| Saturday,
Over in the SFWA conference I mentioned that the Hammer is
coming. I got the resp0nse that
> 2002 NT7 has about a 1 in 250,000 chance of
impact as of the last time I
> looked at the JPL asteroid risks page last night. See
> http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
>
> As usual, the more sensational press is going nuts about the end of
the
> world. All the hooplah is based on 15 days of observations. The
asteroid
> will remain in view for some 300 days.
>
> The real threat to a comfortable retirement these days is the stock
> market.
Which caused me to write this, and I thought it worth repeating here:
1 in 250,000 is pretty thin odds: that is, the expected value (given 4
billion people on earth) is 16,000 dead. If we assume that if 16,000
people were trapped in a mine we would spend at least $1,000,000 on each
one of them, (easily what is being spent on the 9 miners in Pennsylvania)
that is $16 billion we would spend to prevent a disaster of this
magnitude.
In fact we are spending a great deal more to avenge 911, but of course
those were New Yorkers and much higher value (for insurance calculations)
people than 16,000 random people of Earth.
Or, 1/250000 times 4 trillion dollars loss (surely it is that high) by
no great coincidence comes out at $16 billion dollars. Since the
expenditure of that $16 billion is not itself a negative thing -- surely
we would get SOME return on the investment to build space infrastrucure --
it seems that there is a positive return from spending the money to
prevent the disaster even if it turns out it would not have happened.
As with any Bayesian analysis we can also calculate the value of
finding out more and narrowing the uncertainties: that is
Preventing the disaster will in fact cost more than $16 billion.
Depending on the amount it would cost -- probably more like $160 billion
-- we can calculate how much we should spend to find out what the odds
really are. Since the most economical path to discovering the true odds
would be to spend the money on things that would also be useful in
preventing the disaster if it turns out to be more probable than we
thought, it's pretty clear what we should do:
fund projects that reduce the cost of access to space.
Which will also aid in the Strategic Defense of the United States. I've
already pointed out that the first step to that would be a couple of $2
billion X projects, one Air Force and the other Navy, to develop
single-stage to supersonic pure rocket ships with at least 12 (I prefer
16) engines. These should be ships, not ammunition. Reusable with short
turnaround times. Vertical takeoff and landing, recoverable, savable,
reusable, operations driven: the goal is multiple flights on the same day,
with routine operations.
In other words, here is the work statement for the
contract:
- Massively Multiple rocket engines
- Massive means at least 12; rockets rather
than jets
- We don't specify the fuel.
- Strongly suggest that the fuel not be
hydrogen because of operational considerations.
- Savable
- Able to survive an engine out at takeoff
- Routinely reusable with short turn around times
- Fly twice in a day and 6 times in a week and
do that more than once
- Higher and Faster
- Performance is secondary to the other three
points.
- Supersonic flight is the minimum goal.
Anything better than that is good.
Given those goals, build the best flying hardware
you can build for $2 billion in 3 years.
Once we can do that, we can develop one or two stage to orbit savable
reusable ships. And from that we can discover the true odds -- space
observations are a lot easier to do than atmospheric -- and develop means
to shunt this thing away from us if it is in fact aimed at us. Or even
maneuver it into Earth orbit to exploit it.
I have begun a NEW REPORTS PAGE
consolidating discussions on The Hammer, where I will add more on WHAT TO
DO.
And my thanks to everyone who sent expressions of sympathy regarding
Sasha.
And, it turns out, the Hammer gets
more than one shot. Have a nice century.
There's a letter on migration
of autocorrect in Word.
And as if there's not enough to worry us:
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Not sure what to make of this; WTOP is a
level-headed (though left-leaning) news outfit, highly respected.
http://wtopnews.com/news/newsdetail.cfm?newsid=584517
Waldorf, MD, is near both Andrews AFB and Pautuxent
River NAS.
Interesting that witnesses described the object as
being blue or orange. Those colors are pretty far apart. Could
colorblindness account for that?
Gordon Runkle
-- "Far and away the best prize that life has
to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." -- Theodore
Roosevelt
Roland asks why these USAF officials sound like a bad episode of the X
Files:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
articles/A8131-2002Jul26.html
And I don't even want to think about that.
Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, has written a
book about intellectuals and the Left. It is a terribly important book.
