New Mars Forums

My biggest fear is not Iraq, but what may happen in Saudi Arabia sometime in the future.  While they're our "allies" for the moment, I wouldn't be too surprised to see groups of terrorists attempt to overthrow the existing Saudi goverment sometime in the near future (the House of Saud.)  A few well-placed bombs in the major oil transshipment centers over there will probably do the trick, cutting off fully 1/4 of the world's oil supply for many weeks, if not for months.  We would have no choice but to mount a D-Day-type of invasion at that point, otherwise the US and the rest of the Western world would be plunged into a crippling economic depression, as no one would be able to afford to operate a motor vehicle or fly in airplanes or operate factories or grow crops...not with the spot price of oil soaring past $200 a barrel 

Sad to say, we're going to be over there for a very long time to come...and we honestly have no choice but to "dig in" and fight these terrorists on their home territory, or we'll be paying the price on our soil time and time again.  Every time I get disgusted over all the death and violence over there, seeing Bush's constant mis-handling of the situation, etc, etc, I just have to think about one thing: 9-11.  If we are unwilling to fight this war (which I consider the beginnings of WWIII (or WWIV, according to some), they *will* continue to attack us, anyway they can.

I know it sucks, but war is part and parcel of the human existence, and we really have no choice but to fight...otherwise we can kiss our vaunted way of life "goodbye"...permanently.

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58 seconds for me...lol.  Ric, I'm amazed that you can go for more than 3 minutes (!)...same with you too, Mundaka - I'm highly impressed with both of you. 

As for me, I'd be afraid of incurring brain damage going that long without breathing..lol.  I don't think I've ever been able to hold my breath for much more than 75 seconds or so, even as a kid.

Yeah, I know I've been gone a while...just been a bit preoccupied as of late.   

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Edit...Cindy, I've known about the ability of babies being able to swim for years...doesn't surprise me a bit.  What I've never been able to understand is the "inability" of large numbers of people not being able to swim, considering it's not that hard to keep your head above water...I think it's more of a panic reaction than anything.  Interestingly enough, at the university that I went to (UNC-Chapel Hill), it was a *requirement* that you pass a comprehensive swim test before you could graduate, which I've always thought was an excellent idea.

This reminds me of when we went on DST during the '73-'74 oil crisis in order to save energy.  Thing was, this caused kids to have to go to school in the dark, which posed unnecessary risk to the kids, etc.  So what did my local school district do to solve this problem?  They shifted school opening times an hour later, of course...lol.  I was fine with this at first, as it seemed to just put things back to what they were, but when I got home at 4 pm instead of 3 pm, and went to watch my favorite TV show (cartoon hour..lol), it was already over!  Surely the TV people would have put on my show an hour later, just like the school...but noooo....LOLOL     And boy, I just threw the biggest fit about the whole thing with the daylight savings time, which did absolutely nothing except to take away my favorite TV show.

Perhaps I should have voted for #4....maybe we really are fooling ourselves...lol. 

I brought this over from the "what if life was discovered on Mars" thread, as I think it's a good starting point for this thread:

First of all, I'd like to ask if anyone on here has thought what the brain would be like without a conscious?  Well, I've experienced something like that, just briefly, back when I was a teen doing stupid things like racing my friend on a bike without looking where I was going...lol.  I distinctly remember the front edge of my bicycle tire kissing the rear bumber of a parked automobile and then...<....>  The next thing I remember I was "coming to", except I had no idea of who I was, what had happened, where I was...in other words, my brain was booting up from scratch, just like a desktop computer, with me "coming to" being the first step of the process.  Then I gathered who I was...when I was...what had happened to me...and then, lastly, I could feel the physical sensation of pain (thankfully I was not seriously injured, just beat up a little...lol).  I would say the entire process took about one and a half or two minutes, and it certainly gave me pause for thought about consciousness for a long time afterwards.  To me, having a "conscious" or a "soul" is one of the few things in life you can take for granted, so when I experienced those few seconds of actively engaging my senses...while my brain was literally a blank slate...it's kinda to describe this sort of thing in words, except perhaps to say that it felt like I was suspended in some sort of infinite void, and my dazed brain was desperately attempting to grab onto something, anything...lol.

