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Then its just a matter of design and child proofing. How for example, do you prevent your children from driving away with the family car and getting into a traffic accident? There is something called an ignition key, and only the person who has it can start the car. What I'm saying is that a door that leads to the outside will have a similar device, you can't get out without the key. The key might be a physical key, or it might be a combination, a finger print or whatever, but the child won't have it. Also we'll probably have computers that are smart enough not to let someone through the airlock if he's not wearing a space suit or its not properly sealed.
I did mention that a nuclear reactor would be used to heat the water to keep it liquid undeneath. I the artic, you have cold biting winds that carry away the heat from the icy surface. On Mars, you have cold winds, but their less biting than in the artic because they are alot thinner. In fact the Martian atmosphere is often termed a "laboratory vacuum". One of the properties of a vauum, no matter how cold it is, is its insulating characteristic. Water retains alot of heat, and if its heated by a nuclear reactor underneath, the martian wind's ability to carry heat away from the icy surface is very small, the grounds conductivity is alot greater, so perhaps an insulating layer of plastic needs to be placed at the bottom of this lake. Other that that I see no reason why the icy surface could not be -5c on a Martian night that is -70c. You must remember their is very little atmosphere here, the ice will warm up the martian air to about -5c from -70c and that thin air will rise and cold air will take its place, but that air is very thin and it doesn't take much heat to warm it up, and thus not mush heat is lost from the water resevoir, and the nuclear reactor can easily replace that heat. The greatest concern here is heat that is conducted away by the ground.
Well yes, on Earth when you let your kid out to play, there is no possible danger to kill the entire city. But on Mars... :shock:
What sort of explosive do you let your child play with?
If someone doesn't believe in the afterlife, that person would be less likely to fight for his country and freedoms and more likely to make someone else fight for those same freedoms, as this life is all he has, and he's not going to squander it.
Conversely, if someone doesn't believe in the afterlife, that person would be more likely to defend his/ her country and freedoms for a better deal in this one.
Why? Defending your country requires putting your life in danger. Life is a precious commodity to someone who doesn't believe in the afterlife, I doubt he would throw his life away for any reason. For a religious fanatic, its a no-brainer, they figure they're going to die sometime, it might as well be to achieve some useful goal for society. Alot of soldiers have religion, just ask them, I'll bet very few are atheists. Atheists value their own lives highest of all, as existence is all there is. I don't see very many of them stepping up and volunteering to be a dead piece of meat. I'm not saying their cowards, I'm just saying that logically you would expect them to be very careful and not to take unnecessary chances if life is all there is. Maybe some atheists don't think very much before risking their lives, I can't say very much about unthoughtful atheists, maybe they don't realize the danger, maybe their minds and clouded and distracted by other thoughts, its hard to say why they do what they do, but I don't believe that because they are atheists that they would be more likely to risk their lives and not less so.
why criticize religion? Why do the religious refuse to consider dynamic evolution for their static spirituality? That is why we try to show the anti rational religions wrong.
As for 'why would I think that they would make up and combine ideas?' Because that is what they do! For instance! Lord God is Adonai Elohim; Elohim is the star gods of the Phonecians(an underrated culture in the evolution of civilization) and Adonai is the god of the Summarians; they(the jews) just 'combined' the two and said it was their own. Proof that that is how they come up with their various gods. God(s) are just the algebraic x standing for 'i don't know' which was the best theory the ancients could come up with till they saw the power of experiment and mathematics in 600 B.C. through 300 A.D.
Not to mention everything else I've already mentioned that goes unnoted;
That has little to say about whether Jesus existed, there may have been such a person, and you can't disporve that he existed. Whether he did the stuff the Bible said he did is a matter of debate. I believe there are Roman Records of his execution, beyond that, who can say. Why is this so important to you, what do you hope to accomplish with this? People who believe in God or Jesus don't need proof, it is a matter of faith. Proving it is impossible as their are no independent records, and as their are no independent records disproving it is just as impossible, you can doubt the miracles, many people do, but you've set out on a much more difficult goal of disproving Jesus existed, and I don't think there is any way you can.
it's called the pursuit of truth which only a true scientist would know about; the rest of your responce is a true mess of thought which would take a lot more time to disect; you have heard of the conferences of necine havn't you? That's just for starters not to mention you ignored points and facts I made;
There is no way to find out the truth. You can doubt the miracles if you want, but their is no way to find out whether or not Jesus existed. Christianity had an enourmous impact on the West and the Roman Empire, and they are the ones who kept the historical records. If Jesus existed, they would be very interested in saying so, if he did not exist, then they'll be the very last to admit it. There is simply no unbaised source of record keeping. If records of Jesus's birth are not found, it doesn't mean that Jesus wasn't born, it merely means that no records were found. Something happened to create this religion, but it was so long ago, that we have no means of finding out exactly what it was. I don't know what you can do, do you have a time machine? That would be the only way to find out for sure.
