Join the Efforts of a Manned Mission To Jovian Moon Europa 212
Kristian vonBengtson writes "Objective Europa aims to send human beings to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, on a one way mission in search of extraterrestrial life while expanding the borders of exploration and knowledge for all mankind. The starting point of Objective Europa is purely theoretical (Phase I) but will move into more advanced phases including prototyping, technology try-outs, and eventually a crewed launch. Objective Europa is a crowd-researched project made up of an international team of volunteers. Many people from a wide range of backgrounds have already joined and become a vital part of the mission. ... [Europa's] deep ocean and active geology provide a solid platform for extraterrestrial life, making Europa one of the most enticing locations to explore in the solar system. The 600-day flight required to reach Europa is manageable with today's technology, and the many challenges of such a mission pose a perfect starting point for new research and innovative thinking."
FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
"Objective Europa aims to send human beings to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, on a one way mission in search of extraterrestrial life"
Seriously, before you throw your lives away, at least get a minimal amount of evidence that life exists there. I'm sure lots of "special" people will apply for this but none of them will be the types we actually want going there.
Just send a fucking probe. Don't BE a probe.
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well it would still be an adventure.
but I guess the real reason for this is the success a similar thing for going to mars had. I mean success in getting money from suckers.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, $25 application fee, get 100k applications, screen out all but 100 applicants, make them do some impossible tasks until they flunk, then oh well, you all fail.
Thanks for the moneeies.
skeleton in an space suit (Score:2)
Game Over. You and all of your friends are dead.
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Exactly. I'd rather stay here, and live forever. Don't those morons know GTA5 just came out?
Re: skeleton in an space suit (Score:2)
Some people have taste, you know
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Yeah, but in a space suit.
How is it throwing your life away? (Score:4, Insightful)
You can die in pain in dirty diapers in a nursing home, or you can die of radiation-induced cancer doing something that's never been done before and making historic discoveries. Either way is an equal level of deadness.
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If it is the same to you, sir, I'd like my deadness to a) set as late as possible; b) be as painless as possible.
Neither objective is particularly achievable via a one-way travel to an icy rock.
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b) is achievable if you go there with cyanide pills.
Re:How is it throwing your life away? (Score:4, Informative)
when i die, i'd like to go peacefully.
in my sleep.
like my grandfather.
not screaming,
like the passengers in his car...
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/93q1/carwreck.html [netfunny.com]
I first saw this circa 1990 in an excerpt from rec.humor.funny on GEnie. Netfunny is the Web version, posted by the original editor, Brad Templeton (interesting fellow, he); copyrights run from 1987-2008. I've tried to find the earliest version but with little success, since dates are not often given at the many sites of quotations a search returns. Of all the versions I've read, this one seems the best but it may simply be because it's the first one I saw, however the phrasing is the simplest, the arrangement the more effective.
Anyway, Europa seems a fine place to explore. The one-way "me, too" thing is so much horse apples; the crowd sourcing of research is novel to me. If humans go, unless it's part of a large expedition that's taking a five-year run or so at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn for example, wait for a decent fusion drive, stay under g, with a trip time of months not years - then come back. (And as for Mars One, I think the more difficult aspects will be production of food (Vegans aside, meat will be needed, earthworms and chickens, so take along a starter kit of Earth soils) and replacement parts. Likely gonna need some vitamins, although trace minerals ought to be available from the land.)
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"You can die in pain in dirty diapers in a nursing home, or you can die of radiation-induced cancer "
So you also will die in pain in dirty diapers, only without lightly dressed nurses around.
Let me think...
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Anyway, I'm all for space exploration, but people do not seem to understand how many orders of magnitude there are in distance between low-earth orbit (which is becoming routine, but still not "easy") and a moon of a planet that is halfway across the Solar system.
Those orders of magnitude of distance aren't particularly relevant. For example, the ISS travels at roughly 7.7 km/s relative to Earth. That's roughly 1.6 AU of distance every year. Europa averages 4.2 AU away. We can travel distances considerably longer than Europa in a human lifetime at velocities achievable in low Earth orbit.
