I love how you seem to imply access to the station wont be a problem under a non capitalist system. I needed a laugh.
No, I meant that access to the station will probably be part of the job package for people who are actually employed by the organization that runs the station--as long as they remain employed by it. As soon as they lose their jobs they are out of luck. I am envisioning some sort of "East India Company" setup in the sense that the megacorp running the station acts as a surrogate government with powers normally reserved only for governments (e.g. direct taxation and operating a standing military). However, as soon as the number of people at Mars who are NOT employed by the operating organization, nor by national governments or other organizations with sufficient clout, becomes large, then these people-with-no-clout will have to pay through the nose or get no access at all.
Because people may well take their problems into space (remember, a treaty is just a piece of paper and can be violated), or new problems (a la Heinlein) may arise when they get there.
Or asteroids.... Mars has more of those than Earth apparently. Probably not a big concern though.
Because people may well take their problems into space (remember, a treaty is just a piece of paper and can be violated), or new problems (a la Heinlein) may arise when they get there.
Or asteroids.... Mars has more of those than Earth apparently. Probably not a big concern though.
Possible...and while I am not sure how much of a difference it actually makes, doesn't the thinner atmosphere suggest that an asteroid is less likely to burn up on entry, and will come in at a higher speed?
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Because people may well take their problems into space (remember, a treaty is just a piece of paper and can be violated), or new problems (a la Heinlein) may arise when they get there.
Or asteroids.... Mars has more of those than Earth apparently. Probably not a big concern though.
Possible...and while I am not sure how much of a difference it actually makes, doesn't the thinner atmosphere suggest that an asteroid is less likely to burn up on entry, and will come in at a higher speed?
I'm not entirely sure I quoted the right post, I was thinking about orbital installations.
But yeah, asteroids hitting Mars will not burn up as quickly as those hitting Earth.
Smirk, we are saying quite opposite things about gravity. Digging deeper into a planet will not make the effective gravity increase - that's not how gravity works. It will, in point of fact, do the exact opposite.
And your sociopolitical rants are inaccurate, to say the least. Believing them requires one to adopt both the Cold War view that it's "us or them" under all circumstances, and the odd view that everything the leaders of various developing nations spew out about their supposed capabilities is correct, even when available evidence says that's just not so. Perhaps it's a matter of perspective that requires fifty years and status as a former Cold Warrior oneself to achieve, but that just doesn't make sense to me.
During the early colonization phases I could see the treaty holding--but unless humanity really gets its act together, I suspect that one or more Earth-based conflicts, whatever they are once a serious emigration to Mars begins, will spill over onto the Red Planet regardless of the treaty.
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that's true, it could hold as long as they need each other... but unless communications and transportation drastically improves, when the colonies become self-sustaining... yeah
And that's kind of what I have been suggesting with the Heinlein comparisons, especially if care is not taken to ensure the colonists maintain parity in physical strength and capabilities with Earth natives.
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And that's kind of what I have been suggesting with the Heinlein comparisons, especially if care is not taken to ensure the colonists maintain parity in physical strength and capabilities with Earth natives.
But by the same token, so long as the fighting doesn't take place on Earth, Terran strength could in fact be a disadvantage - recall from TMIAHM descriptions of the newly-arrived "yellowjacket" troops stumbling and falling as they tried to run up and down ramps in 1/6g. It didn't hold them to the ground as firmly as they were used to. On Mars, or in space, being used to a 1g field doesn't help.
And that's kind of what I have been suggesting with the Heinlein comparisons, especially if care is not taken to ensure the colonists maintain parity in physical strength and capabilities with Earth natives.
But by the same token, so long as the fighting doesn't take place on Earth, Terran strength could in fact be a disadvantage - recall from TMIAHM descriptions of the newly-arrived "yellowjacket" troops stumbling and falling as they tried to run up and down ramps in 1/6g. It didn't hold them to the ground as firmly as they were used to. On Mars, or in space, being used to a 1g field doesn't help.
