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Mars500 Mission Begins
krou writes "The six participants in the Mars500 project have entered their sealed facility. The project, which lasts for 18 months, is designed to try and simulate a mission to Mars, completely isolated and cut off from the outside world, with a '20-minute, one-way time-delay in communications to mirror the real lag in sending messages over the vast distance between Mars and Earth.' They also have limited consumables, with everything required being loaded onboard from the start. You can follow developments via the blog, or the Twitter feed of Diego Urbina, one of the would-be cosmonauts."
20 minute delay ... they won't be getting first post then
Aren't they called Nursing Homes? Care for the Elderly is strangely akin to this...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Having had in-depth conversations with scientists that are actually in the field, I can confidently say that you're wrong.
We have the technology for a trip. We don't have the political will.
The trip would be return though - we don't have the technology to sustain a habitat there independent of earth.
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Ground control operator: "Hey uh.....Steve, while you're in space and all, mind if I go over to your house and sleep with your wife? I'll give you about 19 minutes to say no"
... the blog's in Russian. In Russia blogs translate you, etc. etc. ESA has a mission diary available though, written by Diego Urbina and Romain Charles.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
If Twitter is still popular at that time yes.
Publicity is a necessary component of NASA missions.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
We have the technology today, we could start designing, building, and testing a manned mars mission tomorrow. The risks would be high, the costs would be huge, and the time frame makes it politically difficult but we have the technology needed to start and by the time the start is done we'll have the technology to finish.
Because the risks are high, we will almost certainly set out to identify and quantify them before putting too much money into the program. One of the risks that we know very little about are the psychological problems of being trapped in a small, enclosed space with a handful of other individuals for a few years. Especially with such limited contact with the outside world and what is almost undoubtedly an boring, repetitive diet (you'd be surprised at how much something like that will drive people crazy after a while).
Last time the Russians tried this, two of them bloodied each other and one of the women was nearly raped. No women this time.
"Men willingly believe what they wish." - Julius Caesar
Well, it depends how you say it - we have the technology to develop the technology needed. But we don't have much of the rockets, landers, habitats, robotics and whatnot we'd need. Everything would have to be designed and simulated and manufactured and tested and... So even if you said "Go!" today, I imagine it'd take JFKs decade at best. And with no Cold War and huge national prestige breathing down their necks I suspect 20-30 years is a very realistic estimate. Of course with the current political outlook I wouldn't bet on it being the 21st century.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They just need to open a realm on Mars.
It might be an empty world tho. I hope they won't ban bots or Rover will be pissed.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Actually we do. we can easily create a sustainable habitat there we have the technology right now. It's all in money. We can create all the air we want IF there is water there we can tap into. send 3 nuclear reactors for power generation, (to have double redundant backup. We need a 13 month OH CRAP survivability window. if everything goes sideways for the next unmanned resupply to send replacements and hopefully land and not crater.
WE could probably do it for the yearly cost of the Middle East wars.
but war is profitable and preferable to humanity. so we choose that above a Martian or even moon colony.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
How long til the party gets gay?
You obviously don't live in New England. Up here, we measure distances in time, not linear measurements. If you ask me how far away something is, I'll give you an answer in minutes or hours.
"How far is it to Boston?"
"2 hours"
The distance to Mars is vast enough that I'd probably answer "You can't get there from here."
"Vast" is a matter of perspective. Compared to any distance we've sent humans, Mars is pretty vast.
The distance is sufficiently vast that we need to make sure the driver can handle the folks in the back seat asking "Are we there yet? Now much further is it?" every five minutes. That's why this test is important.
If the people in this box start killing each other, we at least haven't wasted a bunch of billions of dollars to get their corpses to Mars. We can learn what kind of living space we need to work out to maximize their chances of making it there alive and reasonably sane.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Right on... manned space exploration at the moment represents more of a really long, expensive camping trip than space exploration.
Humans aren't particularly adept physically and mentally to live in such confined quarters for months on end. Maybe someday, when we could build larger, sustainable biosphere-like micro-colonies that could stay in space indefinitely and engage the occupants' senses while it cruises around the solar system.
At least exercises like this Mars500 mission can provide us some more psychological insight in how to get along with each other right here on Earth. But for the near term, it would be cool to dump money in more robotic exploration, science, heck, even extraplanetary mining and fabrication.
How are they going to handle sex?
Some with one hand. Others with two.
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
If you read the link your provided, you will see that Biosphere 2 was nothing close to a scientific experiment. It was not made by NASA, it was not made by scientists.
The questions about a trip to Mars are political. The only technical question is whether we can make it in 6 month or if we'll have an engine to do it in 2 months. The main science question is : what the hell do we need humans on Mars for ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The distance to Mars, relative to me driving down to the corner store to pick up a 6er of Sam Adams, is mindbogglingly vast. And I live in a rural enough area that it's not a short drive.
