New Mars Forums

I just don't get these people who think the Soviet Union was some kind of socialist paradise.  Both Lenin and Stalin hunted down the anarchists and Social Democrats as enemies of the state and pretty much everyone else for that matter even though those people were instrumental in the Revolution.  You could be sentenced to ten years in a Soviet concentration camp under article 58 of the Soviet criminal code just for saying you didn't like the roads!  Prosecutors could interpret just about any act or speech as being anti-state.  Of course the whole point to those types of laws was to insure that Stalin and his evil ilk had plenty of slave labor for their cruel camps.

I believe the article soph was talking about can be found here.  The ball is rolling with nanotech and I believe it won't be long at all before we have very advanced nanodevices available commercially.  My favorite source of news on nanotech developments is Nanotechnology Now.  I particularly enjoy it when some article by fearmongers pops up wanting to ban nanotech research.  You'd be better off trying to ban breathing.  It's quite possible that by the time we're ready to manufacture the CNT materials needed for the space elevator we'll have a whole new slate of quality control technologies that can verify and insure that a CNT fiber is manufactured to perfect standards on a molecular basis.  It wouldn't surprise me at all considering that technical advancement tends to occur in shorter and shorter time intervals.  We'll probably be seeing more technological breakthroughs occur in the first 20 years of the 21st Century than we did the entire 20th Century.

I knew this was going to come up.  Maybe we should just take some hints from our hero Stalin and his glorious agency the NKVD and arrest everyone related with the shuttle program and shoot the traitorous dogs for undermining the revolution.  Then we'll put new staff in there and I'm sure seeing what happened to their previous counterparts they'll see to it the shuttle always land safe and sound.

I'm no expert on this type of thing, but it seems likely submerged vehicles and especially animals on Mars would have a more difficult time staying submerged in a Martian ocean.  A bottom dwelling fish like a halibut would probably have to work harder to keep from floating up than they would on Earth.

I'm feeling a bit cynical about the prospects of people living on Mars indefinately for exactly the reasons you mentioned.  I think there will be Martian bases here and there that people will rotate in and out of but I'm not sure if a civilization will ever develop there.  Hopefully it's a phase I'll just snap out of but I'm starting to wonder if humanity will ever leave this planet in a big way and settle elsewhere in the cosmos.

Vogons?  ???  I don't see anything unethical about terraforming a dead rock that's devoid of life.  Even at this point if there's nothing higher than bacteria on Mars I'm not sure I'd be opposed to terraforming especially if the bacteria's origin turns out to be Earth.

LOL!   What's your favorite hoaxers "proof" that we didn't go to the Moon?  I think I like the bit about how the camera couldn't follow the LEM as it ascended into space because someone would have to be aiming it.  I guess they never heard of remote control.  You'd think that the hoaxers who put this stuff out would do some research but that might hurt the bottom line.

Water on Mars would have a higher surface tension than does water on Earth.  Small marine animals would probably have a hard time living in Martian waterways as would any marine animal that depends upon the rhythm of the tides for any reason.   

I care.  The moon landings were a very historical event and a testament to the technical power of the 20th Century.  I don't want people in 2100 looking back on the 20th Century and thinking the moon landings were faked.  The charlatans who are hawking off this hoax crap should try balancing and challenging their own theories by presenting interpretations of their "evidence" from people who have the technical and scientific background to understand it.  The fact that they keep things so one sided is strong evidence that they're just in this for the money.  Every point the hoaxers bring up is easily explained away.

I don't think Ayn Rand would have liked those people who suggested giving the whole planet to the first bunch to land there.  The idea of squatters rights seems to revolve around land ownership going to those who make productive use of a certain parcel of land and any land they show no capability of developing economic wise they don't have rights to.  In any case, after reading Clark's posts I think you should post on the unviolable spirit of the individual and the goodness of the ego.

Yeah well, a lot of "professionals" at the turn of the last century were pro-eugenics and measured skulls to determine personality traits.  I found it strange that you capitalized "professional", perhaps this is some new elitist overlord class you've invented for your society?    By mentioning that the people who give birth to a child have no right to raise it your basically saying that we exist soley to serve the state, that we have children soley for the benefit of the state since the parents are not allowed to raise or bond with them.  A lot of sympathisers of Soviet Russia often
defend the slavery that went on in the gulags and the work camps as necessary for the greater good and industrialization of the USSR, that it was necessary to destroy these people for the good of the state.  Do you agree?  Is it perfectly acceptable to sacrifice the individual for the good of the state?  Shall we lick the boots of our masters and allow them to stomp all over us?  It's probably an irrelevant question, any Nazi-style colony that treats people as a means rather than an end won't last long anyway--such draconian policies are cruel and unnecessary.  Down with the state.

There's a couple of possible candidates in the Green Party who are very interested in funding space projects.  Even though the GP doesn't stand a chance in hell of winning a lot of seats I'm going to start voting Green.  As far as I'm concerned the two main parties aren't worth voting for anyway.

Problems could arise in merging these groups since a lot of them have very different goals.  I've read articles by members of the Moon Society that rip on Mars Society ideas because they think the Moon is a more logical target.  There's also a lot of people in the PS who only support robotic exploration. Of course they could still work together in general but there'll be a lot of infighting.