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axeil posted:I read a pretty interesting thing a bit back that Venus might be a more workable 2nd Earth than Mars, provided we live in essentially a space station. Venus has Earth-like atmospheric pressure and temperature a few miles up and you wouldn't need a spacesuit, just something to provide oxygen, unlike Mars where it's basically a vacuum and terraforming isn't real technology right now. If we can terraform mars we can terraform earth and then theres no reason to leave earth
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Jul 21, 2019 18:07
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Doesn't this apply to basically everything? Isn't this literally how ecosystems work? Just constant churn of different species killing each other and hiding from being killed and fighting back from being killed over and over till it settles into slowly shifting ongoing patterns forever. Until a species like humans gets agead of other species and takes over the galaxy First there was shifting patterns then humans broke the pattern on earth
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Jul 21, 2019 18:10
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thewalk posted:If we can terraform mars we can terraform earth and then theres no reason to leave earth Your right we should live on earth forwver so i can grab a pint with my m8s in 4055
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Jul 21, 2019 18:15
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thewalk posted:God is out origin species sending seeding dna pods to planets to colonize the galaxy with the power of evolution. Our dna has coding that holds the information of our origins(hence religion). That's completely backwards! God is death, trying to kill us to keep the universe pure and orderly. Satan is the one seeding new lifeforms and we'll link up to hell, not heaven! Get your facts straight, dude!
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Jul 21, 2019 19:19
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Libluini posted:That's completely backwards! God is death, trying to kill us to keep the universe pure and orderly. Satan is the one seeding new lifeforms and we'll link up to hell, not heaven! Get your facts straight, dude! So where do the Thetans come into this?
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Jul 21, 2019 22:24
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Stoner Sloth posted:So where do the Thetans come into this? I’d tell you, but it looks like you haven’t attended the Level 9 retreat yet.
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Jul 21, 2019 23:54
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"We need to slash the NASA budget and stop doing anything in space and that will solve poverty" is a special kind of stupid in a society where a few individuals have written the rules to give themselves more wealth than NASA could dream of.
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Jul 22, 2019 13:43
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bird food bathtub posted:"We need to slash the NASA budget and stop doing anything in space and that will solve poverty" is a special kind of stupid in a society where a few individuals have written the rules to give themselves more wealth than NASA could dream of. Why do you hate freedom, comrade?
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Jul 22, 2019 15:44
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I'm sorry, but where do you live that doesn't require upkeep? Civilizations require upkeep, but ecosystems don't. Earth life has gotten along for billions of years without upkeep. What's the expected lifespan of civilization? Even in the best case scenario where we are mining asteroids and building space habitats and dyson swarm and interstellar generation ships, how long is that gonna last? Not that we shouldn't pursue all that, but if we want to be anything more than a flash in the pan, we'll need to establish ecosystems in more stable environments than orbiting tin cans. We as a species have a narcissistic tendency to see ourselves as the important bit, rather than earth life as a whole. We're on track to be Gaia's skynet. She birthed us, and we could send her seeds to the sky, but we've gone to war with her instead. Human civilization could terraform other worlds, and/or de-terraform this one. What we do in orbit is trivial in comparison.
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Jul 22, 2019 18:32
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Epitope posted:Civilizations require upkeep, but ecosystems don't. Earth life has gotten along for billions of years without upkeep. What's the expected lifespan of civilization? Even in the best case scenario where we are mining asteroids and building space habitats and dyson swarm and interstellar generation ships, how long is that gonna last? Not that we shouldn't pursue all that, but if we want to be anything more than a flash in the pan, we'll need to establish ecosystems in more stable environments than orbiting tin cans. Life After People makes me think its 10,000 years before all of human civilization has more or less been entirely erased and the only evidence remaining being the crumbling and disintegrating concrete foundations of city centers.  In fairness, long term, the argument about the advantages of megastructures for a civilization capable of constructing them have yeah, massive advantages. A niven ring world could hold trillions of people; a "true" dyson sphere is basically infinite real estate for countless quintillions of people. The entire population of massive scifi empires like the Imperium of Man or the Galactic Empire in either Star Wars or The Foundation could probably fit inside one and they could be constructed from decomposing barren star systems for materials. Will there be entire economies dedicated to the logistics and maintenance of these structures? Probably yeah, because entropy affects everything and even the most magical of space metals probably erode over time even in the vacuum of space. But the time scales of such things is massive and incomprehensible. And building even just small scale space stations in orbit is such a massive engineering challenge that we're not even close to solving in terms of quality assurance that it's ridiculous to suppose that its more effective, easier, or cheaper to go that route first. We have hundreds of years of experience in building structures on Earth, in some very hostile regions; and its pretty easy to build and test a habitat on Earth that would be intended for Mars; and its a little harder to test space stations; you gotta submerge them in water or hope your simulations are accurate. These add complications, and the level of endurance they need to survive in space is greater due to micro meteorites and other things that don't become a concern when protected by even Mars's minimal atmosphere. Mars structures would also be maintenance hogs and need maintenance and upkeep; it is just conceptually easier to design and test for the well understood challenges of surviving on Mars; while in the vacuum of space there is this order of magnitude increase in difficulty and cost. Not that we shouldn't also do that too, they're both worthwhile goals; but Nick Land's "Humans need to disassemble the Earth and the sun and forced everyone to live in space" is kinda crazy.
