791–800 of 899 posts
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I wonder what the odds are that some deep sea salvage group is moving to collect that this very instant (or being contracted for such). If Starship lives up to even a fraction of its potential, that [not so] little guy is going to have some serious historicity.
The Russians and Chinese would probably love to examine those Raptors.
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> The 99 years between the Napoleonic and First World Wars were the most peaceful 99 years of European history since at least the Roman Empire; You make a good point about the "Long Peace" between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. While there were indeed several conflicts during this period, they were generally shorter and more localized. The Revolutions of 1848, which affected many European countries. The Russo-T…
> So what motivated Britain to make these alliances The answer to this is incredibly obvious. It's the same reason people have always made voluntary alliances - for security. See also: NATO. As for the "Thucydides Trap", there's plenty of criticism on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap#Criticism Personally I file it alongside Marxism, Asimov's Psychohistory, and all the other Grand Theories Of H…
Notice many of the criticisms that you linked to focus on whether the trap applies to the current dynamics between the USA and China. The mere existence of such debates implicitly accepts the validity of the trap pattern itself.
Other criticisms question the trap's applicability to different historical situations and its underlying mechanisms, such as assigning blame for the resulting conflicts. However, these arguments overlook a crucial aspect of the trap: "incredibly obvious" security moves by one party can provoke equally "obvious" security responses from the other, potentially escalating into a devastating war that neither side truly desires. This can occur even when all parties act rationally, as the challenge to the established "pecking order" drives the trap.
> Personally I file it alongside Marxism, Asimov's Psychohistory, and all the other Grand Theories Of History that try to pretend human behavior is simple and predictable.
It's essential to distinguish the "Thucydides Trap" from grand theories of history like Marxism or Asimov's Psychohistory. Rather than attempting to simplify and predict human behavior on a grand scale, the trap is better understood as a cognitive bias that can lead groups into conflicts with one another. The numerous examples listed on Wikipedia support the existence of such biases:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
While human behavior may indeed be unpredictable at times, it is be unwise to dismiss the influence of cognitive biases on group dynamics and decision-making.
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Oh this opens a whole bunch of really interesting topics. One of the most interesting is ISRU - in situ resource utilization. Using what you have available to make further progress. The Sabatier Reaction [1] is one of the single most important factors in our future expansion. Basically, CO2 + Hydrogen => Methane + Water. Mars has essentially infinite CO2 and hydrogen. So this means we can produce essentially infinite…
more interestingly, the impact on human psyche is basically unknown. We have meh approximations but just like placebo you cannot fake some things, like 'you are not coming back' condition in an experiment. The permanent dwellings and really whole infrastructure would be underground. Lack of atmo and magnetic field basically forces you to dig down. Limited resources - rudimentary food and water. More less bunker life…
And the Mars program is not being publicly funded in any way, shape, or fashion. If it was - we would have likely colonized Mars decades ago. Werner von Braun - the man responsible for the success of the Apollo program already had workably viable plans drawn up for Mars before we even set foot on the Moon. The government's decision to defacto cancel the space program is what led to his very premature retirement. But I do think rapidly aiming for the basics of self sustainability will be important nonetheless. Fortunately Mars is almost set up like a video game in that most of everything we need to survive is somewhat serendipitously present.
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As for what people want to do. It's funny, because I feel the exact opposite. I simply cannot understand people who have no desire to adventurize, explore, and see all that this universe has to offer in what little time we have on this Earth. It's probably why I'm an American yet find myself living half way around the world. And I would be the first to sign up for a mission to Mars as well. It'd certainly be a rather difficult life, but what more could be more desirable than spending the rest of your years laying the foundation for our children and our childrens' children, so that one day people coming to Mars would simply be just a holiday. And perhaps they then will then be the ones laying the foundation on Europa, or perhaps destinations that we can't even realistically imagine today.
