New Mars Forums

What environments do you think intelligent life forms could live in besides a nitrogen/oxy mix? Would a nitrogen/methane (like Titan's, but warmer and with a higher g) ecology be possible? How about argon substituting nitrogen? A CO2/methane planet, although I have doubts about energy yield? I don't really have an education in this, does anyone with knowledge have an opinion?

I used to know a ton about silicon based life and its weaknesses, but I forgot everything. However, I did make a story on phosphorus based creatures somewhere on my computer. I think the best base would be boron. No actually the best base would be carbon.

I was going to rent Xenosaga, but someone told me it's about people doing it with robots. lol Xenogears is $40 at the local video game store.

I just looked at it again and on the bottom of the site it says:

Disclaimer: Columbine PaintBall is a web site for entertainment purposes only. Columbine Paintball is not an actual paintball facility, nor is there any monetary profits related to Columbine Paintball.  However, the ignorant mail people send us is pathetic. Apparently people will believe anything, such as believing that a plane actually crashed into the Pentagon on 9-11.

I'm about to read the Venus series by Pamela Sargent, I've heard a lot about how great they are and the author won the Nebula and Locus awards for Child of Venus so it has to be good. The second book is out of print but you could probably pick it up at the library. There is also quite a bit of material online about terraforming the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Europa, Titan, Ganymede, and Callisto all look promising, or at least posssible.

I think that we should try to just live on Mars as it already is for the mean time. Maybe in the twenty second century we can start terraforming. If we do encounter life on Mars, it would be very rewarding to "raise" it. That is, restore the planet's atmosphere to some thing that the life could thrive on. It would be like humanity's kid! Haha actually it would be like the Uplift Saga, did anyone read that? The author envisions the universe as a place where one sentient race brings another race to sentience in a process called uplift.

I'm getting off track, but I advocate "areoforming" which was mentioned (very briefly) in KSR's books. Which is where we study how Mars was at the end of the Noachian Era when it had liquid water on its surface, and then base our entire areoforming on restoring Mars to how it was then.

Ah dang it I didn't mean to discourage anyone from talking about terraforming Venus! I just meant we shouldn't actually follow through with anything for a long time.

I can't wait, I've been waking up at one in the morning to look at it and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Well it's always annoying to have to keep consulting the one page map when I'm reading the Kim Stanley Robinson books, which I read a long time ago but I'm re-reading them. Did you get the topographic globe or the one made of Viking orbiter photos? We got the second one.

I didn't read any of that, but if we have the technology to terraform Mars then we can terraform Earth too.

<a href="http://www.astronexus.com/misc/3dgraphics/venusterra.html">Terraformed Venus Scene</a>

What do you think it would take to do? I definitely think there will be enough of a case to at least put an orbital station around Venus, but terraforming it seems kind of crazy right now. I guess if we scrubbed all of that CO2 out of the 90 000 millibars of atmosphere we would end up with what, like 60 000 millibars of pure oxygen? That might satisfy our life support needs for the next ten thousand years haha.

We would have to have some way of accelerating the rotation. How were the planets originally set spinning during the solar system's formation? It seems odd that Venus spins west to east but I imagine there will exist some technology in the future that would accelerate it. Maybe we could use magnetics or something.

Whatever we do, the first step in any Cytherean terraforming scheme I've seen is to build a giant shade around the day side of the planet. We could freeze the atmosphere to the surface and then get to work, though it would be kind of dark down there.

I don't know, this was just a thought I've been having lately and right now I don't even think it would be possible. I just thought it would be a good distraction to keep the millions of terraformers off Mars and somewhere else where there isn't a five billion year old record. But who knows, I'm sure Venus has its own interesting things to study.

EDIT: Removed the smilies.