The first thing is Mars has almost enough air pressure for liquid water to exist. On some places on Mars during certain times of the year, liquid water can exist on the surface of Mars, and the geological evidence suggests that water did exist on the surface of Mars on many occasions. Keeping water liquid in a MArtian environment is not the same as doing so on the Moon for instance. Once good thing is that Mars is very cold most of the time and ice will form on the upper surface of any lake that is established, that ice will keep the water below from boiling away, although it will sublimate away from the top layer of ice during warmer periods. The solution is simply to pump more water from the ground to replace that which is lost to the Martian air.
You say,
On Earth to keep liquid water in a pond below the surface ice the water must be at least 1.2 m thick. On Mars probably something like 5 metres. That's gonna weight something like 1570 metric tonnes for a 10 m radius, if the water is enclosed in a double walled dome. I doubt you can take from Earth a structure to resist such pressure.
On Earth liquid water can exist without any layer of ice on top at all. One Mars, which is a cold environment fortunately, you need a layer of ice on top to keep the water below from boiling away, just as is the case on Europa. Sometimes the martian days are balmy and a layer of ice will sublimate away on top, but more can always be pumped out of the ground. I think on average Mars is a cold place and any lake established will always have a layer of ice on top. I doubt Mars will be warm enough for long enough for the top layer of ice to melt away completely.
As for water pressure, you must realize the air of Mars is very thin, so the water pressure will also start out low, less that the surface air pressure on Earth in fact just below the ice. Since water is denser than air, the water pressure will build up rapidly as you descend to lower depths, not as quickly as it would on Earth due to the lower gravity, but still at a certain depth, the water pressure will equal Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level, and at that point you can balance that out with 1 bar air pressure under a plasic dome. The dome would need very little strength as the air pressure will be only slightly greater than the water pressure, just enough to hold out the water. Since it never snows on Mars, the surface ice will be quite clear and sunlight will filter readily through. All that extra water on top because of the low gravity does mean that you will get excellent protection from radiation, cosmic rays , solar flares, you name it, and the water can be used for other things like drinking, raising fish, production of fuel and a number of other things, it would basically be a resevoir that doubles as radiation shielding.
I don't know why your talking about weight, its not as if we're bringing this water from Earth, it is all Martian water.
The trick is to keep the technology comprehensible and society understandable while the humans remain human one million years in the future. I find it very hard to imagine one million years of contiuous technological progress. I have some imaginings of us uploading anf becoming electronic life forms in some type of computer matrix. This would make a kind of sense, because if were were computer simulations of human beings in a simulated universe run on a vast computer network and the program was written just right, we would then be able to control our environment to a much greater extent that we ever could in the real Universe.
For instance, imagine a simulation of Earth with humans on it with an Earth like environment. If a sim-human wanted to travel somewere, he would just have to utter some command words that the computer would respond to, and that computer would simply reassign his coordinates in the simulated world making him teleport to the location he wanted. People could live in houses that would need no doors, they just teleport outside when they wanted fresh air or they could command the computer to make a window appear in their homes and a door when they needed to go outside. When the sim human got hungry, he could simply open the magic cupboard and a cooked steaming hot meal would be ready their waiting for him. Aging would be wholly unnecessary, the computer could simply regenerate the human body as often as necessary to make it stay young, people would be nearly immortal, and as long as their was information about them in the computer, they could always be ressurected from whatever accident befell them. In short life as a simulated human would be much better than that of a real human, but we want real humans in our story don't we.
So where do we get the real humans from?
Perhaps from a Cryonics institute. There are people who arrange to have their bodies frozen after death in hopes of a future technological resurection, perhaps after this happens, the bodies are sent into space, way out into the Solar System in order to stay frozen. After about a million years, the frozen bodies somehow get to Mars and their are machines to resurect them, either by unfreezing them, or using the information from their frozen bodies to make other human body that duplicate the memories and personalities of those individuals frozen, and of course make them all about 18 years old physically. I guess this sort of thing would resemble Riverworld in some respects. People would be resurrected by machines and then the machines would step aside and let the drama begin. The human protagonists would find themselves on a terraformed Mars, and during their journey they will find out why Mars was terraformed, where the people who terraformed it are, and also why they are here. Seems like a fairly decent plot for a science fiction story, don't you think?
