Guitars! Guitars!

So I'm browsing the internet just now, wanted some music to go with it, so I search iTunes and find my old (old!) fave... Van Halen! Haven't listened to Van Halen for ages, it's a bit embarrassing to listen to the stuff of teenage air-guitar wet dreams when I'm all grown up and sensible now (!). And this is OU812 -- yeah yeah, I know, Sammy Hagar (blurgh!) and all that, infantile lyrics, overproduced vocals, etc. But I put on a track I remember as cool, Cabo Wabo, and there's Eddie Van Halen, my childhood musical hero, sounding as awesome as always.

And so I come back to the question -- where have all the f**king guitars gone?! When was the last time you heard a really ball belting guitar solo? You can't hear it in anything recent, that's for sure. Not that I miss the screamingly tight jeans and poofter-hair (sorry, I'm Australian), but musicianship has just vanished from modern rock music. Well, except for Tool, maybe (who are surely the hard rock that Beethoven would be writing were he here today). I'd just like to hear some more rock musicians who know how to play their instruments well, is that too much to ask?

Death Penalty Issues

Michelle Malkin has a post on Stanley Tookie Williams, on death row in California. (Yeah, I'm reading lots of right-wing blogs... doesn't make me a right winger, just means they're dealing more with the issues I find interesting these days. And to be honest, I'm finding it much easier lately to have an honest disagreement with members of the right than the left, who too often resort to name-calling and temper tantrums).

There's no death penalty in Australia. There's currently a big issue about an Australian on death row in Singapore (yet again) for alleged drug smuggling, covered here. It's interesting because I can see both sides of the argument, and while I find myself coming down against the death penalty, it's not for the reasons more usually touted.

I couldn't give a damn about the lives of cold blooded murderers. I believe strongly in social causes, but I don't think that any civilisation can afford to allow appalling behavior an easy excuse. It's sad that some people have terrible childhoods and bad role models, and turn out bad as a result, and we should strive to do all we can to improve those childhoods and prevent the problem rather than cure it. But when society starts making excuses for those who execute innocent people and laugh about it, society is in trouble, and even more people will get hurt as a result. Society is a system of rules. No rules, no society. These are the choices we're faced with.

My reason for opposing the death penalty isn't that I feel sorry for murderers, it's this. The death penalty kills innocent people. They don't get the media coverage of the big cases and convicted murderers that have everyone up in arms. Most of them are poor, and can't afford good representation. The system makes mistakes... and no surprise there, all systems make mistakes. And I really don't understand why so many on the right in America, who distrust every government institution except the military, insist on giving the power of life and death to one of the most obviously hit-and-miss government institutions around -- the criminal justice system. They wouldn't trust the tax department with the power of life and death, even though it makes probably fewer mistakes than the criminal justice system.

I sympathise completely with the urge for retribution, and no doubt if I were in the same position as some of the victims' families, I'd feel exactly the same way. But my point is that the issue needs to be looked at more broadly than just one obviously guilty person who almost certainly deserves to die. The problem is all those other people, whose cases we don't see in the media. The penalty may be applied effectively to many, many guilty people that no one in their right mind could feel sorry for... but then, as a matter of statistical certainty, there'll always be that other guy, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or mistaken for somebody else, who falls through the cracks. Some of the numbers being tossed around by various groups researching the death penalty are scary, I've heard mentioned that as many as ten percent of convictions, in some places, might be wrong. Now, killing one innocent person in order to get nine guilty ones might be acceptable in a war of national survival, but in peacetime, against one's own citizens, it does not seem to me very civilised. The reason we have law (in a liberal democracy, anyhow) is to establish civilisation, as opposed to anarchy and barbarity. If a law or penalty no longer serves this purpose, then I can't see it has any logical or moral reason to continue existing.

For me, keeping alive men like Stanley Tookie Williams is the unpleasant but ethical price to be paid for keeping alive all the innocent victims of wrongful conviction. Many of the families of the former's victims will surely be unhappy about it, that's understandable. But the families of the latter will be grateful.

Relevant SF?

SF really ought to be the most relevant form of literature around today. After all, we live in rapidly changing times, much of that change is driven by new technology, and no other form of literature deals directly with such issues as Science Fiction does. My friend and US publisher Lou Anders says this often, and I agree.

