If I really wanted mankind to invest more money into exploring Mars, I wonder what the best approach would be. What do y'all think?
1. Make enough money to invest your own capital/start your own company. (Ex: Elon Musk) AKA Do it yourself.
2. Go into politics and get enough support to start a campaign? AKA Get the government to do it.
3. Other?
Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
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Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#452Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#453Earlier 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…
It's also worth noting that an all-out effort to help humans thrive in the harsh environment of interplanetary space might have a nice side benefit of curing cancer. Don't underestimate the power of poetry. In the 60s we used the poetics of the moon landing to fund research. This was an innovation, in that previously we could only get that kind of money together for war projects. So I see space as the poetics that sa…
>his was an innovation, in that previously we could only get that kind of money together for war projects. So I see space as the poetics that saves us from spending all our money on war.
Hang on, you actually believe that the space program wasn't a "war project"? LMAO, I honestly envy your delusion.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% this, for sure. you don't have to sell me I'm a microbiologist-- my username here is a tribute to a bacterial genus that drives cholera, necrotizing fasciitis and other nasty stuff. We need new antibiotics now, and it is an economic problem at least as much as a scientific one. The basis for my post is the implication that funding cancer research is a "waste", which I disagree with.
since you're a microbiologist : is the threat to health you describe that bad ? I mean, when I read you, it's Michael Crichton level dystopia stuff.
Michael Crichton/Outbreak type stuff isn't what scares me. It is going into a hospital for a routine hernia surgery or dental surgery and getting an infection that responds to nothing. It could happen right now, but is unlikely. The chances will increase as antibiotic resistance spreads. It's not people screaming in the streets, it a more gradual change to a new normal where routine care may no longer be routine, with maybe occasional bursts of incidence at some hospital or other. There will be a lag-time to making new antibiotics, and honestly it's not now an area of focus for Pharma for economic reasons.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#455Earlier 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…
TL:DR; Your oncologist friend does't understand science or that money doesn't buy solutions or guarantee a linear speedup of results.
There's always going to be problems and no matter what problem you're invested in, someone has a more dire problem that they think all the money and resources should be spent on.
And the thing your oncologist friend needs to realize is that throwing more money at a problem doesn't yield better results. We could spend every penny the Earth spends on space for the next 50 years and not get a solution any faster than the current level of research.
The other issue is this, what's so special about space? Cancer has been with us since forever. What if instead of investing in computers, we spent all that money on cancer research. What if instead of investing in electricity we had spent all that money on cancer research? What if instead of investing in exploring the world, we spent all that money on cancer research.
We could walk back through history and smack down every sort of human endeavor not directly related to cancer research and criticize it as a waste of time compared to any problem someone feels is more important and needs immediate attention. If we did that we'd still be in the stone age and that's not going to help solve serious problems.
Some of it is that it's not always apparent what benefits we'll gain in the long term from unrelated fields of research and discovery. What did electricity do for cancer research in 1882? Not a damn thing. But in 2018 it powers computers and labs worldwide that help us make huge advancements, cure people, increase life expectency. Who could have imagined that in 1882 though? But I am sure people lined up by the truckload to poo poo electricity as a waste of time when there's "real" problems to solve.
What did digital computers do for cancer research in the 1940's? Probably not a damn thing and it was decades before they were powerful enough, available enough, and cheap enough to become the backbone for research of all kinds. We've probably learned more and made more advancements in cancer research thanks to computers in the last 40 years than the last 40,000 years. Seems worthwhile to me.
We can't predict what avenues of research and exploration will lead us to the knowledge that changes the world. Yeah, it may not always be obvious and not everything happens on the immediate timescale that we would like or hope for. But it is shortsighted and hopelessly naive to say, "this will never have a benefit the problems I care about so we should abandon it, clearly it's a waste of time."
>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 very exciting to see in my lifetime.
How about this: A manned mission to mars has serious hurdles relating to human survivability. The unprotected radiation exposure on the trip and on Mars would certainly have affects leading, among other things, higher cancer rates among astronauts. These are problems we're aware of and need to be solved. And what if that effort leads to serious breakthroughs in cancer research or prevention? And we know space travel has serious effects on the human body, if we study that and gain a better understanding of the human body as a result that would have a hard time not having benefits for cancer research, a subject largely centered around a problem with the function of the human body in certain cases.
There's all sorts of ways manned space travel can lead to benefits for all mankind.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still not sure how many planets can form life. We think you need water, certain gases, a stable temperature, magnetosphere to block solar radiation, planet like Jupiter to absorb asteroid like impacts...etc. I'm not sure if Mars ever had all that.
That predicate falsey assumes "life" can only survive in earth like conditions
Nope. I said we "think". So far we have only one data point. No idea if right or wrong :).
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's very tough to explain to someone who hasn't worked on large multidisciplinary projects with mandates to push some sort of boundaries like in exploration, science, and technology. This isn't some theoretical discussion by futurists, there is ample evidence that these kinds of ventures have systemic effects that touch literally every person, socioeconomic class, and daily activity. Academia and private industry ha…
Mandates are cool! Now, given the choice of all the possible mandates (go to mars, fix the environment, fix politics, cure some type(s) of cancer, address aging, fix food distribution, etc.) can you show your work behind why the mandate of going to mars would be the best?
Surely fixing politics, for example, would have a multiplying effect on the efficiency of everything else we do and would just accidentally bring up the living standards of millions of people.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#458Why 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 starters this lake is 2km beneath the surface of the ice cap...
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#459Earlier 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…
> 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…
Asteroid. Clathrate gun hypothesis. One-in-a-billion solar event. Planet-wide nuclear war. Random destabilization of the Earth's core.
There are a lot of things that wouldn't kill you on Mars.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#460Earlier 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…
>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 destro…
There are a whole lot of reasons why space exploration could help the poor. Off the top of my head: infrastructure spending and asteroid mining.