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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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 Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 1:09 am Post subject: |
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| gang ah jee wrote: |
| Mith, since you're on a break from posting your trademark anti-Muslim threads, do you have any links to credible sites that discuss the feasibility of extra-terrestrial colonisation? I'm all for it, but I'd gotten the impression that it's more-or-less impossible. At very least I'd say that we'd need a near something-for nothing energy source to make it in any way viable, and then there are all the physiologicial and psychological issues, etc, etc. But I'd like to believe... |
Did you ever read the Red/Green/Blue Mars book series? Some interesting ideas about colonizing/terriforming. One of the things we don't even think about... worms. You can't have agriculture without worms and some basic bacteria. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 8:56 am Post subject: |
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| gang ah jee wrote: |
| Mith, since you're on a break from posting your trademark anti-Muslim threads, do you have any links to credible sites that discuss the feasibility of extra-terrestrial colonisation? I'm all for it, but I'd gotten the impression that it's more-or-less impossible. At very least I'd say that we'd need a near something-for nothing energy source to make it in any way viable, and then there are all the physiologicial and psychological issues, etc, etc. But I'd like to believe... |
There's a journal online called the Moon Miners' Manifesto that has a lot of ideas, though most of them are for decades or centuries in the future. Every once in a while you find something there that could be applicable to us now though.
I think what we need to work on most is development of the human race as a whole - reducing illiteracy and poverty, because the less of that we have the more people we have that are able to think about more than just their day to day life. That's why I'm particularly excited about India, because not only is their space program starting to get going, but they have almost a billion people and the poverty rate keeps going down there, and if it gets brought down to the rate they're aiming for (I forget what the exact percentile was) that means another 300 million people out of poverty, and that can only be good. That's an increase of human capital as a whole. Along with that we have rocket launches like the one yesterday that bring down the base price, which lets other companies and countries in that couldn't participate before. And the last thing that I'm really hopeful about is the discovery of an Earth-sized planet in the next ten years. See the telescope COROT and the one that NASA's sending up next year (Kepler) for details. Including the improved quality of ground-based observations it's almost certain we'll find an Earth-like planet in another system, and that's a few hundred times more interesting to the average person than another gas giant. So with all that together I think we're just about on the cusp of a breakthrough to becoming a spacefaring society. I'd guess ten years, assuming no great tragedy happens.
I'm not really sure about other sites though. Nobody's really thinking about colonization in the short term, not realistically anyway. Venus, Ceres and Mars seem to be the best targets though we won't know exactly what Ceres is about until 2014 when the Dawn probe arrives. Well, we might have better and better Earth-based observations before then too, so who knows. |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 4:05 pm Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
| Venus, Ceres and Mars seem to be the best targets though |
How is Venus a good target? Aren't the pressures on the surface of Venus like the deep sea? Nothing ever landed on Venus has lasted long. |
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Troll_Bait
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: [T]eaching experience doesn't matter much. -Lee Young-chan (pictured)
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 8:33 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, I guess I talk about that subject a lot. I just found out a few weeks ago that a manned flyby of Venus has been considered since the 60s, that's how close it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_Flyby
This image shows just how close Venus is to us compared to Mars:
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Troll_Bait
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: [T]eaching experience doesn't matter much. -Lee Young-chan (pictured)
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| Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:17 am Post subject: |
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| I'd like to see us colonize the inner Solar System. |
I think that, eventually, we will have to.
"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars."
- Stephen Hawking, interview with Daily Telegraph, 2001
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!"
- Larry Niven, quoted by Arthur Clarke in interview at space.com, 2001
(For more quotes, go here.)
| Quote: |
| So with all that together I think we're just about on the cusp of a breakthrough to becoming a spacefaring society. I'd guess ten years, assuming no great tragedy happens. |
When I was a kid, books I read told me that by this time, we'd long have had space stations like this ...
