Moved: From Opportunity Etched Terrain Options

[JRehling]

No return on investment ever?  How do you know something won't be found on Mars that can't be found on Earth, something incredibly useful?

Grasping at straws, there may be a vanishing probability of such a thing, but that's a few orders of magnitude past Occam's Razor.

I find your lack of faith.. disturbing.

You have to pick and choose the things to have faith in. The notion of colonizing other planets is an offbeat and almost fetishistic yearning among the billions of possible human enterprises -- and is arguably the one with the very worst return for the effort. In 1969, a good argument could be (and was) made that Apollo, without its own immediate tangible return made its worth in showing how inspiring the ultimate voyage can be. It's been done. If the human race isn't sufficiently inspired by watching reruns of Apollo 11, they won't remain long inspired by reruns of Mars Landing 1, either. And come to think of it, 40+ years after the first descent to the deepest place in the ocean, no second trip has been made there, without visible detriment to the species or the planet. In fact, no one I've quizzed was even aware that a second trip had never been made. These things are sideshows to the struggle of the human species, not our One Most Shining Hope.

It's an easy and unquestioned extrapolation from other worthwhile exploration to seeing human colonization of the solar system as an intrinsically noble quest. That doesn't stand up very well under examination. Space aficionados arguing for its necessity is not much different than if basket weavers had a quest for a ten-mile-high wicker basket. You have to spend a long time burrowed into that mindset to see the irrelevance that is a given to anyone outside the mindset.

I have a great deal of faith, but neither the Big Basket nor the Mars Colony are where I have placed it.

[Marcel]

No return on investment ever?  How do you know something won't be found on Mars that can't be found on Earth, something incredibly useful?

Grasping at straws, there may be a vanishing probability of such a thing, but that's a few orders of magnitude past Occam's Razor.

I find your lack of faith.. disturbing.

You have to pick and choose the things to have faith in. The notion of colonizing other planets is an offbeat and almost fetishistic yearning among the billions of possible human enterprises -- and is arguably the one with the very worst return for the effort. In 1969, a good argument could be (and was) made that Apollo, without its own immediate tangible return made its worth in showing how inspiring the ultimate voyage can be. It's been done. If the human race isn't sufficiently inspired by watching reruns of Apollo 11, they won't remain long inspired by reruns of Mars Landing 1, either. And come to think of it, 40+ years after the first descent to the deepest place in the ocean, no second trip has been made there, without visible detriment to the species or the planet. In fact, no one I've quizzed was even aware that a second trip had never been made. These things are sideshows to the struggle of the human species, not our One Most Shining Hope.

It's an easy and unquestioned extrapolation from other worthwhile exploration to seeing human colonization of the solar system as an intrinsically noble quest. That doesn't stand up very well under examination. Space aficionados arguing for its necessity is not much different than if basket weavers had a quest for a ten-mile-high wicker basket. You have to spend a long time burrowed into that mindset to see the irrelevance that is a given to anyone outside the mindset.

I have a great deal of faith, but neither the Big Basket nor the Mars Colony are where I have placed it.

Not sure if i understood your points completely (English is not my mother-tongue), but it seems to me you don't see so much value in human space-exploration. Well, I do.

Ultimately, sending humans to Mars has nothing to do with try and find valuable raw materials, except the ones we need for living (and burning, in order to get back). It's about exploration. Try to find out what's it like and how it became the way it is now. It is about science. And yes, also about what's the best way to do this. There's a awfull lot of spinoff (technically speaking), also from Apollo. And don't forget, that exploration also has to do with emotional aspects: When Neil A. put his foot on the surface of the Moon, it changed not only himself, but the whole world. Forever. It gave us confidence. Confidence to continue the exploration. It is important to realize, that travelling to the moon and back, learned us that we can do things, previously thought impossible. And this is important. Not just the rocks they brought back (and the rocks learned us a lot as well by the way !), it's the whole thing (ideas, inspiration, human identity, knowledge, education, etc) that makes it of infinite value.

I myself think, even more effort should be put into exploring (and ultimately even colonizing) Mars, because it might help us to overcome one of the biggest problem we have down here: energy consumption and how we're going to deal with it. On Mars, we only have solar energy and (probably) water to support us. If we find a way to make this work......we might as well implement these findings and tech. on earth before we suffocate on a frozen ocean. What more do you want considering sustainable development ?

But maybe i'm just a nut that wants to see the first footprint on Mars before he dies.....

Um, maybe we move to another thread (i.e. "manned spaceflight" ?), and continue here on erosional processes and impacts at Meridiani ?

