New Mars Forums

Does Mars have gold? Mars has craters, some of the asteroids that have crashed into it undoubtedly have gold. So what's the price of gold in today's market? The price of gold, when I checked was $1,319.47 per troy ounce, there are 12 troy ounces in a pound, which makes gold $15,833.64 per pound. There are 0.45359 kilograms in a pound, that means a kilogram of gold is worth $34,907.38. A ton of gold is worth $34.9 million, that exceeds $50,000 per ton by almost a factor of one thousand. Now it will cost something to mine the gold out of Mars, and first we have to find out where the gold is. How much will it cost to prospect Mars for gold? We have a whole planet here, I'm sure there is some gold here. Hire some geologists from some gold mining companies to find the gold, I'm sure they have some idea on where to look. Mars is next to the asteroid belt, the difference is the asteroids in the belt are spread out, the ones that crashed into Mars are relatively close together and they have craters marking where they crashed.

Tell me, how did the 49ers find gold? they panned for gold nuggets in streams. There are stream beds on Mars, I am sure, if we can find gold nuggets in those stream beds, we just follow those streambeds to their point of origin and find out where that gold came from. Does that sound like a plan or what?

SpaceX is doing stuff no one else has ever done, particularly in the landing of bottom stage rockets! If he can convince the government that he can open up the space frontier, he might get some funding, Maybe the United States could leave the Chinese "eating our dust" if they adopt Musk's program! I don't know what's going to happen with the SLS after this. We'll just have to see. There is a new Cold War on, it could lead to anew Space Race, but the competitor I'd worry about would be China. if we got a good plan to send one million people to Mars in 50 years, I think we should do it, as all NASA has been doing with manned space is tinker around the edges, maybe the right technologies will produce and explosion of migration into space. If we can get one million people to Mars, we can also talk about building those O'Neil space colonies. Phobos would be a great place to do it. Phobos is 27 km by 22 km by 16 km. The Rama colony I talked about on another thread is 16 km by 35 km on the inside.
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Ram … &FORM=VIRE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(moon)
What Phobos doesn't have, Mars could supply. Since Rama is a starship, we might want to send it to one of the gas giants to get some fuel.
I believe there is enough material and the right sort of material to build this. Of course it won't b precisely like Rama, as the video shows, but by the end of this century, we might be able to build a starship like this, and send it on a century's long journey with colonists to Proxima b or any other more favorable planets in the Alpha Centauri system. We need to b able to open up the space frontier, Elon Musk has a plan to do that, maybe this time it will work. One can hope.

He relies heavily on reusability f his lower stages. His Mars Colonial Transporter is a 2-stage giant rocket, the bottom stage flies back down and lands on the launch pad, and then blasts off with a tank of fuel to take the crew module to Mars. the tank transfers its contents to the crew module, and then flies back to Cape Canaveral for reuse. The crew module them makes a fuel burn for transmars injection, and deploys solar panels for power during the journey, the panels fold back in, the module enters the Martian atmosphere and lands on the surface, that's the part I get from watching he video. Presumably the crew module makes its return fuel from he atmosphere, blasts off from Mars and returns to Earth for reuse. I wonder if Bob Zubrin has yet commented on Musk's proposal, I'd be interested in what he has to say.

