Mars Now
mars.nasa.gov
mars.nasa.gov
The idea was to maximize data throughput between Mars and Earth by routing data packets from the rovers to the orbiters because the orbiters circled every 90 minutes and the rovers had to wait hours for Mars to rotate to get line of sight with Earth. Also, some orbiters can send at higher throughput than others.
It was a fun project but way over my head at the time. I do remember walking into mission control a few times and ESPN was playing on the big screen. World cup was going on that summer.
Also, we hardly understand life on earth. Do we really think we can get life on mars for long periods of time?
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-still-wants-to-drop-n...
The Martian atmosphere is 1/166th the density of Earth's [1]. At the ISS's altitude, it's something like a trillionth.
Sorry, I was unclear. It’s absolutely an issue going to Mars. It isn’t front and centre on Mars.
Is this OST related? Or Mars specific?
It is time we move away from the LNT (Linear No Threshold) radiation risk modeling. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran#Radioactivity
> you'll still get all the cancer sooner than later.
Cancer risk from radiation is probabilistic. If you spend all day outdoors then you increase your lifetime risk of cancer by a significant degree, but it's not like you're definitely going to get cancer. Additionally, most habitation modules, at least early on, are planned to be buried in martian regolith.
Also the moon is worse than Mars in all respects with regard to this so you're effectively arguing that humans should never leave the orbit of Earth. I'm not a fan of that future.
(BTW, we deal with much higher radiation levels in hot cells in reactors here on Earth, and those even have windows into them. I'm sure we can work out something.)
Effectively shielding people from cosmic rays requires either a thick atmosphere, a couple meters of soil, or really thick slabs of metal. The best solution on Mars might be to build a shelter inside a cave or lava tube, but then you run up afoul of international treaty obligations to not contaminate these sensitive environments.
The short answer to your question is "yes, but the foil has to be three feet thick."
The atmosphere of mars is roughly equivalent too 2 inches of soil if the source is directly overhead and 3 inches at a 45 degree angle, but far more than that at low angles. Anything below the horizon is blocked by the surface of Mars, so you end up with well over 50% shielding from cosmic rays vs the trip to Mars. Being further from the sun is also beneficial.
You definitely want to live and work underground on Mars or at minimum below a large water tank, but even just landing in a valley can noticeably reduce radiation exposure as the mountains block portions of the sky so too do they block a portion of cosmic rays.
Though this is dependent on how active the sun is: “If the instrument had been taking measurements on Mars during the comparable period of the solar-activity cycle about 11 years ago, it would probably have seen eight events in 300 sols, contributing an unknown but certainly significantly higher amount to the overall dose.” And of course if Mars was closer to the sun these numbers would be significantly higher. https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/msl/mars-rover-curiosity-pia17600.h...
You can find scientific papers on a lot of subjects where it's hard to get at objective fact arguing one way or another and it's hard to tell how factual they really are.
Also why would you quote the "upper error bar"? I'd like to know the size of that error bar and what the median is.
> The upper error bar right now for a 1000 day Mars mission is upwards of 20% risk of radiation-induced death; most of this is from the heavy ion component of cosmic rays.
This is just an argument that you need to bury things in regolith, at least early on, until we get better shielding designed for heavy ions.
Assuming 940 day mission, percent risk of radiation-induced death for a 40 year old woman is:
* mean: 8.8; 95% confidence [2.78, 21.0]
For a 40 year old man:
* mean: 6.49; 95% confidence [2.58, 13.6]
Source is "Cancer and circulatory disease risks for a human mission to Mars: Private mission considerations", Acta Astronautica, 2018.
Narrowing this uncertainty range requires long-duration human or animal experiments outside the magnetosphere.
Why don't people want to land down there? Is it too rough a surface, more so than at higher elevation? Would it be feasible to land outside the basin and make your way down?
