What nationality will the first person on Mars be?
What nationality will the first person on Mars be?
(34 posts) (13 voices)-
Atreju
MemberIt's going to have to, because humans won't be going to space in biological bodies! :)
To be honest I agree that space exploration by biological organisms is not nearly as cost-efficient as using robots.
However, I think it likely that a human will visit Mars this century, even if its just to plant a flag and play a round of golf before returning to Earth.
Politics was a strong motivator in visiting the North and South Poles, Everest and then the Moon, despite the hazards. I wouldn't be surprised if Mars exerts a similar influence.
Of course the first person could also be a tourist, or more likely a test pilot for a tourist company.
Posted 3 months ago # -
Mnemomeme
Memberhttp://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19890008233_1989008233.pdf
erm... this is going to get some peanuts thrown at me, but...
NASA WorldWind, the downloadable program that maps planets' surfaces, used to provide a detailed image of the collected surface of mars. It no longer does because I revealed this information a couple too many times and somehow it got back to counter-intelligence before too many folks looked.
Classified military bases must be irreversibly deleted from all surface maps that can show them, which are owned or produced by the U.S. government. Ironically, this exact policy is what made the base on mars obvious.
Near the south pole of mars, there is such a deletion. We sent a manned mission in 1988 (it was in the news at the time, good luck finding anything about it now). It'll be 2043 before that mission, and therefore the established military base on mars, is declassified.
We're already there. :)
Posted 3 months ago # -
some of the robots that go to space might look and act very human at times- even down to the cellular level- but this will only be an aesthetic style- those bodies will not be the embodiment of any conscious being- they will be telepresence tools- and they probably won't even be made of natural matter-
for that matter this will describe most of the human bodies on earth at the time as well- so it's not as if natural humans will stay home- they are going extinct- not that anyone will really notice or care besides us philosophers and poets paying attention- since as I said- many will look and act very human- so much so that few will think about upgrading as extinction-
as for nationality- the first space people to visit mars in the late 2030s will likely be part some new sovereign space nerd group like a 'Starfleet' and come from a spaceborn culture already living in asteroid colonies and space stations for over a decade- or be completely independent-
Posted 3 months ago # -
asimov1
Memberwe might not even go to mars for centuries
its a lot of $$$ for a 3 month on the surface expedition .......you could send a fleet of robots one way and build a Mars base for the same money
It may well be that the first people on mars arrive and stay for 20 years....or never come back.
Nationality is anyone's guess, it will be a global effort and it wont really matter what nationality they are
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China may put the first man ( or woman) on a local asteroid ....some earth crossers are as easy to visit as the moon....easier in fact with modern guidance
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humans have the tech to go anywhere rocky or icy in the solarsytem, its just a question of $$$we wont go anywhere unless its worthwhile $$$ on a 50 or 100 year timescale , we will mostly hold fire until then.....robots and telescopes do 95% of what we need / want to do
Posted 3 months ago # -
sensoniq
MemberClassified military bases must be irreversibly deleted from all surface maps that can show them, which are owned or produced by the U.S. government. Ironically, this exact policy is what made the base on mars obvious.
Near the south pole of mars, there is such a deletion. We sent a manned mission in 1988 (it was in the news at the time, good luck finding anything about it now). It'll be 2043 before that mission, and therefore the established military base on mars, is declassified.
Mnemomeme -- how did you find out about this?