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Jul 22, 2019 19:13
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I feel like a long part of this conversation started on someone saying some sort of "good luck building anywhere but underground" where like, so? You are going to have to live indoors, why not underground? You aren't going to have any more trouble going outside from a cave than from a building.
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Jul 22, 2019 21:42
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It'll be at least like Skara Brae on Orkney. Settlement dug into the ground, because excavation is going to be easier and building away from serious fabrication equipment.
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Jul 22, 2019 23:05
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like a long part of this conversation started on someone saying some sort of "good luck building anywhere but underground" where like, so? You are going to have to live indoors, why not underground? You aren't going to have any more trouble going outside from a cave than from a building. Yeah the Mars Direct book has a whole chapter on this and honestly they look pretty chill. You can build them out of bricks made from martian materials and they'll work fine and is about comparable to about half the strength of concrete. Basically you dig a trench and then within the trench build roman style vaults or atriums, you can keep the brick compressed with about 2-3 meters of martian dirt; this puts enough force to easily pressurized the vault and also provides plentiful radiation shielding, and thermal insulation making the temperature swings in the martian day/night cycle unnoticible. These subterranium atriums could be relatively easily constructed to be huge in size, like shopping malls in size; you can prevent leaks with sealant sprayed on the walls and slow leaks due to moisture will freeze, and end up being self sealing. But it also wouldn't be difficult to construct surface structures and large domes; nothing about Mars insists that everyone has to be underground for long term habitations; it's just super convenient and cheap.
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Jul 22, 2019 23:14
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Raenir Salazar posted:Yeah the Mars Direct book has a whole chapter on this and honestly they look pretty chill. You can build them out of bricks made from martian materials and they'll work fine and is about comparable to about half the strength of concrete. There's a giant issue with relying on the Martian soil for building materials. Perchlorate Salts. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/06/20/perchlorate-salt-mars-surface/
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Jul 22, 2019 23:23
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:There's a giant issue with relying on the Martian soil for building materials. Perchlorate Salts. At a glance the article doesn't specifically speak to the salts being an issue in martian soil as a construction material, but if you use it for growing crops or drinking water; so my gut feeling is that maybe its like asbestos? Sounds like an engineering problem. Edit From this other article the analogy that comes to mind is yeah, basically its asbestos. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Jul 22, 2019 |
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Jul 22, 2019 23:29
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:We can account for only 5% of the mass in the universe, have no solid explanation for where all the antimatter went, are missing a bunch of lithium from the entire universe and know of several billion light year wide areas that have barely any galaxies in them. And humanity is some alien races dna escape pod attempt at surviving the event.
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Jul 23, 2019 13:08
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Kerning Chameleon posted:You do realize that is literally what the policy makers at the time lamented, both when the soviets got nukes and much later when the north koreans got their nuclear icbms? "Yeah, in hindsight, we should've struck while we had the chance, that was real dumb of us." Thats stupid. They have kinetic civilization ending rocks to throw at us We have the same weapons. Neither civilization launches because if the other sides sensors pick up the incoming strike your both destroyed. It prevented cold war. It will prevent alien war
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Jul 24, 2019 00:54
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thewalk posted:Thats stupid. They have kinetic civilization ending rocks to throw at us Good luck aiming and launching your return volley in the minutes/seconds that the iron bolide traveling at 0.9c, from an unknown location, takes to go from the edge of your detection network to resurfacing Earth. MAD worked because the superpowers knew where their rivals were, and they were approximately equal in tech level, and we could reasonably predict human behaviour. Imagine instead we found out a hive of wasps was about to develop the capability to wipe out humanity, and we had no ability to communicate with them. That's a closer analogue to interstellar diplomacy. Launching kkv at a civilization before they detect you is unfortunately a very logical conclusion game theory wise.
