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Why Mars Is Not the Best Place To Look For Life
EccentricAnomaly writes "A story over at Science News quotes Alan Stern (former head of NASA Science missions) as saying: 'The three strongest candidates [for extraterrestrial life] are all in the outer solar system.' He's referring to Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. So why is NASA spending $2.5B on the next Mars Rover and planning to spend over $6B more on a Mars sample return when it can't find the money for much cheaper missions to Europa or Enceladus?"
Mars is closer and easier to send people to
Mars is closer to us than Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Not just physically, but culturally. Literature, film, etc, Mars has played a big role in the past 50-75 years. If you hear "little green men", the average person is going to immediately think "Mars". More people are more likely to know the name Mars as opposed to some moons orbiting Saturn ( and yes, I'll admit I had to look in the article to double check that they are in fact moons of Saturn). If you are trying to get funding for something, you go for something people will recognize, because they will be more likely to support it. Ask for something they've never heard of, and they might start wondering if it's really all that necessary. It's sad, but it's true.
Also, people might confuse Europa with a continent, and Enceladus with a Mexican dish. :)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I blame Percival Lowell more than H. G. Wells. Wells just took Lowell's ideas and made a novel out of them. Lowell, being a respected astronomer, caused people to think that it could be true.
Yes, Europa has a probably has a better chance of having life in its subsurface oceans but there is that wee problem of penetrating through its icy crust. How the hell are you going to penetrate through 20 kilometers of ice (minimum estimate) without using a massive thermonuclear bomb? And then if you did, any life in the vicinity of the blast would be annihilated and then the thawed hole would freeze over before a probe could find anything. Yea, forget about Europa.
This seems unfair at multiple levels. First, we understand the basic Martian environment a lot better than other environments so sending things there are easier. Second we know from the Viking probes that Mars has weird chemistry going on in its surface. We still don't know what exactly happened there. The basic results of the Viking experiments seemed to be consistent with life but no complex carbon compounds were found. We now know that this may have been due to the presence of perchlorates in the surface material which could have destroyed the organic compounds when the samples were heated. Mars is still one of the most promising locations for life.
That said, there are less good reasons why Mars is a frequent target. Sending things to Mars takes a lot less time than sending things to the outer systems. That means if one is a scientist one would rather work on a project that sends something to Mars than something that goes far away. Second, Mars has a place in the popular mind that these various moons do not.
The real question that should be being asked is not why there's so much funding for Mars compared to other locations but why there's so little funding in general. The repeatedly canceled Europa missions would be in the cost range of a few hundred million dollars. This is a tiny amount when one compares it for example to how much money the US spends on Afghanistan monthly. The US has messed up priorities. That's why even as we speak, the Russians are doing a sample return mission to Phobos which will launch in a few weeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt. If the Russians were still dirty commies the US would be in an absolute panic and we'd have congressional hearings asking why the US isn't doing something similar. I hope that as China becomes more of a boogeyman the US will start taking space seriously again, if not for the good of humanity, at least for old-fashioned xenophobia. And I suppose that in the long-run I really would prefer that functioning democracies explore and colonize space than other countries, but that's so far in the future at the current rate of exploration that it doesn't seem to be immediately relevant. Right now, we need to just get some people substantially interested in exploring beyond our little rock.
Humans have lived in deserts before. Common Theory is that Homo Sapiens evolved in the grasslands of Africa and thrived in the deserts. Bedouin Arabs still roam the deserts of the Middle East.
Of all the planets in our solar system, Mars is (theoretically) the easiest to Terraform. It has lots of carbon dioxide and Water Ice, which (with the right bacteria) could be used to establish a carbon-based ecosystem. It's Day is only a half-hour or so longer than 24 hours so it wouldn't be too much of a cultural shock for our frail human bodies to adapt to.
Lot's of Science Fiction discuss the colonisation and terraforming of Mars. Some Future Fantasy, some Hard S.F. I recommend reading Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. The Trilogy discusses the Political, Geological, Biological and Physical Sciences of Intra-Solar-system, Extra-Terrestrial Colonisation.
