New Mars Forums

You don't realize how difficult it is to send something into the Sun. NASA has plans to send a probe toward Mercury, and it requires multiple gravitational assists. Any shift in Venus's orbit will occur gradually. Rick Smith seems to think this is not worth doing because it will take a long time and eat up so many resources, I agree with the first part, but I come to a different conclusion.

Yes Venus can be terraformed right where it is, but to make the terraforming long last, the planet needs to be brought further away from the Sun. I believe a civilization should stand on its monuments, and no civilization lasts forever. Maintaining the apparatus that shields Venus from the Sun requires a perpetual civilizational attention, once that civilization goes away, Venus reverts to her former self; if we brought Venus further out, then the planet will reach a life sustaining equilibrium rather than rely on an artificial shield between itself and the Sun. The L1 point is extremely unstable by the way, and that's where the parasol will have to be stationed, the slightest push, if not corrected for will remove the shield and expose Venus to the harsh rays of the Sun. It could be as simple as a slight varience in the Solar Output. If the Sun increases in brightness for example, that Sunlight will push the parasol harder towards Venus and out of the L1 point, Venus's gravity would then pull it further away either into an elliptical orbit around Venus or into a different orbit around the Sun. The Parasol needs self-correcting mechanisms to keep it at the L1 point and those mechanism need to be maintained over time by an active civilization, or else it will fail and the Parasol will drift.

That's one way to heat up Titan, just dump oxygen on it until all the combustible gases are combusted. This ought to melt alot of ice I think.

The Liberals say we have only 10 years to deal with the problem, that means we can't channel our efforts into developing Fusion power to combat the Greenhouse Effect. The liberals would like us to make immediate sacrifices and reduce our standard of living now, I say, no! I think coal has tremendous potential to replace oil, it emits more CO2 however, but it can replace oil. My immediate concern is buying oil from terrorist sponsors or providing them an oil market from which they can readily raise money for their terrorist operations. My immediate concern is to find something my car can run on that provides no revenue for Middle-Eastern countries. The US has the largest reserve of coal in the World, so naturally I'd look to that source, people concerned with the Greenhouse effect would say no and that I should ride around in crappy little put put cars that can barely make it up the hill, so I can get excellent gas milage from petroleum derived fuel, or they say I should walk, or take a bicycle or rely on mass transit and live in a densely packed city. Well I'd rather live the way I live now, in a country with open spaces. I'd rather solve the problem without altering my style of living or reducing my standard of living. We have some time with the global warming problem. If we rush to solve it in ten years, we may make some rash decisions with some negative economic consequences. If we could instead work on Fusion for 50 years and solve the problem that way, there would be less economic consequences and sacrifices to make. I don't like the new ecological "Prophets of Doom". Usually the rule for climate change is gradualism, not catastrophism, so crash programs and belt-tightening are neigther needed or wanted.

Yes, I saw both sides of Niagara Falls, and stayed in a Canadian Hotel once. The Canadian side was a town and the US side was a park. Canada and the US seem much alike, except for the political structures and the currency. As I said before, I'm not really worried about Canadians sneaking across the border and competing with me for my job and driving down wages. What I am worried about is the US government considering someone a threat and the Canadian government not seeing it and the US being right. I think if we can just coordinate our immigration and importation policies then we need not check the US/Canadian border, it would mean giving up soverignty on both sides though. National governments are always reluctant to cede national power. We would have to set up an agency that is answerable to both national governments with a shared power structure. I see no reason why this wouldn't work, but I want to make sure that no terrorists can get into Canada that would threaten US citizens, and I'm sure the Canadians would want to make sure of the same things for their citizens too before we open up the border for unlimited unregulated travel. I think my concerns on this matter are reasonable, and not "garbage". You want me to just wave my hands and ignore them, sorry but I can't. You want open borders between the US and Canada, then security concerns of both countries must be addressed first, that is the price, and I believe most Canadians would find that to be a reasonable request.

I think a veto system would work. You would have Canadian and US Immigration officials at every entry point into the US and Canada, each would have access to a data base from his government and each would have a veto on whether to let a prospective visitor or immigrant in. An external foreigner would need to get visa approval from both countries before he would be allowed into either. This would be a more restricive by default immigration policy. You would need Canadian officials at Kennedy Airport for example, and if the Canadian dosen't like somebidy coming through, he can send him back to his point of origin. Like wise a US agent would be stationed in Toronto, and if somebody coming into Canada looks to dangerous, he would get to refuse him entry into Canada. The FBI and the Canadian Police would also have to share databases so they can track down and apprehend wanted fugitives, and if someone commits a crime in the US that carries the Death Penalty, then Canada would have to hand him over if apprehended up there. Likewise if someone was evading Canadian taxes and is hiding out in the US, the US would hand him over to Canada, it wouldn't matter if he wasn't violating laws in the United States.

