New Mars Forums

Yeah, I think I'll sneak up on Shaun as he preens his plummage like a peacock and then pluck off all of his feathers. He'll be really sexy then.   Maybe after that I'll bake him at 600 degrees until he's a golden brown and then carve him up with a Ginsu knife. 

That's when we celebrate Newton's birthday of course but instead of decorating pine trees we prop up apple trees in the living room and then sit under them waiting for apples to drop and inspire us with great thoughts.  Well at least that's the ritual among physicists anyway.  The big question though is what do you want for Newtonmass? 

I made a pumpkin pie but unfortunately it didn't recieve rave reviews as I think only one person actually bothered eating a slice.

One of the drawbacks to testing, particularly when it's used to judge whether a school is doing a good job or not, is that teachers tend to focus completely upon material that will be on the tests and exclude everything else.  I have a few relatives who are teachers and they tell me this is a bad problem in the schools where they teach.  Testing certainly has its place but it's definately not the end all be all of education, which I think is something you were getting at anyway.

I've tried explaining this to a few people but they usually look at me like I'm high on something when I try to explain that the astronauts float around because they are in continuous free fall and not because they are free of gravity.  Oh well, I guess I'd probably stare with the same look if someone tried to explain heart surgery to me.

I think a lot of it has to do with people just not being intellectually oriented.  They'd prefer to believe in things that give them security, hope, and simple answers about our existence rather than take the less emotionally satisfying and difficult road of science and critical thinking.  In general though I think we underestimate the interest in space a lot of people have.  I find my neighbors have an insatiable interest in looking through my telescope and I've been bringing up the space elevator to a lot of people lately and many of them find it geniunely interesting, including my sister-in-law, which I never would have thought.   I think the problem might lie in education itself.  It's often so impersonal and dry that you can't help but be turned off by it.  We need to engage peoples' imaginations!

Well, I wasn't trying to give the impression that we should build this giant city in space right now!  I just like the idea!  Of course it'd be a logistical nightmare using today's technology.  I think we have a bad tendency to let "reality" get in the way of us developing our ideas sometimes.  I guess they probably accused Michaelangelo of being a hopeless and impossible dreamer when he was thinking of powered flight five hundred years before it became "reality."

Did that show run on American TV?  I don't remember ever watching episodes of Daniel Boone.  Anyways, considering Cindy's genetic legacy, it's probably not good to get her mad when she has a bowie knife in hand.  Or mad at all since she probably wrestles grizzly bars in her sleep. :0  Hmm, anybody else here related to a famous personage?

That would be cool.  I'll pull you back in case the thing sucks you in or vice versa.

Rifkin basically says that humanity is too immoral to develop nanotechnology so a moratorium should be placed on all nanotech research.  Such a moratorium won't work though.  You can ban it in this country or that but somebody is going to keep working on it.  It simply has too many promises for both good and evil.  Anyhow I don't remember Allah giving Rifkin the moral authority to tell us what we should and shouldn't do so he can cram his totalitarian politics up where you know where.

Wow, I was under the impression that the solar chimney idea was pretty much dead.   Did they say how wide the structure was by any chance?  If they can leave the floor of the chimney all soil they could grow crops that are useful as fuel.  I can't wait to see that thing when it's built.  I might have to make a special trip to Australia to see it.  Before I'm turned into fertilizer I think I'll make it a goal to see this giant powerplant and of course the space elevator when it's built.  Brad Edwards already said he'd facilitate tourists so he better not let me down!

I read about this discovery earlier but I didn't realize that it could have efficiencies up there in the 70% range.  That would definately revolutionize solar energy.   If this discovery pans out there's no need to have 80,000 square meter solar arrays to generate the power for ion engines as the Soviets had originally envisioned.  I wonder if we could reduce the mass of a solar powered spacecraft by using free-electron lasers to concentrate power on them from Earth/orbit in the same fashion that they are proposed for the space elevator.  The energy requirements for such a laser might make it unpracticle though not to mention keeping it perfectly aimed all the time.  Oh well, with 70% efficient solar cells lasers won't be needed anyway.

That would be Valerie Solanas.  It just gives me the creeps that there are people out there who see her as some shining example of feminism.    We won't get anywhere if we continue to spew hate toward people under any guise and these very Solanas-style radical feminists are definately haters as bad as racists.  You can't preach tolerance on one hand and advocate genocide against 50% of the population on the other.  It's the ultimate in hypocrisy.  A humanist attitude where we realize we are all human and therefore have the equal right to strive toward any goal and develop our attributes is a less divisive and more effective philosophy in my opinion.

Now that's the kind of advice I'm looking for.  I think one of my problems is that I was trying to remember the patterns of the constellations without really taking the time to learn how they exist in relation to other constellations.  I'm having a hell of a time trying to find the Andromeda galaxy though.  I have a particularly hard time trying to find those constellations which seem to span several fields of view like Andromeda.  My short term memory seems, well, rather short.    Do you have any other book recommendations?  I was scanning Amazon as well and there's a lot to choose from.  I was thinking "Turn Left at Orion" might be a good choice also.

The author makes a lot of good points but I don't buy the idea that L5 colonies are necessarily more logical than colonizing Mars. He seems to be setting up a dichotomy by saying "either we'll be building free-space colonies or we'll be colonizing Mars so here's why Mars is a bad choice."  Why not do both? If his predictions that the private sector and people who just want to get the hell out of here are the ones who will ultimately develop huge space colonies then it doesn't strike me as relevant whether a government chooses to fund a Mars mission or not.  It could only help if the government funded a manned mission to Mars because it will (100% guaranteed) lead to new technology that will make it easier to sustain a human presence in space.  And he also doesn't seem to realize that one of the reasons we want to go to Mars is to just do scientific investigation and quench our curiosity on whether there's life or not.   

Anyhow the author tries to bolster his argument against Mars by saying it isn't suitable for a variety of reasons for colonization and I just didn't agree with any of them.  For instance, he says the atmosphere is useless, well, hardly!  And there's no reason mining on Mars could't be automated as it could be with an asteroid.  I think it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to set up colonies on the Martian surface than it would be to tear asteroids apart to create huge rotating wheels or cylinders in space.  He might have a point about Mars's gravity being too weak to keep people in good health over the long term, but we just don't know yet so I can't buy that argument either until more data comes to light.  I think he could have made his argument better by stating what he thinks the government should be doing instead of going to Mars.  Maybe argue why the money that would go into a crewed Mars mission would be better spent on developing systems that would allow economical and mass access to space.