Where's the profit in landing on Mars? Remember, you've got to cover your $100B+ costs, first. (A lot more than that, actually, unless you "borrow" a lot of NASA facilities like service and launch infrastructure, the DSN, etc.)
Oh man, I've not waited so eagerly for a film since, ooh, Matrix Reloaded, or Phantom Menace... or possibly Scanner, Darkly.
This is not a good sign.
Why, oh why, are all the films of Alan Moore stories made to date been so lame? (Let's see, Constantine - total turkey; V for Vendetta - probably the least bad so far, scrupulously faithful to surface texture whilst completely missing the point; League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - almost as bad as Constantine;... From Hell - well I've not seen that, but as us cricket fans would say, it returned to the pavilion without troubling the scorer.
I know he's got his name pulled for reasons of principle, but really if it were purely down to "how good a film is it?" that would also be a good move.
If anyone out there's only seen the crappy films but not read the books, do yourself a favour and pick them up. Start with Watchmen. It's one of those works that seems to get more relevant every year.
Personally, I'm waiting for "D.R. And Quinch" or "Halo Jones" to be filmed =)
Sadly, a joke is all that this story is. It's nonsense, as anyone with sophomore chemistry and the ability to google up the quantities of CO2 we're talking about could tell you.
As I said, your lack of awareness of this fundamental problem in soft landings at Mars demonstrates that you know nothing about it. Sorry about that. Let me elucidate.
The problem is that MSL is the top of the range of masses that can be aerobraked down to the speed where parachutes doen't instantly shred themselves. By the time you've got down below Mach 5, you're too close to the ground to shed the rest of your velocity. Instead you rely on lithobraking. Now, with a great deal of effort, it's possible to make simple electro-mechanical devices that can survive that sort of deceleration; humans, however, are notorious for going all squishy when you subject them to tens of Gs, let alone hundreds or thousands. It's quite bad for us, in fact. And that is just one example of where the laws of physics make even a manned landing on Mars very, very difficult. In my opinion it's IN PRACTICAL TERMS impossible with today's technology. 2030? Don't make me laugh.
And don't confuse an Apollo-style landing, shovel up rocks, clicky-clicky, salute the flag, take-off again event with colonisation. A colony has to be self-sufficient.
O rilly? Where are they, then? They're not even in LEO, let alone on Mars. They're stuck down here on good ol' Terra with the rest of us.
A very few are actually doing some great work in private-funded launch, it even looks like SpaceX may have a viable LEO launcher, which'd be great. But there's a market for that vehicle at that cost (to launch satellites), and I don't see many people queuing up to may $50m plus for a one-way ride to orbit on non-man-rated launcher. (Yes Viginia, once you get there you have to stay alive and then land safely. You will note that there is virtually no experience with these problems outside state-sponsored national space programmes, ie the USA, Russia and (just) China. Even ESA haven't got a man-rated launcher yet, officially.
Yes, if very large sums were thrown at it, MSR is do-able. (This is a different discussion altogether from manned colonisation, of course.) Personally I'd be delighted if it happened. However I think the 2020/22 window is looking pretty unlikely at this point. Given that the US economy is going down the toilet and the need to slash government spending (whoops, except that politically sensitive defense budget of course) - and the size of the technological challenge - and the length of time needed to develop, in particular, a Mars ascent vehicle - and, well, just don't get your hopes up is my advice.
Laws of physics forbid humanity or at least enough of it to go somewhere else?
Yes, that's right. For any realistic value of the return and the cost, permanent colonisation of other planets is impossible, in the absence of a magic-wand technology providing free energy.
You dismiss my assertion as tripe, then attempt to demonstrate that by resorting to magic wand technological solutions. If it's a simple question of engineering, why hasn't it happened yet? Don't give me "politicians" or "whining ecofreaks" - if there was cheap energy to be had that easily, we'd have done it by now. And as there's no sign of anything like that happening even now, when energy prices just went up by an order of magnitude, doesn't that tell you something?
travel within the solar system will be effectively unlimited in an easily forseeable future. It's a sure bet.
Care to put some actual folding cash money behind that?
Why yes, that's a fantastic idea; we'll just re-liquify the core and spin it back up. It's just a trivial matter of concentrating several magnitudes more energy than that generated by the whole of humanity in recorded history, in the middle of Mars. So what do you reckon, you think 2020 looks like a good aim point? 2050?
