Slashdot Mirror
Mars Rover Reaches Victoria Crater
gevmage writes, "CNN reports that the 'Opportunity' rover on Mars has reached the Victoria crater. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived on Mars three years ago with planned mission lifetime of 90 days. The rover Spirit is wounded, having only 5 of 6 wheels functioning, and so it's moving quite slowly. However, Opportunity is still going strong and has been trucking towards the massive crater Victoria for almost the past year. Scientists have been hoping that Opportunity would get there so they can have a look at geologically older areas — and it's finally made it!" See the NASA press release for links to photos of the Victoria crater.
to see the Victoria crater?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Space really is the final frontier. News stories like this never cease to brighten up my day, and give me hope for the future. Not to sound too corny, but do others find this is true?
yes.
Spirit and Opportunity are some seriously tough robots. My hat is off to the engineering teams that built them. How much longer will they go?
I wonder whether the rovers could potentially meet up somewhere. Is that possible?
I suggest you read Slashdot
Are those English Wheels or Metric Wheels?
According to the article - "Opportunity has been exploring Mars since January 2004" - no where near the three years reported by the poster. No offence, it's just that life is already going by at warp speed and there is no sense in rushing it. I am guessing the three year time frame included the trip to Mars as well.
Once the rover reaches the Victoria Crater, that will an end to Victoria's Secret!
The shuttle program may have been a mess but the rovers are one of the greatest accomplishments in space exploration to date and they just keep going. I'm guessing at least one of the rovers will still be going two years from now. There may have been failures along the way but in Mars research NASA has done a stunning job. Most other countries haven't had much luck getting probes to orbit Mars but NASA has had many successes. I'd love to see the shuttle program scrapped but I'm still a massive NASA fan. I would love to see probe go to some of the more interesting sites on Mars though. The poles and such. They would need a self contained power source though. Nowhere near enough light for solar.
when can the rover reach inside Victoria's Secret?
Spirit is the one who has seen the top of the mountain.
"We don't have major discoveries every week. But we do expect some major new discoveries when we get inside Victoria,"
Seeing projects like this really gives me hope about the space program. I mean, look at the ROI on this project: for a project that was only supposed to last 90 days, we've gotten over 1000 days of use out of it. Kinda makes up for the other "crater" project... =)
Honestly not trying to troll, but no, sorry, this does not restore my faith in humanity at all. Unfortunately, there are far too many things happening every day (take the recent school shooting in Colorado, for instance) to continually keep my faith in humanity pretty much nonexistant.
And while our exploration of space at this point does have practical applications for current-day life, a lot of it is also just a "cool, let's see what we can learn" sort of thing. Which, again, is of use both today as well as in the future. But with the way things are going here on Earth right now (The environment, anyone? Wars? Etc.), who knows if we'll ever really be able to put a lot of our knowledge from space exploration to full use and truly reach the final frontier.
Add an 's to get "Mars Rover Reaches Victoria's Crater" and you get the title of a well worn "video" I used to own.
Just out of curiosity--by what standards exactly, is China "making the US look pretty bad" in space tech?
They've managed--using Russian derivative technology--to put one man into space. Nothing shoddy, true, however the US and Russia each, with completely new technologies, doing something never done before, put people into space over 45 years ago. We put men on the moon about 35 years ago.
I'm all in favor of furthering space exploration, and China is a very welcome addition to the frame (I hope their involvement makes us go to the moon again frankly). Saying that they make NASA look bad though is ludicrous and ill-informed.
No, I'm afraid that things are not moving fast enough to stop the world and let me off.
Actually, now that I think of it, if most of you would just be so kind as to bugger off to Mars I'd probably start to like it here just fine.
KFG
Based on NASA's 2007 budget request, we could fund it for more than 100 years on what we've spent on the war in Iraq so far. We could fund it for 260 years with the money we've spent on the Defense Department in 2006. We could fund it for almost 300 years with the money Bush gave back in tax cuts for the richest 1%. The amount of money the Medicare Drug Plan is projected to cost over the next 10 years could fund NASA for 560 years.
NASA is not the first place you should be looking for answers to the government's budget problems.
And the tip was so pink that it was mouth watering.
Silly scientists! They should have ordered the Complete Care(TM) Accidental Damage service and they would have no reason to be so frightened. Any problem would be resolved till the next business day.
FTA: The rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived on Mars three years ago with planned mission lifetime of 90 days.
