In a Major New Report, Scientists Build Rationale For Sending Astronauts To Mars (arstechnica.com) 99
A major scientific report published Tuesday argues that sending astronauts to Mars is justified by the quest to find life and conduct research that robots alone can't achieve. "We're searching for life on Mars," said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report. "The answer to the question 'are we alone' is always going to be 'maybe,' unless it becomes yes." Ars Technica reports: The report, two years in the making and encompassing more than 200 pages, was published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Essentially, the committee co-chaired by Newman and Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, director of the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, was asked to identify the highest-priority science objectives for the first human missions to Mars. [...] "There's no turning back," Newman said. "Everyone is inspired by this because it's becoming real. We can get there. Decades ago, we didn't have the technologies. This would have been a study report."
The goal of the report is to help build a case for meaningful science to be done on Mars alongside human exploration. The report outlines 11 top-priority science objectives. [...] The committee also looked at different types of campaigns to determine which would be most effective for completing the science objectives noted above. The campaign most likely to be successful, they found, was an initial human landing that lasts 30 days, followed by an uncrewed cargo delivery to facilitate a longer 300-day crewed mission on the surface of Mars. All of these missions would take place in a single exploration zone, about 100 km in diameter, that featured ancient lava flows and dust storms.
Notably, the report also addresses the issue of planetary protection, a principle that aims to protect both celestial bodies (i.e., the surface of Mars) and visitors (i.e., astronauts) from biological contamination. [...] In recent years, NASA has been working with the International Committee on Space Research to design a plan in which human landings might occur in some areas of the planet, while other parts of Mars are left in "pristine" condition. The committee said this work should be prioritized to reach a resolution that will further the design of human missions to Mars. "NASA should continue to collaborate on the evolution of planetary protection guidelines, with the goal of enabling human explorers to perform research in regions that could possibly support, or even harbor, life," the report states.
The goal of the report is to help build a case for meaningful science to be done on Mars alongside human exploration. The report outlines 11 top-priority science objectives. [...] The committee also looked at different types of campaigns to determine which would be most effective for completing the science objectives noted above. The campaign most likely to be successful, they found, was an initial human landing that lasts 30 days, followed by an uncrewed cargo delivery to facilitate a longer 300-day crewed mission on the surface of Mars. All of these missions would take place in a single exploration zone, about 100 km in diameter, that featured ancient lava flows and dust storms.
Notably, the report also addresses the issue of planetary protection, a principle that aims to protect both celestial bodies (i.e., the surface of Mars) and visitors (i.e., astronauts) from biological contamination. [...] In recent years, NASA has been working with the International Committee on Space Research to design a plan in which human landings might occur in some areas of the planet, while other parts of Mars are left in "pristine" condition. The committee said this work should be prioritized to reach a resolution that will further the design of human missions to Mars. "NASA should continue to collaborate on the evolution of planetary protection guidelines, with the goal of enabling human explorers to perform research in regions that could possibly support, or even harbor, life," the report states.
Re: Send the billionaires please, one way (Score:4, Funny)
I'm cool with also sending anyone else who trusts their vision and wants to be a part of this great experiment. Meanwhile I'll re-play BioShock to remind myself of how this plays out.
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Terran life is voracious and competitive and the result of 3-4 billions of years where only the winners get to carry on to the next generation. The life that evolved here on Earth is far more likely to destroy other planetary ecosystems than the other way around.
Obviously, precautions are warranted as we are dealing with something unknown. As you could end up with some annoying consequences like space mold eating your hatch seals. But as for some alien life showing up on Earth and taking over? If it's possi
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You have some interesting points, but I think that rocks from Mars would likely have had any life forms vaporized in the heat of entry through our atmosphere, so you still have that risk.
Not really. Despite the heat of re-entry, meteorites are generally cold when they hit the ground since they tend to keep cool through ablation and/or sheer thermal mass and the square/cube ratio. Sure, a lot of meteors are going to be sterilized as fiery bolides, but if you have a lump of rock left over after re-entry and it had life in it, it is highly likely to survive.
Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:5, Informative)
What's wrong with spending $100 billion to do something cool as shit?
Heck, Americans have spent that much this year paying for Trump's tariffs!
Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:5, Informative)
At least $100 Billion. The tariffs have raised "As of August 2025, tariff revenues since January 2025 totaled $149 billion" (https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff-revenue-tracker-how-much-us-collecting-which-imports-are).
