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  1. #21
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    What species do u think will drink water there ?

  2. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by Kanael View Post
    I find it funny that NASA or people around the world would want to colonize Mars yet we haven't even colonize something that's like a fraction of the way to Mars.
    Mars is in a lot of ways, easier than the moon. The moon may be closer, but that and the easier down-mass, up-mass transit are the only advantages it has.

    The moon has a major problem that Mars doesn't have - lunar dust. Dust is inherently crystalline. In it's natural state it's very "sharp" which en mass makes it abrasive and sticky. On the Apollo missions, dust got everywhere, and into everything and damaged their space suits to a limited degree, because the nature of lunar dust was not known before Apollo 11. It's nasty stuff.

    Dust on Mars, like earth, is weathered by wind and by water. Martian dust will still be somewhat abrasive, but because Mars has a functioning atmosphere with wind storms and possibly even occasional flooding (on geologic timescales), it is less dangerous.

    Furthermore Mars is subject to less severe temperature gradients than the Moon. If astronauts land on the side of the moon facing the Earth, The surface will sometimes be exposed to light directly from the sun, sometimes tangentially, sometimes reflected off the face of the Earth. Building modern electronics with both sufficient heating AND radiators (not to mention shielding) is complicated. Space probes solve this problem by changing their orientation with respect to the Sun, because in space sun and shade matter a lot. That is more difficult on the surface of a moon.

    Mars' biggest problem really is it's down and up mass. It's small enough, and it's atmosphere is thin enough, to be of minimal assistance in slowing something to landing due to atmospheric drag (which is how capsules on earth are slowed - they aren't traveling very fast when parachutes are blown), which means you need something like the Skycrane to get anything of substantial size down. But Mars' atmosphere is thick enough that it can't be ignored like the moon - you do need to account for winds blowing you off course, turbulence and so forth.

    And then getting back up... well that's a whole other challenge.

    The problem is mostly resolved by sending people to Mars to stay. For a short jaunt, yes of course, the Moon is easier. But keeping human beings on Mars long duration is far easier than the moon for environmental reasons alone. Martian soil is scientifically suitable for growth of plants. The moon? Not so much. The Amundsen Scott South Pole Station is in many ways exactly what the first Martian colony would be like.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundse...h_Pole_Station


    We just have to detach ourselves of the idea it's worthwhile to bring people back. People should go to Mars to live.

  3. #23
    Old God endersblade's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Djalil View Post
    You bombed the moon as well?!
    XD
    We bomb everything. What makes the moon so special?
    Quote Originally Posted by Warwithin View Post
    Politicians put their hand on the BIBLE and swore to uphold the CONSTITUTION. They did not put their hand on the CONSTITUTION and swear to uphold the BIBLE.
    Quote Originally Posted by Adam Jensen View Post
    Except maybe Morgan Freeman. That man could convince God to be an atheist with that voice of his . . .
    Quote Originally Posted by LiiLoSNK View Post
    If your girlfriend is a girl and you're a guy, your kid is destined to be some sort of half girl/half guy abomination.

  4. #24
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    Why colonize the moon ?! It's just a rock with no air, food or water (it seems). What could possibly be gained from colonizing the moon ?

  5. #25
    Quote Originally Posted by So bored View Post
    Why colonize the moon ?! It's just a rock with no air, food or water (it seems). What could possibly be gained from colonizing the moon ?
    Helium-3 for nuclear fusion. It's abundant on the moon, but nearly entirely absent on Earth.

  6. #26
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    Quote Originally Posted by endersblade View Post
    We bomb everything. What makes the moon so special?
    Careful with those bombs, the moon is what is keeping the weather and magnetic forces on Earth in balance. Without the moon, the weather would go berserk and tidal waves would wash over the continents.

  7. #27
    Old God endersblade's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by So bored View Post
    Careful with those bombs, the moon is what is keeping the weather and magnetic forces on Earth in balance. Without the moon, the weather would go berserk and tidal waves would wash over the continents.
    You say that like they don't already know that. Mwahahahaha.
    Quote Originally Posted by Warwithin View Post
    Politicians put their hand on the BIBLE and swore to uphold the CONSTITUTION. They did not put their hand on the CONSTITUTION and swear to uphold the BIBLE.
    Quote Originally Posted by Adam Jensen View Post
    Except maybe Morgan Freeman. That man could convince God to be an atheist with that voice of his . . .
    Quote Originally Posted by LiiLoSNK View Post
    If your girlfriend is a girl and you're a guy, your kid is destined to be some sort of half girl/half guy abomination.

