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NASA Looking For Ideas To Explore Mars
ZeroExistenZ writes "NASA plans to make another trip to Mars in 2018 for which they want to devise a plan by this summer. To come up with ideas for this mission, they turn to the public to tackle a few challenge areas. Participants must submit a brief abstract (no more than two pages) outlining the idea, and indicating in which of the topical areas the idea belongs. Abstracts are due no later than 5:00 p.m. U.S. Central Daylight Time May 10, 2012."
You could probably send volunteers. But sending criminals is pointless. Survival on a mars mission will require an extreme level of technical skill that just isn't plausible to develop in that population. Sending criminals is just a ludicrously expensive way to implement the death penalty (and existing systems are egregiously expensive enough).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
This stuff barely qualifies as noise in the national budget. If you care about cutting government spending, the only meaningful choices are health insurance for the elderly, retirement insurance for the elderly, and the military.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
... they need to stop thinking in a round-trip paradigm. We would be able to get a lot more accomplished, a lot quicker, if we drew upon the pool of astronauts and possible-astronauts who are willing to do a long-term mission in the name of science.
Pour as much money as they can into psychological screenings and legal documents making sure that they are absolutely not liable, and send them off. The real reason we've stayed on Earth and its orbiting bodies is that we've concentrated too much on packing enough fuel with them for a round-trip, and not enough on finding ways to allow Humans to live indefinitely in enclosed Martian settlements. The current model of "go to star, get data, come home, instant hero" is just not feasible for meaningful space travel beyond what we have today.
Given that they only recently pulled funding for ExoMars, nearly screwing over a lot of people in Europe (thanks, Russia, by the way) it's a bit hard to believe they're just saying "eh, we want to do our own thing again".
Sort it out, NASA.
That way we'll get a short period of actual usefulness out of them for once.
#DeleteChrome
Send criminals, the way the British used Australia. Either they make it or they don't, but you don't have to worry about packing fuel for the return trip. Ship them supplies and see what happens.
All right! Whom do I have to kill to get a slot?
It should be a minimum of a 6 year trip to justify the expense. They can send supplies on a regular schedule and the containers can be utilized on site. A regular base could be built and people could be rotated out after their 6 year stay or they could stay on if they wanted to. Imagine the exploration and discovery possible with a long term team on the ground.
Cutting spending isn't as important for politicians as the appearance of cutting spending. If they want to stay in office, it's a good idea to find something to cut. The typical voter doesn't have much of a head for numbers, and sees just $X million saved. Millions of dollars always sounds like a lot, even when it really isn't.
The future of manned space exploration may belong to China for just this reason.
get out, walk around.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It's pointless for another reason, given a chance to go to mars, even if ostensibly a "one way trip" NASA would have far more volunteers than they need, including many many fit and technically competent candidates.
Send the elderly to Mars?
1. A cheap way to launch supplies into Earth orbit. No people will be shipped this way so even a huge cannon would be good.
2. Prep the supplies from #1 in orbit (need a space station or shuttle for this) and use cheap, slow engines to get them to Mars.
3. The supplies enter Mars orbit and stay there until they are signalled from the ground to come down.
Keep up a steady stream and roll any improvements into the system and you should be able to supply a mission for however long you want to keep them alive.
Getting them back to Earth will be a problem.
Are there any volunteers for a one-way mission?
At least until they can assemble their own launch pad to get their people back into orbit.
instead of a bunch of administrative bureaucrats? Well... neither do I. But at least the engineers used to get to help.
It's a good idea, but in terms of price per euthanasia it's just not cost effective.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
we really do need to go to -5.
really.
They need to look for direct evidence of life and not gases and such that they can later claim are caused by geological processes. Strap a microscope onto a lander and take soil samples at the surface, 1", 1' and 3' depths and subject them to several conditions that should stimulate growth. Do a pass over each sample with a microscope before and after and look for biological action. Until they see actual cell division happening the debate will go on. Apparently there's no higher lifeforms so you have to look for bacteria or other simple lifeforms. We're talk about what amounts to petri dishes and a basic microscope and we may have an answer. They are spending billions to go to Mars and seem to be making an effort to no look for life. Want more funding? Find life!
It's a good idea, but in terms of price per euthanasia it's just not cost effective.
Aside from that, the elderly could be great astronauts. It'll be a long voyage to Mars and back and the elderly would have the wisdom and the coping skills for such a long, monotonous, and boring trip. And logistically, they're a better pick: they need as much food to support their bodies.
