While we are bickering over whether you can trust me with a firearm or not, the social factors that lead to violence are only getting worse.
Uh, citation? Every report I've heard says that violence, crime, and most related things have been declining for years in the US and continue to do so...
Reusing airplanes would require proof of perfection each time, taking the whole thing apart each time and spending so much time rechecking it. The wear and tear on the system from takeoff and landing is to high in most cases, where you'll see stress cracks places you might not expect. For every one stress crack you can see how many are forming that you can't see?
Fixed that for you.
All of these problems exist elsewhere, and we've been able to obtain incredible reliability despite them. The problem of engineering rocket reusability is one of taking something we know how to do into a somewhat more demanding environment. There is nothing to suggest that the materials challenges there are unsurmountable. There are no fundamental new developments needed to do this.
Think of it this way - every flight of an expendable rocket is the first test flight. Airliners are flown hundreds of times before a paying passenger ever gets on board. I think there's substantial promise that reusable rocketry can be far safer than the expendable variety.
Yes, but that stable system example proves that the greenhouse effect is not rightfully considered to be a form of climate change. It is one contributor to the state of the climate, and as such can be a cause of climate change in some cases. In this we are in agreement.
"Climate change" implies that the climate is different at different points in time. The presence of the greenhouse effect implies nothing of the sort. You could have a stable system in which the greenhouse effect is present at a constant level, and the climate is not changing at all. Venus is very hot, in part because of the greenhouse effect, but the temperature is not increasing (planetary scientists feel free to correct me). That makes it fundamentally untrue to say that the greenhouse effect is climate change. You made that statement, which is where I believe you have a misunderstanding.
Fair enough. I really enjoyed the early Athlon days, personally. The first computers over 1GHz blew my mind. A K6-II was in the first machine I ever built (or owned). Scraped together pennies to build it, started with a scavenged 528 MB drive that was just barely enough to fit Windows 98 and Starcraft. Good stuff.
I've already explained my side adequately. Keep in mind also that the global warming from the greenhouse effect is a climate change and is the one most often referred to when someone rhetorically uses the term, "climate change".
The greenhouse effect is not "a climate change", any more than sunlight or blackbody emissions are. The greenhouse effect is something that causes the earth to retain heat. Blackbody emissions cause the earth to lose heat. Sunlight adds heat to the earth. When all the contributing factors balance, climate stays the same. When there is an imbalance in the energy inputs and outputs for the earth, you get warming or cooling. Warming or cooling has an impact on the total energy in the system, and thus changes the climate.
You clearly perceive yourself to be right because you don't understand what you're talking about, so aren't even aware of how your statements are false. I don't think it will be worth discussing any farther until you consider the very basic inaccuracy of your statements.
My personal favorite was the Athlon XP 1700+. The best was date code JIUHB DLT3C, it had documented cases of getting above 4GHz - pretty good considering that it is still a feat to hit that 10 years later. Bought two or three 1700+'s on ebay before I hit the jackpot. Unfortunately, I never managed to put together the water cooling system I had planned, so I never got it over 3 GHz.
In that context, the Greenhouse Effect is, in fact, a cause. So the OP is correct. The fact that the Greenhouse Effect is itself caused doesn't negate that fact.
The last time I truly got excited about AMD was when the K6-2 came out.
What? During the P4 days AMD was ahead in almost every category in the benchmarks... did you miss that whole era? No denying the picture today is far less exciting, though.
An effect is not a cause. For example, the second definition from that link:
an event, condition, or state of affairs that is produced by a cause
Are you serious? The Greenhouse Effect is the result of gases that transmit visible light more easily than infrared light. Because of the presence of those gases (cause), the system in question retains more energy (Effect). This phenomenon, in turn, is believed to be the primary factor in the observed upward trend in Earth's temperature, averaged globally (Global Warming). A single thing can be both a cause and an effect.
