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NASA's Plutonium Supply Dwindling; ESA To Help
astroengine writes "NASA's stockpile of the plutonium isotope Pu-238 is at a critical level, causing concern that there won't be enough fuel for future deep space missions. Pellets of Pu-238 are used inside radioisotope thermoelectric generators (or RTGs) to generate electricity for space probes traveling beyond the orbit of Mars — solar energy is too weak for solar arrays at these distances. Blocked by a contract dispute with Russia to supply Pu-238 and the US Department of Energy that has not been granted funds to produce more of the isotope, NASA lacks enough of the radioisotope to fuel the future joint NASA-ESA mission to Europa. However, the head of the European Space Agency has announced that they have plans to commence a new nuclear energy program to alleviate the situation."
Pardon my ignorance and possible first post - but couldn't NASA just recycle some retiring nuke warheads for plutonium?
I have a chili recipe that produces a - er - "slurry" so radioactively hot, it could be used to power spacecraft...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
NASA is launching quite soon a spacecraft to Jupiter relying on solar panels. And the ESA spacecraft part of mentioned joint mission will also rely on solar panels. Seems they have improved quite a bit / I wouldn't be too surprised at seeing, eventually, some mission to Saturn relying on them.
Not saying that we don't need RTGs, we do of course (for further missions or more complex ones; using solar panels whenever possible saves RTGs for those...), but part of the premises of TFS is not terribly accurate.
One that hath name thou can not otter
NO! No I say! This just proves that America can't do everything, it just proves how weak we are and how strong they are that we are working with them. Strong people don't need to work with anybody else, only weak people do. Just need to get that out of the way before the other 200 posts saying the same thing.
They just need to construct additional pylons. Problem solved.
What is the airspeed of a fully laden swallow?
Seems like the US is passing on, or simply overlooking an opportunity to create a new small industry, making what is sure to be a product with increasing demand.
Everyday You see me is the worst day of my life -Office Space
Pu
Cultural Victory? Nope.
Diplomatic Victory? Nope.
Space Race Victory? Nope.
That leaves Domination Victory and Conquest Victory.
Decisions, decisions.
You have issues dude. I identify myself as Muslim and it's a creed, but science-wise "Muslims" (Middle East) have lost it (i.e. stop being mad about it).
Yes, Algebra and Algorithm are Arabic words traced to the amazing Mohammed Ibn Musa Al-Khawarizmi (who was "Persian" btw, yes, the people we intend to bomb), and f#@king YES, India was there first.
But that doesn't take from him (or his civilization/creed) the right to call the names.
(For the purposes of this post, I will interchange creed and civilization, even though they're far-far-FAR from being the same thing).
It's a phenomenon Neil Degrasse Tyson describes as "Naming Rights" (I'm no scholar, so maybe it has another name). But basically, when a nation/region excels and innovates, they get the right to name their discoveries and they effectively "own" them.
Why is the rest of the world using .hk, .uk and .whatever domains? Why is the US the only country that enjoys .gov, .mil and .edu without a trailing .us?
Because, this s$#t was invented here, and "we"* earned it.
Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Pluto.. all Greek mythology names, why? They were "it"** back in the day.
So, what happened to the Muslim world? Well, Al-Ghazali decided to take them 300 years back into oblivion.
No scientist/mathematician/programmer/thinker/etc. would ever express prejudice. Empathy and sorrow for ignorance, maybe, but not hatred.
Now... where are we? We have racism (been to AZ lately?), prejudice (Muslim/Jew/*INSERT RELIGION* haters) and a whole lot more.
A lot of Americans do not believe in evolution or other scientifically proven facts. We kill our enemies for our "god-given" rights and we (the majority of us) want religion taught in school.
I wonder if GWB was our "Al-Ghazali", or maybe it will be Obama. Whomever it is, we must stop it and freaking move forward. Otherwise, we're fscked. We'll be the nation that our grandchildren and history talks about as "they invented XYZ, but muhahaha, look at them barbarians." And the elite nations at the time will nuke the ish out of them for being so backwards.
I want us to prevail, but with attitudes like yours and the extreme ignorance level the populace have, I'm afraid it's already too late.
