The S.E.T.I.fication of the cyclotron

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I love where Dan Digitaldust is going with this:

“There are 484 million internet users in the world. Maybe half of them own a computer? Most probably have about a 14″ screen. A 14″ screen is about 100 square inches, about 0.064516 square metres. (Err on the conservative if erred on the optimistic before, there’s lots of bigger screens, but also lots of people who are more than doubled up on computers.)

That’s about 31 square kms. Or a square computer screen 5.5 km on a side, or 7.7km diagonal. It would look quite small from orbit and wouldn’t be much use for working with from there, plus the mouse cord wouldn’t reach.

James suggested that they could be used to make the world’s largest particle accelerator.”

A grid-particle-accelerator. A giant internet-scale machine for proton pelota.

Excellent!

Reminds me of something silly I wrote for /play: “The Literature Accelerator” but /play doesn’t have permalinks for good reasons, so I’ll whack it in below:
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Finders fees

moleitau

Bruce Sterling [via Heckler and Coch]

“It seems to me there’s something direly wrong with the Information Economy. It’s not about data, it’s about attention. In a few years you may be able to carry the Library of Congress in your hip pocket. So? You’re never gonna read the Library of Congress. You’ll die long before you access one tenth of one percent of it. What’s important — increasingly important — is the process by which you figure out what to look at. This is the beginning of the real and true economics of information — not who owns the books, who prints the books, who has the holdings. The crux today is access, not holdings. And not even access itself but the signposts that tell you what to access — what to pay attention to. In the Information Economy everything is plentiful — except attention.”

A dare

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Dare

I promise this is the last space post, honest, but a stupid thought popped into my head that I needed to write down. Not an unusual occurance, but hey.

I was reading a story about the BBC and it’s annual budget, as guaranteed by licence fee collection:

“The BBC spent �280m last year on its digital channels, but this is dwarfed by the corporation’s total budget of �2.5bn.”

The BBC is about to enter a period of scrutiny, examining it’s mission and output in order to review whether it should keep that guaranteed income. So my proposal is for them to radically reassess their mission – working from the money back, and The Earth outward.

The BBC should devote all their resources to conquering Space.

The chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies should nominate Dr. Colin Pillinger as the next director-general, and announce that from the end of 2004 there will be no more TV, no more radio, no more internet services. All of the licence fee income will be ploughed into space exploration.

2.5billion pounds a year is 4.55billion dollars at today’s exchange rates. In one year, the newly rebranded BSC: British Space Command, will have outstripped Bush’s recently-announced 5 year NASA budget increase.

By the time the ISS is complete and the Shuttle retired, we could have an operational chemical rocket launch system, and we could flog launch rights back to NASA. More cash. If we wanted to that is.

The first ten years budget of 40-50 billion dollars instead gets building something far cooler than that. The 8 billion of the first couple of years gets sunk into the successful production of kilometer-long carbon nanotube hausers amongst other nanowonders; the patents from which are owned by the british public (they pay the licence fee, remember) meaning every household recieves back 10s of thousands of pounds in dividends.

The UK public might not know much about material science, but they know what they like. The nation is more united than they have ever been by a live broadcast of a wedding of a minor royal or an EastEnder.

By 2010, the BSC has built a space elevator (invented by a Brit, of course) and start shuttling stuff up-and-down in 2012 to the ISS, which we renew and expand into a launch platform.

The gossamer-light probes and manned exploration vehicles that have been on the drawing board for a couple of years get shifted into microgravity production. British astronauts, reared on MaxPower and TopGear, are warned to stop the taunting buzzruns they’ve taken to doing around the slower American ironclads.

The money’s rolling in by now, from tech spinoffs patents and space elevator usage – and so the government asks the UK public if they want the telly switched back on.

The public, being shareholders in the most wildly-successful commerical adventure since the East India Company, and wanting for nothing, say “nah it’s ok… anyway, we’re enjoying the live feeds of our Wayne mooning the yanks at MACH 22”

Still good friends with NASA, the BSC undertakes to start building the foundation s of the international moonbase in 2018, two years earlier than planned, on the condition that it be named “Anderson-1”

Hey NASA!

moleitauLeave a comment

You should have pitched it as invading the Moon and Mars, and you would have not been so nickel-and-dimed. Dan DigitalDust has this:

“So Bush is commiting a few billion to the Mars race, these are not numbers he fears. He’s a big spender, he’s had well over US$100bn for his wars, he got US$50bn for Afghanistan and US$68bn for Iraq as well as his beefed up defense budget and all the money he’s spending on ‘homeland security’.”

Ok – last space post for a while I think. Just putting off a post about ethnography and innovation that I’m fretting over.