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Why Mars Is Not the Best Place To Look For Life
EccentricAnomaly writes "A story over at Science News quotes Alan Stern (former head of NASA Science missions) as saying: 'The three strongest candidates [for extraterrestrial life] are all in the outer solar system.' He's referring to Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. So why is NASA spending $2.5B on the next Mars Rover and planning to spend over $6B more on a Mars sample return when it can't find the money for much cheaper missions to Europa or Enceladus?"
Mars is closer and easier to send people to
Certainly it would be easier getting humans there than the outer solar system places.
...in fact, it's cold as hell.
is on Europa. I hope I live long enough to see whether I lose that bet.
Mars is closer to us than Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Not just physically, but culturally. Literature, film, etc, Mars has played a big role in the past 50-75 years. If you hear "little green men", the average person is going to immediately think "Mars". More people are more likely to know the name Mars as opposed to some moons orbiting Saturn ( and yes, I'll admit I had to look in the article to double check that they are in fact moons of Saturn). If you are trying to get funding for something, you go for something people will recognize, because they will be more likely to support it. Ask for something they've never heard of, and they might start wondering if it's really all that necessary. It's sad, but it's true.
Also, people might confuse Europa with a continent, and Enceladus with a Mexican dish. :)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
While missions to Europa and Enceladus may be cheaper they won't actually search for life. Instead they will stick a spacecraft in orbit around the moon and map the surface. At best, they may send a small probe to the surface that will survive a few hours in one location. On the other hand, a sample-return mission to Mars will generate knowledge and experience with a quicker turnaround and lower price than a similar mission to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn.
Mars is where the little green men are from! The other planets and moons are obviously uninhabited.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
The invaders came from Mars in "War of the Worlds", written in 1898, and people have been fixated on it ever since.
Don't expect either the U.S. military or NASA to update their plans for invasion based on almost 115 years of scientific research.
Seriously, the plan was to go to Mars since JFK's time, because he thought the Russians might beat us to the moon. NASA never updated the roadmap.
The fact that Mars as no global magnetic field, and any carbon based life would in theory die within a short period of time because of the solar radiation. I do think we are gasping for straws thinking of having a colony on the planet.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Easier to get there but it would be impossible for humans to live on Mars.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Mars needs women.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
I'm just not sure what the point of that would be. Terraforming makes nice sci-fi, but isn't sustainable without incredible amounts of resources (let alone getting it started). If we want a 'launch-pad' outside of Earth's gravity, the moon would make a much better place. If we're just looking for evidence to put towards the origins of life debate, the moon is going to give us much more evidence of early earth-life. There isn't likely to be any life on Mars (other than earth-life remnants blown into space that might have landed there), as under the evolutionary paradigm, the conditions aren't right and any place where they might have been, were incredibly brief.
...to terraform, to transport human payloads to AND to live on. Worst case scenario it makes a good outpost / transfer terminal to the life-bearing moons further out.
We could learn a lot from exploring the planet closest to us, before venturing out to other places.
did you forget to take your meds?
Mars is a desert where humans cannot live. Even if NASA found dinosaur bones in the dirt on Mars, or whatever other proof that there has been life on Mars millions of years ago, who will benefit from that other than a few scientists who will publish the discovery in Science? Mars is inhospitable for vertebrates, and even for plants. Maybe they hope to find oil there, but Earth has not run out of oil yet. Europa, Enceladus, and Titan, on the other hand, might harbor different very life forms, perhaps even some that Man could communicate with.
Yes, Europa has a probably has a better chance of having life in its subsurface oceans but there is that wee problem of penetrating through its icy crust. How the hell are you going to penetrate through 20 kilometers of ice (minimum estimate) without using a massive thermonuclear bomb? And then if you did, any life in the vicinity of the blast would be annihilated and then the thawed hole would freeze over before a probe could find anything. Yea, forget about Europa.
This seems unfair at multiple levels. First, we understand the basic Martian environment a lot better than other environments so sending things there are easier. Second we know from the Viking probes that Mars has weird chemistry going on in its surface. We still don't know what exactly happened there. The basic results of the Viking experiments seemed to be consistent with life but no complex carbon compounds were found. We now know that this may have been due to the presence of perchlorates in the surface material which could have destroyed the organic compounds when the samples were heated. Mars is still one of the most promising locations for life.
That said, there are less good reasons why Mars is a frequent target. Sending things to Mars takes a lot less time than sending things to the outer systems. That means if one is a scientist one would rather work on a project that sends something to Mars than something that goes far away. Second, Mars has a place in the popular mind that these various moons do not.
The real question that should be being asked is not why there's so much funding for Mars compared to other locations but why there's so little funding in general. The repeatedly canceled Europa missions would be in the cost range of a few hundred million dollars. This is a tiny amount when one compares it for example to how much money the US spends on Afghanistan monthly. The US has messed up priorities. That's why even as we speak, the Russians are doing a sample return mission to Phobos which will launch in a few weeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt. If the Russians were still dirty commies the US would be in an absolute panic and we'd have congressional hearings asking why the US isn't doing something similar. I hope that as China becomes more of a boogeyman the US will start taking space seriously again, if not for the good of humanity, at least for old-fashioned xenophobia. And I suppose that in the long-run I really would prefer that functioning democracies explore and colonize space than other countries, but that's so far in the future at the current rate of exploration that it doesn't seem to be immediately relevant. Right now, we need to just get some people substantially interested in exploring beyond our little rock.
How so? Mars is red because of Iron Oxide. Oxide = Oxygen. Mars is similar to earth in basic composition. Just need a way to extract oxygen from rust reliably and efficiently and I see no reason that it would be impossible. Plants can also be genetically engineered to behave differently or to tolerate certain environments better. There is no reason at all to say that this is impossible. Improbable, maybe. Impossible...not at all.
.. would the tea party support a NASA budget that wants to spend money for going to Europe.
All these worlds are yours, except Europa.
Attempt no landing there
Use them together
Use them in peace
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
Nahhh. I'm pretty sure there is a Wal~Mart there.
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Although you are technically correct (the best kind of correct), that's a rather useless way of viewing money. In the U.S., the top 20% have about 85% of the accumulated wealth, and the top 5% have almost 60%, which makes it a remarkably lopsided distribution, with the vast majority of people living below the mean.
