Re: Back to the moon? When?

On Nov 16, 3:32 am, Ian Parker <ianpark...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I m looking at the Far East as a whole. My claim is level, or slightly
ahead. It is difficult to be a long way ahead in a situation where
there is awareness of what everyone else is doing.

The area where America and the West in general is probably weakest is
in the field of reusability of software. Carnigie Mellon University
has got a scale for reusability and disciplined design. More Indian
companies are at levels 4 and 5 than US companies. It has been put
forward that Indian companies are scoring merely because they are
cheap. They are cheap, but there is an underlying professionalism too.
This should be a cause for concern since it means that even if India
does catch up with the US in terms of raw per capita GNP and wages,
their software houses will still have an advantage.

Why doesn't the US make digital cameras? The answer is that the
Japanese are better at it. OK if you are a trading nation you will do
some things better, and another country will do some things better. My
claim that you would go to Japan if you wanted something miniaturized
is valid though.

What is required for manufacturing on the Moon in weight terms I mean?
If you have furnaces your "seed weight" is limited by the need to
conserve heat and probably works out at ~ 100 tons. If on the other
hand you can do your processing cold, with enzymes from artificial
life you may find you require less than a kilogram.

The question of resusable software is an interesting one. If you look
at the Internet you will find that there is a lot of software around.
The ability to reuse it would mean that very little extra software
needs to be written. Some AI investigators have talked about the
ability to write in C. The fact of the matter though is that the
imperative is an understanding of pre existant modules and the ability
to string them together is a compatable chain. (Manifold). India seems
particularly skilled at this.

Let us look at population dynamics. China has a population of a
billion, India about the same. Taiwan, Japan, Malasia etc. have
smaller populations, but are part of the same economic grouping. The
US has 300 million the EU about 600 million (The EU is expanding and
taking on new members.

Unless you are a racist you cannot but conclude that if every economy
were organized efficiently, and increasingly they are, the odds are
stacked up against the US. You say Spanish is an obsession of mine.
Let us look at these figures again. With Latin America the US would be
of comperable strength to the leading Asian nations. If you are not
prepared to learn Spanish you are confronted with 300 million against
billion strong nations.

They may not be wasting their energy on Apollo style expeditions which
do not seem to have very much future. There is one other area I have
not yet mentioned, biology. The 1Kg seed will require some pretty
advanced knowledge. The US is ensuring that bilogical excellence will
not reside there. OK stem cells are irrelevant, in themselves, to
artifical life. They are relevant though in terms of which countries
establish themselves as centers of excellence.

- Ian Parker

You are correct, that what the long term aspects that China represents
are by far superior to anything our wizards have to offer. The
combined expertise of China along with India, Japan and Russia could
be the ultimate collective solution towards future space travels and
off-world habitats.

Those hocus-pocus NASA/Apollo missions of our mutually perpetrated
cold-war space race that was supposedly to/from our moon are nearly
worthless, unless the modifying of terrestrial guano islands is any
part of our future survival from WWIII that's about to bust lose.

Intelligent designed forms of artificial life (perhaps as hybrid
androids) seems our next best and most logical step, especially
towards getting human DNA more rad-hard and otherwise capable of
fending off the likes of super-staph and other advanced forms of
microbe life, which unless eliminated or at least moderated intends to
kill off most all of humanity as is. Going off-world for a fresh
genetic start or kind of DNA reset might not be such a bad idea, even
if that alternative has to start off with underground habitats within
our salty old moon. (at least there'd be no shortage of local energy)

Unfortunately, this Usenet anti-think-tank cesspool of such
insurmountable naysayism is so extensively bigoted and downright
racist that it makes their very own puppet Hitler look like a good
Jewish daycare provider.
--
Brad Guth
.

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