New Mars Forums

Ditto!! ...
                                         

Thankyou, Mark S ... !!
   I was beginning to think I was the only one, apart from Gilbert himself, who could see the logic behind Dr. Levin's ideas.
   I am in complete agreement with you. I believe we will find a world filled with microbiology when we really get to grips with Mars exploration. We may even find life visible to the naked eye, though I haven't the nerve to imagine it will be any more than enormous colonies of individually microscopic organisms ... like the blue-green algae mats which form stromatolites here on Earth.
   At the risk of being seen as tediously repetitive, I also believe that due to impact transfer, any life we find will be based on the same chemistry as terrestrial life.
   What I don't understand, except when I have my conspiracy hat on, is why the "establishment" has so religiously shunned the evidence for life on Mars. It is remarkable to me that they have abandoned the principle of Occam's razor in this case, preferring to conjure up all sorts of exotic Martian soil chemistry (none of which anyone has been able to experimentally duplicate in 25 years of trying) rather than consider the obvious!
   I suppose there may be two possible reasons, neither of which speaks well for the scientific community: Firstly there is the well-known conspiracy theory. The most plausible version  (among a pretty implausible bunch of theories! ) is that the announcement of life on Mars would lead to cancellation of a string of robotic probes in favour of a manned mission, thus ending a lot of secure employment at places like JPL. (i.e. It all comes down to money ... one of the most powerful motivations in human affairs.)  Secondly there is the possibility that almost nobody in the scientific world has the courage to put up his/her hand and say that Martian life explains the data much better than imaginative and unsubstantiated super-oxide soil chemistry does. In other words, science has become so incestuous and stultified that changing a conceptual paradigm is virtually impossible.
   If either of these two explanations is true, it paints a pretty sad picture of the state of present-day scientific enquiry.
   I feel that this is something which should be discussed as openly and as often as possible in order to expose it to more people, most of whom only hear the mainstream scientific viewpoint.
   Incidentally, the idea of JPL involvement in some kind of self-interested subterfuge may tie in with another thread in Forums: That of the sky colour on Mars. There has been a consistent undercurrent of opinion since Viking that the sky on Mars may actually be blue more often than pink. There is anecdotal evidence that JPL adjusted the colouration of the published photographs to make Mars seem more alien and uninviting than it really is. To my mind, this idea is supported by the appearance of the U.S. flag in some of these pictures, which shows the blue background behind the stars as purple. It looks distinctly like somebody needs to turn down the red saturation in order to get an accurate rendition of the colours on the flag.
   If Mars is portrayed as lifeless, with an oxidising soil chemistry poisonous to life, with lurid red rocks, and an unearthly salmon-pink sky, who would be in a hurry to send humans there? Why, even the dust from the surface might corrode an astronaut's lungs, right?!! Maybe we should just send a few robotic probes over the next 20 years ... you know, play it safe, take a few measurements, snap a few more pictures.
   Now imagine the opposite scenario. The soil is sandy brown and ... Wait! ... Was that a little patch of blue-green on that rock over ther?! Maybe. The sky has a blue tinge to it when the dust isn't blowing in the wind. The Labelled Release experiment appears to have found microbial life in the soil and the contrary evidence of the mass spectrometer has been found to be unreliable, therefore discounted. Now huge quantities of water ice have been located in large areas of the planet's regolith, and it is known that conditions occur frequently, at or near the surface, which are conducive to the melting of that ice ... liquid water!! This is a place where a human being could learn to live! Let's send a manned mission as soon as we can!
   Quite a difference, isn't there? Are scientists actually capable of such a manipulation of the facts? I don't know. But their attitude to the work of Dr. Levin tells me something is very wrong somewhere.
                                          ???

P.S. Now we all know there's plenty of water on Mars, the
      establishment is playing up the surface radiation angle for
      all it's worth. Apparently we now need to send probes to
      ensure any future astronauts aren't fried ... and
      according to the news snippets, it's not looking good for
      human missions!
      Interesting, isn't it?!         

