if we could have picked any landing site on mars, it would be Opportunity's.
Actually, if we could pick *any* landing site, there are *a lot* more interesting ones on Mars to choose from. You have to decode Nasa-speak - what they're really saying is: "to be on the safe side, we always land in very flat regions, which tend to be (geologically speaking) rather boring. We are thrilled to have stumbled upon a flat region that looks *different* from all the other flat regions we've landed in before."
In other words, we've graduated from Kansas to Oklahoma. The Rockies, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Rift Valley, Himalaya, etc. of Mars are still waiting for us to develop more robust landers and capable all-terrain robots. Check out ESA's first Mars Express images for a taste of some more dramatic scenery. Can't wait till we get a rover into *that*!
To see what's in store for planetary probes, have a look at this excellent index of missions. First, note the large number of operating missions - good. Now let's take a closer look at the rather smaller number of missions in development:
Hubble SM4 is cancelled. Herschel, Planck, and Rosetta are European; Astro-E2 and Solar-B are Japanese. Most of the NASA missions are near-earth: AMS, Cindi, Glast, Gravity Probe-B, Sofia, Space Tech 5/6/7, Swift, and Twins. Stereo is a solar observatory. That leaves just 4 missions that could be considered "planetary" probes: Deep Impact (cometary), Mars'05 Orbiter, Messenger (Mercury), and New Horizons (Pluto).
Now watch where the budget axe falls next... Messenger and, hopefully, Deep Impact should be too far along to cancel at this point, and anything with "Mars" in its title should be safe, but I do fear for New Horizons. Their problem is that flight time to Pluto is just too damn long for any president to care about. Perhaps they could arrange for a Mars fly-by and re-name the mission "Mars and Beyond"...?
Be that as it may, that (plus Cassini which thank God is already en route to Saturn, and Stardust's sample return) is *it*. Yes, there are many exciting missions under study, but given the new budget priorities set by Dubya, "under study" will buy you nothing unless it's got the Moon or Mars in it. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but I foresee many, many worthwhile science missions, large and small, getting squeezed out. If we're lucky, ESA and Japan will take up some of the slack.
The science I'm most interested in is that which allows man to -stay- in space. (i.e. self-sustaining space environments, or nearly self-sustaining)
This is of the utmost importance, agreed.
Bush's Mars mission is more likely to approach this goal than any non-manned science mission, and as such I believe it to be a better use of funds.
Here's where I disagree. Bush's proposal as it stands doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell to succeed, but for the sake of argument let's assume it does, and that in, say, 15 years men stand on mars, at a cost of, say, $100B. Now that'd be a great achievement, but it still has a fatal flaw:
To send the *second* crew to mars will cost less, but not all that much less - let's say, $10B. To send the third, fourth, etc. crew will still cost $10B each, because of the high launch costs. Once everyone has gone home again, what you'll be left with is an American flag and another deserted "memorial station" or two standing on an empty world. This is precisely what happened to Apollo.
It's all down to economics: reduce launch costs by a factor of 10, and space exploration will thrive. Reduce them by a factor of 100, and space commerce (mining the moon etc.) will thrive. Reduce them by a factor of 1000, and space tourism will thrive. All by itself, without any need for "presidential visions" beyond giving NASA the one priority that should override all others: reduce the cost of getting us out of our gravity well. By itself it ain't sexy, but all else will follow from it.
But let's face it: sitting atop a giant barrel of explosives is *never* going to be cheap enough nor safe enough to let this happen. The shuttle was supposed to reduce launch costs (by being reusable), instead it increased them (by having to be *safely* reusable). The only technology I know of that may be capable of getting us into space cheaply is the space elevator. I would gladly forgo all other space projects for 20 years if the funds and effort went into building the first space elevator, because I know that once it's built, we could catch up with what we missed in no time flat, and then spread "up and out" for good.
He talked about robotic missions like the Mercury and Europa missions and proposals along with the manned operations as well as the new Space Telescope.
Yes, I did read the text. And no, he didn't talk about Messenger or Jimo. He talked about precisely three kinds of robotic probes:
1) those which *in the past* have greatly increased our knowledge of the solar system,
2) the Mars rovers *in the present*, and
2) those which *in the future* will "blaze the trail" for humans to "mars and beyond".
(my emphasis on past/present/future)
He also talked about funding a project estimated to cost several 100B$ to the tune of 1B$, and about NASA finding another 11B$ for it (out of their 15B$/year overall budget) - all without cutting any of the missions he *didn't* mention? Dream on.
(He then talked about his recent visit with Santa on the North Pole, balancing the budget, and cutting more taxes. With that kind of vision, you just gotta vote for that man, dontcha think? Just kidding.)
Far from constituting a revolutionary new vision, this speech actually just continues the time-honored tradition of presidents twisting NASA's arm for reelection purposes, creating gigantic white elephants in a pork barrel ("unifying visions" in president-speak) at the expense of real space science and exploration. It did work like a charm the first time around (Apollo) but then went steadily downhill (Shuttle, ISS, mars or bust).
