New Mars Forums

Why does the word new show up red? ???

I'm not (I wouldn't qualify for membership), but I've met some people that are.  Freemasonry is a loose organization, and many lodges don't have any real connection with other lodges, so the idea of a global conspiracy is pretty far-fetched.

As an aside, the eye-in-the-pyramid symbol on the american dollar is a symbol of the Bavarian Illuminati, not freemasonry (although some lodges adopted it later).  It is also an ancient symbol for divinity.  There's a good (accurate) history of the B.I. here.

I'm sorry for phrasing the question badly, but what I meant was how are you calculating those numbers, the costs in particular?  What data are you working off of?

Using 20 ton launchers instead of the shuttle or ares/magnum is a good idea (and it's already been talked about on this board here), but otherwise your plan isn't too different from the nasa referance mission, which is estimated at $50 billion.  Am I missing something?

I've only read the first one (Red Mars), and I have to say that the entire concept required a huge leap of faith.  Here some of the problems I remember having with it:

---SPOILERS---

-Russia and United States spend trillions of dollars to send 100 people to Mars.  WHY?

-Out of these hundred scientists, who have given up any chance of seeing Earth again, less than 15 actually care about anything Mars-related.

-Said colonists are seemingly capible of building anything they want, without any of the required infrastructure.

-Automation.  You simply can't automate things to the extent described by KSR.  They DID have it way too easy.  "Program a robot to build a factory that will build yet more robots, all so that you can program these robots to build....." riiiight.

-The UN, which played no part in the American-Russian program, is given administrative control of Mars. ???

-Earth "runs out of resources."  Which resources?  Why?  How are they being destroyed?  Wouldn't it be cheaper to recycle old trash than to import it from Mars?

-Transnationals invest in Mars.  They invest trillions without ever seeing a dollar in returns.  right.

-"The Treatment."  Did medical technology stop advancing after they invinted it?  Why live with so many limitations?  In a 1000 years they can't make a Treatment 2.0?  And how was it invented on Mars?  Wouldn't Mars be way behind Earth in medical tools and staff?

---END OF SPOILERS---

Anyway, overall I *did* like Red Mars, and I plan on reading the rest.  But I sure hope no one is taking it as a blueprint for the colonization of Mars.  If anything, it should be a list of what to avoid (face it, it's not a very happy book).  I was also glad that KSR showed the ass-end of globalization, and the bad effects corporatized space could have, although strangely I think that was lost on most people.

Relativity is valid, and virtually every aspect of it has been verified.  The speed of light can be measured cheaply in one's own garage.  Light does take time to get from one location to another (if you don't believe me, listen to some Apollo transmissions, or call someone on a satellite phone).  Changes between relativistic and actual mass are a fact of life in particle accelerators.  Time dilation can be measured by atomic clocks in satellites.  The atomic clock in Denver has to be constantly changed to stay sync with the clock in Washington, due to a difference in elevation.

Einstein's theories of relativity are products of science, and science is an empirical process.  Physicists do not accept or reject a theory based on their own ideas about how the world "should" work, but instead on objective experimental results.  And many times, especially nowadays, these results are totally contrary to our instinctive view of how the universe works.  To believe that the physical world should match our "common sense" understanding is quite na?ve.

Now, I'm not an expert, but perhaps I can clear up some some confusion about the speed of light "speed limit" (I am falling back on physics classes I took a while ago, so someone please correct me if I make a mistake).  Einstein's theories do not say that "nothing is faster than light" or "nothing can move faster than the speed of light."  That is a conclusion that only has meaning from a certain context.  Allow me to explain:

Say you are in a spaceship that leaves Earth orbit, and travels to Alpha Centauri (4.2 light years away).  Since, once you arrive, you know the distance you traveled, and the time it took (from you're point of view), you can easily calculate the speed the spaceship must have been traveling at.  If you aged 42 years, then you must have been traveling at 10% the speed of light (4.2 / 42 = 0.1 or 10%).  If the trip took 8.4 years, you must have zipping along at half the speed of light.  Common sense would say that you could keep accelerating and travel fast enough for the trip to only take 2.1 years, in which case you would be going twice the speed of light.  In fact (despite what you might have heard), this is the case.  There is no "universal speed limit" in that respect.

