Do you ever think what would happen if we did eliminate world hunger? It makes me damn uncomfortable to say this but would we not just get a population explosion and be right back at square 1 of too many mouths to feed? While many people might be sensible (provided contraception is also freely available) would the rules of evolution not mean that whoever has the genes/memes to keep having children will keep doing so. The only solution I see as a species is to grow up and face the realities that it is a finite world we live in and not everyone can have everything they want. This means you and I have to stop doing things we want to. Technology might save our quality of life but it will not stop the laws of thermodynamics, we have to use less energy. And by we I mean me. But am i willing to cycle to work so that someone in India doesn't have their home flooded? Clearly not since I took the motorbike into work today. On the bright side I have no children, no pets and no intention of changing that which is about the best thing I can do for reducing my energy usage in the long term...
It occurs to me the Pi people may be working on this already. But if they were what would happen if they told people about it? Would they get told off again for announcing a product before it is ready? Would next time they wait until they have a few tens of thousand made before releasing them?
You're obviously new to this "girl" thing. Two significant points stand out:
I love comments like these, anything I say about my actual situation; either agreeing with you or disagreeing with you makes me look worse. Bravo! Fine I'll reply with another meme (that is therefore incorrect) "You've obviously never been a married man."
Inside is where all of the most fun stuff you can do with girls happens
And what you are implying takes what, an hour or so? Maybe you want to snuggle up afterwards watching something which brings us right back to downloading.
Speak for yourself. Clearly you're not suffering an English summer. Unless you like your girls in wellies and somewhat damp - wait what did I just say - then inside watching movies is probably the best place to be.
This may well be a very daft question but: It appears that the default is to use a simple solution when people are first developing their websites. Isn't this what libraries are for? Why isn't the default secure method in development environments/website template/distros etc to use a much more secure method? Why is there no standard library that I just say (for example) store_user_password($user_name); and it takes care of it? If there is such a thing why isn't it more universally used and why blame the website implementers for what is a dev environment/toolkit/whatever problem? If the technology the article talks about has been known since the 80s why isn't it the standard in all the modern environments? And whatever the answer I'm not sure the blame rests in the users of however they develop this(unless they are writing their website in C based CGI...).
I like it! We should also tax the quality of information exchanged. After all exchanging an idea that is patented or copyrighted is clearly of more value than the latest gossip. Therefore we should monitor all digital communication, (including but not,limited to mobile devices with and without tactile input) fingerprint it via a method of a hash, checksum or similar function and compare it against a fingerprint of all registered intellectual property. When your information exchange matches the fingerprint you pay the value of that work. Fingerprints that matched more frequently are clearly worth more and therefore their tax should be greater.
Err.... a LAN is an IT cost born by an organisation to enable its activities. It does not place a financial burden on any other party.
Wow! I was going for funny and got this and an interesting mod. In all seriousness though I was trying to make a serious point. What constitutes the internet? To take an educational example, If I have a campus WAN is that part of the internet or only when it connects to outside entity? What if that outside entity is a student laptop or the card machine at the bar in the SU? Where do you start charging for the traffic?
How does the internet place a financial burden on an another party? There are people who want information, people who provide information and carriers of it. To say those who provide the service should pay the carriers is madness. the consumers are already paying for the infrastructure to get the information why should you pay twice? Put it this way if BT fell out with Google because of some foreseen financial burden by the huge amount of traffic related to google and refused to let their customers connect to google what do you think would happen? The customers would want to leave BT and get someone else to provide their internet connection because the reason they pay BT is so that they can connect to people. Saying that is a financial burden is like saying supermarkets paying truckers to transport food from farmers is a financial burden on the logistics industry and government should tax the farmers (even more than they already do) to pay for this burden. It's utter madness. Put it another way, what is easier for an information carrier to accommodate? 1 user consuming 1Gb of traffic, or 1000 users consuming 1Mbit of traffic? Data carrying like everything else is easier in bulk - economies of scale really apply here so why discriminate against those that make the job easier.
Why not tax the data sent across the LAN after all what is so special about internet data? What is so special about the LAN? What about data sent across internal busses? (after all USB could be compared to a network) So why not just tax CPU and memory access directly? You think I might have gone to far here?
