There are plenty of people that spend years lying on the sofa watching RU-vid, only sitting up to play video games or order food delivery. The perfect astronauts for a Mars trip.
That ink story, for me anyways, was interesting as it just shows how a company will lie about one of it’s products and then have to come clean later. This in its small way proves how conspiracy theories gain traction!
On your points about humans travelling for any amount of time in deep space, I'm 100% in agreement. GREAT 2022 book: "The End of Astronauts: Why Robots are the Future of Exploration."
Sorry, to go to Mars, we have to master multiple travels to the Moon and building durable and viable bases there. The Moon is the base for interplanetary human travel missions.
The thing that wrecked the Odysseus mission was "health and safety". Yep, they forgot to remove the physical lockout pin on the ranging laser that was essential to accurately measure altitude during descent. Perhaps next time they'll do away with the lockout pin and simply use a sign that says *_"do not look directly at laser with remaining good eye"_*
Scare quoting health and safety is not necessarily the best look. An unprotected ranging laser could easily result in uncontrolled exposure to anyone in the area. Instead, I'd suggest they tighten up their preflight procedures.
Except we have to leave earth at some point. It's also smart to spread out just in case of a planetary scale disaster. Right now all of humanity is on one planet. So one well placed asteroid could wipe us all out.
@@harshbarj The Only thing that would wipe "us" out would be ourselfs in the end..we're not living together as 1 species on this planet right now, so getting our seperate planets for all alike would only spark an interplanetary conflict and would devide us even more. We've been taught that the rule of nature is the survival of the fittest, but the only way for us humans to survive is to work together, that way we are so much stronger..
On the radio tower - I'm not sure there is any resolution, but the tower site has been visited independently - there is no trace of any recent material theft, and plenty of evidence that the site had already been vacant for over a year.
6 месяцев назад
Yep, that tower theft thing is fake. A few RU-vidrs visited the site and it is clear that the site has been abandoned for a several years now. That bogus transmitter site is kept "active" so that they meet the FCC requirement of being present on both AM and FM, a condition they apparently had to meet when they got their FM license. That radio station has been financially struggling. I believe they have launched a crowd funding activity to collect money. The alleged theft could be a way to stimulate donations.
I work on PS radio systems and it would be pretty hard to steal a tower. Good luck trying to sell that steel! We have copper stolen at sites. If they're smart they just take the gound bars and grounding strips. If they take the AVA or LDF cables, they gonna just end up in jail when they goto sell it. Lol!
I've seen a video of the site being visited. It looked like the entire place had been cleaned out well over a year ago. The building was empty; wiring, controls, transmitter--it was an empty shed with the door hanging by one hinge. Judging from the growth of weeds in the doorway, the lack of tire tracks in the driveway, a small tree growing up through a collapsed chain-link fence--I'd say that radio station was gutted and the tower dismantled closer to two years before the "theft" was reported. (I was a farmer for decades. I know how fast weeds and trees grow, LOL!) So far, the evidence, paper trails, financial reports, etc. seem to implicate the radio station owners as having slowly dismantled the entire site and sold the metal for scrap years ago. --Dan
Google StreetView images showed that the allegedly "stolen" radio tower actually disappeared over a year ago, and even before then, there was a video showing that the AM station was off the air, while its FM translator continued to broadcast, in violation of FCC rules. The most likely theory is that the AM transmitter fell into disrepair and was dismantled, and the story of it being stolen was made up to try to avoid a hefty fine and/or the station having its license revoked if the FCC found out about it.
old guy here who remember in 1960s that we will have men on Mars in 1980s., In 1970s, landing date was set in 1990s, in 1980s landing date in 2000s. In 2004 we have VSE plan for people on Mars in 2020s. It's the same script for more than 50 years, humans on Mars will always be 20 years away. I don't think we need to worry about people suffering flights to Mars. Maybe those wasting a year of their lives in long duration simulations. You definitely highlight a long time in ISS or a submarine is tolerable because you are not millions of miles away.
I think Antarctic expeditions are the closest simulation for a Mars mission in terms of isolation. But the stations are large, no delay in communications and gravity. There is also the issue of solar radiation on the trip to and from Mars. I think we humans are stuck on Earth until our technology advances quite a bit.
