I don't think we even disagree - I'm onboard with the idea that space exploration is an investment in knowledge that's totally worth making.
Colonization is something totally different. A colony either has to become self-sufficient or be permanently subsidized by the mother planet. And both the initial establishment and operating costs are likely to be so high that they dwarf any potential return on the investment.
Taxpayers and/or investors ain't coughing up for "because it's there"
Maybe so, but the people who'd benefit are not the people who would have to pay for the project... so again, taxpayers/investors aren't paying for that.
Name them. Bear in mind that Mars is made of iron oxide and silicates, which can be obtained cheaply on earth.
Curiosity can be satisfied with probes.
Not even the US has been able to afford anything like this so far. There's approximately zero probability that any other country or even group of countries would commit the resources.
Look, I get it. Colonizing Mars would be really cool. But it would also cost a fuck-ton of money, and no one has it.
All the robots in the world won't accomplish the end goal for expanding the human species. While useful precursors and tools, in the end, we need to learn how people can live outside of our biosphere, and learn by doing. Antarctica, the Mars Society desert research station and the ISS are getting us there, but we need to keep pushing the boundaries. At least if one agrees that colonization is a worthwhile goal.
Yes, but what if I don't agree that colonization is a worthwhile goal? How will you convince me?
Everyone seems to just accept space colonization as an end in itself, without any thought of why you'd want to do it (given the enormous cost).
Right, but sending Spirit and Opportunity were pretty cheap. Sending people (and their associated life support equipment) is staggeringly more expensive. You get more bang for the buck with the rovers.
I have the right to live (or die) on my own as I see fit. e.g. If I wish to kill my lungs (smoking), my liver (drinking), that alone is my choice. I don't of course. I wish others didn't either, but that is THEIR right (and choice.) The fact that you are blind to the other side of the equation demonstrates you have this have the false belief that morality of soceity is "absolute" -- it is not, it is relative. Any _truely_ free society does not have right to impose only one set of group consensus of morals onto others -- who determines what is "right" ?
So, you're planning on paying for the full cost of this trip to Mars? No? You want it funded by the taxpayers? Well, here's the answer to your final question then - the taxpayers will determine what's right.
If you want to throw your life away on a self-financed trip to Mars, knock yourself out. But if society's paying for it, society will decide whether it's moral.
Of course, you could play other volunteers with you, as long as some enterprising game company (no pun intended) allowed you to run a server there.
Currently It costs $10k/kg to get something to low earth orbit. I'm guessing $50 or $100k to get a kilogram to Mars. I don't think you'll be bringing a game server.
People today spend decades in solitary confinement and come out relatively unscathed.
Not so much. The attached link is one example, and there are many others that show that solitary confinement is extremely psychologically damaging.
There is too much mollycoddling and emphasis placed today on psychological wellbeing
Dude, it's not about touchy-feely being nice to everybody. It's about the mission - if your crew goes crazy either while en route or on the planet due to inattention to their psychological well-being, the mission is probably not going to be a success. Mental health is part of overall health, and it matters to mission accomplishment.
It's just a matter of effort to move to Mars. It should be done, and the sooner the better.
This is a classic statement. Why should it be done? It would be staggeringly expensive and fairly dangerous. And what's the payoff?
And blow off the "why". What possible reason is there to colonize Mars? Actually, an even better question is this: how can colonizing Mars pay off? Bear in mind that it would cost billions or even trillions of dollars to get a colony established on Mars. Also bear in mind that Mars is mostly made of iron oxide and silicates - just like earth. Leave aside the enormous initial investment, how would you even recover operating costs? There is literally nothing you could produce on Mars and deliver to markets on earth that you couldn't source more cheaply on earth.
Investors and/or taxpayers would have to shell out staggering amounts of money to make this happen... what's in it for them?
