New Mars Forums

Hi Casey!
   The answer is that the solar planets are assumed to be  the same age, and that age is 4,600 million years.( Give or take a few million! )
                                 

My feeling is that all this stuff about private funding for a Mars mission is absolute pie-in-the-sky. The market just doesn't work that way. As others have pointed out, profit is the bottom line and "when do we see a return?" is the catch-cry!
   If NASA hadn't sent men to the Moon, no commercial entity would have done it ... even to this day.
   No, manned exploration of the Moon and Mars is exactly what NASA was created to do and government agencies are the only way we'll ever get to Mars. The committment is too great, the expenditure is too great, the risk is too great, and, even if nothing goes wrong, the length of time until returns start flowing in, is just too great for a private organisation.
   The only possible way I can see for private funding to succeed in such a mission is for a comic book situation to eventuate: Bill Gates and a group of similarly wealthy business people get together and decide to bankroll a mission for no other reason than because they can, and because they want to become part of history!
   Otherwise, let's just keep up the pressure on NASA and the ESA. It really is our only hope!
                                                 

I remember seeing pictures taken by the Viking cameras on the surface during dust storms. Visibilty was reduced but not alarmingly so. Admittedly the horizon was gone but I think visibility was still of the order of tens of metres (my estimate, for what it's worth).
   Being unburdened by any formal training in geology, I feel free to throw in my two cents worth about the form of the sand/dust being propelled around in the Martian air! Much of it, I suppose, has been around the planet several times. In the act of abrading the rocks and mesas, it too has probably been effectively abraded like beach sand here on Earth. I imagine it is probably well-rounded, having had most of the rough edges knocked off.
   Although even rounded particles, if propelled at hundreds of kilometres per hour, must eventually "sand-blast" and erode any material, I submit that the process will be a slow one. The glass lenses of the Viking cameras, subjected to many dust storms over the years they were operational on Mars, suffered no significant deterioration in image quality. This indicates to me that the lenses were not seriously affected by the dust.                                         
   I suspect the dust, though it will be a nuisance, will be found to be far less troublesome than has been suggested.
                                         

My choice (a difficult one) has to be "Terminator". Am I allowed to include "Terminator 2" as part of the package?!
   The whole concept fascinated me and I seem to be able to go back and watch it (them) repeatedly with little diminishment of enjoyment.
   Maybe Arnie's machine-like acting helped in the realism department!
                                     

Hi Adrian!
   This ice-on-Mars news refers to "south of 60 degrees latitude".
    I'm confused (my natural state, according to my wife) because I can't find which hemisphere they're talking about!
   I know there appears to be near-surface ice between 60 degrees south and the south pole, but what does this "new" news refer to?
   If they're talking about the northern hemisphere (which I guess they are), do they mean ice has been found south of 60 degrees north and approaching the equator? If so, is there none between 60 degrees north and the polar cap itself?
   Or do we have to wait for the press conference before we get to find out?
                                       :0

Hi lars !!
   I don't think the back-contamination thing will be a show-stopper .... or at least it shouldn't be .... unless the "powers-that-be", and/or the press, manage to exaggerate its importance. There does seem to be a move under way at present to turn back-contamination into a convenient means of slowing human Mars exploration to a crawl, for what purpose I have no idea. (Maybe it's to do with money. Maybe the present US administration has even bigger plans for military spending than we currently know of, and is therefore avoiding committing funds to a potentially expensive Mars mission. All supposition on my part, of course! )
   I remember when the first lunar landing was imminent. Nobody knew for sure that there weren't lunar organisms which might be deadly to Earth life. Biological isolation suits and an airtight quarantine facility were designed for, and used by, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. The flaw in the system occurred when they splashed down and the Command Module hatch was opened. There were no quarantine arrangements in place at that point, so any lunar bugs in the capsule would have been released into the atmosphere and the waters of the Pacific Ocean!!
   Later on, and actually MUCH TOO LATE, the astronauts were shown in their isolation suits and then waving from inside the quarantine facility!
   Nobody seemed perturbed by this farcical charade. It was almost as if the authorities had staged a pretence at quarantine to satisfy the doomsayers and nobody seemed to notice the glaring fault in its execution!
   I know Mars is a much more likely abode for alien life than the Moon, and must therefore be seen as more of a risk from a back-contamination point of view. But the principle is identical. NOBODY KNEW FOR SURE that there were no lunar pathogens!
   It seems to me that when NASA really wanted to send humans to another world (the Moon), the extremely unlikely prospect of contamination was treated lightly. Today things are different: The still extremely unlikely prospect of contamination (this time from Mars) is being built up as a major impediment to human exploration.
   Interesting, isn't it, how contamination can be largely ignored, or used as an excuse to pull back from manned missions, depending on NASA's agenda at the time!
   So, lars, I don't think back-contamination will be a show-stopper unless NASA wants it to be. They seem to be able to mesmerise the press, and therefore the public, into believing whatever spin they choose to put on a subject. Fascinating, isn't it?!
   Uh-oh! I think I can feel a bout of "conspiracy theoritis" coming on!!
                                         

