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I love The Great Filter because it's like Roko's Basilisk Nerd Sniping. The more you think about it the more you starting to think you've uncovered a lovecraftian conspiracy you weren't meant to know and you end up needing to take a break for a while to calm down.
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Jul 10, 2019 00:39
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My thinking is a sufficiently advanced civilization along the Kardashev scale probably at a minimum, has a radically different way of approaching society to make an interstellar/galactic spanning civilization "work". Do we need, want, or care, about there being a unified government as long as the goal of spreading out species to different worlds suitable for colonization is accomplished? Why would any other civilization care? Put 50,000 people on a self sufficient generational ship or cold sleep with AI robots caretaking for us until we reach New Earth. Or the ultimate scifi life hack is just send a ship with robots and samples of human DNA and cloning vats to just reconstruct the human race from goo once it reaches its destination like the bastard child of the von neumann probe.
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Jul 10, 2019 02:04
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Illuminti posted:Wouldn't a society that differed from us in just the aspect that it didn't have strong, or any, familial or social bonds as a general rule already have a massive advantage over us. Most people did this throughout all of human history hundreds of times over.
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Jul 10, 2019 05:49
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Aren't there shrimp in Russia that are silicon based?
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Jul 11, 2019 20:12
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Kerning Chameleon posted:But no, tell me again about how space colonialism is only upsides. This seems more about how language has certain in-built history. However this seems to suggest maybe using more ethically neutral language without baggage; what are the practical downsides if you're critical of the upsides?
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Jul 13, 2019 01:09
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DrSunshine posted:You unironically support a Khmer Rouge style dictatorship and cultural revolution against all educated people, and want to kill millions to revert humanity back to a pre-technological existence. This is your solution to climate change, as you've posted in other threads, like the Climate Change thread or USPOL. Why should anyone listen to you? Is Kerning seriously not even a "Space exploration is bad because we should be solving ALL OTHER ISSUES FIRST IN ORDER" luddite but a "Thanos was right" ideologue?
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Jul 13, 2019 17:00
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What about this. The universe has no life other than our own and whats on earth. By developing space travel, we can preserve *all* like on Earth, across the cosmos, like Noah's Ark. If the Great Filter is behind us, then its likely far enough behind us that maybe trees and bushes and ants, and fish simply just don't exist anywhere else. Ergo, space exploration is a net good, because of how much more life of all kinds that will continue to exist. The ethics of like, if its okay to release cats and dogs and burmese pythons in some other planets ecosystem can wait until we actually discover the existence of such. Like I assume some of these posters believe genocide is bad, why do they support genocide of everyone? I don't think people in the third world appreciate having their cultures being eliminated forever because of the poor decisions of white people?
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Jul 14, 2019 01:54
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Unoriginal Name posted:Good luck with the singularity for whites only How does everyone dying help non-whites? Trabisnikof posted:I actually do think critiquing our current system of resource allocation that's leading towards Billionaires playing with rockets to make them horny while we ignore the climate catastrophe is actually a critique that can be made in good faith. Which is why there should be a UN space organization funded collectively by the UN member states with most of the burden by the Permanent Security Council members and the extended temporary members. I'm not arguing that privately funded space exploration is good, especially when it mostly free rides off of publicly funded research that made it possible for a profit. The state should be massively be funded it as a collective, collaborative international effort; with a significant part of that effort dedicated to studying and combating climate change. DrSunshine posted:In my belief, we should focus on surviving and repairing from the climate crisis in order to explore and colonize space. Absolutely we should be making some investments into robot probes and SETI and stuff - basic science is very important, but the overarching focus of society should be to making sure that we and as many life forms as possible survive the abrupt climate change. My basic belief is that all the good things that leftists advocate for - UBI, socialism, anti-racism, anti-discrimination, environmental protection, fully automated luxury communism, etc. - are prerequisites to a society that can peacefully explore the universe. Therefore, if we want to ensure that we're not annihilated by a random space catastrophe, or simply obliterated by the natural evolution of the sun, it's incumbent upon us to work towards all those goals. My beef with this is it concedes too much ground to what is nearly entirely a bad faith argument to begin. Both goals can be taken on at the same time.
