RuBisCO

The standard Anti-Luddite argument is that as jobs are taken by automation in one field people start working in another field. This is reasonably backed by history but there is no evidence to assume it will hold true indefinitely and significant evidence it is now not holding true anymore. The introduction of the steam engine and industrial machines first affected agriculture. Automated thrashers, cotton pickers, combines rendering most agriculture jobs obsolete decades to centuries ago. Agriculture employed (or enslaved) over 70% of the America's population back in 1800 Today it only accounts for 2% of the labor force, yet produces enough food for over 60 times the 1800 population (not including food relief or sales to other countries around the world). So if agriculture went from 70% to 2%, all the workers had to go somewhere and they did: into manufacturing. But by 1950 the so called golden age of US manufacturing 35% of the labor force was working in factories, today that number is 9%. Yet US manufacturing has only risen in production and is still the worlds largest manufacturing center in dollar produced. Today 80% of the labor force in the USA is in the “Service sectorâ€Â, but automation is making inroads in that as well. In both Federico Pistono book “Robots will Steal Your Jobs but that’s OK†and Martin Ford book “The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future†they provide a break down of the most common jobs in the USA today. For example cashiers, 2nd most common job is 2.24% of all American jobs, but now self-checkout lanes are being installed and can cut down the number of cashiers by at least 75%. Truck drivers (the most common job in the USA) are 2.61% but automated trucks will likely start taking those jobs as well. Even if a truck driver is required in the automated truck as backup the driver could sleep behind the wheel while the truck drives to its destination without having to stop so the driver can sleep, allowing fewer drivers to do more deliveries. “No these people will move on to new fields†so the anti-Luddite claims. What new fields are there? In the list of jobs from most common to least you have to go down to 34th on the list to get to a career that has not existed more then 70 years ago: Computer Technican/Programmer at 0.74% of the job market. Well maybe people working in service today could get work in intellectual and skilled labour fields. Unfortunately there are in fact a plethora of inroads automation is making in those fields as well: pharmacist replaced by robots, software that is replacing paralegals and lawyers in document review, software that can write journalistic sports and basic business reports, image recognition software that replaces radiologist. It is argued that these things augment and assist people in these fields but if automation helps one person do more of a task then would it not mean that now less people need to do those tasks? Another way to look at this is as a ratio of number of products produces divided by number of people needed to produce said products. Over the centuries this ratio has been going up in general for most products due to automation, but demand went up to match. As a result everyone had been able to get a job even with more and more automation because automation just means more products per producing person. Everyone can be productive because productivity was matched by demand, but can this stay true forever? Every product requires some amount of physical resources and energy to make as well as demand from a limited number of end users. Lets look at energy (as material resources are just a matter of how much energy is needed to to extract, refine and move them): For the last 3 centuries world energy consumption has been growing relatively continuously by ~3% per year. Right now it is at 15×10^12 watts (15 Terawatts), at 3% growth it would be at 150 TW by 2091 or 10 times as much in 78 years! By 2345 our energy consumption would be equal to ALL the energy in sunlight hitting the earth (2.7×10^17 W)! Even if we could produce all that power by nuclear fusion or something the waste heat would exceed solar heating of the planet! The surface temperature of the earth would raise to boiling, literally boiling in just a few years from our activity alone! If we keep projecting 3% growth by the year 3058 humanities energy consumption would exceed the energy output of the entire sun (3.8×10^26 W)! And by the year 3876 humanities energy consumption would exceed the output of every single star in the galaxy (3.8×10^37 W)! Hence why there is no such thing as sustainable growth, it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE! Pistono does a good job explaining this exponential growth problem but fails to really connect it to automation, I will now do that. Thankfully world total energy consumption is starting to stagnate (actually falling in 2009!) and consistently falling in many developed countries. World population growth is slowing (and will hopefully plateau this century, and thus save future generations from mass starvation or heat death as mentioned above) and some developed countries even have negative population growth. But though that may save us from physical limits of energy and matter its not good for production. How are we to produce more products if there is not enough power and raw materials to make them and consumers to buy them? If automation keeps growing the ratio but the number of products can’t keep going up, then number of people needed to make them must go down. Imagine for a moment a restaurant where the owner gets a machine to replace most if not all the workers, anyone that has worked at a McDonalds as a teenager can tell you that it would not be very hard to replace the assembly line of human burger makers with a machines that cooks the meat paddies, drops them on the bread buns, drops down pickles, lettuce, tomatoes and squirt of condiments. Now lets say the workers ran off to start restaurants of their own using the same model. Thus multiplying the number of restaurants, everyone gets a high paying "job" as a restaurant owner but would there be enough consumers for them all? Agriculture has experience several fold increases in products to producers ratio but the number of consumers has increased to match it so the ratio has increased much less if