DARPA Building Futuristic Space Exploration Group 141
coondoggie writes "What started out as an idea about how to further explore the outer reaches of space is now beginning to take more serious shape as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) today issued a call for industry information on how to form such as cosmic entity. Specifically DARPA said it issued a Request For Information intended to solicit ideas and information on structure and approach, and identify parties qualified and interested in furthering what's known as the 100 Year Starship project."
My ship has come in (Score:2, Funny)
Profit!
SpaceX (Score:1)
NASA constrained by funding & politics (Score:2)
NASA is on the top targets of the tea party mood under the misconception that is accounts for a large percentage of federal budget. Plus one president terminating the shuttle and the next president terminating its replacement.
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I am glad to see someone else help pick up the long-term research slack.
NASA is on the top targets of the tea party mood under the misconception that is accounts for a large percentage of federal budget. Plus one president terminating the shuttle and the next president terminating its replacement.
Can you show me where TEA Party members are calling for NASA to be cut or are you just making shit up because the truth won't justify your hatred of the TEA Party?
Actually, about 30 seconds of research [galvestondailynews.com] has revealed that you are lying your ass off:
The Save NASA, Stop Obama group was lead mainly by people who consider themselves Tea Party activists, even though many are well known as Republicans. Organizer Ken Clark, a county commissioner, said the effort was mostly grassroots from the Tea Party members in the area.
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I call BS. While the group that self identifies as "Tea Party" does want to slash government spending, it is for the most part what they consider waste. Yes, this includes a lot of what NASA does... or did you happen to forget that NASA wants to replace the Shuttle with Orion (another piece of bloat) instead of using one of the much cheaper alternatives (as well as ready sooner, more reliable, etc.) being offered by outfits like SpaceX.
Yes, I self identify with the Tea Party. I am not lower middle class,
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I don't think there are many in NASA who want to use Orion. The people who want that senators from states like Utah who would benefit from the program.
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What I mean specifically is that I don't think there are many people at NASA interested in using the solid fuel boosters from the space shuttle to launch payloads into orbit. It is a bizarre requirement that is obviously meant to keep people employed at the expense of anything resembling reasonable thought on the matter.
The thing about SpaceX is that using them gets you away from a lot of congressional oversight which has been adding unnecessary cost and constraints to NASA because many power-brokers in wa
Maybe they can call it... (Score:1)
Starfleet? The organization could be a United Federation of Planets. No, nevermind, that's stupid.
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SMEG (SpaceMen Exploration Group).
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!
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How about SMEGMA (SpaceMen Exploration Group Mining Asterorids)?
Space-XKCD (Score:2, Interesting)
http://xkcd.com/893/
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I think that XKCD is either incorrect, or pessimistic. It would be absolutely true, however, if it said "number of living Americans" instead of "people". I think it's likely we'll have more people walking on other worlds in the next few decades, but they sure as hell won't be Americans (unless they're billionaires paying some foreign space agency for the privilege).
Re:Space-XKCD (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought even more though provoking was the little alt-text that accompanied the comic:
'The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space -- each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.'
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That is poetic! In order to become more than we are perhaps we do need to seek out new life and new civilizations. To Boldy Go.
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I saw it last night, and it was the most depressing thing I've read in a while.
Unfortunately, the human race appears to have little (if any) desire to leave mommy's basement and explore the neighborhood, much less anything else.
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That's because the "neighborhood" has little air pressure, only a minuscule amount of oxygen or water (mostly in a form that would require extensive processing to even get at it), intense cosmic radiation, little in the way of complex minerals or ores, and no topsoil. It's also either very hot or very cold (depending on which direction you head). And it requires a huge amount of time and energy to get from house to house.
That's why we stay in the basement, and probably always will, whether we like it or not
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Reminds me a of science fiction story I read once set aboard a "generation ship" several hundred years into a journey of several thousand. Each year, they would celebrate "Founders Day" by spitting on effigies of the original crew (whose selfish dream had essentially stranded their descendants in deep space).
