OT a bit - fly to the moon or Mars?

But if the boat sinks, you probably have a life jacket, life raft, life
boat, maybe people in the area to assist, etc., in other words you might
survive without the boat or ship. Yes, everything we do has some degree of
danger, you can have a brain aneurysm straining on the toilet, etc., but
that logic has nothing to do with anything.

Now-a-days you might have a boat that could respond to save you... but
thats a VERY recent development. Hell, even the titanic sunk with a
loss of 2/3rds of the souls aboard... Imagine what it was like for
the oceanic explorers a mere 400 years ago plying the Atlantic in
wooden boats with absolutely zero chance of rescue should the **** hit
the fan... And at least a decompression death would only last a few
seconds

Yes, there is an inherent risk to anything... I'm just tremendously
thankful that the explorers who laid the foundation for the modern
world had a much different tolerance for risk than we do today...
otherwise we'd never have left our caves in africa.

My *primary* point the last few posts, has been odds of survival, and living
to fight another day

Your primary point has been based on a modern understanding of
exploration utterly irrelevant to the world in which the explorers who
tamed our world existed. I read some where that your odds of
surviving to have children as a new world explorer who settled
bordered on near 50% or less for the first hundred years... Yes the
risks now are worse... but our technology and ability to predict is
better... either way- I don't think you can argue that for a certain
segment of the population, it is a worthy risk.

I'd love to believe there was another inhabitable piece of real estate
besides earth, but so far I haven't seen a shred of evidence, and going
beyond our solar system for anything besides observation and probes would
truly be SciFi at our primitive state. Sending humans 44 million miles with
a gigantic payload, after our robotic rovers and mapping satellites have
shown Mars to be another Death Valley on steriods just doesn't make a lot of
sense to me.

Even if there was a world that supported life as we know it, any
attempt to settle would be impossible... Microbes from an alien world
would (probably) bet uttlerly beyond the capacity of the human immune
system to tolerate... the first hundred or two years of orbiting an
earth-like planet around another star would be spent merely trying to
engineer humans to survive in the new environment...

That doesn't mean we shouldn't go. That doesn't mean the struggle of
trying to sustain a colony in a sub-standard environment can't yield
valuable insight into how to maintain a sustainable colony here on
Earth. It doesn't mean that the process of trying to adapt the human
animal on an alien world wouldn't give us valuable insight into the
workings of the human body, in context of universal (as opposed to
terran) biology.

Challenge yields learning. Challenging brings risk. The risk isn't
"worth it" to you... ok, we understand. Stop trying to make that
judgement for the rest of us...

We don't agree... that's cool... but don't tell those of us willing to
risk our mortality on advancing the human species that we are wrong.

Plus the robots don't insist on a round trip ticket or need
life support 24/7. My manned explorer itch doesn't need scratched at this
point, unless new data is found.

And robot's don't experience... They don't "Understand"...
Fundamentally, that's the only thing that we humans do that makes us
notably different than the rest of the mass in the universe.

But to each their own.. If we all thought the same, it'd be a really, really boring life.

Oh so true

No really a bad thing, it just seems that the chance of surviving a
mistake
or a bout of Murphys Law has risen exp

The risks to survival have increased, as have our models for
predicting those risks... seems to be a fair tradeoff to me.

Hell... exploring space might even make us accept the near 50%
mortality risks that our predecessors who settled our world faced...
I just pray that we accept that risk before the instinct of those of
us who are willing to take it are bred out of the population...
because only then are we truly damned to an existence of
insignificance.

ManhattanMan wrote:
EridanMan wrote:

You continually speak of the danger of human space exploration as a
bad thing. I could not disagree more.


No really a bad thing, it just seems that the chance of surviving a
mistake or a bout of
Murphys Law has risen

damn spastic mouse -

as I was saying

It just seems the chance of surviving a serious mistake or round of Murphys
Law has increased ten fold when dealing with outer space, as compared to the
"old fashioned" ways. On terra firma you usually have some wiggle room,
literally, and possible alternatives, but up there the margin is cut way
down.