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Jul 24, 2019 11:35
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We absolutely don't have relativistic weapons so even if we know exactly what planet and which star they were shooting at us from we'd have zero means of returning fire if we found aliens tomorrow. Additionally, if you're thinking on a galactic scale, if losing one planet means ending the threat of an upstart civilization but thats okay you got planets to spare and if you win you have millions of years to fix it and to spread to a million other worlds then maybe it's a small price to pay. Which is another reason why we presumably want to outfit von neumann terraforming probes and colony ships to hundreds of worlds so we become essentially unkillable. It's presumably possible an alien civilization could just aim ocean evaporating rocks at *every* single planet and moon in the galaxy (and these strikes are essentially undetectable) just to be sure. Maybe that's what got the dinosaurs and presumably we wouldn't be safe unless we managed to find them first before they pull that trigger. A lot of things are quite disturbing when you know you're probably on the lower end of the technology tree compared to anything else that may exist out there.
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Jul 24, 2019 14:07
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One thing I never see people talk about re:space travel is the organizational, as opposed to the material cost. I really like the post in the OP about the scales and energy costs involved in sending anything to another star, but even within the solar system doing something like colonizing the moon would involve a pretty crazy material investment, as some people already pointed out. What I think this misses though is that any kind of human endeavor is a product of exerted power, of the ability to direct resources along with the availability of resources. Space optimists like to say things like "when we are a type 3 civilization, we will have technology that will let us overcome these problems" but besides the point that technological progress doesn't really work that way, we also just do not operate "as a species" or "as a civilization", things like the moon landing were performed by powerful actors within the human species, like the US or USSR government or their military-industrial complexes, not by any species or civilization as a whole. In the case of the moon landing, the will to demonstrate ICBM and other technological capabilities was great enough to spur them into investing that amount of resources and to take the risk of trying it. Projects like that are only undertaken in earnest if there is a powerful motivator that can overcome the tendency to avoid the risk involved. So for example, while it's clearly possible to put a man on Mars in technological or material terms, it would require a tremendous organizational, political and human effort to actually commit to doing it. It's not only expensive, but failure or an accident would cause loss of face, loss of investment and tremendous political damage to the people involved in starting the project. In the case of the moon landing, there was still an incentive powerful enough to overcome this risk, but Mars is exponentially riskier and there is no real immediate gain except some prestige. While human actors aren't exactly perfectly calculating rational beings, I think there are probably hard limits to how willing any single actor would ever be to commit to a large project like a Mars landing, let alone colonization or terraforming, and so these projects are in fact really unlikely to ever happen in the absence of a real incentive. This is also why it's so difficult to act on climate change in any drastic way. I like to watch the youtube show PBS Space Time and while I think it's a great show for explaining things to a general audience, it occasionally veers into this kind of "type 3 civilization", Dyson Sphere magical thinking, and it annoys me. It's interesting to me how people with a technology and physics background, at least those within the mainstream, tend to ignore the power and politics that are involved in actually doing these things and reduce it to "civilizations" or "the species" like in a videogame.
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Jul 24, 2019 19:34
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I'm sorry, but what exactly are you saying? I don't really get your point other than you seem to be saying, "Hey space exploration is really hard." I think everyone knows this though? It was in fact *the* justification JFK used for the Moon program. Things like energy consumption space civilization tech levels are all just thought experiments within the context of thinking about the future on large timescales and in a large scope of distance; it gives people something to think about and provides briefing materials to people who might not know, it's useful to explain complex concepts to lay persons; it isn't meant to be a predictor. I'm also not sure about your usage of "space optimists" either, whether or not we could go to Mars successfully isn't really a matter of "Is the glass half full?" thinking, but something that's been fairly thoroughly studied and examines as exceedingly feasible. Like when you say "it's expensive!" Well compared to what? Congress agreed on a deal to increase military spending by 150 billion dollars; more than twice the amount needed to get people on Mars; that seems on the scale of national economies rather cheap. There are differences in degree and in kinds; there's a difference in kind between the idea of colonizing 500 planets and in colonizing Mars in terms of feasibility and just how "speculative" these challenges are. Getting a man on the moon vs getting a man on Mars is a difference in degree. Building a larger space station so we can build a larger space station to build a tug to go to an asteroid and get its resources are all different steps of degree until the tug/mining part; that's a difference in kind. Have you seen kurzgesagt's videos? They try to keep some of these concepts on the side of realistic and attainable. To speak more specifically about organizational cost; I don't see Mars as being fundamentally different from the Moon landing; and could easily see China/Russia/the US/the EU all trying in parallel to get there once another space race fires off without requiring much additional scaling up of existing bureaucracies. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 20:11
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Why won’t the stupid nerds that don’t know how the world works be the ones that would pay for space flight/ tragically direct the government to pay for it as the brain geniuses shake their head at it? What force will make there be a thing a large number of “optimists” want to fund that would also never be funded across all countries and cultures forever?
