The future of space exploration.

There was only one reason, why humanity reached the outer space in the 60s: the Cold War or more precisely the nuclear payload, that if delivered is the ultimate weapon of our times. Delivered? German failed attempts to bomb London with fast and unstoppable rockets pointed world in the direction of intercontinental missiles, and what is the better test field, than space rockets. It doesn't create diplomatic or domestic tensions, yet the difference is none, since you can always just replace people with nuclear payload. Of course some will argue, that even if it was important, the curiosity of people was as important. At those times only two governments in the world was able to attract enough finances and people required to accomplish such a achievement.

Times has changed and now governments are slowly backing up from space programs, with one exception of China, which now tries to catch up. In spite of this regress, we have more space optimists, than ever before. A lot of people think, that nowadays a space exploration will be picked up by private sector. Here you have an interview by Economist with lawyer of Bigelow Aerospace. 

The first space flight of Space Ship One was the biggest accomplishment by private sector so far. It wasn't able to build enough speed to remain on orbit, nevertheless it ended an era of government monopoly on space flights. All thanks to one amazing constructor Burt Rutan.

When you listen Burt talking, you really do grow optimistic about the whole private space flights. Why shouldn't we be? If government can, a private sector surely is able too. Of course it is, but there is only one problem, private sector not always would want to. Private sector operates similarly to evolution: it can try things, but if it won't prove to be profitable, it will be abandoned. The only way the private sector will continue humanity chase after space flights, if it would prove to be profitable.

What are the ways, a space flight can be profitable. Let's review some of ideas.

There are plenty of people out there, who would pay enormous money to see the earth from space. If the ticket would cost $100k, than a company offering space flights, would have a constant flow of customers. To get near this amount the spacecraft needs to be able to repeat flights over many years with constant, high level safety, but it doesn't have to remain on the orbit. Burt Rutan's idea seems to do the trick, s if he will tune up some details, we may see such a offers in US' travel agencies. Would it drive space flights further? I seriously doubt it. Would people want to go to the Moon, Mars or Jupiter's moons? At the price $100k certainly, but it doesn't seem achievable in near or much further future. Even to the Moon? To the Moon, who knows, but is the Moon such an attraction? The other planets will be out of reach for tourists for a very long time. Why? There is barely anything we can do about travel time. There is a risk of space radiation, and preventing that is incredibly costly. Not too mention, that cost of obtaining orbit twice and changing a solar orbit is just cosmic. Yet if the tourism will drive the costs of getting to an orbit, that would be a huge step.

The next step might be a need for raw resources. The radioactive elements are probably the first ones to end up on Earth, yet they might still be needed in 100 years or so, since work on Fission reactor is progressing very slow. On the other hand a fission reactor may give it a boost anyway. If you would build an automatic mine base on the Moon, with an automatic "fuel station", than the costs of transporting many raw materials would be most probably low enough, thanks to low gravity of our sole natural satellite. Gravity of nearest planets and travel time seems to be to much obstacle for a private sector. 

What about energy? Under the condition, that the only workable fission reactor requires a great gravitational force. Meaning fission reaction, that produces more energy than requires to be sustained, happens only in stars. Obviously it would be a waste if we wouldn't harvest it. One effective way to do it, is to put a solar panels in space. Just putting panels in space is not harder than visiting the Moon, but since it requires more travels from the surface of the Earth to the near and far orbits, a space ladder might be absolutely necessary for it to be profitable. There is no way any single company would afford the costs of building space ladder, but the obvious advantages of such construction is so huge, that governments can step in, if only a political and economic support for such solution will be enough. At this time I don't see how solar panels in space would be more profitable than any other energy source, not to mention, that I am strongly convinced, that fission reactor is possible. Even if it did happen, it won't help the above. 

The private sector has a quite space to fill, but can he achieve more than that? By themselves this is as much they can hope for. However there is another foreseeable milestone, that the governments might be forced to accomplish. Colonizing Mart and/or Venus. A fear of going extinct my get us to these two planets. Both of these planets have features, that make them ideal targets. The most important is possibility of terraforming. Extremely costly? Yes, but who cares? We have to do it some time in the future. When that happens, the private sector will have another huge area to thrive. Interplanetary crafts, space ports, space safety. And to what will our governments be forced to after? Space elevators, space vacuum cleaners? How much we have to fear to create enough impact on governments? A lot. It may take centuries, before the technology will be cheap enough and our voice loud enough. If we survive until then, it will happen, no doubt about it.

