that's what the drones do now. taking conditions warrant further would be "shoot a hellfire at any vehicle that has a passanger with an ak-47" or "gatling down anyone walking around with an ak-47". humans fail often at deciding when to do that too though.
Humans and drones fail at that. Especially when they're operating as peacekeepers in a country where it's completely legal to walk around with an AK-47.
So, a few questions spring to mind. How expensive was the nuclear reactor in question? Was it more or less expensive than the equivalent capacity in wind turbines? What are the fuel and operating costs of the nuclear reactor, and are they greater or less than the operating expenses for the equivalent capacity in wind turbines. What, aside from generating power, is done on the two square miles of land the Fort Calhoun plant takes up and how does that compare to the 70 square miles for the wind turbines on which you can do nearly anything?
Also, since you're asking about what effect a wind farm of that size would have on the environment, I think it's fair to ask what effect the heat output of a nuclear power plant has on the environment. Those cooling towers aren't just for show. They're mostly evaporative coolers, so they actually release a plume of water vapor. Is that better or worse than the potential weather effects of drawing down wind energy?
The UK already figured out that wind power claims are exaggerated.
The article you quote there says:
Statements made by the wind industry and government agencies commonly assert that wind turbines will generate on average 30% of their rated capacity over a year, it said.
But the research found wind generation was below 20% of capacity more than half the time and below 10% of capacity over one third of the time.
This seems like an exercise in how to lie with statistics. If you're below 20% half the time, you're obviously not below 20% the other half of the time, which makes your average necessarily higher than 20%. Of course, it does say "more than half the time", but how much more? Also, it doesn't actually directly contradict the 30% average figure, which you would think it would if it had actual findings that contradicted that figure. About the best this study seems to be able to do is point out that wind power doesn't maintain a perfectly steady rate. Duh! This is why you don't rely on it as your only source of power, why you maintain a power grid that lets you pipe in power from far away when you can't produce all you need locally, and why we need to keep working on storage technologies. Everyone already knows all of this.
As for your other two links, they don't really seem to be related to the issue of wind power or renewable energy at all. Those articles are about social problems that are killing people. The source of the energy used for heating seems to be irrelevant.
That's not exactly what I would call a good example of a logical fallacy slippery slope. The original quote is from Martin Niemöller. The Nazis did come for him and he was locked up in Dachau.
faced with facts that don't accord with your world view, you simply ignore them and fall back on stupid semantic arguments.
Ok, sure. Because I am, after all, the one who responded to a simple statement of how long it took for the US to go from putting a man in space to putting some on the moon by disagreeing and bringing up almost unrelated points about other, previous, rocket development. No, actually that was you. I also wasn't arguing over semantics, I was arguing over facts. The simple fact is that the original poster you replied to was correct about how rapid the development of the Apollo program was. Now we have 4+ decades of additional experience, more advanced technology, and powerful CAD tools. There's no good technical reason that we couldn't develop something like the Apollo program in a similar time-frame today. There are all sorts of political, economic and cultural reasons. It's also worryingly possible that we don't have the available human talent any more, or at least that the politics and culture restrain that talent more today than in the past.
If and when they return to Earth they will not be able to walk again without significant physical therapy and they will be known as the biggest bad-asses in the Solar System.
Polyakov was walking on his own within a matter of hours after 437 days in microgravity. He surely received extensive physical therapy and large amounts of medical testing, but he didn't need any of it to walk again. Is there something magical about the microgravity when you're off around other planets that makes it worse than the microgravity in low Earth orbit?
We took 8 years to go from never having launched a man in a rocket to landing them on the moon and bringing them back safely.
Um... no. The development of the booster started a couple of years before the decision to go to the moon. The development of the engines for the booster started a couple of years before *that*. The capsule (but not the lander) was also well underway in study and development before the decision was made to go to the moon.
Um... yes. At least, if you're talking about just the US and not the human race in general. May 5th, 1961, Alan Sheppard goes on a suborbital flight. July 20th, 1969, Armstrong and Aldwin walk on the moon. 8 years and 2 months. If you go back to Yuri Gagarin, you add another month. If you go all the way back to Sputnik 1, it's something like 11 and a half years from the first space launch to walking on the moon. Currently, it's 43 and a half years since that first moon walk. So, in 2 and a half years, it will have been 4 times as long since we set foot on the moon than the time between the first space launch and setting foot on the moon.
In other words, 5 years should be ample time. All of that preparatory work for the Moon that you're talking about is also in place for Mars as well. You may not have noticed, but we've been sending things there on a regular basis.
with an enormously larger delta-vee requirement (if you come back)
It's really only marginally larger. The majority of either a Mars mission or a Moon mission is getting off Earth in the first place. Mars does have twice the escape velocity of the moon, but you can save a lot of energy by aerobraking on Mars.
Zubrin of the Mars Society already addressed this issue. You don't take the fuel with you, you make it on Mars. His plan is to send a "fuel factory" to Mars many months in advance. This machinery would extract fuel from the CO2 atmosphere. I don't recall the exact details, but might be as simple as separating the carbon and oxygen. He suggests powering it with nuclear reactors, but I wonder if solar would be better, if slower.
The plan is to send an advance robot mission to make methane and oxygen for rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere for the return trip. It could be made with Martian water, broken down with electrolysis, but Zubrin doesn't rely on being able to take advantage of in situ water. Instead, he suggests sending liquid hydrogen and a nuclear reactor. The hydrogen is reacted with CO2 extracted from the atmosphere to make methane and water through the Sabatier process, then the water is subjected to electrolysis to produce O2 and to recover some of the hydrogen to go back through the process. The end result would be a multiplication of, for example, one ton of hydrogen to 4 tons of methane and 8 tons of oxygen, which would be used as return fuel. He also suggests producing more oxygen for a better fuel mix by directly cracking CO2, although exactly how that's to be done optimally is a bit less well understood. Landing somewhere with in situ water to operate with would eliminate the need to crack CO2 and even the need to bring along hydrogen. On the other hand, extracting frozen groundwater with remote units might be a challenge, although some interesting ideas have been floated for microwaving frozen groundwater. The big problem would be surveying for it. Zubrin's idea is to keep it simple by extracting in situ resources from the atmosphere, which comes directly to your compressor and doesn't present a lot of surprises.
Zubrin is very enthusiastic about the nuclear reactor as power source. Once again, I think it's the idea of keeping it simple. Not that a nuclear reactor is necessarily simple, but, once it's designed and built, a properly automated nuclear reactor could sit on a rover and operate without having to do anything complicated. Zubrin calls for a 100 kilowatt reactor (apparently 100 kilowatts electric) with a mass of about 3500 kilograms. It's worth noting that, if you could actually get the pu-238, an RTG using 500 kg of Stirling engines at around 23% efficiency could produce about 372 kilowatts of electrical power. Of course, although shielding wouldn't be too much of a problem, dealing with the 1.6 megawatts of heat during transit might be a challenge. Some lightweight solar panels can also provide similar power levels for the mass, but you have the problem of trying to have robots lay out a solar array. So, the nuclear reactor seems to be the best choice for a simple, self-contained advance mission. The actual reactor doesn't seem to exist yet, however various similar reactors have been made in the past. Examples are the Topaz and Topaz II reactors. I can't find actual output figures for the Topaz II, but they were apparently shooting for 40 kilowatts (electric) from a reactor with about a 1000 kg mass, so if it was practical, the 3500 kg reactor producing 100 kilowatts would be. The Topaz I managed 5 kilowatts (electric) from a 320 kg reactor. Scaling that up (or just strapping a bunch together) would give about 54.7 kilowatts. Of course, it used some sort of thermocouple to produce power at very poor efficiency. A Stirling engine based design would quadruple the electrical output.
Overall, Zubrin's plan seems pretty good. It still needs a lot of pieces built that aren't presently in existence as off the shelf products, but none of the technologies are wildly speculative. It looks like it' still going to be a good long while before anyone pulls all the pieces together, however.
You don't seem to have actually read the post you're replying to. IdahoEV doesn't seem to have any illusions for you to correct.
You seem to have some illusions about the relative difficulties of launching from various celestial bodies, however. First of all, you can't even get remotely close to orbiting the Moon by jumping there. Perhaps you were confusing our Moon with Deimos, where you really could pull that off with a good leap. On the moon, the minimum you need for orbit is about 1.5 km/s, which is a bit hard to achieve. You wouldn't be able to manage it even if you could jump tall buildings in a single bound back on Earth.
