Fueled by watching Equilibrium and a documentary on space travel psychology: To get any living person to an objective like mars, wouldn't it make at least partial sense to use emotion suppressing drugs? Living in very cramped confinement, with altered everyday physics, loss of genuine natural cycles to base life on, constant noise, constant extreme danger, probably with regular technical problems, knowing you are an immense distance from home and may not return, with the same people with the same habits, possibly with other nationalities probably resulting in at least mild culture clash, and huge mental and physical pressure. Seems to me that the only way someone could get much further than the moon without killing themself and/or the rest of the crew would be to pump themself with chemicals that suppress their ability to become angry, irritated, scared etc. But what would be the most likely scenario if the drug on board a craft/in a small colony ran out? Do you think animalistic rage would ensue? Or fatal panic? Or do you think it more likely that it'd be gentler? Do drugs like this exist ? e: aaah, that's assuming the craft used is launched from Earth (as in not using Ion Drives or something)and is still going to take 200+ days to mars by the time we try.... I suppose it's more relevant to even further
Do drugs like this exist ? Yes, there are drugs to induce sleeping and relaxation but why would a crew want to take them for they would be busy doing scientific studies on the way to mars. The problem is that it will take 2 years to go and return which means a very large craft must be built AND radioactivity will be saturating the craft all the way there AND it will cost a trillion dollars to do this. What would we as humans gain ? THey can send robots to Mars now and get many scientific studies done so why endanger a human being with all the safety problems and other problems that will happen with humans aboard any spacecraft? Don't forget that we sent 30 craft to Mars and only 11 made it SAFELY there. That's not a very good record IMO. Robotic craft are cheap, small and we can afford to lose them if they fail. Sending humans would require many things to ensure their safety but even then look at what happens to the shuttles! That's allot of money to spend on a craft that perhaps may not make it to Mars, so I'd think we should stick with robotic craft for say 20 to 30 years or more.
well we're bound to leave for Mars eventually, unless we're all annihilated first. When we do it seems likely that it'll initially be a small, isolated colony to begin with, so I think this still applies to that. mumbleyeahmmmhummmyeahmumblemumble
And I was really talking emotion-shaping chemicals rather than sleep induction, allowing people to continue tasks without being affected by panic or anger etc. doing what they're supposed to be doing, just a bit more zombie-like. .edit: cockeyed spelling
Again I ask you as to why we need to send humans when robots are very good at what they do. In another 10 years we will have even better robots that will think for themselves somewhat and we will be able to retrieve samples of soil and rocks from Mars.
As a excersise in the run up to possible terraforming perhaps. I'm talking longer term. We will have to leave eventually, and the destination will have to be prepared a huge time in advance. ...obviously.
Terraforming?? That's sci-fi all the way. You can't terraform a world that isn't ready or able to become something that it wasn't intended to be. No matter how hard you try , Mars will still be without water, trees, and atmosphere for eons to come no matter what SCI-FI you try to do.
comments on manned space, terraforming I have a couple of things to mention. First, if your goal is science, there's no reason for people to leave LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and if you aren't interested in the effects of space (weightlessness or low gee environment) on people, then there's no reason to put people into space in the first place. I think though that most people agree to some extent that the reason to explore space or for that matter to do anything in space is so that people can live in space. In other words, a key purpose of space exploration is so that people can live in space, on Mars, and elsewhere. A lot of the urgency of the space development people is that we have a poor presence in space. One good-sized war or an ecological disaster might shut the doors on space development (not to mention other worthy human endeavors) for a considerable time (eg, possibly several generations). Once you have a reproducing population in space, that changes the equation. It also improves Humanity's chances down the road. What makes Earth livable? Far as I can tell, the key things are sunlight, the right elements in the air, and a global ecology that keeps everything in balance. Mars has the crucial thing that matters - sunlight. We can give it the rest. On Mars, it appears to me the key problems are that you probably will need to bring in various elements that are in short supply, particularly nitrogen and water, and you will need to get the Martian rock in chemical equilibrium with the desired atmosphere. That's a lot of work.
We can give it the rest. How? If Mars has no water or atmosphere how do you make those things appear? That's SCI-FI again.
Using a great deal of energy any effort it would be possible to change Mars into an Earth Clone; it would probably take millions of years, depending on how we did it. There is hundreds of times the water required for this operation in our solar system; plenty of carbon and nitrogen as wll; it 'just' takes the application of energy and intelligent action to do it... something like the total output of the sun for a year or two would suffice. This is not impossible; it just turns out to be an incredibly long, difficult and energy consuming business that we may never get round to doing. But one day we might have a millennium or ten to spare- who knows... __________________ SF worldbuilding at http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Why not just build space stations that were fully functioning life support systems. Onboard such space stations would be grenhouses to grow food, supply air and do various other necessary things. Wouldn't that be a better way to explore space? It would be much cheaper and would not require anything but what it was in order to survive. I'm just thinking this way would be better for it isn't possible to wait for millions of years, if even then that would work, to terraform a planet. Another way is to genetically alter humans to be able to exist on planets like Mars by manipulating their genes to make there new bodies able to adapt to the conditions that are there. If we could alter the genes enough anything could be done in order to have the right sequencing to survive on any planet we find.
Thats not possible if not even unicelluler life can exhist on mars how will humans even with years of genetic manipulation ever survive there
Perhaps in the future the geneticist will be able to implant genes from other things that would assemble with ours to make hybreds. Say putting a gene of a organism that can witstand immense heat or different chemicals in order to live. It cannpt be done now, this I understand, but the future could be very interesting with this type of gene manipulation wouldn't you agree?
Yes, gene modification is probably a good way to procede; Mars is a tough place to fully terraform, but you could drop a few hundred comets on it then genemod the colonists to live in the resulting atmosphere whatever it is- this is a quick and dirty method of making a planet habitable. Other methods- build huge inflated greenhouses from polymer sheet to keep local atmospheres in; these could be extended to cover whole planets eventually; build a population of tailormade robots ; build a series of computers for people to live in Matrix simulations. You could probably get the best result from the last strategy. _________________ SF worldbuilding at http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Where are you going to get "a few hundred comets" from? There's not that many around this solar system at any one time. Most comets have a very long path to take and aren't seen for centuries at times. So that idea isn't going to work out. If you live in a "matrix" then your not on another planet but only in a computer simulation. That's not going to other planets at all IMO.
How about just sending some water over there and genetically altered organisims that can survive most likely unicellular. then leave them be for a couple 100- 100000 years something should work out. There is nothing wrong with earth at the moment but when we completly mess it up in a couple 100 years mars should have developed some kind of complex wildlife.
If you send oranisms to Mars with water , it would take billions of gallons of water to even try to sustain them in it. Water on Mars would evaporate rather fast for there's no atmosphere or clouds to hold the water onto the surface long. The dust storms cover the entire planet for months at a time so the sunlight wouldn't get through to the organisms living in the water even if the water lasted for awhile. You can't send water there unless its sealed inside of containers and remains sealed until it's used for drinking or other purposes. They would have to alter human genes to adapt to the environment on Mars and supply humans with food and water or whatever they would need to exist there.
oh oops forgot about that hehe well i guess if you are making a green house type structure to suport life on mars and not let the oxygen float away. Why not just make a little colony instead? Um they could function using solar energy and have a chamber for oxygen producing plants for the colony?
They tried to make a biodome here to see if it would work. It didn't but is now this. http://www.desertusa.com/mag99/apr/stories/bios2.html
You can't terraform Mars because Mars doesn't have the gravity to hold onto an atmosphere sufficient for humans to live in.
