New Mars Forums

I really only support democracy because I can't think of a better way.

The number of times I've seen somebody doing something half-witted and turned to my wife and said: "And that person has the vote ... ??!!!"
                                    ???   
    I really only support democracy because I can't think of a better way. But maybe there should be some kind of restriction on the number of "jackasses" who get to vote (?).
    At least in America, the worst of the 'great unwashed' probably don't bother to vote anyhow. Here in Australia, we more or less force the mongrels to show up on polling day because voting is compulsory. (Are we suckers for punishment or what?! )

[P.S. While I'm ranting, I've heard compelling arguments against allowing just anyone to have children, too. As I've mentioned in the past, a woman I used to know would look at some kinds of parent and say there should be an examination you have to pass before being allowed to procreate. I think she may have had a good point and I think it may be just as applicable to voting, too!   :hm:  ]

Thanks, Reb and Atomoid!
    It's great to see this stuff being discussed in an open and intelligent way. I don't know why NASA can't do the same.
    Oh, I realise NASA can't be seen to be too speculative about it but I feel they're taking the reticence just a little too far. Whether it's entirely their policy to do so or just another example of professional scientists being too afraid of ridicule, and even ostracism, I don't know. But NASA's catch-cry recently has been "Follow the Water!" and yet it seems more like they're actively avoiding it than following it!
    Given that we now know much of Mars has water in the soil, and often a great deal of water quite close to the surface, enigmatic features extraordinarily reminiscent of ponds, 'tongues' of ice, slurries of mud around craters, etc. should surely be investigated more closely. We have the Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Express orbiters sending back countless images; surely one of these satellites, at least for some of the time, could be devoted to analysing a few of these features in an attempt to determine their nature once and for all.
    Where is all the excited discussion about it from NASA scientists? Or are they all under pressure to conform in some way?  At least Dr. Chris McKay came out and said the discussion of Opportunity's "magic carpet" of mud-like material just "went away" when it shouldn't have. (I like that man! )
    I think it's becoming more difficult to deny there's a kind of code of silence about water on Mars, despite NASA's purported interest in it.  O.K., I agree there's no indisputable evidence of standing bodies of water (or brine) on the martian surface but, with the way NASA's going about the investigation (or should I say not going about it?), there never will be!

    I know I tend to harp on paradigms, but I think they're important in this situation. There's a paradigm going back to Viking, and perhaps as far as the disappointment of Mariner 4's photographs, which says Mars is a bone-dry, frozen, sterile desert and standing water is impossible on the surface due to the temperature and atmospheric pressure. Despite Viking evidence suggesting metabolism by micro-organisms in the soil, exotic hypothetical soil chemistry was invented to explain away those results. Now that we have tantalising photographic evidence of surface brine and ice, it's being conveniently ignored.
    Important reputations rest on the proclamations that Mars is dry and, consequently, lifeless. I have a strong feeling nobody wants to rock the boat too much while the 'eminences grises' responsible for those proclamations are still alive.

    Another crackpot conspiracy theory?
    Yeah, maybe ... or maybe not.   :;):

[P.S. By the way, try and ignore my paranoid ranting and keep the pictures coming!  I, for one, appreciate the effort you guys put into this thread. Nice work!     ]

RobS:-

    Ble-echhhh!!   :bars: .. 

CM:-

    Sounds grim!  ..  :laugh:

    Hmmm. Unless things in the food department start looking up, I may be forced to turn NASA down when they plead with me to lead the first expedition to Mars.
                                             

