New Mars Forums

The science fiction design does, but the structure Freeman Dyson had in mind when he coined this term was not a solid object, but a cluster of such objects to absorb all the light of the star in order to harness its energy, there are a number of things which can be done with this energy, I have named a few. Terraform planets and moons, provide transportation between various places within our Solar System and beyond. This Dyson would have a number of spotlights to deliver solar energy to various places, it intercepts one billion times the energy received by the Earth, and small portion of it can light up the Earth to keep things just the way they are, we can illuminate Venus, so as to maintain an Earthlike environment there, a spotlight can be shined on Mars, each of the asteroids in the asteroid belt can similarly be illuminated by spotlights from the sphere, no need for mirrors to concentrate light. The entire Jovian System can be lit up, 3 of the Gallilean satellites will likely end up with carbon dioxide atmospheres surrounding global oceans. At the distance Jupiter is from the Sun, much of the ice on the surface of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto will be dry ice, that will sublime into an atmosphere of carbon dioxide surrounding a bubbly ocean of water.

Saturn will be illuminated, its icy rings would dissolve in the vacuum of space leaving behind rocky material, Titan would melt, giving it a nitrogen/carbon-dioxide atmosphere, the smaller moons would turn into giant comets with long tails. I wonder what would happen to Saturn itself, its upper atmosphere would warm up, water clouds would rise to higher elevations, some interesting chemical reactions will occur.

Uranus and Neptune would more easily be terraformed, maybe become true water worlds with endless oceans. Uranus would be a strange place if it keeps its tilt.

Problem is, if you give up your spaceship to have a house on Mars, you have to build a brand new spaceship to launch the next group of colonists, if you reuse that spaceship, then you don't have to build a brand new spaceship to get that next bunch of colonists over to Mars, the amortize the cost of the spaceship (all of its reusable stages and components) over the total number of trips it can make, if you sacrifice the spaceship so the colonists have a home on Mars, you make the trip that much more expensive as you are forcing the colonists to buy the whole spaceship in order to get to Mars instead of just one trip on that spaceship. I think Zubrin is still operating on the throwaway mindset.

You mean by not hewing the leftist line that "of course science is not being perverted by politics, never mind those scientists that doctored the evidence of climate change in the UK", we must believe the "Pinocchio report" is that it? When someone has lied to you, one tends not to trust that person later. I'll just assume that man caused global climate change is not happening, because the people gathering the evidence are not being honest with us, it is not a matter of questioning the scientific method or not believing in science, it is a matter of not believing those specific individuals who have called themselves scientists and who have lied to us. I don't care how dire the "chicken little" reports are. Scientists are human, they have human failings and agendas, I do not trust someone who has a history of lying telling me about global warming, especially if their career depends on there being global warming caused by humans! I believe in research for alternate energy, but primarily to reduce our dependence on imported oil from countries we cannot trust, rather than for some second order effect of reducing supposed man made global warming. My main concern is not importing oil from the middle east, and for those people not to have monopoly pricing over us, so prices at the pump don't shoot up like they have in the past. If an electric car can deliver that without the taxpayer having to subsidize them, then that's great, but otherwise, I don't want to incur this cost on society as an effort to serve "chicken little" science about "Doomsday" because the world they claim is getting warmer, and how we just can't survive those palm trees spreading north.

Who's "data," who's "facts?" I am not going to trust "Pinocchio's data," I am not going to trust "the boy who cried wolf!" If someone lied to us, he may be telling us the truth next time, but who can tell when? I'll take my chances that he may be telling the truth, because a warmer global climate doesn't sound so bad to me, a bad economy that comes with following their suggestions on what to do about global warming is what happened over the last 8 years as a result of Barack Obama's policies, I think we need a break from global warming, we gave it a good try over the last 8 years, so lets stop and see if the world has cooled any because of  those policies, if the world has not, then what's the point of following them? Can you point to any specific evidence of the suggested remedy for Global Warming actually working? If not, they why incur those costs for following them? 8 years is a long time, they were an expensive 8 years, lets have some economic growth for a change, if our economy gets bigger, we'll have more resources later, or maybe better solutions that don't cost so much if global warming later turns out to be true.