Not really. Few sane people would argue that a slightly elevated CO2 count is a problem. Few would argue a highly elevated one isn't a problem. The question is where on the scale do we lie? If we could spread out what would be a highly elevated CO2 dump out over several thousand years then the short term highly elevated problem becomes a very long term very slightly elevated one and there is no problem for anyone. Put it another way, the first cave man to build a fire did not cause global warming. The first steam engine did not cause global warming. Only when there are literally billions of these fires do we start to have a problem, if we can make these billions of fires look like a longer term one we're back to no problem. Unless of course our descendants come up with a technology that is another CO2 source that competes with the natural CO2 sinks that nature has in place in which case they're just as guilty as we are and that then becomes an issue of cross generational ethics. Worst case scenario then for me is we give our descendants a CO2 problem, let's hope we've built enough other cool things to make up for it. (for example, would your great-grandparents trade the global warming we face for sanitation an excess of food, life span and personal entertainment we pass onto the next western generation. I think they would call that a good trade, so we had better make sure we improve enough other things about life to make it worth the problems we pass on.)
there seems to be an undeclared war going on between science and religion right now
Not IMO, but I can see why it seems like it. I don't think it's a jaded view, I think it's a case of some people seem to want the world to be like the stories they were told as a child and some people want the world to follow rules. Either subscription requires mysteries, in one philosophy the answer is to ask a higher authority, in another it is to investigate it. Now maybe this puts too much credit on the science viewpoint, because for example I cannot myself investigate the Higgs Boson, I have to appeal to authority there; so I have to have faith in those who have done the maths and run the experiments. You mention though the things that science can't answer, for me these fall into two categories: 1) God of the gaps: Things that science currently can't answer - what started the big bang. Did life evolve here. etc. An ever rescinding viewpoint, take your views on the merit here as you can 2) Philosophy To use a religion to answer the question of why we are here is I believe false. For example I think Buddhism has as much to say on this as Christianity. So to search for an answer in one single religion is I believe misguided. Now if you want to take in all of human philosophy and work from that to find an answer then great, but religion is a datapoint here, not a conclusion.
RTFA Photosynthesis is more effective in diffuse light.
Easy to imagine that with light coming in from many angles the particles in plant cells that have the chlorophyll are illuminated from more sides therefore more efficient.Also leaves that aren't perfectly lined up with the sun get more light than they otherwise would.
I'm fairly sure you're being sarcastic, but let's work with your scenario. First off SpaceX have said they think they can get it down to about $1million per 1 way trip. Other than that your post seems to be pretty spot on about what we can expect from early colonisation. Except two things: 1) There are resources out there to be had, maybe not on planets but if for example you're mining/building the solar arrays that power most of Earth then there's serious money to be made up there. The fewer people are up there, the more money each person can make and vice versa. Once it is at all profitable to be up there supply and demand will kick in. So while it costs a fortune to get up there if you can make a larger fortune when you're up there expect people to start mortgaging themselves to pay for it. 2) Let's assume it becomes possible for the moderately rich guy to liquidate his assets and with that afford a trip to space. Expect to see everyone from revolutionaries to criminals to geeks who are fed up with the current state of copyright law to try and build a new life there because they are fed up with the current government. It may not be as comfortable a life as the one they had on earth but if they get to set their own laws or it allows them to leave behind ideologies they don't like then I can totally see it happening.
Even if this sort of thing only appeals to 1% of the 5% of people who could afford it That is still hundreds of thousands of people up there and once they have built the infrastructure the quality of life up there will improve and make it more attractive. Yes I'm a dreamer but it's a fun thing to be - and no progress was ever made by giving up.
The chance of losing your incredibly expensive payload is a factor in the price that customers are not going to ignore
That's why a major part of the cost of launching a satellite is insuring it. If the money you save by a cheaper rocket is less than the cost of the larger insurance premium you have won. And if rockets were cheaper you would be less risk averse when it came to satellite design and be willing to design a much cheaper satellite. So It's not a simple set of equations but put it this way: we don't design terrestrial domestic satellite dishes to be nine nines reliable because we can cheaply replace with a new one. In orbit satellites however have to be massively overengineered mostly because of the cost of sticking a new one up there. If launch were cheaper you could have both increased in orbit and on the ground redundancy.
es, they'll have a lot of volunteers, but how many of those volunteers will have the necessary physical capabilities and specialized skills?
