131–140 of 164 posts
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I would say, given the state of politics and the general attitude to the climate and natural resources, our first priority should be colonising another planet. Putting some scientists on Mars for a few years is step 1 in that very important insurance scheme!
If we could terraform a planet as barren as Mars, wouldn't fixing earth be significantly easier?
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The biggest problem to fixing earth is the people with politics that fly in the face of reality. Mars Doesn't have republicans, so I think it would be easier to terraform than earth.
Unless you're building better humans, we're going to have the exact same political problems on Mars that we do on Earth. Except in an environment where any small thing going wrong has the potential to kill everyone .
We could accidentally fire nukes, accidentally let a GM smallpox strain out, accidentally start WW3, we could do so much as it is. That is beside the point anyway.
Presumably the first people to go to Mars are going to be vetted for some level of education and skill. This will likely prevent the fear mongering, demagoguery and other forms of lying that allow some successful politicians argue against singularly true facts, at least for a little while. Likely until the mars colony is self sufficient.
Even then it seems unlikely you will get an anti-global warming lobby on Mars, because it is good for every business (presuming breathable air is government utility/service).
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Before a rector is turned on the inside of it isn't particularly radioactive. In order to last from the creation of the solar system to the present day uranium had to decay very slowly when not in a critical mass, specifically U235 has a half life of 700 million years. So it's really the radiation of uranium that you have to worry about if you find yourself in a room with a hunk of it but the toxicity. Still, people…
Not saying it was unfounded fear (I'm very pro space nuclear power), just pointing out what the actual contention is. People have an adverse reaction to anything with the word "nuclear" on it, even more so when it is put on top of a half million pounds of propellant and lit with a non-negligible failure rate. The reality though is that failure of the rocket doesn't mean the reactor or fuel is vaporized and thrown to…
A nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile is visually identical to a launch rocket carrying a peaceful payload to LEO. The neural association between "nuclear missile" and "rocket with nuclear reactor payload" is very strong.
It doesn't matter how many facts you throw at it. In the mind of the public, all launches have the possibility to result in another Apollo 1 or STS-51-L (Challenger) or STS-107 (Columbia). Every "nuke" is the Castle Bravo test. Every reactor is Chernobyl. And the public generally is terrible at risk assessment and actuarial math.
You could actually make the launch safer than an afternoon stroll on a Florida golf course, but no one is going to lie down in front of your golf cart screaming, "lightning strike!" or "angry gator!" or even "cardiac infarction!" or "terrorists!"
People may have no problem at all if you just call it "an NCG power plant" (for neutron-cascade generator) and say the details are classified for security reasons--that "security" being the type associated with a toddler's blanket.
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> on the surface of mars Why? Wouldn't it be easier to bootstrap by mining asteroids, and manufacturing in micro gravity, then dropping nearly finished goods onto the planet? That'd also allow you to use the same bootstrapping infrastructure for several surface sites.
Mining asteroids has a ton of issues even beyond the obvious cost and R&D problems. They are generally far from the sun so solar power is significantly less useful. You need to move a lot of bulk material which means heavy Delta V problems. Micro gravity means you can't have humans in the area for long without giant structures. Finally, economically resources are just not that scarce. The delta V issues are more reas…
No, they aren't. There's tons of asteroids in Earth-crossing orbits. And Mars-crossing orbits too. It'll be a long time before we use those up.
>You need to move a lot of bulk material which means heavy Delta V problems.
No, you don't. You process the ores near the asteroids; you don't have to ship it all to the point-of-use.
>Micro gravity means you can't have humans in the area for long without giant structures.
So what? You don't need a lot of humans there; this stuff needs to be automated (or at least remote-controlled). And artificial gravity doesn't need a giant structure; you can do it with a small structure on a tether.
>Finally, economically resources are just not that scarce.
That depends on what resources, and where you want them. If you want a lot of platinum, it's very scarce here on Earth, but mining one Earth-crossing asteroid could provide a huge amount of it relatively cheaply.
>As to mining Mars's moon's they don't really have a lot of useful material that is not on Mars in the first place.
How do you know that? Mars's moons are really just captured asteroids and likely have no geological relation to Mars at all.
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The biggest problem to fixing earth is the people with politics that fly in the face of reality. Mars Doesn't have republicans, so I think it would be easier to terraform than earth.
Unless you're building better humans, we're going to have the exact same political problems on Mars that we do on Earth. Except in an environment where any small thing going wrong has the potential to kill everyone .
No, not immediately.
This isn't much different from other colonization missions in human history: humans from one place got sick of the people living there, and went somewhere (relatively) uninhabited so they could live the way they wanted without the political problems they had back home. Eventually, there were new political problems of course, but that took generations; for the initial travelers, it was a sensible move. And the political problems that came were likely different, as so much time had passed.
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> Before we can consider seeding terrestrial stations on Mars, we should consider seeding a communications net around Mars. We already do. > Once we have a half dozen satellites circling Mars... We already have half a dozen active satellites circling Mars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Mars_Odyssey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter https://en.wik…
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_(radio) >Data rates up to 1 Mbit/s That's a bit of a problem. It only seems to be a relay for other spacecraft and small surface craft. Much more data will need to be exchanged between Earth/Mars when humans are involved (weather, video, entertainment, collected data, software, etc.) You'd probably want several brand new satellites dedicated to communications for an initial col…
The bandwidth back than was more than adequate to handle a website like Hacker News, and the store-and-forward protocols that were developed back then to preserve bandwidth, like SMTP and NNTP, will probably come back into play for a Mars/Earth link. Any video would need to be highly compressed and low quality by today's standards, but in the 50s and 60s TV was far lower quality than it is today and served its purpose just fine. Audio recordings for voice messages likely would be just fine without any quality reduction.
You have to remember that the initial colonists are going to necessarily be a fairly independent bunch. They're not going to need, or care, to keep up with the latest shows, music, or social media. They'll be too busy with surviving, collecting and transmitting scientific data, and writing letters to their loved-ones back on Earth.
It's about time. Engineering decisions shouldn't be made based of irrational fears of general population. If nuclear power plant is best option for space mission we should use it.
Irrational fears? What are the chances of the rocket launcher blowing up with the reactor? How would we compute the fallout range as a function of altitude of the blast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Design_Reference_Mission
MDRM 5.0 PDF (big file; power generation is 7.3.4, page PDF-pg#85): https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373665main_NASA-SP-2009-566.pdf
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say, given the state of politics and the general attitude to the climate and natural resources, our first priority should be colonising another planet. Putting some scientists on Mars for a few years is step 1 in that very important insurance scheme!
If we could terraform a planet as barren as Mars, wouldn't fixing earth be significantly easier?
I personally feel that having a "fallback" in case something literally Earth shattering happens is compelling enough a reason to colonize other bodies in our solar system, Mars included.
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I agree about self-created problems, but what about annihilation through any other "natural" mass extinction event? I'd argue that to be a good motivating factor.
That's an interesting proposition, but how realistic is it really? If we're talking about something like a huge asteroid colliding with the earth and/or a huge volcanic episode that would trigger a mass instinction, wouldn't the pale blue dot still be more hospitable than Mars? We have access to technology the dinosaurs didn't have, our chances of survival would probably be much better overall. Even in case of man-ma…