You know, this gets me thinking... what's really the minimum necessary for a person to stand a chance of making it to the surface of Mars alive? Let's say:
1) 150 days transit 2) Passenger remains drugged out of their gourd during the whole voyage so that they don't go crazy in the ridiculously small amount of space they're allocated, nor burn more than a minimal amount of consumables. 3) No extra radiation shielding; craft keeps its thickest end toward the sun and puts its consumables around the passenger but otherwise does nothing special 4) Landing hardware done as an exact duplicate of MSL, no re-engineering. MSL used a 4 tonne spacecraft to deliver a 900kg payload to the surface. An incredibly cramped capsule may fit that payload profile. 5) No attempt to get back or even survive for any significant length of time. Passenger has to be someone who wants to die on Mars.
Normal O2 consumption is 0,9kg/day; let's say 0,7 due to #2. Consumption of pure fat for say 1500 calories per day is 166g; let's say 300. I don't have numbers on CO2 scrubbers, let's put it at the same as O2. Let's say 3 liters (3kg) water consumption per day, 2kg recovered from the air via a chiller, 1kg lost to excretion, so 1kg total per day. Let's say 1kg other consumables per day. No complex recycling systems or anything that could seriously inflate your costs. We're at the ballpark of 3.7kg per day, so 555kg for the journey there, which doesn't need to be landed. Give them 600kg for some margin and a little time alive. These figures probably wouldn't size your spacecraft out of an affordable launch vehicles.
So yeah, if you really wanted to, I bet you could have a moderate chance of delivering a suicidal human alive but very ill to the surface of Mars to live for a short period of time for only a couple billion dollars in development + launch costs.
And farmers are used to buying water for 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than that, so what's your point?
In the US farmers buy/pump water by the "acre foot". When you're using such large measurements to describe the amount of water purchased/pumped, you know that the consumption is going to be vast. And if you're paying for that consumption with almonds, you know it's going to be cheap.
While this may cause short-term fluctuations, the long-term picture will be fine. A higher price on almonds will make other global regions start growing them more. The price will come back down in 5 years or so. And that's if the water issue caused an abrupt change, more realistic is a gradual shift.
Growing water-intensive crops in the desert is a stupid, stupid thing that people have been doing way too much because there was little cost associated with depleting aquifers. Payback time for that short-term thinking is rapidly approaching to many different regions.
As for bees, well, sort of. CCD isn't a threat to the species, as one can mass-breed queens, and a new hive can be readily produced just with a queen and a handful of workers. CCD brought the average winter hive loss rate in the US from about 15% to about 30%. But honeybees themselves wouldn't be threatened even if the loss rate was 90% (not to mention that they're not even native to the US). It's just a question of how expensive it becomes to keep them; it's a cost to beekeepers.
On the other hand, pollination services are a major *profit* to beekeepers. If they lose that, then they're losing money. So even if the significant reduction in pollination services increased winter survival rates, it's still going to be a big loss to beekeepers. Which means fewer beekeepers, which means fewer hives.
On the other hand, that's probably good for local pollinators who compete with honeybees for resources...
(as a completely unrelated side note, I've been pondering a lot about how one could fight a lot of the honeybee pests and diseases that affect hives, and handle management better... I'm awfully tempted to some day try to make an electrical tomography brood frame controlled by a couple multiplexers and monitored by a raspberry pi running EIDORS or other tomography software to see what's developing, where, what's walking around on the comb, what's developing malformed, whats clearly a pest, etc, and potentially run significant current through infested cells to kill / sterilize them... you probably couldn't catch mites but hive beetles, bacterial brood infections, etc should be catchable.. the big question, apart from how easy it'd be to interpret the data, is how much of an effect the monitoring (and potentially sterilization) would have on the hive, bees can sense electric fields)
Hey, if you like consuming massive amounts of energy to produce water that costs about $0.50/m, that's your call. But water that expensive won't support water-intensive agriculture anyway, so....
This plan seems to forget that it takes time to grow these crops. It takes 3 years for your first crop of almonds and 8 before the tree is delivering anything like commercial quantities.
You think California's water crises are just going to disappear in a decade? This is a long-term problem. The long timeframes on crop switchovers for certain types of crops is just more reason one needs to take immediate action.
There are lots and lots of ways to lower the water usage of both the general population and water intensive applications such as farming.
