So how do you imagine that miners on Mars will be competitive without actually having mining equipment? Do you think that they can make a go of it by fashion crude picks and shovels form the Martian regolith and hammering away?
Have you ever attempted manual labour in a space suit? There's a reason why robots are favoured for that sort of thing.
In my post above I made mention of the orders of magnitude difference between the cost and the benefit for mining on Mars - disregarding the enormous cost of having humans do it (which is no longer economically viable on Earth, let alone Mars). I'm not advocating remote mining: it's just far more realistic than having humans do it.
Deflection. The question was, in construction and research on ISS, do they use the available human labour, or do they send robots to do it? Of course robots are used where there aren't humans, but that's not the topic of discussion; we're talking about a world where there's a human settlement on Mars. You're arguing that robots outcompete humans in a space environment where humans are. Well, we have precisely one space environment where humans are - ISS. Where are all of the robots outcompeting them?
The robots that are outcompeting them are on Mars, and orbiting Jupiter taking pictures, oh, and orbiting the earth transmitting signoals around and doing science and stuff.
The best numbers I could find is that the annual cost of the ISS is $US6B, with 0.5B allocated to keeping it up there. This leaves $5.5B as the cost of manning it with humans, and supplying their needs, medical supplies, entertainment, warmth, oxygen, water, etc. The ISS is not self sustaining - and Surprise! a Mars colony will not be either - Musk estimates a million people as the requirement for it to be self sustaining, and this assumes you could convince a million people to move there, once the initial excitement dies off, and this is completely delusional, unless there is something to motivate people to want to live there.
1. Excitement - no, you'll spend your Mars days inside avoiding the radiation and the depressurization risk
2. Money - Nope, no way to make money off going to Mars, no commodities, no industry, no economy, not enough population for a services industry
3. Glory - you're joking aren't you? Nobody is going to remember the 4027th person to travel to Mars.
4. Exploration - Nope, already fully mapped and analysed by the MRO (a robot).
Have you seen how slow Mars rovers move and how carefully they have to weigh each action, in an environment where if you mess up, there's nobody there to rescue / repair you? Have you seen how much maintenance and consumables is involved in mining?
The concept that "robots will do everything" is simply not realistic.
Show a little imagination and optimism. With this technology, we could avoid all of the downsides of sending humans to Mars at all. You get your minerals, and nobody is condemned to a miserable life on a frigid, lifeless, airless, irradiated ghetto. How is that not a good outcome for everyone?
Do robots do everything for the astronauts on the ISS? Of course not; the astronauts there are basically glorified construction workers and lab techs. Why?
The ISS is just floating there doing nothing. Meanwhile, robots are exploring the outer reaches of the solar system. Landing on Titan. Snapping pictures of Pluto. lassooing comets. Why do we send robots instead of humans? Because they are better.
It's certainly an arguable point as to whether it's worth the cost sending humans in the first place - but once they're there, there's no debate at all about whether it's cheaper to use their labour or to engineer, build, and send robots to do the same task.
No that's right, there is no debate - robots win every time.
Commodities that you dig up (apart from the problem of how machinery of that size could be transported to Mars) don't require humans to be on site. Even on earth, on site presence of humans is kept to an absolute minimum. So if some consortium wanted to transport minerals or bulk stone from Mars, and they are somehow able to overcome the negative cost:benefit ratio (still orders of magnitude away) then they don't seme to have any reason to rely on a Mars Colony.
1. They don't have to ask the mars colony for permission to mine remotely
2. The colony could probably not reach any veins of interesting minerals because there are no roads, energy is limited, you can't fly (without air) and you can't camp remotely because of the need for pressurized vessels to live in and the radiation levels which require shielding, They are really limited to the area that they could walk or drive to in a day (say 250 km^2).
3. A mine remote from the colony has no reason to be financially attached to the colony, and earth resident company could run the whole thing from earth. so they don't need to pay the colony any money.
All in all that suggests the human colonists aren't going to be competitive with robotic miners, and thus can't make money by mining.
Perhaps a new colony forced to live in a very special environment will create a civilization that places value and wealth on working together in order to survive to achieve the ultimate goal of exploration for a generation or three.
There has to be a reason why, in the long term, people would want to live on Mars. After a few thousand people have done it, it loses it's novelty - like flying has lost it's novelty and now relies on the utility of traveling quickly from place to place to be viable.
There isn't a rush to live in the earth's remote places - the Simpson desert, or on oil rigs, or remote islands off the coast of Antarctica. That's because once the novelty of remoteness dies off, people need other motivators to live there.