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Jul 24, 2019 21:08
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Uh can you clarify what you're saying, I don't understand. Maybe it's sarcasm or something, I honestly don't know.
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Jul 24, 2019 21:35
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The Moon landing is a great analogue to a Mars landing. We went there for that big epic first, studied geology for a bit, lost interest and then left the place. No reason to think Mars will be different. NASA's strategy with the gateway and lunar base is great because afterwards they'll have infrastructure which might be useful for all the other stuff they need to do. Politics may dictate NASA's direction but this time they'll have more than a story and a box of rocks to show for it.
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Jul 24, 2019 21:59
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Shibawanko posted:One thing I never see people talk about re:space travel is the organizational, as opposed to the material cost. I don't really understand your concept of organizational cost, but I agree that manned missions to Mars, moon bases, etc. don't really solve any problems which Americans care about, and that the will to pay for and do those kinds of things doesn't exist outside of science enthusiast communities on the internet and NASA. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 22:10
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Sometimes something doesn't have to solve a specific identifiable problem to be worth doing. At a minimum it is stimulus spending for the aerospace industry.Owling Howl posted:The Moon landing is a great analogue to a Mars landing. We went there for that big epic first, studied geology for a bit, lost interest and then left the place. No reason to think Mars will be different. You don't really have a means of knowing this. Part of the reason why the US lost interest was because the USSR collapsed. Maybe China might step up and spark the US to renew its interest in space out of spite and this time since China seems wholly unlikely to collapse anytime soon maybe that will keep things going; but even so putting that aside I don't think you're reasoning is correct and seems based off of a flawed inductive hypothesis. At a minimum there's a few reasons off the top of my head: 1. The private sector seems fully invested into exploiting space. As much as I am contemptuous of Musk, the door has been opened. If the US gov't lands on Mars that passes a lot of savings onto the private sector that would want to follow up on that if not work in collaboration with it. 2. There does seem to be legitimately a renewed interest in space; I think the next time we see NASA get a significant infusion in its budget will be a good signal that all bets are off to the races. 3. Sunk Cost fallacy. Ultimately nothing was left on the moon and there weren't any resources of usefulness. A Mars mission at least generally seems to plan around a permanent presence. The inertia of always having people on Mars will like the F-35 and jobs, make cutting funding and "stranding" people there politically unpalatable once its set in motion. quote:NASA's strategy with the gateway and lunar base is great because afterwards they'll have infrastructure which might be useful for all the other stuff they need to do. Politics may dictate NASA's direction but this time they'll have more than a story and a box of rocks to show for it. For the purposes of a Mars mission the Moon is a "siren" leading sailors to their death. A moon base provides no scientific or direct benefit towards the success of a Mars mission. I think a Moon base might potentially have other benefits, such as iirc H_3 for fusion research and maybe infrastructure towards large orbital structures? But I don't view these things as overlapping from a technically specific mission perspective. The advantage of Mars Direct/Semi-Direct is that by having a 10 year mission plan you have at least a solid 8 year term to get it done and its unlikely to be hard cancelled in the beginning of a different President's term. Nixon more or less IIRC continued the Moon landing program from JFK/LBJ.
