Cite?
Excellent. Then you won’t mind skimming $100 mil from the $15 bil NASA budget?
Interesting definition of “treatment” - no wonder you think you’re so up on social programs O_o
Cite for what? That you think that ordinary plants can’t be used for reversing desertification? Cite as to what kinds of plants can be used for the process?
Yes, I will mind. Why don’t we take some of the money we’re paying farmers not grow crops and use it for that instead?
So I take it you’ve read the book, tried everything it suggests and are still SOL?
Glad we agree. 
You create a high-yield plant with agricultural value in the Sahara, and then transport it to a place that’s about 140 degrees cooler on a good day, has 1/4 the sunlight, no irrigable water, and much less gravity. We don’t even need to do the experiment. The damn thing dies in a matter of hours.
Well, that’s exactly what I proposed now, isn’t it?
And it took observations to learn that it does not.
It would take observations to prove, if one did not simply accept mathematical consistency, that the Pythagorean Theorum actually works. I mean, if somebody writes it out and then provides a proof without diagrams, and you won’t believe it until you go out and measure a right triangle, that’s fine. One could say Michelson and Morely, and all those who believed there must be an “aether” took the approach of not accepting Maxwell’s equations at face value. What the equations suggested was so radical, I suppose it was only proper someone go out and actually observe what was predicted. But the simple fact is c is fundamental, and whether somebody measured the predicted phenomenon or not, Maxwell did not derive c from observing the speed of light. And he did not discover that c is constant in any frame of reference by doing an experiment. It simply comes out of the mathematical description of electromagnetic phenomena. What was suggested, again, flew in the face of what was then believed about physics, but in retrospect, it’s clear to see that human intuition was wrong, and the mathematical description was absolutely true. Human intuition is what created the aether when it wasn’t needed, so you could say experiments were not needed to prove Maxwell’s equations were true, but that intuitive objections to what they revealed were false.
The geodesic dome. I’ve seen plans for covering whole cities here on Earth with Fuller domes – many have objected to that idea on all sorts of grounds, but not on the grounds that it can’t be done. A geodesic dome is very sturdy and very stable and very good at distributing forces around evenly.
Have you read the book? I hope so, if you’re claiming that it actually lives up to its title.
If you want to know about Matthew Lesko, all you have to do is read the two reviews of that book in the link you provided. He is out to make a quick buck by putting information that is either publically available to everyone (phone numbers that are available in phone books and on the internet) or plain useless (out of date phone numbers and information) into a book and then claiming that it will save you a ton of money. He is a snake oil salesman, pure and simple, and if you believe his claims or commercials then I have to believe you fall for every Ponzi scheme that you come accross.
But hey, maybe it’s smarter to believe him. After all, in his own words, THIS IS NOT A SCAM. You can’t really argue with that, can you?
Not really pertinent, but he also drives around in a car that has question marks all over it just like the suit he wears in his commercials.
Zagadka circa 1687. Hey Newton, why are you wasting time on that physics stuff? Someone smart as you can figure out a way to clean up all the horse crap we have here.
I love the argument that the NASA budget is preventing us from doing X, Y and Z - when we have no trouble finding how many billions for Iraq? It’s a matter of priorities, not money.
People are starving in Sudan, but it is not because of inadequate agriculture. It’s because of politics, religion, and ethnic strife. I don’t think acting like someone who is brilliant in one area is going to be smart in another is going to help that.
And I can assure you, when I was on Arpanet 30 years ago no one thought about making money off of it. The net succeeded because it was big enough to be viable, because computers hit a good price point, and because there was a killer app. The commercial networks like Compuserve didn’t make it, remember.
BTW, if you think space travel is necessarily too expensive, compute the amount of energy needed to get you into orbit, then compute how much that costs (check your electrical bill for a rate.) Space travel is expensive because we do it so inefficiently. Once we can get to orbit cheaply, the rest will follow.
Yes, because millions of people dying from disease and famine every year are “horse crap”
Smoooooooooooth.
Right. My priority is human rights and equality. Yours is Star Trek.
Everything in its own part, yes. I never said it was all one problem or all solved with one solution, merely that one solution could help the situation. Tuckerfan’s rather simplistic viewpoint of “solving all desertification with $100 million” was just a humorous footnote. Of coruse the situation is much more complex than that.
Right. Once someone finds a use for space, they will invest in it competitively.
Right. And telling space scientists that they all of a sudden have to become biologists and agriculture experts is going to help how? You think an astronomer is going to cure Aids? That an astrophysicist is going to develop new seeds? Scientists are not die cut pieces you can dump on whatever you choose to work on. And don’t say it’s money - putting another $100 million in AIDS research is likely to not get anywhere. Some of this stuff is hard, and progress is not directly proportional to budgets.
I’m confused. Is $60 billion or so for Iraq (more now no doubt) your idea of human rights and equality? Fine, let’s pay for it by cutting back a smidgin on the tax cuts for the rich. It isn’t the money. In 1965 we could afford both Apollo and food stamps. What was causing hunger in America then was lack of focus. There was a famous CBS documentary that got everyone’s attention.
Never done cost-benefit analyses, I see. If getting a pound to orbit costs $5, not $5,000, there is a lot you can do. Today computer chips made in Florida are sent to Thailand to be packaged and tested, then sent back. That’s cost effective. Do you think we’d do that with sailing ships? Try to have some imagination, and be a bit forward looking.
It seems you’d rather have a few new bombers and fighters than the chance of a future in space. For me, I’d settle for 10x the military budget of potential enemies (or whatever it is) instead of 11x, and do some of this stuff.
And one more thing. In 1969 Nixon followed your wishes and cut way back on NASA’s budget. If paradise on earth ensued, I sure as hell missed it.