Whether leaving everything behind to move to Mars is morally good or bad is sort of beside the point. It's about the mission: GP's point is that people actually willing to do this likely are motivated by personality traits that would unfit them for success - perhaps these folks are antisocial, and the mission would require living in close proximity to others? I have no idea whether this is true or not, but it at least seems plausible. And this is a dynamic that wasn't in play in the Curies.
... not Paul Krugman. As best I can tell, this classic quote came from a blogger identified as Kung Fu Monkey. You also see it all over the internet, usually unattributed, but all the attributions I've found have been to KFM. If anyone has attributed it to Krugzilla, I can't find it.
... is one in which a gunman starts shooting people in a public place, and comes under fire from one or more "good guy" bystanders in the crowd. The argument from gun ownership proponents is that this situation would be better than the default (in which the gunman is the only one doing the shooting). My argument is that it would be worse, because of the likelihood of even more danger to innocent bystanders (plus: what the hell are responding law enforcement people supposed to do in this situation? Just shoot everyone?).
There are states pretty free of gun regulations and shootouts like you imagine don't seem to occur.
True but irrelevant. What you're saying is that most people aren't, in fact, running around carrying pistols in the hopes of defeating gunmen. My point is that if they did start doing that, we'd be worse off and not better.
Being killed by a driver pursued by police is a far more immediate threat, for example.
Also true but irrelevant. Getting killed in a shootout in a grocery store is statistically fantastically improbable. I am, in fact, a lot more worried about dying in some form of a car wreck than I am about getting shot. But it's still true that having lots of people running around with guns makes me MORE likely to get shot, not less.
yes, sure, because their reactions would be so fast that they'd see the attacker drawing, identify the situation, draw their own weapons and shoot the attacher before the attacker gets a round off.
Not to mention the fact that having a whole bunch of people shooting at each other in a crowded grocery store is not necessarily an improvement over one guy shooting in a crowded grocery store. Did the GP ever stop to think that the good guys' bullets keep traveling? And said supporters would probably never mistake a guy reaching for his cellphone for a gunman, right?
Look, I'm a gun owner and I'm not in favor of taking away everyone's guns. But the idea that what we ought to do to be safer is have a whole bunch of random schmoes running around carrying pistols everywhere quite frankly terrifies me.
Well, guns in Sweden are mostly hunting weapons. We don't have concealed semi-automatic weapons. Semi-automatic or fully automatic weapons generally have only one intended use, and that is to kill people
That comes as a great surprise to me, as I used a semi-automatic weapon just this morning to kill some ducks. Oddly, that's the purpose the manufacturer (Remington) intended this model (SP-10) to be used for.
Let's not make semi-automatic weapons to be some kind of extra super-scary weapons that only murderers use - they're routinely used for hunting, for example. And it's not like banning them would really solve anything - this guy could have fired just as quickly and hit just as many people with a pair of revolvers.
Ad hominem arguments aside, you've unconsciously revealed the real issue here: colonization of other planets is utterly infeasible in the absence of magic. The only way it becomes even remotely economically feasible is to postulate the existence of some kind of magical technology (such as anything that would let us cheaply transport the huge quantities of required stuff across interplanetary space) that would make it feasible. Just getting to low-earth orbit currently costs around $10k/kg. Slashing that by a factor of 10 would be an amazing feat (Falcon 9 heavy, if it's successfully deployed, would come in around $3.5k/kg to LEO) - and would still leave colonization of the solar system hopelessly expensive.
And there's nothing to suggest that any such magical technology is coming - there aren't even any promising lines of research. SpaceX is basically just improving the efficiency of existing concepts, and is unlikely to produce any order of magnitude improvements in cost. The so-called "space elevator" is total pie-in-the-sky. Nuclear rockets are hideously expensive in their own right and are political non-starters in any case. And there simply isn't anything else even being discussed.
Throw in the fact that other bodies in the solar system are made of the same stuff as the earth (silicates, ferrous metals, etc), and the answer is obvious. There's no reason to colonize other planets. The stuff about "infinite solar power" is nothing more than a red herring - we have infinite solar power right here. There's no need to go a quarter of the way across the solar system to get it.
