New Mars Forums

Nice ressurection of a dead thread, Tb0ne.

Anyways, since the damage has been done, and I've never gotten to comment on it before, I bought and read 'Red Mars'. I also bought and read 'The Years of Salt and Rice', also by Kim Stanley Robinson. And, honestly, I dislike them both. I dislike them a lot - the prose is pretty, but that's about all I can say for them.

They share common faults - things aren't thought out, don't make any sense, and things transpire in a curious hazy unreality. The whole of the story in Red Mars doesn't make any logical sense from a political standpoint, as has been pointed out before, but it also doesn't make any sense from a people standpoint, either: we get all these diverse groups and oddballs wandering around Mars without any particular unifying vision or purpose and are expected to believe that (somehow) they make colonization a successful effort. Right. IMHO, the most likely consequence would be that the next expedition would explore the ruined bases and find the 21st century equivalent of CROATAN on the walls, leaving behind only a mystery of senseless loss.

As for the other book, don't get me started...

Actually, instead of some NASCAR-like plaster-it-with-stickers approach, if you're going to commericalize the next step in space, it makes much more sense to simply go to, say, General Motors, and say "We want a Mars rover that can {specifications}. You can make it look as much like a Pontiac/Chevy/GMC/whatever as you want, use the image in advertising as much as you want. We'll spare some astronauts to do the dog-and-pony show at auto conventions. In return, provide us with a few units gratis."

For the rover repair module, simply offer a similar deal: rights to promotional use in exchange for paying for the actual unit. It's NASA's problem to fly it to Mars (or wherever). Some large sign will be put on the side saying "Tire Kingdom" or whatever.

It would look much less busy than your idea, and the promotional value to the corporations is enhanced by its exclusivity.

Correct. It's a little known fact that Von Braun got to inspect Goddard's work when brought to the US and he announced that Goddard had been ahead of everyone until 1936 - not bad considering he did all of the work on a fraction of what the Germans had to boot.

Von Braun, for what it's worth, was basically chased into working for the Nazis by a decree banning all research into rocketry outside of military applications.

An interesting change to history would have been if the Army hadn't sent out the low-ranking officer who dismissed the work Goddard was doing as unimportant. It's likely that with funding and assistants even in the same ballpark as the German effort, the US would have had ballistic missiles first and had a huge jump on the space race - unlike the Germans who had other priorities and had an industrial infrastructure under attack, the US would probably have developed and deployed something along the lines of the A-9 (follow-on to the V-2/A-4 missile) by the end of the war. Such a missile would be in the Redstone's ballpark - add a capsule to the top, and you're in space.

Yeah, hope it misses, or, barring that, hit someplace no one will miss, like the Iranian nuclear program.

Actually, I prefer mindless violence and madness on TV; serious thinking is to be done over books or with other people. On the other hand, I like my mindless violence to say exactly what it is, and not pretend to be 'educational' or in any way informative.

I understand Graeme's frustration with people who never shut up about their pet theory. I once drew up a little cartoon of a guy beating the tar out of a dead horse with a bat, with the caption "It's dead, you can stop now" to post on another forum once, simply because I was tired of the guy never shutting up. (It turned out some moderator got annoyed too and banned the guy, so the work was mostly wasted... but the picture is still floating around somewhere for me to use at the opportune moment.  )

Such people will never stop talking about their particular hobbyhorse. I can think of a few people like that we all know.  :laugh:

In other words, a largely toothless and pointless law. I've seen governments create some amazingly dumb, pointless, stupid, and/or insane laws, and this one is up with a few others at the top of 'dumb'.

I'd change that to "the obnoxiously religious".

As far as the heaven/hell thing, the folk saying about "The path to hell is paved with good intentions" is grossly misleading. Even if you don't have a fricking clue what the hell you're doing, why, or what you should be doing, so long as you're acting in good faith and realize that god forgives, you're safe for the afterlife. I think Catholics and the Orthodox christians have a doctrine called invincible ignorance or something like that which defines it more clearly.

