Would you feel better if guns were outlawed and everyone reverted to knives, arrows, baseball bats? The will to death isn't exclusive to any particular tool.
I'd rather be stabbed, arrowed or hit with a baseball bat than shot, as the odds of surviving are greater. There will always be people who will kill other people with their bare hands, but it's a lot, lot harder than shooting them half a dozen times with a semi-automatic pistol.
Assuming your statistics are valid, which isn't really important, you do not know how large the percentage of that 6 per day is the result of self protection and thus a desired outcome.
A human death is never a desired outcome.
When most people are armed, the consequence of self defence is much more likely to be an unnecessary death than in societies where most people aren't armed, simply because it's a lot easier to shoot and kill someone than stab, slash, punch or bludgeon someone and kill them.
Such ark ships could even support space for other near sentient species (Higher Primates, Dolphins, Parrots and Cephalopods.) We could help other species attain full sentience and become technological species in their own right.
And on what scientific non-brain-farty evidence do you base that rather extraordinary claim?
An attempt at a colony on Mars or the moon would go a long way toward answering those questions. Perhaps the most important side-effect of such an effort would be to reshape our policies toward our own planet.
In the same way that the Apollo program ushered in a new world order of peace and harmony?
Oh and by the way I am a libertarian, and I never had any guilt for ignoring them to begin with, never mind not wanting to. To me that's like feeling guilty for fish or trees. What about them? I just don't care. Why, does that make me evil or something?
For new readers, he's referring to OP's sig about homeless people.
The answer to your question is that not caring about other human beings' suffering makes you a psychopath: I'm not religious so I wouldn't use the word evil.
having humanity stay on Earth till the sun burns out would be crazy
No one's saying that we won't make progress in the next five billion years you know, just that we need to be realistic about what we can achieve in the next couple of hundred.
The problem with a lot of the wild-eyed optimistic space fanboys on slashdot is that, because they are generally computer-oriented, they think that the whole world follows some version of Moore's law, whereby technology must inevitably go on improving at some exponential rate, so that any problem eventually becomes solvable when you can chuck enough computing power at it.
Yes, but having a few hundred people in glorified space stations or in The Thing-like camps on Mars isn't going to save humanity.
What we need is the ability to travel faster than light, and therefore back in time, so that any potential asteroid hit can be averted in plenty of time.
Oxygen means either the oxygen atom or the O2 molecule. Stop playing semantics.
Gee, if only there were some way to convert one to the other, maybe even have a fuel source as a byproduct, wouldn't that be a wonderful dream?
It depends on (a) the quantities of water easily accessible on Mars and (b) whether your water spliting equipment doesn't use more fuel than you generate as a byproduct.
Martian soil doesn't have humus, it's just sand and rocks.
I don't live in San Francisco but I can make sourdough bread.
Yeah, all you have to do is to terraform Mars, leave it for a few million years, and you'll have proper soil, a breatable atmosphere and singing and dancing pink unicorns to ride on.
People really need to stop being such naysayers and ninnies. The issues we face with space exploration (radiation, bone loss) are far less serious than what the explorers faced during the age of discovery (parasites, scurvy, and lots more).
Early explorers had at least some reasonable chance of returning alive, plus if anything went wrong along the way, most places they ended up in would be inhabitable without requiring vast amounts of external equipment to provide air, water and food.
But mainly, there were actually useful places and things to discover, not just the chance of Yet Another Fucking Asteroid.
Bone loss is the only really serious consequence, and even that may not matter if you don't worry about actually returning to 1G.
So only serious life-sentence criminals or the terminally insane would ever be sent into space long term. Most of us wouldn't be too thrilled at the idea of never being able to return to Earth.
Living in a glorified space station is not many people's idea of fun. Psycholgically, it would be like living in a submarine or something, which is to say most people would go insane after a few months.
Your idea of anti-gravity drugs is amusingly off the wall, but like many space nutter ideas based on science fiction rather than scientific evidence.
Even the most hostile environments on earth usually have at least SOME oxygen, water, soil, air pressure
The moon even has most of those.
Mars has all of them.
You're just playing with words. Mars does not have soil in the normal sense, just a sort of inert dust, the atmosphere is not breathable, water would have to be extracted from deep-laying ice, and so on.
You couldn't survive on Mars without massive backup from Earth.
