New Mars Forums

Hi Soph!

    I'm not sure I fully understand all the details of your plan, but the concept of relaying stuff between here and Mars sounds feasible. (To me at least! )

    I imagine cargo-carriers from Mars orbit could deposit fuel, mined from Phobos and Deimos, at the 'intermediate' points you mention and return with materials left there by the last Earth vessel. In turn, cargo-carriers from Earth, having deposited their export materials, could load up with that fuel and take it back to Earth orbit to power future trips.

    The fuel from the Martian moons, as others here at New Mars have been advocating for months, could make the whole thing much more economically attainable.

    It's all a long way off at this stage, I guess, but, as my mathematics teacher always said: "Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted."
    It's good to think ahead and speculate a little bit.
    Nice one, Soph!!
                                         

I've always thought a little speculation never did any harm! Within reason, of course.
                                     

Dicktice, on the surface of it, what you suggest is probably the hard-nosed, realistic, in-yer-face kind of response we should be making.

    However, I've been assured that these things often take longer than you might think and that we shouldn't necessarily expect a report until maybe early 2003.

    Gravity control has been a dream of humanity's for so long now that your cynical dismissal of it is very understandable. And the odds at this stage are heavily in your favour that the whole thing is sheer fantasy.
    But NASA decided it was worth $600,000 to investigate the alleged effect and the final report isn't in yet. And, given its potential to change our future so profoundly if it works, I for one am prepared to give them as much leeway as they need!!

    Of course, that doesn't stop me being as impatient as a kid waiting for Santa to come!

Wouldn't it be great if this argument about public-versus-private, and rockets-versus-elevators, were just a repeat of the kind of arguments which probably occurred back in 1902: Ships or trains or some combination of the two? Where does the future of transport lie? Naval power or the Army? Which branch of the military will wield the real power in the next hundred years?
    Nobody had a clue that air transportation and air power wielded by Air Forces would transform the world. Their thinking just didn't extend to that kind of possibility.

    Just suppose that while we're all examining rocket capabilities, both chemical and nuclear, or even surmising about space elevators, the real action is happening in research labs.
    Call me a dreamer if you will (I've been called worse! ), but wouldn't it be stunning if the gravito-magnetic effect were just about to make all our arguments moot?!!
                                                                 :0

    A little off-topic, I know. But the thought entered my head so I decided to throw it into the discussion.
    Go Ron Koczor !!!
                                           

Deutschland Erwache !!

    Heil Cobra!!!

Awww ... C'mon Phobos!!
    Put away that Ginsu knife and turn off the oven ... I was just foolin' with ya!

    And please ... don't deny a man a little 'plumage preening'. At my age, the opportunities are few and far between!!

Hi Andy!
    I can't help you with your first question, regarding which plan is definitely the correct one to quote to interested parties.

    But as for "the side benefits of being a member of the Mars Society", I think I can help you there.
    If you are a fully paid-up Mars Society member, you have the proud satisfaction of knowing that your subscription is helping to advance the objectives of a great and glorious enterprise, unlike certain people, who shall remain nameless ... although Phobos and Josh Cryer might know of whom we speak!!!
    In addition, there is the extra satisfaction of having risen above the thronging masses who are keen to make their views known to all and sundry, whilst being rather less keen to put their money where their mouths are!!

    Nobody should infer from this that I would knowingly put pressure on certain individuals to join TMS. ... Perish the thought!
    Nor is it my intent to imply that simple miserliness is an indication of a lack of commitment to the cause.

    Hope I haven't wandered off topic too much!

Byron, I think you've certainly put forward a very valid point here.
    Education is supremely important in all this. But it's not just the system, as such, which is failing us. We need teachers who genuinely love science and can convey their enthusiasm to their pupils. It's sad to hear of your own experiences at school where, apparently, the teachers didn't succeed in firing your imagination. Were they stifled by the system or did they just not have that infectious fascination with the subjects they taught? Maybe we'll never know for sure in your case.
                                          ???

