Lunacy from Brussels

They've put two robot explorers on Mars for less than the cost of making a movie about it.

Thanks, Rich

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He reminds me on that guy who, in the 1890's, announced that they should close the patent office because everything that could possibly be invented already had been.

Cheers! Rich (zws, would you mind including attribution? Thanks.)

Ever heard of "plants"?

Cheers! Rich

Yup. "Sixty miles an hour! Your blood would boil!"

Have fun vegging out on the couch while we go explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no man has gone before. (A few years ago, I had a GF who told me that I had gone where no man had gone before, but that was more like inner space. )

Cheers! Rich

OK, so don't go.

But it's unfair of you to exhort us to shackle ourselves to your personal limitations.

Thanks, Rich

Point taken - that was me[1]. I was probably in an agitated state at the time, with this guy advocating cutting us off from the frontiers - The Bomb was, indeed, invented - I think it was just radioactivity that was discovered, albeit many years earlier. The Curies spring to mind, but I'd have to look it up, and I'm way too lazy to do that. :-)

Thanks, Rich

1. "Proper" English would have that be "that was I", but that sounds so stuffy and stilted. - RtDL

Has anyone ever asked what percentage of these minorities actually have _applied_ for the job? Artifically inflated employment ratios are just as damaging as any other form of discrimination, like, some self- righteous prig is sitting on his high horse, saying, "Oh, gee, since you're so inferior, you need special advantages just to catch up."

Feh. Rich

Your charm is exceeded only by your superhuman grasp of the issues at stake.

Remember, I didn't come into this conversation saying I want you to pay for my beliefs. I came into it saying I didn't want to pay for yours.

No. A more reasonable inventor would be Otto Hahn. " His most spectacular discovery came at the end of 1938. While working jointly with Dr. Strassmann, Hahn discovered the fission of uranium and thorium in medium heavy atomic nuclei and his first work on these subjects appeared on 6th January and 10th February, 1939, in Naturwissenschaften."

In article , wrote: [...]

Deep-sea colonies are many times harder to do than space colonies. The pressure grows by about 0.45 PSI for each foot of depth. By time you get a thousand feet down, the wall thickness becomes a major part of the cost.

In article , Pooh Bear wrote: [...]

What's the point of living in Texas?

Texas is too cold except for when its too hot.

No point in humans going to Texas

Ditto Texas

Actually MTBE was the cheaper fix. Ethanol was the fix that works and has limited environmental impact. Guess which one the oil companies chose? And now they are screaming they are not responsible for MTBE contamination.

When I'm elected world ruler, the oil company executives who OKed MTBE will only get to drink water from MTBE contaminatred wells.

Mark

Because clearly it is inconceivable that any vehicle could contain the vast amounts of food and water required to support life.

Resources - oxygen (in surface rocks), water (hence H2 and O2 again, probably easier to get at than the various oxides), metals, ...

ROFL. Squirm all you like, but every message you post simply makes you look sillier.

Thereby conveniently ignoring the fact that I'm not talking about interstellar travel, and I've said this more than once. There is no point in sending a manned mission to another solar system, even assuming it was technically feasible, unless we can be SURE there is an interesting planet there to be visited. This implies robotic exploration first.

Among other things, you're assuming that the collision will be head-on. Cast the organ you are pleased to call your mind back to an earlier message of mine where I talked about transfer orbits and the objects that are likely to be encountered in them.

I repeat the observation that we have yet to lose a spacecraft to collision on one of these long-term missions.

? I'm not talking about anything more SF-like than simply traveling to other bodies in our solar system and establishing a permanent presence there. I'd call the transportation idea a solved problem, it's really life-support and mining/refining equipment we're arguing about at this point. No need to invent fantastic futuristic technologies to achieve any of this; all that's (apparently) necessary is to restrain the simpleton neo-Luddites amongst us.

If you're talking about interstellar travel, then I agree.

of an

How's that?

Thanks, Rich

of an

would

They knew what was known by science at the time. That's part of the point - we know more now than we knew then, and stopping learning new stuff would be certain death.

There you go, declaring another law of nature without even investigating it. I saw an imminently practical design for the front shield of an adaptation of the Bussard ramjet, albeit they left the design of the scoop as an exercise for the reader. ;-P

Cheers! Rich [proofreader's note: The Philosophizer was in on the review of this piece, and he's just itching to put in his plug:

A long jouney is likely as safe as walking through a minefield.

Yeah, that's almost as bad as confusing Star Trek with science fiction ;)

I'm sure he's talking about torchships that are going so fast that the interstellar hydrogen acts like a rain of alpha and beta "rays", notwithstanding the neutron and gamma flux from the corresponding dissociation of the front shield.

The one I saw had a method of overcoming that problem, albeit it involved using some of the fuel mass. ;-) [proofreader: reaction mass mass. :-)][The Cynical One: Both, you idiots!]

Ever read that SF story where some space station gets holed, and the patches were in the other end of the station, so to save the atmosphere-substitute, some fat guy sat on the hole? It raised a pretty respectable welt, and got some frostbite, but if you're running the internal atmosphere-substitute at about 25% of a terrestrial atmosphere (is that a bar?), wouldn't that be about like putting your hand (or butt, in the case of that story) up to a vacuum cleaner hose?

Thanks! Rich