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If only we lived on the Moon, a Lunar Space Elevator would be just the thing, but then the LEM had no trouble reaching Lunar orbit without one. I don't know how a Lunar elevator would help a suborbital reach orbit unless it dangles all the way to the fringes of Earth's upper atmosphere.
Accuracy can be aided in several ways with regards to the pellet stream. For one, the pellets can be aimed very carefully, two, they could have a transmitter and GPS system in each leading pellet and the other pellets would automatically follow. The Suborbital ship would also have a GPS system, would be able to detect the incomming stream of pellets and place itself in front of them. And then a laser would focus in on each pellet varorising each ahead of impact with the suborbital. The energy of the impact would then be spread all over the entire surface of the impact shield rather than a tiny little spot. What hits the ship would be an incoming stream of gas, actually the reverse of a rocket if you think about it. The GPS would tell the laser where the pellets are, so it knows where to aim, it would also tell the Suborbital where the pellets are so it knows where to place itself, and the pellets would have little reaction thrusters so that it knows where to place themselves. If you like, they could simply be hollow shells filled with gas. Either the laser destroys the containers or the pellets empty themselves of their contents and move out of the way so that only their contents impact with the ship.
Seems like this job should fall under the Air Force Budget, since detecting Near Earth Asteroids is part of the defense of the homeland. Searching for threatening asteroids falls under the category of defense, and should not count as part of NASA's budget.
Why not convert it into a space hotel and sell it to private industry as a target for space ships to dock with? Bigelow is already developing one space hotel, why not another one? What about the Solar Panels, one could experiment with a microwave transmitter to see if you could transmit power to the ground, and test the feasibility of SPS satellites.
On a two year mission to Mars, how many space suits will need to be brought? It the astronauts run out of suits, they are stuck in the hab and can't do any exploring, and they need to keep at least one suit in reserve so they can walk to the Earth Return Vehicle or asent stage to make it back to Earth.
On the otherhand, if we didn't want multiculturalism, we could have stayed in our thirteen colonies. we've decided to become a continental power instead and Manifest Destiny is in part absorbing other cultures. I have nothing against our country getting bigger, and I realize that part of the price of that is absorbing other cultures and thereby changing our own. I don't want to absorb violent and destructive cultures however, or cultures that reject democracy, fortunately the cultures that border our own aren't so incompatible with democracy and we can absorb them a little at a time without them making their problems too much of our own, but everything must be taken in moderation of course. We're not the British culture we started out being.
So much hot air, that Pat Robertson, the difference between the West and the Islamic world is that in the middle east such people are actually taken seriously.Pat Robertson is not quite the same caliber as Bin Lauden either, if he uttered the sort of stuff that Bin Lauden said, Pat would alienate what followers he does have. The West is a very materialistic society, maybe not so much as Europe, but enough so that religious leaders often complain about it. Alot of Muslims are slaves to their religion, they wear certain clothes, they pray at proscribed intervals each day an they face a certain direction when they pray, this whole sort of thing tends to suppress individuality in Islamic culture, and look at all the Moslem fashions, they are basically changeless. People wear the same style of clothes that their grand fathers wore and great grandfathers and great great grandfathers going back many centuries, If Marco Polo encountered Arabs in his journey, they wore the same clothes that many Arabs wear today, this speaks of an inmobility and an unchanging inflexible quality to Islamic society whereas the clothes Marco Polo wore looks quite a bit different from what westerners wear today. Western culture is dynamic and adaptable while Islamic culture is static, intollerant and inflexible. Everybody must fit the mold set forth by the leaders of this religion and people who don't fit into this mold are hammered down brutally, and this is all stuff the Pope can't say for fear of triggering riots and indirectly causing death through them.
Because we absolutely dominate the world. We won. The US can vaporize any other nation on Earth. At will.
