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Heroes Community > Other Side of the Monitor > Thread: NASA? Miltary?
Thread: NASA? Miltary? This thread is 3 pages long: 1 2 3 · «PREV
TitaniumAlloy
TitaniumAlloy


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posted November 22, 2007 09:02 AM

Why would you want to live on the moon or mars...

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Mytical
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posted November 22, 2007 09:06 AM

Take a good long look around, see what is all happening on earth.  Think about it for a bit...


Now, on the Moon or Mars it would be rough that is true.  However, to get away from some of the humans on this planet...I'd even live on Pluto
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Binabik
Binabik


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posted November 22, 2007 09:14 AM

Woooah, negative vibes!!!

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Adrius
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posted November 22, 2007 09:24 AM

This whole thing with exploring different planets, asteroids and other things is all about USA beating other countries in discoveries... The money should go to the worlds children, or why not try to save our own world with it instead of trying to find other worlds to explore and destroy?
The best proof of the universe having intelligent life is that they havent tried taking contact with us....

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TitaniumAlloy
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posted November 22, 2007 09:26 AM
Edited by TitaniumAlloy at 09:34, 22 Nov 2007.

@Mytical
Quote:
Take a good long look around, see what is all happening on earth.  Think about it for a bit...


Now, on the Moon or Mars it would be rough that is true.  However, to get away from some of the humans on this planet...I'd even live on Pluto

You can live on Earth in isolation too, you just choose not to.
There is nothing on the Moon and there is nothing on Mars that's even remotely useful beyond expanding our scientific knowledge for the sake of saying we can, and have done so.
Difference in gravity aside, the moon and mars have absolutely nothing to offer in respect to a lifestyle, or someone staying there.

Another H-congruous world, on the other hand, is an entirely different story



@Adrius
Quote:
This whole thing with exploring different planets, asteroids and other things is all about USA beating other countries in discoveries... The money should go to the worlds children, or why not try to save our own world with it instead of trying to find other worlds to explore and destroy?

That's a good point, we should save our own world, and is hard to argue with.
The fact is, though, that we aren't doing that (enough), and NASA spendings have no effect on that. If people really wanted to abolish poverty, they would get to it. But they prefer to spend their money on Heroes V expansions and convertible cars.

I don't see why it should be EITHER science OR (environment/poverty/stereotypical heart-throb cause). Why not complain about that same money not being taken out of, say, your computer game industry? I suspect that claim would be pretty quiet around here.
Because people make money out of computer games. There are thousands of other pointless ways that money is spent, even tax payer money, that make NASA look golden in comparison.

If you want your money to go to a starving child, then do it.
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Mytical
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posted November 22, 2007 09:31 AM

Quote:

The best proof of the universe having intelligent life is that they havent tried taking contact with us....


QFE, QFT

They are smart enough to stay away from us.  As for negativity, there is too much anger and hatred in the world.  To much suffering and pain.  .  Causes a little negativity, especially around this time of year.  See so much excess, so much waste.  Gets me a little down.  Yeah, I am not perfect, don't pretend to be.  So I have issues , deal with it
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Binabik
Binabik


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posted November 22, 2007 09:43 AM

Quote:
Woooah, negative vibes!!!
That was my imitation of Donald Sutherland as that French proto-hippy. Wish i could remember the name of that movie.

On topic.

My opinion is that we will never travel outside the solar system. And if we do, it will be so far in the future that any allocation of money for that purpose is a waste. It can be better spent elsewhere, whether you think it should be spent on humanity or sciences.

I don't buy into the argement that the sooner we get started, the sooner we will get there. Any technology advanced enough to reach multiple times the speed of light is so far advance that anything we do now is trivial. The money spent on NASA is very inefficient. If the same money is spent on virtually any type of original research, but spent efficiently, then it advances us further in the sciences in general, and therefore advances us further in application specific sciences.

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Adrius
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posted November 22, 2007 09:43 AM

I think the world as we know will come to an end, but i don´t think the human race will be doomed. We´ll find a way to survive, that´s what we´re good at. Btw, do you guys think that the world will be soaked in glacial waters or will it be a more "the day after tomorrow" world, like a new iceage? Or maybe we´ll just get burned to death?

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Binabik
Binabik


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posted November 22, 2007 10:00 AM

Quote:
Why not complain about that same money not being taken out of, say, your computer game industry?
Computer games have always pushed the technology. The money spent on games is returned to advance the technology. Does it really matter where the funding comes from as long as it advances the technology and that technology can be used for other useful purposes?

Games certainly haven't been the only thing funding computer technology, far from it. But it is significant. If our computer technology was less advanced, would we have already mapped DNA or created models to study the effects of global warming?

