You dont NEED FTL to be an interstellar species. You just cant be an interstellar society. Time dialation traveling at sublight speeds at a significant fraction of C is more than sufficient to colonize the entire galaxy.
Why is time dialation so frigging hard for people to comprehend?
Here's the thing kids-- TIME IS NOT A CONSTANT. It is tied inexorably with accelleration. Want to get to another star system in YOUR lifetime? Just travel some significant fraction of C! Time FOR YOU will slow down, while the rest of the universe will be unaffected. This is proven science-- You just need to measure the muon count at earth's surface to prove it is so.
Now, you CAN state that doing that is going to be very energy prohibitive, and thus very costly. What you CANT say is that this is not possible.
Seriously, the argument of the parent is trotted out every time a topic like this comes up, and every single time it gets bitch slapped for the erroneous crapfest that it is. Time is NOT constant. It is different everywhere in the universe, and hell-- is not even consistent on the surface of the damned earth!
A person shot at a distant star system with enough energy will arrive within THEIR lifetime-- but everyone they ever knew or loved on earth will die of old age long before they get there. Of course, people moving to another star system probably wont be too particular about that, since they are going on a one-way trip.
Do try to keep up. Relativity and time dialation have been around for the better part of a century now. How you feel about it has no bearing whatsoever on it being true. Experiment after experiment has shown that it is. The GP is correct-- AC *CANT* say that, and neither can you.
There is immense job market demand for compliant wage-slaves. Coupled with the institutionalized bald-faced-lies in the H1B sector, you have 2 major employment sectors promoting a glut of lacklustre or low skill level immigrants to come to the country.
The cumulative effects of this bring down otherwise high paying wages in the rest of the economy, making the US less and less attractive to actually highly-valued immigrants with highly sought-after skill sets-- It is not worth their while to move here for lower pay.
Straight up, off the top-- we have a major sector of the US job market (which long ago moved away from manufacturing based jobs to services and technical skills based jobs) that seeks absurd paper requirements, and prices itself out of the domestic labor market, seeking to satisfy its absurd tastes in workers using H1B laborers, creating a market for H1B laborers.
This new market creates very lucrative opportunities in other countries to get desperate people suitably papered up, and foisted into very poisonous employment contracts, even when they really arent able to do the jobs their paperwork says they can.
Add to this that at least one of the countries implicated in industrialized H1B applicant farming also has notoriously bad problems with institutionalized cheating in university settings (coupled with straight up bribery for credentials)-- Seriously, did ANYONE expect ANYTHING OTHER than this?
That's just the tech side of the coin-- There's also the "Immigrant laborers are doing jobs americans dont want to do!" rhetoric. (The statement closer to the truth is that they are doing jobs at pay rates that americans cannot afford to take; The pay rate is below poverty line, and often below legally permitted wages when done above-board with legal citizen workers. This is again, little more than industrialized labor farming for the lowest pricepoint possible. That does NOT attract the "best and brightest".)
But hey-- What do I know. I'm just some guy, not a multi-billion dollar mega conglomerate seeking to continue financial growth in a world economy that cant grow because pay scales have not scaled with inflation. What do I know about the reason detre behind these phenomena!
That's also discounting that the platinum group metals are highly useful for industrual catalyst material, which would be indespensible in space-based manufacturing-- It's necessary to produce bulk quantity nitric acid, and is used to make many kinds of hydrogen fuel cell.
Part of the reason why 'World market for platinum" is so small, is because the metals are hard to extract-- they tend to form in useful deposits only old vocanic areas, which have very hard stone matricies that need to be mined. EG-- it's expensive as fuck to mine, and so there is only a small quantity of the material in active use, which makes it hard to get, which diminishes the potential market.
While your example is indeed a high profile one, it is still just that-- one example-- which is not what is needed to counter the claim of the researchers.
That claim being that statistically, politicians listen more to campaign financiers and lobbyists than they do to their actual constituency of registered voters, and do so by a very large margin.
"Oh look! This voter advocacy group got what they wanted! That means 'You're Wrong!'"
No, it means one of several things:
1) The disparity is not an absolute; (which the researchers never asserted.)
2) The agenda of the advocacy group coincided with another, more influential group's agenda.
3) The actual reason for the group's proposal being acted upon was more "political stunt" than "normal politics."
Love the false equivalence argument there too; It stems from over-application of boolean thinking. It makes several false assumptions, in the effort to disprove a point of contention. Those being: (YourArgument$="Politicians ONLY give time and resources to campaign financiers and corporate lobbyists"), and (Exception$="ACA was co-authored by a member of the Center for American Progress, an organisation that is neither of those, so YourArgument$ is false!" The reality is that YourArgument$= "Politicians STRONGLY FAVOR giving time and resources to campaign financiers and corporate lobbyists", which permits, and expects such exceptions turning up. Meaning, your argument doesn't prove anything other than your own inability to read.
All that is necessary for it (voting) to no longer be a viable method of reliably enacting change, is for the politicians to favor their financial interests sufficiently more than the interests of their constituency. This has been demonstrated by the cited research. Showing that it does not happen more frequently is what you need to prove. NOT that there are exceptions, no matter how exceptional they are. Proving the existence of exceptions only works with boolean properties. The cited problem is not a boolean property.
Try again. Show how the researchers misinterpreted 20 years worth of data, such that voting becomes a viable method of reliably getting political change.
For an example that I think you might better comprehend-- The lottery is not rigged. For every ticket you buy, you increase your odds of winning, which are never a zero percent probability as long as you have purchased at least one ticket. Pointing out how somebody won the lottery does not prove that buying lottery tickets is a good way to reliably make money.
