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Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#381

Post by BurningFrog »

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.

If I understand the Science article¹ right, this lake is 1.5 km beneath the surface. That's a lot of digging when you can't go buy a new shovel.

Besides the fact it was only discovered right now, that is.

¹ The two-way pulse travel time between the surface and basal echoes can be used to estimate the depth of the subsurface reflector and map the basal topography. Assuming an average signal velocity of 170 m/μs within the SPLD, close to that of water ice (20), the depth of the basal reflector is about 1.5 km below the surface

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#382

Post by ivm »

Jedd wrote: post #379
ivm wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> your vision inherently provides a better future

I didn't say that, I said that there are different visions of a better future.

I also didn't say that I have a problem here, only that I would prefer things going another way.

You are attacking a comment I didn't write and had no intention to write.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#383

Post by lxmorj »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #198
Reedx wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an amusing thought. Scientist A: "So... where should we send the rover, this marvel of technology?" Scientist B: "How about a random boring spot?" Scientist A: "Sounds good!" (repeat)

That's literally how the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field photo came to be. They pointed the Hubble to the most boring spot on the sky they could find, just to see what's there.

I mean sure, but they can just re-aim that...

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#384

Post by lxmorj »

walrus01 wrote: post #15
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.

Building a rover that can drill more than a few inches deep is presently a huge technical challenge. If you look at drill rigs used by humans for water wells and such, the rover will need to be 8x larger and heavier than the current Curiosity.

Not contesting the point, but shouldn't Martian rock be significantly less dense due to less gravitational compression?

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#385

Post by RaceWon »

evanlivingston wrote: post #209
pc86 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

Of course predatory mammals pioneered the West. Like all predatory mammals; we went in search of better hunting, better hunting grounds and better mates.

We still do that today. Imo we will still do that 10,000 years from now... because deep down we are what we are.

Edit: We're even "worse" than I gave us credit for.

"https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34011026"

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#387

Post by dionna767675 »

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Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#388

Post by xelxebar »

tbabb wrote: post #372
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 extraso…

To my mind, the Fermi Paradox isn't so much about explaining an absence of life. It's the simple observation that, if life were abundant in the universe, the naïve expectation is that we'd see it everywhere, but we don't, so what gives?

Intuitively, I see it like a bunch of homemade pickles. Say we have 100 jars of homemade pickles but are not sure whether they actually picked nicely or spoiled. If we try a jar and it's bad, we'd probably expect that a lot of the jars have gone bad.

That said, the anthropic principle complicates this intuition. Our sun isn't a random star that happens to harbor life; since we're sapiently asking this question, it's guaranteed to harbor life.

It's almost as if someome tested our pickle jars for us and then just told us that at least one of them was spoiled. In this case, "what is the likely number of bad pickle jars?"

Anyway, the discussion gets even more nuanced and interesting once we start thinking about the likely futures of human civilization, and factoring that into the mix, but I'll stop here.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#389

Post by watwat1 »

vehementi wrote: post #376
thaumaturgy wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

It absolutely is a mindless babbling of idiots. Myopic, virtue signalling empty shells of human beings to be more precise.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#390

Post by watwat1 »

civilitty wrote: post #355
omegaworks wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a mandate to solve the climate issue and create a sustainable economy on this planet. We humans have a biological human desire to remain alive and eat food. I would argue that that is a stronger innate, biological human desire needed for basic evolutionary survival then that for exploration.

> We humans have a biological human desire to remain alive and eat food. Humans have a biological desire for exploration because it is critical to remaining alive and finding food. Humans are such a physically weak species with such a long child raising process that we could not have survived any other way. Exploration is how you survive when apex predators grow out of control, forcing you to move to a safer region.…

Thank you. It’s sad the fundamental truth of your comment will be lost on so many here.
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