Average house size by country correlates strongly to electrical consumption per capita with the US, Canada and Australia generally high in both regards. Average house size in Germany is half of what it is US. http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
If you consider house size to be a component of quality of life, then Germany is taking quite a hit on quality of life to get those lower electrical consumption numbers.
In this scenario - there is no such thing, and even if there was - you can't know WHERE it would be.
. A volcanic superplume could turn cover ANYWHERE in magma.
Both of these objections are addressed by using multiple sites.
We're talking about events that can move CONTINENTS around, Hell there are events on the list that can CREATE new continents !
[citation needed] This is a gross misunderstanding on continental theory.
There's plenty of evidence of water on Mars
You can't drink evidence. Until you can actually quantify the usable amount of water on Mars, you must as assume that you'll have to bring it all with you.
At best this one is a tie.
No such thing as tie. Any equivalent problem will always be a thousand times more expensive to Mars due to transport costs. For every water purifier, you take to Mars, I can build a thousand on Earth. For every solar panel to you take, I can build a thousand. etc.
it has to be MARS sustainable
There is no such thing as Mars sustainable because Mars sustains no life.
I can still rely on ore and other local resources. You can't GET to the ones on earth.
There is no shortage of ore on Earth.
In this scenario water is too scarce for ANY to be deemed non-potable.
Surely a spacer like you understands that water used for cooling can be recollected and reused. In fact, its a good way to distill wastewater back into drinking water. Along with the acknowledgement that environmental disposal of waste isn't a priority, you are conceding that nuclear is a viable power source.
No - in a nuclear winter scenario - you have maybe 5% of the sunlight you're used to
Nuclear winter scenarios last for a few years. A decade at the most.Food can be stored for that long.
Oh -and I was the one who suggested we do the Moon over Mars - because it makes sense to start where it's a bit easier.
OK, so how you growing plants when its completely dark for a month at a time? Also your toxic soil and water problems are now far, far worse. Look up all the problems that the Apollo missions had with lunar dust.
Can they do that on Venus ? No ? Then no.
I'm ignoring your Venus scenario, because its ridiculously implausible. At a minimum, it would require that all the oceans boil off. I'm sticking to scenarios based on real scientific evidence.
No - colder than that - continuously for decades, perhaps centuries,
What's your scenario here?
at least one Mars it's not PERMANENTLY sub-zero.
The average temperature on Mars is minus 60 degrees C. At the equator, at noon in the summer, Mars sometimes gets up to 20C. Then it drops back to minus 70 C at night. You have to deal with this every single day. Now do the math on how many solar panels you need to keep your colony warm.
A Mars colony would need a way to extract and add to the water supply
That has nothing to do with the soil. Look up Mars perchlorates and tell me how your going to grow plants in that. Or grow plants in lunar soil in the dark.
We're already pretty good at this - we deal with it in space travel all the time.
No we don't. The Apollo astronauts were the only one who have left the Van Allen belts and they only spent a few days outside their protection. You seem to know very little about space travel.
But there's no risk of an earthbound asteroid scoring a direct hit on a colony.
Typhoons and earthquakes are a matter of picking a stable locaction. In fact, we can pick multiple redundant locations all over the world to cover all the possibilities. We can build a hundred bunkers for the fraction of the cost of one colony.
. It needs to be proof against volcanoes far beyond anything we've ever seen
Tell me again, what is the largest volcano in the solar system? https://www.universetoday.com/...
Better make sure your colony can handle that.
your bunker cannot rely on ANY outside resources
Neither can your colony.
You don't know that there will BE drinkable water afterwards.
There is no drinkable water on Mars. Period. Full stop.
We tried to build a self-sustaining environment in the 1990s - it was called Biosphere 2, it was a complete disaster.
Which sounds like a non-starter for your colony.
that means growing crops. With no sunlight - so that means you need electric lighting, and you have no outside energy sources.
Solar intensity on Mars is about half of what is on Earth. A completely cloudy day on Earth gets more sunlight than Mars at noon.
