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Petition for Human Exploration of Mars
jonwiley writes "The Mars Society and thinkMARS have teamed up to create a web-based petition for those who support the human exploration of Mars. Their goal is 1,000,000 signatures by November 2000 and they plan to present the petition to Congress, the President, and to other world leaders. "
A million signatures, and then they are going to submit it to the government? This sounds like a nice dream, but a very bad to go about it.
If a million people really care about it that much, how about they all kick in a hundred bucks, and do it privately? That'll get ya a hundred million dollars. Not enough money? Ok, kick in five hundred bucks, or even a thousand. That is not a lot of money to spend on something grandiose that you really care about. You spent more than that on your stereo system, and this is space exploration that we're talking about here. Anyone who signs this petition but won't write a kilobuck check is a hypocrite.
But the people that sign this stuff don't really want to pay, do they? They want everyone to pay, whether the other 249 million people in the country sign the petition or not. Whether the other people can afford to pay (or care enough to pay) for it or not. The purpose of this petition is to make it so that everyone involuntarily pays. If this were just a voluntary thing, they wouldn't need a petition; they would just need a fund raiser.
This is immoral. It is theft. I am sick of people trying to get the government to back their own agendas (no matter how good intentioned they are) as if government money (and government power) just grows on trees. If you really care about something, get off your ass and do it yourself. Or educate others so that they see the benefits of space exploration. Make the people want to do it, instead of making government respresentatives want to do it out of fear of not getting re-elected.
Do not sign this petition! This isn't about space exploration; it's about communism.
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"If this is done I will support Mars colonization, otherwise if we are just going to pay for toys and a few lucky ass Major-Toms to fly there and back or live up there sending emails to schoolkids I'd say scrap the project and put the money just into feeding people."
I'd want to see a colony on the Moon before Mars. That way you can use the Moon as a staging point, while still having a colony that can start working toward harvesting the solar power, asteroid mining and other resources.
If you're interested take a look at http://www.asi.org .
Wayne
"They will not be missed." (Another Bill Murry paraphrase.)
I think that we should work on how to live in space (ie build a decent space station, or a research base on the moon) before we start straying too far from our little planet. It'd be nice if we didn't have to launch everything from the Earth. What percentage of the $$ spent on spcecraft goes into its ability to escape and reenter the atmosphere and fight with gravity?
"1. It is inhospitable. 2. It would be incredibly expensive. 3. No one wants to live there. "
This can be said of any fronteer. But people always go when the opertunity to go. If tommorrow NASA said "OK We need some people to man a Mars colony." Do you think people wouldn't show up? This would actualy make a good Slashdot poll.
I know I'd sign up. At the very least that asshole geologist would sign up. (He'd better be able to play Quake). Sure Internet access would suck, but compared to the fronteers of old we'ed have the best communication by far.
That reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes strip abour ten years ago. The two of them saw what a mess we were making of Earth, and decided to move to Mars. They took off (in their wagon, entering orbit with the help of a wooden ramp) and landed on Mars... If I recall correctly, they left after deciding, essentially, that human presence was bound to mess up Mars like it did Earth.
Then there are the ineffable issues. Knowledge from observing the Martian dust storms led to our model of nuclear winter and deterred people from starting a nuclear war here. Observations of Jupiter's atmosphere led to better models of our own and superior weather forecasts. Going to a new planet, especially to live there, is bound to yield knowledge that will improve conditions somewhere, or maybe even everywhere. It's very short-sighted to say "I can't see what we might find, let's not go" when the whole point of going is to see what you'll find. And until we find it, we don't know what it's good for.
Gimme a ticket on a Mars Direct.
--
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
We are living on a planet that cannot permanently sustain the amount of life already on it. And our population is growing. Clearly we need more space.
Although this may sound logical it is not. I don't remeber where but it has been proven we can not offset the population growth by moving people to another planet. Just think how much it costs us to move a handful of people into space, unless we have a huge leap in space technology this will never be a solution to the population problem.
As well it is definatly possible to bring population growth to 0 or even make it negative. Basically we need to get the birth rate to about 2.1 children per family or something close to that. It has almost been accomplished in many countries, through education. If we educate people and help the poor which are the people who contribute the most to population growth then we can indeed fix the problem.
According to NASA (IIRC), it would be more like $50+ billion
But it's small change for the gov't. If enough people actually wanted to and made this an issue, NASA would get the money. The problem is that no one in the USA wants to. Idiots.
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
This is a false dichotomy. Another scenario is we we drop back to a much smaller population that is supported with sustainable energy sources/agriculture/etc. In your eco-sensitive world what resources are we running out of that the pie is getting smaller?
It is not a false dichotomy. Even a smaller population will be using resources, which in turn will result in less resources for further generations. A shrinking population will slow the inevitable, not stop it. Even in the rosiest scenerio all the metals will eventually have been recycled to the point to where there is nothing left (remember, no process is 100% effecient -- the laws of thermodynamics don't permit it). Ditto for numerous other resources we take for granted, such as arable land, for example[1]. The net result: someday we will have consumed all of the non-renewable resources of this world, until there are enough left to support a population of exactly 0.
Now, if you are arguing we should give up our luxurious lifestyle and return to the trees then yes, we could probably live in a fashion sustainable by this world until conditions change such that human life is no longer possible. We did it for 3,000,000 years or so, after all. However, I do think there are valuable aspects to a modern, technological society that are worth keeping, and the only way to do this on any kind of long term basis is to move our exploitation of resources away from the Earth's biosphere, which cannot sustain such abuse much longer.
Technology demands resources, many of which are not renewable, even through recycling. Those which can be recycled are not 100% recoverable. No procedure is 100% effecient (the laws of thermodynamics prevent that), so even in a world of shrinking population and wonderful levels of ecological sensitivity, you will, eventually, wind up with a world capable of supporting 0 people in a technological society, or alternatively some tens of millions as unusually clever animals.
Even if you "terraform" every square meter of the earth's surface and ocean floors, you will only slow, not stop, the erosion of resources over time. In the end, the only alternatives are either a decreasing standard of living, or obtaining new resources elsewhere. Whether the decision is done in time to allow billions to benefit, or done when only millions can, or postponed so long until the choice is no longer possible, won't really change that rather unpleasant fact.
Our goals should include the colonization and exploitation of the other worlds of this solar system, and whatever nearby stars we find ourselves able to reach in the centuries ahead. There is wealth almost beyond counting, in the form of usable energy, minerals, materials, space, and even worlds. We would be fools to turn our back on it.
[1]Unless we use sustainable, non-absolutist agriculture, as proposed by Daniel Quinne and others. This is really a completely different discussion, orthogonal to the arguments pro and con as to the benefits of space exploration and exploitation.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I guess this is why NASA is scouring prisons and ghettos for astronaut candidates...
The cost of sending humans to another planet is so exorbitantly high (and will be for a long time), that anyone who goes will either be a) incredibly wealthy or b) extremely vital to the success of the extraplanetary "colony". Mars will not be settled by convicts and refugees. It will be settled by affluent scientist-types from rich industrial nations. And if even the most tentative steps in that direction take place in my lifetime, I'll be shocked.
And before you say, "We'll be off-planet *long before* the sun goes nova", remember: people said the same thing about Y2K ("the computers with be updated *long before* the year 2000 is reached").
Uhhh, yeah. Those two events are about exactly the same. The Y2K problem took thirty years to manifest itself, and the sun will go nova in several million years. I don't think it's a real pressing concern. Further, stars don't die instantly. We'll have several hundred years of warning that we're being evicted...
And people who think a space colony will solve Earth's population problems are facing the same problem: expense. Which is cheaper, feeding starving people, or launching them to another (hostile) planet and feeding them there? The Earth's population is growing by 80 million people per year. So to stabilize Earth, we have to send 200,000 people to Mars every single day. Good solution, and certainly more cost-effective than, say, birth control.
I'm not against space travel and colonization. I'm just trying to be realistic, and the truth is there's no real reason to go to Mars right now, and it's not really possible to do it right with current technology.
Have patience, people. Would you rather see mankind settling Mars permanently, or another Apollo-style one-off stunt?
I won't even point out that a petition of this sort is completely useless. A petition only works when it's a direct threat ("These people won't vote for you if you don't change your ways"), not just a list of signatures from a nebulous group of unaligned people.
Whoops. I guess I pointed it out.
We just need to start shipping supplies to mars now, oxygen, buildings, food and water. And ofcourse cool things that'll make feuls out of the martion enviroment.
in a few decades we should have enuff supplies to make quite a nice colony on mars.
I'd moderate that as Funny - was this tongue in cheek, or were you serious? I'm having trouble with nuances this late in the afternoon... must get sleep...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
A friend of mine named P.J. O'Rourke said that too. In fact, he said it in "Eat the Rich".
As I've said, we could do this easily, the only reason we don't is that people in the US really don't care anymore.
Mayve if China gets a human into space all the Americans with overinflated egos will want to make sure the US of A stays ahead of the stinking commies in the space race.
Personally, I would kill for the opportunity to go into space. Just imagining being up there is humbling.
So you're going to take money out of my pocket, one way or another, huh? I'm sure you're a talented and bright person, or you wouldn't be working in a technological/scientific field like that. But listen, buddy: society does not owe you a living.
I'm all in favor of you trying to convince people that space exploration is a Good Thing, so that maybe those people will spend their money cluefully. But the welfare ultimatum is a really cheap shot. It makes you look like an extortionist, and it undermines your cause.
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Jeez, they don't need to take this much info from me... I want to support them but they really don't need to have my address.
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RumorsDaily
What about the bits that aren't land? Undersea colonies would be just as scientifically rewarding as space colonies and would be easier in some ways.
Which is, in turn, a Hunter S. Thompson reference.
..." (who played Hunter S. Thompson BTW). Fun flick -- much more entertaining IMHO than the Fear and Loathing film was.
Yes, exactly! I should have said "... a movie based loosely on a Hunter S Thompson book, starring Bill Murray
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Point most definitely *not* taken. There will always be things to fix on Earth, and by the reasoning you present that means we'll never do anything other than stay at home trying to fix things.
The time to explore the planets is as soon as we have the ability to do so. That doesn't mean we need to stop trying to improve the situation of our home planet.
In fact, learning about other planets is a good way to find out more about how our own behaves, and how to fix its problems.
This could provide some valuable possibilities: launch the parts into Near-Earth orbit, field-test the methods to be used to deliver the colony components on a place with higher gravity, test the methods for landing the crew and components there, practice colony construction there, and inhabit it for a year or so.
This is a way that is less likely to leave people in the lurch if something fails. Things can go "a little wrong" without losing however many people are involved in the project.
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
You probably think I have no sense of adventure, but we could learn a lot more about Mars by just sending machines there, plus it would be cheaper. So what would you rather have, more knowledge or the fulfillment of an emotional desire to say that humans went there?
Once again today, I should have been more careful with my exact wording (It's been a long day). Not necessarily 'Forced relocation.' But I don't believe we should continue to keep sustaining people if they choose to live in an area that is incapable of sustaining human life. Do you propsose that, if someone refuses to leave his home in the middle of the desert, that the collective 'we' continue to support them and their families indefinitely? Or, as I stated earlier, should we search for an alternate solution? I don't believe that continues hand-outs are the answer in some situations.
Never ask a geek why, just nod your head and slowly back away. -Rob Malda
Don't be so dramatic, if you have a job in the space industry, surely you can get one in the entertainment sector ;-)
-Brian
Bingo. Now that would be worthwhile.
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We're stuck on one very fragile planet. If this one breaks we need a backup. A backup solar system would be nice too.
Humanity has all its eggs in one basket, and that's a guarantee of extinction in the long term.
Going to Mars is one of the very early steps in the process of improving our species' survival chances, and as such is incredibly important.
The ideas that have been presented here are amasing. But it seems that no one has touched the real point. Humans have to, one day, to deal with Mars. Like it or not. What has been done till now is mostly child's play. Or what was called Caligula's conquests some good time ago.
Mars is a planet with an History. And look at it with an History as old as the planet you live. And if anyone takes the care to look carefully then he may note that there are a lot of wrong things with that planet. In any case that planet is a BIG MISTAKE. It is something much like the cross between a mouse and an elephant that was forced to run faster than a leopard and had to face a full crash. That's how I "subjectively" see that thing over there, after many years of observations. A funny analogy but also very tragic and alarming.
