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| 5/25 |
| 2004/12/9-10 [Health/Men, Science/Space] UID:35222 Activity:very high |
12/9 Would you fly into space if you had a 5% chance of dying?
\_ Why? I don't understand why people would want to go to space
under the current circumstances(no ftl travel, no inhabitable
planets, no space stations with any real life or industry.)
I can see the excitement of space *science*, done by robots,
but I just don't get the appeal of being the monkey in the can.
\_ It's an experience that few people in history have had. You
obviously have no sense of adventure.
\_ Yeah there's not much up there anyway. I mean, it's called space
for a reason. If they get a moon base I'd want to go there.
\_ http://zoom.cafepress.com/6/1540286_zoom.jpg
\_ where can i get this shirt?
\_ http://tinyurl.com/6m6jp
\_ driving is?
\_ ...not very useful for getting into orbit. Just so ya know.
\_ Apples to oranges...
\_ 5% per trip
\_ once? sure! 20 times? uhhhh.... no.
\_ If I'm single and the trip is free, maybe.
\_ depends on what that 5% is. probably yes, though -sax
\_ Wow, you are crazy. -- ilyas
\_ Hell yeah! When do we go?
\_ What's this 5% based on? If number of fatal missions out of total
missions flown, then this is somewhat misleading; cf. the number
of fatal flights out of total flights flown versus number of fatal
flights this year out of total flights this year for air travel
safety parallels.
\_ I don't think it's based on anything. You're reading far too
deeply into a hypothetical question. You're not very fun at
parties, are you?
\_ Feh. This is what you do for fun at parties? Dinner parties,
perhaps, but odds are good you spend a lot of time getting
pantsed at keggers.
\_ I think you just proved my point about not being fun at
parties, Mr Painfully-Literal Dorkboy. Train harder,
grasshopper.
\_ actually, it is more like 2%:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030204-space01.htm
http://tinyurl.com/46g4g (global security)
\_ Every man dies, few men truly live.
\_ Every man lives. Few men win the lottery.
\-at 5% i'd go. however i dont think i'd pay $5000
for a day in orbit. if you guys would subsidize
to bring the out of pocket costs to say $2500,
i'd go. probably if you die, you die pretty fast.
i think the odds of a horrible death are lower.
i probably wouldnt tell my mom until i got back
however. in case you are interested, in about
50yrs of everest climbing, <1500 summiteers, >150 deaths
on the mountain. peak fee i believe is $USD 18,000.
my guess is, the moment you cross 7000meters you have
more than a 2% chance of dying in the next 48hrs ...
although maybe i am underestimating the number of
deaths in the Khumbu Ice Fall. --psb
\_ Yeah, but on Everest, your intestines don't bubble out
of your eyes while your skin explodes and your lungs turn
to jelly, just before the space monster comes and eats
you. -John |
| 5/25 |
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| tinyurl.com/6m6jp -> www.cafepress.com/d20shirts When you do, what do you scream through a mouthful of pulve rized doritos? NOTE: there is a CENSORED version of the d20 shirt now available. |
| www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030204-space01.htm By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff Three days after the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia and the d eaths of its seven crew members, scientists, engineers and politicians are asking the crucial questions: What went wrong? But there's another vital question: What were those people doing up ther e? America spends billions of dollars to send handfuls of brave, brilli ant people into a region totally hostile to human life. They go to expa nd our knowledge of the universe, but critics say that much of the astr onauts' work could be accomplished with automated space probes, and the rest probably isn't worth doing. In a time when unmanned satellites ca n broadcast TV images around the world, and robots can scurry across th e surface of Mars, why send people into space? A Gallup poll taken ri ght after Columbia went down showed that 82 percent of Americans want t o continue sending people into space. The same poll was taken after the 1986 destruction of the shuttle Challenger, and the result was nearly identical. But why such devotion to this expensive and sometimes deadly adventure? Ask the aeronautical engineers and space scientists, and while they spe ak of commercial benefits and scientific breakthroughs, they speak of s omething else, something oddly nontechnical and deeply human. People wi ll keep on going into space because they're people, beings that hate no thing more than an empty space on a map. They've scanned and photographed the planets at a fraction of the cost of sending humans on the same voyages. In 1997, a miniature dune buggy called Sojourner, launched to Mars for a mere $265 million, sent back razor-sharp photos of the planet that ast onished the world. This year alone, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will spend $600 million to launch two roving robots towa rd the surface of Mars, while the agency will go partners with the Euro pean Space Agency and the Italian government to fire a $150 million rad ar-mapping satellite at the red planet. The cost of all these Mars miss ions added together barely amount to a rounding error, compared to the estimated $400 billion cost of sending people to Mars. But there'll be nobody on Mars to repair these robot probes if things go wrong. Dava Newman, associate professor of aeronautics at the Massachu setts Institute of Technology, said people must go into space to do the jobs robots cannot do. Spina, who helped design a n experiment that flew aboard the doomed shuttle, said that public supp ort of space travel requires humans in the loop. Assign all the mission s to robots, he argues, and political backing for the space program wou ld fade to the point where even robots would no longer be launched. org and former director of space p olicy at the Federation of American Scientists, justifies sending human s to space in language reminiscent of the Cold War. Roland said it soon became cle ar that the system would never be cheaper or more reliable than the thr owaway rockets it replaced. Most of the useful stuff could have been done in other ways; We learned how to fly and we were so intoxicated by the excitement of it that we just flew a lot. It could be flown as an unmanned rocket for launching satellites, or with the addition of a modular crew capsu le, could launch people into orbit. Bruce Murray of the California Institute of Technology agrees with Rolan d's case against the shuttle. He said that the system was a good idea a s an experimental craft, but it could never have lived up to NASA's vis ion of a cheap, reusable space vehicle. He would get no argument from Gregg Maryniak, executive