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71 Percent of U.S. See Humans On Mars By 2033
astroengine writes "In a recent poll funded by the non-profit Explore Mars, 71% of respondents agreed that the U.S. will send a human to Mars within the next two decades. Unfortunately, on average, the sample of 1,101 people surveyed thought the U.S. government allocated 2.4% of the federal budget to NASA — in reality it's only 0.5%. With this in mind, 75% of the respondents agreed/strongly agreed that NASA's budget should be increased to explore Mars through manned and robotic means."
99% Percent of U.S. See Flying Cars by 1985.
Two things man is exceptionally good at with great consistency; overestimating his progress in the future and underestimating the resilience of nature.
76% of the U.S. population believes an invisible guy in the sky watching them all the time too.
Unlikely doesn't get more likely just because you got the majority to believe it...
Developing a new high speed rail network - London to Birmingham..
"Construction along the line is due to start in 2017 and be completed by 2025. The first train services will run between London and Birmingham from 2026." https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/developing-a-new-high-speed-rail-network
Add in the delays and 2033 looks possible! - Would you believe England used to rule 3/4 of the planet?
Poll sponsored by Boeing and Mars exploration group finds public opinion agrees with their own wishes. Here is essential information on how polls work, courtesy of "Yes, Prime Minister": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
Do you think this poll is stupid?:
Yes [x]
No [ ]
And in other news, 100% of Humans agreed that this Poll was stupid.
The poll was taken by one person, but I just scaled it up to the entire human race because why the hell not? All glory to the statistics toad.
Statistics doesn't work that way. Not even remotely.
1000 people barely even represent an entire region, never mind a damn country, especially if it is one local group of people in the same area!
Not to mention the types of people who typically take polls in the first place!
I am sick of these stupid polls that do this. STOP IT, STOP RUINING MATHS. GO AWAY. GO TO MARS!
Given that Mars's Gravity is roughly 39% that of the earth a manned mission seems unlikely unless great improvements are made in rocket efficiency. Unless they intend it to be a one way mission in which case can I volunteer Piers Morgan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Morgan
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Translates to "71% of humans wish humans could be on Mars by 2033"
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
What those 77% of people fail to realize is that we can no longer organize ourselves well enough to accomplish this sort of task. NASA, as an institution, long ago stopped being about technical successes and exploration. During my years working with NASA, I discovered that a NASA manager's career success is measured solely by the number of people they manage and the size of the budget they control. Not by how many successful missions they achieved, not by the technology breakthroughs they fostered, and not by any other rational measure beyond their org chart success.
So we have no government agency capable of focusing on such a complicated goal as landing humans on Mars. They immediately get distracted with project management issues and politics. If private industry were to try and undertake this effort, there would have to be some financial incentive for our largest private spacefaring corporations to try and cooperate, since none have the resources alone to achieve the goal within 20 years. And the only model they have for organizing themselves is NASA today. No one still working in the industry knows how NASA of the 1960's worked, and society has changed to the point that the technical people required for such an effort are no longer motivated to make the selfless sacrifices needed to achieve such a goal. All the good engineers left aerospace for the Dot.Com world in the '90s. Those remaining few are motivated by commercial and personal financial success, and that requires a much shorter planning and gratification cycle than 20 years.
Sorry, we won't be going to Mars. We're a bunch of greedy, self-absorbed, small-minded apes that have reached the pinnacle of our organizational skills at the bottom of our gravity well.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
98.6% believe in an invisible force that causes objects to fall to earth when released.
You may as well be on the Moon for all the good it does. Mars may be a great goal on some scientific agenda however we have the Moon and it's much closer. The only thing however that comes to mind in both cases for colonies or even some manned outpost is what would you do with it? Yes, there's the scientific exploration aspects of it but as World History would point out, Explorers were in search of riches, trade routes or room to expand. The technical hurdles would certainly mean more expansion in terms of possibly new technologies that we can use here on Earth, new material science, new electronics or new discoveries on Physics. Other than that, I would submit that the Moon or Mars don't really represent much other than commercial mining opportunities. In order to have the remotest chance of being economically feasible, this would mean that there would have to be some new or unknown mineral lurking out there, or something so rare here on Earth that the astronomical (pun intended) costs to retrieve and process would make sense. Now, if it were purely for expansion would could always find a planet like Pandora and just send in the Military to fight blue giant cat people or if you're of the Star Trek genre, then you could find Orion Slave Girls and bring them back for fun and profit!
