Humans, fickle? Indeed we are! A few years back, I read about some interviews done with people who had survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
The majority of the sentiments were something like "I had had enough of life, and I had so many problems. But an instant after jumping, I realized that all those problems were solvable, except one - that I had just jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge!"
Yes, at least a few of the people who arrive on Mars, ready to settle and stay, will change their minds. (A fair number of the Mayflower pilgrims voiced similar sentiments.) But the basic idea of going to Mars isn't to set up some tech-free commune - it will be to build the next link in a space-faring civilization, and to create a lifeboat for humanity in case the next rock has our name on it.
Bringing materials back to Earth, from Mars? Not likely; if we wanted to bring raw materials back to Earth, we'd grab them from the asteroid belt so that we wouldn't have to lift them against even Mars' feeble gravity. Mining the Moon may be useful, or at least Harrison Schmidt thinks so, to extract He3 from the lunar dust to be used in fusion powerplants.
Yes, yes, just as Neil Armstrong and Harrison Schmidt returned to Earth. But with any luck, there are people who are alive today who will help to settle the Moon - and die there of old age. Humanity must either continue out to the other planets, and to the planets of other stars, or our race will die here in the cradle of Earth the next time a BIG rock hits the Earth, we will become extinct. I'm a big believer in humanity not becoming extinct.
The ultimate "space exploration is immoral" argument boils down to one of two things. Either you're a coward, and think all humans should be cowards, or you hate humanity and APPROVE of the idea of human extinction. Because if we sit here long enough, it WILL happen. It's a statistical certainty.
The less-sane of the commenters here seem to think that we're about to blast off for Mars tomorrow. It's not going to happen; we don't have any rockets. We can't even send more Americans to the International Space Station, now that NASA has decided to cut off cooperation with the Russians. But by the time we _can_ go to Mars, we'll be ready to live there - for a long time. Will it be ten years? Thirty? Fifty? Hell, I'm astonished that we haven't even been back to the Moon in the last 40 years. We could be on Mars NOW, if we had wanted to, in 1980.
So, let's start NOW. It won't be easy, it won't be cheap, and it won't be entirely safe - but nothing worthwhile ever is. People died learning about electricity. Marie Curie died learning about radium. People died learning how to fly, and people died learning how to dive, and people die every day in learning how to drive. People will die learning how to build lunar habitats, and learning how to land on Mars, and how to build homes there. And a lot more people WON'T die, and we'll learn what we need to know to settle Mars, and to build starships.
And just as it has always done, the knowledge that we gain in doing these things and going those places will make life easier and safer for you cowards who stay behind.
Sorry; my crystal ball is in the shop, so I truly do NOT know what the outcome will be. If yours is in good working order, then visit your stockbroker, and your certainties will carry somewhat more weight. Or at least, your bling will.
Oh, yeah, we're all going to die eventually; that much is certain. But nobody is proposing to send humans as sacrifices to the God of War, or that we're just going there to fertilize the Martian dust. There's a CHANCE of survival beyond the first 72 hours, and probably much longer.
You object? Don't go. It's just that simple. Had an opportunity like this come up 40 years ago, I'd have jumped on it. But they won't be ready to go for several years yet, and I'll be 70 by then; they wouldn't take me.
Does it really matter WHERE you die? If we're in the business of trying to maximize human lifespan, then perhaps we should consider banning skydiving - or at least, base jumping, because THAT crap is DANGEROUS. But we're not going to do that, and we shouldn't be quite so squeamish as writing off any visits to Mars.
Yes, going to the Moon is going to be dangerous, especially when we start setting up lunar colonies. And going to Mars, or the Jovian moons isn't going to be any safer. But then, scuba diving - and even bicycling - causes its own inevitable death toll.
The Roanoke colony vanished without a trace. Something like that is certain to happen to at least one Moon mission, and at least one Mars mission. But when we stop trying to grow, we may as well finish dying. Go ahead - but don't expect me to support that decision.
By your standard, the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies were "suicide missions"; the people who boarded the Mayflower never expected to come back. The first colonists to Mars will never return, and probably wouldn't want to.
But the difference will be, the Martians can phone home pretty easily - where a letter back to England was a rare event in the 1630's.
A "one way" trip isn't necessarily a "suicide mission".
The real problem is that there is very little on TV that's worth watching, no matter WHAT the delivery medium is. Dozens of formulaic "crime" dramas. Dozens of unfunny "situation comedies". Every show tries to copy everything else that was ever PREVIOUSLY successful, but the copy is never even half as good as the original.
NOTHING new on TV is worth watching. And I've already seen all the good reruns.
