10-17% probability of cancer SOMETIME for those 25-35, and loss of fertility. Sounds perfectly doable to me.
First of all, that's about the same probability that they'll die in a voyage-related accident, as many have noted above. And this way, they still get to live for an additional 20-40 years before the die of cancer -- way better than death by explosive space-suit decompression.
Second, although the Russians send up young cosmonauts, the Americans only send up old people. No American aged 25-35 will fly to Mars. Any American Martians will be at least 45 and already have kids, thus reducing the cancer probability and neutralizing the sterility issue all in one go.
UGH! Watching that just brings home that no matter how much I might have been disappointed by the plot and dialog in Episode I, it could have been made 100,000 times worse by getting a bunch of fanboys together to make a mediocre video of how they though it SHOULD have been done.
WHAT'D WE FORGET!? Our brains are only so big... we're sure we forgot a handful of excellent gadgets. So tell us, what'd we leave off the list? We'll publish the most popular reader submissions in an upcoming issue, and we'll send the official Mobile PC Pez dispenser to the person who suggests forgotten gadget #1, along with a copy of this issue autographed by the entire staff! Send submissions (along with your full name and address) to
null@mobilepcmag.com. Remember: Nominations have to meet the criteria outlined on this page!
I'll bet! 'null' at pcmag.com? I think we all know where the 'suggestion box' chute goes to: the shredder!
I admit I didn't RTFA. 60 km/s is too fast for slowing down at Mars using atmosphere alone, you're right.
Would work at Titan, though, with its huge, puffed up atmosphere. You'd need an old-school ablative shield instead of the sissy ceramic tiles that the Shuttle uses.
Actually, it would be trivial. All you need is a heat shield.
If you go into a direct entry, i.e. you don't go into orbit around Mars first, you just hide behind your heat shield and let friction with Mars' atmosphere slow you down.
This is the method that the Space Shuttle uses to slow down to land back on Earth -- its moving at 5 miles per second, and slows down using atmospheric friction. This is how the Apollo astronauts returning from the Moon slowed down from 7 miles/second. It is how the Mars Rovers slowed down when they arrived at Mars (not sure of the closure rate), and how the Huygens probe that just landed on Titan slowed down when it got to Titan 2 weeks ago.
What's HARD is to slow down at a place WITHOUT air, like the Moon. However, since objects without air usually have lower gravities than those that do, its not as hard as trying to land on a place like Earth without air. That would be TRULY difficult.
Grad students involved in the building are now either professors or burger engineers, depending on how good they were. There are grad students that got involved in the process later (like me), but we haven't invested NEARLY the time and effort as those that have been working on this stuff since I was in Jr. High school.
> the Lunar Land tides maxed on June 3 and they do it again on July 1
Note that there is NO empirical correlation between either the intensity of lunar tides and earthquakes nor the phase of the lunar tide and earthquakes. Exhaustive scans through 50 years of data show total non-correlation.
It is possible that we may someday discover something that will allow that affects or causes earthquakes, and that we might therefore be able to predict them. However, the answer is not lunar tides, despite the number of uninformed persons who seem to think differently.
Glenn is exactly right. If you want to go to Mars, go to Mars! If you want to go to the moon to do science, then fine, but ya ain't gonna learn ANYTHING on the Moon that would help you get to Mars. Okay, maybe practice keeping space-suits clean from the nasty fine dust.
Wow, news flash, Russians land rovers on the moon 35 years ago! Well, shit, folks, that ain't exactly news. Anyone who cared enough to find out has known that since it happened.
Watch, in 35 years, some stupid kid is going to post on slashdot: "Wow, did you know that they showed Janet Jackson's boob on TV in 2004? I never knew that before!"
The water source for the Martian channels is weird. It is certainly not rain: the channels don't spread out enough and there are closed drainage systems. Planetary scientists (I am one) think that the channels might have been formed by sapping: the water comes out of the ground in a spring.
That's a good point. The real reason is that space-based nuclear reactors have been used before and a new one could be easily space-qualified, and therefore be cheaper. A nuclear rocket would take a lot of up-front development, which would be more expensive -- however, eventually I think that nuclear propulsion will be the cheapest way to Mars. Just not yet.
Also, you can launch, land, and use the reactor in an unmanned vehicle -- no shielding for astronauts necessary!
