Slow Day on TC. Read this instead!

[harrisonreed]

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/ ... e-on-mars/

Mars Mushrooms

Marshroomz

[BGuttman]

You need a subscription to read it.

[harrisonreed]

Dang. Basically, they think they found life on Mars, in the form of a fungus-like growth.

screen-shot-2021-05-07-at-9-26-35-am-1620394019.png

[imsevimse]

I could read that without a subscription?
Interesting. I do not know what to think of this. Is it real? I guess a "fungus life" on Mars is a very hopeless life. No plants, no trees, no cars, no music and no trombones. I guess if they could communicate they would ask the neighbours the question "what's the point?" and how to order a trombone.

/Tom

[harrisonreed]

FWIW popular mechanics is a relatively legit publication. But I think they have it wrong here.

[timothy42b]

I read popular mechanics occasionally. But according to this site they relied on a questionable source:

https://www.cnet.com/news/no-nasa-photo ... ars-sorry/

Finding simple life anywhere else is of course a Very Bad Thing (VBT).

The reason rests on the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, and Great Filter hypothesis.

Per Fermi and Drake, given the huge number of stars and planets, (around a billion galaxies each containing a billion stars, give or take) there should be lots of alien civilizations. But as far as we can tell space is empty.

Now we come to the Great Filter. For life to develop from simple molecules to advanced civilizations it has to proceed through a series of small steps. Somewhere in those steps there is at least one step that is so hard it's all but impossible to get past. But where is that step? If it is early in the process, then by sheer dumb luck or divine guidance humans got past it. No worries.

If we find simple life anywhere else, then the Great Filter step is NOT early. We just haven't got there yet. The Great Filter step is late in the process, and sooner or later human life will be destroyed.

[robcat2075]

Mars is going to be an unrewarding disappointment for whoever gets there.

[harrisonreed]

Mars is at least easy to take off from and has a lot of resources and almost bearable temperatures, but that's probably about it. If you have some place else you want to go, Mars is pretty good. Maybe not as good as the moon, but maybe better in a few ways. The problem with our Earth is that it's actually really big and heavy, and super hard to get off of. Think about the Apollo rocket, and the truly tiny payload it was able to deliver to the moon. The same rocket taking off from the moon could probably move an entire building to anywhere else in the solar system.

The issue is, where do we really want to go? I think the first travelers to Mars are honestly going to go insane.

I'd go to Mars if it was like it was in Cowboy Bebop though.

[robcat2075]

I think 100 years of sci-fi stories premised in colonies on asteroids or moons or planets have caused people to be rather unquestioning about the economic basis for such things and especially the need for humans in those places at all.

Advances in robotics and automation have pretty much outstripped everything that it was presumed you needed people on-site to explore another planet.

[robcat2075]

In the 1950s, serious people thought a trip to the moon would require a ship like a submarine with dozens of crew to handle the navigation and operation tasks.




By Apollo that had been whittled down to a crew of three with mostly remote/automated craft operation. A few human pilots were needed only for final steps of landing and docking.


Today, space ships dock automatically and large rovers can find safe touchdown spots completely autonomously.

The rover can spend years looking under rocks and taking pictures without ever needing to hurry back to the LM before its oxygen runs out.

[Kingfan]

Heard they found a restaurant on Mars - great food, but no atmosphere.

[harrisonreed]

It was just a dishwasher. They've been tippin' on Mars.

[Cotboneman]

You need a subscription to read it.

I guess you don't need a subscription to read the ads!