So this whole shuttle blowing up thing really blows. And not just because seven people died- the death of an explorer, an adventurer, and one who takes those sorts of risks isn't a tragedy, in a twisted, Klingonish sort of way, it's an Honor.
No, the tragedy is this: Bush. The economy stinks, and now he has an excuse to pull more money from space development and exploration and sink it into a flawed economic plan. And don't tell me he wont: there's no oil in space. This is going to pull us further from the ISS, which is going to weaken the US hold on space, which only bothers me because it's going to be that much harder to get out there in a few years.
Maybe Nasa will get smart and start tourism once it cleans this mess up. As a four year old, I was wondering why they didn't book seats on flights for tourists; people want to go, and it generates revenue.
Suck.
I say this- let not these heroes have died in vain, and do not tarnish their memory with fear and apprehension. These people were explorers, going into danger regularly, and they knew this. Fear is not going to spread the best parts of humanity to space, only the worse.
No, the tragedy is this: Bush. The economy stinks, and now he has an excuse to pull more money from space development and exploration and sink it into a flawed economic plan. And don't tell me he wont: there's no oil in space. This is going to pull us further from the ISS, which is going to weaken the US hold on space, which only bothers me because it's going to be that much harder to get out there in a few years.
Maybe Nasa will get smart and start tourism once it cleans this mess up. As a four year old, I was wondering why they didn't book seats on flights for tourists; people want to go, and it generates revenue.
Suck.
I say this- let not these heroes have died in vain, and do not tarnish their memory with fear and apprehension. These people were explorers, going into danger regularly, and they knew this. Fear is not going to spread the best parts of humanity to space, only the worse.
I swear that before I die, I will go into space. It's been my dream forever.
All that's bullshit however, and not the important stuff. I saved that for last.
The main purpose of the Space Program is hope. Hope in generic human capacity. Faith even; faith that we can perform under pressure, and create, and act.
You talk about saving the environment, but one of the main tools that lets us know the state of the environment is extraterrestrial observation. Weather sattelites let us see climate change and track down the sources.
There are too many people for Earth. The maximum occupancy was reached 2 billion people ago, and someone called for the Fire Marshall, and we're all about to get in the shit. No amount of environmentalist action is going to fix that- the Earth doesn't have the capactity. So either we kill them wholesale (Something Bush is good for), or we start finding other places to put them.
Science is responsible for doing a lot of horrible things that harm all of us. My favourite anti-science rant right now is the concept of "terminator technology". "Terminator technology" is something that could conceiveably kill every one of us, due to the law of unintended consequences. I also don't trust corporations enough for them to be in charge of what can grow and what can't grow.
*snip*
We'll fuck it up again: Probably. But maybe we won't. There's too much built up here to ever start clean again. *snip*
i don't believe that there's too much wrong here to fix it. i think we need to give ourselves more time, and if we don't fix it, we shouldn't have a second chance to go fuck somewhere else up. we're a race of children, and we fall victim to our own hubris far too often to be trusted.
It's a waste of money: That's silly. The billion dollars soaked into whatever space project isn't wasted. That money still cycles through the economy, just like any other expenditure. *snip*
It's also horribly mismanaged.
Also, this is the Randian anarchist in me, but screw the poor, screw the children, and screw health care. That's not the role of a government, of course, neither is space exploration.
this is an entirely different conversation... and one which involves a good bottle of wine. I don't know if Cate's mentioned, but I'm the former Executive Director of the Libertarian Party of NV, and Dan's the Immidate Past Chairman. Neither of us are Libertarians anymore, although both of us have some libertarian (small-L) leanings.
So it should get its dirty hands out of it, and cease to exist. See, this is why we need a space program- there's no room to build a fresh outlook on society here; anarchy can't work on Earth because there's too much built up already; it could never take root. In space, you end up having a very practical anarchy. If you are a nusiance, abusive, controlling, or in any way tend to imitate those nasty parts of earth culture, no one has to put up with you. They also don't have to give you air. Of course, now I'm sounding like Heinlein.
