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Posted on 08/16/2009 12:22:46 AM PDT by Nachum
Is it a question of revenue or one of priority?
How much were we spending on providing 'services' for illegal aliens? How about all the programs we spent the money on, LBJ's 'great society', the war on povety (pull out! It's a quagmire!), all the myriad social programs used as an excuse to invade our daily lives and which have sewn the seeds of the Socialism we are seeing grow like kudzu in our government today?
I recall the shift, the crap about "Why spend money in space when we have problems right here on Earth?", yadda yadda yadda.
Here is my solution, and it does not involve marginal tax rates of 91%: Change emphasis. Real welfare reform, send the illegals home and secure the border, downsize invasive social programs, and get America off the teat. Look upthread (post 9) at the amount NASA spends versus HHS. Giving NASA one tenth of the HHS budget would put us on Mars in a decade, not just the moon, and taxes would not have to change.
The lesson learned by the colonization of the United states,is one part of history they will not repeat.
A colony is only a colony, while it is dependent. The moment it becomes self sufficient, the power base changes.
A independent off world society is uncontrollable and scares the living hell out of those who want to run this planet under their collective thumb.
It's not technology,blocking the moon and mars, its selfish power.
Within a few years, there were the HP RPN programmables, TI had a programmable one (algebraic notation) with magnetic strips to store programs and an optional printer, and the average $30 calculator (about 10 hours of work at minimum wage) would do trig functions and had memory.
Within a decade, the personal computer was making inroads, and now a cell phone has capabilities that were pretty much science fiction then.
While the demand for such cannot be solely credited to the space race, the weight/size constraints of the aerospace industry were a driving force in the economy which led to those developments and so many others we take for granted.
Yet, lunar operations could begin with small-scale production of ceramics and metals for structures and tools.
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Yeah. Why not send some of these little mobile-marsbots to the moon to mine and produce?
there....fixed it.
Oh we have the revenue alright - it just goes to entitlements and pork. If we still had the will, then the money is there. No need to raise taxes. Just look aat the chart.
“It is a question of direction and will, not ability.”
And that is the nub of the problem. No will, not since 72. Back then we were churning out engineers by the truck load, now it is lawyers. See the problem?
“Giving NASA one tenth of the HHS...”
Give NASA the same budget as HHS has now and give HHS NASA’s current budget, remove all PC restraints, restart the Orion program killed in the 60s and give us neat slogans equivilant to “Mars by 1965, Venus by 1975”.
Teach the public that a serious manned space program would not only gurantee full employment, a heavy industry rivaled by none, far better schools, but also raise the US standard of living and health care beyond any other country in the world bar none. Not to mention the greenweenies could have cheap solar cells to power their toy cars.
And, like the US did during the Apollo program, give Hope and Wonder as a free gift to all humanity. (Not the Hussein variety.)
Not only that but we’d have some place to go, if socialists ever took over the US and wanted to micromanage our lives -— opps.
+1000
Oh you saw one of the smaller ones - my first one filled a very large room: basketball court sized.
ping!!!!
And enough for them to hire people to shout down citizens at townhall meetings - ACORN: when only a nut will do...
However, billions for ACORN is not ambitious enough...
"Debugging" was done with a flashlight and something to put the bugs in (usually moths)...
I recall using paper tape and punch cards, myself...
I can’t agree with that.
To say the what has happened with computers (just to pick one)is just a refinement of technology is incorrect.
Memory storage alone is based on materials and technologies that were beyond science fiction forty years ago.
Modern computing speeds were considered largely impossible forty years ago. The technology for gigahertz computing isn’t a refinement of the old 8086 PC’s. It’s a completely different approach with architecture and design.
Some of the problem, as I see it, is that the new technologies are far more specialized and we generally do not learn about all the ins and outs of them unless we work in specialized fields.
Read up on James Clerk Maxwell sometime when you find the free time - Very interesting - field theory - 19th Century; and who BTW laid the foundations of cybernetics.
Really neat stuff. However all his 200 quaternions, save four, were thrown out as impossible abominations. And the four that were kept were totally altered (to vector theories) - by a self-educated guy named Heavyside. From those few altered theories comes all we know of the electromagnetic radiation and the things we developed from that knowwledge.
see:
Oliver Heaviside - The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age by Paul J Nahin and;
The Man Who Changed Everything - The Life of James Clerk Maxwell by Basil Mahonr
To me, it is not the speciallization/complexity - it is life altering inventions like electricity that characterize what I was talking about.
FYI: The first known computer was invented by the Greeks to navigate in 150 BC or so.
The invention happened then; all else is a refinement of the same idea - faster, better etc but still a computer.
I’m really not sure where a person can go with that.
It seems that by this type of argument, a Freightliner tractor truck is just a refinement of an Assyrian oxcart.
I suppose I just don’t see it quite that way. Things that follow similar forms but address radically different functions have never struck me as having that kind of relationship.
Perhaps I need to ponder this as a philosophical question for a while.
Indeed. But the internal combustion engine is new. Your analogy only really works if the Peterbuilt - I prefer that brand - was powered by the magnetic cats from another thread.
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