What is coming through to me in your posts is that you are not really a fan of the human exploration of Mars and your main interest lies in restricting who would get to go to the Red Planet, if you would let anyone go at all.I don't care about the non-existent bugs on that planet and the obvious safety concerns with getting there. That shouldn't stop the people who really want to go from going. People all over terra die doing various recreational stuff every day, even in the nanny states. So what.
Preliminary evidence indicates it is a hostile planet.
But did you not see the quote from the NASA workshop that some forward contamination by humans is inevitable?
...there are no significant resources that can sustain/support life of an unreasonably large population.
You need to transform the environment somehow to enable the manned colonization.
I've also determined in other posts that the search for microbes/other dormant life will not be conclusive. The agenda for finding life is dependent on conditions that existed in Mars more than 4.5 billion years ago before Mars lost its magnetosphere. There is no indication of complex life on Earth during that time. So this effort on Mars is really running on fumes.
Nobody really believes that life on Earth was started by microbes on meteors. There is simply NO evidence of this. NASA has been duped into performing missions of only philosophical/anti-religious value, that will never be clearly achieved by their stated objectives. There will always be some argument with their results. This is not inspiring kids into science, technology and math.... and I don't blame them.
In the case of barrenness, we run the risk of an Earthly virus running amok in the closed hab, but this medical emergency will have to be solved as much in advance as possible for the ring station and the lunar colony as well. If it is conceived that an Earthly bacteria will mutate into a super-flu, because what, the combination of UV and Beryllium is perfect for this possibility? Then what? It seems quite a bit less likely than us getting our own rightly feared super-flu back on Earth.
If there is extinct life, and it is thought that somehow this dead alien DNA will infect and mutate our bacteria to some new form, then it must also be totally accepted that Jurassic Park is right around the corner. The only way dead alien DNA could successfully meld with Earthly DNA is thru deliberate manipulation by living humans, 'cause it certainly can't be done by dead aliens. I can't see this as the problem forbidding human colonization.
If there are living ecosystems there already, there is a very compelling argument to keep orbiting and observing for a long time. I don't have a "plan" for this. In my defense, I've been criticized roundly for thinking far in advance. But hey: I've got limits as to how far I'd project my speculations.As always, if the rovers should find a stone axe or a calculator, all bets are off.
As to the Wiki page which you have made yourself the major contributor. Perhaps you can now see that a "crowd" of one, has limited knowledge to share. What everybody seems to be overlooking in this crowd sourced, hive minded document, is that the whole is only as good as the pieces. There are a lot of faulty pieces making up this whole.
I saw an episode recently, I believe on Discovery Science channel, and a biologist who studies microbial life forms living in harsh environments stated that data from the MSO shows methane levels emanating from ancient volcanic vents on the surface to be consistent with large underground colonies of bacteria.Even if the planet were totally lifeless, there is great value in the geology as well as the potential for terraforming.
So the organisms we take to Mars would spread out through the surface,
and would evolve very rapidly
as micro-organisms do, because of the horizontal genetic transfer between them, and the relatively short generations. Studies have been done using just small colonies in flasks and they evolve into distinct versions with different traits in a fairly short time on the years time scale, not the longer time scales of animals etc.
So with the whole of Mars in place of the flask of the laboratory experiments, and with many diverse habitats there to try to colonise
So - then they have evolved without any of the usual restraints of the rest of the eco-system you get on Earth
So - that's why you might get new pathogens evolving as a result of introducing some new organisms to Mars
Generally people tend to be too timid with wikipedia, and don't take up the invitation to dive in and be bold, especially in these science areas (while in other areas like politics they might be too bold I suppose).
...very remote chance of early intelligent life. It would have to get off to an impressively fast and early start on Mars. Since we really know nothing much about how easy it is for intelligence to develop,... wouldn't say absolutely no myself, but extremely unlikely on basis of what we know so far
So if there are any mistakes in my contribution then they should find them sooner or later.
It would be hysteria if I said the probability is high. Just saying the probability is unknown, and that when you risk so much, even a tiny probability can't be contemplated.
Quote from: robertinventor on 06/20/2012 11:17 pmGenerally people tend to be too timid with wikipedia, and don't take up the invitation to dive in and be bold, especially in these science areas (while in other areas like politics they might be too bold I suppose). It is interesting that such a timidity exists, especially with the promise of anonymity that Wiki offers. As an interesting, to me at least, digression, I believe that the crowd sourced online model would work if the sources were actually people. As it is, the sources are anonymous avatars, who supply misinformation at voluminous rates. Some of us only have 24.7 hours in the day, and there's simply not enough time to fix Wiki.
Quote from: Robert...very remote chance of early intelligent life. It would have to get off to an impressively fast and early start on Mars. Since we really know nothing much about how easy it is for intelligence to develop,... wouldn't say absolutely no myself, but extremely unlikely on basis of what we know so farMankind has no idea how long that process takes, and a sketchy idea of how long it took in our case. Our particular circumstantial past, complete with extinction events, is not by any stretch the only theoretical path that the genesis of self conscious intelligent life could take. As far as that idea goes, we could not tell if there is an intelligent species of our advancement on Andromeda, just to pick a galaxy at random.So it is with the genesis of life itself. We have one data point to go from, and the scientificists have no mechanism at all to hypothesize about its origin.Nut the general sense is that Mars is barren. I have no idea what the truth of the matter is.
Quote from: RobertSo if there are any mistakes in my contribution then they should find them sooner or later.Good to see that you said "should", not "will".
Quote from: robertinventor on 06/21/2012 09:01 amIt would be hysteria if I said the probability is high. Just saying the probability is unknown, and that when you risk so much, even a tiny probability can't be contemplated. Unfortunately, you use the hysterical term, "can't". The risk needs to be determined so that we "can" contemplate a manned landing on Mars.
Unfortunately, NASA is pre-occupied with insisting that terrestrial life, in some new and unusual cases is actually alien life, that is, when they're not building rockets to nowhere, or retiring rockets that work. Thus, they are content to look merely for "signs" of life elsewhere, and are happy to move the goalposts to more distant locations, like Europa, bleeding funding from a quicker, more productive development of cis-lunar capabilities.
I am curious how would you stop private colonists from going to Mars.I sure hope US government will not become some sort of dictatorship which prohibits its citizens from exploring and settling outer space.
The nearest I can think of is if it gets some kind of international protected status, similar to Antarctica, probably some kind of international treaty that no-one is to land on it for the time being.
That depends also on whether we want to terraform it first as human colonists could get in the way of terraformation...
NASA is pre-occupied with insisting that terrestrial life, in some new and unusual cases is actually alien life...
Could be.
I am curious how would you stop private colonists from going to Mars.
With potential cost of Mars real estate and resources of immeasurable trillions of dollars...
Quote from: robertinventor on 06/21/2012 04:12 pmThe nearest I can think of is if it gets some kind of international protected status, similar to Antarctica, probably some kind of international treaty that no-one is to land on it for the time being.With potential cost of Mars real estate and resources of immeasurable trillions of dollars, good luck keeping people out. Especially that you apparently want to protect some Martian bacteria. Bacteria now have more rights than humans? Gosh...