New Mars Forums

Putin is about as reliable a partner in a joint manned Mars mission as he is a reliable partner in the War on Terrorism.

These are all management issues you speak of. How does that implicate the corporation in general? If you get rid of the corporation, what are you going to replace it with? A government agency perhaps? Such an agency still requires management, and is still subject to the managerial abuses you speak of, but a government agency is not subject to the compedative pressures of a private corporation, so the money it spends comes from taxpayers, and who are going to be the taxpayers if not corporations?

Corporations are the source of all the money the government has to spend. Corporations pay the people who pay their taxes and on top of that corporations pay taxes themselves. Corporations compete with other corporations and to gain the customer's business, corporations often have to cut costs to lower its price to attract the customer. Point number 4 you make is questionable. If a corporation was a monopoly, it would provide fewer jobs, not more. Monopolistic company would try to maximise profits so as to enrich its stockholders, it wouldn't hire any more people than necessary, it wouldn't innovate or improve efficiency or service either. Monopolies try to provide as little service as possible for the maximum amount of money. What I'm trying to say is that a market with a bunch of competing corporations produces more jobs than one that is dominated by a single monopoly.

Most corporations aren't monopolies however, it would be a grave mistake to get rid of all corporations because some of them are monopolies, because the corporations that compete actually produce wealth and if you get rid of them, you are actually killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Nothing else creates wealth quite as efficiently as private compedative corporations do.

You know something else that's funny? There are even left wing corporations that don't believe in Capitalism, but they still are corporations. The New York Times Corporation is one such example. You get rid of all corporations you will also get rid of the New York Times, that great spokesman for all left wing causes.

Religion is how we humans cope with our own mortality.
Business is how we earn a living, feed ourselves, provide for our material wants and our desires.
Politics is how we deal with our fellow human beings, how we get along, and how we sometimes try to manipulate the social dynamic to seek advantage for ourselves.
Crime is how we seek advantage for ourselves at the expense of others, and sometimes it is just the result of one's mental illness and his inability to deal with others in this world.

Probably these four factors will follow us into space and onto Mars. People we still have religion as long as they fear death, people will still need to earn a living and do business. We will remain social creatures and engage in politics, and some will seek opportunity for themselves and commit crimes against others. A successful society in space will have all the elements of existing successful societies on Earth, Human nature will not change and so we must make allowances for that. I think the best thing space allows for us, is to seperate societies that cannot or will not get along by vast distances, so their will not be war. One of the problems existing to day is the "Clash of Civilization" or cultures, we are faced with a primitive culture that will not deal with our liberal modern ways of thinking, and so would like to get rid of us. they devote a disproportionate amount of their energy and resources even going as far as killing themselves to get rid of us and our modern ways of thinking. America faces another problem, the West will not band together to fight this menace, individual countries would rather fight this menace alone or seek accomodation with it rather than stand by our side so we can pool our resources together to fight this menance, seems they'd rather fight us instead as we make a much easier enemy, and they can feel good by defying us Imperialist Capitalist Americans. So what do we do? Move to Mars perhaps, maybe even rename it Planet America?  :?:

Mars lacks some certain things to be sure, and we'd all have to live under domes or other similar enclosures, but if we retreat from the World, then I can think of no better place we can go than Mars, but perhaps the Isolationist among us don't really mean that all 300 million of us should get into space ships and all fly off to Mars, they'd much rather we pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist and stick out heads in the sand like ostriches, this works until the World comes and bites us. Too bad we have to spend so much money and our young men and women's lives keeping the dictators down and trying to prevent them from aquiring nuclear weapons, all resources that could have been used for space exploration and colonization all down the drain on the bloody battlefield, what a pity.

It also makes those projects more expensive, and it introduces the temptation to take as much time as you like in completing it as all your potential compedators are on board with you. I think if JFK extended his hand in friendship with the USSR and planned to go to the moon in a joint mission, we still would not have gotten there.
Also it seems to me that Russia is not a traditional ally of Arab countries. Russia by tradition is an Orthidox Christian country, only a minority of their people are Muslims, and some of those muslims have conducted terrorist operations against the Russian people, but opposing the United States in all things takes precidence in Russia over fighting Islamo-facism. If Russia is trying so hard to be our adversary, trying to see to it that Iran gets nuclear weapons and trying to kill Americans by proxy in their foreign policy, what the heck are we doing building an International space Station with them? Russia is not the same country that we started the project with, that country was a democracy, not an empire. I'm sorry that Russia's only sense of self worth is in opposing us in all things that matter, I wish it were otherwise.

So would Mars be a:

1)  Desert Planet
2) Prarie planet
3) Forest Planet
4) Jungle planet?

