Re: some here will find this amusing

quoth Guillaume Laurent:

| Off the top of my head : finding a cure for AIDS so there's a chance
| to stop the current catastrophy in Africa ?

this raises a whole new issue, which i do not especially want to go into 
because it is astonishingly complicated and contentious. suffice it to 
say that there is a body of evidence, so far unrefuted, that AIDS is an 
utterly arbitrary listing of diseases that don't have anything to do 
with each other and that share no common cause and therefore cannot 
share a cure. by the cdc's accounting, if you die of just about 
*anything* (i don't think they've added car wrecks to the list, but 
wait) and have antibodies to the (so far as anyone has ever 
demonstrated) utterly benign htlv-3 (a/k/a HIV) retrovirus, you died of 
AIDS. but there are some problems: the death rates for persons having 
those diseases and the retrovirus is no higher than those of persons 
having the disease and no retrovirus. added to the charade is the fact 
that they are not even testing for HIV in africa; the epidemic numbers 
merely assume that everyone there who dies of diseases on the approved 
list has died of AIDS. to say that someone has "died of AIDS" is the 
same as saying that a person "died of old age."

additionally, those who receive the "drug" cocktails designed to inhibit 
retroviral growth frequently die from the drugs themselves, even as 
chemotherapy often gets patients before the cancer does. there is no 
evidence of decreased life expectancy resulting from being 
HIV-positive, though many of the behaviors that cause one to become 
HIV-positive do in and of themselves reduce lifespan.

now. why is this? well, the whole story is a pretty sorry one, beginning 
with dr. robert gallo's theft of htlv-3 from french researchers in 
1984. it was followed by gallo and margaret heckler marching out and 
announcing -- with no evidence at all -- that the cause of AIDS had 
been found (though AIDS at this point comprised chiefly karposi's 
sarcoma, a rare cancer typically the result of amyl nitrate use, and 
pneumocystis carinii pneumonia which is present also on 
non-HIV-positive patients). for purely political reasons, huge amounts 
of money were devoted to finding a "cure" for HIV. anyone who 
dissented, both as to HIV and as to the existence of a "disease" called 
AIDS, was shouted down and his career was ruined. AIDS became a 
political issue and an industry. there is very little decent science 
going on in the field.

which is why the big noise being made, largely by the administration, 
about AIDS in africa is disingenuous. the u.s. wants to spend a lot of 
money fighting AIDS in africa. sounds very generous, doesn't it? ah, 
but here's the rub: that money would be in the form of anti-HIV drugs. 
meaning that the u.s. government would buy huge amounts of very 
expensive and ineffective drugs from u.s. companies and foist them off 
on subsaharan africa.

what might be done instead? things that prevent and cure the specific 
diseases rather than this ghost battle against the HIV bogeyman. but 
here, too, is a problem: for people to avoid those diseases, they need 
to do things differently, and in this era of culture uber alles it is 
all but impossible to suggest, never mind campaign, for that.

| > perhaps you can illustrate this, both as to the technologies that
| > are being "kept on hold"
|
| Take blue ray laser for instance. It's been here for almost a decade,
| and only now we're seeing it in some DVD players.

somehow i don't think that progress in dvd players is much of a pressing 
technological issue.

| Do I really have to dig up the last statistics on how 3rd world
| countries have been faring compared to industrialised ones ?

yes. and perhaps at the same time you could explain how this doesn't 
mean, then, that industrialization is clearly the way to go.

| Then what is this program supposed to bring in the field of new
| discoveries, that some probes couldn't ?

putting a person someplace is an order of magnitude more complicated 
than putting a robot there. it is in this area that human flight 
produces results that robotic probes do not.

| A multi-year travel would get you no further than the solar system,
| and there's very little point in putting people on any other planet
| than Mars because the environment is just too hostile. So if we're
| really going to "explore", it means away from the solar system.
| Unless the light speed barrier can be broken somehow, that's hardly
| doable in human lifetimes.

so, if i read you correctly: we should not go to the moon or mars 
because we cannot go to other solar systems. i should not go to the 
grocery store today because i lack the means to go to paris. 

| Supply and propulsion are only one side of the problem. Keeping the
| passengers from going mad is another one, probably even more
| difficult.

again, our history is chock full of instances involving multi-year 
voyages in cramped quarters and in which nobody went mad.

| If I recall correctly, we stopped trying to send people further than
| orbital space because it made very little sense, since automated
| probes are much more fit for the job. I don't see this changing
| anytime soon, because economics rule, and more in the US than
| anywhere else. So I doubt that people would accept to blow resources
| over something which is known as pointless.

you do not recall correctly.
-- 
dep

It's remarkable how quickly a problem goes away once the people with
a vested interest in there being a problem go away. -- Mark Steyn

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