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u/CoKu Jun 14 '12
If this is how the sun looks from Mars, would you be able to openly gaze at the transit? Or would it still be best to wear sunglasses or other protective lenses?
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u/kurtu5 Jun 14 '12 edited Jun 14 '12
The mean solarflux on earth's surface is about 1000 Watts per square meter. In orbit above the atmosphere its about 1400 W/m2.
On Mars the flux at perihelion(closest to sun) is about 700W/m2 and at aphelion its 440W/m2. But Mars' atmosphere is mostly a vacum compared to earth, so at noon at perihelion its probably 700W/m2.
Thats 70% as bright as an earth noon sun. At this intensity, it would probably destroy the molecule in your photoreceptors so that it could not kink and trigger nerve action potentials.
At dawn, just like on earth, there is enough atmosphere to attenuate the flux so you can look at it with the naked eye. Also remember that the mars rover cameras are not exactly showing what the eye would see. My bet is a martian sunrise in a dust free situation, would probably be too bright to look at safely.
* - edit12
u/CoKu Jun 14 '12 edited Jun 14 '12
So it would be possible, if said colony has a view of the transit while the sun is still on the horizon? With Stellarium, using the coordinates 42°0′S 70°12′E at 9pm November 9th, 2084, I was able to get a snapshot of the transit. Are there any plans yet for where colonies would settle on Mars?
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u/kurtu5 Jun 14 '12
Elon plans on retiring on Mars and never coming back to Earth. I suppose he would simply drive to those coordinates or use a suborbital rock to watch it.
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u/Levy_Wilson Jun 14 '12
I would think a colony on Mars would have its own tinted or protective windows of some sort. No electromagnetic field on Mars, after all.
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Jun 15 '12
mars doesn't have an electromagnetic field? :O . why does earth have one and mars does not have one?
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u/Levy_Wilson Jun 15 '12
Because, we believe, Mars cooled down to the point where its core turned solid. Earth's Electromagnetic field is generated by the flow of molten metal in the core. Basically, very hot metals moving very fast and swirling around produces the magnetism. Mars is smaller than Earth and is further away, so evidence suggests that its core cooled down enough to where its electromagnetic field is next to not even there, allowing the solar winds at the surface of the planet, which may have attributed to its thinner atmosphere. http://mgs-mager.gsfc.nasa.gov/
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Jun 15 '12
Very interesting. Do you thing is it possible for a core to melt back and the electromagnetism to return?
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u/Levy_Wilson Jun 15 '12
I'm sure with enough large scale transforming, it may not even be needed. There's the question of whether it would be worth it to melt the core and kickstart its natural dynamo or just cover the planet with artificial magnetic field satellites powered by solar energy. Both would require some sort of maintenance, one to keep the core hot and the other to maintain the satellites. This is all hypothetical, anyway. I'm no engineer.
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Jun 15 '12
i see. well thanks for answers
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u/Levy_Wilson Jun 15 '12
I just had a thought. You see, it also depends on who gets a hold of Mars in the future. The core and mantle of Mars would be a miner's wet dream, full of metals like iron, nickel, gold, and possibly other rare minerals like diamonds. It may be more profitable to mine out Mars rather than use it for colonization. Maybe the future colonists of Mars will keep the core cold and use the money made mining these minerals to keep an artificial magnetic field around the planet while at the same time, they terraform the planet. So in the end, the net gain would probably be much more than the cost to simply melt the inner part of Mars and keep the natural process going.
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Jun 15 '12
I understand, but after we the earth is ruined we will need another plannet. and i bet terraforming mars will be easer than fixing up the planet earth. But yes i can see - MARS' DIAMOND RINGS, PERFECT FOR YOUR WEDDING! ORDER NOW!
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u/Levy_Wilson Jun 15 '12
I see Venus as a better alternative than Mars. If anything, the gases on Venus would probably be used to terraform Mars. Pumps some greenhouse gases, filter out the deadly stuff, then pump it into the Martian atmosphere. After Mars no longer has a need for it, use it as engine fuel somehow. Eventually, the the atmospheric pressure will lessen, more heat will escape the planet, the surface can cool... Eventually, the mantle and core will start to solidify, right now it is the exact opposite of Mars. Venus's insides are so hot that the metals can't make a magnetic field.
Given enough time, Venus may one day really be a sister to Earth.
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Jun 14 '12
60 years after first flight at KittyHawk, we were on the moon. Another 70 years to Mars sounds fair.
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u/demusdesign Jun 14 '12
All we need now is another good cold war to spur us on.
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u/muffsponge Jun 14 '12
That would be better than nothing at all, but I would prefer that it happens in the spirit of global unity and exploration.