And considering the danger involved, well I think most elderly people I know have come to peace with the idea that they don't have much longer. In addition, I think we don't give old people enough credit and in turn it creates a self fulfilling prophecy of decline. Why should one keep oneself up if you're going to be cast away? We're no longer a hunter gatherer or agrarian or industrialized society where a strong back is needed most of all.
Patience and wisdom would be quite a value on a long monotonous space mission.
Only if we can mine unobtanium without getting our asses kicked by blue aliens.
Really, they just need to RTFM (and cough up a metric shitload of money).
Easy peasy.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Fuel for a return trip is mostly an excuse. You just need to do the return trip in two hops: bring enough fuel in the lander to get yourself to orbit, then dock with a giant tanker that carries enough fuel for the rest of the trip. Mars gravity is only about twice that of the Moon, and we got a lander into lunar orbit over fifty years ago, so I can't imagine a Mars ascent being that much of a leap.
The harder part is actually landing a pod big enough to provide long-term living quarters. You could probably do it with inflatable buildings and large air compressors, but you'd still need a supplemental oxygen supply and either a steady supply of food and oxygen or a means of producing your own.
The ideal solution would require landing somewhere with water ice. Water can provide oxygen by electrolysis. Sure, there are other ways to get oxygen (using CO2 electrolysis, for example), but that won't provide them with the water they'll need for other things like cooking, bathing, etc., so landing somewhere with an ample supply of water would be a big plus.
So combine some very powerful air compressors with oxygen generators, lots of heating coils, some inflatable buildings, some disassembled airtight greenhouses, two or three shipments containing large, rolled-up solar panel sheets, etc. and it might actually be feasible to create a long-term habitat on Mars for not a lot more than the cost of a few rover missions. Remember to provide at least three of everything so that they won't be screwed if one of them doesn't work, preferably in separate bundles within reasonable walking distance of a single drop zone. Then provide a small lander with enough reserve oxygen and power to last them a month or two just in case it takes them longer than expected to get things set up.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
And spare me the Spacex stuff. Unless they are immune from liability, and bankruptcy. A few mishaps, some dead space tourists, and we're permanently grounded.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There's a flaw in your metaphor: timeline.
The European discovery of Australia was in 1606 - this is about equivalent to "sending a small, Apollo-like exploration mission to Mars". More and more exploratory missions went on from various countries, but colonization was effectively unattempted until the late 1700s, nearly two centuries later (and driven, at least in part, by the American Revolution cutting off the outflow of "transported" criminals to America).
In short, sending a large number of unskilled and unmotivated colonists to a new land won't work until at least decades after initial, small-scale exploration is possible. You need at least hundreds (the first British Australian colony was over a thousand settlers) to have a sustainable colony - right now, we can't send tens, much less hundreds or thousands, of people to Mars, even one-way. Sending prisoners, half a dozen at a time, to Mars, at the cost of billions per trip, would get us nothing but a pile of skeletons on a distant planet and a national deficit that will require new fields of mathematics just to calculate.
The Moon might be a more plausible location (and by "more plausible" I mean "slightly closer to physically possible"). But even then, the metaphorical timescale doesn't look to good - we probably won't have a permanent Moon colony until 2150, by your analogy.
I read the challenge areas, basically it's all the things that the guys working at NASA should be doing, if the Federal Government hadn't slashed their already inadequate budget to the point where it is now nothing more than a bunch of bureaucrats doing time.... So now some organization called the "Lunar and Planetary Institute" a division of "Universities Space Research Association" - to quote: "USRA engages the creativity and authoritative expertise of the research community to develop and deliver sophisticated, forward-looking solutions to Federal agencies and other customers - on schedule and within budget." ... wants free ideas - must not be getting any good ones from their "authoritative experts in the research community....lol
do they have lawns on mars?
Why should anyone waste their time sending NASA anything? We already have enough goddamn ideas already. What we need now is someone to put them into action, not more meetings to plan more meetings.
Metric value for a shitload. Is that by weight or volume?
Surface and sub-surface mapping is easy. LADAR gives you the surface map, thermal imaging (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13518143 and http://thermal-imaging-blog.com/index.php/2011/06/06/finding-pyramids/#.T4tWe9Xe4tY) gives you subsurface structures and a good idea of what the composition is.
Triage is more complex but doable. Different materials allow radio through at different velocities and refract at different angles, so a simple system is to use a GPR setup with multiple receivers. If you know the difference in time it takes to transmit a signal from A to B through one medium versus another, plus what appears to be behind what when you look at one point versus another, then you know enough. (This is because we can reproduce the minerals we do know are on Mars and can therefore know what those look like using such technology in advance. The stuff you'd want to triage is stuff that doesn't fit with behaviours we'd expect to see.)
