New Mars Forums

This is incredible news.  Now we have a chance of getting somewhere.

rob:

a lot of people at several forums have been keen on the idea of, if the space elevator is completed, or we have cheaper RLVs, sending a NPP or NTR ship up to orbit piecemeal, avoiding an earth launch.

this is especially attractive with the elevator, because its cheap, and easy to get to a central location.  If you assemble it in orbit, and launch from there, you avoid the political implications of an earth launch, and are far more likely to receive political support.

I've been thinking of combining Orion-style pulse propulsion with an ion drive, for short bursts of acceleration combined with long distance cruising-its a great combination, i think.  And ion sounds nice to the public.  People will like the idea.

There is nothing ego-centric about my belief.

Would you worship a god that allows such things as the holocaust to happen?  Don't blast me for holding such things up as unjust and cruel.  You judge things callously as if they are minor events to be postulated, and lament people for losing faith because of them.  There is nothing arrogant in losing faith because of genocide.

Why is this ego-centric?  Because I have determined that I believe God does not exist?  I never said I was right, so your whole ego-centric spiel is, to put it lightly, pointless.  I am entitled to believe what I want, without being deemed as arrogant.  Is it any less ego-centric to set up a Church to preach about God, because you believe he exists?

I never said God should conform to my view, I said that I would not worship a God that went against my views.  Read what I said, dont extrapolate whats not there to support your arguments.

If you have never seen an Eskimo, there is nothing ego-centric about not believing in their existence.  Again, this anecdote is pointless.  If somebody said Bigfoot exists, and they saw him, would me doubting Bigfoot's existence be ego-centric?  Certainly not.

Your argument is laughable.

I do not go out and propogate my ideas while slapping down others, as you do.  I state my own beliefs without forcing them on anyone else.  So having a belief is inherently ego-centric?  I've got to stop having opinions then...

And eskimos-well, inuit if you want to be correct, do exist, and have been physically seen and proven to exist unlike God.  I have never seen God, but I have seen an Inuit.

For me to worship God, yes, I believe he should behave as I expect him to.  If not, my faith would be a little shallow, wouldnt it?  I would be ashamed if I blindly worshipped a cruel, and unjust (IN MY VIEW) God. 

Ego-centric?  Look in the mirror.

Ah, but you misunderstand.  I expect nothing from God, because I don't believe in God. 

Even if he does, yes, this would not meet my expectations, and I would not deem such a God worthy of worship.

you explain to me how a "reasonable, merciful, and just God" could let people be starved, raped, burned, tortured, exterminated, beaten, and on and on, for no reason other than that they were jewish.

how could a God let a race die?  This is a perfectly rational conclusion, and I think you are belittling it to a horrific degree.  Please read the book first.

I know a kid that smokes pot every day.  He's a 4.0 honors student, and a star lacrosse player on varsity since freshman year.  He is obviously very productive, cal, and his athletics isnt hurt at all.

In fact, many of the "potheads" in my school are kids you would never know-some you do, mainly because they play up the image to be cool (long hair, acting retarded, etc.), but most pot smokers are pretty normal.

I thought this falls under cost, logistics, and funding.  Your choice though.   

the research should not be patented, but the resulting structure should be.  That way, another company could use the research to build something else, maybe unrelated, maybe related but with a different design.  So much research is done for one application that could be used for multitudes of unrelated applications.

Say a company does R&D on a fusion spaceship.  A power company could use that research to build a better plant, and another space ship company could expand on that design to make it more efficient, smaller, bigger, etc.  So long as its not a copy, it would not violate the patent.

I for one never saw jesus do any of these things.

Did Jesus pull the sword out of the stone as did Arthur?  Oh, wait, theyre both fiction-neither happened, in my view.

Say what you will, in the early stages, at least, of mars, there will be currency.  But I think it will be in the form of cards...not credit so much as debit.  Because you cant send a wad of cash to earth, i think that most earth-mars transactions will be done via computer, through a computerized economy.  It will be like a bank account, but without cash. 

You could still use the dollar, or euro, most likely the dollar as the unit of currency.  A sale would see the transfer of "dollars" to your account.  This would be the dollar value of your good-but it would be purely numbers...our economy runs on this concept even today.  If everybody were to cash out their net worth, there wouldnt be enough cash.  If there were, it would be so devalued by inflation, that it would be useless.

The same goes for earth.  When goods are received, computerized currency is transferred to mars accounts, which is used to buy goods from earth.  Think of it as interplanetary paypal.  Banks would be super-secure computer servers with a few technicians, and a few staff operating online, taking loan requests, deposits, etc. 

A lot of paperwork would be gone.

On a similar note, i think mars may be our real chance to see a "paperless office."   

i think the average person loses over 30%.  so yes, a 20% flat rate would be better than the status quo.  15% if money were trimmed where it isnt needed seems pretty feasible to me.

according to my father, who is in the defense industry and did his doctorate on said industry, about $65 billion of the $300 billion defense budget is spent on equipment.  The rest is salary and other stuff.