| Monday
January 29, 2007
Subject: Letter from England
The Sunday UK News:
Conservative comment on Labour's patriotism. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6307217.stm>
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Observer/politics/story/0,,2000512,00.html>
The cash for honours scandal. Blair's
involvement? <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6307073.stm>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/28/nhons28.xml>
Prison overcrowding crisis. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6306161.stm>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/28/nreid28.xml>
<http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2192984.ece>
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Observer/politics/story/0,,2000610,00.html>
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2569856,00.html>
Students now required to declare parent's degrees
so they can be discriminated against.
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/28/ndegree28.xml>
Spy poisoning story. <http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2192982.ece>
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/28/wlitvin28.xml>
EU pork barrel politics. Not particularly surprising,
given the UN track record.
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/28/weu28.xml>
Muslims urged to reject un-Islamic vaccinations. <http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article2193012.ece>
British Library to start charging. <http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2192972.ece>
Fudge, hope and charity. <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2569864,00.html>
Commentary:
During the week, I discussed alienation and anomie
with a liberal English colleague of my age. He told me that things had been
much worse before Thatcher came in and swept the place out. While he doesn't
like Thatcher, he does grant her that. The mechanisms of alienation don't
appear to be as clear-cut as the simple influence of modern capitalism--it
is more people's loss of control over their own life. Capitalism can have
that effect, but so can a class system that becomes frozen and so can the
misuse of power to exploit people who cannot defend themselves.
Targets: The UK has a very low auto accident rate, but
sky-high pedestrian and bicycle fatality rates. The underlying problem is
that the fatality rate for pedestrian accidents goes from 20% when the car
is doing 30 mph to 50% at 33 mph, 70% at 35 mph, and 90% at 40 mph, and
although the standard urban speed limit is 30 mph, UK drivers customarily do
35-38 when the road is clear. That is then aggravated by the fact that most
UK drivers do not respect the pedestrian's or bicyclist's legal priority
once in the road at an intersection. As usual, the Government has set a
*target*--for cutting the pedestrian fatal accident rate in half over the
next three years. There isn't enough time for redesign of the road system,
so the police have been tasked with *enforcing* the urban speed limit. To
avoid ticketing everyone all the time, the police have been approaching this
very gingerly, and are now being pushed by the Government to raise the
pressure.
I usually commute by bicycle, but I also appreciate
the driver's side of the problem. The mobile speed cameras used for
enforcement are usually sited where they have good visibility on urban roads
on segments designed for a maximum speed of 40 mph, and not at the locations
with the most serious problems. (I can attest to this from experience.) The
long-term solution would be redesign of the roads so that 35-40 is no longer
a comfortable speed, and the raising of the crosswalks and bicycle paths at
intersections to force the cars to give way, but that will require money the
Government is unwilling to spend.
-- Harry Erwin, PhD, Program Leader, MSc Information
Systems Security, University of Sunderland.
<http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw> Weblog at:
<http://scat-he-g4.sunderland.ac.uk/~harryerw/blog/index.php>
[Emphasis added by JEP] Ye gods. Ye
flipping gods.
==========
Subject: Viet Nam War Jokes (I
am a paid scubscriber)
Dear Dr Pournelle
I think that a better joke, is one that was popular
amongst the advisors when I served there. I've also told it to people who
fought against me. They also found it appropriate.
"America is loosing the War because they are trying to
drag Viet Nam kicking and screaming into the Twentieth Century. The
Communist are winning because they are content to merely drag Viet Nam into
the Nineteenth Century."
Now my perspective on Viet Nam is different from most
for several reasons.
1) I served in Viet Nam USN (PO-2) attached to TF-116
(Mekong Delta)
2) I am retired military (SSG Army National Guard)
3) My wife of 34 years is Vietnamese
4) I actually spend more time in Viet Nam these days than I do in the US
5) I actually have 21 semester hours of Vietnamese language credit on my U
of Maryland (Far East Division) transcript.
What I find most interesting about the Viet Nam War
these days is how thoroughly we seem to be winning the peace.
Sam
"The state which separates its scholars from its
warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by
fools," Thucydides.
