A mining mission can be done for initially about $200 million, about the same cost as DS1.
Oh, really? Quote your source. If you're talking about tonnes of material (more on that in a moment), what sort of delta vee are you looking at? Even with ion engines you wouldn't be able to nudge that sort of mass into LEO inside of a century with the payload that could be launched with current boosters.
As for finding asteroids that weigh tons, how do you propose to do that? The only way we have to detect rocks that size at the moment is when they hit our atmosphere (and, shortly thereafter, the Earth). Any asteroid that we can track (and thus rendezvous with) doesn't weigh "hundreds of tonnes", it weighs millions or billions of tons.
The point is economic. I want the commercial exploitation of space as much as you, but I'd rather focus on what we can realistically achieve in the forseeable future.
NASA would dearly love to get their hands on that amount of pristine asteroidal material. If it could be done for $200 million, they'd be doing it already. Guaranteed. Or are you more clever than the people at JPL that make unscheduled landings on asteroids or nurse clapped-out technology testers into cometary flybys? Despite the occasional cockups, NASA gets pretty good value for money from its space probes.
Your figures are patently unbelievable, and we will not see the sort of mission you discuss for several decades to come. Live with it.
Whoo! Sturm und drang! Try not to resort to ad hominem attacks on my genetics if you want your arguments to be taken seriously. Let's try again:
One of the reasons we're not doing stuff which is very feasible
Feasible according to whom? I'll say it again: Current and projected space probes are pushing the envelope of what is currently technically possible.. Let's dissect your 'feasible' technologies:
You talk about using a mirror to break up the asteroid. The largest space mirror deployed to date (with only partial success) was a Russian one less than 20 meters acoss. To break up an asteroid several kilometers across would require a REALLY BIG mirror, orders of magnitude larger than the biggest space structures launched to date. The Russians had difficulty stopping their small mirror from rippling, and accurately pointing and focusing one kilometers across, as your mirror would need to be, is something that will require heaps of practice and lots of money to perfect.
You want to stop the asteroid's rotation using a cable attached to an anchor. The longest cable deployment in space to date was a NASA/Italian experiment on the space shuttle that broke. There are further tests in the works, but a cable long enough and strong enough to halt an asteroid is a LONG way off.
Spectroscopy gives us some details about surface composition, but that is a long way from giving us all the information we would need to exploit those resources. Carbon is very useful for building lots of things, but if you have to free it from mineral complexes then it adds several levels of complexity to the space-based engineering. Given that the largest materials processing facility launched to date would fit in a filing cabinet, and cost tens of millions of dollars, I don't think we'll be seeing space smelters by christmas.
I also noticed a subtle shift in your emphasis between posts. Quote from your first:
Mining an NEA isn't going to cost a billion dollars because you don't mine it conventionally.
So it will cost less than a billion dollars? Cheap at half the price, especially in light of all the technology development I've outlined. By your second post, your argument has become:
One of the reasons we're not doing stuff which is very feasible is there've been no pathfinder missions because of the politics involved in space travel.
Political will == expenditure. Now you're saying we can achieve these things if we throw "the budget for Vietnam" at it. It would take us part of the way, but that was not your original point.
I do believe the things you are talking about will one day be possible, but the thread was about what we should be spending our limited resources on NOW. Talking about how we shouldn't waste our time on pissant little probes until we are all living at L5 adds nothing to the debate on effective use of current resources.
So all you have to do is perform a complicated set of maneuvers, utilising technology that currently does not exist, to utilise asteroidal resources that we currently have very little knowledge of. Piece of piss. Don't know why we aren't all living on the Moon right now.
The most advanced asteroid/comet space probe under development at the moment is the ESA/NASA Rosetta probe to be launched in 2003. It is going to cost in the neigborhood of $400 million. It will rendezvous with a comet, observe it for a year, and then launch a tiny lander to gather data from the surface. Listen carefully:
Designing it is pushing the current boundaries of our technological expertise.
The proposal you outline is so far in advance of our current capabilities that it is laughable. It's like saying that if we want to lower costs of getting to orbit, we "just" need to build a space elevator. To do what you want would require pathfinder missions to test the bleeding edge technologies, sccout missions to ensure that there are usable resources on the target NEA...billions of dollars doesn't begin to describe the level of investment required to do what you describe.