As far as the bit about 'heaven being static', I've heard the theological theory advanced that when you die, you don't go to a 'permanent' heaven, so to speak, but basically spend time from then until the End of the World ™ observing things and being left free to make your choice. The literally apocalyptic events of those last days is supposed to make the existence of god quite clear to whatever people are left on Earth (1) so they can make an informed choice. The people in heaven don't need that (if an avowed atheist like flashgordon dies and ends up in some waiting-room type heaven like that, I'm assuming he's rational enough to change his opinions on the existence of God, for instance), but they still get to make their choices.

After that... well, there's something about a new heaven and a new Earth, and being free from death... so I suppose that annoying light-speed barrier wouldn't be a problem anymore. Anyone up for a grand tour of the universe? Only lasts a few billion years...

(1) An interesting thought: Revelations is a great story for the end of the world - you have sinister plots, a giant beast with ten heads ruling the world, and other plot elements that seem like the mutant offspring of Orwell and Kafka, but most of the events seem to be limited to Earth. Someone should tell Falwell and his crowd, perhaps we can get a boost to Mars colonization. (An interesting side note is that the bit about 'the rapture' in the Bible says that the believers were gathered from all over the earth and and also 'the heavens' (in the sense of 'outer space'). Unless this was referring to God picking off an astronaut or two in orbit, those people with the bumper stickers are a bit premature)

Back to heaven, aren't you up on that whole 'Jesus' incident?

The benefit is probably entertainment, which certainly explains why we would be given free will. It allows us to act in defiance of all logic and sanity, thus increasing our entertainment value. And with some 7 billion of us, many heavily armed and/or nuts, you can be assured that God may have many qualities, but 'bored' is not one of them.

Get yourself one of those little propane camper-stoves, you can do much better than lukewarm potato salad and sandwiches. Slice up some veggies and put them in a baggie, slice up some meat and put them in a different baggie with marinade... mmm, stir-fry. Add some fruit salad kept cold in the cooler and perhaps some cole slaw...

Or are you referring to the kind of picnic where you're at a table in a park with a grill nearby? That's not nearly as fun.

Mad Grad Student, against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

I've heard about those rumors too. Basically they occur because conspiracy theories run amok in certain parts of the third world - every random event is caused by some sinister bunch of people, generally working at the behest of the US, Israel, or UN. It's related to the black helicopter-New World Order types in the US... I suppose it's witch hunt hysteria dressed up in modern clothing. The crops caught disease because witches cast evil magic spells; earthquakes in the Indian Ocean are obviously caused by secret US agents blowing up nukes.

I suppose in a few centuries we'll have people on Mars posting messages that their terraforming efforts are part of a secret plan from the old planet to take Mars away from them, or something. If we ever meet up with aliens, I'd like to ask them if they have paranoid conspiracists dreaming up weird explanations for mundane but rare things, like believing that supernova are caused by rogue government officials blowing up stars for some mysterious, nefarious purpose.

The mini-cows aren't GM, they're simply bred down for size, much like chihuahuas are not the result of insidious Aztec genetic engineering programs. As for food, I'd favor potatos and corn for raw caloric foodstuffs and a selection of vegetables grown on a much, much smaller scale for proper vitamins and minerals. You don't eat 'all' of a plant, so I'd simply feed the parts of the plants we don't eat to the cows.

Cows are pretty stupid animals and will eat damn near anything, but it's largely irrelevant what the cow eats as it will turn whatever nutrients it gets into beef and other cow bits. I always am amused by the people who use the 'would you eat X that ate Y?' and are trying to get people emotionally disugsted by the idea of eating Y 'indirectly'. Come on, if you ate rich chocolates and filet mignons, would you consider your own feces from such foodstuffs any less disgusting than if it were the product of you eating raw corn and turnips?

However, I'd be feeding the cows leftover plant waste, so it doesn't matter that you're squeamish! As far as algae and snails go, if I have my steak-and-potatos alternative, no, I'll not eat the algae and escargot. I imagine that the GM kids would eat the algae in the form of algin used to make their ice cream more creamy, but not in any other form, at least not willingly.