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Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#351

Post by idlewords »

ryanmercer wrote: post #36
liberte82 wrote: post #11

Why 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…

There's no way to put human beings on Mars without contaminating the planet with Earth bacteria. The bigger the chances there may be life on Mars, or that life once existed there, the more important it becomes to confine exploration to sterilized robots.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#352

Post by 01100011 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #340
01100011 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Normal…

Maybe you misunderstood me or I wasn't clear. What I'm saying is to let NASA keep the money but shift focus towards general technological development, ala Australia's CSIRO. NASA's budget is relatively tiny, especially when compared to the military industrial complex(sure, a lot of that is just benefits for troops, but still).

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#353

Post by vinniejames »

3rdAccount wrote: post #343
henryaj wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but a large body of water makes finding life much more likely. And if we find life on our doorstep, we ought to reduce our estimates of how unlikely abiogenesis is – suggesting the Great Filter is ahead of us, not behind us.

Still not sure how many planets can form life. We think you need water, certain gases, a stable temperature, magnetosphere to block solar radiation, planet like Jupiter to absorb asteroid like impacts...etc. I'm not sure if Mars ever had all that.

That predicate falsey assumes "life" can only survive in earth like conditions

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#354

Post by aggie »

henryaj wrote: post #316

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

Evidence of a second occurrence of abiogenesis would be bad news in that it would significantly lower the probability that abiogenesis is the Great Filter, though it wouldn't rule out a Filter somewhere between abiogenesis and human-level civilization.

But this discovery alone doesn't imply much, as we already know the presence of liquid water isn't that rare. We need to examine it first.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#355

Post by civilitty »

omegaworks wrote: post #276
civilitty wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very tough to explain to someone who hasn't worked on large multidisciplinary projects with mandates to push some sort of boundaries like in exploration, science, and technology. This isn't some theoretical discussion by futurists, there is ample evidence that these kinds of ventures have systemic effects that touch literally every person, socioeconomic class, and daily activity. Academia and private industry ha…

We need a mandate to solve the climate issue and create a sustainable economy on this planet. We humans have a biological human desire to remain alive and eat food. I would argue that that is a stronger innate, biological human desire needed for basic evolutionary survival then that for exploration.

> We humans have a biological human desire to remain alive and eat food.

Humans have a biological desire for exploration because it is critical to remaining alive and finding food. Humans are such a physically weak species with such a long child raising process that we could not have survived any other way.

Exploration is how you survive when apex predators grow out of control, forcing you to move to a safer region. Exploration is how you survive when the climate changes, forcing you to find new sources of water and food. Exploration is how you survive when overpopulation puts pressure on resources, like when tribes get too close and too big to each other and go to war.

Exploration is how we survive.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#356

Post by handsomechad »

ryanmercer wrote: post #36
liberte82 wrote: post #11

Why 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…

Why are you using 1% of GDP for your number?

2018 spending will be 4 trillion

2018 GDP is 20 trillion

so a thats a 5% increase

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#357

Post by jpatokal »

stickfigure wrote: post #300
ChuckMcM wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false dichotomy that always annoys me. It is entirely possible that by spending $400B to safely send people to Mars and live there, especially in a moderately high radiation environment, that we will discover EXACTLY the mechanisms that send cells into cancer states and how to reverse that so they stop. Otherwise we're going to have colonists getting cancer and dying too quickly. Then not only do we get to…

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…

Um, we have settled the Gobi Desert and there's plenty of ways to make it pay, most notably this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyu_Tolgoi_mine

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#358

Post by robotrout »

bordercases wrote: post #255
robotrout wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. You tell your mom that, after she's gotten cancer, asshole. How did her lifestyle cause her cancer in her ovaries (another inflammation caused cancer), I wonder? While you're chastising your mom for her lifestyle, the rest of us will be looking/hoping for a cure. You should know that even you will experience increased and chronic inflammation as you age, no matter how much better than your mom, your lifestyle is.…

My mother did get breast cancer and it went into remission partially by increasing the quality of her lifestyle during and after treatment, as mandated by a pilot study she went through to help assess such an intervention. The lifestyle change was more extreme than what we would have considered necessary before her cancer, but doing cardiovascular exercise every day is already known as having an influence on bodily i…

Nice that your mom got better with her breast cancer. I'm sure you know that a lot of breast cancer "survivors" are victims of an over hyped mammogram screening that calls any lump, no matter how slow growing, "cancer". Whether that's what your mom had or not, it's still scary though. [1]

My mom died of ovarian cancer after living a lifestyle that even you would approve of. Victim shaming pisses me off.

Shaming the victim with this lifestyle bullshit is not productive, and neither is minimizing people who actually search for cures rather than preaching lifestyle.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g366

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#359

Post by lisper »

ryanmercer wrote: post #36
liberte82 wrote: post #11

Why 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…

> For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans.

No, you don't.

> For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years.

That's true, but that is because of budgetary constraints, not technical ones. If you put the same amount of money into a rover as it would take to send a human, you could cover a LOT more ground with autonomous rovers. This is self-evidently true because whatever vehicle you use to get a human from A to B you can instead use to move a human-mass (plus life support and consumables) worth of scientific and excavation equipment instead.

P.S. I used to work on the Mars Rover program.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#360

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

aeternus wrote: post #224
evanlivingston wrote: post #209

Earlier 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…

Technology is actually one of the few things that definitely does trickle down. Refrigeration, washing machines, cellular technology, farming tech, medicine & vaccines, all of these have had extreme impact on those at the bottom. I'd recommend reading Enlightenment Now, an excellent book that really nails the positive effects that general scientific 'progress' has had on society as a whole.

> Technology is actually one of the few things that definitely does trickle down.

Yes, both in both good and bad ways, of course. Lots of people in the world have cheap mobile phones, which enables all sorts of possibilities. But we also all suffer the negative effects of industrialisation (the poor more than the rich, of course) on our environment.

> I'd recommend reading Enlightenment Now, an excellent book that really nails the positive effects that general scientific 'progress' has had on society as a whole.

I'm very dubious of Pinker's Whig-like claims about 'everything getting better'. I'm not convinced that we've become less violent, only better at killing, and from greater distances (so it seems less brutal).

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