past, nations have almost never "explored for the sake of exploration". They've explored for the sake of economic development. Columbus, Magellan and the Conquistadores -- and the nations that backed them -- were in it strictly for the money.


I think the (original) nature of the expeditions was somewhat different. Columbus certainly thought he could make a fortune by trading to "the Indies", but then Columbus was half-mad. From Isabella of Castile's point of view, the affair was purely speculative (which was why Columbus only got three ships) and the most likely consequence was that Columbus would disappear over the horizon and never return.

When Columbus did return with a story of land -- easily accessible land, too -- across the ocean, to the surprise and chagrin of everybody except Columbus himself, Spain got interested; only to find, in short order, that what Columbus had discovered was neither China, Zipangu, nor the fabled Spice islands, but a handful of very unhealthy mosquito-infested jungle rocks.

For all that, they went and planted colonies there anyway, claimed all the land beyond a vast imaginary line, and kept exploring. Part was the hope that -- eventually -- they'd be able to discover a route to China (not to be realized until Magellan, who discovered how very difficult that route would actually be). Part was the desire to keep the Portuguese (who in 1498 discovered the really worth-while route to the Spice Islands, via the Cape of Good Hope) from getting a jump on them. Part was the residue of the crusading fervor of 1492, the patriotic concept that Spain had the right and duty to Christianize the heathen. Thus, they kept sending knights and priests across the ocean, to get killed fighting the Caribs, or die of malaria -- or of syphilis.

In short, for the first several decades, Spain's American adventures looked like dismal folly -- certainly when compared to Portugal, who in the same period had taken over the Indian Ocean trade from the Arabs, and together with their control of African gold exports, were raking in money hand over fist. But the Spanish kept at it, for the reasons mentioned above, and sheer bloody-mindedness, until they conquered the only two considerable states that existed in the Americas -- Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. They had come looking for gold, and were able to loot the comparatively little that had been gathered by the despots of these states; but the real wealth of these empires was in the silver mines of Mexico and the Andes. Only when they had got the silver extraction up and running -- about fifty years after Columbus -- did they begin to turn a profit on their American venture. (The huge amounts of silver they coined would turn out to cause disastrous inflation for Spain, and ruin their economy while tempting them to spend vast sums on continental wars, dropping them from the top power in Europe to a second-rate satellite state in a hundred years; but that's another story.)

So the motivations here were more complex than Bruce suggests. Any rational person would have given up on the Americas by 1520 at the latest. The Spanish -- happily, in the short term, for them, very unhappily for the native Americans -- were not terribly rational decision-makers. Their empire was not founded upon sound financial advice and sensible prospectuses, but upon romantic fantasies of cities of gold in the jungle. That they actually found and were able to exploit a real source of cash was no more than luck -- but it was luck that a less bull-headed people (my apologies to the descendants of the 16th-century Spaniards!) would never have stuck around to run into.

Is there a lesson for space exploration in all this? Very possibly not. The only point is, I suppose, that you can explore, and explore, and find nothing of value; but you never know whether something of value might eventually turn up, whereas if you do the smart, sensible thing and cut your losses, you can rest assured that it never will turn up.
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dvandorn
post Feb 25 2006, 04:39 AM
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QUOTE (David @ Feb 24 2006, 09:46 PM) *
Is there a lesson for space exploration in all this? Very possibly not. The only point is, I suppose, that you can explore, and explore, and find nothing of value; but you never know whether something of value might eventually turn up, whereas if you do the smart, sensible thing and cut your losses, you can rest assured that it never will turn up.

Very, very well said, David. I couldn't have said it better myself.

-the other Doug


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Guest_Richard Trigaux_*
post Feb 25 2006, 06:39 AM
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About the motives of exploration (Earth exploration some centuries ago, space exploration now) Bruce says there were very interested motives. Other say it was for knowledge only. I would not make so much simplistic statements, as reality was (and is still) very complex: different individual people can have very different motives, and a given individual can have several motives, conscious or unconscious, idealistic motives that they keep in their mind and down-to earth motives that they put forward to earn funding (or the countrary).