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Except that you need to overcome the gravity well of earth and (parts of) the sun. Here, I have an illustrative xkcd refecence: http://xkcd.com/681_large/ [xkcd.com].
You are comparing apples and oranges here. The speed in LEO is (mostly) constant. The (bits of) the ISS where once injected into orbit with significant energy and since then not much additional energy is needed to get the ISS going. (In LEO there is still some atmosphere and slows down the ISS and this is equalised occasionally.) But when you go to a diff
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Yeah. By the time this mission could launch, our robots will actually be a lot more capable of doing useful research on Europa than the human settlers, especially when you control for all the mass that needs to be launched in order to keep people alive (and not crazy) for as long as this would take. Instead of people, why not send a nuclear submarine that could use its reactor to melt through all the ice and then navigate the sea beneath? If we have a chance of finding something cool, it will be down there.
I doubt it. While I will agree that there is considerable "low hanging fruit" in terms of very legitimate science that can be done by sending robotic probes, there will reach a point in that research where having actual people physically there will make a whole lot of sense. With the distances involved, bandwidth for sending data can be a considerable problem. Some local synthesis of the data (like was done with the Kepler mission... which had terabytes of data to sift through) can take place in an autom
Re:FFS (Score:5, Funny)
"why not send a nuclear submarine that could use its reactor to melt through all the ice and then navigate the sea beneath?"
Because submarines' flying abilities, even when nuclear, compete in the same league as pigs.
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Because submarines' flying abilities, even when nuclear, compete in the same league as pigs.
Not quite. [youtube.com]
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Yeah. By the time this mission could launch, our robots will actually be a lot more capable of doing useful research on Europa than the human settlers, especially when you control for all the mass that needs to be launched in order to keep people alive (and not crazy) for as long as this would take. Instead of people, why not send a nuclear submarine that could use its reactor to melt through all the ice and then navigate the sea beneath? If we have a chance of finding something cool, it will be down there.
The nuclear submarine would still face one major problem. The ice layer surrounding the ocean is MILES thick, maybe as thick as the crust here on Earth. Perhaps a nuclear sub might be able to melt its way through. (that assumes that you could get that much payload to Europa.... a pile with that kind of wattage just for waste heat is going to be HEAVY. That still leaves the rather thorny issue of the ice tunnel immediately freezing above it. How in tarnation are you going to get your data through?
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Well we could send all the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers, and advertising account executives. I would throw in the politicians and lawyers also, but that's just me.
I'd send the politicians and lawyers first. Advertising account executives and MBA's would be next. If that doesn't kill all life on Europa, then we should surrender to our new Jovian overlords.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Informative)
There are conditions on Europa very similar to the conditions in certain places on earth that contain life. There are large chunks of shit that have been flying back and forth between there and here for billions of years. They've retrieved man made objects that have been in space for decades with bacteria on it that survived and re-animated after being thawed on earth. It would be more astonishing if there we didn't find life on Europa... and pretty much every other planetary body in our system.
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It looks to me like a student thesis project in art or sociology or whatever. I mean the website...
I don't think anyone is actually planning to do this.
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i love how everyone assumes we're just going to jump on a rocket and head over there, you don't think probes will be sent initially? should we not plan beyond that?
Then why even bother sending people? If the probe doesn't find life are the people still going to go? What is the plan beyond sending some people to be cooked by Jupiter?
they're starting "phase 1" which is research and determining what tech we can use and what we still need to invent. seems to me that's pretty damn reasonable.
What the fuck is reasonable about it? What if a probe does find life. We're going to send a bunch of bacteria/virus laden meat-bags to contaminate the Europan (or is it European, damn that's going to be confusing) biosphere...
To die there. Just how much thought has been given to how this will affect any life that may be there? Part of me
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If we go by Arthur C Clarke (and really, why shouldn't we?) it would be Europan which has a nice ring to it.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Funny)
If we go by Arthur C Clarke (and really, why shouldn't we?) it would be Europan which has a nice ring to it.
If we go by Arthur C. Clarke, we should attempt no landings there.
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"They want to be the Neil Armstrong of Europa--the _dead_ Neil Armstrong of Europa."
