New Mars Forums

SpaceNut,

We're not going to intervene so long as President Biden is in office.  That may be to everyone's advantage, though.  If America enters the war, all bets are off.  I do not wish to sacrifice our European allies to Putin's bid for conquest of Ukraine.  There's a 50/50 chance that Russia will use nuclear weapons if America directly intervenes- if not against America, then against our allies.  Russia's military may know that the nuclear option is a losing proposition, but Putin may not care or they may believe their own BS about America not responding in kind.  It's agonizing to watch, because America's military would chew up and spit out the entirety of Russia's military inside of two weeks, but we must stay off the battlefield this time around and support Ukraine from afar.  We meddled in their affairs, so this is the punishment.

Ukraine is already doing everything they need to do.  They're wrecking all of Russia's war machines that have been committed to the fight.  As losses mount, Russia will either withdraw to prevent further losses or subject their mechanized units to annihilation at the hands of the Ukrainians.  They may ultimately use nukes in Ukraine, but after that happens the Russian people will depose Putin.  The destruction of Russia's armor, artillery, trucks, assault helicopters, and attack jets in Ukraine is the best possible outcome for everyone, including the people of Russia.  Otherwise, more of our allies from the other European countries will be sacrificed, along with many more Russian soldiers, to satiate Putin's desire for conquest and the reformation of the old Soviet Union.

The point of leveling an entire city is to break the will of your enemy and to starve those who do not perish in the bombardment.  America did the same thing to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  To the best of my knowledge, nobody was ever charged with "war crimes" against civilians for utterly obliterating those cities, so the lesson is that the winner gets to write the history books and to visit every conceivable horror of war upon their enemy with impunity.

Mars must have a unified system of governance with no right of secession.

If you want to prevent war, forcing people to go to war if they want to govern themselves is not a very good way to go about it. I guess you can call the attacks by central government "security operations" if you want, to pretend Mars doesn't have wars...

Martian wars will be nowhere near as bad as the totalitarian planetwide society you're proposing to prevent them.

The real question is, why would Martians go to war with each other? Why do countries fight now? Establishing one group that thinks it has the right to own the entire planet is a very good way to ensure war. That seems to be the normal reason for war here on Terra.

This report is not about existing life on Mars, but instead, on efforts to find a variety of bacteria that might survive there at Mars atmospheric pressure.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/enterta … 00239.html

BGR
Bacteria could be key to letting humans breathe on Mars
Joshua Hawkins
Sat, March 19, 2022, 4:09 PM

One of the biggest obstacles facing NASA’s goal of putting humans on Mars is providing much-needed consumables like water, oxygen, and food. The current goal is to find ways to produce these items on the planet, which would help reduce how much we need to transport from Earth to Mars. Thanks to bacteria, scientists may have found a solution to at least one of those problems by giving humans a way to create oxygen on Mars.

bacteria could help us create oxygen on Mars
NASA is already looking into tech that should let us breathe on Mars. But now, scientists want to take it a step further by creating Oxygen on the planet itself.

Scientists first published their findings back in February of 2021. In a press release, the scientists highlighted the importance of sourcing important consumables from Mars itself. When we do put human boots on the ground, sourcing those things from Earth would be costly, especially in the long run.

With cyanobacterium, though, scientists believe they could create oxygen on Mars, allowing us to breathe freely on the Red Planet.

“Cyanobacteria have long been targeted as candidates to drive biological life support on space missions, as all species produce oxygen through photosynthesis while some can fix atmospheric nitrogen into nutrients.” the press release reads.

But what makes this bacterium so special? For starters, all types of cyanobacteria use photosynthesis to produce oxygen from carbon dioxide. Additionally, the bacteria have already proven resilient, as it survives in some of the most hostile environments on our planet. Because of those two factors, many believe they could be key to letting humans create oxygen on Mars.

Making it suitable for the Martian environment

But, before we can use cyanobacteria to create oxygen on Mars, we have to find a way to make it grow there. While many believe it could survive the harsh environment, the Martian atmosphere has less than 1 percent of the Earth’s total pressure. As such, the bacteria are unable to grow directly in the atmosphere. But, creating an Earth-like atmosphere on Mars would be too costly.

That’s why a group of scientists, including astrobiologist Cyprien Verseux, created a bioreactor called Atmos. Short for Atmosphere Tester for Mars-bound Organic Systems, Atmos allowed the scientists to test atmospheric conditions similar to Mars. The goal was to find out which atmospheric conditions allowed the cyanobacteria to grow the easiest.

We could then use this information to make slight atmospheric changes on Mars. This would allow the cyanobacteria to grow under those conditions. That would then allow them to create oxygen on Mars. They found that the particular type of cyanobacteria they used, Anabaena, grew under all the conditions that they tried. As such, they proved that oxygen-producing cyanobacteria could be cultivated on Mars at low pressure under controlled conditions.