The escape velocity of the Moon is about 2.4 km/s. The escape velocity of Mars is about 5 km/s. For Earth, it's about 11.2 km/s. So Mars has just over twice the escape velocity of the Moon and Earth has a bit more than twice the escape velocity of Mars. That makes taking off from Mars more like taking off from the Moon than it is like taking off from the Earth, especially so when you consider the near-vacuum of the atmosphere. The Apollo ascender was about 56% fuel by mass, but only had to achieve about 1.7 km/s to meet up with the command module. A Mars mission would similarly only need to achieve about 3.36 km/s (Mars Odyssey orbit, for reference). Using the ideal rocket equation, that means that a Mars ascender with comparable specific impulse to the Apollo ascender would need about a 3 to 1 propellant to payload ratio. That's idealized, of course. It might actually be something like 5 to 1. It's more than the Moon, but it's not some ridiculously unattainable ratio. We can also certainly get it out of our gravity well, even if we need to launch the lander dry and fill it in orbit. As far as landing goes, the thin atmosphere of Mars, while fairly launch friendly, still offers significant aerobraking potential. Enough that the amount of fuel you need for landing your lander + ascender + fuel for ascension shouldn't need to be more than the amount of fuel you need for ascension.
Anyway, in the end, fuel is cheap in space travel. It's going to be something like 1% of the budget for even a big, dumb rocket. There clearly will be a lot needed for a Mars mission, but it's not one of those cases where the requirements rapidly grow ridiculously out of bounds and you need a mountain worth of fuel to send an apple there and back.
Well, for starters, the ISS isn't a spaceship with anything like the manoeuvrability or acceleration to do anything remotely like that. Furthermore, the ISS isn't exactly what you would call sturdy. It's a step up from aluminum foil. I'd go on, but the suggestion was just so ridiculous I'm sure I'm just rising to some bait.
There is, however, a verified record of a falling meteor causing a half-megaton blast in Russia two days ago. About a hundred years ago, there was a 10-15 megaton blast, also in Russia that was almost certainly a falling meteor. That would seem to demonstrate at least some potential for destruction.
Good point. The symbol seems to be more or less a color swap of the red cross logo, which is just a color inversion of the Swiss flag, which is, itself, just a variation on the war pennant of the Holy Roman Empire, of which the pope is the commander in chief. So, it could be a very clever reference on the part of the editor. Or it could just be a flimsy excuse to post something that really isn't relevant to Slashdot, but that's sure to stir up all kinds of argument (and therefore, the theory goes, page hits).
I'm not sure that I'm mixing anything up so much as we're both drawing our distinctions slightly differently. We seem to be mostly in agreement. You do have to live with people voting for stupid things in a democracy. On the other hand, that doesn't mean you have to like it.
No, that is incorrect. The idea behind the US is that people should foremost have the freedom to make their own choices, not collectively, but individually
Rationality as compared to concepts like the divine right of kings and infallibility of religious authorities that dominated in an earlier age. Concepts like free speech, trial by jury, search only through due process, all seem rational to me compared to the way those things have been done in the past. I wasn't trying to say that the founders were Vulcans or anything like that.
But any system that attempts to enforce rational and scientifically sound government is likewise incompatible with individual liberties, because if you don't have the option to make "the wrong choice" you don't have a choice at all.
I think you can have rational government without removing choice from the equation. The Establishment Clause of the US Constitution is clearly an example of a system that attempts to enforce rational government and also protects individual liberties. It's by no means a strict either/or situation.
Maybe a little late to reply, but I'm going to anyway.
The interesting thing to remember is that there aren't a lot of pure democracies out there. Instead, most countries are like the US: democratic republics with built in government constraints such as the US constitution. The idea behind the US, for example, is supposed to be that it is based on rationality and scientific (or at least Enlightenment) principles. Living under a direct democracy would probably be a terrifying experience without some form of voter exclusion that only allowed _informed_ votes (and any such system would be hard to prevent being gamed), and, even then, it could be terrifying if you were a member of any sort of minority. Then there's the fact that it would probably be short-lived since it wouldn't take long for some majority or another to vote in a new system of government.
