New Mars Forums

Alrighty then. I guess someone was feeling argumentative.

My theory falls flat in the face of some rather odd and misapplied evidence. The fact that the first computers were the size of buildings and could only do the most rudimentary mathematical operations means nothing when a modern computer with orders of magnitude more computational power can be concealed within a Hallmark card. The fact that a few autistic individuals are exceptionally good at esoteric math applications means nothing when the vast majority of the human race is fantastically bad at doing these operations. Deep Blue faced off against Gary Kasprov more than ten years ago; since then supercomputers have advanced by leaps and bounds and can be programed to be, for all intents and purposes, impossible to beat at Chess by any human opponent.

Saying that computers have no capabilities beyond ordinary human mental faculties (as you appear to imply) is not factually correct. Would you mind calculating pi to a thousand decimal places? You could probably do it, if given several hours of painstaking mental math work, but my graphing calculator can do the same operation in a fraction of a second. Just because a human brain is capable of performing a certain task does not mean that it's necessarily feasible from a practical standpoint. There is a very good reason why engineers use CFD software to acertain the flight characteristics of a new design. Computing the same numbers through mental math would take a ludicrously large interval of time. There are certain tasks for which computers are simply better-suited for than people; that's what the evidence seems to suggest.

For certain other tasks, however, there's no beating the human brain. By nature we are exquisitely good pattern-finders, and are wonderful at making causal links and rationally working through problems (at least, when we feel like it). This is why, no matter how advanced computers become there will still be no substitute for real, warm, living, breathing human beings when the task involves exploration or discovery.

Umm, what? Uh, yeah, I suppose that could be the case. It could also be the case that the universe was created three seconds ago by a team of multi-deminsional space kangaroos with all of your memories intact, so you only think you've been alive longer. Both theories are plausible, but neither actually deserve any credence. So far there is nothing at all that indicates that computers have the ability to think or feel beyond their programing. Considering that people design computers, you'd think we'd be pretty knowldegable about their inner workings, so it's safe to say that your compy won't feel hurt if abandon it for the new and improved iteration. I assume that you're not actually being serious, but there are real reasons why we know that computers aren't haunted with mystical spirits or any other kind of mumbo-jumbo.

What would you suggest I focus on, then? There are very real, very good reasons to focus on grades for someone in my position. You'd think we'd be arguing this the other way around, with me begging to ditch classes and throw caution into the wind and you pleading with me to think of my future. Weird, huh? Just making another good-natured poke in the eye, of course.

If you want to use a thersaurus, fine by me. However, I'm not going to, and now you know my reasoning behind my decision. I didn't just wake up one morning and think Hey, wouldn't it be fun to rationalize reasons why not to use a thersaurus!? The reasons justify the actions in my humble opinion.

Odd, the apropos used the be merely the thread of complete and utter friovolity. Now it's become the thread of complete and utter friovolity, plus very serious, heated debate. Now that's a combination you don't see every day. Brave new world indeedy.

I suppose you could say that, but I'm not sure it's a completely perfect analogy. Unfortunately, our minds aren't really built to process logarithms, or complex math, or calculate pi to an obscene number of decimal places. There are certain tasks that machines will always do better than humans, menial tasks that involve many constants and few variables. The instant any variables become involved, however, and all bets are off; that's where the good old-fashioned human brain really shines. You can do whatever you want, but I would never utilize a word that I don't fully understand (well, most of the time), which unfortunately many people tend to do when given ample access to a thersaurus. They may be synonyms, but there is a very real difference between words like "debacle" and "fiasco" and "mistake." Subtle nuances are everything in good writing, that's why I won't touch a thersaurus.

However, I fully realize that this is going to stop absolutely no one from using a thersaurus, and I understand why. It's a tool that can help its user obtain better grades, recognition from peers, what have you. The whole idea seems unsettling to me, though, it's another thing I'm weird about. Not that I have any problem with ladders, though. Ladders are our friends.