I better start learning Chinese (Ni Hao) :(
And finally; to be on-topic; NASA needs to get some more of that "shiz-nit" :P
----
* I'm kind of one of you("us") now!
** A.K.A. The $h#t
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I hear they got the hookup, and they kinda owe us. Just sayin'.
The best way for ESA to help would be to take what NASA has left and put it to Actual Productive Use by a civilized, rational people instead of in the hands of a budding theocratic dictatorship.
The sooner America no longer has access to space, the safer the rest of the us will be.
Maybe they could use a Radioisotope Photoelectric Generator instead, at least for power, and save the Pu238 just for heating. From my understanding of it, limited since the only article (from 1981) I've ever read about it was the one I linked to, a RPG can use any gamma ray emitting isotope and will have full power for a period equal the half-life of the isotope used. And IIRC there are still several reactors in the US that can generate isotopes.
Never heard anything more about it, anyone else know more?
We've got 5 more years, someone at NASA better be working on Mister Fusion. And hovercars.
I'm sure N. Korea or Iran would be happy to sell us some.
Table-ized A.I.
Can they use uranium instead? I have this friend that might be able to loan them his Uranium PU-32 explosive space modulator..
Shouldn't we be building breeder reactors that make Plutonium? It might help with global warming by retiring some caol fired power plants.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMuWOLVAzYY
Table-ized A.I.
Don't care if it's off-topic, great reply man! Far too often we, as Americans, take our issues with policy and political leadership and smear it across whole swaths of culture and people. I take extreme issue with those that would cause others undue harm, especially terrorist and despot regimes, but for God's sake I don't hold their people/citizens entirely responsible unless they personally participate and prove that they deserve it.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
At the beginning, where Isaac describes the slowly decaying Galactic civilization; that's what the United States reads like more and more.
The signs are everywhere: Leadership that's seriously out of touch with the people; infrastructure that's still good but getting worse; dwindling education, increasing racial tension and population segregation; etc.
We remember the good old days, and the good old days WERE brighter. Technology overall still advances, but what's not advancing is our position in it. Thanks to a distinctly anti-intellectual culture and an increasing distrust of "da gubbmint" combined with a ridiculous war, our economy is in a shambles, our regulations are a mess, and our population often seems more interested in "being heard" than listening long enough to identify the problems.
I find it sad to see our nation on the decline.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Yea you've fucked us over for years and we've found something the international community will protect us against you on.
:P
But we're magnaminious, and we have the second largest supply in the world.
And the moral high ground
Why not just call Iran or North Korea? they must have a bunch of Pu-238 if they are making Pu-239
There's a real question as to whether the US still has working nuclear weapons. Much of the production capability was shut down years ago. For over a decade, the US had lost the capacity to make nuclear "pits". They used to be made at Rocky Flats, which shut down in 1993. Los Alamos now has a limited production capability for new nuclear pits, but no pit made there has been tested in an actual detonation. The complete ban on nuclear testing, even underground, means there's some doubt about whether new physics packages actually work. Current practice is to build duplicates of designs from the 1970s.
One of the non-radioactive materials for H-bombs is out of production, and attempts to make more of it have not been successful.
There's also a tritium shortage. Tritium, with its short half-life, has to be replaced periodically. That's getting to be a problem.
The second team is building these things today. Early atomic bombs were designed by Nobel prizewinners. Today, the people involved are far less qualified and not very motivated. Almost everybody who ever designed a bomb that went off has retired. There's a proposal to design a "dumber bomb" with a very long shelf life, but without testing, nobody really has confidence that would work.
we (the majority of us) want religion taught in school.
Thankfully, that same majority in which intellectual dishonesty and ignorance is so pervasive is also laden with apathy. And even if the majority somehow got a bill through the Congress, I think a great deal of the freethinkers in America are relatively confident that the Supreme Court would quickly strike it down as unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Thanks! and I whole-heatedly agree with you!
I recently watched The Unthinkable (if you haven't watched it, it's a great movie), and as to not spoil it for anyone, all I can say is that I was sitting at the edge of my seat and rooting for Samuel Jackson throughout the movie.