I'm all for manned missions when it's obvious that that's the only way we'll
get the desired results. Something like Mars in on a scale that by the time
the hardware and technology are ready, I really doubt if I'll be around to
see it, IF it comes about at all. It would be a fantastic adventure, for
adventures sake, but is it REALLY necessary? I don't know..

I realize many great things for the grounded masses evolved from the space
program, and mentioned that in my first post. I've always wondered how many
things might have evolved anyway, and at what cost.. We'll never know..

On May 9, 5:49 pm, (Mutts) wrote:
Terra forming Mars?

Now something like that is very very far off I know. And there is a giggle
factor.

I recall an article (Popular Science? Discover?) about a decade ago,
which detailed how to terraform Mars. At the time, they figured it
would take 50-100 years, at a mere $150 million a day (one third to
one half the cost of the Iraq war). Costly, but if shared by all the
nations, quite doable... and the result is more or less another Earth,
with thinner air.

Just think of the vacation possibilities. Heck, I've seen Earth
tourist hotels that probably took more effort ;-)

EridanMan wrote:

Challenge yields learning. Challenging brings risk. The risk isn't
"worth it" to you... ok, we understand. Stop trying to make that
judgement for the rest of us...

We don't agree... that's cool... but don't tell those of us willing to
risk our mortality on advancing the human species that we are wrong.


Whooaaaa! Au contraire Eridan - I've just been tossing around some very non
scientific opinions, and checking the pulse of others. Obviously yours has
risen. I'm NOT making a judgement for anybody, or telling anybody they're
wrong about anything, just simply giving another viewpoint from what yours
or theirs might be.

Half my posts circulated around Jose and I trying to determine if space
exploration and conventional (?) exploration didn't have some degree of
being 'different' (not the primal urge to be doing it, but the physical act
itself, or that's the way I saw it), and as anyone can see, we agreed to
disagree, as you do.

Sorry if I pinched a nerve!

Cheers'n Beers... [_])
Don

But if the boat sinks, you probably have a life jacket, life raft, life
boat, maybe people in the area to assist, etc., in other words you might
survive without the boat or ship.

This might be true if the Queen Mary sinks today. It wasn't true when
the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria sailed. They had each other,
and that was about it.

=They= were pioneers. People on the Queen Mary are tourists.

My *primary* point the last few posts, has been odds of survival

What were the odds of survival of the Pilgrims? (based on the number
that survived, vs the number that died enroute or in the first, say,
year) What are the odds of survival of an astronaut? (based on number
who died in flight, or in the first year of their colonization of a new
planet)

You mentioned Lindbergh (Lucky Lindy!), and I kind
of remember reading he landed with fumes (?) left in his gas tanks;
however, if he had run out, he still had a good chance, ok - fair chance in
the Spirit of STL , of gliding down to a safe landing, Plan B, and maybe
Plan C would follow Plan B if he ditched in the ocean and was left floating
around, Plan D if the rescue craft sunk, and so on.

Actually, somebody took off before Lindburgh. They had three people
(IIRC), three motors (a tri-motor Folker), and never made it. So much
for "good chance - ok, fair chance..."). Lindburgh had a one-in-four
chance (in hindsight).

I'd love to believe there was another inhabitable piece of real estate
besides earth, but so far I haven't seen a shred of evidence

There's at least as much evidence as there was to Columbus.

Sending humans 44 million miles with
a gigantic payload, after our robotic rovers and mapping satellites have
shown Mars to be another Death Valley on steriods just doesn't make a lot of
sense to me.

Then don't go. But don't try to stop others from going... even on
your... well I was going to say "dime" but really, it's "tenth of a
hundreth of a penny".