we look at it from a products to consumer ratio rather the products to producers ratio. Still it increased enough that only a tiny fraction needs to work in that field now. As is Americans are eating way too much, many are morbidly obese and dying of diabetes and heart disease: we would need to institute real vomitoriums to get people to “consume†more food! But this scenario does not just play out with foods. Imagine cellphone makers replace all there laborers with machines, and that magically those laborers got the education to design new cellphones and manage new cellphone companies, with a production to R&D ratio of greater then 100:1, could we all stand to buy 100 cell phones to keep all those new cell phone companies afloat? This logic can be extended to all products all people even the filthy rich don’t buy incredible amounts of stuff like a kleptomaniac on speed! Everyone’s (unless mentally disturbed and/or on drugs) consumption will become satiated with enough supply. And because population growth is slowing and will hopefully plateau production will eventual reach the limit of consumer saturation. Now some may argue that automation can’t take ALL jobs, well at present and for the near future that seems true. Most automation is done by at best Weak Artificial Intelligence: very “smart†at a specific task and completely incompetent at anything else. The IBM’s Watson supercomputer and DeepQA program can and has trumped the best humans at answering even cryptic questions from memorized knowledge, it certainly is smart at that and will likely replaced tech support workers and research aids, but it can’t create new data, or assemble a product or drive a car. Other WAIs though can do each one of those task from Self-evolving software that discovers new technologiess, to image recognizing factor robots, to self driving cars. Yet WAIs can only do those tasks they are specifically programmed and built for: they can’t think about or are even “aware†of anything else, they have no consciousness. A Strong Artificial Intelligence that could solve or adapt to any problem a human can and/or could qualify as conscious is likely decades away, and some theologians and philosophers say its impossible because of some supposed mystical and supernatural property of the human brain (aka the soul). SAI though is not nessassary: machines don’t need to take all jobs, just enough, fast enough, its simply a matter of automation taking jobs and incomes faster then they can be replaced. Imagine if say 30% of job force are forever safe from automation, that would mean 2/3 of the population would be unemployed and unemployable! If we assume everyone could move to doing what jobs that are left and that somehow those remaining fields could grow to fill everyone’s employment needs its likely most of those jobs that are left would not be high paying or desirable, as is the service sector switch for most workers has had detrimental affects on the economy. Imagine machines will soon replace most, but not all service jobs, what jobs are left? Maintaining the machines? Sure but only a few people are needed to do that verse all the number of people who did those jobs the machines replaced. Ok how about jobs as engineers, biochemist, inventors… but those require extensive educations, above average intelligence and creativity. Ok how about artist and craftsmen? Again you the need for creativity, rarefied skill and talent, not enough people will be around to buy all those arts and crafts. There won’t be more people having plumbing problems and needing more plumbers, having electrical problems and needing more electricians, heck if you have a computer problem these day you usually contact a machine first that can answer some of your problems rather then a paid specialist. Even if automation does not replace a job outright it replaces enough parts of that job to make the worker more efficient and effective, and without more demand to match the increase productivity there will need to be less workers. If automation enters an industry but the industry can’t grow to match (because of physical limitation at most), then its work force must shrink, we have the historical drop of agriculture and manufacture jobs as proof of that. The profits that was taken to pay wages now goes up to the owners of the businesses, and the unemployed workers must compete in a shrinking job market, this would cause incomes to drop, middle class to shrink and become poor, the poor grow poorer and the rich to grow richer. That is exactly what is happening today! Stock markets and capital gains are higher then they have ever been before, yet unemployment is up, people are getting lower and lower paying part-time jobs. The middle class is shrinking into poverty. “The top 10 percent of Americans have experienced rapid income growth over the last 40 years, but the bottom 90 percent haven’t been so lucky. In fact, average income rose just $59 from 1966 to 2011 for the bottom 90 percent once those incomes were adjusted for inflation.†- http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/03/25/1772521/average-income-for-the-bottom-90-percent-of-americans-grew-just-59-in-40-years/ That’s right we have not moved our income up for the common American for nearly 50 years now! Yet US farm production has gone up, US manufacturing production has gone up, capital has grown. Most Americans have moved to poorer paying part-time dead-end service jobs, that most of them hate! Much of this is blamed on outsourcing now, a problem only in that its giving someone else “your†job. Outsourcing is a problem for the working population of developed nations, it drives salaries down to the lowest common denominators of the world. But truth be known machines are now competing with developing country’s cheap practically slave labor! For example Foxcon the Taiwanese electronic giant that assembles all Apple products of all things is beginning to to automate. It is all a matter of when will machines cost less then a practical slave in a undeveloped country. Also unskilled impoverished labors can’t compete in quality verse the precision of automatons, nor will automatons commit suicide or demand pay raises or human rights, machines as long as they are design not to will never feel, never want, never need. To truly determine if automation is a greater problem then outsources simply compare the product to worker ratio there to here: “if 10% of China’s electronics production was moved to the U.S., China would lose 300,000 jobs. Yet, just 40,000 new jobs would be created in the U.S. Put another way, if all of China’s manufacturing output was magically transported to the U.S. tomorrow, the U.S. unemployment rate would decline by only 2.75 percentage points after accounting for the effects of automation.