Ok, you've justified maybe 10-20% of government spending at all levels with that. Now how are you going to justify the rest? Particularly the corruption and graft going to the rich, well connected, and powerful?
It absolutely was not "quite forseeable", any more than quantum computers and fusion power have been "quite foreseeable"; it was fraught with major technical challenges that had to be overcome, and there was no guarantee that they would be.
Sorry, I don't buy it. ITER threw money at a superconducting technology they knew wouldn't work for commercial purposes rather than one that merely needed some development to work.
It's taken a lot of work to turn flexible, durable, long HTS wires suitable for magnets into a reality. And that doesn't come cheap.
I bet $!4 billion would have gone a long way here and still have enough left over to put together a few fusion reactors. Opportunity cost is invisible.
Hands off means we have to learn how to deal with our world not merely ape what we are told.
It's being told rather than having to learn by yourself which allowed humans to transcend mere instinct and develope culture. Indeed, that's what culture is - a stream of acquired knowledge being passed down to the next generation.
So what? It's irrelevant to my statement since self-created culture would still include learning at the collective level.
Then there's the concern that the budding civilization might jihad your ass, if they knew about you.
A budding civilization might want to jihad your ass, but how are they're going to do that? You're the interstellar empire and they've barely reached their orbit, if that.
You don't want to find out the hard way that yes, they can destroy you even if you started with a tech advantage and it takes tens of thousands of years for them just to get to you.
Both material and energy are abundant in space, and we're already automating our manufacturing so manpower shouldn't be an issue either. So what form would that exploitation take? The only thing of value I can think of is information - the ideas and cultural memes produced by the unique viewpoint of an alien civilization. Maximizing the production of those seems to entail maximizing both the material wellbeing and freedom of citizens, so it's not at all certain if such exploitation would, in fact, be bad.
If demand is abundant as well, then there you go. And we have knowledge which need not help the less advanced race (eg, turning life on a planet into your own personal computer).
My point is that even anaerobic Earth-based life will leave a definite signature on the surface of Mars, Europa, or the other places that might host life. You wouldn't need to look hard.
They went from 90 A-m to 300k A-m between 2002 and 2009, overwhelmingly due to research by and demand from high-energy plasma physics research projects, particularly tokamaks.
I should add here, this technological innovation was quite foreseeable. And there shouldn't have been such a long lead time to the start of ITER. It's remarkable how low our standards for design of multi-billion dollar projects are these days!
Why are you pointing out something I pointed out in my first post on the subject?
Because high temperature superconductors have been around longer than that. It's a fairly obvious bad design decision even for the 90s.
If ITER went and redesigned their magnets now after all of the other engineering work has been done the budget would go up and people like you would be raising hell about that.
Their budget did go up and their schedule did slide by a number of years anyway, let us note.
But you better bet that DEMO will use more advanced magnets.
I wonder how much overbudget DEMO will be. But I'm sure, we'll have a better idea what a commercial power plant won't be by the time we've run DEMO for a while.
Therefore we should expect every planet that can possibly support life to already have it.
Then where's the life elsewhere in the Solar System. There's several places where we could plant Earth life right now. And it'd be pretty obvious after a while that we did so.
Nothing at all led to what we have now - clearly not the optimal solution.
And you have evidence for this? I'll note that such guidance on Earth would be both dependency forming and likely to result in reactionary behavior. Hands off means we have to learn how to deal with our world not merely ape what we are told. Further, by openly supporting a particular choice, you create another political faction and incentive for others to oppose the choice.
Just look at modern religion. There's a bunch of people who, if they became convinced that their religion was fake, would go off the deep end. That's a typical problem of dependency. And we have the peculiar weirdness in the West of openly practicing Satanists who only exist because Satan is the mythological bad guy of a large portion of the world.
Then there's the concern that the budding civilization might jihad your ass, if they knew about you. Better to let them work out their problems among and against themselves, rather than becoming a huge target for an interstellar crusade. A lot of things have to go right in order for a civilization to develop a space-side presence.
And that's not the only way to make a mistake.
