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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Humans Will Never Colonize Mars
The suggestion that humans will soon set up bustling, long-lasting colonies on Mars is something many of us take for granted. What this lofty vision fails to appreciate, however, are the monumental—if not intractable—challenges awaiting colonists who want to permanently live on Mars. Unless we radically adapt our brains and bodies to the harsh Martian environment, the Red Planet will forever remain off limits to humans.
Mars is the closest thing we have to Earth in the entire solar system, and that's not saying much.
The Red Planet is a cold, dead place, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earth's. The paltry amount of air that does exist on Mars is primarily composed of noxious carbon dioxide, which does little to protect the surface from the Sun's harmful rays. Air pressure on Mars is very low; at 600 Pascals, it's only about 0.6 percent that of Earth. You might as well be exposed to the vacuum of space, resulting in a severe form of the bends—including ruptured lungs, dangerously swollen skin and body tissue, and ultimately death. The thin atmosphere also means that heat cannot be retained at the surface. The average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 degrees Celsius), with temperatures dropping as low as -195 degrees F (-126 degrees C). By contrast, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok Station in Antarctica, at -128 degrees F (-89 degrees C) on June 23, 1982. Once temperatures get below the -40 degrees F/C mark, people who aren't properly dressed for the occasion can expect hypothermia to set in within about five to seven minutes.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday August 02 2019, @02:46AM (3 children)
Yeah, that's always been an interesting bit of hypocrisy, let's prosecute the researchers as war criminals, and we'll be keeping all that useful research, thanks. Even worse was Unit 731, where the guys who carried out the human experiments were not only not prosecuted but allowed to keep working because the results of their (utterly unethical) bioweapons research was in demand in the US.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Acabatag on Friday August 02 2019, @03:39AM
I was going to bring up Unit 731, which was Japanese. But what they did was in some ways far worse than the Nazis. They used US Prisoners of War, not just Chinese civilians, for their experiments. Which included a lot of vivisection. But they also did things like air-drop biological warfare vectors on regular Chinese villages.
We wanted the tech they had developed, and the alternative was the scientists going to the Russians, so those bastard scientists got amnesty. The head of Unit 731 in fact became a prestigious professor at a US institution.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 02 2019, @02:21PM (1 child)
So, uhhhhhhmmmm, what would you have done? Bulldoze all that research into the mass graves with the dead Jews? Wouldn't that have been spiteful of the Jews, themselves? Their lives were considered wothless, and thrown away, some of them in the name of research. Then the "liberators" come along, and trash the data gained from the research. That would seem to be less respectful of the dead, than those who murdered the Jews to get the data.
Tough call, isn't it? There's no way to "make things right", but I think preserving the data is more right than destroying the data.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Saturday August 03 2019, @02:55AM
A lot of the experiments were carried out on Russian prisoners, particularly the ones the Allies wanted the data from, e.g. exposure to freezing conditions. Others were on German citizens, e.g. a number of experimental programs used Dachau as their source of subjects. I guess in 1945 the Allies were less concerned about data gathered from Russians and Germans...