I find that College Education is highly over-rated, it costs too much for what it gives you! Maybe the money we spend on College education would be better spent on healthcare. I've been to college, got an Economics and a Computer Science degree, and I couldn't find the jobs for them afterwards, and I still owe a lot of money for college and I'm 49 years old! I looked for work from 1995 when I graduated to 2001 when I gave up. My mother died in 1995, I inherited her Florist shop, an was able to keep it running till 2001 with the help of my uncle, the rent got too high, had to close. So I started work as a limousine driver, and it barely pays the bills. So I'm not terrible impressed with college education and what it gives you. The price of college is terribly inflated, I see classes full of 20 to 30 students going deeply into debt to pay some professor's salary, I don't know why that salary costs so much when you divide it up among all those students! Maybe the professor uses expensive chalk! The prices of those textbooks are absurd! There is a huge difference between the price of a regular hard cover book which may cost between $30 to $50 in the Nonfiction section and the price of a College Textbook which can cost upwards of $250 or more, same paper, same hardcover, as far as I could tell, they weren't encrusted with expensive gems and gold leaf! Why are we taking out these huge loans t pay for this college rip-off! I think that money could be better spent on health insurance, as I think saving a life is more important than giving one an expensive over-priced college degree! College could be a lot cheaper without subsidy from the state! What if we returned college loans to the free market? What if we allowed people to use bankruptcy to discharge their college loans just like their other loans and credit card balances? It would be harder to get a college loan then, the interest rates for people who could get them would be higher, an a lot of colleges would have to close their doors because of fewer students attending, or they could try lowering their tuition rates! I don't think colleges need to cost nearly as much as they do! I think a college should be run as a business without subsidy from the government. Teaching people in college shouldn't be any more expensive than teaching people in high school! I see the same textbooks, the same chalkboards, the same classrooms, and the same teachers. Sure they teach more advanced stuff, but I don't know why it should cost more! I think the colleges are ripping us off with the help of subsidized college loans made by the government! The government should get out of that business, return it to the banks, and the Colleges will be forced to reduce their tuition rates if they want to stay in business! Does that sound reasonable to you?

Also on the point of socialism, I distinguish a social safety net from socialism. Socialism attempts to replace capitalism. I figure we should budget a certain amount for that social safety net and stay within that budget, rather than bankrupt ourselves to pay for every social program we can imagine. My Economics degree didn't help me to get a job, but it did improve my understanding of economic relationships, my father was an Economist besides. Seems what professors teach is highly slanted towards the left. There is something called the multiplier effect for instance, it seeks to justify government spending as a driver of the economy, it states that when the government takes money out of your pocket and spends it there is a multiplier effect, the money paid to government workers gets spent in grocery stores that pay their workers and so on, but this is a sleight of hand, as you don't pay attention to the person who got his pocket picked by the government, there is a negative multiplier effect in that the money that gets taken out o the taxpayer's pocket does not get spent at the grocery store, the grocery store doesn't hire people and pay its employees salaries with that money the government took. The two multiplier effects cancel out and its simply a redistribution from a productive sector of the economy to he government sector. Too much government means less economic growth, as performance in the government sector is not determined by economic productivity as it is determined in the private sector, this slows down economic growth as we have seen over he past 8 years. It would be nice if I could get a job with all the stuff I know about economics, as it seems that the people running the government know so little, and they are messing up the economy big time!

well then its not Capitalism if they do, part of the definition of capitalism is there is competition. What socialism argues is that because this happens, Government might as well get into the act and establish its own monopolies. Government gouges customers all the time with its high taxes. Government doesn't give you a choice about whether to pay for something or not.

Such a thing is an oxymoron, by definition Capitalism involves competition. Big corporations don't always like competition, they want to maintain their positions against competition, because they have more to lose from it than to gain from it, the small companies take on the "top dog" in the market through competition. Large companies are more amenable to higher taxes because it keeps down capital formation and thus their competitors.

Regulation is expensive and thus destroys competition. Large companies have greater efficiencies, so it is easier for them to comply with regulation, since they can afford entire departments to do so, not so with "mom and pop" businesses.

You ever work on a team when some of the team members aren't pulling their weight? In a competitive situation, if too many members aren't pulling their weight, the team loses, but when the team is the government, it just ends up wasting your tax money. one of the reason NASA has accomplished so little since the Moon missions is that it knows how to waste your tax money. How much money did it waste on Space Station Freedom during the Bush years? How many billions of dollars were spend on paper studies?

With large organizations such as this, office politics often trumps business and efficiency, a lot of these middle managers are protecting their turf, instead of dealing with what the customer wants, this is also and example of poor management practices! People in large companies often get complacent, what happens in one small office or another often has no measurable immediate effect, big companies can use their "bigness" to hem in competition, they can influence politicians to regulate the market to big company's advantages, and they can also get those government contracts to compensate them for those higher taxes they might have to pay.