While you're at it, why don't you tell us how we could easily and cheaply cure all known disease by developing nanotechnology? Or solve greenhouse gas emissions by building fusion reactors? These things may happen one day, but they aren't going to come cheap.
Come back down to Earth and live in the here and now. If we could do these things in the budget you are thinking of, then we'd already be doing them.
mining asteroids can turn a profit (Mars probably can't)
1) The discussion is about returning 500g of samples for scientific purposes, not stripmining other planets for profit.
2) Who says mining asteroids would be profitable? It would cost at least billions of dollars to undertake such a mining mission to a NEA. We are still capable of mining ores here on Earth much more cheaply, and we aren't going to run out any time in the next few decades.
we can use ION drives to get there (like Deep Space 1 used), but they don't work to-from Mars due to the gravity of Mars
Guess you better tell NASA that. There are several exploratory design concepts that would utilize ion engines to get probes to and from Mars. You would need a complementary conventional engine to leave Mars orbit, but you would still make overall weight savings by using ion engines for the cruise phase.
(steam is a fairly good rocket fuel in fact)
Actually, it's a fairly crap rocket fuel as H2O. It's cheap and plentiful, which is why some concepts bother with it at all.
getting lots of stuff from NEAs to orbit is looking cheaper than getting it from the earth, therefore it may be possible to send people to Mars using the fuel collected from NEAs; in the meantime we can turn a profit boosting satellites into GEOsynchronous orbit and such like...
Its 'cheaper' in terms of fuel expenditure. In the real world of today, however, you would have to factor in the many billions of dollars that setting up your NEA fuel depot would cost. One day it will be the way to go, but your argument is like saying that we shouldn't spend millions on developing better silicon chip lithography because one day quantum computing will be much better.
Basically Mars would be a white elephant right now. Cool as heck, but pointless.
There is exploration and research that many people would like to see undertaken right now, rather than wait for Buck Rogers to do it for us when we are all old and grey.
An average space probe nowadays costs about $350 million, and we can do it right now. NASA has firm plans to launch one or two Mars probes every two years, with the design of the 2003 and 2005 missions already well under way.
Manned space flight , in comparison, is still hideously expensive. The final cost of the ISS will run into the many tens of billions of dollars in order to keep 6-7 people in low Earth orbit. A permanent Lunar base capable of supporting a similar sized research crew would be comparable in cost, at the very least. As for Lunar production/launch facilities, check back in a few decades.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to take a Lunar holiday one day. But putting everything on hold until that remote possibility becomes a reality would hinder the very real and immediate science we can do for comparatively little right now.
There are plans to relaunch the science package that was lost on the Climate Orbiter. The 2005 Mars Reconnasisance Orbiter, which will essentially be a Martian spy satellite capable of resolving surface features 20cm across may carry the entire sensor package originally carried on MCO. This will be made possible due to continued advances in miniaturization.
There was actually a twin to the MPL slated for launch this year along with the Mars Odyssey orbiter that arrives in Mars orbit in a few weeks. It was mothballed after the MPL screwup in spite of being nearly completed. There are noises being made about finishing it and launching it along with the MRO in 2005. It would seem a pity to waste the millions of dollars that had already been spent on it.
I have been provided no credible evidence of a god, therefore I do not believe that there is one. That is not the same as believing that there could not be a god.
Sounds like agnosticism to me. Also, you did implicitly state that you believed that God wasn't real:
More bad news for the religious among us: the Easter bunny, tooth fairy, and Santa Claus aren't real either.
Sounds like a belief in nonexistence to me.
My point was that you are holding religious beliefs to a different standard of evidence than you would other beliefs.
Then it was a poorly argued point. All matters of faith are not logically equivalent. A belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life (based on the size of the universe, or whatever) does not compell me to place that faith in the same basket as belief in UFO abductions.
Another problem is that you seem to have just as immature a notion of God as the people you slag off. I suspect that a lot of smart religious people do not believe in a bearded guy sitting on a cloud, but have a more sophisticated notion of a universal principle. The fact that a lot of people don't have this maturity does not invalidate the basic premise.