Since it just uses the CO2 from the Martian atmosphere (along with a little H2 brought from Earth), along with electrical power, to create Methane (CH4) and Oxygen (O2), it doesn't require much of a factory at all. In fact, there was a small, maybe 10 pound, demonstration version on board the Mars Polar Lander. Unfortunately that crashed in 1999, so it wasn't able to show that the process worked . . .
Anyway, there's no mining to be done. All it takes is tanks, an air fan, a little starter Hydrogen, and solar panels (though admittedly it works better with more power -- for a manned landing it would require a small nuclear reactor). You can just set the thing up, hit the 'on' switch, and wait a few months and it fuels itself up.
You can read more about this sort of thing in Robert Zubrin's book, _The_Case_for_Mars_.
You're right in that there are more and easier departure opportunities to the Moon than to Mars. However, my point is that the energy required, and thus the cost, is lower for Mars (if you use the Martian atmosphere to generate fuel at the other end).
True. However, the ability to make the fuel for the return trip ON MARS, and not to have to drag it from Earth and soft land it on the surface, more than makes up for the difference in escape velocities.
1. The moon is only 3 days away. Mars is months away. Logistically, it's easier.
Untrue. Most of the energy to get to the moon (which is proportional to the size of the rocket you need) goes into getting out of Earth's gravity well. Getting to Mars is a bit more expensive than the Moon in terms of propulsion. However, once you get to the moon, you need a big rocket to slow you down to land, and a big rocket to send you back to Earth. For Mars, you could use the atmosphere to slow down (parachute), and then produce fuel for the return trip in situ using atmospheric consituents and power from a nuclear reactor.
Bottom line is that Mars, if done right, is EASIER to get to than the Moon.
You can legally buy rocks from the moon for a buttload cheaper than $50,000 woven into plastic. Some meteorites that were collected after landing on Earth were found to have come from the moon. When a large object hits the moon, moon rocks are thrown into space and some of them land back on the Earth. This trick works for Mars, too. Here's a little piece of moon rock for under $1000, for instance.
Should what OS the candidates' websites are running determine how you should vote? Well, not directly, no, but I'm surprised at the number of posters that claim it to be utterly irrelevant. I don't think that it is.
I think that, to some degree, it reflects the style and nature of both the candidates themselves and the organizations that they have created. Bush believes in government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations; maybe he got a price break from M$ after he had Ashcroft back out of the Netscape lawsuit against them. Gephardt is a union stooge; the collective bargaining agreement with his IT staffers must have specified nothing but Windows and Microsoft Word to be used or they'd strike. Sharpton demonstrates that he is linearly independant from the other candidates by running Solaris. Dean, whose website alone made him $25M and the Democrats' front runner, has hard-core geeks and a tweaked Apache server running FreeBSD.
It may not make or break the campaign, or determine who I'm voting for, but the IT choices made by the candidades' organizations sure seem to me to be oddly appropriate based on who those people are and who they're campaigning for.
In the '80s, the Japanese announced that their national goal was to develop AI within 10 years. Obviously, their goal and reality failed to mesh. This goal seems to be the same, "wouldn't it be nice if" and then throw money at the problem. At least with going to the moon, you knew it was possible if you only threw ENOUGH money at the problem. This sounds like another goal that will be forgotten in about 20 years once they realize that its not going to happen.
According to xephem, for Magadan, Russia at Lat 59o57'N, 150o48'E on August 8 the twilight only just ends at 10PM (Sun 10 degrees below the horizon)! Why do they have the streetlights on at all before 10PM, when there's still daylight, but not after 10PM, during the few dark hours that you get there?
I'll bet after they go out the stars are incredible, though. . .
You should come by the Titan Missile Museum just south of Tucson, Arizona. The place was a working nuclear missile silo until they shut it down in the 1980s. The best part is the retired military people that give the tours that don't quite understand everything that's going on, and the propagandistic stuff they have and say (e.g. "these people kept the peace for 40 years", or "of course, now that these are decomissioned its no longer a problem").
They have gigantic 2 ton steel doors that you can close by hand, hilarious 1960s computers, and a big concrete block on the surface so that the Russian spy satellites can verify that this is NOT one of the nuclear silos that count against our treaty allotment.
Anyway, while you're there, keep in mind that the real reason the Titan II sites were decommisioned, of course, is that in the 1980s we had a breakthrough in nuclear weapons technology -- small and light bombs! Now they have smaller, cheaper, and more reliable Minuteman missiles that took their place. The danger is as real as it ever was, and actually seeing the stuff in person is both cool and gives you the willies.
Slashdot Mirror
10-17% probability of cancer SOMETIME for those 25-35, and loss of fertility. Sounds perfectly doable to me.
