This is getting pointless. Besides the fact that you have openly admitted there are gatekeepers in the financial services industry that are even beyond government control in some cases, there are a whole bunch of presumptions being made with your suggestion that simply wouldn't apply to the WMF, or would take long enough to work their way through the judicial system that more than a few phones in congressional offices would be ringing off the hook to change laws involved.
Besides, you can always go back to cold, hard, cash that can be donated through fundraising efforts of local meet-up groups or other volunteer groups that already do exist, including local WMF chapters that are already officially recognized by the WMF, and then physically move that cash to the WMF offices. This isn't anything like Wikileaks that is explicitly trying to keep from having formal offices in a fixed location.
The legal, political, and public relations consequences to engaging in such an action would set a legal fire up that would burn most career politicans opposing the WMF, and might even take a few judges out with it. Even bringing this issue up shows that you really don't understand political realities here. A legal approach to shutting down the WMF simply won't work. It may have worked in the past, but the WMF and Wikipedia in particular are so ingrained into American society and indeed much of the rest of the world that it can't be taken down through such amateur tactics. The rot must happen from within, not from an external threat to the project.
The whole point of this discussion is how a textbook publisher might get around to shutting down Wikibooks as a project, seeing that it is somehow a threat to their business model. I am declaring that simply can't happen through legal channels as nothing Wikibooks or any other Wikimedia project is doing right now is illegal, and that such laws to make it illegal simply will never be passed or long kept on the books if subversively submitted. You are off on a hypothetical tangent that would have so much else happening that your supposed "shutting down fundraising of the WMF" would not be instantaneous and would completely backfire on anybody even attempting such a stupid thing.
The thing is that it isn't strictly Austrian vs. Keynesian philosophies either. Economics is hardly an exact science, in spite of fancy mathematical formulas and the trappings of what appear to be scientific theories.
From my own review of the field, it seems more stuck in the rough equivalent of alchemy like Chemistry was for a great many centuries as a really sound scientific foundation to the issues involved are not really known or understood. Even stuff like the supply/demand curve thought to be foundational to economics is hardly ever nailed down with real numbers, and basic things like the slope of that curve or any other real mathematical treatment is largely a guess. Most of the time I doubt that a good economist could get a formula to get better than a single digit of accuracy on an economic prediction, where they are considered successful theories if they can even get the number to come out positive or negative accurately. Compare that to a study I saw in astronomy that asserted six digits of accuracy for the mass of a planet found in a solar system 600 light years away. Yes, unusual circumstances for being that good..... but the accuracy has not been challenged by anybody familiar with the measurement techniques.
I'm not saying there haven't been some valiant attempts at establishing that strong foundational theory, but they really aren't there yet.
BTW, the world seemed to do fine before the creation of things like Superfund sites. Still, don't make this sound like I prefer a complete abolition of government entirely. You can hold corporations and even individuals personally liable for damage they cause, and I don't have a problem with laws that require a bond to be used for clean-up depending on what activity they are doing, or even being held in a courtroom to take responsibility for their actions.
No, personal liberty does not mean "corporations polluting and not cleaning up". It implies you have the liberty to take actions without having somebody explicitly forcing you into an action. More along the lines of "thou shalt not" type requirements that tell you what is dangerous and therefore something you shouldn't do, rather than "thou shalt" commandments from a government bureaucrat. I don't even mind laws that say "you can do this, but here is the penalty for this action". Essentially liberty is that you can do whatever you want as long as you are not infringing on the liberties of others.
Contrast that with a somewhat famous saying in the bad old Soviet Union which essentially said "that which is not prohibited is required". Under the old Soviet version of Communism, you were told where to work, what to eat, and often even who to marry. You lacked liberty in almost everything unless you were in the ruling elite... arguably not much different than when serfs served the Czars and his minions.
And that is a difference between what you are suggesting and what is really happening in the EU parliament or even the U.S. Congress how?
At the moment, I have a very hard time distinguishing a "campaign donation" from a flagrant bribe. Rod Blagojevich only made a mistake in terms of appointing the successor to Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate seat representing Illinois because he didn't "mask" the fine details.
At the very least, you would know that the government is bought lock, stock, and barrel rather than having groups leverage funding that is being stolen from citizens at gunpoint.
While taxes certainly are of ancient origin, enough that they are mentioned in the Bible (both Old and New Testament), the nature of taxes has certainly grown to be substantially more complex and the tendency for tax policies to increase in complexity almost as a mathematical law. The original "Code of Hammurabi", including tax code, was written on a stone tablet that could be seen in every Babylonian city and read in a few minutes.
The Internal Revenue Code of the United States, on the other hand, is so impossibly huge that I seriously doubt any single person has ever read the whole thing. Between changes made by Congress, common law rulings in court cases, internal policy making guidelines at the Internal Revenue Service, and executive orders by the White House, I think it is safe to say that no person could even keep up with just the changes being made to that tax code as a full time job. A team of accountants, perhaps... but not a single person.
That says nothing about other kinds of taxes like trying to decypher tables for import tariffs (like a really odd rule that limits the number of wool suits you can import from Hong Kong.... but importing them from Beijing is no problem) and other very odd and some downright weird rules... like calling a network stack protocol driver to be a munition subject to physical inspection. In the past the tables were much, much simpler and didn't go into such fine details to drive you nuts. I think the Byzantium Empire, infamous for its bureaucracy, doesn't hold a candle to most 1st world governments of today.
Really?! Then what is a government supposed to tax. Any economist will tell you that negative externalities are *exactly* what a government is supposed to tax and then use the money to subsidize positive externalities. The government is certainly not the most efficient body in the world, but I'd argue that compensating for externalities should be the government's first priority.
Any economist? Keynesian economists, perhaps, would argue the POV you are espousing right now. Many who follow the Keynesian school of thought are in prominent positions in government power including the current chairman of the Federal Reserve as well as the President of the United States... and several treasury ministers in other countries too. And how they've been handing the economic situation over the past five years or so is supposed to give us confidence that they are doing the right thing and their philosophy is sound?
There are several economic philosophies which do not accept this basic premise you are claiming here, in particular those who follow the Austrian school of thought instead. Most of them feel that personal liberty is far more important than some sort of command economy controlled by some government bureaucrats, because those same bureaucrats simply can never have enough information to make proper decisions in the first place.
At issue here to is a sense of trust on the part of the government towards its citizens. A government which trusts its citizens to do the right thing is by far more likely to give you personal liberties and stay out of your life than a government which wants to monitor every detail in your life and protect you from yourself. Are you sure you want a government sticking its nose into your business, telling you how to live your life?
For myself, several recent hikes in the tax rate for tobacco were very much unwarranted. The only reason they are usually successful is because smokers are increasingly a minority, and one that can't claim such attacks as unfair because somehow the uses of tobacco are somehow "dirty" and therefore socially acceptable.
BTW, this is the same reason for the "tax the rich" suggestions, because "the rich" don't really have much in the way of votes. As long as it is "not me", most people are fine with raising taxes as long as they get the benefits from those taxes. Then again, that is the problem if you are trying to literally hold somebody for ransom at gunpoint to steal their money, and do so legally. Taxation should be viewed as a last resort for government funding precisely because of this problem.
More significantly, any attempt to "help the poor" through tax policies is inevitably going to hurt "the poor" far more through those taxes than if they had never been imposed in the first place. They should be viewed as a "necessary evil", and in some ways I'm not entirely convinced that taxes are even necessary at all. I've heard of proposed government forms that have a constitutional prohibition on any form of taxation, where the government itself is considered a public charity which does fundraising with a model similar to what PBS does right now for television programming. I don't know if such a government would be effective at getting the necessary funds for operations, but if such a government did exist I believe the society under such a government would be one of the most prosperous in human history.