Bob wants a dog (Cause). He buys a dog (Effect). Bob just bought a dog (Cause). He then buys dog food (Effect).
This is basic logic. Try to understand topics before attempting to educate others about them.
As long as you are ok with a company that sells its product by exploiting poor college students. I worked for Cutco for a while, and while it is true that their knives kick ass, I think the techniques they use for sales are shady at best... somewhere between the power games of car salesmen and the relationship exploiting, pyramid-scheme shenanigans of Multi-level marketing.
For myself, the real turn-off has been that this show has become the defining cultural reference for nerd-dom. That is, when I talk about something nerdy, mention that my background is in physics, or do some socially inept thing that reveals my nerd-hood, there's a very good chance that someone will bring up tBBT, either comparing me to Sheldon, or comparing the thing I'm talking about to an episode of the show.
Really, I don't think there's anything wrong with the show - it is just annoying how much it defines nerd culture in the minds of the public. I imagine doctors feel the same way about medical dramas, and most people who have identities that correspond superficially with television characters are probably familiar with it. It's like talking about Will and Grace whenever you talk to a gay person, or The Cosby Show whenever you talk to a black person. It is annoying when people base their opinion of you on a fictional comedic character. (Especially when the assumption is that you personally love the show because it contains people "just like you")
Given our lack of detection capability, it's not surprising that we haven't spotted hundreds of alien worlds inhabited by intelligent life. They could be out there but we wouldn't be able to see them at all.
Precisely. Although apparently, given sufficient motivation, we could put something in orbit on the other side of the sun and get enough magnification through gravitational lensing to check one of them out with spy-satellite-like resolution. Which would be awesome.
Why would the deaths be any different than they currently are? Fewer and fewer babies born each year for whatever reasons would lead to our extinction. Violence isn't necessary nor desirable.
Humanity isn't going to go extinct without a struggle. Any event of sufficient magnitude and impact to cause the extinction of the species will redefine the idea of suffering.
That said, I understand being loopy when you're sick - hope you feel better.
I certainly don't wish to expedite the process by harming any fellow humans, but if our species was to go extinct in the relatively near future even (hundreds of years), I would be ok with it. Species go extinct all the time. If we don't get to spread all over the galaxy, that's fine too. We aren't any more or less important than other species. (Or maybe I feel that way merely because my sense of self-worth is very low.)
I don't know how you could consider yourself caring and be ok with the extinction of our species. Extinction isn't just a nice, gentle, pop out of existence. It would mean horrifying, painful, violent deaths for billions. Imagine every person you have ever encountered dying in terrible ways. That is what extinction means, and I don't want our generation or any following generation to experience it if we can help it.
Fermi's Paradox exists because the universe is large enough that there should be lots of aliens around, but that doesn't seem to be the case from observation. What is the logical conclusion if we detect aliens on this planet (the most Earth-like one thus far)? We only have a few options. 1: That we just so happened to find another planet full of life, and it exists before "The Great Filter" just like us, and every other planet out there is a dead husk of an annihilated intelligent civilization, or 2: That it is either onerously difficult or unrewarding to contact alien civilizations. Either one would explain why we haven't heard anything yet (Roswell, etc notwithstanding).
Here's the thing - according to our current understanding, #2 is absolutely true. #1 is just speculation. Statistically, if we have exactly 2 samples of habitable planets and both contained life, it would be highly improbable that the reason for a lack of contact is that there is no intelligent life out there. Occam's razor and all that.
If physics stays mostly the same, no breaking light barriers or infinite energy, #2 will continue to be true. That's the most parsimonious answer and it fits with everything we know of the universe, so that's the reasonable thing to assume.
The universe would be a bit more boring if we are the most advanced inhabitants, but it would be a hell of a lot safer (from our perspective). Due to the timescales involved, the chances that an alien race is 10 or 100 years ahead of us is tiny - they would likely be many thousands of years more advanced, and that kind of technological advantage would put us in a completely powerless position if any kind of negotiation started... probably the only meaningful thing we could do in such an encounter would be to threaten to destroy our entire planet... the equivalent of a man facing down a police department by threatening to kill himself. Even then, it is likely that they could stop us if we tried.
