New Mars Forums

Free Spirit:-

    The sad answer to that question, of course, is that nobody has a clue how to do such a thing!   
    It's certainly not going to happen with rockets because of the ridiculously enormous reaction mass you'd have to carry and, even with an impossibly-tightly-focused, ground-based laser, the amount of energy you'd have to pump into it to keep accelerating a constantly increasing mass, closer and closer to light speed, would be vastly greater than Earth's entire energy production! You'd need to be able to harness a good proportion of the output of a star, I should think, to achieve your goal.

    Unless we can invent a propellantless space-drive, a la science fiction, I think it's a lost cause. And even if we could produce a true space-drive, it would be a one way trip as far as coming home to friends and relatives is concerned, because of the time dilation reasons outlined above.
                                       

    However, something has been happening recently in this field which may prove very interesting.
"Focus" magazine, July 2003 Ed., p.63:-

    Who knows where this latest research will lead us? Maybe nowhere useful or maybe to a means of breaking the light-speed barrier.
    I think that would be ... Relatively Special, don't you?! {Groan ..     }
    Sorry!

Josh:-

    I understand your feelings in this regard, and I daresay Cindy does too, Josh. And I'm sure we would all like to think we could just walk away from this problem and have the terrorists do the same.
    This is exactly my point in all these recent exchanges of opinion. I'm trying to tell you that it ain't gonna happen!
    The fat's in the fire.
    The cat's among the pigeons.
    The solid waste has reached the cooling device.

    Whatever the reasons behind all this, America's ill-advised foreign policy decisions included, it doesn't matter any more. It's gone beyond that. It's no longer a political debate.
    Maybe we shouldn't have put all the deckchairs in a row on the promenade deck, perhaps we should have placed them in cosy groups of, say, 4 or 5 towards the stern of the ship near the recreation area. ... It doesn't matter!! The Titanic still has a big hole in it and it's going to sink. (Or at least it probably will unless we do something about it.) Recriminations, 'I told you so s', and political point-scoring are all futile gestures right now. Though I've noticed that some people are like recorded messages in this regard; as soon as the word 'politics' comes into the conversation, they automatically spout the same lines from that best-seller: "American Crimes through History". All very interesting, but you could do the same for the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, Ancient Rome, the Incas and Aztecs, most of the European medieval monarchies, more recently Spain and Portugal, France, Holland, Belgium and Britain. (So what's new .. ?! )
    I believe some of you people have a very limited historical perspective, which is always going to distort your view of everything.

    By all means let's discuss how best to neutralise this new enemy of progress but let's not waste our time in apportioning blame. Time enough for that after we've dealt with this far more pressing problem.
                                             

Hear hear yet again, Cindy!
    I think you've said it all but I must say I've never come across the notion that reaching a decision based on known facts is an indication of the cessation of mental function!!  :laugh:  [Clark, that is a killer deduction on your part - one of your finest so far!]

    As for terrorist attacks on western soil since 9/11, I count Bali. Of the 202 people killed last October, 88 were Australian. They were slaughtered in a nightclub where foreigners were known to gather; largely young fun-loving Australians partying on holiday (vacation, in American lingo). The Balinese people are predominantly hindu, as was all of Indonesia before islam swept into the archipelago many years ago. They are gentle, smiling, tolerant people who have established warm friendships with back-packing young Aussie tourists in recent decades.
    To all intents and purposes, as far as I'm concerned that vicious attack may just as well have been staged in a beach suburb of Sydney, Australia.
    The words of the poet Rupert Brooke were used to describe parts of Europe where British troops fell in the fierce fighting to liberate Europe from the Nazi yoke. But they could just as easily be applied, with the appropriate alteration, to the brave American soldiers engaged in the same conflict. The words are: ".. there's a corner of some foreign field that is forever England."

    I know the circumstances aren't exactly parallel and I know I risk being accused of overdramatisation or some kind of maudlin sentimentality, but in a way I feel the same about that small area of Bali. Whether it occurred, in a technical sense, on Australian soil or not, doesn't seem to matter much. At least, it doesn't to me.

You know, I switched on my computer with a tinge of trepidation just now, thinking my last post would attract considerable flak.
    I imagined being labelled as some kind of idealistic, slightly right-wing fruitcake who believes in fairy tales! I know how hard-nosed some of our fellow contributors can be here.

