But what you just linked defnitely suggests a possibility of life????

Like the article you linked essentially says we know nothing and likely won't for a long time, so why are you linking an article filled with speculation to disprove speculation?

And why are you such a douche?

My current year long senior project (team of ~40) for my aerospace engineering degree is to design a less than 20 year mission to set up a manned outpost (>300 day stay) on either Phobos or Deimos (Mars' moons), including excursions on Mars and at least one moon, that would be possible using NASA's current budget, adjusting for inflation and maintaining all other current contract obligations.

I have no idea right now but I'll let you guys know if we decide that this matters, lol

dude, the guy asked "how do they know it's water". i said "they found small quantity of hydrated salt" because that's what they used to determine its water. i'm not disproving freaking NASA, what the fuck is wrong with you.

also, i'm not a pessimist, just a realist who don't go around saying that there is life out there without having no clue whatsoever of what i'm talking about.

the mathematical probability of life is the exact opposite of what you said. considering the scale of the OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE, exactly why i quoted the fermi paradox.

and bruh, "your blablabla application of the fermi paradox is blablabla not supported by the majority of the sicentific community".

not only you don't have any fact or data to make that claim, i'm interested in knowing what kind of scientific community you're referring to. You're probably using the general consensus of ignorant people on the internet.

if that's what you got from the article, you obviously didn't read it. your "the article you linked essentially says" proves that. what you mean is "i completely misinterpreted the article and this is my equivocated view of what the article said"

While you're all arguing about other neat stuff, it's getting pretty clear that this news is being slightly taken for granted. We have a fucking robot on another planet and helped us discover (not just the robot, but also not the point) very strong evidence of flowing water. Whether this planet has life hiding somewhere on or in it is next or close to, but this is all too surreal still and I think what we have now should be the main focus.

Explain to me how the articles points of: We don't know if there is life but there is certainly the possibility of life does not equivocate into "Possibility of life"

http://cdn1.theodysseyonline.com/files/2015/02/16/635596455202180449440465362_squid12.jpeg

Solar is the best option, for the early stages at the very least. It would take about twice the area to generate the same amount of energy here on earth, but even so it would be safer, more reliable, and I would guess cheaper than nuclear. The whole no atmosphere thing would also make it more consistent than here on earth.

Hunting for life outside of earth is necessary for our understanding of life, how it comes to be, and our place in the universe. Fundamental questions that science is well within its right to try and answer.
And the only resources we lose by searching for life is the metal and manpower we spend making spacecrafts and going through mountains of data. The money spent goes back into the economy, so what's really the issue?

There is no reason to be aggressive towards people that are enthusiastic about a topic they don't know everything about, especially astronomy.

With the number of habitable zone exoplanets discovered in recent years and considering how fast life was able to develop on earth it wouldn't be too surprising if at least one other planet in our galaxy has some form of life. Sentient or not. There isn't any evidence to prove one way or the other yet sure, but it's fine to think one way or the other as long as you don't present it as fact.

brothah, the article has over 200 lines, you read the last 4 and used that to completely misinterpret the entire thing. either you fucking read the whole thing or you just stop trying. please.

thank you.

even though your statement of "evidence" ignores credibility and the fact that one's closest to the truth is that who presents itself to be more rational and methodical, you've been so far the least idiot to talk about this. i appreciate your neutrality and lack of fallacies. thanks man.

Nice, but not surprising.

About nuclear: No, just no.
First of all there's a slight difference between a nuclear submarine which can dock and refuel and where a reactor malfunction will at worst result in the death of the crew, a crew which by the way is sitting on 92.2Mt worth of nuclear warheads. The best possible outcome in case of a reactor shutdown would be no casualties. Compare that with what happens on a Mars colony. No power ->You're fucked. Any replacement parts are at least 18 months away. Everyone dies.

You're right about shipping fuel though. It's not feasible. The solution is not to ship any fuel. Photovoltaics will have to do. Think about it. No one would be insane enough to have the ship powered by a nuclear reactor during flight. There probably won't be a return trip so you can use those panels. You'll need a few more but shipping them should be doable. Bonus: Prices will be falling below 1$/W for a run of the mill system soon, so even factoring in radiation hardening, which is a given in nuclear reactors, and only a bit more than half the irradiance they should actually be cheaper. Unless you're getting it built by the Chinese you're looking at >4.5$/W for a nuclear power plant on Earth. That's excluding fuel cost and let me tell you, shipping to Mars is expensive. A few million dollars per ton just to get it into orbit, not even close to Mars. A rough estimate says 1 ton of uranium should get you about 20 years at 2MW, so around 2kW/kg. Add the rods and it's <1kW/kg. Even with current technology solar panels should get you 150W/kg on Mars. Add the reactor or life expectancy >20 years for the panels and it's not looking good. It's simply not worth dealing with the risks and complexity.

