And yet there you are, stuck with the contrasting levels of religous belief between scientists in the UK and India. It's almost as if atheism is irrelevent to pursuing a career in science. Of course that's correct.

Unless it a) is not an actual increment in safety, and b) is not the only imposition the FAA makes. There's also c) the estimate is a wild underestimate of the true cost (the FAA has an incentive to underestimate cost). Given that the air carriers are complaining so much, I think the FAA is probably low balling the cost and maybe exaggerating the benefit as well.

Look at some videos of Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Their suits would weigh about twice as much on Mars, but aside from that, it's pretty much the same environment.

The timing matters sure. I'll just note that the alleged cause precedes the alleged effect. That plus the correlation implies causation.

Why? Last I checked space science wasn't actually a high priority. This is a nuance that people routinely miss in my postings about manned space exploration. Keep in mind Keenmustard emphasized the value of science. In that light, then it matters what you use to get that science and on site humans have considerable advantage over current remote controlled robots in terms of scientific output for the dollars spent.

But if your goal is merely the appearance of doing scientific research, then robotics is the better deal since the ante is much smaller. You can throw something on the surface of Mars for a few hundred million dollars right now.

And that's fundamentally why surface-based lunar research stopped for forty years. There was nothing cheap you could do on the surface of the Moon that could look impressive after the Apollo missions.

I read through your essay. You spend way too much time talking about changing peoples' attitudes rather than concrete structural changes that would matter more.

For example, we already have part of the above. It turns out people are willing to borrow lots of money for an expensive education rather than get the cheap or free education. There's little difference in outcome between societies with free education and those with expensive educations.

And energy has been plentiful in the developed world for half a century or more. Same goes for opportunity through small businesses.

And housing isn't cheap because it isn't cheap to make or situate. The technology has to come about first in order for that to happen.

I'll just note that a lot of the obstacles to progress here come from your fellow utopianists who think that interfering with the above leads to their desired utopias. Perhaps you could all agree on the ideal approach (it'll only take forever, of course) while the rest of us build a nice society, which probably will include a substantial space-side presence?

Alternately, perhaps you could find a few perfect people who believe what you think needs to be believed, and implement a prototype of your desired society. If that turns out well, and it probably won't - be warned, then there will be a strong example for getting the rest of us to adopt the necessarily beliefs in order to implement your utopia.

That's a terrible risk diversity argument. There might be thousands or even millions of human generations before the next asteroid big enough to destroy human civilization on Earth. Taking fifty years to say, first develop the alleged "Star Trek" utopia wouldn't significantly change the risk for us.

Instead, I think far more mundane risks are better to consider. For example, there are routinely large economic downturns every ten to twenty years. A larger economy due to a space-side presence would help to smooth out the effects of such recessions.Or if there's a large war or disaster, there would be more resources available to help mitigate the harm.

Obviously, they don't provide a "killer ap" for space development, but there really isn't one over the span of a few human lifetimes except the opportunity to be at places that are completely alien to us on Earth and do things that haven't ever been done before.

The shiny side of the foil needs to be on the outside of the hat. The problem here isn't government intervention, rather a lack of same. The problem is corporate sociopathy and lack of standards. The standards should have been set up before anybody started building equipment. Where government fell down was not mandating that. Not a surfeit of regulations but a lack of them.

And had there been a monopoly there would have been no compatibility problems, but would have caused worse problems.

Indeed I did, but people who have invested in their worldviews have this nasty habit of only seeing what they want to see.

I didn't "find it wasn't". The bottom line on Apollo is that it was a national prestige projection which had scientific research as a lower priority. Despite that and various other constraints, such as the short time actually spent on the Moon, they did enough research to shut down all unmanned surface exploration by the entire world for forty years.

Trademen were paid in pounds, gentlement in guineas.

Are you announcing that the UK is giving the Falklands to Argentina?

The line holds.

Indian scientists significantly more religious than UK scientists

Not asking isn't the same as not making an evaluation. I'm also somewhat amused by the intimation that Hindus don't discuss religion. They certainly do evangelize.

What makes Hinduism so "inclusive" and syncretic is incorporating external religious figures or practices into Hinduism. Unfortunately this tends to distort the incorporated figure beyond recognition. The "Jesus" that is incorporated by many into Hinduism is not the same Jesus of Christianity. They are incompatible.

I think you are overstating the prominence of atheists as a component of the Hindu faith community.

Neither a plane ticket to India nor speaking with educated Indian atheists is necessary to understand social religion, or state religion. It's something that has been around a while.

"They will hold to an outward form of godliness but deny its power." - 2 Timothy 3:5

How widely do you think that Hindus accept their ritual without belief as Hinduism? I doubt it is universal. All they really are is atheists performing socially accepted rituals.

Hindu fundamentalists vs. Hinduism: Column