Even at that, considering how much material Earth and Mars have exchanged over billions of years, it wouldn't even really be that amazing for single cell life to be on Mars, especially if it has a common origin with life on Earth. If we proved beyond doubt that it had an independent origin, THAT would be big.
Let's put aside the long timelines and asteroid impacts and focus on more recent exchanges. We keep sending probes to Mars, and I don't think we sterilize them before we send them. I know space is a harsh place, but bacteria on Earth live in some exceedingly harsh environments. Is there any way to guarantee that nothing survived the journey, and that any life that may be on Mars wasn't in fact brought over by us in the first place?
And if we found bacteria there, how would we prove whether it is native or our own? We haven't even discovered all forms of higher life on Earth, let alone created a database of every bacterial strain. Could a "new" bacteria we find there actually be a less common form native to Earth that we've never catalogued, that managed to survive a probe ride and thrive over there? I keep expecting scientists to announce they've found bacterial life over there, only to eventually realize far later that it's actually Earth life.
indeed
https://www.rt.com/usa/160636-...
and to quote Laszlo Toth on the older probes which searched for Martian life by digging a scoop of Martian soil and vaporizing it to look for organic compounds to indicate there might be life there, "No! It means there was life, but you just burned it up!"
"In order to make a mars colony viable, then you need to make people WANT to go there and not just the few crazies."
Hummm... maybe that's the hidden agenda of some politicians... Just making this planet less and less palatable (wars, global warming, famine, religious bigotry...) so people WANT to go to somewhere even as inhospitable as Mars.
If you mean putting humans on Mars isn't needed for mapping or geology missions, you're right. But exploration isn't just bringing back the facts of remote places for scientists to go over. Exploration is also humans going to places and being there and seeing it for themselves because, if we're serious about the survival of the species in the very long term, that is exactly what we will have to be able to do.
we can transport our criminals and/or irish people there.
One way I can see to make things cheaper is to use the Interplanetary Transport Network to ship the bulk of the material needed for a settlement. But I'm quite sure someone better qualified than I am already took this possibility into account. The ITN has already been used to send probes, after all.
but then you have to worry that you'll run out of 32 bit interplanetary transport protocol addresses
A more accurate phrase might be, "that the nation is willing to spend."
I'm pretty sure "the nation" is not willing to waste so much money on the military, but yet here we are.
every country seems to bloat their military. In Russia, every railway clerk or uniformed doorman for an apartment building is part of the "militia". In Egypt, the military runs everything from farms to appliance manufacturing. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages...
Somewhere out in space is a great big rock heading our way. It might not hit for ten million years, or it might hit this decade, but it will hit eventually.
The long term aim should be to establish a sustainable colony somewhere. That isn't possible right now, the technology is still a long way from ready. We can lay the groundwork though - develop new technologies, gather data on how they perform, refine designs, study the planet. The first steps that later generations can build upon, because it's going to be the most expensive undertaking in all of human history to date and someone has to be willing to make the first payments even if they will never see the ultimate result.
the biggest thing is get familiar with what it's like offworld. And education is always expensive, one way or the other. so, no surprise there.
make it look like a NASCAR car. hang a camera outside it all through the trip to broadcast the sponsors back to earth. put sponsorship stickers all over the astronauts' suits too, like NASCAR drivers.
"The sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The 8th "Biblical Tetrad" occurs in 2014-2015 and there will not be another "Biblical Tetrad" for almost 600 years. We are in the time of this tetrad now.
This is part of a "tetrad" (iirc, 4-in-a-row of them in the same relative timeframe) of them - those are the ones "weird things" have been known to happen on them.
For jews & christians in particular, some weird things have happened coinciding with these lunar events.
Jesus death & resurrection
Jews return to Zion/Israel declared a nation
Great Plague of Europe
Millions of Jews + Christians martyred
P.S.=> Do I *believe* this is "the end of the world" as the article summary states some will believe (or rather the beginning of the end)? I don't really know WHAT to believe in anymore there's so much bullshit false propoganda or circumstantial evidence coincidences - but, I'll tell you what I believe after we go through this & time after (only way to be certain's to see for yourself)... apk
apocalyptic events: pope comes to US and Cuba; Boehner quits; VW cheats on diesel emissions; hedge fund manager moves into drug marketing;
I think you're overestimating the socialist influence. I worked there from 2010-2014, and most of the upper management I met there was definitely capitalist rather than socialist.
