Tag: mars

Red Mars

the odds of this not sucking are very high. maybe we could get an establishing shot of

Vince Gerardis is moving from Westeros to Mars. The “Game of Thrones” co-executive producer is teaming with Spike TV to develop the scifi series “Red Mars,” an adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy novels.

Mars is brutal

Mars One wants to establish a human settlement on Mars, and fund this decade-long endeavor by involving the whole world as the audience of an interactive, televised broadcast of every aspect of this mission, from the astronaut selections and their preparations to the arrival on Mars and their lives on the Red Planet.

There are already over 80k applicants and there is only one way to get voted off the island: out the airlock.

2023-01-12: A cogent anti-Mars case

we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.

DNA sequencing on Mars

venter is such a show off. after wining the human genome race, he sailed around the world, collecting dna samples, and doubled the number of all known genes. then he claimed to have created “synthetic life”, and now this. the man clearly has enormous talent, but i wonder if he is as insufferable as the biography suggests.

Craig Venter and Jonathan Rothberg are competing to put a DNA sequencing machine on Mars, each claiming that it is the best way to search for and confirm Marian life. “This will work only if the DNA on Mars is exactly the same in its fundamental structure as on Earth. It is very unlikely that terran DNA is the only structure able to support Darwinian evolution.” Though I lean slightly toward Venter. Some of the chemistry of DNA life has been shown to imply have the best combinations of stability and just the right breakability and attachment probabilities in the bonds.

Why we explore

When a human stood on the Moon and looked back at the Earth, we changed, fundamentally. Our human horizon popped out 300K km. Forever, we would see the Earth differently, because we had seen it from someplace truly foreign. This is why Mars is important. When we get a human to Mars our horizon will expand 1000x farther, and it will never go back.

Making life multi-planetary

It is important that we take action now to make life multi-planetary, because this is really the first point in the 4B-year history of Earth that it has been possible. That window of possibility will hopefully be open for a long time, but it may only be open for a short time. That’s why I think urgent action is required on making life multi-planetary.

2012-11-12: This guy has more vision (and execution) than all the web 2.0 kiddies together.

Elon Musk wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80K people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500K a trip. In Musk’s vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.

2013-10-03: My latest toy to mess with tiny Luddite brains

2015-08-17: Long but worthwhile read

I’ve always envied everyone who was alive during the excitement of the moon landing in the late 60s. When I’ve thought about The Story of Humans and Space, the 1960s always seemed like a fluky 10 years of supreme excitement in the middle of an otherwise calm and steady trajectory: But now, I’m seeing the moon landing more as a precursor of something much bigger. Without realizing it, we may be standing on the precipice of one of the great leaps in biological history, and the moon landing may later be seen as the first labor contraction in the birth of an entirely new era for life on Earth. And somehow, we may actually be alive as that new era dawns.

2017-06-15: More details have been published

SpaceX is estimating they will be able to achieve $140K per ton for the trips to Mars. If a person plus their luggage is less than that, taking into account food consumption and life support, the cost of moving to Mars could ultimately drop below $100K. Cost will be brought down 5M % with fully reusable rocket, orbital refueling, propellent production on Mars, CH4 / O2 DEEP-CRYO Methalox fuel.

2018-08-31: Using Starship for habitation

SpaceX plans to live out of the BFS ships initially on Mars and then build out the facilities (habitation, power systems, mining and landing pads). The BFS would land on Mars with 100 tons including the ship.