Also, once you are manipulating less advanced creatures, you create the incentive to exploit that relationship. I'm sure there are some directives I could insert on that stone tablet to increase my net worth or future advantages, for example. It's foolish to assume, given your present opinion of humanity, that our motives will somehow become pure by the time we contact a primitive intelligence.
I was under the impression that lots of them that we took advantage of as a resource-based civilization required water as the transport medium.
Sure, hydrothermal ore genesis is right out. There's apparently very little hydrogen on the surface of the Moon and much of what is there comes from the solar wind.
There's also the possibility of exotic mineral transport processes with chlorine or fluorine gases and compounds according to computer model. That might be a way, for example, to get naturally occurring CFCs and concentration of uranium (via uranium hexafluoride). Not worth speculating more on it since we need real evidence from underground fluid systems rather than a computer model based on really weak assumptions (that the Moon's volcanism had at some point in the past the same gas mix as Earth minus the water).
"Cost-benefit is an essential part of maximizing productive results in *any* endeavor in *any* industry, except perhaps, producing worthless luxury items."
Naive. "Cost/Benefit" is pure fiction, usually pushed by those who wish to cloak their motives and are lousy at Maths. "Cost" is easy to quantify, it is a quantifiable... quantity; time and resources usually predicted, (wrongly...), down to the second and the penny. "Benefit" is qualifiable; a matter of judgment as to whether the result of the Analysis is better or worse. This led to such nonsense as "Death Panels", a strictly Political talking point. This is dividing numbers by wishful thinking.
So you can't quantify the benefit of basic science research? Sounds like you have no business speaking of this topic then.
"Nevertheless, practicality is also important."
Unfortunately, you can't read the future, and neither can I. And that is the problem with practicality; what is pie-in-the-sky now may be essential to living a century from now, and there is just no way to know. Dick Tracy's Wrist Radio in 1946 was just cartoon nonsense for decades. Yet research in RF continued at a steady pace, along with the growth of technical and social infrastructures that have made cellphones ubiquitous. And yet we have no Flying Cars, which Henry Ford was tinkering with in the Twenties.
The wrist radio had obvious, significant value not "cartoonish nonsense". It just wasn't possible for decades.
I find it remarkable that our best understanding of the dynamics of human economics is assumed not to apply to basic scientific research because woo. We can't know for sure that indiscriminate funding of anything labeled research is going to be a disaster for human progress, but it's the safe bet.
No. It's being interpreted now as being illegal in the past. That's very different from actually being illegal in the past. It's a fiction. And other posters have noted various special deals continue to be made to companies to lure them to the EU. Will those deals be interpreted as always being illegal some point in the future?
That's why we have laws against ex post facto law and regulation. To prevent precisely the sort of abuse happening here.
So if ITER doesn't have to use helium-cooled superconductors any more and those arent' the future of fusion reactor design, then why do they?
Yes, and what percent of mainstream fusion researchers do you see lining up to back cutting ITER funding to support some massive Polywell project?
There's this conflict of interest between most of the researchers (whose work is based on the tokamak reactor design) and the most promising research.
You can't just take Bussard's scaling claims at face value. Real-world phenomenon aren't limited to just linear and quadratic scaling curves. And the fact that the concept is 20 years old and has little peer-reviewed results doesn't exactly give it much credence vs. cutting something that's pretty well understood and which there's relatively little doubt about its ability to scale (ability to prove economic, that's a more up-in-the-air question).
We won't need to take Bussard's claims at face value when we can build a scaled-up Polywell for a small fraction of the cost of the ITER project and find out for ourselves.
Except, of course, I just spelled out the reasons why it is. It's like someone saying "hey, they invented a cheap 300mpg car as a side effect of this project, that's going to be immensely valuable" and you responded "Unless, it's not, of course".
Which is a ludicrous comparison since higher magnetic fields at higher temperatures, using helium-cooled superconductors, just isn't that valuable compared to lowering effective ground transportation costs of humanity by a factor of ten. That's like getting two orders of magnitude return on investment (assuming you spent $14+ billion for it) - which you aren't going to get with ITER.
Research on magnetic materials is just a single example of a tiny fraction of that cost. How many more examples do you want? Or will you be equally dismissive to all of them? Where do YOU think that $14+ billion is going? Do you think there's just some bonfire where they burn it all? It's mostly spent on researchers, working on the technology behind the various subsystems. Much if not most of which is multi-application.