Think about what happens when the cable breaks - unless it's very close to the surface, where stresses are at a minimum you get a stupendously thick cable falling hundreds of miles onto, well, everywhere. Geostationary (the maximum-stress point below which everything will fall to Earth in case of a break) is 22,000 miles away. Earth's circumfrence is 25,000 miles. No place on Earth would be safe from the impact, and the damage would be horrendous.
To be fair, it would make an awesome disaster movie though.
I look forward to reading you published paper that ties all physics together and definitive proves chemical fuels are the only way we will ever be able to travel.
What's that? you don't have one? well then, STFU.
Well, OK, then I look forward to reading you (sic) published paper that definitely proves that there isn't a teapot orbiting the Earth.
The problem at the moment is that we seem stuck at travelling at less than the speed of light, so that the nearest potentially inhabitable planets are thousands of years away, whatever cool new fuels we come up with.
I think NASA should "give up" on human space flight altogether... and leave it to the private sector. NASA should focus on exploration with space probes, fund basic research, and make the resulting data publicly and freely available. The rest will take care of itself.
That is one of the stupidest "leave it to the free market" statements I've ever seen. The precious private sector should do its own fucking basic research, not piggyback off taxpayer funded work to create private profits for a few space tourist wankers.
I think that a lot of the technology researched in working on a manned mission to Mars would be very useful in other fields.
Probably, but at what cost? And the point remains that even if we get a few people living on Mars, they're not going to ensure the future of the human race if the Earth gets hit by an asteroid. And we're not going to get interstellar travel by incremental increases in technology, we would need some major theoretical breakthrough.
There is a difference between acting stupidly in private and acting stupidly in public. All the OP was saying is that if you do something stupid in public you can't complain if it gets recorded and put on the internet.
If President Obama got drunk and jerked off in the middle of a public street, then it would be legitimate to publish pictures of it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a lot easier to pick on Africa than China, isn't it?
Would you feel better if guns were outlawed and everyone reverted to knives, arrows, baseball bats? The will to death isn't exclusive to any particular tool.
I'd rather be stabbed, arrowed or hit with a baseball bat than shot, as the odds of surviving are greater. There will always be people who will kill other people with their bare hands, but it's a lot, lot harder than shooting them half a dozen times with a semi-automatic pistol.
Assuming your statistics are valid, which isn't really important, you do not know how large the percentage of that 6 per day is the result of self protection and thus a desired outcome.
A human death is never a desired outcome.
When most people are armed, the consequence of self defence is much more likely to be an unnecessary death than in societies where most people aren't armed, simply because it's a lot easier to shoot and kill someone than stab, slash, punch or bludgeon someone and kill them.
Such ark ships could even support space for other near sentient species (Higher Primates, Dolphins, Parrots and Cephalopods.) We could help other species attain full sentience and become technological species in their own right.
And on what scientific non-brain-farty evidence do you base that rather extraordinary claim?
An attempt at a colony on Mars or the moon would go a long way toward answering those questions. Perhaps the most important side-effect of such an effort would be to reshape our policies toward our own planet.
In the same way that the Apollo program ushered in a new world order of peace and harmony?
Oh and by the way I am a libertarian, and I never had any guilt for ignoring them to begin with, never mind not wanting to. To me that's like feeling guilty for fish or trees. What about them? I just don't care. Why, does that make me evil or something?
For new readers, he's referring to OP's sig about homeless people.
The answer to your question is that not caring about other human beings' suffering makes you a psychopath: I'm not religious so I wouldn't use the word evil.
having humanity stay on Earth till the sun burns out would be crazy
No one's saying that we won't make progress in the next five billion years you know, just that we need to be realistic about what we can achieve in the next couple of hundred.
Would we be able to broadcast any music we felt like, ignoring copyrights?
Yes, obviously it's the RIAA who are preventing us from colonising the stars.
The only thing worse than a space nutter is a singularity nutter.
The problem with a lot of the wild-eyed optimistic space fanboys on slashdot is that, because they are generally computer-oriented, they think that the whole world follows some version of Moore's law, whereby technology must inevitably go on improving at some exponential rate, so that any problem eventually becomes solvable when you can chuck enough computing power at it.
I would counter that any problem is solvable given sufficient application of resources. Also, you're one depressing motherfucker.
OK, show me the plans for a time machine that can be built with sufficient application of resources.