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
First of all, the U.S. will be sending (uniformed) humans to Africa, Middle East, and such places. There are wars to be fought there, forget about space exploration.
And then, what's on Mars? For what reason would any country "send humans" to Mars specifically?
Finally, as a species we are clearly intellectually and consequently technologically unable to become what they call "space-faring".
On the bright side, at any second of any day we might be contacted by aliens who will be generous and kind to share their knowledge with us. Like in a movie.
Yeah I think that's our best bet for a bright future.
You might be able to build a space elevator on mars, gravity is lower there, that should make it a lot easier to send stuff home.
We're not that far from having the tech to be able to colonize Mars f'real. But we're not there yet, and I doubt we'll be there in 20 years either. I think we could be, but only if we put aside childish things, and BWAHAHAHAHA
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
71% of respondents agreed that the US will send a human to Mars within the next two decades.
The other 29 percent know we don't have a launch platform capable of getting us there.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
And 57% of respondents agree by 2053 we will be flying around the galaxy in faster-than-light spaceships. You know, like the Millennium Falcon. They saw it in a movie. And most of those believe Obama is a Secret Muslim Nigerian. What are we trying to prove here?
(emboldening, mine)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like we're simply trying to prove the validity of a certain method of business...
Hello, I am the Nigerian President of the USA,
As you know, my countries are in turmoil, so I need your help to smuggle my Secrit Muslim inheritance of pressious diamounds from Nigeria into the USA to solve this dire $16.5 trillien nashonal debt problem.
Unfortunately, only the Millennium Falcon is capable of transporting these valuables through the Evil Galactic Umpire's diplomatic sanctions, and they will not accept my payment of carbonite crystels, which is all I have access to in my current situation.
Please, you must help me save my people from Finance Oil Wars so that we may and purchase safe passage from the NASA smugglers. I only need All Social Security Benefits more to pay the smugglers. Please do not forward this message to the police of The Repelican Party or we will surely be found and executed, and our people will suffer great deals. For your assistance with this trouble I am willing to wire transfer you Peece on Earth and Goodwill dollars once this matter is settled.
To help, please make arrangements for payment at this website.
Please also reply and include your bank account and routing number and your All Pursonal Online information so I can send you compensation for your good deeds.
I sincerely Thank You in advance for help in these troubling times.
Signed,
Obama Hussein Jong il Bin Laden III.
if any humans get to mars by 2033 they wont be american, theyll be chinese.
Just like that 2012 Gallup survey of US citizens, the one that found 46% of American respondents believe an invisible superhero who lives in the sky created humans in their present form.
Forgive me if I consider US citizens something of an unreliable group when it comes to science.
You might be able to build a space elevator on mars, gravity is lower there, that should make it a lot easier to send stuff home.
Ironically, as gravity reduces and the ease of building a space elevator increases, the costs of the regular alternatives to an elevator decrease.
I wonder if we would ever find anything on Mars that is so rare and expensive that it would be worth fetching it from there? It seems doubtful.
During the past 540 million years, there have been five major events which killed over 50% of life on Earth. Do you think humanity will survive the next mass extinction? What if a supernova goes off some hundred light years away, an asteroid heads towards Earth, a global pandemic breaks out, or a third world war erupts? If we make it our long-term goal to establish a permanent colony on Mars, at least we'll have a backup of humanity in case disaster should strike.
I also believe that we'll benefit from developing the technology to settle on another planet. For instance, you mentioned faster space drives; if we don't continue to explore space, where will the motivation and funding for heavy propulsion research come from? If we settle on Mars, can't we use similar technology to populate more arid regions on Earth? If we eventually manage to terraform Mars, wouldn't that revolutionize agriculture on Earth too? And I bet such an expedition will be accompanied by thousands of minor breakthroughs in materials technology, medicine, etc. that we don't yet know how will benefit us.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=step-into-the-twilight-zone-can-earthlings-adjust-to-a-longer-day-on-mars
How many of those surveyed believe humans never landed on the moon?
If other polls are to believed, there's more than likely some overlap between the two!
Unfortunately, the Mars Landing will never take off under the combined weight of tea baggers, so no reason to party yet.
I'm guessing you're taking a different meaning of teabagger than the one that comes to my mind.
I am a big proponent of NASA. I would like to see the budget increased. I would do it with cuts in the military and corporate subsidies (particular to oil companies).
Then next time a stupid survey asks "would you like to increase spending" I really wish there were a follow-up question "what would you give up to see this happen."
