Filed under: Apollo program, Astronomy, Buzz Aldrin, Constellation program, General Musings, Google, Government, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Peter Diamandis, Predictions, Press, Science, Society, Space, tech
As I mentioned the other day, news of the new Google Lunar X Prize organized by Peter Diamandis is getting a fair amount of attention, and appropriately so. It’s good to see Diamandis pursuing his dream, as I wrote about in this post about the Heinlein Centennial Gala:
And then Peter Diamandis‘ brilliant, inspiring presentation about how he considered Heinlein to have written not just visionary fiction, but had actually mapped out a functional business plan with The Man Who Sold the Moon. Diamandis said his dream, his goal, was to be there to welcome NASA back to the Moon when the Constellation Program vehicle arrives. This brought a standing ovation and cheers.
Indeed. And with the new Google Lunar X Prize, there’s a fair chance that could actually happen. If private space companies can land a remote-operated vehicle on the Moon under the prize guidelines by 2013 (most people are of the opinion that it’ll happen sooner), then I’d bet that scaling up the tech used to accomplish that to have people – perhaps even Diamandis himself – on the Moon before NASA’s target date of 2020 for Constellation is certainly possible. Remember, we went from having barely function sub-orbital craft to the Apollo 11 Moonshot in just 8 years.
One of the things I find particularly interesting is a bonus possible under the Google Lunar X Prize guidelines. Here it is:
• BONUSES: An additional $5 million in bonus prizes can be won by successfully completing additional mission tasks such as roving longer distances (> 5,000 meters), imaging man made artifacts (e.g. Apollo hardware), discovering water ice, and/or surviving through a frigid lunar night (approximately 14.5 Earth days).
That one bit right there in the middle that I bolded is what I’m talking about. It simultaneously nods to the accomplishments of NASA and also thumbs its nose at the agency. It perfectly sums up the mixed emotions many in the private sector feel about the government’s involvement in space exploration and development: respect for what was accomplished in the past, yet a burning desire to prove that the private players can do more, do it faster, and do it for less money.
I haven’t begun work on it yet, but one of the ‘intervening’ novels of my future history series (between Communion of Dreams and the prequel I’ve started titled St. Cybi’s Well) would be set sometime in the 2030s at one of the Israeli colonies on the Moon. The main character would be an artist who is on sabbatical there, exploring how the space environment effects an aesthetic sensibility. And one of the scenes I’ve envisioned would have him visiting the site of the first Lunar Landing, which has been carefully secured to preserve it as it was left by Armstrong and Aldrin, in order to use the site as inspiration. I must admit, I sort of hate the thought that there would be additional rover tracks there in order that someone could claim a bonus for the X Prize.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Ballistics, Failure, Fireworks, Guns, Marketing, movies, NASA, Science, Society, Space, tech, YouTube
A buddy of mine sent me a bunch of YouTube links last night to clips of explosions (among other things). Some were compilations of failed rocket launches, some were ‘stupid human tricks’. He knows, budding pyromaniac that I am, that I would enjoy such things. Hey, what do you expect from someone whose birthday is the Fourth of July?
Anyway, it got me thinking about a niche cable channel which would be sure to be a huge hit: The Explosions Channel. Oh, I know that The Discovery Channel does some of this, as does The History Channel. But on those, explosions provide the punctuation for other stories, with the occasional feature on firearms, artillery, fireworks, demolitions, et cetera which has a higher-than-average explosion count. But think of the potential for a channel where you just *know* that you could tune in and catch some big explosions, anytime, day or night! It’d be like MTV for the jaded geek, pure visual heroin for the explosions junkie. Guys like me could turn it on, and sit there, slack-jawed and drooling, eyes wide, as explosion after fireball after thunderous report . . .
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Apollo program, Burt Rutan, General Musings, Heinlein Centennial, NASA, Predictions, Society, Space
This morning, when I went to check on her after hearing some stirring, my mother-in-law looked at me and asked if I knew where her toothbrush was.
“Yes. I know where it is. When you get up, we’ll be sure to use it.”