I call it "mars or bust" rather than "mars and beyond" because given the evidence so far (esp. the proposed funding), "bust" looks far more likely to me than "mars", let alone "beyond".
Depends on your concept of "we". The Russians had an extensive Venus orbiter/lander program - absolutely thrilling stuff considering the difficulties Venus presents. These guys were pioneers, the first to land a probe on another planet. The moon as well.
I guess its time to look forward to either landing people on Mars, or pushing spacecraft further to Mercury.
Why adopt Dubya's limited vision? The really juicy planetary science targets are Jupiter's icy moons, and Saturn's Titan. As has been pointed out, all of these, along with Mercury, are underway.
Alas, it looks like Dubya's "mars or bust" program will drain the funding from many of the most exciting future space science missions, just as the "look mom, I'm (barely) in space" ISS did before, and the space shuttle (the Swiss army knife of spaceflight: does everything, but nothing well) before that. I'm so glad for those missions whose probes have been launched already - harder (though not unheard of) to axe those.
Jupiter is just a (humungous) ball of gas, there is no land to land on, nor sea to splash in.
There are certainly going to be phase transitions to liquid and solid (aka "sea" and "land") somewhere in that humongous ball of gas. Operative question is how to design a probe to withstand the enormous pressure at the depth at which these phase transitions occur.
Ummmm... something to do with recent presidential grandstanding creating new funding opportunities for crazy-ass projects such as this? Just a wild guess...:-)
- nic
Re:Altitude of HST & ISS
on
Saving Hubble
·
· Score: 1
would there be any issues with lowering the HST to join the ISS?
Yes. The reason given for scrapping the HST service mission was that in the event of a problem, the space shuttle would not be able to reach the (relative) safety of the ISS. If the shuttle alone can't go that way, dragging the HST along seems rather far-fetched. IIRC it's not the altitude that's the problem, but that one is in a far more polar orbit than the other.
This means that you can theoretically heat or cool a house with just a painted square on the roof a few square meters in area, if you could just create a material of the right color.
Ummmmm... I'm afraid that at least with respect to heating, it's been done: glass is transparent in visible light but opaque at room-temperature black body radiation frequencies, aka infrared. It's called the greenhouse effect, and it heats my wintergarden just fine.
Another great patent idea lost to public-domain prior art - doh!:-)
1986: NASA loses ability to put men in LEO following Challenger disaster 1989, Bush senior: let's put men on Mars! 2003: NASA loses ability to put men in LEO following Columbia disaster 2004, Bush junior: let's put men on Mars!
Diagnosis:
1. severe reality disconnect 2. inability to learn from experience 3. stuck in a "Groundhog Day"-type loop 4. possible violation of the ban on human cloning 5. reelection more important than future of humanity
If Bush wants space exploration instead of white elephants, he should fund more robotic probes. If he wants to be seen as a visionary, he should fund the space elevator, which would do more for manned spaceflight than any number of economically unsupportable, one-shot Apollo-type stunts. (That said, I'd take the one-shot Apollo-type stunt anytime over the ISS.) But what am I saying, I'm forgetting diagnosis #5 above.
And I never said 911 was a foreign policy dispute.
09/11 itself isn't, but the U.S. "retaliation" for it certainly is.
I reject your premise that 911 was merely a diplomatic technicality.
Huh? Have you *read* what I wrote? Are you on shrooms or what? Of course 09/11 was a horror, but in what way does that justify, say, the invasion of Iraq?
Irrelevant. Your opinions with regard to the U.S.'s behavior in other matters does not change the nature of 911.
If you were capable of reading my posts you would know that I was criticizing U.S. foreign policy in general and the invasion of Iraq in particular. I am in complete agreement with you regarding the nature of 09/11, that is not the argument at all. However, 09/11 is germane to this discussion only in that your government is exploiting the climate of fear 09/11 has generated in the U.S. to further a reprehensible foreign policy that has been in place since cold war times.
Shrooms or not, please try to distinguish between: a) 09/11 itself, b) justifiable U.S. responses to 09/11 (e.g., persecuting Al Quaeda), c) questionable U.S. responses to 09/11 (e.g., keeping prisoners for years without legal recourse), and d) U.S. actions against parties that have nothing whatsoever to do with 09/11 (e.g., the invasion of Iraq). There is of course a continuum between b) and c), where one might argue for instance whether overthrowing the Taliban was justified or not. What I am mostly concerned with, however, is d), and the fact that your government is fabricating links to 09/11 to justify d).
Over and out, at least until you're sober again. Must be good stuff, shame to waste it on political discussions. Go get laid or something.
So show me the WMDs. Show me the infamous "45-minute" capability. Explain why where has been a suicide and several resignations in the UK over the "sexing up" of a dossier on Iraq's military capabilities. Explain why you couldn't wait another 3 months to let the U.N. weapons inspectors do their job.
As for "sovereign nation": Germany and Japan at the end WW2 were no less "sovereign nations" than Iraq was.
Completely different situation, since Germany and Japan had declared war. Nations at war forfeit their sovereignty in the event that they lose. Iraq was not at war with anyone at the time.
