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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.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Won't the Women go to Venus?
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
>
> *I* need women.
>
> As do most
I don't know about you, but I don't need women badly enough to fuck a clump of rust at -50F. Major shrink factor there, bud.
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.
Will we still need telephone sanitizers in thirty years?
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
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.
Listen buddy, if you want to talk about the War in Iraq, then go over to the "politics" section.
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?
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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. --
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.
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!
new?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
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?