Although you are technically correct (the best kind of correct), that's a rather useless way of viewing money. In the U.S., the top 20% have about 85% of the accumulated wealth, and the top 5% have almost 60%, which makes it a remarkably lopsided distribution, with the vast majority of people living below the mean.
What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
The bigger problem I have with your post is the assumption that the rich have predominantly earned their money. There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.). The vast majority of working class income falls into the first category. The vast majority of upper class income falls into the latter category. So any tax scheme that does not tax the upper class more than the working class is unfair because it takes away money that the working class have earned to allow the rich to keep more money that they haven't earned.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No, it sits in vaults doing nothing while most of the human race starve. My favourite rich guy story is this one where he was so rich he didn't even notice for a couple of years that someone had stolen loads of money from him. Trickle-down is bullshit.
other than just looking for life. Also, Mars probes can operate for years not just for hours like the one on Titan.
There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.)
I don't want to get caught up in another endless thread about class warfare, but how are capital gains and interest "unearned"? Investing money can be hard work, and that money isn't just sitting there - it becomes available for other purposes, such as funding new companies. I grew up watching my father spend many hours each week looking over the family's investments and planning for the next several decades of our lives - he managed to pay for several college educations this way. But according to you, he didn't "earn" any of the money he made through his investments, so it's okay to confiscate it?
Now, the argument that people who make the majority of their income solely through capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as the rest of us - that I can pretty much agree with. But they earned it just as much as I earn my salary. I also have no problem with the concept that the tax burden should be proportional to income, or that the working poor should get a steep reduction in taxes. I don't really object to taxing the rich at a slightly higher rate either. But I'm really not comfortable telling someone that they don't deserve their wealth and should forfeit it to the government, especially given some of the batshit insane things we spend it on. And yes, colonizing Mars falls into that category.
NASA has no real scientific focus. It's just all over the place. If I were in charge, I would give it one primary mission, and a secondary mission, and then have a tertiary agenda.
Agendas:
1. Detection and defense of incoming bodies, including the development of better D&D technology. Eventually this will be fulfilled and go into maintenance mode, where Agenda 2 then gets primary funding.
2. Find life using existing technology including the development of better D&D technology. While this will never be complete (once we find it we can keep on finding it) we will look for more and more sophisticated forms. (I assume extraterrestrial bacterial detection would happen first, then complex organisms)
3. All other efforts on determining the nature of the universe. JWST, Hubble, etc.
As far as I am concerned NASA has no reason to send humans off planet. We should be developing Avatar-like technology for near earth operations and AI driven tech for stuff where the lag is too long.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
1) The simplest boring device is merely a boring (pardon the pun) RTG or nuclear reactor, melting its way in slowly over the course of years.
2) You don't have to bore to get to the subsurface; ice volcanism brings it up for you. Heck, an Enceladus probe doesn't even have to *land*, thanks to its geysers. BTW, Enceladus isn't the only Saturnian moon with ice geysers -- just the one with the biggest ice geysers.
3) Please propose an alternative Europa hypothesis to a subsurface ocean.
I noticed you didn't discus Titan. Titan should be an incredibly easy body to explore due to its combination of a thick atmosphere and low gravity -- hot air or helium balloons, powered blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, variable-pitch wing aircraft, autogyros, etc. While the Delta-V requirements to get there are certainly high, they're tempered somewhat by the very easy aerocapture. It's an ongoing laboratory of organic chemistry due to the photocatalytic chemical reactions in its upper atmosphere (likely creating the tholins found all over the Saturnian system -- which we really know very little about, apart from that they're complex organic chemical compounds). It has seasonal and permanent organic lakes, ice volcanism dredging material up from the warmer subsurface, tectonic activity, and on and on. Honestly, of all the bodies in the solar system, I think Titan calls out the most for exploration.
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
Errr... no. What happens is that people who sell things profiteer off the windfall. The cost of living increases to the point where the poor are still poor and the middle class are still middle class. That is precisely what happened when women entered the workforce in a big way in the 1970s.
You have a five-figure user id, so you're probably Gen X. If your parents owned the house you grew up in, chances are good that you couldn't afford to buy it today.