  8. #28
    I doubt this would create a set back, if we had to and we did colonize the moon, we would just bring large containers of water with us. But I'm pretty sure we don't know what's even inside the moon either.

  9. #29
    There is water there. http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/

    Enjoy

  10. #30
    The Lightbringer serenka's Avatar
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    well fantastic, people in the UK can't even view the bbc website.
    dragonmaw - EU

  11. #31
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    When you are the moon the best form you can be is a full moon, eehh… and then a half moon he’s alright, but the full moon is the famous moon and ehh… like three quarters no one gives a shit about him, when does he come? Like two days into the calendar month? He’s useless. Full moon. The moon, The main moon.

  12. #32
    Quote Originally Posted by Kalis View Post
    According to a report by Japanese scientists, the previous belief that there may be ice on the moon could be incorrect, and it might just be a shiny white rock called anorthosite.

    This has implications for potential lunar bases, as they wouldn't have local access to a water supply, therefore making permanent occupied establishments less viable.

    Is this a killer blow for colonisation of the moon, or merely a setback?

    http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2013...living-on-moon


    On the plus side, this means that there probably aren't any Nazi bases on the dark side.

    Merely a set back, as we've explored, what? MAYBE 1/1000th of 1% of the moon?
    Apply blizzards model to any other subscription service,you'd be outraged:
    Netflix adds no new movies for a year, you click a new movie, there's a $5 fee.
    You're in an accident, click your onstar button, but there's an addition $20 fee for them to help.
    You turn on your tv only to find all you get are the infomercial channels. Every other show is pay per view.
    See how dumb that model is?

  13. #33
    The Undying Kalis's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fya View Post
    There is water there. http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/

    Enjoy
    I think the point is that the previous methods for detecting water were wrong, and that they detected rock.

    - - - Updated - - -

    As the BBC apparently doesn't like people resident in Britain from reading about Science, here is the article in full:

    "The US space agency Nasa sells dreams. There’s nothing wrong with that – after all, space and its exploration have always been a source of reverie, from Johannes Kepler’s youthful space-travel fantasy simply called The Dream to visions of the ‘final frontier’. The problem with dreams is that sooner or later you must wake up.

    To judge from an article on lunar bases on Nasa’s web site, it’s reluctant to do that. “When multiple spacecraft all found unequivocal evidence for water on the moon it was a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel,” the article says. It explains that the atomic components of water – hydrogen and oxygen – on the lunar surface move towards the poles, “where [water] accumulates in the cold traps of the permanently shadowed regions.” Since it was first proposed several years ago, this idea that the polar craters, particularly the so-called Shackleton crater at the south pole, are lined with ancient ice has inspired many hyperbolic newspaper stories about colonising the Moon. But it’s looking ever less likely that it is true.

    A new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters drives another nail into the coffin of lunar living. It suggests that what was at first taken to be bright, reflective ice in the Shackleton crater is in fact more likely to be white rock.

    When the Apollo missions reached the Moon at the end of the 1960s, they brought back a sobering message: it seemed to be a dry, barren dustball. But the modern dream of “water on the Moon” began in earnest in 1994, when Nasa’s spacecraft Clementine orbited the Moon and studied the mineral composition of its surface. The reflections of radio waves beamed into the shadowed polar craters suggested that they might contain ice. But follow-up studies using radio telescopes on Earth failed to find any such evidence.

    Then in 1998 another Nasa Moon mission, the Lunar Prospector spacecraft, used a special instrument to search for hydrogen atoms – a possible signature of water molecules – on the Moon’s surface. It detected the hydrogen signals from polar craters, but when at the end of its mission the spacecraft was purposely crashed into a south polar crater in the hope that it might send up a plume of water detectable from Earth, nothing of the sort was observed.