You can't even do nuclear - you have no way to dispose of the waste, no source of new nuclear fuel
After an ELE, we're not particularly worried about environmental impact. So we can just toss the waste out a hatch.
you can't spare the water to cool it,
You don't need potable water to cool a reactor. And the water is reusable. How are you planning to cool a reactor on Mars again? You don't even have liquid water to start with.
it's going to get very, very cold.
Not as cold as Mars. Which is sub-antarctic temperatures every single day.
If your soil gets overplanted - you're screwed because you can't know the soil outside isn't toxic or radioactive.
I guess you're screwed on Mars. Because the soil on Mars already is already toxic. And you have to deal with radiation every day because there is no magnetosphere.
Basically - you want to build something that is probably completely impossible.
Basically, you want to build something that is probably completely impossible BUT ON MARS. Can't you see the idiocy? You have to do every thing the bunker does, but ON ANOTHER PLANET.
but it does NOT have to be completely sealed off from the outside world,
The colony has to be at MORE sealed off than a bunker. My vault dwellers can put on a parkas and breathing tanks to go outside. Your colonists need full spacesuits.
it does not have to function without even SUNLIGHT
You have less sunlight that Earth would have.
it has access to external resources for raw materials and soil
My vault dwellers can go out and collect far more resources than your colonies. High quality processed materials would be piled up. Literally cities full of scrap metal and spare parts. What have you got on Mars that is even comparable to that?
But unlike your bunker - it's actually within the realm of conceivable possibility.
Every single objection to a bunker applies to your colony. If we are betting on the survival of the human race, then on a dollar for dollar basis, which plan makes more sense? A single manned mission to Mars is estimated to cost a trillion dollars. That is not even close to the cost of full colonization. How many bunkers can we build with that much money?
You're probably right. But that is a problem for the financial backers to worry about. As a gamer who owns a Vive, the only thing I care about is whether the game is fun or not.
Most scientists are quite sure that the former is the easier one of the two- because there's time.
[citation needed]
We have plenty of time to build a bunker. We could start right now if anyone was concerned. No need to wait for Elon Musk to build a rocket.
We can build that colony over a matter of years before the first humans even arrive.
We could build an underground bunker over a matter of years using the same technology and without launch costs. Give me one good reason why building a bunker (or multiple bunkers) would be more difficult than building a colony, using the same technology.
The Permian/Triassic extinction wiped out 97% of all the species on the planet at the time.
No, it did not. From wikipedia: up to 96% of all marine species[6][7] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species become extinct. Speaking as terrestrial vertebrate myself, a 30% chance is pretty good odds compared to a planet with NO LIFE EVER. Even in your worst case scenario, Earth is still infinitely more habitable than Mars or the Moon have ever been.
Please explain how all major Cretaceous mammalian lineages survived the K-T extinction, but humans would have "not a fucking chance"
If humans cannot survive circumstance that other mammal species have already demonstrated to be survivable, then how do you think we're going to survive on a planet where no life exists at all?
Even when the universe has thrown a big rock at Earth, it was still the habitable planet in the solar system. Earth could simultaneously be hit by an asteroid, nuclear war and global warming and still be a paradise compared to Mars. There is no feasible scenario where Mars or the Moon are better a places to restart humanity.
If you throw enough money at any technically challenging project, it will create spin off technologies. If we spent billions of dollars to explore the ocean, it would create spin off technologies. If we spent billions of dollars to on self-sufficient colonies in Antarctica, it would create spin off technologies. There is nothing particularly special about Mars.
Look. I see what's going on. This isn't about facts or numbers. You are living out what you think is the optimum low-cost of lifestyle. So when someone, like me, points out that there are ways to live on a low income without being stuck in the ghetto, its not just a difference of opinion, its an attack on your personal decisions. I could spend days citing cost-of-living index, home prices and USDA food desert data and it wouldn't make a difference. You've painted yourself into an emotional corner where you can't have a rational discussion because you're too invested in validating your own choices.
From your original post that I replied to:
Then they get pissed when you point out
They're not getting pissed off at the point your trying to make, they're getting pissed off at you. Because you're emotionally incapable of considering options besides the one you've chosen.
Giving a man 10 acres of land is obviously cheaper than giving him 10 square feet.
