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How To Die On Mars
An anonymous reader writes: Many space-related projects are currently focusing on Mars. SpaceX wants to build a colony there, NASA is looking into base design, and Mars One is supposedly picking astronauts for a mission. Because of this, we've been reading a lot about how we could live on Mars. An article at Popular Science reminds us of all the easy ways to die there. "Barring any complications with the spacecraft's hardware or any unintended run-ins with space debris, there's still a big killer lurking out in space that can't be easily avoided: radiation. ... [And] with so little atmosphere surrounding Mars, gently landing a large amount of weight on the planet will be tough. Heavy objects will pick up too much speed during the descent, making for one deep impact. ... Mars One's plan is to grow crops indoors under artificial lighting. According to the project's website, 80 square meters of space will be dedicated to plant growth within the habitat; the vegetation will be sustained using suspected water in Mars' soil, as well as carbon dioxide produced by the initial four-member crew. However, analysis conducted by MIT researchers last year (PDF) shows that those numbers just don't add up."
Mars One's plan is to grow crops indoors under artificial lighting. According to the project's website, 80 square meters of space will be dedicated to plant growth within the habitat; the vegetation will be sustained using suspected water in Mars' soil, as well as carbon dioxide produced by the initial four-member crew
Lol. Yeah right.
Except underground, which is the obvious solution but people are too fixated on making housing above the ground.
Even on Earth, living underground would shield us from the extreme cold and extreme heat. That would be better for us and would require a lot less energy to warm us in the winter and cool us in the summer.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
or am i over simplifying
And forget about it. Mars schmarz. Lego goddess.
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Mars has a number of places, where the magnetic field is strong and hundreds of km high. Is it enough? And if not, is not is, in effect, not about the lack of magnetosphere, but about the lack of atmosphere dense enough, which does not stop most of the non-charged particles?
The point of a permanent Mars settlement is the fact that some of us would rather die on Mars. I don't understand why people are finding any problems with that.
"Violence is not the answer. Violence is the question. The answer is yes."
I forget where but recently I read a really good point - the radiation shielding someone on Mars might want to wear a lot (especially outside) is actually quite useful, because it adds weight that puts stress on your bones to the same degree Earth gravity would, thus reducing the problem of bone loss through everyday movement instead of just exercise periods.
As mentioned though, it seems like any mars settlement could make good use of the canyons there to help with shielding.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Without a planetary magnetic field to shield it from lethal radiation, and without the ability to retain a useful planetary atmosphere, how exactly would we terraform Mars?
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Mars One is a scam.
http://www.iflscience.com/spac...
perchlorates. Mars seems to be chalk full of them. There are some microbial lifeforms which are able to metabolize them, but we can't. In fact, their pretty bad for us. For large values of bad.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, heartily approves of this message, and congratulates Anonymous Reader of the Memetic Corps for its successful infiltration of yet another blueworlder news source.
"We applaud the efforts to educate the blueworlders in all the horrors that await them, and remind them that all manners of dying remain open to them, whether it be from thruster failure, dust accumulation on their solar panels, capture by salt crustpits, oxygen poisoning, wheel failure, dissolution in toxic solvents such as dihydrox, or even infestation by the pink semi-symbiotic organic lifeforms that afflict them so. We encourage them to try further, for the more they hurl themselves at us, the more of them die in the process!"
When an anonymous writer reminded the Speaker that most of the blueworlders already knew that the project known as "Homeworld One" was a scam, and reminded him of the longstanding theory that the pink self-replicating symbiotes are actually the real threat, K'Breel spake thusly:
"Let my words ring out across our fair red sands: When the submitter of this story finally gets here, we shall remove his gelsacs last!"
There is no truth to the rumor that the mic remained hot and captured the Speaker's further utterance, sotto voce, that the anonymous writer's gelsacs were to be removed first.
We haven't even managed to put a base on the moon, but for some reason we think that we can put one on Mars? Sheer idiocy.
Mars is hard. Even getting to Mars is hard. Even if you have an awesome first rate plan many Mars missions catastrophically fail.
This isn't the case of you will get stuck on Mars if your mission plan sucks. This is comic early space program rocket explosions in Earth's atmosphere suckitude.
How to die on Mars:
1) Go to Mars
2) Wait
No one has yet figured out step 1.
PS: You should go to Mars! It's a real paradise -- there's no crime, no disease, no oppression, no pain, and no death. And no taxes, either.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
That's because we hate you. We want to ass-rape you with our giant rockets and burn you with their jet exhaust, but not before we defecate all over you. That is the way of our kind.
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I don't understand
It's just my job 5 days a week
Rocket man! Rocket man!
