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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Going to Mars, anyone?
Friday. 8.31.07 6:52 pm
So a couple of people in my office are on the team to plan the human exploration of Mars. I was sitting in on the teleconference they had the other day and it was pretty interesting. Of course, some people think that planning some 30 years ahead for the human exploration of Mars is planning a little *too* far ahead, but for a project this large, I'm sure it can't hurt to start a little early.

The idea right now is to build a base on the Moon first. The eyes of the world have shifted back to the moon for several reasons, one, because Chinese and Indians are racing there, much like the USA and the USSR did back in the day, and two, because we've realized that a lot of the technology that we used to get us there in the first place has been lost or forgotten and we have precious little time to pump the guys in charge for that kind of information, because they were all old back then, and it's approximately 40 years later now. Thirdly, we see the moon as the obvious stepping stone on our way to Mars.

Each planetary body has its own challenges. Mars is very far away. That is its main challenge. Just to get there at current speeds it would take about 6 months. Then you'd likely stay on the surface for about a year. Then it would be 6 months back home. During that time in microgravity, your heart would start to weaken. It would weaken because it no longer has to pump your blood against gravity, and like any other muscle, it would start to atrophy and break down a bit with disuse. This wouldn't be a problem if you intended to stay in space forever, but if you ever came back down to the Earth your heart might be overwhelmed with strain and fail. The same goes for your bones. The more weight you carry around, the stronger your bones are, because they build up density proportional to your weight. Weightless, your bones would slowly lose their density until you would return to Earth extremely brittle and possibly unable to stand.

The only fix against this kind of deterioration is constant exercise. You would have to exercise on exercise machines for hours and hours and hours so that your body would stay fit. Forget sleeping through the whole thing... unless they could freeze or stop your normal body processes... you would turn to mush. I guess that's the whole idea behind the "cryo-freeze"-- somehow you stop your body from deteriorating while you're in space.

NASA has been figuring out what astronauts need to do to stay healthy on long space voyages by sending people up for extended stays on the International Space Station (ISS). Sending people up here for stints of 3-6 months has allowed NASA to develop a routine that would keep them in shape.

The other tough thing about the long trip to Mars would be just getting along with your crew mates for that long. NASA, in addition to having all kinds of physical, academic, and skill-oriented requirements for astronauts also has personality requirements. For each mission they choose among their qualified crew members a group that will get along-- i.e., they don't choose two dominant people to go on a mission, or a whole crew of passive or submissive personality types. They have to choose a leader, a mediator, and a "care-taker", in some cases.

Exploration of Mars is still a long way off, to be sure, but if everything goes as planned, you could see it happen in your lifetime. We're already deciding where we want to go and what the astronauts will do when they get there. If you have a suggestion about where you want to go or what information you would like to know about the Red Planet (or any other planet for that matter), I'll make sure somebody hears about it.
3 Comments.


This stuff is way over my head.

I don't know your birthday... :( Do you know mine?

Ah well. We'll have the rest of our lives to get to know small stuff like that.
» Dilated on 2007-08-31 09:29:21

Sign me up
I don't know if I'd actually go for it, but I'd really love it.

Might miss home after 2 or so years, though.
» middaymoon on 2007-08-31 11:30:50

The Gravitational Research Branch (code SLR) and I guess the Space Biosciences Division in general (code SL) here at Ames are addressing (or trying to address...) many of those problems associated with long-term space flight. There are a number of system-wide physiological things to consider during prolonged space travel, but there are also many things on the molecular and cellular level that must be dealt with as well:

- The amount of radiation one may encounter during an extended bout in space may lead to cellular damage on the protein and DNA level. Depending on the type of radiation encountered, the essential process that keeps our cells dividing healthily--the faithful replication of the cellular genome--is at risk.

- Signal transduction--the biochemical framework upon which life as a multicellular organism is built--may work differently in non-Earth environments. I'm not sure if there has indeed been research confirming this, but I suspect that any sort of experiment we can do on Earth to simulate these conditions may underestimate the extent to which signal transduction is altered in vivo. Of course, if our signal transduction pathways go haywire, it has implications for a wide array of body systems, including cellular repair, morphogenesis, and development. This leads into the whole thing about having bones and muscles crap out more easily, which has just as much to do with these interactions at the cellular level as they do at the organ level.
» ranor on 2007-09-02 12:20:01

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