So why do so many people still view SF as irrelevant? Much of it, clearly, is that a majority of people just aren't paying attention to how the world's changing -- people have to eat, and pay the bills, and most people simply don't have the hours in their days to keep up to date with such things. Which is why they have writers to do it for them. So why aren't more of those writers household names today, like the Asimovs, Arthur C Clarkes and Heinleins?

There are two issues here I think worth considering. The first is that Science Fiction may partly have itself to blame. SF doesn't thrust itself into the real world like many other genres do. When jetliners flew into the twin towers on September the 11th 2001, the media immediately sought interviews with Tom Clancy. Likewise it's not uncommon to hear crime writers talking about real life crimes, and even less uncommon to hear the writers of political thrillers talking politics, or family drama writers appearing on Oprah to discuss their relationship with their parents.

There are some examples of SF writers getting similar attention -- Arthur C Clarke's opinions are still sought frequently on space travel and communication, William Gibson is asked about the internet, and Kim Stanley Robinson quotes can be found whenever NASA plans some new Mars initiative. But mostly, from what I've seen, SF writers are rarely recognised or consulted as experts in the field. When cloning became real, no one ran to SF writers -- they talked to doctors, scientists and geneticists. Bird flu threatens us with a global pandemic, yet despite all the SF predictions of future germ catastrophes, it's once again the whitecoats getting asked all the questions. And probably this is sensible thinking by the media. After all, a lot of SF stories dealing with disease pandemics have been cliched nonsense or excuses to indulge in yet another dystopian, post-apocalyptic world where men can be real men, and sport big guns, and wear leather, and drive big cars with spikes on them... all great fun, perhaps, but serious? And SF is solely responsible for most of the cliches about clones that lead to exasperated scientists having to explain again and again that no, we don't grow them in vats, and no, they're not like androids and will have no more desire to take over the world than anyone else.

The other side of this argument is that the mainstream also appropriates SF all the time. They sneer at cloning as impossible, then refuse to give credit once it happens. They tell SF writers to 'grow up' and be serious, then happily accept the benefits when some new piece of technology first predicted by SF writers arrives. This is inevitable, and we can only keep explaining, tiredly, that most things now taken for granted were once derided as impossible, and that if it weren't for the existence of people who continued imagining impossible things, nothing would ever change.

The second issue is that we may simply be in an anti-SF epoch right now. The so called SF 'golden age' happened in the fifties and sixties, when there was also a real space race going on, and real psychological barriers were being destroyed all the time. I don't think this is a coincidence. I wasn't there, so I can't imagine the ground-shaking enormity of someone landing on the moon for the FIRST TIME. When Clarke and Kubrick brought out 2001 the movie, I'm sure it seemed to many people a reasonable timeline -- that by the year 2001, surely we would have space stations and moon bases and interplanetary travel, because that was the sharp angle on which the development curve was ascending. That space-faring future seemed inevitable, then, and it forced people to speculate about what was coming.

Today, that sense of inevitability is gone. Space travel is expensive and dangerous, and all the dates the media put on arriving on Mars, or even returning to the moon, are about twenty years away at the soonest... and of course, they were twenty years away in 1985, too. There are no personal robots, no flying cars (see my previous post), and the internet is fun, but it's a place for games and porn and online advertising, not Matrix-style mind bending reality twists. SF always promised a future wide-eyed and amazing. Well, the future is here, and it's... mundane.

What's the answer? Well, that's harder to know than the future itself. I've heard some in publishing say SF just isn't as much fun as it used to be, and it should do more gee-whizz stuff to get the fans back. I doubt it. A big part of crime fiction's success, I think, is because it combines elements of peoples' everyday lives, and familiar worlds, and puts them together in a dramatic form. Horror even moreso. When something is familiar, writers don't need to extrapolate much, and can simply assume a certain readerly familiarity with the subject matter. Then on the other extreme you have fantasy, much of which is pure escapism, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the popular perception of SF, it seems to me, currently lies somewhere in the middle, neither escapist enough for the escapists, nor relevant enough for the thinkers. Much of it is familiar only to people who read it regularly, and to many readers, that with which they aren't somehow familiar is also not dramatic. My sister-in-law confesses that SF and Fantasy alike just baffle her. It has no relevance to her world, and she can't connect with any of it. If she were abducted by aliens, I suspect that feeling might change. But we can hardly arrange such a thing just to boost sales. Can we?