If you landed on a terraformed planet, would you most likely land in a forest?

Can I assume you are not going to turn Jupiter into a Star?

EXXON and other private oil companies together have only 10% of all the oil resources in the World, the other 90% belong to governments and are exploited by government owned and run oil companies. EXXON is just the tip of the iceburg and it cannot extract oil from places it does not control and isn't allowed to operate. Governments jealously guard these resources whenever the price of oil is high. So called big oil companies like EXXON are just bit players and their participation and investements in oil doesn't affect the overall oil supply situation. the oil market is controlled by Governments, not by "big" oil companies. Exxon literally lives off the crumbs left over by the national oil cartels that control most of the oil in the World. If an investor is a modest person and can't think of anything better to do with his money, he might invest in Exxon and live off the crumbs left over by OPEC. If you want really big time however, you will want to invest in space colonization and get there first! The first people to get their and establish their authority, will set the rules that everyone else will have to live by. I think that in the end is a much more profitable investment than a bottom feeder like EXXON, who just invests in oil drilling and can't really affect the overall oil picture, and are at the mercy of OPEC. OPEC sets the oil price and EXXON can profit by it or not with the small percentage of the World's oil that they actually own.

Mars is out there, there is a whole planet's worth of stuff. You could do asteroid mining right on the surface of Mars, the Moon too, because each crater that you see and the remains of an asteroid buried under its surface, some of those asteroids have valuable mineral wealth. the Geology of the Moon and Mars is mostly dead, so those asteroids haven't gone anywhere since, they are still there. I think it may be easier to mine the asteroids buried under Mars's craters, than to mine the asteroids in the belt. On Mars they are close together, in space they are far apart and in different orbits.

Governments have the money, that is true. The problem is, governments often spend the money in ways that are politically motivated rather than the most efficient. The consideration of funcing the mission or completing the project is often secondary to the one of creating jobs for one's home district, or swaying the vote of a certain senator by awarding a fat jucy cost-plus contract to some supplier. The agency might end up buying things and services it doesn't need. The vehicle design itself might be changed to satisfy certain requirements and constituents. The matters of cost and efficiency are usually the last to be considered, and only by the congressional budget office looking to save money to spend on their own pork barrel project that has nothing to do with space travel. If the only matter to be considered is whose congressional district or state benefits from the added jobs from government spending, then NASA is ultimately going to lose out.

The Space Station thing is another matter, in that project we needed Russia's participation, not to share costs or to make use of their expertise, but to satisfy the Doves in our own Congress who wanted to see us making peace with the Russians and involving ourselves in collaborative projects with them. Another consideration is to employ Russian Rocket scientists, so they don't work for the Iranians, I think in that goal, the ISS project has failed, and its design was compromised to make use of russian components, and its orbit was made less usefull from the need to launch some of the components from Russia. A lot of energy was wasted by launching the ISS into a high inclination orbit, this served to make the ISS project more expensive and to take away funds from other endeavors such as space exploration, or building a successor to the Shuttle.

What government should do is provide the money and say what it wants, and then shut up. The government should keep what it wants constant, it should not say to the company how it wants it to be accomplished or what subcontractors they should employ, or where they should build their plants, so long as they are in the United States. The private companies should be allowed a free hand in design without government buerocrats and politicians looking over their shoulder, and so long as they meet the government's objective then the money should be rewarded after the fact to the company that delivers the goods for the lowest cost.

I think a stepwise process of intermediate awards would be best, with a first, a second and a third prize. The first prize winners product should then be used in the next step of the project. if the company is a third prize winner, it is still in the competition for the next step of the project, the second and third prizes serve to defray the cost of the investment for the investors, and keep them in the competion.

One must be careful before one relies too heavily on foreign suppliers for one's space program. I've seen competions in the space programs and cooperation, I think competition has produced more results. Cooperation just means that all involved can relax and take it easy, since all the potential compedators are involved in the same project, there is no hurry, no need to make hasty decisions or to rush things, and you can always be a little bit more careful, add more redundant systems just in case things go wrong and the engineers can ask what if in many diferent languages, and the cost of the program will balloon way out of proportion. Just look at the Airbus 380 for what can happen in a multinational development program. I think national rivalries and friendly competition is a definite plus. Just imagine:

A) "We better hurry up of the Chinese will get to the Moon first."

or

B) "Isn't it great that we involved the Chinese in our joint program to land men on the moon? Its a good thing too, who would of imagined that the costs of the program would have ballooned so much? I doubt we would have been able to afford it all by ourselves. Just the design studies alone cost billions and nothing was built yet. Even with the Chinese involved we had countless discussions on how we should proceed to go to the Moon, the Chinese wanted to go one way while we wanted to go another, finally after several conferenced and design studies, we settled on a mission profile that we both can life with, with various components manufactured in each of our countries, or course our engineers and their both had ideas on how to improve the mission and make it cost less, but making all the parts and pieces fit together, boy that cost alot!"

