231–240 of 273 posts
Watching a launch live in 1080p? With footage from the craft and booster? Truly amazing.
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The chance of a colony on Mars NOT seeking independence when it reaches a modicum of self-sufficiency is nil. Look at the US; separated by 6-12 weeks of sailing. It's human nature to seek to govern your own affairs, and with travel time to Mars being around 300 days, as soon as they can, they'll become independent.
I don't know. Look at Canada; separated by the same distance yet it remained a colony until 1931. While rebellious space colonies has been a dependable sci-fi trope since the 50's, I am skeptical things would really work out that way given how dependent Mars would be on Earth for everything other than the very basics of self-sufficiency. I am talking about things like art (music, books, films) and the kinds of develo…
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Now we can keep X% of the knowledge of humanity on a portable device. That should help.
A lot of human knowledge cannot be written down and has to be passed on person to person. There isn't enough bandwidth in a book to actually convey a lot of it. Machining is one instance of this. You basically have to have somebody show you how to do some of it. Same thing with forging. (At least in my experience)
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But our "redundancy site" is awful for human life. Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation. We will need to leave Earth in 5 billion years when the sun goes red giant. 5 billion years is an INCREDIBLE amount of time. Things we do in 2019 will have zero influence on those times. It is much more lik…
Imagine if we just worked on fixing up the place we live on already that has air we can breathe, abundant liquid water, and isn't inundated with deadly radiation. Funny, but extremely high altitudes of the atmosphere of Venus could fit the bill in the context of places in the Solar System. Temperatures and pressures are around room temperature and pressure there. The thick atmosphere of Venus provides some radiation…
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Now we can keep X% of the knowledge of humanity on a portable device. That should help.
A lot of human knowledge cannot be written down and has to be passed on person to person. There isn't enough bandwidth in a book to actually convey a lot of it. Machining is one instance of this. You basically have to have somebody show you how to do some of it. Same thing with forging. (At least in my experience)
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> A successful mars colony would need to have a plan to reach self-sufficiency through Martian plus asteroid resources. Not at all. While there will be an economic and logistical incentive to reduce the dependence on imports from earth, it is not reasonable to expect the colony to fully duplicate the manufacturing capabilities of earth. There will be drugs, electronic components and human experts that will imported f…
I don't think any imports from Mars could be profitable. Except scientific data, of course. The colony will depend on Earth tech for a long time. The only case for a self-sustained colony I see is some local political extremism. To prefer to live on Mars by one's own means would take some very strong Earth-incompatible views.
Tourism and some healthcare likewise, but that's not really an import.
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I'm not a fan of war, but many technologies and sciences were developed for military use, everything from mathematics for ballistics, food preservation, thermodynamics, antibiotics, nuclear energy, the lunar program, and GPS. So yes, war is a horrendous waste and terrible detriment to humanity, but even war has had some beneficial side effects.
The same effort can be put into inventing these in the absence of conflict. You do need funding and you do need urgency, but that's a question of national will.
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Ok it’s 50m now, still speaking about earth orbit
Source!? Falcon 9 cost is not even public is it? Your number is wayyyy too high to match with current SpaceX economics I think.
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Now we can keep X% of the knowledge of humanity on a portable device. That should help.
A lot of human knowledge cannot be written down and has to be passed on person to person. There isn't enough bandwidth in a book to actually convey a lot of it. Machining is one instance of this. You basically have to have somebody show you how to do some of it. Same thing with forging. (At least in my experience)
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I've felt that about SpaceX ever since seeing the Grasshopper testing videos. Up until that point, if a rocket slowed down during takeoff something had gone horribly wrong. Then it just... hovered... and landed, and I realised this was the start of a new era of space travel. The Falcon Heavy launch is still the highlight for me but this one is probably more important, simply because it's so normal and routine now and…
Up until that point, if a rocket slowed down during takeoff something had gone horribly wrong. Just in case anyone is unaware of the most notable exception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC-X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IWIv2MKcyg DC-X has been a major inspiration and proof-by-example for commercial reusable rocket efforts. Its technical achievements and focus on aircraft-like low-cost operations showed a path o…