I was brought up in the christian faith. It wasn't until I developed more critical faculties during my teens that I began to question what I had accepted as a child.
   Christianity is probably one of the weirdest religions, in my humble opinion. I say that without any intention of criticising those who follow it. As far as I am concerned, religion is a personal thing and, as long as no organised religion seeks to curtail my freedom, I am happy to reciprocate. But I do have views.
   The three-gods-in-one bit, which Phobos mentioned, makes no sense to me at all ... though I've had it explained to me dozens of times by experts. Yahweh, the jewish god of the old testament, is supposed to be the same god as god-the-father of the christian trinity. Yet he was the one and only god ... "a jealous god" ... throughout the old testament. He never once, in all his chats with jewish elders, intimated that he was part of a small group! Even if Jesus wasn't born yet, he must have existed then anyway, mustn't he? And where was the holy spirit all that time? Very strange!
   I don't know why a baby is born a sinner, either. I can't accept that explanation about the sins of the fathers. It's just a guilt trip.
   I also have no idea why a "son-of-god" has to be brutally tortured and slaughtered in order to appease god-the-father, who is ostensibly a god of love.
   And I am supposed to accept and believe I'm a sinner, I must believe god loves me, I must believe the only way to avoid being burned in hell forever as punishment for something I didn't do is to accept that the barbaric crucifixion of someone I never met is my salvation! Very odd!
   And this is all packaged up neatly as a choice I can make, based on faith. The choice is eternal life in paradise or eternal suffering in the pits of hell. Now this has me foxed! If a guy says to you at the gates of Disneyworld, you can either go in and have fun or he's going to drag you away and torture you to death, where's the choice in that?! That's not a choice, it's a threat. If that happened, you'd call the police and have the guy taken away and charged. There'd be psychological profiles done to determine whether the guy was insane and needed to be placed in care.
   Even supposing god does want us to believe in him, why the cloak-and-dagger routine? Why does it have to be based on faith? If he is watching us, why doesn't he come out in the open and show us incontrovertible proof that he's there ... like he did when he went by the name of Yahweh and smoked and thundered his way across the Sinai peninsula?! How come he's so shy all of a sudden?
   If there is a god, that god made us intelligent. He made us so that we can analyse things and come to conclusions using our large brains. I've used my brain to analyse christianity and, with the utmost sincerity, I can find nothing in it that makes sense There is nothing in it I CAN believe in; nothing I would even WANT to believe in. When I ran that past the Christian Society in high school (affectionately known as the god-squad) and suggested to them that surely Jesus would understand and let me off with a warning or something when I died, they answered no! No belief ... no heaven!! In other words, my reward for carefully considering christianity and finding myself unable to comprehend or believe in it, was to be burned in hell for all eternity!! A most unpalatable religion!
   In any event, there is a growing body of evidence that Jesus (and yes, he was a real person) did not die on the cross. He was apparently either taken down while still alive, or a substitution occurred and someone else died in his place. Either way, the evidence suggests he was married to Mary Magdalene and had children. The whole family was smuggled to the south of France according to most researchers. Why did Rome seek to execute him and why did his people go to such lengths to save him? For one reason: He was a direct descendant of King David; he was jewish royalty and heir to the throne of Israel. Rome perceived him as a threat to the state, which is why they used crucifixion, the accepted execution method for enemies of the state.
   Just thought I'd throw in my two cents worth!!
                                           

O.K. ... O.K. .... I'm alright now! Back on the medication and everything's fine!
   But I've put a layer of Alfoil on my metal helmet, just in case. You can't be too careful!
                                           

I tend to side with Nirgal when he says he hopes this asteroid really is on a collision course with Earth. Or at least I hope they THINK it is right up until about 2015, and then find it's going to miss by a comfortable margin.
   This is pure mischief on my part, I admit, but it comes from too many years of talking about space to too many people who treat it as a joke.
   The number of times I've spoken about Mars, the asteroid menace, space elevators, etc. only to see that familiar pitying smile and hear some inane cliche about "all that flying around in space stuff"! Virtually never have I heard an intelligent comment or an interested question. The attitude is almost universal that THIS is the REAL world, down here on good old Terra Firma. Space is a way-out subject, of no relevance to human affairs, and best left to those scientist boffins in white coats and other, similarly amusing eccentrics.
   Sometimes it drives me crazy! I feel like shaking these people and telling them to wake up! They think their day at the office is more real than the prospect of a projectile carrying the energy of 10 million hydrogen bombs slamming into our only cosmic lifeboat. Such an impact is very rare, I admit. But to show no interest at all in the sheer mind-boggling power of it, to have not a single intelligent question to ask about it, and to dismiss it out of hand as a topic unworthy of discussion by "sensible people", is beyond my comprehension! And that is what the great majority of people are like ... like ants scurrying around on the sidewalk by the Empire State building, oblivious to the greater reality going on just above their heads!
   Wouldn't it be delicious for once to see real concern in these people's eyes about something outside their immediate cosy little world. To see them emerge from their cocoon of false security and finally realise that space is REAL ... that it CAN affect THEM!! That we need to understand it and become adept at controlling some aspects of it if we want to be at least moderately sure of surviving.
   Imagine what we would achieve in space over the next 13 years if we all thought our lives depended on it! We might even learn to stop shooting at each other and concentrate on shooting the asteroid.
   I know it's evil of me to want this ... but if it shakes the majority of us out of our small-minded complacency, and no harm comes of it, it will be worth it!
   End of rant !! I feel better now!  (Huh? ... Yeh, I know ... three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers .... ! )
                                           

Quote from Auqakah:-

"The reason for this is that a suns lifespan is determined by the amount of heavy-metal material that is in its core."