I sure will be equally dismissive of the whole lot of them. If there was a serious benefit to ITER, we would have known about it by now. It wouldn't be vague talk of technological improvements or fusion break even in ten years.
If you want something to attack for budget reasons, direct your gaze upwards (ISS). I think $150B for that is a lot harder to justify.
Well, I googled myself about ISS and boy was I on fire in January 2014.
I'm sure there's useful stuff being studied. Who knows? It might even some day approach within an order of magnitude of the original cost of the station.
When I read posts like the above, I have to remind myself that not everyone realizes the extremely high value of what could have been done with the money spent on publicly funded research like the ISS.
For example, we could have built three or so ISSs for that price (at least half of the savings gained by cutting out the Space Shuttle and a similar amount gained by dropping the "international" from the ISS). But we prudently didn't because the research is far too valuable to triple the quantity produced without actually spending a cent more.
or
[Teancum] Treatiing the existing ISS structure as sunk costs
Can't because the ISS costs almost $2 billion a year just to keep operational. Also, the same sort of bad decision making that led to the Shuttle and the ISS leads to more recent bad decisions such as development of the Space Launch System.
There's the matter of political hygiene. Let's say I have an apartment and I leave the place a serious mess, with food and stuff lying around. It won't be long before rodents, bugs, and other vermin are squirming through my apartment. But by cleaning up the apartment and especially getting rid of the easy food sources, I greatly reduce my vermin problem.
I see the ISS as it currently stands as a pile of old, rotting food feeding the next generation of cockroaches and rats. If it weren't around, then things like the Shuttle, Constellation, and now SLS would have been greatly curbed.
and
[Princeofcups] You sad sick fuck. The world is not beholden to the economic views of market capitalism. Science and knowledge expansion requires the expenditure of resources that are NOT tied up in making the elite more elite. It's your viewpoint that has destroyed what was once the greatest scientific community and left nothing but a corpse picked over by weasels and hyenas.
But regardless of whether or not tokamak fusion eventually becomes economically viable, the work on superconducting magnets that's been spawned because of ITER is going to be of immense value.
Unless, it's not, of course. That's the problem with unfounded assertions.
And couldn't we have done the work you think is immensely valuable for a lot less than $14+ billion (ITER's cost in current US dollars)? Opportunity cost is the first sacrifice on the altar of Big Science boondoggles.
The other obvious argument against is that it's a lot of money spent for little value. Sure, China could waste that money in an even worse way, say invading some low value country. But they could also just not spend that money in the first place and reap the benefits of that.
The other arguments against large-scale research funding are just a bunch of monkeys thumping their chests on computers they wouldn't have if the politicians had listened to their chest-thumping parents, while connected to a network that wouldn't exist.
Just because someone blew a lot of public funds doesn't mean that anything you just mentioned was dependent on that any more than beating drums during a solar eclipse keeps the sky serpent from eating the Sun.
Sure, if I was given a couple of trillion dollars to build a better stone tool for digging roots and grubs from deeper soil layers, I might agree that low value, massive, publicly funded scientific/engineering projects are really important. But I'm not getting the sugar necessary to persuade me to go along with these boondoggles. Please fix.
Ore genesis didn't take place on the Moon but the surface material seems to be reasonably mixed to not require it.
You think based on very little evidence. An obvious rebuttal here is that certain ore genesis processes on Earth required volcanism or asteroid impact, both which have happened on the Moon. For example, the nickel deposits of Norilskâ"Talnakh are thought to be formed by sulfur chemistry transferring nickel and other metals into a layer of magma pinned under the Siberia Traps eruptions (which would be in the top ten lunar maria by surface area, if it happened on the Moon instead of on Earth).
The famous Bushveld complex is a concentration of platinum group metals thought to be caused by an asteroid impact melting into a magma body and then selectively crystallized out last as the magma body slowly cooled.
So we have two mechanisms for substantial differentiation and ore genesis on Earth, which would apply just as well to parts of the Moon.
Further, there's direct evidence of significant differentiation possible with the "orange soil" discovered by astronaut Harrison Smith during the Apollo 17 sortie which had high concentrations of titanium (8% by mass) and "rich in zinc" which probably came from late stage volcanism on the Moon's surface.
