Not going to happen, and I’m not sure it would be good for the country. And this is from a registered Bush hater.

>”II) The Chinese change their government from totalitarian Communist despotism to a Western -or Indian style – democracy.”

Yeah, have fun waiting for that.

>”III) Iran gets and tests a nuclear bomb soon – as I’m afraid its the only thing that may stop Israel and Bush’es Amercia from doing something very stupid like attacking Iran.”

You’re kidding, right? I mean… you’re kidding?

>”If the M.A.D. + idea worked for The Cold War & India-Pakistan, here’s hoping it works again the same way ..”

Hope in one hand and crap in the other. See which one fills up first.

You’re still fighting the last war.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/34142.html

And an alternative:

http://reason.com/news/show/122023.html

Nice picture.

And it doesn’t hurt that, like the DPRK and Israel, an atomic Iran would be conventionally (har har) a regional atomic power. Unconventionally is the big fear, but the active components of atomic bombs are quite exacting pieces of machinery difficult to miniaturize and I don’t see an atomic Iran as being particularly threatening that way.

As for attacking Iran, I don’t see it as particularly likely (indeed, if people didn’t actually truely believe it to be a possibility, I’d argue it to be a total canard). Sabre-rattling is the usual method of looking tough without actually getting into a scrap, and the Iranian theocracy will probably solve itself in a relatively bloodless revolution within the next twenty years, primarily because the theocrats have almost no popular supprt except when Iran is threatened from the outside, due to a very strong sense of nationalism there.

Now, were I a fan of conspiracy theories (and if I thought our current government were sly and bright enough to be sufficiently Machiavellian to do it) I’d say that if the government actually was quietly helping Iran to become a regional atomic counterbalance to Israel they’d have all the more reason to rail against it publically until it becomes an ingrained meme that America Has Nothing To Do With Iranian Atomic Power. Basically make a matter of quiet policy a public antithesis, and when it does eventually become exposed, fallout (heh heh) is reduced due to incredulity.

Hmmn… Isn’t the current meme in power ‘Neoconservatist American triumphalism’ or in a nutshell : that the yanks’ll invade anyone they want to regardless of having any halfway decent reason for doing so???

Anyone that is except tough larger superpowers like China or those like N. Korea armed with nukes that can actually, sorta you know, fight back …? (It says nothing good about the US that its recent victims – Iraq & Afghanistan – are pitiful third world countries with stuff-all military & political might. Its kinda like the winner of the Indy-500 entering his race car in the under 10 soapbox derby & then boasting how great he is for winning… )

The _current_ memes may well change after The US and / or Israel try flattening Iran … (coming soon to a TV near you?)

… Or a war erupts with China over Taiwan or just both superpowers desire for “full spectrum dominance” ie. world rulership.

… Or who knows what other militaristic, all-balls, no-brains gambit Bush the lesser will try before departing the “presidency.”

Whether anything’ll be left to launch anything remains to be seen.

Personally, I’d prefer it was America still standing and able to launch ‘Orion’ or its equiv. than China (hey, I am a Westerner) but my first preference would be that such stupidity and waste of lives never happens which is why I’m really hoping :

I) The US comes to its senses & impeaches Dubya Bush preferably yesterday or earlier.

II) The Chinese change their government from totalitarian Communist despotism to a Western -or Indian style – democracy.

&

III) Iran gets and tests a nuclear bomb soon – as I’m afraid its the only thing that may stop Israel and Bush’es Amercia from doing something very stupid like attacking Iran.* If the M.A.D. + idea worked for The Cold War & India-Pakistan, here’s hoping it works again the same way ..

————————————————-
* Iran, incidentally wouldn’t do aything stupid for the same reason. It knows if it gets the bomb and uses it (or passes it on to AQ) it will be vapourised. At present, America and Israel (both nations with large WMD and nuke arsenals) have no such deterrent stopping them considering attacking Iran. Which would, most likely, spark WW-III.