At last! Thankyou Phobos for raising the question again about the necessity for a sample return.
   I've been trying hard to break this mind-set which seems to have everyone believing that, just because a few people at NASA want some rocks brought back from Mars, we should go along with the idea. I won't reiterate what I've written elsewhere on Forums but suffice it to say I DO NOT agree that a sample return is required; for ANY Mars program, and certainly not for GOM's suggested program of ten years.
   I think we have to stop regarding every word from NASA as holy scripture. They're just a bunch of humans, like us. They don't have the monopoly on ideas and good sense and they (God knows) are just as capable of errors of judgment as we are.
   Let the first human crew do the testing, as Phobos so rightly suggests. At least that way we'll be sure. What would one batch of sterile rocks from one small area of Mars tell us about microbial life planetwide .... effectively nothing!! We may have missed an oasis seething with pathogenic bacterial life just over the hill!
   And that's precisely what the ditherers and the environmental fanatics will say, too. The MSR route is a never ending one because we will never have enough sample material to CATEGORICALLY EXCLUDE ALL DANGER of back-contamination! We could do dozens of MSRs over a period of decades and still not convince some people.
   Ask the astronauts themselves! See if they are prepared to take the vanishingly-small risk of Hellas Herpes or if they'd rather wait until the mission can be guaranteed risk-free!! After they'd finished laughing at the concept of a risk-free mission, all you'd hear is: "Where do I sign?!"
   That's all you'd hear from me, too!
                                                 

Thanks Bill, for starting this topic. It really cuts to the chase as far as the practicalities of our plight are concerned.
   The big picture for me in all this is a real nail-biter: America, without question, has the money and the technology to put a permanently manned base (colony, if you like) on Mars by 2030 if it feels like it. But history is a precarious kind of thing and unforeseen events can change things more rapidly than we care to think about. If a nation has the capacity to do something great, it shouldn't hesitate too long.
   I had a responsible job which paid reasonably well but, in common with most jobs, it had a high percentage of repetition involved in it. For twenty years I spent most of my waking life doing that job and I like to think I was pretty good at it. But when I look back at those twenty years, I don't remember anything much about all the days I spent at work. What I remember clearly are the vacations I had with my family; the scuba diving, the travel to interesting places, mind-altering books I read, and fascinating discussions with friends. All these activities stand out and shine like diamonds among stones to me.
   Bill, what you pointed out about farm subsidies versus Mars exploration is a perfect example of what I'm driving at. In another 50 years, who is going to remember farm subsidies and all the other mundane stuff we live with every day? The diamonds that do shine out in a nation's or a planet's history are the events outside the workaday world; the breaking of the sound-barrier, the Hoover dam construction, Jesse Owens beating "the master race", the moonwalks, the eradication of smallpox, the ISS (for all its political problems), etc.
   We only remember the shining moments, the uplifting moments; everything else is just paying the rent and buying the groceries. So, in a very real sense, WE ARE our shining moments, and nothing else.
   Mark S, too, hits the nail right on the head when he says: "What we need is an intellectual renaissance in America which causes current and future generations to embrace science, technology, and achievement." This is what we will remember because it leads to the big things: The inventions, the exploration, the discoveries, the diamond-bright achievements among the everyday stones. THIS IS US!! This is what we're meant to do!
   America is in a totally unique position: She is easily the richest nation the world has ever seen and her potential for greatness is unprecedented. She has to be made to understand what she is capable of. But NOW! Who knows what may happen tomorrow.
   This may be the only reason we'll find to go to Mars, but in the end, it's the only reason that matters.
                                     

