Futuof Space Colonization (And why do we always keep going into politics and economics?)

With all due respect, the USSR was defeated in the cold war by the US.
In fact, the democracies have won all the big wars and most of the small
ones in the twentieth century. The vast majority of hardware, and all of
the people, in space today was put there by democracies. All of the
richest countries in the world are fairly democratic. Democracy is,
therefor, demonstrably stronger than dictatorship. Currently, all of
the major powers, except China, are more-or-less democratic (if you
don't believe in Russian democracy, note that the Russian president
Putin won the most votes in the last election, unlike the US president
Bush who lost by 500,000 votes and moved into the White House anyway).

On Thursday, May 30, 2002, at 02:45 AM, Ryan Healey wrote:

> True. Undemocratic governments do tend to have their leadership lasting
> longer.
>
> Whether they can compete with democracies remains to be seen but it's
> quite
> likely. Afterall the USSR managed to beat the US into space and if it
> weren't
> for all the problems they had with their moon rocket they could have
> beaten the
> US to the moon.
>
> --- Lucio_de_Souza_Coelho wrote:
>> Only democratic governments. In China, for instance, I would guess
>> that the
>> policy for the ongoing space program will last as much as the current
>> leadership of the country - and that duration is not limited by
>> elections.
>>
>> (...)
>> Lucio Coelho
>

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect and
deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html