New Mars Forums

Hi Alt!
    I believe I'm detecting a bit of a diversionary red-herring in tackling the definition of an 'anti-coalition-pro-UN' news medium, rather than the main point of these revelations about possible major corruption in the anti-war camp.
    But O.K., I'll go along with it briefly. I don't know which of the American media are more likely to give you a balanced evaluation of the Iraq situation but, here in Australia, it's quite difficult to find any which aren't, or weren't in the past, distinctly anti-war (not to mention distinctly anti-American).
    Our ABC and SBS television services have been discussed on the letters pages of newspapers with regard to their obvious stance against the liberation of Iraq. Just the other morning, I witnessed the veteran presenter of our "Today" program visibly squirming with stifled aggression towards our Prime Minister over Australia's involvement in Iraq. Many of our group chat shows, on almost any channel, feature young luminaries in the world of T.V. journalism jeering at your President Bush, Britain's Tony Blair, and our John Howard.
    As I've mentioned, it's really very difficult to find any reference to the growing scandal of this oil-based, U.N.-anti-war-group corruption in any media outlets here in Australia. It's not surprising, in view of the plainly anti-war pro-U.N. position of the majority of Australian journalists during the past year or more, that this shocking story is being soft-pedalled as much as possible. If found to be even half true, it will pull the rug out from under the carefully fabricated anti-coalition worldview we've been plied with for months. If there had been the slightest whiff of President Bush being involved in any such scheme, the left-wing ferrets of the Australian Journalists Association would have been into it like rats up a drainpipe!   :;):

    But enough of this little detour away from the important point. Has anyone heard any further news about widespread and high-reaching corruption in the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program?
    You may need to look pretty hard for details because I don't think information will be readily forthcoming.

    As an aside, and despite the doom-and-gloom "Iraq is a flaming cauldron" views we see all day on T.V., I add this, written by British liberal commentator, William Shawcross, in "The Spectator":-

    I know there are many things wrong with the situation in Iraq and the terrorism, inflicted by a few thousand well-armed religious fanatics, has caused more problems than anticipated. But I like to try to balance the monotonous diet of pessimism orchestrated by the media with some of the (deliberately?) overlooked good news.
    Be thoughtful about what you are fed by the media. Whenever I witness a mass campaign by the media to whip people into a frenzy of condemnation about something, I fetch out my trusty bull***t detector! It's telling me we're all standing, up to our ankles, in left-wing bulls***t!!
                                               :laugh:

My first "inside look", too. Thanks, Cindy!   

Luca, if you haven't done so already, go back to RobS's post on April 29th and read the site he gave a link to. It's a fairly comprehensive account of the chemistry on Mars, as it is understood at this particular moment. (Thanks again, Rob!  :up:  )
    [P.S. Luca, I don't necessarily agree with all of the conclusions reached in Rob's link - especially the 'bone dry Mars for the last 3.7 billion years bit !!!!  :down:  I can't possibly go along with that and I suspect we still have a very great deal to learn about our favourite planet (outside of Earth, of course! ).]

    Hi Greg!
    A very warm welcome to New Mars. 60+ y/o kid, huh? ... All the better; somebody with a bit of perspective on life! 

    At first I thought Adrian's response to the astronomy assignment question seemed a little harsh and out of character but his explanation does indeed make a lot of sense. I believe in kids being required to show a little initiative with their school work. We ought not to be making life too easy for them because it'll do 'em no good in the long run to be spoon fed.

    Stu:-

     :laugh:  Ha-ha !!
    I agree entirely with your sentiments and I love your sense of humour. More power to you, sir!

I guess this topic has been aired somewhere else here at New Mars(?) but I haven't found it yet. It's been hard to find any reference to it anywhere in the press or on T.V., too, but maybe I haven't been paying enough attention.
    The Australian newspaper ran an editorial which sums up the story and I've been waiting for it to really take hold in all the mainstream media - so far it's been kept fairly quiet.
    Here's the editorial from two days ago (somebody please tell me if quoting it verbatim is against the regulations and I'll delete it. I'm assuming that because it's 2 days old, it's no longer a copyright issue.)

