China joins rush for Mars

[bananas]

Source: China Daily

More than 600 applications from China have been made to join a Dutch aerospace project that plans to send humans to Mars for permanent settlement.

<snip>

In the first three days since last Monday, as many as 20,000 people globally submitted their applications online, with more than 600 coming from China.

Bas Lansdorp, co-founder of Mars One, said he is confident of turning the dream into reality, and plans to attract more than 500,000 applicants.

<snip>

Lansdorp said Mars One chose Shanghai as the second stop for the application press conference after New York because he believes many Chinese, including youngsters, are very interested in becoming astronauts, especially as the country already has its own astronauts.

<snip>

Read more: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-04/29/content_16460937.htm

[Franker65]

1. That's a lot of applications for a suicide mission

A pity they can't find a way to get the people back.

[greiner3]

2. Their states mission;

Is to establish a colony.

[Katashi_itto]

5. I applied. It's not a suicide mission. It's simply not coming back.

You live there, period.

By your logic, being on Earth is a suicide mission.

[Marrah_G]

12. I would totally go if I had the chance

[greiner3]

3. I just TRIED;

To register to be considered to be on the flight and got the error message;

"Invalid date."

Hey, I am in pretty good shape, for a soon to be 57 yo!

I call age discrimination!

[bloomington-lib]

4. At least there are pockets of optimism in the world

[Joe Bacon]

6. China will get to the Moon and Mars. We won't.

America no longer has a National Will. Since the New Right came to power, we have a National Won't.

China will get to the Moon, build a base and start a settlement on Mars. We'll just sit back and do Bible studies as the nation continues it's decline.

[AtheistCrusader]

8. Shit, start a rumor there's oil on Mars, and we'll be there in 12 months.

[WCGreen]

11. Or a crater that looks like Jesus...

[Yo_Mama]

18. This is a Dutch project!!

Maybe living on a low-lying area and the threat of global warming is inspiring them. Or maybe they're just curious. Or maybe this is a type of scam/publicity stunt.

[Dreamer Tatum]

19. So?

What would be the objective of being on the Moon or on Mars?

[PATRICK]

7. Colonists?

Has something changed regarding the 100 years it would take to "fast cook" the planet to make it possibly minimally supportive of Terran life(but not people). Consequences of getting that expensive project wrong are also unknown. That bio-domes don't even work securely on earth for exported slaves who want to sit around and admire the birth of oxygen for hundreds of years as their bodies react to the lower gravity and really strange organisms start to evolve.

What happened to the ticket-holders for moon trips in the seventies? what happens when people who have bought stars and planet names find the rest of the galaxy has beat them to it already?

Time to revise "a sucker born every minute" to the Malthusian curve.

[L0oniX]

9. "rush" ...oh please spare us the framing. I'm in a "rush" to shit this morning too.

[sofa king]

10. Good for them.

Going to Mars is a little bit like fishing a billiard ball out of a pocket, shooting it into another corner, and dropping it into another pocket.

Once the ball is in the pocket, it wants to stay there, and only great effort and expenditure of energy will get it out again.

On the other hand, you can take that same billiard ball out of the first pocket, drop it into your coat pocket, and take a tour of the city, stopping at every point of interest along the way so long as you don't sink the billiard ball somewhere else... while the Martians struggle to get off their new rock.

Without an inexpensive path back to orbit, Mars is a dead end, just as inhospitable and deadly as the vacuum of space (if not more), but with the added inconvenience of high gravity. It will probably wind up being dependent upon other space-faring peoples in order to sustain itself.

I think the attraction to Mars is that it superficially resembles our own home. But it will never hold an atmosphere like ours, its abrasive dust will never stop clogging and devouring components, the wispy atmosphere it has will add weight and complexity to any launches from the surface of Mars back to space (and Earth), and its inhabitants will be just as stranded and remote as Mr. Christian's followers after they burned the Bounty. Anything they produce aside from information will come with a launch-premium that will make it prohibitively expensive anywhere else in the solar system.

So I say let the Chinese and the Russians fight over Mars while we reach for the asteroids, Lagrange points, and rings.

[GreenStormCloud]

13. What's the rush? Mars will still be there a thousand years from now.

Even twenty years from now technology will have greatly advanced, especially computer/electronics/DNA technology. Let's wait some and send smarter robots.

[Posteritatis]

14. And twenty years from now people will say the exact same thing

Which is why that argument invariably translates as "we should never do this ever."

[GreenStormCloud]

15. One day robots will be smart enough to do everything on Mars for us.

Then we can send the robots.

I do not see any value at all in establishing a colony on Mars, or the Moon either.

[Heywood J]

16. Probably not the best idea until we've solved a few problems first.

Here's what happened the last two times they tried it with real, trained astronauts:

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/37467140/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/russia-launching-mars-mission-simulation/

A similar experiment in 1999-2000 at the same Moscow institute went awry when a Canadian woman complained of being forcibly kissed by a Russian team captain and said that two Russian crew members had a fistfight that left blood splattered on the walls.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-mars-mission-sleep-20130108

However, sleep quality varied strikingly among the six men, the scientists found. One man, isolated from the normal cues of light and dark experienced on Earth, abandoned the 24-hour day and adopted a 25-hour version, slowly moving in and out of sync with the sleep-wake cycles of his crewmates.
<...>
Other crew members retained their 24-hour cycles, but one started sleeping at odd times of the day as well as at night. Another man slept less and less as the mission continued, unlike his peers. In total, four of the six crew members experienced some kind of sleep problem.

Though there are a few legendary stories of madness and violence — a cook who turned on others with a hammer, a scientist who axed a colleague over a chess dispute — Palinkas said most problems are lower-grade feelings of depression, anger and irritability, along with difficulty of sleep and concentration that may exhibit itself in what is often referred to as the zoned-out "Antarctic stare."

[Safetykitten]

17. Yes, all the old world countries were just fucking around sending people to the new world.

and the people that went there were just fucking around.

The Chinese are very interested in an entire planet to destroy. This one is getting towards it's expiration date and it would be great to have an entire planet to raze to make shit.