What the destruction of NASA means
(This is a response to Jordan's post "Who Will Control the Moon?")
I've had several people ask me why I'm so "upset" over Obama's destruction of NASA. "Upset" is far too weak a word, by a googolplex of orders of magnitude. Basically, what Obama has done, almost certainly to please his biggest backer, mainland China, no matter who else, is destroy this country's future. And not just our country's. With us out of space, China, now the most powerful nation on Earth, has a free field to colonize the Moon. Once she has established bases on the Moon, she will be able to use it as an orbital weapons platform to drop so-called Rods from God, a.k.a. kinetic energy weapons, on any place on Earth -- and such kinetic energy weapons, fired via railgun from any such platform into Earth's gravity-well at a velocity such that with a gravity-assist from Earth they will reach 20 km/sec by the time they impact our world, can level mountains. Nuclear weapons can't do that, but kinetic energy weapons that originate in space can -- all you have to do is keep firing them and firing them and firing them in huge job lots, and they can flatten any area you aim them at, turning it into one vast crater. They take the form of long, cylindrical nickel-iron rods some 20 meters long by four meters thick; there's all the nickel-iron you could ever want there for the taking in the Solar System, so you'd never run out of ammo. All you have to do is tool the material into the desired shape and start firing it. There's no radioactive fallout, which means you can immediately occupy the area once the molten rock that floors that crater cools down. And because you're firing straight down at the Earth, you've got an extreme advantage over target nations, because anything fired back at you from Earth's surface has little chance of reaching you, and even if it does, it'll hit with a very low velocity -- atmospheric friction will rob it of almost all its energy on the way up.
And once China gains that advantage, she will use it to put a lid on the Earth that never comes off. Nobody will get into space after that, except China, and she will only colonize the Moon, and then only for military purposes. Why? Because her mandarin class -- the so-and-sos who run everything in China and always have, no matter which emperor, including Mao, thought he was the one giving orders -- wants no threats to their continued hegemony over China and her possessions. Since, conceivably, a Chinese colony beyond the Earth could use Rods-from-God to nail China herself and break free from her rule, that means only trusted military personnel would be based on the Moon, and that no families would be allowed there, because families could build into new nations, and new nations would be a threat to China. By then, all the Earth would be China's possession, so nobody on Earth save a small cadre of military professionals would be allowed off the Earth. And that would be the utter end of all exploration and colonization of space.
There's no time left for a new species to arise on Earth that can get Earthly life into space. So once China grabs everything, Earth can write off any chance of her having her babies -- colonies of Earthly life -- offworld, where they can survive her demise. And she will die someday, inevitably, either from something like
which could happen at any time, or 3 billion years hence, assuming the Milky Way and Andromeda merge, ending up something like this:
(Note the bright blue color of the center of that mess. That is the result of a collision between two galaxies some one hundred million light-years away, referred to by astronomers as ngc 3256, and the hue of the light in its central portions indicates it's full of gamma radiation, the energy of which is so high that at a distance of 500,000 light-years it would fry anything in the Milky Way to a charred husk. For more about ngc 3256, see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080506.html.)
or in 5 billion years, when the Sun leaves the Main Sequence and swells into a red giant, engulfing all his inner planets, including Earth. But most complex life will fail much earlier than that, around 100 million years from now, and by 10 million years from now, the evolution of creatures capable of creating another technologically advanced, potentially spacefaring civilization on Earth will no longer be possible. This is it -- and we've failed to do our job.
What truly galls me is that this is exactly what my adoptive parents and two sets of foster-parents would have had orgasms over: the destruction of the one thing I hold dear above all others. They wanted to completely crush my spirit -- and I'm quoting there -- and destroying anything I love was their favorite way of doing so. They called themselves conservatives and voted Republic, but they would have voted for Obama in a heartbeat if they knew he'd destroy my country and my country's involvement in space. That it would have broken my heart was all they cared about -- nothing else would have mattered to them. Not their own children, not their relatives' descendants, nothing.
What happens to creatures who destroy their world's chances of perpetuating its life after it itself dies? They are guilty of both murder and suicide on the greatest possible scale, and I can't imagine a just God would ever relieve them of responsibility for that. Every control-freak Leftist and everyone else who has embraced the "space doesn't matter, so let's discard any chance of getting there" platform of the Obama administration is in fact responsible for destroying not just this country's future, but that of all life on Earth. Way to go, assholes. Proud of yourselves?