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Not exactly. The wealth disparity has been getting worse since 1945. This means overall, most of the money is going to the rich. I have no problem with rich, middle class, and poor existing, I have a problem with 95% being poor and 5% being rich. You would expect a system that benefits all people equally would maintain a relatively close distribution of wealth over time.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
'Earn' doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. The idea that someone could 'earn' a billion dollars is ... hilarious.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Capital gains are not proportional to the amount effort you put in, they're proportional to the amount of money you put in. They're also exponential. If you reinvest, you're going to make more next year than you did this year. You're don't just make money, you make more money the more money you make.
Unless, of course, you lose money, because there is always risk involved. One of the reasons for the capital gains tax being relatively low is to encourage re-investment into the economy. I don't know at what point the capital gains rate becomes high enough to hurt the economy, although I'm sure some economists have ideas. And it does sometimes involve effort, as I'll explain below.
Your father may have spent a lot of effort, but was it work? What was accomplished? When someone goes to work at the widget factory, something has changed. Several people who did not previously have widgets now do. The stock market? From a distance to me it looks like a continuous racetrack with a lot more horses.
He put his money back into the economy, which means that theoretically, someone could have started a widget factory using his money, which is certainly accomplishing something. (Not that he ever had enough money to start a factory - I think my parents were somewhere in the top 5%, but above that point the gaps between each percentile start to become enormous.) But more generally, you're thinking about capital gains in too narrow a sense. If I buy a house in need of repair, fix it up and remodel it over the course of a year, and sell it for twice what I paid for it, that's capital gains, but it certainly accomplishes something useful to society. Should it be taxed at the same rate as ordinary income? Sure, if it's the primary source of income, I can't think of a good reason why not. But it's not "unearned", which is what the parent poster was claiming.
By the way, if it's not obvious I'm at least partly playing devil's advocate here. But I have to admit that I cringe when I hear some of the arguments made in favor of more steeply progressive taxation. I agree that it's appalling that we went into debt because of upper-class tax cuts, and it's even more appalling that some people want to increase taxes on the working poor. But I also consider some of our major public expenses to be indefensible, and I also don't believe that it's moral to expect other people to pay for everything that strikes our fancy. And I say this as someone who earns well under $100,000/year, and will probably never be genuinely rich. Getting back to the original thread, I don't include NASA among the indefensible budget items (and of course it's a relatively small fraction), but if we raise taxes on the top 1%, it should be to pay off the debt and strengthen our social safety net, not start a colony on Mars (or buy more supercarrier groups, for that matter). And I'm also one of the people who genuinely hopes that someone does start a colony on Mars someday - I just don't really expect this to happen in my lifetime.
In fact, it's cold as hell.
For context, click Parent.
Not nearly as easy as terraforming the Sahara desert, though, so why don't we start there ?
What investments in production capacity? The U.S. hasn't done that in any significant way for as long as I've been alive. It just outsources the labor to some other country where the cost of labor is cheaper.
- the U.S. has nothing to do with it. It's always done by private interest - individuals looking for a buck. In your lifetime (unless you were born prior to 1965), the conditions have been deteriorating, as U.S. was burning through the wealth created even before 1913, and obviously the monopoly wealth created between 1947 and 1965. The reasons for it are numerous, but the result of all those reasons was the same: increase labor costs, increase taxes, increase business costs by increasing regulations, protect monopolies, destroy competition, subsidize monopolies, destroy money by inflation, all of these are done by government.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great for the U.S. to invest in production capacity. I'm just not convinced that leaving the money in the hands of the same rich people who have repeatedly failed to invest in that capacity will miraculously cause that to happen. The extremely wealthy do not create jobs. The people who create jobs are the middle class workers who start small businesses.
- the rich have 'repeatedly failed' to invest?
The reason that USA has ANYTHING is because people were investing, and yes, majority of those who really invest are rich or became rich while working on their ideas (like Wozniak and Jobs, since those are the preferred examples of today).
Every single dollar that the rich are not spending on themselves is used as an investment. As I said previously: how exactly it's invested is a different topic, but the reasons that the investments are not done into USA's production capacity are again: government and everything it does.