The only problem with the ground is that its not transparent. We want to let sunlight in so we can grow our food. If we use water for shielding we are not going to bring it from Earth, so it won't be part of the mass budget, but once we are on Mars, it would be desirable to find a source of water, once that is accomplished, we can use water as radiation shielding while also taking advantage of its transparent optical qualities to grow food, now what's the problem with this?
What if for instance we were to pump Martian out of a frozen aquifier, and supposing there was enough water, what if we made an artificial lake, filling up a crater and then placing the Mars habitat under water? Mars is fairly cold most of the time. If we did this during Martian winter the water would freeze almost immediately. We could use a nuclear reactor to keep the bottom part of the lake liquid and have a submerged habitat. Perhaps the frozen surface of the lake would keep the liquid water from boiling away much as it does for Europa. The water pressure on the underwater habitiat could be enough to balance out a 1 bar atmosphere under a plastic dome. Their would be an extention that leads to the surface of the ice where astronauts can get out and do EVAs. The temperature of the water in the pond would be just above freezing. the interior of the dome would be heated more than this. It doesn't really snow on Mars, because of that fact, the surface of the ice wouldn't be white but clear as glass instead, it would require occasional sweeping to prevent dust from accumulating on top, but I believe that with proper maintnance the ice surface of the artifical lake can be kept clear and allow sunlight to filter through. Another idea would be to raise fish in this lake, another source of food, I also see no reason why artic plants couldn't also grow under water at the bottom of this lake. There would be moon pools where divers can go in and harvest some of these fish for food. I think there is enough water on Mars to do something like this.
I view the Iraq war as sort of parting of the curtains, we didn't so much make enemies as reveal who they were. There are various shades of neutrality in this. i wouldn't mind France being neutral in the Iraq War, I really wouldn't. If France would simply shrug its shoulders and say it wouldn't care to participate in the Iraq War, that would be fine with me. The problem I have with France is that it wasn't simply neutral and uninvolved, it actually campaigned against out plans to rid the World of the Saddam menance once and for all.
If France truly was neutral, it would stay out of our way, and let Americans take the casualities and the French can happily stay on the sidelines. The problem was France was trying to stop the American Invasion of Iraq and it really wasn't their business, they were doing everthing short of actually sending French troops into battle against American troops, it seems they really wanted to save this dictator for some reason, and I don't understand why. Iraqi contracts with France really weren't worth that much, and there was really no reason why they couldn't have new contracts with the new Iraqi government if they stayed neutral. Why did France have to deal only with a brutual dictator that murdered many millions of its own people?
What the French and many Europeans don't understand, is that the United States really doesn't get anything positive out of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the contracts with Halibuton really aren't alot, and the money their getting is coming directly from US taxpayers in any case, not from the Iraqi people or their oil fields, as the MoveOn.Org people like to mythologize. If George Bush really wanted to make Haliburton rich, there was a more direct way to go about this than to start a war. The idea that we need to start wars to make our corporations rich is just nuts! The US Government is quite capable of appropriating money and simply giving it to Haliburton for no other reason than to enrich its stock holders, this would have been less costly than actually fighting a war, as in a war, you must produce material that gets wasted and used up, if we simply gave Haliburton the money directly there would be less waste, because then the shareholders would buy consumer goods vacation homes and most of that money would be plowed right back into the US economy without some of it being wasted to supply the soldiers with material, and munitions that get used up, consumed or destroyed by enemy action. Money that gets spend on bullets, and bombs is gone when those munitions are expended, much better for our economy if that money got spend on homes, cars, country clubs and Yauhts.
The fact is we are in Iraq for another reason, to prevent a dictator from becoming too powerful and threatening our oil supply and thus messing with our economy. Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, George Bush wanted to make sure this did not happen again, he probably figured that so long as we were mobilizing to fight terrorism, he might as well take care of the Saddam problem too. Who could have figured that Europeans and France were capable of showing such emotion and feeling for the "Butcher of Bagdad", and making a villian into a Matyr? I wouldn't. What about the terrorists and the radicalization of the Arabs? I feel that they were always there plotting against us, and all the Iraq War did was "raise the curtain" and reveal who and how many they were.
I think if we wanted a quick war, we would have had to be harsh and brutal with Iraq and Iran, this was not to be, and I find brutality to be distasteful amd unpleasant as do most Americans.
The only other option is to outlast the enemy while being careful to avoid causing too many civilian casualities on our part, liberals undermine this effort by complaining about this long unending war and lack of progress. I don't like killing large numbers of civilians to subjugate a Nation, but the liberals don't like this second strategy of seemingly unending conflict and lack of progress. I think the price of quick progress however is leveling cities and basically destroying Iraqi society and ruining it much like the way the Ancient Romans Ruined Carthage.
