Slashdot Mirror
Conquering the LaGrange Points?
3laws_safe writes "For decades, people have dreamed about building colonies at the five LaGrange points, intersections in space where gravitational and centrifugal forces balance out to provide orbital stability. But now, the official magazine of the U.S. Space Command advocates seizing control of the LaGrange points before other nations do it. From the article: 'We face the need to control the chokepoints of the solar system.' Arthur C. Clarke, who depicted a LaGrange colony in his classic 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust, is not very happy about this. He argues we should not 'export national rivalries beyond the atmosphere.' Is he right? Or should we prepare for the fact that such rivalries are inevitable, even in space?"
It's gonna be finders keepers with the LaGrange points. Those who wish to get them should get while the getting is good. I'd much rather the US take control of them than China, who seems to be the only other power with something like the capability.
Do I entirely trust the US government to be altruistic? No, not really. But I'd rather them be in control than the Chinese, Indians, or Russians. If you had to pick - and you probably do - which would you go for? That's really the question here.
While Clark sentiments are noble, they're equivalent to saying that we shouldn't even be having these rivalries here on the ground. He is correct, but wishing does not make reality so.
Space colonization is going to be like any other form of colonization in history, only with less killing of the natives. It's going to be a chance for each country's "Way of Life" to be exported abroad and for each country to seize resources for themselves so that they can dominate their rivals close to home. The fact that it's in space instead of across the sea is irrelevant.
This is history. Prepare to repeat it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You don't need a stable solar orbit when you can't even get to low-earth orbit reliably. Let's see how tomorrow's shuttle launch goes, then go back to dreaming about the military domination of the solar system later. Or maybe we can just the the &%$#* international space station finished, ferchrissake...
Have you read my blog lately?
Discussions assume that the LP is a tiny patch of ground that can be taken and defended. Really, how large a volume of space does the usable portion of the LP occupy?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Even if the conflicts in space are just the diplomatic/political kind (ie - we built a base here first - this section of Mars/Moon/Space is ours), and not the military kind - they are inevitable. The only reason they haven't happened is because there is no reason to claim territory in space - yet. But once it starts, every nation that can will start planting flags... its not a matter of if - its when.
It's stupid shit like this that makes other nations despise you.
I think most American citizens are fine people. It's time for you citizens to wrest control back from the evil scum who run your country.
If you do not, the inevitable outcome will be further degradation of your personal safety. You can not afford to let this happen.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
By 1996, 41 nations, representing more than 80 per cent of the earth's population, had signed the treaty. Of these, 27 nations were full voting members of the treaty organisation.
Provisions of the treaty can be changed only by unanimous agreement of the voting members.
The treaty also bans any military operations, use of nuclear weapons, or disposal of radioactive waste in Antarctica; encourages the free exchange of information from scientific research conducted there; and forbids nations from making any new territorial claims on the continent.
It, however, made no ruling on existing territorial claims.
Why isn't this a viable model for control of the LaGrange points? Seems like there is a lot less resources to exploit in the LaGrange points than in the antarctic... hell, there aren't even any penguins living in the LaGrange points!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
We need competition.
If there was one thing that drives space exploration its competition, not your starry-eyed dreams of free society, or the wonder to know and explore. There is a reason it was called the "Space Race". For the better part of 35 years we have done mostly nothing in our national space initative, sure we have mars rovers, comet impacting probes, and other devices we have yet to fully understand. But where have WE gone?
We have sat in the comfort of earth and lower earth orbit for more than 35 years. We have sat here because space has turned from something to have national pride for, to something that really only makes the news with its failures.
Everyone wants to find fault with NASA, the Administration, some scape goat, (And I will not argue with their faults), but no one wants to see the real reason why we are stuck at home.
We have no competition. None. No country to upstage us for a long time. There are people who remember why we went to space, and those people wrote this article. Competition is coming though, and we will be hard pressed to catch up, because that is what we will have to do, Catch up.
Yes we are technologically superior, and probably will be for the forseeable future, but if you can believe, space is not captured by technology, it is captured by the human spirit, the will, the drive that is in all of us, but we have somehow learned to ignore this with our endless safety and budget meetings. Space has been turned into routine.
Competition will come from China, yes, everyone would like to call them at least somewhat backwards, but that is a dangerous interpratation.
