Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars • Hacker News Board

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#281

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

forapurpose wrote: post #119

ChuckMcM wrote: post #94

Earlier 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 agree, both that it is absolutist and that we've spent more on preventing murder. What is the common thread to both of these absolutist comments? Both cancer and murder are systems in crisis, not 'things' in their own right. They have the same questions

1a) What causes a cell to decide live forever (metastasize)?

1b) What causes a person to decide that killing another person is the solution to some problem?

2a) How can we detect a cell that is about to metastasize? How can we stop it?

2b) How can we detect a person that is about to murder? How can we stop them?

3a) What would have to be true for cancer to never be the cause of death ever again?

3b) What would have to be true for murder to never be the cause of death ever again?

See? Both are systems where individual elements within the system have decided to work against the system rather than within its constructs.

There is no drug, no treatment, that will 'cure' cancer until we understand exactly what is going on in a cell that knocks it out of line. And there will be no end to murder until we understand exactly what is going on inside a person's head when they decide that is the correct course of action. Everything we do on these two fronts (cancer, and murder) are delaying actions to minimize their impact on the greater whole.

The other part that some people have assumed (but the GP did not) is that spending this money on Mars exploration would reduce the amount of money that is currently allocated to cancer research. It wouldn't, it was specified as 'new funds'.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#282

Post by bamboozled » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

remote_phone wrote: post #43

ryanmercer wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

Or, just get 2% over 5 years from top 5 ranked nations by GDP for both endeavours ? Doesn’t seem ridiculous to me?

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#283

Post by the8472 » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:09 PM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #83

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says 1.5 km down. I'd expect there to be significant pressure down there. Enough to make it liquid at -10C? I suspect so, but I'm not an expert on the pressure gradient on Mars...

Mars only has a surface gravity of about 3.71m/s^2 compared to Earth's 9.81m/s^2. This means that 1.5km of ice will just create something like 0.38 times the pressure the same column of ice of the same density would create here on Earth. If this ice were densely packed, the mass of a 1m^2 column of ice that high would be a bit less than 1400 tons. This creates a pressure of 5.1MPa or around 51 bar. Now if I could get…

The melting point does not really budge much for standard water.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Phase_di...

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#284

Post by jchrisa » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:12 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #185

remote_phone wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An oncologist wishing more money was spent on cancer? In other news, water is wet. First of all, the optimal place for me to spend my money is not necessarily the optimal place for someone else to spend theirs. We can't know for sure, of course, but who were would have preferred Elon Musk start a cancer research firm instead of SpaceX? Secondly, there is no universal "cancer" that we can fight. There are hundreds of…

It's also worth noting that an all-out effort to help humans thrive in the harsh environment of interplanetary space might have a nice side benefit of curing cancer.

Don't underestimate the power of poetry. In the 60s we used the poetics of the moon landing to fund research. This was an innovation, in that previously we could only get that kind of money together for war projects.

So I see space as the poetics that saves us from spending all our money on war.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#285

Post by xvector » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:12 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #193

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Eventually the Earth is going to be hit by an asteroid or cooked by the sun. It's an eventuality that on cosmic timescales is going to happen sooner rather than later. Getting mankind off of Earth and spread across multiple planets and solar system will yield untold positive side effects, and one or more of those may impact cancer research. More cancer research is not going to stop an asteroid.

> Getting mankind off of Earth and spread across multiple planets and solar system will yield untold positive side effects, and one or more of those may impact cancer research.

And yet perhaps one of the blocks with modern science is people hitting the grave before they can finish innovative research. It takes at least 26 years to train a human from scratch to advance to basic research level in a field. You can add another 10, 20 years before proficiency. At least half the human life until total proficiency (as it stands) is reached and perhaps a quarter of the human life for which researchers can make meaningful contributions.

Arguably, focusing on problems on Earth - like eliminating mortality, solving longevity, curing cancer and dealing with death - will do more for our species long-term than exploring space right now. When your scientists live longer, more discoveries, contributions, and innovations can be made.

