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The terrorists have won because they have caused us to ... flush billions of dollars down the toilet in the process.

Correction, Trillions (with a "T"). Let it run for another 10 years and we'll be in the neighborhood of a Quadrillion.

For that amount of money, you could give ever man, woman and child a good education for pennies, repair all of the infrastructure (hell, fibre to every home and rail in every city), subsidized jobs for a living wage, single-payer healthcare, renewable energy for all and on and on.

Instead, we have "mission accomplished" by 20 guys and a couple of wannabes who crashed/threatened to crash airplanes? That's an effin' PHENOMINAL return on investment. And we rolled over.

Why trust the government? Our government sucks. It has no qualms about burning up 1.4 trillion making enemies around the world in favor of certain moneyed interests, but can't be bothered to do something actually useful for a fraction of the cost.

http://costofwar.com/

I'm guessing: The U.S. Secretary of Defense has no knowledge of computer technology whatsoever, except what he learned from his children. But he wants to be cool, seem knowledgeable, get his name in the news, and get government contracts for associates, so he put his name on a scary memo written by his staff, who also have such associates.

That's a guess, but it seems a likely guess given the fact that technically knowledgeable people use different language and recommend examination of code for security problems and sloppiness.

Some of those who want government corruption want continuous war because government "defense" contracts provide easy profits, and it is easy to keep corruption secret.

If they get easy money, the corrupters don't care who is killed, what lives and property are destroyed, or how much money is wasted. For example, the book Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban provides a huge amount of detail about a small part of the corruption.

Divide the cost to the U.S. taxpayer of just the war in Afghanistan ($574,624,781,538) by the population of Afghanistan (35,320,445). The U.S. taxpayer has already paid 16,268 hard-earned dollars for every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan. The results: Mostly, things are worse.

If those who want corruption can't get the taxpayers to pay for killing other people, they want "cyber war". See, for example, Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran.

The U.S. government has invaded or bombed 27 countries since the end of the 2nd world war.

Constant war makes us poor.

2) No one has a trillion dollars to spend on this.

Wrong. The money is there - it's just currently going to killing people for oil.

http://costofwar.com/en/

There's no where near the tech level to easily put this sort of thing on the moon and there's no way the company will actually spend money to do this.

Yup. It's a pure PR stunt. ...but...

- We humans already have put things on the moon before. The engineering knowledge is still here, although the technology it self is probably rusted by now, or lying in some Aerospace history museum.
- It costs *only* 21 billion. That's well within the reach of *several* current day mega corps. Microsoft could afford this if they wanted, for example.
- If the USA didn't stupidly go into some senseless "War against Terrists!", they money spent they could have paid, not for one lunar pizza restaurant, but for a whole freaking franchise of restaurants. If the USA didn't blow money on their stupid war, if the money was diverted to the NASA, they've could permanently colonized the moon with the same budget and time frame...

Stop wasting our time.

...stop wasting your money.... :-P

I'm sorry, but Al Qaeda's actions were not a waste of time.

Don't believe me?

How much has the US spent on the wars in the Middle East so far? Yeah... most of that money could have been spent on healthcare, education or boosting the economy (admittedly, the war spending does keep some people employed).

From Al Qaeda's point of view, with a few box cutters, IED's and vintage assault riffles, they've managed to make the US waste tons of money and the US people lose the very rights that they are "fighting for" in the Middle East. So yeah, I wouldn't call that a waste of time.

If I'm willing to pay the price of fuel, let me decide.

$789,062,132,241.

Your invoice is in the mail. When can we expect payment?

Taking stock of the 30 years of the shuttle program...how else these dollars could have been used...

The cost of the shuttle program over 30 years ($196 billion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program) could have funded 0.163 wars in Iraq and Bumfuckistan ($1,218 billion - http://costofwar.com/en/). A much worthier cause, killing brown people, no?

There is not much we have benefited.

You must be a card carrying Republicantard, or at least, a bible humper.

