New Mars Forums

The oceans have been well explored enough to virtually rule out the existance of sea dragons, and even if we could capture one, I doubt it would do us much good for getting to the Moon. Sea dragons are mythological creatures, just like unicorns and pixies, I doubt fairy tales offer us any avenue of approach for exploring the moon, the cow thing has been tried, there jumping skills are highly over-rated in such books.

Yes, I saw that movie, they land on a twin Earth where everything is backwards. The cosmonauts think they are meeting their girlfriends and wives, but they notice they are left-handed when last they remember ther were right-handed, also they require a mirror to read anything, the Sun also rises in the West and sets in the East, and they are examined by the psychologist and put in a nut house when they claim to be not of this Earth.

I'm not advocating burning down people's homes by the way, it is just that sometimes this world provides us with some unsavory choices. General Sherman had to make one of those, he didn't enjoy burning down those homes, he wanted to end southern resistance once and for all and end the War, that was the greater good he sought, and he was a big advocate for reapproachment after the South surrendered, he was not an evil man, he just though ending the War with victory was more important than preserving people's private property.

Do you think you live in a storybook world, where there is always a moral at the end of each story?

Sometime the question is simply that of survival.

If the good guys don't win, then Evil wins.

If you let the evil side win then evil triumphs.

But sometimes the only strategy for defeating the forces of evil is slightly evil itself.

The dilemma is this, in order to survive the evil you are facing, you must do something that is somewhat evil yourself, and if you refuse to do that, the evil truimphs totally and the result is much worse.

Do you pretend that situations like that don't occur in the real world?

Terrorism often requires that you risk harming innocents in order to fight it. There is often no perfect strategy that you can follow where you can harm only the guilty and none of the innocent. If the good side adheres to a rigid moral conduct where it always gives the potentially guilty the benefit of the doubt in order to spare the innocent, then evil wins and none of the inncent is spared in their victory.

If you would rather the United States lose than do something wrong in order to win, then the terrorists win, the United States falls, and you don't get another chance to fight them, but in your perfect world, I suppose that never happens, for God is watching over you, and He makes sure that situations like that never occur, is that what you believe?

I think the United States represents the better of the two civilizations when held against that of the Islamic terrorists, and I think it should win and survive even if it has to do something evil in order to achieve victory. Because if the terrorists win, there will be no mercy for any of us, and no freedom either, no freedom of thought, no freedom of religion. Now if you want the US military to act as perfect knights in fighting these hordes, then they will fall, and fail to protect the civilization they claim to represent, is that what you want?

Most liberals avoid moral dillemmas whenever they occur, they shrink from them and hide in their shells shirking responsibility for the outcome.

Here is a simple question: If terrorists are shooting at you from a crowd that contains innocents, do you fire back?

Most liberals would say you don't fire back and let them slaughter you. If you follow their advice then the terrorists win and they can slaughter the innocents in the crowd at their leisure after they have gotten you out of the way.

So do you fire back into the crowd and almost certainly kill some innocents while shooting atthe badguys?

Most liberals are "Now People", they only care if you fight well and honorably, not if you win. Liberals don't care about the ultimate ourcome of the conflict only that you fight as righteous soldiers and never harm a hair on a innocent's head, even if that means you lose. Liberals can't see the big picture however, they want us sending our soldiers into the slaughterhouse have the enemy grind them up and giving them rules of conduct designed to protect the innocent and which also guarantee that they can't win, and after a while after we've slaughtered enough of our soldiers by their rules of engagement, they declare the war to be unwinable and say we should concede and retreat. The ultimate outcome for a policy of retreat will be our final demise and the distruction of the civilization, and the liberals within, that put these extreme demands on our soldiers to do no evil no matter what.

Remember those coal mine accidents in Pennsyvania? They send humans into those mines, not telerobots, there must be a reason for this.

We also can't learn how to run a space base by sending telerobots only, they can't work on Mars after all. What we need to do is set up a community of humans on the moon, and the only way to find out how to do this is by setting up a community of humans on the Moon.

There are somethings a robot cannot do for itself. Most robots built are specialized for one task or another. A remote control robot would have a 2 second time delay, that would tend to make such robots somewhat clumsy when operated from Earth, their reflexes would be slow. If such a robot were to trip over a rock, the operator would know about it about one and a quarter seconds later, and would send the commands to catch itself to the robot and those commands would reach the robot after it is already lying on the ground. A teleoperated robot would have to move slowly and deliberately to avoid damaging itself. Another hazard of of working at the poles is losing direct line of site with Earth. If an operated decides to take a walk around the back side of a hill and loses direct line of site contact with Earth, the robot is lost, and another one has to be sent from Earth to continue the work. Probably a number of teleoperated robots would end up piled in shadowy craters and behind hill sides after awhile.

