New Mars Forums

Bill:-

    So about 40% of Americans voted.
    About half of those voted for Bush (20% of Americans).
    You guesstimate, or believe, about half of these Bush-voters think the world is 6000 years old (10% of Americans).

    Even assuming your cherished belief is correct that half of Bush-voters are creationists (based on what?), that means maybe 1 in 10 Americans think the world is 6000 years old.
    This is an appalling and utterly deplorable state of affairs.

    But, since we're airing cherished beliefs today    , let me take a wild guess and suggest that as many as 90% of Americans think Earth is on the brink of a runaway greenhouse effect. They think the polar ice-caps will soon melt, inundating the world's coastal cities, changing the climate drastically, bringing about the demise of civilization at best, and maybe of all terrestrial life at worst.

    Creationism is an intellectual dead-end, by definition, while fears about the greenhouse effect are at least based on scientific data. But the belief factor is almost as strong in one as it is in the other - it has to be, since our climatic forecasts are based on computer models. And these models are inherently flawed because we simply don't know enough about our own planet - there are just too many variables.

    It's a matter of faith in either case. It's just that we have 10% of Americans who adhere to a religion which flies in the face of science, and 90% of Americans who adhere to an act of faith which is sanctioned by science (... but science with a political agenda). Each one preaches armageddon in its own sweet way.
    I disapprove of both situations.

   [And that's coming from someone who wants CO2 emissions reduced or eliminated as soon as possible - but not because of politically motivated doomsday priests.]

    Incidentally, Bill, the Bush/Kerry fight is over. Bush won. You really must try to move on, for the sake of your health. What will you do if Hillary wins in 2008? Without your anti-hero to worry about day and night, the hole in your life may be too big to fill.

   [P.S. While I was looking up the voter turnout in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, I accidentally stumbled across some figures about voter profiles.
    Apparently, among U.S. college graduates who voted, 52% voted for Bush while 46% voted for Kerry.
    I mention this only because I found it difficult to believe that the Republican Party voter is always and necessarily a slavering moron - a picture you paint so often and with such endearing zeal.]
                                                               

The links you posted, DonPanic, do nothing to reassure the likes of CC and me:-

    The first link is so full of would be, could be, might be maybe that it's difficult to deduce anything concrete from it.
    The second link sounds like the script from "The Day after Tomorrow" - full of breathless sensationalism. You'll note that it's dated February 22nd 2004 and says:-

    Well, here we are in the middle of that "next year" they were raving about and there's no problem yet with sea levels creating major upheaval for millions.

    You do your case no good at all, DonPanic, if your case is to belittle those of us doing our best to sift and separate the facts from the fantasy.

I missed out on all that fun, too. 
    I've never heard of this particular tradition.

::Edit:: I wonder if Dicktice might be able to throw some light on it?  ???   

I can't stand by without saying I understand CC's stance on this point about Earth's climate.
    We're pretty smart and we have our super-computers but we're dealing with an enormously complex system when we try to predict the future behaviour of an entire planetary biosphere. It seems to me to be impossible that we're aware of all the factors and have incorporated all conceivable variables into our climate models. To suggest otherwise smells strongly of overweening hubris to me.
    Out of 4.6 billion years of climatic history, we have figures for only about the last one or two centuries. In addition, we have very incomplete data for broad swathes of geological time going back maybe 600 million years (plus scanty information about specific large-scale events in the last billion years or so) - but certainly nothing on a millenium by millenium basis before perhaps a few million years ago. In other words, our data are severely limited.
    Extrapolating from severely limited data is fraught with possibilities for large errors - errors large enough to make nonsense of the extrapolation. [And, DonPanic, you don't need to be doing research at Los Alamos or CERN to understand this simple limitation of the scientific method. You and your Euro-pals may not be able to comprehend it but I believe CC does.]

    In further support of CC, Earth's biosphere and climate have changed enormously over geological time. The amount of oxygen in the air, for example - negligible for billions of years at the start - has swung between 10% and 35% of the total atmosphere in the past 500 million years. Over a similar period, the percentage of atmospheric CO2 has been far less than it is today, and also up to 20 times as much as it is now!
    In all that time, the variations in average global temperature, none of which had anything whatsoever to do with human interference, were always counteracted by 'checks and balances' in the natural system. Some have cited "Gaia" as the mechanism behind the self-governing nature of the beast - life itself automatically controlling the environment to ensure its own continued viability.
    These climatic variations, over long periods, have all been on a scale larger than anything humans have witnessed since the advent of civilization. But our knowledge of finer climatic checks and balances, which may operate over very much shorter time-periods, is very much sparser.
    Could the average global temperature swing up and down by about 1 deg.C, at random, on a timescale of centuries? Does the biosphere react swiftly and automatically to such changes in ways we don't know about?
    Don't know? ... Exactly!