Build something that's actually worth something, that would put them in a good position to advance science: nah, too expensive...
Read the criticism.
He said the project would become an investment "black hole" with little scientific value or benefit to society, sucking resources away from other research sectors such as life sciences and quantum physics...
If true, it doesn't advance science but instead hinders it. It's remarkable how people who supposedly are clued about science are clueless about the economics of science.
but I concentrate on the South here because they are always the side which gets white washed when it comes to the Korean War
[...]
The North today may be run by nut jobs, but do not mistake the cause of the Korean War as solely the Norths fault, nor on the same level as todays North Korea...
Nor should you. Despite your attempts at some sort of reverse whitewashing, it remains that North Korea started the war and would have finished it with a brutal tyranny over the entire Korean peninsula, if it weren't for the direct intervention of a superpower. It wasn't solely North Korea's fault. They had considerable help from the USSR and China.
But to cast blame on South Korea because they did evil things that were irrelevant to North Korea's interests? Well, I guess they showed weakness by not invading first with a superior force, so sure, let's blame the South Koreans too.
Two centuries isn't that long in the grand scheme of things.
It's long for democracies. Older than the UK, for example.
If America will last longer than other democracies, I doubt it is because they had better democratic systems, but rather better UN-democratic practices that rig the game and exploit general voter ignorance and apathy. Printing the world's primary reserve currency and having the biggest guns also help.
It's not worth arguing that. In some sense, things like the Bill of Rights are undemocratic. But if the system is based on pulling the wool over voters' eyes, it's not going to stay a democracy. It's also worth noting that the US didn't have the the primary reserve currency and biggest guns for most of its lifespan. That's a very recent thing.
Not that longevity is a good metric for determining whether you are still had and practiced the democracy and freedom that you pioneered.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, you've justified maybe 10-20% of government spending at all levels with that. Now how are you going to justify the rest? Particularly the corruption and graft going to the rich, well connected, and powerful?
It absolutely was not "quite forseeable", any more than quantum computers and fusion power have been "quite foreseeable"; it was fraught with major technical challenges that had to be overcome, and there was no guarantee that they would be.
Sorry, I don't buy it. ITER threw money at a superconducting technology they knew wouldn't work for commercial purposes rather than one that merely needed some development to work.
It's taken a lot of work to turn flexible, durable, long HTS wires suitable for magnets into a reality. And that doesn't come cheap.
I bet $!4 billion would have gone a long way here and still have enough left over to put together a few fusion reactors. Opportunity cost is invisible.
The donks might actually replace her with someone who isn't entirely vomit inducing.
And that would be a terrible thing.
Hands off means we have to learn how to deal with our world not merely ape what we are told.
It's being told rather than having to learn by yourself which allowed humans to transcend mere instinct and develope culture. Indeed, that's what culture is - a stream of acquired knowledge being passed down to the next generation.
So what? It's irrelevant to my statement since self-created culture would still include learning at the collective level.
Then there's the concern that the budding civilization might jihad your ass, if they knew about you.
A budding civilization might want to jihad your ass, but how are they're going to do that? You're the interstellar empire and they've barely reached their orbit, if that.
You don't want to find out the hard way that yes, they can destroy you even if you started with a tech advantage and it takes tens of thousands of years for them just to get to you.
Both material and energy are abundant in space, and we're already automating our manufacturing so manpower shouldn't be an issue either. So what form would that exploitation take? The only thing of value I can think of is information - the ideas and cultural memes produced by the unique viewpoint of an alien civilization. Maximizing the production of those seems to entail maximizing both the material wellbeing and freedom of citizens, so it's not at all certain if such exploitation would, in fact, be bad.
If demand is abundant as well, then there you go. And we have knowledge which need not help the less advanced race (eg, turning life on a planet into your own personal computer).
Mars, Europa, Ceres, Enceladus, Ganymede, and Callisto are all thought to have a liquid water layer or water-saturated layer in their crust.
My point is that even anaerobic Earth-based life will leave a definite signature on the surface of Mars, Europa, or the other places that might host life. You wouldn't need to look hard.