Its a shame you used that word to describe Afghanistan, it no doubt gave someone an excuse to down mod your post as flamebait even though you are actually making a very worthy point: The amount we spend on wars far exceeds the amounts we spend on space exploration, especially when you consider that the money spent on Shuttles took 30 years whereas we have spent the money on Afghanistan and Iraq far more quickly.

Also, insulting all republicans probably didn't help your point. Hopefully this post will now actually show up to people browsing at 1 and above so they can still see your post and make up their own minds. In future though, you might want to try and make the same point in a more level headed manner if you actually want to convince anyone that your point has any merit.

Taking stock of the 30 years of the shuttle program...how else these dollars could have been used...

The cost of the shuttle program over 30 years ($196 billion - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program) could have funded 0.163 wars in Iraq and Bumfuckistan ($1,218 billion - http://costofwar.com/en/). A much worthier cause, killing brown people, no?

There is not much we have benefited.

You must be a card carrying Republicantard, or at least, a bible humper.

But why the heck should voters have to pay for photo ID? Just let people be entitled to a free one once every 4 years (e.g. if you keep losing your photo ID, you either pay for the replacement or you don't vote, I think that's fair).

USD16 or USD20 * 300 million is only 5-6 billion bucks. And that's assuming the cost is 20 bucks (might be more or less depending on how inefficient the system is). The USA has blown away way more than that:
http://costofwar.com/en/
http://www.google.com/search?q=federal+reserve+trillions

The USA is willing to spend trillions picking governments in other countries, but not willing to spend a few billions in picking its own government.

Go figure what the real problem is.

'We the people' have spoken.. 'We' do not want more freedom.. In fact, too many (these are your kids, so this is your future) think we already have too much. If 'we' did, 'we' would vote for freedom regardless of the propaganda being spewed against it. 'We' want convenience and American Idol and will kill anybody who gets in the way of that... Big business is the government. It is delusional to expect 'reform'. Regime change will not be peaceful by any means.

As I see it, both the USSR and the USA lost the cold war. it is just taking the USA a little longer to topple, given, as you say, all the money the USA had to use to that end (and the social processes set up then and before just continue). From a two time congressional medal of honor winner and Marine Major General, Smedly Butler:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

See also Arms Race:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_race

See also failing infrastructure in the USA.
http://costofwar.com/en/

See also how your life depends on how well Russian and Chinese computers in charge of nuclear weapons are working (computers the USA may have tried to sabotage).

Sure, the USA has a war machine you may trust to only go off when and where it is pointed. Funny how you need to trust the Russians and Chinese about that too, when presumably we have a war machine because we can't trust the Russians or the Chinese or whoever else. How much do you trust Russian and Chinese engineers with your life? If you are willing to do that, then why are you so worried about them taking ... what?

Every step in an arms race may make a weird kind of sense, but overall, the end result of the game when you play with post-scarcity powered weapons is pretty much everyone is going to die as the arms race spirals out of control. Plagues, nukes, killer robots, security bureaucracies with gas chambers, asteroid bombs, particle beams, and so on -- take your pick if you want to keep building the war machine and encourage everyone else to keep building the machine.
"99 red ballons - Nena "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14IRDDnEPR4

See also, for a new idea about games:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
"Finite games have a definite beginning and ending. They are played with the goal of winning. A finite game is resolved within the context of its rules, with a winner of the contest being declared and receiving a victory. The rules exist to ensure the game is finite. Examples are debates, sports, receiving a degree from an educational institution, belonging to a society, or engaging in war. Beginning to participate in a finite game requires conscious thought, and is voluntary; continued participation in a round of the game is involuntary. Even exiting the game early must be provided for by the rules. This may be likened to a zero sum game (though not all finite games are literally zero sum, in that the sum of positive outcomes can vary).
Infinite games, on the other hand, do not have a knowable beginning or ending. They are played with the goal of continuing play and a purpose of bringing more players into the game. An infinite game continues play, for sake of play. If the game is approaching resolution because of the rules of play, the rules must be changed to allow continued play. The rules exist to ensure the game is infinite. The only known example is life. Beginning to participate in an infinite game may be involuntary, in that it doesn't require conscious thought. Continuing participation in the current round of game-play is voluntary. "It is an inv

Makes me wonder...
What if we had spent the THREE TRILLION (and counting) dollars on renewable power? Would it have reduced demand enough that it would have driving down the price of oil?

