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For RobertDyck re posts about politics....
Thanks for keeping an eye on things, and for sharing some of your discoveries.
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the political poem was quite inspiring, and it could continue on with many more versus....
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For RobertDyck ...
Any chance you will return to productive activity this year?
The Large Ship is not finished.
The Food Topic is languishing.
Meanwhile, GW is making significant progress in developing the Space Tug infrastructure to toss Large Ship out to Mars, to catch it there so you don't kill everyone with a pass through the atmosphere, to toss it back to Earth from Mars, and to catch it smoothly at Earth.
Your design only needs to be add 1 km/s on the outbound side to escape Earth, and about the same on the inbound side to enter the capture ellipse.
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For RobertDyck re Sun tea!
Thanks for your report on making Sun Tea.
The proportions of the mixture surprised me, but I've never tried to make tea as you described.
The amount of sugar your post reported is one cup to two cups of tea.
I only have experience with tea bags in a hot cup of water, but all the sweetener I would use (normally) would be one bag of sweetener, amounting to less than a tea spoon.
That is a prodigious amount of pure sugar.
I go years at a time without using any granulated sugar, so I found that quantity surprising.
Thanks again for your report and commentary on the experiment.
The heat dome we are experiencing South of you may not reach all the way up to your latitude.
***
SpaceNut has been dealing with setbacks recently and for the past year.
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For RobertDyck re sun tea and habitat design ...
Best wishes for success with your latest Sun Tea venture.
Folks in the US have been thinking about tea more than usual in recent days. I saw a note on the Internet that reminded me that coffee houses were popular in both England and the US during the time period of 250 years ago, and thoughts of revolution were apparently in the air. I venture a guess that tea would not have quite the same effect!
You are someone I think of as possibly interested in habitat design, and since you may not have noticed the post about a gent in Switzerland who has been thinking about a rotating habitat near Deimos, I thought I'd at least suggest you take a look. As a moderator you should be able to find the post, but if you need help just holler.
Your opinion of his .7 G design would be of interest to me for sure, and possibly to one or two others who still visit this forum from time to time.
.7 G is an interesting compromise between Earth normal and Mars normal. There might be a reason to build a habitat that provides that G force.
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Ok. Where is this habitat post?
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For RobertDyck re #206
Thanks for asking .... Little by little I've been trying to build up a list of chapters active around the world.
It would make sense to me for this forum to serve all those chapters, as well as rank and file membership, but so far, that has not happened.
In the meantime, here is the list. The article about the habitat is in the Switzerland topic.
Index» Mars Society Chapters
Pages:1Post new topic
Topic Replies Views Last post
Mars Society Switzerland by tahanson43206
2 46 Yesterday 09:34:10 by tahanson43206
Mars Society Costa Rica Chapter by NewMarsMember
2 199 2026-05-02 18:06:03 by tahanson43206
Mars Society Houston by tahanson43206
5 2,491 2026-05-04 11:56:38 by tahanson43206
Mars Society Scandinavia by tahanson43206
4 2,722 2026-04-26 14:53:55 by tahanson43206
Mars Society Chapter in Calgary Alberta by Number04
5 8,179 2026-04-17 10:06:08 by tahanson43206
The Martian Chronicles (MS Youth Chapter) - Seeking help for a youth publication... by Stevo3
0 2,933 2004-10-16 19:31:01 by Stevo3
MS Youth Chapter - seeking new members/articles! - Interested in helping out? Read on... by Stevo3
1 8,055 2005-08-31 22:09:41 by Marsman
Creating a Mars Society Chapter - Any ideas onhow to create a Mars chapter by lzrdking
6 11,942 2021-08-21 20:15:39 by SpaceNut
Pages:1Post new topic
Index» Mars Society Chapters
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For RobertDyck re your post in the Switzerland topic...
Please follow up your question by contacting the president of the Switzerland chapter and inviting him to join this forum and promote it to his chapter members.
You can invite him to participate in a topic about rotating habitats if we have one.
Or there might be another topic or two where discussion of the issues involved in designing a habitat for space might be found.
I'm not interested in more discussion. It's time for this forum to stop promoting endless discussion and start producing results.
People who are going to Mars are not going to need a steady diet of endless discussion. They are going to need facts and best practices and rules to live by, such as the (by now well known) 3-5-8 rule for habitat pressure.