Indeed. The Viet Nam War was not a mistake; it was
a campaign of attrition made necessary by the ultimately successful strategy
of Containment. We had no interests in Viet Nam per se other than denying
the South as expansion territory; had the North Viet Namese not been
Stalinist (and later Soviet) clients, it wouldn't have mattered too
much to us who controlled the old provinces of Tonkin, Anam, and Cochin
China; and once communism ceased to be a world threat (ceased so thoroughly
that there is a generation and more who never understood that it WAS a world
threat, and many of those who now seem so bold cringed at thought and
blubbered that it was better to be Red and Dead, and better to live on our
knees than die on our feet).
America can be a good friend. Had we merely toppled
Saddam and got out, who knows what might have hapened in Iraq? But we will
never know now. We are good at winning peace. So much better that it's
amazing how many seem to prefer war when it is not in our interest.
============
Subject: Statement from someone serving in
Afghanistan regarding troop increase
Jerry,
I can't pass along who this came from, but I can vouch for it's
authenticity with 100% certainty. It was written by a field grade officer
serving in Afghanistan as an open letter to his peers.
Please do not use my name as that could compromise the source. My
apologies if it's not in an easily quotable format if you choose to publish
it.
---begin quote
I felt the need to express some thoughts in honor of all our troops who
just learned they'll be serving another 4 months here. I feel the same for
the troops in Iraq, but since I know Afghanistan best, I'm focusing on our
troops here.
3,300 US troops will be extended in Afghanistan for another 4 months
after having already served a one-year tour.
Strategically speaking, these US troops continue to set the example for
the rest of the world. The 36 other nations who have had some role in
Afghanistan should see this commitment by US troops and choose to share the
burden. If they do not, then they should not be listed among our closest
allies.
The Taliban, who have proven to be persistent against all odds, should
continue to feel the force of NATO breathing down their necks with an eerie
omniscience uncommon to earthly mortals. We have proven that we can defend
ourselves while still providing aid and comfort to the government and
citizens of Afghanistan. We do this while allowing full autonomy and freedom
of governance to the Afghan leadership and people. Has such a monumental
task ever been accomplished by so few in such a short amount of time?
Iran, who continues to attempt to influence and control the region, will
now be rooted out and revealed for the troublemakers they have been.
Contrary to their claims, the Iranian government has been stirring up
trouble by funding the terrorists, supplying them with arms and
intelligence, and coordinating their movements. This behavior only works
against them and their future is very bleak indeed.
Pakistan has finally gotten the message that they must do everything in
their power to gain control of their side of the border. The lawlessness and
unrest that exists within the western Pakistani provinces has fueled the
insurgency into Afghanistan. Only recently has Pakistan begun to take
serious steps to gain control of the area, but even their efforts have been
"one step forward, two steps backward." Most of our troops will be based
along the Afghan border with Pakistan, and the greater number of troops can
only bolster Pakistan's resolve to continue to secure their own side (with
or without NATO intervention).
Personally speaking, of course, the extra time away from family and
friends will be very tough on our troops. All the strategic victories in the
world do not erase the absence of a father during the birth of his child or
the absence of a mother during an important event in her child's life. These
troops risk everything just by showing up for work and doing their duty. The
quote I've heard most often around Camp Eggers is, "Let's finish this now so
my son or daughter doesn't have to come back here in 5 or 10 years and
perform this same mission!" Among the pain of prolonged separation, there's
a sense that we're nearing the point where the momentum of our efforts will
carry this nation out of the dark ages and into a time of prolonged
prosperity.
Most troops fully support and take great pride in the mission we've been
given and respect the leaders who gave it to us. Many are confused by the
media reports that overlook our success and instead focus on body counts and
the fog and friction common to any armed struggle. The media fails to
capture the context that never before have 37 nations come to the aid of a
struggling nation and achieved so much in such a short time to give this
nation new hope. We cannot be omniscient and solve all the world's problems,
but in this remote corner of the world, the generous nature of humanity
shines bold and true in the generous sacrifice of the men and women of NATO,
led primarily by the United States military.
---end quote
==========
“I say we just let them go and we do this ourselves.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/world/middleeast/25haifa.html?
