Brett_

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• Commented on Obituaries
  After the Winter of Discontent, it was going to be someone who would have to deal with the trade unions, the publicly owned companies, and the high inflation rate - Thatcher just happened to be that person at the right...
• Commented on Me, talking
  @Scott-Sanford Intelligence augmentation will definitely happen, but it won't look much like the cyberpunk brain implants. When your glasses will do realtime google searches for you, you don't need any electronics in your brain. Especially if it's cheaper and easier,...
• Commented on Me, talking
  I think the world of 2043 will look drab and plain to anyone not wearing their attachable augmented reality glasses/skin stimulant pads/hearing plugs. You won't have the flashy, neon colorfulness of cyber-punk cities, because it will be all virtual -...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  I wonder if the greater size of the lander would help. You would need some truly enormous parachutes, but you'd also get more air resistance coming down. Mars' atmosphere is rather annoying for anything except making methane rocket fuel. It's...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  Agreed. The "yech factor" aside, I've always heard that water made the best radiation shielding for astronauts on their way to Mars. I looked up one of Robert Zubrin's old talks on Mars, and he said it was five inches...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  @Memomancer Science fiction has done immeasurable damage in promoting fantasies about space travel that real spaceflight has no hope of measuring up to. It's more that they tended to be too optimistic about the time frame. All manned space activities...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  I forgot to add- If you've ever wondered why the computers aboard space probes and the ISS are relatively old stuff (supplemented by laptops in the latter's case), it's because of those cosmic rays. They tend to cause annoying "bit...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  Stopping the Cosmic Rays is probably impossible due to the sheer mass of material required, but they don't usually kill you. They just give you a slightly heightened risk of cancer, depending on how long you are in space. The...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  Tito's idea is a good one. You want to have a few inches to feet around a small part of your spaceship serving as the "storm shelter" in case of a solar flare, and you can use just about any...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  As I said above, "democracy" meant "a Democratic Iraq that would be friendly to the US and Israel". Many of the policymakers believed all the bullshit that Ahmed Chalabi and his crowd were feeding them, because they'd been wanting to...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  @Heteromeles Or that's what they said to the interviewers. All of these people had huge bones to pick with the Bush Administration (and often with each other). Moreover, many of the details match up. This is not a situation conducive...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  @Heteromeles Go google "Iraq Invasion Oil" and you'll find that a good chunk of the Wikipedia article "Rationale for the Iraq War was about oil. To be fair, it also includes denials from some people (Blair and John McCain, notably...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  @Heteromeles Right now, that future looks a bit like cell phones and solar panels, does it not? Sounds good for Africa, amongst other places. There was a good article in (I think) the NYT times last year about a Palestinian...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Solar will no doubt continue to get cheaper, but not because it's fundamentally getting cheaper to produce them in 2013. It will get cheaper because the heavily-subsidized, grossly oversaturated field of Chinese solar panel production companies will continue desperately trying...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  1. Chinese growth slows down to the 5-6% range. They have one big environmental disaster, and a whole ton of labor riots that we won't hear about. This won't be enough to seriously force change in the regime, although they'll...
• Commented on Always Look on the Bright Side of... SF
  True, but in the typical Cyberpunk world anyone with a moderately sized bag of cash can arrange for spammers to be visited by mercenaries in armored hovercraft mounting belt-fed autocannons. The lack of spam may be consistent with the rest...
• Commented on Always Look on the Bright Side of... SF
  Antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be scary, but not that scary. The reason why we don't see them exploding all over the world is because that antibiotic resistance comes with a steep biological cost, and the vulnerable bacteria out-breed them quickly once...
• Commented on Always Look on the Bright Side of... SF
  I forgot to add the sense of "anomie", or isolation. That obviously hasn't gone away in real life, but when I've read it in fiction it always feels like a hold-out from fears of isolation Robert Putnam-style in the Industrial...
• Commented on Always Look on the Bright Side of... SF
  A lot of the Cyber-Punk elements feel stale to me, particularly in the setting. Why the Blade Runner-esque skyscrapers and flashy everything? It's starting to feel like the Zeerust Future - and probably will be in 20 years....
• Commented on Always Look on the Bright Side of... SF
  I blame it on the (somewhat) popularity of Cyberpunk when doing futuristic stories, what with its giant skyscrapers and noir-ish setting. There's also a lot of SF that is really Fantasy out there today. Meaning that instead of the usual...
• Commented on Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!
  I'll second what Dirk said. Publishing or dealing with a particularly controversial social topic (such as race) in a socially inappropriate way can make your book unpublishable. As for "fearing the Other", I think the key evolution in politics has...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  The scenario actually sounds like a big boost for space colonization. As mentioned up-thread, an immortality drug this cheap and convenient means that in most countries, the establishment isn't going to die off in favor of new blood. They'll have...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  I would definitely take it. Aside from being able to see how "things play out", it would allow me to make some very long-term investment and career plans. You could spend extra years or even decades in school, knowing that...
• Commented on 2512
  Saying that it "looks like it's worth it" is stretching what Planetary Resources can realistically do a lot. Right now, virtually all of it except their time-share telescopes is speculative, along with their pathway to actually making a profit off...
• Commented on 2512
  EDIT: Make that "upper" stratosphere....
• Commented on 2512
  Good post, Charlie. Assuming no transhuman weirdness or collapse, I believe that 1. Warfare is going to look surprisingly retro by modern standards. We're testing solid-state laser platforms that can be mounted on vehicles (one on a jeep shot down...
• Commented on Context is everything
  To summarize for those too lazy to go to the wiki link, Scarcity in economic terms means the finite resources available to meet the theoretically infinite wants of a population. Scarcity doesn't stop just because certain goods and services are...
• Commented on Context is everything
  Plus, they're grad students. You expect existential despair. @Heteromeles #116 I've got news for you: *EVERYTHING* changes its local environment. Humans are not unique in this regard. Elephants and ants structure forests, and if it weren't for the pervasive pollution...
• Commented on Context is everything
  One thing to remember is that progress as the organizing myth of our culture is only a few centuries old, and really took off outside the US and Europe only in the last 50 years. The myth of growth as...
• Commented on Context is everything
  To be fair to the post-western-Roman-Empire Europeans, they probably just didn't have the population density or agricultural productivity to make water mills useful until the 9th century, especially not on the scale of the Barbegal and Janiculum Mills. Once they...