People aren't machines. You're just not getting this whole "evolution" thing, are you? The reason we have an instinct for self preservation is because we depend on genetic inheritance to multiply. Genes which code for self preservation are likely to survive long enough to make copies of themselves - ones which don't code for self preservation are less likely to do so. Machines don't have genes, and they don't copy themselves, ergo no evolutionary mechanism and no way to evolve a self preservation instinct.
Is that actually true? Judging by her politics/personality, I wouldn't be at all surprised... but I haven't been able to find any credible sources to support that claim. All I can find is articles saying something like "reportedly" she has it "somewhere on her body".
How about I just land the next one 100 meters away?
In that case you're taking 10 years to go 100 meters. Even worse. Maybe you're happy taking 500 years to accomplish what one manned mission could do in the next 20 - I'm not.
I cannot think of a scientific objective achievable by one human mission not achievable by a series of 60 probe missions. Clearly, neither can you.
How about taking a core sample, and bringing it back to Earth? Sure, you can do it with probes, but how much will THAT cost? How about gathering such samples from 15 different locations in a 25 mile radius? How much will THAT cost? 10 times as much? 20? 30? How long will it take? At the present speed of the Mars rovers, probably about a century.
Just because costs have been low so far doesn't mean that they're going to stay consistent for all missions. Any time you need have a return mission, you're going to increase your costs, probably by an order of magnitude at the least. I don't think you truly appreciate the complexity and cost of the systems which would be needed to do these things. If your missions get complex enough, pretty soon you're looking at costs starting to approach those of manned missions.
More importantly, the primary purpose of sending manned missions shouldn't be scientific, but infrastructure development. Send them there with enough resources to set up a small building. Send a second mission with a small nuclear generator, a greenhouse, and supplies for setting up hydroponic gardens. Build yourself a nice outpost and you can have a small community doing all the science you like. Better yet, start with the moon and turn it into a launching pad for future missions. You'd massively decrease the costs of all future missions, both manned and unmanned.
As to the rest of your comment, I won't even bother. It's quite clear that we're speaking two different languages. It's not so much that we disagree on any specific points, but that you're either not understanding what I'm writing, or you're deliberately misinterpreting it. Either way, I'm out.
It's actually a direct neural interface. I had a USB port installed in my left ear, ages ago! I'm surprised you haven't heard of it - everyone's doing it these days.
I guess I'll let them send me a Diesel, since there is no such thing as a 16GB Rally2.
Really? That's extremely strange considering that the operating system and browser which I am using to type this message are running off of a 16GB OCZ Rally2 which I am holding in my hand. Here, I'll read what it says on the body, again...
Yep: It still says OCZ Rally 2 16GB.
I can back up what "drsmithy" said - the read and write performance on these is excellent, which is why I chose it in the first place. If you want to be able to carry around a portable linux system with you, r/w speed matters a great deal. Ubuntu running off of my old no-name flash drive took about twice as long to boot up, and firefox would go inactive for a minute at a time, on a regular basis. Plus doing updates really, really sucked. Now, running off the Rally2, I rarely have any such problems.
What do you imagine them doing that 60 remote probes could not?
Taking less than a day to walk 100 meters is a good start. If you don't have the mental faculties to think of anything else, then we may as well end this conversation.
The Soviets completed successful sample return missions to the moon via remote probes 3 times in the 1970s
You're comparing launching a remote probe off of the moons surface to launching one from the Martian surface?
Go on, pull the other one!
By developing rockets. On Earth. Nothing about how to get to the moon was learned by astronauts on the moon (obviously).
You know, you could have just written "yes, I was wrong, probes won't help us get to Mars". Really, it's ok. You CAN say the words "I was wrong". I have faith in you. Go on, try it!
I'm arguing that we have funded manned missions extensively, and accomplished very little. We have funded remote missions and accomplished much more for much less money.
That's a load of crap. We stopped funding manned missions decades ago. Up until that point, we had accomplished plenty with manned missions, and practically nothing via remote. Once again, your argument is circular.
You argue people are so clever we must send them.