While I know of the plot of that book I still have yet to read it (it IS sitting on my shelf of things to read though ), so that is a good point I had not considered. That said, we're dealing with about 2/5 gravity here, which may be easier to train to cope with. So I would still wager that Earth could land troops that were at least reasonably functional and they will have the advantage in numbers and resources for a long time, which means in all seriousness that zergrushing is an available strategy for them. In contrast, the Martians, unless they have had some way to maintain parity with Earth natives, will not be able to land troops at all on Earth (which given their lower numbers would likely be employed following a decapitation strike...i.e. nuking a few capitals--but without the ability to land troops, they would not be able to hold their territory and prevent Earth from retaliating violently and with huge numbers compared to what the Martians could muster).
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Are the Martians fighting for independence, or to control Earth? If all they want is to become a separate nation (as in the other thread here about Mars), there's no need to land troops, much less hold territory, any more than the Colonies needed to invade the British Isles in the American Revolution. (You really should read that book, by the way. It's very well-written, and the point is made that the Loonies don't need to defeat Earth militarily - they just need to make holding onto the Lunar colonies too expensive and painful for the Terran Federation.)
I see the start of Colonizing Mars by the middle of the 21st Century, but then the question is to what end? How far do we go with it. and what happens we do find that Mars has its own life, whether its devolped its own, or Earth life got their and adapted to its new enviroment?
Ancient Griffon insult
That one is so stupid, he lost a Rock/Paper/Scissors game to a Pony.
Mars has no ecosystem. Any life there is microbial, at most - and since any hypothetical microbes evolved completely separately from us, it's unlikely they'd be any threat to us. At the moment, our best bets for complex microbial life in the Solar system seem to be under the ice of Europa, or in the hydrocarbon seas of Titan (there's *some* sort of chemistry going on on those shores, whether it be a microbe that eats hydrocarbons and excretes ammonia or some sort of bizarre cryochemical thing). And sadly, we've had to abandon the dream that any other worlds in this system hold anything more complex than microbes.
Obviously we'll have a LOT of issues to contend with if we ever hope to get a viable colony in place on Mars, but one of the questions I've been wondering about a lot is this: even if we can get supply issues solved and ensure that our colonists are properly shielded from radiation, etc., is human life inherently unsustainable due to the (approximate) .35G gravity environment? We know that zero-G is damaging to the body over time and we can see the effects on the ISS astronauts. But would Mars gravity still be too low for safe, long-term settlement?
Whereas the idea of colonizing Mars is a wonderfully romantic notion - it's wholly impractical and useless at this point in time. Might as well talk about colonizing Venus as it's pretty much just as unpragmatic and difficult to adapt to human life as Mars (ok, not quite as bad due to the fact that you couldn't even build a "biodome" in Venus' temperatures). Something as basic as water must be painstakingly extracted from Mars assuming there's even sufficient quantities of ice present. The average temperature of Mars is -67 F - almost 100 degrees below zero (by comparison the average temperature of the Arctic is -35 F). There's hardly any hydrogen due to the lack of a magnetic field on Mars - it's all blown off.
Like all sci-fi fans, I'd love to see space travel. I like to see NASA funded well even if it's doing nothing but taking pictures of the Earth from space (they still do a great deal of useful and interesting work). I like to see probes showing me the desert of Mars and the Moon. But human colonization of other planets is a long long way off and may never happen. War is cheaper and easier if resources and population becomes that problematic.
And, even if you could terraform Mars somehow there's the big big problem of the fact that all they hydrogen would just blow off into space again.
Tragically, for the time being, humans are very very stuck on Earth.
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There's plenty of hydrogen on Mars. Sure, it's all bound up in chemical combinations with other elements, but it is there...
It would actually be possible to create a biome on Mars (difficult, lengthy, and expensive, but possible). The atmosphere would eventually be stripped away by solar winds - but you could make it a shirtsleeve environment for, say, ten thousand years to so, and since that's almost twice as long as recorded human civilization thus far, it doesn't really sound that bad to me. In another ten thousand years, either we'd figure out a way to extend the life of that biome, or it would no longer be a matter of concern (for one reason or another).
And you exaggerate the difficulty of colonizing Mars, while minimizing the difficulty on Venus. It's not just the Venusian temperature that's an issue - there's also the thick, toxic atmosphere, the ever-present clouds of sulfuric acid, the high winds... Essentially, on Mars you could walk on the surface today with nothing more than a standard pressure suit. On Venus, your suit would be shredded by the winds, at which point the winds would then be competing with the heat, the atmospheric pressure, and the poisons to see which would kill you first.
