Mars missions fade away

[davide]

The Obama administration's proposed budget will gut NASA's Mars exploration plans, at least for the near future. It will cut the agencys partnership with the European Space Agency to send probes to Mars in 2016 and 2018. "The 2016 mission, called the Trace Gas Orbiter, was to sniff the Martian atmosphere for methane, which could signal the existence of microbes on the surface. The 2018 mission was to land a rover to gather rocks and soil for eventual return to Earth."

“The impact of the cuts ... will be to immediately terminate the Mars deal with the Europeans,” said G. Scott Hubbard, a Stanford University and former NASA planetary scientist who revived the agency's Mars exploration program after the 1999 failures. “It's a scientific tragedy and a national embarrassment.”

President’s next budget to cut Mars, solar system exploration - The Washington Post

But there is some good news. At least we know that the federal assistance money that takes about 60% of the budget (and away from NASA) is being used wisely. The number of free, federally subsidized cell phones w/250 monthly minutes has doubled in the past couple of years. "In Louisiana, the number [of free phones] grew from 38,000 in 2008 to 626,000 in 2011, an increase of 1,565 percent. ... the system has been "fraught with fraud ... People have been ripping this thing off left and right" ... "In Arizona, nearly half of 1,313 ... subscribers ... were deemed ineligible for the program."

FCC Wants $25 Million for Cell Phone Subsidy Program 'Fraught with Fraud' - US News and World Report

 

[Thabtos]

The good news is these cuts do not do away with the Curiosity rover they're sending up there.

The bad news, well relatively, is this ensures that I'm not voting in the general election.

It's ironic that when I talk to my kids and tell them that man once walked on the moon, to them it's the same as me talking about Atlantis, or the Roman Empire, or some other historical tidbit that's so removed from their reality it might as well be a fairy tale.

I hate the callous attitude people have toward space exploration. I was listening to a call-in radio show where people were basically ridiculing manned spaceflight. It's depressing to me.

I guess the idea of the U.S. spending trillions of dollars on technology that's not made to kill other humans is beyond the pale for most people.

Stephen Hawking, a clueless moonbat obviously, said that interstellar travel is the only chance humanity has for survival in the long run.

You can't walk if you can't crawl, and right now we can't get a human past low earth orbit.


Bleah,

/rant off

 

[mike]

What i find most interesting is this

By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain... - Science - News - The Independent

How to become immortal: Upload your mind - by Terrence Aym - Helium

According to Ian Pearson, a British futurist, death will be a thing of the past by 2050.

Pearson is one of many futurists, cybernetic experts and artificial intelligence researchers whose thoughts are converging on the same basic idea: Why not upload everything that's in the brain—everything that makes a person who they are—into a computer and then download it again into a new body? Doing such a thing would make the individual theoretically immortal

Which means we will likely become post biological long long before we get off earth......

It seems likely then given the terrestrial model, any species visting us will have done the same.

This could go a long way towards explaining some of the odd aspects of the subject, including the elusiveness, and deliberate deception aspects

 

[stonehart]

What i find most interesting is this

By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain... - Science - News - The Independent

How to become immortal: Upload your mind - by Terrence Aym - Helium



Which means we will likely become post biological long long before we get off earth......

It seems likely then given the terrestrial model, any species visiting us will have done the same.

This could go a long way towards explaining some of the odd aspects of the subject, including the elusiveness, and deliberate deception aspects

Very nice hypothesis regarding the possible ETH.
To me this makes a huge amount of sense in regards to the massive distances involved in interstellar travel, solving the human (alien) lifespan problem.
Such that it no longer matters how long it takes to travel across space as the biological aspect is removed and if married hypothetically with cloning technology the mind could be re-installed if you will into a new host.

 

[mike]

Exactly, we can already print organs

'Organ Printing' Could Drastically Change Medicine - ABC News

why not print an entire bioplatform

Bones, muscles, organs etc etc etc.

And just transfer the "mind" to the platform when you want a physical form.

Again our own model looks like developing conciousness transfer long before we do interstellar flight

 

[stonehart]

Exactly, we can already print organs

'Organ Printing' Could Drastically Change Medicine - ABC News

why not print an entire bioplatform

Bones, muscles, organs etc etc etc.

And just transfer the "mind" to the platform when you want a physical form.

Again our own model looks like developing conciousness transfer long before we do interstellar flight

Well that makes sense as well for what is the point of cloning if you can not transfer the mind to the new form.

 

[davide]

I agree with most of the above comments and believe that, unless humanity is obliterated by its own hands or by a natural event, within a thousand years or so, two things could very likely make interstellar space travel possible:

1) Just as Friedman says a laser is more than just a strong flashlight, we will develop a method of traversing long distances by something other than powerful rocket thrust. It will be something we can't even imagine -- just as Thomas Jefferson could never imagine a real-time video conference with someone in China with a device he could hide under his wig.

2) Humans will live incredibly long and healthy lives due to advances in artificial and lab-grown body parts. (Hopefully, we will institute term limits by then and the fools in D.C. will finally make a rational change to Social Security.) We could become a race of people that would physically and emotionally survive the challenges of deep space travel. Although interstellar space travel might not take as long as we might think now, it could still take time, but not require thousands of generations if our life-spans were to increase.

But as Thabos indicated, space exploration must first be made a priority. NASA has to sell it as something essential for the future of all of mankind -- not just a neat thing to do. We have forgotten the technological, educational and economic boom that resulted from manned space exploration. Instead, all we hear is that the money would be better spent by using it to fund one of the government's mandatory entitlement programs that are taking nearly 70% of the budget.