Why Mars Is Not the Best Place To Look For Life 298
EccentricAnomaly writes "A story over at Science News quotes Alan Stern (former head of NASA Science missions) as saying: 'The three strongest candidates [for extraterrestrial life] are all in the outer solar system.' He's referring to Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. So why is NASA spending $2.5B on the next Mars Rover and planning to spend over $6B more on a Mars sample return when it can't find the money for much cheaper missions to Europa or Enceladus?"
Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:5, Insightful)
Mars is closer and easier to send people to
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It's actually a good thing if we don't find life on Mars, so we can avoid an Andromeda Strain type of situation, or War of the Worlds in reverse, when we try to set up a colony on Mars. Sterile planets are better for terraforming. If we find life on Europa, we can happily let them keep living there. We don't want a moon base there anyway.
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"All of these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there." - 2010: Odyssey II, Arthur C. Clarke
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This is the correct answer.
Even if we don't find life on mars, it will be important as a second establishment of civilization, this is more important than finding other life (because it will prolong the period we can look for it)
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Even if we don't find life on mars, it will be important as a second establishment of civilization
I disagree -- Mars will never support a civilization, as a civilization would require an ecosystem to support it, and (short of terraforming) Earth-based life cannot grow on Mars. Mars might support a research outpost or two, but that outpost will be forever dependent on supplies from Earth for its long-term survival, and therefore not viable as a redundant backup location for humanity that could help if Earth was lost.
For an example of what would happen to a Mars outpost that doesn't get resupplied regula
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Re:Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:4, Insightful)
Look a bit closer. Even getting into orbit could had the very same reasoning behind. Even today we aren't having our colony vacations in orbit, and probably won't for decades if ever. But how much it changed the world getting there for something else, and developing the associated technologies for getting there and taking advantage of that fact? A lot of the consequences of getting there wasnt even imagined by the time the race started. Not sure if we will ever terraform Mars, or even put self sustainable colonies up there. But all that we should develop to get that goal will give us a lot of benefits down here.
Also, that kind of reasoning will delay that forever, always should be a better use of money in the present instead of betting on having a future. Earth history is full of events that could make all saved pennies worthless, our time here could be running out, no matter if that will be next year, next millenium, or a millon years later, and we can do something about it now, not sure later.
Regarding the "top 1%", if an incoming disaster threaten us in the middle/short term, if its the solution their assets will finance a colony on mars... and they will be the ones that will be saved. We've seen that so many times in movies that will not surprise anyone if it ever happens.
Re:Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:4, Insightful)
We can afford it. All the USA needs to do is slow down killing other people and use about 10%o f the military budget for Mars and it is a done deal.
Problems on Earth are mainly not due to technology or money, but poor government. People are not starving because there isn't enough food. They starve because they live in places with incompetent, corrupt, or evil governments. Going to Mars is cheap and easy compared to solving poverty.
We are much better at managing the planet. There has never been such widespread wealth and peace [samharris.org] for such an extended time. Room for improvement, but we are on the right track. Well, maybe not the Tea Party.
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The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly coloured, and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question - is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say 'Hey! Don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.' And we...kill those people. Ha ha ha. 'Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride. SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and family. This just has to be real.' It's just a ride.
But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because: it's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings, and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourselves off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here's what you can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defence each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, for ever, in peace.
- The late, great Bill Hicks. Gone much too soon...
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Genius! We should do this as many times as it takes, until there is no longer a top 1%!!
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How about only until the top 1% controls no more than 10% of the wealth? They'd still have ten times as much as the next guy they want to look down on. But that guy they were spitting on would be so much better off.
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"We could probably afford it if we strip the top 1% wealth from their assets."
The American dream- be successful, then be hated for being successful, then have your assets taken away.
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What is dumpass
That phrase is the shit!
What is dumpass with stripping the top 1% of he world population from their assets?
And then what, distribute it evenly between everyone? So now everyone has $5000(?) extra in their pocket, and prices for everything just rise to compensate because everyone knows everyone else has a little extra to spend? The end result is just to hurt the 1% and cause inflation. Kinda sadistic.
