From: mykes@shell.portal.com (mike myke schwartz)
Subject: Re: Democrat == Loony Left??? (was Re: Christiani
Followup-To: talk.politics.misc,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,alt.rush-limbaugh,alt.politics.bush
Organization: Portal Communications Company
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL7]
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1993 06:14:34 GMT

Dr. Norman J. LaFave (lafave@ial4.jsc.nasa.gov) wrote:
: In article <C057zn.Dnt@unix.portal.com> mike myke schwartz,
: >Comparing space to the New World is utter nonsense.  There was already
: >life in the new world as soon as we "discovered" that it was here.  Trees
: >and people and animals and water and oxygen.  The technology required
: >to get there did not need to be invented.
: 
: Besides being immaterial to the question of whether it is
: worth the cost to explore space, what does this have to do with anything.
: So our nearest neighbors in space are not occupied, so we will have
: to work to make them habitable, so our launch technology is not
: yet adequate..... Using logic like this, we would never have accomplished
: anything. You sir do not have a crystal ball and have no more data than
: anyone else. This means that you cannot possibly know what we will
: achieve or discover because we haven't even performed detailed surveys
: yet. The only thing I do know is that we will achieve NOTHING if we
: risk NOTHING.
: 

Comparing space to the New World is exactly what proponents of manned space
missions harp on.  The free market does take risks, if the potential of reward
is there.  The question of risk is "what is the correct risk"

: >Even if there is life 300 million light years away, it is of ZERO
: significance.
: >All of space is big, but the fraction of it that can be explored from
: space
: >is puny and costly.  Ever hear of Bang for your Buck?  We get NO bang
: from
: >sending humans at many bucks.
: 
: Again you are applying an assumption that technology will
: stagnate.
: 

I am describing our space program after 3 decades of government funded R&D.
Find that life 300 million light years away, prove to me that we can interact
with them, and prove to me there is a reason to interact with them.

[ insults deleted ]

: Go ahead, hoard your money, refuse to see the importance of
: pushing the envelope, taking risks, then explain to your children why
: their
: quality of life is so much less than yours was and why America is
: no longer competitive.

Without NASA, people wouldn't be pusing the envelope, right?  Not true.
As for my children, IF and when their standard of living is worse than
mine as a child, my ownly answer can be that in the 1930's, our country
took a giant step towards socialism, and in the 1990s, socialism won.

Your statement that America is no longer competitive is utterly false.
Compare us to Japan.  We have 6x their GNP and 2x their population.  Their
government revenues are 22% of their GNP, ours is 26%.  By what measure,
Sir, do you claim America is no longer competitive?  Japan sure has become
more competitive, but what is wrong with that?  Do you feel that we Americans
are so inferior that we will stop doing what we do to succeed?  We can't
stand a little competition?

: >
: >And no matter what your scientific friends say, it is simple propaganda.
: >With unmanned space flight, we proved your friends wrong about the
: planetary
: >conditions on Venus, found water on moons, found the first active
: volcanoes
: >(not on earth) in the solar system, got to see almost every planet and
: moon
: >in the solar system up close...
: 
: And we will learn even more when we send our most adaptable, flexible
: robots to study the same effects----humans. They can even be programmed
: on the fly.... Do you really believe these missions closed the books or
: even
: scratched the surface? I can tell you from talking to the people who
: run these programs that they did not.
: 

Scratched the surface?  Hardly.  A lot is possible, and we can't do it all,
at least overnight.  We could build a city for 6,000,000 people in the
deepest ocean, but we don't for obvious reasons.

: The great George Bush, he and Ronny did more to destroy cutting-edge
: research in this country than anybody by diverting funds to their
: ridiculous "war against communism".
: 

Bitter...  and now you drag out the anti-Reagan bullshit.  It's old, tired,
irrelevant, and your opinion.

: > What do you think the "New World Order"
: >means?
: 
: Absolutely nothing. It means large nations with internal problems
: have become lots of little nations beating the hell out of eachother.
: 

That IS what they choose to show on TV...

: >To let a poor
: >person from one of those two countries (or many others) live as well
: >as our drug infested, tv watching, car driving, air conditioned, nintendo
: >playing "poor" is something we can indeed do - and likely long before
: >we might break the speed of light barrier (if possible).
: 
: You have much more faith in the inherent goodness of the world than I
: do. Humans has an uncanny nack of kicking others when they are down and
: justifying it using the flimsy of arguements. Still I too would like to
: see this
: happen only funded with defense cuts, not the measely R&D budget.
: 

Yes, I DO indeed have faith in the inherent goodness of the world.  The more
education, health care, knowledge, industrialized, etc., a poor nation becomes,
the more good they display.  Investing our money in having Somalia or the
Ex-USSR become competitive in the world is long term R&D.

The defense budget has already been cut and the military must also look to
spend their reduced dollars on things with more bang for the buck.  Too bad
the peace dividend got spent, instead of being invested.