   I've read a little bit about stellar evolution over the years but I've never come across any reference to heavy metals having any effect on the longevity of a star.
   A main sequence star eventually runs out of hydrogen and may then start fusing helium into carbon. In some cases, a star can go on fusing heavier and heavier elements until its core has become mostly iron nuclei. Fusion beyond this point requires more energy than it liberates, so the star's core collapses. Iron and metals heavier than iron play no part in the energy producing life of a star.
   A star's tenure as a main sequence (i.e hydrogen-fusing) star is determined by its initial mass. A star like our Sun remains on the main sequence for about 10 billion years. A star 10 times as massive is about 40,000 times as bright and stays on the main sequence for only about 2.5 million years. A star with about 1/3 the mass of Sol will be only 1/100 as bright but will stay on the main sequence for maybe 300 billion years.
   I have never seen any reference to small quantities of metals in a main sequence star having any life-shortening consequences. And when I say small quantities, I mean SMALL quantities!
   Sol, our star, has a mass of about 10-to-the-power-of-27 tonnes. That's 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes.
Of this mass, about 0.1% is known to be made up of metals. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of metals in the Sun, right now, as we speak!
   The amount of nuclear waste produced in all of Earth's reactors since 1942 is, at most, on the order of 1000,000 tonnes. If we dropped ALL of it into the Sun tomorrow morning, it would increase the mass of metals there by 0.0000000000000001%!! To put this into some kind of perspective, in order to double the percentage of metal in the Sun's mass from 0.1% to 0.2%, we would have to dump 1000,000 tonnes of nuclear waste into it EVERY YEAR for 1 million trillion years!!
   I feel confident that we could launch our nuclear waste into the Sun without fear of shortening our star's lifespan in any measurable way. But I tend to agree with Nirgal82 that we might some day find a use for depleted uranium and plutonium. For reasons we cannot imagine today, such heavy metals may become extremely valuable in the future. Let's not potentially throw the baby out with the bath water by putting our spent fuel where we can never hope to gain access to it again.
                                           

P.S. What about the cost of launching so much mass into
       space?!

Yeh! I'll go along with that ... Many happy returns!!
                                   

Given that nothing is ever perfect, and given that control of Mars by the U.S. is not necessarily the worst possible outcome by any means, I'd be willing to accept that scenario if only they would GET ON WITH IT!   
   As Cobra said, America will most likely play a major role in Mars exploration/colonisation. But I still think it's possible that America could leave it too long. If she continues to treat Mars with ambivalence, and talk up a return to the Moon (which I've noticed seems to be the trend just lately), then Mars slips further and further into the future. American sources commonly talk about humans-to-Mars in 20 or 30 years ... and they say it as though they've got all the time there is.
   What if they haven't? 30 years can be a long time in a country's history and a great many things can happen. Opportunities don't often sit in front of you and wait indefinitely while you hum and hah over whether to grasp them or not!
   Russia has economic problems, to be sure, but she has a large pool of talented and educated people, huge experience in space, and she still has enormous natural resources. Who knows where she'll be, technologically and economically, in a quarter century. On Mars, perhaps? ... Thumbing her nose at the U.S.?
   The European Union is no slouch when it comes to science and technology, either. While America pumps more and more of her economic life-blood into a bigger and bigger military machine, maybe Europe will steal a march on her and show the New World that the Old World still has what it takes! How would a Mars under European control suit everybody? What if Russia JOINS the E.U.?! What a space power that might create!
   A less likely but more unpalatable scenario might involve a Mars controlled by Beijing. Difficult to imagine, I grant you, but not completely out of the question if the Chinese economy ever approaches its potential and its totalitarian regime remains in power. One of the advantages of a dictatorship is that it doesn't suffer from the political near-sightedness induced by election hurdles every 3 or 4 years! If a new "Great Leader" sets his sights on Mars for whatever reason, what's to stop him?
   Alex Lightman has the right to stand up and speak his mind at the Boulder conference. Anyone who would deny him that right, would also undermine the basis of liberal democracy.(We've been through all that stuff with Adolf Hitler! Let's not rehash it here! ). What concerns me is that Mr Lightman seems so certain that American control will necessarily be an option.
   Unless America gets up off its ... laurels(! )... and revises that 30 year time-table downwards a little bit, her options in space may not be as broad as she fondly imagines!
                                     ???