If Kepler-186f is teeming with intelligent life, then that would be really bad news for humanity because it would push back the Great Filter’s position further into the technological stages of a civilization’s development. This would imply that catastrophe awaits both us and our extraterrestrial companions.
No it wouldn't, because then Fermi's Paradox is solved - Fermi's Paradox exists because we Earthicans are, by all appearances thus far, the only life that exists, intelligent or otherwise. If the first exoplanet we manage to check harbors intelligent life, then it would suggest that there is a lot of intelligent life out there, and it is just effing hard to communicate and travel over interstellar distances.
First of all, Planetary Resources seems to be devoting some significant effort to this and already has significant investment and development underway... mind you, their focus is on asteroid resource utilization, but they are still ultimately tracking asteroids and learning how to manipulate and relocate them. The fact that these are the exact same capabilities required to prevent an asteroid impact is not a coincidence.
The second thing is the Planetary Society's Laserbees concept - get a fleet of tiny, solar-powered satellites with frickin' lasers, send them to orbit around an asteroid of interest, and then have them fire their lasers at the asteroid, timed such that they keep hitting the proper point, the asteroid heats up and ejects mass in the direction of your choosing, and you basically have a laser-powered thruster that uses solar power and the asteroid itself as reaction mass.
This concept has been reviewed in depth and compared very favorably with other suggestions, and actually holds some promise of scaling well, unlike the gravity tractor technology.
There are experiments that have explored the upper size limits of quantum behavior - the classic double-slit experiment has been performed with electrons, larger elementary particles, and I believe even large molecules (buckyballs, if I recall correctly). The catch is, to observe such behavior with actual particles, the system had to be cooled down, and must be cooled more and more for larger and larger objects. It is interesting to think... this is a very low-entropy state, particles are moving very slowly, and entropy is the "time compass" of the universe - if it is increasing, you are going forward in time. This research makes me think that perhaps the extreme cooling, and the quantum behavior that emerges in such cases, is because you have slowed things down enough for the universe's quantum computations to "catch up". It's almost like supercooling and overclocking the universe itself.
Yes, this is an incoherent rant: I know just enough quantum mechanics to draw totally unfounded links between things I don't really understand, but I figure it's ok as long as I see my nonsense for what it is.
Very, very interesting link here, but I must take issue with your description. Saying that the bird's ability to navigate is enhanced by the observer effect made me think that birds measured in experiments more reliably found their destinations, while birds that didn't got lost more, or something to that effect. The observer effect deals exclusively with the fact that a measured thing seems to behave differently than an unmeasured thing. I'm imagining the double-slit experiment with a flock of birds... which, come to think of it, sound pretty awesome. They're working on doing it with viruses, so who knows?
This article, though, has more to do with quantum spin and something akin to the Stern-Gerlach apparatus - very interesting, but something else entirely. Still, I now have an ambition to have my eyes augmented with superoxide and cryptochrome so I can visualize magnetic fields. Mmm.
An array of ultra-sound sensors around the car, compiled into a simple birds-eye-view display. Like a storm radar image. You'd see at a glance the car (or motorbike) in your blindspot. Dramatically improved situational awareness.
They have features somewhat like this already. Mazda has a sensor feature that lights up a blinky alert on the side view mirror if there is someone in your blind spot.
Yep, good arguments for abolition of NASA as a whole. Tasking it with stuff, that — however cheap — has nothing to do with aeronautics and space, is not right.
Ah, the truth comes out: you just want to criticize NASA on shallow principles, without actually having any informed opinions about budget items that matter. Your objection amounts to blaming the near-collapse of the banking system on their free coffee in the lobby, which is clearly not part of a bank's fundamental purpose.