And all of them will be properly handled if there's a fair market pricing for water.
Using RO membrane treatment plants the water is purer then what falls from the sky
Are you talking RO of salty or fresh water? Even RO of freshwater can be pretty expensive; RO of saltwater is in most places cost prohibitive (not to mention a massive energy consumer). Though there are some interesting alternative technologies which may provide for affordable desalination in the future.
Well, if we want to extend the analogy of SpaceShipTwo vs. Falcon 9 + Dragon (with delta-V as range), compared to a baseline Model S, then Virgin's car would go about 30 miles with a top speed of 20mph and would cost $750.
In short, Virgin's electric "car" would actually be an electric bike.
Same reason that he hid every last radioactive isotopes that has a half life of less than 80 million years which is not not continually produced by natural processes but left around every last isotope with a half life of greater than 700 million years.
Um, yes we do know that they're there. There are plenty of pictures of skylight caveins and entirely collapsed tubes from satellites orbiting the moon. On Mars, too.
And would mean that earth-quality emergency medical care would be almost impossible to get.
Seriously, the last people you want to put onto a rocket and launch at several Gs up, into a high radiation environment, and then land on a desolate rock far from the rest of human society, is people who can die from hitting something too hard.
Very few volcanic pipes are diamond laden on Earth - primarily just kimberlites, which require a special type of volcano feed by very deep magma that's high in volatiles. They're almost all very old. The moon tends to be poor in volatiles and the depth requirements would be far greater to achieve the necessary pressures, at least 1/2 to 2/3rds of the way to the core.
Still, who bloody knows?
There's all sorts of gem possibilities on the moon, way too many to list here. They're probably the most valuable export-to-earth lunar resource we could mine at this point in time, as you can imagine what sort of premium the market would put on them even if they're pretty much the same as earth gems (let alone if they're mineral species not found on earth)
There's unlikely to be much in terms of heavy metal deposits, apart from asteroid finds, which doesn't sound like a market big enough to justify the expensive of the trip. Helium 3 is a total red herring. And of course your labor and hardware costs will be through the roof due to the incredible expense of shipping consumables. Isotopic Enrichment of light elements in-situ seems quite unlikely as a consequence.
Still, I can envision a market. Just any old moon rock will always have an interest from collectors who have an interest in space, and mineral collectors in general. You could probably turn a good profit on an ongoing basis for regular shipments of small volumes of samples to be sold at very high prices.
Any gemstone finds on the moon would have an additional, and much broader market, they could probably command incredible market prices. Most precious gems are made of light elements like one finds on the moon, and in processes that could readily have occurred on the moon. There probably are new gem species that never naturally occur on earth in sizeable quantities as well. A funny one would be if moonstone was found on the moon. (Na,K)AlSi3O8 and formed in plutonic felsic rock, all of the ingredients appear to be there.:)
Yeah, I can think of a ton. You're hosting a party and you discover you're out of something. You're a company who just had a critical item break and you lose money until you can get another. Your flight leaves soon and you discover that you forgot to pick up something. You're cooking a big dinner and discover that you don't have a key ingredient. And on and on, there's no end to the list.
This "it's not my typical usage needs" attitude that many here are displaying is also the problem I see with many attitudes about electric cars. "Well, I drive 300 miles every day and only have enough money to buy a used jalopy and live in an urban apartment with no electricity". Fine - then don't get a freaking EV yourself.. It doesn't mean that everyone in the world's needs are the same as yours.
Worse, what I see as a lot more likely is people who see their friend's computer left logged into FB and want to prank them... these days they usually write some sort of embarassing post or message their friends. But if they would instead write a post talking about suicide, and then use their own accounts to alert Facebook...
Shouldn't be surprising that they wouldn't form a coalition with the Independence or Progress parties.
The Independence Party (Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn) is basically Icelandic Republicans. It's too good of an analogy not to make. If Republicans in the US like it, they like it. They're maybe not as hard on the social conservatism, but economic, yeah, they can party with the best of them in the US Republican Party. Anti-EU.
