After the brilliant landing of the Phoenix on Mars, how can we not open this series of discussion postings other than with thoughts about exploring the Red Planet?! First, some thoughts on exploration itself…
Exploration is expanding human experience, and human consciousness.
Most of the universe we can only explore passively, sensing with our most powerful instruments radiation emitted from different times and places around our universe. Astronomy is exploration!
In the tiny confines of our solar system, we can actually interact physically with the environment we are exploring via probes, mostly operating at distances too great to permit teleoperation. Being able to teleoperate robotic systems in near real time brings a new dimension to remote exploration, as does virtual reality.
When all is said and done, however, the best vehicle to carry human consciousness to new environments is the human body, which is why I want to write first about human exploration. Each time I post to this site, I would like to put forward just a single thought and see what sort of discussion it might evoke.
The first thought on human exploration is ethical. Life is good, and I believe expanding life to lifeless regions is good. That is a reason to dream of living sustainably on Mars, the one potentially water-rich off-Earth place reachable by current technology with enough gravity to allow semi-normal human life. It is important to search as hard as we can with surgically sterilized robots, such as Phoenix, Opportunity, Spirit, Pathfinder and the Vikings, for Martian life, the presence of which would certainly constrain human activities. If our best on-site and remote measurements cannot detect signs of present life, however, then human explorers should follow our robots, both in order to enable a more thorough search for life, present and extinct, and also to extend the experience of what it is like to be on Mars, and to share this experience with humans who will never make the trip.
By Jared at 2:16 PM ON 08/01/08
As a proletarian working class individual from the same type of working class family, there was never the real opportunity to study the arts as from Promethean represented Beethoven as for the poet Shelly.
Then in a new discovery of self promotional gratification, a common offense of ethical civility began a natural defense to gain focus on the unexplained and unexplored.
Although actual memory lane is somewhere around the snail mail trail department, seeing the big picture is not just looking at the planet Saturn. Knowing that Saturn is made up of the main body with rings (a, b, c, d, e, f, g), has gaps, divisions, and moons (Phobe, Lapetus, Hyperion, Titan, Rhea, Dione, Tethys, Encladus, Mimus, Janus-Epimethus, Prometheus, Pandora, Pan) and etc is just a stop on the way. Furthering "why" the names were given, "what" similarities will assist in remembering, "how" do these motivations compare to surroundings, "where" is the access for more updated material, and "when" does this information effect and affect your decisioning...
...all led to a very simple tool that:
a perception of the effect/affect rule, or dirty little trick that's quick...
Is as simple as "e" is for explaining, ie; effect.
&
Is as simple as "a" is for after, ie; affect.
Well, it led to more than that, however, sometimes getting to the far side of complexity is rather simply the very proximity extension that will keep your instinctual nature there once you arrive.
Ousty...
By ulla runchel at 3:21 AM ON 08/08/08
http://www.123hjemmeside.dk/happystarlight/11453493
Hi, this is how I see a glimpse of the future, thanks for everything.
Ulla Runchel