Why even mention it?
Because it's one of the fundamental concepts of international law, and as such highly relevant here.
domino theories, neo-colonialism, and U.S. special economic interests.
The domino theory is not being brought up here. There is no domino theory for aggressive Islam: Iran failed to go much beyond its borders.
*sigh* why do I feel like I'm arguing with a bunch of grade schoolers? I cited the above as three typical motivations for past U.S. invasions, nothing more, nothing less.
the U.S. and its numerous allies
At last count, the UK, Australia, Poland, Spain, and the Philippines (and don't tell me I forgot Tuvalu or the Vatican). Very impressive. Have you ever paused to ask yourself just why the vast majority of your numerous allies - including, I might add, the majority of the population in all of the above countries - have opposed your invasion of Iraq?
are anti-colonialist
Yeah right. If invading another country so as to ensure (or, as in the case of Panama, to shut off) the flow of some raw material (oil, cocaine, whatever) into your country isn't colonialist, what is? Don't make me go to webster.com again.
Saddam under Iraq was an imperialist/colonialist power (having designs on conquest of Kuwait, Israel, and other places). It is mainly this which got them in trouble.
No, it is this (namely his designs on Iran) which got him the CIA support to become a ruthless dictator in the first place. The CIA needed a counterweight to Khomeini, just as in Afghanistan they needed the Taliban as a counterweight to the Russians. The Iran-Iraq war cost countless millions of lives, did the U.S. feel compelled to intervene? Of course not: Iran was "evil", so attacking it with chemical weapons was "good". Saddam's became "evil" only when he tried to annex Kuwait, which is "good".
It all makes a lot more sense once you realize that the definition of "good" here is "having oil and a stable government of whatever nature, with no anti-western axe to grind". Saudi Arabia, for instance, is a "good" intolerant absolutist monarchy, but should it turn into a democracy, it is bound to become an "evil" one.
liebenschraum
"love foam" (liebesschaum)? It's Lebensraum (room to live). Hey, cut me some slack, I got attacked here for the British spelling of "harbor". Sorry for plucking apart your paragraph like that, but it's you who managed to cram so many howlers into such small space.
The U.S. tends to spend more helping these countries than it ever gets back
While this is undoubtedly true (pray what exactly do you expect to "get back" from poor countries?), it is worth noting that the U.S. ranks rock-bottom among developed nations in terms of its quality of development aid:
Ironically, although the U.S. and Japan provide the greatest amount of foreign aid to poor countries in nominal terms, they received the two lowest scores in the aid category. This was because U.S. aid as a percentage of GDP ranks in the cellar among the 21 wealthiest countries, and because the quality of the aid from both countries is regarded as particularly poor. Much of both countries aid is "tied;" in the late 1990s, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) told Congress that almost 80 percent of its resources were used to buy U.S. goods and services.
Do you consider it reasonable, therefore, for the U.S. to hijack random aircraft throughout the world and crash them into things as a response to 911?
I never said that I consider retaliation a reasonable or moral basis for foreign policy. I did say that the invasion of Afghanistan could be considered a reasonable U.S. response to 09/11 if the Taliban had perpetrated it. Your likely response of "but the Taliban had links with Al Qaeda" is precisely the start of that slippery slope I was talking about. The Taliban and Saddam are ultimately both CIA creations - so are you going to bomb Langley? Of course not. This kind of argument is only used to claim the moral high ground when it suits your government's purposes.
To complement your above ludicrous scenario, how would you feel if the French bombed Hollywood so as to preserve the "vital cultural and economic interests" of their film industry? Some of the stunts the U.S. have pulled in South America (Panama, Grenada, etc.) are not far from that level of arrogance and lunacy.
If I may briefly assume you have made a strong argument that the U.S. invaded Iraq with intent to conquer her
No, you may not - don't put words in my mouth. The U.S. invaded Iraq in order to create a dependent client state in the oil-rich Gulf region, as a backup for the likely case that the shaky Saudi regime (or at least its support for the U.S.) collapses. They will leave Iraq as soon as sufficient political and economic infrastructure is in place to ensure that goal, and no sooner. Of course it's much easier to swallow the "we are good, Saddam is evil, therefore it is our moral duty to depose him" horseshit the government feeds you.
The nature of fundamentalism is to selectively enlist moral principles in support of one's own purposes. In that sense, the U.S. is becoming increasingly fundamentalist, and this is as worrisome a development as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. From fundamentalism to fascism is but a short step - beware the beginnings. If I sound overly dramatic, consider the erosion of civil liberties in the U.S. and (to a lesser extent) Europe after 09/11. Consider hundreds of prisoners held for years at Guantanamo without being charged, without access to lawyers, in direct violation of the Geneva convention. Doesn't that worry you? Scares me as much as any raving ayatollah - more so, in that it's *our* governments doing this.
You misrepresented the grandparent's premise by implying that invasion (presumably in the formal military sense) is a prerequisite for retaliation. Your modification of the premise is, of course, absurd. 911 is an excellent exception to your "rule".
