New Mars Forums

Mars has a thicker crust, a more rigid mantle and no extant plate techtonics.  But recent discoveries have shown that there are extant magma plumes within the Martian mantle that do reach the surface.  But only in a few locations.  Geothermal power on Mars is only realistic in specific locations.  The area to the south of Elysium appears to be one such area.  Unfortunately, it also appears to be the most seismically active part of Mars.  Not ideal if you want to build an underground base.

Robert, Donald Trump is actually a godsend in disguise for Canada.  Let me explain why.

The combination of Trump trade policies, BREXIT and Chinese aggression against Australia, raise a geopolitical opportunity for the CANZUK alliance.  The combined populations of Canada, UK, Australia and NZ are greater than 150 million - that is half the population of the US.  All are wealthy, educated, first world countries.  Collectively, this alliance would be the third largest economy on Earth, would control about half of the worlds natural resources and would be in a position to police and control all of the worlds major trade routes.  These four countries need to work together to produce a powerful, global nuclear navy.  Once that is done, we can approach other nations like Singapore, Egypt, Panama, Sri Lanka and ultimately Japan.  With those countries part of the alliance, we control the routes of trade and basically rule the world.  But Canada, UK, Australia and NZ need to form a close alliance supported by a strong nuclear navy to be a credible partner for these countries.  Individually, none of us can do this and they wouldn't take us seriously as a security guarenteur.  But all four of us can, by working together to build that world-spanning nuclear navy.

Donald Trump has proven to be very useful.  America is withdrawing from the world stage and Trump's style of diplomacy and extortion is alienating allies that were previously tight with the US.  That includes many countries hosting US bases, that could later become CANZUK bases.  Trump is the perfect catalyst for bringing into being an alliance that could ultimately supplant the US as the dominant world power.  Our four nations working together are the only ones in a position to do this.  Russia cannot do it.  Neither can China, given its internal problems.  All four white commonwealth countries are needed to do this, because we need the population, industry, resources and consumer base of all four.  We ideally need conservative governments in all four countries to kick this off.  Given the direction of travel, that is entirely possible.

This would have been much more difficult without Donald Trump.  If he wants to continue strong arming and bullying foreign allies, I say we let him, even encourage it.  In 20 years, we could be in a position to approach those countries with a better deal and a navy equivelant to that of the US.  If Trump and the subsequent Vance administration has bullied them for all that time, it only strengthens our hand in negotiating with them.  We offer them something that he didn't: an equitable partnership that respects their dignity.

NATO and Donald Trump have reached an agreement.  The US can now place missiles on Greenland and mine the rare earth resources that it needs.  In the meantime, Greenland remains Danish territory, on paper at least.
https://youtu.be/y8hULV9zdY0

The video explains that this is exactly the deal Trump wanted in the first place.  A lot of people (myself included) underestimated Trump and assumed that he must be insane because we failed to understand how he negotiates what he wants.  In fairness, he published a book 'The Art of the Deal' some 40 years ago, explaining how he negotiates.  He starts with an outragious demand that no one would agree to.  This creates a storm of fear and anger on the other side. He then reaches what would appear to be a compromise, but is in reality exactly what he wanted in the first place.  Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, thinking they have achieved some kind of compromise and got something that they wanted.  In reality, they have been played.  He gets what he wanted.  The whole unhinged, petulant child routine is an act, because he needed the other side to believe that the invasion was a real possibility.

When you understand how he operates and look at the whole routine in heinsight, it is actually an act of genius.  This guy knows exactly how to play people.  If he had gone to the Danes in the first place and asked for the right to mine whatever he wanted and put missiles on Greenland, he would have got pushback.  Playing it the way he did, he ended up with everything he wanted in the first place.  We should have read his book.

The only downside is that he can only pull this trick so many times, before people cotton on.  Maybe the rights to Greenland were worth exposing the tell.  On that point, I do have some doubts.  Greenland has never been a very valuable territory for anyone.  There is a reason why none of the great powers ever seriously challenged Danish sovereignty over Greenland since the middle ages.  It is a horribly cold and windy environment and working conditions are probably harder than they would be on Mars.  The terrain that isn't covered in an ice cap, is mountainous and rugged, making inland transport almost impossible.  None of the fjords are really ice free, making it difficult to establish a port that can transport ores out.  Mining Greenland will be expensive.  The Chinese have tried it and largely failed.  Time will tell if US companies can make it work where the Chinese could not.