What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
The bigger problem I have with your post is the assumption that the rich have predominantly earned their money. There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.). The vast majority of working class income falls into the first category. The vast majority of upper class income falls into the latter category. So any tax scheme that does not tax the upper class more than the working class is unfair because it takes away money that the working class have earned to allow the rich to keep more money that they haven't earned.
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Now get off my lawn
No, it sits in vaults doing nothing while most of the human race starve. My favourite rich guy story is this one where he was so rich he didn't even notice for a couple of years that someone had stolen loads of money from him. Trickle-down is bullshit.
I imagine bio-engineering would be the direction to take to avoid that. If scientists can design a self-replicating micro-organism to extract oxygen from the soil and release it (and then die without leaving something toxic behind), it may be possible to make Mars easier for humans to live on. Yes it's a big "if", but it's an area scientists are making a lot of progress in, so I wouldn't discount it completely.
However, I'd be more worried about this:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast31jan_1/
If that's true, you'd be fighting a losing battle no matter what you do.
is, why Venus seems like a tabu for exploration and research?
There you are, staring at me again.
other than just looking for life. Also, Mars probes can operate for years not just for hours like the one on Titan.
There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.)
I don't want to get caught up in another endless thread about class warfare, but how are capital gains and interest "unearned"? Investing money can be hard work, and that money isn't just sitting there - it becomes available for other purposes, such as funding new companies. I grew up watching my father spend many hours each week looking over the family's investments and planning for the next several decades of our lives - he managed to pay for several college educations this way. But according to you, he didn't "earn" any of the money he made through his investments, so it's okay to confiscate it?
Now, the argument that people who make the majority of their income solely through capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as the rest of us - that I can pretty much agree with. But they earned it just as much as I earn my salary. I also have no problem with the concept that the tax burden should be proportional to income, or that the working poor should get a steep reduction in taxes. I don't really object to taxing the rich at a slightly higher rate either. But I'm really not comfortable telling someone that they don't deserve their wealth and should forfeit it to the government, especially given some of the batshit insane things we spend it on. And yes, colonizing Mars falls into that category.
"Leave people who have earned what they have alone to keep it and keep producing more, like water the money is recycled eventually in ways that benefit us all."
Doesn't seem to work that way. To continue your water analogy:
Evaporation takes water from the sea and rains it out on the land, where it runs off down brooks, streams, and rivers back to the sea. And lots of people use small volumes of it as it flows back to the sea, from whence its cyclic journey begins again. And the small volumes of water used by many individuals goes back to the sea as they pee, die, run their waterwheels, whatever. Yep, a nicely recycling hydrological or monetary ecosystem. Some folks have more, others less, but most people have plenty for their needs.
Then 1% of the people figure out how to impound runoff behind dams. These few folks impound 80% of the runoff, and they set guards around their dams and lakes to deny it to the other 99% of the population. Meanwhile, the reservoirs get deeper and wider, concentrating more and more of the available runoff into the hands of the 1% because there's just no effin' way *one* guy can use the *entirety of Lake Mead*, while ten million guys can easily keep that amount of water (money) in useful circulation.
Hydrological/ecological result is big, deep guarded lakes in surrounding desert until water overtops the dams and breaks them. Economical/ecological result is increasing wealth concentration and societal breakdown, followed by revolution. Look around you, it's not hard to see the signs.
A Wal-Mart, you mean the Chinese got to Mars?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
NASA isn't there to find extraterrestrial life, it's there to get funds to do exploration. On that basis, do you think it will be easier for them to finance a mission to Mars or one to some distant rock that nobody outside the scientific community has heard about, cares about or could find on a map?
If they fail to find life on Mars (despite the David Bowie song), they can recover by saying "we haven't failed, we just haven't succeeded YET". However if they "waste" billions on a mission to one of the more likely, but unpronounceable candidates, then "the public" will start asking questions about why they were looking there, when everybody knows Mars is a better bet.
NASA's main goal is to secure its own future. It won't achieve that by trying to spend money on unpopular things that taxpayers aren't prepared to fund.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
> would be impossible for humans to live on Mars
Who cares? This is all about "the first post" thing, the first human who sets his foot on Mars wins, period.
A Wal-Mart, you mean the Chinese got to Mars?
Yeah, where else do you expect the red chinese to be?
He can be president of Mars. I'm sure it would be perfectly constitutional
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
We're not looking to discover what early Earth life looked like; we have Earth for that. What we're looking for is life that evolved in a completely isolated environment. Life on earth pretty much all uses DNA and RNA - it was the "fittest" self-replicating pattern, and it's pretty much got a monopoly on Earth. But if we can find life out there that hasn't had to compete with any of the lifeforms on earth, and didn't evolve from any life forms on earth, that would be incredibly interesting. We'd get to see if our set of amino acids were just the solution that life on earth stumbled upon, or if they're so head-and-shoulders above the competition that they will form wherever they can form.
I can't figure out what you mean by "the conditions aren't right under the evolutionary paradigm." Honestly, the sentence parses as gibberish. The basic ideas behind evolution don't even require organic matter. As Dawkins points out in "The Blind Watchmaker," any pattern that is predisposed to create copies of itself will show up in an environment more often than a pattern which is not. If the copying process has the potential to introduce random transcription errors, the it has all it needs to perform a search of the local pattern-space for "best pattern at copying itself." And, with scarce resources, there is an external pressure for these self-replicating patterns to be best at self-replicating. Nothing in here demands a perfectly earth-like environment. Water certainly helps, because all sorts of interesting chemical reactions occur at an impressive rate in aqueous solutions, but if we're looking for life outside of Earth, we need to be prepared to look for life not-quite-as-we-know-it.
NASA has no real scientific focus. It's just all over the place. If I were in charge, I would give it one primary mission, and a secondary mission, and then have a tertiary agenda.
Agendas:
1. Detection and defense of incoming bodies, including the development of better D&D technology. Eventually this will be fulfilled and go into maintenance mode, where Agenda 2 then gets primary funding.
