Well Water Likely Available Across Mars (behindtheblack.com) 102
schwit1 quotes Behind the Black: A science paper released today and available for download [pdf] cites evidence from about two dozen deep impact craters located from the equator to 37 degrees north latitude that Mars has a ground ice table at an elevation that also corresponds to other shoreline features.
The paper calls this evidence of "planet-wide groundwater" with elevations that "notably coincide with the elevation of some ocean shorelines proposed by previous authors."
Science writer Robert Zimmerman adds that "The evidence suggests that this deep groundwater water table (as ice) almost certainly still exists at all latitudes, though almost entirely underground...
"All you will have to do is dig a well..."
The paper calls this evidence of "planet-wide groundwater" with elevations that "notably coincide with the elevation of some ocean shorelines proposed by previous authors."
Science writer Robert Zimmerman adds that "The evidence suggests that this deep groundwater water table (as ice) almost certainly still exists at all latitudes, though almost entirely underground...
"All you will have to do is dig a well..."
"All you will have to do is dig a well..." (Score:1)
Ice in a dozen craters is being extrapolated into planet-wide groundwater, which in turn is being extrapolated into "all you need to do is dig a well" - which in turn means Coca Cola production on Mars begins in 2025!
Re: "All you will have to do is dig a well..." (Score:1)
No or course we won't travel to Mars that's such crazy talk ....
Re: "All you will have to do is dig a well..." (Score:1)
In Sweden we already have julmust.
Bring the Julmusk.
Well? (Score:2)
Re: Well? (Score:2)
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too deep (Score:5, Informative)
TFA says the ground-ice table is 4.0-4.8km below the surface. That'd make the well quite deep -- we did manage a 12km hole on Earth but it took multiple decades to dig. Doing so without means to ship all the equipment might be a wee bit hard.
And if you dig that deep, you might reach Hidden Fun Stuff.
Re:too deep (Score:4, Insightful)
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I take it you've never drilled a well. 4KM deep is a really long hole. Drilling in Antartica would be easy peasy, ice melts into water and is easy to pump out. Rocks, not so much. 4KM of rock would take forever.
Re: too deep (Score:2)
Doesn't seem like a big challenge. (Score:1)
The digging is with in the realm of possibility... having the equipment onsite is admittedly a challenge...
Considering the entire planet is a huge supply of iron oxide, you can simply set up a facility to extract iron and produce as many drill shafts as you need. You'd only need to bring a bunch of drill heads and some of the surface machinery to Mars as those would be a lot harder to produce than the drill shafts (though eventually you'd be able to produce those on Mars as well).
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Dear fuckup, I know you are not APK, but you seem to be too dumb to realize not everybody is on your level of mental deficiency.
Re:Does not matter (Score:5, Funny)
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Butthurt fanboi alert!
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Which has been clear for decades.
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Re: Does not matter (Score:2)
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The technology is not there. We have a somewhat reliable capability to put people into low earth orbit. We do not have the capability to get people to the Moon at this time and we never had it except for a very brief visit, followed by running home. When we have had a stable, self-sufficient Moon-base for 30 years or so, Mars will slowly become a possibility, but that Moon-base is wayyyy off in the future, if it happens at all.
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We do not have the capability to get people to the Moon
This is a ridiculous statement. We have the technology to go to the moon, technology has advanced since the '70s. It's just a matter of whether we want to do it or not.
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This is a ridiculous statement. We have the technology to go to the moon, technology has advanced since the '70s. It's just a matter of whether we want to do it or not.
You seem to be unaware of how this works: If you do not continuously use them, technological capabilities deteriorate and go away. Many things needed to go to the moon have not been used for a long time and hence are not available anymore. They need to be re-discovered and that takes time. Also, just go there, walk around and come back will not cut it. That this is mostly a meaningless stunt is far more obvious today than it was back then.
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Many things needed to go to the moon have not been used for a long time and hence are not available anymore.
Like what? Core memory? Guess we'll really regret not having that around anymore.
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It does not. That is an illusion. There are many things we cannot make anymore because we have lost the knowledge to do so. This is rarely discussed publicly, but one place were you hear it occasionally is that if you have not built a nuclear power station for a few decades, it gets extremely hard to do it again.
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> They need to be re-discovered and that takes time.
Yes, but it is still orders of magnitude easier than the initial discovery/invention and proof-of-concept.
One of the reasons why movies whose plots are "if we kill (or otherwise neutralize) X who knows how to do Y (which everyone now knows can be done), the world is saved" are pretty silly.
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A pair of Falcon Heavy launches are easily capable of sending people to the moon and returning them to Earth. The only thing lacking is a willingness to accept the risk.
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And if you think that the _engine_ part is all that it takes, you are missing 99% of the problem. Thinking that things are simple is easy when you do not see most of the problem.
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You do realize that a working colony would require about 20'000 people (if carefully selected) and that it need to be self-sustaining in a harsh environment? We may be there in a few hundred years, but not much earlier.
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Why exactly would it require 20,000 people? If it were fully-automated, it'd have no minimum inhabitant requirement.
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So you'll want a vehicle capable of landing a hundred tonnes or so of payload at a time. If only someone were working on such a thing...
Also note the water's 4 km below the Mars equivalent of "sea level", not below the surface. Much of the actual surface actually cuts into this layer.