Our two newest members are likely to be interested in education. They are in position to impart education to others, so I am hoping they see this forum as a structure suitable for delivery of education. So far that has NOT been the case, although GW Johnson certainly tried.
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The Mars Society Switzerland website has completely blocked me. I cannot see their website. Considering there's a link at the bottom of the page to show my IP address, I suspect they're blocking anyone not in Switzerland. That's rude.
So I tried to look up the Switzerland chapter head on the Mars Society chapters page. Unfortunately that entire page of the Mars Society main website is down. So I sent an email to the director for chapters.
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For RobertDyck re #209
Thank you for your follow up! I am surprised that this occurred, because I first learned about the Switzerland chapter from LinkedIn which is certainly an international web site. And blocking ** Canada ** of all places does seem (to me at least) unwise.
However, it is possible that the assaults on the web site are massive ... we have experienced massive attacks on this tiny little web site, as you should know, but may easily have forgotten since others took care of it.
Please ** do ** keep attempting to contact the president of the Switzerland chapter, and if you do reach him, please let him know we are available and we will be happy to admit members who are willing to put up with a tiny bit of vetting to be sure they are not robots or something worse.
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For RobertDyck re Swiss portal !!! Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I am ** very ** interested because we are using Cloudflare to protect our Lifeboat account. You have an account there, and you should be able to get in. However, Cloudflare has been increasing protection services, and I'm wondering if you can still get in. SpaceNut put the link at the top of the main page.
I'll check now to be sure you are included in the access list:
OK ... you are on the list! Please see if you can still log in. The web site is showing you made 6 posts so you definitely got in. I would imagine that occurred during the outage that occurred due to hacker activity on our primary host web site.
Here is text I captured from the Swiss site:
Why have I been blocked?
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
What can I do to resolve this?You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.
I didn't record the "Cloudflare Ray ID" but I assume anyone can regenerate it.
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For RobertDyck re post on Aluminum and new item:
Thank you for your history of Aluminum (eg, origin of bauxite) and particularly Canada's wisdom in partnering with Alcoa.
It is often rewarding to read your reflections on or discussions of various topics.
***
I'm working on a concept to expand the forum into education, and I'd like to toss a preliminary sketch your way to see if you can see anything that you could support...
The need for humans interested in helping with the Mars project is massive, although few can see the potential. I see an opportunity in the confluence of the STEM activity of a robotics company in China and the needs of the Mars Society to inspire thousands of young people to learn the fundamentals of engineering to support the high technology that the Mars Enterprise will require.
Your vision in the past has been on the scale we are talking about. Your Large Ship was intended to carry 1000 passengers at a time, and that implies a need for humans to populate the settlement and to carry out useful activity there.
It seems to me that highly educated humans would be needed, and the variety of education needed would be sufficient to sustain the community without Earth support as soon as possible.
Our newest members are associated with the education community. I am assisting with early learning about STEM robots, and my current work with the Cokoino CKK0017 and LynxMotion AL5D is what I am offering for evaluation.
The LK Cokoino company has been remarkably helpful. The have revised the documentation they offer, based upon feedback I provided, and most importantly, they have agreed to add new products to their Amazon product listing.
We have a potential to reach young Americans (and perhaps others as well) with an opportunity to learn the basics of robotics engineering and quite a bit of computer science.
The CKK0017 is based upon the Arduino concept, and it uses C++ in the Arduino sketches.
The LynxMotion uses a subset of a robotics language that (I think) might be called ROS.
My current project is to program a Raspberry Pi 5 in Python, to take commands from the Cokoino board (using a PS/2 game controller), and create the commands LynxMotioin recognizes in the correct sequence to perform various tasks.
I started with an objective of creating a capability to operate a drilling tool in a remote location (ie, Dremel inside the trunk of a car).
However, in working with all these robots (1 LynxMotion, three CKK0017's and now a late edition, a JetCobot by Elephant Robotics), I realized that the familiar Pick and Place operation would be attractive to many students.
Accordingly, I'm modifying the work plan to create ToolPoke in the current line, and PickPlace in a new one.
The key difference is that ToolPoke mounts a tool in the gripper and does not release it. PickPlace opens and closes the jaws to collect items, move them and release them at the destination.
Potentially, if Mars Society is interested, we could reach thousands of young people with this platform, supporting vendors such as LK Cokoino.
