New Mars Forums

Just a few questions and comments.

    Bin Laden and company have already demonstrated what they want to do to America and its allies. If they had access to nuclear and biological weapons, there is no doubt they would use them against a western city or cities.
    Josh and AltToWar make black-and-white moral judgments about their country's history and how evil America has been and still is. And it's their right to express those sentiments and aspire towards a better world if that is their desire. But this may be a bad time to get up on the high horse with the prospect of Washington DC disappearing in a nuclear fireball!
    And the complete destruction of Washington or San Francisco or Chicago or London is exactly what we're facing here. Make no mistake - as soon as the means are available to Osama and friends, this is what will happen!

    Terrorist groups, as such, are viewed as incapable of building atomic bombs and refining biological weapons so as to make them 'deliverable'. The technology and engineering required is something needing the infrastructure and organisation of a state. So it's easier for Bin Laden to simply purchase such weapons from somewhere like North Korea, which apparently has them already, or Iraq, which would dearly love to have them as soon as possible.

    My point is, Iraq is almost certainly developing nuclear weapons. At one point, they imported dozens (hundreds? ) of medical appliances, if memory serves, which contained a certain type of high-speed switching device which Iraq is forbidden to import. Why is it forbidden? Because such a switching device is needed in the manufacture of detonators for atom bombs.
    The U.S. administration probably knows much more than it wants to reveal right now about Iraq's weapons program because it doesn't want to compromise its espionage agents and show its hand too early. But, if Saddam Hussein isn't in the process of making nuclear and biological weapons, I'll eat my hat!!

    Sure, let's deal with North Korea, Iran, ... anybody who threatens mass destruction. But, at the moment, Iraq is on the menu. Why are some of you so happy to take the risk of not dealing with this problem?
    Do we have to wait for the mushroom cloud over New York before you people finally realise what you're up against?!

    Just curious, that's all.
                                           ???

Anyone who feels the need to say: "I'm not old" 4 times in quick succession ... is old!!!  Believe Me!

    Thank God I'm not old, I'm not old, I'm not old, I'm not old!

P.S. The very best of luck with your patent! I hope it works
       and I hope you make a fortune from it!
                                           

Hi Echus!

    I suspect you're confusing the pressure exerted by Earth's atmosphere with the gravitational field.
    I remember seeing pictures in books of a man balancing three elephants on a plank on his shoulders, with the notes under the picture explaining that this was the equivalent of the air pressure on a human body at sea-level. Presumably they calculated this from the surface area of the average human and the sea-level pressure of 14.7 lbs/sq.in.

    This is not the same thing as gravity.

    But essentially you're right in saying a human arriving on Earth after a long stay on Mars would feel like their flesh and blood had turned to lead! And while their bones might also feel like lead, they might be more like chalk in terms of strength!

    I guess most people at New Mars already know my views on native-born Martians visiting Earth .... I think they simply won't be able to!!
    I also think a Mars Direct mission without artificial gravity (i.e. 180 days in zero-g, 500 days in 0.38g, and another 180 days in zero-g) will pose extremely serious problems for returning astronauts.

    I could be wrong of course. But nobody's convinced me of that yet!
                                          ???

Hi Robert!

    Going back a few posts to my question to you about negative matter - I was barking up the wrong tree!
    I understand now what you were referring to ... thanks for the clarification.

    I appreciate the enormous difference between 50,000 atoms and 6*10^23 (Avogadro and all that! ), but I am still amazed at the 50,000 anti-hydrogen atoms!!  I was imagining a few dozen or something along those lines!

    I'm still hanging out for more information on what's happening at CERN, though. If there's any truth to that story, it sounds like somebody could have stumbled upon a new way to produce a lot of energy in a short space of time ... more than the fire extinguishers could cope with anyway!!
                                         

    Actually, it only just occurred to me to qualify my jocularity by expressing the reservation that I hope nobody was injured in the alleged incident.
                                         ???

Hi Robert!

    I noticed that "antipositron" thing too and just assumed it was a slip of the pen. Since an antipositron, as you say, would be a plain old-fashioned electron(! ), I assumed they meant positrons.
    Nevertheless, confirmation of that would be interesting ... and confirmation of the whole story would be very exciting indeed!

    Something else I noted was your comment: "Negative matter is theoretically composed of negative energy and exhibits negative gravity. However, it has never been observed or otherwise proven to exist."
    I'm not sure from this whether you mean that negative matter or negative gravity has never been proven to exist?
    Negative matter, anti-hydrogen, has in fact been produced in considerable quantity, but whether or not it exhibits negative gravity has yet to be determined.