    So, it's beginning to look like the anti-war brigade's attitude was actually "all about oil", not that of the coalition of the willing!
    I've always thought that that was bound to prove the much more likely case, since now the Iraqi oil production benefits go straight to the Iraqi people. Australia certainly never got any illicit oil out of it, I'm sure of that!
    Up until now, the "all about oil" theory just never made any sense to me. Now, it does ... but not in the way most of the press has been bleating about it for the past 12 months.
                                         :;):
    I, for one, am very much looking forward to some of these hypocritical "anti-war" crooks being brought to justice. But it'll be interesting to see whether some of the anti-coalition-pro-UN media will give it much coverage.
                                            ???

Yes, thanks Rob. I almost posted a link to this site myself but you beat me to it.
    It doesn't look like good news for the Wet Mars brigade, me included. It's mainly that damned olivine which has thrown a spanner in the works!
    And all that H2SO4 they're talking about - if it's as ubiquitous and as concentrated as they suggest, will it pose a danger to materials we send there? I'm talking about polymer greenhouses, building foundations, astronauts' boots and gloves, etc.
   If we begin terraforming and produce just a little water to start with, that water will be very corrosive I should think - at least until we release much larger amounts of water to dilute the acid.
                                         ???

    [Unless there's more to it than meets the eye and the conclusions in the link are all premature.]

Many thanks, Bill!
    It was nice of you to remember my views on potential martian life when you spotted this blog. The methane recently confirmed in the martian air certainly does add some weight to the idea that Mars has a bacterial biosphere and it's always gratifying to see one's pet hypotheses gather strength.
    I suppose there's still quite a way to go, though, before definitive proof of life on Mars is declared. The whole planet could be as sterile as motel decor for all the absolute proof I have!
                                             
    But I doubt it.

The notion of adding bacteria to the Venusian atmosphere to "help with the co2 problem" may not work.
    Back in early 2003, there was a bit of a buzz about the dark bands in the atmosphere of Venus, which only show up in UV light. This means there must be a chemical in the bands which absorbs UV light.
    Nobody could figure out what the chemical might be, unless it's of bacterial origin.

    If Venus already has bacteria in its atmosphere, those bacteria haven't done a very good job of reducing the levels of CO2 so far!
                                           

Hi BGD!
    I was interested to see your reference to the so-called Zero Point Energy in your last post. I've just finished reading "The Hunt for Zero Point", a book by a "Jane's Defence Weekly" Aerospace Consultant called Nick Cook. (For those new to this jargon, Zero Point refers to quantum vacuum fluctuations, whose existence has been experimentally verified by the Casimir Effect. Empty space isn't actually empty. Untold numbers of virtual particles spring into and out of existence every second in every cubic centimetre of space - a seething foam of potentially accessible energy.)
    According to Cook's research, the Nazis had a secret weapons program in the closing years of WWII, which had been subsumed into the jurisdiction of the SS. Although nominally under Himmler's control, the program was actually run by a guy called Kammler, an SS general who was using jewish scientists selected from the concentration camps to help develop anti-gravity propulsion and weaponry based on the theories of an Austrian called Schauberger.
    I don't know whether I should continue describing the main thrust of the book, since some of you may want to read it for yourselves and I'm not sure if I'm breaking some kind of copyright law! (I guess a broad precis is O.K., though.)

    Anyhow, Cook makes it look very much as though there's been a 'black' anti-gravity propulsion program going on in America since the late forties. Kammler, among others, was never called to account at Nuremburg and nobody ever tried to trace him. This, despite his involvement in slave labour programs and having been instrumental in the massacre of 62 scientists, in early 1945, who had worked on his secret weapons agenda. It looks as though Kammler may have bought safe passage to the U.S. using his experimental results in anti-gravity as his ticket.
    It's a great book and the author's background in high-tech military aircraft, together with his professional contacts within the aerospace industry, make the story very believable. I recommend it to anyone interested in the new concepts emerging now in the world of physics.