Bin Laden is an a$$hole, and the 72 virgins (myth) will be well-hung top-men scavenging his and his goons' cavities while slow-roasting them to perfection (yes I hate them as much as you do, probably even more so).
The stories that have been hitting Slashdot about censorship in Pakistan and other Islamic countries gathered quite a few "look at them backwards Muslims", instead of generating empathy about the sad state of these countries.
I should know, I lived in a couple of them growing up. People are afraid for their lives and cannot speak up. People can't discuss politics in coffee shops, because that guy smoking hooka is new and he might be from internal affairs, and if he marks you, your family won't even know what happened to you (Egyptian NSA-equivalent calls it "sending someone behind the sun").
America used to be the great nation everyone there talked about. It was wonderland, where you can criticize leaders and "be alive the next day". Where your creed and background did not matter, only what you knew and what you can do.
But somehow when we started meddling with their affairs, we became the villain. There's an Arabic saying that goes something like "Me and my brother would fight my cousin if he does us wrong, but if a stranger comes in, my cousin and I will team up".
The solution is _not_ to go into these countries with military force to "spread freedom", the solution is to stand up against tyranny with words, show them an example of democracy over here and not to co-operate with their regimes to oppress people.
Final words: Any kind of zealotry (religious/nationalistic/software) is ignorant, and I hope that I see a world without hatred before my time is up here. I doubt it, but I'm still an optimist inside and one can dream.
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They've got a critical amount of Pu-238 and they want more?
Dude, as a Muslim, I find your criticism of Al-Ghazali to be grotesque. Al-Ghazali was probably the greatest thinker mankind has ever produced, and the implication that he took science backwards is just plain wrong. The dates alone don't add up, as many of the more modern developments from the Muslim world (Ibn Sahl's work on optics, Taqi al Din's engineering feats and many others) post-date Ghazali, and most subsequent scholars cite his work as being of the highest caliber.
Furthermore, having read Ghazali fairly extensively, I am in a position to say that Ghazali's work drew heavily on the scientific method to demonstrate the shortcomings of various philosophical principles vis a vis objectivity, as well as mathematics, which he was very comfortable with, and used as a yardstick against which to measure other truths. He did not "take Islam back 300 years". Quite the opposite, he added enormously to the understanding of the interplay between personal growth and understanding of the external world.
Finally, Montgomery Watt, a _Christian_ scholar who studied Islam extensively, called Ghazali "the greatest Muslim after Muhammad". I don't agree with him, but his words reflect the extremely high caliber of Ghazali's work. Personally, I think that only someone unfamiliar with Ghazali's work could possibly criticize him; I've never heard a coherent criticism of Ghazali that actually stands up to scrutiny. I doubt your criticism would even be accepted by any _non-Muslim_ scholar familiar with Ghazali's work.
In conclusion, you don't sound very educated in either science, philosophy or your religion. I suggest a spot of reading before firing that mouth of yours off any further.
Everyone wants to blame the lack of progress at a miscegenation of the population and market, but what it all boils down to is such a self-centered country as the United States only failed recently when all the risk-management and debt collections tried to integrate slave labor and foreign interests into the country so as to elleviate much of the failures that accompanied progress. What you see today is a military industrial complex (as defined by Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower) separate itself from the pretend "free market" maintained by the civilian debtor nation. Basically what it means is the United States progressed, foreign countries continually try to cash-in on leaked progress, investments don't turn-out, so the United States bifurcates into a productive admiralty-rule self-sufficient military government at the expense of a failing populous that it only pretends into existence as a decoy to isolate enemies pursuant to the Trading With The Enemy Act (which civilians violate every day when they buy foreign-made electronics). Everything isn't real, it's all simulated: television, depressed immune system from bad water and food, the immediate response by courts over disagreements is to drug and fatigue everyone into compliance, police constantly harassing freemen for not enfranchising their family and property into the State-charter, and the Illuminati Freemasons in the Catholic Church are controlling everyone's lifestyle through municipal corporations. It's Hell on Earth, and we are taught to believe we're in Heaven on Earth.
The last one that was designed in 1968 and shut down about three years ago was an incredibly expensive French white elephant built with the idea that Uranium was going to run out quickly. There are better ways to make the stuff, as seen by what the military use to make it and by what ambitious developing nations use to make it (eg. Egypt, Indonesia and a long list of others with CANDU reactors).