2. Find life using existing technology including the development of better D&D technology. While this will never be complete (once we find it we can keep on finding it) we will look for more and more sophisticated forms. (I assume extraterrestrial bacterial detection would happen first, then complex organisms)
3. All other efforts on determining the nature of the universe. JWST, Hubble, etc.
As far as I am concerned NASA has no reason to send humans off planet. We should be developing Avatar-like technology for near earth operations and AI driven tech for stuff where the lag is too long.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Errr... no. What happens is that people who sell things profiteer off the windfall. The cost of living increases to the point where the poor are still poor and the middle class are still middle class. That is precisely what happened when women entered the workforce in a big way in the 1970s.
You have a five-figure user id, so you're probably Gen X. If your parents owned the house you grew up in, chances are good that you couldn't afford to buy it today.
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What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
- if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, what you'll have is consumer spending that is financed not with credit but with money that otherwise would continue being used in investments (whether you like the investments that these are use for or not is a different topic), but you won't have the bottom population any wealthier for it.
They'll be able to buy more stuff with less credit, but they won't be better off at the end, specifically because the investments into actual production capacity would have been cut dramatically.
By taking other people's investment money and 'sharing' it among everybody, you just end up with somewhat more stuff you bought in the short term, and nothing to buy in the long term, because you just destroyed the investment capital.
The bigger problem I have with your post is the assumption that the rich have predominantly earned their money.
- this is completely irrelevant! Yes, some have taken it from governments, because governments were handing out the cash to those, who knew how to take it.
This problem needs to be stopped at the source, because it can't be solved at the receiving end, there is always somebody else in line for government money.
But the question of whether somebody earned the money or not is absolutely irrelevant, the only relevant question is: what is the government doing to prevent people from investing locally and instead they either gamble or invest abroad.
Very few people actually want to gamble with their money, majority just want some security and a revenue stream, and this means their money is used to fund some investment strategy, some form of business.
Real economic activity is not in buying stuff - this is just a trivial consequence of production. Real economic activity is in producing stuff, and the only real production that market needs takes place when somebody has their own money on the line - skin in the game, no riskless gambling that gov't has been forcing people to engage into since 1971.
You can't handle the truth.
Regardless, income should be taxed as income. The capital gains tax being so minuscule is one reason there is such a large disparity in wealth and also such an unfair bias of government to the wealthy since the middle class can't even vote with their dollars effectively when a wealthy person or corporation funnels millions at promoting political candidates that favor them, and suppressing candidates that favor the average Joe. Why the hell do you think there hasn't been more Ron Paul in the news? He is being censored by media. The working classes gets 20-30 percent of their paychecks taken away, and they typically make 30-60k, then there are people making 200K + a year from investments only getting taxed at 15 percent? Sorry, but screw that. Income is income. Investments in companies is a grossly over exaggerated benefit of our current system. When someone "invests" you end up owing them more money than you got out of them and thus they benefit from your idea and your work like a leech, that is not as nice as something called "savings" where you get to the the sole person benefiting from your money and efforts. Unfortunately the middle class can't afford to save in this economy, nor in this system that absurdly favors the wealthy. Wages have been frozen for a decade, entrepreneurship has been steadily decreasing since the 80's and all the money people put into their houses evaporated because some rich assholes who are totally sheltered from bad economies were designing fraudulent financial instruments to basically get richer.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Not exactly. The wealth disparity has been getting worse since 1945. This means overall, most of the money is going to the rich. I have no problem with rich, middle class, and poor existing, I have a problem with 95% being poor and 5% being rich. You would expect a system that benefits all people equally would maintain a relatively close distribution of wealth over time.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
If your parents owned the house you grew up in, chances are good that you couldn't afford to buy it today.
I am confused as to what you are trying to say in your post, as the quoted line basically contradicts the first part. We can't afford houses because we are getting paid less and less while the wealthy are getting paid more and more. The only people benefiting from the US economy is the top 5 percent, the rest are basically trying to get by.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
What I'm saying is that a single-event forced redistribution of wealth would only raise the standard of living temporarily.
When women entered the workforce, families started earning a lot more, which made them better off for a while. Then prices readjusted. Today, single-income families are essentially priced out of the property market in most places.
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Yeah, ha ha hah, the rich are so dumb, and they don't deserver the money they have...
Seriously, though, put someone in power who pledges to take away the wealth of the top 1% and what do you think will happen? He'll line his pockets and his rich friends with the money, while using it to make you do something silly. Like posing like a criminal to take naked pictures of yourself before you travel....
The problems are many, and the "populist" movements have been co-opted long ago to help the powerful cement their power.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
'Earn' doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. The idea that someone could 'earn' a billion dollars is ... hilarious.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Colonizing Mars in the foreseeable future is indeed batshit insane. Seriously, there's no point. Even when we start running out of surface area, space habitats will make more sense.
Capital gains are not proportional to the amount effort you put in, they're proportional to the amount of money you put in. They're also exponential. If you reinvest, you're going to make more next year than you did this year. You're don't just make money, you make more money the more money you make.
Your father may have spent a lot of effort, but was it work? What was accomplished? When someone goes to work at the widget factory, something has changed. Several people who did not previously have widgets now do. The stock market? From a distance to me it looks like a continuous racetrack with a lot more horses.
I'm not advocating singling out the 1% richest people in the world and taking all their money, but any system where the only possible result is that the rich get richer needs a serious reexamination.
404: sig not found.
What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
No, what history shows is that it does not take long until you have drastically reduced the overall standard of living.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Capital gains are not proportional to the amount effort you put in, they're proportional to the amount of money you put in. They're also exponential. If you reinvest, you're going to make more next year than you did this year. You're don't just make money, you make more money the more money you make.
Unless, of course, you lose money, because there is always risk involved. One of the reasons for the capital gains tax being relatively low is to encourage re-investment into the economy. I don't know at what point the capital gains rate becomes high enough to hurt the economy, although I'm sure some economists have ideas. And it does sometimes involve effort, as I'll explain below.
Your father may have spent a lot of effort, but was it work? What was accomplished? When someone goes to work at the widget factory, something has changed. Several people who did not previously have widgets now do. The stock market? From a distance to me it looks like a continuous racetrack with a lot more horses.
