Both of my grandfathers did this 100 years ago. They never saw their homeland or most of their friends or relatives ever again. They must have known that was the way it was going to be. I often wonder how they felt about it.
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Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
81–90 of 152 posts
Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
#82I 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…
Given differing aptitudes for solving different problems, the comparison might be moot. However let's say an individual is equally competent in both areas, and let's play the devil's advocate for a minute.
No matter how successful you are at creating utopia, there are many more people that have an interest in engineering the failure of both you and your creation, and each one of them is a human that is potentially as capable as yourself, if not more so. They will collectively outlive you, their efforts will be relentless, and the knowledge that they gain in undoing your work will also be passed down to future generations.
With that in mind, the relative worthiness of efforts might not fall hard to the side of solving political problems right at this instant.
Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So just getting to Mars would exceed the safe limits This is the problem with your argument that I'm underestimating risks. You're assuming that nobody finds a way to solve this problem or to mitigate the effects of the radiation, and that nobody would be willing to find a way to go even with the health concerns. I know this will be extremely difficult and quite costly, but I think hard work and constant innovation…
> Prove it. Until you do, I disagree. Well I can't personally __prove__ it, but I believe the general belief in the science community of prolonged space-travel is that it will most likely mess you up. Probably in more ways than we've even thought of. I don't think, at least with today's tech, that a human can travel to Mars and back and be perfectly okay. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/space-dangers.html http://w…
A lot, not all, but a lot of those people popped up after Bush 41 said that we were going back to the moon and to Mars. NASA heard it was a JFK mission, going to be completed regardless of cost, and told their project managers to put as many things into the mission critical path so they would get funded. When they returned to Congress with a 30-year $450 Billion plan, it was funded with 0 dollars.
To be fair, we don't know what 3/8 g will to do someone after a year. For all that it's important, though, it's comical that we haven't put some spinning Skylab space stations up to find out.
Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
#84Before talking about colonizing Mars, why not colonizing other areas of Earth? See the Sahara for example, or even your own deserts in US. Closer, more clement climate and no less resources. Why colonize a far away deserts when we have enough on Earth?
Because we don't want to.
Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
#85Both of my grandfathers did this 100 years ago. They never saw their homeland or most of their friends or relatives ever again. They must have known that was the way it was going to be. I often wonder how they felt about it.
Guys, it's pretty obvious edw519 is talking about his grandfathers emigrating to a brand new nation and leaving the old one behind forever. Lots of world travel was incredibly expensive.
Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
#86Unless explorers will be given property of sizable portions of martian land and a number (more than 1!) of back and forth Mars-Earth tickets, this will definitely not attract the kind of valuable and resourceful people that would really be needed to create a self sustaining colony! And you'd also need something like a "diversity Mars Visa lottery" open to anyone so that a colony will not only be formed of "boring, su…
The goal of a colonization effort is never to make the new place more appealing than the old place for the majority of people, or even the median, or even a sizable minority.
You want Mars to appeal enough that you can get dozens or hundreds or people who have both the means and will to do it.
Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
#87I don't get it. What is the point of sitting in a caravan on Mars and waiting to die? Is the guy proposing this going himself to set an example? If there is going to be any kind of colony, it needs some means of sustaining life and babies.
You don't just sit there waiting to die.
You go out and build things. We'll ship all the stuff the first people need for several years, but they will need to learn to find their own water, manufacture plastics, grow food, and all that stuff.
Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Well. No he wasn't.
There's also a real possibility that the technology doesn't exist. There's an even greater possibility that it does, and we arn't capable of comprehending it.
Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
#89If 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…
> send enough rocket fuel for a return trip
That hasn't been the plan for a long time. NASA's Design Reference Mission, and the one anyone who has studied Mars missions at any point in the past 20 years, is to manufacture fuel on Mars. In fact, you would probably send this equipment to Mars first so that the astronauts going to Mars would have a fully fueled return ship ready and waiting for them before they even take off from Earth.
Re: Wanted: People Willing to Die on Mars
#90They will certainly find people. However these people won't die of old age. Radiation alone will make sure of that.
Whether this project has any point at all is a question of rational thinking vs. mass psychology. Scientists will tell you that it is pointless to send humans to Mars. All research can be done with robots - cheaper and without endangering human life.
However, a human colony on Mars might generate irrational public excitement which in return could lead to governments investing more money into space travel and colonization again.
I said irrational excitement because we know we can do it. NASA simply hasn't done it because there is neither money nor a rational reason for it. If the US government wanted to NASA could have a Mars colony up and running in no time. As the article points out the technology already exists.
Personally I believe the irrational excitement factor will be a strong one and thus these people who basically sign up to die of radiation poisoning will end up being true "space pioneers".
However, I doubt that Mars One will actually manage to secure the necessary funding. So I am not getting excited about this yet.