SpaceX and Orbital's cargo and launch systems have been developed largely thanks to NASA's COTS program. It has been far more effective than the typical cost-plus approach, and has done far more for developing the nation's space capabilities overall. NASA isn't being allowed to do what makes sense though - they have to dump billions into a rehash of old shuttle hardware since we allow politicians to dictate their missions for short term campaigning points.
If you have a substantive claim (maybe include a source, or numbers of your own?) then I would be happy to continue the discussion. Otherwise, I think you are just trolling, and ignorantly, so I don't think it will be worth my time to participate.
The muslim outreach point is merely taken from a clumsy statement by a NASA Administrator, and as far as I'm aware doesn't correspond to ANY budget item. (feel free to point one out) The other study you criticized involved 3 individuals, one of whom was a grad student, and took somewhere on the course of a few months... let's be generous and suppose each person costs 100k/yr, 3 people *.5 years = $150k. This is about.001% of NASA's budget. Considering that it might meaningfully inform NASA policy (unrest on Earth could conceivably impact discussions about colonization efforts, technological solutions to environmental problems, or exploration of off-planet resources) I think this is quite defensible.
SLS, on the other hand, really isn't. Consider that SpaceX (which has an excellent track record of fulfilling their promises) is planning on selling the Falcon Heavy for $135 million. At that price, very few people are going to go for the far more expensive but similarly capable SLS. Perhaps 1 launch a year might be achieved, with only NASA and perhaps secret DOD missions as customers. With all the development costs and staffing requirements for the system, a launch rate of 1/year would mean that the cost for each would be $5 billion. If things shake out more like what's on the current manifest (1 or two launches a decade) then that will turn into $15 billion. Source: http://www.thespacereview.com/...
How would any responsible politician push for such a program, when it is 30-100x more expensive than free market solutions?
Slashdot Mirror
While we are bickering over whether you can trust me with a firearm or not, the social factors that lead to violence are only getting worse.
Uh, citation? Every report I've heard says that violence, crime, and most related things have been declining for years in the US and continue to do so...
Reusing airplanes would require proof of perfection each time, taking the whole thing apart each time and spending so much time rechecking it. The wear and tear on the system from takeoff and landing is to high in most cases, where you'll see stress cracks places you might not expect. For every one stress crack you can see how many are forming that you can't see?
Fixed that for you.
All of these problems exist elsewhere, and we've been able to obtain incredible reliability despite them. The problem of engineering rocket reusability is one of taking something we know how to do into a somewhat more demanding environment. There is nothing to suggest that the materials challenges there are unsurmountable. There are no fundamental new developments needed to do this.
Think of it this way - every flight of an expendable rocket is the first test flight. Airliners are flown hundreds of times before a paying passenger ever gets on board. I think there's substantial promise that reusable rocketry can be far safer than the expendable variety.
Yes, but that stable system example proves that the greenhouse effect is not rightfully considered to be a form of climate change. It is one contributor to the state of the climate, and as such can be a cause of climate change in some cases. In this we are in agreement.
"Climate change" implies that the climate is different at different points in time. The presence of the greenhouse effect implies nothing of the sort. You could have a stable system in which the greenhouse effect is present at a constant level, and the climate is not changing at all. Venus is very hot, in part because of the greenhouse effect, but the temperature is not increasing (planetary scientists feel free to correct me). That makes it fundamentally untrue to say that the greenhouse effect is climate change. You made that statement, which is where I believe you have a misunderstanding.
Fair enough. I really enjoyed the early Athlon days, personally. The first computers over 1GHz blew my mind. A K6-II was in the first machine I ever built (or owned). Scraped together pennies to build it, started with a scavenged 528 MB drive that was just barely enough to fit Windows 98 and Starcraft. Good stuff.
I've already explained my side adequately. Keep in mind also that the global warming from the greenhouse effect is a climate change and is the one most often referred to when someone rhetorically uses the term, "climate change".
