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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."
Mars still needs women...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I predict we will arrive on Mars in tentacled tripod ships and fire death rays at the inhabitants until we are driven from the planet by microorganisms.
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Won't the Women go to Venus?
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Leather Goddesses of Phobos
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Arthur Thompson, mission manager for MER surface operations, told Reuters in an interview in Lima, "My best guess is 20 to 30 years, if that becomes our primary priority."
In other words, Notgonnahappen. 8(
Moo.
Getting them back will take another 20 or 30 years.
I can see the fnords!
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.
Asked how long it could be before astronauts land on Mars, Arthur Thompson, mission manager for MER surface operations, told Reuters in an interview in Lima, "My best guess is 20 to 30 years, if that becomes our primary priority."
If it is primary priority. Which I doubt it will be. And depending on who is our next president might affect how much funding NASA gets.
I need women!
Because you cannot take woman into space.
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The way primary and secondary education is going these days, women will be leading the mission to Mars. Quite a role reversal from the times when that movie was made.
Mars sounds like a dreamy undisclosed location to me!
*I* need women.
/.'ers.
As do most
Are there any women even READING this stuff, let alone posting?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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 think the Mars people will get very tired of all that masturbation and gay sex well before 20 years.
I'm hoping they really plan ahead. Make sure the residents have plenty of lockers full of weapons and ammunition just in case personnel become demonic flesh eating zombies, or disembodied flaming heads.
Oh, and don't forget to hide little closets all over the facility. Who knows when hidden closets large enough for a full sized human will come in handy?
I wonder if there will be people on *Earth* in 30 years.
Of course, I remember growing up in the early '80s and hearing about how we would be on Mars soon after the turn of the millenium. Well, my ship never did arrive. I would rate this up there with the "fusion power is just around the corner" mantra.
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
Are there any women even READING this stuff, let alone posting?
Yes we read this stuff. You should really mind your manners if you want a woman, love.
You might try pretending to be offended by the way women are being spoken of. We're suckers for that kind of stuff.
Just hope that we can get there before Marvin the Martin blows up the Earth with his Uranium Pew-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
Where's Duck Dodgers when you need him?!
At least not America, they couldn't afford the effort. Way too costly with that defecit they've got.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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.
people could be landing on Mars in the next twenty or thirty years.
Sure, if we can make a "business case" for it. Otherwise people will say "what do we need that for?" and go back to their reality shows and home improvement projects.
Some people would say this is a stagnant society. The phrase "unwiped ass" is a better description of a society obsessed with suburban paradise at the expense of every last shred of dignity and wisdom.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
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.
Given the typical short lived duration of marriage these days they ought to start sending the divorce lawyers right around the time they start sending the women. Or better yet, just send all the lawyers. Now there's a science fiction horror story if ever there was one: "Attack of the intellectual property lawyers from Mars."
Will we still need telephone sanitizers in thirty years?
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
twenty, thirty years? How long did it take us to get to the moon? And what have we done since then? It's quite possible, if we really want it done, give NASA a decent budget for a while, etc. However, thats got about the odds of a snowball in hell. Space just isn't sexy any more, and it's unlikely any president will give any more than nominal support. I predict space progress will be slow and relatively unspectacular for at least twenty years. Its a damn shame, too.
Support more choices in goverment-Vote 3rd party.
Tech: We're picking up a transmission. It's from... Mars!
Manager: Oh. My. God. Lets see it!
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All: URRGH! GOATSE!
I'm really offended by the way women are being spoken of here, it's really sexist and primitive. Besides, what make you think that women would not be there first anyhow?
A guy...
Here we go again!
Why not? Some Slashdotters have been waiting longer than that.
Irony galore. A woman posts on slashdot about the shortage of women on slashdot, actually gives advice on getting women (to those who don't already know how), and is consequently modded down to flamebait.
The mooon flight happened for ME. I was 13 then, and glued to the TV that whole day watching the coverage. Position the rapid progress of the Lunar mission against the-pop culture like "2001: ASO," and I actually thought I might, as an ordinary person, be able to make an admittedly expensive vacation into orbit during my lifetime.