Posted 3 months ago # -
Mnemomeme
Membersensoniq, my grandfather has had satellite TV since 1985, I remember lightning striking that giant iron dish more than once and frying his whole entertainment system. Back in the late 80s, you had to actually move the dish around throughout the day in order to get your satellite channels, and switching channels meant moving to another satellite most of the time. The coordinates system that the targetter used was extremely primitive, you could get encrypted channels "by accident" if you aimed within a certain general vicinity of the broadcast point because the encryption format relied upon the hardware at the receiving end to make sure you weren't getting channels you didn't pay for... very silly. Anyway, because of that, I learned how to pick up the naughty channels when nobody else was home, but once I didn't have time to change the settings and grandpa figured out what I'd done. So, in his own free time, grampa scanned around and found the raw prebroadcast international newsfeeds, and on one of those they were sending the story about the manned mission to mars back to the editing room before it could be censored. :)
Now... years later, after my father worked in nuclear power plants for a living, and after he got shifted to digging a hole in the ground near the NASA/Ames research facility at the foot of the redwood city mountain area (you can check worldwind, or google maps, it's blacked out in both) I managed to be enough of a nerd to run across the NASA WorldWind (before yahoo even existed, much less google, or googlemaps) program and start exploring the world through that compiled landsat imaging system and found the blacked out region where my dad worked. Later, after that, I joined the army and became aware of what is now public knowledge due to Cheney's debacle trying to get his house blurred off google maps. Classified military installations must be irreversibly deleted from satellite photography.
Eventually WorldWind incorporated the moon, so I started exploring the moon and noticed there were some gaps in the imagery and discovered that the survey satellites don't get the whole surface most of the time. When they incorporated the mars survey into the system of course, nerd that I am, I wanted to see where the face is, and look at the inverted valley-bubbles, and check out the giant chasm and the meteor impact zones and the biggest volcano in the solar system and so forth. Then I got to thinking about the gaps I saw on the moon because there are surprisingly few on the mars imagery. So, I found that at the north pole, where there's a bunch of snow and ice on the ground, there are some funky gaps created by the rims of craters and the odd angle of the survey. So, as I started studying the south pole of mars, I ran across this little square patch in the dead center of a survey image, it wasn't an omission. I zoomed in really close and turned on the surface altitude imagery (which is like 50 miles out of place most of the time) and discovered that the deletion is directly lined up with the actual surface image, which itself is extremely unusual. So I zoomed in even closer and found that it was a hewn square zone with a V shaped trough cutting from the east side to the center, like a ramp to an airport on top of a mesa or something. Since the image where I wanted to look was repeatedly deleted (evident by the layers upon layers of distortion around the edges of the deletion area) I looked around it a bit and found, stretching 128 miles east of the deletion, a road leading to what looked a mine in a crater full of ice. Then, because I had noticed this tiny little road leading to the deletion, I looked around some more and found a couple of other roads leading out of the deletion in different directions. That's when I remembered... military bases have to be deleted, and back in the 80s grandpa and I had watched the raw news feed about a manned mission to mars.
So... I showed it to a couple family members and some friends online... and now a couple years later the entire surface of mars is encrypted by NASA WorldWind, in order to hide this ridiculous red-tape mishap. :)
Posted 3 months ago # -
The first "person" on Mars will be a telepresence robot - technically, it already is (as all probes/rovers are already limited versions of telepresence robots).
iPan, you obviously haven't read either CASE FOR MARS or ENTERING SPACE otherwise you wouldn't suggest such stupid ideas for exploring Mars. Zubrin fully explains why a "telepresence" and robots on Mars won't work. You're just going to have to read the books, because I don't have the time to educate everyone here. I know, that last statement sounded as cocky as asimov1 usually sounds. Sorry. :)
James
Posted 3 months ago # -
Come on guys, get over yourselves.
Nasa will put an American astronaut on mars in the mid 2030s. End of story. No other country is even remotely close to being about to do it. Nasa is drawing up plans for it as we speak.
Yes, you are probably correct. Robert Zubrin is already preparing for this and it will be as soon as possible. Zubrin says he can go right now, with present technology. Read CASE FOR MARS. See http://www.MarsSociety.org
FROM THE MARS SOCIETY WEBSITE:
This declaration describes the motivation for our Society. It was ratified and signed by the 700 attendees at the Founding Convention of the Mars Society,
held August 13-16,1998 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, United States.