    I think this is the point of CC's posts on this subject. There appears to be a tendency among scientists to state things about global warming with a certainty which appears unjustified.
    There is a growing body of evidence that there's at least bacterial life on Mars - impact transfer of material between the rocky planets, the the Viking experimental results (dismissed up to now but gaining credence), large expanses of ground ice even near the equator, the acceptance that liquid water can exist today (if only fleetingly) at the Martian surface, gradual and grudging acceptance that Mars is very likely still geologically active, and now the discovery of regions of the atmosphere with high concentrations of methane (and possibly even formaldehyde).
    But despite all these data, the scientific establishment still has its heels dug in pretty tight - the paradigm is still that Mars is sterile, something which seems patently unlikely to me.
    It seems to me that the scientific community has opened its heart to the concept of human-mediated global warming with the same enthusiasm with which it has resisted the concept of a Martian biosphere.  ???

    Scientists are just human beings. They're subject to the same 'herding instinct' as the rest of us. They're tempted to toe-the-line to ensure their acceptance by the in-crowd in just the same way as the rest of us, especially when their employment and financial survival depends on it.
    To this extent, I can see exactly where CC is coming from and I applaud his independent thinking.

    By the same token, I don't believe for a moment that CC is advocating we should abandon caution and go on pumping CO2 into the air. I don't advocate that either.
    My opinion is we should work hard to minimize our impact on the ecosystem. For this reason, and for various other geopolitical reasons dear to all our hearts, we should push for alternative energy sources which impact far less on the world around us. We need renewable and benign energy sources and we need them now!
    The reason I say this and believe this is because I don't know whether what we're doing to the atmosphere is dangerous and I don't want to take the risk.
    But, in agreement with CC, I think it behoves the scientific community to drop any political agenda with which it may sympathize (and I believe there's more than a hint of politics involved) and admit its own uncertainty with equal candour.

    To paraphrase Shakespeare, 'methinks the scientific global warming community doth protest too much'!  I think that if they presented their findings in a more realistically ambivalent way, their pronouncements would gain credence with those of us able to differentiate between a scientific hypothesis and a scientific law.
    Just a few thoughts.   

That 'false-color rendering' panoramic picture is just great.
    Every now and then, they give us some real scenery to look at and this is a marvellous example. The scene looks so 'real' and so inviting. I can easily imagine stepping into this picture and wandering around the rock outcrops with a hammer in hand.

    God, I'd love to go to Mars!!   

Incredible stuff!
    As usual, I woder what those astronomers of the 17th century would make of the advances in science since they named Mira AB the "wonderful star"?
    It would be so good to see the look of amazement on their faces, if only we could bring them forward in time to the present and show them the wonders of 21st century science. They'd be half stupefied with wonder! 

Hmmm.
    Either "could have" or "would have" sounds like too many words in our neck of the woods, when "had" seems to suffice ... at least to our way of thinking.
    It's all purely academic, of course, and there's obviously no absolute right or wrong involved. It's in the same category as "colour" versus "color", I suppose, and various other subtle differences between American and English versions of things.

    And, although I'm used to it now, for a long time the phrase "I did that already" sounded wrong to my ears. In English classes at school, that kind of sentence construction would have been rejected by our teacher. We would have been required to write "I've done that already".

    Another difference, which has more or less disintegrated these days as Aussies take up more and more of the American way of saying things, is in the sentence "She has a different way of speaking, doesn't she?". When I was a schoolboy, that sounded really odd. The Aussie/Brit way of saying that was "She has a different way of speaking, hasn't she?"
    The "doesn't she" version is not incorrect, of course, and I'm not trying to suggest it is. It's actually an abbreviation of the phrase "does she not?" - just as legitimate as the Aussie/Brit abbreviation of "has she not?". Just different, that's all.

    In a way, I wish I hadn't started all this!!   :;):   :laugh:

   [Thanks people for your kind indulgence as I veered off-topic there. Just a few passing comments on linguistic idiosyncrasies that interest me. Nothing important.    ]

Completely off-topic and probably only of passing interest to me - Cindy reminded me of something when she said, about the hybrid cetacean:-

    It's the American use of 'would have' instead of 'had' in this context. I've noticed it frequently on U.S. television shows and I've never been able to get used to it. Not that it bothers me at all; it's just a small grammatical curiosity. But Brits and Aussies would say: "I wish they'd included a photo of the baby .." or, conversely, "I wish they hadn't .."
    Sorry. Had to mention it. No big deal. All over. I'll go away now. 

Martian Republic:-

    Hmmm.
    As I've often emphasized, I don't classify myself as any kind of expert on geology or physical geography, but I wonder whether carbon might have an intrinsic advantage over copper when it comes to affordability.
    Copper has to be mined - dug out of the ground - usually in compound form, I presume, and then isolated. Native copper exists, I'm sure, but it must be in relatively small quantities by now, no?
    Carbon, on the other hand, is still readily available in either solid (coal), liquid (petroleum) or gaseous (methane) form, and likely to remain so for much linger than copper. We could even harvest it from the CO2 in the air, I guess, if the need arose. (Maybe killing two birds with one stone, to some extent, vis-a-vis 'global warming'.) But it's easier to get the carbon out of fossil fuels, I imagine(?).
    While copper must become progressively more difficult to recover from Earth's crust, as all the superficial deposits become 'worked out', the carbon in coal and natural gas will provide an ample supply of carbon for centuries to come.

