New Mars Forums

So if someone rapes and murders your sister, its "frontier justice", is that it?

Someday people will leave Earth forever and live the rest of their lives on Mars. Unlike a change of address to some other part of the world, where life can go on as usual, after the move to Mars, colonists will be constantly reminded that their on another planet every time they get up, every time they drop something or pick something up, and every time they walk around. In a domed environment, you could theoretically make a neighborhood look just like a place on Earth as in a particular episode of the Martian Chronicals, but the one thing you can't disguise is the gravity.

Suppose one is a bit eccentric and wanted the Mars colony to look like a place on Earth, so he camouflages the dome from the inside to look like blue sky with  clouds holographically projected on its inside and with natural levels of sunlight where appropriate and a hidden ceiling sprinkler system to simulate rain when clouds are projected over head. With sufficient trickery and wind generators with sound absorbing walls, you could produce a neighborhood that looks just like a community on Earth with roads, houses, and garages with cars in them, but the one thing you would always come back to is the gravity. the gravity would never seem right. People would be bouncing arouns too much and things and people would seem to fall too slowly.

Now the sun shines through someones window in the morning, the bees are buzzing and the birds are chirping in the trees, and the husband gets out of bed and stumbles around clumsily under the low gravity, he hops around and bumps his head against the ceiling cursing loudly when he does so, waking up the wife. The children are already watching cartoons in the living room. Breakfast is served in the kitchen, and the husband is busy putting on his spacesuit for the trip to work. Unfortunately his spacesuits are thick and bulky and he can fit too many in his closet, so he wears the same one he wore yesterday this morning. Just before he seals his helmet on, he asks his wife to go pick up his other suit at the cleaners today. So he climbs into his car and grabs onto the steering wheel with his thick gloved hands and the garage opens and he pulls the car out. The car hits a speed bumb as it heads towards the domes outer airlock, and it goes flying into the air. The car thuds back onto the asphalt some distance away, he drives into the airlock and the inner door closes, the chamber depressurizes and the outer door opens revealing a pink sky and a barren ruddy landscape with a lonely road leading out toward the horizon. There is another car out ahead, and another car follows his out through the community airlock. There is a line of traffic pulling out of the community for it is rush hour. the man drives his car and the road splits in several directions and other domed communities are seen in the distance, he passes a number of road signs, one showing the speed limit, some billboards with advertisements, and finally the dome of the big city where he works. A line of cars drive into a long tunnel that goes underneath the big dome, and then stop. the light turns red on top and the outer door of the municiple airlock closes. A line of cars waits for a time outside, and then the door opens to reveal an empty tunnel, and the cars waiting outside drive in and then stop when the tunnel is full. The man drives through the inner door of the airlock when it opens and out onto the city street which is filled with cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, and horse drawn carriages. Cops watch carefully from their little tiny vehicles to make sure no one parks in the wrong spot. there are bus stations, fire hydrants all all sorts of reserved spaces where parking is not allowed, and their are parking meters that are only in effect certain times during the day, and at other times, parking is not allowed to make way fro garbage pickups and the like. The man drives into a parking garage and pays twenty martian dollars to the parking attendent to park his car. He opens the door and bumps his head on the doorframe as he attempts to trise out of the car. Two people skip and hop down the corridors of the office building colliding with one another and knocking each other silly.

What issues are not settled peacefully now, will be settled more violently later when their is power at stake. I think the process of creating a Martian World Government should be a neat and orderly process with a minimum of violence, that means we should all agree on a process to form that new government and then go about it. The alternative may be colonists warring on each other, and I thing the environment on Mars is hostile enough. A Mars with many different nations will have the same problem of war and terrorism as does the Earth. You cannot assume that the entire Mars population will be composed of civilized scientists with their heads in the clouds and no personal conflicts with each other, because they are so much better than everybody else. No no, with increasing population, there will be rising crime as opportunities abound, and with crime you will need laws. I think a democratic World government will be best. the initial population will be small, less that most Earth Nations for the whole planet. The interests of the population as a whole will be best served by a single Mars government, that way they won't waste resources fighting each other and the Nations of Earth won't manipulate the small Martian nations and play them against each other. I think one of the main attractions of going to Mars is to get away from the conflicts going on at Earth, but if their are many nations on Mars, that negates that advantage, and then you have the spector of nuclear War. Who wants to live on a nearly airless planet where you are always 30 minutes away from potential nuclear destruction, when you can live under the same circumstance except on a planet with a breathable atmosphere. I think an independent space colony would be more attractive than living on one of the many nations of Mars. At least an O'Neill colony would have a single goverment. A single Martian government would be more compedative with free floating space colonies.