What exact revelations are you looking for on this pristine planet? You see there is a paradox here, if we avoid contact with the planet then we never get to find those hidden bacteria that your looking for, but if we have the extensive contact required to do a really thorough search, we increase the chance of contaminating the planet with Earth life forms. What I suggest is that we stop worrying about the nearly lifeless planet Mars and start worrying about ourselves. Mars is not the only planet out there, there are plenty of other Mars-like planets out there that we haven't touched and probably never will. These Marslike planets with unthinking bacteria hidding beneath the planets' surfaces will be thousands and millions of light years away, the bacterial if such there are will likely thrive underneath their planet's surfaces until the local primary goes nova, and throughout each planet's lifetime the bacteria will probably never evolve beyond the single cell stage and will probably never be visited by Earth Humans. If we "mess up" Mars by our presence or perhaps through terraforming, cheer up - there are likely to be many more Mars' that we'll never get to tough or alter, so the loss of Mar's native biosphere is not likely to be so great in the overall scheme of things. A terraformed Mars will likely have more life than any native biosphere that we may find there.

Why exactly do we need a riot of alien flora and fauna to settle a planet?
Seems to me, your just looking for an excuse not to go, first its because we might contaminate an alien Martian biosphere and then its because there is no biosphere, seems like you've covered both angles haven't you? So if someone say there's life then the life could be dangerous, it could contaminate the humans that live there and they could bring the life back to Earth and wipe out the human race, or we'll wipe out all Martian lifeforms with Earth bacteria that quickly adapts to the Martian environment and quickly takes over the planet.

Or else we have a dumb colonist who steps outside without a spacesuit and who suffocates due to lack of oxygen, and we have a bunch of other colonists who say, how can we settle this place if we can't breath its air? There are no local plants growing here that we can pick and stuff into our mouths, so how are we going to eat if their aren't edible plants growing here already? Ah, these conditions are way too inhospitable to us, and to top it off there's no money growing on trees, lets go back to Earth.

Without a large human presence, that microbiologist is less likely to find those well hidden Martian life forms. How do we know there's no life on the Moon for that matter. There could be an alien abode of life buried underneath the Moons surface, powered by a nuclear reactor and and supported by alien technology, like that monolith in the Movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. We don't know there is no hidden alien artifacts underneath the Moon's surface which might be dangerous to humans, so we should not go before we make sure that no such alien technology exists right?

No, it is the technology! If the technology is such that it requires a decision by government and the investment of billions of dollars to get to the Moon and Mars, then technology is stuck. Sooner or later something is going to give and free up te wheels of progress and we'll be on our way to the Moon and Mars in large numbers. The technology I'm talking about is the technology to make space travel cheaper, that is where we have the Duh factor. We need clever new ways to get into space not the same old same old that we have been using ever since we went to the Moon.

Technological revolutions are by their nature very unpredictable, so far we haven't had a technological revoultion in space travel since Sputnik. Unless you've been to the Future, you really can't say what's going to happen.

Doesn't that depend on economies of scale? For ten people it might not make any sense to have a cycler, but what if you plan to send hundreds or thousands of people to Mars in a single launch window? We'll assume also that a Mars colony has already been established and that housing is constructed with native materials, the biggest tast becomes just bringing the people with their luggage to Mars. For that you need an enourmous cycling space station that carries and reuses all the infrastructure needed to support that many people on the outbound and inbound legs of the journey both ways. The Cycling space station basically has a closed recycling life support system, food is grown their, oxygen is regenerated partly with the help of plants, and their are some peopl who actually live on this space station serving the needs of the passengers enroute to Mars, it is basically a space hotel, there are people who work and live here and there are the transients on their way to Mars or back to Earth.

Cyclers can start out small however. It looks like we won't build an Island One for a while yet, I believe someone said it would require 3,000,000 tons of lunar material, but what if we built a one tenth scale Island One, so instead of it being 3,000 feet in diameter it is only 300 feet in diameter? If we kept the rotation rate the same as in the larger model the inhabitants would experience one tenth Earth's gravity at the space station's equator, and the amount of lunar material required to build it would be only 3,000 tons, about the equivalent of 30 payloads of the Aries V rocket delivered to low Earth Orbit. If we could build the ship at L5 or perhaps even L1, then we could use a high efficiency engine to slowly bring it into a Cycler Orbit. Where the Full scale Island One has land area for 10,000 people, the one tenth scale Island One can provide the same amount of living space to 100 people. The mass of the Island one is a cubic function and it gets reduced by a factor of 1,000, but the interior area of the sphere is only a square fucntion of size so the living area only gets reduced by a factor of 100 on a one tenth scale reduction in size.

A One tenth scale Island One would require 3,000 tons of building material, while it is possible to bring that material up with multiple expendable rockets, it might be more economic to process lunar material on a small scale. This would be great practise for when we work up to building actually full scale O'Neill colonies. Granted one tenth gravity wouldn't do much to keep the travellers in shape, but it would help them to move around a bit more easily, and eat their meals in a non "zero gee" environment. Perhaps if people's stomachs can tak it, the Mini Island three can be spun a bit faster to provide Mars Level gravity at the equator.

