1) If we can't go there directly and exploit material wealth there (thus voiding the "we might need the resources!" argument); and 2) If we're hoping that some sort of computerized droid army will somehow magically be able to breed and raise humans from an "Instant Human Mix" (Just add water and bake!) at the far end (the impracticality and extremely unlikely nature of this event is a huge argument against the "it's a hedge against species extinction!" argument); and 3) We find a planet that's similar enough to ours at the far end to support earth life natively (thus making the entire premise possible);
What gives us the right to - essentially - infect it? If it's capable of supporting life, it's likely that there already *is* life on that planet, of some form. You don't think a bunch of aggressive, hungry humans showing up might tend to disrupt whatever sort of ecology has already evolved? On the one hand, we're asked to accept on faith that "the universe is huge, of course there are earth-like exoplanets out there!" But on the other hand, we're asked to accept on faith that the universe is devoid of sentient life besides ourselves, and that no other life form would react badly to what is, in essence, an invasion and occupation by a foreign species? I'm curious what twists and turns of illogic allow the people arguing for colonization to hold these types of beliefs. It's precisely this sort of dissonance that leads me to believe the "let's colonize space" crowd has watched FAR too much Firefly & Star Trek, and done FAR too little rational thinking about the matter.
Really? What magical method is going to achieve a $1/kg launch cost?
Because Elon Musk, who sort of has a vested interest in making space commercially viable, has suggested that he believes he can drive launch costs for LEO down to $500/pound (that's $1100 / kg) over time. (source).
Where's the remaining $1099 going in your $1/kg scenario?
And pray tell, how much will it cost to launch even the most bare-minimum mining equipment, smelting equipment, foundry & metalworking equipment, and basically one of every other type of industrial machine we'll ever need up into space, set them up, and control them for the years they'd need to operate? And where, exactly, are they going to mine? Not a lot of planets or asteroids in Low Earth Orbit last time I checked.
No, it is a bad idea for humanity to pretend it has other realistic options if it wants to survive long term, and get down to the business of learning to coexist peacefully and sustainably here on earth with one another.
There are no other planets which are hospitable to human life in our own solar system. You could make a little base on Mars, and a dozen or so people could live there indefinitely, with supply lines reaching back to earth, constant communication, and ridiculously high energy requirements to support their efforts. That does not make Mars a useful hedge against extinction. If you want that, you *need* a planet capable of (naturally) supporting human life - similar atmosphere, similar temperature ranges, similar chemical makeup. Which means... that's right, you need to look at traveling to another star.
The *closest* star to us is, at speeds typical of current space travel, anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 years away. At the short end, that's significantly longer than recorded human history, and at the long end, you're halfway back to the emergence of modern homo sapiens as a distinct species. That's the *closest* star, with no guarantees that there's any planet capable of supporting human life in any meaningful way at the far end.
We can fire a can full of humans off into space, but the parameters for such a mission - the distances, life support requirements, multi-generational nature of the trip, and the simple evolutionary pressures they'd face along the way would mean that they:
1) Almost certainly would never arrive alive - we can't make a goddamned Honda that'll last 20 years without a huge investment in time & money to maintain it, but we're magically going to make the most intricate "ark" ever conceived, and keep it functioning properly for tens of thousands of years with virtually no maintenance? Parts wear out and break down - how will the ship carry enough spares for the duration of the trip? Where will they get materials & appropriate machinery to produce their own? Who will have the expertise to create a new one? A computer, you say? Great, who's going to fix the computer when it breaks?
2) If they did arrive, they would almost certainly not be "human" in any sense of the word as we knew it on their launch date; Evolutionary changes and mutations would certainly be visible after that much time in a hostile environment, and in that closed a gene pool.
3) It would be a one-way trip with no meaningful communication back to earth, ever, meaning we'd never even know if the mission was successful; What would be the point of pretending that we "prevented extinction of the species" by blindly firing some ships off into space, at a time, material, and energy cost that would beggar most industrialized civilizations on the planet today?
Once again, the argument of large scale colonization and exploration is moot unless there is a significant revolution in our understanding of basic physics, biology, and energy generation. If you want to put a little base on Mars for the science, make your case. Don't pretend it's anything but that - a dozen people completely dependent on earth for resupply is not a hedge against a big old asteroid hitting earth. They'll die shortly after earth is wiped out, probably to mechanical failure, or if they're really good, to starvation or suffocation when their oxygen and food run out.
That's all very interesting, and I'm sure you're very proud of yourself for being so anti-free-market in public, but you realize that capitalism and the free market, despite it's shortcomings, have lifted more people out of poverty and improved the living conditions of more people around the world than any other competing economic system in history, right?
So we cannot go to mars because a select group of wealthy and powerful will not get more wealthy and more powerful?
So your solution to avoid this is to take a huge chunk of money and power, and hand it to a select group of already-wealthy and already-powerful technocrats? Because last time I checked, there was a lot of whining about how the private sector won't do it because there's no profit, so the only way to do it is via government edict, right? You realize that the government taking billions of dollars from you, me and everybody else to buy spaceships and other high-tech colonization gear is nothing but a gigantic giveaway to private industry, don't you?
Let's be clear here: YOU will not colonize Mars. There is no science they can't do cheaper & easier in earth orbit or via unmanned exploration that will benefit YOU at all. YOU will see no benefit, other than some sort of odd childish satisfaction from seeing some sort of science-fiction fantasy come true. So what you are arguing for is a giant giveaway to defense contractors and tech firms, making a "select group of wealthy and powerful more wealthy and more powerful," and you're complaining that *I* have the limited understanding of the situation?
. Do you really believe that closed cycle life support is so massively difficult a task that finding new physics and building the starship enterprise is a better hope?
