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Science News General; Stuff that doesn't need its own topic
Topic Started: Apr 9 2014, 07:11 AM (11,236 Views)
Flisch
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Superhuman
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What. It's not as if we didn't try hard enough. We just didn't have the means to check. Quite honestly even now we're more or less fumbling in the dark.
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Tartarus
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Scrublord
Oct 20 2016, 01:56 AM
Tartarus
Oct 20 2016, 01:39 AM
we have not managed to look nearly as hard as we'd have liked.
Oh, well what would you recommend?
More extensive studies of Mars. And eventually sending human astronauts there. Humans can actively seek out life and figure out the best places to look for it far better than any probe or rover ever could.
So far we have just scratched the surface of what there is to know about Mars. There is still a lot more that can be learned in the future.
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Kamidio
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The rovers are remote controlled. Humans are already telling them where to go.
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Tartarus
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I know the rovers are remote controlled. But even so they are quite limited in what they can actually do. Humans could access areas that would be difficult or impossible for rovers to access and could potentially conduct searches and studies far more advanced than what a rover can.
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Flisch
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Have you ever tried fine maneuvering a remote-controlled buggy or whatever? Now do that while you can't even look at the buggy from all the angles you want/need and with a time delay of hours.

(Do they actually remote control them? I was always under the impression that they give them tasks and the rovers just do them autonomously. Everything else would be a pain.)

In the case that there is no and never was any life on Mars, we will only be 100% certain of that a few years (possibly even a decade) after we have established at least a manned research outpost there. And that is far future talk.
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LittleLazyLass
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What if life only lives underground? Might go undetected from the surface if there's no existing direct connection.
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Flisch
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Which is why it might take up to a decade. Even if we don't find life on the surface, we will only be 100% sure about Mars always having been devoid of life, if we also look in the hard to reach places. And that will take years. Heck, depending on how much the colonization of Mars is funded, it might take way longer than that. I mean, nobody is interested in colonizing Antarctica and that's like only 1% as costly. And Mars doesn't even have any resources you can send back to Earth with a profit. So it really stands to reason that as soon as the initial "We did it!" boom ebbed off, nobody wants to burn money by sending materials to Mars. I just hope we won't neglect the people we sent there. And bringing them back is also costly and would even feel a lot like defeat, so whichever organization was in charge of colonizing Mars would be most hesitant to return the colonists to Earth, if the project is found to be unsustainable. Hopefully it won't end in disaster.
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Tartarus
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I think it will probably take a lot longer than a decade from now before anyone sets foot on Mars. Yeah, there are plans to get people there in the near future, but actually pulling it off is a lot easier said than done. That said, I think we will have people going to Mars at some point in the future, I just am not very hopeful it will be occurring as soon as is often claimed.
On the search for life, I agree we still need to look in the hard to reach places. Martian microbes living in, for example, subterranean aquifers are an interesting possibility.
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Flisch
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Tartarus
Oct 22 2016, 06:47 PM
I think it will probably take a lot longer than a decade from now before anyone sets foot on Mars. Yeah, there are plans to get people there in the near future, but actually pulling it off is a lot easier said than done. That said, I think we will have people going to Mars at some point in the future, I just am not very hopeful it will be occurring as soon as is often claimed.

That's what I said:
Flisch
Oct 21 2016, 07:13 PM
we will only be 100% certain of that a few years (possibly even a decade) after we have established at least a manned research outpost there. And that is far future talk.