The spectrum of atheism can't really be compartmentalized that easily. For one thing, there's the whole disbelief vs belief argument where some people insist that the antonym of "belief" is also "belief" but just that the subject changes and therefore atheism is a religion. I can go as far as considering it a religious _viewpoint_, but most forms of atheism lack all the components that make a religion a religion. As for the spectrum, it mostly starts at the agnostic viewpoint that there could be a god or gods or spirits, or ancestors, or thetans, or whatever, but there isn't any sensible way to tell, so there's no intellectually honest reason (Pascal, while brilliant in many ways, ignored the serious flaw of multiple religions to choose from in his famous Wager) not to be neutral. The spectrum goes more or less all the way through to fiery atheists who hate a particular religion or all religions so much that they anthropomorphize the god(s) of the religion, as an object of hatred, in a way that's almost indistinguishable from belief. Aside from that, there's some interesting outliers that are close to atheism, but don't quite fit into it. For example, some who describe themselves as agnostic don't fit into the atheist spectrum and are believers, but just don't have a firm view of what. Then there's what you might call opposition religions. The self-declared "satanists" I've met have mostly been Baudeliare-inspired young people whose viewpoint was more or less atheist or agnostic, but expressed in terms of satanism as a form of social rebellion. They mostly didn't really believe in god or the devil, but they came from backgrounds with crushing religious pressures, so they rebelled. Then there's actual satan worshippers (who probably also call themselves satanists and don't draw the distinction that I'm drawing here) who actually literally believe in satan. They're clearly not atheists. I consider them to actually be believers of whatever particular religion they oppose. For example, christians who become satanists are still typically christian believers. They still believe in the existance of the christian god and Jesus, etc., but they've chosen opposition rather than worship. Same for other judeo-christian religions and for non-judeo-christian ones. Despite them not being atheists, it seems that the same kinds of pressures and angers may drive them as drive some of the more extreme atheists.
All that said, the majority of atheists fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and just want to be neutral. The problem they encounter is the prevalence of the "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality in the bulk of humanity.
If you consider the length of the pipeline and the internal pressure and how many seams, joins and fittings are attached, not to mention that the things are very popular for target practice, it's not that strange.
Sort of hard to make significant contributions to history as an atheist when revealing yourself as one gets you burned at the stake isn't it? The other choice is pretending to believe, in which case your achievements go down in history as some of the great achievements of _insert religion here_.
Slashdot Mirror
that's what the drones do now. taking conditions warrant further would be "shoot a hellfire at any vehicle that has a passanger with an ak-47" or "gatling down anyone walking around with an ak-47". humans fail often at deciding when to do that too though.
Humans and drones fail at that. Especially when they're operating as peacekeepers in a country where it's completely legal to walk around with an AK-47.
So, a few questions spring to mind. How expensive was the nuclear reactor in question? Was it more or less expensive than the equivalent capacity in wind turbines? What are the fuel and operating costs of the nuclear reactor, and are they greater or less than the operating expenses for the equivalent capacity in wind turbines. What, aside from generating power, is done on the two square miles of land the Fort Calhoun plant takes up and how does that compare to the 70 square miles for the wind turbines on which you can do nearly anything?
Also, since you're asking about what effect a wind farm of that size would have on the environment, I think it's fair to ask what effect the heat output of a nuclear power plant has on the environment. Those cooling towers aren't just for show. They're mostly evaporative coolers, so they actually release a plume of water vapor. Is that better or worse than the potential weather effects of drawing down wind energy?
The UK already figured out that wind power claims are exaggerated.
The article you quote there says:
Statements made by the wind industry and government agencies commonly assert that wind turbines will generate on average 30% of their rated capacity over a year, it said.
But the research found wind generation was below 20% of capacity more than half the time and below 10% of capacity over one third of the time.
This seems like an exercise in how to lie with statistics. If you're below 20% half the time, you're obviously not below 20% the other half of the time, which makes your average necessarily higher than 20%. Of course, it does say "more than half the time", but how much more? Also, it doesn't actually directly contradict the 30% average figure, which you would think it would if it had actual findings that contradicted that figure. About the best this study seems to be able to do is point out that wind power doesn't maintain a perfectly steady rate. Duh! This is why you don't rely on it as your only source of power, why you maintain a power grid that lets you pipe in power from far away when you can't produce all you need locally, and why we need to keep working on storage technologies. Everyone already knows all of this.
As for your other two links, they don't really seem to be related to the issue of wind power or renewable energy at all. Those articles are about social problems that are killing people. The source of the energy used for heating seems to be irrelevant.
That's not exactly what I would call a good example of a logical fallacy slippery slope. The original quote is from Martin Niemöller. The Nazis did come for him and he was locked up in Dachau.
faced with facts that don't accord with your world view, you simply ignore them and fall back on stupid semantic arguments.
