NASA Announces Discovery of Salty Water On Mars ... Maybe
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Today's promised mystery announcement from NASA has finally been made: dotancohen writes "A NASA orbiter has found possible evidence for water on the surface of Mars that flows seasonally. The water likely would be salty, in keeping with the salty Martian environment."
Adds an anonymous reader: "Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring, NASA says, and repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere."
You can find more on the claimed find at NASA TV.
George Harrison? (Score:2)
*ducks
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Pictures of the cycle? (Score:3)
What the website has [nasa.gov] is a single sequence. I don't see any cyclic activity. It's also oddly widespread, almost stringy, as though the flow is considerable and the scale of the picture is much bigger than it appears (not unlikely, and given they added no scale information it's almost useless as science).
Re:Pictures of the cycle? (Score:5, Informative)
How about a video?
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?collection_id=14483&media_id=104892521&module=homepage
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Do they happen right above water melt temps? (Score:3)
Still need to research and read all the articles, but would be cool to correlate the temperature and melt events.
Drake Equation (Score:2)
As I asked in the earlier post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2357996&cid=36953978
Does anyone remember if Drake assumed one or two habitable planets per planetary system (like ours)?
I have to think the signs point toward more, not less, life in the universe.
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err, I posted the wrong link above: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2364470&cid=36989158
Sorry.
Re:Drake Equation (Score:4, Interesting)
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The Drake equation is ultimately [...] about providing a framework for collecting and thinking about what parameters might influence the amount of life in the universe.
Yes, and discovering the liquid state of water in an otherwise extreme environment (such as the surface of Mars) increases our expectations.
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Important for two reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
This is important for two reasons. The first reason this is important is the obvious issue that the presence of liquid water makes the existence of life a lot more likely. It seems that conditions for life are really surprisingly common. What we still don't know is how likely life is to form in the first place and how easily it travels. There is speculation about panspermia and life on Earth having come from Mars on meteorites but the orbital mechanics make that direction a lot more likely than from Earth to the Mars.
The second reason this is important is that in the long-run colonization and exploration of Mars will be a lot easier if water is easily available. The presence of water will be directly helpful for some plans aside from directly helping humans. For example, the Mars Direct plan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct [wikipedia.org] involves exploratory missions to Mars where some of the rocket fuel for the return is methane made on the surface. Current versions of that plan call for bringing the necessary hydrogen to Mars. This isn't too bad since hydrogen is only a small fraction of methane by mass. But if we could split the water using electrolysis and get the hydrogen directly from that that would potentially further reduce the amount of mass needed to be launched from Earth. Unfortunately, the water here seems to be not so common that one could actually rely on this. This is probably non-viable unless one had much better maps of where the water was, how deep it normally was, the exact locations of the water, detailed knowledge of what salts were making the water briny and any other major chemical contaminants which could make electrolysis machinery unhappy. So overall, this is unlikely to impact missions to Mars in that direct a way.
Re:Important for two reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but at some point, you want actual boots on the ground. If the goals of space travel do not include eventually getting humans off this rock, well, then not only is the interest in it going to be near zero, but the point as well.
Unmanned craft can do some of the best science, including helping us figure out where to land the boots.
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The point of space travel is that it is interesting. If we find proof of life on Mars, and manage to get a sample back on earth for study, I would be thrilled, and I would be happy to pay my share for the expenses.
As far as actual boots on Mars, I think that's a pretty pointless endeavor. It's just an empty rock, orders of magnitude harsher than the most desolate place on earth. Why the hell would you want to be there ?
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Frankly, watching toy robots driving around Mars veeeery slowly isn't really all that interesting.
Ditto any other unmanned mission. Some of them are useful, occasionally you get a neat picture to put on your desktop, mostly they're just too boring to even bother keeping up with.
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The robots have accomplished more than humans did in the same time. You don't have to watch them drive. You can do something else, and return in a few year's time to see the results.
I'm not a PhD candidate, and I enjoy reading about the stuff they've discovered. Many other people do the same thing. It costs
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The results are meaningless unless humans are planning on going there.
And the robots have accomplished almost as much in the years they've been trundling about as a human could have in a day of work up there.
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I assume that doesn't include the time it takes to get a human there in the first place ? I agree things are much better if you ignore reality.