When I was a kid, the assumption was interplanetary travel would be nuclear powered and therefore much faster than the currently plan Mars trips. If we want to go to mars a restart of the nuclear rocket program is probably essential.
Lamy- WOW! IMHO all of their ink stinks. Thanks for the article, Fran. I'm going to see if the retailers still have the authentic pens made in Germany to add a few more to my collection. As far as ink colors go, batch to batch they are different. I think that's why Noodler's always has a gigantic selection of colors...some that are pretty similar to older named inks but aren't named the same.
Wow! What a great episode. I always knew from the start that colonizing Mars was a pipedream. Impossible, and rediculous. Lets put our dreams towards saving this planet and humanity.
I know this is not where I should be getting my news, but, I do enjoy this content because I learn a lot about current events that I otherwise don’t seek out.
There are SERIOUS problems with rotating habitats, since they can't even be PROPERLY simulated on Earth, not the least of which is the Dzhanibekov or Tennis Racket effect, where a rotating habitat contains an uneven mass distribution, forms multiple rotational axes, and they fight for supremacy, flipping the habitat through structurally destructive movements. Until this is worked out and solved, and I hope it's soon, we can't have 1G gravity in rotating space habitats. The other problem is moving around these habitats. You can't just add a rocket motor. Rotating habitats become gyroscopes, so everything about them is weird. We've got some 'splaining to do!
If they video stream their trip to Mars live it can be a new show online called "Event Horizon the Reality Show"😄 Then we can see them doing nasty things to each other when they ran out of food and water 😅
Thinking about that radio tower and how ballsy that is... does this happen in other parts of the world too: In my city (Christchurch, New Zealand) we are having a (new, never heard of this before very recently) issue where ballsy criminals are buying cordless disc grinders and duct taping them onto the end of long PVC pipes and cutting (LIVE!) electrical power wires between poles the street which can be 11kV to 20kV. This is happening in the middle of the night and leaving streets (and a suburb in one case) without power when people wake up in the morning! So yeah... is this a thing on other parts of the world (particular... stealing LIVE conductors!)
Thanks for pointing that aspect regarding how susceptible the human body is to deteriorating in space travel. Considering the human body's main composition is water and there is no such thing in space, it would be impossible not to get the moisture exhumed from your body. Simply put, there is no water ionization anywhere except for your own.
All the problems you list for manned Mars missions are serious, but the one that has no realistic solution is radiation. Specifically the galactic cosmic ray flux (GCR). No realistic shielding will protect them during travel, and once on Mars, colonists would need to live underground almost 100% of the time, and most of that time will need to be spent on a centrifuge to counter the low gravity problem you described. Not at all the sort of romantic life people imagine.
Great topic. The data on "being in space" so far has come from LEO, where the only thing the astronauts have to work with is resistance machines. On Mars, even though it's only 1/3 Earth gravity, it's gravity - a constant 24/7 (or whatever those numbers are on Mars, lol) force to work with, just like Earth. I expect we could devise weighted clothing/suits to wear most of the time which would require similar levels of physical exertion as living in Earth gravity, for those who plan on returning to earth. I don't know the science but to me it seems like the hole in this idea is that your internal organs would still only feel 1/3 Earth gravity, and what affect that will have upon return to Earth I have no clue. Weighted suits is a starting point though. Apologies if this idea isn't new, I've never heard of it.
I'm very supportive of robotic exploration of space, including Mars, but I don't see much value in human exploration for all the reasons that you mentioned. Human exploration is also vastly more expensive than robotic exploration. We could probably send out 100 robotic missions for the price of a single manned mission.
NASA and the federal government should make a deal with 6 long term sentence inmates for a reduced sentence if they complete this experiment: Simulated 6 month space trip to Mars, 12 months spent in simulated Mars habitat with environmental space suits and 6 month return trip. Any shenanigans and you're back in the slammer!
I think people handle isolation very differently, but everyone will have some level of negative effects from it. As long as the crew is thoughtfully put together, and they function well together autonomously from the team back on Earth, I think much of it can be remedied. They have to be a family, basically, with the ability and will to work out any issues that might arise. But yeah, there's also physical health.
