Why not a Mars mission?

Paul McAuley makes a good point about Obama and Brown and their bailout money: it's enough to pay for a handful of manned missions to Mars.

But let's get those costs into perspective. President Obama has estimated that taxpayers will have to pay in the region of 2.3 trillion dollars to bail out the American banking system... Even so, that's enough to fully fund five manned missions to Mars, assuming each costs around 450 billion dollars, the high end of estimated costs. Likewise, the cost of bailing out just two UK banks could fund three missions. Seems like a bargain to me.

Does anyone know if Kim Stanley Robinson and Stephen Baxter are available to design a new set of stimulus packages?

The economic crisis explained

Today's Guardian features a nice, limpid piece by Aida Edemariam on the origins of the current economic crisis which contains a nice set of objections to pater's rather dubious solution:

The obvious question, to my mind at least, is, if it was all imaginary in the first place, why can't we just write it all off and start again? Why can't we consign it all to an imaginary dustbin, instead of throwing yet more money into a hole we don't know the depth of? Because, as the Treasury spokesman would say with a slight sigh, to do so would instantly decimate the complex web of salaries, house-buying, businesses (most of which can't function without the flexibility provided by bank credit) and general day-to-day consumption otherwise known as a western economy.

"We are a capital-intensive society," says Kirchmaier. "This makes us more productive, and wealthier. Ending a capital-intensive society would mean sending us back to the stone age. We have seen instances in history where states tried to renegotiate their debt and start all over again. Germany after the first world war was such a case, or Zimbabwe now. None, I would say, counts as a success story."

Quite.

SGI in trouble again

It looks like SGI are going back into chapter 11 and, possibly, merging with Rackable. Oh how the mighty have fallen...