The Progress Party (Framsóknarflokkurinn)... this is a beast that you really aren't familiar with in the US. Sometimes they're referred to as right-populism, but really I think the best way to describe them is the "Idiot Party". Generally they do terrible in the polls right up until a couple weeks before the election, when they come out with some Big, Super Plan, which basically amounts to "We're going to give you tons of money, and you're never going to have to pay for it, like,not EVERS!" There's so little time before the election that idiots get enough time to hear about it but not enough time to hear about how utterly terrible it is, and Framsóknarflokkurinn surges in the polls... then their support quickly collapses after the election, but who cares about it then? They're in government and can enrich themselves and their friends to their heart's content. Anti-EU.
The Pirates on the other hand could easily form a coalition with a number of other parties:
Samfylkingin (not sure what the English translation for them usually is)... as much as Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn is Iceland's Republicans, these people are really Iceland's democrats: left-center pragmatists. But then again, the left in Iceland is further left than the US. Pro-EU.
Left Greens (Vinstri Grænir): Yeah, there's also a Right Greens, but they're a small party, no need to talk about them. The Left Greens are a traditional Green Party... Left-Idealists. Anti-EU.
Bright Future (Björt Framtíð): Relatively new party. They're another leftist party, with some stances matching with Samfylkingin but others matching the Left Greens. Pro-EU.
The Pirates have no pro or anti EU stance, except that people should get to vote on it. They're very much not happy with our current government's promise breaking and lawbreaking on this front. But the membership is mixed on how they'd actually vote - they just want to get a vote.
I think the Pirates would form a great part of any potential leftist coalition. They have a lot of policy blind spots where they try to avoid taking stances, but they're very hardcore on certain issues that really need an advocate.
It depends on what you mean by "bay". We certainly don't name things with the word" bay", as that's an English word. But we have lots of firðir, víkur, sund....;)
We already have to follow most EU rules and regulations due to being in the EFTA and other treaties. But we don't get to vote on them.
And you can lecture me about how wonderful it is to be a little country not part of some bigger entity when you have to pay 4-5% higher interest rates on home loans and pay out the nose for goods and have nobody ship to you and on and on.
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You know, this gets me thinking... what's really the minimum necessary for a person to stand a chance of making it to the surface of Mars alive? Let's say:
1) 150 days transit
2) Passenger remains drugged out of their gourd during the whole voyage so that they don't go crazy in the ridiculously small amount of space they're allocated, nor burn more than a minimal amount of consumables.
3) No extra radiation shielding; craft keeps its thickest end toward the sun and puts its consumables around the passenger but otherwise does nothing special
4) Landing hardware done as an exact duplicate of MSL, no re-engineering. MSL used a 4 tonne spacecraft to deliver a 900kg payload to the surface. An incredibly cramped capsule may fit that payload profile.
5) No attempt to get back or even survive for any significant length of time. Passenger has to be someone who wants to die on Mars.
Normal O2 consumption is 0,9kg/day; let's say 0,7 due to #2. Consumption of pure fat for say 1500 calories per day is 166g; let's say 300. I don't have numbers on CO2 scrubbers, let's put it at the same as O2. Let's say 3 liters (3kg) water consumption per day, 2kg recovered from the air via a chiller, 1kg lost to excretion, so 1kg total per day. Let's say 1kg other consumables per day. No complex recycling systems or anything that could seriously inflate your costs. We're at the ballpark of 3.7kg per day, so 555kg for the journey there, which doesn't need to be landed. Give them 600kg for some margin and a little time alive. These figures probably wouldn't size your spacecraft out of an affordable launch vehicles.
So yeah, if you really wanted to, I bet you could have a moderate chance of delivering a suicidal human alive but very ill to the surface of Mars to live for a short period of time for only a couple billion dollars in development + launch costs.
Who wants to sign up? ;)
Biosphere 2 was pretty flawed but it actually did something. Even had some educational value.
This is just a scam. I think the only unknown is whether the founders believe it to be a scam or whether they're truly convinced by their own BS.
What about the prelatic, mesoperiodic, catechetic and eupotamic values of the US GDP? Should we remove them too?
Aquifers do not fill up with a single rainfall.
And farmers are used to buying water for 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than that, so what's your point?
In the US farmers buy/pump water by the "acre foot". When you're using such large measurements to describe the amount of water purchased/pumped, you know that the consumption is going to be vast. And if you're paying for that consumption with almonds, you know it's going to be cheap.
Lots of sunlight with little cloudcover, long growing seasons, and tons of water available from rivers and aquifers.
That is, until you deplete them.
