SultanOfSwing

Capitalism, in particular the American and British flavour, results in a great many deaths through conflict and denied access to resources. Marxism-Leninism didn't work but it's not like we in the West are the goodies either.

I could argue, if I felt like it, that the US itself is a planned economy just like the USSR. It's just planned around perpetual war and to be honest I'm pretty sick of it, so I'll never claim to be objective when criticizing liberal capitalism, which despite many of the best intentions, is not even remotely leftist, and is at best centre right. You don't get to be woke, color blind, and down with the gays when you turn a blind eye to the suffering caused by American (and British and French) imperialism in the Middle East to name but one thing. Not you as in you yourself, of course, you know what I mean.

For your last part, communism will even if applied in a pure form, likely never result in a utopia. But socialism as a vehicle can strive to get as close to a utopia as humanly possible.

I haven't, but I will look it up, thanks.

chawkins99

I admire your enthusiasm for the ideal, but it will never happen. Even the communist countries are rife with corruption. The haves and have-nots will always exist. At least in this country, anyone can succeed if they really want to.

If Bezos were to liquidate his assets today, he could give everyone on the planet $25 each.

Can't argue with this...

SultanOfSwing

That's because human nature restricts us but it's not wrong to strive for something better either.

Anyone can succeed to a degree, but the odds are heavily stacked in favor of those who already have a degree of wealth in the family to start with. These people are born on 3rd base and think they hit a triple.

I don't believe any success that didn't come from your own labor is anything to admire, or emulate.

Of course it was hyperbole, and not just referring to him alone but if you consider a tax on ongoing income, there are real differences that could be made.

But there is no will too, because even liberals need an 'other' to look down on and an 'us' to pretend to be part of.

So I rant and scream into the void as much for my own therapy than anything else.


Yeppers.

ddsrph

I would never support any system that does not have a strong incentive for work. A drastic tax overhaul with much higher rates for the super wealthy with a negative rate for the poor/lower middle class would be a big improvement. Something like the earned income tax credit expanded. A able bodied person had better have a dam good excuse for living off my tax dollars. For good or bad most Americans feel the same way and it will never change. Take a look at Jeff Bezo’s life story. Born in Albuquerque to a 17 year old high school student, who soon divorced but managed to finish high school. Later married a recent Cuban immigrant hence the name Bezo’s. No sign of silver spoons or blue blood anywhere. Do to nothing more than good grades he managed to get into Princeton. During high school he ran the burger machine at McDonald’s. If he had been lazy he would have the perfect excuse for being a total failure.

SultanOfSwing

From each according to his ability, from each according to his need. Housing, food and medical care are human rights and will be provided but it you want anything more than a basic existence then you sell your labor. But the key is, it should be under your terms, not that of essentially a modern day feudal lord. Work for work's sake is why people get stuck in dead end jobs pushing paper and burn out at 40. Trust me, I was right on the edge of that until a few months ago. It's exhausting, demoralizing and rampant and needs to stop. Again, this is just me being idealistic so make of it what you will.

I don't care who gets my tax money, as long as it goes to helping workers and not turning Palestinean children into skeletons. Just put the power in the hands of the workers and that's already a vast improvement on our current cycle of endless, meaningless, immoral war.

I'm not in the least bit interested in defending or glorifying class traitors but I'll leave it there because you didn't offer it up confrontationally so you don't need to hear me rant again.

ddsrph

Is there any society you can point to that demonstrates the success of a system you envision? One where the people are not fleeing at any opportunity? One thing we do agree on is Work is Hell. Without proper motivation too many will choose not to. In your case you worked hard and got a promotion which is the way it’s supposed to work. Now that poor bastard doing your old job is suffering and would probably appreciate part of your raise.

