I saw that you tried to equate academic studies of climate change funded mostly by various governments to the old tobacco industry funded attempts to discredit the academic studies linking smoking and cancer. That's bullshit on the face of it. And all this talk about "scientists being human" is true but a bit bogus, too. The usual reward for an academic researcher successfully accomplishing the goal of a research grant to determine something about nature is... another research grant so that they can continue similar research for their high five-figure or low six-figure salary. Successful academic researchers are driven personalities else they would have dropped into easier and more lucrative fields, but they are not prone to corruption. The real reward in academia for hard work and success is the recognition of your peers and the ability to continue to do what interested you in the first place. In private industry, on the other hand, the rewards are explicitly monetary, with success in a project (or the appearance of success) rewarded by bonuses and raises. It is all about the all mighty dollar. I've been in both positions, in industry I got the five figure bonuses on top of my six figure pay. I prefer academic work with its five figure salary. Which type of work is more prone to corruption based on the explicit rewards available? Since most shills for the oil and coal industries are only in it for the money they project that the climate scientists must be, too; they are wrong. Again, I've been there, both places.
The best way to do the mental translation is to just memorize the F and C values for a few temperatures. 0 C and 100 C are easy enough for those raised on F ( 32F and 212 F). But if you memorize 10C = 50F, 20C = 68F, 30C = 86F, and 40C = 104F that about gets you what you need. And -40C = -40F. Outside the range of -40C to about 100C, educated people should be using Kelvins anyway. For high temps like in this article just forget the difference in zeros and multiply C by 1.8 (or 2 if you're in a hurry) to get F. This was probably pedantic sounding but that's how I (native F speaker) do it.
One practical reason from personal experience -- the traction control (which can't be turned off) is tuned such that if you get stuck in a place where the front wheels spin, the traction control will shut down power to the rears. So you can't use the rears to push you out of loose sand or snow if the fronts don't have traction. So no off road capability at all. I suppose the only reason it has AWD is to push through loose snow (but don't stop or get stuck) and of course, marketing. Most of them are 2 wheel drive models though so there is no implied off road capability with them. 90% of AWD SUVs have never been off road, anyway.
No experience with a Volt but I have a six year old Hybrid Toyota Highlander. No battery replacement indicated anytime soon. I would pay a premium for an electric or hybrid electric car just for the driving experience -- instant torque on demand, no engine noise at low speeds or stopped. It really feels old fashioned when I drive my non-hybrid car. You are right, you don't save money replacing a used car with a new one, but unless you want to drive a patched up junker you have to replace it sometime. By the way, the Highlander is a real hot rod and I've had a few 'Vettes and Camaros in my day. Did I say Instant Torque and a CVT transmission?
You are certainly correct in everything in your last post. Of all the industries to cling to the imperial system, the aerospace industry is the least forgivable. I was around (in the 70's?) when the US tried to metricise and it was shot down as a Communist plot. You have no argument from me that failure to completely abandon the imperial units is stupid by all those who haven't done it.
As already pointed out somewhat, the bases of the SI units are entirely arbitrary, too. The meter was originally based on a fraction of the earth's circumference but that was tremendously awkward because the earth doesn't have a constant circumference. Also the fractional difference between a liter and its original definition as the volume of 1 kg of water is a failure for the metric system. SI units beat the older units but not by all that much, they are just the "standard" now.
That's a great question/observation. It wouldn't even take an initial asymmetric distribution of mass. The moon is extracting rotational energy from the earth through the tides which the moon itself is causing. So a body could approach the star in such a way that it raised a tide then passed orbital energy to the star via that tide. I don't know how likely this is but I can see it could happen. I'm glad I put "It is difficult..." in my original post and not, "It is impossible..."! Maybe this is well known and I just haven't seen it before in my (very) limited exposure to celestial mechanics.
It is difficult for a body not already in orbit around a star to be captured by it unless there is a third body or something else (dust cloud, etc.) nearby to take away some of the kinetic/potential energy involved. If there is no third body then by a conservation of energy argument -- the small body falls toward the star, faster as it gets closer then slingshots around and back into interstellar space. Even if there are "third bodies" around it is just as likely they will transfer energy to the interstellar visitor and send it out with more speed than it came in with. Similar thing happens with the solar system comets -- they are technically in orbit around the sun way, way out there but occasionally one gets perturbed and comes in close -- unless it gets further perturbed by a planet it will fly a practically parabolic trajectory and go right back out to the far edges of the solar system.