    This is an interesting article which appeared only a matter of weeks ago. I remembered reading somewhere that anti-hydrogen had been created, but I was surprised at just how much of it!!
                                         :0

    This whole CERN report has got me intrigued! If anybody hears anything more about it, I'd be very grateful if they would take a minute and post it here.
    Thanks ahead!
                                           

I fear AltToWar may suffer from terminal paranoia. It appears everything is bad in his book: Right-wing governments are out to enslave us and now the scientific community is corrupt to the point of selling us all down the river for 30 pieces of silver. Nobody can be trusted .. they're all out to get us!  Hell ... some scientists even have the audacity to state their conclusions that global warming mightn't be as dangerous as we're led to believe!! Can you conceive of that ... people having the gall to express an opinion other than the politically correct one?!  My God! At this rate we'll have an outbreak of independence of thought!!
                                         

    Soph, my comments were never meant to be derogatory towards you personally. I was simply trying to utilise your attitude towards atmospheric nuclear rocketry as part of my argument about public opinion and how difficult, if not impossible, it will be to change it.
    What I was at pains to point out was that NuclearSpace was putting forward a hypothetical situation. He very carefully indicated he was talking about a scenario wherein new types of extremely clean low-yield bombs, fully tested and approved, might be used. What little radiation such bombs might produce would be so attenuated over such vast volumes of air and such enormous areas of, say, the Pacific Ocean, that the contribution to Earth's natural background radiation would be much too small to measure.
    NuclearSpace wasn't saying 'to hell with the biosphere, let's just go ahead and detonate hundreds of filthy radioactive devices because I want to get us into space at any cost and I'm a right-wing lunatic who couldn't care less if the Earth I leave my children is a wasteland of pollution and poisonous isotopes'!
    I feel this subtle point has been overlooked ... and that's what worries me.

    Technology advances all the time. There's a constant stream of new data and new innovations. Things don't remain the same.
    Just because a certain suggested means of getting 10,000 tonnes into Low Earth Orbit involves atmospheric nuclear explosions, that shouldn't result in a knee-jerk reaction of dismissal. Every proposal ought to be examined on its individual merits before a verdict is reached.
    If the new proposal proves unsatisfactory after fair, transparent, and rational analysis, then by all means reject it.

    All I was saying is that we're becoming almost superstitious about nuclear applications. I'm not interested in anything which is going to damage our beautiful planet and neither, I'm sure, is NuclearSpace. But for heaven's sake, let's put away the crucifixes, amulets, and necklaces of garlic and look at Orion critically but reasonably!
                                            ???

P.S. What's the range of an electro-magnetic-pulse from,
        say, a 0.1 kiloton nuke? If we launch from a floating
        platform a thousand kilometres from the nearest land, is
        e.m.p. still going to be a problem? It seems most unlikely
        to me but I'm ready to be proved wrong.

It's tempting, in view of how quickly life appears to have originated on Earth, to speculate that it arrived ready-made from space. In our present state of ignorance about how life got started, that explanation is as good as any!

    But the problem with panspermia, as it's called, is that it's intellectually unsatisfying - simply skirting around the problem of bio-genesis on Earth by 'pushing it back' to another planet, or another star system, at some indeterminate time in the past. In other words, it doesn't address the real problem of how inanimate matter crossed the threshold into the realm of the living. In fact, it's a bit of a scientific cop-out in that sense!

    Paul Davies, a world-renowned physicist, in his book "The Fifth Miracle", comes to the conclusion that our current state of theoretical knowledge is inadequate to explain how life arose. His argument is complex and I don't understand all of the details, but a key point is the difficulty of explaining how the extraordinary amounts of random-but-biologically-relevant information needed to create a genome could arise from chaos. This is a profound problem because a functional genome has, paradoxically, to be both random and highly specific in order to provide the vast amounts of information a functioning organism has to have.
    Dr. Davies has decided there are fundamental laws of nature we currently know nothing about, which we will have to discover before we can understand the mystery of life's origins.

    There is obviously something special about this particular universe which must predispose it towards life.
    Fascinating, isn't it?!
                                       

Hi Mauk2!

    I haven't gone through your plans properly yet but in principle, if it can be made as safe as you say it can, I think it would have to be the next best thing to Orion.

    The idea of having a reusable, 2 million pounds to LEO rocket sounds sweet indeed!

    I'd be interested to hear what people like Robert Dyck have to say about it, since they seem to have appropriate expertise in this kind of stuff.
    The usual problems with the 'nuclear = leprosy brigade' would arise, of course. But at least now the U.S. has an administration which is prepared to examine all the options - including nuclear.

    Thanks for the fascinating idea!
                                                 

    I hope we hear more about it.

Hi Josh!

    Sorry I imagined you as being left-wing in outlook. I'd quite forgotten you're an anarchist ... against all forms of government. (I think? )
    It's just that I don't think in terms of anarchy much, and  the people here in Australia who criticise America seem to be mainly Australian Labor Party supporters. So, I thoughtlessly put two and two together and got .. five!

    Don't worry about taking this any further with references etc. I'm already too far outside my main areas of interest and my reason for being here at New Mars. But thanks anyway!

    I guess I just get tired of the constant haranguing against the U.S. and feel some kind of balance needs to be introduced into the argument.
    There's probably only a handful of countries I could live in.  America is one of them. My country is militarily weak. Do I fear America? .. No.  If my country were invaded, would I ask for help from America? .. Yes.  And would she come? .. Yes.

    That's really all I need to know. She's a great country, she's a strong country, and she's a friend. Long may it stay that way!
                                         

Hi oker56!

