Worthy of survival

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?

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.

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

Bob Kolker

Bob Kolker wrote:

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


Agreed. It's long past time we stopped modelling our propulsion system on
1500-year-old tech and started thinking outside the box.

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

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

Elvis Gump wrote:
Marcovaldo wrote:
"Elvis Gump" wrote in message
Yeah but the only resources we have in abundance are lawyers, guns
and money so who will fan the **** if we send 'em all to Mars?

I like the idea of sending all the lawyers to Mars. This idea alone
could reinvigorate the space program.

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

Microsoft programmers. And the Bush administration. g

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

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

Bob Kolker wrote:

:They have stolen water from the colorado river basin.

There's some rule that says you have to let it all flow out into the
ocean?

:That is your free
:water source. The way it was done was to divert water to LA and leave
:Mexico high and dry.

Hogwash! Mexico gets more water than they ought to because the treaty
that divided up the river flow was based on a very wet year and Mexico
is guaranteed a certain flow.

--
"It's always different. It's always complex. But at some point,
somebody has to draw the line. And that somebody is always me....
I am the law."
-- Buffy, The Vampire Slayer

Bob Kolker wrote:

If it could the Israelis would have done it by now.

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


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.

Keep in mind that the New World is on this planet and has everything
need to sustain human life. Mars has nothing, bupkis, kduchus, nada,
zilch, zero. And it does not have a magnetsphere to keep any
atmosphere we could build. The best we can do is put domes on mars
and stay mosly underground during the day time.

True, but Greenland has/had nothing but ice and walruses when the Norse
explored it. g


Your kuyper belt project will take decades, perhaps centuries to do.
We can get everything we need, right here on the ground cheaper and
faster. We choose not to do these things, not because they are easy,
but because they are too hard and too expensive. Tell me, laddy, will
the Georgey Porgey LVT tax scheme produce the revenue for this?


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.


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

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

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.
Engery: how about

1. Sunlight (photo-voltaic electrical power, and making hydrogen from
sea water).
2. Geothermal heat sources.
3. Tidal Power.
4. Nuclear fission.
5. Hydro electric.

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?

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.


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.

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).

And please do keep in mind that our current burn and float mode of
propulsion will put our astronauts in free fall so they can loose five
to fifteen percent of their calcium per year and develop cataracts from
cosmic radiation frying their retinas. Building a shielded ship makes it
heavy and difficult to loft using current propulsion technology. Ditto
for building a ship that can be spun slow enough for the centrifugal
force to be a significant substitute for gravitation. Evolution has not
gifted us for space travel. We evolved as ground huggers and we barely
manage to do sea travel gracefully. No matter how nifty the ship,
sea-sickness still exists. Currently a significant percentage of
prospective astronauts are disqualified because of balance and
vestibular problems. This is found out by short zero-g flights of a
heavy on a parabolic trajectory. They don't call it the vomit comet for
nothing.

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.

Bob Kolker

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. And your Georgey Porgey LVT is even less
able to produce the revenues necessary.

If you like small government forget about mighty manned space ventures.
Even heroes like Burt Rutan have yet to put anything useful in orbit.
Actually that have not put anything useful or not in orbit, thus far.
Keep in mind that Robert Heinlein wrote -fiction-. Some Jules Verne has
come true, but Jules Verne did not know about megnetospheres and the
lack thereof or cosmic rays. Robert A. Heinlein conveniently ignored
these problems. A bit of handwaving and "oh, we'll solve them" and they
go away. Right?

Bob Kolker

wrote:


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.

Bull****! Mars has no Magnetsphere. Solar Radiation will "sandblast" any
atmosphere we can put in place. Keep in mind the Sun is very mean and
dangerous. It only seems benign to us because we have a magnetosphere
protecting us. When or if that goes away, prepare to use 2000 sun blocker.


Of course we can, technologically. Just not politically. Too many
corrupt and incompetent governments involved.

Also no need. There are lots of places with sufficient rainfall.


Compared to Mars, the
Sahara desert is a vaction resort. Mars sucks **** as a location. It is
dead. It will cost a fortune to make a habitat just for a few people and
it won't be sustainable. There is not enough free water there for any
population growth and water is too heavy to carry on interplanetary
wessels.


You don't carry it on vessels. You move KBOs and similar objects.

Hocus Pocus. The heavist long term load we have hoisted into freefall
weighs under twentyfive tonnes. Our propulsions systems, dear lad, are
elaborations of the Chinese Rocket perfected during the Tang dynasty.
Can the area around the Dead Sea be made self sustaining. It cannot.




Sure it can.

If it could the Israelis would have done it by now.


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.

Keep in mind that the New World is on this planet and has everything
need to sustain human life. Mars has nothing, bupkis, kduchus, nada,
zilch, zero. And it does not have a magnetsphere to keep any atmosphere
we could build. The best we can do is put domes on mars and stay mosly
underground during the day time.


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


It is. But Mars is actually eminently terraformable.

The **** it is. No magnetosphere. The best we will get is Dome City
somewhere near the poles so some water can be tapped from the ice. Mars
has not been a live planet for two billion years and is not likely to be
one ever again.

Your kuyper belt project will take decades, perhaps centuries to do. We
can get everything we need, right here on the ground cheaper and faster.
We choose not to do these things, not because they are easy, but because
they are too hard and too expensive. Tell me, laddy, will the Georgey
Porgey LVT tax scheme produce the revenue for this?

Bob Kolker

Atlas Bugged wrote:


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.

Bull****. I have addressed the economics square on. Anything we can get
in space we can get on the ground for two cents on the dollar. What do
you have against cheaper, faster and easier?




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

This Luddite knows more about the machinery than you do. I have
addressed the problems openly and squarely. I have Facts. You have
Optimism.


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."

You said it and truly too. Go ahead, ignore reality.

Bob Kolker

Elvis Gump wrote:

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.

Europa is not only a bad place to visit, it is a worse place to live on.

Open the pod bay door, Hal.

Bob Kolker