The greenhouse effect is not "a climate change", any more than sunlight or blackbody emissions are. The greenhouse effect is something that causes the earth to retain heat. Blackbody emissions cause the earth to lose heat. Sunlight adds heat to the earth. When all the contributing factors balance, climate stays the same. When there is an imbalance in the energy inputs and outputs for the earth, you get warming or cooling. Warming or cooling has an impact on the total energy in the system, and thus changes the climate.
You clearly perceive yourself to be right because you don't understand what you're talking about, so aren't even aware of how your statements are false. I don't think it will be worth discussing any farther until you consider the very basic inaccuracy of your statements.
My personal favorite was the Athlon XP 1700+. The best was date code JIUHB DLT3C, it had documented cases of getting above 4GHz - pretty good considering that it is still a feat to hit that 10 years later. Bought two or three 1700+'s on ebay before I hit the jackpot. Unfortunately, I never managed to put together the water cooling system I had planned, so I never got it over 3 GHz.
In that context, the Greenhouse Effect is, in fact, a cause. So the OP is correct. The fact that the Greenhouse Effect is itself caused doesn't negate that fact.
The last time I truly got excited about AMD was when the K6-2 came out.
What? During the P4 days AMD was ahead in almost every category in the benchmarks... did you miss that whole era? No denying the picture today is far less exciting, though.
An effect is not a cause. For example, the second definition from that link:
an event, condition, or state of affairs that is produced by a cause
Are you serious? The Greenhouse Effect is the result of gases that transmit visible light more easily than infrared light. Because of the presence of those gases (cause), the system in question retains more energy (Effect). This phenomenon, in turn, is believed to be the primary factor in the observed upward trend in Earth's temperature, averaged globally (Global Warming). A single thing can be both a cause and an effect.
Bob wants a dog (Cause). He buys a dog (Effect). Bob just bought a dog (Cause). He then buys dog food (Effect).
This is basic logic. Try to understand topics before attempting to educate others about them.
As long as you are ok with a company that sells its product by exploiting poor college students. I worked for Cutco for a while, and while it is true that their knives kick ass, I think the techniques they use for sales are shady at best... somewhere between the power games of car salesmen and the relationship exploiting, pyramid-scheme shenanigans of Multi-level marketing.
You can observe siphon action with various non-fluid objects - you can accomplish the same with a string of beads and a couple of jars, for instance.
For myself, the real turn-off has been that this show has become the defining cultural reference for nerd-dom. That is, when I talk about something nerdy, mention that my background is in physics, or do some socially inept thing that reveals my nerd-hood, there's a very good chance that someone will bring up tBBT, either comparing me to Sheldon, or comparing the thing I'm talking about to an episode of the show.
Really, I don't think there's anything wrong with the show - it is just annoying how much it defines nerd culture in the minds of the public. I imagine doctors feel the same way about medical dramas, and most people who have identities that correspond superficially with television characters are probably familiar with it. It's like talking about Will and Grace whenever you talk to a gay person, or The Cosby Show whenever you talk to a black person. It is annoying when people base their opinion of you on a fictional comedic character. (Especially when the assumption is that you personally love the show because it contains people "just like you")
Given our lack of detection capability, it's not surprising that we haven't spotted hundreds of alien worlds inhabited by intelligent life. They could be out there but we wouldn't be able to see them at all.
Precisely. Although apparently, given sufficient motivation, we could put something in orbit on the other side of the sun and get enough magnification through gravitational lensing to check one of them out with spy-satellite-like resolution. Which would be awesome.
Why would the deaths be any different than they currently are? Fewer and fewer babies born each year for whatever reasons would lead to our extinction. Violence isn't necessary nor desirable.
Humanity isn't going to go extinct without a struggle. Any event of sufficient magnitude and impact to cause the extinction of the species will redefine the idea of suffering.
That said, I understand being loopy when you're sick - hope you feel better.