No, that's not what I said. Being clever has nothing to do with it.
I was expecting you to name oranges, bananas and apples, tops. That's about as far as fruit gets in most people's diets.
I don't know that "most" is accurate, but yeah, people in general probably don't eat enough fruit.
Point still stands though. You've listed plenty of sources of vitamin C. Got anything with A in it?
Apricots.
The original commenter has finally responded, so I'll just point you to my response to him. Apparently there aren't any fruits which contain Vitamin D, but, regardless, his statement was that "vitamins don't grow on trees", not "some vitamins don't grow on trees".
Vitamins A,D,E and K only dissolve in fat, and as such, only come from animals.
Vitamin A - Apricots. Vitamin D - UV irradiated mushrooms. Vitamin E - Nuts, Seeds, Asparagus, lots of others. Vitamin K - Kiwi, Avocado, Spinach, lots of others.
Plus Vitamin D is naturally synthesized by the human body when exposed to UV radiation.
Even if you were right, though, your original statement would still be stupid. Vitamins clearly DO grow on trees.
If you had stated that SOME vitamins don't grow on trees, I probably wouldn't have bothered responding. I'm not an expert, so I would have assumed that you were probably right. However, after researching your claims about Vitamins A, D, E, and K, it's become apparent that you have no clue what you're talking about.
Nope, he's serious. How many tree-grown products do you eat? I'm betting three or four types of fruit, at most.
Well... in no particular order.... oranges, tangerines, peaches, pears, apples, cherries, plums, avocados, bananas, mangoes, lemons, limes, pineapples, kiwi, and coconuts, to name a few.
I don't like grapefruit or quince but I do eat them sometimes, and I LOVE pomegranate but rarely get the chance to eat it, so it wouldn't be fair to add them to the list. Regardless, that still quadruples your "three-or-four". There's also various forms of nuts (walnuts, chestnuts, almonds, pecans, and pistachios, for me, primarily), plus products such as maple syrup.
So... if you're right, and he really was being serious... well, I don't know how to put it any more politely than "he's an idiot".
You seem to be saying, humans on mars can do more than humans controlling probes, if you ignore the difficulty and expense of getting them there and keeping them alive and operating.
When Bush suggested launching new missions to the moon and mars, the NASA estimate for the entire effort came out to $120 billion. The Mars Rover missions cost something like a billion each. That means that for the price of 120 remote missions we can afford to launch two manned missions - one to the moon, and one to mars. Following missions would be significantly cheaper, since the initial R&D and infrastructure costs would have already been covered.
Even if they only stayed there for a couple days the astronauts could gather more data than a dozen rover missions, AND they could bring back samples for earth-side analysis - something which is essentially impossible with probes.
I suggest they not only can, but have. It is not clear to me manned missions will ever achieve what remote probes are doing now. e.g. years of operation on mars.
Doing something for years and years is only an accomplishment when there isn't a faster way of doing it. If you spend years manually calculating the value of Pi to the Nth digit and someone comes along with a computer and replicates the same feat in half a second, does that mean that his achievement was somehow inferior to yours because it took less time?
Human missions don't need to "achieve years of operation on Mars" in order to justify the expense. A couple days of human time on mars will achieve FAR more than your "years of operation" via rover.
But in any case it seems clear to me that these goals are best advanced today by gaining as much knowledge of other planets as we can.
Really?
How did we get to the moon? By building better telescopes and studying it in detail from the ground? Or by developing rockets?
The only things we need to know in order to create settlements on Mars and the Moon is:
1. How to get there. 2. How to take our environment with us. 3. What hazards to expect during the journey and after arrival.
Gaining more knowledge about our destinations is a great idea, but it does nothing to actually get us there. At best it gives us a better understanding of what to pack before we leave - at worst it provides no relevant insights.
If they are better for the job, where are they?
Waiting for the funding, mainly.
Saying manned exploration is better if you ignore the drawbacks of manned exploration is just dumb.
The only drawback is that politicians don't want to authorize the necessary funding when it's much simpler to just toss NASA a bit of spare cash every now and then, and pretend that it's being well spent.