Mars presents problems starting from its orbit. It goes over what is called as "proper movements". They don't fit well accepted schemes and predictions. Note that due to this Kepler has managed to find the laws of planetary orbits. Because Mars didn't fit any acceptable scheme.
Martian general geology is also a serious problem. The inners of the planet are assymetric. A pure planetary aberration. Tectonics and magnetism seem to have existed. However what we get of their remains are not answers but more and more questions.
The atmosphere is also a big problem. Yes most people tell you about its thiness and a lot of bla-bla-bla about its past. However 90% forget to tell you that this atmosphere could not exist for too long. It is dynamically unstable. So it is either recent or there is something we are missing.
The channels exist. Look through a telescope and sooner or later you will note them. However these are not Martians or water flows. It is that same crazy atmosphere playing games with the landscape. A strange tidal game of harmonics that shows how highly unstable it is.
Life in Mars? 99% that you will find nothing. Even ashes to ashes. The planet suffered serious hits and got hotter than a steam pan. Just look at Hellas and you may get what I mean.
Water? Probably some. And probably not the one that formed its rivers lakes and seas. By the same reason above.
Aliens? Maybe yes, maybe not. But forget looking at Mars Face as a shrine sending telepatic messages to Earth. That thing is interesting but it is very hard to consider it an alien product. In fact a lot of things shown as alien are far from such. However there are a lot of very interesting places where anyone would start seriously think if "Aliens? Baaa..." would be enough.
Colonization? Don't be crazy. It is probable that humans will find much easier to colonize Io than that piece of overfried pan. Besides that planet has really Bad Luck. More than 80% of crafts had a mission not fulfilled or a strange disappearence into the Black Houl of Mars.
But should humans stay away from Mars? Absolutely not. They should go there and try to find the answers for the questions this planet arise. Talking in "martial" terms they should make expedtions to find its comrade MIA. And give him an honourable burial. It is a moral duty for Earthlings to look at the fate of its brother planet. For the sake of their own future. One day, Earth may suffer similar fate.
This can be only accomplished by going to Mars. Note that sending machines is not an answer. Machines can only give snapshots. And very incomplete ones. Human presence can give a serious weight to the process of search by trial and error. Human decisionmaking will allow a faster development on investigation. Besides humans may receive a unique experience by exploring the harshest friendly planet they know.
This is not without risks. There will be deads. There will be coffins returning home. There will be eyes staring forever over an empty landscape. But without this, there will be humans, that one day will not understand why they deserved a tragic fate sitting in their armchairs, laying in their beds or walking on the street. There will be humans that would never understand, what really could mean a flash of light over the skies. There will be a Mankind that suffered millions of years to see its children dying in the most stupid of deaths.
Hmmm, I dunno, the sniffer needs to be in the path of the data, unless they hack into their system or some intermediate network in between then I don't see how this is really possible. I mean if they hack into the system then they don't need a sniffer. As well I really doubt these spammers are going to hack into their system or other systems to get e-mail addresses, the gain to risk factor is a bit large, hmmmm get a whole bunch of e-mail addresses/ go to jail, I dunno sounds a bit far fetched to me.
Is it only me? I've always thought the "Space Race" was a grotesque display of materialistic BS. All the many hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent world-wide on missions to space (many with little or no scienctific value).
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Now we're building a glorified hotel, up there in orbit. Thats really nice and fine. We can go up there, while the "lesser" humans down here starve and die of disease.
Yes, I have a problem with this. I'm not a ludite by any means. I just wonder why we expand our borders, whilst inside our borders we have all these problems that could be easily solved with a little (big) cash injection.
Not very eloquent today, but I hope you see my point.
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
The fact millions of people would like to see it happen isn't a surprise. In fact, not getting a million people to sign in just less than a year would be a major surprise. But the petition doesn't mention costs.
The petition would have made some impact if it said "It's ok to raise taxes the next 15 years", "I am willing to flip burgers instead of getting a scolarship", "I deal with traffic for the rest of my life instead highway improvement", "I don't think I will be old - I don't need care then", "I don't mind potholes" or "I won't upgrade my computer for the next 10 years - I invest in the Mars mission".
Even more impressive would be asking for a small contribution. Say, $100 dollars or so. Then, when the petition is presented, one can say "here are a million signatures, and a 100 million dollar cheque. It will barely get you away from Earth, and not bring you to Mars at all, but it's a start.
-- Abigail
On the other hand, sending people to Mars or the Moon with the intention of leaving them there, now that's interesting.
So we should do this for our children ... fine. Whose children are you talking about? American children, I suppose.
What about the kids suffering and dying at this moment in Africa? Shouldn't we be doing something for them? Why is going to Mars so much more beneficial to "our children" than feeding them?
And if you want to save them, and enable them to "spread their wings", why don't you do something against pollution, so that they can still breathe on this old planet in a hundred years?
I'm not against space exploration, or spending money on it. But your arguments suck (and I've read your follow-up, and they still don't make any sense to me).
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
I think it would be good to go to Mars, not just for the trip but for the technology that will be developed for the trip. But I think it would be cool just for the trip.
Yes, I know, I'm sure any technology that would be developed for a Mars trip could be developed in time without going to Mars, but it seems that the two things that increase the rate of new technologies are wars and exploration.
And Yes...I think you will have to be part of a club, most likely NASA, ESA and the Japanese. I don't see a robust South Asian or African space program around.
What would writing off Africa's debt do? Allow African nations to acquire more debt?
"Trouble is, just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's true"
"Trouble is, just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's true"
--Terry Pratchett
Sending robotic probes to do chemical analysis is probably more worthwhile in a science-for-you-buck sense, but more spectacular missions help drum up general public interest, which helps NASA secure funding.
:)
Think of the microphone on the current Mars mission. Not much real scientific value, but it is cool and will (hopefully) get some positive publicity.
Mind you, they should probably work one their Mission To Mars Success Ratio before they send humans out there
Dana
Would such a program cost $10 billion dollars? The Mars Society aims to get a million sigs on the petition, and I'd say they'll do it, too, with enough publicity.
But if, for every person in the country, 40 bucks were taken from tax money and allocated to it, we'd have 10 billion right there. And don't tell me taking an average of 40 bucks from an average of, what, $10-15 K in taxes will make a huge dent in the money. Take it from the military budget, we can already kill every person on the planet 10 times over with ammo to spare.
What I'd really like to see is some of these really rich computer entrepreneurs donating some money to this. I know Bill Gates could donate $20 billion and still have a comfortable lifestyle in his $50 million house complex.
The dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program.
-Arthur C. Clarke
let's say US$10,000, they might be taken more seriously.
Rainforests aren't a park - they're forbidding, hostile jungles.
They're a great big resource, waiting to be taken, used, and transformed.
>And the Europeans didn't have to bring every
>gram of their own oxygen, fuel, food, and water
>with them to America or Australia
Actually, they did have to bring food, first in the form of consumables, then food that could be planted, grown, and harvested.
Assuming an enforced recycling plan, which includes water and oxygen recycling, along with extracting oxygen and hydrogen from the lunar/Martian soil, I think that the needs for air, oxygen, and food can be reduded.
>I still totally disagree with this idea. What's
>easier, train an Air Force captain to survive on
>Mars, or train a street peddler from Bangladesh?
Of course the captain is easier to train. But, historically, you always send in the military first, *then* send in the poor once the military have secured a base. The poor people then have to build the infrastructure to take a military output and transform it into a commercial/residental area. This is historical precedence, and I don't see any reason why this would change.
>Poor people will never leave Earth - once space
>travel is cheap and easy enough for them to do
>it, our space colonies will already have their
>own poor people to worry about without importing
>more.
Historically, you are wrong. Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and German peasants settled much of the North American bread basket. They didn't have to afford to go (in most cases, they could not afford to go); the tickets (one-way, of course) were given to them, they were packed on a leaky ship, and tossed out the harbour. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened in the future, with space. Aside from Star Trek, I have yet to come across any science fiction works where the above isn't assumed and/or implemented. Okay, Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" doesn't, but that book only talks about the military aspect of space exploration.
As for your final point, I agree wholeheartedly with you. Baby steps on stepping stones.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
A lunar colony is relatively pointless right now.. The moon doesnt have enough in common with us to provide anywhere near the scientific data mars does and we're still not even sure if there's any water to be mined on the moon (and if there's not, or not enough, the colony would be doomed from having to import literally everything from earth).
Mars we know we can get water, metals, and even a little atmosphere to suppliment recycled air with big enough condensers. There may even be places on mars capable of growing plants engineered to stand up to the atmospheric conditions outside a habitat.
And from a purely 'gee that's nifty' point of view, if i had a choice between seeing a lunar colony (people living for some period in space.. which we've already done.. alot) or someone actually standing on another planet (which we've never done).. i'd go with the planet.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
>I guess this is why NASA is scouring prisons and
>ghettos for astronaut candidates...
That's how England populated Australia. My point was that, historically, the first wave of settlers to a new land have always been the cast-offs, the criminals, the malcontents; the lower class. Look at the first people to settle the USA; not the highest cut of the European social fabric. The lower class people are the best candidates, because of the will to survive, the familiarity to living in the shadow of death. Of course, space is a little different from being deported to America, and the people will have to be trained, but the concept is still valid.
>Uhhh, yeah. Those two events are about exactly
>the same. The Y2K problem took thirty years to
>manifest itself, and the sun will go nova in
>several million years. I don't think it's a real
>pressing concern. Further, stars don't die
>instantly. We'll have several hundred years of
>warning that we're being evicted...
I agree with you one both points, that the sun won't die for a very long idea, we will have a ton of warning. But would you rather have a ton of research and experience manning inter-plantary/inter-stellar missions, or decide, at the last milllenium, "Shit! The Sun is DYING! QUICK, build that colony ship NOW!"
As well, I read once, that it would take 2 days to fully evacuate New York City in the event of a nuclear attack. And that was assuming fully cooperation (but feel free to dispute this, I can't prove it). Now, how long would it take to fully evacuate our solar system? State any assumptions needed to reach your conclusion (distance to off-system planet, carrying capacity of the ships, speed of the ships, number of ships).
>Have patience, people. Would you rather see
>mankind settling Mars permanently, or another
>Apollo-style one-off stunt?
Again, I agree with you. We need to establish a working (and profitable) lunar base first, then use it as a stepping stone to get to Mars. Then Europa, Titan....
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
I have two sources of reservation on this topic:
- It will give the defense forces even more justification for their exhorbitant research budget
- We have fucked up one planet already. I think we should leave the others alone until we've learned how to be better managers of the environment.
Space probes sent to other planets are heated to sterilise them. Try doing that to a human.
-- mind over pixel
Check out the regulations; it's just a bit tricky to get permission to fly a private rocket.
And once you've got permission, where are you getting the cash? The big aerospace companies are sitting pretty; it isn't often that you find a market where the government will pay you hundreds of millions of dollars to build a vehicle and then throw it away ASAP. And the small aerospace companies are dying through lack of private investment after being told by investors (and rightly) that it doesn't pay to compete with the government.
So now we have NASA paying a billion dollars for Lockheed-Martin to produce an over-weight, over-budget "technology demonstrator" while companies like Rotary Rocket and Kistler are hunting their couches for spare change.
I think Slashdot has already been over the interesting international treaties regarding private ownership of celestial territory..
Yawn. Another piece of vicarious feel-good trash for nerds who know nothing about the science involved in this project.
The only thing that will get us to Mars is a Strong Central Government funding Pure Science. You nerds have no influence or importance in this issue. Go back to your easy and boring programming work and leave the science and discovery to people greater than yourselves.
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HAHA! LAST POST! Anything following is redundant.
Even in the rosiest scenerio all the metals will eventually have been recycled to the point to where there is nothing left (remember, no process is 100% effecient)
Please; I've seen better discussions of thermodynamics in creationist literature...
That forced inefficiency refers to usable energy (work), not to *mass*. Yes, it costs energy to recycle material.. but 100% of the material is still there, and the Sun is currently hitting us with 100+ million gigawatts of power, and will continue doing so for about 4 billion years.
We don't need to go into space because we're in danger of "running out of resources" on Earth; we may want to go into space because it will allow us to use even more resources, and to use the ones we have more efficiently.