Not so. The claim I am disputing was:
Can you come up with one example where the U.S. was not retaliating?
in the context of U.S. invasions. Webster defines "to retaliate" as:
transitive senses: to repay (as an injury) in kind intransitive senses: to return like for like; especially: to get revenge
(boldface mine for emphasis). Clearly, a prior kind of invasion of the U.S. by another nation is required for a U.S. invasion of the perpretrator to be considered a retaliation. So the question rather is, can we come up with examples where a U.S. invasion *was* in retaliation?
Pearl Harbor is one, fine. 09/11 can be considered a kind of invasion, but while that justifies action against Al Qaeda, overthrowing the Taliban is a different matter. All that rhetoric about "the friends of our enemies", "axis of evil", etc. leads down a very slippery slope of cannonboat diplomacy littered with domino theories, neo-colonialism, and U.S. special economic interests.
Iraq represents a new nadir in that regard, and this is where the criticism stems from. Nobody but a few fanatics sheds a tear for that bastard SOB Saddam, but ends do not justify means, and the means used here - specifically, U.S. riding roughshot over the U.N., invading a sovereign nation on an extremely flimsy, and most likely forged, pretext - are scary in their amorality and ruthlessness.
Re Pearl harbour: Hawaii did not become a state of the U.S. until 1959, and to this day there are arguments that this may have in fact been illegal.
In any case, U.S. entry into WW-II is not at issue here. For the sake of focus, we can limit ourselves to even just post-cold-war cases, doesn't change the argument at all.
Can you come up with one example where the U.S. was not retaliating? Probably not.
Given that the U.S. have never been invaded: retaliate for what?? For not conforming to U.S. ideas of how the entire world should do their bidding? Never mind history, start with a dictionary and look up "invasion" and "retaliation".
The U.S. acts internationally with all the aggressive zeal of a Jehovah's Witness at your door, and smarts and subtlety to match (that is, zero). With a vast military arsenal to back them up, and little to no compunctions about using it. "Why do they hate us so", sheesh it's bloody obvious innit?
But his wing allows him to travel four feet horizontally for every foot he descends, which meant he could cover 22 miles in this six-minute flight.
4:1 glide ratio? Errrr... a modern paraglider gets 8:1, never mind hanggliders at 12:1 or gliders at 40:1. A paragliding wing weighs less than 15 pounds, costs less than 3000 US$, and is safe, easy, and comfortable to fly, none of which can be said of this contraption. Tens of thousands of paragliding pilots worldwide routinely use their wings to stay in the air for hours at a time, and fly distances far in excess of 22 miles. I'm substantially underwhelmed by this clunky thing.
He had become the first person to fly across the English Channel without using an engine.
Conveniently ignoring the airplane that brought him to 30'000 feet first. From that altitude, he probably could have covered the same distance on his parachute, or just using a flying suit. Fun it may be, one of the great ideas of 2003 it ain't.
In that regard cloning is no different from any other technology, going back to the invention of trains ("man was not meant to travel faster than 10 mph"), and probably the wheel ("things are not meant to go round and round"). Luddites will forever smash the looms but in doing so not only fail to stop the inexorable march of technology, with all its positive and negative effects, but also (tragically) fail to participate in shaping these effects.
"Playing God" has always been human nature (Prometheus!), and the starting point of any useful debate about new technology is therefore not "we shouldn't play God", nor even "should be play God?", but "*how* do we want to play God?"
- nic
Re:The ethical problems with cloning,
on
The Opening of Biotech
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not sure how I would feel, and what mental strain would be thrust upon me if I were to be able to look at my mother/father and know that I was an exact biological copy, with an overwhelminmg likelihood of getting - say - prostate/ovarian cancer at age 43.
All a matter of perspective. In her 1976 story "Houston, Houston, do you read?", James Tiptree, Jr. subverted this position by positing a future in which cloning has become the norm, sexual reproduction having been eliminated by disease:
"It's so perfect," [the clones] tell him. "We each have a book, it's really a library. The Book of Judy Shapiro, that's us. Dakar and Paris are our personal names, we're doing cities now." They laugh, trying not to talk at once about how each Judy adds her individual memoir, her adventures and problems and discoveries in the genotype they all share. [...] "We make excerpts of the parts we like best. And practical things, like Judys should watch out for skin cancer."
And our cherished "biological uniqueness" elicits only pity from the Judys:
"How do you know who you are? Or who anybody is? All alone, no sisters to share with! You don't know what you can do, or what would be interesting to try. All you poor singeltons, you---why, you just have to blunder along and die, all for nothing!"
In short, biological uniqueness, being pretty much the only game in town at this point, may be grossly overrated.
Problem is that IQ isn't additive, it works more like resistors in parallel: let's assume (realistically) that each of us has an IQ of 150. Then if 3 of us get together, the groups overall IQ will be
IQ = 1/(1/iq1 + 1/iq2 + 1/iq3),
which works out to just 50, well below the "rocket science" threshold of 80. As group size increases, group IQ tends to zero, a phenomenon well-known in programmer and government circles.