Of course, the human brain can do a myriad other tasks that artifical computers are bad at. Exploring, feeling emotions, falling in love, and dreaming new technology come to mind. Plus you can shove a human brain in an MRI machine and expect it to come out unscathed. And of course, they're the only supercomputers that can be made with unskilled labor anywhere in the world. IMHO, Arthur C. Clarke got it wrong. These aren't the waning days of carbon-based intelligence, on the contrary, the golden age of the spacecraft-building apes is just begining, no cyborgs required. We'll keep building robots, of course, but as supplements, not replacements.

The logistical problems entailed by a two-way scientific mission are trivial in comparison to those of a one-way colonizatoin mission. Besides, I highly doubt that any government would be willing to support a mission that offered no return for the daring astronauts involved, most of the general public would view that as being downright unethical. Realistically, we can't expect this to happen, at least, not at first.

Keeping a weblog is an interesting and effective way guage the inner qualities of one's peers. I suppose the idea behind a blog is that the reverse is true, that over time the blog keeper will bare the deepest contents of his or her mind for all the online world to see, but ever since I started keeping one back in June I've noticed that more often than not the reverse is true. Despite the fact that it's been online for nearly two months, my blog (http://www.xanga.com/home.aspx?user=VonBraunGuy) has recieved very few comments, but those that have been made have been highly enlightening.

I seem to recall hearing once that people often project their inner faults onto others when insulting them. I never really took much stock into that philosophy, but it seems to be exactly what's happened here. About two weeks ago I posted an entry that managed to enrage a few of my classmates (without even trying :? ). Near the end of one detractor's very lengthy critique of myself as a human being, he mentions that I spend excessively amounts of time belittling others' intelligence (I paraphraze of course, the original wasn't really in complete sentence form). I find that ironic in that he states that line after a long period of doing exactly what he accuses me of. Usually I love people, but they do get on my nerves sometimes (certain people anyway).

Recently the topic of thersaurus usage came up in a chatroom. I make it a point never to use a thersaurus under virtually any circumstances. It's practically become taboo nowadays. In my humble, very personal opinion thersauruses almost always do more harm than good. IMHO, if you couldn't actually think of the word in question, how can it possibly fit in with the rest of the prose at hand? Personally, I think that thersaurus use borders on outright cheating, and really ought to be discouraged. In addition, the more you use a thersaurus, the more dependent you become. It's simply bad all around.Then again, this is probably just me once again.

I once tried to explain the concept of radioactive decay to an English teacher (during lunch of course). It nearly got me thrown out of the room. Oddly enough this was the same person who nearly gave me a 100% on a highly esoteric paper about Kelly Johnson. Generally, the more productive your intentions, the less likely they are to succeed, except under highly specific circumstances.

Lately I wrote an entry at the previously-mentioned weblog that I am in no way qualified to write on Magnetic Resonance Imagery. I'm not quite sure why writing about generally poorly-understood topics like that is so fun; maybe it's because no one would ever be willing to talk about it in an ordinary conversation. The curse of knowing very much about science and technology is that you realize how extraordinary the universe is, and virtually no one cares. It's a bit like reading the greatest novel ever written and then being unable to discuss it with anyone. Oh, well, that's why we have weblogs and New Mars, I suppose. 8)

If/when we finally get around to colonizing Mars, this cost estimate is a great example of why it will not be done this way. $200 million billion is well beyond what is economically feasible for every government on Earth combined, even if amoritized over a century. Moreover, I seriously doubt that this plan would be viable from a logistical standpoint either. I'm usually one of the last people to say that a plan is impossible, but I'm pretty confident that sending 10 million colonists to Mars over the course of a century is quite undoable with anything even resembling today's technology. Think about what this would require; more than 200,000 people would need to be sent each launch window. Fewer than 500 astronauts and cosmonauts have been beyond Earth's atmosphere over the last 44 years, and none of them have ventured beyond cislunar space. Sending 200 times this number to an alien planet every single year for a century will not be physically possible for quite some time.

