Sayonara

That's not actually true though, is it? Granted you do need the involvement of some third party at some point, but that's no different to the reproductive limitations of people in many heterosexual marriages, and nobody is telling them that they can't "marry". Even if it were true, procreation is not a precondition of marriage in any civilised country I can think of, so the point is fatally flawed in two respects. Fewer specious arguments pls k thx.

Pioneer, you have entered a new argument without responding to the questions I had about your previous post. Please show some grasp of forum etiquette and deal with the issues I raised.

This is the most pathetic attempt to justify discrimination I have seen for a while, yet sadly it seems to be pretty much the basis of the vast majority of anti-gay marriage sentiment. An "inhuman marriage"? You require a reboot. Are you also opposed to terrorists and war criminals getting married? Because of the political and legal structure of the time, not because they were of any particular colour. A weak argument, since the counter is simply "then why is it so important that we can't call our marriage a 'marriage'?" Are you saying that gay people who 'think' they are married are - if you will pardon the pun - out of their trees? If you are proposing that being gay makes one permanently delusional then I suggest you back that up, substantially and quickly. John said this already, but it bears reiteration: oh, the irony.

I'd also like to point out that Moontanman is making the same mistake as Lance, only on the order of a star system rather than a planet. The OP is asking about humanity millions if not billions of years into the future. On that timescale, even the resources of the entire solar system are not "almost unlimited". The risk of us over-developing our solar system to the point where we cannot make the jump to other systems is only marginally lower than the risk that we over-develop our planetside civilisation to the point where we cannot spread off-world. And the difference is only attributable to us learning from mistakes made during a successful run of that latter process. I suggest that you look into exactly what components and materials are required to construct even a simple spacecraft. Also consider while doing this that future technologies, although being largely based on current technologies, will likely require more complex resource investments. You might also want to look into how many Stop Work Orders are issued for space projects because the costs skyrocket (again, pun not intentional) way beyond what is reasonably proportionate for the mission. For example, the Pluto-Kuiper express was originally red-flagged by NASA at $650 million.

I agree, both with the timescale (as a minimum) and with the principle of establishing a practical and future-facing basis for operations now, with a technology that reduces energy requirments and increases payload mass per unit travel window. It is true that there are many abundances of elements to be found on Earth, but there are two issues here: Firstly, if we are so desperate as to invest the energy, R&D, and funds into a very difficult extraction process to winkle the last million tonnes of something out of the planet, then would this not be somewhat of an indicator that we are already royally screwed? Secondly, this reservoir of resources on Earth should be seen as a sort of emergency reserve, to be accessed only if strictly necessary (or even possible) if space mining turns out to take a lot longer getting established than we plan for. Because there are three realistic alternatives here: Stay on the planet, use the resources that are here, and eventually run out; Try to mine for materials in space, horribly mis-judge, and destroy our own resource pool; Invest the correct resources in the development of space mining operations for the whole planet, and source alternative resource pools off-planet for everything that is critical to our civilisation. Option 3 is obviously the most difficult to achieve. I would like to be optimistic about mankind's future, but with the current state of civilisation across our world I suspect that self-interest and resource partitioning will really work against most of the ways in which we might seek to spread out into the solar system. The only way I can see it working would be through commercial ventures, but this would of course be incredibly slow. Also I am not sure there are many corporations capable of sustaining such a massively high-risk and high-capital project.

I don't really see how explaining the problem in simple terms is the same as "obfuscating the issue". The issue IS the resource limits. As I have already stated in this thread there are time limits on the usuable volumes of key elements which we are already measuring in decades. And I only mentioned one or two of them. Everything you are proposing is possible, I am not arguing against that at all. But you have to take a step back and look at the massive scope of a long-term, highly resource-intensive project such as expanding into the solar system, and ask yourself who is going to put the capital into that project? How would such a doubtless controversial project survive the countless changes of administration and policy that would occur while it was being planned and run? Which nations will be involved, and what will their priorities be? Except the very realistic problem of not having one or some specific materials which you need to make the technology work, as I believe I might have mentioned once or twice already. How else do you imagine it will happen? Let's say the USA wants to start mining asteroids in 2040. Russia and South Africa have the last remaining stockpiles of platinum that the USA needs to complete fabrication of their mining drone swarm. But oh no, Russia and South Africa actually don't want to sell such a precious commodity to the USA just so that it can be blasted into space, probably never to be seen again; as it turns out they'd much rather put it into their domestic industries and keep themselves afloat for a bit longer. I imagine that would be the only sensible method, but you still have that magical step (2) in there which completely ignores the critical element of whether or not the beginning of operations actually can be established. In short, this argument is like trying to lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your own feet. On your first point there, precisely; I am NOT thinking ahead. I am thinking about the painful birth of the system, and the problems it may encounter. YOU are thinking about the grand new age of solar system resource farming, and hand-waving away the problems you don't want to hear about. I admire your vision, I really do, but you aren't being very realistic about the means humanity usually employs for deciding what is the best way to squander our precious resources. On your second point, I am not sure what you mean by telling me that it will not be necessary to put a "complete" infrastructure in place. Surely any system you have for retreiving materials is "the" infrastructure of the time? I did not think I had proposed any requirement for an all-or-nothing, solar system-wide mining operation. I don't really see how it makes any difference, since at the rate Earth consumes resources we might just as easily run out of critical elements after building one mining platform as we might after building a thousand. Until there is an actual plan behind this, using actual data for material abundance, and a specific technology tree designed, it is just an assumption. Some less kind people would probably put it in the "fantasy" box, seeing as you want it to be possible but don't know that it is. You're not making sense. What you are talking about is the growth and development of an infrastructure. I'm not talking about engineering problems; I'm talking about resource limits. You have to speculate to accumulate, and humans are not good at doing that on a planetary scale. It really isn't just a question of positive thinking; it's a question of what is and what is not possible, whether through the limits of what can be done technologically or the limits placed on our ability to fuel such a technological feat.