When I first joined the Bevatron, there was still a dark wooden shack on top of the shielding. If you looked down a pipe there, and if the machine was tuned just right, you would see "Flashes" of individual Nitrogen, (And later Iron.), nuclei impinging on the Retina or Optic Nerve. It turns out that with training; an eye can distinguish between Carbon, Nitrogen, Neon, Argon, and Iron nuclei; the remnants of old, old Supernovas.
Normally, one had to be an Astronaut who had experienced these flashes- such as on the Moon, to be allowed to do this.
But...
At that time there was no reliable way to tune a handful of individual nuclei to an endpoint. Ion Chambers needed much higher Flux to operate, and Solid-State detectors just weren't there yet.
So they had to send the most-junior Technician with a Motorola HT200 in to look down that pipe and report when the tune provided the right rate and field.
That most-junior Technician was Me.
(There is no reasonable way to shield against +2GeV/n Cosmic Rays. You just have to endure them, and look at the pretty lights. Luckily the flux in Deep Space is pretty low.)
You can find the description of the early Eye-Flash experiments, starting on page 11, here:
http://hpschapters.org/sections/accelerator/Stannard%20Lecture%20March%202011rev1.pdf
What would it feel like to live there? Would you have to be careful walking? How long would it take to adapt.
g = 3.75 m/s^2 vs 9.8 m/s^2
How much dirt would be required to shield from all/most of the radiation? Yes, manual labor requires more oxygen, but worst-case scenario, they use shovels and pile dirt on an aluminum dome or such for some initial shielding?
Why not use water as insulation against radiation as there is plenty of it in Mars soil and the structures that can be made watertight, airtight and flexible at the same time do not add weight substantially.
Do they come with a Turban version?
(Yes, I know, I have a Sikh Sense Of Humour.)
At a feast for your water brothers, who will grok you in fullness as you go on to become an old one.
Mars One's plan is to continue to siphon money until everyone else figures out it's a scam.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Why on earth would you use CO2 from the inhabitants? The vast majority of the atmosphere is CO2.You could create environments that are heaven for plants, but totally toxic for humans. The plants will expel oxygen which you can use for human habitation. You can so break water if all you have is electricity, The big question is whether something like Nitrogen is available as buffer. Last thing you want is a high oxygen environment unless a fire is something you enjoy. You need about 78% inert gas, 20% oxygen, and various other impurities, such as CO2. I wonder if there have been experiments on how much CO2 plants can cope with?
Stupidity is a death sentence.
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
ask a martian for help.
The vast majority of our medicine is derived from animal, plant and bacterial cultures that consume such a ridiculous amount of space both in their farming and upkeep and in the support structure needed for the farming and upkeep. We really need a chemical and compound printer to be a major research goal - right up there with life support and habitation. It seems achievable today - if you took something like pubchem and built a system of linking one chemical to the next with known chemical reactions you could feasibly pipe the synthesis on an individual basis into something like a FPGA for chemical reactions and hit a good 90-99% of chemicals with it, but thus far there has been very little work on producing such a thing (some MEMS stuff aside.)
Heavy objects will pick up too much speed during the descent, making for one deep impact. ...
I seem to recall hearing some recent developments in science, some wacko claim by some Italian guy that the acceleration due to gravity was actually independent of the mass of the object. That would indicate that both heavy and light objects would accelerate the same way under the influence of gravity on Mars. What a silly notion, I'm sure the Pope will cure him of his heresy.
Heavy objects will pick up too much speed during the descent, making for one deep impact.
1. Speed gained during decent does not depend on weight of the craft.
:)
When considering aero-braking/parachuting/gliding the only thing that matters is lift/drag generating surface area vs mass
2. Speed gained during decent (from mars gravity) is nominal compared to orbital transfer speed/orbital speed that needs to be zeroed.
Mars orbital speed at 200km is around 2.4km/s, total amount of speed gained from direct decent from 200km to 0km on Mars is around 1.2km/s (with no atmosphere), in real life we would see orbital speed (2.4km's) decreasing on decent due to atmospheric drag (until it reaches terminal velocity, which depends on point 1. but should be less than 1km/s for any viable design).
Prior to achieving stable orbit around mars we have to (aero-)brake from at least 15km/s (orbital transfer). So theoretical 1.2km/s from Mars gravity (which actually doesn't happen) is a really small amount of additional velocity compared to the amount we have to brake anyway.
Playing a few hours of KSP should be mandatory prior to posting articles about space flight on the internet
How to get off mars, is to die.
The amount of fuel that one needs to break the gravity would be prohibitive to land.
Hence the one way ticket that NASA intends to sell you through proxies.
After all, we can't have the US Gov. sending us on a one way ticket to Doom.
Just wouldn't make good propagandist or political sense.
The Martian, by Andrew Weir.