The Muslims do seem pretty eager to tangle with an 800 pound gorilla, don't they. Because we don't varporize them, they think we are weak. I just wonder if their is a middle ground we could take were we don't vaporize them but we vaporize something else instead just to remind them of what we are capable to doing. Why does a rattlesnake rattle? If we were a rattlesnake, we have not been making it obvious that we have a poisonous bite, perhaps we should give them a warnming of some kind just to give them an idea of what we are capable of if pushed too far. They keep on pushing us and pushing us to see how far they can go. Alot of people seem to have forgotten their is something called a shot across the bow.
You know a tiger that doesn't bite is just a pussy cat.
96,000 is merely a drop in our bucket of 300 million, it take a disproportionate amount of our resources to watch this tiny minority however, it is fortunate that we live so far away from the centers of Islamic populations and that most of our immigrnats are Christian Hispanics. Maybe they speak Spanish and not so much English, but at least most are not fanatics that blow themselves up. Unlike many Conservatives, I think the US has mostly benefitted from the explosion of immigration, we reached our 300 million number because of it, and because of our large number of people we have become a superpower. If we stopped accepting immigrants after 1776, we'd be a much smaller country. Then there is China with its buirgoning population of 1.2 billion people. China is growing fast, it is improving the income of its many people and as their standard of living increases, China becomes more powerful with more income at its disposal, and in the hands of an undemocratic unelected government. China will be building up its military with much more sophisticated weapons all paid for by increasingly influential Chinese taxpayers, and that military will increasingly challenge ours as it increases in power. China is playing catchup with us, as it approaches us, its growth rate will slow down as it has to innovate more and copy what we already have less. I think China is well on its way to becoming a superpower later on in the 21st century. The question remains of whether the US will remain a power to be reckoned with in the 21st century. Alot of first world industrial powers have small populations, the people living in these countries tend to prefer this as they don't like to compete for jobs with newly arrived immigrants willing to work for less. The people in advanced countries also don't like to have many children as they have to pay for their college education. China has a teaming population of citizens whose standards of living it can raise, the US on the other hand can bring in immigrants and improve their atandard of living so we can compete in the long run with nations like China. The risk of course is if we bring in too many people from the third world, they'll vote socialist and the socialists will enact policies that inhibit economic growth just like they have in the countries the immigrants came from. Also its important that the tide of immigration isn't so great that they overwhelm the native born Americans. And its also important that the majority of immigrants don't come from a single country such as Mexico for instance. One concern is that Mexicans might all immigrate to the Southwest, and try to annex that territory to Mexico by force of their numbers, just as American settlers did in the other direction with Texas. The majority of immigrants should mostly be from neighboring countries that might have long term designs on our territory. No Seudatenland Mexicans, no restive minorities who congregate on one place and demand independence from the US, That must not happen! That is why the concept of the melting pot is important. We need a large population of Americans, not various nationalities that want to break apart this country.
If the prize to be won is big enough, then the private money will come, because that money is out there. The trick is to make going to Mars profitable. Governments can do that without getting in the process of how to get there, that way we can let the efficiencies of the market drive the means to get their rather than government buerocracies.
That is true Martin_Tristar, what we need is an investment environment conducive to investment where the investor is allowed to realize a return on his investment.
What we basically need is a framework for drafting a Martian and Lunar Constitution, I think the constitutions themselves must be agreed to by the people present on those bodies at the time of the signing. What needs to be agreed to on Earth is the requirements required on Mars to allow the convention to go forward and gain international acceptance by the major spacefaring powers, I don't mean everybody, I just mean the major spacefaring powers, the sooner talks commence the easier it will be to agree to something. The best time for developing the agreement is when the thought of extraterrestrial colonization seems like "pie in the sky", because then the members aren't really seeming to give up anything. The agreement should be rather simple and technical, basically how many people need to be sent to Mars and for how long before a constitution can be ratified, until such time the various manned missions will be controlled by the sponsoring space-faring powers. Space-faring powers could be either nations or corporations. Maybe the number should be something like 100 rather than 10, that means that the constitution won't be solely decided by the first nation that manages to put down footprints on the red soil. I think 80% of the total inhabitants of the Moon and Mars must be available to make quarum to comence the Constitutional convention, and then the delgate/astronauts will decide on the constitution. Most likely the constitution will already be written up on Earth and brought over to Mars for the delegate/astronauts to sign, as their proffession will be in exploring Mars, not deciding on these legal matters, but there's will be the signatures on the document. I say 80% of the planet's inhabitants, because I forsee the possibility that some space faring powers may not wish for their to be a constitution, so they will send some astronauts there who will not participate in the constitution to deny quarum and the legal force of the meeting. The major powers can then send even more astronauts until the get the 80% they need to override the holdouts and commemce the meeting.
