New Mars Forums

Hey, Phobos!

    Haven't heard from you in a little while. Good to see you back ol' buddy!
    I'm not sure about all this hiking on Europa stuff, though! You'll need to have a quiet word with the material manufacturers first, I think.   

Hi Josh!

    Thanks for the encouraging words about finding Mars next year. Don't worry, I'll be out looking for it ... colour-blind or not!!
                                         

    And now, thanks to Cindy, I might even be able to find Antares somewhere in the vicinity, too! Or will it be somewhere different in 6 months?
                                                  :0

Hi everybody!

    I read recently, for what it's worth here, that the 98% chimp DNA thing may be wrong. Some researchers now believe that the figure is closer to 95%.

    I think AltToWar might have been disagreeing with something I said in a post about 1 page back - that humans are a flawed species. I didn't mean flawed as in original sin, I meant that we're carrying a lot of unfortunate baggage from our simian ancestry.

    Here in Australia, we have a substantial problem with 'broken homes' and single parents trying to raise children. Actually, 25% of all Australian children are born outside of marriage these days. ( Before anybody goes into attack mode, I state here and now that I am not an orthodox adherent of any religion and do not have an axe to grind about sex outside marriage or whatever. All I care about is that children have a stable and loving environment in which to grow up.)
    Time and time again, we get news about another child battered to death by a 'de facto' husband. The de facto is not the child's father but lives with the mother. We never hear of biological fathers battering their biological offspring.

    Aetius is correct when he outlines the kind of appalling savagery of which chimpanzees are capable. I distinctly remember seeing a fascinating documentary which overturned the popular notion that chimps are gentle guileless creatures.
    One of the worst aspects of their behaviour, which stuck in my mind for its sheer callousness, was that of males towards females nursing another male's child. If a female is breast-feeding young, she is (a) infertile and (b) not interested in sex anyhow. In order to successfully mate with that female, the male needs to get rid of the baby ... and he does!! The standard method is to snatch the child away and bash its brains out on a tree trunk or a rock. After a brief period of mourning, the female is then ready to be inseminated by the simicidal suitor and will then disseminate his genes, not those of the previous father!

    Every time I see news on TV of another baby killed by its 'de facto' father, I think of chimpanzees.

    Chimps also engage in border warfare with other bands of chimps, do all those other things Aetius mentioned, and always have a dominant alpha male who exercises power by brute force.
    The parallels with humanity are striking. Anyone who chooses to ignore these parallels and pretends they don't apply to modern mankind, is 'playing with a short deck' and can never fully comprehend the human condition.
    Some of us here at New Mars won't like this assertion and will attempt to deny its importance. I understand your motives and sympathise. It's very disquieting to see just how thin a veneer of civilisation that 5% of our DNA provides, and how close to the animal kingdom we really are.

    Saddam Hussein is a dominant alpha male. When push comes to shove, so is Al Gore (however much he may try to deny it), and so is George W. Bush. These people haven't arrived where they are by being gentle and self-effacing. Politics is the new jungle and the new chimps have new weapons and new tactics ... but the rules have barely changed.

    Just because I'm enough of a realist to recognise its existence, doesn't mean to say that I condone all of this chimpanzee behaviour. I don't condone imperialism and I don't condone the exploitation of the weak by the strong. There are better and far more productive ways of making us all better off! Beyond a healthy level of competition, the best tactic by far for humanity's future is sensible cooperation and teamwork. Only a neanderthal could seriously suggest otherwise.

    In other words, I'm with Cindy. It may only be 5%, but Vive la difference!!
                                     

Hi Dickbill!

    I agree with you about the mathematics of the article I linked to. There's been a major foul up somewhere - and I apologise for not checking the figures.
    My main purpose was to indicate how uncomfortable fast rotation rates can be, but it never occurred to me that our correspondent (the author of the piece) might have slept through mathematics classes in highschool!

    I agree that 3.35 metres radius and 5 rpm will give you no more than 0.093g. And no amount of vector analysis is going to give you 1.45g in any direction!

    In order to get a vector acceleration of 1.45g at the floor near the wall (with 1g in the vertical of course), you'd need a lateral centripetal acceleration of 1.05g. This translates into a rotation rate of nearly 17rpm. And to stand up in that environment, you'd need to make an angle of about 44 degrees with the floor!!
    None of these figures even remotely resembles the ones our author quoted, so I don't know where he went wrong with his numbers.
    Sorry!       ???

