New Mars Forums

There is a diffrence between making fun and ripping someone's belief system up and insulting it in the process. That man crossed the line

Some might argue that you are engaging in the very same behavior as you post regarding anothers viewpoint on the matter.

You cannot have freedom of expression unless an individual is free from physical violence. There will always be those who find anothers viewpoint offensive, for whatever reason. If you allow or accept violence as an acceptable response to the expression of ideas, then you stifle thought, and reduce debate.

Without the freedom to express ourselves in the absence of violent reprisal for our views, we cannot communicate or find common ground in a peaceful manner. I suggest you think through your position in a bit more detail, as it is generally held by a radical minority.

Rather than editting the previous page, http://www.americandaily.com/article/8352]Privatize Space Exploration contains the info I was referencing.

There is reason to believe that the political nature of the space program may have even been directly responsible for the Columbia disaster. Fox News reported that NASA chose to stick with non-Freon-based foam insulation on the booster rockets, despite evidence that this type of foam causes up to eleven times as much damage to thermal tiles as the older, Freon-based foam. Although NASA was exempted from the restrictions on Freon use, which environmentalists believe causes ozone depletion, and despite the fact that the amount of Freon released by NASA's rockets would have been trivial, the space agency elected to stick with the politically correct foam.

You ever hear tell of a science fiction story, how a colony was in unrest because the guy incharge of waste disposal wasnt doing his job...Earth gov sends an officer out to investigate only to find that the reason he was refusing to push the button that processed waste was every one victimised him and austracised him for being the guy who "handles the shit". Basicly the rest of the colony were a bunch of snobs...So the Earth official (thinking this has gone far enough) pushes the button only to be treated with the same level of contempt as the last guy.

Uhhhhh. No.

Burt managed to keep his little "shuttlecock" Space Ship One from cooking at suborbital velocities (around Mach 3-5 generally) by adding alot of drag at high altitude where the air is thin... but if you tried to do that from orbital velocities (Mach 25+, over eight times faster), the wings would rip right off and the composite crew cabin would vaporize Columbia style, since you can't use high drag at such high speeds. Burt can't solve that problem with the current SSO design.

I ought to also point out that Burt's ship never made it to orbit. In fact, it never even got anywhere CLOSE to orbit. In order to go into space and stay in space, you have to not only reach an altitude of 200km or so (double what Burt's SSO did), but you must have a ground speed at Mach 25 (parallel to the Earth's surface). Burt's rocket burned every last drop of fuel and inertia to just barely get half way to orbital altitude, and up there it was basically stopped and had almost zero ground speed. In order to push SSO into orbit and carry the other nessesarry equipment that SSO lacks, it would need 200-300X (two or three hundred times) the fuel. It would be so big, it would hardly fit on a 747 jumbo jet.

And thats just for passengers, no payload at all.

If your hope was that the X-Prize was supposed to foster real development of orbital commertial infrastructure, then it failed badly.

MarsDirect, in its stock unmodified form, would NEVER work.

Here's someting I think you're missing. The vast majority of people in the US, Europe and the UK do not approve of a religious fanatic killing someone for "offending" them. When the Muslim community doesn't condemn such acts but instead carries on about "deserving it" and being "stupid" as you have been doing it makes the native people of the country much less tolerant of the Muslim immigrants. By your reaction, you are part of the problem.

No, they don't. Neither you nor I have a "right to not be offended." Suck it up and deal with it. Murdering people and carrying on like there's rampant "Islamophobia" only harms Muslims themselves. If Europe truly was as Islamophobic as you seem to think they'd simply stop letting them in. Which may yet happen, given behaviors discussed here.

Not at all. I merely hold the opinion that any nation can choose whether or not to let others in and those that do enter are obligated to adapt themselves to the native culture rather than expecting it to adapt to them.

See, what you'r missing is this: Both the US and many European countries used to do two very important things regarding immigration that they no longer do. One, they favored immigrants from countries with similar cultures thereby making assimilation easier. Two, they based citizenship on ancestry rather than place of birth. It used to be you were born a US citizen only if your parents were US citizens, now a pregnant illegal need only cross the border in time to deliver, at taxpayer expense, a new little American citizen meal ticket. The same applies to a lesser extent in many European countries.

I'm not against immigration and I'm not anti-Muslim. I am however for responsible immigration and I expect that Muslim immigrants accept that our society is a package deal. If someone wants to move to America or Britain, it behooves them to become American or British. Anything less is destructive to the society hosting them, detrimental to their own prospects and just a little bit silly. Why leave in the first place?