Of course we *can* do it. The point is, there is absolutely nothing of value to be gained by doing so. The energy and financial commitment required to support even a SMALL outpost of half a dozen people on Mars "permanently" is ridiculously prohibitive. What would be the point of doing so?
In answer to this, I hear two main themes:
1) "Then we won't be putting all our eggs in one basket!" -- 6 people on Mars with an 8-month-long lifeline back to earth is not a hedge against species extinction. If you want self-sustaining colonies, you need thousands of people at a minimum. Then think about how much material, energy, and simple living space will be required to house those people, and ask yourself whether or not the hundreds of trillions of dollars it would require to build that infrastructure on Mars might be better spent here on earth. And even if we manage to jump off to Mars... we're still tied to a single star, and incredibly constrained by our reliance on external supplies, unless you think that a thousand people on Mars would survive happily without constant resupply and communication back to earth.
2) "Because there are resources we could exploit there that aren't available on Earth!" -- Like what? What magical element is in such abundant supply on Mars that it is cost-effective to build an extraction operation millions of miles away, and establish months-long supply routes which will ship that material back to earth for processing? Which materials, specifically? Give me your business case, or shut up about moon mining.
So yes, I think that basically "finding new physics and building the starship enterprise" - as far-fetched as it is to consider - is our better hope. Or, realistically, understanding that this planet is it for us, and if we can't make it work here, we won't magically make it work somewhere else, and devoting our time and energy to solving real problems here on earth, rather than imaginary problems 4 million years down the road.
Assuming a 3 man crew and a well planned design, a modest underground bunker should be possible within a few hours, depending on whether you run into bedrock or whatnot.
You've never actually dug a hole with hand tools in rocky terrain, have you?
You do realise that there are some planets in our own solar system, right?
*sigh*
You do realize that none of the other planets in our solar system will support human life - that any colony or structure we build there must be *entirely* self-sustaining, self-contained, and extraordinarily fault tolerant - right?
You do realize that building and shipping a habitat that will house a mere handful of people will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and that's a low-ball estimate, right?
You do realize that "6 people in a tin can orbiting one of Jupiter's moons" does not provide any appreciable insurance for the human species against extinction events, right?
If you want to send people to do science for a few months, great. But let's stop pretending that we're ever going to build a large-scale colony on another planet when that planet is fundamentally incapable of supporting human life. The energy, time, and financial costs are far too high for it to be anything but a "because we wanted to see what would happen" sort of thing.
Mars is fundamentally inhospitable to human life. The rest of our solar system is fundamentally inhospitable to human life. This fairytale notion that we're going to magically whisk ourselves away to another planet, star system, galaxy, etc. and live there is just that: a fairytale notion. We better learn to behave well here on earth, because this is all we've got until we learn to violate our fundamental understandings of time & distance to enable faster-than-light travel.
Any attempt to convince yourself that we will build a self-sustaining colony on another planet or other body inside our solar system which will be entirely self-contained & self-sustaining - i.e., capable of supporting human life indefinitely in the midst of an environment that is hostile to human life - is just delusional mental masturbation, and simply enables us to continue behaving in self-destructive ways in our own habitat here on earth.
Yes, it's much better to just have a failed door lock between you and explosive decompression, that's a much better design for living someplace with virtually no atmosphere. Why have your habitat's internal air pressure contribute to (and reinforce) the seal on the door by making it open inward?
Given our current understanding of physics and biology, you would be spending far longer than presently-recorded history traveling in an interstellar "generational" ship to reach the closest stars; there is no guarantee that ANY of them will have earth-like conditions that would be suitable for human life.
We are not going to construct colonies - either floating, or planet-bound, that are of sufficient scale & size to provide any hedge against extinction. The materials, the cost, the risk, and the energy requirements are simply too high.
If you're talking a legitimate hedge against extinction, then you need to: 1) Find another planet that is close enough to earth conditions that it would be suitable for human life. 2) Build a space ship capable of surviving the time required to travel there; 3) Provision a space ship capable of surviving and supporting human life for thousands of years; 4) Build a large enough ship & colonization group that you wouldn't end up with hundreds of generations of inbreeding and genetic defects at the end of the trip; 5) Find a bunch of people who don't mind dooming hundreds of generations of their descendants to life in a tin can hurtling through space, and that they will never, ever see or hear from Earth in any practical manner again; 6) Ensure that no critical part, anywhere, at any point on the trip, goes bad; 7) Figure out a way to land the ship on the far end with all that cargo; 8) Realize that a small gene pool, after thousands of years of travel and introduction to a completely new habitat, may very well diverge from "human" evolution in significant ways such that calling the people landing on the far side of that trip may not be particularly "human" in any appreciable sense anyway.
9) As an alternative to all that, develop faster than light travel or some sort of fool-proof suspended animation, as well as a computer system capable of self-healing and adaption on an unprecedented level, and find a way to power it for thousands of years without error or failure.
In light of all of those limitations, I'd suggest that in the long run, learning to behave like civilized fucking human beings and get along with one another without shitting all over the blankets might just be the easier and more practical way to survive as a species.
Maybe NASA is so smart that they've ruled that out already as impractical?
If Sarah Palin can come up with "Drill Baby, Drill," I'm pretty sure the brainiacs at NASA with all their learnin' have at least considered the notion.
My point is for us to build a base on Mars practically
You could have stopped there. It is not an economically feasible operation on any scale larger than "send a couple geeks there to do some science". It may be scientifically interesting, and we may have a lot of NASA geeks get hot and bothered over the prospect of months cooped up in a small cargo container surrounded by inhospitable environment, but there is nothing you can find on Mars (or anywhere else) that would be economically practical to extract and ship back to Earth.
