STEPHEN HAWKING: WE HAVE 100 YEARS TO LEAVE EARTH

I'm all for exploring Mars, but using us breathers, eaters, and poopers to explore it seems like a waste of space vessel to me. Let's stick to inorganic machines.

Well, you certainly won't be accepted as a candidate for colonist with that attitude.

Agreed. What's the point in colonizing Mars anyway?

Be careful, I was strongly chastised for introducing this subject into this thread.

I would consider the Scandinavian welfare state to be a variant of capitalism. I may not understand them as well as I should, but what I understand is that while an extensive social safety net is in place (and enjoyed by the citizenry) free markets and free trade are emphasized and private property rights are protected. It is also my understanding that centralized planning is limited to state mediated business/labor negotiations and agreements that may not even fit, very well, the definition of the term. Obviously the state must heavily tax businesses as well as citizens in order to fund social programs, but this, to me, is something much different than controlling the means of production and centralized economic planning

To me there are basically two systems at play in the world (outside of the the sort of tribal communities living deep in the jungles of such places as Brazil and Papua New Guinea): Capitalism and Socialism. There are variants of each: Social Democracy (the Scandinavian welfare state) being one variant of capitalism, and Democratic Socialism being a variant of socialism. I'm not sure there are currently any real examples of a Democratic Socialist state. Venezuela's strongman leaders (Chavez and now Maduro) might have liked to call themselves Democratic Socialists, but the democratic part of the equation is a sham. I would certainly not be the first person to point out that once Democratic Socialists are democratically elected, they have a strong tendency to discard democracy.

However I'm open to being educated. I asked max to provide examples of "alternative economic systems" i.e. systems that not capitalistic or some variant thereof that have been as successful as capitalism and it's variants in raising people out of poverty. I don't believe he did, but you may be able to.

(We may want to take this to a new thread so as to not annoy its originator)

There's the level of accomplishment that is achieved by placing a human on Mars that dropping a robot there can't even approach.

For the purposes of gathering data, machines can now (or in the very near future will) serve as well or better than humans, but there are other reasons to explore Mars, just as there were other reasons to explore the moon.

Machines can analyze Martian soil and rocks and send back reports as detailed as we might need, but they can't describe what it feels like to walk on that soil or hurl one of those rocks. Probably not a hell of a lot of scientific data would be forthcoming from those actions, but a lot of emotional data would be. Neil Armstrong's first step on the surface of the moon was one of those rare human events that most people alive and cognizant at the time can vividly remember, even to the detail of where they were and what they were doing when it occurred, and they experienced it vicariously.

Human exploration of space is certainly more costly than machine exploration, but sending a robot to Mars ain't cheap. With so many immediate and critical needs of humans on earth, space exploration, for a lot of people, is a low priority even if it's being done on the cheap by sending machines. There are a lot of people who are very excited by and interested in the pictures of Mars sent back to earth by roving robots, but the level of excitement, interest, and inspiration generated by a human talking to us from Mars would be off the charts. If one believes exploration of space is humanity's destiny and vital to it's survival, it needs to be done one slow and expensive step at a time and the excitement and interest of the citizens paying for needs to very high.

It's likely that a manned mission to Mars, will be, to some extent, an international venture to reduce costs for any single adventurous nation and leverage the world's technological and human resources. The attraction of a joint venture that can be conceived as a unifying endeavor is obvious. What that is worth is a matter of opinion, but it's virtually non-existent if Europe, Russia, China, India, Japan and the US join forces only to send up another robot.

It's extremely costly and it's dangerous for the explorers, and I don't fault anyone for thinking that, at least right now, it should be a low priority, but it's also the sort of thing for which there will never be a perfect time.

I will continue my proposed approach to
1First develop a lot of robotic "citizens" to be launched onto a Mars settlement so they can prepRE FOR HUMAN HABITATION. Construction of solar induction furnaces to xtract oxygen and produce plate metal for habitation pods and tunnels
2Develop rsources by mining and pozzolonic concrete
3Set up heted greenhouses for ag

Prepare for colonists in 10 to 20 yers after on site robot teams (Im saying another 50 years bfore weve got a self running monitoring and repairing robotic capability

All about Martian Concrete from pozzolonic cementitious material on the planets surface
READ ALL ABOUT IT HERE

I'm with FM on sending a preparatory mission. I don't know that we need to have them years in advance, though. We need to get geologists on the ground there well before any attempts to create a thicker atmosphere. Once water vapor and a thicker atmosphere go to work, you're going to see mass wasting in canyon systems, or just around any cliffs. Ecchus Chasma has a cliff which, at its terminus at Kasei Vallis, is more than 4000 meters tall--that's taller than most mountains in North America. You would not want to be in that canyon when the face of the cliff begins to break up. Mars is a xeric environment--throwing a pail of water out of an airlock would cause the surface material to literally explode. Valles Marinaris is long enough that if it's western entrance were located at Portland, Oregon, the lower end would stretch to Miami. You'd want geologists crawling all over it before any changes were made to the atmosphere. That means lots of geologists, and lots of time.

So we would want people to explore and catalog the surface areology before there is any water vapor introduced into a constructed atmosphere. The results of such an effort would almost certainly be fatal.

That image makes me think... let's send the US to Mars! Great!

sure, send some poor geologists, theyre expendable and people dont want em for pets, (or is that lawyers?)

I didn't hear anyone ask you to volunteer. In all seriousness, though, as soon as the atmosphere begins to change, it would be extremely dangerous for anyone to go into those canyons.

As for ambulance chasers, Hell yes, send a couple of hundred off to Mars. Stamp their tickets "One Way."

We may not get the chance to exit from Earth anyway.

www.popularmechanics.com/space/a26885/space-junk-cleanup/



Then again, seeing as how all the stuff out there might prevent our exit, perhaps we could also manage to have an asteroid be diverted when it encounters the trash. Sure, it doesn't solve the global warming, but, at least it might divert or prevent that threat and even alien invasion (although those aliens might hold the answers to solving our predicament).

If we can put it there some smart scientists may figure a way to clear it one day.

How about a big space umbrella to solve global warming. Keeps the NASA jobs program going and show the greenies we're do'n something about it.

Win - win!

Hey farmer. Made it to CO without getting wet. Maybe just luck but had no traffic jams going through Dallas/Ft. Worth. There must be at least a traffic God.

Fine. It's a sensible option. What precisely, though, do you mean by "citizens?" Is the use of the term "citizens" tongue in cheek or are you implying true AI? I can't imagine machines being granted citizenship without it.

I think that once we all leave earth it along with the other planets will disintegrate

er
okay

WR 104 is a triple star system that is about 7.5K light years away and the binary stars are indicting that they will be collapsing in hundred thousnd years or so.. They could, upon their death, give birth to a GAMMA BURST,(although these stars arent of a low enough metallicity so the generation of a GRB may be quite speculative) .In any case, should a GRB be possible, this one apparently has our number.

a Gamma burst from 6000 light years would have an advective dispersive spread of gamma rays that would tke out most of our solar system. the GRB i one of the most frightening ways to kill a planet. The things that would happen re just inconceivable in our normal frame of experience. Atmosphere being torn away, water boiling, even digging deep in the earth would be futile since it would be a long duration burt (1000 years or more).

Our solar system would be wiped clean of all life and all water

That puts Trump into some better perespective

I have always speculated the need to send a fleet of "arks" to the deep reaches of space, to go boldly for thousands of years if necessary, in search of a home. Sure they would never find their goal, but then again, as Fats Waller always speculated, "One never knows, do one?"

Millions and millions of years, perhaps