Slashdot Mirror
Utah, the New Red Planet
tsornin writes "The Philadelphia Inquirer reports in this article that Mars Society crews have chosen Wayne County, Utah as an effective simulant for the Red Planet. Although Mars exploration is hardly a high priority on any government's list at the moment, Robert Zubrin and other Mars Society members hope that through their research in Wayne County and in the even more remote northern Canadian location, they can show world governments that a mission to Mars is viable."
It certainly makes sense to choose Utah to simulate a lifeless, barren desert of a planet. I've been there, once.
These guys have watched too much sci-fi.
... spend a gazillion dollars on a manned mission to Mars so they can send back more picures of rocks and red dirt.
"...they can show world governments that a mission to Mars is viable."
Oh puh-leeze!!! Yeah right, that's exactly what we need
Sorry, been there, done that and bought the T-Shirt. There's nothing more to see here, please move along.
The goal, he said, is to simulate as closely as possible the working conditions that future Martians would have to endure.
So when we go to mars we become Martians???
Latest news:
The Utah Global Surveyor has detected alcohol in the state. However, it's locked up below the surface in ice and little umbrellas. It does bode well for future explorers, though.
But seriously, folks... if you haven't read Zubrin's The Case For Mars, do so. You'll be on the streets demanding Mars missions within minutes of finishing it.
I guess that title makes sense...
I mean, the moon is actually a soundstage in Nevada right?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Wayne County, only slightly more hospitable than the surface of Mars
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I found a book in my local library's used book sale room from 1988 titled The Race to Mars (I don't remember the authoring organization and sadly, the book is downstairs and I am far too lazy to get it at this point in the morning).
It talks about the progresss made, mostly Soviet, up to the date of publication, with lots of cool diagrams and photos.
What bugs me the most is the introduction, with phrases to the effect of "the Soviets intend to land a man on Mars by the end of the century" and "during the nineties, the Soviets will map and survey mars extensively in preparation for a manned mission."
And still nobody's there. But I guess it's okay, cause we have Utah....
Karma: T-rexcellent.
The Martian atmosphere, Zubrin says, is 95 percent carbon dioxide. By combining that with a relatively small amount of hydrogen brought from Earth, the plant would be churning out an ample supply of methane, CH4, and water, H20. The methane would serve as a propellant to get the ERV and the astronauts back home.
Methane as propellant, uh hu. I'd like to know where the hell Zubrin wants to get the oxygen to burn the methane.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4203/ ch14-3.htm
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
different gravity conditions? - that's always intrigued me more than what patch of desert they use to simulate Mars.
Video Game cheats, hints a
Frankly, as an honorary Martian I find this offensive.
Is NASA trying to say that Mars can be compared to a dust bowl inhabited by stray dogs, unintelligent rednecks, Mormons and inbreeders?
I request that NASA moves this experiment to a place devoid of culture, such as Australia or Germany.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I hope he understands that his simulation is BS; real astronauts on mars would never be able to survive without alcohol.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Trying to get slashdot in trouble with scientology again?
:)
Remember. These people are only slightly more crazy than your average Stallmanite. The chief difference being, they will kill you.
There would be areas of Antarctica that would be more like Mars than Utah with a constant hostile environment due to the extreme cold. You would only need a place not constantly covered in ice. Of course the abundantly rich oxygen and no radiation are other problems in simulating Mars here on Earth. Perhaps the best way to simulate Mars with be through some bio dome like structure with virtual reality.
The other big question of course is "Why". Why do this at all? Do people really think simulating and then visiting Mars is a possible step in permanent habitation? Our only chance of survival in THIS solar system is here on earth. And any planets revolving around other stars are too far away for us, right now. It's a disservice to get everyones hopes up for living on Mars.
Believe in things of which no person has ever learned
Use the money to raise our politicians' salaries by 2000%. Maybe then they won't sell us out so often.
