Posted by
michael
on from the burial-not-exactly-the-right-word dept.
roman_mir writes "Celestis is the name of a company that is offering space burials for some $11K USD. Isn't this nice, like there is not enough garbage in space already... So, how many of you want to be buried in space? I want to burn in the Sun (or at least the egomaniacal part of me.)"
I want to burn in the Sun
by
Threni
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
We all will...eventually. You'll be dead anyway, so why does it matter if you get toasted in the months following your death rather than a few hundred million?
I'll beat that price!
by
Simonetta
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
For only $10,000 US (deposited in my Swiss bank account before your transistion to the next world), I will...
receive your ashes from the cremation facility,
and...
Give you a multi-colored ink-jet printed certificate that your ashes will be on the next space-shuttle flight and scattered into low-earth orbit. Where they will cause millions of tiny little twinkles that commemorate your life...
and...
Make sure that your ashes (in real life) don't make a big mess in the parking lot behind my apartment.
Your easy answer is, alas, too easy.
by
rjh
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
it DID cause the cold war
More accurately, it kept the Cold War from becoming hot. The Cold War was going to happen regardless of whether we dropped a nuke or Martha Stewart on Hiroshima. The US and the USSR were (are) both ideologically expansionist powers, in that each wanted to see its ideology adopted by the rest of the world. When two expansionist powers come into conflict, there's going to be a cold war and most likely followed by a very hot one. Unless, of course, both sides know that a hot war would be a literal hell on earth, thus giving both sides a strong incentive to not start a hot war.
Did we come close to nuclear war in the Cuba embargo? Damn straight. Why didn't we exchange nukes? Because both sides were reluctant to.
For the first time in the history of the world, we've invented a weapon which has not been used for over fifty years. That has never happened before.
I actually rather like the Bomb. It's a simple, one-question choice: are we as human beings morally developed enough to be allowed to continue existing?
It's a one-question exam, scored pass or fail. So far, humanity has made the right choice. I think that's rather hopeful, myself.
If any other country committed such an atrocity against another as the United States did to Japan, we would have World War 3
I see. So we could either kill 250,000 Japanese (and several thousand Korean slave workers who were in Hiroshima when the Bomb hit, and several thousands of other nationalities, too) in two attacks so terrible, so catastrophic, so Wrath of God, that the Japanese surrendered... or we could go forward with Operation Olympic and kill millions of Japanese and millions of Americans.
After the Nagasaki bomb hit, the Emperor was willing to surrender. Do you know what his aides' response to this was? They tried to murder him so that he wouldn't be able to surrender; and without an Emperor who could sign a surrender, it would've condemned Japan to decades of warfare. That's how hardcore, how serious, the Japanese generals, warmongers and militarists were: they wanted the world to end.
By nuking two cities, the United States forced a surrender.
Was dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. No matter what arguments you make for it being a war crime, there are powerful and compelling arguments that not dropping The Bomb would have been a greater crime. And no matter what arguments you make in defense of The Bomb, you cannot argue away 250,000-plus people wiped out in an instant, their shadows etched onto the sides of buildings.
I have no answers. I only appreciate the spectacular difficulty of the question. That you have found easy answers strongly suggests to me that you have no appreciation of the question.
In the end, humanity is advanced more by people who have no answers than by people who have answers without understanding the questions.
Slashdot Mirror
We all will...eventually. You'll be dead anyway, so why does it matter if you get toasted in the months following your death rather than a few hundred million?
For only $10,000 US (deposited in my Swiss bank account before your transistion to the next world), I will...
receive your ashes from the cremation facility,
and...
Give you a multi-colored ink-jet printed certificate that your ashes will be on the next space-shuttle flight and scattered into low-earth orbit. Where they will cause millions of tiny little twinkles that commemorate your life...
and...
Make sure that your ashes (in real life) don't make a big mess in the parking lot behind my apartment.
it DID cause the cold war
More accurately, it kept the Cold War from becoming hot. The Cold War was going to happen regardless of whether we dropped a nuke or Martha Stewart on Hiroshima. The US and the USSR were (are) both ideologically expansionist powers, in that each wanted to see its ideology adopted by the rest of the world. When two expansionist powers come into conflict, there's going to be a cold war and most likely followed by a very hot one. Unless, of course, both sides know that a hot war would be a literal hell on earth, thus giving both sides a strong incentive to not start a hot war.
Did we come close to nuclear war in the Cuba embargo? Damn straight. Why didn't we exchange nukes? Because both sides were reluctant to.
For the first time in the history of the world, we've invented a weapon which has not been used for over fifty years. That has never happened before.
I actually rather like the Bomb. It's a simple, one-question choice: are we as human beings morally developed enough to be allowed to continue existing?
It's a one-question exam, scored pass or fail. So far, humanity has made the right choice. I think that's rather hopeful, myself.
If any other country committed such an atrocity against another as the United States did to Japan, we would have World War 3
I see. So we could either kill 250,000 Japanese (and several thousand Korean slave workers who were in Hiroshima when the Bomb hit, and several thousands of other nationalities, too) in two attacks so terrible, so catastrophic, so Wrath of God, that the Japanese surrendered... or we could go forward with Operation Olympic and kill millions of Japanese and millions of Americans.
After the Nagasaki bomb hit, the Emperor was willing to surrender. Do you know what his aides' response to this was? They tried to murder him so that he wouldn't be able to surrender; and without an Emperor who could sign a surrender, it would've condemned Japan to decades of warfare. That's how hardcore, how serious, the Japanese generals, warmongers and militarists were: they wanted the world to end.
By nuking two cities, the United States forced a surrender.
Was dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. No matter what arguments you make for it being a war crime, there are powerful and compelling arguments that not dropping The Bomb would have been a greater crime. And no matter what arguments you make in defense of The Bomb, you cannot argue away 250,000-plus people wiped out in an instant, their shadows etched onto the sides of buildings.
I have no answers. I only appreciate the spectacular difficulty of the question. That you have found easy answers strongly suggests to me that you have no appreciation of the question.
In the end, humanity is advanced more by people who have no answers than by people who have answers without understanding the questions.