Beforehand, you can be assured that there were plenty of naysayers like yourself who demanded to know why you would want to have anything to do with...
That's a good thing, because otherwise society would be pulled hither and yon with every new idea, whether good, bad or indifferent.
For example, racism and the Electric Universe.
Once it was demonstrated that racism is Bad, most whites have switched -- slowly, over time -- to varying points along the spectrum from tolerance to acceptance.
Not so much on the Electric Universe theory, which is still fringe no matter how vociferous it's supporters are.
And it simply isn't. If that's not a good reason, what is?
you can bring along a relatively small mass of consumables and use them to generate a lifetime supply of oxygen from local resources.
This is the crux of the disagreement between us. You say it's hard but doable, whereas I think you're Mars mission relies on Handwavium to convert chemical transformation formulas into actual non-laboratory processes.
(This is similar to -- but on a much larger scale than -- why we don't have supersonic passenger aircraft: some problems' only solutions are sooo expensive that the problem isn't worth solving.)
A single human can easily run a cobbled-together lab
Only if the relevant "stuff" has been sent up with him.
Remember that Spock didn't actually create a tricorder interface from stone knives and bearskins. (Not that Spock actually exists, but I hope you get the point.)
the clunkiness and pre-limited capabilities of a robot.
Every rover has had more features.
In the place of the mass of water, food, fuel, etc, etc needed to keep humans alive... what' to stop us from sending multi-robot systems with even more complicated gear, with maybe a static "home base" laboratory.
The rovers would then just be collecting devices with a bunch of little boxes. Once a rover fulls all of the specimen trays, it drives back to "base", swaps it's full trays for empty trays and goes back out.
In the meantime, the laboratory system analyzes samples from multiple rovers.
when is the last time any notable portion of the population even noticed when a robot launched or landed?
Opportunity, Spirit & Rover got significant Big 5 (ABC/CBS/NBC/FNC/CNN) air time when they got to and touched down on Mars.
if we can get stuff to mars as cheaply as we currently get stuff to orbit
If "if" were a skiff, I'd be fishing. But it's not, so I'm not.
Even though it doesn't cost that much more to get a projectile whizzing towards Mars than it does to get it in LEO, that's pretty useless, and still damned expensive!
You've got to actually get something useful orbiting the planet and then successfully ease it down the Martian gravity well.
Under a *deep* -- and therefore very expensive -- gravity well.
For the rest: In-Situ Resource Utilization.
Mine it and process it?
1/3rd gravity
3/8g is a much better approximation, but that's just a quibble.
just bring a couple of shovels
*Really*?? Sigh....:(
So, 200 wheelbarrows full of rock on Earth would be like 600 wheelbarrows of rock on Mars? Get back to me when you've moved 10 wheelbarrowfulls(sp?) of rock 100 yards.
make them from local materials with the 3D-printer you brought from home
And the buttload of infrastructure to convert the local material into something usable by the 3D printer?
one guy has figured out how to make cement with all-Martian materials.
Go see how he made it. I guarantee you that there's a huge load of complex Earth infrastructure behind it which would have to be replicated on Mars.
If the construction crews wore the kind of suits that someone would wear at 115,000 ft altitude.
generated using the sabatier reaction and electrolysis, respectively
Where will all of the feed stock come from?
I've got the sneaking suspicion that lots and lots of people don't realize what a really, really deep chain of industry is required to build something as simple as a one-speed bicycle.
You don't dig caves.
My fault. Should have said "tunnels", because maybe there aren't Martian caves where we think it's best (or even "ok") to live.
And even if there are, what if they have to be extended, enlarged, strengthened, etc?
Bottom line: why would anyone live in a place that's drier and colder than the Atacama, has much less atmosphere, and is a minimum of 34M miles from everyone else? (Because of the distance and gravity, "Because it's there" is a Very Nonsensical Reason.)
Maybe, but why? There's nothing on Mars but... dust and rock. Who the hell wants to live in Antarctica-meets-Atacama-meets-115,000_foot_mountain (not that puny 35,000 foot Everest)?
Yes, because I've researched: (a) how difficult it is for humans to work in space suits, and (b) how much the human body does not like ionizing radiation, and (c) how fucking cold it is on Mars.
We'd need at least two successful Biosphere2 experiments before that will happen,
Hah.
Who builds those biospheres? Lots of people with lots of trucks and cranes. Trucks and cranes... just don't run on Mars. No oxygen.
Where do they build them? In Arizona. Nice, warm, sunny, near-to-civilization Arizona.
Not only build it in deep, frozen Antarctica, but have it succeed in deep, frozen Antarctica and then I'll be relatively impressed.
But still it won't protect people from radiation.
What, you say? Live in caves?
Digging caves is hard. It takes lots and lots of heavy machinery. Which must be transported to Mars, along with fuel and spare parts, and machine shops, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
even very smart, very successful, technologically savvy people have impossible delusions (in this case that humans can live for long periods beyond everything that we take for granted on Earth).