I don't view those things as "intolerance." Denying medical care to a sick child due to religious beliefs is not intolerance and that was another example I provided. I view those things as heinous acts done in the name or religion. Intolerance is far too tame a word.
Choosing the one element of that list that I would not classify as rooted in intolerance (except of ideas) does not alter the basic nature of my point. You're being a bit semantically slippery, here. Let's use other words: bigotry, chauvinism, fanaticism. You say potayto, I say potaato.
Now show me that it's positive influence outweighs the negative.
Prove to me that the positive benefits of capitalism, secular humanism, Taoism, etc, etc outweigh the negative. What a pointless challenge.
Okay, here's some positive things that organised religion does: foundation of socially inclusive charitable institutions, political activism such as liberation theology, safekeeping of secular knowledge during the dark ages. If you want to claim that such activities could carry on separate from religion, then you have to accept that murderous hatred and fanaticism could as well.
Atheism is not a religion. It is the rejection of "faith"
You have faith that your disbelief is true. Any logical system is built on unprovable axioms that must be believed in despite being unprovable.
. If you are unwilling to reject the notion of "God", why would you reject the notion of the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, or the tooth fairy?
A totally specious line of reasoning. Just because someone believes one thing, they are not compelled to believe in everything.
I don't care about the positive philosophies of religion. It's time for man to grow up and take responsibility for his own behavior, thoughts, and morals.
And all those whose societies are still too immature to deal with that can just implode for all you care. Perhaps they need to eveolve toward enlightenment by being shown positive examples of how to live without God. Insulting them will do that admirably, of course.
Christianity led to the Crusades. There was no weird splinter group that had perverted Christianity to that purpose.
Actually, there was. Landless nobles used the crusade as an excuse to steal land from other Christians, not just Moslems or Jews. The calling of the Western crusade was misguided, but was at least partially in response to the foreign threat to the like-minded Byzantine Empire. It can be viewed as a political decision. How is it different to the formation of a Western coalition to fight Communism in Vietnam?
And religion brainwashes its practitioners into believing that they are doing the right thing, whether it's murdering abortion providers or crashing planes into skyscrapers.
Or it can be used to teach 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. The vast majority of religious bvelievers are peaceful, if occasionally misguided. It's often a few bad apples that spoil the whole barrel.
I never accused anyone of intolerance
Yes, you did:
I'm tired of holy wars, crusades, jihads, fatwas, terrorist acts by Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews
That's an implicit assumption of intolerance.
Why should I be tolerant of something that has caused so much death and suffering?
Perhaps because you have an overly simplistic view of one of the most (if not the most) influential elements of human thought over the course of recorded history.
Religion has both good and bad elements. It is a notion that we are (in my opinion) evolving away from, but to scapegoat it for all the bad things that humanity has done ignores the fact that it is often a hypocritical excuse for bad behaviour rather than a cause.
Atheism is a default position. We all start out atheists when we are born.
No we don't. That's like saying that we all start out with centrist political views. The whole notion of concepts like politics and religion is so alien to a newborn that to say they have any position at all is fallacious. Stricly speaking, from an etymological point of view, your interpretation of the word is correct, but "English as she is spoke " has a more restrictive, belief-based meaning.
How can I have a belief one way or the other if the concept itself seem unintelligible? This is the position of many atheists.
No, that's the position of an agnostic. An atheist actively disbelieves in the existence of the divine.
Are you an agnostic theist or agnostic athiest?
Neither. Try not to be so binary.
Well, there are plenty of atheists who are skeptical of the communism idea as well as the god idea.
Which has nothing to do with my original argument. Theist governments can be socialist, totalitarian, capitalist or any other -ist.
There are positive examples of 'atheistic' societies that are not repressive, but they tend to be centered around some defining philosophy like Buddhism. My point was that an overtly atheistic culture is not necessarily free of the type of repression that theistic cultures are.
Okay, I was making a glib point, but the word is 'watered down' anyway. Buddhism and Confucianism have few or no positive references to God/gods, but most people, particularly in the West, would consider them religions.
Atheism is a religion, too. It is a concrete belief that is held without any conclusive proof one way or another. Some atheists are more dogmatic and hate-filled than your average churchgoer. Ask Russians what life is like under an 'enlightened' atheistic government. Belief or disbelief in universal principles is no guarantee of morality.
