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Donald Trump Thinks Going To Mars Would Be "Wonderful" But There Is a Catch
MarkWhittington writes: Donald Trump, the mercurial real estate tycoon and media personality who, much to the surprise of one and all, has become the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president opened his mind just a little about his attitude toward space exploration, according to a story in Forbes. In an answer to a question put to him about sending humans to Mars, the current focus at NASA, Trump said, "Honestly, I think it's wonderful; I want to rebuild our infrastructure first, ok? I think it's wonderful." In other words, dreams of going to Mars must take a back seat to more Earthly concerns. It is not an answer many space exploration supporters want to hear.
Many people would like to see Donald Trump go to Mars.
But the Martians would probably consider him to be an illegal alien and might expect us to pay to put up a wall to keep him out.
We spend next to nothing on space exploration. The tons of waste and needless pork projects in government needs to go first. If trump is half as capable at business as he claims then there should be plenty of surplus to do both without cutting funding or raising taxes.
Don't worry. When it comes time for the Florida primary, he (along with every other candidate) will be competing to come up with the most amazing program ever. After the primary, it will be forgotten until the next election.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> In other words, dreams of going to Mars must take a back seat to more Earthly concerns. It is not an answer many space exploration supporters want to hear.
That sounds perfectly sane. Sending people to Mars now, is a waste of resources. We send probes, probes tell us basically what we already know (its slightly less inhospitable than say...Venus) and we learn some new details about the inhospitable conditions. Artificial Intelligence or Genetically Engineered creatures to send to Mars is a much more efficient approach. Let's get that working on Earth, first and we can talk about the myriad of inhospitable places that open up. That's very long term thinking, which is part of what space exploration is about. I don't think Trump supposes to know anything about long term technological viability. He just happens to be on the right side of this.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Reality TV star Donald Trump advising us on space exploration...who could possibly object to that?
He could hardly do worse than Congress, with its insane, unaffordable Porklauncher.
Besides, there's no way in hell the US government is going to be funding a trillion dollar NASA trip to Mars. The first people there will be tourists flying on their own dime, at vastly lower cost.
The funny part is that he thinks modern America has the ability to fix its broken infrastructure. Things that could be built in months a century ago would take a decade or more of environmental studies before anyone even started work, and a decade more to build.
Trump is one of the better of the bunch. He likes to shoot off a lot but really one of the most obnoxious blow hards ever made a pretty good president. Teddy Roosevelt had a tendency to outrage people too but looking at his legacy he was one of the better ones.
much to the surprise of one and all, has become the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president
It doesn't surprise me at all that Trump is in the lead. He represents everything that the republicans keep saying they want. Now they have it and they don't know how to get rid of it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Repairing existing infrastructure is not likely to need significant environmental impact studies, as the existing presence of the decaying infrastructure has already made its impact on the environment.
Honestly, the biggest problem is financial cost.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The limitation is not financial. Space exploration isn't expensive compared to other large infrastructure projects. Space exploration is very difficult and really exciting to work on. Given the opportunity, it could suck the attention and political talent away from domestic infrastructure projects.
In the upper levels of the government, there are a handful of roles from which a person can realistically manage the combination of congressional and bureaucratic oversight necessary to get "large" things done. If we're going to Mars, the director of NASA needs to be a superstar with a ton of facetime with Congress. That person can be the "visionary" science expert in Washington, or the "establishment" expert in Washington, but he can't "just" be a good administrator.
Chuck Bolden is a great guy, but he's not calling up his personal friends in the VC community like Arati Prabhakar (DARPA director and current "visionary" expert) or playing a key role in high stakes international diplomacy like Ernest Moniz (Sectretary of Energy and current "establishment" expert). Both of those administrators specialize in military related work. As long as the focus in Congress (and the media) is defense, it's going to be hard to break into that scientific leadership role focusing on anything but defense.
The Berlin Wall was built by East Germany to keep people from leaving not to keep invaders out.
The real problem not being discussed is you can either have open borders or a welfare state. You can't have both for long.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Can you name some scientific advances and inventions by the soviets in the space race, or only (if that) the ones made by americans. Many have argued (including Richard Feynman) that the advances of the space program were not technological, but organizational (not a trivial problem when here are hundreds of thousands of people involved)
The (economic) question is however are those advances better (more progress/$) than direct funding of consumer products? Analysis shows no.
I am aware of such analyses, but do not know if such analysis is the consensus opinion or more a conjecture at this point.
I would still argue that overall the other benefits I listed imply that government funding of such things would be good. If nothing else, business is sometimes very risk averse, and once government research proves something is feasible, then they will jump on it (see the various businesses that have popped out of projects started at FFRDCs, for example). So such funding would then jumpstart consumer products that wouldn't have been tried in the first place by the private sector.
Honestly, the biggest problem is financial cost.
