Mars!
 

When are we getting there?

Never!!

Seriously though, I have no idea.

Probably never.

This is more of a speculative thread, rather than something to discuss. I mean, its likely that we'll eventually go to Mars, if not to unload some of our population, just to get materials to compensate for what we've already used here on mother Earth.

All the same, while I suppose you could discuss the means & the whens of space travel, I'd suggest this thread be kicked over to General.

But that's just me.

SWB

There's an arsenal of spacecraft that'll get there some time late 2004: a bigger, better, won't-break-when-it-touches-something rover, another global surveying thing, a soil sampling thing from the Euro space agency, possibly a Japenese spacecraft that's had some delays, and a Russian one that I haven't the faintest clue with what it'll do. One of them is supposed to visit Phobos and Diemos I think.

We'll have enough stuff there to make human trips pointless, except for the sake of saying we did it. One of them is sending back soil samples. It's crazy how many things have been sent to Mars.

I'm more looking forward to Cassini, which will have a lot more instrumental capabilities than Gallileo and will visit Saturn, as well as New Horizons which will visit Pluto--though that one'll be a wait.

Everyone knows mars dosen't exist. The big red thing is just what we think mars would look like if it existed like wyoming or canada. Spiffy Has Spoken.

There's currently four spacecraft on the way to Mars as we speak, unfortunately recent unusually solar activity damaged three of the spacecraft. The JAXA's Nozomi which was suppose to go in orbit around Mars is now unable to do so because it was unable to make a course correction at a critical time. So now it's going in orbit around the Sun. The ESA's Mars Express had some power problems that have been worked around leaveing it's power level permanently lower. It looks like this one should make it in orbit and be able to deploy the Beagle-2 lander. NASA's Spirit and Opportunity are fairing much better. One of the instruments aboard the Spirit failed but other than that everything's good. Regardless, this January we should start getting a flood of information about Mars.

Over all I have to say I'm quite please at the current increase of pace of space exploration. Cassini should get some awesome pictures of Saturns in half a year's time. What I really want to see is NASA's Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. It's a good time down the road before it'll get launched. This thing going to have a full blown nuclear reactor so that it can power instruments that normaly couldn't be used and it'll carry submarines to explore the ocean's of these moons. It'll be the most impressive probe to date when it's built.

Mars...? Isn't that a candy company?

Actually it's just a candy bar, not a company.

Well send a lot of probes and crap to Mars (we already are) but I doubt we'll actually send someone there or set up a colony or something. I think it depends on whether we can find water on the surface, plus we'd have to find huge amounts of natural resources; something to make a colony economically beneficial. Otherwise we'll just keep sending probes so scientists can quench their thirst for useless information.

Nah, Mars is a company. I'm pretty sure they own Snickers and bunch of others. The big ones are what: Nestle, Hershey, and Mars?

I don't really think setting up a colony would be very beneficial. We'd have to live in some pressurized bubbles and there's little to no liquid water. If we had colonies, they'd probably be pretty dangerous.

But other than that, why not?

I've discussed the colony idea a lot with someone else, and he convinced me it will probably never happen, or at least not for a very long time. If we're talking about a colony, and not an research facility. With a colony, you have to ask, why would people move there? First off, we'd need to transport large supplies of food, water, and oxygen to them at huge cost... because terraforming will take a long time. some of you may have read the mars books by Kim Stanely Robbinson, where they terraform it pretty quickly. But that is sci-fi... it will probably take over a thousand years given present technology. And there is no reason to do it at all.

When you think about it, it is just the costs that make a colony ridiculous. The reason for colonies in the past was profit motive. But for mars, they need to spend a huge amount to make it work, and they wouldn't be getting very much back in return... iron is about the only thing. The overhead cost would be way higher than whatever they could get back. Colonies have never been made just on the priciple of colonization because it's possible.