Seems like we started working on this station with a democracy and ended up working on it with a dictatorship. One wonders if international collaboration projects like this are such a good idea. Should we go to Mars with Putin?

A lethal disease would kill the whole crew off straight away, and they wouldn't live long enough for the next launch window back to Earth, their would be no "Andromeda Strain" as their bodies would remain on Mars, and theirs would probably be the last human mission to go there. I think it rather undramatic if the heroes of our story don't stand a chance, and they are simply doomed and die. There is no way our intreped explorers can bring a whole hospital with them either. if they contract some lethal disease, they are all alone and their is no one to help them, so they die on Mars.

I had more in mind challenges the heroes are capable of dealing with in a realistic situation.

Take the classic story A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burrow, so what if you wanted to change this Planetary Romance into hard science fiction?

Mars is not the way E.R. Burrows describes it in his book, but how close could it have been? I think ten centuries in the future is just as much fantasy for us as an alternate reality where history was different.

So how do you create a world that is as close as we can get to Barsoom while maintaining a Hard science fiction flavor?

First their is no teleportation.

John Carter is not a Immortal Civil War Veteran who never grows old.

John Carter is instead a NASA Astronaut on a Mars mission in the 21st century. Not our 21st century, but that of an alternate reality where history diverged from our own on Mars around 1 million years ago and where our historical history stayed on track until sometime in the Early 20th century when people realized the canals on Mars weren't fake or some optical illusion, probes confirmed their existance, a northern Boreal Ocean is also discovered and the atmosphere is comfirmed to be a similar mixture to that on Earth.

Ok, John Carter is one in a crew of 6 or 7 astronauts that land a Mars hab somewhere. The gross features of real Mars persist, but they are overlaid with a biosphere, the craters are eroded in the southern highlands, the smaller ones are probably erased, the larger ones have smooth lips.

Then their are the canals. As you said before, the canals would have to be very wide to be visible through Lowell's telescope on Earth, about how wide would you say? 20 miles perhaps? Is that too much or too little. If one stood on the shore of one of the canals, would one be able to see the other side or would it be over the horizon? What sort of canals would they have to be, taking the real topography of Mars into account? Their would be no canals in the Boreal ocean for instance, but leading from it into the southern highlands their would be. Now what would the water level of the canals be, all at sea level? To do that an awlful lot of rock would have to be excavated all the way down to the zero datum or whatever the sea level of this terraformed Mars is at.

All that rock would have to go somewhere, so perhaps their would be chains of artifical mountains made of excavated rubble running alongside these sea level canals. If you can terraform a planet, digging a planet wide system of canals might not seem like much work. the seas and the canal water would be salty of course. Otherwise you need rain water and ground water to fill the canals, either they are very long and very straight rivers that run into the Boreal Ocean or else their is a system of locks that need to be mantained to facilitate shipping across the planet.

We're assuming the Mars terraformers are mostly gone and are no longer maintaining the planet, so things will just have to "coast" for one million years until humans from Earth can get around to exploring this planet. Sea level locks are low maintainence since the ocean water from the Boreal ocean simply fills them. If the canals are very wide, then water will evaporate from their surfaces and perhaps condense along the straight ridges or artifical mountains running alongside the canals. The mountains would have to be far enough back so that the runoff doesn't silt up the canals over a period of one million years, there has to be something left for Lowell to see.

Would these canals serve a purpose?
I think they would carry ocean water over to large shallow evaporation ponds in the southern hemisphere so as to hydrate the atmosphere and provide more moisture to facilitate precipitation and grow plants. That water would of course run off back into the canals and into the Boreal ocean.

Also we'd have a whole new branch of the human family Homo Marinerianis. the protohumans brought over by the aliens evolved into homo sapien's equal, these are the "red martians" in other words, the aliens are the "green martians", they stand about 9 feet tall and their muscles and skeletons aren't capable of supporting their weight under Earth's gravity. I don't think Homo Marinerianis would look quite the same as we do, they'd probably be adapted to Mars' lesser gravity too, but perhaps their powerful Earth-evolved muscles could be used to some evolutionary advantage. I don't know if they'd necessarily evolve into giants just because of the low gravity, maybe that can take advantage of their ability to jump up high instead.

I'm really not into X-Files, secret alien spaceships and the like. if you think planets are hollow, that is your theory not mine. A lot of people have a serious disconnect when someone mentions aliens.