New Mars Forums

I had a look at the Mars Society chat room the other day - to be frank, I wasn't too impressed. I understand how it might be educational for Mars Society members to develop this chat room, but frankly for discussion it is far easier to use Internet Relay Chat (IRC) which has automatic logging and a whole host of bots that fulfil a variety of needs. The only advantage that the Mars Society chat room has over IRC is that it has an easily accessible interface. And of course, it would be simple for anyone (including me) to set up a web gateway for an IRC channel.

Anyway, there's been some real activity on these forums of late. Are people still interested in taking part in a weekly or biweekly chat?

Rejoice! I managed to get the search option working. It turned out that the forum programme was looking for a search directory that didn't exist (instead, there was an empty file of the same name), so I put the directory back and it works fine now (I hope).

Right you are. Here's an article about global warming on Mars. The article gives several explanations about why this warming might be taking place, including that 'Mars might not only change dramatically from year to year, it also appears to host very extreme seasons.'

I think that it would be a bit premature to say that just because Earth is warming and Mars is warming, there is a connection between the two - correlation and causation and all that. It does seem that greenhouse gases (mainly CO2) are the culprits in both cases though - but the circumstances are wildly different.

I honestly can't explain it. His post was there before, and now it's just gone. Now, if all his posts had disappeared from the forum, which they have not, I could put it down to some database error. The only possibility is that Phobos deleted it himself, but I don't know whether that's true (you can delete your own posts). Very very weird. Could be a bug in the program.

We can't know exactly what Garvin is thinking about when he says 'something amazing' unless he actually tells us, but I think it's likely to be something on the lines of how large quantities of water in Mars' past and present may alter our understanding of the planet.

Perhaps as Josh said Mars really did have a warm, wet past with a long-lived ocean; this would be quite conducive to the formation of life and we might find fossils. If there's a lot of water underground, it's not impossible that there is some liquid water about, so there might even be extant life. Personally I think that if either case were true, that's definitely 'something amazing'.

I can second Clark's recommendation for Sophie's World (me agreeing with Clark? Say it ain't so! )

It's a great introduction to the different schools of philosophy through history, and it's also an engrossing story to boot. A suggestion for another thread: Perhaps we should make a list of books that all self-respecting Mars Society members and potential colonists should read?

Strange. I probably have to replace a file. I'll look into it next week when I've finished my exams.

The first Foundation trilogy is a deserved classic, but everything past that is IMO a complete cash in, especially the novels that ham-handedly try to tie his Robot and Foundation series together.

I loved his standalone novel The End of Eternity though. Great ideas, great stuff.

That's a very interesting post, Heloteacher. There is a case being made for crew self-selection although I don't believe NASA takes it too seriously - I imagine they're still stuck in the top-down hierarchy of making decisions and in any case think that their crews can do no wrong.

A Mars crew has many similarities to other small crews in isolated circumstances, but there is one significant difference; NASA (or whoever) will have the capability to constantly monitor the activities and performance of its astronauts by video surveillance. Whether or not they choose to enact this, and if so exactly how they'll do it, is another thing. But how would the astronauts respond to, say, constant monitoring, intermittent monitoring and no monitoring? Would it reduce crime and interpersonal conflicts, or would it increase stress?

Hah, I agree. Probably the recycled Earth cities will be those that evoke the most vivid memories in them; Paris, Venice, Hong Kong, Jerusalem(!), etc. I should probably have a look at my KSR books to see how he named his cities.

I believe (I'm not certain, though) that the point of Heloteacher's post was suggesting whether a Mars mission could be funded entirely without the aid of the government; hence, it would be possible for media rights, access rights, etc, to be sold - Greg Benford wrote about this possibility in 'The Martian Race.'

China is being very vocal and open about its space exploration ambitions - they are planning to launch their first Moon mission (not known whether it is manned or unmanned) in 2010, with the ultimate goal of setting up a base for minerals extraction.

It strikes me that this isn't the best way of getting minerals, probably mining asteroids is more cost effective, but then I doubt that this is China's true goal. I'm always doubtful of proclamations from space agencies, so I'll withhold judgement on China until I see them actively extending their capabilities beyond Earth orbit.