New Mars Forums

Yes, me too. And all your technical arguments seem to be sound. But under what circumstances can such research be allowed to proceed?

That's exactly the problem. Who is going to even risk the possibility that a Mars government, or even a national government which has leased research territory on Mars will do as North Korea did and arbitrarily expel inspection teams!? For sure the U. S. government will not permit any other government to even have the possibility of doing so, and other governments won't like it a bit if the U.S. sets up nuclear research programs for military or unknown purposes. Such an attempt would inevitably lead to the most potentially deadly arms race that humanity has ever known.

It would seem that such research would be socially practical only: (1) if the research focusses on largely peaceful uses and (2) if the inspection teams have the built-in, guaranteed capacity to shut down the production facilities if they deem it necessary. In this case, the political issues, however difficult, are much more critical than the technical ones.

Yea, Clark. You go, baby!

Thanks Sean, Cindy, Rob.

Though I am a founding member of the Mars Society, I have never been to an annual convention. Chicago, because of its central location, would have been my best chance for awhile.

Rob, thanks for the observations on what especially struck you about the convention. I have a comment on your post but think that it would best be under a new thread. I will post my reply on a thread titled "Martian Nuclear Proliferation" in the "Martian Politics" forum.

I will now have to make frequent trips to Mississippi so there will also be frequent long pauses in my responses. Alas, my laptop is with my daughter at college and my parents don't have a computer.

Very interesting article. And it is interesting to see how they are using their small business incentive programs.

However, I couldn't resist one quote from the article.

Hey, Grandma with her canning jars will be impressed! The ability of modern program administrators to make it seem as if their program is inventing civilization is truly amazing.

Regardless, I am glad to see that NASA is paying attention to this issue now. And the resulting storage process should be fascinating.

Let's see, building a vehicle that is cheap, works, and keeps on working is not worthy of praise? Well, from the perspective of someone who has gotten hold of his share of unreliable technology, I'll give you a consumer/taxpayer's perspective. Until a technology is highly reliable, it isn't technology. It's just a bunch of little boys and girls playing with mudpies.

As long as they enjoy it, and learn something from it, we can and should give it modest support. But when they insist on a whole personal water theme park just to get started, maybe it's time to take another look.

Now if a private corporation wants to invest in a theme park for them because it figures that they will create something which will make a lot of money, more power to them. But a private company, unsubsidized by government, isn't going to give the producers of high cost failures a lot of second chances.

And a technology which is cheap and reliable but doesn't have 1000 experimental "bells and whistles" attached is worth much more than one that has these things and is either very complex/costly to operate or unreliable or both. In competitive industry we can, on the whole (though there are exceptions), let long-term sales tell us which total technologies (final products) are the best. Unfortunately, with products produced primarily through government funding we don't have this information until, at best, very late in the game.

And as far as "lavish adoration" goes, for some people saying anything positive about another country at all is "lavish adoration" or even treason. Maybe someone needs to write a good grade B movie about the current perspective, Day of the Xenos.

<bow>

No, without people speaking out the rest of us don't have the chance of learning something.

Thanks for the coin analogy! I now see how you can have information about the state of a distant particle though no information has been transferred (at least in the usual sense of the meaning of the word "transfer").

Neat!

Thanks for clarifying this one.

Yes, I can see that power transfer would be impossible. What I still need to know is just what is going on in the "quantum teleportation" of laser beams. Maybe Scientific American wrote an article on it.

Again, thank you very much for taking the time to explain these things. It has helped a bunch .

You seem to be implying that a thing can't be used without being owned. Air and water would seem to be two examples of things that can be used without being owned. And how about books, or records? Of course the type of society makes a difference. Land can be used without being owned in a hunter-gatherer society, but it's much harder in a society which has achieved agriculture and a settled existence.

However, this fact should not be used to obscure the economic and social advantages of ownership, as in your original example. I would suggest to Cindy that ownership, has, on the whole, been very much a positive social arrangement, especially when the U.S. came along and individual ownership of small pieces of land became the norm. A man could use his property as he saw fit, rather than being the equivalent of a "sharecropper" all his life. He could do thiswith the reasonable assurance that it could not be taken from him without "due process of law" and "just compensation".

These days "due process" has become insufficient protection and "just compensation" a laugh so the issue needs to be looked at again, but that's another, but related, story.

The idea of zones would allow a very flexible set of development arrangements. Development organizations could be countries, industries, non-profit communities, or conceivably even individuals.

But my impression is that 1000 km zones would be much too big for most purposes. How about letting the developer propose a zone size and have it reviewed in the light of the developer's overall plan?

I agree completely. And yet our shuttle and ISS people manage to find ways to complain about the Russians. They just can't stand it that the Russians' (necessarily) simpler spacecraft are more reliable than the more technologically advanced but more fragile shuttle.

Since NASA has screwed the American taxpayer to the tune of MANY billions of dollars by hugely overdesigning the shuttle, every Soyuz flight is a reproach to them. Some call the NASA plan technology development, others corporate (and NASA employee) welfare. Well, maybe "workfare" would be a more appropriate term.

I see that there are already cost overruns on RTF for the shuttle. This is a chronic condition for NASA. Time to fire whole planning staffs and find some Kelly Johnson types who can bring complex projects in on time and under budget to provide some leadership in those programs. It is notable that many of the NASA unmanned programs manage to  meet time/budget constraints very well.

It's interesting to note that we could easily have been on Mars by now. But NASA's plan for implementing Bush I's Mars initiative was so expensive that it staggered even the jaded sensibilities of the U.S. Congress. If a tiny fraction of that money had been given to Bob Zubrin, Bert Rutan, etc. we'd have been there by now.

Hey, I have an idea, lets let the contract for planning the space exploration initiative to the Russian Space Agency. Ummm, no, given the chance the RSA would be even more greedy than NASA.

But I understand the Russians are going to start making us pay for the resupply sometime next year.

<blush> I goofed. While I was correct in saying that no "hardworking" gene had been discovered, I was wrong in saying that no genetic manipulations were involved. The mechanism used to block the dopamine receptors did involve gene expression.

I'm very sorry.

Neither would I and I didn't propose it. The prisoners are unselectedc for anything but being prisoners. I suggested that the genetic selection be on Mars with a population heavily screened to rule out serous known genetic defects which would incapacitate a person. No actual manipulation of genes would be involved.

It is a social experiment, not primarily a genetic experiment.

The business about the child in the closet is totally irrelevant as Clark knew when he made his comments. Clark, as shown by previous posts on other threads, believes that criminals should be allowed the opportunity to move to new situations anonymously in order to get a new start. That's the kind of thinking that led to the numerous arrests of violent criminals in the 80's and 90's who had many previous arrests that nobody in the community knew about. If he wants to live next to them without knowing about it, let him! As a matter of fact, he would make a great ethical officer for the Moon portion of the experiment. He can see that none of them are mistreated, like having to be interrogated by screeners to decide whether they should be offered an opportunity to emigrate to Mars.

How about it Clark?