Squabbles at The Planetary Society

100 years from now and tens of trillions of our hard earned loot
spent, it'll still be all about Mars this, Mars that and Mars so forth
until hell freezes over, of which by the way happens each and every
night on Mars.

~ BG


On Nov 22, 2:58 pm, jacob navia wrote:
Martha Adams wrote:
Navia's "100% certain" recipe which he mentions a few messages
up this thread, is only a good recipe for a complete halt to
Mars settlement.

Exactly. My position is that only automatic unmanned probes can
be sent until we know for certain that either there is no life
in Mars or that life in Mars can handle contact with us and
vice versa.

Contrary to Mrs Adams, I want to avoid xenocide, and I want to
avoid any risk to the human biosphere with a non planned
contact that could be disastrous to us or to them, if they exist.

If we do that, then someone else gets to Mars
-- and *gets* Mars.

This kind of mentality is completely ridiculous. Even if the
U.S. establishes some colony on Mars, it will not own Mars
in any way. Other people will be able to go there in much
the same way as the US did, and live there if they want to.

Further, Navia seems to have neglected
his reading, for he apparently fails to recognize how much is
to be said for going to Mars *and staying there* rather than
going and returning. This idea has been around for some years,
it is getting serious development.

Yes, I do not consider that kind of suicide mission a good
way to go to Mars.

It is possible that once the biological problems solved, humans
could go to Mars for extended periods of time, but it will be
surely NOT the first expedition to arrive there that will do
that. In any case, the plans of Mrs Adams are way beyond what
the U.S. can do in the next 30-40 years.

o There are no technologies of human survival (the life support system)
that has been tested in deep space without constant human
intervention. Look at the international space station. It needs
constant supply of oxygen, water, food, and spare parts to maintain
the outpost just running a mere few hundred kilometers from the
surface of the planet. And that is the best we can do now.

o A trip to Mars even when Mars is the closest to Earth is a whooping
56 Million kilometers, surely a trip of 8 to 10 months. Then, to make
the trip worthwhile the humans would stay for several months, let's
say 1 year, then they return making something like a 2 year in deep
space (in the best conditions, it could be much longer if we consider
that earth and Mars approach themselves every two years only).
There is no life support system that can handle 2 years in space
without failure as yet. The problems appearing in the ISS give us a
very good view of the stand of the life support engineering today:
oo space suits that fail
oo electrical systems breakdown
oo problems with the oxygen recycling
and an incredible long list.

Mars has no oxygen, water is difficult to find and may need mining
and purifying, food is unavailable and nobody knows if plants can
grow in Mars with temperatures in summer around the Antarctica
temperatures on earth. There are not many plants in Antarctica
as you may know...

Obviously Mrs Adams has thought about this and has found all the
necessary solutions, but besides science fiction, there are TODAY
and for the next 30-40 years not any technology that can bring a
life support system needed by a few humans into the planet Mars
and making it work there.

-------------------------------------------------------------

What is interesting also when reading Mrs Adams prose, is this
central sentence:

quote
Navia's "100% certain" recipe which he mentions a few messages
up this thread, is only a good recipe for a complete halt to
Mars settlement. If we do that, then someone else gets to Mars
-- and *gets* Mars.
end quote

In the mind of Mrs Adams, the U.S. must get there to extended the
Amrican Empire before other people (obviously hostile since they
are not US citizens) get there first.

This is completely idiotic. Any expedition to Mars is such
a big effort that no country in the earth can manage it alone.

It will be a international effort supported by all people of
this planet, not an expedition to put the flag somewhere!

The idea is this: if you go to Mars you need to fetch along
major hardware to get back. Further, the return journey is
more dangerous than the outgoing journey, because you've used
up most of your hardware and supplies resources. But if you
rather use that hardware weight to bring along an industrial
base for survival on Mars, and having set down there you stay
there and get busy building your settlement, this is *far,
far* more progressive and productive than returning to Terra
and leaving everything you did on Mars, back on Mars.

To this, only two words suffice:

life support ?

As for the cross-contamination Navia seems frightened of,
does he know researchers *today* have a large collection of
rocks in hand, known to have come to here from Mars? I
haven't heard of any of these researchers turning green or
purple, or developing extra heads, nor any else of that.

Fossilized remains of Mars life have been found. Yes.
And as everyone knows, after thousands of years in space
there wasn't any risk of contamination at all. This is
obvious to anyone but to Mrs Adams... apparently.

Another, completely different thing is to make contact
with those beings IN MARS when they are not fossils but
alive.

