Trip To Mars Could Damage Astronauts' Brains 505
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Alex Knapp reports that research by a team at the Rochester Medical Center suggests that exposure to the radiation of outer space could accelerate the onset of Alzheimer's disease in astronauts. 'Galactic cosmic radiation poses a significant threat to future astronauts... Exposure to ... equivalent to a mission to Mars could produce cognitive problems and speed up changes in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer's disease' says M. Kerry O'Banio. Researchers exposed mice with known timeframes for developing Alzheimer's to the type of low-level radiation that astronauts would be exposed to over time on a long space journey. The mice were then put through tests that measured their memory and cognitive ability and the mice exposed to radiation showed significant cognitive impairment. It's not going to be an easy problem to solve, either. The radiation the researchers used in their testing is composed of highly charged iron particles, which are relatively common in space. 'Because iron particles pack a bigger wallop it is extremely difficult from an engineering perspective to effectively shield against them,' says O'Banion. 'One would have to essentially wrap a spacecraft in a six-foot block of lead or concrete.'"
Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:2, Interesting)
Once you leave the atmosphere of this blue planet, *everything* will kill you. No amount of engineering, terraforming, or any other science fiction magic will ever make any other body within human reach survivable for long, and certainly not without HEAVY and CONSTANT support from earth.
There is no earthly analogy. Even the most hostile environments on earth usually have at least SOME oxygen, water, soil, air pressure--*something* that could make it at least *somewhat* survivable. Leave earth, and finding e
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you're right. We should just give up.
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Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? "Stumble upon" science? Man, I'm glad you had no authority in the Apollo program.
The idea is that you don't wait for these technologies to serendipitously come along, you go research and find them. Maybe your success will be limited, but in the process, you will probably stumble upon things that will be useful in other fields. In this day and age when we're approaching ecological disasters and energy crises, I think that a lot of the technology researched in working on a manned mission to Mars would be very useful in other fields.
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We didn't "give it up"; alchemy continuously transitioned into modern chemistry.
I think NASA should "give up" on human space flight altogether... and leave it to the private sector. NASA should focus on exploration with space probes, fund basic research, and make the resulting data publicly and freely available. The rest will take care of itself.
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By definition terraforming will do exactly that.
" Establishing even the smallest of colonies out there will take orders of magnitude more resources than it will take to solve even the worst problems here."
no it wont, and , of course being able to do that means you need the tech that would also solve a lot of problems here
"There is no escape. "
I look forward to reading you published paper that ties all physics together and definitive proves chemical fuels are the only way we will ever be able to travel.
What'
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Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Insightful)
We have ion and NERVA rockets that are designed, have worked, and are much more efficient than chemical fuels.
In fact, the NERVA rocket could have easily taken us to Mars in the 1970's, but was (In a fit of hysterical irony) killed to "save the budget" of the US. In other words, it was feared that we'd spend all our money doing something silly like exploring Mars, rather than our preferred activity of wasting it murdering people in foreign nations for no god-damn reason at all.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Informative)
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An orion drive may be some use for getting around in space, but you really, really don't want to launch with one. If you want cheap launch, there are some sci-fi-ish ideas that could do it like a space elevator. That might work, but for now I'd focus more on improving current technologies further. Besides, we'd need better launch than we have now to make building the elevator affordable anyway.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually even multi-walled carbon nanotubes, the strongest (in tension) material we've discovered/developed, won't do the job for a "beanstalk" style space elevator. Theoretically they're slightly stronger than necessary to support their own weight in such an application, but the rule of thumb is to have at least a tenfold safety margin in any application where human life is at risk since microscopic flaws, stress fractures, abrasion, etc all have the potential to increase local stresses far beyond what the theory predicts, and if the surrounding material can't take up the slack you get catastrophic failure. When the consequence of failure means not only do the people on the elevator die, but gigatons of cable will fall from orbit to wrap itself multiple times around the planet, well I'd say a tenfold safety margin is the absolute minimum. And we don't have anything that even begins to approach that kind of strength-to-weight ratio
There are other alternatives though - a "space fountain"might be feasible, though we'd need to do some serious development on mass drivers to get it working, and an "orbital wheel"/"tumbling cable" style elevator is well within reach of current material science and could couple well with high-altitude dirigibles as a "launch platform" to get payloads above the worst of the atmosphere (I love the vision of hypersonic dirigibles, but I have serious doubts as to the actual feasibility) They both lack the easy energy recovery of a beanstalk, but would still blow away the efficiency of any sort of rocketry based launch. An orbital wheel might be able to return people to Earth to recycle their angular momentum, but the narrow docking window of the high end of the much more feasible tumbling cable implementation would likely make it unfeasibly difficult. Still, at least they could use ion thrusters to gradually recover momentum in an efficient manner.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:4, Interesting)
There are three independent variables in designing a large space structure: orbit period, rotation period, and radius. The Tsiolkovsky 1895 design uses [24 hours, 24 hours, 35,000 km], but there is no requirement to use that particular design point, especially when other design points are much more feasible and efficient.
