New Mars Forums

Interesting article, though perhaps the most important points are tucked in there and easily overlooked.

"Most people, most of the time, just want to get along. They'll accept a little inconvenience, ignore a few insults, and smile at people they hate if it allows them to get on with their lives. Most people on both sides of your issue just wish the issue would go away. If you're not careful, those apathetic majorities will get together and craft a compromise. And where's your revolution then?"

Quite true, which is largely why we went in to Iraq with fewer troops than an outright conquest would have required, why we're so careful about what we bomb and when, why we're so reluctant to enter cities and slaughter insurgents. Yet at the same time this means that civil war may be the best thing that could happen from our perspective. Rampant death, destruction, terror and mayhem doesn't harm us severely if the bulk of the population doesn't in their guts feel that we're causing it.

Question 1: What is the first and biggest obstacle between you and victory?

If you answered "People on the other side of my issue," go sit in the corner. That answer is completely wrong. If you assume terrorists think that way, everything they do will seem like total insanity.

The first and biggest obstacle to your victory is that the vast majority of the people who sympathize with your issue are not violent extremists. They may agree with you in principle. They may even sound like violent extremists late at night over their beverage of choice. But when the hammer comes down, they won't be there. There are weeds in the garden and final exams coming up and deadlines at the office. Good luck with that car bombing. Call me next time, maybe things will have settled down by then.

Question 2: In radicalizing your sympathizers, who is your best ally?

No points awarded for "the media" or "sympathetic foreign governments". In radicalizing your apathetic sympathizers, you have no better ally than the violent extremists on the other side. Only they can convince your people that compromise is impossible. Only they can raise your countrymen's level of fear and despair to the point that large numbers are willing to take up arms and follow your lead. A few blown up apartment buildings and dead schoolchildren will get you more recruits than the best revolutionary tracts ever written.

Perversely, this means that you are the best ally of the extremists on the other side. That doesn't mean you love or even talk to each other -- they are, after all, vile and despicable demons. But at this stage in the process your interests align. Both of you want to invert the bell curve, to flatten out that big hump in the middle and drive people to the edges. That's why extremists come in pairs: Caesar and Pompey, the Nazis and the Communists, Sharon and Arafat, Bush and Bin Laden. Each side needs a demonic opposite in order to galvanize its supporters.

Where will he attack? The target needs to fulfill two criteria: First, it needs to be justifiable to an Islamic audience. Bin Laden's pre-election message was probably aimed at them rather than us, and was intended to pre-justify the next attack. From an Islamic point of view, Bin Laden has now pleaded with the American electorate to be reasonable, and has been rejected. Any attack that follows will seem all the more justified. Second, the next attack needs to empower Bin Laden's most aggressive enemies in the United States. He wants us to continue striking first and asking questions later.

It is probably hopeless to try to read Bin Laden's mind in enough detail to guess his exact target. (And there is always the worry that we will do his thinking for him or point out something he has overlooked.) Undoubtedly much will depend on the opportunities that most easily present themselves. But one class of targets seems all too obvious: red-state megachurches whose leaders have made virulently anti-Islamic statements. They are relatively undefended. They are the heart of Bush's political power base, and so can be blamed for his policies. They can easily be portrayed as enemies of Islam. And, last but not least, an attack on a church would rile American hawks like nothing else.

And as a history aside when it was decided that the freeing of europe from the dominance of the Nazis it cam down to two men as to how it would be done. These men swam unto each beach in turn and took samples and found how the beaches makeup was made. It was these two men who found out how much structural strength each beach had and this determined how we invaded and which beach we used. This was done for every Beach landing that ever happened. So you could say a small frogmen approach did lead to D day.

Certainly not, I would be quite happy to hear O'Keefe stand up and say "Shuttle, ISS, and Lunar/CEV projects are all terminated effective 1/1/05 and all monies reallocated to begin work on a manned Martian program on 3/1/05."

What I don't like is MarsDirect. MarsDirect is the problem, that it cannot deliver on its promises without sacrificing crew safety or scientific payload as currently envisioned, and even if it could be pulled off, the four-man crew with limited equipment and the limited options for expansion (clusterd HABs? integrated TMI, no cargo lander, no practical provision for a base) make it a bad investment in the long run.