AC says starting a civilization is just like operating a washing machine.
They went from 90 A-m to 300k A-m between 2002 and 2009, overwhelmingly due to research by and demand from high-energy plasma physics research projects, particularly tokamaks.
I should add here, this technological innovation was quite foreseeable. And there shouldn't have been such a long lead time to the start of ITER. It's remarkable how low our standards for design of multi-billion dollar projects are these days!
But hey, I think it's wonderful how you feel qualified to lecture physicists on how dumb they are in their magnet designs!
It's their designs. Being completely irrelevant to some future commercial operation is not my fault.
Why are you pointing out something I pointed out in my first post on the subject?
Because high temperature superconductors have been around longer than that. It's a fairly obvious bad design decision even for the 90s.
If ITER went and redesigned their magnets now after all of the other engineering work has been done the budget would go up and people like you would be raising hell about that.
Their budget did go up and their schedule did slide by a number of years anyway, let us note.
But you better bet that DEMO will use more advanced magnets.
I wonder how much overbudget DEMO will be. But I'm sure, we'll have a better idea what a commercial power plant won't be by the time we've run DEMO for a while.
Therefore we should expect every planet that can possibly support life to already have it.
Then where's the life elsewhere in the Solar System. There's several places where we could plant Earth life right now. And it'd be pretty obvious after a while that we did so.
Nothing at all led to what we have now - clearly not the optimal solution.
And you have evidence for this? I'll note that such guidance on Earth would be both dependency forming and likely to result in reactionary behavior. Hands off means we have to learn how to deal with our world not merely ape what we are told. Further, by openly supporting a particular choice, you create another political faction and incentive for others to oppose the choice.
Just look at modern religion. There's a bunch of people who, if they became convinced that their religion was fake, would go off the deep end. That's a typical problem of dependency. And we have the peculiar weirdness in the West of openly practicing Satanists who only exist because Satan is the mythological bad guy of a large portion of the world.
Then there's the concern that the budding civilization might jihad your ass, if they knew about you. Better to let them work out their problems among and against themselves, rather than becoming a huge target for an interstellar crusade. A lot of things have to go right in order for a civilization to develop a space-side presence.
And that's not the only way to make a mistake.
Also, once you are manipulating less advanced creatures, you create the incentive to exploit that relationship. I'm sure there are some directives I could insert on that stone tablet to increase my net worth or future advantages, for example. It's foolish to assume, given your present opinion of humanity, that our motives will somehow become pure by the time we contact a primitive intelligence.
I was under the impression that lots of them that we took advantage of as a resource-based civilization required water as the transport medium.
Sure, hydrothermal ore genesis is right out. There's apparently very little hydrogen on the surface of the Moon and much of what is there comes from the solar wind.
There's also the possibility of exotic mineral transport processes with chlorine or fluorine gases and compounds according to computer model. That might be a way, for example, to get naturally occurring CFCs and concentration of uranium (via uranium hexafluoride). Not worth speculating more on it since we need real evidence from underground fluid systems rather than a computer model based on really weak assumptions (that the Moon's volcanism had at some point in the past the same gas mix as Earth minus the water).
"Cost-benefit is an essential part of maximizing productive results in *any* endeavor in *any* industry, except perhaps, producing worthless luxury items."
Naive. "Cost/Benefit" is pure fiction, usually pushed by those who wish to cloak their motives and are lousy at Maths. "Cost" is easy to quantify, it is a quantifiable... quantity; time and resources usually predicted, (wrongly...), down to the second and the penny. "Benefit" is qualifiable; a matter of judgment as to whether the result of the Analysis is better or worse. This led to such nonsense as "Death Panels", a strictly Political talking point. This is dividing numbers by wishful thinking.
So you can't quantify the benefit of basic science research? Sounds like you have no business speaking of this topic then.
"Nevertheless, practicality is also important."
Unfortunately, you can't read the future, and neither can I. And that is the problem with practicality; what is pie-in-the-sky now may be essential to living a century from now, and there is just no way to know. Dick Tracy's Wrist Radio in 1946 was just cartoon nonsense for decades. Yet research in RF continued at a steady pace, along with the growth of technical and social infrastructures that have made cellphones ubiquitous. And yet we have no Flying Cars, which Henry Ford was tinkering with in the Twenties.