Look at the size and tonnage of the ISS and other space vehicles & modules, then look at their living capacity. You will not have large scale colonization and exploration of space - for economic or survival purposes - without overcoming significant swaths of our current understanding of simple physics.
Here's the thing: most people don't *enjoy* driving their commute every day - driving, especially in stop & go gridlock, SUCKS. People *enjoy* smoking & drinking. They won't need to "ban" driving, it'll simply be something that most people opt not to do once the systems are available in their car - and they will be, sooner or later (admittedly more likely later).
If they offered an "autopilot" function in cars, most (i.e., the overwhelming majority) would want it simply because it gives them more free time each day to do something they consider meaningful, fun or productive. The system would probably require the driver to operate the vehicle for a minute or so onto a roadway, and again at the far end of the trip to park... but if you could sip coffee, send some email, read the paper, or even nap for the other 30 minutes of your commute, who *wouldn't* want that? You'd get all the benefits-to-the-rider of mass transit without the restricted schedule, limited service areas, and occasional silent-but-deadly-farts from your fellow riders.
Sure, there'll be a few idiots who believe the illusion of being in control of their vehicle gets them to their destination faster; they're welcome to their fanciful notions, but in reality, all the weaving & speeding they're doing will make a difference of about 12 seconds to their commute. I can't count the number of times I've seen somebody trying to speed and weave their way through morning traffic in Boston, only to end up within a car length of them getting off the highway 20 miles farther along.
Really, so the right to your own life, your right to liberty, with all it implies - these are just meaningless BS things that some smarty-pants thought up a couple hundred years ago, and mean nothing?
May we then conclude that you'd have no objections to me making you my slave?
Funny you should mention all that, because it's dead wrong. It is currently against the law for any healthcare institution to refuse to perform medically necessary emergency treatment on any patient for any reason. The Protect Life Act, which is (I believe) being debated by the Senate at this point, would allow hospitals to refuse abortions even if they are medically necessary emergency treatment, however that bill is not yet law and probably won't pass the Senate.
This means if you go into a Catholic hospital's ER as a pregnant woman, with an emergency that is life threatening, and for which the appropriate (and only) medical treatment is an abortion, the Catholic hospitals are obligated by law to provide you that abortion. If the hospital refuses to do this, they are violating the law, and are thus exposed to criminal and civil liability.
However, if the procedure is not medically necessary, then why should they be forced to provide it, if an effective alternate exists? If the procedure is not a critical emergency situation, then you have plenty of time to seek out an abortion at your leisure from someplace which will provide it to you. So what, in your estimation, is the issue with current law (doctors may not refuse if it is an emergency situation) that requires the violation of a doctors' right to operate his practice in a manner consistent with the law & his own ethics?
No, "can't afford a baby" is NOT a "health" issue. "can't afford a baby" is an economic issue, which may well have health ramifications, but is not, in and of itself, a health issue. If the mother comes to the doctor with a sick baby, his medical oath requires him to render any medically necessary life-saving treatment already. It doesn't require him to take the baby in, give it three squares a day, and finance its college education.
If doctors are *compelled* to provide abortions when there is no medical necessity for that abortion (i.e., the pregnancy poses no risk to the life or health of the mother), then why aren't we also compelling doctors to cut a check for every pregnant woman who needs the money? After all, you've defined being unable to afford a baby as a "health issue," and "writing a check for $10,000" would certainly help fix that "health" issue, wouldn't it?
Do you see how stupid your argument is? Or should we also talk about a doctor's obligation to end the "health issue of homelessness" by operating a free hostel for any homeless person who happens to need a place to stay?
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
See that last clause - "according to regulations and the UCMJ"? The UCMJ includes language that explicitly states that you are expected to follow lawful orders, specifically Article 92 (emphasis below mine) of the UCMJ:
Any person subject to this chapter who— (1) violates or fails to obey any lawful general order or regulation; (2) having knowledge of any other lawful order issued by a member of the armed forces, which it is his duty to obey, fails to obey the order; or (3) is derelict in the performance of his duties; shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”
The UCMJ specifically states that you are required to follow "lawful" orders - not "all" orders, not "anything an officer says," though you may still be arrested and subjected to a court martial if the person whose order you are refusing believes his order to be "lawful." In much the same way, you may be arrested and charged with a crime if you shoot someone who breaks into your home and attacks you; you can make your "it was self defense" argument in front of the court, and let the powers-that-be decide whether or not your actions were reasonable and lawful.
You seem to have a lot of very definite ideas about how things work, despite your inability to get even a single detail right in all your comments on this subject. Don't you think this might be the appropriate time to shut up and learn the facts, rather than spout off ill-informed opinions based on your own fanciful notions of how the world works?
If doing your job violates your sense of morality, you have the wrong job!
Fact: It's quite possible to be a doctor and never, ever, ever perform an abortion, or even have a patient request one from you.
Fact: It's quite possible - in fact, it's the vast majority of cases - for an abortion to be requested for no medical reason whatsoever - instead, the request is made for social, economic, convenience, or other personal, non-medical reasons in the lion's share of abortions. In the small portion of cases where an abortion is medically necessary to preserve the life and health of the mother, the medical ethics of the situation are already fairly clear, because the doctor is required by his ethics to provide medical care when it is medically necessary.
The proper analogy here would be if that man chose to enlist and then decided to go AWOL.
Your analogy sucks: military service is, by definition, publicly funded. Military personnel are therefore public servants, and may not discriminate. Medical personnel in private practice (e.g., not government employees - military, NIH, CDC, etc. etc.) are NOT public servants.
Or, if you really want to press the military analogy, you could also consider the fact that soldiers are DUTY-BOUND to refuse to follow orders that are illegal or immoral. So, for instance, if your division commander orders you to execute a hundred children in a village in order to get some intelligence out of the residents, you would be obligated by law, ethics, and morality to REFUSE that command because it is illegal and immoral. Why should we expect unquestioning obedience to the whims of state bureaucrats from doctors in private practice, when we have a very clear exception to this even for military personnel, who are public servants in every way imaginable?
