New Mars Forums

Oh pretty much big talk/bluster/etc... The Russians nor the ESA have the required money, technology, or skills for the landing and returning part of the Mars mission.

He is calling for the end of NASA, ya know.

Just let it burn in the atmosphere. Skylab and MIR told the scientists everything they need to know about long-term human presence in space and zero gravity.

I'm sorry but what the hell is going to come out of ISS that is not already known? How ants multiply in zero gravity?

So you're going clark? Dang, that's three guys already. I want to go. We'll see what happens.

Enough crying over Gore.

What's Nader and Kerry's positions on Space Exploration?

Irrelevant!  :;): 

Congress is what matters. And 2008 and 2012 matter more than 2004. Bush ain't going to do anything between 2004 and 2008 other than shuttle return to flight, ISS completion and a few small prizes.

No, not necessarily irrelevant if Kerry wins.  Although you do make a good case for it being irrelevant if Bush wins!

Enough crying over Gore.

What's Nader and Kerry's positions on Space Exploration?

hen Bill Clinton was 8, he started taking himself to church. When he was 10, he publicly committed himself to Jesus. As a boy, he begged his Sunday school teacher to take him to see Billy Graham. And as anybody watching his book rollout knows, he still exudes religiosity. He gave Dan Rather a tour of his Little Rock church, and talked about praying in good times and bad.

More than any other leading Democrat, Bill Clinton understands the role religion actually plays in modern politics. He knows Americans want to be able to see their leaders' faith. A recent Pew survey showed that for every American who thinks politicians should talk less about religion, there are two Americans who believe politicians should talk more.

And Clinton seems to understand, as many Democrats do not, that a politician's faith isn't just about litmus test issues like abortion or gay marriage. Many people just want to know that their leader, like them, is in the fellowship of believers. Their president doesn't have to be a saint, but he does have to be a pilgrim. He does have to be engaged, as they are, in a personal voyage toward God.

Clinton made this sort of faith-based connection, at least until he sullied himself with the Lewinsky affair. He won the evangelical vote in 1992, and won it again in 1996. He understood that if Democrats are not seen as religious, they will be seen as secular Ivy League liberals, and they will lose.

John Kerry doesn't seem to get this. Many of the people running the Democratic Party don't get it either.

A recent Time magazine survey revealed that only 7 percent of Americans feel that Kerry is a man of strong religious faith. That's a catastrophic number. That number should be the first thing Kerry strategists think about when they wake up in the morning and it should be the last thing on their lips when they go to sleep at night. They should be doing everything they can to change that perception, because unless more people get a sense of Kerry's faith, they will feel no bond with him and they will be loath to trust him with their vote.

Yet his campaign does nothing. Kerry talks about jobs one week and the minimum wage the next, going about his wonky way, each day as secular as the last.

It's mind-boggling. Can't the Democratic strategists read the data? Religious involvement is a much, much more powerful predictor of how someone will vote than income, education, gender or any other social and demographic category save race.

Can't the Democratic strategists feel it in their bones how important this is? After all, when you go out among the Democratic rank and file, you find millions of Democrats who are just as religious as Republicans. It's mostly in the land of Democratic elites that you are likely to find yourself among religious illiterates.

But of course this is the problem. Forests have been felled so people could publish articles and books on the religious right's influence on the Republican Party. But as the Baruch College political scientists Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio have suggested, the real political story of the past decade has been the growing size and cohesion of the secular left, and its growing influence on the Democratic Party.

According to the American Religious Identification Survey, the number of Americans with no religious affiliation has more than doubled since 1990. There is now a surging but unself-conscious power bloc within the Democratic Party.

Like the religious right in the Republican Party, the members of the secular left are interested primarily in social issues. What unites them more than anything else is a strong antipathy to pro-lifers and fundamentalists. While 75 percent of Americans feel little or no hostility to fundamentalists, people in this group are far more hostile to them than to other traditional Democratic bête noires, the rich or big business. They don't like to see their politicians meddling with religion in any way.

Just as Republicans have to appeal to religious conservatives but move beyond them, Democrats have to appeal to the secular left but also build a bridge to religious moderates. Bill Clinton did this. John Kerry hasn't. If you want to know why Kerry is still roughly even with Bush in the polls, even though Bush has had the worst year of any president since Nixon in 1973 or L.B.J. in 1968, this is one big reason.

What do you win if you win at Drake's lottery?

“I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space.”     

Physicist Stephen Hawking speaking to Britain’s Daily Telegraph Newspaper as reported by Reuters on October 15, 2001.

= = =

The world probably will not end anytime soon.

Yet if we expand into space, our species might well become extiction-proof.

= = =

I agree that whoever settles space first is NOT assured to shape future human culture as it spreads across the solar sytem.

But you cannot win if you don't play.

The 1000 year plan is ok. But now going somewhere more then orbit with what we have is like crossing the ocean on a raft.

Not saying its impossible, as is crossing the ocean on a raft is possible and proven. Just you know, it will be a flag and footprint mission. I'm not interested in those. Its great but I can think better ways of spending that money.

I don't think Stephen Hawking is interested in flag and footprint missions either. 

As soon as someone is persueing the von Neumann machines plan, then I'm interested. I don't even follow the rover missions, nor does the apollo project interest me and the ISS can burn in the atmosphere.

I don't think we are going to expand in space as long as the government has to pay for everything.

And Stephen Hawking said in the next 1000 years, a 1000 years is a long time.

So basically I'm putting all me money on robotics and nothing else.