But personally, I think there's more to it than just a chemical / biological process in the brain...simply because it's painfully obvious how *little* we know (from a scientific standpoint) about this sort of thing.  How could one ever go about measuring consciousness?   How could we ever prove that the soul / conscious is simply the end result of a biological process?  If the brain can exist without a soul (however briefly), than might it be possible that the soul / consciousness can exist independently of the brain, like what 1000's of people have related to when they "died" but were later revived?  If "consciousness" was ever found to consist simply of mathematical algorithims and data flow, which we could measure as a measure of the brain's function, then could a person's "soul" be transferred into computer databases or some other form of artifical storage as a way of achieving immortality?  Or is this something more akin to the visible portion of an iceberg..what we see may be pretty danged impressive, but the part that we *don't* see is far more impressive still.  Might the human consciousness / soul represent one of the "higher" stages of life itself, which is united by some unifying force (what most people would consider God or the Creator, etc.)

The problem I have personally with the idea of the soul being merely the result of chemical/biological processes is that this line of thinking has a way of stripping the "value" of life that we (the human race) hold dear to us, which essentially forms the backbone of our civilized society.  For instance, I caught this from Bill O'Reilly's column in today's paper, about what's on the radio these days: "My glock is nice, / I shot her twice. / The ho no mo' / I got ta go ..."  To me, someone who thinks like that (and the fans of this type of "music" as well) suffers from a lack of appreciation of the soul and life itself...i.e., life is cheap, so it doesn't really matter if you shoot someone or not; life has no meaning, neither does death, why should anyone care?  If the majority of the population starts devaluing life to such a degree, then the human race would not be long for the world...

Not that I'm religious or anything, but I really and truly believe think life is something *more* than a series of measurable chemical processes, and that conciousness is something more than a complex series of mathematical algorithms.  But what of people's attempts to create A.I. and artificial bacteria?  I'm not saying that these things will be impossible or even improbable...but provided that we are eventually able to achieve these things, we might just discover something that we didn't know before...

I hope I've given you guys something to chew on for a while...hehe..

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Not me...lol...I'd be having the time of my life if I could experience something like that.  Talk about your "novel" experience!

As for the "Forbidden Planet"...it's definitely one of those "two thumbs up" movies...it was cinematic sci-fi at its best...truthfully, it's one of my all-time favorite films.  I *highly* recommend watching it if you've never seen it

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You've made some excellent points, C.C....thank you...

I fully agree with you about diverging biology if Martians were "left alone"...if anyone would like to see this principle in action, I would recommend a trip to the "Altiplano" region of the central Andies, namely southern Peru and central Bolivia, which has an average elevation of 14,000 feet above sea level.  15,000 feet is generally considered the upper limit of permanent human habitation, so anyone living at thirteen or fourteen thousand feet is "pushing the envelope" so to speak.  And the folks really do look different as a result of biological adaptation to the extreme altitude...they have large, barrel-shaped chests (for greater lung capacity) and rose-red cheeks as a result of being exposed to higher UV levels...not to mention having blood with higher concentrations of red blood cells, etc.

Poor me, when I visited that area, I came down with altitude sickness, as my body just could not cope with the lack of O2 in the air...I had severe headaches, could not eat, etc.  Desperate to get to a lower altitude, I went to the Las Paz "El Alto" airport (highest in the world, at 4020 meters), and sought to fly to Santiago, Chile a day early than I was supposed to (I had a reserved plane tix.)  But when I found out there wasn't a flight going to Santiago that day, I was extremely distraught, as I was *desperate* to get down to sea level.  Much to my good fortune, the airline person was able to get me on a flight to Arica, Chile, just 30 minutes by air, on a different airline...which was a real "life saver"..lol (I was able to continue on to Santiago the following day, as scheduled.)

I tell you what, when I got off that plane a couple hours later and took a deep breath of the deliciously thick sea-level air...I don't think I ever felt better in my life...lol...    It was like going from having a severe flu to an instant cure...the difference was absolutely amazing. 

But my experience down there illustrates the fact that we have divergent biologies of humans even right here on Earth...there are places where I (a humble sea-level dweller..lol) really wouldn't be able to live, although the residents do just fine.  So it's not much of a stretch to think that the biology of humans living on Mars and elsewhere could become so different from the rest of us that they could very well evolve into a whole other "species" of human...which is something that I'm admittedly not comfortable with.