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I only wanted to see if I get agan modded down as troll. Sigh ... ;D
Nevertheless the fact that 1% of the world population owns 99% of the wealth is disgusting
If you can deal with it, fine for you.
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And served with a nice Chianti, I suspect.
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Well, that would be a net win in terms of loss of life. A horrendous number of people have to die to maintain that wealth.
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Instead, you try to make people around you implement your ideas - including the idea to get insanely rich.
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Personally I think that trickle up economics works much better. If the average person actually has some disposable income, they can spend it and award the people who have a compelling product instead of spending all their income on necessities, necessities that keep increasing because a certain class of people think they deserve a 10%+ raise every year, even if they haven't done anything particularly positive and usually done something that is long term negative.
Re:Take from the rich and give to the... rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Although you are technically correct (the best kind of correct), that's a rather useless way of viewing money. In the U.S., the top 20% have about 85% of the accumulated wealth, and the top 5% have almost 60%, which makes it a remarkably lopsided distribution, with the vast majority of people living below the mean.
What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
The bigger problem I have with your post is the assumption that the rich have predominantly earned their money. There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.). The vast majority of working class income falls into the first category. The vast majority of upper class income falls into the latter category. So any tax scheme that does not tax the upper class more than the working class is unfair because it takes away money that the working class have earned to allow the rich to keep more money that they haven't earned.
Re:Take from the rich and give to the... rich (Score:4, Insightful)
There's earned income, and there's unearned income (capital gains, interest, etc.)
I don't want to get caught up in another endless thread about class warfare, but how are capital gains and interest "unearned"? Investing money can be hard work, and that money isn't just sitting there - it becomes available for other purposes, such as funding new companies. I grew up watching my father spend many hours each week looking over the family's investments and planning for the next several decades of our lives - he managed to pay for several college educations this way. But according to you, he didn't "earn" any of the money he made through his investments, so it's okay to confiscate it?
Now, the argument that people who make the majority of their income solely through capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as the rest of us - that I can pretty much agree with. But they earned it just as much as I earn my salary. I also have no problem with the concept that the tax burden should be proportional to income, or that the working poor should get a steep reduction in taxes. I don't really object to taxing the rich at a slightly higher rate either. But I'm really not comfortable telling someone that they don't deserve their wealth and should forfeit it to the government, especially given some of the batshit insane things we spend it on. And yes, colonizing Mars falls into that category.
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Capital gains are not proportional to the amount effort you put in, they're proportional to the amount of money you put in. They're also exponential. If you reinvest, you're going to make more next year than you did this year. You're don't just make money, you make more money the more money you make.
Unless, of course, you lose money, because there is always risk involved. One of the reasons for the capital gains tax being relatively low is to encourage re-investment into the economy. I don't know at what
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Unless, of course, you lose money, because there is always risk involved
The problem is there is a large proportion of the super rich where there is no risk involved. They screw up and we bail them out. Then they give each other million dollar bonuses because even with their screwups they still made money.
The other problem is the class of people who make decisions that pay good in the short term, like laying off all the workers and selling the factory to the Chinese. Huge profits for a short while so they ma
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Errr... no. What happens is that people who sell things profiteer off the windfall. The cost of living increases to the point where the poor are still poor and the middle class are still middle class. That is precisely what happened when women entered the workforce in a big way in the 1970s.
You have a five-
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If your parents owned the house you grew up in, chances are good that you couldn't afford to buy it today.
I am confused as to what you are trying to say in your post, as the quoted line basically contradicts the first part. We can't afford houses because we are getting paid less and less while the wealthy are getting paid more and more. The only people benefiting from the US economy is the top 5 percent, the rest are basically trying to get by.
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What I'm saying is that a single-event forced redistribution of wealth would only raise the standard of living temporarily.
When women entered the workforce, families started earning a lot more, which made them better off for a while. Then prices readjusted. Today, single-income families are essentially priced out of the property market in most places.
