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Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#131

Post by iamforreal »

ryanmercer wrote: post #99
harperlee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we're quickly screwing this planet I'd love to see humans achieve interplanetary colonization in my lifespan, but that one is a lame reason: as much as we hurt Earth, it will remain much more habitable than Mars.

> but that one is a lame reason: as much as we hurt Earth, it will remain much more habitable than Mars If we stopped using all fossil fuels TODAY (as well as eliminated the cattle and hog industries), as in every single person on the planet, it would a few thousand years to return to pre-industrial revolution levels of CO2. We're realistically looking at a MINIMUM of 6ft increase in sea level before the end of the c…

A supervolcano eruption, nuclear winter, or large asteroid impact would still leave the earth more habitable than Mars.

We're a long way from being Venus

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#132

Post by larkeith »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #54
walrus01 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a rover that can drill more than a few inches deep is presently a huge technical challenge. If you look at drill rigs used by humans for water wells and such, the rover will need to be 8x larger and heavier than the current Curiosity.

>If you look at drill rigs used by humans for water wells and such, the rover will need to be 8x larger and heavier than the current Curiosity. Not necessarily. The hole will be stationary relative to Mars so you could just send a little base station with radio and power that drops a paper towel roll sized module with an unspooling data/power link cable and your science stuff into the ice. It can either bore its way…

Huh, that's a good point - a large enough RTG on a data uplink cable would make its own way down through the ice, given time. There would be a lot of crosscontamination between the various ice layers and the lake though, so that's unlikely to fly (or sink, as the case may be).

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#133

Post by TeMPOraL »

harperlee wrote: post #57
ryanmercer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is going into biotech fortunately though. Sam Altman started nudging YC towards biotech a few years ago (one article example https://www.wired.com/2015/11/y-combinator-sam-altman-interv... ) and to date has funded the following companies directly involved in cancer research and treatement: Cambridge Cancer Genomics, Oncobox, Mednet, HistoWiz, Luminist, iSono Health, Notable Labs. And I agree, cancer needs figur…

> we're quickly screwing this planet I'd love to see humans achieve interplanetary colonization in my lifespan, but that one is a lame reason: as much as we hurt Earth, it will remain much more habitable than Mars.

Indeed. Through development of space colonization technologies also gives us an on-Earth backup. Whatever habitats we could put on Mars, it will be much easier to put them here, and isolate ourselves from the effects of environmental devastation we caused.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#134

Post by AstralStorm »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #28
walrus01 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building a rover that can drill more than a few inches deep is presently a huge technical challenge. If you look at drill rigs used by humans for water wells and such, the rover will need to be 8x larger and heavier than the current Curiosity.

See: Armageddon, the movie. Maybe we just need to go full Bruce Willis. Somebody get Ben Affleck to sing Leaving on a Jet Plane . In seriousness, it sounds like a fascinating problem. If anyone has seen the drills they use to make holes for piles for new condo/office towers—they're probably wider than needed in this case (not actually sure of that)— the drill (bit?) is extendable, but the rig itself is enormous. Thos…

Use a digging rig combined with multiple explosive charges perhaps. Essentially a small shape charge version of solid boosters will work.

It would be similar to preparing a shallow mine.

After the hole is made you get to clean it up to obtain decent samples though.

Whether this would save size or mass is to be seen, a digging drone would preferably be small though very sturdy and dense to survive landslides.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#135

Post by wilsonnb2 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #118
wilsonnb2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also entirely possible that the cure for all forms of cancer is a diet consisting entirely of frosted flakes, and that spending $400B researching the effects of all-cereal diets would also discover the cure for cancer. However, it's far more likely that $400B in cancer research will do more for curing cancer than hoping for side effects from $400B in other research.

There are about a thousand things you use and benefit from everyday that were side effects of other research and spending (primarily military). But you take them for granted and so it is easy for you to make value judgments regarding how money is spent.

> But you take them for granted and so it is easy for you to make value judgments regarding how money is spent.