The challenge then becomes to get the right people over to Mars that will sign the right kind of constitution that will allow for private investment and development of Mars so as to allow a financial return to investors, and if the technical requirements of just getting there are met, then a group of like-minded people will be sent their to agree on a prewritten constitution and those sent will simply sign it and then get on to exploring and inhabiting Mars. I find that better than endless discussions and compromises at the UN by member states that do not even travel in space, and by various competing ideologies. Basically each power will write his own constitution for Mars, and whoever gets enough people over to Mars to sign their constitution will get that constitution enacted as the law of the land. Very simply Endless compromises with minor powers at the UN may result in an unworkable and ineffective document, much like the UN is an unworkable and ineffective organization. A winner take all system, where the society most capable of sending people to Mars determines how the planet is governed will most likely result in a strong capable governing system rather than the weak incapable symbolic world organization that is the UN, that is how I see it. the best thing to agree to on Earth is how to enact the Martian constitution rather than to the particulars and politics of that constition here, and technical competance will decide whose ideas win out, not politics. I think the Capitalist powers are the most technically competant, so I think their ideas will win out as they will be capable of sending the most people to Mars.
Israel and the US have been convenient scapegoats for a long time now. This is not healthy, but Israel and the US haven't exactly been making their job difficult of late.
Maybe we should stop being convenient scape goats, for example, we could declare war on them the next time they attack us and we can thus deter them from using the United States as a scapegoat. Maybe we could have let Israel finish the job they started in Lebanon. Maybe we can tell them to their face what we think of them and their violence and if they react violently, we'll let violence beget violence, and this time we can let them make sacrifices for peace and not us! There used to be a flag in American history, it showed a snake with a caption under it saying "Do not tread on me!"
Why are we aways the first to forgive, the first to understand, they first to help our enemy back up on his feet and to help him rebuild? Maybe the problem with the Iraq War is that, we've been too generous with our enemies? All the trouble we've had in Iraq has come during the rebuilding phase, perhaps we'd be better off if we just attacked them when they threaten us, and let the stew in their rubble, let them sit in the dark and haul water in buckets from the same river that they use as a sewer, maybe then it would finally penetrate their thick skulls that messing with us is not a good idea. I'll probably think the better of this statement later, but I'm tired of us always being the victims of our own generosity.
Islam is not a monolithic groupthink cult, just as Christianity is not a monolithic groupthink cult.
All the evidence I see on telivision seems to suggest that it is. Everywhere on the news I see Muslims who are eager to fight us and are just looking for the slightest excuse to do so. Nowhere do I see peace protestors who want to give peace a chance. I do not see the Muslim equivalent of peaceniks that seem so prevalent in our society. In fact the peaceniks in ouw own society seem to defend the warmongers in theirs, I do not see an equivalent peace movement in Muslim society, they keep their heads down if they exist, and they are very quiet and not vocal like ours.
There is no equivalent to fundamentalist Islam in Christianity, nothing in christiandom approaches the scale and violence of fundamentalist Islam, nothing, there may be a few cults here and there, but nothing that has seized control of entire societies and has enforced religious blue laws with violence and harshness that approaches the Muslim Shaira.
No one wants another crusade more than the Moslems, I looked very hard to find moderate Muslims in the News today, and I couldn't find any. Even the leaders of Turkey and Pakistan got into the act. I'm sick and tired of public officials having to walk on eggshells for the Moslems, and appologize for basically saying the truth about them. Moslems are very prone to violence, but you better not tell them that, because these violent people get violent when you call them violent.
