New Mars Forums

I agree.  Most scientists agree that a dense (though maybe not quite that of Earth) lasted on Noachian Mars and perhaps through mid-Hesperian Mars.

Now I'm confused...Are you saying that we should use the moon as a slingshot?  Or use it as a launch pad and then use Earth to slingshot?

Well, I dont' know about SpaceBull, but that is not my Mars, but is my Aldebaran Spaceport from ZAQ1, the SciFi book I'm hoping to finish someday.
My version of a terraformed Mars is a purely-recreational...um...national park with minimal settlement by responsible people.  That's my idyllic Mars, to tell the truth.  I may be interested in Government, that's my hobby, but this is exactly how I would want it, though it's probably impossible.  I'm a Green-Red.

By what I said, I meant that AFTER establishing the moon as at least a launch pad, a Mars-ship could be built on the moon, with relatively few importations from Earth.  As for travelling, if you were to take off on the moon, you could use a very little amount on fuel and be able to hold more of other stuff.  You blast off to Mars, let inertia do the rest, and land.  Of course, the flaw with what I said is that it doesn't address how one was to get back :oops: .

But Antarctica is on Earth.   If we wanted to do that, this message board wouldn't exist!

I think now that Kim Stanley Robinson made it a bit too fast, but then again I don't blame him, because if he didn't who would read is work?

You've got some good points there, Cobra.  I have to agree with you on everything you said, though I wish you were wrong .  But, you're not.  Well, in my civs in Civilization II the citizens like to revolt against me and cause all this civil disorder even with all that I do for them.  They just don't understand that my pocketbook isn't bottomless.

What! :shock:
That is excellent!  Great!  But we don't want too much, do we?

Oh, by the way, I ran across a terraforming site that had a link to a downloadable program.  It's so cool.  I can now flood Mars.  It's interesting watching Olympus Mons disapearing under water from a virtual globe of the planet.  (Doesn't win anything on graphics, though.)

I wrote this a few days ago somewhere else.  Some of it doesn't apply to this board, because it's obvious many of you like Kim Stanley Robinson.

     This is important, is it not? If we are to colonize Mars, we
have to have one. We need a structured society, one that has a
concrete government in which all are equal (I mean this very
literally), and there is no poverty or out of control greed (greed is,
after all, a human nature).
     I have been reading up on forms of government, which is a hobby
of mine, and about a year ago, before I even cared about Mars (or
astronomy, for that matter), I found revelation in a very irrelevant
place--a Fantasy writing message board (it was a vBulletin style
board). Anyway, the thread was about choosing a form of government
for your fantasy world, and of the 30 some-odd choices, there was one
that perked up my ears, or whatever you would call the metaphorical
virtual online equivilant. In it was what was called an Isocracy, and
further down, a Pantisocracy. Isocracy worked in a way where all the
members of the society had equal share in social order and
responsibility. Pantisocracy took it a step further: all were equal
members of the govenrment.
     Then, as if in answer after all that waiting for some help as how
to operate economy under such an unusual society, I read Red Mars.
Two of the scientists, Vlad and Ursula, were explaining to John Boone
(who had been the first man on Mars) their idea called Eco-economics.
This, in short, was a system where the amount of work determined the
amount of pay, somehow linked so it wasn't just the heirarchial, "paid
by the hour" system again. I'm going to have to re-read it, but
whatever it was talking about, it was brilliant.
     Finally, there are Arkday Bogdanov's (from Red Mars as well)
ideas, such as round buildings where all people live and work in equal
sized rooms, and work and recreation are not kept in seperate
locations, allowing god knows what.
     Like I said, I have to read those parts again and give a clearer
meaning to these ideas. But in the meantime, anyone with opinions
toward this, please post them here, and try to use your best legible
grammar.

It looks like rocks to me, too.  now, if that had been Inca City on Mars, that would have been more impressive, but the Inca City formation is known, so I guess that wouldn't count.

I'm not sure if there is already a thread for this, but I'm going to post one anyway.

In A Traveller's Guide to Mars by W. K. Hartmann, there is one chapter (indirectly) about Martian water-ice.
In short, he says that many super-optomistic (though maybe correct) scientists beleive that Mars may, in fact, hold enough water-ice in three forms (will get into those later) to form a global ocean of ten meters deep.  By "global" they mean that the hypothetical Martian ocean would be ten meters deep planetwide IF the planet was a perfect, smooth sphere.
The water could be:
--Hidden in the polar ice caps.
--Locked in mollecular form in minerals in lower regolith.
--In an underground layer of frozen ice.  (This would probably contain the greatest quantity.)
What do you think?  It sounds too optomistic even for me, but I'd be happy with a 2-meter global ocean.