Your video, SpaceX Makes History | MARS, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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Part 1
http://videosift.com/video/Doom-Resurrected-To-Hell-and-Back-Part-1
Part 3
http://videosift.com/video/Doom-Resurrected-Guns-Guitars-Chess-on-Mars-Part-3

Part 2
http://videosift.com/video/Doom-Resurrected-Designing-a-First-Impression-Part-2
Part 3
http://videosift.com/video/Doom-Resurrected-Guns-Guitars-Chess-on-Mars-Part-3

Your video, A Lesson in Failure: The Rise of the Mars Candy Company, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

My long time issue with the "they would be too intelligent/evolved to have any interest in us" type scenario, such as he puts as number two here, is that we go through great lengths to try and research and understand very primitive life. There are efforts being made to talk to dolphins and apes. We're looking to build ships to crash or land ships onto Titan to see if there is microbial life on a moon orbiting a gas giant, not to mention work to see if Mars once upon had life. So the very fact we're able to get off our little rock (though not much off it), I think would warrant a stop and look, perhaps to help answer what was life like at such an early stage of evolution.

Not said stop and look doesn't imply any sort of communications. Indeed there may be a Prime Directive like thing with them where by they see and observe, but leave no evidence of such a visit (alien abductions being just mental illness coupled with abuse or other issues).

Now distance is a super valid point, but by far the most likely point is the survivability window, which he talks about in point three. We're still a level zero civilization (Kardashev scale) and decades until we reach a level one civilization (unfortunately it seems delayed even further due to some very anti-science moves being made by certain groups). Moving up that scale is only one thing, avoiding killing ourselves via war is another huge one. With CRISPR technology advancing, there is a very real danger of a Division/Stand/Utopia type disease coming to the foreground, especially if driven by a zealot (ala Division and Utopia). I highly doubt a man made black hole or something, but war or a CRISPR engineered disease... Not to mention the natural disasters he mentioned, and others, such as huge gamma ray bursts and others that we've managed to avoid. And we'd have to think that most civilizations go through somewhat similar phases, with a universe that is fairly hostile to life, even if many planets are capable of at least starting life. Generally I figure that most civilizations never make it past the stage we are at now, and those that do probably don't get to stage two and beyond (to be fair, I doubt any civilization can achieve stage two on Kardashev's scale as it goes beyond knowledge needed, but materials and more).

Back to the technology of communications point. I've generally figured if you are space faring, you gave up on radio communications and are using strange properties or something along those lines.

I'm really impressed with this person, but the whole idea of going to Mars I find really stupid.
We're destroying the planet so the solution is to go to another planet and do what??? fuck that one up too?

God, people don't know their film history anymore!

Mars Attacks ripped that off from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, only there the song was a high-pitched wailing "Puuuuberty loooove."

Man, I have to watch that movie again.

"Get your ass to mars" -Douglas Quaid

Your video, Why Should We Go to Mars?, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Well, to be fair, we don't have any real idea of the living conditions on planets in nearby systems that are roughly earth sized. We haven't been able to detect them until the last few years, and most of those are orbiting too close to the sun (because those are the easiest to detect), and getting any kind of real idea of their atmospheres is currently unavailable. There could be several systems with habitable planets within 30 ly, we just don't know yet. We are improving our capacity to detect these every year, so perhaps by the time we have colonized Mars, we should have a few viable extra-solar earthlike planetary candidates to send probes. Still would be another 50-100+ years after sending probes to receive back enough data to justify sending colonists. Hopefully by then our tech has matured enough to make it possible, and the war with Mars has settled down enough.

-Massive Waves
-Global earthquakes
-Frequent Volcanic Eruptions

How is Mars worse than this? And it sounds like a lot of the tech used for Mars could help if this ever happened to Earth. How is that a bad thing?

My concern is this : Imagine a global extinction event , lets say a repeat of the event that killed off the dinosaurs : a massive asteroid direct hit , instantly killing everything on roughly the same continent or general planetside , such an impact would punch a hole in the very tectonic plate it lands on and cause massive waves not just in water , but in the ground itself , waves of rock and earth surface taveling around the globe meeting on the far side of the impact and ricocheting back again . We are talking GLOBAL earthquakes off the scales, for YEARS after the impact as the tectonic plates are slowliy settling in, all this is followed by a thick cloud of ash from the impact, refueled by frequent vulcanic eruptions , this will block out most sunlight , so after the initial toasting , the few lucky survives of this pandemonium can look forward to hundreds of years of atomic winter. Sounds pretty fuckin bad.

But guess what : thats still better conditions for life than Mars. And Mars is goddamn paradise compared to the other planets around us. Anything outside our immediate neighbourhood ? Forget it , they are ATLEAST thousands of years travel away, making moving anything of note there unfeasable. We ARE a one planet species. Get used to it , take good care of this one , its all we got.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Really great video and post-mortem on the shuttle program. Lots of clips and images that I've never seen before.

My money is on Musk and the Red Dragon to get people to Mars first.


*promote

Ok I'll try to divide up my wall text a bit better this time

I totally acknowledge that people in the past, and even in present day, some people have to live a certain way in order to survive, but for the vast majority of people that doesn't apply.


