Sir David Attenborough says we in serious trouble if we dont change our ways.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by TLAM Strike

"You understand what the Federation is, don't you? It's important. It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada."

Damn a humanitarian and peacekeeping armada... sounds like exactly what we need.

There are already members of the US military volunteering for missions to other planets. A Starfleet Foreign Legion?

The launch of an Orion would increase the yearly radiation exposure to the global population only a minimal amount. The largest nuclear blast ever (189 megatons) yealded an increased exposure of 0.11 mSv/yr, which has degraded now to 0.007 mSv/yr. An Orion would be equal to only a 10 mT blast. Currently you are exposed to 2.4 mSv of natural radiation every year.

Currently its possible to build nuclear devices that require only 2-3% Fission to detonate. Compared to something on the order of 60% for a normal H-Bomb. Fission is what (for the most part) makes fallout.

Hmmm, good point, and if we're in a hurry (for example Alien space elephants are attacking ) then it would be better done on the ground, but I think that it would probably be better built in space. It would be easier to sell to people too, you know how people are with nuclear anything.

I did see a program about a decade ago about using lasers to fire objects into space, aha, yes, it was the Lightcraft:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightcraft

A Mars outpost is just a small step into the solar system, but it is land. It may be arid and hostile, but construct pressurised domes and it is a beginning, put in seed banks and DNA samples, and male and female humans, and our knowledge. We desperately need a Library of Alexandria, or a Holy Roman Empire, something to maintain our knowledge if we face disaster. I don't expect humanity to be utterly wiped out, but we run the risk of being shunted so far back in our progress that it'd make the Dark Ages look like a sitcom and all it would take would be one rock, one virus, one stupid decision at the wrong level.

I don't know what it is...but just of late it seems that more and more people are realising the fragility of human existence on this planet. I just hope that something is done about it by the right people.

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Skybird

In several centuries - maybe. I doubt that we have that much time. And sending two men to Mars and back - what meaning could that have? It may offend our boasting egos, but the meaning rates close around zero. Even a station on Mars, crewed with half a dozen person, means nothing for mankinds future.

Well it all starts somewhere doesn't it? Rovers first, then a few people for a day, then a outpost manned for a year, then it gets bigger. Its all part of a process.

And moon - I can not imagine to build habitats for huge autark colonies on moon. At best we will have a kind of robot mining up there, and automatted ore-transportation to Earth'S orbit. MAYBE. Moon has no atmospühere, and we have no idea how to get one up there.

The Atmosphere is a big pain in the butt. It blocks all that nice solar energy we could use as power. Plus it makes everything rust. Don't get me started on the weather!

But the robot mining is a good idea, we will need the mine shafts...

Remember Star Trek II?

CAROL: There is food in the Genesis cave, enough to last a lifetime, ...if necessary.
McCOY: We thought this was Genesis.
CAROL: This? It took the Starfleet Corps of Engineers ten months in space suits to tunnel out all this. What we did in there ...we did in a day.

We've done it before. Once we create a basic habitat, O2, soil, light we bring in the strongest plant and animal life we have to build a self sustaining ecosystem. Then we move in.

So, living there, colonies and all that - no. I think it also is not desirable. It would be like spendign all your life aboard a dived submarine. Whioch maybe only is bearable because a submarine can surface, if it wants, and open the hatches, and there you climb out and tank some sun and light and wind and fresh air. A moon colony can not "surface"..

After a generation being inside a habitat will be normal. There is a great passage in the novel 2001 where a young child on Luna expresses disgust at the thought of going down to Earth, its all a question of physics to get it where we want it to go.

And I do not think our technology is so solid and surviving that it would maintain human life for decades on Mars, in autarky, and independen t from Earth.

The Voyager probes are still going strong. Some of the gear Buzz and Neil left at Mare Tranquillitatis still work. Sprint and Opportunity failed to lack of a snowbrush.

We have technology that can last, we know how to build everything we need. All we need is the will to go and do it.

We have nio technmology for realsitical terraforming in a forseeable timeframe.

See the link I posted above. Plus all the other ingredients we need are just floating around. There is more water and oxygen floating around the outer planets than there is on Earth.

Even the flight to Mars can fail and kill the expedition just because one single chip for 8 cents breaks down. Our technology is not of that kind that we can trust it to run for generations.