:P
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Scrublord
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One thing that's always bothered me about life on Mars is the fact that we seem equally obsessed with trying to colonize/terraform the planet. By definition, wouldn't that mean causing a planetwide mass extinction of any existing life?
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Tartarus
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Scrublord
Oct 24 2016, 08:08 PM
One thing that's always bothered me about life on Mars is the fact that we seem equally obsessed with trying to colonize/terraform the planet. By definition, wouldn't that mean causing a planetwide mass extinction of any existing life?
Yes that is an ethical issue that a number of people have brought up.
If it does turn out that Mars is a living world then I would personally be against terraforming the world for that basic reason. It would kinda suck if we ended up ruining the first actual extraterrestrial ecology we discover.
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Scrublord
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But at the same time, you could argue that we need to get off this planet sooner or later. And when we do, where else are we gonna go? Pluto?
My Projects:
The Neozoic Redux
Valhalla--Take Three!
The Big One



Deviantart Account: http://elsqiubbonator.deviantart.com

In the end, the best advice I could give you would be to do your project in a way that feels natural to you, rather than trying to imitate some geek with a laptop in Colorado.
--Heteromorph
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Sphenodon
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Calcareous

I think that the most feasible course of action would be to send a manned mission of researchers to survey various Martian areas first. While far more cost-prohibitive, resource-intensive and fragile than probes, they are infinitely faster and can operate and analyse data without the rovers' seven-hour delay. After a few such missions (or several, depending on your level of caution), life would either be discovered or not; how things proceed from there would be fairly self-explanatory. Aside from Mars, the Moon is also a feasible are on which human colonies could be established; it's devoid of life, and a colony established on the Dark Side (a satellite relay network would have to be constructed, but this would be far simpler than establishing the colony itself) wouldn't even pollute the visible surface. Plus, the Moon serves as a bit of an economical incentive; it has a ridiculous amount of helium-3 stored in its crust, which could potentially refund the colony's cost if mined or even make it profitable far in the future.

We have a Discord server! If you would like to join, simply message myself, Flisch, or Icthyander.
Some of my ideas (nothing real yet, but soon):
Refugium: A last chance for collapsing ecosystems and their inhabitants.
Pansauria: A terraforming project featuring the evolution of exactly one animal - the marine iguana.
Mars Renewed: An insight into the life of Mars thirty million years after its terraforming by humankind.
Microcosm: An exceedingly small environment.
Alcyon: A planet colonized by species remodeled into new niches by genetic engineering.
Oddballs: Aberrant representatives of various biological groups compete and coexist.

..and probably some other stuff at some point (perhaps a no K-T project). Stay tuned!
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Dakka!
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I think that the human race should forget about all these silly adventures and focus on fixing the problems we have right now rather than trying to fly a manned Mission to mars. To the moon to collect helium-3 maybe but only if they can actually reconfigure their nuclear power plants to burn helium-3.
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Unrelated:The Final Spec:What Could Have Been, And Still Can
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Sphenodon
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Calcareous

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I think that the human race should forget about all these silly adventures and focus on fixing the problems we have right now rather than trying to fly a manned Mission to mars. To the moon to collect helium-3 maybe but only if they can actually reconfigure their nuclear power plants to burn helium-3.

A noble goal, but that would be an endless and futile task - enough huge, sprawling problems without morally or logically sound solutions have sprung up on the global scale that we'd get locked up in an endless cycle of alleviating issues (a bit like what happens in Spore's space stage if you make too many acquaintances). Plus, space offers far more than just helium-3 - for example, asteroid mining offers enough gold and platinum that their non-value based properties could finally be used for something (such as gold's excellent conductive/reflective capabilities and platinum's extreme non-reactivity to chemical reactions).

We have a Discord server! If you would like to join, simply message myself, Flisch, or Icthyander.
Some of my ideas (nothing real yet, but soon):
Refugium: A last chance for collapsing ecosystems and their inhabitants.
Pansauria: A terraforming project featuring the evolution of exactly one animal - the marine iguana.
Mars Renewed: An insight into the life of Mars thirty million years after its terraforming by humankind.
Microcosm: An exceedingly small environment.
Alcyon: A planet colonized by species remodeled into new niches by genetic engineering.
Oddballs: Aberrant representatives of various biological groups compete and coexist.

..and probably some other stuff at some point (perhaps a no K-T project). Stay tuned!
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