China isn't a Superpower now and I doubt in the next 25 years they will be.
I wrote a small paper about this last month for a Grad School class, I'll spam it out here...
I'm a military historian primarily who has spent the bulk of my studies on the American West (1860-1890), the Arab Israeli Wars (1956-1982) and the Second World War in both the Pacific Theatre of Operations (PTO) and Western European Theatre of Operations (ETO) and the strategic nuclear element of the Cold War.
I base my stance that the United States is a Superpower by its military strength. A modern Nation-State or Bloc cannot really be a Superpower unless it possesses the military might to enforce its will or act as the steel gauntlet under the silk glove.
The PRC maintains the largest standing army in the world, although there is a general belief both within the PLA and among outside observers that numbers are of limited usefulness in estimating the power of a military. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) includes the PRC's Navy and Air Force. The PLA's official budget for 2005 is $30 billion, but this does not include money used for foreign weapons purchases, military-related R&D, or the paramilitary PAP. A recent RAND study estimates that the total military spending of the PRC is 1.4-1.7 times as large as the official military budget. By some estimates of true spending, the PRC's military spending, approximately $56 billion, is third after the US's of over $400 billion and the Russian Federation.
The PRC, despite possession of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, is widely seen both within and outside of China as having only limited ability to project military power beyond its borders and is not generally considered a true superpower, although it is widely seen as a major regional power. This is due to the limited effectiveness of its navy due to the lack of aircraft carriers and a limited air force with much less flight training time, and older planes.
A large army and large navy do not make a Superpower. China lacks the ability to project power either with an air bridge as the United States did in '48, '73, '90-91 or sealift as the United States has done time and time again since the end of the Second World War. Where the United States can deploy tens of thousands of personnel and multiple combat Brigades in the air or by sea to any point on the planet, China will have a hard time moving units across the Taiwan Straights under the best of conditions.
While the PRC does have a number of nuclear systems that can strike the United States or Europe, they lack the number to be an effective deterrent against the American nuclear forces. When I say a deterrent against the American nuclear force, I am drawing a line between the use of nuclear weapons against urban centers to kill people and the use of nuclear weapons to blow up someone else's nuclear weapons. The concept of MAD was not that both the United States and Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to kill lots and many people; the concept of MAD was centered on both sides having nuclear weapons that could destroy both sides' nuclear weapons. China lacks the nuclear weapons to eliminate the American nuclear systems and so MAD will not exist between the US and PRC.
It is estimated that the PRC has 400 nuclear devices of which 325 are deliverable. 24 of these are on the DF-5 series of ICBM that could strike the United States. The United States has 500 Minuteman III missiles and 288 Trident II D-5 missiles that can strike the PRC with over 3,000 warheads.
Conventionally the PRC lacks naval systems for sea-lane control that are vital to any imperial designs. The French, British, American, and Soviet empires/hegemonies relied on large and capable naval forces to maintain control of the sea-lanes and
"Though several flags of the United States have been symbolically planted on the moon, the U.S. government makes no claim to any part of the Moon's surface. The U.S. is party to the Outer Space Treaty, which places the Moon under the same jurisdiction as international waters (res communis). This treaty also restricts use of the Moon to peaceful purposes, explicitly banning weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear weapons) and military installations of any kind. A second treaty, the Moon Treaty, was proposed to restrict the exploitation of the Moon's resources by any single nation, but it has not been signed by any of the space-faring nations."
"Ownership of the Moon (and other celestial bodies) is governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1979 Moon Agreement. U.N. legal experts state that the Moon falls under the legal concept of res communis, which means everyone owns it (the concept is also applied to International Waters). Article VI states The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty. The effect of the Outer Space Treaty to restrict control of private property rights, in the way that the law of the sea prevents anyone owning the sea, is often disputed by those who claim the ability to sell property rights on the Moon and other bodies, but this dispute has never been tested in a court of law."
The Moon is sort of like the ocean past the territorial limits.
It's open for everyone, however if you leave something there, it still belongs to you, for example the Chinese couldn't legally take any American or Soviet equipment left on the Moon.
Thats funny, I was just reading up on DDT earlier today.
It is believed that [malaria] afflicts between 300 and 500 million every year, causing up to 2.7 million deaths, mainly among children under five years.
Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."