You know what they say about the hand that rocks the cradle. The first country to send men to Mars will certainly have enourmous influence over what follows that mission. I believe in democracy, the Chinese government does not, or the Russian one for that matter. Any country that send men to Mars is also demostrating its technical capability of colonizing the Solar System, its not the Red Planet thats important so much as demostrating our ability to get there. Once we go to Mars, mining the asteroids should be well within our grasp and thus we can spread outwards into the Solar System and American values and democracy will grow as we spread into space. If the Chinese do it and we don't, then we'll end up living in the shadow of an interplanetary Empire, well be like China once was during the European age of exploration, an exploited colonial possession. I don't want to bow to any Chinese Emperor or Russian Czar, whatever the titles they may actually use, so I think its imperative that we have a strong manned space program.

All in all, I think the political Right has been more friendly to a manned Mars Endeavour that the Political left has been. Remember the firstmajor politician to call for a Manned Mars Program was Vice President Spiro Agnew. JFK briefly considered it, but then put a priority on reaching the Moon. The Liberals had some admirable qualities right up unti Lyndon B. Johnson, after him, the liberals did too much self-examining, they questioned the United States's place in the World, they questioned our accomplishements and whether we should try to achieve anything. The Next Democratic President after that was Jimmy Carter, and Jimmy Carter didn't do squat for the space program, all he did was wear sweaters in the White House and he turned down the thermostat and he conducted all nmight vigils to solve the problems of the US hostage crisis, but for NASA he did nothing. During his administration no US astronauts flew into Space Gerard Ford had Apollo-Soyuz, Nixon had Apollo, LBJ had Apollo, Gemini, and JFK had Mercury. But I don't know of any Democratic President that had any real vision of where to go in space. Clinton just kept launching the Shuttle, and their were abortive attempts at SSTOs and the cancellation of the NASP program, started under Reagan and continued under Bush. I think getting rid of the Shuttle was a blessing, now we don't waste time deciding what to do with the Shuttle other than to keep launching it. With a focus on Mars, NASA either carries it forward or stops. If someone doesn't like the Mars program, he should decide on what else we should be doing instead, and I haven't heard any good ideas from them.

Its meant to be upsetting Gallup sets up poll results in order to influence public policy and Gallup does not want the US sending people to Mars, they want the Chinese or some other leftsing organization getting their first, so naturally the poll results reflects their opinion, I also remember all the results of those exits polls in 2004 that had John Kerry ahead, when he really is behind. Much of the news organizations are very political and liberal these days. They can no longer be counted upon to give reliable results. The main thing with Gallup is that the Manned Mars program is George Bush's baby, because it is a think associated with George W. Bush, they want to see it crash and burn. It is another manifestation of Bush hatred. Everything about Bush has got to fail, the media makes stuff up when ever it can get away with it to sabotage Bush, its as simple as that.

I don't know what they want to have instead of a Mars program, as it is replacing the Shuttle. Once the Shuttle is gone, what there really talking about is canceling NASA. "Do you want to spend money on NASA, or do you want to eliminate the program?" Then find the most liberal America-hating cities to ask this question of for a scientific result that goes their way. By the time Bush leaves office the Mars Program will be well under way, and hard to stop. the Shuttle is a goner, there is no way to justify the shuttle or to resume making parts for it. The Shuttle will die in 2010 and that's that. Some people would like the CEV to be used as nothing but a ferry for the Space Station, and they want to spend as much money as possible so the United States doesn't achieve any significant accomplishments for it. They want NASA to spend the money and for our international partners to get all the credit.