So to conclude, we're better off building our rockets individually. Perhaps we could share experiences under GPL though.
Slashdot Mirror
if we could have picked any landing site on mars, it would be Opportunity's.
Actually, if we could pick *any* landing site, there are *a lot* more interesting ones on Mars to choose from. You have to decode Nasa-speak - what they're really saying is: "to be on the safe side, we always land in very flat regions, which tend to be (geologically speaking) rather boring. We are thrilled to have stumbled upon a flat region that looks *different* from all the other flat regions we've landed in before."
In other words, we've graduated from Kansas to Oklahoma. The Rockies, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Rift Valley, Himalaya, etc. of Mars are still waiting for us to develop more robust landers and capable all-terrain robots. Check out ESA's first Mars Express images for a taste of some more dramatic scenery. Can't wait till we get a rover into *that*!
- nic
To see what's in store for planetary probes, have a look at this excellent index of missions. First, note the large number of operating missions - good. Now let's take a closer look at the rather smaller number of missions in development:
Hubble SM4 is cancelled. Herschel, Planck, and Rosetta are European; Astro-E2 and Solar-B are Japanese. Most of the NASA missions are near-earth: AMS, Cindi, Glast, Gravity Probe-B, Sofia, Space Tech 5/6/7, Swift, and Twins. Stereo is a solar observatory. That leaves just 4 missions that could be considered "planetary" probes: Deep Impact (cometary), Mars'05 Orbiter, Messenger (Mercury), and New Horizons (Pluto).
Now watch where the budget axe falls next... Messenger and, hopefully, Deep Impact should be too far along to cancel at this point, and anything with "Mars" in its title should be safe, but I do fear for New Horizons. Their problem is that flight time to Pluto is just too damn long for any president to care about. Perhaps they could arrange for a Mars fly-by and re-name the mission "Mars and Beyond"...?
Be that as it may, that (plus Cassini which thank God is already en route to Saturn, and Stardust's sample return) is *it*. Yes, there are many exciting missions under study, but given the new budget priorities set by Dubya, "under study" will buy you nothing unless it's got the Moon or Mars in it. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but I foresee many, many worthwhile science missions, large and small, getting squeezed out. If we're lucky, ESA and Japan will take up some of the slack.
- nic
The science I'm most interested in is that which allows man to -stay- in space. (i.e. self-sustaining space environments, or nearly self-sustaining)
This is of the utmost importance, agreed.
Bush's Mars mission is more likely to approach this goal than any non-manned science mission, and as such I believe it to be a better use of funds.
Here's where I disagree. Bush's proposal as it stands doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell to succeed, but for the sake of argument let's assume it does, and that in, say, 15 years men stand on mars, at a cost of, say, $100B. Now that'd be a great achievement, but it still has a fatal flaw:
To send the *second* crew to mars will cost less, but not all that much less - let's say, $10B. To send the third, fourth, etc. crew will still cost $10B each, because of the high launch costs. Once everyone has gone home again, what you'll be left with is an American flag and another deserted "memorial station" or two standing on an empty world. This is precisely what happened to Apollo.
It's all down to economics: reduce launch costs by a factor of 10, and space exploration will thrive. Reduce them by a factor of 100, and space commerce (mining the moon etc.) will thrive. Reduce them by a factor of 1000, and space tourism will thrive. All by itself, without any need for "presidential visions" beyond giving NASA the one priority that should override all others: reduce the cost of getting us out of our gravity well. By itself it ain't sexy, but all else will follow from it.
But let's face it: sitting atop a giant barrel of explosives is *never* going to be cheap enough nor safe enough to let this happen. The shuttle was supposed to reduce launch costs (by being reusable), instead it increased them (by having to be *safely* reusable). The only technology I know of that may be capable of getting us into space cheaply is the space elevator. I would gladly forgo all other space projects for 20 years if the funds and effort went into building the first space elevator, because I know that once it's built, we could catch up with what we missed in no time flat, and then spread "up and out" for good.
- nic
Did you watch his speech or read the text of it?
He talked about robotic missions like the Mercury and Europa missions and proposals along with the manned operations as well as the new Space Telescope.
Yes, I did read the text. And no, he didn't talk about Messenger or Jimo. He talked about precisely three kinds of robotic probes:
1) those which *in the past* have greatly increased our knowledge of the solar system,
2) the Mars rovers *in the present*, and
2) those which *in the future* will "blaze the trail" for humans to "mars and beyond".
(my emphasis on past/present/future)
He also talked about funding a project estimated to cost several 100B$ to the tune of 1B$, and about NASA finding another 11B$ for it (out of their 15B$/year overall budget) - all without cutting any of the missions he *didn't* mention? Dream on.
(He then talked about his recent visit with Santa on the North Pole, balancing the budget, and cutting more taxes. With that kind of vision, you just gotta vote for that man, dontcha think? Just kidding.)