You need to draw a distinction between the positive philosophies espoused by most major religions and the self-serving hypocrisy of those who would use noble concepts to their own ends.
Just because you don't 'need' the myths of organised religion doesn't give you the right to get pointlessly aggressive with those who do. In a lot of ways, the myths of eternal life or reincarnation/karma are a lot like parents using Santa Claus as a way of teaching children the benefits of being good. It is explained to the immature in language they can understand and identify with. By the time they are old enough to see through the stories, the value of the underlying message will hopefully have made some impact on them. The fact that a lot of people misinterpret the message and stay stuck in a juvenile fantasy world indicates that it is not a foolproof methodology, but secular humanism doesn't have a 100% strike rate either.
Perhaps you should examine your own belligerent tone of phrase before you start accusing others of intolerance.
But what's the point? The only confirmed life on other planets far away will be from "Intellegent Life" (Meaning they have access to radios).
Maybe not. NASA has plans to some day launch a deep space interferometric array of Hubble-class telescopes that will be able to resolve a 25x25 pixel image of an Earth-size planet 50 light years away, and determine spectra from its atmosphere. If they find oxygen, then they can be pretty sure they've found life.
Voyager is more advanced than anything that NASA has produced lately.
Based on what criteria? The processing power of its computer? The sophistication, compactness and sensitivity of its instruments? The Voyagers were marvels of 1970s technology, but current probes can definitely do more for less.
The difference between Voyager and current proposals is that Voyager cost billions of dollars, while most probes nowadays come in at under $400 million. Voyager had about a dozen instuments, most probes now have at most five or six. Voyager was exploring areas of the solar system that we had never been to before, so everything was new, and major discoveries were dropping into our laps. Mars still has surprises in store, but they are more subtle than volcanos on Io, or braided rings around Saturn.
There is one last superprobe still to go; Cassini is the biggest probe ever launched, with a dozen instruments. It also cost over three billion dollars. We will not see its like again.
"It would probably be a wise move to attempt colonization of the Moon before colonization of Mars. The moon would serve as a shakedown field test for technology and techniques. If something goes wrong, it's a lot closer back to Earth."
We'll probably go back to the Moon sooner rather than later. NASA has a 'secret' wish list called the 'Decadal Plan', which examines what they would like to do in the decade following the completion of the International Space Station in 2006-07. Rumour has it that they are looking at 100-day missions outside lower Earth orbit, either extended stays of 2-3 months on the Moon, or (even cooler), missions outside Earth orbit entirely to passing asteroids. The ISS would serve as an assembly and staging post for such missions. I wish I had a link for this, but it han't been leaked in its entirety yet. Any obliging NASA employees out there?
"The key to major investment in the Mars program is potential profit. Mars is an untapped planet of ore, minerals, and *potentially* fossil fuels."
Leaving aside the extremely dubious possibility of fossil fuels, it is unlikely that bulk materials mined from Mars will ever become a commodity here on Earth. You'd have to boost them out of Mars' gravity well and on a trajectory back to Earth. We mine mineral ores here on Earth by the millions of kilograms, so unless we develop antigravity anytime soon, it's unlikely to be economically feasible.
Far more likely is the exploitation of mineral resources in Earth-crossing asteroids. A lot of them are essentially billion-ton lumps of high-grade metals. We could install big ion drives or other propulsion sources on their surfaces and slowly coax them over a period of years into a (high enough for public-opinion comfort) orbit around Earth. It would then be simple to use Earth's gravity well to deliver the mined materials direct to Earth's surface.
Even this is unlikely to ever happen. We just aren't that short of raw materials here at home, and recycling is likely to be far more economical for the forseeable future.
...of a number of factors, its atmosphere being the least important. Atmospheric engineering is a doddle compared with imparting angular momentum or radiation shielding.
Venus rotates extremely slowly (and retrograde, meaning opposite to the direction Earth does), such that its day is 243 Earth days long; more than one Venusian year. This would obviously have to be fixed before anything else. In comparison, Mars has an orbital period of just over 24 hours, and would probably require no adjustment.
Venus (and Mars) have no magnetic field to speak of. This means that there is no shield from the Sun's radiation, and is a serious impediment to successful terraforming that has not been adequately dealt with in any proposal I have seen.