We may have to just agree to disagree on this topic but here's another look at it -- Let's say the H atom (in ground state) and photon are in a perfectly reflecting box so that neither can get away or be absorbed by the box. Again for simplicity say that the photon has only enough energy to take the H atom to its first excited state. All that QM can tell us is that, if a measurement is made (by something other than the atom and photon), what the probability is that the H atom will be found in its first excited state with no free photon or that the H atom will be found in its ground state with a free photon present. QM cannot in principle tell us what the history of emission and re-emission of the photon was -- until the measurement is made the system is in a superposition of the states -- there is no history of separate states. The same logic applies to the photon and H atom in free space between us and the supernova -- until a measurement is made (by something else) the photon and H atom are a closed system in a superposition of states.
Let's take your hydrogen atom example above for simplicity -- does the photon "really" get absorbed by the H atom or do the photon and H atom exist in a quantum superposition of "photon got absorbed" and "photon didn't get absorbed" until some other "observer" comes along and decides the situation? So where do the superpositions end until you postulate a sentient observer and how do you define that? I don't know the answers.
If Armstrong's testimony is the one I saw on C-Span about two years ago, he was also with Gene Cernan (Apollo 17 Commander) and Norm Augustine (former CEO of Lockheed Martin). Augustine was also head of the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee which was formed in 2009 for the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Both Armstrong's and Cernan's testimony came off as fairly uninformed and mostly saying how great it is to have a space program. Augustine came off as the informed one in the room, fresh from the Review and basically stated that space is great but NASA screwed away all the money allocated to Constellation and we weren't going to get anywhere that way. The Committee's conclusions are interesting reading -- a basic one (cut from W'pedia) is, "The Committee judged the 9 year old Constellation program to be so behind schedule, underfunded and over budget that meeting any of its goals would not be possible."
Several reasons:
1) Often we would like to get a big sample data set back to our home offices for analysis while the field team is still in place to do quality analysis they can't do.
2) Sometimes the field team needs application software or documentation down there. On a related note, because of the availability of Internet there we are much less paranoid about shipping down every piece of documentation they could possibly want.
3) Recreational -- during down time the people down there like to surf the web like anyone else -- this is currently a low priority use but is still be nice for the folks down there 3, 4 or 16 months at a time.
Disclaimer -- coming from a physics and elec engineering degree holder. There are 'hard' sciences and there is everything else. 1) Business -- I haven't taken any business classes lately but did take the first two Economics classes required in the Business curriculum at my undergrad school -- A+ in both classes, easiest of my whole undergrad curriculum. All you had to do was know what the definition of a derivative was and that was half the math you needed to know. Now, the real economists do some serious math but not the watered down stuff the business majors get. 2) Health professions -- you have to learn (I mean memorize) a bunch of science to get through the MCATS and into med school but after that it is all memorization and pure endurance, so my doctor friends tell me. Doctors are usually pretty bright but they aren't doing science in their daily work, any more than car mechanics are in diagnosing engine problems. 3) Social sciences -- it's not science if you can "prove" any hypothesis which you can dream up. Social sciences suffer from the same defect that many non-science fields of "knowledge" do -- assertions in the field are rarely falsifiable. Same holds for Education.
I applaud their efforts, but even without doing direct reverse engineering, accomplishing any engineering project is vastly easier if you have seen that someone else has done it before. So until the Chinese do something that the Americans and Russians haven't already done, they haven't really proved anything in space. As far as building on the American and Russian space technology of the 20th century and applying 21st century improvements where they are useful, I'll put Space-X up against the Chinese and show a similar pattern of achievement.
I'd say we "understand" gravity about as well as we do any aspect of the real world -- we have mathematical models which predict its effects to levels of precision beyond our experimental ability to find a discrepancy. The models are known to break down under extreme conditions but those are currently beyond our ability to experiment or observe. All we have to describe any phenomena in the universe are similar predictive models -- there is no deeper "understanding". In the realm of mathematics, where we get to create the initial hypotheses of the system, I would say there is a "deeper" understanding, but the epistemology scholars will probably get all over me for that.
Maybe I haven't surveyed the market lately, but what car or truck marketed to the consumer market has a 600 mile range on any fuel now? About 300 miles seems to be the usual range on gasoline.