A person stating "You wont win." is supported statistically. Sure, you MIGHT win-- but your odds of it happening are vanishingly small.
The people you are arguing against are saying "Voting wont get you the change you want." This is supported by the statistics presented by the research cited, as more often than not this is indeed the case. Just like the lottery, somebody has to win. In the case of politics, sometimes the underdog gets his way. It does not make either into reliable methodologies.
The pedant's pedant antecedant was to see the point, but fail to read it.
Since your pedantry has you all tied up in knots, let me break down what others are so desperately trying to get you to realize.
1) Yes, The people casting the votes for legislation are indeed the elected officials. HOWEVER, the laws being voted on are often NOT PENNED BY THESE PEOPLE. Instead, they are often first penned as proposals by interest groups, which then get run through an approvals and support process, and get folded into larger bills, which then eventually get voted on. This is known as a "Christmas Tree Bill" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
2) While anyone may theoretically petitiion congress, many studies have been conducted which indicate that congressional members (used generically for both house and senate) do not give any weight at all to such petitions, and give all their attention to the lobbyists that show up with suitcases full of money, minivans full of hookers, and dumptrucks full of blow.
These things are the elephant in the room my friend. It has been fucking PROVEN that the popular vote and popular issue created interest groups have practically no power to influence US policy, and yet you cling to the "VOTE!, IT'S THE WAY!" statement.
Somebody here is being delusional, and it isnt the people you are arguing with.
Given that you yourself are making similarly baseless assertions based on confirmation biases, I find the solidity of your arguments to be in question.
Rather than handwave about how long haul mining and aluminum smelting somehow instantly kills people doing it, (a proposition that would mean that the aluminium cans used to ship soda are made in a process that systemically ends human lives, which is an absurdity in itself- There are industrial accidents and risks of exposure, yes-- but more people die in car crashes and from inhaling carbon monoxide from faulty domestic heaters than die in smelter related incidents-- which is a statement that can be supported on demand with actual statistics, collected by real social scientists.)
So please, if you are holding out on some actually substantive basis for your condemnation, by all means, share it with the rest of the class.
Clearly, we are not even discussing the same things at all. Clearly you think I am advocating space hotels on mars, when really I am advocating the bare essentials for colonists to survive there.
Would there eventually be hotels on mars?
Only if the colony gets built first.
Your position is a self fulfilling prophecy-- We never go to mars, ever, so of course, there is never going to be a mars colony!
The problem, is that you make this an absurdity, by then asserting "because we will never go to mars, we dont need to make a mars colony!"
In short, you are suffering from circular logic, and are in fact the deluded one.;P
Oh, I'm the one who needs to be on psychoactive meds?
You DO realize that the argument you just made:
"Yes, which is why we're 7 billion now and adding 200000 new people every day."
Distills down to "Yes, there's a problem and we are ignoring it, and so far we havent died yet, so we can just continue to ignore it-- because past performance is an indicator of future performance! Except that it isnt!"
Especially since in just the past century, when the vast majority of this high technology has risen, atmospheric CO2 levels have risen sharply, and mean global temperature has gone up with it, and shows no signs of stopping or being reduced, and that basically every reputable climate scientist on the planet agrees that even if 100% of human industrial output stopped overnight, the coming ecological catastrophe could not be averted. Yes, adding 200,000 new people every day is perfectly a 'Sensible' thing to do. Clearly.
At least on mars, adding gasses to the atmosphere, any gasses at all, would only make the planet MORE habitable-- and research on how to make crops and industry work in such a hellhole would at least buy some insurance for the now inevitable future for earth, thanks to people like yourself.
If people complain about being able to "afford it" now, how do you intend for them to "afford it" when resources are literally at the breaking point?
Staying alive to see tomorrow would take significant priority over scrounging up and refining enough metal and fuel to launch even a single rocket into space under those conditions-- let alone building an entire martian colony.
This is one of those things that needs to happen when times are good, not when times are bad.
It's too much for me to actually research this issue, so I will make some shit up about how the prior poster is clearly batshit for pointing out that there are whole classifications of asteroid that are nearly completely pure metal, and that the composition of these objects ranges from 15% iron-nickel alloy to near 100% iron-nickel alloy.
He's such a nutter! Hoo boy! See everybody, See me shout it from the rooftop? He's a NUTTER, A NUTTER!
I said it, and said it again, that makes it true! TRUE I SAID! TRUE!
Oh gawd, it's wierd again! The KING space nutter! AND HE'S BRINGING SCIENCE IN ON THIS! OMG! SUPER SPACE NUTTER! SPAAAACE NUUTTTER! (Did I get enough vapid spittle in that?)
Seriously AC- YOU are the one who sounds like the true believer. No amount of plausibility study will ever dislodge your diehard faith that humans will never get off this rock, and because of your faith, you want to sabotage others that lack your convictions, all so you can (Maybe, sorta) get something that you want that is at best equally improbable (A happy future leisure-society utopia, from your own admission) and at worst delusionally impossible (Since you hand-wave away all the consequences of your proposal as being solvable by mystery science, even when real scientists outright say that this is not possible, and that expecting science and technology to just whisk it away is not being realistic, and then have the gall to claim being a realist.)
So go ahead, demonize me some more. Hurl more poorly structured ad hominems my way. Repeating a lie a thousand times does not make it true-- Maybe if you keep huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf, and laughing like a hyena on nitrous oxide, you will eventually have a cerebreal embolism and spare us all the misery of your continued postings.
