New Mars Forums

Hey Charbax!

impressed to see you're actually did this, i have to be honest i was doubting you were serious...

Now let's hope you don't run into trouble...

(There's someone with a law degree on this forum (forget who, i'll look it up)(EDIT: It's Bill White)

maybe PM the person and ask for some legal advice
(make sure you get it for free! )

All the luck!

You were one of the people with the 'good pen' i had in mind   when i wrote my idea down. Would be nice to see some of your  'old french philosophy' friends here getting their opinions into the formation of a 'new' colony... I mean Voltaire et al, the social contract (Rousseau)... Revolution-independence, the effect of the new technologies that were so important in that era on the thinking of the man in the street. A new colony would be a major psychological, philosofical (and of course technological) experiment.  it's all pretty fundamentall stuff, that could add to 'deepening' discussions...

BTW, a quick scan shows *at least* 1 in 5 people post kinda regularly, so this is quite an active memberbase...

phew. Depends on how robust the ecosystem is, for a start...

A lot of Earth is landmass that's not really habitable (Desert, steppe etc..) but the surface of Mars is comparable to that of the Earth (that's minus our oceans)

so... Several billions, if you're really good at terraforming, that is. Here on Earth were doing at best a fairly lousy job terraforming deserts, so extrapolations are a bit difficult...

Don't get me wrong when i say i'll probably won't contribute to this thread after this one last post. It's just that I find it too hard to write out my thoughts in English, esp. with a subject as subtle as politics...

Politics is important, people that say it isn't, are in danger of being ignored in the future, so discussions are good, are essential. But oh-so difficult...

Most people have a 'clear' idea what the ideal format of government is (in their opinion), and won't change their minds about it, lots of fruitless dicussions ensue.
I (personal opinion!) think it's nigh impossible to predict how Martian politics will evolve, we don't even know what the average demographic profile will be...
Anyway, i'll keep reading this thread, lots of different views here, should be interesting.

I think he's basically ok, but the 'recovering' part means, IMO he's a 'bit' bitter about the Status Quo.

And no i didn't get face to face, but i read something about Dr. Zubrin's testimony, where Rand reacted on... a bit harsh, so i posted a reply... it GOT DELETED!, when i complained about that, it came back... etc... He didn't really answer my questions, but i didn't want to start another yes/no/yes/no thing... So he got the last word, essentially.
Here's the thing: Zubrin and Simberg

ps, i did watch the whole hearing not part of it as simberg did (he says that in so many words) and i stand by my original observation: Zubrin impressed them big time, they might've thought initially 'who's that nervous guy' but heiir closing comments were 100% in favor of Zubrins 'Bold initative'

This is also mentioned on the board, here, in fact it was my first post on NewMars...it starts on nov 3

Storm in a glass of water, maybe, but it made me feel really bad at the time.

Byron... My observation was from my European standpoint, so it's not an exclusive U.S. 'disease'...

I'm afraid i'll probably start a flamewar here... But i'm serious when i say things got kind out of hand when all of a sudden the people involved in personnel-job recruitment etc. started putting plaques on their doors saying 'human recources management' (in non-english speaking companies, that is...) I always felt like that was humiliating, like we are being seen as just 'another' recource like coal, metal, energy,... use it for your purposes and throw it away when it gets old...

Still wondering where they got that terminology from. Possibly from a book by some guy like Donald Trump or so... Back when the money was good and the sky the limit...

GCNRevenger,

You're of course very right in pointing out that more research into GCNR and Vasimir would be the more logical thing to do, but... Long-term planning hasn't been any government's strongest point, ever... And business has this thing called fiscal quarter... "Yea, um... we spent another bunch of money on somethng you shareholders won't see the benefit...errr never mind, look at our new old reliable LOX stuff!":D

So we're stuck with what we have, basically, we can only hope there'll be more demand for high isp stuff in the fuure, so that there'll be more money invested into those fields. Now it's just 'a waste of money' becase no immediate payback.

wgc, ion engines are more propellant-efficient, but only get 'interesting' for longger-range missions. They accellerate *very* slowly, but for long times. They're cheaper to go to mars, but slower... For further-outlying targets, like neptune, pluto etc, they are both cheaper and faster than the 'traditional' stuff. Simply because they have 'more time' to keep accelerating towards their targets. Mars is simply a little bit too close...

Sounds familiar, indeed...

Now the spotlight is on NASA, but *every* single big corporation is guilty of the stuff the nasa workforce quotes...

I did several jobs, in several places, it's the same thing e v e r y w h e r e.

I think the main problem is the people that so desperately want to get higher-up... no matter what.

in order to do that, they have to show their bosses, shareholders, presidents... they run things more efficiently, cheaper etc than their rivals, and they will conceal every single problem that arises in their department, too scared it might give them a bad grade...

Most of the time they either cook up the numbers or cut into safety, redundancy, back-up things...
All *seems* to work ok... until something unsuspected happens, then you have a major disaster.
All of a sudden you realize your 'efficient' organisation is just a cardboard box, the smallest 'mishap' (god i hate that word!) causes it to crumble to pieces, and everybody starts pointing at each other... Sad. And too familiar.

What I'm a bit concerned about...

*Suppose* that the administration IS planning for a manned Mars mission in the future (not very likely, reading recent news, but... let's suppose this anyway)

AND Bush gives that "We are going to Mars" speech on Dec 17.

...Only to see 2 out of 3 landings fail miserably (given past failure rates, that's a real possibility)

What would Nasa's-govnmnt reaction be?

Or even worse, Bush waiting to announce the "Big Plan" *after* scheduled landings...

Dunno if that would be legal... Copyright stuff and all that?

From the ground up... That depends, again if you have input from earth or not (tele-education, for one)

Self-sustainment would be possible with a relatively small number of people, but it would be a stagnant society, without external input. No hi-tech society on Earth is totally isolated from the outside. Take North Korea, arguably the most isolated society on earth (i could be wrong) They have big problems, that could be 'easily' solved with some imports from abroad (physical and intellectual)

You could go far with a well equipped CAD-CAM manufacturing plant, and a well equipped hospital, and a good working greenhouse,  but the people operating it will still need some outside expert-knowledge, now and then...

Hmmm... All of a sudden i remember the Biosphere 2 project, some 8 people inside a closed-off biosphere, harvesting their own food, repairing the life support systems... they had *a lot* of expert-input from 'outside' and barely managed to survive their 2 years(!) missions... And they were ll highly trained, multi-disciplinary experts to begin with. (But they couldn't go 'outside' to harvest volatiles, ores etc, so maybe bad comparison...Biosphere 2

Got one link... Wired

Note that they actually plan to have a Falcon V ready by 2005! that's again amazingly fast...

Some more info on Falcon I and V, TheSpaceReview

Go, Elon!