This is the beauty of a free market, and free will. The doctor can't force the mother to keep her baby, and the mother can't force the doctor to perform medically unnecessary procedures that he has a moral objection to. The doctor is free to decline to provide the procedure, and the mother is free to go find another doctor who will perform the procedure.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a doctor practicing today who would refuse to perform an abortion if the pregnancy posed a legitimate danger to the health of the mother - that whole "do no harm" thing. Of course, you'd also be hard-pressed to justify a *majority* of abortions performed today as "medically necessary to prevent a threat to the health of the mother." Do some reading here if you think that rape/health problems actually represent large portions of the reasons women seek abortion each year.
And to be clear: I am very staunchly pro-choice, and believe a woman should always have the right to seek an abortion if she wishes it. But I hold no illusions about the majority of abortions being for any reason other than ending an "unintended" or "inconvenient" pregnancy - too young, would interfere with education, can't afford a baby, don't want a baby, whatever the reason is, it is overwhelmingly NOT a "health" issue that drives the choice. But I would never say that a doctor running his own private practice should be *forced* to provide a service which he objects to. If he works under contract and his contract specifies that he must provide those services, then of course he'd be in violation of his contract, and thus subject to termination; but compelling individuals under no such obligation? No thank you.
What you're saying is that we have created an infernal machine which runs on its own without any input from us, and will destroy anybody seeking to change it, and resist those efforts at change.
The problem is, the system ceases to exist if nobody runs. The people with power have no power if they are not elected. The people who are elected cannot be corrupted by the system if they are elected with the express intention of changing it, and are held to account for their decisions and actions. The system only has whatever power the electorate cedes to it.
Political potency has been taken from them.
No, they have ceded their political potency by overwhelmingly voting for one of the 2 "new boss, same as the old boss" major party candidates, who are by and large bough & sold by the corporations making political donations. I guarantee that if you took a real survey of the real people on the ground at OWS who are protesting, and actually got honest answers out of them, you would find that 50+% of them didn't bother to vote at all, and a large portion of the 50% that did vote went overwhelmingly for Obama or McCain in the last election. Rather than helping to get third party candidates elected, they participate in the machine, and then bitch when the machine behaves in exactly the same way it always has.
The people have no sway over the political process in America. The sooner we all recognize that the system is broken, the sooner we can work on fixing it.
I'm not sure what mechanism you think allows people to go from "people have no sway over political process," to "the sooner we can work on fixing it." If the people have no sway, then the only way to fix it is with a violent revolution: i.e., destroy it, clear away the rubble, and build something new and better in its place. "Protesting" the system you have described makes just about as much sense as the moles and rabbits holding signs and marching in protest against the combines which till up the fields in the spring: they're not driving the combine, and neither the driver nor the machine give a shit what happens to a few moles and rabbits as long as the crops get planted. I think putting the electorate in the role of powerless victims serves the interests of the establishment: "There's nothing I can do to change it, so why even bother going out and voting, and why even bother running? And why even bother trying to do anything?"
I reject the notion that any system is so corrupt that anybody taking part in it will inevitably be corrupted by it - it is a system of people, created by people, and run by people. If 99% of the people want that system to change, it will change.
So you're saying that, in the bottom 99% of the country, not a single electable candidate exists? They have to just vote for the Democrats or Republicans offered to them by the rich?
Because I'm pretty sure that if there's that much outrage in 99% of the people, they could easily defeat ANY major-party candidate they wanted to with ease. THEY HAVE 99% of the vote, and then they bitch that "nobody's worth voting for," when the powers-that-be offer them candidates who will (unsurprisingly) preserve the general status quo.
If the 99% can't field a single candidate, or find a way to support & run a candidate whose beliefs are in line with the desires of The 99%, then why are they bothering to protest? They've already conceded their political impotence.
This will always give them undue influence in the political process.
Unless, you know, people actually pay attention to the behavior of their elected representatives, and refuse to vote for people who go to Washington and promptly start sucking at the corporate lobbying teat. We have ways of removing corrupt officials. We have more than 2 parties in the US. If "The 99%" ACTUALLY WANTED to elect somebody other than the same corporate shills and whores that we keep re-electing to office, it would happen. I don't care how rich the Koch brothers are, if 99% of the population voted for something, and 1% of the population votes for the opposite... by my count, that's a historic landslide win for the 99%.
But something like 60% of the voting-age "99%" don't bother to cast a vote. Because it's easier to bitch than it is to be informed, and involved with the political process.
If people exercised the merest shred of rational thought when it comes to politics, and exercised the barest iota of follow-through on holding their candidates accountable for results, then the government simply wouldn't be for sale to the rich, because it wouldn't matter how rich you are if you're always outvoted.
The root of the problem is the climate in Washington that allows corporations to run amok with impunity, and by extension, the problem is the self-satisfied laziness of the vast majority of "The 99%" that keeps electing the same cast of crooks, whores, and shills to run the government with the same results term after term.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Since it's specifically written that way in the Fifth Amendment, no, I don't find it that strange. You CAN assert your fifth amendment rights during civil proceedings if answering a question (say, during a deposition) would incriminate you - your fifth amendment rights supersede the right of discovery - but the judge (and, if it's a jury proceeding, the jury) may draw an adverse inference based on your invocation of fifth amendment rights in civil cases. In other words, if you are involved in criminal cases (say criminal negligence for creating & continuing to sell a faulty product that you knew would injure or kill people), and also involved in civil cases for damages caused by that same product, you can invoke 5th amendment rights when asked questions that might detail whether you KNEW the product was faulty - since that would incriminate you in your criminal case, but the jury can look at that answer, and draw their own conclusions in the civil case and say, "since he invoked his 5th amendment rights, it seems likely that he DID know the product was faulty, and thus is liable for the damages it caused."