Don't you think this is a sort of "god of the gaps" argument? What you are saying is this: 1) Earth has limits on the useful extractable volumes of resources required for space expansion, 2) Something something something mumble cough cough, 3) Hey presto, a mining and recovery infrastructure throughout the solar system (or at least the interesting bits) which plugs those resources gaps. While I don't doubt for a second that there will be abundant supplies of various elements and minerals throughout the solar system that will be very useful to us, we can't just make the assumption that they will ultimately be harvested. Consider what I was saying earlier: as time goes by, demand for the valuable materials with unique chemical properties goes up. Supplies go down. There is the very realistic possibility of crucial resources become so scarce that their paucity puts a block on the very technology we would need to mine them off Earth. This is what I meant by resources potentially placing a limit on space expansion, and that's even if we assume that everything we would need to harvest to keep expanding is actually where you expect to find it. In a way it's a kind of race: can we put the necessary infrastructures in place before the critical materials become too scarce, or develop new technologies which rely on relatively more abdundant alternatives? I didn't think you were a fan of speculation in these threads, but regardless I tend to agree that confirmation of rich off-planet sources of those elements is an intriguing bit of news which deserves an optimistic response. There is of course the issue of whether or not we can mine or otherwise extract the materials we are interested in, but at least for now we know they are there. Quite possibly. If there is one thing we have learned from the history of expansionist material capitalist societies, it's that someone will at least try.

Yes, but which one did he choose to start a thread for? That is my worry. I think we agree more than disagree on most other points, after those clarifications. I am glad to hear that. Part of my problem with this thread was that I asked what your agenda was very early on and you did not give a very compelling answer either way. I appreciate you denied having some kind of ulterior motive on several occasions, but that is not the same as explaining why you think this question of "natural order" need arise, or what significance you expect to derive from it. Hence my concern! I would suggest that the first step in determining if there is an order to be respected, would perhaps be devising some means of objectively showing that humans should not operate in ways for which their bodies are not adapted. I'll hazard that this would be quite difficult to demonstrate.

I think you are missing my point entirely. I am not defending against the claim that anal sex is more prone to disease transmission, but the idea that this -- backed up by "something in the universe, which may or may not be god, doesn't like it when you do it bumwise" -- is any kind of valid reason to suggest that people stop. Is that more clear? AtomXY does not ask the question about anal sex being more prone to disease transmission, except in the thread title. In his posts the actual content reflects a desire to see people stop having anal sex. This desire is ostensibly down to health reasons, but his rationale betrays an ulterior motive. If this were simply a discussion about the comparative likelihood of STD transmission in vaginal and anal sex, then we would agree that a condom should be worn and move on. In fact that has pretty much already happened. However, the main topic in this thread is the strange link between anal sex and AtomXY's nebulous universal "order". Well, yes. It's bordering on being a truism. But arbitrary anatomical comparisons can't be made against a backdrop of mythical universal order without some pretty compelling evidence. I'd be interested in hearing what you expect such a study would (or would not) show. But I have to ask, why does sexuality come into it? Anal sex is not exclusive to homosexuals. True, but you can dismiss a proposal that is made on the back of hand-waving and metaphysical quackery. I wasn't aware that there was a Unified League of All Homosexuals who have vetoed criticism of anal sex. Different people have different views, and you seem to be imprinting your own reaction to some of those views onto your responses to this discussion. Fair enough. FWIW, I agree that no group should be immune to criticism. However that comes with the caveat that if you admonish one group in particular for a certain activity, and ignore other groups taking part in the same activity, then your motives deserve scrutiny. It was not my intention to misuse statistics, nor to suggest that occurrence frequency can be used to downplay risks. What I was saying was that what's sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. As I said before, the only place he asks that question is in the thread title. In the O/P and subsequent posts it as almost taken as a given. He sums up his aims as "I basically just wanted to see if others would agree that there is some anatomical order that is better left respected", and characterises this unnamed agent as "some order in our universe" which he had previously described as 'not necessarily God'. Can you honestly say that does not prompt you to question his reasoning more closely? Nothing so vague. What I am saying is that his argument must be commensurate with his claim. Look at it like this: his claim is "our anatomy does indeed point to an order that is healthy and structured for us to follow." My response to this claim has been to ask why it was broached and discussed in a thread which deals with anal sex (whether mm or mf) as the only act which is deemed to work against this order. I think that the question as to what this shows of the OP's motives is a significant one that needs to be asked, and it should be asked regardless of whether some people think that an over-sensitive gay activist fringe gets its own way too much. I hope that clarifies my position!

