RIP Spirit
:( Gone but not forgotten
NASA will today end attempts to contact its Spirit Mars rover, killed by lack of sunlight during a "stressful" Martian winter. The agency last heard from Spirit on 22 March 2010, when it transmitted from the sand trap in which it had been stuck since April 2009. The orientation of its solar panels led scientists to conclude it …
"killed by lack of sunlight during a "stressful" Martian winter."
Nothing that a couple of spare batteries and a cleaning lady with a duster cannot fix. Oh, and while she's at it she can give the contraption a shove so that it could drive out of that (quite shallow) pit and go do what it's supposed to be doing.
'Red Planet winter/estimated -55°C,/icy death.'
So one day the earth will be so over populated that we will have to travel to places like this to survive?
We could populate antarctica , the sahara and pretty much any barren wasteland on earth and it would still be better and cheaper.
"We could populate antarctica , the sahara and pretty much any barren wasteland on earth and it would still be better and cheaper."
Yes, and it would still be on one, single, vulnerable planet...
The only way of ensuring that the human race can survive, is to not have all our eggs in one basket.
we routinely fly hundreds of people about in pressurised containers and we've got power supplies whose refuelling needs are measured in years or decades, what you're ACTUALLY saying is that there's absolutely no technological barrier to colonising Mars aside from getting there.
Once we can do that routinely and get to another couple of planets, we can start considering ourselves an impressive civilisation. Until that date, we're just one asteroid/plague/war away from being a thin layer of plastic and shoes for a future archaeologist to dig up.
if it wasnt for the bleeding heart scaremonger greens, we could have fitted them with small nuclear generators and then they wouldn't have needed solar power. Even on explosion i doubt it would have been much worse than Fukushima (itself a miracle triumph considering what battered the reactors there)