;-)
Are you sure these rovers were made in America??
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Or did any of you keep expecting a Transformer to pop into the picture?
There's a lot of good info and advice in the Bible...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Imagine the research and the discoveries we could do if there were no wars. If only a third or fourth of the DoD budget was given to scientists ... I guess you could have the ISS up and running in one year with just a few Ares V launches. It kind of makes a science-loving person a bit sad ...
Imagine how many scientific discoveries and inventions might never have been made if there were no wars.
It's a popular complaint though, because as opposed to the war in Iraq enhancing the US society every day it goes on, NASA isn't achieving anything good for it with their funding. :-p
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Yes and all wars ever are going to magically disappear when we erase the DoD. I'd love a toke or two on whatever you're smoking.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
It's positive to see we won't grow bored quickly once humanity gets tired of playing war. But if you compare the budget spent on war and compare that to space exploration, it's more of a depressing thought.
It does send out a great message saying "look what we can do with today's technology", but most people seem to lack a sense of imagination to see the possibilites if we really were determined to go out there. In fact, we should have been a lot further if you simply look at people were doing 40 years ago. Now we can start all over.
Personally I'm awaiting the arrival of the first melting pot on the moon. That would mean we're in business.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Please keep your particular brand of emo out of the voting booths, thanks.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Yeah. Things like radar, sonar, high performance jet engines, compact wireless telegraphy, nuclear power and computers would all have been invented so much quicker if there hadn't been wars to get in the way.
Have you noticed that the countries with the largest militaries are the one's with the most capable space programs? Have you noticed that the countries with socialized medicine and minimal military are not in space, or they largely piggy back on the former? I think things are a bit more complex than you suggest. Now I'm all for greatly increasing NASA's funding, but getting rid of the Pentagon will do more harm to NASA than good. The place to cut the budget is all the damn pork projects that do nothing other than get incumbants re-elected. Some of these are in the Pentagon, but many are outside of it. Pork is one of the few things conservatives and liberals agree on.
"The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win."
Robert A. Heinlein
They are amazing. The rover architecture is obviously a great success. It makes me wonder why we are not sending many more identical or slightly upgraded craft. There is a single larger rover planned for 2009, but it seems to me that it is unlikely to out perform a larger number of cheaper craft and that a replan was in order. But for sheer exploration it is hard to beat these things.
an ill wind that blows no good
Therefore, we should fully fund DARPA -- and halve the rest of the DoD budget!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
if they were attached to swallows, how many coconuts could be carried?
You can't handle the truth.
Will Vista be released before even one of the rovers dies?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Imagine how many scientific discoveries and inventions might never have been made if there were no wars.
Shouldn't take long to do it, since half of the technological advances are BECAUSE of war, including the internet, the rockets/missle that NASA launches on, and the majority of spending in the sciences.
You don't have to like war to understand that while the price is high, so are the rewards for the victors. The key is being the victor.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Various mechanisms involving dust, wind, steep slopes, etc. have been proposed, see this article.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
And in the case of Germany, the rewards are great for the losers. I'm no historian, but everything presented so far leads me to believe that Germany was much better off after WWII than it was before. I suspect Japan is too, but it may be that I am looking though too thick a cloud of cultural bias.
Despite out ability to do 'Really Bad Things' we still move on.
We create stone, and bend metal to our desires. We can talk nearly instantly accross the globe.
We have been to the moon and have sent a machine to the edge of the solar system. Everyday people go out off there way to help others in some way.
Yeah, they're are asses, and bad people, but MOST people are good most of the time.
So overall humanity is a great, and can do amazing things every day.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I just got two monitors in my office... looks like I have a new wallpaper for them! Sweet!
Funniest comment I've read in ages, and to think I nearly took offence because I thought you were serious......... :p
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
...but how does nasa protect Freedom?
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
Imagine living in a world where a school shooting wasn't news.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The Alachua County Health Department could have designed GPS if they had the kind of money the military does. The things we civilians have that were originally military projects are in the civilian sector because there is a need for them. We would have everything we have today, and maybe even sooner, if the money had gone to NASA, for instance, instead of the military.
When the government designs something that should last two or three years, it never lasts more then 90 days before failing. When the government designs these things that are supposed to last 90 days, they end up lasting two or three years. I wonder if they should start designing everything to last 90 days, as they might do a little better that way :-)
Congratulations to all of the people who worked on the MER mission! It has been a pleasure and a tremendous source of pride to watch Spirit and Opportunity work on the surface of Mars. Keep up the great work on this mission and on the NEXT!
