I would not trust a vanilla ksp player to pilot a rocket, an RSS/RO/Principia player on the other hand

We could get one of those big wine presses, dress it up like a rocket and put the ultra rich on there 'ok everyone hold on tight, you'll be blasting off to that super exclusive space hotel as soon as soon as you press that big red button...'

We can spend the remaining money on public services and social infrastructure.

He wants to go to Mars. Hopefully he will stay there. And run out of air.

It takes a lot of effort and nuance to pass a good idea. It only takes one shithead (republican) flinging poop to muddy the waters, so it's incredibly hard to pass good legislation.

You need like 65 Democrats to even have a chance, but that will be very hard since R voters are dumb as bricks and if Trump didn't wake them up to their stupidity, nothing will.

Personally I disagree, I think the Liebercrats have mostly died off, the tenor of the debate within the modern democratic party has almost completely become "just a public option or complete wipeout of private medicine?"

Personally I think the best first step is just removing the age floor on Medicare. You're eligible soon as ya come out the womb. The only other change you'd need to make immediately is mandating that doctors accept it if they want to remain licensed to practice.

Which is Romneycare.

They had a supermajority and they still wouldn't do anything but pass a Republican bill.

Biden has consistently shown himself willing to change his position on almost any matter as long as his colleagues and constituents show it too.

2008 had a lot regular Democrats spooked about big bad single payer. With younger representatives he'd definitely be on board when the will starts showing.

Nope, even conservativer Dems than the one we wrangle over today refused to get on board with the filibuster proof majority so long as the public option was still included

I guess that's okay... I guess...

Poor man’s Robosuck?

Not because they're rich, because they waste their money on this sort of thing rather than using it to do anything helpful.

It's hardwired in humans or even just all primates. We're sensitive for relative differences in earnings and wealth and will react rather violently when certain limits are exceeded.

It's why there were debt jubilees, noblesse oblige or even just high taxes on big income, but modern rich feel this does not apply to them anymore.

They used that one already, all promising to give away most their fortune but mysteriously are all richer than they ever have been...

I don't really wish them death though, there was a chap with a much better idea actually - he helped the former emperor of his country to learn the importance of hard work and community spirit which allowed him to live happily as a garder.

Well, the DNC absolutely kneecapped Bernie when he was running against Hillary. I mean, we literally have the emails to prove it.

Against Biden, the issue wasn't the DNC as much as it was Elizabeth Warren refusing to consolidate the liberals behind Bernie as the moderates consolidated behind Biden. The final nail in the coffin was the prominent black leader who thew his support to Biden and handed him a critical victory in one of the southern states. This always annoyed me deeply, because Bernie was literally out there getting arrested to fight for their civil rights while Biden was on the wrong side of the busing civil rights issue.

Oh well. At least Bernie dragged Biden much farther left than he would have been.

I don't think it's a generational thing. Whatever corruption kept Biden from doing single payer healthcare will also stop younger presidents from doing it.

Bernie was a beneficiary of the DNC fuckery. They wanted an "unhinged commie" to scare the base into line behind Hillary.

The reality is America won't go actually progressive until the world is dead.

You win again gravity!

"Hi there, Zapp Brannigan, motel 6 captain extraordinaire. You may have heard of me."

I think if you kill yourself and your offsprings, you're still considered for the Darwin award.

SpaceX has significantly reduced lift cost

No they haven't. Musk keeps lying about that as he lies literally about everything else, but they haven't reduced cost as they change pretty much the same as others.

There are also still MANY tech hurdles to overcome as well.

0ceangate 2: Space, The final frontier

We don't need to listen to NASA...we wanted to do things differently.

I'll take my chances in space thanks.

Has someone been watching SFIA?

Yeah, in most situations you'd be correct. Short of the entire biosphere getting vaporized(basically only possible from a rouge asteroid or from a superweapon like a nichro-dyson beam), Earth will always be more hospitable than almost any other body in space.

The exception to that is that you can make habitats that are custom-tailored for life. If defense is your goal, in theory you can shield an o-neill cylinder from anything except black holes and neutrino beams(possibly dark energy beams as well, I don't know). Unlike Earth, which would be very difficult to shield from a relativistic kill missile, unless they are less than a couple light-hours away, you can simply slightly alter your course randomly and that will prevent any targeted weapon from being able to hit you.

Guided weapons can be taken out by the fact that they have to be slower and have much more complex machinery. A simple perimeter defense machine gun(which you will have anyways for macro-meteorite removal) should be enough to take out the guidance systems.

That pretty much only leaves area attack weapons. You'd have to custom tailor your defense to each type of weapon, but I can't think of any you couldn't defend against. For example:

Biological weapons are no threat, your atmosphere and water systems are scrubbed anyways.

Massive nuclear bombs are most harmful due to their radiation and magnetic fields in space. But you're likely to have your habitat surrounded by your water supply to shield from cosmic rays. The magnetic field can be removed as an issue by having the hull made of superconducting material, as space is cold enough to keep several current superconductors operational.

Psychological weapons can be avoided because your entire station is a faraday cage, your enemy has no way to propagate information you don't want inside it.

But if we wrecked Earths environment, doesn't that mean we'd have the same issues there? No, not really. Your station can much more easily be climate controlled. Excess CO2 can be scrubbed for fertilizer and air, or just jettisoned from the station. Heat management is as simple as controlling the stations albedo and available surface area for radiation.

Keeping a space station running is way easier than keeping all of earth running. Even when scaled up to the size of Earth, it's wildly unlikely you will be dealing with fossil fuels on the scale Earth is. The biggest issue on the station will be biodiversity and food chain mangement. We don't know how a ton of vital critters react to space or differential gravity, so it's pretty likely we will have to alter species to adapt them to the station. My personal favorite examples are spidercrabs that magnetically walk around the outside hull in the vacuum of space in order to repair the hull. My second favorite is wifi-bees that use the same algorithm as your Roomba to methodically pollinate all the flowers. My least favorite is the flesh eating bacteria that we will have to make to deal with all the dead biomass.

Edit:also you can't defend against vacuum decay unless you are willing/able to wrap your station in dark energy. But if you can do that, you can protect against any weapon, flat out. Because that allows you to causally disconnect yourself from the rest of the universe, basically like a pocket dimension.

If we were any good at making habitats we wouldn't have these problems in the first place.

Ok but don't people living in Syria and the USA deserve healthcare? Shouldn't all humans get food, shelter and medicine when there is clearly the resources to ensure we all have those things?

Everytime I see memes like this it always makes me laugh how america-centric people's positions are. Can the counties that already have healthcare enjoy space travel without septics moaning about their country, lol.