Only they won't. Part of being Neil Armstrong was from the very beginning that he came back.
I don't think JFK's words "...and returning him safely to the earth" were a mere poetic license but an essential part of the plot.
Re:FFS (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering that Neil & Buzz landed on the Moon with only 8 seconds of fuel remaining in their landing engine, they came pretty close to becoming permanent residents on the Moon anyway... not to mention that the original landing site was horrible as well (Neil Armstrong deliberately avoided that spot and traveled a couple more miles down range for a better spot... hence why the fuel was so low). They were real engineering test pilots that day in July of 1969, which is part of why they deserved the recognition they got too.
It is also an example of why you don't want to have necessarily ordinary folks with no training or qualifications on a "first trip" to some place exotic like Europa. You can do that once the trip to that location is ordinary and boring.... sort of like the places Space Adventures sends people now. Sadly, customers for Space Adventures still need to spend six months at Star City in Russia before they go into space, but at least it is mostly ordinary (although rich) people who go.
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They would have not been stranded on the moon, they would have fired their return rockets. They where almost in perfect alignment for rendezvous with capsule in orbit. If you can get off the surface of the moon, it is not that big of a deal to get back into orbit from higher up. I am almost certain they trained for this situations, since technically anything could go wrong with the landing system.
If the return system had failed, that would be a different story.
Don't they know (Score:3, Funny)
All these worlds are yours EXCEPT Europa.
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Humans. So predictable.
So what this really is: (Score:2)
It is a role playing game at this point. Tabletop exploration of Europa.
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I have wanted space technology since I was a child and wanting is not a project. First you study and then you design and then you test something that will serve to do the job and -then- you decide how to apply it. I have worked on this for decades and found a technology that I am reasonably certain will allow cheap travel in and out of the gravity well. All I was ever interested in was getting
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I work with a lot of startup companies. We have a saying that might apply. Lots of people think that the idea is the key. We say that say ideas are cheap, execution is key. And sometimes a bad idea done well can beat a good idea done poorly.
I know that doesn't give any real help. But it does help explain why some things take off when better ideas don't.
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One of the people who was hired there is now the secret weapon for Micron. Sometimes it is the people and that person in particular was a modest genius, which is rare.
In this case I am not looking to make a company that makes money. I hear about a lot of people who would pay to die on Mars or Europa and wonder what they are smoking. Eff
If I wanted to live in an icy wasteland... (Score:2)
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Nah, it just wouldn't be the same. Greenland doesn't have enough radioactivity and it has way too much air.
Whyd do we need to send humans? (Score:4)
"Objective Europa aims to send human beings to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, on a one way mission in search of extraterrestrial life while expanding the borders of exploration and knowledge for all mankind.
If you think it would be fun to go to Europa even if it means you will die there, that's totally something you should try to do. As for science and exploration, there is really nothing that a human being is going to be able to see or do, beyond what can be done by a robot.
Adding humans to a space mission just makes everything harder, because now you need to bring a whole bunch of shit like water, food, waste treatment machines, CO2 scrubbers, radiation protection, space suits, and extra rocket fuel to propel all this extra mass and even more rocket fuel to propel the extra rocket fuel. The only time when sending humans on a space trip would be beneficial to the human race at this point would be if the earth became full, and we needed to lower the population without killing people or sterilizing them.
Re:Whyd do we need to send humans? (Score:4, Informative)
Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.
The principal investigator for the Mars rovers said that if he were on Mars he could do in 45 seconds what the rovers do in a day.
Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.
What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?
Re:Whyd do we need to send humans? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what's a human supposed to do on Europa? Operate a hammer and icepick? That doesn't sound very productive. That 45-second figure on Mars sounds hyperbolic, since on good days, the rovers can actually go pretty far and take lots of pictures.
But here's what I don't get about people who make comments like yours: Instead of looking at current missions and wishing that humans were there to do it better, why not instead ask what humans would do in space, and wish for (and design) machines that could do it as well. I mean, be concrete. For all the mission specific objectives (beyond: what happens to a person there?) that manned missions have - whether it's reconnaissance, construction, experimentation, etc. - I am pretty sure that it would be less expensive and less risky to make robots that could preform them equally well, less expensively and more safely. I think that's been the case since basically the Apollo era, when human lives were cheap and autonomous systems were miserable. That's the good reason why the Apollo era ended in 1972. The NASA home run of the 70's was the Voyager program. Then we pissed away the 80's shuttling people to LEO for no very good reason.