He put his money back into the economy, which means that theoretically, someone could have started a widget factory using his money, which is certainly accomplishing something. (Not that he ever had enough money to start a factory - I think my parents were somewhere in the top 5%, but above that point the gaps between each percentile start to become enormous.) But more generally, you're thinking about capital gains in too narrow a sense. If I buy a house in need of repair, fix it up and remodel it over the course of a year, and sell it for twice what I paid for it, that's capital gains, but it certainly accomplishes something useful to society. Should it be taxed at the same rate as ordinary income? Sure, if it's the primary source of income, I can't think of a good reason why not. But it's not "unearned", which is what the parent poster was claiming.
By the way, if it's not obvious I'm at least partly playing devil's advocate here. But I have to admit that I cringe when I hear some of the arguments made in favor of more steeply progressive taxation. I agree that it's appalling that we went into debt because of upper-class tax cuts, and it's even more appalling that some people want to increase taxes on the working poor. But I also consider some of our major public expenses to be indefensible, and I also don't believe that it's moral to expect other people to pay for everything that strikes our fancy. And I say this as someone who earns well under $100,000/year, and will probably never be genuinely rich. Getting back to the original thread, I don't include NASA among the indefensible budget items (and of course it's a relatively small fraction), but if we raise taxes on the top 1%, it should be to pay off the debt and strengthen our social safety net, not start a colony on Mars (or buy more supercarrier groups, for that matter). And I'm also one of the people who genuinely hopes that someone does start a colony on Mars someday - I just don't really expect this to happen in my lifetime.
What investments in production capacity? The U.S. hasn't done that in any significant way for as long as I've been alive. It just outsources the labor to some other country where the cost of labor is cheaper.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great for the U.S. to invest in production capacity. I'm just not convinced that leaving the money in the hands of the same rich people who have repeatedly failed to invest in that capacity will miraculously cause that to happen. The extremely wealthy do not create jobs. The people who create jobs are the middle class workers who start small businesses.
If you want production capacity, take the money from the rich and give it to the middle class. Some of those people will just buy consumable goods, but the ones who are not barely getting by will look for ways to invest that in things that can make money, including the production capacity you so crave.
And sure, in the end, maybe you've created a new top 1%, but at least some part of that new top 1% will be made up of people who aren't squeezing that last cent out of the market by outsourcing everything to China.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Citation needed.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Just try looking a bit harder. You may wish to check out the leads at http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/index.htm
Then again, would you really want to find life there and open that bag of worms?
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
Ok, yeah. When I was saying capital gains I was just thinking about the stock market. The only time a company makes money on a stock is when it is first issued. After that, if you buy a stock, the only difference is the stockholder you bought from has your money and you're the person that the company now pays dividends to for as long as it exists.
404: sig not found.
In fact, it's cold as hell.
For context, click Parent.
Seriously, if we're going to consider best places to search for life, then Earth probably has to be on the top of the list. It's the closest planet to us and very easy for us to study, it's solidly in the temperature zone necessary for water-based life and even has liquid water oceans on its surface, and finally, we already know there's life there and what it looks like. So if we're going to look for life based solely on which place has the best chances of finding it, then we need not look past Earth.
Unless, of course, you lose money, because there is always risk involved
The problem is there is a large proportion of the super rich where there is no risk involved. They screw up and we bail them out. Then they give each other million dollar bonuses because even with their screwups they still made money.
The other problem is the class of people who make decisions that pay good in the short term, like laying off all the workers and selling the factory to the Chinese. Huge profits for a short while so they make huge money, then move on. Meanwhile the company no longer has any income and eventually goes bankrupt leaving a lot of creditors and investors holding the can. Some how society has decided that these bastards deserve even more rewards because they did really good for a short while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I suspect that was due to many factors, not just increased income per family. However between the 1940's and 1970's people could basically afford to purchase homes at reasonable prices, make a good living and support their families, and have a reasonable expectation that if one works hard, they will get rewarded. This doesn't happen anymore. No one with half a brain or even a rudimentary knowledge of economics is saying there shouldn't be wealthy people, or we should just take it all. Its just that currently, the benefits of this modern society are being biased towards the rich, and they have been for quite some time. Whatever the reason, it has been occurring.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
But if we are going to do that, we are better [off] staying out of a gravity well.
Agree. We ought to be mining the asteroid belt, building vast tin cans filled with habitable environments, spinning to provide gravity.
I'm sure that'd be a lot simpler than terraforming, though there'd still be a lot of things to work out, such as shielding from cosmic rays, holding in enough atmosphere at Earth air pressure (it'd be a bomb out there, after all), and any number of "what if"s that the engineers/planners fail to anticipate. "What, there's no calcium to be found in the Asteroid Belt?!?"
Still better than holding all our eggs in one bucket (Earth) as we are now. Considering Earth's history, we ought to be taking Extinction Level Events more seriously. This ought to be humanity's main priority.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Really - the Moon landings were also a political stunt and nothing more. The uppity-ups are not interested in science. Just in trophies. Titan, Europa and other moons of the outer planets are just too unknown by the average Leno Jay-Walking crowd who can barely tell you who the first president was but can tell you every word Snookie spouts out on a given episode. Mars, tho, is a viable trophy because even with the intelligence drain that is sucking the brains out of the average public citizen while they bake their buns in front of reruns of Jersey Shore or are rabidly following the antics of the Kardashians inbetween tweeting about every bowel movement, everyone knows about Mars. The Moon is so 39 years ago. Mars is the current fad. If future missions don't end in catastrophe, it too will be mostly forgotten as the Apollo missions have (except for Apollo 13 since most of what the average couch-potato knows of that came from the movie).
I'm still waiting on someone to explain why there are so many billionaires in China, Russia, and all the other countries around the world decrying the evils of capitalism while promoting half assed economic systems that are supposed to bring economic justice the the average proles who spend their lives with their hand out instead of actually contributing something to society. The sad fact is that the planet is over populated and growing more so every day. Human life might be considered sacred but the last time I looked the human species was not in any danger of going extinct. Worldwide population control is the only thing that will improve the quality of life. Since the chance of that happening is nil I guess we will just fall back to the true and tried method of population control using war. The trick this time will be trying to preserve a viable ecosystem after the war is over that will support the survivors.
