New Mars Forums

Look at all these folks worried about a mere 1 degree Celsius change in the Earth’s average temperature.  Why, we deal with models for climate modifications that large all the time here at New Mars. 

Let us at it.  We’ll get you ten degrees Celsius, easy.

Thank you.  Actually, I did not have much problem with Katrina.  Rita shut us down for a month, though.  After four tropical storms in five years, I made the decision to move before nature made it for me.

And that's the real danger, isn't it? 

Radical environmentalists are not just asking us to conserve resources and increase efficiency, they're asking us to abandon material innovation as a driving force for our society.  Unfortunately, we're already living so close to the carrying capacity of the Earth that that is no longer an option.  What radical environmentalists are really calling for is collapse, caused by removing resources from society rather than deriving alternatives.  They want to turn back down the evolutionary path of humanity, and have set their sights on a pleasant wooded pasture at the trail's end. 

There is no worldview more opposed to that of the Mars Society.

Yeah, there's a lot of crazy, ignorant, mathematically-challenged fear mongerers in the environmentalist movement. 

However, I'm not certain that using the lunatic fringe of the environmentalist movement as a bogeyman to avoid dealing with  underlying functional issues is an appropriate response to it.

For example, because of my hobbies and other personal interests, I pay attention to my local climate (not today's weather - the climate), and over the past twenty years it has changed for the worse as far as I'm concerned.  We're in the midst of a drought, one of a series in a decade of below average rainfall, and that's mucking up all sorts of things for me. It's getting warmer, too.  Summers are hotter, and the average date of last frost is a month earlier than fifteen years ago.  But, on the bright side, I have finally taken Robert's advice and moved far enough inland that I can now receive hurricane evacuees instead of becoming one again.   

I am having an environmental problem. 

But I've no plan for going to Washington, or even my state capital (except on shopping trips).  I'm not marching on anybody.  I even waited until gasoline headed back toward $3+ per US gallon before bothering with a fuel efficient car (but you'd better believe I did it, and I'm now looking for a plug-in hybrid).  My lack of desperate action has some of my more socially vocal friends looking at me cockeyed and muttering under their breath, because I'm doing something that is anathema to every shouting protester off picketing their local refinery.

I'm adapting.

And along the way, I've made an important discovery: on the whole, the conservationists are right.  Many of the lifestyle changes being promoted by modern conservationists not only conserve resources but money.  If you don't give in to consumerism and just buy whatever new "green" product the voices in your TV tell you, then conservation of your household resources can not only save you money, it can do so without costing you capacity.  Ultimately, efficiency is the best way to adapt to reduced resources if you want to save money. 

Efficiency has given me more expendable income, and has actually made me a more effective advocate for things I really do care about, like scientific research.

Try the Wikipedia Article on Fred Thompson.

According to several straw polls, Fred Thompson would be a front runner, but I attribute no significance to that until it becomes more than just a straw poll.  I don't count a candidate in until he's in, and Thompson appears content to vacillate until the registration deadline.

I think so. 

The age of the deposit is strongly indicated by the thickness of the layer of ordinary red-brown, wind-blown dust deposited on top of it.  Laying down a deposit that thick would take only a few thousand years. If the silica depositing water trickled up from below (more likely in my opinion, because the silicate rich soil isn't everywhere in that area, as it would be if given a chance to weather away), it could be even younger than that.

Exactly, Robert. 

That's why I'm with Clark on this one.

Politicians might be having fun with this, but if it were a deal between two international business firms instead of a state and a province, the way I'd solve it is with this paragraph:

"Manitoba Hydro takes exception to the requirements of customer document Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Omnibus Bill" SF 2096.  Manitoba Hydro offers audits and environmental qualifications per our current accepted quality control program according to our existing contract."

I might also include a note about why, if I liked the guy I was deigning to e-mail.

(I don't assign much weight to the alternate view, either.)
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The estimated age of Gliese 581 is 4.3 billion years - slightly younger than our own sun.  Fow all we know, there could be a native civilization there.

  Where's your spirit of skepticism!

Why, I just recently started an experiment testing a prediction of general relativity that has never been investigated using the accuracy possible with modern lasers and computer controls.   I have a hypothesis that old Albert overlooked something in his original formulation of General Relativity (and, more specifically, that modern theorists are overlooking something in their revival of the Cosmological Constant), and my odds of being right are about 50%, too.  Confirmation of frame dragging gets me to 51%.

So let the Gravity B team play.   

No, I have to defend Star Trek on this one.

Star Trek is not responsible for that part of the problem.  As a group, people tend to be more focused on problems that are right in front of them.  When asked to devote resources to something else, they will automatically ask, “Why not help with my problem first?”  When they just don’t want convincing, “This is more important” or “We’re too busy” is a typical response.  People got wrapped up in their own issues long before Star Trek, and they’ll get wrapped in their own issues up long after it’s gone.

However…

It may surprise you to find that a lot of people disagree.

I’ll leave it to that series’s fans to set you straight about your claims regarding the absence of crime, money and deadbeats in the fictional Star Trek universe.  (When not even Star Trek claims we can overcome a social problem, it’s time to resign ourselves and adapt.) 

As for hunger and poverty, there is growing recognition that while the poor will always be with us, we do have a realistic chance to effectively eliminate starvation and squalor from the Earth with current resources. 

The economics of tackling the problem are already fairly well laid out, and not all of it is theoretical.  The World Bank, for example, is already implementing some very promising programs, including a lot of the necessary research that is still needed.  The percent of international GDP necessary to implement the majority of these programs is from 1% to 3% of the national budgets of every participating developed nation, if we can only get a majority of the G8 onboard.  That’s going to be difficult to arrange (the budgetary equivalent of trying to gear up an Apollo-Era NASA), but it’s within reach.

I know that many people remain convinced that eliminating squalor is too hard, but that is precisely why we should choose to do it.  It presents just as great a challenge – technical and political – as space exploration, at an equivalent cost.  It is just as much within our reach as the Moon was in 1961.  No Star Trek necessary.

Ah, but we would want it to blow away. 

The virtue of carbon black is that it can be manufactured from carbon dioxide and it can be powdered enough to be windborn.  It's also fairly innocuous.  Having the low albedo agent blown on the wind seems to be a fairly efficient means of delivery.

Hmm.

Demron is apparently a vinyl chloride-ethylene copolymer.  This stuff might have some mechanical strength to it.  I wonder if the crew quarters themselves can be constructed of it?  That would kill two birds with one stone, providing both shielding and superstruture to the crew quarters.

Huh?  Wind deposition has been a favored hypothesis for soil formation on Mars since the Viking missions.  Surface features the wind-driven processes can't explain do make all the headlines, true, but that hardly makes this NASA's first admission that there's dust on Mars.