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TitaniumAlloy
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posted November 22, 2007 01:46 PM
Edited by TitaniumAlloy at 13:50, 22 Nov 2007.

Binabik money spent on NASA doesn't go towards building faster-than-light spacecraft or intersolar colonization...

Quote:
I think the world as we know will come to an end, but i don´t think the human race will be doomed. We´ll find a way to survive, that´s what we´re good at. Btw, do you guys think that the world will be soaked in glacial waters or will it be a more "the day after tomorrow" world, like a new iceage? Or maybe we´ll just get burned to death?

Either:
-We wipe ourselves out through climate change (ice age, floods, atmosphere no longer viable)

-An ice age comes around regardless

-An asteroid wipes out human life

-A war results in a nuclear winter

-We become extinct due to an epidemic virus

-The sun explodes, we are unharmed by solar flares but we have no sun



Cheery

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Adrius
Adrius


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posted November 22, 2007 01:57 PM

Do you mean if the sun turns into a supernova? Then it would grow extremly fast, burn the earth into and then explode, or turn into a black hole.

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TitaniumAlloy
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posted November 24, 2007 06:21 AM

No apparently a recent study indicates that the solar flares wouldn't reach earth to burn it when the sun dies...

Here's an interesting article that weighs up possible options of future colonization:

Where to next in Earths dying days?

Earth is now so dangerous that humans must find a new home if the species is to survive. That was Stephen Hawking's message last week. But where should we go? Alok Jha weighs up the options, from the mountains of Mars to the acid clouds of Venus.
1. THE MOON

Pros

¡ö Great views of Earth, and it will take just three days to get there in the exploration vehicle NASA is designing.
¡ö It's made from the same stuff as Earth (it was knocked out of our planet in a violent asteroid collision billions of years ago) and is full of minerals that could be used to build shelters, help make fuel and oxygen, and sustain life. One useful mineral is ilmenite, which could provide colonists with oxygen, hydrogen and helium.
¡ö NASA is scouting for ideas on how to build a base there in the next few decades. Stephen Hawking talked about people having a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and that's theoretically possible, although NASA's plans are in their infancy. Because taking materials into space is so expensive, scientists want to be ready to build as much as possible on the moon.
¡ö Food will be a major issue (along with oxygen) when living on a large, airless, lifeless rock, but NASA has been working with microbiologist Amy Grunden of North Carolina State University on genetically engineering crops that can be grown in harsh, off-planet environments.
¡ö You can plan where to build your mansion; it's possible to buy real estate there. Pick a decent spot.

Cons
¡ö The unending sea of grey might get depressing, and much of the moon is permanently in shadow ¡ª gloomy and cold.
¡ö While talk of people living in domes is all very well, no one has succeeded in designing a shelter (or a way to build a one) that would be safe from asteroids, while allowing in enough light to remain pleasant to live in (and grow plants).
¡ö The lack of gravity will eventually tell. Kevin Fong, a doctor specialising in space medicine at University College, London, says low gravity will eventually cause bones and muscles to waste.
¡ö People have been selling land on the moon since the 1970s. One British-based company says it has sold more than $7 million worth. But the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs drew up the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, and that says no nation can claim ownership of any celestial body, including the moon. This may mean your deeds to land on the moon will prove worthless.
¡ö Finally: if Stephen Hawking thinks we need to leave Earth to avoid getting wiped out in some major catastrophe, will running to the moon be far enough?

2. MARS

Pros

¡ö Stunning scenery, if you like red, and great for climbers ¡ª it boasts the biggest mountain in the solar system, Olympus Mons, which rises to 26,000 metres, leaving Everest's 8850-metre peak in the shade.
¡ö After the moon, it's our best bet for a colony. Hawking talked about having a base there in 40 years.
¡ö The gravity there ¡ª about 40 per cent of that on Earth ¡ª is probably enough to keep you healthy for a reasonable time. And there's a slim chance you will stumble across some humble form of native life on the planet, which would win you an instant Nobel Prize.
¡ö Unlike the moon, Mars does have an atmosphere, albeit a rather thin, carbon-dioxide-heavy one. So there's a chance humans won't always be confined to shelters or space suits. "Terraforming" the planet (building up the atmosphere to make it more habitable for humans) has been much discussed. Ideas include building a roof to trap an atmosphere, or introducing bacteria and plants to build up useful gases such as oxygen.
¡ö There's plenty of frozen water at the poles and, maybe, underground.