Anarchy doesn't work. It's a fundimental fact of humans that we're all sheep. Anarchy lasts till a bully finds a stick. Then it's a dictatorship.
All that's bullshit however, and not the important stuff. I saved that for last.
The main purpose of the Space Program is hope. Hope in generic human capacity. Faith even; faith that we can perform under pressure, and create, and act.
You talk about saving the environment, but one of the main tools that lets us know the state of the environment is extraterrestrial observation. Weather sattelites let us see climate change and track down the sources.
I agree with you here... But the space program is also responsible for allowing us to put spy technology in the sky, which is probably intercepting this message and scanning it for "inappropriate" as soon as I hit send. It's also going to throw a big old missile shield up there so that we can then be the aforementioned bully with the big stick, threatening everyone else until we get our way... and that means that there'll be no where to go.
There are too many people for Earth. The maximum occupancy was reached 2 billion people ago, and someone called for the Fire Marshall, and we're all about to get in the shit. No amount of environmentalist action is going to fix that- the Earth doesn't have the capactity. *snip*
We need to practice rational population growth, and Americans need to stop eating meat. On the land it takes to support one over-feed beef cow, we could grow enough vegitable matter to feed 20 people. There's no reason why the earth can't provide enough food for everyone here now, and a bit more. We have already hit 0 growth in America and in most of the western world. We need to spread rational population growth methods in the 3rd world and population will stabilize and decline with the spread of education and better opportunity.
Science is also responsible for alot of good things too- like say, agriculture (not commercial agriculture- that's business' fault), medicine, etc. Just because it does some bad things doesn't mean it is bad. You have to discard the foolish ideas as they come up, and encourage the ones that aren't. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater won't do anyone any good.
There is too much clooging here. It's not that there's any one problem that's so bad, it's that there are centuries and millenia of kleft, cracks into which strange ideologies have fallen, ways of doing things that exist not for expediency, but becuase they do, and so on. It's not totally unfixable, but I'm not sure it can be fixed from within.
It's mostly mismangaged because of a lack of funds.
Anarchy can work, on a population of size one. Which is the only way any government system works. And I'm going to cease to be an anarchist once I finish my system of government. It's in progress.
"Allowing us" to put spy sattelites up? And so? Belladona allows us to poision people, but that doesn't mean we should go tear every plant of it up by the roots does it? Space technology allows us to move away from petroluem based plastics, find new industrial methods that don't require environmentally destroying chemicals (it's just amazing what microgravity does for laboratories). And that's the applied knowledge; I don't need to go into the abstract and interesting cosmological knowledge space exploration gives us.
It's too late for practical population growth, and it's not food that's the real problem. Though, on a side note, if I eat less meat than I do, I get noticably unhealthy. That aside however, we're not just straining the land, we're straining the hydrosphere; there isn't enough water. We're straining the space constraints- there isn't enough habitable room. We're straining the disposal facilities- there's not enough room for our effluvium, and I'm not just talking about the stupid waste that a disposable society produces, I'm talking about pure body waste. We don't need zero growth, we need decline. And lots of.
Which is the only motivation I can condone for going to war. Kidding.
Medicine has been in use long before the current state of "science"... In fact, a lot of the medicines used by ancient cultures are now being "validated" by science and are in use today. Some which are unable to be "validated" still work, whether science wants to admit it or not. In fact, science has done more harm than good when it comes to medicine. We now have an entire generation that spends a large portion of it's time being doped up by people because we're all seeking better living through chemestry, instead of seeking a balanced and healthy life. Argriculture pre-dates what I think of as science by a very large number of years.
Just because it does some bad things doesn't mean it is bad. You have to discard the foolish ideas as they come up, and encourage the ones that aren't.