An extremely expensive and flimsy basket, yes. Earth hasn't been exposed to anything th
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"The robots have accomplished more than humans did in the same time. "
absolutely ridiculous.
Ignoring the fact that the robots are a human accomplishment. A human could ahve done everything that ahs been done in a week.
Robots have never accomplished anything. That's because they are a tool created by humans to help US accomplish things.
Re:Important for two reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
As they used to say back in the day (and I guess will be doing again soon) "How will it help us feed children in Somalia?"
Modern water filtration and purification is built on technology invented by NASA.
Re:Important for two reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
As they used to say back in the day (and I guess will be doing again soon) "How will it help us feed children in Somalia?"
Launching a manned expedition to Mars only involves engineers, aerospace workers, sufficient budget, and if you were determined it would take three to five years. Feeding children in Somalia, now there's a serious undertaking... first you'd have to invade the country to get rid of the Islamic warlords who are not allowing aid in to feed the children now and then engage in multi-decade nation building. Would take easily 50x to 100x the cash and about 20 years longer than sending someone to Mars, plus casualties.
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Finding life outside out planet, even if we never leave, will be a profound event. Making the question 'is their lifwe out there' a definite yes.
That will bring us t the next question: Is there intelligent life out their.
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It's just an empty rock, orders of magnitude harsher than the most desolate place on earth. Why the hell would you want to be there ?
Why do we have manned research stations in Antarctica? After all, it's just one huge snow desert.
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Because it's cheaper/easier to have manned research in Antarctica than to deploy robots to do the same.
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I take it your ancestors where dragged kicking and screaming out of the cave.
Three - 18months on MArs we could get more information then if we spent decades studying it with robots.
Then there is all the tech that will need to be developed which drive economic success for decades afterwords.
Then there is a step out of the solar system.
And then there is looking up at that harsh rock and saying "We've been there". Striving for the next thing, and making the universe our bitch.
we do it because it's hard.
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I assume they got out of their cave to hunt for food, not because "it was hard" .
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Pretty much. It was a nice demonstration what we once could do, but that's about it. Do you even wonder why we stopped doing it ?
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At some point I think some geologists in an ATV with a few months to spare could probably do the work of dozens of rovers. But the expense is high. Besides I tend to look at the current and next few generations of rovers and probes as narrowing down the places we should look. If we had gone to Mars, say, twenty five or thirty years ago as a lot of the Apollo folks seemed to think we would, it would have been sort of a shot in the dark. Life on Mars, if it exists, may not be as universally prevalent as l
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A dozen astronauts on the moon did more science than all the unmanned landers in NASA's history combined. That is partially because "hey, we've got to bring the fellas back anyway, may as well bring some rocks too" but is also because humans are just plain more adaptable, more flexible, and more useful when it comes to doing science.
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There's no reason why you couldn't collect some rocks with an unmanned probe. The Russian Luna program did that, and I'm sure NASA could have done better.
On the other hand, unmanned missions have returned a wealth of information from the outer solar system. I don't know if the moon rocks can beat that.
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define best.
A person can do in 1 minute what a robot can do in a week.
A person can make decisions and adjust plans right at the moment.
Anyways, its a false dichotomy. You do both, each where approriate.
Would we want to send a human on the Juno voyage? of course not.
Would we want to only send machines to Mars? of course not.
All this research that's being done would be done a lot faster if people where on Mars.
Plus, human endeavors makes us unique as a species. It's not walking upright the makes us different,
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Not necessarily. A probe in an orbit around Mars can cover a lot more area than a human explorer by foot or a small cart.
We can send a 1000 probes, with different instruments, all in different locations, with less time and effort it would take to send a single human being in a clumsy space suit, and keep him alive.
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However, water on mars is nearly impossible because they said that the current atmospheric pressure will literally boil water on the surface, even at those low subzero temperatures.
My take was that salty water could indeed be on the surface, at least briefly. Pools and ponds, not so much. But pools of salt water could indeed be available subsurface, perhaps in the first couple of meters of soil.
Face on Mars (Score:3)
So what's the next probe going to do? (Score:2)
How are they going to get at this water if it's even possible? Drill down? Burrow down? Sample soil from outside these spurts?
Is there any other evidence? (Score:2)
Changing dark streaks. Cool. Something is going on down there that fundamentally changes our perception of Mars as a planet that's frozen in time. (Well, except for the dust storms and the seasonal variations in the polar caps.)