Hi GOM!  Responding:-

1. "That's smart" ..... Come now, GOM, sarcasm is the lowest
     form of wit, they tell me!    You can do better than that.
     I said I've thought about the possibility of a cover up.
     That's quite a ways from saying there is a cover up and
     even further from deciding who's in charge!
     But there are people who are solidly convinced that the
     Masonic Order is somehow up to its armpits in it. (I'm not
     convinced, though I've heard that every last U.S.
     President has been a Mason. Is that true? And why is
     there an egyptian obelisk in Washington DC? It's all fuel for
     cospiracists, I suppose. )

2.  "I highly doubt you are a gullible victim" almost sounds like
     you think I'm somehow part of the "cover up"! Flattering
     but not true, unfortunately. (If there's something going on,
     I'd love to know what it is!      )  No. .... I'm quite
     serious about being a gullible victim. I've seen movies and
     read books describing webs of disinformation so intricate
     that I'm convinced, if a government had a secret, it could
     tie us up in so many lies we wouldn't know what to
     believe! If you were to dwell on this stuff too long, it
     would drive you crazy; for every dozen conspiracy books
     there are a dozen different conspiracies. On May 9th, you
     said, with what I took as a disparaging glance in my
     direction, "I make up my own mind". But remember, you're
     only making up your mind using information somebody has
     fed you. Same as me! We're all in the same boat doing our
     best to make sense of everything.   

3.  I don't know if anyone would be seriously disturbed or
     scared by irrefutable evidence of buildings or carvings etc.
     on Mars. (I'm quite at home with the idea ... wouldn't
     phase me at all.) Many of my acquaintances, who know
     nothing about anything higher than the cruising altitude of
     a 747, would be stunned, I think. Some of them would
     probably not believe it. Some, I often think, are quite
     incapable of assimilating such information at all, and would
     contrive to ignore it completely!
     I don't know when we'll have hard evidence, if there's any
     to be had, but you must surely know from my other posts
     that I wholeheartedly share your obvious impatience at
     NASA's painful procrastination. Believe it or not, we're on
     the same side; at least as far as that's concerned!

     Nobody's ever called me a cheerful debunker before!  :0 . I don't know whether I've been complimented or insulted! I only know of a few suggestions as to who is supposed to have carved the Face on Mars :-
a) Indigenous martians, now extinct or living underground due
    to an environmental catastrophe.
b) A race from another star system who left it as a message
    for the developing human species on the next planet (us).
c) People from Earth who achieved high technology millenia
    ago (maybe Atlanteans or some such) and whose history
    has been lost to us.
d) Inhabitants of a tenth solar planet whose highly elliptical
    orbit brings it to the inner solar system every few thousand
    years. These aliens, according to the story, have interfered
    in Earth's history also and were the "gods" of egyptian
    history.
   I'm sure these four theories do not exhaust the collection. There are probably people who think it's all the work of demons, but that's really getting out to the fringe and I'd rather not go there!
   What's your angle on all this, GOM? You've got me curious.
                                      :0

Hi Peter! Thanks for getting the thread back, but I think it's one of those threads with so many frayed bits leading off in different directions that it'll be hard to stick to the central theme!
   You make a comment about the discovery of life making a difference to colonisation plans but you do not specify what kind of life; entirely indigenous and alien life or just familiar Earth-type life. Which do you mean? Also, if it's just Earth-type bacteria and moulds, how would you envisage that changing the colonisation plans, if at all?

