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Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

phys.org

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Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#101

Post by lmm »

fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

I can't see any path to colonising the galaxy that doesn't start with colonising the solar system. It's always going to be a long term project, there are always going to be things on earth that look like more immediate priorities, but I want humanity to spread among the stars, and if we don't start now then when?

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#102

Post by skzo »

fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

Indeed, but you are forgetting that Earth also has the biggest threat of them all... Humans

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#103

Post by biffq »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #95
coldtea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think they'd let random "mavericks" go there without a police and guns and laws? The whole reason of spending trillions to get people there would be to exploit and control the shit out of the place...

We can put that another way: the odds of a populated Mars being an anarchist utopia are nil. Politics and power dynamics would remain. Moving planets doesn't let you escape power-structures, and anarchism is still stupid - you still have to hope you get a good power-structure.

It appears you are setting yourself up to a series of sound disproofs, such as having to point out how communities with purpose without the damaging effects of power dynamics are more efficient, intelligent and effective.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#104

Post by ur-whale »

fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

>I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed.

Correct, but short-sighted.

However much Earth has, we'll quickly gobble it all up.

To quote Bartlett : "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett)

The only way out is up, and the first stepping stone is the Moon, next is Mars.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#105

Post by fuscy »

lmm wrote: post #101
fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

I can't see any path to colonising the galaxy that doesn't start with colonising the solar system. It's always going to be a long term project, there are always going to be things on earth that look like more immediate priorities, but I want humanity to spread among the stars, and if we don't start now then when?

Humans are terribly designed for space exploration: die quickly, require sustenance, can't handle high G forces, can't handle radiation.

I always believed that if humanity is to colonize something, it would be through robots that do all the exploring and mining for us.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#106

Post by dagw »

skzo wrote: post #102
fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

Indeed, but you are forgetting that Earth also has the biggest threat of them all... Humans

but you are forgetting that Earth also has the biggest threat of them all... Humans

So will any place we colonize.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#107

Post by worldsayshi »

jamesrcole wrote: post #20
verelo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh I’m not convinced. “This rewrite will be different, we will make all the right choices!”. Next conversation “it’s just wrong in different ways”. Like you’re right, the inertia of established countries probably holds us back a lot, but I’m unsure that we have evolved sufficiently to do better. It’s possible to imagine, but it doesn’t seem like an obvious outcome just yet.

Despite what we hear in the media, the world has gotten so much better in many ways in the last couple of hundred years. That's not to say there aren't big issues, or no things that have gotten worse, but there's a clear and very strong overall trend. See for example The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, by Steven Pinker https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/... Or…

The world has gotten much much better in some ways (health, longevity, child-mortality, education, economy, violence).

But it has also gotten much much worse in others (environmental destruction, military capability).

We can't just focus on one aspect and neglect the other. One doesn't take away the magnitude of the other. The magnitudes of the bad as well as the good are both enormous.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#108

Post by lmm »

brigade wrote: post #28
ryanSrich wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to start somewhere that isn’t earth. Interstellar travel over the next 100-1000 years will be a requirement for the next 5000-10000 years if humans expect to survive that long. Starting development now to understand terraforming and building out the primitives that allow for it in the future is something we owe to generations to come.

If you're arguing species-level survival, really we're going to survive longer than that, short of a meteor strike or maybe nuclear war. Sure, 99% of the population might die, the equator could become uninhabitable, and we might lose advanced tech in the ensuing wars, but it'll take much more than climate change to completely wipe out homo sapiens. We do need to be colonizing other stars within a quarter billion year…

> We do need to be colonizing other stars within a quarter billion years or so though. The sun won't last forever!

If we don't start now, when? It's the kind of thing that you can always put off for another million years.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#109

Post by MeteorMarc »

Can anybody explain: the article mentions 0.14% of oxygen in a low pressure atmosphere to be insufficient for aerobic life. Where does the higher oxygen concentration (mole/m3) in subsurface brine come from? Obviously it is not in equilibrium with the atmospheric concentration. Is it non-equilibrium due to historic circumstances? Is it an equilibrium with surrounding rocks? Do rocks outgas oxygen?

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#110

Post by bobm_kite9 »

sigstoat wrote: post #27
ravron wrote: post #3

But it may not have enough carbon dioxide: http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/files/2018/08/Inventory-...

there are other, significantly more effective, greenhouse gases.

I thought the absence of a magnetosphere would mean that any atmosphere would be stripped away by solar radiation anyway?
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