Sedna, space probes?, colonies? what's next?

Ool wrote:
"Sander Vesik" wrote in message ...

I think there is a slight difference between 'can be done' and 'makes
sense to do' - given the distance, does it even make sense as a space
based source of ice/water?

Does it make sense for Eskimos to live in the Arctic?


Pick some other place for them to live and explain why living there
would make them happier and why they haven't left.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

Ool wrote:
"Uddo Graaf" wrote in message ...
"Sander Vesik" wrote in message
...

Even with FTL, colonising Oort cloud may be easier than plants around
far-away stars. At 4c it still takes 9months for a one-way trip to
Alpha Cenaturi - and much longer for other stars. FTL - unless it
is high multiples of lightspeed - only makes interstellar travel and
colonisation slightly easier. You will pobably still need generation
ships - just the number of generations born on-ship will be lower.

Mostly colonization will be done by 'system hopping' and will therefore be
doable. Someone calculated once that if we started now, we could colonize
the entire Galaxy in 3000 years.


That would require FTL, considering the Galaxy is 100,000 light years
in diameter...


Even with arbitrarily fast FTL we couldn't possibly colonize the Galaxy in
3000 years - not even very sparsely.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

Dick Morris wrote in message ...
G EddieA95 wrote:

Ok, how about giving me a compelling reason for doubling the population.


Because the alternative to *letting it double* (no one wants to purposely
raise the P that much, but it will get there), would be a tyranny such as the
world has never seen. I for one would rather see a few more wildlife species
gone than live in a world where infanticide, euthanasia and mass executions are
used to keep the P down.

The world saw several tyranies of that magnitude just in the last
century. Draconian population control measures have been employed in
China in recent years, and if the world's population doubles, we may see
them employed other places too. But such measures are not necessary.
Many countries in Europe have stabilized their populations without
draconian measures. All it requires is the proper incentives.

Many countries in europe are struggling to stabilise their
populations. Only large scale immigration allows the population to
remain static, and that tends to be unwelcome/

Ool wrote:
"Dick Morris" wrote in message ...

To think that population can continue to grow for a very long time, at
anything like the current rate, simply because it has in the past has no
logical basis. The real world doesn't work that way. But it really
would require some sort of technological "deus ex machina" to save us.
What would that be? Surely you don't mean Julian Simon's absurd
proposal for feeding the world (even vast muliples of the present
population) by growing crops in high-rise, 100-story hydroponicums with
artificial lighting powered by breader reactors (fueled by the 3.3 ppb
of uranium in seawater)?

I'd bet my money on SPSs fueling those hydroponica rather than nuclear
reactors--*if* they ever become necessary at all... There's enough
space for them up there--a ring of 260,000km circumference.

You may then aswell grow the crops on orbit and de-orbit using electric
propulsion (mass-driver or similar) and parachutes. Youcan even produce
the material for the parachutes in orbit.


(If space elevators ever become possible we might as well grow all our
food up there in the first place and reforest the whole planet...)

Space elevators are not needed for this at all.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

Many countries in europe are struggling to stabilise their
populations. Only large scale immigration allows the population to
remain static, and that tends to be unwelcome/


Because immigrants bring their societies's problems with them. The Irish
brought their Gangs, the Italians brought their Mafia, and the Arabs brought
their Terrorists, and these problems that they've brought have hurt the people
who were born here and welcomed these immigrants with open arms.
We tried to save the Union during the Civil War, but Irish gangs had forced us
to divert troops to New york City to quell riots.
We tried to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages to prevent public
drunkeness, wife beatings, and highway accidents, but then we welcomed the
Italians Immigrants to our country, they brought the Mafia who unleashed a
reign of terror and forceably overturned our Prohibition Amendment through
their criminal activities, the result being that tens of thousands of Americans
die in drunken driving accidents every year. Thank You Al Capone, thank you
very much!
Now we have Arab and Muslim immigrants searching for a better life and mixed
among them are terrorists waging a Jihad and wanting to kill Americans, ask
them though and they'll pretend to be like the others searching for a better
life. We pay a high price for being an immigrant country.

Tom

"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 03:14:41 GMT, in a place far, far away, Dick
Morris made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

You continue to misunderstand that the "limits of sustainability"
are
an artifact of bad governance, not an objective natural boundary.

I've always had this problem understanding things that aren't true.
What specific policies do you think we should enact to remove all
Earthly limits to human population growth?

That's an amusing strawman, but we weren't discussing "all Earthly
limits to population growth." We were discussing the issue of whether
or not earth, or the US, is currently overpopulated. Neither is, and
both are a very long way from getting there.

If you will go back to my previous posts you will see that "Earthly
limits to population growth" are exactly what I've been discussing.

No, you were saying that we are overpopulated. I am saying that we
are so far from being so that it's not worth worrying about.

While the Earth and the US are not, bits of it are.

However, this raises an interesting point. Given that the Earth is far from
over populated - why not colonise the underpopulated bits of planet Earth
first?

Plenty of room in the Highlands of Scotland, Antartica, Siberia...

Dave

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 22:31:54 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Dave
O'Neill" dave @ NOSPAM atomicrazor . com made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

No, you were saying that we are overpopulated. I am saying that we
are so far from being so that it's not worth worrying about.

While the Earth and the US are not, bits of it are.

However, this raises an interesting point. Given that the Earth is far from
over populated - why not colonise the underpopulated bits of planet Earth
first?