I don't know why NASA doesn't just buy some left over stuff from the UK, France, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, half of Eastern Europe or as part of a non proliforation deal - North Korea.
There is a lot of plutonium of various isotopes out there. It's only the politics of pretending there isn't that get in the way of NASA getting some (plus stupid counterproductive sabre rattling in the direction of Russia - the cold war is over guys!).
You can't buy it on the private market because there is no market for it. This shit's only useful when you don't risk poisoning anyone, and when you can't use solar panels or any form of fossil fuel. In other words, it's only useful when you're as far away as Mars, and there isn't much commercing done about there.
It's created as a result of deliberate human intervention instead of being found as-is in nature. It's synthetic.
The US has been using up its existing stockpiles of Pu-238 to build RTGs for a mixture of civilian deep space projects and black intel operations such as non-solar-powered stealth spy satellites and seabed-emplaced submarine monitoring stations. The Russians agreed to sell the US some Pu-238 under a licence that prevented it being used for military functions but they shut that down when it became obvious the US was reallocating most if not all of its home-grown stockpile to the military side of things. Like oil Pu-238 is fungible and the Russian supply of Pu-238 was effectively enhancing US military capabilities.
Perhaps it's too small of quantity to be of use but why not recycle the PU-238 from the RTG's used in nuclear weapons? We've retired/dismantled several thousands of nukes that used RTG's. The RTG production is now under the Sandia National Labs & they should know whether these RTGs could be of any use to NASA's problem.
...you don't need Plutonium to make Muslims feel good about themselves, right?
I mean, since this is possibly NASA's FOREMOST mission: ... and math and engineering,"
"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- (Obama) charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science
-Styopa
The agency in question is probably the NRO. So basically, it has gone from NASA into the NRO black space project.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse
The Indian plant is accelerated thorium which is a vastly differerent sort of plant to a plutonium fast breeder - so much so that it actually has a viable future.
I suppose people can always pretend I've given the wrong answer by changing the question, but I'll assume it wasn't deliberate because that would be extremely childish.
Empathy? According to prevailing beliefs (held by all but ignorant red-staters), the state of those countries is what the people of those countries want, and for Americans to feel that this is wrong is to be disrespectful of Islamic culture.
That assumes
1) The people can listen
2) The people will listen
3) The people will believe what we say, despite all the propaganda (much of it coming from the US itself...) painting the US as the root of all evil
4) The people, other than those at the top, matter at all.
I don't have a solution. If there was some sort of home-grown pro-freedom movement, the best the US could do is oppose it. But as far as I can tell (from 10,000+ miles away...) there isn't; the people want their chains. Not surprising; there's a lot of people in the US who want them too.
I read a great book called "The Discovery of Freedom" by Rose Wilder Lane (Little House on the Prairie). It examines the attempts at freedom through history. The First was the Moses leading the Jews to Freedom and the founding of Israel. The second was Mohammed who again wrestled control away from the churches/government and taught people to be free which lead to a spectacular civilization that lasted though the European Dark Ages. Ever wonder why the Renaissance happened in Italy and not Britain? Because they were very close and interacted with the Muslim civilization. The third was the founding of the US. It looks like our attempt at freedom will not last as long as the Muslims. It is only with freedom and liberty does civilization thrive. This book shows that freedom is not the norm. The norm is dictators, theocracy, and poverty. This looks like where we are headed. It seems people get comfortable with the luxuries freedom provides and they forget how fragile it is. People think there will always be computers and movies but history shows that once people abandon freedom and reason it is easy to slip back into the normal state of humanity which is abject poverty. http://mises.org/books/discovery.pdf
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Perhaps, just perhaps, it's not actually "chains" that they want, but a different set of ideals than what you consider "freedom". Consider, freedom in the US and the UK amounts to nothing really, other than the right to be offensive to other people under the protection of "freedom of speech" and the right to be a slothful drain on society under the right to the pursuit of happiness.
Perhaps other cultures have ideals that you just don't understand, and call them "chains" because it's an easy way to put their ideals down and self-vindicate your own.
