Worthy of survival

Elvis Gump wrote:



So what will we chain together at the bottom of Earth's oceans afterward?

Environmentalists.

Bob Kolker

"Elvis Gump" wrote in message
.. .
wrote:
On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 14:41:55 -0500, Bob Kolker
wrote:

wrote:
??? No imagination....
What do you propose? The only other place in the solar system with a
decent amount of water is the moon Europa.

There's lots of water. It's just a question of moving it to where you
want it. All that takes is energy, and there's lots of that, too.

-- Roy L

It's very, very cold on Europa though and Jupiter is giving off, I think
the technical term is a '****load' of radiation it's own damn self. If you
want to live on Europa be prepared to have funny looking kids who shiver a
lot.

Besides last I heard Europa was infested with Monoliths.

If Europa is so bad, how come so many Americans take a European vacation
every year?

Bob Kolker wrote:
EvilBill wrote:


Well, here's a radical idea: we could always call a ceasefire with
the people we're currently involved in slaughtering by the thousands
and stop spending so much on weapons and foreign wars. Then there'd
be more cash to go around.

The Muslim fanatics will not reciprocate. Any attempt to call a truce
will be interperted as weakness and spur them on to carry out the Will
of Allah to conquer and subjugate the dar al Harb. They declared war
on us, not we on them. WTC 1993 and 9/11 are declarations of that war.


Actually their anger at the West is due to our continued support of Israel
and our interference in Middle Eastern politics. Not to mention there's more
and more doubt emerging about who was actually responsible for 9/11. (Oh,
and the FBI reckon Bin Laden's been dead for nearly 5 years, too...)

If we pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and stop lending active support to
Israel, 90% or more of what our governments refer to as 'terrorism' will
stop. And it's not like we need to invade foreign countries and kill their
civilians in the tens of thousands, to effectively defend our own home
countries.

In any case, I didn't say to stop *all* defence spending. Just to stop
spending on nukes and other WMDs which should never have been invented in
the first place and whose only purpose is to cause massive civilian deaths.
By all means keep the military services well equipped to defend our
homelands.

--
--
* I always hope for the best. Experience, unfortunately, has taught me
to expect the worst.

Yahoo: evilbill_agqx
Web: http://www.evilbill.org.uk

EvilBill wrote:


Well, here's a radical idea: we could always call a ceasefire with the
people we're currently involved in slaughtering by the thousands and stop
spending so much on weapons and foreign wars. Then there'd be more cash to
go around.

The Muslim fanatics will not reciprocate. Any attempt to call a truce
will be interperted as weakness and spur them on to carry out the Will
of Allah to conquer and subjugate the dar al Harb. They declared war on
us, not we on them. WTC 1993 and 9/11 are declarations of that war.

Bob Kolker

On Wed, 04 Oct 2006 11:08:30 -0500, Bob Kolker
wrote:

wrote:

On 3 Oct 2006 16:12:10 -0400, (William December
Starr) wrote:

In article ,
said:

On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 11:44:12 +0100, Stephen Fairchild
wrote:

Apart from mining the asteroid belt I can't see much plunder
out there.

??? No imagination....

So, what do _you_ imagine?

Energy and raw materials, the basis of life.

We already have them in abundance. Raw materials. The Earth oozes them.

As long as we are happy with that much.

Engery: how about

1. Sunlight (photo-voltaic electrical power, and making hydrogen from
sea water).

The earth's diameter imposes a high but fixed limit on how much
sunlight can be intercepted without going into space.

2. Geothermal heat sources.

Far more limited.

3. Tidal Power.

Same.

4. Nuclear fission.

A high limit, but a non-renewable resource, nonetheless.

5. Hydro electric.

Limited applicability -- and there are better uses for that water
pressure.

NB: Controlled nuclear fusion is a looser without a mazooser. Controlled
nuclear fusion has been 30 years in the future for the last 55 years. We
do not have the technology maintaining a tritium to helium fusion
reaction long enough to draw enough power to sustain it and still
produce enough for useful ends. At what point does one give up a cause
as lost?

Not after less than 60 years, anyway. How long have we been trying to
extend maximum human lifespan? Should we give that cause up as lost,
too?

If you insist on burning stuff we can mine methane in the Arctic, we can
burn coal (the U.S. has enough for 500 years at current rates of
consumption). We can also tape deep oil deposits, tar sands and shale.
It will cost a bundle, but it is (1) there and (2) a hell of a lot
cheaper than going to asteroid belt.

