New Mars Forums

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RONMAN !!!

    A thousand blessings upon you on this auspicious occasion ... may your progeny outnumber the stars!! (I think that's an ancient arabic benediction .. ! )

    50 is a fine age to be. You still have health and vigour (we hope and assume) but have attained the wisdom of maturity.
    Long may you live and long may you give support to The Mars Society!
                                       

  [This message is brought to you courtesy of Themescules.]

Hi! This is Shaun's wife speaking.

    Shaun is currently unable to post on this thread due to second degree burns of the scalp and face.

    Boy, was that spaghetti HOT !!!       

   [He's not expected out of intensive care before Christmas!]

Hi Cindy!

    Why the dire warning about reading Jean Meslier's last testament?

    As far as I could tell, the whole thing was just common sense from beginning to end.

                                       :0

And Nida ... !

    Lay off us poor innocent menfolk willya?!! We've never done anything wrong.

    Wanna hear a good joke?:

   Q. Why did the housewife cross the road?
   A. The ROAD?!! ... What was she doing out of the
       KITCHEN?!!!!!
                                         

    Calm down, calm down ... I was only revving you up for fun!
                                           

All the planets and moons were subjected to intense bombardment in their early years.
    The picture they've painted of a hellish Mars was repeated all over the place, including here on Earth. There's nothing new in what they say. In fact, I don't understand why they've suddenly released all this stuff - it's a complete non-event dressed up as new research.

    Apparently they can't understand how Mars could have been warm and wet enough to produce the surface erosional features we see everywhere. So they've decided it all happened during the late heavy bombardment and stopped immediately afterwards, except for maybe a little volcanically induced melting of permafrost later on.

    This, to me, is an example of a spurious argument at its most obvious. First you accept a premise that Mars couldn't have maintained warm wet conditions. But what about all those river valleys and outflow channels? Hmmm ... let's blame it all on the heat released by impacts! Hell, we can even use this hypothesis to provide the rainfall necessary to explain the branched valley networks all over the southern highlands!!
    This way, we can have a planet permanently frozen, barren, and inhospitable (which fits in with the 'Faint Young Sun Paradox' ), and yet still account for the water features ... brilliant!

    It's a nice try but it won't work.

    The evidence for flowing water on Mars shows that there have been long periods of clement conditions over most of the planet's history. Just recently (wish I could remember where), I was reading that evidence shows there has been almost continuous water drainage from Argyre, north via Uzboi Vallis and Ares Vallis, out onto Chryse Planitia, over billions of years.
    Go back, in this thread, to my post which I made in June, about an absolutely huge lake bed discovered just south of the equator at about 180 deg. W. They've even identified the shoreline. This lake contained 5 times more water than The Great Lakes and it spilled northwards over a natural weir for who knows how many thousands of years.
    In another thread, Josh drew attention to the smoothness of the northern plains of Mars and wondered how anything but an ocean could have formed them. I agree with him. Those plains are easily the smoothest large scale surfaces in the entire solar system. Smoother even than their only rivals for smoothness, the abyssal plains of Earth's oceans!!
    There's little doubt in my mind that Mars has experienced long periods of "nice weather"! Long-lived standing bodies of water have almost certainly existed there.
    If that conflicts with the accepted climate model for early Mars, throw out the climate model and start again!! Don't try to throw out the evidence for liquid water over the eons, because it just won't go away!

    I recently posted about a new stellar evolution theory (again I can't recall where) which maintains that our Sun was actually hotter in its early history than it's given credit for. It gradually cooled over the first 1 or 2 billion years as its nuclear fires settled down, and then began its current inexorable increase in output which will ultimately make even Earth uninhabitable.
    This theory hasn't been accepted yet - science is slow to adapt at times! But it would very neatly explain how early Mars maintained a warm wet climate, without recourse to impossibly complex atmospheric models involving up to 5 bars of CO2 and thick clouds of heat-retaining CO2 crystals!! Occam's Razor dictates that we take the least complex explanation available to us. For me, it's blatantly obvious which explanation is simpler!

    Don't despair! I'm quite sure this latest hypothesis about Mars is full of holes and won't ... hold water!
    GROAN ... !!
                                           

Well, Matt, you're the second person under twenty-one I've had occasion to compliment in the past 24 hours!

    I admire your mental flexibility in being able to modify your opinions as the facts demand, and your willingness to try and see the other person's point of view. To my mind, these are crucial tools for successful social interaction, and yet remarkably few people ever develop them properly. Witness some of the inflammatory exchanges which occasionally blight this noble website, for example.

    You're doing great for a twenty year old (no patronising attitude intended here by the way) - many people twice your age don't understand what you've already learned.

    If it were up to me, I'd get you on a flight to Mars. I think you'd make a damned fine Martian!!

Tim writes:-

    In my view, this is absolutely true. I've always maintained that proof of any modification of a gravitational field using electromagnetic means would be regarded as monumentally important.
    The potential benefits of nullifying gravity are just so overwhelming that every country would be racing to refine and develop the technology.

    As for the drawbacks Robert hints at, which might limit the utility of a gravito-magnetic effect, I haven't the mathematical wherewithal to debate with him on a theoretical level. But my instinct tells me the whole field (sorry! ) is too new for us to be drawing any conclusions at this stage.
    What if higher temperature superconductors are produced, not requiring liquid nitrogen? What if some means is devised to shape the region of gravity modification? What if other design efficiencies are introduced which reduce the necessary power input?

    This may be a simplistic analogy, but when Karl Benz designed his one cylinder internal combustion engine, he could hardly have imagined what a century of design improvement would achieve. What would he have said if confronted with a Formula One racing car screaming around a track at 300 kph, if you told him the engine used precisely the same principle as his first 'horseless carriage'?!!

    Once proof of principle is established, I feel confident the world's scientists and engineers will do the rest!
   
                                         

Yeah, Cindy!
    Must be the British influence again ... like the driving-on-the-left-side-of-the-road thing!
    I suppose it helps to distinguish 'a tyre' from the verb, 'to tire'. Not that there seems to be any confusion between the two in America, though!
                                   

Speaking of the Moon.

    You know those occasions when the Moon is visible in broad daylight? Sometimes, if the light is just right, the 3-D nature of it becomes much more obvious ... or at least it seems so to me.
    When this happens, I just stop in my tracks and stare at it. Somehow, you can really  feel the mass of the Moon! It changes from an abstract blotchy light in the sky into a very obviously solid, massive, ball of rock!
    I know this sounds like I've been experimenting with unusual substances, but those moments seem to elevate your consciousness and you can almost feel the 'indentation' in the fabric of space made by the Moon's rocky bulk! For just a brief time, it's like you 'understand' gravity ... not with your mind, but with every part of you.

    I don't think I can explain it any better than that. But it's a very pleasant feeling - as if you've transcended your senses and comprehended something you can't ordinarily feel or appreciate.
    If anyone has felt this already, maybe they could let me know ... perhaps I'm stupidly trying to describe something everybody routinely appreciates but that I've only discovered in recent years!!
    On the other hand, if you haven't experienced this thing, look out for it. It's when the less-than-half-a-Moon hangs, impossibly heavy, in the daylight sky and you can feel its crushing size and weight.
    Surreal stuff!!
                                          :0

I can run the tyres on my car at 25 lbs/sq.in. (too soft) or at 40 lbs/sq.in. (too hard). Either way, the tyres will still function O.K.
    The difference between 25 and 40 lbs/sq.in. is slightly more than 1 Earth atmosphere. So, theoretically, I could set my tyres at 25 lbs/sq.in. here on Earth, and drive my car out of the Hab cargo bay on Mars without the tyres exploding (ignoring a few other impediments of course! ).

    I suppose one of the main problems with vulcanised rubber would be the temperature ... or would it?
    Depending on the latitude, season, and garaging facilities, a vehicle's tyres might be subjected to temperatures as low as -100 deg.C.
    Would a set of Goodyears stand up to that?    :0

Soph, I agree with you that there is nothing inherently wrong with terraforming.
    And atmospheres don't just disappear ... at least not overnight. If we establish, say, a 500 millibar atmosphere around Mars, the lower gravity and lack of a coherent magnetic field will result in leakage to space. But it will take millions of years before we're in trouble with low pressure again.
    As strange as it may sound, I believe there've been a few suggestions to put an atmosphere around the Moon too! Even at 16% of Earth's gravity, it's believed Luna can hang on to an atmosphere long enough to make it worth doing.

    I tend to side with those who believe the Martian climate can be 'tipped over' into a warmer phase relatively easily. Warming will release more CO2 and lead to more warming etc. And the introduction of a cocktail of super-greenhouse-gases should really get things moving.
    For an amusing and enlightening hour or so of  terraforming entertainment, take a look at The Mars Simulator Project. You'll be amazed at how much difference a little bit of super-greenhouse-gas makes to the Martian atmosphere's ability to retain heat.

    My biggest reservation with terraforming is the apparent lack of nitrogen. People talk about finding nitrate beds and producing nitrogen from them, but analyses of isotopic ratios of the small amount of it (2.7%) left in the atmosphere today suggests that Mars' original inventory was low in nitrogen to start with. However, I don't know why this should be, since Earth has plenty of nitrogen and so does Titan, so why should Mars be so bereft of it?
    At the moment, it looks like a show-stopper for ever creating a breathable atmosphere, unless we import N2 from elsewhere ... a major and daunting task.

    But maybe the information we have is too incomplete to judge accurately at this stage.
    I certainly hope that's the case!
                                         ???

I don't know if this is helpful or not, but apparently the average species lasts about 4 million years before evolving into something different or becoming extinct all together.
    I don't know if this 'lifespan' applies to intelligent species, though, since they should have the sense to avoid many of the extinction traps a non-sentient species tends to fall into.
And perhaps an intelligent species consciously resists evolution by using technology to control genetic mutations which, though possibly advantageous, are seen as socially unacceptable.
    On the other hand, maybe being intelligent creates its own dangers ... weapons of mass destruction, for instance.

    Too many unknowns again!!

    I think however many variables we throw into the Drake equation, the fact is that Phobos, Bill, and Adrian are all essentially right. It's an interesting framework for discussion but really it tells us nothing.

    I think Byron hit the nail on the head when he more or less said we won't know for sure until the Galactic Federation gives us a call!!
                                     

I still think the problem's the axe ... it didn't quite go deep enough!!