It's certainly the same mindset people leaving the luxuries of the Old World had when setting out for the New World. The Old World was richly developed and full of culture, life, and civilization. Going to the New World entailed a voyage, as long as 4 months, and one which was quite frequently deadly. All to get to a completely undeveloped chunk of land full of oft unfriendly natives, new diseases, and all sorts of great ways to die in the middle of nowhere. And that's if you survived the voyage across to begin with, which many didn't. In many ways, we have it easier.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran#Radioactivity
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I've got the black and white arty photo as my lockscreen which gives you an idea https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/E46BxzjjUkpthVBNE6k8mn-192...
Here's the full-sized pic: https://rare-gallery.com/mocahbig/1305111-SpaceX-Starship-Bl...
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Only the V2 is a rocket, the V1 is a flying bomb. They're both terror weapons, as actual products they have no direct military value, they exist solely in order to scare the shit out of enemy civilians, but liquid fuelled rockets are an invention with a whole lot of interesting practical applications - the V1 is just a bad idea (unless you have unlimited resources, which the Germans did not, and your goal is to terri…
> your goal is to terrify enemy civilians, which is not a legitimate military strategy This seems like a perfectly legitimate military strategy? It’s a strategy which the allies used to great effect in Germany and Japan :/ The Germans used rockets instead of bombers because they couldn’t, not because they didn’t want to.
Of course we bombed the hell out of German noncombatants too, so we don't exactly have an unsullied record.
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It's easy to say that now. Have you lived through unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. How many of your country's people should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started by the enemy? Should you not use the means…
The firebombing of Dresden needlessly killed thousands of civilians, and arguably did nothing for the war effort. With the posisble exception of bolstering the resolve of front line German soldiers. Had the axis powers won the war I'm certain it would have been classified as a war crime and Bomber Harris would have been the first against the wall.
Both sides were not the same.
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Allied options were: 1. Invade. Expected Allied casualties of 300k all the way to much more than a million. Expected Japanese casualties: tens of millions, perhaps up to literally all of them. Previous Japanese strongholds fought to the last man, earlier in the war the Allies invaded an island with 11000 Japanese soldiers, and I think 47 of those eventually surrendered. The rest died. The civilian populations on thes…
> This option turns out to have had the lowest bodycount in the end Given that you don’t know the body count of the other options, given they didn’t happen, that’s a bold statement to make.
The reason hiroshima and nagasaki (small cities) were chosen as nuke targets was because every other bigger city was already mostly destroyed due to firebombing campaigns.
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Here's the full-sized pic: https://rare-gallery.com/mocahbig/1305111-SpaceX-Starship-Bl...
I love how utilitarian that rocket looks - still has all the layout marker marks and welding/grinding marks all over it.
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> Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki…
This is an excellent point. This is why it was necessary to beat the Germans first - so the Russians could invade or at least threaten Japan. Even so, a land conquest of Japan would have cost vast numbers of lives - far more than the nukes. When people die one by one in war, the emotional impact is blunted. But when a million die in one bomb, it seems much worse, even if the overall body count is lower.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y43-p3xLDyo
This is from the final episode of the series. Easy Company have fought their way from Normandy to Germany, losing hundreds of their friends and brothers in battle after brutal battle. Now the Nazis have surrendered and they finally have some respite - but their celebrations are shortlived. Their commanding officer informs them that they're to be redeployed to the Pacific. The war isn't over, and the expression on Malarkey's face at 2:09 says it all.
Whatever anyone says about the atomic bombings, I bet those men were damn happy to hear about Japan's surrender. Imagine if they'd been sent to invade Japan, in another brutal campaign that would have taken months if not years, costing hundreds of thousands more Allied lives.
Then imagine telling them that the government had secretly developed a powerful new weapon that could have ended the war earlier and avoided all this bloodshed - but they hadn't used it because they were worried about the moral implications. I don't think they'd have agreed it was the right choice.
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> Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki…
Hmm, the books I’ve read in Japan make it seem more like the emperor was just tired of an unwinnable war. The nuclear bombs and soviet invasion were simply a catalyst. They just got a surrender note from the US at the proper time for that to be the topic under consideration (aside from, you know, surrendering to the people that tricked you being a generally bad idea). I like how they ultimately accepted the unconditi…
Even though he should have been:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/hirohito-the-war-crimina...