New Mars Forums

lol, you know what i meant.

Oh, so its magic huh?

Here we are talking about elevators that extend beyond ATMOSPHERES, and you call FTL travel MAGIC???

Comon man, as scientifically improbable as it is, it's still possible. Many respected engineers and scientists have been working ways to make it work, so i wouldn't discount it so readily.

Okay, this may go a little off topic, but i'll go with this. Ultimately, as much as i love space, and i admit the obvious benefits of being able to transport goods from one sphere to the next easily outside the gravity well are good reasons enough to take such a path.

BUT!

Humans are still animals, as much as we like to say we are different and special (and indeed we are), and as an animal, Myself (and many other people) would feel a lot more "at home" on a planet rather than a man-made biosphere. You also need to take many other things into consideration. Space Elevators, and Biospheres are more like "half-way" points between technological leaps, than actual technological leaps themselves. For instance space elevators, they can carry MASSIVE amounts of freight from the bottom of a gravity well, to the top with far less energy and far more easily than a rocket can. Just like Cranes can carry large numbers of material and parts to the tops of buildings faster and safer than a siimpler rope and pulley system. But then take the limitations of a crane into acount,

1. it can only go as high as its arm allows it.

2. It is still fixed the to ground.

3. Lifting space is limited.

Now you may ask, "what does a modern crane have to do with a space elevator?"

Here is my point.

Today we have a better system for transporting large material from the bottom of a worksite to the top of the site. Sky Cranes - Essentially helecopters with a rig on the bottom. They can carry material for as high as they have to go, AND can carry far MORE than a conventional crane.

Ultimately we will eventually carry freight off world by Single Stage to Orbit spacecraft  equiped with engines and thrusters that us fuel more effieciently than modern space-craft, and carry just as much, if not more than a supermassive elevator, and here comes the kicker; all at a fraction of the cost. And of course someone else will invent something even better and make both methods obsolete.

And now coming back to Bio-Spheres, why live in a biosphere if Nature has already given us plenty of planets to occupy and live on. Which are perfectly habitable and require little maintenance. Plus OFFER resources instead of TAKE resources away. Nature had things figured out, all we need to do is work WITH it instead of against it. But i do see TEMPORARY biospheres being a VERY practical solution.

Say for instance we use them to PREPARE populations that are already en-route to an earth-like world. Have dozens of them strung together in a ring-like colony ship that when it reaches its destination would land each sphere onto predetermined points on the host planet. That way the planet would emediately become a self sufficient colony.

Also don't get confused, these ships will be traveling at speeds faster than light, AND probably the colonists will land on the host planet within the first generation. Most of the time spent on the colony ship would be around orbit of the planet. To allow the colonists to develope a sense of status-quo before they land.

I agree with you partly. Yes, physical changes will in fact play a major role, but at the same time (at least a far as Mars is concerned) human beings will ultimately change little on the outside. Though internally i can foresee a lot of change, for instance in the case of those born and raised on Mars hundreds of generations out, they will probably be taller than Earthlings by a foot or two, but at the same time, thier bones and muscels will be far weaker, all because of lower gravity. In fact the same can be said for anything that lives on mars for any number of generations, take evergreen trees for instance, on Mars, while they are in fact suited for the climate, they will be massively taller because of the lack of strong gravity. Imagine a bunch of skinny redwoods!

I fail to see any legitimate reason for human beings to augment thier bodies with cybernetics, because even for war, only a select few would need cybernetic augmentation (the Marines for instance). Because war as a whole would nearly almost always be fought from orbit, because its far cheaper and safer for the attacking force to bombard a planet from orbit than it is to send a ground force. Marines would ussually be limited to diplomatic escort duty or search and rescue ops. Full On war would definately be a Naval affair. 

oh geez, i've gone off topic.  :oops:

That is an excellent point, and i am sorry if i made my 1000 year mars sound like a utopia, lol. Of course there would still be many social problems on the planet just as there are on earth, Human Nature always gets in the way of a true Utopia, and to be honest I'm glad. The idea of Utopia is actually rather boring to me.

I have to disagree, i would hope thatt our dependence on technology doesn't get to that point. Actually i see that in a thousand years, our species (even on the path it is now) would eventually reach a non-technological equilibrium with nature, ultimately seperating ourselves from nature for nature's benefit. With our perfecting of synthetic lubricants and renewable plastics, and with discoveries of "TRUE" renewable energy sources, i see that Nature will not depend on us in the least, and neither we on it.  Ultimately what i'm trying to get at, is, that Mars would have a fully stable Terraformed climate.  This is just a matter of personal opinion, but existence in "multiple biospheres" is kind of a bleak existance.

But yes, Terraforming is extremely expensive and its short-run gains are too few to make it practical, so ultimately, Yes Mars WILL be terraformed, but it MAY be one of the ONLY planets to be terraformed. Because quite simply in a thousand years, we'll have already expanded to the edges of the galaxy and colonized thousands of other Earth-like worlds, not Mars or Venus-like ones.  <-- Of course my expansion predictions are in fact based on our current rate of technological advancement.