Far from constituting a revolutionary new vision, this speech actually just continues the time-honored tradition of presidents twisting NASA's arm for reelection purposes, creating gigantic white elephants in a pork barrel ("unifying visions" in president-speak) at the expense of real space science and exploration. It did work like a charm the first time around (Apollo) but then went steadily downhill (Shuttle, ISS, mars or bust).
I call it "mars or bust" rather than "mars and beyond" because given the evidence so far (esp. the proposed funding), "bust" looks far more likely to me than "mars", let alone "beyond".
- nic
I thought we never landed on Venus
Depends on your concept of "we". The Russians had an extensive Venus orbiter/lander program - absolutely thrilling stuff considering the difficulties Venus presents. These guys were pioneers, the first to land a probe on another planet. The moon as well.
I guess its time to look forward to either landing people on Mars, or pushing spacecraft further to Mercury.
Why adopt Dubya's limited vision? The really juicy planetary science targets are Jupiter's icy moons, and Saturn's Titan. As has been pointed out, all of these, along with Mercury, are underway.
Alas, it looks like Dubya's "mars or bust" program will drain the funding from many of the most exciting future space science missions, just as the "look mom, I'm (barely) in space" ISS did before, and the space shuttle (the Swiss army knife of spaceflight: does everything, but nothing well) before that. I'm so glad for those missions whose probes have been launched already - harder (though not unheard of) to axe those.
to try and land/splash on Jupiter
Been done.
Jupiter is just a (humungous) ball of gas, there is no land to land on, nor sea to splash in.
There are certainly going to be phase transitions to liquid and solid (aka "sea" and "land") somewhere in that humongous ball of gas. Operative question is how to design a probe to withstand the enormous pressure at the depth at which these phase transitions occur.
Best,
- nic
I'm not sure why this warrants an article now
:-)
Ummmm... something to do with recent presidential grandstanding creating new funding opportunities for crazy-ass projects such as this? Just a wild guess...
- nic
would there be any issues with lowering the HST to join the ISS?
Yes. The reason given for scrapping the HST service mission was that in the event of a problem, the space shuttle would not be able to reach the (relative) safety of the ISS. If the shuttle alone can't go that way, dragging the HST along seems rather far-fetched. IIRC it's not the altitude that's the problem, but that one is in a far more polar orbit than the other.
- nic
it costs about $40 to move one gallon of diesel fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad.
Funny, it costs Mobil less than a buck to move one gallon of diesel fuel from Kuwait to Los Angeles. Ahh, the efficency of the army.
- nic
This means that you can theoretically heat or cool a house with just a painted square on the roof a few square meters in area, if you could just create a material of the right color.
:-)
Ummmmm... I'm afraid that at least with respect to heating, it's been done: glass is transparent in visible light but opaque at room-temperature black body radiation frequencies, aka infrared. It's called the greenhouse effect, and it heats my wintergarden just fine.
Another great patent idea lost to public-domain prior art - doh!
- nic
Screwing a candle is indeed an excellent way to generate body heat!
- nic
Let's see:
1986: NASA loses ability to put men in LEO following Challenger disaster
1989, Bush senior: let's put men on Mars!
2003: NASA loses ability to put men in LEO following Columbia disaster
2004, Bush junior: let's put men on Mars!
Diagnosis:
1. severe reality disconnect
2. inability to learn from experience
3. stuck in a "Groundhog Day"-type loop
4. possible violation of the ban on human cloning
5. reelection more important than future of humanity
If Bush wants space exploration instead of white elephants, he should fund more robotic probes. If he wants to be seen as a visionary, he should fund the space elevator, which would do more for manned spaceflight than any number of economically unsupportable, one-shot Apollo-type stunts. (That said, I'd take the one-shot Apollo-type stunt anytime over the ISS.) But what am I saying, I'm forgetting diagnosis #5 above.
- nic
And I never said 911 was a foreign policy dispute.
09/11 itself isn't, but the U.S. "retaliation" for it certainly is.
I reject your premise that 911 was merely a diplomatic technicality.
Huh? Have you *read* what I wrote? Are you on shrooms or what? Of course 09/11 was a horror, but in what way does that justify, say, the invasion of Iraq?
Irrelevant. Your opinions with regard to the U.S.'s behavior in other matters does not change the nature of 911.
If you were capable of reading my posts you would know that I was criticizing U.S. foreign policy in general and the invasion of Iraq in particular. I am in complete agreement with you regarding the nature of 09/11, that is not the argument at all. However, 09/11 is germane to this discussion only in that your government is exploiting the climate of fear 09/11 has generated in the U.S. to further a reprehensible foreign policy that has been in place since cold war times.
Shrooms or not, please try to distinguish between: a) 09/11 itself, b) justifiable U.S. responses to 09/11 (e.g., persecuting Al Quaeda), c) questionable U.S. responses to 09/11 (e.g., keeping prisoners for years without legal recourse), and d) U.S. actions against parties that have nothing whatsoever to do with 09/11 (e.g., the invasion of Iraq). There is of course a continuum between b) and c), where one might argue for instance whether overthrowing the Taliban was justified or not. What I am mostly concerned with, however, is d), and the fact that your government is fabricating links to 09/11 to justify d).