    But nevertheless, Coriolis effects in space will be more troublesome the smaller we make the radius of rotation of our spacecraft or the more artificial gravity we want to produce. The unpleasantness reported in the article is accurate, even if the numbers aren't!

Hi Byron!

    I couldn't agree more with your frustration that we're not doing much more in Low Earth Orbit to investigate the effects of long-term exposure to Coriolis effects and, especially, to 0.38g.

    Your scenario of starting at 1g and reducing to 0.38g as the Hab nears Mars is the one I favour. And spinning up to 1g as soon as practicable on the way home is the way to go, in my opinion.
    That way, the astronauts are kept in normal Earth gravity for the maximum time possible, which must be better for them in the long term.
    My notion of the ideal situation is a cable 1.8 kilometres long joining the Hab and counterweight (i.e. a spin radius of 900 metres), and a rate of spin of 1 rpm. This should give a supremely comfortable impression of normal Earth gravity with virtually none of the unpleasant side effects of rotation.

    I visualise low thrust ion engines being used to maintain tension on the cable as the Hab separates from the counterweight. These engines could be shut down only as the two masses are 'spun up' using other ion engines, and as the rotation itself becomes sufficient to keep the cable taut. Using this technique, I foresee no difficulties with the cable getting "all tangled up".
    I've suggested ion engines because we know how to make them, they exert a gentle and continuous thrust perfect for spinning up and spinning down, and the mass of fuel required would be small.

    As far as the cable itself is concerned, I really think worrying about it breaking is taking nervousness to unrealistic extremes. People enjoy rides at carnivals all the time and hardly give a thought to how many things could go wrong and possibly kill them. Some people even jump out of perfectly serviceable aircraft ... on purpose (    ) ... and plunge Earthwards, hoping that a carefully packed pile of material and string will pop out of a sack on their backs and prevent them encountering the ground at high velocity!! Haven't you ever stood on the 30th floor of a skyscraper, this time with just a glass wall between you and that high velocity encounter with the ground?! And didn't you ever wonder about the glass breaking? But how often does that happen?

    Life's a risk. As they say: Living is a life-shortening experience!
    There are so many risks involved in a crewed Mars mission. The chances of the cable breaking would be so far down my list of things-to-worry-about as to be completely trivial.
                                         

AltToWar asks:-

    Yeah! In its crudest form, that's what I'm saying.
    For all of recorded history, there has always been a dominant empire of one sort or another. If there was more than one at any particular time, it was only because they didn't know of each other's existence, or lacked the logistics to wage war over the distance between them.
    My opinion is that such behaviour - the dominance thing - is rooted in our primate genetic heritage. There always has to be a dominant alpha male. And, on a larger scale, there always has to be a dominant alpha nation.

    However enlightened some, or even the majority, of us become, our politics always take the same shape - generation after generation. It's always a struggle for power between one man and another, or one nation and another. Power and wealth ... it's as simple as that.
    And however outwardly caring and humane our political systems may be on paper, however grandiose our speeches about peace and sharing may be, it still comes down to the actions and motives of a few men (usually) in positions of power, or a few men desperately seeking positions of power.
    At best our political institutions can blunt the worst effects of such power struggles in most cases. But it's always a containment exercise. We're always battling to keep the evil genie inside the bottle.

    Am I a cynic? I suppose I must be. Though I could attempt to take refuge from that accusation in the usual trick of claiming to be a realist!
    Empires have risen and fallen, kings and dictators have fought and schemed, and wars have raged over and over through every century in human history. Surely you must allow me to claim to be a realist if I say it's just us - humans. We're the problem! The evil genie isn't really in the bottle, it's in all of us individually. Some of us can control it by an effort of will and an ability to see the 'bigger picture', but most of us can't.
    And the worst part of it is the perpetuation of a situation whereby the people, even in a democracy, who attain power, are the people who crave it most. And they're just the people you don't want in positions of authority because they're driven more by primal instincts than by reason.