director of the X-Prize Foundation, a St. Louis organization that will award $10 millio n to the first privately funded group that launches a three-person craf t into space, brings it safely back, then does it again with the same c raft in two weeks. The idea is to provide a financial incentive for aer ospace companies to invent low-cost ways of getting people into space. In the 18th century, Britain's Royal Society used a cash prize to spur the invention of the first clock to keep accu rate time on a ship at sea. This enabled navigators to accurately calcu late the ship's longitude, making ocean travel far safer. Maryniak said he figures the same incentive might finally result in a cheap space ro cket. And he's convinced such a ship will have no shortage of passenger s ''Pretty much seven out of 10 people in the developed world, in surv ey after survey after survey, say that if they could buy a ticket to ri de into space, they'd buy one,'' Maryniak said. The United States has sent 786 people into s pace since 1961; If you add the cr ew of Apollo 1, killed on the launch pad during a training exercise, th e number rises to 17. That's a fatality rate of a little more than 2 pe rcent. Compare that to Magellan's trip around the world during the 16th century. By that standard, the human explorati on of space so far has been remarkably free of tragedy. Still, there's no question that others will die in space, or on the trip to space or the way back. Doug Belkin of the Globe staff and Globe correspondent David Chandler co ntributed to this report. |
| tinyurl.com/46g4g -> www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030204-space01.htm By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff Three days after the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia and the d eaths of its seven crew members, scientists, engineers and politicians are asking the crucial questions: What went wrong? But there's another vital question: What were those people doing up ther e? America spends billions of dollars to send handfuls of brave, brilli ant people into a region totally hostile to human life. They go to expa nd our knowledge of the universe, but critics say that much of the astr onauts' work could be accomplished with automated space probes, and the rest probably isn't worth doing. In a time when unmanned satellites ca n broadcast TV images around the world, and robots can scurry across th e surface of Mars, why send people into space? A Gallup poll taken ri ght after Columbia went down showed that 82 percent of Americans want t o continue sending people into space. The same poll was taken after the 1986 destruction of the shuttle Challenger, and the result was nearly identical. But why such devotion to this expensive and sometimes deadly adventure? Ask the aeronautical engineers and space scientists, and while they spe ak of commercial benefits and scientific breakthroughs, they speak of s omething else, something oddly nontechnical and deeply human. People wi ll keep on going into space because they're people, beings that hate no thing more than an empty space on a map. They've scanned and photographed the planets at a fraction of the cost of sending humans on the same voyages. In 1997, a miniature dune buggy called Sojourner, launched to Mars for a mere $265 million, sent back razor-sharp photos of the planet that ast onished the world. This year alone, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will spend $600 million to launch two roving robots towa rd the surface of Mars, while the agency will go partners with the Euro pean Space Agency and the Italian government to fire a $150 million rad ar-mapping satellite at the red planet. The cost of all these Mars miss ions added together barely amount to a rounding error, compared to the estimated $400 billion cost of sending people to Mars. But there'll be nobody on Mars to repair these robot probes if things go wrong. Dava Newman, associate professor of aeronautics at the Massachu setts Institute of Technology, said people must go into space to do the jobs robots cannot do. Spina, who helped design a n experiment that flew aboard the doomed shuttle, said that public supp ort of space travel requires humans in the loop. Assign all the mission s to robots, he argues, and political backing for the space program wou ld fade to the point where even robots would no longer be launched. org and former director of space p olicy at the Federation of American Scientists, justifies sending human s to space in language reminiscent of the Cold War. Roland said it soon became cle ar that the system would never be cheaper or more reliable than the thr owaway rockets it replaced. Most of the useful stuff could have been done in other ways; We learned how to fly and we were so intoxicated by the excitement of it that we just flew a lot. It could be flown as an unmanned rocket for launching satellites, or with the addition of a modular crew capsu le, could launch people into orbit. Bruce Murray of the California Institute of Technology agrees with Rolan d's case against the shuttle. He said that the system was a good idea a s an experimental craft, but it could never have lived up to NASA's vis ion of a cheap, reusable space vehicle. He would get no argument from Gregg Maryniak, executive director of the X-Prize Foundation, a St. Louis organization that will award $10 millio n to the first privately funded group that launches a three-person craf t into space, brings it safely back, then does it again with the same c raft in two weeks. The idea is to provide a financial incentive for aer ospace companies to invent low-cost ways of getting people into space. In the 18th century, Britain's Royal Society used a cash prize to spur the invention of the first clock to keep accu rate time on a ship at sea. This enabled navigators to accurately calcu late the ship's longitude, making ocean travel far safer. Maryniak said he figures the same incentive might finally result in a cheap space ro cket. And he's convinced such a ship will have no shortage of passenger s ''Pretty much seven out of 10 people in the developed world, in surv ey after survey after survey, say that if they could buy a ticket to ri de into space, they'd buy one,'' Maryniak said. The United States has sent 786 people into s pace since 1961; If you add the cr ew of Apollo 1, killed on the launch pad during a training exercise, th e number rises to 17. That's a fatality rate of a little more than 2 pe rcent. Compare that to Magellan's trip around the world during the 16th century. By that standard, the human explorati on of space so far has been remarkably free of tragedy. Still, there's no question that others will die in space, or on the trip to space or the way back. Doug Belkin of the Globe staff and Globe correspondent David Chandler co ntributed to this report. |