RTFireflyI’m confused as to why the axe has to fall on NASA to pay for global warming.
Are you in favor of cutting the budget for PBS? After all, the arts are nice and all, but we won’t need them if the earth turns into another Venus, right?
How about cutting medicare? Sure, it would be nice to make old people healthier, but global warming is far more important.
The Department of education? Four times NASA’s budget. If fixing global warming is so important, surely we can let the states go back to running education and free up all that money to pay for global warming research, can’t we?
Somehow, all these ‘other priorites’ always crop up when talking about NASA’s budget, but never the other, much bigger budgets of government agencies we could just as easily survive without.
Nitpick: Chrysler is an American brand name once again. This year, Daimler-Benz sold 80% of its stock in Chrysler to Cerberus Capital Management LP, one of the largest private equity groups in the United States, for $7.4 billion. It is now called Chrysler LLC. Daimler-Benz now owns only about 19.9% of Chrysler.
Interesting. Don’t most people who believe in your political philosophy argue that without government, people will donate money to charities and give the poor and unfortunate all the help they need?
For one, because the axe should fall on manned space travel anyway. This ain’t going nowhere meaningful for a long time, so why not wait until there’s some reason to go somewhere?
But it ain’t the money. Go back and read what I said in post 94.
You’re right - we should spend money on bad programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars if we also spend money on good programs costing a minute fraction of that. :rolleyes:
Why? How will this help?
Go back to post 94 and rebut what I actually said, not what you imagine I may have said.
What’s the earliest, IYHO, that we can have a functioning, self-sustaining colony on another world? Because until then, our eggs are in one basket.
Yep. So?
Yeah, except even looking right at it, you still can’t read. I was talking about preserving an existing condition - that of the Earth already being terraformed.
The point being that anywhere we go in space, if we want to live on a planet permanently, we’ll have to terraform it - and it will be a much more daunting task than simply maintaining the viability of this planet’s biosphere.
See, like I said, you can’t read. I never suggested that we terraform Earth, but only that we maintain and preserve the condition of its having been terraformed already.
Can I point out that you are a complete idiot? Yep, this is the Pit. You’re a complete idiot.
You’re right - if we join in with what the rest of the world’s already trying to do, that would be “making their decisions for them.”
There are two possibilities: either we build a moon base just for the hell of it, in which case it’s just a waste of money. Or it’s part of a larger effort to plant a self-sustaining colony elsewhere in the universe, in which case it’s a damned enormous new venture that will occupy a lot of time, energy, and attention from both our leaders and the scientific community to do right. In which case the reduced attention to other new and important initiatives, such as addressing global warming, will have a strong likelihood of detracting from their success.
That wasn’t what you said. What you said @96 was:
Exactly what I’m saying. And we don’t have to leave Earth to do so!
All you need, to make progress towards self-sustaining settlements on the moon or Mars is: (a) send more unmanned probes there to find out what mineral resources are available to you, and (b) develop habitats here on earth that can be self-sustaining with only the inputs of sunlight and those mineral resources.
In the 1960s, we got to the moon in eight years, using 1960s technology. Once we demonstrate the ability, here on Earth, to set up a long-term colony on the moon or Mars, I have little doubt that we can do so in a similar timespan.
Getting there isn’t the hard part. Making it work there is. But getting there is the expensive part, because it involves keeping humans alive across hundreds of thousands (moon) or tens of millions (Mars) of miles of vacuum. So why spend money on the easy but expensive part, before we master the hard but cheap part?
Well, no. But that has nothing to do with this discussion, except in the precincts of your imagination.
We don’t need to fix it; we just need to stop breaking it pretty soon. That’s technologically easy; it’s only a political challenge.
And advances in energy efficiency, power generation, capture and sequestration of carbon emissions…what’s particularly improbable about any of these?
Those are symptoms. The cause is increased amounts of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. We’re quite capable of putting less CO2 in the atmosphere, without going back to the hunter-gatherer era.
No, I never said that. See above.
Yes.
Maybe not - but if you can’t do it here on earth, there’s no reason at all to believe you can do it in space. It’s like trying to do calculus if you can’t do algebra.