Pure capitalism is when two or more people in the wilderness trade their goods and services in the absence of any regulating authority. American Indians practiced pure capitalism, fur traders in the wilderness practiced pure capitalism. Capitalism was around before Karl Marx gave it a name, the difference is Capitalism was always there whenever there were two or more people wanting to make a trade, however Socialism is an invented or made thing.

Much like Frankenstein's Monster, Socialism is a made thing, it is not natural!

Interesting.

Here is a possible animal we might genetically engineer for a terrafomed Mars. Remember the Oliphant from Lord of the Rings?
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=ima … ay&first=1
This gives you a better idea of its scale and what it can do.

Here is a still. These creatures look similar to elephants, so it appears that we might create such creatures from Elephant DNA, they question is, would we want these things on Mars?

Easier to use plutonium for a ground launch. I think nuclear fusion is better for interplanetary and interstellar trips than for ground launch, where you have a whole host of better options than nuclear fusion. What you want for a ground launch I high acceleration to overcome Earth's gravity and also to increase your velocity above that. With interstellar travel using generation ships, I think nuclear fusion is best. Fusion is relatively cheap compared to the other options. Lasers and other beamed propulsion methods required sustained homefront efforts, and a generation ship would take centuries to reach its destination, that is asking a bit much for the society that sent the ship. Nuclear fusion is contained within the ship, and it is capable of reaching 5% of the speed of light and then slowing down upon arrival. Antimatter is expensive and dangerous to store for long periods of time, say a couple centuries, fusion fuel (Deuterium, Tritium, and Helium-3) can be stored in tanks made of matter without exploding! the Interstellar ramjet has problems related to drag, has a slow acceleration rate, and a maximum speed, and it would be much easier just to use stored fuel for a generation ship like Rama.

One of the differences between the United States, and the parliamentarian system of Canada is that here in the United States, we do not elect parties but individual people. Parties are a means to get individuals elected to office, but they are not always used. Our Constitution does not refer to political parties. When our nation was founded partisan politics was looked down upon, political parties operated in the shadows, parties in George Washington's time were informal groupings of like-mined people who were organized to get their people elected. George Washington was a member of a such a grouping called the Federalist Party, the opposing party was called the Democratic Republicans, this informal group is the ancestor of the modern day Democratic Party, it was the party of Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, the President that ordered the invasion of Canada in the War of 1812, by the way! (It wasn't James Monroe - that was my mistake to get those two confused!) You see the United States doesn't have partisan politics built in to its system, it leaves open a path for a non-partisan independent to be elected. Donald Trump could have run as an independent, it would take a lot of money to do so, but Donald Trump chose to make use of the Republican party and campaign donations, as it would save him from having to sell one of his hotels to finance his campaign. I don't know if someone like Donald Trump could ever be Prime Minister of Canada, a person could be a financial genius, and a self-made billionaire, but if he is not a career politician, they Canadian System would not let him in, he would have to show experiences as a politician, other politicians who were elected would have to elect him, and thus they Establishment is built into this Parliamentary System.

It might also mean that it I harder for a politician to do unpopular but necessary things such as fight inflation for instance by slashing government spending, usually when such is done, the pain comes first and the benefits come later, this is easier to do when th elections come on a fixed schedule, rather than whenever there is a vote to call them. Sitting Presidents can be removed through a process called Impeachment. I have to say, that if Barack Obama was Prime Minister of Canada, and he held the same attitudes towards Canada as he does toward the United States, he would likely not be serving as Prime Minister for the full 8 years he served as President. Obama really only had to be popular twice, once before the election of 2008 and once again before the election of 2012, and with the help of Hurricane Sandy which wracked the New Jersey coast! There Obama got to show his "True Concern" for the people of New Jersey, without actually doing anything about it other than going on a tour of devastated areas with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and having cameras film every step of the way! We also have a biased media that wants to get Democrats elected no matter what, instead of accurately and fairly report the news! If you want to know the truth, the Media isn't the place to go. One has to go to multiple places to figure out what actually is happening rather than get the Media's point of view and bias!