As writers, of course, we can ultimately only write to please ourselves. If we're lucky, our personal tastes will coincide with the public's. But I can't help wondering, whenever I think on this, what would happen if the sub-orbital tourism boom promised by people like Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos happens in a few years. Imagine seeing ordinary people (if fairly wealthy ones) taking rides into space not just every month, but every day. That, the newspapers would surely say, would be Science Fiction-made-reality. Gosh, people might realise, isn't space travel exciting! What great TV it makes to watch. I'd love to do that, if I had the money. And it's happening right now! If the prices keep coming down, I'll be able to do that. Certainly my kids and grandkids will. Probably they'll go into orbit. Maybe even to the Moon and Mars. Now where can I find some books that tell stories of what that might be like?

There's only one section of shelves that'll do it mate, and it's not the celebrity biographies. Until, of course, the mainstream begin to appropriate it all, and then all the 'experts' are engineers, tourism operators, businessmen and even stock fund managers. And everyone says 'no, this isn't science fiction, it's happening right now, it's real, how can it be?'

This is SF's eternal dilemma -- today's mundane reality is yesterday's fantastic vision, and the future just keeps fading, mirage-like, into the distance. Oh well. We'll just keep trudging after it. We'll get there one day.

Alienation

Here's an interesting link on The Rhine River (via instapundit). Basically the author states that the Europeans are unable to integrate Muslim immigrants because of the European racial and cultural identity complex.

I agree that's true, but I think the malaise goes deeper. The trouble with the kind of cultural seperatism mentioned here is that it manifests itself in economics too -- notice that it's always the nations most insecure about their culture and place in the world that are the first to cry protectionism in the face of free trade. This then slows the economy, creates high unemployment, and exacerbates the problem all over again. Pretty soon it becomes a vicious circle, like the one France has been stuck in for 20 years.

America, on the other hand, has a notion of nationalism far more abstract and general than simple race or religion -- wasn't always the case, of course, but it's increasingly becoming so. This means America doesn't feel its identity so easily threatened by anything, including trade and immigration, and so there's not the same impulse to slam on the brakes. Of course America's had its share of racial turmoil and urban riots, but for the most part, I think, these have been a part of the never-ending process of American change and reinvention. America's upheavals seem to actually change things, fundamentally, at least in parts. In France, the government is just clinging even more tightly to the policies that got it into such trouble in the first place -- like that old story about the skydiver who freezes in terror on the way down, and clings ever more tightly to the ripcord, thus preventing his buddy from pulling the ripcord and saving his life. Open societies don't freeze or cling. One day soon, France will have to thaw, before it hits the ground.

Rising China

This kind of thing gets annoying after a while.

There's an opinion article in The Australian by John Mearsheimer just recently... turns out it's a reprint from a debate between Mearsheimer and Zbigniew Brzezinski from Foreign Policy magazine earlier this year, though for whatever reason, The Australian's editorial people didn't credit that on the internet page. Anyhow, Mearsheimer's going along okay, if a little simplistically, and explaining why China's rise in the Asia Pacific might not be a peaceful one. Familiar enough thesis, and sort of plausible. But then he has to destroy his argument's credility by throwing in rubbish like this...

"Why should we expect the Chinese to act any differently than the US did? Are they more principled than the Americans are? More ethical? Less nationalistic? Less concerned about their survival? They are none of these things, of course, which is why China is likely to imitate the US and attempt to become a regional hegemon."

So America is the benchmark for aggressive nationalism? For unethical behaviour? For lashing out in fear because they're 'concerned for their survival?' Now I've got my share of bad things to say about various American policies at various periods (and Australian ones, for that matter) but give me a break.

America got to be the 'hegemon' in the Pacific because the Japanese attacked them. Little place called Pearl Harbour, might ring a bell. Yeah yeah, America threatened to cut off Japan's oil, so the Japanese had 'no choice'... a bit like the school yard bully having 'no choice' but to punch another boy in the nose for failing to surrender his lunch money. In fact, if you want to look through history, America did its damnedest to stay OUT of all the world's troubles, and the greatest anti-American fury in much of the world during WW2 was that they took as long as they did. Funny thing, history -- back then, everyone complained that America always came to war too late. Now, they complain they're too early.