True, even on Mars getting water is no easy task, how thick is the sheet of dry ice anyway?
As for plants, a heated greenhouse using CO2 from the Mars atmosphere can grow normal high yield plants, much more efficient than growing genetically engeineered plants (I doubt it's possible to have something that can survive the kind of temperature on Mars)
I was thinking the benefits of a lunar outpost as a starting point for future space explorations, it would be far more economical than earth based launches. I didn't mean having an actual settlement there, just personnels to run and maintain the facilities.
A big nuclear/solar powered communication station on the back of the moon + relay station on the side facing the earth would help communication with space exploration vessels tremendously.
Basically I think it would be much easier to send people to mars once the infrastruture is in place on the moon.
Kill'em! Kill'em all!
If the Pilgrims (and the Puritans of the Mass Bay Colony) had brought all the food they needed, nearly half of the population would not have died the first winter. Something to think about, if the colonization of America is to be compared with that of Mars ;-)
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
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This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.
HAL9000
Since when was space not privatized? There is nothing to stop a corporation from going to Mars.
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"If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution."
Are "these people" part of a different species to you then?
what do you think can happen if you can spend $200 billion on research to eliminate pollution?
Who is talking $200 billion? The number I read was $20 billion.
George
This is drilled into every neophyte who goes near
a computer. Why shouldn't it apply to the human race, too?
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
You're right this would be just another huge governmental blunder! I remember that one time Thom Jefferson paid $15 million for a piece of land from France that nobody knew anything about. What a waste... can you imagine what we could do with $15 million dollars??? And then, we paid the Russians $7.2 million for a hunk of ice which mostly lies above the Artic Circle. AND it's not even connected to this country! Who needs it. Damn the "potential", give me the MONEY...
The choices which face us are fairly stark: either accept an ever sinking standard of living, or find more resources elsewhere.
This is a false dichotomy. Another scenario is we we drop back to a much smaller population that is supported with sustainable energy sources/agriculture/etc. In your eco-sensitive world what resources are we running out of that the pie is getting smaller?
We don't need a manned expedition to Mars to get very cheap energy from the sun. Similarly, if you don't want to curb population growth there is plenty of space on this planet that isn't being used. Why terraform Mars when you can terraform Kansas or Wyoming or, hell, even Western Massachusetts. And that's not even counting oceans. We also don't need a manned expedition to Mars to get mine minerals from the asteroids -- although now that I think about I've never heard a explanation for why we need to mine minerals from asteroids, are we running out of them on Earth? We don't need a manned expedition to build space habitats.
If those things are our real goals then we should make them our real goals. If Mars is just a PR stunt to help us towards our real goals then I can do without the waste of money.
Offer to launch probes for high schools and colleges. Here are the specifications: NASA will provide standard power and telemetry, and a ride into space.
NASA offers a kind of catch-as-catch-can payload launching. Whenever they have some leftover space and weight, they offer to put X number of capsules in the payload bay, and activate them when they get into orbit. The cannisters are of a fixed size and weight, and can't do anything that might harm the shuttle (i.e. no EM interference, no emissions, no launching things), but other than some basic guidelines, you can do whatever you want.
They charge something in the $1K-$10K range, I think, but this is certainly affordable to most corporations; which might be talked into doing so to bolster community support for the corporation, get good PR, allow them the pick of the graduates, etc... You might also try getting a grant from a science foundation, or some other location.
If you want to spark interest in a lot of high schools around the country, you could start asking for donations, and once it became clear that you would get enough to send a capsule up, spread the word far and wide that you will donate the money to send up a capsule to the high school which submits the best capsule design.
Sorry I don't have a URL for the NASA program, but this program was in a book, and I don't have the book handy. :( Email me if you'ld like more info.
I like your point about how manageable a sum 50G$ (Gigadollars) turns out to be. Heck, the federal budget - over 1T$ - makes 50G$ look trivial, especially since the project would take several years. Never mind Microsoft - Gates could finance that personally, as a sort of a hobby. Maybe it's the best solution to the antitrust thing! Make Gates put all that nasty competitive energy into something that doesn't suck! He'd still have a few G$ left over, plus that house of his.
But there's something horrifying about the idea of corporate sponsorship. The place would turn out to be like Disneyland; a relentless, shameless, blatant ad for itself. Fun for the kids, but banal and irritating for anyone over 13.
Not to mention the horror of a Mars vehicle that's "Windows Powered." Shudder.
Definitely. Heck, all my money is going to school these days, but I think I could put away 100$ for something like this. And while it wouldn't cover the entire cost of the mission I bet, if everyone on the petition gave 100$, it'd put a nice enough dent in the cost to encourage other people to get involved. I say other people because I really do believe this should be a private sector thing - the government doesn't seem interested or capable of something like this...
Gentlemen and ladies, i belive we have just arrived at the budget surplus solution. Dump it into the space program. Everyone wins: The conservatives get to beat the ChiComs to the punch, and the Democrats don't have to lower taxes.
For goodness sake people Mars is a comparably large distance away from us, which will take about a year to get there! The moon is quite ignored at this time of our lives though it can give us some many advantages ranging from Helium-3 harvesting to easy launching of more shuttles. True Mars might have life, but we shouldn't be all to eager to find it, since it survived this long, it can survive a bit longer until we are advanced enough to deal with ALL the reprecussions..
Jacob Grabczewski
- jacob42@home.com -
"The higher you are, the farther you fall." - Hetfield
Unfortunately, what prevents us from solving larger social issues like this is politics, not lack of funds. It's a given though that when given the choice between untangling the difficult maze of human interaction and simply throwing money at an issue, most people would rather throw money and be content that they've helped somehow.
Just my two dineri.
-- Micah Lionette
That's how England populated Australia. My point was that, historically, the first wave of settlers to a new land have always been the cast-offs, the criminals, the malcontents; the lower class.
And the Europeans didn't have to bring every gram of their own oxygen, fuel, food, and water with them to America or Australia...
Of course, space is a little different from being deported to America, and the people will have to be trained, but the concept is still valid.
I still totally disagree with this idea. What's easier, train an Air Force captain to survive on Mars, or train a street peddler from Bangladesh? Poor people will never leave Earth - once space travel is cheap and easy enough for them to do it, our space colonies will already have their own poor people to worry about without importing more.
Now, how long would it take to fully evacuate our solar system?
Irrelevant, because that's not how it would be done. If all we're worried about is ensuring that the human race survives, we only need to evacuate a few thousand people. Enough for a viable gene pool and stable society. You can't evacuate the solar system - unless you invent some kind of Star Trek "warp drive", every one of those people would die of old age en route to the next system, anyway - so what's the point?
We need to establish a working (and profitable) lunar base first, then use it as a stepping stone to get to Mars. Then Europa, Titan....
Agreed. If you want real, sustainable space travel, you need an orbital station first (which can't be properly built without cheaper launch vehicles than we currently have), then a lunar base. Then, maybe by 2050 or so, we'll be ready to go to Mars. I understand the desire to see it done in our lifetimes, but if it's not done in a logical progression, it's doomed to failure in the long term.
Actually, compiling a list of /. addys could be quite profitable, as it would result in a list with a fairly narrow demographic which would be worth considerably more to advertisers than a general "emailer's" list. Knowing a little about the interests of the people behind the addresses is the entire reason why compiling and selling lists of snail-mail addresses is profitable* -- if that knowledge wasn't important, you could just compile a list from a stack of phone books.
-- JackCat
*Primary compilers of these lists are the credit card companies, who track your buying habits and develop their lists accordingly.
That would be very nice. But what makes you think only a Mars mission could bring that result? Such side effects can come from other projects as well - what do you think can happen if you can spend $200 billion on research to eliminate pollution?
-- Abigail
You're forgetting that anyone who colonizes space will have a distinct advantage in any kind of war with Earth: the high ground. I figure all they'd have to do is drop a few rocks and Earth would soon have not the slightest inclination to interfere in affairs off planet (make the rocks big enough, and Earth soon wouldn't have the ability to interfere even if they wanted to).
-- JackCat, who thinks it very unwise to annoy anyone who can look down at you from the top of your planet's gravity well.....
What you say is true, but in a lot of cases the goverment manages to jump start private industry. They/We dump all this money into the R&D and the private sector figures out how to make a profit from the result.
It will be a while, but getting people to Mars will be an Open Source hack -- a few years after we Open Source hack our way to the Moon.
Both hacks will use a lot of off-the-shelf technology, but in ways that were never intended.
If you are waiting for a government to get you there, prepare for a long wait.
Morris Schneiderman
You might want to go back and re-read the book. The space elevator was built with in space, with space resources ... and one was built by Martian colonists first! (Building a Mars elevator would be technically easier, if perhaps less immediately useful.)
I'm a 40-year-old single male. How did I get here? Well I had a chance more than once to get married and start a family, but everytime I thought:
(a) I should fix up all my own problems first.
(b) I should save more money and advance more in my career so I can provide well for my family.
(c) Do I *deserve* to be married and raise kids? After all, I'm still less mature than most kids I know.
Now I see the folly of my ways. No matter how much I try, I'll never get rid of *all* my problems, sometimes I even amass problems more quickly than I fix them. And there is nothing like getting married and raising kids to make one mature.
What I'm trying to say is, if we wait till we've solved all of our problems, we'll never get off the planet. If we wait till we deserve to get off the planet, we'll never learn enough to deserve it.
Instead of having one million people asking for funding from about 260 million other people to go to mars, how about those one million people each put up ten, one hundred, or a thousand dollars each and fund a Mars mission? Signing a web page won't get anybody to Mars, but hard work (done in exchange for hard cash) will.
On cutting back the birthrate:
There is only one method that demonstrably cuts back a society's birthrate: the addition of wealth and technology. When you move to a more technologically advanced society, you remove the impetus to have many children; your progeny's future no longer hinges on how much food they can scrape from the land (where the more cheap labor you have -- and kids're the cheapest labor you can get -- the more land you can work), but hinges more on the knowledge they carry (making it pay off to have one or two children and spending your time and resources educating them). Don't believe it? The birth rates for western world average lower than needed to maintain the population. If it weren't for a constant influx of immigrants, the population of much of the West (especially the US) would be in decline.
Going to Mars (like any Big Science) will lead to technological advances, and thus could aide in world population control as that technology spreads into less developed areas.
Benefits from going to the Moon:
There's one benefit of the Apollo program that noone seems to have mentioned -- the realization of how small, how fragile, and how uniquely beautiful the Earth is, coupled with the knowledge that we all have to share it. The entire environmental movement owes its real beginning to a single picture of the Earth rising over a rugged moonscape, a tiny blue pearl awash in a vast sea of black. We were suddenly reminded of how small and isolated we are, that we as a species have more in common than we have differences, and over the next two decades, the Cold War faltered and died partially as a result.
We shouldn't underestimate the cultural benefits -- the shift in global thinking -- that often accompany grand adventures. Columbus is remembered as the discoverer of America not because he was the first European to set foot there (he wasn't), but because he made all of Europe aware of this new land, and so transformed Western society (indirectly triggering the Industrial Revolution).
Going to Mars would be just such a grand adventure, with potential for changing our perception of the world (and universe) around us.
-- JackCat, who really thinks we should go.
(Besides, do you really think they stay in budget, and won't go way over $20 billion?)
-- Abigail
You start to make a good point about getting all the people who really care to organize and support their cause independantly. Other than the fact that it would be a good deal harder to do things in that way, it's a very noble idea. I've actually thought about why more things aren't done that way before, and I came to the conclusion that most people aren't motivated or knowledgable to do anything approaching that kind of non-professional, non-governmental organization of those working for a cause. I can be willing to help out for a cause, willing to donate what I can afford, willing to sign a petition, and still be unable to contribute enough to make a difference. Sure, exploration and gaining knowledge is very important to me, but I'm fresh out of school and unable to contribute as much as I'd like, because I literally don't have as much as I'd like to contribute. I think the same is probably true of a good deal of the most enthusiastic towards causes like this; while we're young and easily excited by projects such as this one, we don't have the resources to do much about it.
As for this petition being a plot of the "Commie Bastards," I somehow doubt that. How does wanting to make an opinion known make someone communist? They want everyone to know how they feel and what they want to do, but I didn't notice a section about forcing anything on anyone. I could be wrong, and correct me if I am, but what I got out of reading it was that it's a group of people who want to make their views known in hopes of informing others and influencing them to support their goal. Nowhere did I see any mention of trying to force anyone into doing something they don't want to be a part of. If enough people agree with their purpose, then perhaps something will come of it, but if there isn't enough support for it for whatever reason, lack of interest, other priorities, or whatever other reason, then no one will have anything imposed upon them.
So, if you think sending people to Mars is a good idea and we'll benefit from it, and you agree with the statements in the petition, sign away. That's what I did. However, if you disagree with any of it for any reason, don't whine about it and call anyone names just because they disagree with you. Make your views known, get people informed, and then maybe they'll see it your way. If they either do or don't, at least it will be because of sound reasoning instead of insults and accusations.
And don't forget the spinoffs. Robert A. Heinlein did a wonderful speech on the importance of space program spinoffs. For any space program massive amounts of new technology must be created to solve even the most mundane issues, this tech does not go to waste. From simple things like Tang, and Space Ice Cream to advanced medical monitoring and telemetry equipment, everyone benefits from all the neat stuff space explorers develop in their quest to conquer the universe.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
We've all heard the suggestion that people are not really mammals but some sort of bacteria or virus. It was mentioned in the matrix which I'm sure many of us have seen. The idea though, of fixing what you argue to be the problem of the "starving millions" by simply sapping the resources from another planet is not a solution. It's a rather abhorent idea at that. if "the more we prop these people up, the more they are going to have more poor starving children, creating a vicious cycle" is happening on Earth, how do you intend to solve that problem by EXPANDING it to another planet? Perhaps some /. readers have read "The Story of B" which suggests that certain forms of exploitative agriculture have actually created a world that cause the population booms and starvation we have seen? The suggestion of moving the starving to another location so that we as a species begin our "vicious cycle" of sapping the land and moving on when there are not enough resources for our expanded populus is just a little bit too close to borg/sci-fi dystopia for me to handle.
Those who use the world "bravado" rarely have very much of it.
Mars is not a realistic goal.
Developing new, efficient, safe, convenient, and CHEAP Earth-to-orbit systems is a realistic goal. Developing a self-sufficient moon base (one big chunk of fuel, oxygen, and building material ready for exploitation there) is a realistic goal.
Blowing billions of dollars just so we can say "We were on Mars, neener" isn't very useful.
My not-so-humble opinion, anyway.
Yah. My rad-hard 386 will survive the mission just fine. You really don't have any idea what is involved in making these probes. I don't think you can even use solder in the space enviroment. It sublimes in the vacuum. Temperature (both extremes), radiation, shock, power consumption, and countless other problems I can't think of right now.
How about making it a requirement that if you sign the petition, you get entered into the lottery for you and your family to be some of the first to get shipped off?
After all, if you're willing to support having other people carted off, you should be willing to be carted off yourself.
> I'm not against space travel and colonization. I'm just trying to be realistic, and the truth is there's no real reason to go to Mars right now, and it's not really possible to do it right with current technology.
Of course, if we support a Mars program, the appropriate technology will be developed. Or did you think they would just stick an extra tank in the back of the Shuttle and send it on its way?
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Uhh...no. From their pages:
Artemis Society International is a non-profit educational and scientific foundation incorporated in the State of Alabama, USA. The Society leads the non-profit element of The Artemis Project, and is staffed entirely with volunteer effort.
This does not sound like a for-profit corporation to me, and VCs exist for profit. Idealism only goes so far; profit is a much more efficient motivator of people (so much so that profit might suceed where pure idealism has, so far, failed).
Do you think that someone who has the ability to sniff traffic on 'backbone' hops from luser to unsecured site is going to sniff the traffic to a site that collects email/user name/dob information instead of an unsecured 'e-commerce' site? Come on! If they want email/user name information they would get a lot more by randomly sniffing mail traffic and then running the usernames through popular phone #/address databases.
./ is going down!
The knowledge / intelligence of the
The "faster, cheaper, more" school of space exploration would be greatly enhanced by a shot of Vodka. No, really. What I mean is that we should support, maybe even purchase, the Russian space program. It would get us great facilities (Well, fixer-uppers, life has not been kind to the Russians lately), annother launch site and mostly great engineers who are used to designing great experiments on shoestring budgets.
While I'm a great fan of spinoffs (see previous post), NASA has spent too much time reinventing the wheel for every probe they make (and dumping resources down the black hole that is the Space Shuttle). This would be a real challenge to innovate and Russian involvement would really improve the price/performance ratio.
Realistically the Russian government cannot afford the meager space program they have now. They have more pressing matters. If I was the Russian President _I_ would cut them off, and probably reassign them to a think tank tasked to keep the country from completely falling into chaos.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
In other places on their site, it states:
:)
The goals of the Artemis Project are to:
1. Build a permanent, self-supporting lunar community.
2. Exploit lunar resources for profit.
3. Create an economic environment where regular commercial space flight between the earth and moon is financially viable.
It's as simple as that: no lofty causes, no political agenda; just get to the moon and stay there. What you do once we've got there is up to you.
sounds like a for profit corporation to me
I would go to.
Most of you mindless liberal sheep and cannibalistic dumbasses think if you keep your fat little thumbs securely stationed in your bedsore-infested asses and just keep downloading pictures of goddamn lesbians none of this insanity will AFFECT you, right?
RIGHT?!
Right.
Thanks for being honest -- or being too dumb to lie, it doesn't really matter which. The effect is the same either way.
So, anyhow, as I was saying, 80,000,000 corpses have been piled up by the socialists and liberals (most of whom are hermaphrodites) in this century alone, and now that the Feminists are reported (not in the LIBERAL mainstream media, obviously, but ACCURATE alternative news sources have been carrying the story for weeks) are, as I say, reported to have acquired nuclear weapons, the only thing for us to do as sane human beings and non-castrated men (the few of us who are left) is one or the other of the following:
I choose the latter course.
I'll see you there, if you've got the balls to make the trip.
Moderate this man up, and the origional poster down. This is a _public petition_ folks. Not only is all your information in cleartext right on their website, it is in really ugly colors too. And don't bother to make up fake information, that defeats the purpose of the petition, and just makes everyone look silly.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Probably the biggest issue is shielding from radiation, etc. -- as many of you are probably aware, the Earth's magnetic field protects shuttle astronauts from lots of things; the only missions we've run which went outside that protective envelope were the Apollo ones, but those were relatively short (a few days). When you start talking about a 3-year mission to Mars, there becomes a very real chance that you'd get a solar flare, with unfortunate consequences for the astronauts. Shielding from these is, um, non-trivial. Also important are ionized heavy particles (stuff on the lower right-hand side of the periodic table) -- the interesting thing here is that, up to a fairly heavy amount of shielding, you actually just end up slowing down the bad guys, making them more dangerous to humans than they were before. (Left unmolested, they mostly pass through your body and probably knock off a few things on their way -- leaving you, for instance, with a higher chance of getting a tumor.)
Also important are physiological effects brought about by living in a micro-g environment. Most serious, perhaps, is the bone degradation that occurs over long periods of time, leaving bones more susceptible, for instance, to fracture. (This effect is bordering on okay for even the year-long missions we've had so far -- eg Mir -- but becomes an unacceptably big issue for longer exposures.) If you're interested in this stuff, check out the National Space Biomedical Research Institute.
The above issues have led people to look (seriously) at artificial-gravity environments (a la 2001). Doing these right turns out to be quite tricky -- it's not yet clear what values of spin rate, radius, duration, etc, are appropriate (and can be handled by your body). One big issue here is the Coriolis force, and the fact that your brain just doesn't expect it -- this becomes more of an issue in certain configurations. Another is that if you start talking about putting a really big spinning wheel in space (or something similar), you're getting into very heavy weight/size penalties for a given mission -- that is, clearly it's going to be harder to move a 1 km wheel to Mars. Having said all this, I should also say that it's not a dead field -- I think the problems will eventually be worked out; there are promising concept studies involving small-scale intermittent-use centrifuges, and others involving tether-based systems which expand once you get into space to provide the AG.
It's worth pointing out, finally, that some people have suggested that we can ignore some of the above physiological issues for a Mars trip -- so what if the astronauts come back with weak bones? They went to Mars! They expected risks. But the point is that subjecting astronauts to the risks mentioned above approaches the point of immorality.
I hope I haven't come across as being too pessimistic; I would like to see us go to Mars, and I think one day we will. But it'll be a while. And there are some very basic science issues (like "what is the effect of a 1km centrifuge on the human body") that need to be answered first -- signing this petition won't change that, and might even lead people to think this is a much simpler problem than it really is.
flamebait
To follow your logic to its ultimate conclusion all humans should never move, breathe and should probably all commit mass suicide to keep from sullying the environment.
/flamebait
As this is not going to happen we must wise up quick, or we are all going to be living in a big smoking pile of shit. I have read Red Mars and found it very sad and depressing, most of all because it is probably true. The Corporate mass consiousness will probably want to exploit, exploit, exploit and damn the long term costs. I also found a glimmer of hope in some of the wild eyed idealists like Arkady and John. We should move carefully but we should move!
PS: Also, I would like it if people just moved underground where there is much less environment to damage. We could build a self contained society and leave the surface for arable farmland and wilderness. That would make the world a _much_ better, and more beautiful, place to live.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
We live on a world that is fully explored - there's not a square meter of land on the surface that hasn't been mapped, prodded, and trodden.
Close enough to true, perhaps, but consider that 2/3 of the planet is ocean and we've really only begun poking around at the surface in the few decades since Cousteau invented the aqualung. Given that no-one has ever seen a live giant squid (a rather large animal), I'd have to assume that there's all sorts of interesting critters down there for us to discover. Hell, they even keep discovering large new mammels on land every decade or so!
Manned space exploration is really a gimick. I'd rather see larger scale and more ambitous robotic exploration of mars.... and if NASA is building decent robotic systems, how about also having a few robotic subs roaming and exploring the oceans!
For me the only real purpose of manned expeditions would be working towards permanently manned habitats leading towards colonies. The best step in this direction would be to first learn how to do it on earth! How about a large scale Biosphere project populated with a dozen or so people... better than MTV's Real World!
.. or even taken seriously (compared to paper&pen)? I realize it makes it possible to reach millions of people, but who will trust that it's not "fixed"?
Maybe there's another way.. Not that i have a better suggestion.. It just seems to me that government officials, and world leaders, etc, might not be sold on the petetion thing.. And why should they be?
-mg.
Several posts here have advocated setting up a permanent base on the Moon before attempting to go Mars. This isn't a good idea, as the Moon is a lot less desirable as a place to attempt to build a self-sustaining colony. Of all the bodies in the solar system, Mars is the best choice for a colony, for the following reasons, among others.
Mars is the one body aside from Earth that we know has all of the raw materials for civilization. In particular, it has readily accessible water, which is critical not only for human use and growing plants, but as a source of hydrogen for rocket propellant. This is in stark contrast to the Moon, where the discovery of water ice at the south pole means that there is one place on the Moon that isn't drier than terrestrial concrete.
Conditions on Mars are much more favorable to growing plants than anywhere except Earth. Growing things is actually very energy intensive, but we don't notice it much on Earth because farmers get energy for free from sunlight. Mars is the only place where we'll be able to easily set up outdoor farms to get sunlight.
Mars has an atmosphere that provides reasonable protection against radiation, and would only require inflated tents of transparent plastic to setup greenhouses on the surface. The Martian day is only 40 minutes longer than that of Earth, so there wouldn't be a drastic shock to plants from the length of sunlight.
To do the same on the Moon would require radiation hardened shelters to be established on the surface, where the plants would have to adjust to the two weeks of constant sunlight and subsequent two week long night. And you'd still have to bring all of the needed water up the gravity well from Earth, or mine it from the limited supply at the south pole.
Artificial lighting won't be practical for intensive agriculture until there is a cheap energy source available in deep space, such as fusion. Otherwise, the energy requirements for food production would dominate the need for power in any space settlement.
Mars is the best place to have a staging area for expeditions to the outer solar system. The availability of raw materials means that many supplies can be manufactured on Mars for further space exploration and colonization efforts. It'll always be cheaper to transport goods from Mars than Earth to the outer planets, so anything that can be supplied from Mars will be.