Also consider, by how many different metrics can American society be said to be better than, say, Indonesian? I think if you have a good honest look, you'd find that the US only wins on metrics that don't actually mean anything societally, such as "number of televisions per capita".
Good thing they still have an ample supply of ammonium phozdex.
Why cannot Ghazali be both a great thinker and responsible for long term stagnation of thinking and science?
A quote from the wikipedia page on him:
"Ijtihad is the process through which Islamic scholars can generate new rules for Muslims. Ijtihad was one of the recognized sources of Islamic knowledge by early Islamic scholars – that is, in addition to Quran, Sunnah and Qiyas. While it is not widely agreed that Ghazali himself intended to "shut the door of ijtihad" completely and permanently, such an interpretation of Ghazali's work is believed to have led Islamic societies to be "frozen in time". Works of critics of Ghazali (such as Ibn Rushd, a rationalist), as well as the works of any ancient philosopher, are believed to have been forbidden in these "frozen societies" through the centuries. As a result, all chances were lost to gradually revitalize religion – which may have been less painful had it been spread over a period of centuries."
The page goes on to wonder if stopping Ijtihad was his intention or not, but if that was the result of his actions, I think blaming him may have some ground.
In conclusion, you don't sound very educated in either science, philosophy or your religion. I suggest a spot of reading before firing that mouth of yours off any further.
Wonderful, an ad hominem attack from an AC. Please create an account so that we can have a discussion instead of one-off posts (I wonder if you'll ever see this).
Al-Ghazali was probably the greatest thinker mankind has ever produced, and the implication that he took science backwards is just plain wrong.
Greatest thinker mankind has ever produced? No comment. But, no, I still stand behind him taking Islamic science backwards.
The period I criticized him for is 1095, when he threw science and scientific investigation out the window and replaced it with Sufism and revelation as the only way to truly understand the universe. When he said "there was no way to certain knowledge or the conviction of revelatory truth except through Sufism". That right there to me is throwing in the towel and calling it quits.
What do you think the repercussions on the Islamic scientific community were when he spent the last 16 years of his life being "technically" a preacher? What did he discover while repeating the "divine names" (dhikr) all day?
I'm not saying Islam or religion itself is bad (I probably lost our Atheists here), but the effect of inhibiting science and discovery by giving up and relying on the divine to truly understand the world is devastating to science. Didn't God say in Quran that we should learn math? (Al-Isra 12). And no, I'm not of the school that interprets "Hisab" as reckoning instead of math (but that's a different discussion).
Where would the world be today if Einstein or Newton spent more time in the Synagogue/Church and gave up on science?
Ok, maybe Newton is somewhat of a bad example since he also said "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or can be done". Maybe we would have learned a lot more about the universe had he not hit that wall, or maybe not.
Anyway, I have more important things to do with my time than to go and get Montgomery Watt's book to investigate and argue this point further. I might do it someday, but for the time being, I'm taking Neil Degrasse's and my own interpretation of what happened during that period of time over the AC who's "very familiar with his work" on Slashdot. mmkay?
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Off-topic still and replying to myself, the GWB/Obama simile above is horrible since neither one of them is a scholar.
I need to stop posting so late at night.
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Oh, I think 20 kg of high purity Pu-239 would make some individual Muslims feel very good. Specifically, Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. It's not HEU, but it'll sure do in a pinch.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a whole host of others might be less than thrilled by it, though.
This is why it's risky to rely solely on single ouside suppliers for critical items. The funding for new Pu-238 production by DOE has been held up at least in part due to the availability of it for sale by the Russians.
It's a good source and a reasonable solution, provided unforeseen problems like the contract trouble that's stopped us buying it don't come up. But, in world affairs, they sometimes do.
Unfortunately, it would take several years to start producing it again even if funding were available now.
Similarly, we're about to rely on Russia for manned transport to the ISS and don't have a backup that wouldn't take years to be ready (be it man rating the Falcon 9, or some other). Similarly, I'd not advise the Russians to rely on the US (or any other single country) as a sole source supplier for something critical either.
Countries like the US and Russia have different interests and needs that sometimes don't work out the way people expect. Outside events can push them to differences when no such was planned or foreseen.
