The Sublime & Beautiful vs. Reality

This blog is a record of one man's struggle to search for scientific, philosophical, and religious truth in the face of the limitations imposed on him by economics, psychology, and social conditioning; it is the philosophical outworking of everyday life in contrast to ideals and how it could have been.


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The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God
and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.
--Johannes Kepler

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Thursday, July 10, 2008

Socio-Technical: The Vision vs. reality

Here is the vision of what could have been for the international space station:



Here is what the short-sighted leaders of the few nations built:

3 comments:

Stu 陶明瀚 said...

My first thought when I saw this post was the enormous amount of tax dollars being spent on what I see as nothing more than a real estate grab for future weapons systems. (The pockets in the financing chain are typically governments with a vested interest in spying on neighbors, and missile defense) and any collaboration for science is in my opinion only the collection of data for perpetuating the arms complex.

So my question is what would be the practical purpose of spending billions of dollars (aside from military advantage) on this sort of project, as opposed to high speed rail infrastructure or some such domestic alternative to the coming fuel crisis.

Pardon my ignorance in advance, it is not my intention to belittle the author, only speculate on opposing viewpoints.

It seems that most of the stuff that I have heard that is useful to the general good could be replicated in a lab (i.e. 0 gravity medicine)

Stu 陶明瀚 said...

Of course missile defense is a pretty good reason if you live close to these events

Mad Russian the Natural Philosopher said...

The idea is to colonize space, utilize the vast resources available in the solar system and have factories, habitats, etc. so that the earth could be used as an agricultural paradise to feed everyone.

President Eisenhower deliberately set up NASA so that civilians would control space instead of the military controlling it.

Because our economy for so many decades was and is setup to service the military, the resources could be redirected to build infrastructure both on earth (high speed rail) and in the solar system without causing a massive loss of jobs (in fact it would create thousands of new good paying jobs).

It requires a paradigm shift in economics from scarcity to plenty (For example one decent sized nickel-iron asteroid would provide more than all the nickel and iron produced by all the mines on earth in a year.).