[JRehling]

Not sure if i understood your points completely (English is not my mother-tongue), but it seems to me you don't see so much value in human space-exploration. Well, I do.

Ultimately, sending humans to Mars has nothing to do with try and find valuable raw materials, except the ones we need for living (and burning, in order to get back). It's about exploration.

That's fine, but there are an infinitude of places to explore, and not an infinitude of resources (eg, money). Why is the surface of Mars special, and not, say, the layer of the Earth's crust 8 km down? The difference is more aesthetic than anything else, and $50 billion is a lot of money for a work of art.

Try to find out what's it like and how it became the way it is now. It is about science.

Most likely, it would not be about science. For the cost of a human mission, dozens of MSLs could be launched. Robots will increase in ability, and even though one sol of robot exploration may never equal one sol of human exploration, the cost favors robots... 100 robots could out-explore a human team. Especially if, like the MERs, they are allowed to take their time.

And yes, also about what's the best way to do this. There's a awfull lot of spinoff (technically speaking), also from Apollo. And don't forget, that exploration also has to do with emotional aspects: When Neil A. put his foot on the surface of the Moon, it changed not only himself, but the whole world. Forever. It gave us confidence. Confidence to continue the exploration.

But it didn't. Only missions that were already budgeted on July 20, 1969 were flown to the Moon. No new mission sending humans past 500 km above the Earth's surface have been planned since that day! If anything, the moon landing ended the active pursuit of human exploration into deep space -- there is certainly no evidence that it encouraged it.

The same thing happened with the descent to the bottom of the ocean. It had never been done before, it was done once, and has not been done since. And in the case of the ocean, were you even aware that it had been done exacly once? I guess you did not (correct me if I am wrong!). And if the value of a voyage to the bottom of the sea is worth so little that exploration "fans" don't even read about it, when why spend billions to perform "another" exploration? Why isn't the voyage to the bottom of the sea inspirational?

It is important to realize, that travelling to the moon and back, learned us that we can do things, previously thought impossible. And this is important. Not just the rocks they brought back (and the rocks learned us a lot as well by the way !), it's the whole thing (ideas, inspiration, human identity, knowledge, education, etc) that makes it of infinite value.

Again, this was all arguable in 1969, but now the arguments have shown no substance. What Apollo showed us was that we could do "anything" we have the money for. If Apollo already taught us that lesson, what more is there to learn? And why not do it in the sea or deep in the earth's crust?

I myself think, even more effort should be put into exploring (and ultimately even colonizing) Mars, because it might help us to overcome one of the biggest problem we have down here: energy consumption and how we're going to deal with it. On Mars, we only have solar energy and (probably) water to support us. If we find a way to make this work......we might as well implement these findings and tech. on earth before we suffocate on a frozen ocean. What more do you want considering sustainable development ?

It's unlikely that the best way to achieve progress with regard to X is to fund an enormously expensive program about Y. If we spend $50 billion on solar power, we'll solve those problems faster than if we spend a small fraction of $50 billion on solar power as part of a Mars program.

If (when?) propulsion one day becomes much cheaper than it is now, the situation may change, but so long as the program would cost tens of billions, it simply will not happen.

[mike]

Ultimately, it's impossible to say what the 'value' of anything is. Perhaps the world would be exactly the same if the Mona Lisa was never painted, or perhaps it's vastly different because of it.

Someone will walk on Mars, someday. I'll grant you that we may not explore the entire planet with actual living humans.

And as far as there being no useful minerals on Mars that we can't find on Earth, I fail to see how you can just outright make that claim - psychic powers? What will the lottery numbers be next week?

[deglr6328]

And as far as there being no useful minerals on Mars that we can't find on Earth, I fail to see how you can just outright make that claim - psychic powers?  What will the lottery numbers be next week?

I think I might tend to side with the argument that we are unlikely to find any natural resources of real economic value on Mars. But I don't think we will need to invoke psychic powers to support this view. Just a little science. First let us agree that we are extraordinarily unlikely to find anything but the ~92 naturally occurring elements on Mars, the same that we see on Earth. Will we see different abundances of those elements on Mars? Doubtless. But will we find large enough quantities of the rarer (on Earth) and therefore more valuable elements to make commercial exploitation of them attractive? With the current shockingly high cost of spaceflight the answer is a definite NO, but in the distant future that may turn to a maybe. Now as for finding valuable minerals on Mars, I am even more skeptical of this prospect. The overwhelming majority of the mining we do on Earth is for pure elements, copper, iron, aluminum, etc. We get these elements in impure mineral form and then convert them to pure elements through various energetically intensive processes. So we're usually not after the minerals themselves, just thier elemental constituents. I would say that we now have a sufficiently advanced mastery of chemical manipulation to allow us to produce most minerals synthetically. Even diamond is readily produced in laboratories today. So I think it very improbable that we will find a mineral which has some gobsmackingly special and valuable properties on Mars which we either wouldn't have already known of on Earth or couldn't synthetically produce on Earth.