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Jul 14, 2019 05:44
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Hard disagree. I feel we as a species should learn to outgrow our primitive need to grow and spread our seed at any cost. When I compare it to the mentality of a cancer cell, I mean it: a cancer cell seeks to consume resources and grow and spread at any costs, even if it means the ultimate death of its host and itself. Everything you just said sounds like that to me. This isn't ethically, morally, or logically, you're decision to make or your place to judge. It's also contradictory. We more or less already expanded across the entire surface of the globe and live everywhere conveniently habitable for us, and though geoengineering made things mostly uninhabitable barely habitable at great expense. If we have, by definition, already expanded for the sake of expansion, and then in your words "learned to make do with our resources in a sustainable way" then why can't we expand a little further, a few extra planets, and learn to use those sustainable *and* now also have redundancy? I get your probably just a terrible troll but at least try to be logically consistent. Like you're against (us) humans, expanding because ostensibly we displace or consume resources used by other life, but your fine with all life, human and otherwise, all dying? The idea that your insisting on that there is a natural "ending time" for our species is just wholly inconsistent with your first principles; if one species of ants, displaces and exterminates and out-competes another species of ants, you'd be fine with this; this is a contradiction.
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Jul 14, 2019 16:22
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Or we're like a failed science experiment gone horribly right. One thing that comes to mind though when it comes to not maybe "life" but "sentient life" and difficulty identifying no less communicating with it are social insects like ants; which are frighteningly intelligent in terms of problem solving in a extremely robust way. I.e tossing the corpses of dead ants into the waiting jaws of a carnivorous plant in order to safely feast off of its nector/bait... There could be alien species out there that while maybe obeying the chemistry of how life develops may not be recognizable as "life as we know it". An interesting example might be the planetary biological naturally evolved AI collective intelligence depicted in Avatar. Which is kinda tragic because to me that was the most interesting part of the whole movie and its basically treated as a mcguffin spirit tree the whole time because the movie is just Dancing with Wolves in scifi trappings. In reality a collective intelligence that exists distributed throughout an entire planet would be revolutionary, and the potential innovation from studying and communicating with it would be transformative; but no, its all about harvesting rocks and the tree is just a footnote!
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Jul 15, 2019 05:34
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ashpanash posted:I wouldn't exactly call what ants do problem solving, at least not in the sense we're thinking of it. Ants can, for instance, build mighty anthills, however they would not 'think' to build an anthill in order to get access to a food source. It would take thousands of generations for a behavior like that to emerge. Right, its a bunch of simple instructions that in the aggregate create emergent behavior. I am just saying that alien life could be much more highly evolved ants and it'd be hard to notice.
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Jul 15, 2019 14:32
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Didn't Einstein and Bohr have a whole slew of pretty famous debates? Einstein wasn't just "some clerk" for all that long was he?
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Jul 16, 2019 13:30
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dex_sda posted:Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you we can totally do thing 'x', whether that be stopping climate change or making a colony on Mars. Even if they aren't lying to you, and even if they are very smart, they might be incredibly wrong. Excellent post though these last two points seem weird to me. Climate change is mainly a function of cost. How much will it cost? In terms of either money, gdp, or human misery, but I think there isn't a question in it. Mars from reading Mars Direct also seems to not be in any doubt, just a matter again, of cost, and political will; more so because it's more "option" while pressure is building for action on climate change.
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Jul 17, 2019 15:32
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Owling Howl posted:Well we don't need people to be there long term for science and research missions. Working in shifts is fine and probably cheaper than building something they'd be comfortable in for years. For science stuff that makes sense, but eventually the goal would probably be to either setup a colony (a backup in case of asteroid seems useful) or to terraform Mars.
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Jul 18, 2019 03:51
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Owling Howl posted:Eventually maybe but that's a very long way off. If you wanted to do it within say a century we would have to massively expand public funding and I doubt you'll find much support for that from either side. It would have to be private enterprise but there's no economic incentive to build a self-sufficient base on Mars. Every fancy vaguely plausible cool sounding scifi thing has two variables that are a function of "money" and "political will" tell me something I don't know. DrSunshine posted:I wonder how practical in the long-term these terraforming ideas are for Mars. Even if you were able to re-thicken the atmosphere and melt all the water, wouldn't it be subject to long-term ablation from solar wind thanks to the lack of a magnetic field? It seems to me that you'd need proper tectonics and a geodynamo for habitability in the long term. One estimate I read was 10,000 years. Seems long enough to think of a solution; since most of human technological process was over the last 300 years.
