New Mars Forums

Somebody tell me this is a joke.
    That picture of Saturn is the one I was getting the other day when I clicked on Cindy's "Schiaparelli Basin on Mars"!
    Just to confirm this, I went back to Cindy's post and clicked again.
    Now I'm not getting Schiaparelli or Saturn!
    I'm getting the "E Nebula in Aquila"!!!!   

    I think I need to go see a doctor or something!
                                     

Small non-relevant post.
    I keep meaning to say that I've stopped vacationing now and returned to Cairns. A good thing too! The temperatures on the Gold Coast were unseasonably cold and I only managed to get into the sea on one day.
    Fortunately spring comes early in the tropics and Cairns is basking in warm sunshine with daily maximums of about 28 deg.C
    Almost time to hit the pool again!   

[Sorry! Off-topic. I'll shut up now.]

The 6' man should take about 35 to 40 minutes to walk 4 kilometres.
    It depends, of course, on the definition of 'walk'. My mother-in-law's idea of walking would result in 4 kilometres taking about an hour and a half - assuming she made it to the 4 km mark at all !!
    Then again, I've seen power-walkers who could probably do 4 kilometres in not much more than 20 minutes.

    The term 'alkaline' is really just the opposite of 'acidic'. In chemical terms, an acid is a proton donor while an alkali (or 'base') is a proton acceptor.
    For example, nitric acid's formula is HNO3. When you mix it with water, it goes into solution to form the ions H+ and NO3-. The H+ is simply a hydrogen ion, a hydrogen atom deprived of its electron and hence positively charged. It's the simplest ion there is because it's just a proton!
    Because HNO3 provides a proton, it is a proton donor or an acid.

    A common alkali is sodium hydroxide or NaOH. When you mix it with water, it too goes into solution, this time forming the ions Na+ and OH-. The OH- ion is called a hydroxide ion and, as you can see, it is negatively charged. It's negatively charged because it carries an extra electron. This negativity causes it to attract the H+ ion (or proton), making it a proton acceptor or an alkali (also called a 'base').

    If you mix acids and alkalis, one neutralises the other. Using the above examples, the H+ (proton) combines strongly with the OH- (hydroxide ion) to form H2O (water, of course). Hence, no more acidity and no more alkalinity - they're both neutralised!
    The remainder of the chemicals also combine to form what is known as a 'salt', in this case sodium nitrate or NaNO3.
    Common table salt is also a 'salt' (of course! ) because it too results from the neutralising of an acid and an alkali (base). Hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide give rise to table salt (sodium chloride) if you mix them.

    Now, as for the description of 'alkaline' applied to long-life batteries, I don't know what type of chemical reaction is being used here. I suppose I could look it up but maybe it's enough for you to realise that the term simply means that some kind of alkali, or proton acceptor, is involved in the generation of electricity(?).
    It's enough to keep me happy anyhow!!   

[P.S. No doubt Robert Dyck could enlighten us as to the alkaline battery's inner workings right off the top of his head. That man's a mine of technical info.     ]

How incredibly flattering that anyone should be interested enough to ask me such a thing! It makes me go 'all unnecessary' to think my childhood exploits could be the subject of curiosity on the part of another person. I'm very much afraid it's bound to turn out a disappointment.

    To begin with, it sounds like I came from a family of jet-setting world travellers. Nothing could be further from the truth! Until I was ten, I'd never been more than 150 kilometres from where I was born.
    The fact is, the tourist trek through Egypt was simply part of a migration from Australia to Britain, mostly by sea. We stopped briefly in places like Singapore, Penang, Colombo in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), Mumbai (then called Bombay), and then the Suez Canal. You could either stay with the ship as it passed through the canal or leave the ship at the Red Sea end and rejoin it at the Mediterranean end, with a bus trip to the pyramids and Cairo in between! Needless to say, we opted for the bus trip.

    When trying to remember things from your childhood (and even later in life, I suppose), you tend to recall only isolated events which caught your interest at the time. My memories of Egypt are like disjointed sequences in a movie, some very clear and coherent and others blurred and confused.
    The highlights, as I mentioned, were the museum and the Great Pyramid. No, I never climbed the pyramid! I got as far as about the third or fourth layer of blocks but an ascent to the top is no easy matter. It's not only physically demanding but quite dangerous too.
    I do remember the cramped passage ways inside the pyramid, and especially a long upward climb in a single-file line of tourists in semi-darkness. The ceiling of that passageway was very low and, even at my age, I had to crouch slightly. The adults were really bent over!