Koba was a pet name for Stalin. "The Dread" is another
translation of "The Terrible", a title given to an earlier
Russian Autocrat named Ivan.
Warning: there is some strong language in this book, and in one of the
paragraphs I include here. Also, Robert Conquest and I are old friends and
we have been reading each others books for a long time, and Conquest was
also a friend of Possony's.
First chapter of 'Koba the Dread' http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/28/books/chapters/0728-1st-amis.html
'Koba the Dread'
By MARTIN AMIS
Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest's The
Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:
We may perhaps put this in perspective in the
present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty
human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.
That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is
411 pages long.
"Horse manure was eaten, partly because it
often contained whole grains of wheat" (1,340 lives). "Oleska
Voytrykhovsky saved his and his family's ... lives by consuming the meat
of horses which had died in the collective of glanders and other
diseases" (2,480 lives). Conquest quotes Vasily Grossman's
essayistic-documentary novel Forever Flowing: "And the children's
faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by
spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with
beaks, or frog heads thin, wide lips and some of them resembled fish,
mouths open" (3,880 lives).
<snip>
I didn't read The Great Terror in 1968 (I would have
been more likely, at that time, to have read Conquest's poetry). But I
spent an hour with it, and never forgot the cold elegance of the following
remark about "sources": "1. Contemporary official accounts
require little comment. They are, of course, false as to essentials, but
they are still most informative. (It is untrue that Mdivani was a British
spy, but it is true that he was executed.)" I have recently read the
book twice, in the first edition (which I must have successfully stolen
from my father), and in its revised, post-glasnost form, The Great Terror:
A Reassessment. When asked to suggest a new title for the revised work,
Conquest told his publisher, "How about I Told You So, You Fucking
Fools?" Because the book, itself revolutionary at the time of its
appearance, has since been massively vindicated. In the mid-1960s I joined
in hundreds of conversations like the following (the interlocutors here
are my father and A. J. Ayer):
"In the USSR, at least they're trying to forge
something positive."
"But it doesn't matter what they're trying to
forge, because they've already killed five million people."
"You keep going back to the five million."
"If you're tired of that five million, then I'm
sure I can find you another five million."
And one can, now. One can find another 5 million,
and another, and another.
Alongside all this there was, in England then, a far
hotter debate: the one about Vietnam. A certain urbanity was maintained in
arguments about the USSR. It was in arguments about Vietnam that people
yelled, wept, fought, stalked out. I watched my father forfeit two
valuable friendships over Vietnam (those of A. Alvarez and Karl Miller).
For he, and most but not all of the frequenters of the fascist lunch,
broadly backed American policy. And this was, of course, the position of a
minuscule and much-disliked minority. In my first term at Oxford (autumn,
1968) I attended a demonstration against the resuppression of
Czechoslovakia. Some sixty or seventy souls were present. We heard
speeches. The mood was sorrowful, decent. Compare this to the wildly
peergroup-competitive but definitely unfakable emotings and
self-lacerations of the crowds outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor
Square, where they gathered in their tens of thousands.
In 1968 the world seemed to go further left than it
had ever gone before and would ever go again. But this left was the New
Left: it represented, or turned out to represent, revolution as play. The
"redeemer" class was no longer to be found in the mines and
factories; it was to be found in the university libraries and lecture
halls. There were demonstrations, riots, torchings, street battles in
England, Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA. And remember the Paris of
1968: barricades, street theater, youth-worship ("The young make
love; the old make obscene gestures"), the resurgence of Marcuse (the
wintry dialectician), and Sartre standing on street corners handing out
Maoist pamphlets .... The death throes of the New Left took the form of
vanguard terrorism (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the
Weathermen). And its afterlife is anarchistic, opposing itself to the
latest mutation of capital: after imperialism, after fascism, it now faces
globalization. We may note here that militant Islam cannot be made to fit
into this "model" or into any other.
<snip>
The Left never intends to express any regret for hanging on to
Stalinism long after the record was clear. Sometimes the rest of the world
needs reminding of just how shameless our "intellectuals" were
and are.
Above is an estimate
of the energy in Lucifer. 6.6 x 10^5 Megatons of HE (this was done
in Mathcad)
Andy
No small amount...
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