Sending people to Mars actually has enormous benefits - for all the power of rovers, they have to be treated very carefully because everything they do is delayed by 15 minutes. You can't catch yourself in the middle of a move and stop - you have to rely on the onboard logic for that and hope it works out. The rovers are great, but they've always suffered from, despite everything, getting less done then 1 geologist with a shovel could.
But those are just the small rover's we're using today. If you're talking about a manned mission, you'd need to build a vehicle in orbit large enough to get people to the planet. If you're going to do that, just build a bigger damn robot, with a bigger brain and bigger shovel / drill. It should be able to do any surface stuff an astronaut stuck in an environmentally sealed suit could before their oxygen supplies ran out.
No, you can launch directly from the ground to Mars. I don't know where this whole "orbital vehicle construction" paradigm comes from, but it hasn't been on the table for a Mars mission since the very first concepts, all of which got whacked by the government for being too expensive. This was decades ago.
As far as humans vs. robots, I have fantastic respect for the achievements of the JPL and everyone else involved with Curiosity--but we are nowhere even remotely near being able to build a robot that is as useful as a human. Even having robots operated by telepresence (e.g. by humans in orbit) would be a huge step up in terms of scientific payoff.
We might one day have autonomous vehicles as capable as people, but we're sure as fuck not there yet.
One of the plans I saw called for using Dragon capsules fitted for Mars landing as inter-linking modules for habitation, and linking them all up so they'd form a kind of rover convoy. Something somewhat similar is actually operating in Antarctica right now: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/05/antarctic-walking-research-lab. Hell Elon Musk's whole original Mars vision was that he wanted to buy a rocket and launch a greenhouse of plants to Mars, just to show it could be done (well, also it'd be hella useful science). I think he's still planning to do it.
I'm all game for sending plants / algae to Mars to see what happens (fingers crossed that they somehow adapt to the environment and start to spread), but not people. Not until we're sure we can get them back (or at least as sure that we were with regards to Apollo). Someone already said this, but what if you ran halfway out of your supplies and then had a change of heart? Whoops, too bad; now we get to listen to every painful transmission you send back to Earth begging for some kind of impossible rescue and /or cursing NASA / Space X / society as you slowly die.
NASA's plans have a return vehicle waiting on the ground before any crew launch. The whole thing works in two (or three, depending on the DRM version) launches directly from the ground--you send an unmanned cargo vehicle (or pair of them) with a return vehicle, reactor, and some hydrogen feedstock. The return vehicle starts fueling itself on the surface, and then the crew and scientific payload are sent to land at a nearby location once the return vehicle is determined to be operational. There's another return vehicle (ostensibly for the next mission's crew) that can be redirected to land near the first crew if something goes wrong with the landing and crew #1 is too far from their return vehicle.
You should probably read one of the NASA design reference mission documents. Elon Musk, of course, has his own ideas--but the DRM is probably still the best way to get familiar with what a manned mission would actually look like. It's really quite safe as far as manned spaceflight goes--probably no riskier to the crew than Apollo was.
[Edit: here's a PDF of the latest study. Note again that this isn't Elon Musk's architecture, but NASA's. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373665main_NASA-SP-2009-566.pdf I am not yet at the point of really taking Elon Musk's mission seriously, although I wish him the best of luck.]
NASA's plans have a return vehicle waiting on the ground before any crew launch.
That's fine; ELM was talking about a possible suicide mission, before we have any return trip infrastructure in place.
As far as humans vs. robots, I have fantastic respect for the achievements of the JPL and everyone else involved with Curiosity--but we are nowhere even remotely near being able to build a robot that is as useful as a human. Even having robots operated by telepresence (e.g. by humans in orbit) would be a huge step up in terms of scientific payoff.
Alright then: what are the important things that a human explorer weighed down by their environmental suit, with limited surface time, resources, tools, and safety precaution barriers, can do that one of our rovers cannot do?
Personally, I could never be a Mars astronaut. Even if I wasn't married, the probability that I would never see my mother or brother again would be heartbreaking for me. At the most optimal time in both planets' respective orbits, it still takes something a little over three minutes for light to get from Earth to Mars, which means that even Skyping isn't exactly feasible unless you're going to sit there painting your nails for seven minutes while someone replies to your simply query, "how are you today?"
If I didn't have these family considerations to worry about, though, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Alright then: what are the important things that a human explorer weighed down by their environmental suit, with limited surface time, resources, tools, and safety precaution barriers, can do that one of our rovers cannot do?
