"It's interesting how different news sites spin #marsgate"
That's because there are quality news sites and there are blogs. There is no evidence Mars One is not sincere in their attempts.
Here's another medium article by the Mars One applicants refuting the conspiracy theory: https://medium.com/@oscarmathe...
I would advise people to give this a chance.
Let me clear up some things about Mars One. It is often claimed that Mars One is a scam and has no scientists, engineers, technology, timetable, suppliers or plan. This is just not true!
Scientists and Engineers:
Lansdorp received his Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Twente University in 2003. For five years Lansdorp worked at Delft University of Technology and in 2008 founded Ampyx Power in order to develop a new, viable method of generating wind energy.
Lansdorp is also a successful entrepreneur. Here is a ted talk about his last company.
Arno Wielders received his Master of Science in Physics from the Free University of Amsterdam in 1997. He was soon hired by the Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, to work at Dutch Space in the Very Large Telescope Interferometer Delay Line project.
Gerard 't Hooft, Nobel laureate and Ambassador of Mars One
Gerardus (Gerard) 't Hooft is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Received the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Norbert Kraft, Chief Medical Officer, Mars One
Norbert Kraft is an American Medical Doctor with over 17 years of experience in aviation and aerospace research and development as of 2012.[1] His primary area of expertise is developing physiological and psychological countermeasures to combat the negative effects of long-duration spaceflight.[1] He has worked for the Russian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency and NASA.[1]
Grant Anderson, Sr. VP Operations, Chief Engineer and Co-Founder, Paragon Space Development Corporation 28 years of experience in spacecraft systems design, requirements formulation and preliminary and detail hardware design. Founded or help found 5 companies, two of which are still operating.
Time table: http://mars-one.com/en/mission...
Suppliers: http://mars-one.com/en/partner...
Technology they want to use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
They don't plan to develop much of the technology themselves, they're planning to buy it from other companies mostly such as SpaceX. Most of this technology exists already. They have written statements of the companies that they are willing and able to supply these things.
Price/Funding:
All they need is the funding, and they plan to get that through broadcasting and sponsor deals. His argument is that the olympics got 6 billion dollars in sponsor deals, so wouldn't a colony/trip to mars get the same? It would certainly help them get funding if people didn't denounce it as soon as they hear the name. The mission is so cheap (6 billion dollars) because it's a one-way trip. Sending people from Mars back to earth is very expensive. Also, they're not a big wasteful government agency.
The falcon heavy for example costs only $77-135M to launch (2013). Technology has come a long way, this combined with the privatization of space has caused costs to drop significantly.
Comparison Olympics/Moonlanding:
http://www.theguardian.com/med...
According to this the 2008 olympic openings ceremony was watched by 1 billion people. According to wikipedia in 1969 (the world population was only half of what it is now, and people weren't as well connected as they are now) the moon landing had 500 million people watching. So, just imagine, how many people would watch a landing on Mars in 2023.
Other:
Not saying they're actually going to be able to pull it off, but there's no evidence that their efforts aren't sincere.
Here is a press conference that answers most of the questions you may have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I am aware that reddit AMA was badly received and too vague for the bold claim he was making. But he answers most of the unanswered questions in the press conference.
Also, there is an error in the summary. The rover/communication satellite will be going up in 2018, but the first astronauts won't be leaving until 2024.
Lansdorp himself is a successful entrepreneur, here is a ted talk about his last company. He sold his stake and has been using the profit he made there to get Mars One off the ground for the past 3 years.
Among the people supporting them are:
- Gerard ‘t Hooft, Nobel Prize winning Theoretical Physicist
- Dr. Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society
- Terry Gamber, worked on the lander designs for the Viking mission
- A very large number of experienced people (see their website Advisers, ambassadors)
They don't plan to develop much of the technology themselves, they're planning to buy it from other companies mostly such as SpaceX. Most of this technology exists already. They have written statements of the companies that they are willing and able to supply these things.
List of the technology they want to use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_One#Technology
The total cost is estimated at $6 billion. Technology has come a long way, this combined with the privatization of space has caused costs to drop significantly. The falcon heavy for example costs only $77-135M to launch (2013).
They plan to get this through sponsorship deals. They're going to broadcast the entire thing on TV. Which makes sense, the olympics receives 6 billion dollars for 1 billion viewers. The moonlanding in 1969 had 500 million viewers. The population of the earth was only 3,5 billion back then and people weren't as well connected as they are now. So imagine how many viewers a colony on Mars would get?
No one says it's guaranteed that they will succeed, but i think they should try, and we should support it.
More information can be found on their website and IndieGoGo campaign:
http://www.mars-one.com/
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mars-one-first-private-mars-mission-in-2018
The campaign is just to help pay for the Lockheed Martin study and to convince sponsors there is enough interest. I have donated myself, and advise people who think space exploration is important to do the same. It's risky, but it's high impact.
Geordie Rose's (D-Wave CTO) response:
The majority of that post is simply factually incorrect.
