From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Mar 22 2001 - 06:56:33 MST
On Thu, 22 Mar 2001 Spudboy100@aol.com wrote about an ion engine that
could be used to launch from the ground:
> Plaudits to the engineers, and a fork to the heads, of the taxpayers that
> would fund such a project. Although, I am fairly sure it would be safer to
> watch, from a sufficient distance then the Project Orion concept of the
> 1950's, in which fission bomb-lets would launch spacecraft from the earth
> surface.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this, Dyson's requium can
be found at:
http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/ETI/Authors/Dyson-FJ/DoaP.html
I hearby nominate this event as one of the 10 Darkest Days
(sometime in January 1965) in the history of Extropianism.
Two others that come to mind are the termination of the Apollo
Program, and the decision not to use the leftover components
to launch a larger SpaceLab. I'm not sure Bush's decision
not to go to Mars would count because the price was so
completely ridiculous.
Lets see if we can nominate a list of these. Its a Dark Day
if we looked into the Eye of the Singularity and "blinked".
It probably doesn't qualify if it may have had significant
probability of negative consequences (e.g. the Mars Program
might have set back U.S. economic growth sufficiently to
postpone the Singularity, though this is obviously debatable.)
Perhaps we can vote on "The Darkest Days List" at Extro5.
Note, in my brief thinking about this, it is (for me) hard to
come up with "Darkest Days" outside of the area of space
exploration.
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:06:36 MST