• Mars Rover Curiosity Sends First Full-Color Panorama of Its New Martian Home
    154 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;37175904]Nomatter what we do, no amount of damage is even slightly comparable to what goes on in the universe. We could nuke every living thing on this planet to extinction, and it still pales in comparison with the limitless destructive power of the universe.[/QUOTE]The Earth was formed by two equal-sized planetoids smashing into each other. The sheer awesomeness of what this must have been like gives me a natural high for at least two hours every time I think of it. Supernovas make me faint. [editline]10th August 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=JeanLuc761;37175784]And yet, so few people appear to care. It's bizarre how indifferent the general public seems to be in its attitude towards space.[/QUOTE]My seven-year-old sister is fascinated by space, I love it when she visibly is awed by pictures of space and the sheer scale involved.
[QUOTE=thisispain;37176066]that's a nice science fiction-esque concept, but it's likely that if anyone populates the mars it will be large companies with huge budgets. if you thought corporate control over people was bad now it'll just get worse. i just don't buy utopianist philosophies about space. it didn't work on earth.[/QUOTE] Companies helped first settled the west (for the Europeans, at least). You could argue the negatives of this like murdering thousands if not millions of natives and all those things, but you can't do that on mars. The only people that have the ability to make settlements on Mars at least in the beginning will be Nations and Companies, or Companies funded by Nations (probably the most likely). Not all companies are evil masterminded corporations that want to fuck you at every corner. SpaceX and the like don't want to sell useless shit to the masses like record companies or Viacom and friends. They just want to transport your shit to space at what will be a marvelously cheap price for the feat. (estimated around $500,000 by Elon Musk. About the cost of a middle-class house in California.) And really, there's nothing really beneficial about settling on Mars at the moment. We can't really exploit the resources it had even if we wanted to. The first colonies will most likely be scientific exploration colonies.
we should like, make gardens and forrests, so we can make air.
[QUOTE=thisispain;37176066]that's a nice science fiction-esque concept, but it's likely that if anyone populates the mars it will be large companies with huge budgets. if you thought corporate control over people was bad now it'll just get worse. i just don't buy utopianist philosophies about space. it didn't work on earth.[/QUOTE] nah. it'll be governments before corporations. corporations will oil the gears and fill in the gaps - basically they'll make things cheaper and more ubiquitous, but governments will have to spearhead the initial colonisation if it ever happens, purely because corps are out to make a profit, and space colonisation is the longest shot anyone could ever sell. about corporate control - that's already a massive problem that needs to be reined in right now. guess what, if corporations do slowly subduct the power of governments, we won't be going to space. we'll be staying right where we are, because the super powerful corporations that we'll have a problem with will be the ones run by power-hungry yet myopic bastards, and there's more immediate profit to be made from earth's resources here. finally, it's not a utopian philosophy - I might be thick, but I'm not that thick, dude. it has nothing to do with utopianism. it's a simple case of "space has a huge amount of available resources, so let's go and get them, oh and we're liable to get wiped out by a single asteroid strike at some point in the future if we don't bother." really, it's not about space. it's about time. [editline]11th August 2012[/editline] and OvB is right, there's no real way we could colonise mars or get resources from it any time soon. asteroids first. okay so we've heard my defense of a very small part of my vision (shared by a bunch of other people) of one of our possible futures. I want to know what your best-case scenario vision of the future is like
[QUOTE=Mr. Someguy;37175904]Nomatter what we do, no amount of damage is even slightly comparable to what goes on in the universe. We could nuke every living thing on this planet to extinction, and it still pales in comparison with the limitless destructive power of the universe.[/QUOTE] That doesn't justify anything. A number of crazy cosmic energies could destroy Earth at any moment but that doesn't make it okay for us to do it, what the hell.
The closest thing we'll probably see to a Mars colony in the near future would be manned landings and small temporary outposts. Those will be done by NASA and probably SpaceX in unison, along with whatever other companies that supply habitats and other technologies needed for survival. It's not going to be Total Recall for probably a few hundred years.
