Pete Worden, who once served various roles in BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense), began his directorship of NASA Ames a few days ago. He joked that after this talk he might be looking for a new job.
The reason for going into space is settlement he said. Since the National Space Society’s primary goal is settlement of space, this went down rather well as you might guess, as in ‘standing ovation’.
He talked about some of the reasons why the Moon is a very useful place for permanent habitation. There are a number of potentially dangerous technologies which could be developed there first before being applied on Earth. Things like replicators, real AI’s that evolve a million times faster than humans, sample returns from Mars, research on Zero Point Energy and others. As Pete said, “There is no EPA and damn few lawyers” on the moon.
Pete believes private ownership of land on the moon is of almost overriding importance. If we can get the international law unambiguously settled, there could be a land rush.
He laid out a way to solve global warming using the market and private ventures. A mass equal to about 30 super tankers placed at the Sun-Earth libration point is enough to build a sun-shade capable of blocking 1% of the solar radiation falling on Earth. It would put a planetary thermostat into human hands. Since he is talking about a large number of ‘small’ parasols rather than one large one, it allows the project to proceed in commercial sized, independant, competing chunks. How does it get funded? You identify equivalent carbon credit for the amount of solar radiation blocked and price your shade accordingly. At rates of dollars/ton of carbon emissions, 1% of irradiation represents trillions of dollars.
One of my Australian drinking buddies (who works on microsats) asked for Pete’s opinion on data purchase. Peter is for it and would be quite happy to buy data or offer anchor tenancies to private ventures that put rovers on the moon. There are several companies who are rather far along in this regard and I would say even his positive public statement will be of enormous assistance to them. He went even further and said he is interested in working with any privately provided space services.
I do not know if Pete Worden can pull this off or not, but I do know he is saying things he really believes. We know him and he knows us.
Before Worden, we had a short talk by California congressman Dana Rohrabacher who is pushing a “Zero G, Zero Tax” bill. He does not think there will be much resistance because it is creating business and investment that would not otherwise be there.
For those who do not know Dana, he was involved with the LP back in the early days but joined the Republicans and became, along with Ron Paul, one of our two ‘Libertarians in Republican clothing’.
“As Pete said, “There is no EPA and damn few lawyers” on the moon.”
Would it not be better, more cost effective, to send all those lawyers and EPA types to the moon, so we can go on with our lives here on earth ?
A number of people have been selling off plots of land on the moon for a while now. One such is this: http://www.moonestates.com/
One chap even gave the Queen an acre for her birthday.
Surely the trouble with solving global warming with a sunshade in space is that it would not involve any personal suffering and deprivation by individual people, which is a necessary thing for believers in the green religion?
How can people be saved if they don’t suffer?
I mean!
I think that buying land on Venus site is an even better scam than buying swampland in Florida…
As well as the American left (which, as you know, controls the vast majority of academia and the media – and against which the bulk of the Republican party is not exactly a reliable ally), the great enemy of private property in space is the Space Treaty and the United Nations (or rather the ideas behind these things).
Outside the United States “international” (meaning proto world statist) is considered automatically good.
The idea that (for example) “international law” (in the modern sense of law created by government) might be wrong or evil is just not considered.
So private property in space (without which private space projects are a waste of time and resources) will depend on the United States breaking free of “world opinion” (i.e. the opinions of the international statist elite).
One of the few good things about the Bush Administration was the contempt it seemed to show for “international law”, and “world opinion” – but that seems to be weakening.
Trying to achieve private property in space by “talks” and other such would (of couse) be a mistake.
Even if the United States government was in favour, virtually no other government would be.
To start such talks is to lose, as one has accepted the authority of the “international community”.
One must proceed without such “agreements”.
Dale, for some reason the Trackback function comes up as “Error 404” on my usual Avant browser and IE. Temporary-I-hope anti-spam measure?
My comment can be found here.
Since Dallas isn’t all that far away for me, can you point me toward gaining admission to next years conference?
Jacob: That would be like saying ‘send all the lawyers to America and we can go on with our lives in Europe. I’d prefer to leave the lawyers with the past rather than condemn myself to live in it.
The online sales of plots are not ‘real’ and if you read the fine print they are novelties. The issues of land rights has yet to be settled in a way that is satisfactory to people who actually wish to invest billions rather than people who like to talk a lot and whose net worth and investment is SFA.
Will: go to isdc.nss.org. Their web site should be active by now. If not, let me know. I’m about to leave for DC after one night in NYC. And if I do not respond quickly, never fear… I’m over 1300 behind in my email and am unlikely to catch up until the end of the month after two more sleep-optional jobs.
As for the sunshade at the libration point, I can’t think of any device more likely to produce unexpected, unpredictable and highly disastrous effects. Who could possibly predict the detailed effect of cooling one percent of the surface of the Earth? Whose computer program is capable of predicting what storms, droughts and tidal disturbances such a scheme is likely to produce? It’s a tort lawyer’s dream.
Robert: You didn’t read very carefully, did you? It would not be one gigaproject. It would be smaller parasols blocking far, far smaller amounts. It would takes decades to build up to any reasonable fraction of that one percent. Plenty of time to study what is going on.
Unlikely to have any more serious consequences than anything else we are doing to ‘stop global warming’ and far more controllable.
I think that betrays a fundamental failure to understand what this ‘sunshade’ would do. It would not shade 1% of the earth’s surface, but reduce the total ‘sunshine’ over the whole earth by 1% — which is vastly more predictable, but neverehless still not certain.
Anyway, there is another way to achieve the same effect, which is to place a large number of high altitude helium-filled balloons, with suitably white upper surfaces and black lower surfaces, to shield about 1% of the earth’s surface.
Cost as %age of orbital sunshade scheme?
— Maybe 0.01%?
But in any case, the Greenies would object to any technological solution, as people would not have to suffer and see the light and be born again as Greenies and that would never do, would it?