The best 'Case for Mars', IMO, is that it's a (hardly effective) motivator to get us off cradle Earth to secure our survival - people are just USED to living on planets and don't bother thinking outside the gravity well (box).
What we should be striving for is using the raw material in the asteroid belt to build large (rotating) space habitats which are much much much more efficient than the waste of space/material below your feet on Mars.
And hey, one day we'll probably disassemble Mars for its matter too -- we'll save Earth for last. :)
--
Power to the Peaceful
Their official forum is pretty low key considering the supposed membership. I wonder why?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
They can't even make a moon colony. What makes them think we can even reach mars without going insane (2 year trip people). And don't tell me about theoretical engines and freezing people for 2 years. We should go to the moon, learn to live there, then learn how to go to-and-from the moon and earth with relative ease before we even suggest the notion of going to mars.
It is a classic problem of supply meeting demand were it not for the interference of 'well meaning' fools trying to 'help protect us from ourselves'.
BTW, what besides the coolness factor are the reasons for wanting to go to mars? I bet most here do not know them, but perhaps the majority here will gleefully parrot some recorded sound bite reasons (that is what sheep do, they don't reason in order to come to a conclusion, but rather justify their decision afterwards with illogical, inconsistent, hand picked 'facts')
Read their founding declaration and statement of purpose.
"We must go for the youth"? Puh-leaze. If the wealth of neat-o keen scientific advancements here on boring ol' Earth isn't enough to inspire young Billy to become a scientist, what makes them think a journey to Mars will? Sending advanced robots to Mars that have the ability to observe and communicate data 63 million miles back to Earth isn't enough to get little Sally interested in science? Well, little Sally's probably a dumbass that wouldn't amount to anything no matter what you did, then. Go waitress, Sally. Billy can be the cook. Spend that $450 billion (or whatever outrageous amount it would take to do a roundtrip manned mission to Mars) on killing terrorists and reducing the $6T national debt.
I always knew those Utiahns are green! They're just hiding in a human skin! Hmmz, and I thought Roswell was the place to be.
Okay. I've BEEN to Utah. It's not THAT bad. I mean, I've been to parts of the south that still have liquor laws that are more backwards than those in Utah.
Here's an interesting fact: there were more places to buy a drink at Utah's Winter Olympics than at Nagano and Lillihammer COMBINED.
Get rid of the income tax so these loonies will stop constantly trying to waste my money. Or at least let us taxpayers choose where our tax money goes. If enough loonies check the "[ ] IDIOTICALLY PREMATURE USELESS MANNED MISSION TO MARS - $450,000,000,000" box, well, hey, it gets done. But if more people happened to check "[ ] KILL TERRORISTS" or "[ ] REDUCE $6,000,000,000,000 DEFICIT" boxes, well, I guess the loonies would just have to try harder to convince everyone.
Spending six months to a year or more in isloation, especially in a very small room no bigger than, and maybe smaller that a college dorm room, with only the food and entertainment you brought with you, can be very stressful.
Heck, for the nearest current equivalent look at antarctica, where they get snowed in for the winter, and thay have much larger facilities. While now they have email, etc, they are still pretty isolated, and start to get a little wacky after just the few months of social isolation. The culture starts to evolve and drift based on the unique events on the base.
It is sort of like a bunch of geeks working at a big company. The geeks form their own culture, and are somwhat isolatedfrom the main body of people, even when bumbing into a ton of people in the hall way. Who are the aliens there? the geeks or the working stiffs?
heck, you even see this in religion, those isolated communities off in the desert, etc.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
They wish to use Utah, and it's population of LDS, to simulate what life would be like on a planet with a hostile lifeform. I don't know what's more hostile to civilised life than 3.2 beer. Conversely, they are going to use Canada to simulate a planet with a polite, and peaceful lifeform.
Fry: Very impressive. Back in the 20th Century we had no idea there was a university on Mars.
... trees ... hemp ... soon the whole planet was terra-formed!