This is much less than la Presidenta's claim of $22 Trillion (last we heard, inflation tends to raise his estimate week after week). For comparison, the entire U.S. GDP for 2024 is $29.184 trillion (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp). We cannot trust any numbers put out by la Presidenta's regime, they are likely "massaged".
For the continuing damage: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/res... [yale.edu]
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He's listed like a dozen things that he wants to pay for with the tariff money, each of which would individually consume anywhere from "a large minority of it" to "more than all of it".
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last i heard, the check is in the mail
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The root cause is that the vast majority of the American working class don't realize they are the working class. They are afraid to tax the rich because they might become rich one day themselves, or because they believe the rich might pack up their investments and leave.
As long as people vote like they wish to be victims of capitalism, then that's all we'll ever be.
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That $100 would be better spent on probes to planets, not attempting to cram people into a tin can and sending it to Mars....unless.....if they promise to cram Elmo in, then I might support it.
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It's a historic boondoggle where he makes trillions of dollars.
Spending the funds on climate change mitigation, population sustainability, and curing the assets gap ought to come first. That's a problem that "scientists" need to chained to solve before dubious excursions to other planets.
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I just had to remind someone else of this: sarcasm tags are now mandatory on all sarcasm.
Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, this report reeks of the people promoting Lunar exploration in order to mine Helium 3: a solution in search of a problem. They already have the thing in mind that they want to happen (in this case, settle Mars) and are searching backwards for a means to justify it.
In no way, if the actual goal is "studying life", will $100B buy you more results by sending humans than by sending robots, and nor will it shorten the schedule.When you put humans into the mix, suddenly all of the resources for your project end up going to delivering, sustaining, and retrieving that "smart hammer" you're sending, rather than the actual scientific equipment.
I'm not saying that there can't be good justifications for settling other planets - their can be. Musk's is the most defensible, IMHO (that it's a long, slow, expensive project, but is needed to learn how to make this rare thing (consciousness) redundant against natural and manmade disasters (the latter risk of which grows every year), and we never know how much time we'll have left to do the very-long project needed to do so. Though Musk IMHO grossly downplays the timescales and costs for true resource-independence (or rather, independence to the degree that *if necessary*, it could develop full resource independence on its own, even if shipments of key supplies from Earth are more efficient), and his "quick terraforming" notions are fantasy.
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I think the promotion of a Lunar mission is more to give NASA some $ to spread around to their long term partners.
And the NASA-derived mission is just flailing in the dark, what a mess.
Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:5, Insightful)
well, we have spent more than that on the iss, and last experiment i saw was a zero-grav bot trying to find a rubik's cube in a module. much of the research done there isn't really worth the cost and could be done much, much cheaper on earth. but since we have it we gotta use it. it's was way overhyped. freeman dyson pointed out the clear distinction between "space science" and "space adventure, or sporting events in space": https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
he was also very sceptic about the purpose of the iss itself at that point in time, he was part of the commitee tasked to examine space projects and the iss was the last one he would recommend, but his advice was completely ignored. sadly, i can't find the talk where he explains that story in detail.
however, in the long run we definitely should learn about humans living in space and space travel. after all, what we spend on that, including this mars project, is but a tiny fraction of what we spend on eternal wars and all sorts of megalomaniac projects, or just amass the wealth on a tiny 1% of people who could probably fund this entire trip on his/her own.
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Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score:4, Insightful)
Realistically the two things that will make it happen are
1. China is doing it
3. Billionaire joyrides
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Not to say that spending money to do "cool things" is inherently wrong, but just as a reminder: the Trump administration cut $8B from USAID's annual budget and it's projected to lead to 14 million extra deaths by 2030, 4,5m of them children [ucla.edu].
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Yes. Let's do this. (Score:2)
Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score:5, Interesting)
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Uhh,, are you crazy?? It's got an atmosphere with clouds of pure acid that snows lead sulfide on a surface that'll melt you face in 5 seconds. That said, we ought to do it.
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Still more friendly than Mars, with more usable local resources
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I dunno, balloon cities .. how stable is the atmospheric layering? We may be better off inhabiting space itself in modular space stations built from asteroid minerals. I would not be opposed to trying it though.