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Jul 18, 2019 18:53
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Owling Howl posted:Yeah and I'm saying the political will to spend trillions of dollars across changing administrations on an essentially altruistic project for the greater good of the species at the expense of tax cuts or social spending right now won't manifest ever. One lesson of the Apollo Program is that the public lose interest real quick when the big Firsts are done. You can get people behind flag and footprint missions and maybe even a science outpost but when it comes time for the mundane sustained effort to expand the base from 50 people to 100 and then 200 and so, you'll need something more convincing than "It'll be useful if everyone else dies." I'm not a politician, it isn't my job to sell Mars to the American public. It feels like a pointless waste of time and energy to discuss whether anything has the political will behind it or not. High speed rail may or may not have political will behind it even, so I don't see the point of bringing it up when presumably there are more interesting aspects of Mars to discuss. Whatshisface trying to argue Humans would be evil to colonize space is a more interesting philosophical and ethical discussion then whether "political will" exists and using it as a prerequisite to discussing cool scifi poo poo. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Terraforming mars is a waste of time. You could use the resources needed to build perfectly engineered space colonies that'd house more people and not leave them on a rock with low gravity that's constantly blasted by solar radiation. Now THIS is more interesting! In science fiction, whether it be something like Mobile Suit Gundam or Isaac Asimov's Nemesis, orbital space colonies are never portrayed as containing more than some tiny fraction of the population of an overpopulated Earth. The resources to build a a single space colony orbital to house just 50,000 people feels like it would be enormous. A Gerald R Ford class supercarrier is 13 billion dollars and holds approximately 4,100 people. Napkin math says that's then 130 billion dollars for 41,000 people for probably just the "material mass". Actually getting that much material into space through some kind of space elevator, or processing space asteroids for materials and then tugging fabricated parts together at the specific points; feels like it would make it vastly more expensive by at least an order of magnitude. By rocket is 22 billion dollars per tonne. How much more expensive? Hard to know. Do we factor in the cost of a space elevator that is also going to be hideously expensive? What of the cost of mining asteroids? Heck asteroid mining is what probably *necessitates* space colonies to exist which also presents an interesting chicken-egg problem. How much mass of materials do we need for just 50,000 people? How much then for 500,000? 5,000,000? Assembling that many superstructures in space and the whole infrastructure to mine, process, fabricate, 99% of this effort needing to be done in space to begin with... All for probably what is only a relatively small percentage of the population? Then there's the fact presumably, massive amount of the space/mass of these space colonies probably needs to be dedicated to the massive and redundant array of machinery to filter/process/recycle air, water, waste, heat, and then hydroponics facilities to insure some minimal ability to feed the population if a shipment or two gets missed. So these things probably need to be vastly larger than the minimum needed to house the population just for extra stuff. We probably want like around 650,000,000 people at some point no longer living on Earth but in space; my gut feeling is that this isn't going to be a practical number without us upgrading to a solid 1 or 1.2 on the Space Faring Civilization Scale. Hence, Mars is in the end more practical. It's only 60 billion dollars over 10 years just for a crew of 4-12 people on Mars basically year round and you can gradually with machines and supplies you ship to Mars gradually build up underground facilities more quickly and cheaply with "off the shelf" (hardened for Martian use, but technologies that basically already exist) technologies. Sustaining an effort over 24 years to grow Mars to 500 to 1,000 people can be charted fairly easily on a graph. In 100 years it's easily imaginable once there's a critical mass of staff, machinery, and so on for things to take off and imagine how Mars, even without significant progress in terraforming, can achieve a large complex human civilization. The Mars Direct gives a pretty good framework using existing technologies and well understood engineering ideas to allow basically anyone to think, "Yeah in 100 years we could have 50,000 people living on Mars" and actually understand and think through the steps to get to that point. I can't imagine a SINGLE plan for orbital superstructures that doesn't have "Step 6) ??? We invent some supermetal here...?" scrawled all over the place. dex_sda posted:An O'Neill cylinder is indeed an easier method of creating self-sustainable habitation outside of Earth, but Mars does have an advantage of having it's own gravity, so it won't have to spin. Not that it would be a big problem in a cylinder, but it is something. We can "Increase Awesome" and "Decrease Suck" at the same time.
