New Mars Forums

Why go to the Moon? Why not? Going to Mars doesn't preclude going to the Moon. For one thing the launch window to the Moon is contiuously open, while the launch window to Mars appears only once every two years. What is NASA going to do on the off years when their is no opportunity to launch a mission to Mars. Well. the more Ares V boosters NASA orders, the cheaper the per unit cost of each booster is going to be. Anyway, why do all manned missions have to be targeted specifically for Mars? The objective should be to develop a transportation system that can be used for the inner solar system. Maybe one mission can be for the Moon, another for Mars, and a third for the asteroids. There are alot of near Earth asteroids that could be investigated, maybe some asteroid mining ideas could be tested.

If your going to use nanotech, why not just have a nanotech membrane to hold atmosphere in without resorting to making humans breath liquids? Their is something that has been discussed on nanotech forums called "Utility Fog". Utility fog is little particles in the air about the size of dust motes, but are actually nanotech machines, they float around in the air and they have many arms that can be used to attach themselves to other nanotech machines. These things are invisible to the naked eye unless they link up and form macroscopic objects, one particular object which they can form would be a membrane that can hold in air against the vacuum. Generally you would start with a bubble on the surface of the moon. A solid object such as an astronaut can step through the membrane as the nanotech objects would part upon contact with the astronauts suit, and they would make way as the astronaut moves forward closing up the hole behind the astronaut as he steps completely inside. The bubble would extend downward into the moon dust and rock forming a complete seal to keep in atmosphere. Meanwhile nano assemblers would make more of these "Utility foglets" as they are called, and they would extract oxygen and other gasses from the ground adding to the atmosphere. The bubble would probably have to receive regular shipments of other gasses to add to the atmosphere as it expands. More utility foglets would be made as the surface of the membrane expands to accomodate the enlarging atmosphere. Over time the bubble will grow larger and larger until it completely encompases the Moon.

The atmosphere of this moon would have an abrupt edge to it. A spacecraft landing on its surface would first make contact with the membrane, its rocket engines would quickly vaporize a hole through it and air would rush out, more foglets would be sucked along with the outward rushing air, they would attach to the edges of the membrane and the membrane would close behind the spacecraft, though perhaps not as neatly as it would were an astronaut stepping through in his spacesuit. The internal pressure of the atmosphere would hold the membrane up, which at this point would have no contact with the Moon's surface. the air would be filled with spare foglets, which would be completely inert unless activated, people would be breathing these things into their lungs all the time.

Oh, I see, you smash the asteroids into the planet! The problem I have with this idea is that it uses up alot of valuable asteroids. People might want to live in them or build space colonies out of their material, if you smash them into Venus, you are denying this possible use. Asteroids can house alot more people than a terraformed Venus can, and the people who are homesteading the asteroids are going to have questions about this misallocation of resources. The asteroids are also going to mess up the landscape of Venus, either make it look like the Moon or melt the crust entirely. I think making Venus molten is a giant step backwards if you want to terraform it.

One small consolation is this, if you cool Venus, it will shrink, and if Venus shrinks, it will spin faster, just like any figure skater that pulls in her arms while spinning.

I think the best thing you can do is to shade Venus with a diffraction lense dispersing the sun's rays, then have a giant reflector parked on the night side that alternately provides night and day on the side that would otherwise experience continuous night. Perhaps as compensation, the light received by Venus should be dimmer than that received by Earth, perhaps on Mars levels of illumination. While Venus is cooling, you don't have the reflectors on the night side. A Martain level of light will facilitate the cooling of Venus while still allowing photosynthesis to convert CO2 to oxygen. When this is done, you just add in the reflectors on the night side.

You do need to have the terms long enough so office holders can accomplish something for their constituents without running for reelection all the time.

An Island Three Cylinder is 20 miles by 4 miles with about 40 square miles of living space if you exclude the window Solars which let in light to opposing valleys. On Mars this is the equivalent of a dome 3.56 miles in diameter.

Both can house 10,000,000 people with each having 111 square feet per person assuning no multi-level dwellings.

Both provide 24 hours day/night cycle.

In one colony the colonists must deal with 0.38-G while in the other, they only have to deal with it if they want to.

Lets assume the Martian dome is also 3.56 miles high.

When a Martian colonist steps outside there is a world to explore. Probably 10,000,000 people would go about various different things

When a Space colonist steps out side their is vacuum and empty space, he lives in an artificial world, but one which more closely duplicates the Earth than the Martian colony dome.

Now what activities would 10,000,000 people be doing in free space from a cylinder colony and what would 10,000,000 martians spend their time doing by comparison, and which colony would be harder to establish?

It is a bit of intellectual dishonesty. Instead of coming right out and saying he doesn't want a trip to Mars, he instead uses his expert opinion to say going to Mars will cost too much.

People do tend to over generalize, don't they.

You mean some scatterbrain might rebel against the leader he elected, or maybe the minority who didn't get the leader they voted for are a bunch of sore losers and rebelled. If the minority overthrows the majority, what you end up with is tyranny. Once the rebels decide that there is not going to be a rule by majority if successful, then one by one, each of them is going to lose power in the power struggle that is to come, and then one of them is going to rise to the top eliminating all rivals by gaining more followers than the rest and using them to impose a reign of terror to keep the population cowed and under one dictator, that is why I have little sympathy for people who rebel against the Majority rule, and they should be dealt with harshly before they threaten freedoms.