As for ethics and nationalism, I'm an Australian, and I'm damn glad we have to suffer American nationalism and ethics instead of that which came with the Imperial Japanese Army. If the Chinese were to come and save us from some other promised invasion just as nasty as that one would have been, I'd welcome the Chinese 'nationalistic, unethical army' too, with open arms. It'd be better than seeing what happened to Nanking repeated in Sydney or Melbourne. Let's get some perspective here.

Furthermore, if all hegemons are only interested in beating everyone else down, as Mearsheimer argues, why is America almost single-handedly funding China's rise? Where would China's booming economy be, without the American market sucking in their exports like a giant hoover? Without the tens of billions of dollars of American investment that floods into China each year? It's not like the Europeans have led the way in opening their markets the same way. Without America, China today could be rather like, say, North Korea. Only much bigger, and much more well armed with nukes and the like, and thus enormously more frightening.

The truth, I suspect, is that many American planners know all too well (even if they haven't admitted it publically) that there's no other choice. America funds China's rise, knowing it may well displace America at the top of the stack in the long term, in order to avoid the instability that would go with a poor, hungry, backward, nuclear armed China in the short term. And besides, India's rising too, whose long-term prospects I believe are better than China's, and makes a nice counter-balance of democracy and pluralism to a part of the world that desperately needs it.

Say what you like about other American policies, but vis-a-vis China, and India, I think America has it exactly right. It's maintaining stability while promoting growth and democracy. It's only the lack of imagination on the parts of some narrow-minded people that makes them incapable of imagining worse possibilities. I can think of far, far worse ways to go.

space x

More cool news at hobbyspace (and some other sites, but he's the only one who links to them all).

IT entrepreneur Elon Musk's company Space X is finally flying their small satellite launcher on November 25th.

For those unfamiliar with Space X (and the media's mostly ignoring it), the cool thing here is that they only cost about a third of what the big guys (Boeing and Lockheed) do. Musk is also developing an intermediate-size booster called Falcon 5, and a really, really big SOB called Falcon 9. For me, the coolest thing Musk said at the press conference was this, liveblogged by Michael Belfiore:

'Boeing and Lockheed can't win on a level playing field. The only way we can fail is if we're stupid. If we build a good rocket and we launch it and it's reliable, then we have a very bright future and there's very little a competitor can do to stop us.'

If the rocket doesn't blow up, as new rockets often do, and establishes a track record, this could be huge. As I posted earlier, the biggest obstacle to making the human race a spacefaring civilisation is cost. Anything that brings it down is very good news. Though I don't entirely agree with Musk that Boeing and Lockheed are finished if Space X succeeds -- hopefully they'll stay in the race, invest their own money in new technologies that make things cheaper, and then we'll have competition. A Space X monopoly wouldn't help anyone.

Falcon 9 will evidently be able to carry people. It's only a few years from launch. Pretty soon he'll be able to send those people to orbital facilities provided by Robert Bigelow. Bigelow has said he's not much interested in operating tourist hotels himself, he'll just sell the hardware to anyone else who is. Imagine maybe a hotel chain, say Hilton, wanted to do so. Virgin is already poised for hundreds of millions in free advertising from the Virgin Galactic venture, even before considering the prospect of actual operating profits. How much is it worth to Virgin, advertising wise, to have their name emblazoned on the sides of actual manned spacecraft soaring into sub-orbit? How much would it be worth to a Hilton or Shangri La to have their name on an orbital hotel? You can just see the ads, can't you?

Possibilities, possibilities...

Mark Steyn on France

In Mark Steyn's latest opinion piece in the Telegraph, he writes:

"Three years ago -December 2002 - I was asked to take part in a symposium on Europe and began with the observation: "I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark.""

Now I quite like a lot of Steyn's stuff (despite the fact that I'm a centrist not a rightist) but there's a constant theme running through this article that is just wrong. It's summed up best where he invites us to imagine the year 2020 or 2025, where the 'Islamic Republican Coalition' has just won a majority in France's national elections.

Seriously? The first thing a French Islamic Party of the kind Steyn's talking about would do is force these young rioters to grow beards, stop wearing their American sports gear, and turn off the French gangsta-rap they're listening to on their stolen stereos. They're just not those kinds of Muslims, but with a lot of commentators, sadly, this inconvenient fact doesn't fit into their grand theories of clashing civilisations, so it's ignored. Perhaps he's really talking about the UK, or Holland... maybe that would fit better, I don't know as much about the situation in those nations. But get it straight people -- as I posted to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit a while back now, 'It's not an intafada!'.