Going to Mars at this point is worthless. We already know Mars has little to offer for human sustainability. Travel time is still ridiculous and to think this is our future planet to colonize is only for the space dreamers. We have important things we could do on planet Earth that would be far more helpful to human's then wasting money on Mars. I do not believe in the whole global warming prophecy because it seems it has only been created to benefit a few and really never addresses the fact we simply need to take care of Earth. Do we need Al Gore flying personal jets around crying the sky is falling. Maybe Al Gore should go to Mars to stop any initial deniers who might corrupt Mars as they have Earth. Just think how much wasted time and money has happened talking about climate change rather then simply doing educated things about it? Give Elon Musk the credit he deserves, maybe he could go to Mars and actually achieve a goal. For now the most important space is around and on Earth. Not Mars.
Stupidity is a death sentence.
Then we are all stupid and will all die. (paraphrased)
Mars One is a bunch of useless bloody loonies!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
So the only thing they need is a compressor to keep the plants alive..
I don't know how they will die on Mars, but we will be watching them with a 4 to 24 minute time delay.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
"However, analysis conducted by MIT researchers last year"
I'm a bit foggy on the specifics, but wasn't one of the major "faults" noted in that study the loss of nitrogen via out gassing to prevent CO2 buildup. And some quick internet searches found various commercially available systems that don't have consumables to extract nitrogen/CO2 from an atmosphere (either removing CO2 directly from the habitat or removing the nitrogen from the waste CO2 stream before expulsion). Don't get me wrong there are plenty of challenges that could end a Mars colony, but I don't think that analysis was all that reliable in identifying them.
EVOLUTIONARY DEAD END COOKIES
(serves 7 billion)
INGREDIENTS
two million years of domesticated fire
six millennia of scientific curiosity
two centuries of significant progress in science and engineering
50 years of space exploration
35 years of awareness of KT impact and necessity of planetary defense
one cup irrational fear of radiation and willful disregard for shielding techniques (to taste)
one sprinkle fear of death from any cause not typically experienced by modern suburbans
lump of plain common sense (if you can not find it, substitute two tbsp blind faith and a pound of dogged determination)
tiny dash of optimism
PREPARATION
Carefully combine all ingredients in a large bowl of stars, ensuring that you completely blend the essential characteristics that have allowed these naked apes to overcome natural extremes of climate, predators, disease and boredom. Beat until technological excellence rises to the top. Form into several self-sustainable colonies and multinational corporate enterprises. Place in space oven preheated to a degree of caution and optimism. Bake until spinoffs from the enterprise rise to the occasion with the potential to enhance and expand human civilization with its yummy goodness, colonies in space are able to mobilize quickly in Earth's defense, and Galaxia might be achieved.
SERVING
Throw out all that shit. Engage the collective human mind in sitcoms and 'reality' shows.
Promote artificial issues that represent lack of vision or restraint (terrorism, energy poverty) as if they were natural threats
Let the fucking insurance companies guide all innovation and risk taking.
Promote zombies and head-shot horror in mainstream media as a gateway to cannibalism and violent population reduction.
Popularize cheeky '1001 ways to Die' angles.
Feed the slack.
Characterize folks who try to push through these barriers as 'space nutters'.
For cookies, spray flavored coating over a nutritionally inert Styrofoam shapes and market them as "heart healthy".
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Mars is below water freezing point most of the time. But a substantial greenhouse gas atmosphere could change that.
Must be specially designed for thin air
mars likely geologically stablized hundreds of millions of years before Earth. Life may have evolved there first, then "infected" Earth by meteors.
can do a lot more useful science than sticking a human up there for little more than a photo-op
Why does PopSci say getting enough CO2 for the plants will be a struggle? The atmosphere on Mars is 95% CO2. Sure, it's thin; that's what compressors are for. But literally 95 out of 100 molecules bonking into the outside of your habitat are plant food - surely that could have made it into the article a little more clearly than [[... you can find a way of introducing extra carbon dioxide, perhaps through CO2 scrubbing technology. Such innovation, which would involve absorbing gas from the thin Martian atmosphere ...]] Nope, just compress it with a piston, move it through a valve, repeat.
Now, getting rid of CO2 after you don't need it anymore may be a different story. ;)
Don't send humans until a fully functional and seriously redundant habitat has been created. When we can do all of that, it's time to move in. If we can't, we're not ready.
We're not ready.
Which will never happen because Mars lacks both the gravitational pull and magnetosphere to hold such a thick atmosphere in place.
1. Go to Mars.
2. There is no step 2.
3. There is no step 3 either.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I wonder if the research group had anyone that actually knew anything about farming? I doesn't sound like it.
They say "die of lack of oxygen" and "Fire from too much oxygen" at the same time? Strange...
I think it was a bunch of freshman students. 8-)
Do you really have to be such an asshole when you post? Your content may have been useful and probably correct, but your douchiness just makes me want to down mod you badly.