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Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

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

#191

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

anywherenotes wrote: post #188
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with. When it comes time to think about colonizing other star systems, it's going to take a really, really long time to get to them and we'll have little idea what their worlds are like. Seems to me it'd be better to work on colonizing space…

Isn't a planet just a big spaceship with things built in? You can dig inside it for things, you don't need to capture asteroids, planets can travel through space and have a protective shield - the atmosphere, and Earth is already traveling at huge speeds, which are at very least on the level with the fastest spaceships we can currently make. Sure guiding a planet maybe harder than a spaceship made specifically for th…

> planets can travel through space and have a protective shield - the atmosphere

Most worlds in our system don't have a significant atmosphere, most of those that do have too much of it. Like gravity, atmosphere also poses a problem for getting back to space.

> no man-made spaceship can match that for billions of years.

Not unmaintained, no, but if it was unmaintained that probably means everyone who lives there is dead anyway.

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

#192

Post by WhompingWindows »

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…

You're assuming colonization is needed, when in reality we are just another species and are nothing to the universe on the cosmic scale. And yet, relative to the pointless wars and countless trillions spent primate-posturing, putting humans on a second floating rock is just as, if not more, sensible.

For me, it's something inspiring, a grand adventure, and may allow us to confirm the presence of life outside of our own globe. That alone would pay the cost of tickets, since shattering the illusion that our globe is the only one endowed with life by a creator, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished by rational beings.

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

#193

Post by nradov »

cbkeller wrote: post #133
richardknop wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the current thoughts on what caused oceans on Mars to disappear (with some remainder concentrating in ice caps)? Was it some impact of a really big meteor/comet? It is accepted that Mars used to have liquid water oceans and rivers in the past, correct? You can see geological remains of rivers and oceans, for example, quite clearly on Mars.

It seems increasingly likely that there was originally quite a bit of liquid water on Mars during the Noachian ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noachian ) and Hesperian ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesperian ) -- the Martian geological time periods more or less contemporaneous with what we call the Archean Eon on Earth. It's not clear that this would have been quite as extensive as "oceans" yet, but it's definitely…

That's why those schemes for terraforming Mars seem so unrealistic. In order to sustain an atmosphere over the long term we'd have to keep dropping ice comets down the gravity well. There's no way to make it self sustaining.

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

#194

Post by konceptz »

fuscy wrote: post #105
lmm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans may also be the best at handling what you stated. You’re comparing us to robots but if you say humans were designed then our collective knowledge limits us to 1 at present. So we’re the best and worst.

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

#195

Post by TrevorJ »

fuscy wrote: post #105
lmm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans build tools though.

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

#196

Post by hyperbovine »

Faark wrote: post #147
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…

Others already mentioned benefits for us currently living humans. Long term it is also interesting from an evolutionary aspect. Humans communities on earth are less and less isolated from each other, making it near impossible to evolve in different directions. That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum. Gravity well's are an isolating factor. Living on mars will require a highly isolated economy…

> Humans communities on earth are less and less isolated from each other, making it near impossible to evolve in different directions. That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum.

That is not how evolution works. You want more mixing to increase fitness, not less. Small, isolated populations are notorious for harboring deleterious genetic variants that decrease overall fitness.

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

#197

Post by wnkrshm »

novaRom wrote: post #158
wnkrshm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder why people think that there's so much money you can take away from space exploration R&D when the whole sector is basically really tiny and funded on a comparable magnitude of public broadcasting in some countries (e.g. NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR). The discussions ensuing about the usefulness of space exploration are always passiona…

> NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR Please note, every household in Germany pays a special tax, so called "GEZ TV tax" which is approximately 250 USD per year per household. Additionally, every company, every small business in Germany pays 250-44000 USD per year (depends on how many people are employed by this business).

Fair point, I'm German myself so the public broadcasting budget could just be inflated - the yearly budget of the BBC is about 6 billion iirc.

Still, it's a drop in the bucket against the military budget of the US.

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

#198

Post by onemoresoop »

Setting a moon base would teach us things quite a lot faster than going to Mars because of the distance and close proximity to earth. The moon is different than Mars, i know, but Mars would come up next after this. I think space travel would be much easier if started from a moon base due to the low gravity. A disaster on Mars would delay this project by a few centuries. Let's make small firm steps.

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

#199

Post by WorldMaker »

mr_overalls wrote: post #171
alex_duf wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Personally I see quite a few positive things behind colonising Mars. I think it's not about having a "backup", it's not about resources (or in a really long time) it's about the challenge. If we can put our best engineers to solve how we re-use and recycle water, how we grow crops in extreme condition, how to control the O2 CO2 cycle (at a larger scale than on the sp…

Not to mention that Mars gives humanity an opportunity to improve skills essential to expanding to other solar systems. Besides the obvious - large-scale terraforming - a "practice" settlement of Mars gives us an opportunity to innovate and refine practically every engineering skill, form of social organization, or general skillful endeavor in humanity's repertoire. Metallurgy, genetics, geology, farming, medicine, p…

There's an old sci-fi idea, that if I recall Carl Sagan agreed with, that we should be working to colonize Venus now (which I believe "now" meant the 1970s at the time), because worst case if the greenhouse effect spirals out of control unstoppably (as climate change predictions have feared since the 1970s), surviving on Earth is going to be the same problem as colonizing Venus.

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

#200

Post by picsao »

alex_duf wrote: post #119
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. Personally I see quite a few positive things behind colonising Mars. I think it's not about having a "backup", it's not about resources (or in a really long time) it's about the challenge. If we can put our best engineers to solve how we re-use and recycle water, how we grow crops in extreme condition, how to control the O2 CO2 cycle (at a larger scale than on the sp…

Earth is even if hit a better backup. Also longterm effects could easily undo all colonys. Even hospitable earth is littered with failed colonies.
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