Ummmm....... Not necessarily so. Sound under water can be ducted through sound channels and convergence zones. Depending on the depth/pressure, the salinity, and the temperature, faint noises can by heard by a hydrophone hundreds of miles away - but NOT detectable on a hydrophone a half-mile away that isn't at the sound channel depth. (Source: I was an airborne acoustic sensor operator for several years in P-3 Orion ASW aircraft, long long ago). I'm guessing that every US submarine that transits the IO for the next ten years will have secondary tasking to search for MH370.
Of course, if the airplane is on the bottom, in the mud, or in an abyssal trench, the sound could be muffled and not audible even a dozen yards away. Since we have essentially no clue where the airplane is (except that we can be pretty sure it isn't in the "black hole" between Don Lemon's ears) the whole search effort is, essentially, a crap shoot.
We actually had better data on the Air France jet that went down in the Atlantic a few years ago. They eventually recovered the flight data recorders, although it took almost 2 years. But we had a pretty good idea of the track of the aircraft, even though we didn't know WHEN it had gone down.
Here, we can't even be certain that it went down. There are only three good chances for what happened to it. 1) It went down at sea. 2) It crashed into the jungle. Or 3), it landed someplace and is being hidden. The only thing we can be certain of is that it's not flying any longer.
I was just about to say, "the return of the Nemesis theory", except that "theory" was always too strong a word for that - "conjecture", perhaps.
The idea was that sub-stellar-mass dark companion of the Sun would pass near enough to the Oort cloud to throw a barrage of comets into the inner solar system every 35 million years or so, and that we're just about due. The name of this object would be "Nemesis". (I think Asimov wove that into the end of one of his last stories,,,)
I still like this as a working hypothesis, but I can't really see "dark matter" coming into play - unless the "dark matter" is Jupiter-sized or thereabouts.
Besides, it we're going to go to the Moon for power, I think Harrison Schmitt's plan to mine He3 from the surface and ship it back to fuel our fusion powerplants.
Why on the surface of the Moon? That's nonsense. In case they hadn't thought about that, the nights on the Moon are 14 days long; why go into space to achieve the same problems we have right here on Earth?
Build them in orbit. First of all, they won't need to be sturdy enough to hold up under their own weight, and can be in the sun 99% of the time. Second, beaming power back from 22,000 miles up will be easier than beaming it back from 250,000 miles.
Hey, I lived through Nixon, and Ford, and (ughhh!) Carter - Reagan was a breath of fresh air, and FAR superior to anyone before or since. The Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama years have been one heartbreak after another.
Nobody who actually worked through the Carter era could be nostalgic for it.
Correct, and passing the Biennial Flight Review after 30 years would cost more than learning to fly in the first place. And I'd also need to renew my medical certificate. Which I could do, but what's the point, when I can't afford to fly anyway? But my Private Pilot's License stays there in my wallet right next to my NAUI certification card, to prove that once upon a time, I did some interesting stuff..... At least I still get SOME use out of my Amateur Radio license.....
I too have a pilot's license - but only because they never expire. I haven't been at the controls for 30 years, because it was just too darned expensive to maintain a hobby that was getting to be less and less enjoyable with every passing year.
Wouldn't the Morris Worm qualify as the first "cyber weapon"? Granted it was crude and uncontrollable, but I'd bet that the same could have been made for the Mark 1 Mod 0 Blunderbuss 500 years ago.
And I think that the power of a cyber-weapon would lie primarily in secrecy, like land mines; you don't know you're under attack until you've already taken considerable damage.
The Communist Manifesto and Atlas Shrugged are to examples of DYSTOPIAS; these are Bad Things. I know that President Obama is using Atlas Shrugged as a "How To" manual, but that's the wrong way to use it.
And any reading list that includes Marx must also include Machiavelli; "The Prince" can greatly mitigate Marx's pernicious influence.
Slashdot Mirror
Humans, fickle? Indeed we are! A few years back, I read about some interviews done with people who had survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.
The majority of the sentiments were something like "I had had enough of life, and I had so many problems. But an instant after jumping, I realized that all those problems were solvable, except one - that I had just jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge!"
Yes, at least a few of the people who arrive on Mars, ready to settle and stay, will change their minds. (A fair number of the Mayflower pilgrims voiced similar sentiments.) But the basic idea of going to Mars isn't to set up some tech-free commune - it will be to build the next link in a space-faring civilization, and to create a lifeboat for humanity in case the next rock has our name on it.