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Re: Does not matter (Score:4, Interesting)
Moon bases are never going to be self-sufficient, they'll always be dependent on importing volatiles that the moon lacks. Mars has everything Earth does...more limited quantities in some cases, but more than enough for a self-sufficient colony's needs.
It's easier to land payloads on Mars than it is on the moon. While the atmosphere can't brake large vehicles to subsonic speeds, it can still take care of the majority of the entry velocity, which lunar landers must deal with using their landing rockets. Mars missions do have to carry a few months of consumables for the trip in addition to what they'll need on the ground, but that's hardly something that requires 30 years of experience on the moon to achieve.
Re:Does not matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody is going to Mars this century. Deal with it.
I am confident that Man will get to Mars within 10 years, and that people will be living on Mars for several Martian years within 20 years.
Rocket technology is both far more sophisticated and cheaper in real terms, than it was when Man landed on the Moon. Almost totally reusable rockets of the BFR class and above, will make it happen. Provided Trump, and his ignorant ilk, don't get in the way.
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You have no clue what you are talking about. I do get that it is "modern" to expect great things for the near future, but that does not make it any less demented and stupid.
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I would not. There were flying animals for a long time, so there is reason to believe it is possible. However, say, 2000 years ago, I would have been one of those saying "not anytime soon" and you would have said "in 10 years". There is a difference between "impossible" and "not anytime soon" and you are currently ignoring that for an utterly cheap shot. I get it that you are excited and I am the one with the bucket of cold water. But switching off your intelligence and being a mindless fanboi instead just
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I suppose the difference is that there exist people with specific, detailed, and active plans to get to Mars, who are showing genuine progress and have already demonstrated their ability to execute on such ground-breaking plans. They believe they will succeed, which is of course no guarantee, but neither is there grounds for your flat dismissal.
The onus is on you to point out the flaw in their plans - something they (with their much greater subject knowledge) overlooked. Something more specific than "it's h
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No, we did not. You seem to be unaware how extremely much effort went into these stunts back then. And there is a bit more to colonizing something than just to get there.
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You're going to be really sad then. Because that's not going to happen.
We can keep a half dozen people at most alive on the ISS with monthly supply runs, and we're less than a day away. It took us three years to just have the basic structures in place and hooked up.
Mars is 6-9 months away, and it takes a giant rocket to get there. That's no Soyuz or Falcon. That's BFR or Falcon Heavy, an Atlas or Ariane 5, a Delta IV Heavy. If we build structures as minimal as the ISS, which has already clocked in at $150 b
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Re: Does not matter (Score:1)
Going to Mars with our available technology is like building a plane out of things you have in your house, or sailing to the new world on a ship made out of your house. It's fucking lunacy and it aggravates me to no end that you see yourself as a dreamer and not a fucking twit doing 0 to push the technology or conversation forward. Honestly, I don't see us ever getting to Mars because half of our species are self indulgent fancy-flighted morons that don't understand the task or the limitations.
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If we build structures as minimal as the ISS, which has already clocked in at $150 billion, we're committing to launching one of those very big, very expensive rockets every month. That means either the initial investment needs to be way, way higher to make it more self-sufficient, or we need to incur rather hefty ongoing support costs, with a launch a month of those monsters.
If you used the SLS for that, you'd be right. Just like it was a bad idea to use a $1.2-billion-per-launch vehicle for launching ~15-tonne modules to the ISS when Russians could launch 20 tonne ones for $100 million apiece. But that's more of a political matter than a matter of technical necessity.
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I think we can get have a credible Mars program in place in ten years, if for some reason the public wanted that.
I think it would be physically possible -- although just barely -- to land a human on Mars in that timeframe, if cost and risk to that person are no object, which they will be.
Remember, half of all Mars missions have failed. Mars is hard; much harder than the Moon. The trip is long, requiring years of consumables to be packed and large quantities of fuel to be tankered. There are considerable
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A rocket is the easy part.
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A rocket is the easy part.
True enough. Nobody is even thinking about long term space habitats, the composite shielding that will be needed, more reliable and efficient water, food, and atmosphere systems, fuel generation on Mars, or many of the other tech that will need to be developed to make that trip. We're still about two years out from getting the BFR into space. There will be time to refine to its equivilant of Black 5, as well as testing for landing and take off again from Mars that will happen after we have Mars side re-fuel
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The BFR will likely get to Mars within 10 years, but you vastly underestimate the technical and especially the non-technical problems of getting approval to send humans. The Falcon 9 has been flying for 9 years, and we'll be lucky if the first human flies on it this year. Approval for all the additional dangers of a Mars flight (time, radiation, different flight profiles, etc) will require many, many unmanned Mars flights... and those flights are limited to happening every ~2 years when then planets are clo
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That said, MPML was just seeing some discussion of a possible Earth impactor a couple of months before 2029's Apophis near-miss. Which will get the "sky is falling" crowd running around, screaming.
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We do not. You let enthusiasm blind you. Water 4km down is irrelevant, unless you are prepared to ship a few 1000t of drilling rig and a few 10'000t of support equipment.
Where is it? (Score:2)
A Boring Answer (Score:2)
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Surprised (Score:2)
"Robert Zimmerman adds that "The evidence suggests that this deep groundwater water table (as ice) almost certainly still exists at all latitudes, though almost entirely underground... "
Bob Dylan seems to know this stuff.