    When I was transplanted from Australia to London at the age of ten, I managed to bluff my way through a selection process and gained entrance to a Grammar School. This was, in retrospect, one of my luckiest breaks in life!
    The teachers were called 'masters' and some were still wearing their degree gowns to classes. We addressed them as 'sir' (or 'miss' ) and were required to stand when they entered the room, and again when they were leaving.
    They were brilliant!! They knew their subject inside out and were generally full of enthusiasm for it (still! ). In physics classes, we spent many happy hours repeating some of the salient scientific experiments of the past three centuries and collating our results to see if we agreed with the likes of Young, Newton, and Boyle! We played with ripple tanks to learn about diffraction, slits to demonstrate the wave-like nature of light, miniature cloud-chambers to observe the paths of radioactive particles, etc. In chemistry, we learned how people like Lavoisier, Mendeleev, and Avogadro had revolutionised our understanding of atomic and molecular interactions. In biology we cultured bacteria and conducted our own little genetic experiments on fruit-fly.
    The masters seemed to enjoy it and I just loved it!! They taught us science, sure, but more importantly, they taught us how a good scientist's mind works. We were educated to think critically and to avoid jumping to premature conclusions.
    I still remember their faces, their voices, their mannerisms. They were wonderful teachers (maybe some still are) and I developed enormous respect and affection for them. I owe them all a great deal.

    In Australia in recent years, the standard of teachers has dropped alarmingly. I've seen my own children's report cards full of punctuation, grammar, and spelling mistakes.
    It's not hard to see why, either. Many of our friends' older children, who failed to get into their preferred careers because of poor academic results, went into teaching!! Teaching has become a depository for people who can't get into anything else.
    This to me is absolutely scandalous! The profession of teaching should be sacred. Only the best and brightest should be allowed to impart knowledge to our children because it's crucial to every child's future and, ultimately, to the success of our society.
    It's been suggested that they should 'raise the bar' considerably when it comes to the academic standards of would-be teachers, while simultaneously raising the rates of pay to very high levels. We need to enhance the status of teaching and start attracting the highest calibre of applicant for the job ... putting it up there with law and medicine.

    Oops! Sorry, Byron. I guess I got a little carried away and rambled a bit!
                                       

    Dicktice, I really like your idea of using the media to continually emphasise to the public 'the bigger picture'! It would be great if we could get some inspiring film footage, taken from a good vantage point, of the Earth-Moon system as a whole. That could be interspersed with some of the beautiful film of Earth taken from the ISS, and maybe some shots of the lunar surface too.
    I agree with you that educating the public in this way would be an excellent method of literally 'raising awareness" ...      (No apology. Pun intended!! )
    Thanks for the response.
                                         

Hi Byron!

    It's very nice of you to be so complimentary, but I can't classify myself as a "lone dissenter" by any means. It sounds great though! .... A voice in the wilderness trying to persuade the world that it's going the wrong way!!
    But the fact, as in most cases, is far more mundane than the fiction. All you have to do is to read stuff from all sides of the story and treat each version with as much critical neutrality as you can muster.
    There are usually several different sides to any story because the world is a complicated place. Not very much is in simple black and white. The climate is probably one of the supreme examples of this premise because it's essentially a chaotic system with countless poorly understood inputs. We like to think our complex modelling of climate characteristics on super-computers has given us an accurate insight into the climate and our influence on it. But, time and time again, our climate models, hailed as definitive when they were new, are found not to match the facts! We really aren't as smart as we think we are.
    Bearing this in mind, when all the world's press and other media start screaming in unison that the sky is falling, and when hundreds of scientists start agreeing with each other that they've definitely got a handle on how Earth's climate works (for sure this time! ), I just naturally step back and say ... "Hang on a minute. There's something wrong with this picture!"
    Call me stubborn, obstinate, and recalcitrant if you will!! But every time I go to the drawer in my head marked 'Experience', the files there tell me that if nearly everyone is running in the same direction, yelling and shouting, they're usually going the wrong way! I'm very wary of mobs, however eminent some of them may be.
    So it's nothing heroic, I'm afraid, just down-to-Earth common sense!

    In response to your question, the answer is I'm not sure how Australia would change in the event of another ice-age. What I do know is that, during the last one, many of the currently arid parts of inland southern Australia had lakes and relatively lush vegetation, which supported large tribes of aborigines in some comfort. I suppose the best guess is that the same pattern of climate would re-establish itself.

    Incidentally, as far as the rate at which a new ice-age might impose itself on the world is concerned, there is at least some evidence that it would be very quick. Although it would take many centuries to build up thick ice sheets across the northern continents, some schools of thought believe the actual change-over to much lower average temperatures could occur in half a human lifetime!
    If the human population were, say, 1 billion instead of 6 billion, we might just be able to cope with the enormous changes to agricultural patterns and the human migrations which would follow. But as it is, we're 'on the edge' and overstretched. Even small changes in local micro-climates are enough to disrupt the economies of whole countries. We're too vulnerable because there are too many of us.

