New Mars Forums

Great but perhaps this should go under Life Support Systems. Building concrete structures on Mars isn't terraforming.

Also there is a good argument no to rush everything the colonists will need to live on Mars along with the colonists. Cargo for instance doesn't need to be rushed quickly to Mars so long as it gets there before the colonists so they can use it. What if you wanted to use an ion drive to deliver a massive payload of supplies to Mars, taking several years to get there ahead of the colonists? The slower you go, the more cargo you can bring!

But we associate March with the beginning of spring. Mars has seasons, Earth has seasons, each part of the Earth year has its analog for Mars, so why not use 12 months but make them longer? There are a lot of cultural reasons for this. We are familiar with the month names of January through December, so why not use them for Mars as well? And since Earth Mars month is longer than its equivalent Earth month, we know where to put all the traditional holidays, in the first half of each Mars Month. Christmas would be o December 25th, and then you have half a Mars Month left before you celebrate New Years Day!

The nearest white dwarf is Sirius B, it is a bit further out than Proxima Centauri. My proposal is simply to use Proxima as an energy source, solar collectors on the star facing side of the inner cylinder would collect Proxima's energy, an use that to generate more white-yellowish light similar to our sunlight, there would be a fictional image of Earth's Moon or some other Moon, since this is an artificial world, tides can be simulated by pumping water into and out of holding tanks at the bottom of seas. The stars would be images of the actual stars as seen from Proxima. The stars you'd see in the projected night sky would be the stars you would see at underside of the opposite side of the ringworld from which you are standing. Stars would wheel around once every 1.8263 days, same as the rotation of the ringworld. It is a small ringworld compared to Niven's, but still plenty huge. It has the approximate surface area of around 30,500 Earths, About 1% of Niven's Ringworld. Still 30,500 Earth's worth of real estate is nothing to sneeze at, and red dwarfs are very common, and they can last for over one trillion years, not that we would likely be around for that long.

Just a little small detail, we haven't achieved break-even with our fusion programs yet, how are we going to build a fusion rocket I we don't even have that? SLS uses existing technology, it is not a fusion rocket, it is not a space elevator, as you said, it is a reprise of the Apollo Program and it will get us back to the Moon! if we wait for fusion, I may never see a person walking on another World ever again. Fusion will come in time, and we re working on fusion even as we speak, but as they say, "Don't count your chickens before they've hatched," and they haven't hatched yet!

There is another way to terraform the planet

What if we take this idea, make it larger, and replace the Solar Flux tub illuminator and the fusion reactor with Proxima Centauri? What would you call it then? A famous science fiction writer wrote a novel about this sort of world. If Proxima b is like our World, it should have a lot of iron to build this world out of. and remember the metal tungsten has a high melting point.

Melting point
3695 K (3422 °C, 6192 °F)

Boiling point
6203 K (5930 °C, 10,706 °F)

Surface Temperature of Proxima Centauri
3,042 ± 117[10] K

The surface temperature of Proxima Centauri just happens to be below the melting point of Tungsten and carbon by the way. That means these materials can come in contact with the surface of proxima centauri and stay solid. Ergo, we can mine Proxima Centauri for building material, as well as volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, all to make our ringworld's atmosphere out of. Lets say wemade a scoop out of tungstein, mined from Proxima b and have it skim Proxima Centauri's atmosphere in an elliptical orbit with enough momentum so it makes it back out with some of proxima's atmosphere, cool it down and see what elements we have. The thing about Proxima is that convection is operative, so what is in its core can end up at its surface and vice versa. In this version of ringworld, the inner cylinder takes the place of the shadow squares, yet it is only about 500 km shorter in radius than the ringworld floor, enough so there is space between the inner cylinder and the atmosphere such that you could fly a spaceship between them in a vacuum. As it my artificial world idea, the inner cylinder is a holographic television or video screen, it produces an image of our sun appropriate for various latitudes on the ringworld's surface, it is a small ringworld. Proxima's bolemetric luminoscity is 0.0017 that of our Sun, by taking the square root and multiplying it by an astronomical unit, we can get a radius of it. 6,184,658 kilometers.

this ringworld would have a tangential velocity of 246.274 km/sec and it rotates once every 1.8263 days to get a centrifugal force of 1-g, its width would be the same as Proxima, about 0.282 the diameter of our Sun, which makes it 392,374.8 km wide. The inner cylinder shields this world from Solar flares, produces a convenient fictional image of the Sun. The radius I so large that there is no perceptible curvature between the ground sky. The sky appears normal, the image of the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Northern and southern latitudes are colder than the equator or is we wish, we could havemultiple equatorial, tropical, subtropical, temperate, subarctic, and arctic climate bands. Weather patterns won't resemble Earth, prevailing winds will tend to blow either due south or due north depending on latitude, as this spin of this artificial world is completely perpendicular to its surface, moving north or south produces no cyclonic vortexs, hurricanes jus don't happen here.