Where are you getting three trillion? Cost of War has it listed at a less that a forth of that, and I'm certain that number is inflated.

Which makes me wonder...
If you can't get your facts straight about the cost of the Iraq war, why should we listen to anything else you have to say?

Also, most of our current sources of renewable power produce electricity. We don't get our electricity from the Saudis. We have plenty of nuclear, natural gas, wind, tides, and yes, even coal. The problem is, very few cars run on electricity and no commercial airliners do. This is where our oil goes. The only replacement we have for our imported oil involves vegetable oils and ethanol, neither of which is efficient enough to make a difference. Ethanol, for example takes over a gallon of fuel to produce a gallon of ethanol. That's going the wrong way. It literally costs more to make that it's worth.

Sigh.... as always you have focused on the minutae in order to feel better about your cognative dissonance regarding the whole.

http://www.brussellstribunal.org/pdf/lancet111006.pdf
A million afgan deaths and rising

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Add another 100 000 and rising for Iraq.

divide by 3000 (deaths in 9/11)

yah, wait, i just did the math, I was wrong in my previous post. Now you do the math and figure out by how much

http://costofwar.com/
We also spend our childrens future while doing this.Well over 5 million dollars per enemy combatant death.

The red cross estimates that we kill 10 civilans for every combatant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio
The last time Israel went to war they killed 30 combatants for every civilian....

I hope these citations help/ Now please. Who has been charged? DId an act written in 1917 and never updated cover the internet do you think? How is this any different from the pentagon papers? Why are you not outraged about the NYT? Maybe because they would love to go beat the Feds in court again so they are trying to pick a fight they might be able to win. I also still await the reference to you claiming some nonsense about me thinking secrets are never needed. You certainly cherry pick when it comes to responses!

Cost of both wars over 7 years: $1,124,390,382,240 http://costofwar.com/.

Deficit of a single year of Obama's budget: $1,500,000,000,000 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aNaqecavD9ek.

Budget deficit handed to Obama: $400,000,000,000 http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2008-02-04-budget-analysis_N.htm

Sticking it to the elitist /. crowd who think ending a 7 year war is the answer instead of reining in a president who spends that in a single year: priceless

Morons.

It was perhaps $1B / day for awhile, which stuck in my head. But according to here the cost of Iraq + Afghanistan since 2001 is $1.1T. It's an average of approximately $300M/day for the entire 10 year period. While $300M/day is less than $1B/day, the expense of $1.1T is nonetheless one of our largest expenses. A fiscally responsible budget will be impossible until those costs are accounted for, and I believe Congress is being dishonest in saying that they can accomplish a fiscally responsible budget as they have not provided a way to pay for it, or shown an inclination to dial down those expenses, either by withdrawing and cutting troops, or reining in defense spending.

And for the record, I did assume that we would collect oil profits from seized Iraq oil to pay for the war--it was advertised as a way to pay for it. What actually happened to that revenue I don't know, but I suspect it was used to rebuild the country's infrastructure.

At the end of the day, the newly elected GOP majority was elected on the platform that they would reduce government spending, but since they apparently don't have any heart to reduce military spending I don't think they'll be able to accomplish much, if any, real reduction or improvement of the US credit score.

Well, using the internets:

Rough cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 (based on http://www.costofwar.com/ at the time I viewed it) and rounding to the nearest billion:
Iraq: $745,000,000,000
Afghanistan: $330,000,000,000
Total: $1,075,000,000,000

US Population:
310,186,000 (based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States)

So if nothing had been spent on either war (and who knows how they are calculating the figures of course), each US citizen could have been paid: $3465.66 - or alternatively saved that much in taxes :P

Its a long way from $75,000 per year.

context.
What this context

http://costofwar.com/

I see no mention of the words billion or million. Only numbers.
The context was my head.

