Moon base, do it now.
I began this article a while ago, and just found the remnants of it as I went to write up another about robot wars and distributed brain processing. I'm just going to leave this up here and let you make what you will of it. I think I was going to use the link below to compare our current budget for Mars to our budget for the Moon and be mad about it. Enjoy.
This article is not about science fiction, I swear.
A couple years ago, my cousin David and I traded some science fiction. I probably handed him some Charles Stross while he handed me a Ben Bova novel. Truth be told, I ignored that book for years due partly to having other items on my reading list, partly to being a bit too busy to enjoy the convenience of reading but I mostly forgot about it because of the god awful cover art.
Some time later, I moved to Salem, Massachusetts and joined the public library with my wife. While perusing their science fiction section I saw a block of wall dedicated to this author my cousin had insisted I read years prior. Based on his yet forgotten recommendation, I dug through and found a trilogy with some decent cover art and a pretty tight summary. "The Precipice" was my first real introduction to this prodigious master of the genre.
One of the locations in "The Precipice" is Selene, the moon colony. Built underground on the moon, the thick wall of moon above the colony protects it from all sorts of cosmic radiation. It's temperature is easily controlled due to the lack of wild changes between day and night. And it thrives harvesting solar energy on the surface which lands unfiltered through atmosphere onto solar collectors.
This is what they just found on the moon. I think we have a new priority in space travel people.
There's a cavern on the moon roughly the size of thirty-four football fields stacked in two rows of seventeen, lengthwise. And that still leaves room to spare around the outside. It's under a forty foot wall of moon stuff to prevent all the ill's of outside from getting in. The temperature stays at a balmy negative four degrees Fahrenheit year round, which is nothing but a bit annoying if you already live north of Connecticut. A day on the moon, as far as those on the moon would care, lasts roughly twenty-nine and a half earth days. Half of that is sunlight. Without the atmosphere like Earth has, we can start harvesting as soon as the sun comes up and continue until the sun goes down almost fifteen days later. On Earth, sunlight doesn't do us to much good until it's a little higher in the sky. The more atmosphere sunlight has to travel through, the less energy it has. We could heat the installation during daylight with a solar thermal, essentially boiling liquid on the surface and transferring that heat underground. And during the night, we could use some of the electricity we stored up
If you're not excited by this point you're either dead or an amphibian.
It's not a colony, it's a large lab.
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516674main_FY12Budget_Estimates_Overview.pdf
437.7 2454.6
Thoughts on Noprivacyville
I caught an article by Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) outlining a thought experiment based on a city with no privacy anywhere except for the bedroom and bathroom. The city tracks you via GPS and also tracks everything you do via smart devices and one hell of a network. All this data is aggregated and made public for everyone and about everyone, no exceptions.
Theoretically I could pull up the mayors data and see that he's at home watching episode 13 of family guy. Smart sensors in his chair would tell me that his heart rate is nominal, blood pressure is within tolerance and that he's weighing in at a respectable 237 pounds. I remember seeing the mayor last fall and thinking he was a bit plumper than 237 so I look into his weight and see a nice graph charting out the 32 pounds he's lost since last October. Way to go mayor. Curious about his weight loss, I probe deeper. I compare his caloric intake to his caloric output and see 2200 coming in and 2600 going out daily. He's obviously working out. I'm curious about what he's eating so I dig into his diet. He just ate dinner; Chicken, broccoli and lowfat cheese. Lots of protein, little fat. I see that the type of cheese he uses contains 14g fat. That's funny because the company I work for sells cheese with 10g of fat for the same price. An advertisement pops up on his TV moments later telling John. A. Smith that he's looking great, but he could tighten up that diet a bit with WONDER-CHEESE® sold at his local convenience store.
Now, with a city with a population of 100000, who in their right mind would track people individually? You'd have to invest way more manpower than would be worth it for that kind of targeted advertising. Apply a few software engineers to the problem and you've got a system utilizing adaptive algorithms to look for certain combinations of traits to target potential clients. You could just target anyone who's eaten cheese recently, or has had a meal that would have done well with some cheese, but that's a lot of money to be spending on people who might want to buy your product. Ideally you want to spend money only on the people who will spend money on you. Every customer who sees your add and doesn't buy the product or spread the word, is wasted money. This model applies to per person targeted advertising, nothing like billboards or the like. What you want your algorithm to do is to find people who's lifestyle is improved by your product. Companies will target advertisements based on two vectors, quality and price. It's too costly to employ software to spend your money for you on a customer to customer basis if your product can't corner one or both of those items. Without the upper hand, it's more cost effective to hit as many customers at once for the lowest cost with general advertising on TV, radio and billboards. With targeted advertising, the best bang for the buck wins.
If you read through the comments in the article, it's plain to see a vast majority of people lean away from the extremes of Noprivacyville. Everyone wants to be more or less anonymous in their daily comings and goings. I personally would be one of the first to volunteer for the project. There is nothing I love more than the concept of personal data aggregation. My only issue with this is people sneaking in unchipped and committing robberies. If an outsider could get access to the cities database, they'd instantly know everyone's personal habits. When they'd be home, if they kept their doors locked, how to best steal from stores. All the info would be there for the devious. This might be offset with a combination of smart devices and camera's. That chair the mayor sat on in my earlier example would still record data if an unchipped person sat in it. They'd leave behind a trail of data. Include into the occasion camera's everywhere and that might help a bit more. Maybe the officers would have a program set up where an algorithm tracked the unchipped through the cameras and the clues they leave behind else wise.
There are more thoughts to be explored, such as the affect on crime in general, corruption in politics and police brutality in a city where everything is tracked on record, but I've got finagling lessons to attend to.