†-http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/rethinking-re-shoring/ This can’t continue for long. If more products could be produced maybe their price would drop and the ever poorer people could still buy them but as I covered before there are fundamental limits in energy and materials that we appear to already be hitting that limit production. As the people get poorer they can’t buy the products anymore. So demand will drop, and that means the rich will start to see profits drop, their only recourse to make profit will be to increase efficiency, automate more, only feeding the fire! In fact the economy of individual nations and thus every nation because of glottalization will become increasingly unstable and fall into recessions one after another. Oscillating wildly or possibly even entering depressions until economic solutions are implement. What solutions are there? 1) Increase minimum wage: only a temporary solution and in the long run will push for even more automation for it artificially increases the value of human labor, which value is dropping as machines can do more and more of that labor cheaper. 2) reduce working hours: All the sci-fi prophets of old (as well as economist like Keynes himself) thought we would live in times of boredom today, with nothing to do because of automation, they assumed (wrongly) that the wealth from automation would distribute evenly enough and we would all be working single digit work weeks. Legally reducing what is a full work wee, 4- day work weeks, might certainly help, its has for many other countries, but we are still someways politically and technologically from making single digit work weeks possible. 3) Progressive taxation: if those that own all the capital are profiting at the cost of the poor, then simply tax the rich more and the poor less, forcibly redistribute the money, this of course is hersay to most conservatives, but lets assume it is done: where do we put the money? More education, again not going to help as our economy simply can't grow much more to support everyone having well paying high end jobs, worse if strong AI ever comes around all the education in the world won't make anyone competitive with that in intellect. Perhaps more infrastructure, more services to reduce the prices people pay on things like medical care, sure but that will only help a little. 4) People Capitalism: James Albus suggested a way for capitalism to make automation its blessing and not its curse. If the only people who are assured profit from increase automation are those that own the automation, own the capital, then the solution for the ever more unemployed is to have them own the capital too! Basically have the government convert social security and corporate holdings into stock and give that stock to every citizen. In short everyones “job†would increasingly become stock broker, managing their own stock portfolio, until the day and age perhaps when “universal doer†aforementioned strong AI comes into being and can replace ALL jobs, then everyone would simply live off their holdings and dividends. Its an elegant solution, its only a solution that will only work for those that can managed their money wisely, shrewdly and with an educated understanding of investment. Everyone else would likely blow all that stock away on bad investment moves and ponzi schemes: The stock market would become even more volatile and likely result in massive losses for all from the idiotic investing of many. The only solution would be regulating how and what people can invest, or even having the government invest for them. 5. Socialism: Just have the government take over more and more of industry and hand out checks in welfare to everyone. It could work assuming we could replaced ALL jobs, or force some people to work some jobs that can't be replaced. Of course politically most countries have a chance of doing this as a snow ball has not melting in Hel... 6. Resourcism: even less probable anytime soon then #5. Imagine a world without money, instead machines manage who has what at what time and how. We all are allocated resources invisibly. Lets say you want to go jet skiing, instead of buying a jet ski, you just go to a lake where one is provided for you, enough are built and cared for by machines to deal with demand, if demand increase, people will at first need to be turned away, while more jet skis are made and stocked. Likewise all products could be managed like this assuming we have a FULLY automated economy. Such a future is pure star trek: were things cost so little that money can be abolished and people live to better themselves for self betterment sack and not money. Sounds great but how do we get there from here? How do we deal with limited production of products that have value only because they are human made, a separate “renaissance festival†market? And how do we deal with all the people who would just spend their time doing the opposite of self improvement? 7. Exterminalism: Ok everything I said above and to this point about “solutions†has been without moral or political judgment, so what I'm going to say next I want you to know I'm just suggesting it could happen, not saying it a good idea, please don't call me ****: just kill off the useless people. Look either the rich start giving in to the poor with any or all the above or the poor eventually revolt and kill off the rich. The rich could counter and kill off the poor first. Assuming militaries become heavily automated too, or soldiers become obedient enough, it could happen and I don't doubt some countries will go this away. It may not need to go as far as the rich setting kill bots lose on the poor: Legalize all drugs, legalize suicide, legalize robotic prostitutes and in a few generations much of the poor will have either hung themselves, overdoes or stopped breding, in some ways and in some countries this may already be happening.

