Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Real NASA Technologies In 'The Martian'

Posted by Soulskill on from the unveiling-the-NASA-potato dept.

An anonymous reader writes: On October 2, movie audiences will get to see Ridley Scott's adaptation of Andy Weir's brilliant sci-fi novel The Martian, about a near-future astronaut who gets left for dead on the planet Mars. (Official trailer.) Both book and film are rooted in actual science, and NASA has now posted a list of technologies featured in the movie that either already exist, or are in development. For example, the Mars rover: "On Earth today, NASA is working to prepare for every encounter with the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV). The MMSEV has been used in NASA's analog mission projects to help solve problems that the agency is aware of and to reveal some that may be hidden. The technologies are developed to be versatile enough to support missions to an asteroid, Mars, its moons and other missions in the future." They also show off their efforts to develop water reclamation, gardens in space, and oxygen recovery.

60 comments

  1. book was boring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    i hope the movie has some tits atleast

    1. Re:book was boring by PPH · · Score: 1

      Yep. Three

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    2. Re:book was boring by TomGreenhaw · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Huh - I couldn't put it down.

      --
      Greed is the root of all evil.
    3. Re:book was boring by Rei · · Score: 4, Informative

      The book was terrible. One an average of at least one god-awful mockery of science per page and the main character "scientist" who writes like an 11-year-old boy and apparently doesn't know a single technical term for anything.

      The terrible science wouldn't be so bad if the author didn't keep rubbing it in the reader's face, and I'm not even talking about the "growing potatoes with about 2-3 orders of magnitude too little light while planting them stacked on top of each other like cordwood" aspect. For example, again and again he kept doing the idiot version of chemistry, like:

      "Not because of the perfect landing, but because he left so much fuel behind. Hundreds of liters of unused Hydrazine. Each molecule of Hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of Hydrazine has enough hydrogen for *two* liters of water"

      (Morbo voice: "Stoichiometry does not work that way!")

      It's so hard to pick the most terrible example from the book... one that's definitely a contender was the "habitat went up to 64% hydrogen and down to 9% oxygen without him noticing" part ;) Really, the high sqeaky voice didn't tip him off? The unconsciousness wasn't a clue?

      Though him freaking out about the RTG was pretty priceless too... really, the whole thing is like a MST3K film in book form. I have trouble taking people seriously when they claim they thought it was a good book.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    4. Re:book was boring by es330td · · Score: 1

      Did you miss the part where this book is fiction? You are aware that authors get to make up stuff or fudge reality in that kind of book, right?

    5. Re:book was boring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hydrogen makes your voice squeaky? I though that was Helium

    6. Re: book was boring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't quote me, but I think any gas that is less dense than air should increase the pitch of your voice.

    7. Re:book was boring by Rei · · Score: 1

      And that is why you liked The Martian. ;)

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    8. Re:book was boring by Kozar_The_Malignant · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, they don't. In science fiction, or at least hard SF, which this purports to be, you get to posit a coupe of unknown things, like faster than light travel, inertia dampers, anti-gravity lifts, space elevators, and such. After that, though, real science has to work. Two plus two still has to equal four. You can't split molecules of H2O and get some left over He as a bonus. As the GP poster notes, the amount of insolation has to be right. The fiction part, and the good writing part, comes in seeing how that characters react to the situations they are in. There are a large number of really good planetary colonization/survival stories that have been written since the 1950s. This book is not one of them.

      You can always posit that magic works, but then you've crossed over into fantasy, not SF. Or, you can blur the lines a bit, as Heinlein did in Stranger In A Strange Land, which is ultimately about ethics and morals and how we treat those who are different. Whatever you do, once you set up the rules, you have to play by them. If you're going to get way more insolation than Mars actually gets, you have to tell us how, or it's a major fail with anyone who has a decent science education.

      --
      Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
    9. Re:book was boring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Each molecule of Hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of Hydrazine has enough hydrogen for *two* liters of water"

      Stoichiometry *does* work that way ... if you're talking about gases, and holding pressure and temperature constant.