While this may cause short-term fluctuations, the long-term picture will be fine. A higher price on almonds will make other global regions start growing them more. The price will come back down in 5 years or so. And that's if the water issue caused an abrupt change, more realistic is a gradual shift.
Growing water-intensive crops in the desert is a stupid, stupid thing that people have been doing way too much because there was little cost associated with depleting aquifers. Payback time for that short-term thinking is rapidly approaching to many different regions.
As for bees, well, sort of. CCD isn't a threat to the species, as one can mass-breed queens, and a new hive can be readily produced just with a queen and a handful of workers. CCD brought the average winter hive loss rate in the US from about 15% to about 30%. But honeybees themselves wouldn't be threatened even if the loss rate was 90% (not to mention that they're not even native to the US). It's just a question of how expensive it becomes to keep them; it's a cost to beekeepers.
On the other hand, pollination services are a major *profit* to beekeepers. If they lose that, then they're losing money. So even if the significant reduction in pollination services increased winter survival rates, it's still going to be a big loss to beekeepers. Which means fewer beekeepers, which means fewer hives.
On the other hand, that's probably good for local pollinators who compete with honeybees for resources...
(as a completely unrelated side note, I've been pondering a lot about how one could fight a lot of the honeybee pests and diseases that affect hives, and handle management better... I'm awfully tempted to some day try to make an electrical tomography brood frame controlled by a couple multiplexers and monitored by a raspberry pi running EIDORS or other tomography software to see what's developing, where, what's walking around on the comb, what's developing malformed, whats clearly a pest, etc, and potentially run significant current through infested cells to kill / sterilize them... you probably couldn't catch mites but hive beetles, bacterial brood infections, etc should be catchable.. the big question, apart from how easy it'd be to interpret the data, is how much of an effect the monitoring (and potentially sterilization) would have on the hive, bees can sense electric fields)
Hey, if you like consuming massive amounts of energy to produce water that costs about $0.50/m, that's your call. But water that expensive won't support water-intensive agriculture anyway, so....
You think California's water crises are just going to disappear in a decade? This is a long-term problem. The long timeframes on crop switchovers for certain types of crops is just more reason one needs to take immediate action.
And all of them will be properly handled if there's a fair market pricing for water.
Are you talking RO of salty or fresh water? Even RO of freshwater can be pretty expensive; RO of saltwater is in most places cost prohibitive (not to mention a massive energy consumer). Though there are some interesting alternative technologies which may provide for affordable desalination in the future.
Well, if we want to extend the analogy of SpaceShipTwo vs. Falcon 9 + Dragon (with delta-V as range), compared to a baseline Model S, then Virgin's car would go about 30 miles with a top speed of 20mph and would cost $750.
In short, Virgin's electric "car" would actually be an electric bike.
Same reason that he hid every last radioactive isotopes that has a half life of less than 80 million years which is not not continually produced by natural processes but left around every last isotope with a half life of greater than 700 million years.
I reject Satan and all of his works!
You would be wrong.
Um, yes we do know that they're there. There are plenty of pictures of skylight caveins and entirely collapsed tubes from satellites orbiting the moon. On Mars, too.
And would mean that earth-quality emergency medical care would be almost impossible to get.
Seriously, the last people you want to put onto a rocket and launch at several Gs up, into a high radiation environment, and then land on a desolate rock far from the rest of human society, is people who can die from hitting something too hard.
Very few volcanic pipes are diamond laden on Earth - primarily just kimberlites, which require a special type of volcano feed by very deep magma that's high in volatiles. They're almost all very old. The moon tends to be poor in volatiles and the depth requirements would be far greater to achieve the necessary pressures, at least 1/2 to 2/3rds of the way to the core.
Still, who bloody knows?
There's all sorts of gem possibilities on the moon, way too many to list here. They're probably the most valuable export-to-earth lunar resource we could mine at this point in time, as you can imagine what sort of premium the market would put on them even if they're pretty much the same as earth gems (let alone if they're mineral species not found on earth)
There's unlikely to be much in terms of heavy metal deposits, apart from asteroid finds, which doesn't sound like a market big enough to justify the expensive of the trip. Helium 3 is a total red herring. And of course your labor and hardware costs will be through the roof due to the incredible expense of shipping consumables. Isotopic Enrichment of light elements in-situ seems quite unlikely as a consequence.