I'm still waiting ...  |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 3:03 am Post subject: |
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| Yes, but we were woefully unprepared back then. I think the Apollo program probably did more harm in making people feel like they were making progress (yay, all the way to the moon!) when still robotic probes had barely gone anywhere. In terms of science we've been advancing at a tremendous speed - back in the 70s people thought Pluto was the last object and after that a whole bunch of empty space, but now we know there are thousands and thousands of other objects, many of which are just about as big and bigger. Plus the 200+ extrasolar planets we've discovered, etc. The Apollo program and so on was kind of like giving machinery to a third world nation without the infrastructure to keep them up - for a few years things go well, but then they start to break down and nobody knows how to fix them, eventually they all start to rust and then the harsh reality sets in that they weren't ready for them in the first place. |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 5:46 am Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
| back in the 70s people thought Pluto was the last object and after that a whole bunch of empty space, |
We didn't know about the oort cloud (and by extension, comets) in the '70s? I think as well the orbits of the outer planets have always suggested some larger mass out there.
(The oort cloud has not actually been seen, just hypothesized... comets have to be coming from somethings.) |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 6:03 am Post subject: |
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| mindmetoo wrote: |
| mithridates wrote: |
| back in the 70s people thought Pluto was the last object and after that a whole bunch of empty space, |
We didn't know about the oort cloud (and by extension, comets) in the '70s? I think as well the orbits of the outer planets have always suggested some larger mass out there.
(The oort cloud has not actually been seen, just hypothesized... comets have to be coming from somethings.) |
Maybe the Oort Cloud, I remember reading about that in the early 80s when I was in elementary. I don't think we knew about the Kuiper Belt then though. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 8:30 am Post subject: |
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Great news: it appears that the rocket was still working fine when the video cut out, that it got to within a minute of its target location and even deployed the satellite mass simulator ring. That makes it a 95% success.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/content/?cid=5056
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Falcon I flight - preliminary assessment positive for SpaceX
By Chris Bergin, 3/24/2007 11:14:51 PM
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has noted that the preliminary assessment of the Falcon I flight shows that the second stage shut down only a minute before schedule - and still managed to deploy its satellite mass simulator ring.
The shutdown appears to have been caused by the sloshing of propellant in the LOX tank, increasing observed oscillation, which would normally have been successfully dampened out by the second stage Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system. However, the impact on the second stage nozzle during separation caused a 'hard slew' correction, over-compensating previously simulated scenarios.
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mnhnhyouh
Joined: 21 Nov 2006
Location: The Middle Kingdom
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| Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 8:44 am Post subject: |
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On a positive note for the unmanned program, those two robots are still moving around on surface of Mars, three years on.
Did they do any disinfection on them before putting them on the surface? It would be a shame if there was life on Mars (talking bacteria like things here) and our introduced forms wiped many of them out, in a sort of Guns, Germs and Steel fashion.
h |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 4:34 pm Post subject: |
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| mnhnhyouh wrote: |
On a positive note for the unmanned program, those two robots are still moving around on surface of Mars, three years on.
Did they do any disinfection on them before putting them on the surface? It would be a shame if there was life on Mars (talking bacteria like things here) and our introduced forms wiped many of them out, in a sort of Guns, Germs and Steel fashion.
h |
Oh yeah. They won't let them fly until they're certified as being clean of bacteria. I think it stems from the Apollo days when they brought back a camera from a previous moon probe and found bacteria still living on a lense. It had been in vacuum and exposed to radiation for months and months! |
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mnhnhyouh
Joined: 21 Nov 2006
Location: The Middle Kingdom
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| Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 4:50 pm Post subject: |
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Just looked at the Mars Rover site. One of them has now travelled over 10 km, and both are still going!!!
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/
h |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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Troll_Bait
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: [T]eaching experience doesn't matter much. -Lee Young-chan (pictured)
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| Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:02 pm Post subject: |
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| mindmetoo wrote: |
| mnhnhyouh wrote: |
On a positive note for the unmanned program, those two robots are still moving around on surface of Mars, three years on.
Did they do any disinfection on them before putting them on the surface? It would be a shame if there was life on Mars (talking bacteria like things here) and our introduced forms wiped many of them out, in a sort of Guns, Germs and Steel fashion.
h |
Oh yeah. They won't let them fly until they're certified as being clean of bacteria. I think it stems from the Apollo days when they brought back a camera from a previous moon probe and found bacteria still living on a lense. It had been in vacuum and exposed to radiation for months and months! |
How did the bacteria survive for months in the freezing cold vacuum of space, doused in radiation, and most importantly, without a discernable source of food! Even Superman has to eat when he's taking a break from tossing his evil clones into the sun. I guess this lends credibility to the theory that there may be a whole ecosystem in the upper atmosphere that we're unaware of. |
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