Well then.....IS there anything physically valuable on Mars at all? IMO the answer is obviously a HUGE YES!! That thing is information. Information about the (new?) geological processes which occur there, information about the atmospheric phenomena there and of course the big question of life on Mars. I couldn't even begin to put a value on information about the nature of present or past life on Mars. It would truly be a landmark in the history of.....well, history. Not to mention the insights it could provide to the origin of life on our own planet.

[Stephen]

Not sure if i understood your points completely (English is not my mother-tongue), but it seems to me you don't see so much value in human space-exploration. Well, I do.

Ultimately, sending humans to Mars has nothing to do with try and find valuable raw materials, except the ones we need for living (and burning, in order to get back). It's about exploration.

That's fine, but there are an infinitude of places to explore, and not an infinitude of resources (eg, money). Why is the surface of Mars special, and not, say, the layer of the Earth's crust 8 km down? The difference is more aesthetic than anything else, and $50 billion is a lot of money for a work of art.

You're probably right. If human beings are ever going to get to Mars they will ultimately need a better rationale than mere "exploration". Exploration might suffice for the first three or four expeditions. Maybe even the first five or six. If, however, the idea is to keep on going to Mars indefinitely then "exploration" is not going to cut it.

You also remember that explorers are people:

1) Who go out, find and study new places, then come back home again;
2) When they go out on multiple expeditions they generally go to a different places each time.

Captain Cook did that. So did Apollo. Each mission went out snd back; and each one which did go went to a different site. Now that's all very well and good if all you're doing is exploring, but it also increases the expense and it also made it easier (in Apollo's case) for those in charge in say STOP. There was no expensive infrastructure to be left behind and no people who had to be brought back to Earth. All the planners had to do was simply stop sending expeditions.

Try to find out what's it like and how it became the way it is now. It is about science.

Most likely, it would not be about science. For the cost of a human mission, dozens of MSLs could be launched. Robots will increase in ability, and even though one sol of robot exploration may never equal one sol of human exploration, the cost favors robots... 100 robots could out-explore a human team. Especially if, like the MERs, they are allowed to take their time.

1) Realistically, that is not going to happen. Congress might be willing to spend $100 billion on a few manned trips to Mars, but neither Congress nor anybody else is going to be spending that kind of money on a bunch of robots. Axing Apollo, for example, did not free up lots of billions for spending on unmanned space exploration. The money that might have been was spent elsewhere.

2) "100 robots could out-explore a human team".

That statement is implying that it is the robots themselves who are doing the exploring when in fact the real explorers are arguably the humans back on Earth who are controlling those robots by remote control. The MERs and MSLs are little more than their proxies. The humans are the ones who direct their explorations. If a human forgets to send them a command, the communications links are interrupted, or the money runs out and the human support teams back on Earth are disbanded the explorations of those robots would come to a grinding halt.

[djellison]

I've made all these subforums so the good stuff doesnt get lost in the noise.

USE THEM!

Doug

[Marcel]

I've made all these subforums so the good stuff doesnt get lost in the noise.

USE THEM!

Doug

You're right moderator. Apologies for being so rude by letting ourselves go in the wrong thread. And for producing noise.....It won't happen again

[djellison]

Consider yourselved all firmly bitch-slapped

Doug

[Bob Shaw]

Ouch!

Getting back to the topic...

...The best way to keep costs in perspective is to look at one simple fact: no money is spent on Mars in the process of going to Mars. It's all spent HERE, supporting industries, creating subsidiary wealth, and keeping the technological side of things ticking over - it's an investment in our society as a whole. Granted, there are some remarkably poor returns for such investments (like the ISS) but all you need is a paradigm shift or two and suddenly Burt Rutan is flying your granny to an orbital hotel - and, like it or not, the newly-minted space capitalists just wouldn't be doing what they are today if the state hadn't been there first. I'm sure the first few flights to Mars (or anywhere else) will be 'expensive' - but so long as there's not an Apollo hiatus then things will calm down somewhat.