Juno is NASA's newest planned mission to Jupiter. As part of the New Frontiers missions, it will focus on cost-effective research of the planetary giant. The project's costs will not exceed USD $700 million, however, budgetary restrictions have caused the original launch date of June 2009 to be pushed back to August 2011.

Apparently, that's about the same as the US has spent on the war in Iraq (ignoring all the other countries [including Iraq] and the none-financial costs)

http://costofwar.com/

or to put it another way

Due to the secretive nature of Hollywood accounting it is not clear which film currently holds the record as the most expensive film ever made. Some charts have Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End in the top spot which had an estimated cost of $300 million[1] while others have Spider-Man 3 which was officially acknowledged to cost $258 million.[2] Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and its sequel Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End were produced together on a combined budget of $450 million,[3] making it the most expensive production. More recently there have been reports that Avatar is the most expensive film ever made with speculation that it cost $280 million,[4] which if true would make it the most expensive single-film production.

But then there's the 'real' costs too, how much people spend on movies, just like how much they spent on this project.

For instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films
1 Avatar 20th Century Fox $2,731,058,342 2009
[# 1]
2 Titanic Paramount Pictures
20th Century Fox $1,843,201,268 1997
[# 2]
3 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King New Line Cinema $1,119,110,941 2003
[# 3]
4 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest Walt Disney Pictures $1,066,179,725 2006
[# 4]
5 Alice in Wonderland Walt Disney Pictures $1,024,291,110 2010
[# 5]
6 The Dark Knight Warner Bros. $1,001,921,825 2008
[# 6]

It's just a bit overpriced.

http://costofwar.com/

Hey, you just inherited a business that's racked up too much debt, and your income is down by 30%. You have two choices: borrow to restructure your business, or fire most of your staff, sell off your assets, and pray you don't have to declare bankruptcy.

In the business world, most people are going for option one. When you're a government, and option 2 includes sending millions of people into poverty, it's a pretty bad option.

Bottom line, Bush cut taxes for the wealthy and started two wars, and we're going to suffer for it for a long time. Even McCain said back in 2000 that tax cuts for the wealthy didn't make sense when we had to make sure that we kept our promise to the greatest generation and made sure social security was solvent. And he said again around 2003 that keeping the tax cuts was unwise when we didn't know the cost of reconstruction.

By the way, the cost of those two wars just tipped over 1 trillion dollars.

http://costofwar.com/

I think you're confused. You seem to think the point of having troops in Afghanistan is to achieve some lofty goal, like ridding them of the Taliban (impossible) or "bringing Democracy to them" (laughable, see the history of how well the soviets did "bringing Socialism to them.")

No. The reason we're there - the only reason - is so that the money pump can operate transferring cash from USG coffers into the pockets of the military industrial complex. That's the whole thing, right there. Everything else is purest propaganda. We're not being "saved" from terrorism, the Afghanis have zero interest in our culture, the Taliban (if not by name, then certainly by culture) has a complete and utter lock on the region and the more we beat on them, the more sympathy they get. Which works great, because then we pump more dollars into the war, and the beat goes on.

The Afghan war represents the longest single conflict the US has actively been involved in (that means actually fighting.) The cost (profit) of the Afghan war so far has been 277,444,750,000 as I write this, it's more now by quite a bit. Follow the link, take a look. Remember: Every dollar spent goes into someone's pocket. They're not burning up, being lost or otherwise leaving the economy. They go directly from the US government into the pockets of the military and those that supply the military. Primarily the latter.

And what does the average person on the street here in the US benefit from this nearly 300 billion dollar corporate welfare program? Well, if you're employed by the defense industry, quite a bit. Otherwise, nothing. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are much more likely to produce terrorists now than they were before. Which, from the point of view of the MIC, is good, because that means more -- more wars, more airport scanners, more "security", etc. From the POV of the politicians, it means more erosion of the constitution ("emergencies", y'know), and more and more power focused in federal hands.

Our society has become the world's poison pill. I wish it weren't; I wish we had managed to make a constitutional republic work, it does seem like the optimum model, but we never really got close, and now... now I think it's too late. There is so little of either an honest republic, or a constitutional basis underlying what does exist... and our "democracy" is so twisted into a two-parties-not-of-the-people model... I can't see how we can pull back from the brink here.

I don't think $1T in minerals is enough to justify an invasion and war alone, especially one that cost a significant fraction of that value, particularly if you look at the true cost of the conflict.

Why not? Right now, that would be quadrupling the investment.
Plus... you are thinking in today's dollar value, when you should be thinking in future demand.

However, it could take decades for extraction to reach its full potential due to the war, the lack of heavy industry in the country, and a corrupt national government."

Decades down the road sound just about around the time when we start running out of oil and copper and when our cars start running on lithium. Batteries, that is.

Only problem is - Afghanistan will NEVER be a Saudi Arabia of anything.
Its geopolitical position makes it far more volatile.
Its geographical position makes it far less hospitable (no sea or ocean exit).
AND, since USA has missed its shot to become TheGreatFriendTM after they've helped Afghanistan get rid of USSR and has become TheGreatFiendTM - it will never be as friendly as Saudi Arabia towards the USA.
Not to mention that it doesn't have a royalty class that you can buy-off like Saudi Arabia had/has.
Oh and... Saudi Arabia was not one of the world's leading producers of opium back in the Abdul Aziz's and FDR's time.

Go on, mod me down, but I'm a taxpayer and this isn't what government should be spending my money on.

How about, "Fuck you. Get some priorities, moran."

Second it doesn't take into account Bush keeping the cost of the wars "off the books".

Let's explain it this way:

So what was the real deficit Obama inherited? The $600 billion deficit Bush was running plus the $200 billion of TARP money that probably won’t be repaid (mainly AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). That totals $800 billion. That was the real deficit Obama inherited.
Then he added $300 billion in his stimulus package, bringing the deficit to $1.1 trillion. This $300 billion was, of course, totally qualitatively different from the TARP money in that it was spending, not lending. It would never be paid back. Once it was out the door, it was gone. Other spending and falling revenues due to the recession pushed the final numbers for Obama’s 2009 deficit up to $1.4 trillion.

  So, effectively, Obama came close to doubling the deficit.

But, since you brought up the wars, let's look at how much they cost. According to the left wing Cost Of War.com site, the total cost of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is about $990 Billion. Obama's deficit spending had exceeded that in his first year in office. Now, keep in mind that the $900 billion was the total cost since 2003 when we invaded Iraq. So, unless Obama increased funding for the wars by more than seven times, your "wars kept off the books" as an excuse for Obama's deficits argument is total bullshit.

And you accuse me of lying?

Politicians don't care what is cheaper in the long run. They care what is cheaper in the short term.

No they don't, otherwise they would not have authorized not one but two wars. Those costs are approaching $1 Trillion.

Falcon

So, it's no surprise that Bush failed to fund the program fully, since he put our society 1 trillion dollars in the hole due to the war in Iraq.

Bush failed to fund the program?

In the US, although the President may ask Congress to fund particular programs, it is always Congress that decides whether a program is to be funded, and at what level... and in this matter of NASA's budget, President Obama will probably soon learn to appreciate this fact.

For the past six years America's civil space program has been aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. That's the plan announced by President George W. Bush in January of 2004. That plan also called for developing the technologies that would support human expeditions to Mars, our ultimate destination in space. But two things happened along the way since that announcement, which became known as the Vision for Space Exploration.

First, the President failed to fully fund the program, as he had initially promised. As a result, each year the development of the rockets and spacecraft called for in the plan slipped further and further behind. Second and most importantly, NASA virtually eliminated the technology development effort for advanced space systems. Equally as bad, NASA also raided the Earth and space science budgets in the struggle to keep the program, named Project Constellation, on track. Even that effort fell short.

To keep the focus on the return to the Moon, NASA pretty much abandoned all hope of preparing for Mars exploration. It looked like building bases on the Moon would consume all of NASA's resources. Yet despite much complaining, neither a Republican-controlled nor a Democratic-controlled Congress was willing or able to add back those missing and needed funds. The date of the so-called return to the Moon slipped from 2020 to heaven-knows when. At the same time, there was no money to either extend the life of the Space Shuttle, due to be retired this year, or that of the International Space Station, due to be dropped into the Pacific Ocean in 2015, a scant handful of years after it was completed.

So, it's no surprise that Bush failed to fund the program fully, since he put our society 1 trillion dollars in the hole due to the war in Iraq. Now, NASA is cannibalizing all its other programs in order to save the one effort, the moon, and the larger goal of going to mars has been largely forgotten. What Obama did was right.

(Sure, go ahead and mod me down, but you can't escape the fact that Obama is facing a reality where the budget needs to be cut to bring the deficit under control, whereas the past administration and congress continually lived in fantasyland believing that they could spend whatever they wanted.)

Better not: they'd know that SETI is useless and a waste of money.

If they understand orders of magnitude, they might know that Paulson's 800 Billion bank bailout or the $ 1 trillion (and counting) Iraq/Afghan wars could have funded SETI for more than 150,000 years which is a respectable percentage of our life as modern humans. That the costs

Why would interstellar civilization be much different? They could evolve from creatures like us; the "negative" traits of ours that you describe are a byproduct of us being highly expansionist as a species.

Yup. But some where along the progression of evolution, a successful civilisation has to drop some of these negative expansionist trait to be able to advance without obliterating itself. With great capabilities (like interstellar spread) comes also great power (like much more advance power source) and much more potential of destruction which has to be contained to avoid collapse.

---

As a small example, most of our instinct such as the Uncanny Valley, the tendency to think about everything as an "Us versus Them" problem or other forms of racism, stems from the remote past where our hominid ancestor were living in small packs/tribes. Where it paid, from an evolutionary point of view, to discriminate against outsiders, because thus you were discriminating in favor of the pack / the tribe and such most probably discriminating in favour of (distant) relatives.

But, humanity luckily learned to somehow overcome such instinct and push away the boundary of what it considers in a "Us versus Them" thinking, in order to be able to function in much bigger units than a pack / a tribe. Leading possibilities to build cities, states, and civilisations. Which were able to achieve much more advanced stuff than what was available to a small group of animals.

I suspect that, in order to achieve even bigger projects, like space colonisation, a civilisation needs to go beyond regional conflicts and reach a global planetary collaboration, to pool together the necessary resources & knowledge.

Currently, some of our terran population is spending a crazy amount of budget in local wars, while its local space agency is only having a fraction of it. Of course if we're spending more money in trying to find creative ways to inflict misery onto other member of our own specie, we're never going to reach an interstellar level of civilisation.

You actually mean less than one trillion right? Less than two percent of our total national debt?

I'm not saying it was a good use of our money, and I could spend all day naming things I would rather see it spent on (or, you know, I wouldn't mind keeping a little more of what I earn), but I'm tired of seeing people perpetuating this idea that the wars are directly responsible for a large portion of our debt.

Stop having so many wars... they're expensive! Iraq and Afghanistan, ~$150 billion a year. How many bullet train systems could you buy?

Not to justify the war in Iraq, but $150 billion a year isn't shit compared to the $2 trillion the government's spent on bailouts in the last year. Even going by the (likely biased) http://costofwar.com/, that's twice the amount spent on the entire Iraq and Afgahnistan wars. And that's just one year.

The point is, you can't just point out one thing and say, "It's because of that." The government's spending crazy amounts of money all over the place, on a TON of shit that it shouldn't be spending money on. I'm kinda surprised we keep voting in these morons. First Bush, now Obama. I'm almost scared to think about who's gonna be next.

This is such an oft-repeated notion -- "Reagen forced the Soviet Union to collapse by outspending them!" -- but is it true? There's much evidence that the USSR was on the verge of collapsing all by itself due to internal problems. I'm also pretty sure that the Russians knew that Reagans idea of putting hydrogen-bomb-driven X-ray lasers in space was the deluded fantasy of a scientifically-illiterate old fool. Russia may have cried foul about it, but that was just their way of using SDI as a political bargaining chip, and in no way implies that they actually thought it was going to come to fruition.

