New Mars Forums

Terrorism is pure murder and nothing else, it is not justified by any military goal, it purpose is entirely to kill civilians and no one else. When you bomb a military target and kill civilians in the process, that is not terrorism, that is collateral damage, but if you target the civilians themselves with no other purpose but to murder them, that is terrorism. I keep telling you this over and over, but you insist on using your own definition of terrorism. The Holocaust was terrorism, its entire purpose was to kill civilians that were not involved in the conflict Germany was fighting, the Holocaust had no military justification, and it was an act of terrorism on a grand scale.

You are talking about individual soldiers commiting murder because they are mad at the enemy that is shooting at them, in all such cases, these murders served no military purpose other than to satisfy the individual soldiers thist for revenge. Alot of soldiers also raped, looted and plundered, these activities served no military purpose, killing individual civilians does not defeat the enemy, and is therefore not justified as a military action, it is only murder. The military authorities did not order these actions in the case of America, they were all based on individual actions of individual soldiers a case of poor disappline and insubordination in other words, not an organized activity such as was the case of the Holocaust.

It is also used by a strong military force to exterminate a weak opponent, as the Germans thus exterminated the Jews.

You can turn an asymmetric combat situation into a symmetric one, in which case the greater force wins. The enemy can be deterred from using terrorism as a tactic if it understands that terrorism can also be used against his people, if his asymmetric combat is made symmetric then he loses, that is how the North beat the South in the Civil War. The North had the preponderance of forces, superior numbers of troops and equipment, and towards the end of the Civil War when the Confederates were getting desperate, they started using Asymmetric combat techniques. William T. Sherman simply made it clear to them through his actions, that the South's Asymmetric strategy would be made symmetric and the South would be made to suffer all the greater, and that pursuaded the South to end the War rather than face devastation by a vengeful Northern Army. Israel does not exactly symmetrise the War, but pursuing the terrorists does have consequences for the civilians living around those terrorists. If the Palestinians don't want to live in a battlefield, then they should stop harboring terrorists in their community and then the Israeli gunships will have no reason to visit them, seems logical enough to me.

If both sides are suffering from this tactic, then both sides have reason not to use it, especially the side with the weaker forces.

So you think Timothy McVeigh should have been treated as the equal of the United States Government because he used terrorism and as you say the United States used terrorism against say the Indians for example? So instead of arresting Timothy McVeigh the US Government should have sent a representative to negotiate with him and to sign a peace treaty?

I say Timothy McVeigh was wrong and the US government was right to arrest and execute him, just because there are two sides does in no way mean that both sides are morally equal. Just as I use my independent judgement to decide that Timothy McVeigh was wrong to blow up that building with children in it, I also use my independent judgement to determine that the Palestinians are also more wrong for murdering innocent civilians without justification than the Israelis.

In the book Island One was compared to the Queen Elizabeth II with the point being made that it would have a similar mass to that ocean liner. So we do make objects with a mass of 3 million tons. And why not talk about it, don't they say that talk is cheap? As for the production capability, well we must build our way up to it of course and before that happens we build smaller things.

And I say again, why not, talk is cheap and people talk about starships, which are surely much harder to build than these O'Neill colonies. People also talk about stockpiling and storing antimatter to be used for propulsion and that's way harder than an O'Neill colony, there is talk of building giant lasers to propell laser sails to the stars, all these things are further away than O'Neill colonies which are simply large structures in space.

The Earth receives cosmic rays that come from all directions of space too. How many cosmic rays that are received by the colony would depend on how recessed the colony is into the Moons surface, it is is recessed enough, then the cosmic rays can only come from one direction, directly above the colony.

So? I didn't include the condition that the area of mirrors be small, and mirrors don't need to be of glass either, a shiny reflective sheet of aluminum would do just fine. The mirror would of course be flat, and it would be in the shape of an oval. The oval shaped mirror would be held above the colony dome by a  light weight tower with spindly legs mounted on a circular track surrounding the dome. The oval shaped mirror is held above the dome at a 45 degree angle so that it catches the horizontal sun rays and reflects them downward, the circular track allows the mirror to track the Sun as the moon rotates. The mirror always faces the sun and reflects the sunlight downwards into the dark crater where the dome is situated. If "night" is desired then individual segments of the oval shaped mirror are rotated 45 degrees so that their edges are oriented towards the colony dome, such that each segment reflects the light back at the Sun instead of down on the colony. When the mirror is looked up at from directly underneath it appears circular due to its 45 degree tilt. When the mirror segments are oriented edge on toward the colony, the onlooker would see the mirror framework and the stars shining through the individual mirror panel frames. Unlike on Earth when you build tall towers, on the moon you don't have to worry about windloads on the cross section of the tower or the mirror. The tower can be made light weight and just strong enough to support its own weight and the weight of the aluminum mirror it holds directly above.