The developers of Project Orion had the right idea, don't build a spacecraft like a spacecraft; build the thing like a damn Battleship. If you increase the launchable weight you increase just how tough the whole system is. You quickly get to a point where the spacecraft is not dependent on some computer chip made in Taiwan, you get a ship that has its own machine shops and manufacturing.

We have visions, fantasies, yes, and I love them. But I am also aware that they are science fiction, and will remain to be that for another couple of centuries at last. If they ever get realsied at all. And that is a very big "if".

We went to LEO (half way to anywhere as RAH once said), we went to the Moon, we seriously were going to Mars before the Soviet Union collapsed (just what do you think those year long missions aboard Mir were about? Setting a record? Ego? You don't keep spending that money for pride).

Either we get along on this planet, or evolution is done with this failed design of ours. I really wonder if inventing instrumental intelligence and these two hands of ours - marvellous tools - was such a great design of evolution. It has not resulted in a design that fosters life, increases its own survivability in the evolutionary race and does not exterminate itself. So what is it good for, from an evolutionary POV? It seems to bear no advantages. Other, less complex and sensible life forms seem to outlast us easily, and at a smaller cost to the planetary biosphere.

Chances are high that homo sapiens is a dead end of evolution. Sad, but I have started to take this possibility into account. And I think it is the one with the greatest probability.

In other words: No, like Attenborough I'm also not optimistic.

"We are too many." I keep writing this since years.

Take a tortoise, which lives longer than a human and walks around its its own armored shell, and flip its on its back or lift it up and put it in a tree; what happens? it dies. A human can think of a way out and build it.

There is no natural harmonious state the hippies keep talking about. The universe's natural state is decay.

We are the only species yet discovered with the intelligence and tools to do something about it.

[August]

Originally Posted by TLAM Strike

Well it all starts somewhere doesn't it? Rovers first, then a few people for a day, then a outpost manned for a year, then it gets bigger. Its all part of a process.

Exactly. The only prerequisite is the will to do it.

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by August

Exactly. The only prerequisite is the will to do it.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson said: If China said they were going to Mars we would be there in nine months.

[Skybird]

TLAM,

The voyager drones are primitive, and the distance they have passed does not impress me at all. To use my metaphor from the beginning: they have made one small step closer to the still distant beach that is some kilometers behind. Still no water in sight.

The distances out there are HUGE. I mean: REALLY REALLY HUGE. Bigger than human mind can imagine. We can only handle it abstractly, via mathematics. What the numbers in reality mean, we cannot imagine. We have no idea. That abyss out there is impossible to grab for the human imagination.

A life in space and surrounded by technology and steelwalls, I think you underestimate the psychological and physiological basis which man, as creatures of Earthly nature and with a genetic heritage, cannot leave behind so easily. After all we are still animals wanting to run freely over a planet's surface and with an oipen sky above us. Many of our civilisatiopnal mental and psychological diseases derive from us forgetting this origin of ours.

Everything starts with a first step, right, and I did not say it never will happen. It'S just that I said: in some centuries. I think it will take much more time then you seem to imagine, and I think we do not have that time. It also takes more than just technology. It probably will need a genetic and physiological alteration of ourselves, of our genetic code.

I tend to say that technology is part of the way the former exclusively biological evolution of man works to let him alter the design path of the homo sapiens project. It enables us to reach where we would not reach woithout technology, and to live where without terhcnology we would not be able to live. It has an evolutionary meaning for us. But still, the developement is not without inner contradcitions, like we still are not fully adapted to walk upright and thus suffer typical health probolems from our movement appararus that derive from that. We are even less adapted to the integration and the repsonsible, non-suicidal use of technology. And technology also still has not the solid quality and robustness and reliability that we should base the survival of our species on it, blindly. Today we have between 600 and 1200 tehcnical microfailures inside cockpits of modern airliners, due to the many CPUs in there. Most of these events are so small ins cale that threy even do not get noticed. Sometimes they get noticed, and sometimes planes fall out of the sky. And this is in a lame and tame envrionment wihtout the harsh storms on mars and without cosmis radiation, micrometeorites, extreme temperatures differences and so on and so on.

Then there is the currently lacking transportation capacity, both travel between sky objects like Earth, Moon and Mars, and then from orbit to Earth, and the other way around. Both for mining on the moon as well as forming huge spacecraft and extraterrestrial habitats, huge payloads need to be lfted and moved. By design our current industrial and economical and techcnical potentials simply cannot afford and cannot imagine how to do that. So here again, a massive quantum leap in the way we arrnage the life of many people in societies and tailor industrial supply systems arround them, need to be redesigned: again we need toi start doing homework on earth, not start with thinkling about space first.