"Science journals were biased against DDT. Philip Abelson, editor of Science informed Dr. Thomas Jukes that Science would never publish any article on DDT that was not antagonistic."
"Extensive hearings on DDT before an EPA administrative law judge occurred during 1971-1972. The EPA hearing examiner, Judge Edmund Sweeney, concluded that "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man... The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."
"Many experiments on caged-birds demonstrate that DDT and its metabolites (DDD and DDE) do not cause serious egg shell thinning, even at levels many hundreds of times greater than wild birds would ever accumulate."
"The article author should point out that this is in Great Britain (United Kingdom) and is an effort by the government (The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management) to get a broad range of opinion, unlike George W. Bush's White House in the USA, which is just fine with it's own set of selective facts and could care less what polls say."
Which is 100% wrong on how our National Nuclear Waste Facility and local facilities are figured out.
Yucca Mountain is a ridge-line in Nye County, Nevada; composed of volcanic material (mostly tuff) ejected from a now-extinct caldera-forming supervolcano. The "mountain" is most notable as the site of the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository, a U.S. Department of Energy terminal storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste.
The US has been discussing and debating this since 1957 at the Local, State and National level for national sites, local sites and transportation.
Firstly, I think that MS needs Apple more than Apple "needs" MS.
Microsoft is selling the idea to the world that it is not a Monopoly which should be broken up. Microsoft points to Apple, Netscape and Real as proof that there isn't a monopoly in Desktops, Browsers and Streaming Media.
Should Apple go away, that arguement is harder for Microsoft to make.
Secondly, Mac users, don't all become RDF Zombies. I use Macs and Windows boxes, I've supported Macs from System 7.0 to 10.4 and Windows from 3.11 to XP. I've seen all the problems, I've fixed all the problems. I use a Macintosh because I can run a server that doesn't need rebooting every week and a desktop that is rock stable. Windows at this point isn't as good of an option for me, takes too much crap to keep it running.
Because the Clinton or Kennedy Administrations never ever did anything unprovoked or invasionary.
Yea, it's all Bush doing this illegal and unprovoked stuff.
As for Iraq not posing a threat to the United States, thats not what Clinton, Gore and the majority of the United States House and Senate thought from 1990 to 2002.
No, the problem with Big Media isn't that they are lap dogs to the powers that be.
The problem with the Big Media is they think they are a power in themselves.
Look at the Vietnam War's coverage, look at Rather and CBS's attempts to pawn documents off on the people to change an election, look at the coverage of the current Gulf War and the lack of coverage on the UN's problems in the US.
Because you as a poster on/. know how much it's going to cost to "rebuild" places damaged by the Hurricanes. Hint, you could throw a trillion dollars at them and they'd never be rebuilt.
As for the not leaving it open for feedback, he is simply saving himself tons and tons of hate and spam from not just "nasty liberals", but jackasses of all stripes.
Well if the UN Security Council for example controls it, you think China, France, UK and Russia will be more in favor of a xxx TLD? Or lets say Iran, China, US, UK, Tunisia, Thailand and Cuba are deciding, you think it'll happen then?
The nation/organization that should have final say at this point, is the one that does have the final say right now.
The difference is, the ex-submariers were submariners in the Cold War or the 90s. The future of surface and submarine warfare is going to be in the littorals, were passive sonar sucks. So the USN has been working on new active sonar systems for operating in the shallow noisy littoral regions.
I'm assuming, having only skimmed the article that they are likely understating the ability of the claw and how the Velociraptor operated it's claw.
Skin, even the scales of a reptile, aren't that hard to cut, only takes a few pounds of pressure to cut a mammal's skin, based on Monitors and Iguanas I've been around (had a Green Iguana for 11 years) they are tougher, but not that much tougher than humans, maybe 200-250% tougher than we are. Reptiles have *very* strong fingers in species that use thier feet alot, like an Iguana, I have to use leather welding gloves to handle my beast.
Even with reconstruction of muscles based on striations of the bones, we don't know what kind of strength these creatures had, we don't know what kind of tip or edge they really had. This is all speculation. Based on my own experiance with a hand raised House Monster in the form of a Green Iguana, if my buddy weighed 20 kilos and didn't just sit around watching TV and listening to XM Radio and worked for his food, just getting a foot hold scrambling when picked up could easily cut to the bone.
