Where do we go after Mars??

Just a really quick question, after America and everyone else lands on the moon and then Mars (by about 2025? is that right?).. where does man kind go from there. AFTER building bases on these bodies,
do they move on to a different planet?
do they leave the solar system?
Has NASA started to plan this far ahead?
eeepp thanx guys

After Mars is the asteroid belt. Asteroids are giant hunks of raw minerals and ores just waiting to be mined turning a fortune and providing Earth will all the raw materials we need to spread our seed out to the stars.
This is why it is so vital we establish a permanent base on the Moon. Realistically we can't get to Mars without using the Moon as a jumppoint.
I just hope we last that long!

NASA's website says Earth, Moon, Mars and beyond.
I think getting to Europa should be a priority. The moon is almost the size of our moon. Europa has a thin outer layer of ice, as much as 50 km deep. We need to get there and find out. If there is then that will be two places in our solar system that would give us more hope into finding life.
For going to Europa, we will need very good robots. Tainting the water could be a disaster or if there is a microbiological life form it could infect Earth if brought back.
Even if the water is not usable to us will still find out valuable information.

I believe we will be ready to send people to another solar system in 10 years.

I think breakthrough propulsion and tech is just around the corner. Humanity is due for another large leap in tech. It has been long already since anything truely breath taking has been discovered.

My guess is another solar system by 2030 at least a probe.

I see incredably breakthroughs resulting from a greater understanding of string theory and its implications on reality.. it's amazing what is proposed is possible with modern day technology. Unfortunately I feel politics will forbid any truely amazing advancements from taking place for some time. There's enough people against going to the Moon, saying we should focus resources on local problems. Those of us who see the light, however, know that getting to the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids, means an end to _many_ of our local problems.
This anti-progress mindset will see amazing discoveries such as anti-gravity craft and wormhole capture devices go unnoticed in their significance and implications, and humanity will most likely pay the price by being stuck on this very angry rock far longer than we need to be.

I can see Humanity landing on the Moons of several planets in the near future.
Europa
Io
Ganymeade
Titan
Callista
maybe pluto at some point.
If heat shielding can be improved purhapse Mercury.

i think like just about everyone probably, theres many moons to be explored, and what about venus, its supposed to be third to earth like efter mars isnt it? and murcury maybe, but most definitly the astroid belt. i think after mars that may be NASA's next plan or at least japans unless were going to work together on this, thats why japans got the plans on a space station on the moon.

I don't know if we'll ever have anything useful to do with Venus. Even the incredably hardened soviet lander was crushed by the intense pressure moments after landing and snapping a few pictures. Mercury would be a good place to put some sort of collection station for solar radiation, but it too would have to be capable of withstanding unimaginable heat and the constant 'earth'quakes.

It think it would be a good step to use autonomous probes/craft to start mining the asteroids for resorces in the eventual colonization of the solar system.

Venus wuld be difficult because of the extreme tempuratures and pressure there, there would have to be a jump in technology to even survive there.

biggest hinderance is politics, and the fact taht people think the poor are more important then humanities future

This might help: Kardashev Scale.

The scale is not a hard and fast law. There is no reason we cannot 'punch a hole' through the levels to 'break out' into the Galaxy. But it gives you an idea of where we might go and what we might do, if we quit bickering and manage to dodge the big rocks.

So, in fact the increased energy usage of emerging countries like China and India , while creating some challinging problems in the short term, precisely for the reason of solving that will force us rapidly a few notches up the Kardashev scale....

AFTER MARS

Personally, from an efficiency point of view, I would opt to expand human colonisation, gradually hopping and utilising the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.

Naturally that doesn't mean we shouldn''t send some robots to IO and Europa surface for scientific interest, but for human expansion in space, asteroids have one big advantage and that is that the dont have the deep gravity well that planets and large moons have, wich increases the cost to lift stuff from or drop to the surface. I would like to see a natural progression towards spacehaitats and worldships intead designed to have superior surface to volume area and energy efficiency as opposed to clumsy planets, this should eventually lead to Dyson spheres

Following this reasoning, I question if we should go to Mars first instead of Mercury, sure Mars and Venus have that sex-appeal for terraforming, but those processes takes hundreds or thousands of years, you could have expanded your civilisation to the next star by that time!!!