TLAM; I think you are a prime candidate for a German meganovel of almost 1000 pages that a German bestseller auhgtor has published two years ago or so, the novel is called "Limit" and is by Frank schätzing whom i have recommend before for his thriller "The Swarm". Schätzing did all the stuff that you seem to like: he took trend sof present technology, for example the new Google glasses, anbd extrapolates them on basis of current engineers' statements to a level they likely will reach within the next future in around 15-20 years, if the world goes optimal. He describes how private business has taken over space travel industries and made them more potent then NASA ever could have been. He describes how the first Luna hotel got build, how a rivaly between Russian, Chinese and American space industries could look like, how orbital lifts solve the problem of moving huge payloads between orbit and Earth'S surface, and mining gets done by huige robot fleets on moon. It is science fiction, but not typical, it is more an attempt of a - I admit: over-optimistic - reasonable speculation on how present technology can end up to be used in the forseeable future if in man's world all things suddenly go smooth and well. Embedded is a thriller and crime story of sabotage and spying, assassins and flying hover bikes that do air battles.

Entertaining read, and maybe right the stuff who have on mind.

BTW, plans to bring a man to Mars there have been since the 70s. According technology - if accepting the risks of it - we have since the 80s, it was said. By the late eighties and early nineties, a man could have been on Mars indeed. Why did it not happen? Profanities like money. Lacking interest. Politics, and refocussing on other things closer to home. What did Ju said so irresistably? "Making money, breed like rabbits, muddle through".

It will remain to be likme that for long time to come. And probably until it is too late. So again, I do not say all these highflying plans and visions could not become real one day, maybe. I only say it will take much much more time than optimists imagine. And probably more time then we have. Ifd on Easrth we fall back into a state wiothout national and cultural organisaitons, if our natiosn fall apart and we move around in tribal groups and maintain only small local industrial hotpsots possibly, you can forget about efforts needed to run programs capable to bring a signbificant ammount of people into space and onto other planets, build them habitats, and enable them to live and survive there in autarky.

Another thing I just thought about: medical problems of chnaged gravity. The degeneration of muscles, the changes in cardiovascular system, and skeleton, chnages in metabolism and physiology and indocrinology. We understand by now that these chnages are real, and can only be slowed - they cannot be prevented so far, and they all tend to reach potentially dangerous, lethal status sooner or later. You can send an astronaut into the spacecraft's gym daily, but this only slows down these changes - it does not prevent them.

BTW, is the ISS considered to be in a build state close to "finish" now or are they still doing construction work on it? And constant maintenance, with a constant flow ofd items materials coming from Earth? How many years did it take to get it to where it is now? Was it ten years to build it so far, or already longer? - And no, not for a million dollars I would fly in that thing to Mars.

A week ago or so I linked to that huge Mars panorama picture NASE has glued together from 800 single photos. Nice job. But the sight of it left me with a feeling of - isolation,. loneliness, and very very massive deillusionising. Not even in the Sahara I felt like that, and that was the most lonely place I ever experienced. But that image from mars was imply - bleak, dismal, dreary. And UNINTERESTING. By that image I say there is nothing that could attract me to wanting to live up there in a tiny artificial habitat. That'S like life in a prison cell. Just that in prison you see somethign outside the window, assuming your cell has a small window. Up there you see - nothing. It's one thing to make one trip to the moon and return. Or to dive to the bottom of the Marianen abyss, and some hours later return. Going to Mars and live there - that is something completely, totally different.

[troopie]

Originally Posted by JU_88

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ne...-16185461.html

Sadly I gotta agree with the old man,
At some point Mankind will have to face either the daunting task of stablising its own numbers voluntairly - or deal with nightmare consquences of not doing so.
And I also agree its not nice to discuss at all, but there will come a day when we wont have a choice any more.

Personally I think JU and Sir David A are raising a very important issue here; Overpopultion.

The world population has more than doubled in the last 60 years. It's now 7 Billion, from 3 billion in 1960.

So maybe youse are right and we may have a colony on Mars by 2070, but you'll be sharing EARTH with 14 Billion other people!

Sound sustainable?........



