How about kicking other people's satellites out of orbit... or placing an explosive charge on them which can be detonated at will, if a war flares up at some point in the future.
This might sound a bit tinfoil-hat, but the USAF has a history of working on antisatellite warfare, and space superiority is probably going to be as important to the 21st-century battlefield as air superiority was to the 20th century. If you can use space to navigate, communicate, and spy- and deny your enemy the same ability- then you've got a major advantage on the battlefield.
What about him? If what you quote is true, then he didn't just handle things poorly, he handled things unprofessionally. He gets involved with a married woman at work at then ditches her for another woman he meets at work? It is almost always a bad idea to get involved with people you need to have a working relationship with... to say nothing of people you might have to work with 100 miles above the earth.
His career is probably shot at this point. They won't fire him- it would draw yet more unwanted attention to NASA, and he might make false accusations (or worse, true ones) about NASA's own failures (for instance, that NASA turned a blind eye to this kind of behavior). But NASA might issue a strong reprimand, and make it clear that they would do everything in their power to make his transition to a non-NASA career as quick and painless as possible. I doubt he will ever fly again- there would be too much negative publicity. If they ever put him on a shuttle, the mission would get more publicity from rude jokes by Leno and Letterman than any of the actual science would.
Personally, I would never go for something like this. When I'm writing a paper, editing an image, or using a spreadsheet for a significant amount of time, I want a screen that doesn't cause eye damage and a keyboard that won't cause carpal tunnel syndrome.
On the other hand, yes, there are times when I don't need a full screen and keyboard: maybe I just want to look up the showtimes for a movie, find street directions on Google Maps, dash off a quick email to my friend. But here, it's too heavy (1.5 lbs), doesn't have adequate battery life (3.5 hrs), costs too much ($2000) and I wouldn't want the hassle of having a full Windows installation.
This device manages to be too much and too little at the same time. It's too small to do serious work, so it can't replace your laptop. In principle, it could replace your Blackberry, but it's too large, expensive, and crammed with features(take a hint from iPod: less is more!), so it won't. It's a device trying to kill both the laptop and the Blackberry and ultimately doing neither. There might be a niche for something in between the Blackberry and the laptop in terms of size and features, but I can't see this device taking it.
What they really mean when they say, "we're not out to kill WOW" is "we won't get killed by WOW". If I wanted to invest in or partner with a company doing a MMORPG, my first question is going to be, "how will your company survive if you can't take significant market share away from WOW?" The answer is that you'd have to find a different group of gamers, or offer something different enough that people would play both your game and WOW.
Otherwise... well, Blizzard isn't invincible. If you build a better game and market it well, people will come. But even though it's possible to beat Blizzard, your chances of failure are very high. So if your entire strategy hinged on the idea that you could beat Blizzard at their own game, I'd say you were at best, reckless, and at worst, deluded.
Why is it that there seems to be two responses from these anti-Bush/anti-patriot act groups? "Terror laws don't work" where as the last full scale terror attack on our country was 5 years ago. The second response is usually "Well the world hates us" and you look again and there hasn't been an attack on US soil since 9/11. So why hasn't terrorism reigned supreme here if everyone hates us and Homeland security isn't working? We aren't fighting the three stogies here.
There are three answers:
(1)They don't have to strike on our home territory to hurt us- in fact, they can hurt us a lot more easily, and more effectively, by attacking us abroad. If I were a fanatical Saudi Arabian suicide bomber, I could bomb a Starbucks in Topeka, but it would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to plan, and it would have a low probability of succeeding. On the other hand, I could just head to Iraq. It's a lot easier to get across the unsecured Iraqi border than through American customs, and once I'm there I look like everyone else and speak the local language, so it's much easier to operate and blend in. And the Americans have done me the favor of shipping to my front door- at the cost of billions of dollars- their young men and women. Praise Allah!
(2) They are busy attacking our allies -as they did in Madrid and London- to isolate us. And quite effectively. Notice how small the "coalition of the willing" is these days?