In that case, I think we must end this discussion. Whatever your hypothetical inputs are for a moon or Mars colony, they can be more or less duplicated on Earth. If you insist on being given a lot of resources to solve a harder problem without having demonstrated that you can solve the cheaper, easier problem in the same vein, it’s clear that you just want to have a pile of money thrown at you for manned space travel, and all the rest is bullshit.
Wow, you really can’t read, can you? It’s too late to undo the damage we’ve done. People are going to suffer. The best we can do, and apparently you (I’m being generous here) understand this, is we can stop making it worse. But even a moron could tell you we’re not going to stop making it worse anytime soon and raping NASAs budget isn’t going to help one bit. How naive can you be? For decades and decades you - and I do mean you, there’s no doubt about it - have been saying “feed the poor first! Feed the poor first!” So NASAs funding gets cut, we don’t spend much on space research and guess what, the poor don’t get fed either. I’m so sick of this game you play.
You honestly believe gutting NASA will fund your little “save the earth” plan? You really think this?
Cold-hearted and uncaring? Yes, so why don’t we try to get off the only planet in the whole fucking known universe that actually has an ecology we can damage? Let’s fuck the shit out of Mars. Who cares? It is NOTHING but rock. Nothing lives there. Let’s stop shitting in our own bed, and go find a toilet.
My understanding of Libertarianism is that without government, people will remain free to donate money to charities, and that’s the only just and ethical way the thing can be done, and if they don’t, letting the poor starve is still a better state of affairs than coercively taxing the well-off to feed them.
That’s the truth. Going to the moon for anything other than astronomy is a fool’s errand, unless we develop microwave power.
…bullshit.
Surely you mean for us to think of it as a gravity well that we’ll have to claw our way out of. Unless you build the rocket completely from parts made on the moon, including fueling it with moon-rocks, you’re going to have to spend dozens of kilograms of rocket fuel to get each kilogram of fuel onto the moon; tens of kilograms getting it off earth and another handful of kilograms slowing it down so it doesn’t plow into the moon at near-escape velocity. Those kilograms of fuel that you’re using to move fuel would be better spent moving real payload from the earth to Mars.
Going from Earth to the Moon before going to Mars is like trucking airplane parts and gallons of jet fuel from Death Valley up to Denver before flying to New York. Sure, an airplane assembled in Denver won’t have to climb those first 5,000 feet, and will use less fuel on the trip. But check your total budget and you’ll wish you’d just flown to Denver.
Mars has an atmosphere that allows spacecraft to decelerate gracefully; the moon has no such atmosphere and all visitors must either bring their own braking engines and fuel, or slam into the moon at their travel speed. Simulation software can accurately and precisely predict the positions and gravitational effects of the planets on spacecraft allowing us to craft long but efficient trajectories from earth to just about anywhere. Assuming a relatively efficient trajectory for Mars can be found during the time window that you wish to launch in (i.e. Mars isn’t on the other side of the Sun) then you probably waste less mass on parachutes and heat shielding than you would on descent fuel.
Bob Zubrin has written extensively about going directly to Mars, with a plan designed to manufacture fuel for return trips from Martian soil and atmosphere. The chemicals necessary to create that fuel do not exist on the Moon. The Moon is a distraction if your goal is Mars.
Well, you like to end your posts with the ever-so-childish “no point discussing this with you so we’re done.”
Hey, when I read that, I like to give people what they want. But then they come back anyway, so I guess you’re not done.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt; you don’t think gutting NASA will save the world.
You should sleep well, because if your fear is that “the public” will become preoccupied with returning to the moon and ignore global warming - that’s not going to happen. There are far more people like you, and you will always succeed in under-funding NASA under the pretext of funding things like feeding the poor or “fixing” global warming or whatever the current popular important cause du jour is.
Unfortunately, all you’ll succeed in doing is making fat politicians fatter, and feeding their own pet projects. The money NASA doesn’t get will not benefit your cause in any way. But you’ll feel better here on earth content in the knowledge everyone is going down with you and we didn’t spend too much on that silly space stuff.
Well, let’s put it this way: we’re done debating. But since you were kind enough to add a perfect example of why debating you is fundamentally impossible, I thought I’d point that out as a public service.
You seem to have understood some of what I’ve said, but mostly your supposed restatement of my points preceding your supposed rebuttal is nearly unrecognizable. It’s often so far from what I actually said that I wonder why you need someone to debate with.
