The Big Picture: Once Upon a Time in The Future

[ReaperzXIII]

Well as I have been told that Mass Effect in real life is impossible in my life time so Im one of those that don't give a crap also expanding to space assumes the co-operation of humanity and we all know that is never going to happen so good luck creating space australia!

 

[The Stonker]

In my opinion the age of space exploration is over. The new science frontier, in my heavily biochemistry studying view, is the human genome and genetic technology. Look at a DNA molecule, that's the future.

EDIT: also giving a highly biased view of "scientists" not all of us work on making your ipods smaller. That's the fields of physics (and even then not all of physics anyway.)

2000th post as well. Rather glad it was biology themed.

You should be ashamed.
For if space is the final frontier, the big end which never ends, utopia.
For in space then you can find everything and anything, space is where almost all fields of science come and go hand in hand.
I personally love biology, but what will happen when we will have overpopulated the world and we need a new place to live on? Well...To space! But unfortunetly the nation which has the best scientists,research and such, just decided to cancel the project.
I would have cancelled loads of other things instead, to research space travel.
Yes, I love space and all science.

 

[Therumancer]

I don't understand how asking for proof of where Obama was born is racist. You have to be born in the US to be president, no matter what color your skin is.

You could argue that isn't been asked and answered, or is no longer in question. That's fine. Argue that the burden of proof has been met. No problem. But racist for asking? That's just plain lazy. "I don't like that you ask those questions, so I'm going to just call you a racist, and hope that you go away."

Sure, and every WHITE president has had a bunch of mouth-breathers asking whether he was born in Sweden, Scotland, or Croatia.

Oh, wait, that didn't happen.

But the first time a black man takes office, it JUST SO HAPPENS... Sure, buddy. Lemme guess, you start every other sentence with "I'm not a racist, but..."

Haven't played the video yet, was checking the comments to see if I wanted to.

I will say in response to this that there is more to the issue than that. The whole "I'm not a racist but" thing is due to fear of persecution from questioning a popular leader.

I don't feel any need to start comments that way however, and I've never made bones about my problems with Obama. Largely because of the efforts being made to sidestep certain questions about his citizenship. By this I don't mean the question of whether he was born in the US, or en-route to the US and given a birth certificate when he shouldn't have one.

The problem with Obama is that when he went to school overseas, one of the requirements was that people had to renounce citizenship to other countries in order to attend. There is a BIG question about whether he did this or not. This comes down to a very simple pass/fail thing where you don't even need to ask him or his people. All you have to do is look at whether that's a policy, and if he attended there. Nobody was willing to look into that one officially, and that accusation tends to get "glossed over" in these situations.

Now, no offense, but if this guy renounced his citizenship to attend school he definatly shouldn't be President, even if he got it back later. Simply being willing to do something like that should have been a major mark against him. People were however so anti-Bush, or wanted a liberal victory so bad, that nobody was willing to address this issue officially as far as I ever saw.

What color he is doesn't matter with that kind of accusation, it would be a big deal with anyone. What's more, when you discuss racism in regards to Obama, it's just as easy to ask people "Do you support him just because he's black?". The race issue cuts both ways with Obama and criticism.

Any way it goes, questions WERE raised that should have been addressed.

Above and beyond his citizenship, which is now a moot point (we can't very much have someone prove he wasn't a citizen now that he's been in office for years), I've had more of an issue with his actual term as president. I had less issues with Obama than I did with say Kerry, despite voting for Mccain (and I actually wanted Giuliani for president for reasons I won't go into), however he started me towards joining the Anti-Obama crowd when he assumed the office during a time of economic crisis, and then ran what was supposed to be the most expensive circus of an inaugeration in history. If there was any time for a president to ascend quietly, that was it. Even so I wouldn't have had an issue with the inaugeration celebrations (they all do it) if his price tag wasn't supposed to be so record setting under these conditions. It's almost as bad as Bill Clinton using "Air Force One" to go get a hair cut (which was a legendary incident), but Obama this happened when he was just coming into office.

 

[AVATAR_RAGE]

The solution another cold war

 

[DazBurger]

Feed the poor? We are already too many mouths to feed, if we are to feed everybody it WILL be at the expense of the other living creatures around us.. We are simply too many!

There are two solutions to that: Kill some off or find more room.

Where oh where would we be able to find more room I wonder?..


Space-travel is not an expensive hobby, its an investment!

 

[TimbukTurnip]

Glad to see I'm not alone in placing space as a priority above feeding the hungry and the like. Sure I'd like those problems to be solved, but no matter how hard people try, I believe they will never be fully solved.