+ Mutually Assured Destruction – the reason Russia didn’t nuke America and vice-versa despite some very close shaves eg. the Cuban missile crisis.

I’m just waiting for the first astronaut to land on the Moon, jump out of the Chinese lunar lander and claim the Moon …

… in the name of Tibet! ;^)

…. & then defect to the West and tell the Communist Dictators of the “people’s republic” where they can go!

After all, what can they do about it when they’re up there & the Govt’s not? Of course getting a Tibetan – or Taiwanese or Xinjiangean for that matter – selected as a “taikonaut” astronaut will be a bit hard although many disenchanted Han (majority Chinese ethnicity) are around …

… Not least millions of Falun Gong practitioners (okay they’re relig. & we don’t like that but they don’t deserve the sort of brutal repression they’ve been getting all the same.)

Thank you, Arthur, but I suspect my joke was a little too subtle. From my previous work I am VERY familiar with the “Odyssey” series (which I believe Phil will make known to his readers here fairly soon).

I was making reference to the scene in “2061, Odyssey III” where the Chinese land on Europa and discover a life form in the ocean under the ice.

> The third monolith was found in orbit around Jupiter (or Saturn,
> if you’re reading the book based on the original screenplay).

Actually, the book was not based on the screenplay. They were written together over many, many writing sessions between Clarke and Kubrick. Once they had finished the final screenplay, the two parted company and, like Darwin’s finches, the stories evolved separately up to their publication/premiers. The destination for the Discovery was always Saturn, but effects problems in getting a believable ring system had Kubrick make a very late decision to move it to Jupiter. Clarke, though, kept it Saturn so that he could place TMA-2 in the center of the white zone of Iapetus (or “Japetus” as he calls it in the book).

- Jack

The ROI is currently disputed. Without atomic propulsion, one has to expend inordinate amounts of wealth to get materials to the moon (to build a mining base) and then it has to return this material back to Earth. The cheap way to do this is mass driving, but anyone who’s read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress can tell you people would put up with Earth being mindfully and carefully ortilleried about as well as they would Orion drives.

Asteroids… small asteroids (if any are within reach) could have ion engines planted on them so they can slowly constant-accel to Earth, and that would be relatively cheap (whether cheaper than a moonbase, I can’t say). Carbonaceous asteroids may have organic compounds synthesizable into petroleum-analogs, which could be of great interest to industrializing powers…

Metal prices are rising and rising as China gets a decent standard of living. Maybe they’ve seriously considered mining the moon and asteroid belt whilst everyone else is only reading about it in sci-fi literature.

Maybe I’ve been reading too much sci-fi myself…

No argument (hence the Murgwendenliebe voice). I’m simply saying we can do it now and could have been doing it for the past quarter-century (with the post-Saturn space exploration plan). So when people whine about not having their flying cars and robot overlords there’s just one person to blame.

YOU.

Yes, you, Joe America!

The car has to come back down at some point. Preferably not on my head.

Here you go:
http://www.americanautogyro.com/

That’s as close to a flying car as you are going to get. About as safe as flying gets once you are properly trained. The horizontal rotor is unpowered and in autorotation during flight, so your engine can literally fall out and you can still land safely from almost any height.

You mean the nuclear bomb powered spaceship? Yeah, that’ll play in Peoria^H^H^H^H^H^H Berkeley.

You think the US is an outcast *now*? It doesn’t matter that it would be a drop in the vast radiation bucket that is outer space. It would still be the “Ack! Teh nookulear! Pbbt!” Even people who understood the science would still use it for political reasons.

We’ve got Putin in Russia right now flinching at imagined threats from the West. We’ve got a government in China that’s 50 years out of date. Yeah, lets put some nuclear bombs up in high orbit. That’s go over well.

Nope. Orion is politically impossible with the current set of ideological memes at play in the world.

You can go get your helicopter licence and fly around… all it takes is $

Project Orion. We’ve had the technology since the late 1950s, just not ZE VILL (/Strangelove voice) to do so.