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What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
- if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, what you'll have is consumer spending that is financed not with credit but with money that otherwise would continue being used in investments (whether you like the investments that these are use for or not is a different topic), but you won't have the bottom population any wealthier for it.
They'll be able to buy more stuff with less credit, but they won't be better off at the end, specifically because the investments
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What investments in production capacity? The U.S. hasn't done that in any significant way for as long as I've been alive. It just outsources the labor to some other country where the cost of labor is cheaper.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be great for the U.S. to invest in production capacity. I'm just not
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What investments in production capacity? The U.S. hasn't done that in any significant way for as long as I've been alive. It just outsources the labor to some other country where the cost of labor is cheaper.
- the U.S. has nothing to do with it. It's always done by private interest - individuals looking for a buck. In your lifetime (unless you were born prior to 1965), the conditions have been deteriorating, as U.S. was burning through the wealth created even before 1913, and obviously the monopoly wealth created between 1947 and 1965. The reasons for it are numerous, but the result of all those reasons was the same: increase labor costs, increase taxes, increase business costs by increasing regulations, prote
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What this means is that if you repeatedly cut the top 1% down to the mean and distribute it among everyone else, it doesn't take long before you have dramatically increased the overall standard of living.
No, what history shows is that it does not take long until you have drastically reduced the overall standard of living.
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Citation needed.
Re:Take from the rich and give to the... rich (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it sits in vaults doing nothing while most of the human race starve. My favourite rich guy story is this [bbc.co.uk] one where he was so rich he didn't even notice for a couple of years that someone had stolen loads of money from him. Trickle-down is bullshit.
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Yeah, ha ha hah, the rich are so dumb, and they don't deserver the money they have...
Seriously, though, put someone in power who pledges to take away the wealth of the top 1% and what do you think will happen? He'll line his pockets and his rich friends with the money, while using it to make you do something silly. Like posing like a criminal to take naked pictures of yourself before you travel....
The problems are many, and the "populist" movements have been co-opted long ago to help the powerful cement t
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'Earn' doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. The idea that someone could 'earn' a billion dollars is ... hilarious.
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Mars ... has about 1/3rd of earth gravity. In summer at the equator it is about 20 degrees centigrade warm, even with an atmosphere of less then 10 milli bar, less then 5 even.
In valleys, canyons the pressure goes up to 100, or even 200 milli bars. They have 10km deep canyons on Mars, can you believe this? Colorado River Canyons are dwarfed against that.
You have the desert. The beautiful sunsets, the amazing sun rises.
With solar panels you can harvest sun, you can melt ice to get water, you can create metha
Re:Mars is closer and easier to send people to (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is something for which we don't know much about the long-term health effects of. It might be no better than microgravity.
It's hardly the only massive canyon in the solar system, however. The Saturnian system has some impressive ones (like Ithaca Chasma), made all the more impressive in comparison to the size of the body they're on.
Sounds more like Earth than Mars. :P
Between the greater distance and the electrostatic dust that clings to everything, not nearly as well as on Earth. At least with most other bodies in the solar system, you don't get dust clinging to all of your sensitive electronic equipment.
Water becomes more abundant the further out in the solar system you go.
Not readily. CO2 is such a sparse gas on Mars, and the process to convert it to methane is not trivial. On the other hand, say, on Titan, you've got an atmosphere already full of methane. LOX can be burned like jet fuel on Titan. Most of the solid bodies from Saturn on out, and to a lesser extent in the Jovian system, are covered with tholins -- all sorts of various complex organic carbon compounds, nearly all of which could be used for hybrid rocket fuel much easier than trying to produce methane on Mars. On any body with ice, you can produce LOX and LH anyway; fuel is not really the issue. At least there's lots of LH engines to choose from; there aren't many methane engines out there.
Only with *extreme* difficulty; Mars's atmosphere is so thin it's almost negligible. It's far much easier on Titan or Venus's habitable cloud layer (there's a layer of atmosphere in Venus with a temperature similar to a hot Phoenix day at a pressure similar to that of La Paz -- and even a normal Earth atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, so floating colonies are not out of the question. You could even walk outside in shirtsleeves, although you'd need a mask to provide oxygen and goggles to protect your eyes from long-term exposure to the trace carbon monoxide; the small amounts of sulfur dioxide may also be an irritant).
