Yeah I saw it on the news. Pretty awful... but I think alot of people are making way to much of a fuss about it. It's not like this happens every day...
I agree that inspector-type people should check it out to see what went wrong, then our shuttles will just be that much more safer! It's not like going into space is the safest thing in the world though... I'm not trying to say I don't care for the people who died, but we've got to keep going into space...
-<font color="#33ff33">Nova</font>
(Supposed to be American flag at half staff... oh well.)
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Actually we should be going to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. There are untold riches in raw materials there - the equivalent of atleast one Mars-sized planet in free resources! Huge amounts of sodium, calcium, potassium, silicates, iron, nickel, troilite, pyroxene, various kinds of sulfurs, various types of gold minerals, etc.
Just in iron alone, the belt is estimated to contain 1.65 x 10^21 pounds (825 quintillion tons) of iron - enough to cover the Earth's landmasses with half-mile think layer of iron. At present Earth prices, the value of that iron (say $50/ton times 7 x 10^17 tons) is about $3.5 x 10^19 dollars. Since the US deficit is around $300 billion ($3 x 10^11), I think there is enough to give everyone a nice tax return! =) This speculative (yet fairly accurate) data comes from an excellent book on the subject: 'Mining the Sky' by John S. Lewis. | |
I will rue the day when Nasa starts naming their shuttles after snack foods, companies, slogans, titles, fantasy characters, or L33t Sp3@K
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now heres an issue, we arent too far into technology and space travel. What about wars and sabotaging in space? Most of it is being dominated by America, dont you think the other countries other than America's allies would be jealous and goto many serious extremes to do anything in their power to cause as much damage and death as possible?
Certainly there is much defense at these launch sites, but theres NONE in space | |
Lesbian Assassin wrote:
We're not going to be able to "terraform" Mars... give it an earthlike atmosphere and change the soil to something that can support plants, etc. If we had the technology to do this, we would be using it to repair are own much less damage ecosystem. We could build domes with imported atmosphere and try to maintain them with an artificial ecosystem of plants. So what have we accomplished? We just built an indoor farm at about a million times the cost it would have taken to do so on earth. Id imagine that if we had the technology to terraform, we would repair the damaged earth and seed the planets of our solar system with life. The impact of this would have unlimited possibilities both good and bad. | |
going to those asteroids could prove fatal if even one mistake is made.
"okay now an inch to your left....no.no your other left... aww crap, look at what you did. there goes New york." | |
I would just like to say, we will have little need for fuels, find other ways and recycle plasitic, so fuel and oil and what not are being less needed every day, ok maybie not so with plastic, but only because most people dont recycle. Think about the fact that we wont use rockets much longer, lazer and ion drives are becoming better and better and will over time replace all the rockets, which are exspensive and ineffectant because the more fuel you take with you the more you need to get you going, so its not the way so to.
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who said we would bring them all the way back here? We would mine out there and send faighters back.
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The Conjuror wrote:
Hey fello coders, chip in your opinion, should man/woman space exploration be put to a stop or keep it running? I myself vote keep it running because not only will it ruin my dream of being the first human on mars, but will ruin many other younger children's dreams, what do you guys think? What the heck? Just cause a space shuttle crashed doesn't mean they will even take it into consideration to stop space exploration. That's like stopping a mission cause you failed it. RaeKwon | |
I don't buy that we're running out of fresh water...
The total amount of water on our planet is the same as it was millions, even billions of years ago... In fact, if any change has happened, it's been an increase (however small) from the ice in all of the various meteorites that have landed here... Any water that is used by animal or plant life is given back to the environment in one way or another... The only way to lose water from the planet is to ship it off into space... And as of yet, we haven't done so (any water we've sent into space on missions came back to the Earth... unless they left some on the moon) Even in breaking water down into Oxygen and Hydrogen (which we've done) doesn't really lose us anything, because we have the ability to put them back together (which we've also done, and this is one of the methods used in new electric cars... their exhaust is actually water...) But, you say, we're running out of fresh water... Please, water is still water, regardless of what is in it, as long as it hasn't been molecularly altered, it's still water... And even if it has been changed into something that isn't water, we can change it back... And it's a very simple matter to turn contaminated water into clean water... Perhaps a bit expensive, depending on what needs to be done, but if it came down to some sort of planetary water crisis, price becomes a non-issue... Who needs money if they're going to die from not having any water? As for the other limited resources, we could manufacture atmosphere and fuel replacements... Probably not at this point, but it's definitely a possible goal for our technology... Life on this planet could be sustained for as long as it is necessary... | |
Our rivers, our coral reefs and animals that live there all contribute to filtering the toxins out of water..
