Posted on 04/06/2014 3:18:26 PM PDT by Usagi_yo
Title is the subject, link is to the results. Go to slashdot.org if you want to take the poll, it changes every day, but the results should hang around alot longer than the poll.
(Excerpt) Read more at slashdot.org ...
Send ours to the middle east kamikaze style.
Heading west on the Oregon Trail was usually a one-way trip as well.
Maybe we can get many of “our” politicians to “volunteer”???
Seems to me we have this in the world in muslim fanatical human bombs who volunteer to destroy themselves and everyone around them for a “heroic” cause. No, I would not approve of any sort of mission from a civilized country.
Send politicians.
We take the car keys away and send aging parents to old folks’ homes. What’s the difference, especially if they’re willing? It’s hardly euthanasia.
They could help build something for future generations once there.
Send Justin Bieber.
Absolutely.
No higher or better exercise of personal freedom. When we ask soldiers to take a hill, we don’t even give them a choice.
I volunteered.
Some spent the rest of their life on the trail.
Two out of three of the ‘Forty Niners” heading out to California were never heard from again.
The goal should be robots good enough to be given an exploration plan for a day and report back later. You pretty much have to do it that way, anyhow, since interactive remote control is not practical when a vehicle is light-minutes away.
I don’t get the point of sending anyone.
Mars/Moon are desolate outposts like Antarctica and Greenland are today.
If there is a financial case to prospect further there, then the prospectors will find a way. If there is a financial case to build a remote town/hotel there, then the developers will find a way.
In the meantime there’s plenty of prospecting and science to be done using drones by NASA.
Every mission has the possibility of being a one way mission.
Yup. There’s a big difference between sending someone to certain death and another to send people to try to live.
Wait! there's a fatwa against that. OK send the jehadis along with them to execute them when they get there.
Now that's Muslim outreach, where no Imams have gone before.
There are some one-way missions that are reasonable. For example, if at some point, Mars missions resulted in a large, self-sustaining underground habitat, sufficiently advanced to have a purpose of slowly terraforming Mars, so that astronauts were effectively colonists, I see nothing wrong with their volunteering to do so.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.