What is a Christian likely to do if you say to them that Christianity is a violent and evil religion? Most Christians will say, "Your wrong!" and explain why that person's wrong, most Christians will not pick up a gun and start shooting people because he felt offended at somebody insinuating that Christianity is a violent religion. The more Muslim violence that is seen on television, the more people will say that Islam is a violent religion, and why shouldn't they? The evidence is shown before their very eyes everyday on the news thanks to these same radical Muslims who get offended by people saying their religion is violent. Palestinians burned churches in Gaza because the Pope said their religion is violent, these same Muslims that voted for terrorists, so what do they expect the world to think of them? I'm sick of the violence and the excuses for violence and the violence because somebody called them violent. If they want to stop being called violent they should stop being violent, stop supporting violence and stop voting for terrorists.
The Russians running the Russian Space program are one thing; the Russians running the government are quite another. Cosmonauts are happy to be in space, they don't care whether its in cooperation or in competition with the Americans. Vladimir Putin is another factor, he seems to measure Russias progress by how bad a time he can give the Americans, he has this old KGB mindset which is always thinking about what bad things he can do to the Americans without provoking open warfare, he regards NATO as a threat, and he does not regard Russia as a team player with the rest of the European nations that are members of the EU and NATO, he instead wants a Russian dominated sphere of influence and wants a Russo-centric area of Europe surrounding his country, so long as his impluse is to build Russian Empires, then he will have trouble getting along with his European neighbors. After all France does not run Germany and Great Britian, it gets no sphere of influence surrounding itself, why should Russia. If Russia wants to be a regular European country, it should stop trying to run the affairs of neighboring countries like the Ukraine, Georgia, and Belorus, it would stop trying to support dictators throughout the world and start acting like a democracy and support similar democratically-minded countries in the world against dictatorships. Russia instead has supported countries like North Korea, Iran, and Belorus. I still fail to see the advantage of working with a country that has a hostile foreign policy to our own. I'd rather they all be democracies and have values similar to what we have. This is for future missions, its too late to do something about the ISS, I think its best just to finish that.
I would like to have some discussion here regarding mining asteroids from the inside out.
If the asteroid rotates, then a shaft dug parallel to the surface would have a "floor" to work against due to centrifugal force.
If you were only just below the surface, you push out the "floor" from below you (or some of it anyway) and it would fly out to a waiting orbiter.
Oh, I like it - using the asteroid's own rotational energy to dismantle it.
Hey, if you attach a standard electric generator at a pole of rotation, you'll get your electrical energy for free - maybe we could use gigawatt lasers to carve it up.
Most asteroids probably don't rotate fast enough to have an outward centrifugal force at its equator. Asteroids are like giant mountains in space, I'm not sure that they wouldn't just fall apart and break up into chunks if rotated too fast. I think a solid metal asteroid with no faults and fissures could rotate quite fast. I've even heard proposals that you could make a space colony out of that, you simply focus the sun's rays on one of the poles and you melt a cavity in the center of the asteroid, and later on you add atmosphere, water and dirt, and you have a rotating asteroid colony. But I kind of doubt that most asteroids are one solid chunk of metal, I think they are in part at least held together by their own feeble gravity, the large ones anyway.
Tom Kalbfus,
Good idea but how would you implement such a thing?
As you point out as the water vapor on Venus increases so does the temperature, 1% water as steam equates to around an additional 15% temperature .To create a water world you will need to import around 60 bars of hydrogen to convert the CO2 into C and H2O.