The thing is, this doesn't say 'water' to me because it could very well be some other physical phenomena which isn't all that different from Lowell's canals or the face on Mars. They really should do proper science and wait for something more concrete, such as spectroscopic data,
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They seem to be hedging their bets, but to my mind, their explanation of a briny mud is probably most likely. The temperatures near the equator should be high enough in the Martian summer to make this work. It's a tentative discovery that will have to wait until we send more probes. At least this gives those designing future missions a better kind of candidate location for looking for flowing water, and maybe even life. Landing a rover near one of these flows, if it can be done, might prove very fruitfu
Re:Is there any other evidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
They really should do proper science and wait for something more concrete, such as spectroscopic data, before making such announcements.
What exactly do you think they did? Re read Kim Stanley Robinson? Yes, their is spectroscopic data that supports the ideas, yes they need to do more it.
Proper science isn't waiting until you know everything. That never happens anyway.
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We know there are significant amounts of water ice on Mars, in some places pretty close to the surface. In a way, it only stands to reason that in the warmer areas near the equator that frozen water with a lot of salts and other minerals in suspension would melt, and if it stays liquid for any length of time, it will form mud and flow downhill. This isn't a "wow, never saw that coming" kind of a discovery, it's a more a confirmation of some of the theoretical work that's been going on over the last five o
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What exactly do you think they did? Re read Kim Stanley Robinson?
Well said.
I love how half of the Slashdot comments imply that the commenter must know more about Mars and Geophysics than NASA.
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"The thing is, this doesn't say 'water' to me because I'm not a specialist on the mission'
There; I fixed it for you.
Ob. XKCD (Score:4, Funny)
Real Science!
http://xkcd.com/683/ [xkcd.com]
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Good example of why a Mars base would be useful (Score:2)
Observations make it look like there might be some sort of water cycle going on on Mars. Now the question is can existing probes provide further evidence? If not is new probe required? If there was a human presence on Mars they could mount an expedition to investigate.
It's hard to put humans into space but, humans are so much more adaptable to changing mission parameters.
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While a typo, it's absolutely brilliant in how Orwellian it sounds!
Paper out today in Science (Score:2)
Contrary to what some have speculated, this is not just science by press conference. There is an actual paper [sciencemag.org] out today in Science magazine (subscription only, but a summary is here [sciencemag.org]). It is speculative, but not of the "arsenic life" or "bacteria in a Mars meteorite" variety.
Re:Salty water seeping out of Mars in the summerti (Score:4, Funny)
Please. Marspiration.
Re:Salty water seeping out of Mars in the summerti (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Salty water seeping out of Mars in the summerti (Score:4, Funny)
Gah, you guys wouldn't know majesty if it hit you in the face.
Funny, I was once punched by a Queen for exactly that reason.
Re:Salty water seeping out of Mars in the summerti (Score:5, Informative)
Something like that.... It could be briny salt water or something else...
Lisa Pratt used the example of putting a bottle of soda in the freezer to a reporter asking questions.... Before soda completely freezes, the bottle of soda forms an ice made of pure water and it is surrounded by a concentrated solution of sugars and syrup that is super sweet still in liquid form. A similar freezing process is believed to be happening in Mars, where they think it is a briny solution that is seeping out of the surface from the underground ice water as that solution has yet to freeze compared to ice water.
It's pretty cool stuff. If there are seasonal cycles like this in the subsurface of Mars, then it is most likely that there are some extreme microbes in there that feed off of this solution... They say that if earth had no seasons, then there would be very little diversity in life and this finding shows there are seasonal cycles that might possibly support life.
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They say that if earth had no seasons, then there would be very little diversity in life
Who's "they"?
In most of the tropics, there's very little seasonal variation. And those are the areas with some of the highest diversity.
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It's pretty cool stuff. If there are seasonal cycles like this in the subsurface of Mars, then it is most likely that there are some extreme microbes in there that feed off of this solution...
Emphasis mine. Don't carelessly throw around such descriptions when we are talking about the magnitude of such a find.
Re:civilisation is collapsing (Score:4, Insightful)
But on the other hand, this is the age of hate, so please, cut loose.
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What a moron. How in hell is a clever geologist, astrophysicist, or aerospace engineer supposed to help "stop people from dying"?
