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Old October 7th, 2004 #1
Jenab
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Default Jewish baiting and speech suppression.

The following posts are those I made in another forum, The Internet Book Database of Fiction.

http://www.ibdof.com/index.php

I went in there to share some technical information about how to calculate the orbits of other planets and transfer orbits to fly from one planet to another.

http://www.ibdof.com/viewtopic.php?t=1838
http://www.ibdof.com/viewtopic.php?t=1837

After posting those treatises, I became involved in a discussion of fossil fuel depletion and its probable effect on human colonization of other planets.

At one point, I put the blame on the unwise use of fossil fuels on the ideals of humanitarian egalitarianism. I said that all you get when you feed the hungry is more hungry people to feed later: it's like trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it. I also said that if more energy had been used to gain a permanent footing in space, while leaving the masses of mankind at the feudal level (i.e., no cars, no air conditioners, no TV), the fossil fuel might have lasted thousands of years instead of a hundred years, that when the end finally came it would be gentle, and that the humans who had established themselves away from Earth could continue to keep the technology spark alive with extraterrestrial sources of energy, such as solar energy or Titan's methane sea.

I was warned by a moderator not to be so Nietzschean because WW2 had been fought to prevent someone from asserting the superiority of his own race. I responded to that in a particular way, and the moderator took a "masked dislike" to me. Is he a Jew? I don't know. He acts like one.

Jerry Abbott

Last edited by Jenab; October 7th, 2004 at 09:35 AM.
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #2
Jenab
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Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 8:58 am

A big reason to colonize would be that all hell is about to break loose on Earth: stuff like worldwide famine, global resource wars, food riots, race wars, cannibalism, and in general a pretty bad time. On another planet, you wouldn't have to worry about any of that.

The problem is that it's too late. Humanity has spent too many ergs in air conditioners, too many barrels of oil growing food to feed the hungry (and they're still there and still hungry), and not nearly enough investment of terrestrial fossil fuels in gaining access to extraterrestrial energy supplies in anticipation of the depletion of same here on Earth.

Whether there is a nuclear war or not, humans are nearly finished as a technical species. It is, I repeat, too late to correct the failure to develop resources off-planet. That should have been done starting in 1940 or so, instead of doing anything else.

Out there near Saturn, about a billion miles away, is a moon called Titan. It's surface is covered with an ocean of primordial methane. Think we're ever going to get our hands on any of it? Nope!

How many asteroids do you suppose Mankind will ever mine for metal? Answer: none.

How many cities will ever exist on the moon? Answer: none.

We did have a chance at a "Star Trek" kind of future; we don't have that chance any longer. We wasted it.

Why did we waste it? Stupidity? Not exactly.

We succumbed to an error of moral values and ideology, often called "egalitarianism." If one man bakes himself a cake, we figured, then it isn't fair that there are other men who do not have cakes. Cakes must be given them! To be FAIR! The minions of fairness, frothing at the mouth, took over our public institutions for making collective decisions - governments, that is - and started making public policy conform to their distorted and exaggerated sentiments, and burdening more normal folks with the costs of subsidizing their programs.

The masses of humans should have remained at the feudal level of culture. The use of fossil fuels should have been reserved to those who used them to help along the powers of mankind to acquire all of the resources of the solar system, with the idea that then it would be possible to consider interstellar voyages to seed the rest of the galaxy with the life that originated on Earth. To our species fell the responsibility for ensuring that this mission did not fail...but fail we did. Nature's organizing principles did three billion years of labor here in vain. On some other planet, at some other time, nature will repeat her work, perhaps with a better result. But it won't be us.

So don't worry about whether you would colonize or not. You can't. Nobody can. Humans will never live on other planets.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #3
Jenab
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 11:15 am

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
I disagree with your 2nd, 3rd, and penultimate paragraphs ... but somewhat agree with the rest.

You make a lot of good points, but I think it's too soon to write us off just yet ... at the very least, draconian conservation combined with population controls and heavy efforts made to switch to renewal resources are imperative - and are not beyond our grasp.

Viable interplanetary and interstellar travel is not beyond our grasp either. I have some interesting links to share ... but only if your mind isn't already made up and resigned to humanity's ultimate doom. Mine isn't, and I hope yours isn't. Smile
Oh, sure. If the right people were in charge of things now, we might yet pull out of a permanent downward decline toward the stone age. But the right people are NOT in charge. The right people don't have the muscle to put themselves in authority. Mankind made a choice, and it went the wrong way. It will continue going the wrong way, until the power grids fail for the last time, until there's no more fuel for tractors, no more fertilizer for farm crops, and we're left with no electric power and only enough food to feed five percent of us. I don't see why your decision about whether to post your links depends on my attitude.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #4
Jenab
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Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2004 11:33 am

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
Well, I'm sorta getting the impression (hopefully false) that you're already absolutely convinced, beyond all possibility of doubt or need for discussion, of mankind's ultimate doom.

If that's the case, you've already ruled out any possibility for discussion before it can even get under way.

Am I wasting my time ? I hope not. I enjoy discussing such things - but not if the person I'm discussing it with has already made up their mind beyond all possible hope of change. Not much fun or enticement in that, from my end. Smile
I am not beyond being persuaded. I never am. But in order to persuade me, your evidence will have to be good enough to show me why what I think I see is wrong. It might turn out that I will not be convinced that you are right, after I've seen your evidence, but in that case I'll tell you why your evidence failed to convince me.