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The problem of a generational ship wouldn't be that the inhabitants hated the original crew. The problem would be gettin
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Now imagine if Earth was, at best, a few thousand square meters of living space, and you had to share that space with hundreds of other people. And no matter what *you* want to do with your life, the simple fact remains that your survival, and the survival of all of the people you know and live with, is entirely dependent on whether or not you can become a competent mechanic, despite the fact that you'd rather be a writer, or a musician. Oh, and you also have to marry and reproduce with someone who you're
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You are criticizing the quality of life from the viewpoint of a person living
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So you see no ethical problem with the idea of selling someone's entire family into indentured servitude, for as long as their family & descendants should live, so long as the first person signing the contract agrees that it'd be cool and fun to be an indentured servant? So why can't we sell families into servitude today? Sure, the first couple people you sell into slavery will object, but once they breed, those kids won't know anything but servitude, you'll have created a sub-class of servants for li
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The reason people emigrate is to have a "better life," and it would be monstrously immoral to knowingly send people out into a situation where they and every single one of their descendants is going to have a demonstrably WORSE life than they would have had. We don't suggest to the peasant farmer in India that he might enjoy living in the middle of a battlezone in Darfur, and we don't suggest to the homeless guy in Miami that maybe he'd be better off moving to Boston in the middle of February.
Unless you re
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And the multiple-planet graves of cultures who didn't appreciate how unsurvivable and unsustainable the other planets and moons in their solar system really were.
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Thing is, getting people off-planet is not going to increase racial survival unless they can form self-sustaining colonies. Right now, if we were to have permanent colonies on the Moon and Mars, and Earth were eaten by a star goat, the colonies would die pretty darn fast.
There's only a handful, if that, of off-Earth locations in the Solar System that don't make Antarctica look like Paradise, and Antarctica is a whole lot easier to get to. There are probably more hospitable places in other systems, but
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I disagree about the racial survival: if it turns out to be extremely difficult to build a "Biosphere 4" on the Moon or Mars and have it not covered in mold / swamped in CO2 / all plants died of unknown causes in a year, then hopefully this will increase all people's appreciation of the only working example that we as a race have -- Biosphere 1 (Earth).
If a child has a toy and is t
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Of course, we should stop nuclear fusion research and the LHC right now, because according to you, they will never work.
money (Score:4, Insightful)
From the fine article
Methods to incentivize researchers,
Ummm, I'd try money.
Re:money (Score:5, Insightful)
Money-ish. Most academically/philosophy-motivated people I know (inluding myself) are happy to have moderate income with high job security and substantial housing subsidization.
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Interesting. People I know of that have that call it "Golden Handcuffs"
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Awww, shucks. =\
To explore strange new worlds... (Score:1)
Requirements (Score:3)
Re:Requirements - Purple Wigs (Score:2)
# 1: Female uniforms must include mandatory Shiny Purple Sexy Wigs.
http://fortresstakes.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/ufo_moonbase_girls_purple_wigs.jpg [wordpress.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UFOTVDVDnew.jpg [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_(TV_series) [wikipedia.org]
Said organization must comply with the following requirements:
- Uniforms should be brightly colored, vaguely indicating role, and adaptable to look good while allowing for command-level officers to engage in hand-to-hand combat on a regular basis.
- All senior officers should be skilled in everything. Yes, everything. We'll decide who does what based on who's standing around at the moment, not based on some specialized set of skills or designated responsibilities.
- The organization should construct a fleet of vessels, with one vessel getting all the priority assignments while the rest of the fleet does Sudoku until needed for a well-intentioned but otherwise ineffective show of support.
- The organization should be composed of scientists and explorers who just so happen to run around with the most powerful weapons currently available. Asteroids can hurt, right?
Duh! (Score:2)
It's called Starfleet! It's formed by gathering up civilizations after they develop warp drive technology. Everybody knows that!
Want to be optimistic... (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to be optimistic. When I chose engineering as a career, my goal was to aid humanity in colonizing space, because I could see that we've run out of terrestrial expansion room.
But TFA is Michael Cooney's Layer 8 blog. Cooney mines the Federal Business Ops website [fbo.gov] for RFIs and RFPs and then writes entire articles based on conjecture and conclusions reached by means of Boots of Springing and Striding [coryj.net]. I've worked on programs that have received Cooney's attention and was amazed at how wrong he was on so many points, and how he presented his erroneous assumptions as facts. It's hard to take anything I read on Layer 8 credibly.
