Space

Space Frontier Conference

2 Comments

I’m sure that some among my readership must be attending the conference. Is there anyone out there with whom I could share a ride to Ames from SFO on the evening of the seventeenth if I were to attend?

2 thoughts on “Space Frontier Conference”

  2. Rand, I hope you won’t mind if I make a completely off-topic comment. I don’t mean to make this a thread-jack, so if you’d like, please treat this as anonymous email and just delete it when you’re done reading it.

    “Alternatively: I hope readers won’t be distracted by the following and I hope they will reply if they can share a ride with Rand on July 17th!

    I’d like to recommend the comments by “Doug M.” at this link: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=8533#comments

    Doug M. takes on Gregory Benford, among others, and refutes the claims commonly made by space enthusiasts about what happened when China stopped exploring and trading on the high seas in the 1400s. I particularly recommend the comment Doug made on July 8th, in which he compares and contrasts China and Japan, and then takes a swipe at libertarians. I don’t think you or other libertarians should mind — regardless of one’s politics, it is interesting reading.

    Here is an excerpt:

    “There was a hermit society in East Asia that rejected trade and turned its back on the world. But it wasn’t China. It was Japan. From about 1600 until 1853, Tokugawa Japan slammed its doors shut, prohibiting travel or entry by foreigners and trade beyond a single tiny port. While China continued to trade with the world, allowing missionaries and explorers and tourists and traders to come and go, Japan spent 250 years resolutely ignoring the rest of the planet.

    “So, did Japan stagnate and fall behind technologically? No. They didn’t industrialize, but they continued to advance. By the early 1800s, Tokugawa Japan had math just barely short of calculus and economics at the level of Adam Smith. They had telescopes and basic chemistry; they knew about the moons of Jupiter and the circulation of the blood. As for shipbuilding, in the early 1600s they built several European-style ships, and even sailed one across the Pacific to Mexico as a proof-of-concept. (The Spanish viceroy there was quite nonplussed.)”

    […]

    “If burning your fleets and turning inward is a recipe for disaster, then Japan should be a miserable Third World hellhole today. They rejected exploration and trade much, much more firmly than China ever did. But Japan, and not China, was the first to successfully adopt the Industrial and Scientific revolutions. The 250 years of hiding in a cave… made no difference.”

    —

    Read the whole thing! As has been noted by you, Rand, and by others, the actions of China with regard to its ocean going ships has been the focus of rather tortured analogies made by space enthusiasts many times, but Doug’s comments, which are mostly about China and not Japan, put the whole story in an interesting new light. I apologize again for the off-topic comment. Please feel free to delete or edit the above as you see fit.

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