Excelsior!
Steven Squires, the science director for the Mars rovers has stated that Opportunity will likely spend a lot of time at the crater, which is a scientific gold mine. They want to analyze the exposed subterranean material on the crater walls. I get the impression that the rover may ultimately be asked to go cautiously into the crater and likely spend the rest of its life there. It could go for a while, or it could die any minute. Should it fail while in the crater, it will leave a rich scientific treasure trove behind. There really aren't any other better scientific objectives in the vicinity, and to get the most out of the crater, it will have to go in. I'm not sure it will have the power to climb back out, but, atleast it'll be easy to find once we get there ;)
> Unfortunately, there are far too many things happening every day [...] to continually keep my faith in humanity pretty much nonexistant.
You would really rate our society on the basis of the worst we have to offer? What a pessimistic view of the world! I, for one, will look at mankind's heroes when evaluating. I suggest not letting the actions of outcast individuals craft your view of humanity, especially when those actions are legally and morally opposite to society at large. Instead, celebrate with us the accomplishments of the great humans who let us stand with them in their triumphant light. These scientists chose to explore another world, place semi-autonomous probes on either side of that planet, and share, with all of us, those sights over our worldwide telecommunication network. How can you let the actions of so few others overcast the amazement of truely landmark accomlishments?
I know... Let's stop funding the federal government with income tax altogether and then I get to keep MY money. There seems to be this weird idea these days, that somehow this is the government's money and that they give US tax cuts. No, it's mine. The government takes it from us, folks, sometimes by force. Voluntary tax system my ass! It really seems crazy to me that the same people who cry about how horrible the government is, are the same ones who insist on encouraging its growth by demanding that we give it more money to waste. If that's not stupidity, then I don't know what is.
No federal income tax.(I'm just slightly less opposed to state income tax, because I at least have a tiny bit more say at the state level and if Im really pissed, I can just move away from that state) That way, if I want to fund private space ventures, then I can voluntarily do so. By the way, I like tax cuts (the Bush tax cuts did benefit me) and I'm not rich.
</rant>
There was a time when movies had plots. So you knew who's ass it was, and why it was farting.
-Not Sure
Well, perhaps we will need precisely some of the knowledge we gain from space exploration in order to overcome problems we are facing here on earth. Perhaps if we had never had NASA or some equivalent somewhere in the world, we would have no chance of surviving the problems we might have with the environment, for instance.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
If a nation progresses ahead of its neighbors scientifically or economically but invests nothing in its military, that nation will promptly be attacked, invaded, and conquered by a neighboring country. The key to surviving is to spending enough on the military so that it is more expensive for another country to successfully attack you than to conduct the scientific research and economic development on their own.
I can see the Spiritists are out in full force today.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
How very democratic of you. At least you were only modded "funny" and not "insightful." Ever stop to think that so-called "pessimists" might actually be motivated to seek change in things that they feel are fucked up? Viewing things in a negative light is not equivalent to giving up.
The actions of a few "outcast individuals" do not erase great accomplishments that we achieve. At the same time, great accomplishments don't erase all of the truly vile shit that's going on out there. I'm not just talking about one single shooting, or even our destruction of the environment, or global violence. Those are all just microcosms of the bigger picture. It's fun and easy to always look at and celebrate the good stuff, but some of us don't want to do that at the expense of ignoring things that need to be fixed. And also, all it takes is a few of "the worst we have to offer" to fuck things up for the rest of us.
I didn't mean in space tech specifically, but in general. Just today a "successful" fusion was announced, and they figured out how to blind US satellites.
The government can't save you.
I think you missed my point, or misread my post. I was rebuffing the parent's belief that wars (or at least military spending) got in the way of science.
Do you honestly think that just throwing money around will eventually result in scientific progress on par with nuclear energy or high-performance jet propulsion?
Actually they've put up three. See Shenzhou 6 for the other two.
Good for them. "China" also announced an AIDs cure a couple months ago. Anyone can make announcements, I'll start being impressed when I see more than propaganda.
After all - we were never on the moon so why should we now believe we have a remote control rover on mars?
..it's a crater alright.
The rover Spirit is wounded, having only 5 of 6 wheels functioning, and so it's moving quite slowly.