With an all out space effort to transport hydrogen from everywhere possible, i think we could do that in about 50,000 years.(maybe 50% of GNP spending from every country on earth on the effort to move hydrogen for 50,000 years)
Where do you get that figure of 50,000 years anyway? When you look to the Outer Solar System, there are some very large bodies that are made mostly of hydrogen. What if you got all the hydrogen you need and formed it into a single large ball and pushed it on a collision course with Venus. There are two possible sources of hydrogen, the gas giants or the large balls of ice in the outer Solar System. Pluto, as you know has a methane atmosphere, that is 1 carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. As Pluto moves outward, its atmosphere freezes on its surface. You could scoop that up and fling it into space using Mass Drivers, then you can collect the methane and process it into hydrogen gas, and use the carbon to make the walls of large liquid hydrogen tanks. You can accumulate all they hydrogen you need in ornit around Pluto, or even better Sedna, which likely has a methane crust on its surface. Since these bodies are way out, their orbital velocity around the Sun isn't that great, and it becomes very easy to halt that forward velocity and set these giant hydrogen tanks on a collision course with Venus, it might take a couple centuries, but this is way better than 50,000 years, and all they hydrogen you need would collide with Venus all at once, all 60 bars of it! or course you want the hydrogen gas to remain liquid, or perhaps you don't. There is nothing that say you can deliver the hydrogen as a gas. What happened if you release the hydrogen as a gas immediately prior to collision with Venus? It will expand outward to fill the vacuum, but what if it hit venus just as it expands to fill a volume equal to Venus. Most of that hydrogen would smack right on top of the atmosphere at a velocity almost that of the local Solar escape velocity. I think that would generate alot of heat spread out over the top of half a hemisphere of the planet. I don't think a gas-on-gas collision would create any craters, but a layer of hydrogen would sit atop of the atmosphere for some time. the question is, how quicly that could be made into water vapor and carbon, what is the leakage rate of hydrogen into space and whether you can create enough water to absorb most of the oxygen from carbon dioxide before the free hydrogen completely escapes the planet.
You could still use solar powered pumps to suck harder on the air!
The hardest vacuum you can have is one with nothing in it. If you want to such harder than the vaccum of space, you need to have less than nothing. I'm not sure a vacuum filled with exotic matter would suck more than a vacuum that was merely empty.
Generally you use vaccum to suck air, is the straw where halk in the atmosphere and half out, the force of vaccum would be counteracted by the force of Venus's gravity that holds the air onto it surface in the first place.
The Best way to change your government is to convince your fellow countrymen to change the government. The Strength of the West is its democracy. I am convinced that we wouldn't be as rich if it weren't for our democratic traditions. Their is a good reason why Russia is poor, and that is because it has been in the thrall of dictators and monarchs for most of its history, and the interests of the people were not addressed, and I think they are still not being addressed. I don't think its in the Russian peoples interest to get into a war with the US or western civilization, I don't think it is in their interests to support Islamic radicalism, terrorism, or Iran's attempt to get the nuclear bomb, the only reason they are doing this is to get our goat, but it also puts the Russian people in danger of getting in a conflict with us over matters of national pride only, and who is the cock that rules the roost. the Russians would like to be number one, and their is only one number one, and at the moment it is the United States. It is easier to destroy than to build, and so the Russians are putting in the greater effort in trying to knock us down from our perch than to build themselves up, that is the tragidy that is Russia today. I'm a believer in positive competition and positive national rivalry, wear each country strives to be great rather than to try amd tear each other down. There is only one number one, but number two isn't so bad, and as long as their is peace in the world, it doesn't matter, what matters is how each individual lives in his own country.
I think the West's greatest weakness is a lack of unity, and the negative national rivalry where each country seeks to tear into each other and everyone tears into the country that is on top, and while they are all fighting to see who is "King of the Hill", the West pays no attention to external threats to western civilization that terrorism represents. Do you know what MoveOn.org is all about? It is about a group of people who think the United States shouldn't be on top, and their primary concern is removing the US from the leadership position in the West, they don't care what the terrorists are doing, as far as they are concerned, they are just tools to drive the US from its preeminent position. I think the main reason the US is the most powerful nation of the West is because of its population, there are 300 million of us. Europe has more people, but they are divided among many nations. The United States is 300 million middle class individuals, some countries have higher per capita incomes than we do, but their populations are small. Some countries have more people than we do, but their people are poor. The United States is a large population country with a relatively high wealth and income level, that is why we are a superpower. The other countries in the high income category are China, India, and I think the United States is the Third most populaous country, and I think Indonesia is the fourth.