Well, move faster than 1.5 inches per second for one, and achieve Curiosity's entire mission in about a week's time if you've got a buggy to drive around. That leaves two months and three weeks, minimum, to do even more science.
Personally, I could never be a Mars astronaut. Even if I wasn't married, the probability that I would never see my mother or brother again would be heartbreaking for me. At the most optimal time in both planets' respective orbits, it still takes something a little over three minutes for light to get from Earth to Mars, which means that even Skyping isn't exactly feasible unless you're going to sit there painting your nails for seven minutes while someone replies to your simply query, "how are you today?"
If I didn't have these family considerations to worry about, though, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Claustrophobia would do me in on even the most rudimentary space mission. Just watching some of the old shuttle mission procedures gives me the shakes.
You guys that actually want to go up there are cray cray.
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
And humans can do pretty much all things whereas a rover can do exactly the few functions its hardware and software construction permitts.
I love when people talk about terraforming Mars like it's a possibility. Dead core plus no magnetosphere means it will never work.
And heck, we can't even terraform parts of Africa to feed starving people there, how the hell are we going to terraform a planet a hundred million miles away with zero life on it?
As a guy who has done prison time and spent 2 years inside a small, crammed cell, I can tell you that borism is going to be the worst thing in the world. No matter how much stuff you bring, how much you like the people you are with, soon you will get restless and need to do something else. At least when I was in prison I knew when the end was. Suicide might be high in the first group because of our comfortable life styles.
But with that said, sign me up. I'm sure Christopher Columbus didn't think he would return the first time he sailed east.
I love when people talk about terraforming Mars like it's a possibility. Dead core plus no magnetosphere means it will never work.
And heck, we can't even terraform parts of Africa to feed starving people there, how the hell are we going to terraform a planet a hundred million miles away with zero life on it?
Dead core and no magnetosphere!? Challenge accepted.
I love when people talk about terraforming Mars like it's a possibility. Dead core plus no magnetosphere means it will never work.
And heck, we can't even terraform parts of Africa to feed starving people there, how the hell are we going to terraform a planet a hundred million miles away with zero life on it?
Yeah, and getting to the moon is impossible because you'd have to go through the Van Allen radiation belts, which is just ridiculous!
The necessity of a magnetosphere to life isn't established; we know it's necessary to prevent the atmosphere of a planet from being ablated into space, but we can always replace lost atmosphere. It certainly isn't needed to protect life on the planet's surface already underneath an atmosphere: we know this because at several points in time Earth's own magnetosphere has collapsed, and none of those collapses coincided with an extinction event.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I love when people talk about terraforming Mars like it's a possibility. Dead core plus no magnetosphere means it will never work.
And heck, we can't even terraform parts of Africa to feed starving people there, how the hell are we going to terraform a planet a hundred million miles away with zero life on it?
Can't or won't?
It ain't the environment that is making it impossible to feed Africa.
I love when people talk about terraforming Mars like it's a possibility. Dead core plus no magnetosphere means it will never work.
And heck, we can't even terraform parts of Africa to feed starving people there, how the hell are we going to terraform a planet a hundred million miles away with zero life on it?
Can't or won't?
It ain't the environment that is making it impossible to feed Africa.
Seriously. Famine is, ironically, not caused by an actual deficit in the food supply.
I love when people talk about terraforming Mars like it's a possibility. Dead core plus no magnetosphere means it will never work.
And heck, we can't even terraform parts of Africa to feed starving people there, how the hell are we going to terraform a planet a hundred million miles away with zero life on it?
Dead core and no magnetosphere!? Challenge accepted.
Just drill to the core and detonate a couple nukes to get things spinning again, Boom core restarted.
CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
edited March 2013
We can colonize and/or terraform almost anything given enough time and effort; most of the time it won't be pleasent immediately or even for a few centuries, or ever, but it can be done.
All we need is better technology and energy sources to speed the process along and more time to deal with space age growing pains and our continued adolescence as a species.
We can colonize and/or terraform almost anything given enough time and effort; most of the time it won't be pleasent immediately or even for a few centuries, or ever, but it can be done.
All we need is better technology and energy sources to speed the process along and more time to deal with space age growing pains and our continued adolescence as a species.
There is literally no reason to terraform Mars. If at some point in the future Earth becomes uninhabitable because we've trashed it and we've developed a way to turn Mars into a habitable planet, we can fix anything wrong with our own planet using the same technology. If you're thinking of eventually having to leave Earth when it becomes inhospitable due to the sun going red giant, going to Mars isn't going to be far enough.
Time and money would be better spent researching and developing technologies that enable us to find and get to planets which are already suitable for human life.
