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Russian Group Plans Manned Mars Mission By 2011
weekendwarrior1980 writes "A group of Russian space experts on Friday announced an ambitious plan to send a six-man crew to Mars within a decade, a project it said would cost only $3.5 billion. Russian space officials dismissed the project as nonsense. They plan to have 6 people explore Mars for months before returning to Earth. The Mission would take 3 years, and would depend on fully equipped spacecraft containing its own garden, medical facilities etc."
Should be just about as feasible as the Bush space plan.
Oh wait...
number one... considering the astronaunts and their environs will be closed off by cold hard steel, the amount of contamination will be minimal at the least... expecialy after launch.. space and re-entry.
Number two... whatever microbes we bring with us .. expecialy planet level ones... wont have much of a chance surviving in mars's near lack of an atmoshphere... much less it's totaly different environment.
number three... even if we do contaminate the planet somehow... six people... ona PLANET... not gonna do any damage... and the knowledge they reap in turn for that contamination i think far outweighs the risk.
number four... who gives a sh**, our destiny is to colinate and grow as a succesfull species, at the expense of dead, and/or near-dead planets. Our expansiona and colonization, and security by not putting all our eggs in one basket (earth).. is far more important than any stinking microbes on mars... which brings me to point four
we should get to the buisness of terra-forming mars ASAP anyways... with current technology we could terraform mars into an inhabitable planet (at least atmosphere wise) within 4 to 5 hundred years... this is a time-consumptive process, and given the balence between scientific advances and set-backs... we may as well get cracking as soon as we can.
while i think martian life is a great thing to study, i think our life should take precedence... at all costs.
also i dont see why the two cant be done simultaneously... honestly...
the sooner we get off this planet and having living humans on another.... the sooner we'll see a huge jump in space exploration and technical advancements. Maybe even real space ships that can cover our solar-system in our life time.
and MAYBE... even space-ships capable of reaching the nearest stars within our life-times... though that is much less-likely.
in either case, we need to spark the fire.... and i for one am illing to sacrafice martian microbes for it.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?