Then let the market set the rate. If I can get a job at SpaceX Asteroid mining Co that has a 95% survival rate but pays about twice as much as a similar mining job on Earth, or one that has a 50% survival rate at Joe Bloggs Space mining co but pays 20x the ammount because of the money they saved on the rocket by cutting corners then let Joe Bloggs see if he can get anyone to work for him. If not he needs to increase his pay or improve his rocket. i agree when the Government is putting people in orbit they should be on the safe side, but as long as the risks are made clear up front why not let people offer risky chances as long as it's made clear they're risky?
Putting on my strategic management hat I was a little worried when I first heard this news. I should explain: In most engineering you have a core group of engineers. Put too many on one project and progress gets slower not faster. Likewise there are only so many good engineers around, adding poor engineers to a group slows the group down disproportionally. So the way to be successful is often to have the smallest team you can get away with working on one goal. Even having auxiliary teams that take the technology you develop and apply it to new applications slows the core team down because they need to provide support to the auxiliary teams. No amount of money or clever management or good people can really change this. So I was really worried about this particular step of the commercialisation of space because if they get distracted into competing with the entrenched players then they could lose the goal of getting cheap manned presence in space. If they are busy servicing commercial customers will this take their eye off the goal of manned space flight and orbital facilities? But then I guess that this commercial offering will keep them honest, accountable and above all visible to their costs so that others have to keep up. That and developing heavy lift is part of the end goal. That said I'm a little concerned that on Earth heavy lift is a relatively small part of the transport market. There are very few trucks on the road that carry more than 40 Ton, so why do we need so much spacecraft development focussed on >40Ton. I guess the answer to this is that most of the stuff on earth that is >40 Ton of the road is construction equipment and we certaily need a lot fo that in space...
I'm assuming you are a believer then: If so do you believe in the miracles as described in the bible e.g. the loaves and the fishes. I assume if there are no false fossils then the universe is billions of years old. So God's place is to be the creator and source of morals? God therefore appears in different forms to different people to fit with their culture/variety is good. Evil exists because of free will and God would rather have free will and evil than remove free will. If so I can get all of that but the one thing I still don't get is why would God's intervention in the world reduce in proportion to the availability of reliable evidence? Similarly how do you cope with some of the old testament stuff such as the acts of the pharo's magicians or his vulnerability to Iron Chariots. I'm honestly curious, I have a number of religious friends who in all other things I respect their logic and reason fully, but I dare not ask them these questions at dinner parties for fear of annoying them...
To paraphrase your post: You can test evolution based on what we can see now. You can test evolution, you can figure out what causes it, you can see the MRSA at the beginning being killed by antibiotics and measure its progress as the resistant strain infects the whole hospital. You saw how the system began and ended, and thus you know for a fact that evolution did its thing.
The difference is we do know why with evolution. a better adapted strain that is not killed by anti-biotics will almost by definition be more numerous than one that is killed. Now an invisible elf could still be doing all this, but something that you define as being unmeasurable itself is of no interest to science simply because it tells us nothing. However let's suppose we had an emissary from the gravity elves arrive tomorrow. [Let's suppose he's come to tell us that he's fed up with rubber because its often used to hold in his nemesis Helium (he hates how it makes his voice sound) and so gravity will no longer apply to rubber.] Science could still investigate gravity and treat it like we always did as long as it follows predictable rules. As you say why it works doesn't matter in this case, but why still has a place in science. Why the sky is blue or why helium balloons rise is a perfectly valid scientific question. Now we may not know the answer to why gravity yet, but we once didn't know why planets moved the way they did, and I'm certain why gravity is going to be just as interesting as orbital mechanics was or QED is in explaining the why of particle wave duality. I can walk into a room with a shredded pair of slippers and a guilty looking puppy it is safe to act in the knowledge that the puppy shredded the slippers. Yes my wife could be playing a trick on me at the expense of the puppy, but if that is the case I have worse problems than a troublesome puppy. Why can't I look at Earth as it is now, and deduce how it most likely came to be barring outside influence? It all comes down to with sufficient technology/magic anything is possible. We could be in the matrix we could be a lab experiment for aliens using us to test cosmetics, but if by definition if we cannot test for their existence then all we can do is learn the rules of the system and work from there. What else would you have us do? Anything else is a linguistic trick to say "I acknowledge that we may being manipulated however assuming we are not..."