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Jul 19, 2019 14:56
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I like to remind people that to "grow colonies" in space, you can't just shuttle warm bodies out. They have to also be willing to breed. A lot. With a much smaller selection pool of candidates than they're used while earthbound. This is pretty stupid. It's difficult to really know where to start because of some stupid hosed up troll ideology but lets begin. First, let us assume you are referring to colonists. And not to the initial period of temporary habitation by scientists on a rotating basis. I.e, for the first 24 years it can be generally assumed, that the research mission on Mars is initially 6-9 months and then gradually expands to 1-2 years and then 2-4 years with staff and crew being rotated in and out, much like the ISS due to still unknown long term health effects of low gravity. At some point after say 12-24 years, let us assume Mars becomes open to a permanent presence of colonists. -We could obviously select colonists to be mainly committed/married couples with a psychological evaluation by a family therapist. -But even more obviously, it's just like, a small colony; whose goals are likely to be mainly focused on expanding infrastructure for later use; there is actually no need for the colony to at all need to have "sustainable population growth" as any kind of immediate or long term "20-50 years" goal; the population grows mainly from people arriving from Earth for work; some of these people can freely go back on the return trip if they want since we already have that for the research part. Especially when you factor in some random distribution of LBGTQ+ individuals who want to go. -China seems to be doing fine with a few million extra males; why do women need to be handmaids? Statistically most women have sex and give birth even with widespread contraceptives. In fact, you *want* to LIMIT births on Mars and encourage contraceptives because much like in the normal workforce, people who are pregnant or taking care of kids aren't able to do much demanding work; and no doubt on Mars you want to VERY carefully make sure that there aren't more people than your facilities can handle! So people not having children is actually a plus; immigration from Earth comprising 99% of population growth is probably ideal for over a hundred years. -People on Earth with even population distribution don't seem to have much difficulty in its individuals finding partners for loving; since immigrants to Mars likely all need to be highly educated and possess skills, it seems highly unlikely that such women would willingly go to Mars just to have their rights taken away; and no doubt would be highly predisposed towards liberated ideas of sexual mores and who knows what a Martian society would look; probably a lot of hedonism and lots of sex once the cultural baggage of marriage goes away. Why would colonists going to Mars act or behave any differently from previous human history on the matter? The idea that a Martian colony is actually anti-feminist and requires the systematic exploitation of women in order to reach success just fails any and all scrutiny. There's zero logic behind it that doesn't fall apart completely at the seams.
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Jul 19, 2019 16:34
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Unoriginal Name posted:Anyone have a plan for getting things off the surface of this rock without dumping CO2 into our already degrading atmosphere I mean a space elevator is a pretty good way of doing it that way; but I don't think the emmissions from a space program are much of a fraction of total emissions from having a still fairly inefficient fossil fuel based industrialized economy. So I think its fine because we can probably make it CO2 neutral easily just by increased investments into more efficient measures and technologies in other fields. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:It's really a shame there's not a bunch of readily available rocks in space that are pretty much pure metal and require a minimal amount of delta V to push into a lagrange point. Lots of things from the 70s may have had incredibly ambitious and optimistic calculations. In the post I made, I posited that housing even 50,000 people in space would be a colossal undertaking, and now you're throwing 170 trillion at me? How? I'm not sure if Nick Land should be considered credible? Like obviously pushing "rocks in space" with the resources, something I already mentioned, isn't going to simple, requires a large infrastructure to support; and require facilities and staff to extract, process, refine, and fabricate, all in space; with obviously pre-existing infrastructure that has to be built and iterated through. Those rocks might be abundant in some resources, but all of them? Probably not. Either you need large crews of people and machines to break it apart, or a large facility to break it apart, and thus need crews and machines to make that first facility and so on. The idea that this is somehow easier than Mars I don't think is remotely true if you actually start thinking about the breakdown of steps required, or just how much and difficult and arduous those steps would be, because they seem like an order of magnitude more difficult then just digging a bunch of tunnels on Mars; comparatively speaking. Breaking this down in steps; its 10,000$ per pound for powered rocket flights into orbit/Mars; there isn't to my recollection, an added difficulty in getting to Mars if you can get to orbit; as you can launch from Earth and get to Mars with a single launch and no need to stop or refuel for a one way trip. For Mars you can in a single 1 way trip, launch equipment to create an automated facility to process the Martian atmosphere into rocket fuel; and with robots start fabricating some basic facilities. Successive trips can further expand this and add redundancy; your first Mars manned mission is a crew of 4 that takes 180 days to get there in comfortable conditions and stay there for 600 days before relief with intermediate rocket trips for supplies or relief; then they leave using fuel they processed while on Mars. So basically a 10 year program for 60 billion gets you the beginnings of a Martian research outpost and settlement. For a space orbital colony you need to first build a space station to habitat crews; which needs to be even more regularly relieved due to zero-g conditions. This station is needed to build another station(s) to build towards a drydock to build your craft to travel to the belt because maybe whatever you can launch from Earth won't have the energy to push a big rock; in fact you may not want to risk pushing the rock so well it hits Earth, so maybe we're going to do most of our initial space stuff in the belt? We have decades of experience in building space stations but I don't think we're going to be able to jump straight to an O'Neill cylinder yeah? So maybe more than one small scale experimental ones need to be built first? And these even for 50,000 people, are probably massive. They probably cannot be built without the use of similarly large drydocks, even if these "drydocks" are mostly skeletal foldable structures; I think something like 99% of what would go into making a supercarrier needs to be done all in space in zero-g? Some things are easier in zero-g, but I'm sure a lot of things are harder. Basically I don't believe the 170 trillion figure; and it obviously isn't as simple as pushing rocks around; there's clearly a whole lot more steps involved just to get to the point you can start *building* a space colony that isn't a consideration for Mars which could be done within 10 years. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 18:06
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Dameius posted:Yeah, one of the big selling points of space colonies is avoiding gravity wells for things. Who cares about lifting things into orbit when you can just grab rare earth minerals that are far from rate out of asteroids. Yes but, this isn't actually easier then going to Mars though. It would be a cool thing to also be doing at the same time for a lot of reasons, but I don't think "We should make space colonies instead of a Mars colony" is based on anything concrete.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:26
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Infinite Karma posted:This idea is pretty much the entire reason for asteroid capture and mining, right? Sending up thousands or millions of tons of metal to build ships out of is such is really expensive and time-consuming. If we just had to send up stuff like electronics and air/food/water, and the structure of spacecraft was already in orbit waiting to be sliced off an asteroid, it'd be a sea change in what we could build in space. A space elevator does partially alleviate the need somewhat; and especially comes into play when it comes to actually shipping people off world when you can't scale up a astronaut training program for every clerk you send to space. But yes, when it comes to building massive superstructures (not even getting into compromise megastructures) or space tugs and what have you, you want to transition to asteroid mining pretty quickly; I don't know what the mineral deposits Mars have but perhaps there's a long term need for asteroid mining to sustain Mars. Plus any sort of huge generational ship to bring colonists to another starsystem probably needs to be assembled in space and be gently caress off huge.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:52
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Infinite Karma posted:Space elevators are still sci-fi stuff that require exotic materials we haven't figured out yet. Asteroid capture might be too, but that seems less insane for some reason. Just so you're aware, there's a whole book on the subject of setting up a manned outpost on Mars "on the cheap" using entirely off the shelf technologies, titled Mars Direct. The rocket it posits for traveling to Mars would be a modified Saturn V; which doesn't need to be built in orbit. This is because once you've escaped earth's gravity, heading to Mars doesn't require much impulse, and is why it takes 180 days depending on the position of the planets. You're coasting off of spent energy conserving remaining fuel for course corrections and is also a one way trip with the return fuel processed on Mars by an automated facility. The "You got to build something in orbit to get to Mars" was known as the Werner Von Braun "Battlestar Galactica" plan, was estimated to cost 600 billion dollars and would only allow 60 days to study Mars before needing to bug it out of there, vs the 600 days of the Mars Direct plan which would only be 60-70 billion dollars (over a similar timeframe) which also skips prerequisites the von Braun plan required (orbital infrastructure to build it and decades of low gravity research and testing). NASA has since been developing "Mars Semi-Direct" in consultation with Zubrin; but this isn't just theory or a book but is actually a major part of the current conversation and planning at NASA. Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Just about any bootstrap you can do on mars you can also do in space. If mars can be started by robots and automated fuel processing, so can the initial settlement of a lagrange point. Tolerances and risk assessments mate. You really can't 100% automate the process of setting up your Space Forge; the automation for the Mars outpost is only meant to get the ball rolling and to generate your exit strategy for when humans get there which is in fairly short order after initial landing, i.e within 6 months of the first landing. You have wider latitude for mistakes, wide tolerances for faults. Piloting the little drone on Mars takes only a fraction of the requirements of your remotely operated spacecraft as we've seen with the probes we've launched to study comets and poo poo, where everything has got to go right the first time and there's no second chance. Your robot on mars are probably on wheels or tracks and operated in 2D, 3D only when handling and moving things about, or otherwise just sit there when it comes to fuel processing. Your space stuff is 3D all the time, always moving, and always correcting. "If it can be done on Mars it can be done on space" requires a lot of handwaving. Again, all of this feeds into that Mars is lower risk and "easier" expenditure of effort compared to space-space stuff. You can probably use robots and automation for a lot of things in space but don't pretend they're equivalent that's just nonsense. But at some point you want human hands along for the ride and their hands in the process just like Mars and supporting them in space is a lot harder and more expensive, presumably 10x more expensive.
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Jul 19, 2019 20:21
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Sadly all I can find for delta v sources are all based on Wikipedia, or based on Atomic Rockets which is based on wikipedia, but as far as I can tell, you need over half again as much delta V to go from LEO to Mars surface as you would just getting into LEO in the first place. It's not an insignificant amount of fuel. What you are missing is that you need to expend a lot of chemical fuel to slow down once you intercept mars. Sure, you spend most of that 180 days in a small capsule, coasting along, but you are still talking about a serious amount of fuel. Oh, and if anything goes wrong you die. There are no rescue missions, because it would take months to get to you. You're operating on some incorrect assumptions and results in a post that confuses a couple of things together and gets it quite a bit wrong. There are two kinds of transfers to get to Mars, an oppositional transfer, and a conjunction transfer. Oppositional is seen as "faster", a 90 day trip but also requires not only considerable energy and deltaV to make the trip, but also generally means going so fast you need to expend fuel to slow down. However the 180 trip is the conjunction transfer which involves going slower, slow enough that you don't have to use fuel to slow down at all. You can either dip slightly into the Martian atmosphere to slowdown and pull up to enter a stable orbit to assess the situation in case the weather is bad and then land, or just do aerocapture and plunge straight in, using the atmosphere to slow you down, burn off your excess speed and then land. You probably mostly read a source focused on oppositional transfers because its the transfer that is advocated by lobbyists who want nuclear thermal rockets (NTRs) developed as they are "faster" and carry more payload. So in terms of spent fuel, we are discussing "heavy lift vehicals", they generate up to around 500,000 lbs of thrust and various designs deliver between 100 to 250 tonnes into LEO; the Saturn V could do 140, Ares V was around 130, and so on. This is proven and existing technology for the most part. It's 4.3 km/s dV to send the spacecraft into a Trans Mars Injection, 3.7 km/s dV for a 250 minimum energy trip. The book states that there should be at least 0.7 km/s dV spare in the former scenario for any mid course corrections when there is at most 0.4 km/s dV that could occur. The lander provides 700 m/s dV for aiding in the accuracy of the aerobrake, the total dV for the trip is about 6 km/s while an oppositional mission needs around 7.8 km/s dV. The oppositional mission also has the issue of needing to swing by the inner solar system which presents issues. Using chemical rockets its about 25-30 tonnes delivered total to the Mars surface, a NTR could do 35-40 tonnes. So all of this is more than enough. In fact it's entirely possible that if the mission is a bust and you must return to Earth the conjunctional transfer actually can give you a free return trip back to Earth; so depending on "what goes wrong" you just go back and doesn't cost extra fuel, as per what happened with Apollo 13, and it's available for 175 out of 180 days of the trip. If something goes wrong on Mars uh, like, did you read the fact it was a 600 day mission for a total 980 days? In such a long term mission, "something goes wrong" would be baked