When can I buy the Millennium Falcon?

Obsession

I am obsessed with rocket ships. (Why? Because Trump might be the President of the US, and I don't want to be here at that point.)  My hero is Elon Musk (read about his latest adventures in the wait but why blog, by Tim Urban, another one of my heroes!)  Why am I obsessed with rocket ships? Because that's the only way to save your ass when the sh*t relay hits the fan. Some day, when we have an intergalactic civilization, it will be obvious when you have to leave a planet because crazy people are taking over, with a spaceship you can actually do it. Today, not so much.

How Much Can I Pay?

So, when can I buy the Millennium Falcon?  Okay, not me specifically, but someone in my situation. Let's assume you are in the top one percent of the US economy. And let's assume that the economy grows  at 3 percent per year (okay, aggessive but not unbelievable.)  So how much money am I making every year?  According to CNN I should be making $400,00 in 2010 to be in the top 1%.  So assume I want to buy an Recreational Vehicle (the Millennium Falcon is the coolest RV ever, but WTF, going for the win.)  $800,000 in the year 2040 and $1.6 Million in 2064.  A 3 % growth rate means it doubles every 24 years.

How Much Would it Cost?

So how much would the Millennium Falcon cost today?    The Apollo moon landing cost about $12 Billion per launch (in todays dollars) and took place in 1970.  A shuttle launch took about $450 Million in 2010. Today, just to get to low  earth orbit costs $70 million per launch, which is a lot. And Elon has promised to drop it to $500,000 in 2040 to get people to Mars.  If you average those numbers out, it's a fairly steady 12.3% improvement per year.  Not bad.  That means the cost comes done by half every 6 years.

Can I Afford it?

Now let's assume that I'm going to live in the Millenium Falcon, so I can afford to finance it like I do a house, over 30 years, using 25 % of my income (if you live in CA, this will sound familiar.)  So, at a 3 % interest rate I can finance about $5,000,000 in 2040 (10x the trip cost.)  So, it might not be the Millennium Falcon, but certainly you could finance some type of space station vehicle.  Space front property.  Not sure if we'll have faster than light travel (the Alcubierre warp drive might take a little longer to get the kinks out of it) but the ship will be able to take off and land.  Good enough for me. I declare a win.

And Where Can We Go?

And here's where the Millennium Falcon can take you: On the grand tour, and further.

But what we're really aiming for is to have Burning Man on Mars.

So that takes a little bit more effort, but 2040 seems like a great goal!

Thanks for reading.
 -Dr. Mike

Grand Vacations or Burning Man on Mars. It could happen.

Precursors
No, it will happen. At least if the aliens don't get here first. But we'll talk about that in another blog post.

What I want to talk about today is the mistaken idea that progress will end. There's a neat book by John Brockman, actually a series of books that I call 'blog fodder.' The one that drove me to write about Grand Vacations is: "This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that are Blocking Progress." John has put together several books of this type where he asks scientists, economists and others to write something provocative on his chosen topic. These books are great fun to scan. Many of the articles are great fun, many are just crazy, some are so bad they aren't even wrong (as Wolfgang Pauli would say.)

The article that started my train of thought that has led to this blog post was: "Economic Growth." Cesar Hidalgo, an Associate Professor at MIT claims the idea of economic growth must die. He makes two arguments: 1) the idea is recent (this century) and 2) the idea is absurd. Both arguments fall into the 'not even wrong' category. Here's why he thinks economic growth is absurd: If growth rates continued at 1% per year, in a thousand years the average American would make $1.1 billion in the year 3014. Yeah. So what. Some people in America make more than that today.

But really, it's not about the money it's about the capabilities. And in the year 3014 the average American will have more capabilities than the average billionaire has today. Can the average billionaire take a vacation on Mars? Not today (although several are trying.) But in 3014 the average American should be able to. Think about what the average person could do a thousand years ago: walk, shout and listen. Not a lot. A thousand years later we have cars, jets, spaceships, mobile phones, the internet, computers and electricity. Things change.

Grand Vacations
What Grand Vacations are available today and how do they compare to the past?

Circumnavigation of the Globe
One Grand Vacation available today is a trip around the world. Robert Heinlein did it and wrote about it in the early 1950's. Today you can take the Queen Mary II on an around the world trip (the Cunard line actually has three ships circumnavigating the globe continuously.) The first people to ever sail all the way around the world were some crew members on Ferdinand Magellan's ships in the years 1519-1521. Five hundred years ago. First time ever to routine in half a thousand years. Things change.

How else can you circumnavigate the world? There are several jet based vacations: one by the National Geographic Society, one by Four Seasons, one by Abercombie & Kent, one by the Smithsonian Society, and the list goes on. What was science fiction 150 years ago is now common. SkyTeam will even let you set up your own itinerary. The globe has even be circumnavigated via hot air balloon. And Google is managing a fleet of balloons to provide world-wide Internet coverage. So don't tell me that things don't change.