The third alternative is to admit defeat and retreat, we pretend that the Terrorists are our superiors and we act defeated, yet by doing this we give our enemies a sense of accomplishment and only encourge them to attack us further in hopes of making us retreat some more.
I'd much rather stay the course and fight this war for generations that to admit defeat or to use harsh and brutal tactics for a quick ending. Which would you prefer?
I tend to think the ISS is way over budget, but the Russia we started the project with was not the same Russia that exists today. Yeah, we started it, so best to finish it to get something out of our expense and trouble, but competition is not a bad thing either. We're not close to approaching the maximum resources from any of the countries, alot of it depends on public interestm the more the public interest, the more money that will be made available. We can certainly afford it. What is worse two missions each with 6 astronauts from two different countries or one mission with 6 astronauts with each country paying for half a mission instead of a complete mission each?
I get a sense that you don't really want asteroid mining to work because it will interfere with your other ideas or so you think.
Ah yes, because I don't parrot the "asteroid mining = good" dogma, I must have a hidden, alterior, manipulative, Maciavellian agenda!
but if the drill presses down to bite against the Phobos surface, it will also be pushing up against 1 ton of machinery... the solidity of Phobo's surface will prevent the machinery from rising further and it will hold it fast
Heh yeah, except your drill rig will also spin in circles as soon as the drill bit gains traction with the surface... There is still a substantial amount of force needed to get a drill bit to even start, and I have doubts that just inertia would be enough. Even if it were however, you'll need alot of propellant to push around the drill rig. How efficient is that?
I believe NASA solved that problem during the Gemini program, they invented tools for working in space, one such was a drill with a counter rotation ring, that way it didn't spin the astronaut. Larger counter rotation rings would no doubt work. its not that I'm an engineer or something, but sometimes you sound like your saying, "Oh here's a problem we have to deal with, lets give up, there's no way anyone's going to solve it!" I bet you their is an engineer who upon reading that sentence is going to say, "what do you mean I can't solve it?" Breaking the light barrier, building starships, finding a cure for old age, and mining the asteroids are all at the same level of difficulty. In each of these endeavours you are going to encounter problems. if you say, "This has never been done, I give up the problem won't be solved by you. I may not be an engineer, but I think I have enough of an intuitive grasp to realize that mining the asteroids is not as hard as finging a way of traveling at 50% of the speed of light. I think if we are going to settle the Solar System, we'll have to find a way to use the asteroids. Mars doesn't have that much surface area, and Interstellar travel will be extremely hard and expensive. The easiest thing to do to accomodate our expanding civilization is to build free floating space settlements, and this will require asteroids alot more than lifting material off of planets.
its called invention
Invention does not nessesarrily require radical thinking.
I guess its a matter of how far you think "outside of the box". I don't think mining the asteroids is as far outside of the box as building an antigravity machine to lift yourself off the surface of the Earth. The further you go outside the box, the more likley you are to go wrong, on the otherhand the best answer might not be inside the box, so you have to look elsewhere for it.
Well, speaking about how bad might be communism, capitalism, fascism, anarchy and every other form of government (or no government), I think we should always remember something history teaches us for thousands of years: no matter how wonderful is the system, there are always people which will corrupt, pervert or ruin it for their own selfish goals. It's the human nature killing and enslaving us, nothing else.
Well capitalism takes human imperfection into account, it makes people compete against other people and tends to discourage corruption as that makes compeditors inefficient when they pay off unproductive people, the vulnerable spot is with government that taxes the productive sector, there you can have corruption because their is no competition in government.
Under Communism their is no competition in the entire economy, everone works for the government and so corruption is everywhere.
Assuming the worse is called paranoia and it always leads to Chaos and destruction. I never though Sadam Hussein was much of a threat prior to the war but a lot of people did so I can’t site that as an example of Bushes stupidity assuming he didn’t already know that Sadam wasn’t much of a threat. Anyway, I don’t shed a tear for Sadam but I’ll say this. An alliance works two ways. Unilateralism is one way. With bushes antics of you are either with us or against us and of course freedom fries is it Europe or the US that is being diplomatically divisive. Well, at least the US is acting with courage and principle so I give them the moral edge.
It is a simple question, "are you with us or against us?" Don't you think it is wise to know the loyalties of your supposed allies? Would you want to go into combat with someone you didn't trust? How do you know the Muslim guy who's standing next to you isn't going to shoot you in the back? Betrayal is a common theme in the Middle East, they like to pretend to be your friend and to want to help you and then they stab you in the back and other arabs call them a hero for being so clever with this tactic of betrayal. Whereas in other places this is considered dishonorable, there is not such dishonor in such behavior in the Middle East. Treachery is part and parcel of everyday life, why else do you have so many people posing as pregnant women and blowing themselves up and then having crowd sing and dance their name afterwards. When your opporating in the Middle East, you want to know one thing, "are you with us or against us?" I think that's a reasonable question. I tend to think working with one's enemies who want you dead is not a good idea. What is this anyway with the prime minister of Iraq visiting the Iranian President? If he's going to fight terrorism, what business is it of his to go visit with one of its sponsors. I tend to think if you fight terrorism, you fight all terrorism and everyone who supports terrorism is the enemy. I don't know what the heck we are doing, having an embassy in Syria, a sponsor of terrorism.