You can do that anywhere. But it's not nearly as simple of a process to do sustainably as you're imagining.
It's far too simplistic to declare Europa and Enceladus's surfaces as being *all* ice. And it's not like anyone would live on the *surface* of such a world when you could so readily go underground for radiation shielding. And those are but two bodies amount the vast many possibilities in the solar system. And who says that colonization needs to occur *on* a solid body anyway? It could just as well be done in space, with only mining done to solid objects (which might not even be planetoids/moons), so you don't have to have your people locked deep in a gravity well. And if you're going to choose a gravity well, why choose a deep one when it might not actually offer any health benefits?
Anyway, this is a whole red herring, because this was a discussion about exploration and the search for life. Colonization is so far off of a topic it shouldn't even warrant consideration at this point in time.
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Woah, Europe is that inhospitable? /sarcasm
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Those 400 knot takeoffs and landings will be exciting, and you can forget about balloons in such an atmosphere.
http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/mars.html [x-plane.com]
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There is no point in sending people to Mars; people can't do anything that a rover can't do cheaper and better.
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Mars might be the best place to put life, though (Score:2)
Certainly it would be easier getting humans there than the outer solar system places.
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How so? Mars is red because of Iron Oxide. Oxide = Oxygen. Mars is similar to earth in basic composition. Just need a way to extract oxygen from rust reliably and efficiently and I see no reason that it would be impossible. Plants can also be genetically engineered to behave differently or to tolerate certain environments better. There is no reason at all to say that this is impossible. Improbable, maybe. Impossible...not at all.
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But if we are going to do that, we are better [off] staying out of a gravity well.
Agree. We ought to be mining the asteroid belt, building vast tin cans filled with habitable environments, spinning to provide gravity.
I'm sure that'd be a lot simpler than terraforming, though there'd still be a lot of things to work out, such as shielding from cosmic rays, holding in enough atmosphere at Earth air pressure (it'd be a bomb out there, after all), and any number of "what if"s that the engineers/planners fail to anticipate. "What, there's no calcium to be found in the Asteroid Belt?!?"
Still
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I imagine bio-engineering would be the direction to take to avoid that. If scientists can design a self-replicating micro-organism to extract oxygen from the soil and release it (and then die without leaving something toxic behind), it may be possible to make Mars easier for humans to live on. Yes it's a big "if", but it's an area scientists are making a lot of progress in, so I wouldn't discount it completely.
However, I'd be more worried about this:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ [nasa.gov]
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We're not looking to discover what early Earth life looked like; we have Earth for that. What we're looking for is life that evolved in a completely isolated environment. Life on earth pretty much all uses DNA and RNA - it was the "fittest" self-replicating pattern, and it's pretty much got a monopoly on Earth. But if we can find life out there that hasn't had to compete with any of the lifeforms on earth, and didn't evolve from any life forms on earth, that would be incredibly interesting. We'd get to see
My money... (Score:2)
never.. (Score:2)
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My money is on the Earth.
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Because it's closer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mars is closer to us than Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Not just physically, but culturally. Literature, film, etc, Mars has played a big role in the past 50-75 years. If you hear "little green men", the average person is going to immediately think "Mars". More people are more likely to know the name Mars as opposed to some moons orbiting Saturn ( and yes, I'll admit I had to look in the article to double check that they are in fact moons of Saturn). If you are trying to get funding for something, you go for something people will recognize, because they will be more likely to support it. Ask for something they've never heard of, and they might start wondering if it's really all that necessary. It's sad, but it's true.
Also, people might confuse Europa with a continent, and Enceladus with a Mexican dish. :)
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More people are more likely to know the name Mars as opposed to some moons orbiting Saturn ( and yes, I'll admit I had to look in the article to double check that they are in fact moons of Saturn).
Should have looked more closely, Europa orbits Jupiter [wikipedia.org].