Gravity does most of the accelerating of the solar sails. They are not so thin that they can accelerate significantly. What the light pressure does is hold them on course as they fall toward Earth. These aren't the most efficient of solar sails that I'm talking about, they are only efficient enough to make tiny course correction to compensate for fluxuations in the gravity field and the spaces between the solar sails are timed to converge just before impacting with the spaceship, so that many thousands upon thousands of them impact with the spaceship in a short period of time. The sails converge much like an accordion. They manuever into position, their rotations and everything is taken into account so that they are right on target and hit flat on and normal. In the final moments before impact it doesn't matter if some are shadowing others, their courses have already been predetermined at much closer range than L1 by their maneuverings and they maneuver themselves to converge together prior to impact, so that the density of material hitting the space ship is appreciable and provides it with substantial acceleration. Much of the aluminun will evaporate upon impact as they are hitting it at a very high velocity, Perhaps some of it will stick, but also some of the shield will ablate and much more of the aluminum will spread outward as a high temperature plasma of aluminum gas. I think this all has to be computer modeled to get any more educated answers about the feasiblity of this.

I don't know GCNRevenger, you sound similar to one of those "man will never fly" people from the 19th century. Such a person would have said things like: "If you examine a bird's bones you will find that their bones are hollow, now a bird's muscular strength to weight ratio is much higher than a humans, so therefore, no matter how many feathers you can glue to a man's arms and no matter how hard he flaps them, he still won't be able to fly. I tell you this endeavor to build heavier than air flying contraptions is doomed to failure, and we should concentrate our efforts into building faster and more powerful steam locomotives. The steam engine is the wave of the future and its here to stay."

Logic depends on the initial assumptions made. A person with the tiniest scrap of information can deduce a whole lot, which is what Plato and Aristotle did. The problem was, that tiny scrap of information was insufficient for making the logical deductions they did. One can assume from 19th century information that the Earth is the only thing in the Universe that does not move, because the speed of light is the same in any direction you measure it in. Since other objects are moving, it can be assumed that they would measure different speeds of light depending on which direction their measuring it in.

If you start with the wrong assumption, your logic can be flawless, but you end up with the wrong conclusion or as they say, Garbage in Garbage out.

Plato and Aristotle were not very big on experimentation, their idea was to withdraw from the world and remove all distractions of the material world so they can think purely logical thoughts in their world of ideas, this idea really didn't advance the Greeks too far I'm afraid. they did great in Math, since that did not require too much experimental evidence, but in the World at large, they came up with bizarre theories of a world made up of four elements called air, earth, fire and water, and that everything was made up of atoms of those four elements. This led many people to try to rearrange these atoms so they could make gold out of lead, because "surely these learned scholars from ancient times must be right, just look at thos giant marble monuments they built, anyone who could build that must be right, and thus we must stand on their shoulders and discover a way to turn lead into gold. - Alchemy."

How can you be sure that you know what is possible and what isn't? What if those pellets were solar sails of the same mass, and since they are so thin they could vaporize easily or perhaps they don't need to be vaporized? I think as they are, they could hit the spaceship flat on without concentrating any force on any particular location. Solar sails can manuever in space, simply by becoming selectively reflective and non reflective, they can altern their angle of attack on the sunlight and through this maneuving the sunlight and their maneuverings would push them on the proper course to hit the ship. And it just so happens that another starship idea involves laser sails and the sails themselves being used as reaction mass against a starship. One must be open to new ideas, to reject them out of hand because you think you know all their is to know about them risks rejecting a perfectly valid idea. I think some things you can't really know whether they will work or not, which is why you try them out, just like many people did up to the period the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane. Remember Aristotle, who thought he could deduce the entire Universe through reason alone? I think he missed the mark widely. I don't think chemical rockets which carry all their own reaction mass and energy supply will be the ultimate answer for getting of the Earth's surface. The Lunar Elevator doesn't really solve this problem, it instead solves a problem of getting people off the lunar surface, a problem that doesn't really exist. A terrestrial space elevator would solve this problem provided we can find strong enough material, but I think having a plan B in case this doesn't work out would also be a good idea.