I don't mind fees for services from the government. If you apply for a marriage license, want a health inspection done of a restaurant you own, or in some way employ a government worker, you should be paying for those services rendered. I don't think government would have to be eliminated if taxes didn't exist, but those in charge of government operations would be a whole lot more careful about how the money is spent if they have to literally beg for every penny they get.
I am pretty certain that a legal defense fund could be raised for the WMF if there ever was a need... or even for one of the volunteers in the performance of their assigned duties (assuming that it was pretty straight forward). Once things get settled down, you can also "SLAPP" back and counter-sue for legal costs... refunding anything actually spent plus per diem costs for defendants and other legitimate expenses, not to mention barratry fines The penalty for losing could be pretty bad for somebody trying this to somebody at the WMF.
More to the point, any such lawsuit would get the Barbara Streisand effect for the company making the lawsuit, where the public relations damage alone should be awful enough that anybody stupid enough to try this sort of silly stunt through legal channels might as well be pointing a gun to their own head.
Seriously, a legal approach that would attempt to shut down a Wikimedia project is doomed to failure. Even trying to write a law, at least in America, that would shut it down would be completely ineffective. Simply put, I think you are out to lunch to even suggest it would be possible except for a very narrow issue that wouldn't ever shut the site down.
The licensing issues for computer programs isn't really all that different in terms of the basic copyright laws, but the case history for computer software certainly is quite a bit different.
If anything, I find it a crying shame that cultural works like the original Hunt the Wumpus, Colossal Cave "ADVENT"ure, ELIZA, or Space War wouldn't be considered as seminal and historical in nature as Huck Finn, Tale of Two Cities, or the Gutenberg Bible.
It sounds like this definition was written by people with a decided contempt for folks who write elegant software as a literary form. The only difference is that the grammar is considerably more constrained for computer software, but that still isn't an excuse for it to be treated any different.
I would utterly dare a company, with or without SOPA, to "block" Wikimedia projects and sue the WMF for copyright violations from previous fair-use content plus original content donated to the foundation through open source licenses like the GFDL and CC-by-SA. Seriously, I dare somebody to even try.
Of any on-line community, the Wikimedia projects are among the few that take copyright laws world-wide seriously and I would put them dead last in terms of getting into serious trouble, with ample discussions and prior history showing how they they aggressive steps to remove copyright violations.when found.
What is being suggested here is that somehow publishing companies are going to try some "extra-legal" things like assassinating members of the WMF board or even going after individual Wikimedia contributors. Sure, all of that is illegal as hell, but if you don't want to bother dealing with the law anymore anything is possible. Smashed server farms, deliberate DOS attacks, and other sorts of thuggery might work. An appeal to legal avenues including re-writing laws to kill Wikimedia projects is at this point a futile effort and simply will not work. The WMF may not have a huge amount of money to spend on professional lobbyists, but they can make up for that with a protest in Washington DC that would put to shame most other political movements.... especially if the existence of the WMF projects is on the line.
At this point, the only way to kill the Wikimedia projects is to hire subversive folks to go into the projects, become admins/bureaucrats, and then become deletionist trolls "raising the standards" so virtually nothing new can be added and that 90% of the projects get deleted anyway. I swear that is happening already.
Part of the problem is that I worked for a small engineering company which was subsequently purchased by a multi-national conglomerate that in turn was not very well managed. I loved my local supervisors, but the problems started to come when many of the financial mistakes were dumped onto the division that I worked for (unjustifiably so I might add). That is the reason for the schizophrenic attitude toward documentation, as the goals of the company shifted over time.
The really sad thing about this particular company is that it had a multi-discipline engineering team that could literally build just about anything you could dream up, and a factory on site to even built it. I bet with just a little bit of imagination alone we could have built spacecraft that went to the Moon or Mars, and certainly built other monumental things that I know you have seen over the years. In the process of trying to "re-invent" the company rather than sticking to the core business of what it is we were doing (along with the games being played at the corporate headquarters half a continent away, and eventually on a completely different continent) the entire team was dismissed one by one on grounds like what happened to me, with eventually most of the engineering being "outsourced" to China, India, and other countries.
To me, it was the loss of potential that was simply thrown away, because the real creative drive of that company was thus completely lost. Not so much myself but my co-workers, many of whom were simply amazing in what they were able to accomplish.
The problem is the presumption that the one and only purpose of a corporation is "to maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". Such a statement is commonly found in corporate charters of most for-profit corporations, but I assert that mission statement is not legally required to be in any corporate charter, and that bona fide companies can and do exist which have other purposes for their existance.
What I find sad is that few of those companies with alternative charters which spell out those other purposes are rarely found, or worse yet the corporate charters of those businesses which have alternate purposes are frequently changed to have the "maximize profits" clause put into the charter.
A famous example of a company which most definitely has an alternate charter is Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, which has a significant social activism component in its charter. Even though it is only a subsidiary of a conglomerate at the moment, that social activism component is most definitely still there. "Newman's Own" brand is another very good example. I wish I could use Google as still another example, but their "do no evil" is mixed with the maximize profits motive.
I know photographers who will do more than take hundreds of photos for just 10 that are good. Some of them will literally sit for weeks or even months in the most uncomfortable situations. This particularly famous image is one that the photographer went into a war zone for and through all of the effort only came out with this one photograph (with a whole backstory on even that photo).
The worst bugs I've encountered are compiler bugs. Yes, I've found a few, and it gets to be a real pain in the ass to find those bugs as well, because you go over your software time and time again and never really seeing just what is going on. There was one point that I even dropped into assembly to see what my software was doing op code by op code to make sure it was doing precisely what I wanted it to do, but still couldn't find the bug. I ended up optimizing the software along the way, but it didn't seem to help.
I updated the compiler and the bug went away. If you want to talk about frustrating, try explaining to a supervisor why you spent the past two months banging your head against the wall doing almost nothing else.... because that software was a critical piece for the operation of the business itself and had a multi-million dollar client demanding that it get fixed.
I find that the real documentation of software is more along the lines of documenting software interfaces and APIs (when using linked modules) and even a short description of what the software is even supposed to do in the first place. Nothing is more frustrating than having a disk with a binary that nobody knows what precisely it really does.
Documentation can take a whole bunch of levels, and I'd agree that it is important.
Still, I ended up getting fired from a company because I dared take the step to actually organize the documentation for a whole software development team. Oh, the company executives were all grateful that I bothered to document my software in a clean manner and provide proper references to the software and even put the software components into the company-wide parts system (the company was mainly a hardware company.... putting software into the inventory chain had a unique set of problems). The gratitude was shown by simply showing me the door because I was then dispensable as any other developer could pick up from where I left off.
Only the real truth is that nobody at the company could figure out my inventory system and the documentation just got dumped on the heap with all of the other engineering notes from all of the rest of the stuff done by the company.
Mainly I'd like to point out that documentation is far more than just comments around snippets of code or as headers to functions. Design documents, development notes, meeting minutes (if taken at all), customer requests, contracts, bills of materials (if equipment is needed to use the software), and other aspects are all part of that documentation process.
I would agree... to a point. Much of the "self-documenting" also depends on the programming environment as well, specifically the programming language being used.
For myself, I find that my C/C++ software tends to be much harder to "self document" and takes much longer to get back into if I have put the software off for awhile (say a year or more) to work on other projects, and is much more difficulty to decypher in terms of understanding the code sufficiently to make meaningful bug fixes when it is other software. I don't want to get into holy wars over languages, so I'll leave this be and not note some of my favorite languages. It isn't as bad as Intercal or Malbolge, but then again those languages were deliberately designed to be obfuscated.