Those motivators are missing for Mars, which is a far less friendly place than a desert or remote island.
If loan providers have no way to collect in the event you default, then they aren't likely to loan you the millions required for a ticket - and you aren't going.
Most women on earth don't want to have 5 babies - let's assume they wouldn't on Mars either, Also, it's unclear that it's possible to gestate in that environment, large doses of radiation and a low G environment do not sound favourable, plus the dangers associated with being 80 (hard) days away from medical facilities, most women would probably forgo that option.
I'd agree that large numbers of colonists would be problematic. There is no way to generate income, because Mars has no industry, no supply chain, no primary industry, no financial sector, no plausible services industry, and no chance of being able to trade with the Earth. Economically, it's a basket case. It will costs millions of dollars to transport a colonist there - money which, presumably they will need to find themselves, which means they will be heavily in debt.
Which then means after the initial flights, nobody is going to preference Mars over Earth, with all of it's abundant opportunities.
The closest would be the death zone close to the summit of Everest or K2 (without the stunning views). Once in the death zone, you start dying and keep dying until you come back down the slope.
Why doesn't either side stop the wars that were going on when they took power? How is that not a valid question?
Well, if we are being honest you said (I quote) But Trump hasn't gotten a good portion of the world mired in failed countries at war. When it comes to war, Hillary is probably to the right of any previous president, including W. by which we should be able to assume that you could speak to question of how this could be, if Bush started a war (on false pretenses) that Trump approved, in which a million people died, and Hillary didn't start any wars, and neither did Obama, and neither Obama, nor Hillary boasted (as Trump did) of their plans to kill millions more innocent people by nuking them.
It seems to me (and correct me if I'm reading this wrong) that the distinction seems more like the Republicans and their nuke obsessed warmongering candidate Donald Trump are the ones with blood on their hands, not the other way round, as you confidently asserted.
How is running guns into war zones to fight a proxy war in Syria not the same as Vietnam?
It's different in any number of ways, but most pertinently, nobody detonated a nuclear missile over Hanoi - mostly because they knew it would be a monumental mistake. Luckily, Trump wasn't around at the time.
Tridents have selective yields. In other words, adjustable. Starting in 2001, the British ones were able to go from 0.3 ktons to 100 ktons yield. ). 0.3 ktons is much less than North Korea's nukes. There's no reason to believe the US doesn't have similar capability.
If they do have this capability, then it isn't public knowledge. The British Tridents use a different warhead, and their nuclear strategy is quite different to the US, who have actual tactical warheads that they can attach to a cruise missile or drop from a plane without having to worry about the extremely negative consequences of lighting an SLBM and having that signature show up on various screens and dealing with the tense discussions that happen afterward.
If US Tridents have such a capability (an upgrade targeting package and the ability to only light one or two of the IRVs) then they aren't saying, and fair enough, which brings us back to Donald.
If Donald meant his reference to the trident to mean this, then he is deliberately exposing details of the Trident's capabilities that are probably classified. Is he an enemy of the United States? Or is he just an arsehole that likes to shoot his mouth off? I find that concept very ironic, given that he condemned Hillary for emails that someone else sent her and none of which exposed the US to harm, and here he is, harming the US to make himself look gangsta. What a dickhead!
No, most likely he meant it as read. He meant a Trident at full power, doing what it does best, detonating over Mosul or Palmyra or Raqqa and incinerating 100s of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent Syrians or Iraqis. When he says he's going to "bomb the sh*t out of them" to use his words he doesn't mean to distinguish between ISIS and innocent people: as the analyst says (in the article I posted: "Trump’s plan to use thermonuclear weapons against ISIS-held areas such as the Syrian city of Al-Raqqah would result in an astronomically high number of civilian casualties, according to CNN military analyst Peter Mansoor. “Al-Raqqah alone has a population of over two hundred-thousand people, the vast majority of whom are not affiliated in any way with the Islamic State,” Mansoor said. “A strike of this magnitude would not only result in the loss of millions of innocent lives and infrastructure, but it would set diplomacy and stability in the region back at least a hundred years.”
What a guy!
Why do you think Japan wants to start building nukes?
I mean, robots are no where near performing on the same level as humans when it comes to ingenuity and ability to come up with and implement ad hoc fixes to problems that no one could even imagine before launch of the mission.
Without humans, the mission is less complex so the risk of some problem occurring is much less.
But putting that question aside, the problem with robotic missions is that they will never get the same sort of funding as human missions.
