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After Apollo 204 burned on the pad, it was re-named Apollo One in order to emphasize its imprtance to the overall apollo mission. When Challenger was lost, it was early on in the prgram, and there was a strong motivation to make it work. Now?
I think it might be a good idea to consider what we want from any space program. Apollo took us to the moon, in competition with the soviets. That particular space race is not possible in today's world. The shuttle was meant to keep NASA employed and funded, I don't know that I want that any more. ISS seems designed as an international space embassy/hotel; it's not my first choice, but I like it better than a jobs program.
The mandate I would like to hand to my elected officials, is the establishment of a self-sustaining human infrastructure located outside the earth's gravity well. It might be an L-5 colony, it might be lunar, it could be mars, or even part of a space elevator... as long as it gets us off this rock, I'm for it!
My challenge lies in bringing this mandate down to the moment, in tems that the unimaginative can understand. Here and now, I want to equip the remaining 3 shuttles for robotic launch and landing, so they can serve out their remaining operational lifetime without needing to be man-rated all over again.
I remember reading in Larry Gonick's history of america, about a chinese anchor found off the coast of southern california. If it had been a rotted ship that collapsed there, I think they'd have found a lot more than just an anchor.
Unfortunatly, Gonick doesn't give a reference to his sources, so he must be full of huey.
...Come to think of it, this chinese landing that might have taken place 500 years ago, might look a lot like the moon landing in another 500 years. The people who said "we never went" may have gained the upper hand by then, and all the video in the world will not convince them otherwise.
One of these fringe-reality types put out a book in the 70's that claimed the chinese had written records, not only of how far across the pacific ocean was, but a good account of how far across the north american continent was. Again, I can't read chinese, so his sources meant nothing to me, so he must have been full of huey.
My point here, is that we might do well to remember that continental drift was once considered fringe science, as was the idea that rocks could fall out of the sky. If the chinese made it to cape horn (not that crazy a claim), who's to say that california is out of the question?
So lately I've been thinking about what kind of theme camp I want to be part of for 2003 burning man.
(www.burningman.com if you're curious)
I also just noticed that the red planet will be making its closest approach to the earth (a mere 35 million miles!) on August 27th this year, 5 days before the man burns.
This suggests an opportunity to do some mars-related space outreach. Geodesic domes are common on the playa, some of them could be scale models of the planets. There is *lots* of open space on the playa, this could be used to demonstrate orbits.
If we wanted to get fancy, (and who doesn't?) we could have video tape running in the background, showing films with martian-analog themes (tatooine in star wars, Dune, the road warrior, Priscilla, all have pop culture ties to our future on mars)
I don't know if I'm whistling in the dark, or preaching to the choir: has anyone here been to burning man? Is anyone here planning on going to burning man? Does mars-themed art have any appeal?
There are 8 months in which to plan such craziness, so now's the time to start dreaming...
I just discovered a free shareware download of a martian screen saver Here. There's also one for earth and the moon.
I'd be interested if anyone else can get it to woek smoothly, it seems I need to make openGL work on my video card before I get the good animation. But the screen snapshots look tantalizing!
As far as plants go, I don't know enough biochemistry to do more than guess. I just have a hunch that the cheapest, easiest plantation is going to have an atmosphere that humans wouldnt' want to breathe. Maybe just because it generates more plot potential for science fiction stories. Argon is more common on mars than nitrogen, so I expect it could become the inert 'filler' gas (not sure if it has any ill effects on humans) wheras any available nitrogen is going to want to get used in fertilizer.
Reenforcement of celings against regolith weith might itself be heavy, but I think all of this assumes that we'll be able to use martian materieals for some kind of concrete equivalent. If all structural members have to come from earth, there is no way to make a colony affordable.
As for lava tubes suddelny becoming filled with new lava, all the evidence points to mars with no internal activity at all. No marsquakes to speak of, no magnetic field, nothing to suggest that there's anything hot below tha martian crust. If this turns out to be wrong, it's all for the better, since there would then be a possibility for geothermal power. As for the risks of living on a dorman volcano, humans do it all the time. Of all the risks that martian colonists run, being flooded with hot lave seems really, really, remote.
I'd be curious if Outpost two has a better economic engine than the first one, or the main improvement is that you get to blow things up. I've stayed away from it beacuse the packaging promises mars combat, and I'm really bored by the war rats scenario.(Gripping Hand)
Alpha centauri is a fun play, I really like the tech tree... but other than futuristic packaging, it doesn't seem much different than the older civilization games. The basic concpet is the same, compete with other players for planetary dominance.