Navia, it's good you're thinking about some of this stuff,
but did you know, other people are doing that too?

Yes, I knew that. :-)

To
much better effect than you have accomplished so far? ??

Well Mrs Adams, I could say the same. Specifically I would like
to know how the people you send there will

o find oxygen to breathe
o find water to drink
o find food to eat
o find a repair store for the ALL the hardware they carry,
together with the repair technicians and tools needed
to replicate the tools that break down, fail, etc.
o Note that they will need also tools to repair the repair store
that will also fail!

What you fail to understand in your romantic dreaming about
"living off the land" is that Mars is another planet... Not
any earth. It is completely different!

--
jacob navia
jacob at jacob point remcomp point fr
logiciels/informatiquehttp://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32

On Nov 21, 8:32 am, kT wrote:
jacob navia wrote:
Pat Flannery wrote:

jacob navia wrote:
Pat Flannery wrote:
The planetary society makes a mistake by trying to get us to send
humans to Mars

We can't send humans to Mars until we know for certain that there are
no living things there.

Particularly things like this:
http://www.badmovies.org/movies/angryred/angryred6.jpg

Pat

Unable to have any rational discussion.

I raised some concrete points in my post. You ignore them and just
try to ridicule them.

Typical of this group.

It's still good for a quick link every once and a while, and also the
occasional infamous William Mook first principles post, plus the news :

http://habitablezone.com/space/messages/531315.html

And there is this :

http://www.itemsinthenews.com

http://www.frontiernet.net/~c.younge..._the_news.html

What are you looking for specifically, most rational people who lurk
here have very specific interests and well thought out plans in place.

People that have something to discuss go off on their own tangent.

There is a big argument going on about fuel depots, have you been
following those discussions? It's far more widespread than the usenet.

Our resident wizard of Oz, William Mook, seems to have a rather nasty
bipolar butt load of problems with caring for anyone other than the
top 0.1% of America, and perhaps all of the 0.0001% of humanity,
leaving the lower 99.999% to rot or wish they were dead.

A space fuel depot or OASIS and otherwise nifty gateway at the Selene/
moon L1 is technically doable, especially if you believe 10% of what
our NASA/Apollo wizards with the "right stuff" supposedly did.

~ BG

jacob navia wrote:

Exactly. My position is that only automatic unmanned probes can
be sent until we know for certain that either there is no life
in Mars or that life in Mars can handle contact with us and
vice versa.

You want to see that going in best possible form?
Read "Men, Martians, and Machines" by Eric Frank Russell.
They have _got_ to make that into a movie someday, just so the audiance
can see the pure and unspeakable horror of the Martian Chess Trophy.
I made a little diorama from that book and its description of _that thing_.
Mine is done in fluorescent orange with fluorescent green highlights,
and wound up like a dead intestine nailed to a rotting tree trunk.

Pat

jacob navia wrote:
Martha Adams wrote:
Navia's "100% certain" recipe which he mentions a few messages
up this thread, is only a good recipe for a complete halt to
Mars settlement.

Exactly. My position is that only automatic unmanned probes can
be sent until we know for certain that either there is no life
in Mars or that life in Mars can handle contact with us and
vice versa.

BTW, you do realize that the two Soviet Mars landers that preceded
Viking _weren't_ sterilized before heading there, and although they were
slated to self-destruct after landing and completing their missions via
internal thermite charges, there's no guarantee that they ever did that.
So that sort of kisses pristine Mars goodbye, doesn't it?

Pat

"jacob navia" wrote in message
...
Martha Adams wrote:
Navia's "100% certain" recipe which he mentions a few messages
up this thread, is only a good recipe for a complete halt to
Mars settlement.

Exactly. My position is that only automatic unmanned probes can
be sent until we know for certain that either there is no life
in Mars or that life in Mars can handle contact with us and
vice versa.

Contrary to Mrs Adams, I want to avoid xenocide, and I want to
avoid any risk to the human biosphere with a non planned
contact that could be disastrous to us or to them, if they exist.


If we do that, then someone else gets to Mars
-- and *gets* Mars.

This kind of mentality is completely ridiculous. Even if the
U.S. establishes some colony on Mars, it will not own Mars
in any way. Other people will be able to go there in much
the same way as the US did, and live there if they want to.

Further, Navia seems to have neglected
his reading, for he apparently fails to recognize how much is
to be said for going to Mars *and staying there* rather than
going and returning. This idea has been around for some years,
it is getting serious development.


Yes, I do not consider that kind of suicide mission a good
way to go to Mars.