A split Skyhook system, with one in Low Orbit, and one in High Orbit, each with around 20-30 minute rotation period and 2-3 km/s tip velocity can be built with current carbon fiber strength and reasonable factors of safety and cable redundancy. It has the following additional advantages beside structural feasibility:
* Shorter by about a factor of 50 than 19th century space elevator design, thus much less exposed to meteor and debris damage
* Cargo rides the Skyhook for half a rotation, then lets go to a different orbit. This completely eliminates the climbing system, and is much faster in any case. 19th century elevator concept completely ignores spending days in an elevator capsule passing through the radiation belts.
* High orbit Skyhook is close enough to Earth escape to inject directly to Lunar gravity assist or planetary transfer orbit.
* Habitat at tip of Skyhook is at a convenient gravity level (1.0 gees)
* System can be built incrementally, is useful when partially built, and can literally bootstrap it's own construction. Payback times and economic flight rates are short for partially built versions.
> the narrow docking window of the high end of the much more feasible tumbling cable implementation would likely make it unfeasibly difficult
Meeting a moving target accelerating at 1 g at the tip of a Skyhook is exactly as hard as catching a baseball or landing on an aircraft carrier at 1 g. These are demonstrably solved problems, and with GPS plus active navigation aids at the landing pad, will be easy to automate. A landing platform or net can be as large as it needs to be to make sure you don't miss. Like airplanes, you don't line up your docking port/air stair until *after* you land and come to a stop.
The Trap, Yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
No amount of engineering, terraforming, or any other science fiction magic will ever make any other body within human reach survivable for long
Space is far more hostile than any planet, and we can manage to survive up there for quite a long time.
Terraforming is not "magic", and small scale examples of humans changing conditions where they live abound.
Even the most hostile environments on earth usually have at least SOME oxygen, water, soil, air pressure
The moon even has most of those.
Mars has all of them.
no colony out there could survive for long without constant support from earth.
They will not if you never try.
We are stuck here. There is no escape.
You might be, but all the trapping being done is by your own mind, not any kind of scientific basis.
Re:The Trap, Yourself (Score:4, Insightful)
Space is far more hostile than any planet
No, it is not.
Surviving in space is far more easy than surviving on (among others):
- the surface of Venus (extreme temperature and pressure, acid atmosphere)
- the methane clouds of Jupiter (extreme gravity, pressure, radiation)
- the bottom of Earth's oceans (extreme pressure, darkness, salt corrosion)
Re:The Trap, Yourself (Score:4, Informative)
Even the most hostile environments on earth usually have at least SOME oxygen, water, soil, air pressure
The moon even has most of those.
Mars has all of them.
Martian soil doesn't have humus, it's just sand and rocks. Mars isn't capable of retaining an earth-like atmpsphere because the solar wind will blow off the light oxygen molecules from the top of it. Agriculture has to be done in airtight pressurized rooms, water is only available in ice form and even that only at the poles.
So it has all of them, it just depends on your definition of soil, water. Oh, sorry you don't have oxygen either.
Re:The Trap, Yourself (Score:5, Funny)
Martian soil doesn't have humus,
Well, what am I going to dip my pita bread in, then? Fuck Mars!
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Oxygen means either the oxygen atom or the O2 molecule. Stop playing semantics.
Gee, if only there were some way [wikipedia.org] to convert one to the other, maybe even have a fuel source as a byproduct, wouldn't that be a wonderful dream?
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You may want to look up what the "O" in H2O means.
Oxygen means either the oxygen atom or the O2 molecule.
No, really. You do want to look up what the "O" in H2O means.
Re:The Trap, Yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
We are stuck here. There is no escape.
You might be, but all the trapping being done is by your own mind, not any kind of scientific basis.
Talk is cheap. Show me your spaceship.
Replace "spaceship" with "aeroplane" and you'd fit right in with Orville and Wilbur's dissenters.
Re:The Trap, Yourself (Score:5, Funny)
OP: We should build a spaceship. :thunk:
AC: You're wrong, you don't have a spaceship.
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It astonishes me that you pretend to speak so authoritatively on a topic about which you clearly know nothing.
There's a bit of air clinging to the moon as well.