: >In this sense,
: >the world should indeed be hording its pennies and making it possible to
: >deliver food, medecine, information, technology, goods, and even your
: >fantasy driven ideas anywhere in the world is where I'd put the money
: >NOW.
: 
: Again, this country produces a bumper crop of food which rots in silos
: every year. We don't have to hoard pennies to do this task. The means
: are there already. We spend aound 1% of our tax dollar on the whole
: space program. How far do you think this measly % would go in your
: scheme?

Well for starters, we could theoretically ship all the food that rots in
our silos and ship it to the USSR where people can use it.  However, it
is going to rot in their silos because they have no infrastructure for
economically distributing the food fast enough.

Where we differ about the 1% is twofold.  1% is not measly - I guarantee
you will have an easier time retiring down the road if you put 1% of your
income into an IRA.  But we're not talking about your income, we're talking
about the governmnet revenues and 10's of billions.  More than we spend
on foreign aid, and several times what the Marshall Plan cost.  Second,
given that we have spend 1% for years/decades, I would spend that money
differently.

: 
: >
: >You accuse me of being happy with incremental improvements to existing
: >technology, while you are much moreso guilty of exactly that.  100x the
: >speed of point to point communications from any spot on the earth to
: >any other is a much bigger gain for humanity than a 100x cheaper space
: >access medium.
: 
: You must be kidding me. Not only will this happen without government
: intervention, it won't even be that difficult or challenging. It is an
: incremental improvement to a technology which has been growing on its
: own for two decades. What do you think the ethernet is?
: 

I think you made a mistake and meant internet instead of ethernet...  Internet
does have a lot of corporate involvment (which refutes you claims they
don't invest) but a lot of governmnet involvement, too.  If not all, parts
of the internet have been and still are funded by the government.  What's
this about government intervention?  And the universities aren't using
government funds for their part?

: >And YOU are the one who says we should look at space
: >investment as a % of GNP (or whatever).  Consider that cutting the %
: >by 100 and increasing GNP by 1000 makes your fantasy research budget
: >increase by 10x.  That's MY vision.
: 
: You really think that effortless, spineless, riskless goals like your
: communication network will achieve this? How may I ask will it
: regain our technological lead over our foreign competitors?
: 

Riskless?  Hardly.  No doubt it would cost many billions of dollars to
run lots of fiber everywhere, including the most isolated corner of podunk
idaho.  The cost of the fiber alone is a lot.  And it won't happen overnight.
But the sooner the better, and the sooner it is working for everyone, the
better.  Imagine Usenet if 10x the people used it (and that would be only
2.5% of the population).

There would be whole new industries from it.  For starters, you're going to
need new phones everywhere, and phones that are unlike any phones we have
now.  Your answering machine (another industry) will be a digitial vcr
instead of just audio.  The amount of information would be so huge that
you will need a device to just filter out what you care about.  You will
not only have HDTV, but you will have a hundred million channels to choose
from.  You will be able to video conference with your co-workers (and still
share all the work you do as you do now) even if you are in podunk, and he
is in Mountain View.  The educational benefits would be huge, because of
the ability to distribute educational materials from anywhere to anywhere.
It would reduce the need for people to congregate in cities, relieving a
lot of the urban blight issues from society.  There would be information
services like UPI, dow jones, banking, available to the public.  There would
be services which allow you to use a supercomputer, rent hard disk space,
and use of software.  The demand for support jobs for the network would be
huge - everything from running the fiber to maintaining it to installing
new equipment to designing it.  I wonder what, say, $35 Billion per year
over a decade would do.


: >
: >: "You will pay for your lack of vision"
: >
: >We're paying dearly for your presence of "vision"
: 
: You better look again because in real terms we are not spending
: squat on any kind of long-term R&D. We better start or there
: will be hell to pay in the future. If you want money for your
: "New World Order" program there are plenty of wasteful programs
: with larger budgets to go after. You won't feed the world with
: the after-dinner mints.
: 

Ah, we are spending lots of money on long-term R&D.  The Marshall Plan
was a $12.5 Billion investment in Japan and Germany (and France and Brittain
and...).  These countries used the money to build new infrastructure and
it took 50 years for them to become hardly competitive with us.  The New
World Order is not something that happens in any one president's career,
but happens because a president has the vision to plan for our interests
50 years down the road.

You may harp about the military budget, but since 1989, it has been reduced
from $357 Billion to $289 Billion - a 20% cut already.  The plans to reduce
the budget in an orderly fashion are in place.  The sad thing is that the
military has a lot of engineers who could be used to improve infrastructure
around the world.  Also, it is ironic that the cut in defense also coincided
with a deep recession...

: Norman
: 
: Dr. Norman J. LaFave
: Senior Engineer
: Lockheed Engineering and Sciences Company
: 
: 
: 
: 
: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
:                                Hunter Thompson
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc