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A Mars Mission's Greatest Challenge: Radiation
daSeiz writes "A New York Times article explores the possible effects of prolonged radiation exposure in deep space. Surprisingly, very little is known about the subject. We'll need to find innovative new ways of shielding spacecraft from fraction-of-lightspeed interstellar rubbish if we're ever to spend much time outside our own magnetosphere."
Deflector dish. DUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!1!1! Oh wait thats TV... It can work
http://www.users.muohio.edu/reamsjp/donate.html
I'm a pretty right wing, Iraq war supporting guy, so don't get this the wrong way, but that stat is most likely horribly wrong, I mean, did you look at how it was created?
Gallop asked 1178 Baghdad residents in August and September whether a member of their household had been executed by Saddam's regime. According to Gallup, 6.6 per cent said yes.
The polling firm took metropolitan Baghdad's population - 6.39 million - and average household size - 6.9 people - to calculate that 61,000 people were executed during Saddam's rule.
I mean, come on now. If you can't see at least one or two thing wrong with that survey, you just aren't looking hard enough. I'm sure it was a lot of people who truly were executed, but you shouldn't use stats from that survey.
Casual Games/Downloads
Okay then, if the number is 28,000, 32,000, or 51,000...does that make my point any different? The fact is, the article puts a human perspective on the ouster of Saddam, and that is woefully needed in a time when the opposition scratches and claws for every bit of news that can be spun politically. That is essentially the hypocrisy of the liberal mantra when it comes to the war in Iraq: they politicize every event, whether it be directly related to the war or peripherally related to the war, into something that can be used to amass politicaly capital when the crux of the liberal argument against the war is that Bush was politically motivated in taking us there in the first place!
I'm as excited as anyone about the prospects of sending humans to Mars and beyond, and I sorely wish the replies had stayed on topic. I stopped reading kuro5hin because it became an extension of indymedia or moveon.org. It's a shame that Slashdot is declining in the very same way.
Well, not to sound too bitter, but going to Mars seems like a much better way to spend billions than going to Iraq.
If the Martians start flying spacecraft into buildings on Manhattan Island and mailing anthrax around the US, I'm sure that BOTH parties will agree with you.
Or even if the Jupiterians do, and the Martians are suspected of funding them.
B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, we'd have had a lot of trouble without the help of - ironically enough - the French.
Besides, the billions we're spending now in Iraq had nothing to do with Iraqi lives. The original argument was to protect American lives and everyone else from the weapons of mass destruction Saddam was supposedly ready to unleash.
No. It was always about all of those things, and your "everyone else" included the people who live in Iraq. But actions to stop the mass murder of tens of thousands of people were not backed by UN resolutions, oddly enough. WMDs were, and Saddam was in clear violation of those by the UN's own standards. Not that they really cared much, but at least the issue was open. It's a little like arresting Al Capone on tax evasion charges rather than serial murder, which is exactly what happened.
If we had been serious about those 61,000 lives you mention, we could have saved many more of them for much less money if we had practiced a better policy in the middle east YEARS ago. But we didn't seem too upset about it then.
Er, sure. Give me the keys to your time machine and and I'll go take care of it. Actually, we were pretty upset in 1991, and we did everything we were authorized to do to stop those deaths, and more, from happening. Our misguided adherence to world opinion was responsible for thousands of deaths when the Kurds and Iraqis who thought they'd be rid of Saddam were killed when coalition forces stopped short. If not for the US-enforced no-fly zone and insistence on UN sanctions there'd have been even more death. Better policy sometimes means war sooner rather than later.
Anyone who says billions are better spent on war than on peaceful scientific exploration had better have some amazingly damn good reasons for war.
It's not really an either-or, but survival seems like a good reason. Or freeing countries from homicidal dictatorships so that their citizens can join us in contemplating the wonders of peaceful scientific exploration, instead of worrying about vanishing forever because they watched the Discovery Channel with a forbidden satellite dish.