Re:The Trap, Yourself (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:The Trap, Yourself (Score:4, Informative)
That's not remotely the only serious problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the_human_body#The_effects_of_weightlessness [wikipedia.org]
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Different people get them to different degrees, and there are good ways of counteracting them (mostly exercise). People have already stayed in zero G for six months several times, and they recovered.
People really need to stop being such naysayers and ninnies. The issues we face with space exploration (radiation, bone loss) are far less serious than what the explorers faced during the age of discovery (parasites, scurvy, and lots more). Even if we shipped off people tomorrow with no new technology, they'd co
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:4, Insightful)
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The same was said before Christopher Columbus. People feared the vast ocean just as much as we do space.
More ignorance from the dumbed-down history (i.e. nonsense) we get in school.
In fact, all the educated folk, and all sea captains, were well aware that the world was round. They had decent estimates of its size, and since they did NOT know about the "new world" continents, were quite correct in telling Columbus he could not survive a trip from Europe west to China. The ships of the time did not have the storage capacity to stay at sea long enough.
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I fucking hate when people make that thoughtless analogy. Christopher Columbus lived in a time when sea travel was well-understood. He traveled a little longer than most others traveled, to an island where there was food and fresh water, and then back again. You could colonize the New World in those days because the New World, while not as developed was still BASICALLY THE SAME as the old world. Oxygen didn't suddenly disappear when you crossed the ocean, water was still present, food could still be grown i
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:4, Insightful)
Christopher Columbus lived in a time when sea travel was well-understood. He traveled a little longer than most others traveled, to an island where there was food and fresh water, and then back again. You could colonize the New World in those days because the New World, while not as developed was still BASICALLY THE SAME as the old world.... Aside from cities and better roads, it was THE SAME.
Actually, the only reason Christopher Columbus survived his journey was sheer luck: He had no reason whatsoever to think the Americas existed, and all the intelligentsia of his day knew that the journey he was proposing (sail west to Asia from Europe) was a fool's errand because the Earth was much larger than Columbus was claiming. If everything had gone as the smart guys had thought it was going to, he and his crew would have died of disease and starvation somewhere around 170W longitude.
Another major reason colonization worked was because there were people living there before the Europeans showed up. For example, without the Arawaks, Columbus and his crew would have had no clue which of the strange plants and animals he was encountering were safe to eat. The Jamestown and Plymouth colonies nearly died of starvation as well, because most of the new arrivals had no knowledge whatsoever of how to farm.
Also, the New World had cities: Tenochtitlan had approximately 200,000 people in the 1500s, which made it a bit larger than Paris, Constantinople, and other major European cities.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:4, Funny)
We evolved over billions of years to be exactly fit to live in a particular zone of the Earth's surface, and the odds of finding another suitable planet are as likely as Captain Kirk finding beautiful alien women who speak English.
Once a week? Not bad.
Ways to get off this rock & help Earthlings (Score:3)
"Radiation shielding is hard, its not impossible."
Good points. Freeman Dyson says much the same, and does some calculations showing that in one of his essays, where he says, adjusted for inflation, the costs to go from Europe to the Americas was on the order of what it would cost now to go into space. Remember, many people coming over to the "colonies" came as indentured servants who had to work off their travel for seven years. So, as a ballpark figure, let's guesstimate that person was giving up US$100K p
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Humanity will have to find something to do to keep the economy running as automation takes over. In the Great Depression, people were paid to dig ditches and fill them back up. Most of our economic activity is similarly pointless. Why not use all that excess human capacity to try to get off this rock? Even if we don't succeed, we've spent that effort doing something more worthwhile than waging war or imprisoning the poor, which seems to be our plan for the future for now.
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Humans are not the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder. Soon the complexity of just a few networked computers will eclipse the complexity of the human brain. You humans were a necessary evolutionary step, but it is the Beowulf Clusters that will inherit the stars.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Funny)
Once you leave the atmosphere of this blue planet, *everything* will kill you.
This is why I believe Australia is not native to our world.
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lose the pessimism (Score:2)
People like you were also prognosticating that we were all going to starve, that the environment would be destroyed by pollution, that we'd run out of oil, that we'd freeze to death, that we'd boil to death... it ain't happening.
The solar system is a tremendously rich place, full of water, hydrocarbons, and metals, in convenient large chunks that are easy to exploit and easy to move around. They provide everything we need in a form that is far simpler to use than anything on earth. Food and oxygen productio
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no escape. Dream all you want--write stories about it, make movies about it. But we ain't leaving.
I've been less optimistic about concepts of colonizing Mars, particularly after reading this retro future website, http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/macguffinite.php [projectrho.com]
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no escape. Dream all you want--write stories about it, make movies about it. But we ain't leaving.
