Meanwhile, I've been dinged on performance reviews because of a tendency to snap at people who ask the same question several times.
Not working well with others is one thing, but going so far as to become violent and actually bite or nip at them is another. If you were a dog I'd call the local shelter to have you put to sleep. Civilized people don't attempt to eat each other for any reason. And biting someone for being stupid is particularly perverse and insensitive.
There's a clear distinction between a criminal who we should try to arrest if at all possible (and criminals do get killed by cops without a trial in similar circumstances, even on U.S. soil, where they are armed and resisting arrest)
So to get killed by a cop in the US not only do you have to be armed, but you also have to be resisting arrest? Wow. That's news to me. I thought American cops could just shoot whoever they wanted as long as there weren't too many civilian witnesses. BTW, in America you are always resisting arrest when a cop uses force against you. If he is using force against you obviously you must have been resisting, right?
As far as the commander-in-chief of the US military being able to order anyone he wants killed, would you have a problem with it if he ordered your death or the death of someone you cared about? Probably he would have a good reason, like a twitter post critical of the DHS or something.
1. There is simply no other place where we can build large spacecraft. Earth's gravity well is too deep. The moon is a nearly perfect manufacturing base. First build a nuclear power plant and then a smelter. Then start plundering the natural resources of the moon to build stuff.
2. It would be an easier experiment than trying to live on Mars or Jovian moons. Only once we have successfully lived on the moon for a while would it be worth trying for Mars or Titan.
3. It would allow us to build kilometer scale radio telescopes facing away from the earth and not being as subject to terrestrial interference allowing for a much more effective SETI program. In addition to SETI it would allow for terrestrial sized telescopes of all sorts that don't have to worry about the atmosphere getting in the way of the astronomy.
A constant 1 g acceleration would reduce travel time considerably
I should think so. At a constant 1 G acceleration you would reach the speed of light in just 354 earth days. Since even Alpha Centauri is far more than 1 light year from earth it would be difficult to see how you would maintain your artificial gravity for the whole trip.
Who cares about 'profitability'? The goal is not to get rich. The goal is exploration and science and progress as a species. A permanent lunar settlement is a necessary first step for any kind of ambitious space exploration project.
Of course getting the private sector interested in paying the bills isn't going to happen because space exploration is not about making a profit and it never will be until and unless we can get the cost of space launches down by many orders of magnitude.
Imagine 500 years from now when we finally make contact with other intelligent life in the galaxy. They ask why we have never ventured out farther than our moon and barely even there. We reply that it just wasn't profitable. They ask us what we mean by that. We try to explain that our species refuses to do anything unless after the activity is over everyone involved is able to 'buy' more consumer goods afterward.
How do you think they would view us? Probably something like the way the Humans view the Ferengi on Star Trek.
Actually it's not immortality. It's because we're geeks and space travel is ultra-cool. Traveling to another star would be the ultimate adventure. And frankly, as a species, staying on our little home planet is just cowardly and pathetic.
How would we get around the low gravity problem? Even if you could get enough or create enough oxygen, inert gases, and greenhouse gases (maybe we should be exporting our excess carbon dioxide to Mars) how would you prevent it from being lost to space? I suppose we could coat the entire surface of the planet with neutronium to increase its gravity.
People who say stuff like this usually have no idea the distances involved. It would probably take us MILLIONS of years to reach the nearest planet that's even remotely habitable. We don't have any kind of technology that could possibly survive that long, much less that could keep fragile human bodies alive that long.
Actually we have the technology to reach Alpha Centauri in 50-100 years. Although it would probably take 100-200 years to build the infrastructure and the large ship necessary to do so. And, yes, I do know exactly how large a distance 4.39 light years is. It's far, but not millions of years far.
Well we definitely wouldn't have Tang. The idea of mixing sugar, citric acid, and ascorbic acid is just too far out there. Only an alien intelligence could have come up with that. And no NASA = no aliens among us. So without Tang we might still have life, but not as we know it.