 

[Thespian]

Yeah, all those arguments about problems on Earth outweighing our fascination with the stars are clichéd. But for a god damn reason. Arguments against the Nazi's methods are also numerous and clichéd, but it doesn't make them any less valid.

Sure, I'm totally with MovieBob in saying that Cities on Mars would be cooler than Peace on Earth. But I thought we could get past what's "Cool" and look at what is not just better in the long term - i.e, working towards helping our own pollution and poverty-addicted planet rather than handing our adolescent cousins their first joint - but also a hell of a lot more realistic.
Practically speaking, it would probably be centuries if not millennia before a self-sufficient city was made on Mars, and it probably would have worsened Earth's situations.
What in the hell is so great about Space? There's probably more interesting stuff in our tiny insignificant speck than there is in thousands upon billions of any give direction away from us. We might discover a new type of rock, or the chance that perhaps some day maybe, improbably, possibly, something nearly resembling a bacteria that could, with luck, begin to form into life a couple million years after we've died out. That's all that is waiting for us out there.
What's waiting for us here is the onset of another environmental disaster, a rapidly exhausting supply of resources, geopolitical divisions and an enormous percentage of the world in desperate poverty.

It is not evil to want to have space ships before we have food for children in LEDC's. But it is silly and irresponsible.

Finally, Bob, (Who I am addressing because I ASSUME you read every single post in these threads,[/self-imposed ridiculing]) I have only the greatest sympathy for whatever or however Humanity has mistreated you as you said, and I've learned not to belittle what anyone has gone through. But are you really responding to it in the right away? Because "Humanity" mistreated you, you respond my not wanting to help those who suffer by way of poverty or war? People who are not just NOT the people who caused your misfortune, but probably people who have suffered similarly?
Have you really thought about this?

Glad to see I'm not alone in placing space as a priority above feeding the hungry and the like. Sure I'd like those problems to be solved, but no matter how hard people try, I believe they will never be fully solved.

I don't mean to be directing my argument at you, but more using this statement as an example to work off.

I mean, I do not understand this logic that so many people seem to have. "I can't see it changing, so why bother?" How many times throughout history has this been said? When someone noticed the glaring inequalities to women, or to black people, how many times did they shrug and say "That's how it's always been" or "It will never change"
Futility is no reason to stop trying.
It is certainly not a reason to say "Whelp, I don't think putting money into the glaring flaws of our society will fix them, so, let's make SPACESHIPS!"

 

[Caligulove]

When I think about the bleeding hearts, as you call them, that are focused on more immediate Terrestrial things, then my response is that renewed interest in the Space Program, combined with the education for the new generations can help really invigorate an industry that really has been forgotten for some time, and have people focused on the innovation in Space Travel to acquire great wealth, metaphorically and monetarily- instead of all the people I see on campus trying to get their MBAs to work at some corporate job- or far too many wanting to be investment bankers.

Change the incentives and the rest comes

 

[k-ossuburb]

Actually, technically speaking, when you look up into the night sky you're looking into the past, not the future. The light from those stars traveled millions/billions/trillions of light years to get to us, we're seeing them as they were millions/billions/trillions of years ago.

However, I do get where you're coming from, luckily the U.K. space centre is still going on strong (until Cameron cuts that, too, that is). Although we don't launch many (if any) rockets into space, we do a lot of engineering work on the technology that makes it up there. Although, it's a shame that NASA isn't doing it any more, they're the guys I found the most likely to achieve the lofty goals of space colonization. At least we still have China, I suppose.

 

[flying_whimsy]

This review made me so sad, as I'm in the exact same boat as Bob.

What happened to striving towards progress? To furthering human achievement and becoming more than we are? I usually sarcastically respond in this situation with something about flying cars, but honestly, what the hell is wrong with us? Arguably, the internet has been ground zero for everything awesome over the last twenty year: nearly instant dissemination of information across class and geopolitical boundaries and what do we do with it? porn, WoW, and facebook.

Humanity epic fail.

 

[franzieperez]

The end of the space shuttle does by no means mean the end of space exploration.

First of all, there have been many ideas that have been proposed over decades, like orbital launch platforms and thing like that, as substitutes for the shuttle program. Hell, many of the die-hard rocket scientists didn't want the shuttle because it would phase out multi-stage rockets, which were then seen as the pinnacle of manned space exploration, and to be fair, man didn't go to the moon in a shuttle, so it can be said that it hasn't even had the biggest impact on space exploration.