It's interesting that you suggest, as others have, that insane overactive military budgets are what led to the collapse of the Soviets, though. A couple of guys fly planes into buildings one time, and we blow nearly a trillion dollars to defeat "them", whoever "they" are. If we hadn't spent a trillion dollars on nonsense, we would have had it, and been able to keep our own economy from dying. But we did, so we didn't, so we couldn't. Our own little empire isn't doing so hot, thanks to military spending.

Wonder how much the treatment will cost? How many kids don't get to eat at school so that someone gets this treatment.

This website estimates 700 billion dollars in direct costs, if we figure a school lunch costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 dollars (have no idea what the actual average cost would be,) that's about 100 billion lunches I guess. Somewhere in there.

Oh wait a minute, you said treatment, as in the spinal cord repair. I thought for a minute you were talking about the Iraq war, Mr. Center-right conservative. Sorry, my bad.

I have no idea how much the treatment will cost. Pocket change to us, but as I always say, a tax dollar spent on something besides bombing someone is a terrible waste of a dollar.

I keep seeing people posting about how much more advanced than us a species would have to be to reach earth. I simply don't see why thats true. To my knowledge we have at least general knowledge of every major technology we would need to travel between stars, and thats with NASA never having had a budget over about $34B 2007 dollars, and currently closer to half of that. If we spent less time and money on killing each other and bailing each other out, and maybe cared about something other than our own social problems, there's no reason we couldn't have people on other planets as we speak.

Consider this:
For about $135B 2005 dollars we effectively went from flying propeller planes to repeatedly placing men on the moon.
Since 2001 we have spent about $865B in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since Fall of 2008 we have committed about $12.2 Trillion Dollars to "Economic Recovery" plans


The barrier between us and the stars is not some insurmountable technology one, its a matter of money and willpower. The only hope I see is that private interests (including SpaceX and other companies) will pursue these technologies (considering that hundreds of companies have higher revenue than NASA) otherwise I'm afraid we may never get off this miserable rock before we kill ourselves off. You wouldn't bet the uptime of a moderately important website on a single webserver, yet we continue to bet the survival of our species on a single rock floating in space.

Barring a massive program of depopulation

Well, there's your solution.

Well, except the USA's war in Irak proved that it cost much more than 10bn to go and kill a few civilians in a small region.
Nah, funding fusion is still cheaper. Could buy around 20 ITERs for the same budget.

I went to two of those tea parties. I protested on behalf of the fools and of the successful. Neither extreme, nor anyone in between, should be forced to give up their property against their will.

Hah! Ever hear of the IRS? They do it every day for over a century and a half. The roads aren't going to build themselves you know. Everybody pays taxes. And everyone benefits from having roads, too.

This whole tea party thing is just a gigantic public jackoff orchestrated by Fox news. Primarily because their guiding philosophy is "if their side does it, it's automatically bad." How about all those taxes you paid while Bush II held the reins? Why didn't those chap your ass? He did bailouts too you know, 700B worth as he walked out the door. And oh yeah, also got us into a seriously expensive war or two.

Where's your outrage over that? Oh yeah, there isn't any. Because the asshole who did all that has a (R) after his name, and not a (D), so it's okay.

It's like listening to a bunch of 5 year olds argue for chrissakes. Grow the fuck up already.

http://www.costofwar.com/ and various other sources estimate something like $400 to $700 billion total since the beginning of the war, which is more than all of those things except the tunnel combined. If you factor in some possible indirect costs, maybe we could have built that tunnel.

It costs $300 million PER DAY.

http://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+iraq+war
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/business/17leonhardt.html

Stop wasting taxpayer money!!

Yeah, we really should get our priorities straight.

At $50 PER SECOND can anyone think of a more expensive hobby? Diamond studded golf in the bayou? Occupying Iraq? I'd expect at least one person to sign up simply to say they've done the most expensive thing a human can do.