_r=4&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
- Roland Dobbins
============
And continuing a discussion
on the lessons of Viet Nam:
Here's Fred On Everything , column 346, telling other
nations how to lose wars:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Vegetius.shtml
<<
(10) Insist that the US military never loses wars.
Instead, it is betrayed, stabbed in the back, and brought low by
treason. For example, argue furiously that the US didn’t lose in Viet
Nam, but won gloriously; the withdrawal was due to the treachery of
Democrats, Jews, hippies, the press, most of the military, and a
majority of the general population, all of whom were traitors. This
avoids the unpleasantness of learning anything from defeat. Further, it
facilitates a focus on controlling the press, who are the real enemy,
along with the Democrats and the general population.
>>
All right, the cop is not necessarily an expert on
military history. But this does prove that you're walking against the wind
here.
Noam Chomsky agrees with you. According to him, the
Vietnam war bankrupted the Vietnamese, so they had to play by World Bank
rules, and this successfully ended 'the threat of a good example'. So to
him, the USA won the Vietnam war.
So who's right? Fred and most of the world, or you and
Noam?
Paradoctor
I take it that you have not read Strategy of
Technology.
Nor am I sure of your point here. If you are
insisting that the US suffered a terrible military defeat in Viet Nam you
are of course and indeed walking with the wind. That mayor may not make you
correct, but proof by repeated assertion and appeal to the general public is
fine for politics, but not so good for analysis.
Fred makes some valid points, but being Fred,
insists on throwing in every possible argument when writing his polemics.
The facts of the case are easily seen. In 1972 South Viet Nam, with the aid
of the US (but with few US casualties; the aid was materiel and air support
of a level similar to what we applied in the Balkans under Clinton) utterly
destroyed an invasion from the North of armored corps level strength
employing World War II numbers of tanks and trucks and artillery. It takes a
very strong bias to call that a defeat for the US. To any rational person
destroying a 150,000 man invading force and capturing or destroying an
armored corps looks like victory.
In 1975 a resupplied North Viet Nam sent a similar
sized force south. The US did not participate: no air support, and materiel
aid of, and I am not making this up, 20 cartridges and 2 hand grenades per
ARVN soldier. Viet Nam accordingly and predictably fell. No rational person
would have predicted a similar outcome. Since the United States did not
participate in resisting this flat out invasion from the North, how is this
a defeat for the United States armed forces? WE DID NOT FIGHT. That was a
political decision. Had we fought and lost you could call that a military
defeat, but it takes twisted thinking to say that the Army was defeated when
it was not fighting.
As to Chomsky's remarks, I pay little attention to
him so this is the first I have heard. I have no objection if he gets things
right once in a while, but I fail to see how his views about the World Bank
are relevant here other. Surely you are not seriously suggesting the
opposite?
I realize that most people do not want to take
responsibility for betraying an ally with the result that the dominoes fell,
the Killing Fields of Cambodia became a shadowy horror no one wants to
recall, and we were faced with the nightmares of reeducation camps and the
courage of the boat people. It is easier to blame the army for failing in
Viet Nam than it is to accept the fact that the American people and their
Congress betrayed an ally and thereby condemned millions to death and
torture.
As to Fred's tirade, I do not understand what the
Jews had to do with any of this, and I don't know too many people who
suggest that we ought to use the lessons of Viet Nam as justification for
controlling the press or suppressing the Democrats. I would have thought
that rational people trying to learn from history would first be careful to
get their history straight.
You can prove anything if you make up your data.
You can draw any lessons you like from history if you ignore all the
inconvenient historical facts. You may learn from good history but you learn
little from bad history.
And it is not good history to say that the US armed
forces lost a war they were no longer fighting when their last engagement in
that theater was an unalloyed victory. We had much to learn from Viet Nam;
one lesson was that conscript armies are not good at long campaigns of
attrition (and Containment was necessarily a war of attrition). The result
was the new model all volunteer military, which showed its abilities in the
First Gulf War and did so splendid a job that it was assumed that it could
do anything it liked in Mesopotamia. But that is another story for another
time.
Fred's polemics are always entertaining. Sometimes
they are on target.
And by coincidence this was in today's mail:
I went through ROTC 1962 - 66, going on active duty in
1969 and serving in South Vietnam in '70 and '71.
