Nice. An "easier" source of water is a huge bonus for the first people landing no Mars.
« the water likely has a great many salts dissolved in it »
Might be easier to get less saline ice and melt that than to desalinate saltwater.
Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
171–180 of 495 posts
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#172Earlier 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.
Eh, the military invents very few things, they mostly spend money on custom development of existing tech to make it better at killing things or facilitating the killing of things.
The car, the calculating machine, the photograph, the steam engine, the radar: none where invented by military men or even those funded by the military.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have already spent $500B on cancer research[1] and it hasn't cured. This also isn't an "either/or" proposition. As I mentioned, people travelling in space are subject to a lot of radiation which is known to cause cancer, so part of the research is going to be figuring out how to fix cells that are cancerous. Cancer is a systemic problem, it isn't measles or polio or TB. You have to understand the system in order t…
> We have already spent $500B on cancer research[1] and it hasn't cured That's a pretty absolutist statement. We've spent more preventing murder, but murder still happens. We have developed many treatments for cancer that have added many quality life years for millions of people.
I think what might be more damning is if the preventative measure for cancer is better full spectrum healthy habits
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Point is, this is one of but many causes of diseases jointly classified as "cancer". Cancers share similarities in their (visible) method of action, but they have very different causes. There isn't going to be a single cure for "cancer".
Yes, there are many causes. We are in violent agreement. If you focus on the causes, you are preventing cancer, not curing it. You are playing whack-a-mole.
LOL Seems more cost efficient long run to address lifestyle than deal with proximal consequence
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real question here is why bother spending 1% of our GDP on space exploration? What tangible benefits is it going to bring, and why are those benefits worth more than the benefit that will come from spending 1% of our GDP on something else?
The real question here is why bother spending 1% of our GDP on anything ? It's the same argument as to why we shouldn't invest in infrastructure "don't build those high speed train routes, we'll only see the benefit in 30 years" - space exploration is an investment in the future, and like a lot of investments, the potential payoff is variable but we can never know without trying. If we take a VC analogy (being here o…
CERN isn't the crazed rush that the moonshot was, it's mostly just stable funding to a certain facility.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
A thermonuclear war and the ensuing nuclear winter would shift the situation quite a bit. Which is not that far-fetched, we have the capability and have been dangerously close a couple of times.
Earth might still have stronger fundamentals, but it is good to have options. And, perhaps more importantly, technology developed in pursuit of becoming a multi-planetary species might very well help here on earth too - both in our current development path and in case of disaster.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, they compete for the same funding. We have a much more pressing issue than either: lack of working antibiotics... Cancer unsolved does not cause too many issues (it is a terrible disease nonetheless), while solving third world medical problems is mostly matter of goodwill and logistics (and comparatively cheap). But if we hit a new resistant superbug... That will decimate everywhere, everyone. Think pl…
> But if we hit a new resistant superbug... That will decimate everywhere, everyone. Think plague combined with malaria. Talking about multidrug resistant strains of bacteria. If just one becomes reasonably virulent we are really out of luck. AFAIR this is a bit of a dramatization. The primary threat of superbugs isn't a new super plague (which is unlikely). The danger is that a big part of our medicine will suddenly…
100% this, for sure. you don't have to sell me I'm a microbiologist-- my username here is a tribute to a bacterial genus that drives cholera, necrotizing fasciitis and other nasty stuff. We need new antibiotics now, and it is an economic problem at least as much as a scientific one.
The basis for my post is the implication that funding cancer research is a "waste", which I disagree with.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#178Why don't we send a rover to some of these interesting places? It seems like we're constantly making fascinating finds on Mars, then send rovers to the middle of a random rocky desert.
For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years. 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039. If we could g…
>A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date.
Why though? Doesn't seem an inherent limitation of rovers -- just the current rover design.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#179Earlier 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?
You're missing the fact that the US military is in its core a employment and social services program used extensively to create artificial jobs and artificial demand for skilled labour and high-tech products and services.
Not to mention the cultural importance that the US military as an institution has on the US, of course.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years. 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039. If we could g…
I was talking to an oncologist yesterday. Her biggest frustration is that Silicon Valley billionaires are spending billions upon billions to send things to space, when there are serious problems on Earth that could be fought, most importantly cancer. It’s hard to argue with her. $400B/yr would fund a lot of research that would benefit humanity a lot better than a coordinated mission to Mars, even though it would be v…
Stuff cancer, $400B/yr would actually let us address some of the climate change issues that we should have dealt with a decade ago.