"Sites of areologic interest are far apart, its seasonally induced micro-climate conditions are rough and pronounced due to somewhat larger surface atmospheric pressure, winds are stronger, dust storms longer lasting, it experiences higher seasonal and diurnal surface temperature variations, shorter days and exposure to sunlight during Southern hemisphere winters, and as a deep impact basin, terrain is fairly rugged, inclined, and often covered with deep pockets of sand.”
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/12158/why-has-no-l...
For a simple visitation mission, you can pick an easy place, sure (the other reply points out why this basin is not in fact that easy). But this does nothing to prove that long-term habitation of Mars is in any way possible.
Good thing that goes hand in hand with economic improvement, based on historical evidence, and make greenhouses on Mars more likely.
It's funny how angrily and desperately they insist that nothing really changed and everything is a "nothing-burger", but they're gaslighting you as usual.
Speech and public opinion is still under the control of billionaires, and Musk is not likely to be particularly less greedy, self-serving, or egomaniacal as Murdoch or Soros or Bezos, but he is not in lock step with them. The enemy of my enemy is... quite possibly still my enemy, but it's beautiful to watch them fight one another. And if it can distract them from starting new wars or stealing more money and rights from people for just one minute, that's a wonderful bonus.
You mean like addressing climate change, vs spending trillions trying to terraform a planet to make it barely habitable.
Needed for Mars, useful for Earth.
[0] and, indeed, have used that argument against his critics when Musk was just a plucky upstart spending mere hundreds of millions on making the prototype that led to the Falcon
[1] https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/11/investigative-reports/u...
For example: climate change is heavily used by people who know how to gain power by fighting it. It doesn't disprove the issue itself.
All effective strategies includes natural forces, because it is very difficult to fight against them. So no wonder why climate change (as being a massive natural force) is used by people in power for their benefit.
It does when you consider that the very people who are promoting that severity are doing what I linked above behind the scenes and their own behavior hasn't changed at all (e.g., all of them flying private jets to Egypt for COP, having multiple pieces of real estate, etc).
The harsh truth is that the very people who are responsible for telling people to panic are, in fact, not panicked at all and are using fear as a smokescreen to take absolute control over the entire world (zero hyperbole in that statement). It's classic sleight of hand, just on a global scale.
Because many people in the West lack any spiritual grounding, they've latched on to climate change (think about the term alone; of course the climate changes—it always has) as a pseudo-religion and defend it to absolutely irrational ends. This is why anyone who even remotely questons it gets labeled as a heretic ("climate change denier"). You may as well be saying "you're denying my god" which explains the often-hysterical backlash you get.
In my own life I know I consume way too much sugar. No doubt it is bad for my health, yet I do it. Does that have any bearing on the notion that consuming 1000+ calories a day of refined sugar is bad for me?
Secondly, you are creating a strawman argument. Show me the scientist who is saying what we need to do is to panic? What they are saying is we need to take corrective actions ASAP. Those two things aren't remotely the same.
Third, you make claims about people's motivations being tied to lacking spiritual grounding. That seems like a testable claim: I would bet there are tens of millions of self-described religious people who believe in AGW and that it is an urgent problem. In my own, US-centric experience, the main correlating factor is political identity, not religious identity.
Not "rich people," people who are going to climate conferences whose primary purpose is to figure out how to lower carbon emissions and meet C02 goals. It's a perfectly logical conclusion.
> Secondly, you are creating a strawman argument. Show me the scientist who is saying what we need to do is to panic?
Scientists do not (precisely how I know the fervor is a lie), but there's plenty of "crisis" and "red alert" language which lead to people panicking (see: idiots blocking traffic or gluing their hands to art) [1].
> Third, you make claims about people's motivations being tied to lacking spiritual grounding.
Yes.
True. Or, at a minimum, they aren't doing anything concrete that you would expect if they actually believed what they're saying.
> ... and are using fear as a smokescreen to take absolute control over the entire world (zero hyperbole in that statement).