There's plenty of cash hogtied up in the derivatives markets. And there is over 4.5 trillion in "excess reserves". Personally, I'd rather see it used for California desalination plants, but whatever. Like the water itself, the money is just not where we need it. It is being used to fix the toilet on somebody's yacht.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
For that matter, we should really lift everyone up, and completely avoid any sort of taxation on income, right? If it's lifting SOME people up to have them working without paying income taxes (even though they get to benefit from the things that the people who DO pay income taxes are buying for them), then it will lift everyone even higher if nobody pays, right? If prohibiting some people from working without paying taxes is bad, then we should lift the prohibition on working without paying taxes. Otherwise we just get more people not paying taxes, when we could just have everyone not paying taxes.
... that WE allow people to travel freely to Mexico, and WE don't have any control over whether they overstay their visas there? That's already the case. Mexico, on the other hand, is absolutely draconian about illegal workers making money in that country. That's why one of their main industries is the expedited piping of other Central American illegals from south of their country to north of their country.
Yeah, that muddled mess makes just as much sense as your open border claptrap. "Both directions" means what
Regardless of your nonsense, here's a basic fact for you: Pew Research reports that only 4% of Central American illegals in the US actually work in agriculture. Your entire meme about food prices going up due to a sudden drop in cheap illegal labor is pure BS and you know it. Removing illegals from that sector would have only a very marginal impact on production costs or retail prices across the board. Please try another lefty meme talking point.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I think he's also a (political, if not business) buffoon, who won't last past pre-season. But hey: belly laughs are where you find them.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
You could have saved your breath. I know exactly where you're coming from. Your wild hand waving is entirely expected and predictable regular right wing propaganda as old as the universe. I said, make it two way. Borders are global "Jim Crow". They define racism and bigotry, in addition to the revenue they generate. I guess I have to repeat once again, save your silly politics for the believers in the echo chamber, and see your aspirations of supremacy for what they are. The veneer has worn off. Anybody with even the slightest inkling of respect can see right through it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program's lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas.
Seems reasonable.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You are entirely neglecting the fact that the reason the toxins are there is from mining by a private corporation that never cleaned up its mess. But EPA bad, corporation good, right?
Moron
I'm sorry--you think that the Trumpalicious One is revealing a single thing that is off of his script? Oooookay. . .
If ever a man's hairstyle told you absolutely all you needed to know, that hairstyle was Trump's. A ridiculous bit of follicular folly that successfully underscores the naked scalp from which it attempts to distract.
It's Summer. Donald is Me First & the Gimme Gimmes filling air time before the real campaign begins.
Of course, I don't dispute that he could be a total false flag operation for Her Majesty, intended more as a wrecking ball than anything else.
I'll also cast a protest vote for him, should your buddies at GOP Central insist on nominating JEB.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
> To the contrary, I think he might actually be better than most at diplomacy -- he knows how to negotiate and strike deals, even or especially with people who are hard to deal with.
Yep, that's EXACTLY what he's very good at, negotiating deals. That's why his book is called The Art of the Deal.
I won't vote for him, but I will acknowledge what his strengths are. He figures out what the other side ACTUALLY wants and what he actually wants, and comes up with a way for both sides to get most of the what they want. He _might_ help negotiate through the gridlock in Congress by proposing or supporting bills which allow most people to achieve their ends.
I say "what they ACTUALLY want" because most of the time, what people ask for isn't what they actually want. Software developers understand that. Somebody might propose a ban on SUVs when they want cleaner air, a foreign leader might make all sorts of demands when what they really want is to save face, to tell their constituents that they stood up to America. Trump's skill is to find a way to allow the foreign leader to declare victory while giving us what we want.
That said, I think his weakness is that he speaks too soon and too much, without first thinking about what he's going to say. I have a reputation which exceeds my actual skills and knowledge. The myth is that I know a LOT, that I almost always have the correct answer, that I'm virtually never wrong. The truth is that I simply keep my mouth shut when I don't know. It's not that I always have the right answer, it's that I don't often argue for an answer that's wrong. I shut up or just ask questions unless and until I have the right answer. Trump isn't like that.
A true Libertairian president could balance the budget in 5 years. Cut all tax breaks and corporate wealfare, Impose a national healthcare with cost controls, cut the military by 25%, impose a flat tax on America of 25%.
How's the colonization of America an unique event? People walked across the Bering land bridge when they had the chance just like they walked into Europe and Asia. They may have had boats as well like the people who colonized Australia probably did and the people who colonized many islands definitely did.
Now an unique event would be colonizing Antarctica, something much easier then Mars but still needing quite a bit of technology beyond fire, canoes and spears
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Seriously, I really expected something more from him than stock answer #202, namely "Yeah, I think $topic is a good idea but we should get our act together first".
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a non-answer from a politician. This answer fits any question, any topic, anything. That's neither a commitment nor a dismissal. It is, essentially, nothing.
*sigh* This campaign is going to be a long one if they already start with the empty statements in the primaries.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.