Rover Finds New Evidence That Ancient Mars Was Habitable
space.com
space.com
My favorite part:
> Opportunity is poised to break the international record for distance traveled on another world during the drive to Solander Point.
Incredible. Just incredible.
Say what you will, but those machines rolling around Mars, navigating terrain, taking pictures, analyzing samples, using sunlight to recharge, sending data to earth via radio, and countless other capabilities, are a celebration of human intelligence.
The author, Robert Zubrin, also developed the Mars-mission plan Elon Musk seems to be following. (Zubrin's book also paints a fascinating picture of what's wrong with NASA: http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-Mars-Settle-Planet/dp/0684835...)
Quotes from the Terraforming paper:
"drastic modification of Martian conditions ... using 21st century technology."
"Humans... would require breathing gear, but pressure suits would be unnecessary"
"Average temperatures could be above the freezing point of water for significant regions during portions of the year, enabling the growth of plant life in the open."
Look! Life on Mars! Ah, never mind.
Ad infinitum
What has been happening recently has been more and more evidence about the conditions of ancient Mars, especially in relation to the long-term presence of water. We've known for a long time that Mars has had liquid water on it in the past, what we haven't known is how much and for how long and under what conditions. We've known more recently that Mars still contains a substantial amount of sub-surface water ice over much of its area. And we've learned more recently that Mars appears to have had sufficient water to form long-lived lakes and rivers, long enough to allow the formation of both rounded river rocks and pebbles as well as conglomerate rocks made up of those but also hydrate minerals that can only form in conditions of near neutral pH and low salinity.
These are big discoveries, even though from a certain perspective they may seem like yet another "water on Mars!" story. These discoveries are painting a picture of ancient Mars that was not just occasionally wet or perhaps a hellscape Mars covered with brackish or boiling lakes but an almost familiar Mars with lakes and rivers that would be nearly drinkable for humans and that lasted millions of years at least. Certainly conditions that lots of Earth-bound life would find it quite easy to live in. And that provides the tantalizing hope that perhaps some form of life arose on Mars and survived for a time and perhaps lives still in some sheltered underground areas. It's not evidence or proof of life, it's the hint of a possibility. But again, that's the way science works. You narrow down possibilities and provide hints for further investigations.
What about 'maybe not', 'doubtful', 'perhaps not'... is that any less scientific?
Imagine applying for a $1B grant to study the possibility of a designer? What would be more dramatic, discovering there was a creator, or finding some bacteria on mars? Not that the discovery of life on Mars or any other place for that matter would alter truth in the slightest.
- How much evidence do we expect to get for a billion dollars? A decibel? A hundred decibels?
- Would sufficient evidence either way come about anyways, through other human endeavors?
- Assuming we started at 1:1 odds for long-term presence of water, and moved to 100:1 odds, that's twenty decibels on that particular question (and there are others). Again, way higher than I'd expect on designer research.
- Probably not.
I'm not sure I why you said to apply the same logic to the pursuit of life on other worlds. We're clearly discovering things. Plenty of people say the value of discovering those things is low, but I didn't mention value-of-information.
Every 3.6 seconds some child dies of starvation here on Earth. How many children can you feed with $400,000,000+?
Maybe if you down vote this post enough, the problem will go away?
Fact is, there will always be people dying on earth. It's sad. But why bother?
Sending the human race to another planet, then maybe another galaxy, are long term projects, and it makes sense to care about that however.
If it only required the sacrifice of 5,000 children, that would be a very cheap price to pay. It will certainly cost (as in opportunity costs - how the money could be used in different ways) many more lives.
Yet you know what? It's a great deal. If we lose our only current planet, all of humanity goes down, including any possible future "children" one may imagine.
How many people do you expect will have existed in 10,000 years from now (humanity is much older than that!), given our current population? (let's say no grow)? Round that to 5 billion per 100 year with an greatly overestimated lifespan of 100 years to ease our calculations. We have a lowball estimate of (10,000/100)*5b = 5 000 billion
It would be quite a bargain to sacrifice a total of 5 billion to ensure a living of the 5 000 billion future humans that will exist... hell, even a 100 billion!!
So yes, children are dying, it's sad, and your use of "saying that to the mothers" is a call to use sentimentalisms to obscure the facts.
Yet the facts remain : having more than one habitable planet is a necessity to protect the continuous possibility of a thriving human race, in case of major disasters (at mass-extinction level).
A dollar spent on the mars rover is a dollar not spent on poverty reduction. I do think that in the long run, spending on science and tech in general does prevent poverty, but it's not clear that the mars rover does so.
It's very hard for people to face that in our global economy, it's very easy to save lives at very low (relative) cost and yet people and Western government choose not to by spending money on other things. But it's the truth.
The cartoon you linked to is not logical. If I want to advocate spending on a particular thing, I have to at least be willing to hear counter-arguments so that I can actually convince people to spend money on it.