Canadians might not agree with some US laws, but if someone violates then in the US and then hides in Canada, then the Canadians would have to hand him over to face US justice, and it works the otherway too.

Actually I agree that the Democrats are more interested in embarrasing the President. Some Democrats are interested in Space, John F. Kennedy was and so was Lyndon Baynes Johnson, without those two Presidents we might not have gotten to the Moon when we did. Whenever the Democrats have been out of power for some time they go on "attack mode" and try to create problems for the President and by so doing for the country as well. For some politicians, politics is just a game with winners and losers, they expend their efforts trying to create problems for their opponents so they can score points and win. The Democrats seem more moderate when they are in power than when they are not. I dare say, some of the democratic constituents have little love for the USA, and some pols will try to satisfy those interests to get elected.

It would be much simpler if the Democrats would simply provide enough funding for both programs rather than force us to cut spending on one to provide funding for another. If the Democrats want both programs, they should fund both programs, and stop with the expensive penny pinching that will only drive up costs in the long run, they did this with the Space Shuttle by the way The original design for the space shuttle by the way called for a winged lower stage and a winged orbiter, both were to land on a runway, but the Democratic cheap penny-pinching Congress cut funds for development, and the result was compromise and the Shuttle which we have today, and here we go again, cutting funds for a future program to help maintain a present program. I would be happy to have both if Congress would provide funding for both, but if they force us to make a choice, my choice would be the Constellation Program as I think that is more of a space exploration program than the ISS. What I don't want to see is the Orion Program pushed back and back to maintain a bloated Space Station. I think our return to the Moon has been delayed long enough.

Because they haven't agreed on a budget. The reason for the freeze is that no one can agree on next year's budget, so the fallback position is the previous years budget, and what are the Democrats doing now? A non-binding resolution condeming the War in Iraq which took 3 weeks to hammer out, sole for the purpose of embarrasing the President, three weeks that could have been more productively spend appropriating the additional funds NASA needs for next year. There were no Budget freezes until the Democrats came to power. I think if the Republicans got reelected to the majority in Congress, NASA wouldn't be having this problem. As it is, I'd gladly sacrifice the Space Station to keep the CEV program fully funded. The ISS is a white elephant, and the Shuttle is scheduled for decommisioning in 2010. If it really is necessary to keep the Shuttle going for 3 more years, NASA could always sell launch services or Shuttle tickets more controversially, it doesn't matter what NASA launches so long as it keeps the Shuttle Personel in jobs and around til when we are ready to launch the Ares. if somebody else pays for the payload, NASA can keep going with the Shuttle program until it expires in 2010. The savings from not fisnishing the Space Station can go toward keeping the Constellation vehicle program on track. If you want someone to complain too, complain to Congress for freezing the Budget and forcing this choice on us, but given my preference the Future is more important that the present of NASA as that present is unacceptable. If everybody was happy with the Shuttle program, we could have just kept on launching the thing and adding on to the Space Station ad infinitum, but since we decided to change course, lets get on with changing the course. The ISS is just a ready source of funds where money is being wasted on a space station to house astronauts doing trivial activities in low Earth orbit, it is nice to have this "fat" to cut so we don't have to cut into the "Muscle" that will actually take us to the Moon and Mars. I don't see much of anything of value that is being don on the Space Station, the Shuttle however is an employment program for those people we want to keep with NASA for when we want to employ them in launching the Aries Rockets. So we can have the Shuttle do 'whatever' while we're getting the next generation launch vehicles ready to launch as soon as we can.

If you assume we would use chemical rockets such as the Saturn V, but that is a ridiculous assumption. I've also heard that if we use chemical rockets to travel to the nearest stars, the stages required would outweigh all the matter in the Universe, that say to me that we won't be using chemical rockets for interstellar travel. Also the planet that's made out of rocket fuel is Jupiter, but the comets come with their own rocket fuel. Any civilization capable of moving planets, won't be using chemical rockets anymore.

