From: Technotranscendence (neptune@superlink.net)
Date: Sun Sep 07 2003 - 06:42:00 MDT
On Saturday, September 06, 2003 1:34 AM Spike spike66@comcast.net wrote:
> Don't ruin good beer Robert, cheer em on.
> We are all one species.
Who's this "we"?:)
> And don't worry about communism, it will die
> a natural death soon.
Let's hope so. It certainly seems to be loosening up. I'm not prepared
to get into a discussion of Chinese politics and history, but it seems
like Chinese Communism is slowly evolving into something much more free
and open. There might be setbacks and it might take a while, but it
appears China either won't go through the kind of revolution that
happened in Eastern Europe or that it hasn't reached the critical point
where a revolution can take place. Perhaps Greg has some insight into
this???
> I hope the Chinese are successful. It is
> inevitable that the free world would stop
> going to the moon anyway: no money to
> be made there. Yet.
I don't know about inevitability. The US space industry from the 1950s
to today is heavily subsidized and regulated. (The non-US space
industries are likewise heavily subsidized and regulated.) This leads
to all kinds of economic inefficiencies and roads not taken.
The problem with lunar commercialization is getting over the initial
costs. I think the Moon would be a money maker for tourism at least,
but we need the infrastructure to get there. Of course, this could be
said about a lot of projects, but in this case, it seems obvious that
government intervention has driven up launch costs. Since we can't
really go back in time and correct this, we have to focus on the future.
One thing we should try to do is get the space industry to stop being a
giant welfare program.
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/MyWorksBySubject.html
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