At some point it will _not_ be cheaper, and it would be better to go
before going gets that expensive.

Anyone who says we have an energy shortage in the absolute sense simply
is not paying attention. What we have is a shortage of wit and wisdom
and a mega dose of weaking blinders and shortsightedness. The is more to
energy than natural gas and petroleum.

All granted, there are still limits. And history indicates that while
population increase and growing energy consumption are linked, _lack_
of population increase is linked to even _higher_ growth in energy
consumption.

Since we are a race of curious apes we can behold what the other planets
are like by orbiting optical interferometer arrays and teasing out data
on small planets that are currently shielded by sun-blind. If we find
there is another earth thirty light years away we can eat our hearts out
because with our very best -prospective- technology we can hope against
the odds for a propulsion system that will produce speeds of c/10. That
means Other Earth is 300 years away and the time dilation effects of
c/10 speed are negligable (check any text on special relativity).

What can one say about what technology will be like in 300 years?

With all these problems do you think Joe Taxpayer is going to be
willingly mugged for the cost of overcoming them? Particularly when you
consider how much cheaper it is to do things on the ground. Surely your
Georgie Porgey LVT is not going to produce a revenue stream that will
even begin to deal with the problems. Forget it. We aren't going
anywhere. Learn to be happy in the environment for which we are evolved.
It can be done.

Not by the kind of people who got us here from the caves, it can't.

-- Roy L

On Wed, 04 Oct 2006 11:12:28 -0500, Bob Kolker
wrote:

wrote:

There's lots of water. It's just a question of moving it to where you
want it. All that takes is energy, and there's lots of that, too.

Sure, and it costs so much we can't afford it. Remember it is tax payers
who are footing the bill and seeing god damned little return for what
have been stolen from them.

Absurd. Communication satellites _alone_ have paid for all nations'
space programs many times over.

Some Jules Verne has
come true, but Jules Verne did not know about megnetospheres and the
lack thereof or cosmic rays.

And what don't _you_ know about?

_Get_it_?

-- Roy L

On 2006-10-04 08:57:56 -0700, "EvilBill" said:

They're too busy massacring little kids and their mothers in Gaza and
the West Bank.

That's right - those poor victims of Palestinians, because they and
their extensions of Hezb'allah and Hammas never, ever killed mother and
children deliberately.

It's amazing how many idiots ... oh, wait, it's Kolker...

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006 05:51:05 -0400, "Atlas Bugged"
wrote:

[much of back-and-forth with Bob and Roy deleted for BW]

On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:18:37 -0500, Bob Kolker

Interplantary
travel is so limited and so expensive only the bare minimum can be
carried in and that can sustain life for only a short time.

The same could be said about the Vikings' settlements in Greenland and
Newfoundland. They failed, but only because they were small,
half-hearted, private efforts. If you send one ship, you are likely
to fail. If you send one a week, sheer weight of numbers and learning
from experience makes it much more likely you will succeed.

The only
good thing I can say about Mars is that Venus is worse.

It is. But Mars is actually eminently terraformable.

The thing most of Kolker's adversaries clearly miss is the economic
component. Roy at least seems cognizant of it, but brushes it aside anyhow.

What you appear to mean is the financial case, not the economic one.
Things that were once financially impossible are now easy, even
trivial. The average cellphone has more electronic computing power
than NASA did when it first put men into orbit. There is no reason to
think technology will not continue to do that. We just don't know to
what or when or how it will do it.

If you leave economics out of the discussion, Bob clearly looks like some
sort of Luddite (and he is, in fact, among the Baddest Apes In The Monkey
House,) but once you add in the economic aspect, he's clearly right. The
bottoms of the oceans and the barrenness of the deserts are infinitely less
hostile than any known extra-Earthly spot, and a thousand times easier to
get to.

Not infinitely. And the ease of getting to those spots is precisely
the problem: they are already occupied by others, who will not just
give them up and go away. India and China have clear looming resource
crises, especially with energy and water. The US effort in Iraq is
showing them just how costly it can get to take other countries'
resources without permission. The money spent so far in Iraq (and it
is not a tithe of what will be needed to finally get it stabilized)
would have bought a heck of a space program. When China is next hit
by serious drought -- and that is only a matter of time -- they are
going to realize that maybe $1T -- or $2T, or $10T -- spent to get
permanent control of the weather will be money well spent. India,
same.