Jerry Abbott

Last edited by Jenab; October 7th, 2004 at 06:49 AM.
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #5
Jenab
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Brad provided me with this link.

http://www.charlespellegrino.com/project_valkyrie.htm

Then another poster, Pirate Queen ChoChiyo, jumped in to argue with me...

Jerry Abbott

Last edited by Jenab; October 7th, 2004 at 06:52 AM.
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #6
Jenab
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Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 10:14 am

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
No offense, Jenab, but my comment to this is "piffle." From my earliest youth, I was conditioned to believe that I would be a small chunk of radioactive carbon before I was old enough to vote. Or else that the four horsemen of the Apocolypse would ride me down and stomp me before sending me and my disobedient arse to hell. It scared the bejesus out of me until I final learned to say "whatever" to the doomsayers.
And once there was a boy who cried wolf. The first two times were hoaxes. The third time, the wolf (Peak Oil) really did show up. But the people of his village had been conditioned by false alarms (Y2K) to regard the boy as a hoaxer.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jenab
A big reason to colonize would be that all hell is about to break loose on Earth: stuff like worldwide famine, global resource wars, food riots, race wars, cannibalism, and in general a pretty bad time. On another planet, you wouldn't have to worry about any of that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
Hell has been loose on earth since earth came into existence. Any student of literature and/or history knows that mankind has been attempting to eradicate itself since the dawn of time, yet, here we still are. I suspect we shall continue to be here until the earth drops into the sun. And, on another planet, if there were no native beings to engage in war, cannibalism, racial violence, or other stupid behavior, we shall certainly bring the darker side of our human nature with us and inflict some if not all of it upon ourselves anyway.
Even if humans muddle through after the fossil fuels are gone, they will continue to evolve...not necessarily upward...and will not be recognizable as humans by the time the sun moves off the main sequence in five billion years.

By the way, Earth will cease to be habitable in two billion years...three billion years before the sun runs out of hydrogen to burn. The reason for that is that the sun's total luminosity is increasing at about the rate of 10 percent per billion years. Two billion years from now, the oceans will start to evaporate, which will lead to a runaway greenhouse effect - assuming that one hasn't started from a different cause before then. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, just not as efficient for that purpose as carbon dioxide is. So, about two billion years from now, the Earth will become like Venus and all life which remains stuck here will die.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jenab
The problem is that it's too late. Humanity has spent too many ergs in air conditioners, too many barrels of oil growing food to feed the hungry (and they're still there and still hungry), and not nearly enough investment of terrestrial fossil fuels in gaining access to extraterrestrial energy supplies in anticipation of the depletion of same here on Earth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
The restless, relentless inventiveness of the human mind will tinker and tinker until new forms of energy are created.
That's a basic fallacy of thinking. The human mind has never "created" energy. It has only devised new ways of tapping into natural energy resources... wood, coal, oil, uranium. The problem is that soon there won't be any new and higher resources to tap into. Inventiveness creates ideas, not matter nor energy: for something to be done, both the ideas and the material prerequisites are necessary, and neither can substitute for the other.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
Who could have imagined that words could be sent through wires to people on the other side of the world? Who would have imagined that people could chug along the bottom of the sea and not drown? Walk in space? Preserve vegetables in ziplock bags in a freezing environment during the sweltering heat of summer? Mankind is a clever bunch of monkeys. We will kill and hurt each other, but we will also quit doing it occasionally and get on to something more productive, like creating solar generators or finding the cure to AIDS.
All of those things depend on a naturally occurring energy resource, and the more people who participate in the benefits of technology, the faster these energy resources are consumed. Until our times, there was always a higher and more copious energy resource to be exploited. Soon, there won't be.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
My point is: It is only too late if we are all dead. And some of us are still alive and kicking.
Too late - for what? Fossil fuel depletion will kill about nine billion people in one way or another. Of course, you don't have to be one of them. The situation will be a bit like two people running from a hungry bear. You don't have to outrun the bear, only the other person. If you outlive those who are to die, if you are alive when the world's population is again in balance with the food supply, then you will have escaped from the bear.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jenab
Whether there is a nuclear war or not, humans are nearly finished as a technical species. It is, I repeat, too late to correct the failure to develop resources off-planet. That should have been done starting in 1940 or so, instead of doing anything else.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
Sorry, I just don't believe it. See above. My gifts do not lie in the technological areas; I'm more into philosophy and literature and humanitarianism. But I know enough people whose gifts do lie in the tenchnological arena that I am convinced that not only is off-planet development of resources possible, it is damn near unavoidable.
I'd agree that it's damn-near necessary to keeping the technological spark alive. Unfortunately, it will also be impossible. A starving man finds eating necessary, but he won't be eating if he never finds food. He can "invent" with his mind however he likes, but it won't cause food to appear unless it exists in the natural world outside his mind. And likewise for industrial civilization: it will die. Our mental gymnastics won't prevent it from dying.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
"If it can be conceived, it can be achieved." And there is a lot of conception going on in the minds of a lot of truly brilliant people in this world. Will it be in my lifetime? God, I hope so. I'd love to see it, even though I'm too dang old to participate much more than as a spectator--but it will happen. I believe that with as much intensity as I believe that the earth is round, the tide is unstoppable, and my brother is a doofus.
I'd like to see such a thing happen, too. But about 2010, you, too, will see why it won't happen, ever. We "fed the hungry" knowing that we could never cure hunger, and by doing so we sacrificed our chance to bring the seed of Earth's life to other worlds. The hopes of all of our world's life - of every species past, modern and future - rode on our species, and we failed them all, we betrayed them all, with our humanistic egalitarianism.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jenab
We did have a chance at a "Star Trek" kind of future; we don't have that chance any longer. We wasted it. Why did we waste it? Stupidity? Not exactly. We succumbed to an error of moral values and ideology, often called "egalitarianism." If one man bakes himself a cake, we figured, then it isn't fair that there are other men who do not have cakes. Cakes must be given them! To be FAIR! The minions of fairness, frothing at the mouth, took over our public institutions for making collective decisions - governments, that is - and started making public policy conform to their distorted and exaggerated sentiments, and burdening more normal folks with the costs of subsidizing their programs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
So, is your position here that the poor should be left to starve so resources can be better directed to the technological development of the priviledged classes? I'm not sure what you're saying.
That is almost correct. The least of mankind should have been left to nature's usual means of handling the least of any species: an early death by starvation or by predator. If we undertook to carry them along for reasons of charitable sentiment, we should at least have ensured that they bred no more of their weak stock.