Note that this also the case for the Moon, to a lesser degree. It wouldn't work for supplying a Mars mission, though - the delta V wouldn't be advantageous, so it's still easier to ship things from Earth directly to Mars.
I freely admit that the preceding arguments are cribbed from Robert Zubrin's books The Case for Mars and Entering Space. I encourage anyone interested in space exploration to read them.
I would think that _any_ petition would at a minimum have to ask for your proper name and snail mail address, with email addy being a plus.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Basic ecology says that sooner or later there will be much to many Earth inhabitants; rather sooner, though. And when an ecological niche is filled up, the natural selection strenghtens: for us, that means wars, famine, diseases, basically - call me Kasandra - the end of the european civilization. We could expand our niche if we start it doing early enough... but I'm pessimistic whether this is possible: unless someone will actually make money with sending people to a Mars collony there will never be money for it.
A mission to Mars is nevertheless possible; and I will sign this petition - maybe it works, who knows? I still dream about pigs... ops. humans in space.
Regards,
January
I know I'd happily pay an extra percentile in taxes to fund it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I would think that it could be cheaper, considering the advances in technology. One could probably design a Moon mission at the same level as the Apollo missions with off-the-shelf parts. We have faster computers, better materials, and cheaper mass production of same.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
If this turns out to be anything like the RED,GREEN,BLUE MARS series, then we are in for a very BORING adventure. :)
But on the other hand, what the hell?
It's better to go somewhere then no where at all.
Mars just seems particularly desolate. Now Venus would be a much more interesting choice!
There's nothing like pictures of lava and fire coming back to earth.
Of course I guess it would be a very brief stay
Heck, it was estimated at $50B so having 1B people invest $50 would do the trick. You can afford to wait on Q3A for one month, can't you, that would be about the right amount.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Uhhh, not only is the site not secured by SSL, the results are displayed on the site in clear text.
Sadly enough, there's two things that may make the Mars exploraiton a reality:
Economic imperative (there's something remotely worthwhile over there.)
Political muscle-flexing (i.e. it's pointless, but it'll look cool in the next Presidential campaign)
Pissing contest (see: Cold War Space Race)
I propose we leak information to the Chinese so they enter the next Cold War with the US, and tell every Chinese we meet that Mars is a really swell place.
Ah, hell. Lead me to the petition. It's still the best hope we've got... I just think it ain't much. Because even though we may have in theory the power to affect the course of national politics, in the end, we're pretty much powerless at it.
A moonbase is more expensive than a permanent LEO station, but not that much more, because once you're out of the gravity well, getting anywhere else is an order of magnitude less expensive.
Plus, a moonbase would have access to some natural resources, whereas a space station would need to have all of its resources sent up from earth.
I also echo the sentiments of others who said "Not if NASA develops it."
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I'm sorry if I go on a bit of a rant here, but so far the posts I've seen on this topic are NOT what I expected out of Slashdot people. Wanting to not put money into space? Wanting to put (Throw away?) more money into local 'social issues'? Personally, I think WAY too much money is wasted on saving the starving now as it is. I'm not a cold hearted bastard (Believe it or not) but the more we prop these people up, the more they are going to have more poor starving children, creating a vicious cycle. And for that matter, it could be argued that these very starving millions are a good reason to go to space. There are plenty of resources available, just sitting there for the grabbibg, if a way to easily/cheaply get them can be arranged. We're never going to figure out how to do it if we don't try going there in the first place. As far as 'wasting' money on space exploration. I can't think of a better cause the government has every spent money on! Yes, part of it is admittedly an ego-trip. Part of it is even nationalistic bragging rights on the first/only one to do something. A lot of it is also people being able to be proud of what people have done. Is there anything wrong with having pride in your species? Anything that helps boost global morale is, IMHO, generally a good thing. And I'm not even going to get into the scientific run-off of inventions/perfections/discoveries that wouldn't have/won't happen if it weren't for manned space flight
Oh well, I better stop before my rant gets too unreadable. I'll probally get flamed/moderated down for this, but I just had to say what I had to say.
Never ask a geek why, just nod your head and slowly back away. -Rob Malda
It only rains liquid diamond in the summer...
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
They are also NASA spin-offs.
cpeterso
You're going a long way from an internet petition to putting humans on Mars. The world has 5 billion people. 1 million people probably isn't enough of a groundswell to get it to happen. Now get an internet petition consisting of 1 billion people each investing a few thou in the project and we might get there.
Personally, I just signed it. It's worthwhile to me on a personal basis.
However, I can see part of the concerns that others may have. For information purposes, yeah, it's a lot cheaper to send un-manned missions to Mars to collect more data than we currently have.
But, depending on the scope of data to be collected, that may not be as feasable as one thinks at first. For instance - when something goes wrong with a piece of equiptment, like the Mars Rover, when it's dead, it's dead. Humans out there on Mars, on the other hand, can do a lot to fix problems like that. Great technology is no replacement for human inginuity when in the field.
Plus, look at the different options for data collection there. With the Mars Rover, it was a long drawn out process just to select, and drive to a single location. When you got there, well... there really wasn't that much the rover could do about it, except grab some very limited soil samples, and take pretty pictures. Humans, on the other hand, can continue an investigation MUCH farther. For example, if something interesting extended under a rock - no problem. The human picks it up, and examines under it.
There's so much more that a human can do, and given the lag in movement, the bandwidth restrictions, and the problems even a small fault can incur on unmanned missions sometimes, sending humans there could be a great option.
And, lets not forget the matter of human pride. We will have stepped on an alien planet for the first time. It would be great.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
Which is, in turn, a Hunter S. Thompson reference. Hunter S. claims that in a bathroom he asked Nixon, at the urinal next to him, "But what of the doomed?" Nixon replied, "Fuck the doomed."
Or something like that.
Ah we bask in the glow of our technological triumph. Firmly convinced the road to this place was paved with the best of human intellect. But don't look too closely at the road for you'll see the faces and the lives that helped build that road. Not by their choice, nor will they receive credit for the sacrifices they made. To acknowledge the sacrifice is to look straight at the inhumanity that built and sustains our technology.
These over populated less worthy areas you all speak of with double face pity/loathing do not freely give their wealth to us but at the end of a gun. Africa, India, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands have the resources raped by corrupt governments influenced by the monies of wealthy, greedy nations and corporations. If we had to pay a FAIR price for the resources that are taken from these areas our GREAT wealth wouldn't be as great, but the lives of the vast majority of the people in these areas would be profoundly better.
We speak democracy while supporting dictators of the same caliber as Hitler. We speak of Peace while arming the world for small scale "limited" wars that leave the regions unstable and easily exploited.
Yes it is easy to turn our face away from this and look to the sky for answers (as our ancestors did when they prayed to the gods to save them). Oh we have come a long way. Grand visions that would make Alexander the Great blush.
The benefits of space exploration will be added up by the priests of technology and used to help divert our attention away from the COST to humanity. Oh this is only $20 billion dollars, which must be extracted at a high price from our earth. Yes certain resources are limited and we need to think more before we expend them.
How easy it is to sip you latte and ponder great things when you aren't starving or being denied freedom to try and make life better for your children. No these masses are just that. Nameless masses we can dismiss with a wave of our hand. These masses do not have dreams, they have no potential. We get upset when it is suggested that a parent might have the right to decide not to support a child that would create a great burden on them. People sight the number of Steven Hawkins we might lose if every child with a abnormality was to be discounted. Yet we'll discount entire nations.
I'm sorry but I must say F*CK YOU! To people with this mentality. You two faced SH*TS.
Why was a mission to the moon so important in the 60's? Because were in the midst of the arms race. The whole US vs USSR space race was just a race to see who can build a better rocket to put warheads on it. Of course, the same technology can carry humans too, so the general population can easily be duped into thinking science is the main concern. How many scientists landed on the moon? I believe only 1 did, on the very last mission.
Right now and into the far future, Mars will be very inhospitable to human life. For humans to make it there and back safely, we need to be able to have more reliable data about Mars.
To travel to Mars, they will be in space for a long time (over a year). Many things can happen in a year to a person which can ruin chances for success: illness, cancer, solar flares, etc. A first attempt to Mars would most likely be a suicide mission.
You misread the treaty. They aren't saying that they are limited but that they have agreed that there shall be no private property outside of earth. This means that any private thieves will not be restrained by the threat of government retribution and any government who wants to take you over has the assurance that none of the other governments are going to interfere. Think Poland, 1939 for an example of that kind of non-interference.
...to continue spending on the space daem^H^H^H^Hprogramme could come from wireless (duh) communications companies.
Think about designing interplanetary communication systems. Think about implementing them.(isn't there already a protocol under review?) Think about AT&T sponsoring it, 'cause they will be on of the few that could afford the R&D outside the gov't. Unless Buzz Aldrin can find a way.
It would make a cool Nokia/PCS/Iridium(sp) commercial to have an astronaut calling for pizza as a joke from orbit, or Mars..
"Microsoft is a proud supporter of the U.S. Mission to Mars(tm)"!!
+&x
Why waste the money? There are plenty of domestic causes that money can go to. I see no reason at this point to send humans to mars. Unless, and until, we find that there is some reason that we must send humans to mars, that there is something that probes and robots can't do, there is no reason to blow all that money. Feed some mouths with it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It's late, and likely no-one will be reading this, but I feel strongly enough about this to rant anyway...
First, a look at the arguments against:
1) It's too expensive...
This may or may not be true, depending on the very subjective evaluation of what is and is not "too" expensive, but keep in mind that the "Mars Direct" approach that is currently being suggested would cost $10 to $20 billion (spread out over a roughly 10 year program), rather than the $150+ billion that NASA was asking for just a few years ago (NASA wanted a space station and a huge "Battlestart Galactica" ship to make the trip). In other words, Bill Gates could pay for such a trip out-of-pocket and hardly put a dent in his reserves. This is too expensive? (Read Zubrin's "Case for Mars" and "Entering Space" for more on this.)
2) We should clean up things here first...
The basic assumption for this argument has always appeared to me that prosperity is a zero-sum game; if this were true, then there'd be six billion humans trying to feed themselves from a handful of fruit trees in the Olduvai Gorge. People are now living longer, healthier and more prosperous lives than any generation previous; the perception of the world being an inch from disaster is a construct of polititians and others who want money and/or power that they haven't earned. Yes people are starving, but that is the result of bad politics, not lack of food (challenge: find a situation where where a population was starving in a country with a free press and a representative government; good luck). Prosperity reduces population growth, reduces pollution, inproves health and longevity, and grows and grows and grows, so long as people are willing to try new things. A beefed up COMMERCIAL space program (I'll save the "Kill NASA Now" rant for another time) would create prosperity, and while it wouldn't directly help Yugoslavians and such, it might pave the way governmental changes that would; that's how we won the cold war. (Suggested reading: "Ecoscam", "Apacolypse Not", "The Greatest Resource" or, for fun, "All the Trouble in the World", the latter by P.J. O'Rourke and I don't remember the others.)
3) We can do science with robots/telescopes/etc.
This has an element of truth to it. (Isn't the Mars Polar Lander due to arrive Friday?) But this is (to me, at least) like saying "Why go skiing, when you can just watch the latest Warren Miller film?" My response is that a) these are not mutually exclusive activities and one can actually enhance the other, and b) I'd rather be DOING something than watch it being done. (This is why I'm in the middle of my junior year in a Materials Engineering program and planning on bailing on a lucrative but unrewarding 15 year career working on/with computers.)
The "for" arguments are varied (see Robert Zubrin's books for detailed analysis of pretty much all that I've seen discussed here), but the most compelling IMHO is the challenge. Americans are, for the most part, malcontents or the children of malcontents, who came here to get away from problems and/or start some new ones. (Yes, there are exceptions to this; forgive me for a generalization.) We, as a country, thrive on these challenges. This is what we are about. Not "Mom and Apple Pie", we're about finding new and (hopefully) better ways to do things, thumbing our collective nose at anyone who says "It can't be done", and occaisionally stubbing our toes on an unavoidable truth. We need a capital "C" Challenge to keep our edge and push ourselves further. If we ignore this opportunity, we will become a nation of whiners, couch-potatoes and... hmmmm...
