Futudirection for Humanity? (was Don Davis article)

On 4/4/06, Don Davis wrote:
(...)
> One day it is not impossible that there will be major wars between
> the major countries on the South American continent. I recall
> Argentina working on nuclear technology, but I haven't kept up on who
> down there are likely to get atomic weapons soon.

I know nothing about the Argentinian nuclear program. However, during
the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from the 60's to the 80's,
nuclear technology advanced enormously here (our first nuclear plants
are from that time) and there are clues that the military may have
tested, or anyway planned to test, a-bombs.

Anyhow, in our current political environment I don't see any trend of
development of nukes across the continent. (Although in a vaguely
related issue there is a growing lobby for construction of more
nuclear plants, since our hydroelectricity is close to the limit and
fossil fuels are a dead end.) However, if some day in the future the
bomb becomes attractive, we have the technology for enriching uranium,
so I don't think that much research would be needed. The atomic genie
is out of the bottle not only here, but all over the world.

(...)
> Space planes are apparantly impossible to refine to the point of
> becoming a practical method of getting into space. Every new project
> to create a space plane after the shuttle has died a miserable death
> with only Buran actually being test flown, an ominous sign that our
> abilities to invent as we need, as was factored into Project Apollo,
> is in decline. Perhaps if the priority traditionally given to military
> projects was given to a practical reusable spaceplane with no regard
> to development costs it could be done. The pathalogical draining of
> resources into the means for warmaking makes doing any other major
> project that much more difficult.
(...)

Thanks, you managed to get this thread closer to the topic of this list! :-)

I think that chemical rockets have reached the practical limit of
technological advance, and that may exclude space planes.
Nevertheless, I think that there *are* advances still to be explored
in cheap access to space, but I think that they pass for complete
paradigm shifts in either economic or technological principles.
Assembly-line rockets (preferably Big Dumb Busters), nuclear-powered
fully-reusable launchers (now that the anti-nuclear green movement
hopefully is starting to decline) or, who knows, if we are lucky even
the space elevator may be the way to go.