Humanity's first colony on another planet will have to be a much different, more austure venture. How many people are really needed for a permanent, self-sustaining colony? It's likely the same number as the lower limit of people needed for a healthy gene pool, perhaps 100-1,000 colonists. The most that any individual government or consortium of governments will be willing to spend is probably $5 billion a year for about 20 years, so $100 billion becomes our price cap. There's no way on Earth the UN will launch a program such as this; a Mars colony will have to be a mostly one-nation effort. Assuming that travel to the red planet can become relatively routine, it may be possilbe to start a colony on such a basis.

The trick here is to make the colony as self-sufficient as possible as soon as possible. While everything imported from Earth will have an exorbitant price tag and shipping fee, all items produced in situ are practically free, at least, those back on Earth don't have to pay for them. Thus, the best way to save money is to minimize the number of launches required to make the colony completely self-sufficient. Once the colony is independent, no further support launches will be neccessary. According to The Case for Mars, a heavy-lift SDV with an NTR upper stage could potentially launch 24 colonists one-way to the red planet, assuming no technological breakthroughs (scramjets, cyclers, etc.). In other words, ten flights minimum will be required for crew transport. Assuming two such missions can be launched each window of opportunity, it would take roughly ten years to transport the colonists to their destination.

Here's my proposal for a bare-minimum Mars colonization program. Over ten years, ten heavy-lift NTR cargo shipments are made to a site determined by previous manned scouting missions near a ready supply of water and perhaps geothermal energy. The cargo flights would include items such as greenhouses, chemical processing equipment, drilling equipment, a nuclear reactor, and inflatable habitation modules. The following ten flights are devoted to sending the first colonists, who will assemble the base and scramble to expand it as much as possible with local resources. In order to create living space without imported resources, underground tunnels could be built, or perhaps caves could be uitilized. Eventually, greenhouses and new hab modules could be created with plastics produced locally.

Granted, this is at the absolute lower limit of possible colony arcitectures, but it is also entirely possible without any technological breakthroughs. Unfortunately, I don't think that we can ask much more out of the initial colony, at least if we want to see it happen within the next century. I doubt that space exploration will ever recieve much more funding than it is currently in real dollars, so it is unrealistic to expect countries to spend trillions of dollars on an effort that will bring them very few practical benefits. As fun as fantastical sci-fi-like colonies are to imagine, humanity's first self-sufficient outpost outside of Earth will probably have much more humble origins.

Oh, come on, you're the one who keeps bringing that "I'm so smart" line of pointless rambling up repeatedly. The only time I mention goofy factoids like my class rank is when irate members with attitude problems and/or atrocious grammar start calling me names. I make a point not to name-call other members, but sometimes they really do get on my nerves. The point here is: thanks for the kind words on my intellectual capability, but I honestly couldn't care less about how big my ego is. Hence I haven't inflated the thing in ages, I'm not even sure where it is anymore. Probably in one of those old piles full of Popular Sciences and chemistry notes I have in my room.

I know what makes the wheels on the train go round and round. When they stop going round it's almost assuredly for some prosaic reason such as power variations or to give the train ahead more space. Bomb threats where the last thing on my mind at the time I was in said Underground car. To tell you the truth, I was much more concerned with where we were going after dinner (house of Parliament and photo-op across the Thames incidentally). Likewise I find it a little comical when people worry about terrorism when they get on an airplane. I'd love to say to these poeple: "You do know that the odds of this plane being hijacked are about as good as you or me winning the lottery tomorrow, right? Stop complaining and drink you're coke." Really, most people don't know the first thing about handling risks.

West Coast? Multi-cultural ocean? Someone has some 'splainin' to do.

