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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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This is one of the best current threads. The speculations are inspirational, mostly. The only thing that excites my imagination more than detection of ETI is colonization of another planet in our system. Many of us are of similar late middle age; a top off of the most exciting time in human history to live would be for us to see these things before our last breaths.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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I have begun following this thread now it's taken on some serious questions and speculation.
I simply am along for the ride, however.
Is it possible that this speeding up of the various bodies is a portent of the end of time?
One dimension down, but space times three is still there but with no one to appreciate it. This is mostly all new and eye-opening to me because I did not take physics in HS and developed no active interest, consequently.
It's not blowing my mind, but making me think out of the box (or is it a tesseract?) I've been existing in all my life concerning phenomena such as is being discussed here.
Please carry on while I lurk and observe and try to learn something about a difficult topic.
Thanks to all conCERNed.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Moose and I went back and forth on this on the 'Falcon 9' thread. My position is there's no leaving the Earth for evolutionary reasons which constrain to this planet. Even if there were a means to instantly travel to 'similar' planets elsewhere we could not survive them.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Are you an Elon Musk fan?
I am.
"Musk thinks it's vital for mankind to create a self-sustaining city on Mars to protect against human extinction, and also to inspire people."
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-says-spacex-will-send-people-mars-2025-n506891
Keeping the dream alive.
Healyje, I get your points (I think) and generally agree; and yet none of them keep us from creating and developing these "self-sustaining" artificial environments on our neighbors, eg, the moon and Mars, I don't think.
I get the fact that we're nine-tenths non human dna, that our matrix is comprised of "alien" cells, etc.. So?
I'd like to see us become a multiplanet species. I think it is totally within our technological capabilities.
Frankly, I don't get the dissers and debbie downers here and elsewhere who show no interest for these kinds of endeavors. Whether it's SETI and First Contact or a self-sustaining colonization off-earth (even if it's only a couple HAVs). But, yes, people are different.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 2, 2016 - 08:01am PT
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Bringing It All Back Home (for a few minutes)
 posts
2,226,878 x ave number of words per post =
a big number, right
I guessed that 'mausoleum' would not be among them.
My intuition failed me.
However "mausoleum at halicarnassus" does not appear.
Go figure or don't.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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climbski2, I agree...
It may take more than one or two tries at civilization before humans {or perhaps their descendant species?} get it right...-cs2
Seems to be suggested, imo, given the way robust ecologies generally work out.
"In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option, I'm gonna have to science the sh#t out of this."
Mark Watney
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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It all comes down to the energy required to move mass from the surface of the Earth to the planet of your desire...
in this day and age, the best rocket propellent is liquid hydrogen with a very high specific energy, 141 mega joules per kilogram. It isn't very compact, so the vehicles employing it are large, think Saturn 5 size...
...with all it's might, the Space Shuttle was only capable of taking payloads into Low Earth Orbit...
I don't think that the cryo plant required to liquify hydrogen is inexpensive, and handling the stuff is a real issue (hydrogen-oxygen mixtures from 2% to 98% are explosive).
Enough stuff has to be lifted to the new world to be able to overcome the local hostile environment for a time until the local resources can provide a sustainable presence. This might suggest Venus as a better bet than Mars... but it is all such a stretch.
These are all essentially technological issues, which require innovation supported by research and development programs. What drives this is uncertain. No one is worried about any impending crisis that would suggest we leave planet Earth. No commercial venture can support a viable extraterrestrial presence. Oddly, the ISS provides an economic incentive for private commercial ventures to supply it... but the ISS has no purpose other than to learn how humans can stay in space for long period of time... short compared to a trip to even our closest planetary neighbors.
Right now the incentive for space travel is space travel itself... I don't think that can be maintained into the indefinite future.
A propos that, things on the ISS break and have to be repaired... not a new issue as anyone who sails in the ocean can tell you, the boat starts to break immediately. Large crews on the early voyages were required so that the boats could be constantly repaired, a necessity for survival. Single handed transoceanic travel took 400 years to develop, largely due to the improvement in ship building that allowed few enough repairs that a single person could manage.
The ISS benefits from being in LEO, so it can be supplied from the ground. In the sailing analogy, it doesn't venture far from land... Apollo 13 is a case study of launching off on a voyage dominated by orbital dynamics with enough propellent to alter the orbital trajectories, but far short of overcoming the daunting energy issues of shortening the travel time from the Moon back to Earth. That voyage was epic and nearly ended in tragedy. But it was relatively short.
Going to Venus or Mars will be a lot more difficult, will likely require human sacrifice in the learning-to-do-it phase, and is short on justification.
The sentiments regarding the "Final Frontier" are easy to subscribe to when you are eating TV dinners on the sofa and watching some funky Burbank melodrama... we all know what it is like to be cowering under a boulder high in the mountains avoiding getting soaked by ice cold water and trying to avoid the terrifying randomness of the blue bolts striking about us. While less dramatic events can kill you quite quickly in the vacuum of space.
Flinging yourself in a ballistic trajectory on a two year voyage with little ability to alter that path and keeping it all together to enjoy the heroic tribute on your return is quite another thing.
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WBraun
climber
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It all comes down to the energy required to move mass from the surface of the Earth to the planet of your desire...
Gross materially yes, although this is the crude modern caveman method.
But moving the subtle material energy is not like that although still material energy.
Superior even then is the living entity transmigrating in it's spiritual form thru mantra .....