Actually, spirit has stopped because it does not have enough power to move very far during Martian winter, and they would rather camp it on a small slope facing the sun than risk getting stuck without sunlight and freezing its parts to death. Spirit camped last Martian winter also for several weeks for a similar reason.
When Winter is finished (soon), it will rove again. However, it will not be near as nimble as it was with all 6 wheels.
Opportunity is at a slightly better lattitude for sunlight, and has been on flat areas this winter, so it does not need such winter camping.
Table-ized A.I.
Ah you're correct, I forgot about that flight. thanks for the correction!
wow, this is hilarious. I see a slashdot lead-in extolling the longevity of the mars rover program and think, "I'm gonna go in there and post a comment blaming President Bush for something, just as a joke" ... and, lo and behold, there it was, already waiting for me. Modded 5 Insightful to boot.
I'll give you credit, based on the timestamps it actually took all of 35 minutes for you to turn a discussion of astronomical exploration into a rant about Iraq and tax cuts.
[about 35 years ago.] Slight connection: The first U.S. Moon Landing was Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969 which was more than 37 years ago.
But in space, nobody can hear you count.
Table-ized A.I.
On the other hand, you look at this accomplishment, and then you wonder why the world's most popular operating system is successfully attacked by 13 year olds.
What was once true, is no longer so
The USA is 5-for-6 in successfully landing it's landers (only failure was the Mars Polar Lander). Viking 1, 2, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity all were successes (and wonderful successes at that).
USSR had zero landers successfully make it.
The ESA is 0-for-1 in landers.
Yeah, I've heard this explanation from you people who "really" know the story. Anyone else sick of these monday-morning quarterbacks? After Pathfinder lasted months instead of 30 days, they accused them of "knowing it'd last more than 30 days anyway." What, now you're gonna claim they KNEW it'd last 2.5 years?
Granted, if they lasted 98 days, and tried to sell that as "wildly exceeding expectations!" or played with the numbers like "Almost 10% more time than we thought!" then you'd have something. But sometimes, a cigar is a cigar: this is an AMAZING accomplishment, and 90 days to have a remote control rover working millions of miles away is NOT a pessimistic estimate, especially since that's around how long Pathfinder lasted...
OK. I agree with you, but consider this... something like HALF the taxes we pay goes just for interest on the debt! What I would like is if Congress could get the DEBT under control before the fscking government collapses.
If we had a ballanced budget AND got rid of useless spending such as NASA, optional wars, AmTrak, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Weapon systems that we don't need, National Endowment for the Arts, Federal Department of Education, UN, National Parks, etc, etc. then we could have a REALLY FUCKING BIG TAX CUT!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Minimal "professional" army, socialized medicine, and still goign strong on rocket science.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Not so much humanity, but it does restore my faith in robots. Is it just me, or did anyone else recall R2D2's trip across the desert in STAR WARS?
For people that like the rovers and hadn't stumbled upon it before:
http://midnightmarsbrowser.blogspot.com/
"the Midnight Mars Browser software, which allows home users to download images and view slideshows and "virtual reality" panoramas from the Mars Exploration Rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity"."
it is really awesome, try it out, you get the latest pics from Mars virtually real time (before they're up @ jpl's site.)
Pannable and zoomable panorama's, false colour and true colour movies etc etc.
Minimal "professional" army, socialized medicine, and still goign strong on rocket science.
Really, they have progressed from the "minor league" of unmanned flight to the "major league" of manned flight?
Unfortunately, there are far too many things happening every day (take the recent school shooting in Colorado, for instance) to continually keep my faith in humanity pretty much nonexistant.
I disagree. The amount of evil like that is really *very* small. USA is 300 million people nation, yet a thing like that makes national news, because it happens so very rarely.
All that stuff would have been discovered eventually since the markets that they serve today would have found they were useful.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... it is clear that whatever progress is achieved in science during wars, it is not worth it.
Most stuff whose development is speedied during wars would have reached fruition anyway given its usefulness.
People always talk about how much war advances science forgetting to mention all the brilliant people (scientists, students, engineers) that are killed sensesly in the process.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
My blood just boils when people make these ascertions without giving them a second thought. They have bought in the popular wisdom spread mostly in countries in which, oh surprise, the economy is highly dependent in selling death machines.
If you think that science in Iraq, Sudan, Palestine or Afghanistan is going to be advanced at all thanks to the ongoing wars there, I venture with confidence that you are an idiot.