First? You mean before space? We surely will, but there's no reason
to not start to colonize space as well if it's economically feasible,
for at least two reasons: eggs in a single basket (we had another
close brush with an object the other day), and ability to start with a
clean sheet of paper in government.

Rand Simberg wrote:

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 03:54:59 GMT, in a place far, far away, Dick
Morris made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit



Rand Simberg wrote:

On Mon, 22 Mar 2004 23:47:41 GMT, in a place far, far away, Dick
Morris made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Do you care?

Of course I care. If there are enough who care, the species will
survive. If not, they won't, but the population growth is a secondary
issue. What matter is how it grows, not whether.

There's your problem right there. You imagine that some sort of
technological "deus ex machina" is going to allow us to have endless
population growth.

Because it has, and there's no reason to suppose that it won't
continue for a very long time.

To think that population can continue to grow for a very long time, at
anything like the current rate, simply because it has in the past has no
logical basis.

I don't expect it to grow for a very long time at anything like the
current rate. All reputable projections show it as declining within
this century. I'm simply saying that doubling it (or even increasing
it by a factor of ten) isn't a problem at all per se, given a modicum
of intelligent governance.

....which you still decline to characterize.

I certainly have. Go back and look again. The whole point of the
population stabilization movement is to prevent us from becoming a
scourge.

It's not necessary to control population to do that.

The Polynesians became a scourge on Easter Island, and elsewhere,
because they didn't control their populations. On Johnston(?) Island
they died out completely.

They were too close to the edge with inadequate technology. We are
not.

They got to the edge in the first place because they didn't control
their population.

Rand Simberg wrote:

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 03:14:41 GMT, in a place far, far away, Dick
Morris made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

You continue to misunderstand that the "limits of sustainability" are
an artifact of bad governance, not an objective natural boundary.

I've always had this problem understanding things that aren't true.
What specific policies do you think we should enact to remove all
Earthly limits to human population growth?

That's an amusing strawman, but we weren't discussing "all Earthly
limits to population growth." We were discussing the issue of whether
or not earth, or the US, is currently overpopulated. Neither is, and
both are a very long way from getting there.

If you will go back to my previous posts you will see that "Earthly
limits to population growth" are exactly what I've been discussing.

No, you were saying that we are overpopulated. I am saying that we
are so far from being so that it's not worth worrying about.

I never said that. And you have never said why you think we're so far
from being overpopulated.

Rand Simberg wrote:

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 03:19:46 GMT, in a place far, far away, Dick
Morris made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Endless population growth does not work on a finite planet.

I've never proposed endless population growth.

You've never admitted to any particular physical limits that I've seen
either.

It seemed beside the point, since we're so far from them it's not
worth discussing. Obviously if we were to somehow get to the point at
which the entire mass of the planet were converted to writhing blob of
humanity, that would be overdoing it.

Is that your limit? Don't see any limits short of turning the Earth
into a writhing blob of humanity?


I recommend a book called "Overshoot..." by
Catton, which may clear up some things.

I doubt it.

Of course you do: It's not "politically correct".

Au contraire, it's probably the ultimate in political correctness.
It's people like Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg who aren't politically
correct.

Do you mean to tell me that you cannot see the rampant political
correctness on the anti-environmental right?

You obviously have no idea what political correctness means.

I saw enough of it on the radical left to know it when I saw it on the
radical right. I was a conservative for 40 years, so I had a belly full
of it by the time the Soviet Union collapsed and the right adopted the
environmental movement as it's new bogeyman. I know political
correctness whenever I see someone refuse to answer a question and back
up their opinion with facts.

Ehrlich? You're joking, right?

If you think it's all a joke, then you're the one who is not to be taken
seriously.

Sadly, it's not a joke, because people like Ehrlich have caused
needless suffering and misguided millions through his fundamental
ignorance of ecology, technology and economics.

Were you, by any chance, a business major?

Apparently you failed to notice that your hero, Julian Simon, was
utterly clueless about ecology and technology, and managed to delude
himself into thinking that the issue was strictly about economics.
Remember how we were going to make copper from other metals? Ehrlich is
a biologist who has forgotten more about ecology than all the right-wing
anti-environmentalists put together will ever know. You might explain
how Ehrlich caused suffering by warning people of what was coming.

Poverty is largely caused by misgovernment, not by overpopulation per
se, even at our current technology level.

I see you didn't have a response to this.

I've gotten the impression that you think ALL government is
"misgovernment", so I wasn't sure if there was any point in arguing.

No, not all government, but most governments in Africa and Latin
America are misgovernments. As is Europe to a lesser degree.

Bad government policies are one way to impoverish people, but not the
only way. Without access to sufficient resources, prosperity is
impossible, regardless of government policies.

You continue to not realize that people themselves are the ultimate
resource.

Try "energy". Remove the entire civilized world and the tribal peoples
in the Amazon, etc. would never notice. Turn off the Sun and everybody
dies in a remarkably short time.

Even if we could magically institute good government all over the world
tomorrow, the improvement in sustainability would only buy us some
time. Population growth would eventually outstrip the increase in
agricultural production.

Eventually being the operative word. It's not a worry for you, or
your children, or your grandchildren.

You keep saying things like that, and keep failing to back them up with
any substantive reasons, other than vague assurances that the free
market, or something, will provide.

Nothing vague about it at all. It always has, and there's no reason
to think that it won't continue to.

Nothing vague about that answer! I give you reasons and you ignore
them, except to delete them from your replies.