    The first response was Josh's. Predictably, he could see little of any merit in the sociological achievements of western civilisation [-'I don't see what you're trying to get us to "fight for" Shaun.'-], but overall I thought his response, while typically cynical, wasn't quite as cutting as I'd expected.   O.K. Josh!    (But I still disagree strongly with your philosophy and feel sorry that you seem to see so much that's bad and so little that's any good.)

    But the responses from Byron and Cindy were real heart-warmers! Thankyou very much for those responses, which made me feel a lot better!
    Oh I know we don't see exactly eye to eye on everything. Hell! ..  That's the way it should be. But it's very gratifying to know one's viewpoint on something important like this is understood and, to a large extent, agreed with.
    All I want is for a united world to move forward to the kind of future we should inherit. As Cindy says, a lot of people are intrinsically good. A lot of them have worked long and hard and tried their best in order to get us where we are. If for nothing and nobody else, it's for those people we should fight. We owe it to them (and ourselves) to avoid this latest attempt to send us back to a new dark age of ignorance and intolerance. Byron's words in this regard are chilling; a monumental terrorist-instigated recession is a frightening thought.
    If such an event ever came to pass, Josh, even you might come to appreciate the material comforts our badly flawed system once afforded you. If things got really bad, you might even wish for a return of the evil market economy you once despised so thoroughly!
    You never know ... stranger things have happened!   :;):

Thanks for the comeback, Clark.
Clark:-

    Ha-ha!  :laugh:  Yeah, it sure looks like I'm on the warpath all right!
    Hey, wait a minute ... I am on the warpath!

    I appreciate your debating tactics here, Clark: Turn the argument around and throw it back, undermine the argument by attempting to cause doubts as to its morality, if possible cause pangs of institutionalised 'white man's guilt' in your opponent.
    These are all perfectly acceptable tactics in, say, a highschool polemic meeting and they would no doubt earn you points for your team.

    But I think you may have missed the point of my post (accidentally, of course .. ! ). This isn't highschool any more and terrorist attacks are not hypothetical. In the real world, nobody educated takes seriously the argument you make, by implication, that islamic fundamentalism is somehow worthy of comparison with liberal democracy. It plainly is not and you know this full well, my machiavellian friend!
    I reiterate my point again that we no longer have the luxury of time to debate the finer points of one social system versus another, and in the case of islamic fundamentalism it's a 'no-contest' anyhow.
    We're all targets. If we're not under attack today, we almost certainly will be tomorrow; that's what our opponents do, it's their mission.
    I'm suggesting we abandon the kind of cute 'ivory tower' musings you put forward in your last post and all pull together in what I see as a potentially very serious contest for civilisation in this new century.

[P.S. And please, Clark, don't come back with: "Name one cute ivory tower musing in my last post" or "Who are you to say liberal democracy is better than islamic fundamentalism?". ... Cos it won't work!!      ]

Good points, Byron.
    I sympathise entirely with your sentiment that it would be very satisfying to mobilise a massive effort to root out this 'cancer' once and for all. But that may be easier said than done.
    I suspect the weak point in your argument may be in comparing this war with the more formal war against Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan. At least that one was fought by regular armies 'out in the open', so to speak. Today's terror war reminds me of the legendary boxing tactics of Muhammad Ali, who expressed it in his own poetic style: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee; your hands can't hit what your eyes can't see".
    A major mobilisation may well prove ineffective against guerilla warfare of this kind. Where would you concentrate your firepower? Germany's renowned military prowess was severely hampered in WWII by covert resistance operations conducted by French, Polish and Russian saboteurs behind the main battle lines. This went on despite absolutely savage reprisals by the Gestapo and the SS against civilian populations. And those people were merely fighting for their countries; these muslim fundamentalists think they're fighting for God!!
    Don't misunderstand me, Byron, I'm not suggesting we shouldn't increase our resolve to destroy these fanatics. I merely query how best to go about it. It may be that the current undercover investigations and manhunts are the best way. I can't imagine suddenly sending 50 army divisions into, say, Malaysia to raze the terrorist training camps, without very serious objections from the Malaysian government! I think we need to fight smarter, not harder.