For instance, Cooney regularly glosses over the transient nature of the RFIs he cites. Keep in mind that an RFI is merely a "Request for Information." It's an unfunded solicitation of ideas and white papers, used to identify whether there's anybody credible out there who has an idea plausible enough and attractive enough to warrant going back to the DARPA Director and, eventually, Congress with a budget request for a real RFP and phase I study program. Many RFIs result in either nothing, or an RFP for an unfunded IDIQ or a shoestring SBIR type contract. They're fishing expeditions. And sometimes they're done for internal projects just to get new ideas for free, or for programs hardwired for an existing contractor just as a sort of threat. (But on the other side of the coin, DARPA is usually not tricksy like that... but there's still no guarantee of any money available.)
Still, I'm very glad that DARPA is soliciting ideas, at least... there's a phrase in the R&D world: "DARPA Hard." DARPA doesn't consider ideas that are just matters of engineering -- making existing tech lighter/faster/cheaper. They want to push the state of the art and hope to sponsor real, fundamental science that opens up new possibilities. Starships are indeed DARPA Hard.
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Population of the world: ~7 billion;
Population density of New York City: 27,532 / sq. mi.
Population density of London, England: 12,450 / sq. mi.
Area of Texas: 268,581 sq. mi.
The entire population of earth would fit into a city roughly the size of Texas, at the same population density as New York City. Cut the density in half (slightly more dense than London), and you're talking about everybod
Are they still waiting? (Score:1)
Remember Jefferson Starship?
Are they still waiting for the first star ship to Hijack? It has been so many years that the original bunch may be too old now but I wonder if they trained their kids?
The star ship stonies rocking their way across the stars!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUT1xvdrlDA [youtube.com]
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Aren't those the fools who tried building a city out of rock-and-roll instead of concrete and brick? Sure, worked great until the first big storm came through. I can still see those bloody Members Only jackets scattered everywhere in the rubble.
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Aren't those the fools who tried building a city out of rock-and-roll instead of concrete and brick?
Rock and Roll? Wuss-music, more like!
Join! (Score:1)
Starship is wrong answer (Score:2)
The energy to send a description of an object to another star is roughly a million times less than the energy to send the object itself. So the right answer is to send a small nanotech factory which builds a receiving station at your destination. Then you scan a person at an atomic level here, transmit the data, and build a copy at the other end. Besides being frugal from an energy standpoint, it allows you to travel at the highest possible speed (that of light), and the trip time from the traveler's poi
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@AC1 - are you conscious when asleep or under medical procedure? The assumption is that an atomic detail copy contains all the detail to recreate the person, including their consciousness. If you don't agree, then where is the extra data stored in the body? I assume the traveler lays down in and operating type room, put to sleep so they don't move around, then is scanned. The copy wakes up in reverse order, first body set in operation (heart started, etc), then woken up.
@mdsolar - even if you have access
Why FTL won't happen (Score:2)
FTL travel requires bypassing the energy required to move a mass through normal space.
The moment you have FTL, you have a method for adding infinite energy to the universe... say by using FTL to boost a mass out of the middle of a solar system, then letting it fall back in via traditional Newtonian methods from the outer edges of it.
I'm pretty sure the universe doesn't like that.
Re:Just paper (Score:4, Insightful)
Grow up. Dreams are our contribution to the universe and the foundation of our legacy. The individual's small contributions to mankind's monuments is the essence of life after death.
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You realize you just told an Anonymous Coward to grow up? That's like telling Gilbert Godfrey not to squint his eyes and sing bass.
Re:Just paper (Score:4, Interesting)
Close, but not quite. Unlike religious dogma, which is pretty much all fiction (it has zero real evidence supporting it), space age dreams are completely feasible and possible. The problem is that it takes political will, hard work, and a lot of money, over a long time (not just one election cycle) to make them happen. That's why they'll never happen here in the USA. The populace doesn't want to pay for it (though they'll happily pay over half their tax revenues to invade other countries), the corporations don't want to invest in it (because there won't be a big ROI within 5 years), and frankly, the populace just isn't capable of it any more because there aren't enough people with technical (science/engineering) educations able to pull it off.