Russia has had cosmonauts up on Mir all alone for between 9 months and 1.5 years (I don't remember exactly, but that long by yourself has to be hard).
Mir usually had three people on board at any one time. It occasionally had two, during the initial shakedown period, and during the last (privately funded by MirCorp) maintenance mission. There was never a time when there was only one cosmonaut in orbit. Individuals made extended stays while crewmates came and went. The longest stay, of 438 days, was by Valeri Polyakov in 1994-95.
SpaceDev claim to have developed a standard Mars microprobe architecture that they will sell for about $24 million. NASA is apparently looking at it for their proposed Mars Network, a combined GPS (APS=AreoPositioning System?) and communications network. It could also be used to place 2-3 small landers/balloons/etc into Mars' atmosphere. The design is meant to be launched as a secondary payload on launchers such as Ariane 5, and use Earth/Moon gravity assists and Mars aerobraking to get it there. Spacedev will sell it to any interested party, and CEO Jim Benson said "You say things aren't happening fast enough with NASA's current Mars Exploration Program. Then decide what you want to send to Mars, get a sponsor, and just do it! Inner planet missions like this one can now be done for about the cost of a private jet or mega-yacht" How about it, Mr Gates?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, really? Quote your source. If you're talking about tonnes of material (more on that in a moment), what sort of delta vee are you looking at? Even with ion engines you wouldn't be able to nudge that sort of mass into LEO inside of a century with the payload that could be launched with current boosters.
As for finding asteroids that weigh tons, how do you propose to do that? The only way we have to detect rocks that size at the moment is when they hit our atmosphere (and, shortly thereafter, the Earth). Any asteroid that we can track (and thus rendezvous with) doesn't weigh "hundreds of tonnes", it weighs millions or billions of tons.
The point is economic. I want the commercial exploitation of space as much as you, but I'd rather focus on what we can realistically achieve in the forseeable future.
NASA would dearly love to get their hands on that amount of pristine asteroidal material. If it could be done for $200 million, they'd be doing it already. Guaranteed. Or are you more clever than the people at JPL that make unscheduled landings on asteroids or nurse clapped-out technology testers into cometary flybys? Despite the occasional cockups, NASA gets pretty good value for money from its space probes.
Your figures are patently unbelievable, and we will not see the sort of mission you discuss for several decades to come. Live with it.
Whoo! Sturm und drang! Try not to resort to ad hominem attacks on my genetics if you want your arguments to be taken seriously. Let's try again:
Feasible according to whom? I'll say it again: Current and projected space probes are pushing the envelope of what is currently technically possible.. Let's dissect your 'feasible' technologies:
You talk about using a mirror to break up the asteroid. The largest space mirror deployed to date (with only partial success) was a Russian one less than 20 meters acoss. To break up an asteroid several kilometers across would require a REALLY BIG mirror, orders of magnitude larger than the biggest space structures launched to date. The Russians had difficulty stopping their small mirror from rippling, and accurately pointing and focusing one kilometers across, as your mirror would need to be, is something that will require heaps of practice and lots of money to perfect.
You want to stop the asteroid's rotation using a cable attached to an anchor. The longest cable deployment in space to date was a NASA/Italian experiment on the space shuttle that broke. There are further tests in the works, but a cable long enough and strong enough to halt an asteroid is a LONG way off.
Spectroscopy gives us some details about surface composition, but that is a long way from giving us all the information we would need to exploit those resources. Carbon is very useful for building lots of things, but if you have to free it from mineral complexes then it adds several levels of complexity to the space-based engineering. Given that the largest materials processing facility launched to date would fit in a filing cabinet, and cost tens of millions of dollars, I don't think we'll be seeing space smelters by christmas.
I also noticed a subtle shift in your emphasis between posts. Quote from your first:
So it will cost less than a billion dollars? Cheap at half the price, especially in light of all the technology development I've outlined. By your second post, your argument has become:
Political will == expenditure. Now you're saying we can achieve these things if we throw "the budget for Vietnam" at it. It would take us part of the way, but that was not your original point.