My current "favorite" language is Scratch, which sadly is too limited for real work and lacks a decent compiler to improve performance. Even that has documentation problems, however, as the multi-threaded nature of that programming language can do some weird things when you get some complex software going that makes Intercal look like a simple language. Python, Ruby, Object Pascal, and a few other languages are better than average, however, and IMHO much better than C++ for readability and self documenting.
The problem with a satellite having a satellite is rather complicated. It turns out that the Moon has only a very limited number of stable orbits... a fact not discovered until after the Apollo Missions. It turns out that by sheer coincidence one of the "sub-satellites" (a small satellite carried in the Apollo service module for a few of the later flights) just happened to hit one of the ideal orbital inclinations, but there were a couple that didn't and only lasted in orbit around the Moon for just a couple of weeks. The one that was in a pretty stable orbit still only lasted a couple of years before it crashed... although it did reveal some excellent science. The reason for this is "mascons" or mass-concentrations on the surface of the Moon where the actual gravity varies, pushing and pulling the object in orbit. Apparently such features are quite common for smaller bodies, but not so common for larger planets like Mars, the Earth, or Venus.
The other problem is that the gravitational interaction between the various objects. The concept of a Hill Sphere is especially important to consider that the gravitational gradient when close to a large body pushes other things away, or yanks it down into that object. Essentially, if there was another object orbiting one of the moons of other planets in the solar system, it would have been yanked off a long time ago by either another moon, the planet it is orbiting, or other planets as they got close. See also the Three-body problem for additional details.
Interestingly enough for the Moon (aka the "Earth's Moon"), if you view its orbit from a heliocentric POV rather than considering its interaction directly with the Earth, it has its own orbit around the Sun and indeed that orbital path is completely concave in nature... the only "satellite" of any planet in the Solar System to do such a thing. Essentially the Earth and the Moon are just two objects that gravitationally interact with each other as they orbit the Sun together, and from this perspective treating both bodies as a double planet is much more logical. In other words, there are other strong reasons to treat the Moon as a planet.
My largest problem with all of the definitions, however, is that it is a very myopic definition as it only considers planets that orbit the Sun (aka only in this Solar System) to be legitimate planets. I think a more realistic definition of a planet should ignore whatever it happens to be orbiting or even if it is orbiting anything at all (such as drifting through intergalactic space). Physical characteristics of the planet, such as stratification of the planetary core (such happens with Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, and even Titan) as a result of residual heat over a prolonged period of time since planetary formation, an atmosphere (Mercury might have an atmosphere if it was further from the Sun.... perhaps... and it does have a residual atmosphere of sorts), and other significant factors would play into the definition. BTW, such a definition still would likely exclude Pluto, but that one is debatable. I'm fine with the concept of a minor planet, especially if you don't mind lumping in Io, Triton, Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and the Moon into the definition with the Kuiper Belt planets, Pluto, Vesta, and Ceres. All of those are significant bodies in their own right, and likely will be important in some fashion for future human civilizations, so there is a point to such a classification beyond mere ontological discussions. Phobos is clearly not a minor planet, as it is far too small... to give a counter example.
The problem with inaccurate scientific journalism is that sadly political decisions are made for both funding and policy making based upon what gets reported. I won't get into hot-button issues (global-warming, population control, eugenics, etc.) but all of these and much more become a significant issue when it crosses into the political realm. I saw locally (I live in Utah) how the cross between horrible journalism and politics showed up with the "Cold Fusion" reactor by Pons and Fleishmann at the University of Utah ended up getting the state legislature to set up the "Cold Fusion Institute" and slap all sorts of "intellectual property" claims upon everything those guys did. And then watch as the whole thing fizzled away. Say what you might about the concept of Cold Fusion (or "Low energy nuclear reactions" for the politically correct), its intersection with politics was fueled by popular science journalism and I would argue still is to some extent.
The reason for many of the major problems with NASA also has to do with lousy journalism, and to some extent popular media from filmmakers and other media producers who inaccurately portray the problems of spaceflight (both the horrors as well as the challenges). Some of them do pretty good coverage, but not all of them and certainly major events like the lunar landings or early launches have distorted the image of what could really be happening.
I could go on, and it is easy to do so as well, but I think my point is well made. Sensationalizing planetary discoveries beyond what is actually found is also desensitizing the public to what is really something pretty impressive when you dig into it deeper. It seems like every six months or so another planet "more Earth-like" keeps getting discovered. I think at this point if we discovered a planet with a moon having 1/6th of its mass, and that planet covered with a liquid water ocean transmitting the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message back to us with an appendix showing the difference between their planet and the Earth, that the news media would simply say "what, another Earth-like planet?" and ignore the whole thing altogether.
The problem with the Galilean moons is that they are quite close to the host planet, thus inside what could be the equivalent of the Van Allen belts of Jupiter. That is where the deadly radiation comes from, not so much from the planet itself.
I've wondered as a "what if" some large "Earth-sized" body orbiting a gas giant might be like. There have been several gas giants found orbiting stars in their "habitable zones", so the question is no longer merely theoretical in terms of the potential to find such objects. I think you may have something there, where it may even be that such "moons" orbiting gas giants might be more common as "habitable planets" than even solitary planets orbiting a star like the Earth is. If anything, it might even be a fun SF story to speculate how the Earth keeps getting skipped over in galactic surveys because all of the gas giants in our solar system are found to be outside of the habitable zone, thus not really considered a likely candidate for a habitable planet.
Yeah, it will be exciting to see what is currently the great age of planetary discovery. More has been learned about planets over the past 50 years than the whole of history prior to that. I would dare even say that includes the Earth itself, in spite of geological studies done previously. When you have a data set of one it makes comparisons hard to make, but we now have hundreds of planets for comparison... which allows real science to be done when trying to come up with theories on how it all works.
The resources to set up a permanent colony on the Moon will by necessity have to be found on the Moon, or at least from places that have a much shallower gravity well (like an asteroid). To presume that much in the way of materials are going to be coming from the Earth to set up such a colony is utterly absurd.
There will never be something like the Amundsen-Scott Research base set up on the Moon made up of supplies shipped in from a distant source. Oddly enough, even the South Pole base has a greenhouse for growing vegetables and they harvest water from the surrounding environment to take care of daily needs. It could be made more self-sufficient, but for what they do it seems to be enough given what they are trying to accomplish, not to mention the desire to be minimally impacting the environment in Antarctica.
The Moon doesn't have an environment to worry about (not withstanding several environmentalists who have spoken up about potential pollution issues on the Moon from industrial activity there). Many of the raw resources we need can be found on the Moon in abundance, including water, oxygen (in much greater supply), metals of almost every kind you can image, glass, and other resources that are very useful to an advanced industrial society capable of getting to the Moon in the first place. About the only element missing in substantial amounts is Nitrogen, and that can be condensed and shipped with relative ease from the Earth or found elsewhere in the Solar System as well. It is also something that is easily recycled so it doesn't have to be a major issue in terms of setting up that colony.
BTW, I think that the money being spent on underarm deodorant is worth being spent on an ongoing basis as an insurance policy of sorts to expand the reach of humanity. That money is going to be spent on spaceflight efforts anyway, so the issue isn't if it will be spent on some cause that you think is more worthy, but rather if it will be spent making some corporate executives in Chicago or Washington DC fat and happy or if there is going to be some good being done with that kind of money instead. By shooting down a Moon base, you are simply making sure that it just gets swallowed up by government graft and corruption instead of at least some good happening.