Zero? Really? I'm calling baloney on your claim here.
Yes. They're surprisingly overt about their end goals. I think the gullibility of "the masses" even surprises them. They want to flip the world economic system to be "stakeholder" based, meaning, they own everything (literally, down to the land itself) and you own nothing. It's neo-feudalism.
The whole climate change brew-ha-ha is simple psychological manipulation, i.e., "we'll tell you the sky is falling with our models, reinforce it via the media co's we control, and repeat it until you accept it as truth." People who are terrified will listen to anyone who appears to have an answer or is operating from a position of authority (the last 2-3 years being a beta test that was successful). It's just the Milgram Experiment/Agentic State thing on a massive scale.
These people believe they're the rightful rulers of this world and all other people are, for all intents and purposes: assets on Earth's balance sheet.
"they want to flip the economic system..." https://www.butajape.com/comic/conspiracies/
And "of course the climate changes--it always has" https://m.xkcd.com/1732/
What you fail to recognize, or refuse to recognize, is that global conspiracies to take over the world are completely unnecessary to explain everything you mention. Just pretend for a moment that human behavior really is warming the planet and, if continued, will have devastating effect. Some people would freak out. Some would not care because they'll be dead before they feel the impact. And some people would tell others what to do but hypocritically continue to act in their own self-interest.
The harsh truth is that conspiracies rarely pass Occam's Razor.
On the CO2 side, even your comic is incorrect (it has to draw dotted lines to force its "joke") as CO2 has been decreasing: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide... and with proper application of regulation, carbon capture [2], and nuclear energy, will continue to decline.
> Just pretend for a moment that human behavior really is warming the planet and, if continued, will have devastating effect.
I have. For a long time. The effects it's having (per scientists, not news outlets) are immediately manageable and if people quit being ignorant about energy policy (wasting money on windmills, solar panels, and batteries and instead invest in nuclear safety and redesigning regulation), can be outright solved and made a non-issue long before grandma melts in the backyard.
---
What you fail to recognize is that you've been programmed, intentionally, to dismiss anything you disagree with as a "conspiracy theory." A term that was coined by the CIA to discourage people from questioning the JFK assassination. [3]
[1] https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/11/investigative-reports/u....
[2] https://carbonengineering.com/
[3] https://archive.org/details/CIADOC1035960/page/n1/mode/2up
You're looking at the wrong statistic, my friend. Climate is a global issue, so global emissions matter more than US emissions. Try this graph, from your same source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissi...
(Of course CO2 declined in 2020-2021 due to the pandemic shutdown. Unfortunately, 2023 global CO2 emissions will likely continue the prior growth trend.)
Your comment that the proper application of regulation, carbon capture, and nuclear energy would fuel declines is fine and I support all of the above. However, climate deniers and opportunists cherry-pick data and stall needed regulation in the name of politics and economics.
Carbon Engineering-type solutions and generalized R&D into massive climate capture is absolutely necessary, but has little to no business model behind it without a carbon tax or other market-driven incentive. Again, climate deniers lambaste government-funded climate R&D and free-market incentives (i.e., accurately pricing carbon) as either pork-barrel politics or unnecessary and broad overreach. I'm being kind, because people at the extremes use much more dire language.
Carbon Engineering is a fascinating case study and odd place to hang your hat. They are a startup, with 142 employees on LinkedIn and their flagship plant "is expected to capture one million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually when complete."[1] Humans emit approximately 35 billion metric tons of carbon annually, so it would take 35,000 Carbon Engineering plants in production to get us to carbon neutrality. And even then, our atmospheric CO2 is still 100 ppm higher than it was in 1960[2]. Who pays for building those plants? At best-case cost of $94/ton, who pays the $94M/year operating cost per plant, or $3.3 trillion per year?
Actually reversing the carbon impact requires us to massively reduce emissions and massively invest in carbon capture. We're not doing either.
Nuclear is a phenomenal technology, but a political and regulatory nightmare. Thankfully it's being re-thought, but that will take time - as will the process of building them. Significant additional nuclear power won't be connected to the grid for a minimum of 7 years, maybe 10. It's just not enough.
This is why "all of the above" is such an important concept. We need to invest in research, revise regulations, create market incentives, and use wind and solar that are available today to feed our growing need for power instead of building new coal and gas fired plants.
But there will never be the political will to do all of that when people delude themselves to believe carbon is declining (it's not), solutions will appear on their own (they won't), we aren't affecting the climate (we are), and the drive to shift to a lower carbon footprint is because a cabal of elites want to take over the world (they probably are, but that's always been the case and that doesn't mean climate change isn't real).
[1] https://carbonengineering.com/ [2] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Engineering#Pilot_plant...
There is evidence both for and against more free speech on Twitter. If someone can't admit that, chances are they are plagued with cognitive dissonance and highly partisan in their reasoning. For example, there is evidence that Twitter has granted amnesty to accounts that were previously censored and according to stated motivations this was done for the sake of freedom of speech.
I happen to suspect that you are right and that currently some rulings are made with input outside the policy team and that this is currently happening more frequently than it used to. One thing that convinces me of this is that I frequently see people reaching out to Elon Musk directly and reporting that they have been censored in some way or the other. Then these cases seem to be resolved, with the other person praising him for ending the censoring of their political thoughts, which implies that he intervened in a policy decision.
However, I'm not sure I could call this proof that banning decisions are made more arbitrarily than before since these are blacklist removing interventions rather than bans.
So basically, when you claim that is now more arbitrary than it was before, that comes across to me more as your own speculation than anything definitive. We don't have proof of that. In sharp contrast, anyone who claims that the previous ownership did make arbitrary decisions does have proof. It is now a matter of public record that in some high profile cases (I happen to agree with some of them, but that is beside the point) Twitter did make arbitrary decisions rather than policy rooted decisions. In fact they did this often enough in decisions that weren't as high profile that there was a category label in the moderation reason, being called a one off.
It seems the current Twitter wants to be much more transparent than the former. So it might be that at some point in the future we will be able to see the moderation metrics: if we could, then we could answer your implication with with actual data. Filter by moderation justification field and get a count both positive and negative and we would have a much better sense of whether decisions were being made arbitrarily.
But as you said it's early days with not much evidence. Perhaps it will work itself out.
In the grand scheme of things, Twitter is noise.
Can you tell me what that problem was?
But we won't be going to Mars, help or no. Starship and Superheavy (Can and Kicker, by my lights) are woefully inadequate to the task.
The atmosphere is made mostly of CO2. At the surface, it has a pressure of 93 times that of Earth, and temperature of 464 °C / 867 °F. This is sufficiently hot and pressurized that the atmosphere is neither a gas nor a liquid, it's a supercritical fluid. Wikipedia says that we use supercritical CO2 industrially because of how good it is at dissolving things.
The record survival time for a stationary probe on the surface of Venus is 127 minutes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Physical_characteristics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_fluid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_and_explorations_...
Venus is also strange for having a retrograde (and very slow) rotation relative to other Solar System planets due to a mix of being close enough to be tidally locked to the Sun and its (now extremely thick) atmosphere creating strong thermal tides that affect its rotation. It used to be thought (and I thought this) that its retrograde rotation was due to impacts in its early history. But, in any case, having moons is unrelated.
Because it lost its rotation, it lost its magnetic field. Because it lost its magnetic field, it lost its hydrogen.
Mars lost its hydrogen the same way, because its core froze enough to kill its magnetic field. There is more than one way to go.
Venus is in a bad way.
I don't think hackers, explorers and founders have ever been most people.
Also I disagree that the technology to get to Mars or the Moon is inapplicable to elsewhere in the solar system. And most of the other options are generally worse than Mars for one reason or another. I'd like to hear what you think "Step 2" actually is.