    10. Re:book was boring by TomGreenhaw · · Score: 1

      Its just an opinion. Most people I know who have read the book liked it too.

      I don't really care if you don't take my opinion seriously. As such, feel free to stop reading this at this point. Hopefully others who may like the story will take your opinion with a grain of salt.

      I agree that a lot of the science is not well explained, but with science fiction I always must suspend disbelief. I like Star Trek too, but c'mon - travelling through wormholes and time? Not really likely and also not the point.

      It's been a while, but I thought he was asleep when the hydrogen mix went way up. He noticed immediately when he woke up.

      Please explain what's wrong with the stoichiometry. Hydrazine is N2H4. React O2 and you get two H2O and one N2. I agree that getting this desired reaction safely may not be well explained.

      The potatoes were genetically engineered and he had bright lights. I agree that its unlikely, but it is at least plausible.

      In any case, like any book, some like it and some may not. I recommend you skip the movie - I think I'll like it.

      --
      Greed is the root of all evil.
    11. Re:book was boring by Rei · · Score: 1

      Which, of course, he wasn't.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    12. Re:book was boring by Rei · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, it's a book for people who don't know science.

      Hydrazine is N2H4. React O2 and you get two H2O and one N2.

      Which says nothing about how much volume they take up as liquids. You can only use that approach when dealing with ideal gases maintained at a constant temperature and pressure. The volume of water you get from burning a liter of hydrazine is only about 1,15 liters. Liquid density and number of moles have no inherent linkage. Do you think that if you take a bottle of styrene and polymerize it into polystyrene that it suddenly shrinks down to just a couple percent of its former size?

      The author makes this mistake over and over and over again, and it's the sort of thing that would get you a D in high school chemistry.

      The potatoes were genetically engineered and he had bright lights. I agree that its unlikely, but it is at least plausible.

      The potatoes were there to be cooked as thanksgiving dinner, and no, it's not even slightly, remotely possible. Your lights have to replace Earth sunlight. They have him taking Mars sunlight (44% as strong) striking 200 square meters solar panels, which the author describes as "an astounding 10.2% efficiency" with no hint of sarcasm (that's actually a terrible efficiency). The panels aren't sun tracking, so you're looking at a capacity factor of 20%-ish in a sunny location *if* they're kept perfectly clean, which of course the book keeps telling us that they're not. So now these 200 square meters of solar panels are creating an electricity equivalent of the sunlight that hits 1,8 square meters of ground with the sun overhead on Earth. But wait, we're not done! Just assuming that 100% of it goes into powering the lights, you have to then account for the inefficiencies of the lights. The most efficient lighting in the world today are lab-scale LEDs with an EQE of about 30% (note: this is different from luminous efficiency, which is weighted by the frequencies the human eye is sensitive to). If we assume no other losses in the system (very much false), then we have the amount of sun that strikes half a square meter of ground on Earth... to grow 100 square meters of potatoes.

      Now, there are some potential improvements there. The lights could be frequencies that plants use more efficiently than broad-spectrum sunlight. And there's the fact that the sun strikes plants at different angles (although they still intercept more than a fixed-angle planar solar panel, it's only simple cosine losses). But if you want to account for things like that, then you need to whack off another 30% or so of the energy for dust, another couple dozen percent for energy used on life support and other habitat functions, another 5-10% for wiring and conversion losses, you need to drop your light efficiencies to a more realistic 10-20%, and so forth. And where's he supposed to get lights tailored to plant growth? The book simply says he uses the habitat's regular room lighting.

      It's orders of magnitude off. Which should be obvious to anyone who took even the slightest amount of time to think about what was being proposed. Or has ever seen a greenhouse where plants are grown under light. And speaking of that, he's talking about using normal room lighting to grow plants. The sun hits the surface of the Earth at about 1000W/m^2. Going with 20% efficient LED light bulbs, that means you need 5kW of light bulbs per square meter to match it. Meaning if these were say 30W LED bulbs (very bright for that sort of efficiency), you'd still be having to place 167 of them per square meter to match the sun. Is your room lit up like that?

