'Reach for the Stars' now becomes 'Retreat to the Past'

Big D in Tx says:
“Don’t want to pay taxes? Fine, don’t. You can go live in the woods, or join a commune, or whatever is hip these days. But don’t drive on paved roads. And if your house burns down or you get robbed or are critically injured – don’t call 911. And unless you live in a completely deregulated and privatized area, don’t use utilities. Pump your own water, make your own electricity, verify for yourself that everything you want to eat is actually safe for consumption, the list goes on…”
Interesting that most of the services in your list are supported by state and local Taxes. Why is it then that my federal taxes are several times greater than my state and local taxes. My only apparent contact with the federal Govt is the IRS and an the occasional contact with the post office employee. Just sayin…

j ferguson says: What utter nonsense. [quality and availability of communications technology will accelerate everything, more innovation is to come!]
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Unfortunately, j ferguson, increasing communication technologies in itself is not necessarily a good thing, nor guarantees future progress. Any technology can be used for “evil” as well, and increased communication technologies, when used for propaganda (for instance in the 1930’s), could be used for negative or non-productive purposes as well.
In the present day, increased communication technologies could be used by people like Goebbles (or Mann) to propagate misleading, manipulative beliefs in order to exert control over a compliant populace.
Unfortunately, j ferguson, increasing communication technologies in itself is not necessarily a good thing, nor guarantees future progress.

Gunga Din,
Thanks for that.
What you attributed to Lincoln seemed like a thoughtful response to the “Communist Manifesto” published in 1848. In the 1860s Lincoln could have commented on the works of dreamers like Marx & Engels but I supect Lincoln had more important matters on his mind.
Your quote dates from 1916 only a year before the “October Revolution” that was followed by an attempt to govern according to the Communist Manifesto (Russia, 1917-1991).
Before dismissing the “Manifesto” as a total failure, rate this country in terms of the extent that the ten goals have been achieved here. Allocating 10 points to each goal my assessment of the USA is 62% Communist. To my intense embarrassment, my homeland rates higher still:
http://morcombe.net/KarlMarx.htm
In an earlier comment I referred to education in the USA that is now approaching what Marx & Engels recommended:
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
No mention of giving parents any say in the education of their children!
Only the USA has tried to apply the quaint idea that the government serves the people. Elsewhere and elsewhen, the people serve the government. IMHO the USA can improve the odds that “the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands” rather than backwards into a gloomy socialist Utopia:
http://jpetrie.myweb.uga.edu/bulldog.html

Big D in TX says (August 27, 2012 at 3:25 pm): “Are you serious? What country do you live in? It can’t be the USA…So how about we take a step back now and have some respect for a magnificent system that WORKS and is PROVEN.”
Eh? What country do YOU live in, Big D? The one I live in (USA) is rapidly going broke. It only “works” for the politicians and their cronies.

That is a terribly pessimistic point of view in the lead article!
I would say we are actually on the cusp of a golden age of science, which will put everything that has gone before it, amazing as that has been, into the shade. We are in the process of establishing a new level of scientific expectation, confidence and achievement, and what I think is driving this is the global expansion of secondary and tertiary education, in all societies, at all levels and in all endeavours, and in particular in science, that has occurred since the 1970s.
Back in the ‘glory days’ of the Victorian era, university education was actually restricted to a privileged few from the wealthier classes of dominantly western societies, who were selected, not usually on merit, but for the wealth, social position and influence of their parents. Scientific advancement was the province of a few scientific universities and institutions, a few wealthy persons of leisure, generally supported by private inheritance, and in the more practical engineering fields of a growing class of industrialists, who funded research and development for profit, and also established charitable institutes for training and further research. Those times may seem like a scientific golden age to us, because all the low hanging fruit were still waiting to be picked by anybody who had the time, resources, brains and education to bother, but numerically they were actually just a very small beginning.
The real tsunami of scientific advancement, which most of us take very casually for granted, has happened since the global educational revolutions of the 1960s and 70s. We have spent the past 40 or 50 years building a world in which tens of millions of people a year, of all nations and races, from all over the globe, get a university education. A large number of these actually enter university on examined intellectual and academic merit, and a not insignificant proportion are then educated to a very high level and continue on to conduct innovative research in scientific subjects.
The upshot of this has been that the few basic scientific disciplines of 50-200 years ago have since spawned an enormous range of highly specialised sub-disciplines and new fields in which advances are now building, one upon the other at an almost unbelievable pace. You only have to look at research fields as diverse as psychiatry, medical imaging, cybernetics, cosmology, geophysics, biochemistry, genetics, microelectronics, materials science, ..the list is endless, and the practical advances in telecommunications, oil exploration, agriculture, food technology, aviation, weapons technology, environmental science, ..the list is also endless, to see how science has blossomed and what a bounty we are reaping from it. So I don’t think the golden age of science is over. Far from it. It is only just getting into gear.
And I don’t particularly worry whether it is the USA, India, China, Europe, Russia, Japan, the Middle East, or some as-yet unforseen commercial entity that takes us to the next stage in space exploration. Even if it isn’t the still exceptionally-capable and impressive NASA that does it, it won’t really matter. Whoever does it, it will certainly happen, and it will still be another great step for us lot: the human race, as Neil Armstrong succinctly pointed out.