That is true, low pressure is easier to work with than high. Mars can have some rocks tossed at it to increase its mass, and water brought from the outer solar system, again to increase its mass. Mars is a lot easier to work with than Venus. I mean, we have the technology right now to terraform Mars. Venus? nope. Well...
Venus might be, if we toss enough ice at Venus. But that will take time.
You're not going to be adding sufficient mass to Mars to make a difference - it's fairly massive as such things go already. The point of adding water is to make a more livable environment for humans, if you really want to do so. (In his most recent blogpost, David Brin points out that the briny water found oozing on Mars may be sterile due to the presence of perchlorates, which destroy organic life - and are an ingredient in rocket fuel. If they're there in sufficient amount, one begins to wonder if Mars might become the new Saudi Arabia, with its sands dotted by drilling rigs extracting rocket fuel to supply asteroid mining operations... However, if that does happen, you don't want to go dropping gigatons of water ice from orbit, because that'll pollute the fuel supply.)
Venus, on the other hand, would take several tens of thousands of years to terraform, absent some major breakthroughs in physics and chemistry. Currently, you'd want to start by seeding its atmosphere with blue-green algae, which will gradually break down the acidic components of its atmosphere and perhaps reduce the atmospheric pressure to something a tad less ridiculous. That might then reduce the horrific surface winds, as the temperature begins to go down. You're still going to be dealing with a situation where the planet rotates so slowly that a local day is longer than a local year, so that might be another level of challenge altogether.
Then again, as Venus has no magnetosphere, its only protective magnetic field is generated by solar-wind interaction with its upper atmosphere, so reducing that might actually prove counterproductive for colonization - at least Mars is further away from the Sun, so solar radiation has had some chance to attenuate...
that is true. Tossing a chunk of ice at Venus would start the process, but without the core and an acceptable rotation, Venus will just... still have issues.
The debate about Mars is... do we terraform it closely to what Earth has for farming expansion to support our population or are we going to mine it?
I would think the general population would want it to be settable, with the eventually development of Mars to a point where we can breath its air. In order to do that, we do need to increase its mass a little. Perhaps an asteroid of a certain size to create an event that will generate an atmosphere of sorts to protect the ice from disappearing while we toss it at Mars.
Increasing Mars' mass won't help. The fact that its volcanic phase seems to be quite some time in the past, coupled with the lack of a magnetosphere, tends to indicate that Mars probably lacks a molten outer core - and without volcanoes it won't generate its own atmosphere no matter what you do to it. (On the other hand, if you were to toss enough mass at it to significantly increase the overall planetary mass, you might well restart volcanism - by reducing the entire surface to magma due to the bombardment. This might be considered counterproductive...)
Dropping a few gigatons of ice might make a fair start on the process of creating a temporary atmosphere, however, by releasing gases there. The solar wind will strip them away - but not overnight, and "quickly" only in geophysical terms, in which thousands of years would be an insignificant amount of time.
Dropping ice on Venus wouldn't help there, either - the sulfuric acid and atmospheric density are the big killers. Find a way to thin out what passes for air there, say by finding some way to convert sulfer to nitrogen (transmutation of elements is still something we can only accomplish with a few elements, in small amounts, in highly unusual conditions), and the runaway greenhouse effect will diminish, lowering the planet's overall temperature. (Then you just need to find a way to deal with the lack of a magnetosphere, and the day lasting for more than 240 Earth days...)
For comparison purposes, the mass of the Moon, with a surface gravity half that of Mars, is over 80 quintillion tons (7.34767309x10^22 kilograms, more scientifically, but I have a gut feel for imperial measures that I lack for metric). The mass of Mars, with a similar density to that of the Moon, is over 7 hundred quintillion tons, or ten times that of the Moon. (Earth lucked out - its average density is almost twice that of Mars.) If you wanted to double Mars' mass, you'd need to crash 20 lunar-sized masses into it. Good luck with that.
well, We could toss an asteroid at a high enough speed to smash to the core... then drop some nukes down there... 200 megaton nukes... might be enough to trigger some molting, while adding weight. We don't need to add a whole lot of weight, just enough to get the core molten again enough to generate a magnetic shield strong enough to protect life while we figure out what to do to prevent the atmosphere from being stripped away again.
but as for venus, the reason why I suggest large chunks of ice is to absorb the carbon dioxide. Perhaps with enough water, it may reduce the carbon dioxide, allowing us to eventually tackle the sulfur .
