Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Pigs In Space!

Boing Boing is worried about the less physically fit space tourists of the near future. They refer us to a recent article in the British Medical Journal reminding readers that space travel is not comparable medically to earth-bound travel. Current astronauts are required to be far more physically fit than ordinary folks in order to be regarded as fit for space, and even these exquisite specimens have reported a host of physical changes and medical problems, degenerating eyesight, dangerous changes in their immune systems, and so on. Since "space tourism" is not going to be profitably available to more than the extremely rich any time soon, and I think it will tend to select for self-congratulatory celebrity-CEOs of the compu-tech variety, almost every one of whom got rich privateering the ingenuity and labor of coders and engineers who would eagerly have done the work for the sheer joy of it anyway and then made it available for free, it is hard for me to see the prospect of "space tourism" as the next idiotically risky rich man-boy's thrill-toy as much of a problem for everyday people to worry about.

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