Such a great future awaits us, but the private sector is not enough. There are milestones in our space exploration, which can be reached only by governments. Not because people without help from state wouldn't achieve it, but because people need to feed. Some milestones are to big steps to be crossed for economic reasons. Sometimes we must be organized by officials, forced to be taxed, so enough people would be able to work on reaching the goal, we all know has to be reached. The free market is great at micromanagement and steady progress. Private sector can only take small and relatively inexpensive steps, which need to bring it some profits. Not everything can be achieved in small steps.

Regulating economy and scientific method.

One thing people has in common is overconfidence in their own ability to reason and predict. Ian Ayres in his book "Super Crunchers" described couple of examples, where so called experts were easily beaten by simple statistical method called linear regression. The method is very simple. The whole idea is to chose some data, that we believe (or tested before using different methods) is correlated with the numbers we are trying to predict and then find some polynomial, that has most predictive qualities, what is generally almost the same as solving a set of equations. I won't be describing details about measuring probability of accuracy or overfitting, or trying to find a prediction with a non-polynomial function. 

Statistics are not some mambojumbo to tell us who is likely to win next elections. It is mathematical vehicle, that allows us to deal with uncertainties in a scientific way. Science is problematic in many areas. While in math and computer science everything is abstract and everything can be proven or disproved using logical rules, almost all science is dealing with a real world, where nothing can be really proved, so the only thing it can do is to test theories and go on with those, that were not disproved by empirical facts. In physics, chemistry, biology theories need to be always accurate and every contradiction disproves theory, but there are also economy, psychology, sociology, actually medicine is here too, where theories may be thought valid even if there are cases, where they didn't predict the outcome. Yet still certain predictions can be made and certain theories can be formulated, but to test them, we need mathematical tool, which is statistics. How science look in these areas? There is barely any theory prior the research, more often only a hunch, that something maybe interesting there. We conduct our experiments and then apply our statistical tools to see if something valid can be made out of the outcome. If there is something, then we formulate theory and look for another experiments, that may disprove it in a statistical sense. 

One problem many economists face, when doing their research is how to test their theories. Their theories deal with whole nations and you can barely conduct an experiment with whole nation. I mean you can't just create different scenarios and execute them on different nations, or can you? Of course there a ways to deal with this obstacle, since life sometimes offer us natural experiments, that maybe treated in a scientific way. Sometimes we don't care about scientific content of a theory and we just make a prediction without really testing the theory. That's how many financial experts work, but at least they use statistics, so it has at least some merit (ok, not all of them, but let's leave it here).

How then our governments introduce new laws? And when? The timing is really important. New law is brought under consideration, not when someone comes up with a new theory, but when some people see a problem with a current law system. Of course sometimes the problem is "obvious" to all of us, like for example during crisis. Sometimes is "obvious" only too a certain group or company, that is struggling under the current law. What happens next? Problem is "obvious" and often so is the solution, at least generally. The details are then discussed among experts and the new law is drafted. Then comes political machine and bargaining between different parties and their lobbyists. They believe the experts knowledge and intuition about how our economy should work. There may be some value in the opinion of experts, but regardless of that, what they actually do is that, they create a huge and yet scientifically invalid experiment, that is conducted upon whole nation. I find it kind of scary. Yet at the same time, no one is even thinking about conducting really useful experiments, that may bring us some knowledge, not only about how our society works, but also what is the best for us.

Concluding above I would like to bring up some theories, that were never tested and won't be in a near future, yet they may give us an idea of better behaving system. Let's start with a more reasonable one. In USA corn farming is largely subsidized by a government. Theory is, that subsidizing a certain crop will be more often used as a food for a live stock, regardless how healthy it is for animals and/or meat consumers. Patent law has negative effect on creativity, since every discovery published will be comprehended by others and may be use it to come up with new ideas, even though it will bring down profits from an idea. Another one: lack of intellectual property law won't make authors go bust, but only distribution companies, even though they may earn less money from their previous work, so it would raise a quality of our entertainment. 

We may argue about how valid these theories are, but the point is, that many laws introduced may not help a nation's economy, but only switch a power to a one side of the market, what translates to a better profits for some companies and people. Even though the experiments with laws are conducted on larger scale, when different countries create different laws, but in our times of global economy we can observe a tendencies to uniformity. What's more if you could valuate laws not only by its contribution to GDP, but also how it affects the lives of simple people, than maybe some laws we would find less profitable, yet still more attractive, because it increases the quality of our lives. There are many candidates for such assessment.