into the mission parameters; you're supposed to stay there for a very long time, almost two years. The mission better be equipped for you to be able to eat your veggies and tough it out with medical supplies, redundant systems, and enough spare supplies and so on that since you're already expected to stay there for so long, waiting 6 months worst case between resupply missions shouldn't be an issue. Its 180 days to 250 days to get there, for a 600 day duration on the surface; you can easily have enough rockets making trips for autotonomous resupply runs or new staff every X many months, just like those arctic remote bases in the far north or south that only get resupplied once every several months either way; it's comparable. As for the rest: quote:Compare that to establishing a space station somewhere in cislunar space. You'd be within days of a rescue mission if anything went wrong. Why would you be in cislunar space for asteroid mining? For building an orbital shipyard and some initial test habitat maybe, but anything that would actually be exploiting asteroids for resources would be further away than Mars would be. Additionally space stations have to deal with one thing underground complexes on Mars don't. Space debris. A problem that is much worse in LEO than it would be out in the asteroid boonies. quote:A cislunar fuel station turning ice into fuel would be able to provide fuel to every space probe and mars rocket that wants to leave LEO... I don't get the point of this sentence or honestly the rest of your post. Because long term moving up the Kardaschev scale obviously "everything" should be on the table; like what precisely are you disagreeing with? I don't disagree with the idea of eventually going for superstructures, but I don't think there exists any amount of math to support the idea that it would be more cost effective to build space superstructures in lieu of getting the ball rolling on Mars. Why can't or shouldn't we, do both? Additionally, suppose we started off with an effort for Mars first, wouldn't there eventually be a compelling need to build superstructures eventually? Looking at your original post at the topic: quote:Terraforming mars is a waste of time. You could use the resources needed to build perfectly engineered space colonies that'd house more people and not leave them on a rock with low gravity that's constantly blasted by solar radiation. The ISS, which is just a few cans tied together, is 150 billion dollars, and houses like 6 people. For half the cost we can just straight up have the same number of people on Mars. The idea that colonizing Mars presents some sort of opportunity cost, or inefficiency, that only space superstructures can resolve, is science-fantasy, not science fiction. Basically, there is already, at least a wholly thought out plan that details the processes as to what a Mars plan looks like, and there are tonnes of white papers and plans out there about what terraforming Mars could look like over what most estimates I've seen made it sound like a 100 year period. I don't think anything in an analogous level of thought out detail or planning exists for space superstructures, beyond whats in scifi books because the task is several order of magnitudes more difficult. What are the economics, how much does it cost, what is the mission profile, what technologies yet need to exist; you haven't answered any of the questions while I could at least point to a commonly well received book on the subject that and paraphrase bits of it. And Project Rho doesn't count. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Jul 20, 2019 |
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Jul 20, 2019 14:29
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Missionary Positron posted:The possibility of ~infinite resources~ presented by proponents of space exploration is a pipedream that allows nerds to cling onto fantasies of maintaining current standards of living while the planet boils alive. We'd be better off by cutting funding for overpriced garbage like the ISS, manned spaceflight, and Martian RC cars, and focus the resources on poo poo that can actually help people like more advanced earth/climate observation satellites. Another post with zero basis in objective reality. How do you propose maintaining even a second world standard of living when we have another 6 billion people within 100 years? We can't mine the Earth forever. It'd be LESS emissions not more to get resources off world. Go sit there with Kerning Chameleon in the corner.
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Jul 20, 2019 16:17
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my dad posted:I love how wonderfully low-key racist this post is. I'm pretty sure merely saying "second world standard of living" isn't racist, they're standard polisci terminology; is there some other word that you would prefer I use or was there some way in which I presented it that came off as offencive? Because I mean presumably the post I responded to claimed the issue was about standard of living among first world nations and their desire to maintain that standard via off-world resource extraction, and their inferred solution is some sort of ecofascist totalitarian state to enforce a more equitable standard of living (which would be lower for first world nations, but presumably higher for others). I legitimately have no idea what you're referring to, could you please elaborate?