You can't be serious. We've got effectively infinite solar power on Earth, and we're not using it... because it's kind of expensive even when you live right next to the solar panel factory. If you had to fly the solar panels 70 million miles, the cost would be right out the window.
But they already have a Dropbox-like service - iDisk. It's not as good as Dropbox, but it's pretty Dropbox-like.
it seems reasonable for Apple to fully integrate MobileMe into the next version of OS X
I'm not sure how much more integrated it could get. iDisks mount up just like local disks. MobileMe mail is integrated w/ Mail.app. Galleries goes hand-in-hand w/ iPhoto. Etc.
Considering the upload speed and reliability of typical residential broadband, I also don't see what the cloud offers end users at this point beyond limited storage and syncing. Anything else would raise privacy concerns, waste bandwidth, and—perhaps most importantly—detract from the "native app experience" that Apple so cares about.
I'm with you on this one. I'm on a FiOS connection, and I still wouldn't want to have to pull major parts of my OS and/or applications over the "wire" every time I booted up. That's nuts.
... had luxuries like air, water, and at least some food available for free on-site. Even much more hospitable places than Mercury had to be forcibly colonized (Australia, anyone?). I think the GP is pretty much right on target.
Sure, that'd be cost effective. All you'd have to do is build a planet-wide rail network from 70 million miles away. Then keep the part of the tracks exposed to the sun for months at a time from melting. No problem.
Here's a thought: if you want to colonize some other planet, why not pick one that stays cooler than, say, molten lead?
... is that it's not what's on the phone itself, it's what the phone gets you access to - all your online accounts. Just reading the phone's memory isn't going to provide that.So they still need the court order to do any serious digging... at least so far.
... because if they're in a Faraday cage while they are looking through your phone, they're only seeing what's on the phone, not trolling through your Exchange/MobileMe/Dropbox/Flickr/etc accounts stored in the "cloud". And if they take the phone out of the cage to look at that stuff, the remote wipe kicks in.
Google broken? It doesn't seem like it to me - most of the time the results I get are pretty relevant - and the few that aren't stand out enough that I rarely click on them. Maybe I'm not searching for highly profitable search terms? I know I'm not that interested in mesothelioma, for one thing.
A prime example of this kind of thing: the theory of continental drift. Wegener proposed it sometime around WWI, but it wasn't accepted by the geology community until around the 60's. There were a couple of reasons for this - among them: Wegener was unable to identify a mechanism for the movement of the continents, but even after a full-fledged theory of plate tectonics came out around 1959, the whole thing was pretty much laughed off for years. The other big reason to dismiss Wegener: he wasn't a geologist by trade, and after all, how could he know anything about the topic?
If blackbirds in my part of the world are anything to go by, they don't flock much, at least not in large numbers like other birds. So several thousand blackbirds falling out of the sky in the same area is just strange to me, but blackbirds elsewhere could behave differently?
Not sure where you live, but it does seem to be the case that blackbirds behave differently depending on where they live:
Red-winged Blackbirds in the northern reaches of the range are migratory, spending winters in the southern United States and Central America. Migration begins in September or October, but occasionally as early as August. In western and middle America, populations are generally non-migratory.
Slashdot Mirror
Taxpayers ain't paying for "because it's there".
I don't think we even disagree - I'm onboard with the idea that space exploration is an investment in knowledge that's totally worth making.
Colonization is something totally different. A colony either has to become self-sufficient or be permanently subsidized by the mother planet. And both the initial establishment and operating costs are likely to be so high that they dwarf any potential return on the investment.
Look, I get it. Colonizing Mars would be really cool. But it would also cost a fuck-ton of money, and no one has it.
Yes, but what if I don't agree that colonization is a worthwhile goal? How will you convince me?
Everyone seems to just accept space colonization as an end in itself, without any thought of why you'd want to do it (given the enormous cost).
