From: JAY DUGGER (duggerj1@charter.net)
Date: Sat Jan 18 2003 - 17:14:41 MST
On Sat, 18 Jan 2003 16:45:07 -0600
So much as I wish to believe this--and I came to
transhumanism through the L5 Society--I can only think of
four cynical things.
1) President Reagan challenged America to build a
permanent space station by 1990.
2) President Bush, Sr. announced the Space Exploration
Initiative (later renamed the Human Exploration
Initiative), which would have placed infrastructure from
LEO to Mars's surface. For those of you who follow
Zubrin's arguments, this is the idea he derided as
"Battlestar Galactica" in The Case For Mars.
3) Richard Hoagland, author of The Mounments of Mars, must
also feel great pleasure.
[snip]
>the collar suddenly. An opportunity to break nukes in
>space treaties in a
>big way? (Are they still active?) Something a probe
IIRC, the conventions only forbid placing nuclear weapons
in orbit, not power sources. Lord knows the Soviets put
reactors in orbit, and both they and the Americans put
RTGs aloft. I had a cousin working for GE on a liquid
sodium-cooled space-based reactor design in the early
1990s.
4) Having just read Dyson's Project Orion, my last cynical
thought revolves around the US government designing a new
generation of small, low-yield nuclear charges. Now that
they have them, they need a rationale for their mass
production. An Orion-class spacecraft sounds good, and the
idea of ~1500 _tons_ to Mars sounds better.
Saturn by 2012, anyone?
Jay Dugger, who indulges in cyncism because he just broke
$4000 worth of electronics at work.
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