That's an excellent choice, if she has a gmail account. Especially if you get one with HDMI (external monitor for her older eyes) & USB jacks (external keyboard for her older hands).
As long as I can remember (that includes Captain Kangaroo and the Watergate Hearings), I've known I'm going to die, and it's never worried me that much.
No, I don't want to die, but it's gonna happen whether I want it to or not, so no use getting my tits in a twist about something I can't prevent.
There's also the case that the high price Dell is signalling that Firefox costs money and installing it is a non-trivial task, again both things that damage Mozilla's brand.
This.
My first thought is that it's either a direct MS plot, or the devious idea of an MS fan high in Dell's corporate structure.
The whole point of Bitcoin is to make a payment network -- essentially, a distributed-but-still-secure version of Paypal.
Then "they" are failing miserably.
Bitcoin -- being a cryptocurrency -- is fundamentally different from PayPal, which is a payment network sitting on top of various government fiat currencies.
Creationists want to teach their fairy tales in schools and want to make public policy based on something someone was purported to have said 2000 years ago.
The vaccines-cause-autism crowd wants to reintroduce infectious disease, and the anti-GMO crowd wants poor brown people to starve. (Of course, they don't say that, but it's the result.)
I'd rather battle creationism any day, since one is fighting a book, and the other fights the combined power of Oprah and Deepak Chopra.
Slashdot Mirror
Beforehand, you can be assured that there were plenty of naysayers like yourself who demanded to know why you would want to have anything to do with ...
That's a good thing, because otherwise society would be pulled hither and yon with every new idea, whether good, bad or indifferent.
For example, racism and the Electric Universe.
Once it was demonstrated that racism is Bad, most whites have switched -- slowly, over time -- to varying points along the spectrum from tolerance to acceptance.
Not so much on the Electric Universe theory, which is still fringe no matter how vociferous it's supporters are.
And it simply isn't. If that's not a good reason, what is?
I don't understand that response.
you can bring along a relatively small mass of consumables and use them to generate a lifetime supply of oxygen from local resources.
This is the crux of the disagreement between us. You say it's hard but doable, whereas I think you're Mars mission relies on Handwavium to convert chemical transformation formulas into actual non-laboratory processes.
(This is similar to -- but on a much larger scale than -- why we don't have supersonic passenger aircraft: some problems' only solutions are sooo expensive that the problem isn't worth solving.)
A single human can easily run a cobbled-together lab
Only if the relevant "stuff" has been sent up with him.
Remember that Spock didn't actually create a tricorder interface from stone knives and bearskins. (Not that Spock actually exists, but I hope you get the point.)
the clunkiness and pre-limited capabilities of a robot.
Every rover has had more features.
In the place of the mass of water, food, fuel, etc, etc needed to keep humans alive... what' to stop us from sending multi-robot systems with even more complicated gear, with maybe a static "home base" laboratory.
The rovers would then just be collecting devices with a bunch of little boxes. Once a rover fulls all of the specimen trays, it drives back to "base", swaps it's full trays for empty trays and goes back out.
In the meantime, the laboratory system analyzes samples from multiple rovers.
when is the last time any notable portion of the population even noticed when a robot launched or landed?
Opportunity, Spirit & Rover got significant Big 5 (ABC/CBS/NBC/FNC/CNN) air time when they got to and touched down on Mars.
if we can get stuff to mars as cheaply as we currently get stuff to orbit
If "if" were a skiff, I'd be fishing. But it's not, so I'm not.
Even though it doesn't cost that much more to get a projectile whizzing towards Mars than it does to get it in LEO, that's pretty useless, and still damned expensive!
You've got to actually get something useful orbiting the planet and then successfully ease it down the Martian gravity well.
That is the hard, expensive part.
Because nobody cares if we send yet another robot?
Eh? Really?
a radiothermal-powered Komatsu 300 would need about 368 kgs of pu-238, or about 490 kgs to have that power level 30 years out.
You'd better reopen Hanford PDQ.
why would anyone want to live in the Atacama desert? Or any desert?
I've wondered that many times, and have never come up with a good reason for why people live (as opposed to "endure in mining camps") in deserts.
Why would anyone ever need to build a boat or domesticate a horse, or cross a river, or build roads, or invent trains, or start mining for ores?
To make life less precarious, less of a drudge. Let me rephrase that: to make life easier.
Your question seems nihilistic to me.
To leap from "it's stupid to live on Mars" to "it's stupid to live at all" is... too absurd for words.
We have such a supply chain right here on Earth.
Under a *deep* -- and therefore very expensive -- gravity well.
For the rest: In-Situ Resource Utilization.
Mine it and process it?
