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Any ideas on experiments to determine what causes a planet's magnetic fields? I thought I'd read on here that even though conventional wisdom says its related to a planet having a large molten core this idea is less well supported than most things accepted as scientific fact. This seemed like the best forum to put this in as it seemed like something a robotic probe could do better than a manned mission. As best as I can remember Earth and Jupiter are the only planets with significant magnetic fields. I ask because this seems to me to be an important thing for human habitation of other worlds if only because it is something naysayers bring up so often. Before we can do anything with some chance of it working we need to know what to do which leads us back to the above question of determining the cause of planetary magnetic fields.
It would probably be best for greenhouse cultivation in the early years due to its low tolerance for cold, but kudzu could be useful perhaps. I can't attest to its uses as food or medicine, but I intend to try growing some for that purpose in the next year or so. It does grow like crazy so it could be useful for getting rid of CO2. It can be used for nitrogen fixation. The article says it can be used as forage, and I've heard this is true for goats. However, I've heard it causes cattle to get sick.
How about musk oxen? Related to goats so one would think they could live on a wide variety of plants, and that they and their milk would be palatable. They produce a winter coat of quivit which according to some sources I've seen is the warmest natural fiber, and it just falls off in the spring so you just need to gather it up and not bother with shearing them.
However, I don't know much about them for certain so maybe they aren't that good. One would think if they really were that beneficial native peoples would have used them in the same ways reindeer were used in other arctic and subarctic cultures.
It sounds cool.
Large amounts of atmospheric nitrogen also acts to prevent fires, but there are other gases that could be substituted for that purpose I think.
Sorry about the new topic. Meant for this to be in the thread the quote came from. You could always just build your garage/port facilities outside the crater's rim and ride an elevator up. There've been elevators built before for moving tractor trailers or even the ones used on aircraft carriers for moving planes. They should be powerful enough in the early years until you actually have a planetary economy going. Not sure if that'd be simpler than a road though.
Another benefit of craters (some moreso than others) is that you are dug in closer to the bedrock, meaning that once average annual temperatures break the freezing point of your groundwater it won't take much extra water (if any) to fill in down to the bedrock than it did to fill down to the permafrost. In these locations noosfractal's domed craters could possibly begin terraformation before outside pressure levels would otherwise allow, thus accelerating the oxygenation process and ozone formation (which I also have a model of).
Craters would erode away with rain unless they were all of mostly rock wouldn't they? Maybe I'm on too short of a time scale, but Mars has some slight wind erosion going on now. The air would thicken with water vapor that's going to be the rain, and then you'd have the erosion from rainfall eating away at regolith craters too.
Are the berries you listed restricted to bogs or just acidic soils? I know I've seen blueberries in permanently dry land before.
Are there still wood bison out there? I thought the last few were interbred with plains bison at a Canadian Park back in the day when the only bison left anywhere were there and Yellowstone. Not a problem either way since we could always just select for smaller bison to begin with.
I like the idea about getting the iron out of the soil. Use it as a building material or something.
Raising and caring for honeybees is well known and public. Plus there are a few varieties to choose from like Italian, African, or Japanese. Maybe you could get some funding from animal lovers if you use Japanese honeybees as they're losing ground to invasive species. Plus the workers are either entirely stingless or have mild stings. Honeybee honey also has a very long shelf life. Raising bumblebees is currently proprietary knowledge so you'd either have to figure it out yourself or pay for it. It might be patented or copywritten though so by the time it is needed maybe it'd be common knowledge. The downside is their honey becomes rancid in a few months. Not a problem really except that'd limit it use as a human food source.
Why not start building a few manmade domed islands when we first get to Mars with the bogs inside? We'd probably just want to go with plants and bees so it can be left to its own devices. The advantage is first the soil is being prepared for when the outside atmosphere is ready so those areas could be a bit ahead of the rest. Also it'd supplement the food supplies of anyone out exploring the surface as well as giving them a base of operations away from home. Hop out of your rover, pick some berries, go camping, and stretch your oxygen supply a bit by sleeping inside the dome.
It might be better for someone trying to redo Mercury on the cheap to copy the craft the early cosmonauts used I think so you don't need to rent and have ships or aircraft staged to pick you up at sea. Coming down on land you can just radio someone to come pick you up after you're down without worrying about drowning, but you might want to bring a gun in case you have to fight wildlife while you're waiting.
after settlement has begun?
If folks withdrew themselves to a small section of the planet could you begin bombardment with relative surety that ti wouldn't kill everyone? Or is bombardment lost as a serious possibility after settlement begins?