I believe my ROTC training was excellent, with good
emphasis on guerrilla operations and insurgencies. There was frequent
reference to Mao's book on how an insurgency should be conducted. That book
was not directly part of the curriculum, but I did read it and Che's, too,
and our curriculum covered the book material - which, after all, was more
about philosophy than tactics, anyway. We were taught that there were
advantages and disadvantages to each side. Among the advantages on the
guerrilla side were that they generally chose when and where to fight,
blending back into the local population when things got too hot. Primarily
for this reason, insurgencies take years to put down. If conditions are not
favorable, the guerrillas don't come out to fight. But if they don't come
out to fight from time to time, they lose the popular support (or control
over the local population) they have to have to succeed, and eventually
cease to matter. So successful counter-insurgencies require times on the
order of a decade or more to succeed. I was taught that no insurgency ever
triumphed by guerrilla tactics alone. That is, winning eventually required
conventional battle. (I saw Lawrence of Arabia during this period, and
enjoyed it enough to read Lawrence's book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I
realized when I read of his illness prior to the attack on Aqaba that his
description of how the Arabs should fight the Turks was very nearly a
description of Mao's tactics, just not set out as five principles. I've
since seen that Mao read Lawrence's book prior to writing his own book, and
was influenced by it.)
This I was taught in something on the order of 100
hours of classroom instruction, which covered considerably more than
guerrilla warfare.
I was therefore surprised, then puzzled, then
dismayed, and finally disgusted to listen to press questions of the
generals, and press reports. After some battle in which the VC or North
Vietnamese were defeated, the press would ask General Westmoreland (or some
other military figure) if this result meant we could see the light at the
end of the tunnel. The general would hedge, while allowing that the victory
was important. The reporter would ask again if the battle victory meant the
war would be over shortly. More hedging, because the general knew full well
that putting down an insurgency, especially one actively supported by a
hostile force likely to retain a base free from invasion, would require many
years. More pestering. Finally the reporter would get the general to allow
as how improvement was significant and therefore the magnitude of the
hostilities was likely to be greatly reduced in another few years.
Then the reporter would emphasize that the military
was optimistic about the conflict being essentially over, and a victorious
US being able to pull out, within another couple of years. I decided that
the media reporters were either stupid and ignorant, in which case they
should not be allowed to have all that much to say to the public, or they
were intentionally attempting to distort what they were reporting. I suppose
that many of them were the former, but surely those at the tops of their
profession were neither stupid nor ignorant.
If I could learn and be taught in such a short time
the keys to winning an insurgency, from either side, why couldn't the
reporters learn the same? Why couldn't they then use some of that knowledge
to help the public understand? Instead they all seemed intent on coercing
admissions and controversial statements from the authorities, at least some
of whom must have been honorable people not trying to put anything over on
anyone. Now we read about how the US military did not understand guerrilla
tactics, and therefore fought the wrong war. I wouldn't say the US military
made no mistakes in Vietnam, far from it, but any mistakes made were
certainly not for lack of understanding guerrilla tactics. Heck, we had a
lot to do with formulating those tactics.
Just read British reports from the times of the US
Revolution! Our military in Vietnam was severely restricted in cutting the
supply of arms and troops to the enemy, possibly at least in part for good
political reasons. Efforts to isolate the population from guerrilla forces
by relocation were reported in the press as deportation of peasants from
ancestral lands of many generations. In spite of these and similar US
handicaps, and in part because of the losses of the Tet Offensive, the Viet
Cong had largely been eliminated as a threat by the time I arrived there.
Our "incursion" into Cambodia had so weakened the North Vietnamese forces
that we were able to return nearly all the combat troops to the US, leaving
behind mostly supply and liaison forces. As you have pointed out, the first
assault by the North Vietnamese was handily defeated, with the second
succeeding because we removed all support.
Now many folks take it for granted that our military
mistakes caused us to lose in Vietnam. Many pundits and politicians talk
knowingly about "another Vietnam" without bothering to characterize the way
in which they see a similarity. Politicians especially like
emotionally-loaded but imprecise phrases.
It's all very discouraging....
