New Mars Forums

I wish the MS would do a better job of publicising these types of things.  I think the member roles might increase a bit if people saw that the MS wasn't just running the analogue stations.  If the MS succeeded in contributing significantly to developing something like a very flexible, durable, and comfortable spacesuit that was used on an actual manned mission I think it would do wonders for bringing the MS out of the darkness.  To be honest, spacesuit design is the most fascinating thing to me for some reason.  I just can't envision living on Mars if I have to use huge, heavy, and bulky spacesuits like those the lunar astronauts wore.

The base of the elevator is a moveable platform that will shift the ribbon accordingly to avoid any major satellites/space junk.  The buzz phrase is "active avoidance."

The ribbon of the elevator is far too long to be a good conductor.  Resistance would eventually kill any electric current sent down from it, certainly a lot more than 50%.  Another problem is that even if you could send power down the ribbon the anchor station will be hundreds of miles from civilization so you'd have another power transmission problem.  It's easier to just microwave the energy.  I'm going on the assumption that you mean this power is meant for consumption by the general public and not the elevator itself.  The lifters will be powered by ground based free electron lasers.

For the first elevator it's best to keep things as simple as possible which means having only one ribbon and you don't want to waste time bringing down a lifter when you could be sending multiple lifters up in it's place.  The lifters are pretty much just simple frames with motors attached anyway, nothing all that special or particularly expensive.

That's always a good upgrade option but I think it would be best to focus first on just getting the elevator working using one tether for simplicity.  If the first one works it's a safe bet that more and better elevators will be built.  And the counterweight of the elevator does extend beyond GEO significantly enough that payloads could be launched to Mars and the asteroid belt and everywhere else in the inner solar system.  The elevator wouldn't work if the actual counterweight was planted in GEO.

Depends on the type of laws they intend to enforce and how they plan to enforce them.  Being that UN officials, at least the American ones, aren't on my ballot I'm hesitant to just hand them blatant power to rule as they please.  If they aren't directly accountable to the people then I don't want to be subject to this so-called world court.  I think justices, i.e. Supreme Court judges and the like, should be voted on by the people not appointed by politicians.

Since the state holds all rights it can legally and rightfully coerce the lowly individual as it sees fit.  After all, in Clark's colony you wouldn't even be allowed to raise your own children, they'd be taken from you to be raised by "professionals."  The individual means nothing, the collective means everything.  Can't wait to immigrate to Clark's colony.  I have an extra ticket if you want to come along AJ.   

Cindy said:

The moons are already going to be lost to Mars in one fashion or another.  Phobos will eventually crash into Mars and Deimos will just fly off into interplanetary space the way our own moon is doing.  Both moons are just tiny, captured asteroids anyhow.  With all of this talk about the danger the moons pose to space elevators the ultimate solution would simply to move the satellites into appropriate orbits with the right velocities and use them as the counterweights for space elevators.  Problem solved and you'd basically have a direct link to a giant iceball for the taking.  A project for far in the future of course!

The similarity of those faces in the photographs are definate proof of an Iraq/Mars connection.  Now it begs the question, did the little green men whisk Saddam off to Mars in the nick of time?  I'm not so sure I want to go to Mars now if Saddam and his little green allies rule the planet. 

I believe mass colonization will only happen once the private sector can get people into space en masse and economically.  Since the Outer Space treaty prevents countries from declaring sovereignty over extra terrestrial real-estate I can't see anything more than a few science bases being setup by governments.  Gov'ts are about as likely to promote the growth of colonization of outer space as they are to promote the mass colonization of Antartica (which is subject to similiar treaties at the OST.)  Of course there are possibilities that science outposts could inadvertently grow into big colonies or that countries may withdraw from the treaty and stake out claims for themselves, but these seem unlikely.   And I really don't see much of a difference between a company charging people tickets to ride their spacecraft to a colony and a few government commissars choosing who may and may not leave Earth.  Most socialists don't want to see mankind leave Earth anyhow.  They'd rather we be quarantined to Earth and have the money that would be spent on space projects be funneled into their pet social causes here on Earth.

The only solution is to tax everyone at 95%, have a handful of fools, I mean, experts make all economic decisions for us, use gulag slave labor to make up for work where our genius command economists failed and to resurrect Stalin as dictator.  Anything less is fascism and I simply won't stand for it.   Long Live the Ten Year Plan!  :angry:

It figures that you'd bring up Buran about five minutes after I deleted all of my bookmarks relating to it.  What's sad is it's precisely because of the Buran program that the Soviet ideas for building bases on the moon were ultimately canned.  According to the biography "Korolev:  The Man who Masterminded the Soviet Drive to the Moon"  (title might not be exactly that) The Soviets ultimately developed the Buran because they feared the space shuttle had military purposes and they wanted a similiar vehicle as a "counter threat."  I think the space shuttle and Buran programs might have actually been one instance where the cold war competition in space actually set us back.  I don't think the Buran was a big enough improvement over the shuttle, at least economic wise, to make it a much better alternative.

Another good book is "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene.  It's my favorite pop-sci book.

I remember you mentioning that.  Even if Mars doesn't have a lot of active volcanoes it's possible that a lot of the areas that show recent water runoff might be related to geothermal energy, which could be evidence that Mars hasn't cooled off.  Anyhow, if Mars happens to have a nuclear reactor at the core I'm going to nominate you for the Nobel Prize in geology.  Come to think of it, do they even offer Nobels in that field, if they don't they should! 

Most of my college linguistics professors took this position.  There is no such thing as a "superior" language since the primary goal of speech is merely the transmission of ideas.  One might argue that a large vocabulary somehow makes a language superior, or the flow of its vowels, or some other arbitrary thing, but these are purely aesthetic and secondary.  Languages are flexible, if they need larger vocabularies or more sounds they'll be incorporated.  Unless a single cultural group becomes predominate on Mars, I don't see how you can just sit down and tell everybody "ok your going to speak this language now."  Good luck! There should be no "official" language of Mars, at least in the beginning.  Let the language evolve on its own.  Not everything needs the help of the dictators!