Bad humor aside, the distance to Mars (about 55 million km, if you use the closest approach) is still vast compared to a trip to, say, the Moon (the furthest out Humans have been so far, at about 385,000 km).
It's almost 150 times as far to Mars as it is to the Moon. That's sufficiently "vast" that we really need to make sure humans can manage the trip in a confined space without killing each other.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Not so bad for Eve. Not only is it somewhat relevant to the subject matter, but by the time they get back, they would have skilled up!
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
Yes, perhaps I should have added modifier "realistically" to my 20-30 year estimate. I have no doubt that we could be on Mars in 10 years or less if we mounted an Apollo-program-like effort today, but that would require the kind of resources that we're extremely unlike to commit. At the height of the NASA's Apollo development (1966), NASA's budget represented about 5.5% of the total federal budget. To achieve that equivalent level of support today, you would have to increase NASA's budget by over 10x. With a huge (and rising federal) debt, an already out-of-control deficit, and two unending wars still hanging around like albatrosses around the neck of the country; it's pretty unlikely you could even get a Congress to DOUBLE the NASA budget, much less balloon it from $19 billion a year to $200 billion.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
All male (or all female) is probably the best way to arrange these things, unless they are prepared to give up their privacy in such matters. It's okay to have segregated showers etc in a submarine these days because of the sheer size of them now. But if you are trying to budget for 3-4 man crew, then they have to be comfortable being naked in each other's presence.
It would be a useful second round to try it with mixed genders, but for now arranging it with just the one gender give a more defined control group. This way they can analyse the group for stresses that are not caused by shyness or reproductive ... urges. If round one succeeds and round two fails, then they learn that it's okay to send groups to mars, one gender at a time.
Men require more calories on a day to day basis, so an all female crew would require less resources than a male crew, but women are also much more social creatures, and being without contact to the wider world, would likely affect them more. (In the wild) It has been seen how males would often lead solitary lives (bull elephants, lions, bears) while a lone female (among mammals) is very rare. Women might find it a lot harder to leave everything behind them and go on a trip like this. And for this reason it would be interesting to see a similar project with women and compare the results
It would be interesting to hear from a woman on this subject. If one ever comes here...
These people are obsessional fools, not scientists or explorers. If these morons were serious in finding out what it was like to spend 500 days locked in a room, they could just ask any of the millions of people that the government (USA or Russian Federation, what's the difference?) is holding in prison.
Space Exploration is a 20th-century quasi-religion that is beginning to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe it too strongly.
Get over it. Manned space flight was a 20th-century phenomenon that has been determined to be too expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and throwing hundreds of billions of dollars (that we don't have anymore) into space doesn't solve them. Grown-up people who have to make hard and realistic decisions about our public funds and resources have decided this. Tom Swift halfwits can't accept it. Too bad. Time to get real.
People born into 20th-century America are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space explorations. There is no trillion dollars for anything. There is no trillion dollars left anywhere in the USA.
There WAS a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $600,000 mortgages to janitors. There was a trillion dollars spent on federal government budget deficits. Money is not a physical good. Money can be created out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing. Technical people never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There were trillions of dollars unwisely spent...and 'there were' means the past. America was rich, now it's not. There was money in the past but there isn't going to be in the future. The trillions of dollars that space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and its endless possibilities for the betterment of humanity don't exist anymore. They've been already spent; and they're gone. The Burger Kings and endless suburban strip malls is what you got for it. It's all that you're going to get. This is the great tragedy that is America and what it could have been, but isn't and now never will be.
Not so! At its closest, Mars is about 55 millions km away whereas you travel about 150 million km each year.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
18 months in a confined, dark space is nothing for most Slashdotters.. ofcourse, sociallizing with 5 other people would be.
Humans aren't particularly adept physically and mentally to live in such confined quarters for months on end.
Maybe they should study inmates living in segregation units in prisons.
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Are you perhaps familiar to one of the previous attempts where one of the Russian volunteers tried to force himself on a Female Canadian memeber of the crew.
There is a research university that recommended growing a Dwarf wheat as a Mars mission strategy, instead of trying to take all the food you need with you, you cultivate the grain, burn the stalks to turn them into a bio-char that can be used first to filter the air, and then later as fertilizer for to grow more wheat. If their premise is right and you can't possibly carry enough food for the trip then I'd want to see multiple crews practicing their farming skills here on Earth and get it right for 18 months at a time before I sent up anyone who was totally dependent on the system.
There is plenty of work we can down here to get ready to go out there.
It might be better to test the theory first with a mixed group
I already conducted an experiment with a limited sample size within a constrained time-frame (1 girl and 5 minutes respectively).