The countries in which some scientific advancement is gained during conflicts do so because they already have a research infrastructure in place. THis research infrastructure would produce useful science no matter what, the tax in human misery is an unnecessary price to pay and it is frankly disgraceful that there are pople thinking in those terms.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
To say that the rewards are great for the losers shows such an abismal ignorence that I don't know where to start.
But lets start somewhere.
Germany was the second country with more people killed after the USSR, this without accounting for the people killed in the demented genocide that took place there. Entire towns like Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig were literally removed from the face of earth, and ever since then Germans, most of who by now had nothing to do with the war, have to deal with a national anguish that is difficult to appreciate unless you have been there (which let me venture, you haven't).
As for Japan they had to endure two atomic bombs. I don't in which demented univers that may be compensated by economic prsperity a few years down the road. Not in mine surely.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The countries with space programs are the ones big enough and rich enough to afford it, and the desire to impress one's neighbours. First it was the USA and the Soviets. Then it was the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese (no, the Europeans and Japanese don't have their own crewed launch vehicles, but the Europeans are planning to build one). The Indians are in the advanced stages of a moon probe. Key common factors: big economies. Key differences: almost everything else.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The US ingored blantantly most of the Geneva convention during the Vietnam War.
Vietnam, in spite of this, is better off now.
This is due to adopting market reforms and has nothing to do with the existence of the UN or the Geneva convention.
How in your mind economic development after a war is linked to reasonbale safeguards against butal behaviour is beyond my comprehension.
We have seen plenty of conflicts (Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, Yugoslavia) in which the Geneva conventions and the UN were just meaningles words and the countries that suffered these conflicts don't seem much better off for it , as a matter of fact, not respecting such conventions becomes a deterrent for progress and investment, as the US sponsored situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine sadly shows.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your first assertion are a bloody statement of the obvious. It is like saying that countries with the largest militaries are also leading examples of armored tank development. Well, doh.
How your mind tries desperately to link socialized medicine with space travel is amusing to read, it should be enough to say that correlation is not causation...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
On the one hand - on the other hand, the biggest incentive there could possibly be to fire up the space program was if you had good reason to leave the planet. I mean, yeah we talk about how bad it is here, but if we take the most gloomy predictions of us causing global warming and killing the ozone layer and killing the rain forest and so on - but it's not like your SUV would stop working, or that McDonalds would run out of food.
Now, let's say we had a nuclear holocaust, global winter, most of the world irradiated and uninhabitable, not *that's* incentive to terraform Mars (and not screw up again...) You saw how much could get done in the 1960s just because it was a top priority. If you got that kind of incentive on starting a Mars colony, it would happen in a decade or two.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Have YOU ever stopped to think that some of the things you are so pessemistic about are red-herrings? The Environment? Is there anyone other than high-schoolers, leftover hippies and Al Gore that still think we puny humans are capable of "Destroying the Environment"? And no, please don't trot out all your Pseudo-scientific "evidence" to try and convince me, it won't work.
I've had plenty of time, as a reformed environmentalist, to study the issues and learn that we humans have little to no lasting impact on the overall health of our planet's environent. Yes, we can temporarily kill small areas of the earth, but unless we work at keeping them dead, The earth reclaims those areas within a few years.
Frankly, I have seen enough data to convince me that even with a concerted effort by all humans on the earth to make it totally uninhabitable to human life, we could not accomplish it. We might make some areas really unpleasant, we might kill off most of the human population in the process, but we simply could not ruin the environment. We just don't have the power. It is a strange arrogance that makes people think that we could.
As far as war goes, there will always be wars of one kind or another for as long as people exist. That is just a fact of life, it's time to grow up and get used to it.
So stop being so emo, grow up, and for criminy's sake lose the black clothes and get some slacks and a polo shirt!
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
...have they found out what Victoria's Secret is?
(yeah, yeah, -1, Groan)
Several of the software routines allocated just three digits to counting Martian days (Sols) and the mission is about to exceed one thousand in October. So they had to correct the software. The software also shifts the main transmission frequency. The new Reconanaissance Orbitor has just started photography. Its transmissions use up musch of the deep space network capacity.
The nice thing about the martian rover robots is their reprogramability. They've solved several problems with uploads, e.g. flash memory overflow, dead wheels, Y1K, etc.. Plus they've created new capabilities, e.g. automatic detection of dust devils without having to uplaod huge image files to Earth.
