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Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

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Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#51

Post by Udo »

saalweachter wrote: post #43
Udo wrote: post #22

If Mars can be mined for water (and it looks like it can), there is no reason to make it a one-way trip only. Sending people there with the explicit expectation to die soon speaks of poor planning and not a lot of willingness to export the basic tenets of humanity into space with us. It's a bad precedent, it carries the wrong message about the value of intelligent life, and I'm afraid the mission's limitations also i…

> Scraping together a suicide team and shooting it roughly in Mars' general direction is not the answer to this problem. I think you misunderstand. While the linked article is brief, the one-way plan isn't to send a ship-full of people with suicide pills, but to supply them for the next 40-80 years from Earth. Because of the hilarities of the rocket equation, it is cheaper to send rocket after rocket full of water, b…

> the one-way plan isn't to send a ship-full of people with suicide pills

Maybe I got caught up in the ridiculousness of the article's sensational tone, but even so there is no technical reason to actually plan on never having return flights. This relates directly to your other statement:

As I wrote in the parent comment, the presence of water on Mars allows for the production of rocket fuel on site. This ties in to where I mentioned extended infrastructure such as a space elevator and a Moon base, because those too will make trips back and forth economical (instead of scraping everything together for a singular "by the skin of our teeth" mission like this one).

I wrote about these points for a reason ;)

Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#52

Post by rdl »

shantanubala wrote: post #46
rdl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I could do a particularly good job running the country, and wouldn't try (beyond a few weeks/months in transition). There are plenty of other African leaders in other countries, particularly elected in the past ~10 years, who are far better. I don't think there's any reason why EG wouldn't be able to come up with some domestic political leadership which was better than what they have now. The problem is…

Practically speaking, how do you ensure that the new government doesn't become corrupt in a year or two? Or more importantly, how do you restore the people's faith in their government so that they participate? Also, how would a trade embargo "fix" a country? Perhaps it would force a dictator to lessen or hide civil rights violations, but it would not repair the economy or necessarily give people more confidence in th…

Probably this is one area where an oil embargo would be more helpful in combination with removal of the government. An external power could enforce an embargo against oil unless a substantial percentage was spent on domestic infrastructure and programs, vs. funneled into a dictator's personal accounts.

"Oil for food" in Iraq in the 1990s was a horrible fiasco, but there have been cases where natural resource wealth hasn't been strictly a curse.

For ongoing security and government assistance, probably the only entity able to credibly do anything in EG is the AU, which has become a lot more credible in the past 5-10 years.

Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#53

Post by zeteo »

tokenadult wrote: post #10

I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical countries of the world (there is overlap between the two sets) to try to change those from the inside. When I was in high school, going to a high school that was named after an astronaut just after the first moon landing, I thought it was completely natural to hav…

>Making any of the world's poorest countries richer in general, or making any of the world's most oppressed countries freer in general, is [...] a much tougher and more interesting problem, a problem more worthy of a gnarly man willing to risk his life

Involving yourself in foreign politics is no substitute for going to Mars. Even if you magically turn Zimbabwe into a political and economic clone of Alabama, the overall capabilities and prospects of mankind remain substantially the same. Successful manned flight that expands our species to another planet is much more admirable and worthwhile from this point of view.

Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#54

Post by rdl »

nnq wrote: post #29
ewolf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fantasize about doing that sometimes, but usually, you can't get into politics without being a citizen — either due to legislation or because you won't be accepted as a representative by the population, for obvious reasons. But assuming you can get into politics, you'll still have to deal with an enormous struggle for power (be it elections you have to win or powerful people you have to convince) in order to get in…

It's probably doable, but not without a whole bag of dirty tricks, and a group of well trained supporters... but you'd end up being like a secret agency manipulating foreign countries' politics, nothing new here, and if you were to succeed you'd give in to the temptation of using your "great benefactor, savior from poverty..." power for more one-sided goals. If you want to change a foreign country for the better and…

It would be amazing to have an entity, sort of like the US military crossed with the Red Cross, which just went into conflict zones or repressive regimes to provide infrastructure of government (power, water, education, transportation, law enforcement, security for civilians, etc.). Capable of defending itself, but not taking sides other than providing that infrastructure to everyone. Nominally this is the UN's mission in some countries, but it doesn't really do it.

Satellite TV (Al Jazeera and western sitcoms) largely accomplished this for information in the greater Islamic world. Doing the same for non-information goods would require actual infrastructure on the ground, though.

Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#55

Post by jimzvz »

tokenadult wrote: post #10

I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical countries of the world (there is overlap between the two sets) to try to change those from the inside. When I was in high school, going to a high school that was named after an astronaut just after the first moon landing, I thought it was completely natural to hav…

As a citizen of a so called third-world country, your post is extremely condescending.

Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#56

Post by ewolf »

nnq wrote: post #29
ewolf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fantasize about doing that sometimes, but usually, you can't get into politics without being a citizen — either due to legislation or because you won't be accepted as a representative by the population, for obvious reasons. But assuming you can get into politics, you'll still have to deal with an enormous struggle for power (be it elections you have to win or powerful people you have to convince) in order to get in…

It's probably doable, but not without a whole bag of dirty tricks, and a group of well trained supporters... but you'd end up being like a secret agency manipulating foreign countries' politics, nothing new here, and if you were to succeed you'd give in to the temptation of using your "great benefactor, savior from poverty..." power for more one-sided goals. If you want to change a foreign country for the better and…

See my edit regarding the "dark side". You are generally right, but there is at least one example that turned out well despite occasionally taking advantage of illicit maneuvers.

Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#57

Post by ewolf »

eCa wrote: post #30
ewolf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fantasize about doing that sometimes, but usually, you can't get into politics without being a citizen — either due to legislation or because you won't be accepted as a representative by the population, for obvious reasons. But assuming you can get into politics, you'll still have to deal with an enormous struggle for power (be it elections you have to win or powerful people you have to convince) in order to get in…

But you don't need to get into politics directly. If you create a business that solves a local problem (local to the poor country of choice) good enough, and fairly enough, you can create ripple effects. Maybe not at national levels, but at regional and municipal levels. Not easy, but not impossible. (At least I hope so when I got my rose-tinted glasses on.)

Alright, that sounds feasible, albeit being on an entirely different scale.

Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#58

Post by redwood »

tokenadult wrote: post #10

I wonder how many people are willing to take on the real adventure of living in any of the twenty poorest countries in the world, or twenty most tyrannical countries of the world (there is overlap between the two sets) to try to change those from the inside. When I was in high school, going to a high school that was named after an astronaut just after the first moon landing, I thought it was completely natural to hav…

I spent the last year in Bangladesh and indeed it did have an effect on my interest in going to Mars. So thanks for also making the connection.

Literally on the one hand I want to say "sign me up!" and yet on the other hand, after my experience living in isolation and without so many comforts in Bangladesh, I do worry I'd regret giving up on so much to move to Mars.

Alienation, isolating, and the lack of comforts give you a lot of time to think, and it's easy to think you've made a mistake. I wouldn't want to be haunted by that feeling. On the other hand, to explore red martian rocks on the edge of human civilization... it has a romantic appeal.

When romantic appeal and "the real thing" meet, sometimes it's not all happy.

Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#59

Post by theoutlander »

shantanubala wrote: post #32
rdl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not me. We mostly know the solutions to fixing the most oppressed or otherwise defective parts of the world; we just don't find it worthwhile to implement those solutions. I could solve 90% Equatorial Guinea's problems for The solutions to the most defective countries are all pretty straightforward and widely known; it's figuring out how to turn decent but not ideal countries like Pakistan into really stable first-wo…

> I could solve 90% Equatorial Guinea's problems for Oh really? What's your plan? How do you intend on ensuring that culture is preserved while you implement this plan? Or do you believe that Western culture is superior because it has been more successful in the last 100 years (forgetting that segregation ended less than 50 years ago, if you must include the eradication of entire populations as "successes," we can ca…

Ryan - I'm on the Epidemiological Modeling team funded personally by BillG. I concur that the skillset required to solve problems on our planet (eradicating infectious diseases in our case) is completely different than those required for inter-galactic exploration. Perhaps the only overlap would be Mathematics, but that's the foundation for pretty much everything.

Shantanu - You're right. Simply throwing money cannot solve global issues and no single person including Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett combined have the monetary resources at their disposal to tackle even 5% of global issues. However, they're the right kind of people to take on sociological challenges and eradicating diseases because there's a lot more to the problem than that. For instance, bureaucracy, corruption, beliefs, natural causes, etc. I was really surprised (shouldn't have been) to learn that a significant portion of their funds are allocated for dealing with corrupt governments for our mission to globally eradicate diseases like Polio, Malaria, HIV, TB, etc. With my limited experience in that realm, I can state that the problem is definitely way more complex than it appears at the surface (and I think you get that as well).

Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars

#60

Post by greyfade »

saalweachter wrote: post #43
Udo wrote: post #22

If Mars can be mined for water (and it looks like it can), there is no reason to make it a one-way trip only. Sending people there with the explicit expectation to die soon speaks of poor planning and not a lot of willingness to export the basic tenets of humanity into space with us. It's a bad precedent, it carries the wrong message about the value of intelligent life, and I'm afraid the mission's limitations also i…

> Scraping together a suicide team and shooting it roughly in Mars' general direction is not the answer to this problem. I think you misunderstand. While the linked article is brief, the one-way plan isn't to send a ship-full of people with suicide pills, but to supply them for the next 40-80 years from Earth. Because of the hilarities of the rocket equation, it is cheaper to send rocket after rocket full of water, b…

> As the article says, the technology for a return trip just doesn't exist; the technology for a series of one-way trips does.

Implying that we won't come up with that technology by the time we get people there.

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