Unfortunately, it's the foolish ideas that get the most funding... whether it's from the government or from private corporations. Of course, in a capitalist soceity, that makes sense... it isn't as profitable to cure a disease as it is to treat a disease. Never mind the politico-economic benefit of making a naturally occuring phenomenon more deadly -- as in the concept of "weaponized anthrax".
It's mostly mismangaged because of a lack of funds.
That's not what I've been hearing from the talking heads, but I'm not sure that that's a basis for comparison. I think it's mismanaged because there's no incentive for it not to be. And I'm suspicious of any organization that is on Shrub's list of things to increase funding on... The purpose of NASA is not science or exploration, it's an arm of the DOD... Bush wants his little nukes in space and his spy satelites and all that crap. That's not beneficial to man, and it's not serving any purpose of making things better for us... It's just another way to kill people without having the honour of facing them like a man.
Anarchy can work, on a population of size one. Which is the only way any government system works. And I'm going to cease to be an anarchist once I finish my system of government. It's in progress.
That's the idea... We've evolved beyond all the -isms that are currently available. We need some new political philosophers.
"Allowing us" to put spy sattelites up? And so? Belladona allows us to poision people, but that doesn't mean we should go tear every plant of it up by the roots does it?
Belladona is a naturally occuring organism, with benficial properties to life on this planet. I can't see any benefit to spy satelites, nukes in space or stupid experiments on the effects of weightlessness on ants or what have you.
Space technology allows us to move away from petroluem based plastics, find new industrial methods that don't require environmentally destroying chemicals (it's just amazing what microgravity does for laboratories). And that's the applied knowledge; I don't need to go into the abstract and interesting cosmological knowledge space exploration gives us.
Yay, experiments. I'm all for them... Except when they involve animals, of course. Which NASA does quite a bit. If there are people who are interested in going in to space and having experiments done on weightlessness and excessive consumption of Tang, fine by me. It's a consent issue.
It's too late for practical population growth, and it's not food that's the real problem. Though, on a side note, if I eat less meat than I do, I get noticably unhealthy. That aside however, we're not just straining the land, we're straining the hydrosphere; there isn't enough water.
Yeah, there is.... We just need to be better about conservation. You haven't seen water waste til you've seen a golf course in the desert. I'd love nothing more than to see the concept of "lawn" made illegal in the southwest. You want grass, go north, east or west of here. This is not a grassy environment. Don't waste the water making it one. In non-developing areas, we use approximately 150 gallons of water a day (this is total usage, per capita... includes ice, water, cars, lawns, excessive showers, and water used on agriculture to support our ickky lifestyle.) Our society is unhealthy, and a lot of the blame for that can be laid at the door of the promise of the scientific community which claims that it's going to make everything better in 10 easy steps.
We're straining the space constraints- there isn't enough habitable room. We're straining the disposal facilities- there's not enough room for our effluvium, and I'm not just talking about the stupid waste that a disposable society produces, I'm talking about pure body waste.
Body waste can be recycled. Human waste can be composted in to an increadibly useful and rich fertilizer.
We don't need zero growth, we need decline. And lots of.
I can't argue with you here... That's part of the reason why I chose not to reproduce.
Which is the only motivation I can condone for going to war. Kidding.
Actually, in my mind, nuclear war = chemotherapy for the planet.
Second, I have NEVER felt like I belong on Earth. Earth is an IT, not a SHE. It's a lump of dirt and rock and gas and water and we happened to evolve on it along with a slew of other things. I've always felt that my place is somewhere other than Earth, and I am sure there are others who feel the same.
Thirdly, if we can keep the damned missionaries out of the spaceships, we hopefully won't repeat THAT mistake. Chances are that it will be a very long time before we actually visit a place that has life that's intelligent enough to try to convert; hopefully, by then, we'll have evolved a bit more than we have now.