Over and out, at least until you're sober again. Must be good stuff, shame to waste it on political discussions. Go get laid or something.
- nic
Nothing was forged.
So show me the WMDs. Show me the infamous "45-minute" capability. Explain why where has been a suicide and several resignations in the UK over the "sexing up" of a dossier on Iraq's military capabilities. Explain why you couldn't wait another 3 months to let the U.N. weapons inspectors do their job.
As for "sovereign nation": Germany and Japan at the end WW2 were no less "sovereign nations" than Iraq was.
Completely different situation, since Germany and Japan had declared war. Nations at war forfeit their sovereignty in the event that they lose. Iraq was not at war with anyone at the time.
Why even mention it?
Because it's one of the fundamental concepts of international law, and as such highly relevant here.
- nic
The domino theory is not being brought up here. There is no domino theory for aggressive Islam: Iran failed to go much beyond its borders.
*sigh* why do I feel like I'm arguing with a bunch of grade schoolers? I cited the above as three typical motivations for past U.S. invasions, nothing more, nothing less.
the U.S. and its numerous allies
At last count, the UK, Australia, Poland, Spain, and the Philippines (and don't tell me I forgot Tuvalu or the Vatican). Very impressive. Have you ever paused to ask yourself just why the vast majority of your numerous allies - including, I might add, the majority of the population in all of the above countries - have opposed your invasion of Iraq?
are anti-colonialist
Yeah right. If invading another country so as to ensure (or, as in the case of Panama, to shut off) the flow of some raw material (oil, cocaine, whatever) into your country isn't colonialist, what is? Don't make me go to webster.com again.
Saddam under Iraq was an imperialist/colonialist power (having designs on conquest of Kuwait, Israel, and other places). It is mainly this which got them in trouble.
No, it is this (namely his designs on Iran) which got him the CIA support to become a ruthless dictator in the first place. The CIA needed a counterweight to Khomeini, just as in Afghanistan they needed the Taliban as a counterweight to the Russians. The Iran-Iraq war cost countless millions of lives, did the U.S. feel compelled to intervene? Of course not: Iran was "evil", so attacking it with chemical weapons was "good". Saddam's became "evil" only when he tried to annex Kuwait, which is "good".
It all makes a lot more sense once you realize that the definition of "good" here is "having oil and a stable government of whatever nature, with no anti-western axe to grind". Saudi Arabia, for instance, is a "good" intolerant absolutist monarchy, but should it turn into a democracy, it is bound to become an "evil" one.
liebenschraum
"love foam" (liebesschaum)? It's Lebensraum (room to live). Hey, cut me some slack, I got attacked here for the British spelling of "harbor". Sorry for plucking apart your paragraph like that, but it's you who managed to cram so many howlers into such small space.
The U.S. tends to spend more helping these countries than it ever gets back
While this is undoubtedly true (pray what exactly do you expect to "get back" from poor countries?), it is worth noting that the U.S. ranks rock-bottom among developed nations in terms of its quality of development aid:
Nuff said.
- nic
Do you consider it reasonable, therefore, for the U.S. to hijack random aircraft throughout the world and crash them into things as a response to 911?
I never said that I consider retaliation a reasonable or moral basis for foreign policy. I did say that the invasion of Afghanistan could be considered a reasonable U.S. response to 09/11 if the Taliban had perpetrated it. Your likely response of "but the Taliban had links with Al Qaeda" is precisely the start of that slippery slope I was talking about. The Taliban and Saddam are ultimately both CIA creations - so are you going to bomb Langley? Of course not. This kind of argument is only used to claim the moral high ground when it suits your government's purposes.
To complement your above ludicrous scenario, how would you feel if the French bombed Hollywood so as to preserve the "vital cultural and economic interests" of their film industry? Some of the stunts the U.S. have pulled in South America (Panama, Grenada, etc.) are not far from that level of arrogance and lunacy.
If I may briefly assume you have made a strong argument that the U.S. invaded Iraq with intent to conquer her
No, you may not - don't put words in my mouth. The U.S. invaded Iraq in order to create a dependent client state in the oil-rich Gulf region, as a backup for the likely case that the shaky Saudi regime (or at least its support for the U.S.) collapses. They will leave Iraq as soon as sufficient political and economic infrastructure is in place to ensure that goal, and no sooner. Of course it's much easier to swallow the "we are good, Saddam is evil, therefore it is our moral duty to depose him" horseshit the government feeds you.
The nature of fundamentalism is to selectively enlist moral principles in support of one's own purposes. In that sense, the U.S. is becoming increasingly fundamentalist, and this is as worrisome a development as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. From fundamentalism to fascism is but a short step - beware the beginnings. If I sound overly dramatic, consider the erosion of civil liberties in the U.S. and (to a lesser extent) Europe after 09/11. Consider hundreds of prisoners held for years at Guantanamo without being charged, without access to lawyers, in direct violation of the Geneva convention. Doesn't that worry you? Scares me as much as any raving ayatollah - more so, in that it's *our* governments doing this.