I also don't think this is a zero-sum game either. Indeed I think efforts to set up a closed ecology on another planet (using the term very loosely suggesting that the Moon could at least be considered a dwarf planet) would go a long way to understanding what is absolutely essential for biological systems. The research from that effort alone is as likely to help "develop sustaining methods of producing food for impoverished nations" as almost anything else done on the Earth, and I would dare say would be even more productive at achieving that goal than most other efforts in that line of thought. Having to rethink what tools are needed to make tools to make tools that can reproduce themselves is also going to help out in offering those same "self-reproducing tools" for developing countries to build their own infrastructure rather than relying upon the largess of older industrial economies. If anything, I think the money spent on spaceflight (if spent wisely) could be beneficial to even the poorest of people on this planet.
It depends on what you call a planet, as I would call the Earth's Moon to be more accurately described as a dwarf planet than a "moonlet" or something like Phobos or Mimas that clearly don't fit the description of a dwarf planet under any possible definition of the term. As such, if you could call the Moon as a dwarf planet, we have been able to send a crewed expedition in spacecraft to another planet. The technical capability of sending people to other planets in the Solar System (most notably Mars and Venus) really only need somebody to come up with the money or to find a cheaper way to get the task accomplished. The raw engineering needed to accomplish that task is minimal. What has kept NASA from going to Mars and establishing a permanent research base like the Amundsen-Scott base on the South Pole has mainly been the sticker shock of such an operation by the U.S. Congress, on what could arguably be said is the most expensive way to get there.
Every major planet in the Solar system has received a visit by a unmanned probe (most of them by several) and soon every dwarf planet can be added to that profile except for the newly discovered planets in the Kuiper belt along with several comets and asteroids that have have close encounters with man-made artifacts. If you want to focus on Mars, every potential opportunity to use a to get to Mars has been used for some kind of spacecraft over the past decade, and I personally think that will be a permanent condition for as long as humanity exists at this point. It may not be an American spacecraft, but somebody is going to be en route to Mars at every possible opportunity in the future.
Still, I agree with your basic premise. The universe is a vast thing and the distance to other stars is so huge compared to the scale of moving around the solar system that it seems unlikely within this century much less any near term scale that can be measured in historical terms. Perhaps within 10,000 years we might have the technology to actually send somebody to another star and the planets around it, but I wouldn't hold my breath that it would happen either. The solar system around our star will be flooded with people and civilizations before the first real attempts to travel to another star are even attempted.
This is one of the reasons for the Kepler mission, as it is trying to answer this question in particular. What are the possible variations of planets in the universe (especially the Milky Way galaxy) and just how common are smaller planets, as opposed to gas giants? One of the things that Kepler has discovered is that smaller planets seem to be much, much more common in our galaxy than the larger planets, and that planets which have the rough diameter of the Earth may be found in abundance.
BTW, this is one of the reasons I am against the current definition of a planet by the IAU, because the entire definition seems to be completely ignorant of planets that are outside of our little solar system. Using that definition, the only place that a planet can exist is close to our Sun, and it must have that one unique and only star in the universe as the primary gravitational influence for that body. I guess that hammers home that the 700+ "planets" discovered elsewhere really aren't planets at all. Then again, I have argued that the definition of a planet ought to be based upon the physical characteristics of that body and not upon any heliocentric description. I would even argue that Titan (currently termed a "moon" of Saturn) ought to be "promoted" to the status of a planet in its own right with the Galilean moons being termed dwarf planets along with the Moon. Apparently some astronomers have some problems with that.
Still, with that many planets to sift through, it certainly would be useful to try and come up with some sort of systematic way to classify important characteristics of all of those planets, even if only to find out what kind of characteristics are unusual or even if the Earth is a common or rare kind of planet. Based upon the Kepler data, it may be common, but at the moment we really don't know.
I tend to think of the vastness of the universe more toward what the potential of humanity could be rather than how insignificant I am at the moment. I hear comments from others about how there are too many people, that the natural resources are running out, that somehow there is a finite universe confined to the little planet that we live upon, and then realize just how mind boggling vast this universe really is to put things into perspective. We have the potential to at least partially fill this universe with life, and to know that the greatest pieces of music, the greatest architectural achievements, the most amazing scientific accomplishments, are still in the future.
We as a species are just emerging out of our infancy and beginning to see the wonders of what may be, with unfortunately some people who like looking at what we have with the telescope pointing in the wrong direction and those same folks trying to use a telescope as a microscope instead thinking that is all there ever can be.
I do agree that humility is another aspect of this, as I need to be reminded that my little role in what is happening in the grand scheme of things is not really all that important.... other than perhaps I may get an occasional opportunity to influence the lives of others in hopefully a positive way that will inspire them to stretch their potential a little bit more and become something more tomorrow than they are today.
The reason why China has typically not been "the aggressor" is mainly because there was no need: they controlled almost all of the territory, resources, and people that they cared to have. There was the invasion of Japan in 1281 that resulted in a dismal failure (and how the mysticism of the Kamikaze started in Japan) as well as ongoing bumping up against Russia in terms of control of Siberia, but for the most part they have been the top dog in their end of the world holding what amounted to be essentially a monopoly in terms of governance.
BTW, from a Chinese perspective, the invasion of Japan is recent history. They think in terms of millennia and not mere decades for what is history. Furthermore, I wouldn't put China's hands as exactly clean in terms of lack of wars... they just tend to be more territorial in nature and much closer to home. Going to war against Tibet, Vietnam, Russia (more than a few times), Japan, and for that matter even against the United States of America (in Korea) sounds like quite a bit of adventurism. It could even be argued that particular war against America was one that China initiated. And that is just wars involving China in the 20th Century. Their involvement in Afghanistan (which they share a border BTW) is something I suspect but that I don't think the U.S. State Department wants to emphasize.
You completely missed the point I was trying to make, and perhaps I could clarify it a bit. If China wants to be in space, if they want to get something happening, they need to have an operational tempo including financial commitments from the government to make it happen. That financial commitment can happen in a number of ways, but most significantly they need to have a high flight rate doing whatever it is that they are doing.
China isn't doing that at all, and instead this whole thing is just a pure propaganda ploy where I'm not really convinced they even care to get into space at all. They love the idea of being in space and showing their citizens that they are one of the leading nations of the Earth from an economic and scientific viewpoint by being in space, but they aren't showing that they have a commitment to remaining in space and doing things in space. That is my point.
More significantly, China is being a non-player here. With their current operational tempo they will never, and I repeat never become a major player in space. It is more like they are hedging their bets for the future with the thought that there might be a future for humanity in space, but at the moment they are only doing a half hearted attempt at staying in the game. I will acknowledge that China is building the infrastructure to get a space program going, but the launch towers are going to rust to pieces before they get used.
BTW, the comment here is a thinly veiled jab at Charles Bolden and his comments about being more open and friendly to Islamic countries in terms of space policy and in cooperating with countries in the Middle East on projects happening in space. While I can admit I'm disappointed in Obama's space policy on a number of levels (as it is pretty much the very last thing his administration seems to care about), America is going to emerge in the 21st Century as the leading country technologically in part because of what the people of America are doing in space. I am more hopeful than ever that America is going to lead the rest of humanity out to the stars, but it is going to be done in a uniquely American way, rather than trying to get that accomplished through some sort of crash Socialist program paid for at government expense. If anything, I think the Office of Commercial Transportation will become "The Space Agency" in America rather than NASA, and it is just a matter of time before that fact is recognized. I just hope that NASA remains relevant in the future for their own sake.
