Covington suggests (if that link doesn’t work, page down to Friday, January 30) that we look for alien intelligences by attempting to detect signatures of exotic experiments in physics. Given the problematic course of development of extraterrestrial civilizations, this is at least as good an idea as the more conventional approach. I hereby dub it the Covington Technique.
This reminds me of a proposal …
Jay Manifold
The Economics of Science
— deserve a blog all their own; a paid one, which is why I won’t be doing it unless somebody offers me an outrageous rate, like 40¢/word. So all I’m putting in this post is tidbits:
How I’d Go To Mars
Over on Arcturus, I rashly promised to post something about how I’d do the whole Moon-Mars thing. And so I shall, but with no pretense of technological or future-historical accuracy, though I’ll mention some technologies and dates; instead, I’ll be building a strawman proposal, with attention to its project-management aspects (in what follows, all definitions are taken from A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge [PMBOK® Guide], 2000 Edition; Project Management Institute).
The first of those being assumptions, whose formal definition is “factors that, for planning purposes, are considered to be true, real, or certain.” In particular, I’ll assume that stakeholder (“individuals and organizations that are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of project execution or project completion; they may also exert influence over the project and its results”) interests have already been balanced.
They haven’t, of course, and the game-theoretic aspects of a program slated to stretch through as many as seven future Administrations, twice that number of Congresses, and nearly thirty Federal budgets, render the prospects for the new space policy rather bleak, I’m afraid. So let’s pretend that isn’t true. The American public is united in its support (or perhaps cowed into submission, or merely indifferent enough to raise no objection): we’re going to Mars! How do we get there?
The Struggle for Space
As Jonathan kindly notes below, I’ve been space-blogging up a storm recently over on Arcturus, mainly because we’re in the busiest stretch of space news since the tragic events of last February. I feel that I owe Chicago Boyz some commentary of a less purely technical and more interdisciplinary nature.
(Besides, I know what they’re thinking: He seems like a pretty good guy, but did the Common Core really take? So I need to prove myself by talking about, y’know, humanities and stuff.)
Anyway, for the purposes of getting something out here for everybody to chew on, I’ve identified three conceptual difficulties that interested observers — mostly Americans, but plenty of foreigners as well — are experiencing as they hear the back-to-back news of varyingly successful ongoing activities in space and leaks of the Administration’s proposal for the next generation of space exploration.
I’m listing them in order of (my perception of) increasing difficulty, or decreasing tractability. The first is pretty much negotiable. The second is much more fundamental, but subject to melioration. The third, in combination with sufficiently powerful political institutions, could be a show-stopper, the more so since I can’t recall ever seeing it written about elsewhere — it’s an “unknown unknown.”
So If There Weren’t Any Iraqi WMD Programs …
What can this possibly be about? Whaddaya know, turns out that “more than a thousand [Iraqi] Ph.D.’s were trained in the black arts of making nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.” Now we’re going to spend $22 million giving them non-WMD work.
It may be glorified welfare — a similar program for Russian scientists “has yet to develop a single commercial product” after eleven years — but the concept of redirection training is sound. I note that $22 million over 2 years would employ only about 50-60 Americans at high-tech labor-market rates, but presumably could pay 10-20 times that many Iraqis a comfortable salary by regional standards.