(3) America is pretty good at integrating its immigrants, so Al Qaeda has very few sympathizers in the United States. Muslim immigrants to the United States tend to like America, identify as Americans, and to pick up our values, and their kids are very well integrated into the culture. They may not like the government but they like the country. However, Muslims in Europe much more often end up isolated, economically disenfranchised, and pissed off at their host countries. That makes them more likely to look to radical Islam and hatch bomb plots, as in London. The way we treat our immigrants, and not the Patriot Act, is probably our strongest defense against domestic terrorism.
I don't really give a rat's ass about Hilary's character, or lack thereof. Sure, most people might find George Dubya more easy-going, likeable, the type of guy you would hang out with over a beer. Fine, but he's just not remotely competent or qualified to run the country.
I just want someone who can do a reasonably good job solving the problems we all agree need solving. They can be a stiff nerd like Gore, a cold bitch like Hilary, a hothead who shoots off his mouth like McCain, a guy with zillions of ex-wives like Giuliani, or a Lovecraftian Elder God whose unpronounceable name inspires madness in all who hear it. I don't give a damn. Just so long as they do a halfway decent job of running an administration which finds practical solutions to the challenges facing our country such as Iraq, energy, education, immigration, and soforth.
I've had enough of principled candidates with character. Just get me someone who can do the fucking job. That's what we need- more pragmatism, people who are committed to getting shit done, enough of the naive idealists like the Neocons and Bush.
That's nothing. They've already learned how to get into houses... White houses seem especially vulnerable.
You know, I think that the idea of comparing George W. Bush to a chimp is really offensive and in poor taste. If you have any sense of decency- which I rather doubt- I think you'd apologize for this kind of immature name-calling. I can't even begin to tell you how angry I am that you would stoop to comparing such a fine, upstanding species of primate to the President of the United States of America.
Also, giant squid (I'm not sure which, Architeuthis or Mesonychoteuthis, would have bigger eyes) have the largest eyes of any animal on earth. The sheer light collecting power of having such a large retina suggests they're designed to see in very low-light conditions (like owls and whipporwhills), although I don't know if anybody knows how they use them.
The ammonium is used for bouyancy (being lower density than the surrounding seawater), and not to resist pressure. Not having any gases inside them, squid are incompressible. It's unclear whether Mesonychoteuthis has as much ammonium as Architeuthis but reports are that the specimens don't smell quite as strongly.
At any rate, it's not as if there's a shortage of natural gas in Alaska. There are vast quantities in the Prudhoe Bay fields; the problem is that without a gas pipeline, there is no way to get it out of Alaska and to market. There is a lot of interest in building a pipeline, but you can imagine the various considerations- environmental impacts, terrorism threats, negotiating terms with the Canadians and Native American peoples in order to cross their land, what cut the state gets of the revenues- so it's not happening immediately. However, it will eventually happen if energy demands keep growing the way they have been.
And it's not as if deceptive use of images (still and film) was invented with Photoshop and other digital image manipulation tools. All Photoshop does is make image manipulation faster and easier.
I do a lot of photography, and I can radically change the image by changing the position of the camera, the lighting, the composition of my shot, the lens I use, F-stop(aperture), exposure, ISO settings(sensitivity), and soforth... it goes on and on. And you can put some makeup on the model to make her skin look better. And obviously, choose a model with really great skin, and not an average user of your skin-care product. As for post-processing, I learned photography with a digital camera, but my understanding is that the entire reason it's called "Photoshop" is that many of the image manipulation techniques are the same kind of thing you could do in a darkroom if you were a competent developer. You could make the image lighter, or darker, or selectively brighten certain areas, so on and soforth. Before there was the digital Airbrush tool in Adobe, there was the physical airbrush. And how is adding a digital tear more "fake" than putting a little water on the actor's cheek?
It's faster and easier to manipulate imagery these days, but it's always been possible to manipulate images, and images have always been human creations, rather than unbiased recordings of reality.
Here's a tip. The cheat code for open heart surgery is" up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start. Also, there's a power-up hidden behind the left aorta.
Sure- you *might* be able to theoretically build a ship that could go further but all politics is local. Look at our politics- could we gather the will to build a 10 trillion dollar multi-generation star ship?
