Link: White House wants your advice on space exploration
post by polymathwannabe · 2014-10-18T14:32:43.597Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 24 commentsContents
24 comments
"The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is planning ahead — way ahead. The agency wants you to email ideas for how "the Administration, the private sector, philanthropists, the research community and storytellers" can develop "massless" space exploration and a robust civilization beyond Earth."
This is beautiful.
"We are running out of adventures [...] the mountains have all been climbed, the continents explored, and the romance of sailing away on a tall ship to undiscovered islands is no more. What will fire the imaginations of the next generation?"
http://io9.com/white-house-seeks-advice-on-bootstrapping-a-solar-syst-1647619795
24 comments
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comment by Toggle · 2014-10-18T19:19:37.726Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm surprised by how many downvotes this post is getting, although I suppose that there's a certain element of politics here.
I upvoted it because, while of limited use in preventing AI-related dangers, an interplanetary civilization is extremely helpful in shrinking the total number of events that qualify as existential risks (asteroid impacts, grey goo scenarios, etc.). A political demonstration of enthusiasm for space exploration seems like a reasonable and good step to take.
Replies from: Lumifer↑ comment by Lumifer · 2014-10-18T22:01:53.177Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm surprised by how many downvotes this post is getting
I downvoted this. It's a feel-good marketing exercise with zero consequences, as far as I can see. In the best case your email will be read by a bored intern who'll forget it five seconds later.
Replies from: Toggle, ChristianKl↑ comment by Toggle · 2014-10-18T23:57:01.594Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
My thinking has more to do with volume than with any specific email. I agree that this shouldn't be taken seriously as a request for policy ideas, but as a demonstration of popular enthusiasm it has more potential.
Replies from: Lumifer↑ comment by Lumifer · 2014-10-19T00:06:29.616Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
So, write a Perl script :-/
But what exactly do you expect your volume of email to accomplish?
Replies from: Toggle↑ comment by Toggle · 2014-10-19T18:57:20.731Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Primarily, to influence the degree to which elected officials believe that supporting space programs will increase their share of the vote.
Replies from: Lumifer, ChristianKl↑ comment by Lumifer · 2014-10-20T17:02:51.024Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Will it -- do you think it's a correct belief? That's not obvious to me. Remember that allocating budgets is a zero-sum game.
Replies from: Toggle↑ comment by Toggle · 2014-10-20T18:48:31.444Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
You may have to clarify the relationship between your skepticism about this process and your final sentence, I'm not sure I understand your point. While the budget is loosely a zero-sum game, individuals making the tradeoffs are motivated by political incentives, and among these incentives is popular support. Nor are we in any obvious 'stable attractor' in budget-space; new programs with new funding are included, and existing programs often have their share of funding increased, with each new budget. As I mentioned to ChristianKI, there is already precedent for NASA receiving a larger share of the federal budget than it does today (that is, the years 1962-2012). There doesn't seem to be any obvious disconnect between a demonstration of popular support and an increase in funding.
Further, this is not like voting; political support for NASA is on a continuum, rather than being a binary proposition. If only a small number of people show support (or a large number of people do), then an additional email still has value.
Replies from: Lumifer↑ comment by Lumifer · 2014-10-20T20:08:28.233Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm not sure I understand your point.
I should have been more clear: do you believe that ceteris paribus a candidate who supports (more) space programs has an electoral advantage over one who does not?
The zero-sum game remark hints at the fact that "We should give a foozillion dollars to NASA" can be (and routinely is) countered by "No, we can use that foozillion dollars better by giving it to {somebody else}".
Replies from: Toggle↑ comment by Toggle · 2014-10-20T20:33:35.005Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks for clarifying. This paper present a fairly coherent view of the nuances behind that question, I think.
The answer to your question is not obvious, which is presumably at least part of the reason that NASA funding has languished so badly in recent decades. It has a broad base of support (~80%), but the general public has a surprisingly poor understanding of that agency's size and scope. People overestimate its share of funding to a huge degree (a nontrivial percentage think it takes up half of federal spending!), and consequently think we spend too much; it's not clear what would happen if the majority of the population actually found out how little we actually spend on the problem, as they would in an election that prioritized NASA as an 'issue'. It's a bit like a candidate with low familiarity among the voter base, in that it's generally seen as an opportunity to 'frame' the message more completely.
