New Mars Forums

G'day Slavvy,
I suppose it does matter because who ever controls space controls the world and the future. I can't remember who said it but someone said something to the effect of "Like the English who colonised America, the peole who colonise Mars will be the 'top-dogs' for the next 1000 years."

I would say that it would be possible, but not anytime very soon.

http://www.islandone.org/APC/Catapults/02.html
http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Matrio … ivers.html

That'll take a lot of cars.  :laugh:

But cars produce carbon monoxide... does anyone know if carbon monoxide is a greenhouse gas?

By the way, welcome to the New Mars forums dude.

I think that the US would give more respect to the UN if the UN actually did something. If the UN had of prevented Soviet Russia from starting the nuclear arms race then America would not have been put into the position of "world police" as it is now. The thing about the UN and international law is that it permits a soverign nation to do whatever it wants inside of its own borders, which means killing, oppression, fear etc. How can we have an organisation who is supposed to be protecting world peace and stopping rouge nations like Nazi Germany from forming if they allowed a nation to oppress it's people?

umm, how big will they be?, and I don't really want neutrons going into my back...

Reading over your post it sounds like your suggesting having them turned off while your walking around, but still, I think that they would be way too bulky for everyone to carry.

If anyone has seen the movie Red Planet (don't rush out and see it if you haven't, it's pathetic and you will hate it), they have nuclear batteries in their environmental suits. But they were really ridged and I would hate to wear one of them.

I was wondering;

what subjects will I need to take at school and what degrees should I aim for at Uni so I could become an effective martian colonist/astronaut?

I was doing a bit of thinking about mass and whatever for space-flights and like what to do on the trip over to Mars and I'm wondering, what the hell is there do to on a space trip which takes months?

Would I be able to take a guitar or something along, and what about the normal everyday stuff like shaving/hair cuts and things like that?

There seems to only be talk about the technical side, but what about the non-technical stuff like mundane life.

I also doubt it.

Israel and the Jews have pretty much never had peace in their entire history. But I believe that if there was a full-scale war then Israel will win. It says in the Bible that after Israel was re-formed as a country there will be hell to pay (no pun intended) for the enemies of Israel and they will be destoried.

By the way,
hello people, I haven't had much time to check the forums in ages, but I will try to login and post more often. 

Hey there,
I've been away for awhile but I'm back now (Yay).
Anyway, I got sent this email and I find it rather amusing.

SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective

I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under
18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each.

II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept
for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking
about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second --- 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, [is it?] moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting
element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them --- Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates
enormous air resistance --- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each.
In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously,
exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound
Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the
back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

Star dies in giant gamma ray bursts

Yup, I agree with you there.
In the shops at the moment, theres about 5-10 cds that I really really want, but they cost NZ$30-$35 each. Thats insane, you can't expect a normal person to be able to afford all of that. When it comes to burning cds, music and games etc, I ask myself, if it really was illegal, then why are cd-writers sold in the first place? I don't go out and copy lots of cds for my friends or anything. But, like, they sell cd-writers, so what do they expect when people copy cds because they can't afford to buy them all from the shop.

That sounds quite cool. I wonder if the Mars Society will go for this...