I think he's overestimating the socialist influence of Nazis, in that Nazis outlawed socialism, arrested tens of thousands of German socialists and communists, put them in concentration camps and executed them, years before they began arresting Jews; and were supported in this Godly activity by major US corporations, such as Ford Motors, General Motors, Standard Oil, ITT, Chase National Bank, etc. and American rightwing individuals such as Henry Ford and J. Edgar Hoover.
If the manager at A or B level are half as clever as those I know, they will have left no paper trail. They will have organized informal meeting with the engineer/C level manager/underling telling them to ignore the things. Face to Face. No per email or paper. The underling will be where the trail end off cold , despite the underling protest they reported the problem there will be no trail. Not the first time I have seen that happen.
My advice to all "underling" involved in such a story : make sure to make a solid paper and email trail leading to your superior. Do not under any circumstance limit yourself to verbal acknowledgment.
As for those who will ask me Why no advice to whistleblow ? Well duh because this is the easiest way to not only torpedoe your carrier, but the story will be buried AND nobody will hire you again for your honesty.
i wonder why they didn't try the "it must have been a virus uploaded into our production system!" ploy.
All of the models are wildly wrong in predicting climate, so the "evidence" is pointing against any of the alarmist models you are peddling being correct.
CO2 has risen substantially in the last decade or two - with very little corresponding warming. There are a lot of theroes and hand-waving why, but in the end the EVIDENCE is that CO2 rising does not lead to temperature rise, despite many previous predictions to the contrary.
Previously we were all told Global Warming would bring more extreme storms, but the extremity of storms has remained slightly below average in recent years.
When will you zealots wake up to what real science (and real, vs. massaged, data) has been trying to tell you? You can go peddle e-meters or find some other gullible idiots to scam. At least then you wouldn't be screwing over the Earth with your crackpot religion.
"wildly wrong"; an odd piece of scientific terminology, but if "All of the models are wildly wrong in predicting climate, so the "evidence" is pointing against any of the alarmist models you are peddling being correct." is your quantification of the situation, then "any model WITHOUT an AGW term is so far beyond wildly wrong as to be completely useless in predicting climate since the mid twentieth century; despite being not that bad previous to that point, so the evidence is pointing very strongly that AGW is a real factor that kicked in 70 years ago, even though there are other modifiers of much smaller effect that we haven't yet quantified" http://a.static.trunity.net/files/190901_191000/190966/figure-9-5-l.png
I think the urea cheating may be for reasons of customer acceptability.
Commercial diesel equipment which uses urea as NOx control can use between 1-5% of the volume of diesel fuel in urea solution. In Europe, where urea has been used in trucks for many years, a truck stop will have urea pumps next to the diesel pumps. So that you can fill both tanks simultaneously.
For passenger cars, there is considerable pressure to make the urea a service item, which can be refilled at the 10k mile service interval, in order to avoid the risk of customer non-acceptance. There is therefore a strong pressure to be as frugal as possible with the urea in order to minimize the size/weight of the urea tank and ensure that it will last the duration of the service interval.
Coming soon: do it yourself kits to extract urea from pee, to go with the biodiesel manufacture kits.
You're right that the technology is installed and works, but the performance and maintenance downsides are severe. I didn't want to make my original post too long to read, but here's more detail to explain.
Most small VWs (Jetta, etc) use a "lean NOx trap" to capture NOx in a zeolite sponge. The zeolite fills up with NOx and needs to be cleaned out periodically (every minute or two, takes a few seconds). During the cleaning cycle, engine power is limited to *20%* of maximum. VW's patent says they wait until the driver eases off on the throttle to do it, but still, that's a huge performance hit and a big incentive to cheat (by not doing the cleaning.)
See patent link in my original post for details (warning: machine-translated from German.)
In VW's larger vehicles (Passat, mostly), the car carries an extra tank full of gallons of urea, which is sprayed into the exhaust to react with the NOx. This reaction needs precise temperature controls (which probably limits engine performance), and the tank is big and heavy. By using less urea than needed, VW can use a smaller lighter tank, which needs to be refilled less often. (VW pays for urea replacement for the first 30,000 miles.)
I have my own idea (patent applied for). The exhaust is captured in a large balloon towed behind the car. At the end of the day, the balloon is connected to a pipe at your house, and the contents and downloaded and treated.
The easiest method for everyone, electric cars and the EPA can do it's regulating thing at the power station. You know it is coming, want to be a pollution pus hog, then you will be paying a large regulatory cost to do so.
Yeah but... VW wanted to beat Toyota out worldwide. hybrids and electrics have become Toyota's playground, so VW decided to stay with the German companies' playground, diesels. People have been noticing for years that diesels are giving mileage results comparable to hybrids.