This telescope started operation in 2025.  It is expected to detect hundreds of thousands of new small bodies in the solar system.

One interesting recent discovery is a main belt asteroid some 710m in diameter, rotating once every 1.88 minutes.  That is a surface velocity of 19.8m/s.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news … -2025-mn45

It occurs to me that rapidly rotating bodies like this could provide free energy accelerating spacecraft onto different orbits.  They are also potential weapons in a future solar system.  Using this body in particular, a tether with a length of 101 asteroid radii (35.85km) would have a tip speed of 2km/s.  Such a tether could hurl projectiles onto trajectories that would collide with planets and space colonies.  This would be relatively cheap and technically easy to do.

Something like this was featured in the sci-fi series The Expanse.  The Belters hurled space rocks and lumps of iron onto a collision course with Earth.  They coated them with stealth tech composites to prevent them from being detected and taken out by nuclear tipped missiles and rail guns before impact.  Using rapidly rotating asteroids as slings, this sort of thing could actually happen in the centuries ahead.  In the nearer future, tapping asteroid rotation can be used to reduce the propulsive dV needed to bring ores mined on asteroids back to Earth orbit.

Edit SpaceNut: Copied your post before closing the other one.

Void, perhaps the Russians have read Sun Tzu's The Art of War.  Specifically, the part that says 'never interupt your enemy whilst he is making a mistake'.  If Trump annexes Greenland, I cannot see any other nation in the world wanting a US base on their soil in the future.  Overnight, US bases would stop looking like security guarentees and look more like stategic threats.  The arrogance of what Trump is doing is quite staggering.  Can you imagine a situation where a country like Britain, France or Russia, threatened to use troops to sieze Alaska, if the US did not hand it over to them peacefully?  What on Earth makes anyone here think America can play by different rules to everyone else?

What Trump is doing is nothing short of extortion.  It poses a grave risk to global security, because it is likely to weaken trust between the US and allied nations.  Without cooperation from those nations and their willingness to have you on their soil, a large part of US power projection capability disappears almost overnight.  No wonder the Russians are keeping quiet about this.  They undoubtably want it to happen.  I said before that I didn't think Trump was a Russian agent.  I'm not so sure now.  If a US president were a Russian agent and wanted to damage the relationship between the US and the rest of the world, he would be doing exactly what Trump is doing.

This is interesting.
https://evidencenetwork.ca/germany-is-m … ar-fusion/

The Germans have invested hundreds of millions of euros into inertial confinement fusion using femtosecond lasers.  ICF uses lasers to heat the surface of a frozen pellet of hydrogen isotopes.  As the surface heats up, x-ray pressure sends shockwaves through the interior of the pellet and the outer layers ablate off. The laser drivers used up to now, have delivered the energy to the pellet surface slowly.  The problem is that plasma ablated from the pellet tends to shield the surface from recieving additional laser light.  This makes laser drivers relatively inefficient.  Femtosecond lasers could substantially improve driver efficiency as energy is delivered to the surface before a plasma bubble can form around the pellet.

The National Ignition Facility, without the benefit of femtosecond lasers, made history in 2022, by generating 3.15MJ of fusion energy from 2MJ of laser energy.  The low efficiency of lasers means that this is nowhere near breakeven from a net energy perspective.  But if driver efficiency can be improved through use of femtosecond lasers, it should take this technology much closer to net energy breakeven.  If femtosecond lasers allow overall breakeven to be reached, then ICF will be efficient enough to provide a neutron source for breed and burn hybrid fusion fission reactors.  This would dramatically improve the sustainability of the fission fuel cycle, whilst avoiding the need for reprocessing.

Previously, we examined building a 200m wide catenary dome from Martian bricks as the site of a town hoysing 3000 - 10,000 people, depending upon the density of construction.  I wonder if a steel structure would be quicker and easier to produce?  Repeatable hexagonal units can be produced in large numbers.  These can be welded into a frame structure that is then covered in loose rocks and regolith.

