Mars

Another pub

The Mars rovers return

 

That's how I just saw it when I read your post. They could get off the planet but not have enough to sustain life for long.

It depends on how capable we are at the point the Earth is destroyed.

At the moment there's no doubt we're nowhere near advanced enough.

 

The Eden project type of environment built somewhere could be successful, but building it in the 1st place and whether it would withstand whatever the environment would be is another thing. I expect it would be a stay of execution.

 

I think a lot of the future depends on the search for water on the moon. We didn't discover it until 2008/09 so we are very much in the primative stage of this exploration. If there is as much water as they believe, it could be a complete game changer.

Not to forget China are on this as well, so they must seriously believe there is something in this. Life but not as we know it, Jim.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/water-on-the-moon-guide

How much water is on the Moon?

Based on remote observations by radar instruments aboard Chandrayaan-1 and LRO, the lunar poles have over 600 billion kilograms of water ice. That’s enough to fill at least 240,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. This is a low-end estimate because the amount of water detected is limited by the strength of spacecraft radar. New missions with radars that penetrate deeper will likely find more water ice.

 

The moon has to be very short term though. Water, atmosphere and faster/further space travel will be needed imo. I think we'll really be on the way if we can establish a colony on somewhere like Europa or Titan. The latter having an atmosphere possibly similar to Earth.

 

We've got to learn to walk before we can run mate. We are looking at 2028, before we get anywhere near setting anything up on the moon. This should have been done decades ago, but suppose with the technical advances since then, we've not really lost any ground on the space race.

The moon and mars are nothing more than stepping stones across an enormous expanse. Every stepping stone we can make, puts us nearer Titan, merely using your example in course of direction. But just those few steps will advance and evolve our knowledge as we learn new things.

This is not about what we can do, or what our children or grandchildren can do, I'm looking at the bigger long term picture. I can make excuses now for why we didn't progress from 1968 onwards, because of the changes in technology, I just wouldn't want people to look back in a couple of centuries and not have helped towards future space exploration.

People thing this is about the Earth, it's not for me, nothing of the sort, I just love the destiny of it, something I can never live to see, but only imagine.

 

Oh yeh I don't disagree with that and it's what I was referring to earlier. My previous post was about what Roy had said.

We'll go through it all as you said, but until we get to somewhere beyond the moon, I think we won't have advanced enough for humanity to continue if the Earth was destroyed. It's the tipping point imo. The point of no return.

 

In truth it would take hundreds of years to make any significant progress on another planet unless we had a **** off big ship we could transport stuff on.
To start with we would need materials to build accommodation with and all the associated bits such as generators, water pumps wiring etc.
Then to move on we would have to build manufacturing plants for electrical components, metal excavation to build things with and a means to actually do something with that metal (forging, machining, smelting etc) unless we continued to use the **** off big ship to keep ferrying stuff made on Earth from planet to planet.

Can we survive long enough to set up a supply chain and will it conform to the "just in time" strategy of today

 

This is why I said we're at the Industrial Revolution stage if making a comparison.

But I wouldn't go as far as to say it would take hundreds of years once we've established a colony on the moon. We just don't know after that. It could happen sooner. Bit like going from Marconi wireless telegraph to smart phones inside a 100 years if we're making the comparison there. It's not linear, it becomes exponential the more breakthroughs you make.

 

The Sirens of Mars review: Inside the hunt for life on the Red Planet


We once thought Mars had canals built by an advanced society. We've come a long way since then, but there is still much to discover, finds Leah Crane



SPACE 1 July 2020
By Leah Crane

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NASA’s Perseverance rover will soon look for signs of life on Mars

NASA/JPL-Caltech



Book

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for life on another world

Sarah Stewart Johnson


Allen Lane (Buy from Amazon*)

IF YOU look up on a clear night, you might spot a light brighter than all the others, not twinkling like a star, but floating serene and reddish-tinged in the sky. Across history, many have gazed at Mars and imagined what its distant shores might hold. Some have even sent spacecraft up there to find out.

In her book The Sirens of Mars, Sarah Stewart Johnson tells the story of the Red Planet and those who have sought to understand it, from Herodotus and Euclid to NASA and its Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, with the author herself slotted in between.


The tale begins before Mars was even understood to be a place, when it was just a light in the sky. It then moves on to when scientists thought that Mars could be truly the twin of Earth, when apparent lines on its surface were taken to be the canals of an advanced society. Even after discovering they weren’t canals, people still thought they could be signs of vegetation, the signature of a green and thriving planet.

At the point Stewart Johnson reaches the first space missions to fly by Mars and their failures to spot any obvious signs of life, the disappointment is palpable. The narrative feels as if it is building towards a big revelation, maybe even the discovery of living organisms on Mars. Those who have studied the planet for a long time know intimately the roller coaster of emotion it has caused.

Stewart Johnson has made Mars her life’s work. She is from a space-loving family, making her career choice seem inevitable. The book is part memoir, part history, part education, and the three flow together so smoothly you might not even realise how much you are learning about Mars.

At one point, she describes crater walls as “reveal[ing] layers that had been stacked like the pages of a closed book, one moment in time pressed close against the next”. She manages to press moments in time together as closely as the sedimentary rocks on Mars, revealing its history just as the rocks do.

