Space development and economics and climate data

View 710 Sunday, January 29, 2012

My son Richard and family have been visiting this weekend. My oldest son Alex came over today, so that we could have the traditional New Year’s dinner of blackeyed peas and rice with vegetables. It’s been a busy weekend.

Here are a few pictures. My granddaughter Ruthie with her father Richard, and our dog Sable who was very well behaved:

And me being a doting grandfather:

I look a bit like a sap, but Ruthie didn’t mind. Sable off in the background was watchful; she has decided that Sable needs protecting. Fortunately Ruthie has a dog of her own at her home in Washington, so she’s used to dogs and knows that pulling tails is something you don’t do.

I can’t resist one more shot, Ruthie, her father, and Alex doing a high five:

So that’s what I’ve been doing lately.

I note that when challenged about the cost of space development Newt Gingrich answered that it wouldn’t be done by spending public money in the usual way. He wasn’t talking about grand Apollo style projects – although I can say I am prepared to prove that Apollo made a net profit for the United States, and I don’t mean through the development of Tang – but about using prizes and X projects to develop technology and encourage private enterprise. I covered all that in my book A Step Farther Out, along with other reasons for the United States to become a spacefaring nation again, and while I said all this long ago I see no reason to change my views. Mankind has no choice but to go to space, and there are profits to be made there. At the moment we are not a spacefaring nation, but we can become one. We have the technical means to build systems that will allow commerce in space, with voyages taking less than a year between significant places in the solar system. This is quite comparable to the commerce times after the discovery of the Americas and continuing well into the 19^th Century. But I have said all this before. Space development proved to be more difficult and expensive than I thought, but much of the expense was due to bureaucratic inefficacies, and a lot of the technological developments were financed by and the military and focused on military uses.

I suppose I should do a modernization of A Step Farther Out one of these days. I understand that Peter Dimandis is saying many of the same things I said in Step in his new book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think . I’ve been preaching this sermon for thirty years. It’s good to see that others agree.

I once told Bill Gates that those who take mankind permanently into space will be remembered long after Isabella the Great is long forgotten. That remains true.

 

 

a free public lecture Wednesday, February 8, presented by artist David Em and astrophysicist Julian Merten

in connection with the exhibition

THE SHAPE OF THE UNIVERSE: RECENT DEEP SPACE PHOTOGRAPHY at the Pasadena City College art gallery, curated by David Em.

LECTURE: Wednesday, February 8 at 7 PM, lecture hall R-122 (directly behind the art gallery).

I have yet to hear any of David’s presentations that were not exciting and thought provoking. Highly recommended.

Evidence continues to accumulate in the climate change discussions.

Solar Minima and Cooling Story

Jerry,

You’ve probably been sent this by others, but just in case. It seems that scientific support is emerging for the idea that Solar activity strongly affects Earth temperatures. I know, shocking, isn’t it? Seriously though, there’s news here that we may be entering a deeper than usual Solar minimum, as deep or deeper than the Dalton Minimum of the late 1700’s (cannon sledged across the Hudson ice, yes) and possibly as deep as the Maunder minimum of the second half of the 1600’s, when the canals of Holland were skatable and London held winter fairs on the Thames ice.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming–Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html

Henry

From the article:

Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)

Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Observations and data are to be preferred to models in most sciences – indeed are the criteria for determining the usefulness of models. So far as I know, not one climate model including the ones that have cost tens of millions of dollars predicted any kind of hiatus in the steady climb of Earth temperature. At this point I would be far more inclined to rely on the data than the models.

I can recall the days of “The Japan That Can Say No”. These were the days of the “Japanese economic miracle”, and many of our financial pundits warned that Japan was going to eat our lunch. Then Japan faltered economically, and the ear from 1990 – to 2000 was known as “the lost decade.” Japan is recovering and they have done many things well; their ups and downs have been different from ours. Still, they are not in an era of rapid economic growth.

China appears to be in a recession, although they are keeping that a state secret. I may be misinterpreting the information I am getting, but I don’t think I am. China is faltering in its headlong growth. So are the other Asian Tigers.

Europe is certainly not in a period of rapid growth, and much of Europe appears to be in deep trouble, kept afloat largely by German determination, even as Greece and some of the faltering countries refuse to cut back on consumption and deficit financing.

All of which is to say that we’ve seen this kind of thing before. The Crash of 1929 didn’t have to lead to the Great Depression. There are reasons why it did. I don’t think those who control US economic policies understand how it happened.

There are some economic fundamentals that cannot be ignored. One of them is that some of the jobs exported cannot be recovered, and some long term unemployment will never be remedied by people returning to jobs that will never return. Something else must be done. At the same time, paying people for not working will produce more people applying for the job of not working. Thus has it ever been and I see no reason to believe it won’t be that way in future. If you want more of something, subsidize it. If you want more unemployment, subsidize that. And if you want to predict global economies, look at global employment.

All of which is to say that we need to do some fundamental rethinking about this, but perhaps when we do so, we need to remember that we haven’t been smart enough to command our way out of our problems – are we smarter now?

I do know some fundamental economic truths – at least they are ‘true’ in the sense that they come from observation, not theory. I have stated them before. Energy and freedom lead to prosperity. Restricting energy and adding not freedom but commands and regulation lead to downward economic pathways. Thus has it been, and thus will it be.

Civilization trends toward converting more and more of its output to structure. Infrastructure or superstructure isn’t important: output is seized and converted to structure, and the largest beneficiaries of that are bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are devoted to the preservation and expansion of the bureaucracy and its members, and only secondarily to the purposes for which they were founded. Thus has it been, and thus will it be.

I suppose I merely state the obvious. I will plead that, as Samuel Johnson observed, people seldom need educating, but they often need reminding.