What a fun website for a Sunday morning!
The Space Elevator
What a fun website for a Sunday morning!
Tag: space
Organs Printed in Space
… and I still can’t tell you exactly how (or why). But if you can tell me the how and the why, I’m all ears!
So You Think You Know Economics
I hope you do, and I think I do – know economics, that is.
But I’ve always thought about economics (how to get the most out of life), here on earth. I haven’t thought about what economics might be like on other planets, on space stations, or on whatever else lies ahead of us in terms of both space and time (pun kind of intended).
Paul Krugman had a fun paper about this written more than forty(!) years ago. The paper is freely available, and you can download it over here, but there is also a Wikipedia article about it, if you would prefer to begin there.
As the Wikipedia article says, the summary of the paper was this:
How should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Interstellar_Trade
The next line in the Wikipedia article is genuinely funny, and that in typical Krugman style:
This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Interstellar_Trade
But a much more recent post by Robin Hanson invites us to do a serious analysis of a no-longer-ridiculous subject: how should one think about social analysis of a future that is much more about space travel.
We understand space tech pretty well, and people have been speculating about it for quite a long time. So I’m disappointed to not yet see better social analysis of space futures.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/07/space-econ-howto.html
In this post I will therefore try to outline the kind of work that I think should be done, and that seems quite feasible.
I teach Principles of Economics for a living, but have only very rarely (well ok, almost never) thought about Principles of Economics as it relates to space travel. As Tyler Cowen might say, most of the basic principles will remain the same, and demand curves will slope downwards, but what will actually change?
This is surprisingly hard to think about, because I tend to just assume that economics is always earth bound. And it takes me time to wrap my head around the fact that I’m thinking about economics in a very different context. Robin Hanson helps us overcome this initial hurdle:
Here is the basic approach:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/07/space-econ-howto.html
1. Describe how a space society differs from others using economics-adjacent concepts. E.g., “Space econ is more X-like”.
2. For each X, describe in general how X-like economies differ from others, using both historical patterns and basic econ theory.
3. Merge the implications of X-analysis from the different X into a single composite picture of space.
His first example about X is that of lower density. Or, in plainer English, space is just going to be really far away from everything else. I mean, really far away. What does that mean for an economy, when it is just ridiculously far away from everything else?
Let’s think through this a bit. Can, say, thinking about Neom be similar to thinking about this problem? Or Naypyidaw? Or are we talking about a completely different problem, because of the vast difference in terms of distance? And if you say it is a completely different problem, why do you say so?
Are we talking about travel costs being significantly different? What about the cost of communication (both within that base, and back to Earth)? Which resources become more valuable because this base is s far away, and which resources are valuables “just” because they are scarce on that base? Will, as Robin Hanson points out, lower density mean lower product variety, and what will that imply for this economy? How should one think about Dixit-Stiglitz in this context?
Read the whole thing, of course, but Robin Hanson points out a variety of ways in which space economics is going to be different. I’ll highlight just a few below:
- It’s going to be very far way, as we just discussed
- It’s going to be much harsher (read science fiction!)
- It’s going to be wildly different in terms of resource economics
- What about population growth?
As I said, I struggle to think about this just because my mental framework thinks about economics in a very Earthian (yes, this is now a word) context. And that precisely why I enjoyed reading this blogpost so much, because it gives me a very pleasant headache about stuff I thought I knew.
And I hope you’ll spend some time with this very pleasant headache too! 🙂
Update: Shubhneet Arora sends along this recent Krugman column/newsletter, very relevant to this blogpost. Thanks Shubhneet!
Tech: Links for 3rd September, 2019
- “But analog storage takes up a lot of room. So sending the bulk of human knowledge to space will require a lot of compression. To do this, Spivack tapped Bruce Ha, a scientist who developed a technique for engraving high-resolution, nano-scale images into nickel. Ha uses lasers to etch an image into glass and then deposits nickel, atom by atom, in a layer on top. The images in the resulting nickel film look holographic and can be viewed using a microscope capable of 1000x magnification—a technology that has been available for hundreds of years.”
..
..
Tardigrades on the moon.
..
.. - For folks who ask how to go about learning R. Start here.
..
.. - As I have mentioned earlier, I have the app, Peak. I don’t know how much of an impact it has on my mental performance, but I enjoy the routine(s) and am slowly getting better at all the games. They celebrate their fifth anniversary today.
..
.. - “When he saw the gilded letters of the Trump hotel, he gave a gleeful chuckle. “Out of all the American Presidents, he is the only one whose speeches I can understand directly, without translation,” he remarked. “There are no big words or complicated grammar. Everything he says is reduced to the simplest possible formulation.””
..
..
If I could have, I would have excerpted the entire article. An interview with Cixin Liu.
..
.. - Teachable.com – of course I would be interested, wouldn’t I?
Tech: Links for 9th July, 2019
- “In it, astronaut Sally Jansen has been working to come to grips with a Mars mission that went disastrously wrong, and NASA ended its crewed missions into space. But while she’s trying to move on, scientists detect an object designated 2I/2044 D1 entering our solar system, and when it begins to slow down, they realize that it’s an alien artifact. Jansen is called in to try and intercept the object and figure out what is behind it before it reaches Earth.”
..
..
Science Fiction is a great way to learn a lot and have a lot of fun while doing so, and for that reason, I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the premise of this book. In similar vein, I recently (and finally) finished The Three Body Problem, and can heartily recommend it.
..
.. - “The camera was loaded with machine vision algorithms trained by Hamm himself. They identified whether Metric was coming or going and whether he had prey in his mouth. If the answer was “yes,” the cat flap would lock for 15 minutes and Hamm would get a text. (In a nice flourish, the system also sends a donation, or “blood money” as Hamm calls it, to the National Audubon Society, which protects the birds cats love to kill.)”
