You have missed my point. To equate that picture to space travel.......every beast leaving the river would have at least one good croc bite.

Edit: and they would never cross a river again.

 

You have missed my point. To equate that picture to space travel.......every beast leaving the river would have at least one good croc bite.

Edit: and they would never cross a river again.

Space travel won't always be that dangerous because relative danger in space travel is a solvable engineering problem not a static given. The engineering solution for the beasts is to allow the vast majority of beasts to pass in relative safety after the very high risk of the initial few.

 

Do you believe it possible for man to go to mars by say......2035?

 

Do you believe it possible for man to go to mars by say......2035?

Yes, it's a monetary (is it worth the cost) and engineering problem (make the risk factor reasonable) not one of basic science. It's all about motivations. If we knew for sure the earth would explode in 2035 do you think we wouldn't find a way before that happened?

 

I suspect the only thing slowing them down is the shielding physics.....not the money. I'll bet with shielding....that could compare to space station doses.....that there would already been a big push to go.

 

I suspect the only thing slowing them down is the shielding physics.....not the money. I'll bet with shielding....that could compare to space station doses.....that there would already been a big push to go.

I agree but it's not a show-stopper.

Overview of Mars Mission Crew Health Risks
• Mission And Crew Health Risks Are Associated With Any Human Space Mission – Briefing is focused on space exploration crew health risks associated with space radiation
• Exploration Health Risks Have Been Identified, And Medical Standards Are In Place To Protect Crew Health And Safety – Further investigation and development is required for some areas, but this work will likely be completed well before a Mars mission launches
• There Are No Crew Health Risks At This Time That Are Considered “missionstoppers” for a Human Mission to Mars – The Agency will accept some level of crew health risk for a Mars mission, but that risk will continue to be reduced through research and testing
• The Most Challenging Medical Standard To Meet For A Mars Mission Is That Associated With The Risk Of Radiation-induced Cancer – Research and technology development as part of NASA’s integrated radiation protection portfolio will help to minimize this long-term crew health risk

https://smd-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s..._Tech_for_Risk_Mitigation_Simonsen_TAGGED.pdf

https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/04/mars-astronaut-radiation-shield-set-for-moon-mission-trial/

 

Have we really become that risk averse? How many people died on a typical sailing from the Old World to the New? How many graves are along the Oregon Trail? How many bodies are still on Mount Everest?

Hi,

Well if you feel that casual about the death risk then you could probably sign up for a trip to Mars yourself
You are making it sound like because people died in the past they should die in the future too. The decision to die will come from the volunteers i guess so maybe it's not a risk for them but a given.
Dont get be wrong, i would not be so anti mars if there was anything good for us there, or it was already terraformed.

 

I'm sure other have different priorities.......but the first problem is gravity. Our bodies are physical mechanical structures........that require a force gradient to work against.

Even if we had suitable radiation shields......by the time we got there... we would be too loopy/loosy to do much.

So....for any craft that has any mission time.......we need a rotating structure. One half of a G might be all that's needed for body maintenance. Why has this not been done? Ask Niel. Niel is nothing but a classroom show off.....and knows nothing of nature. People like Niel are the reason we remain ignorant.

Next... the shielding. We have metal foams......but the shielding should be electrical and physical. The earth uses the solar wind to establish a particle shield around the planet. We might be able to make a small particle shield around a craft. The particle shield might be a mile in diameter. It would also allow easier craft tracking. Also.....the solar wind could be a fuel source.

Next....is the velocity. The first two problems(gravity and shielding) depends on this figure. We have spent and wasted a lot of resources for decades.......on science fiction....instead of engineering. We haven't even built a jumper.....that can go to the moon in a day.

They waste our resources on theoretical problems......instead of solving engineering problems.

You have to remember.......that these people doing this work still believe in a 2D or flat universe.

This is why to this day they believe the planets have elliptical orbits. Ignorant flatlanders.

Acceleration.......first...purge the gut/body of gas.....next....fill sinuses/ears and lungs with liquid. Insert body into liquid cylinder. In this condition/state.......the body in a complete liquid cradle......we can accelerate without damage. Hopefully.

We would know these things if we quit the science fiction and get back to physical science.

Hi,

I agree with some of the stuff you said, but Niel knows nothing of nature? That's extreme and very wrong. If you truly believe that show why.

