Space Tourism – Run before 2012, or it won’t matter!
Longtime fans of this site, or people who have hung around the circuit long enough know that I have a tendency to write strange cases. Earlier this semester, I threw together a case as a handout for my Argumentation & Debate course. The case took me about 30 minutes to write (Lexis Nexis for the win!) and was designed to spark discussion as to how to properly attack an affirmative. I asked my students to read this case, and write down the reasons why this plan would be a bad idea. I put their responses up on the board, and then proceeded to explain negative debate strategy, placing each of their responses into one of the understood formats of negative arguments (DAs, Counterplans, Case Attacks, etc.).
A few of my students got very excited about the “fun” factor of a case like this, and have even run it at tournaments. Not surprisingly, they were not unbelievably successful. Since I don’t care much about winning but about the education (I think a fact that annoys some of you), I enjoy hearing about very intelligent debate students finding themselves unable to respond to a silly case, simply because they don’t have cards.
Another strategy that seems to have faded from use is the criticism of individual pieces of evidence. Most of the evidence in the below 1AC is critically flawed in one way or another.
In any case, enjoy. At least until an asteroid kills us all.
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i actually wrote a similar case this year, but have yet to break it. my favorite cards are these, which frame failure to vote for space col as losing 10^31 human lives per second
IT IS VITAL FOR HUMAN LIFE THAT WE AGGRESSIVELY PURSUE SPACE COLONIZATION
BOSTROM, Yale Philosophy professor, Utilitas, 03 (Nick Bostrom, PhD, Oxford Uni., “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development,” Utilitas, Vol. 15, No3, page 308-314)
With very advanced technology, a very large population of people living happy lives could be sustained in the accessible region of the universe. For every year that development of such technologies and colonization of the universe is delayed, there is therefore an opportunity cost: a potential good, lives worth living, is not being realized. Given some plausible assumptions, this cost is extremely large.
THE OPPORTUNITY COST OF DELAYING SPACE COLONIZATION IS ASTRONOMICAL-WE LITERALLY LOSE MORE LIVES EVERY SECOND BECAUSE OF OPPORTUNITY COST THAN THERE ARE ATOMS IN THE HUMAN BODY
BOSTROM as cited (Nick Bostrom, PhD, Oxford Uni., “Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development,” Utilitas, Vol. 15, No3, page 308-314November 2003)
As I write these words, suns are illuminating and heating empty rooms, unused energy is being flushed down black holes, and our great common endowment of negentropy is being irreversibly degraded into entropy on a cosmic scale. These are resources that an advanced civilization could have used to create value-structures, such as sentient beings living worthwhile lives. The rate of this loss boggles the mind. One recent paper speculates, using loose theoretical considerations based on the rate of increase of entropy, that the loss of potential human lives in our own galactic supercluster is at least ~10^46 per century of delayed colonization.[1] This estimate assumes that all the lost entropy could have been used for productive purposes, although no currently known technological mechanisms are even remotely capable of doing that. Since the estimate is meant to be a lower bound, this radically unconservative assumption is undesirable. We can, however, get a lower bound more straightforwardly by simply counting the number or stars in our galactic supercluster and multiplying this number with the amount of computing power that the resources of each star could be used to generate using technologies for whose feasibility a strong case has already been made. We can then divide this total with the estimated amount of computing power needed to simulate one human life. As a rough approximation, let us say the Virgo Supercluster contains 10^13 stars. One estimate of the computing power extractable from a star and with an associated planet-sized computational structure, using advanced molecular nanotechnology, is 10^42 operations per second. A typical estimate of the human brain’s processing power is roughly 10^17 operations per second or less. Not much more seems to be needed to simulate the relevant parts of the environment in sufficient detail to enable the simulated minds to have experiences indistinguishable from typical current human experiences. Given these estimates, it follows that the potential for approximately 10^38 human lives is lost every century that colonization of our local supercluster is delayed; or equivalently, about 10^31 potential human lives per second.
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Not topical.
Also, lol