No. I’m asking you to stop criticizing others (me) for doing what you don’t do. Not sarcastically, perhaps indirectly.
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It’s 2017.
Nothing is more suspicious than sincerity.
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The last line I deleted before posting?
“The internet, where even sincerity is suspect.”
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As human beings, we want to ensure the long-term survival of our race, and the only way to do that is to grow the human presence in space, in colonies across the solar system.
Any particular objection to your going first?
microwaves to a base station.
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And as I went on to say, to do it, if/when we attain the necessary technical and scientific expertise (which we are nowhere near having yet), would require putting an entire european nation’s worth of people on mars, just to have the bare minimum economic foundation needed to be able to build and repair the machines needed to keep them alive. Which is ridiculous, insane.
Think about how much investment and effort would be required to make Little America in Antartica not require any importation of goods, services, or labour going forward. Think about how difficult to impossible it would be to find the number of people with the needed skills who would willingly go there to live and work full time to expand the existing base in Antartica to full self sufficiency. Now imagine you have to hire thousands of times as many people to go to Mars, to live and work there full time there, under even worse conditions than in Antartica, in order to get your self sufficient mars base off the ground.
Think about the brain drain problem experienced by small communities on earth. Then think about how much bigger a brain drain you will have of workers on your not yet self sustaining mars colony, as you struggle to build it up past the tipping point, with workers deciding they would rather they and their children not spend their entire lives inside a pressurized underground warren.
Very simply, i don’t think it can be done without using slavery. And slaves have a tendency to revolt and/or run away. Again, I say, if an insurance policy is what we’re after, it’s going to be far easier and less problematical to fireproof our current home than to build a new one just in case this one burns down.
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My point was not to debate the details of a mars colonization scheme, but to point out that you’re doing a disservice to your own side of the argument by employing strawman and ad hominem arguments.
And like, hey, I agree with you and disagree with Musk But from what I know about him, calling him an idiot can only make you look bad. He has no formal aerospace engineering but he intimidates the rocket scientists at SpaceX. This is not a dumb guy, and he’s put a lot of thought into mars colonization.
Musk acknowledges pretty much all the challenges you cite, arguing that it’s still worth the try even if success is an extreme long-shot. And this is a guy who has already pulled off some incredible long-shots in his career – his concrete accomplishments in the real world lend his side of the argument credibility that some internet rando simply cannot hope to match.
So you’re not in a good position to argue that what he’s trying to do is stupid because it’s impossible. You could maybe argue that the attempt at mars colonization actively harms the earth and that’s why it’s a bad idea – that’s the tack I would take myself. But you’re arguing that it’s a bad idea because it’s hard and won’t work, and given that Musk acknowledges it’s hard and is trying anyway for moral reasons, that just makes you look like a sour grapes wanna-be instead of an intelligent and informed critic.
I don’t want my position – that we are creatures and not robots, and that we belong on earth not in space – to be written off as the position of sour grapes wanna-be losers, so I humbly beg you: find some better arguments.
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This conspiracy theory also shows a sweeping disregard for the historical reasons for going to the moon. Fooling the American public is a pretty trivial goal, governments do it all the time. But Fooling the Russian government would not have been a trivial task. Better, in fact, not to make the attempt, then to try and fail to convince them of such a lie. As with Sandy Hook, it shows a blatant, callous lack of care for, or interest in, real history.
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And yet you can buy a laser cutter or just import a 5w laser diode all heat-sinked up and ready to roll without any issues. Laser laws here are more than just a bit patchy. 
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and we’re still the same caveman assholes, by and large, by the standards of 200, 2,000, or 20,000 years ago.
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Well, then, we probably won’t ask you to do it. (-:
But, seriously, do you object to those of us who don’t share your beliefs going ahead and doing it without you?
Because that’s the plan.
SpaceX is going to Mars. Mostly because Elon wants to, and has a plan that might actually work.
The “sustainable civilization as backup for Earth” is PR spin to make it seem like something… more serious, something with… greater moral gravitas, somehow… than just a wealthy man’s quest for The Greatest Adventure Evar.
But that’s what it is, really. Elon wants people to colonize Mars, and he’s got the money to bootstrap a business plan that might actually succeed in doing that.
But that business plan requires an ongoing colony, not a once-and-done flags-and-bootprints national-pride exercise (in funneling taxpayer dollars to favored congressional districts).
Elon’s building a ‘railroad to Mars.’ The equivalent of the transcontinental railroads that opened the American West to colonization.
There are more than a few monied interests - universities, businesses, governments, private individuals - who see space as ‘the New Frontier’ and Mars, particularly as ‘the New California.’
Vast opportunities to be had by the adventurous and the daring. Some will succeed, some will fail.
But they all need the ‘railroad’ to get there. No one can afford to pay what it costs to go to Mars doing it the NASA way (including maybe even NASA). Waaaaay too expensive.
You don’t have to come along if you don’t want to.
And if you don’t want your tax dollars ‘wasted’ on buying NASA cheap SpaceX tickets to Mars, be sure to discuss that with your representatives.
But the rest of us are going, with or without you. (-:
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Dumb question: It looks like there are several comments that had disappeared near the top of the thread. I went back to reread my comment about the friend who built a laser to ping the moon, and found it, as well as the apparent space hating troll’s original comment, was AWOL. Is this an artifact, and can I retrieve them somehow?
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Posts often get swallowed as by-catch when trolley posts are eaten. Under the activity tab on your user-page is a “Download My Posts” button, which is the only way of retrieving them.
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Holy fucksocks, I think I may just fluv you.
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Ain’t a lot of teenagers who can figure out how to use a laser cutter to zap airline pilots [1].
[1] @M_M presumably knows the history, but for the benefit of the northerners: they restricted high-power laser pointers after a bunch of idiots decided it’d be fun to hang out near airports and aim them at the cabin windows during landings.
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When I’ve bought an e-book from Amazon the file resides on Amazon’s system and is not available to my Calibre software.
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Thinking about it some more, the exponential relationship between time and position, means that a slowed down film can never simulate low gravity. If the viewer measures acceleration off the screen, then a 1/6 slowdown will work, but it can’t be made to work if the viewer measures position vs time for a fall from different heights.
You could just do it for one moving object by varying the slowdown to suit the object on screen, but its impossible for two objects and totally impossible with technology from 1969, and you’d be making a cartoon anyway.
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The way that the linear ratio 1⁄6 gets involved in the example is:
After 0.56 seconds on the moon, the object only falls 5⁄6 of a foot.
See? There is the factor of 1⁄6.
But the object does NOT take another 2.8 seconds to hit the ground.
It’s not starting from rest and falling the first ten inches six times.
d = 1⁄2 a t 2
t 2 = 2d ⁄a
t = √( 2d ⁄a )
The astronauts and their equipment are not supposed to be changing size, so we can ignore d. What is being simulated is a change in acceleration, a. In order to simulate that change in acceleration, the TIME dimension, t, the DURATION OF THE VIDEO, must be adjusted by the square root of the reciprocal of the change in acceleration.
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even on Earth some regions are in need of supply, a self-sufficient base on Antarctica or in the Gobi Desert are more or less out of reach (but this could be probably solved by throwing money and resources on the problem)
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