Depends on whether the ideology is true or not, the abolitionist movement during Lincoln's days was an ideology, and so was the pro-slavery movement that opposed it, I wouldn't consider both of them to be on an equal footing. Some ideologies work because they deliver the goods, other ideologies work for only some people by getting others to believe in it for long enough for some people to take power at other's expense, this is how I classify the Global Warming claim, there are people who will benefit economically if we follow the proposed remedies of the Global Warming crowd, most people will not benefit however, because the remedy suggested implies higher energy costs because renewables are more expensive, the people selling us the renewables will benefit, but not us the energy consumer, and there is no way to prove that if we buy more expensive renewable energy it is actually helping the environment. I would much rather wait for the technology develops so that renewable energy becomes less expensive. We've already had 8 years of Obama an 4 years of Carter forcing these "not ready for prime time" technologies on us, it I time to take away the crutches and see how these renewables compete with fossil fuels on a level playing field, if they still cannot, then we have been wasting our money subsidizing them and by making fossil fuels more expensive, if they don't achieve the objective of making renewables more competitive after we "take away the crutches" from them, then it has not been worth it. We have had a total of 12 years of these liberal policies, that is enough sacrifice, we have sacrificed economic growth and a growing economy, our standard of living has stagnated, it is time we focused on economic growth for a change. 

So he says, that is like a plant in a Faith Healing sermon, someone who claims to be blind, or paralyzed and in a wheelchair, and then at a prearranged time the faith healer goes up to him and rubs his eyes to touches his legs, and miraculously the plant says, "I can see, its a miracle!" or he gets up and walks and says, "I can walk, its a miracle!" and all the parishioners dish out the money on the collection plate and later on the Faith Healer meets with the plant and gives him his cut for a good performance. So we have to trust that they guy was a skeptic before and now he isn't, or perhaps he was, but money passed to him "under the table" "convinced" him otherwise.

 
Most of those stand more than 1 meter tall, so a 1 meter rise in the oceans is not going to drown them if their heads are still above water. You know there I technology for floating, they are called boats, and they have legs, they can wade out of the rising water and onto higher dry land, you have not convinced me that they cannot!

 
Why should they die? Didn't anyone give them swimming lessons? Why can't they wade out of 1 meter of water? You are assuming they act like trees with roots in the ground. Why should we care about people who insist on acting like trees and say their legs are stuck in the ground and cannot move. If we wait long enough, we will all die anyway even if there isn't any global warming. I am almost 50 years old, in another 40 years I will probably die whether there is global warming of not! I would rather spend money on medical technology that can extend my life than on fighting global warming, which will not!

Money is a measure of the resource available to us that keep us alive, if we spend money to fight global warming instead of on medical technology, then more of us will die sooner. I don't think the most likely cause of my future death will be drowning due to a rise in the ocean level, more likely it will be a heart attack or cancer or some other old age ailment. I am hoping for miracles, and if we spend money on that, they will be more likely to occur, but there is a tradeoff between spending money on personal health and global health, that is why money and cost are important!

Venus is a potential other Earth. There is a rock, 250 miles in diameter that will com within 50 AU of the Sun SY99 I think it was called, it takes 20,000 years to complete an orbit, it will reach perihelion in 2054. If we perfect whole body suspended animation and have a spaceship that can get us there, we can perhaps see this terraformed Venus for ourselves.

Which Venus will we see when SY99 comes around again? Will it be this one?

Or this one? Seems to me, we can set robots to work on Venus and go on a 20,000 year trip around the Sun, and presumably when we get back, there will be a terraformed Venus ready for us to occupy an inhabit, the only monkey wrench in this plan is what the other seven billion humans and their robots will be doing on the planet next door, will they interfere?