My own preference would be to mostly rely on Soyuz as a manned laucher to the ISS, but keep a couple of shuttles running at a much lower launch rate for a back up until newer vehicles are proven. Expensive and hopefully not needed, but most insurance is like that.
My thoughts exactly. This is why Obama is so brilliant - he knew NASA would have this problem and that's why he made NASA's #1 priority mission improving relations with Muslim nations. The guy is brilliant! http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/06/nasa-official-walks-claim-muslim-outreach-foremost-mission/
Al Ghazali? You got this from a blog, didn't you?
From the wikipedia:
Al-Ghazali's criticism of Aristotelian physics and Aristotelian cosmology played an important role in the development of an independent astronomy over the next several centuries. From the 12th century onwards, Islamic astronomy began becoming a science primarily dependant upon observation rather than philosophy, primarily due to religious opposition from Islamic theologians, most prominently Al-Ghazali, who opposed the interference of Aristotelianism in astronomy, opening up possibilities for an astronomy unrestrained by Aristotelian philosophy.
Al Ghazali died in 1111. But the "stagnation" attributed to Islamic science came centuries later.
There was, however, a more recent al-Ghazali. Perhaps the blogosphere, desperate for a simplistic meme, has intertwined the biographies.
That ad-hominem was added after a fairly lengthy post including several points. It doesn't surprise me that you've decided to ignore them all and skip straight to the last line.
Just so as you know, Einstein was also deeply religious, he saw his study of the natural world as being an investigation into the methods of God. Given that you seem to think that he was less religious than Newton (if such a thing could be quantified) then you are once again mistaken about the nature of a person you are referring to.
Neil Tyson, may be good at what he does, but he is not a religious academic. Montgomery Watt (not that I consider his work to be of high value, but just so you know why I referenced him) on the other hand studied religion exclusively for about a half century.
It seems to me you're just name dropping famous people in order to sound smart, without actually knowing much about them.
You claim Ghazali "threw science and scientific investigation out the window". I just cannot see how you'd come to this conclusion given that his work into the nature of truth and certainty (best gleaned from his book "Deliverance from Error") contributed to the development of the scientific method as we know it today. He himself was an accomplished mathematician, and drew heavily on mathematics in his works. I have no idea where you get your views from, but they just aren't even close to reflecting what Ghazali was all about. There's a reasonably good movie about his life called "The Alchemist of Happiness" in which Abdul Hakim Murad explains Ghazali's affinity for science, objectivity, reason and mathematics.
Ghazali did not "replace science with sufism", what he did was explained why they two were not in conflict. He did this with such efficacy, that many subsequent Muslim scientists were, in addition to their formidable academic achievements, also accomplished students of tasawwuf.
If you want to critique Ghazali, read his work. They're almost all available in English, with very high quality translations. I think you'll find that Neil Tyson has not the faintest idea what on Earth he's talking about.
Sadly, I don't hold out hope that you'll actually go and get a copy of any of Ghazali's works. More likely, you'll just write off post (posted under my name, btw) and declare yourself to be correct, despite the total lack of any evidence supporting your position, other than second and third hand opinions from people who don't know what they are talking about.
Ghazali's work is available. You can get it on Amazon. There's no excuse for you to be relying on other people to feed you an opinion.
I hate printers.
Usually when "plutonium" and "critical" are used together in the same sentence, it isn't good.
That ad-hominem was added after a fairly lengthy post including several points. It doesn't surprise me that you've decided to ignore them all and skip straight to the last line.
I skipped to it because it seemed that I was going to waste my breath talking into the void (AC's do not get notified about replies, do they?).
Just so as you know, Einstein was also deeply religious, he saw his study of the natural world as being an investigation into the methods of God. Given that you seem to think that he was less religious than Newton (if such a thing could be quantified) then you are once again mistaken about the nature of a person you are referring to.
I'm aware of that. I do not have a direct quote, nor do I care to search for one. I was simply trying to get a point across that when we say "only god knows this", it means we're giving up and are not going to investigate further.