Michael D. Biggs
Mao lays out the strategy in great detail. We have
a good bit of history of irregular warfare, from the Spanish resistance to
Napoleon to the South American wars of liberation, the British campaigns in
North America, our own experience in the Philippines, Lawrence and Mao,
etc., but it does not seem to form part of the curriculum in military
history. As Mr. Biggs says, he could learn all this in a few months.
Francis Hamit tells us that MI didn't learn these
lessons, probably because it was so compartmented and obsessed with security
and rejecting infiltration that no parts of MI ever talked to each other.
This has always been a disastrous policy. The reason Intelligence
organizations must be concerned with secrecy is the protection of sources.
Protection of data is insane.
I recall in 1964 Goldwater suggested we bomb the Ho
Chi Minh Trail in Laos. Lyndon Johnson immediately responded that this was
trigger happy and a terrible idea. As I listened to Johnson in my office in
San Bernardino I was looking at strike photos of our air strikes against
targets on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. They were of course need to
know Top Secret. I kept wondering from whom this was a secret? Surely the
NVA knew we were bombing them? Surely they knew better than we did how
effective our strikes were? I could only conclude that the actual target of
secrecy was the American people.
In the latter stages we developed aircraft with 105
howitzers that could place the first shot -- first -- with a 20 foot CEP at
a slant range of 10,000 yards. The enemy never knew what hit him, or where
the bombardments came from. The effect was devastating. These were used in
the 1972 battles. Of course we were not going to give such weapons the the
South Vietnamese, which is the effective answer to the question "didn't they
have their own air force?" Such questions are seldom thought through.
========
Subject: RE: Rehashing the end in Vietnam
The point to be made here is not whether we won or
lost in Viet Nam. The point is that We (the People) let ourselves be
manipulated by the press into accepting at face value something that may or
may not have been fact and in doing so, allowed ourselves to desert an ally
who we had promised to defend; And we are getting ready to do it again.
(Wasn't there a saying at one time something along the
lines of, "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it")?
One of the results of Viet Nam, among others, was an
Army that was composed of losers, who smoked pot and did drugs and could not
have defended Western Europe let alone beat the next largest army in the
world, at even odds, while attacking them in a fortified position (Desert
Storm). I know, I joined that army when it began rebuilding and it took a
fortune and 10 years of work. We do not need that again. It is bad enough
when the army has incompetent generals. The only thing worse is to have a
competent army with incompetent civilian direction that sets them up for
failure and then, to save their worthless political careers, tells the
People and the army that the army is what failed. ** Beware the wrath of the
legions...
Patrick A. Hoage
Links to a mild alteration by Russell Seitz
===========
Subject: Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth
Hi Jerry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI
It's 15 minutes long. For those interested in the
education of their kids, it is well worth the time to have a look. There is
nothing in the video that would surprise you, I think, but it left my jaw
hanging.
What is interesting is how she points out math
tutorial books that she can purchase from Singapore that actually do teach
proper math. Why Singapore? Do the Asian's know something that the
American's have forgotten? (It's a rhetorical question).
- Paul
In case anyone missed it in View. This one is
important.
========
Forty years ago.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16833094/
- Roland Dobbins
===========
On Viet Nam:
Jerry,
No... After looking at some history sites, and
studying your replies, I understand your point and concede the merit of it.
I will confess to misunderstanding the nature of that
civil war. I had been thinking of the "civil' part of the war as the
conflict between the north and the south, as opposed to an insurgency in the
south that was encouraged and supported by the north. I gather that the
latter is the more appropriate characterization, given the history of the
region. I don't know if that is a common misunderstanding, or just the
unique product of my foggy memory. I was in high school for much of the war,
graduating in 1970, so I am sure that I didn't pay nearly as much attention
to the policy debates and details as you or some of your other readers did.
What I retain are mainly overall impressions of the conflict based on the
media coverage of the day. Your reality checks on this subject have
therefore been very educational for me.
I think it would be a surprise to most people who
lived through that era to learn that the Tet offensive ended the insurgency
portion of the conflict You say that the intelligence community was aware of
this. But was there much effort to sell this point of view to the American
public, to persuade them that this conflict was now more like Korea, and
therefore "winnable" in the sense that Korea was a win? I just do not
remember much of that. Perhaps distrust of the Government's official
optimism about the war had grown to the point that no reversal of opinion
would have been possible.