Fermi Paradox is just a discrepancy between the expected amount of life and the actual amount. According to what we know it should be far higher. Which means either the universe is a lot more dangerous than we thought it is or life and evolution aren't as easy as we think they are.
So mathematical probability isn't an argument you should be using to tell us there's no life out there.
Also going by mathematical probability Boltzmann brain wins by a very large margin.

actually my initial idea was the contrast the mathematical probability with the fermi paradox
now that i reread my comments, i seem to have worded it a bit wrong, my bad. you are correct about this.

Now that we have found something worthwhile on Mars, the new space race will begin. American flags need to get planted over there ASAP.

fuck that lets all move off this god forsaken planet first :^)

So does that mean I am correct in my interpretation that the Fermi paradox does not rule out life existing in any way and is in fact just speculation as to why we haven't seen it yet.

But wouldn't solar's effectiveness be greatly reduced due to the amount of particulates at Mars like aforementioned dust storms which can render solar power generation almost nill? I don't deny short term it is the easiest but the amount of panels and the cost of such highly efficient panels/the need for maintenance greatly reduce their viability.

Uhm, we have plenty of water here.

Let's get back to the moon first. Fusion reactors would be very helpful for that, not to help us get there, but to make us get there. Helium-3 would be a good incentive.

It's also way easier to get to Mars from the Moon. Thanks to earths escape velocity you need about 12 times a vehicle's weight in rocket propellant to get away. On the Moon 2 times is plenty. You still need to get to Mars which is about the same effort as starting from Earth. Also assembling a spacecraft on the moon might be easier than doing it in orbit. A base on Moon would mean that either in orbit or on the Moon we'd have the facilities to assemble it which is basically mandatory. Going directly from Earth to Mars would mean ~250:1 fuel ratio.

EDIT: #43/44
Yes, the Fermi Paradox is the question why we haven't seen it even though we should've. It not existing is only one of the possible answers. Keep in mind that while we are listening (SETI) we are not broadcasting. You'd need way too much energy for that, we can only do focused transmission and some argue (you can look it up if you want to get deeper into the Fermi Paradox) that we shouldn't even do that. So life existing but choosing not to communicate is a possibility.

About solar panel maintenance: It's quite the opposite. The rovers were only expected to operate 3 months before the accumulated dust would render them inoperable due to the solar panels power output being too low, but the wind kept cleaning the them. Also all the maintenance needed to solve that problem can be done with a broom.

wouldnt the energy expenditure building on the moon be the same overall? you're still doing the same physical work of moving the ship so like the same energy is needed, but now yr doing it over several launches that are all expensive as shit. Like unless it'd be impossible to get to mars from earth what'd be the benefit?

I did not know about the wind cleaning effect that is pretty great.

I'm glad my hypothesis of Quert being a pedantic douche was verified. Thank you for the actual conversation Setsul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75_Y1ggoh94

http://goo.gl/4aNZVl

I would imagine geothermal would be (the most) viable on Mars. I'm no planetary scientist but if I remember correctly Mars has a pretty decent amount of heat in there (not to mention the biggest volcano in the solar system). Put a giant metal rod down the volcano's throat and put the other end into a bunch of water and there's your steam. Obviously that's oversimplified but still, geothermal is good. Someone correct me if Mars isn't so hot underground. Solar power is just difficult because of how far the sun is prob.

@Quert you really are an unpleasant man aren't you

#46
It's not about the fuel itself, rather how you store it. Saturn V or SLS are fucking massive, now imagine 20 times the weight and volume. Slapping 2 booster rockets on something to get it off the moon is easy, but you can't do that with 200. Building it on the Moon vs Low Earth Orbit depends on how much easier if at all the gravity makes it because you actually have to use more energy to land on the moon and start again compared to going directly. Getting to the moon directly is about the maximum that makes sense. For the past decades we've been using rockets that max out at 20-30t payload to LEO. The Falcon Heavy is supposed to manage 53t. The SLS Block 1 93t, Block 2 130t. The Saturn V was 140t. All in one go won't work, you can't build something that big in Earth's gravity unless you spent literally millions of tons on structure (think skyscraper). So the plan is to assemble just what goes to Mars in orbit. That means you only have to build something about the size of the Saturn V or SLS, a few thousand tons. Structural integrity is obviously not a problem, those things held on Earth so without gravity you can build it even lighter. Compare that with a few hundred thousand tons + structure to actually hold it together if you were to start on Earth.

Then there's fuel cost vs actual cost. 90-95% of the spacecraft will be fuel. Building a huge few hundred thousand tons (empty weight a few ten thousand tons) is insane. Getting a few hundred tons of spacecraft into orbit to assemble it and a few thousand tons of fuel after that is easy. Liquid fuel, tank shape is irrelevant, you can max out relatively cheap commercial rockets (SpaceX's goal <1000$ per pound to orbit) and just repeat until everything is up there. If you wanted to really cheap out you could use a single reusable system. Fuel cost stays about the same (structural overhead on both small and huge rocket is significant) but you only have to build one small rocket instead of a huge rocket 200 times the size. The cost benefit should be obvious. Cost of assembling the actual Mars stage in orbit that you'd have to build either way will be way less than that. Also it will be lighter and easier to build since it doesn't have to hold together under gravity.

