New Mars Forums

Dook, you're talking about large-scale nuclear alchemy. This concept was explored once upon a time in a book by Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
    He predicted that some future society, in which energy is freely available at virtually no cost, would be transmuting elements at will to create whatever physical commodities are required. In that society, everybody will have whatever they want, whenever they want it. The only thing of value will be knowledge because all of mankind's physical needs will be fulfilled and all material goods will be essentially free.

    While I look forward to this technological Utopia, summed up presciently by John Lennon in the immortal words "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of Man", we may need to examine the dearth of nitrogen on Mars in more realistic terms .. at least for now!   

This is all news to me.   
    I don't remember much talk of ammonia on Titan until now.
    In agreement with you, Cindy, and to quote a certain alien with a rather mobile upturned eyebrow: "Fascinating."  :;):

Hi CC.
   I'm afraid I've been having trouble with my interpretation of posts quite a lot lately, so if I've emphasized the wrong aspect of one of your posts, I apologise. Now that you've clarified it, I see your point, which is certainly a valid one.
    But, just in passing, I think it's only fair to recognize the contribution of the Soviet people to Hitler's downfall - a contribution I feel isn't always fully acknowledged. The reason for that comparative lack of recognition of the Soviet effort in the eyes of the West is no doubt tied up with the point you make, that the Soviet Union was really a thinly disguised enemy in allied clothing; a regime every bit as detestable as the one we were all fighting.
    I fully accept that aspect of your comment.

    Thanks, Bill, for going on record as agreeing with me about the Soviet contribution etc.  :up:
    Not unnaturally, I think, this gave me pause for thought and I stopped dead in my tracks to think over what I'd actually said. I couldn't help feeling that, if you agreed with me about this, I may have inadvertently said something I didn't mean!     [Just kidding.]

    Hi Cindy!
    It was very kind of you to make flattering comments about my knowledge of history but they're undeserved, I'm afraid. There are only certain areas of history I have a degree of familiarity with, most of the rest being as much a blur to me as it is to any other amateur, of course.
    Some years ago, though, simply because it interested me, I made a fairly extensive study of WWII in Europe and the period leading up to it. I'm sure I've forgotten most of what I learned but some points still stand out clearly in my mind - something I cling to, with an air of quiet desperation, as evidence that Alzheimer's hasn't quite gotten the better of me just yet! 

    Just to tackle the other main point of these recent posts, I think it's very difficult to paint portraits of alternative histories in Europe in 1944/45, or alternative histories anywhere, anytime, for that matter!
    But, in this case, we should remember that the Soviet forces in spring 1945 were formidable, to say the very least. And Soviet industry was in full war-production mode. As I think I've touched on before, they had upwards of 40,000 T-34 tanks (and were producing 2000 more each month), tens of thousands of artillery pieces, and millions of battle-hardened troops. Patton may have thought he could roll them back to Moscow, as the Germans managed to do in 1941, but I think it would have been the mother and father of all battles to try it.
    An allied drive into Russia might just have succeeded if the German Army could have been pressed into service on the West's side. Although it was a defeated force, the Wehrmacht's main problem was largely one of military supplies and fuel. The Reich's supply of raw materials had been effectively choked off and its industrial base badly damaged. But, if the German military machine could have been resupplied and re-organized quickly enough, their addition to a hypothetical latter-day Grande Armee might well have turned the tide. In fact, many German soldiers, perhaps largely unaware of the grisly excesses of their own government, were convinced that the Allies would do exactly that - amalgamate, at the last minute, with the German Army and press on against the Bolshevik hordes, the 'true enemy of European civilization'.
    But of course, with the liberation of the Nazi death camps fresh in everyone's mind, joining forces with an army that had made genocide possible just wasn't morally and politically feasible.

Just a couple of brief comments.

    I tend to take the "Stalingrad was wonderful" thing at face value. As everyone knows, Stalingrad was the high-tide mark and turning-point for Nazi Germany. After Stalingrad - at which the entire German 6th Army was obliterated, the first-ever capture of a German Field Marshal occurred, and 250,000 of Germany's finest troops were killed or captured - it was an almost uninterrupted retreat to Berlin for German forces.
    Although it was a horrible bloodbath that dragged on for months, Stalingrad's conclusion, in January 1943, marked the beginning of the end for Hitler - ample cause for celebration among anti-Nazis everywhere.