The time has come for humanity to journey to Mars.We're ready. Though Mars is distant, we are far better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were to travel to the
Moon at the commencement of the space age. Given the will, we could have our first teams on Mars within a decade.
The reasons for going to Mars are powerful.
We must go for the knowledge of Mars. Our robotic probes have revealed that Mars was once a warm and wet planet, suitable for hosting life's origin. But did it? A search for fossils on the Martian surface or microbes in groundwater below could provide the answer. If found, they would show that the origin of life is not unique to the Earth, and, by implication, reveal a universe that is filled with life and probably intelligence as well. From the point of view learning our true place in the universe, this would be the most important scientific enlightenment since Copernicus.We must go for the knowledge of Earth. As we begin the twenty-first century, we have evidence that we are changing the Earth's atmosphere and environment in significant ways. It has become a critical matter for us better to understand all aspects of our environment. In this project, comparative planetology is a very powerful tool, a fact already shown by the role Venusian atmospheric studies played in our discovery of the potential threat of global warming by greenhouse gases. Mars, the planet most like Earth, will have even more to teach us about our home world. The knowledge we gain could be key to our survival.
We must go for the challenge. Civilizations, like people, thrive on challenge and decay without it. The time is past for human societies to use war as a driving stress for technological progress. As the world moves towards unity, we must join together, not in mutual passivity, but in common enterprise, facing outward to embrace a greater and nobler challenge than that which we previously posed to each other. Pioneering Mars will provide such a challenge. Furthermore, a cooperative international exploration of Mars would serve as an example of how the same joint-action could work on Earth in other ventures.
We must go for the youth. The spirit of youth demands adventure. A humans-to-Mars program would challenge young people everywhere to develop their minds to participate in the pioneering of a new world. If a Mars program were to inspire just a single extra percent of today's youth to scientific educations, the net result would be tens of millions more scientists, engineers, inventors, medical researchers and doctors. These people will make innovations that create new industries, find new medical cures, increase income, and benefit the world in innumerable ways to provide a return that will utterly dwarf the expenditures of the Mars program.
We must go for the opportunity. The settling of the Martian New World is an opportunity for a noble experiment in which humanity has another chance to shed old baggage and begin the world anew; carrying forward as much of the best of our heritage as possible and leaving the worst behind. Such chances do not come often, and are not to be disdained lightly.
We must go for our humanity. Human beings are more than merely another kind of animal, -we are life's messenger. Alone of the creatures of the Earth, we have the ability to continue the work of creation by bringing life to Mars, and Mars to life. In doing so, we shall make a profound statement as to the precious worth of the human race and every member of it.
We must go for the future. Mars is not just a scientific curiosity; it is a world with a surface area equal to all the continents of Earth combined, possessing all the elements that are needed to support not only life, but technological society. It is a New World, filled with history waiting to be made by a new and youthful branch of human civilization that is waiting to be born. We must go to Mars to make that potential a reality. We must go, not for us, but for a people who are yet to be. We must do it for the Martians.
Believing therefore that the exploration and settlement of Mars is one of the greatest human endeavors possible in our time, we have gathered to found this Mars Society, understanding that even the best ideas for human action are never inevitable, but must be planned, advocated, and achieved by hard work. We call upon all other individuals and organizations of like-minded people to join with us in furthering this great enterprise. No nobler cause has ever been. We shall not rest until it succeeds.
Source: http://www.marssociety.org/home/about/founding-declaration
Posted 3 months ago # -
asimov1
Memberref Nasa will put an American astronaut on mars in the mid 2030s. End of story.
.....yawns
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.even if that did happen it will just be a technical exercise, & it will cost every US citizen a 1000 bucks +
enthusiasm and reality quickly part company when the $$$ stack up
A manned mars shot will cost around $ 100 billion !!!......you effectively have to land or build a Saturn V rocket on the surface of Mars !!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars
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.The truth is that by the mid 2030 the US will be considering putting its entire defence force into mothballs, or face bankruptcy
Posted 3 months ago # -
Giulio Prisco
Key MasterMartian, I hope.