[QUOTE=OvB;37176277]The closest thing we'll probably see to a Mars colony in the near future would be manned landings and small temporary outposts. Those will be done by NASA and probably SpaceX in unison, along with whatever other companies that supply habitats and other technologies needed for survival. It's not going to be Total Recall for probably a few hundred years.[/QUOTE] I'd hate to be the guy who has to think up a new one liner for when they first step foot on Mars.
[QUOTE=Cone;37175477]without people, there is no Mars, nor is there an anywhere. Mars just a clump of dust without people there to give and take life in equal proportion. Earth would be much the same if we weren't such poetic creatures.[/QUOTE] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyQca1cwe54[/img]
[QUOTE=OvB;37175722]Every picture of Mars is amazing. We've been here for a good 100,000 years banging rocks and sticks together and only in the past 50 give or take have we been able to take photographs from the surface of another planet. That's monumental in my book. This is happening in your generation, your tiny window of life in humanity's life span. Every picture from mars should blow your fucking mind. Same can be said about most of our technical inventions in this era. Flight? Flight is pretty insane on it's own but flight to another planet? That's ridiculous.[/QUOTE] Looks like the drive from Las Vegas to San Diego to me.
I also can't help but wish that we'll somehow be wondrously introduced into an alien space federation like on First Contact
[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;37175103]Source: [url]http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-08/mars-rover-curiosity-sends-first-full-color-panorama-its-new-martian-home[/url][/QUOTE] It looks so much like earth.....sucks that the atmosphere is thin.
[QUOTE=Kalibos;37175389]mission control go ahead command confirming that we are looking at another fucking planet copy that say again this [B]is[/B] fucking mars we're looking at. jesus good christ goddamn.[/QUOTE] It's actually really amazing, sounds so goofy though. I mean, seeing planets in black in white is one thing, but actually seeing a photo in color - its amazing. It would be awesome to see video (like a gopro style camera) of the rover just driving around.
just in case no one has seen it yet. [url]http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/[/url] They have been posting new pictures every day, pretty cool.
[QUOTE=MR-X;37176944]It's actually really amazing, sounds so goofy though. I mean, seeing planets in black in white is one thing, but actually seeing a photo in color - its amazing. It would be awesome to see video (like a gopro style camera) of the rover just driving around.[/QUOTE] Well it can take full HD video at a good frame rate so we'll have some soon enough.
[QUOTE=ac/14;37176962]just in case no one has seen it yet. [url]http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/[/url] They have been posting new pictures every day, pretty cool.[/QUOTE] To add to that, there's also this: [url]http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/targetFamily/Mars?subselect=Spacecraft%3ACuriosity%3AMission%3AMars+Science+Laboratory+%28MSL%29[/url]
[QUOTE=thisispain;37175423]no that's the last thing mars needs. people.[/QUOTE] It's already dead. What kind of harm can people do?
space is cool
why are the edges blacked out?
[QUOTE=ZestyLemons;37176493]I'd hate to be the guy who has to think up a new one liner for when they first step foot on Mars.[/QUOTE] "Wellp, here we are, nice place, time to go home!"
[QUOTE=Chernarus;37177822]why are the edges blacked out?[/QUOTE] It's a panoramic made from 130 different pictures stitched together. The black spots are places where no photo was taken.
Not a panorama, but here's a new shot from Curiosity (obviously unfinished false color) [t]http://i.imgur.com/baZOH.jpg[/t]
Imagine what the ancient Romans thought when they gazed upon the stars, Oh what the first astronomers saw when the looked through their telescopes, Or even what pilots saw as the stared upwards into a vast and starry sky, They saw the impossible, a land of Gods, where no man could ever reach or ever conquer. And that is why they were wrong. We see now that the lands of the Gods are not unreachable, untamable, We see that in the vastness of time and in the greatest of minds, nothing is impossible.