Arthur C. Clark would be rolling in his grave...
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More people are more likely to know the name Mars as opposed to some moons orbiting Saturn ( and yes, I'll admit I had to look in the article to double check that they are in fact moons of Saturn).
Should have looked more closely, Europa orbits Jupiter [wikipedia.org].
Arthur C. Clark would be rolling in his grave...
See what I mean? Unless it's something you are actively interested in, it's easy to get them wrong. If you are trying to change peoples' priorities, you have to start with something they know. Then you can move on to things they might be unfamiliar with.
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I get what you are saying, but when it comes to matters of science, I don't think we should demean it by marketing it like a soft drink or brand of clothing.
I think we should instead focus our energies on educating people as to why these places make good choices, instead of trying to cash in on pop culture tropes that have no scientific basis.
I admit, though, that the latter method is usually more effective, at least here in the U.S., anyway...
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That's all well and good, but this isn't the National Science Foundation, it's NASA. NASA science is much MUCH more political than NSF science. It maybe not be the best way to do it, but it's the only way it's going to happen.
Only because it's taxpayer funded. Once upon a time, pure scientific research was something we embraced, even if there wasn't a way to necessarily monetize the discoveries. Nowadays it seems like the general public has been convinced that the pursuit of knowledge is, in itself, worthless unless we can capitalize on that knowledge.
NASA is having problems because everyone thinks sending people up into space is a waste of money. We need to explain to them why it's not, not come up with more creative ways to
Re:Because it's closer. (Score:5, Funny)
Mars is closer to us than Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Not just physically, but culturally. Literature, film, etc,
Yes, that I have never quite gotten into or understood that Europan tentacle porn as much as I have the Martian three fingered face hugger porn. Titanian porn makes me feel inadequate.
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Bingo! This is all about public relations and nothing about the scientific justification. Taxpayers want to dream they will a day send someone (even just to die) on Mars, they feel it is a great way to spend money, while sending a probe on Saturnian moons seeking for life indications there isn't that great for them. In fact, people don't care that much about extraterresterial life, they care much more about going somewhere else to prove they are a so marvelous creature capable of spending ressources on usel
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Mars has a better PR team.
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In all fairness Enceladus does sound like Enchirito, but a lighter, healthier version.
Becuase... (Score:2)
Mars is where the little green men are from! The other planets and moons are obviously uninhabited.
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You are joking, but I fear this is the actual reason. People are somehow enchanted with Mars and will never let go until they find something.
Invaders come from Mars (Score:2)
The invaders came from Mars in "War of the Worlds", written in 1898, and people have been fixated on it ever since.
Don't expect either the U.S. military or NASA to update their plans for invasion based on almost 115 years of scientific research.
Seriously, the plan was to go to Mars since JFK's time, because he thought the Russians might beat us to the moon. NASA never updated the roadmap.
Re:Invaders come from Mars (Score:4, Insightful)
I blame Percival Lowell more than H. G. Wells. Wells just took Lowell's ideas and made a novel out of them. Lowell, being a respected astronomer, caused people to think that it could be true.
One thing at a time (Score:2)
We could learn a lot from exploring the planet closest to us, before venturing out to other places.
A desert (Score:2)
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Humans have lived in deserts before. Common Theory is that Homo Sapiens evolved in the grasslands of Africa and thrived in the deserts. Bedouin Arabs still roam the deserts of the Middle East.
Of all the planets in our solar system, Mars is (theoretically) the easiest to Terraform. It has lots of carbon dioxide and Water Ice, which (with the right bacteria) could be used to establish a carbon-based ecosystem. It's Day is only a half-hour or so longer than 24 hours so it wouldn't be too much of a cultural sho
Re:A desert (Score:4, Interesting)
Not nearly as easy as terraforming the Sahara desert, though, so why don't we start there ?
Europa (Score:4, Insightful)
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Seems to me it's much, much easier than all that.
