51–60 of 171 posts
>He was a member of the German rocket development team at Peenemünde Just the guy to be answering ethical questions...
The world isn't some Hollywood movie where the good guys and bad guys are clearly delineated.
A more curt, but more direct response would be: As a Christian Nun, you wouldn't even be in Zambia if it weren't for explorers increasing the bounds of our knowledge. Apart from the Copts in Egypt, there's not a lot of 'native' Christianity in Africa.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or "99% of US Congressmen own shares in the military–industrial(–congressional) complex, so we need any excuse to funnel $trillions over there"
I wish they kept dumping more and more money into NASA instead of just directly into the military.
See the first link joering2 posted. If you look at the top 10 defense contractors you'll find that several of them are also Nasa contractors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm weary of these statistics as one can manipulate data to suit one's purpose. Source please?
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_good_news_of_the_d... That video does a very good job of explaining this. As child mortality decreases, family size goes down. I'm sure the data is manipulated to suit someone's purposes, but all seems reasonable to me...
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_shows_the_best...
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/hans_rosling_reveals_new_in...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish they kept dumping more and more money into NASA instead of just directly into the military.
NASA is part of the military-industrial complex. See the first link joering2 posted. If you look at the top 10 defense contractors you'll find that several of them are also Nasa contractors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NASA_contractors
I don't know if this makes me cruel, but whenever people talk about donating money to starving children in Africa, I always imagine the following: If I were to donate some amount of money to starving children in an impoverished nation every year I could, theoretically, bring some of them out of starvation. However, these children would then grow into adults, and then these adults would have children of their own. The…
When Bill Gates' wife began pushing him to work on issues of third-world health, this was more or less his argument against it. She dug up the statistics to show that this idea, while intuitive, is not supported by fact. As health improves-- and in particular as child mortality goes down-- birth rates fall accordingly. As we all know, Gates got on board, and now funds a lot of health research and on-the-ground initia…
I don't know if this makes me cruel, but whenever people talk about donating money to starving children in Africa, I always imagine the following: If I were to donate some amount of money to starving children in an impoverished nation every year I could, theoretically, bring some of them out of starvation. However, these children would then grow into adults, and then these adults would have children of their own. The…
Firstly I would like to suggest that even if you can only tackle the symptom, not the cause, it would still be worthwhile - a patient with untreatable cancer should nonetheless get painkillers. You are correct that the number of people in the second generation would be higher than the number you bring out of famine. But if you do nothing the second generation would be even larger still since the fertility rate of the extremely poor is so high. Therefore simply alleviating the symptoms and not the causes of poverty (a) delays the suffering of hunger by a generation, and (b) reduces the total number people suffering in the second generation.
Of course, it would be far better to eliminate the cancer. In many cases it's difficult to know how effective the long-term treatment is, but in some cases the outcome can be measured quite well. Here's a great talk by Esther Duflo about measuring the effectiveness of aid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zvrGiPkVcs In the book she co-authored called "Poor Economics" she mentions a study of a deworming program for children in Kenya. The study concluded that an extra year of deworming costing $1.36 USD PPP lead to a lifetime income gain of $3,269 USD PPP for the child. To me that is a slam-dunk evidence that aid can be effective in the long term.
Ok, so the story with microscope was a good one. I was initially shortsighted. But coming back to the recent Mars mission, anyone has any ideas, more or less accurate/detailed, of how this particular mission will/could benefit our civilization? This is a serious question.
Unlike other mars rovers, Curiousity isn't solar powered. It's nuclear powered. RTGs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen... ) are not new, but I have no doubt that plenty of refinements went into the process to make this one better and more efficient. Now what if this is the next fuel source for cars? We could dramatically cut down on our use of fossil fuels. That's pretty world changing. T…
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_MQ-8_Fire_Scou... [2] http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2012/07/marine-kmax-bea...
A more curt, but more direct response would be: As a Christian Nun, you wouldn't even be in Zambia if it weren't for explorers increasing the bounds of our knowledge. Apart from the Copts in Egypt, there's not a lot of 'native' Christianity in Africa.
I doubt it would have the same impact; I don't think the Catholic church is anticipating the conversion of godless Martians.
Ok, so the story with microscope was a good one. I was initially shortsighted. But coming back to the recent Mars mission, anyone has any ideas, more or less accurate/detailed, of how this particular mission will/could benefit our civilization? This is a serious question.