The population of a Lunar colony would likely be transient, people would tend to come and go, and what you said about Lunar gravity is also a good argument for O'Neill colonies since those can be made to provide Earth level gravity environments.

You can't predict at what level the population will level off at, that is a result of individual decisions about whether to have children. Humans have historically always filled in their living space, if more living space is provided, they are likely to have additional children to fill that in as well. If you are so down on space colonization, then why bother to talk about manned space travel at all, you could live in a world where everybody stares down at their feet all the time. The whole point of space travel is to expand the range of habitats humanity can inhabit, I really don't see any other reason for people to travel in space.

Do you know what a cycling orbit is?
It is an orbit that takes the ship from the vicintity of Earth to the vicintity of Mars, and the gravity of Mars bends the orbit path just enough to send the ship back to Earth, whose gravity bends it juist enough to send in back to Mars again and this cycle is repeated over and over again with very little or no propellent expended. A cycling spaceship doesn't require much in the way of rocket engines to maintain its cycling orbit. You could have lunar rock placed around the cycling ship as it cycles around in its orbit, more and more lunar rock can be added with each passage close to Earth, until the cycling spaceship has a thick coating of rock that can block just about any type of radiation due to its sheer bulk, even secondary particles caused by cosmic rays hitting rock can be blocked if there is enough rock underneath it, and since rock is plentiful on the Moon and water is scarce, you use the rock. The rock needn't be processed overly much, a simple net can hold the stuff onto the spaceship, passage ways can protrude outside the layers of rock so that other ships can dock with the cycler.

Yes, those are large numbers, and it tells you how far we still have to go, but I think we shouldn't shrink those challenges. We should have realistic expectations for the immediate future, but we should also try to push the envelope as well. If we want to settle the Solar System, I mean really settle it, we need something like an O'Neill colony. If we just live in tin cans launched from Earth, our ability to live in the Solar System as a society is going to be very limited. Having a handful of people living on the Moon and Mars is a start, but we should not stop there.

I have no expectation of building an O'Neill Colony instead of going to Mars. I believe Mars is a step along the way, not directly of course, but we do have to improve our capacity to get into space to get to Mars and the Moon.

A Moonbase at the Pole could be very much like an O'Neill colony eventually, if we keep on expanding it, then eventually it could house 10,000 people just like an Island One Colony, it would not rotate for gravity of course, but we could build a dome in a crater with an equal land area to one. We'd start out by placing modules on the Moons surface and gradually as the population increased, we'd be able to specialize more and do some construction out of native materials - one of the requirements for building an O'Neill Space Colony. Being sited on the Pole, such a colony would not have to deal with a month long day/night cycle, it could sit in the shadow of a dark crated protected by the Moon's surface from Solar flares and partially from cosmic rays. Mirrors could then reflect the horizontal sunlight straight down into the colony provising light for agriculture. I suppose the mirror or mirrors would have to be light weight and mounted on a turntable so as to track the Sun. A lot of little mirrors would probably be easier.

A polar Moon colony can just as legitimately be called a space colony as would an O'Neill settlement. One possible use for moon rocks, would be as a radiation shield for a cycling spaceships between Earth and Mars. If you pile enough moon rocks around an space ship, you will have an effective radiation shield.

I don't want US Astronauts to have to fly Putin Spaceways. Our partnership was not initially with a dictator. Since we have time to accelerate the Orion Program, as Russia seems unstable, we should, and not have to face the problem of no manned space vehicle.

Our tolerance for fanatics blowing themselves up, or crashing airplanes into our buildings while they practise their religion is rather low. It would be one thing if Islamic terrorism was a fluke, but just tune in for the latest suicide bomb attack in Iraq and you realize that its not. If it was a fluke it would not be so common, but since thousands of US soldiers have died from religious Islamic fanatics blowing themselves up, there is something wrong with that religion for them to allow such a thing, and I certainly don't want to roll out the red carpet for them so that there will be more of them to blow themselves up and kill more Americans.

Also if Iraqis can't tamp down their violence in Iraq, and are unready for democracy, then I don't want them in my country ruining what we have here. I prefer Islamic terrorism to be an Islamic problem, I don't want to make their problems my problems. Its too bad mainstream Muslims have allowed their religion to gain a reputation for suicide fanatacism, they have failed to condemn it in sufficient numbers and they complain too much when we fight Islamic terrorism.