Not much these days, it used to be that someone ran for Congress because he wanted to get something done, as opposed to just wanting a job to earn a living.

The question is, what are his interests and do they coincide with ours? I'm pretty sure Donald Trump doesn't just want a government job, he has all the money he needs, he could retire if he wants, he needn't do a single thing ever again but go on vacation for the rest of his life! I'll tell you what he does want. Donald Trump wants fame, he wants notoriety, he wants he place in the history books as some thing more than just another billionaire, to him, getting elected President would be his crowning achievement, and to get his place in the history books, he needs to be a great President, like FDR, his immediate predecessor from New York!

That just goes to show you how far outside the Establishment Donald Trump is, if these men would band together in spite of their political differences to oppose him. This shows that Donald Trump isn't one of them, he is a true outsider, not one who is part of the Establishment, who earns his bread and butter through politics as these men did.

And for the last 8 years, our economic growth has averaged around 2% while over the same period, part of which Canada was under a conservative government, its economy grew faster, but then Canadians looked south of the border, and they saw America's economy struggling, and they said, "Hey, our economy is growing too fast! There are too many jobs up here, we got to slow it down to 2%!" and so they elected a liberal government to fight excessive growth in the Canadian economy so it could be more like the USA! And Candians saw those riots in Chicago on television and they said, "Hey, where are our riots! How come there are no race riots in Canada? We got to fix this!"

The American Revolution represents a missed opportunity, the missed opportunity was Britain's they had the opportunity to spread their country to the New World, but instead they chose to make colonies of them and exploit them for immediate gain, part of the attempt to do this was the Tea Tax which sparked the Revolution. the Revolution should have been throughout the Empire, instead it was limited to the 13 colonies. The UK's other colonies, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand broke off, so where is the British Empire today? It could have been a republic bigger than the United States, it could have kept Nazi Germany and the Russians in check, but it broke apart instead because of petty rulers that wanted power!

Colonizing Mars is all about creating a new society. Naturally if one is open to creating one on Mars, one should not reject out of hand the idea of creating one on Earth. RobertDyck makes a bunch of emotional arguments against, based on the notion that we're "Us" and they are "Them", and that somehow because we have a higher population than they do, that we would want to exploit or ruin them. Canada used to be a bastion of British Imperialism, it is that no longer, but what is it now?

Imagine an alternate history if you will, one where the South won the Civil War and became a separate country called the Confederate States of America, they have their own flag, national anthem, and a Capitol in Richmond, Virginia, but they have since abolished slavery, so for them its no longer an issue, Yet they still have "Dixie" as their National Anthem, they have their own Senate and House of Representatives, a President and Vice President, just like we do. Now imagine I am having this discussion with GW Johnson - an Ardent Confederate Nationalist, and I bring up the subject that since slavery is no longer an issue, why should we reunite out two countries the USA and CSA. And GW Johnson starts talking about Southern Honor and how you "Yankees" want to exploit us Confederates. I could have a similar sort of conversation with him in that parallel universe that I'm having now with RobertDyck. I could argue for instance that a country like the CSA no longer stands for anything other than not being a part of the USA, and he might make a bunch of emotional argumens supporting Southern Independence, and he might mention the banking collapse. etc. I would then mention that when the CSA was founded, it wasn't by a bunch of liberals.

That is a funny thing, you establish a bunch of borders and people seek to justify them. The United States was established for a specific purpose, and I think it was a good one, it wasn't established t maintain slavery or as a bulwark of British Empire, those other two causes have gone by the wayside, but not that of the United States of America. The Confederates lost their bid for independence while the Canadians remained within the British Empire for a time. I think we are lucky to be in a country that still stands for something other than not being a part of someone else.