Spending $400B on dealing with the greatest tragedies and sources of sorrow known to mankind today - death, disease, illness - would be far preferable to most people than investing in space.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#286

Post by thaumaturgy » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:12 PM UTC

omegaworks wrote: post #275

thaumaturgy wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some modern thinking has confused self-loathing and careful introspection. There were a great many things that could have, or arguably should have, been done differently in the past, but many of those things were done in the context and to the standards of the day. The transgressions of the past resulted in a technologically advanced society. Introspection considers this and asks, "what should we do differently in th…

You're presenting an either/or scenario where none was proposed by the poster you were responding to. The thread began begging the wealthiest countries on the planet to contribute a significant amount of that wealth toward space exploration. No one here is making the argument that we should spend no money on space exploration. People are simply arguing against spending significantly more on it when we have more press…

The person I responded to, in the part that I quoted, brought up people without electricity and plumbing as a contrast to spending efforts on exploration. It looks like an either/or to me.

> People are simply arguing against spending more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with.

But this argument happens every time the issue of funding space exploration comes up. Every single time. Without fail. Not a single time is there a proposed NASA budget without part of the discussion devolving into, "why don't we just hand the money out to the poor instead?" Not a single time do the risks and costs of SpaceX, or a new satellite, or the rovers, or the ISS, or other efforts get discussed without someone saying, "but cancer..."

This is a line of thinking which scrutinizes every single dollar spent on exploration. Left unchallenged, it would eventually halt all spending on exploration altogether.

I, and a lot of other people -- like the person at the top of this thread -- believe that exploring Mars is not just worthwhile, it's necessary, in spite of the many other people on Earth who have more immediate needs.

Dr. Robert Zubrin argued that case far more eloquently than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#287

Post by civility » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:18 PM UTC

bvc35 wrote: post #166

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but to quote the annoyingly semi-reasonable creationist Ken Ham: “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.” (Note: I am not a creationist, I do agree with the logic of that argument, but I also see no scientific basis for any religious origin story of life to have more scientific basis than others). We have recreated the conditions that predate life and found that organic molecules were formed, but we’ve never ob…

You see a man lying still on the ground, blood pooling around his body, and a woman standing close by gripping a knife with bloody hands. What happened? “We weren’t there. We didn’t observe it.”

She tried to save his life by removing the knife, then she went in to shock? Probably not the explanation you had in mind. This is not a good metaphor.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#288

Post by xvector » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

Mahn wrote: post #72

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…

> What I'm more upset about is people spending obscene fortunes on Farmville, World of Warcraft gold, Candy Crush EleventeenNinenty4 Now With Extra Bedazzle, Fortnight etc. Energy, agriculture, medical, space are often neglected in favor of the iPad fruit of the month app of the week. It is extremely frustrating. I'd like to think that this is a transfer of wealth from idle hands to productive hands, since I have to…

> have to assume that at least a portion of the business owners behind those cash machines you mention won't just sit on a montain of money, but rather reinvest it in something.

Of course they reinvest it in something. They reinvest it in the same trivial businesses - Farmville, Candy Crush, etc. It's a self-perpetuating cycle of inanity.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#289

Post by ada1981 » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:21 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #246

evanlivingston wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the dialogue quoted here demonstrates the underlying issue that is lost in futurist thought. No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with powerful technology traveled west and stole land from other groups of people. They also traveled south and east and used that technical and economic power to enslave other humans and forced them to develop the west. Development and progress for progress' sake…

Some modern thinking has confused self-loathing and careful introspection. There were a great many things that could have, or arguably should have, been done differently in the past, but many of those things were done in the context and to the standards of the day. The transgressions of the past resulted in a technologically advanced society. Introspection considers this and asks, "what should we do differently in th…

Certainly we ought to solve global hunger and access to water before spending trillions of dollars to go find water on mars.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#290

Post by xvector » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 8:23 PM UTC

megaman22 wrote: post #60

remote_phone wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fighting cancer is being the little Dutch boy sticking your finger in a dam. Adding a decade or so at the end of people's lives is great, but bodies break down, and you're going to be fighting a constant rear-guard action. Getting off this rock is the first step towards getting all of our eggs out of one basket.

And this is why we need to approach the problem with the general view of fighting death. Whether it's simulating the human brain or eliminating cancer, the most important thing is stopping life from ending and enabling people to live happy and productive lives for as long as they please.