YOU want it during YOUR lifetime? I'd like to see us not have dropped the ball completely, during MY lifetime, which is about half-over. Hopes for middle-class-afordable orbital access are pretty much shot. Heck, hopes for continuing existence of the middle class seem to be going down the drain, too.
As for a ark? For Mars, I favor the "Pork Chop Express," (with a wink'n'nod to Kurt Russell, in "Big Trouble In Little China") named after the so-called pork-chop plot of Earth/Mars transit orbits. Picture a habitat (or several) of some sort remaining in the Earth/Mars transition orbit.
When the right time comes around, boost from Earth and match speed with the habitat. Get in and ride to Mars. At Mars, get out and de-boost in another vehicle into Mars orbit.
The key is to boost your Earth/Mars transfer vehicle (the habitat) into that orbit *once*. Thereafter, you only boost people and supplies. That lets the habitat become more spacious and better shielded, since its recurring costs are lowered. The trip is supposed to be the worst part, after all. There's only an opportunity for Mars every two years or so, but the window is a few months wide. Eventually it would be nice to have several transfer habitats.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The X-Prize was created in 1996. 8 years later, the private space industry has managed to fly human beings with an astonishing 5% of the kinetic energy required just to get into earth orbit. Projecting from that, I'd say you're estimate is a tad optimistic.
Yeah, but how does Halliburton make money off of us sending people to Mars?
Hey baby. I'm the only man on the planet.
www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me.
I seriously doubt that we'd face extinction, short of a world-wide climatic effect. Yes, we'd have dead and dying people everywhere, and there would be plagues.
However, humans are quite versatile. Our life expectancy might be shot down to the 40's, but we'd still be able to find food if there was any such thing left to be found. Unlike many animals, we can eat both meat and plants, and we're not really hindered like many species by regional boundries or climates.
Short of world-wide universal extinction of all bugs, plants, and animals, I think we'll survive as a species. There would be regions where growing things would still be possible, and small groups of people would re-start society from the ground up. There's a fair amount of evidence that such world-wide catastrophies occured in the past (such as the supposed "atlantean distruction"), resulting in many deaths, but still people survived, formed new cultures, and 'progressed' to where we are now. They kept parts of their culture and beliefs - not necessarily in the same state that they were originally - and formed the cultures of our ancestors.
I could see it all happening again. The western world could go to war with the east, and annihilate the large power centers of the world. The butterfly effect would take out all the other societies, wars would errupt, and disease and famine would strike. Enterprising individuals would store up goods, go into what is left of the wilderness and survive, while the lesser, weaker humans would simply try to perpetuate their futile existence and die.
I don't imagine it would take much more than 150 years for the whole process to play out from current society to a fractured group of cultures that have formed their own identity and only have a fleeting rememberance of the previous world, taking things and twisting them into legends and religions.
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Furthermore since when does capitalism display dignity and display wisdom?
All the time, provided there are no artificial limits placed on it.
The forced economic classes that it creates can only be called dignifying to the rich and the quickly shrinking remnants of the middle class.
Wasn't always that way. There actually used to be a middle class back when people had careers instead of temp jobs. Almost anyone who put in a day's work could earn an honest wage and afford a home. Now, the median price for a home is almost a half million dollars and the average job lasts less than 18 months.
There will be no further significant space exploration because business decides everything and there are no money grabs available.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
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.
I for one, welcome our new female overlords.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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. --
"We can be on Mars in 30 years"
There is nothing physical, technological or financial (yes, it won't break the bank if done smart) stopping us from visiting and settling Mars.
The roadblocks are politics and motivation. Shit, we could be on Mars in 15 years if we really wanted to.