You know there is a saying: A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. To answer your first question, if you have alot of detainees, you have a greater probability of one of them breaking at the mere thought of torture. You see it is their own evil mind that complete's the picture along with their evil image of us. If they think we are the sort of people who might shove them out of a flying airplane, they might break and give us the information we need to know when we open up the door. Maybe some of them are prepared to die, but the chances are, the more you have, the more likely one of them is likely to break. And of course the Media is spreading the propaganda that the CIA tortures people, it may not be necessary to actually torture them, if they just have the thought of falling into the hands of the dread CIA, and the CIA officer might find it useful to do little to dispel this illusion in the minds of the detainees. After all they're the ones to spread this propaganda, how fitting would it be if some of them were to fall victim to the very same propaganda that their organization generated about us? When they are not in our clutches it is a source of hatred that motivates them to commit these attacks against Americans, but when they are captures, that hatred turns to fear, because they are in the Clutches of the Great Satan! Now if the Great Satan indicates or aludes that he will shove you out the door of this high flying airplane, are you going to believe him if you think he is evil incarnate? Alot of these terrorists have been brainwashed into thinking we are the devil himself, when in captivity that makes a useful lever in his interrogation, don't you think? Evil doesn't have to be done, merely alluded to. the prisoner will see the lion in one of the cells, perhaps surrounded by bones that might have been one of his past meals. In reality the lions are fed stakes fresh from the butchers,but the prisoner's don't know this.

And if we remind them of there past crimes they feel anguish from it, is that also a form of mental torture? What about the time we led those German Citizens through their own Death Camps let them see those huge piles of corpses that were generated by their own government, was that also mental torture? Some of those citizens committed suicide after seeing all that, so clearly it was. I do not feel guilty about reminding people of their past crimes, if it gives them a sense of mental anguish that's good, maybe others of their kind won't be so quick to follow their example then.

I don't think mental torture is torture, I think alot of it is just plain justice. If a person has an evil mind, hes also likely to have an evil imagination of what his captors might possibly do to him, because he would and may have done similar things to prisoners he had in his captivity, if he were to suffer mental anguish from it, good! If he is just an innocent bystander who was mistakenly captured, he'll just have to trust us not to execute or torture him and we won't, it is the people withthe most evil imaginations that are the most vulnerable to this sort of thing.

Calling mental anguish torture just ties our hands so we can get no useful information out of them at all, and innocent people will die because we were't willing to apply a little pressure on our captives. Remember, just because they are behind bars doesn't make them heroes or somehow noble or anything like that. If they were terrorists before they went into captivity, they still are terrorists after they are captured. I know it is the liberal tendency to feel sorry for anyone who ends up behind bars no matter what the reason. The purpose of the incarceration is to protect our soldiers, and to get information out of them if possible, and maybe foil future terrorist plots, and capture more terrorists.

Given the choice of whether we brutally beat the living crap out of them to get information or whether we use psychological tricks, which would you prefer? Which is more likely to cause injury or death the the captives, indicating that they may be fed to the lions or actually feeding them to the lions? I think the answer is obvious.

How much have we really spent on developing the technology to get off Earth. As far as I can tell, not a whole lot. I have a number of ideas that could be tried to get off Earth, one of them is Lunar Pellets. Most such schemes require an intial investment is space infrastructure and once in place, that should bring down the cost of going into space substantially. I'd rather expand into space than fight over stuff on Earth. I think part of the problem is engineers who encounter engineering problems and then throw up their hands and say it is impossible to solve rather than solving them. the only reason I support the Iraq War is that we live on the same planet as these dementos that blow themselves up and threaten our liberty. I would actually prefer isolationism if we could in fact physically isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity. This "stick your head in the sand of North America" brand of isolationism simply won't work as were are not physically isolated from the rest of the World anymore, the oceans are't big enough to keep the world's problems from our shores. I don't like spending my money to solve the world's problems and have the ungrateful scum of humanity revile us for it. We are not doing it for them, but for ourselves, that is why we got involved in World War I and II.