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Jul 20, 2019 17:01
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Unoriginal Name posted:"You cant expect us to live like those people." I never said that though? Where did I say this? I only figured it would be difficult, that's the only thing I said, I gave no opinion as to desirability.
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Jul 20, 2019 18:04
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Owling Howl posted:What do you base that on? If we can mine and refine stuff in a vacuum then clearly we have perfected electrical mining equipment and can refine without burning coal. At that point there would be no emissions at all apart from launching rockets. Right? I responding to the person claiming space exploration would make climate change worse.
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Jul 20, 2019 22:29
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Unoriginal Name posted:Your colonization plan is founded on the idea that we've solved the question of compact, emission-free, electricity generation. With cheap, off-the-shelf, technology. Where did I claim this? Sorry to be rude, but it seems like you haven't been following the conversation and you confused two entirely separate arguments/conversations together. 1. Mars Direct is a plan written years ago by a NASA engineer/consultant; it relies on off of the shelf and "relatively" cheap technology to do a particular mission that maximizes certain results. I.e it means to be cheaper than alternative plans (60 billion$ vs 650 billion$ for the von Braun plan), over a shorter timeframe (10 years); for a longer "manned" duration on Mars (600 days vs 30 days) for less radiation exposure (52 rems over 980 days). This is just about setting up a permanent research outpost and to "get the ball rolling". "Phase 1" so to speak. 2. I made no claims that this was "emission free" or relied on "compact, emission-free, energy generation" that was "cheap and off the shelf" where did you read this? 3. I did however claim that space exploration in general should result in the long term, in less emissions for an industrialized society, then mountaintop or open pit mining, fracking, and so on for resources. This is a separate mission from Mars Direct, and isn't a direct goal of Mars Direct. Because I responding to this post: Missionary Positron posted:The possibility of ~infinite resources~ presented by proponents of space exploration is a pipedream that allows nerds to cling onto fantasies of maintaining current standards of living while the planet boils alive. We'd be better off by cutting funding for overpriced garbage like the ISS, manned spaceflight, and Martian RC cars, and focus the resources on poo poo that can actually help people like more advanced earth/climate observation satellites. Which seemed to be claiming that space exploration doesn't help with climate change, or perhaps even makes it worse. Both are incorrect claims, which I was responding to by itself, but not in conjunction to the previous conversation, you are aware that a single poster can be engaged in two or more entirely separate conversations in the same thread yes? 4. It's especially strange as nothing about colonizing Mars in general past the initial goals of Mars Direct after landing humans on Mars necessarily requires miniaturized power generation or emissions free miniaturized power generation but I guess it would be nice to have? I surely never mentioned it. Though we can make nuclear reactors decently compact these days, I'm sure it's doable; but it certainly isn't required for getting to Mars; maybe for the terraforming steps? I haven't read that section in the book in years so maybe you read ahead? Can you confirm? Quite strange indeed that you appear to be arguing to someone else, strange indeed, quite perplexing since I don't see anyone in the thread making that argument either.
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Jul 21, 2019 00:04
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Infinite Karma posted:But has NASA figured out how to get it into space? Within the risk that is generally allowed for modern space missions, that is. A block of highly enriched uranium, and a bunch of liquid sodium is a problem for range safety unless that reactor core can survive the self-destruct process and uncontrolled reentry without a breach. Maybe it's a negligible risk, and maybe we would say the risk is worth it, but that's not how policymakers see it. Policymakers think its fine to have nuclear reactors in submarines or in planes*, this isn't substantially riskier because uranium burning up in the atmosphere isn't the worst result compared to others. There's no risk of a meltdown in space so the risk comes from the material burning up and well its probably less than atmospheric nuclear tests. Edit: Also we have nuclear reactors in space already, satellites have already been shot into space with them on. *The Russians literally had a nuclear powered turboprop jet. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Jul 21, 2019 |
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Jul 21, 2019 00:11
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Additionally the ship regarding nuclear power in space has sailed. There's been like 50 nuclear powered systems launched into space.
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Jul 21, 2019 01:03
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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"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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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 17:05 |
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I also imagine that constructing a cloud city/outpost on Venus isn't even on the drawing board of any agency, and probably requires building something in orbit and then lowering it in.
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Jul 25, 2019 22:49
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