If you want to define civil disobedience that way, fine. We need another term then. How about if we call it 'principled disobedience'. The idea is that millions of people decide to break a particular law as much as possible, but if they are caught and prosecuted they don't have to necessarily sacrifice themselves to the unjust law. They can do whatever they want and say whatever they want that is consistent with their own self-interest.
Did you even read the page you linked to? They are not describing an insulation system that does not require thermal energy to keep the inside at a higher temperature than the outside. They are just describing super-insulation. I love the idea of super-insulation almost as much as I love delicious, wonderful C02. Super-insulating doesn't stop heat transfer. Not even vacuum panels can do that. You still have to generate heat. Have you ever taken a physics course?
If you are really serious about halting C02 production you should be advocating a world government that outlaws burning and supplies cheap nuclear power to all parts of the world. If nuclear power were cheap enough people in colder climates could use electric resistance heating to heat their super-insulated homes for zero C02 emissions. 100% nuclear is really the only sensible solution for those who want to reduce C02 production.
Still, poor people will be totally screwed because nuclear electricity is inherently much more expensive than coal-based. Hydro is nice because it results in cheap electricity, but most parts of the world just don't have enough powerful rivers to dam up (and essentially destroy). And places in the world that can generate electricity with wind power are even rarer.
I can't speak for all AGW skeptics, but for myself:
1) I don't see any reason to believe that the amount of C02 produced by technology is enough to turn the earth into venus any time soon via the greenhouse effect. IOW we believe that the amount is too small to make a significant difference. And trying to predict what will happen in 10,000 or even 1000 years is pretty foolish. Our species may not even be around. In which case, artificial C02 production will stop until some other species evolves enough intelligence to start burning things.
2) Even if C02 generated by combustion will heat the earth sufficiently to destroy all life on the planet in the next 10,000 years and even if we don't run out of things to burn in that time (one of the unspoken premises of AGW) realistically there is absolutely nothing that any of us can do about it. As long as human beings are alive they will burn things. The only way to stop them is to kill or imprison anyone doing so. I'm not sure I'd want to live in such a society.
3) I think we will run out of fossil fuels many thousands of years before global warming would even remotely become a threat to human life. In fact as soon as we create viable fusion power we may see a lot more nuclear plants being built which will eventually reduce our C02 emissions substantially in any case. It's hard to believe it will take us even another millennium to solve the fusion problem.
4) Unless we know for certain that our C02 production will result in the extinction of our species in a reasonable time frame, the cure is worse than the disease. To stop burning fossil fuels now would bring us to a pre-industrial level of civilization resulting in lots of starvation. The only reason our planet can support so many human beings is through technology. Without that technology a large percentage of the population will die. Starting with the poorest people and poorest countries. Rich people can afford to buy electricity no matter how expensive it is. Rich countries can afford nuclear power plants and expensive electric transportation technology that runs off the nuclear grid. Poor countries can barely afford traffic lights.
5) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I haven't even seen any evidence I would characterize as strong let alone extraordinary.
Have you seen a lot of astrologers coming out against astrology? How about priests debunking religion? If all of modern climate 'science' is rotten to the core and isn't really even science then it would only attract true believers in the first place.
I remember taking a microeconomics course in college at a time when I was reading a great deal of Austrian economics. I disagreed with the Keynesian ideas being taught in class and I had detailed reasoned arguments as to why I disagreed. It didn't matter. If my answers were not pro-Keynesian, they would be marked wrong on the exam. It was clear to me that it would be very difficult to become a modern economist in this pro-Keynesian climate if you didn't believe in it.
It may be the same in climate science. If you find the arguments and evidence in favor of AGW unconvincing then it seems pretty unlikely you would become a climate scientist in the first place. It may not even be possible. Especially if you have some integrity and are unwilling to lie about what you (don't) believe to be true when taking exams.
Unless you also consider life to be a pollutant. One possible solution to global warming is to exterminate all life on the planet. At that point no one will be around to care if the world heats up by a few degrees every thousand years. Or we could just exterminate all of the human species if we are the ones creating the problem. We could send up a drone with all of the nuclear weapons from the cold war and nuke the planet from orbit. It really is the only way to be sure.
