”We must continue to go into space for humanity."


Peter

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Having hijacked the "Chess" Topic with aviation stories, it is hypocrisy for me to complain about the wormhole into another universe here.

To be flip--what a useless warning--we don't need to go into space for the sake of humanity; we need to send some of humanity into space--with no way back--for the sake of humanity.

--Brant

bon voyage!

Mars One is a one-way trip to Mars scheduled for 2023. So far, about 100 people have signed up, most of them young, but only 20 oif them female.

http://mars-one.com/en/about-mars-one/about-mars-one

I recommend the Bruce Sterling novel, Schizmatrix, which takes place in the solar system after a nuclear war. Maybe a couple thousand people (I don't think as many as 10,000) are left out in orbit, on the Moon, and in the asteroids. They make it. And Terrams do survive on Earth, also. Not everyone dies in a nuclear war and after some time, we pick ourselves up and start over.

(Samarkand was destroyed twice by barbarians. Rome totally depleted Greece in 188 BCE. "Catagena" is the Spanish name for Carthage, whence they all came, though the home city was destroyed by Rome. When the Uighars moved on nothern China, the Sung Dynastry retreated south, but it brought a renaissance with all their artists and such crowded into one central place. Just sayin'...but, yes, life on Earth sucked, though it would be hard to prove objectively that living in Space was materially better -- just different...)

Robert Heinlein is easily the most optimistic visionary. Melissa Snograss's Circuit triology follows in the same vein, but from an explicitly libertarian framework as the story is about the evolution of "frontier justice" in the solar system.

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Me? I don't know if it is infinite or not.

Then you withdraw any claims concerning entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics as well - since you no longer have boundary conditions to assume the 2nd law applies.

I know the surface of a 3 sphere of finite dimension is topologically unbounded. So I will not withdraw a thing. If physical space time is a manifold that is homeomorphic to a four sphere (I don't know that it is) it is unbounded. It is possible that space-time is bounded. It is possible that space time is unbounded. There exist pseudo Riemanian manifolds of both kinds. We don't have empirical data to decide the question.

Write us when we have empirical data to resolve the question. Otherwise you should hold your peace.

I am not withdrawing a damned thing.

Ba'al Chatzaf

So on faith you want to assume the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies without any empirical data to support boundary conditions where it would apply.

Dennis

there are megatons of empirical evidence supporting 2LOT. Like any general proposition about ALL of physical reality a finite number of experiments cannot prove it in its generality. No physical law can be -proven- in the same way a mathematical theorem is proven. A physical law can only be falsified by a contrary empirical finding. So it is not faith. It is holding 2LOT provisionally until such time as it is disproved empirically. In the meantime there is lots of evidence for 2LOT even though it is not proof.

Faith is for preachers. Practical provisional holding of an evidence supported general law is just prudence and good sense, not faith. The sure fire way of proving 2LOT is false is producing a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Can you do it?

Ba'al Chatzaf

You have entirely missed the point - you have failed to empirically demonstrate the conditions where the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics even applies. The 2nd Law is derived from mathematics and a small number of assumptions -

boundary conditions among them. You have failed to even meet the bar of applicability.

You are expressing faith that it applies apparently without an understanding of where the law even comes from.

Dennis

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