Velociraptor has a skull length of 249 mm (9.80 in), a total length of 2.7 m (8 ft 10 in), a hip height of 0.5 m (1 ft 8 in), and weighs 20 kg (45 lb). The 'raptors portrayed there were modelled after a larger relative, Deinonychus.
Netware 4 was the best but Novell just started blowing it in the late 90s. I came on as a Netware admin in 1996-97 and once you got the thing set up, Netware admining consisted of surfing/. and once in a while going up stairs, flicking on the monitors to make sure the "snakes" were still crawling around the screens.
Migrating to 5 was a disappointment, we had some migration issues in the spring of '00 and Novell was already sliding, Macintosh support was garbage, they outsourced the client and charged you twice. Groupwise started to sink and in '01 I got out of the Novell shop I was at and moved on.
They also priced themselves out of the market with thier client and server licences.
Re:The show will need local humor appeal
on
Homer Becomes Omar
·
· Score: 1
In the 60s the US was rolling from the boom of the 50s, the recapitalization of the US following the Depression and WW2, there was another huge fall off right after WW2, so really the lull had lasted from 1930 to 1947. From '47 to '63 there was a huge boom and things were good. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Polaris missiles, Minuteman, Titan and a host of other rocket projects slammed out. US and Western defense were tied to rockets.
Then the costs of the Great Society and Vietnam started to pile on, the economy started lagging at the same time. The moonshots were inertia of the early 60s but cuts were coming. Apollo ended in '72 as the economy really started to lag, then the '73 War and the Oil Crisis kicked our behinds.
The US didn't need heavy lift rockets for national defense anymore, so Space became a sideshow, the Russian economy lagged too inspite of thier oil independance and so thier programs lagged at the same time. They build Mir and two shuttles, we built the Shuttles, probes and Hubble.
The 80s were on again and off again economicly. The boom of the 90s could have funded a Mars shot, but NASA blew it's pitch to Bush 41 with talk of a half trillion dollar bill and the Clinton Administration didn't get Space and didn't get Defense and so NASA crawled along.
Theres ALOT of petroleum left on Earth in the normal form "Oil", Tar Sands and Shales. Hundreds of years worth at 2000 levels if all the known Shale, Tar Sands and Rock Oil is added up. Theres lots of it left, the idea that it's "scarce" is a fiction, right now the price is high because of speculation, storm damage and a lack of refinery capacity.
Combustion of one cubic metre of commercial quality natural gas yields 38 MJ (10.6 kWh). Natural Gas import and movement is difficult from a safety and logistics standpoint due to the nature of a tanker full of it and the ports needed. Moving NG through pipes is hard, so the best way is to liquify it and move it then in chilled pipes and on tankers.
In the US there are between 1,300 and 1,779 Tcf remaining in proven and unproven deposits, theres estimated to be about 5,210.8 Tcf in the world in proven deposits.
In 2003, world natural gas consumption was 95.5 Tcf. Russia, which consumed 15.3 Tcf, and the United States, which consumed 22.4 Tcf, accounted for 47 percent of the total. Consumption of natural gas is projected to increase by nearly 70 percent between 2001and 2025, with the most robust growth in demand expected among the developing nations. By the year 2025, total world consumption of natural gas is expected to bet 151 trillion cubic feet.
If there are 5,210 Tcf of NG, at 2003 levels theres about 54.6 years of proven Natural Gas.
Slashdot Mirror
Because bio-spheres didn't work and because a building that people can and will live in are not made from the same materials as a space craft.
Buildings are heavy, going into orbit takes LOTS of fuel.
China isn't a Superpower now and I doubt in the next 25 years they will be.
I wrote a small paper about this last month for a Grad School class, I'll spam it out here...
I'm a military historian primarily who has spent the bulk of my studies on the American West (1860-1890), the Arab Israeli Wars (1956-1982) and the Second World War in both the Pacific Theatre of Operations (PTO) and Western European Theatre of Operations (ETO) and the strategic nuclear element of the Cold War.
A piece in the Atlantic Monthly in June caught my attentions, How We Would Fight China by Robert Kaplan - http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/kaplan, was of interest to me.
I base my stance that the United States is a Superpower by its military strength. A modern Nation-State or Bloc cannot really be a Superpower unless it possesses the military might to enforce its will or act as the steel gauntlet under the silk glove.