Are you aware that if we were to do a MSR (sample return) mission, the earliest possible launch opportunity is 2020/2022? There's considerable doubt whether anyone will evenpropose such a thing, for complicated technical reasons you can google up for yourself. But you think that three years after that, we're going to put humans on Mars.
(1) and (2) are given. On (3) you are stonkingly, incredibly, stupefyingly wrong. You couldn't be more wrong if you'd set out to be Captain Wrong. (It's the "technologies" bit.) For starters, could you explain your solution to the Mach 5 problem? (No, I know you don't know what that is, I'm using it to illustrate my point, vis., that you are talking bollocks about something you know nothing about. Now go away and google and read for a few years.
People's desires to live apart don't trump the laws of physics I'm afraid.
The technology you speak of IS a magic wand, not only by today's technological standards, but because of the laws of physics. Yes, yes, there are still some fundamental problems in physics remaining to be solved. I will grant you that if some super-Witten unifies relativity and The Quantum ((tm) pterry) and somehow finds a source of infinite free energy, lots of things become possible including colonising Mars, turning Pluto into a giant theme park, building a ring world, yadda yadda. However that chances of that happening are vanishingly miniscule. Much much less than my chance of winning the lottery (and I don't play the lottery.)
No. If you wield a magic wand and warm the planet to the point that the polar caps and underground ice melts, you've only got a few thousand / tens of thousands of years before it's all boiled off into space. Low gravity, no core magnetic field.
The gist is that as the atmosphere was stripped away and the grew too cold and low pressure for surface liquid water to persist for long enough to cause obvious landforms, it was going into underground aquifers and ice deposits. Every now and then a big transient source of heat (volcanic eruptions or magma plumes in the mantle, and impacts, basically) deliver a big pulse of thermal energy that melts a large quantity of water. Result, landforms like canyons, areas with very large boulders that were carried from "upstream" by the floods, etc. There are other causitive agents, eg collapse of crater-rim walls releasing lake water, ice damn collapse, Milankovic cycles warming areas, polar wander... (and if the new idea about the lowlands results from a gargantuan impact are correct, it seems likely that the upper crust migrated significantly over the planet to reach an equilibrium position with the lowlands at one pole or the other, the Tharsis bulge (Olympus Mons et al) near the equator, etc.
Look, we are never, never, ever going to "colonise" Mars. There's no reason to do it except SF fantasy wish fulfillment or too much time spent watching scientifically nonsensical films and books. IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. James van Allen was right. There's no reason to go there when we can do anything humans can do with robots for a thousandth of the cost and risk. Yes, it's "slower" than spending a couple of hundred billion dollars over 20 years, but so what? Mars has been there for 4000,000,000 years; it's not going anywhere.
If you're very very lucky, your children or grandchilden may live long enough to see a manned landing; personally, I very much doubt it. Hmmm, I must get round to setting up that thingy on longbets.org...
...vast regions of Mars contained rivers and lakes...
This has been OLD NEWS since the Viking orbiters, more than thirty years ago, though thanks to the demands of the mass media, the goldfish-like attention spans of the general public and the rigours of academic tenure, publishing, and funding rounds (not to mention PR teams at academic institutions, who often seem to know jack shit about the subject they're writing a press release on) it gets recycled every time there's a water-related Mars discovery. I'm sure I've seen three or four water-related stories based on MER (rover) research, then there's the Mars Express data, Mars Odyssey's spectrometer data (hint: why do you think Phoenix happened to land somewhere where there's water ice 5cm below the surface - luck?). Oh yeah and of course Phoenix is just about to drop ice scrapings into the TEGA oven and cook out any water, carbonates, in fact everything else that vaporises at less than 1000 degrees C.
The significant aspects of the two new papers (one in Nature, on in Nature Geoscience) are indeed the phyllosilicates, more commonly known as clay minerals. (if you're thinking of the clay in your back garden, imagine it after lying in an Antarctic dry valley for a three plus billion years, in a near vacuum, and hammered with UV. To the layperson this is what Arthur Dent would have identified thusly: "well, it's rock, isn't it?" It adds to the evidence for medium-term (up to 10^6 years) periods of free-standing or flowing water on the surface at essentially every scale, from regional morphology such as flash flood outflow channels, river deltas, coastlines and the like down to rock formations that are clearly indurated, contain silica minerals (google 'Spirit Tyrone') or haematite (blueberries, which are concretions formed in water-saturated rocks) and vugs (voids left by water-soluble crystals.) When you wet particular kinds of rocks that Mars is known to have a lot of, you get clays (phyllosilicates) as a result.
