New Mars Forums

The A.I. wouldn't have to be sentient to be useful anymore than rovers on Mars don't need to be sentient to be useful.  With good programming and a lot of computing power, robotic assistants should be able to be programmed to do more of the mundane tasks unworthy of human attention.  Taking chimps to Mars would just create a situation where you'd have to bring in massive additional cargoes of food, life support equipment, etc.  Robotic assistants, at least at first, would be easier and more efficient to keep.

One shouldn't forget the various Soviet manned Mars missions that had been on the drawing board in previous decades.  They had some good ideas in my opinion, things like attaching sensors to the hull so cosmonauts know which parts of the ship have the most and least amounts of radiation levels, etc.
Of course the drawback to most of them is that they used the Battlestar Galactica philosophy of design.

I hope that if we do go to Mars it's with an eye toward a continued human presence and not just a one-time shot.  If we do sustain a Mars science base, I think your right that there's probably a very good chance that something like a colony could emerge that would require a dedicated effort from Earth to sustain.  It's hard to imagine a colony really getting started any other way considering the expense.   And if people actually started having families on Mars, it might be impossible to bring the offspring back to Earth, which could trap Earth into something of a moral obligation to support the colony.  That could be an interesting dilemna.   With enough drive, Mars could probably become fairly self-sufficient in a short time.

The Artemis Society designed a manned mission to Europa just as something of an intellectual exercise.  They assumed that once you got close enough to the ocean beneath the ice there would be large pockets of dwellable space in the ice that would be deep enough to protect you from radiation.  I don't remember how they intended to protect the people from the radiation outside of the ice even though there was a time interval that had to be observed.  Anyways, it's not a mission I'd volunteer for.  :0

But would it be feasible for a colony to spare land to produce food for what are essentially meat-eating animals?  Their dietary restraints could make them very expensive in terms of resources to maintain.  It might be worth it though considering how important to morale pets could prove.

What would be the best ways for a long range rover to navigate about?  I was thinking of maybe setting up two very tall towers some distance from each other that would have a beacon attached so the rover would be able to triangulate it's position and record with some accuracy points of interest to return to.  I guess the ultimate would be to have some kind of Martian GPS system but that probably won't be in the budget for awhile.  Anyways, with such navigation systems the rover could do a lot of the driving itself.  When you want to go home just press a button and let the rover do all the driving.  It could also store areas in it's computer bank that the crew could just bring up and have the rover automatically drive to.

You have a good way of thinking about it.  If we get to bogged down in saying we have to have an X percentage of success before we even go we might never go.  X can be a hard number to judge anyway.  The best way, like you said, is to put in a lot of redundancy, do the research that needs to be done, test the systems out extensively, then go to Mars!

Unless the ship carries extremely powerful engines with enough fuel to turn the ship around and shoot it back toward Earth (which probably won't happen) the ship will probably just have to complete its flight to Mars before it can head back toward Earth.  With computer guidance and control the ship should be autonomous enough to get itself back to Earth without any help from the crew, so the death of a crewmember probably won't be catastrophic in the sense that it would doom everyone else.  I wonder though how you would handle a corpse in such a situation.  It could be a problem if there's no airlock to eject it out of or some other storage capability built just for such a scenario.

What kind of plant is Spirulina?  Is it a leafy plant or is it like fungi or something else?  Never heard of it, not under that name at least.

After Mark S brought up the Trans-life project and after hearing about these balloon projects the Mars Society is sending to Mars I'm half-thinking about joining the MS myself.  I definately agree that an organization that is actually doing and not just "promoting" is worth supporting.  Anyways, I want to go the Mars convention they hold next year.  I have to go to at least one of them just to see what they're like.  Hopefully it won't be held to far away.

Awesome, I'm glad someone mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright.  I love his buildings, they are definately transcendent beyond mere structures.  I bet he'd blow us away with his architectural designs for Mars.

I feel your pain.  I don't understand what the big deal is about setting up lunar bases before we go to Mars.  Some argue that we need to go to the Moon to learn how to colonize Mars, but the two environments are so different that going to the Moon won't make a difference anyway.  The methods for making rocket fuel and extracting water on the moon are far different and less efficient than you'd use on Mars.  Really though, at this point in time, I'd be surprised if we even got so far as to set up some half-baked lunar base.

If people can't claim land I doubt if there will be many economic reasons for going to Mars.  I don't know what the difference is between a government official telling you not to go on that patch of land or an individual owner telling you the same thing.  Of course if your an anarchist nothing what I just wrote applies.