New Mars Forums

A terribly sad tale about that poor young woman being raped by that excuse for a human-being. I'm not nearly as squeamish about the death penalty as many others here and I just found one more to add to my list - along with all child molesters everywhere. ( :bars2:  )  I can tell you right now, if I'd seen that appalling disgrace happening and I'd had a rifle handy, that bast*** wouldn't be bothering anyone ever again.
    And this shame on the female victim crap .. I'll never understand that BS!  Instead of the relatives hiding the poor girl away, they should be out looking for the cur that attacked her. And they should maybe take a rope with them, too.   :realllymad:

    No, Cindy. I can't help you with the desalination thing on the Abraham Lincoln. If it's a nuclear-powered vessel, they probably have energy to spare for such things but I don't know much about it. I'm sure someone here will know.

    The Australian people have breached the $100 million mark, and still rising - great stuff! And now our government has pledged $1 billion in total aid, to be spent over the next 5 years, for Indonesia alone. There will be other aid to other countries, too, I believe. But Indonesia caught the brunt of the disaster and Australia is her nearest neighbour.
    Plus, we were among the first aid-workers to arrive at some of the devastated sites and the Aussie naval vessel, HMAS Kanimbla, with heavy-lift helicopters on board and laden with supplies, is on its way to help as we speak.
    I am extremely pleased and proud of my country's efforts, even though it's no more than our neighbours have a right to expect from us at such a time.

    Again, I draw attention to the American efforts also. As she has always done, these past hundred years, the United States has stepped up to the plate in fine style to help those in need. I'm very impressed that the Abraham Lincoln was so quickly on the scene. And what a magnificent job she's been doing, too!
    I don't give a Good-God-Damn what the detractors and left-wing loonies have to say about America, you're not just a Superpower .. you're a super Power!  Your politicians often let you down badly (we all have that lousy problem, in any democracy) but you're a big country with big-hearted people and I'm more than happy to call you all 'cousins'.
                                                        

    [Cindy, you raised fears about future tsunamis affecting the east coast of Australia and that maybe we should keep some cash in the kitty to save our own a**es in case of such an eventuality.
    The most likely cause of a major tsunami in the Pacific is a submarine landslide in the Hawaiian Islands. Apparently there's evidence that a previous slide caused a mega-tsunami which produced a wave 500 metres high on one of those islands!   
    By the time such a wave reached Australia, it would still reach a height of some 50 metres at the shoreline, destroying most of the infrastructure on our eastern seaboard. If that happened, a billion dollars one way or the other wouldn't save Australia from an economic meltdown of apocalyptic proportions. Especially since a similar wave would simultaneously take out most of America's western seaboard - pulverising cities like San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
    We'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.]

Let's not get too excited over oil on the Moon or Mars etc.
    Oil's no good unless you can burn its derivatives in oxygen, which means shipping it home to Earth. While this is perhaps theoretically feasible in some future world, you have to bear in mind the phenomenal costs involved in doing that.

    Anyone for gas at, say, $2,000,000 a gallon?   :laugh:

Looks like New Mars might have started a slow winding down in activity.
    While it used to be a case of "New Mars is still a young site", now the explanation for the low posting rate might be "New Mars is an ageing site"!  (Or am I being premature in my judgment?)
                                                    ???
    Still, I suppose all good things must come to an end and New Mars is no different; nothing lasts forever, I guess
                                                       

A pointless poll based on contrived and simplistic logic, in my opinion.

    [Oh, and just what we need, too ... another thread designed to give Bushophobes more excuses to air their pathology.
     Even the hardened political debaters at New Mars, with the exception of one or two diehards, have grown weary of that particular fray, Scott.     ]

CM:-

    No no no, CM.
    Not that kind of crab!

    On a marginally more serious note, I've been wondering about possible metabolic arrangements which would allow a creature such as an arthropod to survive on Mars. This train of thought serves two purposes. First, it enables me to justify my seeing live crabs in Mars pictures (    :;): ), and second, it allows me to conjure up what I think of as interesting scenarios of Mars' past.

    To begin with, you have to speculate that Martian life gained a foothold long ago, either as an indigenous process or courtesy of impact transfers from Earth. Then, I suppose, you have to assume the production of an oxygen-rich atmosphere and the rise of multi-cellular animal life.
    Next comes the atmospheric loss and dessication of Mars, which would have presumably killed off much of the diversity of flora and fauna in a way reminiscent of, though much worse than, Earth's Permian extinction event of 250 million years ago.

