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Well Water Likely Available Across Mars (behindtheblack.com)
schwit1 quotes Behind the Black: A science paper released today and available for download [pdf] cites evidence from about two dozen deep impact craters located from the equator to 37 degrees north latitude that Mars has a ground ice table at an elevation that also corresponds to other shoreline features.
The paper calls this evidence of "planet-wide groundwater" with elevations that "notably coincide with the elevation of some ocean shorelines proposed by previous authors."
Science writer Robert Zimmerman adds that "The evidence suggests that this deep groundwater water table (as ice) almost certainly still exists at all latitudes, though almost entirely underground...
"All you will have to do is dig a well..."
The paper calls this evidence of "planet-wide groundwater" with elevations that "notably coincide with the elevation of some ocean shorelines proposed by previous authors."
Science writer Robert Zimmerman adds that "The evidence suggests that this deep groundwater water table (as ice) almost certainly still exists at all latitudes, though almost entirely underground...
"All you will have to do is dig a well..."
Ice in a dozen craters is being extrapolated into planet-wide groundwater, which in turn is being extrapolated into "all you need to do is dig a well" - which in turn means Coca Cola production on Mars begins in 2025!
We're waiting.
TFA says the ground-ice table is 4.0-4.8km below the surface. That'd make the well quite deep -- we did manage a 12km hole on Earth but it took multiple decades to dig. Doing so without means to ship all the equipment might be a wee bit hard.
And if you dig that deep, you might reach Hidden Fun Stuff.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I'm sure Elon will be greatly saddened to be called a nobody.
That seems increasingly unlikely. The technology is there, it's just a matter of finding someone crazy enough to push it through and get it done.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Nobody is going to Mars this century. Deal with it.
I am confident that Man will get to Mars within 10 years, and that people will be living on Mars for several Martian years within 20 years.
Rocket technology is both far more sophisticated and cheaper in real terms, than it was when Man landed on the Moon. Almost totally reusable rockets of the BFR class and above, will make it happen. Provided Trump, and his ignorant ilk, don't get in the way.
The technology is not there. We have a somewhat reliable capability to put people into low earth orbit. We do not have the capability to get people to the Moon at this time and we never had it except for a very brief visit, followed by running home. When we have had a stable, self-sufficient Moon-base for 30 years or so, Mars will slowly become a possibility, but that Moon-base is wayyyy off in the future, if it happens at all.
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I will only drink RAW Mars water. Raw water contains tasty minerals and perchlorates that could have health benefits. The statements in this post have not been evaluated by the FDA. No medical claims are made or implied of any kind.
You have no clue what you are talking about. I do get that it is "modern" to expect great things for the near future, but that does not make it any less demented and stupid.
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Nobody SHOULD go to Mars this century, but probably will. We need to search for life before we contaminate the planet with earth life because: 1-It gets much harder to detect once you have contamination. 2-We might kill off native life, possibly including intelligent life. 3-We might bring something nasty back.
We do not have the capability to get people to the Moon
This is a ridiculous statement. We have the technology to go to the moon, technology has advanced since the '70s. It's just a matter of whether we want to do it or not.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We've had the ability to colonize the Moon since the first moon landings. We didn't because of Cost. We've had the ability to get to Mars since the moon landings. We didn't because of Cost. The supply of easy money doesn't appear to have improved.
This is a ridiculous statement. We have the technology to go to the moon, technology has advanced since the '70s. It's just a matter of whether we want to do it or not.
You seem to be unaware of how this works: If you do not continuously use them, technological capabilities deteriorate and go away. Many things needed to go to the moon have not been used for a long time and hence are not available anymore. They need to be re-discovered and that takes time. Also, just go there, walk around and come back will not cut it. That this is mostly a meaningless stunt is far more obvious today than it was back then.
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We can make a good business case for a colony on the moon. To build orbital solar power stations and railgun them into Earth orbit. On a planetary power grid scale the astronomical cost of a colony is smaller than launching the stations from Earth. There is no plausible business case for a colony on Mars. None. Nothing with any hope of a return on investment within a human lifespan.
Many things needed to go to the moon have not been used for a long time and hence are not available anymore.
Like what? Core memory? Guess we'll really regret not having that around anymore.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You're going to be really sad then. Because that's not going to happen.
We can keep a half dozen people at most alive on the ISS with monthly supply runs, and we're less than a day away. It took us three years to just have the basic structures in place and hooked up.
Mars is 6-9 months away, and it takes a giant rocket to get there. That's no Soyuz or Falcon. That's BFR or Falcon Heavy, an Atlas or Ariane 5, a Delta IV Heavy. If we build structures as minimal as the ISS, which has already clocked in at $150 billion, we're committing to launching one of those very big, very expensive rockets every month. That means either the initial investment needs to be way, way higher to make it more self-sufficient, or we need to incur rather hefty ongoing support costs, with a launch a month of those monsters.
For what? (Not to mention, who's going to be willing to fund that?)
For a fraction of the cost we can keep sending rovers. InSight cost $0.8 billion. Curiosity was expensive at $2.5 billion. Even if you swear we can do a Mars outpost for the price of the ISS, which is laughable, we could send 60 Curiosities for that price. Given that we'll get years of service out of that rover, and given that we could build a bunch of them in bulk for a lot less money, that sort of investment makes sending people look silly.
What makes it even more unlikely is that we'll likely have to send those 60 robotic missions before people anyway, because we're going to need to prep the living site. We need to find and purify water, set up power infrastructure, create habitation, set up the HVAC and air handling. Any one of these things going wrong, which will at minimum take hundreds of billions of dollars, scraps the human mission before it even starts.
Claiming we could tap this water ice is a fantasy. Mars is poisonous. The dust is, and the water is. We're not going to ever be drilling 4km deep wells on Mars. The expense and engineering it would take to do that would pay for another 60 rovers.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Yawnn... shouldn't be a prob.
[($)]
I think we can get have a credible Mars program in place in ten years, if for some reason the public wanted that.
I think it would be physically possible -- although just barely -- to land a human on Mars in that timeframe, if cost and risk to that person are no object, which they will be.
Remember, half of all Mars missions have failed. Mars is hard; much harder than the Moon. The trip is long, requiring years of consumables to be packed and large quantities of fuel to be tankered. There are considerable health problems that a trip to Mars in an Apollo style vehicle would entail. You will likely need a vehicle of unprecedented size to provide radiation protection, supplies storage, and weight simulation.
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Baloney! We have the tech to get there. All we need is a stainless steel rocket (and Musk is building it now). Now that we have discovered water, a colony should be simple to setup: a few solar collectors to melt the ice, we can use caves or dig to build housing to protect from the radiation. We can also use a pebble reactor for year round power. The future is here!
TOTAL BS. Musk is building a stainless steel rocket that will take us there. All we need to do is scale it up and we can do it today. Just like computers have gotten better, so has space tech. I think we will be there in a couple of years now that we have found a reliable supply of water.
I am thinking more like 5 years, or 3. You don't realize how low that SpaceX has reduced launch costs. The stainless steel rocket is already in trials (it had a small issue where it fell over in wind), but once it scales up it will be able to take us to Mars.
That isn't a problem. Ever heard of a desalinization plant??? That tech has been around for decades.
WRONG. Technology only gets better and better. You are probably one of those people who didn't think humans could fly. But now we can. And so you are wrong.
Exactly what I was thinking! You just SIMPLY setup a facility on Mars to extract iron from the planet and produce as many as you need. You just need to bring along some stuff, and SpaceX has low-cost reusable rockets which can be used for that.
Elon will be the one leading us to Mars. He is literally our last hope to get off this rock.
Yeah, but we need to get off this rock stuck in a gravity well before an asteroid wipes us out.
People like you once told us that humans couldn't fly, or couldn't go past the speed of sound, or even colonize America. But we proved that you were wrong, and we will prove that you are wrong again!
Musk is already building the rocket - that is NO problem. He just needs time and some money to scale it up.
There is plenty of reasons to go to Mars. The first is to get off this rock stuck in a gravity well so we don't all die when the asteroid hits. Secondly we have always explored. It is people like you who once said we shouldn't go to America. But we did and that is why we are here now.
You probably don't realize that SpaceX has reduced launch costs by about 20%.
You probably said that it was impossible for humans to fly, but here we are, flying.
Going to Mars with our available technology is like building a plane out of things you have in your house, or sailing to the new world on a ship made out of your house. It's fucking lunacy and it aggravates me to no end that you see yourself as a dreamer and not a fucking twit doing 0 to push the technology or conversation forward. Honestly, I don't see us ever getting to Mars because half of our species are self indulgent fancy-flighted morons that don't understand the task or the limitations.
> They need to be re-discovered and that takes time.
Yes, but it is still orders of magnitude easier than the initial discovery/invention and proof-of-concept.
One of the reasons why movies whose plots are "if we kill (or otherwise neutralize) X who knows how to do Y (which everyone now knows can be done), the world is saved" are pretty silly.
Which has been clear for decades.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I take it you're another member of the (fairly large) class of "people who have never drilled a 4km-deep well in their life". That's a lot of kit. Just the cable is multiple tonnes.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That said, MPML was just seeing some discussion of a possible Earth impactor a couple of months before 2029's Apophis near-miss. Which will get the "sky is falling" crowd running around, screaming.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
"Robert Zimmerman adds that "The evidence suggests that this deep groundwater water table (as ice) almost certainly still exists at all latitudes, though almost entirely underground... "
Bob Dylan seems to know this stuff.