If you could magic up a civilization on Mars today, it'd exponentially cheaper to launch materials from Mars to elsewhere in the solar system than to launch those same materials from Earth. Similarly it'd be cheaper to dig those materials out of the ground for use on Mars than it would be for them to be used directly on Mars.
Counterintuitively, it's cheaper to launch materials from Mars to Earth's Moon than it is to launch them from Earth's surface to the Moon.
On the other hand a rocket that flies from Mars surface too Earth's moon only needs to be 90% fuel which is a lot easier to do with modern materials. This also means that you can carry significantly more payload as your total mass.
With some napkin math, this allows you to launch, with the same rocket, from the surface of Mars to Earth's moon a payload 10 times bigger than if you launched it from Earth. The penalty you pay getting stuff out of Earth's gravity well is just simply huge.
The technology for living there, and some of the technology for going places, does. Would you really want to try to go to Epsilon Eridani without going to Mars first?
> it's much easier to build next-generation rockets on Earth
Ultimately probably not; Earth's gravity well is too deep. Mars is, AFAIK, the only place we could conceivably build a space elevator with current materials technology, so if we assume interstellar rockets will need to be built with materials from both asteroids and planets then Mars orbit is likely the best place for that.
That's not true: the Moon would be much easier.
But if you're just comparing Mars to Earth, then definitely yes. Building a space elevator on Earth is sci-fi for now. I'm not sure about Mars, but on Moon it would be rather easy actually, since not only is the gravity 1/2 of Mars', but there's no pesky atmosphere.
Really? The moon's gravity is 1/2 or 1/3 that of Mars, but its angular velocity is about 1/27th.
(from The Expanse)
Earth, metaphorically speaking, is humanity’s “cave”. A very nice and comfortable cave of course, the possibility space for the development of our species is bounded by it. It’s in our best interest to develop the ability to venture beyond the cave for increasingly longer periods and eventually become able to live outside of it indefinitely.
With this in mind, the moon is too close and convenient for long term self sufficiency to develop. Mars on the other hand is only reasonably accessible once every couple of years or so, which forces the issue of self-sufficiency right out of the gate. The first few decades of human presence there will be focused almost exclusively on self-sufficiency. This is important, because that means it has a far better chance of continuing to exist if/when political will for it wanes.
The upper layers of the Venetian atmosphere may seem attractive at first glance but it has several impracticalities, namely having to stay permanently aloft and total inaccessibility of the resources on and below Venus’ surface.
Will some take part in efforts to move beyond Earth’s surface with greed as a driving factor? Undoubtedly, but I don’t think it’s a valid reason to not do it.
The first words spoken on Mars should be, "Cool. Now, how far is Jupiter from here?"
To shield against the high energy component of cosmic rays, you need to wrap the crew compartment in something like a few meters of polyethylene or water. This is far heavier than anything we could launch today, but would work on something like a nuclear pulse rocket (that has a minimum weight requirement!)
There's an additional problem around Jupiter, which is what Pioneer 11 discovered. The strong magnetic field causes lethal radiation levels at the inner moons. Again you can solve this by wrapping yourself in crazy amounts of water or plastic, but it's far beyond our capability now.
Going to Mars is a legitimate goal.
But i would also like to see a make-the-Sahara-green-(ish) program.
Why not a Neom-but-in-a-viable-way program.
ALso, an even bigger debate is Appolo-mission-to-Mars vs 10-other-unmanned-programs-for-the-Solar system.
What other solar system destination would you propose instead? It's not like we have a lot of convenient alternatives to choose from.
I'd rather visit Mars than Venus, that's for sure.
Just don't visit the surface. It's really, really nasty down there.
