Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars • Hacker News Board

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#331

Post by hutzlibu » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 9:58 PM UTC

omegaworks wrote: post #309

hutzlibu wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I would argue that that is a stronger innate, biological human desire needed for basic evolutionary survival then that for exploration" I would argue both is interconnected. With exploring new areas, whether on earth or on mars, new potential spots for human life gets found/get made inhabitable. And even though human sustainable colonisation on mars is far away, we need to start sometimes. Maybe just to make it a s…

>Besides, there never was a time, when there was no hunger on earth. We produce enough food, now, to feed every human being on this planet. In fact we make 17% more food per person today then we did 30 years ago, even with the population increasing over that time period. [1] Ending hunger is an achievable goal. >I don't think it is smart to stop everything else until we get there Again, no one is saying we "stop ever…

"Again, no one is saying we "stop everything else until we get there.""

It sounds a bit like it. Because also the main problem with this thought is, it requires a different distribution mechanism. Socialism for example. And or managed economy. Because today food gets produced the capitalistic way. To make money. Not a charity. Poor people don't have money.

So if there is a charity to buy enough food and able to distribute it to everone ... ok. But many tried, and you could argue it disrupted local food economy (charities bringing in free food, nobody bought from the local farmers anymore, they went out of buisness, simplified but happened)... and therefore increased the need for food delivery etc.

Also, as cruel as it is, the less hungry people, the more people who need food.

In other words, the problem is complex and not simpel. So those who feel the need to solve it (I do a bit actually) should do it. But others who want to explore the mars .. should do that.

Both is important. But maybe mars is actually simpler, than sustainable solving world hunger. Btw. people also like electricity, houses, cars, education ...

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#332

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

anticensor wrote: post #327

ChuckMcM wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, both that it is absolutist and that we've spent more on preventing murder. What is the common thread to both of these absolutist comments? Both cancer and murder are systems in crisis, not 'things' in their own right. They have the same questions 1a) What causes a cell to decide live forever (metastasize)? 1b) What causes a person to decide that killing another person is the solution to some problem? 2a) How…

Yes, cancer and murder are duals. Do you think there may be a way to convert between measures against either?

Not sure how this relates to the argument. Can you be a bit more specific?

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#333

Post by stickfigure » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 10:03 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #303

stickfigure wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have that precisely backwards. The humans don't get sent to live in a high-radiation environment until we figure out hot to prevent the cancers. We're not just going to send a bunch of people to their death. This is what irks me about "send people to Mars!" - we aren't anywhere near high enough on the technology tree to even contemplate the endeavor. Or to quote Bruce Sterling: I'll believe in people settling Mar…

I like this image, although when I think about deserts I think about the Mojave desert and the people who died crossing it to get to the gold that was in the Sierra's. Or the oceans people crossed to get to the Americas. While there is 'hospitable' there is 'hard to survive' and I think surviving a journey across the ocean with 16th century tech might have some parallels. I get the mindset of staying at home around t…

There's a pretty substantial difference between "living on the other side of the ocean" and "living in a submarine", which is probably what life on Mars would be like given foreseeable technology. It's not just fear of the unknown. It's the sheer practical matter that life on Mars (if possible) will be extremely difficult, and the only obvious benefit is that you can say "hey look, I'm on Mars!"

Hell, you can simulate life on Mars by signing up for a career in deep sea diving. Actually, deep sea diving is probably a million times easier since you can pretty easily get parts from the surface.

I should have posted the full Bruce Sterling quote:

I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.

On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense.

If there were a society with enough technical power to terraform Mars, they would certainly do it. On the other hand. by the time they got around to messing with Mars, they would have been using all that power to transform _themselves_. So by the time they got there and started rebuilding the Martian atmosphere wholesale, they wouldn't look or act a whole lot like Hollywood extras.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#334

Post by SiempreViernes » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 10:04 PM UTC

gls2ro wrote: post #232

SiempreViernes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, the military invents very few things, they mostly spend money on custom development of existing tech to make it better at killing things or facilitating the killing of things. The car, the calculating machine, the photograph, the steam engine, the radar: none where invented by military men or even those funded by the military.