You're arguing that manned Mars missions haven't accomplished anything, so we shouldn't fund manned missions. The reason they haven't accomplished anything is because we haven't funded any. That's a circular argument. If you do not fund a line of research, you cannot use the the lack of results as a reason for not funding it. Otherwise we could have used the same "logic" to refuse funding for remote missions in the first place, or for any space exploration whatsoever. Using that argument, we would have simply said "nobody has ever launched anything into space, therefore we shouldn't bother funding rocket research, and should make better telescopes instead". NASA would have, quite literally, never gotten off the ground.
Thousands of times the budget, and they can't keep their toilet running in LEO. Drop them and give me a thousand times as many mechanical probes; can you imagine the improvement in scientific results for the money?
Besides the obvious PR value, a human team could do more work in the first hour than the rovers have done since first landing. Properly outfitted, a human team could spend months on Mars, performing practical experiments, collecting core samples, and exploring vast stretches of terrain. Best of all, they could easily change their plans/experiments if significant new discoveries are made, whereas with machines it takes decades to design, construct, launch, and land a new probe capable of performing the required work.
It's an old argument, and a pointless one. No machine can come close to matching the versatility of a human being, nor will they in the foreseeable future. While unmanned probes will always be an extremely important part of space exploration, it's silly to suggest that they can replace manned missions.
Of course, the big clincher is that manned missions are an absolute necessity if we plan on establishing colonies on other planets or moons, or if we want to start exploiting the vast resources of the asteroid belt. Even if all of our scientific missions could be successfully performed by remote, sooner or later we're going to want to establish new frontiers.
The wealth of most of the northeastern United States can be traced to the Niagara Falls dam, and the vast amounts of energy it provides without the need for human effort.
All of the Niagara power plants combined - including the Canadian (incidentally, the biggest) ones - produce about 4.4 GW of electrical power.
New York state alone uses more power than that, without taking into account the power generated for transport via internal combustion engines, or power generated for various industrial uses which do not feed off the grid.
The US as a whole consumes more than 3 TW of power if we include all energy consumption (industry and transportation take a big chunk). So, while the falls are an excellent resource, you're vastly overstating their importance.
The technology he was experimenting with was seized by the US government, and is currently being explored in the HAARP project.
Well then. It's a good thing you've got that tinfoil helmet to protect you, huh?
These HAARP conspiracy theories are amongst the most bizarre in the world. About the only sillier one I've heard is the idea that the Hubble telescope is actually a spy satellite. You people live in a whole different universe...
This may be the first time I've heard the effects of 9/11 and subsequent fearmongering described as "limited."
How else would you describe majority opposition for the Iraq war, something like 50% opposition to the Afghan conflict, constant complaints about wiretapping and "enhanced interrogation techniques", and the lowest approval figures of any president in US history?
Sure, the 9/11 attacks had a strong impact on the American people. However, the long term effect has been negligible. People are still split on the same old political lines, and continue to quibble about the same old issues - the existence of an external threat seems to be the last thing on most peoples minds. When the biggest argument in your nation regarding the war on terror is whether or not to prosecute CIA agents who engaged in "waterboarding" captured militants, you know that people have pretty much dismissed the threat of terrorism.
You don't even need that. In fact, such jingoistic propaganda is unlikely to work in most modern democracies, absent real attacks such as 9/11 (and even then, the effect seems quite limited). Our people have lived without external threats for so long that they tend to be more paranoid about their own government and fellow citizens than they are about other nations. No - if you really want to bring the people to the bidding of their leaders, just tell them you'll keep them safe from misfortune and failure. Turn the government into their surrogate mother and you'll turn them into children - unable to even contemplate resisting your control.
To be fair, he did say "for reuse or resale". He didn't specify what KIND of use. You could use it a a paperweight, a doorstop, a hammer... the possibilities are endless! And then you're done using it, you can always sell it on e-bay.
No CO2 is not a deadly toxin to mamals. If it were, paintball would be one of the most dangerous sports on the planet. Could you imagine a sport where people run around shooting each other with balls propelled by compressed nerve-gas?
