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Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#401

Post by Jedd »

ivm wrote: post #400
Jedd wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't say that, I said that there are different visions of a better future. You agreed with GP who stated they would prefer Elon Musk had started a cancer research firm instead of SpaceX, and you said 'I would prefer solving Earth's problems too'. (Personally I'd prefer cancer research wasn't conducted by 'a firm' at all, but that's aside.) What was the 'better' in reference to a 'better future' mean?

Better than now.

> Better than now.

Aha, so you weren't comparing different futures, you were comparing now to a type of future that you weren't committing to (and certainly weren't suggesting a future with Musk running a cancer-curing-firm would be better than a future with Musk not curing cancer for profit).

Perhaps you can understand why I was confused.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#402

Post by darpa_escapee »

mighty_atomic_c wrote: post #397
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.

It is a matter of order. First, we learn how to terraform ourselves out of our inadvertent unhelpful terraflopping, then we use that learning to terraform anywhere we go. :)

Or we can look at thousands of years of human history, where we stripmined and trashed where we ate and slept, and then moved on to the next place just to do the same to it.

Each day, we're given the choice to change the way we relate to the resources at our disposal. I haven't seen any evidence that the incentives which drive us to cause great harm have gone away. On the contrary, the evidence I have seen points to those destructive incentives as being the driving force behind space colonization.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#403

Post by opportune »

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…

>If we don't get people living and populating on other planets, the human species is doomed.

It's probably significantly cheaper to transition to fully carbon-neutral, non-polluting energy sources and infrastructure than it is to create a self-sustaining colony on the moon or mars. Space isn't going anywhere, and even if this delayed space exploration by a few decades, the odds of an event out of human control destroying us in that time are extremely slim.

And yes, many people would rather money be spent on cancer research, or better yet, alleviating poverty. Plus, it is certainly possible for general cancer therapies to exist and work, such as gene therapy or drugs that prevent metastasis. But this is a false dichotomy anyway - money could just as easily come from government debt, higher taxes, a shift away from luxury spending/goods, etc.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#404

Post by pmoriarty »

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…

"there is no universal "cancer" that we can fight. There are hundreds of different types, just as distinct as different diseases."

There's no universal bacterial infection, there are hundreds or even thousands of different types, yet antibiotic drugs have been effective for a wide range of diseases, and have probably saved billions of lives since their discovery.

Of course, those drugs are becoming less effective since they've been so overused, and we need new ones. But the pharmaceutical companies aren't too keen on developing new antibiotics because it's not profitable for them -- just the kind of thing that a big monetary investment can significantly help.

So, would you maybe like a few more classes of antibiotic drugs, which could potentially save the lives of billions more people, or would you like to go back to the days when a paper cut on your finger could kill you but we might potentially get a tiny, fragile colony on Mars?

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#405

Post by opportune »

zackmorris wrote: post #139
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.

Ya my feeling at this point is that there is likely primitive life on every planet having liquid water, which means at least one moon around every gas giant, which means nearly every star which has gas giants (not even counting planets in habitable zones). So that part of the Drake equation is covered, but intelligent life could still be rare. I just imagine the odds of a planet-sized petri dish not evolving life in…

I don't think liquid water is sufficient by itself - first, aside from water, life as we know it requires some source of energy. Since surface water seems much less common than subsurface water, that means life will need to get energy from some sort of chemical process similar to the bacteria that live around hydrothermal vents. That means those vents need to exist in the first place, and need to expel sufficient chemicals for energy creation.

There also may need to be some source of extremely high bursts of energy such as lightning, to create the compounds that are precursors to life (amino acids, RNA, etc.), and those bursts must also not be so frequent/widespread that they kill all life.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#406

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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).

> What I'm saying is to let NASA keep the money but shift focus towards general technological development, ala Australia's CSIRO.

You actually have to go to Mars or there is no impetus to invent the technology required to go to Mars.

Without that you have two problems.

The first is that there is no goal, so nobody knows what to work towards, so you get undirected research that never goes anywhere. This is the problem the NIH and NSF have -- they fund a lot of research and 5% of it is brilliant but 95% of it is not.

The second is that there are other goals, but they're pedestrian. So there is money and somebody figures out how to divert it to their own business, and it ends up funding research that would have otherwise been done by the private sector if those companies' lobbyists hadn't figured out how to get the government to foot the bill instead. Which doesn't grow the pie at all, it just transfers tax money to well-heeled companies with good lobbyists.

Plus, I mean, we get to go to Mars. How is that not awesome enough to justify <1% of the federal budget? Spend a different <1% of the federal budget on the thing you wanted.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#407

Post by ivm »

Jedd wrote: post #401
ivm wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than now.

> Better than now. Aha, so you weren't comparing different futures, you were comparing now to a type of future that you weren't committing to (and certainly weren't suggesting a future with Musk running a cancer-curing-firm would be better than a future with Musk not curing cancer for profit). Perhaps you can understand why I was confused.

Yep, sorry for the confusing wording.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#408

Post by monadgonad »

robotrout wrote: post #358
bordercases wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother did get breast cancer and it went into remission partially by increasing the quality of her lifestyle during and after treatment, as mandated by a pilot study she went through to help assess such an intervention. The lifestyle change was more extreme than what we would have considered necessary before her cancer, but doing cardiovascular exercise every day is already known as having an influence on bodily i…

Nice that your mom got better with her breast cancer. I'm sure you know that a lot of breast cancer "survivors" are victims of an over hyped mammogram screening that calls any lump, no matter how slow growing, "cancer". Whether that's what your mom had or not, it's still scary though. [1] My mom died of ovarian cancer after living a lifestyle that even you would approve of. Victim shaming pisses me off. Shaming the v…

> Victim shaming pisses me off.

Yet you’re going right ahead and assuming that someone else’s experience is not _real_ cancer because they survived it and your mom didn’t? You really don’t have the right to be calling anyone else an asshole.

> and neither is minimizing people who actually search for cures rather than preaching lifestyle.

It seems like your feelings about your mom are preventing you from thinking objectively about this. Lifestyle can be a cure as well as a preventative, an extremely effective one, but that’s often overlooked because it’s easier and more profitable to get someone to take pills than it is for them to change all their dietary and exercise habits. Attitudes like yours, that say it’s wrong to call it anyone’s fault, really don’t help.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#409

Post by Whitestrake »

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…

Dismissing an argument because it's often repeated by many people sounds like you're making an argument against popularity, maybe even a fallacy fallacy.

Other than the link at the end of your post, I don't think anything you said actually challenges the opposing argument.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#410

Post by jibal »

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.

The water's a mile down. Duh. Here's a clue for you: the people who make these decisions as to where to send rovers are intelligent. That's why their choices aren't the choices you would make.
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