That would come at the expense of Mars though. I don't think we are at the final "end of Days" stage of technology and that it will be the 20th century for the next 10,000 years, I think we'll end up with more efficient rockets than Saturn Vs, what those rockets will be is hard to say, there are several likely candidates of course. The requirements for moving planets within the solar system is in someways less strenuous than interestellar travel. High relatavistic speeds aren't required for instance. Terraforming will be more like gardening at this late stage in human history. Mars will no doubt be terraformed first, and its probably easier to build a free space colony than to terraform a planet, but people will eventually look at Venus and say, "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a second Earth? Sure there are plenty of more likely candidates in other star systems, but we live here, and also Earth is here. It is more easier to transfer life from Earth to Venus than from Earth to som eplanet orbiting some distant star. Also we can apply the resources of a Solar System spanning civilization toward moving Venus, while around some distant star we only have the resources of a star ship and its crew.

Yes, we will terraform plenty of Worlds, some will be terraformed because they are easy to terraform, while others will command the resources of a Type II Civilization because of its close proximity to human civilization, that's all I'm saying. People will value a second or third Earth more that the trillions of comets orbiting the Sun. There are plenty of things we might more easily do than terraform Venus, and we shall do them. I think in the Long Run, all four planets might be moved to within the habitable zone. Probably the first step would be to shade the planets since that is easier than moving them. Venus could be terraformed longe before it is moved to the proper orbit. An easier thing to do would be to spin up Venus, hitting Venus with comets on sideways trajectories in the same direction will increase its rate of spin and add volitiles.

So every fourth orbit of Venus and every third orbit of Earth, Venus will be pulled outward and Earth inward in the same location in the Solar System with respect to the Sun. What this will do I think is deform the orbits of both Venus and Earth so that they are both more elliptical, once this happens sufficiently, they will no longer be in a 4:3 resonance with each other. So the trick it seems to me is to get Venus past this point and use more comets to recircularize each planet's orbit as we move Venus further out. I don't think 112,500,000 km is far enough out anyway as it is not much farther out than it is now. We probably want something more like 140,000,000 km, something far enough away so that the sun doesn't trigger a runaway greenhouse effect, and so that we don't have to permanently place an object between the Sun and Venus to reduce the amount of light reaching the planet. The Sun is getting brighter, so we might eventually want to move the Earth farther out anyway, though messing with a perfectly ok global climate is a dangerous thing.

One needs to ask, do we have a better use for the Oort cloud comets? As they are, they present a long term danger to the Earth as many of them may be perturbed by a passing star and some of them may impact the Earth. I think getting rid of them may be a good thing as there would then be nothing to perturb when next a star passes close by. Also it may take 60,000 years for the comets to fall toward's Venus, but would it take 60,000 years to alter their orbits so that they do so? How long would our civilizational attention span need to be to set this all up? Undoubtably, we'd have to rely heavily on automation to get this done.

Perhaps something could sit on each comet's surface and give mid course corrections when needed. 60,000 years is about the time it would take to reach the nearest stars with current rocket technology. Interstellar travel, it seems requires lots of patience, and so too does terraforming. I think we may terraform Venus a little quicker by interposing some object between the Sun and Venus at the L1 point, but this would have to be maintained by an active situation. Physically moving Venus could terraform the planet for a billion years, and moving Earth could extend the habitability duration of Earth to account for the increasing solar output as the Sun ages. As things stand now, the Sun has 5 billion years of main sequence life to it, but the Earth will be much like Venus is now, before the Sun goes into Red Giant Stage, if nothing is done to move it further out to compensate.

All these projects would exceed my natural life, including interstellar travel anyway, unless major advances in medical technology or interstellar propulsion were to occur soon. The future is the future, if its 1,000 years or 60,000 years, it hardly makes any difference to me, but I can still talk about it and make pleasant coversations to pass the time

I think if we travel interstellar distances, we will have to terraform planets anyway. Even an "Earthlike" planet is not likely to be Earthlike enough for us to live on its surface unassistated. To have a truly "second" or "third Earth", we are going to have to make them, in the meantime we will live under domes or in artificial colonies made out of asteroids. Since this will be the case, it will make little difference whether we orbit this star or that star. I think a determined and long lived interstellar civilization can fill the galaxy full of Earth-like worlds, where ever one can exist with enough persistance. The best kind of planet to start out with would be one with all the gross features of Earth, the right rotation rate, the right distance from the Sun, enough water, and an atmosphere that can be easily converted to a breathable mixture due to the addition of the right kind of plant life. We should not have to move planetary masses to get this accomplished, but rather we would have to scour the galaxy to find the right type of planets to easily terraform, simply by introducing the right sort of life to it.