Larry Niven did a lot of hard sci-fi; that is he actually took into account things like elementary physics and economics. The book that sticks out in my mind here is "The Mote in God's Eye", where an alien civilization builds a slower-than-light probe with a light sail and launch it to a nearby star system using a massive laser. The detail I remember is that the extraordinary amount of energy required to do this means that it takes almost the entire energetic output of the alien planet in order to build the probe and then power the laser. Combined with the alien's unstable political system, this means that launching the probe results in a complete collapse of their civilization. Getting a spacecraft to even a small fraction of the speed of light requires vast amounts of energy- more than our current entire energy output, if I recall.
That's what we're talking about. The energy and resources expended would be non-trivial. It's not like cutting funds to the National Endowments for the Arts current crop of penis-related imagery is going to do it. We're talking trillions of dollars worth of materials, scientific research, power, and soforth, something that would make the Iraq war look cheap in comparison. That's going to mean less money available for things that directly affect the quality of our lives- roads, research into curing AIDS and cancer, helping to develop Africa, law enforcement, national defense, and soforth. Someone has to pay for the energy, materials, manpower, and research that go into building a starship.
The question is, how much are we willing to pay? A few hundred extra in taxes per year? I could probably stand that. A few thousand? I don't know. Half your wages? I like the idea of space travel, but I don't like it that much. But that's what it might take to do it using anything like current technology.
And that's the big question, in my mind- it's not enough to make space travel possible, it has to be economically feasible.
The dinosaur argument doesn't hold water. Turtles, salamanders, crocodiles and pike all survived the extinction, and none of them had, to my knowledge, any kind of a space program. What killed the dinosaurs was that they had high food requirements- being large and warm blooded- didn't have the ability to store food, and then the ecosystem collapsed. We, on the other hand, do have the ability to anticipate asteroid impacts and store food.
The best way to survive a Chicxulub-style impact is the Dr. Strangelove model. Get an underground complex to ride out the initial fallout of red-hot debris, have a nuclear reactor for power, some parkas for ventures outside into the cold, food to survive for 10-100 years, a force to defend it from looters, and store up the machinery needed to start reestablishing an industrial civilization when things have recovered. It wouldn't even have to be a terribly large population, since you could have a bank full of ten thousand frozen embryos to maintain adequate genetic diversity.
Concievably there are threats where a space program is the logical answer- say, the sun goes supernova- but an asteroid impact just isn't one of them.
These calculations sound like something of a black art. Originally, this asteroid was supposed to have a 1 in 5500 chance of hitting earth, then it was downgraded to 1 in 24,000, now it's 1 in 45,000... apparently the calculations are easily thrown off by tiny differences in the measured velocity http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn9203-risk- of-asteroid-smashing-into-earth-reduced.html%5D.
Even so, 1 in 45,000 sounds a bit high. I can't claim to know anything about orbital mechanics, but there are other ways to approach the problem. One of them is to look at history- written history, archaeology, and geology. There are no written accounts, as far as I know, of a meteorite causing significant numbers of human casualties, either through an impact or through a tsunami induced by impact. To put this in perspective, earthquakes have killed many hundreds of thousands of people in the past century in Mexico, China, Iran, Peru, San Francisco, Japan, Pakistan and so on; older earthquakes have killed massive numbers of people- often hundreds of thousands- in China, Iran, Portugal, Syria, Sicily, etc. Tsunamis have killed hundreds of thousands, recently in the Indian Ocean; Krakatoa killed a huge number of people when it blew up and created a tsunami. Explosive eruption in Crete seems to have wiped the Minoan civilization off the map. Floods kill people so routinely that it's hard to even keep all the flooding events around the world straight.
What this says is that throughout human history, in terms of natural disasters, the earthquakes, tsunamis (induced by earthquake or eruption), volcanic eruptions and floods have been far more deadly than asteroids and comets. The geological record suggests that at points, asteroid impacts have been devastating enough to destroy most of the existing ecosystem for periods of time (as indicated by the extinction of plankton, plants, and herbivores at the end of the Cretaceous) but that events of this magntitude are vanishingly rare- once every hundred million years or so. Smaller events are a more realistic worry, but even then they aren't that common. I've been to Meteor Crater, in Arizona and I'm sure it was a doozy, and it would have sucked to be within a few miles of it, but Meteor Crater is notable precisely because things like it are so rare. If meteors were that common, we would expect to see a lot more of them dotting the deserts than we do.