    The Museum of Antiquities was full of mummified remains of Egyptians from different social strata and from different eras in history. I remember being mesmerised by the age of these remains and personal effects; the thought that these people had really lived their lives and used these items so long ago. The older the exhibit, the more fascinating I found it! For some reason, I recall being especially interested in anything 3,000 years old or older. Don't ask me why! I guess I thought 3,000 years was just an incredible age.
    I got dragged out of there before I'd really had a chance to take everything in. If it had been left up to me, we'd have missed the bus for sure!

    Speaking of the bus, I remember vividly a thought that came to me as I sat in the bus waiting to leave a hotel we'd stopped at for lunch. Looking out the window, I stared at two Egyptian boys, not much older than myself, wearing what looked to me like stripy pyjamas(! ) and sitting on the dusty kerb with their bare feet in the gutter. They looked dirty. Not the spectacular dirt that sometimes adorns western children who've been out playing; this was that grimy, more permanent sort of dirt you associate with people who probably don't have access to bathrooms and soap. For the first time in my life I felt the deep-seated disquiet of what, in retrospect, I now recognise as a real sense of vulnerability. It had never dawned on me before that I was privileged to have what I had. I can't even say I'd considered  it my right. I'd just never even considered it!
    Now, looking at those boys, I imagined the glass not being there ... the bus not being there ... my parents not being there!! How long would I last, alone in the streets of Cairo?! Of all the things I experienced in the five or six weeks of that, to me, monumental journey to a new life in London, my most powerful, enduring and frightening memory is of that sudden revelation in the bus.

    The remainder of the trip took us to Malta and finally to Naples. We had brought our car on the ship and drove the rest of the way to England via the ruins of Pompeii, Rome, the Mont Blanc tunnel under the Alps, then Paris and the cross-channel ferry.
    I won't bore you with any more details!

["Thank God for that!!", I hear you all shout!   :laugh:  ]

Nope!
    This time I actually got what I ordered ... 'Mars Through a Small Telescope'.
                                   

P.S. What's "5:47 a.m." ?
      And what's it got to do with breakfast?

      Wait, wait!! I just looked it up. Apparently the term "5:47 a.m." relates to something called "Early in the Morning".
      Funny .. I always thought morning started at about something called "Seven O'Clock". (Or preferably some time after that!! )
                                     

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BGD !!!!!  (Belated, I know, but just as loud!!    )

    My excuse is that I left for my 'vacation' or 'holiday' on the very day you turned 22.
    Wow! A quarter of the way to 88 already!!   

Thanks, Adrian, for the interesting link about lifters. Looks like they're just a form of electrical helicopter!   

    Dicktice, I did see the New Scientist article you mention. It was some time ago now so I don't remember all the details.
    I forget the name of the scientist who maintains a mirror light sail won't move, but common sense seems to tell me he's wrong. A mirror sail should be the most effective form of light sail, since it maximises the proportion of photons doing a complete 'about face' and minimises the number being absorbed. To my way of thinking, a reflected photon whose momentum is flipped from +1 to -1 is contributing twice as much momentum to the sail as a photon which is absorbed and has its momentum changed from +1 to zero. It's just arithmetic!

    As for the doppler effect, at the kind of velocities we're talking about within our solar system, any such effect will be vanishingly small.
    However, if our light sail is getting faster as it moves away from the light source, the apparent wavelength of photons falling on its surface must be getting longer. If the wavelength is increasing, the frequency must, by definition, be decreasing. Since the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency, the faster the light sail goes, the less energy each photon impact imparts to the sail.
    As a result, the rate of acceleration of the sail should decrease as the sail moves ever faster, not increase.

    This Doppler effect, though, as I've mentioned, will be unimportant unless we're talking about speeds which are a significant fraction of light speed. Within our solar system, it seems to me that a light sail, with its vast area and relatively low mass, will start to experience noticeable 'atmospheric drag' due to interplanetary gas density long before the Doppler effect becomes a problem.
    But it is an interesting theoretical problem just the same. And with the imminent launch of The Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 solar sail, we may soon have actual data to work with and be in a position to dispense with the hypothesising and start dealing with facts!
                                           

Dickbill, you certainly have put a lot of thought into this hypothesis of yours! 

    And your conclusions seem to be saying that the universe was planned, billions of years in advance. Does this mean that you support the notion of a supreme being doing the planning?
    I don't ask this question with any ulterior motives. I'm not a rabid atheist waiting to shoot you down if you tell us you're inclined to believe in God! Nor am I some fundamentalist religious nut ready to consign you to hellfire if you deny there's a God 
    As I've said elsewhere, I happen to believe there's more to this universe than nuts and bolts. I believe there has to be some reason for all this incredible beauty and intricacy, and for the rise of consciousness.
    It seems that maybe you feel the same way, though you arrive at this conclusion from a different direction.