It doesn't matter that CO2 is a waste product - the terms "poison" and "toxin" have a very specific meaning, and CO2 does not fall within them.
If we were to go by your apparent definition, dyhydrogen monoxide would be considered a poison, too - it's one of our main waste products, and excessive consumption of it can kill you.
Yeah, coating the entire surface of the Earth with gold foil to increase its reflectivity and eliminate global warming is technically possible too -- but that doesn't mean it's going to happen!
The thing is... quite often, there's a happy mid-way point between the completely ludicrous, and the "no can do" attitude. In your example... how about mandating that all roofing tiles be white or reflective, and constructing all drivable surface from light-coloured concrete instead of black tar?
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People aren't machines. You're just not getting this whole "evolution" thing, are you? The reason we have an instinct for self preservation is because we depend on genetic inheritance to multiply. Genes which code for self preservation are likely to survive long enough to make copies of themselves - ones which don't code for self preservation are less likely to do so. Machines don't have genes, and they don't copy themselves, ergo no evolutionary mechanism and no way to evolve a self preservation instinct.
I call dibs on the first Neanderburger!
Yeah, I can see the reasoning there. If you're starving and the only available food source is pork ... eat your neighbor instead!
Is that actually true? Judging by her politics/personality, I wouldn't be at all surprised ... but I haven't been able to find any credible sources to support that claim. All I can find is articles saying something like "reportedly" she has it "somewhere on her body".
So what's the correct answer? How about:
"Yes, but it's ok because it takes attention away from your hair."
In that case you're taking 10 years to go 100 meters. Even worse. Maybe you're happy taking 500 years to accomplish what one manned mission could do in the next 20 - I'm not.
How about taking a core sample, and bringing it back to Earth? Sure, you can do it with probes, but how much will THAT cost? How about gathering such samples from 15 different locations in a 25 mile radius? How much will THAT cost? 10 times as much? 20? 30? How long will it take? At the present speed of the Mars rovers, probably about a century.
Just because costs have been low so far doesn't mean that they're going to stay consistent for all missions. Any time you need have a return mission, you're going to increase your costs, probably by an order of magnitude at the least. I don't think you truly appreciate the complexity and cost of the systems which would be needed to do these things. If your missions get complex enough, pretty soon you're looking at costs starting to approach those of manned missions.
More importantly, the primary purpose of sending manned missions shouldn't be scientific, but infrastructure development. Send them there with enough resources to set up a small building. Send a second mission with a small nuclear generator, a greenhouse, and supplies for setting up hydroponic gardens. Build yourself a nice outpost and you can have a small community doing all the science you like. Better yet, start with the moon and turn it into a launching pad for future missions. You'd massively decrease the costs of all future missions, both manned and unmanned.
As to the rest of your comment, I won't even bother. It's quite clear that we're speaking two different languages. It's not so much that we disagree on any specific points, but that you're either not understanding what I'm writing, or you're deliberately misinterpreting it. Either way, I'm out.
It's actually a direct neural interface. I had a USB port installed in my left ear, ages ago! I'm surprised you haven't heard of it - everyone's doing it these days.
Really? That's extremely strange considering that the operating system and browser which I am using to type this message are running off of a 16GB OCZ Rally2 which I am holding in my hand. Here, I'll read what it says on the body, again ...
Yep: It still says OCZ Rally 2 16GB.
I can back up what "drsmithy" said - the read and write performance on these is excellent, which is why I chose it in the first place. If you want to be able to carry around a portable linux system with you, r/w speed matters a great deal. Ubuntu running off of my old no-name flash drive took about twice as long to boot up, and firefox would go inactive for a minute at a time, on a regular basis. Plus doing updates really, really sucked. Now, running off the Rally2, I rarely have any such problems.
You're right, I misread the figures.
Taking less than a day to walk 100 meters is a good start. If you don't have the mental faculties to think of anything else, then we may as well end this conversation.
You're comparing launching a remote probe off of the moons surface to launching one from the Martian surface?
