Mars is a One Way Ticket
Humanoido
Posts: 5,770
http://www.myfoxny.com/story/19262671/group-plans-mars-settlement
If the journey to Mars is one way, never to return to Earth for the rest of your life, will you go?
If the journey to Mars is one way, never to return to Earth for the rest of your life, will you go?
Comments
-Tor
I'm too much a creature of comfort.
Also, I prefer to stay alive and sane.
(And far from nutcases)
They want to start the colony with 4 people?
Then add 4 colonists every 2 years?
It'll take a very long time before that colony reaches the numbers neeed for survival.
Feel free toread up on the 50/500 rule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization#Population_size
Some of the very first colonists would need to be medical personell,
What happens when the audience loses interest after the first of second group of colonists are on their way?
(Anyone knows how many watched the final Apollo mission lift off on TV? )
Anyone have any idea how difficult it is to run a properly balanced Hydroponics system in a closed environment for many years at a time?
(Actually, they'll probably want several, with separate recycling systems in case of contaminants or dieases)
Picking the right plants, animals, insects, fish... is a difficult task.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
What kind of power systems will they set up?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS-3
In BIOS-3 they used lots of 20KW Xenon lamps (all in all, 400KW for 3 people)
Setting up a permanent colony isn''t possible before we have located usable resources such as metals and can mine them remotely.
-Phil
They might have to upgrade my Netflix account, and guarantee shipping on parts from china, but how much slower could it get?
And I don't think Curiosity has found any shrimpz yet.
Edit:
The program is called Mars Rising. It is on Discovery's Science Channel.
But it gets better, if your suit develops a leak, you die horribly. If your living module stops working you die horribly. You have to be watchful of your partners who may or may not go nuts and if that happens you have to kill them(NASA's contingencies for this weren't pleasant). Resources are scarce and you can't afford to keep the mentally ill or very sick around for very long. You get diabetes, well there's the airlock, so take a long hike and don't come back.
Has all the makings of a good horror movie.
...awww - you guyz!!!
...and, your point is???
It would be a honor to take that risk !
I guess there ARE some drawbacks. I better call that NASA guy back....
The point is that if you weren't a loonie before the trip, listening for leaks or 'weird noises' from the recycing, or the fear that one of your fellow colonists wil turn psycho is almost guarranteed to send you to the madhouse...
And as a small colony won't have spare resources to care for you, it won't take long before... you know...you never wake up...
(Even a serious depression can be enough, especially if they think it may make you do something that endangers anyone else.)
Some forms of Diabetes and other diseases can be controlled with a strict diet, but if you need Insulin... Might as well take a short walk out the airlock without a suit.
(You'd be instantly disqualified from outside work, you can't be used for any critical supervision, and will probably be required to never be alone for more than a few minutes. In short, you'd be just about useless. )
Somewhere I once read that a person can survive for 30 seconds without a spacesuit in outer space...
That is for a 'certain degree' of survive...
(If they hook you up to an iron lung to replace the boody mess in your chest, and you're OK with living without sight, hearing and probably taste, and so on... )
A small leak in a suit can be patched up, but a broken helmet is death.
Sand and grit in joints will slowly destroy the suit, no matter how well you maintain it. And suits are custom fitted to the user. (They won't need to be as bulky as the suits used in space or on the moon, though)
How long will they last, and when they do fail, where will they get replacement suits?
The way I see it, you'd need a small town worth of colonists to keep the colony alive for more than a decade.
And of course regular resupply ships.
I had a HAL response seconds ready before ecro posted.
Curse you erco.
-Tommy
It's getting to be a lot of work staying a step ahead of everyone with all my wisecracks and Ebay deals.
Delivery is much faster when you're local: http://www.killerpizzafrommars.com/
+1......more like +5!!
Would you be allowed to live your life under your own terms or would you still be bound by rules and regulations from your masters on earth?
As you would be reliant on those in charge back on earth for a very long time I doubt you could create your own utopia .You would do all the hard graft and build what you would like to call home and once done the authoritarians and leaders will arrive and change everything to suit themselves and you will once more become a cog in the machine.
I wonder how long it would take mankind to have it's first war on Mars?
I worked at NASA-Ames many years ago, and the building I worked in had a large room that could be evacuated to very low pressures. It was orignally used to check out the structural design of rockets in a vacuum. Later on it was used to simulate the Martain atmosphere. It contained a wind tunnel that was used to study how sand dunes were created on Mars. Maybe they'll let people rent some time in that room to see if they really want to live on Mars.