But GPR is energy-intensive. No big deal - if it's a triage, you know the general area, you're wanting specifics. Since moving to a location is going to take days by rover, you can afford to triage by any process that consumes as much power as your solar cells can gather in that time. You can afford for it to be wasteful, because you don't have to carry more than one target area's worth of power at any one time and can recharge the batteries between runs.
The original scans have to be a lot more conservative, since you need to perform an unknown amount of surveying and therefore cannot use more power than you can gather in the same amount of time, but isolating a point out of a fixed, small area is going to be a brief, infrequent task. The quality therefore matters far more than the power requirements, when you're working that way round.
Identifying organics will be hard without some sort of spectral analysis. The detection of methane in the past is only significant if that methane was produced by biochemical process rather than an inorganic process, and that is currently unknown. Further, it's only important if the organic found is ALSO an organic relating to such methane production. Terrestrial biochemistry is highly diverse, so there's no such guarantee. Assuming you were looking for those specific organisms, however, life operates with a negative feedback system. Thus, if a process produces X then as the concentration of X increases the production must decrease. X will eventually become toxic to the process. Since we've seen methane and the Viking landers saw CO2 production, you might want to take methane and CO2 along. By repeating the Viking experiment with differing, controlled levels of initial CO2 and methane, you should determine if a negative feedback loop exists. If you saturate, run the experiment then return to a known previous unsaturated state an inorganic system -might- produce the same response as it did in that same state previously. An organic system is guaranteed not to, since you created an environment that was toxic.
There's one catch. This requires spectral analysis and the requirement said you can't do that. True, all chemical responses (organic or inorganic) will also produce a heat signature (2nd Law of Thermodynamics) but ALL the chemistry will be producing heat and you will have NO idea what fraction might be biochemical and therefore NO means of predicting what level of reduction in activity is significant. (If 1% of the activity might be biochemical, you're looking at a very different level of difference being significant than if 90% might be biochemical.) If you can't construct a hypothesis H1 in the first place, you cannot establish how likely it is if what you are seeing is H1 or H0.
There are techniques for extracting proteins in biochemistry. IIRC, you need them to be in a solution, you add various solvents and reagents and then you filter. Then you're just measuring the mass of that part of the filter vs. the expected
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...some obstacles need to be dealt with:
- Energy: The theory is there, as is a practically unlimited supply of helium-3 on the Moon. That's a stopover just to refuel and the ready technology for controlled nuclear fusion. Step n-1: permanent lunar base.
- Food/water: OK, the water bit is easy: pretty much the simplest polyatomic compound in existence, it has many uses including oxygen generation (photoelectrics/hydroponics?), and it can be recycled to an infinite degree. It's also pretty dense, so storage isn't much of a problem. Food is a simple matter of growing your own, for which a garden needs to be built and the necessary skills present to maintain it to the point where it is a constantly replenishable source of chemical energy and other essential nutrients. Such gardens can be located on the lunar colony, in orbit around Earth, the Moon or Mars (better yet, all three), with a limited supply onboard to be replenished during stopovers during the trip.
- Psychological studies: impacts on long-term enclosure in tin can environments (ask the Russians), in small groups of less than half a dozen (ask the Russians or any political prisoner), and application of these studies to determine the suitability of any candidate for the mission as to their likely responses to such conditions and steps that can be taken to mitigate any negative effects such as cabin fever - wouldn't do the mission any good to have someone suddenly decide they're going for a walk without a spacesuit on. Strike that, it'd be an End-Of-Mission event.
- Damage control. We're talking about micrometeoroid strikes, radiation surges, orbital anomalies, structural failures, electronic failures, and the training required to recover from those.
There's just a few. There's a lot more, probably even more that I wouldn't think of if I wrote a thousand pages on it, never mind two. I think the eggheads are talking about a robotic mission here. For which I would suggest a small, semi-autonomous probe with the ability to cover large distances rapidly (neutrally buoyant craft with fan engines?) and the ability to take and analyse samples with the equipment it has onboard. So, some serious miniaturisation technology, probably some endlessly renewable power source (printed PV array?), redundant systems (or more than one probe)... it could be done with technology we have now, the question is how to utilise what we have, or how to adapt what we have to do what we want?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Plunk down an incubator bursting with embryos and see what happens...
its all around a winner ... we get people on mars, clean house, and I doubt anyone would bitch about the cost
My suggestion is cheapest: Spend the money on improving technology. Until it's cheap enough to
visit Mars. What are we loosing by waiting a few years, or even a decade?