I could be way off here, but I have this belief that mars is going to be hard. Harder than Antarctica, harder than waterworld, harder than the empty quarter of saudi arabia. When I think about the underlying economics of shootemup warfare, it's only possible because the environment is rich enough to allow it to happen. So any scenario that has lots of people killing each other on mars, strikes me as unrealistic as bug eyed monsters and martian canals. I think indentured servitude, even slavery is possible. But killing people for political reasons is a waste of every precious resource we have.
...and that's why computer wargames only interest me when they're comic book fantasy like starcraft, or set on earthlike planets.
I'd be curious as to what games people have played that give a feel for martian economics. For a long time, my favorite was the classic Outpost, despite its mysterious chemicals and counterintuitive interface. Lately I've been obseesed with 1602, even though it's hardly futuristic, it has a genuine feel for the difficulty of maintaining a technical infrastructre.
Are the any other games that you'd reccomend? Anyone want to design an open source mars sim?
I tend to thing on the conservative side, since the martian colony won't be viable until martians can safely have children. This may mean everyone donates sperm and eggs which are kept deep underground, but the lower the technology base, the more reliable systems will be.
I favor domes for plants, but they will be pressurized with CO2 compressed from the martian atmosphere, not valuable breathing air. Workers can wear gas masks in a shirtsleeve environment when maintaining the infrastructure.
My favorite vision of a human hab, is a tunnel dug into the side of a canyon or mesa, looking out over the valley. A spectacular view, with plenty of regolith above. And lava tubes, naturally, for the big and cheap solution, if they can be found.
I think there's some merit to the 'hurry up and wait' idea... In the ultimate cheap shot, we launch a few pounds of robust nanotechnology goo at mars, and it grows a colony for us, fully fueled and ready to live in.
One hazard of the 'go there now' idea, is that we might launch the beginnings of a colony effort, only to find later that we hadn't built a wide enough pyramid of logistical and political support. Flags and footprints will always be a tempting out for politicians who want to salvage some short term political capital, at the expense of long term efforts which won't bear fruit until after the founders are dead. A ten year effort was all we could manage with the moon, and now we want to spend centuries terraforming?
I don't think it's hopeless, though. Looking at earth through the lens of mars, it's possible to areform ourselves without leaving this planet. I think it's in everybody's best interest to increase the political attention span beyond the 4 year re-election event horizon. I think it means taking an interest in politics beyond space activism, and looking at local issues. As the saying goes, the world is run by those who show up.
I'm of two minds about water and sewage. One scenario has water being really plentiful. It's a heat sink, radiation shield, fluid medium for aquaculture, and a moral booster. There might be plenty of open fountains and engineered streams as an indidantal part of the extensive waterworks. In these circumstances, Bio treatment could make a lot of sense.
OTOH, water might prove more expensive, and the pathway from sewage to food might need to be much shorter. We might need a dry transport mechanism, with gasses, ambient mars radiation, and time all having a part. I expect the sludge will be processed into hydroponic fluid, which'll then be sent to the ag domes.
Given the not-inconsiderable cost of heating and pressurizing hab space, I think colonists will find it easier to crank up the heat just a wee bit more and go nude in the living quarters. It's not like they haven't endlessly thrashed in each other's social space already.
They'll still want clothing, to be sure: Working spaces, corridors, and ag domes are going to be cold! And there will be dress suits for the broadcasts back home, wouldn't want to upset John Q Taxpayer.
The first generation will probably repair and restitch their clothing until the second or theird wave of machinary comes in from earth. At which point all the fibers can be recycled and refabricated into new thread and new cloth. This might be the first application of Stephenson's vision in Diamond age of a 'matter compiler'.
Recently I was daydreaming about using uplifted chimps on the mars base, like David Brin uses in Startide Rising. It's a little weird I admit: there's no solid data that suggests chimps' smaller size and greater strength would be worth the training and handling issues.
They could crawl through spaces smaller than any human (which might not turn out to be a good thing,...) They would take up less food and less air. They can already speak ASL here on earth. What if they could use specially designed power tools? It might make for a good labor force to augment the human talent pool.
And I can easily imagine the political fallout. Animal rights activists protest as hard as the anti-nuke folk did Cassini. Yet mars might be the only place where chimps were treated as a culture of their own, having their own unique social needs. Among chimps on earth, the martian chimps could be seen as having made their own Isreal, thier own homeland.
It's not hard to take that one step further and see chimps becoming extinct on earth, and then mars would have its 'first' uniguely martian species. (like just about everyone else here, I'm assuming mars has no native life)
Pretty farfetched, I know. But no more farfetched than the idea of humans living on mars, at least to John Q taxpayer.
As for industry standards, Netscape 4 doesn't support them. The current standard is to use XHTML
and CSS, neither of which it can handle, and New Mars uses a lot of CSS.
If I had complained about cascading style sheets, you'd have a valid point. But as far as I know, the HTML standard still requires authors to close table tags.