The French government aren't scared of the Islamic radicalism of the riots not because they're complacent, but because that radicalism doesn't exist. What does scare them (or should) is the fact that they can't solve the problem within the framework of the vaunted 'French System' (read 'Socialist Straightjacket') and they can't admit the whole system is broken, and so they've got no idea what else to do. The latest idea is to create a new volunteer civil service (no, I don't know what that means either) which seems to just give everyone government jobs. Great... French government debt already stands at more than 14 thousand Euros per person, the highest in Europe, and they're going to radically increase spending? Thus depressing the economy further, thus creating more unemployment, thus creating more crime and riots... you get the idea. They have to grow the economy, cut spending, deregulate housing, fix education, liberalise zoning laws, improve law enforcement... if France was producing lots of jobs, even racism would be less of a problem, because employers would have to hire skilled people where ever they found them, regardless of race or religion. But if there's ten applicants for each job, and it's an undisputed fact that many of the Muslim neighborhoods have terrible schools, it doesn't take much racism in society to imagine the white guys getting all the first preferences.

None of which excuses the rioters, who in any civilised society deserve jail, not concessions. But instead of doing what needs to be done for its own good, the French government are once again cringing and conceding, and insert your anti-French cliche here. The rioters don't even have much support in their own neighborhoods..; after all, whose cars do you think they're burning? Whose schools, and whose gymnasiums, and whose shopping centers? Local ones, of course. But Nicolas Sarkozy seems the only politician more interested in giving protection to victims than concessions to thugs.

The whole scene would be perfect for a French black comedy film... if it weren't so utterly humourless for the innocents caught in the middle.

Conspiracies in France...

An Indian ex-diplomat thinks a London-based muslim radical group with links to Pakistan is behind the France riots.

It's not impossible, the French police were hinting darkly at behind-the-scenes organisers themselves. But I'd caution that some of these Indian bureaucrats have been fighting Pakistanis for so long, they see them behind every corner.

Big Deal?

Apparently we (Australia) won a soccer match the other day.

As an Aussie Rules fan, I think that (big yawn) well, I think that it's kind of (bigger yawn)... well, you know. But hey, I only watch one soccer tournament every four years, so I guess it might be kind of fun to have some Australians to cheer for.

Space Ship Two

Design issues facing the successor to Space Ship One, winner of the X-Prize.

Great to see people working on solving real issues, rather than just theoretical ones. This thing's gonna be so cool...

Via: Hobbyspace

The Forgotten Muslims

In all the talk of the France riots, it occurs to me that it's only men we see rioting. This brings me back to an issue typically ignored by the media, particularly the French media (although it seems to have been getting more exposure lately), the fate of muslim women in European society. This long article by Marie Brenner in Vanity Fair last year illustrates the darker side fairly well.

I'm no expert, and I haven't been in Paris long enough to become one, but anecdotally, it seems to me that young French muslim women are more eager to integrate into French society than their brothers. For many muslim girls, the freedom afforded to non-muslim women in French culture is very appealing. But frequently, as Brenner's article makes clear, that freedom remains elusive.

Islamic extremism may be pretty rare in France, but conservative cultural attitudes regarding muslim women seem pretty commonplace in muslim communities. It seems to me that if French society truly wants to preach equality and understanding to its muslim citizens, it needs to start enforcing the rights not only of job applicants to a fair hearing, but of muslim girls to live free lives not just by muslim standards, but by French standards. That will mean making forced marriages illegal, for example. It would also mean interfering in the family affairs of conservative muslims, and I don't think Chirac and co have the guts, especially not now.

But either French social norms must apply equally to all, or be condemned as hypocritical. I think, sadly, we can see which is more likely.

Arthur C Clarke on Blogs

How on earth did the blogosphere miss this? Or maybe they didn't, but I didn't see anything when I google searched.

I guess not many western bloggers scan Indian newspapers. Outlook, by the way, is a seriously good magazine, for anyone wanting to know more about India. One day we'll all need to, like it or not...

SF and Economics

Technological development and economics are entwined. That’s why I think it’s a good idea for science fiction writers, or at least, those who take predictions of the future at least moderately seriously, to have some basic understanding of the fundamentals of economics.

