Phi for All

Is everybody looking for some funny? Welcome to the club! It's become a little tradition here at SFN to roast new Moderators with some good old-fashioned slander. Tonight's vict-, I mean guest, is Dak, that wunderfolly brillyunt Brit with a really twisted point of view. Dak isn’t really a bad speller, it’s just tough to type with a pencil in your teeth. He can’t use his hands because someone’s tied the arms of his jacket behind his back. He mostly sits around watching British children’s shows and thinking up ways to make interesting sounds with beer and a straw. When the foam starts coming out of his nose he boots up his computer, a Commodore PET 2001 Plus with an 800x600 monitor he rigged up from an old aquarium, parks his lo-rez arse on a padded cinder block and starts heckling the rest of us here at SFN. Dak truly puts the “e” in eccentricity, usually more times than is proper. For that and his promise to sign over his trust fund to blike, we have honored him with this promotion to the SFN Staff. Dak is truly an inspiration to everyone who thinks, “If *he* can make it, it’s way beneath me!”

Tough to do when people are going to lie about usage when it's illegal. Legalize it and there *will* be an increase in usage - at least when asked now that it's legal.

*ahem* *is this on?* Ladies and gentlemen of SFN, I recently clicked on the IRC Chatroom link and joined the wonderful people there in a stimulating conversation. The people in Chat are NOT evil, they are NOT demons and they are NOT spawns of Satan as we've been lead to believe. They are hard-working, industrious types who only have your best interests at heart. Sure, they can be funny at times, but mostly they are serious-minded individuals who just want to be your friend. They don't work for a foreign power and are absolutely NOT aliens trying to (sob) take over the world. Please click on the SFN Chatroom button at the top of your screen and be prepared to make a friend. Thank you. Well done, you cringing meat-puppet. Your family lives another day! Why is that red light still on?! I said WH-

No smell rules out septic rupture. No oil rules out Beverly Hillbillies scenario : ( Bail it out with a tin can and see if it rises without rain. You're right, until that hole is dry don't waste cement.

Are they continuing to fill or did it stop? You mention sludge, is it stinky, oily, watery, what?

I've always believed a positive outlook is preferable to a negative one. If prayer helps you stay positive, that's great. I think some people who pray are looking for very specific outcomes and are often disappointed. If the placebo works, use it. Let's be careful here, we're not debating supernatural reasoning but rather the efficacy of prayer in medicine. Let's not cross the line into religion and specific religious beliefs.

Finally some decent Moderators! It's about time! Those other $%@#*s really suck !#@& through a straw! Way to go... ... um, what were your names again?!

I still don't like using the broad term "drugs" when talking about legalization. As has been pointed out, some types of judgment loss are more tolerable than others. I don't hear too many good stories about PCP.

I think pot should be legal. Some might want something stronger but they'd probably space out how to contact their heroin dealer.

Good for you! I'm more than happy to be wrong in this case.

You LIE!!! I saw that photo of you and Fidel with those monster stogies!

You smoke cigarettes, don't you? It could be residual smoke from your lungs. When you fill your mouth with air you're using your lungs to compress the air in your mouth.

Welcome, you wonderful woman! We've been waiting to hear from the saner side of your household!

I'm from Colorado and in the old west "slapping thigh" meant you're going for your gun. Maybe it scares the sneeze out of you, Probably works for hiccups too. Seriously, I've never heard of this and I can't imagine the bodily mechanism. Would any sharp pain do the same thing or does it have to be your thigh? Perhaps this is a form of acupressure?

I think a Mars colony would need a very limited set of criteria to perform to be considered successful; they simply aren't going to be able to do a whole bunch of complicated tasks and also work towards self-sufficiency. But I agree that it could happen. I also agree that it wouldn't be in Mars' best interests to claim total independence from Earth. I'm a globalist so I share that belief. It just shouldn't be a chimp named Blair. Ever. I really hope we're thinking that way when the time comes. If it happened today the need for short-term ROI might outweigh propriety. I think Sayo tried to bring that up with disaster relief. It would almost certainly cause tension. Look at how nationalistic many people get when they hear about their own country sending aid offshore when there are so many problems in-country. No worries. It would be nice to live that long and see what problems they do have, and how many of our concerns they've dealt with.

A serum derived from a Martian source which cures the latest superflu on Earth? Some form of bacterial life which thrives in Mars' 95% CO2 atmosphere and can be used to destroy cancer cells? Why is it easy to imagine a totally self-sustained Mars colony and not a valuable commodity for it to export?