This simple reassurance allowed her to get back to sleep, and when we got her up at her usual time about 45 minutes later, she had completely forgotten the whole thing. See, she is well into the arc of Alzheimer’s, and has slipped to the point where she doesn’t really know where she is or who is around her most of the time. But little things like knowing that she has her own toothbrush, and she can use it, seem to make her happy, give her a measure of security. I don’t try to understand it. I am too exhausted for that. I just try to roll with it.
***********************
Last night a friend sent me the first news reports of the explosion at Scaled Composites, indicating that two people had died and others were injured, evidently during a test of one of their rocket engines. After reading the brief news item, I replied:
Well, shit.
But as everyone involved said during the Centennial – this is going to happen. And while we have to work to take precautions, we can’t allow it to stop the future.
My friend responded to this with:
Yes. If people say we should stop, I have just two words for them:
Apollo One.
My parents knew the astronauts. And if we’d let that fire stop the space program, well……..
***********************
I met Brian Binnie at the Heinlein Centennial. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s OK. Brian was the pilot of SpaceShipOne for the two flights which won the Ansari X Prize. He works for Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites. During his inspiring presentations and discussions at the Centennial, he conveyed a simple, honest love for what he did. He made no pretense that he was a brilliant engineer or scientist (though he holds a couple of advanced degrees), and poked fun at his own public speaking skills. He came across as a regular guy, highly skilled in flying test vehicles, and more than a little amazed to have been involved in making history. I like regular guys, people who are smart and extraordinary but don’t take that too seriously.
I hope Brian wasn’t one of the people hurt in the explosion. But even if he was, I bet that his attitude won’t change, and he’ll still be convinced that private spaceflight is worth the risk. On one of his test flights ofSpaceShipOne , the ship was badly damaged and he could have easily been killed. Obviously, that didn’t stop him then. I’m sure Brian, and all the others at Scaled Composites, will be going over the data from the test to see what happened, and how to avoid it in the future.
7/28/07 Update: Scaled Composites named those killed in the blast: Eric Dean Blackwell, 38, of Randsburg; Charles Glenn May, 45, of Mojave; and Todd Ivens, 33, of Tehachapi. No word on the injured.
***********************
Panel Finds Astronauts Flew While Intoxicated
Jul 26, 2007
By Frank Morring, Jr./Aviation Week & Space Technology A panel reviewing astronaut health issues in the wake of the Lisa Nowak arrest has found that on at least two occasions astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so intoxicated that they posed a flight-safety risk.The panel, also reported “heavy use of alcohol” by astronauts before launch, within the standard 12-hour “bottle to throttle” rule applied to NASA flight crew members.
You know, if you were going to strap me as cargo to the top of a chemical rocket with a 1-in-50 chance of catastrophic failure, I might well be still a little drunk, too. Oh, not if I was going to be responsible for flying the damned thing. But if I was just along for the ride? Yeah, I can see getting drunk before hand.
But that’s no way to run a space program.
***********************
One day last week a steam pipe ruptured in New York City, killing one person and injuring many others. Each day in the US over 100 people are killed in vehicle accidents, and about half that number are murdered.
I was orphaned in early adolescence, one parent murdered and then the other dieing about 18 months later in a car accident. I came to understand death much earlier than most people in our country do. I’ve had a few close calls myself, all of them stupid and unexpected things that had my luck gone just a little differently, I would have died. Now, at middle age, I’ve got the typical health risks for a man which could mean an early and unexpected death.
But I don’t worry about that. Death wins. Every time. None of us gets out of here alive. We are all going to die, sooner or later. The only real thing that matters is that we live life as completely as possible, loving, creating, building the future. Brian Binnie understands that, and I’d bet that the others at Scaled Composites do too. I like to think that my parents understood that. My mother-in-law, who may not understand this on an intellectual level, still experiences life, still worries about her place in the world, still wants to make sure that she can brush her teeth.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
I remember, when I was a kid back in the 60s, that it was still fairly common for people to routinely and without much thought to just toss junk out of their cars onto the side of the road. I’m not talking about the occasional idiot with no care for the environment – I’m talking about your typical American. The roadsides, as a result, were awful. This was also still the era of private and informal ‘dumps’ all through the countryside where people would just literally fill up a small creek valley with their trash and unwanted junk. It wasn’t really until the nascent environmental movement got going that people started to think of the world a bit differently, and within a decade or so it was no longer culturally acceptable to just toss junk out of your car or dump your trash.