Bringing materials back to Earth, from Mars? Not likely; if we wanted to bring raw materials back to Earth, we'd grab them from the asteroid belt so that we wouldn't have to lift them against even Mars' feeble gravity. Mining the Moon may be useful, or at least Harrison Schmidt thinks so, to extract He3 from the lunar dust to be used in fusion powerplants.
Yes, yes, just as Neil Armstrong and Harrison Schmidt returned to Earth. But with any luck, there are people who are alive today who will help to settle the Moon - and die there of old age. Humanity must either continue out to the other planets, and to the planets of other stars, or our race will die here in the cradle of Earth the next time a BIG rock hits the Earth, we will become extinct. I'm a big believer in humanity not becoming extinct.
The ultimate "space exploration is immoral" argument boils down to one of two things. Either you're a coward, and think all humans should be cowards, or you hate humanity and APPROVE of the idea of human extinction. Because if we sit here long enough, it WILL happen. It's a statistical certainty.
The less-sane of the commenters here seem to think that we're about to blast off for Mars tomorrow. It's not going to happen; we don't have any rockets. We can't even send more Americans to the International Space Station, now that NASA has decided to cut off cooperation with the Russians. But by the time we _can_ go to Mars, we'll be ready to live there - for a long time. Will it be ten years? Thirty? Fifty? Hell, I'm astonished that we haven't even been back to the Moon in the last 40 years. We could be on Mars NOW, if we had wanted to, in 1980.
So, let's start NOW. It won't be easy, it won't be cheap, and it won't be entirely safe - but nothing worthwhile ever is. People died learning about electricity. Marie Curie died learning about radium. People died learning how to fly, and people died learning how to dive, and people die every day in learning how to drive. People will die learning how to build lunar habitats, and learning how to land on Mars, and how to build homes there. And a lot more people WON'T die, and we'll learn what we need to know to settle Mars, and to build starships.
And just as it has always done, the knowledge that we gain in doing these things and going those places will make life easier and safer for you cowards who stay behind.
Sorry; my crystal ball is in the shop, so I truly do NOT know what the outcome will be. If yours is in good working order, then visit your stockbroker, and your certainties will carry somewhat more weight. Or at least, your bling will.
Oh, yeah, we're all going to die eventually; that much is certain. But nobody is proposing to send humans as sacrifices to the God of War, or that we're just going there to fertilize the Martian dust. There's a CHANCE of survival beyond the first 72 hours, and probably much longer.
You object? Don't go. It's just that simple. Had an opportunity like this come up 40 years ago, I'd have jumped on it. But they won't be ready to go for several years yet, and I'll be 70 by then; they wouldn't take me.
Does it really matter WHERE you die? If we're in the business of trying to maximize human lifespan, then perhaps we should consider banning skydiving - or at least, base jumping, because THAT crap is DANGEROUS. But we're not going to do that, and we shouldn't be quite so squeamish as writing off any visits to Mars.
Yes, going to the Moon is going to be dangerous, especially when we start setting up lunar colonies. And going to Mars, or the Jovian moons isn't going to be any safer. But then, scuba diving - and even bicycling - causes its own inevitable death toll.
The Roanoke colony vanished without a trace. Something like that is certain to happen to at least one Moon mission, and at least one Mars mission. But when we stop trying to grow, we may as well finish dying. Go ahead - but don't expect me to support that decision.
By your standard, the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies were "suicide missions"; the people who boarded the Mayflower never expected to come back. The first colonists to Mars will never return, and probably wouldn't want to.
But the difference will be, the Martians can phone home pretty easily - where a letter back to England was a rare event in the 1630's.
A "one way" trip isn't necessarily a "suicide mission".
The real problem is that there is very little on TV that's worth watching, no matter WHAT the delivery medium is. Dozens of formulaic "crime" dramas. Dozens of unfunny "situation comedies". Every show tries to copy everything else that was ever PREVIOUSLY successful, but the copy is never even half as good as the original.
NOTHING new on TV is worth watching. And I've already seen all the good reruns.
Because it would be funnier if he's mocking the arrogant twits at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" rather than emulating them.
Sorry; not "brightest minds". The movie quote you're looking for is "We have top men working on this." "Who?" "Top ... Men".
Ummmm....... Not necessarily so. Sound under water can be ducted through sound channels and convergence zones. Depending on the depth/pressure, the salinity, and the temperature, faint noises can by heard by a hydrophone hundreds of miles away - but NOT detectable on a hydrophone a half-mile away that isn't at the sound channel depth. (Source: I was an airborne acoustic sensor operator for several years in P-3 Orion ASW aircraft, long long ago). I'm guessing that every US submarine that transits the IO for the next ten years will have secondary tasking to search for MH370.