   Hi Christina! I note your comment: "Let's hope the sample return mission does go on time."
   This implies that there is actually a time-table with "Mars Sample Return Launch Date" written on it. There isn't! This whole sample return thing is an unnecessary hurdle, with difficult technological ramifications, placed in our way by a plainly procrastinating U.S. space administration. It's an ideal way of throwing the whole humans-to-Mars program into low gear.
   I can see all sorts of environmental groups sharpening their knives and getting into this spurious argument over biological contamination. And once that starts, you Christina and I will certainly be long dead before the first footprint appears on Mars! (You will have noticed, of course, that not a single environmentalist or journalist raised a finger in protest in the 1960s while we were landing unsterilised probes on Mars!! But everybody's getting hot under the collar now they perceive a threat to OUR biosphere! Hmm.)
   As I have suggested elsewhere in New Mars, it would be far easier to check for dangerous life-forms and chemicals right there on the surface of Mars with a small automated lab. No need for complicated sample returns and no need for containment facilities at this end. Simple!

   Hello HeloTeacher ! (Is there an echo in here?! ) It's so refreshing to see someone hit the nail on the head the way you just did!
   NASA either has a clandestine agenda (ask the conspiracy theorists) or, as you have so aptly pointed out, they have completely lost their nerve!!
   Firstly, as I have pointed out elsewhere, there is no reliable evidence that Martian regolith is superoxidising or otherwise toxic. That hypothesis arose from faulty Viking data. Look up the work of Dr. Gilbert Levin for verification; the logic is impeccable. Secondly, everyone agrees that the chances of finding microbes on Mars capable of acting as human pathogens are one-in-a-million (colloquially, "practically zilch").
The first astronauts on Mars will be there for about 500 days. This is plenty of time in which to die of "Chryse Cholera" or "Syrtis Septicaemia"! So if they do get sick, they'll never get the chance to bring the contagion back to Earth.
   Before somebody says we can't risk the lives of our astronauts, what were the odds that Armstrong and Aldrin might die on the Moon? Only one-in-a-million? I don't think so! Much worse odds than that! Did that stop them? Would it stop a team of Mars explorers today? NOT A CHANCE!!
   Something's happened to NASA since the days of Apollo and HeloTeacher has identified that "something" very accurately. The astronauts are as courageous as ever but their leadership has lost its backbone.
   Hi MarkS! If you're right about that NASA poll and the 60% of Americans being against humans-to-Mars, then these are dark days for the Mars Society and, ultimately, for America's tenure as Earth's pre-eminent power. The U.S. was built to go forward. If she's not going forward, she starts to die.
   Hi Phobos! I love your gung-ho attitude! Hope it's contagious.
                                           

Two months to go ... and still no word from Ron Koczor at the Marshall Space Flight Center!
   Why no progress reports?
   Is this a good sign or a bad sign?
                                                           ???

pablo, I take the opportunity to welcome you to this site. It's always good to have smart, enthusiastic people on side in the struggle to get humans to Mars.
   Your efforts on the web to monitor and, if possible, to shoot down all this baloney about Martian Measles is music to my ears!
   I fear the long-suffering New Mars contributors have had to listen to me raving about the illogic of all this "back-contamination" bull**** for too long!! It will be great to have someone like you aboard, putting a different but complementary spin on it. And I couldn't agree more with your sentiments about Dr. Zubrin; "Man what a thinker", indeed!
   While we're on the subject, even if Mars has wall-to-wall, ravening, man-eating pathogens everywhere you look, the first astronauts are going to be there about 500 days! If they're going to develop any diseases at all, we're giving them ample time for incubation, aren't we?!! If they do catch something, they'll be long dead before they ever get the chance to bring their contagion home. So we're really including the quarantine period in the mission time-table; a real time saver! And you can't tell me you'd have trouble finding volunteers for the trip because the dangers haven't been thoroughly researched. Unlike the lily-livered politicians and mission planners, the real players, the astronauts, will not be in the least bit frightened by inscriptions on the map which read: "Here be dragons" !!
   ####! If they are, tell 'em to move over .... I'll go!!