I don't mean to put down people who are (for a refreshing change) taking a long-term, big picture view, but I think that there are more commonplace disasters we need to worry about, like earthquakes and tsunamis, which involve more boring, mundane solutions, like good building codes, tsunami warning networks, tsunami evacuation sirens, and flood control.
Interesting point. This article has one reference. One. "Tally, Steve (1992). Bland Ambition: From Adams to Quayle--The Cranks, Criminals, Tax Cheats, and Golfers Who Made It to Vice President. Harcourt. ISBN 0-15-613140-4." First off, it sounds like a popular history book, not a scholarly work of the sort you could cite in a serious academic paper, second, it doesn't cover the two most recent vice presidents, Gore and Cheney. If this is what Wikipedians think constitutes good scholarship, well, I wouldn't hold my breath on being taken seriously by academics.
Listen, I'm speaking as someone who has spent a fair amount of time editing Wikipedia and trying to make it better: the writing is awful, the scholarship isn't very good, and because of the poor scholarship there is no way in heck that I, as an academic, would be able to get away with citing a Wikipedia article in a serious academic paper, or would even allow my students to cite it in one of their student papers.
Wikipedia isn't failing at this. It's doing this remarkably well. The failing is in reactionary academics who feel threatened by Wikipedia, and the perception these people cause.
This is pretty typical of the irrationally defensive reaction that legitimate criticisms of Wikipedia generate. Wikipedia is a really good introduction to many topics, but it has serious problems which limit its use for scholarly work. The problems of lousy writing and poor scholarship are potentially fixable, but not when Wikipedians spend so much time and effort trying to deflect blame to others, saying "you just don't get it" or "why don't you fix it" and soforth. Academics tend to be pretty cutting-edge, really. We've embraced PDFs and the internet as a means of distributing manuscripts, the open-source, online journal PLOS biology has done very well; I'm practically addicted to Google Scholar. It's not that I don't "get" Wikipedia. Precisely the opposite: I see where it's failings are, and unless they're fixed, I'm not going to take it seriously as scholarship.
You know, I hate political correctness as much as anyone, but I've honestly got to wonder: am I the only person who found Starcraft to be offensively racist? The SCV pilot is the only black unit, he's the lowest on the totem pole, and he's a dumb, nose-picking, menial laborer of a negro. Short of having him pick cotton instead of mine crystals, I have a hard time imagining how Blizzard could have possibly made a game which was more backwards, stereotypical and offensive towards black people.
But what about the expansion pack? They had that black Ghost! He's no stupid menial laborer. So that's a positive portrayal of black people, right? Whatsisface, Duran... traitorous, backstabbing, double agent Duran. OK, nevermind. I'm not saying we need the Supreme Court to order a quota in video games or anything, but would it have fucking killed Blizzard to have a single, positive portrayal of a minority?
If they were real, ESP and telekinesis would have their costs, but the benefits would be so massive that natural selection would inevitably tend to favor them. The result? Precognitive snakes that would know exactly where to wait for a mouse, sharks which could use mind control to make fish swim into their mouths, lions which could track zebras by tuning into their thoughts and then communicate the location to packmates. ESP and related phenomena would be obvious and they would be everywhere.
And likewise, a tribe of people with weird mental powers would be treated as oddballs and shunned, like in "X-men". But just like in "X-men" their gifts would make them so powerful that nobody would really have a chance against them, and normal, average, everyday Homo sapiens without the ability to see the future, use telepathy, or manipulate matter with their minds would been wiped out centuries ago. If these sorts of phenomena were real, we wouldn't be arguing about how they would change the world- they would have already changed the world.
Guerilla warfare is very effective as a political tool, it has limited military value. It's primary purpose is not to "win," it's to induce weariness in the enemy through disruption.