But VW wanted their diesels to offer no user abrasion greater than a gasoline car; and filling up a tank of urea now and then seemed like something undesirable.
First let me say that this change is urgently needed.
But, it's unlikely that automakers who build gasoline cars are cheating like VW did. It's especially difficult to clean NOx from diesel engine exhaust because unlike gasoline engines, the exhaust contains lots of extra oxygen. Diesels need special NOx-cleaning devices which add cost and weight, and can seriously limit performance in some situations. Gasoline engines just need minor modifications to the engine computer software and the catalytic converter to clean NOx, so there's very little need to cheat.
i'm glad you brought this up because I was wondering just today... is it therefore impossible to use catalytic converters on diesels for the NOx like we do on gasoline cars? Is it because there is more to clean up? Or is it because they don't want to clog up the exhaust?
Yeah, it's a total joke that the car companies were able to self-certify their emissions tests.
I'm a amazed they didn't claim that a virus had invaded their production systems and was now being installed on all the cars. Maybe blamed North Korea.
Who thinks we would have been better off spending the trillion dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan war on space? For that money and time we could have a permanent ISS size base at one of the lunar poles. In fact it would be pretty much the same companies making the ships as make the equines for the war machines.
I'm not sure how many equines we're still using for the war machines.... and I'm pretty sure they don't make them the same way we make rockets.
(Just Kidding)
My thesis is that humans are a violent species, and that they enjoy killing each other
If that was true, everyone would be out killing all the time, or at least trying.
In actual fact, relatively few people are murderers, and it's not just fear of being caught.
like chimps, we don't like to kill our friends and relatives that much; but we really do think fighting with strangers is a winning strategy. unfortunately, being better and making tools than chimps, fighting with strangers often tends to be fatal for somebody.
Plenty of people have been put in jail and hanged for war. Starting a war is a crime against the peace. More people go unpunished than punished, but it's still a crime.
but enough about the previous president and his cabinet.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's put aside the long timelines and asteroid impacts and focus on more recent exchanges. We keep sending probes to Mars, and I don't think we sterilize them before we send them. I know space is a harsh place, but bacteria on Earth live in some exceedingly harsh environments. Is there any way to guarantee that nothing survived the journey, and that any life that may be on Mars wasn't in fact brought over by us in the first place?
And if we found bacteria there, how would we prove whether it is native or our own? We haven't even discovered all forms of higher life on Earth, let alone created a database of every bacterial strain. Could a "new" bacteria we find there actually be a less common form native to Earth that we've never catalogued, that managed to survive a probe ride and thrive over there? I keep expecting scientists to announce they've found bacterial life over there, only to eventually realize far later that it's actually Earth life.
indeed https://www.rt.com/usa/160636-...
and to quote Laszlo Toth on the older probes which searched for Martian life by digging a scoop of Martian soil and vaporizing it to look for organic compounds to indicate there might be life there, "No! It means there was life, but you just burned it up!"
that's where the canals come from, duh.
"In order to make a mars colony viable, then you need to make people WANT to go there and not just the few crazies."
Hummm... maybe that's the hidden agenda of some politicians... Just making this planet less and less palatable (wars, global warming, famine, religious bigotry...) so people WANT to go to somewhere even as inhospitable as Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just cancel the F-35 project. That will buy you about 5 trips to Mars.
what? cancel the joint strike paperweight?
If you mean putting humans on Mars isn't needed for mapping or geology missions, you're right. But exploration isn't just bringing back the facts of remote places for scientists to go over. Exploration is also humans going to places and being there and seeing it for themselves because, if we're serious about the survival of the species in the very long term, that is exactly what we will have to be able to do.
we can transport our criminals and/or irish people there.
One way I can see to make things cheaper is to use the Interplanetary Transport Network to ship the bulk of the material needed for a settlement. But I'm quite sure someone better qualified than I am already took this possibility into account. The ITN has already been used to send probes, after all.
but then you have to worry that you'll run out of 32 bit interplanetary transport protocol addresses
I'm pretty sure "the nation" is not willing to waste so much money on the military, but yet here we are.
every country seems to bloat their military. In Russia, every railway clerk or uniformed doorman for an apartment building is part of the "militia". In Egypt, the military runs everything from farms to appliance manufacturing. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages...
Somewhere out in space is a great big rock heading our way. It might not hit for ten million years, or it might hit this decade, but it will hit eventually.
