Mars One Project: Glorious Adventure - Ending in Tragedy?

[Stone1]

This is not exactly the right forum place for my post but the closest one. If it should be posted under general chat, please mister moderator transfer it there!

If you are interested in space exploration like me, you certainly heard about the Mars One project.
Details on

So what I'd like to discuss with other forum visitors, is there a realistic chance of success for shipping humans to Mars within 10 years time? And what could the benefits be?
Or will we be just sending suicide explorers to a far-away planet to no avail?

Mars is a dune-like planet with no humus nor much of an atmosphere, some mineral resources for sure, but consider the cost of bringing them back here.
And what about ethics? Should we allow a private company to send people into their doom? Of course, the candidates are not being forced to take this one-way ticket, but nevertheless they are doomed to die on another planet, the company is not legally bound to bring them back. Will we have an obligation as a society to invest large amounts of cash and resources to organize a rescue mission afterwards?

Aside from all doubts and fears, isn't it great to live in a time where we soon will have the opportunity to set foot on another planet! It must have been similarly exciting for people who were born earlier to see the first human on the moon (in monochrome, but live!).


The austrian adventurer and stratosphere-jumper Felix Baumgartner will bite his ass if only eleven years after his record-jump some other guy or girl will be the first human on mars. But he also thinks that some mild dictatorship would do us all some good. Strange fellow, there must have been some synaptic malfunctioning when he hit the sound barrier.

[HarryStottle]

hadn't even spotted this one until just now.

Does (from 2006!) answer your question?

[Stone1]

It's been four years since I read that post so I admit that I forgot about it.

Your predictions sound reasonable to me and the trend in the scientific community already is set towards automated exploration. I guess we'll also see increased space tourism, elitist as it is now, but also available at a reasonable price for a middle-class income in a few decades. I'm already putting some bucks aside. A moon hotel cabin with earth view for a week with my wife at my 60th birthday, that should be feasible.

So I conclude that the trip to Mars might be the last big adventure of mankind 'in real life'. Makes me shiver a bit, on the other hand being alive at this critical time of human evolution - and if all goes well I'll still be - is overwhelming.

Of course it's also possible that it might take us a little longer to reach the stage of digital life (up to a century, as you wrote ). Then perhaps when I'm an old man I'll take the trip to Jupiter that Arthur C. Clarke envisioned.

Let's just hope that we've bound our authorities to a reasonable behaviour until then or else those precious (without the gravity of Jupiter, the inner solar system including Earth would be doomed) gas giants might be vaporized in a space fight between armed space drones and suicide terrorist spaceships .

Hehe, I've found a linux gadget replacing my Hal9000 theme, now my computer sounds even more psychotic, but at least it's much more polite than under MS Windows. Did you ever try Linux? It's always sorry and apologizes when running into an error.

[HarryStottle]

I've "dabbled" with linux and wish I could live in it, but my principal programming language is Visual Foxpro which only works under windoze so me and my clients are stuck with it (though that won't last much longer as microsoft have terminated development on it)

I like the sound of that HAL9000 theme. Might go looking for a windoze version...

[Stone1]

You can find it here:

MS support for Foxpro ends January 2015. It's in heavy use in german IT. I wonder if I should buy some Oracle stock?

By the way, what I write in italics is not serious, it's just ironical commenting or rethorical questions. Nice you answered anyway and have fun with the HAL gadget and a nice weekend to you, venerable sire.
See, if you pet me 'squire', I can have my revenge. I'm gonna pay a visit to the frenchmen late September, I wonder how far I will get there with my french skills. Je vais voir. A bientôt.

[HarryStottle]

aha, downloaded. Now I have to see if it's safe to use a windoze 7 theme on windoze 8...

are you a foxprogrammer as well?

[Stone1]

You're really an early adopter, Mr. Stottle. Windoze 8 eh? Wouldn't touch that with a long stick. Except with a touch-notebook mayhaps. I wonder if it's coincidence that Ballmer takes his hat less than a year after the release of that 'OS'. Just the next step in a chain of failures, from Windoze phone over Windoze Surface RT and the master plan to release new Windows versions in shorter intervals - windows 8 took away the start button, windows 8.1 brings it back to the users. Plus a super-duper touch interface with integrated gadget store. Marketing at its finest. Planned obsolescence in operating systems. Were it not that I like to do some serious gaming from time to time, I'd given up on MS long ago. Although Windows 7 SP 1 runs quite smoothly on my machine. Not a single BSOD since I installed it.

No, I'm not a foxprogrammer, I just tought myself basic on the C64 and learned (turbo) pascal (for Windoze) at school, later on IBM RPG/400 on the glorious AS/400 and picked up some C++ along the way. But I haven't done any coding for almost a decade. Instead I started playing chess again.

[HarryStottle]

Personally, I find chess too stressful!