I don't know how it happened that so many people are brainwashed not to understand this, but everything that government does is detrimental to investments because it's all about spending on things government wants to spend on, it's not about building anything that the market wants and needs. It's about taking investment capital out of private investments and putting into hands of people, who just want to spend it based on their political needs, but those have nothing to do with improving the economy.
Even when government supposedly wants to help the economy somehow, it's always failing miserably in every way possible. From the introduction of the Federal reserve and income taxes and to the new deal and SS and Medicare and every war and every department, be it energy or education or housing, whatever it touches, if money is involved, it's going to destroy it.
If you want production capacity, take the money from the rich and give it to the middle class.
- in absence of government preventing the economy from working that's EXACTLY what the market does!
But you cannot take away money from rich and give it to the middle class indiscriminately, it has to be done based on a good idea that market would want to see implemented, that's why the only real way to do so is not with government at all, but as loans - investments into capital.
There HAS to be cost associated with borrowing money, and government destroyed that cost as well now, with 0% interest, which obviously prevents anybody from being able to borrow anything (except government), who is going to lend you money at 0%? Only government.
Government is the force that destroys investment opportunities and you are blind to it to such a great extent, that your great idea is to take more money out of the private sector and give it to the government?
Government doesn't have the liquidity problem, it prints and borrows all it wants (especially since it was able to push interest rates down to 2% even on the long yielding curve). It's NOT the liquidity that is lacking, it never was, not when government is involved that can print.
You can't handle the truth.
The money spent on sending people into orbit is negligible to the money spent on sending people to Iraq.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
However between the 1940's and 1970's people could basically afford to purchase homes at reasonable prices, make a good living and support their families, and have a reasonable expectation that if one works hard, they will get rewarded. This doesn't happen anymore.
I work hard, make a good living, and support my family. It is hard to do, however, because people like you keep wanting to take away my hard-earned money and, through redistribution, give it to others who haven't worked as hard or to bail out others who've made poor decisions in their lives.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
So why is NASA spending $2.5B on the next Mars Rover and planning to spend over $6B more on a Mars sample return when it can't find the money for much cheaper missions to Europa or Enceladus?"
This summary doesn't accurately describe the situation at all. The Mars missions are so more expensive largely because they are doing more. The next Mars Rover is going to be larger, heavier, and more capable than the two previous--wildly successful--rovers in pretty much every way. That $6B mission is a sample return mission, lifting off and bringing a research payload from Mars back to Earth is an enormous technical challenge. It's never been done before and that will drive most of the cost.
Also the linked missions aren't quite as cheap as the summary implies. The proposed mission to Europa has an estimated cost of $2.5 billion (and $4.7 billion is the given estimate in the last paragraph of the first link in the summary), exactly the same price as the first "overly expensive" Mars mission mentioned. The Enceladus trip is much cheaper, estimated at a little over half of a billion, so that at least is a reasonable alternative, though I still want to point out that that mission is much earlier in the planning stages, and missions that diverge a lot from previous missions are more likely to have ballooning costs as new found kinks are worked out.
Another issue is that not only are the Mars missions promising more, but there is a much greater chance that they will be able to live up to those promises. Every single Mars mission we've done so far has added to our body of knowledge on the planet, and our ability to better plan a mission and engineer a craft that can get more and better data on the next run. From Viking and on we have answered many, many questions about Mars, and learned about even more questions (meaning that we know the sort of doodad that needs to be on the next mission to answer that new question). Starting a new series of missions to a new celestial body means that in a lot of ways you have to start back at the drawing board again. This is another reason to start small on a new body, better to have 3-4 partially successful $200 million missions leading up to that big $2.5 billion dollar rover mission rather than trying plan a $2.5 billion mission right of the bat.
I should clarify that I don't think that investigating these moons is a bad idea. I think it's a wonderful one. However I don't think that we should investigate these moons in place of Mars, when we have already accumulated so much experience on how to investigate Mars. It's also worthwhile to note that this was the viewpoint of every scientist interviewed in the article. Nobody said that they didn't want to go to Mars, they all said that they wanted this moons visited in addition to Mars, not instead of.