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Jul 24, 2019 23:23
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I am just a thoroughly average rando but I thought we didn’t return to Luna at least in part because moon dust was/is a hair-tearing fuckin nightmare to deal with (it isn’t subject to the same forces of erosion as good old Earth dust, so it’s like microscopic razor blades with an electrostatic charge that will cling to and gently caress up practically anything you bring there)
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Jul 24, 2019 23:31
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SatansOnion posted:I am just a thoroughly average rando but I thought we didn’t return to Luna at least in part because moon dust was/is a hair-tearing fuckin nightmare to deal with (it isn’t subject to the same forces of erosion as good old Earth dust, so it’s like microscopic razor blades with an electrostatic charge that will cling to and gently caress up practically anything you bring there) I went and did some googling but didn't really see anything to this effect as a decisive reason. It seems more like that there is/was just a lack of political will to fund NASA in a sustained way and incoming administrations love fiddling and fuddling with NASA's mission goals which wastes time and money with constantly changing directives. From what I could google previous NASA administrators have said if the money and political will was there the US would've still been going to the moon.
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Jul 25, 2019 00:03
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It was a bunch of reasons, but the process being very expensive and the moon being desolate, resourceless, and toxic to both men and the machines we sent alike were certainly among them. We went to the moon before we were really ready in order to prove a point. We strapped men in tin cans onto heavily modified and augmented weapons technology. We did amazing things in getting there and even more amazing things in keeping most of the people who were in the machines alive. But we didn't have the technology to stay and do actual resource collection or form a long-term habitat without it being even more expensive and life-threatening than it already was. And Mars is way worse. Imagine all the problems of the moon, but instead of Earth being three days away, it's 2 years away. ashpanash fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Jul 25, 2019 |
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Jul 25, 2019 00:30
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Raenir Salazar posted:Uh can you clarify what you're saying, I don't understand. Maybe it's sarcasm or something, I honestly don't know. Like, complaining in one breath that there is no will at all to do something while complaining in the next breath that too many people want a thing is contradictory. At some point a horrible nerd who we all hate will get control of some government somewhere on earth and have a space program no matter how many times we click our tongues at them and tell them how silly it is or whatever.
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Jul 25, 2019 01:01
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We should scrap this whole NASA thing and instead spend the money on building penetrating satellite imaging so wr can find JFK JR
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Jul 25, 2019 02:49
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The US will land people on Mars as soon as it seems possible that any other country might try, largely because it would be culturally embarrassing for Americans to not be leading on something like that. Beyond all that, NASA is fairly cheap for what they do and always has been. People will always complain about it because it's iconic, whereas wheat subsidies are easy to forget.
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Jul 25, 2019 07:12
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ashpanash posted:It was a bunch of reasons, but the process being very expensive and the moon being desolate, resourceless, and toxic to both men and the machines we sent alike were certainly among them. We went to the moon before we were really ready in order to prove a point. We strapped men in tin cans onto heavily modified and augmented weapons technology. We did amazing things in getting there and even more amazing things in keeping most of the people who were in the machines alive. But we didn't have the technology to stay and do actual resource collection or form a long-term habitat without it being even more expensive and life-threatening than it already was. Mars isn't 2 years away. It's 90 days if you use some big ship you built in orbit, 180 if you use some hypothetical Saturn V. Mars is also better than the moon in some ways, since it actually has some sort of atmosphere so there's more protection from cosmic radiation. I think we do have the technology *now* to make either Moon/Mars work, it just needs engineering and testing and the money to make it happen.