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For RobertDyck re reply from Mr. Brisson!
Thank you for sharing this correspondence!
It would be terrific if we (this forum) could become a publishing site for Mr. Brisson. You are our Senior Moderator, and an invitation from you might be successful. I suspect Mr. Brisson was unaware of this forum before your contact. I am impressed that he knew or had contact with Dr. O'Neill.
Translation of The Case for Mars into French is a valuable service.
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Excusez-moi, je ne parle pas français. Mon vocabulaire français est très limité.
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Canada is known for it's ability to support French and English, and no doubt many other languages where immigrants are present. However, for reasons of geography, I get the impression Switzerland may be host to more languages than even Canada.
I asked Google Search and here is it's brief report:
Switzerland has four official national languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansh.
However, due to its diverse resident population, dozens of other languages are spoken daily, with English being widely used by about 43% of the population and various immigrant languages spoken regularly.The primary languages spoken among Swiss residents are divided as follows:
German (including Swiss German dialects): Spoken by approximately 61% of the population, predominantly in central and northern cantons.French: Spoken by about 23% of residents, mainly in the western region (Suisse Romande).Italian: Spoken by nearly 8% of the population, primarily in the southern canton of Ticino.Romansh: Spoken by a small minority (about 0.5%) in the southeastern canton of Graubünden.
Multilingualism is a defining feature of the country. Over two-thirds of all residents regularly speak at least two languages, with English, Spanish, Portuguese, and various Balkan languages rounding out the linguistic landscape.
I greatly appreciate French, but would not venture to try it after so many years of dis-use.
The same is true for German and Spanish. Language, like mathematics, must be kept in practice or it fades over time.
Actually, I can see a dilemma for Mr. Brisson, if we were to offer this forum as a communications hub for his members. Few would prefer English as their first language, although I expect all could deal with it. If we have a topic set up for a chapter whose members speak a language other than English as their primary language, it would be hospitable of us to support languages other than English.
That said, in past years we have had members who live in many countries, and all have handled English with apparent ease, so perhaps that is not a major concern.
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For RobertDyck re conversation with Mr. Brisson.,..
I might have missed it in your report, but did Mr. Brisson address the Cloudflare issue?
Is he even aware that Cloudflare is blocking access to Canada and the US? Attacks are not likely to be coming from either of those countries.
Does he have a list of approved IP addresses?
Such a thing would be a lot of trouble to maintain.
We tried that briefly with the Lifeboat site and it ** was ** a lot of trouble to maintain.
SpaceNut (for example) requested an IP address, and his phone promptly went to another IP address.
With a phone, the IP address would probably depend upon the cell tower network.
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Excusez-moi, je ne parle pas français. Mon vocabulaire français est très limité.
I thought I was being cute. Translation of above: "Excuse me, I do not speak French. My French vocabulary is very limited."
We were required to study French as a second language in school. I had a great teacher for grade 1, and learned a lot. She left for maternity leave the summer between grade 1 and 2, and never returned. The teacher for the rest of elementary school was not so good. I knew less french after grade 6 than I did at the end of grade 1. It was optional for grade 7. My parents bought a new house, I had a new school for grades 8 & 9. French was mandatory, but the class was so much more advanced than me that I had no idea what the teacher was saying. I just accepted a grade of zero for that class.
In 1993 I met a woman who was an immigrant from Paris, France. She expressed interest in me. I studied Conversational French Beginner Level 1. I had motivation, so actually learned. Beginning was very difficult, I effectively learned from scratch. But then she reconciled with her ex-husband who still lived in Paris. L'amour etre guerre! (Love is war!)
Canadian government likes to claim everyone can speak both English and French. That's propaganda. The province of Quebec has legislation to protect the French language. Almost everyone there speaks French. Everywhere else, people speak English. I heard stories that everyone in Quebec is able to speak English as well, but I visited Montreal, and no, that's not true. Senior government officials can speak both languages. But the average working people in Quebec do not know how to speak English. Here the small town of St Boniface was the largest French speaking community in Canada outside of Quebec. That town merged with Winnipeg in 1972, when Winnipeg absorbed most of the surrounding bedroom communities. One former mayor liked to refer to St Boniface as our "French quarter", using a term from New Orleans. Everyone I met there can speak English. The college there is taught exclusively in French. Quebec French is different than Paris French. And St Boniface French is different again. I studied at St Boniface College.