      And heck, I'm only even talking about the lighting here, it's just one of about two dozen different reasons why the entire concept as presented in the book is a complete non-starter, from him doing absolutely nothing to remove the perchlorate salts from the regolith (regolith apparently being a word that this "botanist" doesn't know - although

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    13. Re:book was boring by jordanjay29 · · Score: 1

      You can't split molecules of H2O and get some left over He as a bonus.

      You can never split H2O and get He. Nor does Watney in the book.

    14. Re:book was boring by Rei · · Score: 1

      No, but he does "chemistry" that's just as bad - that's the point you seem to be missing.

      --
      "99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
    15. Re:book was boring by jenik · · Score: 1

      Completely agree. Apart from the poorly edited writing the reason I put it down after about a hundred pages were the glaring errors in chemistry (and elsewhere). "Anyway the reserve [liquid] oxygen would only be enough to make 100 litres of water (50 litres of O2 makes 100 litres of molecules that only have one O each)." This is bullshit, 50 litres of liquid oxygen make only 64.7 litres of liquid water. You can't have a sci-fi *based* on science and engineering feats with the science (can't speak for engineering) being completely wrong - not fictional, just wrong.

    16. Re:book was boring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A few words on sunlight on Mars. It's not actually as bad as you make it out to be. Solar irradiance at Mars is only about 44% of insolation at Earth, if you're only considering the distance from the sun. If you consider atmospheric losses, then it's more like 60% at the surface of Mars. But that's only with the sun directly overhead. Sunlight hitting the Earth's atmosphere at an angle is attenuated even more. On Mars, the effect is significantly less. Then there's weather. Earth has all kinds of weather that can block sunlight. Mars has very little weather that can block sunlight. There are dust storms, yes, but they're a lot less common than cloudy weather on Earth and most observations from the surface of Mars have shown that the dust storms don't actually significantly diminish the amount of light that reaches the surface. As a result, the actual quantity of light available at the surface of Mars for generating power ends up being more like 70% of that typically available on Earth.

      Usable values of sunlight on Mars for a decent location turn out to be around 200 Watts/m^2. So, that's about 40 kW at the panels, which turns into about 4.08 kW of electrical power with the lousy solar panel efficiency. If we say that the lighting efficiency is about 25%, that gives about 1 kW of actual light coming from the lights. So that's more like 1 square meter on Earth. But that's only if you were at the equator, at noon, on a clear, cloudless day. Compared to the actual average on Earth, that's equivalent to about 5 square meters of ground. That's obviously still not enough for the crop in question, of course.

      As far as feeding a human being goes, the bare minimum amount of land required to feed a person is something like 690 square meters. So they would definitely be a bit short.

    17. Re:book was boring by DRJlaw · · Score: 1

      Yes, it's a book for people who don't know science.

      Well you've certainly taught him, you professional hard sci-fi writer...

      He wrote a fictional novel for entertainment. Critiquing other's work under standards it was never intended to meet is easy. Demonstrating that you can do it better is infinitely harder.

      For example: You complain about the hydrazine-to-water conversion because it might yield 15% more water by volume in an ideal process? And you're insulted because the author didn't walk through calculations of density and mass-to-mole conversion, but instead made a like-versus-like comparison in units that a casual reader would understand with 1 significant figure of precision?

      Hint: You think and write like an engineer. Engineers are not his audience.

      Attempt to write something better. Then, watch it die miserably since, given your writing sample, you're not going to have an appreciably-sized, paying audience for that mess.

    18. Re:book was boring by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Clearly the OP is an "Actually" type of guy. I don't think I need to say any more...

    19. Re:book was boring by hattig · · Score: 1

      Clearly the author needed scientific review of his work, and then he could have gone through and fixed up the amounts to make things work (e.g., he would have 80 litres of liquid O2 up front instead of 50).

      Hopefully the movie has fixed things - probably by removing the attempts at being scientific to make it palatable to the audience.

      So maybe we can assume the solar panels aren't 10% efficient, but 40%. And that there is another power source besides solar (the article alludes to this). And maybe that growing food in regolith would be a primary experiment for martian travellers, so they would have suitable lighting with them. Doesn't fix the book, but it might fix the accuracy of the movie.

