Corporate Space

[virgil]

Not quite sure what kind of arguments I can give to a friend of mine who strongly feels that NASA shouldn't be a gov't agency, and stuff like it should be privatized (profit breeds innovation in her opinion).

[name_here]

Tell her that space has a number of potential future applications that aren't profitable, so we need a government agency to do experiments and technological development to make those possible.

[virgil]

The argument boiled down to her terrible opinions about the gov't doing more than military defense; stuff like "the gov't shouldn't run your life" (extends to corporations who are people too, in her eyes) and that public demand will make businesses honest without the need for 'nanny state' regulations. Etc, etc.

EDIT: And that the robber barons should be viewed as anecdotal evidence, at best; and that a couple bad eggs don't prove the rule.

[Doom]

Tell her that space has a number of potential future applications that aren't profitable, so we need a government agency to do experiments and technological development to make those possible.

This would be the absolute worst way to go.

1) If the potential future applications are NEVER going to be profitable, then there's no reason to spend tax dollars on it.

2) If the potential future applications are only going to be worth something after X amount of dollars are spent, then a corporation can do it, weighing their potential profits against the initial investment. This is how every other business works, from hot dog stands requiring a few hundred dollars before any potential profits are realized, to car manufacturing plants that require tens of millions before generating even a single dollar.

[Blasted]

public demand will make businesses honest.

Mad Gerald: ...ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! "Make businesses honest," you say?

I think 12 months of laughter (Rik Mayall's Blackadder clip) is entirely appropriate here.

[K]

Not quite sure what kind of arguments I can give to a friend of mine who strongly feels that NASA shouldn't be a gov't agency, and stuff like it should be privatized (profit breeds innovation in her opinion).

Ask her to name five inventions created for profit (and not things which eventually made a profit after huge pure research investments like computers). She will fail this test.

If she tries something dumb like trying to use things like the automobile, jump on the internet and give her the actual history where it took 200 years and a laundry list of inventors before a profit could be made on internal combustion engines. Wikipedia seems like it was invented for just such a purpose, and it works for basically every invention of note (though things like the Snuggy are technically patented, I think we can agree that a blanket with arms is not an invention of note).

Aside from the cotton gin and shuttle weaving and peanut butter, the other 99.99% of research started out as pure research that no one had figured out a use for yet. You really don't need a degree in history to know that.

There is a reason why WWII led to more groundbreaking scientific advancements in a few years than the 100 years before it: investment in pure research with no thought of profit.

If she is still willing to argue against the recorded history of human invention, I think you can just write her off as a conservative or libertarian nutcase and move on with your life. Rationality is not their friend.

[Doom]

That argument only works if you're sure only governments have invented things. I believe Thomas Edison would tend to disagree (incidentally, has a couple more than 5 inventions for profit).

[Username17]

That argument only works if you're sure only governments have invented things. I believe Thomas Edison would tend to disagree (incidentally, has a couple more than 5 inventions for profit).

Thomas Edison is a robber baron who sent armed thugs to hold back the deployment of alternating current. According to the woman with whom this argument is being had - he is anecdotal at best.

-Username17

[K]

That argument only works if you're sure only governments have invented things. I believe Thomas Edison would tend to disagree (incidentally, has a couple more than 5 inventions for profit).

The number of scientists who made a profit off their inventions is really quite small, and usually represent single moments in the course of scientific development when the pure science sees a payoff.

I mean, you can make money today by making slightly better computers because lots and lots of people poured fortunes into pure research. Simply put, we never could have gotten computers by pursuing the profit motive at any point in the process until the 1970s.

Heck, even Edison never got rich with his inventions considering his investments. At best, he made a decent living. (For contrast, look up the life of one of his contemporaries: Rockefeller.)

PS. There is also strong evidence that Edison stole most or even all of his inventions from "assistants" like Tesla.

[Josh_Kablack]

Not quite sure what kind of arguments I can give to a friend of mine who strongly feels that NASA shouldn't be a gov't agency, and stuff like it should be privatized (profit breeds innovation in her opinion).

I vote for a 9mm type argument. Those people are immune to reason.

[Doom]

Be that as it may, the question was "5 inventions for profit"...Edison certainly had 'aggressive' business practices, quite possibly stole some inventions from someone else...but attacking the (alleged) inventor doesn't really change whether the inventions were created with a profit motive.