That people have power or money motives is pity for them. Anyway when these people pass, they ultimately have earned nothing. What I retain is that there are worthy motives to keep exploring: knowledge, emotion of discovering the universe we are living in... even if our lives are a glimpse of light between two eternities, at least this light is beautiful. That we need to put forward money motives to earn funding from politicians is pity for them.

By the way, we can still vote to select those politicians...
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hugh
post Feb 25 2006, 07:03 AM
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I wouldn’t have called Bruce’s posts a “rant”. I don’t find his tone helpful, but neither is this:

QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 23 2006, 04:12 PM) *
you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant .

A bit touchy, no..? There is no way we can be sure if congress would react in the way Bruce described, but the assumption that the end of manned spaceflight would mean the end of ALL spaceflight seems a stretch. The Russian experience doesn’t help, because their record of failure after failure with unmanned probes compared so badly with their relatively successful manned program-the opposite of the American experience. The economy collapsed, something had to go- which program would you expect to be cut, in those horrible circumstances? They punished failure and rewarded what looked like success. If that happened with NASA, what would the space budget look like?

In any event, I find this thread provocative and thoroughly entertaining. How the Manned Spaceflight mess is resolved affects planetary exploration so profoundly that I don’t see how you can stop people getting obsessive and emotional. It’s important stuff, and how it all plays out is going to be fascinating.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Feb 25 2006, 11:47 PM
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Well, I guess I'll have to stay "provocative" without "ranting", which will be an interesting balancing act.

Frankly, I'm a little baffled that I've set off such indignation here. Go to virtually any political blogsite on the Web. THERE, by God, you will find ranting. Most political blogsites serve not as a site for reasoned debate, but as coffeeklatches for people who already had the same ideological belief to congregate and stroke each other's egos by agreeing with each other, in much the same way that troops of chimpanzees cement their social ties by grooming each other. Occasionally a member of another rival ideological troop comes over and challenges the blog group, at which point there is much screaming and jumping up and down and throwing of sticks until the intruder retreats again. Two nights ago I read the suggestion that the main achievement of the Web will turn out to be the extent to which it's made it easier to assemble lynch mobs on a worldwide basis, and I'm afraid he's right. But the extent to which the members of this particular group are upset by any forceful comments at all -- by anyone, with any belief -- seems to me to have a certain Girlie Man quality to it which I really think we can't afford intellectually.
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Bob Shaw
post Feb 26 2006, 12:21 AM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 25 2006, 11:47 PM) *
Well, I guess I'll have to stay "provocative" without "ranting", which will be an interesting balancing act.

Frankly, I'm a little baffled that I've set off such indignation here. Go to virtually any political blogsite on the Web. THERE, by God, you will find ranting. Most political blogsites serve not as a site for reasoned debate, but as coffeeklatches for people who already had the same ideological belief to congregate and stroke each other's egos by agreeing with each other, in much the same way that troops of chimpanzees cement their social ties by grooming each other. Occasionally a member of another rival ideological troop comes over and challenges the blog group, at which point there is much screaming and jumping up and down and throwing of sticks until the intruder retreats again. Two nights ago I read the suggestion that the main achievement of the Web will turn out to be the extent to which it's made it easier to assemble lynch mobs on a worldwide basis, and I'm afraid he's right. But the extent to which the members of this particular group are upset by any forceful comments at all -- by anyone, with any belief -- seems to me to have a certain Girlie Man quality to it which I really think we can't afford intellectually.


Bruce:

Chimps *are* fun, but Bonobos have a better way of dealing with conflict!

There's something about the WWW which causes mild remarks to be taken as gross insults, and gross insults to be taken as far worse. Perhaps it's the lack of social cues, perhaps it's the *truth* leaking out. Maybe we do all want to eat the brains of every stranger from the next valley, and rape our sisters. And then our brothers. Oh, joy!

