NASA will be boradcasting live on NASA.com TV Monday.

[SGT ROCK]

Instead we throw endless amounts of money into the military industrial complex

The last I heard NASA is expecting to have manned missions to MARS sometime in the 2030's and the private sector is saying anywhere from 2025+ so there's that.

Couldn't agree more with the money spent on destruction... it's really OVER THE TOP, and they complain about welfare and programs for the poor which is a drop in the bucket compared to the $ we spend on killing technology. It's completely out of control, big business and the military industrial complex are really what will break us eventually.

I'm with Erowid on the water issue, I read about the perchlorate too which they said was or could be used rocket fuel. Considering that and water for sure now, it makes Mars a logical next step for the space program as it is probably the best candidate for a base or colony when compared to others bodies in our system. Terra-forming without a magnetic shield would be a difficult task I'd think too.

They can make oxygen from the water perhaps and fuel is there, the temps are the closest in the system to ours, it comes down to shielding and a food supply. So there's some promise there or hope still for perhaps bases or colonies. I also just saw an article on the development of a propulsion system that can get us there and back on one tank of fuel. All this points to Mars as being the best bet for more exploration and off world colonization. LIFE there now, perhaps not but more study of Europa may be fruitful too in the search for life out there.

Interesting ...

[perrinoia]

Here's the problem with terraforming Mars:

Creating an Ozone layer on Mars is easy... All it takes is a millennium of pollution, or a couple of nukes to the poles, then sending algae to clean up the mess.
The problem is (what caused there to be no atmosphere in the first place) gravity, or lack there of.

Mars has roughly 1/4 the gravity of Earth, which means everything on Mars weighs less than it would on Earth, including Oxygen. There are heavier gasses that would stay on the surface, which we couldn't breath, and oxygen would rise like helium or hydrogen does on Earth, and we wouldn't be able to breath it...

In fact, they believe it was like earth, but the atmosphere "bled off", millions of years ago. What's to stop the atmosphere that we create from bleeding off, too?

However, there is hope that it won't happen again... One theory as to how Mars' atmosphere left, is the creation of the asteroid belt, which some believe was the destruction of a planet orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

Basically, the other planet got too close to Mars and Jupiter, and got ripped apart by their gravitational forces. An event like that could have stripped the atmosphere from Mars. So it that's true, then the atmosphere we build has a good chance of sticking around, but if the slow bleeding theory is true, we probably won't be able to create atmosphere faster than it disappears.

Any-who, that's all the cents I've got on this topic.