Regardless of how the inventions were acquired or who invented them, things like light bulb, phonograph, telephone and tupperware, among quite a few others (cf pharmaceuticals, some of which even work), were invented with a profit motive.

[Orion]

I was pretty sure we had decided suggesting that people be shot was not how we do things around here. (here being the den. not america. it's exactly what we do in america)

[Username17]

Regardless of how the inventions were acquired or who invented them, things like light bulb, phonograph, telephone and tupperware, among quite a few others (cf pharmaceuticals, some of which even work), were invented with a profit motive.

The telephone was a subtle improvement on the telegraph and was made by several people simultaneously. Bell is the guy who cashed in, but he didn't even make it first, just cashed in first. The phonograph started as the phonatograph that was a non-commercial venture, but more importantly still was actually invented in the metal disk system used by Edison by a French poet who never saw a Franc.

Tupperware isn't even an invention, it's just a container that happens to be made of plastic. Yes, people engineer subtle improvements in shit for profit all the time. I don't think that's in dispute.

-Username17

[K]

Be that as it may, the question was "5 inventions for profit"...Edison certainly had 'aggressive' business practices, quite possibly stole some inventions from someone else...but attacking the (alleged) inventor doesn't really change whether the inventions were created with a profit motive.

Regardless of how the inventions were acquired or who invented them, things like light bulb, phonograph, telephone and tupperware, among quite a few others (cf pharmaceuticals, some of which even work), were invented with a profit motive.

Ok, let's take on of your examples: tupperware.

This is an invention by the Earl of Tupper. He made quite a bit of money using plastics around 100 years after Alexander Parkes invented plastics.

Tupperware is basically an airtight plastic container. Tupper didn't invent the materials, and hermetic seals are so old that we still use the alchemic term.

That's an example of a "single moment in history were pure research turns a profit." If Tupper had been forced to research his own plastics, he never would have made a dime and would never have done the research in the first place. Heck, he might have dropped a fortune into it and just failed.

But, it doesn't matter if some people intended to profit when they invented something, or even that some people have made profit on inventions... all that matters is if that is a sustainable model for innovation.

Since at no point in human history has there been sustained innovation through pure profit motive, it becomes hard to even imagine a world where it could be true.

I mean, every industry right now is basically subsidized by pure research coming out of universities or paid for by government. Not only that, but it always has been.

It has also been argued that patent law has been stifling innovation for decades. Considering the innovative research not coming out of corporations, I don't see any evidence that profit-based research would work at all.

[Zinegata]

People are getting it backwards. Corporations aren't going to space because the government monopolizes space travel. Corporations don't go to space because there's nothing there to make money out of.

Seriously. It's easier to mine resources that already exists on Earth. There's nothing that can be produced in zero G that's so much better than Earth-produced items to justify the cost of a rocket ship to send and bring back materials. Maybe someday we'll have orbital solar collectors, but until a reliable space-to-ground energy transmission method is discovered it's simply easier to mine for coal.

And tourism? Sure, it makes a lot of headlines now, but space travel is a very specific type of tourism - akin to climbing Everest which is only done by a couple hundred people annually. Most tourists want to go to places where there are other people to meet, and where there are things like "restaurants" and "souvenir shops".

Only one space-based venture has ever made sense for corporation thus far: And that's satellites. There are a ton of satellites up there already for commercial purposes - which make a lot of commercial sense as it eases a lot of vital tasks such as communications that can't be achieved otherwise.

[Doom]

That's some extremely fine hair-splitting there. Even a pencil is so complicated no one person can claim to understand it all, much less to have invented it.

I guess because it has wood in it, it could be discarded as a possible invention outright (millions of years of evolution involved there), above and beyond the extremely complicated design.

What exactly is our definition of 'invention', then? We seem to want to rule out anything associated with unfair business practices, unknown inventors, too simple, too complex, didn't make enough money, or using materials that are too simple or complex.

So, for your girlfriend, first you need to establish what you mean by 'invention', then we can try to figure out what exactly a government sponsored space program can do to create an 'invention' that simply cannot be done any other way.

[Cynic]

Earl of Tupper.