Prof.: Well, in those days Mars was just a dreary, uninhabitable wasteland, much like Utah. But unlike Utah it was eventually made livable when the University was founded in 2636.
Leela: They planted traditional college foliage. Ivy
Fry: Does that mean it's safe to breathe the air?
Prof.: Of course!
You can't handle the truth.
Society members hope that through their research in Wayne County and in the even more remote northern Canadian location, they can show world governments that a mission to Mars is viable.
Shouldn't the goal of this research be to determine if a mission to Mars is viable? The society has already decided that it is viable, and no doubt whatever research they do will be tainted and shaped by this assumption. The research that comes out of this experimentation will be no more accurate than Exxon's studies concerning the Valdez's environmental impact, or the IPCC's terribly flawed global warming studies.
Maybe they wanted to simulate polygamy ... best way to establish a remote colony.
For more information about The Mars Society's Mars Desert Research Station, I suggest you have a look at the MDRS Website.
We're all well aware that NASA very secretly faked the moon landing. I, for one, am very pleased to see that they're being so open about where they're going to film the Mars landing.
I was watching a 2 hour Discovery special on the Mars Society Canadian habitat project last night, and I couldn't decide if these guys are visionaries or crackpots.
One some levels, the organisation was impressive, with tons of construction material being airdropped onto an island. The last drop shed it's 'chute and wrecked the construction crane and some other material. Brought up on a diet of space opera (and Junkyard Wars), I expected them to swing into action with a "can do!" plan. What actually happened was that the project manager and society head had a falling out over safety, the construction team walked off, a new architect had to be flown in, and a long debate over what to do next ensued. OK, they did get it all sorted eventually, but the attitude of some of the team really surprised me. After all, this was an "opportunity" rather than a problem (to use management parlance), but some of them seemed to think that it was better to play it safe, call the whole thing off, and try again the next year. Uh, guys, a manned Mars mission wouldn't have that luxury.
And then there were the mock EVA suits that they were using, that were - to be brutally frank - kiddie playtime stuff, being mostly trash can lids and plastic tubing. They were quite honest about this, saying that the idea was merely to try out a lot of activities in the suits to try and predict the problems we'll encounter on Mars. Problem was, they failed to apply lessons that we already know, and started with circa 1950's technology. The big problems were that the helmets fogged up (duh), that it's hard to get items out of your own pockets (so you need mirrors on your wrists, which they knew that NASA suits already have but didn't put on their own suits) and that it's hard to read dim LCD screens through a fogged up helmet.
I really do want to be enthusiastic about the Mars Society, but I can't help but feel that it's a big talking shop and mutual support society for very frustrated people who really wish that some serious money would get put into a Mars mission. It's hard to criticize them for doing something, but it's also hard to take Mars Society seriously when they seem to be more like a Disney Space Camp group having a fun vacation rather than doing bona fide boundary pushing experimentation.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Mars:
Has no strip clubs.
Has no alcohol.
Has no dirty mags.
Utah:
Has no strip clubs.
Has no alcohol.
Has no dirty mags.
Logical.
What does this say for the Mormons? And did anyone ever notice the striking similarity between the word Mormon and martian. Always did have my reservations about them.
Jimmy _______ | | | \__/
Hasn't this already been done?
Didn't they just pick some desert in the US for the manned missions to the moon too?
Follow me
see...and all this time i thought they were saying Utah was 75% mormom...i guess they really meant 75% martian...
makes sense now...ever seen Shawn Bradley anyway...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Quite honestly, as great as the ISS is, I wish NASA put its money and research into some sort of moon base. Some congressmen had pushed for this as an alternative plan of action. We would have kept ourselves a few generations ahead of nations developing their own space program while at the same time advancing science.. Now we'll have to play catch-up once another communist power begins its reach for the stars.
www.lonseidman.com
*insert obligitory cliche about Wayne County, Utah being devoid of intelligent life*
;)
*return to your regularly scheduled thread*
*sigh*
I'm glad that's over with
Mormons are actually from the planet Kolob...not Mars. But, having lived in Utah for 20 years, I have to admit that locating the space ship in Utah (especially rural Utah) will get the Mars Society accustomed to dealing with alien cultures.