    Another point is the tendency by some parts of the media to associate religious fundamentalism with poverty. In a way, I agree with the connection, but not in the way it's portrayed on TV and radio. There it's reported that poverty and hopelessness cause islamic fundamentalism to blossom; I say that islamic fundamentalism causes the poverty and hopelessness in the first place.
    I don't have the figures handy but I read a report which showed clearly the correlation between islamic states and economic and technological backwardness. Science can't flourish in a closed society where the exchange of ideas has to pass a vetting process by islamic clerics to see whether the Koran allows it. And here's the big one ... (as we have mentioned elsewhere at New Mars), how many countries can exclude 50% of their people, their women, from social, educational, and workplace fulfilment and still expect to prosper?!! NONE!  [Hell! My wife informs me, frequently, that Australia is only spared complete collapse by the efforts of Australian women.    ]
    Osama Bin Laden was never poor and neither was his evil little Egyptian side-kick Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Many islamic states are floating on oil; hardly something which predisposes a country to poverty. Yet, when interviewed on television, their people all spout the same anti-western doctrine. They're not driven to such hatred because they're poor and hungry; they're obviously schooled in it by their religious leaders.
    I don't subscribe at all to the notion that this awful terrorism which threatens liberal democracy is an economic war. That's just more of the usual guilt-trip an opportunistic left-wing tries to hang on us at every turn.
    No, this is an attempt by one group to forcibly impose its religious beliefs on the rest of us and it's going to be very hard to stop them. We really need to put all our own political rivalries aside right now and pool our resources ... this is serious business.
                                         ???

I don't think it was about oil.
I think it was genuinely about security on a world scale.
I don't know where the WMDs are - maybe they've been destroyed or shipped out. Maybe there weren't any.
I still think Afghanistan and Iraq were justifiable wars.
I think the UN is impotent in such things.
I am so sorry for the U.S. and U.K. troops on the ground.
I am so sorry for the average Afghan/Iraqi trying to just live.
I hope very much that America will succeed in rebuilding both Afghanistan and Iraq despite the rabid religious lunatics.
I very much appreciate the sacrifices being made by America and Britain in the interests of democracy and security; a heavy burden.
From recent documentaries, I think western civilisation is up against it in a big way.
This terrorism isn't about poverty or oil; it's a war of ideologies.
Our enemy is without reason and without pity; a religious zealot, the worst of all possible opponents.
This enemy will not relent if we walk away. S/he will carry the war to us wherever we are.
This enemy does not comprehend liberal democracy and the rights of the individual.
In one form or another, we will be fighting this war for decades or longer; it may never be over.
But we have to fight it.
I, for one, will not go back to the middle ages, nor will I abandon progress.
I won't be told where to get off by some ignoramus who knows nothing, sees nothing, and cares for nothing outside his own twisted view of the contents of the Koran.
This is serious business.
The light of civilisation is worth fighting for, even to the death.
Let's do our best to make sure it's their death and not ours.
                                         

Cool pics!
    Cheers Cindy.     

Free Spirit:-

    Ha ha ha !!  :laugh: What a picture that conjures up .. very amusing, Free Spirit!
                                       

Hi Lacodia!
    My initial response to this is that you are still accelerating the entire mass of the craft at 9.81 m/sec/sec. You have to be because otherwise you won't get the desired effect in the crewed inner hull.
    All you are doing to create the change in angular momentum is trading the inward pull of the tether for the inward push of the thrusters.
    There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that of course, except for the continuous high rate of fuel usage in the thrusters. Considering that you're using a standard Hohmann transfer orbit, it's still a 6 month trip. That's a long time to be firing those thrusters! If you were to just aim your craft at Mars and accelerate at 1g, flipping around at the half way mark and decelerating at 1g, the trip would take about 42 hours. (Assuming you waited until Mars was closest to Earth.)
    I think the latter method is considerably more fuel efficient! Unless I'm missing something important here.
                                       

    By the way, a warm welcome to New Mars! You'll have a ball here with some of the discussions.
    Most members are great fun, though quite a few of them are politically right out there on the edge. But don't worry. My politics are perfectly normal and reasonable (thank God), so if there's anything you need to know on that score just ask me! OK?
                                         

Byron writes:-

    Why should they side with the islamic fundamentalists?

Rex writes:-

    Oh yes, Rex! Don't misunderstand me. I haven't exactly thrown in the towel just yet and I'm quite sure you haven't either!
                                           

    I haven't totally given up on a trip to the Moon in my old age for one thing.        :;):

[P.S. Thanks for the compliment, by the way. It's always gratifying to think one's comments about inner feelings have been well received.]