    In any case, I'm impressed with the originality of your thoughts.
                                       

Today I have on my conspiracy hat (a remarkably good fit, too ... !    ).

    Just suppose that a high-level NASA group had decided that the discovery of life on Mars - any life, whether Earthlike or not - would spark the mother and father of all Greenie Crusades against any further exploration, especially by humans.
    This would explain the lack of any life-detection instruments on the two MERS; NASA would be keen to avoid having to announce Martian life for as long as possible, even if they knew right now that it exists, so as to enable the development of space transportation systems capable of getting us to the red planet before the sh** hits the fan! Once Mars is ruled out-of-bounds by the almighty environmental movement, it would be much harder to elicit funding from congress for deep space missions because, of all the potential targets, Mars is surely the most glamorous and inviting. Take away Mars and you cut the heart out of space advocacy, at least for many people.

    But what of Mars Express and Beagle II ?
    Would NASA's influence be enough to stifle any ESA discovery of Martian life or might Europe ruin future Mars exploration by inadvisedly 'letting the cat out of the bag' too soon?

    Just an idle thought!   ???

Hi Cindy!
    Your Schiaparelli Basin on Mars looks a bit like Saturn to me!
                                   

Yes, Cindy. As far as I know, the original intention was for a 'purist' version of "The Passion", with the script in Latin and Aramaic and no subtitles.
    The last I heard (read), a decision about whether or not to provide subtitles has yet to be made. Maybe this represents a weakening in Mel Gibson's resolve (?).

    You're right, Josh, that the objections by the jewish community revolve around their ancestors being portrayed as 'bastards', as you put it. Apparently, there's a scene which shows a crowd of jews baying for Jesus' blood.
    It's feared that, if such scenes are released, old christian anti-jewish feelings will be rekindled, based on the old "It was the damned jews who murdered the Son of God" logic.

    I've never quite inderstood this logic, even from the point of view of a christian (which I'm not anyhow). The basis of christianity is that the Son of God had to die in order that a vengeful God the Father could forgive humanity its sins.
    Sooner or later, somebody had to betray Jesus so he could die! Otherwise all of us would still be destined for the fiery pits of eternal damnation. Or at least that's how I understand the story!
    If Jesus was destined to die and the jews were destined to ensure he did die, how can the jews (or Judas for that matter) be held accountable?!

    But then, I gave up trying to comprehend christianity many years ago!
                                         

There are indeed many aspects of Mars today which seem paradoxical.
    How do you reconcile the early warm wet period with the faint young Sun? How do you reconcile what looks like large recent lava flows with a small planet which should have lost its internal heat by now? How can you have northern plains, largely bereft of recent impact craters and hence apparently young, which look suspiciously like an ocean bed - when you can't possibly have had an ocean in recent Martian history? How can frequent flows of large quantities of liquid water from Argyre, north via Uzboi and Ares Valles, into Chryse through much of Mars' history be explained when Mars is purported to have been frozen solid for at least 3 billion years?

    There's something wrong with our understanding of the red planet ... something fundamentally wrong!
    My view is that we're standing here with a few pieces of a jigsaw in our hands, congratulating ourselves for having a pretty good understanding of how Mars evolved. It seems to me there are some crucial pieces of this puzzle missing and we're misinterpreting the entire picture.
    I think Mars is considerably more complicated than we realise.

    Dickbill, some time ago here I mentioned a piece of maverick research which challenged our current theory of how the Sun behaved during its first 1 - 2 billion years. I can't remember the source now but the new hypothesis suggested that soon after ignition the Sun burned up to 5%, or even 7%, more brightly than it does today. Over the next billion or so years, it settled back to maybe 70 - 80% its current output. Then it began its slow and steady increase in brightness which continues today and will ultimately make our own planet uninhabitable.
    I've heard no more about this radical hypothesis and it could have died a natural death by now. But it would go a long way toward explaining how Mars could have been warm enough to support liquid water, and perhaps life, on its surface back at the beginning of the solar system.
    My knowledge of stellar evolution is patchy, to say the least(! ), so I can't be sure of what I'm suggesting. But a flaw in our knowledge of how stars evolve seems a less complex way of explaining Mars' surface than recourse to super-exotic atmospheres of partially condensed CO2! We should remember Occam (or is it Ockham? ) and his razor. The more complicated an explanantion of anything gets, the less likely it is to be accurate.

    In summary, I agree with those of you who express puzzlement at the enigma of Martian history. We very definitely have an awful lot to learn - and no mistake!!   ???