Mars may be fairly dry, but it clearly has liquid water, some organics, and reasonably high temperatures.
I don't see why this needs to be an either/or scenario. If we stop wasting money on sending people into orbit, we can send a fleet of advanced robotic probes to all of these destinations.
There were life on the planets those moons orbit..?!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
Life on Mars = either "a TV show" or "stick to what they know"
as opposed to
Life at other places = "never heard of these places - stick with Mars"
No way. Complete human extinction events are so incredibly unlikely that we should not be spending insane amounts of resources to prevent that.
Also, even if we tried, the effort would be wasted anyway. Suppose this extinction event would happen 100,000 years from now. What is the chance that anything we build or do right now will survive the next 100,000 years ? It's practically zero.
What investments in production capacity? The U.S. hasn't done that in any significant way for as long as I've been alive. It just outsources the labor to some other country where the cost of labor is cheaper.
- the U.S. has nothing to do with it. It's always done by private interest - individuals looking for a buck. In your lifetime (unless you were born prior to 1965), the conditions have been deteriorating, as U.S. was burning through the wealth created even before 1913, and obviously the monopoly wealth created between 1947 and 1965. The reasons for it are numerous, but the result of all those reasons was the same: increase labor costs, increase taxes, increase business costs by increasing regulations, protect monopolies, destroy competition, subsidize monopolies, destroy money by inflation, all of these are done by government.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great for the U.S. to invest in production capacity. I'm just not convinced that leaving the money in the hands of the same rich people who have repeatedly failed to invest in that capacity will miraculously cause that to happen. The extremely wealthy do not create jobs. The people who create jobs are the middle class workers who start small businesses.
- the rich have 'repeatedly failed' to invest?
The reason that USA has ANYTHING is because people were investing, and yes, majority of those who really invest are rich or became rich while working on their ideas (like Wozniak and Jobs, since those are the preferred examples of today).
Every single dollar that the rich are not spending on themselves is used as an investment. As I said previously: how exactly it's invested is a different topic, but the reasons that the investments are not done into USA's production capacity are again: government and everything it does.
I don't know how it happened that so many people are brainwashed not to understand this, but everything that government does is detrimental to investments because it's all about spending on things government wants to spend on, it's not about building anything that the market wants and needs. It's about taking investment capital out of private investments and putting into hands of people, who just want to spend it based on their political needs, but those have nothing to do with improving the economy.
Even when government supposedly wants to help the economy somehow, it's always failing miserably in every way possible. From the introduction of the Federal reserve and income taxes and to the new deal and SS and Medicare and every war and every department, be it energy or education or housing, whatever it touches, if money is involved, it's going to destroy it.
If you want production capacity, take the money from the rich and give it to the middle class.
- in absence of government preventing the economy from working that's EXACTLY what the market does!
But you cannot take away money from rich and give it to the middle class indiscriminately, it has to be done based on a good idea that market would want to see implemented, that's why the only real way to do so is not with government at all, but as loans - investments into capital.
There HAS to be cost associated with borrowing money, and government destroyed that cost as well now, with 0% interest, which obviously prevents anybody from being able to borrow anything (except government), who is going to lend you money at 0%? Only government.
Government is the force that destroys investment opportunities and you are blind to it to such a great extent, that your great idea is to take more money out of the private sector and give it to the government?
Government doesn't have the liquidity problem, it prints and borrows all it wants (especially since it was able to push interest rates down to 2% even on the long yielding curve). It's NOT the liquidity that is lacking, it never was, not when government is involved that can print.
You can't handle the truth.
I'm, say, 80% in agreement with you, but...
When someone "invests" you end up owing them more money than you got out of them
Is it unreasonable for someone investing in a potentially profitable enterprise to ask to share in that profit?
Unfortunately the middle class can't afford to save in this economy
Are you referring to the USA? I'm middle class, live in the UK and save every month. That's a very strong, general statement you're making.
entrepreneurship has been steadily decreasing since the 80's
What about the .com boom?
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
OK, so the problem is lack of a magnetic field. Well, we know how to create magnetic fields. Just put a big coil around Mars' equator and send a big current through it. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
...in fact, it's cold as hell.
So hell has finally frozen?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Many people care about special forms of rocks, known as gems.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Don't forget that companies quite often buy some of themselves back, especially if they're sitting on a pile of cash and expect profits to push the stock price up later. Then they can re-sell said shares for a profit.
And, for those who claim investments aren't earned income and should be "redistributed," go for it...so long as you redistribute losses at the same time. No having your cake and eating it here, bub. Somehow I think your tune will change a bit, though, when you get hit with the bill.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The problem is there is a large proportion of the super rich where there is no risk involved. They screw up and we bail them out. Then they give each other million dollar bonuses because even with their screwups they still made money.
The "no risk" applies to *everyone* when you think about it. Consider this: you run up your credit cards to the max, buy a big house, new car, and in general live beyond your means. Then the bills start coming in and you can't pay them. You go to bankruptcy court, file Chapter 7, and your debt is now erased. All your creditors are left screwed while you get to start over fresh. Sounds a lot like a bailout, doesn't it?
Some how society has decided that these bastards deserve even more rewards because they did really good for a short while.
No, society has done no such thing. Most companies have Boards that decide how to reward the executives, not "society." It's these Boards who give million-dollar golden parachutes out. Blame them? Well, actually, the Boards *are* accountable to someone. They're called "stockholders." So, much like how "society" is responsible for electing useless, corrupt politicians (thus we get the government we deserve), stockholders who sit idly by and allow Boards such behavior get what they deserve as well.
As uncomfortable as it is, if you follow the chain of responsibility, you usually end up finding out the problem is the many of us, not the few of them.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
However between the 1940's and 1970's people could basically afford to purchase homes at reasonable prices, make a good living and support their families, and have a reasonable expectation that if one works hard, they will get rewarded. This doesn't happen anymore.
I work hard, make a good living, and support my family. It is hard to do, however, because people like you keep wanting to take away my hard-earned money and, through redistribution, give it to others who haven't worked as hard or to bail out others who've made poor decisions in their lives.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I have a problem with 95% being poor and 5% being rich.