“Mars may not be quite as arid and dead as we once thought, but rather it has water hiding everywhere”

As much as that history contains many disappointments, from the revelation that the canals of Mars aren’t real to the understanding that there is unlikely to be life on the surface, it is also optimistic. There are many joyful moments, such as when scientists realised that Mars might not be quite as arid and dead as we once thought, but rather it has water hiding everywhere.

Those moments are what propel the story forward and what drives Stewart Johnson to keep travelling to some of the most extreme and barren environments on Earth to grasp at the possibility that there may yet be life on Mars that looks nothing like it does here on Earth. “We are still struggling to contend with the truly alien, to recognize and interpret signs of ‘life as we don’t know it’, ” she writes.

The Sirens of Mars comes at an exciting time: Mars researchers have more information now than at any other point in history, and NASA’s Perseverance rover, scheduled to launch this month, will surely bring a wave of discoveries when it collects rock and soil samples in its search for signs of ancient life. Yet as the interest in Mars grows, with many nations and companies working on missions to its surface, researchers’ efforts to understand it become increasingly urgent.

As Stewart Johnson writes: “The next decades are thus critically important for the search for life because the window to explore an untrammeled planet – a pristine record of the past – is closing.”

In the end, the book tells you what anybody who has studied science learns as they move from one school year to the next: the more we know, the clearer it is that what we thought we knew before was wrong. However, as Stewart Johnson so clearly describes, the journey of understanding where we were wrong propels us ever forward to explore.

(*When you buy through links on this page we may earn a small commission, but this plays no role in what we review or our opinion of it.)

 

I read somewhere it's the food that's the problem. To survive on another planet, it's about how much food you can take with you and intruth we haven't got big enough rockets to sustain the supply we needed, without endless journeys back and forth. I can only assume this is why discovering a water source on the moon is invaluable, and probably why the Chinese are in a race to get there too.

NASA document quote:
The Search for Water The presence of water at an outpost has major implications since hydrogen and oxygen elements can be extracted from water quite simply by the use of electrolysis. While it is still debatable whether the water actually exists or if it is in a form that can be accessed in the regolith or extracted, if it does than. it would be highly desirable to mine it and use it. The hydrogen and oxygen can be used as fuel and oxidizer for propulsion systems which range from ascent vehicles to hopper vehicles to fuel cell driven surface mobility. In addition, there are hydrogen reduction methods for extracting oxygen from the regolith and in this case the hydrogen would not have to be brought from earth. Water for human consumption and water for plant growth are also highly desirable. The presence of water would have a large effect on the mission mass, especially if it could be used for ascent stage propulsion systems.

The topography of the craters that may contain water is rather steep and hazardous. The slopes range from 15 degrees to vertical and access is challenging. In addition, if the water does exist then it is likely that it will be in the cold traps of the crater or the permanently· shadowed regions, which never warm up. The water is likely to be mixed with the regolith which must be excavated and the separated in situ or transported to the production area for water extraction and distribution. These aspects of the search for water on the moon make it well suited for a mobile robotic walker or other robotic mobility system.

 

It's not the breakthrough though mate, it's the physical means.
You can't just go to the moon and start building another rocket to take you further, you need the facilities and components to build that rocket in and from.


For me the one thing i can't get my head around with modern tech is how we went from the old capacitance touch screens of 30/40 years ago to the ones we have today where you can drag stuff around. Will look into it one day.

 

The physical means relies on break through though. You're still seeing it as "building another rocket to take you further" because that's all we know right now.

That's like someone trying to envisage faster air travel with propeller planes when nobody had even imagined jet propulsion.

It's that what I'm talking about when I say breakthrough. Each step we take will lead to breakthroughs we (the lay person) can't even imagine right now because those things will present themselves to folk who have built colonies on the moon, through ideas and opportunities in people far more intelligent than you and me.

 

Can Plants Grow with Mars Soil? | NASA

 

Nope, forget the transport and think more of what you would need to colonise somewhere to an acceptable standard and continue development.
It would take either a massive amount of time or the means of taking that development/capability with you.
There may be water on the moon or oxygen on mars but what would we need on site to extract that in enough quantity to build a community?

 

On the first part, aye agree that would take time. How long was the industrial revolution though? The single biggest event in our history that completely changed how and where people lived.

On the second part 'taking it with you' - that's very much dependent on technological advances, and there progress will become exponential imo.

 

I am not talking technology or ability here, we already have that and have gained it over 200 years as you hint.
I am talking physical capability on a distant planet. You need raw materials to make stuff and for that you need a means of getting them then ways turning those materials into something useful. Yes we have the know how but the actual doing (or getting to that stage) takes years of hard work.

 

Go to bed Diego ffs.

 

Let's go a bit closer then, you are in Alaska (using that because i watched ice road truckers a few weeks back ), your water pump blows what do you do?
Mine some aluminium, cast a new pump body and machine it, manufacture a bearing and seal somehow etc etc. Simple problem that is not very easy to fix unless somebody has had the foresight to build a manufacturing plant to make the bit you need.

 

You call the AA innit