But now. From November 2015 until March 2025, our Prime Minister was Justin Trudeau. He drastically increased immigration, and deliberately invited cultural and ethnic diversity. Now the city of Winnipeg is flooded by immigrants. Unfortunately not all speak English. Ability to speak the language used to be an entry requirement. That is, an immigrant had to prove ability to speak either English or French to be allowed in. Tourists could come, but to immigrate here required ability to speak the language. Now...
Anyway, my little joke just got me in trouble.
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I posted the only reply I received. I just sent a short email asking about Cloudflare.
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For RobertDyck ... thanks for the translation for those who do not read or understand French.
I had a real French teacher in high school, and ** really ** enjoyed the language. French and English have so much in common I can read most of a French document. However, unlike you, I would not trust myself to compose a sentence in the language.
Thanks too, for your observations about how regions in Canada differ.
I suspect the people you met who you thought don't speak English might have been actively resisting the encroachment of English. They certainly ** could ** have learned the language. Kids can learn multiple languages easily as your 1st grade experience shows.
Thanks for your follow up with Mr. (Monsieur to our English friends) Brisson!
I hope he takes this opportunity to extend his outreach a bit.
LinkedIn is an unusual way to spread the Mars Gospel, but it worked for me.
I am struggling to memorize the name, so paste it here to help:
Pierre Brisson
Président Mars Society Switzerland
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For RobertDyck re post in Money topic...
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 80#p240180
Money is one of those topics that requires the human brain to be operating at high efficiency and with high bandwidth.
I have found it difficult to build and then maintain the required state for any length of time.
The result is that when I read such a thoughtful post as yours, I know there are errors (due to mis-information someone fed you long ago), but I can no longer remember why the errors are wrong.
I suspect that all of us have this same experience with difficult subjects that require vast numbers of neurons to be engaged simultaneously in achieving the required mental state.
You were provided false information long ago, and you repeated it in this post. Government ** can ** be sustained by taxes, but it does NOT ** have ** to be sustained by taxes.
Companies create wealth all the time, by producing products, or individuals create wealth by delivering services or products.
If you are in need of nourishment and have a huge accumulation of gold, and another person has fresh baked bread, your mound of gold means nothing if it is not valued by the baker.
Fiat money is a useful shortcut to exchange, but it has a short life.
Your post starts with a reference to an online presentation. If you watched the presentation, and if you are feeling generous, please explain why the online presentation is worth anyone's time. In essence, I think I am saying that time is precious, and I don't want to waste it.
The subject of money is important to me, and possibly to many others, but I have found that thinking about money is like climbing Mount Everest. It is possible to climb Mount Everest with oxygen and it is possible to look out over the landscape and have a sense of comprehension, but for me at least, the visit to the peak of understanding is brief, and I am left with fragments of insight, such as that the idea that a government is dependent upon taxes is wrong. However, I no longer feel able to explain why.
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For RobertDyck re post about possible collapse...
That was another of your thoughtful posts ...
We humans are probably better off because the Maya collapsed. Their religious practices might have been imposed upon others if they had survived.
However, the points you raised about the earlier-then-expected demise of fossil fuels seem to me to have significant weight.
China (in particular) has been working to wean itself from fossil fuels, and it seems to me likely they will succeed.
Meanwhile, in their wisdom, American voters put into office a group that is acting to limit or even reverse progress toward elimination of fossil fuels dependency.
Regarding Mars .... your prescription of tight management of the population is understandable, but it is the opposite of freedom.
You can see examples of tight control of the population on Earth right now.
North Korea, China, Russia, Iran ... these are the first countries that come to my mind as examples of places where individual freedom is curtailed. Attempts are under way to eliminate individual freedom in the United States.
On the ** other ** hand, life away from Earth ** must ** be tightly controlled! A single act by an individual, whether accidental or intentional, could cause loss of life for everyone in an enclosed, pressurized habitat.
On Earth, the crews selected and trained for life in submarines are able to deal with the circumstances there for months at a time. My understanding is that management of these crews includes providing almost no free time, with everyone expected to invest time in training to gain a higher rating, or to perfect the one they have.