SultanOfSwing

Since I kind of came up with my own interpretation of Lenin's words, this is really more theoretical. Maybe small scale communities exist but nothing on a national scale that I know of. We just differ in that I don't think lack of desire work needs to be punished, we just reward those who give more back, that's all. And i don't think I'm even a Leninist anyway, though I don't believe he had the chance to realize his vision, and I do believe he was a champion of the working class. The Party, and later Stalin, changed the direction and the rest is what it is. If I'm anything I lean small c communist with no article, rather than 'a Comminist'. In practice I'm a traditional British socialist in the Tony Benn mould. Workers' rights, strong unions, fair pay for honest labor, etc. But I realize compromises have to be made, even if I believe there is a better alternative to neoliberalism. Work can be hell but it doesn't have to be. More power at the bottom and less of a gap to the top has to be a start, I think.

I got really lucky with my job though, I won't lie. I had a cushy position before the takeover and I could feel the changes coming and was convinced I'd get screwed. I did my job but it wasn't really something I could excel at beyond helping the team as much as I could. It was the way I conducted myself in an interview for another position that helped. Luckily I like the change. The poor bugger doing my old job is me. They haven't moved all my responsibilities yet! In time, and hopefully soon but I'm still for now ordering all our materials too. I hope everybody in the company gets their own raises though, I always will.

Shard

Don't we all
BTW what's your new avatar? Some kind of helmet?

Shard

This is supposed to be the SPACE thread folks ! It's a refuge from the politics and culture wars elsewhere on the forum.

So just finished watching a French series on Mars called "Missions" anyone know it? It's 2018 but somehow I just saw it on BBC iPlayer. Very interesting if not slightly confusing. It has a second season too, but that's not up yet.

It doesn't portray Mars with any particular grandeur or fascination, and it's made me reassess my interest in going there (were Elon to offer me the opportunity). Vacation, sure, to live/colonize, no thanks.

Actually, the series is not so much about Mars as AI and aliens.

ddsrph

I was about to make this post before we got side tracked on political issues. I have been thinking about mankind’s future and wondering if there is any possibility of travel much beyond our solar system due to distance. With current technology even the closest star is out of reach. Thinking that we should be sending out our genome was surprised to learn we are doing that. Is their any reasonable theoretical technology to achieve speeds near 1/2 light speed? With that and a multigenerational space craft finding other inhabitable planets would be possible.

Shard

There's something called a solar sail which is 10% light speed, but I believe the payload has to be very small (grams rather than kgs). Kepler 442b is siad to be the only other habitable planet in our galaxy (which seems an underestimate ?!) and that's over 1000 light years away. All this talk about being a "space faring" species/civilization sounds very premature. I think if there is other intelligent life within reach of the Earth, it's far more likely that they come to us than we go to them BTW, speaking of multigenerational travel, have you seen the film Passengers (Netflix) it's very good.

SultanOfSwing

It's the stage helmets used by Daft Punk. So in a way you guessed correctly.

I will mention this and leave it there. The privatization of space might be a political concern, but it's also a very real problem. I'd rather keep sending astronauts up in rickety 1970s Russian rockets held together with electrical tape and pure strength of will, than see space travel and exploration, the things I have loved since I was a child, turned into yet another monetized commodity. I'm passionate about space and astronomy, and I don't need to be made any more disillusioned or jaded than I already am by seeing the final frontier being turned into a PR and marketing stunt. It is genuinely upsetting, but I am sorry for derailing the thread as well.

With that being said - think about Mars. It's twice as far from the Sun as we are, it rarely gets warmer than -20C on the surface, and the average surface temperature is -60C. It is a planetwide Antarctica, with no magnetic field to protect you from the solar winds, there is water but very little and it's trapped in ice or under the surface. The thin atmosphere isn't suitable for breathing and in order to make it suitable for breathing you would have to extensively terraform the planet, which would take hundreds of years, let alone the fact that the technology to do this would likely take another few hundred to reach! So you can forget about living there within the next 500 years if you want it to be any kind of meaningful experience.