Health care

Pensions and health care are two major problems of aging societies or I should say problems of people, who are now in their thirties. In the longer run it is hard to design a health care and pension scheme too serve to an unknown demographics, but there are some problems, that are to be addressed in the near future.

United States are currently in the middle of their health care reform. Less known to the world Poland is also trying to restructure it's health care. When USA is coming back from private model of health care, Poland is experimenting with it. We can see that each model has its own disadvantages but also advantages, so it is understandable, that when reforming health care, governments are trying to get the best from both, hopefully without causing political earth quake.

One of the problems with health care is that, we can always pour more money into it to acquire some small addition to nation or individual life span, yet despite the fear of death we all share, we have to put a price on our lives and decide how much we want to spend in relation to additional time we can acquire for the money. Obviously the government is not necessary the one, that should be making this decision, yet if it is only up to us, we can make the prices to skyrocket. When we add to that a safety precautions against medical mistakes and greediness of private insurers, we may or do end up paying enormous money. Health is important to us, unless we are young and optimistic, so we create a lot of demand. Only considering this I make a confident prediction, that every health care will attract a lot of criticism.

There is one thing that, that I would like to point out. There are medical procedures, that are very common throughout the population, and even if they may not be cheap, they are affordable, just because the huge demand attracts a lot of competition. What's more they are often not a matter of life and death. Yet there medical procedures, that incredibly expensive and at the same time our life depends on them. However because they are quite rarely needed, the divided cost among the society is minimal.

Of course it is a bit simplified grouping, but I believe any health care reform should explore this approach. My amateur proposition would be to divide medical procedures according to how patient life depends on it and what is total cost of such procedure for the society. Then every expensive procedure, medicament or examination, that is not life and death matter, should be provided by a private sector, while the opposite by a national insurance. The middle will be of course the hardest to deal, but appropriate mixture by trying and failing method can be obtained.

Unfortunately this idea is quite hard politically to promote in Europe, where people are used to get their health care for free or low cost, but in USA it probably would be much easier. Funny thing is, that in Poland we kind of going into that direction. Our social health care is ineffective, so the private sector is filling the demand, but of course any expensive procedure is a domain of national health care (and cheap ones for poorer people). However living in Poland I hope I won't have to be dealing with our national health care in any near future.

Introspection doesn't help.

Social anxiety, depression, hypochondria, etc are quite common in modern society, but I want call them diseases. Not because they shouldn't be treated, but because the label hurts. Being sick requires a visit to specialist, medication and that creates the an atmosphere of something very serious, but tension doesn't help with these. Even if someone can't help by themselves, they shouldn't label themselves with a sick person, but rather someone, who wants to enhance life by acquiring positive attitude and self-regulating skills from a trainer. 

Do I suffer from them? It is a bit complicated, if only because I don't feel like admitting it. Seriously I believe at this point of my life I don't, but there was a time, when I probably would easily be diagnosed with at least one of them. 

I remember a book of a Jewish psychiatrist, who described in it his experience in Nazi's concentration camp. The main idea of this book is, if the life had only a meaning, when everything is great in our lives, than the life would have no meaning at all, so every suffering we endure in our life has also a meaning. He supported his thesis with histories of prisoners, who at one day stopped seeing any meaning in their suffering and without one they were unable to live further and without any particular reason died. If you have any problem with your life, don't feel like you are worse than anyone else. Every anxiety attack, every moment of sadness you suffer is as important as the moments of happiness. You don't even have to know the meaning of your life, as long as you remember, that every moment has the same value. The book is called "Man's Search for Meaning. An Introduction to Logotherapy" by Viktor Frankl. 

If you ever played any board game like Chess or Go, than you definitely know, that there is optimal amount of time (depending on your skill), you should use before taking another move. If take too much time, you won't necessary make a better move, but actually you will start too make even worse moves. Probably poker players know it even better, when they outguess themselves to take a certain action, just to find out, that their first thought was the best. Psychologists did some research about how well, we can understand our motivation. There are two experiments I heard about, that kind of prove it. In one they asked people who were in relationship, why they love their partner, but they asked them in two different ways. One was very straightforward without very much time for answer, but in the second they gave them a lot of time and ordered to think about their relationship. I believe the number of different reasons were considered, but I may be wrong about the details. Than they waited, and after some time, they revisited people to check if they were in the same relationship. What was the outcome? It happens, that the quick answers were quite well correlated with the time their relationship lasted (means less reasons, less time), but there was no correlation in the second group. What does it mean? I means, that when they had more time to think about their life, they didn't necessary come to a better conclusion. In similar experiment, people were given one of two paintings, one they chose by themselves. Two groups were divided similar as above and after some time, they were asked, how much they liked their painting. The experiment showed similar results. People who had less time to choose, were happier about their choice than those who had much more time. 