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Venus's middle cloud layer is quite similar in most properties to Earth's troposphere, with convection cells, wind speeds, etc seemingly having a similar distribution to that on Earth. There's also lighting, seemingly at roughly Earth levels (though a lot of uncertainty), although we know very little about it, including even where it occurs (incl. whether it's in the middle layer), and why. Because Mars hogs most of the planetary exploration budget :P
Aerostats generally deal better with turbulence than fi
Re: Venus is orders of magnitude easier to coloniz (Score:5, Informative)
Recent studies suggest that it does not have anywhere near as much acid in its atmosphere as we thought, especially in the upper atmosphere where heâ(TM)s talking about.
Re:Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score:5, Interesting)
Where are you going to live on Mars? You need meters of concrete above you if you don't want to die from the radiation.
You need an insulated, radiation proof pressure suit to do anything outside on Mars. An acid resistant suit is all you need in my cloud city on Venus. Temperature is perfect, pressure is fine and no radiation.
How will you generate electricity or get power on Mars? Solar is plenitiful on Venus.
Mining for carbon, water and all the elements of life sucks. Percipitating it out of the atmosphere is easier.
A big balloon is a relatively easy thing to transport to Venus compared to what you need to take to Mars to set yourself up. Especially when you don't even need your balloon to be perfectly sealed. There will be no pressure difference with this floating colony. So holes will smell awful and make your eyes water if you don't fix them fast but a large hole on Mars is going to literally suck.
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Temperature is perfect, pressure is fine and no radiation.
This caught my eye so I looked it up. Here is a quote I found in relation to your claim: "Intense at the Top: Venus is closer to the Sun and receives intense solar energy, especially ultraviolet (UV) radiation, at its cloud tops."
Explain your position here please.
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The remaining UV radiation that makes it down to 50km can easily be stopped by the structure of your habitat or the solar panels on the roof. The ionized particle from the sun would be comparable to high altitude cities on Earth.
You might even end up with algae problem on the outside of your colony, since bacteria will like find a way to do photosynthisis there.
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Yeah, but that's UV radiation. Most transparent materials are opaque to UVC, the most dangerous UV light. There are even plenty of transparent materials (such as typical window glass) that are opaque to UVB. So that's the most dangerous UV light blocked possibly without even any special filter materials. UVA can be blocked by some materials that are fully transparent to ordinary visible light. Otherwise, there are plenty of coatings that are still largely transparent that can block it. So, you can block bas
Re:Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score:5, Interesting)
So, this is not only wrong, but it'd actually be more convenient if it were true ;)
Venus's middle cloud layer (the one in question) is actually more like vog (volcanic fog) on Earth. It's not an acid bath, it's a sparse aerosol, with visibility measured in kilometers. The particulates are higher molar than on Earth, but otherwise, it's not a very aggressive environment, and if not for the molarity difference it would be on the order of standard worker PEL levels. You could be out in shirtsleeves for quite a while before you started getting dermatitis (but you would need face protection, both for breathing, and to protect your eyes - not just from the aerosols, but also e.g. carbon monoxide).
(Here I should add the caveat that we don't know if there's any precipitation or dew/frost in Venus's middle cloud layer; it's still a debated topic. We've put so damned little resources into studying Venus, unfortunately, and as a result there's still massive unanswered questions)
Lead sulfide has absolutely nothing to do with Venus's middle cloud layer. It is a (probable) surface phenomenon in Venus's highest regions. The fact that Venus's surface is a natural chemical vapor deposition lab (plus has some interesting volcanic fractionalization / selective thermal erosion possibilities) does, however, raise interesting resource possibilities. The surface, though hostile, was accessible even to Soviet tech developed in the 1960s; much of what we build for industry has to endure vastly more hostile conditions than Venus's surface. The air is so dense that it makes landing much easier than on Mars - it's been calculated that with the right trajectory, you could fire a hollow titanium sphere at Venus, have it enter the atmosphere, decelerate from orbital velocity, and land intact on the surface, without any entry/descent system whatsoever). One probe lost its parachute during descent and still landed intact. The atmosphere is dense enough that you can "dredge" loose material, and fly around with a small metal bellows balloon (controlling flight with small winglets), and return to altitude with a phase-change balloon.