They are not backwards, but merely held back. Their genetic and social expansion has been curtailed by a government for the better part of thousands of years. Im not just talking about their recent communist regime. They will find their drive one day, and when they do, they will not be stopped. The fatal flaw that our space program has suffered, the degeneration into routine, will not be a factor for a population long held back.
We as a nation must see this, we must see this coming competition, and thrive on it as we always have. LaGrange Points, Mars, Asteriod Belt, these are places humans can learn to use for our benifit, they are above and beyond critical to our long term survival, and competition will get us there, one way or another.
There is truth in humor.
Because one general in an obscure military journal tossed out the idea doesn't mean that the US supports this position, is working towards achieving this goal, or really much else.
Colonizing, or capturing, or whatever exactly the military wants to do with the LaGrange points is decades if not centuries away, and decades if not centuries away from being militarily significant. It is in no way feasable right now, given the ballooning US budget deficit. Our current national debt could not take the strain that the financial burden of such an endeavor would entail. This is nothing more than one soldier's wet dream.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
History suggests otherwise. When ancient civilizations discovered other civilizations, did internal feuding stop? Consider the frist century of the USA: the Whiskey Rebellion and the Civil War come to mind. Or consider 19th-century Europe. Did the existence of external enemies cause all German-speaking peoples to unite? Not until late in the 19th century (and the result was the Holocaust uniting is not always good). Italy was similar. Or consider 20th century Africa. The existence of more militarily powerful civilizations outside of Africa in the 20th century had the effect of increasing the intensity and deadliness of war in Africa.
In short, you have a nice theory about human beings doesn't withstand scrutiny unless you believe that human beings will magically change and will no longer behave as they have throughout history.
Eventually, though...if you're willing to concede that it won't happen except on a multi-millenial timescale, then I'll buy it. Yes, eventually, the tendency for war may be bred out of human beings.
I like to think of it as how movies and video games taught me.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Civilization taught me that the first into space will be the only civilization that lives and even then we will inevitably fight amongst ourselves for supremacy of land and space. And regardless of what country we come from, there will be an intellectual divide that separates each faction of thought, whether it be a hive mind, militaristic, eco-friendly, or religion based mindset.
The Terminator Movie Series taught me that mankind is destined to destroy itself.
And Highlander taught me that there can be only one.
So ultimately, no matter where we go, we will want to be the first to claim our stake, and if there is a dispute, we will battle it out until all others are ultimately destroyed for that is our destiny until there is only one left.
Conflict is inevitable, but war isn't.
What does a country being democratic have to do with it?
I seem to recall the US removing several democratically elected heads of state in South/Central America just because they saw them as threats to US economic/polic interests...
Let's also not forget the Iranian coup, (from Wikipedia):
"By the 20th century Iranians were longing for a change and thus followed the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905/1911. In 1953 Iran's prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq, who had been elected to parliament in 1923 and again in 1944 and who had been prime minister since 1951, was removed from power in a complex plot orchestrated by British and US intelligence agencies ("Operation Ajax").
Many scholars suspect that this ouster was motivated by British-US opposition to Mossadeq's attempt to nationalize Iran's oil. Following Mossadeq's fall, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (Iran's monarch) grew increasingly dictatorial... His autocratic rule, including systematic torture and other human rights violations, led to the Iranian revolution and overthrow of his regime in 1979."
"Humans in space are still humans just like the one on this blue ball."
Actually, I'm not too sure of that. Numerous astronauts report that the trip into space changes a man - and I think I can understand that, sort of.
It's a radical change of perspective. Viewed from down here, our earth seems rather huge, and if you try to get the "big picture", the only way to do so is via maps. Conveniently, all those maps come equipped with fat, red, obvious national borders, making it easy to divide the earth in "us" and "them".
From space, it's totally different. Not only will you suddenly have a very hard time pinpointing your hometown, let alone your country. Also, it becomes hard to think of the planet as "big" when you buzz around it in less than two hour's time (the orbital period of the ISS is ~90min) and when the atmosphere is just a sliver over the sphere's mass. Or when you watch the earth shrink to the size of a ping-pong ball when making the minutest of celestial excursions, for example to our moon.
I find it very understandable that humans will act less crazy and childish in such an environment, and it's this hope for the betterment of mankind which made me an enthusiast of manned space travel.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
[...] which will necessitate extending national power into outer space, in order to enforce any claims on territoriality.