Well sure the moon's poles may have lots of water billions of tons of it that could be eaisly mined via nothing more then shoveling chucks of lunar soil into an oven and heating it to above boiling (several hundred degree's more to get out all the hydrates too) that could be done via a solar concentrator, but what about nitrogen and carbon?

I don't know about that, a polar lunar base can be placed in a so called "peak of eternal light" where it could receive solar power for at least 80%, temperature extremes would be reduced, radiation levels would be lower because of the sun being at such a low angle as to be easily blocked by building the habitat in a pit. Water is just a few kilometers away in the craters of eternal darkness, as well as all the hydrates available in all the soil everywhere there. On Mars to get from the equator to known proven reserves of water is going to require traveling thousands of kilometers up to latitudes above 70°, building a base at high latitudes will reduce solar power and increase heating requirements.

And that has very little to do with a lunar outpost program. Like you said: get back on topic... wait what was the topic?

You do relies people can use a whole variety of random indicators as you have to say america is doomed as well, right? Look China is 1.35 billion people, over 4 times USA population, if their GPC per capita exceeds 1/4 the USA they will be the worlds largest economy. Financing to build a manned lunar exploration program and the political will to do it should be all that is needed, unless your saying one of those indicators will doom that endeavor as well, maybe they will never be able to cash the check for a moon rocket because their bank will be too busy collecting urine samples?

Sounds fine with me.

It is already in stryth's link.

China's space program has moved slowly but consistently, an advantage of a toletariain goverment capable of following through with long term plans. I would not be supprised if by 2030 they had landed on the moon and were begining to build a lunar base, but the name should be mandarin for "eat your hearts out americans" not "Moon Palace" and I think the design will be very diffrent by then: at the very least all the habitable stuctures should be coverd in at least a meter of lunar dirt for radiation/micro-meter protection.

Excellent stryth! I never got around to painting them all just the ones I used the most and had thrown a wobbly about accidently confusing for normal wheels, repeatedly. I think it only fair if they all weigh a little more then their stock counter-parts though.