The insurgency is currently able to take out our soldiers, our Humvees, our helicopters, and even our M-1 Abrams tanks, using guerilla tactics. This hardly sounds like "limited military value", if by "military value" you mean the ability to inflict losses upon one's enemy.
At any rate, it's idiotic to talk about warfare and politics as somehow being separate things. As Clausewitz said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. The entire *point* of warfare is political. Sure, we rolled into Iraq, blew up a lot of tanks, took out the Baathists, held territory, built some bases, and shot a lot of insurgents. Does that mean we win? No. Not unless we can achieve our desired political outcome. And not only is that outcome- a stable, democratic Iraq- not happening, it is now further away than ever. Appointing competent people like Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and General Petraeus as the head of the military is a step in the right direction, but it comes after so many missteps made by incompetent hacks like Rumsfeld and Bremer that it is probably too late.
Holding their own in the political sense that they still exist, which in practical terms is all they need. However, from a military perspective they have not had any significant victories over the US.
Listen, there's a famous story about a U.S. officer talking to his North Vietnamese counterpart during the Paris negotiations. He says, "You never defeated us in the field." The NVA officer shoots back: "That is true. It is also irrelevant." You're confusing tactical victory with strategic victory. It is possible to win tactically and lose strategically. That is what happened in Vietnam. That is what is currently happening in Iraq. When people shoot at us, we usually kill more of them than they kill of us, so that's a tactical victory. But we haven't been able to achieve what we wanted- a stable, pro-Western democracy- so we're losing in Iraq.
It really has become security theatre. Australia has caught the bug too. According to the person in charge of the entire Federal legal system we have to watch out for terrorist bikers
Hey, don't tell me terrorist bikers are not an issue in Australia. I've seen both "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior", so I know what I'm talking about.
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This might sound a bit tinfoil-hat, but the USAF has a history of working on antisatellite warfare, and space superiority is probably going to be as important to the 21st-century battlefield as air superiority was to the 20th century. If you can use space to navigate, communicate, and spy- and deny your enemy the same ability- then you've got a major advantage on the battlefield.
His career is probably shot at this point. They won't fire him- it would draw yet more unwanted attention to NASA, and he might make false accusations (or worse, true ones) about NASA's own failures (for instance, that NASA turned a blind eye to this kind of behavior). But NASA might issue a strong reprimand, and make it clear that they would do everything in their power to make his transition to a non-NASA career as quick and painless as possible. I doubt he will ever fly again- there would be too much negative publicity. If they ever put him on a shuttle, the mission would get more publicity from rude jokes by Leno and Letterman than any of the actual science would.
On the other hand, yes, there are times when I don't need a full screen and keyboard: maybe I just want to look up the showtimes for a movie, find street directions on Google Maps, dash off a quick email to my friend. But here, it's too heavy (1.5 lbs), doesn't have adequate battery life (3.5 hrs), costs too much ($2000) and I wouldn't want the hassle of having a full Windows installation.
This device manages to be too much and too little at the same time. It's too small to do serious work, so it can't replace your laptop. In principle, it could replace your Blackberry, but it's too large, expensive, and crammed with features(take a hint from iPod: less is more!), so it won't. It's a device trying to kill both the laptop and the Blackberry and ultimately doing neither. There might be a niche for something in between the Blackberry and the laptop in terms of size and features, but I can't see this device taking it.
Otherwise... well, Blizzard isn't invincible. If you build a better game and market it well, people will come. But even though it's possible to beat Blizzard, your chances of failure are very high. So if your entire strategy hinged on the idea that you could beat Blizzard at their own game, I'd say you were at best, reckless, and at worst, deluded.
There are three answers:
(1)They don't have to strike on our home territory to hurt us- in fact, they can hurt us a lot more easily, and more effectively, by attacking us abroad. If I were a fanatical Saudi Arabian suicide bomber, I could bomb a Starbucks in Topeka, but it would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to plan, and it would have a low probability of succeeding. On the other hand, I could just head to Iraq. It's a lot easier to get across the unsecured Iraqi border than through American customs, and once I'm there I look like everyone else and speak the local language, so it's much easier to operate and blend in. And the Americans have done me the favor of shipping to my front door- at the cost of billions of dollars- their young men and women. Praise Allah!