But that just begs the question: why should we fund such a mission in the first place? The robotic mission is justified by science and our desire to explore new places. Arguable, of course, not everybody agrees that those goals are worth the spend, but let's say we agree that they are. Having the exploration craft carry a human along does nothing to further that cause, anymore than the cause is furthered by having the craft carry a bag of random meats, or a monkey that urinates on everything. Good for a laugh maybe - but we could explore more, and longer, and also go to far more interesting places for the same amount of spend.
Once we have this capability, we can easily send lots of robotic and scientific payload along with humans -- it amounts to simply using the same payload delivery system that we are developing for humans anyway.
But again, why send a human? Why not a cow, or a peacock?
On the other side, if there is no ambition to fly humans to Mars, then no one will develop these capabilities. There is simply no funding for a system that delivers 10 tons of cargo onto the surface of Mars, unless it can also deliver humans, and bring them back safely. So we cannot send big robotic missions to Mars.
We can if we want. But honestly, Mars is a bit boring, and we also know a great deal about it already. We have the opportunity to go to interesting places instead, why not do that?
Human missions generate lots of excitement, lots of excitement leads to lots of funding.
No, they don't.
There is a little excitement but it's confined to a small circle that happens to hang around in places like Slashdot. That might trick you into thinking this is a bigger deal than what it is.
In the end, I think human spaceflight has been largely defunded because nobody can explain why we are doing it in terms that don't sound religious. Sorry, but perhaps the lack of funding is rational and not some mistake because congressman are fat and lazy.
Robotic missions can never be on par with human missions in terms of how much excitement, and thus funding they can raise.
You are presupposing the people who currently don't care one way or the other will suddenly get excited for some reason.
Perhaps, in the end, we need a better reason than a dog and pony show.
Both sides have started stupid wars. The question is, why does the other party, after denouncing them, not get the f*ck out?
Nope, that's not the question. The question is (a) Why did the Republicans start a war in Iraq on false pretenses and kill a million Iraqis? Who benefited? Did Trump himself benefit? (b) Why does Trump claim that he did not support the war at the time when we have recordings of him saying that he did? Was he lying then, or now? (c) Why are the Republicans trying to blame someone else for the butchery that they committed?
Killing a few thousand with a tactical nuke to wipe out a threat is peanuts in comparison.
Trump used the words 'Trident' and 'submarine'. The Trident is an ICBM. It is not a tactical nuke. He (Trump) readily assented to the estimate that millions would be killed. See the link I posted.
Or better yet, just get the hell out of the middle east. Get out of the middle east, and let them kill each other off.
In which case, I don't get why you are voting for Trump. He is a 'boots on the ground' guy. He says he plans to send in troops - again. Unless he is lying?
Why does everyone keep saying Russia works with Trump? I have yet to see anything along those lines other than a couple of comments from Trump about Putin.
Pretty sure the US Bill of Rights says that a court of law is required to make that judgement, not a 2 bit shitposter on./
Same sort of court of law that found Trump guilty.
. I'd literally rather have a monkey as POTUS than Hillary.
A monkey would make a better (less offensive) president than Trump. Less, err, unpredictable: and no monkey has ever expressed an intent to kill millions. Nor are monkeys as sleazy - no monkey has ever settled a sexual harassment suit out of court, afaik.
Seeing as the person he is running against said tens of millions of US citizens are deplorable, irredeemable, racists.
Stop lying.
What she actually said was:“you could put Trump’s supporters in two big baskets. They’re what I call the deplorables. The racists and the haters and the people who are drawn because they think he can somehow restore an America that no longer exists.”
And that is:... true. A proportion of Trumps supporters do support him for exactly that reason. She is telling it like it is.
Apparently Trumps supporters don't like people telling it like it is when the telling doesn't match with their own internal fantasies.
If they aren't embarrassed by the things Trump says and does, and by the fact that they had no-one, not one person, in the ranks of the party that they thought was better qualified to lead the party and the country then Donald Trump, they surely wouldn't be embarrassed by the release of schedules or private emails.
How can the private things be MORE embarrassing then the dirty laundry of Donald's mouth? That just boggles the mind.
Every few days we hear of another republican disowning him and his bizzarro worldview. What could be said that's more embarrassing?
So, are there references for when Obama said that being unpredictable was good in a n unclear stand off?
Is there a quote form Mitt Romney saying that Japan and South Korea should develop nuclear weapons?
Is there a quote from Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or indeed any of the other Republican candidates, saying the it's inevitable that Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons and nothing can be done about it?