You need a base station and a penetrator. The penetrator is hooked to the base station via a tether that can play out. It has a nuclear power source that allows it to heat its exterior above the melting point of ice. The penetrator melts a hole, gravity pulls it down, and the tether gets nicely secured above it as the ice refreezes. Keep melting and playing tether out until you hit water, then do whatever - deploy a sub, sit around and look, etc.
This seems unfair (Score:5, Interesting)
This seems unfair at multiple levels. First, we understand the basic Martian environment a lot better than other environments so sending things there are easier. Second we know from the Viking probes that Mars has weird chemistry going on in its surface. We still don't know what exactly happened there. The basic results of the Viking experiments seemed to be consistent with life but no complex carbon compounds were found. We now know that this may have been due to the presence of perchlorates in the surface material which could have destroyed the organic compounds when the samples were heated. Mars is still one of the most promising locations for life.
That said, there are less good reasons why Mars is a frequent target. Sending things to Mars takes a lot less time than sending things to the outer systems. That means if one is a scientist one would rather work on a project that sends something to Mars than something that goes far away. Second, Mars has a place in the popular mind that these various moons do not.
The real question that should be being asked is not why there's so much funding for Mars compared to other locations but why there's so little funding in general. The repeatedly canceled Europa missions would be in the cost range of a few hundred million dollars. This is a tiny amount when one compares it for example to how much money the US spends on Afghanistan monthly. The US has messed up priorities. That's why even as we speak, the Russians are doing a sample return mission to Phobos which will launch in a few weeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt [wikipedia.org]. If the Russians were still dirty commies the US would be in an absolute panic and we'd have congressional hearings asking why the US isn't doing something similar. I hope that as China becomes more of a boogeyman the US will start taking space seriously again, if not for the good of humanity, at least for old-fashioned xenophobia. And I suppose that in the long-run I really would prefer that functioning democracies explore and colonize space than other countries, but that's so far in the future at the current rate of exploration that it doesn't seem to be immediately relevant. Right now, we need to just get some people substantially interested in exploring beyond our little rock.
Re:This seems unfair (Score:5, Informative)
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$100 million is about what the US spends on Afghanistan in 36 hours. It would last 6 in Iraq.
<sarcasm>Well, that's great. There should be more money for science soon then... Right?</sarcasm>
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The US has messed up priorities.
This [calamitiesofnature.com] visual comes to mind.
Europa is off-limits. We can't land there. (Score:2, Funny)
All these worlds are yours, except Europa.
Attempt no landing there
Use them together
Use them in peace
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All these worlds are yours, except Europa.
Meddling crotchety old aliens can bite me. We'll go where we damn well please.
My question (Score:2)
is, why Venus seems like a tabu for exploration and research?
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is, why Venus seems like a tabu for exploration and research?
872 degree F surface temperature, 93 bar surface pressure, a bunch of hydrochloric acid that, along with the temperature and pressure melts everything in a few minutes.
What's not to like?
There are many research goals (Score:3)
other than just looking for life. Also, Mars probes can operate for years not just for hours like the one on Titan.
It's about fulfilling people's expectations (Score:2)
NASA isn't there to find extraterrestrial life, it's there to get funds to do exploration. On that basis, do you think it will be easier for them to finance a mission to Mars or one to some distant rock that nobody outside the scientific community has heard about, cares about or could find on a map?
If they fail to find life on Mars (despite the David Bowie song), they can recover by saying "we haven't failed, we just haven't succeeded YET". However if they "waste" billions on a mission to one of the more l
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That's part of it, but looking for life on Europa is a mission FAR beyond our current state of the art. It's not going to be on the surface, far too much radiation and no atmosphere. It's postulated to be in a postulated water ocean postulated to be buried under a tens or hundreds of miles thick ice sheet. We have no direct evidence that the ocean is there, we have no direct evidence of how thick the ice might be, and to some degree, what it's made of.
Even taking all the presuppositions as ac
Re:It's about fulfilling people's expectations (Score:4, Interesting)
1) The simplest boring device is merely a boring (pardon the pun) RTG or nuclear reactor, melting its way in slowly over the course of years.