So Mars isn't worth considering as a second home. It is worth studying scientifically, however, which is why we've send so many landers there since 1976. We kind of need to forget the idea of setting up a base there. Sending man to Mars might have a romantic appeal, and for research purposes an Apollo style mission program would have merit, but even that is orders of magnitude harder than going to the moon. It takes about seven months to reach Mars, so that's a 14 month round trip, not taking into account how long it would take for the return window to open up, which is another four months or so. Which makes it in total an 18-24 month round trip assuming everything goes to plan (around 60% of all Mars missions have failed, often before observations could begin). This isn't like going to the moon, where we haven't been since 1972 anyway. The seven month outward leg is longer than the average duration of a stay on the ISS. Robotic landers are much more suited to this kind of trip for now, and we should continue sending them. IF we find evidence of life, past or present, or an abundance of sub-surface water or something like that, THEN we can look at sending people there. We should look at returning to the moon first, IMO.

Solar system exploration is still important and valid. Before I dropped out of my degree, I wanted to get into planetary science, so I have a strong interest in it. But it's not quite the time for humans to be going out beyond the moon yet, and we shouldn't be putting all our eggs in the Mars basket, either. Uranus and Neptune haven't been explored since 1986 and 1989 with Voyager 2. Europa, and other moons of Jupiter and Saturn present opportunities to explore further and we haven't been back to Venus since the 70s.

I want to say it, but I won't. Let's just say, NASA should be left alone to do what it does best without outside interference in the field of space travel.

Distance makes it very difficult. With our current technology it would take 20,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, although there are planets in that system so at least it's a worthwhile target. The farthest spacecraft from Earth right now is Voyager 1. It is about 13 billion miles away and was launched in 1977. On the surface, 13 billion miles seems like a long way but this is space, right? This is essentially 0.21% of a lightyear in let's just say 50 years. While Voyager 1 is technically in interstellar space, it is still near enough a lightyear short of reaching the Oort Cloud, so it is still for all intents and purposes inside the solar system.

Distance is a problem that currently is pretty much insurmountable. The sheer magnitude of the speed of light, and general relativity severely limit how fast objects can travel through space. Don't get me wrong, it would be amazing to get humans, even just human technology to another star, but it's a pipe dream for now.

ddsrph

Yes. Passengers was a very good movie. We are probably doomed as a species and just waiting for the sun to kill us off.

Shard

The fact that a Mars journey is significantly longer than a moon journey doesn't make doing the journey unreasonable. There are plenty of people that would be willing to invest a few years travel time (let alone half a year) were it safe to do so. The question is what to do on Mars, and that's where the private sector can play a role. If the private sector (that's individuals!) see a purpose in going to set up camp there, then why not? A publicly funded mission would inevitably be questioned on resource misalocation, rightly so, but not a privately funded one.

Interesting that Mars is -60C surface temperature, somehow I always associate cold with ice/snow, but I suppose there's no reason to do so. How cold would Pluto's surface temp be?
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SultanOfSwing

Space exploration is about research, advancement of the species and science. I don't see the value in just 'setting up camp' in a hostile environment, not to mention the prolonged affect of 30% Earth gravity on the human body. People will die trying this and for what? This isn't Lewis and Clark, this isn't crossing the oceans, on a planet we evolved to be able to survive in with generally known quantities other than what wildlife and/or people they may have encountered during the trip. Look how hard it was just to reach the South Pole. There is nowhere on Mars that isn't as bad, if not worse, than Antarctica and there is no rescue mission. No helicopters to dispatch if someone is stranded off-base at night when the temperature is dropping. That's game over.

We can't even get our affairs in order here, there is a very real threat of ecological collapse, possibly within our lifetime and certainly within 150 years and we're just looking at Mars thinking 'that'll do'. Seems rather short sighted.

There needs to be water for ice and snow, but that's just because that's what you see on Earth. Mars is at the very far outer extreme of the habitable zone, but because of the thin atmosphere it can't really trap heat the way Earth can (Venus is on the inner boundary, but it is the other extreme, as its dense atmosphere traps too much heat). Though, even if Mars had an Earthlike atmosphere the average temperature would still be below freezing, around -40C (cold enough for mercury to be solid). Now that's average, of course, and even now it is possible to see temperatures of above freezing, and even up to 15-20C on Mars but that's rare. Once you get away from the sun, and outside of the safety of Earth's magnetic field and thin atmosphere, the solar system is generally pretty cold. It's a wonder life had the chance to evolve here at all when you think about it.

The surface temperature on Pluto is generally between -240C and -220C.