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But Phobos is in a much shallower gravity well, it ms more sense to obtain fuel from Phobos than Earth's Moon as you have to fight that larger moons gravity well to get the fuel to your ship. Besides were talking about a circuit between Earth and Mars, at some point along that curcuit, the interplanetary ship is going to have to refuel. Why not refuel at Phobos instead of low Earth Orbit where there is nothing to refuel from except what is brought up from Earth?

I'm curious, how would you then turn a warp drive into a time machine? Because unlike a Tipler Time cylinder, or a Wormhole, with a warp drive, the drive actually travels back in time with the traveller. If I were to write a science fiction book, and wanted the heros to visit the time of the dinosaurs, then he would do it in a spaceship equipped with a warp drive. If you have a "Many Universes" Sort of history, what you'd do then is to bring one end of a wormhole with you when you warped back in time to the dinosaur age, then land on Earth 65 million years BC and the colonists can then step through the wormhole. Of course colonizing the past would change history, but presumable with the wormhole you could step across the timeline and be back to the original history in the present no matter what goes on on the other side of the wormhole.

The main point that's hard to swallow is that people with this technology can go back many different times and leave wormholes in many different eras that diverge into parallel historical tracks due to the activities of the time travellers. The economic potential of this is the fact that you could mine the same gold vein many different times. People from the future whould know where to look for all the mineral deposites they already mined out and mine them out again in the past. You'd have a virtually infinite supply of resources. In a world like this, there is no reason to explore the stars when you have many different parallel Earths you can colonize and exploit.

Also if you were to travel to a historical era such as Earth 1776, it would quickly cease to be the year 1776 once the time travellers make contact with the locals. They can all be educated and brought up to modern standards, what happens with regards to the revolutionary war becomes irrelevant and time colonists from the future barge through pave highways and build houses. If the British and colonial armies cause trouble, then a modern strike force would quickly set things right so they don't bother the time colonists who are trying to settle here.

However, when I tried to demonstrate how you can travel in time with the Warp drive I failed, because I assumed that there was no time dialation in the warp bubble relative to the observer as that ship was not actually moving and was instead creating space behind it and estroying space in fron of it. Naturally all this spacial expansion and contraction would stretch and compress lightwaves traveling from it. If for example a ship were to travel instantaneously from Earth to Alpha Centauri and there was no time dialiation between the ship and the observer, what would be observed is the ship or the effects of the warp bubble moving away from the observer at appearently the speed of light until 4.4 years passed and the ship will have actually have been seen to arrive by the observer. Time on the ship as it moves away will appear frozen as the occupant of the ship experiences no passage of time.

I believe the operative phrase is oppositional contrairianism. The liberals don't have any good ideas, so they just oppose whatever ideas George Bush has.

I'll tell you one thing George Bush has done, he's given a manned Mars program a bigger boost than any Democratic President has done. Ok, Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson did make Apollo happen, I'll grant you that, but lets compare JFK and LBJ with George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, now whats the difference between the first two Presidents and the second two?

Answer: The first two are now dead and the second two are alive.

The kind of Democrat represented by LBJ and JFK is going extinct, what happened to Lieberman when his Party turned on him is an example of what's happening to all the moderate democrats who stand on principle and patriotism. Basically Lieberman put his country before the goals of his party and for that the Democratic Party has not forgiven him. The Democratic Party wants to see the USA defeated in some way by the terrorists so that the Democrats can take back their seats in Congress and win back the Presidency under the platform of, "I'm not so stupid as George W. Bush!"

Those of you supporting a Manned Mission to Mars should consider the last two Democratic Presidents that supported a similar goal to the Moon and how dead they now are, as compared to the two living Republican Presidents that supported such a goal and the Presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton who didn't. I think the resemblence is uncanny, but have you ever considered why Mars is Red and the Earth is Blue? Remember how Al Gore wanted to explore the Earth, while the Two Bushes wanted to send men to Mars? There you have it, Red State/Red Planet, Blue State/Blue Planet. 

When you have one world wide agency you have one leadership who decides what avenues to follow whos advice to listen to and whos not to. That agency can go down one corridor and get stuck at a dead end, someone else who is not listened to may have some good advice that the administrator just won't listen to, without rival agencies in competition to this one, he has nowhere else to go with this idea, however under a compeditive system he does. An Administrative monopoly is not always the best thing, as despite the pooling of resources, that whole agency and everyone under it is still subject to the limitations of the same leadership.

The International Space Station is sort of like that, they had the attitude that no matter what, we're going to build this space station, if someone has better ideas, too bad, the ISS takes the lion's share of the budget and you just get the crumbs left over if their are no cost overruns with the ISS. The other countries pool their resources together and thus sucking out money from people who may have better ideas. Competition frees up more resources than collective action as national pride is at stake under a compeditive situation where its not under a collective space agency. If something goes wrong with the project fingers always point to the prime contributor to the project and all the lessor contributors escape culpability.