Do you go to lawyers' offices and criticize them for not all becoming doctors too? Because we spend far, far more on lawyers in this country than we spend on unmanned space missions.
You talk about lacking resources, but that's exactly what there is in space, in great abundance; the only problem is getting to it economically. Even better, unlike here, harvesting resources in spa
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So what you're saying is that it's OK to behave like a lawyer as long as there are lawyers?
We are not lacking resources on earth. We just fail to apply science to distribute them properly and to educate on birth control.
There is not a substantial risk of a large asteroid coming and wiping us out in the near future. We are far more likely to be wiped out by ourselves by continuing our current approach of competitive greed and resource squandering. Get your priorities straight.
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And how again do you propose to fix that? The problem is a political one, nothing else. Are you saying that NASA scientists should go into politics?
Re:civilisation is collapsing (Score:4, Interesting)
It wouldn't be the worst idea if some tried. People are obsessed with thinking their viewpoint is marginalised, but there are a whole lot of people in the US struggling and not taken in by Kodos, Kang or the Koch brothers' experiment. The might listen to a group of rational men who get a thrill out of problem-solving rather than power-mongering.
But I think choosing to work for NASA already says a lot about your priorities. Your mind can change as you grow, of course.
As for up-and-coming scientists, people forget that withdrawal of labour is the most powerful collective tool of the common man. There are too many scientists who have become cogs in military-industrial production lines. The majority of NASA's resources are directed toward this: creating blueprints for the likes of Lockheed and Boeing. Good, clever people must take a stand and say I am not going to work for you - I want to do something better. I am not arguing against space science. I am arguing against what has happened to space science. It is not a worthy money vacuum.
Re:civilisation is collapsing (Score:4, Insightful)
First, you're assuming that someone who is "clever" at astronomical research could also be clever at food production, medicine, or other fields. I doubt that is the case. I love astronomy, aviation and physics, but I absolutely sucked in high school and college at chemistry and biology because I wasn't motivated to study those things. If you are good enough in your field to be a literal rocket scientist, I would wager that in almost every case, it's not because you are simply brighter than those who didn't make the cut; rather, it's because you wanted it more than those who didn't make the cut, and therefore you pushed harder to achieve that goal. That does NOT necessarily imply that you have the necessary motivation to make an impact in other scientific fields.
Second, even if the money went to aid rather than science and the best scientists applied themselves to reducing human suffering instead of space exploration, I'm not convinced that that would solve the problem. Why? Because, IMHO, most human suffering in the world is our own fault. In the '90s, the U.N. tried to bring food and medical aid to people who were suffering in Somalia. Very little aid reached the people who needed it. That wasn't because those with an abundance (i.e., the U.S., Canada, Europe, etc.) didn't provide enough aid. Food was left to rot in Somalia, while people were starving. The problem was that Somalia -- like much of Africa throughout my lifetime -- was struggling with complete anarchy. The warloads who ran the country were stealing the aid and giving it to their supporters while everybody else was dying. The U.N. tried to come in and restore order (ever see the movie "Black Hawk Down"? I highly recommend it) but basically got their butts kicked. Mankind's propensity for inhumanity and violence is a much, much more important cause of human suffering than anything nature can throw at us. Money and science aren't the answer for that problem; eliminating greed and selfishness is the solution, and good luck with that.
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it's because you wanted it more than those who didn't make the cut
This is bullshit '80s everyone-can-do-it fantasy. Some people are smarter and/or have more opportunities than others - life's unfair like that.
eliminating greed and selfishness is the solution, and good luck with that.
Completely agree. The Second World War brought welfare states to various Western European countries which reduced suffering dramatically and demonstrated how it can be done. Unfortunately, the process has been reversed since the '80s/'90s.
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So your solution to these problems is trying to 'stop people dying' and thus ensuring an ever increasing human population, then you go on to moan about lack of resources!
Do people spontaneously and involuntarily give birth just through staying alive for longer?
You do realise the space race has led to many, many discoveries that have helped mankind?
You do realise that the space race refers to something which hasn't happened for 20 years (30 if you discount what happened under Reagan)? NASA now is nothing like NASA 40 years ago.
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Do people want to live in a world where they can't even dream? Where they have to sign a registry and wait for the next open slot to have a child?
Two incredible strawmen. Suggesting we don't spend billions on space research and that we educate people on birth control is not the same as stopping people from dreaming and forcing people to wait for a ticket before they can have a child.