      But generally I watch movies for entertainment, and I can suspend disbelief to that end. Otherwise I would not have made it to the end of 2012.

    20. Re:book was boring by es330td · · Score: 1

      Reaching way, way back (with help from the Interwebs)...

      Hydrazine (H2NNH2 or N2H4) has a molecular weight of 32.05 g/mol and a density of 1.02g/cm^3

      1L of Hydrazine = 31.83 mol

      1 mol Hydrazine => 2 mol N + 4 mol H

      4 mol H + 2 mol O => 2 mol H2O

      31.83 mol Hydrazine => 63.66 mol H2O

      63.66 mol H2O has a mass of 1146g or 1.146L at STP

      I think I got that right.

      While his mental calculations weren't accurate to four decimal places, from a Fermi calculation standpoint he was close enough to the actual value to act on his estimate. He took a bunch of shortcuts but his logic "each hydrazine molecule yields two hydrogen molecules" is sound which means that two liters of liquid hydrogen combined with sufficient oxygen to make water should yield roughly two liters of water, which it actually does within about 10%.

      There are certainly other examples of deviation from factual science but this one doesn't seem that bad.

  2. Re:Stop. Just stop. by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 1

    "Never" is a looong time, Sparky.

  3. Promethius 1.5? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 2, Interesting

    >> Ridley Scott's adaptation

    I saw Promethius. Forgive me if my hopes aren't that high for "The Martian."

    1. Re:Promethius 1.5? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yea, like the cringe-worthy line in the trailer "I'm going to have to science the shit out of this!"

    2. Re:Promethius 1.5? by jordanjay29 · · Score: 1

      This is the post-Breaking Bad society. "Science" is now a verb, if you haven't noticed.

    3. Re:Promethius 1.5? by rbrander · · Score: 1

      And I saw "Blade Runner". You ever see a great sportsman play a bad game? Movies are complicated things where a whole lot of people have to all get it right; it's not a precise science.

    4. Re:Promethius 1.5? by neminem · · Score: 1

      I have absolutely no problem with that. In fact, that's one of my favorite things about English - given proper context, you can quite easily verb nouns and noun verbs. I think that's all kinds of interesting. (I wouldn't say that science "is" a verb - I would say that science is a noun, which is being used a verb in that sentence after having a null morpheme applied to it. Though particular verbs that get used as nouns *often* enough eventually do graduate to being full dictionary-level verbs.)

      Signed,
      A descriptivist

  4. Re:Stop. Just stop. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ooo oo you mean like Terra-forming long as in the human race will probably be extinct before its done long, yeah good luck skippy.

  5. Re:Stop. Just stop. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have been saying this for years: living anywhere other than Earth is a pipedream. We evolved to live on Earth. We live in our specific gravity and atmosphere and background radiation level. We cannot ever live on Mars for a prolonged period of time. Evolution doesn't work that way.

    Of course the space nutters just say "but but we just live underground and and and etc...". Give it up. These are the same people who claim AI is right around the corner because they can ask Siri to check the latest football scores.

  6. Re:Stop. Just stop. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html

    Food for thought. Be sure to read the earlier entries too, great stuff.

  7. NASA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    can't get back to moon, but yeah lets prepare to go to mars.

    1. Re:NASA by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 0

      We can go back to the moon, there is just no reason. Other than beating the soviets, there was no reason to go the first time. Science on the first landings was prohibited in fears that something might accidentally break pushing anything beyond the stated goal of landing on the moon and returning safely. NASA geologists were prohibited from even speaking with the astronauts Science was an afterthought. We're here, now what?

    2. Re:NASA by KeensMustard · · Score: 1

      We can go back to the moon, there is just no reason. Other than beating the soviets, there was no reason to go the first time.

      Yes. Of course the same issue applies equally to Mars: apart from quasi-religious, nobody has articulated a reason for us to go. Hopefully the truth of this comparison will sink in before we waste too much money on this monorail venture.

    3. Re:NASA by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      I've personally met some of these people. There's nothing quasi about it.

