squirrelking - thats a fusion reactor based on earth that is still experimental. Thats one heck of a long way from a fusion reactor that can be put on a spacecraft small enough and light enough and powerful enough to do the job. Its not even intended to produce power just to demonstrate controlled fusion that creates more energy than it consumes is possible. No one has anyone actually produced stable usuable amounts of power from fusion yet. So the idea we will have fusion powered spacecraft soon is bollox! Decades away yet if ever.
" Being a research reactor,[3] thermal-to-electric conversion is not intended, and ITER will not produce sufficient power for net electrical production. Instead, the emitted heat will be vented.[7][8]"
I effing hope fusion comes on line soon tho. We badly need it.
As for whoever compared a depleted plutonium battery with high level active waste, away tae **** ya walloper!
Glad you picked up on this one - I did as well but didn't say owt in case I got called a wallopper! I know you consider me ignorant on nuclear stuff but even I know the differnce.
Unless of course by fusion powered spacecraft you mean that old concept project orion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
No one has anyone actually produced stable usuable amounts of power from fusion yet. So the idea we will have fusion powered spacecraft soon is bollox!
It is, but not for that reason. Fusion power research is all about terrestrial energy generation on a large scale. If we ever get a fusion powered spaceship it'll be completely different. So don't confuse the two lines of research.
Molgrips - it was the idea we could have fusion powered spaceships soon I was calling bollox. Because it is. We are still decades off having an energy producing fusion plant of any sort
If we can't fix earth, we can't upgrade Mars.
Humanity needs a backup, but that might mean planning for the future, tidying our room, fixing that broken window and fixing the leaks instead of trying to move house.
Its not even intended to produce power just to demonstrate controlled fusion that creates more energy than it consumes is possible.
Huh,unless they have changed their minds (entirely possible since I saw the presentation years ago) the idea was in the second decade the 500MW output could be fed to grid. First decade is testing and yeah, probably dumped as heat. One of our engineers got a job as a technician out there, very jealous!
I'd assumed @molgrips was meaning fusion for planetside power. There are still more options than an orion plate, awesome as it would be.
It was the "soon" i was arguing with
If we can’t fix earth, we can’t upgrade Mars.
Humanity needs a backup, but that might mean planning for the future, tidying our room, fixing that broken window and fixing the leaks instead of trying to move house.
It's that false dichotomy again. You can do both, they aren't mutually exclusive. Indeed they might be complimentary, stuff you learn putting people on Mars could help the problems you have on Earth.
Its analogous to people arguing you shouldn't build cycle lanes until there are no potholes in the road.
I'm not suggesting it should be humanities number one priority, but the idea we shouldn't invest in space at all because there is stuff on Earth we should fix instead is flawed.
Molgrips – it was the idea we could have fusion powered spaceships soon I was calling bollox. Because it is. We are still decades off having an energy producing fusion plant of any sort
Yes I agree, but all the effort is going into terrestrial power generation and it's going to be 100% different to providing thrust for a spaceship. Just wanted to clear that up.
TBH it is highly likely that any manned mars programme will also provide benefits for earth. Not necessarily intentional ones but that's pretty much how science works. And we're not just talking about things like tech developed for the journey or for the first martians... Humans basically respond extremely well to doing stuff at the 11th hour, it's a curse and a blessing, we can sit about for decades avoiding a problem. And on Mars or the moon just like in early space flight you pretty much start at the 11th hour and spend a ton of time and effort and ingenuity finding innovative ways not to die. It focuses the mind splendidly.
it is also of course inspirational. There'll be a generation of kids going into sciences and engineering who if you ask their main influences it'll be shooting a Tesla into space. And Minecraft.
richmtb
Full MemberIt’s that false dichotomy again. You can do both, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed they might be complimentary, stuff you learn putting people on Mars could help the problems you have on Earth.
Yes, true. But at teh moment we're not doing the first, more critical thing that's right in our face. That's not because Elon Musk's trying to go to Mars, of course.
(just to point out what ought to be obvious but often doesn't seem to be, Musk's organisations are doing tons to help things on earth too. Binning the starship programme wouldn't really do that much for the battery programmes)
I'd be reading the expanse books to get an idea of what not to do
I’m not suggesting it should be humanities number one priority, but the idea we shouldn’t invest in space at all because there is stuff on Earth we should fix instead is flawed.
Musk could however plough all that money into abating climate change, an issue with a very urgent deadline, rather than preparing for some unknown extinction event that could be centuries down the line. The fact is a) mars cannot be colonised in the timescale needed to escape climate change and b) escaping climate change by improving how we use the earth is MUCH easier than colonising mars.