10 acres in Montana is cheaper than a parking space in NYC. While 10 acres per person is a bit excessive, the US has 2.4 Billion acres of land. There's no particular shortage of land if you're not concerned about location.
I live in a dense, inner-city ghetto, near a race track, near highway, near schools. I have a $421/month, 15-year mortgage.
Sounds awful. Your mortgage is almost as much as mine and I live in a nice suburb of Seattle.
In rural PA, I can buy a place for somewhere between $200k and $779k
Look harder. Trulia lists the median housing price in PA as $165,000. That includes homes in more expensive urban areas. A quick google search turns of plenty of homes in rural PA for half that.
I can drive for 40 minutes to find food. Good luck ever finding a fucking job.
We're talking about UBI. If people on UBI were migrating to rural areas, then getting a job isn't a priority. How long it takes to get to the store isn't particularly important either, since someone on UBI would have copious free time.
Why do you think the poorest of poor end up in inner city ghettos?
I don't know. You tell me?
Are they too fucking stupid to find those nice, cheap rural areas where they'd live like kings and honored concubines?
Lots of them do. Why do you think that places like Arizona and Nevada are full of old people? Because when you have a steady fixed income, then moving to a cheap rural area is a smart move.
Hell, why aren't landlords up in those rural areas making a giant, highly-profitable business of it?
Some of them are. Trailer parks are very profitable. One of the problems is that rural real estate is so cheap than there's not much advantage to renting.
That's utter nonsense. It doesn't even pass a common sense litmus test. In any cost of living comparison, rural areas are always more affordable than urban centers. If you're trying to get people to accept the idea of universal social security, then why are you trying to make it more dystopian than it needs to be?
People will hate the idea of living in a suburban ghetto, but moving to rural area will appeal to a lot of people. Living off UBI in a mountain cabin or quaint farming village doesn't seem so bad.
Right now, in the US, we let 1.5M people live in the streets without letting it burden our conscience too much. I don't see any way that UBI would make that number any worse.
No news is good news. The media tries to create as much hysteria as possible. So its good to have an occasional reminder that the general state of the country is on an even keel.
I read that same WaPo article before I even replied to your comment. Its the first thing that comes up when you google Japanese school lunches. I'll just highlight a few things that stuck me.
Schools in Japan, by contrast, give children the sort of food they’d get at home
How is that going to work out in the US? You think kids are going to eat Japanese lunches when they get sugar cereals and chicken nuggets at home?
When it comes to food, Japan has some deeply ingrained advantages. Children are taught to eat what they are served, meaning they are prone to accept, rather than revolt against, the food on their plates.
There's that culture problem.
Municipalities pay for labor costs, but parents — billed monthly — pay for the ingredients, about $3 per meal, with reduced and free options for poorer families
Average US school lunches are about $2.43=$2.60, which includes the cost of labor. Your Japanese lunches are 20% more expensive. Not much of difference but defeats the idea that this approach is any cheaper.
Now back to your points
what needs to change is not only the school lunch model, but American attitudes, specifically the tendency to make excuses and whine about the perceived lack of freedom and individual choice.
What you really don't seem to grasp is that most Americans don't want to live in a Japanese style culture. Our grandparents fought a war to prevent that from happening. Voters are rejecting the party that's trying to push for these changes. The foundation of American culture is freedom and individual choice. And we're not going to reject those values just because a few kids are fat.
Slashdot Mirror
You've just demonstrated why its never a good idea to let junkies make decisions.
The thing is that we consume a lot less electricity in Germany.
Your houses are also about half the the size of the US. http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
If electric and petrol are cheap, then poorly insulated houses and gas guzzling cars aren't problems that need to be solved.
If you consider house size to be a component of quality of life, then Germany is taking quite a hit on quality of life to get those lower electrical consumption numbers.
Both of these objections are addressed by using multiple sites.
[citation needed] This is a gross misunderstanding on continental theory.
You can't drink evidence. Until you can actually quantify the usable amount of water on Mars, you must as assume that you'll have to bring it all with you.
No such thing as tie. Any equivalent problem will always be a thousand times more expensive to Mars due to transport costs. For every water purifier, you take to Mars, I can build a thousand on Earth. For every solar panel to you take, I can build a thousand. etc.