(2) They are busy attacking our allies -as they did in Madrid and London- to isolate us. And quite effectively. Notice how small the "coalition of the willing" is these days?
(3) America is pretty good at integrating its immigrants, so Al Qaeda has very few sympathizers in the United States. Muslim immigrants to the United States tend to like America, identify as Americans, and to pick up our values, and their kids are very well integrated into the culture. They may not like the government but they like the country. However, Muslims in Europe much more often end up isolated, economically disenfranchised, and pissed off at their host countries. That makes them more likely to look to radical Islam and hatch bomb plots, as in London. The way we treat our immigrants, and not the Patriot Act, is probably our strongest defense against domestic terrorism.
I just want someone who can do a reasonably good job solving the problems we all agree need solving. They can be a stiff nerd like Gore, a cold bitch like Hilary, a hothead who shoots off his mouth like McCain, a guy with zillions of ex-wives like Giuliani, or a Lovecraftian Elder God whose unpronounceable name inspires madness in all who hear it. I don't give a damn. Just so long as they do a halfway decent job of running an administration which finds practical solutions to the challenges facing our country such as Iraq, energy, education, immigration, and soforth.
I've had enough of principled candidates with character. Just get me someone who can do the fucking job. That's what we need- more pragmatism, people who are committed to getting shit done, enough of the naive idealists like the Neocons and Bush.
You know, I think that the idea of comparing George W. Bush to a chimp is really offensive and in poor taste. If you have any sense of decency- which I rather doubt- I think you'd apologize for this kind of immature name-calling. I can't even begin to tell you how angry I am that you would stoop to comparing such a fine, upstanding species of primate to the President of the United States of America.
Also, giant squid (I'm not sure which, Architeuthis or Mesonychoteuthis, would have bigger eyes) have the largest eyes of any animal on earth. The sheer light collecting power of having such a large retina suggests they're designed to see in very low-light conditions (like owls and whipporwhills), although I don't know if anybody knows how they use them.
The ammonium is used for bouyancy (being lower density than the surrounding seawater), and not to resist pressure. Not having any gases inside them, squid are incompressible. It's unclear whether Mesonychoteuthis has as much ammonium as Architeuthis but reports are that the specimens don't smell quite as strongly.
NASA says that if you don't stop doing you-know-what, you're going to go blind.
At any rate, it's not as if there's a shortage of natural gas in Alaska. There are vast quantities in the Prudhoe Bay fields; the problem is that without a gas pipeline, there is no way to get it out of Alaska and to market. There is a lot of interest in building a pipeline, but you can imagine the various considerations- environmental impacts, terrorism threats, negotiating terms with the Canadians and Native American peoples in order to cross their land, what cut the state gets of the revenues- so it's not happening immediately. However, it will eventually happen if energy demands keep growing the way they have been.
I do a lot of photography, and I can radically change the image by changing the position of the camera, the lighting, the composition of my shot, the lens I use, F-stop(aperture), exposure, ISO settings(sensitivity), and soforth... it goes on and on. And you can put some makeup on the model to make her skin look better. And obviously, choose a model with really great skin, and not an average user of your skin-care product. As for post-processing, I learned photography with a digital camera, but my understanding is that the entire reason it's called "Photoshop" is that many of the image manipulation techniques are the same kind of thing you could do in a darkroom if you were a competent developer. You could make the image lighter, or darker, or selectively brighten certain areas, so on and soforth. Before there was the digital Airbrush tool in Adobe, there was the physical airbrush. And how is adding a digital tear more "fake" than putting a little water on the actor's cheek?
It's faster and easier to manipulate imagery these days, but it's always been possible to manipulate images, and images have always been human creations, rather than unbiased recordings of reality.
Here's a tip. The cheat code for open heart surgery is" up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start. Also, there's a power-up hidden behind the left aorta.