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This is getting pointless. Besides the fact that you have openly admitted there are gatekeepers in the financial services industry that are even beyond government control in some cases, there are a whole bunch of presumptions being made with your suggestion that simply wouldn't apply to the WMF, or would take long enough to work their way through the judicial system that more than a few phones in congressional offices would be ringing off the hook to change laws involved.
Besides, you can always go back to cold, hard, cash that can be donated through fundraising efforts of local meet-up groups or other volunteer groups that already do exist, including local WMF chapters that are already officially recognized by the WMF, and then physically move that cash to the WMF offices. This isn't anything like Wikileaks that is explicitly trying to keep from having formal offices in a fixed location.
The legal, political, and public relations consequences to engaging in such an action would set a legal fire up that would burn most career politicans opposing the WMF, and might even take a few judges out with it. Even bringing this issue up shows that you really don't understand political realities here. A legal approach to shutting down the WMF simply won't work. It may have worked in the past, but the WMF and Wikipedia in particular are so ingrained into American society and indeed much of the rest of the world that it can't be taken down through such amateur tactics. The rot must happen from within, not from an external threat to the project.
The whole point of this discussion is how a textbook publisher might get around to shutting down Wikibooks as a project, seeing that it is somehow a threat to their business model. I am declaring that simply can't happen through legal channels as nothing Wikibooks or any other Wikimedia project is doing right now is illegal, and that such laws to make it illegal simply will never be passed or long kept on the books if subversively submitted. You are off on a hypothetical tangent that would have so much else happening that your supposed "shutting down fundraising of the WMF" would not be instantaneous and would completely backfire on anybody even attempting such a stupid thing.
The thing is that it isn't strictly Austrian vs. Keynesian philosophies either. Economics is hardly an exact science, in spite of fancy mathematical formulas and the trappings of what appear to be scientific theories.
From my own review of the field, it seems more stuck in the rough equivalent of alchemy like Chemistry was for a great many centuries as a really sound scientific foundation to the issues involved are not really known or understood. Even stuff like the supply/demand curve thought to be foundational to economics is hardly ever nailed down with real numbers, and basic things like the slope of that curve or any other real mathematical treatment is largely a guess. Most of the time I doubt that a good economist could get a formula to get better than a single digit of accuracy on an economic prediction, where they are considered successful theories if they can even get the number to come out positive or negative accurately. Compare that to a study I saw in astronomy that asserted six digits of accuracy for the mass of a planet found in a solar system 600 light years away. Yes, unusual circumstances for being that good..... but the accuracy has not been challenged by anybody familiar with the measurement techniques.
I'm not saying there haven't been some valiant attempts at establishing that strong foundational theory, but they really aren't there yet.
BTW, the world seemed to do fine before the creation of things like Superfund sites. Still, don't make this sound like I prefer a complete abolition of government entirely. You can hold corporations and even individuals personally liable for damage they cause, and I don't have a problem with laws that require a bond to be used for clean-up depending on what activity they are doing, or even being held in a courtroom to take responsibility for their actions.
No, personal liberty does not mean "corporations polluting and not cleaning up". It implies you have the liberty to take actions without having somebody explicitly forcing you into an action. More along the lines of "thou shalt not" type requirements that tell you what is dangerous and therefore something you shouldn't do, rather than "thou shalt" commandments from a government bureaucrat. I don't even mind laws that say "you can do this, but here is the penalty for this action". Essentially liberty is that you can do whatever you want as long as you are not infringing on the liberties of others.
Contrast that with a somewhat famous saying in the bad old Soviet Union which essentially said "that which is not prohibited is required". Under the old Soviet version of Communism, you were told where to work, what to eat, and often even who to marry. You lacked liberty in almost everything unless you were in the ruling elite... arguably not much different than when serfs served the Czars and his minions.
Perhaps the government needs to get out of that business altogether. Are you advocating such a standard?
And that is a difference between what you are suggesting and what is really happening in the EU parliament or even the U.S. Congress how?
At the moment, I have a very hard time distinguishing a "campaign donation" from a flagrant bribe. Rod Blagojevich only made a mistake in terms of appointing the successor to Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate seat representing Illinois because he didn't "mask" the fine details.
At the very least, you would know that the government is bought lock, stock, and barrel rather than having groups leverage funding that is being stolen from citizens at gunpoint.
While taxes certainly are of ancient origin, enough that they are mentioned in the Bible (both Old and New Testament), the nature of taxes has certainly grown to be substantially more complex and the tendency for tax policies to increase in complexity almost as a mathematical law. The original "Code of Hammurabi", including tax code, was written on a stone tablet that could be seen in every Babylonian city and read in a few minutes.
The Internal Revenue Code of the United States, on the other hand, is so impossibly huge that I seriously doubt any single person has ever read the whole thing. Between changes made by Congress, common law rulings in court cases, internal policy making guidelines at the Internal Revenue Service, and executive orders by the White House, I think it is safe to say that no person could even keep up with just the changes being made to that tax code as a full time job. A team of accountants, perhaps... but not a single person.
That says nothing about other kinds of taxes like trying to decypher tables for import tariffs (like a really odd rule that limits the number of wool suits you can import from Hong Kong.... but importing them from Beijing is no problem) and other very odd and some downright weird rules... like calling a network stack protocol driver to be a munition subject to physical inspection. In the past the tables were much, much simpler and didn't go into such fine details to drive you nuts. I think the Byzantium Empire, infamous for its bureaucracy, doesn't hold a candle to most 1st world governments of today.
Really?! Then what is a government supposed to tax. Any economist will tell you that negative externalities are *exactly* what a government is supposed to tax and then use the money to subsidize positive externalities. The government is certainly not the most efficient body in the world, but I'd argue that compensating for externalities should be the government's first priority.
Any economist? Keynesian economists, perhaps, would argue the POV you are espousing right now. Many who follow the Keynesian school of thought are in prominent positions in government power including the current chairman of the Federal Reserve as well as the President of the United States... and several treasury ministers in other countries too. And how they've been handing the economic situation over the past five years or so is supposed to give us confidence that they are doing the right thing and their philosophy is sound?
There are several economic philosophies which do not accept this basic premise you are claiming here, in particular those who follow the Austrian school of thought instead. Most of them feel that personal liberty is far more important than some sort of command economy controlled by some government bureaucrats, because those same bureaucrats simply can never have enough information to make proper decisions in the first place.
At issue here to is a sense of trust on the part of the government towards its citizens. A government which trusts its citizens to do the right thing is by far more likely to give you personal liberties and stay out of your life than a government which wants to monitor every detail in your life and protect you from yourself. Are you sure you want a government sticking its nose into your business, telling you how to live your life?
For myself, several recent hikes in the tax rate for tobacco were very much unwarranted. The only reason they are usually successful is because smokers are increasingly a minority, and one that can't claim such attacks as unfair because somehow the uses of tobacco are somehow "dirty" and therefore socially acceptable.
BTW, this is the same reason for the "tax the rich" suggestions, because "the rich" don't really have much in the way of votes. As long as it is "not me", most people are fine with raising taxes as long as they get the benefits from those taxes. Then again, that is the problem if you are trying to literally hold somebody for ransom at gunpoint to steal their money, and do so legally. Taxation should be viewed as a last resort for government funding precisely because of this problem.
More significantly, any attempt to "help the poor" through tax policies is inevitably going to hurt "the poor" far more through those taxes than if they had never been imposed in the first place. They should be viewed as a "necessary evil", and in some ways I'm not entirely convinced that taxes are even necessary at all. I've heard of proposed government forms that have a constitutional prohibition on any form of taxation, where the government itself is considered a public charity which does fundraising with a model similar to what PBS does right now for television programming. I don't know if such a government would be effective at getting the necessary funds for operations, but if such a government did exist I believe the society under such a government would be one of the most prosperous in human history.