..
..
There are many people who bandy about the word AI these days, but this very short read (and within it, a very entertaining video) helps you understand how it could by applied in myriad ways.
..
.. - “LightSail 2 is more ambitious and will actually try to maneuver through space, and even boost itself into different orbits using sunlight. The new mission’s mission control website will let people around the world follow along, including the 23,331 people who contributed to the project’s Kickstarter campaign, which raised $1,241,615 for the spacecraft.”
..
..
A third link from the same website (either The Verge is on fire, or I am being lazy today), but the best of the lot, in my opinion. It is now possible to crowdfund a satellite launch that contains a sail – and you can now watch your investment in space as it flies above your head. What a time to be alive.
..
.. - “But while Tufte’s concerns are not limited to charts, he has spent a lifetime thinking through what he called the “perennial” problem of how to represent a multidimensional world in the two dimensions of the page or screen. At the end of the day, he pulled out a first edition of Galileo Galilei to show how the great minds of the past had grappled with the same issues. He rhapsodized over Galileo’s tiny, in-line sketches of Saturn, which clearly inspired his own advocacy of “sparklines” (tiny charts embedded in text at the same size as the text), as well as some beautifully precise illustrations of sunspots.”
..
..
Data visualization, medical visits, Galileo and sparklines. As they say, self-recommending.
..
.. - “And with 92 percent of future jobs globally requiring digital skills, there’s a focus on helping students develop skills for careers that don’t yet exist. Last year, Sweden declared coding a core subject to be taught from the first year of primary school. And there is an appetite for these skills among students, too, with 85 percent of Brazilians from 16-23 indicating that they want to work in the technology sector. ”
..
..
Well, there’s a thought – I refer to Sweden’s decision. One, complements, not substitutes. Two, the links are worth following in this link – this is a subject very close to my heart.
Tweets for 28th June, 2019
Links for 27th May, 2019
- ” In today’s world, we’re typically writing contracts in natural language, or actually in something a little more precise: legalese. But what if we could write our contracts in computational language? Then they could always be as precise as we want them to be. But there’s something else: they can be executed automatically, and autonomously. Oh, as well as being verifiable, and simulatable, and so on.”
..
..
Stephen Wolfram on computational languages, and what it might mean for all of us in the future. Can’t say I understood all of it right off the bat, to be honest – which is why I’ll be reading it again sometime later.
..
.. - “I was interested in the notion that you could take a busy place — an airport and a marketplace, you can call it kind of a mall, with hundreds of shops and all that comes with it — and cohabit it with a magical park, which is nature at its best, which is relaxing and serene, and is the escape from all of that busyness.Airports are not exactly relaxed places, and I thought, what would be better than to create a place of total serenity?
We’ve planted thousands of trees and all kinds of other vegetation. And now, six months since we planted it all, it’s already a lush jungle.
You walk through the trails, and you forget you’re in a city, and you forget you’re in an airport, and you forget you’re in a building. You’re just out there in nature and, in that sense, it’s completely magical.”
..
..
Singapore’s Changi airport now has a seven storey waterfall apparently. Of course it does.
..
.. - “Econtwitter is wonderful. Yesterday, an undergraduate emailed me to ask for book recommendations about the overlap between economics and philosophy. I recommended:Amartya Sen The Idea of Justice
Michael Sandel What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
Agnar Sandmo Economics Evolving
and
D M Hausman and M S McPherson and D Satz Economic analysis, moral philosophy, and public policy
Then I asked Twitter, and here is the resulting, much longer, list. I won’t editorialise about them, although some are not good undergraduate intros in my view. One striking thing is how few recent overviews there are, however (as @esamjones also pointed out on Twitter). Huge thanks to all who made suggestions. This is a fantastic collective list.”
..
..
Whatever bookmarking method you use, add this to that resource. And as she mentions, #econtwitter, really is wonderful. Diane Coyle with a very important, very useful list. Undergrad resources for the intersection of economics and philosophy.
..
.. - “If you missed the Chinese mission, maybe it’s because you were focussed on the remarkably inexpensive spacecraft from SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit organization, which crash-landed into the moon on April 11th, soon after taking a selfie while hovering above the lunar surface. The crash was not the original plan, and SpaceIL has already announced its intention of going to the moon again. But maybe you weren’t paying attention to SpaceIL, either, because you were anticipating India’s Chandrayaan-2 moon lander, expected to take off later this year. Or you were waiting for Japan’s first lunar-lander-and-rover mission, scheduled to take place next year. Perhaps you’ve been distracted by the announcement, in January, on the night of the super blood wolf moon, that the European Space Agency plans to mine lunar ice by 2025. Or by Vice-President Mike Pence’s statement, in March, that the United States intends “to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years.””
..
..
The New Yorker explains how the moon is becoming a rather crowded place, and is likely to only get even more crowded in the years to come – and also explains why.
..
.. - “Santacreu and Peake compared research and development (R&D) efforts of the U.S. and China for the period 1999-2015. As of the most recent year, China’s R&D intensity, measured by R&D spending as a percentage of GDP, was 2.1% of GDP versus 2.8% for the U.S.However, China’s R&D intensity grew from less than 1% over the period studied, therefore increasing considerably faster than that of the U.S. “Because R&D intensity is a proxy for technological advancement, these data suggest that China is catching up to the U.S. in technology,” the authors wrote.”
..
..
Ask yourself this: in about thirty years from now, are you more likely to see the world’s innovation hub be in China or America? This article points to the likely answer.
EconForEverybody 