Unfortunately worse than a retreat towards the past is possible. Next to no prior historical regimes deliberately set out to reduce the material and energy prosperity (“consumption”) of all or nearly all of their subjects as an ideological goal in itself. Even Soviet Communism, for all its huge faults, at least had material and industrial expansion as a goal. (Pol Pot was far worse though).
Without a positive vision of the future, an anti-growth enviroreligion becomes increasingly prevalent. Even science fiction is often starting to go downhill by now (with the exception of transhumanists).
Having a frontier would be a major partial counter. The fizzling of the space age so far, with no cities or expansion of human settlement in space, is the great tragedy.
The fundamental showstopper so far is not having step #1 of a space age completed yet: to get beyond rockets costing on the order of a thousand times basic propellant costs (with propellant mostly liquid oxygen costing cents per kilogram but thrown-away expendable hardware costing hundreds to thousands of dollars per kilogram). The problem is amortizing multi-billion dollar programs over launch goals of only a handful of tons, with millions of dollars a ton cost impractical for most potential applications.
Ironically, the 30 MJ per kg kinetic energy requirement of 8 km/s LEO orbital velocity (“halfway to anywhere in the solar system” in delta v terms, to borrow a phrase from Heinlein), before inefficiencies, is not that much different than a transoceanic airline flight’s energy usage (where, for perspective, jet fuel gives around 130 MJ/gallon in a more terrestrial application not counting ambient oxygen mass). However, rockets carry their own oxidizer, burn propellant in minutes instead of hours in a flashier high power-to-mass-ratio manner, have more inefficiencies, and, most of all, so far lack rapid-turnaround reusability like airline aircraft. If such as a 747 was expended on a single flight without reuse or was technically reusable but had a particular design of thousands of ceramic heat shield tiles taking months between flights to refurbish (Space Shuttle analogy), airline travel would be astronomically expensive too.
Health issues from lack of 1g gravity are an artifact of having launch cost around the equivalent of a payload’s mass in gold, making extra mass for rotational artificial gravity structures temporarily seem impractical. Likewise, radiation shielding is solvable if not under the same mass constraints, especially via electromagnetic shield options.
Fortunately, there are alternatives for orders of magnitude improvement in launch costs (although requiring briefly some extra upfront capital investment), several actually but a particularly good one being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram
With that, the astronomical resources of space could be utilized, from how a lunar mass driver can launch cumulatively a few hundred times its own mass in lunar material each decade, to nickel-iron asteroids almost like giant chunks of stainless steel (not rusted, not oxidized like natural iron became on Earth) to cubic kilometers worth of oil shale in comets ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale#Appendix:_extraterrestrial_oil_shale ), and much else. Most is more valuable and more practical to use in space than trying to return to Earth, with the exception of gold and other platinum-group metals (which, aside from traces found in the crust, mostly sunk into Earth’s core in terrestrial history but are abundant in some asteroids). Yet such would be excellent for space colonies of city scale and beyond (a bit like http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Contents1.html ).
If nothing like the Startram is funded, the best hope is for suborbital tourism startup companies to potentially approach airline-like reusability and economics over time, especially under economy of number, not because suborbital flights are much of orbital velocity in themselves but because very similar technology from rocket engines to launch operations could lead to rapid-turnaround orbital launch vehicles later.
In the long term, there is orders of magnitude more than enough material even in this star system alone to make thousands of times Earth’s land area in artificial worlds, in space habitats, obviously not overnight but with room for more work to be done and potential for growth for up to eons upon eons to come. (Any civilization eventually reaching the corresponding power handling capabilities and all else, approaching type 2 on the Kardashev scale, would also find the Oort cloud and interstellar flight far more in reach than we do). The economics of making space habitats may superficially seem implausible, but vapor deposition of metal possible in the vacuum can allow vast voluminous structures to be made with a relatively small number of personnel, alien to terrestrial experience. Once a starting industrial base with some thousands of personnel was obtained, one old NASA estimate is:
“If automation permits a moderate increase of productivity to a value of 100 t/person-year, which is twice the value now appropriate for processing and heavy industries on Earth, the large Bernal sphere could be built for an investment of 50,000 man-years of labor. That is equivalent to the statement that 12 percent of the maximum population of one such sphere, working for 3 yr could duplicate the habitat. Automation is much better suited to the large scale, repetitious production operations needed for the habitat shell than to the details of interior architecture and landscape design. It seems quite likely, therefore, that the construction of new habitats will become an activity for specialists who supply closed shells, ready for interior finishing, to groups of prospective colonists.”
http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Chapt7.html
Done right, it would be fun, for those taking part and for their future descendants, including human flight indoors in partial g sections anytime, at a moment’s whim, to the ceiling, to a treetop, almost anywhere, in fact relatively starting to live in 3D instead of 2D:
http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070426002835/tmp2/images/8/88/Plate10.jpg
http://www.davidszondy.com/future/Living/leisure.jpg
http://listverse.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/60256-1152359707-large.jpg
http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/Images/Art/Hardy/lowgswm2.jpg
At this point, the future of mankind could go either way. In public memes and ideology, society is mostly going downhill. Albeit far less outside the field of electronics than in it, technology is still advancing so far, though, hopefully enough before the window of opportunity closes from such as a global U.N. limitation on launches per year as has already been proposed.