However, things do get weird when you paint other objects into the picture.  During your 2.1 year trip, you conduct some experiments (in which you are traveling "at" twice the speed of light, according to your calculations when you arrive).  Inside the spaceship everything is fine, but as you look out the window, you notice that all the stationary objects in space seem to be getting shorter.  Indeed, you get out your meter stick and measure the length of some Kuiper-belt object as you zip out of the solor system, and sure enough, it is shorter than it should be.  It seems like all of space (except for you) has squeezed or compressed in the direction you are traveling.  It has.

If you were to use your magical meter stick to measure the entire distance you travel, from Earth to Alpha Centauri, you would find that rather than the 4.2 light-years that you expected, the distance you'd measure is 1.05 light-years (I'm making up these numbers as I've forgotten the equations used to calculate them).  Once you arrive at your destination and slow to a stop, the universe stretches back to its normal configuration, and the distance from Alpha Centauri to Earth becomes 4.2 light years again.  Since the trip still takes you 2.1 years, from one point of view you could say that you were traveling at only 50% the speed of light while you were moving (1.05 / 2.1 = 0.5 or 50%).  From this point of view, the universe will continue to get shorter and shorter as you travel faster and faster, and the speed that you can observe as you travel will approach, but never reach the speed of light.  Only from this and the next example can you consider the speed of light a speed limit.  But once you slow down, the universe will stretch back out and you'll notice you've gone a very long distance in a very short time.

Finally, if I were to observe your trip to Alpha Centauri from Earth, I too would draw separate conclusions.  From my point of view, as you accelerate faster and faster, I see time slowing down for you.  What you see as a 2.1 year trip, I see as a 8.4 year trip (as in I age 8.4 years).  So from my point of view, you're also going at only half the speed of light.  And no matter how hard you try, from my point of view you will never move faster than the speed of light.  Or put another way, it is impossible for you to make it to Alpha Centauri without me aging at least 4.2 years.  But this is only from my point of view as a "stationary" observer, and is no more or less valid than the ones above.  That's the beauty of relativity.

Anyway, I know this is rather long winded, but I hope you can see that the "universal speed limit" is fictional in the sense that it only exists from certain points of view.  Let me know if it helped.

Edited for format and typos

Visited by moderator 2022/01/28

Well said dickbill.  If only the American media would do what you just did.

Where did you hear that?

---

What I said (or at least intended to say) was that it would be 15 years until cnt's could be mass produced in both the quantity and quality required for HighLift's concept.  The second article you posted gives a fairly good summary of how the current generation of cnt's are made.  It's a very inprecise process, creating tubes that are deformed, variable width, and have all sorts of holes.

The HighLift ribbon will require billions of billions of billions of yet more billions of moderate length carbon nanotubes of an exact width and length without any abnomalities or deficiencies.  It's been shown that cnt with just one missing or misplaced atom will have drastically different properties.  Why this is the case is still unkown, and will need to be thoroughly researched before any real progress can be made.

We don't even know if we can create such nanotubes, let alone in the quantity required.  We assume (rightly, I'm sure) that it is possible, but we have much to learn before we can even begin to consider how.

soph:  Carbon nanotubes could be mass produced within the next 15 years, but that's not half the problem.  The CNT fibers would have to be delicatly woven together in order to provide the strength HighLift is talking about.  That kind of positional control on such a large scale is more than decades away.

I'd be willing to debate this further, but perhaps we should move it to another thread.

Columbia flew on a totally different orbit than the ISS.  There is no way it could have manuvered to the ISS with the fuel it had, and from what I understand, really wasn't any concern about the foam.  The tiles were built to withstand such impacts, and analysis of the tapes showed a piece of foam that technically shouldn't have caused any damage.  So either a) it's a coincidence or b) there's something that didn't show up in the tapes, and NASA couldn't have known before hand.

As for in-flight repair, NASA says thats impossible, which I believe.  An EVA might have told them the damage, but any EVA would be dangerous and would have taken away from the science of the mission.

This is a terrible accident, but I think all the choices made by NASA were right with the data at hand..