Moon bases are never going to be self-sufficient, they'll always be dependent on importing volatiles that the moon lacks. Mars has everything Earth does...more limited quantities in some cases, but more than enough for a self-sufficient colony's needs.
It's easier to land payloads on Mars than it is on the moon. While the atmosphere can't brake large vehicles to subsonic speeds, it can still take care of the majority of the entry velocity, which lunar landers must deal with using their landing rockets. Mars missions do have to carry a few months of consumables for the trip in addition to what they'll need on the ground, but that's hardly something that requires 30 years of experience on the moon to achieve.
So you'll want a vehicle capable of landing a hundred tonnes or so of payload at a time. If only someone were working on such a thing...
Also note the water's 4 km below the Mars equivalent of "sea level", not below the surface. Much of the actual surface actually cuts into this layer.
A rocket is the easy part.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Your should take a vacation to Antarctica for a couple of years. It's a tropical paradise compared to Mars.
A pair of Falcon Heavy launches are easily capable of sending people to the moon and returning them to Earth. The only thing lacking is a willingness to accept the risk.
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The BFR will likely get to Mars within 10 years, but you vastly underestimate the technical and especially the non-technical problems of getting approval to send humans. The Falcon 9 has been flying for 9 years, and we'll be lucky if the first human flies on it this year. Approval for all the additional dangers of a Mars flight (time, radiation, different flight profiles, etc) will require many, many unmanned Mars flights... and those flights are limited to happening every ~2 years when then planets are close. Getting approval for humans to actually live on Mars will be even harder to achieve.
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It does not. That is an illusion. There are many things we cannot make anymore because we have lost the knowledge to do so. This is rarely discussed publicly, but one place were you hear it occasionally is that if you have not built a nuclear power station for a few decades, it gets extremely hard to do it again.
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And if you think that the _engine_ part is all that it takes, you are missing 99% of the problem. Thinking that things are simple is easy when you do not see most of the problem.
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You do realize that a working colony would require about 20'000 people (if carefully selected) and that it need to be self-sustaining in a harsh environment? We may be there in a few hundred years, but not much earlier.
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I would not. There were flying animals for a long time, so there is reason to believe it is possible. However, say, 2000 years ago, I would have been one of those saying "not anytime soon" and you would have said "in 10 years". There is a difference between "impossible" and "not anytime soon" and you are currently ignoring that for an utterly cheap shot. I get it that you are excited and I am the one with the bucket of cold water. But switching off your intelligence and being a mindless fanboi instead just disgraces you.
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No, we did not. You seem to be unaware how extremely much effort went into these stunts back then. And there is a bit more to colonizing something than just to get there.
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We do not. You let enthusiasm blind you. Water 4km down is irrelevant, unless you are prepared to ship a few 1000t of drilling rig and a few 10'000t of support equipment.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why exactly would it require 20,000 people? If it were fully-automated, it'd have no minimum inhabitant requirement.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I suppose the difference is that there exist people with specific, detailed, and active plans to get to Mars, who are showing genuine progress and have already demonstrated their ability to execute on such ground-breaking plans. They believe they will succeed, which is of course no guarantee, but neither is there grounds for your flat dismissal.
The onus is on you to point out the flaw in their plans - something they (with their much greater subject knowledge) overlooked. Something more specific than "it's harder than you think".
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Exactly, robots don't suffer from genetic bottlenecks.
Ezekiel 23:20
You are aware that he's trolling you?
Ezekiel 23:20
If we build structures as minimal as the ISS, which has already clocked in at $150 billion, we're committing to launching one of those very big, very expensive rockets every month. That means either the initial investment needs to be way, way higher to make it more self-sufficient, or we need to incur rather hefty ongoing support costs, with a launch a month of those monsters.
If you used the SLS for that, you'd be right. Just like it was a bad idea to use a $1.2-billion-per-launch vehicle for launching ~15-tonne modules to the ISS when Russians could launch 20 tonne ones for $100 million apiece. But that's more of a political matter than a matter of technical necessity.
Ezekiel 23:20
A rocket is the easy part.
True enough. Nobody is even thinking about long term space habitats, the composite shielding that will be needed, more reliable and efficient water, food, and atmosphere systems, fuel generation on Mars, or many of the other tech that will need to be developed to make that trip. We're still about two years out from getting the BFR into space. There will be time to refine to its equivilant of Black 5, as well as testing for landing and take off again from Mars that will happen after we have Mars side re-fueling worked out. But really, this can all be seen in that nobody is spending any real money on getting to Mars. Musk, in all his optimism still expects a Mars mission to cost around $200 billion. Until we see somebody willign to pay $20/year to go to Mars for the next decade, nobody is even trying to get there in ten years (let alone to find out they can't). NASA already told Trump they can't get to Mars in 8 years with unlimited funds, and I doubt that the extra two years would make a difference.