To quote again the guy who wrote my signature: "Science adjusts its views according to what's observed; faith is the denial of evidence in order that belief can be preserved" A scientist is doing a "better job" when he finds evidence that conflicts with the current viewpoint. The devout are doing a better job (and consider themselves more righteous) when they ignore evidence that conflicts with their beliefs. Or at least that's how it seems to me from the outside to me.
the bible commands us to consider the work of his (God's) hands, and from that to draw our own conclusions about God's reasons.
* Genesis 15:5 He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars..." * Psalm 143:5 I remember the days of long ago; I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done.* * Psalm 92:4 For you make me glad by your deeds, O LORD; I sing for joy at the works of your hands* * Proverbs 6:6 Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! * Luke 12:24 Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!
So you're damned if you do seek knowledge and are also commanded to do so.
Blue, Blue, Ah! so that's what that colour is called. I had been beginning to worry. Unfortunately wikipedia has nothing on "That strange yellow ball in the sky".
the real test will - unfortunately - come the first time someone gets killed. I'm not sure the private sector could afford a Challenger inquiry.
I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for spoiling my morning:-( Seriously how did we survive these things in the past, how did we react the first time an airplane killed someone or when the first time a gas light exploded. Why are we so different now? Are we different now because we can and should know better that these designs have flaws? Would the challenger disaster have been worse if the design had found to not be faulty, or would the public outcry have been worse if the collective result was "Nope we did the best we could, damnded if we know why that went wrong" instead of known flawed design + management overide + unfortunate conditions. Maybe they'll be lucky and it will live up to its projections of 1/1000 failures and it will take 3000 launches for the statistics to catch up with them. Maybe something as simple as luck in the nascent stages of space flight makes the differences between the civilisations that colonise their galaxies and those that don't. Maybe that;s another variable in the drake equation?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you ever think what would happen if we did eliminate world hunger?
It makes me damn uncomfortable to say this but would we not just get a population explosion and be right back at square 1 of too many mouths to feed? While many people might be sensible (provided contraception is also freely available) would the rules of evolution not mean that whoever has the genes/memes to keep having children will keep doing so.
The only solution I see as a species is to grow up and face the realities that it is a finite world we live in and not everyone can have everything they want. This means you and I have to stop doing things we want to. Technology might save our quality of life but it will not stop the laws of thermodynamics, we have to use less energy. And by we I mean me. But am i willing to cycle to work so that someone in India doesn't have their home flooded? Clearly not since I took the motorbike into work today.
On the bright side I have no children, no pets and no intention of changing that which is about the best thing I can do for reducing my energy usage in the long term...
It depends on the application. The A15 would be the wrong thing if you were interested in minimizing:
*cost
*design complexity
*power
All of which the Pi is interested in doing.
It occurs to me the Pi people may be working on this already.
But if they were what would happen if they told people about it? Would they get told off again for announcing a product before it is ready? Would next time they wait until they have a few tens of thousand made before releasing them?
You're obviously new to this "girl" thing. Two significant points stand out:
I love comments like these, anything I say about my actual situation; either agreeing with you or disagreeing with you makes me look worse. Bravo!
Fine I'll reply with another meme (that is therefore incorrect) "You've obviously never been a married man."
Inside is where all of the most fun stuff you can do with girls happens
And what you are implying takes what, an hour or so?
Maybe you want to snuggle up afterwards watching something which brings us right back to downloading.
Speak for yourself.
Clearly you're not suffering an English summer. Unless you like your girls in wellies and somewhat damp - wait what did I just say - then inside watching movies is probably the best place to be.
I think the point is that the invasive species are hitchiking a ride on "a floating dock the size of a boxcar". This is new man-made intervention.
This may well be a very daft question but:
It appears that the default is to use a simple solution when people are first developing their websites.
Isn't this what libraries are for? Why isn't the default secure method in development environments/website template/distros etc to use a much more secure method?
Why is there no standard library that I just say (for example) store_user_password($user_name); and it takes care of it?
If there is such a thing why isn't it more universally used and why blame the website implementers for what is a dev environment/toolkit/whatever problem?
If the technology the article talks about has been known since the 80s why isn't it the standard in all the modern environments? And whatever the answer I'm not sure the blame rests in the users of however they develop this(unless they are writing their website in C based CGI...).
