New Mars Forums

Going back about 4 days to Tim_Perdue's post (By the way, Tim is the fella who, upon learning of my Australian nationality, expressed his intention to try not to hold it against me. So far, he has shown admirable restraint but I don't know how much longer he can control his natural impulses! ).
                                       :;):

    Somewhere in New Mars, about 6 or 12 months ago, I posted about a very entertaining documentary I'd seen on TV. (I wish I knew now where that post is - I can't find the damned thing.)
    Anyway, the point is that a craft driven by explosions can and does work. A research team in the late 50s / early 60s produced a working model (using conventional explosives of course! ) and filmed it flying to a very respectable height.
    I think, from memory, that there were about a half dozen explosions and the miniature craft looked perfectly stable to me!
    Werner von Braun saw the same film and, although he was extremely skeptical beforehand, became an instant convert to this mode of rocketry.

    Putting aside the politics of nuclear power, I'm quite convinced that Orion is a perfectly feasible launch system. Naturally I'm wary of any system which utilises nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, for obvious reasons. But with the march of technology, I'm prepared to believe that sufficiently 'clean' nuclear devices can probably be developed. In any event, I'm prepared to look at the facts before making up my mind.
                                   

I still think it's the axe.
                                       

The journalists responsible for inaccurate overdramatisation of radiation data which might lead to the abandonment of Mars colonisation efforts will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes!!
                                          :angry:

    By the way, can anyone remember whether Dr. Zubrin gave estimates of surface radiation dosages after the establishment of a 500 millibar CO2 atmosphere?
                                              ???

Cindy, you're really a very nice person to offer to help with the cows when we get to Mars! But, before this cow thing gets completely out of hand, I should point out that I barely know one end of a cow from the other - except that one end slobbers all over you and the other end ... well, .. does something else all over you!
    I don't remember now exactly how I came to be confused with ol' Farmer Brown (maybe I suggested cows for milk and for their contribution to soil creation, or something), but Cindy, there's no way you would be helping me with the calving!! At best, I would be handing you ropes and towels - not the other way around!!!
                                               

    But I appreciated your very kind offer anyhow! 

No, tipping is not the norm here. Though, if the service is exceptionally good, I will leave a $5 note at a restaurant - more as a token of appreciation than as the God-given birthright of waitstaff!!
    And, if a taxi driver is especially helpful with luggage, I won't ask for change in many cases, or will ask for change from a rounded up figure. (i.e. For a $13 cab fare, I'll only ask for $5 change from a $20 note.)
    So, as you can see from this, people here haven't got 10 or 20% gratuity figures in their heads. Anything you might want to give is really just an extra and you won't get punished for not leaving tips.

    And thanks, everybody, for reassuring me about American currency - I don't feel quite so stupid now!   

    By the way, Phobos, I'm glad to know your hand is at least partially functional again. Here's hoping it makes a complete recovery!
    But I think you'll have to forget about calling Martian currency units 'Olympians'. That's 4 whole syllables!! As it is, the two syllable 'Dollar' has been shortened to 'Buck' for convenience! God knows what they'd make of a 4 syllable word.
    And who said anything about me selling my cows when I reach Mars?!! After spending 6 months in the Hab with a couple o' dozen head of cattle, all nice and cosy, I kinda think I'd miss 'em if I sold 'em!
                                     

P.S. I like all the American names for coins - quarter (or two
       bits), dime, nickel, and penny. We don't have that here.

Wow, Josh!
    There's way more pragmatism in you than first meets the eye!! I never would have suspected ...
                                   

    [ Jes' messin' witcha bro' !!!     ]

Hi Josh!
    I've never ripped one myself but I have seen torn ones so, yes, they can be damaged.
    But they do actually feel plasticky and they're harder to fold than paper money. The different colours are really very nicely done - only the $100 note is green!
                                   

No sense of humour, some people!
                                      

I found this article in the Sunday paper last weekend. As a former 'leftie' myself, I guess it struck a chord with me and expresses something of how I feel about the Iraq situation:-

                      BEGINNING OF ARTICLE.

    "Confessions of a Former Leftie."

    British historian and TV producer Phil Craig was a peace marcher long before September 11 and Bali. Now, he argues, President George Bush will be vindicated in his war on Iraq.