Right, but sending Spirit and Opportunity were pretty cheap. Sending people (and their associated life support equipment) is staggeringly more expensive. You get more bang for the buck with the rovers.
So, you're planning on paying for the full cost of this trip to Mars? No? You want it funded by the taxpayers? Well, here's the answer to your final question then - the taxpayers will determine what's right.
If you want to throw your life away on a self-financed trip to Mars, knock yourself out. But if society's paying for it, society will decide whether it's moral.
Currently It costs $10k/kg to get something to low earth orbit. I'm guessing $50 or $100k to get a kilogram to Mars. I don't think you'll be bringing a game server.
Not so much. The attached link is one example, and there are many others that show that solitary confinement is extremely psychologically damaging.
Dude, it's not about touchy-feely being nice to everybody. It's about the mission - if your crew goes crazy either while en route or on the planet due to inattention to their psychological well-being, the mission is probably not going to be a success. Mental health is part of overall health, and it matters to mission accomplishment.
This is a classic statement. Why should it be done? It would be staggeringly expensive and fairly dangerous. And what's the payoff?
And blow off the "why". What possible reason is there to colonize Mars? Actually, an even better question is this: how can colonizing Mars pay off? Bear in mind that it would cost billions or even trillions of dollars to get a colony established on Mars. Also bear in mind that Mars is mostly made of iron oxide and silicates - just like earth. Leave aside the enormous initial investment, how would you even recover operating costs? There is literally nothing you could produce on Mars and deliver to markets on earth that you couldn't source more cheaply on earth.
Investors and/or taxpayers would have to shell out staggering amounts of money to make this happen... what's in it for them?
Whether leaving everything behind to move to Mars is morally good or bad is sort of beside the point. It's about the mission: GP's point is that people actually willing to do this likely are motivated by personality traits that would unfit them for success - perhaps these folks are antisocial, and the mission would require living in close proximity to others? I have no idea whether this is true or not, but it at least seems plausible. And this is a dynamic that wasn't in play in the Curies.
... not Paul Krugman. As best I can tell, this classic quote came from a blogger identified as Kung Fu Monkey. You also see it all over the internet, usually unattributed, but all the attributions I've found have been to KFM. If anyone has attributed it to Krugzilla, I can't find it.
... is one in which a gunman starts shooting people in a public place, and comes under fire from one or more "good guy" bystanders in the crowd. The argument from gun ownership proponents is that this situation would be better than the default (in which the gunman is the only one doing the shooting). My argument is that it would be worse, because of the likelihood of even more danger to innocent bystanders (plus: what the hell are responding law enforcement people supposed to do in this situation? Just shoot everyone?).
True but irrelevant. What you're saying is that most people aren't, in fact, running around carrying pistols in the hopes of defeating gunmen. My point is that if they did start doing that, we'd be worse off and not better.
Also true but irrelevant. Getting killed in a shootout in a grocery store is statistically fantastically improbable. I am, in fact, a lot more worried about dying in some form of a car wreck than I am about getting shot. But it's still true that having lots of people running around with guns makes me MORE likely to get shot, not less.
Not to mention the fact that having a whole bunch of people shooting at each other in a crowded grocery store is not necessarily an improvement over one guy shooting in a crowded grocery store. Did the GP ever stop to think that the good guys' bullets keep traveling? And said supporters would probably never mistake a guy reaching for his cellphone for a gunman, right?
Look, I'm a gun owner and I'm not in favor of taking away everyone's guns. But the idea that what we ought to do to be safer is have a whole bunch of random schmoes running around carrying pistols everywhere quite frankly terrifies me.
That comes as a great surprise to me, as I used a semi-automatic weapon just this morning to kill some ducks. Oddly, that's the purpose the manufacturer (Remington) intended this model (SP-10) to be used for.
Let's not make semi-automatic weapons to be some kind of extra super-scary weapons that only murderers use - they're routinely used for hunting, for example. And it's not like banning them would really solve anything - this guy could have fired just as quickly and hit just as many people with a pair of revolvers.