Then you have no problem, because that's not the case. Not in the US anyway. And let's not forget that the "poor" in the US enjoy a higher standard of living than the middle classes of most other countries.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
'Earn' doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. The idea that someone could 'earn' a billion dollars is ... hilarious.
Hilarious doesn't mean what you think it does, either. Suppose I come up with an invention today that allows practical, sustainable, affordable, safe nuclear fusion. Such an idea would not just revolutionize an industry or a country, it would revolutionize the world. How much is that idea worth? Why, it would be worth whatever someone would be willing to pay for it. Most intelligent people would agree such an idea would be worth not just hundreds of billions, but perhaps *trillions* of dollars. And me, as the sole person who holds the idea in his head, could sell it to whoever I choose for whatever I want. Even if someone paid me $100 billion for it, they'd have gotten a bargain. But nevermind. According to you, nobody and nothing is worth that kind of money.
At what point do you just get honest and admit this whole "kill the rich" fascination of yours has nothing to do with equality and everything to do with envy and jealousy?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What the first poster said:
Mars is closer and easier to send people to
and the fact that people (including scientists), that have a very publicized name/image, have a real issue scrapping programs once the following simple pattern occurs:
- something looked really good, project planned
- money was allocated, stuff was built
- project accomplished phase 1
- additional phases planned
- project proven to be less valuable than newly planned alternatives
Very few can say, "Fascinating. I guess this project is no longer as important as the other one(s)."
Most say, "Mine is still the best idea, and I can prove to you why. Just give me some more money and time. Stop being distracted and let's get back on task here."
Quickly summarized version, but I think anyone who can read gets the drift.
If you believe youtube, NASA did blur stuff on the moon to hide the presence and/or remnants of aliens or their stuff.
Space habitats don't really make all that much sense. You have problems to overcome that planetary surfaces solve simply by being planetary. Lack of gravity has been shown to be a health problem. Spinning the habitat may give you "gravity", but you introduce other problems, starting with the ability to dock with the habitat, and structural integrity of the habitat. There will ALWAYS be a risk of catastrophic decompression on a space habitat. Radiation needs to be dealt with.
Unless, of course, you're going to build those habitats to be planet sized to provide gravity, then provide an atmosphere to stop the radiation, In which case, why not just colonize an existing planet?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I dispute your premise. Show me the invention that hasn't had multiple people behind it. Every patent is a race to file. We have plenty of inventive people.
And frankly, if the case you described were real, I think I and others might be willing to make an exception. None of the wealthy today are worthy of that exception. Not one.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Considering Earth's history, we ought to be taking Extinction Level Events more seriously. This ought to be humanity's main priority
No way. Complete human extinction events are so incredibly unlikely that we should not be spending insane amounts of resources to prevent that.
Earth's already gone through, what, five of them, and now we're capable of producing our own via the numerous nuclear arsenals out there, not to mention people fiddling with bio-weaponry. Considering how smart people and politicians are, do you really want to leave this to the last? The downside is way bigger than the cost.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
That's about one per billion years, and the solar system now has fewer big rocks wandering around. Also, humans have a better chance of surviving an impact than dinosaurs, at least some humans. We can build shelters, for instance, and keep food in storage for a long time. We're also much smaller, so we don't need so much food, and we're much more adaptable and creative.
And if you don't trust people with our nuclear/biological weaponry, why would you trust them to keep a colony running on another planet ? They'll fuck that up too.
I used to work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked on MSL (the Mars rover mission that's grown to $2.5B), and did some R&D on a system that *could* end up on a Europa mission. The entire Jovian system is a radiation nightmare. If I remember correctly, it'll take years for the spacecraft to get there, we can orbit Jupiter relatively safely, but as soon as we orbit Europa or Ganymede, mission life is like another 45 days? The electronics will simply die of overdoses of radiation. Also, currently no FPGAs, can survive this radiation environment long enough to get any science done. Yes, there are *some* rad-hard FPGAs, but, again, they cannot take the total integrated dose (TID) of radiation that the Jovian environment is going to dish out in a short about of time. This means, the spacecraft would need about 30 ASICs between control avionics and instrument packages. That is no small (nor cheap) undertaking. I don't know what they mean by "cheap" missions. I think of earth orbit sats for like $300M, but you're not going to Jupiter for less than $1B. But even then, I think MSL was originally bid at $0.8B and look what happened. These systems are ridiculously complex and sometimes it's a situation of not knowing what you don't know. When you finally get a glimpse of what's really going on, well costs go up... a lot. Also, NASA doesn't just say, "hey let's go here". It's all about the science and you need scientists that want to study something there. The most recent decadal survey (http://www.universetoday.com/83813/where-to-next-decadal-survey-prioritizes-future-planetary-missions/) showed more scientists interested in Mars and what-not compared to outer planet missions.
Pretty much everything I said applies to our situation in the US. For example, my parents at one time had their house paid off. They used the equity in this house to upgrade to a larger property further out of town (sort of as a nice retirement spot since there is a nice pond they share with neighbors and a place for horses). They did this almost 10 years ago. Once the housing bubble hit, it wiped out most of the excess equity they had from using their previous house to upgrade, and now they owe basically what their house is worth on the mortgage minus some from their payments over the years. I don't disagree that investments are important for some things, nor that the person investing deserves something for it, I am just saying that the argument "the wealthy being able to invest for start ups is beneficial for the economy" is over-exaggerated. First off, the wealthy aren't even investing due to fear and even if it that weren't true the things they tend to invest in are not small businesses. Having an economy where only the wealthy can invest in anything, and everyone else can't even save to invest to get wealthy ends up with something like feudalism. I.e. you owe them their investment plus interest and/or part of your company, they do no work in the company but you must send a portion of profits their way. Meanwhile, they exert control over you through their investment. This isn't bad in itself until this becomes the only way to start a business. Since you can't even start a business without the investments of the wealthy, the wealthy end up owning a piece of everything. You could possibly buy out their stake over time, but this of course is at the discretion of both parties (of course depending on how their contract is set up). Essentially, the distribution of wealth is causing a middle class capable of small business entrepreneurship to shrink and have to go to the wealthy class whenever they try to start anything. I say entrepreneurship is shrinking because it is. Most people are becoming employees rather than small business owners because they can't find investors, and they can't save (at least enough in a short enough period of time). http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2011/2011-04.cfm
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
That's idiotic. It goes to other places so other people can do stuff with it. That's what investment means.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Since when has the search for extraterrestrial life been part of NASA's mandate? And why must the search for life be the sole reason for NASA to launch a scientific mission?