By the way the NASA image isn't
"colour enhanced"
-- that's CRISM data overlaid on a visible-wavelengths image. (CRISM is a spectrometer and is the instrument that ID'd these minerals.)
...standing pools, which are conducive to the formation of basic organic matter.
This statement is, uh, mistaken. What it's getting at is the notion that long periods of exposure to water is generally considered to be probably very very important if not essential to early life. ("organic matter" would be anything with a carbon atom in it, e.g. coal, plastic, methane, oil... it's one of those words that means something totally different in particular scientific context. Like "metals" (tho' that means at leat three different things to different sciences...)
Much much more at a popular search engine near you.
I don't know why you find it so funny, that's the best advice going for a workaround, until the vendors have a patch. See the Vixie story linked above. Unless you'd prefer to push hosts files to all your users every morning?
You are right, of course, (another alternative is a patched BIND outside your broken f/w), but somehow I doubt many Windows-only shops are going to get far building an OpenBSD-based NATing pf config from scratch in the next week or two.
It's not just public-facing DNS servers that are vulnerable. Think about it. Dr Evil spams your entire company with a web-bug infested mail, or just a link to the domain he wants to poison. Ten seconds later he starts flinging spoofed poison DNS responses at the outside of your NAT (if you have one.) Result: misery!
That's good to know; after I reported it to CERT, Checkpoint and Cisco, following Tom Cross' XForce blog posting, the only replies I've had were an auto-responder from CERT and an automated "mail loop detected, aborting processing" alert from the bowels of Cisco. (I've also seen Vixie say CERT are working on a bulletin.) Mebbe someone else had reported it to them first. *shrug*
FWIW we're slaving internal DNS off patched external servers for external lookups. Apparently Windows 2000 DNS/DCs can't do that.
Slashdot Mirror
There is cheap energy to be had easily.
OK, I stopped reading there, because you're either an idiot or delusional.
It will be private enterprise.
Where's the profit in landing on Mars? Remember, you've got to cover your $100B+ costs, first. (A lot more than that, actually, unless you "borrow" a lot of NASA facilities like service and launch infrastructure, the DSN, etc.)
Oh man, I've not waited so eagerly for a film since, ooh, Matrix Reloaded, or Phantom Menace... or possibly Scanner, Darkly.
This is not a good sign.
Why, oh why, are all the films of Alan Moore stories made to date been so lame? (Let's see, Constantine - total turkey; V for Vendetta - probably the least bad so far, scrupulously faithful to surface texture whilst completely missing the point; League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - almost as bad as Constantine;... From Hell - well I've not seen that, but as us cricket fans would say, it returned to the pavilion without troubling the scorer.
I know he's got his name pulled for reasons of principle, but really if it were purely down to "how good a film is it?" that would also be a good move.
If anyone out there's only seen the crappy films but not read the books, do yourself a favour and pick them up. Start with Watchmen. It's one of those works that seems to get more relevant every year.
Personally, I'm waiting for "D.R. And Quinch" or "Halo Jones" to be filmed =)
Sadly, a joke is all that this story is. It's nonsense, as anyone with sophomore chemistry and the ability to google up the quantities of CO2 we're talking about could tell you.
Results 1 - 10 of about 173,000 for mars mach 5.
As I said, your lack of awareness of this fundamental problem in soft landings at Mars demonstrates that you know nothing about it. Sorry about that. Let me elucidate.
The problem is that MSL is the top of the range of masses that can be aerobraked down to the speed where parachutes doen't instantly shred themselves. By the time you've got down below Mach 5, you're too close to the ground to shed the rest of your velocity. Instead you rely on lithobraking. Now, with a great deal of effort, it's possible to make simple electro-mechanical devices that can survive that sort of deceleration; humans, however, are notorious for going all squishy when you subject them to tens of Gs, let alone hundreds or thousands. It's quite bad for us, in fact. And that is just one example of where the laws of physics make even a manned landing on Mars very, very difficult. In my opinion it's IN PRACTICAL TERMS impossible with today's technology. 2030? Don't make me laugh.
And don't confuse an Apollo-style landing, shovel up rocks, clicky-clicky, salute the flag, take-off again event with colonisation. A colony has to be self-sufficient.