- nic
You misrepresented the grandparent's premise by implying that invasion (presumably in the formal military sense) is a prerequisite for retaliation. Your modification of the premise is, of course, absurd. 911 is an excellent exception to your "rule".
Not so. The claim I am disputing was:
Can you come up with one example where the U.S. was not retaliating?
in the context of U.S. invasions. Webster defines "to retaliate" as:
transitive senses: to repay (as an injury) in kind
intransitive senses: to return like for like; especially: to get revenge
(boldface mine for emphasis). Clearly, a prior kind of invasion of the U.S. by another nation is required for a U.S. invasion of the perpretrator to be considered a retaliation. So the question rather is, can we come up with examples where a U.S. invasion *was* in retaliation?
Pearl Harbor is one, fine. 09/11 can be considered a kind of invasion, but while that justifies action against Al Qaeda, overthrowing the Taliban is a different matter. All that rhetoric about "the friends of our enemies", "axis of evil", etc. leads down a very slippery slope of cannonboat diplomacy littered with domino theories, neo-colonialism, and U.S. special economic interests.
Iraq represents a new nadir in that regard, and this is where the criticism stems from. Nobody but a few fanatics sheds a tear for that bastard SOB Saddam, but ends do not justify means, and the means used here - specifically, U.S. riding roughshot over the U.N., invading a sovereign nation on an extremely flimsy, and most likely forged, pretext - are scary in their amorality and ruthlessness.
- nic
Re Pearl harbour: Hawaii did not become a state of the U.S. until 1959, and to this day there are arguments that this may have in fact been illegal.
In any case, U.S. entry into WW-II is not at issue here. For the sake of focus, we can limit ourselves to even just post-cold-war cases, doesn't change the argument at all.
- nic
Can you come up with one example where the U.S. was not retaliating? Probably not.
Given that the U.S. have never been invaded: retaliate for what?? For not conforming to U.S. ideas of how the entire world should do their bidding?
Never mind history, start with a dictionary and look up "invasion" and "retaliation".
The U.S. acts internationally with all the aggressive zeal of a Jehovah's Witness at your door, and smarts and subtlety to match (that is, zero). With a vast military arsenal to back them up, and little to no compunctions about using it. "Why do they hate us so", sheesh it's bloody obvious innit?
- nic
But his wing allows him to travel four feet horizontally for every foot he descends, which meant he could cover 22 miles in this six-minute flight.
4:1 glide ratio? Errrr... a modern paraglider gets 8:1, never mind hanggliders at 12:1 or gliders at 40:1. A paragliding wing weighs less than 15 pounds, costs less than 3000 US$, and is safe, easy, and comfortable to fly, none of which can be said of this contraption. Tens of thousands of paragliding pilots worldwide routinely use their wings to stay in the air for hours at a time, and fly distances far in excess of 22 miles. I'm substantially underwhelmed by this clunky thing.
He had become the first person to fly across the English Channel without using an engine.
Conveniently ignoring the airplane that brought him to 30'000 feet first. From that altitude, he probably could have covered the same distance on his parachute, or just using a flying suit. Fun it may be, one of the great ideas of 2003 it ain't.
- nic
My "7 inch schlong" sounds so much more manly than my "14.5 centemeter prick".
Agreed...
especially since 14.5 cm is less than 6 inches.
- nic
Playing God
In that regard cloning is no different from any other technology, going back to the invention of trains ("man was not meant to travel faster than 10 mph"), and probably the wheel ("things are not meant to go round and round"). Luddites will forever smash the looms but in doing so not only fail to stop the inexorable march of technology, with all its positive and negative effects, but also (tragically) fail to participate in shaping these effects.
"Playing God" has always been human nature (Prometheus!), and the starting point of any useful debate about new technology is therefore not "we shouldn't play God", nor even "should be play God?", but "*how* do we want to play God?"
- nic
I'm not sure how I would feel, and what mental strain would be thrust upon me if I were to be able to look at my mother/father and know that I was an exact biological copy, with an overwhelminmg likelihood of getting - say - prostate/ovarian cancer at age 43.
All a matter of perspective. In her 1976 story "Houston, Houston, do you read?", James Tiptree, Jr. subverted this position by positing a future in which cloning has become the norm, sexual reproduction having been eliminated by disease:
And our cherished "biological uniqueness" elicits only pity from the Judys:
In short, biological uniqueness, being pretty much the only game in town at this point, may be grossly overrated.
- nic
Problem is that IQ isn't additive, it works more like resistors in parallel: let's assume (realistically) that each of us has an IQ of 150. Then if 3 of us get together, the groups overall IQ will be
IQ = 1/(1/iq1 + 1/iq2 + 1/iq3),
which works out to just 50, well below the "rocket science" threshold of 80. As group size increases, group IQ tends to zero, a phenomenon well-known in programmer and government circles.
So to conclude, we're better off building our rockets individually. Perhaps we could share experiences under GPL though.
- nic
is Russian Siberia part of Europe?
"new" Europe or "old" Europe?
- nic
"lasts longer than your marriage anyway"