    Again, reiterating my comparative ignorance on the subject, it looks likely that carbon-based power cables must ultimately win out over copper cables as far as economics is concerned.
    I believe the processing of carbon into nanotubes will become straightforward as technology quickly advances. So, I don't factor in current difficulties in that regard because I feel sure we will overcome them.

    I'm willing to be proven wrong on any of this, by the way. 

    In any event, if it costs you twice as much for the carbon-nanotube cable in your spacecraft, but you get many more kilograms of payload into LEO for fewer dollars, who cares?

Gosh! A 'moonbow'. 
    I didn't even know they made such things!
    I'll have to keep a lookout for them - especially since humidity is par for the course here in Cairns. 

The Nazis did so many evil things it's difficult to comprehend it all. The medical experiments of the infamous Dr. Mengele, for example, were cruel beyond belief.
    People have asked whether the results of his 'work' can be used to help relieve suffering today, or whether they came from such evil that they should never be used. My personal opinion is that NOT using that information to do good is simply compounding the crime. No one can do anything now to help the poor souls Mengele tortured in the name of medical science all those years ago, but their suffering is not for nothing if something good can be done with the data.

    The rocketry data gathered by Nazi scientists, including Von Braun, falls into a different category in that America or Russia using it could do nothing to directly alleviate human suffering. But the data existed in 1945 and destroying it just to repeat the same work again would not have brought back the people whose lives were destroyed in the gathering of it.
    America needed the information and they needed Von Braun's expertise to remain technologically strong enough to counter the growing threat from Stalin's Soviet Union - a very real danger to human rights everywhere.

    Information, to me, once it exists, is like any implement; it isn't good or bad in itself. It depends how you use it. It may be that Von Braun should have been punished for his tacit involvement in the use of slave labour during the war. But that same case may well apply to countless other Germans who were caught up in the surreal world of totalitarian evil that was Nazism. What duress was he under? How many of his family members would have been tortured and killed if he failed to cooperate? What would any of us have done in the same position?
    I imagine Von Braun had his demons to deal with, as I'm sure many people did on both sides of that horrible war.

    As an aside, why is it I can't avoid wondering if Sean Meaney is driven at least as much by a dislike of NASA (or perhaps America in general) as he is by righteous indignation at their use of Nazi science or ex-Nazi personnel?
    This comment of his, for instance, seems to reveal a total disdain for the whole scientific establishment(?):-

    Or am I mistaken?  ???

    I hadn't heard this 'Clarkeism' before but it's very appropriate, I feel. As I think I've mentioned before, there were all sorts of fears about space travel before the first human went into orbit:-
  1) Zero-g would cause disorientation and total incapacity. (Not so.)
  2) Radiation would fry us. (Not so.)
    Then later:-
  3) When orbiting Earth failed to produce the predicted disastrous effects, some peole were sure leaving Earth-orbit probably would. They reasoned that a human on the way to the Moon, seeing mother-Earth receding in the distance, would suffer a kind of primeval separation anxiety and lapse into madness. (Didn't happen.)
  4) The Van Allen radiation belts would be lethal. (Not true if you pass through them quickly.)
  5) The Moon would be covered in a sea of fine dust, perhaps many metres thick, into which a crewed landing craft would sink without trace - as though in a dry form of quicksand. (Not so.)
  6) Incredibly hardy organisms in the Lunar regolith would find humans very tasty and devour them on contact, or hitch a ride back to Earth and eat the rest of us too! (Didn't happen.)
  7) Lunar dust itself would be chemically dangerous to humans. (It turned out to be a minor irritant. No big drama.)

    These fears are typical of our general tendency to imagine the worst about unexplored territory and probably reflect a survival instinct which has served us well in the past. If you don't know what to expect; expect the worst and plan for that ... then you're more likely to avoid disaster.
    Before space became the 'final frontier', explorers thought they'd sail off the edge of the world if they went too far. Unexplored seas were assumed to be filled with monsters and early maps were marked accordingly. Strange and dangerous animals inhabited distant shores, ready and waiting to pounce on the unwary.

    I see much of the present-day anxiety about Mars in the same light. The soil will be poisonous or voracious pathogenic organisms are awaiting our arrival, smacking their lips and slavering at the thought of all that lovely human meat!  :;):
    By all means, let's be careful and think things through. But let's see our primitive fears in the context of history and stop telling one another scary stories around the campfire.
    Most human fears are either completely unfounded or turn out to be unnecessarily exaggerated.

    [Thanks for the kind comments, Cindy. It's good to be back.    ]