Why do you think it'll be hard? I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but what difficult challenges to survival do you specifically think they'll struggle to overcome?
There are enough places on Earth that was can barely manage to survive without major supporting infrastructure. Those places have the benefit of a breathable atmosphere and Earth gravity. Mars has a far more brutal climate (with a more elliptic orbit creating a more dramatic range through the Martian year), no breathable air, and a weaker gravity.
The weak gravity is the real killer, colonists bones would decay, the calcium would leach into the bloodstream causing serious health issues. Muscles would atrophy. The colonists' sense of balance and motion, evolved to Earth gravity, would be constantly disorienting. Low gravity has a lot of negative health effects.
Mars also has nothing like the Van Allen belt, it's bombarded with radiation that colonists would constantly need to be shielded from.
Mar's atmosphere is poisonous to humans, and has a much lower atmospheric pressure, so colonists would need to have a constant protective bubble protecting them from the world they were on.
Mars hasn't got liquid water. There is water there, but it would require a lot of energy to get it to the point of being usable.
Energy is another issue. Solar energy could provide some energy, though it'd be massively expensive to get enough arrays to support a colony with the required infrastructure. In theory they could create some kind of nuclear energy plant, though the logistics of transporting that to Mars and maintaining it are staggering.
The psychological impact of taking an animal evolved to live in Earth conditions and put them in a completely inhospitable environment deeply dependent on a very complex and expensive infrastructure, with disorienting gravity, health decay, very limited variety in food, and other likely spartan living conditions a Mars colony would be completely hellish for most.
There may be ways to manage these problems, but the millions of dollars spent per colonist to get them there along with the millions spent per colonist to sustain them are a pretty serious impediment. A colony would need to ultimately be economically independent to make it worthwhile. Mars has some resources that might be valuable to Earth, but whether they'd be viable to support a colony needing such an expensive infrastructure to survive isn't a guarantee. Would humanity be willing to pour trillions upon trillions into a Mars experiment in the hope that the experiment might work?
Not to mention the psychological effect of a dim, reddish atmosphere replacing the sky humans are accustomed to. I'd wager the effect would be very depressing, over time.
Colonists could use energy to get artificial lighting to a decent level, but in a wholly artificial environment it might would be depressing to have no nature to experience. We evolved to like living in natural environments that we couldn't really reproduce on Mars. No oceans, no streams, no lakes, no time in the sun, no natural beauty, it sounds like a horrific nightmare to me.
I don't think living on mars will be that hard. I think building the large industrial base required to extract resources and manufacture the equipment required to live on mars will be very difficult (read expensive and slow).
It may, in fact, require more resources for one person to live on mars than one person can produce with our current (or near future) level of technology.
I think just building the energy infrastructure to do energy expensive things like make steel or silicon ingots will be very difficult. Not to mention that there is no source of petroleum on mars, so plastics are going to have to synthesized using other materials. The difficulties are legion once you get down to the details.
How sure are we that there's no petroleum on Mars? If Mars contained any sort of life at one point or another the likelihood of fossil fuels is there, correct?
This would be the biggest discovery of all time, if we actually discovered remains of life on another planet. At the moment and as far as we know, there is no life on Mars and there never has been. It would be fantastic to be proven otherwise, but we cannot rely on hopes of finding oil.
My understanding is that Mars at this time has much less sedimentation than Earth has. It may have had more in the past, but was there ever the volume of organic material that Earth has had in e.g. the Gulf of Mexico or the Tethys Sea?
If we find fossil fuels on Mars, I'm not entirely sure we'll be climbing over each other to burn them. That would be a discovery of immense importance.
In the short to mid term, living on Mars or an asteroid will be much harsher that on Earth. It is colder, there are plenty of space radiation. You'll have to put a suit to go outside. You are not going to frolic in a shallow creek on Mars soon.
Creating new habitable space will be expensive it will be like living in a submarine or an Antarctic base during winter. Forget about having large space for entertainment like a football stadium or a theater. I think that after a few months of that regimen people will start to appreciate more life on good old Earth.
I agree that living conditions will undoubtedly be hard at first, but will only improve from there.
The first humans to live on Mars will almost certainly already have gone through many months/years of rigorous on-Earth testing to ensure they don't go stir crazy. Indeed, MARS-500 is a wonderful, recent example of research into this area.