Ad hominem arguments aside, you've unconsciously revealed the real issue here: colonization of other planets is utterly infeasible in the absence of magic. The only way it becomes even remotely economically feasible is to postulate the existence of some kind of magical technology (such as anything that would let us cheaply transport the huge quantities of required stuff across interplanetary space) that would make it feasible. Just getting to low-earth orbit currently costs around $10k/kg. Slashing that by a factor of 10 would be an amazing feat (Falcon 9 heavy, if it's successfully deployed, would come in around $3.5k/kg to LEO) - and would still leave colonization of the solar system hopelessly expensive.
And there's nothing to suggest that any such magical technology is coming - there aren't even any promising lines of research. SpaceX is basically just improving the efficiency of existing concepts, and is unlikely to produce any order of magnitude improvements in cost. The so-called "space elevator" is total pie-in-the-sky. Nuclear rockets are hideously expensive in their own right and are political non-starters in any case. And there simply isn't anything else even being discussed.
Throw in the fact that other bodies in the solar system are made of the same stuff as the earth (silicates, ferrous metals, etc), and the answer is obvious. There's no reason to colonize other planets. The stuff about "infinite solar power" is nothing more than a red herring - we have infinite solar power right here. There's no need to go a quarter of the way across the solar system to get it.
You can't be serious. We've got effectively infinite solar power on Earth, and we're not using it... because it's kind of expensive even when you live right next to the solar panel factory. If you had to fly the solar panels 70 million miles, the cost would be right out the window.
But they already have a Dropbox-like service - iDisk. It's not as good as Dropbox, but it's pretty Dropbox-like.
I'm not sure how much more integrated it could get. iDisks mount up just like local disks. MobileMe mail is integrated w/ Mail.app. Galleries goes hand-in-hand w/ iPhoto. Etc.
I'm with you on this one. I'm on a FiOS connection, and I still wouldn't want to have to pull major parts of my OS and/or applications over the "wire" every time I booted up. That's nuts.
... had luxuries like air, water, and at least some food available for free on-site. Even much more hospitable places than Mercury had to be forcibly colonized (Australia, anyone?). I think the GP is pretty much right on target.
Sure, that'd be cost effective. All you'd have to do is build a planet-wide rail network from 70 million miles away. Then keep the part of the tracks exposed to the sun for months at a time from melting. No problem.
Here's a thought: if you want to colonize some other planet, why not pick one that stays cooler than, say, molten lead?
... is that it's not what's on the phone itself, it's what the phone gets you access to - all your online accounts. Just reading the phone's memory isn't going to provide that.So they still need the court order to do any serious digging... at least so far.
... the passcode is a four digit number. It certainly would be possible for them to just brute-force it.
... because if they're in a Faraday cage while they are looking through your phone, they're only seeing what's on the phone, not trolling through your Exchange/MobileMe/Dropbox/Flickr/etc accounts stored in the "cloud". And if they take the phone out of the cage to look at that stuff, the remote wipe kicks in.
Google broken? It doesn't seem like it to me - most of the time the results I get are pretty relevant - and the few that aren't stand out enough that I rarely click on them. Maybe I'm not searching for highly profitable search terms? I know I'm not that interested in mesothelioma, for one thing.
A prime example of this kind of thing: the theory of continental drift. Wegener proposed it sometime around WWI, but it wasn't accepted by the geology community until around the 60's. There were a couple of reasons for this - among them: Wegener was unable to identify a mechanism for the movement of the continents, but even after a full-fledged theory of plate tectonics came out around 1959, the whole thing was pretty much laughed off for years. The other big reason to dismiss Wegener: he wasn't a geologist by trade, and after all, how could he know anything about the topic?
Not sure where you live, but it does seem to be the case that blackbirds behave differently depending on where they live:
More at Wikipedia.
For what it's worth, I've seen these things in huge flocks in winter. The rest of the year they're fairly solitary.