Not exactly whether or not we should bombard it, but it I didn't want to disrupt the toher thread.
I guess it is too bad for the article's author that Magellan's crews didn't begin infighting and kill each other and neither have any astronauts in space.
In that case maybe I do know something that's contributing to it then. Hopefully it continues and pays off for the Mars Society and manned exploration of Mars.
The board had been cruising along with a max users at one time of around 70 for months, and then bam it jumped up to 100 or so when the recent shuttle launch happened. But then yesterday it set a new record, and right now there's 60 guests browsing around. Is something going on that I'm not aware of, or has the public just greatly increased its interest in Mars all of a sudden?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,287367,00.html
Announced by the company that's been setting up private stays on the ISS. They also want to do a private spacewalk for pay by 2009 if I rememebr correctly. It's in the article anyways.
That's a good bit more expensive than I would've been expecting especially when they say they're using existing Soyuz modules to do it. At that cost one wonders if they might be better off bumping the price up a few million and including a trip to the moon's surface too.
Besides gasses there is nothing else there. You can get the same gasses elsewhere (anywhere).
This is something I've wrestled with in the past. However, it seems to me that the vast majority of human expansion hasn't been driven by that much of a realistic economic incentive. Folks mostly go places because there's land free of occupation. That was the main selling point of Greenland and Vinland to Vikings in Iceland. Maybe it isn't a tenable economic model anymore, but most of the people in history seem to have moved places with their only concern being whether or not they could get enough for their family to live on there not whether or not they'd have some advantageous place in the world economy.
Why not simply detach your spaceport from the city? That would eliminate much of the danger of having a catastrophic accident involving spacecraft. Casualties would be limited to those working on the spaceport ballon at the time and those on the spacecraft. Have warehouses on site to store things entering and leaving, and ferry things to and from the spaceport with whatever craft is used for cargo transportation.
Would other planets pass in front of the light and block it? If so how often? Everything's moving around pretty much in the same plane so it seems like this might be a problem.
How does that happen? I know there's just a tiny group of folks actively supporting manned space flight, but surely there are more of us than folks who support NASA's pure science stuff?
What sort of entertainment are they offering?
While not politically correct a single sex crew would prevent any problems caused by relationships. It is a long time to expect folks to behave professionally continuously.
That sucks.
1. Population control - when the density of some organisms is growing, it's easier for its parasites to expand - this factor influence stability of the ecosystem.
The question is if without it, some specie could dominate its ecological niche?
Maybe it could be set that it would be automatically controlled by concurrency, food access,...?
Maybe such domination wouldn't be so bad?
Maybe without this control factor, ecosystem would achieve different point, which would be stable?
If all else fails humans can control population of large plants with a little effort. In any event if left to itself a new equilibrium would develop, but it might be one we wouldn't like.
2. Stress increase - the elimination of weak organisms.
It improve selection, required to evolution. But after a few billions of years, a few thousand shouldn't be so important...
If it would be planned well, evolution shouldn't throw it out from the stable point...Removing of weak organisms, makes place for new too, which probable would have positive influence on the effectiveness of ecosystem, but needs some energy to grow earlier.
So the removing of the parasite should make the population older, but I think that it wouldn't affect the effectiveness much...?
Mars will be an island as well as a distinct environment from Earth. We'd want to let mutations and recessive genes be expressed. While we may need or want to make a few directed modifications nature would likely do a better job of molding existing genetics into the ideal form for Mars.
Any thoughts on what effect turning the Sahara into a mixture of lakes, grassland, forest, and agriculture would have on earth's albedo?
I was going to answer your question about the change to Mars' gravity, but some punk apparently removed the formula for grvaity from wikipedia. Now the only formula I can find requires a radius which isn't really something I want to be playing with with non-spherical bodies is it instead of volume? If anyone has the formula for gravity using volume could you post it here.
The Planetary Society did try to launch a solar sail, but the rocket it was on exploded.
How did they get such a huge membership though? I'd never heard of them until I came to this site. Admittedly I'd have never heard of the Mars Society if not for Zubrin's books, but at least that is something that is out there for public consumption. However, it is at least on a very limited basis being put out in the public's eye.
I've never been to a Mars Society convention, but that's an interesting thing mentioned earlier about the technical discussions. Maybe there should be concurrent technical lectures with a more general overview lecture offered at the same time. Say while one is talking about the best way to recycle water another is giving a non-technical discussion of what an ideal small base would look like given what we know right now, where it might be located and why, and that sort of thing.
I saw a report in the last week that the EU was going to be providing all the funding for htis now instead of seeking some private money. Not sure how this affects the non-EU countries that had pledged financial support.