NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars • Hacker News Board

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#281

Post by manmal » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:48 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #166

habosa wrote: post #103

In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!

Science fiction almost universally assumes the speed of light is not a hard limit. At this time we have every reason to believe that it is a limit. Our theories also say that if you were to go faster than light (which you cannot) it implies time dilation and time travel - again science fiction just assumes a loop hole so that doesn't happen. Many talk about travel at 10 times the speed of light (warp-10) as if that i…

Star Trek's warp drive actually does not necessarily move the ship at faster-than-light-speed, but by warping space-time around the ship ("warp bubble"), so only the effective distance crossed per time is faster than SoL. I'm sure many of HN's audience are already aware of that, but it's worth noting that this might in theory even be possible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

There are lots of problems with this theory, but to me it's mind blowing that it cannot be fully excluded yet. I guess we will need AI superintelligence to find out.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#282

Post by ufmace » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:50 PM UTC

thearn4 wrote: post #42

I'm a bigger fan of putting a semi-permanent ISS 2.0 on the surface of the moon vs. boots on Mars. I don't work directly in exploration systems, but I'm not the only one at NASA who feels this way. But more than anything I think we and the other executive agencies would take any strong commitment on an exploration and human spaceflight direction from congress that survives across presidential administrations over any…

I've been hoping that, whatever we end up doing, we do something that at least as a side effect, creates reusable infrastructure in space that we can continue to use for other purposes. This seems a lot better, if less glamorous, then going for a big, flashy goal, but then throwing all of the hardware away when you're done.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#283

Post by vermontdevil » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:52 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #264

habosa wrote: post #103

In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!

Why is it always an alien invasion and not just alien curiosity or scientific interest? I'm sick of this trope that all alien species must be like the worst demographic of humanity.

Reflects on how we see ourselves doesn't it?

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#284

Post by mturmon » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:55 PM UTC

boona wrote: post #63

snappyTertle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There's more important things to spend public money on at the moment (like servicing the $20T in debt). Let private companies, like SpaceX, voluntarily spend R&D on it.

Considering how little impact they've had recently with a $19 billion dollar annual budget, maybe what we're seeing is an administrative or leadership problem. It would suck for those involved if NASA got severe cuts, but in the long run the geniuses there would find jobs in the private sector like SpaceX and they could make a real difference.

Just for reference, here is the list of NASA science missions now flying: https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=Al...

The private sector would have no incentive and little ability to mount these missions.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#285

Post by lgg » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 7:58 PM UTC

wanderingjew wrote: post #212

datr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just an FYI. In Star Trek at least the warp system works like this: warp-1 is the speed of light and it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity. Source: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor

> it then increases exponentially with warp-10 being infinite velocity No, no, no. That was only in the Voyager episode Threshold . It is widely regarded as one of the worst Voyager episodes, and the entire plot of that episode doesn't make any sense. There are questions of if this episode is even canon. In any event, there are other Star Trek episodes where warp 10 is not a hard limit. All Good Things has ships trav…

No, it is actually (mostly) correct. In ST:TNG they redefined the definition such that it is infinite. It was documented in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, which was published in 1991 and was written by the technical advisors for the series, who based it if the internal series technical bibles[1]. This was a distinct change from the original TOS which they never explained or formally retconned, but for all the series in that era it holds.

That was the standard scale used ST:TNG, ST:DS9, and ST:VOY with the notable exception of All Good Things. Obviously the point was to convey to the audience "Hey look, in the future things go much faster." Unfortunately they had originally chosen a scale that doesn't make that obvious to most viewers (it is not intuitively obvious that Warp 9.999 is substantially faster than Warp 9.99[2]). At a practical level it also very inconvenient to have a speed scale where all of the speeds share the same prefix (IOW, it is much easier for the captain to call out "Warp 9" and "Warp 12" then it is is to call out "Warp 9.99" and "Warp 9.999."

