Also in rural areas, vermin control is often most easily achieved by the judicious application of a piece of lead and a bit of smokeless powder.
Yep, nothing like a tech-9 with the anti-fingerprint finish to frighten off wayward bears or nail a rabbit now and then. Of course, some folks are partial to sawed-off full-auto AK-47s with the long clip, others like the old-fashioned snub-nosed 10-foot-accuracy-range.38 revolver. Matter of taste, I guess.
The most interesting part of this review are doom's confessions and attitudes.
I was surprised that the data doesn't seem to support private ownership of guns as a crime deterrent.
Presumably it never occurred to him to think beyond "Me have gun, nobody now hurt me."
the difference between a poison and a medicine is often a matter of dosage... If something is not crazy, just not established, I would be inclined to award it "0 cuckoos," aka "Why not?"
This is little more than a magical-religious belief. doom believes it for no other reason than that it seems to have a nice ring to it, a sort of symmetry. Some homeopathic schools take it to the next step, claiming that if a high dose of a poison is bad, a low dose must be good. Equally preposterous. doom's follow up reasoning is a nightmare. He is essentially telling us that if something is not established, we should consider believing in it anyway. I hope he doesn't have an Ameritrade account, for his own sake.
doom, please forgive me for giving you a hard time, but come on! Wars have been started over strong, unquestioned beliefs!
This organic matter would live in a high pressure environment, and when they die, their cells could also be liquified into oil.
Right. By virtue of being alive, the bacteria do not become instantly carbonized by the heat and pressure. And what do they die of, old age? Bacteria divide, remember?
Don't get me wrong, I share the ideals expressed in your sig. It is disheartening, though, to see those very ideals crushed every day on such a vast scale.
The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture.
[Two distinguished elderly gentlemen, sitting at a table in a large, lavish library. Several books are scattered on the table, and each man is poring over a different densely-written tome.
Wilkins: I say, old chap, whatever does the word "fotzenmoldarischkeit" mean?
Billingsley: "Fotzenmoldarischkeit?" Good heavens, what a strange word! I must say, I haven't the foggiest notion. Have you looked in the google.com section, near the catalog?
Wilkins: Yes, I did, and it suggested several articles. Unfortunately, all of the shelves were gone! Ripped quite out of the floor it seems. Not a trace left.
Billingsley: Oh my, how unfortunate. Are you quite sure you looked at the right shelf?
Wilkins: [somewhat irritably] I can assure you, Old Boy, that I am quite capable of searching for a book. Here, I believe I still have the reference...
[Wilkins hands Billingsley a scrap of paper with the call number scrawled on it.]
Billingsley: [squinting through his reading spectacles] Hmm, yes... I see. "h-t-t-p colon slash slash w-w-w dot blackwell dash synergy dot com slash links slash d-o-i slash ten dot eleven eleven slash fourteen sixty-seven slash ninety-two slash..." What's this? Is this "'a' eight s", "'a' eighty two," or "a-b-s"? Here, here, I do believe you may have looked on the wrong shelf. You do know they are not in linear order, don't you?
[Wilkins is making a dour scowl]
Billingsley: The librarians must eliminate shelf fragmentation, Old Boy! "'a' eighty-two may well be on an entirely different floor from "a-b-s!"
[Wilkins snatches the scrap of paper from Billingsley's hand]
Wilkins: Confound it! Why don't they put things together by Topic! Why can't one simply browse through the stacks and find what one needs!
[Wilkin continues to grumble to himself as he ambles off to search for the article]
A rare eloquence, a marvelous economy of words; concise, yet expressive; direct, accessible language equally meaningful to the sage and to the barbarian. Moronic, perhaps, yet clear and precise.
I'm starting to get the impression that there is some sort of major hazard somewhere on the way to Mars. It seems that quite a few probes have been getting so beat up as to be partly or completely inoperable on arrival to Martian orbit.
