New Mars Forums

Lets suppose I'm a Canadian, and I live in the geographic center of that country, on the western short of the Hudson Bay to be precise, and some environmentalist comes up to me and suggests that I should reduce my carbon footprint to save the planet from global warming. I take a look around the frozen landscape, and see a couple of polar bears frolicking in the distance and I simply ask why?

This is the image of what the area looks like.

And suppose I live in a place that looks like this. I am standing there next to my eskimo wife asking "why I should care about Global Warming? Isn't it cold enough already?"

I always thought terraforming would be a touch nut to crack, but Titan has lots of nitrogen, and a low gravity as well, despite its size, the surface gravity on Titan is less than out Moon. By the time we're ready to terraform Mars, the tech should be available to obtain nitrogen from Titan. Titan has more than enough. Probably th easiest way to transport it is to collect the nitrogen at the Saturn-Sun L1 Point, and then give the big ball of nitrogen a shove when the planets are light up just right for a gravity assist trajectory to impact Mars. Well need some insulation to get the stuff closer to the Sun while keeping it frozen, and then we unpack it prior to impact. The native atmosphere on Mars will intercept it and we'll end up with an atmosphere that is 50% carbon-dioxide and 50% nitrogen, we then send another package to Mars upping the atmosphere to 25% carbon-dioxide and 75% nitrogen and we keep on sending more and more nitrogen until we can get the carbon-dioxide percentage to under 1% of the atmosphere. Along wit the nitrogen de also deliver enough water to fill the ancient Ocean basin on Mars.

So you kind of just disproved Global Warming, seems it hasn't helped Canada much, still the area with farmland and boreal forests are much larger than California, and Canada has the population of California. Maybe you ought to elect Arnold Schwarzenegger to be your next Prime Minister, the fact that he was born in Austria shouldn't be too much of a problem. I hear he's into the environment these days!

Anyway, you don't need to grow your food everywhere you live, there is still mining, oil drilling and forestry as viable careers in Canada, people can earn a living from that and import food from the United States if they must. How much does orange juice cost in Canada? I bet it either comes from Florida or California!

But Canada has so much land! Canada has ten times as much land per person as does the United States! What I don't get is why you think land is in such short supply when you live in such an enormous country? Why would you want to live in such a regimented one size fits all town? Why would you want your family car in a distant parking garage, where someone may break into it and steal it? And what happens if there is a power outage and the rail system no longer works, and you have to walk all the way to the parking garage on your own two feet during a cold Canadian night? Canada is such a nice big country, If I lived there, I would want a nice big yard, not live in a row house in a small town and pretend the rest of Canada doesn't exist! Would you really want to be stuck in a small town with no car and be dependent on mass transit to get around? Why? Also aren't underground tunnels expensive to dig? I would think that a country like Canada would be full of frontiersmen out in the wilderness living log cabins. Not a bunch of miserable urbanites that never leave town cause they have no cars!

The key is property rights. Why should people work hard if government just takes it all away from you if you do. If you are poor, how are you most likely to vote? Are you going to vote for the guy who promises to tax the rich and give away stuff for free to the poor people. But you know, "if you give someone a fish he east for a day, if you teach him how to fish, he eats for a lifetime." The poor have tendencies to want stuff for free, but unfortunately getting stuff for free doesn't make them any less poor. The source of jobs and productive activity which could bring the majority of people in the Third World out of poverty is the rich, if government taxes them at high rates in order to give free stuff away to the poor to get their votes, you will have less rich, and less stuff to give away for free, people stay poor. The thing about poor people isn't that they don't work hard, its that they are suckers, they want to follow what they perceive as the easier path, they vote for politicians that promise to give them stuff for free, and they only way they can get that stuff to distribute for free is by taxing the rich and driving them out of the country. There is not that many rich people compared to the poor in India for instance. India is a democracy, and most of the votes are from poor people. Politicians want those poor votes because they will get them elected, and they need to tax rich people to buy those poor votes, thus they act like robin hood. Robin Hood economics doesn't work! There are two classes of rich people, those who befriend the politicians, and get a tax break and those who do not and are taxed to pay for the politician's redistribution program. The really rich people, have special relationships with the politicians who make laws, they get set asides from their friends, they get to keep their wealth. Those who are merely rich, but are the providers of most of the jobs in the country are not so lucky, they get taxed to the max, and thus can't hire as many people and bring them out of poverty with productive labor. What you liberals don't understand is you can't bring people out of poverty by taking from the rich and giving to the poor, what you have to do is give the poor productive jobs doing stuff which generates income which pays for their wage and pays the investor a return on their investments for providing those people with a job. There are never enough government jobs to go around, they come at the expense of taxing the rich, and those jobs are mostly regulatory rather than productive.