1/3rd gravity
3/8g is a much better approximation, but that's just a quibble.
just bring a couple of shovels
*Really*?? Sigh.... :(
So, 200 wheelbarrows full of rock on Earth would be like 600 wheelbarrows of rock on Mars? Get back to me when you've moved 10 wheelbarrowfulls(sp?) of rock 100 yards.
make them from local materials with the 3D-printer you brought from home
And the buttload of infrastructure to convert the local material into something usable by the 3D printer?
one guy has figured out how to make cement with all-Martian materials.
Go see how he made it. I guarantee you that there's a huge load of complex Earth infrastructure behind it which would have to be replicated on Mars.
To just advance rocket tech, why send people? Why not bigger (or multiple) robots?
What you describe are science missions, which is kinda reasonable, since humans are much more flexible than robots.
But why not spend the money and mass required to keep humans alive on even larger and more complicated robots?
maybe even RTGs
I wouldn't get my hopes up...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Terrestrial
Maybe the Atacama desert would be better?
If the construction crews wore the kind of suits that someone would wear at 115,000 ft altitude.
generated using the sabatier reaction and electrolysis, respectively
Where will all of the feed stock come from?
I've got the sneaking suspicion that lots and lots of people don't realize what a really, really deep chain of industry is required to build something as simple as a one-speed bicycle.
You don't dig caves.
My fault. Should have said "tunnels", because maybe there aren't Martian caves where we think it's best (or even "ok") to live.
And even if there are, what if they have to be extended, enlarged, strengthened, etc?
Bottom line: why would anyone live in a place that's drier and colder than the Atacama, has much less atmosphere, and is a minimum of 34M miles from everyone else? (Because of the distance and gravity, "Because it's there" is a Very Nonsensical Reason.)
Maybe, but why? There's nothing on Mars but... dust and rock. Who the hell wants to live in Antarctica-meets-Atacama-meets-115,000_foot_mountain (not that puny 35,000 foot Everest)?
Really, that's the bottom line.
Are you sure that's delusional?
Yes, because I've researched:
(a) how difficult it is for humans to work in space suits, and
(b) how much the human body does not like ionizing radiation, and
(c) how fucking cold it is on Mars.
We'd need at least two successful Biosphere2 experiments before that will happen,
Hah.
Who builds those biospheres? Lots of people with lots of trucks and cranes. Trucks and cranes... just don't run on Mars. No oxygen.
Where do they build them? In Arizona. Nice, warm, sunny, near-to-civilization Arizona.
Not only build it in deep, frozen Antarctica, but have it succeed in deep, frozen Antarctica and then I'll be relatively impressed.
But still it won't protect people from radiation.
What, you say? Live in caves?
Digging caves is hard. It takes lots and lots of heavy machinery. Which must be transported to Mars, along with fuel and spare parts, and machine shops, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
Howard Hughes had plenty of successful aeronautical and electronics companies, but still went mad.
(Not saying that EM will...)
even very smart, very successful, technologically savvy people have impossible delusions (in this case that humans can live for long periods beyond everything that we take for granted on Earth).
That's an excellent choice, if she has a gmail account. Especially if you get one with HDMI (external monitor for her older eyes) & USB jacks (external keyboard for her older hands).
Xubuntu would also be a good choice...
about my death?
As long as I can remember (that includes Captain Kangaroo and the Watergate Hearings), I've known I'm going to die, and it's never worried me that much.
No, I don't want to die, but it's gonna happen whether I want it to or not, so no use getting my tits in a twist about something I can't prevent.
A sample size of 12 is ridiculously small.
With controversial topics, you have to start somewhere, and that place is always small.
Then you maybe go on to the bigger studies.
There's also the case that the high price Dell is signalling that Firefox costs money and installing it is a non-trivial task, again both things that damage Mozilla's brand.
This.
My first thought is that it's either a direct MS plot, or the devious idea of an MS fan high in Dell's corporate structure.
exacerbated physicist
I think you meant "exasperated physicist".
For one thing, string theory will probably need to be scrapped.
Electric Universe FTW!!!
I'd tell my kids, but with the strict warning about the dire consequences of breaking the agreement.
Or they could have told her to keep her God damned trap shut for once in her life.
Are we sure those aren't her grandparents?
Or is he her stepfather? 'Cause if I were her stepfather, she'd be sleeping at her bio-father's house tonight...
No, we want some assurances they've done real safety testing instead of just assuming
How "some" is "some"?
The whole point of Bitcoin is to make a payment network -- essentially, a distributed-but-still-secure version of Paypal.
Then "they" are failing miserably.
Bitcoin -- being a cryptocurrency -- is fundamentally different from PayPal, which is a payment network sitting on top of various government fiat currencies.
Creationists want to teach their fairy tales in schools and want to make public policy based on something someone was purported to have said 2000 years ago.
The vaccines-cause-autism crowd wants to reintroduce infectious disease, and the anti-GMO crowd wants poor brown people to starve. (Of course, they don't say that, but it's the result.)
I'd rather battle creationism any day, since one is fighting a book, and the other fights the combined power of Oprah and Deepak Chopra.