So, when I see this kind of news item, I am taken back to those days:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A spacewalking astronaut tossed two large chunks of junk off the international space station Monday, hurling the old equipment into orbit.
Clayton Anderson, a sportsman who enjoys officiating basketball games back on Earth, heaved a 1,400-pound, refrigerator-size ammonia tank away from the station. His first toss was a 200-pound camera mounting.
Mission Control declared the tank throw great and “right down the middle.”
Um, guys, is this really the image we want to send? I know that the two items are expected to ‘de-orbit’ and burn up on re-entry within a year, but still . . . There are over 100,000 bits and piece of space junk in orbit already, complicating launches, threatening satellites and space-based telescopes, and even risking astronaut survival in orbit. The US Space Surveillance Network tracks like 10,000 of these items. Adding to this mess isn’t smart, and treating the disposal of junk as though it were some kind of game seems to me to be a very bad idea. It’s like we’ve stepped back 50 years, to a time when it was OK to just treat the Earth as our garbage dump. Have we learned nothing?
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, MIT, NASA, Predictions, Science Fiction, Space, tech
Via BoingBoing, word of a new design of space suit under development at MIT which would replace the bulky pressurized suits used for the last 40 years:
Newman’s prototype suit is a revolutionary departure from the traditional model. Instead of using gas pressurization, which exerts a force on the astronaut’s body to protect it from the vacuum of space, the suit relies on mechanical counter-pressure, which involves wrapping tight layers of material around the body. The trick is to make a suit that is skintight but stretches with the body, allowing freedom of movement.
This is exactly the kind of suit I envisioned for Communion of Dreams, something that looks more like a wetsuit than a small spacecraft. Not that that is a new idea, since it is also the kind of suit envisioned by many SF writers and movies/shows since the 60’s. It just makes sense that the tech would evolve this direction, not unlike how early deep-sea diving rigs became more sleek and user-friendly over time.
There’s another benefit to the direction that the MIT team is going with their design: it will aid in maintaining physical conditioning, which is always a problem for prolonged weightlessness. From the news release:
The suits could also help astronauts stay fit during the six-month journey to Mars. Studies have shown that astronauts lose up to 40 percent of their muscle strength in space, but the new outfits could be designed to offer varying resistance levels, allowing the astronauts to exercise against the suits during a long flight to Mars.
Images available here.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Government, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, NASA, Peter Diamandis, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, TGV Rockets
One of the panels I attended at the Heinlein Centennial included Pat Bahn of TGV Rockets. I got there a bit late, and he had a call which pulled him away early, but the few minutes he spoke about his company and the future of spaceflight as he sees it were fascinating.
As opposed to the large-scale space project, such as we’ve seen both in government (NASA) and with Peter Diamandis‘ vision (mentioned previously), Bahn has a very mundane, almost boring approach of incrementalism. He figures that it makes more sense to just keep expanding at the margins – to develop dependable, suborbital services which will bring about a demand for increased services, which will spur additional innovation in the necessary tech, which will in turn make more expansion possible, et cetera, in an upward spiral which will eventually get us off this rock in a stable and dependable way. His basic strategy is expressed in this article he wrote three years ago:
In the late 1970’s, Business Week magazine ran a cover story on the latest Cray supercomputer and how it was going to revolutionize American business. Deep inside that same magazine was a small story mentioning that Apple computer was now selling micro-computers. Business Week was correct that a computer was going to revolutionize American society, they were just wrong about which machine it was going to be. Fifty percent of the American public and 99 percent of the aerospace industry are convinced that a moon program will revitalize and grow a new space era. Meanwhile, 1 percent of the industry is working on the systems that will actually do that.
