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james_davis_nicollThe Final Section
Jerry Brown - From Limits on Earth to Possibilities in Space
This section is almost content-free. Brown was quite keen on the whole idea of pouring hundreds of billions down O'Neill's rathole. On an unrelated note, 51% of the US space program money got spent in Brown's state.
I'll skip the poems.
Instead of Frictionless Elephants - Talking with Gerard O'Neill
This is another interview with O'Neill.
I thought "breaking the problem into parts" was something everyone got in school?
It's odd that McClure doesn't see a role for biology in what is a giant habitat for humans in an extremely hostile environment. What happened to her, I wonder? O'Neill does, even if he doesn't really understand how little he knows about the biological issues involved.
It's been found that a dictatorship is what works.
He's talking about small units of people but now I wonder if the governance of these habitats was ever touched on?
Once again we see a time table based on unrealistic expectations for the shuttle. Ah, well.
Interesting that he dismisses the idea of Earth importing metals from space.
The fact is that although we are working on something which I think has a tremendous amount of potential, from an economic viewpoint it is very dicey in that it's a one-crop economy. Energy. If someone finds a solution to the energy problem which is better, quicker and cheaper than satellite solar power done this way, then we're wiped out.
And of course this in conjunction with the discovery that the shuttle was expensive and couldn't fly as often as promised and something came apart in mid-flight is what happened. Well, except the solution to the energy problem for the next few decades had been found - it's just that the people in the 1970s were misled by their circumstances.
O'Neill is a bit confused when he talks about
Quebec Hydro and Churchill Falls and by "a bit", I mean very. Of course back then there was no google and the whole effort was in a far-off land whose inhabitants speak a little known language.
Churchill Falls and the shitty deal Newfoundland signed and then could not get out of (which basically saw a have-not province subsidizing a company in a have province) was a sore point in provincial relations all through the 1970s and beyond (says the guy who was in the ~Newfoundland contingent during the regional federal-provincial conference simulations in high school).
I wonder when exactly interest in this stuff peaked? I don't think O'Neill understood S-curves.
O'Neill: Well, that's an example of one of these dark prospects that you were asking about, Stewart - if there were to be a binding set of treaties that were to go into effect that would for example make it impossible for satellite solar power to exist at all. It could happen.
This is may be a subtle reference to the Moon Treaty, which was being drafted at the time.
There's some discussion of his mass driver idea: in that early bit, is he talking about mag-lev? Mag-lev trains are even cooler than flying cars or jet packs...
Did his estimate of mass driver efficiency stand up in practice?
The long view: Nearly content-free bit of optimism about the future.
Thanks: self-explanatory.
Jerry Brown - From Limits on Earth to Possibilities in Space
This section is almost content-free. Brown was quite keen on the whole idea of pouring hundreds of billions down O'Neill's rathole. On an unrelated note, 51% of the US space program money got spent in Brown's state.
I'll skip the poems.
Instead of Frictionless Elephants - Talking with Gerard O'Neill
This is another interview with O'Neill.
I thought "breaking the problem into parts" was something everyone got in school?
It's odd that McClure doesn't see a role for biology in what is a giant habitat for humans in an extremely hostile environment. What happened to her, I wonder? O'Neill does, even if he doesn't really understand how little he knows about the biological issues involved.
It's been found that a dictatorship is what works.
He's talking about small units of people but now I wonder if the governance of these habitats was ever touched on?
Once again we see a time table based on unrealistic expectations for the shuttle. Ah, well.
Interesting that he dismisses the idea of Earth importing metals from space.
The fact is that although we are working on something which I think has a tremendous amount of potential, from an economic viewpoint it is very dicey in that it's a one-crop economy. Energy. If someone finds a solution to the energy problem which is better, quicker and cheaper than satellite solar power done this way, then we're wiped out.
And of course this in conjunction with the discovery that the shuttle was expensive and couldn't fly as often as promised and something came apart in mid-flight is what happened. Well, except the solution to the energy problem for the next few decades had been found - it's just that the people in the 1970s were misled by their circumstances.
O'Neill is a bit confused when he talks about
Quebec Hydro and Churchill Falls and by "a bit", I mean very. Of course back then there was no google and the whole effort was in a far-off land whose inhabitants speak a little known language.
Churchill Falls and the shitty deal Newfoundland signed and then could not get out of (which basically saw a have-not province subsidizing a company in a have province) was a sore point in provincial relations all through the 1970s and beyond (says the guy who was in the ~Newfoundland contingent during the regional federal-provincial conference simulations in high school).
I wonder when exactly interest in this stuff peaked? I don't think O'Neill understood S-curves.
O'Neill: Well, that's an example of one of these dark prospects that you were asking about, Stewart - if there were to be a binding set of treaties that were to go into effect that would for example make it impossible for satellite solar power to exist at all. It could happen.
This is may be a subtle reference to the Moon Treaty, which was being drafted at the time.
There's some discussion of his mass driver idea: in that early bit, is he talking about mag-lev? Mag-lev trains are even cooler than flying cars or jet packs...
Did his estimate of mass driver efficiency stand up in practice?
The long view: Nearly content-free bit of optimism about the future.
Thanks: self-explanatory.