And if you compare the primitive rovers of today to manned missions, keep in mind also that the latter would be several orders of magnitude more expensive, and what amazing advances we could make if those budgets were going to robotics and autonomous systems. Maybe those robots really could do in 45 seconds what yesterday's rovers take a day to do. I mean, for fuck's sake. We have cars that can drive better than my mom.
Some examples (Score:2)
Being able to fix a stuck wheel has some value, as does being able to make new instruments on the scene from parts in the lab.
But that line of thought presupposes that gathering data is the only thing humans care about.
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First of all, 3D printers really aren't that good yet. There is definitely some promise there, but nothing that you wouldn't by far and away make huge piles of money with simply doing terrestrial applications first.
The cost of a government mission to Mars has been proposed to be about $100 billion dollars. That is expensive, but it is definitely in the range of something that a 1st world country could afford to accomplish if they cared enough about the issue to actually accomplish the goal. Perhaps you m
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That 45-second figure on Mars sounds hyperbolic, since on good days, the rovers can actually go pretty far and take lots of pictures.
And on bad days, nothing happens, meaing it takes 0 seconds to do what was done. I think a good comparison here is between the Mars rovers and the corresponding manned lunar rovers of the Apollo program. They travel about the same distance. Apollo 17, for example, had three excursions of the lunar rover, each a bit over seven hours, for a total of somewhere around 22 hours of time on the Moon, the longest set of the Apollo program. They covered almost 36 km of distance over that time. The MER rover, Opportu
Re:Why do we need to send humans? (Score:3)
Jupiter's radiation belts are pretty extreme; there's some info in the Galileo data. :)
We can't possibly carry enough shielding for the x-rays alone... and get there in a reasonable time.
A Jupiter mission will have to launch from Mars orbit, IMHO; unless we learn a new engine technology.
Although;
I still think we should send as many people to Mars as will go; I'm sure when the postcards about the Ham Bushes and Blanket trees come rolling in from Mars, and how we were completely mistaken on the whole there no
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What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?
Wikipedia says there is enough radiation on the surface of Europa to kill a human in a single day (it's tidally locked with Jupiter, but I'm not sure if that helps the far side or not). I imagine they're headed to the subsurface ocean, if it exists, so they won't have to worry about it after they melt/drill their way through as many meters of ice as it takes (the Mars One site claims that five meters of Martian soil provides the same protection as Earth's atmosphere). But yeah, they'd definitely need to d
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Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.
They also are orders of magnitude more difficult to get to mars or Europa healthy and stay that way for any length of time. If you could spend the same amount of money that a manned mission would cost on an unmanned mission, you could afford an order of magnitude more and better robots as well.
Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.
As I said, it's fine if you want to go to Europa and see it for yourself before dying. This doesn't help science at all. Having one person there doesn't magically make everyone else able to experience Europa. All
Re:Whyd do we need to send humans? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're talking about Steve Squyers, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover missions. He's a really smart guy and he's not wrong in his statement you're quoting. To wit, Apollo 17 astronauts collected about 110kg of lunar rocks during 22 total hours of EVA and drove a grand total of 36km while the Spirit rover only drove about 3.6km and examined (but did not collect) about 25 rocks over the course of 8 months.
However you simply cannot use this data to imply that humans sent into space are magically more productive than robotic probes. A field geologist would need to do a day's worth of work in 45 seconds on Mars because they would die of asphyxiation in about three minutes. To prevent that they would need to carry around their own oxygen. To keep it from floating free it would need to be contained in some sort of mask. The freezing temperatures would then kill that geologist within a few hours so instead of a mask they would need a whole insulated airtight suit. To keep from dying of dehydration within three days they would need water. Now that they would survive the night they would need food or else they would be ineffectual in their explorations after a few days and dead of starvation within a few weeks.