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Jul 25, 2019 15:29
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Raenir Salazar posted:Mars isn't 2 years away. It's 90 days if you use some big ship you built in orbit, 180 if you use some hypothetical Saturn V. Raenir Salazar posted:Mars is also better than the moon in some ways, since it actually has some sort of atmosphere so there's more protection from cosmic radiation. I think we do have the technology *now* to make either Moon/Mars work, it just needs engineering and testing and the money to make it happen. Atmosphere on Mars is very tenuous. More importantly, it's not the atmosphere that provides the bulk of the protection on Earth. It's the magnetosphere. Guess what Mars doesn't have. Finally, Mars has higher gravity, which is actually a disadvantage, as it's harder to leave the gravity well, making return crafts bulkier and therefore requiring a massive increase in starting fuel, in accordance with the Tsiolkovsky equation. A moon colony is much more useful (you could build a mass driver and get resources from the soil into orbit cheaply - something the higher gravity and atmosphere and distance from Earth make Mars terrible for), in addition to being easier. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Jul 25, 2019 |
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Jul 25, 2019 15:59
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Raenir Salazar posted:You don't really have a means of knowing this. Part of the reason why the US lost interest was because the USSR collapsed. Maybe China might step up and spark the US to renew its interest in space out of spite and this time since China seems wholly unlikely to collapse anytime soon maybe that will keep things going; but even so putting that aside I don't think you're reasoning is correct and seems based off of a flawed inductive hypothesis. At a minimum there's a few reasons off the top of my head: No we can't predict the future, only learn from the past. If Congress directs NASA to build a permanent base on Mars NASA will do that pending funding but I have seen no indication congress will do that. Trump wants to go, and fast, but AFAIK he never talked about staying there. He may simply want a JFK moment in history and will then promptly stop caring. Remember he doesn't want to go to the moon because we have already been there. Well once we've been to Mars, we've already been to Mars. The private sector depends on a profitable venture materializing. The best bet may be mining but there's a lot of stuff that needs to be developed and put into space for that to get started. Raenir Salazar posted:For the purposes of a Mars mission the Moon is a "siren" leading sailors to their death. A moon base provides no scientific or direct benefit towards the success of a Mars mission. I think a Moon base might potentially have other benefits, such as iirc H_3 for fusion research and maybe infrastructure towards large orbital structures? But I don't view these things as overlapping from a technically specific mission perspective. The moon is only a siren call if your only objective is to go to Mars. NASA got lots of other stuff to do so taking a broad view and developing infrastructure that can be useful for a variety of missions is sensible. Since NASA may only get to go to Mars once it also makes sense to prepare well to both minimize risk and develop the tools that will maximize capability of the team that goes there. We may need new tools to aid people working in constricting spacesuits in reduced gravity in harsh environments for months. New suits, rovers, medicine tools, who knows. Besides going to Mars is not time sensitive so there's no reason to rush it. There will still be geology to study in a few years. I do take issue with notion that the Moon has no resources. There's water, regolith contains iron, aluminum and magnesium along with volatiles, oxygen, co2. If you could extract a metal it ought to be possible to manufacture heavy and bulky structural parts for probes, telescopes,, ships. Oxygen and hydrogen could be used for fuel depots. The moon is good and useful.
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Jul 25, 2019 16:10
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Owling Howl posted:I do take issue with notion that the Moon has no resources. There's water, regolith contains iron, aluminum and magnesium along with volatiles, oxygen, co2. If you could extract a metal it ought to be possible to manufacture heavy and bulky structural parts for probes, telescopes,, ships. Oxygen and hydrogen could be used for fuel depots. The moon is good and useful. To be clear, my intention is not to suggest that the moon is bereft of resources. As you rightfully point out, after we have done significant analysis and reconnaissance of the moon for 50 years, and after we have considerably improved our understanding of manufacturing science, there are clearly avenues that could be explored for material extraction and potential fuel resources. However, at the time of Apollo, we not only lacked the detailed mapping and analysis of the potential resources on the moon, we also lacked the technology for extraction or utilization of said resources with any sort of efficiency.
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Jul 25, 2019 16:24
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Raenir Salazar posted:Mars isn't 2 years away. It's 90 days if you use some big ship you built in orbit, 180 if you use some hypothetical Saturn V. Remember, Mars doesn't share Earth's orbit like the moon does. At times it's relatively close. At other times, it's extremely far away. As dex_sda mentioned, by far the most efficient method of travel is a Hohmann transfer, and an alignment between Earth and Mars that favors that method happens roughly once every two years. quote:Mars is also better than the moon in some ways, since it actually has some sort of atmosphere so there's more protection from cosmic radiation. I think we do have the technology *now* to make either Moon/Mars work, it just needs engineering and testing and the money to make it happen. Mars' atmosphere is about 1% of Earth's give or take. It is effectively a vacuum as far as our bodies would be concerned. In fact, the atmosphere makes Mars an even harder target, because it's so rarefied. There's just enough of it that if you ignore it and barrel into it, it will burn you up - but it's not enough to float you down with parachutes once you drop below supersonic speeds. That's why Mars landings have required such interesting engineering solutions. And again as dex_sda pointed out, a 1% atmosphere is not going to protect you from cosmic radiation. Mostly it just makes a Mars mission harder. If there's any benefit it probably only comes in the form of some relief from temperature issues through convection.