There is no such thing as Mars sustainable because Mars sustains no life.
There is no shortage of ore on Earth.
Surely a spacer like you understands that water used for cooling can be recollected and reused. In fact, its a good way to distill wastewater back into drinking water. Along with the acknowledgement that environmental disposal of waste isn't a priority, you are conceding that nuclear is a viable power source.
Nuclear winter scenarios last for a few years. A decade at the most.Food can be stored for that long.
OK, so how you growing plants when its completely dark for a month at a time? Also your toxic soil and water problems are now far, far worse. Look up all the problems that the Apollo missions had with lunar dust.
I'm ignoring your Venus scenario, because its ridiculously implausible. At a minimum, it would require that all the oceans boil off. I'm sticking to scenarios based on real scientific evidence.
What's your scenario here?
The average temperature on Mars is minus 60 degrees C. At the equator, at noon in the summer, Mars sometimes gets up to 20C. Then it drops back to minus 70 C at night. You have to deal with this every single day. Now do the math on how many solar panels you need to keep your colony warm.
That has nothing to do with the soil. Look up Mars perchlorates and tell me how your going to grow plants in that. Or grow plants in lunar soil in the dark.
No we don't. The Apollo astronauts were the only one who have left the Van Allen belts and they only spent a few days outside their protection. You seem to know very little about space travel.
Do you think M
. It needs to be proof against volcanoes far beyond anything we've ever seen
Tell me again, what is the largest volcano in the solar system? https://www.universetoday.com/... Better make sure your colony can handle that.
your bunker cannot rely on ANY outside resources
Neither can your colony.
You don't know that there will BE drinkable water afterwards.
There is no drinkable water on Mars. Period. Full stop.
We tried to build a self-sustaining environment in the 1990s - it was called Biosphere 2, it was a complete disaster.
Which sounds like a non-starter for your colony.
that means growing crops. With no sunlight - so that means you need electric lighting, and you have no outside energy sources.
Solar intensity on Mars is about half of what is on Earth. A completely cloudy day on Earth gets more sunlight than Mars at noon.
You can't even do nuclear - you have no way to dispose of the waste, no source of new nuclear fuel
After an ELE, we're not particularly worried about environmental impact. So we can just toss the waste out a hatch.
you can't spare the water to cool it,
You don't need potable water to cool a reactor. And the water is reusable. How are you planning to cool a reactor on Mars again? You don't even have liquid water to start with.
it's going to get very, very cold.
Not as cold as Mars. Which is sub-antarctic temperatures every single day.
If your soil gets overplanted - you're screwed because you can't know the soil outside isn't toxic or radioactive.
I guess you're screwed on Mars. Because the soil on Mars already is already toxic. And you have to deal with radiation every day because there is no magnetosphere.
Basically - you want to build something that is probably completely impossible.
Basically, you want to build something that is probably completely impossible BUT ON MARS. Can't you see the idiocy? You have to do every thing the bunker does, but ON ANOTHER PLANET.
but it does NOT have to be completely sealed off from the outside world,
The colony has to be at MORE sealed off than a bunker. My vault dwellers can put on a parkas and breathing tanks to go outside. Your colonists need full spacesuits.
it does not have to function without even SUNLIGHT
You have less sunlight that Earth would have.
it has access to external resources for raw materials and soil
My vault dwellers can go out and collect far more resources than your colonies. High quality processed materials would be piled up. Literally cities full of scrap metal and spare parts. What have you got on Mars that is even comparable to that?
But unlike your bunker - it's actually within the realm of conceivable possibility.
Every single objection to a bunker applies to your colony. If we are betting on the survival of the human race, then on a dollar for dollar basis, which plan makes more sense? A single manned mission to Mars is estimated to cost a trillion dollars. That is not even close to the cost of full colonization. How many bunkers can we build with that much money?
You're probably right. But that is a problem for the financial backers to worry about. As a gamer who owns a Vive, the only thing I care about is whether the game is fun or not.
You're not even going to try to give a reason? If a self-sufficient bunker wouldn't work on earth, your colony on Mars doesn't stand a chance. QED.
