Can we make this new religion with me as its leader... Also need to make sure people know that the more money they give the church the more they will benefit with miracles in daily life. Because you know... People need hope in miracles in life
To think about it, just witnessing the endless variety and beauty of Cosmos is boring. I will give you all of my possessions and join your church but only if it has a hidden sinister purpose, just taking everyone's money doesn't quite turn you into a supervillain yet. What about maximizing chaos? Initially you'll need to help stuff grow, prosper and develop and eventually slowly build up divisions that lead to an endless strife and stalemate but one that cannot be resolved through diplomacy. All the sides must also be sinister and chaotic in their own twisted ways while being inherently anathema, nemesis to each other on existential level.
The old concept that "robots are better and cheaper than humans" appears as little more than generalization and misconception. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1203/1203.6250.pdf --------------------- TL;DR Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity says “the unfortunate truth is that most things our rovers can do in a perfect sol [i.e. a martian day] a human explorer could do in less than a minute”
of course, that might change should they ever decide to switch to autonomous aerial reconnaissance, the difficulty there of course being creating a drone that is capable of flight in the martian atmosphere and durable enough to weather the... weather >.> On the other hand, you could combine the two, and just make a huge number of drones that base at a series of rovers.
I wonder if hot air balloons powered by radioisotope heaters would fly. We could legit have a friggin' steampunk robot colony on Mars.
Considering the amount of trouble they're having with a fricking RC car with cameras on it do you suppose they'll have that much more luck with a flying drone? All I'm saying is - required power levels to sustain flight vs. to move on ground, factor in the far thinner atmosphere and far less lift for any solution for keeping the thing in the air. Then, consider things like sudden planet spanning sandstorms and being able to land safely somewhere and wait through the storm and maintain power levels etc. I think flight in far thinner atmosphere without any supply and maintenance is a lot more difficult than driving an RC car. My son successfully operates RC vehicles and does recon missions to the living room and beyond. They suggested balloon based floatation colonies for Venus. The only problem was that they essentially suggested living on a hot air balloon that is suspended above hell with no opportunity for rescue should anything ever go wrong. On Mars you should be able to use hot air balloons but due to the atmosphere being so thin the sheer size of the balloons needs to be far greater than on Earth. Besides that it's just a matter of having lighter air in the balloon and the balloon being able to weather those sandstorms and so. Why radioisotope? I would think that some form of solar power or so would be better and ideally if I could choose freely I'd pick a thorium. It's safer than Uranium based fuels and hundreds of times more common and cheaper and exists on Mars too. Currently we have almost 3 million tonnes of easily and cheaply extractable thorium on Earth that has been surveyed. On the other hand this weighs a lot more and I don't know how much something like a 10kW or stronger RTG would weigh or if they can be built.
yes, thinner atmosphere would mean less lift, but lower gravity would mean less need for lift. Not sure if it would be viable but I'm nowhere near sending my first drone army to Mars, either , and as I said, I have some ideas for surviving the sudden changes of weather, as for flying, yes it would be more difficult, excepting that you could more easily program a drone to say, fly 1km north, circle east one degree, return to hub, take pictures. Put some proximity sensors and some method of dealing with the weather and you're gold, flying is -way- easier when you know there's no other air traffic besides yourself and you have no trees or other non-significant terrain features to worry about. We have autonomous drones that can hover around a person in motion, focus on their facial features, and maintain relative distance and rate of travel, I'm fair to certain we can manage to construct a autonomous flight pattern that could handle the dead martian circumstances. Radioisotope heaters are used because they take up very little space and mass, always a good thing in space. Balloons might not be a terrible idea actually, sure they might need to be massive, but send throw out a bunch of weather balloons around Mars and you could build yourself an early warning system for those wild sandstorms. The balloons would just need to drift high enough to avoid the storms themselves. All considered that's not a terrible idea either, assuming you can meet the required lift, hell pack some solid state sensors on the thing and you could probably just use droppods to deliver them.
Problem is that you're not just going to grab an off the shelf drone and ship it to Mars. In fact, you're not going to take an off the shelf circuit and put it on a Mars drone. Normal circuitry and electronics can't take a beating and even on the extremely well protected Earth surface they suffer from periodic problems. On Mars much less on the voyage there anything sent is going to be exposed to a real punishment in terms of what electronics can tolerate. You need to design special shielded variants of whatever you are going to build and this is expensive and laborous. Even on Mars you need to have shielding on the robots because Mars has negligible magnetic field to protect electronics, shielding and specifically designed resistant electronics. Because I know jack shit at the moment of flying drones on Mars, I forwarded the unanswered https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Could-a-drone-fly-on-Mars to a bunch of people such as NASA PR guy who knows his stuff to JPL workers etc. in the hopes of finding out more on this topic. Let's hope someone bites. The balloons and such aren't a bad idea, the problem is that we have to manufacture everything on Earth. It is cheaper to make a Mars satellite than to land something on Mars. Weather satellites cover a lot more ground and can do many things a balloon can't do. On Earth we use balloons exactly because they're so much cheaper than satellites. We can literally see a sandstorm kicking up from orbit and the full extent of it. All we needed are more weather satellites.
well yes, you'd need a lot of research before you could even build a prototype and then testing is only as good as how close you can approximate the mars atmosphere and gravity on earth or in space. Shielding isn't really all that complicated, the problems are they're either heavy, or fragile, or both. But none of that really matters until you know whether it's even reasonable to attempt to fly on the planet. Balloons on the other hand, like you said might need to be a lot bigger, but that can actually work to your advantage since you'd likely make the balloon out of foil which is an excellent shielding material, protecting you from a lot of the Sun's radiation, it's very lightweight and can be stored in very small packages before deployment. They could even be deployed just inside the atmosphere if your craft was to enter on a shallow trajectory, deploy balloons which would fill as they fall and then jettison the canisters. You could then use a trivial amount of motor power to fly them, and solar could easily supply that power, weather balloon satellites could totally surveil the surface with minimal effort... though, that's assuming the planet doesn't have nightmarish high altitude winds that we simply haven't had any reason to notice before ^.^
Looks like I was guilty of the "oh, if they haven't done it then it makes no sense"-fallacy. Immediately one of the answers to the drones on Mars was this: Looks like you guys are thinking along the same lines as the actual Mars researchers.
No because that would mean harry potter is not magic. Because potions is STILL chemistry. So if someone says "i want to learn potions like harry potter" you can reply "you can. just go any accredited college/university and get a chemistry degree"
Only don't learn potions exactly like Harry Potter, because he cheated in potions class and you'll be expelled.