Go on, pull the other one!
You know, you could have just written "yes, I was wrong, probes won't help us get to Mars". Really, it's ok. You CAN say the words "I was wrong". I have faith in you. Go on, try it!
That's a load of crap. We stopped funding manned missions decades ago. Up until that point, we had accomplished plenty with manned missions, and practically nothing via remote. Once again, your argument is circular.
No, that's not what I said. Being clever has nothing to do with it.
Getting ass-raped by Homeland Security?
Well thanks for the correction. Out of a list of 16-ish plants, I had to get at least one wrong!
Are you ok?
I don't know that "most" is accurate, but yeah, people in general probably don't eat enough fruit.
Apricots.
The original commenter has finally responded, so I'll just point you to my response to him. Apparently there aren't any fruits which contain Vitamin D, but, regardless, his statement was that "vitamins don't grow on trees", not "some vitamins don't grow on trees".
Vitamin A - Apricots.
Vitamin D - UV irradiated mushrooms.
Vitamin E - Nuts, Seeds, Asparagus, lots of others.
Vitamin K - Kiwi, Avocado, Spinach, lots of others.
Plus Vitamin D is naturally synthesized by the human body when exposed to UV radiation.
Even if you were right, though, your original statement would still be stupid. Vitamins clearly DO grow on trees.
If you had stated that SOME vitamins don't grow on trees, I probably wouldn't have bothered responding. I'm not an expert, so I would have assumed that you were probably right. However, after researching your claims about Vitamins A, D, E, and K, it's become apparent that you have no clue what you're talking about.
Well ... in no particular order .... oranges, tangerines, peaches, pears, apples, cherries, plums, avocados, bananas, mangoes, lemons, limes, pineapples, kiwi, and coconuts, to name a few.
I don't like grapefruit or quince but I do eat them sometimes, and I LOVE pomegranate but rarely get the chance to eat it, so it wouldn't be fair to add them to the list. Regardless, that still quadruples your "three-or-four". There's also various forms of nuts (walnuts, chestnuts, almonds, pecans, and pistachios, for me, primarily), plus products such as maple syrup.
So ... if you're right, and he really was being serious ... well, I don't know how to put it any more politely than "he's an idiot".
Uh. That was a joke, right?
When Bush suggested launching new missions to the moon and mars, the NASA estimate for the entire effort came out to $120 billion. The Mars Rover missions cost something like a billion each. That means that for the price of 120 remote missions we can afford to launch two manned missions - one to the moon, and one to mars. Following missions would be significantly cheaper, since the initial R&D and infrastructure costs would have already been covered.
Even if they only stayed there for a couple days the astronauts could gather more data than a dozen rover missions, AND they could bring back samples for earth-side analysis - something which is essentially impossible with probes.
Doing something for years and years is only an accomplishment when there isn't a faster way of doing it. If you spend years manually calculating the value of Pi to the Nth digit and someone comes along with a computer and replicates the same feat in half a second, does that mean that his achievement was somehow inferior to yours because it took less time?
Human missions don't need to "achieve years of operation on Mars" in order to justify the expense. A couple days of human time on mars will achieve FAR more than your "years of operation" via rover.
Really?
How did we get to the moon? By building better telescopes and studying it in detail from the ground? Or by developing rockets?
The only things we need to know in order to create settlements on Mars and the Moon is:
1. How to get there.
2. How to take our environment with us.
3. What hazards to expect during the journey and after arrival.
Gaining more knowledge about our destinations is a great idea, but it does nothing to actually get us there. At best it gives us a better understanding of what to pack before we leave - at worst it provides no relevant insights.
Waiting for the funding, mainly.
The only drawback is that politicians don't want to authorize the necessary funding when it's much simpler to just toss NASA a bit of spare cash every now and then, and pretend that it's being well spent.