Civil cases are decided on the "preponderance of the evidence," and in this case, they can use your 5th amendment assertion as evidence in and of itself.
Slashdot Mirror
So here's the question:
1) If we can't go there directly and exploit material wealth there (thus voiding the "we might need the resources!" argument);
and
2) If we're hoping that some sort of computerized droid army will somehow magically be able to breed and raise humans from an "Instant Human Mix" (Just add water and bake!) at the far end (the impracticality and extremely unlikely nature of this event is a huge argument against the "it's a hedge against species extinction!" argument);
and
3) We find a planet that's similar enough to ours at the far end to support earth life natively (thus making the entire premise possible);
What gives us the right to - essentially - infect it? If it's capable of supporting life, it's likely that there already *is* life on that planet, of some form. You don't think a bunch of aggressive, hungry humans showing up might tend to disrupt whatever sort of ecology has already evolved? On the one hand, we're asked to accept on faith that "the universe is huge, of course there are earth-like exoplanets out there!" But on the other hand, we're asked to accept on faith that the universe is devoid of sentient life besides ourselves, and that no other life form would react badly to what is, in essence, an invasion and occupation by a foreign species? I'm curious what twists and turns of illogic allow the people arguing for colonization to hold these types of beliefs. It's precisely this sort of dissonance that leads me to believe the "let's colonize space" crowd has watched FAR too much Firefly & Star Trek, and done FAR too little rational thinking about the matter.
Really? What magical method is going to achieve a $1/kg launch cost?
Because Elon Musk, who sort of has a vested interest in making space commercially viable, has suggested that he believes he can drive launch costs for LEO down to $500/pound (that's $1100 / kg) over time. (source).
Where's the remaining $1099 going in your $1/kg scenario?
And pray tell, how much will it cost to launch even the most bare-minimum mining equipment, smelting equipment, foundry & metalworking equipment, and basically one of every other type of industrial machine we'll ever need up into space, set them up, and control them for the years they'd need to operate? And where, exactly, are they going to mine? Not a lot of planets or asteroids in Low Earth Orbit last time I checked.
No, it is a bad idea for humanity to pretend it has other realistic options if it wants to survive long term, and get down to the business of learning to coexist peacefully and sustainably here on earth with one another.
There are no other planets which are hospitable to human life in our own solar system. You could make a little base on Mars, and a dozen or so people could live there indefinitely, with supply lines reaching back to earth, constant communication, and ridiculously high energy requirements to support their efforts. That does not make Mars a useful hedge against extinction. If you want that, you *need* a planet capable of (naturally) supporting human life - similar atmosphere, similar temperature ranges, similar chemical makeup. Which means... that's right, you need to look at traveling to another star.
The *closest* star to us is, at speeds typical of current space travel, anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 years away. At the short end, that's significantly longer than recorded human history, and at the long end, you're halfway back to the emergence of modern homo sapiens as a distinct species. That's the *closest* star, with no guarantees that there's any planet capable of supporting human life in any meaningful way at the far end.
We can fire a can full of humans off into space, but the parameters for such a mission - the distances, life support requirements, multi-generational nature of the trip, and the simple evolutionary pressures they'd face along the way would mean that they:
1) Almost certainly would never arrive alive - we can't make a goddamned Honda that'll last 20 years without a huge investment in time & money to maintain it, but we're magically going to make the most intricate "ark" ever conceived, and keep it functioning properly for tens of thousands of years with virtually no maintenance? Parts wear out and break down - how will the ship carry enough spares for the duration of the trip? Where will they get materials & appropriate machinery to produce their own? Who will have the expertise to create a new one? A computer, you say? Great, who's going to fix the computer when it breaks?
2) If they did arrive, they would almost certainly not be "human" in any sense of the word as we knew it on their launch date; Evolutionary changes and mutations would certainly be visible after that much time in a hostile environment, and in that closed a gene pool.
3) It would be a one-way trip with no meaningful communication back to earth, ever, meaning we'd never even know if the mission was successful; What would be the point of pretending that we "prevented extinction of the species" by blindly firing some ships off into space, at a time, material, and energy cost that would beggar most industrialized civilizations on the planet today?
Once again, the argument of large scale colonization and exploration is moot unless there is a significant revolution in our understanding of basic physics, biology, and energy generation. If you want to put a little base on Mars for the science, make your case. Don't pretend it's anything but that - a dozen people completely dependent on earth for resupply is not a hedge against a big old asteroid hitting earth. They'll die shortly after earth is wiped out, probably to mechanical failure, or if they're really good, to starvation or suffocation when their oxygen and food run out.
That's all very interesting, and I'm sure you're very proud of yourself for being so anti-free-market in public, but you realize that capitalism and the free market, despite it's shortcomings, have lifted more people out of poverty and improved the living conditions of more people around the world than any other competing economic system in history, right?
So your solution to avoid this is to take a huge chunk of money and power, and hand it to a select group of already-wealthy and already-powerful technocrats? Because last time I checked, there was a lot of whining about how the private sector won't do it because there's no profit, so the only way to do it is via government edict, right? You realize that the government taking billions of dollars from you, me and everybody else to buy spaceships and other high-tech colonization gear is nothing but a gigantic giveaway to private industry, don't you?
Let's be clear here: YOU will not colonize Mars. There is no science they can't do cheaper & easier in earth orbit or via unmanned exploration that will benefit YOU at all. YOU will see no benefit, other than some sort of odd childish satisfaction from seeing some sort of science-fiction fantasy come true. So what you are arguing for is a giant giveaway to defense contractors and tech firms, making a "select group of wealthy and powerful more wealthy and more powerful," and you're complaining that *I* have the limited understanding of the situation?