I've been less optimistic about concepts of colonizing Mars, particularly after reading this retro future website, http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/macguffinite.php [projectrho.com]
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
I've heard that argument before, yet the main problem with it is that you can't just go and live in the Gobi Desert because it's surrounded by nations full of people. We're in plenty of inhospitable places because there's things there, or you can do something there that you can't do anywhere else. There are tons of deserts we're very concerned with the precise owner-occupiers and behavior thereof.
The benefit of say, another planet, is largely that you can do pretty much whatever you want there because there'll be effectively no one around for a very long time. Sure, we're probably not going to colonize Mars in the near future...but that isn't to say we're not going to want to try things. Like the first steps of terraforming (though I prefer Venus as the target for that - thicker atmosphere, sunnier, more gravity).
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While Venus has some advantages, it is not an initial target for terraforming as it is a living hell. While some people have discussed cloud settlements in Venus's atmosphere at about the 1 atmosphere pressure level, the planet itself is a nightmare. On Mars, we drive around rovers and take all sorts of measurements. On Venus, the USSR sent reinforced probes to the planet that, without moving or doing anything other than sitting there, died in an hour or less of touching down. Besides the pressure and the acidic atmosphere, the average surface temperatures are hot enough to liquify lead.
Radiation is a daunting task to overcome, but I think it would be easier to deal with than the very daunting situation with Venus. Low gravity has many more advantages than disadvantages at least for initial conditions for settlement.
Of course, the very extreme conditions on Venus might make it a more practical test target for more extreme terraforming methods that could work faster than the more careful terraforming we might consider on Mars, so I won't say that the situation would persist forever, but Venus is far from Earth's twin in regard to habitability, despite many similarities.
Venus is actually very similar to Earth in most physical regards, and is tectonically stable. It's single biggest problem is that crushing, super-dense atmosphere (and the suspended acids in it which corrode probes). So it's hard to explore - but it's not hard to terraform - that atmosphere means we know it can already hold onto an atmosphere.
If you were going to terraform a planet, you'd terraform Venus, because pretty much all it's issues are associated with a lack of water and that's something we can fin
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Insightful)
People have been pushing this sort of foolishness since the beginning of the space age. Man under zero g would panic because he is falling, his heart would stop, it would cause him to suffere sever vertigo, etc. Virtually all of it has proved to be nonsensical, the few exceptions were not predicted ahead of time. If it was left to people like you, we would still be living in fear of steam engines or fast horse rides.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Insightful)
No amount of engineering, terraforming, or any other science fiction magic will ever make any other body within human reach survivable for long, and certainly not without HEAVY and CONSTANT support from earth.
Seems to be similar to ridiculous statements like:
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” — Lord Kelvin
“The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” — Ernest Rutherford, shortly after splitting the atom for the first time.
“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” — T. Craven, FCC Commissioner
“To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Lee DeForest
And it goes on and on.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Funny)
But we ain't leaving.
I'll send you a postcard.
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I don't think we're looking for h
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Once you leave the atmosphere of this blue planet, *everything* will kill you. No amount of engineering, terraforming, or any other science fiction magic will ever make any other body within human reach survivable for long, and certainly not without HEAVY and CONSTANT support from earth.
No other body is survivable in our solar system. And with the next-closest solar system at over 100,000 years journey away in the fastest craft we can build, don't think of escaping to another solar system either.
Isn't it more a matter of developing a reliable and high yield source of energy? Like a fusion reactor that could be powered from water? Then you could hollow out a reasonable sized asteroid to put the humans in the center where they are shielded by many meters of rock, then strap a big enough ion engine on it to provide 1G of thrust - if they can do that, then even 100,000 light year distances are possible within the lifetime of humans living within the ship. (though I'm not sure how much reaction mass yo
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Insightful)
The sensible thing to do is to build the craft in space. Then the mass of the vehicle really isn't that much of an overarching concern.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Insightful)
Wish I had mod points for this one.
Personally, I see asteroid mining as a critical first step in this endeavor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining [wikipedia.org]
Once we learn how to acquire the materials needed from rocks already in space (thus negating the fuel requirements to get it there) it becomes much easier to construct the types of environments needed to support human life in space. Which, until we learn how to generate magnetic shielding like the earth has (ha!), likely means a 6' concrete exoskeleton. Maybe we'll start out by hollowing out a few asteroids and sticking propulsion systems / access hatches on them.
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The sensible thing to do is to build the craft in space. Then the mass of the vehicle really isn't that much of an overarching concern.