Ask the people suffering if they love life. If they do, then hey, good enough.
What does this mean? If they aren't killing themselves then life must be good enough and we can forget about them?
Why do we have to make everybody's life better at the expense of our own?
You don't have to. But you're advocating making better the life of people who are already doing well.
Well destroying hope is a good way to make people not want to live, isn't it?
If you only get hope out of people exploring Mars then yo
Re:civilisation is collapsing (Score:4, Informative)
True, but what's the best way of doing that? It cost NASA half a billion every time they launched a shuttle. Sure, they do some research, but it's a fraction of their budget. Justifying NASA's budget because of spin-off technologies is like justifying military spending for the same reason - there's a grain of truth there, but you get a lot more results if you invest in results, rather than in explosions with a little bit of research around the edge.
The problem with funding space travel now is that we really don't have the technology to do it well, and funding space research doesn't give us that technology. Most of the materials we need, and the computing power that's required, for the present generation of space craft came from other research. Space was just a side venture. The materials, medical, and energetic technology that we need for a space program that's anything other than dick waving is still decades away.
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It is another way of appropriating resources, but not just another way. Looked at over the course of history, science gives the best return on the dollar of any investment. And those benefits accrue to society as a whole, even the poorest. It's hard to complain about misappropriation of resources to science when science is the only reason we're able to support the number of people we have on this planet. If you want to avoid the malthusian catastrophe, we have to invest in this kind of research.
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Science is a method, not an act. Just because some scientific endeavours have proven useful it does not mean that every act of research using the scientific method is worthwhile. And while we may have been limited by lack of understanding of physical processes one hundred years ago, this is not what is holding humanity back today. We have solved the hard physical/biological/environmental science required for the vast majority of humans currently on this earth to lead a comfortable life - we simply refuse to
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And what's your suggestion for fixing this? Have all the scientists go into politics instead? Yeah, I'm sure they'd do great in the elections.
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I shan't blow my own trumpet, but to give examples from my cousins: one's in demography and another is an agricultural engineer.
So... food, disease control, resource allocation, that sort of thing. Lots of fertile ground.
Re:civilisation is collapsing- no it isn't (Score:5, Insightful)
Overtime, the amount of suffering has gone down by many metrics. For example, in most of the developing world, infant mortality now is much less than it was 50 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality [wikipedia.org] The infant mortality rate of the planet as a whole has gone down by a factor of about 3 compared to the rate in the 1950s. The world's level of literacy is also increasing. Average lifespan has also gone up in the developing world. More importantly, that lifespan increase has occurred even if one just looks at the average lifespan of people who survive 3 years of age (this helps deal with most of the infant mortality issue). So no, civilization isn't collapsing. In fact, civilization is doing quite well.
Sure there are things we can do in the here and now to help people directly, like give more money to help deal with malaria and the like. If you want to really care about your own money going to optimal causes, a good thing to look at is Givewell http://www.givewell.org/ [givewell.org] which identifies efficient, underfunded charities that are doing helpful work, especially in the developing world.
But, let's address your final claim that this is having fun while others suffer. That's simply not accurate and is missing the point. When the Apollo moon landings happened, people in poor areas crowded around the few radios they had to listen in. Why? Because as badly off as they were, they understood that some things really are achievements for humanity as a whole. In the long run, we're going to need to colonize space. And we'll need to be ready for it. Moreover, we have a real reason to figure out how common life is- for some reason there's almost no intelligent life out there. We need to figure out, for the good of humanity as a whole, if the Great Filter preventing the rise of intelligent civilizations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_filter [wikipedia.org] is ahead of us or behind us. I suspect that most of it is behind us, but if there's any in front of us, it needs to appear before space travel becomes cheap or easy. The more we know about how common life is, what kinds of life evolve, and other related issues, the better understanding we get of whether we need to be prepared for possible filtration up ahead. This is for the good of humanity as a whole.
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Indeed, the world is getting richer. Since 2000, 28 countries [guardian.co.uk] have moved from "poor" to "middle income".
The percent of people in the world living on less than $1.25 a day has fell from 52% to 26% between 1981 and 2005. In China alone, 600 million people have left the under $1.25 per day income line during that period.