    No Moon river

    Each alleged sighting of lunar ice provoked new headlines forecasting future moon bases, feeding an apparent public thirst for space colonization. But for scientists, the debate has remained unresolved. In 2009 NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, designed to map the Moon’s surface in even more detail and carrying several instruments that might be able to detect ice. Last year a team of planetary scientists reported that the south polar Shackleton crater has a bright floor and even brighter inside walls, suggesting that some material has gradually slipped down the slopes onto the bottom of the crater. The researchers suspected that this stuff could be simply lunar “soil”, called regolith because it is really just mineral dust, with no organic matter. Lunar regolith is bright and reflective when freshly exposed – the bombardment from cosmic rays, solar wind and meteorites gradually darkens it, but on the crater’s walls it is particularly well sheltered from such disturbances. But the team also offered the tentative possibility that the bright material could be a very thin layer of rock dust mixed with 20% ice.

    Now along comes a team of Japanese space scientists to squash that enticing idea. Led by Junichi Haruyama of the Japan Aerospace Space Exploration Agency (Jaxa), based in Kanagawa, they have analysed data from Jaxa’s lunar orbiter Selene – better known in Japan as Kaguya after a legendary moon princess. Last year the team reported that Selene (which operated from 2007 to 2009) had found rocks made of the mineral anorthosite all over the Moon. This stuff is thought to be formed when meteorites hit the Moon and melt its surface, and the researchers suggested that the Moon might have a thick layer of it several kilometres beneath its surface, created by a massive impact soon after it was formed.

    Lunar anorthosite is very pure and bright white, as shown by the lumps of it brought back by the Apollo missions. But here’s the clincher: unlike ice, anorthosite absorbs infrared radiation strongly at a wavelength of 1.25 micrometres, providing a distinctive signature of this mineral. And that absorption was just what was seen by Selene on the inner wall of the Shackleton crater. So it looks as though it isn’t ice.

    Haruyama and colleagues don’t rule out the existence of water elsewhere on the Moon, for example hidden away in sub-surface caverns. But they suspect that the amounts might be small. That may still be scientifically interesting, raising questions about how it got there and how it might move around on the surface. Yet without a significant amount of water on the Moon, it is hard to see how any substantial space colony could be established there – the cost of sending up regular water supplies (which would be used not just for drinking but for making hydrogen as fuel) just doesn’t look viable.

    That would be a shame, because there’s surely useful science that could be done from a moon base, not least in terms of finding out how this ball of rock formed in the first place (we still don’t really know). It might also literally bring us back down to Earth, forcing us to accept that the universe is a truly inhospitable place, so that we’d better take care to keep our house in order.

    Given the history so far, it would be unwise to imagine that this is the last we will hear of water on the Moon. But it would be unwiser still to start planning to build a colony up there."

  14. #34
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    Quote Originally Posted by moremana View Post
    Earth wasn't a set back, the human race destroyed it.
    WOW Where are we now??

  15. #35
    Merely a Setback Adam Jensen's Avatar
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    There is water in our urine, if we can create a good filter, we can drink what we piss out. Seems to me that if we developed a good filter (one you'd want to trust because who wants to drink piss?) we could stretch whatever water we bring for a while.

    It's not fun to think about, sure, but most of the water you drink now has been drunk before.
    Putin khuliyo

  16. #36
    Titan Yunru's Avatar
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    We can just send robots there to do a dirty work...
    Don't sweat the details!!!

  17. #37
    Deleted
    OMG guise, how does the cheese stay moist if there's no water? O_o

  18. #38
    Quote Originally Posted by Djalil View Post
    You bombed the moon as well?!
    XD
    Why not? Have you seen the surface of the moon? It's getting bombed all the time by meteorites.
    Grand Crusader Belloc <-- 6608 Endless Tank Proving Grounds score! (
    Dragonslayer Kooqu

  19. #39
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    Quote Originally Posted by moremana View Post
    Earth wasn't a set back, the human race destroyed it.
    The planet is just a rock covered with a space mold called Life. Humanity would have to go to great lenghts to actually destroy it. Even after humanity is gone, probably due to self destruction, the rock will be in the same place and the space mold will just look differently but will still be there.

  20. #40
    It's funny you mention bombing, because using a nuclear weapon on Mars to gain access to sub-surface ice and shelter is an entirely legitmate and effective way to start building infrastructure on the planet.

    It's been seriously explored by NASA in the past, and I'm sure will come up again. Because when not used to target enemies, what is a nuclear weapon? A really big explosion. And unless you're ready to ship thousands upon of tons of TNT and two dzen 60 ton Mining Construction vehicles to Mars, using a 500 pound nuclear weapon to do your hole digging for you makes a whole lot of sense.

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