    4. Re:NASA by hattig · · Score: 1

      Yeah, that's what is truly unbelievable!

      Space X will get there. Probably a lot later than the recent article suggested of course. And I don't know why they want to do the single-shot to Mars rather than the two-shot LEO, then Mars method. Oh well...

      NASA will only get there if the Chinese start a project to get there first, and that would require their economy to turn around :-) - but NASA might get a budget in that case.

  8. Based in parts on "Mars Direct" by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Informative

    The basic plan in the book is a variant of Mars Direct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct, which was a proposal for a much cheaper way of getting to Mars than previous proposals. The primary cost savings are in making some resources on site (especially fuel for the return). If you haven't read The Martian you should. The book was excellent. Also, relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1536/.

    1. Re:Based in parts on "Mars Direct" by rbrander · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the link. I've been telling people that was my favourite scene in Apollo 13 this whole time.

      Frankly, the people posting hate on this book (I'm on the last chapter and have been reading it almost bouncing in my chair the whole time, all week) fill me with laughter and pity.

      Guys, you are very, very literally-minded people with dull imaginations and badly need to get laid or otherwise loosen up. Novels are not instruction manuals on how to set up your BBQ. Novels are mostly metaphors. Not just the "moon was a ghostly galleon" kind of direct metaphors you find in a sentence, the whole problem and setting and plot are a larger metaphor. It's like you're critiquing a "Tale of Two Cities" as unbelievable because no two unrelated guys were ever that much of a pair of twins that close associates would be fooled.

      The author has created a pulse-pounding drama by having it be One Man Against Nature, a really classic trope, read your Jack London. Yes, he cut a bunch of corners to make it possible for one guy to do just way, way more than the equipment and energy and available potatoes could really do, so that the story could be one man, forseeable tech, near future. The reality is that we'll have all those kinds of difficulties, need all that ingenuity, have all those close shaves, exploring space and Mars...but it'll be spread over many people and many missions and the specific problems will be different (and they'll totally obey every law of nature). The novel distills all that future adventure into one guy in one year, like distilling beer down into Scotch.

      No one real-life action hero has 22 life-threatening adventures in one year; no one detective catches dozens of wily, smart, prepared serial killers in one career, (hell, no one town has that many). But by concentrating the adventures of a zillion cops and lawyers into one cast, stories are created that *people will watch* whereas real-life stories may be found on obscure cable channels Sunday afternoons.

      The best story about making of Interstellar was the director telling Kip Thorne he needed the black hole to warp time by many years to the hour...long walk on the beach or whatever, and Thorne comes back with "well, barely possible, if it was spinning at an insane rate", and, well, that became the kind of black hole it had to be. [ And of course, that's after the magic FTL wormhole was already sucked up by the scientists. ]

      The point of Interstellar was not to compete with Cosmos, it was to wake up the audience to just how amazing and complex space-time really can be in extreme locations; people got to marvel at the human meaning that time-rate-compression would have, what a black hole would look like, how a wormhole entrance would be a sphere, a 3D portal through 4D. All that was AWESOME and if you let your literal-mindedness close these stories off from your enjoyment of it, your other hobbies must include throwing cold water on your pants while clicking through Chive hotbodies, because "in reality" you are never going to meet those hot people.

  9. Re:Stop. Just stop. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That blog was hilarious. Here is a list of "things they might need" from that blog:

    Energy. Oxygen. Food. Rocket Fuel. INTERNET. "Other obvious equipment".

    LOL. They need Internet on Mars? Oh yeah, and "other obvious equipment". What are you, 12?

  10. Robinson Crusoe on Mars! by DivemasterJoe · · Score: 1

    As a kid I loved that film. Mona the Woolly Monkey, oxygen recovery via some crazy rocks that sublimated...also Adam West.

  11. In Related News by quantaman · · Score: 1

    The Mars One project just announced they were reviewing a multi-million dollar study that proved humans could build sustainable habitats on Mars.

    --
    I stole this Sig
  12. Oh, c'mon admit it you watch MacGyver reruns. by jpellino · · Score: 1

    It's not a documentary, it's speculative entertainment.