I see your point, Earthfirst, but there is the problem of gravitational fields and escape velocities.
    At present, the outer solar system is cold. When a small moon or planetary body is very cold, any atmosphere it may have can remain on its surface because the average kinetic energy of the gas molecules is so low. The gravitational field is weak but the molecules haven't the velocity to escape.
    Even so, today in the outer solar system, only Titan has an atmosphere truly worthy of the name.
    If we imagine some future era, when the Sun is a vast red ball bathing the outer planets in warmth, the frozen seas of Europa and Callisto may melt and Titan's surface temperature might rise to equal Earth's present average. But then the problem of weak surface gravity will come into its own and cause trouble. Even the largest moons of the outer system, Ganymede and Titan, have surface gravitational accelerations equal to only 1/7th of Earth's - that's even less than Luna's!  Within a very short timeframe, all the freshly melted water and the dense nitrogen atmosphere of Titan will have escaped into space, leaving dry airless rock behind.
    In the past, astronomers have hypothesised that the massive atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, etc., might be driven off by the heat of a red giant Sun, perhaps leaving behind Earth-size rocky cores. Now that we've discovered Jupiter-like planets orbiting other stars, well within the orbital distance of our own planet Mercury, we recognise that hot gas giants can and do exist. So the likes of Jupiter and Saturn will retain their present form, even after the Sun has expanded into a red giant.
    We can't live on the gas giants and their moons will all be like our own Moon, unterraformable, so what's left? All we could do, I suppose, is either move the inner planets outward, as you suggested, or keep dragging still-frozen KBOs inward to replenish the volatiles on our new home worlds. Either way, it's once more a case of playing planetary snooker!

    By the time we get to that stage, with our own solar system on its last legs, we (if 'we' still exist) will have undreamt of technology available to us. We'll most likely have travelled to numerous other star systems and established ourselves there. Some of the stars around which we'll have settled might be K-type stars, which remain on the main sequence far longer than stars like our Sun and could sustain our civilisation for many billions of years after our own is finished.
    So why worry?     

Thanks, Atomoid, for the comeback on the surface water question.
    The 'neutron-based' water detection instrument has, as far as I know, only produced maps on a planetary scale. So I think your comment about the sensitivity being too low to detect small ponds of brine is probably right.
    Perhaps one of the cameras orbiting Mars could be aimed at one of these hypothetical ponds in such a way as to capture a glinting of the Sun off the surface. A mirror-like effect would betray the existence of  a body of water. Or is the idea of standing bodies of water (brine) on the martian surface so avant-garde that no professional scientist would even entertain it. In other words, is it a case of: "It's impossible so we don't need to investigate it ... end of story."?
                                                 ???

Sounds good!   
    Picking up a really old magazine in a book exchange can be very entertaining and absorbing but this is like a 'newer' and more reliable version of that same sensation, I suppose.
    I found a website somewhere once that had advertisements from the fifties and sixties for 'new' cars. In retrospect, you know so well that the vehicles advertised are heavy, gas-guzzling, unreliable death-traps! But in the pictures, they're so shiny and portrayed as something you've just got to have; the people in the pictures beaming all over their faces and awe-struck by the magnificence of these latest 'superior' machines! (All now long forgotten in car graveyards.)
                                                   

I just can't figure it out.
    Sometimes I could swear I'm looking into deep dark pools of briny water in these pictures - with shorelines and transparent shallows, gradually deepening to where the bottom is obscured by the mass of water above it.
    Then I see another picture and think .. Nahhh! It's just dark sand.
    Is there no instrument orbiting Mars today which can tell us if we're looking at liquid water, or at least brine? I'm going crazy with curiosity here!!
                                         :bars2:

Don't know if you still visit here or not but
    HAPPY BIRTHDAY anyway, JoeDaWolf !!!
    Drop in and say hello some time.
                                                       

Messianic Prophet, ca. AD 30 :-

Bill:-

    O.K. Thanks Bill!
    Just thought I'd ask.   

[You realise, of course, that if John Kerry is elected President and abandons space, I will never forgive you.   ??? ]

Hi Comstar03.
    Yes, Australia did have an early stab at space exploration back in the Woomera days. But it's been "a long time between drinks" - to quote a phrase!   
    When I was a kid, I wasn't playing with wind-up toys of Aussie space capsules carrying Aussie astronauts. It was the Soviet Union or it was America doing the good stuff ... [period].

    I've seen what years of apathy and neglect did to the nascent Australian space program and I certainly don't want it, or anything like it, to happen to the United States.

    That's why the article about John Kerry is so worrying to me, even though I'm not American. I see myself as a citizen of Earth and I see space as the only way forward for the human race. To that extent, I feel justified in at least asking where the U.S. space program would be going under John Kerry.
    The article I linked to above seems to be saying Kerry is a closet Luddite who thinks the universe ends at the cruising altitude of Air Force One. That's a serious accusation and I wanted to know if there's any truth in it.
                                               ???