He probably has broken the law - the other day I heard him spruiking his business interests at a media event supposedly for him to renounce his previous claims about Obama and his place of birth - in my country there are laws to prevent conflicts of interest, which it seems there aren't in the US otherwise he would certainly have broken those laws. And there are ongoing investigations into his business connections which, if the allegations are true, would dwarf Clintons wrongdoings.
But regardless, there are worse things than breaking the law. His attitudes on nuclear prolifieration, in particular, his suggestion that South Korea and Japan ought to acquire nuclear weapons, his attitude that nothing can or should be done to ensure that Wahabbists (like ISIS) do not acquire nuclear weapons. His refusal to rule out detonating nuclear weapons in Europe, His claim that being unpredictable is a good approach in a nuclear standoff.
There was talk amongst Republicans that Trump might be suffering from a mental illness. He appears to genuinely believe he is qualified to lead a country.
I'm not a fan of Hillary by any means. But she doesn't seem to be doing or planning or saying anything that would materially damage or embarrass the United States, if she were elected. Trump seems to embarrass and denigrate the country every time he opens his mouth.
I remember a decade and a half ago there were scandals where false Global Warming data had been spread around.
It happened more recently than that of course. Not so long ago (last year), on this site I had a guy claiming that there was no warming and pasted a link to a data site (woodfortrees.org) to prove it. Of course his link was carefully constructed to exclude regions where the warming signal was more obvious - in other words, he concealed the truth. Which did make me think how (or if) he actually believed there was no warming if he went to that much trouble to conceal the warming signal?
I disagree though, that this ought to make me distrust the science. Yep, there's lots of liars out there. Plenty of the top level operatives (e.g. Judith Currie, Anthony Watts) are sponsored by PR companies to spread "a difference version of the truth" (in other words, lies) but how does that actually impugn the science of climate at all? It sounds counterintuitive to me, that the existence of bodies who are paid to disguise the facts actually means the facts themselves are in doubt.
That's a reasonable assumption. The hat seems to choose based on fairly arbitrarily set criteria (it's a hat, after all, and not that smart). Unfortunately old Godric might have been a noble fellow, but he obviously didn't see that every character type has it's strengths and weaknesses:
1. "Boldness" = tendency towards callousness and bullying (G)
2. "Loyalty" = low self esteem (H)
3. "Wits" = Arrogance, aloofness,lack of empathy (R)
4. "Ambition" = Egomania
If each person had been placed with others who would balance out those weaknesses, they would all have been better off. I recall that someone in the book said something to that extent toward the end: 800 years too late, IMO.
Of course the books are written from a Gryffindor perspective which tends to frown upon the ambition and rule-bendiness of the Slytherins and downplay the fact that the Gryffindors like to bully people e.g. secretly poison people for the laffs, or lock a guy in a cupboard for 6 months or so. Hilarious - I wonder how his parent's felt?
So you are not interested. That is you. It might be boring to you, but it has a lot of real estate to explore in the search for exobiology and experimentation to try adapting earth based organisms.
It has about 4 sq metres of real estate to explore. More, if you are motivated to dig more. And slime and mould will grow find on Mars: mystery solved. Feel to watch that mould grow to you hearts content.
I could keep myself quite interested.
Sure. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. For six months. And then do the same on Mars.
No accounting for what it takes to amuse some people.
As for being bored on the trip, you do realize that at one time it took two months to make it from Spain to the New World. That was with limited provisions and a much larger crew with far less entertainment options.
What new world are you referring to?
Making the trip is possible in 150 days. Preventing getting bored requires a mirror of Netflix, Hulu, Wikipedia and people that are no so prone to attention deficit as you.
Right, so you plan is to watch Netflix for six months on the way to Mars, then watch Netflix for 6 months while you are there (plus the occasional digging and unblocking. And then, what? Watch Netflix for six months on the way back?
That's just great. Except from my perspective, we could achieve the same ends without you ever leaving your house. So the is NO WAY that we are going to pay for your little cheeto's fueled excursion. You want to commute to Mars and back watching Netflix for the duration? That's fine, but you can pay for it.
We are not all so broken.
You want spend six months nauseated in a tin can watching Netflix, then six months cowering underground watching Netflix, and then six months in the vomit can again, watching Netflix. Because to you, this represents an animated diversion from your ordinary life.
I have no conception of how boring and tedious your life must be.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever attempted manual labour in a space suit? There's a reason why robots are favoured for that sort of thing.
In my post above I made mention of the orders of magnitude difference between the cost and the benefit for mining on Mars - disregarding the enormous cost of having humans do it (which is no longer economically viable on Earth, let alone Mars). I'm not advocating remote mining: it's just far more realistic than having humans do it.