Heck, I give 110% at my job and SO SHOULD THE BUDGET!
The Chinese will be the first humans on Mars, but that's okay because we are paying for it. Just hit that WalMart up again - the brothers need another oxygen tank.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Jumping the gun is not necessarily the best way to get things done.
The most oft-discussed and visible triumphs of manned space have been by necessity "get there, plant the flag and get out."
But the ultimate goal should be not just to visit space or establish some dangerous and isolated outposts there (though there is no shortage of volunteers!)...it should be to move into space in a series of self-sustaining stages.
This means we first need to build a space colony here on Earth, and decide on some practical steps to take that will achieve the ultimate goal. And each step should be of immediate practical and commercial value.
I would like to call attention to Marshall Savage's amazing project and book, The Millennial Project. another synopsis and at Amazon. Some have picked fun at Savage's priorities, but frankly until this book/project arrived on the scene there had been nothing like it.
In that plan, terraforming Mars is step 6 of 8. In this scenario we are not just landing on Mars to establish an outpost... at that stage we have already perfected the technology for habitats in space. If our focus is on 'the next logical (small) step' instead of some ultimate goal and devote our complete effort to these steps, by 2033 we could be moving outward in all directions... instead of just one.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
We don't even have a manned space program. We could not put someone into orbit, let alone the moon or mars.
And in the 60's we though by the 70's we'd be living on the moon
Clearly this doesn't hold a lot of valor.
In ten years manned spaceflight with be over. Quite likely for more than an hundred years if not more.
....as long as we're allowed to continue to spend money we don't have, why not?
Of course, I suspect that when you ask the question differently, you're going to get a very different response:
"Assuming that whatever % of budget goes to NASA comes directly out of services you receive, what % of budget should NASA get?"
-Styopa
OK, anyone up for raising the money for a flight to Mars as a Kickstarter?
Exactly. What is the actual cost/benefits ratio here?
Saying we made it there? So what? What's the point if there's nothing there of use of value that we can bring or make use of back here on Earth?
Are we out of human suffering and everyone has enough food, water, shelter, medical care, and jobs that we can piss away money into space?
Any possible scenario for a lunar (or Martian settlement) involves eminent loss of life and hardship, especially at the outset when our learning curve begins. One of the difficulties an American expedition would encounter is the high price placed on each American life. The Chinese might have an edge here, and could perhaps design equipment and housing without the quintuple safety redundancies that have made NASA projects so time consuming and expensive. Backslash is onto something though...nothing would fire up the US government's interest in off-earth exploration faster than a threat to national security.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
but just don't see them on planet Earth anymore by that time.
Well if SpaceX can get the reusable Falcon working, 2033 is about right for a Mars landing powered by cheap commercial space transportation.
But I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Does the phrase "Bread and Circuses" mean nothing to you?
Multiple variant linear regression analysis is inclusion-free on the order of flawless a life changing asteroid impact with our rather inhabitable little rock will occur. Whether it is an extinction event or merely teleports us back to the Stone Age is irrelevant with regard to the loss of all human technology and scientific progress. A robotic presence during exploration is invaluable. Robotic slaves at the off-planet human settlement will be handy like a pocket on a shirt. Without a human presence, well, there goes our entire legacy.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I, for one, can't believe that people will ever be able humans on Mars. Heck, I can't even see people on airlines flying at a measly altitude of 35,000 feet! Sheesh.
I'm sure most of them certainly would allocate more money to NASA. Ask them though if they're support a tax increase in order to bolster NASA's budget. Almost all would drop their support in a heartbeat.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not anti-tax and I PERSONALLY would have no issue with paying a little more if I knew it'd go to NASA. I'm just saying that most people probably wouldn't. Most operate under the impression that the government just has all this free money to send where it wants with no clue that those resources and funds have to actually come from somewhere.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
But NASA can't. If we do get to Mars in that time frame, it will be the Chinese or, more likely, one of the New Space companies like SpaceX.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
In your comment I detect touching faith in American government’s care for American lives and security. But let’s not go as far as China is search of expendable human beings to be sent to Mars. Let’s scoop up those south Asian families that have been dying in their dozens, and in their sleep, in American drone strikes. I think they would prefer a trip to Mars anyway.