Of course we *can* do it. The point is, there is absolutely nothing of value to be gained by doing so. The energy and financial commitment required to support even a SMALL outpost of half a dozen people on Mars "permanently" is ridiculously prohibitive. What would be the point of doing so?
In answer to this, I hear two main themes:
1) "Then we won't be putting all our eggs in one basket!" -- 6 people on Mars with an 8-month-long lifeline back to earth is not a hedge against species extinction. If you want self-sustaining colonies, you need thousands of people at a minimum. Then think about how much material, energy, and simple living space will be required to house those people, and ask yourself whether or not the hundreds of trillions of dollars it would require to build that infrastructure on Mars might be better spent here on earth. And even if we manage to jump off to Mars... we're still tied to a single star, and incredibly constrained by our reliance on external supplies, unless you think that a thousand people on Mars would survive happily without constant resupply and communication back to earth.
2) "Because there are resources we could exploit there that aren't available on Earth!" -- Like what? What magical element is in such abundant supply on Mars that it is cost-effective to build an extraction operation millions of miles away, and establish months-long supply routes which will ship that material back to earth for processing? Which materials, specifically? Give me your business case, or shut up about moon mining.
So yes, I think that basically "finding new physics and building the starship enterprise" - as far-fetched as it is to consider - is our better hope. Or, realistically, understanding that this planet is it for us, and if we can't make it work here, we won't magically make it work somewhere else, and devoting our time and energy to solving real problems here on earth, rather than imaginary problems 4 million years down the road.
You've never actually dug a hole with hand tools in rocky terrain, have you?
You're very welcome!
*sigh*
You do realize that none of the other planets in our solar system will support human life - that any colony or structure we build there must be *entirely* self-sustaining, self-contained, and extraordinarily fault tolerant - right?
You do realize that building and shipping a habitat that will house a mere handful of people will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and that's a low-ball estimate, right?
You do realize that "6 people in a tin can orbiting one of Jupiter's moons" does not provide any appreciable insurance for the human species against extinction events, right?
If you want to send people to do science for a few months, great. But let's stop pretending that we're ever going to build a large-scale colony on another planet when that planet is fundamentally incapable of supporting human life. The energy, time, and financial costs are far too high for it to be anything but a "because we wanted to see what would happen" sort of thing.
Mars is fundamentally inhospitable to human life. The rest of our solar system is fundamentally inhospitable to human life. This fairytale notion that we're going to magically whisk ourselves away to another planet, star system, galaxy, etc. and live there is just that: a fairytale notion. We better learn to behave well here on earth, because this is all we've got until we learn to violate our fundamental understandings of time & distance to enable faster-than-light travel.
Any attempt to convince yourself that we will build a self-sustaining colony on another planet or other body inside our solar system which will be entirely self-contained & self-sustaining - i.e., capable of supporting human life indefinitely in the midst of an environment that is hostile to human life - is just delusional mental masturbation, and simply enables us to continue behaving in self-destructive ways in our own habitat here on earth.
Yes, it's much better to just have a failed door lock between you and explosive decompression, that's a much better design for living someplace with virtually no atmosphere. Why have your habitat's internal air pressure contribute to (and reinforce) the seal on the door by making it open inward?
Why would it be nice?
Given our current understanding of physics and biology, you would be spending far longer than presently-recorded history traveling in an interstellar "generational" ship to reach the closest stars; there is no guarantee that ANY of them will have earth-like conditions that would be suitable for human life.
We are not going to construct colonies - either floating, or planet-bound, that are of sufficient scale & size to provide any hedge against extinction. The materials, the cost, the risk, and the energy requirements are simply too high.
If you're talking a legitimate hedge against extinction, then you need to:
1) Find another planet that is close enough to earth conditions that it would be suitable for human life.
2) Build a space ship capable of surviving the time required to travel there;
3) Provision a space ship capable of surviving and supporting human life for thousands of years;
4) Build a large enough ship & colonization group that you wouldn't end up with hundreds of generations of inbreeding and genetic defects at the end of the trip;
5) Find a bunch of people who don't mind dooming hundreds of generations of their descendants to life in a tin can hurtling through space, and that they will never, ever see or hear from Earth in any practical manner again;
6) Ensure that no critical part, anywhere, at any point on the trip, goes bad;
7) Figure out a way to land the ship on the far end with all that cargo;
8) Realize that a small gene pool, after thousands of years of travel and introduction to a completely new habitat, may very well diverge from "human" evolution in significant ways such that calling the people landing on the far side of that trip may not be particularly "human" in any appreciable sense anyway.
9) As an alternative to all that, develop faster than light travel or some sort of fool-proof suspended animation, as well as a computer system capable of self-healing and adaption on an unprecedented level, and find a way to power it for thousands of years without error or failure.
In light of all of those limitations, I'd suggest that in the long run, learning to behave like civilized fucking human beings and get along with one another without shitting all over the blankets might just be the easier and more practical way to survive as a species.
Maybe NASA is so smart that they've ruled that out already as impractical?
If Sarah Palin can come up with "Drill Baby, Drill," I'm pretty sure the brainiacs at NASA with all their learnin' have at least considered the notion.
You could have stopped there. It is not an economically feasible operation on any scale larger than "send a couple geeks there to do some science". It may be scientifically interesting, and we may have a lot of NASA geeks get hot and bothered over the prospect of months cooped up in a small cargo container surrounded by inhospitable environment, but there is nothing you can find on Mars (or anywhere else) that would be economically practical to extract and ship back to Earth.