My favorite fountain pen ink was Parker Sapphire. No longer avail. At a pen show, some ink guy sold me three bottles of noodler ink and gave me his recipe to come close to Parker Sapphire. It was close, and a used it for 6 months, then moved on for variety.
I wonder if VR could help with the psychological issues? They could share grand experiences (think co-op multiplayer games) together to build team sprit/relations and stave off boredom and drudgery. Nasa could feed them new VR worlds via data link, whatever they wish for.
Another option is faster a space craft. A Nuclear Thermal Rocket (NTR) is being developed by Nasa and Darpa. An Earth to Mars trip with an NTR would take 3-4 months vs 6-9 months for a chemical rocket. Also you wouldn't have to wait for the minimal transfer window every 26 months. You can launch at anytime. So it should be theoretically possible to construct a 1 year trip to Mars and back. As for Mars loneliness. I expect Mars might end up like Antarctica. A population of 1000-5000 people rotating in and out. Mostly researchers from many different country.
One of my doctors told me that if I was sedentary, I'd get a trophy. Also, someone is still stealing steel. Also, also, Pascal was my favorite language. It had some structure like C but was more natural languagesque and less terse.
I’m also interested in what is no longer available or what is not being allowed that is more important then thee innk not being the same We may never know. Thank you for the news
I don't know very much about how ink ages and didn't research it at all , but could it be that the older ink aged and isn't the same for that reason .....
Hmmm crazy crews,,, Captain James Cook FRS (7 November [O.S. 27 October] 1728 - 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, cartographer and naval officer famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean and to New Zealand and Australia,,,, these people were away from civilisation , for years,, they seem to have coped..... First voyage (1768-1771) ,,,, Second voyage (1772-1775) .... OR ...finding america & exploring it .... all took years & away from civilisation ....
Honestly, us neurodivergent types would have a better chance of surviving on Mars, as long as you can find a group that gets on well enough. I loved covid lockdown, even though I was required to still go into the office. I honestly went for days, sometimes more than a week without talking to anyone, and I was getting so much done since there was nobody else there to distract me, it was great! It would almost be worth getting riddled with cancer and wasting away due to the reduced gravity and dying within a few years.
Fran, if Black Mirror is paying attention, they’ll have a episode, where deep space missions will be manned by prisoners, as life sentence, punishment exploration.
Yeah, Walt passed a little while back. Lots of emails back and forth over the years but oddly enough I was never a customer. He dealt in all kinds of test equipment in addition to slide rules and other devices for making math a little easier.
Fran, couldn't the same thing have been said by someone conducting "simulations" of cross-ocean travel in the time of the great explorers like Magellan? I mean, look what happened to mariners who were at sea for months or years. They were isolated at sea for months, terrible storms, problems with the ships themselves, not knowing where they were really going at all (maybe just a vague idea), illnesses of all kinds (like scurvy). As you know, expeditions would leave with three ships and hundreds of crew members and come back in one ship with a bunch of raggedy stragglers. Yet they did it anyhow, just because.
The difference is that the ocean is not an empty vacuum, devoid of virtually anything to see or do. Life on an ocean-going vessel is far from idle, the daily routine is filled with vital tasks that require attention to detail, and the rugged weather ranges through diverse extremes. Space travel is literally solitary confinement, a prison sentence with no possibility of reprieve until that distant point where it just ends.
@@QuicksilverSG I don’t know about that. For instance, much of what goes on with the crew of the ISS has to do with maintenance of the vessel itself, both inside and out, as well, they conduct a multitude of experiments, which a crew of any interplanetary vessel may be tasked to do. In other words, the idea that any crew aboard a Mars bound space ship would just be sitting in space with nothing to do or concern themselves with until they reach their destination is absurd. They will be very busy and won’t have much time to sit and stare out into the abyss of space, contemplating their existence.
