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Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#291

Post by anonytrary »

colemannugent wrote: post #103
gbugniot wrote: post #90

A note slightly related: Mars reaches perihelic opposition with the sun on July 27, 2018, which means observers on Earth will have their closest view of the planet since 2003. Great time to borrow a telescope.

Being able to see the red of Mars at night is strange. Since I (and probably most of us on HN) live in the worst area for light pollution it's not too often you can see other planets like this unaided.

Jupiter and Venus are incredibly bright, you'll be able to see them with the naked eye at night even if you're in a city.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#292

Post by squirrelicus »

ryanmercer wrote: post #36
liberte82 wrote: post #11

Why 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…

So if I'm optimistic, we could do this.

But why would we?

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#294

Post by qaq »

rsync wrote: post #279
qaq wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well name 1 other country that cab increase money supply the way FED does yet maintains the status of world's reserve currency? Luxembourg nobody cares on a global scale. Switzerland has extremely competent military and they are def. not in a position to manipulate the currency the way FED does and remain a viable financial center.

"Switzerland has extremely competent military and they are def. not in a position to manipulate the currency the way FED does and remain a viable financial center." Well, actually, since you brought it up ... The SNB has been buying euros, and other currencies (selling swiss francs) since 2011 in an effort to depress its value, which they believe is too high and hurts their exports. Here is a decent summary of the ev…

Thats an interesting read I was not aware this was done at this scale. But still hard to remove military from equation.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#295

Post by lightsighter »

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…

That's all fine and good right up until the next >=10km diameter asteroid has a collision with the Earth, in which case all those humans with cancer will be in the same state as all the humans without cancer. Given that it's been about 65 million years since the last one of these and they tend to happen about every 50 million years or so, you could argue that we are due...

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#296

Post by TangoTrotFox »

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.

You have to keep in mind we're teetering on the edge of an exponential explosion in knowledge. What's been done in decades with all of our rovers and probes on Mars could have been accomplished in a matter of days by a single human on the planet. That's not an exaggeration. For instance we're coming up on Curiosity 6th year on Mars in a couple of weeks. It's traveled, in this entire time, a bit less than 13.3 miles. There's an ongoing odometer available here [1]. And it's had some major instrumentation errors (such as with its drill) that a human could have trivially repaired on site.

Only question is how long is it going to take us to get those feet on the planet. From there? I'd expect major discoveries will be a matter of months.

[1] - http://curiosityrover.com/tracking/drivelog.html

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#298

Post by yonkshi »

adventured wrote: post #237
endymi0n wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underestimating the cost of US healthcare per capita by an extreme amount. Universal healthcare would cost a minimum of $3.6 trillion (that's an ideal scenario where the US gets its per capita spending down to other high spending nations), and a more likely ~$4.5 trillion. Higher education for all would cost at least $600 billion (close to the existing spending for all post secondary institutions annually), mo…

Would you please provide some sources on all your numbers? those are some astronomical numbers and are essential in validating your point.

Edit: I did some of my own research, UHC take 8~11% GDP in other countries. That would put us around 1.8 trillion (2016 GDP). Much less than $3.5 trillion you claimed.

Plus, US is already spending 16% of GDP (~3 trillion) on health care, despite not having universal healthcare. 11% GDP for UHC does not seem like a bad idea to me

source: https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#299

Post by joe5150 »

zaroth wrote: post #247
fucking_tragedy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point you're making is pretty pedantic considering the OP clearly recognizes that funding for universal healthcare comes from somewhere, they say as much themselves.

I mean, that was kinda the point?

"Free" as in "free at the point of use" is a well-understood concept

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#300

Post by stickfigure »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #56
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…

This is a false dichotomy that always annoys me. It is entirely possible that by spending $400B to safely send people to Mars and live there, especially in a moderately high radiation environment, that we will discover EXACTLY the mechanisms that send cells into cancer states and how to reverse that so they stop. Otherwise we're going to have colonists getting cancer and dying too quickly. Then not only do we get to…

You have that precisely backwards. The humans don't get sent to live in a high-radiation environment until we figure out hot to prevent the cancers. We're not just going to send a bunch of people to their death.

This is what irks me about "send people to Mars!" - we aren't anywhere near high enough on the technology tree to even contemplate the endeavor. Or to quote Bruce Sterling:

I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.

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