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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[Everything suggests] that Hawking is absolutely right when it comes to his prediction of man's survivability
Hawking has a very narrow band of expertise. Anyone who would believe he is an expert in the area of Armageddon must not understand the nature of expertise nor the nature of Armageddon.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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^^^
If I had to sit in a powered wheelchair and be taken care of every day by others..I might think mankind is a bit more fragile than it perhaps is.
However I have been very fortunate to experience more of the opposite spectrum of human existence. Humans tend to survive colonize and breed in just about every ecological niche on this planet.. on land anyway.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Werner has yet to speak on this:
... nor the nature of Armageddon
I think Armageddon is his area of expertise?
"...the material world will dissolve into the unmanifest god-all-one-world except stupie Americorns will be on Mad a Desh Express hoping to ride at at the speed of Av-corns that hit Newton on the Head some years ago."
We all could learn something from HIM.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Until Werner builds or projects the idiot proof vibrating transmigration machine for the masses we'll be using conventional rockets for propulsion from a geostationary base to the inner planets. Now the trick is to get supplies, fuel, and components for ships and habitats to the way station at low cost. How's the state of technology progressing for the space elevator?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I think it is entirely reasonable for Musk to pursue his interests. He has the resources and provides the incentive to try to get onto another planet.
His timetable assumes "success" which is also a reasonable assumption when starting a very questionable activity. And he will learn a lot about the problem. But his optimism is not sufficient for a successful realization of his goals.
The early colonizers of the Americas came to a place with vast resources which were exploited to support the colonies. Foremost water and food. Each succeeding wave of colonization came in contact with the preceding ones, and learned from them the local knowledge.
Walking across the Bearing Straight following game is not equivalent to shooting yourself into space to arrive at an entirely hostile world with none of the necessary requirements for human life.
Maybe you could imagine being the first humans to voyage out into the Pacific Ocean to explore that vastness and colonize the atolls that dot it... but even then you'd have rainwater, and fish, and some deep knowledge of voyaging on the ocean.
Colonizing an entirely foreign planet is stuff we have only a meager fictional literature on, and it is a bit of hubris to declare we'll figure it all out in a decade. We haven't gotten humans back to the Moon since late 1972, more than forty years ago.
A reminder that the Space Shuttle was intended to lift supplies to some permanent space settlement, and cost roughly $1B per launch, and only into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), was never viable, in terms of being a space age equivalent to an 18-wheeler. While it did lift some components to the International Space Station (ISS) the majority of that lift was done by the Russian Proton rocket, which can lift 23 tonnes into LEO. The Saturn 5 could lift 118 tonnes into LEO at a cost of roughly $200 M, compared to the Shuttle's 24 tonne lift...
How many tonnes of stuff do you have to get to Mars or to Venus before you can create a self-sustaining colony there?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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I appreciate your points, Ed.
The last few months in particular I've been focusing on the "constraints" that govern our species and its powers and freedoms in the natural environment - esp those substantiated and defined by science as revealer and messenger - in relation to what we might call our spiritual growth (or flourishing and well-being).
Your last couple posts reflect some of this.
Still...
"Sign me up."
Evolutionary civilization by increments.
A walk on Mars would be another (let's see if I can get this right) small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind.
It would be a huge inspiration. I would think. For umpteen millions. For all believers, like me, in positive sum (human) civilization.
EXTRA
It's not always about personal heroic achievement (edit: "tribute"), I don't think, either. It wouldn't be for me, I don't think. But I'm over 50 yo (closer to 60 now) so motivation circuitry arguably corrupted?
"Flinging yourself in a ballistic trajectory on a two year voyage with little ability to alter that path..."
Yeah, baby!
As long as I got (1) something of an exercise wheel and (2) a telescope (reflector, 8" min) and 3) youtube and (4) last but not least a woman for the other things.
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Brokedownclimber
Trad climber
Douglas, WY
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I find myself in agreement with HFCS, regarding Mars.
More fundamental to me as a (now retired) scientist is the ongoing search for life. In that regard, a sophisticated probe to the 2nd moon of Jupiter, Europa, would have precedence over anything going to Venus; the structure of Europa is in large part, water beneath a very thick icy surface. NASA has gone with the proposition to "follow the water." On Europa, water is plentiful. Recent studies have shown that water is also available on Mars, which was flowing with the stuff some 500,000 years in the past. I would propose that the NASA budget be increased enormously, at the expense of bringing in more "refugees." Whoops--that's political, and this is a science based thread. I won't go there any more. At one point, the cost of going to Mars was estimated to $500 Billion, but that involved the German Plan of taking everything along, including return trip fuel and oxidizers. The Mars Direct concept has reduced that figure by perhaps an order of magnitude before calculations changes based on value of the currency over the intervening time. OK, let's assume mars for $100 Billion, with the expense spread out over the life of said project? Five to 7 years to design and build the hardware? Two years for the trip there? A prolonged stay on the surface of the planet, then a return to Earth? Spread that budgetary estimate over 10 to 15 years, and the cost is pretty paltry. A special probe to Europa? That could easily be built with the existing NASA budget spread over time.
Let's go, all gravity-impaired Earthlings!!
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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BDC,
$500B for Mars, that about $1400 per USA person or will the rich pay for it next election?
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Thanks Moose. Makes for interesting reading in my unusually long layover in Seattle.
Escaping Earths gravity well and the peril in returning payloads is prohibitive with conventional rocketry. There is a discussion of the state of tech at www.extremetech.com if you Google space elevator. This will happen, eventually.
And no, I can't support the pessimists here that harp on that mankind is its own worst enemy and is likely to destroy itself long before it could establish it's evil, virulent seed upon other worlds. Also that earth based life is not viable off planet.
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