I certainly don't wish to expedite the process by harming any fellow humans, but if our species was to go extinct in the relatively near future even (hundreds of years), I would be ok with it. Species go extinct all the time. If we don't get to spread all over the galaxy, that's fine too. We aren't any more or less important than other species. (Or maybe I feel that way merely because my sense of self-worth is very low.)
I don't know how you could consider yourself caring and be ok with the extinction of our species. Extinction isn't just a nice, gentle, pop out of existence. It would mean horrifying, painful, violent deaths for billions. Imagine every person you have ever encountered dying in terrible ways. That is what extinction means, and I don't want our generation or any following generation to experience it if we can help it.
Fermi's Paradox exists because the universe is large enough that there should be lots of aliens around, but that doesn't seem to be the case from observation. What is the logical conclusion if we detect aliens on this planet (the most Earth-like one thus far)? We only have a few options. 1: That we just so happened to find another planet full of life, and it exists before "The Great Filter" just like us, and every other planet out there is a dead husk of an annihilated intelligent civilization, or 2: That it is either onerously difficult or unrewarding to contact alien civilizations. Either one would explain why we haven't heard anything yet (Roswell, etc notwithstanding).
Here's the thing - according to our current understanding, #2 is absolutely true. #1 is just speculation. Statistically, if we have exactly 2 samples of habitable planets and both contained life, it would be highly improbable that the reason for a lack of contact is that there is no intelligent life out there. Occam's razor and all that.
If physics stays mostly the same, no breaking light barriers or infinite energy, #2 will continue to be true. That's the most parsimonious answer and it fits with everything we know of the universe, so that's the reasonable thing to assume.
The universe would be a bit more boring if we are the most advanced inhabitants, but it would be a hell of a lot safer (from our perspective). Due to the timescales involved, the chances that an alien race is 10 or 100 years ahead of us is tiny - they would likely be many thousands of years more advanced, and that kind of technological advantage would put us in a completely powerless position if any kind of negotiation started... probably the only meaningful thing we could do in such an encounter would be to threaten to destroy our entire planet... the equivalent of a man facing down a police department by threatening to kill himself. Even then, it is likely that they could stop us if we tried.
If Kepler-186f is teeming with intelligent life, then that would be really bad news for humanity because it would push back the Great Filter’s position further into the technological stages of a civilization’s development. This would imply that catastrophe awaits both us and our extraterrestrial companions.
No it wouldn't, because then Fermi's Paradox is solved - Fermi's Paradox exists because we Earthicans are, by all appearances thus far, the only life that exists, intelligent or otherwise. If the first exoplanet we manage to check harbors intelligent life, then it would suggest that there is a lot of intelligent life out there, and it is just effing hard to communicate and travel over interstellar distances.
First of all, Planetary Resources seems to be devoting some significant effort to this and already has significant investment and development underway... mind you, their focus is on asteroid resource utilization, but they are still ultimately tracking asteroids and learning how to manipulate and relocate them. The fact that these are the exact same capabilities required to prevent an asteroid impact is not a coincidence.
The second thing is the Planetary Society's Laserbees concept - get a fleet of tiny, solar-powered satellites with frickin' lasers, send them to orbit around an asteroid of interest, and then have them fire their lasers at the asteroid, timed such that they keep hitting the proper point, the asteroid heats up and ejects mass in the direction of your choosing, and you basically have a laser-powered thruster that uses solar power and the asteroid itself as reaction mass.
This concept has been reviewed in depth and compared very favorably with other suggestions, and actually holds some promise of scaling well, unlike the gravity tractor technology.
There are experiments that have explored the upper size limits of quantum behavior - the classic double-slit experiment has been performed with electrons, larger elementary particles, and I believe even large molecules (buckyballs, if I recall correctly). The catch is, to observe such behavior with actual particles, the system had to be cooled down, and must be cooled more and more for larger and larger objects. It is interesting to think... this is a very low-entropy state, particles are moving very slowly, and entropy is the "time compass" of the universe - if it is increasing, you are going forward in time. This research makes me think that perhaps the extreme cooling, and the quantum behavior that emerges in such cases, is because you have slowed things down enough for the universe's quantum computations to "catch up". It's almost like supercooling and overclocking the universe itself.