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Jul 25, 2019 16:36
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Kerning Chameleon posted:The Great Filter could just be the fact that interstellar space is fundamentally physically impractical. That means you could have some star system-wide civilizations, but physics hems them in their home star systems. That seems like it would kill a lot of sci-fi wet dreams pretty stone dead. These space diacussions usually involve big numbers. Maybe theres an infinite number of great filters. The final one being heat death of the universe
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Jul 25, 2019 17:46
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"The most efficient transfer is every 10 months" is a totally different claim from "Mars is 2 years away".ashpanash posted:Remember, Mars doesn't share Earth's orbit like the moon does. At times it's relatively close. At other times, it's extremely far away. As dex_sda mentioned, by far the most efficient method of travel is a Hohmann transfer, and an alignment between Earth and Mars that favors that method happens roughly once every two years. I already mentioned this around 2 pages ago when discussing the different transfers and the different deltaV requirements. Mars Direct posits different transfers and possibilities. It isn't 2 years to wait and then 180 days to get to Mars, you can check the book, it's like the second chapter. It is two years to *come back* if for any reason you need to abort, without concern for fuel. quote:Mars' atmosphere is about 1% of Earth's give or take. It is effectively a vacuum as far as our bodies would be concerned. In fact, the atmosphere makes Mars an even harder target, because it's so rarefied. There's just enough of it that if you ignore it and barrel into it, it will burn you up - but it's not enough to float you down with parachutes once you drop below supersonic speeds. That's why Mars landings have required such interesting engineering solutions. Mars *does* has enough of an atmosphere that Mars Direct relies on it to do the job of slowing down a lander instead of burning fuel to slow down (thus allowing the rocket to have more room for supplies and equipment); or instead incase the weather is bad, allow the lander to slow down only a little in order to get caught within Martian orbit. dex_sda posted:Finally, Mars has higher gravity, which is actually a disadvantage, as it's harder to leave the gravity well, making return crafts bulkier and therefore requiring a massive increase in starting fuel, in accordance with the Tsiolkovsky equation. So this would be a problem, if I wasn't referring to Mars Direct as the basis for exploring Mars. Since I am in fact referring the Mars Direct, I know this isn't an issue; because you first send an unmanned rocket that lands, sets up an automated facility, and produces the fuel you'll need for the return trip. Solving the mass/bulk issues. quote:A moon colony is much more useful (you could build a mass driver and get resources from the soil into orbit cheaply - something the higher gravity and atmosphere and distance from Earth make Mars terrible for), in addition to being easier. A moon colony is more useful for interplanetary exploration and exploiting the solar system yeah and I fully support Doing Cool Things for the Sake of Cool Things but is entirely unnecessary for exploring Mars as a practical matter. Owling Howl posted:No we can't predict the future, only learn from the past. If Congress directs NASA to build a permanent base on Mars NASA will do that pending funding but I have seen no indication congress will do that. Trump wants to go, and fast, but AFAIK he never talked about staying there. He may simply want a JFK moment in history and will then promptly stop caring. Remember he doesn't want to go to the moon because we have already been there. Well once we've been to Mars, we've already been to Mars. I don't really get the point of this sort of thing in the thread though is the thing? I think it is probably going to happen and you don't think it will; so why in either case, keep talking about how its not happening to people who assume it will happen? People want to talk about cool space nerd things. It's just opinion that gets in the way of things people want to talk about. quote:The private sector depends on a profitable venture materializing. The best bet may be mining but there's a lot of stuff that needs to be developed and put into space for that to get started. SpaceX already exists. quote:The moon is only a siren call if your only objective is to go to Mars. NASA got lots of other stuff to do so taking a broad view and developing infrastructure that can be useful for a variety of missions is sensible. Since NASA may only get to go to Mars once it also makes sense to prepare well to both minimize risk and develop the tools that will maximize capability of the team that goes there. We may need new tools to aid people working in constricting spacesuits in reduced gravity in harsh environments for months. New suits, rovers, medicine tools, who knows. Besides going to Mars is not time sensitive so there's no reason to rush it. There will still be geology to study in a few years. As I said multiple times, in an ideal scenario we're doing ALL the cool and good things all at the same time. And I never claimed the Moon is barren, I specifically mentioned Helium 3. I only say that if the goal is Mars, then the Moon is a bit of a trap, if we're throwing everything at the wall; great, no problem there.
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Jul 25, 2019 17:56
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Raenir Salazar posted:It is two years to *come back* if for any reason you need to abort, without concern for fuel. Sorry if I was unclear, but that was my main concern. Not the time it takes to get there when it's planned - but rather the time it may take for an emergency abort or resupply.
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Jul 25, 2019 19:13
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