I don't mind fees for services from the government. If you apply for a marriage license, want a health inspection done of a restaurant you own, or in some way employ a government worker, you should be paying for those services rendered. I don't think government would have to be eliminated if taxes didn't exist, but those in charge of government operations would be a whole lot more careful about how the money is spent if they have to literally beg for every penny they get.
I am pretty certain that a legal defense fund could be raised for the WMF if there ever was a need... or even for one of the volunteers in the performance of their assigned duties (assuming that it was pretty straight forward). Once things get settled down, you can also "SLAPP" back and counter-sue for legal costs... refunding anything actually spent plus per diem costs for defendants and other legitimate expenses, not to mention barratry fines The penalty for losing could be pretty bad for somebody trying this to somebody at the WMF.
More to the point, any such lawsuit would get the Barbara Streisand effect for the company making the lawsuit, where the public relations damage alone should be awful enough that anybody stupid enough to try this sort of silly stunt through legal channels might as well be pointing a gun to their own head.
Seriously, a legal approach that would attempt to shut down a Wikimedia project is doomed to failure. Even trying to write a law, at least in America, that would shut it down would be completely ineffective. Simply put, I think you are out to lunch to even suggest it would be possible except for a very narrow issue that wouldn't ever shut the site down.
The licensing issues for computer programs isn't really all that different in terms of the basic copyright laws, but the case history for computer software certainly is quite a bit different.
If anything, I find it a crying shame that cultural works like the original Hunt the Wumpus, Colossal Cave "ADVENT"ure, ELIZA, or Space War wouldn't be considered as seminal and historical in nature as Huck Finn, Tale of Two Cities, or the Gutenberg Bible.
It sounds like this definition was written by people with a decided contempt for folks who write elegant software as a literary form. The only difference is that the grammar is considerably more constrained for computer software, but that still isn't an excuse for it to be treated any different.
I would utterly dare a company, with or without SOPA, to "block" Wikimedia projects and sue the WMF for copyright violations from previous fair-use content plus original content donated to the foundation through open source licenses like the GFDL and CC-by-SA. Seriously, I dare somebody to even try.
Of any on-line community, the Wikimedia projects are among the few that take copyright laws world-wide seriously and I would put them dead last in terms of getting into serious trouble, with ample discussions and prior history showing how they they aggressive steps to remove copyright violations.when found.
What is being suggested here is that somehow publishing companies are going to try some "extra-legal" things like assassinating members of the WMF board or even going after individual Wikimedia contributors. Sure, all of that is illegal as hell, but if you don't want to bother dealing with the law anymore anything is possible. Smashed server farms, deliberate DOS attacks, and other sorts of thuggery might work. An appeal to legal avenues including re-writing laws to kill Wikimedia projects is at this point a futile effort and simply will not work. The WMF may not have a huge amount of money to spend on professional lobbyists, but they can make up for that with a protest in Washington DC that would put to shame most other political movements.... especially if the existence of the WMF projects is on the line.
At this point, the only way to kill the Wikimedia projects is to hire subversive folks to go into the projects, become admins/bureaucrats, and then become deletionist trolls "raising the standards" so virtually nothing new can be added and that 90% of the projects get deleted anyway. I swear that is happening already.
Part of the problem is that I worked for a small engineering company which was subsequently purchased by a multi-national conglomerate that in turn was not very well managed. I loved my local supervisors, but the problems started to come when many of the financial mistakes were dumped onto the division that I worked for (unjustifiably so I might add). That is the reason for the schizophrenic attitude toward documentation, as the goals of the company shifted over time.
The really sad thing about this particular company is that it had a multi-discipline engineering team that could literally build just about anything you could dream up, and a factory on site to even built it. I bet with just a little bit of imagination alone we could have built spacecraft that went to the Moon or Mars, and certainly built other monumental things that I know you have seen over the years. In the process of trying to "re-invent" the company rather than sticking to the core business of what it is we were doing (along with the games being played at the corporate headquarters half a continent away, and eventually on a completely different continent) the entire team was dismissed one by one on grounds like what happened to me, with eventually most of the engineering being "outsourced" to China, India, and other countries.
To me, it was the loss of potential that was simply thrown away, because the real creative drive of that company was thus completely lost. Not so much myself but my co-workers, many of whom were simply amazing in what they were able to accomplish.
The problem is the presumption that the one and only purpose of a corporation is "to maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". Such a statement is commonly found in corporate charters of most for-profit corporations, but I assert that mission statement is not legally required to be in any corporate charter, and that bona fide companies can and do exist which have other purposes for their existance.
What I find sad is that few of those companies with alternative charters which spell out those other purposes are rarely found, or worse yet the corporate charters of those businesses which have alternate purposes are frequently changed to have the "maximize profits" clause put into the charter.
A famous example of a company which most definitely has an alternate charter is Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, which has a significant social activism component in its charter. Even though it is only a subsidiary of a conglomerate at the moment, that social activism component is most definitely still there. "Newman's Own" brand is another very good example. I wish I could use Google as still another example, but their "do no evil" is mixed with the maximize profits motive.
I know photographers who will do more than take hundreds of photos for just 10 that are good. Some of them will literally sit for weeks or even months in the most uncomfortable situations. This particularly famous image is one that the photographer went into a war zone for and through all of the effort only came out with this one photograph (with a whole backstory on even that photo).
The worst bugs I've encountered are compiler bugs. Yes, I've found a few, and it gets to be a real pain in the ass to find those bugs as well, because you go over your software time and time again and never really seeing just what is going on. There was one point that I even dropped into assembly to see what my software was doing op code by op code to make sure it was doing precisely what I wanted it to do, but still couldn't find the bug. I ended up optimizing the software along the way, but it didn't seem to help.
I updated the compiler and the bug went away. If you want to talk about frustrating, try explaining to a supervisor why you spent the past two months banging your head against the wall doing almost nothing else.... because that software was a critical piece for the operation of the business itself and had a multi-million dollar client demanding that it get fixed.
I find that the real documentation of software is more along the lines of documenting software interfaces and APIs (when using linked modules) and even a short description of what the software is even supposed to do in the first place. Nothing is more frustrating than having a disk with a binary that nobody knows what precisely it really does.
Documentation can take a whole bunch of levels, and I'd agree that it is important.
Still, I ended up getting fired from a company because I dared take the step to actually organize the documentation for a whole software development team. Oh, the company executives were all grateful that I bothered to document my software in a clean manner and provide proper references to the software and even put the software components into the company-wide parts system (the company was mainly a hardware company.... putting software into the inventory chain had a unique set of problems). The gratitude was shown by simply showing me the door because I was then dispensable as any other developer could pick up from where I left off.
Only the real truth is that nobody at the company could figure out my inventory system and the documentation just got dumped on the heap with all of the other engineering notes from all of the rest of the stuff done by the company.
Mainly I'd like to point out that documentation is far more than just comments around snippets of code or as headers to functions. Design documents, development notes, meeting minutes (if taken at all), customer requests, contracts, bills of materials (if equipment is needed to use the software), and other aspects are all part of that documentation process.
I would agree... to a point. Much of the "self-documenting" also depends on the programming environment as well, specifically the programming language being used.
For myself, I find that my C/C++ software tends to be much harder to "self document" and takes much longer to get back into if I have put the software off for awhile (say a year or more) to work on other projects, and is much more difficulty to decypher in terms of understanding the code sufficiently to make meaningful bug fixes when it is other software. I don't want to get into holy wars over languages, so I'll leave this be and not note some of my favorite languages. It isn't as bad as Intercal or Malbolge, but then again those languages were deliberately designed to be obfuscated.