Is they any clue as to what went wrong? Also I noticed the Russians were participating in it. What is it with the Russians and Mars anyway? Why can't the Russians manage to land a probe on Mars?

Actually the blue area is the atmosphere, because of the centrifuge, it never gets up high enough to push against the atmosphere. the inner cylinder is just a giant curved television screen, it also hides the landscape above, it redirects the light coming from the central flux tube, to produce fictional images of an Earth like sky. What you would see if you were walking on its surface would appear to be the surface of an Earthlike planet, the only thing that would give it away is if you are on a very flat landscape and can see all the way out to what would be the horizon, in a hilly or mountainous setting, it would look just like the surface of the Earth. the inner surface according to my drawing which is scaled 10 kilometers per pixel, is 510 kilometers above the floor of this cylinder, th atmosphere attenuated to a vacuum before reaching the surface of the inner cylinder, that is why you can fly a spaceship between the top of the atmosphere and the inner cylinder. The outer cylinder would spin around you once every 90 minutes, at about the same relative velocity as a spaceship in a low orbit around Earth. What one would see while between the atmosphere and inner cylinder would be a black sky above with an image of the sun and stars, and landscape and weather below, much the same as one would see while orbiting Earth, the only difference is the curvature of the ground below would be negative instead of positive, it would wrap around the artificial sky above, which is why I think the inner cylinder should not rotate at all because then the spaceship could dock with it, perform maintenance in zero gravity, or close to it.

This is based on the Darrian Calendar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar
Here is the first month of my Mars Calendar, this one is designed to hang on the wall and above is a picture of Mars or about Mars.

Hydrocarbons could be turned into other hydrocarbons which are solid at room temperature.

The trick is how do you build it? The International Space Station orbits at 400 kilometers above the Earth's surface. Not the idea appears to be to build two space elevators on opposite ends of the Earth. Preferably over the equator.

Here are two locations at opposite ends of the Earth where such elevators may be located. coincidently, its hard to find two such areas along the equator that are also on dry land, there are probably the best locations for these elevators. Now if the elevators are to be 400 kilometers high, we need a belt that is in orbit at an altitude that is 400 km above the equator, that also means it has a radius of 400 km + 6400 km = 6800 km, the circumference of the belt would thus be 2 * 6800 km * Pi = 42,725.66 km. If we assign a mass of 10 kg per meter then 1 kilometer would have a mass of 10 metric tons, the entire belt would thus have a mass of 427,256.6 metric tons. this belt would support two space elevators at opposite ends of the Earth. I suppose this would be useful for Venus and other bodies that don't rotate much. You could do this with Saturn, it would be a much bigger belt of course, and there is ring material to work with Two tethers can dip into Saturn's atmosphere One can dangle a colony from each of these tethers. You could probably suck in hydrogen and use it to power your fusion reactors.

Now we get to the idea of terraforming Saturn. Saturn has a rotational period of 10.2336 hours, it has gravity nearly equal to Earth, and at some latitudes, exactly equal to the Earth due to the planet's rotation, and I don't think that could be said for any other planet in the Solar System. So we build an artificial sun, place it in orbit around Saturn in the direction of the planet's rotation. So Saturn rotates 360 degrees in 10.2336 hours, so how many degrees will it rotate in 24 hours? 24*360/10.2336=844.2777 degrees Subtract 360 degrees from that, and we need an object which orbits 484.2777 degrees in a 24 hour period, from the "surface" of Saturn, this Sun will appear to rise, set, and rise again in 24 hours, its distance would be defined by its orbital period. So if this Sun requires 24 hours to orbit 484.2777 degrees, its actual orbit period would be 360*24/484.2777=17.841 hours for an orbit. This orbit's radius would be 158,300 km, about the orbit distance of Epimetheus which is about 138 km in diameter. Clearly not big enough for this job. We need to generate 95.181 times the sunlight tat falls on the Earth to cover Saturn, we need an object that is large enough to appear the size of the Sun seen from Earth, how big would that be? The Sun is 150,000,000 km from Earth, and the orbit in question is 1000 times closer to Saturn. Since our Sun is 1,391,400 km in diameter, our artificial Sun will have to be 1,400 km in diameter to appear about the same size as our Sun. It seems that Rhea will do as it is 1530 km in diameter.

This is Rhea, looks round enough, it is bigger than we need, and this is good, since we are going to move it closer to Saturn and heat it up to the temperature of the Surface of the Sun, much of it is water ice, strip off the hydrogen and use it to fuel a fusion reactor. Heat up the rest of rhea to incandescence, and we have ourselves a Sun for Saturn, which at the distance of 158,300 km rises and sets on a 24-hour schedule.