Carbon dioxide isn't the real problem - if you can find a way to reduce the sulfur, plants can handle the carbon-sequestration issue. (Look up the Carboniferous Era sometime - it's not a time when it would have been comfortable for us to live, but it supported some amazing plant life.)
Artificially increasing Mars mass to increase its gravity? ~_~ Isn't that kind of mad scientist territory with its potential to disrupt the orbits of objects within the solar system? It seems like that would be something that could have a ton of unintended consequences.
It is kind of sad that large scale ideas like this get scoffed at simply because the project wouldn't have an immediate short term gain. The reason why people support the idea of one day colonizing Mars isn't so much about an immediate tangible profit, but the idea that it is a step forward in human development. The ability to move beyond the natural confines of our world and expand humanity across new horizons. There is also the train of thought that it will help us avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, by spreading out across multiple planets you reduce the chances of civilization being wiped out by a single disastrous event.
not to increase the mass of the planet to Earth, but enough to generate a shield. We don't know the properties of Mars's core. Take Mercury for example. It's pretty small but has quite the shield.
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No, I meant that access to the station will probably be part of the job package for people who are actually employed by the organization that runs the station--as long as they remain employed by it. As soon as they lose their jobs they are out of luck. I am envisioning some sort of "East India Company" setup in the sense that the megacorp running the station acts as a surrogate government with powers normally reserved only for governments (e.g. direct taxation and operating a standing military). However, as soon as the number of people at Mars who are NOT employed by the operating organization, nor by national governments or other organizations with sufficient clout, becomes large, then these people-with-no-clout will have to pay through the nose or get no access at all.
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Possible...and while I am not sure how much of a difference it actually makes, doesn't the thinner atmosphere suggest that an asteroid is less likely to burn up on entry, and will come in at a higher speed?
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But yeah, asteroids hitting Mars will not burn up as quickly as those hitting Earth.
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And your sociopolitical rants are inaccurate, to say the least. Believing them requires one to adopt both the Cold War view that it's "us or them" under all circumstances, and the odd view that everything the leaders of various developing nations spew out about their supposed capabilities is correct, even when available evidence says that's just not so. Perhaps it's a matter of perspective that requires fifty years and status as a former Cold Warrior oneself to achieve, but that just doesn't make sense to me.
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While I know of the plot of that book I still have yet to read it (it IS sitting on my shelf of things to read though
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That one is so stupid, he lost a Rock/Paper/Scissors game to a Pony.
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Icerose was in part asking a hypothetical question about what miners would do with life that was introduced by colonists.
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Whereas the idea of colonizing Mars is a wonderfully romantic notion - it's wholly impractical and useless at this point in time. Might as well talk about colonizing Venus as it's pretty much just as unpragmatic and difficult to adapt to human life as Mars (ok, not quite as bad due to the fact that you couldn't even build a "biodome" in Venus' temperatures). Something as basic as water must be painstakingly extracted from Mars assuming there's even sufficient quantities of ice present. The average temperature of Mars is -67 F - almost 100 degrees below zero (by comparison the average temperature of the Arctic is -35 F). There's hardly any hydrogen due to the lack of a magnetic field on Mars - it's all blown off.
Like all sci-fi fans, I'd love to see space travel. I like to see NASA funded well even if it's doing nothing but taking pictures of the Earth from space (they still do a great deal of useful and interesting work). I like to see probes showing me the desert of Mars and the Moon. But human colonization of other planets is a long long way off and may never happen. War is cheaper and easier if resources and population becomes that problematic.
And, even if you could terraform Mars somehow there's the big big problem of the fact that all they hydrogen would just blow off into space again.
Tragically, for the time being, humans are very very stuck on Earth.