Actually it will probably make real pollution worse. The more resources you spend on C02 control the less you have to spend on toxic chemical control. I'm in favor of increased C02 production but against toxic chemical
Average global temperatures are up 4c in the last century, 2c in the last decade
Citation needed. I thought I had read from a reputable source (NOAA perhaps) that the warming was estimated to be about 0.8 degrees celcius over the last 130 years.
Where are you getting your data from? The hydrogen in interstellar space is very sparse and what little there is might be scooped up and used for fuel with a magnetic scoop. A super-Orion sized craft could reach speeds of up to about 0.1c. At that speed Alpha Centauri is only 44 years away. The chances of hitting a macro sized object in interstellar space are low. The vast majority of matter in the galaxy has already clumped into solar systems.
What attempts were made exactly? Citation desperately needed. IIRC, Orion was canceled for political, not scientific, reasons. Nuclear propulsion is the only means we have of traveling interstellar distances in any kind of reasonable time frame. In what way are the concepts flawed?
I was posting about the idea of doing something for real. Something that would actually stop CO2 production by fundamentally altering our entire way of life and you post something about the joke known as the Kyoto protocol. This is typical. Why don't you actually respond to the real question. What would you do to actually solve the problem of greenhouse gas production? In all your rhetoric you haven't bothered to mention that.
Let me give you a concrete example. If you want to stop me from burning whatever I want anytime I want whether it be wood or coal or petrol you are going to have to actually come to my house with weapons and arrest me. That is the only way. And you may as well execute me because whenever you release me from prison I will just do it again. Now, if I am the only one on the planet who thinks that way then you have no problem, but if there are millions or billions of people who think that way then you have a very, very big problem. One that the Kyoto protocol doesn't give you any idea how to even begin to solve without world government death squads or whatever. Even with world government death squads it wouldn't be easy. You are talking about people who are burning fossil fuels for survival. That's pretty fundamental. It's going to be hard to stamp out every homemade generator and wood stove and steam engine etc. Can't you see how incredibly difficult it is to get so many people all over this planet to stop producing C02? Or maybe you are the idiot.
None of those so called solutions will work. Do you really think you can power the whole planet by damming up more rivers, and putting up some windmills and and photovoltaic panels? The technology is just not there. And proper house insulation? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke? We are discussing the end of the world (for humanity) and you are rearranging some deck chairs on the Titanic. And "mass transit" are just words. Maybe you could flesh that out a bit. Your post just reminds me about how people like you spend all of your time thinking about how the sky is falling and no time at all thinking about what to do about it. Also, hubris is thinking that our species is even capable of global climate change on the scale implied by AGW. One solution that takes care of human greed, hubris, and AGW is immediate global thermonuclear war on a grand scale to sterilize the dirty human infestation of mother earth. Would you support that?
Since 1880, the average global temperature has increased 1.5F (0.83C)
Wow. That's a lot. So assume 0.83 degrees every 130 years. That's 0.006384 degrees per year, 0.06384 degrees per decade, 0.6384 degrees per century, and 6.384 degrees C per millenium. So in the year 3012 we can expect average temperatures to be 6.3 degrees C higher than they are now. In 4012 they will be 12.6 degrees higher and so on. In just 10,000 years our planet will be 63.84 degrees warmer. Enough to make equatorial areas uninhabitable. So maybe in 10,000 years humans will all be living in underground homes in Antarctica. Of course we will still have fossil fuels to burn then, right because AGW is true and Peak Oil is false.
whether it's a liquid-in-glass thermometer in a standard wooden shelter or an electronic thermometer in the new smaller and more open plastic shelters
Huh? They are still using liquid-in-glass thermometers at some of these stations? I hope they have accuracies greater than +/-.01 degrees C and people can judge the meniscus well enough to gauge that accurately. Yikes. That does not inspire confidence in the accuracy of the data.
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In addition such tests also discriminate against stupid and mentally retarded applicants. How could that be considered 'fair'?
Meanwhile, I've been dinged on performance reviews because of a tendency to snap at people who ask the same question several times.