    Getting to the main point ("Break out the champagne!", I hear you all cry in unison! ), my belief is that the human condition I've described will never change. We're a flawed species. Whichever nation you examine in detail, you'll find monstrous acts of barbarity hiding in its history ... any nation!
    I don't condone Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but then I don't know enough about what went through Truman's head when he OK'd it. Were his decision processes based entirely on a malicious and blood-thirsty desire to incinerate women and children? Maybe. Did he make the decision lightly? I don't know. I like to think there must have been reasons beyond simple mindless vengeance, but maybe there weren't.

    In any event, in a world bedevilled for millenia by one ruthless empire after another, I see no reason to change my opinion that the current American Empire is easily the most benign we've ever seen.
    Even if its absolute power eventually corrupts it so thoroughly that it decays from within (the usual fate of empires), all we can look forward to is the rise of another empire to replace it. And we mightn't be so lucky next time!

Yeah ... probably.

    But then, it's the only way to be. Leastways, I enjoy it! 

Thanks, Byron! But maybe we should get back to the proper thread now we've educated each other on our respective countries' social structure.   

    C.C. and Cindy are right, in my view. They've both hit the nail right on the head.
    Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the Roman and Nazi systems are a testimony to that - both were brutal.
    But nobody has ever had the kind of military power now wielded by America. And yet U.S. policies, though often self-serving, are still remarkably benign.
   I still marvel at how the U.S., between 1945 and 1949, was the only country on Earth with a nuclear capability and never used it. You can be quite certain that the U.S.S.R. under Stalin, had it been given the same advantage, would have wasted no time in annexing all of Europe and God knows what else!

    It's hard to imagine who else you might trust with the kind of power America has today. Sure the U.S. has its faults, but anyone who gives the world hamburgers, jazz, rock 'n' roll, the Chevy Bel-Air, and manned moon-landings, can't be all bad!!
                                       

Thanks again, Byron, for your unwavering support of the great Australian way of life! You're right in saying we have a lot going for us in very many ways ... in fact, we call ourselves 'the lucky country' (and actually believe it, too! )

    Most of us regard a full-time job (if you can track one of 'em down these days, working for a boss who hasn't been stung by the Unfair Dismissal legislation yet! ) as a 37.5 hour week. We have automatic annual paid leave entitlement of 4 weeks. Unsocial hours usually attract a time-and-a-half rate of pay, unless the job is obviously just one of those jobs which are, of necessity, carried out when everyone else is partying or sleeping. (But then the rates of pay tend to take that into account when you sign up.) Major public holidays such as Christmas and Easter Sunday attract double-time or even double-time-and-a-half pay rates, and I have heard of triple-time being paid but can't remember the circumstances of that.
    Every employer is required by law to pay 9% of whatever s/he is paying an employee into the retirement superannuation scheme of the employee's choice. This is above, beyond, and separate from the wage itself. And every employer must, by law, pay a Workcover premium for each employee as insurance in case the employee is injured at work. Though this in no way excuses an employer for not providing a safe workplace - they can be, and are, sued for failing to do 'what any reasonable person in the same circumstances might be expected to do to ensure the safety of employees'.
    If feasible, no worker is expected to work more than 4 hours without a 15 minute rest break.
    After 10 years of service to the same organisation (15 years in some States), an employee is entitled to 3 months long-service leave on full pay. In some cases this can be negotiated and taken as, say, 6 months leave on half pay.
    In some States, they have leave-loading. too. This means that your vacation pay (which is paid to you before you go on leave) is boosted 15% to help with your vacation expenses. In other words, if your gross pay before tax is normally $500 a week and you're going away on vacation for two weeks, your gross pay for the period of that vacation will be $1150 instead of $1000.
    Also, there are various sick-leave entitlements which guarantee full pay for certain periods, depending on the industry and how long you've worked for your employer. (The problem with this being that some Australians regard the sick-leave as 'beach-leave' and tend to take the full number of days as a kind of extra vacation right for when the weather's good! )

    In many ways, the above work conditions are a good thing. But there's a price for everything and, in Australia's case, it's national productivity. If making money is the point of the game, and I appreciate that for many people it isn't, then Australia is probably less efficient than America.
    Many small business owners are hardly any better off than the people they employ, yet they have risked their own money to set up a business and find themselves in a nightmare of legislation - all designed to protect the employee. The myth still persists, though, that: "Oh, you own your own business ... you must be doing really well!" In Australia, that is very often not the case. And many who would otherwise start a business and employ a few people, end up backing away and saying: "It's really not worth it."

