101–110 of 152 posts
Before talking about colonizing Mars, why not colonizing other areas of Earth? See the Sahara for example, or even your own deserts in US. Closer, more clement climate and no less resources. Why colonize a far away deserts when we have enough on Earth?
Because any catastrophe that would destroy earth probably would destroy your desert too?
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Practically speaking, how do you ensure that the new government doesn't become corrupt in a year or two? Or more importantly, how do you restore the people's faith in their government so that they participate? Also, how would a trade embargo "fix" a country? Perhaps it would force a dictator to lessen or hide civil rights violations, but it would not repair the economy or necessarily give people more confidence in th…
> Practically speaking, how do you ensure that the new government doesn't become corrupt in a year or two? Or more importantly, how do you restore the people's faith in their government so that they participate? Here's how I'd do it: pass laws specifically forbidding these actions by government officials, the punishment being death. And then when someone violates the law, you kill them. You wouldn't have to do this t…
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But you don't need to get into politics directly. If you create a business that solves a local problem (local to the poor country of choice) good enough, and fairly enough, you can create ripple effects. Maybe not at national levels, but at regional and municipal levels. Not easy, but not impossible. (At least I hope so when I got my rose-tinted glasses on.)
Corruption. Remember that if you go to one of the 20 poorest or tyrannical countries of the word, you will probably go to one of the 20 more corrupt countries in the word. So while creating a successful business you will be "asked" to share a part of it, and I hope you can keep enough to create the ripple effects.
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Corruption. Remember that if you go to one of the 20 poorest or tyrannical countries of the word, you will probably go to one of the 20 more corrupt countries in the word. So while creating a successful business you will be "asked" to share a part of it, and I hope you can keep enough to create the ripple effects.
this is the point where you find your own private army and say no to sharing the wealth with the corrupt.
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That is a historically naive assertion. Take a look at the list of countries in this article - most of them are still in pretty serious shit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re... It very rarely works out.
The US government's interest in intervention is not "fix things for the residents" but "US interests" (which, during the cold war, essentially just meant opposition to the USSR and some basing rights or access to resources). Admittedly even by that metric, most of the US interventions have been failures. There are a few cases where US/NATO intervention has been sort of helpful. Panama is probably better now that we g…
Somehow Balkan conficts never got critical review from journalists and rosy propaganda stayed even to this day.
For example in present day Croatia there is only 7% of people who would actually stay to live there if they could go and live somewhere else. Danke Deutschland indeed.
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> Scraping together a suicide team and shooting it roughly in Mars' general direction is not the answer to this problem. I think you misunderstand. While the linked article is brief, the one-way plan isn't to send a ship-full of people with suicide pills, but to supply them for the next 40-80 years from Earth. Because of the hilarities of the rocket equation, it is cheaper to send rocket after rocket full of water, b…
> send enough rocket fuel for a return trip That hasn't been the plan for a long time. NASA's Design Reference Mission, and the one anyone who has studied Mars missions at any point in the past 20 years, is to manufacture fuel on Mars. In fact, you would probably send this equipment to Mars first so that the astronauts going to Mars would have a fully fueled return ship ready and waiting for them before they even tak…
I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical countries of the world (there is overlap between the two sets) to try to change those from the inside. When I was in high school, going to a high school that was named after an astronaut just after the first moon landing, I thought it was completely natural to hav…
Not me. We mostly know the solutions to fixing the most oppressed or otherwise defective parts of the world; we just don't find it worthwhile to implement those solutions. I could solve 90% Equatorial Guinea's problems for The solutions to the most defective countries are all pretty straightforward and widely known; it's figuring out how to turn decent but not ideal countries like Pakistan into really stable first-wo…
I take issue with this. Technological advancement over the last few millenia has been driven by how many smart minds we have at the table thinking of new ideas and new solutions to old problems. To get more folks at the table, we need for them to stop worrying about how to avoid gulags, and get them start training in emerging fields. People in Vietnam studying computer science will bring more technological marvels to your world than sending a rocket and biodome to Mars, the problems of which could mostly be tackled by first building biodomes in harsh environments on Earth, or by finding ways to conquer disease and get fresh water to more of the world's poor.
Build me a sealab and irrigate the Sahara, you don't need Mars to start working on those problems, and those problems could probably help you learn really important skills for Martian exploration (and eventual terraforming) while providing more immediate technological benefits to humanity.
I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical countries of the world (there is overlap between the two sets) to try to change those from the inside. When I was in high school, going to a high school that was named after an astronaut just after the first moon landing, I thought it was completely natural to hav…
>Making any of the world's poorest countries richer in general, or making any of the world's most oppressed countries freer in general, is [...] a much tougher and more interesting problem, a problem more worthy of a gnarly man willing to risk his life Involving yourself in foreign politics is no substitute for going to Mars. Even if you magically turn Zimbabwe into a political and economic clone of Alabama, the over…
I disagree. Advancement is directly related to how many minds we can free up to work on intellectual pursuits. Even before Moore's law, publications and rate of invention largely tracked with size of population (minus the portion preoccupied with agriculture).
Going to Mars involves calibrating some rockets and making a sustainable habitat for long periods of time. Hard problems, to be sure, but there's nothing about that trip we would do without thoroughly testing it first on Earth. We mostly know how to send projectiles throughout the solar system, and we mostly know that long term stays in space suck, and we mostly know that robots and telescopes pay back orders of magnitude more in scientific discoveries than equivalent manned missions for the cost. (ie, manned missions have the mirrors on the moon and tang, hubble and curiosity have contributed far more to space science...)
I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical countries of the world (there is overlap between the two sets) to try to change those from the inside. When I was in high school, going to a high school that was named after an astronaut just after the first moon landing, I thought it was completely natural to hav…
Why worry about meaningful change, why work against the dysfunctional, towards peace and sanity, why care about reaching our true potential as intelligent beings on this planet when we can instead fantasize about going to Where no man has gone before ?