On a similar note, I wonder if Snoop Dogg will fly it just so that he can claim to have gotten higher than any other stoner ever.

If you're curious, as I was, the war in Iraq has taken somewhere on the order of 133,000,000 seconds and cost on the order of $434,277,000,000 http://costofwar.com/ for a cost of roughly $3,265/second, an impressive number to be sure, right up until you divide it by the number of taxpayers.

Excuse me, I need to go fight a land war in asia. Be back in a few minutes.

if we cannot take a stand on censorship, how can we possibly expect China to?

Fine, take a stand on censorship. But by hounding Google, you're doing it wrong. I can't say this enough, it seems, so I'll bring out the obnoxious bold letters again. Google has no impact whatsoever on whether or not the Chinese government censors its citizens. None. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Goose egg.

Could they take it up as an issue and maybe make an impact using their financial resources? Maybe. But then, they could also take up fighting genocide in Darfur. They could take up preventing AIDS in Africa. They could take up womens' reproductive rights. They could take up building tidal wave detection and alerting systems in southeast Asia. They could spend every dime they have on solving the world's problems. They already spend a lot. Which other ones should they take up? What do they have to do before they're no longer evil? Go bankrupt?

If anything, by hassling Google, you're actually being counterproductive, as there are much more effective means of trying to make positive changes than wasting your time griping about a company that has absolutely no say-so in the matter at all. Do you really feel so strongly that filtering search results in China is so evil that you should boycott Google for doing it? I'm sorry, but that's pretty stupid.

Plus, if this is the standard by which you judge whether a company is or isn't evil, then you're pretty much screwed supporting any company. As I've said, every company that deals with China at all has to abide by Chinese laws. Do you have a television? Did any of its parts come from China? You obviously have a computer, who made all of the components in it?

Oh, and what do you plan on doing about the U.S. government? That's right, our own government. You know that huge national debt that we keep hearing about? Guess who owns $416.2 billion of it? That's right: China. Just to put that in perspective, that's just shy of the amount of money that has been spent on the Iraq War. That's right, put another way, China is indirectly paying for our little experiment in spreading so-called democracy. (You sure as hell didn't think that we were paying for it, did you?) So unless you want to move out to the wilderness and get by on subsistence farming and hunting, I guess you're supporting oppression in various places around the world.

So of all the productive things that could be done to help unfetter the Chinese people from government oppression, and of all the ways in which you depend on China to live a normal life, why are you singling out Google to pick on? I mean, I already know the answer, but I'm interested in seeing what you have to say.

The war costs a little more than that: http://costofwar.com/

*sigh* regardless of what you think about the Iraq war (pre or post) you people need to get a handle on yourself and your facts. Judging from your apparent angle you should find this page acceptable: http://costofwar.com/ Find me the trillions you are speaking of? Even double it for money spent until we get out and to replace weapons. $750b. Second, this is debt - as is a large part of the rest of the budget. On an accrual basis the deficit is still > 500B/ year. And shall get much worse, not because of defense or other discretionary spending, but becasue of those wonderful things called entitlements. When your hero Obama comes up with a solution to funding the current gap in entitlement outlays then I'll listen to him talk about making broadband and whatever else a 'right'. I'll even forget about the 'redirection' of corporate efforts. Last - income taxes do not fund social security, medicare or medicaid so don't start with the 'tax breaks for the rich' bs.

And a whole lot of other useful things like teachers, public housing, additional health care and other benefits to our country if we weren't spending our money somewhere else at the moment.

The real problem is obviously that Bush wants to spend 10 billion now, instead of spending it when there was still hope that a nation could be built. But no, the money needed to go to Haliburton.

I went and found a cite for you http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com _wrapper&Itemid=182. Maybe the OP figured it was so easy to find that you wouldn't come back asking for a cite before at least googling a simple phrase like "cost of the iraq war" Looking further into it to make sure that site is not pulling numbers out of it's ass I checked this page http://costofwar.com/numbers.html which documents how they calculated the total from congressional documents.