I like it! ,limited to mobile devices with and without tactile input) fingerprint it via a method of a hash, checksum or similar function and compare it against a fingerprint of all registered intellectual property. When your information exchange matches the fingerprint you pay the value of that work. Fingerprints that matched more frequently are clearly worth more and therefore their tax should be greater.
We should also tax the quality of information exchanged. After all exchanging an idea that is patented or copyrighted is clearly of more value than the latest gossip.
Therefore we should monitor all digital communication, (including but not
Maybe I should patent that idea too?
Err.... a LAN is an IT cost born by an organisation to enable its activities. It does not place a financial burden on any other party.
Wow! I was going for funny and got this and an interesting mod.
In all seriousness though I was trying to make a serious point. What constitutes the internet? To take an educational example, If I have a campus WAN is that part of the internet or only when it connects to outside entity? What if that outside entity is a student laptop or the card machine at the bar in the SU? Where do you start charging for the traffic?
How does the internet place a financial burden on an another party? There are people who want information, people who provide information and carriers of it. To say those who provide the service should pay the carriers is madness. the consumers are already paying for the infrastructure to get the information why should you pay twice?
Put it this way if BT fell out with Google because of some foreseen financial burden by the huge amount of traffic related to google and refused to let their customers connect to google what do you think would happen? The customers would want to leave BT and get someone else to provide their internet connection because the reason they pay BT is so that they can connect to people. Saying that is a financial burden is like saying supermarkets paying truckers to transport food from farmers is a financial burden on the logistics industry and government should tax the farmers (even more than they already do) to pay for this burden. It's utter madness.
Put it another way, what is easier for an information carrier to accommodate? 1 user consuming 1Gb of traffic, or 1000 users consuming 1Mbit of traffic? Data carrying like everything else is easier in bulk - economies of scale really apply here so why discriminate against those that make the job easier.
Why not tax the data sent across the LAN after all what is so special about internet data?
What is so special about the LAN? What about data sent across internal busses? (after all USB could be compared to a network)
So why not just tax CPU and memory access directly?
You think I might have gone to far here?
Not really.
Few sane people would argue that a slightly elevated CO2 count is a problem. Few would argue a highly elevated one isn't a problem.
The question is where on the scale do we lie?
If we could spread out what would be a highly elevated CO2 dump out over several thousand years then the short term highly elevated problem becomes a very long term very slightly elevated one and there is no problem for anyone.
Put it another way, the first cave man to build a fire did not cause global warming. The first steam engine did not cause global warming. Only when there are literally billions of these fires do we start to have a problem, if we can make these billions of fires look like a longer term one we're back to no problem.
Unless of course our descendants come up with a technology that is another CO2 source that competes with the natural CO2 sinks that nature has in place in which case they're just as guilty as we are and that then becomes an issue of cross generational ethics.
Worst case scenario then for me is we give our descendants a CO2 problem, let's hope we've built enough other cool things to make up for it. (for example, would your great-grandparents trade the global warming we face for sanitation an excess of food, life span and personal entertainment we pass onto the next western generation. I think they would call that a good trade, so we had better make sure we improve enough other things about life to make it worth the problems we pass on.)
there seems to be an undeclared war going on between science and religion right now
Not IMO, but I can see why it seems like it.
I don't think it's a jaded view, I think it's a case of some people seem to want the world to be like the stories they were told as a child and some people want the world to follow rules. Either subscription requires mysteries, in one philosophy the answer is to ask a higher authority, in another it is to investigate it.
Now maybe this puts too much credit on the science viewpoint, because for example I cannot myself investigate the Higgs Boson, I have to appeal to authority there; so I have to have faith in those who have done the maths and run the experiments.
You mention though the things that science can't answer, for me these fall into two categories:
1) God of the gaps:
Things that science currently can't answer - what started the big bang. Did life evolve here. etc.
An ever rescinding viewpoint, take your views on the merit here as you can
2) Philosophy
To use a religion to answer the question of why we are here is I believe false. For example I think Buddhism has as much to say on this as Christianity. So to search for an answer in one single religion is I believe misguided. Now if you want to take in all of human philosophy and work from that to find an answer then great, but religion is a datapoint here, not a conclusion.
Yes, and the sig is from "Not Perfect". If I have my way that would be my funeral song, but that's another story ;-)
RTFA
Photosynthesis is more effective in diffuse light.
