New Mars Forums

An idea like this was proposed in the Starflight Handbook by Eugene Mallove and Gregory Matloff for accelerating starships. The main idea was to avoid having the ship carry its own reaction mass. If you have the ship interact with exteror incoming reaction mass, you get a way from having a rocket carry its own reaction mass supply and thus the acceleration is limited only by the velocity of the incoming pellet stream. I see no reason why this idea could not work on a small scale just to get a ship from suborbital to orbital velocity.

The basic idea is to make pellets out of moon rock, accelerate them against the Moons orbital velocity so they fall towards Earth and Earth's own gravity will accelerate these pellets to near escape velocity but not quite. If the pellets are not intercepted they will go into an elliptical orbit around the earth witht he low point just above the atmosphere. Since the pellets will be accelerated one after another in the same direction, they will encounter similar gravitational forces and folow the same path towards the Earth. As this occurs in a vacuum their paths should be quite predictable. Perhaps transmitters will be accelerated with the stream of pellets so they can more easily be detected by the suborbiter so that it can position itself in front of them.

No, but American foreign policy is America's business. The fact that the Russian government is oppressing the Russian people and denying them their rights is nothing to go to war about, but I think American values comes into play when deciding what international partners to participate in international ventures with.
It is really no different than deciding not to buy consumer items that were made in sweat shops employing child labor in a foreign country. Like you said, it is really none of our business what sort of labor laws a foreign country may have, but we can certainly decide to ban imports from that country if their labor practices offend us, it is no different with Russia. If Russia becomes a dictatorship we can decide not to participate with Russia. Besides joint missions with undemocratic countries to Mars would probably lead to undemocratic compromises in the colony's government. I think we should endeavor to spread democracy where ever we go including out in the Solar System. I find undemocratic governments offensive as I believe it is the innate right of all human beings to decide how they are government. A form of government that doesn't allow free and fair elections or elections with no choices under a one-party system is unjust, and we should do nothing to support such a government.

I do not think they were good then either, just because they were fighting one kind of evil doesn't make them good, and remember they also allied with Nazi Germany before Nazi Germany turned on them. Soviet Russia was never a reliable or dependable ally, they only fought on our side because Hitler wanted to kill them and we wanted to get rid of Hitler. Flip flop allies are not good or dependable, the only time we can depend on the Russians is when someone else wants to murder them and we want to stop the murderer. Russians can always be counted on to look after their own interests, but in a permant ally, something more is required, the US is for example an ally of Israel, even though our short term interest might be served by our not being an ally of Israel. Russia certainly is not an ally of Israel even though many Israelis are former Russians. I think the US has some good allies that have stuck by us through thick and thin, Russia is not one of those allies. Our priorities should be to work with those allies that have been good to us. Great Britian, Japan, Austrailia, and Israel for example.

Freedom means people do what they want as individuals, it is individual freedom that matters. All independent nations have freedom to act however they choose, North Korea has freedom of that sort, but its people are not free. You are ignoring the freedom of individuals within countries when you consider only the freedom of those country's governments.

Like a good engineer, you must design a government for the worst case situations, not the best case. If you assume the best case, that everyone will get along and will do what they are told, that is an open invitation for a dictatorship.

You have to seperate out the mission from how the colonists govern themselves. If they rely on Big Daddy from mission control an unhealthy situation develops, much like the Spanish colony in Mexico turn into the Mexican Empire. People in Mexico were used to obeying a Spanish King from across the ocean, it was not hard for them to go from that to having a Mexican Emperor replacing the distant Spanish King, and from the Mexican Emperor you had popular uprisings, revolutionary movements and now a corrupt Mexican government that while holding elections was dominated by a single political party for a very long time. Mexico is poor because its founders were authoritarians who didn't let the people participate in determining the government and passing laws, and since they were not used to doing this, when they finally got the chance they did not do so very well. The British colonies on the other hand were largely self-governed, when the time was right, the people of British North America were ready for independence from England and to establish the United States of America.

When colonizing Mars, I don't think we ought to be following the Spanish model as their new world colonies became third world banana republics and dictatorships suseptable to every radical political philosophy that was on the market.