The USA dreaming of large space projects is a lot like Zimbabwe dreaming of large space projects. It's just ridiculous to think about it. Now China, OTOH, is a different matter. While it'll be a little while before they're ready to do anything big in space, they're getting there quickly, because they have the political will and the money, and don't mind putting in hard work unlike Americans these days.
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Now that I've actually worked in the corporate field for a while, I can say this: It's not that all Americans are lazy. It's that doing a better job than your boss, even at your own job and not his or hers, is political suicide. This is why you got the crap beat out of you by bullies in high school. If he or she can keep you from enjoying any benefits your intelligence and hard work provides, he surpasses you on the food chain. "If you're so smart, why'd you get your ass kicked." "If you're so smart,
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Our youngest generation is indeed rather lazy. I'm only 37, and I see a huge difference between my generation and the 20-somethings that are coming into the workforce now.
But there's also the big issue that we just don't have a lot of technical talent available for any big projects. Much of what we do have available is in the computer fields, which is necessary for, but in no way sufficient for, any space projects. You need aerospace engineers for that, and we haven't been making too many of those lately
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You're a moron. There's nothing in physics that keeps people from getting off the planet; we've done it before many times, both with humans and with robotic explorers. It doesn't even cost that much to send robots to Mars, compared to how much it costs to wage wars. A few hundred million is chump change for an economy the size of the USA.
If you're talking about sending people to other stars, you might have something (or you might not; considering modern physics is only about a century old, I'd say it's p
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The smart thing to do would be to wait until we have better physics, and thenexplore space. There's no point using old shitty physics that's not going work anyway.
And as long as solar power on earth is cheaper/Watt than in orbit, let's build it on earth.
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Modern physics is working just fine for tooling around the solar system. The various space agencies haven't had much trouble getting rovers on Mars, intercepting comets, getting MESSENGER into Mercury orbit, and many other things. NASA didn't even have any trouble getting men to the Moon on the first try way back in the 60s.
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Sure, for short distances and/or small probes, it works fine. With an insane budget, you can even have 2 men walk pointlessly on the moon for a few hours.
For bigger stuff, like mining, terraforming, or human travel to other planets, we need better gear.
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Yes, we need better gear, but not better physics. The physics we have is fine for short distances, and doesn't change based on the size of the craft. What we need is better ways to lift cargo to orbit, and better ways to get around the solar system, such as ion engines, nuclear engines, etc. All these things have either been partially designed, or even prototyped. And finally, we need money, which is the real limitation of it all, but if we didn't waste money on oil wars and a bloated military, this wou
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There *are* some basic problems that need to be addressed, but as you suggest they are largely engineering.
My take on it is that the primary problem that needs to be addressed it a closed ecology. We don't currently know how to maintain one, and there's a clear need for that before any extended human space project is feasible.
FWIW, I feel that we have a real need for several long term habitations in different locations. On various moons, on Mars, on Luna, possibly on Mercury, and definitely on various ast
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Honest questions. Given your suggestion that we may be destined for inevitable self-destruction:
1) What makes you think expanding to half a dozen other locations wouldn't simply result in 6 times the self-destructive behavior? ("Mars humans are better than Luna humans, kill them all in the name of the Mars God!")
2) What makes our species worth the effort of preserving it, if you feel that self-destruction is inevitable
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Ever hear the phrase "putting all your eggs in one basket"? Understand at all what it means?
I don't consider our self-destruction inevitable, just extremely likely unless we take steps to lower the risk. One way to lower the risk is to eliminate single points of failure. Another is to operate separable components in different environments (so that they experience different stresses).
FWIW, I expect stability to be possible only with drastically changed social conditions...like having the executive control
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Ever hear of focusing on low-hanging fruit?
Developing interstellar travel and spending trillions and trillions of dollars on building colonies in places which are not hospitable to human life, or on speculative interstellar missions to "find a planet" is about the most expensive and fanciful way of accomplishing your risk mitigation goals that it's possible to conceive of.
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Actually, they had a LOT of trouble. This doesn't mean you're basically wrong though. The job is a bit harder than you seem willing to admit, and some of the payoffs are quite speculative. (And I do worry about some of the designs for an SSPS to power earth, though it should be quite easy to build one to power other space endeavors.)
Still ... If we're real lucky one of the outcomes of the Fukishima disaster will be a Japanese SSPS, And if that's done well ...
