One Hundred Years From Now

I just finished reading The Hazards of Space Travel: A Tourist’s Guide. Since there have now been five space tourists and there will be many more in (probably) a few years, a book describing what you need to look out for while visiting Io doesn’t seem as science fictiony as it would have a few years ago.

This is not a review (go here for that). I did want to talk though about an assumption the book makes that the final space frontiers for this century will be the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter. Even getting out that far seems a bit far fetched today, but in just twelve years in the 20th century we went from launching a small ball into orbit to sending people to the moon. What if we use that pace as a base for predicting the future instead of the more leisurely pace of the space program in the last 40 years?

Although we most likely won’t get anyone to Mars until the 2030s, people could have landed on Mars back in the early 1980s if we had decided to do that. After the first moon landing, NASA pitched a Mars expedition to the White House based on an evolution of the Apollo infrastructure. At that rate, sending people to Saturn by 2001 seems reasonable (that was the destination in the book 2001: A Space Odyssey but not the movie since apparently the prop people couldn’t make rings that looked convincing on film).

So this is all to say that I don’t think the Jovian moons will be the limit of things by the end of the 21st century. Why not assume that there will already by tourists heading toward a small rocky planet orbiting a nearby star in a huge ship that uses some bizarre technology we couldn’t even guess at today? Check back in 93 years and we’ll see where we are.

By the way, I still haven’t finished the book about Rome. I only have about 45 pages left and I’m not going to start reading something else until that is done, so I’ll post about that soon.

Reintroducing Myself

I’m just starting my first day of work at the Mozilla Foundation as a Programs Coordinator. I’m really looking forward to using my experience with the Mozilla community and my experience with non-profit management to help the Foundation meet its goals. Although I don’t have many experiences about the job to share yet, I’ll be posting more as I get settled in.

Since I’ve been mainly involved with mozdev.org over the last several years, there are many new people in the Mozilla community that I haven’t met yet and many others who I haven’t talked with in a long time. I’d like to reintroduce myself to everyone and I invite anyone who is interested to get in touch with me through my blog or by email at david at mozilla dot org.

Mozdev Hires A Full-Time Web Developer

The Mozdev Community Organization has just hired a full-time web developer named Doug Warner. Doug will be responsible for working with both the community members and the Board of Directors to improve and expand the services and features that are offered on mozdev.org.

This is a big transition for mozdev, since things have been run almost entirely by volunteers since the site was launched in 2000. We have been contracting with sysadmins on a part-time basis for the last couple of years, but their work has been limited to a few hours a week and has been focused on keeping the servers running instead of improving the way the site works.

With someone dedicated to working on the site on a full-time basis, I think we’ll be able to catch up on old feature requests and bug fixes (for instance, this one that’s been waiting since 2002) and also make some progress on doing some innovative things with the site so it can be a more useful resource for the Mozilla application and extension development community.

The Caperberry Is Ineffective

I didn’t take the book about Rome I had been reading with me on vacation, so I picked something new up at a local bookstore. Now I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. I haven’t finished it yet, but I did risk finding out the ending by going to the wikipedia page about the book. There is a book within the book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy and there is also a mention that this title is a reference from the Bible, although it doesn’t quote the text it comes from. The wikipedia page doesn’t have the quote either, but google pointed me to the Online Parallel Bible. Oddly enough though, the word ‘heavy’ doesn’t show up in any of the translations of the passage, but instead the grasshopper is either a burden or the grasshopper is dragging himself along. In addition to the grasshopper, there’s also mention of a caperberry bush (and that line seemed as good as any for a title for this post).