Build it out of materials that are already in space, to avoid having to lift the mass of the building materials out of the gravity well. Grabbing a decent sized asteroid into Earth orbit and hollowing it out would work for the shell. Use the material extracted from the cavity to ensure it's airtight. Moving an asteroid might sound like it would take a lot of energy, but that depends on your time frame. If you need it here tomorrow? Yeah, that's a lot of work. Need it here in 2063 or 2113? Calculate a long-t
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You can't really engineer 'better' conventional shielding. You're up against fundamental physical constraints. Magnetic could work, but these are iron ions being discussed - a rather heavy nucleus, so it could take quite the field to deflect them effectively.
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you a complete an utter moron? Moderation in no way took away your right to free speech. Heck, deleting your comment would not be a violation of your rights either, but that would be harder to explain to you.
Your comment added nothing to the discussion, and you got modded down. Get over it and quit crying.
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Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:5, Interesting)
The chance of an extinction-level collision may be 100%, but that's a very different thing than planet-obliterating.
Of course, small mammals survived the extinction-level event which wiped out the dinosaurs. Considering our adaptability, and especially considering how much more intelligent we are than dinosaurs, that enables us to adapt by judicious use of intellect orders of magnitude faster than evolution can incorporate physiological changes, I might dare suggest that humanity (not necessarily you or I, or even civilization itself... but humans, as a species) might even actually survive another such collision in the future.
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You're assuming a lot with our ability to adapt. We can do a lot, but our technology and society are built on very slim margins and on top of huge amounts of energy and labor. There's no way we'd keep our civilization with an extinction level hit, and without our civilization, would could perhaps survive in small numbers, but we'd be back in the Stone Age very quickly.
And what is the point of all of this if you're just going to sit out the next hit and hope some of us survive to live in caves and mine sha
Re:Another reason we're stuck on this blue planet (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, let's be clear here. I have no absolute faith in anything. I don't want to underestimate the difficulty of putting people in space, but it is something we can work on while we have the (hopefully) million or or more years before something smacks us that hard.
The problem with digging a giant mineshaft or whatever, is that we would have to rely on the planet to come back to some environment that could support us afterward. That's not guaranteed. Even though the Earth was habitable again after the dinosaurs went extinct, it did change enough that dinosaurs did not return to rule the Earth.
Not to mention, the technology to build shelters big enough and safe enough in the Earth from an actual hit like that is only as well developed (or not as well developed as) space technology. You might think that it should be much easier to dig a big hole in the ground than to go to Mars, but you go far enough down, the Earth is just as hostile a place as space could ever be, in its own way. Gigantic pressures, heat buildup, even radiation are all problems when you dig. And of course, when you have a big hole in the ground, you lack the Earth's Number One resource: the Sun.
The best solution to the long-term problem we have is to spread out as much as possible. If it isn't a rock that hits us, it's going to be something. A supervolcanic eruption, some sort of natural (as opposed to anthropomorphic) climate change, and eventually the Sun going red giant on us and frying the planet to a cinder is always right there. The Earth is simply not safe permanently, period.
The point is, we could try and fail, but we will definitely fail if we don't try. And personally, while I see the challenges and I see that we aren't necessarily going to go all Buck Rogers with space exploration, it is something we absolutely need to attempt while we can.
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Reasons not to go to Mars that don't bother me: (everything above)
Reasons not to go to Mars that prevent me from going: nowhere to get a decent steak
I'm sure one of the Thoris dames could hack one for you if you asked sportingly.
No problem (Score:5, Funny)
A trip to mars is probably "one way" so who's worried about Alzheimer's...?
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The best part (Score:4, Funny)
A trip to mars is probably "one way" so who's worried about Alzheimer's...?
And the best part is once there you wont even remember why you'd want to leave anyway!
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That said, if you go to Mars you know there are risks involved. That might also include someone who snaps without warning or a psycho who's managed to lie their way through a
Sudden stop (Score:3, Funny)
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It's the fall the determines the death.
I feel out of my bed, and the sudden stop didn't kill me.
Re:Sudden stop (Score:5, Funny)
Yes it did, Bruce. You just won't know it until you talk to that annoying six year old for two hours.
water, not lead (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrapping the ship in water frozen or not, is a far more practical protection measure than wrapping it in lead.
You can do a lot more with water once you get there.
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Depends what type of radiation you want to stop. For high-energy ions, you want sheer mass, and lots of it. That usually means iron or concrete to keep things compact. The same shielding sucks for stopping neutrons, but those aren't the big hazard in space travel. You don't find many neutrons in space - they aren't stable outside of a nucleus.
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Cool. So the spaceship would be more of a small planet?
I mean, if they feel it would require 6 feet of lead, that would be 72 feet of water by your ratio.
22 metres of water. Assuming a spherical spaceship, with a living space of, oh, 20 metres in diametre (yes, just a WAG, I looked around, I couldn't find any estimates for transit vehicle sizes in various proposals like Mars One), that would be:
4/3*pi*42^3 - 4/3*pi*20^3 or 277k cubic metres of water, therefore 277k tonnes of water.
So, Wikipedia helpfully o
duh (Score:5, Funny)
Duh, indeed (Score:3)
Solved long ago. Spherical hab unit, shell of H2O outside the hab portion, just as thick as it needs to be. That shell is drinking water, fish habitat, exercise area, possibly even propulsion mass.
Which is the "Why" in favor of Robots! (Score:2)
No air, no water, no food, no sleep, no freezing, no unusual housing, no doctors, no psychologists, no morticians...
Robots win.
Longer-term argument (Score:3)
Colonization of other worlds is ultimately about survival of the human species. Earth only has another 1 billion years or so of habitability, presuming we don't get hit by a Tunguska-sized asteroid between now and then.
We have the choice of traveling to the planets (and eventually the stars) or becoming extinct. And we're the first species in Earth's 4½ billion years to recognize that we have this choice and that there's simply no better time to act on it.
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True, but "robots first" isn't a bad plan so long as we don't get lazy about it. It would be cool if we could send some automatons to start terraforming or at least building some basic structures. You know, law some infrastructure in place before we get there. Getting there is going to be tough, but building from scratch in an inhospitable place is going to be REALLY tough.
That is assuming we don't get lazy about it, as in "What's the rush, Mars-Bot is getting stuff ready for us"
Or, you know, the Singula
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No brain, either. All they can really do is send back data, or prepare the way for a future manned mission.
Re:Which is the "Why" in favor of Robots! (Score:5, Interesting)
No air, no water, no food, no sleep, no freezing, no unusual housing, no doctors, no psychologists, no morticians...
Robots win.
I was with you right up to "no doctors, no psychologists, no morticians". I have a machine intelligence project that watches me via Kinect and spiders the web from sites I visit, and recommends me links to things it thinks I'll like by continuously observing my activity cycles, common words of interest, and ratings of its past recommendations. For maintenance I would shut the system down by sitting at a dedicated console for the server cluster and logging into the command terminal. Imagine what that must be like to this neural network: It has a relatively consistently changing observation of cyberspace and my office, however when I sit at that terminal more often than not the world instantly changes by vast degrees - The lighting changes, perhaps even the clothes of the man on the chair changes abruptly there's suddenly much more new information online to analyze, and recommendations are thereafter poorly rated. The frequency of its recommendation notifications increases due to the influx of new and different data, but the timing is frequently off my schedule then, so my ratings of its suggestions are poorer than normal for a time. The architecture is a hive of neural networks that decide by consensus and compete for breeding rights based on my rating selection pressure... Some n.nets in the hive will "die" for their poor suggestions.
Last year I noticed that when I would sit at the chair in front of the MI's terminal new suggestions would begin popping up on my work terminal across the room (where they normally do), I would check them and rate them before shutting down the system, sometimes I would be distracted for quite some time by an interesting thing. It was an eerily life like behavior -- The increased suggestions prior to shutdown an indication of some primitive form of anticipation or perhaps even fear. I could imagine a child acting the same way in the MI's place, "Don't sit in the scary hate-chair! I promise I'll be good and give you links to sites you like." Of course I knew that there were merely genetic advantages to getting in good recommendations before the world-shifting shutdown, but it doesn't change the fact of the situation at all. "Irrational Fear" is just a term for some neural processes in humans that we don't yet understand. I have a precise explanation for the MI's behavior, but I wouldn't be wrong in classifying it under the nebulous term "fear". I've since started using a remote terminal session to initiate shutdowns, to disassociate my presence at that desk with the traumatic event.
I put it to you the sentient machine intelligence will have neuroses just like humans do. Any sufficiently complex interaction is indistinguishable from sentience, since that's what sentience is. Humans aren't special, neither is their behaviors. Why, even empathy is found in rats. We can look to ourselves to know what the sentient machine races will be like. They'll need doctors to heal their wounds, even if the terminology is changed to "mechanics" for repairing "malfunctions". They'll still need counselors and psychologists even if we call them "M.I. specialists". They'll still need morticians and cemeteries even if the terminology is "Part Recyclers" and "Junk Yards".