The PRC maintains the largest standing army in the world, although there is a general belief both within the PLA and among outside observers that numbers are of limited usefulness in estimating the power of a military. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) includes the PRC's Navy and Air Force. The PLA's official budget for 2005 is $30 billion, but this does not include money used for foreign weapons purchases, military-related R&D, or the paramilitary PAP. A recent RAND study estimates that the total military spending of the PRC is 1.4-1.7 times as large as the official military budget. By some estimates of true spending, the PRC's military spending, approximately $56 billion, is third after the US's of over $400 billion and the Russian Federation.
The PRC, despite possession of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, is widely seen both within and outside of China as having only limited ability to project military power beyond its borders and is not generally considered a true superpower, although it is widely seen as a major regional power. This is due to the limited effectiveness of its navy due to the lack of aircraft carriers and a limited air force with much less flight training time, and older planes.
A large army and large navy do not make a Superpower. China lacks the ability to project power either with an air bridge as the United States did in '48, '73, '90-91 or sealift as the United States has done time and time again since the end of the Second World War. Where the United States can deploy tens of thousands of personnel and multiple combat Brigades in the air or by sea to any point on the planet, China will have a hard time moving units across the Taiwan Straights under the best of conditions.
While the PRC does have a number of nuclear systems that can strike the United States or Europe, they lack the number to be an effective deterrent against the American nuclear forces. When I say a deterrent against the American nuclear force, I am drawing a line between the use of nuclear weapons against urban centers to kill people and the use of nuclear weapons to blow up someone else's nuclear weapons. The concept of MAD was not that both the United States and Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to kill lots and many people; the concept of MAD was centered on both sides having nuclear weapons that could destroy both sides' nuclear weapons. China lacks the nuclear weapons to eliminate the American nuclear systems and so MAD will not exist between the US and PRC.
It is estimated that the PRC has 400 nuclear devices of which 325 are deliverable. 24 of these are on the DF-5 series of ICBM that could strike the United States. The United States has 500 Minuteman III missiles and 288 Trident II D-5 missiles that can strike the PRC with over 3,000 warheads.
Conventionally the PRC lacks naval systems for sea-lane control that are vital to any imperial designs. The French, British, American, and Soviet empires/hegemonies relied on large and capable naval forces to maintain control of the sea-lanes and
So, I reckon, by this the signatory states for all intents and purposes make this claim of res communis to the entire Solar System.
No, there are treaties on Space and the Moon
h tml
"Though several flags of the United States have been symbolically planted on the moon, the U.S. government makes no claim to any part of the Moon's surface. The U.S. is party to the Outer Space Treaty, which places the Moon under the same jurisdiction as international waters (res communis). This treaty also restricts use of the Moon to peaceful purposes, explicitly banning weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear weapons) and military installations of any kind. A second treaty, the Moon Treaty, was proposed to restrict the exploitation of the Moon's resources by any single nation, but it has not been signed by any of the space-faring nations."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Legal_status
"Ownership of the Moon (and other celestial bodies) is governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and the 1979 Moon Agreement. U.N. legal experts state that the Moon falls under the legal concept of res communis, which means everyone owns it (the concept is also applied to International Waters). Article VI states The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty. The effect of the Outer Space Treaty to restrict control of private property rights, in the way that the law of the sea prevents anyone owning the sea, is often disputed by those who claim the ability to sell property rights on the Moon and other bodies, but this dispute has never been tested in a court of law."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/SpaceLaw/outersptxt.
When was there privacy?
Since the invention of the telegraph and the creation of a road network, theres not been "privacy".
What was privacy? No one knowing what newspapers you subscribed too? Since theres been advertizing there has been selling of subscription lists.
The Moon is sort of like the ocean past the territorial limits.
It's open for everyone, however if you leave something there, it still belongs to you, for example the Chinese couldn't legally take any American or Soviet equipment left on the Moon.
Thats funny, I was just reading up on DDT earlier today.
It is believed that [malaria] afflicts between 300 and 500 million every year, causing up to 2.7 million deaths, mainly among children under five years.
Population control advocates blamed DDT for increasing third world population. In the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem but to assure than up to 40 percent of the children in poor nations would die of malaria. As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, "Rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing."