Consider http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html
Here are NASA's objectives according to the National Aeronautics and Space Act:
"(1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.
(2) The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles.
(3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space.
(4) The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes.
(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere.
(6) The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency.
(7) Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this chapter and in the peaceful application of the results thereof.
(8) The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities, and equipment.
(9) The preservation of the United States preeminent position in aeronautics and space through research and technology development related to associated manufacturing processes."
Nice assumptions. I didn't even say anything that your response would even make sense for. I said that working hard doesn't pay off anymore. Obviously you have to do it otherwise your family starves. Its just that the effort in keeps getting you less as time progresses. It appears that you have a bone to pick against an imaginary enemy. The only bail outs I see are going to the Banks and Financial institutions courtesy of your hard work. I don't see people who have been laid off getting hardly anything. Do you not think that a plumber works hard? Or a construction worker? How about white collar workers that get laid off in large swaths to temporarily boost company profits so the CEO gets a huge bonus? Is everyone just a burn-out in your book? People do work hard, when they have a job that pays them what they are worth. Furthermore, most people on SS and Medicare are DUH retired. Most people don't want more taxes on income from their jobs, except on capital gains where it makes sense. I don't think its fair that I get taxed at 30 percent when I pull in 40k when someone is getting taxes at 15 percent on the 200K + they make on investments. Income is income, no matter where it comes from. Make it a flat tax on all income regardless of its source above 22,500 and Ill be happy.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
This is another example of Program Suicide, which has been responsible for so many Big Projects programs being killed. When the budget gets tight, the leaders of different sections of the program start fighting for resources. They start campaigning for allies outside the program, who in turn use the in-fighting to as an excuse to have the program cut. In this case, NASA as a whole is committing suicide. Manned vs. Robotic programs, Inner planets vs. Outer planets, missions vs. research. Add to this the groups pushing commercial space vs. NASA, and the whole U.S. space program is killing itself. There are a lot of groups that want NASA's money and the space community is helping those groups to get it. If we kill the space program this way, we deserve the consequences!
You would expect a system that benefits all people equally would maintain a relatively close distribution of wealth over time.
Why would you expect that?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Thanks. This the subject nobody's talking about. Our priorities are so fucked up. Why are we talking about going to Mars vs. Europa? We need to do all of it! And instead we're pissing away orders of magnitude more money on smart bombs and cruise missiles and replacement limbs for brave kids. WTF?
Because the net inflow/outflow of money to middle class, rich, and poor should remain more or less the same proportionally +/- some differences over time if everyone is indeed benefiting from the wealth creation in an economy. Its well known large differences between rich/poor cause problems, and in times where the middle class has the major share of wealth, the economy is booming, businesses are thriving, etc. Correlations perhaps, but worthy of caution.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
What do you think it means?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/earn
1a) to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered
In contrast, for example, to being born to wealthy parents, and then leveraging your access to capital to exploit the work done of others and take their earnings as your own.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I think (in some cases at least) investment is work, in the sense that it isn't effortless. Whether or not the work is productive, as in accomplishing anything or befitting the economy, is open to debate.
So forget the capital gains tax.
Increase the estate tax, and get rid of the loopholes that let people avoid the estate tax. Make the first $10million of anyone's inheritance untaxed, then tax the remainder at 99%. THAT will end the tyranny of the upper class in 2 generations... Which is why no one talks about it, and why it will never happen.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Under a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the debtors assets are liquidated. I think you meant Chapter 11 or 13 where debt is *reorganized* and the debtor still pays all of some of it back at reduced (sometimes greatly) terms.
Bankruptcy laws were changed drastically in 2005 by lobbying from banks and other debt owners and there are now means tests and many other barriers to "erasing debt." IANL, but for an individual, I don't even think it's possible in the US.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Has had an axe to grind with the Mars program for a long time. Nothing new to see here. He's probably also bitter ever since the IAU demoted the planet his baby is headed to a "dwarf planet."
Full disclosure: when he was the science director at NASA, he threatened funding changes that would've put me out of a job, so he's not my favorite person in the world, so take the appropriate amounts of salt with MY comments.
With all that said, I agree with him to an extent. I would *love* to see more attention to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But the anti-science, cut the budget at all costs people are ascendant right now, and their opposition is pretty luke-warm at best to the space program. The Mars program has momentum and the chances of us getting all the cool stuff funded is virtually nil. I doubt the sample return mission he's talking about will even get funded, especially in light of a recent OMB releases. For missions to Jupiter and Saturn to get any congressional love right now is not likely.
Investing money is kind of hard work. I started last week and have been making money hand over fist, but this week I'm in gold and cash because I saw the stock market starting to peak and had stop losses set that all triggered. I only made 9.02% in one week.
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Everyone who cares, knows what Mars is. Most people do not know who, where, or WTF Europa, Titan, and Enceladus are. When a big part of the mission would be public appeal, that does count.
The working classes gets 20-30 percent of their paychecks taken away, and they typically make 30-60k
Unfortunately the middle class can't afford to save in this economy, nor in this system that absurdly favors the wealthy.
I'm sorry, my net pay outstrips my expenses. I pay $725/mo for an apartment (I could get a better one for $680/mo), $60/mo for electric but $100/mo in the hottest summer months, $50/mo for cell phone, $200/mo for food. My big expenses are the $720/6mo for insurance and my $375/mo car payment.
In the end, I have around $1400/mo in expenses and $1800/mo in savings, after paying all my benefits and paying into my 401(k). I live in a modest sized apartment that I've furnished well for around $5000. I prepare my own breakfast and lunch using luxurious high-end lunch meats (including some genuine German-made product that's fucking delicious), sushi made from raw tuna or smoked salmon... fairly regularly, lamb falls into my diet... lots and lots of shiitake and portabella mushrooms... the good stuff. I shop at Lands' End for all my clothes, which ... well, they have some very nice $70 pants and $30-$40 shirts, not to mention boxers at $15/pair.