Deflection. The question was, in construction and research on ISS, do they use the available human labour, or do they send robots to do it? Of course robots are used where there aren't humans, but that's not the topic of discussion; we're talking about a world where there's a human settlement on Mars. You're arguing that robots outcompete humans in a space environment where humans are. Well, we have precisely one space environment where humans are - ISS. Where are all of the robots outcompeting them?
The robots that are outcompeting them are on Mars, and orbiting Jupiter taking pictures, oh, and orbiting the earth transmitting signoals around and doing science and stuff.
The best numbers I could find is that the annual cost of the ISS is $US6B, with 0.5B allocated to keeping it up there. This leaves $5.5B as the cost of manning it with humans, and supplying their needs, medical supplies, entertainment, warmth, oxygen, water, etc. The ISS is not self sustaining - and Surprise! a Mars colony will not be either - Musk estimates a million people as the requirement for it to be self sustaining, and this assumes you could convince a million people to move there, once the initial excitement dies off, and this is completely delusional, unless there is something to motivate people to want to live there.
1. Excitement - no, you'll spend your Mars days inside avoiding the radiation and the depressurization risk
2. Money - Nope, no way to make money off going to Mars, no commodities, no industry, no economy, not enough population for a services industry
3. Glory - you're joking aren't you? Nobody is going to remember the 4027th person to travel to Mars.
4. Exploration - Nope, already fully mapped and analysed by the MRO (a robot).
Have you seen how slow Mars rovers move and how carefully they have to weigh each action, in an environment where if you mess up, there's nobody there to rescue / repair you? Have you seen how much maintenance and consumables is involved in mining?
Do these look like Mar's rovers to you?
The concept that "robots will do everything" is simply not realistic.
Show a little imagination and optimism. With this technology, we could avoid all of the downsides of sending humans to Mars at all. You get your minerals, and nobody is condemned to a miserable life on a frigid, lifeless, airless, irradiated ghetto. How is that not a good outcome for everyone?
Do robots do everything for the astronauts on the ISS? Of course not; the astronauts there are basically glorified construction workers and lab techs. Why?
The ISS is just floating there doing nothing. Meanwhile, robots are exploring the outer reaches of the solar system. Landing on Titan. Snapping pictures of Pluto. lassooing comets. Why do we send robots instead of humans? Because they are better.
It's certainly an arguable point as to whether it's worth the cost sending humans in the first place - but once they're there, there's no debate at all about whether it's cheaper to use their labour or to engineer, build, and send robots to do the same task.
No that's right, there is no debate - robots win every time.
1. They don't have to ask the mars colony for permission to mine remotely
2. The colony could probably not reach any veins of interesting minerals because there are no roads, energy is limited, you can't fly (without air) and you can't camp remotely because of the need for pressurized vessels to live in and the radiation levels which require shielding, They are really limited to the area that they could walk or drive to in a day (say 250 km^2).
3. A mine remote from the colony has no reason to be financially attached to the colony, and earth resident company could run the whole thing from earth. so they don't need to pay the colony any money.
All in all that suggests the human colonists aren't going to be competitive with robotic miners, and thus can't make money by mining.
Perhaps a new colony forced to live in a very special environment will create a civilization that places value and wealth on working together in order to survive to achieve the ultimate goal of exploration for a generation or three.
There has to be a reason why, in the long term, people would want to live on Mars. After a few thousand people have done it, it loses it's novelty - like flying has lost it's novelty and now relies on the utility of traveling quickly from place to place to be viable.
There isn't a rush to live in the earth's remote places - the Simpson desert, or on oil rigs, or remote islands off the coast of Antarctica. That's because once the novelty of remoteness dies off, people need other motivators to live there.
Those motivators are missing for Mars, which is a far less friendly place than a desert or remote island.
If loan providers have no way to collect in the event you default, then they aren't likely to loan you the millions required for a ticket - and you aren't going.
I'd agree that large numbers of colonists would be problematic. There is no way to generate income, because Mars has no industry, no supply chain, no primary industry, no financial sector, no plausible services industry, and no chance of being able to trade with the Earth. Economically, it's a basket case. It will costs millions of dollars to transport a colonist there - money which, presumably they will need to find themselves, which means they will be heavily in debt.
Which then means after the initial flights, nobody is going to preference Mars over Earth, with all of it's abundant opportunities.
The closest would be the death zone close to the summit of Everest or K2 (without the stunning views). Once in the death zone, you start dying and keep dying until you come back down the slope.