"Science journals were biased against DDT. Philip Abelson, editor of Science informed Dr. Thomas Jukes that Science would never publish any article on DDT that was not antagonistic."
"Extensive hearings on DDT before an EPA administrative law judge occurred during 1971-1972. The EPA hearing examiner, Judge Edmund Sweeney, concluded that "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man... The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."
"Many experiments on caged-birds demonstrate that DDT and its metabolites (DDD and DDE) do not cause serious egg shell thinning, even at levels many hundreds of times greater than wild birds would ever accumulate."
http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm
Where is this Christian Church you speak of?
"The last time I even saw this issue in print was while Clinton was still president."
Try a Google News for Yucca Mountain
Results 1 - 20 of about 384 for yucca mountain.
Theres tons out there in print in this issue, and there has been all through the Bush Administration.
"The article author should point out that this is in Great Britain (United Kingdom) and is an effort by the government (The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management) to get a broad range of opinion, unlike George W. Bush's White House in the USA, which is just fine with it's own set of selective facts and could care less what polls say."
Which is 100% wrong on how our National Nuclear Waste Facility and local facilities are figured out.
Yucca Mountain is a ridge-line in Nye County, Nevada; composed of volcanic material (mostly tuff) ejected from a now-extinct caldera-forming supervolcano. The "mountain" is most notable as the site of the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository, a U.S. Department of Energy terminal storage facility for spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste.
The US has been discussing and debating this since 1957 at the Local, State and National level for national sites, local sites and transportation.
Firstly, I think that MS needs Apple more than Apple "needs" MS.
Microsoft is selling the idea to the world that it is not a Monopoly which should be broken up. Microsoft points to Apple, Netscape and Real as proof that there isn't a monopoly in Desktops, Browsers and Streaming Media.
Should Apple go away, that arguement is harder for Microsoft to make.
Secondly, Mac users, don't all become RDF Zombies. I use Macs and Windows boxes, I've supported Macs from System 7.0 to 10.4 and Windows from 3.11 to XP. I've seen all the problems, I've fixed all the problems. I use a Macintosh because I can run a server that doesn't need rebooting every week and a desktop that is rock stable. Windows at this point isn't as good of an option for me, takes too much crap to keep it running.
Because the Clinton or Kennedy Administrations never ever did anything unprovoked or invasionary.
Yea, it's all Bush doing this illegal and unprovoked stuff.
As for Iraq not posing a threat to the United States, thats not what Clinton, Gore and the majority of the United States House and Senate thought from 1990 to 2002.
No, the problem with Big Media isn't that they are lap dogs to the powers that be.
The problem with the Big Media is they think they are a power in themselves.
Look at the Vietnam War's coverage, look at Rather and CBS's attempts to pawn documents off on the people to change an election, look at the coverage of the current Gulf War and the lack of coverage on the UN's problems in the US.
I went Alliance because I like dwarves. Played dwarves in AD&D, Shadowrun and now WoW.
Haven't gotten into Horde, not sure why, guess I don't like thier starting areas much at all.
Because you as a poster on /. know how much it's going to cost to "rebuild" places damaged by the Hurricanes. Hint, you could throw a trillion dollars at them and they'd never be rebuilt.
As for the not leaving it open for feedback, he is simply saving himself tons and tons of hate and spam from not just "nasty liberals", but jackasses of all stripes.
Well if the UN Security Council for example controls it, you think China, France, UK and Russia will be more in favor of a xxx TLD? Or lets say Iran, China, US, UK, Tunisia, Thailand and Cuba are deciding, you think it'll happen then?
The nation/organization that should have final say at this point, is the one that does have the final say right now.
The difference is, the ex-submariers were submariners in the Cold War or the 90s. The future of surface and submarine warfare is going to be in the littorals, were passive sonar sucks. So the USN has been working on new active sonar systems for operating in the shallow noisy littoral regions.
I'm assuming, having only skimmed the article that they are likely understating the ability of the claw and how the Velociraptor operated it's claw.
Skin, even the scales of a reptile, aren't that hard to cut, only takes a few pounds of pressure to cut a mammal's skin, based on Monitors and Iguanas I've been around (had a Green Iguana for 11 years) they are tougher, but not that much tougher than humans, maybe 200-250% tougher than we are. Reptiles have *very* strong fingers in species that use thier feet alot, like an Iguana, I have to use leather welding gloves to handle my beast.
