you could stick your neck out further and say your incorporating a space necklace on mars to aid in re-launch
provided that the long tail singularity we get nano tubes big enough into production
That dust is part iron. A lot of it is iron, actually, which both conducts and retains beta radiation.
Beta radiation is the stuff that murders humans.
Well, yes, but at least Musk produces things which are a net benefit to society. Well, I’m skeptical of the feasibility of Mars colonization and the absurd “hyperloop”, but even if Tesla cars never become affordable, it’s pretty clear the major car makers were inspired to start getting into electrics because of Tesla. As for Zuckerberg, if all the Facebook servers exploded, the world wouldn’t be any worse and probably better.
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Well, being able to protect ourselves and our constructs from radiation is the big hurdle right now: everything else is either negotiable, or solved.
That, and of course what zero/low gravity does to living bodies made for earth.
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Oh, I won’t be going. But no one else will be going, either, so I don’t know how meaningful my intention to stay home actually is.
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Why? I mean, if you’re planning on colonizing anyway, why wait until you’ve got a way back, if you plan on staying there?
We won’t have any real idea of how viable a long-term Mars settlement is until we’ve sent people there for a shorter visit. Spain didn’t send the first waves of ships to the New World without enough supplies to survive a return voyage.
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Hell, I was just going off your previous comment of doing a one way mission and having to build a working system to even have a chance of getting back.
The weed out process to find a team thast could handle the level of psychological stresses that would be involved in a mission like this would likely take as long as building the actual ship itself. It’d probably be much easier to find people to do a one way solo trip compared to one’s that could endure this.
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Well, we’ll see how it goes.
It’s a major, major undertaking - although SpaceX is avoiding most of the heavy lifting associated with Apollo: The tech is already mature + ingenious cost-saving measures.
It will inevitably run into some unexpected trouble with the environment and/or human capabilities that we don’t even know of yet and the first wave of colonist will most likely fatally fail.
But: It’s a meaningful, great enterprise and I salute everyone involved in their struggle to advance humanity. And Musk has a good track record of successfully pulling off the seemingly impossible.
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Absolutely. While I’m skeptical of his chances of success, if anyone can do it, it’s Elon.
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We need to make an exhaustive search for life on Mars before we begin doing cowboy stuff there. We will never have another chance after this one.
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Hey, it had sufficient truthyness!
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There is something to that - a really thorough search will, however, ultimately require boots on the ground, in and of themselves altering the environment. Some kind of an interplanetary Heisenberg rule…
While I think it will require a really huge colony to start having any noticeable impact on the environment of the planet as such, we should face the fact that once a human sneezes on another celestial body, it will become irreversibly infected with terrestrial microflora, irrespective of how many air vents may be in the way. And some of that microflora will probably be able to survive in the harsh environment. And a small subset of that microflora might be able to thrive.
So from one point of view - a catastrophic ecological contamination. However from the other point of view - we could be the Martian panspermia. Planting life on another planet which may give rise to completely new organisms, millions of years after the last colonist die in their glass domes.
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Mars can have him.
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Don’t hold your breath, although inhabiting the surface of Mars will expose you to more radiation than the surface of our planet, it’s because of the thinner atmosphere and lack of a planetary magnetic field. If the particles hitting the planet are sufficiently energetic, they could turn heavy metals in the soil into radioactive isotopes, but as the article I linked to indicates, surface radiation on Mars is .67mSv per 24 hours, while exposure on the spacecraft while traveling to Mars is 1.8mSv per 24 hours, and the vast majority of the radiation on the surface of Mars is stellar in origin.
For reference, average annual radiation exposure in the United States is about 6.2mSv/year and an exposure of 1Sv is associated with about a 5% increase in the risk of death from cancer.
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We have an entire continent that is much more hospitable and several orders of magnitude easier to get to that we have hardly used. I’ve said it before, we’ll colonize Mars when Antarctica becomes too crowded.
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Your characterization of the work is highly scientific. Sociologist are you?
Nope. Physics/math undergrad, graduate research in astrobiology and planetary atmospheres. I stand by my characterization of your post.
But great for wind turbines. If you can them them to work in reduced atmosphere.
Well, no. Wind turbines would be nearly useless. )-:
Turbines need force to generate power. Force = Mass x Velocity. Decent velocity, but very, very little mass. Thus very little force.
Not really practical as a power source.
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