Does anyone have any hard data on the statistics of spacecraft survival for all known Mars missions? Am I incorrect?
I hate to chime in, because I've been trying to wean myself away from MS Office with OpenOffice and StarOffice, but making charts in the OO spreadsheet is nowhere near as smooth as in the MS equivalent.
For basic documents, though, the WP is OK, and I have made several printable forms with the presentation program.
No, no, no! You've got it all wrong! In order to free people you have to bomb the fuck out of them, take over their natural resources, and make them start a civil war that will tie them up for at least 50 years or so!
Shit, give them free software and you will empower the bastards. Then what will happen? Self-sufficiency? Resourcefulness? Rampant prosperity? You're crazy! They'll turn off their TVs! They'll stop buying worthless shit! They might even decide to take their education into their own hands!
You're wasting your breath. People view it as some kind of cosmic destiny issue, not as a business proposition nor even something that needs to obey the laws of thermodynamics.
we would have to raise $215 billion and not see any return until the year 2015 (our focus was on He3, but I think this'll apply to most any moon mining operation).
Surely nobody uses enough He3 currently to pay for this project. Or [gasp], did it assume a vast He3-consuming fusion energy industry would exist by 2015 that would snap up limitless amounts of expensive He3 from space?
Now, bear with me, this is a tough question: Which is the more expensive process?
Folks, this is pure unadulterated bullshit decorated with fancy trappings. If the Space Resources Roundtable really believes it is commercially viable to bring in mineral ore from the moon, the asteroids, or Mars, then they have pretty much shown us all their cards. Worse if they propose to build the refining infrastructure at an extraterrestrial location (add this comparison to the above two statements). Only a fool could possibly be concerned about their pompous opinions.
I am thankful for the calm and measured tone of your comments, but you are still falling prey to wishful thinking. While technological advances will make possible some things that are practically impossible today, they will not suspend the laws of thermodynamics. It will cost the same amount of energy today, tomorrow, and a thousand years from now to move large masses millions of miles, escape from planetary gravitation, etc. This is a point that believers in human space exploration always gloss over. That cost of entry will not decrease, it will remain the same.
Similarly, my remarks on terraforming Mars are not short-sighted. You may object to them, they may be extremely irritating obstacles, I may resemble some dour-faced accountant in presenting the costs to you, but they are fundamental physical obstacles that will need to be overcome. It is naive and quite frankly superstitious to believe that technological advances will inexorably push them aside. These extremely large monetary, energy, and time costs will not go away merely by Moore's law or constant technological advance.
Extensive bio-engineering could produce radiation hardened people who would not require extensive protection from the environment.
In this argument is a flaw that many people miss. In order for this to occur, one of two things must occur:
Some evolutionary mechanism must be applied to humans to select for the characteristics you describe.
The characteristics must be deliberately and accurately added to the human genome with high a priori confidence that they will have the intended results.
The flaw involves the basic mechanism of evolutionary change. In option one, as you should be aware, those individuals who did not have the intended phenotype must be selected out. That means that at very least they not be allowed to reproduce, and in nature that typically means that they must be allowed an early death. Only those with the desired phenotype would be allowed to survive and reproduce. In this scenario, some sort of iterative genetic engineering scheme would presumably be used. Individuals with the desired phenotype would not only be allowed to survive and reproduce, but they would also be the genetic platform for successive modification. Don't even dream that these changes are achievable in a single generation. Even with active and deliberate modification, it would take hundreds or even thousands of years.
The second option is absurd. It implies we know exactly what to do without ever having done it. Even if it is extensively tested in animals, the technique will be fraught with uncertainty before it is applied to humans. It will be a complex change, very likely involving large numbers of genetic loci, and the perturbations this will cause in the genome, proteome, metabolome, etc. will not even be theoretically modelable for a long time, let alone clinically approved for humans by the FDA or its successors.