Replies from: Lumifer↑ comment by Lumifer · 2014-10-20T20:52:03.179Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Well, I doubt I'm representative of US voters, but to my mind NASA suffers primarily from not having a realistic medium-term mission that anyone (beyond science geeks) cares about and from being a bloated, sclerotic, and highly inefficient government organization. Neither problem can be fixed by more funding.
Replies from: Toggle↑ comment by Toggle · 2014-10-20T21:08:21.464Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sure, but those aren't the problems I'm hoping to solve using this funding. I'm hoping the funding will help solve the interplanetary civilization problem.
(They do impact the efficiency of dollars spent, of course- so they are important to solve. But those are efficiency concerns, not solid barriers.)
Replies from: Lumifer↑ comment by Lumifer · 2014-10-20T23:54:32.564Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
These barriers look pretty solid to me. Not that my opinion matters, but I wouldn't give any more money to NASA until it demonstrates the ability to find its gold-plated ass with both hand faster than in a decade. In more formal terms, it's not that NASA is just inefficient, I wonder whether it's capable any more...
Replies from: Toggle↑ comment by Toggle · 2014-10-21T00:10:42.951Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Given the obvious fact of ongoing space exploration (Curiosity being the most prominent), NASA is obviously capable to some degree. Current missions demonstrate success and competence in areas that few other organizations have even attempted.
In other words, the machine is still running- put money in one end, and a space program comes out the other. If that's not a good enough ROI for you, that's one thing. But I think a group of people that are running daily experiments in their Martian science laboratory qualify as functional.
Replies from: Lumifer↑ comment by Lumifer · 2014-10-21T01:17:46.163Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yeah, but it's all old technology. Launching rovers using plain-vanilla chemical rockets was first successfully done by Russians in 1970.
Replies from: epursimuove↑ comment by epursimuove · 2014-10-22T07:22:34.100Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The first electric cars were made in the 1880s. Is Tesla Motors using old technology?
The Mars rovers use lots of new technology (the aerobraking system and "skycrane", to name one). NASA has certainly experimented with new propulsion technology like VASIMIR and ion drives, it's just that these are high-specific-impulse low-thrust platforms unsuitable for launch but good for maneuvering once in orbit. Not all aspects of a field will advance at the same rate. Compare processing power to battery capacity, for example.
↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2014-10-20T00:29:04.804Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
NASA is not manned mainly by elected officials but by bureaucrats.
Replies from: Toggle↑ comment by Toggle · 2014-10-20T01:45:26.124Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Their budget is determined by the elected representatives in congress, and influenced by the executive branch.
As a percentage of the national budget, NASA's funding is half of what it was twenty years ago (and dropping), and 1/9th of the peak 20th century value. There is a historical precedent for NASA receiving a much greater degree of federal funding, which would certainly increase the number of active projects and possibly increase the rate at which we gain an interplanetary foothold.
Replies from: ChristianKl↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2014-10-20T12:14:28.097Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If you want to influence a congressman to make him think that he will get more votes then you should direct the emails directly at that congressman.
↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2014-10-20T00:30:15.379Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's a feel-good marketing exercise with zero consequences, as far as I can see. In the best case your email will be read by a bored intern who'll forget it five seconds later.
I don't think that's the case. With hiring Musk to transport astronauts to the ISS the NSA has shown openness to outside ideas.
Replies from: Lumifer, gwern↑ comment by gwern · 2014-10-20T01:00:15.533Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The NASA contract program was started by a public petition?
Replies from: ChristianKl↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2014-10-20T13:21:02.681Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This isn't petitioning process. It's a process of an government trying to gather outside ideas for a specific topic. It's a fairly distinct process.
comment by [deleted] · 2014-10-18T18:18:18.602Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"massless"? Is that a funny way of saying "not actually going anywhere"?
Replies from: Richard_Kennaway↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2014-10-19T08:47:11.775Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"massless"? Is that a funny way of saying "not actually going anywhere"?
Is that a funny way of saying "haw haw politicians hur hur"?
A glance at the link shows that "massless" here means using mass that's already out there, instead of hauling everything up from the Earth's gravity well. Digging a little further, the term appears to have been coined by Mason Peck of Cornell University and formerly Chief Technologist at NASA.