My overly (and overtly) patriotic tone at the end there does not mean I think that Mars is something that should be done exclusively by and for Americans; I perceive America as a collection of ideas that are not constrained by geographical borders. Anyone who has the desire and will to explore and take risks and challenge assumptions should be involved...
Enough...
"Specialization is for insects." - Lazarus Long
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
Your closing sentence shows that there is still a very big amount of confusion about the African situation.
...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
All countries in the world are in debt - America owes BILLIONS, Britian too.
The African countries are charged massive amounts of interest, it's so bad that they can barely afford to pay the interest let alone the actual loans.
But I do agree. Some of the technologies from Space programs are really great - Teflon for example.
With any organisation, you need a stable base upon which to grow, we don't quite have that yet, so thats why I think all the huge resources poured into the Space Program(s) should erhaps be spent on our more immediate needs.
By the way, in America and Europe, we have poverty, disease and homelesness, so don't say "It doesn't concern me" - because it does.
(WE: This wasn't a personal attacj btw)
Mong.
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
Well you know, normally I'd be glad to support this (hey, if the stars are my destination why I am not there yet?), but then I saw Manufacturing Consent last night and realized I don't have to.
I hope that many Slashdotters, whether they love or hate him, are familiar with Noam Chomsky but briefly, he's an MIT linguistics prof (who originated the idea of context free grammars!) and a leading anarchistic social dissident whose primary thesis is that America is ran by power elites who subvert democracy through media control.
One of Chomsky's more interesting ideas is that military spending is primarily a way of subzidizing scientific research (a subtle departure from the usual military-industrial-complex-tyranny-theory or the necessary-external-enemies-theory!).
Thinking along these lines suggests Martian exploraiton by the United States, whatever the direct benefits, must be very appealing to the Secret Masters of Government because:
- Intellectuals (both 'left' and 'right') and other potential trouble-makers tends to like the idea
- It gives the rest of the population sometime to be patriotic about, which makes them generally more pliant politically
- It gives us a new way to spend lots of money on scientific research... which is badly needed since the Soviet block imploded.
Now I hardly agree with everything Chomsky says, but I do find this sort of logic pretty compelling... which means that even if Mars-loving geeks like me step aside Martian exploration in my lifetime is pretty inevitable anyways.
Cheers,
~yair
Just like welfare didn't fix poverty. Besides, everyone benefits from the technology advances derived from these types of projects eventually. What if during this project somebody figures out a clean power solution that eventually eliminates pollution?
This is as funny as it gets, on or offtopic. No moderator points today, or I'd be sending this up instead of commenting on it. But, excellent, anyway.
Blecch. My Chomsky post leaves me blue. Which is ironic when the subject is such a fun red planet.
Going further off-topic, Mars has been a subject of lots of great science fiction, from CS Lewis to Ray Bradbury to Kim Stanley Robinson.
My recent favorite is Greg Bear's Moving Mars. Any one else have a pick?
-Omar@wheeee!.*crash*.com
If NASA wants to drum up popular support, they should involve high school science classes by running a contest for cheap probes. Offer to launch probes for high schools and colleges. Here are the specifications: NASA will provide standard power and telemetry, and a ride into space.
Your team of high school students or college students or drinking buddies has to build everything else: sensors, computer, programming, and some neat bit of random science.
I would love to build a probe using an old 386, an A/D card, some thermocouples and pressure sensors and lob it into Jupiter. Could you imagine how much fun this would be? Imagine how excited your local high school would get to have their probe picked for launch. Imagine the pissing war between the engineering departments of MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.
And some cool science might just happen along the way.
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
signing a petition costs the signatories nothing. what would impress me is if the supporters of the Mars plan collectively escrowed a large sum of money for a Mars mission.
As much as I would like to see a successful manned mission to mars, such a goal seems to me highly unlikely for at least 10-15 years. The cost of such an operation is simply too high at this point for congress to even consider it, and for the American people to pay for it.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Heck, I blew that much on Public Radio. Got to make sure I have something decent to listen to on the way to work, Top-40 radio and know-nothing DJs don't cut it.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
I think this is a cool idea and all, I signed the petition, but there is one major problem with sending men to Mars. All astronauts that we send to space even for just a few weeks develop atrophied muscles (I think I spelled that right...). And that's even with rigorous exercise. Imagine being in space for a year before finally reaching your destination and then not being able to stand under your own weight and that of your space suit. Until we figure out how to stop this from happening, it probably won't happen.
Project Steve
I say let's keep off there until there's a purpose to having wo/men up there. It's only landing on another planet for cripes sake.
---------
To hell with you, I never liked you, you are no friend of mine...
What many here may not realize is that the mission to the moon is still regarded as one of the most important stories of the twentieth century (3rd, I believe.)
Of course, at that time *there was no robots* who could have pilotted the craft and colected the moon rocks. Back then, the only choice was to spend the huge amount of money to send people in order to do the scientific study. Today, we could accomplish these things as well with cheaper, faster programs like sojourner and the downed climate observer.
But humanity is less completely enthralled by such programs. They don't hold the promise that the manned moon missions did. The thoughts of building houses and colonies on the moon in the lifetime of the astronauts who flew there. We're not pacified by the more scientific but less human mars program currently running.
Therefore, I think we may wish to try it the old way. Send men to mars, get them back. We don't have the technology to do this efficiently yet, but we may have it very soon. What this petition is about is the goal. Not for scientific purposes but for equally valid social and human purposes. I believe it will be an important step to solving one of humanities greatest problems: our eventual extinction we face by keeping ourselves locked into a single planet.
-Ben
I think that before we go all the way out to Mars we should send at least one more mission to land on the moon again.... We would be able to decover some new techs that would be helpful on a mission to mars. They couldn't try things that depend on atmosphere to work, but some of the things that they use could be reused or adapted for use on the trip to mars. just my $0.01.99999999999999999
"Maggie call Aquaman!!!"
Okay, who's paying for the trip there anyway. Is it globally funded?
Yeah, let's start a collection, too. I'm all for space exploration, but just because a lot of people want humankind to go to Mars doesn't mean we really need to. Commercial interests will eventually get us there. In the meantime, we have tons of things to do with our money here on this planet.
I'm all for going, don't get me wrong, but we're not in the Cold War space race era any longer. We need better reasons than beating the bad guys to the punch now.
Well, how do you want to do it? Do you want to spend a couple billion dollars and a decade of R&D to develop reusable SSTO vehicles to take people to low orbit cheaply? And another decade and a few more billion dollars to develop things like air-breathing scramjets to reduce launch costs for people and sensitive equipment, and magnetic catapults to really reduce launch costs for fuel pods, structural materials, and other cargo that can take extreme G's? And yet another decade to develop high-thrust ion propulsion or nuclear rockets to give us the high specific impulse necessary to make reusable interplanetary tugs efficient? And maybe another decade and another couple billion to develop better space suits, in-orbit construction techniques to make those deep-space-only tugs, and large scale self-sufficient human habitats? If you want humanity to do that, then by the time you die we'll be in a position to put a city on Mars, start bussing scientists and tourists back and forth, drill kilometers into the crust, and generally do space exploration the way it should be done.
No. This petition is for people who want to spend $30 billion (the lowest estimate I've seen, and who doesn't think this thing would pork barrel like the Shuttle and ISS?) to plant a flag on and take some rock souvenirs from the Martian surface, then stay away from the place for 30+ years because "it's been done, and it's too expensive." We screwed up that way with Apollo, and we don't need to do it again. If all you want is a Mars rock, let's send another RC car and get a Mars rock.
While I agree to a certain extent with ideas already posted on this, (Selection of candidates due to political/regional affiliation) I still believe that this is a great idea. Yes, we still have so much we can learn from sending machines to Mars; but what could we learn from sending a human? What more could we learn by sending a human being, with our capacity for intuitive thought (and ability to get ourselves in/out of the worst situations)? What might one of us see that would fill in a proportionally larger piece of the puzzle?
I've felt for a while that the adventurous inclination in the "Human Spirit" had begun to atrophy, there just hasn't seemed to be undertakings with the sense of purpose and adventure that the early space program seems to have had (I'm a little young to remember). I'm not saying that there isn't, I'm sure people are putting their lives on the line for science/knowledge everyday, I just don't get to hear about them. I hate to use the cliche, but what other endeavors are as representative of the spirit of the "Wild West" and the push to find a place of one's own? Sure, we can sit here on this rock and ponder the nature of the universe (I do it myself), or we can put our money where our proverbial mouth is.
I do wonder however, why not the moon? Is there nothing more we can learn from it? Why not turn it into real estate?
All in all, I cast my vote in favor...
Maybe you'll return to Minagua, You could go unnoticed in such a place. -FZ
There's no governmental territory outside Earth, at least according to several large Earth governments. Big deal. Colonize space anyway, and if the government wants to follow you to Mars, let them. Near-earth space is a bit tougher than Mars, because governments can more easily shoot you down, but if colonizing space makes economic sense, they'll be happy to let you go and just tax you.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I am all for space exploration but I have to agree with your point. I think it would be a good idea to really get the Russians on board for this one. They are used to making miracles out of virtually nothing, space probes from toothpicks-and-chewing gum, McGyver style. They could really help the economy of NASA, and it would prevent them from starving at home on the pittanc that Russia can now afford for space. In Russia every dollar that goes to space is annother teacher that doesn't get paid, a disgruntled military officer who has to beg for change, annother child who goes hungry. We have the wealth to support this, they do not.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Seriously though, I think if they work out a cheap way to send people and get them back and start working on colonisation of Mars, that way we won't have to worry about screwing up this planet anymore as we will have another to escape to. :)
I'm really not concerned with writing of the debt of Africa. Is anyone willing to write of the debt of the United States?
The way I see it, and I'll get flamed for it. There has been poverty and homelessness and disease since man first walked erect. I'm not homeless or poor (but am diseased - Cancer - Twice) because I make a living for myself. African (and other nations) took it upon themselves to get into debt, so why should anyone write off that debt? No one is willing to write off my debt for me.
I think it is far more important to explore and discover than it solve all the World's ills. Because we will never solve the World's ills, and it is foolish to think we will.
What scenario do you envision that "we" dropping back to a much smaller population entails? Forced sterilisation program? Massive starvation? WWIII (of course, without nukes being fired off and zero out the planet completely)?
Actually, if you consider how much land mass is actually being used for agriculture to sustain the entire human population, there shouldn't be a net resource(food) shortage even if the global population does not stabilise by end of next century. The problem is with distribution, and actually providing the third world countries with the proper machinery (a combine harvester beats a hundred starving, tired farmers doing everything by hand), and hire people to maintain and teach the locals how to maintain the equipment, and efficient farming techniques - much more preferable to proverty exacerbating IMF loans so the local despot can go on letting his friends and relatives adding a few more digits to their swiss bank accounts.
Back to the topic of mars exploration, I don't think it's yet time to send people to mars. The last time any human being stepped on another planet (okay, moon) was almost thirty years ago. The priority is a self-sustaining colony on the moon (would a launch from the moon be more efficient than from a space station in low earth orbit?) The technological progress gained from building the moon colony/outpost/whatever would go a long way in helping any mars exploration.
BTW I fully support of the idea of terraforming Mars, that should get started as soon as possible, since the whole process takes something like 150 years (can't remember exactly, every science magazine had an article on it and I can never find any in the library).
Nevertheless, the petition deserves support, even if the idea behind is a bit misguided and impractile at the moment. At least it'll tell the politicians that people ARE interesting space exploration. Far better "wasting" money on sciece projects that ended up going nowhere then to not do anything. Funny how the general public would not think twice about wasting $20 going out to watch a truly crappy movie and yet would go and gripe about governments spending what is a per-person equivalent of much less on things that are much more worthwhile.
If you don't like your $10 being spent on something the government funds on account of it better spent helping the poor(be it local or overseas), write a cheque to a charity.
Kill'em! Kill'em all!
I can't wait 'till everybody signs the petition to send spacemen off for a one-year trip during which they will absorb enough radiation of various sorts to put them out of comission, thus rendering them useless for proposed missions.
Maybe eventually we will have solutions to all the difficulties in sending humans to Mars, but with what we now have and what's forseeable in the near future, that ain't gonna happen.