In both cases, ethical objections are probably insurmountable, and rightly so for the time being. You might return to your argument that future technological advances will solve the problem, but you gloss over the complex genetic interactions that will vary among different individuals and over time within individuals. It is an NP-complete problem, which may be amenable to technological advances, or may not be.
Finally, I do not oppose space travel. I oppose manned space travel for the foreseeable future. It is wasteful and pointless. All useful and scientifically interesting goals that can be achieved with manned space travel can be achieved more quickly and cheaply with robotic and tele-operated devices. The only exception is the utterly redundant goal of carrying out manned space travel to improve manned space travel. If there is a distant goal of humans traveling to and colonizing extraterrestrial locations, and please bear this in mind in all future discussions of this topic, that goal will be reached if and only if that location has been fully set up and "colonized" by robotic vehicles beforehand, and routine round trips and prolonged stays can be carried out by the machines in a safe and reliable manner.
Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?
Of course it can! All we have to do is convince everyone to learn it in addition to whatever languages they already speak. People will learn it in droves! Everyone will quickly become proficient, damn the effort! All so that we can easily speak to our electronic devices and save those poor natural language parsing software developers from needless effort. Forget all those neural-networks
and whatnot. Let's do it the hard way, like men!
They'll even make movies in Silbo, because everyone will be fluent and will want to completely immerse themselves!
If this is a major factor, then a solution would involve additional language in the contracts to deal with downloadable music. Market price pressure seems strong and downwards, so both the music companies and the artists will likely have a new low-price, low-royalty, high-volume category. This may be a nice silver lining for consumers. Music companies are utterly out to lunch on their idea their product's market value.
What do you folks think? I think the typical CD currently list-priced at $18 or so is really only worth about $2-5, retail. At that price, I would buy much more often than I do now.
the stupid users are too stupid/afraid
the smart users know how to get it for free
Simple. Those two categories account for the tails on either side of the normal curve. They account for a relatively small portion of the area under the curve. The big money is in the middle.
Not only a year behind, but hallmark MS vaporware.
"One of these days we will release Longhorn, and boy oh boy, will it be great! You'll see. For real, Dude, I'm not kidding. I'm totally serious."
"Soon we will have software to control spam and make Outlook stop its automatic execution of worms and viruses. Just you wait, when it comes out, it will be fantastic. Any time now, the clock is counting down. Here it comes! Here it comes! I can almost see it! It's coming...!"
"In the not too distant future, we will have a spectacular piece of software that has something to do with downloading music. Forget what there is now, ours will be vastly better. Not only will you be able to download music, but it will cure all manner of skin eruptions, boils, intestinal inflamation, and hair loss. It will reduce the national debt, and resolve the budget deficits of all states that have them. By using it, users will be guaranteed a robust and exciting love life, and their income will steeply and monotonically increase for the duration of their use of the product. It will bring peace to the middle east, stabilize the situation in Iraq, and allow UN peacekeepers to withdraw from the Balkans. This product will be so spectacular, so brilliant, so innovative, so revolutionary, so holy-fucking-shit awesome, so blah blah blah blah..."
For all the talk of military spending, especially here in SF, it's actually not that big of a budget item.
Ahoy there, Matey! Nearly half of all discretionary spending is "not that big of a budget item"? Spending more on the military than most other nations combined is "not that big of a budget item"?
Excellent job of talking about someone else's remarks. You certainly don't seem to be referring to mine.
And all of your whining about fixing the planet means nothing if we get hit by an asteroid or have some home-grown menace take out a good portion of the population doesn't it?
This coming from a guy who proposes to "populate our own moon." Guess which scenario is less survivable, continuing to survive on earth as we have been ("You know... for a few million years already?"), or living in extremly expensive and vulnerable habitats on the Moon's surface.
Get off your moral high horse and realize that populations will continue to rise, humans will continue to consume, and we are thrashing this planet.