Look at the size and tonnage of the ISS and other space vehicles & modules, then look at their living capacity. You will not have large scale colonization and exploration of space - for economic or survival purposes - without overcoming significant swaths of our current understanding of simple physics.
Here's the thing: most people don't *enjoy* driving their commute every day - driving, especially in stop & go gridlock, SUCKS. People *enjoy* smoking & drinking. They won't need to "ban" driving, it'll simply be something that most people opt not to do once the systems are available in their car - and they will be, sooner or later (admittedly more likely later).
If they offered an "autopilot" function in cars, most (i.e., the overwhelming majority) would want it simply because it gives them more free time each day to do something they consider meaningful, fun or productive. The system would probably require the driver to operate the vehicle for a minute or so onto a roadway, and again at the far end of the trip to park... but if you could sip coffee, send some email, read the paper, or even nap for the other 30 minutes of your commute, who *wouldn't* want that? You'd get all the benefits-to-the-rider of mass transit without the restricted schedule, limited service areas, and occasional silent-but-deadly-farts from your fellow riders.
Sure, there'll be a few idiots who believe the illusion of being in control of their vehicle gets them to their destination faster; they're welcome to their fanciful notions, but in reality, all the weaving & speeding they're doing will make a difference of about 12 seconds to their commute. I can't count the number of times I've seen somebody trying to speed and weave their way through morning traffic in Boston, only to end up within a car length of them getting off the highway 20 miles farther along.
Really, so the right to your own life, your right to liberty, with all it implies - these are just meaningless BS things that some smarty-pants thought up a couple hundred years ago, and mean nothing?
May we then conclude that you'd have no objections to me making you my slave?
It's not good, Kriss Kross. I think it might even qualify as wiggity wiggity wiggity wack.
Funny you should mention all that, because it's dead wrong. It is currently against the law for any healthcare institution to refuse to perform medically necessary emergency treatment on any patient for any reason. The Protect Life Act, which is (I believe) being debated by the Senate at this point, would allow hospitals to refuse abortions even if they are medically necessary emergency treatment, however that bill is not yet law and probably won't pass the Senate.
This means if you go into a Catholic hospital's ER as a pregnant woman, with an emergency that is life threatening, and for which the appropriate (and only) medical treatment is an abortion, the Catholic hospitals are obligated by law to provide you that abortion. If the hospital refuses to do this, they are violating the law, and are thus exposed to criminal and civil liability.
However, if the procedure is not medically necessary, then why should they be forced to provide it, if an effective alternate exists? If the procedure is not a critical emergency situation, then you have plenty of time to seek out an abortion at your leisure from someplace which will provide it to you. So what, in your estimation, is the issue with current law (doctors may not refuse if it is an emergency situation) that requires the violation of a doctors' right to operate his practice in a manner consistent with the law & his own ethics?
No, "can't afford a baby" is NOT a "health" issue. "can't afford a baby" is an economic issue, which may well have health ramifications, but is not, in and of itself, a health issue. If the mother comes to the doctor with a sick baby, his medical oath requires him to render any medically necessary life-saving treatment already. It doesn't require him to take the baby in, give it three squares a day, and finance its college education.
If doctors are *compelled* to provide abortions when there is no medical necessity for that abortion (i.e., the pregnancy poses no risk to the life or health of the mother), then why aren't we also compelling doctors to cut a check for every pregnant woman who needs the money? After all, you've defined being unable to afford a baby as a "health issue," and "writing a check for $10,000" would certainly help fix that "health" issue, wouldn't it?
Do you see how stupid your argument is? Or should we also talk about a doctor's obligation to end the "health issue of homelessness" by operating a free hostel for any homeless person who happens to need a place to stay?
Once again, you are wrong.
The oath taken by soldiers is as follows:
See that last clause - "according to regulations and the UCMJ"? The UCMJ includes language that explicitly states that you are expected to follow lawful orders, specifically Article 92 (emphasis below mine) of the UCMJ:
The UCMJ specifically states that you are required to follow "lawful" orders - not "all" orders, not "anything an officer says," though you may still be arrested and subjected to a court martial if the person whose order you are refusing believes his order to be "lawful." In much the same way, you may be arrested and charged with a crime if you shoot someone who breaks into your home and attacks you; you can make your "it was self defense" argument in front of the court, and let the powers-that-be decide whether or not your actions were reasonable and lawful.
You seem to have a lot of very definite ideas about how things work, despite your inability to get even a single detail right in all your comments on this subject. Don't you think this might be the appropriate time to shut up and learn the facts, rather than spout off ill-informed opinions based on your own fanciful notions of how the world works?
Fact: It's quite possible to be a doctor and never, ever, ever perform an abortion, or even have a patient request one from you.
Fact: It's quite possible - in fact, it's the vast majority of cases - for an abortion to be requested for no medical reason whatsoever - instead, the request is made for social, economic, convenience, or other personal, non-medical reasons in the lion's share of abortions. In the small portion of cases where an abortion is medically necessary to preserve the life and health of the mother, the medical ethics of the situation are already fairly clear, because the doctor is required by his ethics to provide medical care when it is medically necessary.
Your analogy sucks: military service is, by definition, publicly funded. Military personnel are therefore public servants, and may not discriminate. Medical personnel in private practice (e.g., not government employees - military, NIH, CDC, etc. etc.) are NOT public servants.
Or, if you really want to press the military analogy, you could also consider the fact that soldiers are DUTY-BOUND to refuse to follow orders that are illegal or immoral. So, for instance, if your division commander orders you to execute a hundred children in a village in order to get some intelligence out of the residents, you would be obligated by law, ethics, and morality to REFUSE that command because it is illegal and immoral. Why should we expect unquestioning obedience to the whims of state bureaucrats from doctors in private practice, when we have a very clear exception to this even for military personnel, who are public servants in every way imaginable?