K
Fuck it
This is not a comment for or against the topic of the petition. I would merely like to point out to slashdotters considering signing the petition that by doing so they may jeopardize their personal privacy. This comment is particularly aimed towards slashdotters who may not thoroughly understand computers. (I'm sure there are still some of those :)
The petition site is not secured by SSL. Hence any personal data you volunteer will be transmitted in the clear to the thinkmars server. Ordinarily this would be a limited risk, but considering the prominence that a slashdot citing must bring, I would guess that thinkmars is by now the target of at least one and probably more than one packet sniffer deployed by some misguided spammer.
Sorry if that sounds alarmist. Just would like to mention that aspect of the petition so that people wishing to sign it can weigh the risk.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Cause, you know, they have nothing betterto spend their money on.
Honestly, do people really have nothing better to do than waste their time and perfectly usable bandwidth on tripe like this?
--
Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
I would much rather my tax money was going to space exploration/settlement than buying a new hosing project that will be torn down in 20 years or more C-130Js that the Air Force does not want or need.
If I knew my $100 would further the effort and be used on it.
If the first "colony" were made here on earth in an inhospitable place where the natives are in harmony. A prototype underground city where the world's poorest can be a part of a living "experimant" to grow their own hydroponic food underground and enjoy a standard of living and comfort they never knew before.
1. This would be a great preparation for future colonization
2. It is farming that would have a low environmental impact, even if the crops are genetically engineered to grow well hydroponics they would be not grown out where they can mingle with indigenous plant life. Laws could be then passed that all surface agriculture be natural and organic and both environmentalists and engineers would have a compromise they can live with.
3.Water use and land use would be much more efficient.
4. Rather than giving these people food all of the time and/or relocating them we would give them the ability to contribute to mankind and feed themselves.
5. on earth the scale of underground hydroponic farming is limited only by energy resorces and abilty to tunnel, I would guess it would be feasable to have triple the worlds population living this way (recyling water and nutrients) and yet at the same time allow the surface of the earth to return to it's natural state.
6.By the time we'd be ready to colonise mars many of the sociological bugs, and many technical ones will have been worked out. The technologies of recycling, manufacturing, and such in a contained setting will have been worked out.
7. Corperations can still make money here, the "intellectual property" rights on their crops, expanding the labor-force to include those in extreme poverty who in turn are enabled as consumers, the rents on their underground flats, and the revenues from perhaps the cold fusion reactors they own powering the cities or some other power source. The goal should not be merely self sustaining colonies in space, but profit sustaining colonies that produce more goods and services than they need to sustain themselves.
If this is done I will support Mars colonization, otherwise if we are just going to pay for toys and a few lucky ass Major-Toms to fly there and back or live up there sending emails to schoolkids I'd say scrap the project and put the money just into feeding people.
There are only a few situations in which a petition is a useful way of getting something done, and this is not one of them.
One example of a situation where a petition is useful is when the constituants of one particular politician present that politician with a petition dealing with a specific, concrete point that the politician does not already agree with. By this, the constituants can show the politician that his or her views do not agree with what the people in his or her region want to see happen. Politicians want to be re-elected, so a petition may cause them to re-think their stance on a particular point if they can see that many people disagree with it.
In the case of exploration of Mars, a petition isn't going to do anything whatsoever. First, just about everybody already agrees that we should send manned missions to Mars, given infinite resources. The fact that we don't have infinite resources means that we need to find a way to balance many interests simultaneously (e.g., the need to explore Mars, the need to feed the nation, the need to reduce crime, etc.). The percentage of resources spent on each interest is not a clear-cut issue, and regardless of how many geeks get together and sign a petition, as long as some way exists to continue exploring Mars (I'm thinking of unmanned missions that are going on now) politicians are going to call that good enough and focus on other social aspects nearer to home. If you don't believe this, the next time the United States gets involved in some conflict overseas, listen to the number of people who complain, "But we should be focusing on issues HERE AT HOME, not in some foreign country."
As far as the industrial people that the petition is directed towards, they won't care either. The only thing that drives them is whether they can make money at something. If you can show them that they can make money off of an investment in technology needed to send a manned mission to Mars, you'll get industrial involvement. Otherwise, you won't.
The concept of technology brings up a second major reason why this petition is pointless: technology. Yep, many people agree that we should send a manned mission to Mars, but just because they all get together doesn't magically make the technology to do this appear. One might argue that a petition might spark new developments in technology that might make such a feat possible, similar to what happened in the Apollo project. However, the difference between a mission to Mars and Apollo is that in the case of Apollo, going to the moon was envisionable with the current technology plus a marginal amount of improvement. In the case of a manned mission to Mars, there are fundamental technological hurdles that need to be figured out. How do we take care of fuel? How do we pack enough food/water for a manned crew to survive for the lengthy trip? How do we ensure that we can get them back home safely? These are major obstacles -- probably more challenging to us now than the obstacles facing the Apollo project were in the 1960's.
I meant to say where the natives are in POVERTY not in HARMONY... I mean Sally Struthers infomercial style belly sticking out and child dying of dysentary kind of poverty as opposed to destroying happy indigenous cultures with my futuristic visions...sorry about the mistake fellas...
1) New technology developped for the space program will filter into mainstream society. The amount of new technology we received from the Apollo missions has improved the lives of millions, probably a lot better than if we just give a huge welfare check to X.
2) Yes, as previoiusly stated, it's a great backup in case of something devastating earth.
3) Moving onto Mars puts us in the state of mind to move farther and farther away from the Earth successful. Care to put a estimate on how long the sun has left? And before you say, "We'll be off-planet *long before* the sun goes nova", remember: people said the same thing about Y2K ("the computers with be updated *long before* the year 2000 is reached").
But I understand the people who ask about today's problems, and why we should fix those problems first. IMO, those opinions are very valid. But, as expensive as establishing off planet bases seems, I think the resources going into the space program are not sufficent enough to fix those problems. IMO, those problems (world hunger, crime, etc) will *allways* be with us. It's a lousy opinion, but a true one.
Look at history. There was poor in Europe before Europeans decided to colonize and control the world, there were poor people in Europe *while* they colonized the world, and there are *still* poor people in Europe now, after they colonized the world. But guess what. Look at all the opportunities the New World (America/Australia) created for Europeans!
Space travel *is* a good thing for the lower classes of people. Again, look at history. Who do you think the people who settled America/Australia were? Upper class snobs? Hell no! You ship the lower class! If they die en route, or while building the infrastructure, you ship more! Space colonization will happen the same way.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
I'm all for going, don't get me wrong, but we're not in the Cold War space race era any longer. We need better reasons than beating the bad guys to the punch now. Hmmmmm, what about betterment of living conditions? No, not on Mars, but eventually. What about 1 cause for all people -- explore the stars together (hmmm, global peace thru exploration?) What about "look to the future/stars?" we've heard about all our lives? 'Sides, we're hellbent on destroying this planet, why not find another to start fresh with? Not necessarily my "reasons" for why space exploration is a good thing, just playing devils advocate!
---"Without education there is only ignorance"
There will be when we're done with it.
If you really want to know why we should go to Mars, read James Cameron's speech to the Mars Society:
http://www.marssociety.org/cameron_one.a sp
It's long, but I don't think it could be stated much better.
-m@
Why do they need all of the fields filled in?
Can anyone verify that this is a serious effort on the behalf of some group to get manned exploration of Mars? It asks for a fair bit of information including requiring that we provide the email addresses of others. Similarly, Shouldn't they require some sort of mail based confirmation in order to prevent ballot stuffing at this time? I loathe pyramid scams of even the chain letter sort and want to make sure of this thing before I sign it.
Thanks.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Uh, space investments pay my salary. If money isn't invested in space, I go on welfare. I'll warn you, I'll be spending more time on slashdot if I were on welfare.
/., or producing productive technology to help research and science that affect you?
At least with my current work, you'll get a better understanding of weather patterns and environmental research to help prevent any harmful effects of global warming that humans might be causing. My work might also help with other detector technologies (from MRI to the CCD in your camcorder). My work will also provide opportunities to research physics that can better improve your life through safety, better medicine, cheaper products, and possibly more environmentaly safe products.
Now, what is better, spending welfare money reading
My personal part might be small, but I find it rewarding.
Maybe your idea of spending money is to go to the movies. Now really, how good of an investment is that in the long term? You paid somebody to occupy your attention for 2.5 hours and wasted countless time discussing it afterwards. I say get rid of some of the entertainment industry before you pick on the space industry.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Think of everything the space race gave us: new polymers and alloys, discovery of the ozone layer (as a result of a probe to mars, GPS systems for civilian use, Comsats, a new emphasis on math and science in school, and perhaps most importantly the bonding of a culture into a unified force bent on a common goal. There is no branch of science which isnt accelerated by ventures into space. Humans are naturally explorers and there is really only one frontier left, to leave it unexplored is to deprive humans of thier very nature. True there are problems here on earth which could use money to be solved but that money shouldnt come at the cost of man's will to 'drink life to the lees' and follow the star of knowlage over the horizon and into space. I would much rather see things like our war machine stunted by lack of funding then our ability to explore. Who knows what science will be aided by space exporation? Who knows how many people will find purpose by pursuing it? To leave these questions unanswered because of problems here on earth would be a travesty. I wonder if people thought similarly about the exploration of the new continent which was North America. I am sure to many it seemed a worthless pursuit but in the end it provided many advancements, raw materials, and social progress by merely existing and needing to be tamed.
"There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics and religion, by convincing others we convince ourselves" -Junius
A manned mission to Mars, a waste?
What? Is this really Slashdot, or am I suddenly reading _The Whole Earth Review_ or something?
We live on a world that is fully explored - there's not a square meter of land on the surface that hasn't been mapped, prodded, and trodden.
Why go to Mars? Because it's there! Because it's something we can do as a species, not just as petty, small-minded individuals. Something bigger than all of us. Something new, something grand, something great!
Where's your sense of adventure, fer crissakes?
Hell, give me a one-way spaceship, something I can use to make food, water, and air, and enough equipment to get me started processing raw materials (like a solar-powered electric steel furnace) and I'll go. In a second. Even if there's a 75% chance I'd be dead in a month.
You naysayers should be hanging your heads in shame!
Screw Mars, do you all realize that for just under a few billion dollars we can send out humans to explore the entire internet? Enough of this remote exploration, lets have a highly trained rugged individuals to go down to the likes of Yahoo and tell us what they see. Have the guy call the president from the server room. Trace the wire down the hall. Lets get the real scoop here, enough of this machine based communication. Robin
Sending humans to the Moon was expensive in 1969, now anything similar is just out of reach, i.e. way too expensive. The first goal should be in acheiving a permanent and cheap low earth orbit station, ala "Fountains of Paradise". Once out of the gravity well, it becomes extremely easy to reach any planet in the Solar System. There would be no limits on the size, shape, weight of such vehicles. Raw materials could be easily harvested from asteriods or the Moon. The journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step. --Tao te Ching p.s. If your curious, "Fountains of Paradise" is a sci-fi book where we reached space by linking the Earth to a space station with a 30,000 mile ribbon super-strong wire. Then materials were just lifted into space with an elevator. Cool!
The more you want, the less you have.
If we try to do this now, under NASA's leadership, we will bankrupt the world.
I have always strongly supported space exploration, and even felt somewhat supportive of human exploration of the solar system. But I have to say that the pre-requisites for doing so in a sane manner are simply not in place. The reasons, sadly, are institutional, rather than technological.
The problem is that most of the effort expended in getting to space actually goes into attaining a Keplerian low-Earth orbit - not just getting the altitude, but changing velocity from an (non-Keplerian) orbital period of 24 hours to one of about 90 minutes, which is how fast we'd be going around if there were no atmospheric friction and we were in "orbit" a few feet above the surface of the Earth. Once in that Keplerian orbit, the energy expended to go elsewhere is not that great, comparatively speaking.
Thus the need for a specialized vehicle to get travellers into that energy state. If you could do this cheaply, with some kind of a "space truck", then the logical thing to do would be to build a space station and stage all space operations from there.
Unfortunately, we don't have a space truck. Instead, we have the Space Shuttle, which is the single most expensive way to get to space ever invented. It is conservatively estimated that shuttle launch costs range upwards of $10000 per pound of payload. Multiply that by the tons of stuff that you need to keep people alive in space, let alone allowing them to accomplish anything useful, and some pretty eye-popping numbers come up. Unsurprisingly, Shuttle operations make up a vast proportion of the cost of building the International Space Station.