And, as an aside, there was an analysis done years ago on the payload to LEO cost of Saturn V, and a comparison made between it and everything else which followed, and it was the clear conclusion that building a system, and then keeping it flying, would result in serious savings. Looks like the Americans paid no heed, but the Soviets did - their Soyuz spacecraft and booster have been flown a ridiculous number of times (hell, the Russians even still fly Vostok as Resurs vehicles!).

[ilbasso]

I've made all these subforums so the good stuff doesnt get lost in the noise.

USE THEM!

Doug

All these forums are yours
Except Etched Terrain
Attempt no unrelated postings there
Use them together
Use them in peace

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

John Rehling: "And come to think of it, 40+ years after the first descent to the deepest place in the ocean, no second trip has been made there, without visible detriment to the species or the planet."

Actually, several such trips have been made -- but they've all been made by sophisticated robots (usually Japanese), which have achieved tremendously more in the way of scientific observations of the bottom of the Marianas Trench, at tremendously lower cost, than "Trieste" did in 1960 (including returned sediment samples which have provided very interesting biological information). Which proves Rehling's point even better than his own statement did.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Bob Shaw: "The best way to keep costs in perspective is to look at one simple fact: no money is spent on Mars in the process of going to Mars. It's all spent HERE, supporting industries, creating subsidiary wealth, and keeping the technological side of things ticking over -- it's an investment in our society as a whole. I'm sure the first few flights to Mars (or anywhere else) will be 'expensive' - but so long as there's not an Apollo hiatus then things will calm down somewhat."

You could use that argument to justify doing ANY goofy thing because of its secondary benefits, regardless of whether its primary benefits are as high as they should be. (Back in the early 1960s, science journalist Richard Greenberg did a spoof on the Apollo Program, in which President Kennedy decided that the best way for the US to show its technological superiority to the Russians was to teach an animal to talk before 1970.)
___________________________________

"Granted, there are some remarkably poor returns for such investments (like the ISS) but all you need is a paradigm shift or two and suddenly Burt Rutan is flying your granny to an orbital hotel - and, like it or not, the newly-minted space capitalists just wouldn't be doing what they are today if the state hadn't been there first.

If there is an economic return from space, then let the market determine it, damn it -- and stop forcing the taxpayers to pay for it. This certainly applies to space tourism, which -- for some time to come, and maybe for a VERY long time time to come -- will be limited entirely to letting spoiled millionaires fly briefly in space. Exactly why should we be forcing the taxpayers to contribute to that?
______________________________________

"I'm sure the first few flights to Mars (or anywhere else) will be 'expensive' - but so long as there's not an Apollo hiatus then things will calm down somewhat."

As Jeffrey Bell pointed out recently, except for microelectronics, there have been almost no new technological discoveries made in the last half-century that will greatly lower the cost of space travel -- and microelectronics redounds mostly to the benefit of UNMANNED space missions, whether scientific or commercial.

Shaw is, however, expressing a truth he hadn't intended -- which is that America's top priority in space technology at this point should be to try to reduce the cost of launch into Low Earth Orbit by developing launch vehicles that are as cheap as possible. Those will obviously be beneficial for ALL kinds of space missions -- manned and unmanned -- and so should be developed in any case. But we don't need to hitch a superfluous Apollo II program to that development program -- instead, we should wait until those cheaper launch vehicles are available to start work on a follow-up Apollo, because then, and only then, will manned spaceflight conceivably be worth the cost. (Given the extent to which Britain got burned on the Concorde, it's a bit flabbergasting to see a Brit peddling similar bad logic about the space program.)

[Bob Shaw]

Bruce:

I think the last paragraph of my post made exactly the point that payload to LEO costs are crucial, but that the US has consistently dropped the ball in that regard, while the Soviets/Russians have not. For an even more excessive example of the wrong way to build an economic LEO capability look at Japan - or, in the case of manned spaceflight, the stop-start Chinese Shenzhou manned space programme (and it's predecessors). So it's not a criticism of the US, so much as an appreciation of Comrade Korolev's fine engineering and the Soviet legacy of mass production!

And, as for the nouveau-capitalists in space, I'd not tried to suggest that they should be in future financed by the state, but simply that without past efforts by state-funded entities then today's lean and mean types wouldn't have been able to proceed! Not that a good few of them have been unaverse to sniffing around for gummint money when their own bucket of spondulicks has begun to run a teensy bit dry, eh?

And *don't* start me on about Concorde! It could lead me all the way to ELDO...