Duckweed!
https://youtu.be/U_405zhZkbY

This is a small, floating family of plants that is regularly eaten in eastern countries but is considered to be pond scum in the west.  By my calculations, 1kg of wet yield contains 430 calories.  Average productivity is around 20kg/m2/year.  So an 84m2 pond would produce enough calories to feed 1 person indefinitely.  More interesting is that some species are about 40% protein by weight, making this 10x more productive than the equivelent area of soybeans.  What is more, duckweed contains all nine essential amino acids.  This means you can build muscle by eating duckweed without supplementing it with anything else.  It is also a vegetable source of vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acid.  Some varieties are high in starch, allowing dried and powdered duckweed to be blended with wheat flour to make bread.  This is more nutritious and healthy than standard bread.

These floating plants are about the size of sand grains.  We could pump floating duckweed through transparent pipes on the Martian surface.  Martian CO2 could be injected into the water and the plants would convert it into biomass.  The water can be warmed using nuclear waste heat.  This allows the wasteheat radiators of Martian nuclear reactors to serve as an abundant food source.  To feed a city of 1million people would need an area of some 84km2.  That is a square about 9km (5.5 miles) aside.  This is more compact than most cities with a population of 1million.  Presumably, water with dissolved acetate salts would grow duckweed without sunlight.  In this case, our food production could take place in a compact facility using nuclear power.  But as nuclear reactors need waste heat radiators anyway, why not use them to grow duckweed in sunlight and then use the electric power for other purposes?

Human waste can be recycled very efficiently in this arrangement.  Waste would first enter an añaerobic digester, producing methane as a fuel.  When fully digested, the waste breaks down into water with dissolved nutrients and an organic sludge which seperates by gravity.  The water can be pumped back into the duckweed farm.  The organic sludge would be added to martian regolith and used to make soil.  Nothing gets wasted in this arrangement.

Duckweed is a photosynthetic plant.  It is therefore a potential source of chloroplasts, which Robert has discussed as a means to produce oxygen and glucose in compact volumes.  The glucose can be added to foods to boost calorie content. It can also be fermented into alcohol.  This will have uses as a fuel, a low temperature working fluid, a screenwash for vehicles, solar panels and greenhouses and for human consumption.  Over time, we may find ways of using alcohol, yeasts and algae to make rum and whisky that we can export to Earth.  This was my original hacienda idea.

The End of China's Rise and the Future of World Order.
https://youtu.be/IL6OHMr21f8

As Chinese economic power declines, it becoming increasingly aggressive.

This video discusses rope drives.
https://youtu.be/C-WxGuZhCuk

One thing I find interesting is that a single pulley can drive several rope drives for different machines.

To make carbon monoxide, carbon must be burned in an atmosphere with limited oxygen.  This releases about 20% of the heat released by complete combustion.  The process that Kbd512 has described produces particles of carbon.  So that is what we start with.  Carbon monoxide has important uses of its own.  One such use is the production of reduced iron.  Making strong engineering bricks is another use we have noted.  But it is a precursor to other more convenient fuels.  For example:

CO + H2O + heat = CO2 + H2
2H2 + CO = CH3OH.

This is methanol.  It is a clean burning liquid fuel that doesn't freeze until -97°C.  We could store it in tanks on Mars with very little pressurisation.  By using the appropriate catalyst, methanol can form dimethyl ether:

2CH3OH = H20 + H3C-O-CH3.

Dimethyl ether has been considered as a diesel substitute.  It would make an energy dense rocket fuel that is less volatile than methane.

SpaceNut, that is excellent research.  To produce actual Earth daylight effect sounds quite energy intensive, given that a sunny day in the northern hemisphere delivers a ground level solar flux of ~400W/m2.  For a 31,000m2 town, that implies 12.4MW of light, requiring ~5x that much power (60MW) in input electricity.  That is a lot of juice and a heavy burden on base power supply.  Averaged over 24 hours, that is 20MW of input power.  It is also a lot of heat that must be removed from the space.  It might be considered acceptable if it proves to have strong benefits for the mental health of residents.  I wonder how much we can compromise in terms of power consumption by eliminating frequencies that are beyond human eyesight?  Lighting for plants tends to be optimised for specific spectra that are most efficiently absorbed for photosynthesis.  How well will humans adapt if the daylight they experience is a different colour, i.e more shifted towards the red spectrum?

It occurs to me that daylight we experience here on Earth has considerable daily fluctuation.  Some days are overcast, others provide full sun and often the weather changes throughout the day.  Lighting in the habitat could be turned into a kind of dump load for excess power.