Sure - why not? The arguments for humans apply just as much to cows, or fish, or parrots.
Why doesn't either side stop the wars that were going on when they took power? How is that not a valid question?
Well, if we are being honest you said (I quote) But Trump hasn't gotten a good portion of the world mired in failed countries at war. When it comes to war, Hillary is probably to the right of any previous president, including W. by which we should be able to assume that you could speak to question of how this could be, if Bush started a war (on false pretenses) that Trump approved, in which a million people died, and Hillary didn't start any wars, and neither did Obama, and neither Obama, nor Hillary boasted (as Trump did) of their plans to kill millions more innocent people by nuking them.
It seems to me (and correct me if I'm reading this wrong) that the distinction seems more like the Republicans and their nuke obsessed warmongering candidate Donald Trump are the ones with blood on their hands, not the other way round, as you confidently asserted.
How is running guns into war zones to fight a proxy war in Syria not the same as Vietnam?
It's different in any number of ways, but most pertinently, nobody detonated a nuclear missile over Hanoi - mostly because they knew it would be a monumental mistake. Luckily, Trump wasn't around at the time.
Tridents have selective yields. In other words, adjustable. Starting in 2001, the British ones were able to go from 0.3 ktons to 100 ktons yield. ). 0.3 ktons is much less than North Korea's nukes. There's no reason to believe the US doesn't have similar capability.
If they do have this capability, then it isn't public knowledge. The British Tridents use a different warhead, and their nuclear strategy is quite different to the US, who have actual tactical warheads that they can attach to a cruise missile or drop from a plane without having to worry about the extremely negative consequences of lighting an SLBM and having that signature show up on various screens and dealing with the tense discussions that happen afterward.
If US Tridents have such a capability (an upgrade targeting package and the ability to only light one or two of the IRVs) then they aren't saying, and fair enough, which brings us back to Donald.
If Donald meant his reference to the trident to mean this, then he is deliberately exposing details of the Trident's capabilities that are probably classified. Is he an enemy of the United States? Or is he just an arsehole that likes to shoot his mouth off? I find that concept very ironic, given that he condemned Hillary for emails that someone else sent her and none of which exposed the US to harm, and here he is, harming the US to make himself look gangsta. What a dickhead!
No, most likely he meant it as read. He meant a Trident at full power, doing what it does best, detonating over Mosul or Palmyra or Raqqa and incinerating 100s of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent Syrians or Iraqis. When he says he's going to "bomb the sh*t out of them" to use his words he doesn't mean to distinguish between ISIS and innocent people: as the analyst says (in the article I posted: "Trump’s plan to use thermonuclear weapons against ISIS-held areas such as the Syrian city of Al-Raqqah would result in an astronomically high number of civilian casualties, according to CNN military analyst Peter Mansoor. “Al-Raqqah alone has a population of over two hundred-thousand people, the vast majority of whom are not affiliated in any way with the Islamic State,” Mansoor said. “A strike of this magnitude would not only result in the loss of millions of innocent lives and infrastructure, but it would set diplomacy and stability in the region back at least a hundred years.”
What a guy!
Why do you think Japan wants to start building nukes?
They don't.
Destroying the enemy is the only form of self-d
I mean, robots are no where near performing on the same level as humans when it comes to ingenuity and ability to come up with and implement ad hoc fixes to problems that no one could even imagine before launch of the mission.
Without humans, the mission is less complex so the risk of some problem occurring is much less.
But putting that question aside, the problem with robotic missions is that they will never get the same sort of funding as human missions.
But that just begs the question: why should we fund such a mission in the first place? The robotic mission is justified by science and our desire to explore new places. Arguable, of course, not everybody agrees that those goals are worth the spend, but let's say we agree that they are. Having the exploration craft carry a human along does nothing to further that cause, anymore than the cause is furthered by having the craft carry a bag of random meats, or a monkey that urinates on everything. Good for a laugh maybe - but we could explore more, and longer, and also go to far more interesting places for the same amount of spend.
Once we have this capability, we can easily send lots of robotic and scientific payload along with humans -- it amounts to simply using the same payload delivery system that we are developing for humans anyway.
But again, why send a human? Why not a cow, or a peacock?
On the other side, if there is no ambition to fly humans to Mars, then no one will develop these capabilities. There is simply no funding for a system that delivers 10 tons of cargo onto the surface of Mars, unless it can also deliver humans, and bring them back safely. So we cannot send big robotic missions to Mars.
We can if we want. But honestly, Mars is a bit boring, and we also know a great deal about it already. We have the opportunity to go to interesting places instead, why not do that?
