29 OCT 2011 by ideonexus
Government Maps the Terrain for Private Enterprise
There is fundamentally no business case for private enterprise to advance a space frontier. When you advance a frontier, you are making mistakes that the capital markets choose not to value. You have to create patents to enable things that you don't know will work. Anytime you are the first person to do something on that scale, the history of human civilization has demonstrated that the only funding available to do that via governance.
And so what then happens is the patents get issued. The ...
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Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how government explores and maps out the terrain before private enterprise comes along behind after the costs and risks have been determined.
29 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
The Rationale for Doomsday Chests
After the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, much of what we consider "civilization" ceased to be. Literacy, medicine, science, agriculture, engineering, astronomy, governance, all went into decline or regression for the hundreds of years which we now call "The Dark Ages".
During this period monasteries were practically the only repositories of scholarship and learning. One historian notes that monks were not only the best educated members of society, by far, but were often the only...
1 During the Dark Ages, the Human race came precipitously close to losing all knowledge permanently when the black plague almost wiped out the scholarly religious classes.