Ok, sure. Because I am, after all, the one who responded to a simple statement of how long it took for the US to go from putting a man in space to putting some on the moon by disagreeing and bringing up almost unrelated points about other, previous, rocket development. No, actually that was you. I also wasn't arguing over semantics, I was arguing over facts. The simple fact is that the original poster you replied to was correct about how rapid the development of the Apollo program was. Now we have 4+ decades of additional experience, more advanced technology, and powerful CAD tools. There's no good technical reason that we couldn't develop something like the Apollo program in a similar time-frame today. There are all sorts of political, economic and cultural reasons. It's also worryingly possible that we don't have the available human talent any more, or at least that the politics and culture restrain that talent more today than in the past.
If and when they return to Earth they will not be able to walk again without significant physical therapy and they will be known as the biggest bad-asses in the Solar System.
Polyakov was walking on his own within a matter of hours after 437 days in microgravity. He surely received extensive physical therapy and large amounts of medical testing, but he didn't need any of it to walk again. Is there something magical about the microgravity when you're off around other planets that makes it worse than the microgravity in low Earth orbit?
We took 8 years to go from never having launched a man in a rocket to landing them on the moon and bringing them back safely.
Um... no. The development of the booster started a couple of years before the decision to go to the moon. The development of the engines for the booster started a couple of years before *that*. The capsule (but not the lander) was also well underway in study and development before the decision was made to go to the moon.
Um... yes. At least, if you're talking about just the US and not the human race in general. May 5th, 1961, Alan Sheppard goes on a suborbital flight. July 20th, 1969, Armstrong and Aldwin walk on the moon. 8 years and 2 months. If you go back to Yuri Gagarin, you add another month. If you go all the way back to Sputnik 1, it's something like 11 and a half years from the first space launch to walking on the moon. Currently, it's 43 and a half years since that first moon walk. So, in 2 and a half years, it will have been 4 times as long since we set foot on the moon than the time between the first space launch and setting foot on the moon.
In other words, 5 years should be ample time. All of that preparatory work for the Moon that you're talking about is also in place for Mars as well. You may not have noticed, but we've been sending things there on a regular basis.
with an enormously larger delta-vee requirement (if you come back)
It's really only marginally larger. The majority of either a Mars mission or a Moon mission is getting off Earth in the first place. Mars does have twice the escape velocity of the moon, but you can save a lot of energy by aerobraking on Mars.
Zubrin of the Mars Society already addressed this issue. You don't take the fuel with you, you make it on Mars. His plan is to send a "fuel factory" to Mars many months in advance. This machinery would extract fuel from the CO2 atmosphere. I don't recall the exact details, but might be as simple as separating the carbon and oxygen. He suggests powering it with nuclear reactors, but I wonder if solar would be better, if slower.
The plan is to send an advance robot mission to make methane and oxygen for rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere for the return trip. It could be made with Martian water, broken down with electrolysis, but Zubrin doesn't rely on being able to take advantage of in situ water. Instead, he suggests sending liquid hydrogen and a nuclear reactor. The hydrogen is reacted with CO2 extracted from the atmosphere to make methane and water through the Sabatier process, then the water is subjected to electrolysis to produce O2 and to recover some of the hydrogen to go back through the process. The end result would be a multiplication of, for example, one ton of hydrogen to 4 tons of methane and 8 tons of oxygen, which would be used as return fuel. He also suggests producing more oxygen for a better fuel mix by directly cracking CO2, although exactly how that's to be done optimally is a bit less well understood. Landing somewhere with in situ water to operate with would eliminate the need to crack CO2 and even the need to bring along hydrogen. On the other hand, extracting frozen groundwater with remote units might be a challenge, although some interesting ideas have been floated for microwaving frozen groundwater. The big problem would be surveying for it. Zubrin's idea is to keep it simple by extracting in situ resources from the atmosphere, which comes directly to your compressor and doesn't present a lot of surprises.