This Mars society has obviously never seen the Australian outback. Eg this site . Sorry for slashdotting.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
For the 2378250542437th time: Why the heck do we give such a hoot about Mars? We need to start small, folks. Have we all forgotten that we have our own little "alien" rock to populate first? The Moon should be our current goal, screw Mars. If we get all excited and gung-ho about the Red Planet and forget about the Moon, we're doomed to the "biting off more than we can chew" philosophy.
Don't babies have to crawl before they can walk? Or walk before they can run? If we skip the moon, we're going to go from crawl straight to a dead sprint, resulting in us falling flat on our faces.
The Mars Society needs to change its name to the Lunar Society and change its focus from Red to Gray. That, and they need to get over the fact that the X-Files is coming to an end...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Oh yes, it looks like Mars out here, but I think these people forgot to account for the +30C temperature difference between Utah and the surface of Mars.
officially no alcohol allowed. however, there was vodka stashed on board.
Amen. Gotta wonder if the Mars Society reads these threads on the Dot. They must not, because they'd find a whole mess of us "Moon First Folks" here.
The chain should go Earth, ISS, Moon, Mars. Since the ISS is operational, it should be used now as a jump-off point to the moon. We didn't have the ISS in '69 and we still made it OK, twice actually.
Here's an idea: let's petition the Mars Society to change its tune and get with the Lunar Plan...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Are Mormans allowed to use the Internet? If any Morman reads this, can you tell me why we haven't been getting the Church of Latter Day Saints TV commercicals in Canada anymore? What happened? I always loved those ads when I was young.
I would've thought that the Moon would be more of "an effective simulant for the Red Planet" than Utah (or any other place on Earth) could ever be. But then again, what do I know. Let's just jump into the deep end and see what happens. If we fail, then so what if people won't fund us for another hundred years.
When I visited Hawaii's "Big Island" and went to the top of the extinct volcano there to watch the "famous sinrise", I noticed that not too far from the viewing site were rocks and soil that looked just like the Viking II landing site. I tromped around for a few minutes pretending like I was walking on Mars (until my wife started shouting, "What the f*** are you doing there? Its just a bunch of rocks, you stupid nerd!")
As far as the weather, I agree with the other readers that polar regions on earth are probably a better training place. However, if you want the *visuals*, then Hawaii is the place. Plus, you can stop at Maui on the way home.
Also, the atmosphere was kind of thin up there, at least to an Earthling.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, it has more resources and the ability to be terraformed. But terraforming takes a heck of a long time. Even though we can develop these nifty terraforming technologies to try and speed up the process, the course of nature must also be factored in.
How many millions of years did it take to get Earth to where it has been since life appeared? The first organisms couldn't come out of the water or they'd be fried by UV or other radiation. Once they could resist that, they came out. Then they started affecting the world beyond surface tension.
How long did it take for those first landlubbing lifeforms to affect their environment, creating gasses released into the atmosphere, developing ways of converting energy (photosynthesis, anyone?)? While we can do all that relatively quickly and without a terribly insane amount of thought, how long will it take to affect Mars on a global scale? And how long before that global change will support life as we know it?
Or who's to say life as we know it will be around by the time we hit Mars? There are just too many questions that need answers before we can take a stab at it.
With all the press Mars gets, the common man has seemed to forget about the moon and replaced it with images of Batman/Jim Morrison giving Mars the finger, or Lieutenant Dan standing in a nifty CG model of the Solar System. They're all Mars-Crazy. When is there ever talk of the moon unless it's an eclipse?