O rilly? Where are they, then? They're not even in LEO, let alone on Mars. They're stuck down here on good ol' Terra with the rest of us. A very few are actually doing some great work in private-funded launch, it even looks like SpaceX may have a viable LEO launcher, which'd be great. But there's a market for that vehicle at that cost (to launch satellites), and I don't see many people queuing up to may $50m plus for a one-way ride to orbit on non-man-rated launcher. (Yes Viginia, once you get there you have to stay alive and then land safely. You will note that there is virtually no experience with these problems outside state-sponsored national space programmes, ie the USA, Russia and (just) China. Even ESA haven't got a man-rated launcher yet, officially.
Yes, if very large sums were thrown at it, MSR is do-able. (This is a different discussion altogether from manned colonisation, of course.) Personally I'd be delighted if it happened. However I think the 2020/22 window is looking pretty unlikely at this point. Given that the US economy is going down the toilet and the need to slash government spending (whoops, except that politically sensitive defense budget of course) - and the size of the technological challenge - and the length of time needed to develop, in particular, a Mars ascent vehicle - and, well, just don't get your hopes up is my advice.
Laws of physics forbid humanity or at least enough of it to go somewhere else?
Yes, that's right. For any realistic value of the return and the cost, permanent colonisation of other planets is impossible, in the absence of a magic-wand technology providing free energy.
You dismiss my assertion as tripe, then attempt to demonstrate that by resorting to magic wand technological solutions. If it's a simple question of engineering, why hasn't it happened yet? Don't give me "politicians" or "whining ecofreaks" - if there was cheap energy to be had that easily, we'd have done it by now. And as there's no sign of anything like that happening even now, when energy prices just went up by an order of magnitude, doesn't that tell you something?
travel within the solar system will be effectively unlimited in an easily forseeable future. It's a sure bet.
Care to put some actual folding cash money behind that?
...an old staple of science fiction. Why haven't these come to fruition?
I think you just answered your own question.
What makes you think the laws of physics owe humanity a "backup for earth"?
Why yes, that's a fantastic idea; we'll just re-liquify the core and spin it back up. It's just a trivial matter of concentrating several magnitudes more energy than that generated by the whole of humanity in recorded history, in the middle of Mars. So what do you reckon, you think 2020 looks like a good aim point? 2050?
I think that we will be there by 2025.
fsm give me strength...
Are you aware that if we were to do a MSR (sample return) mission, the earliest possible launch opportunity is 2020/2022? There's considerable doubt whether anyone will evenpropose such a thing, for complicated technical reasons you can google up for yourself. But you think that three years after that, we're going to put humans on Mars.
(1) and (2) are given. On (3) you are stonkingly, incredibly, stupefyingly wrong. You couldn't be more wrong if you'd set out to be Captain Wrong. (It's the "technologies" bit.) For starters, could you explain your solution to the Mach 5 problem? (No, I know you don't know what that is, I'm using it to illustrate my point, vis., that you are talking bollocks about something you know nothing about. Now go away and google and read for a few years.
Those people weren't experts, even in the laws of science as understood at the time. They were idiots. Remember what Sagan said about Bozo the Clown?
People's desires to live apart don't trump the laws of physics I'm afraid.
The technology you speak of IS a magic wand, not only by today's technological standards, but because of the laws of physics. Yes, yes, there are still some fundamental problems in physics remaining to be solved. I will grant you that if some super-Witten unifies relativity and The Quantum ((tm) pterry) and somehow finds a source of infinite free energy, lots of things become possible including colonising Mars, turning Pluto into a giant theme park, building a ring world, yadda yadda. However that chances of that happening are vanishingly miniscule. Much much less than my chance of winning the lottery (and I don't play the lottery.)
No. If you wield a magic wand and warm the planet to the point that the polar caps and underground ice melts, you've only got a few thousand / tens of thousands of years before it's all boiled off into space. Low gravity, no core magnetic field.
But what are the net benefits to mankind from the expansion of billions of dollars in Mar exploration?
By the way, I think you'll find there's an "S" at the end of "Mars".