    --
    "Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
    1. Re:Oh, c'mon admit it you watch MacGyver reruns. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      speculative entertainment would be better served by 4 tits, now thats progress.

  13. Re:Stop. Just stop. by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Compared to the primordial African savanna "Eden" we evolved to fit, most of the places where humans already live are unbelievably harsh. Clothing, agriculture, shelter and other simple technologies have brought us this far. Now, civilization and high-order technology are combining in ways that are about to make things really interesting.

    Man plus machine form a complex that can live anywhere that physics will permit.

  14. Tag line by mknewman · · Score: 1

    I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this! Looks like the worst sci-fi movie since The Astronaut Farmer. Quit taking liberties, Hollywood. We are SMART.

  15. Re: Stop. Just stop. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Probably is not the same as definitely. Never is still a long time.

  16. Lifeless Planet by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 1

    Did someone think up this game after playing Lifeless Planet on Steam?

    --
    I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
  17. What's an "analog mission?" by msauve · · Score: 1

    The MMSEV has been used in NASA's analog mission projects...

    They have digital missions?

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  18. Re: Stop. Just stop. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yeah and people used to think the Earth is flat. You're making absolute statements in a world of constantly changing parameters. As of today it's probably a pipedream but who knows about tomorrow? If everyone had a closed mind like you we never would have gotten anywhere.

  19. Thanks a lot! by chaoskitty · · Score: 1

    Perhaps some people here wanted to see the movie without knowing what it's about ahead of time. We're not all Americans with zero attention span, after all.

    Next tiime, DON'T put a major plot point in the introductory paragraph, please.

    1. Re:Thanks a lot! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is not a major plot point it is the premise of the book/movie. If you read the first paragraph of the book you would already know this "major plot point". If they didn't say that, some would just assume it is about ET beings from mars or some such crap.

  20. Re:Stop. Just stop. by jordanjay29 · · Score: 1

    That blog is extremely simplistic, by Internet they mean email/communications.

  21. Re:Stop. Just stop. by KeensMustard · · Score: 1

    Compared to the primordial African savanna "Eden" we evolved to fit, most of the places where humans already live are unbelievably harsh.

    No. No: they aren't. They are all well supplied with oxygen and reasonable atmospheric pressure, in all cases you can work outside without being bombarded with deadly radiation. There are no instances of humans choosing to live in places where the ground itself is so poisonous that exposure to it would make us sick.

    None.

    What's more, as a general rule, humans choose, where they can, to live in environments which are generally conducive to our well being. Nobody really chooses to live in a rat infested slum awash with sewage. That is the point: why don't humans live in antarctica, or one the sides of the himalayan mountains in the death zone, or in the simpson desert?

    Because we don't want to. As nice as those places are to visit, and as beautiful as they are, nobody wants to actually live there.

    This applies to Mars - and an order of magnitude more. Mars is about as pleasant and hospitable as outer space. Without the awesome views.

  22. Re:Stop. Just stop. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You are so aggravated that the concept of Lunar and Martian colonization is creeping more and more into the public consciousness, aren't you? If you had been alive during the 50's, you would have been so frustrated at those 'nutters' talking about orbiting the Earth and flying to the moon.

    How sad to be so scared and angered by technological advancement, how tragic... because it just won't stop.

  23. Well I was.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I was going to see the movies until I saw the trailer now why bother? Chock full of spoilers it was.

  24. Re:Stop. Just stop. by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

    "Unbelievably harsh" is relative the technology of the time. A few specialized people do live in Antarctica now. New islands have been created, and swamps drained. As we better at robotics and nanotech and genetic engineering, we will populate the solar system.

  25. Re:Stop. Just stop. by hattig · · Score: 1

    The blog isn't a scientific article about living on mars. It's an article about how one proven achiever of a man is putting everything in place to make getting to Mars achievable in his lifetime. The examples are simplistic, because the reality would be tedious.

    Compared to the joke that is the Mars One project, it seems achievable!

  26. What is this "Chive hotbodies" you talk of? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And yes, to all your points. "Actually" guys missing the point and being annoying, as usual.