My current "favorite" language is Scratch, which sadly is too limited for real work and lacks a decent compiler to improve performance. Even that has documentation problems, however, as the multi-threaded nature of that programming language can do some weird things when you get some complex software going that makes Intercal look like a simple language. Python, Ruby, Object Pascal, and a few other languages are better than average, however, and IMHO much better than C++ for readability and self documenting.
The problem with a satellite having a satellite is rather complicated. It turns out that the Moon has only a very limited number of stable orbits... a fact not discovered until after the Apollo Missions. It turns out that by sheer coincidence one of the "sub-satellites" (a small satellite carried in the Apollo service module for a few of the later flights) just happened to hit one of the ideal orbital inclinations, but there were a couple that didn't and only lasted in orbit around the Moon for just a couple of weeks. The one that was in a pretty stable orbit still only lasted a couple of years before it crashed... although it did reveal some excellent science. The reason for this is "mascons" or mass-concentrations on the surface of the Moon where the actual gravity varies, pushing and pulling the object in orbit. Apparently such features are quite common for smaller bodies, but not so common for larger planets like Mars, the Earth, or Venus.
The other problem is that the gravitational interaction between the various objects. The concept of a Hill Sphere is especially important to consider that the gravitational gradient when close to a large body pushes other things away, or yanks it down into that object. Essentially, if there was another object orbiting one of the moons of other planets in the solar system, it would have been yanked off a long time ago by either another moon, the planet it is orbiting, or other planets as they got close. See also the Three-body problem for additional details.
Interestingly enough for the Moon (aka the "Earth's Moon"), if you view its orbit from a heliocentric POV rather than considering its interaction directly with the Earth, it has its own orbit around the Sun and indeed that orbital path is completely concave in nature... the only "satellite" of any planet in the Solar System to do such a thing. Essentially the Earth and the Moon are just two objects that gravitationally interact with each other as they orbit the Sun together, and from this perspective treating both bodies as a double planet is much more logical. In other words, there are other strong reasons to treat the Moon as a planet.
My largest problem with all of the definitions, however, is that it is a very myopic definition as it only considers planets that orbit the Sun (aka only in this Solar System) to be legitimate planets. I think a more realistic definition of a planet should ignore whatever it happens to be orbiting or even if it is orbiting anything at all (such as drifting through intergalactic space). Physical characteristics of the planet, such as stratification of the planetary core (such happens with Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, and even Titan) as a result of residual heat over a prolonged period of time since planetary formation, an atmosphere (Mercury might have an atmosphere if it was further from the Sun.... perhaps... and it does have a residual atmosphere of sorts), and other significant factors would play into the definition. BTW, such a definition still would likely exclude Pluto, but that one is debatable. I'm fine with the concept of a minor planet, especially if you don't mind lumping in Io, Triton, Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and the Moon into the definition with the Kuiper Belt planets, Pluto, Vesta, and Ceres. All of those are significant bodies in their own right, and likely will be important in some fashion for future human civilizations, so there is a point to such a classification beyond mere ontological discussions. Phobos is clearly not a minor planet, as it is far too small... to give a counter example.
The problem with inaccurate scientific journalism is that sadly political decisions are made for both funding and policy making based upon what gets reported. I won't get into hot-button issues (global-warming, population control, eugenics, etc.) but all of these and much more become a significant issue when it crosses into the political realm. I saw locally (I live in Utah) how the cross between horrible journalism and politics showed up with the "Cold Fusion" reactor by Pons and Fleishmann at the University of Utah ended up getting the state legislature to set up the "Cold Fusion Institute" and slap all sorts of "intellectual property" claims upon everything those guys did. And then watch as the whole thing fizzled away. Say what you might about the concept of Cold Fusion (or "Low energy nuclear reactions" for the politically correct), its intersection with politics was fueled by popular science journalism and I would argue still is to some extent.
The reason for many of the major problems with NASA also has to do with lousy journalism, and to some extent popular media from filmmakers and other media producers who inaccurately portray the problems of spaceflight (both the horrors as well as the challenges). Some of them do pretty good coverage, but not all of them and certainly major events like the lunar landings or early launches have distorted the image of what could really be happening.
I could go on, and it is easy to do so as well, but I think my point is well made. Sensationalizing planetary discoveries beyond what is actually found is also desensitizing the public to what is really something pretty impressive when you dig into it deeper. It seems like every six months or so another planet "more Earth-like" keeps getting discovered. I think at this point if we discovered a planet with a moon having 1/6th of its mass, and that planet covered with a liquid water ocean transmitting the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message back to us with an appendix showing the difference between their planet and the Earth, that the news media would simply say "what, another Earth-like planet?" and ignore the whole thing altogether.
The problem with the Galilean moons is that they are quite close to the host planet, thus inside what could be the equivalent of the Van Allen belts of Jupiter. That is where the deadly radiation comes from, not so much from the planet itself.
I've wondered as a "what if" some large "Earth-sized" body orbiting a gas giant might be like. There have been several gas giants found orbiting stars in their "habitable zones", so the question is no longer merely theoretical in terms of the potential to find such objects. I think you may have something there, where it may even be that such "moons" orbiting gas giants might be more common as "habitable planets" than even solitary planets orbiting a star like the Earth is. If anything, it might even be a fun SF story to speculate how the Earth keeps getting skipped over in galactic surveys because all of the gas giants in our solar system are found to be outside of the habitable zone, thus not really considered a likely candidate for a habitable planet.
Yeah, it will be exciting to see what is currently the great age of planetary discovery. More has been learned about planets over the past 50 years than the whole of history prior to that. I would dare even say that includes the Earth itself, in spite of geological studies done previously. When you have a data set of one it makes comparisons hard to make, but we now have hundreds of planets for comparison... which allows real science to be done when trying to come up with theories on how it all works.
The resources to set up a permanent colony on the Moon will by necessity have to be found on the Moon, or at least from places that have a much shallower gravity well (like an asteroid). To presume that much in the way of materials are going to be coming from the Earth to set up such a colony is utterly absurd.
There will never be something like the Amundsen-Scott Research base set up on the Moon made up of supplies shipped in from a distant source. Oddly enough, even the South Pole base has a greenhouse for growing vegetables and they harvest water from the surrounding environment to take care of daily needs. It could be made more self-sufficient, but for what they do it seems to be enough given what they are trying to accomplish, not to mention the desire to be minimally impacting the environment in Antarctica.
The Moon doesn't have an environment to worry about (not withstanding several environmentalists who have spoken up about potential pollution issues on the Moon from industrial activity there). Many of the raw resources we need can be found on the Moon in abundance, including water, oxygen (in much greater supply), metals of almost every kind you can image, glass, and other resources that are very useful to an advanced industrial society capable of getting to the Moon in the first place. About the only element missing in substantial amounts is Nitrogen, and that can be condensed and shipped with relative ease from the Earth or found elsewhere in the Solar System as well. It is also something that is easily recycled so it doesn't have to be a major issue in terms of setting up that colony.
BTW, I think that the money being spent on underarm deodorant is worth being spent on an ongoing basis as an insurance policy of sorts to expand the reach of humanity. That money is going to be spent on spaceflight efforts anyway, so the issue isn't if it will be spent on some cause that you think is more worthy, but rather if it will be spent making some corporate executives in Chicago or Washington DC fat and happy or if there is going to be some good being done with that kind of money instead. By shooting down a Moon base, you are simply making sure that it just gets swallowed up by government graft and corruption instead of at least some good happening.