Posted 3 months ago # -
Giulio Prisco
Key Masterhumans won't be going to space in biological bodies
I think (and I hope) biological humans will go to space, in this century. We need that so we can begin to look at the stars with sense of wonder again. But I agree that real expansion into space, beyond the solar system, will be for uploads.
Posted 3 months ago # -
sensoniq
MemberVery interesting history Mnemomeme, thanks for sharing...
May I ask you -- are you still in the army? If not, it must have been very tempting to think about pursuing an extended career in the army, for the purpose of rising through the ranks and learning more about the Mars base, no? (Not that I even know if Army Intel would be privy to the Mars base information, but it would certainly seem more likely than not).
Posted 3 months ago # -
Mnemomeme
Membersensoniq,
erm... no.
"Threat to the integrity of the chain of command," is written in bold print on top of my file. In plain english, "This guy is too smart to be controlled, we tried to kill him and it didn't work, plus he got his superiors willingly promoted out of his way and into positions where their incompetence became obvious but didn't result in anyone getting hurt. We like sucking at our jobs, so he can't have one anymore."
Even the military saw me as too effective of a ladder-climber to tolerate my presence for long. ;)
Posted 3 months ago # -
Captainplanet
MemberPart of the Mars society website's FAQ
Q: Sending humans to Mars is a waste of taxpayer dollars.
A: If done in a cost-effective manner such as Mars Direct, human exploration of Mars can be accomplished easily under the existing NASA budget -- which currently accounts for less than 1% of federal discretionary spending. A total mission cost of $30 billion, when spread out over the 20 years envisioned by Mars Direct (10 years to first flight, 10 years afterwards during which five missions are flown), represents approximately 10% of the $300 billion NASA budget for that time frame (based upon current annual funding levels of $15 billion).
Funds allocated to a Mars exploration program are not simply disappearing from the American economy, either -- indeed, the vast majority of those $30 billion goes to pay the salaries of engineers, support staff, even factory workers whose plants would assemble the hardware necessary for Mars missions. Meanwhile, the technological advances that are a natural by-product of space exploration programs -- which in the past have included MRIs, velcro, and the microwave oven, to name a few -- will help drive economic activity for years to come.
EDIT:
Here, just take a look for yourselves http://www.marssociety.org/home/about/faq
Posted 3 months ago # -
Atreju
Member“Nothing more manifestly distinguishes the Anglo-Saxon than his intense and persistent energy…”
The first man on Mars will speak English as a first language.
The American Case
The USA is the only nation ever to land a man on another planetoid, namely the Moon.
To this day, the nation that has thought most practically and studied most thoroughly the measures for a manned mission to Mars is the United States. Mars Direct is the best plan yet devised in both pragmatism and cost-effectiveness.
While its public funded manned spaceflight initiatives have been reduced in scope the United States still has a wealth of experience in manned spaceflight unmatched, except perhaps by Russia.
Privately the United States is the hub of a burgeoning manned spaceflight industry lead by SpaceX, Boeing, Bigelow Aerospace, Sierra Nevada Corporation and Scaled Composites.
Simply, if you wanted to go to Mars today you would pay the Americans to take you.
The British Case
The most proactive private manned spaceflight program in development at the moment is that of British firm Virgin Galactic, headed by adventurer/entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson.
Branson wants to go to space and he’s paying the Americans to take him via Scaled Composites designed Space Ship Two and White Knight Two.
Virgin Galactic is also part of the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) multiphase space technology development program, working with Sierra Nevada Corporation, which is developing the Dream Chaser, a reusable spaceplane vehicle, launched by White Knight Two, that can transport cargo and up to eight people into orbit.
The British Case is driven by an alliance between American space industry innovation, Virgin’s astute business entrepreneurism and Sir Richard Branson’s “Heroic Age of Exploration” idealism.