    We were there for peace. We were there to confront the American cowboy warmonger. We were there to watch actor Emma Thompson on a truck.
    Actually, of the day I marched in Britain against cruise and Pershing missiles, what I remember best is the bemused look on the faces of a group of miners as Emma performed her mobile political cabaret.
    Anyone remember cruise and Pershing? Or the Greenham Common missile base protests? You only catch them on UK television archive shows now, but back in the early 1980s stopping NATO deploying those American missiles was the great anti-war cause. It was what you did if you were young, decent and liberal.
    And how we decent young people hated Ronald Reagan. We all had that poster of him as Rhett Butler with Margaret Thatcher as Scarlett O'Hara: "She promised to follow him to the ends of the Earth. He promised to organise it."
    No, he wasn't funny - he was dangerous. He wanted to tear up detente, he wanted to confront what he naively called "the Evil Empire". For Christ's sake, he even went to Berlin and shouted: "Tear down that wall!"
    We'd all read Animal Farm and none of us was that keen on the Soviets, but at least they'd given their people decent healthcare, hadn't they, and a fantastic underground system? Oh, and jobs for life, unlike the evil Thatcher. What was the point of provoking them?
    Like a lot of lefties, I ended up in the current affairs department of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Eight years after protesting, I found myself in Eastern Europe.
    Amazingly, the Wall had, indeed, been torn down. My assistant producer had family in the old East Germany and he wasn't too pleased to hear of my peacenik past. Did I have any idea how much people like him had hated people like me?
    Did I know how crushingly miserable life had been in Eastern Europe, that the image of healthcare and jobs for life was strictly for the consumption of visiting left-wing reporters, and that the reality was grey, oppressive and corrupt?
    And, most of all, did I not know how much it had meant when Reagan challenged the Soviet overlords, matching their SS-20s with his own missiles, inviting them into a spending race that they could not win?
    And that's why I didn't march this time around. Because America, even with a cowboy in charge, isn't always wrong.
    Two paragraphs, both true:-
    ~ The United States has bankrolled and armed vicious regimes, refused to pressure Israel into making substantial territorial concessions in the West Bank, and has wilfully undermined international efforts to secure fair trade and environmental protections.
       Bad America, very bad.
    ~ For three generations the people of Europe have benefited hugely from the military and economic power of the United States. That power disposed of first the Nazis and then the Soviets. In the last decade it has chased a fascist dictator out of the Balkans and a reactionary death cult from its laboratories in Afghanistan.
    Good America, yes, very good America indeed, especially when you consider what the multilateral United Nations' decent and liberal approach to problems has given us in recent years: Rwanda, Srebrenica and a 12-year game of hide-and-seek in Iraq.
    I like to imagine peace protesters sitting in a cafe in Jerusalem, Baghdad or Damascus one day, in a revitalised, democratised and peaceful Middle East, and realising that the turning point was the removal of Saddam Hussein.
    Optimistic? Naive? I suppose so.  But some good will come out of a regime change in Iraq. Reformers in Iran will be inspired, the violent Islamic group Hamas will lose its major paymaster, and the Saudi oligarchs will think twice before funding more jihad fanatics.
    I'd say the optimists have as good a chance of being right as the naysayers, whose relentlessly negative predictions about recent Western military actions have been equally relentlessly wrong.
    Liberal British columnist Madeleine Bunting wrote a few days into the bombing of the Taliban that Afghanistan was America's new Vietnam. Last week she attempted to discount any cheering crowds that we might see in Iraq as "a few days jubilation staged for the TV cameras."
    Well, Afghanistan wasn't Vietnam, and CNN will not need to stage any jubilations in Baghdad.
    Why would a liberal want to dismiss the liberation of the Iraqi people? Because anti-Americanism trumps all her other instincts.
    From my experience, mainstream left-liberal opinion remains resolutely opposed to the war, however many nasties chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix and his team can dig up in Saddam's back garden. It's also very much inclined to believe anyone but Bush or Powell when it comes to evidence about the nasties.
    "Still not proven ... no clear risk" is the consensus, even after Colin Powell's tape recordings, and even after British TV reporter Jane Corbin's excellent documentary showed just how the inspectors get the run-around.
    I've made enough current affairs programs to understand and to share much of the case against America. But my feelings about the war on terror have been different from the start.
    I was in Florida on September 11, 2001, researching a book on World War II. In the week after the attack, the airlines were down, so I drove across rural Florida and Georgia, watching the flags come out and the patriotic messages go up on the billboards.
    People were calling the radio shows. One question dominated, the same one I heard in bars, shops and around the dinner tables: "Why do they hate us so much?"
    "It's just a minority," I said.
    I returned home and realised that it wasn't a minority at all. To my astonishment, it included many of my liberal friends, and writers and thinkers I admired.
    In that first week a cartoon in The Guardian painted President Bush as an ape dumbly trying to impersonate Winston Churchill, while The Independent offered a blind, deranged Bush firing his cowboy six-shooter and treading on a dead Arab. And all this before a single American bomb had been dropped on Afghanistan, and with 3000 bodies - we still thought 10,000 then - beneath the Trade Towers rubble.
    I phoned a friend in the television business. We both said we were fearful. I was talking about Islamic terrorism, perhaps next time with a nuke, but it turned out he meant "the mad cowboy in the White House". It struck me then that, after so many years of opposing American foreign policy, the Left could not see beyond Vietnam-era slogans. It could not recognise that a toxic stew of rogue regimes, apocalyptic weapons programs and a perverted form of Islam posed a deadly threat.
    It posed a particularly deadly threat, come to think of it, to the values of the Left itself: to women's rights and gay rights; to secularism, pluralism and multiculturalism. In fact, you name the liberal "ism" and Osama was against it. But one "ism" still trumped all: anti-Americanism.
    The coming endgame with Saddam will, at the very least, rid the world of a proven danger, and lessen the chances that the next terrorist attack will take out millions not thousands. If war comes, will innocent Iraqis die? Certainly. More than the Americans will admit, fewer than the peaceniks will claim. But innocents have been dying for decades under this revolting regime.
    We're told that war will drive Muslims into the arms of al-Qaida. But remember what bin Laden said in the days after 9/11: "America is weak, it cannot take casualties, it ran away in Somalia."
    Throughout the 1990s the West responded tamely to attacks by bin Laden (the African embassy bombs, the USS Cole), to attacks by groups linked to Saddam (the Saudi barracks bomb, the assassination attempt on Bush's father, the first World Trade Center attack), and to the continued refusal of Iraq to disarm as required by the Gulf War ceasefire. Ten years of this weakness only encouraged our enemies to be bolder.
    Good, decent people are painting their "No War" signs; even Nelson Mandela, the conscience of the world, tells me I'm backing a bunch of racist oil-imperialists. Nelson may be against me, but at least Czech leader Vaclav Havel understands. Which brings me back to Hyde Park in London in 1983.
    Eastern Europeans know that when they suffered oppression, it was America which tried to help them, and the Western Left which marched in tacit support of their oppressors. The communists, as we later discovered, never believed that NATO would respond to the deployment of their SS-20s. They thought that the protests of Phil Craig and Emma Thompson and lots of other decent liberal people would make it impossible.
    I still hope that Saddam will do the same. But I fear that all this marching will make him think that he still has a chance. And that could be more dangerous than any cowboy in the White House.
                             END OF ARTICLE.

