On Monday 07 Feb 2011 4:30:10 am Anish Mohammed wrote: > I do think the Counter arguments provided looks equally hand wavy. >
I agree. But the counter arguments are hardly complete. There is a lot more. In a very long article he ends up stating quite seriously and in equivalent words : "If my aunt had a dick, she would have been my uncle" and bases that conclusion of a series of false premises and inaccurate constructs. He looks at his dog, thinks the dog is his aunt and then says "If my aunt had a dick, she would have been my uncle" He imples that space exploration might not have occurred if not for the twin coincidences of madman wanting large rockets (Hitler) and madmen wanting ICBMs (USSR) - neither of which is true. From here he goes on to say: >Space travel has not proved nearly as useful to the human race as boys of my > generation were once led to believe, but it does have one > application—unmanned satellites—that is extremely lucrative to the civilian > economy and of the highest imaginable importance to the military and > intelligence worlds. What astounds me about this sentence is that it was the US that started a race for manned space exploration. Neither Hitler nor the USSR had anything to do with it - rendering the first 1/3rd of the article completely useless verbal diarrhea. To cut a long stoy short - ignoring reams and reams of facts mixed with pure fiction Einstein Stevensons says: >But none of the bright young up-and-coming economies seem to be interested > in anything besides aping what the United States and the USSR did years > ago. In fact this is complete nonsense. Most economies are uninterested in doing what the US did. What the USSR did was far more sensible - but, having roundly (and unfairly) cursed the USSR for something the US initiated, now he suddenly switches things around and lumps the USSR along with the US's faults. To top it all - the moron fills his article with questionable and irrelevant rubbish about rockets and ICBMs and says "Oh - all that is not important just look at oil spills" This fellow confuses "America" with "world". And tries to cover his ignorance and confusion with an ocean of irrelevant misinformation. shiv PS: I must not stop before countering that egregious "fourth paragraph" - which in fact was merely written to fill up space and contributes nothing to the purported subject of the article >Atomic bombs turned out to be expensive, dirty, controversial, and of > limited military use (it was difficult to find targets sufficiently large > to be worth using them on). So they might have fizzled out, were it not for > the fact that there just happened to be another victorious nation, > controlled by a dictator, every bit as evil as the V-2 maker, but not so > crazy, who insisted that his nation, the USSR, had to have atomic bombs > too. Moreover, the conditions existing in the USSR then were such as to > enable the development of that bomb in near-perfect secrecy. The United > States could only guess at what the Soviets were doing; and given the > stakes, they naturally tended to make the scariest guesses possible. The > military logic of nuclear warfare forced them to develop the hydrogen bomb. 1. "limited military use": Nonsense. The most powerful militaries have designed themselves around atomic weapons from the 1940s 2. (it was difficult to find targets sufficiently large to be worth using them on). So they might have fizzled out, : Utter rubbish 3. "there just happened to be another victorious nation, controlled by a dictator, every bit as evil as the V-2 maker, but not so crazy, who insisted that his nation, the USSR, had to have atomic bombs": its all Russia's fault 4. "Moreover, the conditions existing in the USSR then were such as to enable the development of that bomb in near-perfect secrecy." - and the Manhattan project a few years earlier was conducted in the full glare of media pubicity? Which planet does this idiot live on? 5. "The military logic of nuclear warfare forced them to develop the hydrogen bomb." ROTFLMAO! Balderdash. Neal Stephenson will bluff as and when he wants.