    I thought I saw a comment from someone (was it CC?) to the effect that America beat Nazi Germany, then handed the country back to the Germans.
    I think it's often the case that the Soviet Union's contribution to the defeat of Hitler is overlooked or at least grossly underestimated. 3 million German troops invaded Russia in 1941 and drove hard and fast into the heart of the Soviet Motherland. By the time of the D-Day landing in June 1944, the Red Army and Soviet industry had recovered from this almost unimaginable mauling at the hands of the cream of the Third Reich's military forces, including the notoriously effective Waffen-SS Divisions.
    Even if D-Day had failed, it's extremely unlikely that the release of some 50 German Divisions, stationed in France, to fight on the Eastern Front, would have done any more than delay the inevitable march of Soviet troops into Berlin.
    In fact, it could be construed that the landing of Allied troops at Normandy was as much to prevent Stalin taking over all of Western Europe as it was to establish a second front against Germany.

Bill:-

    Forgive me if I seem obtuse but I'm uncertain how to interpret your meaning here, Bill.
    You appear to be saying that the hypothetically flourishing Martian biota we're speculating about could have largely died out maybe a billion years ago, possibly leaving isolated bacterial remnants underground. And it looks like you're placing the 'arrival' of life on Earth at some time close to, but perhaps slightly after, that event.

    Am I on the right track or have I got it all wrong?

CM:-

    Me too!
    It'd be a real talking-point to put it in martinis at your next party. Should be quite a blast.
                                                 

Oops, sorry Flash!      :-

    I assume from this comment that you're an environmental activist. If so, I'd like to make the point that I'm actually quite 'green' myself in many ways - but only when I can see the sense in whatever the activists are .. well, 'active' about!

    I believe there are various issues which environmentalists would do well to examine in detail before making those knee-jerk responses I mentioned. For example, I think nuclear power production should be revisited objectively; without all the wild-eyed and emotionally charged reactions we've come to expect. This is especially true today, in view of all the fuss over rising CO2 levels and global warming, when it's not obvious that alternative clean-energy sources will be able to provide a viable substitute in the near future. But I'm not here to argue that point per se.

    As for Mars, I strongly suspect there are people with alternative agendas out there who would be more than happy to use Martian microbes as an excuse to curtail human space exploration. Some of those people are just plain Luddites, of course, but others probably include space scientists whose careers depend on a well-funded robotic space program or on space-based telescopes etc.
    I was just trying to bring this personal concern of mine to your attention but I guess my frustration with the wilder elements of the environmental movement came through too strongly!   :;):

    My apologies if I inadvertently insulted you.
    I certainly didn't set out to do that.   

By the way, Dickbill supposedly posted at the thread next-door to this one, '(Non-)Official Life on Mars Poll', on Feb.16 2005.
    I can't seem to access that post, for some reason.   ???
    Anyone else having the same trouble?

Flashgordon:-

    Hi Flash!
    I'm not sure whether you've been following some of the more obscure debates in other threads here about how the discovery of life on Mars could affect future missions(?). But anyhow, just to recap, proof that Martian bacteria exist could either spur exploration, or hamper it severely.
    As you know, there are people out there paid to worry about forward and backward planetary contamination issues. If those issues go away, those people don't have a job. It's therefore in their interests to play up the contamination possibilities to the hilt, regardless of the damage it might do to Mars missions.
    The contamination worry depends on Mars having produced microbes which are either a new branch of life, and therefore unique and vital to our understanding of what life really is, or microbes which are ravenously predatory and potentially capable of destroying life here on Earth. In the former case, we mustn't contaminate Mars; in the latter case, we mustn't allow Mars to contaminate us!
    They've got a tailor-made, knee-jerk, scare-mongering reason to stifle mars trips either way, and they'll have the full mindless support of the environmentalist movement no matter how the dice may fall. All they need is hard evidence that there's something alive on Mars and the circus can begin.

