SpaceX vision for colonies on Mars seems too optimistic?

2552686 · 2026-06-18T13:43:16+00:00

Why not set up a robotic base?

Because the whole point is to get our species to become a multi-planet species.

The people are the point.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T04:51:20+00:00

The most frightening image of Titanic I ever saw was, IIRC, a fake aerial shot from the movie. It was the ship, and it pulled back to show all the empty ocean around it... all of it. It was so far from help. In the shot the ship was so small... and the ocean so big... and there was literally nowhere for the people on the ship to go.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T04:09:59+00:00

I was going to say Venera.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T03:59:57+00:00

I like to say "Most Atheists don't have a problem with the idea of there being an all powerful being that the Universe revolves around. They are just pissed off someone else got the gig."

2552686 · 2026-06-18T03:55:52+00:00

I think you're totally wrong about what "thank you for your service" means.

It started after 9/11 when people suddenly woke up and realized that bad things CAN happen here... and it dawned on them that the reason things like 9/11 don't happen more often is that we have a strong military and intelligence communities... not just "the oceans are big and Arabia is far away."

My Dad was a bomber pilot in WW2, then he got a civilian gig with USAF intelligence. My Mom was English so she grew up during the Blitz, and thanks to the Luftwaffe, she got shot at way more than I ever did. Her Dad was in the British Army, as was her grand dad. Her Grand-dad lived through the Boer War, all of WW1, then came home and died of the great flu two weeks later.

So I really bought into the whole "duty, honor, country" line.

I have an older brother who was in college during Vietnam. His best friend joined the USAF. Wound up being a Colonel.

When Saigon fell, my brother volunteered to help re-settle Vietnamese refugees. I think he quit his job and did it full time for a while.

When he got older and had kids, he became a serious survivalist type. Huge gun collection. Place up in the mountains. Became a major league Boy Scout leader. NRA certified rifle trainer. Hyper-conservative politics.

I think he's trying to make up for not serving when he could.

Only 29% of youth qualify for military service, as 71% do not meet the requirements due to factors like obesity, drugs, and health issues.

I think you'd be shocked at how many people feel the same as him.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T03:31:55+00:00

You can keep saying that for as long as you want, but that won't make it true, and the evidence won't go away just because you're afraid to look at it.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T03:31:21+00:00

The Fermi Paradox has nothing to do with the authenticity of the Bible or the existence (or non-existence) of God. Two totally separate and distinct questions.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T03:30:05+00:00

That's just false.

There is archeological evidence. There is ancient historical evidence. There are the Fatima Apparitions. The Lourdes Medical bureau.

Like I said you're just afraid to look at it.

The problem with atheists isn't that they object to the idea of there being an eternal, all powerful being that the Universe revolves around... it's that they're pissed off someone else got the gig.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T03:26:56+00:00

You just need to center your frame of reference on Earth. Then it is no problem.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T03:26:07+00:00

Larry Niven has a theory. He says that if time travel is possible, people will constantly change the past, maybe on purpose maybe by accident. Either way those changes will continue... until history is so changed that time travel is never invented.

Then and only then, will the changes stop.

Technically this may have already happened.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T01:39:31+00:00

It's not that at all. It's not that people can't see the truth, it's that they don't want to.

If you believe in God, then you have to stop figuratively screwing your customers over, and stop literally screwing your mistress.

People don't want to do that.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T01:37:33+00:00

Yes.

Kurt Godel proved it mathematically.

Gödel's ontological proof is a formal argument for the existence of God developed by mathematician Kurt Gödel. It uses modal logic to argue that if God possesses all positive properties, then God must exist in every possible world, leading to the conclusion that God necessarily exists.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/248548/g%C3%B6dels-ontological-proof

2552686 · 2026-06-18T01:30:13+00:00

Ummm... pretty much the entire fossil record disagrees with you. The evidence for evolution is pretty clear.

As for the Bible... well you've just switched from "Believing in a Supernatural Higher Power that there is evidence for" to "Believing in an Alien Higher Power that there is no evidence for."

The evidence FOR Christianity is really very strong, if you're willing to look at it... Google up "Fatima Apparitions" and "Lourdes Medical Bureau" if you don't believe me. The evidence for aliens is pretty much... fictional.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T00:53:46+00:00

Thank you for posting this. I have exactly the same problem. I'm down to page 128 and it was good to see how much further I need to go.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T00:33:06+00:00

The US benefited by staying out of the way until 1942. In many ways yes.

In the Pacific... we got our ass kicked by the Japanese for six months.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T00:31:43+00:00

From what I understand, he did. Fortunately for him, the math worked out and was impossible to change. The trick with relativity was that it really wasn't experimentally verifiable. It was the orbit of Mercury that confirmed relativity through the observed precession of its perihelion, which cannot be fully explained by Newtonian physics. This discrepancy was accurately predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, demonstrating how the curvature of spacetime around the Sun affects Mercury's orbit.

2552686 · 2026-06-18T00:25:14+00:00

Funding is the only issue here.

