Bases on Mars? What's the holdup?

NOW...WHAT'S HOLDING US UP? IRAQ...economy decline...everything is. And as far as I see that much money will not come out of thin air, we have got to find another solution if we want to be on Mars.

 

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Fair point. So it's either save up or come up with a new technology that is cheap to develop and cheap to implement. This could take a while.. lol

 

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Enmos...you cannot just say its mostly money. Its like this, imagine: today is 1800's...the minister/king/ruler of Britain decided that we need to go to the moon this instant and so he orders engineers to devise a plan to get to the moon. We can't fly yet...nope...We don't know about electricity either...nope...We got steel and boy do we got a lot of it...

So Enmos, what do engineers do? Oh they make a pyramid that spans thousand miles using steel beams and that pyramid eventually is built until the stratosphere of Earth...were at that altitude after hundred of years people stop dropping dead because they haven't got the oxygen. So all that for nada...null...nothing.

 

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there is only one route, to develop new technology...as far as I can see. The theoretical physics are already there, we need to invest in these physics more.

 

Why do we have to ever go to mars anyways?

 

because Mars is the closest thing to us that has the resources to sustain in-situ Life Supporting Systems for humans. And also we need to get to space because we need to invest in future, because there will not be enough Earth for everyone. And...we need to get to space to lessen our chances of extinction by either our own war or some asteroid impact...

 

Yea but how much is that goign to cost in the end ? There may not be that much of a difference, however cheap the technology turns out to be.

 

nope not at all...if technology is cheap enough to be mass marketed and applied to other areas (not just Mars) some of the profit can offset the price. That all has to be beared in mind.

 

Ever heard the story of the Bacteria Civilization on the petri dish?

Once upon a time their was a civilization of bacteria that lived on a petri dish in some lab, their scientist knew that every hour their population would double and that they already had a population that covered half the dish, so withing the hour they would overpopulate, thankfully one of their astronomers found another petri dish, it looked smaller and much harsher to live on and most of all it was far far away (a whole 10 cm!) they put their whole economy into developing the technology to live their and into transporting millions and billions of their people over their, it was bitter work but it paid off because in less then 2 hours they were all starving to death and dieing... what happened? If the bacteria people had only decided to stop dividing or had put that technology into modifying them selves photosynthetic they could have living on the endless counter top.

 

nice story...but we are not bacteria. We got wars regulating our population. Why can't we both modify ourselves and move to a new petri dish at the same time? :shrug:

 

Sure we can do both, but what makes in to the new petri dish won't be human anymore (and won't be so animalistic as to fight wars anymore). Alot easier to move people around when they don't have bodies made of needy flesh and minds runned by emotions and instinct.

 

Technology is also holding us up. Carbon nano-tubes are looked to be one of the primary components of the cable for the space elevator. However, current product methods mean that

1) The nano-tubes might not be pure
2) Nanotubes might not be aligned in the same direction
3) Hard to form composites with carbon nanotubes
4) Extremely expensive to manufacture (MUCH more than its weight in gold)

This results in cables that contain carbon-nanotubes to be highly expensive and not significantly different from other composites.


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http://wikichem.net

 

Don't forget, we didn't have any trouble landing on the Moon, which has no atmosphere at all. It's just a matter of landing your ship under rocket power. This is not very hard - we did it on the Moon decades ago, and there have been several more modern demonstrations of vehicles that could take off and land on earth under rocket power.

 

draqon has been reading the unmannedspaceflight forum a little to much.

 

Planetary war, now that's the mark of an advanced civilization.

 

I can't wait until we turn another planet into a trash heap. And just think how much more garbage and destruction we'll feel free to unleash when this world can be openly described as disposible.

 

I might be wrong on this (maybe someone could clarify?), but I think the spinning of the planet, as well as the material within the planet creates the magnetic field. It's the same concept of producing electricity in a generator.

-HGVonGalten

 

Yeah...Mars is around -70 C and has basically no atmosphere. I would certainly hate to "ruin" it.

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