In the meantime, may I say that I, personally, appreciate heresy. I like provocation. I enjoy robust, cruel and entirely unforgiving debate. The only thing I don't enjoy is... ...boredom. Going on and on and on and on about some fixed notion, without any let up - now, that *does* bug me! But earnestly giving hell to the sloppy-minded, no problems!

Please keep up the iconoclasm!

Bob Shaw


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lyford
post Feb 26 2006, 01:47 AM
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I appreciate the range of opinionated opinions expressed by fellow members, and a little "energetic" bumping of elbows and egos I think is to be expected when we have invested so much into these topics. This board is the height of civility compared to the Wild West of teh intenets out there, but even so, I do feel that this particular thread has gotten more off track and the tone uncomfortably close to ad hominems than others.

I want to chime in on some of the exploration qua exploration discussion, but this thread has been hijacked enuf. We have a whole Policy and Strategy section. Wouldn't it be more apropos to go off over there?

PS -But cripes, if you can rant against manned spaceflight on a BBS called UNMANNED SPACEFLIGHT, where can you do so? blink.gif


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David
post Feb 26 2006, 03:06 AM
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QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Feb 26 2006, 12:21 AM) *
There's something about the WWW which causes mild remarks to be taken as gross insults, and gross insults to be taken as far worse. Perhaps it's the lack of social cues

My impression is that some people find themselves in interactions on the internet which they would not normally engage in -- perhaps they have little social interaction outside of the 'net and therefore have little practice in arts like politeness, tact, and diplomacy in speaking; or perhaps they are under the impression that ordinary rules of social interaction do not apply on the internet, because you cannot see the person you are talking to -- and you are frequently disguised by one form or another of voluntary anonymity.

The truth is, of course, quite the reverse; print tends to be a harsher medium than speech, and it takes all the tact you can manage not to come across as a fool, a buffoon, or someone careless of others' feelings. Frustration with discovering that people may take offense where you believe yourself to be doing no more than speaking the unvarnished truth may lead some to adopt intentionally abrasive personas; but this is probably not the best response. It's good to remember that what seems trivially obvious to one person may be a difficult and controversial point to another; and that minds are changed, not in a flash of logic, but through the slow persuasion that comes through an accumulation of irrefutable evidence. Or, as the old adage has it, more flies are trapped with honey than with vinegar.
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mcaplinger
post Feb 26 2006, 03:56 AM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 25 2006, 03:47 PM) *
Well, I guess I'll have to stay "provocative" without "ranting"...


I don't take issue at all with the crux of your argument in this thread; I agree with some parts of it and not with others. What I object to is that you rarely acknowledge that anyone else's insight has any validity or adds anything to the discourse. You're pretty well convinced you're right about most things, and for you that's usually the end of it.

Of course, the rest of us might learn to just read your messages without responding, because your initial messages are usually worthwhile at least at some level, the subsequent responses unfortunately less so. I try to follow that strategy as much as I can, but sometimes, like now, I can't help myself.


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Guest_Richard Trigaux_*
post Feb 26 2006, 07:55 AM
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QUOTE (David @ Feb 26 2006, 04:06 AM) *
My impression is that some people find themselves in interactions on the internet which they would not normally engage in -- perhaps they have little social interaction outside of the 'net and therefore have little practice in arts like politeness, tact, and diplomacy in speaking; or perhaps they are under the impression that ordinary rules of social interaction do not apply on the internet, because you cannot see the person you are talking to -- and you are frequently disguised by one form or another of voluntary anonymity.


I thinnk that respect of the others still apply on the internet. In the beginning there was some idea as the internet was a "free" space, so that social rules such as politeness would not apply. This is not true, as people can still be vexated by words, and it is worse because these words are in public, and public defamation is added to public insults. It is even still worse on a forum where the webmaster allows for such behaviours: even in the case you are frankly and unfairly attacked, you cannot make this recognized. I remember once I was purposelessly attacked and grossly insulted on a forum, by several persons, and the webmaster was doing as if there was no problem, I had to threaten him of a legal action to make him remove gross personnal insults and gratuitous accusations. Why it is so? Because distance or anonimity allow for sadistic people (this is not for you, Bruce) to stalk others freely and without fear of reprisals. And this situation can be very painful for the victims.