The reason we have Hate Crime laws is because we have a history in this country of hate groups like the KKK who decided to terrorise some other people in an identifiable group for no particular reasons other than that they were "different". And we have individuals who may not have been formally part of those groups but somehow got the same idea. The Hate Crime laws are there to suppress that particular strain of criminality. Until and unless you are on the receiving end of one of those groups you don't really have the position to have a completely informed opinion about those laws. From a completely practical viewpoint you want people in identifiable (generally minority) groups to think they are protected under the law from such targeted criminality -- otherwise the populace will fracture into gangs for self-protection viewing everyone else as a potential deadly adversary, with the resulting mass violence.
Thanks for the analysis (and non-flaming reply). I had considered the "I,Robot" collection as a predecessor to the "Caves of Steel" since they were both robot centric, but it's been a long, long while since I read them. Maybe need to reread, but I recall I really didn't like the last of the Foundation novels.
I know I'll be demolished for this but, "I, Robot" takes a lot of undeserved criticism because it took some of the Asimov themes and characters but wasn't a direct copy of an Asimov story. I heard it got retitled at the last minute to drum up interest. The movie had some good, insightful moments (interview where the Robot asks Will Smith's character if HE could write a symphony, etc). By the way, the Asimov 'I, Robot' and 'Foundation'' series both jumped the shark when he tried to bring them together at the end. The movie was better than that.
Quite often you get some techie who thinks they are smarter than everyone else bragging or fantasizing about how they can "take down the man". Well, "the man" has smarter people available and unlimited resources. If the police can't handle your crime wave (and many of them have military toys they are itching to use) then the National Guard will bring whatever it takes. As hard as it is for the libertarians to believe, most people would rather not live in a neighborhood where the gangs are trying to outgun the police. This is why there is monitoring of the Internet, etc with the general support of the populace (oh, I forgot, -- the "sheep"). The sheep and the police will win as long as they are both content with their arrangement.
You're right, I know that, but if the Middle Eastern oil flows got significantly disrupted then the world market price of oil instantly goes to $500/barrel everywhere and the world economy absolutely craters. Maybe good for the Canadians for a while but nobody else and not even them for them for long. Plus, we get enough of US consumption (about 15% I think) from the Middle East that we couldn't do without it for now -- maybe in a few years if we ramp the shale production fast enough.
The Market doesn't work worth a damn when external costs (not paid for by the user) are not included in market price. For gasoline the big one now for the USA is what we pay in military costs to keep the oil flowing out of the Middle East -- there should be a $2 surcharge on every gallon just for that. Gasoline's other externalities are mostly environmental -- although I will say that emissions at the tailpipe (other than CO2) in the in newish cars are now so low as to not be much of a problem in most areas -- but the "free market" didn't put those clean engines in the cars, regulations did. Those regulations are there so that I, as a breathing person, don't have to pay the costs of you building your refinery upwind without including the equipment to keep your emissions out of the air in my lungs. Fix the problem of externalities and I'll be all for the free market.
That sort of thinking (noble combat, laying your life on the line for something you believe in) is what got hundreds of thousands of young men to go to their deaths in the trenches in WWI. War is just one extreme of the application of force to achieve your group's desires -- slaughtering of animals and unfortunate native populations which get in the way is the other extreme. We usually have called them wars when the protagonists were equally enough matched to make it risky for both sides but in the history of applied force the entire spectrum from outright slaughter to "heroic" stands against impossible odds have been seen. I guarantee you that the professional soldiers tasked with winning the wars which their societies send them to have no desire at all to put themselves at any more risk than absolutely necessary. If they could send an army of avatars to do the dangerous work they would. When the European Americans were killing off the native North Americans there was no talk of "being prepared to die for the cause", it was just a killing process -- Bison or People, it was all the same to them. All wars would be like that if the soldiers got to choose. It's not pointless -- the point is to take something away from some other group who doesn't want to give it up. In the past the best soldiers were a society's young men -- if they weren't prepared to fight then that culture didn't stay around for long. If technology allows us to send robots or avatars instead, I'm all for it. If you want to end wars, you have to make them dangerous for the folks back home, too, so they will consider other options -- that's why the US and the USSR never went directly at it -- all the warmongers at home knew that they were at the same risk of nuclear incineration as the actual combatants.
As a native Texan, let me tell you, most of the state officials and legislative reps here would be proud to say they depend on faith for most of their decisions, heck, its election season and half of them have it in their ads. That said, the cities like Houston don't have the final say in water use -- the state trumps local control and the "rule of capture" (you can take as much out of the ground under your land as your pumps can pull) is strong here..