@@elkabong6429 - The ISS is not a space ship, it's a space station in a low Earth orbit of about 90 minutes per rotation. Maintaining such an orbit around the Earth is a far more complex enterprise than piloting a vessel along a predetermined course to a distant planet. In addition, the ISS receives periodic supplies from Earth, and hosts a wide variety of science and technology projects conducted by numerous international teams, which keep it in constant communication with support teams on Earth. By contrast, a space ship is by necessity stripped down to the bare minimum equipment needed to securely complete its self-contained journey. Once its long-term trajectory is set, only minor course corrections are needed during its months-long flight. Aside from life-support systems maintenance, there is little more to do but wait for the ship's momentum to take it across the void between Earth and its destination, and there are no majestic views of the rotating Earth below to keep its crew company.
I think the physiological condition of humans selected for space flight is probably one of the most pressing, non physical, issues. The thing is the type of people currently being chosen as astronauts are probably some of the least suitable for long term isolation. A person who would voluntarily isolate themselves for years is thought of as strange and unstable by a socially orientated society, but self sufficient hermits 'preppers' could be the ideal Martians!
correct@@jamesphillips2285 - and now the station is off air completely because the FM repeater was intended to support the AM station. Without the AM station, the FCC shut them down.
People also looked at google street view images, and it's clear the tower was taken down a long time ago - if you go back far enough, there are 2 towers relatively close together, and then you go forward in time, and "oops", the tower in question is gone - more than a year ago.
🤣 Gawdddd I love your channel miss Fran! When I speak the same words in any conversations with Elon Musk fans or any space related enthusiasts, I get the fire tongue ritual without any sane debate or whatever. It's seems people simply do not want to know all the details about space travel and what it must be like, even though in my nation we have an astronaut explaining this. We need a whole different race of beings that could live through such a dire route through nothingness and than a whole different race of beings, to eventually do something on a planet, so technologically it is possible, yet with humans ... besides that, the advantages are left to be seen. I rather believe that Mars will be populated by machines and robots, rather than living organisms. But well...people seem too focussed on whatever movies tell them and show them, I guess.
mushroom "lives on decaying matter" i think its probably surface only, maybe skin level at most as opposed to the cordyceps mushroom which takes over the hosts brain. Interesting nonetheless
Yin and yang….a frog with a mushroom growing out of its body which could theoretically transfer to humans and make us all look like walking forest floors…but McCartney gets his bass back! All good then.
The solution to the Mars problem isn't to send bigger ships with some form of simulated gravity. The solution is to send much faster ships with nuclear rockets of some sort that can get there in weeks instead of months. If you can get there in less than 3 months, land, hop around for 3-6 months and then get back in less than 3 months, many of the issues with long duration spaceflight - including the need for provisions and life support systems that last for years - just go away. But yeah, trips to Mars with chemical rockets aren't viable.
I don't think I'd want to be in space for any significant length of time until we solved the gravity problem enough to stave off the physiological effects. That's going to take a lot of engineering.
The idea of a Mars mission being "controled" by an earth command seems strange. Its a self contained expedition. Separately i dont see long term every day space travel until there is artificial gravity (probably rotation based as it can be done with a tethered counterweight.. although i'd love to see the full circle)
As other commenters here and on other sites discussing visiting Mars, the solution is not to send humans. Humans have & are developing the technology to find out everything we need to know about Mars and other planets with "robots". As much fun as the human trips to the moon were, the knowledge gathered from those trips could be done by equipment similar to what we have sent to Mars. Sending humans to Mars will result in deaths and-or mental and physical problems. It is debatable whether sending humans back to the moon is of much value. Although if Elon wants to go to Mars that's his decision.
One thing this makes think about. What if earth were to continuously transmit some sort of live feed to the spacecraft while they were going to Mars? How would the live feed behave the further the craft got from earth? Would those in the feed appear to move slower or would the feed start to break up at the craft?
The feed would simply be delayed further and further from "live" as the craft progressed farther from Earth. By the time Mars is reached, the astronauts would be seeing what was transmitted about 20 minutes prior. The relative velocity difference between earth and the spacecraft would be too small for significant relativistic / time dilation effects to occur and change the "speed" of the stream. Nor would the craft "outrun" the signal, since it's traveling at a miniscule fraction of the speed of light. There may be some Doppler shift of the transmission itself, but correction for that is trivial, especially with digital communications. (Obviously there may be some signal breakups due to antenna positioning during maneuvers and such, but that's irrelevant to the question at hand).