Therefore if someone doesn't want us to be the leading super power in the world, he has to do one of two things either:
1) he must reduce of population, it must be cut down significantly, tens to hundreds of millions of Americans must be killed to make us a small country, I don't see how this can happen without inviting our wrath and loosing our nuclear arsenal on the perpetrators of this genocide.
2) The other is to make us poor, many countries have tried to make us poor, the latest is Venuzualia by trying to raise the price of oil. the price of oil is mostly an irritant to us, we don't live and die by the price of oil. I think if the price of oil was high enough for long enough we would develop alternatives to it and our enemies would no longer have that level to manipulate. Another way to make us poor is to try to get us to become excessively socialistic, if we spend too much on social programs that are inefficient and weigh down the economy, then our economy would not grow as fast or might shrink if taxes were too high. I think a low tax regime has positive effects on growth and over the long term has greater positive effect on tax revenue raised than raising taxes will have. Their is an optimum tax level where economic efficiency is the highest, and generally that number is closer to 0% taxation than it is to 100% taxation. I do not think it is the business of government to tax people so high that they do not get rich; I think if you let people get rich, then they'll generate more income for the tax coffers. I don't blame Capitalism for the fact that some people are poor, I blame the fact that poor people do not have marketable skills and so cannot get higher paying jobs. Government can train people and provide for education so people can find better jobs, and I think that's a legitimate thing for governments to do, but they should not interfere with capitalism while doing so, because doing so will make the country poor, and that is just what our enemies want.
I understand that individual Europeans aren't always supporters of their governments, and neigther are Americans for that matter, it just seems that in my case at least, if I were President of my country, the policies of my country would not be so different from George W. Bush. I believe that action speaks louder than words and apparently George Bush shares this sentiment, maybe he depends too much on his actions speaking for themselves. George BUsh ought to realize that in politics talk does matter, its just that talk alone is no substitute for action. Terrorists in the middle east are plotting against us, Iran's trying to get the bomb, and the UN is filled with hot air and nothing but hot air. If you want to stop Iran from getting the bomb, the only thing that will stop them is action. The UN can be used as an excuse for inaction, if we try to get all the countries onboard to stop Iran, they never will, so all that is left is only talk and inaction. The Iranians want us to talk and negotiate until we are blue in the face while they build an atomic bomb. Russia, it seems would like Iran to get the atomic bomb, so it will let nothing occur in the Security council other than talk, because of its negative agenda with the United States and its concern over who is "king of the hill".
George Bush cannot wait forever, and their comes a point where he must shut his mouth, walk away from the UN and take some action against our enemies, that is what the Iraq war was all about as far as I'm concerned, a dictator was taken out, and we will never know what would have happened were he left in place as a consequence, that is the thankless task of preemption. Hitler could have been simularly preempted, and the World would never know about World War II as a consequence, and nobody would ever thank the man who would have deposed Hitler except for a few Jews perhaps, I say the same goes for Saddam. We can never see into the World of what might have been, it is all conjecture. I'm glad we don't have to deal with Saddam as a World leader anymore, the price we paid for getting rid of him was high and were still paying it, but it is our sacrifice, and the World should not look a gift horse in the mouth. Nothing is perfect of course and terrorism may or may not be a side effect of our policy to get rid of Saddam. You see people only see the problems we have, they don't see the problems we've avoided through our actions. Those who complain about out involvement in Iraq, don't want to know about the 500 chemical canisters we discovered there, and they want to ignore the history Saddam had in destabilizing the Middle East and Invading Kuwait, as it doesn't serve their purpose in opposing the Iraq war.
I respect all your opinions, and I will listen to them, and your arguments for them if I don't always agree with them. I am generally prospace, I want humans to go into space and expand into the Solar System, if national pride can be hitched to this wagon, then I would hitch it. I prefer positive competition in the race into space. I want to see all our nations striving to mine the asteroids and settle their people into space, there is plenty of resources for every one. What I don't want is society putting space and the rest of the Universe into a little box and having them focus entirely on terrestrial concerns only, in this respect I find the War on terrorism a distraction on our drive to get into space. I believe in space travel for the everyman, and not just for the elite. By getting most people to live in space, we relieve the Earth of the burden of supporting us. I think Mars is a good first start in our effort to live in space, it is an easily reachable stepping stone, but I think people will eventually live all over the Solar System, not just on Mars. I think Mars is a good benchmark to get us going on the right technological path toward space travel for the masses, and maybe we can leave the petty concerns of Earth in the dirt where it belongs.
