New Mars Forums

Hi Cindy!
    Yes, I noticed this item of news too.
    You're right, of course, that it does indicate you could find one or two sterile areas on a planet but that you would be unwise to draw sweeping conclusions from such sparse data.
    Even if the current wisdom is correct, and Viking really did establish that the Martian regolith is without life in the two places tested, we certainly cannot say the rest of Mars is lifeless also.

    But where does that leave us? I submit that we knew that already and that this result from the Atacama Desert, while interesting, doesn't really change anything as far as Mars is concerned. The situation, according to the present-day paradigm, is that Mars is most likely dead but that there could be isolated oases where life hangs on by its fingernails. If not, then perhaps we'll find fossils of life which developed early in Mars' history but later succumbed to the deteriorating conditions.
    That's what 'science' says about it today.

    You already know the way I feel about it!    :;):

I guess I'll have to apologise and withdraw my last post here because I haven't been able to get any confirmation personally that it's true.
    I'm very sorry if I've raised any hopes unjustifiably but, believe me, nobody could be any more disappointed than I am.

    Two people reported seeing the same news clip, involving Dick Cheney I think, but it must have been a case of inaccurate journalism.
                                                 

I'm hearing that President Bush has already announced a Moon-base and humans-to-Mars, all within 15 years.
    I haven't been able to confirm it yet.
                                                           ???

Is it true what I heard this evening, that President Bush has just announced both a Moon-base and humans-to-Mars within the next 15 years?!!!
                                              ??? 

    Or are they having me on?

Yup.

I really don't understand how people can imagine living on the Moon is a realistic idea.
    The daylight lasts two weeks and the darkness the same. There are no volatiles except for rumours of water-ice at the poles, and even that most likely exists as a low percentage in the regolith, spread over hundreds of square kilometres - a nightmare to try and recover.
    But the biggest factor against 'living' on the Moon is the gravity. Unless you plan to go there and stay there, a horrible thought given the desolation and general conditions, you will want to go home to Earth again frequently. How long can a human live in 1/6th g and yet return to Earth gravity and resume normal living?
    I suggest crews would have to be rotated about every 6 months, longer is possible but this exacerbates the detrimental effects.
    I know Mars presents essentially the same problem with its 0.38g but it has approximately 24-hour days, vast quantities of water and other volatiles, and the prospect of terraformation making it another home for humanity. The chances of getting people to go there on a one-way basis are very much greater than could ever be the case with the Moon.
    While it is much further than the Moon, Mars has an atmosphere for aerobraking. Thus from Low Earth Orbit, getting payloads to Mars isn't fundamentally more difficult, in terms of rocket fuel, than getting the same bulk down onto the lunar surface. It just takes longer.
    However, the prize is worth the journey time, since Mars is scientifically far more interesting than Luna.

    If the U.S.A. is going to use Moon exploration as a cover-story for a major military build-up in the Earth-Moon system, I will be extremely disappointed. Such a scheme would undoubtedly put paid to any prospects of humans to Mars for decades, quite possibly for longer than I have available to me!
                                                     

Robert:-

    No no no no no !!! Dear Robert (and I mean Dear Robert without irony), you misinterpret my post completely and misjudge my intentions.
    I'm on record elsewhere at New Mars praising Bill for his intelligence and his cogent arguments in favour of his ideals.

    Bill recently espoused the idea of utilising waste heat from a fission reactor to supplement the performance of a solar tower on Mars. I made enthusiastic noises about it and tried to encourage more discussion about it, even when reservations about radiation were voiced by other interested contributors. I still think it's an idea worth further consideration.
    Bill's comment at this thread, about doing our smelting under a solar tower collector-skirt, struck me as amusing and I wanted to tell him so. But I wanted to say it in a tongue-in-cheek way which might also be found humorous.
    Knowing Bill holds anti-Republican views (he makes no secret of it), I assumed he must be a Democrat. So I couched my compliment about Bill's sense of humour in a classic pantomime description of his political leanings, as you might expect a right-wing radio shock-jock to express it.