Hmmm...assuming that national pride is going to be a motivator ("no way in hell..." is how you actually phrased it) then we can restate the problem in terms of preserving national pride. When you look at the problem from that perspective, it becomes a matter of *preventing* the Chinese from getting to Mars before the US does. In order to prevent the Chinese from getting to Mars, the US will have to be able to project their national will on the Chinese, and the way one nation projects its will on another nation is by force. This force is applied by military and economic might. Finding funding for military might (at least in the US) has been pretty much independent of political or economic issues. Defense budgets routinely survive presidential and congressional elections, and are less affected by economic slumps. (Not untouched by, but certainly don't suffer as much as other government programs do.) So -- in a bucket, beating the Chinese to Mars becomes a matter of delaying the Chinese long enough for the US to get there first. Overt or covert military ops, industrial espionage and economic warfare to sabotage the Chinese Mars effort become plausible when you look at the problem this way. I'm not saying I want it to happen this way, or that it will happen this way, but it is a plausible scenario that is fairly independent of politics and economics in the US. It only requires that the US be more concerned about national pride than the consequences of using military or economic force. As events have showed us over the past dozen years, the US seems to be more than willing to go to war (on multiple fronts, if necessary, and at a severe cost to their economy) when their national pride has been damaged, so I would conclude that some kind of action by the US to prevent the Chinese from reaching Mars first has a probability approaching unity of occurring.
Do you guys know the Mars Direct Program? It was developed by Rober Zubrin. The point of the program is that we are technically able to go to Mars. We were it 15 years ago en today we still are. We can do it relatively cheap (20 billion) and without need of in-orbit build spaceships. I recommend reading The Case for Mars by Rober Zubrin. wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
The resource that is lacking is WILL.
Call it "political will" ... "moral fortitude" ... whatever. Once the tech is available, the only thing preventing any group from making a large project like this happen is the will to do it. Which is precisely why we probably WILL have a Mars mission (manned) by 2033 ... but it WILL NOT be the government doing it.
Private enterprise has the will, the stated goal, is gathering the money, and refining the tech. Elon Musk is not the only one, either.
People routinely OVERestimate how difficult this will be once the will is in-place.
(Note: having the will to "do it" includes the acceptance of the RISK involved. Kinda like Everest climbers and cave divers.)
See you space cowboy
"They thought the budget allocated 2.4% instead of .5%"
Okay...so? No one knows what the actual percentages are that the government allocates to organizations. In general, people will have an idea of what something should be, but to ask them on the spot how much NASA or any organization gets allocated is a pointless question. Doesn't prove someone's stupid, doesn't prove someone doesn't care.
Also, everyone wants everything to get funded more. Unfortunately, there are limited resources. People thinking NASA should get more money is not the same thing as them saying "take 2% from healthcare and move it to NASA".
Elerium-115, obviously.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
If you ask people 'do you like generally non-controversial policy X', they will support it in droves. The public's ability to understand how much things cost, how much they are willing to pay, and how they should prioritize their concerns is a completely different matter. I couldn't find it in three minutes of searching, but Pew had a poll a couple of years back where the only category the US respondants could agree on is cutting foreign aid to cut the defecit, which is only because the budget doesn't have a line item for 'waste and abuse' which seems to be how most people think we will get most of the way to making debt payments. When it comes to public policy, most voters seem to be deluded, but we are particularly gifted in the land of the free.
How well did that turn out for Rome? ;)
Another big difference though is that, precisely because of the greater transportation times, a Mars base would be designed to be far more self-sufficient than the ISS. Consider that the ISS is a sealed can that must get all it's replacement supplies from Earth, while a Mars base will have ready access to essentially unlimited quantities of water (assuming it's built near the icecap or other source), carbon dioxide, and sand. Assuming the sand is non-toxic all you need is some big, tough, transparent bags and probably some mineral supplements and a bit of insulation from the ground beneath you to create bubble greenhouses and grow all the food and oxygen you could want. At that point all you need from Earth is replacements for things that break and perhaps mineral supplements for anything that gets leeched out of your ecosystem and you can't find locally - from Biosphere 2 though I believe the biggest problem on that front was carbon, and with unlimited CO2 delivered to your doorstep that's not really an issue.
Couple that with the fact that almost every serious Mars-base proposal involves them making their own fuel from water for the eventual return trip and you don't really need massive ongoing support - a care package of non-renewables every now and then and they should be golden, and once you've got such a package in orbit getting it to Mars is only a small additional expense unless you need to get it there quickly for some reason.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's probably actually less of an issue than you'd think - the ISS is already dealing with most of what we'll encounter on the trip. The Earth's magnetosphere primarily shields against the solar wind - high velocity ionized atoms. And by virtue of their atomic nature that will be stopped by pretty much anything, though dissipating the charge may be an issue.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
...get your ass to Mars.