Huh?!!
   Did somebody say "Martian concrete"?

   I happen to be quite enthusiastic about Martian concrete!!

Maybe it depends how far you can get in an age of civilization and progress that determines whether you can maintain that progress or lose it to the forces of chaos and/or barbarity.
   Militarily, if you educate your potential enemy and include that group in your progress, you defuse the situation. However many regions the Romans "civilised" (or subjugated to their own interests! ), their influence was limited and there were always barbarians outside the borders awaiting their chance. Today, the toppling of our world civilization is becoming less and less likely as more and more people come to benefit from economic advancement. Why destabilise a system that benefits you?
   If a civilization grows quickly enough, so that everyone becomes a beneficiary, you might eliminate hostile military action as an instrument of decline.
   Similarly, if our ability to combat disease improves fast enough, we may avert disaster in the form of a lethal worldwide pandemic.
   You might even develop sufficiently to save yourself and the whole planet from the kind of cosmic event that helped usher out the dinosaurs, an asteroid impact. We haven't reached that point yet and it's just a case of which comes first: The technology or the asteroid!
   But it seems unlikely we will ever have the ability to stop one of those massive volcanic events which occur at intervals in Earth's history. Millions of cubic kilometres of lava spew forth and inundate vast areas with liquid rock. One such event occurred at the time of the Permian extinction 250 million years ago in what is now Siberia. 90% or more of all the species on Earth died. Another event occurred at the same time as the K/T extinction 65 million years ago in India (and at the same time as that famous impact on the Yucatan Peninsula). 75% of all life forms disappeared at that time.
   To avoid succumbing to that kind of "barbarity", civilization has no choice but to establish itself off-Earth. .... Hey! Mars might be a good place!! (I wonder if anyone else has thought of that?! )
   So I think Lord Bolingbroke was right and wrong! In his day, what he said was essentially correct. Civilization was very vulnerable to decline because it wasn't advanced enough. But I believe he was wrong to say that true and lasting progress can never be achieved. It's just a case of progressing quickly enough to work out the solutions before encountering the problems.
   We in the 21st century are getting close to achieving this goal of unassailable progress, but we mustn't take our eye off the ball for even a second. Time is probably not on our side!
                                          ???

Am I allowed to say I agree with both Bill and Clark, at least to some extent?
   Clark's logic is inescapable and it's almost impossible to argue coherently against what he says. Bill's wise pragmatism, on the other hand, is probably a realistic way of looking at the situation.
   Maybe the potheads, drunks and other assorted misfits will save us a lot of trouble. Maybe they'll open airlock outer doors, having forgotten to put their suits on! Or perhaps they'll go for long walks and fall asleep in their suits .... failing to wake up when the air runs out!
   There must be a thousand ways an intoxicated person can kill him/herself on Mars without endangering the rest of the colony.
                                           ???

Hi John!
   Again I find myself in agreement with most of what you say.
Especially the idea of a shielded 1g rotating habitat in Mars orbit. There is no doubt in my mind that 3.5 years in 0.38g will be very detrimental to any astronaut with plans to return to Earth.
   I have been advocating spun-up Mars missions for some time now and I think a 900 metre spin radius using cables (at 1 rev per minute), to provide full 1g artificial gravity, is desirable outbound and homebound.
   With this and the 1g hab in Mars orbit, we can conduct long-term exploration without condemning our people to chronic debilitating illnesses when they return to Earth.
   Perhaps we could rotate the crews from LMO to surface duty every few weeks, so that their bodies never become fully adapted to 0.38g. This will achieve the desired effect of maintaining muscle tone and bone density, with the added bonus that the astronauts will be "super-strong" when on the surface and less prone to tiring.
   In the long term, of course, some of the astronauts will volunteer to become permanent Mars residents. Since they will not be returning home to Earth, they can be left on the surface and not required to spend time at 1g in LMO. In my opinion, that will be an irrevocable decision on their part since they will become unable to tolerate Earth's gravity. Going back won't be an option.
   I get the impression that some New Mars contributors tend not to take the gravity adaptation problem very seriously. Maybe I tend too much towards the opposite viewpoint. But I think it will be more of a problem than a lot of people realise.