[Bill Hicks]

We're not going to Mars, and neither are the Chinese. It's called Peak Exploration and it is very much tied to Peak Oil:

http://billhicksisdead.blogspot.com/201 ... m-and.html

[vision-master]

Then again, maybe we already are there.

Of course our masters wouldn't tell us this. lsol

[Narz]

Wouldn't it be cheaper to try to colonize the sea floor or something?

[mrflora]

Zubrin has recently revealed a cut-down version of his Mars plan based on Spacex's recently-announced Falcon Heavy launcher. The Falcon Heavy is supposed to be able to orbit nearly 2x the Space Shuttle's payload at one-tenth the cost. I think the Zube's plan is mostly a thought experiment, although at under $1 billion there are a number of wealthy people who could sponsor it if they were so disposed.

Elon Musk has stated that he intends to retire on Mars, take it however you will.

Regards,
M.R.F.

[rangerone314]

Can't even get Biodome to work, not likely to get Mars to work. Too far away to maintain a colony that is not self-sufficient.

We are likely to crash our civilization because of wrecking the current environment we live in; I doubt humans will be able to either gather enough understanding to recreate a survivable environment on Mars or enough self-control not to flush our current environment.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Isn't there some sort of 80/20 principle that should work for space exploration?

What we're already learning with advanced telescopes, and the plans for those in the pipeline currently are simply STUNNING -- and those telescopes do a LOT of work for a LONG time once they're built and launched.

It seems to me we should stick with that, learn all we can, and use the serious financial and resource requirements required for manned expeditions (much less colonies) on resolving many of our serious problems we currently have (and are escalating) on EARTH.

If we (for example) find little green intelligent men near star X, we can always re-evaluate. Even then, aside from a probe and a LOT of patience, I don't see us doing much of practical value by a bunch of (as John Cleese of Monty Python fabulously puts it) "knee bent running about" and expending horrendous resources until we actually make contact, even in that extreme case.

Almost all of the arguments I've seen recently for continuing a serious manned-expedition based NASA are based on testosterone induced visions of "leadership" and "spirit of exploration" rah-rah stuff. How about some common sense and learning self control first, as a species?

[Graeme]

mrflora, Here some more on Musk's plans!

Don't expect to hear any nostalgia about the soon-to-end space shuttle era from Elon Musk, the millionaire founder of Space Exploration Technologies. Musk isn't prone to look to the past, but rather to the future — to a "new era of spaceflight" that eventually leads to Mars.

SpaceX may be on the Red Planet sooner than you think: When I talked with him in advance of the shuttle Atlantis' last liftoff, the 40-year-old engineer-entrepreneur told me the company's Dragon capsule could take on a robotic mission to Mars as early as 2016. And he's already said it'd be theoretically possible to send humans to Mars in the next 10 to 20 years — bettering NASA's target timeframe of the mid-2030s.


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

You can't always take Musk's timelines at face value. This is rocket science, after all, and Musk himself acknowledges that his company's projects don't always finish on time. But if he commits himself to a task, he tends to see it through. "It may take more time than I expected, but I'll always come through," he told me a year ago.

Since that interview, a lot of things have come through for SpaceX. The company has conducted successful tests of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule. Before the end of the year, another test flight is expected to send a Dragon craft all the way to the space station for the first time. If that test is successful, SpaceX can start launching cargo to the International Space Station under the terms of a $1.6 billion NASA contract.

The company is also in line to receive $75 million more from NASA to start turning the Dragon into a crew-worthy space taxi for astronauts by 2015 or so. And just today, the company broke ground on a California launch pad that could be used by the next-generation Falcon Heavy rocket starting in 2013.

Once the Dragon and the Falcon Heavy are in service, the main pieces would be in place for a Mars mission, Musk said.

msnbc

[peripato]

China will be there within 10 years.

Just sit on your arses and watch.

Gas

“我相信，这个国家应该致力于实现这一目标，在此之前的十年，是降落在月球上的一名男子和他安全返回地球”

[peripato]

Wouldn't it be cheaper to try to colonize the sea floor or something?

Perhaps the empty space between our collective brains would be a better place to start.

[Sixstrings]

There's nothing on Mars that necessitates our going there. Near earth orbit habitats for large-scale solar power and communications. That makes sense. Zero-G manufacturing.

Funny thing about colonizing space is that it's easier to colonize the ocean floor yet we haven't done that.. it's expensive, it's dangerous, the EROI ain't there..

We haven't even scratched the surface of exploring the oceans on this world.

(for that matter Alaska's pretty much empty we should colonize that)

[Sixstrings]

“我相信，这个国家应该致力于实现这一目标，在此之前的十年，是降落在月球上的一名男子和他安全返回地球”

The Chinese have a ways to go yet. We may have given up, but the US is still apex on space tech. China's still behind us overall.. they just recently built a stealth bomber, who knows how good it is. Could be junk. They're workin' on drone tech, but we're way ahead there.

I read they just recently got spy satellites that are about as good as ours. But a manned moon mission? Mars mission? We could do it, they have a long way to go..

[Sys1]

We don't really need to get to Mars.
We just have to put on TV news some Hollywood movie of 3 mans holding an Earth flag on the 3D remade red planet in order to make people think that if shelves are empty, bridges are collapsing and brownouts are slowly killing the internet, it has nothing to do with a collapsing civilisation since Hey! We are on Mars!
One year later, you could made another movie where you see a city on Mars.
Five years later, you could launch empty rockets every months while saying it's people going to Mars.