[citation needed] We have plenty of time to build a bunker. We could start right now if anyone was concerned. No need to wait for Elon Musk to build a rocket.
We could build an underground bunker over a matter of years using the same technology and without launch costs. Give me one good reason why building a bunker (or multiple bunkers) would be more difficult than building a colony, using the same technology.
No, it did not. From wikipedia: up to 96% of all marine species[6][7] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species become extinct. Speaking as terrestrial vertebrate myself, a 30% chance is pretty good odds compared to a planet with NO LIFE EVER. Even in your worst case scenario, Earth is still infinitely more habitable than Mars or the Moon have ever been.
The Hubble has made more discoveries than all the Apollo missions combined. All without ever leaving LEO.
How big are the mammals living on mars or the moon?
If humans cannot survive circumstance that other mammal species have already demonstrated to be survivable, then how do you think we're going to survive on a planet where no life exists at all?
Even when the universe has thrown a big rock at Earth, it was still the habitable planet in the solar system. Earth could simultaneously be hit by an asteroid, nuclear war and global warming and still be a paradise compared to Mars. There is no feasible scenario where Mars or the Moon are better a places to restart humanity.
That's why the light rail is being built. So that non-techies can live in Tukwila or Lynnwood and commute to their jobs in Seattle.
If you throw enough money at any technically challenging project, it will create spin off technologies. If we spent billions of dollars to explore the ocean, it would create spin off technologies. If we spent billions of dollars to on self-sufficient colonies in Antarctica, it would create spin off technologies. There is nothing particularly special about Mars.
Then they get pissed when you point out
They're not getting pissed off at the point your trying to make, they're getting pissed off at you. Because you're emotionally incapable of considering options besides the one you've chosen.
10 acres in Montana is cheaper than a parking space in NYC. While 10 acres per person is a bit excessive, the US has 2.4 Billion acres of land. There's no particular shortage of land if you're not concerned about location.
Sounds awful. Your mortgage is almost as much as mine and I live in a nice suburb of Seattle.
Look harder. Trulia lists the median housing price in PA as $165,000. That includes homes in more expensive urban areas. A quick google search turns of plenty of homes in rural PA for half that.
We're talking about UBI. If people on UBI were migrating to rural areas, then getting a job isn't a priority. How long it takes to get to the store isn't particularly important either, since someone on UBI would have copious free time.
I don't know. You tell me?
Lots of them do. Why do you think that places like Arizona and Nevada are full of old people? Because when you have a steady fixed income, then moving to a cheap rural area is a smart move.
Some of them are. Trailer parks are very profitable. One of the problems is that rural real estate is so cheap than there's not much advantage to renting.
That's utter nonsense. It doesn't even pass a common sense litmus test. In any cost of living comparison, rural areas are always more affordable than urban centers. If you're trying to get people to accept the idea of universal social security, then why are you trying to make it more dystopian than it needs to be?
People will hate the idea of living in a suburban ghetto, but moving to rural area will appeal to a lot of people. Living off UBI in a mountain cabin or quaint farming village doesn't seem so bad.
No, we don't have anything like that. At least not in the US.
Right now, in the US, we let 1.5M people live in the streets without letting it burden our conscience too much. I don't see any way that UBI would make that number any worse.
Chinese is tonal language with a pictogram writing system. It's never going to catch on a global language.
No news is good news. The media tries to create as much hysteria as possible. So its good to have an occasional reminder that the general state of the country is on an even keel.
A lot of idiots get the wrong message about a lot of movies. This is especially true for satire. Doesn't mean that movies themselves are bad.
How is that going to work out in the US? You think kids are going to eat Japanese lunches when they get sugar cereals and chicken nuggets at home?
There's that culture problem.
Average US school lunches are about $2.43=$2.60, which includes the cost of labor. Your Japanese lunches are 20% more expensive. Not much of difference but defeats the idea that this approach is any cheaper.
Now back to your points
What you really don't seem to grasp is that most Americans don't want to live in a Japanese style culture. Our grandparents fought a war to prevent that from happening. Voters are rejecting the party that's trying to push for these changes. The foundation of American culture is freedom and individual choice. And we're not going to reject those values just because a few kids are fat.