It's rude to make such assumptions about me. I do not take the positive side effects from research for granted.

You simply haven't made a case showing why $400B in space research will generate more or better positive side effects than $400B in cancer research.

All research will have side effects that can't be anticipated. It's stupid to perform research with "random, unknowable" side positive side effects as a primary justification.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#136

Post by TeMPOraL »

AstralStorm wrote: post #117
Gravityloss wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or better robots. Not more expensive ones but more launches and faster progress. One would need to iterate and tolerate some failure.

The problem is that any launch to Mars is going to be really expensive, even if you adopt the cheapest known means (currently owned by SpaceX). It might be actually cheaper to solve ancillary problems and actually send humans one than say try 20 unmanned missions... With more benefits too.

Or to send more people to the Moon, push the research on in-space manufacturing and bootstrap some semblance of economy in cislunar space. This seems like the most reasonable way to escape the trap of expensive space missions you mention.

The trap goes like this: launches are expensive, so let's get more bang for the buck by putting more stuff in a single mission; this makes mission both more expensive (insurance) and preparations take much longer; this decreases the frequency of launches, which increases their costs.

Getting some production upwell (fuel, vehicle hulls) would decrease cost of launches, allowing for more frequent and simpler missions, and hopefully break us out of this trap.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#137

Post by ryanmercer »

iamforreal wrote: post #131
ryanmercer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that one is a lame reason: as much as we hurt Earth, it will remain much more habitable than Mars If we stopped using all fossil fuels TODAY (as well as eliminated the cattle and hog industries), as in every single person on the planet, it would a few thousand years to return to pre-industrial revolution levels of CO2. We're realistically looking at a MINIMUM of 6ft increase in sea level before the end of the c…

A supervolcano eruption, nuclear winter, or large asteroid impact would still leave the earth more habitable than Mars. We're a long way from being Venus

Tech developed for off-world colonies can be used on earth...

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#138

Post by nrclark »

softawre wrote: post #85
zilian wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a mainstream argument against space exploration. We could then apply it to, "we could try to feed everybody before developing new medication for the rich"... We can tackle many problems at once and we have to ask ourselves : what's the goal of humanity ? Also : are we safe forever on Earth ?

> are we safe forever on Earth ? and that's why Mars exploration is more important than curing cancer. Cancer is unlikely to kill everyone of us all at once.

There's almost nothing we could do to this planet which would make Mars a more attractive option. I guess there's always a meteor/comet risk, but practically anything else still leaves Earth as a better option.

Even if we all had to live in bio-domes because the planet was so polluted, it would _still_ be a better option than Mars, just by virtue of the fact that we have gravity and an atmosphere. On Mars, a cracked bio-dome means everybody dies. On Earth, you could probably just go fix it.

Earth has:

  - Gravity
  - Much better temperatures compared to Mars
  - A moderately-pressurized atmosphere
  - Water (even if it's salty/polluted)

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#139

Post by zackmorris »

mFixman wrote: post #23

20 years ago it would have been unthinkable to find water in any other planet in the solar system. Mark my words: in 20 years, we'll find extremely simple proto-bacterial life in Mars and in many other planets.

Ya my feeling at this point is that there is likely primitive life on every planet having liquid water, which means at least one moon around every gas giant, which means nearly every star which has gas giants (not even counting planets in habitable zones). So that part of the Drake equation is covered, but intelligent life could still be rare.

I just imagine the odds of a planet-sized petri dish not evolving life in billions of years, and I certainly wouldn't take that bet!

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#140

Post by [deleted] »

endymi0n wrote: post #76
russellbeattie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if we in the U.S. stopped killing people in senseless wars, we could use some of the trillions we spend on that to both fund medical research and fly to Mars. But that's obviously a fantasy.

Then again, for the 700 billion dollars defense budget you'd get free universal healthcare and higher education for all of the US — AND would still have a few dozen billions to spare on cancer and Mars expeditions... but who in their right mind would want that?

[deleted]
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