Not working well with others is one thing, but going so far as to become violent and actually bite or nip at them is another. If you were a dog I'd call the local shelter to have you put to sleep. Civilized people don't attempt to eat each other for any reason. And biting someone for being stupid is particularly perverse and insensitive.
There's a clear distinction between a criminal who we should try to arrest if at all possible (and criminals do get killed by cops without a trial in similar circumstances, even on U.S. soil, where they are armed and resisting arrest)
So to get killed by a cop in the US not only do you have to be armed, but you also have to be resisting arrest? Wow. That's news to me. I thought American cops could just shoot whoever they wanted as long as there weren't too many civilian witnesses. BTW, in America you are always resisting arrest when a cop uses force against you. If he is using force against you obviously you must have been resisting, right?
As far as the commander-in-chief of the US military being able to order anyone he wants killed, would you have a problem with it if he ordered your death or the death of someone you cared about? Probably he would have a good reason, like a twitter post critical of the DHS or something.
Why do we need Moonbase Alpha?
1. There is simply no other place where we can build large spacecraft. Earth's gravity well is too deep. The moon is a nearly perfect manufacturing base. First build a nuclear power plant and then a smelter. Then start plundering the natural resources of the moon to build stuff.
2. It would be an easier experiment than trying to live on Mars or Jovian moons. Only once we have successfully lived on the moon for a while would it be worth trying for Mars or Titan.
3. It would allow us to build kilometer scale radio telescopes facing away from the earth and not being as subject to terrestrial interference allowing for a much more effective SETI program. In addition to SETI it would allow for terrestrial sized telescopes of all sorts that don't have to worry about the atmosphere getting in the way of the astronomy.
A constant 1 g acceleration would reduce travel time considerably
I should think so. At a constant 1 G acceleration you would reach the speed of light in just 354 earth days. Since even Alpha Centauri is far more than 1 light year from earth it would be difficult to see how you would maintain your artificial gravity for the whole trip.
Who cares about 'profitability'? The goal is not to get rich. The goal is exploration and science and progress as a species. A permanent lunar settlement is a necessary first step for any kind of ambitious space exploration project.
Of course getting the private sector interested in paying the bills isn't going to happen because space exploration is not about making a profit and it never will be until and unless we can get the cost of space launches down by many orders of magnitude.
Imagine 500 years from now when we finally make contact with other intelligent life in the galaxy. They ask why we have never ventured out farther than our moon and barely even there. We reply that it just wasn't profitable. They ask us what we mean by that. We try to explain that our species refuses to do anything unless after the activity is over everyone involved is able to 'buy' more consumer goods afterward.
How do you think they would view us? Probably something like the way the Humans view the Ferengi on Star Trek.
Actually it's not immortality. It's because we're geeks and space travel is ultra-cool. Traveling to another star would be the ultimate adventure. And frankly, as a species, staying on our little home planet is just cowardly and pathetic.
How would we get around the low gravity problem? Even if you could get enough or create enough oxygen, inert gases, and greenhouse gases (maybe we should be exporting our excess carbon dioxide to Mars) how would you prevent it from being lost to space? I suppose we could coat the entire surface of the planet with neutronium to increase its gravity.
People who say stuff like this usually have no idea the distances involved. It would probably take us MILLIONS of years to reach the nearest planet that's even remotely habitable. We don't have any kind of technology that could possibly survive that long, much less that could keep fragile human bodies alive that long.
Actually we have the technology to reach Alpha Centauri in 50-100 years. Although it would probably take 100-200 years to build the infrastructure and the large ship necessary to do so. And, yes, I do know exactly how large a distance 4.39 light years is. It's far, but not millions of years far.
Well we definitely wouldn't have Tang. The idea of mixing sugar, citric acid, and ascorbic acid is just too far out there. Only an alien intelligence could have come up with that. And no NASA = no aliens among us. So without Tang we might still have life, but not as we know it.
