321–330 of 495 posts
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Yet, given the last asteroid induced extinction event, the south of France, the midwest US, and the bottom of the ocean would still have been more habitable than Mars.
Not for the ones that experienced it first hand.
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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…
Per the Great Filter[0], this is really bad news, right? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
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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. So could a better rover and rovers are getting better quickly. And you could send hundreds of rovers for the cost of a manned mission.
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Or just decrease the insane US defense budget.
Can't project global power without 600 billion and god knows how much black budget money. If anything the need to project influence is rising again in a way we haven't seen since the height of the soviet union. despite the rhetoric being thrown at other NATO members right now i fully expect the budget to swell again towards 700-750 over the next two terms
Lots of people besides God know. It's 'black' because it's not specifically allocated in unclassified breakdowns. The total amount (per agency) is included in the appropriations bill.
[0] $52.6 billion in 2013 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...
[1] $81.1 billion requested in 2018 https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-admin...
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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…
I would have preferred that.
EDIT: Sure, downvote me for honestly answering a question. I don't really care about colonizing space right now, I care about a lot of other problems here on Earth. Perhaps you think that's short sighted, but I'd rather Musk have started another Simons Foundation or DESRES than SpaceX. More power to him, and I don't bear him any enmity, but I don't respect the decision.
We don't need to leave the planet to solve our current problems with overpopulation or climate change. More importantly, the reality is that the things that will kill anyone reading this are not going to be solved by going to Mars.
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> 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…
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A couple of reasons. The first is that to make a mission to Mars cost effective, we have to wait about 18 months for Earth and Mars to line up in the right positions, otherwise it costs too much in rocket fuel to be worthwhile. The second is that the missions lag behind the discoveries - it's much easier to analyze pictures and spectographs than it is to design a mission, secure funding for it, and then do it. Sendin…
We have a proven design in Spirit/Opportunity. There should be an assembly line cranking them out.
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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…
The case for Mars is that “humanity putting all of their eggs in one basket” (Earth) is the most fundamental problem of all. Everything else is a band-aid.
(Cancer can’t be cured, incidentally: https://tapas.io/episode/58081)
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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…