I think with the French, we should make them choose sides, rather than let them play both sides. If France is going to deal with our enemies behind our backs, then we should push France over to the enemy's camp so at least we know who our enemy is, instead of having to deal with backstabbing and betrayal, it a very simple choice for France, pick a side, and if you pick the wrong side, your going to have to deal with us.
What use is their in dealing with backstabbing double dealers anyway, why don't you tell me that?
You can have a sphere on stilts sitting inside a crater with a transparent upper dome for growing vegatables in a greenhouse. The Dome would be made out of insulated glass or plastic on top of which you could place the water shield to block radiation. The water is enclosed and sealed away from the Martian environment with a flexible stretchible plastic so it doesn't sublimate away and when the water freezes, it expands and the plastic expands with it, when it melts it contracts. If it cracks so what? the plastic hold it together and the cracks can be repaired by melting the ice and refreezing it along the crack lines. If the water is pure and without bubbles, it will also be as clear as glass.
Your assuming perfect knowledge on Bush's part. The Point is Saddam wasn't cooperating with the inspection regime, and since he was hiding something we had to assume the worst. Saddam's Iraq was after all a defeated power in the Persian Gulf War, it is also a no account third world country, and I can think of no unworthier reason for breaking the NATO alliance. Its not so terrible that Saddam is gone, that the Iraqis and the Arabs don't know how to deal with it without murdering each other is there problem. I'd say the problem with Iraq was the dictator, not what he had. If you can't trust Saddam, you must assume the worst.
...As for the wisdom as Iraq being a foothold to stop the third great Jihad and the forming of the caliphate, I am not sure that is wise either as Iraq may of hurt future support by allies to help in what may need to be done against Iran and has weakened America’s stomach for the realities of war. Iraq has been very useful as a center point of anti US propaganda without engaging the real source of radical Islam and the threat it poses to the free world.
I am not saying the United States shouldn’t of gone into Iraq. I am saying that it was a questionable act that could have been delayed for diplomatic and political reasons. Wouldn’t it of made sense to go after North Korea first and see if that would of caused the Iranians to start shaking in their boots?
What would you have us do? George Bush already waited quite a long time for international consensus to materialize and it didn't. Sadaam was flouting the international inspection regime and George Bush waited over a year to build international consensus to do something about him and there was no international consensus. I think the world was just trying to use the United States as an international scape goat.
You see some people like to appear corageous by taking on the "big bad bully", but they don't want a real big bad bully to take on, because that might be hard, so instead they take on the United States and try to make us out to be the "Big Bad Bully" with their "Bush Hatred" propaganda. Europe has no capability to take on the real bullies of this world, the Sadaam Husseins, the Ayatohlas, the dictators, the terrorists, tangling with them may get some people hurt and make their citizens targets of terrorists, oh no can't mess with them, so instead the politicians need to make an enemy out of the United State and show their defiance by opposing us. The NATO alliance then divides and does just what our enemies want us to do, now who's fault is that? Cheap heroics is always tempting for those third rate politicians without principles, Hitler did it with the Jews, he made the Jews out to be a big menance threatening Aryan German's racial purity with their corruption and what some western politicians are doing with the United States and George Bush is not very different, its all about power, and the lack of scruples some people have in their quest for it.
No, I said that a way to gain competance in a particular skill was by trying; there are plenty of things that we can predict that trying will yeild little or no bennefit. Asteroid mining is one of these, that all the methods used to accomplish the mining will have to exert force on the asteroid, we know this from highschool physics, but thanks to Newton there isn't an efficient way to do this. There is just not, the only way to exert force is by using a rocket, which is not going to do, or else string thousands of kilometers of wire around the thing. Can it be done this way? Sure, but we know that it can't be done efficiently, and so the penalty of launching easy-to-get reasources from Earth/Moon/Mars is less than the penalty of trying to dig rocks. Scale is everything, that it will just be easier to increase the scale of a Earth/Moon/Mars fuel factory & launch system despite burning most of it for launch.