Jose
--
Quantum Mechanics is like this: God =does= play dice with the universe,
except there's no God, and there's no dice. And maybe there's no universe.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Half my posts circulated around Jose and I trying to determine if space
exploration and conventional (?) exploration didn't have some degree of
being 'different' (not the primal urge to be doing it, but the physical act
itself, or that's the way I saw it), and as anyone can see, we agreed to
disagree, as you do.

Uh... I didn't agree to anything (though I still disagree

Sure, there are differences. There are always differences. I just
don't think they are fundamental differences.

Important, yes. But fundamental? Not a chance.

Jose
--
Quantum Mechanics is like this: God =does= play dice with the universe,
except there's no God, and there's no dice. And maybe there's no universe.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Jose wrote:
Half my posts circulated around Jose and I trying to determine if
space exploration and conventional (?) exploration didn't have some
degree of being 'different' (not the primal urge to be doing it, but
the physical act itself, or that's the way I saw it), and as anyone
can see, we agreed to disagree, as you do.

Uh... I didn't agree to anything (though I still disagree

Sure, there are differences. There are always differences. I just
don't think they are fundamental differences.

Important, yes. But fundamental? Not a chance.



Ok, I agree, half way....... d:-))

Jose wrote:
But if the boat sinks, you probably have a life jacket, life raft,
life boat, maybe people in the area to assist, etc., in other words
you might survive without the boat or ship.

This might be true if the Queen Mary sinks today. It wasn't true when
the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria sailed. They had each other,
and that was about it.

If one, or all, of the ships had sunk, some may have survived in a long
boat, or even a hunk of mast floating, but the *point* being, they weren't
instantly, automatically doomed when the ship sunk. They still had a
chance, and giving odds of those chances are totally out the window, as
simply having any chance beats no chance.

=They= were pioneers. People on the Queen Mary are tourists.

Yeah, no argument there, how'd the QM get in this? I have NO argument
against any bona fide explorer (there have been some frauds) or pioneer who
ever lived, or ever will live - my position is that the ones operating on
terra firma (or to a lesser degree water) have an advantage over someone
operating in a vacumn @ plus/minus 2-300º (or whatever) millions of miles
from earth. That's it! It's not NASA blaspheme, or condemning space
travel, or setting back the human race. Trust me. I think the folks in the
past have done an unbelievable job - there is absolutely no doubt their
ideas of what was looming ahead was a hell of a lot scarier than what we
have, since we have a damn good idea what's there, and precisely where it's
at, we just don't know what's going to happen en route.

Actually, somebody took off before Lindburgh. They had three people
(IIRC), three motors (a tri-motor Folker), and never made it. So much
for "good chance - ok, fair chance..."). Lindburgh had a one-in-four
chance (in hindsight).

If Lindy would have stayed on course and run out of fuel, he may have at
least been over Ireland, or within sight of France - again 1:4 beats 0:0
odds if your machine quits.

I'd love to believe there was another inhabitable piece of real
estate besides earth, but so far I haven't seen a shred of evidence

There's at least as much evidence as there was to Columbus.

Sending humans 44 million miles with
a gigantic payload, after our robotic rovers and mapping satellites
have shown Mars to be another Death Valley on steriods just doesn't
make a lot of sense to me.

Then don't go. But don't try to stop others from going... even on
your... well I was going to say "dime" but really, it's "tenth of a
hundreth of a penny".


How the hell would I stop others?

But by George, now you've done it! I wouldn't go now if they begged me!
You could even throw in a book deal, and I will NOT take it. A guest
appearance on Bowling For Dollars, maybe..... d:-))

I'm all for manned missions when it's obvious that that's the only way we'll
get the desired results. Something like Mars in on a scale that by the time
the hardware and technology are ready...

Those explorers will meet a cadre of Martians who came from Earth before
the hardware and technology was ready.

Jose
--
Quantum Mechanics is like this: God =does= play dice with the universe,
except there's no God, and there's no dice. And maybe there's no universe.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.