By the time 'ordinary' humans get to Mars, there should be a reasonable amount of infrastructure (power/water/heat) already in place to support a population.
As for entertainment, I don't imagine that football stadiums or theatres will be required in the future if everyone had access to something like an Oculus Rift.
Nothing is unmanageable, and it is obvious that an engineered habitat will be less "diverse" than Earth that have evolved for billions of years. Take food for example. The basics will be available anywhere in the Solar system, but you are not going to eat fresh seafood or truffle. I know that this sounds pretty trivial, but lots of what we are taking for granted on Earth will need lots of careful planning and execution to get elsewhere.
Just imagine how screwed up thing would have to get on earth for it earth to be on par with mars. The air is unbreathable, there are no living plants (or anything else) outside, the sun is dim, water is scarce, energy is scarce, and it is very very cold.
The technical issue is not the matter. It's the sheer amount of resources for which the overwhelming majority of the human race will never see a benefit from in their lifetimes.
huh.. you're right. I assumed that anything the military bought these days came with a 1/4 million dollar price tag, but the Mark 84 bomb is only about twice the price per lb of the pumpkin bombs.
Wow. There's an industry in massive need of disruption. I'm thinking a mid-range android phone + some servos + software would do the trick. Let's say one year's dev for a reasonable engineer, so $100k + $300 in parts. Make a 1-Iraq-war-day's worth, and you'd have the unit price down to hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands.
You'll need radiation hardening, a more precise inertial measurement unit (six axis gyro), and extreme reliability and lifetime that no consumer electronics device provides. The labor and materials cost, plus electronics mentioned above, is a lot more than $300. I also doubt you'll find a single engineer with the required aerospace and electrical engineering skills - you don't build an flight control surface control system with some 'ninjas' working on node.js in SF in a year.
I also haven't gotten into the business and logistics costs of pulling this off, but consider the fact that there is not even a RFP for such a device in existence.
Radiation hardening is a requirement to protect the arsenal from EMP attacks in a large scale conflict with a nuclear component. This will hopefully be a rare or nonexistent occurrence, and hardening should not be considered a requirement for bombs used on Al Qaeda and IS (and nearly all other expected enemies). There is a place for radiation hardened munitions in the arsenal for deterrance, and there is also a place for some that are not, and these should be the ones we drop in "low intensity" conflicts, with the occasional release of a hardened munition to act as a quality control test.
Reliability is obviously a concern, but the procurement process should force contractors to open their designs to qualified competitors after a certain period of monopoly profits to recoup their research expenses, sort of like the same way that brand name drugs are eventually forced to compete with generics. Just because these designs are generally national security secrets doesn't mean that the original developer should own the equivalent of an infinite patent on the technology.
Even if you do that and build one. You'll need to spend many many times over that budget lobbying, making friends, getting noticed and networking, formalizing through red tape and so.
Imagine today you have that device in your table. Ok. What is your next step. Just show up at the Pentagon with it in your bag?
A lot of that costs money (unfairly probably) and that is one of the reasons soldiers sometimes end with crappy hardware that costs some astronomical amounts.
Sigh. I should have pointed out that I used to be an Air Force engineer. Although my post was a massive oversimplification, it was not for any of the reasons you pointed out. No, dev time would not be more than 1 engineer, at least not for the bomb guidance part. Most bombs that are dropped do not need massive accuracy - anywhere in a 10m radius will do the job nicely. There ate a few targets where you want 1m accuracy, but that's the exception. A phone 'a sensors should be able to do the job sufficiently well.
No, where you're really going to get burned in dev is hooking the bomb up to the aircraft's targeting system. That's a world of pain right there. The best solution might probably involve making a Bluetooth widget that hooks up to the aircraft and then talks to the bomb via radio. They could be pre-paired in the factory. Not ideal though. You're also going to need to spend a ridiculous sum of money on sales, just to get your foot in the door.
A mark 84 bomb, one of the largest conventional munitions in frequent use, costs about 3k a piece. The mark 84's smaller cousins are cheaper. JDAM kits costs about 27k a piece. How am I making things up?