    I don't want war ... any war anywhere! I don't know anyone with half a brain who thinks any differently. But my feeling is that the time has come to make a show of force.
    The intransigence of France, Russia, Germany, and China in the face of an obvious and long-standing game of brinkmanship by Saddam, in clear breach of his obligations under a resolution passed unanimously by the UN, is a seriously worrying turn of events.
I read somewhere recently the opinion that these countries are simply avoiding their obligation to disarm Iraq by force because they then won't be obliged to help pay for either the war itself or the rebuilding of Iraq afterwards! That, and the opinion that agreements with the present odious regime are just too lucrative for them to want to see Saddam ousted. I'm much more inclined to believe all of this than to believe the French, Russians, Germans and Chinese have suddenly become loving, forgiving paragons of higher morality.
    The whole thing stinks to high heaven, if you ask me. But the worst aspect of it all is the undermining of the UN's credibility in the eyes of tyrants and terrorists everywhere.
    If, unlike Phil Craig, the rest of the world's 'lefties' can't put aside their dogma for a minute and face up to the fact that sometimes you just have to make a stand (even if it does happen to be on America's side), then I guess I'll have to throw my arms in the air and admit I don't understand anything!
                                       

Many thanks Cyclohm for your witty and magnanimous acceptance of my parallel thread!!
                                   
    (I were hedgamacated meself, ya no! )

    I can see why you're so pleased with Robert Dyck's input, by the way. I've always found his comments to be extremely well thought out and informative.

    (I've made my excuses to Dickbill over at 'Viking Labeled Release' about the other two life experiments I promised to provide information on.     )

Right CC !
    It's called conquest, wealth, and power.

    And that's why, probably, there will always be empires - too much primate hard-wiring in the brain, I'm afraid.

I don't know much about the American religious thing, although we in Australia do hear about fundamentalists and I have a couple of books about the threat to science of all that creationist bulldust.

    But this discussion reminded me of an episode in the life of Dr. Gilbert Levin, of Viking Labeled Release Experiment fame. Apparently, Dr. Levin's son, Henry, was interested in studying some kind of chemistry (a chip off the old block, by the sounds of it! ).
    Henry asked his father to take him to Brown University to have a look at the facilities - in part, at least, because Viking Imaging Team Leader, Thomas Mutch, was a teacher there.
    Mutch took the two Levins to see the chairman of the biochemistry department. When Mutch told the professor that Dr. Levin was one of the scientists who had an experiment aboard Viking to detect life on Mars, the chemistry professor said to Gil Levin: "Life detection experiment on Mars? Now wasn't that an expensive waste of time. The Scriptures certainly tell us there can be no life anyplace but on Earth."!!!!!!!
                                       

    Brown University is classified as an important educational establishment, as I understand it (? )
    If the chairman of the Biochemistry Department at such a school can believe this kind of nonsense, it sends shivers of apprehension down my spine about the state of the American scientific community in general!
    Though it would certainly help to explain some of NASA's motives with regard to Mars and the search for life there - motives I've questioned in other threads at New Mars.
                                        ???