    What kinds of creatures might have survived? Perhaps armoured ones which were able to burrow and survive the gradually worsening environment. Perhaps very small ones, able to subsist on very little in a nutrient-poor world.
    Perhaps small arthropods!!

    But how would an oxygen breathing arthropod survive the almost total disappearance of oxygen from the Martian atmosphere?
    Is there any way a small crab-like creature, living mainly in damp briny sand and rock crevices, could form some kind of symbiotic relationship with anaerobic bacteria to get oxygen? After all, we humans depend almost entirely on symbiosis with our gut bacteria for the digestion of our food, and it's believed even our energy-producing cellular organelles, called mitochondria, are actually highly modified foreign bacteria assimilated into multi-cellular animals hundreds of millions of years ago.

    Do we have any biochemists here who could imagine a broadly similar symbiotic mechanism whereby anaerobes could supply sufficient oxygen to maintain the physiology of small, slow-moving, crab-like creatures on Mars?  ???

    Just a few thoughts.   

The question of what becomes of neutron-star-stuff when it is freed of the great majority of the massive gravity which formed it, is an interesting one.
    Is there any reason to believe that neutrons created by crushing together protons and electrons in a monstrous gravity well will somehow resume their former composition without the intense gravity? I've never come across any reference to such a thing happening, even in theory, and I doubt it would occur.

    With only neutrons, and no protons or electrons, there can be no elements as we know them.
    Neutrons stick together in atomic nuclei but that's in the presence of one or more protons. As Trebuchet suggests, I suspect a fragment of neutron star would dissipate in a shower of free neutrons.
                                                   ???
[Unless the original information which described the atoms that were destroyed by gravity to make up the neutron-star-stuff, is somehow preserved at a quantum level within the material and re-emerges to spontaneously reconstruct the original atoms.
   But I'm just speculating way out of my league here.     ]

Hi Rik!

MAY A THOUSAND BIRTHDAY BLESSINGS RAIN DOWN UPON YOU FROM THE HEAVENS !!!
                                             :band:

[O.K., O.K. ... a little 'over the top', perhaps, but I think you deserve it and I enjoyed it!  :laugh: ]

Hi Alan.
    Can't remember if I welcomed you to New Mars or not. If not, sorry, and glad to have you aboard!   

    That photo you linked for us is very interesting; it looks like one of Saturn's moons has a seam running around it! I guess that's where the aliens joined the two halves together when they constructed it.
                                              

Dear Josh,
    This is an unexpected blow to us all at New Mars.
    I think we've had a few disagreements over the years but nothing which could ever seriously stand between us. I am genuinely saddened to hear you may be away for some time and I join the others in wishing and hoping that you'll keep us in mind and come back to us as soon as you possibly can.
    New Mars can't afford to be losing too many people of your obvious wit and intelligence.   ???

    I was very touched by your kind words about me in your last post and I'll be thinking fondly of you in your absence. Thanks for everything you've done for all of us and especially for me.
                                               

    Hoping to seeya soon ol' buddy.

Hi, CM.
    I'm always on the lookout for a bit of sensible discussion about potential fossils in Martian rock. 

    I saw these images a few days ago and was very interested in them because at first glance they looked like they could be fossiliferous. But I couldn't see enough detail to be sure of what I was seeing, so I gave up and moved on - which is what I suspect the guys at NASA have done too.

    I wasn't sure what you were trying to tell us so I looked up fossilised brachiopods and found this picture:-

    Now I think I know what you were implying with the 'radial lines' suggestion, though I'm still having trouble at this level of resolution.
    Another thing which I'm concerned about is the relative scale of these fossils - Mars (if they are fossils) versus Earth. My impression is the proposed Martian brachiopods must be absolutely tiny compared to the terrestrial version and this must mitigate against their being fossils.
    Is this not so?   ???

That's great news about the Cassini deflection manoeuvre.   :up:

    And Titan's flattened North Pole .. hmm .. fascinatinger and fascinatinger!!    
    What a year we've had!   

Refreshing is right!   :up:
    Mr. Zimmerman reminds us that "living is a life-shortening experience" and that space exploration isn't something that can be made risk-free any more than anything can be made risk-free.
    Bravo, Robert!

    In my opinion, he made a pretty good case for 1968 being more of a mess than 2004, too. Yet America took its chances and reached higher than anyone had ever tried before.
    Bravo, America!

    But this is no time for the U.S. to lose her nerve.
    "We choose to go to Mars and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard .."