Re: Drone Technology
Reply #39 –
You haven't answered my question. Why did we have so many hungry, homeless, and so on before the first rocket? With so much money that wasn't being sent into space, why all the suffering? Could it be that the various space programs aren't at fault for this, and if we didn't have them we might still have an abundance of hungry, homeless, jobless and so on?
Sometimes exploration has results that no one can know for generations-- maybe centuries. I live on this continent-- maybe I live at all-- because some guy got the idea that by sailing West, he would eventually reach India and all the riches of the Orient. Who could have known that he would bump into this place, or that the natives he came across would be sitting on wealth that he couldn't imagine? He spent a bunch of Ferdinand and Isabella's money on a questionable venture when there were certainly thousands starving in Spain, eh?
Right now, Mars is a barren rockpile, nobody lives there or indeed can live there unless you bring substantial parts of Earth with you. Given present technology, anybody who goes there is on a one-way ride-- there's no coming back. So we send drones to investigate the place to see if there's a reason, someday, to send men to colonize the place. It may turn out to be an expensive waste of money-- or it may turn out to be the smartest thing we've ever done. Right now, you can't honestly say which it is.
What would happen if a large asteroid slammed into the Earth?
According to several tests involving a watermelon and a large hammer, it would be really bad!