Islamo-facism existed way before 9/11. Ever hear Munich Olympics? But before it was only given a moment's notice and then got ignored after the immediate crisis was resolved. I remember the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979, day after day they gave coverage of those bearded men holding blindfolded US diplomats hostage, and Jimmy Carter doing nothing. I think we was focusing too much on getting the hostages free and not enough on deterring the Iranians, by showing the world that you pay a price if you take US diplomats hostage, but Jimmy Carter did nothing but talk, and that ended his Presidency. Also some of the Jewish Media elites run Hollywood and the Mainstream Press, and they are not giving the War good coverage at all. I guess the Liberal Jews have not connected with the fact that the Terrorists want to kill them in particular for being Jewish.
I for one am not going to condemn Israel for defending itself when attacked, and you have no right to condemn Israel for defending itself when you do not find yourself under attack by those same groups. Then their is the general suppression of free speech that goes on in Europe, the latest episode occured when the Pope quoted a 14th century Byzantine Emperor for criticising the Muslims for spreading Islam with a sword, if I recall my history right, the Byzantines were being attacked by the Islamic Turks. Yet these muslims are ever so sensitive to being criticised for violence that they object by burning churches in Gaza that aren't even Catholic.
One more thing to add, if you are an atheist and you attack mostly christianity, how do you know you aren't just paving the way for Islam. Islam is making inroads in Europe because no matter what evidence to present that Chritianity is false, people still want to believe in something. A lot of people have a heck of a difficult time facing death, if you deconstruct christianity, then they'll just find them some other religion that promises them eteral reward in the hereafter, and maybe it will be a more destructive religion that Christianity is.
However, it is disputed whether the video tape in question actually depicts bin Laden at all, and not some imposter.
"It was also disputed that the United States ever landed any men on the Moon, and it was disputed that humans evolved from apes, and that the world is much older that 6000 years, it is all a conspiracy by evolutionists to make people think they evoved from apes and to abandon their christian faith." You know I got alot of conspiracy theories for you, their is the NASA cover up of the face and the Pyramids of Mars, they could easily doctor the later photos to make them look like natural formations, couldn't they? No doubt there is a secret world wide conspiracy run by the United States to cover up all evidence of intelligent aliens on Mars and that they are secretly controlling our politicians through mind-waves to make them hide their presence by altering pictures received by our space probes, why aren't these theories given equal credence to the one's that their was no intelligent life on Mars. And you heard the one about the hole in the North pole which opens up into a hollow Earth with an internal sun and whose inner surface is inhabited by dinosaurs?
Making up these theories about the US attacking itself doesn't bring you any brownie points with the Muslim World. The Muslim Radicals will still attack Sweden, France, and Germany no matter how much such countries kow tow to their demands and condemn US "Imperialism" and Israeli "Racism". The Muslim World doesn't care because you are not muslim, if the West divides and attacks itself at their urging, they just smile and say what dumb people these westerners are, they are so easily fooled and divided, and they'll attack and condemn the United States, our greatest enemy out of fear of our little bombs. Obviously Western Europe is right for conquest, they'll say to themselves.
I don't buy all your little theories that assign blame to the United States for the 9/11 attack because of how unlikely it really is. Europeans just need to make up the US as an Imperial Bogieman because they are not up to the task of facing up to the real enemies of western civilization. Kind of like the washed up professional boxer who looks for a 90-year old man as an opponent, and then tries to build him up before the audience as a worthy adversary so the fans will be impressed when he beats him. Politicians in Western Europe are really charitans when they go into the whole anti-US act, they build the US up as a formidable Imperialist opponent and then they defy said imperialist opponent, and since the US let him have his freedom of speech and doesn't send the CIA out to assassinate him, his hand pick audience then applauds him for such bravery and defiance in the face of the US Imperialist aggressor. Then he says he must have the US cowed and afraid since they haven't sent the CIA goon squads out to assassinate him, then the dumb dumb left wingers elect him for such "bravery", and they fall for it everytime.