    Anyway, my point is this ("Thank God, he's getting to the point at last!", I hear you all cry.    ): It's fascinating that Alcubierre and others have shown that warp drive is at least hypothetically possible, without breaking any laws of physics, although it requires staggering amounts of energy. But then, coincidentally, it's becoming less and less heretical to discuss the distinct possibility that quantum vacuum fluctuations might be the source of unimaginable amounts of just what warp drive needs .. energy.
    And in the background, we have stories about 'black' programs within the U.S. military to create gravitational propulsion and we have people like Podkletnov and Ning Li, who have done promising work, both practical and theoretical, into electro-gravitics in recent years.

    Could all this represent some kind of serendipitous convergence of ideas? Might we be on the threshold of an enormous leap forward in technology and clean cheap energy for all?
    Something's definitely going on. It's in the air ... I can feel it in my bones!
                                                 

I would like to add my welcome also, Tas!   
    Stu is quite right about the New Mars site; the debate here is of a high standard and our members very tolerant.

    Our leader, Dr. Robert Zubrin, who is the founder of The Mars Society, devised a plan for sending humans to Mars. The plan is called Mars Direct and it has been modified to become NASA's preferred method of sending explorers to the Red Planet.
    It has been estimated that Mars Direct could conceivably place the first crew of four astronauts on Mars in 10 years and for a cost of $50 billion, about $5 billion per year over the development period.
    The plan would leave a string of habitation modules, automated propellant factories, nuclear reactors and pressurised rovers across the surface of Mars which could serve as the basis of a colonisation effort once the initial exploration was completed.
    If humans were to be sent one-way after that, even a conservative modification of Mars Direct would probably allow a colony of maybe a hundred people to be built up over two to three decades. Allowing 10 years for the development phase, 20 years for the initial exploration phase, and another 30 years for colonisation, I believe we could have an expanding and almost self-sufficient colony of over 100 people on Mars by about 2065, and for a total cost in today's dollars of between $300-400 billion. (This does not take any kind of terraforming effort into account.) The cost is very affordable when you consider that it is spread over 60 years - amounting to only about $6 billion a year.

    I hope this whets your appetite for more!   

Thanks for the translation, Rxke. I think it would take me quite some time to get a handle on the Dutch language, even though there are some distinct similarities with English here and there.
    There are some obviously similar words in German too, but then German grammatical rules ruin everything for non-German-speaking people by being so ponderously complex. Does Dutch has difficult rules of grammar also?

    For anyone here who may be interested, I can remember a few words in German which hardly need translating into English at all because they're so similar. These were a great comfort to us novice students of German because of their familiar appearance! :-

              English                         German

                House                                   Haus
                Mouse                                   Maus
                Sun                                      Sonne
                Father                                  Vater
                Mother                                  Mutter
                Sister                                   Schwester
                One                                      Ein
                Four                                     Vier
                Seven                                   Sieben
                Eight                                     Acht
                Blue                                      Blau
                Green                                    Grun
                Table                                    Tafel
                Blood                                     Blut

    I noticed some similarities between Dutch and German in Bolbuyk's sentences too:-
    I have (English)  Ich habe (German)  Ik heb (Dutch)

    It's not difficult to imagine that these three, and no doubt other languages, were all the same language a few centuries ago.
    Apparently, if we English-speaking people were to be exposed to the English of several centuries ago, we would have great difficulty understanding it. In fact, having lived in England myself, and having had occasion to listen to numerous accents and colloquialisms from various parts of the British Isles, I can tell you that, even today, you can have considerable trouble understanding and making yourself understood!       :laugh:

    But enough of this digression from the subject of the thread. How did we get so far off course? 
    Yes, Eric, it seems that many people have been casting around for some way to explain the various paradoxes of Mars. There's evidence suggestive of early tectonic activity but no evidence of tectonic mountain building. There's extensive evidence of plentiful water all over Mars at some stage(s) in Mars' history but there's olivine all over the place too - even in the depths of low-lying terrain like the floor of Mariner Valley. The planet is small and should have been volcanically dead for maybe two billion years but there are large areas which have been resurfaced by massive flows of lava in the last ten million years or less (depending on the accuracy of crater-counts). Much of the northern hemisphere is apparently much younger than most of the southern hemisphere, and on average 5 kilometres lower too - but nobody has a clue why!
    The Russian group's explanation isn't really anything very new. The idea that a major impact might be the root cause of most of the present martian mysteries has been 'doing the rounds' for some time now. It would be interesting to know the Russians' estimates for how big the impactor was, where on the surface it struck, how steep the angle was, and when it hit. Is the Hellas Basin supposed to be the scar from their impactor?
    One obvious difficulty with their hypothesis involves Phobos and Deimos. These two martian moons have densities and albedos which make them virtually indistinguishable from  carbonaceous chondrites found in the asteroid belt. It seems very much more likely that they are captured satellites rather than orbiting impact ejecta.
    But, while we're on the subject of trying to explain Mars' enigmas, the two martian moons themselves only add to the mystery. It appears that their histories are not identical. While both moons are about as densely cratered as the lunar uplands, Phobos's craters appear fresh and sharp, while those on Deimos are wholly or partially filled in with dust. I haven't heard any official explanation for this anomaly but I might suggest one in passing. Perhaps Mars was subjected, relatively recently, to a significant but short-lived shower of debris (asteroids?) from one direction. Perhaps Phobos happened to be on the affected side of Mars at the time, while Deimos was on the opposite side of the planet and therefore shielded. Dust from the impacts on Phobos may have circled Mars and settled on Deimos preferentially, for some reason. Some of the impacts on Phobos (perhaps including the one responsible for the major crater Stickney) could have shifted it to its present unstable orbit, which is inside the Roche limit.
    Just a few thoughts. I'll stop rambling now!

So, Luca, if I understand you correctly, you're saying there are times of the day on Mars when the sky is a vivid blue and so are many of the rocks?
    This is a remarkable position to take on the subject of the sky colour on Mars! I've been suspicious for years that the martian sky would often appear blue-tinged if the local dust content of the air were sufficiently low. Very few people seem to agree; most of them assuming the sky is always varying shades of orangey-pink, as NASA presents it.
    Now, you come along and, not satisfied with perhaps an occasionally pale blue sky, you'd have us believe the sky and the rocks are a rich shade of blue at certain times of almost every day!! 

    I have no quarrel with your argument about the sky, in principle, because I tend to think Mars is more Earth-like than the photos might suggest; certainly less lurid red than NASA generally portrays it.
    But I've never seen rocks of the colour you present in your photos, except perhaps for crystals of copper sulphate which we used to grow on threads of cotton in saturated solutions when I was a kid in school.
    The rocks you show us just look too blue to be realistic!
    Are you sure this is what you think the actual surface of Mars would look like to an astronaut standing there?!  ???
    It seems to me to be very hard to believe.

Yes, I think KSR glossed over the problems of transportation by invoking better technology and larger spacecraft. I don't mean that in a critical way; I'm sure that his scenario is quite attainable in the future if we put our minds to it and invest the green stuff!

    Considering we live in an era when even getting a few humans to Mars seems like a major feat, the idea of getting hundreds of species of animals there in good condition looks daunting. I still think sending a few cattle in the first few colonising missions would be feasible, though, and cows are used to total domestication, often spending long months indoors in Earth's colder countries. But I think a rotating interplanetary transfer vehicle would be absolutely essential in the case of cattle - for pretty obvious reasons involving floating 'debris' if you try shipping them in zero-g!
    I like Rxke's thinking about sending creatures in a state of hibernation. And, if martian winters are going to be generally twice as long as Earth's and twice as cold, genetically engineered species which can hibernate for 6 to 8 months at a time might be a very good idea(?).

    We've discussed at another thread somewhere the prospect of populating oceans on a terraformed Mars with fish and cetaceans. I think it may be harder to establish a stable marine environment than a land-based one. I can imagine the new seas being thick with mud for maybe centuries and taking a long time to settle down in a chemical sense - acidity/alkalinity might be a problem, for example.
    And even if we can get the water into a suitable state, how would you go about shipping a mating pair of humpback whales to Mars?!! We probably won't have 'transporters' and transparent aluminium, a la Star Trek, any time soon!   

    No, I think we'll be needing Byron's speedy 'Mars-in-a-week' transportation system if we're going to get serious about establishing terrestrial fauna on our new world. And maybe some of that tranparent aluminium too ... !