For someone to gain a skill, two things are needed: the opportunity to learn, and the physical/mental potential to do the learning. There is such a thing as opportunities badly targeted, or offered to those who have not a required minimum level of potential. Such poorly targeted opportunities cost as much, if not more, than those offered to people with more aptitude, and the resources spent on trying to teach, say, a monkey to read are utterly wasted. Those resources might as well have been destroyed by fire for all the good they did anybody. Not only that, you may have given the monkey cause for resentment or anxiety or feelings of inadequacy that could have been spared him had we simply left the monkey chattering happily in the jungle.

[continued...]
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #7
Jenab
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
I don't see any connection between making sure all people are fed and clothed and the development of a society which can support a "Federation of Planets" way of life. In fact, I think the ensuring of all people's basic needs being met is unavoidably essential to produce the philosophical mindset that would promote the "Star Trek Federation of Planets" ideals. Otherwise, we would instead have the Dark Empire of Star Wars with a very minimal number of powerful overlords hording the power for themselves and using everyone else as slaves or cannon fodder.
Okay, here's the explanation. We have never had infinite resources. We did have large resources, but we have largely used them up, and we are approaching the end of terrestrial deposits of energy resources. With luck, we can continue on as we are for 20 more years...but that's it, and I doubt that we will carry on for even that much longer.

Since our good times have lasted for about four generations, people in general have come to believe that this is a normal situation. But it isn't. Fossil fuels are a one-time resource. When they're gone, the good times will go with them. The human population has numbers that strain even our high-tech mechanized agriculture to provide food for them all. When there is no more fuel for tractors and harvesters, when there are no more nitrate fertilizers, food production on Earth will drop to 10% of what it is now, as hand-tool farming tries and fails to cope with demand.

When you feed the incapable hungry, you only get larger numbers of incapable hungry people to feed a generation later. Trying to end hunger by feeding the hungry is like trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it. It doesn't work: the fire just gets bigger.

Wisdom should have shown us this, but sentiment prevailed, instead. The energy needed for gaining a permanent toe-hold in space, with sustained technology and access to extraterrestrial energy resources, was wasted on feeding the hungry and on providing unnecessary luxuries to spoiled rich people. The balance of political power shifted in favor of this status quo, and never in all the 80 years of heavy fossil fuel exploitation has it strayed from these species-lethal sentiments.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
(NOTE: I'm not trying to provoke any fights. I'm just saying that there are different philosophical ways of looking at this issue.)
I'm not trying to start a fight, either. But although there may be different philosophies, the mathematics of the situation we are in has only one answer. Mankind is nearly finished as a technical species.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jenab
The masses of humans should have remained at the feudal level of culture. The use of fossil fuels should have been reserved to those who used them to help along the powers of mankind to acquire all of the resources of the solar system, with the idea that then it would be possible to consider interstellar voyages to seed the rest of the galaxy with the life that originated on Earth. To our species fell the responsibility for ensuring that this mission did not fail...but fail we did. Nature's organizing principles did three billion years of labor here in vain. On some other planet, at some other time, nature will repeat her work, perhaps with a better result. But it won't be us.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
The fallacy of this assertion is that noblisse oblige, while a lovely concept so often fails in practice. The illuminati, rather than working for the glory of all mankind, so often tumbles into the abyss of greed and self-agrandizement. Instead of seeding the galaxy with life originating from earth, I have the feeling that the priviledged class would either stay on earth growing fat while the peasant class toiled through their short, miserable lives without being educated, properly fed, or given the opportunity to develop the talents and brilliance that most probably would exist among them.
I definitely agree with you that the "Illuminati" (an actual organized group, but not the one from which rises the fundamental problem) contains the sort of people who would rather rule in a dungpile than serve in someone else's palace. Don't confuse what I mean: I don't mean that the highest among humans in a biological-spiritual sense are the currently highest in the economic sense. The human "rats" have indeed taken over the grain silo and are selling the broken bits that they don't want to the rest of us.