I do believe the things you are talking about will one day be possible, but the thread was about what we should be spending our limited resources on NOW. Talking about how we shouldn't waste our time on pissant little probes until we are all living at L5 adds nothing to the debate on effective use of current resources.
Your argument. Watch:
So all you have to do is perform a complicated set of maneuvers, utilising technology that currently does not exist, to utilise asteroidal resources that we currently have very little knowledge of. Piece of piss. Don't know why we aren't all living on the Moon right now.
The most advanced asteroid/comet space probe under development at the moment is the ESA/NASA Rosetta probe to be launched in 2003. It is going to cost in the neigborhood of $400 million. It will rendezvous with a comet, observe it for a year, and then launch a tiny lander to gather data from the surface. Listen carefully:
Designing it is pushing the current boundaries of our technological expertise.
The proposal you outline is so far in advance of our current capabilities that it is laughable. It's like saying that if we want to lower costs of getting to orbit, we "just" need to build a space elevator. To do what you want would require pathfinder missions to test the bleeding edge technologies, sccout missions to ensure that there are usable resources on the target NEA...billions of dollars doesn't begin to describe the level of investment required to do what you describe.
While you're at it, why don't you tell us how we could easily and cheaply cure all known disease by developing nanotechnology? Or solve greenhouse gas emissions by building fusion reactors? These things may happen one day, but they aren't going to come cheap.
Come back down to Earth and live in the here and now. If we could do these things in the budget you are thinking of, then we'd already be doing them.
1) The discussion is about returning 500g of samples for scientific purposes, not stripmining other planets for profit.
2) Who says mining asteroids would be profitable? It would cost at least billions of dollars to undertake such a mining mission to a NEA. We are still capable of mining ores here on Earth much more cheaply, and we aren't going to run out any time in the next few decades.
Guess you better tell NASA that. There are several exploratory design concepts that would utilize ion engines to get probes to and from Mars. You would need a complementary conventional engine to leave Mars orbit, but you would still make overall weight savings by using ion engines for the cruise phase.
Actually, it's a fairly crap rocket fuel as H2O. It's cheap and plentiful, which is why some concepts bother with it at all.
Its 'cheaper' in terms of fuel expenditure. In the real world of today, however, you would have to factor in the many billions of dollars that setting up your NEA fuel depot would cost. One day it will be the way to go, but your argument is like saying that we shouldn't spend millions on developing better silicon chip lithography because one day quantum computing will be much better.
There is exploration and research that many people would like to see undertaken right now, rather than wait for Buck Rogers to do it for us when we are all old and grey.
An average space probe nowadays costs about $350 million, and we can do it right now. NASA has firm plans to launch one or two Mars probes every two years, with the design of the 2003 and 2005 missions already well under way.
Manned space flight , in comparison, is still hideously expensive. The final cost of the ISS will run into the many tens of billions of dollars in order to keep 6-7 people in low Earth orbit. A permanent Lunar base capable of supporting a similar sized research crew would be comparable in cost, at the very least. As for Lunar production/launch facilities, check back in a few decades.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to take a Lunar holiday one day. But putting everything on hold until that remote possibility becomes a reality would hinder the very real and immediate science we can do for comparatively little right now.
There are plans to relaunch the science package that was lost on the Climate Orbiter. The 2005 Mars Reconnasisance Orbiter, which will essentially be a Martian spy satellite capable of resolving surface features 20cm across may carry the entire sensor package originally carried on MCO. This will be made possible due to continued advances in miniaturization.
There was actually a twin to the MPL slated for launch this year along with the Mars Odyssey orbiter that arrives in Mars orbit in a few weeks. It was mothballed after the MPL screwup in spite of being nearly completed. There are noises being made about finishing it and launching it along with the MRO in 2005. It would seem a pity to waste the millions of dollars that had already been spent on it.
Sounds like agnosticism to me. Also, you did implicitly state that you believed that God wasn't real:
Sounds like a belief in nonexistence to me.
Then it was a poorly argued point. All matters of faith are not logically equivalent. A belief in the existence of extraterrestrial life (based on the size of the universe, or whatever) does not compell me to place that faith in the same basket as belief in UFO abductions.
Another problem is that you seem to have just as immature a notion of God as the people you slag off. I suspect that a lot of smart religious people do not believe in a bearded guy sitting on a cloud, but have a more sophisticated notion of a universal principle. The fact that a lot of people don't have this maturity does not invalidate the basic premise.