Take away the economics and I'm with Roy. But that's the truly bad legacy
of STAR TREK with its replicators and transporters and the rest; so many of
us grew up with the idea that technology would soon render economics moot.

It might soon render everything moot....

And TREK thus simply sidestepped the economic questions, and I think my
generation incorrectly "learned" that economics is not a real showstopper.
Of course, such a belief is stupendously wrong.

The point is, it's often only a temporry showstopper, as technology
changes financial paradigms beyond recognition.

So when I suggest above "Take away the economics and I'm with Roy," the
sentence actually should read, "Ignore reality completely and I'm with Roy."

It's not ignoring reality. It's recognizing the reality that the
current reality is not a permanent reality.

-- Roy L

On Wed, 04 Oct 2006 06:50:26 -0500, Elvis Gump
wrote:

wrote:
On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:18:37 -0500, Bob Kolker
wrote:

It has no magnetosphere. It is wide open to solar radiation.
There is no free water on the planet. It is deader than a corpse. How
are earthlings supposed to grow food there?

Bring in water and air from the Kuiper Belt. If Mars's atmosphere
were made a little thicker than Earth's, the surface temperature at
low latitudes would be warm enough for open-field agriculture, and the
radiation issue would largely go away.

Me wonders if your engineering goes as far as changing a flat tire.

Please explain what part of what I propose will never be feasible from
an engineering standpoint, and why.

Can the area around the Dead Sea be made self sustaining. It cannot.

Sure it can.

Every bit of potable water and food has to be brought in.

Nah. It's just politics.

Have you MET our politicians?

Not yours, maybe, but a number of ours.

Interplantary
travel is so limited and so expensive only the bare minimum can be
carried in and that can sustain life for only a short time.

The same could be said about the Vikings' settlements in Greenland and
Newfoundland. They failed, but only because they were small,
half-hearted, private efforts. If you send one ship, you are likely
to fail. If you send one a week, sheer weight of numbers and learning
from experience makes it much more likely you will succeed.

Well, there it 'tis. We just use the old "baffle them with bull****" method.

The situation in question is _not_ entirely unlike all previous
history.

The only
good thing I can say about Mars is that Venus is worse.

It is. But Mars is actually eminently terraformable.

Now all we need is a couple hundred thousand boys in bubbles to get
things rolling.

Or whatever works. Which is not likely to be that.

-- Roy L

On Wed, 04 Oct 2006 10:49:57 -0500, Bob Kolker
wrote:

wrote:

There certainly could be. It is a matter of political and financial
barriers, not technological ones.

We can't afford it and there are cheaper alternatives. We can barely
afford our manned space program which consists of 1 (count them) space
stations which is in such low orbit it requires periodic boosting to
stay in orbit; ISS better known as ****-can alpha one. For the money we
have spent on it, we sure have not gotten value. Right now the Russkies
are making twenty million dollars a pop hoisting tourists into orbit. I
suupose you can call that profit. Pretty thin gruel, yes? The only
motive I can think of for mugging the tax payers for mega billions and
trillions of $$$$ is to save a small remnent of the human race for an
extinction level event in the not too distant future. How about an
asteroid the size of texas or somthing like that?

At some point, an inventory of NEOs (most easily carried out using
extra-terrestrial observatories) and the infrastructure needed to
intervene in their orbits will become a sound investment from a risk
management perspective. The costs of conducting such projects will
continue to decline, while the value of the interests at risk will
continue to increase. At some point, the lines cross.

The only space missions that have really paid off commercially or
scientifically are the unmanned missions. Hubble has earned its keep
(scientifically) despite its inauspicious beginning (astigmatism later
corrected at a cost of hundrdeds of millions of dollars). The comsats
are winners. They produce profit and convenience. Thanks to our latest
rovers on Mars, Rape and Plunder, we now know Mars is a **** ball not
livable upon.

No one claims it is livable _now_.

There are ways of spending money to produce joy, profit, convenience and
prosperity.

The point is more _posterity_, which is ultimately all there is to
show for whatever you do.

Manned space programs with our current propulsion technology
are not among them. Perhaps we should spend the money to find better
modes of propulsion than we have currently. What we have currently are
latter day versions of Chinese rockets from the Tang dynasty. Any
civillization capable of producing QFT and the Standard Model for
particle physics should be able to do better than this.

Certainly we can do better. But the reason to do better is to _use_
the resulting technology, not wail that it will never pay for itself.

-- Roy L