I also don't think this is a zero-sum game either. Indeed I think efforts to set up a closed ecology on another planet (using the term very loosely suggesting that the Moon could at least be considered a dwarf planet) would go a long way to understanding what is absolutely essential for biological systems. The research from that effort alone is as likely to help "develop sustaining methods of producing food for impoverished nations" as almost anything else done on the Earth, and I would dare say would be even more productive at achieving that goal than most other efforts in that line of thought. Having to rethink what tools are needed to make tools to make tools that can reproduce themselves is also going to help out in offering those same "self-reproducing tools" for developing countries to build their own infrastructure rather than relying upon the largess of older industrial economies. If anything, I think the money spent on spaceflight (if spent wisely) could be beneficial to even the poorest of people on this planet.
It depends on what you call a planet, as I would call the Earth's Moon to be more accurately described as a dwarf planet than a "moonlet" or something like Phobos or Mimas that clearly don't fit the description of a dwarf planet under any possible definition of the term. As such, if you could call the Moon as a dwarf planet, we have been able to send a crewed expedition in spacecraft to another planet. The technical capability of sending people to other planets in the Solar System (most notably Mars and Venus) really only need somebody to come up with the money or to find a cheaper way to get the task accomplished. The raw engineering needed to accomplish that task is minimal. What has kept NASA from going to Mars and establishing a permanent research base like the Amundsen-Scott base on the South Pole has mainly been the sticker shock of such an operation by the U.S. Congress, on what could arguably be said is the most expensive way to get there.
Every major planet in the Solar system has received a visit by a unmanned probe (most of them by several) and soon every dwarf planet can be added to that profile except for the newly discovered planets in the Kuiper belt along with several comets and asteroids that have have close encounters with man-made artifacts. If you want to focus on Mars, every potential opportunity to use a to get to Mars has been used for some kind of spacecraft over the past decade, and I personally think that will be a permanent condition for as long as humanity exists at this point. It may not be an American spacecraft, but somebody is going to be en route to Mars at every possible opportunity in the future.
Still, I agree with your basic premise. The universe is a vast thing and the distance to other stars is so huge compared to the scale of moving around the solar system that it seems unlikely within this century much less any near term scale that can be measured in historical terms. Perhaps within 10,000 years we might have the technology to actually send somebody to another star and the planets around it, but I wouldn't hold my breath that it would happen either. The solar system around our star will be flooded with people and civilizations before the first real attempts to travel to another star are even attempted.
This is one of the reasons for the Kepler mission, as it is trying to answer this question in particular. What are the possible variations of planets in the universe (especially the Milky Way galaxy) and just how common are smaller planets, as opposed to gas giants? One of the things that Kepler has discovered is that smaller planets seem to be much, much more common in our galaxy than the larger planets, and that planets which have the rough diameter of the Earth may be found in abundance.
BTW, this is one of the reasons I am against the current definition of a planet by the IAU, because the entire definition seems to be completely ignorant of planets that are outside of our little solar system. Using that definition, the only place that a planet can exist is close to our Sun, and it must have that one unique and only star in the universe as the primary gravitational influence for that body. I guess that hammers home that the 700+ "planets" discovered elsewhere really aren't planets at all. Then again, I have argued that the definition of a planet ought to be based upon the physical characteristics of that body and not upon any heliocentric description. I would even argue that Titan (currently termed a "moon" of Saturn) ought to be "promoted" to the status of a planet in its own right with the Galilean moons being termed dwarf planets along with the Moon. Apparently some astronomers have some problems with that.
Still, with that many planets to sift through, it certainly would be useful to try and come up with some sort of systematic way to classify important characteristics of all of those planets, even if only to find out what kind of characteristics are unusual or even if the Earth is a common or rare kind of planet. Based upon the Kepler data, it may be common, but at the moment we really don't know.
I tend to think of the vastness of the universe more toward what the potential of humanity could be rather than how insignificant I am at the moment. I hear comments from others about how there are too many people, that the natural resources are running out, that somehow there is a finite universe confined to the little planet that we live upon, and then realize just how mind boggling vast this universe really is to put things into perspective. We have the potential to at least partially fill this universe with life, and to know that the greatest pieces of music, the greatest architectural achievements, the most amazing scientific accomplishments, are still in the future.
We as a species are just emerging out of our infancy and beginning to see the wonders of what may be, with unfortunately some people who like looking at what we have with the telescope pointing in the wrong direction and those same folks trying to use a telescope as a microscope instead thinking that is all there ever can be.
I do agree that humility is another aspect of this, as I need to be reminded that my little role in what is happening in the grand scheme of things is not really all that important.... other than perhaps I may get an occasional opportunity to influence the lives of others in hopefully a positive way that will inspire them to stretch their potential a little bit more and become something more tomorrow than they are today.
The reason why China has typically not been "the aggressor" is mainly because there was no need: they controlled almost all of the territory, resources, and people that they cared to have. There was the invasion of Japan in 1281 that resulted in a dismal failure (and how the mysticism of the Kamikaze started in Japan) as well as ongoing bumping up against Russia in terms of control of Siberia, but for the most part they have been the top dog in their end of the world holding what amounted to be essentially a monopoly in terms of governance.
BTW, from a Chinese perspective, the invasion of Japan is recent history. They think in terms of millennia and not mere decades for what is history. Furthermore, I wouldn't put China's hands as exactly clean in terms of lack of wars... they just tend to be more territorial in nature and much closer to home. Going to war against Tibet, Vietnam, Russia (more than a few times), Japan, and for that matter even against the United States of America (in Korea) sounds like quite a bit of adventurism. It could even be argued that particular war against America was one that China initiated. And that is just wars involving China in the 20th Century. Their involvement in Afghanistan (which they share a border BTW) is something I suspect but that I don't think the U.S. State Department wants to emphasize.
You completely missed the point I was trying to make, and perhaps I could clarify it a bit. If China wants to be in space, if they want to get something happening, they need to have an operational tempo including financial commitments from the government to make it happen. That financial commitment can happen in a number of ways, but most significantly they need to have a high flight rate doing whatever it is that they are doing.
China isn't doing that at all, and instead this whole thing is just a pure propaganda ploy where I'm not really convinced they even care to get into space at all. They love the idea of being in space and showing their citizens that they are one of the leading nations of the Earth from an economic and scientific viewpoint by being in space, but they aren't showing that they have a commitment to remaining in space and doing things in space. That is my point.
More significantly, China is being a non-player here. With their current operational tempo they will never, and I repeat never become a major player in space. It is more like they are hedging their bets for the future with the thought that there might be a future for humanity in space, but at the moment they are only doing a half hearted attempt at staying in the game. I will acknowledge that China is building the infrastructure to get a space program going, but the launch towers are going to rust to pieces before they get used.
BTW, the comment here is a thinly veiled jab at Charles Bolden and his comments about being more open and friendly to Islamic countries in terms of space policy and in cooperating with countries in the Middle East on projects happening in space. While I can admit I'm disappointed in Obama's space policy on a number of levels (as it is pretty much the very last thing his administration seems to care about), America is going to emerge in the 21st Century as the leading country technologically in part because of what the people of America are doing in space. I am more hopeful than ever that America is going to lead the rest of humanity out to the stars, but it is going to be done in a uniquely American way, rather than trying to get that accomplished through some sort of crash Socialist program paid for at government expense. If anything, I think the Office of Commercial Transportation will become "The Space Agency" in America rather than NASA, and it is just a matter of time before that fact is recognized. I just hope that NASA remains relevant in the future for their own sake.