You know, if we could develop FTL technology, I think time travel would be the more attractive option than interstellar travel. I mean, all we have to do is colonize a past Earth. A lot of people say that FTL means time travel, the only thing we don't know is what time travel means. If you could wormhole into the past and mine the past for minerals whose location you already know about, then what happens to the same mineral deposits you've already mined in the present? If the universe duplicates itself by this time travel, you could do this endlessly. Sounds an awlful lot like a free lunch to me. Perhaps but perhaps not. If FTL travel was possible by time travel was not, there would have to be an absolute now, time would have to tick the same for the entire universe somehow. There would have to be an instant that was the same for the whole universe all at once. I'm not sure that this is possible.

Maybe light speed is the limit after all. I think in retrospect this wouldn't be so bad. If you want to travel into interstellar space, you don't have to go all the way to the nearest stars. What is likely to be waiting for you if you make the journey anyway. Basically what it is is another Sun with more planets orbiting it. We'll have more planets to land on, more asteroids to mine and exploit and from that material we can build more space colonies. I don't know what the chances of life modifying an atmosphere so we could breath it, would be. If we create our own earthlike environments such as terraforming Mars or building space colonies, we can do that anywhere, not just in the vicintity of stars, but literally anywhere their is matter to build from and an energy source we can exploit. It could be a star, or it might be a brown dwarf or even a gas giant. if we have fusion it could even be a frozen comet.

I think that since Mercury has a near vacuum as an atmosphere, you can take advantage of this fact to spin it up before you add the atmosphere. If you use just a sun shade to make night and day, you've already eliminated half the available surface for habitation. Of course Mercury is slowly rotating, you what you'd end up with is a planet with seasons, the summer season would alternate between periods of night and day, while the winter season would be all night. If your going to expend the energy to slow down the rotation so it tidally locks, why not use that same rotation system to speed up its roation and produce a 24-hour day/night cycle in the first place. Seems that no matter what you do,your going to have to set up a planetary spin-up system in any case system. I say If your going to change the planets rate of rotation, you might as well increase its rotation rate, since you'll need the same infrastructure in any case to slow it down.

Venus is another problem, it rotates slow but it is not tidally locked with the sun. In one proposal I heard, you place a sun shade inbetween Venus and the Sun and then you place a mirror in polar orbit to reflect the sun's light down to Venus to produce day and night. The only problem with this is the slight detail that the Sun would always be rising and setting in a different location each day. You could probably get the mirror to orbit in a sun synchronius orbit so that it has constant daylight to reflect towards Venus, but Venus would slowly rotate underneath the mirrors orbit. A Venus terraformed in this manner would have a constantly shifting apparent "North" direction. What is at one time the "North Pole" would then become the "Equator" and then the "South Pole" and then the "equator" once again. The same problem exists for Mercury if we don't change its rate of rotation.

The truth is, even if Mars Direct or some other manned mission were implemented, it would still be another astronautic media spectacular, it would give us some interesting news articals to read about, focusing on the activities of an elite corps of astronauts each with several degrees to their names doing Geology on Mars. We need something like a space elevator, which I call a conveyor whose purpose is to enable the mass transportation of people and things into space. Some people don't want a conveyor of any sort, they put up daunting challenges and are not really interested in finding solutions for those challenges, they just put them up their to serve as road blocks to prevent an activity that they find distasteful. Instead of saying they don't like this, they go on to prove why it can't be done, if someone tries to find solutions and ways around the obstacles they have put up, they get quite annoyed with such people as it undermines their argument that it can't be done and so therefore shouldn't be tried.

Some people just plain don't want any humans leaving Earth surface, and it is as simple as that, and they have a number of strategies to prevent the dawning of the true space age.

1) They'll say that manned space travel is a waste of money, and they'll oppose money to improve the space transportation system, saying the truism that space travel is expensive, will always be expensive and since nothing can be accomplished that would make it less so, all appropriations toward that end will be a waste of money. And then they'll go about listing the various ways that money could better be spent, this second part was more effective during the Heyday of the Apollo program than it is now.

2) Failing to disuade lawmakers from making the Appropriations to better the space transportation system, the opponents will attempt to giganticise the program in order to make it unaffordable. They will say things like, "Oh Mars Direct will never work, you have failed to consider X, Y, and Z, and to solve these problems you need much bigger spaceships or the ribbons will not work, they are too thin, you need much thicker cables and Massive launch vehicles to launch the tether into orbit before it can be lowered down.

The Super-Orion has merit, as I recal it was to use 25 million one megaton yeild thermonuclear bombs and it could reach Alpha Centauri in 150 years.

Clearly we are talking here about a generation ship, one that does not launch from the ground. I don't know of any other starship proposals that use current technology. I'm sure there is enough fissionables in the asteroid belt to build 25 million thermo nuclear bombs. Traveling to the stars requires enourmous amounts of energy. The warlike potential of any starship is obvious, simply by slamming into the Earth at its top speed, its likely to make a deadly weapon, and the Super-Orion starship is not the deadliest of potential starships! Any sort of interstellar trip requires the harnessing of enourmous amounts of energy, which if place in thw wrong hands can be quite destructive, it just comes with the territory I guess. 25 million H-bombs is greater than the Entire world's combined arsenal, though no doubt we could make such.