2) You don't have to bore to get to the subsurface; ice volcanism brings it up for you. Heck, an Enceladus probe doesn't even have to *land*, thanks to its geysers. BTW, Enceladus isn't the only Saturnian moon with ice geysers -- just the one with the biggest ice geysers.
3) Please propose an alternative Europa hypothesis to a subsurface ocean.
I noticed you didn't discus Titan. Titan should be an incredibly easy body to explore due to its combination of a thick atmosphere and low gravity -- hot air or helium balloons, powered blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, variable-pitch wing aircraft, autogyros, etc. While the Delta-V requirements to get there are certainly high, they're tempered somewhat by the very easy aerocapture. It's an ongoing laboratory of organic chemistry due to the photocatalytic chemical reactions in its upper atmosphere (likely creating the tholins found all over the Saturnian system -- which we really know very little about, apart from that they're complex organic chemical compounds). It has seasonal and permanent organic lakes, ice volcanism dredging material up from the warmer subsurface, tectonic activity, and on and on. Honestly, of all the bodies in the solar system, I think Titan calls out the most for exploration.
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Find on a *map*? Of the solar system? Is that a joke?
You really think a lay person can't understand "a moon of Saturn" or "a moon of Jupiter"?
NASA's primary mission: Islamic outreach (Score:3)
NASA has no real scientific focus. It's just all over the place. If I were in charge, I would give it one primary mission, and a secondary mission, and then have a tertiary agenda.
Agendas:
1. Detection and defense of incoming bodies, including the development of better D&D technology. Eventually this will be fulfilled and go into maintenance mode, where Agenda 2 then gets primary funding.
2. Find life using existing technology including the development of better D&D technology. While this will never be complete (once we find it we can keep on finding it) we will look for more and more sophisticated forms. (I assume extraterrestrial bacterial detection would happen first, then complex organisms)
3. All other efforts on determining the nature of the universe. JWST, Hubble, etc.
As far as I am concerned NASA has no reason to send humans off planet. We should be developing Avatar-like technology for near earth operations and AI driven tech for stuff where the lag is too long.
I donno, it might be a pretty good place to look. (Score:2)
Just try looking a bit harder. You may wish to check out the leads at http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/index.htm [marsanomalyresearch.com]
Then again, would you really want to find life there and open that bag of worms?
It's also not the kind of place to raise your kids (Score:3)
In fact, it's cold as hell.
Earth is best place to search for life! (Score:2)
Politics. Next question? (Score:2)
Really - the Moon landings were also a political stunt and nothing more. The uppity-ups are not interested in science. Just in trophies. Titan, Europa and other moons of the outer planets are just too unknown by the average Leno Jay-Walking crowd who can barely tell you who the first president was but can tell you every word Snookie spouts out on a given episode. Mars, tho, is a viable trophy because even with the intelligence drain that is sucking the brains out of the average public citizen while they bak
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Why is everyone so fixated on the idea that every form of life should be based on Carbon? In the same way that people in general can't seem to understand that other forms of life may use senses other than the five or six humans have, people should not be hung up on Carbon and other life that is similar in form to what we currently have on Earth.
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Why is everyone so fixated on the idea that every form of life should be based on Carbon?
Because we have a nearly infinite multitude of carbon-based life forms here on earth, and we know a lot about their chemistry, metabolic byproducts, behaviors, patterns, etc. We can put together a list of known items that could indicate carbon-based life, and create experiments or procedures that help us locate them. If you choose silicon (presumably), where do you start? What kind of things indicate products of silicon-based life? That's a pretty short list, I think.
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What does thermodynamics have to do with anything, apart from a first-principles perspective?
Look at the sort of reactions silanols [ic.ac.uk] undergo, for an example of non-carbon-based complexity. The thing is, even if another form of life *could* form on Earth, it'd be immediately out-competed by established carbon-based life.
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Already been done. You expect them to do the same thing again?
No, they're not going to be digging for dinosaur bones, but they're not going to just repeat what Cassini-Huygens did for kicks, either. Some of the Titan probe proposals are really fascinating, to be honest.
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