It is also worth noting, that it is extremely hard to enforce anything in space. Any space station (at a Lagrange point or anywhere else) can be knocked off with a minimum amount of effort and energy by a determined nation anyway. Space is such a hard environment that everything but cooperation would result in inevitable casualties.
We didn't fight the sovjets in space (nor did they fight us there) even when the Cold War reached its hottest phase. A physical confrontation in space would be just plain ridiculous...
... though we can't ignore human nature either.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Who says anyone must hold absolute control of the LaGrange points?
I mean, the same argument could be said for Antarctica -- if we don't turn it into a U.S. controlled territory, the Chinese will! Well, maybe if they were trying to monopolize access to Antarctica, we would care enough to do it first. In the meantime, many countries can conduct their own business on Antarctica and there are no problems.
Why treat space differently? Why would you, in anticipation of a conflict in the future, create one now? If you treat control of LaGrange as a binary choice -- either us or the Chinese have 100% control with no access at all for the other -- then you will bring that situation about. If you say that we will fight over LaGrange and thus we must claim it now and prevent the Chinese from doing so, then you only give them an incentive to take it for themselves, whether before or after we do.
I am fully aware that with history as our guide we can predict conflicts in space. Why assume that all such conflicts are unavoidable and that the only choice is preemptive action? History doesn't bear that out at all. History does say that when one side believes war is innevitable, then it is.
We don't have to go to war with China, over the LaGrange points or anything else. We don't. And only by believing that this is the case will it ever be possible.
So I say we treat it like Antarctica. Nobody claims it, nobody prevents others from accesing it, everybody benefits. If this model of peaceful coexistence breaks down, well hopefully we're not fools and are prepared. But let's not go creating conflicts where none exist yet, okay?
The enemies of Democracy are
They especially did not want to pay the monies owed to Britain for finally dispatching the one true threat in North America to all of the colonies, that being the French, during the Seven Years War/French & Indian War.
The mistake made by the British government was to impose socially unpopular taxes (sugar, stamp, tea, etc...) on the colonist to raise money which undercut the authority of the colonial legislatures. They then sent corrupt (from the colonist point of view) tax collectors to enforce the taxes further undermining local governance. The issue wasn't so much as 'why' the taxes needed to be levied, but rather the 'how'. If the British government instead had relied on the colonial legislatures levy their own local taxes for continued protection of the British army and help pay off the war debt the revolutionary war would potentially have been avoided.
By most measurements, the 13 colonies had the highest standard of living in the world at the time and truly did prosper under protection of the British crown. However, the failure of the British to understand the sensitivities of the colonists planted the seeds of discontentment and revolution.
A lesson that may be appropriate as people on Earth attempt to govern colonies in space.
First, your assertions do nothing to salvage the original claim that these countries somehow attacked America.
America tried to defend South Vietnam against North Vietnam.
When did they join the Union?
America successfully defended Kuwait against Iraq in the Gulf War. The current Iraq war is supposedly due to violations of the treaty ending the Gulf War.
The key word here here being "supposedly", yet even if it were true, which it is not, it was not an attack on America, and the WMD claims were lies by the Bush administration that were nearly as transparent at the time as they were now. The US was far more responsible than Iraq for kicking out weapons inspectors by infiltrating them with spies, which was never part of the deal, telling them they had to leave because the US was going to attack again, and forbidding them from ever reentering to resecure the real weapons sites that they had secured much more effectively than the Americans did (demonstrating that that was never the real intent of the American aggression). As incompetent as the UN was, it was not nearly as incompetent or vicious towards civilians as American operations there are today and Kofi Annan correctly judged the war as an unfounded, illegal war by the US.
I'm not a big fan of the current conflict, BTW. As an aside, claiming any dictator has the right to rule a country by force, which is what you did by talking about Iraq's sovereignty, is a strange belief.
Claiming that Sadaam had a right to rule by force was what the US administrations did repeatedly when Sadaam was still weak enough that he might have been overthown, but the US loved him because he was so good at slaughtering Iranians and we were helping him keep power and even target his chemical attacks.