Henry Clark, August 28, 2012 at 4:33 am,
Space flight is barely into its infancy. Folks like Neil Armstrong went to the moon knowing that a tiny mishap or loss of fuel would prevent them from returning to Earth.
Even with the limited scientific understanding that we have today it is clear that nuclear engines have great potential. 30 MJ/kg ceases to be a problem with nuclear powered engines. In terms of specific fuel consumption the figures of merit look something like this:
Engine type FOM
Chemical 1
Fission 0.2 billion
Fusion 1 billlion
Anti-matter 100 billion
Even with fission, space craft will be able to keep their engines running 24/7 thus providing artificial gravity and the ability to reach nearby stars in comfort.

Jim Clarke says:
August 27, 2012 at 1:57 pm
Wiglafthegreat, I agree with you. It was theft. The government really has no right to force people to give up their money to send men to the moon. But of all the things the government steals our money for, the space program was perhaps the best.
First of all, not a dime was spent in space. It was all spent here on Earth, promoting innovation, expertise, exploration, discovery, knowledge and accomplishment. Now consider all the other things government takes our money for: war, nanny-state programs and fear-mongering. Most of our tax dollars are now spent on fostering individual dependency, and as a consequence…despair. Our government is using our tax dollars to cultivate the seeds of its own destruction and Atlas is about to shrug.
If we must pay taxes, isn’t it better that our government does something truly marvelous with those dollars?

In my opinion, any time our government spends tax dollars on anything outside of constitutionally mandated or constitutionally allowed functions, it is theft.
However, a recent Supreme Court decision says the opposite. According to the Supreme Court, Congress has the power to tax us for anything, regardless of whether the purpose is extra-Constitutional or not.

Big D in TX says:
August 27, 2012 at 3:25 pm
….. Don’t like what the government is doing? Fine, let’s change it. But instead of having a bloody insurrection, we prefer to peacefully vote out the people we don’t like every few years. Even the most powerful position in our government (most powerful seat in the whole world, I think most people will agree) is kicked out after only 2 (two!) terms…..
_______________________________
I used to believe that too. Unfortunately the people we elect to government seats are no longer selected by us and do not actually run our government.
Want an example?
Let’s start with a recent Supreme Court ruling:

Supreme Court refuses to reconsider campaign finance controversy
The Supreme Court refused Monday to reconsider one of its most controversial decisions of recent years, which has had a dramatic effect on election campaigns.
In a 5-4 ruling, with the more liberal justices dissenting, the high court refused to hear arguments over whether a state can limit campaign spending by corporations.
The case focused on Montana, but its implications were widespread.
In a nutshell, the court decided that its 2010 Citizens United decision — which helped open the floodgates to massive corporate spending in elections and give birth to super PACs — trumps state laws. And it won’t be revisited any time soon.