I doubt they've even finished analyzing the data collected so far.
Or how about Mars big brother
it should be fun to watch the 'astronauts' or contestants slowly lose they're sanity while trapped in a metal can on the way to mars
being watched on camera everywhere they go
of course you'd have to dedicate a large chunk of the craft to the cameras and the big chair
and to keep those supplies coming, we need ratings
send a couple of bots called Huey Dewey And Louie (see Silent running), or for a bit more deranged fun how about that bot from Saturn 3
And there in lays the problem. The elderly vote in large numbers and they care about retirement, health care and defense. Until young voters vote in numbers greater than the elderly don't expect change.
Historically, exploration has been round trip. And given that we don't have experience with creating settlements on other bodies, I don't see the case for one way trips.
(1) sex
(2) oil
(3) lower taxes
(4) god
(5) fighting terrorism
No accompanying explanations, rational arguments will only blunt the force of these compelling interests.
As long as your district gets enough pork you can cut as much as you want.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
And, of course, some magic technology so the kiloRads of radiation dose during the trips don't kill the astronauts. 1-2 kRad/year in round numbers.. 600 Rad is a fairly quick death, 300 Rad lets you linger in pain a bit.
We call it "mass". Throw enough protons in the way and you've mitigated the radiation problem well enough.
... they need to stop thinking in a round-trip paradigm.
Agreed, but an unmanned mission will accomplish much more than wasting time and resources trying to keep a person alive. Of all the fantastic space exploration that has happened over the years, the one that impressed me the most was when Huygens landed on Saturn's moon Titan. That was the most unworldly thing I've ever seen.
If I understand, they're talking about the sample return mission. That IMHO would be on the short list of necessary activities before a manned mission. This "RC toy" mission would go a long ways to telling us what sort of world we would be landing a manned mission on.
I suppose if we were to build a sealed living chamber under a mountain of human bodies, it might shield against the solar radiation for a while.
Why does the notion of "humans on Mars" persist? The planet has no magnetosphere, so it'll be a sealed-in, space-station existence. We can't sow plant life, not even plants genetically altered for Martian soil, because the planet lacks the ability to protect biological lifeforms from our Sun. If humanity must go to Mars for competitive political reasons, we're better off shaping Phobos and Deimos into living habitats, and using remote robotics to explore the surface of the planet. Once we crawl from the gravity well, it will be wise to stay out of it.
Unless the plan is to live deep below Mars' surface, or something. I suspect we should figure out how to do that on this planet, first, though.
Then we'll have the money to go to mars. Oh, wait! I forgot. I'm freaking elderly!
Keep yer filthy Govmnt hands off'n my Medicare!
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
until the next tool gains office, puts in a new lap-dog and claims that visiting mars is against gods will, but we should pour billions into state lobbied pork funds for it anyway
I think we should send life to Mars as well. Plants, bacteria, insects. Finding life on Mars will prove little, if anything, as life could still have originated here on Earth and been jettisoned to Mars millenia ago via asteroid impacts. If life on Earth is the only life in the universe, then it's our job to spread it.
Let's think of a realistic plan and what its purpose is. I submit the purpose should be meaningful exploration toward expansion of the human race to the stars in order to:
- understand our environment,
- increase survivability of catastrophes, and
- grow our technical capabilities to a scale necessary to meet the challenges this endeavor presents.
The purpose is not to waste human lives, or waste time, or make political basketball.
We gain the hearts of the populace by making solid progress on the timescales of everyday lives, building momentum, and teaching science so that the populace understands why space is important.
Incidentally nobody wants to go die on Mars or to make a mission that will require dying so let's just stop talking about getting volunteers.
If we try to make a manned mission to Mars in the near future, it is going to be extremely risky and in the best case will end up like the manned moon mission: a success after many years but then a long hiatus of no exploration after that, since we have "gone there". I recommend we do not waste resources on manned travel to Mars yet, at least not without a much faster engine, and proceed with the following:
First of all we need funded projects immediately covering:
- develop a robust, automated, semi-intelligent manufacturing capability able to mine, create parallel worker bots, build smelter and factory, develop energy sources such as solar and heat gradient, etc.
- develop an ultra-high velocity launcher
- develop high speed space engines, whether this is nuclear or ion-based remains to be seen
- develop micro-size exploration craft
The manufacturing technology will be built for use on our own planet and perfect here for many uses and climes. It will work underwater, on arid mountain slopes, in antarctica, in the steamy tropics. It will survive attacks by wild animals, tornadoes, floods and monsoons. This project will revolutionize the human realities and economies of Africa and will turn our deserts into solar energy farms. It can be approached as if an alien space exploration and exploitation mission to Earth, which will might help its promotion.