I get a sense that you don't really want asteroid mining to work because it will interfere with your other ideas or so you think. I don't know why you think so. if I put my engineers hat on we still have inertia to work against in drilling against an asteroid. If you place a 1 ton drill on the surface of Phobos with the drill bit pointing downward, that drill doesn't weigh much against Phobos' gravity, but if the drill presses down to bite against the Phobos surface, it will also be pushing up against 1 ton of machinery. if the drill can extend outward while pushing into the surface and drilling and if it can get a sufficient hold onto Phobos surface by drilling downward far enough before the machinery lifts off the surface beyond the distance of the extended drill bit, the solidity of Phobo's surface will prevent the machinery from rising further and it will hold it fast. And by using the rocky surface of Phobos as an anchor, you can drill more drill bits into the surface and further secure the mining rigs grip on the moon. And once you have a fairly secure anchorage into the Moon's surface you can drill with very large drill bits down to significant depths and get out lots of material. We've never done this before, but it looks like you are afraid to think outside the box like it says at the bottom of your posts. Sometimes however thinking outside the box is what's called for, its called invention. If we are going to mine the asteroids we have to invent a new process, its as simple as that. Avoiding mining the asteroids and mining Mars instead because their is a gravity well to work against and we know how to mine in those conditions is just silly. Inventing a new mining process is only a little trouble, I'm sure some clever person can figure it out, maybe you don't want to , but I bet there is someone else who is willing to give it a try. We should start with probes to the asteroids and phobos, the simple sample return mission. If we can retrieve some samples from an asteroid we simply have to scale up the process and we have an asteroid mining operation.
Do you really like living in a cave, even a pressurized cave. Ice makes a better shield than dirt anyway, because a large component if ice is hydrogen. hydrogen is composed of protons and protons don't shatter when hit by cosmic rays, when the same hist dirt their is secondary radiation. Also another advantage of ice and water is that its transparent, and allows sunlight through and plants to grow, it is much more efficient to use sunlight for this purpose than artificial illumination, just so long as you filter out the bad stuff. Ice makes an excellet radiation shield and so does water, the only thing that needs to be done is to protect the water from the Martian environment, so therefore you encase it in transparent plastic. Domes with water above will tend to be very flat, so they are probably best built from the walls of a crater or a hole dug in the ground. this still allows plenty of natural sunlight to filter through, and you can add UV protection as required.
Children will have to be watched closely and children mostly learn what not to do. On Earth Jennifer could have run out in the middle of the street and get hit by a car, these things happen, the key is teaching your children how to be safe and installing child proof safety locks in the airlocks for children who are too young to learn. These issues are the same on both Earth and Mars, it is the specific dangers that are different only.
Lack of evidence is not evidence for absense. Why is it so important to you to prove that Jesus did not exist? Something evidently did cause Christianity to happen, part of that something may be in the form a of a person named Jesus, that seems the most likely explaination at any rate. Do you think someone just made him up? And if so, who was that someone? Do you think all the Pagan priests of Rome got together and decided to make up a monotheistic religion? That they all agreed to abandon their faith and adopt this new one, and as the discussion wore on, do you thing they decided to make it an offshoot of Judaism as Judaism has the useful properties of Monotheism that is so very useful in getting Roman citizens to obey the law? Paganism allowed for too much difference in opinion and even the gods can be wrong, as they were not perfect and they were powerful, so you had to listen to them some of the time, but no all powerful nor always right. Under the Pagan religion, a Roman citizen can easily say, Jupiter is wrong and he will not be arrested for it. the Roman attitude was, if you insult Jupiter, then its just between you and Jupiter, but in the meantime you better stay out of our town as we don't want Jupiters wrath upon you also falling on our town as well because your in it. There was no Roman Inquisition for the Gods, if you insulted Caesar that was a different story, but if the Romans felt that if you insulted the Gods, the Gods themselves will get even with you in their own way. You respected the gods because of their power over nature not because they were always right.
With monotheism, God is always right according to the religion, the idea of blasphemy becomes popular and it becomes the government's job to enforce religious law and to disallow anyone from doubting God, it is a kind of thought police, but I don't believe the Romans just made up Christianity and wrote up a backstory for it.
GCNRevenger, just because you can't think of a solution to all the problems of asteroid mining doesn't mean no one can. I didn't say we wouldn't have to learn to do a whole lot of new things to mine the asteroids, but as you said in another thread, we can only learn by trying. Outlining the technical difficulties of asteroid mining is not a reason not to try, it is a challenge for our next generation of engineers. There are two ways to react to the technical difficulties of asteroid mining, one way is to be daunted, which is what you seem to advocate here, and the other way is to be driven to find solutions to these problems.