Choosing the one element of that list that I would not classify as rooted in intolerance (except of ideas) does not alter the basic nature of my point. You're being a bit semantically slippery, here. Let's use other words: bigotry, chauvinism, fanaticism. You say potayto, I say potaato.
Prove to me that the positive benefits of capitalism, secular humanism, Taoism, etc, etc outweigh the negative. What a pointless challenge.
Okay, here's some positive things that organised religion does: foundation of socially inclusive charitable institutions, political activism such as liberation theology, safekeeping of secular knowledge during the dark ages. If you want to claim that such activities could carry on separate from religion, then you have to accept that murderous hatred and fanaticism could as well.
You have faith that your disbelief is true. Any logical system is built on unprovable axioms that must be believed in despite being unprovable.
A totally specious line of reasoning. Just because someone believes one thing, they are not compelled to believe in everything.
And all those whose societies are still too immature to deal with that can just implode for all you care. Perhaps they need to eveolve toward enlightenment by being shown positive examples of how to live without God. Insulting them will do that admirably, of course.
Actually, there was. Landless nobles used the crusade as an excuse to steal land from other Christians, not just Moslems or Jews. The calling of the Western crusade was misguided, but was at least partially in response to the foreign threat to the like-minded Byzantine Empire. It can be viewed as a political decision. How is it different to the formation of a Western coalition to fight Communism in Vietnam?
Or it can be used to teach 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. The vast majority of religious bvelievers are peaceful, if occasionally misguided. It's often a few bad apples that spoil the whole barrel.
Yes, you did:
That's an implicit assumption of intolerance.
Perhaps because you have an overly simplistic view of one of the most (if not the most) influential elements of human thought over the course of recorded history.
Religion has both good and bad elements. It is a notion that we are (in my opinion) evolving away from, but to scapegoat it for all the bad things that humanity has done ignores the fact that it is often a hypocritical excuse for bad behaviour rather than a cause.
No we don't. That's like saying that we all start out with centrist political views. The whole notion of concepts like politics and religion is so alien to a newborn that to say they have any position at all is fallacious. Stricly speaking, from an etymological point of view, your interpretation of the word is correct, but "English as she is spoke " has a more restrictive, belief-based meaning.
No, that's the position of an agnostic. An atheist actively disbelieves in the existence of the divine.
Neither. Try not to be so binary.
Which has nothing to do with my original argument. Theist governments can be socialist, totalitarian, capitalist or any other -ist.
There are positive examples of 'atheistic' societies that are not repressive, but they tend to be centered around some defining philosophy like Buddhism. My point was that an overtly atheistic culture is not necessarily free of the type of repression that theistic cultures are.
Theism, perhaps?
Okay, I was making a glib point, but the word is 'watered down' anyway. Buddhism and Confucianism have few or no positive references to God/gods, but most people, particularly in the West, would consider them religions.
Atheism is a religion, too. It is a concrete belief that is held without any conclusive proof one way or another. Some atheists are more dogmatic and hate-filled than your average churchgoer. Ask Russians what life is like under an 'enlightened' atheistic government. Belief or disbelief in universal principles is no guarantee of morality.
You need to draw a distinction between the positive philosophies espoused by most major religions and the self-serving hypocrisy of those who would use noble concepts to their own ends.
Just because you don't 'need' the myths of organised religion doesn't give you the right to get pointlessly aggressive with those who do. In a lot of ways, the myths of eternal life or reincarnation/karma are a lot like parents using Santa Claus as a way of teaching children the benefits of being good. It is explained to the immature in language they can understand and identify with. By the time they are old enough to see through the stories, the value of the underlying message will hopefully have made some impact on them. The fact that a lot of people misinterpret the message and stay stuck in a juvenile fantasy world indicates that it is not a foolproof methodology, but secular humanism doesn't have a 100% strike rate either.
Perhaps you should examine your own belligerent tone of phrase before you start accusing others of intolerance.
For the record, I consider myself an agnostic.
Maybe not. NASA has plans to some day launch a deep space interferometric array of Hubble-class telescopes that will be able to resolve a 25x25 pixel image of an Earth-size planet 50 light years away, and determine spectra from its atmosphere. If they find oxygen, then they can be pretty sure they've found life.