The high-speed space engine will allow us to explore moon, asteroids and Mars on a time-scale that allows many missions during our lifetimes. Do it in months and years not decades.
The launcher will launch seed of this technology to the moon and will be perfected there with astronauts going there for a specific purpose, not just "to go" and make everyone feel good. In other words, the next time we go to the Moon we will take with us a superior technology and feel we can easily set up shop anywhere on the Moon we want.
The exploration craft will be useable on the Earth, Moon, Mars and anywhere else we want to go. Ultimately we want to be able to add capabilities so these semi-autonomous agents can roll, jump, fly, swim, climb etc. as needed and take advantage of local energy sources. Use on the Moon, Mars, Europa and the asteroid belt will be the goals. Before we get there, we can use them on Earth for exploration underwater or in jungles, and for search and rescue, and response to natural disasters like forest fires and tsunamis. Certainly such a capability would have been useful in the Fukushima disaster.
Realistically, our current technology is not high enough at the present moment to sustain a human presence on Mars or the Moon. Ideally from the perspective of someone going there, we would like to have an intelligent, autonomous nanotechnology that could somehow go there ahead of us and build us an entire self-contained, self-repairing station while allowing us to decide what we want to do with the planet. For example whether to leave it as-is, bombard it with ice, seed it with hardy lifeforms, etc.
However an advanced semi-automated manufacturing technology that can slash at the costs and time scales required to develop and maintain this machinery would be very useful, both on Earth and on Mars. If we can better marshal our resources through superior technology it will make life better on Earth as well as bring us a step closer to meaningful exploitation of space.
with money and a steady vision (not changing every few years), it should be a straight forward
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
...or the one from The Black hole? Not the orange one that looked like Zax fucked a dustbin (B.O.B. LF 28), the huge red one.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Like using coupons at a grocery store versus cancelling your cable subscription (but no one wants to give up their TV!!).
That's why I have orbital mining and transfer habitats in the step-by-step approach above. They are in orbits between Earth and Mars, and don't move once set up. They have mass shielding and greenhouses for life support. You get the raw materials for that from asteroids already in orbits between the two planets, so the delta v to move stuff to the desired orbits is not that much.
Crew and supplies meet up with the transfer habitats when they are close to Earth, and drop off when they are close to Mars, so the time unprotected by shielding is low. You also don't have to carry food and water for the whole trip, since the Habitats supply that. You just need enough for the shorter times at each end. It ends up being way more efficient if you are doing more than a few trips.
Yes, because that makes much more sense than spending hundreds of times more on fuel and boosters to send enough material for them to build a settlement. Plus the tens of times more on fuel and boosters per year to keep the settlement running. Plus the increase in budget by a couple of zeros to develop the technology to merely allow them to live right on the edge of disaster while being utterly dependent on those annual shipments....
This stuff barely qualifies as noise in the national budget. If you care about cutting government spending, the only meaningful choices are health insurance for the elderly, retirement insurance for the elderly, and the military.
And of course, morons like the guy above complaining about too much spending will say that the military shouldn't be cut at all.
Phobos and Deimos barely even qualify as "moons", and are really just small rocks in orbit around Mars. They have no significant gravity, and aren't even round. You can't shape them into living habitats, because they have no gravity; people don't do well in microgravity over long periods. If you're going to build any living habitats anywhere, they have to be in a gravity well, unless you can figure out how to keep peoples' bones from deteriorating in microgravity. This is why a Moon base make sense: it's close, it has gravity (1/6g), its gravity is low so it won't require a lot of fuel to get into and out of, and we can probably even build a small space elevator there pretty easily, it has water ice, and it probably has significant natural resources that can be mined. Now, we don't really know the effect of 1/6g on the human body over long periods, but it's surely a lot better than ~0g, as we've already found out the hard way is very bad for humans, which is why people don't stay on the Space Station very long.
Ok, that sounds great and all, but we have to be realistic. All we've done so far is send some humans to the Moon to hit some golf balls and drive around in a buggy. Hollowing out a very small moon and spinning it (requiring some massive engines) is well beyond our capabilities at this point. In fact, we'd have a much easier time skipping the moons and sending people straight to Mars and having them build underground living habitats there. At least that wouldn't require some kind of massive engines big enough to spin a large asteroid.
