Dale.Amon@FAS.RI.CMU.EDU (01/08/86)
The logic just doesn't hold. COntractors on large projects use statistica factors to calculate the number of deaths expected on each large gbuilding, bridge or dam. We can predict quite accurately the number who will die each year from auto accidents, from aircraft. So would you imply that we should not build a bridge because we know that two workers WILL die from fatal accidents before it is completed? There is no course of action that cannot be counted in fatalities. The only course possible is to compare cost and benefit and choose the course which will cost fewer lives. If getting orbiting power stations up with Orion would cost us 1000 lives per year of excess cancer 20 years from now, while coal fired plants cost us 6000 per year (to use an unverified figure posted somewhat earlier) then the choice is crystal clear. I do not know if the numbers are that well known. I do not even know if the cancer projections are wind out the bunghole, because they may be based on 'no minimum dose' instead of 'threshold dose', and thus highly inflated from what will occur in reality. Going into space is going to cost lives, but that will not stop us. It never stopped human's before. The bottom line will be that whoever risks the high stakes game first will dominate the solar system as thoroughly as Britain did in the age of exploration. And the future 'superpower' need not even be the US or the USSR. It could just as easily be Japan or Europe or India: whoever takes the big risks will take it all. And that is as it should be. The meek will inherit the earth, because the rest of us will have left for the stars.
space@ucbvax.UUCP (01/10/86)
In article <8601080922.AA17872@s1-b.arpa> you write: >stopped human's before. The bottom line will be that whoever risks the high >stakes game first will dominate the solar system as thoroughly as Britain >did in the age of exploration. And the future 'superpower' need not even be >the US or the USSR. It could just as easily be Japan or Europe or India: >whoever takes the big risks will take it all. And that is as it should be. >The meek will inherit the earth, because the rest of us will have left for >the stars. Just a historical note: Britain did not dominate the earth in the age of exploration, Portugal and Spain did that. Britain dominated in what I would call the age of colonization, though that may also be incorrect. Ed Biagioni decvax!mcnc!unc!biagioni seismo!mcnc!unc!biagioni