This may be the Mars Society, but I don't think it has to be either Mars or the Solar System. I tend to think that a manned Mars program is only the tip of the spear to get us out traveling the entire Solar System. Mars is the most visible part of this effort, it is a benchmark to test our capability to travel the entire Solar System. I think we should focus on Mars because it is something, it is a place we can go to, and there we can start small. I think it would be a better idea to start with a Mars Base, because if we send humans to Mars at all we will have to start a Mars base to house them for at least two years until the next orbital launch window back to Earth. I think it makes alot more sense to try for Mars than to try immediately building an O'Neill colony at L5. I think O'Neill colonies have their place, but one of the best ways to acquire some of the technology to build O'Neill colonies is to first try to land men on Mars. Mars has got everything, including two asteroids we can practise mining on. Maybe the purpose is to refule the interplanetary spaceship, but in the process we learn to mine an asteroid and later on we can use that same skill to mine other asteroids, some near Earth perhaps and use the material from those asteroids to build O'Neill space colonies. we all have to start some where, and Mars looks like a good place. And to top it off we have the more immediate goal of establishing a human colony on Mars and learning more about that planet. Building an O'Neill colony by itself has no more immediate goals, we will first have to mine the asteroids anyway just to build those colonies, so if we are going to mine the asteroids, why not accomplish something useful in the meantime while we learn such as obtain fuel for the interplanetary Martian Spaceship. the first missions to Mars won't require refueling, but we can try it out, and once we learn, we can build later missions that depend on that resource and make travel to Mars just that much cheaper, and ultimately learn how to mine asteroids and later build colonies in space, that is what its all about.
Most people don't care about space, but perhaps they should. The next empires will be made in the Solar System, for most people to turn their back on it is foolish. I just read an article in the New York Times about David Cameron, the Conservative Party Chief and his opionion about fellow conservative George W. Bush. Apparently winning the House of Commons back from Labour is the be all and end all of his existance, and he figures that to do that, he must advocate the opposite of whatever Tony Blair is doing, therefore he burns some bridges with fellow conservatives in the American Republican Party and he calls them all Neo-Conservatives. If David Cameron is not a Neo-Conservative, then what is he, an Old Conservative? Appareantly he's trying to redefine what a conservative is for the purposes of defeating Tony Blair's Party. Personally, I find David Cameron to be a disgusting individual, he may be sounding the death knell of NATO. Just as Poland and Eastern Europe Join NATO, NATO falls appart because of crass power-hungry politicians like David Cameron.
What kind of Old Conservative is David Cameron, is he in the mold of King George the Third perhaps, does he want to end the special relationship between the UK and US the way it started say in 1776? And all over terrorists too? So NATO ends with Tony Blair, when he resigns Great Britian ends the special relationship and the glue that holds NATO together, no one else wants to pick up the mantle because they all want to be friends with Arabs and big oil, they bow before the Oil barrel and abandon the Atlantic Alliance so they can prostrate themselves before Muslims, and be bought by them and their petrodollars as the Arab terrorists attack Americans and the West. Divided they fall! All the lessons of World War II forgotten and over what, Terrorists who don't even have a country? There is no reason for the US to stay in NATO if our allies are going to stab us in the back, it has been a one-way alliance even in the best of times, as all NATO bases are in Europe. If Europe collectively pulled its weight, it would be an equal partner with the US and not a junior partner, but the politicians there have to beat the anti-American drum to make themselves look good. America is the only enemy they can handle, it costs them nothing to make the USA the enemy except the NATO alliance, as they can't handle real enemies such as International Islamic Terrorism. Maybe Charles Lindberg was right, maybe we should have left the UK to its fate during World War II, all this Alliance stuff has bought us nothing. The dictators of the world are having a field day, the NATO alliance is shattering because of Mr Cameron, and they will soon start building their empires without having to look over their shoulders, just as Hitler did. Sooner or later we'll come to a point where we have to fight them and alot of good people will die because the Alliance was not united and we allowed the enemy to grow strong.
We have not lost alot of men in Iraq, Great Britian lost fewer men than we have, but if the UK breaks the alliance then we will lose many more men in the future against an enemy we might easily defeat now if we don't let them grow too strong. I think the inclination is to let them grow too strong and let our children deal with the enhanced menace rather than to face up to them now. The thing about George Bush is that he goes against the Winds of History. The Winds of History are pushing in the opposite direction of where he wants to go. The Winds of History are blowing in the direction of World War III, just like they did previously for the other two World Wars. Most of the people in the World are inclined to let them blow in that direction since that is the easy path to follow, its not very hard not to fight your enemies when they are weak, its better to talk with them, let the enemy grow strong and when the enemy's ready he'll start the conflict with the West at a time of his own choosing. I think Space may be important, it may be a way to escape the destruction of Western Civilization and in fact all terrestrial civilization. The bad guys are getting what they want, the destruction of the Western Alliance all handed over to them on a silver platter by David Cameron and those in the Labour Party who want to oust Tony Blair. the US will get discourage, grow isolationist, and the only recourse for humanity is to find another home other than Earth.