I'm living the high life, but I'm careful with what I buy and what I spend. I commute on a $600 bicycle that I'm replacing with a $1700 bicycle, which I'll upgrade with a $150 leather seat and $80 clipless pedals. I spend $50 per article on wool clothing--Minus 33 stuff, 100% superfine Merino wool--for the winter, and I currently have two sets of baselayers (light and medium weight) and will need an Expedition weight set to handle December and January most likely... that's $300 total, but I'll use all that stuff again next year.
For the 7 mile commute, it takes me 5-10 minutes longer to get to and from work. I'm healthier, my commute is more fun, and I've been forced to learn to deal with the heat and cold. Cold is fatal to me, but ... well, I've never been able to handle it so well, now that I know how to dress for it effectively. As for the heat? I ignored it mostly; biked around with my 3L camelbak, shorts, long sleeve Zensah compression shirt and a moisture wicking high visibility jersey on top, 106 degrees outside and I'm fine. Had a coworker wind up in the hospital with saline IV and long-term sickness because of walking outside too much, even with plenty of water (with no electrolytes added--that was the problem, that and a fashion statement that made the sweating mechanism ineffective at cooling the body).
On top of it, I pay less for car insurance, less for gas (I haven't put gas in my car in 2 months... I have half a tank, most of it went to elective driving because I didn't feel like biking), less maintenance, and my car lasts longer. I do drive the car once a week or two, occasionally on the highway, to keep the parts moving and make sure it gets to temperature. One day I'll buy a motorcycle for those days or distances I don't want to bike, but don't need the hauling capacity for--it's cheaper (to insure, to maintain, to replace after it's dead, and to fuel).
I am currently behind. Given all my bicycling expenses, I'm about ... huh, actually about $500 away from breaking even just considering fuel and insurance. Next year of course I'll still have... well, more money sunk into bicycles, but that's becoming elective.
So you see, $60k is plenty enough to save, so is $45k. And for your information, I pay around 30% for my investments because I am a shorter term swing trader: anything held for less than a year is "income" and taxed as such, rather than "Capital Gains." I also understand the tax law enough to turn that into a maximum of 16% by using my IRA as a loophole, but if I don't withdraw the money then the actual value starts cutting down because no tax is assessed until I actually withdraw. There's no income or capital gains tax, but a 6% penalty for overcontributi
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So why is NASA spending $2.5B on the next Mars Rover and planning to spend over $6B more on a Mars sample return when it can't find the money for much cheaper missions to Europa or Enceladus?"
This summary doesn't accurately describe the situation at all. The Mars missions are so more expensive largely because they are doing more. The next Mars Rover is going to be larger, heavier, and more capable than the two previous--wildly successful--rovers in pretty much every way. That $6B mission is a sample return mission, lifting off and bringing a research payload from Mars back to Earth is an enormous technical challenge. It's never been done before and that will drive most of the cost.
Also the linked missions aren't quite as cheap as the summary implies. The proposed mission to Europa has an estimated cost of $2.5 billion (and $4.7 billion is the given estimate in the last paragraph of the first link in the summary), exactly the same price as the first "overly expensive" Mars mission mentioned. The Enceladus trip is much cheaper, estimated at a little over half of a billion, so that at least is a reasonable alternative, though I still want to point out that that mission is much earlier in the planning stages, and missions that diverge a lot from previous missions are more likely to have ballooning costs as new found kinks are worked out.
Another issue is that not only are the Mars missions promising more, but there is a much greater chance that they will be able to live up to those promises. Every single Mars mission we've done so far has added to our body of knowledge on the planet, and our ability to better plan a mission and engineer a craft that can get more and better data on the next run. From Viking and on we have answered many, many questions about Mars, and learned about even more questions (meaning that we know the sort of doodad that needs to be on the next mission to answer that new question). Starting a new series of missions to a new celestial body means that in a lot of ways you have to start back at the drawing board again. This is another reason to start small on a new body, better to have 3-4 partially successful $200 million missions leading up to that big $2.5 billion dollar rover mission rather than trying plan a $2.5 billion mission right of the bat.
I should clarify that I don't think that investigating these moons is a bad idea. I think it's a wonderful one. However I don't think that we should investigate these moons in place of Mars, when we have already accumulated so much experience on how to investigate Mars. It's also worthwhile to note that this was the viewpoint of every scientist interviewed in the article. Nobody said that they didn't want to go to Mars, they all said that they wanted this moons visited in addition to Mars, not instead of.
Ah yes. The "everyone with money inherited it through no merit of their own" troll, backed up with the "investing your capital in the work of others isn't a service" tripe. You're full of shit, you know that?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Statistically, I'm right about those with money. Social mobility in this country is very low, look it up. Which is not to say that there aren't exceptions, just not many.
And no, investing your capital in the work of others isn't service.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Social mobility is low. Full stop. Everywhere, at all times throughout history, those who break through to a higher economic class are the exception, not the rule. Social and economic mobility is higher now than at any other time in our recorded history. I have looked it up, thanks.
And if you somehow think that investing your capital in the work of others isn't a service...well, I don't know what to tell you. You're wrong.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
~"Half a century ago it was so great" ("In your lifetime (unless you were born prior to 1965), the conditions have been deteriorating") is one of those myths. Most hilariously and paradoxically, considering you cherish it so much:
America in the 1950s was a middle-class society in a way that America in the 1990s is not. That is, it had a much flatter income distribution, so that people had much more sense of sharing a common national lifestyle. And people in that relatively equal America felt good about their lives, even though by modern standards, they were poor--poorer, if Boskin is correct, than we previously thought. Doesn't this mean, then, that having a more or less equal distribution of income makes for a happier society, even if it does not raise anyone's material standard of living? That is, you can use the fact that people did not feel poor in the 1950s as an argument for a more radical egalitarianism than even most leftists would be willing to espouse.
One that hath name thou can not otter