I've had several people ask me why I'm so "upset" over Obama's destruction of NASA. "Upset" is far too weak a word, by a googolplex of orders of magnitude. Basically, what Obama has done, almost certainly to please his biggest backer, mainland China, no matter who else, is destroy this country's future. And not just our country's. With us out of space, China, now the most powerful nation on Earth, has a free field to colonize the Moon. Once she has established bases on the Moon, she will be able to use it as an orbital weapons platform to drop so-called Rods from God, a.k.a. kinetic energy weapons, on any place on Earth -- and such kinetic energy weapons, fired via railgun from any such platform into Earth's gravity-well at a velocity such that with a gravity-assist from Earth they will reach 20 km/sec by the time they impact our world, can level mountains. Nuclear weapons can't do that, but kinetic energy weapons that originate in space can -- all you have to do is keep firing them and firing them and firing them in huge job lots, and they can flatten any area you aim them at, turning it into one vast crater. They take the form of long, cylindrical nickel-iron rods some 20 meters long by four meters thick; there's all the nickel-iron you could ever want there for the taking in the Solar System, so you'd never run out of ammo. All you have to do is tool the material into the desired shape and start firing it. There's no radioactive fallout, which means you can immediately occupy the area once the molten rock that floors that crater cools down. And because you're firing straight down at the Earth, you've got an extreme advantage over target nations, because anything fired back at you from Earth's surface has little chance of reaching you, and even if it does, it'll hit with a very low velocity -- atmospheric friction will rob it of almost all its energy on the way up.
And once China gains that advantage, she will use it to put a lid on the Earth that never comes off. Nobody will get into space after that, except China, and she will only colonize the Moon, and then only for military purposes. Why? Because her mandarin class -- the so-and-sos who run everything in China and always have, no matter which emperor, including Mao, thought he was the one giving orders -- wants no threats to their continued hegemony over China and her possessions. Since, conceivably, a Chinese colony beyond the Earth could use Rods-from-God to nail China herself and break free from her rule, that means only trusted military personnel would be based on the Moon, and that no families would be allowed there, because families could build into new nations, and new nations would be a threat to China. By then, all the Earth would be China's possession, so nobody on Earth save a small cadre of military professionals would be allowed off the Earth. And that would be the utter end of all exploration and colonization of space.
There's no time left for a new species to arise on Earth that can get Earthly life into space. So once China grabs everything, Earth can write off any chance of her having her babies -- colonies of Earthly life -- offworld, where they can survive her demise. And she will die someday, inevitably, either from something like
Click to viewwhich could happen at any time, or 3 billion years hence, assuming the Milky Way and Andromeda merge, ending up something like this:
(Note the bright blue color of the center of that mess. That is the result of a collision between two galaxies some one hundred million light-years away, referred to by astronomers as ngc 3256, and the hue of the light in its central portions indicates it's full of gamma radiation, the energy of which is so high that at a distance of 500,000 light-years it would fry anything in the Milky Way to a charred husk. For more about ngc 3256, see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080506.html.)
or in 5 billion years, when the Sun leaves the Main Sequence and swells into a red giant, engulfing all his inner planets, including Earth. But most complex life will fail much earlier than that, around 100 million years from now, and by 10 million years from now, the evolution of creatures capable of creating another technologically advanced, potentially spacefaring civilization on Earth will no longer be possible. This is it -- and we've failed to do our job.
What truly galls me is that this is exactly what my adoptive parents and two sets of foster-parents would have had orgasms over: the destruction of the one thing I hold dear above all others. They wanted to completely crush my spirit -- and I'm quoting there -- and destroying anything I love was their favorite way of doing so. They called themselves conservatives and voted Republic, but they would have voted for Obama in a heartbeat if they knew he'd destroy my country and my country's involvement in space. That it would have broken my heart was all they cared about -- nothing else would have mattered to them. Not their own children, not their relatives' descendants, nothing.
What happens to creatures who destroy their world's chances of perpetuating its life after it itself dies? They are guilty of both murder and suicide on the greatest possible scale, and I can't imagine a just God would ever relieve them of responsibility for that. Every control-freak Leftist and everyone else who has embraced the "space doesn't matter, so let's discard any chance of getting there" platform of the Obama administration is in fact responsible for destroying not just this country's future, but that of all life on Earth. Way to go, assholes. Proud of yourselves?