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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."
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.
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.
I need women!
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.
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
And 1,000 US soldiers and 10,000 Iraqis still alive.
Think about it.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Listen buddy, if you want to talk about the War in Iraq, then go over to the "politics" section.
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. --
If not created solely for warfare, many of our technological advances (metalugry, steel, plastic, computers, the internet, jet aviation, canned food) were promoted and mass produced to support a war effort.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Sigh, I wasn't going to get involved with this one, but I can't resist.
1) Amnesty International assessed no such thing as a "saddam and sanctions" count. Amnesty did assess that the *sanctions* killed about 1 1/2 million people, of which about 500,000 were children. However, the US continually called this number way too high when we were supporting the sanctions - do you suddenly believe it?
Furthermore, the hospitals are *still* devastated, some even worse due to postwar looting. The water system is still in shambles. There's more military waste scattering the country. Consequently, people are still dying like they were before.
2) "Even the most conservative estimates had Saddam killing tens of thousands of Iraqis every year". Completely wrong - and, has been demonstrated thusfar. The mass graves found in Iraq contain 3-4 thousand bodies. The largest of them - over thousand bodies - was from the shia uprising. Most of the other graves were either from the shia uprising or the Iran-Iraq war. Some bodies did show signs of summary execution, but it's nothing near like what you described.
Are we just not finding the graves? Doubtful. We're not only locating them from local testimony, but by doing satellite spectral analysis of the soil. Disturbed soil exposes gypsum, so you can see where people have dug.
Most of the inflated counts were arrived at due to including the people killed and missing during the Iran-Iraq war - a war which, might I add, the US supported.
> at the hands of a crazed madman
Please, by all means, demonstrate that he is a "crazed madman". Offer us your diagnosis. Meanwhile, please diagnose Islam Karimov and the other brutal dictators who we're not simply ignoring, but actually supporting. Karimov's security services put to shame the sort of generic middle-eastern torture centers that we found in Iraq; his actually *boiled people to death* (the bodies have been autopsied).
> or we could remove that dictator and give the Iraqi people a chance at freedom
Yeah, they're really grateful, aren't they? Perhaps I should put you in touch with a few Iraqis, and let them tell you how truly grateful they are. I'll have to warn you, one of them was just carjacked a few weeks ago, another had a cousin's husband kidnapped and ransomed earlier this year, and another had a good friend of his almost killed by US forces while reporting about a US convoy for the Guardian (everyone who took shelter from the helicopters that returned in the place that he sheltered were all killed - an al-Arabiya journalist, a man trying to save his kid brother, etc) - so they may not take too kindly to your rosy assessments.
> I've met Iraqis who have suffered under Saddam Hussein
Imagine, expats supporting regime change in their parent country! No way! I guess Costa Rica should overthrow the US government, because when I was down there, all the expat Americans I knew hated Bush and wanted him kicked out.
BTW, when was the last time that you talked to them, and do they have family over there right now?
> in 30 years we could be launching Mars missions from the Baghdad Cosmodrome
Yes - people who daily get to see their countrymen fragged, are going to welcome us with open arms. Sure.
> who beforehand would have been working on designs for dirty bombs or chemical munitions
Yeah! That's it, nations build "dirty bombs". Ok, you just proudly displayed your ignorance there. And as for the chemical munitions - where are these vast stockpiles that Saddam had the country teeming with? The whole zero scientists working on them would do a great job building zero rockets.
You know, in the middle ages, when people set out to find a witch, they usually found one.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
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!