As for authority, there is no World Authority, the UN is a paper tiger, it has failed in Bosnia at the hands of the tiny nation of Serbia, what kind of authority is that? The World is under a kind of controlled chaos, kind of like a town with no law enforcement, people unfortunately have to make their own law based on their own power. If their are terrorists and the United States waits for international saction to fight them, it will wait forever. The terrorists on the otherhand don't have to wait for international permission to attack us. The first obligation of any national government is to protect its citizens, not to slavishly adhere to international law, especially since the UN has proven incapable of protecting us just as it has failed the Bosnians.
Bush Hatred is largely irrational. Most of the Bush haters, if I asked, could not name a single thing that Bush did to them personally. The International Media has been waging an antiBush propaganda campaign against him all led by George Soros. Bush is also the only President that set the United States on a firm commitment to send astronauts to Mars. The Mars program is the new central program of NASA, replacing the Shuttle, all the other presidents fiddled and diddled, they kept the shuttles going on inertia, more lab rats in space, more zero-gee studies, but George Bush started the ball rolling. Thanks to George Bush, we can finally get serious about going to Mars. What have you got against cowboys? Don't you know there are cowboys in Canada too? What about all those people who criticise Bush's cowboy diplomacy and then bite into a hamburger? Where did that hamburger come from? It didn't grow on a hamburger tree.
People always assume George Bush is dumb and then their sorry. Everybody things a democratic victory in Congress is a shoe in, they've been wrong before about Bush. When Bush has a victory, it often is a come from behind victory. Also I wonder what Secretary of State Conzaleeza Rice told the Israeli Prime Minister to get him to agree to a disadvantageous ceasefire for the Israelis. Did she promise something to him, like maybe doing something about Iran perhaps?
What about unilateralism anyway? If something needs doing and the world doesn't go along, something still needs doing. The Civilized World always likes to avoid wars until the last possible minute, Hitler counted on this fact to invade various countries one-by-one. World War II was a very costly war because in part we let Hitler get as far as he did before someone with backbone decided to stop him. From the time France fell to the time Germany invaded the USSR, Great Britian was a unilateralist. Hitler offered Churchill peace terms in exchange for him giving Germany a free hand in Europe, Churchill was a stubborn man just like George W. Bush, his was a lone voice in the wilderness until Chamberlain imploded with his disasterous foreign policy. The United States was the "Europe" back then, we considered Hitler to be Europes problem rather than our own, besides the "Red Coats" were our traditional enemy from the time of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, why should we help that Imperialist power that so many Americans gave their lives to win independence from? Many Americans would have been happy to let the UK hang. Not Roosevelt, but he was in a minority, only chance and a stupid move by Japan and an even stupider move by Hitler to back up Japan saved the day.
All this antiBush stuff is attributed to what I call the NATO effect. NATO is basically an umbrella organization in which the United States helps Europe to defend itself, the main problem is that over the decades, the US has been too helpful to the Europeans, they have come to take national defense for granted, and gotten used to regarding war as a choice. If someone attacks a country in Europe, instead of lending assitance, they say, "Give Peace a Chance" and then the USA come to the rescue with troops, and then half the Europeans call us Imperialists and cowboys for stopping that dictator in Europe when they really want to find out what made that dictator so angry in the first place to invade that little European country. Whenever someone other that the USA starts a war, the assumption is that the belligenrent must be justifiably angry at someone, and the effort goes into finding out what made him so mad in the first place rather than in stopping him.
You can't give peace a chance if their is no chance for peace. I don't see a chance for peace between the United States and Iran for instance. Iran hasn't offered the olive branch to the US for over 30 years, oh they'll say anything to buy time to get their bomb built, but I don't trust anyone who has said "Death to America" for over 30 years.
And why can't you dig into its surface? the best way to find out if something can be done is to try it. We've landed probes on asteroids before, and it turns out not to be that hard. That we've never mined an asteroid before does not mean we can't mine asteroids. The people who shake their heads and say we can never do this will never try and consequently never suceed.
How long has it been for people shaking their heads about crossing the Atlantic? People were for centuries shaking their heads saying that we can never cross the Atlantic, that it is way too vast or that we'll fall off the edge of the Earth. So long as the learned minds kept shaking their heads, no one tried, the Romans could have, but they had experts telling them not to bother, that it was impossible and that their was more productive uses of their resources in building armies and conquering their immediate neighbors.