But again, I agree the Moon is the next place to step to, considering our capabilities, and also the materials that will be needed for any farther steps. It's a lot easier to mine the moon for materials to build spacecraft than to mine the earth for them (which causes environmental problems) and then lift all that material into space (Earth's gravity well is much deeper than Luna's). Then, when we build a moon base, we need to rename the moon to "Luna" (which isn't really renaming it, just adopting the Latin name for it, which would be consistent with all the planet names being Latin in origin except Pluto). "The moon" is a really stupid and generic name, and simply calling it "Moon" sounds like you don't know how to use articles.
Are you stupid? We're destroying our environment mining here on Earth. How'd you like to live next to an open-pit mine? You're an absolute moron; you probably think we should spend resources conquering other nations.
we will need a well structured financial and legal system in place before we can ever go there!
I think you would find an abundant supply of volunteers that would not remotely care about wanted legal comeback, even if there was a very high risk of loss of life. Don't underestimate peoples willingness to risk everything simply to be the first pioneer and go down in history. Hell I would volunteer even with a maybe a 25% chance of death and I am sure many would go with much higher odds of death.
Strange timing on this one. They should at least wait for the Mars Science Lab to touchdown - it won't even be too long until it does, since it's already on its way. That way, media attention on Mars and public awareness/interest in Mars missions will be far greater.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Exactly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay.
Unfortunately, apparently NASA are looking for input for *new* ideas for Mars exploration, and this idea has been looked at already, I presume.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Because it would be ironic.
And I suggest this time not sending criminal, whores and religious fanatics. We've all seen the result of THAT policy. And I'm not even sure if I'm being sarcastic here.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Change yours solar panels to some RTGs. No problems with dust, energy day and night and very reliable. And the plus of "free" heah to heating the habitat
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Idea's place. " To come to idea's for the mission"
Silly rabbit, ideas can't explore mars, We can send monkeys, they're expendible. Failing that we have far more politicians than we can handle. Expendible as well. They may even have compatible genes, so colonization isn't out of the question. I'd do something about that atmosphere first or it will only be a MOSTLY good idea. Well, either way...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
you are aware that the recent bank bailout was larger than the entire operational budget of NASA to date?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
is there anything useful to mine on the moon?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Well it's worse than that. You make a comment that get's voted up, and now I'm wondering what you replied to that got you voted up, so now I am forced to read the parent who'd been filtered out at -1.
Thanks for ruining my lunch.
Mining what on the moon that we can't get far more cheaply here? Not to mention the minor problem of finding whatever it is that you think that is there to be mined that is sufficiently valuable. Even with Heinlein's "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" linear accelerators -- which no sane Earth government would ever allow to be built, mind you, thanks to Heinlein -- fully driven by local solar power, the cost per gram of pretty much anything mined on the moon and shipped back to earth is likely to be orders of magnitude greater than the same thing or stuff mined here. By the time solar power is developed enough to make this feasible there, it will also enable exotic mining technology (like seawater extraction or mining the 70% of the earth's surface that happens to be under water) to be done here and still be cheaper than messing with supporting an artificial ecosystem (even the most abbreviated ecosystem capable of doing the job) 386,000 km away at the wrong end of a mountain of gravitational energy.
Once upon a time it was suggested that a space station would be fundable the same way -- use zero gravity to grow exotic crystal substrates for semiconductors or superconductors, use abundant sunlight to smelt metals, and so on. However the sad truth is that isn't that difficult to do these things down here, and it is always going to be far, far cheaper. There are things one can do better in orbit than one can on the ground, and we are doing nearly all of them already -- monitor weather, facilitate communications, study the stars, work out technology that might eventually open up the planets to us -- but making things at a profit so far isn't even something that one can dimly foresee in the distant future. Only if something rare and enormously valuable is discovered that really truly can only be made, or found, in space, on the moon, in the asteroid belts, is that likely to change. Magnetic monopoles, dilithium crystals, superheavy element 184 (stable, supercatalyst), I dunno.
In the meantime, there is no point in trying to "sell" space colonization as if it is going to be directly beneficial or profitable. It may well be beneficial (for example, it has been suggested that it may keep humans alive through a collapse of civilization on Earth), although we cannot really see how or why it is going to be more beneficial or profitable (beyond a certain point) than (say) investing the money in building a stable, rational world civilization first and then tackling the problem later as a very long term project. This is a legitimate concern -- like global warming, the "cure" for the perceived problem may end up costing 10 or 50 times as much as the problem itself would, even if the problem ends up being as bad as worst case scenarios that are largely overheated imagination come true -- and reasonable people might choose to spend more down here and less up there until we work a few major historical imperatives out.