If you want to define civil disobedience that way, fine. We need another term then. How about if we call it 'principled disobedience'. The idea is that millions of people decide to break a particular law as much as possible, but if they are caught and prosecuted they don't have to necessarily sacrifice themselves to the unjust law. They can do whatever they want and say whatever they want that is consistent with their own self-interest.
Did you even read the page you linked to? They are not describing an insulation system that does not require thermal energy to keep the inside at a higher temperature than the outside. They are just describing super-insulation. I love the idea of super-insulation almost as much as I love delicious, wonderful C02. Super-insulating doesn't stop heat transfer. Not even vacuum panels can do that. You still have to generate heat. Have you ever taken a physics course?
If you are really serious about halting C02 production you should be advocating a world government that outlaws burning and supplies cheap nuclear power to all parts of the world. If nuclear power were cheap enough people in colder climates could use electric resistance heating to heat their super-insulated homes for zero C02 emissions. 100% nuclear is really the only sensible solution for those who want to reduce C02 production.
Still, poor people will be totally screwed because nuclear electricity is inherently much more expensive than coal-based. Hydro is nice because it results in cheap electricity, but most parts of the world just don't have enough powerful rivers to dam up (and essentially destroy). And places in the world that can generate electricity with wind power are even rarer.
There are also very real costs to keeping carbon output at current levels.
Can you prove that?
So do you also consider oxygen, nitrogen, and argon to be pollutants? All of them are quite deadly in the right circumstances.
I can't speak for all AGW skeptics, but for myself:
1) I don't see any reason to believe that the amount of C02 produced by technology is enough to turn the earth into venus any time soon via the greenhouse effect. IOW we believe that the amount is too small to make a significant difference. And trying to predict what will happen in 10,000 or even 1000 years is pretty foolish. Our species may not even be around. In which case, artificial C02 production will stop until some other species evolves enough intelligence to start burning things.
2) Even if C02 generated by combustion will heat the earth sufficiently to destroy all life on the planet in the next 10,000 years and even if we don't run out of things to burn in that time (one of the unspoken premises of AGW) realistically there is absolutely nothing that any of us can do about it. As long as human beings are alive they will burn things. The only way to stop them is to kill or imprison anyone doing so. I'm not sure I'd want to live in such a society.
3) I think we will run out of fossil fuels many thousands of years before global warming would even remotely become a threat to human life. In fact as soon as we create viable fusion power we may see a lot more nuclear plants being built which will eventually reduce our C02 emissions substantially in any case. It's hard to believe it will take us even another millennium to solve the fusion problem.
4) Unless we know for certain that our C02 production will result in the extinction of our species in a reasonable time frame, the cure is worse than the disease. To stop burning fossil fuels now would bring us to a pre-industrial level of civilization resulting in lots of starvation. The only reason our planet can support so many human beings is through technology. Without that technology a large percentage of the population will die. Starting with the poorest people and poorest countries. Rich people can afford to buy electricity no matter how expensive it is. Rich countries can afford nuclear power plants and expensive electric transportation technology that runs off the nuclear grid. Poor countries can barely afford traffic lights.
5) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I haven't even seen any evidence I would characterize as strong let alone extraordinary.
Have you seen a lot of astrologers coming out against astrology? How about priests debunking religion? If all of modern climate 'science' is rotten to the core and isn't really even science then it would only attract true believers in the first place.
I remember taking a microeconomics course in college at a time when I was reading a great deal of Austrian economics. I disagreed with the Keynesian ideas being taught in class and I had detailed reasoned arguments as to why I disagreed. It didn't matter. If my answers were not pro-Keynesian, they would be marked wrong on the exam. It was clear to me that it would be very difficult to become a modern economist in this pro-Keynesian climate if you didn't believe in it.
It may be the same in climate science. If you find the arguments and evidence in favor of AGW unconvincing then it seems pretty unlikely you would become a climate scientist in the first place. It may not even be possible. Especially if you have some integrity and are unwilling to lie about what you (don't) believe to be true when taking exams.
Unless you also consider life to be a pollutant. One possible solution to global warming is to exterminate all life on the planet. At that point no one will be around to care if the world heats up by a few degrees every thousand years. Or we could just exterminate all of the human species if we are the ones creating the problem. We could send up a drone with all of the nuclear weapons from the cold war and nuke the planet from orbit. It really is the only way to be sure.