There is a phenoninon called leading culture. The people who get there first establish the precident and all people who follow must adapt. We want democracies to get there first. The two other leading space powers are China and Russia, neither one is a democracy right now. The Europeans and the Japanese choose to participate only in a small way, while focusing on their domestic agendas. I think its worth the extra $16.67 per person to get there first, rather than just stare at our shoes while the dictators take the lead.

NASA is also a technology development agency, it develops the technology it needs to go into space, it also does aeronautical research which is basically technology development.

Why waste time? Time is a commodity just as valuable as money. I think the bean ounters overestimate the time we've got. China's growing pretty fast, do they think the World will wait for us as we wait to finish the Shuttle? Too many people seem to think that space can be put in a tiny little box in the corner of our universe. We spend outrageous sums to protect stupid little backwards societies that sell us oil, yet suddenly we get all miserly and frugal when we talk about the future of the human race. trying to get off the planet should be our major concern.

It is just two years till the end of the next Congress, we can ask this question a little later. Why wait? We spend so much money on trying to solve our problems on Earth, but they have often proven irretractable. The middle east has not become a peaceful place, no matter how much money we've spent there, yet we continue to devote a major share of our attention to that primitive place, while space travel and colonization is a distant after thought. We spend too much resources trying to manage the current situation and not enough trying to prepare for the future.

The reason we need a larger NASA budget is that we don't want to have to depend on Putin to get us to the Space Station we so laboriously built, that's all I'm saying.

Were their terrorists hiding in that hospital? I don't see any reason why terrorists would not hide in a hospital or stock pile their weapons there, or plan their operations their, just like they hid in the Churh of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Terrorists will bring their war any place they think they can hide from the Israelis. The question is why do the Palestinians allow the terrorists to hide amonst them, why don't they turn them over to the Israelis. I'm sure if General William T. Sherman were running the Israeli side of thie operation, he'd be asking these questions. General Sherman burnt farm houses, destroyed crops and tore up rail roads all to destroy the Confederacy's ability to fight, and that's how we won our Civil War. When the Enemy fights ugly, then sometimes you have no choice but to include some ugliness in your battles with them if you want to win. If the enemy is hiding in hospitals and using them to kill your soldiers, then you have no choice but to attack those hospitals if you want to win. The terrorist enemy has no morals and no scruples about where he will hide and with whom. If the Palestinians would help the Israelis to root out the terrorists, then maybe it wouldn't be necessary for the Israelis to attack the hospitals, but unfortunately the Palestinians saw fit to support them and it has come to this.

I'm sorry, the Israelis scorched no villages in Vietnam. Vietnam isn't supporting any terrorist attacks against Israelis, so the Israelis have no reason to go there. I don't know where you get this information from.

In modern war people's homes and airports will be destroyed. I don't know how you can fight a modern war in cities without that happening. However if the Hezbollah enemy would agree to meet the Israelis in a battlefield away from civilians, then I'm sure the Israelis would be happy to destroy them in detail without harming any Lebanese civilians, but so far they have not aggreed to do that. Feeling sorry for the attackers aren't you? Do you feel they have a right to attack Israel with no danger of relatiation from them? Are Israeli civilians supposed to willingly put their heads on the chopping block so that the terrorists can chop their heads off? If those are your expectations, then I feel they are kind of high. The Israelis will defend themselves even if that means harming their neighbors. Too bad for their neighbors really, but they should never have let the Hezbollah terrorists live amonst them and conduct their attacks on Israel from their neighborhoods. Do they expect the Israelis to come up with some miraculous way of killing the terrorists without harming any civilians? Do you? How can you expect something of the Israelis that you cannot do yourself. If you can make the terrorists simply drop dead where they stand without harming any of the surrounding areas, then why don't you?

Trying to pull some emotional cords aren't you? Well the realities of modern war are such that if you intend to win, some civilian casualities are unavoidable. if you know some miraculous way to kill the enemy while they hide amonst the civilian population without harming any innocents, lets hear it. Come on if you got some ideas, then why don't you put them forward. The only ideas I've heard from folks like you lately has been how to surrender or give up to the terrorist enemy. I feel that letting the terrorists win is the greater of two evils and killing some civilians unavoidable while fighting them is the lesser of the two evils. Apparently you disagree and feel that we should let the terrorists win and rule the World, well that is your perogative, but remember we face the same choice when we fought the Germans during World war II.

As for hypocracy, modern warfare does not always allow for morally consistant positions. If its the "white knights" versus the Barbarians, the Barbarians will always win. I feel that it is more important for us to stop the Barbarians than it is for us to act as "white knights."