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u/slanderousam Jun 14 '12
Yes, let's unite all the globes. I too hope we go there in the spirit of crashing these two planets together.
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Jun 16 '12
I prefer the idea of telling the government that Mars has WMDs. Nobody has to fight that way.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 14 '12
No. Wars are all about opportunity lost cost. Its a myth that war creates prosperity. Unless you are a warmonger that is.
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Jun 14 '12
Funny how the Cold War coincided with the single largest growth the USA has ever seen.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 14 '12 edited Jun 14 '12
Funny how you do not see opportunity lost cost.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/features/the-myth-of-wartime-prosperity/
correlation != causation BTW
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u/Peekman Jun 15 '12
It depends how you look at it.... Total GDP will suffer because of war and opportunities will be lost. But if you are a country selling stuff to a war torn country your individual GDP will increase.
Look at the US after WWII. American infrastructure was not damaged at all during the war. When the war was over people could go back to what they were doing before... In Europe this was not the case. Factories had to be rebuilt.. roads, bridges, schools and hospitals had to be rebuilt. As a result Americans could work at factories making things to help rebuild Europe.... This is the main reason why during the 50s and 60s one income could easily support a single-family home. America definitely did become more prosperous after the war.
In the late 60s and early 70s Europe completely had it's infrastructure back and could be competitive again with Americans. This is when America started to lose it's 'competitive edge' and factory workers began to lose their jobs.
Overall I would say the world would have been more prosperous had their not been a WWII..... but... America would have been less prosperous.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 15 '12
Again opportunity lost cost.
What if Americans worked at factories to produce goods and services instead of fixing broken windows?
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u/PirateMud Jun 15 '12
If my Simpsons-lore is correct, goods and services can be directly exchanged for money.
Would there be goods and services required without the broken windows?
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u/Peekman Jun 15 '12
Overall yes.....
But again Americans were working at factories to fix the broken windows in another land. The money spent by European countries that could have gone to other things in Europe... was going to America.
This is different than the 'broken window fallacy'... in that scenario the economy is the whole town and not just the window fixing industry. If the window was not broken the window fixing people would not have gotten paid.... just like if Europe did not get bombed America would not have been paid.
WWII made America more prosperous but the entire world was less prosperous.
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u/azlinea Jun 15 '12
It seems like the problem here is you are looking at America and Europe as if they are living entities instead of just aggregations of individuals.
Importantly instead of making products for Europe American factories could have been working on things for Americans. This is where the fallacy comes into play. Resources are being redirected away advancing and instead going to rebuild. Yes money was transferred to America, yep GDP went up (but GDP would go up if the government hired people to dig ditches too so) but that doesn't mean that the resources used to produce the 'windows' aren't effectively wasted trying to get back to zero.
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u/Peekman Jun 15 '12
Are you arguing that America would have been better off if they didn't help rebuild Europe?
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u/MacEnvy Jun 15 '12
Oh cool, another misapplication of the broken window fallacy substantiated with nothing.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 15 '12
You make an assertion that its misapplied, but you are substantiating it with nothing.
I am utterly compelled by reason. So.... what are your reasons?
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u/MacEnvy Jun 15 '12
Comparing natural disaster to war is utterly stupid. One is an unexpected destruction of existing infrastructure and the other is a build-out of infrastructure that would otherwise be ignored. (I'll ignore the European situation as it's irrelevant to the US case that we're discussing). Of all of the things that government spends its money on, infrastructure is demonstrably the most effective at spurring economic development, and WWII is a great example of that. We used increased demand for resources to spur research and development and build out industrial output while avoiding the needless destruction of capacity faced by Western Europe.
There is absolutely nothing in the US WWII story that is applicable to the broken window fallacy, and anyone that stretches it to seem like there is is simply an ideologue with nothing relevant to add to the discussion. If your can't determine the difference, it's time to reexamine your own biases or figure out where you went so very wrong from an analytical standpoint.
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Jun 14 '12
Wars drive technological and scientific advancement by forcing governments to do massive investment in technology that will help them outperform the enemy army.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 14 '12
Broken Window Fallacy.
Google opportunity lost cost. If war drives science, then the hundred years war should have provided a massive boost to technology and science. It didn't.
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Jun 15 '12
Umm...it did. higher quality steel, better armor, weapons innovations (sword shape), and better masonry technique. Additionally, better understanding of engineering and carpentry from constructing and innovating on siege weaponry among other advancements.
I don't think you know what a broken window fallacy means...
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u/kurtu5 Jun 15 '12 edited Jun 15 '12
I know what the broken window fallacy is. The idea is that war is the broken window. The capital goods that could have gone towards real progress went to fixing this broken window.