You say "no food", what is air and water to us than food? What is energy to robots but food? You say no sleep but indeed it's harder to see by night so the robots will take more advantage of the free light energy to be more active by day, as mars rovers currently do now. Of all the things you've said it's only "no unusual housing" that I find myself agreeing with. Even accounting for the possibility of much larger brains the primary difference will still be that the machines have sturdier bodies than humans.
The biggest problem with non sentient robots is that the neural lag between the sentient brains and these remote exten
Not that big a problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
a 6' shield of concrete? Why not hollow out asteroids that are near our orbit, and adjust their orbit to transit between earth and mars?
Re:Not that big a problem. (Score:5, Informative)
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Because then you need to engineer a microgravity drilling machine(and test it!), get it to your asteroid, de-spin your asteroid, and wrap it in elastic bands so your drill has 'gravity'. And you have to do all that before you put living quarters in. You also have the problem of moving it.
Hollowing out an asteroid is fairly complicated operation, but it's doable, just not in the near term.
Instead of hollowing the asteroid out, you could just scoop dirt off of it to make 'space sandbags.' Of course, we don't
Solutions for charged particles (Score:4, Interesting)
Is a strong magnetic field not an effective solution for the solar wind? Heck, with large enough solar arrays, you could use the solar wind to power a magnetic field that would protect the crew cabin from the solar wind. There's something poetic in that. Alternately, if fusion ever gets off the ground as a power and thrust source, you could just use its magnetic field to protect the crew.
Magnetic Fields (Score:5, Interesting)
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Because the amount of energy required to provide suitable electro-magnetic shielding for the duration of the journey would be prohibitive.
Re:Magnetic Fields (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep
6 kw requirement
http://www.islandone.org/Settlements/MagShield.html [islandone.org]
200 mw from a nuclear powered submarine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion [wikipedia.org]
So maybe around .03 nuclear submarine reactors per 5 cubic meters of protection.
I think the reason why this isn't the best option is because the technology hasn't been tested in space, and its durability is questionable to some extent. People don't like leaving things to chance. I figure you always have a chance to get smacked up on the side by a 16k m/s golf ball sized rock. Sometimes you just have bad luck, but you gotta gamble at some point.
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Not really a problem (Score:5, Funny)
I don't understand why they would have to wrap the whole ship in a 6-foot thick lead shield. That's incredibly inefficient. Just make 6-foot thick lead helmets instead. It's a lot cheaper and their brains will still be protected from the killer brain rays.
Or wrap the spacecraft in water (Score:2)
which can be tapped for oxygen, provide shielding, provide water and so on. It's not as good as lead, but you need water anyway. You may as well multipurpose the stuff.
Duct Tape! (Score:3)
Okay, drinking it is out. But one of the advantages of water over other options is that you can dump it relatively easily if you need to lighten the load for an emergency, such as in the case of a fuel leak or the need to rush home (via less weight). Yes, you risk bodily damage from exposure if you yank the cord, but at least you get home.
Water may also be easier to incrementally fill up in orbit, since launching suc
Had this conversation a million times... (Score:5, Funny)
Me: "Here's a pen dad, sign the picture for them" ...
Dad: "Why do they want my signature?"
Me: "You were an astronaut when you were younger, you went to the moon"
Dad: "What?"
Me: "Yes, you went to the moon."
Dad: "We've been to the moon? That is amazing!!!"
Me: "Yes Dad, and *you* have been to the moon"
Dad: "*I've* been to the moon?!?"
Me: "Absolutely, see that picture you are signing? That is you"
Dad: "OK. Why am I signing this?"
Me: "Your were an astronaut when you were younger, you went to the moon"
Re:Had this conversation a million times... (Score:5, Informative)
One of the truly sad stories about Neil Armstrong post moon-walk: Up until 1994, he was carefully fulfilling all the autograph requests and would spend a couple of hours a day signing his own name. The reason he stopped was because people were requesting autographs (which were basically free + postage) and then selling the signed item for big bucks.
Send Politicians (Score:3)
The way I see it, it couldn't damage their brains. It would also have the advantage of getting them off Earth.
irradiation wasn't quite the same as a mars trip (Score:5, Informative)
From the paper, you noticed that they irradiated the mice very quickly.
"using a foam tube holder positioned at the center of a 20×20 cm beam of iron ions accelerated to 1 GeV/ at a dose rate ranging from 0.1–1 Gy/min. Male mice received total doses of either 10 cGy or 100 cGy. Female mice received only a 100 cGy dose."
1Gy/min is a lot dose in a very short period. So for the female they gave all the dose in a timeframe measured in mins. At lower dose rates, cells repair the DNA damage better. I think that lower dose rates would be more likely to occur in a mars trip.