The Japanese are a country that has a real ne
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The most useful thing to build in space I can think of is a solar power station with a metals foundry attached. Then it opens up mining asteroids and building structures in space, which opens up many other things such as colonies on Venus and Mars.
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Exactly. A solar power station either in geosynchronous orbit, or even at a Lagrangian point, could harvest tons of free solar power, then beam it back to earth, or do ore processing of mined asteroids. Then you don't have to mine all that material on Earth and lift it out Earth's gravity well for building space-based structures. Moon mining might also be feasible; after all, it's big, and it's always right there, unlike asteroids which pass by with weird orbits that bring them within convenient distance
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What happens to the tides when you remove a large amount of the Moons mass? Not to mention orbits. I believe it would be wise to not mine the Moon.
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Don't be ridiculous. How much mass do you think is going to be removed? Since the start of the bronze age, how much mass in Earth's crust has been mined? Compared to the total, a totally negligible amount.
If we start thinking about building ringworlds or Dyson spheres, then your concerns will have some merit. Moving 0.00001% of the moon's mass to earth is not going to affect anything.
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When people consider using a launch loop on earth, it makes no sense as the air resistance near ground level would make it infeasible to launch an item into orbit, but I wonder how well it would work on the moon. You could use a very large area for acceleration up to escape velocity, then have it move up a hill or something to launch the item out of the moon's gravity well. If you worked it properly, it would be an entirely energy based launch mechanism rather then chemical based and could be man rated (u
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For that matter, on the moon you could build a Space Elevator and use Kevlar for the cable. (Well, probably not really. Kevlar is strong enough, but you'd need to shield it against vacuum or it would probably become brittle.)
OTOH, the Space Elevator is only useful if you're expecting to average as much down traffic as up traffic. So a magnetic launcher would be a reasonable alternative. (Is that what you meant by a launch loop?) Most sky-hooks are out, however, because they almost all require an averag
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Wait a minute, how can DARPA get money to *invest*. Remember the reason Umurikans voted for Tea Party folks is to *cut cut cut* government spending. Shouldn't this really be carried out by a private business -- particularly those private businesses that don't worry just about quarterly profits and share prices--- now don't everybody rush for the opportunity --- line forms to the left for all those interested businesses --- .
The TEA Party supports cutting government funds that go to programs not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution. DARPA falls under the defense budget, which is Constitutional.
Read the 10'th Amendment for more information.
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Yeah. Cut NOAA [noaa.gov] funding. Who cares about tsunamis anyway? Whoops! No more tornado warnings either?
Now all those God-fearing Tea party rednecks can watch their mobile homes fly away.
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Would that be the Medicare cuts that are part of Obamacare? Or another set of cuts?
Or didn't you ever bother to notice that part of the financing on Obamacare was Medicare cuts?
Admittedly, even while those Medicare cuts were being used as part of the "revenue-neutral" financing of Obamacare, the White House was saying that they expected future Congresses to cancel them.
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1 Follow up on first term promises.
or
2 Screw the voting populace for everything they can and suffer judicial review prior to leaving office.
Either way, a win - win situation for the voters.
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Let me simplify it for you.
If you want the TEA Party platform, read the 10th Amendment.
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BS. Just like most idealogical movements, the way to judge it is by the way its members currently conduct themselves, not the core principles its founders started with.
It's just like Christianity. If you listen to Jesus, he'd have you believe it's all about tolerance ("let he who has no sin throw the first stone"), love, and other hippy values. But modern-day Christianity isn't about that stuff at all, it's about bashing homosexuals, killing non-Christians, invading other countries to establish imperiali
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BS. Just like most idealogical movements, the way to judge it is by the way its members currently conduct themselves, not the core principles its founders started with.
Have you ever been to a TEA Party event? The people I have seen there have been nothing but nice, even to those that were there counter protest. The only people who were treated poorly were the ones who had signs that were in poor taste. I'm not sure if they were "astroturphers" (liberal plants there to make the TEA Partiers look bad) or just people who were bought into the Democrat talking points repeated as fact by the media. Either way, they were not welcome.
