MatrixCast 001 – “A conversation with Bruce Damer”
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This podcast is from a conversation between Bruce Damer and Lorenzo that they had in November 2006. Topics included space exploration and virtual worlds.
PROGRAM NOTES:
[All quotes below are by Bruce Damer.]
“Lunar dust is nasty stuff.”
“This is a tough mission to go and look for water ice [on the moon] with a rover. The moon’s temperature is going up and down by hundreds of degrees during the lunar day and night. And this is why the moon is probably not a good place for people, actually, to be in sustainable missions over three days.”
“It turns out that there are a bunch of other problems on the moon, one of them being radiation events. . . . and you’ve got dust. . . . The moon is like a trillion trillion Coke bottles that have been slammed for four billion years with astroids. So everything is these little shards of glass.”
“You don’t just put technology out there and it just works. It never works that way. We’re living in a bubble of hand-maintained, hand-done streets and roads and sewer systems, but that stuff is constantly breaking. The space station is constantly breaking. An oxygen generator goes off-line almost every month, and it’s a crisis. And they still haven’t fixed it after four or five years.
“Stars are temporary interruptions in dust’s normal life-cycle of just hanging around.”
“The NASA budget is a fraction of one percent of the federal budget. It doesn’t even count. [NASA] is one of the smallest agencies. And it still contains some of the smartest, most interesting things going on that our government is paying for. NASA’s budget fits into a few weeks of a foreign war operation.”
“We have a socialistic-style space program. They [the Russians] have a capitalistic-style space program, build em cheap, make it profitable.”
“We should be grateful. We’re rare, incredibly rare, and what do we do? We sit around worrying about stuff and fighting each other.”
(from Digital Space Commons)
Design for a Human Mission to a Near Earth Object