And for your fourth point, it eats money like there's no tomorrow because the GOVERNMENT is in charge of it. If private enterprise were encouraged more to take over, I'm sure they'd do a much more efficient job of it. Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.
cool! i'm always interested in hearing opposition to my views. unfortuantely, most of my friends feel similar to the way i do about almost everything, so we spend most of our time going "x sucks" "yeah" "yeah." "x really sucks". it's not much fun.
Scientists EVIL? WHAT? I don't know you, so I don't know where that idea comes from, but in my opinion, scientists are the good guys.
chemical and biologial weapons; scientific theories of racial purity; creepy and dangerous biologial experiments such as the aforementioned "terminator" seeds... there's a huge wealth of awful science going on right now.
They're exploring, expanding, testing, trying out new things, finding improvements to our way of life, finding cures to deadly illnesses, finding better ways to make things, and so forth. There's a wealth of information to be had in space, and it could benefit us greatly to find it.
Our way of life is only partially improved by science. There's a lot of problems with our way of life that is caused by a number of things that science isn't going to change. Our (and by this I mean American) society is vastly unhealthy and extremely unethical. Those are culture problems, but the science reflects the culture. Science can benefit humanity, but it can't *replace* humanity. Men aren't gods, nor are we particularly wise mortals. We don't have enough of a far-reaching view to defeat the law of unintended consequences. We only find out that there are problems when we need to fix them, which makes science an unstable prospect.
Second, I have NEVER felt like I belong on Earth. Earth is an IT, not a SHE. It's a lump of dirt and rock and gas and water and we happened to evolve on it along with a slew of other things. I've always felt that my place is somewhere other than Earth, and I am sure there are others who feel the same.
This brings me neatly to my next problem with science. The earth is a very complex organism. It may not properly be personified, but she is far more complex than an "it"... We effect changes to the balance of life on this planet that impacts everything. I'm sorry you don't feel home here, but the scientific judeo-christian world view of life existing merely for the benefit of humankind certainaly doesn't help. in fact, it's killing us all by inches.
I dislike the current religion of science... and science is now a religion. unfortunately, it's a religion with out an ethical system or a notion of anything higher than ourselves. (and if you doubt it's a religion, look at your reaction to my dislike of science... it's not logical, it's passionate... i said something not against an intellectual thought that you hold, i said something that offends the base of your deeply held belief system, which caused you to irrationally attack mine. Which is fine, because i'm not a particularly dogmatic anything.
Thirdly, if we can keep the damned missionaries out of the spaceships, we hopefully won't repeat THAT mistake. Chances are that it will be a very long time before we actually visit a place that has life that's intelligent enough to try to convert; hopefully, by then, we'll have evolved a bit more than we have now.
Perhaps... but the problem with our species is that we're particularly narrominded when we think we're "right" and that we know the "truth".
And for your fourth point, it eats money like there's no tomorrow because the GOVERNMENT is in charge of it. If private enterprise were encouraged more to take over, I'm sure they'd do a much more efficient job of it. Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.
I think that Enron and Worldcom defeated that point. Private-sector companies are not as efficient as those of us who were raised in capitialst systems want to think.
See, as a perrenial Randian, I have to argue that the current corporate atmosphere is not a capitalist environment, and there is no "private-sector". In a plutocracy, you can never trust a company. In a strict capitalism, you can always trust a company to act in its own best interest as much as is possible.
First needed economic reform: Decentralization of currency, and the reinstitution of competeing currencies with a physical backing. Currency is best used as a "barter token". The barter system fails for trade when Joebob has oranges and wants apples; Jimbob has apples, but doesn't want oranges. So you institute some token that is representative of the value of some relatively static commodity, often gold. This puts an amazing retraint on the behavior of the economy, and would prevent the rise of Worldcoms.
That's one step in my viral-OOD&P-peer-to-peer-government system. I keep hashing on it.
Aside from me, your other mutual connection is Cate, since she's the one who pointed me in both of your directions. Just to share.