Start a war with the United States you pay a price, you cannot get off scot free. If someone tries a non-military conflict, we can always escalate in into a military one and bring the other side down with us as well. There was always that temptation through out the cold war of "Maybe we can get that shot in and escape retaliation." You remember how Israel reacted to the hostage taking at their borders, that is something called, "the straw that broke the camels back." There are some people that seem to think that you can keep adding straws onto the camels back and so long as you add it one straw at a time, the camel can support millions of tons of straw on its back. The key thing your talking about is whether some enemy can attack us without our knowing that we are being attacked, and if we don't notice this attack, the damage can't be all that great, and there is that other risk.

As far as we know the Great Depression wasn't an attack on Germany, but it did weaken Germany somewhat, enough to get Hitler into power and we know what damage he wrecked on the world economy. If China precipitates a recession, they might really be sorry at the reaction they get from us. If you destabilize a countries economy, you also destabilize a countries political situation and for a country as well armed as we are, that can be very dangerous for all concerned, including China.

Ever consider launching it from the ground in the middle of Antartica? So maybe the equator is more economical because of the Earth's spin, but you can still launch a ship into orbit from the South Pole. You could give the Orions names like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Armageddon. And whos to say we couldn't build nuclear bombs more efficiently. An Orion spaceship can probably reach the asteroids easily enough if it can reach Saturn, it can conduct asteroid mining operations and extract Uranium from the asteroids. I'm sure heavy metals such as Uranium would be more plentiful in space than on Earth anyway, that stuff would've sunk to the Earth's cored when it was molten anyway.

For anyone to act on other than one's economic interest is bound to be expensive, and might as well be futile. If a country were to hold onto dollars while the value of the dollar is rising and then suddenly sell them all in an attempt to cause a sell off, that country may find that it has just lost alot of money. He may temporarily depress the value of the dollar and the other investors seeing sound fundamentals in the economy will reguard this as a buying opportunity, will buy the dollar at the depressed exchange rate and drive the value back up. Now the country trying to conduct this type of monetary warfare just lost some money in an attempt to sabotage the dollar that failed. Investors will almost always have more money than the country attempting this sabotage, and if they see sound reasons to buy the dollar, and they'll see some other country, that doesn't like the US, selling dollars all at once, they'll say, "Oh wonderful, heres my chance to make additional profits as these dopes are dumping dollars for no good reason. Well their stupidity is my gain." In general people buy dollars because they want to buy American goods. People who attempt to wreck an economy by selling dollars abruptly will usually fail, they have to buy the dollars first. In order to buy enough dollars to have an effect on the exchange rate, it will cost them alot of money, money that may otherwise go into weapons systems, and if they sell the dollars they have all at once, they won't get as much money back as they would have had they sold them gradually. If the US economy is not weak, then foreigners buying and selling dollars will only cause small blips in market currecny fluxuations that are soon forgotten. investors tend to act in response to market fundamentals rather than in panic because Libia is selling large amounts of dollars for some reason they can't fathom.

There are also the primaries where the members of each party choose the party candidates. What do you really want? A direct democracy doesn't work when you have more than a room full of people. the only kind of democracy left is a Representative Democracy also known as a Republic. A Republic is a form of democracy, if it is not, it is not really a republic as it is not representative.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn't a union of Republics as those republics weren't representative of the people they represented. The People's Republic of China is also not a Republic as the elections are not real and do not involve real choices. If you think these places are republics just because of the names, then you are fooled very easily. I don't particularly like countries that pretend to be republics but really are not. Czar Nicolas II didn't pretend to be an elected representative of the people, he wasn't afraid to admit he was the Czar, so why is Putin continuing with the trappings of the Democracy he just overthrew? he appoints the governors of the Russian Republics, that makes a lie of the label of it being a Federation, and the fact that those governors are appointed and not elected anymore makes them not republics. If Putin is not honest enough to admit he is a dictator, why should we trust him on joint projects in space?

What if you added enough hydrogen to remove most of the carbon dioxide by combining the oxygen atoms of each CO2 molecule with hydrogen leaving the C behind?