Taste:
Like most of the senses in the human body, the sense of taste is in a constant state re-calibration. It's highly subjective and easily influenced over mere seconds but also long periods of time. They say it takes 3 weeks to acclimatize from things you crave, from salt to heroin. That's why most healthy eating books tell you go to cold tofurkey (see what I did there ) for 3 weeks. It's all about the brain chemistry. After 3 straight weeks you aren't craving it. (The habit might still be there but, the chemically driven cravings are gone).
Try it yourself by eating an apple before and after some soft drink. First the apple will taste sweet, and after it will taste sour. Or try decreasing salt over a 3 week period, it'll taste bland at first, but if you go back after 3 weeks it'll be way too salty.



Food science:
One of the major things stopping me from not being vegan, was the health concerns, so I read a number of books about plant-based eating.
There is a new book "How Not To Die" by Dr. Michael Greger. If you want scientific proof of a plant based diet this the one stop shop. 500 pages explaining tens of thousands of studies, some going for decades and involving hundreds of thousands of people. I was blown away at the simple fact that so many studies get done. Most of them are interventional studies also, meaning they are able to show cause and effect (unlike observational or corrolational studies, as he explains in the book). 150 pages of this book alone are lists of references to studies. It's pure unbiased science. (It's not a vegan book either in case you are worried about him being biased).

At the risk of spoiling the book - whole foods like apples and broccoli doesn't give you cancer, in fact they go a long way to preventing it, some bean based foods are as effective as chemotherapy, and without the side effects. I thought it sounded it ridiculous, but the science is valid.
Of course you can visit his website he explains all new research almost daily at nutritionfacts.org in 1 or 2 minute videos.
He also has a checklist phone app called Dr.Greger's Daily Dozen.

There are other authors too, most of these ones have recipes too, such as Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Cadwell Esselstyn, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr Joel Furhman.
Health-wise it's the best thing you can do for yourself. And if like me you thought eating healthy meant salads, you'd be as wrong as I was I haven't had a salad for years. My blood results and vitamin levels are exactly what the books said they would be.

Try it for 3 weeks, but make sure you do it the right way as explained in the books, and you'll be shouting from roof tops about what a change it's made to your life. The other thing is, you get to eat more, and the more you eat it's healthier. What a weird concept in a world where we are constantly being told to calorie count (it doesn't work btw).

Environmental:
I've read a lot about ethics, reason and evidence based thinking, as well as nutrition and health (as a result of my own skepticism). So I could and I enjoy talking about these all day long. On the environmental side of things, I'm not as aware, but there some documentaries such as Earthlings and Cowspiracy which paint a pretty clear picture.
Anyone can do the maths even at a rough level - there are 56 billion animals bred and slaughtered each year. Feeding 56 billion animals (many of which are bigger than people) takes a lot more food than a mere 7 billion. Therefore it must take more crops and land to feed them, not to mention the land the animals occupy themselves, as well as the land they destroy by dump their waste products (feces are toxic in those concentrations, where as plant waste, is just compost)
The other thing is that many of these crops are grown in countries where people are starving, using up the fertile land to feed our livestock instead of the people. How f'd up is that?
It's reasons like that why countries like the Netherlands are asking their people to not eat meat more than 3 meals a week.

Productivity and economics:
Countries like Finland have government assistance to switch farmers from dairy to berry. Because they got sick of being sick:
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/dietary-guidelines-from-dairies-to-berries/

The world won't go vegan overnight, and realistically it will never be 100% vegan (people still smoke after all). There will be more than enough time to transition. And surely you aren't suggesting that we should eat meat and dairy to keep someone employed? I don't want anyone to lose their job, but to do something pointlessly cruel just to keep a person working seems wrong.

Animal industries are also heavily subsidized in many countries, so if they were to stop being subsidized that's money freed up for other projects, such as the ones in Finland.

The last bit:
If you eat a plant based diet, just like the cow you'll never have constipation, thanks to all of the fibre
When it comes to enzymes, humans are lactose intolerant because after the age of 2 the enzyme lactase stops being made by the body (unless you keep drinking it). Humans also don't have another enzyme called uricase (true omnivores, and carnivores do), which is the enzyme used to break down the protein called uric acid. As you might know gout is caused by too much uric acid, forming crystals in your joints.
However humans have a multitude of enzymes for digesting carbohydrate rich foods (plants). And no carbs don't make fat despite what the fitness industry would have you believe (as the books above explain).
Appealing to history as well, when they found fossilized human feces, it contained so much fibre it was obvious that humans ate primarily a plant based diet. (Animal foods don't contain fibre).

The reasons why you wouldn't want a whale to eat krill for you is:
1. Food is a packaged deal - there is nothing harmful in something like a potato. But feed a lot of potatoes to a pig, and eat the pig, you're getting some of the nutrients of a potato, but also heaps of stuff you're body doesn't need from the pig, like cholesterol, saturated fat, sulfur and methionine containing amino acids etc And no fibre. (low fibre means constipation and higher rates of colon cancer).
2. Your body's health is also dependent on the bacteria living inside you. (fun fact, most the weight of your poop is bacteria!) The bacteria inside you needs certain types of food to live. If you eat meat, you're starving your micro-organisms, and the less good bacteria you have, the less they produce certain chemicals and nutrients , and you get a knock on effect. The fewer the good bacteria also makes room for bad bacteria which make chemicals you don't want.
Coincidentally, if you eat 3 potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you have all the protein you need - it worked for Matt Damon on Mars right?