But how to go about making sure that humans on Earth and off-Earth remain closely aligned?  Your guess is as good as mine... 

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Talk about adventures in weather!  Sounds like you guys had a wild time for a while there...was this due to a slow-moving tropical cyclone or whatever? 

This brings to mind when I was in north Queensland, in March of '86, and they were getting big rains then too.  A cyclone had moved in north of Cairns the day before I got there (I arrived from the south), and I saw flooded streets, etc, but nothing like roads being washed out or anything.  I did see a waterfall at a park north of Cairns which is normally supposed to be pretty tranquil, but it was in full flood when I saw it...it was an impressive sight, to say the least...lol.  That water was moving fast...hehe 

Yeah, I can imagine you're looking forward to winter coming on...meanwhile, the weather here has been absolutely superb, with cooler-than-normal temps, ultra-low humidity and sparkling blue skies, thanks to the wonderous trough locked in over the eastern U.S.  And to tell you the truth, this past winter has been the prettiest of all the winters I've seen so far down here...I just don't recall the weather being so perfect for so long...I'm beginning to wonder if someone isn't experimenting with a weather control machine somewhere...lol    

Now if only this weather would hold for the next six months or so...hehe...but I know that's a bit much to ask 

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Just a comment...  While I think it's great that the Chinese space hero is getting a star named after him, etc, in regards to honoring individuals on Martian currency (assuming there would be actual monetary notes in circulation on Mars...I seriously doubt there will), I would think that they would want to honor their own heros, such as the first person to step foot on Mars, etc, as opposed to depicting people from Earth's past that have nothing to do with Mars.

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Hehe...that sounds like South Florida in June, which is usually our rainest month.  There have been plenty of times I've been caught out in rain so heavy that I've been forced to slow to a crawl...lol.  But it is great fun to watch, especially when you're standing in the doorway and you're looking out at what seems to be like a solid waterfall.

I can't recall getting three feet of rain in three weeks down here, however...that seems pretty extreme...    Are you guys having major problems with flooding, etc?  But given the choice, I'd rather have too much rain than too little...I simply could not imagine living in a place where it doesn't rain for months at a time, and a quarter inch is considered a downpour (!)  And if this house ever floods out from a super cloudburst one of these days, I have my federally-backed flood insurance to fall back on, so no worries about that!...lol 

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Hey...I just found this link...it's the orginal press kit for the Saturn V, with all kinds of facts and figures, with illustrations, etc.

[http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/saturnV/]Original Saturn V press kit from the '60's

There's no denying the fact that the Saturn V was one awesome rocket...I think NASA should build a Saturn VI to take us to Mars....it'd certainly solve a lot of problems in regards to lift capacity...lol

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Since I'm not a scientist, there isn't much for me to add to this discussion...lol.  I do have a question, however: Why would one even *want* to terraform Venus?  Some places are meant to be left alone, and I would place Venus very near the top of the list.

I'll take that antimatter drive any day of the week 

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Excellent point, Mad Grad.  If we have the means to get people to Mars, we would also have the means to bring them back as well...and that's precisely what will happen in the early stages of human exploration of Mars...the first crew might stay six months or a year, follow-up crews might stay several years before being rotated back to Earth...but in all likelihood, they will come back at some point.  But the point is, we can have a human presence on Mars and elsewhere in space without actually colonizing it, and that's probably what will happen long before anyone thinks of settling down on Mars for good.

I fail to see why going to Mars has to be a one-way trip for anyone...we just need to make rapid transit times a high priority     As for actually having children on Mars (or elsewhere in space), hopefully that won't happen until  1) we know it'll be reasonably safe for mother and child and  2) the ability of that child being able to come back to Earth without undue health problems (at least until we're able to have big domes and the like.)

If it is discovered that it would be impossible to bring back a Martian-born child due to the lower gravity, I think that would preclude having children on Mars for a quite a while, due to the moral ramifications of having kids stranded over there for life, not to mention all the infrastructure that would be needed to raise children to adulthood on a Mars base, etc, etc.

We just need to figure out a way to get people to Mars and back, and to eventually be able to do this in weeks instead of months (i.e. fast rockets) and then take it from there depending on our collective knowledge of humans-in-space at the time...

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