Very VERY slowly, over billions of years, hence why Venus has so little water today, hence why its detiruium ratio is absurdely high.

Dry Lab: Space station habitat space that never was filled with fuel, regardless if the structure was manufactured to be a fuel tank. Wet Lab: Space station habitat space that was filled with fuel.

Well sure there could be life living in the clouds: 1. We still don't know what the unknown ultraviolet absorber is. 2. There is a lot of evidence the clouds are made of a lot more then just sulfates, more then #1. Venera's strange chlorine levels when it samples cloud particles to determine their composition, the different types of particle sizes and profiles, etc. 3. Venus's sulfur cycles could support some kind of sulfur feeding organism, like the ones in deep see hydrothermal vents and volcanic cesspools, many of which are acidophiles (although it questionable if anything could evolve to live in concentrated sulfuric acid) such an organisms could take sunlight and crack H2SO4 to H2O and SO3, could take CO2 or CO and SH2 to make biomass and SO2, or what ever, the detected levels of CO, SH2, and even oxygen in venus's atmosphere make for conditions that could hypothetically support the growth of microbial life (assuming it can survive the acid). There could even be life on venus's surface, just not life as we know it, something inorganic and barely more probable than unicorns and spaghetti monsters.

Didn't think a space race was going to save a country anyways.

Well sure there are lots of vegetarian who are who want everyone to know they are hollier then your, but that not a reason to not become a vegetarian. My policy is if someone makes me food, I eat it regardless of what it is, and say it was "divine". When I was in Peace Corps I eat alot of chicken livers and boiled catapillers, no objection, goat is a delicious meat by the way. When I buy and make food for my self though, no meat.

Skylab. We could have made an ISS out of less then 5 Skylabs. Skylab represent what we could have done with the Saturn SERIES of rockets, decades before ISS for a fraction of the price. Imagine had they stayed with the Saturn and after SkyLab as a proving ground they could have eventually launched a 100+ ton, 10 meter wide, wet-lab station made out of S-II and a Skylab upper module (its self a empty S-IVB).

Think of it this way: one person eating meat is equal to ten people eat bread, now if we have 9 of those people die of starvation then that one left can eat meat. A vegetarian diet ultimately requires much less land and energy imputs then a modern meat diet for the same nutritional and caloric output, sure you might need to eat more bread, soy, beans, etc, by volume then meat, maybe even by mass, but to make meat today requires litterally feeding animals food people could have eaten, to make much less meat in mass and volume and energy content then was put in. Dispite the energy denisty of protein it self the amount of energy wasted in making it is what counts. In the developing countries and historically animals eat what humans could not, lived on fallow or marginal lands of limited suitability for argiculture, but those where the days where meat was a one meal out of three luxury at best, not where meat was the primary and largest course of every meal. Look at the rate ofobsesity in developed countries: all that animal fat and protein, greesy burgers, honstly do we really need the energy dense food we eat, replace it with lower energy food of the same volume would must likely help people trim down and save alot of lives from heart disease.

Meat is wasteful: Every kg or grain-fed cow is 10 kg of high-protein grains that could have fed people Meat is suffering: Factory farming is inhuman and animals feel pain and have basic emotions, even chickens. What is the argument so far give for meat, That we evolved to be carnivores? We also evolved to form bands of less then 150, hold territory and kill each other in tribal warfare. We have been overriding our evolution and this is generally been for the better! Appealing to what we evolved for is as backwards as appealing to tradition. Imagine soon we will be able to grow animal muscle tissue in vats, meat without suffering, heck we can already replace all meat protein with vegetable sources if only people could get over the want for the flavor and texture of "meat" and replace it with muck duck and tofu.

Skylon is a wonderful idea, unfortunately the technological and thus finiancial hurdles to bring it from idea to reality are titanic. What can we learn from the failure that was the space shuttle though? Don't let different contractors, lobbies and senators make engineering decisions, certainly! Although we have not learn that one at all, SLS stands are proof of that. Don't drop billion of dollars of established working infrastucture to build anew just because "on paper" it will be better. We sort of learned that, sort of, if we had built a directly shuttle direved booster instead of over-reaching with the constellation program perhaps today NASA would have a SLS already in working order.