This is the sort of thing that people don't always see. Some things are really, really expensive to do now, but are going to be far cheaper in 20, 40, 60 years. We are still working on various key gateway technologies that are IMO essential both for space exploration itself and to create a global economic base for supporting it. Solar, one of the key technologies to solving any perceived "carbon-based fuel" problem, is unprofitable without a substantial subsidy today, but its cost follows a Moore's Law and it is fairly predictable that in 1 to 2 decades it will undercut carbon-based fuel costs sufficient to solve that problem then without draconian and horribly expensive measures now. Thermonuclear fusion seems as though it is a key technology for any sort of space exploration, and nobody has any clue as to how long it will be (if ever) before it matures. Inexpensive high density energy storage (batteries, if you like) is a key gateway technology for space. In fact, nearly all of the technologies that would let us support a carbon-fuel-fr
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Not to mention free radiation... how healthy is it to be that close to RTGs for extended periods of time? How much shielding do you need?
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~ We're looking for plans for a trip to Mars...
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In a game of survival on earth, absolutely. On mars, give me someone with a pretty advanced education, because weapons development counts for little when you can't breathe.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I work at NASA Goddard. I can assure you of this: "engineers" at NASA are looked down upon. At NASA you are nothing unless you are "scientist."
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Pretty much correct. Can I give you a star?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/ernsts-ions-week-concludes-nerva-ion-mars-mission-1966/
Doesn't NASA already have a great idea for a Mars exploration mission? ARES?
Sounds like Howard Wolowitz syndrome.. engineers, the little oompa loompas of science!
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It's absurd to even think of humans - all robotic space ships are sterlised, how can you sterilise a spaceship with humans inside? There is no vessel or spacesuit that can keep all Earth life inside a habitat suitable for humans. Sorry for those of you who fantasize about sending humans to explore the planets, but that's the reality with current technology. And once the life escapes from the human habitat, even as a few microbial cells, the Mars winds will take them all over Mars. It won't kill all of it because of the extreme resilience of bacterial spores. Then it just needs to find one damp patch, ice warmed by the midday sun, or by volcanic activity - and it will grow, spread, create more spores and spread again. Exponential process, starts slowly perhaps but then more and more rapidly until the whole planet is covered by modern Earth life of some form or other. With the billions of years of extra evolution over the whole of the Earth, Earth life would be like cats and dogs invading Australia, it would swiftly wipe out any native life that might have kept a fragile foothold on Mars so far. Also we have never tried seeding an entire planet with life before, with all that space for evolution and no competition to speak of (possibly no competition at all) it could evolve into anything, who knows what will emerge, maybe something that transforms the surface of Mars into conditions hostile to us or the plants we would like to plant there. It's a mad idea to send humans before we understand Mars, terraforming, and life, far better than we do right now.
I think given that mars life is at best microscopic, there actually isn't a whole lot of caring whether or not we wipe them out in the process of exploring mars.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
We don't know that, and microscopic life that branched off from Earth life billions of years ago - or even evolved independently, is of immense interest to science and to humanity too. It could lead to new drugs and treatments, new ways of making nano structures, new processes, it could be amazingly interesting. Also there is no reason at all to be so sure it is microscopic, just because it isn't on the surface of Mars. The surface of Mars is highly hostile to life, especially the very surface of the soil. There could be macroscopic life underneath.
Also a planet seeded with Earth life could be dangerous or make it unable to support our plants! Think of it - an entire planet, billions upon billions of microorganisms covering it within a year or two of exponential growth - zero or minmimal competition from any other form of life - it's a recipe for very fast evolution of new life forms, an experiment we could never duplicate on Earth with simulated Mars environments because we just can't duplicate the scale of it, enormous difference between a planet and a few square meters of simulated Mars environment. Anything could happen.
There's a good reason why current robotic spacecraft are carefully sterilised. Why do so many think it is okay to throw all those precautions out of the window as soon as human astronauts are involved? I can only think it is wishful thinking combined with influence of movies. But movies and sci fi writings for that matter are often scientifically inaccurate and no-one knows enough to write a scientifically accurate movie script or novel about this scenario. Someone should though. I do know of at least a couple of Sci Fi. stories that describe exactly this scenario - they should be made into a blockbuster film, that might make a difference!
For a Pu-238 powered RTG? None. The RTG chassi is already enough to block the alpha radiation emitted by plutonium-238 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium). And anyway, you could simply mount them outside the ship, where you need to have thicker shells because of the normal radiation of space.