'The man who looks to the stars, is at the mercy of the puddle in the road'

If anyone's interested 'Gapminder' is a fantastic downloadable or webased software that animates global UN statics on popultion sizes, birthrates, life expectancy, GDP, etc. by country and year.

http://www.gapminder.org/


There are some great talks by it's designer featuring the program here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_roslin...on_growth.html

One of the things I have recently noticed is that many of the great si-fi movies deal with this problem, prime example is Avitar, I also bought the movie Aliens reserection this week only to notice the same thing being dealt with. The main issue confronting humanity is self, it's the one thing we cannot overcome. The need to consume more has taken on epidemic proportions and now with China and India needing more cars and fuel to run them it will only end in tears.

"You should always leave the table feeling you could eat more" my dear ol gran would say.

[Seth8530]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

Right now, our entire civilization is dependent upon fossil fuels. I heard somewhere that one spoonful of gas has enough energy of one person doing manual labor for a day. If that's true, then talk about efficient!

Someone claimed that 1 tablespoon of gasoline has the equivalent work energy of a man working all day? Lets find out!

according to wiki and this site gasoline has 44.4 Mega joules per Kg
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ArthurGolnik.shtml


according to wiki and this

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i...ty+of+gasoline
The density is between .71 and .77 kg per liter

1 US tablespoon is 0.0147868 L


Using dimensional analysis to convert from MJ per Kg to joules per tablespoon we follow this operation.

44.4EE6 ( MJ to joules) [Joules/kg]*[1kg/.73L]*[.0148L/TBSP] We end up getting around .9 Mega joules per tablespoon.


Now the scientific definition of work is Force*distance.

Lets say we have a 100kg man's "work" to be carrying a 80kg backpack for 35 km ( about 20 miles) We have a very strong man.

First we must convert mass to force. (80kg+100kg)*9.81m/s^2 gives us 176.58 kilo newtons

35 km*1000 gives us meters.

(35*1000)meters*176.58 kn

This gives our man producing 61.803 Mega joules of work a day.

So it would take 68.66 tablespoons of gasoline to fuel this man.

Of course this assumes the man and the gasoline are both burnt 100% efficiently.

[Spoon 11th]

Hans Rosling: Religions and babies. We have reached peak child. Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, he graphs data over time and across religions.


Mankind's yearly total energy consumption currently equals one hour of sun's energy hitting Earth. As our energy consumption doubles about every 30 years it means that in the year 2450 we need to harvest 100% of sun's energy. After that we need space based solar power.

Originally Posted by Ducimus

Right now, our entire civilization is dependent upon fossil fuels. I heard somewhere that one spoonful of gas has enough energy of one person doing manual labor for a day. If that's true, then talk about efficient!

Let's assume hard manual labor worker consumes 6000 kcal (food calories) of food daily. That's 25,2 MJ of energy, which equals about 0,7 liters (0,185 US gallons) of crude oil or almost the same amount in gasoline or diesel.

Hans Rosling: Religions and babies.

That was good

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

That was good

Indeed, just watching another talk of his, he presents data very well.

[Ducimus]

Gotta love the internet. For every thing you could say, regardless of topic there's an armchair expert somewhere who has prove you wrong somehow, someway. ( I can't claim excemption here on the subject of ww2 submarines) So please excuse me while i wait for the peer reviewed articles from the scientific community that I'm sure will follow.

I presume the overall point of the hokey math was to prove me wrong in my that fossil fuels are not the cause of the rise, and sustainment of our modern day civilization. To that idea, i laugh. Regardless of how much energy is in a spoonful of gasoline, it doesn't change my overall point, and it doesn't change the reality of our dependencies upon fossil fuels.

[Ducimus]

Originally Posted by Spoon 11th

Hans Rosling: Religions and babies. We have reached peak child. Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, he graphs data over time and across religions.

Apparently he didn't take into account of the Mormons. As religion, it has a direct impact on the number of births of the people within that religion. Because Mormons have this thing about "multiply and replenish the earth". Personally i don't think the earth needs any more replenishment.

[August]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

"multiply and replenish the earth"

This does become a lot more meaningful if you add "with people of our group/faith/culture/etc"

Because Mormons have this thing about "multiply and replenish the earth". Personally i don't think the earth needs any more replenishment.

But that includes the baptising of people who have been dead for decades so they have already multiplied their flock and replenished the earth in the form of compost.