Please point out where I made a moral argument. They were all quite pragmatic. Unlike you, I don't see the destruction of our earthly environment as inevitable. We can very likely manage reasonably well, even at population levels that will likely be reached in the near-term. Of course, we will have to work hard and spend money, but 1) not nearly as much as to colonize the moon or some other extraterrestrial location, and 2) millions or billions of people will benefit. In your plan, we all have to subsidize the survival of a tiny number of people for no compelling reason. And don't give me crap like "it's for the survival of the species." I am arguing for the survival of the species, you are arguing for the survival of some miniscule group of individuals.
Understand that just because human spaceflight is hard is no reason not to do it.
This is hardly my argument. Conversely, you have put forth nothing to justify it. So who's argument is more compelling, mine which is that we should spend our resources to save our planet and our species, or yours that we should spend our resources to see if a tiny number of people can be made to survive for a while on the moon? You didn't even begin to answer any of the practical questions I made in my post.
We don't need to be 100% recyclable, tree hugging, everyone is fed utopians to leave orbit and attempt to survive.
No, but we probably do "need to be 100% recyclable, tree hugging, everyone is fed utopians" to survive here on earth.
Does that mean we should halt our will for survival? You know, the one that has kept us alive for a few million years already? Oh, I am sure YOU feel you are the only capable of judging whether humanity is 'worthy' of getting off the friggin planet, but luckily, you aren't
By proposing that we reorganize our use of our planet's resources I "mean we should halt our will for survival?" Wow, you lost me there, Dude. I can't see how that follows. Where did I erect myself as the person to decide whether humanity was "worthy" of leaving the planet? Again, I made no moral arguments. But rest assured that I will resist wasting our precious resources so that a few lunatics can pretend they are space pilgrims on the moon until they have to be rescued.
The reality is that humans kill, they cheat, they get lazy. Get over it. We'll export that as much as anything else we bring with us.
Not if I have a vote. People who kill and defraud others should be incarcerated. People who are lazy will punish themselves.
Yes, and we spent 770 billion on social security, medicare, and medicaid in 2001 alone. Just remember to keep things in perspective.
What is that supposed to mean? That social security, medicare, and medicaid are more of a waste than the "Defense" Department? Are you somehow claiming that it is money poorly spent? I guess we should stop supporting all those retirees. Let 'em die. Shit, they're old fer chrissakes.
Now, giving away hundreds of billions of dollars as welfare for "defense"-related companies, and subsidizing the conquest of a Third World oil producer for the energy-trading industry, that's money well-spent. We all benefit from that. Plus, we are fighting terrorism! (even though all of the terrorists were somewhere else). We're also fighting for our American Way of Life! (even though that country wasn't a threat to it or us) And finally, we're fighting to establish freedom, liberty, and democracy in the middle east! (even though we support dictatorships like Egypt, and a variety of repressive monarchies where elections are unknown. Hell, we even saved Kuwait from that aforementioned dictatorship, and delivered it safely back into the hands of its King; we were also able to distract people's attention from Saudi support of international terrorism, and make the more gullible among us think 9/11 was the previously mentioned dictator's work)
All at great expense to the US taxpayer. But, as you say, let's keep it all in perspective. We spent 770 billion on social security, medicare, and medicaid in 2001 alone.
All the knowledge we gain (scientific or otherwise) is ultimately tied to the fact that we must eventually leave this world if we are to grow as a species.
This popular gem, held by a great many people, is a patently ridiculous assertion. It is hardly a "fact," it is an arbitrary belief akin to the tenets of many magical-religious cosmologies in which some bountiful, perfect afterlife awaits us after we shed the grim chains of earthly suffering. It is intellectual rubbish. It ignores the physics and chemistry involved in spreading human life to other celestial bodies. It ignores the costs involved, and how the costs of derived products and services will be affected. How much do you think a can of Coke will cost if its aluminum can is made from bauxite mined on a distant asteroid and refined on a hugely expensive space complex? Homeless people who gather aluminum cans for resale would suddenly become aristocrats. How long do you thing it will take to make Mars habitable? How much will it cost? Will we need to bring in water, atmospheric gases, and other materials? From where? Is it even possible to do? Where will the heat and light energy needed to make it earth-like come from? How will we transport any significant fraction of the human population? At what cost, how long will it take, how will they be selected, what will they do there, etc.?