Muse Among MenSuburban Bunny Princess?Its time for a new shtick Registered Userregular
I had this very discussion in a scifi chatroom not too long ago.
I personally would not become a Mars colonist. There are too many things on Earth that I like, would miss or haven't seen yet. It really would take a special kind of person to be a colonist. Antarctic researchers and submariners, for example, might be able to handle it. Maybe ascetic monks and nuns? I don't think we can underestimate the power of loneliness, isolation and claustrophobia. Here on Earth, people suffer under the weight of solitude in our largest cities. It would be so much more heartwrenching on an entire, uninhabited, harsh planet away. I don't think it is worth it to send humans to Mars (especially on a one way trip) without having established facilities there, get a little town going. A return trip though? Eh, that's different. If the whole affair was properly put together to ensure safety and whatever comforts could be reasonably provided, it might not be so bad. Lets just not to be too hasty. I still wouldn't go but it may well be worth it for OP to do so.
Here we show that a series of planet-encircling superconducting rings can provide an artificial geomagnetic field equivalent to 10% of the present-day field necessary to prevent adverse effects. A feasible system consists of 12 latitudinal high-temperature superconducting rings, each carrying 6.4 MA current with a modest 1 GW of power requirement.
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
That actually sounds less like a practically solvable problem after you posted that.
1. Planet encircling rings. For example, the largest concrete construction right now is a 2km long dam in China. Not equivalent example but it is something.
2. 1 GW of power is what, a thousand general nuclear power plants?
We can colonize and/or terraform almost anything given enough time and effort; most of the time it won't be pleasent immediately or even for a few centuries, or ever, but it can be done.
All we need is better technology and energy sources to speed the process along and more time to deal with space age growing pains and our continued adolescence as a species.
There is literally no reason to terraform Mars. If at some point in the future Earth becomes uninhabitable because we've trashed it and we've developed a way to turn Mars into a habitable planet, we can fix anything wrong with our own planet using the same technology. If you're thinking of eventually having to leave Earth when it becomes inhospitable due to the sun going red giant, going to Mars isn't going to be far enough.
Time and money would be better spent researching and developing technologies that enable us to find and get to planets which are already suitable for human life.
"Because we can" is a perfectly legitimate reason. Having two planets instead of just one is pretty cool, too.
That actually sounds less like a practically solvable problem after you posted that.
1. Planet encircling rings. For example, the largest concrete construction right now is a 2km long dam in China. Not equivalent example but it is something.
2. 1 GW of power is what, a thousand general nuclear power plants?
If we get really really lucky, we might get Martian atmosphere for free if that comet slams into it head on next year (and is sufficiently large and composed of water and some type of frozen gas).
I am really really hoping that will happen, though the current projections are it's unlikely.
Also, it's depressing that Martian atmosphere would cost less then the Iraq and Afganistan wars.
Projected cost is often completely different than actual cost. The Iraq war was supposed to cost $0. The cost analysis of theoretical processes to terraform Mars is likely to be even more inaccurate.
We can colonize and/or terraform almost anything given enough time and effort; most of the time it won't be pleasent immediately or even for a few centuries, or ever, but it can be done.
All we need is better technology and energy sources to speed the process along and more time to deal with space age growing pains and our continued adolescence as a species.
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And a bunch of other things not happening like a asteroid/comet hitting Mars straight up and such.
As far as humans vs. robots, I have fantastic respect for the achievements of the JPL and everyone else involved with Curiosity--but we are nowhere even remotely near being able to build a robot that is as useful as a human. Even having robots operated by telepresence (e.g. by humans in orbit) would be a huge step up in terms of scientific payoff.
We might one day have autonomous vehicles as capable as people, but we're sure as fuck not there yet.
NASA's plans have a return vehicle waiting on the ground before any crew launch. The whole thing works in two (or three, depending on the DRM version) launches directly from the ground--you send an unmanned cargo vehicle (or pair of them) with a return vehicle, reactor, and some hydrogen feedstock. The return vehicle starts fueling itself on the surface, and then the crew and scientific payload are sent to land at a nearby location once the return vehicle is determined to be operational. There's another return vehicle (ostensibly for the next mission's crew) that can be redirected to land near the first crew if something goes wrong with the landing and crew #1 is too far from their return vehicle.
You should probably read one of the NASA design reference mission documents. Elon Musk, of course, has his own ideas--but the DRM is probably still the best way to get familiar with what a manned mission would actually look like. It's really quite safe as far as manned spaceflight goes--probably no riskier to the crew than Apollo was.