Take robotics. Why don’t we all have personal robot servants by now? Or at least, why aren’t the more menial jobs, like garbage collection and street sweeping, done by robotic vehicles? The technology is clearly here, there’s no doubt it’s all technically feasible.

Well, it’s the economics, stupid. The Japanese are developing robot staff for hospitals and aged care homes, to take a load of work off the human staff. In Japan, that might make sense, because wages are high and immigration is low. A robot might cost $200,000 (for the purposes of illustration, all figures shall be in US dollars) but considering that a regular staff member might be $40,000 per year in Japan, the robot will pay for itself in five years. Or maintenance and power included, maybe six or seven. By which stage it will probably be obsolete, but if the design is modular, and CPUs, sensory systems etc, can be upgraded, perhaps that can be extended.

But there’s no demand for robots to take menial jobs in a place like, say, France, because unemployment is high, and there’s loads and loads of North African or Turkish immigrants who’ll do the work far cheaper. Ditto poorer countries like China and India, even mores. And that’s as should be -- it would be both economically stupid, and morally repugnant, to be depriving poor workers of the opportunity to work by replacing them with expensive machines. Deprived of a viable market, there’s little investment in these fields of commercial robotics, and the technology growth is restrained. Of course, when world poverty is history, and everyone is wealthy, that will change.

Then there’s space exploration. Every new piece of territory conquered by a human civilisation has been consolidated (or not) through trade. The British Empire, and the Roman one before it, and (if one subscribes to the term, which I don’t) the American Empire, even mores. If we go to space to stay, it’ll be because there’s profit in it. Profit, of course, is a capitalist term, and all the empires named above were certainly capitalist. The problem with the current approach of organisations like NASA is that they are communist in nature, and we’ve already seen what happens to communist empires.

There’s only one thing that will get the human species back into space to stay, and it’s not another multibillion dollar NASA contract to Boeing or Lockheed-Martin to build some already-obsolete piece of junk that will be horrendously expensive to use for everyone but NASA. Whenever you hear on the news some latest ‘plan’ by some big organisation to go to Mars or the Moon or whatever, ignore it. It won’t be a ‘plan’. The only growth worth having is organic growth, because that’s the only kind that lasts.

The thing to do is quite simple -- lower the prices to the point that lots of private players can enter the market, and then get out of the way. Capitalism at its best can do amazing things, and this promises to be capitalism at its best. Already there are many competing sub-orbital vehicles under development for tourism purposes, and the economics of their operation promises to be very interesting, and hopefully, quite competitive.

Let’s assume the private sub-orbit companies can make money, as I believe they will (some of them, anyway). Critics point out that sub-orbit is one-twenty-fifth the velocity required for orbit, and the technological achievement to get to sub-orbit is thus insignificant. But those critics miss the point that technology alone is only a small part of the equation required to make the human race a space faring species. We need operators (spacelines, if you like) with experience and skills. We need manufacturers, both of complete vehicles, and of key components, like rocket engines, heat shielding systems, avionics, etc. We need logistics. We need personnel management -- tourism companies that know how to make space-tourists comfortable, healthy and nausea-free on their adventures. And we need insurance, and investment, and established stock prices, and good legislation, and for the media to get a handle on what the whole industry is about.

A competitive, profitable sub-orbital industry could establish all of these things, well before orbital travel becomes commonplace, and thus lay the groundwork. Furthermore, if all the participating companies are making profits, then they stand a good chance to get venture-capitalists interested, thus attracting large sums of money into all the relevant R&D projects, thus eventually solving the technology problem too. But investors won’t invest in industries where there’s no proof of a profit, so sub-orbital industries can establish proof-of-concept too.

The way to spot a market boom on the horizon is to spot future potential mismatches of supply and demand. Those don’t get much bigger than in space travel. Sure, not many people would want to do it as it stands today -- not only is it horrendously expensive, it’s also difficult, strenuous, and dangerous. So imagine it becomes as cheap as a luxury ocean liner cruise, and about as safe (although those lukewarm smorgasbord lunches can be lethal). Your market is the entire human species. That’s six billion people, heading toward seven. Only about a billion of them are ‘first world wealthy’, but China and India are booming, and they have nearly 2.4 billion between them... and they’ll pull lots of other nations up behind them. Millions of people take luxury cruises every year. How much more exciting is space?