Just because no such immunity exists, it doesn't mean that any criticism is "legitimate". Nor does it prohibit a robust response or any form of defence. In the same spirit as your statement, one can't simply hand-wave away a valid or sincere defence just by using the magic words "oh, you're whining because you think we're all biased." The door swings both ways, doesn't it? AtomXY has two problems here: 1) He is targeting one specific subset of all the people who practice the particular act he is opposing. He did shift the goalposts a little, but his very first post states "I believe that male and female bodies may actually be meant to be together as opposed to same sex couplings". By all means he is free to have an opinion on the health implications of anal sex, but when he starts to use that opinion as a masquerade for his objection to homosexuality -- especially when the rationale is so absurdly obtuse as "an order in the universe says so" -- then that is when people will quite rightly shout "hang on a minute..." 2) He is targeting one specific sex act out of all the dozens which have similar or worse health implications. If his concern is as noble as he says then people are going to very naturally hear a little alarm bell ringing when he decides only to crusade against a very specific act, one which he quite obviously believes goes hand-in-hand with homosexuality. Despite his claims that he has "experimented on both sides of the fence", if he had the faintest idea of the breadth of gay (mm, ff, and all manner of trans combos) sexual activities, or indeed straight sexual activities, or any of those which are enjoyed by people of all orientations, then he'd see immediately how ludicrous his proposition is. So then you will be advocating a ban on non-procreational sex, for health reasons, won't you? Seeing as how vaginal intercourse is the leading cause of STD transmission. Depends on the circumstances. Clearly if there were better things to argue about, I'd be arguing about those instead. If one directly relates your example to this thread, in terms of the argument structure, it's like asking me to defend the man who didn't wash his hands while everyone else around him is daubing excrement on each other. And you didn't answer my question. I expect that kind of thing from members like Traveler and Farsight, not you

So does that mean that you are or are not okay with people trying to slip under the abuse radar using "concerned for your health" as a cover story?

We aren't worried about a bias in the information; we're concerned about your motives. Or, more specifically, why you are targeting this particular sex act when the espousing of concerns for peoples' health and safety should, one would imagine, not be restricted to such an arbitrary scope. I'm guessing that happens less often than the 2% condom failure rate.

And on that note...

...and is therefore immaterial.

You are not being accurate; you are just making random statements which do not relate to the discussion. Simply saying "NOTHING has zero velocity!!!!" without even knowing what a reference frame is quite clearly shows to those who do know what they are that you have not got the faintest clue what you are talking about. I strongly suggest you learn about reference frames before you continue with this thread. You are not exactly being revolutionary or novel and you are going to end up looking like a complete nitwit if you don't sort yourself out.

Just because you can describe anatomy in terms of how different parts of it compare for different purposes, it does not follow that you can infer any kind of value judgment from that comparison. This is why your "substantial reasons" do not reinforce your argument. What, like fingering? Or maybe auto-erotic asphyxiation. Perhaps there is a special place in this order of yours for fisting. That's not an argument, it's a proposal. And it's a really weak one. People don't skydive because they are psychologically impaired and they don't drive on the freeway because they are emotionally damaged. Faulty assumptions = faulty conclusions. No it wouldn't, because that's something entirely different. Very good point. Or indeed anal sex, muah ha ha.

So you don't think that repressing the physical side of a relationship for no substantial reason might be in the least bit psychologically and emotionally harmful to someone, I take it? Yeah, I thought you might.

What you are trying to do here is impose arbitrary belief systems onto biological drives, and there is no place for them there. Let me ask you this: does this 'order' extend to non-procreational sex? Surely having a penis in a vagina goes against the order of things if it is not going to lead to a pregnancy. And don't even get me started on people wearing shoes and hats.

I think... ...that you should either explain what your agenda is or ask us the question that you really want answered.

Yes, there is something wrong there. You are doing all the work. Make them inscribe each other.

Key to map:

How do you reconcile an attempt to describe the universe from the ground up with the approach of using existing physical laws derived from observation of the universe which operates with mechanisms different to your own?

But that approach requires appreciation for rational thought.

Does anyone really feel threatened by the beliefs of Lutheran fundamentalists?

I like the burny crackly noise the sun makes. It's a big burning space log! In all seriousness though I will watch with the commentary; it sounds interesting.