There are, among humans, those whose eye prefers the horizon to the ground under their feet, who would rather explore than exploit, who are able to look above the present struggle to see the glories that might come to Earth one day, if only we do our part correctly. Those are the "highest" in the spiritual sense: the Nietzsches who desire the coming of a better kind of man, who desire that the least of men be replaced by the equals of our present best and that our present best should be replaced by those who are even better.

These are the people who serve the life force, nature's organizing principles as manifested in living things, by striving to better the quality of life - not the standard of living, but the intrinsic biological quality of the living creature.

On the other hand, there are those who care mostly for pleasures, conveniences, and status. Their ambition is to get these things. Being strongly motivated, they often succeed.

Civilizations come into being when hardy and industrious people are able to build them up from the wilderness. They decline and die after the people have become soft from the comfort and ease that civilizations give them. We will go into the apocalyptic post-oil era with two disadvantages: we are too numerous to do without fossil fuel powered agriculture and we are mostly too soft and weak to endure the rigors of a pioneer life.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
The very bad thing about the feudal system is that it is a kind of caste system. Many brilliant minds would be wasted herding pigs when they could have found the cure for AIDS or developed an alternative energy source using blades of grass and sunlight. Many of the brightest people I know are from the serf class originally. And many of the laziest, most self-absorbed, and un-ecologically minded folks I know are from the "Have's" and "Have-more's" class. The feudal system, in my humble opinion: Sucks.
When I said that the masses of mankind should have remained at the feudal system, I meant that the preponderance of lesser people - the inferior and the mediocrities - should have been peasants without access to fossil fuel powered machines. And I meant that the "nobles" of the social structure would be the biological-spiritual highest of people, not the greedy money-grubbers that occupy the top of the hierarchy today.

Most of the qualities that make people either better or worse are heritable: carried in our genes and passed to children thereby. In the shuffle, some children born to mediocre parents turn out to be smarter than either of them. And occasionally a mental dud will be born to above-average parents. But these are exceptions. Neither life, nor anything else, is characterized by the exceptions. As a rule, like begets like. Usually, you'll find that smart children are born to smart parents, strong children to strong parents, dextrous children to dextrous parents, talented children to talented parents, and so on.

Public policy would do well to create a caste system - not just any caste system but, rather, the right one - and target opportunity first and foremost to the highest caste. Whatever they can't use may be permitted to trickle down to the lower castes, so long as it doesn't spoil them with inflated expectations for the future.

(I deleted a few comments of small importance where in Chochiyo compared me with people who criticized Galileo and Edison, who turned out to be right in the end. I replied that she had the comparison backwards.)

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #8
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I don't think it's too late to colonize other worlds, Mr. Jenab. Certainly it's a possibility that we're all going to die in a nigger hell, but maybe not. I'm a bit more optimistic, you see, in that I never discount the possibility of a major scientific/technological breakthrough, something coming at us from completely out in left field. For instance, the recent space flights performed by a small private company show there is hope yet for whites to establish themselves offworld - the best choice at this point being Mars. And America still has the financial power and the technological know-how to easily colonize the moon, were it not for the dead weight of 35 million groids and 35 million beaners around our collective neck. If we can just take back our country, and rid ourselves of these dark-skinned leeches, the stars can yet be ours. In fact, I'm so confident, I've already designed my starship to make the voyage...









 
Old October 7th, 2004 #9
Jenab
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Another poster, Echus Cthulhu Mythos, joined the discussion. We discussed the possibility of nuclear energy replacing fossil fuels and saving civilization.
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #10
Jenab
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Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 6:17 pm

Quote:
Originally Posted by Echus Cthulhu Mythos
Yo Jenab. Do you seriously, in all honestly believe that Humanity is doomed, through and through, completely and utterly?
Not exactly. Something like 95% of the people living in 2050 will die from hunger, disease, war, or some combination of those. About that year, the world's human population will reach a maximum of 8 to 11 billion. The human population of the world in 2100 will be under one billion, and perhaps less than a half billion.

That doesn't mean that humanity is doomed. It does mean that humanity is heading for sharply reduced circumstances. And it means one thing more.

If the mission of our world was to grow life and then pass its seed on to other fertile worlds, then that mission has failed. Forever.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Echus Cthulhu Mythos
Because if you do indeed convince us, then what you say will occur.
The end of industrial civilization will occur whether I convince you or not, since the cause is the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels, which does not depend on anybody's opinions.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Echus Cthulhu Mythos
Why don't you spend your energies doing something positive like say promoting the neccessity of nuclear energies because fossil fuels suck, or join the Mars Society and help them to put people on the Red Planet. Because I am sure that deep down, you don't really want too embrace our doom as a technical species.
Right. I don't want humans to lose technology. I don't promote this as a crusade; I merely assert it as a prediction.

Nuclear energy would have postponed the energy peak and kept civilization going a while, but not for long. The world only has so much high grade uranium ores, and we'd run out of them. The combined military stockpiles of U235 and Pl239 would support global civilization for only about 16 years.

If the social program I mentioned - feudalism for the masses, technology reserved for those inclined to pursue the development of independent human settlements away from Earth, with perhaps an economy based on interplanetary commerce (as, I think, it'd have had to be, since on no single world in our solar system other than Earth do all the material necessities for life exist) - then civilization could have held out on Earth for far longer. And when the end came, thousands of years from now, it would come gently. And the spark of technology would continue thereafter, held by those people who left Earth, who could continue the effort of carrying both technology and Earth's life to the stars.