From there it only gets worse. In order to do really interesting work the field geologist would need some tools, not the least of which is a camera and a transceiver to talk back with Earth about their findings. To do anything more complicated would likely require more complicated tools. To keep these out of the elements (dust storms, intense UV radiation, Martian attack, etc) the field geologist would likely need some sort of habitat.
So really the field geologist needs literally tons of logistics behind them to do the work of an automated probe. That's a lot of non-mission specific mass to send to Mars just to support the single capable field geologist. With the extra mass comes expense and added complexity of the whole system.
Why not skip the extra bullshit and send more automated probes to Mars that were designed by an army of field geologists? You could send a dozen such missions for the same cost as a single manned mission and end up covering every major geologic region of the planet. You could also fill up its orbit with a squadron of multispectral imaging satellites that could relay data as well as collect their own.
I understand the desire to plant a human being on Mars but at the same time the pragmatic part of me interested in the actual science would rather see a dozen automated missions sent first. Putting inanimate objects in space is Hard, putting living things in space and getting them home still alive in Very Hard, putting people on the surface of other bodies is Extremely Hard, and putting people on the surface of other bodies having them do useful work while there is a damn moonshot (pun intended). Getting them home from said body is a "nice to have" and a minor miracle when it occurs.
Humans can be more effective in some places than robots but they're not necessarily more efficient than robots. If you've got limited will/funds the robot is usually the better option.
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"I understand the desire to plant a human being on Mars but at the same time the pragmatic part of me interested in the actual science would rather see a dozen automated missions sent first."
But then, the really pragmatic part of me knows that there will be no way for those dozen automated probes to gather the willness of citizenship and so, be financed, unless there's the expectation of sending a man to plant his feet over there.
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Because they are orders of magnitude more productive.
The principal investigator for the Mars rovers said that if he were on Mars he could do in 45 seconds what the rovers do in a day.
Besides, visiting a foreign country is different from looking at it through a webcam. A robot probe is just an improvement over a telescope. Humans want to go to places.
What worries me is that the site has only one passing mention of radiation, for a mission to Jupiter orbit. Aren't humans in that region going to be almost literally fried?
On the budget it would take to send that ONE human to Mars and keep him alive in one place, We could have more rovers operating on Mars than NYPD has cop cars.
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The problem with sending people to Europa. Well problemS. In random order
It is just so dodgy. I would love for humans to go to Europa, it would be amazing. But you have to be realistic. This not l
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If you think it would be fun to go to Europa even if it means you will die there, that's totally something you should try to do.
What about people who - at the moment of selecting the flight crew for such a mission - suffer from conditions that would kill them or debilitate them before an otherwise normal lifespan elapses for them? If you're bright and physically apt and you know that at 25, you'll be fine for a few more years, but after 30, there's a 50% chance every year that you'll get Huntington's and by 40, you'll be dead, perhaps dying a bit sooner after benefiting mankind in this way is not such a crazy idea.
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Of all the reasons I stated for why it was bad to send humans to Europa, the humans dying on Europa was not one of them. I don't even care if we send healthy people to Europa to die, if that's what they want to do.
What I am against, is pretending that this is necessary for scientific discovery or exploration. We can actually fit more and better scientific instruments on the spacecraft if we don't need to take any meat sacks and all the stuff required to have the survive the journey.
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If you think it would be fun to go to Europa even if it means you will die there, that's totally something you should try to do. As for science and exploration, there is really nothing that a human being is going to be able to see or do, beyond what can be done by a robot.
I can think of one thing a human can do that a robot will not be able to do. That is get infected with the European bacteria and come down with the first interplanetary cold or flu. That would be some exciting TV there!
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You seriously think that a robot can't become contaminated? Anyways, that's what quarantine is for. In the extremely unlikely case that there's something on a planet with no lifeforms similar to humans, there is a virus or bacteria that's harmful to us, what do you think the odds of us picking it up is?
Pretty much zero. Even with the flu, if you stay 10 feet away from other people and don't put your hands to your face the likelihood of catching it is minimal. And that a virus that's adapted to spreading eas
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Bacteria don't need to have evolved with humans to be able to infect them (e.g. like viruses). All that is needed is for bacteria to be able to survive inside a human and for whatever they produce to be toxic to humans. This doesn't seem like such a stretch considering some bacteria can live in harsh environments like volcanoes and that most things are toxic to humans.