I choose to believe that the in the All Good Things timeline that once Federation started building ships that consistently exceeded 9.9 they came up with a modified scale that had better resolution and was easier to use, but that doesn't change the fact that Threshold (despite being terrible) is actually consistent with the existing source content and All Good Tings is not.

1: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Gener... 2: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#286

Post by gorkonsine » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 8:03 PM UTC

bencollier49 wrote: post #234

valuearb wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you are saying if you take a massive pile of money to hire a bunch of the smartest engineers away from private companies and pay them to solve problems, they'll do it? And if NASA didn't exist, and these engineers instead worked for less bureaucratic, more entrepreneurial businesses, they'd invent nothing?

Well, one would imagine that they would instead be employed in finding new and more effective ways of making people click on adverts.

Or in finding new and effective ways of selling shares of companies for profit.

What's important is that these jobs (finance and advertising) are more valuable work to society than scientific research, as reflected in the pay differential.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#287

Post by javajosh » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 8:16 PM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #233

javajosh wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Musk and Bezos can live in a biosphere bubble on the asteroid belt maintained by an army of their (wholly-owned) mining robots. But Mars is a bad joke. It's deep in a gravity well and is a gigantic, cold Sahara dessert without breathable air. If physicists and engineers can come up with a massless drive and potent, safe energy to drive it (e.g. EmDrive powered by fusion) we cold probably send missions back and…

Most inventions are serendipitous accidents. To find valuable things that can only happen in zero or micro gravity will probably require lots of people existing and experimenting in that environment.

On it's face, that's not a terrible argument. But consider the "bet" you are making: spend like $1T on a habitable structure large enough for a good community, and then ~1B per year to operate it, in the hopes of "serendipity".

How many materials scientists (and their families) would want to live in orbit, or on the moon, in harsh, cramped conditions, with limited tools and resources?

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#288

Post by digikata » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 8:22 PM UTC

gozur88 wrote: post #163

maxxxxx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. You can see it two ways: The SLS is an embarrassment or an admission by Congress that they don't care at all about spaceflight.

It's absolutely the latter. Congress has never really cared about spaceflight - to your Congressman it's just an opportunity to bring federal dollars to his district, because that will get him reelected.

But why not make real plans and actually get something accomplished, then you can point to something truly concrete during re-election, and even bump the funding even more.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#289

Post by ethbro » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 8:28 PM UTC

okreallywtf wrote: post #240

habosa wrote: post #103

In many science fiction books we assume that if an alien planet ever got a whiff of us they'd quickly board their space ships and come see us. It's somewhat comforting to think the alien planet could also be in a perpetual bureaucratic budget crisis and they've dismantled their space program to make more room for tax cuts. Politics could save us from an alien invasion!

The reality could be a lot more melancholy. The universe is so vast and intelligent life so rare, countless species could evolve to space faring too far away from each other to ever have a chance to meet. Faint wisps of eons old radio chatter or long dead ruins might be the best we ever get but even that would be life changing.

It's inarguable that the final probability of contact is the product of a large number of non-certain events.

By that metric alone, and given that the probability of each of realistically pretty small... contact doesn't seem too likely.

Re: NASA admits it doesn’t have the funding to land humans on Mars

#290

Post by qbrass » Thu, Jul 13, 2017, 8:34 PM UTC

sqeaky wrote: post #219

pklausler wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if it would apply to all alien civilizations. The thing about Fermi's paradox is that the Universe is old and the local galaxy is big, so any explanation for the apparent absence of ETI has to cover all ETIs. It just takes one species in galactic history to reach the point of launching a self-replicating interstellar probe to produce a galaxy permanently aswarm with them. Heck, we're not that far away from being…

"in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." — Benjamin Franklin So I guess Ben just knew that aliens would never be a problem because Death and Taxes. Apparently the IRS is more powerful than Statistics and Physics.

He just assumed the aliens would either kill or tax us.