"At the end of the movie, I really care about what happens to the characters … but I’m pretty much missing Gene Roddenberry in J.J.’s interpretation … and at the end of the day, that’s just not OK for me." - Levar Burton
"[OrciTrek] doesn’t have the story heart that the best of my Star Trek had," - William Shatner
"It doesn’t have that element that made … Gene Roddenberry‘s ‘Star Trek,’ what it was." - George Takei
"The Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action." - Roger Ebert
It would actually be possible to create a biome on Mars (difficult, lengthy, and expensive, but possible). The atmosphere would eventually be stripped away by solar winds - but you could make it a shirtsleeve environment for, say, ten thousand years to so, and since that's almost twice as long as recorded human civilization thus far, it doesn't really sound that bad to me. In another ten thousand years, either we'd figure out a way to extend the life of that biome, or it would no longer be a matter of concern (for one reason or another).
And you exaggerate the difficulty of colonizing Mars, while minimizing the difficulty on Venus. It's not just the Venusian temperature that's an issue - there's also the thick, toxic atmosphere, the ever-present clouds of sulfuric acid, the high winds... Essentially, on Mars you could walk on the surface today with nothing more than a standard pressure suit. On Venus, your suit would be shredded by the winds, at which point the winds would then be competing with the heat, the atmospheric pressure, and the poisons to see which would kill you first.
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Venus might be, if we toss enough ice at Venus. But that will take time.
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Venus, on the other hand, would take several tens of thousands of years to terraform, absent some major breakthroughs in physics and chemistry. Currently, you'd want to start by seeding its atmosphere with blue-green algae, which will gradually break down the acidic components of its atmosphere and perhaps reduce the atmospheric pressure to something a tad less ridiculous. That might then reduce the horrific surface winds, as the temperature begins to go down. You're still going to be dealing with a situation where the planet rotates so slowly that a local day is longer than a local year, so that might be another level of challenge altogether.
Then again, as Venus has no magnetosphere, its only protective magnetic field is generated by solar-wind interaction with its upper atmosphere, so reducing that might actually prove counterproductive for colonization - at least Mars is further away from the Sun, so solar radiation has had some chance to attenuate...
The debate about Mars is... do we terraform it closely to what Earth has for farming expansion to support our population or are we going to mine it?
I would think the general population would want it to be settable, with the eventually development of Mars to a point where we can breath its air. In order to do that, we do need to increase its mass a little. Perhaps an asteroid of a certain size to create an event that will generate an atmosphere of sorts to protect the ice from disappearing while we toss it at Mars.
Dropping a few gigatons of ice might make a fair start on the process of creating a temporary atmosphere, however, by releasing gases there. The solar wind will strip them away - but not overnight, and "quickly" only in geophysical terms, in which thousands of years would be an insignificant amount of time.
Dropping ice on Venus wouldn't help there, either - the sulfuric acid and atmospheric density are the big killers. Find a way to thin out what passes for air there, say by finding some way to convert sulfer to nitrogen (transmutation of elements is still something we can only accomplish with a few elements, in small amounts, in highly unusual conditions), and the runaway greenhouse effect will diminish, lowering the planet's overall temperature. (Then you just need to find a way to deal with the lack of a magnetosphere, and the day lasting for more than 240 Earth days...)
For comparison purposes, the mass of the Moon, with a surface gravity half that of Mars, is over 80 quintillion tons (7.34767309x10^22 kilograms, more scientifically, but I have a gut feel for imperial measures that I lack for metric). The mass of Mars, with a similar density to that of the Moon, is over 7 hundred quintillion tons, or ten times that of the Moon. (Earth lucked out - its average density is almost twice that of Mars.) If you wanted to double Mars' mass, you'd need to crash 20 lunar-sized masses into it. Good luck with that.
but as for venus, the reason why I suggest large chunks of ice is to absorb the carbon dioxide. Perhaps with enough water, it may reduce the carbon dioxide, allowing us to eventually tackle the sulfur .
It is kind of sad that large scale ideas like this get scoffed at simply because the project wouldn't have an immediate short term gain. The reason why people support the idea of one day colonizing Mars isn't so much about an immediate tangible profit, but the idea that it is a step forward in human development. The ability to move beyond the natural confines of our world and expand humanity across new horizons. There is also the train of thought that it will help us avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, by spreading out across multiple planets you reduce the chances of civilization being wiped out by a single disastrous event.