Further, though, is the fact they were able to prove it can grow with local ingredients exclusive to Mars. That means we wouldn’t need to import gasses or any other material to make the process happen. Of course, there’s still a lot of work to be done before we can use these cyanobacteria to create oxygen on Mars.

It might not be an immediate solution to making Mars habitable. But scientists at least have a foundation to build upon.

Click here to read the full article.

See the original version of this article on BGR.com

Edit later ... this post ended up in Louis topic about images ... there is probably a better place for it ...

(th)

tahanson43206 wrote:

Mars_B4_Moon just posted a link to news of an improved solar cell for space use.

Such a solar cell might be of interest to designers of Large Ships.

https://interestingengineering.com/spac … -panels-33

The statement adds that, "the IMM-β is also a radiation-hard cell with a power remaining factor of 87% after exposure to 1-MeV electrons at a fluence of 1E15 e/cm2 or equivalent of about 15 years life in GEO."

I note the projected 15 year lifetime in GEO.... Large Ship will be operating in the equivalent of GEO for most of it's service life, so solar cells chosen to support life aboard the ship must be chosen to survive deep space radiation for an extended period.

(th)

First off the panels are 33.3% efficient but the real deal closer is that they are 40% lighter and since we need about 3 times as many to provide the same energy as 1 panel does we are getting closer to being able to use solar from the mass reduction and energy efficiency improvement.

Understood, but SpaceX has come a long way since that time--in technical knowledge and practical terms. There seems to be more concern about shore birds and sea turtles than worries about the explosive potential of a fully fueled Starship and Super Heavy. An accident wouldn't really have the near nuclear explosion, but would create a pretty big fireball. It wouldn't be a nice event to happen near Brownsville, but wouldn't do more than break a large number of windows.

Quaoar,

The Roman Empire was also an... Empire. They didn't have to worry about ethnic voting blocks, because no-one had the vote. And when certain ethnies (e.g. the Jews) got unruly, the legions would march in and sack their cities and pull down their temples. It's not really a good example to draw on to show that multi-ethnic democracies can function well. Switzerland perhaps would be a good example for that -- and it achieves it by having very high decentralisation, so it's multiple democracies that are far more ethnically homogenous than the country as a whole (and which share a common culture... but if you have a common culture you aren't really multi-ethnic, just multi-racial/multi-ancestral).

If you're going to try and have a democratic society with lots of 'ethnic' diversity, you need to make sure everyone assimilates into a common culture. If people from a certain country aren't doing that at a high enough rate, you suspend immigration from that country, because you don't want ethnic ghettos forming. But it's a process that takes multiple generations to properly happen (no, eating pie and chips does not mean someone has assimilated into English culture), so there's a ceiling on what the rate of immigration can be without causing trouble... and the ceiling is far below the current rate of immigration. Probably no more than 0.5%, maybe 0.1%, of the population each year is the max immigration a country can handle without a significant change to its culture/stability. Far less if you've had very high rates in the recent past.

Cultural nationalism generally gets ignored, but it shouldn't be. If you don't want to cut off your roots and be drafted on to the nation you're purporting to join, go home.

Louis,

If your enemies are raiding your Capitol city, then you have a real shortage of soldiers who are able and willing to prevent that from happening.  Rome's enemies clearly had enough food to do that, so where did all of that food come from?

Starships on Mars are a one-way trip unless the propellant manufacturing process is successful.  A big part of that is ice mining in one form or another.  Whether Hohmann or a faster trajectory,  there's about a year at Mars before the launch window opens to go home.  You will need a full refill of about 1200 tons of propellant to make the flight. 

If you plan to bring them home after that year,  that's a min manufacturing rate requirement of about 100 tons of propellant per month.  And just where is the machinery that can do that job?  Just who is working on it?  How far along are they in their verification/development test?  Just how successful have those tests proven so far? 

The same questions basically apply to the ice mining prerequisite for propellant manufacture on Mars.   We have as yet no ground truth to support the remote sensng suggestions (suggestions ONLY!) that buried ice is here or there.  Just how do we find this stuff?  How are we going to dig it up?  What are we going to dig it up with?  How are we going to clean that water up for processing,  when we don't yet know just what it is polluted with?   Who is working on this?  How far along are they?  How successful have they been so far?

I see nothing yet to support a manned mission to Mars in 2029 or any other year that is anything but a one-way suicide mission.  Because there are no answers to any of the questions I just asked.

GW

Yes, I know they have been saying nuclear fusion is just over the horizon for the last 50 years. But multiple reports have shown  advances from different approaches that suggest significant progress is being made.

Also, the White House convened a summit on the U.S. maintaining leadership in fusion power:

Energy leaders are convening at the White House for a summit on the commercialization of clean fusion energy
Jeanne Jackson DeVoe, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
March 17, 2022, 8:22 a.m.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/03/ … ion-energy

  Robert Clark

clark wrote:

Those without any vaccination, die at a higher rate.
Those with a vaccination, die at a lower rate.

That is what science says. Roll your dice, sad sacks.

but stars.

Got any data to support this?  Die from what?