Zubrin is very enthusiastic about the nuclear reactor as power source. Once again, I think it's the idea of keeping it simple. Not that a nuclear reactor is necessarily simple, but, once it's designed and built, a properly automated nuclear reactor could sit on a rover and operate without having to do anything complicated. Zubrin calls for a 100 kilowatt reactor (apparently 100 kilowatts electric) with a mass of about 3500 kilograms. It's worth noting that, if you could actually get the pu-238, an RTG using 500 kg of Stirling engines at around 23% efficiency could produce about 372 kilowatts of electrical power. Of course, although shielding wouldn't be too much of a problem, dealing with the 1.6 megawatts of heat during transit might be a challenge. Some lightweight solar panels can also provide similar power levels for the mass, but you have the problem of trying to have robots lay out a solar array. So, the nuclear reactor seems to be the best choice for a simple, self-contained advance mission. The actual reactor doesn't seem to exist yet, however various similar reactors have been made in the past. Examples are the Topaz and Topaz II reactors. I can't find actual output figures for the Topaz II, but they were apparently shooting for 40 kilowatts (electric) from a reactor with about a 1000 kg mass, so if it was practical, the 3500 kg reactor producing 100 kilowatts would be. The Topaz I managed 5 kilowatts (electric) from a 320 kg reactor. Scaling that up (or just strapping a bunch together) would give about 54.7 kilowatts. Of course, it used some sort of thermocouple to produce power at very poor efficiency. A Stirling engine based design would quadruple the electrical output.
Overall, Zubrin's plan seems pretty good. It still needs a lot of pieces built that aren't presently in existence as off the shelf products, but none of the technologies are wildly speculative. It looks like it' still going to be a good long while before anyone pulls all the pieces together, however.
You don't seem to have actually read the post you're replying to. IdahoEV doesn't seem to have any illusions for you to correct.
You seem to have some illusions about the relative difficulties of launching from various celestial bodies, however. First of all, you can't even get remotely close to orbiting the Moon by jumping there. Perhaps you were confusing our Moon with Deimos, where you really could pull that off with a good leap. On the moon, the minimum you need for orbit is about 1.5 km/s, which is a bit hard to achieve. You wouldn't be able to manage it even if you could jump tall buildings in a single bound back on Earth.
The escape velocity of the Moon is about 2.4 km/s. The escape velocity of Mars is about 5 km/s. For Earth, it's about 11.2 km/s. So Mars has just over twice the escape velocity of the Moon and Earth has a bit more than twice the escape velocity of Mars. That makes taking off from Mars more like taking off from the Moon than it is like taking off from the Earth, especially so when you consider the near-vacuum of the atmosphere. The Apollo ascender was about 56% fuel by mass, but only had to achieve about 1.7 km/s to meet up with the command module. A Mars mission would similarly only need to achieve about 3.36 km/s (Mars Odyssey orbit, for reference). Using the ideal rocket equation, that means that a Mars ascender with comparable specific impulse to the Apollo ascender would need about a 3 to 1 propellant to payload ratio. That's idealized, of course. It might actually be something like 5 to 1. It's more than the Moon, but it's not some ridiculously unattainable ratio. We can also certainly get it out of our gravity well, even if we need to launch the lander dry and fill it in orbit. As far as landing goes, the thin atmosphere of Mars, while fairly launch friendly, still offers significant aerobraking potential. Enough that the amount of fuel you need for landing your lander + ascender + fuel for ascension shouldn't need to be more than the amount of fuel you need for ascension.
Anyway, in the end, fuel is cheap in space travel. It's going to be something like 1% of the budget for even a big, dumb rocket. There clearly will be a lot needed for a Mars mission, but it's not one of those cases where the requirements rapidly grow ridiculously out of bounds and you need a mountain worth of fuel to send an apple there and back.
If that's really the case, then patents are definitely unnecessary.
Sad truth is that whether we like it or not everyone is, or should be, a businessman.
Sad truth is that, by "businessman", we really mean predatory scam artist here.
You're probably just from a much larger town, or at least one without many locally owned stores.
Well, for starters, the ISS isn't a spaceship with anything like the manoeuvrability or acceleration to do anything remotely like that. Furthermore, the ISS isn't exactly what you would call sturdy. It's a step up from aluminum foil. I'd go on, but the suggestion was just so ridiculous I'm sure I'm just rising to some bait.
A half megaton explosion isn't worth the effort?
You do know that the planet we live on is already _in_ space, right?
There is, however, a verified record of a falling meteor causing a half-megaton blast in Russia two days ago. About a hundred years ago, there was a 10-15 megaton blast, also in Russia that was almost certainly a falling meteor. That would seem to demonstrate at least some potential for destruction.
Just like with the Soviet Union, anyone can claim to be doing the "rational and scientific thing" when all they're doing is making up justifications.
