Robert Zubrin: the importance of space for mankind.

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Good point. Torpedoes detonate underwater where there is no free oxygen.

ruveyn

Heh, so we'll be hitting Mars with a more advanced version of the sneakers-over-the-phoneline trick? Clever.

Another thing that really shocked me was looking up more about Phobos and Deimos. Even if I was an astronomy buff as a kid I never really researched moons all that much (aside from the wild and fun ones around Jupiter and Saturn). I was really blown away by how small they are - less than 20 km diameter on average each? they're really a bit more like orbiting asteroids than proper 'moons'.

That's because they probably are in fact captured asteroids.

Yeah. We tend to think of a moon as a spheroidal satellite because it's what we have in natural orbit of Earth, but yep the two Martian moons are essentially amorphous pebbles compared with the Earth's moon. However, they're still plenty large enough to construct within and use as spaceports or hubs of a type. Forget the lousy miniscule ISS, those massive satellites in orbit of Mars are already there in stable orbits and they'll do nicely for space commerce, research, etc. They can become cities in space.

earth has a couple of small moons besides the moon itself as well.

too small too see unfortunately but they are there.

okay okay,

i guess cruithne falls short of the actual definition of a sattelite

This was another really good speech from the same seminar, Everett Gibson giving more backings to the 1996 evidence for ancient life (circa 4 billion years ago) that's been found across approximately 92 kg of Mars rock here on earth.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLMt6us5Cgg[/youtube]

I would love to see Phobos hollowed out (it is porous but not hollow according to the most recent research) through the center and spun around to make a compromise gravity between that of Earth and Mars. It would be a great base for future missions to colonize Callisto, Ceres and Europa, which, IMHO, would be about as good, or even better than, Mars if we can find a significant amount of Uranium or Thorium on any of them. This is due to the fact all 3 are rich in water and Europa may even have significant life under the ice (I believe it does, but I know there is now evidence to support me...at least yet.)

Ceres may actually already be feasible without thorium or uranium resources, as concentrated solar power is probably feasible, thus enabling a large scale asteroid mining industry that could drastically speed up the colonization of the Jovian System.

Indeed, even the Jovian moons of Europa and Callisto may be colonizable without a significant intra-Jovian source of fission fuel, thanks to Jupiter's radiation belt emitting more energy than it takes in from the sun. Thus, perhaps a miniature Dyson ring around Jupiter could sustain large colonies on Europa and Callisto; I do not know of any good calculations of the potential for Jupiter's energy potential, though.

However, for getting anywhere beyond Mars (and probably to it, too) I propose nuclear thermal rockets. They can even act as a launch system from Earth in theory (though not a good idea in reality) and the radioactivity from any accident would be of little importance to colonies under the ice on Europa especially.

Nuclear thermal rockets do not have interstellar capability.

Europa, Callisto and Ceres are all in the Solar System.

We don't need to travel interstellar distances to build yet more homes for human civilization. People who forever make excuses in essence serve to advocate the eternal squandering of our time in nothing more than mere procrastination. There will come a point at which we will no longer be able to be a spacefaring civilization. We could have become a truly spacefaring civilization back in the 70's, but we didn't due to politics. If it weren't for WW2, it could have happened even sooner and we'd have even more resources available that wouldn't have been wasted on wholesale manslaughter, but even so we still have the capability to go NOW, and yet we just don't. I hope that changes, although it will probably never change so long as people piddle about saying that we don't have Star Trek's fully array of technological magic.... We have the technologies necessary to colonize a great deal of our solar system already, so we don't need to wait any more to do so. We need to get everything moving to expand into space while we still can.