New Mars Forums

Joel - it's true that many people have been upset by The Skeptical Environmentalist. But then, many people have liked it, including The Economist, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and even the Secretary General of WWF Sweden. Scientific American In a topic as emotive as environmentalism, there are many vested interests. Notably, Scientific American hated it (although for some reason the Italian version loved it), and this prompted a reply from several prominent biologists including Matt Ridley to defend Lomborg.

In any case, it's clear that the state of the world is yet to be resolved. Lomborg doesn't pretend that the world is perfect, and he fully admits that global warming is taking place. His point is that the world is not as terrible as environmentalists make it out to be, and that conditions are improving everywhere. This is no coffee-table book - the references Lomborg cites are all impeccable, often coming from the United Nations or highly rated US sources. In fact, most of the references he uses are the same that environmentalists use - but he doesn't make the mistake of looking at them selectively.

The population question is ever present. However, consider this - between 1900 and 2000, the world population increased by over 4 billion. Yet there has been no increase in hunger - the daily intake of calories per capita has been increasing worldwide. If the current slowdown in population growth continues, there may be another 4 billion people on the planet in 2100. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the United States Dept. Agriculture and the World Bank all agree that over the next 30 years, there will be fewer malnourished people and that essentially, there will be more food for more people.

It's easy to think that the population explosion can only end in tears, but it's not so. Malthus was wrong - population growth rates are dropping in China and in other developing countries. Advances in agriculture are more than keeping up with the increased demand. It is simply not true that there is a disaster coming, by any set of measurements or statistics released by the US or UN.

I hope I don't seem like I'm dismissing environmentalists as loonies. I certainly care about the environment, and while it's improving I'd like to see it in an even better state. I just feel a little angry that they are continually telling us that the world is in a terrible state when it is demonstrably not. They should have a little more faith in the intelligence of the public, rather than exploiting them. I strongly urge you to read the first sample chapter (PDF) from The Skeptical Environmentalist.

I don't agree that what I said is some kind of computer bigotry. Netscape 4 is an obsolete browser - it doesn't come installed on any computer, and hasn't for the last two or three years. If it did, I'd support it. This has nothing to do with choice of OS - in fact, your choice of browser is OS independent and it costs nothing to change.

As for industry standards, Netscape 4 doesn't support them. The current standard is to use XHTML and CSS, neither of which it can handle, and New Mars uses a lot of CSS. The fact is, a large and increasing number of sites do not support Netscape 4 any more, just as they don't support Netscape 3, or Mosiac.

Yes, Explorer can render 'bad' HTML. The fact is, I made a bit of a mistake writing the HTML for the main New Mars website, forgetting to close some table tags. Explorer can work around that fine, but Netscape cannot.

I will eventually repair the bad HTML, but it's not high on my list of priorities. Why? Less than 5% of people use Netscape 4, and that's not surprising considering that it's now over five years old and is in my opinion, a heap of junk, compared to Mozilla 1.0 and IE5/6.

I was reading the topic on Food in the Life Support Systems forum and was going to add a quick reply about the possibility of growing meat-tissue in vitro, which would satisfy meat-eaters and provide a low-energy way of 'growing' meat.

I then realised that I've already mentioned this possibility at least twice before and wondered whether there was any point bringing it up again.

This kind of thing inevitably happens a lot on forums as new information and news comes along and new members join, resulting in topics being rehashed again and again. A solution would be to create an index of the very best New Mars discussions sorted by topic which members and all Internet users could refer and link to. I certainly think we've had some great discussions in many forums and I would hate to see them disappear into obscurity.

What I intend to do in the very near future is to create a monthly-updated (or thereabouts) page containing the 'best of' the New Mars forums. This sort of thing would be pretty good for a New Mars newsletter as well.

So, once again, I turn to the New Mars members to give suggestions for good threads in these forums! And don't feel too modest about nominating threads in which you've taken a large role.

Ack! I realise this is a serious problem - it does also happen very infrequently for me at university (100Mbps connection). I'll ask the webhosts about it again. For the meantime, I've limited topic page length to 15 posts. If people are still experiencing problems, I can limit it even more.

I don't think it's a problem with the software - a bug like this would've been picked up and corrected early in betatesting. It seems to be something to do with transmission of the pages.

Just upgraded the forums to Ikonboard 3.0.2a. There should be some minor bugfixes, no large differences.

While not discounting the effects of the Moon on the menstrual cycle, I find it impossible to believe that the absence of its gravity will have any effect on women on Mars - it does create tides on Earth, but its gravity simply isn't strong enough to create any physiological effects in humans. There just aren't any sensory receptors in humans that have the resolution for that sort of thing.

That said, the Moon does indirectly create a lot of 28 day cues, the most obvious being its appearance in the sky and the tides. It is possible that humans respond to those cues. But I would like to know how significant the number of births during a full moon is - I can't imagine it's very significant. I remember reading a paper about how women's menstrual cycles tend to synchronise when they're in close proximity, e.g. nunnery, prison - clearly there are other factors involved.

It's probably worth investigating whether being in a submarine or in orbit has any effect on fertility. I suspect it doesn't, since that will have been one of the first things scientists would have tested female astronauts for, and if they found anything mildly interesting we'd have heard of it by now (unless there was a conspiracy, of course    ) - but then the sample size is very small so nothing can be said for sure.

Sure, no woman has ever been out of cislunar space, but I would contend that being in orbit is far more different than being on a planet without a moon.

Unfortunately I'm not going to the convention this year (I went to the first and third) but I do intend to go again soon. Providing there's sufficient interest I would love to do some kind of New Mars panel session or discussion in 2003.

It's a bit of a peculiar problem. When I'm logged in I can't see them either, but if I log out and look at them as a Guest, they're visible. Strange. I might need to fiddle about with some files. More later.

I am a member, of course. It's quite cheap for students to join only $25, and I usually end up renewing my subscription every time I have to go to conference. Personally, I think the Society should put a sweetener deal in with joining, perhaps giving members a free Mars map or cap or something.

To my knowledge, Bob Zubrin isn't registered here and I don't think he visits very often at all. I know that Maggie Zubrin visits occasionally, but the last time I spoke to her she said she hadn't been recently. Bruce Mackenzie is registered here, but he doesn't visit often either.

It shouldn't be long before they drop by here more often though - membership is increasing quite rapidly. Also, as you say, there's a lot of useful discussion here.

Both of these options are now working. I made a post about this earlier, but I think it got lost in the morass. The 'New Posts' option in particular will be very useful considering the rapid increase in post rates we are experiencing.