I was wondering the same thing. Guess it was to illustrate a point that getting home again is where the expense comes in.Originally Posted by Noclevername
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I was wondering the same thing. Guess it was to illustrate a point that getting home again is where the expense comes in.
Do good work. —Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom
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Well, it would stink to have the budget fail while the astronauts were still on Mars! But who knows these days.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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Motivation to grow potatoes?
sicut vis videre esto
When we realize that patterns don't exist in the universe, they are a template that we hold to the universe to make sense of it, it all makes a lot more sense.
Originally Posted by Ken G
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Ah, of course. The proposed Direct Astronaut Mars Option Navigation: Project D.A.M.O.N.
How many movies has he been rescued in, again?
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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NASA needs to pursue “aggressive” development of space nuclear propulsion technologies if the agency wants to use them for human missions to Mars in the next two decades, a report by a National Academies committee concluded.
https://spacenews.com/report-recomme...n-development/
Do good work. —Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom
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Mars rovers safe from lightning strikes, research finds. The friction of colliding Martian dust particles is unlikely to generate big electrical storms or threaten the newly arrived exploration vehicles or, eventually, human visitors.
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-mars-r...lightning.html
Do good work. —Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom
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We've been operating surface probes there for half a century with no clear detections of lightning. Is their next report going to be on the tsunami risk?
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"No clear detection" is no guarantee. We like to avoid unpleasant surprises when considering possible human habitation.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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Are you serious? Do you apply that criteria when you walk out the door here on Earth?
It's close enough. Lightning is clearly not a notable hazard on Mars.
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Yes, that's what has now been determined. Before this we were just guessing.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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No, before this we had actual real-world observations that it was so. Now we just have a study showing that it's not a hazard in little glass tubes that imperfectly simulate the environment of Mars. The latter is much closer to "guessing" than the former.
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No, we had a lack of observations. I stand by my statement.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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I kind of agree that it seems like a lot of effort to test something that doesn’t seem to be a big problem. And as you said, they were just using a laboratory model that may well replicate conditions on Mars.
I have a suspicion, and I am saying this as a person who writes press releases on research papers... My suspicion is the research is probably not just about safety but about modeling atmospheric phenomena in exo-atmospheres, but that in the press releases they played up the safety issue because it’s easy to understand and thus likely to generate press coverage (and attention on science Internet forums)!
As above, so below
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So to test this hypothesis, I went to the paper, and although I can't access the full text, I did read the abstract, and indeed there is no mention at all about safety. The abstract is just describing it as an interesting phenomenon and the research as something that will contribute to an understanding of the Mars atmosphere. I think it would be easy enough to ask the authors about that.
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We test, we verify. It's a reasonable thing, IMO, to check that we may have simply missed something in intermittent and widely scattered snapshots of Mars.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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So you are saying that my reading of the abstract was wrong and that it was primarily a safety study rather than basic science based on previous studies. I could only read the abstract, but perhaps there was something in the paper that says something I couldn’t see?
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You seem to be attributing intentions to me based on something other than my posts.
I mentioned nothing about you or what you said. I was replying to what cjameshuff posted. My fault for not quoting, I think.
Basic experimental science is what I was talking about. We experiment, we simulate, we check and re-check results. I never mentioned safety as a concern.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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So, better get on with studying Mars tsunamis then? You're being absurd. There is nothing at all reasonable in pretending that there's any significant threat from lightning on Mars.
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Yes, perhaps the problem is that you made your post right after mine, without quoting. I think it's better if you make clear what post you are responding to...
However, you also said.
And yet, in post 1178, you said:I never mentioned safety as a concern.
That's not about safety?We like to avoid unpleasant surprises when considering possible human habitation.
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OK, understood. So I understand that when cjameshuff said:
You replied:We've been operating surface probes there for half a century with no clear detections of lightning. Is their next report going to be on the tsunami risk?
But what you really meant to say is:"No clear detection" is no guarantee. We like to avoid unpleasant surprises when considering possible human habitation.
"I think the research was just about experimental science, and wasn't about safety."
Then you should have said so in the first place.... It would have made things much easier to understand.
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Stop putting words in my mouth. If you have questions about what I mean, ask me what I mean.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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Why is this such a big deal to you? We run experiments all the time. We want to test our models. "We didn't miss seeing lightning in our brief local glances of Mars' surface" is a model.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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Again, you didn’t quote... Could you quote so we can know what this is a response to?
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To you specifically, to the world in general. It pushes my buttons like nothing else to have someone reinterpret my statements and add their own meanings without actually asking me.
I don't mean to be insistent about this but I have my own communications issues, it's hard enough for me to be sure someone understands me when it's just my own words.
As for the specifics of my post # 1187, I doubt I made sense, because my brain goes all wonky when I get upset and makes me prone to overstatement. So I probably did say things that are not viable.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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Sorry, i’m not trying to be overly argumentative, that’s really not my goal, but I really don’t understand what I wrote that was putting words into your mouth. If you can point out the place I can go back and see what I was misinterpreting.
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Thanks for clarifying, because that might make it easier to understand things. What is it that makes you upset and prone to overstatement?
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Sorry to repeat myself, but I don’t think anyone likes that. I don’t like it when people reinterpret my statements, so I try not to do it to others. So I’d like to know where I did it to you, so I can be more careful in the future.
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Well, "So you're saying" and "But what you really meant to say is". Telling instead of asking, at least that's how it comes across to me.
How about "What did you mean by", ""what are you saying here" or "could you clarify this"?
Sorry to be so pedantic, but this is a trigger issue to me.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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OK, in post 1189, I wanted to ask:
In post 1178, you wrote:
And in post 1187, you said:We like to avoid unpleasant surprises when considering possible human habitation.
What did you mean by saying that you never mentioned safety as a concern?I never mentioned safety as a concern.
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I was mistaken.
To make my point clearer, I'll say even if human safety were not a concern, even if we never set foot on Mars, my view is that experimentation to verify a hypothesis based on intermittent localized observation of surface conditions would still be justified. The hypothesis being that there's no lightning on Mars.
"I'm planning to live forever. So far, that's working perfectly." Steven Wright
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