It's a vanity project of an utter nutter and there is no way it can be justified in the context of issues facing humanity today, in my opinion.
Edit: I don't think we shouldn't go to mars necessarily, I just think it's more of an issue for 30 years time once we've proved we can reach carbon neutrality and the like
The sun has at least 5 billion years left. We have evolved from single cell organisms in less than 1 billion years. Whatever is still around to see the sun blow up, it wont be Homo Sapiens any more.
If we are purely looking to ensure the survival of the human race, we could put up a few huge, sealed bunkers here on earth which would survive nuclear war of catastropic climate changes far easier than on Mars or elsewhere. Goethermal power isn't running out any time soon.
Avoiding the loss of 99.9% of life on earth is hard, maintaining at least 0.01% is doable.
It will be easier to reverse climate change than make a whole planet (mars or elsewhere) habitable
It's a great subject to have a good think about isn't it!
I don't personally think there's a real 'practical' reason for humans to visit the moon again for the sake of visiting the moon alone, other than as a stepping stone to visiting Mars and there's no real practical reason for Humans to visit Mars it's far cheaper, easier and safer to send rovers to Mars with equipment to send information back to us about soil / atmosphere etc, rather than send a Human just to hold the tools in their hand, or bring some back to study.
But, my word, seeing a Human on Mars is one of those "I hope to see it in my lifetime" things and it does seem, at the moment anyway, I will. The other for me, is the contact with other lifeforms from other planets. Let's be honest, if that happens in the next 40-60 years, it's going to be because they came to us.
Musk talks about the survival of the Human species, that if we don't become multiplanetary then we're just waiting around to be made extinct, which I suppose is true, but by having a goal of Mars is just admitting that Humans are incapable of self control and we might as well put huge effort into colonising another planet, than an arguably smaller effort into saving the one we have, because when our Sun dies, Mars dies too.
Maybe it's just too big a problem for my muggle mind to handle, the jump from Mars to another Solar System is just too big. Even at the speed of light (or just below) it would take months to accelerate to that speed without the humans inside being squished and then take about 5 years to arrive. Imagine the sort of calculations you'd need to do to do that, "it ain't like dusting crops kid" even in the vast emptiness of space, you'd still want to know there wasn't some tiny bit of dead sun tearing between solar systems, it's not like you can steer around it.
If you are looking for the prospect of life you are better off exploring some of the ice moons like Titan, Europa, or Enceladus. Whether it be intelligent life, not a clue.
IMO extremely unlikely that we will become extinct. There are highly likely to be Terrible Events of some kind or another that will make it very much not fun for most people but some of us will carry on.
I think it's fairly unlikely Humans will become extinct in a time frame that the average Man or Women on the street thinks about, but it's not impossible
We're due another Ice Age in about 80k years, Humans have survived them before, but have we become too advanced and reliant on technology to survive another one? Maybe that's one possible extinction event we can avoid by living on Mars.
There's a 0.000001% annual risk of an Asteroid hitting Earth large enough to cause an extinction event, okay it would take a million years to make it a 1% chance, but that does mean it happens every 100 million years or so, the last one happened 64 million years ago, I'm not a betting man, but if something happens every 100 million years or so, and it last happened 64 million years ago, those odds suddenly don't seem so long.
a Super volcanic explosion, 74k years ago there was a volcanic explosion that was so massive it cooled the earth by several degrees and blocked out the sun on most of the earth, it was the biggest extinction event since Humans existed and we were very lucky to survive it. They supposedly happen every 17k year, the last one, a pretty modest one by super volcanic explosion standards happen 26k years ago. The 'big' one is in Yellowstone in the US, it's meant to be a case of WHEN that blow, pretty much every living thing on earth slowly dies over the next few years, plants, animals, if 'we're' lucky a few microorganisms might survive and the few humans left (if any) sealed in bunkers for years, can restart the earth if they can get to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
That's even without considering Nuclear war, Pandemics, Ecological collapse, Catastrophic climate change or just the Sun dying in billions of years.
I just read the actual original question.
A space elevator or launch loop. That's what I would be working on if I was CEO of a space company. The biggest problem with serious space exploration or settlement is how we rustle up a lot of heavy raw materials up in space, out of which we can build stuff. Everything else seems solvable.
The reusable falcon rockets seem like a game changer, but still far too expensive for building anything really big.
A space elevator or launch loop.
Skyhook?
Skyhook?
Well that looks brilliant, why don't we have them already?
Once we are able to extract minerals economically off earth, e.g. from asteroids or even just the moon, there is going to be a gold rush.
Mining on earth will continue, but there will be a lot of pressure to stop making giant holes in the ground, both enologically and economically.
