Slashdot Mirror

Here is a link to one of the papers I read. This one doesn't state that conception and development will be impossible but does show considerable risk in the process.

http://journalofcosmology.com/...

"The key point that Wigner’s friend experiment raises is that consciousness seems necessary to determine the result of a quantum mechanical measurement process. Without consciousness, all the elements of the experiment remain in a superposition of all possible states." link

The logic here is faulty, the observer is something in the rest of the universe that is affected by the collapse of the wave function, and that doesn't have to be conscious. See also

A few seconds reading JOC or about JOC reveals it's a complete farce of a "journal".

More to the point, the Executive Editor of the Journal of Cosmology is none other than Chandra Wickramasinghe himself.

Please recall this article about "panspermia". It means that we are practically certain to find Earth-originated life-forms down there in the ocean of Europa. If life originated there independently of Earth, there might not be any evidence of it left!

Spirit outlived even the wildest speculations about its lifespan, making possible the remarkable discoveries about the igneous, aqueous, and aeolian processes that shaped the landscape that it and we roamed. But despite these successes, I became painfully aware of the shortcomings of robotic exploration of Mars. In a word, it is cumbersome. It took years of painstaking effort to explore just those few square kilometers of Gusev crater. Many tens of humans had to participate to guide the rover along a path that was carefully chosen to maximize both safety and science potential. Although Spirit proved to be much more robust and capable than anyone imagined, its speed and mobility were limiting factors. And despite a science payload exquisitely adapted to the tasks it was designed for, surely we failed to recognize and understand important clues to the geologic history we came to investigate. The experience of exploring a planet with a rover is both incredibly exciting and rewarding and incredibly frustrating. It is science by committee modulated by engineering constraints.

Many on the science team echoed the sentiment that a human geologist could have performed the years of exploration done by Spirit in just a few weeks or perhaps days. It's true that Spirit's amazing toolkit is still unavailable to a terrestrial field geologist. But simple tools combined with the eyes, hands, boots, and brain of a human far outstrip the capabilities of a rover, even those of the next generation Mars Science Laboratory. Given the impossibility of real- time interaction between a human and a robotic surrogate across the millions of kilometers separating Earth from Mars, robotic exploration will never replace what is achievable by humans. Here I am focused on the scientific achievements. The ones that arise from humanity expanding into the solar system, by definition, require humans. Robots should never be viewed as a substitute for humans directly experiencing another world.

If you are interested in spending dollars well, then the current approach isn't a good one. Above we see a two order magnitude improvement between an instance of unmanned space exploration and the manned equivalent of a single geologist. But the manned mission wouldn't cost two orders of magnitude more (for example, Zubrin's "Direct Mars" approach is thought to cost a few tens of billions, assuming no major innovation in launch vehicle costs) and it'd put down a team for at least a couple of years.

Not everything experiences this sort of improvement (eg, orbital imaging, communcation), but it doesn't make sense to claim that unmanned is strictly better when it's not.

Similar arguments hold for more mundane improvements such as manufacturing batches of probes rather than one-off designs. For example, for the cost of the Mars Science Laboratory which will attempt to land in a few days, one could have built and launched several (I think up to six) more Mars Exploration Rovers. Further all of these rovers could have been operating on Mars for years now. MSL is somewhat more capable, but there was a dear cost, a slowing down of research on Mars.

I can't remember where I heard it exactly but I think it was something similar to this or this. I do not know where I picked up the specific idea that earth's possible orbits were influenced by it's wave-particle function. The idea was the if a planet has a wave function as predicted then that wave function would influence it's orbit. I'm not a physicist though so I'm not going to defend the idea, it's just something I remember hearing in relation to electron orbits.

One big difference is the type of meteorite. These may have come from comets rather than Mars. http://journalofcosmology.com/Life100.html

This is the sort of tripe the journal is willing to publish: Is Darwin the New Jesus? and Is Craig Venter Playing God with Genetics and DNA? Garbage journal... disregard.

The proposal:

http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars108.html

And you're right, the first manned mission after all the unmanned supply drops is suggested to be two rockets with two-man crews, so only four people. Then as those four built more and more infrastructure additional personnel would be sent.

Did you actually read the proposal?

Wait, I forgot this was Slashdot. Here's the Proposal:

http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars108.html

Yes, it would horrible if an accident occurred and people died, but the actual proposed mission is actually well thought out.

From the proposal:

"Certainly, the first colonists would be exposed to multiple challenges, from physical rigor to psychological strains due to isolation and uncertainties. However, the astronauts will have undergone psychological profiling and training before embarking on the mission, and would remain in constant contact with Earth via normal channels such as email, radio and video links. In the era of modern communications they would in fact feel more connected to home than the early Antarctic explorers (who had no systematic psychological training either)."

http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars108.html

From what I've read, most plans for Mars colonization don't include any sort of breeding population until after an establishment of a sustainable settlement. If you read the entire proposal you'll see:

"Crew selection for the initial manned mission would have to take into account several factors. Initially, colonists may be preferred who are beyond their reproductive age, because their life expectancy is likely to be 20 years or less, and secondly, the first settlers will endure some radiation damage to their reproductive organs, both during the trip to Mars and on the Martian surface."

reproduction is discussed much later:

"Over time, the human contingent on Mars would slowly increase with follow-up missions. Several cave-centered biospheres would be created, each being in constant communication with other cave-centered biospheres to share experiences on which approaches are working best. At some later time, probably several decades after the first human mission, the colony's population might have expanded to about 150 individuals, which would constitute a viable gene pool to allow the possibility of a successful long-term reproduction program. New arrivees and possibly the use of genetic engineering would further enhance genetic variety and contribute to the health and longevity of the colonists."

http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars108.html

As for arguments about the ethics of raising children on Mars, I think you are wrong to come to a conclusion so quickly. You say that you think it is," unethical to birth a child, who had no choice in the matter, into that sort of lifestyle." but in truth you have no idea what kind of lifestyle people will have in a fully developed colony, no one does and as a consequence can't really make an ethical argument until we have more actual information.

Doesn't anyone RTFA anymore? Richard C Hoagland is one of the cited authors in the article about terraforming Mars.
http://journalofcosmology.com/Mars102.html (he says that NASA nuked Jupiter with Galileo!)

Most of the chapters were amazing and very scientific, but when I saw that name mentioned the whole document took a nose dive in credibility.

--M

Mars Base First: A Program-level Optimization for Human Mars Exploration, Douglas W. Gage, Journal of Cosmology, 2010, Vol 12, 3904-3911.