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I saw that you tried to equate academic studies of climate change funded mostly by various governments to the old tobacco industry funded attempts to discredit the academic studies linking smoking and cancer. That's bullshit on the face of it. And all this talk about "scientists being human" is true but a bit bogus, too. The usual reward for an academic researcher successfully accomplishing the goal of a research grant to determine something about nature is ... another research grant so that they can continue similar research for their high five-figure or low six-figure salary. Successful academic researchers are driven personalities else they would have dropped into easier and more lucrative fields, but they are not prone to corruption. The real reward in academia for hard work and success is the recognition of your peers and the ability to continue to do what interested you in the first place. In private industry, on the other hand, the rewards are explicitly monetary, with success in a project (or the appearance of success) rewarded by bonuses and raises. It is all about the all mighty dollar. I've been in both positions, in industry I got the five figure bonuses on top of my six figure pay. I prefer academic work with its five figure salary. Which type of work is more prone to corruption based on the explicit rewards available? Since most shills for the oil and coal industries are only in it for the money they project that the climate scientists must be, too; they are wrong. Again, I've been there, both places.
The best way to do the mental translation is to just memorize the F and C values for a few temperatures. 0 C and 100 C are easy enough for those raised on F ( 32F and 212 F). But if you memorize 10C = 50F, 20C = 68F, 30C = 86F, and 40C = 104F that about gets you what you need. And -40C = -40F. Outside the range of -40C to about 100C, educated people should be using Kelvins anyway. For high temps like in this article just forget the difference in zeros and multiply C by 1.8 (or 2 if you're in a hurry) to get F. This was probably pedantic sounding but that's how I (native F speaker) do it.
One practical reason from personal experience -- the traction control (which can't be turned off) is tuned such that if you get stuck in a place where the front wheels spin, the traction control will shut down power to the rears. So you can't use the rears to push you out of loose sand or snow if the fronts don't have traction. So no off road capability at all. I suppose the only reason it has AWD is to push through loose snow (but don't stop or get stuck) and of course, marketing. Most of them are 2 wheel drive models though so there is no implied off road capability with them. 90% of AWD SUVs have never been off road, anyway.
No experience with a Volt but I have a six year old Hybrid Toyota Highlander. No battery replacement indicated anytime soon. I would pay a premium for an electric or hybrid electric car just for the driving experience -- instant torque on demand, no engine noise at low speeds or stopped. It really feels old fashioned when I drive my non-hybrid car. You are right, you don't save money replacing a used car with a new one, but unless you want to drive a patched up junker you have to replace it sometime. By the way, the Highlander is a real hot rod and I've had a few 'Vettes and Camaros in my day. Did I say Instant Torque and a CVT transmission?
You are certainly correct in everything in your last post. Of all the industries to cling to the imperial system, the aerospace industry is the least forgivable. I was around (in the 70's?) when the US tried to metricise and it was shot down as a Communist plot. You have no argument from me that failure to completely abandon the imperial units is stupid by all those who haven't done it.
As already pointed out somewhat, the bases of the SI units are entirely arbitrary, too. The meter was originally based on a fraction of the earth's circumference but that was tremendously awkward because the earth doesn't have a constant circumference. Also the fractional difference between a liter and its original definition as the volume of 1 kg of water is a failure for the metric system. SI units beat the older units but not by all that much, they are just the "standard" now.
No problem, corn is wind pollinated so we'll still be able to live off of corn chips and high fructose corn syrup!
That's a great question/observation. It wouldn't even take an initial asymmetric distribution of mass. The moon is extracting rotational energy from the earth through the tides which the moon itself is causing. So a body could approach the star in such a way that it raised a tide then passed orbital energy to the star via that tide. I don't know how likely this is but I can see it could happen. I'm glad I put "It is difficult ..." in my original post and not, "It is impossible..."! Maybe this is well known and I just haven't seen it before in my (very) limited exposure to celestial mechanics.
It is difficult for a body not already in orbit around a star to be captured by it unless there is a third body or something else (dust cloud, etc.) nearby to take away some of the kinetic/potential energy involved. If there is no third body then by a conservation of energy argument -- the small body falls toward the star, faster as it gets closer then slingshots around and back into interstellar space. Even if there are "third bodies" around it is just as likely they will transfer energy to the interstellar visitor and send it out with more speed than it came in with. Similar thing happens with the solar system comets -- they are technically in orbit around the sun way, way out there but occasionally one gets perturbed and comes in close -- unless it gets further perturbed by a planet it will fly a practically parabolic trajectory and go right back out to the far edges of the solar system.