I think a bigger danger is humans contaminating Europa. You can kind of sterilize a robot. You can't sterilize a human. Humans contain e
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We won't be sending humans on a one-way trip. That's a pipe dream at this stage. Short of a dictatorship forcing people to go, the government is not going to send people on a one-way trip to a moon with no prospect of survival. Those who volunteer for such an endeavour are generally not going to be useful to your mission in a scientific capacity.
Stop the planet, I want to get off this ride.... (Score:2)
Wow, the second voluntary exodus plan to emerge recently.
It seems to make a statement about Earth, when thousands seem eager to make a one way trip to their probable deaths, to leave this planet.
Now, what that statement actually means is open to interpretation...
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Why not just sign up to a UFO Death Cult like Heaven's Gate?
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Hmmmm...I give up.
Why, or why not?
Wait, is this a trick question?
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It's it obvious? Hale-Bopp brought closure to Heavens gate! We missed our chance.
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Do explorers flee their home, or rush toward their destination?
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I well and truly understand that.
I'm just not convinced that's a universal motive in these things.
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It says there's still hope for humanity (Score:2)
While I think this particular project (and the one to mars) are unrealistic due to not being robustly funded and planned, I think the concept that some humans may be willing to greatly shorten their lives in order to go off and explore something new shows that there is still hope for humanity. Isn't it nice to hear that some are curious enough and adventurous enough to do this, instead of simply being focused on entertainment and producing more humans?
I would not be brave enough to do this myself, even if I
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Thanks for the reply. :-)
What my motive was....stirring up the mud puddle in order to start some interesting debate/comments.
If I had a realistic chance to go to Europa or Mars, I would probably jump on it.
I've always been one of those that just HAD to see what was over the next hill.
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Plenty of explorers and experimenters have died too. For example, how did we learn certain plants are poisonous? (just think, at least one dead human for every major type of plant in the "nightshade" family, that's quite the body count). There are worse ways to die and more useless ways to die than after exploring in space. In the time it took you to read my post some people choked to death on tough food, some were run over by cars, some were gunned down by street punks, some fell into a hole and died, s
Been there... (Score:2)
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It's not like we weren't warned...
Think of the moons! (Score:2)
Why are they sending humans? (Score:2)
Humans are messy and carrying a bunch of biosphere from Earth to support them could potentially end up disrupting Europa's biosphere if it has one.
One can easily sterilize an unmanned space probe, but preventing even the slightest smallest leak of sewage, spacesuit leak, or the one little bit of plant waste that gets accidentally vented from a greenhouse is probably more challenging than actually sending humans to Europa.
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Someone's Trying to Make Money Here (Score:2)
Can't think of any other reason to put out this sort of wacko mission. Let's see, if it costs 20 Billion and I take just a 1% cut in salary and bennies ... my retirement is guaranteed.
I hope this fails (Score:2)
The last thing we need is a bunch of humans spewing bacteria on a planet/moon that we're trying to examine for extraterrestrial life. One small slip and they could fuck things up for the rest of time.
Clarke had it right. Attempt no landings.
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It'll be fine, they'll be dead before the ship lands, so no one is going to open the door.
NASA knew there were radiation belts around Jupiter.
The Pioneer probes they sent were designed to handle a fair bit of radiation.
Pioneer 11 didn't directly pass through one, but lost most of the pictures it took of Io.
20 years later when they sent Galileo, it still suffered the effects of radiation, losing data.
NASA has already ruled out any possibility of a manned mission to Europa, because the radiation on that moon
Radiation (Score:3)
It turns out that others have done some real work on this. There may be on the order of a meter of regolith which could be heaped on a shelter much faster than one could burrow into the ice. The leading hemisphere gets less radiation than the trailing hemisphere. I personally would look into a long deployable loop of superconductor to provide a pocket magnetosphere.