Larry Niven did a lot of hard sci-fi; that is he actually took into account things like elementary physics and economics. The book that sticks out in my mind here is "The Mote in God's Eye", where an alien civilization builds a slower-than-light probe with a light sail and launch it to a nearby star system using a massive laser. The detail I remember is that the extraordinary amount of energy required to do this means that it takes almost the entire energetic output of the alien planet in order to build the probe and then power the laser. Combined with the alien's unstable political system, this means that launching the probe results in a complete collapse of their civilization. Getting a spacecraft to even a small fraction of the speed of light requires vast amounts of energy- more than our current entire energy output, if I recall.
That's what we're talking about. The energy and resources expended would be non-trivial. It's not like cutting funds to the National Endowments for the Arts current crop of penis-related imagery is going to do it. We're talking trillions of dollars worth of materials, scientific research, power, and soforth, something that would make the Iraq war look cheap in comparison. That's going to mean less money available for things that directly affect the quality of our lives- roads, research into curing AIDS and cancer, helping to develop Africa, law enforcement, national defense, and soforth. Someone has to pay for the energy, materials, manpower, and research that go into building a starship.
The question is, how much are we willing to pay? A few hundred extra in taxes per year? I could probably stand that. A few thousand? I don't know. Half your wages? I like the idea of space travel, but I don't like it that much. But that's what it might take to do it using anything like current technology. And that's the big question, in my mind- it's not enough to make space travel possible, it has to be economically feasible.
The best way to survive a Chicxulub-style impact is the Dr. Strangelove model. Get an underground complex to ride out the initial fallout of red-hot debris, have a nuclear reactor for power, some parkas for ventures outside into the cold, food to survive for 10-100 years, a force to defend it from looters, and store up the machinery needed to start reestablishing an industrial civilization when things have recovered. It wouldn't even have to be a terribly large population, since you could have a bank full of ten thousand frozen embryos to maintain adequate genetic diversity.
Concievably there are threats where a space program is the logical answer- say, the sun goes supernova- but an asteroid impact just isn't one of them.
Even so, 1 in 45,000 sounds a bit high. I can't claim to know anything about orbital mechanics, but there are other ways to approach the problem. One of them is to look at history- written history, archaeology, and geology. There are no written accounts, as far as I know, of a meteorite causing significant numbers of human casualties, either through an impact or through a tsunami induced by impact. To put this in perspective, earthquakes have killed many hundreds of thousands of people in the past century in Mexico, China, Iran, Peru, San Francisco, Japan, Pakistan and so on; older earthquakes have killed massive numbers of people- often hundreds of thousands- in China, Iran, Portugal, Syria, Sicily, etc. Tsunamis have killed hundreds of thousands, recently in the Indian Ocean; Krakatoa killed a huge number of people when it blew up and created a tsunami. Explosive eruption in Crete seems to have wiped the Minoan civilization off the map. Floods kill people so routinely that it's hard to even keep all the flooding events around the world straight.
What this says is that throughout human history, in terms of natural disasters, the earthquakes, tsunamis (induced by earthquake or eruption), volcanic eruptions and floods have been far more deadly than asteroids and comets. The geological record suggests that at points, asteroid impacts have been devastating enough to destroy most of the existing ecosystem for periods of time (as indicated by the extinction of plankton, plants, and herbivores at the end of the Cretaceous) but that events of this magntitude are vanishingly rare- once every hundred million years or so. Smaller events are a more realistic worry, but even then they aren't that common. I've been to Meteor Crater, in Arizona and I'm sure it was a doozy, and it would have sucked to be within a few miles of it, but Meteor Crater is notable precisely because things like it are so rare. If meteors were that common, we would expect to see a lot more of them dotting the deserts than we do.
I don't mean to put down people who are (for a refreshing change) taking a long-term, big picture view, but I think that there are more commonplace disasters we need to worry about, like earthquakes and tsunamis, which involve more boring, mundane solutions, like good building codes, tsunami warning networks, tsunami evacuation sirens, and flood control.
What you say are true. Man use just many words as woman. Me go watch football now.
Damn, Sony sure had me fooled...