Virgin has sponsored numerous aerial and nautical adventures and world record attempts. As a leading player in the emerging private manned spaceflight industry they would likely wish to be involved in any correctly marketed, cost-effective future endeavour to reach the Red Planet.
Summary
With private space industry the only really growth area in manned spaceflight, it is, unsurprisingly, the Anglo-Saxons (and by Anglo-Saxon I mean a citizen from an English speaking nation), the most successful adventurers of all time, who are leading the way to the stars.
This spirit of pragmatic exploration and adventure is captured by one of humanity’s greatest off-world explorers, Buzz Aldrin…
"I am personally delighted to see the expansion of private sector involvement in NASA’s Commercial Crew Development-2 Program, through the recent announcement that Virgin Galactic will be partnering with Sierra Nevada Corporation…in this important step to commercialize access to space – for both civil space, and for the emerging space tourism business. We have learned through nearly fifty years of Human Space Flight experience, and from nearly thirty years of the Space Shuttle operations, that returning reusable vehicles to the launch site is operationally much more efficient, and thus the private sector requirement for low operational costs will dominate this need. I also see great value in capitalizing on the investment that NASA has already made in the Orion Program – to use this capability for its intended purpose – returning from higher energy, deep space missions, where this configuration is better suited to meet these requirements. I would like to endorse this kind of approach as the right direction for our future in human space flight – in partnership with NASA, as a cost effective means of meeting our civil space needs, while also providing the foundation for expanded commercial access to space for the private sector, and enabling the eventual expansion of humankind beyond the bounds of Low Earth Orbit.”
As Aldrin says, this foundation will allow a sustainable growth and development in cost-effective, economically viable space exploration, burgeoning out and beyond the Earth.
The Anglo-Saxon nations have always striven for heights. They were the first to scale Everest. The first to reach the Moon. They will be the first to set foot on Mars.
Posted 3 months ago # -
Zubrin fully explains why a "telepresence" and robots on Mars won't work. You're just going to have to read the books, because I don't have the time to educate everyone here
JJ- what exactly is it about Zubrin's ideas has you so convinced he is right when he didn't even consider the affect of IA augmented substrate independent minds/BCI/uploading/modular embodiment- and obviously has no notion of NKS and technology mining/ matter printing/ teleportation/ or any of the other information technologies that are maturing? Zubrin is clearly not a proponent of the Singularity- shouldn't you get your space exploration references from someone who understands how it is all changed with the Singularity? isn't that the whole point of this forum?
I REFUSE to read anyone that doesn't address these issues for any future predictions beyond ten years- anyone who even suggests some current human body/mind/life beyond 2030 is simply wrong and you shouldn't waste your time either
Posted 3 months ago # -
Atreju
Memberanyone who even suggests some current human body/mind/life beyond 2030 is simply wrong and you shouldn't waste your time either
I get the idea of recursively improving intelligence amplification ultimately leading to some kind of theogenesis and all but why would that pre-suppose no biological humans beyond 2030? I mean what if I don't want to do all that amplifying and just continue to live in my pleasant village and have a cup of tea?
Posted 3 months ago # -
I didn't say biological- I said the modern version of the body/mind and the way way we live our life- as I said earlier there will likely be humaniform telepresence bioroids indistinguishable from today's humans at the macroscopic level- but they won't be from the natural human genome-
Posted 3 months ago # -
Atreju
MemberI didn't say biological- I said the modern version of the body/mind and the way way we live our life- as I said earlier there will likely be humaniform telepresence bioroids indistinguishable from today's humans at the macroscopic level- but they won't be from the natural human genome-
I see
Posted 3 months ago # -
I do think biology has an uphill battle ahead- as I recently posted the shift into information technology presents a fitness filter for any non-encryptable forms- biology is not encrypted and will be naked to hackers- this might force humanity to opt for non-biological backed-up information based substrates for survival -
Posted 3 months ago #
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