[Edit: here's a PDF of the latest study. Note again that this isn't Elon Musk's architecture, but NASA's. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/373665main_NASA-SP-2009-566.pdf I am not yet at the point of really taking Elon Musk's mission seriously, although I wish him the best of luck.]
That's fine; ELM was talking about a possible suicide mission, before we have any return trip infrastructure in place.
Alright then: what are the important things that a human explorer weighed down by their environmental suit, with limited surface time, resources, tools, and safety precaution barriers, can do that one of our rovers cannot do?
Accompany Wilson as he shows you where the Protheon Archive is.
You've got nothing to lose by applying Electricity, are Mars One applications open yet?
"A New Life Awaits You In Off World Colonization!"
If I didn't have these family considerations to worry about, though, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
If you want to launch me into space for the glory of the species, I am down with that.
Political science degrees count for science right?
Well, move faster than 1.5 inches per second for one, and achieve Curiosity's entire mission in about a week's time if you've got a buggy to drive around. That leaves two months and three weeks, minimum, to do even more science.
Claustrophobia would do me in on even the most rudimentary space mission. Just watching some of the old shuttle mission procedures gives me the shakes.
You guys that actually want to go up there are cray cray.
And heck, we can't even terraform parts of Africa to feed starving people there, how the hell are we going to terraform a planet a hundred million miles away with zero life on it?
But with that said, sign me up. I'm sure Christopher Columbus didn't think he would return the first time he sailed east.
Dead core and no magnetosphere!? Challenge accepted.
Yeah, and getting to the moon is impossible because you'd have to go through the Van Allen radiation belts, which is just ridiculous!
The necessity of a magnetosphere to life isn't established; we know it's necessary to prevent the atmosphere of a planet from being ablated into space, but we can always replace lost atmosphere. It certainly isn't needed to protect life on the planet's surface already underneath an atmosphere: we know this because at several points in time Earth's own magnetosphere has collapsed, and none of those collapses coincided with an extinction event.
Can't or won't?
It ain't the environment that is making it impossible to feed Africa.
remember our obsession with domes in the 90s?
Seriously. Famine is, ironically, not caused by an actual deficit in the food supply.
Just drill to the core and detonate a couple nukes to get things spinning again, Boom core restarted.
All we need is better technology and energy sources to speed the process along and more time to deal with space age growing pains and our continued adolescence as a species.
Yeah, what a terrible idea
I'd totally go to Mars, but I don't think I want to be the first one there. I think I'm more of a traveler than an explorer.
There is literally no reason to terraform Mars. If at some point in the future Earth becomes uninhabitable because we've trashed it and we've developed a way to turn Mars into a habitable planet, we can fix anything wrong with our own planet using the same technology. If you're thinking of eventually having to leave Earth when it becomes inhospitable due to the sun going red giant, going to Mars isn't going to be far enough.
Time and money would be better spent researching and developing technologies that enable us to find and get to planets which are already suitable for human life.
I personally would not become a Mars colonist. There are too many things on Earth that I like, would miss or haven't seen yet. It really would take a special kind of person to be a colonist. Antarctic researchers and submariners, for example, might be able to handle it. Maybe ascetic monks and nuns? I don't think we can underestimate the power of loneliness, isolation and claustrophobia. Here on Earth, people suffer under the weight of solitude in our largest cities. It would be so much more heartwrenching on an entire, uninhabited, harsh planet away. I don't think it is worth it to send humans to Mars (especially on a one way trip) without having established facilities there, get a little town going. A return trip though? Eh, that's different. If the whole affair was properly put together to ensure safety and whatever comforts could be reasonably provided, it might not be so bad. Lets just not to be too hasty. I still wouldn't go but it may well be worth it for OP to do so.
1. Planet encircling rings. For example, the largest concrete construction right now is a 2km long dam in China. Not equivalent example but it is something.
2. 1 GW of power is what, a thousand general nuclear power plants?
"Because we can" is a perfectly legitimate reason. Having two planets instead of just one is pretty cool, too.
Actually it's more like 1 nuclear powerplant.
Or coal powerplant for that matter - we generally design and provision in gigawatts these days. Check out this list of nuclear power plants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_stations
Basically, we start at 1 GW.
It's a once in a life time opportunity to make history.
Also right when you leave you can play a video of yourself saying " Get your ass to mars"
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Projected cost is often completely different than actual cost. The Iraq war was supposed to cost $0. The cost analysis of theoretical processes to terraform Mars is likely to be even more inaccurate.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
1. Science
2. ???
3. Profit! Terraformed!!
Turns out the ??? is the important part.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+