 

The nasa pr statements prove my point. They have changed the definition of risk.
Exposing a body to possible multi-year weightlessness and high radiation is a sacrifice, not a risk.
And I would argue with the rad estimates.

It's grubering. It's pr.

With our engineering capabilities for velocity........and the time involved.....we need a safe comfortable ship, preferably 2 or 3 ships, for manned missions. With that time and distance, take a rescue mission with you.

 

Space travel won't always be that dangerous because relative danger in space travel is a solvable engineering problem not a static given. The engineering solution for the beasts is to allow the vast majority of beasts to pass in relative safety after the very high risk of the initial few.

Hi,

I used to think that too, that every problem had an engineering solution too until i saw what happened with the Space Shuttle over the years.

In theory i think there may be an engineering solution to every problem, but it gets shadowed by management and cost concerns. Once we start cutting costs we increase risk, and once we set unreasonable time constraints management looses their sense of reason. It's a deadly combination that always leads to failure.

Not limited to the Shuttle either, remember the Samsung phone battery issue.

One of the problems is that we have things working against us right this very minute: politics and free enterprise. Taken together, costs in the world keep rising, forcing not just the higher costs but more stress on management leading to more mistakes in judgement.

Taking Niel's view to the extreme, we have an equation. It's about pure evolution via organisms that act mostly on instinct versus evolution via organisms that act on what they believe is intelligence, and of course there is a time factor involved in both cases.
In the first case they had millions of years as Bill pointed out, in the second case they (we) have maybe 200 years. So the equation looks something like this:
EvolutionA(1,000,000)=EvolutionB(200)

with a question mark over that equals sign. The question being are they equal, or is one greater than the other. That is, do they both work or does only the left side work out in real life (that has already been proven to work).

We believe intelligence has a positive impact on survival, but we've seen some negative impacts in real life such as pollution and perhaps global warming. So i think the right side of that equation has YET to be proved before we can honestly state that what we are doing is correct.

One of the problems with intelligence is that it seems to promote greed through self satisfying ventures rather than global wellness. Until we solve that we wont do any better anywhere else because we'll just ruin that too.

 

Hi,

I used to think that too, that every problem had an engineering solution too until i saw what happened with the Space Shuttle over the years.

In theory i think there may be an engineering solution to every problem, but it gets shadowed by management and cost concerns. Once we start cutting costs we increase risk, and once we set unreasonable time constraints management looses their sense of reason. It's a deadly combination that always leads to failure.

Not limited to the Shuttle either, remember the Samsung phone battery issue.

Not every problem has an engineering solution but space IMO does. I think we have learned something, we no longer have all our eggs in one NASA management pocket for space travel technology, there is diversity in engineering and management.

The Space Shuttle problems never stopped our desire for space travel and the Samsung phone battery issue hasn't stopped our desire for fancy phones even from Samsung.

 

Not every problem has an engineering solution but space IMO does. I think we have learned something, we no longer have all our eggs in one NASA management pocket for space travel technology, there is diversity in engineering and management.

The Space Shuttle problems never stopped our desire for space travel and the Samsung phone battery issue hasn't stopped our desire for fancy phones even from Samsung.

Hi,

Interesting, but what you could be saying with that last sentence is:
"We failed in the past so there is no reason why we should not fail in the future too".

Yes it's true there could be improvements such as in Sammy's new phone, but the lessons learned can be expensive and time consuming. The alternative is something entirely different which may have a better outcome.

I am simply outlining the pitfalls. A complete optimistic will never see any pitfalls.

 

Hi,

Interesting, but what you could be saying with that last sentence is:
"We failed in the past so there is no reason why we should not fail in the future too".

Yes it's true there could be improvements such as in Sammy's new phone, but the lessons learned can be expensive and time consuming. The alternative is something entirely different which may have a better outcome.

There are entire video genres devoted to fail so I don't consider it unusual in any endeavor.
Human history is the story of failure and success. Who writes history books just about the good times?

 

There are entire video genres devoted to fail so I don't consider it unusual in any endeavor.
Human history is the story of failure and success. Who writes history books just about the good times?

Hi,

It sounds almost like you are trying to provide some kind of guarantee that we must fail in order to make progress. Writing history comes after the fact, and we dont have the fact yet, so that gives us time to consider the options. We can discuss it and figure out what could go wrong before the fact and thus help keep history brighter. We also need to weigh the options by comparing.