Again The Saturn V cost half as much per lbs of cargo to orbit. And that not some digbats on the net claim that from Mike Griffin former administrator of NASA: http://aviationweek.typepad.com/space/2007/03/human_space_exp.html When they were building the shuttle it was claimed to cost just $118 per lbs of cargo to orbit (in 1972) or ~$1400 per lbs in today's dollars. It ended up costing ~$27,000 per lbs, or $1.5 billion per launch. The fact that it missed its cost projections by 20 times is alone an incredible failure! The Saturn V with design and infrastructure cost and only 13 launches cost $46.56 billion in today's dollars, or $3.5 billion per launch, divided by 120 tons cargo capacity equals ~$14,000 per lbs. And mind you the Saturn V could and did bring manned missions to the moon, the spaceshuttle never achieve anything like that, costing so much to operate it killed any chance of financing manned missions beyond low earth orbit. If we had stayed with the Saturn V though we could have launched ~2 manned lunar mission every year from 1972 to today, under NASA budget during that time span. We could have built a moon base by now, possibly even a self sustaining one. We could and did launch a space station with the Saturn V and could have launched more stations: just 4-5 Saturn V launches could have assembled a space station bigger than ISS. We could have even launched missions to Mars directly with the Saturn V. The Space Shuttle is the single greatest technological failure in human history and has held back human space travel by over 50 years.

Fusion or accelerator driven sub-critical reactors. Make power out of nuclear waste, fission it into rapidly decaying or inert isotopes and develop more advance power plants all at the same time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subcritical_reactor

Ok lets suppose SpaceX manages by 2020 to achieve a fully reusable falcon 9, both stages fly-back reusable, manages over 12 launches a years consistently, and manages to at the very least keep it prices down, perhaps even lower, and finally ULA contracts laps and SpaceX is allow to compete with them in defense contracts. But most importantly let us assume demand for launching actually grows with reduce pricing provided by SpaceX. For ULA, Ariane, Starsem, etc to avoid bankruptcy they would be forced to completely overhaul their business model and develop rapidly a fully reusable rocket system that can compete with SpaceX. Would that not be a Space Race? Only this race would be measured by $ to LEO and not specific achievements.

All a god would need to do come before me and preform just one specific feat. After that wether said being created the universe or not, is turelly all powerful, or if anything it says is true are all irrelvent questions! Said being will have proved it can do what ever it wants with me and that I am nothing but its play thing, I would have no choice but to do as it says and beleive every word it says because for all intensive perposes a 'god' can strip me of my freewill, instantly!. In short a god could make even the most harden skeptic beleive, could make the skeptic beleive 2+2=fish by brute mind control!!! Heck it could make 2+2=fish for REAL if it is truelly omnipotent, of course us mortals could not tell the diffrence between our minds being infallibly manipulated or reality being infallibly manipulated. So in short: if a skeptic says "I don't beleive!" then god could simply snap his fingers or wiggle her nose and magically neural pathways in the skeptics mind will instantly re-arrange and the skeptic will say "I beleive!"

Consider the 5 Minute Universe Thought Experiment: Imagine that a god, one that likes a good joke, created the universe 5 minutes ago, everything was create to make the appearence that the universe was billions of years old, with light made in transit from stars billions of light years away, to our memories being fabricated. Think about it: that chair you siting in would likely be where you were born, puffed into existance with memories of a past that never was and completely unaware of your own spontanous birth. You reading off a computer that puffed into being with you, reading posts that were never truelly posted but simply came into existance with a false history and peopling thinking falsy that they made those post... How would you know? Assuming this god did a perfect job there would be no way to prove the universe was 5 minutes old and all observation and all evidence and all your memories would exist to convince you otherwise. There would be no way to truelly know. Now if you want to crawl into a corner and enter a solipsistic catatonic stupur, I would not judge.

Yeah I been having that problems recently to.

I'm still waiting on a smart A.S.S mode in which I can orientate a ship to the positon of the sun regardless of what body I'm orbiting.