New Mars Forums

Since an asteroid or comet on a collision course with Earth will probably be detected decades if not more in advance of impacting you could just alter its course through more simple methods like changing its color.   Making it darker or lighter will affect its velocity in the long term. You wouldn't necessarily have to 'paint' the whole asteroid.

I think it has to be asked what motivates these terrorists to get so angry over America and some of its allies.  I doubt if they hate us just for the sake of hating us, I think they hate us because globalization has been forcing them to swallow values they despise.  Our economic institutions, i.e. transnational corporations, haven't exactly been kind to a lot of these people either.   Biggest and foremost however is America's arrogance in the way it's been carrying out foreign policy which includes subversive and terroristic acts of its own.  Look up the overthrow of Allende in Chile and how the CIA helped install the brutal dictator Pinochet in his place, or how the USA has been sponsoring the indiscriminate spraying of agricultural fields in Colombia that frequently wipe out legitimate crops along with illegal ones. Or how the USA actually aided in the rise of the Taliban and Bin Laden in the Soviet-Afghani war, or how it supported the brutal dictator it 'suddenly' came to hate for being a despotic dicator, Saddam Hussein, in the Iraq-Iran conflict.   This so-called war on the "Free World" was hardly an unprovoked event.

Which qualities make a language suitable to Mars?  Except for maybe the amount of vocabulary there's really no such thing as a language that's superior to another.  Is Portuguese superior to French?  Is Inuit superior to English?  They're all just flapping of the tongue with a few cultural idiosyncracies thrown in.  Languages adapt to their situation, so I'm sure if some Eskimos got stranded on Mars they'd develop the jargon they need to communicate with each other in no time.  So to get to the point I'd say both Italian and Japanese are equally suitable.

If the process is as easy as the article mentioned, it seems generating water from the regolith could turn out to be the most beneficial use of hypercritical co2.  It would beat getting out the witching stick to find big reservoirs of water to tap.  Here's the snippet from the article:

Don't be scared away by Shaun's political delusions.  Before it's all said and done I'm sure Shaun will come to see the logic of the Green Anarchists and will run with the luddite hordes to burn down every last trace of industrial civilization.  Yes, eventually we'll see Shaun kicking back in animal skins and foraging for wild berries out in the jungle.   Civilization and agriculture are not compatible with freedom!  When will you see the light!   ???

That seems to sum it up.      I was reading a study that people tend to drive faster the wider the road gets.  The so-called 'driving the geometry' theory.  If that's true gov't should ensure that when building new roads the road design doesn't inherently induce people to drive faster than the limit.  Of course knowing the way our illustrious public officials think they'll probably pass some law requiring roads to be superwide for 'safety' reasons and keep the speed limit ridiculously low.  Can't say I'd find it shocking.

Great interview with Elon Musk.  I think we might finally be entering the era of cheaper space access.  I just hope the markets start looking up for this sort of thing.

I worry about the same thing.  One thing I've learned from history is that political elites and fanatics with strong agendas have no qualms with imposing their enlightened visions on people regardless of how many people they have to slaughter.  The idea of people like this having whole arsenals of automated 'intelligent' weapons at their disposal doesn't sit well with me either.  And yes I know that early versions of weapons like unmanned fighters will still require a human command to fire but I doubt that will always be the case.

I had a Spanish teacher just like that.  He was this super cranky old man that somehow expected you to magically learn everything the first time around and had no qualms whatsoever about belittling you if he had to re-explain things.  The weirdest part though was how he'd frequently go off on these long lectures on sheep hunting and archaic Spanish words that are no longer used.  I think I learned more about wild sheep than I did Spanish.

Did somebody mention coffee and donuts?  Hey, I think I could use a refresher or two myself in chemistry. 

Can't say I'm surprised at the inflated price tags.  I've just accepted the cold fact that the government really seems to have no interest in keeping things cheap.  If it did it would learn to put its foot down and say enough it enough.  But of course all these bureacrats and big contractors are in bed with each other.  I'm still wondering where that trillion bucks the pentagon lost is.  Have they looked under the sofa cushions?  Ah the joys of spending other peoples' money.

I have bittersweet feelings about DARPA.  On one hand they're probably the most creative and open minded government agency we have for technology R&D but unfortunately a lot of their work lately focuses on technologies that aren't exactly conducive to the privacy of normal civilians.  All of this Homeland Security nonsense is helping to see to that.

Shaun are you telling me that all of those teachers I had in school were wrong when they told us younglings that science is nothing but the search for truth and is the perfected form of human reasoning that knows no bias?   My teachers said all scientists strictly adhere to the scientific method and that it is officially bias-proof.  I don't think my sixth grade teacher would have given you very high marks in science.  :;):