For the fastest expansion you would want to go to places that:
- host the richest resources (energy / water / oxgygen / metals)
- have low gravity for more affordable transport
- are close to your other supporting points, keeping routes between mines and plants short and thus maximising production turnover rates.

Therefore, once we take the Moon, I would propose to go to Mercury first instead of Mars , Why:

examing this factsheet:

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

MERCURY vs MARS
- the highest solar flux, making Mercury the Kuwait of photovoltaics
- very rich in in all kinds of metals, especially the heavy metals that are relatively rare in the outer solar system and that are very much usefull for building photovoltaics...
- lower gravity than Mars
- The orbit of Mars can get it SLIGHTLY closer to the moon supply line, but IMHO the small difference in distance is made up by all the other advantages.


Mars DOES also have mercury in the water department, but I figure its better and cheaper to get that water from icy asteroids anyway.

Basically you would want to harvest mercury for energy and heavy metals, the asteroids for water and the moon and Lagrangepoints to house the plants and assemblylines to put it all together and build worldships.


I fiigure that a nation that goes for mars first first, will after several decades of stealing the glory be surpassed by the sheer economics of Mercury and the Mars colonists could witness Mercurians flyby with a worldship towards the next star while the Marsians are still extracting Ice from Europe and collecting sulfur on IO.


[edit on 2-3-2005 by Countermeasures]

Originally posted by Xeven
I believe we will be ready to send people to another solar system in 10 years.

I think breakthrough propulsion and tech is just around the corner. Humanity is due for another large leap in tech. It has been long already since anything truely breath taking has been discovered.

My guess is another solar system by 2030 at least a probe.

HAHAH that's so funny I can't stop laughing!! )

Do you know how far away the nearest so called Solar System Alpha Centauri? it's roughly 1.35 Parsecs / 4.4LY

That means that light takes 4.4 years to travel the distance...

So unless we discover a way of bending the basic laws of physics and manage to travel faster than light we will be unable to reach Alpha Centauri by 2010....

Actually it would be possable to reach Alpha Centauri with current propulsion tech in about 10000 years.... and that is with an ion thruster, our most advanced form of propultion.

Neon.

A probe by 2030 is very optimistic, you would need to come up fast with a beamed-core antimatter engine and a lot of antimatter fuel, but perhaps with some lower-tec magsail derivate I would see some sort of probe arriving around 2075 or something.

But again we can ask ourselves, should we spent all those billions on a probe, knowing that for halve the money, by putting a really large telescope (with liquid mercury mirror) on the dark side of the moon we make Hubble look like a scratched old pair of sunglasses and could peek directly at surfacestructures of planets in other solarsystems and certainlly pick up the little lights from the alien cities that these planets may or may not have ?

Besides, the lunar telescope could get a good peek at millions of starsystems and give interesting answers in 2-3 years while your probe takes 30 years or something just to peek at one other solarsystem ?

It's like those Command&Conquer and Red Alert strategies, you could rush to a high tec-level early on and do one early strike on your enemy, but if this fails you are constantly be bugged by lack of money and defenses, basically you are doomed against any decent player.

OR you choose to rush your refineries and income generating resources and crank out overwhelming swarms of units slightly later in the game, often this proves the most valuable strategy ....Likewise, i think that instead of building a fancy probe, we should try to turn the moon into a revenue generating resource first and from that point start spreading like wildfire.

so what some other country has sent a small probe to the next star first and has their 15 minutes of fame on television, your country will send a complete WORLDSHIP some decade later.