At a deeper level, believing that escape from earth is an ultimate solution distracts us from the pressing need to reorganize human life on earth to make our continued survival here possible. It is doubtful that we can survive as a species on our home planet with our current use of planetary resources. Nevermind the pie-in-the-sky idea of moving to another planet.
Get real, pal. It will be centuries before your magical beliefs can be brought to life, and you must prepare for the distinct possibility that they cannot be carried out in any recognizable way. In either case, we'd better spend our limited resources wisely, and stop believing in fairy tales.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, nothing like a tech-9 with the anti-fingerprint finish to frighten off wayward bears or nail a rabbit now and then. Of course, some folks are partial to sawed-off full-auto AK-47s with the long clip, others like the old-fashioned snub-nosed 10-foot-accuracy-range .38 revolver. Matter of taste, I guess.
I was surprised that the data doesn't seem to support private ownership of guns as a crime deterrent.
Presumably it never occurred to him to think beyond "Me have gun, nobody now hurt me."
the difference between a poison and a medicine is often a matter of dosage... If something is not crazy, just not established, I would be inclined to award it "0 cuckoos," aka "Why not?"
This is little more than a magical-religious belief. doom believes it for no other reason than that it seems to have a nice ring to it, a sort of symmetry. Some homeopathic schools take it to the next step, claiming that if a high dose of a poison is bad, a low dose must be good. Equally preposterous. doom's follow up reasoning is a nightmare. He is essentially telling us that if something is not established, we should consider believing in it anyway. I hope he doesn't have an Ameritrade account, for his own sake.
doom, please forgive me for giving you a hard time, but come on! Wars have been started over strong, unquestioned beliefs!
Right. By virtue of being alive, the bacteria do not become instantly carbonized by the heat and pressure. And what do they die of, old age? Bacteria divide, remember?
This is ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong, I share the ideals expressed in your sig. It is disheartening, though, to see those very ideals crushed every day on such a vast scale.
Sysiphus meets Don Quixote, with Sancho Panza standing to one side, laughing heartily.
Billingsley: "Fotzenmoldarischkeit?" Good heavens, what a strange word! I must say, I haven't the foggiest notion. Have you looked in the google.com section, near the catalog?
Wilkins: Yes, I did, and it suggested several articles. Unfortunately, all of the shelves were gone! Ripped quite out of the floor it seems. Not a trace left.
Billingsley: Oh my, how unfortunate. Are you quite sure you looked at the right shelf?
Wilkins: [somewhat irritably] I can assure you, Old Boy, that I am quite capable of searching for a book. Here, I believe I still have the reference...
Billingsley: [squinting through his reading spectacles] Hmm, yes... I see. "h-t-t-p colon slash slash w-w-w dot blackwell dash synergy dot com slash links slash d-o-i slash ten dot eleven eleven slash fourteen sixty-seven slash ninety-two slash..." What's this? Is this "'a' eight s", "'a' eighty two," or "a-b-s"? Here, here, I do believe you may have looked on the wrong shelf. You do know they are not in linear order, don't you? Billingsley: The librarians must eliminate shelf fragmentation, Old Boy! "'a' eighty-two may well be on an entirely different floor from "a-b-s!" Wilkins: Confound it! Why don't they put things together by Topic! Why can't one simply browse through the stacks and find what one needs!A rare eloquence, a marvelous economy of words; concise, yet expressive; direct, accessible language equally meaningful to the sage and to the barbarian. Moronic, perhaps, yet clear and precise.
Does anyone have any hard data on the statistics of spacecraft survival for all known Mars missions? Am I incorrect?
No, no. You for one welcome our new Nanocyborg Overlords.
For basic documents, though, the WP is OK, and I have made several printable forms with the presentation program.