In a compadative situation, one country can land men on the moon while the other piles more money into an expensive space station that delivers little return for the effort. The space station financers realize their error as their compeditors lead ahead of them in the space race and thus change their funding priorities to correct for this.

Not all states are intelligently run though. Instead of getting the smartest man in Russia running Russia we instead get Vladimir Putin, who runs his foreign policy so as to oppose everything the US tries to accomplish for no better reason than to show Russia's independence from us. In other words we determine Russia's position  by taking one foreign policy position and thus causing Russia to take the position that's diametrically opposed to ours. Sounds to me like Russia is more interested in being a compeditor than a partner. So if Russia wants to be a compeditor with the United States, then let it be a compeditor!

China doesn't have a dog in the Middle East fight, if it sides with the Arabs against Israel, that is pretty crass. Besides most Chinese aren't muslims. According to the Iranian leader they are infidels too. Seems that Russia and China have abandoned all pretense to nuclear nonproliferation, they want Iran to have nuclear weapons, so what are they waiting for? Russia and China have nuclear weapons, why don't they just give them some. And we can give nukes to Japan, maybe arm the Chechens and the Tibetians with Nukes too. Hey boys, it nukes for everybody!

Now would you like to live in a world like that? I don't think its fair for just the bad guys to have nukes.

How is the Heim drive different then? How does it violate the light speed limit? The Warp drive acts because Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't say how the speed of light limits the expansion of space itself. The inflation theory of the big bang requires that the Universe expand initially at a rate faster than light. The Warp drive takes advantage of this fact and creates spacial inflation behind the ship and spacial deflation in front of it.

Locally, time travel doesn't occur as the warp ship doesn't go FTL in its own immediate vicinity, however it does move the space around the ship at faster than light velocity relative to the rest of the universe by expanding space behind the ship and contracting it in front of the ship. Since the Warp drive cannot be turned off from inside the warp bubble, I think the warp bubble would have to be so configured to attenuate over a certain distance and eventually disappear, leaving the ship back in normal space. A ship would activate the warp bubble, go a short distance and then activate it again, and doing so many times to reach its destination. Physicists say however that anything that can go faster than the speed of light can be turned into a time machine.

The thing about warp drives is they don't have to go faster than the speed of light. You can warp out at half the speed of light or any fraction thereof. A ship that warps out at sublight speed will be redshifted as it moves away and blue shifted as it moves toward, but it wouldn't be velocity that's doing this but the expansion of space behind the ship and the contraction of space in front of it.

A sublight warp ship would be able to communicate with the outside world and the outside world could likewise communicate with it.

Now if a starship were to travel to Alpha Centauri traveling  at 0.5c warp, it would take 8.8 years to get there assuming no time dialation. If you had an arbitrarily powerful telescope and were able to observe its entire journey from the Solar System, it would take 13.2 years for you to observe its outbound journey. If you were to watch a television transmission transmitted from the ship, a minute would seem to last 90 seconds on the outbound leg of the journey. If it turned around and came back at that same speed the same observer would observe it taking 4.4 years to make the journey back, a second on the ship coming back would seem to last 30 seconds and the observer will measure the ships visual progress at apparently the speed of light, neglecting the consideration that the light from Alpha Centauri is already 4.4 years only when by that light you see the warp ship depart.

Now if you warped out at the speed of light, the journey would take 4.4 years, but the observer would be watching the ship depart and take 8.8 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, 4.4 years to get there and 4.4 for the light to show that ths ship arrived. The clock in the light speed warp ship would seem to take 120 seconds for the second hand to go full circle around the clock face. The journey back would seem to take no time at all, but the observer can still watch it approach after it arrived, of course he would see two images of the ship, the ship that has already arrived and the ship as it is still enroute. A second measured in that ship would seem to be -60 seconds long, the second hand would move counterclockwise areound the clock face and time will seem reversed on the approaching ship that will be seen moving further away towards its point of origin.

If you could ever observe the departing ship make a complete journey to Alpha Centauri in less that 4.4 years through that telescope, you would be watching a time machine move backwards in timem because even it the warp ship moved at infinite velocity, it would still take 4.4 years to watch it make progress to Alpha centauri, the occupants of the ship will seem frozen in time as they make that journey, because for them it takes no time at all. This all works fine until you introduce a second observer who is moving slower than the speed of light in relation to the first. If there was a spaceship inbetween the two stars and the warp ship passes by at infinite velocity what would he observe? At 0.5 c, he would take 4.4 years to reach the Solar System and if the warp ship passed by when he was at the midpoint, he would see two ships, one moving toward the sun backwards and one moving toward Alpha Centauri forwards.

So what if we have less experience doing it? It still takes less energy to lift stuff off an asteroid than it does to lift stuff off the earth. Are you saying we should not try doing stuff we have no experience doing and instead do stuff the hard way simply because we've done that before? That makes little sense, we haven't terraformed planets before either, if we aren't ready to mine asteroids, we certainly aren't ready to terraform planets.