It's just like Christianity. If you listen to Jesus, he'd have you believe it's all about tolerance ("let he who has no sin throw the first stone"), love, and other hippy values. But modern-day Christianity isn't about that stuff at all, it's about bashing homosexuals, killing non-Christians, invading other countries to establish imperialism, etc.
Again, when was the last time you've been
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The churches my wife's dragged me to had people wearing anti-gay-marriage and pro-Prop 8 T-shirts, and the leadership openly spouted that philosophy. After getting sick of this kind of stuff, my wife's stopped dragging me to church at all.
What kind of churches do you go to? Obviously not any evangelical Christian ones, which are the majority here in America and growing.
As for the Tea Partiers, all you have to do is look at what their representatives in Congress are voting for. I don't give a rat's ass wh
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The churches my wife's dragged me to had people wearing anti-gay-marriage and pro-Prop 8 T-shirts, and the leadership openly spouted that philosophy. After getting sick of this kind of stuff, my wife's stopped dragging me to church at all.
You mean churches are teaching the Bible? For shame! How dare those evil Christians teach the book that their entire religion is based on!
Either way, opposing gay marriage is not "bashing homosexuals". Marriage is seen as a religious institution. Homosexuality is not. The two don't mix so churches tend to be against it. Churches bash homosexuality, not homosexuals, and they are against homosexuality because it's a sin in the eyes of the church. Churches tend to "bash" all sin. For example, my church
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"BS. Just like most idealogical movements, the way to judge it is by the way its members currently conduct themselves, not the core principles its founders started with."
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democratic Party.
Sorry, low-hanging fruit and all.
But seriously, I wouldn't dignify what you posted by even referring to it as a comment. Never mind the pompous cynicism of considering everyone you disagree with some sort of ignorant, monolithic mass of bad intent, you're even so arrogant as to believe (
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"BS. Just like most idealogical movements, the way to judge it is by the way its members currently conduct themselves, not the core principles its founders started with."
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democratic Party.
Sorry, low-hanging fruit and all.
What, is this supposed to be some kind of snarky come-back?
What I said applies equally to Republicans, Teabaggers, Democraps, or any other group you care to name.
You must be one of those stupid Americans who think everyone absolutely must be a Democrat or
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it's about bashing homosexuals, killing non-Christians, invading other countries to establish imperialism, etc.
Seriously I don't want to start an argument with you or anything, but I think you're way out of touch with christianity. All you do is cast generalized accusations at people based on parodies of them. You can find the lowest of the low on either side, and cast that in to the image of those who oppose you, but that isn't helpful at all. My father goes to Guatemala twice a year to help a village there by building a school and donating money. He is sent there by the church he attends and going there to help ha
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My wager is very few christians really think to themselves "we should kill brown people and establish an empire!" and the few that do aren't really christians. You may see that as the results of their philosophy, or the intentions of the people they support, but it is WILDLY wrong to suggest that is how christians think.
Wrong. A few odd people who go on missions to Guatemala are not representative of American Christians in general. To see what American Christians support, all you have to do is look at who
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Where did I ever say that being a hippy was a bad thing?
I didn't say you said that. I was just transitioning. Perhaps roughly. If Jesus is a hippy, god is a libertarian.
what have Republicans been doing for the last decade? Invasions and imperialism.
See, right here, this is your problem. I doubt christians voted for GWB a second time hoping he would start another war, or are just waiting for us to invade somebody else. In fact, stuff with Libya seems to have people a little wary. Even Christians. This could be caused by simple partisanship, or it could be that they genuinely don't agree with the blanket "lets invade other countries" like you
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Liberals DO support abortion, or at least the right to choose it, but that's a little different from "baby killing". Denying that liberals support abortion choice is denying reality, and it shows in who they vote for.
Same thing goes for Republican voters. They obviously wanted wars, that's why they voted for GWB (esp. the second time). If they didn't want the wars to continue, they would have voted for someone else, but they didn't.
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Did Obama end the wars? The simple fact is that those wars were going to continue no matter who was in office. But it is easier for you people to blame Bush for everything, hell, some of you think he was behind 9/11. The funny thing is that you people also say he is completely incompetent.
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Nope, Obama hasn't ended the wars at all, and what's really funny is the liberal morons who voted for him and "Change!" are now defending him, even though he's not much different from Bush. If Bush did something, they were completely against it, but now that Obama's doing it, they have some sort of twisted logic to defend him, whether it's continuing the wars, continuing Prohibition 2.0, molesting 6-year-old girls at the airports, etc.