Shit, give them free software and you will empower the bastards. Then what will happen? Self-sufficiency? Resourcefulness? Rampant prosperity? You're crazy! They'll turn off their TVs! They'll stop buying worthless shit! They might even decide to take their education into their own hands!
STOP!!!
You're wasting your breath. People view it as some kind of cosmic destiny issue, not as a business proposition nor even something that needs to obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Surely nobody uses enough He3 currently to pay for this project. Or [gasp], did it assume a vast He3-consuming fusion energy industry would exist by 2015 that would snap up limitless amounts of expensive He3 from space?
That is patently ridiculous.
- CurrentCost = CheapThirdWorldLabor + SlowCheapTransportation + CostOfThirdWorldInfrastructure + CostOfThirdWorldInsurance
- SpaceMiningCost = CostOfSpaceTransport + CostOfTerrestrialSpaceComplex + CostOfExpensiveLabor + CostOfAstronautTraining + CostOfExtraterrestrialInfrastructure + CostOfExtraterrestrialInsurance
Now, bear with me, this is a tough question: Which is the more expensive process?Folks, this is pure unadulterated bullshit decorated with fancy trappings. If the Space Resources Roundtable really believes it is commercially viable to bring in mineral ore from the moon, the asteroids, or Mars, then they have pretty much shown us all their cards. Worse if they propose to build the refining infrastructure at an extraterrestrial location (add this comparison to the above two statements). Only a fool could possibly be concerned about their pompous opinions.
Similarly, my remarks on terraforming Mars are not short-sighted. You may object to them, they may be extremely irritating obstacles, I may resemble some dour-faced accountant in presenting the costs to you, but they are fundamental physical obstacles that will need to be overcome. It is naive and quite frankly superstitious to believe that technological advances will inexorably push them aside. These extremely large monetary, energy, and time costs will not go away merely by Moore's law or constant technological advance.
Extensive bio-engineering could produce radiation hardened people who would not require extensive protection from the environment.
In this argument is a flaw that many people miss. In order for this to occur, one of two things must occur:
- Some evolutionary mechanism must be applied to humans to select for the characteristics you describe.
- The characteristics must be deliberately and accurately added to the human genome with high a priori confidence that they will have the intended results.
The flaw involves the basic mechanism of evolutionary change. In option one, as you should be aware, those individuals who did not have the intended phenotype must be selected out. That means that at very least they not be allowed to reproduce, and in nature that typically means that they must be allowed an early death. Only those with the desired phenotype would be allowed to survive and reproduce. In this scenario, some sort of iterative genetic engineering scheme would presumably be used. Individuals with the desired phenotype would not only be allowed to survive and reproduce, but they would also be the genetic platform for successive modification. Don't even dream that these changes are achievable in a single generation. Even with active and deliberate modification, it would take hundreds or even thousands of years. The second option is absurd. It implies we know exactly what to do without ever having done it. Even if it is extensively tested in animals, the technique will be fraught with uncertainty before it is applied to humans. It will be a complex change, very likely involving large numbers of genetic loci, and the perturbations this will cause in the genome, proteome, metabolome, etc. will not even be theoretically modelable for a long time, let alone clinically approved for humans by the FDA or its successors.In both cases, ethical objections are probably insurmountable, and rightly so for the time being. You might return to your argument that future technological advances will solve the problem, but you gloss over the complex genetic interactions that will vary among different individuals and over time within individuals. It is an NP-complete problem, which may be amenable to technological advances, or may not be.
Finally, I do not oppose space travel. I oppose manned space travel for the foreseeable future. It is wasteful and pointless. All useful and scientifically interesting goals that can be achieved with manned space travel can be achieved more quickly and cheaply with robotic and tele-operated devices. The only exception is the utterly redundant goal of carrying out manned space travel to improve manned space travel. If there is a distant goal of humans traveling to and colonizing extraterrestrial locations, and please bear this in mind in all future discussions of this topic, that goal will be reached if and only if that location has been fully set up and "colonized" by robotic vehicles beforehand, and routine round trips and prolonged stays can be carried out by the machines in a safe and reliable manner.