The long term aim should be to establish a sustainable colony somewhere. That isn't possible right now, the technology is still a long way from ready. We can lay the groundwork though - develop new technologies, gather data on how they perform, refine designs, study the planet. The first steps that later generations can build upon, because it's going to be the most expensive undertaking in all of human history to date and someone has to be willing to make the first payments even if they will never see the ultimate result.
the biggest thing is get familiar with what it's like offworld. And education is always expensive, one way or the other. so, no surprise there.
declare that muslim terrorists living on mars have WMD and are about to attack the US.
make it look like a NASCAR car. hang a camera outside it all through the trip to broadcast the sponsors back to earth. put sponsorship stickers all over the astronauts' suits too, like NASCAR drivers.
"The sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The 8th "Biblical Tetrad" occurs in 2014-2015 and there will not be another "Biblical Tetrad" for almost 600 years. We are in the time of this tetrad now.
This is part of a "tetrad" (iirc, 4-in-a-row of them in the same relative timeframe) of them - those are the ones "weird things" have been known to happen on them.
For jews & christians in particular, some weird things have happened coinciding with these lunar events.
Jesus death & resurrection Jews return to Zion/Israel declared a nation Great Plague of Europe Millions of Jews + Christians martyred
As far as my subject? There's more data here:
http://www.jesusonmymind.com/s...
Lastly/IRONIC: My "captcha" = MOONED!
APK
P.S.=> Do I *believe* this is "the end of the world" as the article summary states some will believe (or rather the beginning of the end)? I don't really know WHAT to believe in anymore there's so much bullshit false propoganda or circumstantial evidence coincidences - but, I'll tell you what I believe after we go through this & time after (only way to be certain's to see for yourself)... apk
apocalyptic events: pope comes to US and Cuba; Boehner quits; VW cheats on diesel emissions; hedge fund manager moves into drug marketing;
I think you're overestimating the socialist influence. I worked there from 2010-2014, and most of the upper management I met there was definitely capitalist rather than socialist.
I think he's overestimating the socialist influence of Nazis, in that Nazis outlawed socialism, arrested tens of thousands of German socialists and communists, put them in concentration camps and executed them, years before they began arresting Jews; and were supported in this Godly activity by major US corporations, such as Ford Motors, General Motors, Standard Oil, ITT, Chase National Bank, etc. and American rightwing individuals such as Henry Ford and J. Edgar Hoover.
If the manager at A or B level are half as clever as those I know, they will have left no paper trail. They will have organized informal meeting with the engineer/C level manager/underling telling them to ignore the things. Face to Face. No per email or paper. The underling will be where the trail end off cold , despite the underling protest they reported the problem there will be no trail. Not the first time I have seen that happen. My advice to all "underling" involved in such a story : make sure to make a solid paper and email trail leading to your superior. Do not under any circumstance limit yourself to verbal acknowledgment. As for those who will ask me Why no advice to whistleblow ? Well duh because this is the easiest way to not only torpedoe your carrier, but the story will be buried AND nobody will hire you again for your honesty.
i wonder why they didn't try the "it must have been a virus uploaded into our production system!" ploy.
But all evidence points towards AGW
Sigh. No, it does not, and has not for years.
All of the models are wildly wrong in predicting climate, so the "evidence" is pointing against any of the alarmist models you are peddling being correct.
CO2 has risen substantially in the last decade or two - with very little corresponding warming. There are a lot of theroes and hand-waving why, but in the end the EVIDENCE is that CO2 rising does not lead to temperature rise, despite many previous predictions to the contrary.
Previously we were all told Global Warming would bring more extreme storms, but the extremity of storms has remained slightly below average in recent years.
When will you zealots wake up to what real science (and real, vs. massaged, data) has been trying to tell you? You can go peddle e-meters or find some other gullible idiots to scam. At least then you wouldn't be screwing over the Earth with your crackpot religion.
"wildly wrong"; an odd piece of scientific terminology, but if "All of the models are wildly wrong in predicting climate, so the "evidence" is pointing against any of the alarmist models you are peddling being correct." is your quantification of the situation, then "any model WITHOUT an AGW term is so far beyond wildly wrong as to be completely useless in predicting climate since the mid twentieth century; despite being not that bad previous to that point, so the evidence is pointing very strongly that AGW is a real factor that kicked in 70 years ago, even though there are other modifiers of much smaller effect that we haven't yet quantified"
http://a.static.trunity.net/files/190901_191000/190966/figure-9-5-l.png
it's because the programmers didn't want to resort to urea injection.