Cons
¡ö Two words: Beagle 2. Getting stuff to land safely on Mars isn't easy ¡ª it's not like landing on the moon.
¡ö It's a lot further from Earth and would take at least six months to commute to. It's also darker than Earth (further from the sun), and communicating with home would involve 20-minute delays each way.
¡ö As for terraforming ... "All serious studies say it would take tens of thousands of years, certainly on places like Mars," says Ian Crawford, an astronomer at Birkbeck College in London. Getting to the water could be difficult ¡ª nobody knows how much there is and it would require masses of energy to melt. Fong says terraforming is probably unethical: do we have the right to alter another planet's ecology?

3. VENUS

Pros

¡ö On paper, this could be perfect. It's about the same size and age as Earth, not too far away, and made from the same stuff.

Cons
¡ö"Venus can be summed up in three words: hot, smelly and windy," says Monica Grady, a planetary scientist at the Open University. Venus is a vision of hell. A runaway greenhouse effect (thanks to a 97 per cent concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) means temperatures can soar to 450 degrees ¡ª hot enough to melt lead. Clouds of sulphuric acid blanket the planet in 19-kilometre-thick layers, the atmospheric pressure is 100 times Earth's, there is no oxygen and any water has disappeared.
¡ö Venus wobbles wildly on its axis, making seasonal fluctuations more intense. And there is no magnetic field, which means the atmosphere is gradually being leached away by the solar wind, a stream of high-energy particles streaming from the sun. "Earth just happens to be the right distance from the right-sized star. It happens to have a stable rotational axis because, miraculously, it's got a big moon that stabilises the axial position," says Richard Taylor, a fellow of the British Interplanetary Society. Venus, unfortunately, isn't and doesn't.

4. MERCURY

Pros

¡ö A better prospect than Venus, despite being closer to the sun. It's much cooler ¡ª you might find regions around the poles and in the craters the right temperature. The poles are probably the best places to set up camps because there's a source of water nearby.

Cons
¡ö Like the moon, Mercury is a desert pockmarked with craters. The temperature ranges from -180 degrees at the poles to 400 degrees on the side facing the sun. The average is about 180 degrees.
¡ö Grady says the lack of magnetic field (about 1 per cent as strong as Earth's) means the high-energy radiation streaming from the sun would make life unbearable and the lack of any real atmosphere would restrict people to tiny shelters.

5. THE GAS GIANTS (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus)

Pros

¡ö Complicated weather systems with multicoloured storms.
¡ö All have beautiful rings: Saturn's are merely the most famous.

Cons
¡ö The lack of solid ground on Jupiter and Saturn would mean living in floating homes. Crawford suggests balloons, with gondolas attached, floating in the upper atmosphere. Fun for an afternoon, but for a lifetime?
¡ö The molten surfaces of Neptune and Uranus are covered in thick layers of ammonia and methane. Neptune also has the highest wind speeds in the solar system, with hurricanes reaching 2000 km/h.
¡ö All in all, probably best avoided.

6. TITAN

Pros

¡ö The largest satellite of Saturn, Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a fully developed atmosphere. Awesome, front-row views of the rings of Saturn.

Cons
¡ö"Asthma sufferers, don't go there," says Grady. The Huygens probe sent back detailed images of Titan's thick, smoggy atmosphere in January last year. It is covered largely in nitrogen, with some added methane. Clouds of nasty gases reflect sunlight, leaving the surface at a cold -179 degrees. There is water, but it's usually mixed with ammonia or trapped deep underground. The final nail in the coffin: there is no oxygen.

7. SPACE STATIONS

Pros

¡öThe designs and engineering feasibility studies have been done. In the 1970s, space scientist Gerald O'Neill came up with the idea of 10-kilometre-long aluminium tubes orbiting Earth and predicted that, by the 1990s, millions of people would be living in them. The tubes would spin to produce an artificial gravity and, according to Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Seti Institute in California, residents would have a good life. "There are no mosquitoes, the weather's always good, and you can see the neighbours just by looking up," he says. "If you grew up on one of these things you would probably pity the poor people who had to contend with nature in the raw." In theory, we could build as many as we needed.

Cons
¡ö None have been built and the technology is unproven. The one space station we have has cost $100 billion and can only support six people. Some scientists say it has proved as useful as a chocolate teapot.
¡ö As with the moon, Earth-orbiting space stations might not be the best option if you need to get away from some cataclysmic event on Earth.

8. EUROPA

Pros

¡ö One of Jupiter's moons, Europa would probably offer fabulous cross-country skiing ¡ª the moon is covered in ice about 24 kilometres thick. "Europa has more water than Earth," says Shostak. The ice means easy access to fresh water, and if anyone can work out how to drill through the ice, there's probably plenty of water underneath.