    After some of the things I've said at New Mars, I would half expect someone like, say Alt2War or even Bill, to describe me as a "wild-eyed, slavering, gun-toting, nazi-sympathising, white-supremacist red-neck with neo-imperialist leanings"! But that's O.K. .. it's all part of the game.

    The truth of the matter, as I touched on above, is that I, in common with most people here I suspect, hold Bill in high regard. When he posts about something, I tend to sit up and pay attention. Even when I don't altogether agree with his political views, he makes me think hard about my own position on things and he's been successful in causing me to modify one or two of my beliefs simply because of his persuasive logic and the inoffensive way he presents it.

    Thinking I knew Bill well enough, and that he knew enough about me not to always take me at face value, I launched into the post in question.

    I'm saddened a little, Robert, to think that you could really take me for the kind of person of "harsh prejudice" you went on to describe.
    On the other hand, given that you believed I was genuinely attacking Bill, I have to say I admire the way you came to his defence. As it happens, I've also been a quiet admirer of your democratic views and been impressed with your drive and determination to 'work the system', as it was meant to be worked, and 'go through channels' to bring about change. That takes energy and initiative.

    You see, Robert, I didn't mean it and I'm sorry for the whole misunderstanding. I never would have done it if I'd known it was going to cause more trouble than it was worth.
                                               

[P.S. I hope this doesn't mean we can't rag each other a little bit every now and then. I think it helps if we can laugh at our politics sometimes; it reminds us that, first and foremost, we're human beings.]

Josh:-

    Nahhh!! That's just a little bit of healthy diversity of opinion about politics and such.
    In a hundred years time, what difference will it make?!
    Or, colloquially ... WTF!!
                                           

Bill:-

Ha-ha !!   :laugh:

     You know, Bill, for a hand-wringing, bleeding-heart, linguine-spined, arty-farty, pinko Democrat, you have a pretty good sense of humour!

    [I meant all that in the nicest possible way, of course.  ]

Hi Robert!
    Interesting figures about the mineralogy of martian clays. 

    I wonder how surface-type 2, which seems to have experienced water, still has 2.9% olivine in it. As Christensen is fond of pointing out (almost gleefully if you ask me), olivine is very susceptible to weathering by water and will even break down in the presence of water-ice.
    The only explanation which occurs to me is that aeolian erosion of relatively young olivine deposits in Mars' more recent drier past may have mixed this mineral into the ubiquitous dust and spread it thinly all over the planet (?).
    Perhaps this explanation might also account for the olivine detected deep in the canyons of Mariner Valley, where there appears to be ample evidence of abundant water at some stage(s) in martian history.

    Any thoughts about any of this, anyone?
                                           ???

Cindy, I don't believe I've seen the particular program you mention about JFK's assassination. (Funny .. that word 'assassination' looks like it's got too many 's's in it !)
    But there was a series of programs here about the killing and they called it "The Men who killed Kennedy", as far as I can remember. Anyhow, they were definitely saying it was 'men', not 'a man', who committed the act.

    As far as I can tell, from various lines of evidence I've seen in television shows, I would be inclined to say there were at least two gunmen.
    My feeling is that Oswald probably wasn't involved in the shooting but was just the fall-guy. Ruby was a slightly flaky stooge somehow induced to kill Oswald so as to prevent Oswald's innocence ever being demonstrated.

    I think Kennedy was purposefully eliminated by a group of people in accordance with a plan. I'm not certain who was behind it all but there appears, at least to me, to have been a systematic cover-up after the event on the part of the Dallas police and the FBI.

    At this stage of the game, it seems unlikely we'll ever know the whole truth about what actually happened and why.
    Just my thoughts on it.
                                            ???

Bill, I must say I do admire your lateral thinking in combining two separate ideas, nuclear reactors and solar towers, into one.
    Martian insolation is only about 43% of Earth's but, supplemented by the waste heat from a reactor, the solar heat accumulator at the base of a solar tower might function well and produce a very considerable updraught to power the turbines.

    Nice one, Bill!           :;):