The best thing you can do to help the poor people of the planet is to buy something. It is likely that is was either built by people poorer than you, or that at least the raw materials were
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Oh, I'm sorry, I should have written "Western civilisation" in the sense of the civilisation including NASA - predominantly EU/USA. The planet (fortunately) still has more than one civilisation.
Money is a daft way to measure quality of life. What has to be done to obtain that money? What is that money worth (now and over time)? What freedoms are available with that money? Under what circumstances might those freedoms be taken away? I couldn't give a damn how much money I have: what I want is to be productiv
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The percent of people in the world living on less than $1.25 a day has fell from 52% to 26% between 1981 and 2005
Is that inflation adjusted? Because $1.25 in 1981 dollars is a lot more than $1.25 in 2005 dollars. I'd expect the number to decrease by a similar amount with no increase in quality of life, if their incomes stayed about the same in absolute terms...
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Moreover, we have a real reason to figure out how common life is- for some reason there's almost no intelligent life out there. We need to figure out, for the good of humanity as a whole, if the Great Filter preventing the rise of intelligent civilizations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_filter [wikipedia.org] is ahead of us or behind us.
While I agree that we do need to figure out if there's other intelligent life out there, I think the idea that "there's almost no intelligent life out there" is rather ridiculous, consi
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Overtime [sic], the amount of suffering has gone down by many metrics.
Science is working. It's making a definite and measurable improvement in the life of everyone on the planet. Space exploration is but one of the fields of research that is making this possible. You are looking at the world today, looking at the world as it should be, and seeing that they don't match. The cognitive dissonance bothers you, obviously quite a bit. That's a Good Thing, BTW. However, just because you are
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Well, I was talking about the civilisation containing NASA - i.e. Western civilisation - and it has got much worse since the '80s.
There is no denying that science has improved life over the past few hundred years and that it is still bringing better things to the developing world. But that's far from what I was referring to.
The metrics of life expectancy (particular infant) and daily wage are also passionately overused. Ask instead: do people have the opportunity to be productive? Are they protected from pe
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Most importantly: are they happy?
Is that really most important?
If so, then you'd better start distributing heroin to the poor.
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Well, I was talking about the civilisation containing NASA - i.e. Western civilisation - and it has got much worse since the '80s.
There is no denying that science has improved life over the past few hundred years and that it is still bringing better things to the developing world. But that's far from what I was referring to.
The metrics of life expectancy (particular infant) and daily wage are also passionately overused. Ask instead: do people have the opportunity to be productive? Are they protected from personal risk? Most importantly: are they happy?
The metric of life-expectancy is used so much because it matters. People don't like dying early. And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child. So yeah, people who are having their kids die constantly aren't very happy. If you do insist on metrics that attempt to look specifically at happiness levels then in fact the US is one of the happiest countries (#14 by this ranking - http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/14/world-happiest-countries-lifestyle-realestate-gall [forbes.com]
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The metric of life-expectancy is used so much because it matters. People don't like dying early.
No-one has an informed opinion on the experience of dying itself. Do you have any evidence that people in general want, per se, "to live a long time"? Perhaps you mean that people want more time to do stuff? This requires much more than just being alive.
And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child.
This happens mostly in countries where people don't have access to appropriate resources and yet continue to get pregnant a lot - perhaps out of the belief that enough children will survive to look after them in old age. For the majority of history, infant d
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No-one has an informed opinion on the experience of dying itself. Do you have any evidence that people in general want, per se, "to live a long time"? Perhaps you mean that people want more time to do stuff? This requires much more than just being alive.
People don't want to die. This isn't complicated. Really. Death sucks. Losing friends and family members sucks. Longer lifespans make that less common.
And there are very few things that are more unpleasant for parents than for them to lose a child.
This happens mostly in countries where people don't have access to appropriate resources and yet continue to get pregnant a lot - perhaps out of the belief that enough children will survive to look after them in old age. For the majority of history, infant death was routine and did not cause the majority of people to become chronically unhappy, although our Western bubbles of privilege allow us the luxury of thinking too much about the children.
Historically people get pregnant for a variety of reasons. One obvious one is lack of choice- if you don't have birth control then sex (which humans have a strong desire for) leads to kids pretty quickly. Moreover, people don't want to lose infants but they also want to have children. This isn't necessarily as selfish as wanting kids to take care of in thei
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I remember the events the week leading up to the Landing, at the proceeding events after word. The world watched, and the world changed the day we step foot on the moon. It is also well documented.