The wrist radio had obvious, significant value not "cartoonish nonsense". It just wasn't possible for decades.
I find it remarkable that our best understanding of the dynamics of human economics is assumed not to apply to basic scientific research because woo. We can't know for sure that indiscriminate funding of anything labeled research is going to be a disaster for human progress, but it's the safe bet.
It would be better to leave nothing at all.
No. It's being interpreted now as being illegal in the past. That's very different from actually being illegal in the past. It's a fiction. And other posters have noted various special deals continue to be made to companies to lure them to the EU. Will those deals be interpreted as always being illegal some point in the future?
That's why we have laws against ex post facto law and regulation. To prevent precisely the sort of abuse happening here.
Yes, and what percent of mainstream fusion researchers do you see lining up to back cutting ITER funding to support some massive Polywell project?
There's this conflict of interest between most of the researchers (whose work is based on the tokamak reactor design) and the most promising research.
You can't just take Bussard's scaling claims at face value. Real-world phenomenon aren't limited to just linear and quadratic scaling curves. And the fact that the concept is 20 years old and has little peer-reviewed results doesn't exactly give it much credence vs. cutting something that's pretty well understood and which there's relatively little doubt about its ability to scale (ability to prove economic, that's a more up-in-the-air question).
We won't need to take Bussard's claims at face value when we can build a scaled-up Polywell for a small fraction of the cost of the ITER project and find out for ourselves.
Except, of course, I just spelled out the reasons why it is. It's like someone saying "hey, they invented a cheap 300mpg car as a side effect of this project, that's going to be immensely valuable" and you responded "Unless, it's not, of course".
Which is a ludicrous comparison since higher magnetic fields at higher temperatures, using helium-cooled superconductors, just isn't that valuable compared to lowering effective ground transportation costs of humanity by a factor of ten. That's like getting two orders of magnitude return on investment (assuming you spent $14+ billion for it) - which you aren't going to get with ITER.
Research on magnetic materials is just a single example of a tiny fraction of that cost. How many more examples do you want? Or will you be equally dismissive to all of them? Where do YOU think that $14+ billion is going? Do you think there's just some bonfire where they burn it all? It's mostly spent on researchers, working on the technology behind the various subsystems. Much if not most of which is multi-application.
I sure will be equally dismissive of the whole lot of them. If there was a serious benefit to ITER, we would have known about it by now. It wouldn't be vague talk of technological improvements or fusion break even in ten years.
If you want something to attack for budget reasons, direct your gaze upwards (ISS). I think $150B for that is a lot harder to justify.
Well, I googled myself about ISS and boy was I on fire in January 2014.
I'm sure there's useful stuff being studied. Who knows? It might even some day approach within an order of magnitude of the original cost of the station.
When I read posts like the above, I have to remind myself that not everyone realizes the extremely high value of what could have been done with the money spent on publicly funded research like the ISS.
For example, we could have built three or so ISSs for that price (at least half of the savings gained by cutting out the Space Shuttle and a similar amount gained by dropping the "international" from the ISS). But we prudently didn't because the research is far too valuable to triple the quantity produced without actually spending a cent more.
or
[Teancum] Treatiing the existing ISS structure as sunk costs
Can't because the ISS costs almost $2 billion a year just to keep operational. Also, the same sort of bad decision making that led to the Shuttle and the ISS leads to more recent bad decisions such as development of the Space Launch System.
There's the matter of political hygiene. Let's say I have an apartment and I leave the place a serious mess, with food and stuff lying around. It won't be long before rodents, bugs, and other vermin are squirming through my apartment. But by cleaning up the apartment and especially getting rid of the easy food sources, I greatly reduce my vermin problem.
I see the ISS as it currently stands as a pile of old, rotting food feeding the next generation of cockroaches and rats. If it weren't around, then things like the Shuttle, Constellation, and now SLS would have been greatly curbed.
and
[Princeofcups] You sad sick fuck. The world is not beholden to the economic views of market capitalism. Science and knowledge expansion requires the expenditure of resources that are NOT tied up in making the elite more elite. It's your viewpoint that has destroyed what was once the greatest scientific community and left nothing but a corpse picked over by weasels and hyenas.