And that technological use has been strongly linked with a stark reduction in habitability of the planet, due to irreversable changes in the biosphere.
Swing batter. Swing,. (and I would happily live in a cave someplace, if only such well meaning people as yourself would actually allow it. )
A human would have approximately 5 to 10 seconds in which to respond to the tear in their suit, and if repressurized within 60 seconds, have a fairly good chance of survival.
From the source:
Has Anybody Ever Survived Vacuum Exposure in Real Life?
Human experience is discussed by Roth, in the NASA technical report Rapid (Explosive) Decompression Emergencies in Pressure-Suited Subjects. Its focus is on decompression, rather than vacuum exposure per se, but it still has a lot of good information, including the results of decompression events involving humans.
There are several cases of humans surviving exposure to vacuum worth noting. In 1966 a technician at NASA Houston was decompressed to vacuum in a space-suit test accident. This case is discussed by Roth in the reference above. He lost consciousness in 12-15 seconds. When pressure was restored after about 30 seconds of exposure, he regained consciousness, with no apparent injury sustained.
The use of a form-fitting pressure suit, like that used by a fighter pilot (or those being demoed by MIT for use on mars, which have form-fitting metal coils to supply mechanical compression) would buy the suit occupant even more time in the event of a tear in the suit by preventing ebullism, and resulting drop in blood pressure, and resulting loss of consciousness.
There are a number of potential mechanisms that could be implemented into a space suit of the MIT type, that would make abrasion type holes in the suit less lethal, such as the non-newtonian silicon shear thickening liquid that is used in ballistic vests. A thin layer of this inside the suit would harden under the pressure being exerted on it by the occupant of the suit against the reduced pressure outside, exerted through the tear. This would reduce the effects of the hard vacuum on the suit occupant, buying more time to apply an appropriate patch to the suit.
I dont think you are properly evaluating the effects of a very large asteroid.
A nuke does not burrow all the way into the upper mantle, and spew ejecta back into space on ballistic trajectories.
You know, like some of the earth crossing asteroids would cause if they actually, you know-- collided with our planet instead of just missing by skipping between the earth and the moon.
It does not need to be the size of a planet. The 30 mile wide object referenced above would be sufficient to wipe out 90% of human populations, and seriously imperil the other 10%. Most modern humans are simply incapable of survival long-term without modern technology, and the 100ft tsunamis generated globally ALONE would have destroyed the vast majority of human life if it happened in recent times.
Comparing a large asteroid to conventional nukes is absurd. Even the crazy powerful ones made by the soviets as terror weapons pale in comparison.
Ironic, trying to draw attention to a slight that the initiator already de-facto feels comfortable using himself-- ad-hominems.
Or do you have some alternative explanation for the "Whackackra-doodle-doo!" ?
Granted, two wrongs do not make a right, but implying that the AC is engaging in civil conversation is hardly being honest. It is quite clear that civil conversation is not what the AC is seeking.
Similar arguments have been made over the entire history of mankind. A few centuries ago, I would expect highly intelligent people to have concluded that making reliable flying machines, and having reliable air transport of bulk goods between nations was simply too complicated to be possible, for the exact same line of reasoning you have just proposed.
And yet, we fly freight every day of the year, non-stop, and have whole industries that DEPEND on this.
The problems of today are the quaint footnotes in textbooks of tomorrow.
It's foolish to assert (like a certain AC), that simply because we cannot do something now, we will never (ever) be able to do that thing, and that thinking about how one could possibly do it in order to approach and solve those problems is "Nuttery" and "Religious faith."
I see you that you do not understand the concept of the danger of perpetual growth!
Biological immortality would require, at the very least, oppressively controlled reproduction rights, or the planet would quickly become incapable of sustaining additional humans.
If you think the "One child per family" restriction of china is harsh, it has nothing on the harshness that would be required for sustainable population levels in the face of biological immortality. Mass sterilization at birth would practically be a necessity.
You know. I tried to write a calm, and sensible reply to this poisoned barb you have thrown at me, and I just couldn't do it.
Let's just say that you are simply wrong on a good many of your points.
Here are just a few of them:
1) You make the mistake in asserting that people leaving earth as political asylum seekers would be doing so without something already being there. Even the puritans didnt leave england en-mass until AFTER the colonies in north america were fully settled and productive. --What you are are failing to grasp, is that there would not be such a place to go, if nobody makes the damned colony; The puritans would never have left england, because the colonists never would have preceded them. Did all the irish people fleeing ireland after the potato fammine come with metric fucktons of food and other things? No-- they sold themselves into indentured servitude to come here, with just the clothes on their backs. Why? because there was a means of producing food over here already.
There is nothing inconsistent with wishing to create a colony, with the intention of permitting political asylum once it is able to accept such persons. Granting asylum is a great way to get desperately needed genetic variability and skill diversity for such a project once it is ready to accept such people. The notion that the colony would be built by political refugees when they have no money or resources with which to do it is a strawman of your own construction-- Good thing it isnt what I advocated! Beat that strawman all you want, his stuffing coming out does not impact my position in the slightest.
2) You make the implicit assumption that no industrial capacity or food production would ever be possible on-site at mars. This is a very laughable position to take, so laughable in fact, I wonder from what body of information you produced it from. Data from multiple rovers at very diverse areas on the martian surface has revealed very useful and valuable minerals. Not terribly useful here on earth mind-- we have water, nitrogen and oxygen in copious abundance-- But for martian colonists, those minerals would be more valuable than gold. Do you have any idea how much water is chemically stored in gypsum? Here's a hint-- Gypsum has the chemical formula CaSO4(2 H2O) It's a hydrated sulfate mineral. For every mole of gypsum, 2 moles of water can be produced. The process to do so? Heat it up to about 500 degrees F, and catch the vapor that comes out. Is gypsum a common soil mineral on mars? Apparently so-- Nasa's rovers have found very large veins of the shit.