This is the beauty of a free market, and free will. The doctor can't force the mother to keep her baby, and the mother can't force the doctor to perform medically unnecessary procedures that he has a moral objection to. The doctor is free to decline to provide the procedure, and the mother is free to go find another doctor who will perform the procedure.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a doctor practicing today who would refuse to perform an abortion if the pregnancy posed a legitimate danger to the health of the mother - that whole "do no harm" thing. Of course, you'd also be hard-pressed to justify a *majority* of abortions performed today as "medically necessary to prevent a threat to the health of the mother." Do some reading here if you think that rape/health problems actually represent large portions of the reasons women seek abortion each year.
And to be clear: I am very staunchly pro-choice, and believe a woman should always have the right to seek an abortion if she wishes it. But I hold no illusions about the majority of abortions being for any reason other than ending an "unintended" or "inconvenient" pregnancy - too young, would interfere with education, can't afford a baby, don't want a baby, whatever the reason is, it is overwhelmingly NOT a "health" issue that drives the choice. But I would never say that a doctor running his own private practice should be *forced* to provide a service which he objects to. If he works under contract and his contract specifies that he must provide those services, then of course he'd be in violation of his contract, and thus subject to termination; but compelling individuals under no such obligation? No thank you.
What you're saying is that we have created an infernal machine which runs on its own without any input from us, and will destroy anybody seeking to change it, and resist those efforts at change.
The problem is, the system ceases to exist if nobody runs. The people with power have no power if they are not elected. The people who are elected cannot be corrupted by the system if they are elected with the express intention of changing it, and are held to account for their decisions and actions. The system only has whatever power the electorate cedes to it.
No, they have ceded their political potency by overwhelmingly voting for one of the 2 "new boss, same as the old boss" major party candidates, who are by and large bough & sold by the corporations making political donations. I guarantee that if you took a real survey of the real people on the ground at OWS who are protesting, and actually got honest answers out of them, you would find that 50+% of them didn't bother to vote at all, and a large portion of the 50% that did vote went overwhelmingly for Obama or McCain in the last election. Rather than helping to get third party candidates elected, they participate in the machine, and then bitch when the machine behaves in exactly the same way it always has.
I'm not sure what mechanism you think allows people to go from "people have no sway over political process," to "the sooner we can work on fixing it." If the people have no sway, then the only way to fix it is with a violent revolution: i.e., destroy it, clear away the rubble, and build something new and better in its place. "Protesting" the system you have described makes just about as much sense as the moles and rabbits holding signs and marching in protest against the combines which till up the fields in the spring: they're not driving the combine, and neither the driver nor the machine give a shit what happens to a few moles and rabbits as long as the crops get planted. I think putting the electorate in the role of powerless victims serves the interests of the establishment: "There's nothing I can do to change it, so why even bother going out and voting, and why even bother running? And why even bother trying to do anything?"
I reject the notion that any system is so corrupt that anybody taking part in it will inevitably be corrupted by it - it is a system of people, created by people, and run by people. If 99% of the people want that system to change, it will change.
So you're saying that, in the bottom 99% of the country, not a single electable candidate exists? They have to just vote for the Democrats or Republicans offered to them by the rich?
Because I'm pretty sure that if there's that much outrage in 99% of the people, they could easily defeat ANY major-party candidate they wanted to with ease. THEY HAVE 99% of the vote, and then they bitch that "nobody's worth voting for," when the powers-that-be offer them candidates who will (unsurprisingly) preserve the general status quo.
If the 99% can't field a single candidate, or find a way to support & run a candidate whose beliefs are in line with the desires of The 99%, then why are they bothering to protest? They've already conceded their political impotence.
Unless, you know, people actually pay attention to the behavior of their elected representatives, and refuse to vote for people who go to Washington and promptly start sucking at the corporate lobbying teat. We have ways of removing corrupt officials. We have more than 2 parties in the US. If "The 99%" ACTUALLY WANTED to elect somebody other than the same corporate shills and whores that we keep re-electing to office, it would happen. I don't care how rich the Koch brothers are, if 99% of the population voted for something, and 1% of the population votes for the opposite... by my count, that's a historic landslide win for the 99%.
But something like 60% of the voting-age "99%" don't bother to cast a vote. Because it's easier to bitch than it is to be informed, and involved with the political process.
If people exercised the merest shred of rational thought when it comes to politics, and exercised the barest iota of follow-through on holding their candidates accountable for results, then the government simply wouldn't be for sale to the rich, because it wouldn't matter how rich you are if you're always outvoted.
The root of the problem is the climate in Washington that allows corporations to run amok with impunity, and by extension, the problem is the self-satisfied laziness of the vast majority of "The 99%" that keeps electing the same cast of crooks, whores, and shills to run the government with the same results term after term.
Since it's specifically written that way in the Fifth Amendment, no, I don't find it that strange. You CAN assert your fifth amendment rights during civil proceedings if answering a question (say, during a deposition) would incriminate you - your fifth amendment rights supersede the right of discovery - but the judge (and, if it's a jury proceeding, the jury) may draw an adverse inference based on your invocation of fifth amendment rights in civil cases. In other words, if you are involved in criminal cases (say criminal negligence for creating & continuing to sell a faulty product that you knew would injure or kill people), and also involved in civil cases for damages caused by that same product, you can invoke 5th amendment rights when asked questions that might detail whether you KNEW the product was faulty - since that would incriminate you in your criminal case, but the jury can look at that answer, and draw their own conclusions in the civil case and say, "since he invoked his 5th amendment rights, it seems likely that he DID know the product was faulty, and thus is liable for the damages it caused."
Civil cases are decided on the "preponderance of the evidence," and in this case, they can use your 5th amendment assertion as evidence in and of itself.