How fucking clever.
“Shrub” has been a nickname for George W. Bush since before he was Governor of Texas. Not really very clever, but it’s stuck.
Much as I’d personally like to go to Mars, I’d like to wait until we can do it right – with a properly shielded ship with a rotating section and a plasma drive. First I’d like to spend a couple of decades getting back to the Moon, establishing a permanent presence there, exploring for volatiles, and mining material to be tossed up into orbit with mass drivers, to build some freaking huge stations in Lunar orbit and around the L5 points. What the hell else is money good for?
Oh, stop whining. You get to have Charles Darwin on your currency. Try putting any scientist, much less an “evil-lutionist” on US currency. The whole damned Bible Belt would probably secede from the Union.
So… your printing press or mine?
This part:
That’s my reading of the OP, which seems to be more or less a petty and worthless partisan reaction. Not the worst we’ve seen here, but hardly wirth the wordage.
Nah, the OP isn’t saying it’s GW’s fault. He’s saying that GW’s unwise taxcuts would make a Mars mission even more unlikely and expensive–which you can’t really deny.
But extreme radiation in space and the distances between that planets are nobody’s fault, not even the Republicans’.
I wish GW would irradiating interplanetary space.
Asshole.
“would stop irradiating…”
Take your time. And you might also consider what your reaction would be if you were to learn that there were, in fact, marvelous toys/gadgets/tools that may be traced directly to the Apollo program.
- Rick
What “factual errors?”
It’s not like he just copied the book out of an encyclopedia. In fact, in the foreward, he states that he didn’t like textbooks because they didn’t tell him why stuff was the way it was, just that it was. So, he talked and asked questions of experts in the fields covered in the book, and many of them read proofs of the book so as to catch any errors Bryson made.
So you’re previous points have been refuted and you’re holding onto this?
I’m not saying that it’s not a useful book–I already praised it as an informative survey of the sciences, but as I said, he is not a scientist so he is merely regurgitating what he has been told and not all of it accurately. I’m no scientist either, but I caught errors in dates and numbers, not many but they are there. It’s a fine book, but treating it (or any single book) as infallible is an exercise in credulity.
I don’t have a copy in front of me, so I can’t give you page numbers, but a survey of the readers’ reviews on Amazon might help you see what I mean.
You keep missing the bit where I agree with you on the difficulties of sending a manned mission to Mars–I just think that claiming any statement on science from a pop science general survey as authoritative reveals a certain naivete.
Instead of trying to defend this one, very general book, why don’t you read more books on astronomy and aeronautics so you can get a stronger background on space flight?
With respect to Grey, Mars Direct is a multiple mission project that would cost far, far more than $20-50 billion. I work in DC, I know from cost overruns on simple projects, let alone the runaway costs of long-term exploration and colonization. It’s a worthy project, but the will and the finances have to be found. Look at the ISS, for example, for costs gone mad and flawed engineering. Think about how sound the engineering would have to be for a mission that will take 6 months in space just to get to Mars.
The goal of getting off this rock and becoming a multiplanet species is one that must be achieved, but that will not happen until we assess the risks and the costs realistically and understand that real-life space travel is never going to be like Star Trek.
Fair enough gobear. Though the focus of a Mars Direct derivative is a lot tighter than the 90 Study. That had 4 or 5 schedules with orbital, lunar, mars exploratory and mars landings all placed together. The opportunity to have feature creep is staggering when compared to the Zubrin approach (launch to Mars). It also has the advantage of developing HW able to be used on the moon, should we opt to prepare ourselves that way.
Personally I like the idea of shooting for Mars and getting the Moon as a secondary benefit.
Other than the one on his head?
In all fairness, that does seem what the OP boils down to.
Bias report: I think it’s a damn shame we haven’t sent a man to Mars, and people overestimate the difficulty.
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See, and the thing about textbooks not “explaining why something is, but simply that it is” is unadulterated bullshit. The reason textbooks (science textbooks in particular) are so dry and complicated is that they tend to go into great, overwhelming detail about precisely why something is the way it is, often down to the mathematical level. Simply because Bryson may not have understood the explanation does not mean the explanation isn’t there.
If you’re disposed to ask the larger “why” questions (and who isn’t?,) I’d advise you to look toward philosophy and (not my bag, but others seem to like it) religion.
As one of my favorite physics professors used to say, “There are an infinite number of levels of the question ‘why?’ In physics, we only seek to answer a few of them.”
Bryson’s book is on my bedside table right now, unread, for precisely this reason. I know of Bryson’s tendency toward arrogance (the godawful “Lost Continent”), and I can well imagine that he might take the tone of “I’m better at this than the pros are,” an attitude that always gives me an unpleasant itch.
I’ll read it eventually. I just have to get my skeptically raised eyebrow to climb down out of my hairline first.
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As for the OP, my opinion is that it won’t be for a while, but a manned mission to Mars (and hell, even colonies) is absolutely inevitable, barring a global Dark Age.
I’m sure neither you, or anyone else really believes that man is inferior to machine as an exploratory tool.
Am I the first to point out to our oh-so-intelligently-brilliantly-smartly-brainy OP that any such Mars proposal would be set over the course of MANY years? Most likely beyond Bush’s presidency?
Well, boy will you be in for a surprise, as that is the exact opposite of the tone of the book. But you seem fatally prejudiced gaainst Bryson anyway, so oh well.