Who is to be the arbitrator of "Goodness"? Certainly not the side supporting the terrorists, the one sending out suicide bombers into crowds to go blow themselves up. Israel does not send Suicide bombers and never has, by that measure it values human life more and is thus the default "good" side. Is it your intention to dwell on the Good versus evil debate in order to parayze people from defending themselves from terrorists? Do you want them sitting around thinking, "Do we deserve to survive? Perhaps we don't? Maybe we should just let them kill us?" Maybe you have doubts about whether the Israeli Jews should survive or their children, or whether the Israelis shoulc defend their children from Palestinians suicide attacks, or missile attacks across the border, but they don't. Franky your argument about whether the Israelis should allow the Palestinian terrorists to kill their children and not take all measures to protect them is not very persuasive. Are you trying to convince the Israelis to allow their children to be murdered because of some past history, and that maybe the Palestinians have a "right" to kill them because they were unlawfully deprived of their land.

My feeling is that so long as Palestinians continue to kill Jews, the Israelis have no obligation or reason to listen to them, let them stop first, and then lets discuss what's right for the Palestinians and arrive a some sort of compromise. clearly the Jews need the land more than the Palestinians, as the Palestinians can live alot more places than the Israelis can. If the Palestinians start killing again then the talks cease. Seems perfectly reasonable not to talk to someone who's trying to kill you.

The percentages of minorities influences foreign policy in a democracy, so instead of having Judeo-Christian values, Canada has Islamo-Christian values. Islamic values on the whole are illiberal and intollerant, and if Canada is not careful it may go from a liberal democracy to an iliberal intollerant one by tollerating intollerance. Canada has a small population, and if equal numbers rather than percentages go to both the USA and Canada, guess what's going to happen.

I think Canada is often the place for Muslims pursuing the "American Dream" but hate America so much that they are looking for an alternative. Canada for them is almost the USA, but without those "annoying" Stars and Stripes, and without the Superpower status, and nice humble "little USA" is what they want for pursuing their "American Dream", and if the want to kill some USA Americans for the "latest outrage" in foreign policy, they can just skip over the border.

There is some overlap between Poles and Jews, since most of the Death Camps were built in Poland. Many Jewish Poles died in those camps. Whether its the Poles fault is irrelevant, the Jews didn't feel safe their and the Communist Authorities encouraged them to leave afterwards, alot of them moved to Israel. The problem with Jewish minorities in other countries is that they aren't allowed to form their own armies in their own self-defense, and as an independent Nation, they can. The Non Jewish French did not fight the Germans all that hard, since they knew only the Jews had the most to lose. I'm sure that of France was 100% Jewish, the Germans would have had a much tougher time conquering the place, as they would have had to exterminate every Jew in every population center and since no mercy would be given to any Jew that surrendered all would fight to the death. Most non-Jewish French soldiers surrendered, because they figured the Germans would let them live, and by their surrender they exposed the Jewish minority to the danger of extermination. The Jews thereby realized that they couldn't depend on their non-Jewish fellow citizens to defend themselves against a foreign enemy that wants to exterminate them, that is how I figure Jews would be safer in Israel where you have Jews defending Jews and they are all in the same "boat".

In other words you are asking Israelis to give up their citizenship and immigrate to other people's countries, where they are more vulnerable to extermination and their fellow non-jewish citizens may be less interested in defending them. You see in order for the French to fight to protect the Jews the way other Jews in Israel would, they must all be willing to fight to the death, the French weren't willing to be exterminated along with their Jewish minority, so they surrendered, thus exposing the Jews to more danger by reducing the Germans workload in conquering France. There is no guarantee that further pogroms won't occur if Jews migrate to other countries where they will be minorities. Being a minority means that you are outnumbered by everyone else, and that you are discouraged from forming your own seperate Jewish army to protect yourself with, and history has shown that Jews need that protection, because of all the special efforts that were mounted at various times to kill them and to make them the scapegoat. I think the Jews have had enough after 2000 years of this, and it is about time they have their own country, the rest of the world really gave them no choice.

There are American and Canadian Attrocities as well, does that mean that neither country has a right to defend itself. No country is perfect, and having higher standards that you expect the Israelis to live up to that you expect the Palestinians or yourselves is not fair, and it is a form of bias against Jews. I think the way the Israelis are behaving as a whole is a darn site bettet than the Suicide bomber Palestinians. Israel is giveing up land to them, the Palestinians aren't, they keep what they have and they get more and yet continue to kill Jews.

