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Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#371

Post by stickfigure »

jpatokal wrote: post #357
stickfigure wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mar…

Um, we have settled the Gobi Desert and there's plenty of ways to make it pay, most notably this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyu_Tolgoi_mine

This is a good illustration of what Charlie Stross says:

But even so, when you get down to it, there's not really any economically viable activity on the horizon for people to engage in that would require them to settle on a planet or asteroid and live there for the rest of their lives. In general, when we need to extract resources from a hostile environment we tend to build infrastructure to exploit them (such as oil platforms) but we don't exactly scurry to move our families there. Rather, crews go out to work a long shift, then return home to take their leave. After all, there's no _there_ there — just a howling wilderness of north Atlantic gales and frigid water that will kill you within five minutes of exposure. And that, I submit, is the closest metaphor we'll find for interplanetary colonization. Most of the heavy lifting more than a million kilometres from Earth will be done by robots, overseen by human supervisors who will be itching to get home and spend their hardship pay.

This is not "settling" the Gobi desert any more than manning an oil rig is settling the north atlantic.

Much more well-reasoned detail here:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#372

Post by tbabb »

henryaj wrote: post #316

Per the Great Filter[0], this is really bad news, right? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

Everything about the Drake Equation, the Great Filter, and the Fermi "paradox" strike me as extremely sloppy logic, from which nothing but unfounded conclusions can be drawn.

We have essentially zero data on the prevalence of life in the universe. There is no "absence of life" to explain, because we don't actually know whether life is absent. We more or less completely lack the scientific capability to detect extrasolar life entirely, and have only limited data about life within the solar system-- we have not checked deep in Mars' crust, which will be a comfortable 72F at some depth (and has a good probability of being wet there, too); nor have we checked the oceans of Europa or Enceladus; nor have we checked the methane seas of Titan. We have no datapoints. There is nothing to extrapolate. There is nothing to say. We don't know anything. Anything but the null hypothesis here is bad science.

I also don't think the absence of life on Mars (if it is indeed absent of life, and there are no microbes in deep aquifers) would present trouble, because the surface of Mars is uninhabitable even by Earth standards-- it is far worse than even the most hostile parts of Earth, which are nearly devoid of life despite there being about 4.5 billion years for complex life to evolve into those niches, with the leg-up of a more hospitable start. If there were forests at the top of Everest, I might have an easier time wondering why the bone-dry, -200F, 0.006 atm surface of Mars appears sterile, but given where life has a hard time reaching here on Earth, really no one should be surprised at all.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#373

Post by [deleted] »

mercutio2 wrote: post #362
Aloisius wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) Mmm. No. In 2016, government spending on healthcare would have been lowered by $435 billion and covered every single American if we somehow had transplanted Canada's healthcare system and costs to the US. Total healthcare spending (including co-pay and w…

“If we somehow transplanted Canada’s healthcare system and costs” Get back to me when you’ve convinced US healthcare workers to take a 30-50% pay cut. Until then, US healthcare will remain more expensive than developed countries that don’t routinely compensate doctors and nurses at the level we do.

[deleted]

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#374

Post by aaroninsf »

mercutio2 wrote: post #362
Aloisius wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) Mmm. No. In 2016, government spending on healthcare would have been lowered by $435 billion and covered every single American if we somehow had transplanted Canada's healthcare system and costs to the US. Total healthcare spending (including co-pay and w…

“If we somehow transplanted Canada’s healthcare system and costs” Get back to me when you’ve convinced US healthcare workers to take a 30-50% pay cut. Until then, US healthcare will remain more expensive than developed countries that don’t routinely compensate doctors and nurses at the level we do.

This is incorrect.

The cost of care in this country is not a function of salary; it's a function of grotesque inefficiencies in the system.

When I dug into this during the attempt to repeal the ACA, what I found was the US pays 50% to many times more per capita for much worse outcomes than any other first world nation, with comparisons against Japan being particularly bleak.

Furthermore, that is the result of systemic inefficiencies here resulting from, in a nutshell, protected oligopolies and preservation of profits.

One underreported aspect of the ACA was that in order to secure recalcitrant GOP votes, the Democrats essentially caved on everything other their mandatory features–namely, on allowing the GOP to engineer in changes written by the health care industry and IMO extorted at gunpoint.