Cons
¡ö It is right in the middle of Jupiter's magnetic field, which means that lots of nasty radiation is funnelled directly towards the moon's surface.
¡ö Europa captures some of the sulphur dioxide spewed out by the volcanoes of Io, another moon of Jupiter. "You'd never be able to live on the surface," Grady says.
¡ö Living underneath the ice is a possibility but it means never seeing sunlight. You won't be missing much, though ¡ª the strength of the sun's light at Europa is only 4 per cent of that which reaches Earth.
¡ö There's no atmosphere so, like the moon or Mercury, any human colony would have to be self-contained. Or else you would have to walk around in a thick, radiation-proof spacesuit for your entire life.

9. ANOTHER EARTH (outside our solar system)

Pros

¡ö Finding a replica of Earth, or something similar, somewhere outside our own solar system would be a brilliant solution. No terraforming needed, no shelters, and no need to worry about any dangerous radiation. "We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," Stephen Hawking said in his speech last week.

Cons
¡ö Finding one. So far, 150 planets have been spotted outside our solar system, but they are all giants. Taylor says that, for humans to survive on a planet, we need something no more than twice the mass of Earth. Any bigger and the gravity becomes extreme, pulling in any gas that happens to float by the planet and creating a planet resembling Neptune or Uranus, neither of which are fit for humans. As our telescopes get better, we will no doubt find more small planets, but we're not there yet. "It is very likely that Earth-like planets are present but we haven't discovered them, so we don't know which stars to aim for," Crawford says.
¡ö There's also an ethical problem. An Earth-like planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere that we can breathe is already likely to have its own life. "You won't find an oxygen-rich planet without life," Crawford says. "What is being advocated is appropriating somebody else's planet. That will be ethically repugnant."
¡ö Lastly, of course, there's the small issue of distance. Other solar systems are along way away. And until we've cracked the problem of travelling faster than the speed of light, spotting a great planet elsewhere isn't going to do us a scrap of good. The smallest planet discovered so far was spotted in January last year and it is 15 light-years away ¡ª that's 140 trillion kilometres. Taking the space probe Cassini as an example (it recently arrived at Saturn after a seven-year, 3 billion kilometre journey), it would take 315,000 years for us to reach this planet. That's more than three times longer than humans have been on Earth.
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Binabik
Binabik


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posted November 24, 2007 07:50 AM

Quote:
Binabik money spent on NASA doesn't go towards building faster-than-light spacecraft or intersolar colonization...

You might have misinterpreted what I said because that is basically my point. The needed technology is so far advanced that anything we do now is worthless. So the money is better spent on technologies which are more usefull to us now and can be used in other non space travel applications. I'm sure some of the technology used in the current space program have other applications, but not all.

Another thing about money spent on NASA is that it's a government agency, and therefore extremely bureaucrat and wasteful of funds.

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executor
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posted November 24, 2007 03:01 PM
Edited by executor at 20:11, 24 Nov 2007.

@ TA

Extrasolar terrestial planets have been found (3 or 4, and known exoplanets total 260+ by now), yet they're still too big for us (gravity's sake). One of them is even in habitable zone - see my post on this topic, page 2.
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TitaniumAlloy
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posted November 25, 2007 01:37 AM

Quote:
Quote:
Binabik money spent on NASA doesn't go towards building faster-than-light spacecraft or intersolar colonization...

You might have misinterpreted what I said because that is basically my point. The needed technology is so far advanced that anything we do now is worthless. So the money is better spent on technologies which are more usefull to us now and can be used in other non space travel applications. I'm sure some of the technology used in the current space program have other applications, but not all.

Another thing about money spent on NASA is that it's a government agency, and therefore extremely bureaucrat and wasteful of funds.



I'm not sure what your point is then.
You're saying that spending money on the technology needed for intersolar space travel is a waste of money... yet I doubt there is a single person in NASA who is sitting there trying to build a spacecraft that can travel to Proxima Centauri.

NASA does many other kinds of research and alot here on earth, such as all fields of aeronautics.

Sure some of this may be a waste (in yours or my opinion, for example military plane research), but my point is that they do have other applications other than a Star Trek pipe-dream.
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russ
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posted November 26, 2007 05:11 PM

It doesn't matter what they do exactly. Their purpose is to explore the universe. I think it would be safe to assume that an agency sprcifically dedicated to doing that should do better at it than anything else.

While it could be argued that NASA is better off working on some field of physics that seems the most likely to advance interstellar travel, or to concentrate more on colonizing the planets in the Solar System and building more shuttles, or just exploring as far as we can go, or whatever else, having such an agency and funding it is extremely important.

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