If he had been universally opposed, he would have easily been overthrown and there would not be such a large opposing the US rule. Now, the US is the one ruling by force, responsible for at least a hundred thousand deaths and much more maiming, etc. You cannot impose democracy at the barrel of a gun. Taking sides in civil wars is silly. Disarming and declaring war on one army which basically had terrorism under control just to train a whole other set of army troops for the other side and hand victory to the Iranians is silly and has nothing to do with Democracy. Sadaam was our dictator, just as Bin Laden was our man in Afghanistan and most of the new, improved trained police there are just another dimension for another civil religious war and they are turning loose the same type of death squads that Sadaam had, initiated by American action which has not generally advanced rights at all, as many now-oppressed groups will readily tell you.
Bush is also a dictator over those who oppose his illegal immoral actions taken in the name of America. Just because the political process allows him to take power in an election where there were no credible alternatives does not mean he and his party should have absolute power to lie, cheat, steal, etc. as they do, without fear of any responsibility. Iran is also a democracy, which Bush ironically finds to be illegitimate for similar reasons. There is not as much a difference as you would like to pretend.
Sailing across the ocean changes a man. Spending a year in a foreign country changes a man. Having children changes a man.
Lots of experiences change us. But look back at the last three thousand years of human history, and you'll see that despite it all, people are still driven by the same basic needs and desires, have the same faults and flaws.
Don't think for a minute that the view out a window, however breathtaking, is going to fundamentally change the nature of the human race.
To have a war, you need two armies. The USA and most countries only have one federally-owned/funded/operated army.
150 years ago, the people had access to most of the same arms as the military, not even remotely so today. This makes revolutions practically unthinkable. So if something happens, it would have to be a coup d'etat, assuming the bureaucrats are still sufficiently vulnerable for that to work and enough people get sufficiently fed up with votes making things right or any sort of measurable difference.
A democracy should put the people's rights first but election funding ensures that politicians/parties have to sell out before they can enter the game.
and since im skeptical and youre claiming facts that you say none of us learned in our general education, could you cite some sources so at least *I* could look them up and know the truth?
thanks.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
Revolutions need not be violent. They can happen by civil disobedience.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
On the other hand, over 200 years ago, young Napolean Bonaparte defeated a crowd in Paris by using canons. His forces were severely outnumbered and both sides had guns, but only he had canons and liked to use them (being an artillery officer)...
(NRA, anyone?)
Georgia 2003, Ukraine 2004? Entirely peaceful, though... "Sell out" to whom? To machines? Any sell out is to people, and the fact, that people will wield more influence than others was always an accepted attribute of Democracy.An optimist might even add, that a good Democracy will try to ensure, that better people have more influence. How exactly this better is defined is what differenciates different regimes.
Finally, wondering even further off-topic, ensuring the "people's rights" is trivial -- the majority can still take its rights. What a Democracy should most concern itself with, is the rights of the individual, however unpopular she/he may be umong the people...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why do you assume that humans will stop recording and being interested in history?
I assume no such thing. Humans don't need anything as profound as astronomical distances or geologic time scales to forget. Cement is a good example; the West rediscovered cement by examining Roman structures. It had been forgotten for hundreds of years. People with the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphs did not exist for more than 1300 years. That's a lot of human generations that had absolutely no means of understanding the written record of an entire civilization.
The universe places no upper-bound on our species. Consider the probabilities involved when hundreds of thousands of years pass. Imagine the possibilities of loss and regression that could occur when pockets of humans are separated by tens or hundreds of light years. Aside from the radio emissions we've recently broadcast into the universe, today, one large rock is all that would be necessary to obliterate nearly all evidence that we exist.
Seems like an illogical position for you to take.
Given enough time and space in which to invent new tragedies and triumphs, it seems to me that the only "logical position" is to assume that eventually some of our progeny will not remember from whence they came. To fill in the gaps they, like us, will invent a history. Occasionally a Rosetta stone will appear and they will stand in awe as they consider what has been lost.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Here's the deal -- I don't care about most of this. Bottom line is that Bush has kept the homeland free of terrorism for the past 4 years or so. What happens in Smellistan is just noise.
Believe it or not, this sort of attitude from the rich countries of the West ("we look after our interest, and what happens to some poor bastards far away is just noise") is one of the things which breed terrorists and hatred towards Western civilization. I'm not a Pakistani, so I didn't take your post emotionally. Were I one, I'd probably like to spit in your face for your arrogance and stupidity.
If you think that 'homeland' will be kept free from fear for ever by using such tactics (pushing troubles abroad, to some Smellistans or Fuckraqs), you're just soo wrong and invite a repeat of 9/11.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)