New Mars Forums

Folks, please meet Maryscott O'Connor.

Quite the flamethrower.  :shock:

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Maryscott O'Connor (orphaned by a senseless war) and Cindy Sheehan who lost her son in war started on account of lies will be the avenging angels that will cleanse away the followers of Republican Jesus.

Thus far, not too shabby a performance for Jedi-Mike.  Presidential support. Solid bi-partisan support in Congress. Got the Pentagon on board. (No Delta II will cut into lower price science missions, but so what? in the big picture.)

AND!

Mike Griffin goes on "Meet the Press" and tells Russert that it's human destiny to settle space and he wants Americans to be part of that.

Thus far? It's pretty much all good.

A shared understanding of what it means to be "American" might help.

:? 

What if this ". . . a means of intercepting incoming nuclear missiles . . ." is not technologically feasible?

Besides, block our oil imports and a missile attack becomes unnecessary.

Cobra, if you are saying that some nihilistic murderous 13th century al Qaeda gangsters are a much smaller threat to that project we call "Western Civilization" than the Chinese and the Russians, then I'd say;

"About effing time!"   

Nation-states? I am still fond of Samuel Huntington.

The Mars Homestead project is doing pretty much exactly what Mundaka proposes.

Robert Dyck recently made a somewhat worrisome observation. The surface of Mars might be covered with asbestos.

Ouch!

I totally agree with large swathes of this.

I also believe the Libertarian Left will embrace this more readily than the wealthy Right since the (relative) demise of large corporations will "gore their ox" far more severely by making the concentration of wealth more difficult.

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Which poses the "what if" question.

In June 1944, Hitler has 2-3 A-bombs with maybe 1 more coming 6 months thereafter. When and where can they be used to best change the outcome of the war? 

My answer? The Normandy beachhead a few days after the landing, seeking an armistice. Late last night I was reading about the Mulberry artificial harbor that were landed 9 June. Perhaps a few days of delay to let more Allied forces ashore before  dropping the bomb would have been better for pushing for a western Armistice.

As an aside, I was reading about the undersea pipeline built from England to France to fuel the Allied soldiers. The Normandy operation saw a tremendous number of technology advances.

Operation Bagration was launched June 22, 1944 with 1,700,000 Russians attacking 800,000 German defenders. Army Group Centre was destroyed, utterly. In July, 1944 the Red Army drove the Germans entirely out of the Ukraine with several hundred thousand german casulaties and prisoners.

During that time period, about 20% of Germany's total military forces were in the West. To delay D-Day might have freed up a fraction of those numbers. Not enough to stop the Soviet onslaught.

Postpone D-Day and Joe Stalin ends up in Belgium, Holland and France. 

Germany did have two million soldiers and civilians committed to air defense against the RAF and US Army Air Corp. 10,000 AA guns including many thousand 88 mm which were superb anti-tank weapons.

Stop D-Day AND stop the air campaign and perhaps the Soviets gets stopped when the Western forces along with a million people commtted to air defense move eastwards and set up a defensive line. Stop the bombing and the Luftwaffe turns east as well.

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A dozen A-bombs and Stalin might have been deterred. Two A-bombs and the Soviets would have come on even harder, in my opinion. In 1945, the USA did not have a dozen A-bombs.

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I think Truman made the right choice at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the lesser of evil options. Many more people would have died had we attempted landings on the Japanese home islands.

Alternate history scenario involving Mars.

A pair of A-bombs are dropped on the Normandy beachhead on 7 June 1944 or 8 June 1944. The invasion is crushed.

Hitler tells FDR & Churchill, accept an armistice so I can stop Stalin. Otherwise, Stalin rolls to the English Channel.  US & UK agree and turn to pummel Japan into oblivion. LendLease to Stalin ends.

With the air war ended (in exchange for Hitler recalling his U-boats and NOT dropping A-bombs on London) Hitler transforms tens of thousands of anti-aircraft batteries into anti-tank units and forms defensive lines along major rivers in Poland and southwards.  Fighter plane units that had been attacking B-17 formations now turn east as well.

Hitler builds more A-bombs as does the USA and a Cold War develops with London held hostage and eventually the Red Army is stalemated, even if the Wehrmacht cannot resume eastward movement. Italy becomes "Occupied Italy" and "Free Italy" - - think NKorea and SKorea. World War Two never officially ends with an uneasy truce along the English Channel & North Sea.

US & UK begin fighting the Soviets near Vladisvostok and on the northen Japanese islands. US A-bombs help as do the thousands of aircraft based on US carrier battle groups and later in Japan itself.

George Orwell's 1984 arrives 30 years early, when Stalin gets the A-bomb.

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Fast forward. Hitler dies from Parkinsons by 1950 and Werner von Braun oversees the first human to Mars mission launched from equatorial Somolia in the 1970s.

Working title: "Black Mars"

Perhaps and perhaps not. This point is controversial.

But anyway, the Soviets still would have been darn close to Berlin by the Summer of 1945 and without D-Day a few A-bombs would have killed maybe one or two hundred thousand Russian soldiers but even that would not have changed the final result.

No D-Day? Joe Stalin would have rolled all the way to the English Channel, a Nazi A-bomb or not.

Google Operation Bagration, which started on the Russian front within days of June 6, 1944. Wikipedia has a decent article.

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My idea for a "what if" alt-history novel?  Moved to the new fiction section.

Semi-buried greenhouses could receive sunlight supplements through use of inflatable mylar coated passive collectors spread around outside the facility and possibly light tubes, some of which have attained rather high transmission percentages.

Set up a few dozen inflatable mirrors focused on light tube collector plates and a substantial amount of sunlight can be gathered, far more than just what falls on the greenhouse "naturally"

Back on the old CivCult Mars forum we revisited this topic endlessly.

The sulfur light (they have some in the Smithsonian) is a solid state (hard to break) energy efficient full spectrum light for back up reliability.

Tribal hatred.

The question can be posed this way. "Did Saddam make Iraq or did Iraq make Saddam?"

Given the patchwork quilt of tribes, Saddam believed that only his heavy hand could keep Iraq together as one country. The Shia (such as those who murdered Vincent) would routinely rebel against Saddam and be brutally repressed. Sadr, the Shia firebrand who we deem as dangerous is the son of a cleric murdered by Saddam.

Before the 1920s, the Sunni/Baath (Saddam's tribe) were the henchmen used by the Turks to suppress the Shia and the Kurds. The Iraqi Shia have more than 100 years of animosity towards the Sunni.

The Sunni also hate the Shia as apostates. bin Laden hates the Iranians as much as he hates us in the West, maybe more - - think Catholic versus Protestant at teh time of Cromwell in England.

The Kurds have been steadily laying a foundation for an independent Kurdistan, which terrifies the Turks, Syrians and Iranians and Israel has started giving Kurdish militias support. 

Within these three large divisions (Kurd Sunni & Shia) numerous sub splinters exist as well and alliances form and dissolve with great frequency.

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Iran has a very powerful interest in assuring that a Shia dominated govenrment run Iraq. Not a Sunni, Shia Kurd coalition but a Shia dominated government.

The newly elected Iraqi President (remember the blue fingers?) is VERY friendly to Iran. If the elected President chooses to make Shia Iraq an ally of Iran what do we do?