As I'm sure you know, giving and honoring of
commitments is a tricky thing for democracies
CP, Connecticut
You are not alone. Few seem to understand what
really happened in Viet Nam. We had won in the same sense that we had won in
Korea; stabilizing against infiltration and having built the South to
capability of resisting invasion provided we gave support. The press never
seemed to understand that, and Jane Fonda sympathizers didn't want to
understand. We abandoned our allies to the tender mercies of Tonkinese
invaders with communist ideology. Then the dominoes fell, as predicted, and
Pol Pot took charge in Cambodia. By then Fonda was concerned with slaughter
in Africa or somewhere.
============
Subject: Teacher salaries
Discussion on Charles Murray's "Aztecs and Greeks"
article prompted me to go looking for figures on the educational budget for
my state, which I found at
http://www.schools.utah.gov/default/FngrFacts.pdf. A bit of
number-crunching led to some interesting observations.
Utah's education budget is $2.5 billion annually, with
22,285 teachers paid at an average salary of $40K. 36% of the total budget
goes toward paying teacher salaries. The nation as a whole spends 65% more
per child on education, but the effect on teacher salaries is small ($45K is
the national average) since the money goes toward hiring more teachers.
(Student-teacher ratio drops from 22.4:1 to 15.9:1.) I'm not sure exactly
what happens to the other 64% of the budget, but it's obvious that if
teacher compensation were made a priority my state could afford to pay
teachers competitively with software engineers, presumably attracting better
teachers (and letting you fire the incompetent ones). The national figure is
the same--36% of the budget goes toward teacher salaries. Again, I don't
know where the rest of the money goes, but I hope it's worth the opportunity
cost.
"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk
nonsense."
~Max Wilson
I will let you guess where the majority of the
budget goes.
My first 8 grades were in schools with two grades
per room, 30 students per grade, and one two-year Associate of Arts "Normal
School" graduate teacher: a nun in grades 1-3, and farm wives in Capleville
grades 4-8. We all learned to read and do long division and take square
roots, we read Sir Walter Scott and Longfellow and Macaulay and Ruskin and
such, and got what would now be considered a splendid education. Note that
none of these were schools for bright people. St. Anne's was a lower middle
class parish school that admitted non-Catholics (my parents were Unitarian)
and Capleville was a consolidated rural school for farm children about half
an hour by school bus from where I lived. None of those teachers was
overpaid.
I did go to a school for college bound after 9th
Grade; but not before.
=========
Subject: Populating the next star system -- Alpha
Centauri
Dr Pournelle
Assumptions:
1. The Alpha Centauri (AC) star system lies 4.22 light-years from Sol.
2. AC A and AC B each have habitable life zones. (AC A is a G2 star, like
Sol. AC B is a K1 star.)
http://homepage.sunrise.ch/homepage/schatzer/Alpha-Centauri.html
3. A human generation ship accelerates constantly at 1 mm/sec/sec until
turnover at the half-way point and thereafter decelerates constantly at
1mm/sec/sec.
The duration from launch to arrival in the AC star
system will be just over 400 years. At turnover, the ship's velocity is 0.02
C.
I think it likely that the majority of the ship's
population would choose to remain shipside rather than drop down onto new
planets. This means that if the ship could be refueled at AC, it could
continue to another star system after an interlude of refueling -- say
another few hundred years. During that time, the ark -- for that is what it
truly is -- could nuture the development of planetside colonies.
The point is that one ark will populate more than one
star system. It may not be necessary for each system to launch two arks.
Of course, the politics and history of the ark before,
during, and after the interstellar voyage are unpredictable, being in the
realm of sociology rather than physics. But they would seem to provide very
rich ground for speculation; that is, science fiction stories.
Sincerely h lynn keith
As good a scenario as any.
==============
All,
A few entertaining photos of Niagara Falls back when
winter meant something.
http://flickr.com/photos/peter_schaeffer/369944906/in/set-798006/
http://flickr.com/photos/peter_schaeffer/369944901/in/set-798006/
http://flickr.com/photos/peter_schaeffer/369944897/in/set-798006/
http://flickr.com/photos/peter_schaeffer/369944890/in/set-798006/
Thank you
Peter
=============d
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