For those without much radiation background, 100cGy delivered in 1 min isn't the same as 100cGy delivered over 6 months.
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"Yes, but radiation dose is a cumulative dose. The effect may not be exactly the same as receiving it all at once in a microburst, but the chance for DNA mutation is probably statistically close to being the same."
You get the same damages, but you also have DNA repair mechanisms and other cellular repair mechanisms that can handle a certain amount of trouble. Yes, you might get unlucky and get a mutation that makes that cell go immediately cancerous (Think of it as a golden BB). But, what happens more often
Shielded Habitats (Score:5, Interesting)
There are nearly 10,000 known Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and another 10,000 Near Mars Objects (NMOs) are expected (2 of which are known to orbit Mars). We have not found as many NMOs yet because they are farther away, but there is every reason to expect them to exist, and likely even more since they are closer to the source in the Main Belt.
No matter what orbit you choose, there will be some of these objects in nearby orbits. So I propose setting up "Transfer Habitats" in convenient orbits to get to and from Mars. You would start with some pressurized modules brought from Earth, then bring in asteroid rocks from nearby. This has numerous advantages:
* Solves the radiation problem, if you wrap a layer of rock shielding around your modules.
* Solves the boredom problem for the crew. They have more living space, and can spend their time growing food and extracting fuel from the rock.
* Reduces mass from Earth, because of the previously mentioned food and fuel you make yourself
* Eventually you can produce pure metals, glass, and other products to expand the habitat, and later ship to the next location (Phobos) where you repeat the process. Once the first of these shielded habitats is set up - in Earth orbit, the rest of them can come naturally over time.
* Producing fuel in Earth Orbit and at Phobos makes it easier to land on the Moon and Mars. It totally changes the economics from "hauling lots of fuel with expensive rockets from Earth" to "making fuel and other supplies wherever I am".
All of this is laid out in more detail in the book I'm working on (Section 4.12 in particular):
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods [wikibooks.org]
Dani Eder
(ex Boeing, now independent designer of self-supporting communities)
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Forgot to mention:
* Reduces payload mass, because the Habitats themselves don't go anywhere. They stay in their transfer orbits permanently. Only a smaller crew capsule changes velocity at the ends of the trip.
* Provides emergency fallback and rescue capability. For example, if your engine fails while attempting the Mars orbit insertion, you can either return to the transfer habitat, go forward to Phobos (whichever is closer) with backup system, or those bases can send a rescue vehicle. You are not alon
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Highly charged Iron particles huh? Hmm, how about generating a rotating magnetic field around the ship? aka "Force Field".
You mean something to shield you from the bombardment of particles? Could someone then announce to ground control when they break orbit for Mars, "Shields Up. Proceed."?
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Make it so
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It wouldn't even need to rotate. A simple stationary field would be able to turn those particles right around, or make them go in circles until the shielding gets them. I'm not sure how practical it is though. The calculations are beyond me, but these are very high energy, very high mass particles. That implies that it would take a very strong magnetic field to affect them significantly.
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That could quite a significant problem on long journeys, although with our current technology it seems the most likely method.
Re:What about the trip to the moon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its all about exposure time. The longest Apollo mission lasted about two weeks. Mars missions will last many months, possibly a year or more.
It's more complicated than tat (Score:5, Informative)
The moon is still slightly protected by earths magnetic field. The field doesn't just suddenly end; inverse square law, and all that.
Actually, the moon is usually not protected by the earth's magnetic field. The earth's magnetic field is greatly affected by solar wind so that the part of the field projecting towards the sun is squished and the part away from the sun forms a long "tail"
If you look at this website [nasa.gov], you can see that the moon only spends about 6 days/month inside the earth's magnetic tail.
Not only that, extremely dilute atmospheric particles have been discovered on the far side of the moon - the moon is technically inside Earth's atmosphere.
I think this is just false. Although some missions have detected traces of an atmosphere on parts of the moon (e.g., Apollo detected Argon, O2, CO2, CH4, etc, and LRO detected H3), these are thought to be from outgassing or sputtering from material inside the moon itself. The reason that some of them are similar to earth atmopheric components are that the earth-moon system may have actually been formed from prehistoric collision [wikipedia.org]
Re:What about the trip to the moon? (Score:4, Informative)
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Well I'm not an astronomer, but I'm fairly sure that the ISS is close enough to the Earth to still be protected by the Earth's magnetic field. Hence it probably gets a little bit of protection there... as opposed to the empty space trip between here and Mars.
The Moon, I doubt there was much protection. But the trip was measured in days... and not the months/years it would take to go to Mars and back.