    Compared to the U.S.A., it may be a sustainable argument that Australia is pretty much a socialist country. There are many laws to shield citizens from the worst excesses of capitalism and there really is an atmosphere of egalitarianism in much of our social structure ... something we express as "A fair go for everybody, mate!"
    We're an irreverent mob at heart and too many 'airs and graces' will earn you the reputation of being "a bit up yourself". I confess I don't know exactly how the expression came about, but it means you have an exaggerated sense of your own worth or importance! The typical Aussie has something I think I've mentioned here before: An inbuilt, well-developed bullsh** detector!!
    Some people say the Canadian outlook is about the closest you'll find to the Australian way of looking at life, but I don't know enough Canadians to be sure about that. Although I've certainly liked all the ones I've met so far!! 

    One of the drawbacks of this egalitarianism is a tendency toward quite spiteful treatment of 'the wealthy' and the development of what is known as 'the politics-of-envy' ... an 'us-and-them' attitude which I think is probably counter-productive. It leads to the 'tall poppy syndrome', which basically means that, if you do too well, you should be cut down to size - a philosophy which tends to encourage mediocrity in my opinion.
    Such thinking has led to people on quite modest incomes being regarded as 'wealthy' and taxed accordingly. Anyone earning $50,000 p.a or more falls into this category. If your taxable income exceeds this figure, you lose 42 cents of every dollar over that amount. Until you get to $60,000, when you start losing 47 cents in every dollar. (Plus the universal 1.5% Medicare Levy, which, if you don't have private health insurance, and you earn $50,000+, goes up to 2.5%).
    What income do you have to reach in America before you incur a marginal tax rate of 48.5%?

    Our work conditions are pretty good and our social security system is generous, but the price is high taxation and low incentive to achieve.
    There's always a catch, isn't there?!   

    Thanks for the compliment about being a great boss, Aetius. But the fact is, I could never really be a boss, as such.
    I just end up being friends with everybody! Most people seem to like such a working environment and respond well to it (lucky for me ... because I don't think I could be any different if I tried anyhow! ) ... but at least one person took advantage of the situation. I guess you can't help bad luck!
                                            ???

Very interesting, Alexander!
    There seems to be an upsurge in interest in this field (Oops .. sorry, no pun intended! ) which I find very encouraging. I can't think of anything which would make more difference to humanity's future advancement and well-being than control of gravity.

    Star Trek here we come ... I hope!!     ???

I'm hoping as hard as I can!!

    All fingers and all toes are crossed for this one!

No, Dicktice. There's no corruption at this site.

    The star system relates purely to the number of posts you make.

    But join the Mars Society anyway!   

We are well and truly into the northern Martian summer now. The CO2 'hood', which covers the north of Mars in winter, must have disappeared by this time and the instruments on Odyssey should have been in a position to take readings of hydrogen in the upper regolith.
    Why have we heard nothing?
    The northern plains must surely have at least as much water in the top metre as the southern highlands, and I'm keen to see some results!

    Does anyone know what's going on?       ???

Well, nearly another month has passed and we still haven't heard from Ron.
    Maybe no news is good news ... I don't know!

    Some possibly better good news is that the first cracks in the stony edifice may be starting to appear. What I mean is, the first reports are leaking out that some scientists are beginning to make encouraging noises about gravity modification.

    In this article, from the Space Daily website, which essentially pans NASA for various crimes of omission and incompetence, the following throw-away line appears:-

    [Some top level physicists now agree that anti-gravity devices like the 512kV rotator can reduce the effects of gravity by spinning electrons, but they can't secure funding for research.]

    Written by Carlton Meyer (anybody ever heard of him? ) on the first of this month, this is really quite a statement!
    He drops the line in the middle of a diatribe against NASA, as though it's common knowledge and of little importance rather than potentially the most exciting story since Noah was loading the animals onto the ark!!

    Has anyone else found any references to physicists making encouraging noises about gravity machines?
    Is this Carlton Meyer a credible journalist? Or are we to take his report with a pinch of salt?
                                         :0