The only way to cut down our fresh water sources is to gum up rivers with toxic crap.. in the event we do that, we should all just pitch in to clean the crap up.. Dont want to do that then your part of the problem. | |
And it's a very simple matter to turn contaminated water into clean water... Perhaps a bit expensive, depending on what needs to be done, but if it came down to some sort of planetary water crisis, price becomes a non-issue... Who needs money if they're going to die from not having any water? That's a wonderfully naive way of looking at the world. "If there was any serious scarcity, people would forget about money." Thing is, that money is a stand-in for actual resources... if desalinating (and otherwise decontaminating) ocean water were easy and efficient, we probably wouldn't bother using ground water at all. If you want to get really technical, we're not using anything up at all... fossil fuels are just being rearranged into less convenient forms. I'm sure that if a crisis were imminent, we would put aside our petty bickering over prices and funding and just figure out a way to reassemble the original fuel molecules, as well as recover all the heat that's just kind of bled off into the atmosphere. Entropy, shmentropy... if we need something badly enough, it'll be there. | |
I know, its stupid, but dont we do that with anything, the media just wants to make sure you stay tuned, they find the very few people who think that its a bad idea to cancel the space program and chat with them like there not the only ones. The whole idea will be gone in a mater of months. I think the space missions have greatly helped the US and other countys who have tried to go to space. "How" you say? Well in the quest for the starts, technology is created, thanks to exploration of Mars with simple bots, we have greatly increased all sorts of turrain, face, ect technology and because nasa paid for it, it will be cheaper once out on the open markets(security/cars/police) than if it were created by a compony who funded it themselfs.
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Dareb wrote:
you do know that the word inhabitable means we CAN live on those planets. Oops. Meant "inhospitable". Thanks for pointing that out. =) | |
Scoobert wrote:
I would just like to say, we will have little need for fuels, find other ways and recycle plasitic, so fuel and oil and what not are being less needed every day, ok maybie not so with plastic, but only because most people dont recycle. Think about the fact that we wont use rockets much longer, lazer and ion drives are becoming better and better and will over time replace all the rockets, which are exspensive and ineffectant because the more fuel you take with you the more you need to get you going, so its not the way so to. We will always need fuels--we can come up with new fuels and new ways to exploit them, but at no point will we simply be able to pull energy out of thin air. This is mostly a semantic point--if we had useful fusion, we'd probably have enough hydrogen to supply our energy needs for millions of years at the least, and the sun's not due to run out for several billion years, and either way we're talking about a much longer timeframe than this conversation is generally assuming. But it's misleading and inaccurate to say that we won't need fuel in the future, or that we'll have propulsion systems that don't need fuel. | |
well i meant fossil fuels, not fuels in general, because even electricity is a fuel, kinda a typo, more of a misswording. But things like anti matter will last us almost forever and give off tons of energy(yes, anti-matter is real). The only problem right now is that it takes a 2 mile long tube shooting atoms at each other to create anti-matter. Supposedly were they think the center of the universe is(based on the expanding universe theory) there is a ungodly amount of anti-matter there, but the only problem is making the anti-matter to get there.
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Mars isn't viable as a place to live, but it is certainly viable as a place to mine and extract raw minerals. Oil and fuel are, of course, out of the question, but basic metals like iron, nickel, and carbon are available in huge quantities on Mars -- once humanity manages to extract all of the easily accessible nodes in the upper kilometre of the Earth's crust, mining the surface of Mars would become cheaper than digging deeper on Earth (or the Moon -- Mars is *after* the moon).
As long as the several-month transit between Earth and Mars was cheaper than conforming to terran environmental restrictions or wasting effort to exploit less accessible resource nodes, it would be plenty sane. There's also the consideration that gravity is 0.75 times that of Earth, which means that equipment will be capable of being extracted from the surface with less effort. Plus, Mars has a fair amount of viability for acting as a centre for various NIMBY things: weapons testing, waste disposal*, etc. After all, I don't think anyone would really care about us messing up Mars. It's just a barren rock. This is all assuming that human beings come up with a clean, incredibly efficient energy source -- the cold fusion problem. Otherwise, travel to Mars would be far too expensive. (Also, I'm thinking that cold fusion is also pretty impossible. The nearest example of fusion is the sun, and it burns ridiculously hot.) * Assuming that people didn't have the resources to fling them into the sun, that is. (Mass-driver technologies are already possible with Earth's technology, so if we wanted to use the sun as a trash can, we could; the amount of waste we produce wouldn't even put a little scratch in the sun's bulk. Sol would probably even benefit from a fair portion of it.) | |
Where are you from?