Unfortunately, the shock-jock's fans don't listen to them nearly as much as their detractors. I remember hearing that Howard Stern's fans listened to him for an average of 45 minutes a day and the people who hated him listened for like 4 hours. Suspension and threats of pulling their shows due to complaints are just tactics to boost ratings. Oddly, in the backwards world of media, negativity sells better. Talk show hosts are like car wrecks; the more horrible they are the more people can't look away.

Newton was the absolute accurate truth for centuries. Everyone knew his view of physics to be true. Until it wasn't quite. The only truths are the ones which can adapt as knowledge grows.

They suck the energy from the batteries in the remote! Oh, thank you for that!

You keep going back and forth between what we can do now and what we'll be able to do then. Believe me, if something is found and can only be obtained on Mars and Earth will pay for it, there will be trade. Goods don't have to be cheap, they have to be profitable.

If we're going to assume advancements in technology though, we should also keep a slight hope out for some kind of discovery / process that can only be found / performed on Mars. Trade requires something for both sides to profit from and if Mars has something to offer then trade will ensue. Not that much of a joke, just implausible at this point.

I suppose, in the end, most of this argument is moot. If we can't figure a way to send a colony to Mars and have at least a 90% chance of success no matter what the mission model is we'll never send it in the first place. If sustainability is the goal and we can't make the numbers work with our then-present technology, no one will make the investment. If we figure out a way to have a limited science colony that can at least repair and update their own machinery, harvest water and grow their own food then we'll ask for volunteers and we'll do it. I'm starting to lean more towards Sayo's thinking that Mars is a pretty second rate rock and anything other than a research station is probably not going to happen. While I can see spending a few months traveling there, working a hitch and then coming back, who would want to live there and raise a family there unless life on Earth was somehow less attractive?

I changed the thread name to better reflect the topic for those who scan titles.

I disagree with the "pure" part. Speculation should be based on logical methodology and Sayo has made some extremely tough points to refute. Addressing them isn't something you can brush off and still maintain the integrity of your argument. I have noticed certain discrepancies that keep popping up, like the Martians won't need uranium for power but then suddenly they have reactors to solve another problem. The equation needs to stay balanced. Again, I think Mars *could* become self-sufficient (no freebies from Earth) but I don't think 50 years is near long enough. Remember that a Mars colony's biggest commodity / export is probably going to be research but whoever foots the bill for getting there in the first place is going to want that research as a return on investment, not as a trade medium. Now you're definitely moving the goalposts. "Survival" seems different than "self sufficiency in 50 years". And now we're changing self-sufficiency to mean simply *not* having a "need to rely heavily on Earth for its survival"? I think you used strong terms to begin with and are now back-pedaling. I also think Sayo's "never" is too strong but he's sticking with it. Those arguing for Mars independence in 50 years have tried to refute each individual obstacle to self-sufficiency but when taken as a whole it seems like it would require too many resources and too much manpower. How big is this colony after 50 years (now *this* part is pure speculation)? 1000 people? 10,000 people? 100,000 or more? Within this population you'll have a need for a wide variety of skilled and unskilled professions. And if you obviate the need for, for instance, miners to extract metals and minerals by supposing robots or other mechanical means you've just increased your need for new and growing technology and manufacturing. This feels wrong. Their needs will always be out of proportion to their size it would seem. The list of things a *Mars* colony would need to manufacture is huge. We have a clothing factory ( I guess we're assuming that we have another factory for taking fibers we've grown in our agriculture facility and weaving them into cloth), which needs a factory to make replacement parts for the clothing equipment. Remember that this colony isn't starting out like any other; it's technology needs are far greater right from the beginning. How many factories are you going to need to maintain self-sufficiency? Another thing, are we assuming (as Sayo did at one point) that Earth has a cohesive political infrastructure with an Earth President and no competing countries? Why would any Mars colony want independence if there is a possibility of rival concerns (either simply competitive or possibly hostile)? Lastly, if we assume that Sysco's "technologically advanced apparatus" becomes reality, won't that mean that getting state-of-the-art goods from Earth will just get easier and easier? In that case diminishing returns will dictate that some things will always be easier and cheaper to get from Earth than to make from scratch yourself.

I like this quote from the site: "Our clients are usually surprised at what we find." Let me guess, you have to fill out a questionnaire with lots of personal information on it, right? "Mr Smith, we found 147 slanderous things about you on the Web." Probably only 12 of them were there before you called RepDef. Better than Disney?!