Retracing the Most Famous Circumnavigation: Darwin's Voyage
Darwin wrote about the voyage of the Beagle (where he got the idea and lots of evidence for evolution) in 1839. He ended up circumnavigating the globe in 5 years (it was supposed to only take 2! Oops). The book became a popular travelogue in England and around the world. The first version only had 1500 copies printed, but it hasn't been out of print since and you can find several web versions. You can find a tour that recreates parts of the voyage from Australis, several others are mentioned here. Or you can recreate parts of the trip on your own.

Space Trips
What other Grand Vacations are available? Space Tourism surely qualifies. NASA has commissioned a set of posters that would tickle any explorer's heart. Space Tourism has actually started, Mark Shuttleworth and six others have been on Grand Vacations via Space Adventures. Several companies are working on sub-orbital adventures: Virgin Galactic, XCOR Space Expeditions, Blue Origin, are building spaceships and SpaceX offers flights you could book now. Remember that the first person in space was Yuri Gagarin in 1961, less than 60 years ago. Most people don't know it, but humanity has had at least one space station orbiting the earth since 1974.  So you might try to get there.

For those just interested in weightlessness there's a company providing that service: zero g. And there's an awesome rock band (OK Go) that used the zero-g jet in a music video. See more of their stuff on YouTube.

Safaris
There are many ways to go glamping. But obviously the best is an African safari.  Safaris are a veritable industry.  They used to be about big game hunting, but now they are mostly about photo ops.  Still, what could be better than a trip to the wilds of Africa, back to the cradle of humanity? I would recommend a safari break in the middle of your circumnavigation. That's what I'm planning on doing.

Festivals
There are hundreds of music festivals in the US. Some of the local ones are Montery Jazz and Coachella. A popular one is SXSW which mixes music, film and interactive exhibits. Then there are Art Fairs around the world and in the US.  You could spend your entire life going from one fair to the next. Then there are food festivals: the most famous (at least if you like beer or are German, like me) is OctoberFest in Germany. Don't forget the county fairs, here's the ones in CA. But every state has them.

Burning Man
Arguably the most famous and eclectic anti-festival of them all is Burning Man. Burning Man takes some effort to get to, but nobody said these vacations have to be easy! I can't wait until we have a Burning Man on Mars. It would be a long vacation.  It takes about 3 months to get to Mars. When could it happen? How could you do it safely? That's another blog post.

Invitation Only
Then there are those invitation only vacations: Davos, TED or the Bohemian Grove.

Theme Vacations
You can have a Grand Vacation by setting up a theme.  Some popular themes are baseball, unique museums, science museums, art museums, design museums, amazing buildings, tallest buildings, highest mountains, beautiful ports, longest train routes, Or you could drive one of the longest roads in the world or the steepest roads or the windiest roads or the craziest roads or the most fun roads to drive. Or you could go for beauty.  Or World Heritage sites, there are thousands of them, so there's always one nearby.  Or you could do an archeaological dig or visit ancient ruins. Or the best dive bars in every state.

Or visit all the Disney parks.  My family is in the process of doing this.  We've already been to Disneyland, DisneyWorld, and the parks in Tokyo and France.

One of my favorite dream vacations: visit all the major wine regions in the world.

And my second favorite dream vacation: Michelin starred restaurants.

Or you could follow a book, one that comes to mind is: Huckleberry Finn or pick an epic road trip from some other book (like Mark Twain's Roughing It, a tale of cross continental travel before it was easy.)

Or you could follow your favorite band, mine being either the Beatles or The Talking Heads.  If only they would tour again.

Or think up your own theme: best kite surfing beaches, movie scene locations or famous graves.

Thanks for reading.
 -Dr. Mike

What is it good for?

Welcome to the WIIGF blog: "What's it good for?", the question I like to ask whenever I learn something new.  And I love to learn new things, you might say learning is my passion.

What have I learned this year?  I learned I had cancer.  That'll clear your mind out pretty quickly. Don't worry though, it wasn't life threatening, but it wasn't fun. Actually it was kind of fun. It got me to think about what I really want to do in this world.  And write was one of those things I decided I wanted to do, so here I am.

Unlike my buddy, Don, I'm not quite ready to retire.  I see a huge need to help all kinds of organizations get into the Cloud (with a capital 'C') and improve the world.  So I'm working in Google's Cloud division, doing what I can to help our customers every day. I love working with good people and I've stuck with Google longer than any other job I've ever had, and I plan to stick around a bit longer.  Time flies when you're having fun!

This blog is ostensibly about  how to use the scientific method to study people.

I know it's stupid.

You can't possibly predict how people are going to react to something using the scientific method, unless you do double-blind studies (something I'll blog about later.)  I'm not talking about that.

What I'm talking about is a way to prove that Free Will (with a capital F and a capital W) exist.