Of course, if the airplane is on the bottom, in the mud, or in an abyssal trench, the sound could be muffled and not audible even a dozen yards away. Since we have essentially no clue where the airplane is (except that we can be pretty sure it isn't in the "black hole" between Don Lemon's ears) the whole search effort is, essentially, a crap shoot.
We actually had better data on the Air France jet that went down in the Atlantic a few years ago. They eventually recovered the flight data recorders, although it took almost 2 years. But we had a pretty good idea of the track of the aircraft, even though we didn't know WHEN it had gone down.
Here, we can't even be certain that it went down. There are only three good chances for what happened to it. 1) It went down at sea. 2) It crashed into the jungle. Or 3), it landed someplace and is being hidden. The only thing we can be certain of is that it's not flying any longer.
The BIGGEST lie that just about everybody in the country tells;
"I have read and agree with the End User License Agreement"
I was just about to say, "the return of the Nemesis theory", except that "theory" was always too strong a word for that - "conjecture", perhaps.
The idea was that sub-stellar-mass dark companion of the Sun would pass near enough to the Oort cloud to throw a barrage of comets into the inner solar system every 35 million years or so, and that we're just about due. The name of this object would be "Nemesis". (I think Asimov wove that into the end of one of his last stories,,,)
I still like this as a working hypothesis, but I can't really see "dark matter" coming into play - unless the "dark matter" is Jupiter-sized or thereabouts.
"You can't get your money back from a person who steals your money and buries it at an undisclosed location either."
SURE you can. It just takes 109 years.....
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
Besides, it we're going to go to the Moon for power, I think Harrison Schmitt's plan to mine He3 from the surface and ship it back to fuel our fusion powerplants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually, the MASER was invented first; they only managed to do it with light later.
Why on the surface of the Moon? That's nonsense. In case they hadn't thought about that, the nights on the Moon are 14 days long; why go into space to achieve the same problems we have right here on Earth?
Build them in orbit. First of all, they won't need to be sturdy enough to hold up under their own weight, and can be in the sun 99% of the time. Second, beaming power back from 22,000 miles up will be easier than beaming it back from 250,000 miles.
There are floods in Somerset, England? Funny; Somerset was bogland 1200 years ago, too.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
But they built dikes and drainage pumps. Which works fine, as long as you do routine maintenance on the pump system. Which they stopped doing....
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com...
So perhaps some flooding in Somerset isn't all THAT unexpected?
Hey, I lived through Nixon, and Ford, and (ughhh!) Carter - Reagan was a breath of fresh air, and FAR superior to anyone before or since. The Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama years have been one heartbreak after another.
Nobody who actually worked through the Carter era could be nostalgic for it.
Correct, and passing the Biennial Flight Review after 30 years would cost more than learning to fly in the first place. And I'd also need to renew my medical certificate. Which I could do, but what's the point, when I can't afford to fly anyway? But my Private Pilot's License stays there in my wallet right next to my NAUI certification card, to prove that once upon a time, I did some interesting stuff..... At least I still get SOME use out of my Amateur Radio license.....
"Basically since Reagan LEFT office everything's been downhill."
FIFY.
I too have a pilot's license - but only because they never expire. I haven't been at the controls for 30 years, because it was just too darned expensive to maintain a hobby that was getting to be less and less enjoyable with every passing year.
Wouldn't the Morris Worm qualify as the first "cyber weapon"? Granted it was crude and uncontrollable, but I'd bet that the same could have been made for the Mark 1 Mod 0 Blunderbuss 500 years ago.
And I think that the power of a cyber-weapon would lie primarily in secrecy, like land mines; you don't know you're under attack until you've already taken considerable damage.
Am I reading this right? Google Glass has a _product_, while Chipsip has a _plan_?
Brings back memories of Microsoft Vaporware announcements, which were intended solely to fend off other companies' plans.....
Neither of these is something I'm likely to be interested in, but at least one of them actually exists.
Especially for Accenture, a company with a fairly consistent record for failure in large IT projects, especially for government IT projects.
But at that, the chances of something that can be spun as "successful" are greater for Accenture than for Deloitte. Not by much.... but some.
Wait..... was this comment concerning Slashdot, or about Obamacare?
The Communist Manifesto and Atlas Shrugged are to examples of DYSTOPIAS; these are Bad Things. I know that President Obama is using Atlas Shrugged as a "How To" manual, but that's the wrong way to use it.
And any reading list that includes Marx must also include Machiavelli; "The Prince" can greatly mitigate Marx's pernicious influence.