*Part 1, I have to head out, and I will get back to you in 6-7 hours from now*
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I was wondering, if there are 72 virgins for every man who dies on Earth... imagine the proportion of virgins in heaven is 1:72
Considering that the world male population is 6,602,224,175, then the amount of virgins in paradise is 475,360,140,600.
I hope this pimp God has a laundry in heaven and plenty of Lysol...
Remember, the US government cancelled the Constellation program and post-Shuttle manned spaceflight capabilities, with the hopes that they'd *buy seats* on Russian spacecraft.
And now they can't even agree on buying some plutonium from Russians?
How many people really think that buying those seats on Russian shuttles will happen without any problems?
Face it, America gave away its manned spaceflight. Making deals with Russia can't be relied on -- even small things like plutonium can't be reliably obtained, let alone manned spaceflight through Russians.
We gave it away. And now our manned spaceflight is screwed.
For damn near 200 years the GP method was working. Not that the US got everything right (destroying the natives, slavery, etc...), but it was always at least trying to be ahead of the curve. The US was the place where tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday. It was working. People no matter how oppressed can see that if you do things better then your life will improve. The US was the shining example. Over the last 30-40 years we have done nothing but backpedal, and this has done far far more to bolster oppression in the world than any military action. Being an example is a long term goal. The progressive movement works, good does beget good, it just takes a while. No other "solution" has even come close to succeeding.
Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Pluto.. all Greek mythology names, why? They were "it"** back in the day.
Those are Roman mythology names, not Greek. Which just goes to show, as the Romans were even more "it" than the Greeks.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
There's an Arabic saying that goes something like "Me and my brother would fight my cousin if he does us wrong, but if a stranger comes in, my cousin and I will team up".
Here, we call that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", and it hasn't worked out so well for us. It's why we cozied up to Saddam Hussein (because he was fighting with Iran) and to the mujahideen (because they were fighting the Russians) back in the '70s and '80s, and look how those situations turned out.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
how much they need. and how much money they got.
Empathy? According to prevailing beliefs (held by all but ignorant red-staters), the state of those countries is what the people of those countries want, and for Americans to feel that this is wrong is to be disrespectful of Islamic culture.
In my opinion, its a little bit more subtle than that. The wider moderate Islamic society wants peace and liberty. However, it also wants a smooth transition from the current state of affairs to the world where freedom of expression is tolerated. There's an Islamic proverb, "Better 1000 days of tyranny than 1 day of anarchy." It describes the state of affairs in Islamic culture very well. Everyone wants change, but no one is willing to risk the anarchy necessary to effect it.
Another issue in the Islamic world is the schizoid attitude towards freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is to be demanded wherever Muslims are not free to express their religion. We see this in the reaction towards French bans on headscarves and Swiss bans on minarets. On the other hand, practitioners of non-Islamic religion and culture can have their culture suppressed. I've heard otherwise moderate and sensible Muslims say, "Ah, I would love to have the free speech of the West, if only I could filter out the 'filth.'" The thing that they're missing is that you don't get the benefits of free speech by only allowing free speech in limited areas. True, a lot of religious people believe this, but the Muslim world is the last place where religion is still dominant as a political force.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
It is only with freedom and liberty does civilization thrive.
History disagrees. Every civilization, from Ancient Sumer, right up to our own had slavery at one point or another. The fact that we get by right now without slavery in the US says very little about the necessity of freedom and liberty for civilization. In fact, I'd almost argue the opposite - slavery and oppression are the two tools that allow civilizations to go from city or nation state to empire. Recall Rome. As a republic, it conquered Italy. Under an emperor, Rome was able to conquer most of Europe, North Africa and Asia Minor.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Spoken like a true nigger.
There is no evidence of Einstein following any religion.
Don't bring up the "cold is the absence of heat, ergo evil is the absence of God" article. It's a myth.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's because when they do it it's a traditional part of an ancient tribal culture, but when we do it it's yet another a cynical case of opportunism from the imperialist running-dogs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Spain had considerably more interaction with muslim civilization, given that they only finished kicking them out in 1492.
Your analysis is flaky at best, so take your revisionist claptrap and stick it where you can't hear kumbaya.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's not schizoid at all. That's unambiguous opposition to freedom of expression, along with cynical manipulation of those who support it.