The moon may have significant quantities of water - 2.6 trillion to 80 trillion gallons of it. Mind you, it’s not all in one place, so it might be difficult to get. But there’s probably some good-sized pockets of ice here and there - enough that finding a big pocket could mean sustaining a colony for decades.
Well, Mars may in fact have a LOT of water. In fact, water may all over the place. The Mars Odyssey orbiter found hydrogen spectra almost everywhere it looked on the surface. There may be a huge amount of water about 1-2 feet beneath the surface.
That panorama looks like some of the deserts here on Earth. And the sky is even glowing with scattered light, just like Earth’s sky does in the daytime. It’s like a tourist’s picture postcard. Man, does that ever look inviting. Let’s terraform that puppy. Let’s put some dark-colored plants on that barren wasteland. Make Mars our bitch, indeed!
I don’t understand why we need people on Mars at all. If robots will be doing all the work, and all the personal experience of the astronauts will be mediated through robots anyway, why not spare the extreme expense and danger by keeping the people home and sending probes instead?
There are many, many difficult problems with getting people to Mars. But the most important factor is that the people won’t be doing any good there. There is no way that the people there will be generating any kind of useful product or information. And it would be a terrible place for a colony. Mars cannot sustain human life because there is so little energy there and it would be prohibitivly expensive to constantly bring it there from Earth.
People always generate useful information. People get curious, and wander off, get lost in thought, or just do really, really stupid things that provide unexpected results. A robot does exactly what you tell it to. We need humans on Mars, doing the work of building the colony, terraforming the planet, because of the skills and knowledge that will be gained from this. It will pay dividends in ways we can’t even imagine at this point in time.
It seems to me you are saying you don’t have any idea what good will come of it, but some good has to come from it because going to Mars is so cool. Well it would take a pretty stupid businessman to give tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars without knowing something about what will come from it.
On the other hand, if you are willing to give me $20 billion, I’m sure I can generate some useful information for you. Please trust me. It would be very cool.
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. There are definate things which are going to come from it. For example, the attempts at weather modifcation on Mars will provide useful data to aid in our understanding of weather patterns here on Earth. (Think of Mars as a lab rat for climatologists.) The technology developed for the space program will have spin off benefits as well. Additionally, there will be information gained which we simply cannot predict at this point what it will be. Columbus set out to find India, and discovered the Americas instead, Lewis and Clark hoped to find the Northwest Passage, and the list goes on.
As for other reasons why, we must go to Mars, I’m not going to rehash all the arguments, but will instead refer you to this thread, this thread, and this thread, all of which discuss the matter to death.
Actually, I am happy to let the robots rule the skies- the light speed communication delay between Earth and Mars is several minutes long (more at some times, less at others) so any robots that go there would have to be largely autonomous;
even Sojourner was to an extent.
Give them enough intelligence and self-replicating ability and the robots could colonise the galaxy without us in ten million years, while we stop on earth chatting on message boards.
Yeah…I think I saw that on the Discovery Channel’s show “Shit 'dat Won’t Ever Get Built”…right between the 5000mph Trans-Atlantic train tunnel and the mile-high skyscraper.
Perhaps the problems with getting sustained presense on Mars could be solved by changing the people rather than the entire planet. Advances in genetic engineering or robotics with intelligence (artifical or downloaded) could make it easier to adapt to the planets conditions and more economical to stay.
Of course this is a long way off, and after an initial expedition, but it doesn’t seem so far fetched anymore with the rate of progress in these fields. For the first trip my money is on an international alliance of space powers (US, Russia, Japan and India) doing it in competition with other nations (China, European Union and Korea) for a propagranda victory. Assuming we’re not radioactive gloo or skin eating mutants by then.
I have had the personal pleasure of listiening to and asking questions of the Mars scientists at the JPL, who ran the Pathfinder mission. Sojourner was not even remotely autonomous. All of it’s actions were controlled from the ground.
They would check the latest photos from both the probe and the rover to verify its position, beam some instructions, wait for the braodcast delay as well as execution of the instructions, and check the cameras again.
That great photo of the Martian desert that was posted, along with all the other photos, almost didn’t happen, because one of the first things they did was to accidentallly drive the rover to the top of a not particularly falt boulder. They don’t know how they mangaed to do that, and it took them the better part of a day to figure out how they were going to get it down without smashing it.
The advances in rovers for the next few missions are mostly a matter of building Sojourner on a larger scale, with bigger solar panels, to cover more ground. The rover that can go as far as the distance from Pathfinder’s landing site to that cool mountain in the background won’ t launch for almost a decade. As far as the rover that could actually CLIMB any part of the mountain, you’ll have to wait even longer.
NASA has had some success with autonomous spacecraft (the amazingly successful but hardly ever reported Deep Space One probe), but in terms of the technology we’d need to make a completetely autonomous rover, that could make mission decisions without intervention from ground control, we’ve only taken the first baby steps. There are significant long-term disadvantages to sticking with just robot exploration.
The risk of sending one of the many humans itching to go are great, but by no means insurmountable. And a well-supported human could get a lot more exploration done in the space of two years than any rover could in the short season before the sun gets too dim and the winter freezes the circuitry.
I think a combination of humans and robotic using teleoperation is the best way to explore Mars and the further solar system. The real question is…will it ever happen. As far as I can see, countries TALK about going, but no serious effort is underway to get a real program going. Its sad, but it looks more and more like a trip to Mars won’t happen in my life time.
-XT