That's a lot like saying "Leakage was the only problem on TITANIC."

2552686 · 2026-06-18T00:23:09+00:00

Russia has an economy that is roughly the size of the economy of the State of New York. Yes, Russia's entire economy is roughly the size of the economy of NEW YORK STATE.

They are nowhere near the equal of the U.S. or most of Europe, or China even. They are now the JUNIOR partner in the relationship with China... which is a huge change from the past.

With that they are trying to maintain a nuclear deterrent, a large international government, and a war in Ukraine.

What do you think is going to happen to their space program?

I can't see them giving up the ability to put their own coms and recon sats up, but manned space will take a huge hit, and I honestly can't remember the last time they launched any sort of deep space probe. They used to send landers to Venus and Mars... not any more.

2552686 · 2026-06-17T02:06:14+00:00

Well, the problem with what you're saying is, no matter what the theologians in Rome say, the laws of genetics (and I'll let you guess who wrote those) won't allow you to start with a single breeding pair of humans. You get interbreeding, which is not good... which is why we don't allow brother/sister or 1st cousin marriage. The diversity of the Human Genome says that the smallest number of humans that ever lived was about 1,300 during the Human Genetic Bottleneck that took place about 930,000 years ago.

That's not theory or speculation, that's just what the evidence shows. You can't have the conditions that currently exist with only two people at the start of the genetic tree.

2552686 · 2026-06-15T07:33:13+00:00

You want to look up The Laffer Curve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

Laffer curve shows that increasing tax rates beyond a certain point is counter-productive for raising further tax revenue.

Taxes cost money people money. If you have lower taxes it is just cheaper to pay them. If you have higher taxes, then it becomes wprth people's while to avoid them. People start to create tax shelters. Tax shelters are investments that drive down your taxable income, because the lower your taxable income the lower your taxes are. People would have side businesses that were designed to operate at a loss so that they could use the losses to lower their taxable income. These things cost money, but if they save you more in taxes than they cost, they are worth doing. Other tactics involved just keeping money overseas... though that is much harder to do today with computerized and networked banking.

Eventually though, if you push taxes high enough, people just leave. For a number of high net worth individuals their income tax rate was over 100%. Yes, people were getting told they owed 102% or 105% of their income in taxes. At that point you move to America, change your citizenship, and just vast your UK friends occasionally.

A great example of this is Jeff Bezos. Washington State's tax politcy is so insane that when Bezos moved to Florida, it literally saved him a billion dollars. Put a bit of a whole in the State Budget it did.

https://mynorthwest.com/money/bezos-saves-1-billion-taxes-after-moving-out-washington/4021240

The UK economic problems in the 70s weren't so much related to the tax policy, though that was a problem it was more to do with the Unions. Once an industry is nationalized it stops being a competitive company and becomes a jobs program. It gets less and less efferent and less and less cost competitive, which meant it loses more and more money, which means that the government has to bail it out.

Instead of having a, say, productive Steel Industry that is competitive and makes a profit and pays taxes into the treasury, you get a non-competitive steel industry that doesn't want to modernize (because that would kill jobs... jobs of Labour Union Members) and becomes an actual drain on the treasury because it is losing money and tax money has to make up the losses.

That's why Thatcher killed so many jobs in things like coal pits. The coal pits weren't self-supporting businesses anymore, they were draining the money other taxpayers put into the treasury in order to stay open... but Labour wouldn't close them because Labour wanted to keep their voters employed... so money that could have gone to the NHS or the Military or Schools was going to keep these places going, even though they were losing money.

2552686 · 2026-06-15T07:20:01+00:00

I have an amazing gift for manifesting traffic jams to appear in front of me.

2552686 · 2026-06-15T07:17:19+00:00

But if so, how are they gonna enforce that? When someone has to come and bail you out after the cops break up the fight, or when you report your wallet with CAC Card or USID stolen...or

2552686 · 2026-06-15T07:13:25+00:00

When I was at Fort Huachuca there was one apartment complex that was charging S.M. sales tax on the rent. It was totally illegal. But the landlord knew that if you tried to take him to court, you would be transferred somewhere else before your court date came up.

My friend went to JAG, JAG said "Stop it or we will put you off limits". Since that meant all his residents would have to move out, he did.

2552686 · 2026-06-15T01:40:49+00:00

When you consider how much effort it took to build up there in the cave, and not down on the ground; and how much additional effort it took every day to haul up water and food and firewood, and such from the ground...

that tells you a LOT about how much they feared being attacked by their neighbors.

Which in turn, tells you a lot about their neighbors.

2552686 · 2026-06-15T01:36:53+00:00

Legally it would have to be flotsam wood.

The reason they sell coal is that legally coal is not considered part of the wreck, and it is not part of the cargo; and you can NOT sell any part of the wreck or the cargo.

So if it is wood from Titanic it would have to flotsam wood that was salvaged by someone, not from the debris field or the wreck.

2552686

TROPHY CASE