The common man doesn't read Slashdot, they go to the movies and watch Captain Dan the Newsman on CBS. That's where they get their info. The media shapes their outlook on our policy towards Space, and has since Armstrong and Aldrin landed. Back then, it was all Moon Fever. But now, we've got Mars Syndrome. Since the media never talks much about getting a jump-off point on the Moon, common folk aren't in Moon Mode. The ISS gets more press, but that's just the first leg of the trip...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Great, keep it up!
I loved the Limericks, especially the 'Ouagadougou' one.
most people who starve are either non-christian or non-white in which case there is no reason for us to care, it is not my fault that they are dieing.
Fry: Very impressive. Back in the 20th Century we had no idea there was a university on Mars.
Prof.: Well, in those days Mars was just a dreary, uninhabitable wasteland, much like Utah. But unlike Utah it was eventually made livable when the University was founded in 2636.
Of course! They couldn't admit it, but the Soviet astronauts always had a stash of the good stuff put on board by the launch attendants, and caviar and swiss chocolates too. I think they drew the line at cigarettes though!
Hey Justin, liked your website.
The cats were cool. How come they haven't eaten that cute puppy yet?
... on a web site, at least ensure that you host it on a site that doesn't pop up a zillion fucking browser windows - it just pisses people off.
Well, first of all Utah is full of Morons, oops I meant Mormons, well they are basically the same thing anyways.
So the logical conclusion is that these guys wanting to go to Mars are Morons, and since Mormons are Morons, this is the place to go.
Hey, aren't you the freak stalking our beloved Michael?
Soon people really will be all thumbs.
The space race will begin in earnest again very soon. Once the Chinese start their manned missions....
The Cold War is over and there's no propaganda victory to be had by space travel. The U.S. should base its spending on basic research on something more substantial than international public relations.
The net effect of the U.S. being first to the Moon is that it is not getting criticized for abandoning its lunar landing program. Whoever goes to Mars first is going to wonder how they'll pay for the next trip and what they'll get out of it.
Ceta ces avontu Mars qahetie uvi Utah mon fahtelo mendoc kubarakon. Slashdot cind wantoca isi USA nelo watir matoran.
Great! Now we have the perfect backdrop to fake a Mars landing!
Better than that, some training/testing grounds have had craters blown into them to create a surface as nearly identical as possible to potential lunar landing sites:
Testing sites have been chosen for climate, surface cover, surface type, etc., depending on exactly what they're testing or training for.
iv heard of this simulation. sounds like a cool xperience i sure hope we get 2 the real red planet soon though. but im still not sure a simulation can stand up to the real panet. i guess well never know untill we land on mars
sdgscott
Actually due to the pressence of an atmosphere on Mars, it's easier to slow down and land on Mars than the Moon. It wouldn't take much more than the same rockets that launched Apollo to get men on Mars. Additionally, the Martian atmosphere means you don't have to take propellant for the return trip!
As a resident of Salt Lake City (and non-LDS) you get used to the insipid jokes and stereotypical views from most out of state people. Yes there are no strip clubs, no alcohol, and no dirty mags anywhere to be found here. But did you also know that you need a temple recommend to enter past state lines, and an interview with the bishop to maintain residency? Har har har.
Being ridiculed by a guy named CanadaDave. For the Mormon Church I'm gonna have to say ouch.
test
And is now Jane County. Although why anyone would want to live on him....er....her I mean is beyond me..... Whatever turns your crank I guess
D.A.K.D.A.E.---- Deny all Knowledge, Destroy All Evidence
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports in this article that Mars Society crews have chosen Wayne County, Utah as an effective simulant for the Red Planet.
When can we start terraforming Utah?
They can show world governments that a mission to Mars has already taken place.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Have you been to Utah?
Have you lived in Utah?
I have. For many years.
Utah *is* the RED PLANET of WESTERN CIVLIZATION.
*I* was born in Utah...
The stereotypes ARE true...and much, much worse!