As much as I support manned exploration of space I must agree with your rigorous treatment of the human biology and psychology considerations of a mars mission.
How DARE you bring a realistic fact based take to Mars colonization! Re:submarines, can confirm sometimes people go all the way through the selection and training process, only to find they can't handle it in real life and are evacuated if at all possible. Source,Navy doctor friend.
saturn IV,, could lift 150 tons into low Earth orbit ( Skylab ),, and the big SpaceX heavy lift can put 250 tons into low Earth orbit you could put the equivalent of a submarine and its crew into space SPEED .... Project Orion (nuclear propulsion) ,,,,, ,NASA produced a Mars mission profile for a 125 day round trip with eight astronauts,
Hopefully the #1 and #2 people to go are musk and bezos. And then after that, we could send ALL of the politicians - it would improve earth quite a bit!
So people pay Musk a 100 grand for a one way trip to die? This proves Musk is the greatest salesman to have ever lived. Guess the old saying a sucker is born everyday is true.
Green is your color Fran ❤❤❤ don’t stress - there will be bigger fish to fry soon. We all need to keep our edges tight these days - keeping our family / social circle cared for and tented to 👍
Diesel-electric submarines can't stay submerged very long, but nuclear-powered submarines are limited by their food supply, so they can stay down for several months at a time. Several months is much less than several years, but then there's the really big differences from a mission to Mars: a) you're still on Earth, and b) the crew size of a US attack submarine is about 134 people, and a missile boat has a crew of about 155 people. On a Mars mission, you might have a handful (3-5?) crewmembers you might eventually need to eat. And then you would die, on Mars. Earth is the best place.
A normal most-efficient trajectory to Mars is just 9-10 months not years. But then again being in habitat on the surface of Mars still very isolating but at least you would have gravity.
@franklittle8124 Okay, but a "mission to Mars" is a one-way trip, unless you die there shortly after landing, or leave soon afterwards. If it's 9-10 months to get there, and you took off immediately after landing, it would be a minimum of 18 months (1.5 years) which is about 2.5 times as long as a deployment on a US nuclear submarine, and you would have no time to do any science or set up a "colony". The submariners have full Earth gravity, becausethey are on Earth. The Mars-bound astronauts would already be weakened by microgravity (let's just call it zero-G) by the time they got to Mars, and would be challenged by Martian gravity after they landed. And then they would have to live in underground holes until they died, so they didn't die sooner from unbearable levels of radiation.
Fran, It only takes about 9-10 months for the normal trajectory to get to Mars, not "many-many years". People have spent that much time on the ISS. Exercise regimens prevent the worst effects of being in zero gravity. Also, in this age of texting, who communicates in real time on Earth anyway? I cant even get anyone to answer e-mails anymore.
Without sci-fi high impulse high energy engines, or beamed power motors, 9 months, plus 500 days at Mars for return window , plus 9 months return. Mission time over 1,000 days in zero-low gravity. To get to a 1/3G world with barely enough atmosphere to be much use, not enough magnetic field to do much. Pretty much all the effort needed to live on/in Luna, just on a much longer timescale and larger scale overall needed with less return on decades scale. We are going to need big heavily shielded vessels with gravity simulation. But once you have large vessels like Aldrin cyclers sustaining long human endurance, why bother hanging around a gravity hole like Mars? We don't actually need all that, a lot less would do. Just accept it is going to be costly on the hundreds of years scale and build a wall with space for the names of heroes who died to explore and exploit the inner solar system. 1,000 names a year .100,000 dead over 100 years would be a low body count , not even one days dead on Earth. But even then, why go to a death trap like Mars?
It seems that you regard a mission to mars as just "getting there" - but that 10 months is just 1/4 of the round trip mission time under the best of circumstances, and only if you go when the alignment is ideal, and that there are no issues at Mars to prevent the return at the next available window. And before you get confident about long term zero G effects you have to read Scott Kelly's book about it.