    O.K. There may be a bit of global warming going on, and maybe we're responsible for it. And it's true that you shouldn't go changing things you don't understand. But Earth isn't normally this cold anyway - it normally runs temperatures considerably higher than today's. So the chances of a runaway greenhouse event are vanishingly small ... we're not likely to turn into Venus Mark II !! And longer warmer growing seasons in most places will not be such a bad thing, even if they do occur. And I'm not at all convinced this will happen.

    No. It's the next ice-age that concerns me. That's something really worth worrying about ... and it's overdue!

                                         ???

Hi Bill!

    It sure sounds paradoxical, doesn't it?! Global warming tipping us into the next ice-age!

    I think the most important point is that we really don't know exactly what tips the balance, unless you subscribe to the Milankovich-cycle theory of long-term differences in the tilt of Earth's axis and the eccentricity of our orbit etc.
    Atmospheric CO2 levels have gone up and down like a yoyo in the past few million years due to changes in vegetation and volcanic eruptions etc. Global temperatures have gone up and down, too, of course. But the exact mechanisms are still poorly understood, and direct cause-and-effect relationships are hard to establish because of the number of variables.

    I think we need to get away from this view that the world's climate has been static and unchanging since the dinosaurs died, and that humans are the only agency that's caused any change in the atmosphere. We're not! Monstrous changes have occurred in Earth's atmosphere and climate over periods of billions of years, and many of those have happened since the end of the Cretaceous. Not one of those changes was manmade!! We weren't even around until yesterday, geologically speaking.
    A long period of volcanism could commence next year and last for a million years, during which time the present levels of CO2 in the air could double or triple or quadruple. For a while, at least, global average temperatures could rise by several degrees Celsius and a significant retreat of the polar caps could occur. Whose fault would that be? Nobody's. Would life on Earth be snuffed out? Of course not.
    Since reliable records were kept, over the past century or so, we've recorded a rise in the global average temperature of just 0.5 deg.C. I'm reasonably sure that there's no absolutely indisputable proof that this rise is due to manmade additions of CO2 to the atmosphere, although we are the likely culprits. But this is a non-event compared to what nature is capable of!

    Regardless of what we do, it is unlikely we can keep the next ice-age from happening. The present configuration of land masses is the overriding factor in gross climate characteristics for this planet, with a virtually landlocked Arctic Ocean (very sensitive to changes in insolation) and a large, isolated, frozen continent sitting right over the south pole. We are far more vulnerable to ice-ages than to global warming, but have been lulled into a false sense of security by these past several thousand years of benign interglacial temperatures.
    As I've said, for this reason I don't really lose any sleep worrying about global warming.
    And since nobody has a clue how sensitive the Gulf Stream actually is to changes in the amount of fresh water melting off the northern ice cap, I haven't started worrying about that one yet either!! Every year, another scientist comes up with another plausible climate hypothesis which becomes the fashionable thing to worry about.
    But the painful truth is we're not as powerful as we think we are in terms of our ability to change the climate, and we really have no idea what's going to happen next!!

I think there's some confusion here. The all-female crew is supposed to be taking many different sperm samples with them so that fertilisation can be undertaken as and when required.
    As I understand it, the actual insemination will have to be performed by crew members, one for another.

    Hell!! ... It sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go to when there are so many of us cute cuddly guys ready willing and able to make the trip!!!

Yeah, that 30,000 cu.m. living space is just too good to waste!

    I'm rapidly coming around to the idea that, at least in the early stages of colonisation, and for domes with diameters up to about 50 metres, a full plastic sphere is probably the easiest way to go.
    It eliminates all the problems associated with trying to mix and pour concrete for massive footings, since there's no net force with spheres. And you can import a ready-made 'bubble' from Earth, and an earth-mover (or should that be mars-mover?! ).
    I'm not sure about supports for floors and the flooring material itself, though. Would we have to import that from Earth, too, or could we manufacture aluminium or iron beams from Martian regolith?

    But, once we start talking about domes hundreds of metres in diameter, I think we'll have to go back to the type of hemispherical dome and massive concrete foundations we've talked about elsewhere.

    God I wish they'd stop procrastinating and get on with this stuff!! I'd love to see it started before I drop dead!

                                         ???