That's the internet for you. The Internet tends to cut out the middleman, in the future, people will order direct from factories have them delivered by mail through the internet. there will be warehouses which store groceries for order, trucks from canning packaging facilities, slaughterhouses and farms will deliver to these warehouses, other smaller trucks will deliver these groceries from the warehouses to people's homes, or else there will be stores with no cashiers for groceries, people will pick up their groceries, put them on a cart and walk out the door. The trucks will have no drivers, robots would unload these trucks and put the merchandise on shelves, security guards will guard the stores to make sure nothing is stolen. Store jobs is not where the future is, that is the past, and there is nothing Donald Trump can or should do bout it!

I could probably live on this Earth, assuming the age barrier is cracked, as were probably talking about the mid 22nd century as the soonest this would happen:
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-ear … ion-2017-4

There is also the factor that we would have 20,000 years to build a 250 mile wide, 10 mile thick Stanford torus, lets break this down a wheel 250 miles in diameter is 785.4 miles in circumference, this is 4,146,902.3 feet, it is also 52,800 feet wide giving a total area of 218,956,441,584.6 square feet, over 20,000 year, we would have to complete, 10,947,822 square feet per year or 29,994 square feet per day, this would be equivalent to a square 173.2 feet on a side, or about little more than half a football field. Fountains of Paradise was about the construction of a space elevator sited on a fictional island in the equator on the Indian Ocean. I do think we will be able to do incredible things with the advent of artificial intelligence, the AIs would spend 20,000 years constructing this Stanford torus out of the material of 2013 SY99, they would also be building and repairing themselves, humans would not be involved in this process. We need something which would stay the same for 20,000 years and which would not evolve into something else, what the remoteness of 2013 SY99 does is it takes away competition, there would be no pressure to always build new and improved versions of AIs, the AIs would would follow their program and not deviate from it. Towards the end of the journey the Stanford torus would be complete, and human children would be raised by robots designed to look and act like their biological parents. the AIs would observe the real parents raising their own children on Earth, and thus gather the information they need to simulate the actual parent's child rearing skills, and then they would go into hibernation for 20,000 years on SY99, and be revived "shortly before the end of the trip, the frozen egg cells would be implanted in an artificial uterus, and the children would be grown to term, the AI robots would raise these children in an environment similar to Earth within the ring. The roof would be 1 mile above the floor, the walls of the torus would be 10 miles apart, so walking inside would be much like walking outside on Earth.

But the idea is to preserve the human race from whatever threats that might emerge to it from the future, there is no immediate payoff if you are talking about a mission that will last about 20,000 years, my guess is that the government would be paying for it, whatever government deems that preserving the human race to be a worthwhile endeavor. We don't know what's going to happen to us in the next 20,000 years. 20,000 years ago, there were modern humans on the Earth's surface, but because of technology, we can't really predict what humans will look like 20,000 years from now, we can't even predict I there are going to be any humans at all! If humans wipe themselves out early on, my guess is that Earth itself won't be that much affected, the ability to wipe out the human race is much less than that to destroy the planet, so I guess there will be an Earth afterwards. I suspect this Earth may need to be repopulated with various lifeforms in order of sustain future human colonists. We might want to keep a probe at the edge of the Solar System to monitor what dos happen over the next 20,000 years so the future colonists don't repeat that mistake, and in 20,000 years, whatever threat that is should be long gone.

There should be nitrogen and other useful gases combined in the crust as chemical compounds if not frozen gases. Water contains oxygen and hydrogen, Ammonia contains nitrogen and hydrogen methane contains carbon and hydrogen, we should be able to obtan just about whatever gases we need. The torus, could be built over a long period of time, our technology would improve, we could build it over a century, and after acertain point, we just let it go into space and let the AIs run things. Humans either go into full body suspended animation or they store their progeny in the form of frozen fertilized ovum and return to the inner Solar System, or settle on some other  cometary body, and then over the course of the next 20,000 years, whatever happens to the human race happens. There has got to be a reason for the Fermi Paradox, and part of the reason for doing this is to get around this. I suspect part of the reason is that humans may choose to "evolve" into something else, something that does not require an Earthlike planet to thrive in, hence Earth maybe abandoned. The AIs running this installation certainly don't need an Earthlike environment, that might be part of the answer, butit could be something more dire like runaway nanotechnology, nuclear war or a hostile AI takeover!