What has the meaning of life to do with our ability to make a correct decision? Here we get to the subject. Introspection doesn't help. If you constantly think about your life and what's the point of doing this or that, you outguess yourself in the same way, when making a more straightforward decision about what shoes you should buy. Have you ever tried to think about every breath you take? How strange it becomes after couple a minutes. How scared you become, that you may just not take another one. People are smart creatures and many skills are there in your brain waiting too pop, but if you do it in hard way, than they remain unused. If I thinking about myself and my actions all the time, I deliberately divide the world into two pieces: me and the rest of the world and it is so huge and hard to understand, how can I be not frightened, how can I be important in it? Well you are already a part of it, so you are as important as any other. 

Nice ideas, but they are still introspective. I propose an exercise to let our subconscious skills to work. Whenever you start to think about yourself or part of your body, stop immediately and imagine yourself, or if it is too hard, someone else, that looks he same and had the same life, and then in your imagination try to see, what the person will do or say. Viktor Frankl proposed something similar, imagine yourself as if you already had your life and now you are living for the second time.

Psychology of ruling mind.

It is well known, that power changes people. Greater responsibility forces people to think about things, they didn't have to think about before. If you become a leader of a team, you become a decision maker, but should you really be one? We can think of an organization as a complicated piece of machinery, where everyone should know their place and tasks to carry on, and only one person can decide in which direction the clockwork is going. There is only one problem with this way of thinking. It requires a leader to know how to deal with every possible obstacle and how to chose the best way all the time. For those, who think it is possible, you are naive. If you want a proof, study computing complexity. 

During my college I studied how to process natural languages, for example how to tag words in a sentence with different parts of speech (verbs, nouns and so long). Since many words may be used in different ways and generally the part of speech depends on a context the word was used in. The problem is as hard as problem of answering question, since many tags depend on semantics of the sentences. I mention it, because I remember a fact about this problem, that explains, why I strongly believe, that people can organize better, that in a leader - soldiers way. There was conducted an experiment with number of Americans, in which they had to tag words in a text with parts of speech. The task is quite hard for contextual languages as English, so people on average were able to successfully tag only 96% (if I remember correctly) of the words, but if the people were able to cooperate, they easily obtained 100% score. Efficiency of groups is largely studied subject by sociologist around the world, but actually is not a topic I would like to discuss in details. I only try to convince the reader, that dominating a decision process by a leader of a group is a straight way to failure.

Let's go back to the subject of my refutation. Leaders are quite commonly identified with a group and every mistake of a group will be noted on their account, every complaint will address to them. Since they have to adapt to this role in some way, they will change their way of thinking. It is quite natural, but it also brings a lot of possible problems. Usually leaders have greater knowledge of carried tasks than their subordinates and it is easier for them to fall into the trap of thinking they always know better than any of them, but it is vital to remember, that usually group know much more, than one person can. Yet this superiority feeling is way too common in organizations, companies and what is bothering me the most in politics and governments. 

Superiority feeling of politics may manifest itself in many ways, but one the most annoying way is tendency to over-regulate the people's life in pursuit of some greater goal, like safety or stability. They see a problem and come up with a law, that is specifically meant to fight this one problem with great confidence, that adding another law will make a world/country a better place. Ideally I would force every new law to be scientifically tested for it's benefits, but obviously it can not be done. Yet this over-confidence of politicians is sometimes incredibly annoying, especially if they barely consult it with anyone. 

Here comes another example from computer science. Once upon a time there was a programmer, who thought he can create a perfect computer poker player, by adding new rule for every situation, in which it behaved badly. After ten years of refining his algorithm, he has massively failed and his automatic player had lost with everyone. With this I would like to support a thesis, that even roman law system, that every countries adapted, is quite failing. I don't mean here the actual acts of the roman law, but more abstract regulation system based on simple rules. It became vast and complicated, and yet it fails every day, so in order to make it work, our rules based law system is converting into precedence and authority based system. The thesis might be bold, but it just help me to express my feelings towards politicians confidence in supporting new rule in order to fight a a social problem.

At this point I want to express my disagreement with newly proposed laws for fighting easy access for children to pornography in Australia, Poland and I don't know where else. I hope the intentions are genuine, but it is still a very poor idea, and very dangerous one. Tendencies to rule over internet in  democratic countries are worrisome and I hope it is only because of this over-confidence in rules to solve social problems.