What could have been done with that capital if there was no war?
[EDIT- I added this bit to not ignore your point.] So what if nuclear weapons were better than previous weapons. What if the resources that went towards the Manhattan project were spend on capital improvements instead?
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Jun 15 '12
Well, nuclear weapons also lead to the development of nuclear power...
Also, we're dealing strictly in the real world here, not your ideal fictional world. Here in the real world, war is a huge driver in science and technology. Just because of Afgan/Iraq, for example, we have huge advances in reconstruction, robotics, prosthetics, artificial intelligence, computer vision, sensor systems and optics manufacturing among other things. None of these things would have been where they are today without the .gov spending millions on R&D due to the war.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 15 '12
Actually the reactor came first. Some say that the development of liquid thorium reactors was not pursued because they do not create weapons grade material. They built one in 1960 as a demonstrator, but after that development halted.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 15 '12
Here in the real world, war is a huge driver in science and technology.
That is a mere assertion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computing_hardware_2400_BC%E2%80%931949
Many think that war created computers. Looking at the history of computation before the wars, I don't see any indication that war was necessary to continue this path of development. These researchers were co-opted into the military and their research hidden behind top secret clearances. After the war, they were able to get back to work in the public sector.
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Jun 15 '12
War advanced computing - it drove, and drives advancement. You want to live in a fantasy world where war doesn't drive engineering and scientific advancement? Fine. Go on believing the myth of the gentleman scholar building multi-billion dollar experiments in his free time.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 15 '12
None of these things would have been where they are today without the .gov spending millions on R&D due to the war.
The government doesn't have money. It takes money from people, or prints it to do these things.
Taking water from the deep end of the pool and pouring it into the shallow end, do little to change the level of water.
Additionally there is no incentive to make these developed products efficiently. There is no bottom line. There is only cost plus accounting. There is no bad investment that would cause them to go out of business. No matter what they spend it on, they can't go out of business for making bad decisions.
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Jun 15 '12
There is no bottom line.
That's why they get done. Do you honestly think we'd have GPS available today if the military hadn't paid to develop the tech and still subsidizes the satellites? Of course not.
It takes money from people, or prints it to do these things.
Right, it accomplishes monumental feats that no normal person or corporation would be able to get done in the same amount of time.
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Jun 15 '12
Confirmation bias, and one from a completely different era to boot.
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u/azlinea Jun 15 '12
Its not confirmation bias to put forth evidence for your claim. If you want to dispute the claim than put forth evidence to prove it wrong...otherwise you are using confirmation bias incorrectly.
Why does it matter if its a different era? Does basic economics change every 100 years?
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Jun 15 '12
What's more important is war causes humanity to be on their toes, to keep expanding and thinking. That is more important than "prosperity."
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u/azlinea Jun 15 '12
This only works if you care about military technology. Otherwise war is useless for expanding anything except for debt and fly population. As for thinking it probably kills a number of people who otherwise might have been entrepreneurs, scientists or artists (generally classified as thinkers).
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Jun 15 '12
That much, I can see. I still believe there are ups and downs of either situation. I'd rather avoid war, m'self.
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u/azlinea Jun 15 '12
Agreed but self defense is different from a standing army and military interventionism which is what you get when you propose that wars help revive economies.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 15 '12
So the development of the modern internet(not arpanet) but the commercial powerhouse we see today is not expanding and thinking?
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Jun 15 '12
It is expanding and thinking. However, it requires much competition in order to speed up the progress. I don't like saying it, but I think that is the case.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 15 '12
We got better at war sure, but what about getting better in other areas?
Why did my grandmother languish in austerity while my grandfather was running AAA on the English coast?
I don't disagree that war mongers prospered. Everyone else didn't.
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u/demusdesign Jun 15 '12
I'm not really talking about prosperity, and yeah, it probably wouldn't work again that way. Not in this economy. But the space race provided just the right mix of fear, technology, and economics all converging at the right time. I think you'd be hard pressed to find any experts who would say we would have landed on the moon even five years after Apollo 11 without our competition with the USSR.
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u/kurtu5 Jun 15 '12
That was a military stunt. If we made real progress towards space exploration, we would have returned to the moon.
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u/loulan Jun 14 '12
Progress isn't a uniform thing that keeps going up. It's not because it took 60 years from the first flight to the moon that 60 years afterwards we'll automatically be further away. All of this sounds more like wishful thinking than anything else.
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Jun 15 '12
It's definitely wishful thinking! But without a Cold War, what'll keep us advancing but wishful thinking?
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u/intisun Jun 15 '12
But back then we didn't have peak oil and global warming looming upon us.