A moon base would just mean that the infrastructure to do it would already exist + economies of scale.
Unless we build a space elevator, but I don't think that'll be before our first manned Mars mission.

If you are talking about "life", they are already out there in the universe. It may not be the life that we all think, but when spaceships/satellites are lanched, they contain bacterias that can survive even in space (yes, we sterolize them, but this process isn't perfect enough to get rid of all the bacteria).
Also, when an asteroid landed on earth millions of years ago to form the moon, huge chunks of land were launched into space that contained early forms of life including bacterias that can survive in space. With immensly small probabilities, these chunks of land collided into other planets in our solar system. This chance is close to impossible, but who knows.

Of course, these are life forms originally from earth, but they are still life forms outside of earth.

You're mixing something up. Life coming to earth on meteoroids/asteroids/comets/planetoids or by spacecraft is a legitimate theory (->we are all illegal aliens). The other way round it's a lot more difficult. Bacteria can't survive forever so you need a habitable planet and we haven't sent spacecraft to a whole lot of those, they're not exactly abundant in this solar system.
Also, even if we're going with the most optimistic theories for cooling + Late Heavy Bombardment we're still looking at 100 million years of cooling before Earth got solid ground. Only 30 to 50 million years after the solar system's formation Earth got hit by a Mars-sized planet. No chance in hell (that era was called Hadean (Hades ~ greek hell) because the floor was literally lava) of any life before that. More pessimistic theories say that life either didn't survive or didn't even exist until after the LHB, another 700 million years later.

http://i.imgur.com/LpuF460.jpg

I apologize, I misread your original statement to be more in tune with your later comments (pessimistic). You don't have to be so rude though ("what the fuck is wrong with you"), that's a simple misunderstanding. Just asked you to fuck off and let people be happy. Sadly you couldn't do that.

All realists are pessimists that don't like to be called pessimists. And I do have a very good clue of what I'm talking about thanks.

Why would you quote the Fermi paradox, that's against your point. Do YOU know what you're talking about? The paradox is a discrepancy between how much life we know we should have (a lot) and how much life we do have (we haven't seen anything) and says that it's because of a skewed value. Not that there isn't any, it just hasn't been seen because of that value.

I mean how you were applying the paradox doesn't fit with the definition of the paradox sooooooooooo

You don't have any data either, and I'm using the general consensus of the scientific community based on studies and peer-reviewed work.

Sorry for the tangent. Let's get back to what we were talking about. Photovoltaics?

tfw u learn more browsing tftv than paying attention to the lecture you're supposed to be listening to

I imagine, if we *were* to do something other than a quick layover on Mars, it would be something like the Soviet plan for planetary observation - see, contrary to the "space race" mythos they weren't really interested in going to the moon. There's nothing of value on the moon, it's just neato. What they wanted to do was build a massive rocket (still to date the most powerful rocket ever built - I mean look at this shit it's star wars calibur shit http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/russia/n1-1.jpg - yes that's 30 rocket engines in the first stage). You would then use *several* of these massive rockets to lift various pieces of a space station into orbit, using rendezvous missions to construct the platform piece by piece. Then you would send up additional rockets and attach them for propulsion to another planet (initially the plan was for Venus, but once it was discovered that Venus is a literal hell-scape with acid rain, Mars was picked as the alternative target). Then you would just float the platform to Mars, and it would be a base of operations for an extensive study of the planet and its moons, and any manned missions to the planet itself would be supported by the space platform orbiting Mars itself.

The benefit of this, is that you don't have to worry about colonizing Mars, you don't have to worry about it being a one-way trip, and you can carry myriad supplies and scientific implements in the on-board storage of the facility (it doesn't matter how oddly shaped you are in space so long as your propulsion system can get you going in the right direction without making you spin in circles). Then you just dump any new supplies and astronauts on the platform orbiting Mars, and periodically, you bring samples and people back home. You can also just ship new pieces for the space station as needed if any upgrades are required.

Unfortunately the whole program was scrapped because the N1 rocket kept tearing itself apart :(

I think it would be cool to at least make an effort to do something with Mars - it has potential to be a very interesting planet and the failure of the last attempt to create a climate/geological orbiter means that we need more ways to study the chance that we can actually do something to Mars or its climate (which sounds far-fetched but terraforming is viable if we put some more research into it).

#57
That has pretty much always been the plan, assemble an aerodynamical mess in orbit and send it to Mars.
About the N1, sorry to rain on your parade but while 95t to LEO, 23.5t to TLI is impressive compared to todays rockets (excluding the SLS) if it had actually worked, you have to compare it with the only rocket with the same purpose: The Saturn V. 140t to LEO, 48.6t to TLI.
What did we learn from this? Double the propulsive efficiency gets work done, just strapping more engines to it will make it explode.