For the last 2 years a quiet change has been occurring. Small, privately funded teams have been flying prototype systems that have not received much notice. Armadillo Aerospace in Dallas, XCor and Scaled Composites in Mojave, Blue Origins in Seattle and TGV Rockets in Norman, Okla. have all begun pushing equipment off of the drawing boards and into the skies.
The key is cost effectiveness. Rather than have thousands of people servicing a custom-built, highly advanced vehicle with an extensive support system going for orbital capability, a small suborbital reusuable vehicle should be able to serve much the same market as a first step into space, with minimal support staff (TGV stands for “Two Guys and a Van”) for a tiny fraction of the cost. That market? Scientific, military, even conventional business needs. And the cool thing, Bahn said at the Centennial, is that if you are working with scientists, they will go out of their way to help you, since it is in their nature to want to get the best performance out of equipment by tinkering and adapting it.
This notion of providing a limited and possibly passing service is not a new idea. Bahn has in the past compared the current state of suborbital launch capability to where private aviation was in the 1920’s:
“One of the big business models was to fly up and take a picture of your house and sell it to you for $5,” he said. “That was a big deal.”
“There were many things that were done in the 1920’s that did not suvive the long term test. Wing walking is not what you would call a real market. Never-the-less, many markets matured and outgrew many of the experiments of the era.”
And there was a lot of thought early in the development of rocketry that such capability could be used for postal delivery. It doesn’t sound economically feasible at this point, but there’s nothing to say that it might not become an attractive transportation option for such firms as UPS or FedEx if dependable services were provided by a TGV Rockets or some other company. In his juvenile novel Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein had his characters adapt a retired “mail rocket” for their own spacecraft, used to fly to the Moon.
I find this notion of private development of spaceflight more than a little exciting. When I wrote Communion of Dreams, I was operating under the old model – that the enterprise of getting into space in a big way was going to mandate large governmental involvement and coordination. I’m not going to rewrite the novel, but I am reworking my own thoughts and expectations – this is probably the single largest change for me from attending the Centennial.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Ben Bova, Constellation program, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, movies, NASA, Peter Diamandis, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Spider Robinson, Titan
Take a look at a map of the US. Let your eye more or less gravitate to the center. Chances are, what you’re looking at isn’t too far from Kansas City. Now, notice just how far this is from an ocean.
So, why the hell were most of the entrees at the buffet supper for the Gala at the Heinlein Centennial some kind of seafood? That was the question that everyone at my table wanted to know.
And since I live in this part of the country (about 2 hours from KC), I was the designated spokesman. What I told them was that a) it’s likely that the hotel providing the catering made the decision about the offerings, and the organizers just chose from a list, b) that seafood was likely chosen to ‘show off’ a bit, and c) besides, there are these things called airplanes, which can (and do) bring fresh seafood to even us uncultured louts in the Midwest.
Nah, the entrees were fine. What was actually a much greater concern to me was that for some reason, they had exactly ONE chocolate cake on the dessert table. And that was the *only* chocolate dessert. Huh? At a SF convention? I’ve not been to many, but my experience with other SF and Fantasy fans would lead me to believe that they’ve got a higher-then-usual appreciation for chocolate. Lord knows I sure do. But I got no cake that night.
Anyway, there was a reason why the Centennial was held in the middle of the nation. A fairly good reason, too: Robert A. Heinlein was born in Butler, Missouri, about an hour south of KC, and he spent a lot of his early years in Kansas City. Other places can (and do) claim him as one of their own, but KC was as logical a place as any to host the event. It was kind of fun to see the sign on the local SF club table which read “Join the same Science Fiction club that Robert Heinlein joined!” Fun stuff.