The fact is, I made a bit of a mistake writing the HTML for
the main New Mars website, forgetting to close some table tags.
By way of analogy, the mars climate orbiter was lost because mission planners forgot that they were dealing with two different standards, metric and english. Was it 'measurement bigotry' that crashed a $125 million dollar space probe, setting back our collective dream by at least 2 years? Hardly. But if the mission planners had tried to pin the blame on their subcontractor who had used a nonstandard measurement system, instead of admitting that they had sent the wrong command to the spacecraft, that would have been a serious human error.
Netscape 4 is an obsolete browser
- it doesn't come installed on any computer, and hasn't for the last two or three years. If it did, I'd
support it. This has nothing to do with choice of OS - in fact, your choice of browser is OS
independent and it costs nothing to change.
In fact, the computer I'm using is more than 3 years old. When I tried to upgrade to netscape 6, it was hardly free: it took abiout an hour for the download, and when installed it ran so slowly that I went back to 4.7.
By way of analogy, the space shuttle still uses magnetic cores for its computer memory. Programmers have to wade back much farther than 3 years to make their software work. It's not difficult to look ahead towards earth programmers sending software to mars that needs more hardware than the martians currently have. But then mars is just a computer backwater, they can't compete because their equipment is by necessity 2 years old or more.
The question of whether or not I can read some essays with my prefered browser is really pretty trivial, and that's not what bothers me. As ranking officer here, you get to set the priority status of any system bugs in this analog of a mars colony, and that's hardly a life support failure. I'm trying to point to a larger issue, one that's not going to get fixed by repairing the table tags.
Less than 5% of people use Netscape 4, and that's not surprising considering that it's now over five years old and is in my opinion, a heap of junk, compared to Mozilla 1.0 and IE5/6.
I suppose it's idealistic to presume that mars will escape the kind of computer bigotry we're stuck with on earth... I guess it would only be a problem if more than one software maker is involved in the effort, or more than one language is spoken...
Will mac users and PC users and Unix users still debate the merits of their operating systems while on the red planet? I suppose something like that is inevitable, since the alternative would be (shudder) an industry standard.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but I have as much interest in browser wars as I have with cola wars. I'd rather just get to mars.
When the space program began, no one knew how to go to the moon. A complete set of doctrines, policies, and procedures had to evolve from the best available minds at the time. The book of flight rules that we follow tody with shuttle missions all has its origins in experience that had never happened before WW2.
Those flight rules might be likened to the law of the sea, where the captain is the ultimate authority while underway.
Once the ship lands though, and the colony unpacks, though, there is no precident, no firm rulebook to follow. They can have all kinds of guidelines for how groundpounders on earth think things should go, but in reality, they will be making it up as they go along, I think martians will of necessity be anarchists, by which I mean no coersion among equals. If the ship's captain tries to tell someone to do something he doesn't want to do, there will not be the time to try him, nor the jail in which to convict him. The captain will have to know not to exceed her authority in the first place.
This, I think, is the real reason why it's so much fun to imagine ourselves on mars. A fresh start, no rules, and no one on earth can tell us what to do. It distracts us from the unrelenting backbreaking labor that reality presents.
A martian colony is going to be such a long term project, so amazingly expensive, and by necessity draw from such a large infrastructure on earth, that I don't think any of the historical examples will quite apply.
When I consider the Heinlein or KSR rebellion, it's a trivial exercise to imagine terran authorites lobbing a neutron bomb and then announcing an inexplicable life support failure, and then send another load of loyalists to recycle the bodies and start anew.
In fact, this line of reasoning has led me to the conclusion that until some kind of world government is established where soldiers are obsolete and policemen keep the peace everywhere equally, expenditures on space will never be able to compete with military spending.
As long as wars can be fought on the ground, the public imagining of what 'space' is, will be limited to that thin shell of LEO. Military minds will have no interest in putting civilians out of reach of their weapons, and it makes no military sense to fight on the moon when it's easier to shoot things down than to rise up and meet them. (what lasers work for SDI, work even better from the ground, shooting up at satellites.)
The colonization of space will be as if the earth's entire economy has gone into labor to produce a child. Nothing less will produce a self-sustaining human economy out of the gravity well. Such an effort cannot afford war, and may be the best reason of all to build a democratic UN with teeth.
I think martians are going to find themselves too damn busy to get into organized sports like we have here.
OTOH, I can see simulated disasters becoming their own competition sports. Emergency drills could be a team competition, where players are ranked not only on their speed and accuracy, but their ability to cooperate with people they might not have worked with before. In this version, the rules of the game evolve at the same pace as the colony develops, with new subroutines every time a new componant is added to the colony. This is the one time where it would be acceptable to practice hacking the system.
