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NASA Will Award You $5,000 For Your Finest Mars City Idea
coondoggie writes with this snippet from Network World: NASA this week said it would look to the public for cool ideas on how to build a sustainable environment on Mars with the best plan earning as much as $5,000. With the Journey to Mars Challenge, NASA wants applicants to describe one or more Mars surface systems or capabilities and operations that are needed to set up and establish a technically achievable, economically sustainable human living space on the red planet. Think air, water, food, communications systems and the like.
That a week ago KSP went out of Beta?
Time to check whether the base mods have been updated yet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Where's my $5K?
maybe a middle-schooler will win some.
Build the city on earth instead. Breathable atmosphere, easy resupply missions, plenty of water.
It occurs to me that a feasable plan for a sustainable mars colony is worth a *HECK* of a lot more than just $5K....
Try increasing that by *AT LEAST* a couple of orders of magnitude.
Offering only $5K for a practical idea that once successfully implemented is going to be quite frankly worth trillions of dollars is really undervaluing the significance of coming up with a workable plan in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Barsoom always needs more egg hatcheries. And air generation stations along the canals.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Easier to get to, less radiation (but enough for solar panels to work), lots of water, no huge gravity well to surmount when coming home.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
My first idea is to dig in. Put the people underground, as much as possible. Put critical infrastructure underground as well. No matter how you build, or what you build with, surface structures are going to be vulnerable. Put greenhouses on the surface, put solar panels on the surface, put hazardous research and fabrication on the surface. Put the PEOPLE underground. Dig them in where they can sleep soundly, knowing that they are safe from piddling little things like storms, or meteors, or whatever.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If NASA wants my design, it'll cost them a lot more than $5000. For $5000, maybe I can whip something up in crayon.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I am quite sure with just a few reforms, some of the underground cities used by Martians in the past can be put back into shape - there seems to be too few inhabitants left around there to claim for the vast urban infrastructure that should have been in place back them.
Just watch Bio-Dome.
Only 5K?
We're talking about NASA here people... if they are going to be that cheap in compensation for a great idea... they can go phuck themselves.
First, we have to find the alien reactor...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I could use the $5K, so don't steal my idea.
Yeah, really, I won't even change a lightbulb without getting a signed contract.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Anyone remember the Thunderbirds 2086 episode KUDZILLA?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Give $1000 to charity (won't make any difference to Elon Musk) and give the other $4000 to whoever designs the rest of the city around Tesla's Gigafactory and Powerwall products. Unless Tesla are secretly developing oxygen systems for their already ongoing space concern.
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
Just make a huge bouncy castle and drop it from orbit. They're already good at that!
If someone can build an underground city on Mars, they surely can bring a nuke.
But even so, a Mars city is never going to be 100% self sustaining. At some point in time, they're going to run out of something essential that needs to come from earth.
Here, here's a technically feasible Mars idea.
But wait, that's not a city. Not quite. How about this. There. That was about $5000 worth of work. Pay the man.
That's still better than the market rate of $0.10 for 12 ideas. In fact, you'd probably go bankrupt if you offered that rate, which is why they're limiting it to the top 3 ideas only.
Presumably the plan here is to not overlook anything "obvious" that their experts somehow didn't think of. Obviously, the actual plans in full detail will be developed by the experts.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
What I want to know is where in the world the word 'city' came from in the article's title. There's nothing anywhere close to a city mentioned in the article itself, with the goal of the challenge being to 'establish a technically achievable, economically sustainable human living space'. I don't know about anyone else, but to me, that sounds like an outpost rather than anything like a city.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
What makes you way that? If we can put a rover within 100 meters of where we wanted to, we can put a nuke there.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
So, you put 10,000 lawyers and politicians into a hermetically sealed bag ... you launch that bag into space.
Once you've done that, get back to me and I'll tell you the rest.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"NASA is working on... the rocket expected to launch the [Mars] mission -- the Space Launch System"
My plan:
1. Kill the Senate Launch System and bury it in a landfill
2. Fire everyone who thought it was a good idea
3. Wait around a few years and play Kerbal Space Program
4. Buy a ride on Falcon Heavy R and save a billion bucks per launch
5. Now you can afford to haul more stuff to Mars for a city
Thank you, I'll take the $5000 in cashier's check, Visa or Mastercard.... but definitely NOT American Express.
The answer is 3D printers. They solve all known problems. Just 3D print a massive spaceship, then fly said spaceship to Mars and 3D print yourself a city, then 3D print a breathable atmosphere and magnetic field.
I am going to do a Kickstarter with a $100,000 goal to be used to come up with a good idea within a year. The $5000 from NASA will represent a 5% return on the investment, which is very good these days.
I never change lightbulbs because it's a hardware problem, and I'm a software guy.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
They're not looking for ideas - just publicity. And they've succeeded with this slashvertisement.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Build a floating city in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
For communicating, just use T-Mobile. For the quality of the signal that I get, I can only imagine that Mars is where they place all of their towers.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
Offering only $5K for a practical idea
Well, the probably had a big budget increase!
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
My favorite structure on Mars is the giant clockwork thing in Watchmen. But I guess that doesn't quite meet the breathable air requirement.
Volunteer the entire Tea Party to go colonize Mars.
Table-ized A.I.
That's my suggestion. Biosphere 1 and 2 were both failures. We don't know enough to make sustainable closed biospheres work on Earth, much less in orbit or on Mars. When we have something that lasts 10 years, we might be on to something. Until then, practice, practice, practice... Baby steps. How about an L5 or two to start.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Don't worry, they're not actually looking for ideas. They have tons of ideas. They have people whose whole job is to come up with ideas. They have an army of very knowledgeable volunteers in groups like The Planetary Society who'd write detailed thousand-page treatises on solid waste recycling on Mars, in exchange for just knowing that the human race has an off-world outpost. They're not lacking for ideas.
This contest is just a way to get people to start thinking about a serious effort to go to Mars, as opposed to the Mars One suicide fantasy mission. $15k worth of prizes is cheap advertising. And maybe, just maybe, if enough people start talking about going to Mars our eternally-opportunistic politicians will decide it's a safe bandwagon to jump on and cough up some real support.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
worth a *HECK* of a lot more than just $5K....
Don't be greedy, that's half the NASA budget for 2015.
Screw Mars. Cloud cities on Venus is much more feasible long-term.
We're scouring the galaxy for Earth-like planets when Earth's twin lives right next door. Sorry, but it's not Mars. We just have to adjust the thermostat a bit...
Hookers and blackjack.
In fact, forget the blackjack.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That solved 4 problems fairly well, food, water, power and housing.
Everything else that stems from that is gravy.
Clearly the lack of breathable air is just a tiny detail.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Mass-produce millions of fuel-inefficient cars. (maybe call Nascar about installing a track or two)
Create huge landfills to emit lots of methane; possibly filled with garbage from earth.
These two things combined should get the Mars atmosphere nice and dense for our fragile human bodies!
And what ever you do, DO NOT USE RENEWABLE ENERGY! As this will no doubt rob the atmosphere of the precious greenhouse gasses needed to keep the planet habitable.