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It's not that sterilization wouldn't be desirable for human exploration, it's that it's impossible. We are symbiotic with a lot of flora, we cannot survive without them. Any manned mission is, of necessity, not sterile. Mars' surface is so actively hostile, though, that the spreading contagion theory isn't much of a threat. The real reason we sterilize is to help rule out the possibility that we delivered life in the event that we find it in the future.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Yes exactly it's impossible, so don't do it, find some other approach or wait until you have methods that work. E.g. use robots instead, very carefully sterilised. You could explore by tele-presence perhaps from orbit around Mars sufficiently far away so no risk of crashing into Mars. The very top few inches of Mars is pretty hostile but below it isn't. Life might be able to survive all over the warmer areas of Mars just below the surface - or inside stones - as they do in antarctica for instance. Also though hostile to living organisms, dormant bacterial spores are incredibly resistant. They can survive for hundreds of thousands of years or longer. Mars is especially risky because of the sand storms, spores will spread over the entire planet very rapidly as soon as they find conditions where they can reproduce and with ability to get close enough to the surface and be disturbed by the wind.
The only way to rule out the possibility that we delivered the life is to not go there in person. Machines may be okay if carefully sterilised. Otherwise, leave the planet alone until we can do it safely. There has been lots of discussion of using life for terra-forming of planets, so that gives an idea of the potential power of life - and so also - the danger too. If you could potentially use life to liberate the CO2 and then transform it into an Earth like atmosphere at least temporarily - then you could equally well use lifeforms to make the whole planet poisonous to Earth life. Or - e.g. like many people are allergic to black mould - suppose the entire planet gets covered with a kind of black mould that all humans are highly allergic to, and creates a fine dust so that there is no way to live there safely without heroic measures to remove the mould, just to give one sci fi. type idea - someone should write a story based on that idea. The sci fi stories I remember were 1. a story by Asimov where space explorers exploring a planet with near vacuum conditions find a life form that can survive in near vacuum conditions around a spacecraft, I can't remember the details but it was dangerous because of that. The other is a story about an explorer who found an amazing new life form on one of the planets of our solar system, but left his excrement on the planet wrapped in a plastic bag, when he came back again then the life was extinct destroyed as a result of penetrating the plastic and releasing his excrement. But those are old stories from decades ago before e.g. we knew how resilient spores were and before we knew so much about extremophiles that can live in the most amazingly hostile environments on Earth. I think nowadays there is little doubt that some forms of Earth life could survive on Mars pretty much just as they are now.
One fun sci fi story might be parallel worlds with Red, Green, Blue and Black versions of Mars. The black one would be the one with the black mould in it. The blue one would be one where water is liberated and shallow oceans form at least temporarily. The red one would be for humans that are highly conservation orientated and preserve the planet until it is really needed (maybe in future when Earth becomes too hot to be habitable possibly millions of years or more from now). The green one would be one with plant life all over it. Then explore all those versions of Mars forward a few million years or whatever and see what happens to them.
Electrolysis means splitting using electricity, so no, they don't. More to the point, plants don't convert CO2 to O2 at all. The oxygen released by plants comes from the water that they consume, not the carbon dioxide (source: HowPlantsWork.com).
Also, using plants to produce oxygen is a good idea in theory, but would likely require a relatively large enclosure relative to the number of people who live in it. It might be feasible once you have established a temporary base, but until you have built/assembled/inflated a few large, airtight structures on the planet's surface, it probably is not. A normal (but sealed) greenhouse might produce enough food for a handful of people, but it is unlikely to produce enough oxygen. Also, it would suck if you accidentally put something that plants don't like in your water supply and killed off half the plants. It's easy to store up enough dried emergency rations to last you until a supply mission arrives in a year or more. It's not so easy to store up that much oxygen.
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You need to be able to handle a temperature gradient of almost three hundred degrees between the outdoors and the indoors, and if you're using inflatable housing, I doubt it will insulate particularly well. You think your power bill in the winter is high.... I think it might be pushing the limits of at least the RTGs that are readily available.
Now my quick back-of-the-envelope math says that with resistance heat, some of the larger RTGs could readily handle heating a decent size structure, but that's before you factor in lighting, melting of super-cooled ice for water and oxygen, electrolysis of oxygen, powering communication gear and science gear, etc. It might be doable, but I'd want to have solar backup. It doesn't take that much space for a rolled-up solar panel.
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You can have more than one RTG. Or if you need more power, why not a small, self-contained full fleged nuclear reactor? Solar panels are nice but Mars have a lot of problems with dust, remember the Phoenix mission and the rovers
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time