"Or we could just not continue fucking up and overpopulating our current home."
The only population that doesn't end up using all the resource is..oh wait, there isn't one. The resource will be depleted, and the earth will become uninhabitable. In fact, that could happen tomorrow. Then instead of suffereing people,
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Again, priorities. Why are you worrying about what might happen at some point in a few hundreds of thousands of years rather than people suffering right now who could be helped by much application of much simpler and well-understood science?
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The universe is all one basket.
Besides, it doesn't matter whether our species survives: our species does not collectively feel or think or suffer like some supernatural entity and we would do well to detach ourselves from such quasi-religion. What matters is the known and well-understood experience of existing individuals living in various conditions.
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Well if we don't care about future generations, and all that matters is minimizing the suffering of the existing generation, given that despite our best efforts everyone will die in varyingly protracted and painful ways, plus necessarily experience additional suffering in their lives to varying extents, the solution is obvious:
Exterminate all human life on earth in the fastest and most painless way possible.
And thus is nuclear disarmament by the Cold War superpowers revealed to be the most evil, anti-human,
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The priority is minimising suffering of people right now - but it is not "all that matters". The welfare of existing generations in the future and of future generations also matters. Though we must always remember that we are dealing with individuals just like ourselves, each and every one with a single chance at life and no choice about when are where that chance appeared.
But the survival of the species per se does not really matter. We might evolve quite a bit over the coming billion years. Who knows? Blu
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Yeah, that's really going to help when another Chicxulub-sized rock comes by.
By far the best, easiest, and (most importantly) most likely to be available when we need it method of dealing with such a thing is to 1) detect it early and 2) divert it, preventing the catastrophe.
Creating a large enough self-sustaining off-world colony to allow the human race to survive the loss of earth is a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Even dinosaur-killer-sized impactors will leave the earth a more habitable place for humans than Mars is today.
However, identifying such a large object as a p
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Overpopulation is caused (from a straight causal viewpoint and when considering a moral solution) by too many births, not too few deaths.
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Fucking is not the same as having children.
Some countries have done very well at educating people to reduce the native birth rate.
But we're doing really bad at educating the rest. (Some might say it's intentional, as overpopulation implies desperation implies cheap labour. What do you say?)
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People who fail at thinking will never understand this... stopping worldwide population growth via emigration is likely to never be economically viable. The energy requirements of getting someone into orbit - even with a space elevator built out of superconducting magic - are huge. Getting them somewhere else beyond that is another order of magnitude. Getting everyone born in one year to another planet would require more energy than the human race has used, in total, ever. And then the next year you've
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Not unlike posting on slashdot, actually.
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YASHI - Yet Another Short Sight Individual.
How about all the people that got paid? what about all the companies that will be making new products from the tech for this probe. Oh wait, that's10 years down the road and as such well beyond your ability to grasp.
More people will end up benefiting from this then that same money could help if you gave it to the needy' whomever you happen to consider.
Salt water on Mars; this is fucking huge.
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How about all the people that got paid? what about all the companies that will be making new products from the tech for this probe. Oh wait, that's10 years down the road and as such well beyond your ability to grasp.
If "people will get paid" is a justification for resource allocation to any given endeavour then why not employ as many people as you can to build endless paper chains?
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Is this like the "at least we don't torture people as much as some other countries do" argument for torture?
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Still, it's a big piece of evidence of current hydrological activity on Mars. Not the only piece, mind you, but it makes the argument stronger that Mars may be able to sustain some sort of life.
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The problem, I think, is that life based, say on, gasses (sort of like Arthur C. Clarke's Jovians) could never be very complex. Water and carbon, so far as we know, and I think we know our chemistry well enough to make the statement, seem the best building blocks for complex life. There are alternatives, like methane (which some think might be how life could exist on Titan), but water is still the best, so it probably makes more sense to concentrate on bodies in our solar system where liquid water can be
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Yes, it's a very geocentric view because it's the one data point that we know of. It's possible that life forms in the clouds of methane and ammonia on Jupiter or anywhere else for that matter. We just know how it works in a water based environment. Everything else is up in the air, so to speak.
If you're starting out this kind of research (and we are obviously in the very early phases) and you have a very limited budget, you go for the most likely scenarios first. You leave the gas giants to the science
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