Here is an example of what that means. The pdf Farm Bill 101 lists the large multinational food/ag corporations and their campaign contributions and the money spent on lobbying. For example

Walmart
The largest company and food retailer in the US as well as the largest retailer in the world…
Political Campaign Contributions: (2000–2012): $6,503,150
Lobbying Expenditures (1998–2010): $33,245,000

This is how the influence works Mapping Out The Revolving Door Between Gov’t And Big Business In Venn Diagrams

…When people talk about regulatory capture, this is what they mean. When people talk about corruption and crony capitalism, this is what they mean. If you want a quick visual idea of why so few people trust this government to do the right thing for the people, rather than the big companies, this is why…

When Congress ratified the World Trade Organization treaty, a safety clause for US sovereign rights was put in.

Eastlaw: The Application of WTO Law in China
… status of trade agreements in U.S. law is governed by the Trade Agreements Act of 1979 (hereinafter the 1979 Act). In the Act, Congress made clear that any provision of the Tokyo Round agreements negotiated under the GATT framework would not prevail over a U.S. statute, regardless of when the statue was enacted. ….
…the language of the URAA is even clearer. The features of the URAA are described as follows:
United States Law to Prevail in Conflict The URAA puts U.S. sovereignty and U.S. law under perfect protection. According to the Act, if there is a conflict between U.S. and any of the Uruguay Round agreements, U.S. law will take precedence regardless when U.S. law is enacted. § 3512 (a) states: “No provision of any of the Uruguay Round Agreements, nor the application of any such provision to any person or circumstance, that is inconsistent with any law of the United States shall have effect.” Specifically, implementing the WTO agreements shall not be construed to “amend or modify any law of the United States, including any law relating to (i) the protection of human, animal, or plant life or health, (ii) the protection of the environment, or (iii) worker safety”, or to “limit any authority conferred under any law of the United States, including section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.”…..

That is pretty clear. US laws are held to be above the treaty. However Big Ag as members of the International Food and Agricultural Trade Policy Council (IPC) wrote the WTO Agreement on Agriculture. The person who actually wrote the draft was Dan Amstutz VP of Cargill the grain traders. The FDA, controled by Big Ag, has a completely different interpretation. This is the FDA’s own words in 2008 before the food law in 2010 was passed.

International Harmonization
http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~comm/int-laws.html (link now dead)
The harmonization of laws, regulations and standards between and among trading partners requires intense, complex, time-consuming negotiations by CFSAN officials. Harmonization must simultaneously facilitate international trade and promote mutual understanding, while protecting national interests and establish a basis to resolve food issues on sound scientific evidence in an objective atmosphere. Failure to reach a consistent, harmonized set of laws, regulations and standards within the freetrade agreements and the World Trade Organization Agreements can result in considerable economic repercussions…

ERRrrr, no that is just a big fat LIE but was used to push through the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 that DID have a clause that made Ag regulations “harmonize” with WTO wishes.
Then we have the FDA and USDA, the unelected bureaucrats who actually write the regulations and enforce them. The Ecologist September October 1998 and This page highlights the revolving door between U.S. government agencies, the U.S. Congress, and the pharmaceutical industry. The following former government officials now work at IFPMA, PhRMA, or law firms and lobbying firms that represent the pharmaceutical industry.
So how about the USDA? Is the USDA trustworthy? NO!
Testimony from Mr. Stan Painter, Chairman, National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, American Federation of Government Employees (Congressional investigation of Hallmark Downer Cows)

“…when we see violations of FSIS regulations and we are instructed not to write non-compliance reports in order to give companies the chance to fix the problems on their own. Sometimes even if we write non-compliance reports, some of the larger companies use their political muscle to get those overturned at the agency level or by going to their congressional delegation to get the inspection staff to back off…”
source

Why is this idea of traceability and good farming practices being pushed by WTO through the Agreement on Agriculture?
Sir Julian Rose answered that question in his article.