CO^2 + 2H^2 ---> C + 2H^2O The hydrogen would probably come from the outer solar system, perhaps the energy of impact can disassociate the CO2 and power the above reaction.

Isn't that what I just said? But if only perfect nations are allowed to criticise other nations that grossly violate human rights, then no one gets to criticise them. If only perfect nations were allowed to fight Nazi Germany during World War II then Hitler wins. If you must be perfect in order to fight for what's right then no one gets to fight for whats right. I don't see myself belittling other peoples countries when I criticise their lack of democracy. Cuba is not a democratic country, and I'm not going to let some issue that the US elections of 2000 may have had a little funny business in them prevent me from critisicing Castro, I don't have to be a hyper-nationalist to do that.

Wouldn't you rather spend your money than have the people decide how to spend your money? Do you need a majority vote by the people to decide whether you can buy ice cream and the shop rather than you just deciding to get it yourself? I believe its called your money because you are the one who is authorized to spend it, it belongs to you, not the people. If something needs to be done by government and only government can do it, then you pay a tax and the government spends the money for the people if it is a democratic government or otherwise it spends it for itself, but the government is only authorised to spend that protion of your money that it collects in taxes. The people decide how much taxes to collect from individuals by selecting legislators and Senators. Beyond the taxes you pay, the people have no business deciding how to spend your money as that money belongs to you, not to the people.

Extorion is illegal, as are pyramid schemes, and anti-competitive practises, those aren't the tools of true capitalists but of criminal organizations. I did tell you that Capitalism is something that needs to be regulated if it is to function properly, and people need to play by the rules. The true capitalists play by the rules, they do not break the law, otherwise any Mafia Godfather can tell you that he is only following the rules of capitalism when he engages in anti-compedative practises such as rubbing out his rivals.

Of all the people who engage in anti-compedative practices, the once that do it most often are governments. Why for instance is 90% of the World's oil supply in government hands? Because the governments of OPEC nations and Russia are engaging in anticompedative practises of nationalizing the oil fields and pushing aside private oil companies, these anti-compedative practises by governments are the reason why we pay so much for gasoline.

And what about the Communist Manifesto? Its just a book that some people have taken too seriously. Because of that book, many countries in Latin America have not developed properly. There has been alot of violence and killing because of that book. That book has given people the idea that they have the right to spend other people's money and that has made countries poor as it has prevented capital formation. If you spend your life saving and investing and the government suddenly takes it all away and distributes it among the people, you are going to do alot less saving and investing and the government is going to run out of money to redistribute and the country grows poor. I think Latin America would have been alot richer if the common citizens hadn't gotten the idea that they had a right to spend other people's money and worried about making their own money the honest way rather than appropriating and redistributing other people's money through majority vote. If majority vote decides all economic decisions and investment patterns then people who are not qualified to make economic decisions will be making them and wasting alot of resources.

Let try it. I speculate that maybe the British pound will drop in value to two cents on the American dollar tomorrow. Did I start a panic now? 

I think people speculate on currency because they want to make a profit, not because they want to wage war.

So what happened in 1848? I think the real important events occured from 1861 to 1865, but what was 1848 anyway? My interpretation of Socialism is as a substitute economic system replacing capitalism, but why does it need to be replaced? If a steel sword chops off the head on an innocent person, does that mean we need a substitute for steel? I think charity did not begin in 1848, people gave alms for the poor before that time, Socialism existed as far back as the ancient city-state of Sparta.

Capitalism describes an economic system where people with money make their own economic decisions, the laws of capitalism describe what happens when people are allowed to do so.

Democracy is when people choose their own government by voting.

Socialism is when government interfers with the economic decision making of individuals.

If some people are rich and talented and other people are not, then the capitalistic system favors the rich and talented as that is the most economically efficient decision to make. If you are going to pay someone a million dollars to play baseball, he better draw in the crowds and boost ticket sales, that is in a word Capitalism. If the government says the same busnessman must pay Joe Blow 1 million dollars or he'll be arrested, then that is socialism.