Unfortunately, the number that all those measures are chipping away at is one lethal dose per day. Add in the exposure while getting there in th
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Current methods still won't stop you getting a lethal dose of radiation on a journey from Earth to Mars, let alone Jupiter, which is over 6x the distance.
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Everyone wants to go to Europa though, because it has oxygen in its atmosphere and (frozen) water on its surface.
Europa does not have an atmosphere. It has a fluctuating mesophere like our moon from occasional venting, and water ice as hard as Earth rock, but if you're thinking of skinny dipping on Europa, you're a bit shy of reality.
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Some people think it may have liquid water under the surface.
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oh... and the term mesosphere, means the middle section of Earth's atmosphere. It is a part of an atmosphere.
The atmosphere of Europa may be of very low pressure, but it's still there.
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Jupiter collects in the order of 100TW of power from the Sun's charged particles. Where would you drain that amount of energy to?
Okay, this is even dumber.... (Score:2)
At least the one-way trip to mars has the merit of *SOME* sort of contingency for actually surviving there (not that I think it will be effective... I still believe that such manned missions to mars are merely a drawn-out way to commit suicide, and I don't expect anyone will live more than 2 years after launch).
But what the hell are their contingencies for surviving on Europa?
Re: (Score:2)
what contingency what that be, neither place can support multicellular earth life and quick death is certain without oxygen, warmth, food, water, and adequate radiation shielding.
With today's technology? (Score:2)
Didn't someone figure out that the one-way trip to Mars would be one-way for more than logistical reasons? The other being, with today's technology, the radiation exposure would give you cancer on your 9 month journey.
The folks on the IIS are within Earth's protective magnetosphere.
The folks who went to the moon didn't go for 9 months.
Re: (Score:2)
cancer not an issue, the radiation levels are lethal by the outright mass death of cells. Anyway, there are methods for shielding, I'd say the main objection to a "crowd-sourced" space trip to anywhere would be the lack of billions of dollars and experience that only a few space agencies on earth possess.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is there is no current method of shielding that is effective enough that you can put on a space craft.
You've got to either carry something huge and heavy, like a a bunch of lead to absorb the radiation, or generate your own magnetosphere, which requires more energy than we can generate on earth, let along in a space craft (the Earth has current flows in the order of a billion amps)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, light weight nucliei are better for shielding in space because much less secondary radiation produced. The slower protons cause more damage than the high energy ones which pass through the body without time to interact.
No need to recreate an "earth's magetosphere", there are alternative designs such as having opposing strong fields that in the center of the ship where the crew is the field intensity is low. Also combined electrostatic and magnetic designs. Quite an engineering problem though.
Re: (Score:2)
but you are right, nothing like today's craft would be useful at all, they are death traps outside low orbit.
No, no, no, that's the wrong music! (Score:2)
http://youtubedoubler.com/a7Kj [youtubedoubler.com]
.
You can't go home again (Score:2)
Wolfe didn't mean it literally, but these guys do.
(actually... Wolfe wrote it in a book so isn't it literal? whatever)
One way mission? (Score:2)
Someone just watched Europa Report (Score:3, Funny)
is this a joke? (Score:4, Insightful)
I looked around on the site a bit and watched the introductory video, and underneath the shiny veneer, there really is not much there. The video, for example, certainly looks pretty, but contains no useful information. Instead, it has a few amusing text bites, such as, "FAREWELL CREW... BEFORE YOU DIE... YOU MAY SHOW US LIFE". The whole thing seems a bit tongue-in-cheek. After seeing the site, I really wonder if it is a joke intended to point out how ridiculous the "one-way trip to Mars" plans are. I suspect the site is intended to drum up a lot of interest and volunteers (much like the call for Mars trip volunteers), so that the punchline can be delivered later when it is revealed that the whole thing is based on a completely silly proposition.
Or, perhaps I just hope that this is a joke and not for real...
Arthur C. Clark had something to say about this... (Score:2)
What could possibly go wrong (Score:2)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2051879/ [imdb.com]
The "why send humans" posts... (Score:2)
Message from HAL9000 incoming: (Score:2)
Attempt no landing there.
Re: (Score:2)
Why should anybody care about what some kind of god-like being said in a work of pure fiction?