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Enormous Amount of Frozen Water Found on Mars
schweini writes "Space.com is reporting that the Mars Express probe's MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding) experiment has detected and measured an enormous amount of water ice near Mars' south pole, which would be sufficient to submerge the whole planet's surface underneath approximately 10m of water on average."
Because, in America we don't care about achievement in discovery. The typical attitude is something like why should we spend two billion dollars exploring space when we have real problems in our own country. Yes, that true American spirit that has propelled us since the first foot was stepped on the shores of this country is dead and buried. *sigh*
Seriously, when was the last time you heard a kid cite some social parasite, sports star or rapper as one of their heroes? When was the last time you heard one name an astronaut? In fact, how many people can name even one astronaut that is currently active in the space program?
Unless it involves devising some mechanism of getting us beer, porn or baby jebus in larger quantities and more efficient rates, my fellow Americans largely don't give a damn.
But seriously, why would it have to be an astronaut "currently active" in the space program? Surely you could still have Neil Armstrong or John Glenn be your astronaut hero. I'm sure a lot of people still hold up Michael Jordan as their sports hero, even though he's been retired for years. That illustrates my point precisely. First, on the sports angle - it's sad that we would even compare some guy who scored lots of points in a game where you throw a ball in a hole and who could jump high to a guy who straps himself into skyscraper sized machine with enough fuel to incinerate Florida, escapes the atmosphere, throws on a suit and leaves the shuttle to walk around in the empty vacuum of space, tethered by a little stringy rope and risking his life every second of the way in a manner that no other man or woman on the planet could even comprehend.
Second, on the Neil Armstrong angle. That the only space heroes we could conjure up are those that were around when most of our parents were still watching Saturday morning cartoons is the perfect illustration of how pathetic our desire for exploration has become. Astronauts today are doing far more heroic things every time they step into that suit above and beyond most other human beings. Unfortunately, they are not big, bold, earth-shattering things leading to immense progress. Again, that illustrates the entire problem at hand. We don't have any Buzz Aldrins or Neil Armstrongs at the moment, because we are too busy cutting their budgets, reducing the grandness of their adventures and explaining away the loss of our societal fascination with and dedication to advancement.
There's nothing wrong with admiring sports figures, but neither Kobe Bryant nor Paris Hilton are ever going to discover anything great. Lead man to a new world. Or save man from himself by finding "new lands".
I envy that my parents were a live in a time when a president put an impossible challenge in front of a nation and then they watched nervously as it culminated in potentially the greatest achievement in the whole of history. I envy that the memories my parents and generations before them have are not limited to two space shuttles exploding and screwing up a little robot rover launch, because we used imperial instead of metric measurements.
To be fair, I do some work with kids for educational outreach for space exploration, and one thing that I've always find amazing is that whenever I get in to the question and answer part (usually preparing for something else fun) there's always a couple of kids who have some amazingly fun and insightful questions like 'What planet would you visit if you could?' or 'When do you think we'll have a Mars base?' To be fair, it's a minority of the kids who seem really interested in space exploration or anything beyond a 'whoa, that was really cool!' type of thing (I do mostly rocketry stuff for that reason,) but I feel that a minority are all you need.
I had a discussion with another student a week or so ago about the politics of space exploration, and who of the upcoming nominees would be the best choice with regards to NASA funding and private exploration legislation (I currently think its Bill Richardson, despite my partisanship,) and one of the main things that stuck out at me in our discussion was that it doesn't matter if the public is really excited about it, it just matters that a small minority are willing to put their effort into it, and the majority are willing to tolerate a very minor part of the budget on it ($15 billion is not that much as far as the national budget is concerned.) Not that I wouldn't be ecstatic if everyone started cheering as loudly for a discovery of a life-developing extra-solar planet, or even the discovery of vast liquid seas on Titan, but what we currently have is better than nothing. A couple more billion to allow for more robots along with 'Moon, Mars and Beyond' would be amazing though.
Anyway, I don't have a problem with the Europeans making this discovery, and I'm as patriotic as anyone, because this kind of thing is a human endeavor, and I'm just happy that my country can make a significant impact.
To sum this little rant up, I'd be very happy if our celebrity obsessed culture got over the obsession, but it really doesn't worry me much. My one real concern for the long term future of the US (long-term meaning hopefully not Iraq, Afghanistan, or even immigration) is our educational system so we can remain competitive (but not necessarily dominant) in the technology and discoveries of the future.
It might be fun to at least consider looking into your statements of 'fact'. For example, you might think about whether the statement "Mars has global warming" is a scientific fact, or just a hypothesis still in need of testing... or it might be fun just to smirk and assume you have all the answers.
Your link, for example, says, "new data points to the possibility" of a warming trend. Here, in contrast, is someone disputing (in just one of many ways) your implicit suggestion that both Mars and Earth are warming due to some external cause:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192
Another thing to consider: "more study is needed" (from your space.com citation).
Finally, even if Mars is experiencing 'global warming' - is it of the same magnitude that we are? Why is it happening? You seem pretty eager to latch on to whatever evidence supports your theory without finding out very much about it...
Did you know that if you took all of the sand from the Sahara Desert and spread it out that it would cover all of North Africa...?
Compared to the Earth, as an example, the 10m stat actually says there is very little water. Think about it.
80 meters depth covering just a bit more than 10% of the entire planet. 2/3 ~ 3/4 of Earth is covered in water, with the average depth of all the major oceans sitting at 3800m.
Three-thousand, eight-hundred meters here at home - compared to fifteen meters for Mars. Fifteen??!! Does that sound enormous to you? If it does, I've got an appendage I'd like to show you, in private, of course, you're not going to believe.
This is very exciting as it makes the idea of colonizing Mars sometime in the next 100 or 150 years a little closer. The article mentions even more water:
There's long been known to be an enormous amount of water in Mars' polar caps; the question was how much.
Let's engage in a little creative exercise, for those who have this notion that Mars will be colonized within the next hundred, hundred-fifty years (by colony, assumedly "mostly independent"). Pick a category you would need on Mars -- power, metals, ceramics, plastics, adhesives, clothing, lubricants, hydraulic fluids, dyes, solvents, abrasives, food, personal items, medications, etc -- and pick a specific representative in that category -- say, in ceramics, ferrite suitable for transformer cores, or in plastics, teflon for coatings in high-corrosion environments (like many refining processes). Take your pick. If you want me to break down a particular category, just ask. Once you make your pick, we'll trace back the dependency chain for producing it.
The dependency chains are almost always monstrous.
The simple fact is that, on another planet, you're entirely dependent on modern technology to survive. Modern technology inherently spawns massively long dependency chains. We don't notice these things in our daily lives. We write with a marker and never give a thought to all of the chemical and physical processes that went into making the plastic, the foam core, and the ink, and everything it took to make those chemicals, and everything it took to make those chemicals. And so on. Look around you. Almost everything you see has dependency chains like that. To have a mostly self-sufficient colony on Mars, thus, you must be able to satisfy most of those dependency chains locally. You're talking mining hundreds of minerals (can't find some? Uh oh, you're in trouble!), which will be dispersed across the planet. You're talking about an industrual complex the size of a major US city. Which you'd have to set up on a planet for which it costs tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram to land payload there.
Don't hold your breath.
Assuming ethanol comes from murdered children and the hydrogen from magic, hydrogen saves 132% more lives than ethanol.