Korean Job Discussion Forums

[The Cosmic Hum]

[rollo]

The cool thing about travel to Mars is that we know how to do it. When the U.S. went to the moon we were flying by the seat of our pants. Mars we know how to do it already. Love the stuff curiousity is sending back.

The obstacle now is money and the national will. It will happen. Hopefully sooner than later.

[KimchiNinja]

Shooting a load in zero gravity, errr on second thought better leave the porn on Earth.

[rollo]

couples obviously. The obsession with porn by posters is interesting. I always preferred real life.

[KimchiNinja]

Screw Mars, I say let's hit a different star.

I always liked the idea in the novel Rama; you build a giant cylinder ship, spin it, thus creating gravity, and live on the inside of the cylinder. Basically you just make a little self-contained Earth with dirt, grass, air, cows, etc. It's all sealed up and recycles everything. That way we also do away with the messy aspect of zero gravity loads shooting thru the ship.

For long-distance travel we need to accept it is going to take generations (unless you move faster than light and deal with time distortion which is unlikely).

[mithridates]

Or just live on the inside and not worry about going to a whole new star. Due to the coriolis effect achieving 1g is supposed to take a radius of about 100m which is quite massive, but a low 0.1g is good enough to remove all the annoyance of weightlessness and maybe even keep the human body from degrading. We've only seen the effects of 1g and 0g on the body so nobody knows what the long-term effects of anything in between this is.

As for Mars: it's an exceptionally difficult target. It has an atmosphere but not nearly enough to make parachutes alone a viable way to get to the surface:

http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-getting-large-payloads-to-the-surface-of-the-red-planet

At the moment we're capable of getting about a ton to the surface.