Observations from orbit had detected gypsum on Mars previously. A dune field of windblown gypsum on far northern Mars resembles the glistening gypsum dunes in White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. The origin of that windblown gypsum is, however, uncertain.
"It is a mystery where gypsum sand on northern Mars comes from," said Opportunity science-team member Benton Clark of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "At Homestake, however, we see the mineral right where it formed. It will be important to see if there are deposits like this in other areas of Mars."
Somehow I don't think getting sufficient water will be a problem for a martian colony. Harvesting that dune field alone would produce enough water to supply a massive colony site.
Know what else the rovers found? Ammonium salts at rock nest. The linked paper does give the caveat that the sample could be evolved methane and not reduced nitrogen, and suggests further study with the laser spectrometer. However, the gas form of nitrogen i
Or has the situation with the orwelian police state in much of the western world, coupled with the growing corporatocracy in the eastern world, and the overall growing issues with pollution and and criminality in the rest of the world.
There isnt a single place on earth where people can go to escape.
And of course, in addition to that little gem, there's also the issue of having all eggs in one basket. One very large asteroid impact, and oops-- no more humans.
I want to see people get off of this planet not to satisfy some grandiose fantasy. The earth is so interconnected with all inhabited centers that any number of disasters would spell the end. It's simply a sensible thing to get human presence elsewhere in the solar system.
Nothing to do with "Wonder", or "Exploration", or "Fullfillment"-- More utilitarian reasons.
Thats why I dont want those people to be dropped in a tincan without any air to breathe. I want them to have what they need to survive, and thrive.
On the one hand, I agree with the submission's stance. Those things are custom engineered to perform optimally in the specific problem domain they are engineered for. A space suit worn to do EVAs wont work on mars, or vice versa.
The habitats need to be designed with all manner of ergonomic considerations; people will live the rest of their lives inside the damned thing. They need to be designed to withstand constant ablation by blowing sand and fine particulate dusts. They need to have door seals that are up the the task. They need to have robust circuitry that can withstand the increased intensity of solar storm radiation, since mars lacks a comprehensive global magnetosphere. So many things need to be engineered for, purpose built for the specific tasks at hand, and built to not only last, but last a lifetime, or longer.
On the other hand, the nature of this kind of mission makes it toxic to any world government that would actually be able to accomplish it properly. No politician in this universe wants to be the one who willfully signs the death certificates of highly trained, highly intelligent and skilled people. That's what a manned mission to mars would be. It would require much more than the vertical thrust booster used by the LLM in the 60s to get the crew back to the command module. It would take another complete lower stage rocket. Unless you want to soft-land something that weighs millions of tons, filled with highly volatile propellant on mars so that the crew can get back into space again after the mission period is over, you are planning a one-way trip, and that means consigning those people to die up there.
Politically, a proper mars mission is a non-starter.
That means that only people that would be willing to finance it are sociopaths. People that dont mind if people die, and dont care about being associated with signing that check. Corporate America, and those similarly aligned to the all mighty dollar.
Sadly, that same sociopathy means that any such mission will be done with duct tape, bailing wire, and discount bubblegum wrappers. Lowest bidder on everything. Minimum training for the mission personnel. A mission that, if it succeeds, it would be a statistical anomaly.
I am conflicted.
I want people to get off this planet. But at the same time, I want them to get there safely, properly, and with the tools they need to actually have a chance to pull it off.
I agree with the article author, that the lack of meaty information about this project is not something that instills confidence. By now, the first round of selectees should be getting initial training. Where are they being trained, and what are they being taught? Did they even get out of their homes yet?
The cost of said odyssey is around 300 million dollars, and is a one-time cost, with dividends for your leisure society. Specifically, biologically synthesized aramid fibers on the cheap would enable the construction of better buildings for humans to live in, better clothing for humans to wear in hazardous situations, and possible medical applications as suture material. It's something you can get almost for free, when you consider that the scientific trajectory of your leisure society objective also encompasses many of the same goals. The question is not "Why do this", it is 'Why overlook doing this?"
So far, the reason you have given amounts to "because it makes my butt hurt to see other people's dreams come true and not mine!"
Your florid language points to something on the schizophrenic spectrum.
Your own language suggests somebody that is borderline sociopathic. Does everything other people choose to do have to result in your getting something to be considered of value to you?
Care to provide some citations of these mass-extinctions so I can have a TV? (I don't even have a TV BTW).
As I have just demonstrated, your "Leisure society" is just as guilty of mass ecosystem tampering for poorly justified reasons as my purposeful creation of a biosphere on a world that currently has none is. I was pointing out that I have just as much "Right" to do so, as you do here on earth.
Slashdot Mirror
You dont NEED FTL to be an interstellar species. You just cant be an interstellar society. Time dialation traveling at sublight speeds at a significant fraction of C is more than sufficient to colonize the entire galaxy.
Why is time dialation so frigging hard for people to comprehend?
Here's the thing kids-- TIME IS NOT A CONSTANT. It is tied inexorably with accelleration. Want to get to another star system in YOUR lifetime? Just travel some significant fraction of C! Time FOR YOU will slow down, while the rest of the universe will be unaffected. This is proven science-- You just need to measure the muon count at earth's surface to prove it is so.