Something that I find perpetually fascinating about astronautics in general is the enormous breadth of the field. There is so much involved in space science, exploration, and commerce that the number of sub-fields is staggering. From manned suborbital spaceflight to interplanetary probes to telescopes that peer into the begining of time and take notes on what it looked like there's always something new to learn and explore. Unfortunately, a side-effect of this is that individuals who become deeply involved in one sub-field often lose most of their understanding of the rest of the picture.

On the final flight of the journey, from Philadelphia to Phoenix, I had the good fortune to run into a genuine real-life rocket scientist from Lockheed Martin. At least, he told me he was one, but then again he also told me that he worked for Martin Marietta, so I suppose you have to take it all with a teeny grain of salt (I later got him to clarify who he worked for). To his credit, he was extremely knowledgible in his field, sattelites, but knew virtually nothing outside of that. When I mentioned how well the Mars rovers were doing, he seemed perplexed that they were still functioning. It appeared that he had never heard of Spacex before, even though he told me he had just spent a good amount of time at Vandenburg, where they would have been right next door. I could tell he felt out of his element talking about these areas, so I steared the conversation back towards more comfortable terrain.

It's great to become very knowledgable about the minutae, but you have to keep it all in perspective. I try to keep the big picture in mind as much as possible, hopefully I'll still be able to do this later on as well.

NASA is working harder towards a crystal-clear goal right now than it has been any time in the past 36 years. The VSE has survived for a year and a half now, and is picking up more momentum by the day. Nearly every review of the NASA's current objectives (return to the Moon, maybe later to Mars) has given it their resounding approval. Real progress is happening towards our return to the Moon, progress that will become more visible as time goes by. Most important, NASA's budget is gently inflating with hardly a peep of protest out of Congress. NASA most definately has a goal in front of them, and is making headway towards it.

Going to Mars will cost nowhere near $200 billion, let alone $500 billion, or the absurd $600 billion price tag of Bush-I's SEI. Under the ideal best-case scenareo, $20 billion over the next ten years could take us to the red planet. More realistically, such a project will cost between $60 and $80 billion, depending on how efficiently NASA can utilize its resources and how extensive a mission they desire. A Mars mission is technologically and politically doable, the only major obstacle I see to its exection would be too great a focus on the Moon. As long as we can avoid having the CEV becoming a "Lunar shuttle" of sorts, it can be done.

There's no point in looking at the reliability of unmanned missions to try to figure out the odds of a successful manned mission. During the 1960s the Surveyor and Ranger robotic probes sent to the Moon had a horrific failure rate, and yet every Apollo mission came back safe and sound. The extra precautions taken to ensure the safety of the crew, not to mention the adaptability of real, live humans, greatly increases the odds of success of a manned mission over an equivalent robotic excursion. It will always be safer and cheaper to launch unmanned missions than their manned counterparts, and the sciece return brought by robotic missions will always be laughably pathetic compared to that of human versions.

Going to Mars will not be an easy venture, but it is well within our technological capabilities. We went to the Moon in an era when a computer the size of a room had less computational power than a hand-held calculator. Missions to Mars are absoltuely feasible, and shouldn't turn out to be that expensive either.

Well, Dook, I sure hope that you're right. The trouble is, how do I know that you're right? Can you offer me (or any of us New Martians for that matter) any reason to believe in your religious ideologies? It ought to be a simple question, but I've never asked it to a highly religious person without having them drop every line in the book to avoid it. Does religion have a foundation? You tout belief, belief, faith, belief, but is there any reason behind it? I'm not trying to be antagonistic, I just want to know.

Sometimes I feel as though it's a deep character flaw that keeps my mind open to religion. I scoff at ufologists, astrologers, and those basket-cases who claim NASA has tried to cover up evidence of life on Mars, but are religious advocates any different? Please, don't get angry, I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings. I think that's a legitimate question. Both astrologers and evangelicals claim that you simply wouldn't understand what they know, that you simply must suspend all disbelief and accept their word as fact, no questions asked. And yet we deride one group as being a pseudoscientific diversion from the real world and hail the other as being the path to salvation. Is that right?