You actually had me going that there was an actual lordling from some location called tupper. Earl Silas Tupper was born in Berlin, new hampshire. But I like your idea better. We also need a Dauphin of Teflon.

[fectin]

Not quite sure what kind of arguments I can give to a friend of mine who strongly feels that NASA shouldn't be a gov't agency, and stuff like it should be privatized (profit breeds innovation in her opinion).

Ask her to name five inventions created for profit (and not things which eventually made a profit after huge pure research investments like computers). She will fail this test.

CT machines, every type of aircraft, pretty much every alloy, roleplaying games (Gygax did it for a living, even if he also had fun), microwave ovens.

Should be a broad enough list to be a counterexample.

[Surgo]

If that list, fectin, I think only the first aircraft can be said to follow K's criteria (the Wright brothers actually were the first guys to have the key innovative idea that the wings were what needed to change geometry for turns).

Roleplaying games have a very ancient history, and everything else was given pure research investment by other people.

[Username17]

CT machines

I'm going to stop you right there, because CT machines were produced as a collaborative effort by people all over the world using computers originally produced with research money from the United States Government in the 1950s combined with the tomogrpahic techniques of an Italian radiologist from 1930, using a mathematical setup designed for the purpose by a South African working on a US Government grant in 1963. The fact that the first commercially usable CT Scanner was the EMI Scanner produced in the United Kingdom in 1971 is not a victory for rugged private enterprise working alone. It's actually the story of pure research invested in by the government eventually producing advances that private enterprise runs with when the groundwork is all laid.

I don't actually know the history behind those other things (except for RPGs of course), because they are outside my field. But if someone gave CT Scanners as an example of private enterprise unaided by government research moving us forward into the future, I would laugh in their face.

-Username17

[sabs]

Transistors
Nuclear Power
Electricity
Internet
Semiconductor chips

all of these were funded by Government pure research long before anyone used them for commercial use. Yes, I know that Tesla and Edison worked on electricity to the house. Michael Faraday did most of the ground work for that, while a Professor for life at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

[fectin]

The wright brothers very deliberately built their airplane as a commercial venture, and developed new engines as well as doing a crapton of practical research on lift characteristics.

I didn't know about the South African working on government grant, but the math is simple enough to do out longhand. You wouldn't want to, but it's seriously very simple. That's not even a contribution.

You're probably correct that there is no recent invention free of government support, but that's a point about the pervasiveness of government, not the relative capability of industry.

I'm about to drop out of this discussion. I'm sorry for that, it's not fair.

[Fuchs]

I think the latest crisis shows what the private sector does best: Ruin economies while making personal profit, then scream for help from the very government it earlier scorned.

[tzor]

Not quite sure what kind of arguments I can give to a friend of mine who strongly feels that NASA shouldn't be a gov't agency, and stuff like it should be privatized (profit breeds innovation in her opinion).

Unfortunately, I don't have any good arguments. NASA needs, "a man and a plan" to really work well. Back when George M Lowe was in charge of Apollo, we had that man and we had that plan. Now we don't. While NASA hasn't gotten down to the level of "just another damn department" (like ... say ... the department of energy ... have we removed our dependence upon foreign oil yet ... but that's what Carter wanted the department to do) it has gotten close to "just what the hell are they doing?"

That being said, the primary goal of NASA is science. Two factors come into play here, the fact that NASA is not alone in the world in this department (although for good delivery systems is it still us and Russia) and the fact that the true science is done by the university system, not by industry.

NASA fucked up big time in the past two decades and they have no choice but to pay the price. (The entire world will actually pay the price but we can hobble along on old Russian rockets for a while.) The ISS will continue to be the world's premeire platofrm. Unmanned missions will continue to be the best source of information and data. Most satelites will still be out of reach of any manned repair system and space junk will probably start to get critical within the next two decades. (Where is Quark when you need him?)

Therefore we need NASA because ... no one else wants it.

[sabs]

Actually to be fair, you can find a speech from /every single President/ since Eisenhower promising to get us off our dependence on Foreign Oil.

I'm serious.. every single one.
Eisenhower
Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
Ford
Carter
Reagan
Bush Sr
Clinton
Bush Jr
Obama

I bet if you looked through the presidential archives you could find a Radio address by Truman promising the samething.