ZetaX

That statement is logically just equivalent to "false". There is no paradox here, no insight, nothing. It's really just the equivalent of saying something that is objectively wrong. This is different from "this sentence is wrong" because that one is paradoxical not because it is wrong, but because it is self-referential (and thus neither true nor false). It is also different from time traveling paradoxes because those are not focused on being true statements (i.e. "time travel exists") but on it being non-intuitive (most of them show that time travel is impossible _if_ we also assume certain things, e.g. they leading to the same universe and there being nothing to prevent us to enact the actual paradox; a much weaker statement than "time travel does not exist").

And it does that by encountering aliens¿ It is very likely that traveling to mars won't solve a single one of these issues except maybe material science. Seriously, that's now way to justify spending on NASA.

Really... because that worked so well in the past... If you are so much against big government then you should _also_ be against money for NASA; let private companies do that. There it is at least a far-fetched possibility, as there is some money to get very long term.

You can want as much adventure as you want: the money for that won't come from nowhere. The extra budget for manned missions is indeed somewhat easier to sell to the masses, but what is the point of getting ten times as much money to do the same amount of actual science¿

So you think space exploration is worth about as much as all other research combined¿... Like, say, cancer treatment, vaccinations, genome research, material science, ecology, climate, ...

I think this is a very naive view on economics. If that were correct, then all governments should (and would, assuming they are not completely stupid) start producing lots of [random things]. Obviously, they don't. Why¿ Because that money the government pumps into it does not come from nowehere. It comes either from reserves or from the people (by taxes, cuts or inflation). The actual argument, if it exists, is much more complicated.

Then it is slow (as I said) and so again no problem.

It's not like the way to reach ISS is to shoot it into an orbit which will hit ISS at high speed, then slow down at the last second. At a point where collision is a possible scenario, the relative speed is already low.

When the space pen is all one can offer when talking about the things developed for space travel, then I say you have a pretty bad point. Even I could have come up with better ones than THAT. And if things are or will be developed otherwise, then the point of justifying space travel with it is pretty moot, isn't it¿

A agree that there are many possibilities. But half of them can be studied on earth equally well, and the other half sounds like things we might simply be able to put of for later. I am really not against space exploration in general as long as the results are worth the cost. If the total of the mission you mentioned is ~1 billion dollars then I am all for it. But the current estimates sound so much higher that I would prefer that money to go into other research (including space ones). Sorry, I didn't want to offend you, either. Full agreement there. But we are slowly getting better there, which is especially relevant as manned mars missions would also only start ten or probably more years from now. Sending people to the ISS, feeding them, giving them breathable air, ... are cheap in comparision to the same on mars or on the way there. The ISS is doing a lot of microgravity experiments that obviously are impossible to do on earth; we use humans, not (ro)bots because it is cheaper: we only need to send a few parts up there, the humans will then assemble them and do experiments. This is viable because sending things is relatively easy and the humans are there. If we would try the same with mars, then the traveling distance/time is enormous and the humans would need to be there for at least a decade, maybe more, for this to be viable. Which does not sound like what people are currently planning to do; it would also cost literally trillions (money again spent better otherwise, in my oppinion). Again agreed. Robots still being not the best thing ever was the reason why I mentioned that we could send hundreds of them instead of several humans. They may all be specialized, but 100 specialists can do a lot of research. Sending humans outside of LEO has similiar problems. They would not only need lots of space, food, water and energy (while bots only need the latter), but a similiar protection from radiation. Or we do "suicide missions" (then probably also skipping the return to earth), which seem off the table for most. But if a sane person agrees to do that, then I am totally fine with it; it at least lowers costs a lot, and as I said cost efficiency of the missions is essentially what I am concerned about. Please name some and explain why we would not have been invented otherwise. I don't see why this is an advantage. The "science edge" will always be somewhere, people will move there. In practicallity, the location will depend on the subject. Agreed, but the costs are still absurdely high.

I have no objections to that and even agree fully. I assumed this thread is concerned about the nearer future (say: up to 2050) and the current types of space flight. If space travel actually becomes as cheap as a flight to the other end of the world, then sure, we can and probably should do human space flights. Even pure tourism is fine, but it's a long way untill we will be there. Colonization is also a good goal and not only will probably happen, but also _should_ happen (how to build geodomes, space habitats, do terraforming are all useful skills; trying to make humanity more resistant to the largest ELEs [supernovae, the sund dying, ...] is also a possible goal). But as you said, that's pretty long-term (it is really hard to make accurate predictions, but beginning before 2100 sounds very sketchy). - - - Updated - - - I don't really get what you are talking about here. Humans are a single species to the fullest of the definitions. If there is one I am missing please point me to it. Umm, what¿

I see that it is not the argument of everyone here, as many here have a very naive, KSPesk, understanding on the ramifications. They are mostly thinking about "space is cool" and thereby simplifying everything to a point where it has no footing in reality. Reality is not a game. And you still have not mentioned any experiment that could not be done by a robot at least equally well. The only ones that were given last time where ones on effects on humans, and all those were perfectly testable in LEO (microgravity effects and such) or on earth (isolation etc.). Robots can do a lot already, saying that there are complex things that only humans can do is mostly an argument from ignorance. Dismissing someone by an equivalent of "that's just your oppinion" is a pretty bad behaviour in a discussion. The reason our mars rovers cannot do more is already mainly due to size/mass limits, not because we couldn't do better. With the money and mass restrictions of human mars expeditions we could send hundreds, if not thousands of Spirits and another bunch of Curiosities. And all of them significantly larger and more advanced (both by complexity and being newer) than their earlier counterparts.