The Gala dinner was supposed to be dressy, and most people complied. (There were almost no people in costume all weekend, btw – another way in which this event differed from the Cons I’ve attended.) My friend ML and I joined a table full of charming chaps (well, of course they were being charming to her. Any straight male should be. And many are.) I had kicked in the ‘extrovert’ program, and was being outgoing to the point where one of the other people at the table asked me if I was the designated ‘celebrety’ who had been assigned to the table. Um, no. I dialed down the gregariousness a bit.
Dinner over, we left the round tables at the back of the hall and moved to row seating at the front. It was time for the Gala presentations and entertainment.
This comprised lots of various and sundry awards – Centennial writing awards, SFRA awards, John W. Cambell Award ( later I’ll tell how Ben Bova, this year’s winner for his novel Titan, came up and introduced himself to me…a particular thrill, since I have most of the action in Communion of Dreams take place on the surface and in orbit around that moon. OK, update – the story of that is told here.).
There were also speeches honoring and remembering Robert A. Heinlein, naturally enough. And then Peter Diamandis‘ brilliant, inspiring presentation about how he considered Heinlein to have written not just visionary fiction, but had actually mapped out a functional business plan with The Man Who Sold the Moon. Diamandis said his dream, his goal, was to be there to welcome NASA back to the Moon when the Constellation Program vehicle arrives. This brought a standing ovation and cheers.
The featured remembrance of Heinlein was provided by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, via pre-recorded message from his home in Sri Lanka. It was touching, all the more so for the evidence of Clarke’s own failing health.
Following were more presentations and performances, including information about the Stardance Project, a duet by Spider and Jeanne Robinson, an impromptu rendition of The Green Hills of Earth (the filk song popular in the SF community, drawn from Heinlein’s story of the same name), and finally ending with a screening of J. Neil Schulman‘s new offbeat movie Lady Magdalene’s. I decided to skip the last, but ML told me later that it was fun in a very silly sort of way.
There’s an excellent collection of images from the evening to be found here on the Midamerican Fan Photo Archive. I love people who know how to use a camera – a skill I never acquired.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Apollo program, Buzz Aldrin, Heinlein, Heinlein Centennial, movies, N. Am. Welsh Choir, NASA, Promotion, Publishing, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Writing stuff
I don’t get out much – being a full time caregiver for someone with Alzheimer’s is very demanding, and my wife and I are both careful not to leave all the responsibilities in the other’s lap for any real length of time (like over a weekend). If this was just a short-time thing, it wouldn’t be much of an issue. But we’ve been caregivers in this capacity for four years now, and we could easily have several more years ahead of us. You have to think long-term. This is the reason why I ignore the advice given to all unpublished authors to attend conventions – getting away is almost impossible for me at this time.
But as it happens, she has a concert scheduled with the North American Welsh Choir the weekend of July 7th in Kansas City, and made arrangements some months back to have her sister in from California to take care of my mother-in-law, in order that I could also attend the concert if I wanted. Otherwise, she would be here to help make sure that I didn’t carry an undue burden for the several days my wife would be away.
Then I heard about the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial celebration occuring at the same time – also in Kansas City!
Heinlein hasn’t really been a direct influence on my writing; I haven’t tried to emulate any of his style, or pay homage to his ideas. But few can deny that he was a huge influence in Science Fiction last century. And I certainly read a lot of his stuff when I was young – it helped shape and inform my world view, to some extent. Even to this day, I consider him to have been visionary on a number of points, and going back and rereading some of his classics is a good exercise for any writer – his stuff holds up surprisingly well, even 40 – 50 years after it was published.
Besides, this will be about more than just Heinlein’s legacy. A number of luminaries from the history of space exploration will be there, not to mention lots of science fiction writers and people involved in the publishing industry (check out the list of attendees!). It will be interesting, and a phenomenal opportunity to do some serious networking.
So, I’m going. Given that the big Gala Dinner is being held at the same time as my wife’s concert, I’ll be missing the concert altogether. I’m lucky to have such an understanding spouse.
See you there?
