ghostunit

If you feel that "Greece" must be punished for fiscal irresponsibility with chaos and starvation, then while we're still bundling people into convenient country packages, why shouldn't "the USA" be bombed and occupied?

Oh, those wars and massacres weren't your decisions? Then, you think the average Greek took those Eurozone loans and bailouts themselves?

"More than 6,500 young men and women died in these wars"

I love how the hundreds of thousands of people WE killed somehow don't make it into this count.

As a general rule, do not trust recommendations made by powerful people, be they magnates, presidents or generals.

They are all politicians (or else they wouldn't be where they are), so everything they do has an angle.

So you're telling me Bill Gates is no longer the paragon of intellectual honesty we all know and love?!

Someone has to point out that you have fallen into dogmatic thinking when it comes to our "space future". There is nothing promised, nothing that can be taken for granted, nothing shown to be possible (beyond the current limits of our physics which are: getting to the moon at enormous fuel expense, and 1-way ticket to die in Mars)

a) Travel within the solar system? where do you want to go live, Mercury, Venus? Mars is almost as worthless too, its gravity is 1/3 Earth's. Can't live there for long.

b) We just need to make it cheaper? how, exactly, are you going to get up there except by burning obscene quantities of solid (fossil) fuel, as we do now?

That's where the thermodynamics things comes in play: you have to pay the energy cost, there's no elegant "oh, we're just going to fold space" or some such bs. And fossil fuels are finite by definition, need I remind you.

It's not "we just need to make it cheaper". It's coming up with new breakthroughs in physics that no one can assure even exist.

I find this dogma of "Eventually we will conquer space and make it accessible to all mankind" dangerous in the extreme to the actual, all-too-present predicaments we have here on real Earth such as climate change, environment devastation, fossil fuels/minerals/water depletion and the accelerating destruction of the web of life that makes possible your even being able to breathe.

You are all prey to the "religion of progress".

Your dogma is that space travel is not only possible, but a given, something the universe has put somewhere for us to find and make ours.

Except that, basic hard laws such as the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. say NO. And it's only your religious thinking that allows you to handwave all that with a "we always find a way".

For all we know, in this universe it may be impossible to bypass or even bend those laws. Yet, you're betting the future of the species on old Star Trek fantasies.

As you said, the conditions and difficulty for modern space travel are in the extreme and pushing all of our sciences to their limits. And for what? just to get to... the moon. I don't want to scare you, but if that seems far to you, see how much bigger the distance to anything else in the solar system is, nevermind anything outside it.

I feel a bit embarrassed to have to say the obvious but:

When you sell your company, you don’t own it any more

http://pando.com/2014/03/26/a-reminder-to-founders-when-you-...

Apple Gives Security The Finger, by David Sirota

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/security-the-finger/652da9...

Apple Gives Security The Finger

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/security-the-finger/652da9...

I live in Tokyo right now. Everyone is very busy, yet it's obligatory to be polite at all times and with all people (at work). Don't know how it compares to NY though, never been there.