Definitions of Immigrant on the Web:

Definitions of Immigrant on the Web:

* A person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence.

* This is an alien admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident. Permanent residents are also commonly referred to as immigrants; however, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) broadly defines an immigrant as any alien in the United States, except one legally admitted under specific nonimmigrant categories (INA section 101(a)(15)). An illegal alien who entered the United States without inspection, for example, would be strictly defined as an immigrant under the INA but is not a permanent resident alien. Lawful permanent residents are legally accorded the privilege of residing permanently in the United States. …

* One who settles as a permanent resident in another country.

* a person who leaves one country to settle permanently in another
collections.ic.gc.ca/peh/teachers/Glossary.html …

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&hs=LJC&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official_s&oi=defmore&q=define:Immigrant

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Definitions of settler on the Web:

* a person who settles in a new colony or moves into new country
* a negotiator who settles disputes
* a clerk in a betting shop who calculates the winnings
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

* Settlers are people who have travelled of their own choice, from the land of their birth to live in “new” lands or colonies. In modern history, the word “settlers” is synonymous with terms like pioneers, colonists, or (as British people once called them) “colonials”. It has been argued that all peoples are “settlers”, since migration has featured throughout human history and prehistory. However, the word settler is generally used only in relation to modern or early modern history.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler

* One of the first to settle and develop a new territory.

http://www.google.com/search?hs=oyW&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&q=define%3A+settler&btnG=Search
http://www.albanyinstitute.org/resources/colonial/colonial.glossary.htm

* One who took up residence on, and cultivated, land that had previously been unused.
jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Samples/Glossary.htm

While I am not a religious person, at least in the conventional sense, I do not at all underestimate sperituality. At bottom, that is probably the reason most of us are here worrying about how to get into the Solar System. If humanity does colonize any part of the Solar System, that will be the reason; everything else is an after-the-fact excuse for what we wanted to do anyway.

Dfens: “We won’t know what its key value for economic exploitation is until we explore it enough to have an idea of what resources it has and how accessable they are.”

Once again, I agree with Dfens (just his first paragraoh, in this case!). This is key to anything else. It’s why Dr. Griffin’s Lewis-and-Clark class missions are so important. We won’t know until we’re there, and I for one don’t propose to wait for any “singularities” (which sound far more spiritual than scientific to me).

— Donald

Singularities aside, you can see just that movement in Freeman Dyson’s thinking. He, Ted Taylor, and the others involved in Orion were convinced by 1958 that chemical rockets weren’t ever likely to get us into space on an interesting scale.

Since Orion and nuclear-thermal for launch became “roads not taken,” he’s focused on smaller and smarter payloads: combinations of robotics and biotechnology, which benefit from Moore’s Law and the Moore’s-Law-like possibilities of genetic engineering — for example, the “astrochicken” in “Infinite in All Directions.”

It’s an interesting alternative to the Big Tech of “The High Frontier” and “Mining the Sky.” If we can’t send massive infrastructure into space, maybe we can send seeds instead.

Because New England for so long dominated the cultural scene and American self-image, we think of Plymouth Rock more often than Jamestown. But historians know that Virginia dominated in terms of population, profit and prosperity for most of the 150 colonial years.

So I’ve long felt that we should re-tool our school pageants from Pilgrims and Indians to a more representative image of a well-to-do Tidewater family bowing heads as the patriarch intones: “Dear Lord, thank you for an addictive drug and slaves to tend it.”

I can’t imagine why my local school board is so resistant to the idea.

No, David. I don’t. I didn’t mention the New Englanders because they were an exception to the more general get-rich-quick impetus for European conquest of the America. (You will recall, I’m sure, that Spanish conquest of the Americas preceded the Puritans by more than a century.)

The New Englanders prospered economically because they found a few products that British and European merchants found profitable to import. That, in turn, spurred New England shipbuilding, essentially an extractive industry based on mining the forests.

Finally, as to the spiritual and moral nature of the Puritans, suffice it to say that a good deal of their prosperity was dependent on the profits of the slave trade.

So, unless you’re arguing that Mars will be the source of products worth importing to Earth, or that we should revive the slave trade, you might want to rethink your position.

The thing is, though, we are still in the same predicament today as we were yesterday. We still don’t have a reasonable method of getting to low Earth orbit. All space exploration begins or ends with that capability. NASA seems to be totally incompetent in regard to reducing the cost of anything. There are plenty of decades old concepts that would be cheaper than what we’ve got or what NASA is proposing. Maybe it is time we stopped taking money away from the taxpayers and let the capitalists step up. I don’t see how they could do any worse.

No, you won’t. David. But, Griffin’s tasking from the President did not include delaying the Moon and Mars missions until new exotic propulsion technology had been invented and delivered. It’s unfair to criticize Griffin for failing to distort his orders.

I’d love nothing more than a serious effort to create breakthrough propulsion. But, even with that, I think it will be decades, at least, before we see it. I’m sure that space exploration in our lifetimes will be based on chemical rockets. (I don’t count fission rockets as breakthrough propulsion.)

About those Puritans: Yes, they were driven by ideology. No, the Pilgrims were not Puritans. After the pioneer period, surely by 1700, most New England residents lived better lives than their relatives in England. Most white colonists anywhere lived better lives than their British cousins. And, they were immigrants who settled in New England; your comment is pointless.

Your final and totally unrelated blast of bigotry and hatred destroys any credibility you may have been seeking, and insults the other posters here.

It was relatively easy to snip off a small part of the economy in the late 1600s and transplant it to a new continent. It is very much harder to do that now.

Unlike the sustainable society of the New England Puritans, who had neither precious metals nor the climate and cropland to grow tobacco and cotton for cash export.

Nor were the Protestant colonies of New England founded on some bogus notion of the wonderful diversity of its settlers.

Yet New England persisted and prevailed. You, sir, fail to acknowledge the spiritual, moral,and social profits enjoyed by the early New Egnlanders.

And early New England was “world class” in the worldly endeavors of shipbuilding and sailing.