Human missions generate lots of excitement, lots of excitement leads to lots of funding.
No, they don't.
There is a little excitement but it's confined to a small circle that happens to hang around in places like Slashdot. That might trick you into thinking this is a bigger deal than what it is. In the end, I think human spaceflight has been largely defunded because nobody can explain why we are doing it in terms that don't sound religious. Sorry, but perhaps the lack of funding is rational and not some mistake because congressman are fat and lazy.
Robotic missions can never be on par with human missions in terms of how much excitement, and thus funding they can raise.
You are presupposing the people who currently don't care one way or the other will suddenly get excited for some reason.
Perhaps, in the end, we need a better reason than a dog and pony show.
Both sides have started stupid wars. The question is, why does the other party, after denouncing them, not get the f*ck out?
Nope, that's not the question. The question is (a) Why did the Republicans start a war in Iraq on false pretenses and kill a million Iraqis? Who benefited? Did Trump himself benefit? (b) Why does Trump claim that he did not support the war at the time when we have recordings of him saying that he did? Was he lying then, or now? (c) Why are the Republicans trying to blame someone else for the butchery that they committed?
Killing a few thousand with a tactical nuke to wipe out a threat is peanuts in comparison.
Trump used the words 'Trident' and 'submarine'. The Trident is an ICBM. It is not a tactical nuke. He (Trump) readily assented to the estimate that millions would be killed. See the link I posted.
Or better yet, just get the hell out of the middle east. Get out of the middle east, and let them kill each other off.
In which case, I don't get why you are voting for Trump. He is a 'boots on the ground' guy. He says he plans to send in troops - again. Unless he is lying?
Why does everyone keep saying Russia works with Trump? I have yet to see anything along those lines other than a couple of comments from Trump about Putin.
I suspect the payment of 12.7M by Russia to Trumps Campaign Manager Paul Manaforte and the subsequent removal of the arming of the Ukraine from the RNC platform might have something to do with it.
She was accused of a crime. The OP said "she is a criminal". What is that ripping sound I hear?
They just have the clout to not get arrested like the rest of us.
Yes yes. It's all a big conspiracy - presumably the knights templar and the masons are involved as well.
Hillary is objectively a criminal.
Pretty sure the US Bill of Rights says that a court of law is required to make that judgement, not a 2 bit shitposter on ./
Same sort of court of law that found Trump guilty.
. I'd literally rather have a monkey as POTUS than Hillary.
A monkey would make a better (less offensive) president than Trump. Less, err, unpredictable: and no monkey has ever expressed an intent to kill millions. Nor are monkeys as sleazy - no monkey has ever settled a sexual harassment suit out of court, afaik.
So: you go ahead and vote for the monkey.
Not the best choice? Neither candidate is trustworthy, but Trump hasn't gotten a good portion of the world mired in failed countries at war.
Trump heads the political party that started those wars, and he is their elected candidate. He supported those wars.
His plan at the moment is to kill millions of innocent people with trident missiles fired from submarines in the persian gulf.
Unless he is lying?
Seeing as the person he is running against said tens of millions of US citizens are deplorable, irredeemable, racists.
Stop lying.
What she actually said was:“you could put Trump’s supporters in two big baskets. They’re what I call the deplorables. The racists and the haters and the people who are drawn because they think he can somehow restore an America that no longer exists.”
And that is: ... true. A proportion of Trumps supporters do support him for exactly that reason. She is telling it like it is.
Apparently Trumps supporters don't like people telling it like it is when the telling doesn't match with their own internal fantasies.
I'm not an American, so I won't be voting for either, but it does seem that (a) most of the stories about Hillary, if not all of them, are just shitposts by whiners who can't speak intelligently to problems with her policy direction, and (b) Trump has no clue how to lead a country, and no idea about what to do in complex policy issue like Syria, to the extent that he says whatever comes to mind at the time and he has no regard for whether the things he says are true and accurate, or not.
Just my impression.
If they aren't embarrassed by the things Trump says and does, and by the fact that they had no-one, not one person, in the ranks of the party that they thought was better qualified to lead the party and the country then Donald Trump, they surely wouldn't be embarrassed by the release of schedules or private emails.
How can the private things be MORE embarrassing then the dirty laundry of Donald's mouth? That just boggles the mind.
Every few days we hear of another republican disowning him and his bizzarro worldview. What could be said that's more embarrassing?
Is there a quote form Mitt Romney saying that Japan and South Korea should develop nuclear weapons?