Good point. The symbol seems to be more or less a color swap of the red cross logo, which is just a color inversion of the Swiss flag, which is, itself, just a variation on the war pennant of the Holy Roman Empire, of which the pope is the commander in chief. So, it could be a very clever reference on the part of the editor. Or it could just be a flimsy excuse to post something that really isn't relevant to Slashdot, but that's sure to stir up all kinds of argument (and therefore, the theory goes, page hits).
I'm not sure that I'm mixing anything up so much as we're both drawing our distinctions slightly differently. We seem to be mostly in agreement. You do have to live with people voting for stupid things in a democracy. On the other hand, that doesn't mean you have to like it.
No, that is incorrect. The idea behind the US is that people should foremost have the freedom to make their own choices, not collectively, but individually
Rationality as compared to concepts like the divine right of kings and infallibility of religious authorities that dominated in an earlier age. Concepts like free speech, trial by jury, search only through due process, all seem rational to me compared to the way those things have been done in the past. I wasn't trying to say that the founders were Vulcans or anything like that.
But any system that attempts to enforce rational and scientifically sound government is likewise incompatible with individual liberties, because if you don't have the option to make "the wrong choice" you don't have a choice at all.
I think you can have rational government without removing choice from the equation. The Establishment Clause of the US Constitution is clearly an example of a system that attempts to enforce rational government and also protects individual liberties. It's by no means a strict either/or situation.
Maybe a little late to reply, but I'm going to anyway.
The interesting thing to remember is that there aren't a lot of pure democracies out there. Instead, most countries are like the US: democratic republics with built in government constraints such as the US constitution. The idea behind the US, for example, is supposed to be that it is based on rationality and scientific (or at least Enlightenment) principles. Living under a direct democracy would probably be a terrifying experience without some form of voter exclusion that only allowed _informed_ votes (and any such system would be hard to prevent being gamed), and, even then, it could be terrifying if you were a member of any sort of minority. Then there's the fact that it would probably be short-lived since it wouldn't take long for some majority or another to vote in a new system of government.
In a nutshell, Atheists believe in no God
The spectrum of atheism can't really be compartmentalized that easily. For one thing, there's the whole disbelief vs belief argument where some people insist that the antonym of "belief" is also "belief" but just that the subject changes and therefore atheism is a religion. I can go as far as considering it a religious _viewpoint_, but most forms of atheism lack all the components that make a religion a religion. As for the spectrum, it mostly starts at the agnostic viewpoint that there could be a god or gods or spirits, or ancestors, or thetans, or whatever, but there isn't any sensible way to tell, so there's no intellectually honest reason (Pascal, while brilliant in many ways, ignored the serious flaw of multiple religions to choose from in his famous Wager) not to be neutral. The spectrum goes more or less all the way through to fiery atheists who hate a particular religion or all religions so much that they anthropomorphize the god(s) of the religion, as an object of hatred, in a way that's almost indistinguishable from belief. Aside from that, there's some interesting outliers that are close to atheism, but don't quite fit into it. For example, some who describe themselves as agnostic don't fit into the atheist spectrum and are believers, but just don't have a firm view of what. Then there's what you might call opposition religions. The self-declared "satanists" I've met have mostly been Baudeliare-inspired young people whose viewpoint was more or less atheist or agnostic, but expressed in terms of satanism as a form of social rebellion. They mostly didn't really believe in god or the devil, but they came from backgrounds with crushing religious pressures, so they rebelled. Then there's actual satan worshippers (who probably also call themselves satanists and don't draw the distinction that I'm drawing here) who actually literally believe in satan. They're clearly not atheists. I consider them to actually be believers of whatever particular religion they oppose. For example, christians who become satanists are still typically christian believers. They still believe in the existance of the christian god and Jesus, etc., but they've chosen opposition rather than worship. Same for other judeo-christian religions and for non-judeo-christian ones. Despite them not being atheists, it seems that the same kinds of pressures and angers may drive them as drive some of the more extreme atheists.
All that said, the majority of atheists fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and just want to be neutral. The problem they encounter is the prevalence of the "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality in the bulk of humanity.
If you consider the length of the pipeline and the internal pressure and how many seams, joins and fittings are attached, not to mention that the things are very popular for target practice, it's not that strange.
Sort of hard to make significant contributions to history as an atheist when revealing yourself as one gets you burned at the stake isn't it? The other choice is pretending to believe, in which case your achievements go down in history as some of the great achievements of _insert religion here_.