First of all, that's about the same probability that they'll die in a voyage-related accident, as many have noted above. And this way, they still get to live for an additional 20-40 years before the die of cancer -- way better than death by explosive space-suit decompression.
Second, although the Russians send up young cosmonauts, the Americans only send up old people. No American aged 25-35 will fly to Mars. Any American Martians will be at least 45 and already have kids, thus reducing the cancer probability and neutralizing the sterility issue all in one go.
This all sounds quite do-able. Sign me up.
I see the important central idea around Star Wars in how Darth Sidious's attempt to turn Luke, ends up saving Anakin's sole.
As I recall both of Anakin's soles got cut off along with the rest of his legs and vaporized in the lava.
In other news, Bill Gates predicts that in 10 years, cars won't need more than 640K of RAM.
UGH! Watching that just brings home that no matter how much I might have been disappointed by the plot and dialog in Episode I, it could have been made 100,000 times worse by getting a bunch of fanboys together to make a mediocre video of how they though it SHOULD have been done.
Cheers me up for EpIII, really.
I don't get it. The two pages look the same to me.
Is it the highlighting? They always do that for pages that you find in the cache.
I'll bet! 'null' at pcmag.com? I think we all know where the 'suggestion box' chute goes to: the shredder!
I admit I didn't RTFA. 60 km/s is too fast for slowing down at Mars using atmosphere alone, you're right.
Would work at Titan, though, with its huge, puffed up atmosphere. You'd need an old-school ablative shield instead of the sissy ceramic tiles that the Shuttle uses.
Actually, it would be trivial. All you need is a heat shield.
If you go into a direct entry, i.e. you don't go into orbit around Mars first, you just hide behind your heat shield and let friction with Mars' atmosphere slow you down.
This is the method that the Space Shuttle uses to slow down to land back on Earth -- its moving at 5 miles per second, and slows down using atmospheric friction. This is how the Apollo astronauts returning from the Moon slowed down from 7 miles/second. It is how the Mars Rovers slowed down when they arrived at Mars (not sure of the closure rate), and how the Huygens probe that just landed on Titan slowed down when it got to Titan 2 weeks ago.
What's HARD is to slow down at a place WITHOUT air, like the Moon. However, since objects without air usually have lower gravities than those that do, its not as hard as trying to land on a place like Earth without air. That would be TRULY difficult.
Grad students involved in the building are now either professors or burger engineers, depending on how good they were. There are grad students that got involved in the process later (like me), but we haven't invested NEARLY the time and effort as those that have been working on this stuff since I was in Jr. High school.
So, is it too early to emigrate to Mars for the next 4 years?
> the Lunar Land tides maxed on June 3 and they do it again on July 1
Note that there is NO empirical correlation between either the intensity of lunar tides and earthquakes nor the phase of the lunar tide and earthquakes. Exhaustive scans through 50 years of data show total non-correlation.
It is possible that we may someday discover something that will allow that affects or causes earthquakes, and that we might therefore be able to predict them. However, the answer is not lunar tides, despite the number of uninformed persons who seem to think differently.
Glenn is exactly right. If you want to go to Mars, go to Mars! If you want to go to the moon to do science, then fine, but ya ain't gonna learn ANYTHING on the Moon that would help you get to Mars. Okay, maybe practice keeping space-suits clean from the nasty fine dust.
Wow, news flash, Russians land rovers on the moon 35 years ago! Well, shit, folks, that ain't exactly news. Anyone who cared enough to find out has known that since it happened.
Watch, in 35 years, some stupid kid is going to post on slashdot: "Wow, did you know that they showed Janet Jackson's boob on TV in 2004? I never knew that before!"
The water source for the Martian channels is weird. It is certainly not rain: the channels don't spread out enough and there are closed drainage systems. Planetary scientists (I am one) think that the channels might have been formed by sapping: the water comes out of the ground in a spring.
That's a good point. The real reason is that space-based nuclear reactors have been used before and a new one could be easily space-qualified, and therefore be cheaper. A nuclear rocket would take a lot of up-front development, which would be more expensive -- however, eventually I think that nuclear propulsion will be the cheapest way to Mars. Just not yet.
Also, you can launch, land, and use the reactor in an unmanned vehicle -- no shielding for astronauts necessary!