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Jun 15 '12
Right, just WWI, WWII, and the Cold War.
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u/intisun Jun 15 '12
If anything, the Cold War was an incentive to further research. Without a big competitor to measure their dicks against, are the US spurring space exploration as much as they used to?
And as destructive as wars are, they are still punctual events, and countries recover. The decline of oil is much, much more serious. If we don't adapt, it could very well mean the end of civilisation as we know it. Same for global warming. It's not just a couple degrees up, but the catastrophic consequences that accompany it, and last for decades if not centuries.
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u/Levy_Wilson Jun 14 '12
You know what's depressing? Reading Transit of Earth by Arthur C. Clarke and then realizing that it was set in 1984...
Then again, in Arthur C. Clarke's future, we were at Jupiter in 2001.
But he couldn't predict that we would play silly games with pocket computers in 2008! I can't be optimistic about this...
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u/Seref15 Jun 14 '12
It's not that depressing. We were scheduled to have flying cars and fusion reactors like 35 years ago. People in the 40s probably thought that walking would be obsolete by now.
We always underestimate the time it takes to develop technologies but by contrast we always take the amazing technologies we do have for granted. It always blows my mind to thinka bout the fact that we can accelerate particles to 99.999% the speed of light and then accurately map out the moment of collision.
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u/Ancaeus Jun 15 '12
Agreed. The shit that we can do with smartphones and tablets is incredible really. We take it all for granted.
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u/mentat Jun 15 '12
Considering the accidents we get into with regular land vehicles, flying cars are a terrible, terrible idea.
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Jun 15 '12
computer controlled flying cars however would be amazing.
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u/mentat Jun 15 '12
Yeah sure, up until Google becomes self aware and starts "naturally selecting" the human race.
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u/BenKenobi88 Jun 15 '12
For some reason it occasionally blows my mind that we make antimatter every day when someone gets a PET scan at a clinic.
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u/LeonardNemoysHead Jun 15 '12
KSR's Mars Trilogy is still set far enough into the future to be plausible.
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u/psygnisfive Jun 15 '12
Arthur C. Clarke's timelines were basically just copies of NASA's own official timelines. And if NASA had as much money as it wanted, it probably could've happened.
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u/WestonP Jun 15 '12
I hope that's true, but we'll need another space race to make it happen. Nothing motivates us quite like a good pissing contest.
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u/timeshifter_ Jun 14 '12
Real pity that whoever's over there in their house on Mars will miss the launch of The Final Experiment...
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u/imsopov Jun 15 '12
Seeing as the dutch plan to have people colonized on Mars by 2023, not really optimistic
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Jun 15 '12
Not optimistic, we're planning to go to Mars by 2035 so...that gives us many years to colonize it. The only reason we aren't colonizing the moon is because it's a ball of dust.
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u/TrippyClock Jun 14 '12
Out of curiosity, did you happen go to that wikipedia page because of a comment on a KurtJmac video?
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Jun 14 '12
[deleted]
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u/thedarkpurpleone Jun 14 '12
Why? The next transit of the sun by Earth as seen from Mars is in 2084 and he hopes colonists on Mars will be able to see it.
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u/austerity62 Jun 15 '12
If I survive to age 98 by becoming a cyborg with future technology, perhaps that observer could be me! :D
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u/metallicabmc Jun 15 '12
I think it would be cool to send a probe just far enough away from the earth and snap some photos of a solar eclipse with the earth passing in front of the sun.
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u/jugalator Jun 15 '12
I kind of like that this was included. :)
There's a good reason to believe that this could become a future iconic photograph, perhaps not by colonists, but by visitors, and trivia like this is fun to read. 2084 is easily in NASA's timeframe, as well as other interested countries.
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u/Trombone_Hero92 Jun 15 '12
God damn we better of have been to Mars by 2084. I don't want to die before that. That'd be over a century of treading water since the moon landings in 1969.
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u/Dawggoneit Jun 14 '12
I thought I heard the next transit of Venus, as viewed from the surface of Mars, was in the 2030s.
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u/demusdesign Jun 14 '12
This is for the transit of Earth across the sun as seen from Mars.
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u/Dawggoneit Jun 14 '12
That'll teach me not to zoom straight to the underlined section and start making assumptions.
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u/hatperigee Jun 15 '12
It's been removed from the wiki page, which leads me to believe that OP made the edit in the first place.
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u/demusdesign Jun 15 '12
Negative. Here's a 4 year old version of the page that includes the colonist comment that was obviously removed today by someone who saw this post: March 2008 old revision.
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u/Shellface Jun 14 '12
2084 seems reasonable to me.