It is possible that once the biological problems solved, humans
could go to Mars for extended periods of time, but it will be
surely NOT the first expedition to arrive there that will do
that. In any case, the plans of Mrs Adams are way beyond what
the U.S. can do in the next 30-40 years.

o There are no technologies of human survival (the life support
system)
that has been tested in deep space without constant human
intervention. Look at the international space station. It needs
constant supply of oxygen, water, food, and spare parts to maintain
the outpost just running a mere few hundred kilometers from the
surface of the planet. And that is the best we can do now.

o A trip to Mars even when Mars is the closest to Earth is a whooping
56 Million kilometers, surely a trip of 8 to 10 months. Then, to
make
the trip worthwhile the humans would stay for several months, let's
say 1 year, then they return making something like a 2 year in deep
space (in the best conditions, it could be much longer if we
consider
that earth and Mars approach themselves every two years only).
There is no life support system that can handle 2 years in space
without failure as yet. The problems appearing in the ISS give us a
very good view of the stand of the life support engineering today:
oo space suits that fail
oo electrical systems breakdown
oo problems with the oxygen recycling
and an incredible long list.

Mars has no oxygen, water is difficult to find and may need mining
and purifying, food is unavailable and nobody knows if plants can
grow in Mars with temperatures in summer around the Antarctica
temperatures on earth. There are not many plants in Antarctica
as you may know...

Obviously Mrs Adams has thought about this and has found all the
necessary solutions, but besides science fiction, there are TODAY
and for the next 30-40 years not any technology that can bring a
life support system needed by a few humans into the planet Mars
and making it work there.

-------------------------------------------------------------

What is interesting also when reading Mrs Adams prose, is this
central sentence:

quote
Navia's "100% certain" recipe which he mentions a few messages
up this thread, is only a good recipe for a complete halt to
Mars settlement. If we do that, then someone else gets to Mars
-- and *gets* Mars.
end quote

In the mind of Mrs Adams, the U.S. must get there to extended the
Amrican Empire before other people (obviously hostile since they
are not US citizens) get there first.

This is completely idiotic. Any expedition to Mars is such
a big effort that no country in the earth can manage it alone.

It will be a international effort supported by all people of
this planet, not an expedition to put the flag somewhere!


The idea is this: if you go to Mars you need to fetch along
major hardware to get back. Further, the return journey is
more dangerous than the outgoing journey, because you've used
up most of your hardware and supplies resources. But if you
rather use that hardware weight to bring along an industrial
base for survival on Mars, and having set down there you stay
there and get busy building your settlement, this is *far,
far* more progressive and productive than returning to Terra
and leaving everything you did on Mars, back on Mars.


To this, only two words suffice:

life support ?

As for the cross-contamination Navia seems frightened of,
does he know researchers *today* have a large collection of
rocks in hand, known to have come to here from Mars? I
haven't heard of any of these researchers turning green or
purple, or developing extra heads, nor any else of that.


Fossilized remains of Mars life have been found. Yes.
And as everyone knows, after thousands of years in space
there wasn't any risk of contamination at all. This is
obvious to anyone but to Mrs Adams... apparently.

Another, completely different thing is to make contact
with those beings IN MARS when they are not fossils but
alive.

Navia, it's good you're thinking about some of this stuff,
but did you know, other people are doing that too?

Yes, I knew that. :-)

To
much better effect than you have accomplished so far? ??


Well Mrs Adams, I could say the same. Specifically I would like
to know how the people you send there will

o find oxygen to breathe
o find water to drink
o find food to eat
o find a repair store for the ALL the hardware they carry,
together with the repair technicians and tools needed
to replicate the tools that break down, fail, etc.
o Note that they will need also tools to repair the repair store
that will also fail!

What you fail to understand in your romantic dreaming about
"living off the land" is that Mars is another planet... Not
any earth. It is completely different!


--
jacob navia
jacob at jacob point remcomp point fr
logiciels/informatique
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32

I certainly want to thank Master Navia for the catalog he has
provided of the errors one must commit to believe the kinds of
things he seems to believe. I really do feel he can read --
really! But I think most of what he finds, washes over him
like water over a stationary rock. Oh, well....

Titeotwawki -- mha [sci.space.policy 2008 Nov 23]

Martha Adams wrote:

I certainly want to thank Master Navia for the catalog he has
provided of the errors one must commit to believe the kinds of
things he seems to believe. I really do feel he can read --
really! But I think most of what he finds, washes over him
like water over a stationary rock. Oh, well....

Hey babe...chill... and get into the totally cool groove of the bonobos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
Dig it.
It's pure Good Karma.

Pat