I think the urea cheating may be for reasons of customer acceptability. Commercial diesel equipment which uses urea as NOx control can use between 1-5% of the volume of diesel fuel in urea solution. In Europe, where urea has been used in trucks for many years, a truck stop will have urea pumps next to the diesel pumps. So that you can fill both tanks simultaneously. For passenger cars, there is considerable pressure to make the urea a service item, which can be refilled at the 10k mile service interval, in order to avoid the risk of customer non-acceptance. There is therefore a strong pressure to be as frugal as possible with the urea in order to minimize the size/weight of the urea tank and ensure that it will last the duration of the service interval.
Coming soon: do it yourself kits to extract urea from pee, to go with the biodiesel manufacture kits.
You're right that the technology is installed and works, but the performance and maintenance downsides are severe. I didn't want to make my original post too long to read, but here's more detail to explain.
Most small VWs (Jetta, etc) use a "lean NOx trap" to capture NOx in a zeolite sponge. The zeolite fills up with NOx and needs to be cleaned out periodically (every minute or two, takes a few seconds). During the cleaning cycle, engine power is limited to *20%* of maximum. VW's patent says they wait until the driver eases off on the throttle to do it, but still, that's a huge performance hit and a big incentive to cheat (by not doing the cleaning.)
See patent link in my original post for details (warning: machine-translated from German.)
In VW's larger vehicles (Passat, mostly), the car carries an extra tank full of gallons of urea, which is sprayed into the exhaust to react with the NOx. This reaction needs precise temperature controls (which probably limits engine performance), and the tank is big and heavy. By using less urea than needed, VW can use a smaller lighter tank, which needs to be refilled less often. (VW pays for urea replacement for the first 30,000 miles.)
I have my own idea (patent applied for). The exhaust is captured in a large balloon towed behind the car. At the end of the day, the balloon is connected to a pipe at your house, and the contents and downloaded and treated.
The easiest method for everyone, electric cars and the EPA can do it's regulating thing at the power station. You know it is coming, want to be a pollution pus hog, then you will be paying a large regulatory cost to do so.
Yeah but... VW wanted to beat Toyota out worldwide. hybrids and electrics have become Toyota's playground, so VW decided to stay with the German companies' playground, diesels. People have been noticing for years that diesels are giving mileage results comparable to hybrids. But VW wanted their diesels to offer no user abrasion greater than a gasoline car; and filling up a tank of urea now and then seemed like something undesirable.
How the software cheats is to turn off the emission controls if it looks like someone is actually driving.
Does that mean "wheels spinning" as opposed to just "engine revving"?
emissions testing involves a chassis dynamometer with rolling drums for the wheels, doesn't it? And maybe variable loads?
First let me say that this change is urgently needed.
But, it's unlikely that automakers who build gasoline cars are cheating like VW did. It's especially difficult to clean NOx from diesel engine exhaust because unlike gasoline engines, the exhaust contains lots of extra oxygen. Diesels need special NOx-cleaning devices which add cost and weight, and can seriously limit performance in some situations. Gasoline engines just need minor modifications to the engine computer software and the catalytic converter to clean NOx, so there's very little need to cheat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... http://www.google.com/patents/...
i'm glad you brought this up because I was wondering just today...
is it therefore impossible to use catalytic converters on diesels for the NOx like we do on gasoline cars? Is it because there is more to clean up? Or is it because they don't want to clog up the exhaust?
Yeah, it's a total joke that the car companies were able to self-certify their emissions tests.
I'm a amazed they didn't claim that a virus had invaded their production systems and was now being installed on all the cars. Maybe blamed North Korea.
"...it's bullocks to go to Mars." bullocks to both Mars and Moon.
first equines http://science.slashdot.org/co...
now bullocks.
We're sending a Space Ark.
Who thinks we would have been better off spending the trillion dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan war on space? For that money and time we could have a permanent ISS size base at one of the lunar poles. In fact it would be pretty much the same companies making the ships as make the equines for the war machines.
I'm not sure how many equines we're still using for the war machines.... and I'm pretty sure they don't make them the same way we make rockets. (Just Kidding)
My thesis is that humans are a violent species, and that they enjoy killing each other
If that was true, everyone would be out killing all the time, or at least trying.
In actual fact, relatively few people are murderers, and it's not just fear of being caught.
like chimps, we don't like to kill our friends and relatives that much; but we really do think fighting with strangers is a winning strategy. unfortunately, being better and making tools than chimps, fighting with strangers often tends to be fatal for somebody.
Plenty of people have been put in jail and hanged for war. Starting a war is a crime against the peace. More people go unpunished than punished, but it's still a crime.
but enough about the previous president and his cabinet.