The gist is that as the atmosphere was stripped away and the grew too cold and low pressure for surface liquid water to persist for long enough to cause obvious landforms, it was going into underground aquifers and ice deposits. Every now and then a big transient source of heat (volcanic eruptions or magma plumes in the mantle, and impacts, basically) deliver a big pulse of thermal energy that melts a large quantity of water. Result, landforms like canyons, areas with very large boulders that were carried from "upstream" by the floods, etc. There are other causitive agents, eg collapse of crater-rim walls releasing lake water, ice damn collapse, Milankovic cycles warming areas, polar wander... (and if the new idea about the lowlands results from a gargantuan impact are correct, it seems likely that the upper crust migrated significantly over the planet to reach an equilibrium position with the lowlands at one pole or the other, the Tharsis bulge (Olympus Mons et al) near the equator, etc.
our inevitable colonisation of Mars
Look, we are never, never, ever going to "colonise" Mars. There's no reason to do it except SF fantasy wish fulfillment or too much time spent watching scientifically nonsensical films and books. IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. James van Allen was right. There's no reason to go there when we can do anything humans can do with robots for a thousandth of the cost and risk. Yes, it's "slower" than spending a couple of hundred billion dollars over 20 years, but so what? Mars has been there for 4000,000,000 years; it's not going anywhere.
If you're very very lucky, your children or grandchilden may live long enough to see a manned landing; personally, I very much doubt it. Hmmm, I must get round to setting up that thingy on longbets.org ...
"'scuse me, 'scuse me, officer JPLNazi coming though... "
...vast regions of Mars contained rivers and lakes...
This has been OLD NEWS since the Viking orbiters, more than thirty years ago, though thanks to the demands of the mass media, the goldfish-like attention spans of the general public and the rigours of academic tenure, publishing, and funding rounds (not to mention PR teams at academic institutions, who often seem to know jack shit about the subject they're writing a press release on) it gets recycled every time there's a water-related Mars discovery. I'm sure I've seen three or four water-related stories based on MER (rover) research, then there's the Mars Express data, Mars Odyssey's spectrometer data (hint: why do you think Phoenix happened to land somewhere where there's water ice 5cm below the surface - luck?). Oh yeah and of course Phoenix is just about to drop ice scrapings into the TEGA oven and cook out any water, carbonates, in fact everything else that vaporises at less than 1000 degrees C.
The significant aspects of the two new papers (one in Nature, on in Nature Geoscience) are indeed the phyllosilicates, more commonly known as clay minerals. (if you're thinking of the clay in your back garden, imagine it after lying in an Antarctic dry valley for a three plus billion years, in a near vacuum, and hammered with UV. To the layperson this is what Arthur Dent would have identified thusly: "well, it's rock, isn't it?" It adds to the evidence for medium-term (up to 10^6 years) periods of free-standing or flowing water on the surface at essentially every scale, from regional morphology such as flash flood outflow channels, river deltas, coastlines and the like down to rock formations that are clearly indurated, contain silica minerals (google 'Spirit Tyrone') or haematite (blueberries, which are concretions formed in water-saturated rocks) and vugs (voids left by water-soluble crystals.) When you wet particular kinds of rocks that Mars is known to have a lot of, you get clays (phyllosilicates) as a result.
By the way the NASA image isn't
"colour enhanced"
-- that's CRISM data overlaid on a visible-wavelengths image. (CRISM is a spectrometer and is the instrument that ID'd these minerals.)
...standing pools, which are conducive to the formation of basic organic matter.
This statement is, uh, mistaken. What it's getting at is the notion that long periods of exposure to water is generally considered to be probably very very important if not essential to early life. ("organic matter" would be anything with a carbon atom in it, e.g. coal, plastic, methane, oil... it's one of those words that means something totally different in particular scientific context. Like "metals" (tho' that means at leat three different things to different sciences...)
Much much more at a popular search engine near you.
I don't know why you find it so funny, that's the best advice going for a workaround, until the vendors have a patch. See the Vixie story linked above. Unless you'd prefer to push hosts files to all your users every morning?
You are right, of course, (another alternative is a patched BIND outside your broken f/w), but somehow I doubt many Windows-only shops are going to get far building an OpenBSD-based NATing pf config from scratch in the next week or two.
It's not just public-facing DNS servers that are vulnerable. Think about it. Dr Evil spams your entire company with a web-bug infested mail, or just a link to the domain he wants to poison. Ten seconds later he starts flinging spoofed poison DNS responses at the outside of your NAT (if you have one.) Result: misery!
That's good to know; after I reported it to CERT, Checkpoint and Cisco, following Tom Cross' XForce blog posting, the only replies I've had were an auto-responder from CERT and an automated "mail loop detected, aborting processing" alert from the bowels of Cisco. (I've also seen Vixie say CERT are working on a bulletin.) Mebbe someone else had reported it to them first. *shrug*
FWIW we're slaving internal DNS off patched external servers for external lookups. Apparently Windows 2000 DNS/DCs can't do that.