I think S. Hawking said we need to get off the earth within something like 200 years. Not sure what he based that on. There are a lot of things that could go wrong here on the big E too so maybe that is in itself a strong driving factor.

 

Hi,

It sounds almost like you are trying to provide some kind of guarantee that we must fail in order to make progress.

“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”
―Denis Waitley

You're pretty good at math and statistical trends, fail does not mean giving up, it only means we are not perfect. Progress means change, change means unknowns. It's almost a guarantee some unforeseen possibly catastrophic issue will happen eventually in complex control systems as we build and modify them. Most recently in space with the Falcon 9 cryogenic cooling problem that caused an on pad explosion.

http://www.popsci.com/spacex-falcon-9-explosion-reason

Musk didn't elaborate on how the solid oxygen formed or what happened after that, but the leading theory is that the solid oxygen may have ignited one of three carbon composite helium containers inside the oxygen tank, triggering the explosion that annihilated SpaceX's launch pad.

"This is the toughest puzzle that we've ever had to solve," Musk told CNBC.

Now that the company has a real lead on the problem, they can get to work on fixing it. SpaceX is targeting a return-to-flight in mid-December, although they haven't yet revealed what payload will be launched.

 

Hello again,

Well your insistence has led me to think about it again in terms of risk alone.

If we venture out, we initially risk a dozen lives, and there will be others to follow. If we dont venture out, we risk the entire civilization. Both are very hard to assess, but the current idea is that if we dont we are doomed. So all i can do is feel sorry for the first groups that venture out and just hope for the best not only for them but for our whole civilization...if they dont make it, we wont either.

A lighter look at the situation...
Maybe we can help figure out what might go wrong and thus avoid one more problem. For example, someone trips on the way to the bathroom and hits their head on the control panel, the control panel sees a command to open all the doors and windows

 

In several places you make it sound like we currently don't give any consideration to what might go wrong or how it could be avoided. Nothing could be further from the truth. Significant resources are spent not only thinking about what might go wrong, but testing it, trying to eliminate the potential for it to happen, and developing procedures to deal with it if it does. No one can think of every possibility and so there will always be risk.

 

In several places you make it sound like we currently don't give any consideration to what might go wrong or how it could be avoided. Nothing could be further from the truth. Significant resources are spent not only thinking about what might go wrong, but testing it, trying to eliminate the potential for it to happen, and developing procedures to deal with it if it does. No one can think of every possibility and so there will always be risk.

Hi,

Yes that is why i evaluated the question in terms of risk in my post just before yours

Yes it is given consideration, but then what happens is the corners start to be cut, and that's when people start dying off.
Also, if you read up on some of the things that have gone wrong in the past you'll see it is almost always these cut off corners that meant some people died. You'll also see there are a huge number of problems that went wrong that we are not always told about when they happen. The count is very high, in the hundreds, but you probably dont think that because we are not told right away, if ever when something does go wrong where the people made it out alive.

I guess in the end all we can say is that it is the most dangerous thing anyone can do for the sake of the survival of the species.

 

Hi,

Yes that is why i evaluated the question in terms of risk in my post just before yours

Yes it is given consideration, but then what happens is the corners start to be cut, and that's when people start dying off.

So just what is the difference between "cutting corners" and making "engineering compromises"?

 

The tendency in most industries is to minimize the risk to humans and employ machines or robotics where ever possible.

Increasing mechanization in coal mines is eliminating the need for men to go 100s of feet down and risk being trapped by cave ins or explosions. Sewer cleaning is relying on cameras and remote controlled machines. It would be absurd to promote a mission to send more men down in coal mines or sewers so why is anyone thinking it's a good idea to send men to Mars when remote controlled explorers can do the job?

The manned mission to Mars is just another "pork barrel" project to keep the aerospace industry working and the result of sending 100s of lobbyists to Washington rather than a legitimate endeavor. In fact, the government could just fake it and produce a bunch of phony videos in a Hollywood movie studio or stage a complete hoax using digital animation.

Then when the astronauts return from their fabricated "journey" to Mars, the government and the Mouth Piece Media could stage a hero's welcome complete with parades, a documentary, infomercials, book and movie deals and, a blitz of product endorsements .