I might be very wrong (as I don’t have right now time to research more) but I think _the calculating machine_ and _the radar_ are things actually created as usable products because the military needed them in the first place. I am not in favor of spending (more) money on military.

Not really, their further development certainly benefitted from military money, but the basics came from civilian need for navigation, in general and in mist.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#335

Post by cobbzilla » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

orthecreedence wrote: post #315

fjabre wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

two words: asteroid mining. the “resource extraction” industries are salivating at the prospects.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#336

Post by brainpool » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 10:09 PM UTC

azernik wrote: post #323

henryaj wrote: post #316

Per the Great Filter[0], this is really bad news, right? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

No, whatever happened on Mars has to do with issues of planetary geology and natural climate change that aren't issues for us. i.e. it's a term in the Fermi equation that doesn't apply to us anymore.

What happens on Mars stays on Mars

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#337

Post by jsolson » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

remote_phone wrote: post #43

ryanmercer wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

Single-planet redundancy isn't a problem until it's a _really big_ (say, inescapable) problem.

I'd put good odds on us wiping ourselves out or being wiped out before we manage to put a sustainable stake in some other chunk of ground.

Also $400B/yr is great if you can make use of it. Do we have the intellectual and facility resources to make use of that sort of windfall today? Probably not. Could more money go to cancer research for immediate positive effect? Probably, although working out the logistics for how best to direct that funding requires resources of its own (which is of course the sort of work the Gates Foundation does).

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#338

Post by Aloisius » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

yonkshi wrote: post #298

adventured wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're underestimating the cost of US healthcare per capita by an extreme amount. Universal healthcare would cost a minimum of $3.6 trillion (that's an ideal scenario where the US gets its per capita spending down to other high spending nations), and a more likely ~$4.5 trillion. Higher education for all would cost at least $600 billion (close to the existing spending for all post secondary institutions annually), mo…

Would you please provide some sources on all your numbers? those are some astronomical numbers and are essential in validating your point. Edit: I did some of my own research, UHC take 8~11% GDP in other countries. That would put us around 1.8 trillion (2016 GDP). Much less than $3.5 trillion you claimed. Plus, US is already spending 16% of GDP (~3 trillion) on health care, despite not having universal healthcare. 11…

Remember, government spending increases the GDP. You'd have to get closer to $2 trillion to hit 11% if, for some reason, one wanted to use that as a target rather than per-capita spending.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#339

Post by aeternus » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #317

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, howeve…

Human effort, passion, and drive are highly dependent on belief in a shared vision and end goal. You're likely to get much more effort out of a team if the end goal is to find a thermal material that can survive Mars re-entry vs. a thermal material that can make some industrial process 5% more efficient.

Effort isn't necessarily a zero-sum game, and necessity as the mother of invention has some truth to it.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#340

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Jul 25, 2018, 10:22 PM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #317

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, howeve…

> Could we get the same kinds of spin-off technologies if we reallocated NASA's budget to prioritize technology development over, say, planetary exploration?

Not really. The private sector is really good at technology development, i.e. take an idea and figure out how to mass produce it at low cost.

What you want government funding for is fundamental research. Which space is good at because of the constraints.

Normally if you can't fit your payload on the truck, you send a second truck. That costs another $100, so it's not worth it to you to spend ten million dollars to figure out how to make it work with one truck, even if you figuring out will save a hundred million other people a hundred dollars each.

With space, you can't just send another ten billion dollar rocket, so you do the ten million in research and actually solve the problem, and we get the piece of new technology that everybody can also use for other things.

"Necessity is the mother of invention." It's hot, it's cold, it's far away, adding a kilo costs nine kilos of rocket fuel, oxygen is scarce, gravity is different, etc. You need the constraints to force an invention instead of just suffering the status quo and covering for the inefficiency with brute force.