Is there a quote from Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or indeed any of the other Republican candidates, saying the it's inevitable that Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons and nothing can be done about it?
He probably has broken the law - the other day I heard him spruiking his business interests at a media event supposedly for him to renounce his previous claims about Obama and his place of birth - in my country there are laws to prevent conflicts of interest, which it seems there aren't in the US otherwise he would certainly have broken those laws. And there are ongoing investigations into his business connections which, if the allegations are true, would dwarf Clintons wrongdoings.
But regardless, there are worse things than breaking the law. His attitudes on nuclear prolifieration, in particular, his suggestion that South Korea and Japan ought to acquire nuclear weapons, his attitude that nothing can or should be done to ensure that Wahabbists (like ISIS) do not acquire nuclear weapons. His refusal to rule out detonating nuclear weapons in Europe, His claim that being unpredictable is a good approach in a nuclear standoff.
There was talk amongst Republicans that Trump might be suffering from a mental illness. He appears to genuinely believe he is qualified to lead a country. I'm not a fan of Hillary by any means. But she doesn't seem to be doing or planning or saying anything that would materially damage or embarrass the United States, if she were elected. Trump seems to embarrass and denigrate the country every time he opens his mouth.
I remember a decade and a half ago there were scandals where false Global Warming data had been spread around.
It happened more recently than that of course. Not so long ago (last year), on this site I had a guy claiming that there was no warming and pasted a link to a data site (woodfortrees.org) to prove it. Of course his link was carefully constructed to exclude regions where the warming signal was more obvious - in other words, he concealed the truth. Which did make me think how (or if) he actually believed there was no warming if he went to that much trouble to conceal the warming signal?
I disagree though, that this ought to make me distrust the science. Yep, there's lots of liars out there. Plenty of the top level operatives (e.g. Judith Currie, Anthony Watts) are sponsored by PR companies to spread "a difference version of the truth" (in other words, lies) but how does that actually impugn the science of climate at all? It sounds counterintuitive to me, that the existence of bodies who are paid to disguise the facts actually means the facts themselves are in doubt.
And Atheism, which is at least as old.
I expect there are bad eggs in each house.
That's a reasonable assumption. The hat seems to choose based on fairly arbitrarily set criteria (it's a hat, after all, and not that smart). Unfortunately old Godric might have been a noble fellow, but he obviously didn't see that every character type has it's strengths and weaknesses:
1. "Boldness" = tendency towards callousness and bullying (G)
2. "Loyalty" = low self esteem (H)
3. "Wits" = Arrogance, aloofness,lack of empathy (R)
4. "Ambition" = Egomania
If each person had been placed with others who would balance out those weaknesses, they would all have been better off. I recall that someone in the book said something to that extent toward the end: 800 years too late, IMO.
Of course the books are written from a Gryffindor perspective which tends to frown upon the ambition and rule-bendiness of the Slytherins and downplay the fact that the Gryffindors like to bully people e.g. secretly poison people for the laffs, or lock a guy in a cupboard for 6 months or so. Hilarious - I wonder how his parent's felt?
So you are not interested. That is you. It might be boring to you, but it has a lot of real estate to explore in the search for exobiology and experimentation to try adapting earth based organisms.
It has about 4 sq metres of real estate to explore. More, if you are motivated to dig more. And slime and mould will grow find on Mars: mystery solved. Feel to watch that mould grow to you hearts content.
I could keep myself quite interested.
Sure. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. Recline the seat. Return the seat to the upright position. For six months. And then do the same on Mars.
No accounting for what it takes to amuse some people.
As for being bored on the trip, you do realize that at one time it took two months to make it from Spain to the New World. That was with limited provisions and a much larger crew with far less entertainment options.
What new world are you referring to?
Making the trip is possible in 150 days. Preventing getting bored requires a mirror of Netflix, Hulu, Wikipedia and people that are no so prone to attention deficit as you.
Right, so you plan is to watch Netflix for six months on the way to Mars, then watch Netflix for 6 months while you are there (plus the occasional digging and unblocking. And then, what? Watch Netflix for six months on the way back?
That's just great. Except from my perspective, we could achieve the same ends without you ever leaving your house. So the is NO WAY that we are going to pay for your little cheeto's fueled excursion. You want to commute to Mars and back watching Netflix for the duration? That's fine, but you can pay for it.
We are not all so broken.
You want spend six months nauseated in a tin can watching Netflix, then six months cowering underground watching Netflix, and then six months in the vomit can again, watching Netflix. Because to you, this represents an animated diversion from your ordinary life.
I have no conception of how boring and tedious your life must be.