The result has been clear, the industry has enjoyed record profits since the ACA passed. So much so that one of the problems with the attempt to appeal it or weaken it was that the GOP and its industry interest groups had already gotten most of the things on their wish list.

The worst part of this trainwreck is that for much more money, we enjoy far worse outcomes when you consider most any metric that matters to people: life expectancy, infant mortality, incidence of chronic disease, incidence of disruptive mental illness, incidence of opiate addiction, and so on. In all of these we trail not only the rest of the first world but many countries in the developing world.

There are other factors such as a diet and lifestyle distorted by e.g. the sugar lobby, but even when you 'correct' for those things, the quality of service we get does not make for healthy or happy citizens.

Then add the likelihood of personal bankruptcy or financial ruin as the result of carefully engineered carefully obscured limitations on coverage.

None of this is particularly hidden or hard to uncover; it's just utterly obscured by GOP empty distracting whipping horse talking points and scare tactics.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#375

Post by DoreenMichele »

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…

A lot of research discoveries and new products have come out of both military needs and space programs. In fact, the horrors of war have a long historical association with medical discoveries and medical progress.

I wish life worked like you think it does. But I have no reason to believe it actually does.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#376

Post by vehementi »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #286
omegaworks wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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..."

So? You say that like repetition means it's necessarily a nonsensical droning of idiots. Maybe the reason people always respond with that is that they have a point. Dr. Zubrin doesn't make any compelling points there sadly. There is a ton of "real science" to do here at a wildly better cost-benefit ratio.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#377

Post by api_or_ipa »

AstralStorm wrote: post #130
beamatronic wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a proven design in Spirit/Opportunity. There should be an assembly line cranking them out.

And rockets too, while firing 30 at the same time for redundancy? This is not a valid argument at all. You need different designs that will not fall in the same way. We could e.g. send Lockheed, United Space, SpaceX, Russian, ESA and CSA designs for all of the components at the same time, then it is perhaps possible that at least one week make it. The cost will be huge though.

> while firing 30 at the same time for redundancy?

I presume this is a reference to the failed N1 project with it's 30 NK-33 engines? To be fair, the N1 rocket didn't fail because of it's engines, it failed because of numerous organizational failures, including a ruthlessly rushed design process, lack of funding, and most importantly, the death of it's chief engineer, Korolev. The NK-33 rockets were basically the only part of the rocket that actually survived the program-- they're a big part of the current Soyuz stack if I recall.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#378

Post by alifpunk »

Have a little more faith in the people running these missions than that. The landing spots for any missions we send over are chosn very carefully and with a lot of thought. There are specific goals for any mission and the landing sites are chosen based on those in mind.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#379

Post by Jedd »

ivm wrote: post #361
throwawaymath wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can't know for sure, of course, but who were would have preferred Elon Musk start a cancer research firm instead of SpaceX? 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 Foundatio…

Hey, you are not alone, I would prefer solving Earth's problems too. The downvotes for simply having another vision of a better future are silly.

> The downvotes for simply having another vision of a better future are silly.

It's hubris to declare that your vision inherently provides a better future.

Happily you are completely free to start your own project(s) to 'solve Earth's problems' too -- it won't get in the way of what others (in this case, Musk) is doing, and you can look forward to basking in the glory of curing cancer, etc.

Unless the problem is that other people aren't working exclusively on the things that are important to you?

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#380

Post by toomanybeersies »

01100011 wrote: post #352
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could we get the same kinds of spin-off technologies if we reallocated NASA's budget to prioritize technology development over, say, planetary exploration? Not really. The private sector is really good at technology development , i.e. take an idea and figure out how to mass produce it at low cost. What you want government funding for is fundamental research. Which space is good at because of the constraints. Normal…

Maybe you misunderstood me or I wasn't clear. What I'm saying is to let NASA keep the money but shift focus towards general technological development, ala Australia's CSIRO. NASA's budget is relatively tiny, especially when compared to the military industrial complex(sure, a lot of that is just benefits for troops, but still).

That's basically what DARPA is, isn't it? Except that DARPA is focussed towards military applications.
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