Lunar and Mars exploration aren't specifically addressed. I hope they don't insist on substituting a Gore Sat and calling it "Space Exploration". NASA has set the course, either we go to Mars fast or slow, depending on available funding. If there are truly any "John F. Kennedy's" left in the Democratic Party, then we can certainly go faster, otherwise its "Pass the Pork!"

In order for the Moon base to have a final price, then at some point in the future the Moonbase will have to be abandoned, so the bean counters can tally up all the expenditures that accrued while it was in operation. The only reason we can come up with a dollar figure for the entire Apollo Program is because it is not ongoing. I think ideally NASA should have enough money in its annual expenditure to operate both a Moonbase and a Marsbase at the same time, and as the US economy grows, so does NASA's budget, and technology will hopefully reduce costs allowing NASA to establish other bases elsewhere in the Solar System. Eventually these Installations should pay for themselves though and NASA will move onto other things such as Starships.

Why do anything? I'll net the LATimes would be happy if the US does nothing but contemplate its navel.
The Moon is a foothold into space and Mars is another one.

It would be easier to establish a colony on the Moon, the Moon is closer and our access to the Moon is contiuous, not like Mars where we have to wait for launch windows. People living on the Moon could have phone service, access to Satellite Television and the Internet with near realtime communication with Earth. All you can do on Mars, is send and receive e-mail, voice-mail and video-mail and wait for it to arrive. Martians have to wait for the planets to align properly before making any trips to Earth or to receive any visitors from there. The Moon is the nearest continuously available exterestrial body available for mining. Mars would provide a good roll as a supplier of hydrogen and other volitiles for the Moon. The problems of exposure to radiation and long travel times are less for trips to the Moon, and we can get their with relatively off-the shelf technology more or less derived from our Apollo experience. The Moon would open up the gates for Mars, as it would require us to develop launch technology that would be useful for the trip to Mars.

I don't see how we can just ignore the Moon and head directly to Mars. I think both activities compliment each other, and if we are forced into a choice between the Moon or Mars, our grip on either one would be tenuous at best.

What if there were 10^100 different realities splitting off from a single point in time and just one of them happened to involved a time traveler arriving from the future at just that precise moment. What would the chances be of our reality being the same one with that time traveller in it? Maybe history is always splitting off anyway, whether time travel is involved or not and if someone goes back in time, the point where the traveler reenters the timeline occurs in just one of those realities.

The Time traveller would arrive in some point that appears to be the past, but would then find events unfolding differently from the moment he arrived. This model of time travel preserves free will and everything is random even if you travel back in time.

You can continue to cherry pick Jewish badguys to make your case, Begin is not Prime Minster of Israel now, and neigther is Adolf Hitler the Chancellor of Germany. You have to blow off the dust and the cobwebs off those old Israeli terrorist cases, and I just have to read today's newspapers to fing the Palestinian ones. Palestinian terrorism is an ongoing phenominon, while Jewish terrorists are a footnote in history. The Palestinians have concentrated on killing as many Jews as they could, now think of what the Israelis might do with their capabilities if they had similar goals with regard to the Palestinians? Hamas launches rockets full of pellets into Israeli town hoping to kill as many innocent people as possible, attempting to assasinate Konrad Adenauer is targeting of a specific person, it wasn't as the Palestinians are attempting, to kill as many of a certain category of people as possible. Palestinians weren't trying to kill anyone specific in launching their rockets, their target was Jews in general, not some general or some prime minister, that is my definition of terrorism, totally divorced from military goals and only seeking to kill innocent people. Killing a head of state is an act of War. If Israel wanted to wage war on Germany, then killing its political leader is a perfectly legitimate target, but killing civilians unnecessarily is not. I don't know what political leader or military target Hamas was aiming for when it attacked those Israeli villages with missiles loaded with buckshot, seems their only goal was to kill Jews, and that meets my definition of terrorism.

By the way, what are you trying to do? Drive all the Jews out of the Mars Society? So much Jew Bashing going on here. I'm sure their are also plenty of Jews interested in Traveling to Mars, it would be nice if you could be more open-minded.

So if they are not all Saints they are all villians, is that what your saying? But think about it, only 91 people? Surely with the formost military in the Middle East they are capable of killing much more than 91 people in a bomb attack. The fact that the Palestinian population is growing so fast, indicates that they are not killing as many civilians as they could, you see Israelis control the Palestinian space and they don't maximise the slaughter, yet the Palestinians don't control the Israeli's space and they do their best to kill as many Jews as they can, that is what I mean by terrorism. If a few Jews murder a few arabs, you can't paint the whole of Israeli with a broad brush as that does not constitute Israeli policy, it wasn't Israelis that voted terrorists into their government, if they did, we'd know about it, believe me!