271–280 of 495 posts
Just finished "Red Mars", the book aged quite well for the scifi genre. SPOILER ALERT: The book ends with a dissident faction of Mars settlers living in a hidden water ice dome under the polar cap.
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You could say pretty much the same thing about other cities, other states, other countries, other continents. Why did mankind leave Africa if they just repeated the same mistakes in Europe and Asia? Why did they leave Europe to go to the US if they just did the same thing over there? Why would someone leave New England and go west across America if they're just bringing the same thing? All of that ignores, of course,…
Europe certainly brought their problems to their colonies: they exported their religious extremists, criminals and brought their need to profit, proselytize and conquer with them. Considering the same pressures are behind space colonization as were behind colonization of old, I find your concerns as merely speculation based in fantasy and not history. > but what if "here" is the problem? The same "here" that is human…
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Many medical research organizations have more money than they know what to do with. The heart and stroke foundation is a great example of that. I’m not suggesting we don’t fund these orgs, even reduce funding, but i feel like we could diversify into exploration of the universe a little more than we currently are.
I don't know how you come to this conclusion. I assume you mean the American Heart Association, whose grants are pretty incredibly competitive. Lots of good science doesn't get funded.
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Isn't life thought to have started in "conditions that we humans consider to be absolutely inhospitable".
Yes, but to quote the annoyingly semi-reasonable creationist Ken Ham: “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.” (Note: I am not a creationist, I do agree with the logic of that argument, but I also see no scientific basis for any religious origin story of life to have more scientific basis than others). We have recreated the conditions that predate life and found that organic molecules were formed, but we’ve never ob…
How were the continents a long time ago. Like Pangaea and before. Yes, we have good understanding of the continents before Pangaea.
How did bird evolve? [spoiler alert] They are small dinosaurs!
How is the center of the Sun? [I'm not sure that this falls in the original meaning of “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.”, but it is included in the literal meaning.] In some books of 100 years ago you can find weird explanations about the origin of the energy of the Sun.
Why the time of and orbit of Pluto is 3/2 of the time of the orbit of Neptune? Was this also true in the origin of the Solar system?
Where does the Moon comes from? [Weird story, hope you already know it.]
Most of this things were discovered in the last 100 years. I'm missing a few that were discovered before and are so mixed in the popular culture that it is impossible to imagine that thy were unknown before.
We still don't know how the first life form appeared, and I think we are cueless for now. We don't even know if they[we?] used ADN, ARN or something else. [ARN looks nice]. Did they get the energy "eating" organic molecules, from some H2, or something else? Protein-first or membrane-first?
We will never observe a leap from organic molecules to organic life, because (probably) there is no leap and because it (probably) takes too much time. The plan is to understand a few key steps, reduce the huge leap to a dozen of small steps, perhaps with substeps. Hopefully try to simulate the substeps in the laboratory, experimentally or by computer, and be sure that the path is correct enough. I hope that one century is enough, but perhaps I'm too optimistic.
The answer to “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.” is: We don't know ... for now, but it never stopped us in past to know a few amazing thing, so we are optimistic.
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I think the dialogue quoted here demonstrates the underlying issue that is lost in futurist thought. No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with powerful technology traveled west and stole land from other groups of people. They also traveled south and east and used that technical and economic power to enslave other humans and forced them to develop the west. Development and progress for progress' sake…
Some modern thinking has confused self-loathing and careful introspection. There were a great many things that could have, or arguably should have, been done differently in the past, but many of those things were done in the context and to the standards of the day. The transgressions of the past resulted in a technologically advanced society. Introspection considers this and asks, "what should we do differently in th…
The thread began begging the wealthiest countries on the planet to contribute a significant amount of that wealth toward space exploration.
No one here is making the argument that we should spend no money on space exploration. People are simply arguing against spending significantly more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with.
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I think the dialogue quoted here demonstrates the underlying issue that is lost in futurist thought. No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with powerful technology traveled west and stole land from other groups of people. They also traveled south and east and used that technical and economic power to enslave other humans and forced them to develop the west. Development and progress for progress' sake…
It's very tough to explain to someone who hasn't worked on large multidisciplinary projects with mandates to push some sort of boundaries like in exploration, science, and technology. This isn't some theoretical discussion by futurists, there is ample evidence that these kinds of ventures have systemic effects that touch literally every person, socioeconomic class, and daily activity. Academia and private industry ha…
Why don't we send a rover to some of these interesting places? It seems like we're constantly making fascinating finds on Mars, then send rovers to the middle of a random rocky desert.
For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years. 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039. If we could g…
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For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years. 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039. If we could g…
I was talking to an oncologist yesterday. Her biggest frustration is that Silicon Valley billionaires are spending billions upon billions to send things to space, when there are serious problems on Earth that could be fought, most importantly cancer. It’s hard to argue with her. $400B/yr would fund a lot of research that would benefit humanity a lot better than a coordinated mission to Mars, even though it would be v…
Is cancer not just the accumulation of cellular damage? Sometimes it happens earlier than we’d like or is induced by external factors a la radiation, but ultimately cell replication wears at telomeres and degrades molecular regulation of cell growth. Sure, some specific cases are treatable, but if you live long enough, you’ll get cancer in one way or another - the upper bound. Does “curing cancer” not entail solving all problems associated with aging as well?
It sounds so good on the surface, but do we actually have a better idea what we’re talking when we say “curing cancer” than “solving artificial general intelligence”?
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I would blame the size of the financial services sector on the Fed and inflationary money. I don't see what military power has to do with it? What's the size of the financial sector of Luxembourg or Switzerland?
Well name 1 other country that cab increase money supply the way FED does yet maintains the status of world's reserve currency? Luxembourg nobody cares on a global scale. Switzerland has extremely competent military and they are def. not in a position to manipulate the currency the way FED does and remain a viable financial center.
Well, actually, since you brought it up ...
The SNB has been buying euros, and other currencies (selling swiss francs) since 2011 in an effort to depress its value, which they believe is too high and hurts their exports.
Here is a decent summary of the events leading up to their interventions and the current scenario:
https://admiralmarkets.com/analytics/traders-blog/price-shoc...
In summary, the CHF is viewed by many market participants as a safe-haven, or reserve currency (especially in Europe) and the Swiss National Bank has been acting, unilaterally, for many years to manipulate the CHF downwards in value.
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An oncologist wishing more money was spent on cancer? In other news, water is wet. First of all, the optimal place for me to spend my money is not necessarily the optimal place for someone else to spend theirs. We can't know for sure, of course, but who were would have preferred Elon Musk start a cancer research firm instead of SpaceX? Secondly, there is no universal "cancer" that we can fight. There are hundreds of…
I think the dialogue quoted here demonstrates the underlying issue that is lost in futurist thought. No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with powerful technology traveled west and stole land from other groups of people. They also traveled south and east and used that technical and economic power to enslave other humans and forced them to develop the west. Development and progress for progress' sake…
The problem you're identifying is completely independent of exploration. If we spent more on cancer and nothing on space then we would have more medicine-related technologies and fewer of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
But that doesn't have anything to do with what you're objecting to. Look at the HIV drugs the west has access to and Africa doesn't.
And even if the benefit goes 90% to western countries and only 10% to poorer countries, how is that not still better for everyone than using the money to build military drones or ad tracking systems or something equally useless if not actively harmful?