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Charlie Stross, Cory Doctorow, Fermi's Paradox, NASA, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
Charlie Stross is a smart guy. And a fine writer, with significant Science Fiction cred. So when I saw an item posted by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing yesterday titled “Futility of Space Colonization” with a link to Charlie’s full post on his blog, I was curious. From the post:
That’s the first point I want to get across: that if the distances involved in interplanetary travel are enormous, and the travel times fit to rival the first Australian settlers, then the distances and times involved in interstellar travel are mind-numbing.
This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And in the absence of (c) you’re not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money).
And then this, about the question of colonization in our solar system:
But even so, when you get down to it, there’s not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don’t exactly scurry to move our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all, there’s no there there — just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of exposure. And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we’ll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay. And closer to home, the commercialization of space will be incremental and slow, driven by our increasing dependence on near-earth space for communications, positioning, weather forecasting, and (still in its embryonic stages) tourism. But the domed city on Mars is going to have to wait for a magic wand or two to do something about the climate, or reinvent a kind of human being who can thrive in an airless, inhospitable environment.
Colonize the Gobi desert, colonise the North Atlantic in winter — then get back to me about the rest of the solar system!
OK, like I said, Charlie is a smart guy. Go read the entire thing – I think that he has nailed the economics of the matter of space colonization pretty solidly. He’s right with all the physics, energy requirements, et cetera, from everything that I see and know on the subject.
And he’s dead wrong.
Oh, I think that he’s right – right now, it is hard to come up with a pragmatic, practical argument for the possibility of space colonization. But his argument reminds me considerably of this item posted on Paleo-Future last week:
Aerial Navigation Will Never Be Popular (1906)
The August 14, 1906 Lake County Times (Hammond, Indiana) ran an article by Sir Hiram Maxim titled, “Aerial Navigation Will Never Be Popular.” An excerpt, as well as the original article in its entirety, appears below.
But I do not think the flying machine will ever be used for ordinary traffic and for what may be called “popular” purposes. People who write about the conditions under which the business and pleasure of the world will be carried on in another hundred years generally make flying machines take the place of railways and steamers, but that such will ever be the case I very much doubt.
That item goes on to talk about how flying machines will undoubtably be adopted as weapons of war, but that they will forever remain too expensive and risky for any other venture.
The thing is, it is difficult in the extreme to make solid predictions more than a couple of decades out. In my own lifetime I have seen surprise wonders come on the scene, and expectations thwarted. Technology develops in ways that don’t always make sense, except perhaps in hindsight. 100 years ago, many people thought that commercial flight would never become a reality. 40 years ago, people thought that we’d have permanent bases on the Moon by now. You get my drift.
Everything that Charlie Stross says in his post makes sense. You can’t get to that future from here. But “here” is going to change in ways which are unpredictable, and then the future becomes more in flux than what we expect at present. For Communion of Dreams, I set forth a possible future history which leads to permanent settlements on the Moon, Mars, and Europa, with functional space stations at several other locations outside of Earth orbit. Will it happen? I dunno. I doubt that exactly my scenario would come about. But it is plausible.
And with experience in dealing with exploration and colonization in our neighborhood will come the necessary technologies to go further. Even without a dramatic technological leap, it would be possible to slowly expand outward through the Kuiper Belt and into the Oort Cloud, playing hopscotch from one asteroid or cometary body to the next over generations, out past the edge of our ill-defined solar system and into a neighboring one. I’ve seen calculations pertaining to Fermi’s Paradox indicating that a race with little more than our technology could basically spread across the entire galaxy this way in a matter of less than a million years. Add in that any race doing so would undoubtably maintain at least some minimal rate of technological improvement, and you’ll experience a logarithmic growth which would include some truly stunning (to us) tech.
I am surprised that a writer of Stross’ calibre isn’t able to come up with scenarios which allow for him to imagine this happening, for it to make economic, practical, pragmatic sense. Besides, there is more to human motivation than simple economics – there are plenty of instances in our own real history where people have done things for reasons which do not make sense in economic terms, and accomplished goals which would otherwise never have been attempted.
So, yeah, you can’t get there from here. At least now you can’t. But give us a few decades…
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 