Needless to say the results were highly discouraging.
The power plant of a single nuclear submarine would easily power a large 60 person population mars base. Considering they are not moving all that extra power can be wasted on silly things to increase comfort. The temperatures that nuclear subs run at are similar to mars and therefore would not be hard to keep the entire base at a balmy 78 degrees. Going nuke for the base would eliminate the problems of solar that far from the sun and the dust that would have to be cleaned off. The same power plant can make pure water to drink and air to breathe, just like how they do on Submarines.
In fact 90% of what we need to create a base on mars is in a typical nuclear submarine. If we could launch and plop a boomer sub on mars, it would make for an excellent Martian base.
Being that far away, it's a good idea to have multiple redundancies.. unless you don't value the life of the crew, then don't waste money on spares.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The main science question is : what the hell do we need humans on Mars for ?
I don't think that's a scientific question. I'm sure there's scientific benefit to doing that, maybe more, probably less than making a large number of probes. Personally, I don't think the motivations are that different than people colonizing random islands and going on voyages around the world.
"We" on Earth probably have little need for the resources on Mars right now. OTOH, it'd be a good first step into colonizing and mining the solar system. Titan apparently has more oil than the Earth. So, in 50 years, when we're starting to run out, I imagine someone will be getting rich off of that. Or we'll have switched to a new power and hydrocarbon source, but who's optimistic enough to say that with absolute certainty? Plus there are countless other potential resources.
Since I was curious, here's some math on Titan's oil. Crude oil has an energy density of 46.3 MJ/kg. Titan's escape velocity is 2.65 Km/sec. So, it'll take more than 3.5 MJ/kg to get the oil off of Titan, which seems quite practical if it were transported in bulk (even 10% efficiency would work). You could also gain 62.7 MJ/kg if you could somehow capture the energy involved in landing it on Earth (space elevator counterweight perhaps?).
Mars has an escape velocity of 5.0 Km/sec, so it'd take 12.5 MJ/kg to get something into space. That's an 80% reduction in energy needs if you build the necessary orbital infrastructure using Martian minerals compared to using Terran minerals. Nobody owns them yet, so there are no middle men driving up costs, and pulling rocks out of the ground will be easier in lower gravity. Environmentalists will love the fact that there's no ecosystem to destroy, and people tend to be a little better about working around aesthetically pleasing natural formations.
Heck, the physics of mining the solar system don't seem bad at all. When technology enables it to be done in an economic manner I'd imagine it's all but inevitable for the world to move to a space based economy. Personally, I live in America, so I'd prefer if we were the ones that got rich (or richer, realistically speaking) from that investment. But if we chill out and keep probing the outer planets (pun averted), our geographic knowledge of the solar system will be spectacular, but people on Earth will suffer and die while competing for limited resources.
Manned space exploration is also the groundwork for tourism, and I'd like to visit space sometime in my life, preferably another celestial body. Besides that, it's a lot more effective for generating interest in the sciences, so I think that's a good enough societal boon.
IANAA, but it doesn't seem like it would take too much effort to scout and then hijack an asteroid or ice comet and maneuver it back gradually on the ITN, and then park it in a stable orbit nearby. It'll take a few years to do it without using a lot of fuel, but that gives you time to drum up a market while it's in transit. Then you'll have a decent amount of water or raw material for shielding / etc. to use for other projects, the kind of bulk material which does take a fair amount of dough to transfer out of our gravity well.
But yeah, harvesting it for terrestrial use would be a bit silly since Earth probably has more abundant and accessible minerals, even rare ones.
Wistful thinking, I know... and I've probably been playing too much EVE / Vendetta Online, but I'm frankly a bit surprised that some kind of scheme like this isn't even on the long-term plan.
Yeah, I actually almost got recruited into the boomers, and have worked with lots of sonar technicians. Probably the closest analogy we have to space travel, where they just dive under water and disappear for months and travel through practically inaccessible places under the ice caps.
Might be a good size for a micro-colony, but I still wouldn't draw a comparison to camping out in microgravity in an enclosed space slightly larger than the Apollo for a year or so.
I care what's in space, out of sheer curiosity if nothing else. It may not be Star Trek but if you think it's a vacuum with a couple of rocks, you're a total moron. Total, total moron.
Now the fact that you're asking for anti-aging and life extension (all over this thread) instead of a cure for cancer or something tells me you're just old and not happy with it. Stop being a selfish, cowardly fuck and accept your mortality. You can already live far longer than any human could have in nature, if you're enjoying your life so much, just enjoy what's left of it and die in peace.
You "life extension fanatics" disgust me. After living long lives, you're just screaming "WAAAAAH I DON'T WANNA DIIIEEEE!!!! WAAAAAAH!!!" It's the most fucking pathetic thing I've ever seen.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel