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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
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"
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).
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.
And TFA (the BBC one) mentions that one of the possible uses for the studies they are doing would be to mitigate the effects of isolation on the elderly.
How are they going to handle sex?
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.
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...
I'm holding in the palm of my hand a device more powerful then the computer they used to explore most of our solarsystem. Called a cellphone. (actually a smartphone which is more then a high end computer could do 10 years ago.)
Now, let me tell you, context changes. Time changes. Our technology and knowledge about the universe has changed.
Be it by gazing at the stars and learning about the universe, about motivating and inspiring people to push the limits of the physical possible while they dream about doing awesome things, fed by media, scifi, fantasy, dream-technology or what have you. It inspires and makes you work for days, months, years without end to a seemingly useless purpose.
We have evolved these decades, we have new minds, a new "basic understanding", we process information differently and our younglings and the active working society has different morals, different insights and different goals or knowledge as decades ago.
Instead of shooting it all down, believing your world is fixed and you possess all the current knowledge, you've very intellectually gathered over all these years, as I, it's no reason to disallow discovery or handing over the flag to those who are still eager and unspoilt in their concepts but dare to dream. And their dreams, as yours or mine, are different too.
You wont restore your economy by suffocating it, but by creating economical activity and draw in foreign currency. The problem is when you have "fat years" in a country, people sortof lay back and consume and import. While they're at the same time exporting their wealth, just up the point where it tips over and they're dependent of import (of goods, services, knowledge, ...).
So let these suckers play around with their concept of science, give them boundaries in which they can manoeuvre and need to be creative (no needless large fundings and no "wealthfare" bureaucratic jobs.) things will look much different, then.
tl:dr; time changes.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
18 months in a confined, dark space is nothing for most Slashdotters.. ofcourse, sociallizing with 5 other people would be.
Not a bad rant, but in a fiat economy, money is essentially a fiction. A trillion-dollars is no more meaningful a figure than a hojillion dollars.
What's significant is assets - the housing bubble which you lament left us with plenty of cheap real estate, which is a good thing - and work: whether people do it, what they do, and how efficiently they do it.
There are plenty of Americans who could be working on manned space exploration. If they're not doing that, what would you suggest they do instead? Till the fields? Watch Oprah re-runs all day while collecting welfare?
We can afford manned space travel. We can even afford government funded space travel. The only question is what we give up to free up the people to work on it. I'd say giving up Iraq and Afghanistan would be a good start.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.