Now, you CAN state that doing that is going to be very energy prohibitive, and thus very costly. What you CANT say is that this is not possible.
Seriously, the argument of the parent is trotted out every time a topic like this comes up, and every single time it gets bitch slapped for the erroneous crapfest that it is. Time is NOT constant. It is different everywhere in the universe, and hell-- is not even consistent on the surface of the damned earth!
A person shot at a distant star system with enough energy will arrive within THEIR lifetime-- but everyone they ever knew or loved on earth will die of old age long before they get there. Of course, people moving to another star system probably wont be too particular about that, since they are going on a one-way trip.
Do try to keep up. Relativity and time dialation have been around for the better part of a century now. How you feel about it has no bearing whatsoever on it being true. Experiment after experiment has shown that it is. The GP is correct-- AC *CANT* say that, and neither can you.
Exactly. You get what you pay for.
There is immense job market demand for compliant wage-slaves. Coupled with the institutionalized bald-faced-lies in the H1B sector, you have 2 major employment sectors promoting a glut of lacklustre or low skill level immigrants to come to the country.
The cumulative effects of this bring down otherwise high paying wages in the rest of the economy, making the US less and less attractive to actually highly-valued immigrants with highly sought-after skill sets-- It is not worth their while to move here for lower pay.
Yes. There are many established players setting up shop in Africa.
Gaborone, a major african city, has complexes for many tech and industrial giants.
Check out the wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
I would expect quite a bit to come from there in the coming decades.
This is not at all surprising to me.
Straight up, off the top-- we have a major sector of the US job market (which long ago moved away from manufacturing based jobs to services and technical skills based jobs) that seeks absurd paper requirements, and prices itself out of the domestic labor market, seeking to satisfy its absurd tastes in workers using H1B laborers, creating a market for H1B laborers.
This new market creates very lucrative opportunities in other countries to get desperate people suitably papered up, and foisted into very poisonous employment contracts, even when they really arent able to do the jobs their paperwork says they can.
Add to this that at least one of the countries implicated in industrialized H1B applicant farming also has notoriously bad problems with institutionalized cheating in university settings (coupled with straight up bribery for credentials)-- Seriously, did ANYONE expect ANYTHING OTHER than this?
That's just the tech side of the coin-- There's also the "Immigrant laborers are doing jobs americans dont want to do!" rhetoric. (The statement closer to the truth is that they are doing jobs at pay rates that americans cannot afford to take; The pay rate is below poverty line, and often below legally permitted wages when done above-board with legal citizen workers. This is again, little more than industrialized labor farming for the lowest pricepoint possible. That does NOT attract the "best and brightest".)
But hey-- What do I know. I'm just some guy, not a multi-billion dollar mega conglomerate seeking to continue financial growth in a world economy that cant grow because pay scales have not scaled with inflation. What do I know about the reason detre behind these phenomena!
Seriously.
That's also discounting that the platinum group metals are highly useful for industrual catalyst material, which would be indespensible in space-based manufacturing-- It's necessary to produce bulk quantity nitric acid, and is used to make many kinds of hydrogen fuel cell.
Part of the reason why 'World market for platinum" is so small, is because the metals are hard to extract-- they tend to form in useful deposits only old vocanic areas, which have very hard stone matricies that need to be mined. EG-- it's expensive as fuck to mine, and so there is only a small quantity of the material in active use, which makes it hard to get, which diminishes the potential market.
While your example is indeed a high profile one, it is still just that-- one example-- which is not what is needed to counter the claim of the researchers.
That claim being that statistically, politicians listen more to campaign financiers and lobbyists than they do to their actual constituency of registered voters, and do so by a very large margin.
"Oh look! This voter advocacy group got what they wanted! That means 'You're Wrong!'"
No, it means one of several things:
1) The disparity is not an absolute; (which the researchers never asserted.)
2) The agenda of the advocacy group coincided with another, more influential group's agenda.
3) The actual reason for the group's proposal being acted upon was more "political stunt" than "normal politics."
Love the false equivalence argument there too; It stems from over-application of boolean thinking. It makes several false assumptions, in the effort to disprove a point of contention. Those being: (YourArgument$="Politicians ONLY give time and resources to campaign financiers and corporate lobbyists"), and (Exception$="ACA was co-authored by a member of the Center for American Progress, an organisation that is neither of those, so YourArgument$ is false!" The reality is that YourArgument$= "Politicians STRONGLY FAVOR giving time and resources to campaign financiers and corporate lobbyists", which permits, and expects such exceptions turning up. Meaning, your argument doesn't prove anything other than your own inability to read.
All that is necessary for it (voting) to no longer be a viable method of reliably enacting change, is for the politicians to favor their financial interests sufficiently more than the interests of their constituency. This has been demonstrated by the cited research. Showing that it does not happen more frequently is what you need to prove. NOT that there are exceptions, no matter how exceptional they are. Proving the existence of exceptions only works with boolean properties. The cited problem is not a boolean property.
Try again. Show how the researchers misinterpreted 20 years worth of data, such that voting becomes a viable method of reliably getting political change.
For an example that I think you might better comprehend-- The lottery is not rigged. For every ticket you buy, you increase your odds of winning, which are never a zero percent probability as long as you have purchased at least one ticket. Pointing out how somebody won the lottery does not prove that buying lottery tickets is a good way to reliably make money.
A person stating "You wont win." is supported statistically. Sure, you MIGHT win-- but your odds of it happening are vanishingly small.
The people you are arguing against are saying "Voting wont get you the change you want." This is supported by the statistics presented by the research cited, as more often than not this is indeed the case. Just like the lottery, somebody has to win. In the case of politics, sometimes the underdog gets his way. It does not make either into reliable methodologies.
If you note in the article I cited, there was research that concluded this after reviewing data for 20 years.
If you disagree with the position, the onus of proof is on you to show how the interpretation is wrong.
you don't get an easy out.
The pedant's pedant antecedant was to see the point, but fail to read it.
Since your pedantry has you all tied up in knots, let me break down what others are so desperately trying to get you to realize.
1) Yes, The people casting the votes for legislation are indeed the elected officials. HOWEVER, the laws being voted on are often NOT PENNED BY THESE PEOPLE. Instead, they are often first penned as proposals by interest groups, which then get run through an approvals and support process, and get folded into larger bills, which then eventually get voted on. This is known as a "Christmas Tree Bill"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
2) While anyone may theoretically petitiion congress, many studies have been conducted which indicate that congressional members (used generically for both house and senate) do not give any weight at all to such petitions, and give all their attention to the lobbyists that show up with suitcases full of money, minivans full of hookers, and dumptrucks full of blow.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
These things are the elephant in the room my friend. It has been fucking PROVEN that the popular vote and popular issue created interest groups have practically no power to influence US policy, and yet you cling to the "VOTE!, IT'S THE WAY!" statement.
Somebody here is being delusional, and it isnt the people you are arguing with.
Given that you yourself are making similarly baseless assertions based on confirmation biases, I find the solidity of your arguments to be in question.
Rather than handwave about how long haul mining and aluminum smelting somehow instantly kills people doing it, (a proposition that would mean that the aluminium cans used to ship soda are made in a process that systemically ends human lives, which is an absurdity in itself- There are industrial accidents and risks of exposure, yes-- but more people die in car crashes and from inhaling carbon monoxide from faulty domestic heaters than die in smelter related incidents-- which is a statement that can be supported on demand with actual statistics, collected by real social scientists.)
So please, if you are holding out on some actually substantive basis for your condemnation, by all means, share it with the rest of the class.
Otherwise, please follow your own advice.
Martian condo? Really? Is that what you think?
Clearly, we are not even discussing the same things at all. Clearly you think I am advocating space hotels on mars, when really I am advocating the bare essentials for colonists to survive there.
Would there eventually be hotels on mars?
Only if the colony gets built first.
Your position is a self fulfilling prophecy-- We never go to mars, ever, so of course, there is never going to be a mars colony!
The problem, is that you make this an absurdity, by then asserting "because we will never go to mars, we dont need to make a mars colony!"
In short, you are suffering from circular logic, and are in fact the deluded one. ;P
Oh, I'm the one who needs to be on psychoactive meds?
You DO realize that the argument you just made:
"Yes, which is why we're 7 billion now and adding 200000 new people every day."
Distills down to "Yes, there's a problem and we are ignoring it, and so far we havent died yet, so we can just continue to ignore it-- because past performance is an indicator of future performance! Except that it isnt!"
Especially since in just the past century, when the vast majority of this high technology has risen, atmospheric CO2 levels have risen sharply, and mean global temperature has gone up with it, and shows no signs of stopping or being reduced, and that basically every reputable climate scientist on the planet agrees that even if 100% of human industrial output stopped overnight, the coming ecological catastrophe could not be averted. Yes, adding 200,000 new people every day is perfectly a 'Sensible' thing to do. Clearly.
At least on mars, adding gasses to the atmosphere, any gasses at all, would only make the planet MORE habitable-- and research on how to make crops and industry work in such a hellhole would at least buy some insurance for the now inevitable future for earth, thanks to people like yourself.
If people complain about being able to "afford it" now, how do you intend for them to "afford it" when resources are literally at the breaking point?
Staying alive to see tomorrow would take significant priority over scrounging up and refining enough metal and fuel to launch even a single rocket into space under those conditions-- let alone building an entire martian colony.
This is one of those things that needs to happen when times are good, not when times are bad.
Translation:
It's too much for me to actually research this issue, so I will make some shit up about how the prior poster is clearly batshit for pointing out that there are whole classifications of asteroid that are nearly completely pure metal, and that the composition of these objects ranges from 15% iron-nickel alloy to near 100% iron-nickel alloy.
Instead I will focus on how the OP stated that there are asteroids made of solid cold, and focus on how battshit that is! Nevermind that even really old USGS circulars cite the average gold content of meteorites between .0003 PPM and 8.74PPM, with the average gold concentration of earth's crust being between .001 PPM and .006 PPM , which indicates that careful candidate screening would produce far richer old ores than can be obtained here on earth! That's not important! HE'S A SPACE NUTTER!
He's such a nutter! Hoo boy! See everybody, See me shout it from the rooftop? He's a NUTTER, A NUTTER!
I said it, and said it again, that makes it true! TRUE I SAID! TRUE!
Oh gawd, it's wierd again! The KING space nutter! AND HE'S BRINGING SCIENCE IN ON THIS! OMG! SUPER SPACE NUTTER! SPAAAACE NUUTTTER! (Did I get enough vapid spittle in that?)
Seriously AC- YOU are the one who sounds like the true believer. No amount of plausibility study will ever dislodge your diehard faith that humans will never get off this rock, and because of your faith, you want to sabotage others that lack your convictions, all so you can (Maybe, sorta) get something that you want that is at best equally improbable (A happy future leisure-society utopia, from your own admission) and at worst delusionally impossible (Since you hand-wave away all the consequences of your proposal as being solvable by mystery science, even when real scientists outright say that this is not possible, and that expecting science and technology to just whisk it away is not being realistic, and then have the gall to claim being a realist.)
So go ahead, demonize me some more. Hurl more poorly structured ad hominems my way. Repeating a lie a thousand times does not make it true-- Maybe if you keep huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf, and laughing like a hyena on nitrous oxide, you will eventually have a cerebreal embolism and spare us all the misery of your continued postings.
And that technological use has been strongly linked with a stark reduction in habitability of the planet, due to irreversable changes in the biosphere.
Swing batter. Swing,. (and I would happily live in a cave someplace, if only such well meaning people as yourself would actually allow it. )
Strike Two.
Shall we go for strike 3 AC?
A human would have approximately 5 to 10 seconds in which to respond to the tear in their suit, and if repressurized within 60 seconds, have a fairly good chance of survival.
From the source:
Source:
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/...
The use of a form-fitting pressure suit, like that used by a fighter pilot (or those being demoed by MIT for use on mars, which have form-fitting metal coils to supply mechanical compression) would buy the suit occupant even more time in the event of a tear in the suit by preventing ebullism, and resulting drop in blood pressure, and resulting loss of consciousness.
There are a number of potential mechanisms that could be implemented into a space suit of the MIT type, that would make abrasion type holes in the suit less lethal, such as the non-newtonian silicon shear thickening liquid that is used in ballistic vests. A thin layer of this inside the suit would harden under the pressure being exerted on it by the occupant of the suit against the reduced pressure outside, exerted through the tear. This would reduce the effects of the hard vacuum on the suit occupant, buying more time to apply an appropriate patch to the suit.
I dont think you are properly evaluating the effects of a very large asteroid.
A nuke does not burrow all the way into the upper mantle, and spew ejecta back into space on ballistic trajectories.
You know, like some of the earth crossing asteroids would cause if they actually, you know-- collided with our planet instead of just missing by skipping between the earth and the moon.
Here's something to help better educate you.
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/g...
It does not need to be the size of a planet. The 30 mile wide object referenced above would be sufficient to wipe out 90% of human populations, and seriously imperil the other 10%. Most modern humans are simply incapable of survival long-term without modern technology, and the 100ft tsunamis generated globally ALONE would have destroyed the vast majority of human life if it happened in recent times.
Comparing a large asteroid to conventional nukes is absurd. Even the crazy powerful ones made by the soviets as terror weapons pale in comparison.
Ironic, trying to draw attention to a slight that the initiator already de-facto feels comfortable using himself-- ad-hominems.
Or do you have some alternative explanation for the "Whackackra-doodle-doo!" ?
Granted, two wrongs do not make a right, but implying that the AC is engaging in civil conversation is hardly being honest. It is quite clear that civil conversation is not what the AC is seeking.
Similar arguments have been made over the entire history of mankind. A few centuries ago, I would expect highly intelligent people to have concluded that making reliable flying machines, and having reliable air transport of bulk goods between nations was simply too complicated to be possible, for the exact same line of reasoning you have just proposed.
And yet, we fly freight every day of the year, non-stop, and have whole industries that DEPEND on this.
The problems of today are the quaint footnotes in textbooks of tomorrow.
It's foolish to assert (like a certain AC), that simply because we cannot do something now, we will never (ever) be able to do that thing, and that thinking about how one could possibly do it in order to approach and solve those problems is "Nuttery" and "Religious faith."
You only TRULY fail, when you fail to try.
I see you that you do not understand the concept of the danger of perpetual growth!
Biological immortality would require, at the very least, oppressively controlled reproduction rights, or the planet would quickly become incapable of sustaining additional humans.
If you think the "One child per family" restriction of china is harsh, it has nothing on the harshness that would be required for sustainable population levels in the face of biological immortality. Mass sterilization at birth would practically be a necessity.
Which of us is the sociopath again?
You know. I tried to write a calm, and sensible reply to this poisoned barb you have thrown at me, and I just couldn't do it.
Let's just say that you are simply wrong on a good many of your points.
Here are just a few of them:
1) You make the mistake in asserting that people leaving earth as political asylum seekers would be doing so without something already being there. Even the puritans didnt leave england en-mass until AFTER the colonies in north america were fully settled and productive. --What you are are failing to grasp, is that there would not be such a place to go, if nobody makes the damned colony; The puritans would never have left england, because the colonists never would have preceded them. Did all the irish people fleeing ireland after the potato fammine come with metric fucktons of food and other things? No-- they sold themselves into indentured servitude to come here, with just the clothes on their backs. Why? because there was a means of producing food over here already.
There is nothing inconsistent with wishing to create a colony, with the intention of permitting political asylum once it is able to accept such persons. Granting asylum is a great way to get desperately needed genetic variability and skill diversity for such a project once it is ready to accept such people. The notion that the colony would be built by political refugees when they have no money or resources with which to do it is a strawman of your own construction-- Good thing it isnt what I advocated! Beat that strawman all you want, his stuffing coming out does not impact my position in the slightest.
2) You make the implicit assumption that no industrial capacity or food production would ever be possible on-site at mars. This is a very laughable position to take, so laughable in fact, I wonder from what body of information you produced it from. Data from multiple rovers at very diverse areas on the martian surface has revealed very useful and valuable minerals. Not terribly useful here on earth mind-- we have water, nitrogen and oxygen in copious abundance-- But for martian colonists, those minerals would be more valuable than gold. Do you have any idea how much water is chemically stored in gypsum? Here's a hint-- Gypsum has the chemical formula CaSO4(2 H2O) It's a hydrated sulfate mineral. For every mole of gypsum, 2 moles of water can be produced. The process to do so? Heat it up to about 500 degrees F, and catch the vapor that comes out. Is gypsum a common soil mineral on mars? Apparently so-- Nasa's rovers have found very large veins of the shit.
In fact, There are entire expanses of sand dunes made of gypsum sand in the northern hemisphere of mars.
To quote the linked page:
Somehow I don't think getting sufficient water will be a problem for a martian colony. Harvesting that dune field alone would produce enough water to supply a massive colony site.
Know what else the rovers found? Ammonium salts at rock nest. The linked paper does give the caveat that the sample could be evolved methane and not reduced nitrogen, and suggests further study with the laser spectrometer. However, the gas form of nitrogen i
political freedom for starters.
Or has the situation with the orwelian police state in much of the western world, coupled with the growing corporatocracy in the eastern world, and the overall growing issues with pollution and and criminality in the rest of the world.
There isnt a single place on earth where people can go to escape.
And of course, in addition to that little gem, there's also the issue of having all eggs in one basket. One very large asteroid impact, and oops-- no more humans.
I want to see people get off of this planet not to satisfy some grandiose fantasy. The earth is so interconnected with all inhabited centers that any number of disasters would spell the end. It's simply a sensible thing to get human presence elsewhere in the solar system.
Nothing to do with "Wonder", or "Exploration", or "Fullfillment"-- More utilitarian reasons.
Thats why I dont want those people to be dropped in a tincan without any air to breathe. I want them to have what they need to survive, and thrive.
I am torn on this issue.
On the one hand, I agree with the submission's stance. Those things are custom engineered to perform optimally in the specific problem domain they are engineered for. A space suit worn to do EVAs wont work on mars, or vice versa.
The habitats need to be designed with all manner of ergonomic considerations; people will live the rest of their lives inside the damned thing. They need to be designed to withstand constant ablation by blowing sand and fine particulate dusts. They need to have door seals that are up the the task. They need to have robust circuitry that can withstand the increased intensity of solar storm radiation, since mars lacks a comprehensive global magnetosphere. So many things need to be engineered for, purpose built for the specific tasks at hand, and built to not only last, but last a lifetime, or longer.
On the other hand, the nature of this kind of mission makes it toxic to any world government that would actually be able to accomplish it properly. No politician in this universe wants to be the one who willfully signs the death certificates of highly trained, highly intelligent and skilled people. That's what a manned mission to mars would be. It would require much more than the vertical thrust booster used by the LLM in the 60s to get the crew back to the command module. It would take another complete lower stage rocket. Unless you want to soft-land something that weighs millions of tons, filled with highly volatile propellant on mars so that the crew can get back into space again after the mission period is over, you are planning a one-way trip, and that means consigning those people to die up there.
Politically, a proper mars mission is a non-starter.
That means that only people that would be willing to finance it are sociopaths. People that dont mind if people die, and dont care about being associated with signing that check. Corporate America, and those similarly aligned to the all mighty dollar.
Sadly, that same sociopathy means that any such mission will be done with duct tape, bailing wire, and discount bubblegum wrappers. Lowest bidder on everything. Minimum training for the mission personnel. A mission that, if it succeeds, it would be a statistical anomaly.
I am conflicted.
I want people to get off this planet. But at the same time, I want them to get there safely, properly, and with the tools they need to actually have a chance to pull it off.
I agree with the article author, that the lack of meaty information about this project is not something that instills confidence. By now, the first round of selectees should be getting initial training. Where are they being trained, and what are they being taught? Did they even get out of their homes yet?
Who knows.
No, because I still would have gotten what I paid for. A more mature, more stable code base, from which a good and fully useful product can be built.
The cost of said odyssey is around 300 million dollars, and is a one-time cost, with dividends for your leisure society. Specifically, biologically synthesized aramid fibers on the cheap would enable the construction of better buildings for humans to live in, better clothing for humans to wear in hazardous situations, and possible medical applications as suture material. It's something you can get almost for free, when you consider that the scientific trajectory of your leisure society objective also encompasses many of the same goals. The question is not "Why do this", it is 'Why overlook doing this?"
So far, the reason you have given amounts to "because it makes my butt hurt to see other people's dreams come true and not mine!"
Your own language suggests somebody that is borderline sociopathic. Does everything other people choose to do have to result in your getting something to be considered of value to you?
Sure. The industrialization of china has resulted in the destruction of many species in the yantze river due to overfishing and poorly managed industrial effluent discharging. Further inland, the processing of rare earth metals required to sustain many modern high tech industrial products being manufactured there has caused tremendous loss of biodiversity, and terrible problems for human inhabitants. That's not even counting the consequences of the petro-chemical processing needed to turn crude oil into the plastics necessary to produce the TV, which is having profound and measurable consequences on many animal forms globally. And of course, there's the highly critically acclaimed and "Controversial" issue with fossil fuel use, and the entering of the "anthropocene era", which I dont think really needs a citation, since slashdot covers it basically 5 times a day now.
Care to elaborate on how I used it incorrectly? That particular epithet is used to discourage people from engaging in hypocrisy. The kettle is being a hypocrite by calling the pot "Black bottomed".
As I have just demonstrated, your "Leisure society" is just as guilty of mass ecosystem tampering for poorly justified reasons as my purposeful creation of a biosphere on a world that currently has none is. I was pointing out that I have just as much "Right" to do so, as you do here on earth.
But please, elaborate on how I misused the idiom.