You don't know what the future has to offer, you are not a seer. I prefer to work on the technology to get us off this planet.  Population reduction if led to its logical comclusion will reduce the population to zero and result in the extinction of humanity. I think population growth is slowing anyway, because as we get wealthier, we generally have fewer children, but I'd prefer to reduce population on Earth while expanding it in space, that means transporting people off the planet. The Earth already has too many people. It is hard to sustain a global natural ecosystem with this many people. I think if the Human population on Earth were reduced to 10 million, we'd have a more natural environment, instead of having to devote much of the Earth's surface to agriculture in order to feed ourselves, or perhaps to produce ethenol to run our vehicles. if our vehicles are in space, then global warming is no longer a problem, a natural Earth will find its own balance and will devepo new species over time, which we can mine to feed our artificial habitats in space. Large wild species are disappearing from our planet. the best way to stop this is to get most of us off this planet. We don't have another Earth after all, and new species take millions of years to develop naturally.

I'm not one who believes in a single world society or a global village. I think space allows us the freedom to develop our own societies without getting in each other's way as we do so often here on Earth. if someone want to experiment with communism, let him do so with like-minded people on an isolate space settlement rather than disruptiong other societies through exporting revolution. I don't think all of humanity need to live this way or that, nor does it need to be reformed with everyone being told how to live. Space gives us space and that is the most important thing that is out there.

I just don't like crowded city cultures and global villages, I'd rather be a frontiersman and todays world doesn't allow me this. Everybody has to compete with everybody else for jobs and with the third world, which has suddenly gotten too close for my comfort. I don't like being bothered by third world problems such as religious fanatacism and terrorism. I also don't like buying oil from far away places and weird people who dress funny, worship funny and have a tendency to become suddenly violent when other people don't worship as they do.

You don't get it do you. When you expand the Republic to include other cultures, those other cultures also change the country doing the expansion. We'd go from 300 million to 400 million, one in every four people would be a Mexican if this happened! Our politics would also shift to the left. More Democrats would probably be elected, although the ones that advocate things like same-sex marriage would probably be shunned by Mexico's social conservative culture. What Mexicans are most concerned about is improving their economic situation and their politics reflects that, they want greater government spending and higher taxes on the rich to finance it. If they became part of the USA, they'd then have more rich to tax and the government would have more money to spend on them. You make it sound as if the Mexicans would all be slaving away in the salt mines or something like that.

Expanding the Republic is not the same thing as building an Empire. We already have an informal "Co-Prosperity sphere" as you term it, we also have mexicans freely coming and going and the INS asleep at the switch. If thats the way things are going to be, how much the better would it be if Mexicans also had the rights of US citizens, then their would be no more of this Day Laborer thing for them, they'd get regular jobs and their employers would have to meet regular employment standards in hiring them. The corruption that goes on in the Mexican states would lessen as the FBI would be on top of them, and those same states would also get plenty of help from the Federal government, and in exchange for shoveling all that money the Mexican's way we'd get a larger country. I think that's not a bad deal, do you?

Oh yes there's that flag thing. Well as I said before, it is their choice, all we can do is make them an offer, it is up to them to accept or refuse. The way some Latin American countries are mismanaged some might take us up on this offer, possibly the Cubans after Communism falls. I'm sure we could draw alot of lessons from the absorption of East Germany, and not make the same mistakes the Germans did. I think the South Koreans missed an opportunity to absorb North Korea and they're coming to regret it. There will be a moment of opportunity when Cuban Communism falls, we either seize it or we let it pass through our fingers. Like all post Communist Countries, Cuba will need alot of help, we can offer it to them, if it turns out that we are helping ourselves.

I get tired of us offering assistance with no strings attached. we liberated half of Europe and we only got reviled for it. Next time when we send our soldiers out, it should be to benefit ourselves, next time we spend money on other people, we should get something in exchange, no more freebes. I think we should finish the job in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan and then we should shake the dirt from our feet and lend no more aid to the rest of the World. No more defending Europe, or stabilizing the Middle East or promoting democracy there. If we are attacked, we should retaliate, but no more efforts to rebuild the countries we defeated afterwards, that way we don't make needless targets of our soldiers. Let the Europeans learn to defend themselves, but give no victory parades to our enemies. We'll rub out Al Qaeda and tell the rest of the world where to go afterwards.