If someone becomes convinced enough of the prospects that they put a few billion toward the development of orbit-capable scramjets, and the price-to-orbit suddenly drops to about $10,000 per person (apparently possible, although it won't happen SUDDENLY, I'm just illustrating), there’ll be several million people from all over the world astonished to find themselves above the income threshold where holidays in orbit become affordable. You’d see a massive infrastructure boom in orbit to accommodate them all, with grand space stations and rapid technological advances (they’d have to be big, economies of scale mean facility operators would make more profit per head by reducing infrastructure costs per person, just like in regular hotels). Imagine the capacity requirements. Getting to the moon from orbit is relatively simple, so lunar infrastructure would boom too.

With tourism as the kick-starter, costs would fall sufficiently to bring other business models from the red into the black. All this construction activity would do the same thing that construction booms do anywhere in the world -- create big markets for construction materials, mining, transport and labour. Need metals for those big facilities? It’s still probably cheaper to get it in space than lug it up from Earth, so mine an asteroid... also apparently quite feasible, if there’s a market. In fact, it’d be cheaper to make most things locally (off Earth) than lug them up from the bottom of a gravity well, so there’d be a rush of localisation to lower costs -- manufacturing, food production, oxygen, water, basic consumables, you name it. For example, they could grow wheat in lunar hydroponic facilities, harvest it, make dough, and export it to all other facilities that want bread. I foresee facility managers going over their manifest of items imported each week from Earth, and ticking all the ones they’d save money on by producing locally, and those would be the new local industries. The desire to localise everything to save money will create all kinds of off-Earth production technologies, and help create more and more self-sufficiency. That self-sufficiency will increase as the off-Earth economy, facilities, and... hell, let’s call them colonies (oh please let’s!) become larger, and acquire economies of scale of their own.

From there, the solar system beckons, and we’d be acquiring all the skills and knowledge required to move out into it. NASA, and agencies around the world like them, would be freed from their current straightjacket, and would take on the new role of exploring the solar system... before the private companies get there first. They’d do the stuff, and the science, that the private sector can’t do, or shouldn’t be expected to. Like exploring Mars, or the Jovian System, or the Saturnian System... with people, not robots. Which would be the coolest thing that could ever happen to NASA, certainly much cooler than running a glorified but dangerous lorry service to a space station that is already obsolete, has no apparent function, and will become even more anachronistic in years ahead.

There are other economic issues that need to be considered, too, when thinking about the future. Take space elevators. Arthur C Clarke says they’re technically viable, and I’m not stupid enough to argue with an endorsement like that. My problem with the concept is this -- the engineers said the Channel Tunnel between England and France was technically viable too, and they were right. What they didn’t consider were the commercial challenges faced by fixed infrastructure against flexible transport. They failed to foresee the rise of low-cost airlines, and now Channel Tunnel users are only a quarter of their projected numbers. Instead of going next door, English and French holiday makers can now afford to go to Spain, Italy or further afield in Europe, thanks to low cost airlines. And the tunnel is struggling to pay off the enormous debt of its own construction.

I foresee something similar with space elevators, if they’re ever built. When we get an orbital boom, (and if elevators brought the price down as low as some pundits are claiming, that by definition creates an orbital boom) can they handle all the traffic? If it takes a few hours to get to orbit and back on the elevator ribbon, that’s, what, maybe six trips a day? You can’t run multiple cars on the ribbon, because they’d be too heavy and pull the counterweight out of orbit. If each of these cars is big, and carries anything up to fifty people, it’s still not enough to service the demand I see coming. Not nearly enough. We’re talking millions of people a year, here. And those passengers won’t all be wanting to go to the same destination in convenient groups of fifty -- no, you’ll have fifteen going to the Hilton 2 in 18 degrees elliptic at 680,000 feet, and twenty one people going to the Pleasure Star at 21 degrees elliptic at 820,000 feet, and another five going to New Haven City on the Sea of Tranquility via a three day stopover at the Emerald Star in geosynchronous orbit... etc. Ask anyone who’s ever worked in logistics, it’s a hell of a complicated business. Reliability, flexibility, and rapid turnarounds are key. Fixed infrastructural bottlenecks are murder, especially on the bottom line.