As one example, Troyer hasn’t even had access yet to the system Cathy benchmarked (the Vesuvius – based system). (!) Yes Rainier could be beat by dedicated solvers — it was really slow! Vesuvius can’t (at least for certain types of problems). Another is he thinks we only benchmarked against cplex (not true) and he thinks cplex is just an exact solver (not true). These types of gross misunderstanding permeate the whole thing.
I used to find this stuff vaguely amusing in an irritating kind of way. Now I just find it boring and I wonder why anyone listens to a guy who’s been wrong exactly 100% of the time about everything. Update your priors, people!!
If you want to know what’s really going on, listen to the real experts. Like Hartmut.
Wish i could edit this, it wasn't really an apology, but they are at least in doubt about calling them a loser. Several papers back up the quantum computer claim as you can read in the nature blog post.
IEEE Spectrum apologised for that article:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/hardware/big-win-for-the-losers-at-dwave
It's a quantum computer all right, just not a universal quantum computer. But it should still show quantum speedups for discrete optimization problems.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/04/further-proof-for-controversial-quantum-computer.html
So far, tests have been very promising:
If it continues to speed up like this, there are some very exciting times ahead of us!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/8054771535/ (Rose's Law, the quantum computer equivalent of Moore's Law)
What do you think about the D-Wave quantum computer? Do you think it will be able to display a 'quantum speedup' over conventional computers? If it does, what will the consequences be for your singularity roadmap?
This politician is suspected of fraud and is being investigated by the belgian tax inspection.
http://www.knack.be/nieuws/belgie/fiscus-karel-de-gucht-fraudeerde-met-1-2-miljoen-euro/article-4000115128765.htm (Article in Dutch)
He has some property in Italy that he shouldn't be able to afford.
http://www.humo.be/humo-archief/71654/karel-de-gucht-het-gevecht-met-de-fiscus (Article in Dutch)
There are rumors that he's corrupt, but it's never been proven though.
First of all, I do agree that the original article’s predictions are very optimistic. I do not agree however, that robotics have progressed painfully slowly.
The reason the optimistic predictions of the 1970’s haven’t come true is because we have vastly underestimated the computational power it requires to perform tasks that for us humans seem simple. Almost every human is able to get up, walk downstairs, open the fridge door and make himself some breakfast. We do all of this without giving it a second thought.
It turns out the things we thought were hard such as math, chess, remembering large sets of data, etc are in fact incredibly easy to do for computers (I do realize computers brute force chess, but could a human do that?). The things we take for granted such as bipedal motion, object recognition, communicating with other humans in fact require a tremendous amount of information about the world and a tremendous amount of computational power to process it all.
Robots take advantage of the exponential gains in computer power as predicted by Moore’s law. And Moore’s law has been going steady for years now. Yes, I realize hardware isn’t everything. But it’s certainly a bottleneck. (I don’t think anyone believes they could achieve the same result IBM’s Watson did on a 1000$ computer if they just wrote better software.)
I never understand why people quote ‘The Jetsons’ when it comes down to futuristic predictions. It’s a cartoon. I mean, it’s not like we look at the Flinstones and says ‘Oh, that’s what people in the 1960’s thought the Stone Age was like? Getting served by dinosaurs and driving in stone vehicles?!’. The Jetsons is obviously not an attempt at a realistic prediction about the future. Did anyone (with actual credibility) really think we’d have anti-gravity flying cars by now? I have never in fact seen someone with the credentials to back it up actually predict that we’d have flying cars by now, and certainly not that they would be ubiquitous. People always say this, but I wouldn’t know where it comes from. (If someone knows, don’t hesitate to let me know.)
You say that there was banter about cars driving themselves. How has this not come true? We have seen Google’s driverless car driving 230,000km with only occasional human intervention. The only time it has had an accident was because a human was driving it. The prediction about 30% of all cars being driverless by 2015 seems optimistic to me but more because of legal reasons than technical. Think of the legal implications of driverless cars, who is to blame when there is an accident for example?
TED Talk about Google’s driverless car for more information:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp9KBrH8H04
Also, you quote robots that folds previously unseen towels, I assume you are referring to the PR2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo
How can you not be amazed by this? So what if it takes him almost 2 hours, Moore’s law will soon speed it up. And that’s if they don’t even improve the software behind it.
We are not going to wake up one day and read in the paper about how there was some ‘big breakthrough’ in robotics and we can all go out and buy a 500$ personal robot from Wallmart who drives us around and does our laundry. It will come gradually but faster than you might think. (And I’m sure anyone who has seen the impressive gains in computer power since the 1950’s will agree with me.)
We are already seeing it today, I am sure you have someone you know that owns a Roomba. Robots are helping us fight wars, often autonomously with only a human there to pull the trigger because else it would be unethical. Sure, Robots are expensive today, but as history has taught us, this won’t last for long. The technology will become cheaper and more powerful.
I am certain that the progress in automation in the following century will seem just as impressive to us as the industrial revolution did to the people alive back then.
On a clear disk you can seek forever.