Interesting point. This article has one reference. One. "Tally, Steve (1992). Bland Ambition: From Adams to Quayle--The Cranks, Criminals, Tax Cheats, and Golfers Who Made It to Vice President. Harcourt. ISBN 0-15-613140-4." First off, it sounds like a popular history book, not a scholarly work of the sort you could cite in a serious academic paper, second, it doesn't cover the two most recent vice presidents, Gore and Cheney. If this is what Wikipedians think constitutes good scholarship, well, I wouldn't hold my breath on being taken seriously by academics.
Listen, I'm speaking as someone who has spent a fair amount of time editing Wikipedia and trying to make it better: the writing is awful, the scholarship isn't very good, and because of the poor scholarship there is no way in heck that I, as an academic, would be able to get away with citing a Wikipedia article in a serious academic paper, or would even allow my students to cite it in one of their student papers.
Wikipedia isn't failing at this. It's doing this remarkably well. The failing is in reactionary academics who feel threatened by Wikipedia, and the perception these people cause.
This is pretty typical of the irrationally defensive reaction that legitimate criticisms of Wikipedia generate. Wikipedia is a really good introduction to many topics, but it has serious problems which limit its use for scholarly work. The problems of lousy writing and poor scholarship are potentially fixable, but not when Wikipedians spend so much time and effort trying to deflect blame to others, saying "you just don't get it" or "why don't you fix it" and soforth. Academics tend to be pretty cutting-edge, really. We've embraced PDFs and the internet as a means of distributing manuscripts, the open-source, online journal PLOS biology has done very well; I'm practically addicted to Google Scholar. It's not that I don't "get" Wikipedia. Precisely the opposite: I see where it's failings are, and unless they're fixed, I'm not going to take it seriously as scholarship.
But what about the expansion pack? They had that black Ghost! He's no stupid menial laborer. So that's a positive portrayal of black people, right? Whatsisface, Duran... traitorous, backstabbing, double agent Duran. OK, nevermind. I'm not saying we need the Supreme Court to order a quota in video games or anything, but would it have fucking killed Blizzard to have a single, positive portrayal of a minority?
And likewise, a tribe of people with weird mental powers would be treated as oddballs and shunned, like in "X-men". But just like in "X-men" their gifts would make them so powerful that nobody would really have a chance against them, and normal, average, everyday Homo sapiens without the ability to see the future, use telepathy, or manipulate matter with their minds would been wiped out centuries ago. If these sorts of phenomena were real, we wouldn't be arguing about how they would change the world- they would have already changed the world.
It would appear that someone forgot to tell that to the insurgency and the Taliban.
The insurgency is currently able to take out our soldiers, our Humvees, our helicopters, and even our M-1 Abrams tanks, using guerilla tactics. This hardly sounds like "limited military value", if by "military value" you mean the ability to inflict losses upon one's enemy.
At any rate, it's idiotic to talk about warfare and politics as somehow being separate things. As Clausewitz said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. The entire *point* of warfare is political. Sure, we rolled into Iraq, blew up a lot of tanks, took out the Baathists, held territory, built some bases, and shot a lot of insurgents. Does that mean we win? No. Not unless we can achieve our desired political outcome. And not only is that outcome- a stable, democratic Iraq- not happening, it is now further away than ever. Appointing competent people like Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and General Petraeus as the head of the military is a step in the right direction, but it comes after so many missteps made by incompetent hacks like Rumsfeld and Bremer that it is probably too late.
Holding their own in the political sense that they still exist, which in practical terms is all they need. However, from a military perspective they have not had any significant victories over the US.
Listen, there's a famous story about a U.S. officer talking to his North Vietnamese counterpart during the Paris negotiations. He says, "You never defeated us in the field." The NVA officer shoots back: "That is true. It is also irrelevant." You're confusing tactical victory with strategic victory. It is possible to win tactically and lose strategically. That is what happened in Vietnam. That is what is currently happening in Iraq. When people shoot at us, we usually kill more of them than they kill of us, so that's a tactical victory. But we haven't been able to achieve what we wanted- a stable, pro-Western democracy- so we're losing in Iraq.
Hey, don't tell me terrorist bikers are not an issue in Australia. I've seen both "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior", so I know what I'm talking about.
Also, he is facing some very serious charges. I hear one of the charges he's facing is that he used an aimbot.