Based on what criteria? The processing power of its computer? The sophistication, compactness and sensitivity of its instruments? The Voyagers were marvels of 1970s technology, but current probes can definitely do more for less.
The difference between Voyager and current proposals is that Voyager cost billions of dollars, while most probes nowadays come in at under $400 million. Voyager had about a dozen instuments, most probes now have at most five or six. Voyager was exploring areas of the solar system that we had never been to before, so everything was new, and major discoveries were dropping into our laps. Mars still has surprises in store, but they are more subtle than volcanos on Io, or braided rings around Saturn.
There is one last superprobe still to go; Cassini is the biggest probe ever launched, with a dozen instruments. It also cost over three billion dollars. We will not see its like again.
"It would probably be a wise move to attempt colonization of the Moon before colonization of Mars. The moon would serve as a shakedown field test for technology and techniques. If something goes wrong, it's a lot closer back to Earth."
We'll probably go back to the Moon sooner rather than later. NASA has a 'secret' wish list called the 'Decadal Plan', which examines what they would like to do in the decade following the completion of the International Space Station in 2006-07. Rumour has it that they are looking at 100-day missions outside lower Earth orbit, either extended stays of 2-3 months on the Moon, or (even cooler), missions outside Earth orbit entirely to passing asteroids. The ISS would serve as an assembly and staging post for such missions. I wish I had a link for this, but it han't been leaked in its entirety yet. Any obliging NASA employees out there?
"The key to major investment in the Mars program is potential profit. Mars is an untapped planet of ore, minerals, and *potentially* fossil fuels."
Leaving aside the extremely dubious possibility of fossil fuels, it is unlikely that bulk materials mined from Mars will ever become a commodity here on Earth. You'd have to boost them out of Mars' gravity well and on a trajectory back to Earth. We mine mineral ores here on Earth by the millions of kilograms, so unless we develop antigravity anytime soon, it's unlikely to be economically feasible.
Far more likely is the exploitation of mineral resources in Earth-crossing asteroids. A lot of them are essentially billion-ton lumps of high-grade metals. We could install big ion drives or other propulsion sources on their surfaces and slowly coax them over a period of years into a (high enough for public-opinion comfort) orbit around Earth. It would then be simple to use Earth's gravity well to deliver the mined materials direct to Earth's surface.
Even this is unlikely to ever happen. We just aren't that short of raw materials here at home, and recycling is likely to be far more economical for the forseeable future.
...of a number of factors, its atmosphere being the least important. Atmospheric engineering is a doddle compared with imparting angular momentum or radiation shielding.
Venus rotates extremely slowly (and retrograde, meaning opposite to the direction Earth does), such that its day is 243 Earth days long; more than one Venusian year. This would obviously have to be fixed before anything else. In comparison, Mars has an orbital period of just over 24 hours, and would probably require no adjustment.
Venus (and Mars) have no magnetic field to speak of. This means that there is no shield from the Sun's radiation, and is a serious impediment to successful terraforming that has not been adequately dealt with in any proposal I have seen.
Mir usually had three people on board at any one time. It occasionally had two, during the initial shakedown period, and during the last (privately funded by MirCorp) maintenance mission. There was never a time when there was only one cosmonaut in orbit. Individuals made extended stays while crewmates came and went. The longest stay, of 438 days, was by Valeri Polyakov in 1994-95.
SpaceDev claim to have developed a standard Mars microprobe architecture that they will sell for about $24 million. NASA is apparently looking at it for their proposed Mars Network, a combined GPS (APS=AreoPositioning System?) and communications network. It could also be used to place 2-3 small landers/balloons/etc into Mars' atmosphere. The design is meant to be launched as a secondary payload on launchers such as Ariane 5, and use Earth/Moon gravity assists and Mars aerobraking to get it there. Spacedev will sell it to any interested party, and CEO Jim Benson said "You say things aren't happening fast enough with NASA's current Mars Exploration Program. Then decide what you want to send to Mars, get a sponsor, and just do it! Inner planet missions like this one can now be done for about the cost of a private jet or mega-yacht" How about it, Mr Gates?