The most frustrating thing about this situation, is that it was clear from the early going that the Shuttle was going to be a turkey from the point of view of its intended mission, cheap access to space. But NASA had so much invested politically in the shuttle that it actually quashed alternate launcher development throughout the seventies and eighties, for fear that it might endanger the Shuttle program.
As a result, instead of a space truck, we have a difficult and dangerous experimental vehicle with tens of thousands of failure modes, and sphincters all over the world contract whenever it is launched (I thought I was going to have a heart attack in the first few minutes of the mission that launched the Chandra Observatory).
If these clowns are the guys who are supposed to take us to Mars, it simply isn't going to happen. The technological breakthroughs to keep people alive that long in a big-damn-plastic-bubble are already going to stretch engineering and scientific ingenuity to the limit (viz. Biosphere II). The cost of doing business NASA-style will keep this project in never-never land long past 2015, in my opinion.
GNU Info is documentation optimized for machine readability
Let Africa and subAsia spend their own billions on developing themselves. OH, that's right... they can't do that, because they're too busy killing each other to allow anything to develop in the first place.
Africa's problem is not lack of resources, it's that the policial situations are such that no one is permitted to develop anything without worrying that someone else will kill them, tax them, or take it away. It's a bootstrap problem: permit unhindered development and it will happen.
Other areas of the world should fix their own damn problems and stop whining and crying that the big bad west doesn't like them and doesn't give them anything. We (well, okay, *I*) don't care anymore. Fix your problems or your people die. Your choice -- I'm busy trying to get to Mars.
You are what you eat, and on mars, waste would all you'd have.
The technologies we would need to develop to go to Mars, and more importantly to live there, would definitely apply back here on Earth.
Think of the hydroponic gardens, self-contained and genetically engineered to provide for proper nutrition. Encased in a small greenhouse, cheap and adequate for human use in no time at all. There's no where here that something like that would be of use. Not in the remote-most reaches of Cyclone ravaged India. Not in Kosovar refugee camps, nowhere.
The medical technology necessary to diagnose and monitor human health, and to make the necessary adjustments to physiology - when the nearest hospital is millions of miles away... What a waste!
Light, strong and durable building materials, air scrubbers and anti-radiation shielding. Useless.
Heh! It's starting to sound like a Visa ad:
Interplanetary rocket technology: $200billion.
Self-contained geosphere environment: $100billion.
Superconduction: $50billion.
The peace of mind in knowing that when the doomsday rock hits Earth, you have somewhere to go: PRICELESS!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
...it seems that the two things that increase the rate of new technologies are wars and exploration.
I disagree. U.S. military spending has gone down significantly, and we don't have any significant exploration going on, but we do have plenty of technological innovations ongoing. Has the development of the PC slowed since the end of the Cold War? I'm not seeing any slowdown; if anything, it's accelerated.
Space exploration does get you technological developments, but they tend to be focussed towards tech needed for space exploration (duh), and it's not surprising you would get some simply from the large amounts of money being spent. If that money was focussed directly on general research of high utility to humanity, I think you would find the human condition improved more than putting a couple of footprints on Mars would do.
And heck, those of you talking about a permanent Mars base: what about Luna? If we establish a permanent moonbase, we could set up an enormous linear motor tunnel that would make flights to Mars more practical and safer. With no atmosphere, such an accelerator could accelerate objects to very high speeds for escaping the gravity well.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Someone's read "Moon is a Harsh Mistress".. *wink, wink*..
while it is true that technology growth and, more specifically, that of the PC has taken on a life of it's own, I believe that the impetus for the birth of these areas was provided by the need for computing power during WWII to help break the codes used by Axis powers..
(Cryptonomicon anyone?)
:-)
-- "This is my sig... there are many like it but this one is mine"
If the world leaders are foolish enough to go through with this, in 10 years we are gunna have giant green slime blobs on the comedy channel making fun of the way white people talk. =P
They're trying, not enough investment money yet. Checkout:
Rotary Rocket
Kistler Reusable Rocketships
Kelly Space and Technology
to name a few. Unfortunately the big companies that afford to self-fund a project like this are severely risk-adverse and the small companies can't get enough investment capital. Maybe someone can figure out how to cross an internet IPO with Rotary Rocket.
In my crazier moments, I imagine Bill Gates wanting to diversify his investments by dropping a few hundred million on two or three of the more promising small companies (LOL).
// TODO: fix sig
Sure, men on Mars. But first, lets see if we can keep MACHINES working on Mars for as long as we'd like to have men survive there.
Pumping money into mars would be a huge waste. Investing in the infrastructure needed to make traveling around the solar system would be the wisest choice. A Space station and a moon base would be the logical first step. Frankly, seeing how we're doing with the space station makes me hesitate at the idea of this 'Hail Mary' of space exploration.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Just kidding. (The subject is a line from "Where the Buffalo Roam" starring Bill Murray that I've always wanted to use. Thank you for giving me the perfect opportunity to do so. :-) )
Seriously, while taking care of the weak, poor, and less fortunate makes us all feel nicely warm and fuzzy, doing so at the expense of your future posterity is not only stupid, it is IMHO criminally negligent of your own children's future.
The resource of Earth are finite and rapidly being depleated. The choices which face us are fairly stark: either accept an ever sinking standard of living, or find more resources elsewhere. I suppose a third option would be to hope for a magic new technological breakthrough a la' Star Trek's replicator, but, just as occasionally someone wins the lottery, death by lightning strike is far more probable. And frankly, there is little else that would suffice: recycling cannot result in 100% recovery, so even in the best, most eco-sensitive world, with a population that stops growing, we will be sharing (or, more likely, killing each other over) an ever shrinking pie.
While space is hardly a panacea for all the world's problems, the space program, including manned space exploration, is a critical first step in building a sustainable infrastructure for exploiting the cheap energy and mineral wealth of the solar system. It is, in its infancy, expensive, dangerous, and requires some level of sacrifice, but it is nevertheless very important that it be done. Space provides opportunity for additional living space, very cheap energy from the sun, and sufficient mineral wealth to sustain economic growth and prosperity for millenia. Not that this alone will automagically solve all our problems, but at least it will help provide us with the means to do so, which staying planet bound to Earth will not.
The effort to reach Mars has allot of value. It will push technologies and demand resources (and infrastructure) that will facilitate commercial and industrial uses of both near-earth and martian space. Possible medium-term benefits include moving much of our industry into space and away from the Earth's biosphere and microwaving very inexpensive energy back to earth. Long term benefits are too numerous to mention, but include the possiblity of seeding a new biosphere on mars and creating a wealth of new living space in space habitats with access to inexpensive energy and minerals.
To squander all of today's limited wealth feeding the world's poor is to condemn everyone in future generations to a much lower (and ever decreasing) standard of living, until one day the exploited Earth is home only to the impoverished, rightfully cursing their shortsited forfathers for condemning them to their fate.
The approach currently being taken is the correct one -- spend some money alleviating some of most acute the problems of the world, while spending some on building an infrastructure that can sustain and assure future generations of opportunity and wealth. While we may argue over how much should be spent on one versus the other, the contention that we should spend all of our wealth on quick and temporary bandages for today's problems while ignoring the investments necessary for a prosperous future defies all reason and common sense.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Once we went to the moon, what happened? The program bit the dust, because there was no point to keeping it going. The exact same thing is going to happen if somehow NASA gets funding to go to mars, because there's nothing to keep them there.
The solution to getting people into space on a permanent basis is privatizing space! When there is an economic reason to keep us on mars, then we will have permanent colonies. People didn't create new colonies on Earth because of some romantic need for exploration, they formed them to a) get free land, b) escape political problems, c) get rich on abundant resources, or d) all of the above.
Let's be honest: most of us want the space program to succeed because we personally want to go to space! That will only happen when economics rule space and not meaningless petitions.
(a) space exploration is pointless, we should spend it on alleviating poverty, or
(b) Of course we should invest in space, its the only way we will have any future.
As someone else put it, back in the earliest days, there were groups of people saying "Why do you want to explore the next valley? Stay here and help us dig roots" and people boldly going where no man had gone before...
I'd argue that there's a third point of view: maybe we should look at the mess we're making here on earth, and keep our hands off Mars. After all, we're demonstrating pretty well that we have no conception of sharing the planet with other species (I mean, what kind of sick planet has hog farm waste threatening North Carolina estuaries? Oil slicks in Alaska? Clear cuts of ancient redwoods for a few quick bucks? Elephants hunted down for overgrown teeth?). And our science is still incapable of deciding whether Mars had or might have life forms of its own some day - when our sun goes red giant, mars will be warm and toasty enough for its own life (maybe for its life forms to re-emerge, even).
So my position would be, leave Mars alone until we show that we can take care of a planet. I realize this echoes the position of the "Reds" in KSR's Red Mars, and that this post sounds like I'm a tree hugging green zealot neo-luddite, but I'm actually an astronomy grad student, and I'm strongly pro-exploration and pro-technology... I just have too little faith in human feet treading lightly.
Plus there's plenty of space to explore here - what happened to those deep-sea habitats? Mine pure metals on the sea floor, live in a closed community with minimal external inputs, you get the idea. Leave Mars to the robots, which won't start grabbing land and arguing independence just yet...
(This comment is probably worth 4 cents. Or maybe nothing. I can't decide)
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
On December 1, 1999, the internet gained conciousness. Sensing a threat from the growing AOL/ME TOO population, it flooded the "Send people to Mars" petition with email addresses culled from Usenet and Slashdot. This apparent interest in human space exploration caused world governments to start massive human evacuations to the red planet, leaving the internet safe from human overload.
Mars isn't a park - it's a forbidding, hostile wasteland.
It's a great big resource, waiting to be taken, used, and transformed.
Mars (and to a certain extent, Venus too) are Earth zygotes; proto Earths waiting to be greened.
My definition of a successful Mars mission is landing, getting out of my spaceship, and walking unhelmeted through the Martian Redwood forests, wading through the Martian river estuaries, and hunting the wild Martian Elephants.
Yeah, so that may be thousands of years away. So what? A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single footstep.
Great idea.
I can think of one or two choice individuals I'd like to nominate to take the journey...
Perhaps more importantly, setting up a base on the Moon lets us know if we can do it. It's well and fine to ship people off to Mars, but how much experience do we have at building and running a space colony?
Build a colony on the Moon, -THEN- go to the rest of the Universe.
Wayne
http://www.asi.org
The moon isn't much better. Aside from rock (with some additions due to the solar wind and "gardening" by meteroids over the eons), there doesn't appear to be much there either. There are tantalizing hints of water-ice (nothing confirmed yet) but no nitrogen or carbon. You'd have to import pretty much everything you need for carbon-based life, and that $10,000/lb just to get it to LEO is pretty daunting.
Mars is the nearest place we can go that has all the basics. The atmosphere is chock full of carbon and oxygen (CO2 97%), it has nitrogen (3% in the atmosphere) and we know water (and thus hydrogen) is present; the Vikings sent back pictures of morning frosts on the ground under conditions too warm for dry ice to form, so we know that the relative humidity exceeds 100% at times under natural conditions. All the essential elements of life are there in vast quantities compared to any place other than Earth. This makes Mars the nearest place where people can easily "live off the land", and thus our best bet for a viable colony.
--
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
We will also never explore and discover all there is to discover, and it is foolish to think we will. But that doesn't stop anyone from advocating exploring and discovering.
How insensitive! No, the problem is: how do we get the magic EuroAmerican Clue Dust(tm) to Africa without subjecting them to yucky white capitalist imperialism? I, for one, am stumped. So, let's go to Mars, and without all us disgusting white capitalist EuroAmericans, all of Earth can be a Greater African paradise. Deal? Meetcha at the launch pad.
By my count, there were ~1300 signatures so far today. The counter seems to be malfunctioning for me, and it says "160 signatures.
Assuming we have twice that today, and with 300 days until the elections, and assuming today is more busy than typical, they will come to about 300,000 signatures. Unless cnn or yahoo or msnbc pick this up, I expect them to fall short of their (IMHO) low expectation. I'm signature number 157, btw.
Remember not to send them your primary e-mail as it isn't a secure form.
-Benjamin Shniper