A big question, so this got a bit long even before I inserted some extra details in post-production.
This video series is a classic Ask Me Anything, with 1-2 questions answered each week. It’s for ThisIsTrue.com readers who are curious about whatever. Questions are accepted (only) from Premium subscribers. My wife and I live on a Residential Cruising ship, and I record from my office there.
Questions in this Episode:
- 0:15 Chuck in Texas: Re Andy Weir’s The Martian, with your experience with NASA and friends, how long it will be before we have a full-blown (manned!) Mars mission, if ever?
The Martian on Amazon *: book or movie on 4K BlueRay.
What’s a Klemperer_Rosette. The Puppetteers then moved that cluster away from their galaxy.
Since Youtube Comments are typically a vast, brain-free wasteland of obliviocy, I’m putting the videos on my site where there can be intelligent discussion. The comments are NOT a place to ask questions.
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This was a great show. Informed speculation at its best. Thanks.
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Glad you found it interesting. -rc
An interesting, and valid, take on the possibility of mankind ever colonizing another planet. Many science fiction authors have addressed this. As well as the possibility of whatever environment we go to being toxic to humans in some way. However, the fact that we are able to fundamentally destroy this planet in various ways, whether by pollution of various types, or war, or even a man made plague, makes me feel that we must get our eggs into multiple baskets. Obviously, it won’t be soon, but it is something I feel must be done to save humanity.
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And I don’t argue with anything you’ve said there. -rc
Too often in the discussions about Mars, the discussion is completely focused on the technology of the space travel part of the trip (including landing and return to Earth). It is refreshing to hear you bring some very important issues from outside that sphere.
A great, fairly new, source of research and information on the subject is A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. They cover the topics you brought up and a whole lot more. Each topic covers what we know now, what we need to know to contemplate a colony on Mars, and what we need to do (including some ‘should have dones’) to close the huge knowledge and technology gap.
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Hadn’t heard of that one yet — thanks! Looks interesting. -rc
And just out, a pre-publication copy of A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars from the National Academies. True to form, it is 241 pages for what science humans should do on Mars when they get there.
Of course, neither this report nor the Weinersmith book counter anything you said about political will. I’m pretty firmly in the “What’s the point again?” camp when it comes to humans on Mars. If we need more adaptable and flexible searching on the planet, I suggest we combine the latest advances in robotics and AI with the absolutely freaking amazing engineering of today’s rovers (thanks to JPL and friends). It won’t be that hard to create bots that can do almost everything a human could there but they would be a lot tougher.
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Tougher AND much cheaper to send: they wouldn’t even need a pressurized spacecraft. I did hear about this new report, but hadn’t even begun to look for it yet. I’ll note for others that even the Prepublication edition (240 pages) costs $44.10 in PDF format. -rc
I just clicked download and got the whole thing (I was logged in with my free account).
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Interesting! So much for the price tag. It was easy to create an account and grab a copy. Thanks! -rc
Just had a good time watching your “Ask Me Anything” session on Mars. It really got me thinking!
I disagree with your assertion that heat is a big pollution problem. If it was its own separate thing, maybe. But it is Electromagnetic radiation – like light. It is amenable to manipulation with mirrors. We don’t have to keep it on Earth, we can send it into space! Instead of moving the entire planet, we can much more easily concentrate heat or heating appliances, and use mirrors to aim it into the biggest cold sink there is: space. Easy peasy. Way easier than moving the planet.
Then, you mentioned that Mars dust was toxic to plants. Maybe so, but hydroponics have come a long way in the past several years, and we mostly don’t really need soil to grow crops. It is just easier and cheaper that way on most of the Earth. And humans have traditionally modified their environment to suit themselves.
I think the more pressing problem is drought and lack of water around the globe. If only there were a cheap and easy way to desalinate seawater or purify brackish water…. There is. Back in the 80’s the German engineering firm of Schlaich Bergermann developed a “Solar Power Tower” in Spain, that used a couple of hectares of clear panels (much like greenhouse panels) that warmed the air beneath the panels and channeled the warmed air up through a chimney, which powered wind turbines that produced electricity. They built it in a semi-arid area in the middle of Spain, and it ran for several years while they tried to interest folks into building more of them. Several other organizations were interested, and also planned such installations in desert or arid areas.
I looked at that and though, gee, at temperatures they are developing, such as 170° F., 100% relative humidity (i.e. water vapor) would be practically 70% of the entire volume of the air, and a cubic meter of such air would hold about a liter of water. If such a facility was built over a reservoir of, say, 100 hectares, such a facility could transport close to a million liters of water per day. Anybody who has seen mist rising over a body of water on a cold day can realize that the air within a couple of feet of a body of water is practically 100% humidity. Run that through a condenser on its way to a wind turbine, and you could get both fresh water, and electricity.
It may not be much compared to nuclear powered desalination plants, but it wouldn’t use any electricity, it would also produce power, and when the water condensed, the released heat of condensation could be easily reflected into space. The heat (electromagnetic radiation) gets radiated at the speed of light in every direction. The volume of humidity that disappears creates a refrigeration effect that travels at chemical speed, and concentrates on the droplets of water that condense. That is how hail is formed.
One of the problems with the powered desalination plants is that droughts are often temporary, and when the multi-billion dollar desalination plant is finished and the rains return, the customers are stuck with paying for years for a desalination plant that is no longer needed. In this case, if the rains return and the desalination is no longer needed, the water can be drained from the reservoir, and the facility continues to be run just to generate electricity.
Finally, you touched on the motivation to go to Mars. Think back on what motivated the US to go to the Moon: Fear of enemy action. It wasn’t science, or adventure, or expectation of harvesting riches. It was the fear that the USSR would beat us to the Moon, and then have the high ground to rain nuclear weapons upon us at will.
When the US and the USSR signed the Outer Space Treaty, they did so out of fear of each other’s weaponry. The Russians were afraid that the big US corporations would develop facilities on the Moon and use its resources to outperform anything Russia could do. So they added a clause that no facility on the Moon could be used to create profit. If anybody did develop something, they had to create an identical facility, and give it to an agency of the UN, and also hand over any profits they made to the UN, on the basis that the resources of the Moon belonged to all mankind.
The US, for its part, was afraid that Russia would claim sovereignty over the Moon, and prevent any development by the US. Russia had already landed a probe on the Moon that had sprayed out dozens of USSR pennants, in an effort to claim some Moon property. So they added a clause that said no country could claim ownership of any Moon property, or any asteroid property in space.
I suspect that any effort to establish a facility or colony on Mars would be for similar reasons.
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Heat being the “ultimate pollutant” isn’t my idea, as I explained, and at least one other commenter also noted. I don’t think the lack of water is a problem on a planet with 70% of its surface covered by water. There might be a distribution problem of clean water, though, particularly in some regions (and the affected regions can and do shift). But the bottom line is, this got you (and others) thinking. That’s my goal. -rc