Of all the examples you could have picked, you picked the one that was most explicitly not about desire for exploration. Europeans were not exploring the world for exploration's sake; they were stridently motivated by the promise of loot. The Spanish in particular explored the New World primarily to find new cities of gold to plunder, destroy, and loot, as was done to the Aztecs and Incas, with these entradas funded by people hoping for a share of the loot (unfortunately for them, there was nothing else on the scale of the Aztec or Inca Empires). Later, other countries sought less to actively loot the place but instead monopolize control over raw resources (beaver pelts being key in North America).
Better examples would have been, say, the Polynesian migrations that settled isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean, which the navigators would have had no reason to believe even existed.
I mean... yeah it probably would've been a lot better. They weren't the ones who explored the Americas. It was the people we now call Native Americans
If the Spanish and Portuguese had instead solved AT LEAST their own problems of constant famines and the inefficiencies and brutality of monarchies, they probably would've been a much kinder people...
People like to act like hierarchy is just an inevitable result of increasingly complex societies but there is no archeological or anthropological evidence to support this myth. There's fascistic hunter gatherer groups and the Americas themselves had examples of very large complex and extremely egalitarian societies. Like Teotihuacan which was nearly as large as Rome. After a brief fling with total authoritarianism the people had a revolution and ended up creating one of the first examples of public housing we have evidence of as well as dramatically increasing the average standard of living of everyone
Yeah I think the world definitely be a better place if they waited to solve their problems actually
Then there’s the practicalities: while the moon has long days and nights, there’s no global dust storms, and we can send power from the light side to the dark side with a simple wire (the lunar regolith and the vacuum are both insulators, there’s nothing alive or tectonic to mess with one just draped on the surface, only impacts). The Martian atmosphere is so thin it’s only useful for aerobraking and drones, not breathing, and the lack of atmosphere on the moon means non-rocket-based launchers are much easier, which in turn makes the long-term economics easier (though still terrible with current tech).
But, hey, that's just me.
...
Is that good or bad?
Please don't act like Europeans getting lost trying to find a shortcut to India was a good thing.
Even though it's a future that is grotesquely unfeasible and unwanted for anyone besides the richest 100 people on earth as as ultra decadent projects while 95% of the population on earth lives in societies on their way to collapse from resource depletion and rising inequality.
The fact is that we could use our money on something real, something tangible like saving earth instead of war machines and false promises while the gini coeffecient goes crazy and public education fails.
And i mean this is not just a perspective i've got from researching economics, but from having lots of family in academic science - i've seen how much is about grant money, towing the line and about furthering some state or corporate cause sadly.
This has been explained repeatedly for decades.
There will be more humans on Mars in 100 years, if we skip sending the humans now and develop the technology to automate process first.
maybe someone can find Weinberg’s detailed explanation for others to read.
https://www.space.com/4357-nobel-laureate-disses-nasa-manned...
We can't do that anytime soon. We can't even reliably automate most manual labor jobs right now. We can do some neat stuff with robots, but we always need humans supervising them and ready to step in and reset things because the reliability is poor.
All the current active conflicts and threats of armed conflict are being caused by easterners, not westerners. You're about 20 years out-of-date with your complaint of warmongering by westerners.
That is for machines or post-human life, designed for the purpose, to do, if it is even possible. The answer to "Where is everybody?" is likely to be "They're home" having learned that trying to leave is deadly.
We’ve had 4.2bn years to figure out how to get off this rock. We’ve only got 500m left. In that time, life has printed exactly one golden ticket: humans. Staying here is deadly. The mentality that life on earth will be just fine dooms this planet to complete extinction.
Nowhere near to the amount of time you'd log on a trip to Mars and back.
Training enough astronauts for frequent missions will be extremely difficult, maybe infeasible. Colonizing Mars is a fantasy.
I'm worried that NASA will mess up their livestream of the Artemis 3 mission to the moon, just like they did with the Artemis 1. Compared to what we've been getting used to with SpaceX, it just wasn't that great.
Have SpaceX livestreams set high expectations?
Look, I want NASA to look good, but I'm worried that they are treating the streaming as an afterthought.