New Mars Forums

I don't think it's necessarily bad that parents want to send their kids to private schools, even to religious schools, with vouchers.  After all those parents pay taxes to.  If they feel their child will get a better education at X Catholic school and can actually educate them at less of an expense  to taxpayers than would be incurred by enrolling them in a public school, it could be a positive thing.

I think you have a pretty good teaching model.  If the colony is at a severe shortage of adults who have time to teach maybe they could look into importing some teachers from Earth.  It could get interesting to see what happens when those kids get to be college age and it proves impossible for their bodies to withstand Earth's gravity (assuming they were born on Mars.)  Some people have banged around the idea that the first Martian colony could actually be something like a college town that trains future scientists, engineers, etc.  In any case,  hopefully those Martian children will have advanced educational opportunities when they get to be of age if they can't come to Earth.

If we force ourselves to stay on this planet, I think it's safe to assume that humanity will die off long before the sun even becomes a danger to Earth.  If we want to do our part to keep advanced intelligence alive in the universe I think its pretty much mandatory that we spread ourselves as far and wide into the cosmos as possible.  I think once you have huge populations spread out into the cosmos there's a good chance that intelligence will continue to thrive for eons if not millions or billions of years.  Some populations will get wiped out by natural or artificial disasters but others will be able to carry on.

It might be good to throw the astronauts together for a month on those Mars stations the Mars Society builds.  I've often questioned the value of those stations, but they could be a good way of acclimating the astronauts to living in the hab module that will be home for three years.  I imagine also that spending a month or two in such a hab module out in the middle of nowhere will give a good indication of the social dynamics of the particular crew. 
     The biosphere project I believe lasted a year and was self-contained.  Even though the people got on each others' nerves, they seemed to have come out ok considering that they developed some problems with producing food.  So hopefully it's a good indication that things can go relatively smoothly.

Hello Ned.  I totally agree that the time to capture the imagination is when a kid is sometime around the third or fourth grade.  I've noticed from reading interviews with a lot of scientists, artists, ect that they first developed their passion for such subjects at around those times.  I know I did.  If you wait until high school to interest people, it's going to be way to late.  And I think the education needs to be less fact based and more focused on the imaginative side and the wonderous possibilities that could result.  I agree with  Einstein himself that imagination is more important than knowledge.  Of course you can't neglect the facts, but bare facts are boring and uninspiring, especially to a fourth grader.

If someone does use your concept I hope they change the name of the rocket.  "Barbarian" is such an ugly sounding name for a scientific/colonial rocket.  It's somewhat ironic though.  I'm sure a lot of Native Americans would like to rename the Mayflower the "Barbarian." 

I read somewhere that the Russians were planning to build another hab module for the ISS that they could rent living space on.  I might have been delusional when I read it though.  Anyways, the ISS seems to be turning into more of a space hotel than anything else.  Not that I have a problem with people paying to visit it, but as a science station I don't have the impression the ISS is even close to living up to its potential.

Higher speed would also mean higher energy expenditure, which might be bad in itself.

Actually, Earth could lose most of its advanced life long before the sun swallows the inner-planets in five billion years.  Since the sun will be gradually increasing in brightness as it ages, it'll eventually get to the point in about a billion years where it could cause massive evaporation of the oceans and the resulting moisture trapped in the atmosphere could cause a greenhouse effect that could literally turn Earth into a planet more like Venus.  Hopefully by then we'll have engines that can achieve a good percentage of the speed of light or utilize some exotic properties that are unknown to us to get out of the Solar System.  With time dilation, it's possible you could visit several stars in your lifetime.  Of course, once the Sun does get bright enough to turn Earth into hell, Mars will probably be a nice giant Hawaii.   

Just out of curiosity Andy Kerr, are you an anarchist (sounds like you are?)  If your not and you believe in using a government to unite all of humanity, I think that could end up worse then having multiple nations.  The only way you could unify the entire planet under one government, at least right now, would be to have some kind of dictatorship that would ruthelessly stamp out dissent and try to reform everyone to its way of thinking.  You can argue that this is happening with "Globalist Capitalism" right now, and there's plenty of dissent against that.  On the flip side, I'm not sure I'd want to live under a globalist command economy either.  Such a regime would be very inimical to personal freedom.  But then again maybe you were just speaking of humanity uniting in a more metaphorical, non-governmental fashion.

The type of pets I'm talking about aren't rigidly programmed toys that have a very limited range of actions.  I'm assuming that by time a sizable Mars colony becomes a reality we'll have the technology to compress millions of artificial nuerons with processors that could maybe do trillions of calculations per second in something the size of a cat.  Such a beast would learn from its environment much the same way a real animal does and it could be programmed with a rudimentary set of "instincts" so it knows when it needs to meet bodily requirements.  Such an animal would be a far cry from something you'd pick up at Toys R Us.   It's possible such an artificial creature would be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing if its body could be made realistic enough.  I guess it could be something of a feline Turing test.
     It's true also that artificial pets would require upkeep, but I'd imagine the resources they need for power and repairs would be easier to obtain from the Martian environment.

     I especially find it odd how some people think Darwinism can be applied to societies and politics.  Natural selection has nothing to do with creating a culture that seeks to reward the greediest and merciless members of its society.  I think ants make a good example of a society that couldn't exist efficiently if its members were in continuous turmoil with each other.  I think Hitler proved fairly effectively what kind of society we'll end up with if we go to pains to weed out those we don't think have a right to live as a kind of "forced" natural selection.

I've never been very receptive to the idea that Earthlife was carried to this planet on an extraterrestrial object.  I don't discount the possibility of some rock with Martian bacteria in it being ejected into space and falling to Earth to seed life, but it just seems more reasonable to assume that Earth life started from the get-go on Earth.

It would be challenging to hammer into the social consciousness the need to go to Mars with those high price tags.  We might stress the point that working to develop resources in space could help reduce the environmental strain on Earth, but such technologies would take so long to develop that the myopic public might not buy it.   Got any ideas that could hook the public on spaceflight, especially Mars?  I don't know if creating a party would be the most effective route.  Third party political candidates don't tend to do well, at least in the USA.