On the Windoze 8 front, at the risk of sounding enthusiastic about microsoft, which I definitely aint, I have to say W8 doesn't suck anywhere near as bad as many have suggested. I'm running 3 of my personal workstations on it and it is definitely an improvement on W7. The start menu nonsense is easily cured by downloading a copy of Start8 which essentially forces W8 to revert to W7 behaviour and does it so convincingly that you can forget you're on W8. So I've actually paid for 3 copies (@ $5 a pop, last of the big spenders). Only when my mouse drifts off to the sides of one of my monitors do I get a reminder that I'm on 8.

It's about twice as fast in most operations and inherently more secure, though I won't touch with a bargepole.

My humble tosh NB300 netbook was about to hit the scrapheap when - out of curiousity more than anything - I decided to install W8 on it and, bejasus, it's made the damn thing usable again! Seriously, it boots from cold to usable in a smidge under 35 seconds (and that's coming up to a year later, none of the usual slowdown). But I have to confess I've deliberately kept it as minimalist as is humanly possible. My two "serious" workstations used to start up in a minute or so but they're back to about 3 minutes, which is still twice as fast as W7 became.

It's a little more stable than W7. I probably BSOD'd that on average once a month, I think I've only BSOD'd W8 twice in the last 10 months or so and I think that was down to an incompatible Nvidia driver.

Was pretty impressed with how well it found drivers for everything except my webcam. Not so impressed with how much of my essential software needed special W8 versions but that got sorted fairly rapidly and, as of now, ignoring the huge unknown of potential backdoors for the MIB, I'm moderately content...

[Stone1]

[HarryStottle]

Holy shit.

I want some of whatever you're smoking.

Let's start as randomly as you've written by dealing with the last question first: The syntax for quoting someone is
{quote="someone"}whatever they said that you want to quote{/quote}
but replace all the curly brackets with square ones.

if you forget, then click the "Quote" button on any post and you'll see the entire text surrounded like the above.

On windoze and booting. Am jealous of the solid state drive. If I could figure out how to use Rollback RX (EazFix for W8) with a solid state drive I might go for it. The joy of booting to ready in less than a minute....

On Magnetic flips. Never been convinced by the doom mongers. Looks like it would cause more problems with our Satellites and Wireless Communications than anything else; which would probably be expensive and inconvenient but neither life nor species threatening.

On South Atlantic Magnetic Anomalies. Not heard of anything new. Are you referring to

On Syria: well at least, this time, there's no dispute about the presence of WMD. The "only" problem is that we have no proof (publicly available at least) as to who used them. Have they learned from Iraq? On the evidence front, wait and see. On the military front, I don't think they'd even consider doing more than a missile campaign but the exact effects of that are completely unpredictable. Would, for example, a desperate Assad, launch a last gasp chemical attack on Israel? And if even a single missile got through the Israeli shield and killed a couple of hundred in, say Tel Aviv, what would Israel do in response? Not a pretty thought. It could escalate VERY seriously. I don't see it triggering a global nuclear exchange, but wouldn't be surprised if one or two local mushrooms sprouted and THAT would cause a complete political meltdown, including, almost certainly, the end of the UN.

On alien embassies: don't get me started!
oh. you have.

why would they need/want an embassy on planet? Safer and less threatening off planet.
why would they need to suppress the magnetic field in a vague and imprecise manner which may or may not be what we're seeing in the southern hemisphere?

Nah, my money is still on digital aliens existing in nothing more substantial than a plasma cloud or possibly some multidimensional construct which allows them to interface with us in an avatar form calculated to mitigate our xenophobia. More importantly, if they're out there at all, they're probably watching us as we speak and have absolutely no intention of intervening or introducing themselves until we're vastly more grown up than we are today. If we're in the realm of complete speculation (which we seem to be today) I would guess that they're using a form of surveillance technology which we're not even capable of detecting and only when we ARE capable of detecting it, will they confirm their existence and begin any kind of dialogue...

[Stone1]

[Stone1]

Another question to the philosopher about Syria:

How should the international community react to the abuse of chemical weapons? Today I read that probably Assad's brother Maher is responsible for the strike, and that the Assad family has already fled to Teheran (this is not officially confirmed, the US think tank Stratfor claims that). If that is true and the responsible leaders have fled already, would a limited strike against military targets like the c-weapons stores and facilities be still justified considering the possible consequences?

[HarryStottle]

still getting feet under table after family sojourn in Devon (delightful, thanks for asking; the weather was stunning. Accomodation excellent. Devon scrumpy awesome)

will put up a more considered reply in due course. Syria has definitely become interesting in my absence...

[Stone1]

Devonshire, eh? My parents visited Clovelly last year. Got some truffels as a souvenir, if I remember correctly. Tasty!
Glad you enjoyed your holidays, Harry. I'll stay tuned.

It's back to the diplomacy table in Syria, there's still the chance of a UN-resolution together with Russia and China. Let's hope for the best.