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1. NUCLEAR WEAPONS

ONE CAN make some sound arguments for nuclear power-medical radioisotopes are quite handy, while far-traveling spacecraft can barely function on anything less-but there is no reason for us to go on pretending that we need to fry entire chunks of continents. Not only are nuclear weapons technically clumsy, but they betray a blatant death wish better suited to al-Qaeda than a civilization.

Nowadays, a well-organized state can deftly obliterate any conceivable target with exquisite GPS accuracy. Conventional "daisy cutters" and cluster bombs can be scaled up to any size or potency that the military might need. This leaves nuclear bombs with only one ideal function: terrorism. They are excellent weapons for nongovernmental predators to deploy against centers of government. They are quite useless for governments to deploy against terrorists. So why are governments still manufacturing these expensive, dangerous, easily stolen objects?

If all nuclear weapons vanished tomorrow, the world's current military situation would not be affected one whit. The U.S.A. would still be military top boss. Yet we'd be much less likely to wake up one morning to find Paris or Washington missing.

5. LAND MINES

THE PLANET is already cluttered with well-meaning nongovernmental organizations protesting land mines. Their plaint makes perfect sense when you realize that land mines are ideally suited to blowing up peacemakers once a war is over.

During a war, few soldiers step on land mines, because mines are placed by enemies waiting with rifles. Once the armies demob, though, and armies always do, land mines don't kill combatants anymore. They kill livestock, the brighter and more exploratory kinds of children, and the men and women who wander around after soldiers, attempting to restore the planet to habitability.

There is something to be said for the practice of automating bombs so that people can get killed without any human intervention. After all, there's a long technical trend there, and it strongly favors advanced societies with engineers over those among us who merely pick up hoes and axes in fits of tribal rage. But it's stupid to manufacture and spread lethal devices that don't know when a war is over.

SyntaxVorlon wrote: And Vympel, both sides having the ability to completely annhilate eachother does not make for good peacemaking.

The only reason we aren't still hovering over the button is the USSR disbanded. And didn't the russians 'lose' some of their arsenal not to long ago?

Vympel wrote:

SyntaxVorlon wrote: And Vympel, both sides having the ability to completely annhilate eachother does not make for good peacemaking.

Actually, it made for superb peace making. NATO and the Warsaw Pact never went to war.

captin dumbass wrote:6. MANNED SPACEFLIGHT

ONE HATES to see this dazzling technology go, but when one resolutely sets the romance aside, there's not a lot left. Thanks to decades of biological research, it's now quite clear that flying around the solar system is bad for one's health. Without the healthy stresses of gravity on one's skeleton, human bones decay just as they do during prolonged bed rest while muscles atrophy. Cosmic rays blast through spacecraft walls and human bodies, while solar flares will fry astronauts as diligently as any nuclear bomb. I won't mention the fact that spacecraft are inherently rickety and dangerous, because that's a major part of their attraction.

There is little point in stepping onto the moon, leaving flags and footprints, and then retreating once again. The staggering price of shipping a kilogram into orbit has not come down in decades. In the meantime, unmanned spacecraft grow smaller and more capable every year. Until we bioengineer ourselves to enjoy cosmic rays, or until we've got rockets that can lift a Winnebago made of solid lead, this technology belongs on the museum shelf.

darthdavid wrote:

captin dumbass wrote:6. MANNED SPACEFLIGHT

ONE HATES to see this dazzling technology go, but when one resolutely sets the romance aside, there's not a lot left. Thanks to decades of biological research, it's now quite clear that flying around the solar system is bad for one's health. Without the healthy stresses of gravity on one's skeleton, human bones decay just as they do during prolonged bed rest while muscles atrophy. Cosmic rays blast through spacecraft walls and human bodies, while solar flares will fry astronauts as diligently as any nuclear bomb. I won't mention the fact that spacecraft are inherently rickety and dangerous, because that's a major part of their attraction.

There is little point in stepping onto the moon, leaving flags and footprints, and then retreating once again. The staggering price of shipping a kilogram into orbit has not come down in decades. In the meantime, unmanned spacecraft grow smaller and more capable every year. Until we bioengineer ourselves to enjoy cosmic rays, or until we've got rockets that can lift a Winnebago made of solid lead, this technology belongs on the museum shelf.

And it's people like him that mean i'll never own a summer home on mars...

darthdavid wrote:And it'll be reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllllllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyy useful to launche winnebagos made of solid lead into space...

1. Nuclear weapons (because they're dangerous)
2. Coal-based power (because it's a polluting nightmare)
3. The internal combustion engine (see above)
4. Incandescent light bulbs (hopelessly inefficient)
5. Land mines (because they continue to fight wars after the wars are over)
6. Manned spaceflight (because it's dangerous and inefficient)
7. Prisons (in favour of tracking collars)
8. Cosmetic implants (because they're gross)
9. Lie detectors (because they don't work)
10. DVDs (because they're delicate, prone to delamination, and capable of disabling the player's fast-forward button so you can't skip past FBI warnings and commercials)

Darth Wong wrote:(although a timed self-disabling landmine would solve this problem without taking away a crucial defensive technique from land armies)