what we should have done already

Alright, lets start this off with a number. 3.539.000.000.000.
That is the amount of money the united states spent last year (2012). That year we spent a total of 1.030 to 1.415 trillion of it on defense. That said, the united states gave 16.014 billion dollars on NASA. We spent 88 times more money on rockets and guns than we did on advancing human kind and getting to learn more about the Universe. I hate (i don't hate to say it) say it but what the hell. I mean I am someone that thinks that world peace will never happen, and i actually think that war is a good thing, in the sense that most of all good and important advances in technology come from war. But we don't need to almost a trillion and a half dollars on that stuff. So what i am going to theorize in the following is what i think we could do with that money with out leaving us defenseless and still letting us move forward. Not only that but also Actually let us jump ahead of all other countries and become stronger and more advanced than any other country on earth.
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First lets take a look at our currant space station shall we?
It orbits earth at 230 miles above earth.
Its approximate speed is 4.791 miles a second.
We put it into orbit on November 20. 1998.
 And finally it cost a total of 150 billion us dollars to make.

This is all easy stuff to know, i mean hell you can just look it up. What a lot of people don't know is that it can only hold at most 6 people. I don't know about you but when i think of a Space Station its a place where more than 50 people can live. Its Not a place where there are only a few places where a person can stand fully upright. Now this thing we call a space station cost a total of 150 billion dollars, and we paid for more than half of the full thing. If we took just 25% of what we spent on all of defense we have almost two and a half more money than we spent on the current space station. With this money and the amount in advancement in technology we could make something so much greater for something near the same price.

So lets imagine that we build a larger space station that is large enough to host up to 50 adults. This ship is also able to reduce the amount of radiation absorbed by the astronauts to only increase their chance of getting cancer down to 0.5% from 3% which it is right now.
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In this situation the next step humans or this nation could do would be to make some other ships that would be capable of going to the Asteroid belt. or just past Mars. If thought out it would be capable to have rotating 'crews' of men, some would stay at the space station while others are out at the Asteroid Belt Mining.
The importance in mining this belt is that one of the reasons we don't have more things in space is that it is super expensive to send things into space in the first place. So if we can get the materials we need to build things already in space than we don't have to pay that expense. this would let us build Bigger and better things making in natural to more forward.
Not only that but the Asteroid Belt is filled with elements that are semi-rare. If a country was able to do this than they would suddenly become much more powerful than all other countries.
If started now you could have this sort of thing just finished by the year 2025, only 5 years after when the current space station is going to be ordered down.

Next post i am going to move on from here in the suggested human advancement, or rather where i think we should go.

Space

So like just after the united states and the USSR 'finished' their space race, the result being that the US made it to the moon before the Russians did, we sent out a spacecraft that was going to go and take pictures of Saturn. This ship was only supposed to go on a five year trip and then after it they would send it into the planet where it would be crushed after falling miles into the planet. They decided to just send it away from the sun.
First I should say that this Ships name was Voyager 1, and it competed its Saturn mission with fantastic results.

From this Mission we learned that Saturn, just like Earth, has an Aurora that happens at its polls.

But what i want to get to is that after this mission we just sent this ship out and pointed it away from the sun, and just recently NASA made an announcement that as of August 2012 this ship has left the heliosphere.
The heliosphere is the electromagnetic sphere the sun creates. It is just like the one that our earth makes, and because of our stars heliosphere the planets don't get bombarded with interstellar radiation. And now that this ship has left our Solar System it can be argued that our race(humans) have become interstellar beings, though we did it kinda by cheating as this ship took around 36 years to do it. Anyway (did you know anyways is not a 'real' word as its slang) this ship is going to keep going and at its current speed it will reach the next star in 44,000 years. so just have to wait a bit longer.

The History of Human Data Storage

One thing that makes humans so different from the other beings on this earth is that we have a sense of history. By that I mean we record what has happen, we create data, or information.

 Originally humans created information and passed it along to others through verbal communication. In a way this is the most basic form or data storage. This is still present today in the forms of myths, or stories. Anything you heard that someone else hear that someone else heard is a form or verbal recording. I won't get to into this as it is a simple concept and not that exciting, in this light.

 A second form of Data recording is through the use of pictures or drawings. The most notable of the older drawings are cave drawings. The oldest cave drawings is approximately 40,000 years old and is located in northern Spain. Some debate if this is drawn by humans as at that time there were many more Neanderthals in Europe at the time making it much more likely that a member of that species. That said the average human is about 4% Neanderthal.

 Moving on, the next form or information storage is through writing. Again this is something else that only humans have managed to do, as far as we know. Writing is interesting in the sense that as it formed all over the world sometimes without relation to the other forms, we end up with radically different forms of it all over the world, from Sumerian to ancient Egyptian to Old Chinese. Now, with the invention of writing there is the ability of accuracy that can't be held with verbal remembrance can't have do to the inability of humans to remember thing clearly. I doubt that this is a coincidence that this is the edge of our knowledge of human history. I think that this is the reason that religion is so prominent. After the creation of writing things didn't progress in this area for a long time, due to religion and the dark ages.

 The next development occurred in the 20th century with the invention of virtual storage. Computers in this day and age use things called Bits to record information.  A bit can be one of two things, either a one or a zero. This works by telling the computer to either do something or not, it works like a yes or a no. Because of this the number of bits that have to be used is incredibly large. because of that there are different terms for larger amounts of bits. Above bit is a byte, which is eight bits. above a byte is a kilobyte. here is a list of terms and the number of bits.

Byte = 8 bits
Kilobyte = 1024 Bytes
Megabyte = 1024^2 bytes
Gigabyte = 1024^3 bytes
Terabyte = 1024^4 bytes
Petabyte =1024^5 bytes
Exabyte = 1024^6 bytes
Zetabyte = 1024^7 bytes
Yottabyte = 1024^8 bytes

 Right now the largest hard drive on earth is at IBM's research lab in California. It is an insane 120 petabytes. I know i punt the numbers up there but I want to write it out to show the size of it.
That's 1 160 568 786 830 044 007 717 928 960 bits. That's a little more than one Octillon bits.

Now bits are good but they are getting outdated. In the near (within the next hundred years) future computers will switch from using bits to using Qubits. The difference between the two is that a qubit is that rather then being either a one or a zero it can be both at the same time. Not that it now has three forms, one zero and both, but that it can tell the computer to do both at the same time. An easier way of thinking about it is if you think of how a computer would solve a puzzle. Right now a computer would go till it reaches a T section, at that moment it would take one turn and continue to make that one turn until it reaches a dead end. Then it would go back to the last turn and take the other rout. If it reaches a second dead end. It will do this over and over till it reaches a solution. But with a quontum computer (a computer using qubits rather than bits) would take all possible routs at the same time. This lets it reach a solution in a single 'move'.

Out side of the computer world some scientists have found a way to code information into DNA which would allow us to create biological safes of information. This is still in the developmental stage but it could help somehow in the future.

Where or how do you think we will store information in the future?