Zeal can be a good thing (as Zubrin explicitly says in "Case for Mars,") but I fear that the Mars Society could just become a cult made up of Zubrin's yes-men and lose sight of the larger goal: putting humans on Mars.

Mars Direct, as an intellectual exercise at creating a minimalist Mars Mission, was a tremendous step towards getting us to Mars.  But while it should inspire better mission design than the Battlestar Galactica ship of old, we should not dogmatically adhere to it.

Zeal + In situ resource utilization + nuclear thermal rockets + closed loop life support + a realistic number of crew for the science mission + opposition-class trajectory = a successful formula for putting humans on Mars.

[This thread is really Josh's, Clark's, Bill's, and CC's, I know, but if I may just toss in two cents worth(?):- ... ]

From that article (second) you linked to Bill,

The over all cost of a module is mostly due to the cost of launching it in to orbit. Currently it cost $10,000 Dollars per pound to launch some thing in to orbit. At this price, launching a several ton module becomes dizzying. The future of space is currently being held back at the flood gates of the launch pad. The future of space is waiting for new launch vehicles to dramatically low the price of launch to orbit. After this barrier is over taken we will see the advancement of space move forward faster than ever before.

Bigelow has been waiting for a certain price/launch point (about $500-600 per lb). Falcon and Dnper hit it, which is why he is going forward with this.

One or two sounds reasonable depending on the available budget. Plan for one every two years and if there is money maybe send two. BTW how long will they last for? If they are made for 12 people 6 people should find them fairly comfortable.

$5 billion for a Bigelow habitat? Where did that number come from?

Maybe I better go check and see what the current price for a Bigelow habitat is currently selling for.

Larry,

The trouble is Bill that you just can't do that. The amount of energy available from a given mass of fuel will limit the empty weight of the rocket to a small portion of the fuel weight. If you use heavier parts, either you severely sacrifice the already thin mass margins and so you have to make your rocket much bigger, which makes it more expensive and less reliable for the same payload.

Liquid hydrogen, the best fuel in the universe at the moment, has a mass ratio of somewhere below 10%. So, for every pound dry you add to the rocket (steel valve vs. titanium?), you have to add nine pounds of fuel in order to keep the same payload capacity. Thats not counting the extra tank weight or air resistance. Its not a linear relationship, its closer to exponential.

So there is a good engineering reason to keep dry weight as low as possible and to squeeze every last percent of performance out as you can, since small improvements will make a big difference in payload and vehicle size.

Had the same problem with many parts of KSR's mars trilogy. I would get to certain chapters, roll my eyes when it was a particular characters "turn" and try to fly through those passages as quickly as possible.

* * *

"The Years of Rice And Salt" is the KSR book I most recently read and is the most egregious offender in this regard. The biggest and most serious flaw, IMHO, is that KSR wipes out an entire chunk of the world (Europe) prior to the Renaissance, and yet technological progress somehow is not adversely affected by this. This flies in the face of all logic; if the area which (from the Renaissance on) is the main mover in terms of innovation and change is suddenly eliminated, you would expect to see... less innovation and change. Certainly not none, and I'd figure that the ball would have started rolling somewhere else sooner or later, but it's not unreasonable to expect that progress would be retarded about 100 years or so. "The Years of Rice and Salt" also featured KSR's love of Sufi mysticism, an annoyance in both this and "Red Mars" which severely destracted from both the alt-history of "Rice and Salt" and the SF "Red Mars".

No Bill, the bennefits of economies of scale varies from industry to industry, where in some fields it would have no bennefit at all. In the case of rocket engine construction, or anything that is highly labor intensive generally speaking (e.g. rocket engine construction) and not easily automated then the bennefits will be negligible.

The main reason for completing the station, aside from a stubborn desire to finish something once started, is concern that other nations collaborating on the station would resent being abandoned. Yet the same pressures that have led many Americans to consider the station a white elephant may also be at work abroad. It may be possible to persuade our international partners to accept some losses on the station in return for a truly important role in more visionary space exploration.