You're arguing that manned Mars missions haven't accomplished anything, so we shouldn't fund manned missions. The reason they haven't accomplished anything is because we haven't funded any. That's a circular argument. If you do not fund a line of research, you cannot use the the lack of results as a reason for not funding it. Otherwise we could have used the same "logic" to refuse funding for remote missions in the first place, or for any space exploration whatsoever. Using that argument, we would have simply said "nobody has ever launched anything into space, therefore we shouldn't bother funding rocket research, and should make better telescopes instead". NASA would have, quite literally, never gotten off the ground.
Besides the obvious PR value, a human team could do more work in the first hour than the rovers have done since first landing. Properly outfitted, a human team could spend months on Mars, performing practical experiments, collecting core samples, and exploring vast stretches of terrain. Best of all, they could easily change their plans/experiments if significant new discoveries are made, whereas with machines it takes decades to design, construct, launch, and land a new probe capable of performing the required work.
It's an old argument, and a pointless one. No machine can come close to matching the versatility of a human being, nor will they in the foreseeable future. While unmanned probes will always be an extremely important part of space exploration, it's silly to suggest that they can replace manned missions.
Of course, the big clincher is that manned missions are an absolute necessity if we plan on establishing colonies on other planets or moons, or if we want to start exploiting the vast resources of the asteroid belt. Even if all of our scientific missions could be successfully performed by remote, sooner or later we're going to want to establish new frontiers.
All of the Niagara power plants combined - including the Canadian (incidentally, the biggest) ones - produce about 4.4 GW of electrical power.
New York state alone uses more power than that, without taking into account the power generated for transport via internal combustion engines, or power generated for various industrial uses which do not feed off the grid.
The US as a whole consumes more than 3 TW of power if we include all energy consumption (industry and transportation take a big chunk). So, while the falls are an excellent resource, you're vastly overstating their importance.
Well then. It's a good thing you've got that tinfoil helmet to protect you, huh?
These HAARP conspiracy theories are amongst the most bizarre in the world. About the only sillier one I've heard is the idea that the Hubble telescope is actually a spy satellite. You people live in a whole different universe ...
How else would you describe majority opposition for the Iraq war, something like 50% opposition to the Afghan conflict, constant complaints about wiretapping and "enhanced interrogation techniques", and the lowest approval figures of any president in US history?
Sure, the 9/11 attacks had a strong impact on the American people. However, the long term effect has been negligible. People are still split on the same old political lines, and continue to quibble about the same old issues - the existence of an external threat seems to be the last thing on most peoples minds. When the biggest argument in your nation regarding the war on terror is whether or not to prosecute CIA agents who engaged in "waterboarding" captured militants, you know that people have pretty much dismissed the threat of terrorism.
You don't even need that. In fact, such jingoistic propaganda is unlikely to work in most modern democracies, absent real attacks such as 9/11 (and even then, the effect seems quite limited). Our people have lived without external threats for so long that they tend to be more paranoid about their own government and fellow citizens than they are about other nations. No - if you really want to bring the people to the bidding of their leaders, just tell them you'll keep them safe from misfortune and failure. Turn the government into their surrogate mother and you'll turn them into children - unable to even contemplate resisting your control.
To be fair, he did say "for reuse or resale". He didn't specify what KIND of use. You could use it a a paperweight, a doorstop, a hammer ... the possibilities are endless! And then you're done using it, you can always sell it on e-bay.
No CO2 is not a deadly toxin to mamals. If it were, paintball would be one of the most dangerous sports on the planet. Could you imagine a sport where people run around shooting each other with balls propelled by compressed nerve-gas?
It doesn't matter that CO2 is a waste product - the terms "poison" and "toxin" have a very specific meaning, and CO2 does not fall within them.
If we were to go by your apparent definition, dyhydrogen monoxide would be considered a poison, too - it's one of our main waste products, and excessive consumption of it can kill you.
Uh, CO2 isn't poisonous. Atmospheric toxins and heat absorption are two completely unrelated topics.
The effect is negligible at this point. Even if it weren't, though, it's got nothing to do with what I was saying.
The thing is ... quite often, there's a happy mid-way point between the completely ludicrous, and the "no can do" attitude. In your example ... how about mandating that all roofing tiles be white or reflective, and constructing all drivable surface from light-coloured concrete instead of black tar?