Unfortunately, there came a parade of ideologies: Marxism, capitalism, democratic egalitarianism... that were all hell-bent, in one way or another, on expanding the benefits of technology to the masses. Why didn't someone see where they were all heading? Perhaps someone did, but didn't care. An important point to remember is that the human lifespan is brief compared with the march of events in history. Capitalism, for example, is like a cancer: it grows like mad, kills a world, and dies. But while it can grow, a lot of speculators can get rich, and so they do. Perhaps the world will die as the end result of speculation, but it won't happen in the lifetimes of most of the speculators, so the game goes on.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Echus Cthulhu Mythos
I believe you have written us off too early. There have been vast numbers of people who have proclaimed environmental destruction by X-year in recent times. What makes you correct as opposed to them?
I suppose that I could say, "I'm smarter than they are," but you probably wouldn't believe me. In fact, though, fossil fuel depletion predictions have been around for a long time. They began being circulated episodically in the 1960's or thereabout.

One fellow, M. King Hubbert, correctly predicted that the per capita peak in world oil production would come in 1979 - it has declined ever since. Now the absolute peak, the year in which is delivered to market the greatest number of barrels of oil equivalent - is upon us. From here on, supply will shrink in relation to demand.

The problem with respect to public awareness of the accuracy of the warnings seems to be that the public has a short attention span. The five-day weather forecast, they can deal with. A prediction of a disaster 60 years away, no. Forty years away, no. Twenty years away, still no. Next year - certainly! But when the Crash is only a year away, they will indignantly ask why they were not informed sooner!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Echus Cthulhu Mythos
The will to survive is a powerful force. Just look at ancient Sparta who took on the might of King Xerxes' horde of 250,000 troops with a mere 300.
Well, if the 250,000 must come through a narrow pass that only a few can get into at a time, it might not be so unreasonable to expect the 300 to win. That's the sort of leverage good tactics is suppose to get for your army. But the will to survive saves few who are in so hopeless a position as ours. There are no clever tactical moves that will violate the fundamental laws of nature, in particular the conservation of energy.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #11
Jenab
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Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 6:54 pm

Quote:
Originally Posted by Echus Cthulhu Mythos
Um, whoa, your good at debating. :mrgreen:

I can't really rebutt anything you say, except for the stuff about nuclear energy. Yeah, there is about 20-odd years of uranium left, but the use of thorium and breeder reactor technology would be able to sustain fuel supplies for a time period estimated between 100,000 up to 1 million years.

Personally, I agree that fossil fuels suck arse and we have become too dependant on them and have created freaking oil empires that would rather kill the world than give up their profits. But I also believe when the sh!t hits the fan like it is going to, society will bite the bullet and change to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy can - and will - be the energy source which powers us in the future. That is our only option aside from our downfall as a technical species which you have described.
With breeder reactors turning U238 to fissile plutonium, we might be good for 200-300 years. In principle, that only delays the crunch, but it would permit us to do what our ancestors did: ignore the problem and let our descendants feel the pain.

But there's another bottleneck with nuclear power, and that's the rate at which the reactors that now exist and the reactors that can conceivably be built before the hard times hit us, can produce power. It's too late to begin building fast liquid metal breeder reactors now. We couldn't build enough of them in time.

The problems with fission energy never were satisfactorally solved. Nuclear power plants still have, despite assurances from the industry, a poor risk profile when you consider how much territory one Chernobyl can irradiate. Then there's the problem of disposing of radioactive waste.

And there's one other thing. Our civilization uses many petroleum by-products other than energy. There's plastics and fertilizer, to name an important two. You can't make these things from uranium.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #12
Jenab
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Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2004 7:40 pm

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jenab
With breeder reactors turning U238 to fissile plutonium, we might be good for 200-300 years. In principle, that only delays the crunch, but it would permit us to do what our ancestors did: ignore the problem and let our descendants feel the pain.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Echus Cthulhu Mythos
So because we made the wrong decision 50 or so years ago, even given an extra 200 - 300 years, we are still doomed?
The basic problem is using energy resources at a rate faster than energy resources are renewed. Any way of living that does that is heading for trouble sooner or later. It's a "when," not an "if."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jenab
The problems with fission energy never were satisfactorally solved. Nuclear power plants still have, despite assurances from the industry, a poor risk profile when you consider how much territory one Chernobyl can irradiate. Then there's the problem of disposing of radioactive waste.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Echus Cthulhu Mythos
Chernobyl was one-off. It was a poorly designed reactor... That would be impossible to recreate now as all reactors have containment domes and they are designed so that the reactors have safety features within the physics of the reaction which cannot be turned off....
If the correct energy policy been followed, we could have ironed out all the bugs on the moon where a Chernobyl would have hurt few or none, and meanwhile dumping the waste in a large crater or trench reserved for such. Given time, I think that nuclear fission could become a safe source of energy; however, it is time that we no longer have.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jenab
Then there's the problem of disposing of radioactive waste
I read the first of your links. It may be that a satisfactory solution to the waste disposal problem has been found. It's unfortunate that it wasn't found sooner.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #13
Jenab
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Having read the webpage he linked me to, I returned to ask Brad_H some questions in regard to the Valkyrie rocket.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:15 am

Brad, I read the thread on Valkyrie starships, and I've some comments.

First, how do you generate the necessary quantities of anti-hydrogen?

Second, how do you come up with the muons for the reaction mass? Is it a byproduct of the matter/antimatter reaction?

