Another Cool Vision

The End of Politics

(oh, and incidentally, open access to space)

Majority rule...NOT!
Too many people in the freedom movement seem to be unable to think in terms other than electoral politics and majority rule. No matter what happens, happiness is on the other side of the eye of a needle marked "convincing the majority". Thus we get endless utilitarian essays on the benefits of freedom. Nonsense about voting for Ron Paul, as if voting for freedom ever worked at any other time and place. Endless whining that NASA is doing what they're chartered to do, block space access. Jousting on the battleground the establishment has handed you only proves that you're still in the thrall of fuherprinzip.

The truth is, most human beings are scared silly of the responsibility for their own lives, and unload it at the earliest opportunity on whichever State or God is closest. Individual liberty is only emotionally palatable to a small percentage. The majority is *never* going to be convinced, because they emotionally can't face it. Even the greatest concentration of individualists ever assembled, the early American colonies, quickly fell back under the spell of majority rule.

Let the meek inherit the Earth. It is not necessary to convince the majority. It is only necessary to build and ride a working rocket, then emigrate to orbit and beyond. Building a rocket is simple compared to curing the mental health problems of humankind.

Darwinism
Mao was right and Jefferson was wrong: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, not from the Noodly Appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Throughout history, the amount of individual liberty at any moment has been determined by the military balance of power between the military force an individual can bring to bear, vs. the force a dozen official enforcers can bring to bear. All the talk-talk about the divine right of whatever are rationalizations and PR made to fit the Darwinian facts. Rights are taken by force, not granted by benevolent omnipotent agencies. If you want to sit at the front of the bus, you have to growl and be prepared to bite.

The Internet
In 1990, the Internet as popularly known didn't exist. In 2007, Second Life is a sufficiently interesting electronic universe that Chinese people are farming inside it for real-world money.

Ordinary-looking people who are sexual exhibitionists started posting pictures of themselves on two free websites dedicated to that. A few years later, paid sex workers started posting their advertisements there too, using the exhibitionism population for a cover. People who liked the pros' pictures can join their fan club, buy videos, and meet them at the parties they throw. Really nice fans may be invited to meet them privately in person, or win a contest to do so. A few more years later, there are a couple free rating web sites for professional sex workers, and the web sites of the sex workers, who are of course merely paid dancers who don't sell sex, ask for your username on the rating sites in the initial contact. This all goes on in the open, and appears to be a thriving industry with vastly reduced legal risks for all concerned. This is relevant to space access, keep reading.

People of all ages start exchanging stolen music recordings. Then they exchange stolen TV shows and movie recordings. As evolutionary selection pressure is exerted by law enforcement, the file transfer networks are now in generation five or six, growing towards ever-more diffuse and distributed architectures, with increasingly plausible legal deniability, and increasing resistance to subversion or removal of nodes. The music genie can't be put back in the bottle. Digital Rights Management in Windows Vista and elsewhere will move people towards Linux, which abhors it, and is much harder to break into. The legal risks to an average user with a low profile are practically zero. As long as the files traded contain music, the legal risks to an average DEVELOPER with a low profile are nearly zero. I expect the low-penalty legal playpen of music will continue to evolve law enforcement resistance until the networks can't be easily broken, at which point the files traded will suddenly start containing almost anything at all...including digital encodings of money. The spam problem could be solved by charging five cents to accept a message onto your server from someone you haven't heard of. Imagine a micropayment system of millions of peer-to-peer banks, distributed like the file sharing networks. The money flows for email and web views will cover the money flows made for many other purposes.

Pacific rim manufacturers of all kinds are now advertising on aggregation web sites in search of distributors in the West. Language barrier? Business customs barrier? Just point, click, and haggle. Think of it as international web catalog shopping with a minimum order of a container. If the North American Union happens, turning open borders into freeways will have a similar effect.

One Laptop Per Child?
Mom and Dad can use it in the evening when Junior is asleep. Let's pull ten times more people into the Internet marketplace, people who are used to working around regulatory nightmares. People who have a lot to gain from joining the world economy. People highly motivated to learn a high-skill manual trade like rocket motor construction, on their own time, with no help. Which region in India or Africa will become world famous for their good values on rocket motors? If they can make the crap at Pier One they can make turbopump castings, and the price they will get for them will motivate the quality. Why do you think rocket development can only be done by the people who have historically done it to date?

Rocket development costs are in freefall
In 1960, putting a man in a rocket near orbit took 400,000 people and tens of billions of 1960's dollars. In 2004, putting a man in a rocket near orbit took 150 people and 25 million 2000's dollars (Scaled Composites). In what year will putting a man in a rocket near orbit only take 15 people and 25 thousand dollars? A homeschool study group of teenagers? Why do you think this price has a floor? These prices have dropped in *spite* of the best efforts of NASA.

It used to be that airplane flight control software was the exclusive domain of rocket scientists. Then the speculative New Zealand $5,000 cruise missile project caused quite a stir. Today we have Lego UAVs for $500, which you can put together from a shopping list over a weekend. I expect that price to drop to $100 soon because this seems like a fun toy. And then $50, and then $10.

Garage hobbists now have rocketry-class tools
Today, garage hobbyists read Gingery books and sandcast aluminum in their suburban backyards. Handling equipment is welded from steel scraps, propane heating equipment is mostly plumbing fittings. The more adventurous ones do cast iron. Stainless steel can be done, and the furnace to do it is the size of a 55 gallon drum.

Hobbyists now have great, inexpensive sheet metal welding tools. Look at a Saturn V engine, it's a bunch of sheet metal work, brazing, and welding. This is entirely within the reach of people who build airplanes in their garages. Given accurate blueprints, one person could build an engine. They don't have to repeat the R&D. Nor do they have to repeat NASA's mission of making everything novel, difficult, and tweaked to the max for its own sake. What does a Volksrakete look like?

Tabletop manual mills cost $500 - $1.5K. Today you can build in your garage useful parts that you cannot buy. CNC vertical mills that fit in a garage cost from $2.5K to $12K. Moving into light production costs less than a fishing boat, and it can still be housed in a suburban garage.

The cheapest of the rapid prototyping (RP) tools currently produce weak plastic, but that's perfectly fine for sandcasting and investment casting cores with lots of internal cooling passages. The cheap, free tools won't be limited to weak plastic forever. A commercial RP system that deposits titanium is for sale. The skunk works made most of a large UAV from RP parts. The open source RepRap project is explicitly targeted at duplicating much of itself. Which Pacific rim country will start selling RP machines at import prices?

Synthesis
Several trends are all converging to open space as the new frontier. The low-legal-penalty technical areas that transfer manufacturing and coordinating power to individuals are all being developed at once. This capability snowballs. Manufacturing and coordinating abilities shift political power to individuals. This capability snowballs. It is becoming ever cheaper and easier for the small percentage of the population who are would-be space colonists to find each other and build important parts of real rockets in the safety of their garages. This capability snowballs. Actually inhabiting orbit in anything more self-sufficient than a lifeboat will snowball so much that the space access problem will be solved. It will be another Las Vegas, but with fewer mobsters because there is no fixed location to conquer. Soon I expect to see the people who now campaign ocean sailboat racing for excitement and bragging rights to start campaigning orbital spacecraft for real excitement and real bragging rights. Get with the program. Stop voting and give up on the majority. Buy some tools, find some blueprints, and build a UAV or an engine. Read Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_, and Neal Stephenson's _Snow Crash_ and _Diamond Age_.

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