(There is - probably - a metal in Venus's middle cloud layer, but it's small amounts of iron chloride, a soluble salt)
As for the comment I made earlier about how it would be easier if the middle cloud layer had more acid: sulfuric acid is a resource to a Venus habitat. While it's not needed for lift (lift on Venus can be done with just normal, breathable Earth air, with about half the lift of helium on Earth - you can live inside your envelope, with N2 straight from the atmosphere and O2 made from CO2), H2SO4 is your main source of *hydrogen*. Specifically, heating the aerosols first releases free water vapour. Further heating splits it into SO3 and more H2O. You can then further heat the SO3 over a vanadium pentoxide catalyst to split it to SO2 and O2, or you can inject the SO3 into the front of your scrubber to help extract more free water vapour (it's not all in the aerosols) .
Hydrogen is needed not just for your habitats's water needs (note: gases will always slowly permeate in and out of your envelope, it's not a closed system), but also for propulsion for ascent stages and for producing polymers (including the envelope itself). Ascent stages need lots of hydrogen, unless you go hydrogen-free (carbon monoxide, cyanogen, etc), but these have either poor ISP or big problems with things like toxicity, stability, and/or esp. combustion chamber temperature); even "low hydrogen" fuels like acetylene, diacetylene, H additives to hydrogen-free props, etc still need massive amounts of hydrogen to reach orbit. Chemical rockets would need to be at least two stages, be recovered by balloons, hang and be manipulated from the bottom of
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(To elaborate about PELs: Venus's middle cloud layer is ~1-10mg/m3, depending on altitude, latitude, and what study you trust (our existing data isn't great). OSHA PELs are 1mg/m3 for an 8-hour shift. NIOSH's RELs are also 1mg/m3 for a 10-hour shift, with IDLH of 15mg/m3. Now, this has the two aforementioned caveats. On the downside, Venus's aerosols are higher molarity - 75-85% concentrated vs. ~20% on Earth. On the upside, the vast majority of the PEL/REL/IDLH risk is from inhalation, which obviously, yo
Re: Venus is orders of magnitude easier to coloniz (Score:1)
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If you parked the Venus zeppelin on Mars it wouldn't offer the inhabitants enough protection from the cold or radiation. But that's a minor issue next to the fact that it would explode due to the lower atmospheric pressure.
Seriously? (Score:2)
"The Venetian atmosphere is corrosive to many materials but it isn't toxic"
Oh really? Go suck on some SO2 and see how you get on.
"On Venus there is no need for radiation shielding"
BS. There's no ozone and at the height these balloons would float the UV and assorted stuff from the sun would fry you in seconds.
"holes in your balloon are not fatal"
Wtf re you smoking? Archimedes principle holds on Venus just as on Earth. Lose your lifting gas and you sink and on Venus you'll soon start to cook.
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They are, however, correct. Venus has no (innate) magnetic field, only a weak induced one (about 2x that of Mars's induced field), but it has a massive atmosphere. The mass of matter over your head at a reasonable habitat altitude/latitude combination is equivalent to that of about 5 meters of water. Way more shielding than is necessary for human life. Of course, having even
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Oh really? Go suck on some SO2 and see how you get on.
I mean, one of the houses I grew up in we heated our living room with a fireplace, so... I think the actual concentration may matter some.
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I'm not sure I can take you seriously on the topic of space travel when you're talking about Venetian conditions.
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Say, looks like somebody's reading my papers!
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
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What you're describing is definitely very cool - and likely something humans will do one day. However, the stated reasons for going into space at all are "to find life", and we're pretty sure there's none on Venus. We think there's at least the chance it might once have been on Mars, so coolness aside, Mars is the only* place worth visiting if you're looking for life.
* yes, moons of Jupiter may also have life, but that's even more theoretical than life-once-existed-on-Mars. We'll get there eventually too, b
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Disagree. Venus had good conditions for life to emerge and also is a chemistry pot. Not seeing that on present day Mars.
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It's not entirely clear, but it's quite possible, arguably probable, that at least part of Venus's highlands involve fragments of ancient crust (the highlands also have milder conditions for exploration). Venus was Earthlike before Earth was, with vast warm oceans. There's also some arguments for life in the atmosphere based on gases that have been found, although I don't buy them (in the same way that I don't buy the same arguments for current surface life on Mars).
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If for some reason we actually run out of space on Earth, a floating raft on the ocean would be much easier than Mars or Venus or the moon.
There is no logical reason for humans to ever live on another planet.
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We won't run of "space" .. nuclear war and genocides could happen though. A raft isn't going to help when you have marauding drones.
