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Water found on Mars!

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Bushman

Bushman

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The Phoenix space probe has found water in Mars! See the attached link to the article on the NASA web page!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080731.html

A Mars mission within our lifetime? If there is water, it could sustain life. Imagine the mineral wealth. Imagine the war over who controls the red planet! It could be colonialism mark II. Will it augment the second human renaissance as humanity seeks the philosophical basis for expanding into the solar system?

Poor little Martian microbes (if they exist). They will be plundered and booted into extinction along with the dodo, the Tasmanian Aborigine and the myriad of other creatures sent to their doom by the thinking apes.
 
Bushman said:
The Phoenix space probe has found water in Mars! See the attached link to the article on the NASA web page!

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080731.html

A Mars mission within our lifetime? If there is water, it could sustain life. Imagine the mineral wealth. Imagine the war over who controls the red planet! It could be colonialism mark II. Will it augment the second human renaissance as humanity seeks the philosophical basis for expanding into the solar system?

Poor little Martian microbes (if they exist). They will be plundered and booted into extinction along with the dodo, the Tasmanian Aborigine and the myriad of other creatures sent to their doom by the thinking apes.
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the mining contracts would be off the hook, how would we go as traders living on mars, would there be a mars exchange, how would we go about figuring out time zones etc
 
The US got there first (well, at least with probes!), spending billions of dollars, doing all the work & research ... by rights, they should own it :p:
 
Nyden said:
The US got there first, spending billions of dollars, doing all the work & research ... by rights, they should own it :p:
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Probably. There would not be any doctrine for this is under international law? Could it be the same as international air space and shipping channels?

Christos it would be a legal nightmare. Maybe it would be administered by the UN?

Fascinating really. This would be what the Spaniards felt like when Christopher Columbus discovered the New World!
 
This has assumed for while but they have now got evidence.

http://www.universetoday.com/2008/07/31/we-have-water-on-mars-tega-test-confirms/

Compare these two close-up pictures taken on sol 20 (left) and sol 24 of a trench dug in the Martian surface by NASA's Phoenix Lander. Those sols of the Phoenix Mission (a sol is a Martian day), correspond to June 15 and 18 on planet Earth. Light-colored, dice-sized chunks, visible in the lower left shadow region of the trench in the sol 20 image have vanished by sol 24.
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http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080621.html
 

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I'm imagining the Martian version of Hollywood...

Earth Attacks?

War of the Worlds? - "The chances of anything coming from Earth are a million to one, he said; but still they come."

My Favourite Earthling?

Surely they have a B movie scene up there? LOL
 
It'd be too big of a task for one government IMO because citizens on mars or earth will always hate the government for favouring the other colony, but that'd be long after we're all dead :p
 
So let's assume that we will be able to get there in a craft that is of a reasonable size (in terms of payload), say within 50 years. And assuming that we havn't wiped ourselves out on this little blue planet. So, do we sow the planet Mars with a genertically modified seed that can generate huge amounts of oxygen using the carbon dioxide that we know is in the atmosphere (95% CO2)? Then let it grow for a while, maybe a hundred years, and whamo we have a breathable atmosphere and habitable planet. Then we populate the planet, and see if we can do a better job than on this one.

Apart from the science and technology required to achieve this, does anyone have a problem with this concept?
 
hi buddy, what you said about planting trees or vegatation was really intertesting i was wondering if they have studyed this in a lab or somthing like that, i dont really have a problem if we tried it i think from the earliest signs of life we were meant to expand and evolve (and make a few mistakes along the way).......i think this is meant to be anyway great thread thanks:)
 
The Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars is a good SciFi trilogy that covers the terraforming and settlement of Mars - SciFi but some good theories in there. Either way it would take a long time to produce an atmosphere and develop a soil profile suitable for Earth like life.

On the topic of going there for mineral wealth. At the moment it is all postulation that there are suitable concentrations of metals. While there is evidence of volcanism and the possibility of plate tectonics we do not know how long it lasted or how energetic it was. It may be that processes did not occur suitable for the concentration of metals. Also further to the point without the upheaval and and erosion associated with tectonics any metal concentrations formed at depth would likely still be at depth.

If I had to head anywhere in the solar system to go mining I would be off to the asteroid belt where everything is broken into nice bite sized chunks. The planets undergo differentiation during formation where Fe and Ni and other metals sink to the centre and the light silicate material forms the outer layers. Extrapolating from the meteorites found on earth 92.8% are silicate or rock meteorites, 5.7% are metallic meteorites and the rest are a mixture. So approx 6% of the meteorites within the asteroid belt are of a similar concentration to the core of the Earth, Fe and Ni dominated.

Now based on the estimation that the asteroid belt has a mass of 1/1000th of the Earth and the Earth has a mass of 5.67x10^24kg we get a mass of metallic asteroids of 3.55x10^17 tonnes or 35,500,000,000,000,000 tonnes.
So 35 quadrillion tonnes or 35 million billion tonnes of metal. None of this DSO haematite crap or nickel sulphides, you find this stuff like it just came out of the smelter.

anyway, I digress. Water on Mars, it confirms what was pretty much known, but it's a good start and hopefully it speed up the impetus to get some people up there.
 
There is quite a bit of stuff around about terraforming of Mars. I guess theoretically its possible. I just wonder if people have any moral or other objections to it. Personnaly I dont think I have a problem with it but I guess I havn't heard all the arguments against it yet, so I'm not sure whether there are any issues with it.
 
a manned mission to mars probably isn't too far off in the future, but self contained settlement and terraforming are still a long long way away.

first order of business is probably to expand our orbital bases and get some permanent structures to provide supply and industry in space. dertys asteroid comment is on the money, there have been lots of ideas about attaching thrusters to asteroids and pointing them at earth then processing them in orbital facilities.

a successful lunar base would be the proof of concept for a martian base, but even that is a fair way off (imho). we aren't quite at the tech level to accomplish this yet, we're still limited to traditional materials and launch methods and the settlement of space and beyond will require IMMENSE financial, intellectua and material capital to accomplish.

tech advancements like carbon nanotubes and new propulsion technologies and more efficient power systems need to be developed before things like this become viable (outside of national pride ventures).
 
So this is how it all ends. We stroll on over to Mars like we are the only intelligent lifeforms in the universe, claim it as ours, when unbeknownst to us a superior race was there millions of years ago and have a proxy over it that has been ratified by the Universal Alliance of Intelligent Beings (we were not included for obvioius reasons ie. the use of the word intelligent ). Hence pissing off an aggressive race who see this as a hostile takeover. They decend upon the lemmings with their anal probes and their death rays and, dissolving our bodies to dust in an instant. Viola! the end of the human race, cos we think of ourselves as the centre of the universe.... oh the humanity!
 
derty said:
Now based on the estimation that the asteroid belt has a mass of 1/1000th of the Earth and the Earth has a mass of 5.67x10^24kg we get a mass of metallic asteroids of 3.55x10^17 tonnes or 35,500,000,000,000,000 tonnes.
So 35 quadrillion tonnes or 35 million billion tonnes of metal. None of this DSO haematite crap or nickel sulphides, you find this stuff like it just came out of the smelter.
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I can see it now. From the Qrt June 2050 update of ASX-listed Magic Mushrooms NL.

'Desktop studies have identified an inferred resource of 17.5 QT of 100% FE and 17.5 QT 100% Ni. Magic has employed engineering firm Really Really Really Smart to conduct a mining plan, leading to a BFS in June Qrt 2060. Initial capex estimates are for 10 trillion global dollars.'
 
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