Why focus on Christianity in particular? There are many other religions that inhibit reason to a greater extent. I believe some features of Christianity allowed for greater technological progress than occured in some other parts of the world.
I also think that some other religions make fertile ground for terrorism, much more so that Christianity. These other religions main adherents are in third world countries, so we aren't allowed to criticise them, because it is so politically incorrect, they are poor for god sake, and lets give them a break and not criticise their religion. we'll we suffered because a third world religion proved to be a fertile field for gaining terrorist converts, and what happened in 2001 is evidence for that, so before you focus your crosshairs of Christianity, why don't you look at some of the World's other religions and see how much problems they cause for humanity.
Russia, has potential, its people are educated, and it could go somewhere if only it would stop thinking like one of the bad guys and stop measuring themselves by their ability to thwart and defy the United States of America, I think that is a negative yardstick that they measure themselves by.
Asteroids as you know aren't perfectly smooth or round, they are filled with crevices and craters. Once you get down into the solid part of the asteroid, then you can brace yourself against one part of the asteroids to drill into another part, you don't need rockets or gravity to do that. You can have tunneling machines that grab onto the walls of the tunnels they make and the ore can be transported to the surface of the asteroid for transport elsewhere for processing.
I think the Europeans were coddled too much during the Cold War, the US contributed too much to NATO and the Europeans contributed too little. Before World War II, the Europeans were the major powers of the World. The US was up and coming. After the US beat the Axis, and the Europeans were recovering from the war, they got lazy, only the Eastern Block countries built up to their military potential while the Western Europeans got lazy and let the Americans do everything. Great Britian stayed a respectable military power because it was one of the few countries that wasn't overrun by the Germans. France was conquered and liberated, Germany was occupied and split with the Soviets getting the Eastern Portion. The problem was the Europeans were willing to give Communism a fair hearing, and the United States didn't want Western Europe to fall into the Communist camp for its own security reasons, so it turned out that the Europeans were unwilling to defend themselves to their full capacity, some of them said, "Let the Russians come and run our countries." They were in the minority, but they were a significant enough minority to prevent the Western Europeans from spending what they needed to to defend themselves from the Soviets.
Basically, I'm tired of defending the ungrateful Europeans. Maybe the US should withdraw fron NATO and establish bilateral alliances with European countries like Poland, on the model of the US/Israeli alliance. I think countries such as France and Germany weigh down US foreign policy and prevent us from doing what we need to in order to defend ourselves from growing threats. Perhaps it is time that Germany and France learned to face those threats on their own, and they will drop the simplistic idea that Military might = War therefore Military bad, don't spend money on Military, instead let American Military defend us and then we can call them Imperialists and defy America by being uncooperative and contrary.
France and Germany should take the responsibility of defending themselves unto themselves, maybe if they had to worry about the growing threats out there they wouldn't criticise us so severely. If France and Germany falls and becomes part of the enemy camp, then I'm afraid they'll have to worry about us. But we can't be more concerned about France and Germany then the French and Germans are, if they want to stay free, they should bear the burdens of defending their countries.
But your tryimg to prove someone did not exist. How many citizens of the Roman Empire were there that we have no records of now? Did everyone have a social security number back then? No. Did the Romans keep meticulous records of each one of its subjects? No. Does that mean that is the Romans did not keep written documents of a person, that person did not exist? No. In point of fact, Jesus onloy became famous after his death, the people living at the time he was alive had no reason to consider him to be a person of any particular import. But why do you care? There is nothing you can do to disprove his existance, his existance is as equally valid as his non-existance and you can't prove it one way or another. The Ancient Romans kept no records of North America either, does that mean the continent didn't exist back then either?