No actually that is called weather, weather is highly variable, you have some highs and some lows. You can't really expect every day to be average, and a single say's high temperature is no indicator of global warming. I think we should just roll with it, rather than attempt to engineer the World's climate as we don't know how! I made a few outrageous proposals on how we might engineer the World's climate, you thought they were unrealistic an unfeasible. I pointed out that we could start shoveling dirt today in Antarctica, that would be the equivalent of cutting out carbon emissions in hopes of affecting global climate in the future.

England is more crowded than the United States of America. A lot of Americans like open spaces, they like lots of wildlife, if we were to all move closer to the cities towards available rail lines, we'd lose all that including our 1 acre plots, our standard of living would go down as the price of real estate near rail lines skyrocketed, and we'd all queue up to pack the commuter trains to go to the city. We'd have to go shopping one grocery bag at a time, as that is all we can carry onboard the train. All this packed living makes us more vulnerable to terrorism and nuclear war by the way!

Oh that's very simply, wrap cables around the planet and place solar panels on either side of each cable to generate a direct current. Mars rotates counterclockwise when viewed from above the North Pole, so we run cables around the planet and use solar panels to generate direct current also in the counter-clockwise direction, this will produce a magnetic North in the same direction as true north. If we can generate sufficient direct current we can equal the magnetic field around Earth, and the waste heat from all those solar panels will do much to lower the albedo and heat up the planet due to increased light absorption.

Real Estate, Political independence, you can't make those things on Earth very cheaply. To gain political independence often requires a war. Pretty much all the land on Earth is claimed by someone except for Antarctica. The first question, "if Musk runs out of money" is something that it on Musk's mind all the time, but not on the minds of NASA scientists, if they know they can count on $18 billion a year, they won't worry about doing things cheap or finding a way to make a Mars colony self-sustainable, he is going to find a way to reduce costs, NASA is not interested, because reducing costs is not vital to getting that $18 billion from taxpayers next year. Most taxpayers don't pay much attention to how their NASA dollar is spent, because it is such a tiny proportion of their income. Throw away rockets put an upper limit of what you can do with $18 billion a year, there is nothing you can do with those NASA rockets that will raise additional revenue beyond what's appropriated for NASA, with SpaceX however, reusing rockets and selling launch services is a revenue source that doesn't depend on politics, one can then make rational economic decisions rather than emotional ones such as "lets go explore Mars and take sme real nice pictures for the school books!"

That generally happens when you are at war, and also not providing security, which is what Obama did, costs less that providing it. Obama labeled a number of domestic terrorist attacks as workplace violence, and you know what, we are not going to win the war on terrorism just by increasing security at the airports or building a wall, we are going to have to go out and defeat them where they live! $1 million a month is not a lot of money to spend to secure the wife and son of the had of state of the most powerful country on Earth, I would expect a lot of money to be spent on that, and if we are being cheap on our President's security, we are doing something wrong. The President of the United States, is at least the equal to any Emperor of any large state or Empire that has ever existed, and while he is in office, he should have as much security as he needs. Having a President or his family assassinated would cost the country more than just providing adequate protection.

That reminds me of a movie:

Remember this guy? It was part of the police force of New Detroit, a company town run  by a defense conglomerate OCP in the Movie Robocop.

Congress doesn't have to approve every strike, Congress isn't competent to run a war, and the war has been going on since 2001, the authorization was already made after the 9/11 attack. Syria is in the area where we are fighting terrorism. When our enemies give up and stop attacking us, then the war is over. We can't just unilaterally declare the war over and say every new attack is a new war. The Enemy keeps the war alive, he attacks us at home, there is no place we can withdraw to where he will not follow! So you are saying the President needs special authorization to defend the American People, and that he should do nothing and let Americans be killed otherwise? The way I read the Constitution is that Congress must approve all wars that we start, the Enemy does not wait for Congress to approve their Jihad before attacking us and killing Americans.
Defending the American people after an attack is an automatic action, that includes going out and destroying the enemy. if there is no war and the US President wants to start one, the that requires Congressional Approval. Now we are helping some rebels attack ISIS, and the Syrian government just decided to attack those same rebels with Poison gas, and they are aligned with Iran, a country that has declared war on us many many times since 1979. Anyone who aligns with our Enemy is also our Enemy and has become part of the War, and we can thus attack them without Congressional Approval. There are very few instances where Amerian actually started a war, where there wasn't a war before.

The News media is showing lots of investigative activity, but no results. There are a lot of people actively looking for UFOs as well, but that doesn't mean they are out there.