Fake hopes, just like when church used to promise paradise if you work hard for the landlord.

[Cloud9]

We either get of the planet or we are a doomed species.

[peripato]

We either get of the planet or we are a doomed species.

Yeah, I mean that strategy sure seems to have worked out well for all those other space-faring species the infantile mind believes in. One of them, statistically, should have arrived here by now and turned us out to pasture, much like Europeans did to the Indians of N.A. and other aboriginal peoples of the world. (What? Why do you think they would travel all this way; just to exchange bodily fluids, perform rectal probes?) But where the f%#k are they? We scan the abyss and the abyss just yawns back...

[AgentR11]

I dunno, if I were god of the universe, (lol), and I wanted there to be multiple intelligent civilizations, but I didn't want them to mess with each other, I'd do two things.

Put no more than one in each galaxy.
Put a speed limit on the universe.

They'd never even so much as find out about each other, much less visit.

As a religious person, that leads me to expect:

There is no faster than light travel. Black holes are not tunnels, they are splat-machines. Warp drive only occurs in sci-fi novels.

We are free to wander about our solar system and the milkyway... slowly, IF we can manage to NOT fill our bassinet with poop and drown in it before we can walk.

That *IF* is proving to be difficult.
Maybe that is the divine test!

[ian807]

We either get of the planet or we are a doomed species.

Yeah, I mean that strategy sure seems to have worked out well for all those other space-faring species the infantile mind believes in. One of them, statistically, should have arrived here by now and turned us out to pasture, much like Europeans did to the Indians of N.A. and other aboriginal peoples of the world. (What? Why do you think they would travel all this way; just to exchange bodily fluids, perform rectal probes?) But where the f%#k are they? We scan the abyss and the abyss just yawns back...

I hate to be the one who addresses a spectacular lack of imagination, however....
Are you expecting off world intelligences to be organic creatures that arrive in metal ships and ask to be taken to our leaders?

As we've discovered, it's much easier to push bits around than stuff. By the time you get faster than light travel, you've almost certainly got artificial intelligence or remarkably enhanced intelligence via gene engineering and direct neural I/O to the alien equivalent of the internet, effectively giving you a massively parallel organic neural computer. At that point, you've probably solved most of the solvable problems your civilization has. And even if you haven't, why send organic bodies anywhere? You might send probes and sensors here and there to gather either recorded or real-time data, but physical, dangerous, energy-intensive travel? What for? Oh, and if the earth was surrounded by sand-grain sized probes (You'd want to make them as small as possible), would we even know?

Then there's that little difference in viewpoint. To us, space travel might mean going somewhere and seeing a new planet in our lifetime. To an alien, space travel might mean sending out spores, assuming a few thousandths of a percent will fall on viable planets a few million years in the future, and grow to their happy new life as intelligent fungi. Patience and the perception of time and "self" are going to vary a bit from species to species.

Then there's the little matter of recognizing intelligence when we see it. If intelligent gasbags exist on Jupiter, would we even know as our space probes flew right through them? Intelligent isn't the same as "complex-tool-using." Just ask your local dolphin, whose idea of a complex tool is a sponge.

For that matter, we may not be seeing intelligence that exists on Earth. If a large moss colony was in fact, capable of thinking about complex mathematics and philosophy, how would we know? Moss would only discuss these issues with other plants, chemically, and their favorite topic of discussion might be soil conditions, relatives and the weather. We might pull this out with a Zipf analysis of chemistry exchanges between plants, but as far as I know, nobody has looked.

In short, if you only look within the narrow boundaries of your own preconceptions, you will miss not only what's there, but what could be there.

[Cloud9]

Salvation from little green men what a bad idea. Remember how the microbe exchange worked out for the Indians. My point is simply this: Ours is a violent planet and an even more violent solar system. On day an asteroid the size of Texas will impact this planet. We are either somewhere else or the species ceases to exist.

[peripato]

I hate to be the one who addresses a spectacular lack of imagination, however.... Are you expecting off world intelligences to be organic creatures that arrive in metal ships and ask to be taken to our leaders?

Yes, creatures driven by primal biological urges. In other words, stupid life like us. However we haven't been colonised, despite the high statistical likelihood that at least one high-tech extraterrestrial species should have evolved at some stage before us and left its home planet, or so the theory goes. Expanding even at a snail's pace (i.e. 1% of the speed of light), they could have spread throughout the galaxy by now, given the age of the place.

That they haven't arrived supports the view that other high-tech civilisations either did not exist, or if they did, did not do so for very long (which appears to be our likely fate), or if they do currently exist find that it is impossible to transcend the stupendously vast distances involved. Space is God's quarantine area as they say. Of course, Alien/UFO believers, like all other person's of faith, will bleat until dead that they could still arrive any day now, despite all evidence to the contrary.

[rangerone314]

Salvation from little green men what a bad idea. Remember how the microbe exchange worked out for the Indians. My point is simply this: Ours is a violent planet and an even more violent solar system. On day an asteroid the size of Texas will impact this planet. We are either somewhere else or the species ceases to exist.

One day the universe will collapse on itself or expand until entrophy rules all... then the species ceases to exist anyway.

The odds of little green men saving us are more likely than solving either of the two above possibilities.

[AgentR11]

Space X is a private corporation that sells lift services.
Space X will soon demonstrate the Falcon Heavy.
The Falcon Heavy is capable of lifting the loads needed for a go-and-stay Mars mission.

You wanna go?
Write the check.