On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Gary McMurtry wrote:
> 1) WE are not "Back on Mars", a robotic probe is there, taking > pictures and doing pre-planned experiments on our behalf; Yep and at a cost of ~1/400th of what a manned mission would have cost a decade ago. So we could send 400 robotic missions to Mars for the cost of a manned mission (given economies of scale it would probably be more like 1000 robotic missions for the cost of a manned mission). Show me *where* a manned mission is going to do 1000 times the amount of science that increasingly complex robotic missions might accomplish over the next decade! > 2) As Michael has already explained, it will take a lot of effort to > terraform a planet. Caca. Almost all of the people involved in in the Mars debate do *not* understand nanotechnology. As a result they will continue to get it wrong. The same technologies that make the colonization of Mars affordable and the terraforming of Mars feasible are also the technologies that allow you to dismantle it and turn it into O'Neill style space habitats that allow the distribution of humanity (or its uploaded counterparts) around the solar system to take advantage the abundance of solar energy that the sun currently wastes. Repeat after me -- the colonization and/or terraforming of Mars is a really, really stupid idea. Zubrin almost gets it right at the tail end of "The Case for Mars" in terms of robotic construction of solar power satellites but he doesn't carry it to its logical conclusion. If we are going to spend gigabucks to get even a few humans out of their current gravity well and to the moon or even Mars then one should be asking *why* are you putting these people back into the bottom of a gravity well when you just spent an enormous amount of money to get them out of one? (The problem of adapting to weightlessness is a biotech problem -- it will be solved within the next 10-20 years -- its a simple matter of convincing bones and muscles to believe they are under gravitational stress using drugs and/or gene therapies. And that doesn't even go into the methods for providing artificial gravity in O'Neill habitats). > The only aspect he has wrong is the time scale, > and the economic scale, not to mention the technological scale. > Recall what the current Iraqi "makeover" is doing to the US economy, > per the IMF--keep reading tonight's paper; Yep. That's because people are doing much of the work and not robots (be they macroscale or microscale) that come off of an assembly line. *But* -- if you look at the problems we are going to have maintaining and expanding oil and gas production over the next decade (we are probably at or near peak oil production on a planet-wide basis) then significant investments in Iraq and/or Libya, perhaps expanding production capacity by 3-4 billion barrels/day which has been lost due to their lack of investment in their infrastructure is probably a cheap investment considering the alternatives may be watching the economy take a big hit due to oil prices rising $10-$30/barrel. [snip] > Mars--a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there! I agree -- an O'Neill habitat would be much nicer. All of the above is a general appeal to invest in increased capabilities for robotic probes and produce more of them. Design them for missions that will work on both Mars and Europa and Asteroids. Take advantage of the economies of mass production. Keep making them smaller so one can launch more of them. Add incremental improvements to known-to-work designs. Then when launch windows open up launch half-a-dozen or a dozen such that arrivals are staged to give programmers enough time to fix any software bugs encountered by the early probes. What Mars and Europa offer are opportunities to explore possible routes for the evolution of primitive life. After that is done they offer material resources for the support of advanced intelligent life forms. Also, with respect to the political realities of Bush's efforts, I draw your attention to the following: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3919608/ I have my doubts as to whether Bush is really serious. I would more likely believe he is playing games. Robert == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