Yes, this is an incoherent rant: I know just enough quantum mechanics to draw totally unfounded links between things I don't really understand, but I figure it's ok as long as I see my nonsense for what it is.
For example, birds' touted ability to navigate by way of feeling the Earth's magnetic field is apparently enhanced by the observer effect.
http://www.wired.com/2009/06/b...
Very, very interesting link here, but I must take issue with your description. Saying that the bird's ability to navigate is enhanced by the observer effect made me think that birds measured in experiments more reliably found their destinations, while birds that didn't got lost more, or something to that effect. The observer effect deals exclusively with the fact that a measured thing seems to behave differently than an unmeasured thing. I'm imagining the double-slit experiment with a flock of birds... which, come to think of it, sound pretty awesome. They're working on doing it with viruses, so who knows?
This article, though, has more to do with quantum spin and something akin to the Stern-Gerlach apparatus - very interesting, but something else entirely. Still, I now have an ambition to have my eyes augmented with superoxide and cryptochrome so I can visualize magnetic fields. Mmm.
An array of ultra-sound sensors around the car, compiled into a simple birds-eye-view display. Like a storm radar image. You'd see at a glance the car (or motorbike) in your blindspot. Dramatically improved situational awareness.
They have features somewhat like this already. Mazda has a sensor feature that lights up a blinky alert on the side view mirror if there is someone in your blind spot.
Yep, good arguments for abolition of NASA as a whole. Tasking it with stuff, that — however cheap — has nothing to do with aeronautics and space, is not right.
Ah, the truth comes out: you just want to criticize NASA on shallow principles, without actually having any informed opinions about budget items that matter. Your objection amounts to blaming the near-collapse of the banking system on their free coffee in the lobby, which is clearly not part of a bank's fundamental purpose.
SpaceX and Orbital's cargo and launch systems have been developed largely thanks to NASA's COTS program. It has been far more effective than the typical cost-plus approach, and has done far more for developing the nation's space capabilities overall. NASA isn't being allowed to do what makes sense though - they have to dump billions into a rehash of old shuttle hardware since we allow politicians to dictate their missions for short term campaigning points.
If you have a substantive claim (maybe include a source, or numbers of your own?) then I would be happy to continue the discussion. Otherwise, I think you are just trolling, and ignorantly, so I don't think it will be worth my time to participate.
The muslim outreach point is merely taken from a clumsy statement by a NASA Administrator, and as far as I'm aware doesn't correspond to ANY budget item. (feel free to point one out) The other study you criticized involved 3 individuals, one of whom was a grad student, and took somewhere on the course of a few months... let's be generous and suppose each person costs 100k/yr, 3 people * .5 years = $150k. This is about .001% of NASA's budget. Considering that it might meaningfully inform NASA policy (unrest on Earth could conceivably impact discussions about colonization efforts, technological solutions to environmental problems, or exploration of off-planet resources) I think this is quite defensible.
SLS, on the other hand, really isn't. Consider that SpaceX (which has an excellent track record of fulfilling their promises) is planning on selling the Falcon Heavy for $135 million. At that price, very few people are going to go for the far more expensive but similarly capable SLS. Perhaps 1 launch a year might be achieved, with only NASA and perhaps secret DOD missions as customers. With all the development costs and staffing requirements for the system, a launch rate of 1/year would mean that the cost for each would be $5 billion. If things shake out more like what's on the current manifest (1 or two launches a decade) then that will turn into $15 billion. Source: http://www.thespacereview.com/...
How would any responsible politician push for such a program, when it is 30-100x more expensive than free market solutions?