On the other hand, even if this does mean that people are no longer interested in going to space themselves (at least for the moment), unmanned exploration has always brought back plenty of information in terms of the viability of establishing settlements on the moon, mars, and even further away.

If the probes, robots and telescopes all say its not worth trying to colonize right now due to lack of resources, quite honestly that's good enough for me.

 

[uchi mata]

I honestly do not care

 

[Orcboyphil]

I'm with Bob here but not just for the ohh wow where finally here reason (Though it is a frikkin large part of it). The choice isan't really feed the starving or go to Mars; its go to Mars and the technology that will be necessary to create a viable colony will also be the technology that improves the lot for the poor people of Earth.

 

[Frankfurter4444]

I'm pretty sure there were still hungry people in Europe when mankind saw the need to explore the Atlantic Ocean.

Mankind needs to explore. It's in our biological makeup. The fact there isn't an organization whose sole purpose is to explore the one area not yet explored (space) is a damn shame. I agree with you entirely on that.

I ever become president, that'll be my first priority.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I hate to break this to you, but space is boring.

We went to the moon and we found nothing. If we go to Mars, we will find nothing. Build more advanced telescopes, launch probes, but let's not waste our time with manned missions because they're a dangrous waste of time, human life and resources.

And people might call me a soulless cynic when I say this, but mankind will never colonize space. Sure, we'll try, but we'll always fall back to Earth.

We WILL colonize space! in a few billion years when the sun blows up and we REALLY have to get out! Because the human race can achieve anything with a large enough blowtorch in the ass. if not we will set our goals on the new Iphone or something equally meaningless...

If we haven't already gone extinct within those few billion years, we'll mostly likely will so in the supernova.

Humanity has very much a God complex in that we think we can do anything because of our theories and science. But there are some things we just cannot achieve and space colonisation is one of them. We might one day make it as far as Jupiter, but you know what we will find there? Nothing. Nothing worth colonizing anyway.

And as for contact with aliens, ...that's never going to happen either. Even if there is intelligent life somewhere in the infinite vastness of space, the shear change that we might bump into them is 1 in a quadrillion. The reason why we so desperately wish for there to be intelligent life beyond our own is, because we are a lonely species who thinks a lot yet doesn't really know anyhing. We can't be blissfully ignorant and follow our instincts like every other creature on Earth so we're left to our own devices, wildly flailing our arms around, hoping to grab hold of some answers... Which we are never going to get.

Just as an atheist will tell a Christian, Moslim or Jew that no magical man from the sky will ever appear so as to give us answers, I'm here to tell all of you who dream of alien contact that no all-knowing alien race will ever contact us in order to cure us of our stupidity.

 

[Irridium]

Wait, you mean they cancelled the programs that would have had us going to Mars?

Wow, now I'm really sad.

This is outer fucking space people. We were going to go to other planets. Other planets in outer fucking space! It would have been amazing, we would have stepped out of our planet, become something else entirely.

God dammit. Just god dammit.

 

[WarpGhost]

+1 Bob

+1

 

[Therumancer]

Hmmm, for once I have to agree with everything Bob is saying. The only nitpick I can make is that the proper response to those liberal questions is to point out that the solution to those problems is in space. That's where we can colonize for more living space, and obtain more resources, and all kinds of other things.

As a pragmatic cynic will point out, we could solve a lot of our problems by killing off like 80% of the human population and then instituting stringent birth control and zero population growth policies... which might still be nessicary anyway.

Overall though, space travel is actually the nicer way to strive for a solution at the moment.

 

[messy]

In my opinion the age of space exploration is over. The new science frontier, in my heavily biochemistry studying view, is the human genome and genetic technology. Look at a DNA molecule, that's the future.

EDIT: also giving a highly biased view of "scientists" not all of us work on making your ipods smaller. That's the fields of physics (and even then not all of physics anyway.)

2000th post as well. Rather glad it was biology themed.

You should be ashamed.
For if space is the final frontier, the big end which never ends, utopia.
For in space then you can find everything and anything, space is where almost all fields of science come and go hand in hand.
I personally love biology, but what will happen when we will have overpopulated the world and we need a new place to live on? Well...To space! But unfortunetly the nation which has the best scientists,research and such, just decided to cancel the project.
I would have cancelled loads of other things instead, to research space travel.
Yes, I love space and all science.

Ashamed? I don't think so.

Yes space is a very nice dream. But with the way things are its just not plausible at the moment. Over population I imagine was going to get to us long before we have sustainable bases on places like Mars. The distance alone makes any sort of mission. Also if we keep thinking "on to the next planet" why would we bother looking after this one? I prefer a much more sustainable living philosophy.