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Yeah. Because if Mars' gravity is insufficient, and you'd have to live in rotating habitats anyways, then what are you even doing there, instead of being located e.g. on an asteroid where it's much easier to make a rotating habitat, where your surface is much more resource-rich, and where delivery and return of goods is much easier?
Venus, by contrast, I think few people doubt that its gravity would be sufficient for human life. Mars, it's *probably* enough, but it's not well studied. Moon seems like a co
Rationale (Score:2)
If you need a rationale, you already failed. Going to Mars if fucking cool, next level amazing. It's another fucking planet. A wandering point of red light in the sky our ancestors could only wonder about. How the F can any "rationale" be more compelling than that?
Re:Rationale (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Rationale (Score:2)
Seems like having a friendly chat with your fellow human being is akin to interstellar travel for some.
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Meh. We find life on Mars so what. (Score:2)
Being able to live on Mars is the cool target. Our descendants need that. Doomsday is just around the corner on the cosmic clock.
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1. We take a long, long, long, time doing it.
2. A massi
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to be honest, I'm not sure a Martian biosphere would survive more than a few generations with all the in-breeding.
When everybody's great-great-great grandfather is Elon Musk, you're going to find Earth women not exactly banging down the door to become breeding vessels of the aristocracy on an alien world.
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For the amount of volume/mass required to ship a single human and support them in transit and on site you could ship a lot of embryos in cryo(it's careful plumbing; but a big dewar flask kept at cryogenic temperatures is downright lightweight compared to a full life support system); and shipping embryos gives you the option of bringing massive genetic diversity
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And that's the plot for Alien Covenant. lol. Leave bad David behind. Take the good one.
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I don't believe his baby makers are going for his looks and personality.
What was it about the world's richest man you found attractive?
He definitely looks like a sketchy bag genetically. Anyone for ketamine?
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Guess mine is a philosophical point. We're not moving everyone, we're giving our descendants a chance. Then that's probably my DNA speaking, self replicating in every cell.
In relation to demographics, I don't remember thinking like this before I was a dad.
What if we were the only life in the universe? Are we worth saving? Our ancestors believed earth was the centre of the universe. Maybe that was an intuition.
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Short of unstoppable replicator nanites turning the entire crust into grey goo; or very long term issues with the sun reaching EoL that will be an issue for basically anyone in the solar system, it's honestly hard to think of ways you could break it more badly.
Plenty of possibilities that will make people deeply miserable; or cause 80+ percent of the population to die horribly; but you'll still have a planet wit
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Sun EOL is good enough. It might be super far in the future, but it might take that long for us to be an interstellar species.
In that time there are plenty of opportunities for asteroids, pandemics, societal collapses, wars. There might be a lot of us atm, but we're relatively fragile.
The other aspect of a Mars colony, dare I say, is spiritual, we've always migrated. We love quests, they are something we get inspired by and rally around. We could do with some unity and hope for the future.
It's also another
Beware of advice from one who confuses yes with no (Score:5, Insightful)
If that quote is correct
> "The answer to the question 'are we alone' is always going to be 'maybe,' unless it becomes yes."
we can probably disregard the advice of that professor, who can't use yes and no properly.
The answer to the question 'are we alone' is 'maybe' until we find proof of other life, and then it becomes 'no', not 'yes'.
Re: Beware of advice from one who confuses yes wit (Score:2)
Yep!
Thatâ(TM)s what I noticed and was going to post about, but thankfully you also spotted that bass ackward logic.
Seriously, you probably should not have any responsibility in a scientific field if you get this wrong. Sadly the current American administration seems to prefer those who fail basic logic.
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It'll become a yes because the aliens won't like us. Humanity, forever alone :'(
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Heh. My daughter and I were having a conversation about that just last night. She is a mostly a big believer that there is no "great filter" per se. The answer for her to the question of why intelligent aliens have not reached us yet is that intelligent aliens have not reached us yet. Still she had to concede that, if intelligent aliens were simply holding out on reaching out to us, one probable reason, could pretty well be summed up in a specific example. That example was a specific politician whose identi
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One interesting thing about it as well is that, even if the question of whether or not there is other life out there is actually truly no, there's a funny thing that happens if the question of "will we ever work out interstellar travel" turns out to be yes. Basically, if we manage to inhabit worlds beyond our solar system and it's a repeatable event, then eventually we get life all over the place and the universe still has billions of years left at least for that life to evolve into all sorts of things. So,
Food (Score:2)
I keep saying it:
We have not fed one human for one entire day using food produced independently of Earth.
Not one day. Sure, we've played and grown cress on the ISS and all sorts of other nonsense but we've never made FOOD in FOOD quantities to FEED even a single human for a single day.
If you go to Mars, you have to send a regular, consistent, constant stream of food up to them. As well as all the other materials and any experiments you want to do... like soils and hydroponics.
But even with all the kit, we
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That's IMHO really overplaying it. I don't want to downplay food production effort difficulty, but saying "because we've never done it we can't" is like saying "Because we've never built a 5-meter-tall statue of a puffin made of glued-together Elvis dolls, we can't". We absolutely can, it's just a question of whether one thinks the investment is worth it. And I'm not talking out my arse, I have a degree in horticulture with a specialty in greenhouse cultivation. So much of the "keep the plants alive" sy
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Of course we *COULD* do it.
But we're absolutely not even trying.
Biosphere 2 (failure) was the last significant attempt, and everything else is "growing cress on the ISS". Given that we've had humans constantly in orbit for decades, and been to the moon, you'd think we'd have SOMETHING working by now. But we don't.
And you missed off oxygen. Pretty important. And do you know how much green matter you need to generate net oxygen with humans around? We're talking lab-based forests of the stuff, something t
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Biosphere 2 was an attempt at fully closed loop self-regulation. That doesn't work, and is not what is under discussion. The discussion is of using systems to maintain environments.
Production of oxygen is not remotely difficult. Not by plants, but again, industrial systems. Systems to make O2 from CO2 and/or water are TRL10. They exist, you can just buy them off the shelf. Same with reusable CO2 scrubbers (it's a very simple chemical process: cool = absorb CO2, hot = release CO2; they just cycle betwe
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Also, point of note: it's unlikely you'd actually grow plants and humans in interconnected habitats anyway. You might pump some gases from one to the next, but: agriculture takes up lots of area / volume. If you're talking Mars rather than Venus, then you're talking large pressure vessels, which is a lot of mass, proportional to the pressure differential. Which is expensive. But plants tolerate living at much lower pressures than humans (and there's potential to engineer / breed them to tolerate even lo
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We can grow potatoes from turd and then make turd from those potatoes on Mars. They showed that in the movies.
I bet I know who is behind this (Score:2)
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Elon Musk needs to keep the Mars thing going so the Government keeps SpaceX flooded with tax dollars
What tax dollar “flood”?
Only 5% of next year’s SpaceX revenue will come from NASA.
The nature of uncertainty (Score:2)
Article:
Reality:
The answer to the question "Are we alone?" is always going to be "maybe" unless it becomes "no".
Hindsight is 20-20, but... (Score:2)
If there ever was an economic time to justify the a Mission to Mars, it was the early 80's. National Debt to GDP ratio was at an all-time low, space program was at its peak, and the Space Shuttle program had just begun.
Instead, Reagan decided to cut taxes for the rich.
Now, with a national debt of $38 trillion dollars and China taking over the world, the penultimate thing America can afford right now is a Mission to Mars. (I would have said "the last thing...", but honestly, the last thing America can affo
Try the moon 1st, at least they can return (Score:2)
Scientists who are bad at science (Score:2)
"The answer to the question 'are we alone' is always going to be 'maybe,' unless it becomes yes."
As a null hypothesis, the question "are we alone" can only scientifically be answered in two ways:
A) We don't know. OR
B) No (and here's the evidence).
Personally, I believe there is life out in the universe somewhere, but we'll never make meaningful contact because of the challenges of time and distance. We will likely find evidence of DNA or even DNA-based life having existed in other places in our Solar System (although nothing complex or intelligent in any sense of the word).
Nope (Score:3)
Sending people to Mars to see if there is life merely contaminates the surface so we will never be sure.
$100B? (Score:2)
Gee, years ago, Apple, alone, had $79B IN CASH. We can afford to go to the Moon, and Mars, and elsewhere.
That is, once we tax the wealthy at 72% (as it was in 1972), not 14%.
Or in other Words (Score:2)
Searching for Building Blocks of Life is Stupid (Score:2)
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The only reason anyone really cares about whether we are unique is because it has a profound effect on delusional religious beliefs.
we wanna (Score:2)
"We wanna send guys to Mars. Now go ahead and find out what we will tell the taxpayers about why."