We may have to just agree to disagree on this topic but here's another look at it -- Let's say the H atom (in ground state) and photon are in a perfectly reflecting box so that neither can get away or be absorbed by the box. Again for simplicity say that the photon has only enough energy to take the H atom to its first excited state. All that QM can tell us is that, if a measurement is made (by something other than the atom and photon), what the probability is that the H atom will be found in its first excited state with no free photon or that the H atom will be found in its ground state with a free photon present. QM cannot in principle tell us what the history of emission and re-emission of the photon was -- until the measurement is made the system is in a superposition of the states -- there is no history of separate states. The same logic applies to the photon and H atom in free space between us and the supernova -- until a measurement is made (by something else) the photon and H atom are a closed system in a superposition of states.
Let's take your hydrogen atom example above for simplicity -- does the photon "really" get absorbed by the H atom or do the photon and H atom exist in a quantum superposition of "photon got absorbed" and "photon didn't get absorbed" until some other "observer" comes along and decides the situation? So where do the superpositions end until you postulate a sentient observer and how do you define that? I don't know the answers.
If Armstrong's testimony is the one I saw on C-Span about two years ago, he was also with Gene Cernan (Apollo 17 Commander) and Norm Augustine (former CEO of Lockheed Martin). Augustine was also head of the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee which was formed in 2009 for the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Both Armstrong's and Cernan's testimony came off as fairly uninformed and mostly saying how great it is to have a space program. Augustine came off as the informed one in the room, fresh from the Review and basically stated that space is great but NASA screwed away all the money allocated to Constellation and we weren't going to get anywhere that way. The Committee's conclusions are interesting reading -- a basic one (cut from W'pedia) is, "The Committee judged the 9 year old Constellation program to be so behind schedule, underfunded and over budget that meeting any of its goals would not be possible."
Several reasons:
1) Often we would like to get a big sample data set back to our home offices for analysis while the field team is still in place to do quality analysis they can't do.
2) Sometimes the field team needs application software or documentation down there. On a related note, because of the availability of Internet there we are much less paranoid about shipping down every piece of documentation they could possibly want.
3) Recreational -- during down time the people down there like to surf the web like anyone else -- this is currently a low priority use but is still be nice for the folks down there 3, 4 or 16 months at a time.
Disclaimer -- coming from a physics and elec engineering degree holder. There are 'hard' sciences and there is everything else.
1) Business -- I haven't taken any business classes lately but did take the first two Economics classes required in the Business curriculum at my undergrad school -- A+ in both classes, easiest of my whole undergrad curriculum. All you had to do was know what the definition of a derivative was and that was half the math you needed to know. Now, the real economists do some serious math but not the watered down stuff the business majors get.
2) Health professions -- you have to learn (I mean memorize) a bunch of science to get through the MCATS and into med school but after that it is all memorization and pure endurance, so my doctor friends tell me. Doctors are usually pretty bright but they aren't doing science in their daily work, any more than car mechanics are in diagnosing engine problems.
3) Social sciences -- it's not science if you can "prove" any hypothesis which you can dream up. Social sciences suffer from the same defect that many non-science fields of "knowledge" do -- assertions in the field are rarely falsifiable. Same holds for Education.
I applaud their efforts, but even without doing direct reverse engineering, accomplishing any engineering project is vastly easier if you have seen that someone else has done it before. So until the Chinese do something that the Americans and Russians haven't already done, they haven't really proved anything in space. As far as building on the American and Russian space technology of the 20th century and applying 21st century improvements where they are useful, I'll put Space-X up against the Chinese and show a similar pattern of achievement.
I'd say we "understand" gravity about as well as we do any aspect of the real world -- we have mathematical models which predict its effects to levels of precision beyond our experimental ability to find a discrepancy. The models are known to break down under extreme conditions but those are currently beyond our ability to experiment or observe. All we have to describe any phenomena in the universe are similar predictive models -- there is no deeper "understanding". In the realm of mathematics, where we get to create the initial hypotheses of the system, I would say there is a "deeper" understanding, but the epistemology scholars will probably get all over me for that.
Maybe I haven't surveyed the market lately, but what car or truck marketed to the consumer market has a 600 mile range on any fuel now? About 300 miles seems to be the usual range on gasoline.
