NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

And NASA doesn't gift it's advances to americans, it shares technologies with private companies that share them in the exact same way. You and I still had to pay for our Tang, it was never free.

NASA is a huge inefficient bureaucracy hamstrung by a fickle and corrupt congress. As brilliant as it's engineers are, and they are very brilliant, their projects are extremely fragile, often getting canceled or not funded for ridiculous reasons, or having ridiculous conditions applied to them that slow development (such as parting work out to the less qualified across many congressional districts).

The largest project NASA is investing most of it's resources in is the SLS. It's not revolutionary. It's not a significant advance. It's just a large launch system that's mostly re-using old technologies. It does nothing to lower launch costs. It does nothing to advance re-usablity. It's not a solution to making deep space manned space exploration economically viable.

Any engineers who work on the SLS are engineers denied to SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Sierra Nevada, or a dozen more cost-efficient space launch companies. NASA's competition for engineers raises engineering costs for everyone else. It's wasteful investment in a pork barrel project like SLS diverts revenues that could fund far more efficient launch systems at private companies, and give NASA far more manned launch capacity and much sooner.

Right now engineers at private companies are doing far more to advance economically viable space travel than NASA. Let's thank NASA for the Saturn program, but realize that everything they've done since has been hugely wasteful of resources and detrimental to advancing the cause of space travel.

And the SLS is a boondoggle, so the efforts of those engineers will be totally wasted.

It's not just that they have been held hostage by congress to build the SLS as a pork delivery service. They've also become risk averse. The Saturn V was built with "all up" testing, rushed to testing a completed rocket instead of focusing on component testing. They only flew two Saturn V unmanned missions before they launched one with men on it. Today, SpaceX has launched the Falcon 9 over 20 times, and has a capsule with the safest abort mode ever, and NASA still hasn't man-rated it.

NASA could take a fraction of the money they are spending on the SLS, and start doing monthly deep space launches by the end of next year. They could use 140,000 lb capacity Falcon Heavies and Dragon Capsules to do lunar missions. They could put astronauts back on the moon, build a constantly manned moon base, develop and test rovers and other equipment they want to use on mars.

Astronauts would be lined up to volunteer, even if the Falcon Heavy only has unmanned two test flights. They are far more rational judges of what the safety levels should be than the PR department at NASA.

Then within a few more years, NASA could shift to doing Mars missions when SpaceX and Blue Origin or anyone else can start giving them 300,000+ lb cargo capacity launches for less than $1,000/lb. At that price again they could average a dozen or two dozen launches a year. All that launch capacity would enable them to launch a group of Aldrin Cyclers to provide regular transport to mars and back with heavy radiation shielding, supply storage and room for big crews. Other robot launches can pre-cache supplies, equipment and return fuel on Mars.

But they can never do it using the SLS path. It's going to start off costing near $20,000 per lb for LEO access, and even the later versions will still cost over $10,000 per lb. That just makes Mars missions almost economically impossible. The SLS could only do an Apollo style program, where a decade from now they launch a handful of all-in-one missions (two orbiters, a couple that land) before congress wilts under the enormous costs.

That would predict that the Germans would prefer to ally with other Europeans against people like the Japanese, who they are maximally different from. Historically this did not happen. Yes, there are clear conflicts between each of the groups named, but they are more similar to each other than they are to most other populations of humans.

Let's say an alien combat spacecraft crash-lands in the middle of ISIS-controlled territory. Would you expect ISIS to immediately declare a cease-fire and surrender the craft and its weaponry to the UN so that humanity can work together to face this new threat, or do you think they would immediately go about using it as a tool to better murder their fellow humans?

If you're proceeding purely from history, it's not supportive to say that armies on opposite sides of the world fight each other more rarely than armies next to each other.

A more apt test of my assertion would be the frequency with which civil wars (excluding cross-ethnic wars in poly-ethnic societies) are initiated vs non-civil wars (allowing for the variance caused by internal policing, international politics, etc).

Just because Poles and Germans are similar to you doesn't mean they're similar to each other.

On the latter, I'd prefer a more fair: ISIS and a non-ISIS armed force are engaged in a firefight. An alien ship crash lands and disembarks five non-humanoid aliens. These aliens immediately begin shooting at both parties. What happens?