[edit on 2-3-2005 by Countermeasures]

reply to post by Neon Haze


i totally agree that is impossible. xeven watches to much star trek. maybe we will have the entire andromeda galaxie colonized by 2030 too.

countermeasures

I don't think we are going to expand into space like a "wildfire" anytime soon. Not within this century at least. Even though I do feel we have the potential to build a base on the Moon and even develop the means to start building habitats and ships there... I don't see how in the hell we are going to get enough people up there to man all of them. It is incredibly expensive now just to get half a dozen people into space at a time. How long is it going to take and how much money will it cost to develop a system by which we have "just" a few hundred people living off Earth at any given time?

Perhaps I'm being too conservative, but it could be a thousand years before we have anything even resembling small towns out there.

As for the OP's question... well developing the Moon and Mars will take long enough. There's no rush to send people anywhere else. If we should be rushing toward anything it should be finding some means to get into orbit at a drastically reduced cost compared to what we have now.

Originally posted by Countermeasures
by putting a really large telescope (with liquid mercury mirror) on the dark side of the moon we make Hubble look like a scratched old pair of sunglasses and could peek directly at surfacestructures of planets in other solarsystems and certainlly pick up the little lights from the alien cities that these planets may or may not have ?

There is no dark side of the moon, the moon rotates once per month so all sides get sunlight. There are craters at the pole that are perpetually dark inside, however. That makes them ideal for some incredible infrared astronomy.

Originally posted by Jehosephat
biggest hinderance is politics, and the fact taht people think the poor are more important then humanities future

I agree with the politics issue, but.... what are you talking about!? I'd say the problem is that some rich people care more about their profit than the future of humanity. There are plenty of resources out in space, but it's not profitable to mine them yet at this point in time. Your statement is kinda contradicting. You're worried about humanity, but you don't care about poor people? I'm sorry, but they're human as well. And perhaps the people in charge of humanity's future are poor? They don't seem to be able to afford all this advanced space exploration stuff. If they could afford it, then maybe we'd all be living on Mars right now.


[edit on 5-12-2008 by GrayFox]

reply to post by GrayFox


If you can't make the effort profitable in a reasonable amount of time, what's the point? I know that makes me sound like an "evil capitalist," but "profit" gets a bad rap. The fact is, if you can't make money from it you're only going to be able to do it for a very limited amount of time. That was Apollo's greatest weakness, even failing some might say. As the critics of Apollo say, it was a flash in the pan, "flags and footprints," rather than a sustained presence. If you can make money from it then you can continue doing it. Right now any attempt to make money off of deep space exploration would probably fail, but the good news is that it looks like in the near term, space tourism will be profitable and will result in new space travel innovations. Eventually someone will figure out how to master deep space exploration in a way that will offset the costs, either by reducing the cost (air breathing engines for the intial launch), increasing the value of the product (a manned flight to the moon rather than a sub orbital hop), or probably some of both. It isn't a matter of greed, it's a matter of practicality and sustainability. Flash in the pan donations to space exploration development might warm the heart, but it's like the saying "teach a man to fish."

What's the point? Science and the future of humanity. Profit means absolutely NOTHING if we all die in a nuclear war or if Earth is hit by a giant asteroid. I'm not saying you're wrong. It's true that people want profit, but sometimes there are more important things than money.

reply to post by biggd


reply to the OP:
There was an really interesting article about Saturn's moon enceladus in Scientific american. I believe that will be the next body (probably together with Titan) we'll land on after Mars. Let me explain:
Mercury is just a rocky planet with no atmosphere and there is no reason to land on it.
Venus has too hot and too acidic atmosphere for a manned spacecraft. It's a very interesting planet, but not accesible yet.
We llive on Earth, we land on Moon and Mars.
Jupiter has some interesting moons, most notably Eurpa (which may host life), but Saturn's moons are much more interesting.
A mission to the saturn's moon would be a few years mission and it could be to Enceladus and Titan together. Enceladus has many advantages over Jupiter's Europa. Both moons probably have underground oceans, but unlike on Europa, on Enceladus the material from those oceans come to the surface in geysers. Titan is a misterious moon as well and landing on both moons in one mission would be much cheaper.

Anyway I doubt it will happen in this century, unless there will be another, even greater space race.