The Battle to Save the Polish Countryside
At a meeting with the EU committee responsible for Poland’s agricultural terms of entry into the EU [attended by Sir Julian] the chair-lady said: “I don’t think you understand what EU policy is. Our objective is to ensure that farmers receive the same salary parity as white collar workers in the cities. The only way to achieve this is by restructuring and modernising old fashioned Polish farms to enable them to compete with other countries agricultural economies and the global market. To do this it will be necessary to shift around one million farmers off the land and encourage them to take city and service industry jobs to improve their economic position. The remaining farms will be made competitive with their counterparts in western Europe.”
We protested that with unemployment running at 20 percent how would one provide jobs for another million farmers dumped on the streets of Warsaw? This was greeted with a stony silence, eventually broken by a lady from Portugal, who rather quietly remarked that since Portugal joined the European Union, 60 percent of small farmers had already left the land. “The European Union is simply not interested in small farms,” she said.
“…Farmers…suddenly find themselves heavily controlled by…that most vicious of anti-entrepreneurial weapons: ‘sanitary and hygiene regulations’..These are the hidden weapons of mass destruction … ridding the countryside of small- and medium-sized family farms and replacing them with monocultural money-making agribusiness. “

And last, why was a bitterly contested law that transfers liability from the mega-corporations to the farmer passed during the lame duck session? Why did Senator Richard Burr lie and tell me he was against the law before the 2010 election and then vote for it after the election?

…In summary, we have record low grain inventories globally as we move into a new crop year. We have demand growing strongly. Which means that going forward even small crop failures are going to drive grain prices to record levels. As an investor, we continue to find these long term trends – and this niche – very attractive. Food shortfalls predicted

“At a time when parts of the world are facing food riots, Big Agriculture is reaping huge profits.”
To preserve this trend the National Grain and Feed Association and the North American Export Grain Association wrote a letter to Pres Bush on July 22, 2008 Urging the USA not to build grain reserves since it would interfere with grain trading.

Recently there have been increased calls for the development of a U.S. or international grain reserve to provide priority access to food supplies for Humanitarian needs. The National Grain and Feed Association (NGFA) and the North American Export Grain Association (NAEGA) strongly advise against this concept and consider it an ill advised response to today’s unprecedented agricultural market situation.
The idea of large scale food “reserve” programs to circumvent market responses is not new. Artificial stockpiling of grain, like artificial restrictions on trade, has consistently been proven to be misguided government policy.
…. Reserve stock policies contribute to inefficient use of government funds, depressed market prices for producers, and an impediment to market adjustment when relative shortages and surpluses develop….the competitive marketplace should remain as the U.S. government’s only role in stockholding..” http://www.naega.org/images/pdf/grain_reserves_for_food_aid.pdf

OTHER REFERENCES:
How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis
History, HACCP and the Food Safety Con Job
Agriculture and Monopoly Capital (by W. Heffernan, “Concentration Of Agricultural Markets,” Unpublished paper, Department of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia, October, 1997).
Hunger for profit
Trojan Horse Law: The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 – Hans Bader studied economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law.
And his prediction is now coming true:
Comrades: Have Your Registered Your People’s Garden?

@Gail Combs says:
August 28, 2012 at 7:06 am
The root problem isn’t money in campaigns. The root problem is that government is involved in every aspect of our lives.
Stop government from trying to control us. Work for limited government, don’t work to limit free speech.

For you “Economic experts” I suggest you know very little about monetary policy. Aside from the thorium video, I suggest you all view a documentary called The Money Masters. It will change your view of money and economics every bit as much as the thorium video changes your view of energy. It shows just how irrelevant the Austrian school and the Keynesian schools really are because neither every address money creation.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936

Plants, animals, people, societies and organizaions/governments all must grow or deteriorate and die. All of us organics go through the cycle of growth, deterioration and death. For us all death is certain. This need not be true of our organizations/governments. The path that the USA is on is one of deterioration. We have turned inward with government taking more and more from the private sector to buy votes from both the upper levels and lower levels of the socioeconomic strata. Socialism has not worked anywhere it has been tried and will not work here. Itis destructive of the middle class and results in an elite and lower class with no incentive to invent or produce.
Items such as space and real scientific exploration are the first casualties. Billions of dollars have been squandered to provide sweet deals that produce nothing to political cronies such as green energy scams, unions, welfare recipients, etc.
Free enterprise succeeds based upon greed as its driving force while socialism requires the good will of those in charge. Which do you want to depend upon? Crony capitalism really becomes facism, economically, in the end. And we have that problem as well.