Since it just uses the CO2 from the Martian atmosphere (along with a little H2 brought from Earth), along with electrical power, to create Methane (CH4) and Oxygen (O2), it doesn't require much of a factory at all. In fact, there was a small, maybe 10 pound, demonstration version on board the Mars Polar Lander. Unfortunately that crashed in 1999, so it wasn't able to show that the process worked . . . Anyway, there's no mining to be done. All it takes is tanks, an air fan, a little starter Hydrogen, and solar panels (though admittedly it works better with more power -- for a manned landing it would require a small nuclear reactor). You can just set the thing up, hit the 'on' switch, and wait a few months and it fuels itself up. You can read more about this sort of thing in Robert Zubrin's book, _The_Case_for_Mars_.
You're right in that there are more and easier departure opportunities to the Moon than to Mars. However, my point is that the energy required, and thus the cost, is lower for Mars (if you use the Martian atmosphere to generate fuel at the other end).
True. However, the ability to make the fuel for the return trip ON MARS, and not to have to drag it from Earth and soft land it on the surface, more than makes up for the difference in escape velocities.
1. The moon is only 3 days away. Mars is months away. Logistically, it's easier.
Untrue. Most of the energy to get to the moon (which is proportional to the size of the rocket you need) goes into getting out of Earth's gravity well. Getting to Mars is a bit more expensive than the Moon in terms of propulsion. However, once you get to the moon, you need a big rocket to slow you down to land, and a big rocket to send you back to Earth. For Mars, you could use the atmosphere to slow down (parachute), and then produce fuel for the return trip in situ using atmospheric consituents and power from a nuclear reactor.
Bottom line is that Mars, if done right, is EASIER to get to than the Moon.
You can legally buy rocks from the moon for a buttload cheaper than $50,000 woven into plastic. Some meteorites that were collected after landing on Earth were found to have come from the moon. When a large object hits the moon, moon rocks are thrown into space and some of them land back on the Earth. This trick works for Mars, too. Here's a little piece of moon rock for under $1000, for instance.
Should what OS the candidates' websites are running determine how you should vote? Well, not directly, no, but I'm surprised at the number of posters that claim it to be utterly irrelevant. I don't think that it is.
I think that, to some degree, it reflects the style and nature of both the candidates themselves and the organizations that they have created. Bush believes in government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations; maybe he got a price break from M$ after he had Ashcroft back out of the Netscape lawsuit against them. Gephardt is a union stooge; the collective bargaining agreement with his IT staffers must have specified nothing but Windows and Microsoft Word to be used or they'd strike. Sharpton demonstrates that he is linearly independant from the other candidates by running Solaris. Dean, whose website alone made him $25M and the Democrats' front runner, has hard-core geeks and a tweaked Apache server running FreeBSD.
It may not make or break the campaign, or determine who I'm voting for, but the IT choices made by the candidades' organizations sure seem to me to be oddly appropriate based on who those people are and who they're campaigning for.
Excellent comment, kfg, I was about to say something similar.
In the '80s, the Japanese announced that their national goal was to develop AI within 10 years. Obviously, their goal and reality failed to mesh. This goal seems to be the same, "wouldn't it be nice if" and then throw money at the problem. At least with going to the moon, you knew it was possible if you only threw ENOUGH money at the problem. This sounds like another goal that will be forgotten in about 20 years once they realize that its not going to happen.
According to xephem, for Magadan, Russia at Lat 59o57'N, 150o48'E on August 8 the twilight only just ends at 10PM (Sun 10 degrees below the horizon)! Why do they have the streetlights on at all before 10PM, when there's still daylight, but not after 10PM, during the few dark hours that you get there?
I'll bet after they go out the stars are incredible, though. . .
You should come by the Titan Missile Museum just south of Tucson, Arizona. The place was a working nuclear missile silo until they shut it down in the 1980s. The best part is the retired military people that give the tours that don't quite understand everything that's going on, and the propagandistic stuff they have and say (e.g. "these people kept the peace for 40 years", or "of course, now that these are decomissioned its no longer a problem").
They have gigantic 2 ton steel doors that you can close by hand, hilarious 1960s computers, and a big concrete block on the surface so that the Russian spy satellites can verify that this is NOT one of the nuclear silos that count against our treaty allotment.
Anyway, while you're there, keep in mind that the real reason the Titan II sites were decommisioned, of course, is that in the 1980s we had a breakthrough in nuclear weapons technology -- small and light bombs! Now they have smaller, cheaper, and more reliable Minuteman missiles that took their place. The danger is as real as it ever was, and actually seeing the stuff in person is both cool and gives you the willies.