New Mars Forums

Can you think of any specific species of "weed" that makes a good and durable food plant?  There's one we call miner's lettuce (i have no idea if that's the actual name or not) its a plant that merely has a grass like stem with a flat green disc stuck on top of it.  It grows like mad up in the mountains where I live and doesn't taste to bad even though its not particularly attractive.  I wonder if mushrooms and its related kin would make good plants considering that they're perfectly happy in the dark. Onions would probably grow well to.

Oh yeah, I'd definately pack up the ice chest and head out to camp among the five hundred foot tall conifers of Mars.  In a way I'm almost hoping they don't find life on Mars so there's no ethical impediments to terraforming.   But then again I'm curious to know how Martian life would function and it would answer definitively that life has developed elsewhere.  I just hope Mars develops into more than just a mere research station.  In the future I think Mars could be a great manufacturing place for space born technology, but that's probably a hundred years off if not more.

If our reluctance to develop space resources is because of a
guilty concience, people are expressing it in the wrong way about wanting no human presence in space.  I know I've harped on this point before, but it seems to me we could go a long way toward restoring Earth's ecosystems if we were to move our mining and manufacturing operations off Earth and into space.  What would we rather tear up? A dead asteroid or a pristine forest that happens to be rich in iron or something else?  I'll pick the asteroid.

If the fanatical sect of environmentalists jump on the band wagon in numbers to protest the presence of humans on Mars because they believe it will lead to back contamination, then I think all of this back-contamination paranoia could take on a show stopping form.  The media loves to harp on these points, and even if such paranoid thinking remotely smacks of political correctness, we might find ourselves having to wait until 3074 for the last of the sample return missions to arrive
before deciding if we should go to Mars.  Of course these same people are crying foul over the development of nuclear propulsion in space and don't seem to be making headway to halt it, so maybe I'm just being paranoid myself.

I think the first dog in space was named Laika.  And come to think of it, I think Laika's about overdue for some recognition of her role in spaceflight, so why not name a town after her .  I just hope the settlers don't get carried away with naming towns after modern, well known cities on Earth.  I think the names should be something that has a uniquely Martian air to them.  I liked Adrian's idea of naming them after their Martian locations.

Even if the blimp is viable, why on earth would you want to float around in the Venusian clouds for months on end in a blimp?  There really wouldn't be much for people to do except maybe dabble in some meteorology that could probably be done more efficiently with an orbiter.   It's really a shame though that Venus is such a hellish planet that it kills anything that lands there in five seconds.  We could get to Venus a lot faster than Mars if it didn't have such a bad temper toward visitors.

Even though green houses might be a pain from an engineering point of view I hope they aren't completely phased out.  I think there could be a positive psychological factor to greenhouses in that they can act as a minor escape from the desolate Martian surface and completely artificial surroundings provided by the space hab.  I know if I was living on Mars I'd probably spend a significant amount of time tending to plants.  As for low maintenance but nutritious
food sources, your guess is better than mine.

That space bill is ambitious in what it asks for.  I wonder if it might be best to pare it down some and take out things like the stations on the Martian moons and some of the ship reusability requirements.  But of course,  if the bill must remain intact in its present form or die I'll happily wait the extra decade without complaining.

haha, I'm not sure I'd be so quick to volunteer for a trip to Hellas Herpes, but I generally agree that the chances of finding any life, much less pathogens, from little robots with toy scoops is about as likely as finding watermelons growing at the North Pole.    It could take decades of extensive research done by people living on Mars to even find life, if it exists at all.  Money ear marked for the sample return mission should probably be diverted into research on how to best do science on Mars when a manned landing takes place there.

There seems to be a lot of conflicting viewpoints in the scientific community as to whether Martian dust storms pose a significant threat to probes and human landing parties.  Zubrin, for instance, writes that the Martian atmosphere is so thin the high winds don't really have the potential to be very dangerous (unless you parachut into them).  But I recently read an article here http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-dust-02a.html that brought up the point that these winds could build up an electrical charge and possibly fry any electronics on a lander.  Hopefully someone puts a lightning rod on the hab module just to be safe.

Whether this space junk can be salvaged or not, we might have to capture a lot of this orbital debris anyway just so we can keep going into space with reasonable safety, especially if space elevators become a reality.  God forbid if your slowly ascending into the heavens on a space elevator when some dismembered solar panel of Vostok 4000 slams into the cable
at 18000mph and sends you on a joyride back into the Atlantic somewhere.  Oh well, I'll try staying on topic next time.

Maybe the Chinese are gonna mine for helium 3 on the moon to power their top secret fusion reactor.   Yeah,  I definately suspect an ulterior motive other than mining, the cost of transporting supplies/ore back and forth between Earth and the moon would seem to negate the benefits. 
If they aren't doing it merely for the sake of prestige or militaristic reasons, maybe they're interested in learning how
to mine/survive in places like the moon.  Nigeria after all
is actually planning to spend a hundred million a year in
attempt to create wealth from outer space.  To bad they
don't have a hundred billion.