[Spoon Poetic]

I'm pretty sure most of the White House recoration is the presidents get to choose what of the other presidents' furniture they want, like historical furniture and they can be like "I want Truman's desk in the Oval Office, and Hoover's bureau in my bedroom..." Something like that. But yeah, anyway...

Consider the computer industry. We see such progress in the computer industry that a computer is out-of-date within a couple of years; there's always something new being discovered, something better being developed. Why? Because the computer industry is a free-market system. Efficiency and vision bring profits. Companies are motivated to learn and experiment and develop because they have that incentive. Imagine if the computer industry was run by the government, that has no real incentive to be efficient and productive, as their money keeps rolling in, anyway. Computers might be developed for government and militaristic purposes, but that's all.

This post has been edited by Spoon Poetic: 13 February 2006 - 07:42 PM

[civilian_number_two]

I might be naiive, but I think the benefits to pure science would be similar to privatizing the search for the billionth digit of pi. Space exploration is way too expensive, and the benefits rest way below the costs. Private companies would be more likely to wait for publicly-funded experiments to make headway, and then reverse-engineer the results for industry (as they have done so far with the telecommunications and whatnot). The only industries that seem obvious off the top of my head are mining, tourism and advertising. The first of these is problematic should we ever discover a place out there with any form of life, the second is no big deal, IMO, and the third is terrifying in the short term. The last thing I want is neon satellites in space advertising American beer.

[Despondent]

Once awe-inspired and now I'm despondent on space, as well as star wars. I'm all for privatization of Space Exploration. That Andy Griffith series where he was a junk-man astronaut? Good example.

There's a big universe out there, and I'd hate to depend on NASA, or any other government program to share the bounty of the explorations we "stockholders" pay for.

[Slade]

I think we do enough damage here on Earth, and there's no point to exploring space. Sure, the... erm... space around the Earth, but getting past the moon seems to be a waste of time and effort, and privatization would only inspire more rampant corporate commercialism. Like neon signs able to be seen from space.

[Jordan]

http://www.thespacer...m/article/520/1

That's a good article on wether NASA is worth the money or not. Ok, so it's a pro-nasa article. I personally don't worry too much about it.

Like civillian pointed out, companies around the world spend just as much on advertising their useless products. Microsoft spend more on marketing their XBOX than I'll make in 50 life times. Or something like that.

This post has been edited by Jordan: 14 February 2006 - 01:21 AM

[barend]

the bible says that one of the signs to look out for that the apocalypse is comming is the moon being as red as blood...

that day will be the moon being painted with a coke add on it...

and on that day i hope an alien race comes down to earth and kills us all!

[Sailor Abbey]

that day will be the moon being painted with a coke add on it...

and on that day i hope an alien race comes down to earth and kills us all!

That wont be necessary. I will have already taken care of it.

[barend]

nice one...

[Chyld]

Lets look at it from my ignorant, poseur-anti-capitalist stance. Space research and exploration costs billions if not trillions of pounds/dollars/small pebbles. The only companies that could put aside such huge sums of money for such a thing would be companies that make ridiculously excessive profits. So that's the likes of Microsoft and MacDonalds then.

The Moon becomes a lump of badly programmed software, and Mars becomes a giant factory farm. Splendid!

[Kirby]

Eve-online is an MMORPG that deals with exactly this, space is controlled by corporations. Now I haven't played this game myself but I do hear great things about how it games.

Just thought that it'd be pertinent to the conversation.

[Sailor Abbey]

I watched this show on the History channel today, cant remember what it was called exactly, but they were saying how SETI used to be a government program but they eventually cut it. Now its privately funded by the Hewlett and Packard guys and some other super rich people and it seems to be doing better than ever.

[Gobbler]

Yeah! That's my company alright! Go HP! Wooot! Space will be ours!

[Deepsycher]

Well I can see that privatisation is in their best interest for what they plan to do with it, maybe just trying to grab some future commercialism.

This post has been edited by Deepsycher: 19 February 2006 - 06:33 AM

[Sailor Abbey]

Maybe they just had a few extra million they didnt know what to do with.

[Deepsycher]

"They want the millions to grow as normal, then eventually from people."