The real test will be when Obama's up for re-election, if the liberals r
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If Obama ends up losing the Democratic nomination to another Democrat, then we'll know that his backers were just a vocal minority.
I'm pretty sure a sitting President does not have to be nominated to run for a second term.
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Define "very quickly"?
The president has the power to unilaterally pull out of any military engagement he chooses to, but it takes a great deal of time to withdraw (safely, and without leaving a shitload of material & equipment behind) 10's of thousands of troops from halfway around the world.
Not to mention the simple fact that "unilaterally" ending the wars would result in the situation simply getti
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This is why I don't tell liberals they believe in killing babies. See? If I called a liberal a baby killer, thats ineffective. They don't believe they support that at all.
You forgot that they are for abortions.
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Seriously I don't want to start an argument with you or anything, but I think you're way out of touch with christianity. All you do is cast generalized accusations at people based on parodies of them. You can find the lowest of the low on either side, and cast that in to the image of those who oppose you, but that isn't helpful at all.
And finally, this isn't true at all. I don't pick out the "lowest of the low", I simply look at who people vote for to represent them and make laws for them. You can see thi
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That is, indeed, a very bad assumption. Generally people end up voting for whoever they think is "the lesser of two evils". This is why Condorcet voting or Instant Runoff Voting would change politics considerably. (Over time, admittedly. But perhaps not too much time.)
Just for instance, I voted for Obama despite despising hm, because I considered that he might be a little less bad than McCain. Was he? I'll never know. He's pretty bad. And he didn't keep his campaign promises any better than I expect
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The delegated powers includes laws written for the 'general welfare'. Every President, including George Washington, Madison, et al. have used the General Welfare clause. It's the basis of most federal power since the beginning, and why the framers 'snuck it in' and why they didn't close
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I don't know about this: aren't the Evangelicals mostly younger to middle-aged white people, along with blacks? After all, the black vote was absolutely instrumental in passing Prop. 8 in California a few years ago. The old white people are mainstream Protestants, not Evangelicals; Evangelicalism is a fairly new phenomenon that's taken over the country in only the last couple of decades or so. Yes, it's overtaken mainstream Protestantism, but while I haven't looked up any figures, I doubt it's because of
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Physics has the possibility of compressing space. It happens near wormholes, so it is possible, so if you could compress the space between the Sun and Alpha Centauri, you could travel the distance quite quickly by not traveling between. In order to do this, we need to be able to manipulate gravity, which is why we are supposably using the LHC to discover the Higgs Boson which is generally thought to be used to pass gravity.
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Getting around Einstein's speed of light restriction with "wormholes" is the physics equivalent of saying "Maybe a magic unicorn will stop the volcano." It's nothing more than a wishful fiction.
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If you use gravity to compress space, you don't have to go faster than light. The way the warp engines in Star Trek are designed does not break the speed of light, it generates a field around the ship which compresses space in front of the ship and contracts space behind, the ship does not actually move, do it's effective speed is 0, not multiples of the speed of light.
To an outside observer, the ship would be moving faster than light, but to the ship they are no moving, so which is right? The speed of li
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Wow, so many typing mistakes, I wish I had proofread that...but I believe you get my meaning beyond the typos.
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I don't know the way Star Trek warp engines work, but it has somethin
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There's a difference between current tech and known physics Current tech says we can't accelerate a living human to near lightspeed. We may or may not ever be able to do so. I don't think it will ever be done, but I wouldn't rule it out. (I believe interstellar colonization will be done using generation ships, although we can't do that either.)
Physics, as we understand it, says that (a) we can't accelerate anything to faster than light, and (b) if we could, that would be effectively time travel. Cha
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You're a little be judgmental.
I'd agree that it's *likely* impossible, and we don't currently have any idea as to how to do it. (The negative energy required to stabilize the hole is itself a major problem for anything that isn't microscopic.) This doesn't mean it's really impossible. Just that we have no idea of how to do it. And it looks like there are lots of iffy problems that may not have solutions. But, you know, they might. And saying we can't do it doesn't mean that people 50-100 years from no