Consider that the above complaint is made in the face of the greatest expenditures ev
But regardless of whether or not tokamak fusion eventually becomes economically viable, the work on superconducting magnets that's been spawned because of ITER is going to be of immense value.
Unless, it's not, of course. That's the problem with unfounded assertions.
And couldn't we have done the work you think is immensely valuable for a lot less than $14+ billion (ITER's cost in current US dollars)? Opportunity cost is the first sacrifice on the altar of Big Science boondoggles.
The other arguments against large-scale research funding are just a bunch of monkeys thumping their chests on computers they wouldn't have if the politicians had listened to their chest-thumping parents, while connected to a network that wouldn't exist.
Just because someone blew a lot of public funds doesn't mean that anything you just mentioned was dependent on that any more than beating drums during a solar eclipse keeps the sky serpent from eating the Sun.
Sure, if I was given a couple of trillion dollars to build a better stone tool for digging roots and grubs from deeper soil layers, I might agree that low value, massive, publicly funded scientific/engineering projects are really important. But I'm not getting the sugar necessary to persuade me to go along with these boondoggles. Please fix.
Ore genesis didn't take place on the Moon but the surface material seems to be reasonably mixed to not require it.
You think based on very little evidence. An obvious rebuttal here is that certain ore genesis processes on Earth required volcanism or asteroid impact, both which have happened on the Moon. For example, the nickel deposits of Norilskâ"Talnakh are thought to be formed by sulfur chemistry transferring nickel and other metals into a layer of magma pinned under the Siberia Traps eruptions (which would be in the top ten lunar maria by surface area, if it happened on the Moon instead of on Earth).
The famous Bushveld complex is a concentration of platinum group metals thought to be caused by an asteroid impact melting into a magma body and then selectively crystallized out last as the magma body slowly cooled.
So we have two mechanisms for substantial differentiation and ore genesis on Earth, which would apply just as well to parts of the Moon.
Further, there's direct evidence of significant differentiation possible with the "orange soil" discovered by astronaut Harrison Smith during the Apollo 17 sortie which had high concentrations of titanium (8% by mass) and "rich in zinc" which probably came from late stage volcanism on the Moon's surface.
Build something that's actually worth something, that would put them in a good position to advance science: nah, too expensive...
Read the criticism.
He said the project would become an investment "black hole" with little scientific value or benefit to society, sucking resources away from other research sectors such as life sciences and quantum physics...
If true, it doesn't advance science but instead hinders it. It's remarkable how people who supposedly are clued about science are clueless about the economics of science.
Shouldn't be anything flowing around the second stage. And any o rings on the exterior of the Falcon 9 wouldn't be used to pressurize anything.
but I concentrate on the South here because they are always the side which gets white washed when it comes to the Korean War
[...]
The North today may be run by nut jobs, but do not mistake the cause of the Korean War as solely the Norths fault, nor on the same level as todays North Korea...
Nor should you. Despite your attempts at some sort of reverse whitewashing, it remains that North Korea started the war and would have finished it with a brutal tyranny over the entire Korean peninsula, if it weren't for the direct intervention of a superpower. It wasn't solely North Korea's fault. They had considerable help from the USSR and China.
But to cast blame on South Korea because they did evil things that were irrelevant to North Korea's interests? Well, I guess they showed weakness by not invading first with a superior force, so sure, let's blame the South Koreans too.
Two centuries isn't that long in the grand scheme of things.
It's long for democracies. Older than the UK, for example.
If America will last longer than other democracies, I doubt it is because they had better democratic systems, but rather better UN-democratic practices that rig the game and exploit general voter ignorance and apathy. Printing the world's primary reserve currency and having the biggest guns also help.
It's not worth arguing that. In some sense, things like the Bill of Rights are undemocratic. But if the system is based on pulling the wool over voters' eyes, it's not going to stay a democracy. It's also worth noting that the US didn't have the the primary reserve currency and biggest guns for most of its lifespan. That's a very recent thing.
Not that longevity is a good metric for determining whether you are still had and practiced the democracy and freedom that you pioneered.
It is for determining how stable the system is.