    I have doubts about how easy it is to be certain of dating impact events on Mars.
    I remember when the lunar craters were being considered. Observations from a distance gave scientists a pretty good idea of the order of events as far as cratering was concerned. But absolute dating had to wait until the Apollo astronauts brought home rocks from carefully catalogued sites on the Moon.
    Even so, I understand that there are still many  unanswered questions and lunar geologists would dearly love to go back to Luna for more samples from different areas.

    The topography of Mars is even more complex than that of the Moon, having been subjected to episodic water erosion, including possible sedimentation from persistent standing bodies of water, in addition to prolonged aeolian weathering. Neither of these factors applies to our satellite. Also, Mars is closer to the asteroid belt and the gravitational field of Jupiter, which may have complicated the history of cratering - making extrapolations from the Earth-Moon system unreliable.

    In the absence of an accurate catalogue of dated rocks, I don't see how anyone can be certain of the order of events in Martian geological history.
    While the new hypothesis you mention may turn out to be quite right that some of the flooding was triggered by impact breeching of aquifers etc., my money is on the notion that the Martian climate was actually balmy for longish periods. There's just too much evidence for surface water, which must have been stable in liquid form for long enough to form large lakes, if not the fabled Oceanus Borealis itself!

    The remarkable smoothness of the northern plains (the smoothest large-scale surface in the solar system) is so reminiscent of the sediment-smoothed abyssal plains of Earth's deep oceans, that I have to say I lean towards believing in a former Martian ocean!

    I have to admit, I could be as wrong as wrong can be! I'm just as much a hostage to future discoveries as anyone else.
    Furthermore, I would be lying if I pretended that what I'm preaching isn't also what I want to be true!!

    We'll all just have to wait and see, I guess!

Could I just interrupt this discussion briefly to ask a couple of questions?
    Josh, how much territory did Kuwait annex from Iraq after the Gulf War? Was it actually theft of the land, or were they recovering areas which had been taken over illegally by Saddam in the years prior to the conflict?
    I'm also interested to understand, Josh, your idea that most of the world's evils are perpetrated by an American oil cartel - most of them best buddies with, or related to, George W. Bush.
    You maintain that Kuwait's oil production doubled after the war. So Kuwait puts more oil onto the market, keeping prices low. How do lower prices benefit Standard Oil ... doesn't their profitability decline with lower prices?
    Are oil companies now so powerful that the government of the U.S.A. is helpless before them? Does Congress routinely rubber stamp proposals for war purely on the basis that Standard Oil might gain from it? (Even though it seems that the lower price of oil works against them, not for them? )

    I might just add some thoughts of my own, too. America serves its own interests to a large extent. Few people know this as well as Australian farmers, who receive no subsidies for their produce and yet have to compete with American produce which can be dumped onto the world markets, sometimes for less than it costs our farmers to produce it! The reason being, of course, the ludicrous subsidies propping up American farmers. So much for the competition ethic in the greatest capitalist country on Earth.
    But, having said that, America's economy is very large. If it goes into recession, it adversely affects economies everywhere. In a sense, any action taken by America to encourage economic growth, even if it's essentially selfish, eventually benefits most of the world. The American economic system is largely the world's economic system. That's just a fact. You can hate it if you want to ... but it's not going to go away because you disapprove of it. You have to deal with it.

    I am getting a strong feeling here that both Josh and AltToWar have very definite left-wing leanings. I feel able to make that judgment, not just on what they've said here, but because when I was a teenager, I was much the same way! And there's nothing wrong with having a sincere belief that left-wing politics are good and wholesome politics - in its purest form, socialism is hard to criticise. (Although, as I've said elsewhere, all my experience says it just doesn't work ... and leads to economic stagnation and poverty for all.)

    What concerns me is how inflexibly you two advance your arguments. I'm concerned that the world picture is larger and far more complex than you are giving it credit for, and that you are arguing more from political passion than from a cool evaluation of the facts.
    First of all, the high standards of political morality, which form the criteria of your judgment, don't exist in reality. And they never have existed. Your ideals will never be put into practice - and past attempts to do so make me glad we've given up trying (at least for now! ). Socialism + human greed + human laziness = economic chaos.

    You really should look at history to see how various political systems have fared and how military power has been used.
    I'm here to tell you: YOUR OWN COUNTRY IS NOT SO BAD!!
    Is it perfect? Nowhere near perfect!
    Should we try to improve it? Hell yes!

    But don't throw the baby out with the bath-water! America is still a very fine country in very many ways and I wonder whether you are blinded to that by too much leftist dogma(? )

    Josh, even left-wingers like you, so vehemently derisive of conspiracy theories about NASA, are apparently vulnerable to gullibilty over conspiracy theories about oil cartels!
    I say this, not as an insult, but to alert you to the dangers of where you're argument is leading. I assume you can see the parallels?
    A group of faceless people, hiding behind the respectable facade of a government department, using government money to further an agenda of their own making in an atmosphere of secrecy. Hang on! Is this NASA or Standard Oil we're talking about?!!

P.S. Sorry to have digressed a bit there! Looking forward to
      the answers to my questions.
                                               

Hi AltToWar!

    Are you sure you meant to say "angular" momentum?