What we need is the ability to travel faster than light, and therefore back in time, so that any potential asteroid hit can be averted in plenty of time.
Simples.
We are stuck here. There is no escape.
You might be, but all the trapping being done is by your own mind, not any kind of scientific basis.
Talk is cheap. Show me your spaceship.
Replace "spaceship" with "aeroplane" and you'd fit right in with Orville and Wilbur's dissenters.
"Talk is cheap. Show me your time machine."
Replace "time machine" with "aeroplane" and you'd fit right in with Orville and Wilbur's dissenters.
You see the logical problem?
Radiation too intense? Don't stay outside for prolonged periods
Temperature too cold? Put on thermal underwear.
No air to breathe? Hold your breath and run quickly to the next hut.
Any minor problems are easily overcome.
Oxygen means either the oxygen atom or the O2 molecule. Stop playing semantics.
Gee, if only there were some way to convert one to the other, maybe even have a fuel source as a byproduct, wouldn't that be a wonderful dream?
It depends on (a) the quantities of water easily accessible on Mars and (b) whether your water spliting equipment doesn't use more fuel than you generate as a byproduct.
Martian soil doesn't have humus, it's just sand and rocks.
I don't live in San Francisco but I can make sourdough bread.
Yeah, all you have to do is to terraform Mars, leave it for a few million years, and you'll have proper soil, a breatable atmosphere and singing and dancing pink unicorns to ride on.
People really need to stop being such naysayers and ninnies. The issues we face with space exploration (radiation, bone loss) are far less serious than what the explorers faced during the age of discovery (parasites, scurvy, and lots more).
Early explorers had at least some reasonable chance of returning alive, plus if anything went wrong along the way, most places they ended up in would be inhabitable without requiring vast amounts of external equipment to provide air, water and food.
But mainly, there were actually useful places and things to discover, not just the chance of Yet Another Fucking Asteroid.
Bone loss is the only really serious consequence, and even that may not matter if you don't worry about actually returning to 1G.
So only serious life-sentence criminals or the terminally insane would ever be sent into space long term. Most of us wouldn't be too thrilled at the idea of never being able to return to Earth.
Your idea of anti-gravity drugs is amusingly off the wall, but like many space nutter ideas based on science fiction rather than scientific evidence.
Even the most hostile environments on earth usually have at least SOME oxygen, water, soil, air pressure The moon even has most of those.
Mars has all of them.
You're just playing with words. Mars does not have soil in the normal sense, just a sort of inert dust, the atmosphere is not breathable, water would have to be extracted from deep-laying ice, and so on.
You couldn't survive on Mars without massive backup from Earth.
Think about what happens when the cable breaks - unless it's very close to the surface, where stresses are at a minimum you get a stupendously thick cable falling hundreds of miles onto, well, everywhere. Geostationary (the maximum-stress point below which everything will fall to Earth in case of a break) is 22,000 miles away. Earth's circumfrence is 25,000 miles. No place on Earth would be safe from the impact, and the damage would be horrendous.
To be fair, it would make an awesome disaster movie though.
I look forward to reading you published paper that ties all physics together and definitive proves chemical fuels are the only way we will ever be able to travel.
What's that? you don't have one? well then, STFU.
Well, OK, then I look forward to reading you (sic) published paper that definitely proves that there isn't a teapot orbiting the Earth.
The problem at the moment is that we seem stuck at travelling at less than the speed of light, so that the nearest potentially inhabitable planets are thousands of years away, whatever cool new fuels we come up with.
I think NASA should "give up" on human space flight altogether... and leave it to the private sector. NASA should focus on exploration with space probes, fund basic research, and make the resulting data publicly and freely available. The rest will take care of itself.
That is one of the stupidest "leave it to the free market" statements I've ever seen. The precious private sector should do its own fucking basic research, not piggyback off taxpayer funded work to create private profits for a few space tourist wankers.
I think that a lot of the technology researched in working on a manned mission to Mars would be very useful in other fields.
Probably, but at what cost? And the point remains that even if we get a few people living on Mars, they're not going to ensure the future of the human race if the Earth gets hit by an asteroid. And we're not going to get interstellar travel by incremental increases in technology, we would need some major theoretical breakthrough.
If President Obama got drunk and jerked off in the middle of a public street, then it would be legitimate to publish pictures of it.