So build many elevators, to cater to all this demand. Okay... but you’ve still got scheduling problems. You’d have to book weeks in advance, for one thing, or there’d be chaos. But schedules change. Unforeseen circumstances are, well, unforeseen. Flexibility, as in all business models, will save money, and inflexibility will cost it. And elevators can only deliver cargo to fixed spots in space, the rest is orbital manoeuvre... so you wouldn’t save time, because you can’t go directly to your location, as a spaceplane would. Some desirable locations (hotels in higher orbit, or even geosynchronous, for that awesome, more expensive view) wouldn’t even be accessible -- elevators could take a week to get to geosynchronous, which would delay all other traffic for that week, which would thus be economically unviable. And most of them would be located on the equator, because the high-altitude winds at other latitudes would turn them into the world’s largest skipping ropes... so if you’re not easily accessible from equatorial orbit, tough. The problem with space elevators is their supposed attractiveness is based only upon the orbital market as it stands today... but if there was a boom, the orbital market would transform radically, thus sowing in the space elevator concept the seeds of its own demise. All these hidden costs, bottlenecks and delays... there may be a niche for elevators, but when the boom really hits, I’ll bet on the inherent flexibility of airline-style services, point-to-point travel and charter flights. They may look more expensive on paper, but in practise, I’ll bet otherwise.

Aircars are another fascinating one. There’s a guy called Moller who’s building real flying cars. Whoopee. Whether they actually work or not is another question... but let’s assume they do, and let’s assume they cost half a million each. At that price, who’d be able to afford them? That’s what I thought at first... but think about it. How much does an inner city or suburban house or apartment cost in a big city? You could be looking at close to a million in anyone’s currency these days.

Moller’s aircar can cruise at 300mph for three hours. So if you don’t mind a one-hour commute to work (much better view from 20,000 feet than on the subway, I’d guess) you could live 300 miles from work. On a farm, in a small town, in the middle of nowhere. 150 miles, half an hour’s travel. How much does property cost out there? $200,000 for a nice big farmhouse? Plus the half-a-million aircar, and you’ve saved $300,000 on that million-dollar house in the city, and have a better quality of life... if you like the country, anyway.

City prices could plummet, if aircars caught on. My guess is they wouldn’t collapse, because cities have an intrinsic attraction for many people, and if everyone left for the country, the country would start resembling the city, and then wouldn’t be the country anymore, would it? But certainly that one invention could completely change the demographics and economics of modern human civilisation. But no great surprise there -- cars did, as did trains, as did aeroplanes... and so will spacetravel, one day. Transport is intrinsic to all civilisations, and always will be.

That’s for starters, and I’m sure there’s all kinds of other economic angles for the above mentioned technologies I’ve missed. This is the kind of analysis, for me, that determines whether or not something’s actually likely to happen. Not that any of us, of course, have any REAL idea what’s likely and what isn’t...

Paris Riots

A few things about the riots.

Unbeknownst to some critics, Nicolas Sarkozy is not entirely unpopular in the affected regions -- he’s actually quite popular with many who aren't rioting. He’s also been the only senior politician for quite some time trying to do something about it. Most leave it alone because it’s too difficult, but Sarkozy’s actually prepared to take the risk. By calling the rioters ‘scum’, he’s only showing that he’s prepared to give people in the banlieus the same deal everyone else in France gets. He’d call anyone else ‘scum’ too, if they did what the rioters are doing. He’s offering them equality.

Many of these neighbourhoods had no police there at all. The police simply didn’t go there. Sarkozy’s trying to change that, and a lot of the criminals don’t like it. This is the great irony -- in socialist France, the banlieu residents are proving the capitalists right, showing that everyone, left to their own devices and free of state interference, will become enterprising and seek to make a profit.

These young people did just that -- they got into crime, and set up all kinds of rackets with stolen goods, cars, drugs, you name it. With unemployment so high, and policing almost non-existent, crime was the number one industry in some of these neighbourhoods. What you’re seeing in the riots now is really just the same thing that happens when the government tries to privatise some public company, and the unions go on strike.

This is the French banlieu criminal union going on strike. The French government is trying to take away their gainful employment, and they’re not happy about it. Who said these kids weren’t real Frenchmen?

first post

Well, I finally sucumbed, and have decided to create a blog. I'm not going to post here everyday, but I will post on any issue, topic, idea, newspaper headline etc that catches my interest. And there's plenty of those.