Muons are charged, so you can probably direct them with a magnetic field, but...

Third, how is directing a stream of muons against a sail to propel a starship different from shooting cannons astern from the bow of a ship and having somebody in the stern catch the cannon balls? It seems that the reaction forward would be canceled by the reaction backward, in both cases.

Come to think of it, the reason hydrogen is used AS reaction mass in nuclear powered rockets is that its lightness give it an advantage in being accelerated from a powerplant at operating temperature: more kinetic energy per ounce of reaction mass results from the jet. But if we're talking about a matter-antimatter production of energy for the powerplant, it does not seem to be advantageous to choose hydrogen and antihydrogen. Something with a higher melting temperature would reduce the cryogenic demand (and probably the bulk, too). All you'd have to do is keep it ionized so you could isolate it from matter until it is used.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #14
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Rather than answer my questions about the Valkyrie rocket, Brad_H posted to contend that the more limited energy resources available after fossil fuel depletion would suffice to keep civilization going and enable spaceflight.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 5:19 pm

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
However, I still disagree with your pronouncement of ultimate doom. ... Even without fossil fuels, we can still generate enough power for us to retain some industrial & city like existences ... albeit at a greatly reduced level.
That's correct. Whoever is alive after all the dying is history may use the remaining sources of electric power - hydroelectric, for example - to run a few cities. And, if some of that power is diverted, hydrogen fuel cells can be prepared for market. And rockets can be made and launched...or can they?

A rocket, or even a fuel cell, is more than the fuel in it. You need steel, and getting steel from your reduced energy supply will involve taking energy from consumers who will pay for it.

Remember, hydrogen fuel cells are net energy losers. It costs two or three times as much energy to prepare the fuel for a cell than you can extract by burning that fuel. And that doesn't count the cost of making the cell housing, the pipes and the fittings, etc. Fossil fuels have been so abundant that we've gotten into the bad habit of sloppy accounting.

Now, as for spaceships and trips to Saturn. Even while fossil fuels were abundant, there was much political noise about "tossing money away into space when there are people hungry here on Earth." Do you suppose that the per capita decibel level will drop when the energy budget is much tighter? I doubt that it will. Politics will be even more heavily against space exploration then than it ever was before.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
There are massive untapped sources of such power all across the world ... we just havent had to rely on them because fossil fuels, until now, have been plentiful and cheap. Such things will need to be reassessed when that changes.
The problem with each of those "massive untapped sources" is the lack of a means of tapping them. More than enough sunlight falls on Earth to replace all use of fossil fuels. There's just the little difficulty that a solar energy collector with a surface area equal to Earth's cross section does not exist and cannot be built. And the same difficulty troubles every alternative you have proposed.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
The space program would not be forever deceased, even in your grim picture.
I hope that you are right. But I don't believe that you are.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #15
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Interwoven with the above posts was a discussion of Jewish "Holocaust" claims in WW2. That discussion arose because Brad_H made assertions that were either based on doubtful implicit assumptions or contrary to fact. These posts were removed from the thread and put into a separate thread in a special "Soapbox" area, which is reserved for off-topic discussions, with "looser" rules. Supposedly.
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #16
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Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 10:45 am

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
The space program would not be forever deceased, even in your grim picture. Smile
I'll come back to this later.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
p.s. Be careful about extoling the virtues of neitzcheism (sp?) & eugenics - although there is some truth in what you say on that topic, remember that humanity has already fought a world war bcause someone tried to stake out the turf of genetic superiority and practice natural selection & extermination to further it. Such paths are mined with great ethical peril.
And who is saying that this "somebody" (Hitler) did what his enemies say he did, that he believed what his enemies say he believed, or that he was wrong about judging his group superior in the ways that mattered to him?

Maybe his enemies are lying. The victors write the history books, but what they say isn't necessarily the truth.

National Socialism was crushed by a war in which, except for minor assistance from Italy, it stood alone against most of the industralized world. Considering what they had to work with, the Germans put up an amazing fight - which should suggest, despite their eventual loss, that they were top-notch stuff.

Nobody has ever shown that the economics and values espoused by National Socialism were unwise. The war only proved that there were very entrenched establishments that strongly disapproved of National Socialism's economics and values.

But think about these things:

1. Nature improves species by differentiation and competition. Not by the happy meltingpot method preferred by egalitarians.

2. Germany's economy did soar, before the war, while the industrialized countries on the Gold Standard langished in the Great Depression. The countries with the central banks in them needed war to overcome the Depression. Germany did not need war for that purpose.

3. Germany went to war because of a prior hostile action, namely an international boycott, that prevented it from selling its industrial surplus in exchange for foodstuffs to make up its agricultural deficit. The point to lebensraum was to acquire farmland to feed Germans. And Germany was reluctant to take this step: so reluctant that it endured six years of the boycott before invading Poland.

Hitler's purpose was to unify and revitalize the German people. He wasn't trying to conquer the world. His plans were such that war, when it came, was most inconvenient for him; however, it was considered the lesser evil because the apparent alternative was to watch the German nation slowly starve.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #17
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
I'm almost afraid to ask this question, because I've been enjoying the high level of the discussions we've all been sharing thus far, and I'd hate to see things fall apart after getting off to such an interesting start. HOWEVER, since I'm a child of WWII parents and WWI grandparents (both sides), I'm obliged to proceed ...