    Another way that Martian life can put the kibosh on human missions, at least for a very long time, is the Sample Return Mission (SRM) program. This program entails recovering samples of Martian regolith using robotic probes and examining them in special bug-containment facilities on the Moon, in Low Earth Orbit, or right here on the ground.
    A reasonable blanket reconnaissance would require, I estimate, maybe a half dozen missions, each of which has been predicted to cost about $2 billion. Assuming NASA can afford only one of these ambitious missions every launch window, and assuming no failures, this SRM program is likely to take at least 12 years and cost about $12 billion. And I haven't even factored in the cost of the state-of-the-art containment facilities yet!
    Optimists think the first SRM might lift off in about 2014. If so, the program should be grinding to a halt in about 2026, assuming all goes well.

    There are many people who recognize all this as a monumental waste of time and money. And I'm one of them.
    There is powerful logic which indicates that any Martian life has long been mixing with life here on Earth through the medium of almost constant impact transfer of crustal material between the two planets over the past 4.5 billion years. Whatever life exists on Mars, it would long ago have taken over Earth, if it were so inclined .. in fact, it may well have actually done so about 4 billion years ago! Or the reverse may have occurred.
    The chances of a totally different type of life existing on Mars are vanishingly small. And the idea that any Martian life is poised to devour terrestrial life, in some kind of microbial 'War of the Worlds', is patent nonsense. If there were any chance of that happening, it would have happened long ago.

    As far as human exploration and colonization of Mars is concerned, our best hope is that Mars is found to be sterile. Then at least part of the anti-space, environmentalist, contamination-jobs-for-the-boys argument will be neutralized.
    Unfortunately, that is very unlikely, at least in my opinion (and the opinions of some other people much smarter than I'll ever be). The fact that there's life here means life must either have developed on Mars, and transferred here, or was transferred to Mars after developing here. Given that life is nearly impossible to eradicate totally, once it is established, that life must still exist on Mars.

    When proof of Martian life is discovered - probably quite soon now, I suspect - we, as Mars Society members, should be prepared for the storm of anti-Mars propaganda and misguided environmental activism.
    I think, Flash, that we should all care about whether life exists on Mars because it's likely to make an enormous difference to the dreams of so many of us here.
                                                       ???

Hi Reddragon, and welcome to New Mars!   

    Thanks for the comments on 'my' Martian arthropod. I'm not sure of its exact size but, yes, very small is a fair assessment! (Beware of the term 'microscopic', as used by NASA to describe these small-scale images. They're small, all right, but you won't be seeing any bacteria-sized objects in them.)

    I checked Google for a terrestrial comparison and found that Earth's smallest known spider is an orbweb species from Samoa, with a body variously reported as 0.30 to 0.43mm long (between 1/100th and 1/50th of an inch, if you're American.)
    I think the Martian spider I discovered, lurking in that rock crevice, would be comparable in size.

    As for the likelihood of finding a creature on Mars which resembles terrestrial arachnids, I agree with you that such convergent evolution can't be ruled out - assuming, of course, that any evolution took place on Mars at all!

    We have to remember that there are people out there who think my Martian spider is just a trick of the light and shadow. And, while you and I might regard these people as being totally unreasonable, it's just conceivable they may have a point!
                                             

It must be the season for it, Cindy!

    A few nights ago, I dreamed my wife and I were both on Mars.
    I was at the bottom of a reddy-brown sandhill, in short pants and a T-shirt mind you(!) .. no pressure suit. I was kneeling down and fossicking in the sand, which I remember was damp and gritty at the base of the dune because it was sticking to my bare knees.
    All of a sudden, I found something akin to a large snail or some kind of spiral shellfish. As I picked it up, I noticed something quickly disappear inside the shell .. it was alive!

    I leapt up, brandishing this incredible find in the air, and started running up the sandhill toward my wife, yelling something about the "greatest discovery in the history of science"!!    

    It's funny but, at the time, it didn't seem strange to me that I was warm, comfortable .. and breathing unaided on Mars, and that the sky was blue!
    Weird!!      

How about "Heavy Lift and the Boosters"?