I wonder how deep you could dig on SY99? I suspect a fair amount of it would be frozen gases, go down far enough, you reach some water ice, go even deeper and you reach a rocky core. I suspect SY99 is less dense than Ceres, pressure won't build with depth as steeply as on Ceres. I think one thing you could do is melt a tunnel below the equator on the surface, make it about 10 miles wide, 250 miles in diameter, at this temperature, it would be very easy to have superconductors, the ice in the crust would keep it cold, then you have an underground stanford torus with an artificial light source powered by nuclear fusion. Spincalc tells me that the rotation rate would be 15 minutes to achieve 1-g of centripetal acceleration inside, the velocity would be 3142 miles per hour, about 500 times as fast as a car on the highway, maglev would be required, the gravity and weight of the crust above the tunnel would hold this torus on its tracks, the living space on the inside would be 7,854 square miles, this is almost twice the land area of the big island of Hawaii. Hawaii sustained an ecosystem for millions of years before the first humans arrived on its shores, so I think this ecosystem could be sustained for a mere 20,000 years, as for humans, they would go into suspended animation, or be raised by AI robots towards the end of their journey 20,000 years in the future, the animals couldbe kept alive as part of the food chain in the torus, with some extra stored as frozen ova as backup.

Could be, this object's orbit is extremely elongated, the amount of time it takes for it to complete its orbit around the Sun is comparable to the amount of time it would take for us to send a space ship to Alpha Centauri with today's technology. With today's technology, we can probably send a space probe to Alpha Centauri in 20,000 years, the problem is that we don't know whether Alpha Centauri has any Earthlike planets which could support humans, there is one possible planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, but we still don't know whether it can support human life, but we are standing on one now that does, the chances are good that whatever we do to ourselves in the future, that th Earth will remain a viable candidate for supporting human life, we can send a spaceship to the Earth in 21755 AD, and SY99 could be just the vehicle that could get is there, it would be a one-way "timeship", we just need to cross that gulf of time, that's all. SY99's orbit carry's it out of our Solar System and then brings it back 20,000 years later, it probably has resources that could sustain a human population for quite some time, a fusion reactor may be helpful, otherwise its core may contain fissionable elements that could sustain an atomic fission reactor for the duration of the journey. its trip outside of the Solar System would take it out of human interactions so whatever they do to destroy themselves, SY99 could be safely outside that zone of influence. I am thinking of atomic wars, runaway nanotechnology or adverse AI, I think whatever destroys mankind would also end up destroying itself in 20,000 years and Earth will revert to its pristine condition after a great extinction event, suc as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, nevertheless, we could colonize such a planet. Future Earth might be a good target for human colonization, but we need something that can last 20,000 years and fulfill the mission, something that won' change or evolve during that time period into something we cannot anticipate. The AI's running the show would therefore go into hibernation for 20,000 years, and at their appointed time, they would wake up and raise a new generation of humans, and other plants and animals we may need to sustain such a colony on Earth of this future. Its hard to say what the Earth would look like in 20,000 years, had mankind never evolved, it would be much easier to make a prediction.

If given a choice, would you rather see Trump's tax returns or would you rather have tax cuts? Would you also like to see a picture of Donald Trump naked? Maybe we should protest until Donald Trump releases pictures of himself naked, would you like that? Thissue seems pretty stupid to me! How come all these people want to see Trump's taxes, are they a bunch of voyeurs? Are they a bunch of busy bodies minding other people's business? Would you like a list of all of Ivanka and Tifany  Trumps boyfriends? what other private stuff of the Trump family would you like to see?

Is it the job of the CIA to spy on the opposition presidential candidates and their campaign staffs? Excuse me but this is what police states do! Do you want Trump to order the CIA to spy on the Democratic Presidential candidates, is this now standard operating procedure?

So? Maybe if Putin didn't allow Syria to use poison gas, Trump wouldn't have changed his position on NATO. You see Putin is not behaving nice. I kind of think North Korea developing nukes and missiles is a tad more important. Trump is a negotiator, he is prepared to be flexible in exchange for action on China's part in making North Korea behave itself. Do you have something against this?