Even with reconstruction of muscles based on striations of the bones, we don't know what kind of strength these creatures had, we don't know what kind of tip or edge they really had. This is all speculation. Based on my own experiance with a hand raised House Monster in the form of a Green Iguana, if my buddy weighed 20 kilos and didn't just sit around watching TV and listening to XM Radio and worked for his food, just getting a foot hold scrambling when picked up could easily cut to the bone.
Jurrasic Park misrepresented the Velociraptors.
Velociraptor has a skull length of 249 mm (9.80 in), a total length of 2.7 m (8 ft 10 in), a hip height of 0.5 m (1 ft 8 in), and weighs 20 kg (45 lb). The 'raptors portrayed there were modelled after a larger relative, Deinonychus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus
Why? The fact of the matter is that the iPod wins on the perception it's bigger and more useful.
And for my uses, both my iPods are useful enough I use them all the time, my Palm and Visor, languished and were never used as much.
Sorry, been up for about 30 hours now.
4.11.
Exactly.
/. and once in a while going up stairs, flicking on the monitors to make sure the "snakes" were still crawling around the screens.
Netware 4 was the best but Novell just started blowing it in the late 90s. I came on as a Netware admin in 1996-97 and once you got the thing set up, Netware admining consisted of surfing
Migrating to 5 was a disappointment, we had some migration issues in the spring of '00 and Novell was already sliding, Macintosh support was garbage, they outsourced the client and charged you twice. Groupwise started to sink and in '01 I got out of the Novell shop I was at and moved on.
They also priced themselves out of the market with thier client and server licences.
It's Portland Oregon no doubt about it.
3 92
http://www.portlandtribune.com/archview.cgi?id=12
In the 60s the US was rolling from the boom of the 50s, the recapitalization of the US following the Depression and WW2, there was another huge fall off right after WW2, so really the lull had lasted from 1930 to 1947. From '47 to '63 there was a huge boom and things were good. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Polaris missiles, Minuteman, Titan and a host of other rocket projects slammed out. US and Western defense were tied to rockets.
Then the costs of the Great Society and Vietnam started to pile on, the economy started lagging at the same time. The moonshots were inertia of the early 60s but cuts were coming. Apollo ended in '72 as the economy really started to lag, then the '73 War and the Oil Crisis kicked our behinds.
The US didn't need heavy lift rockets for national defense anymore, so Space became a sideshow, the Russian economy lagged too inspite of thier oil independance and so thier programs lagged at the same time. They build Mir and two shuttles, we built the Shuttles, probes and Hubble.
The 80s were on again and off again economicly. The boom of the 90s could have funded a Mars shot, but NASA blew it's pitch to Bush 41 with talk of a half trillion dollar bill and the Clinton Administration didn't get Space and didn't get Defense and so NASA crawled along.
Theres ALOT of petroleum left on Earth in the normal form "Oil", Tar Sands and Shales. Hundreds of years worth at 2000 levels if all the known Shale, Tar Sands and Rock Oil is added up. Theres lots of it left, the idea that it's "scarce" is a fiction, right now the price is high because of speculation, storm damage and a lack of refinery capacity.
Combustion of one cubic metre of commercial quality natural gas yields 38 MJ (10.6 kWh). Natural Gas import and movement is difficult from a safety and logistics standpoint due to the nature of a tanker full of it and the ports needed. Moving NG through pipes is hard, so the best way is to liquify it and move it then in chilled pipes and on tankers.
In the US there are between 1,300 and 1,779 Tcf remaining in proven and unproven deposits, theres estimated to be about 5,210.8 Tcf in the world in proven deposits.
In 2003, world natural gas consumption was 95.5 Tcf. Russia, which consumed 15.3 Tcf, and the United States, which consumed 22.4 Tcf, accounted for 47 percent of the total. Consumption of natural gas is projected to increase by nearly 70 percent between 2001and 2025, with the most robust growth in demand expected among the developing nations. By the year 2025, total world consumption of natural gas is expected to bet 151 trillion cubic feet.
If there are 5,210 Tcf of NG, at 2003 levels theres about 54.6 years of proven Natural Gas.