Please clarify 2 points for me:

1) Are you in the same philosophical camp of those post-modern Hitler apologists who deny the existence of the Holocaust ?
I notice the slant of the question, and I will attempt to compensate for it in my answer.

I'm not certain why a question about Germany's motive in going to war should have provoked an examination of my opinions about the (alleged) Holocaust. There is some sort of knee-jerk reaction, psychological conditioning, that causes every question of WW2 history to lead rather directly to a probing of the questioner's belief in the Holocaust. Like Obi Wan said, "Search your feelings," and see whether you can find the source of that conditioning.

I am among those who are aware that there were no Jews mass executed in Nazi Gas Chambers. This is a popular hoax, which for years has received official recognition and heavy subsidies from governments, and which has a massive public relations drive for the maintenance of belief. What the Holocaust is not, however, is truth. It is fiction, begun as Allied war agit-propaganda and continued as a cash cow by the Zionists.

The cited death toll in the alleged Holocaust has steadily shrunk in the details - specifics of when, where, how and who. For example, Auschwitz was once said to have been where about four million Jews were gassed. A few objections by knowledgeable scholars caused the Zionists to grudgingly revise that total downwardly by almost three million. Yet the total of casualties claimed - that mythical Six Million - never wavered.

One of the best refutations of the theory that Auschwitz was a "death camp" was made by a Jew named David Cole. Cole's excellent videotaped documentary was made at Auschwitz as he was conducted among the alleged "gas chamber" buildings on the grounds there. It records a number of discrepancies and improbabilities that the staff there paper over because it is against the law to express doubt about the Holocaust throughout much of Europe. David Cole recanted after receiving vicious threats, probably alluding to his assassination, by the Jewish Defense League. As it was with Galileo, his earlier work is sound; his recantation is false.

Examinations of the Auschwitz camp in the 1990s by a forensics team from Canada and the United States took samples of brick from the alleged gas chambers and had them analyzed at Alpha Analytic Labs in Ashland, Massechusetts. No significant contamination by cyanide compounds was found. Another examination of the stolen samples was made in Krakow, where extremely tiny amounts of cyanide compounds were found, however only at levels commensurate with those also found in buildings that nobody believes was ever used as a gas chamber, such as the guards' barracks.

The "Holocaust" is a hoax, all right. But it is a gigantic hoax, with bogus textbooks written about it, and with huge "memorials" built to commemorate it, and with the overt collaboration of public figures, and with endless propaganda in the media all swearing to its factuality.

There are known frauds among the photographical evidence offered by the Zionists as "proof" of their claims: altered photographs, photographs with misleading captions, drawings misrepresented as photographs. Some of the photographs allegedly showing dead Jews at a "death camp" actually show dead Germans after the firebombing of Dresden. Some of the photographs do show dead Jews, but they died of typhus primarily and of malnutrition secondarily. Note that the corpses shown are usually emaciated - gassing doesn't take the pounds off like that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
2) Is the post fossil-fuel apocalypse you're portraying nothing more than a backhanded way of re-peating Hitler's dreams of having a "master race" take over and rule the world ? In other words, is this apocalypse something you're looking forward to with wishful genetic-selection fervor, or is it something you're interested in doing your best to help humanity avert ?
No, I don't write about the post-industrial age in order to fantasize about the coming of a higher breed of men. It would be very good if such were to occur, but my writing on the "apocalypse" is meant to alert people and motivate them to prepare for it. There is no way to avert the end of industrial civilization. There is no way to save the great preponderance of mankind. And, since most must die, then who should live becomes a matter of some relevance.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad_H
This is touchy material - I hope that everyone is able to stay cool and level headed.
There's no more reason for anyone to be a hothead about Holocaust questions than about the historical deeds of Pol Pot and Josef Stalin. I said "no more reason." But more hotheads do, indeed, usually appear when the specific question on the table are the Jewish claims about Jewish deaths in World War 2. The reason for the greater emotionalism in this particular case is, again, conditioning. Examine yourself; find the source of the conditioning. Try to identify it and then exclude it as a motivator for your thoughts and actions.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #18
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Brad_H then posted a stentorious "MODERATION ALERT" in which he said he was obliged to re-locate the thread to The Soapbox. His reason was that Dr. Pellegrino, whose thread it had been in, would be offended if he saw the Holohoax being questioned there. Why would he be offended? Brad_H said that it just naturally followed from Dr. Pellegrino's dad having been a WW2 vet.
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #19
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ChoChiyo weighed in again to indicate how offended she was.

Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 5:24 pm

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
Hmm. I wonder whose charred bodies my great uncle Charlie photographed for the army then? Those hundreds and hundreds of charred bodies.

I'm done with this conversation.
Yes, there were "charred bodies," and some of the were undoubtedly Jewish.

The Nazis cremated the bodies of typhus victims in an effort to control the disease. That's also why the Nazis used Zyklon B: to kill the rats and lice that carried typhus.

Near the end of the war, the Allies bombed the supply lines so that the Germans could no longer bring medicine or food to the camps. That is why some of the prisoners starved, and it is why typhus spiraled out of control. The crematoria were swamped by the death toll, and it is possible that the SS tried to cremate a few corpses out-of-doors.

Anyway, your Uncle Charlie didn't find any gas chambers, no matter what he thinks he saw.