In my region there is a group of charities that get food that would otherwise have been thrown out from local grocery stores. The handling of the food tends to be a bit careless so it's best to stay away from the things that really need to be refrigerated, but it was really helpful for me when I was unemployed. So I for one am glad that grocery stores have too much.
That's great but my point wasn't that they have too much. It was that they are throwing away perfectly good things with only surface/package damage. Giving them to a charity is a much better solution that throwing them in the trash.
There's a national chain of bakeries that operate in our town. They don't offer any discounts at the end of the day because that means that people won't pay full price but will soak up the left overs instead.
Selling seconds/discount items reduces waste but [in poorer areas in particular it seems, and more so with food] it acts as competition against your own full price product. Companies would rather produce waste than damage profits.
Of course there's a fine line and in some areas of commerce price discrimination based on spoilt" goods will be worth while. In large-scale food production the costs of food relative to the selling price are usually low and the negative effects of food wastage aren't born directly by those who do it, it's mainly the same effects as commercial over-farming. Wasting food causes floods (!) but the local bakery don't get the insurance bill and so don't care.
I also am a long time emacs user, but whenever a plugin freezes emacs I immediately stop using it. Is is cider now stable? I know nrepl.el would crash emacs frequently if you asked it to evaluate the wrong thing.
I'm not sure how long this feature has been around, but C-c C-b will abort any running evaluation(s)... I've used it more than once to save a non-responsive cider repl session.
I've never had cider or the old nrepl.el crash or freeze on me, they've always worked fine. I develop on Mac OSX and Linux, what platform are you on? And what Emacs version? I tend to be on the latest GNU releases. Are you using a GNU Emacs or something else? If you're on Mac, I highly recommend this distribution [1]
I use Emacs on Windows too, but I don't develop there, it's mostly a glorified notepad for initial analysis of log files, so I can't really help there. I would recommend getting melpa setup on your emacs and keep cider as up-to-date as possible to see if that helps, assuming you're not doing that already either via melpa or directly from source.
For emacs/clojure users I highly recommend Sam Aaron's Emacs Live. It is an "opinionated" emacs setup and while some of the opinions might not be to your liking, it is really easy to set up and get going with clojure using it.
It seems like from the definition of viscosity and the estimate of glass viscosity provided we should easily be able to observe some glass flow over the course of 10^12 years or so.
It does have less than 1/4 of the payload (by mass) of NASA's MAVEN. So it's not like NASA's much higher budget didn't buy them anything. Still, it is a wonderful thing to show that you don't need NASA sized budgets to do interesting things in space.
I have found it to be MUCH easier to get regular exercise when I live in a reasonably pedestrian safe neighborhood. I have found that the perceived level of effort to maintain fitness varies wildly with my external conditions (stress, neighborhood, prosperity, relationships, etc.). Saying that everyone can do it if they just give it the old college try may be a result of your circumstances.
That'd be great way to establish a regressive tax. Luxury foods don't have more calories than cheap ones so as a percentage of cost cheap food prices would increase more. Not to mention that percentage of income spent on food for low income people is much higher than % of income spent on food by rich people.
Then add: a more aggressive earned income tax, a more generous child tax credit, or a guaranteed minimum income (or some kind of hybrid plan). If the problem is that some people can't afford things, attack that problem directly.
Legally guaranteeing that parents can put their 26-year-olds on their family healthcare plan is also regressive (it doesn't help uninsured families), but that didn't stop it from being enacted.
Is 3D printing really enabling this? If they can make the measurements, I have a hard time believing that an experienced machinist couldn't fabricate the parts necessary. This seems more like a victory of measurement technologies that allow the requirements for a replacement skull to be precisely mapped, than a triumph of 3d printing. (Though I do admit that 3d printing would probably be a lot cheaper than machining.)
Absolutely. No "experienced machinist" can reasonably make this part within spec. The time and cost for a CNC / operator / programming is exorbitant and simply beyond the reach of most people.
3D printing in this context allows for the fabrication of complex geometries that would be incredibly resource intensive otherwise.
You're correct in proposing that measurement techniques have enabled for this. But what good are the measurements if your tools do not allow for you to produce anything meaningful from the data?
Somewhere in the middle: "Typically, they use a special type of cement, but those replacements often don't have a good fit because they had to be created by hand."
