Soon they will find fish and potentially mermaids and mermans in that water.
Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
311–320 of 495 posts
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#312Why don't we send a rover to some of these interesting places? It seems like we're constantly making fascinating finds on Mars, then send rovers to the middle of a random rocky desert.
For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years. 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039. If we could g…
See I like what you're saying, but try this idea on and see how it fits:
What if instead of all that, we just fucken defund education, destroy the environment, and suck as much wealth out of the dregs of society as we can?
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#313Why don't we send a rover to some of these interesting places? It seems like we're constantly making fascinating finds on Mars, then send rovers to the middle of a random rocky desert.
For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years. 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039. If we could g…
> A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date.
So could a better rover and rovers are getting better quickly. And you could send hundreds of rovers for the cost of a manned mission.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years. 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039. If we could g…
I was talking to an oncologist yesterday. Her biggest frustration is that Silicon Valley billionaires are spending billions upon billions to send things to space, when there are serious problems on Earth that could be fought, most importantly cancer. It’s hard to argue with her. $400B/yr would fund a lot of research that would benefit humanity a lot better than a coordinated mission to Mars, even though it would be v…
What if there is a cure for cancer but it’s living/growing on Mars?
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years. 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039. If we could g…
Excellent summary. Although I think you're far more likely to make Starfleet 0.5 in the private sector. This problem is too big for current governments because they can't ever agree and ideas will be weighed down by infighting/constituents. Good luck getting 5 countries to agree to anything other than not going to war with eachother these days. Compromises on ideas would be too much for such a mission. I think the on…
> Although I think you're far more likely to make Starfleet 0.5 in the private sector
Can you (or anyone) explain this to me? It's not like there's a bunch of briefcases floating around in space with $4B in them...why would there be any private interest in space exploration? Seems like even the private companies are just being fed money from governments anyway, so in the end it's public funding.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#316Per the Great Filter[0], this is really bad news, right?
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the dialogue quoted here demonstrates the underlying issue that is lost in futurist thought. No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with powerful technology traveled west and stole land from other groups of people. They also traveled south and east and used that technical and economic power to enslave other humans and forced them to develop the west. Development and progress for progress' sake…
> Also, It's clear that much like economics, technology doesn't inherently trickle down. The problem you're identifying is completely independent of exploration. If we spent more on cancer and nothing on space then we would have more medicine-related technologies and fewer of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies But that doesn't have anything to do with what you're objecting to. Look at the…
Does modern space exploration still produce the same kinds of spin-off benefits as the old school 'big space' programs did(say, up until the 80s)?
Could we get the same kinds of spin-off technologies if we reallocated NASA's budget to prioritize technology development over, say, planetary exploration?
I'm not anti-space... and I think it's important for us, as a society, to reach for the heavens. I also think, however, that it would not hold humanity back much in the grand scheme of things if we stopped exploring planets for, say, the next 50-100 years.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I refuse to argue against pedantry. You knew exactly what I meant by saying "all of humanity". 0 humans alive after mass extinction on Earth = humans are extinct, humanity has ended vs 100 humans living in a space colony after mass extinction on Earth = humans are not extinct, humanity has been saved. >The question is could you save more people in space in a hypothetical end of world scenario than you could people on…
You argued that on one hand we could save individuals with cancer, and on the other we could save all of humanity. Only that doesn't include the individual with cancer, or anybody else on Earth! I knew exactly what you meant which is that a non-zero number of humans would be alive, but to me that doesn't live up to the grandiose idea of saving humanity. I don't want to divert money from cancer and presumably other me…
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Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
An oncologist wishing more money was spent on cancer? In other news, water is wet. First of all, the optimal place for me to spend my money is not necessarily the optimal place for someone else to spend theirs. We can't know for sure, of course, but who were would have preferred Elon Musk start a cancer research firm instead of SpaceX? Secondly, there is no universal "cancer" that we can fight. There are hundreds of…
It's also worth noting that an all-out effort to help humans thrive in the harsh environment of interplanetary space might have a nice side benefit of curing cancer. Don't underestimate the power of poetry. In the 60s we used the poetics of the moon landing to fund research. This was an innovation, in that previously we could only get that kind of money together for war projects. So I see space as the poetics that sa…
It could also be said that an all-out war on cancer would allow humans to survive better in the harsh environment of space. As a geek I like the idea of space exploration, but I don't think it is the only way, or even one of the better ways, of driving technological progress.
Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from the logistical concerns others have mentioned, I would expect the risks of contaminating this site with terrestrial stowaways would be relatively high.
Wouldn't rock from Earth end up on Mars the same way that Martian rocks fall on Earth? If so, then contamination may have already happened in both directions.
True, but if we transport a modern microbe then we might miss our chance to isolate the relatively "indigenous" version and be unable to prove that such naturally occurring exchanges are possible.