Of course it can! All we have to do is convince everyone to learn it in addition to whatever languages they already speak. People will learn it in droves! Everyone will quickly become proficient, damn the effort! All so that we can easily speak to our electronic devices and save those poor natural language parsing software developers from needless effort. Forget all those neural-networks and whatnot. Let's do it the hard way, like men!
They'll even make movies in Silbo, because everyone will be fluent and will want to completely immerse themselves!
If this is a major factor, then a solution would involve additional language in the contracts to deal with downloadable music. Market price pressure seems strong and downwards, so both the music companies and the artists will likely have a new low-price, low-royalty, high-volume category. This may be a nice silver lining for consumers. Music companies are utterly out to lunch on their idea their product's market value.
What do you folks think? I think the typical CD currently list-priced at $18 or so is really only worth about $2-5, retail. At that price, I would buy much more often than I do now.
the smart users know how to get it for free
Simple. Those two categories account for the tails on either side of the normal curve. They account for a relatively small portion of the area under the curve. The big money is in the middle.
"One of these days we will release Longhorn, and boy oh boy, will it be great! You'll see. For real, Dude, I'm not kidding. I'm totally serious."
"Soon we will have software to control spam and make Outlook stop its automatic execution of worms and viruses. Just you wait, when it comes out, it will be fantastic. Any time now, the clock is counting down. Here it comes! Here it comes! I can almost see it! It's coming...!"
"In the not too distant future, we will have a spectacular piece of software that has something to do with downloading music. Forget what there is now, ours will be vastly better. Not only will you be able to download music, but it will cure all manner of skin eruptions, boils, intestinal inflamation, and hair loss. It will reduce the national debt, and resolve the budget deficits of all states that have them. By using it, users will be guaranteed a robust and exciting love life, and their income will steeply and monotonically increase for the duration of their use of the product. It will bring peace to the middle east, stabilize the situation in Iraq, and allow UN peacekeepers to withdraw from the Balkans. This product will be so spectacular, so brilliant, so innovative, so revolutionary, so holy-fucking-shit awesome, so blah blah blah blah..."
Of course, you'll have to wait a year.
Ahoy there, Matey! Nearly half of all discretionary spending is "not that big of a budget item"? Spending more on the military than most other nations combined is "not that big of a budget item"?
And all of your whining about fixing the planet means nothing if we get hit by an asteroid or have some home-grown menace take out a good portion of the population doesn't it?
This coming from a guy who proposes to "populate our own moon." Guess which scenario is less survivable, continuing to survive on earth as we have been ("You know... for a few million years already?"), or living in extremly expensive and vulnerable habitats on the Moon's surface.
Get off your moral high horse and realize that populations will continue to rise, humans will continue to consume, and we are thrashing this planet.
Please point out where I made a moral argument. They were all quite pragmatic. Unlike you, I don't see the destruction of our earthly environment as inevitable. We can very likely manage reasonably well, even at population levels that will likely be reached in the near-term. Of course, we will have to work hard and spend money, but 1) not nearly as much as to colonize the moon or some other extraterrestrial location, and 2) millions or billions of people will benefit. In your plan, we all have to subsidize the survival of a tiny number of people for no compelling reason. And don't give me crap like "it's for the survival of the species." I am arguing for the survival of the species, you are arguing for the survival of some miniscule group of individuals.
Understand that just because human spaceflight is hard is no reason not to do it.
This is hardly my argument. Conversely, you have put forth nothing to justify it. So who's argument is more compelling, mine which is that we should spend our resources to save our planet and our species, or yours that we should spend our resources to see if a tiny number of people can be made to survive for a while on the moon? You didn't even begin to answer any of the practical questions I made in my post.