[QUOTE=JeanLuc761;37175724]What's to ruin? It's an inhospitable wasteland for all known forms of life. At worst, we never colonize it because it's too difficult. At best, we successfully colonize and terraform (to an extent), and life would then exist on a planet that would never have it otherwise, and we simultaneously guarantee our continued survival as a species.[/QUOTE]Terraforming Mars is a bit far-fetched tbh. It's atmosphere is 95% CO2, whereas a non-harmful level of the stuff is less than 1%. You'd have to find a way to remove billions of tonnes of gas and replace it with others. Even then, Mars' atmosphere isn't dense enough to support liquid water, and it getting slowly whittled away by solar winds, as the magnetic field of the planet is too weak to stop it. A lot harder to start up a planet's magnetic field than the film Core would have you believe. In the distant future we may very well find a way to terraform it, but likely not in our lifetime.
These pictures seem so alienating and haunting. Imagine waking up one day and just being in a place like that. NOTHING but rocks and sand forever in every direction by yourself
[QUOTE=Sgt Doom;37178534]Terraforming Mars is a bit far-fetched tbh. It's atmosphere is 95% CO2, whereas a non-harmful level of the stuff is less than 1%. You'd have to find a way to remove billions of tonnes of gas and replace it with others. Even then, Mars' atmosphere isn't dense enough to support liquid water, and it getting slowly whittled away by solar winds, as the magnetic field of the planet is too weak to stop it. A lot harder to start up a planet's magnetic field than the film Core would have you believe. In the distant future we may very well find a way to terraform it, but likely not in our lifetime.[/QUOTE] In biology class I found a paper on the plausibility of large scale plant growing on Mars. In short, It's a very plausible idea, as long as irrigation can be made up for them. It looked into things like soil composition and light requirements. Also Bees. Lot's of bees. [editline]11th August 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=Demolitions2;37178552]These pictures seem so alienating and haunting. Imagine waking up one day and just being in a place like that. NOTHING but rocks and sand forever in every direction by yourself[/QUOTE] Someone's never been to Arizona. [editline]11th August 2012[/editline] (Just kidding neither have I :c)
[QUOTE=FingerSpazem;37175636]As much as I love humanity, we really do plague this earth. [editline]10th August 2012[/editline] How big is that volcano on mars? Three times the size of Everest? I want a high definition shot of that towering in the distance.[/QUOTE] Olympus Mons is thousands of miles away from any rover. That said, I wouldn't doubt that we'll be sending something there within our lifetimes. After all the massive craters, it is certainly a point of interest.
[QUOTE=thisispain;37175683]you can be poetic about it from a distance maybe the occasional tour more than that and you're just going to ruin it for everyone[/QUOTE] Are you seriously being preservationalist... about fucking Mars? I hope you are kidding. Yes, it's beautiful! But it's a huge opportunity! Why the fuck preserve it? It's dust and rock! As it is, it's little bit more than planet sized paperweight! Drill the living shit out of it, build bases, try to see if we couldn't ever do something with the atmosphere (seems a bit unlikely with the weak magnetic field). It's a huge playground for us to take. Why the heck should there be any reason for... preserving it? I understand environmentalism on earth, because, what we fuck up is what we will have to live with, afterwards, but mars is a barren radioactive wasteland, albeit an amazing one. I say send the fucking nukes - make few fresh craters to see what it's what it's really made of in depth. Genetically create what ever organism that could live there just so we could begin with creating at least some ecosystem and spray it all over it! Mars is cool, but we can make it much much better.
[QUOTE=OvB;37175722]Every picture of Mars is amazing. We've been here for a good 100,000 years banging rocks and sticks together and only in the past 50 give or take have we been able to take photographs from the surface of another planet. That's monumental in my book. This is happening in your generation, your tiny window of life in humanity's life span. Every picture from mars should blow your fucking mind. Same can be said about most of our technical inventions in this era. Flight? Flight is pretty insane on it's own but flight to another planet? That's ridiculous.[/QUOTE] You're overexaggerating. Consider this as opening of the New World back in 1492. The real pinnacle starts when people actually move there and Mars will be habitable.
[QUOTE=Dark RaveN;37178945]You're overexaggerating. Consider this as opening of the New World back in 1492. The real pinnacle starts when people actually move there and Mars will be habitable.[/QUOTE] Think of these as a robotic Leif Ericson. Except they're never coming back.
Am I the only one who's surprised how much Mars actually looks like Earth? The panorama looks surprisingly a lot like parts of the American Southwest.
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