The thread on misbehavior reminded me of an idea I've had for some time about maintaining the emotional well-being of mars colonists.
The rationale behind capcom during apollo, was that there were dozens of people on earth who would have legitimate reasons for needing to talk to the astronauts, and this might easily become a distraction if they had contradictory information. Capcom was always an astronaut, who could look at the problem with astronauts eyes, and possibly pre-filter misunderstandings before they occured.
This works okay for the space station, but when long term colonists are doing a bunch of different things at once, I think each colonist will need their own version of capcom. I like to borrow the term Frunch(click) from Niven's The Mote in God's Eye. These are people who live and work full time in martian analog envirnments on earth. Desert sietches, arctic outposts, floating ocean colonies, mines, mountain habs... any place that teaches us a useful idea about mars, we'll want a permanant presence to dry run here where it's cheaper.
Suppose there's an interpersonal struggle between crew members. It would be designed into the system so that the corresponding frunch(click)s would take the sides of their martian counterparts and engage the same disagreement here on earth, where the pressure isn't as great. The kind of talk that we currently regard as 'gossip' would take on its own significance. This would give ground-based shrinks some advance warning about impending problems, rather than putting it all onto the shoulders of the crew.
Just as Apollo had a simsup who devised all kinds of tricky glitches in the mechanical side of things, I forsee a similar kind of preparation for social bugs. But since this mission is of permanant duration, it's going to be a continuous effort that fades out only when the mars base approaches its own social self sufficancy, when there's enough free time for concerts and plays and couch trips.
I seriously doubt that martian colonists will have the luxery of worrying about the belief system of their neighbor.
A former submarine crew member told me an anlaogous story: The modern nucler submarine is so complicated and so interdepenant among its crew, that homosexual crew members are completely integrated socially among the crew. There simply isn't room for paranoia.
On another note, I think Sagan got it right with _Contact_: the religious ideas of those who are allowed into space might be of interest to the press, but ultimately the cost of discriminating against any particular faith will cost NASA (or the foreign equivalent) more support than it could afford.
Like sex in space, religion is going to be purely the business of the astronauts themselves, and I doubt they will find in their best interest to talk about it to the press.
Urban planners rarely like to talk about how modern cities on earth are shaped and constrained by their sewer systems. But martian colonists will have no such luxery. What earth does for free, martians will have to pay for in capital and attention.
Will water be so cheap to process on mars that we'll want to use it for sewer transport? I think if we choose that option, it will become a serious bottleneck for homegrown expansion.
...and then there's the buttwipe question. Here in the states, the softest toilet paper is made from old growth timber pulp, mostly imported from canada. While I suppose alternatives might be grown on mars, like hemp or some other fiber, I expect martians will find it more expedient to develop a more efficient solution. Not as sexy as a new calendar, but it's got to be addressed sometime!
I'm using netscape 4.7 to browse the site, and white the opening page shows up fine, clicking on any of the essays nets me a blank page. The "show surce" option displays a bunch of reasonable-looking html code, so it's not like there's nothing there.
Microsoft's internet explorer 5 works just fine, though.. Is there some feature here that microsoft exploits that breaks netscape?
I'm using netscape 4.7 to browse the site, and white the opening page shows up fine, clicking on any of the essays nets me a blank page. The "show surce" option displays a bunch of reasonable-looking html code, so it's not like there's nothing there.
Microsoft's internet explorer 5 works just fine, though.. Is there some feature here that microsoft exploits that breaks netscape?
When I think of where I want to see the human future in space, I don't imagine humans being content with Mars. I see us in the Oort cloud, on asteroids, in the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. To my view, Mars is just step one into a much larger, deeper journey.
So why are so many people intrigued by the idea of turning mars into the same kind of place that we've just left? The rest of space is harsher than mars to a similar degree that mars is harsher than earth. To me, mars represents a training ground, a place to learn the basics of a spacefaring lifestyle. Turning it into a smaller, faded version of earth would be a huge diversion of resources that could otherwise be used to take us much farther, to many more interesting places. Terraforming seems like a big distraction from the things that space has to teach us.
There's another thing about terraforming that makes me nervous. Someday, eventually, humanity is going to meet extraterrestrial intelligence, and we might have an interest in the kind of impression we make on our new neighbors. Do we really want or need a terraformed mars on our resume? It might be seen as evidence of our tenacity, our technological prowess, and our mastery of the inanimate. It could also be seen as a tendancy to make ourselves incompatible with any other exotic life that comes along.
Granted, there's no evidence that terraforming mars would kill any existing martian life. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. By the time humans will have conclusively determined that no life exists anywhere on or in the planet, other humans will be competing with would-be terraformers for resources. Since I expect to be stuck on earth for the duration, I know where I'd want my money to go...
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