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Dammit. My hovercar, robot butler and moon-dome holidays are also late.
Clearly, Biff won whatever universe-thread we occupy.
Working for a hedge fund?
Make your own
metacafe.com/watch/1699862/h … ver_board/
Or look at the REAL hoverboard (actually works)
gizmodo.com/5549271/a-real-worki … ard-exists
Hugh, you are my density.
Just wait for two iPad revisions.
Looks like the hoverboard industry has five more years to get their act together:
I was wondering about that, but for some reason the date that I had stuck in my head was 2012, not 2015. Probably because, obviously, they couldn’t have visited 2015 because the universe will not exist at that point.
Someone ought to go back and make the facts fit the story.
Forget the hoverboards, we were supposed to be putting humans in orbit around Jupiter nine years ago according to the great Artur C. Clarke. Now we’re lucky to get them in orbit around the Earth!
Steve
Well that is because the president’s number one directive for NASA now is to reach out to Muslim nations instead of exploring space.
Really, it was #3 or 4 on the list, but I agree. It was a stupid idea to use NASA as a diplomatic outreach to other (earth-bound 
) cultures and countries when Reagan proposed it.
“We can find there’s yet undiscovered avenues where American and Soviet citizens can cooperate fruitfully for the benefit of mankind. […] In science and technology we can launch new joint space ventures.” – Ronald Reagan
Video here at about 2:25 of Reagan himself proposing that kind of thing with the Russians.
thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-j … ren-t-here
Seriously, I do find it very sad that we’re pulling back from direct, government-funded space exploration, even if the financial times are hard. We have to leave the planet sooner or later, and the timidity with which we have been moving toward that goal over the last several decades is disheartening.
As science fiction author Ben Bova (and probably many others) has said: “The meek shall inherit the Earth. Everyone else will go into space.”
Of course, I’m pretty happy with Earth myself, but the message that it takes boldness to initiate space travel is what I approve of. The U.S. Space Program has been a political tool since its inception. It’s time to turn it over to scientists and philosophers. (Well, I can dream, can’t I?)
Steve
What once took the might of a civilisation will, at some point in the progression of human advancement, be performed by its citizenry as an act of mindless entertainment.
Unfortunately, getting to space is expensive. The scientists and philosophers will need politicians and/or capitalists to pay for it. Neither group is particularly friendly toward basic research.
Katherine
Space X is getting within the ballpark of being a viable capitalist driven space program, in a cute kind of way. Look at the little venture capitalists trying to do something bigger than making yellow skirts this year instead of brown ones. I think the industrialists will fail for the same reason the social-driven programs failed: the public doesn’t care anymore.
The only thing that will drive space exploration is either
(a) Military Purposes
(b) Private Use (like mining or obtaining something marketable).
Anything political is just a wash out. Like the last project to go to the moon which was scrapped by the current administration in favor of Political reach out programs and dumb decisions like scrapping the new improved space vehicle program to replace the Space Shuttle in favor of “renting” a ride on a foreign countries rocket for the next 10 years.
In the next few years when the Space Shuttle retires we won’t even have a vehicle to visit the Space Station (which we paid a majority for). We would have to depend on other nations for a “lift” to our own low orbit investment.
We are unlikely to accomplish, or even to begin, meaningful space exploration so long as it is a project of one nation (or one cabal or one bloc). The counter-efforts of competing political, financial, and military factions – not to mention egos – virtually guarantee ultimate failure: contracts to the lowest bidder, design compromised to satisfy unresolved theories, over-all planning a melange of incompatible visions.
The model to examine is not European exploration of the Western Hemisphere, though that’s a ghastly enough picture as is; the model is, say, typical output of any large multi-factional legislative body. Laws are enacted and society functions and life goes on, but not at the level of competence and efficiency which would be essential to a serious space program.
Perhaps if we are able, one day, to function collectively as a species, or as Earth-dwellers, we might get someplace. But that won’t happen for a few centuries, at least, and if it happens then, the governing organ may not be an enlightened or benign one. For that, the wait will be much longer.
And please note that I am not advocating one-worldism; the nearer we come to uniformity, conformity, the nearer we come to stagnation. I am only speculating on a timeline.
ps
I completely agree with PJS on this point. I think sentiments such as, now we have to rely on the foreign countries to get to our space station, are completely counter-productive and indicative of the problems which have doomed the space program in the U.S. in the first place. The only reason the public ever tolerated the moon missions was because of its billing as being imperative to national security and pride. If we didn’t get there first, the Soviets would get there, and build nasty moon weapons that will kill us all. Etc etc. If you think the public approved of the Apollo program because of its vast scientific merit and it being an important milestone in the species journey outward from this planet, you are deluding yourself.
Even by the end of the Apollo mission, public support had bottomed out, and while the Shuttle briefly rekindled interest, it was a long slow wane after that. Nobody cared, and NASA didn’t have enough funding and support to do anything manned, beyond Earth orbit. The Shuttle program has been tolerated, with the vague understanding that its doing importance science stuff, but that’s about it. As Robert already pointed out, the effort to expand NASA’s role beyond mere actual stuff in space is hardly “this administration”.
Getting this species off of its home planet and out into the universe must be done as a matter of unified effort. Such a project is far too massive, complex, and (at the moment) unrealistic, for a single nation. This will become even more true in the coming decades. The era of the superpowers is over, and everything is going to have to be scaled back dramatically to fit the new energy constraints, as oil becomes prohibitively difficult and expensive in the next ten or twenty years. Famine from crop loss, and rapid geographical change from climate change will be the two main things that all nations will be struggling against—some won’t make it, some will fracture (wouldn’t surprise me at all if the U.S. is in that latter list, given how unnecessarily polemic and angry the nation is getting over stuff that is nonsense in the grand scheme). Going to space won’t solve either of those problems, so expect political support for it to bottom out. Assuming humanity makes it through the bottleneck, with a leaner and trimmer civilisation coming out in 2070 to 2100, then people will start thinking about the advantages of spreading out again, but it will be enormously more difficult. With oil scarce and technology miniaturised and specialised, solutions will have to be different than anything we’ve tried thus far.
Until we make it through that bottleneck though, fussing over not doing enough space travel is the wrong place to focus our energies right now. Right now we need to be equipping ourselves for a changing planet and a loss of the material that got us from steam engines to iPads in a measly few generations. It is of vast more importance to make sure we don’t lose what we have gained during this accelerated period. That means retooling and scaling back pre-emptively.