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Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
#22The sex issue is just frivolous. E.g. I haven't had anything but rejection from a woman in three years, I'm perfectly healthy and functional, and I'm not being carefully chosen for one of the most groundbreaking missions for the human race.
Yes but I guess the women who rejected you don't live in the same house as you do. Imagine living in close quarters with a bunch of people and some of them are having sex while you don't. You'd have to seclude yourself from them to suppress your feelings and then the whole project would go south.
My guess is that the entire crew will be on some sort of antidepressant to reduce their libido and also the potential for "space madness".
Re: Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
#23Alternative Solution (to all of the above): Build better robots. As in, hard AI. Has the additional advantage of allowing exploration of not only Mars, but every other body in the solar system, and at not much greater a cost. Potentially even other stars. Also improves nearly every other aspect of human existence.
Re: Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
#24I never understood why we abandoned the Moon. It’s only three days away compared to the eight months it takes to get to Mars and it also has water. We should first establish a base on Moon and then venture on to other planets.
There are two schools of thought on how we should approach manned Mars exploration: 1. The incremental approach, the NASA favorite, the outrageous proposal that got dismissed due to budget costs. It involves build a base in orbit or on the moon and using it as a relay between Mars and Earth. 2. Mars Direct. Reducing a lot of the complexity of the incremental approach. Using available technology. Launching directly fr…
NASA's previous administrator championed a lunar base as a prerequisite for a manned Mars mission -- if only to prove that we could send a crew up for an extended period of time without resupply. I never understood this reasoning. We have plenty of ways to engineer and simulate these conditions on Earth (like the MARS-500, recently completed -- tl;dr, it's not fun, but they didn't dismember and eat one another).
The only reason to stop en route to your destination is to refuel. This allows a larger spacecraft to be launched with a smaller rocket (of course you need more rockets to launch the fuel).
Re: Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
#25Alternative Solution (to all of the above): Build better robots. As in, hard AI. Has the additional advantage of allowing exploration of not only Mars, but every other body in the solar system, and at not much greater a cost. Potentially even other stars. Also improves nearly every other aspect of human existence.
Landing people on Mars is most likely feasible with out major breakthroughs in science and technology.
In contrast strong AI might be around the corner - or a million years away. Its much less predictable.
Re: Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is. From the article: "A rotating spacecraft would create artificial gravity that would keep astronauts in tip-top shape."
Strangely, the article fails to follow this up with the next logical sentence, which is: "Also, a rotating spacecraft is trivially easy to implement, meaning that the entire zero-gravity argument is nothing more than a ridiculous canard by those who'd rather suck down a few more tens of billions of pointless microgravity biomedical research before allowing us to leave Low Earth Orbit and do anything interesting."
Nothing involving rocketry is trivially easy implement. To my knowledge building a centrifuge to produce artificial gravity has never been attempted, it would take years of work and tens or hundreds of million dollars to design, prototype, test, and man rate any such a system.
Re: Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
#27Climbing Mount Everest: 5 obstacles (usyesterday.off, 1952)
1) Trip time
A round-trip human expedition to the top of Everest, using current technology, could take two to three weeks. The slower you go, the more supplies you are forced to take and the higher the odds of a catastrophic collision with a rock. Mountaineers would lose more energy and regenerate slower as a result of the longer stay in high altitude. And they would be exposed to larger doses of cosmic rays and solar energetic particles, increasing the probability of cancer.
2) The Big C Problem: Cancer.
Mountaineers traveling to the top of the world, or working on its surface, will be exposed to potentially high doses of sun [...]
3) Sex in Tibet [...]
4) The Yeti [...]
-------- my 2 cents:
You can sit there and keep talking like this or f*ing go do it. A 5 year old today who wants to win the Olympics in 100m works every day for over 10 years for his or her goal. No guarantees of any kind. If we approached Mars the same way, our fathers would have walked on it already.
Re: Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
#28Alternative Solution (to all of the above): Build better robots. As in, hard AI. Has the additional advantage of allowing exploration of not only Mars, but every other body in the solar system, and at not much greater a cost. Potentially even other stars. Also improves nearly every other aspect of human existence.
Landing people on Mars is most likely feasible with out major breakthroughs in science and technology. In contrast strong AI might be around the corner - or a million years away. Its much less predictable.
As a CS student who has done some AI research I can tell you strong AI is not around the corner.
Re: Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
#29I never understood why we abandoned the Moon. It’s only three days away compared to the eight months it takes to get to Mars and it also has water. We should first establish a base on Moon and then venture on to other planets.
There are two schools of thought on how we should approach manned Mars exploration: 1. The incremental approach, the NASA favorite, the outrageous proposal that got dismissed due to budget costs. It involves build a base in orbit or on the moon and using it as a relay between Mars and Earth. 2. Mars Direct. Reducing a lot of the complexity of the incremental approach. Using available technology. Launching directly fr…
Depressingly, the people who allocates funding see neither humans working on Mars nor a prolonged human exploration of space. What they see is usually limited to a guy planting a flag and making a speech.
Oh... and the money allocated to aerospace contractors from his/her state.
I like the incremental approach. If we can build the bulk of the spacecraft on the Moon, the solar system becomes our backyard.
Re: Landing people on Mars: 5 obstacles
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
That couldn't possibly go wrong.
Certainly things could go wrong. But I would argue having a set of people in established, stable relationships is better than either A) having unattached astronauts who will inevitably try to start relationships with each other, leading to a dangerous space soap opera, or B) having a unisex, hetero crew and expecting them to be celibate for years with no problem.
Seriously, if people can make celibate vows on the surface and keep them, they can do it in space, especially if they are selfless enough to realize what they are doing is to benefit their species; personal gratification being set aside.
Monks can train themselves to be celibate, where sexual thoughts and feelings become superfluous and uninteresting, so why not astronauts? It's all about discipline.
And there's always the option of having plenty of sex before going up and self-relief when you need it. If pleasure is more important to someone than advancing humanity, then by all means stay on the ground.