No, I wouldn't expect this particular event would restore your faith in humanity. What confuses me is why people are so quick to say they've "lost faith in humanity" in the first place.
As morbid as it is, I'm almost pleased to find out that an entire nation is absolutely shocked by an event like a school shooting. To me, that is an indication that the lives of tens of people are worth far more than they were not too long ago. Like it or not, that's real progress for a species.
Wars are also horrible, but we see them happening in smaller and smaller theaters, effecting fewer and fewer people than only decades ago.
There is, what seems to me, a huge upswing in environmental awareness. Vehicles that run with the assistance of batteries, alternative fuels or alternative fuel blends are on the road right this second. That's real.
Private companies are now able (and have plans to) launch people into space with relative ease, at very little expense. Space exploration is clearly further along than it has ever been.
Medical science is making headlines every day in its effort to deal with our worst diseases.
Oh, and for all our squables over politics in one particular nation in the world, the platforms have largely shifted from direct opposition to "which one can convince me they'd do a better job at X". Both parties try to convince us they can protect more lives, both claim they can make real progress in environmental awareness, both claim they can protect our financial futures. They just claim different approaches will be more effective. Still we bicker, but that's OK because it moves us forward and keeps the government in line. That says to me that anyone who doesn't think the government ultimately answers to the people isn't paying attention.
So aside from it being a popular thing to say, I don't understand why people are so upset about the human condition. There is always work to do, but I think we're making constant progress. The only question is whether or not I'm doing what I can to assist.
I've been convinced that leaving our planet serves no function towards increasing our quality of life. Everyone says "get off this rock" like they, and only like-minded friends, would get to go. We will take our problems with us wherever we go, and I think we should do our best to solve them now.
That's not to say we shouldn't be working on bigger goals like what you're talking about, I just don't think leaving earth is a solution to anything.
Having seen several replies along this vein, I am surprised that people can actually believe this. Necessity is the mother of invention. War brings a special kind of necessity. War focuses the research more on application and less on theory. It results in real tangible, usable technologies. Peacetime research can also do this but it often focuses more on the theoretical and lets the market create the products and people often hesitate to do this, a product has to be proven to be profitable before it is made. During wartime profit is of no consequence, the product can be useful thus it is made, then that serves as proof to the marketplace and it moves into civilian hands. Do you really believe that peacetime research brings practical product to the market than wartime reseach?
Yes; I am always amazed when we can send a little box with wheels and camers millions of miles away, and control it remotely, and it works! Just getting the rover onto the surface was an incredible feat; the fact that it continues to operate is even more amazing.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
There is an strong element of self-importance in the notion that the earth needs us. But this argument is also a very common, insular, fatalistic generalization that allows you to conveniently ignore the huge effect we actually do have on the environment in which we subsist every day - a primary focus of environmental science of which you are a major beneficiary. By all means, tell the folks with cancer from depleted uranium shells that the earth will be fine without them.
It's a case of letting someone else deal with the problem while declaring immunity from it - perfectly acceptable to those who either don't mind shitting where they eat, or putting their shit in someone elses backyard.
The mind is it's own beautiful prisoner.
By the time the other countries had caught up with the modernization of freshly rebuilt German factories, Germany had a heavy PR advantage in being known for high quality wares, which served them for a few decades more.
As far as calling the loss of a large proportion of your younger male population (i.e. anybody of soldier age), and the destruction of entire cities as leaving you better off .... Does this mean that you're advocating letting Al Quada (or US agents masquerading as them) blow up random US cities with 'rogue' nukes? It should, in your theory, have a very similar effect.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I keep forgetting my rule about responding to comments on Slashdot, which is to read the "home" web site of the poster. Someone who identifies themselves as "Bitterlittleman" is not the person to tell "don't look on the bad side of things."
Who cares. Medical research could be sped up a lot if we allowed vivisection and human testing. The cost to humanity is too great despite any benefits, so we don't do it. War is no different. Sure it spurs research in some areas that wouldn't be funded outside of wartime. So be it, we can do fine without.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I would dispute what you say, but just knowing that the worlds scientific community is nearly united in opposition to what you say is enough for me. I won't waste my time.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Unlike the constant murders in the middle east which barely make headlines anymore.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Actually, the hardware design calls for around 3 months. They rovers nearly died out a few months in, but a freak windstorm actually HELPED them by "cleaning" off the solar panels. THis was unexpected and not anticipated.