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Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

bbc.co.uk

441–450 of 495 posts

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#441
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha that was your first thought?

I know right? There is so much literature and speculation on what it will take to live on Mars that "source of liquid water in quantity" is a greatly simplifying step that knocks a dozen different failure scenarios off the decision tree. I'm guessing that people aren't seeing how big a deal this is for future colonists.

Yeah, but first you've got to drill a mile through the ice cap. Then you've got to fight off the scientific community who are having none of this Conquistador nonsense with your nasty infectious human microbiome wiping out the scientific find of the century.

Melting ice is easier _and_ less evil.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#442
post #23

20 years ago it would have been unthinkable to find water in any other planet in the solar system. Mark my words: in 20 years, we'll find extremely simple proto-bacterial life in Mars and in many other planets.

We have already established that microbes live on the exterior of the ISS. They may have come from Earth originally but it does show that life can exist in conditions that we humans consider to be absolutely inhospitable.

Do microbes really live there, or just survive in a stasis?

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“If we somehow transplanted Canada’s healthcare system and costs” Get back to me when you’ve convinced US healthcare workers to take a 30-50% pay cut. Until then, US healthcare will remain more expensive than developed countries that don’t routinely compensate doctors and nurses at the level we do.

This is incorrect. The cost of care in this country is not a function of salary; it's a function of grotesque inefficiencies in the system. When I dug into this during the attempt to repeal the ACA, what I found was the US pays 50% to many times more per capita for much worse outcomes than any other first world nation, with comparisons against Japan being particularly bleak. Furthermore, that is the result of systemi…

What part of your comment is responsive to “total cost of healthcare is dominated by labor” other than “that is incorrect”?

There are, of course, inefficiencies in every system, and without a doubt, the US system of health care has more than universal health care.

We might be able to shave 10% off the health care system by doing away with those inefficiencies, and conceivably another 5% by bulk negotiating on pharmaceuticals.

But given the (I believe correct) statistics that are bandied about showing the US healthcare system is 50-75% more expensive than other systems, where do you think the rest of that money is going?

It’s labor.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some modern thinking has confused self-loathing and careful introspection. There were a great many things that could have, or arguably should have, been done differently in the past, but many of those things were done in the context and to the standards of the day. The transgressions of the past resulted in a technologically advanced society. Introspection considers this and asks, "what should we do differently in th…

Certainly we ought to solve global hunger and access to water before spending trillions of dollars to go find water on mars.

I don’t see why this is an either or proposition.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#445

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…

This is the wisest comment here.

I promise it's not.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#446
post #421
post #185

Earlier 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…

I find the "asteroid" argument (and Musk's "multi-planetary species" argument) to justifying investment in Mars so strange. Mass-extinction-level asteroids hit Earth once in 100s of millions of years. And even when one does hit us, it'll be easier to find ways to make more of us survive on Earth (we'll see it coming, and can build whatever structures and equipment more easily on Earth than on Mars) than we'd be able…

When you're discussing space exploration, and more specifically space colonization you're never speaking in your or even your great x5 grandchildren's lifetimes. You're speaking at the time scale of civilizations, where something like an asteroid is a very real concern. We're not guaranteed to know that one is coming and "build a bigger bunker" is not necessarily a panacea, especially if the surface is completely decimated. Having a few thousand people in a bunker in that scenario just makes it a bigger coffin.

And exploring Mars isn't about protecting the people on Earth from an asteroid. It's about having multiple civilizations so that when one of them eventually gets wiped out by an asteroid (because at these time scales it is an eventuality, not some super-unlikely thing), there are others and the human race can survive.

Literacy or hunger are not scientific problems, they're political ones.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#447
post #411
post #185

Earlier 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…

> An oncologist wishing more money was spent on cancer? In other news, water is wet. Yeah, because only oncologists care about cancer.

Feel free to quote where I said that; or, you can continue willfully misinterpreting my sentiment.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for the ones that experienced it first hand.

Our ancestors got through it, somehow.

Human would not have. The point is not to ensure that any life on Earth survives, the point is to ensure that human life survives. An ELE of similar size today wipes out the human race. There is no coming back from it and without a generation or more of warning there is no surviving it.

At least having colonies on other planets and moons would give us more of a chance.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#449
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should fix our problems here, today, before exporting them elsewhere. Although, if we export them, that's that many different places to try out solutions in semi-isolation in an attempt to find one that works. If we can parallelize the process, and also get cleaner starting conditions to test, why shouldn't we do so?

This is the cosmic equivalent of "laboratories of democracy"[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy

The problem I see with this is that each independent laboratory cannot be easily configured to the same initial conditions. Especially not one on Mars and one on Earth. It would take a tremendous effort to turn Mars into Earth and then use it in parallel to carry out experiments. If the two laboratories are vastly different, comparisons between the two won't have much backing.

Re: Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of technology she takes for granted was built by the space missions. The tech behind CAT and MRI scans are two examples, but there are many more within medicine. A lot of money is sent to various billionaires. The founder of 5 Hour Energy, for example, spends millions of dollars a year on various medical and green energy projects.

What technology behind MRI scans was "built by the space missions"?

The underlying physical phenomenon is nuclear magnetic resonance. This was first observed by Isidor Rabi in 1938, well before the space missions. NMR spectroscopy was developed in the 1940s and 1950s, again before the space missions.

The first magnetic resonance imaging work was done by Paul Lauterbur in the early 1970s. Before him there was Raymond Damadian (who had the idea of using NMR diagnostically but didn't make any images) and after him there was Peter Mansfield. None of these people, so far as I know, had anything to do with space exploration.

Good MRI machines need very powerful magnets, which these days are made using superconducting wires. Superconductivity was discovered in 1911, long before space exploration was a thing. The first superconducting electromagnet was made by Yntema in 1955, before the space program; the first good superconducting electromagnet was made by Kunzler, Buehler, Hsu & Wernick in 1961; so far as I know they have no connection with space exploration.

But don't trust me. How about NASA? Here's a quotation from https://spinoff.nasa.gov/pdf/AIAA-2010-8885-305.pdf:

Confusion about NASA’s technological contributions to daily life exists even at the highest levels of government. In his speech at NASA Headquarters in January 2004 in support of the Vision for Space Exploration, President George W. Bush said, “Medical technologies that help prolong life—such as the imaging processing used in CAT scanners and MRI machines—trace their origins to technology engineered for the use in space.” This, like the previous examples, is incorrect. NASA has contributed in recent years to the advancement of several specific forms of medical imaging devices, and in the past the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has done groundbreaking research in the field of digital imaging. The CAT scan and MRI technologies, however, are specific applications for which NASA can take no direct credit.

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