So, knowing this, I now seldom engage in an internet forum, unless I am sure that it is fairly moderated (this is for you, Doug). Discussing on Internet with people of far countries and very different cultural/experience background can on the countrary be a very pleasant and useful experience, so long as we don't enter into useless conflict.

Bruce, you should look here: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...opic=2260&st=30If you read my interventions, especially the last, I say: I think that Homeplate is the most interesting site around, they should not depart so fast, and take the time to do what there is to do, without planning to come back one day (Spirit could stop working before). What is there to see in the hills that was not yet seen? But just after Doug comes with right the opposite argument. Would I engage in and endless debate? No, it is useless, because he is right. I am right too, but this rightness cannot stand in front of Doug's argument. So the discution naturally stops at that point.

Still for you, Bruce, please consider this thread: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...opic=2286&st=15 where we discuss the possibility of an ancient greek philosopher (Democritus) had some kind of primitive telescope. I started the discution on this point, post Feb 23 2006, 11:41 AM. Further tty expresses some doubts in his post Feb 24 2006, 09:34 PM, Further I to find an explanation, but without contradicting him on his assertion. Then the discution stops. Why? Because I "won" and intimidated tty? so that he don't dare to reply? No, definitively not, the discution stops here because nobody have something more to add. We considered the different arguments, pro and con, and this ended the discution. Anyway it is a speculative matter and we have no evidence about what actually happened and it would be dogmaticism to grasp to such or such oppinion. But it was a pleasant exchange for me and for tty and for the others who contributed to the discution. We all won, in knowledge and in pleasure. Perhaps one day we shall find democritus tomb, with some strange lens-looking pieces of glass assembled in a bamboo tube, but this is just a wishful speculation. My opinion was rather the second alternative I evoked in this tread: Democritus pushed the use of his naked eyes to their extreme possibilities, and he made clever inferences.

You see, Bruce, how expressing opposite opinions can be a pleasant exercice, not a fight, not a vexation, if we just abandon the useless and troublesome desire of "proving that we are right and we are never false"???
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djellison
post Feb 26 2006, 09:41 AM
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QUOTE (lyford @ Feb 26 2006, 01:47 AM) *
PS -But cripes, if you can rant against manned spaceflight on a BBS called UNMANNED SPACEFLIGHT, where can you do so? blink.gif


That was NEVER what this place was intended for. I'm having very serious thoughts at removing the political, observational and manned subforums as it is.

Doug
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Feb 26 2006, 10:42 AM
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I think the trouble stems from the fact that E-mail is the very first basically new form of human communication invented since writing. It combines the swift response of the spoken word (which, throughout human history, has always included a hell of a lot of impulsive insults that get removed from books, essays and letters after the writer thinks it over) with the permanence of print (allowing the recipient to reread and mull over those insults in detail, and get madder and madder). Abe Lincoln used to let any angry letter he intended to send to anyone sit in a drawer for 24 hours, while he reconsidered whether he REALLY wanted to send it. Nowadays nobody lets an angry E-mail wait for 24 seconds. The Internet needs its own Emily Post, although I have no idea who it could be.

As for Mike Caplinger's response: I am -- genuinely -- interested in what parts of my line of reasoning you agree and disagree with. And I will repeat that I think the accusation that I never back down on anything I say is nonsense -- although admittedly, out of insecurity and fear of criticism, I rarely say anything in the first place unless I'm solidly convinced from the start that I'm probably right, which may be a recipe for trouble.
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lyford
post Feb 26 2006, 04:57 PM
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QUOTE (djellison @ Feb 26 2006, 01:41 AM) *
That was NEVER what this place was intended for.

Understood. I don't want to do anything to jeopardize welcoming posts like this, which is WHAT I assume you intended this place for. smile.gif


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djellison
post Feb 26 2006, 04:59 PM
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Bingo.


Doug
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