A strategy to keep a population under tight control is to give weapons to an elite force, and deny them to everyone else. We see that most obviously in Iran, and I understand that is the case in North Korea. Life in those states is reported to be challenging for the average person.
The United States is experimenting with an interesting alternative. The population has plenty of weapons, which leads to incidents of harm caused by mental illness or psychological states that are indistinguishable from mental illness.
Trust is the glue that holds a community together.
A favorite technique of dictators and those who would like to become dictators is to sow distrust.
We have seen this coming out of Russia for as long as I've been alive, and according to reports much before that.
I'm interested in your (always thoughtful) evaluation of the points I have tried to make.
It seems to me that design of a system that allows a group of humans to live together in harmony is going to be a challenge. It appears to me to be a challenge now and it will be so for as far as I can see into the future.
It is possible that AI may solve the problem for us, by interweaving itself into our lives so we don't even notice our evil impulses being snipped at the bud.
A preoccupation for every human society is dealing with human (male to be specific) aggression. Male aggression is behind much of the advance in technology that has improved lives, but the destruction that seems to occur as a result of that aggression sets us back. Putin's aggression against his neighbors is accelerating the pace of development of warfare.
My understanding is that sports was developed by humans as a way of harnessing human aggression in ways that lead to a net positive. The current World Cup matches are ** very ** interesting in that small Nations can (and do) defeat huge ones.
I think your vision of how to manage the population on Mars needs some development. A high quality of life depends upon trust of each member of the society by everyone else, but some individuals yield to temptation to harm others. Each generation has to be brought up in such a way as to insure they can be trusted and that they can trust everyone else. But defects seem to always occur, so mechanisms to identify and deal with defects seem to be a requirement for a successful community, let alone a planet sized population.
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For RobertDyck re post in Void's topic about CO as a propellant.
You said:
CO & LOX have a Specific Impulse (Isp) of 250 to 290 seconds in vacuum. That's poor. NASA looked at this as a means of Insitu Propellant Production before Robert Zubrin. His improvement was to bring hydrogen from Earth, used the sabatier process to convert to liquid methane. Which has Isp of 350 to 380 seconds. And LCH4 boiling temperature is -127.3°C at 10 bar pressure. So moderate pressure in the tank. Not even as cold as LOX. That makes it easy to work with.
I'd like to see an energy investment comparison.
My impression is that CO and LOX are by far the most practical propellant combination for Mars to Orbit flight. I am hoping someone will do the actual energy calculations. My prediction is that the ultra simple CO/LOX combination will win handily over the convoluted CH4/LOX combination.
The difference in ISP is of little consequence at Mars. The volume of CO and LOX will be greater than would be true for CH4 and LOX, so the tanks will be larger and thus more mass will be required for the vehicle.
However, since these are re-usable vehicles the difference in cost of the vehicle will wash out over many flights, and the energy savings will (I'm betting) easily compensate for the mass difference.
I have seen NO ONE carry out these calculations on this site. What I ** have ** seen is plenty of hand waving.
We actually have members who could perform these calculations.
The comparison needs to include multiple disciplines, because the manufacturing plant to create CO and LOX will be one thing, and the corresponding plant to create CH4 and LOX will be quite another, because the CH4 plant will require input of ultra-clean water, and ** that ** will require an entire subsystem of equipment and transport to deliver the product.
I am betting that by the time you calculate all the extraneous expenses for the CH4 plant, you will have exhausted your investor's patience, if not their wallets.
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For RobertDyck re posts in Methane vs CO topic, and in Chat...
Thanks for your helpful contribution to the new topic. The purpose of the topic is to explore the tradeoffs between the two propellants. It turns out that ISP does NOT tell the whole story. I am hoping to be able to present the relevant information in a series of posts, and am hoping you and other knowledgeable members will provide plenty of feedback to improve the product.
As an example, I did NOT know that CO is far more dense than methane at -180 Celsius. That means the tanks are smaller. The oxygen needed is greater than is true for methane, but oxygen costs less (in energy) to make than is needed for methane, so it is possible that the actual energy cost to ship a ton to orbit using CO will be less than would be true for methane. At this point, it appears that no one in this forum has a clue as to which propellant is the best choice.
Apparently Dr. Zubrin and associates studied the propellants intently in preparation of the first edition of Mars Direct, and they settled on shipping hydrogen from Earth as the best choice at the time.
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