Easy to imagine that with light coming in from many angles the particles in plant cells that have the chlorophyll are illuminated from more sides therefore more efficient.Also leaves that aren't perfectly lined up with the sun get more light than they otherwise would.
I'm fairly sure you're being sarcastic, but let's work with your scenario.
First off SpaceX have said they think they can get it down to about $1million per 1 way trip.
Other than that your post seems to be pretty spot on about what we can expect from early colonisation. Except two things:
1) There are resources out there to be had, maybe not on planets but if for example you're mining/building the solar arrays that power most of Earth then there's serious money to be made up there. The fewer people are up there, the more money each person can make and vice versa. Once it is at all profitable to be up there supply and demand will kick in. So while it costs a fortune to get up there if you can make a larger fortune when you're up there expect people to start mortgaging themselves to pay for it.
2) Let's assume it becomes possible for the moderately rich guy to liquidate his assets and with that afford a trip to space. Expect to see everyone from revolutionaries to criminals to geeks who are fed up with the current state of copyright law to try and build a new life there because they are fed up with the current government. It may not be as comfortable a life as the one they had on earth but if they get to set their own laws or it allows them to leave behind ideologies they don't like then I can totally see it happening.
Even if this sort of thing only appeals to 1% of the 5% of people who could afford it That is still hundreds of thousands of people up there and once they have built the infrastructure the quality of life up there will improve and make it more attractive.
Yes I'm a dreamer but it's a fun thing to be - and no progress was ever made by giving up.
So what you have here is:
simpler older system vs newer more complex system
The Falcon however is simpler and newest.
So let's see.
The chance of losing your incredibly expensive payload is a factor in the price that customers are not going to ignore
That's why a major part of the cost of launching a satellite is insuring it. If the money you save by a cheaper rocket is less than the cost of the larger insurance premium you have won.
And if rockets were cheaper you would be less risk averse when it came to satellite design and be willing to design a much cheaper satellite.
So It's not a simple set of equations but put it this way: we don't design terrestrial domestic satellite dishes to be nine nines reliable because we can cheaply replace with a new one. In orbit satellites however have to be massively overengineered mostly because of the cost of sticking a new one up there. If launch were cheaper you could have both increased in orbit and on the ground redundancy.
es, they'll have a lot of volunteers, but how many of those volunteers will have the necessary physical capabilities and specialized skills?
Then let the market set the rate. If I can get a job at SpaceX Asteroid mining Co that has a 95% survival rate but pays about twice as much as a similar mining job on Earth, or one that has a 50% survival rate at Joe Bloggs Space mining co but pays 20x the ammount because of the money they saved on the rocket by cutting corners then let Joe Bloggs see if he can get anyone to work for him. If not he needs to increase his pay or improve his rocket.
i agree when the Government is putting people in orbit they should be on the safe side, but as long as the risks are made clear up front why not let people offer risky chances as long as it's made clear they're risky?
Putting on my strategic management hat I was a little worried when I first heard this news. I should explain:
In most engineering you have a core group of engineers. Put too many on one project and progress gets slower not faster. Likewise there are only so many good engineers around, adding poor engineers to a group slows the group down disproportionally.
So the way to be successful is often to have the smallest team you can get away with working on one goal. Even having auxiliary teams that take the technology you develop and apply it to new applications slows the core team down because they need to provide support to the auxiliary teams. No amount of money or clever management or good people can really change this.
So I was really worried about this particular step of the commercialisation of space because if they get distracted into competing with the entrenched players then they could lose the goal of getting cheap manned presence in space. If they are busy servicing commercial customers will this take their eye off the goal of manned space flight and orbital facilities?
But then I guess that this commercial offering will keep them honest, accountable and above all visible to their costs so that others have to keep up. That and developing heavy lift is part of the end goal.
That said I'm a little concerned that on Earth heavy lift is a relatively small part of the transport market. There are very few trucks on the road that carry more than 40 Ton, so why do we need so much spacecraft development focussed on >40Ton.
I guess the answer to this is that most of the stuff on earth that is >40 Ton of the road is construction equipment and we certaily need a lot fo that in space...
I'm assuming you are a believer then:
If so do you believe in the miracles as described in the bible e.g. the loaves and the fishes.
I assume if there are no false fossils then the universe is billions of years old.