Or we could land 71% of a person on Mars, today!
Actually some in the USA were accustomed to seeing flying cars as early as 1979. But most of our attention was drawn to the possibility that Daisy Duke might explode out of her jeans.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Ironically, as gravity reduces and the ease of building a space elevator increases, the costs of the regular alternatives to an elevator decrease.
It doesn't change the fact that if you bring down as much as you send up it's basically free to operate, which distinguishes it significantly from pretty much everything else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Our space program is going backwards. About the only salvation we have is the Chinese trying to land on the moon and inflaming nationalism.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I remember the 60's: I believe now that they were the peak of western (if not human) civilization this time around. We have fallen farther as a culture than you young folks can imagine since then, and it was our culture that landed on the moon. Given the will, money and technology can be managed; I see no sign now of the sustained will needed for a Mars trip. The only place to even look nowadays is maybe China, and while they don't have popular elections all the time they're still not stable over the time frame involved.
The one way paradigm lowers the cost and difficulty tremendously, but I doubt any government will go for it and I just don't see a commercial enterprise making the first trip; once their people land (assuming they could still return from Mars orbit), the company is locked into supporting a colony. Given the current legal climate, the astronauts would face more danger from bankruptcies and lawsuits back home than living on Mars.
The fundamental problem is energy. Our civilization may yet fail for lack of it and there is little prospect of that changing. Virtually all fusion research is going into tokamaks, a dead end at best; fossil fuel has unmanageable supply and pollution problems; renewables and fission have serious (at our level) scale problems. We've also have no way to use energy efficiently for space travel: getting people to the surface of Mars with chemical propellants amounts to admitting that we're making a one shot attempt to look at a few rocks and say we did it; putting (enough) nuclear power in orbit is politically impossible, especially for the US.
I fear it is already too late for a moon base; the cost and difficulty of the ISS makes a Lagrange point station look pretty unlikely. An asteroid mission, even a close one, relies on gear we haven't built yet and which changes every election. Unless a major breakthrough happens soon, I'm giving no thought to Mars.
25 % of Americans consume fast food every day
20% of meals are eaten in the car
88 percent of young Americans couldn't find Afghanistan on a map, 75 percent couldn't locate Iran or Israel, and 63 percent couldn't identify Iraq
More Than 40 Percent of Americans Believe the Rapture Is Coming
That 71% think we have an extra trillion dollars or two to go to Mars for no useful or compelling purpose is no great surprise. Depressing? Disconcerting? Tragic? Sure, but not surprising.
"More like "71% of humans wish some other humans could be sent on Mars by 2033." I'm proposing a certain brand of fundies to have the honor of the first shipment. You know, to bring the Word to the savage planet or something. Or maybe the Access."
So when you check into your room on Mars check the nightstand and you will find a Bible open up the front and you will see a stamp "This Bible Placed at the Mars Hilton by The Gideons"
http://www.gideons.org/
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
71% of Americans don't pay attention to past events (History)
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
"Studying the effects of space travel on humans" is a dumb piece of circular logic, so it is an incorrect answer. "Because humans need/want to explore blah blah blah" is also incorrect because the cost of manned space exploration is so high that it drastically reduces the amount of exploration that can be done, so it too is an incorrect answer.
Hint: It would have to be done with robots over a period of at least 100 years with the construction of numerous intermediate way stations.
Challenger showed that NASA was incapable of safely operating manned spaceflight programs.
Columbia showed that NASA was incapable of changing for the better.
According to Back to the Future 2, we will have flying cars in 2 years as well.:)
Actually I just see dead people.
Because they will send astronauts there ... by prayer.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
So, if there are 300million people in the us and a mars program would cost 20-100 billion, then that would be ~1000$ per person, sound like such a good idea now? (I guess its not too bad, that's only ~50$ a year.)
So, what do the other 130 or so space shuttle missions show? Was it some amazing luck that they didn't crash or blow up?
Did you read the reports of the Accident Investigation Boards?
When else are we going to get a chance at terra forming a planet that may be possible as practice? We might need that knowledge. Hell I'd go witha group for free. Just have enough members of the opposite sex for everyone (or whatever ...) and keep the booze flowing.
Not to mention just cool to even try?
Tell them they're dreaming!!!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)