Blaze a trail to the New World
Hey, we're trying to do mankind a favor by dating all the jerks we can find. If nice guys were having regular sex and the jerks were going without, I don't even want to think about what this planet would look like!!
we make getting to the moon regularly a reality before we try to go to mars.. I think when we can get to the moon and back, we will have developed the things we need to go to mars, not to mention it will make building the things needed to get to mars alot easier. any attempt at mars should be launched from the moon, or very close too it. We wont need to carry the fuel to escape the earth for one. we need to: #1) Perfect a method for getting fuel, water, oxygen, building materials and food etc etc into earths orbit cheaply. a large cannon, or rockets. what ever it is should be cheap, wholely reusable and be able to be used 2-3 times a week to keep the supply of vital materials running. #2) Have a space "tug" that goes out from the ISS and retireves the cargo we "shot|rocketed" into space. The tug never actually re-enters the earths atmosphere, its just used for retrieving capsules shot or rocketed into orbit. #3) Build the things we need to get to the moon in space at the ISS. #4) colonise the moon. Lets test our colonisation process before we run off to mars, make sure our habitats/eco systems etc etc are going to work just fine. #5) when we are shootign stuff into space.. building things.. and making regular trips to the moon, THEN lets start applying some of that to getting us to mars. Lets walk before we can run.
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It's been said once in this thread, but I'll say it again: we can do this faster -- i.e. in 10 years -- with the Mars Direct program, on a pretty reasonable budget (closer to $30B than the $50B mentioned elsewhere, actually). That's a snap, considering that NASA's annual budget is currently $15B -- we'd be talking about 1/5 of current funding levels (not to mention only 16% of pre-Columbia shuttle launch capacity, given 2 flights every 2 years).
Get out there and pester your Congresscritters on this. Mars in 1/3 of this time is acheivable if enough people press for it!
How To Get Humans To Mars
The smallest feasible Mars expedition requires 150 or so tons in Earth orbit, which takes 5 trips on the most powerful rocket flying today, the Space Shuttle. A large nuclear powered booster could put six times that mass in orbit in one flight. According to this article, an Apollo size rocket with gas core engines would be safe, economical and would even get rid of excess nuclear waste.
This is not new. NASA tested Nuke engines in the 60's. If we are serious about going to Mars, we have to start building nuke engines.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Remember how George was saying how we were going to go to Mars. Well I agree. I vote to send Bush to Mars.
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!
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new?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
For your information, stability and poor power/weight is the START of problems. And they haven't been solved. A stable aircraft is very fuel inefficient and slow. A fast and fuel efficient design isn't very stable. It's a fact of life. Power requires fuel. What good is a thrust to weight ratio greater than one if you can't make it past the end of the driveway without a top-off?
Hiller's car demonstrated 2 critical facts that doom any subsequent attempts to wed a car and a plane. First: for all the trouble of getting a pilot's license, most people opt for the real thing. Second: design properties for a good car are almost mutually exclusive with the design requirements of a good airplane.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Not a popular sentiment with the Slashdot crowd, I'm sure, but "because it would be cool" isn't a good reason to send people to Mars. Learning more about the universe we live in is a noble goal, but sending a small group of people to Mars as primarily a publicity stunt is a colossal waste of money.
Neither is it reasonable to suggest that a colony on Mars would be good "insurance" against a global catastrophe, as one loony did above. We are so far away from being able to build a self-supporting colony on Mars that it's laughable.
Nearly all of the money that NASA has spent on "human exploration" programs since the 1970's has been wasted. Some of the research on the effects of micro-gravity on human physiology are worthwhile, and need to be done IF long-term manned space missions are going to be considered. Unfortunately, the USSR (and later Russian) government was doing essentially the same research at the same time, for orders of magnitude less money.
The choice isn't necessarily between space research and social programs, although I'd argue that investing in affordable higher education for all qualified students would do much more to advance the state of human knowledge than a mission to Mars ever would.
The choice is between spending billions of dollars on keeping "astronauts" in space for PR reasons, rather than focussing NASA on basic research into the "hard problems" of space exploration.
NASA needs to focus more on basic research into self-contained environmental systems, better telerobotics/telepresence, more-sophisticated onboard intelligence for robotic spacecraft & rovers, automated materials processing, etc. All these things are prerequisites to getting people "out there" for a period of time where they might actually be able to accomplish something useful.
If they dropped support for the International Space Station and just de-orbited it into the sea, they could USE the money they saved on maintaining that albatross, and on re-fitting the Shuttle fleet, to increase basic research activity by several orders of magnitude.
There's nothing that would be accomplished by sending humans to Mars that couldn't be achieved more simply and vastly cheaper by a flotilla of robots.
-Mark
Didn't Doom3 teach us anything about the folly of living on Mars?