I am going to repeat what I said last time this came up: there is simply no reason to send humans beyond NEO (probably even not beyond LEO). Everything farther away is best done by robots (e.g. researching planets/asteroids) or directly on earth (e.g. psychological effects of isolation or building geodomes). And this time: please don't respond with "arguments" that are just a very convoluted version of "space is cool". Yes, it is. Doesn't justify spending craploads of money on something of little scientific value that could have been done at 1/10th the price by robots or on earth.

That "having a release"-condition is not given in your sentence. If it were, your paradox would boil down to "X exists and doesn't exist". The answer for that is just "false" (but you may want to ask Wheatley). Just writing down obviously false statements is not a paradox. So the following is assuming we are not adding that: Sure, "will" means that it "must" release then. But that does not exclude the answer "never" at all. It follows by that first sentence that it also will never be complete. There is no problem in that and it doesn't contradict the second line at all; it even has the very same conclusion as that line ("never complete"). A more simplified version of your statement is "if X is red, then X is green". X being actually red cannot happen as that causes a nonsensical conclusion. But if X is green (or even blue or purple or ...) to begin with then there is no problem at all.

Unless you do weird things, all you will test is your CPU's arithmetics and maybe memory and busses. Why would you expect a purely arithmetical thing to test a GPU¿

You again did not get the point. We could probably simulate that plasma very well if we would have 10^100 times our computative power and the initial data while still only using our current knowledge of the laws of nature. Again: this simulation is not a conceptual or fundamental problem. We very obviously are not even close to such computative power (thus we still do plasma physics). But there is in theory nothing stopping us to simulate plasma at very high accuracy right now only using our current level of physics; it would be a waste of time and ressources to so, but very theoretically we could. Also, the argument for causality is supposed to be testable and then to be tested. It feels very tedious arguing this because every time I do not even repeat the most basic things of science (like testability) I get such response. Guys, try to understand the argument instead of attempting to debunk things for such reasons.

You are missing the point: a hypothesis thats involves a mechanic to explain how something happens (here: evolutionary based psychological reasons) is way more specific than a simple correlation. This is one of the accepted ways to distinguish causality from correlation. Additionally, I was only explaining there why the given statements are not contradicting what I said earlier. In this case because the initial argument had the same inadequacy you gave: only looking at correlations (which may be random, as the CO2 one likely is) instead of causalities. Surely we cannot model human minds at the level of us being able to fully predict what someone says. But similiarily, you could rightfully claim that we were never able to predict how 1000000 of atoms in a plasma will behave (even less a m³ of air); it's not that we are truly lacking the skill, we are just lacking computational power, data and time. It is not a fundamental problem/paradox where we don't know how to deal with it.

You are simplifying a lot here. I did not claim it is trivial, but our lack understanding is far away from being almost nonexistent: As an example, teaching abstinence is like teaching not to breath; sexuality is something deeply rooted in our nature as evolved beings whose predecessors needed to procreate. Look at other places than the US, Europe for example, where the standard in teaching is not abstinence but contraception; way less pregnancies there. That the US ... eds are often heavily influenced by religion, causing them to by nothing more than a version of "don't do it, it is evil". Similiar arguments work for your other examples. As I said, you just oversimplify and then claim we don't understand this at all; we actually understand it quite a bit.

We understand "us" pretty well; you can somewhat guess how persons react to things if you try. I don't see what you find unintuitive at child rearing. There also are paradoxes (even named ones I think) in collective behaviour of humans.

The usual usage of "paradox" suggests that this is the better definition: things we find very counterintuitive. That one fits even those that have an actual very precise answer, e.g. Arrow's paradox or Banach-Tarski's. From a scientific point of view, we are not trying to find paradoxes to be baffled by it, but to better our understanding of something. If time travel or quantum stuff sounds paradoxical, one maybe just doesn't understand it fully or correctly. And paradoxes allow us to see the limits of our understanding or reasoning, which then enables us to adapt and correct them.

NPOV does not mean that every side of an argument should be given equal representation. To even think one should is already a fallacy by itself. NPOV is intended to allow everything factual to be represented (still not equally: more evidence means more representation in general); it surely is not followed strictly, but not giving homeoquacks the banners is not one of them.

Sorry, but I don't get how this responds to what I wrote... You realise my post was about the masses, right¿ I was not talking about ideal scientists, but how the man on the street sees them and what he actually believes. They won't care about about what you wrote because, blatently speaking, they are too stupid or stubborn to realise. In other words, they will hear what they want to hear and only seek evidence that supports their view, however wrong or unfounded.

The problem is more in the mass believing in false experts and demagogues; most won't even google and/or will just believe the first person that a) claims to be an expert, agrees with their point of view. And if you look hard enough, you will find a self-proclaimed "expert" for almost anything. There are actually striking similiarities to religion in there.

Are you assuming the central body to be rotating¿ Otherwise I don't think this is true (the argument would be along the lines of: the invariance of everything under time reversal and symmetry of space shows that everything flies out again, the orbit being symmetric along an axis) and would thus be interested in more formal verfications.

We can partially simulate that on earth or in NEO; also, it is also part of where I said that I am not against long term colonization. Robots will at some point be able to do (even the life one). We could maybe even do right now if sending stuff to mars would not be very expensive. Just look at what curiosity can do already, and it's pretty small (yet rather large in comparision to earlier rovers). Mars is (rough guess) a tenth of earth's surface. It surely won't solve any overpopulation problem, even if we assume the very (!) hypothetical scenario where sending people to mars is cheaper than just building higher buildings on earth.