So God's place is to be the creator and source of morals?
God therefore appears in different forms to different people to fit with their culture/variety is good.
Evil exists because of free will and God would rather have free will and evil than remove free will.
If so I can get all of that but the one thing I still don't get is why would God's intervention in the world reduce in proportion to the availability of reliable evidence? Similarly how do you cope with some of the old testament stuff such as the acts of the pharo's magicians or his vulnerability to Iron Chariots.
I'm honestly curious, I have a number of religious friends who in all other things I respect their logic and reason fully, but I dare not ask them these questions at dinner parties for fear of annoying them...
To paraphrase your post:
You can test evolution based on what we can see now. You can test evolution, you can figure out what causes it, you can see the MRSA at the beginning being killed by antibiotics and measure its progress as the resistant strain infects the whole hospital. You saw how the system began and ended, and thus you know for a fact that evolution did its thing.
The difference is we do know why with evolution. a better adapted strain that is not killed by anti-biotics will almost by definition be more numerous than one that is killed.
Now an invisible elf could still be doing all this, but something that you define as being unmeasurable itself is of no interest to science simply because it tells us nothing.
However let's suppose we had an emissary from the gravity elves arrive tomorrow. [Let's suppose he's come to tell us that he's fed up with rubber because its often used to hold in his nemesis Helium (he hates how it makes his voice sound) and so gravity will no longer apply to rubber.] Science could still investigate gravity and treat it like we always did as long as it follows predictable rules. As you say why it works doesn't matter in this case, but why still has a place in science. Why the sky is blue or why helium balloons rise is a perfectly valid scientific question. Now we may not know the answer to why gravity yet, but we once didn't know why planets moved the way they did, and I'm certain why gravity is going to be just as interesting as orbital mechanics was or QED is in explaining the why of particle wave duality.
I can walk into a room with a shredded pair of slippers and a guilty looking puppy it is safe to act in the knowledge that the puppy shredded the slippers. Yes my wife could be playing a trick on me at the expense of the puppy, but if that is the case I have worse problems than a troublesome puppy.
Why can't I look at Earth as it is now, and deduce how it most likely came to be barring outside influence?
It all comes down to with sufficient technology/magic anything is possible. We could be in the matrix we could be a lab experiment for aliens using us to test cosmetics, but if by definition if we cannot test for their existence then all we can do is learn the rules of the system and work from there. What else would you have us do? Anything else is a linguistic trick to say "I acknowledge that we may being manipulated however assuming we are not..."
To quote again the guy who wrote my signature:
"Science adjusts its views according to what's observed; faith is the denial of evidence in order that belief can be preserved"
A scientist is doing a "better job" when he finds evidence that conflicts with the current viewpoint.
The devout are doing a better job (and consider themselves more righteous) when they ignore evidence that conflicts with their beliefs.
Or at least that's how it seems to me from the outside to me.
the bible commands us to consider the work of his (God's) hands, and from that to draw our own conclusions about God's reasons.
* Genesis 15:5 He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars..."
* Psalm 143:5 I remember the days of long ago; I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done.*
* Psalm 92:4 For you make me glad by your deeds, O LORD; I sing for joy at the works of your hands*
* Proverbs 6:6 Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!
* Luke 12:24 Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!
So you're damned if you do seek knowledge and are also commanded to do so.
Blue,
Blue,
Ah! so that's what that colour is called. I had been beginning to worry.
Unfortunately wikipedia has nothing on "That strange yellow ball in the sky".
the real test will - unfortunately - come the first time someone gets killed. I'm not sure the private sector could afford a Challenger inquiry.
I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for spoiling my morning :-(
Seriously how did we survive these things in the past, how did we react the first time an airplane killed someone or when the first time a gas light exploded. Why are we so different now?
Are we different now because we can and should know better that these designs have flaws? Would the challenger disaster have been worse if the design had found to not be faulty, or would the public outcry have been worse if the collective result was "Nope we did the best we could, damnded if we know why that went wrong" instead of known flawed design + management overide + unfortunate conditions.
Maybe they'll be lucky and it will live up to its projections of 1/1000 failures and it will take 3000 launches for the statistics to catch up with them. Maybe something as simple as luck in the nascent stages of space flight makes the differences between the civilisations that colonise their galaxies and those that don't. Maybe that;s another variable in the drake equation?