261–270 of 342 posts
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They should outsource this to India or Israel.
You want to outsource an incredibly ambitious space program to another country? That'll never happen and I don't know if it should either. Parts of it can be outsourced for sure, but that's it. Like Europe taking over parts of some space projects. Russia being paid for deliveries.
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They should outsource this to India or Israel.
That is insane. Take a USA tax funded public entity and spend the budget of it's most ambitious project in Israel or India. What are you talking about? And we already send money to Russia for Soyuz to get to ISS via ULA.
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> I wish they would commit to something and actually finish it. I think this is pretty well hopeless at the moment. Major NASA projects have a timeline and cost operating on a 10+ year scale, but their budget changes annually and their priorities change with presidential election. Really the only way I can see things improving is if a president managed to stake out a task that couldn't be taken away from them by the…
It may work if during one administration they planned a program that is coherent and actually funded. All the initiatives over the last decade(s?) didn't make sense and were not even funded. In short, they didn't even try. For some reason the unmanned missions are managed much better. I do a lot of reading about them and all the decisions, trade offs and plans seem to be the result of careful and realistic planning.
I think it's largely because they don't have so much safety-related red tape. Loosing a robot is not nearly as big of a deal as loosing a human.
In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!
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Goal: Land humans on Mars. Stretch Goal: Bring them back!
You jest, but if I ever get the opportunity I will take a one-way trip to Mars without hesitation.
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Let me anthropomorphically assume there will always be a closer target to spend excess planetary resources on.
Yes, but the closer target doesn't look alien . How often do countries go to war with people who are similar to them? Now how often with people who are the other ? (Whatever definition fits)
I'd say the historical rule for warfare is that the belligerents are so similar that tiny differences seem irreconcilable. Proximity and competition for resources also seem more important that otherness.
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This is one of the answers to the Fermi paradox.
Only if it would apply to all alien civilizations. The thing about Fermi's paradox is that the Universe is old and the local galaxy is big, so any explanation for the apparent absence of ETI has to cover all ETIs. It just takes one species in galactic history to reach the point of launching a self-replicating interstellar probe to produce a galaxy permanently aswarm with them. Heck, we're not that far away from being…