Venus is a special case, as it is in our own solar system, right near the center of human civilization. I think we would be willing to expend greater resources to terraform that planet than some distant extra-solar planet that is light years away. the greatest uncertainty is the longevity of human civilization or the human species. Will we last long enough to see the terraforming project through or at least set things in motion so that they no longer require our active participation to see it through to completion? I think if we dump enough water on Venus and let the comets fly so that they alter Venus's orbit, in due course Venus will cool down and life will appear on its surface.

Mars will definitely be easier to terraform, in the end though the lower gravity environment will leave a significantly alien planet with life on it. If not maintained, Mars will likely lose its atmosphere again and revert to the same state that we found it. If Venus is terraformed and moved, it could last a billion years and have a billion years of life and evolution on it.

Hey, I got an idea. The reason we're keeping the ISS is to keep the Shuttle Workers employed until we need them to launch the Aries rocket isn't it?

Here's my proposal:
What if we cancel the ISS yet keep the Shuttle program going, then we build a passenger module that fits inside the Shuttle bay. The passenger module has seats and zero gravity bunks and windows on the roof for gazing at the Earth, then NASA will sell shuttle tickets while reserving half the seats for a Shuttle lottery. NASA can then use the proceeds from the Shuttle ticket sales and the Shuttle Lottery to help pay for the Constellation program and avoid delays in the development of the Aries vehicle due to the fixed budget imposed by Congress. You have to admit, this will keep the Shuttle launch workers gainfully employed and the Shuttle Budget will stay as is, paying for the Shuttle launch costs, leaving the ticket sales as 100% profit to pay for the Constellation program or at least that additional amount Congress won't fund. Since the Shuttle Program ends in 2010, this will serve to prove the Space tourism market and stimulate private developers to develop their own vehicles to capture this market.

Well, what do you think?

Yes, it appears, you are not, at least not by the old definition of "liberal" when they actually gave a fig about democracy. I don't insult the Russians, I think they deserve better than what Putin has given them or more accurately, taken away. I just menioned the fact that Putin was a dictator in passing, most people understand this, you apparently don't. Dictators can typically achieve somethings more efficiently and without the debate that democracies can. Putin has turned his office into a dictatorship, that means his job is alot easier than George Bush's, he has no critical press as he controls the press in his country. Newpapers and TV shows that don't sing his praises quickly find themselves out of business, and Putin has alot of levers to pull to see that this happens.

If we had a dictator running the United States, it would be very simple to win the Iraq War for instance, criticism would not be tollerated, and people who criticised would be arrested, if a dictator ran the United States and was a space enthusiast, the money could easily be found to send one thousand people to Mars if he so desired, despite this I think resorting to dictatorship would be a bad move, I don't care what short term problems he would solve because in the long term we would pay the price just like Rome did with the decline and fall of that empire. The Strength of Rome was in its Republic, the dictators that followed simply cruised on its momentum built up during Republican times, the Caesars ultimately undermined the Roman System and laid the foundation for feudalism and a new dark ages. I believe that Putin and his ilk would do the same for future generations of Russians. I do not insult the Russians by saying they deserve better than Putin.

It all depends on the cost of the delay vs the cost of the ET. NASA has to pay all the shuttle workers whether the Shuttle gets launched or not. A delay in the shuttle means NASA still pays its workers, but the shuttle gets launched fewer times per year. If it costs extra to build a spare ET, and keep it ready, I think it may be worth it.

Just because the Democrats are in power, the Bush Administration can't get a budget passed, so its frozen instead and the ISS takes its funding from the Constellation program. Apparently the Constellation program is just a money holder for the ISS in case of budgetary distress on NASA. What I don't get is why the ISS is so damn important that it justifies delaying the Moon program? To keep the Russian Dictator Putin happy perhaps. I don't see why the ISS can't be a money holder for Constellation. The astronauts are clearly having fun onboard the ISS, it would be a shame to spoil their enjoyment of weightless conditions, wouldn't it? Maybe NASA should be rolled into the Defense Department, then it could use some other port barrel spending program as its money holder.  Probably the closing of several military bases could keep the Constellation program on schedule. Maybe NASA ought to be rolled into the Education department, that contains alot of pork money holders should budgets be frozen again.