Still, I can envision a market. Just any old moon rock will always have an interest from collectors who have an interest in space, and mineral collectors in general. You could probably turn a good profit on an ongoing basis for regular shipments of small volumes of samples to be sold at very high prices.
Any gemstone finds on the moon would have an additional, and much broader market, they could probably command incredible market prices. Most precious gems are made of light elements like one finds on the moon, and in processes that could readily have occurred on the moon. There probably are new gem species that never naturally occur on earth in sizeable quantities as well. A funny one would be if moonstone was found on the moon. (Na,K)AlSi3O8 and formed in plutonic felsic rock, all of the ingredients appear to be there. :)
Don't we already know that these exist?
Yeah, I can think of a ton. You're hosting a party and you discover you're out of something. You're a company who just had a critical item break and you lose money until you can get another. Your flight leaves soon and you discover that you forgot to pick up something. You're cooking a big dinner and discover that you don't have a key ingredient. And on and on, there's no end to the list.
This "it's not my typical usage needs" attitude that many here are displaying is also the problem I see with many attitudes about electric cars. "Well, I drive 300 miles every day and only have enough money to buy a used jalopy and live in an urban apartment with no electricity". Fine - then don't get a freaking EV yourself.. It doesn't mean that everyone in the world's needs are the same as yours.
Worse, what I see as a lot more likely is people who see their friend's computer left logged into FB and want to prank them... these days they usually write some sort of embarassing post or message their friends. But if they would instead write a post talking about suicide, and then use their own accounts to alert Facebook...
Believe it or not, there are other musicians in Iceland (really, not kidding!)
It's actually kind of weird the percentage of the population that are incredible musicians.
Shouldn't be surprising that they wouldn't form a coalition with the Independence or Progress parties.
The Independence Party (Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn) is basically Icelandic Republicans. It's too good of an analogy not to make. If Republicans in the US like it, they like it. They're maybe not as hard on the social conservatism, but economic, yeah, they can party with the best of them in the US Republican Party. Anti-EU.
The Progress Party (Framsóknarflokkurinn)... this is a beast that you really aren't familiar with in the US. Sometimes they're referred to as right-populism, but really I think the best way to describe them is the "Idiot Party". Generally they do terrible in the polls right up until a couple weeks before the election, when they come out with some Big, Super Plan, which basically amounts to "We're going to give you tons of money, and you're never going to have to pay for it, like ,not EVERS!" There's so little time before the election that idiots get enough time to hear about it but not enough time to hear about how utterly terrible it is, and Framsóknarflokkurinn surges in the polls... then their support quickly collapses after the election, but who cares about it then? They're in government and can enrich themselves and their friends to their heart's content. Anti-EU.
The Pirates on the other hand could easily form a coalition with a number of other parties:
Samfylkingin (not sure what the English translation for them usually is)... as much as Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn is Iceland's Republicans, these people are really Iceland's democrats: left-center pragmatists. But then again, the left in Iceland is further left than the US. Pro-EU.
Left Greens (Vinstri Grænir): Yeah, there's also a Right Greens, but they're a small party, no need to talk about them. The Left Greens are a traditional Green Party... Left-Idealists. Anti-EU.
Bright Future (Björt Framtíð): Relatively new party. They're another leftist party, with some stances matching with Samfylkingin but others matching the Left Greens. Pro-EU.
The Pirates have no pro or anti EU stance, except that people should get to vote on it. They're very much not happy with our current government's promise breaking and lawbreaking on this front. But the membership is mixed on how they'd actually vote - they just want to get a vote.
I think the Pirates would form a great part of any potential leftist coalition. They have a lot of policy blind spots where they try to avoid taking stances, but they're very hardcore on certain issues that really need an advocate.
... ar sem strax er teygjanlegt hugtak ;)
It depends on what you mean by "bay". We certainly don't name things with the word" bay", as that's an English word. But we have lots of firðir, víkur, sund.... ;)
You won't know until at least an hour or two after the official start time ;)
We already have to follow most EU rules and regulations due to being in the EFTA and other treaties. But we don't get to vote on them.
And you can lecture me about how wonderful it is to be a little country not part of some bigger entity when you have to pay 4-5% higher interest rates on home loans and pay out the nose for goods and have nobody ship to you and on and on.