Philosophers have convinced themselves it doesn't.  They think we are all zombies.  And why do they come to this conclusion?  Because they don't understand physics, they don't understand Shannon's laws and they don't understand Newton's law. I have very little respect for philosophers. And that'll be another blog post.

One of the other things that I'll be blathering about is music.  I've always loved music, I abandoned it in High School (marching band wasn't cool enough), picked it back up in college, then have basically ignored it since then.  And when I say music, I don't mean the passive kind.  Anyone can listen to music.  I mean the active, play it or dance to it kind. I'm going to get back into music again.  First goal: continue learning how to play piano.  Second goal: Live performances. Third goal: something to blog about.

What other things do I find interesting?  Well, you'll just have to listen to me blather about baseball, the American sport. Really it's the sport of nerds.  Baseball is unique in that every play involves just you and the ball.  So everything can be measured.  The measurements are noisy, but predictive.  I've got a whole host of baseball oddities to talk about. (Did you know that players that have tall socks and short pants get fewer low strikes called against them?  Well neither did I, but I'm going to go through the statistics and find out if it's true.)

I've spent a long career in programming, having taken only one programming class in my entire life before I was 50.  After 50 I've take several classes for fun.  So I'm also one of those self-taught programmers who stumbled on the field and could never leave it.  Software is eating the world. And I'll explain why.  And education is at a turning point.  It's going to change a whole lot in the near future, and I know which direction it's going to go.

And I expect to blog about some of the things I've learned over the past few years (I've already talked about sabremetrics - the mathematics of baseball.)  But I've also taken courses on quantum computing and seen some of the most interesting attempts at building quantum computers at my alma mater, the university that granted the first Ph.D. in physics: Yale.  (That happens to be the degree that I stumbled into.)  And I've taken classes in machine learning and I've taken Stanford's physics classes for nerds (as an undergraduate and an old fogie.)  And I'll talk about my favorite professor, Leonard Susskind - who teaches  the class 'Theoretical Minimum' and who's been battling Steven Hawkings for years (and who's right, by the way, and I can prove it.)

I've also turned into a political junky in my old age so I'll blather about that for some time.  Some things about US politics have actually been empirically determined.  Neither party wants you to know about it, but I'll blab about it for several posts.

And I've become somewhat of a foodie and a winie (is that even a word?) so you'll hear about that as well.  

And charities.  Some charities really make a difference in this world. And some don't. I'll give you my opinion on why that is.

And space.  Actually our exploration of space.  It's a lot more interesting than you can imagine.  I'm a child of the space race - I was born one month before the first satellite left the atmosphere and I hope to die after I've seen us set foot on Mars.  That's definitely worth a series of blog posts.

Speaking of space, where the hell are those aliens?  Can we use the fact that we haven't seen any to predict how many advanced civilizations are out there? Yes we can! We can use the famous Drake equation to put limits on the density of alien civilizations in our galaxy.  The seminal work on this topic is from one of my favorite opinionated bloggers: David Brin.  He's one of the premier science fiction writers of the century (read some of his Uplift War series to find out why) and he's a weird mixture of libertarian, conservative, sousvelliance, civil war nut, and fun to read.

Some other stuff I won't be able to resist blogging about include religion, ethics, morality, genetics, information technology, artificial intelligence and particularly the singularity.  I can make a pretty good case that the singularity (or as us Geeks like to call it: the nerd rapture) is already here and people just haven't noticed.  Definitely something to look forward (or back) to!

What I won't do is make stuff up.  Everything I blog about will be true, to the best of my knowledge.  I'll never say something just to be provocative, unless it's true.  I'll show you how to recognize truthiness, how to make up your own mind, how to recognize outright lies, and how to think for yourself.  It's the least I can do.

You can follow my bluesky posts if you want to know what I'm thinking.  There I try to post about things that matter to Geeks.  Physics results. Space launches. Artificial intelligence.  Fun facts. I always try to instill that sense of wonder in everyone, just like one of my heroes: Neil deGrasse Tyson.  If people would just keep that sense of wonder, that ability to ask why, that stubborn tendency to question authority, we'd be much better off.

Finally, some of the other topics I will be turning to in later blog posts include: taxes: why are they good for you?  Reading: is it good for you?  Writing: why can't everyone write?  Nutrition: why don't we know what's good for you?  Genetically modified food: is it good for you? Sports: what are they good for?  Are cars really robots?  Will the TV and cable industries fade away?  Will print die? Who does the best reporting that's based on facts? (Nate Silver makes a decent argument, every day.) The concept of God: what's it good for?  Religion: what is it good for?  The US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence: what are they good for?  What do they really say? The French: what are they good for?  Technology: how does it evolve and where is it going? And whatever else happens to be on my mind when I sit down to write.

Here's hoping I can keep some small set of people entertained, informed and learning new things every week.  See you soon!
Thanks for reading!
 -Dr. Mike



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