The reason we have Hate Crime laws is because we have a history in this country of hate groups like the KKK who decided to terrorise some other people in an identifiable group for no particular reasons other than that they were "different". And we have individuals who may not have been formally part of those groups but somehow got the same idea. The Hate Crime laws are there to suppress that particular strain of criminality. Until and unless you are on the receiving end of one of those groups you don't really have the position to have a completely informed opinion about those laws. From a completely practical viewpoint you want people in identifiable (generally minority) groups to think they are protected under the law from such targeted criminality -- otherwise the populace will fracture into gangs for self-protection viewing everyone else as a potential deadly adversary, with the resulting mass violence.
Thanks for the analysis (and non-flaming reply). I had considered the "I,Robot" collection as a predecessor to the "Caves of Steel" since they were both robot centric, but it's been a long, long while since I read them. Maybe need to reread, but I recall I really didn't like the last of the Foundation novels.
I know I'll be demolished for this but, "I, Robot" takes a lot of undeserved criticism because it took some of the Asimov themes and characters but wasn't a direct copy of an Asimov story. I heard it got retitled at the last minute to drum up interest. The movie had some good, insightful moments (interview where the Robot asks Will Smith's character if HE could write a symphony, etc). By the way, the Asimov 'I, Robot' and 'Foundation'' series both jumped the shark when he tried to bring them together at the end. The movie was better than that.
Quite often you get some techie who thinks they are smarter than everyone else bragging or fantasizing about how they can "take down the man". Well, "the man" has smarter people available and unlimited resources. If the police can't handle your crime wave (and many of them have military toys they are itching to use) then the National Guard will bring whatever it takes. As hard as it is for the libertarians to believe, most people would rather not live in a neighborhood where the gangs are trying to outgun the police. This is why there is monitoring of the Internet, etc with the general support of the populace (oh, I forgot, -- the "sheep"). The sheep and the police will win as long as they are both content with their arrangement.
You're right, I know that, but if the Middle Eastern oil flows got significantly disrupted then the world market price of oil instantly goes to $500/barrel everywhere and the world economy absolutely craters. Maybe good for the Canadians for a while but nobody else and not even them for them for long. Plus, we get enough of US consumption (about 15% I think) from the Middle East that we couldn't do without it for now -- maybe in a few years if we ramp the shale production fast enough.
The Market doesn't work worth a damn when external costs (not paid for by the user) are not included in market price. For gasoline the big one now for the USA is what we pay in military costs to keep the oil flowing out of the Middle East -- there should be a $2 surcharge on every gallon just for that. Gasoline's other externalities are mostly environmental -- although I will say that emissions at the tailpipe (other than CO2) in the in newish cars are now so low as to not be much of a problem in most areas -- but the "free market" didn't put those clean engines in the cars, regulations did. Those regulations are there so that I, as a breathing person, don't have to pay the costs of you building your refinery upwind without including the equipment to keep your emissions out of the air in my lungs. Fix the problem of externalities and I'll be all for the free market.
That sort of thinking (noble combat, laying your life on the line for something you believe in) is what got hundreds of thousands of young men to go to their deaths in the trenches in WWI. War is just one extreme of the application of force to achieve your group's desires -- slaughtering of animals and unfortunate native populations which get in the way is the other extreme. We usually have called them wars when the protagonists were equally enough matched to make it risky for both sides but in the history of applied force the entire spectrum from outright slaughter to "heroic" stands against impossible odds have been seen. I guarantee you that the professional soldiers tasked with winning the wars which their societies send them to have no desire at all to put themselves at any more risk than absolutely necessary. If they could send an army of avatars to do the dangerous work they would. When the European Americans were killing off the native North Americans there was no talk of "being prepared to die for the cause", it was just a killing process -- Bison or People, it was all the same to them. All wars would be like that if the soldiers got to choose. It's not pointless -- the point is to take something away from some other group who doesn't want to give it up. In the past the best soldiers were a society's young men -- if they weren't prepared to fight then that culture didn't stay around for long. If technology allows us to send robots or avatars instead, I'm all for it. If you want to end wars, you have to make them dangerous for the folks back home, too, so they will consider other options -- that's why the US and the USSR never went directly at it -- all the warmongers at home knew that they were at the same risk of nuclear incineration as the actual combatants.
As a native Texan, let me tell you, most of the state officials and legislative reps here would be proud to say they depend on faith for most of their decisions, heck, its election season and half of them have it in their ads. That said, the cities like Houston don't have the final say in water use -- the state trumps local control and the "rule of capture" (you can take as much out of the ground under your land as your pumps can pull) is strong here..