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People on Mars in 30 Years?
lucabrasi999 writes "Yahoo is running a Reuters story in which Arthur Thompson, the head of the NASA 'rover' missions, says that people could be landing on Mars in the next twenty or thirty years. If that is true, I estimate that within 50 years, Mars will need women."
Of course, thats assuming that no short-sighted leaders come about in the future that see space exploration as a waste of money. I for one am all for stuff like this. It brings out the best in us.
As a teen in the early 70's, I heard that we would be on Mars by the end of the '90's. So we would be there in only 20 years into the future. During poppa Bushs term, it was within 25 years.
Now it 40 years later, and it will by in less than 30 years. Hell, by 2100, it will be only 50 years if we keep up with leaders like these.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I really wish it would become a primary priority.
People forget how much we need to support programs like this in order to advance mankind. I mean, look at all the innovation that came about during the times leading up to putting a man on the Moon. Its challenges like this that push the brightest minds of the world towards something other than who can build the best weapon.
I wonder if there will be people on *Earth* in 30 years.
And depending on who is our next president might affect how much funding NASA gets.
I doubt that. Even with Bush's desire for NASA funding congress shot it down. So even a president in the same party as the majority of congress isn't going to have his way on this. The current consensus of the American people is that space is a waste and they want more tax dollars thrown at ghetto waste and trailer trash in the hopes that it makes for a brighter future... As if.
Until Joe Taxpayer accepts that money is not the solution to every social ill I doubt we will have a serious tax-payer funded space program. Which will be never by my calendar.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Why? Because all three can live off of stuff we can't, and are small enough to fit inside a habitat. We eat animals because they're machines that turn grass into meat. (Why we feed cows grain is beyond me, but that's a story for another time.) Goats can eat corn stalks and carrot leaves and other such produce waste. They can also be milked, which solves the 'dairy group' problem.
Now we just need to breed a goat that doesn't grow to a very large size, but has a good amount of meat and makes a lot of milk.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Until we have some political will, or an oscenely rich private explorer (Bill here's a hint: do something cool with all that booty you've plundered from the hard-of-thinking PeeCee users over they years) to start the process, I'll remain skeptical.
Stick Men
We can invent stuff like that without leaving Earth.
No we can't. Invention requires long-term thinking. Business doesn't think long-term any more and hasn't since the 60s. Missions to Mars are out of the question until we can think and plan beyond next week's paycheck.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
It's a tough call. We all know a biosphere-killing rock is headed our way sometime soon (at least in geological terms.) We also know that Mars is our best shot at terraforming an emergency fallback position quickly (100-200 years, less than an eyeblink in geologic terms.) We also all know that Wernher von Braun (a guy whose judgement I trust on such things) drew up realistic Mars exploration plans based on early 1950's technology.
So, why haven't we done it yet? The short-circuited race to the moon and the space shuttle? an anti-imperialistic self-loathing? This is a starker choice than guns vs. butter; it's a bon-bons versus houses kind of thing. It looks like we've got a hillbilly mentality: when it's raining, we can't work on the roof and when it's not raining, the roof doesn't leak.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
I know this is off topic, but I cannot stand when people make such arguments as the one you just made.
The war in Iraq was not a dichotomy in which we got to war and Iraqi civilians die or we don't and Iraqi civilians live. It was a choice between going to war and risking the lives of thousands of Iraqis or not and leaving 25 million to the whims of Saddam. Even the most conservative estimates had Saddam killing tens of thousands of Iraqis every year. Amnesty International estimated 24,000 dead Iraqis every year from a combination of Saddam Hussein and crippling sanctions.
So, we could go to Mars and leave 25 million people in abject tyranny at the hands of a crazed madman with ambitions to become the next Saladin, or we could remove that dictator and give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom and save far more lives than were lost.
This sort of simplistic dichotomy on the war is exceptionally disgusting, akin to Holocaust denial. I've met Iraqis who have suffered under Saddam Hussein, and they will all tell you that as bad as Iraq is now, the horror of living under Saddam's totalitarianism was far worse.
Besides, who knows - in 30 years we could be launching Mars missions from the Baghdad Cosmodrome thanks to an Iraqi scientist who beforehand would have been working on designs for dirty bombs or chemical munitions.
And why? Among other reasons, one of the biggest in terms of setbacks has been relying on Russia for technology, manpower, and funding. This is not a let's-bash-Russia troll, I think this points to directly to serious project management issues at NASA, and if we can't get a sealed stable environment orbiting our planet, how do we expect to pack a crew into a ship and send it 36 million miles away and be anything other than an extraterrestrial coffin?
I love space exploration, I want people on Mars, I want habitats on the moon, I want shuttles flying weekly between the ISS and MoonPod 1, but it's never gonna happen if NASA can't get its act together enough to do something as obvious and QA process basic as asking "Gee, Yakov, I've never seen an oxygen system like this before, do we have the specs on that?"
Granted, in space just about every system is critical, but I'd put O2 scrubbers pretty damn high on my list of priorities, why wasn't it on theirs?
We need to do this thing smart, and to do that we've got to do it incrementally. Speaking as a software engineer for complex automated systems, if you skip design phases you're guaranteed to have problems down the line. So let's not skip phases, let's fix the shuttle fleet, to fix the space station and get it on track. Let's go back to the moon and run some long term sorties, build a moon base, shuttle between base and station. We need real world (moon) experience with extraterrestrial habitation before we pick 6 of our country's finest minds to asphyxiate in the cold black of interplanetary space.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Don't bother. Somebody's set up a pleasure planet in orbit midway between the two. It has gorgeous tropical beaches, mountain hideaways, lakes full of fresh water. It even has a large moon for moonlight strolls.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
A better use of the energy required to evacuate the Earth would be to simply keep it in orbit and move there. If Earth's particular location is bad, strap on some engines and you can move our "Super Platform (or better yet a couple of them)" somewhere else.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Congress-critters are unlikely to fund NASA enough to support that timeline unless we get some serious competition. We need a space race! By someone who will scare the constituents into demanding Congressional action and funding! Mars Needs China!