To nitpick (it’s an important one though), (1) is not at all the assumption used. The assumption is “Maxwell’s equations hold in every frame of reference.” (one can use a number of different assumptions of course). You could of course use a number of different assumptions, but (1) clearly isn’t going to work.
Anyway, this assumption isn’t really true - maxwell’s equations are an approximation to the true quantum mechanical picture (which is in turn an approximation to the true theory-that-we-haven’t-discovered-yet picture), and the empirical evidence that backs them up only looks at a very narrow (relatively speaking) range of circumstances. In particular it’s a low energy density measurement. It’s perfectly possible - probable even - that Maxwell’s equations break down at high energies.
Also there are respectable physical theories which suggest that the speed of light can vary. Not widely accepted mind you, but not laughed off the scene either. See e.g. the so called “Doubly Special Relativity”.
(Incidentally, E = mc^2 can be developed from much weaker assumptions - a common one is that (E/c, p) transforms as a 4-vector, which has a nice symmetry to it).
Further, claiming that special relativity prohibits faster than light travel isn’t entirely true. It doesn’t provide a mechanism for faster than light travel, and it breaks down for superluminal speeds. It does not however rule out wormholes or the like - shortcuts where nothing actually travels faster than light locally, but does so globally (although other considerations may). Sure it (and general relativity) says that faster than light travel causes causality violations, but who knows - maybe causality is overrated?
I’m not saying we will develop a faster than light drive. My inclination is that it probably is impossible. However, your claim (assuming I am correctly understanding your position) that it is a mathematical certainty that it is not possible is wrong. Further, if something like Doubly Special Relativity proves right, it may turn out to not even be a meaningful question - ‘faster than light’ might suddenly not be a well defined term.
I never said that current astronmers need to become ecologists. I said that the government needs to stop putting them on their payroll. They can easily find work in the private sector.
What on the gods’ green earth makes you think that I support the Iraq war? ($200 billion as of a few months ago)
Er, again, I have no idea where you’re getting your dellusional concepts that I support military funding from, but they certainly aren’t from me.
Again, you seem to be assuming that I agree with Nixon’s use of the budget. What gives you this idea? Preconceptions on who dislikes NASA? Please.
Come back when you have an iota of understanding.
Right. Lots of jobs for astronomers all over. I’m in the private sector, by the way, but I’m in favor of government funding research. It helps all of us.
As for the military - you hadn’t made your position very clear to me. When I said it was a matter of priorities, guns or research, you spoke of human rights. so, you agree that there is plenty of money for agriculture research as well as space, right?
So is your problem government funding for any type of research? Are you in favor of industry doing everything? What time window do you think they have? Are you absolutely positive that the blue sky medical researcher won’t discover something that can be applied as a cure for AIDS?
I’m sure you’ve managed research, and know all about the tradeoffs you have to make, right?
No, that is not what I meant. You have been complaining that money spent on NASA is taken away from that used for agriculture research, or research into the cure for diseases. (If not, why did you bring up agriculture?) I can only conclude that you think cutting the NASA budget would somehow magically result in the increase in budgets for the stuff you like. All I’m saying is that we’ve been there, done that, and both suffer. I trust you don’t believe the current administration would do any better.
Well, obviously you have to transfer the research to the useful subjects. That kinda goes without saying.
“Useful”? Who is to say what is useful, or what will become useful in the future? Certainly not you.
The only complex part of it is the politics. The dollar figure would probably be a lot lower, if one didn’t have to take into account bribes. The simple facts of the matter are that air wells work well enough in the desert (they got so cold on the inside that the ancient Egyptians would scrape ice off of them) to provide ample water for growing plants. Using local labor (extremely cheap in third world nations) and local materials (rocks are quite abundant in many deserts) one can build a plethora of air wells once the natives have been shown how to build them. As the water flows out from these air wells, it can be used to irrigate all kinds of plants. The more plants you have, the higher the moisture level in the air, which means the more water the air wells can crank out, which means more plants can grow. Given a few generations, one could reclaim large desert areas (at least until the environmentalists showed up and started complaining about all the desert habitat being wiped out) quite simply. No need for exotic methods whatsoever. Oh yeah, and while this isn’t the best cite around, it’ll have to do for now. If you want, I’ve got a bunch of articles on air wells, that I’d be a happy to scan and email you this weekend.
The problem, of course, is that this isn’t a “sexy” solution, so you can’t get folks interested in it at all . And you’re not going to get NASA scientists working on problems like world hunger (after all, what the hell does a rocket scientist know about such things?), you shut down NASA and all the engineers and scientists there will go to work on things for GM, Ford, Boeing, and improving useless consumer crap like turnip twaddlers.
Say I build a wormhole, and I leave one end of it on Earth. I take the other end, put it in a fast spaceship, and rocket away at some significant fraction of the speed of light, returning to Earth in the distant future (though for me the trip only seemed to take a few years). Since one end of the wormhole travelled with me in my frame of reference, I have a wormhole with one end opening to the distant future from my departure, and one end that opens into the deep past around the time I departed.
So, I now have a time machine.
In the future, I select a random person. I gather all the genealogical info. I can on that person, and determine who his or her ancestors were. I step back through the wormhole to the past, hunt down one of those ancestors, and kill him. There is no way that person I selected can now be born, since I bumped off his great-grandfather.
What will I find when I reenter the wormhole and go back to the future? Will the descendent of my victim still exist? If he did, how would I explain it? If he didn’t, what the hell happened? The the future just rearranged itself? If I was looking through the wormhole or left a video camera, could I witness somehow the effects my altering the past might have on the future?
Possible or not, this is one causality-violating possibility if there are traversible wormholes. At no point in the above did anyone go faster than light speed. But when you build shortcuts through spacetime, weird, weird stuff can happen.