We don't need to be 100% recyclable, tree hugging, everyone is fed utopians to leave orbit and attempt to survive.
No, but we probably do "need to be 100% recyclable, tree hugging, everyone is fed utopians" to survive here on earth.
Does that mean we should halt our will for survival? You know, the one that has kept us alive for a few million years already? Oh, I am sure YOU feel you are the only capable of judging whether humanity is 'worthy' of getting off the friggin planet, but luckily, you aren't
By proposing that we reorganize our use of our planet's resources I "mean we should halt our will for survival?" Wow, you lost me there, Dude. I can't see how that follows. Where did I erect myself as the person to decide whether humanity was "worthy" of leaving the planet? Again, I made no moral arguments. But rest assured that I will resist wasting our precious resources so that a few lunatics can pretend they are space pilgrims on the moon until they have to be rescued.
The reality is that humans kill, they cheat, they get lazy. Get over it. We'll export that as much as anything else we bring with us.
Not if I have a vote. People who kill and defraud others should be incarcerated. People who are lazy will punish themselves.
Duh, yeah! Let's all get in like a big rocket an' shit? an' den go to like a planet an' shit? Dat would be like y'know cool an' shit?
My dear Sir! If only the total cost was a mere $200 billion!
Sigh.
[gaze wanders off of into the distance, just a hint of tears wells up in his eyes]
What is that supposed to mean? That social security, medicare, and medicaid are more of a waste than the "Defense" Department? Are you somehow claiming that it is money poorly spent? I guess we should stop supporting all those retirees. Let 'em die. Shit, they're old fer chrissakes.
Now, giving away hundreds of billions of dollars as welfare for "defense"-related companies, and subsidizing the conquest of a Third World oil producer for the energy-trading industry, that's money well-spent. We all benefit from that. Plus, we are fighting terrorism! (even though all of the terrorists were somewhere else). We're also fighting for our American Way of Life! (even though that country wasn't a threat to it or us) And finally, we're fighting to establish freedom, liberty, and democracy in the middle east! (even though we support dictatorships like Egypt, and a variety of repressive monarchies where elections are unknown. Hell, we even saved Kuwait from that aforementioned dictatorship, and delivered it safely back into the hands of its King; we were also able to distract people's attention from Saudi support of international terrorism, and make the more gullible among us think 9/11 was the previously mentioned dictator's work)
All at great expense to the US taxpayer. But, as you say, let's keep it all in perspective. We spent 770 billion on social security, medicare, and medicaid in 2001 alone.
This popular gem, held by a great many people, is a patently ridiculous assertion. It is hardly a "fact," it is an arbitrary belief akin to the tenets of many magical-religious cosmologies in which some bountiful, perfect afterlife awaits us after we shed the grim chains of earthly suffering. It is intellectual rubbish. It ignores the physics and chemistry involved in spreading human life to other celestial bodies. It ignores the costs involved, and how the costs of derived products and services will be affected. How much do you think a can of Coke will cost if its aluminum can is made from bauxite mined on a distant asteroid and refined on a hugely expensive space complex? Homeless people who gather aluminum cans for resale would suddenly become aristocrats. How long do you thing it will take to make Mars habitable? How much will it cost? Will we need to bring in water, atmospheric gases, and other materials? From where? Is it even possible to do? Where will the heat and light energy needed to make it earth-like come from? How will we transport any significant fraction of the human population? At what cost, how long will it take, how will they be selected, what will they do there, etc.?
At a deeper level, believing that escape from earth is an ultimate solution distracts us from the pressing need to reorganize human life on earth to make our continued survival here possible. It is doubtful that we can survive as a species on our home planet with our current use of planetary resources. Nevermind the pie-in-the-sky idea of moving to another planet.
Get real, pal. It will be centuries before your magical beliefs can be brought to life, and you must prepare for the distinct possibility that they cannot be carried out in any recognizable way. In either case, we'd better spend our limited resources wisely, and stop believing in fairy tales.