Ok, I'm not the one trying to redefine democracy. All I'm saying is that nothing in this world is perfect and that I apply fuzzy logic in deciding which countries aren't democratic and with whom we should be involved in joint missions with. It is not my purpose to examine the warts of our electoral process under a magnifying glass, and these warts go both ways. I recall that some "dead people" voted for JFK too. But by and large out electoral process is fair, not perfect I should add, but it is a good indicator of the mood of the public, which is more than can be said of how Cuba conducts its elections. You can quibble about a few thousand votes counted here, or a few thousand votes that shouldn't have been counted there, but there is a vast difference between dictatorships like Cuba, and Republics like the US and Japan. Let us just say that some countries don't have our best interests at heart, and we should have partners in space that we can trust. Besides, there is nothing wrong with some competition, this acts as a motivator to get us moving faster. One can also say that if all the World's companies suddenly decided to get together and jointly produce cars, that this would be more efficient as all the car companies would be combining their resources together to produce cars. Once can say it, and there is a certain logic behind it, but it would not be true.

I think it is better to have competing interests exploring and exploiting space. The competition should be kept on friendly terms, but a little rivalry can go along way towards driving these accomplishments.

I don't think terraforming Venus is possible without a permanent sunshade dimming the Sun. While much of Venus problem is due to the green house effect, the main problem is that Venus is just too close to the Sun to begin with. Figure on having a permanent sunshade parked between Venus and the Sun at a minimum. A world with total water coverage would have 142% more exposed water surface that the Earth, and it doesn't matter how much deeper you make the oceans after that, because it is the water surface that is exposed to the air that matters. I don't see how this doubles the evaporation rate if you assume a similar light level, provided artificially, to that on Earth. You can make the oceans as deep as you want by importing water from the outer Solar System. I think once a certain dept is reached, the oceans will start forming a layer of dense ice over the ocean bottom due to the tremendous water pressure, I believe this is called ice II or ice III, I'm not sure, I'm not sure that we'd want this, their are plusses an minuses.

The basic idea is to get Venus' ocean to rotate faster and independently of the planet itself, then you can build platforms that float on the oceans surface with plants and animal life growing on it. Some dissolved minerals in the ocean is desirable, but if the ocean bottom is covered with a layer of ice, then the Venusian crust will be isolated from the ocean above, and the more water we add to Venus, the fresher the water will become, even up to the point where one can drink it. However the more water we pile on Venus, the more the upper ocean layer can super-rotate. Venus's atmosphere already does this. If you are floating in Venus's upper atmosphere, you would experience a 48 hour "day" because that is how long it takes the wind to blow you around the planet. Another great thing is that a rotating water ocean would also produce a magnetic field, even if Venus's core did not. Now the problem of rotating the ocean is significantly less that rotating the entire planet, the mass involved with just the upper layer of the ocean is alot less, and it will probably rotate some all by itself, and it may even be a function of how deep the ocean is. Now once we have a Water world Venus, living on the surface of this perpetual ocean is really a small proble for would be terraformers who are used to manipulated masses on a planetary scale. Artificial islands shoud not be beyond them. You probably want these artificial Islands to maintain their positions on the globe relative to each other. You might even be able to recreate the shapes of the Earth's continents floating on this ocean. Not so sure about mountain ranges, these floating continents must be light enough to float on the surface of the ocean, so I guess the landscape will be flat.

FTL travel would answer the Fermi paradox quite nicely. If you could travel into the past, why would you bother going to other stars? The past is certainly more hospitable to humans than planets orbiting other stars as humans evolved to fit the conditions on Earth. If you could travel into the past, you could colonize 1776, and quickly bring their technological standards up to our own. You could of course make sure the American colonists win the Revolution, and then you could pave highways, and build houses for migrants from the 21st century. There is lots of cheap land to be had here, and if 1776 gets full, there is still 1775, and then 1774. If you keep going further into the past you will enounter vigin territory. I think quite literally, 1776 will cease to be 1776 once time travelers from the future arrive there, the timeline will likely follow a different historical track once they arrive their. If people continuously travel into the past, their numbers in the present will dwindle down to nothing or almost nothing, there is no reason to expand outward to the stars when all these hospitable past Earths await you, this is one solution to the Fermi paradox. Also if the timeline keeps on splitting due to all of this time travel activity, very few of a member of any single species will ever be seen in any single reality. As seen from the point of view of someone who doesn't time travel, members of the species will just seem to disappear as they go back into time, and since they create their own historical branches, no evidence of their activities in the past will ever be found. In fact there will be no evidence that time travel exists at all if the multiple history theory of the universe holds, time travelers will simply disappear, never to be seen again. Only the people who actually undertake the journey will ever know if time travel is possible.