Actually it will probably make real pollution worse. The more resources you spend on C02 control the less you have to spend on toxic chemical control. I'm in favor of increased C02 production but against toxic chemical
Average global temperatures are up 4c in the last century, 2c in the last decade
Citation needed. I thought I had read from a reputable source (NOAA perhaps) that the warming was estimated to be about 0.8 degrees celcius over the last 130 years.
Where are you getting your data from? The hydrogen in interstellar space is very sparse and what little there is might be scooped up and used for fuel with a magnetic scoop. A super-Orion sized craft could reach speeds of up to about 0.1c. At that speed Alpha Centauri is only 44 years away. The chances of hitting a macro sized object in interstellar space are low. The vast majority of matter in the galaxy has already clumped into solar systems.
What attempts were made exactly? Citation desperately needed. IIRC, Orion was canceled for political, not scientific, reasons. Nuclear propulsion is the only means we have of traveling interstellar distances in any kind of reasonable time frame. In what way are the concepts flawed?
I was posting about the idea of doing something for real. Something that would actually stop CO2 production by fundamentally altering our entire way of life and you post something about the joke known as the Kyoto protocol. This is typical. Why don't you actually respond to the real question. What would you do to actually solve the problem of greenhouse gas production? In all your rhetoric you haven't bothered to mention that.
Let me give you a concrete example. If you want to stop me from burning whatever I want anytime I want whether it be wood or coal or petrol you are going to have to actually come to my house with weapons and arrest me. That is the only way. And you may as well execute me because whenever you release me from prison I will just do it again. Now, if I am the only one on the planet who thinks that way then you have no problem, but if there are millions or billions of people who think that way then you have a very, very big problem. One that the Kyoto protocol doesn't give you any idea how to even begin to solve without world government death squads or whatever. Even with world government death squads it wouldn't be easy. You are talking about people who are burning fossil fuels for survival. That's pretty fundamental. It's going to be hard to stamp out every homemade generator and wood stove and steam engine etc. Can't you see how incredibly difficult it is to get so many people all over this planet to stop producing C02? Or maybe you are the idiot.
None of those so called solutions will work. Do you really think you can power the whole planet by damming up more rivers, and putting up some windmills and and photovoltaic panels? The technology is just not there. And proper house insulation? Is that supposed to be some kind of joke? We are discussing the end of the world (for humanity) and you are rearranging some deck chairs on the Titanic. And "mass transit" are just words. Maybe you could flesh that out a bit. Your post just reminds me about how people like you spend all of your time thinking about how the sky is falling and no time at all thinking about what to do about it. Also, hubris is thinking that our species is even capable of global climate change on the scale implied by AGW. One solution that takes care of human greed, hubris, and AGW is immediate global thermonuclear war on a grand scale to sterilize the dirty human infestation of mother earth. Would you support that?
From the linked page:
Since 1880, the average global temperature has increased 1.5F (0.83C)
Wow. That's a lot. So assume 0.83 degrees every 130 years. That's 0.006384 degrees per year, 0.06384 degrees per decade, 0.6384 degrees per century, and 6.384 degrees C per millenium. So in the year 3012 we can expect average temperatures to be 6.3 degrees C higher than they are now. In 4012 they will be 12.6 degrees higher and so on. In just 10,000 years our planet will be 63.84 degrees warmer. Enough to make equatorial areas uninhabitable. So maybe in 10,000 years humans will all be living in underground homes in Antarctica. Of course we will still have fossil fuels to burn then, right because AGW is true and Peak Oil is false.
From that NOAA page:
whether it's a liquid-in-glass thermometer in a standard wooden shelter or an electronic thermometer in the new smaller and more open plastic shelters
Huh? They are still using liquid-in-glass thermometers at some of these stations? I hope they have accuracies greater than +/-.01 degrees C and people can judge the meniscus well enough to gauge that accurately. Yikes. That does not inspire confidence in the accuracy of the data.