Jerry Abbott
 
Old October 7th, 2004 #20
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Posted: Mon Oct 04, 2004 6:41 pm

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
Well, my great uncle Charlie Smith (who just passed away last summer at the age of 98, lucid and brilliant until his last second of life) was a surveyor for the army in WWII, and he himself saw piles of charred bodies left behind by the Nazi's.
Undoubtedly, he did. After the Allied bombings late in the war, it was hard for the Germans to resupply their labor camps. Shortages of medicine caused an epidemic of typhus, and many of the prisoners (as well as some of the guards) died as the result. To control the disease, the Nazis were cremating bodies, but the epidemic killed people faster than the krema could handle them. So as a desperation measure, some of the SS tried to burn bodies out-of-doors, often without success. Bodies, being mostly water, burn even less readily than green firewood.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
He saw evidence first hand of the torture and slaughter of hundreds if not thousands of people innocent of any "crime" except the crime of being Jewish or gypsy or black or a "sympathizer."
There's quite a bit of excessive claim here. First, your Uncle Charlie didn't see any torture or slaughter. He saw corpses. He may have been told lies about what had killed them. It is helpful for a government to make its soldiers hate the enemy, and our government isn't above using falsehood to achieve that end. The Nazi Homicidal Gas Chambers are exactly where Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction are. Nowhere.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
If anything, Hitler's enemies are guilty of UNDERemphasizing that fact that Hitler was a sick, twisted, evil little man, even if he did build good bridges and good railroads.
Nope. Hitler was a man who devoutly wanted to restore Germany to the German people and to restore the German people to greatness, which they fell from after WW1, and which they were prevented from regaining by the Treaty of Versaillais. Hitler saw that Jews owned the media and that they were using those media to popularize anti-German culture. Hitler took those media away and made their presentations conform to the standard of German culture again. Hitler refused loans from Jewish bankers in order that Germany would remain free of obligations of the sort that had ensnared the governments of England and America. Hitler was very wary of communism, both the Soviet Union and the "Red" agitators who were fomenting revolution throughout much of Europe. He knew that many, perhaps most, of those agitators were Jews.

Hitler wasn't a "twisted, evil little man." Any belief in that implausible charicature indicates a lapse of rational thought.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
There is film of hideous experiments on HUMAN BEINGS from the Nazi's own data collections. I have seen some of it on the History Channel, and it is sickening. There are stacks of data on medical experiments performed without anesthesia on children. Children. If that's the master race, then I say, give the world to the monkeys.
The History Channel is owned by A&E Television Networks. A&E is a joint venture of Hearst Corporation, ABC, and NBC. ABC and NBC have always been controlled by Jews. The Jew with the ultimate control over ABC at first was Leonard Goldenson, but since 1995 has been Michael Eisner, the Chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company. The Jew who began in charge of NBC was David Sarnoff, then it was his son Robert.

The essential Jewishness of Jewish television has never changed, though the specific Jews involved have moved around a bit. NBC is a good example of that moving around: its executives recently reshuffled among the key positions. Andrew Lack, who had been chief of the network's news division, ascended to become its president and COO. Neal Shapiro, who had been producing Dateline NBC, moved into Lack's old job. Jeff Zucker, who had been producing the Today show, was promoted to NBC entertainment president (a job that apparently was created for him), and Jonathan Wald moved into Zucker's old spot after shoving aside a lonely gentile named Michael Bass, who had been filling in for Zucker. Jews, Jews, Jews... and it's that way in every TV network. And it was that way in Germany, too, right before Hitler slapped their mischievious hands and took their toys away from them.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
Once again, it depends upon the quality of those operating the system. Perhaps a pure form of socialism would be a great thing. But there is too much greed and lust for power in this sad world to allow such a pure form to exist. Cancer cells, by definition, are quite vigorous and powerful and can quickly overwhelm the "inferior" noncancerous cells. Do you want cancer cells taking over your body because they are vigorous and hardy?
Certainly not. The quality of a cell, or a person, isn't a function of his energy level alone: his aims matter also. However, if the aims are good, the energy level can be a consideration.

Oddly, among the greatest of the anti-Marxists was a Jewess named Ayn Rand (a.k.a. Alice Rosenbaum). She explained why Marxism always fails from a combination of tragedy-in-the-commons (at the grassroots level of society) and economic treason in which The State, having stolen property from each in the name of all, becomes nothing more than a mean, mean manager of everybody's lives.

But whereas Rand did very well teaching us why Marxist socialism does not work, she ignored the biological factor and tried to impute Marxism's weaknesses to forms of socialism that are relatively untroubled by them. National Socialism is one such form.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirate Queen ChoChiyo
Pure bred animals are often, eventually, bred into unhealthiness and unsturdiness by excessive inbreeding. Note the rampant hip displacia in large pure bred dogs and the nasal/breathing problems common amongst bull dogs and other breeds bred for the "pug" nose. There has also been some evidence of psychological instability in some dogs bred for "superiority."
Ah, your mistake. Those dogs were bred for show, not for superiority. Inbreeding does cause bad recessives to be reinforced at a frequency much higher than is the rate with cross-breeding. But the whole point to eugenics is to eliminate poor genes, and this is done by combining inbreeding with culling. Whenever a defective child is born, if the defect is serious, the child is barred from reproduction. If those dogs you mentioned had been culled for physical defects, the rampant hip displacia would have been eliminated long ago.

[continued...]
 
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