I suppose it is the right thing to keep an open mind on this subject, but I seriously wonder about these issues. It bugs me, on a very deep, spiritual level. I agree, the more one understands about science the more one realizes how miraculous the universe is and the more wondrous every tiny event in life becomes, but is that a good reason to believe in God?  The more I think about it, the more I keep thinking that we really could have gotten to where we are now without any divine intervention. That of course doesn't rule out the existance of God by a long-shot, but it does make me wonder.

More than anything else, I would love to believe in God. It wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination for me at all to imagine that he/she/it really exists, but it's the "why?" that's the kicker. Dook, have you ever really asked yourself if God exists? Have you ever recieved a satisfactory answer? If you have, please let me know, because this issue is bugging the living crap out of me. Even now, I remain cautiously optimistic that there is a God, but I always wonder if I'm not just succumbing to my desire to have such a belief.

Nothing could be less irrelevant in my opinion than whether or not God exists. If we could cleanly resolve the issue one way or the other it would be a revelation greater than anything I could imagine. Unfortunately, I'm doubtful that that will ever happen. Is God really out there or is he just a figmant of our collective imagination? I don't know. I hate the Nichze-esque argument that God either exists or doesn't based on whether or not we believe in him. Can you will a tree to exist or disappear? I for one can't, I'm almost positive that you can't do that with God either.

Whether or not God exists, I suppose I wouldn't really live my life any differently. I might pray more often if I were more confident in God's existance, but that would be about it. I make an effort to live each day to the fullest and do as much good as possible; I wouldn't change that based on a resolution to this question. But I still want to know, you know? Gosh, I feel like one of those SETI scientists I'm always heckling. They have no reason to believe that they'll ever pick up a signal and, IMHO, they don't have a snowball's chance on Venus of doing so. Likewise, I keep my mind open to religion and talk at length to die-hard supporters of the ideology, and yet I wonder how this is any better. I'm quite certain that asking these questions does not make me a bad person, and I will defend that to the ends of the Earth, but there are people who get to me sometimes who try to make me think otherwise.

If nothing else, this is a fun subject to discuss since I get a chance to arm-wave aimlessly and have people listen. Usually I try to cut down on arm-waving as much as possible, but with religion it's tough to make any argument that  doesn't involve sketchy support. Makes you wonder... :;):

Oh, I hope not.

Unfortunately, I have to agree here. It seems like every month now Russia announces a new plan for a mission to Mars, yet none of these paper plans have been backed up with any actual development. I find it very unprofessional of the Russian Space Agency to continue to posture in this way without actually doing anything other than ferrying crews to the ISS twice a year. Yes, they have a limited budget, but before you complain about NASA's fixation on the shuttle, consider how synonymous Soyuz has become with the RSA. In the past 38 years Russia has never seroiusly attempted to launch any manned mission beyond LEO or even on anything other than Soyuz. IMHO NASA has a much brighter future than the RSA.

Will PGMs really be valuable enough to support lunar mining? Keep in mind that it's awfully expensive to ship large amounts of material between Earth and the Moon, and rather infrastructure-intensive. Even if you highly automate operations it will be extremely expensive to start the first permanent base on lunar regolith.

I'm all for colonizing the Moon (if possible), but I'm skeptical if there's such a short-term solution to the bugetary problems.

Great, and here I am with a mere four stars. Maybe I should lurk less, post more. Nah, like that's gonna happen. Sorry for disturbing everyone.

Apparently if Spacex hasn't expressly stated that any development has occured with the Falcon I, we should assume that it hasn't happened yet. Their behavior keeps seeming nuttier by the minute (where in the net is my update!?), but there is real progress happening. I would say that the odds are better than 50/50 that Spacex will launch by August or so, and the odds are quite good that they'll launch before the end of the year. It could be worse. Most alt. space companies simply sit around doing nothing.