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Probably going off on a forum inappropriate tangent here, but while the pro-Venus folks almost had me convinced I'm starting to dought it now. A sphere with a diameter of 1 km would only be able to lift 366.5Mkg. Maybe I'm mistaken about how much stuff weighs, but once you start putting in some homes, some machinery, some food production, and other stuff that doesn't seem like it'd be very much. But like I said I'm not sure how much stuff weighs.
Not the tiny one they've been building out in Arizona or New Mexico a bit at a time, but a real single large building with most of its volume owing to its height?
Over here in Germany, when they were part of the government they actually stopped construction of all nuclear plants and forced the industry to sign an agreement on closing all existing plants within some 20 years.
Y'all are supposed to scrap all your nuclear plants by 2014 according to that aren't you? There's no way they'll replace that loss with cleaner power that's anything near as cost effective. That never ceases to surprise me about this thing. If CO2 emissions are as horrible as they say they are the comparatively miniscule amount of nuclear waste that is made by nuclear plants generating the same power should look like nothing. Folks are a bit more open in some parts of the US about building them, but there's still plenty of folks deadset against nuclear plants.
I hereby apply to deliver the bad news to the non manned programs that don't support human exploration or work to defend earth from impacts by heavenly bodies. Give me my paaycheck and NASA badge, and I can be in Washington and ready to go in two days.
He's right in one way though I fear. If we ever want to get something done about moving significant numbers of normal people off planet anytime soon we're going to have to raise money and retain complete control of it ourselves. Put it in the government's pocket, and all the programs we don't support are getting a cut.
One thing with Jupiter's moons is the deadly radiation - 10 minutes unshielded is enough to kill a human.
Have a way to heat your landing craft's "skin" and melt your way down into the ice. Between it, the water you leave between yourself and the bottom of the ice, and your habitat you should be protected from most of the radiation.
Europa is the worst off. Until you've got lots of well designed atmosphere, you're probably going to be living under the water.
That as my plan all along. There have been folks who got by fairly well on diets of mostly seafood. I mean you're probably stuck for a while anyways which might cut down on your potential colonist base, but maybe you could place a massive lattice work in the ice over time to shore up a section of ice to act as a permanent surface.
Your right though its probably a crazy idea.
Europa sounds so great, and I've got to think that even if it lacks native life it could be seeded easily from earth. Given how many species live only between certain depth ranges we could even possibly introduce earth species without a threat to native species if any exist and things turn out right as to where they live.
Does anyone know if there's any information on the composition of the interior of Europa though? Is it a sphere of water below the ice, or is there a metallic core? If so is it solid or molten?
Even lacking native life and a course of chemicals for a chemosynthetic species at the bottom of the pyramid I think we could maybe slowly get things going. Dump enough biological waste into the water, and then build your ecosystem on some filter feeder like clams. That'd likely take a long time though.
There's a topic on the human missions board I think about colonizing earth's oceans that might have some applicability.
^You could always get a motorcycle. Maybe it wouldn't work for you, but for me I don't usually need to haul cargo around. When I buy something ro go on a trip, but that's about it. A small motorcycle's pretty cheap compared to a car, and those things get a lot more to the gallon than any of these hybrids everyone's going gaga over. Ride it most of the time, and it'd pay for itself relatively quickly.
I agree though at least some of the things do save you moeny, and they don't promote that enough.
Since I've no clue what any of this costs with money I'll just list what I'd do in order of priority and let folks argue if they want over whether or not I could accomplish it with my budget.
1. Map moving bodies with the potential to hit earth. Since I hear telescope time is pretty hard to comeby I'd probably build 4 observatories dedicated to this. One in each quarter sphere of the earth so as it could be done round the clock until done. Then I'd rent them out once that's done, and if they weren't making money I'd donate them to Auburn University.
2. I'd fund this Translife Project listed down the forum list.
3. Concurrent with this I'd develop a way to redirect said potential threats.
4. I'd build a large number of probes to explore the ice moons of the gas giants thought to have liquid water oceans under the ice. I'd start launching them once they were ready to go.
5. I'd begin development and testing of spinning bodies to generate a force equal to 1g as well as growing food on them at the light levels around Mars.
6. I'd try to move one of the potential threats into orbit around Venus out beyond the Roche limit. Even if it fails and hits the planet at least maybe it'd blow a little bit of the atmosphere off.
7. Once I felt certain we could place one in orbit without messing up I'd start moving them into Mars orbit beyond the Roche limit.
8. I'd work on building a spinning space station in orbit around Mars using the technologies developed in 5.
9. At this time I'd also begin investing in work to land on whatever happened to be the largest moon of Mars at that point as well as a way to gently move the moons together and bind them together.
10. The above craft would be fueled using fuel made from the Martian atmosphere which would be obtained using a rocket powered glider. The glider would launch from the space station and enter the upper atmosphere of Mars where it'd suck up atmosphere. Then it'd fire its rocket to get back into orbit and dock at the station station where the fuel would be produced.
11. Using Phobos, Deimos, and the new moons we'd begin constructing a single large moon around Mars.
Hopefully this could all work with the outcome being that Mars would have a moon large enough to nurse anything left of a molten core back to health or remake a molten core if its solidified if that's possible. At the same time it'd also remove the threat of potential impacts on earth. Any potential threats moved after Mars moon had reached an appropriate size could be directed so as to impact Mars or create a moon for Venus by a similar method.
12. I'm probably out fo money so I'll quit now.
Ha. I left it out, but I intended to ask where he stood on space. I know where he stands on the other stuff.
You know your cat though. How many stray cats have you ever talked to?
It would be cool to have a Google Moon type thing though, but it'd be hard to get funding though. Of course if everyone really does go through with their planned moon missions in the near future you might might be able to charge a subscription to watch the folks up there move around on the surface if you could do it real time. A launch or a descent would probably be really cool to watch from orbit too.
3. a "big majority" of skeptics that have doubts and are not sure to believe or not but (simply) want futher evidences taken with modern technologies and (best) from a "third source" (maybe... from China...)
.
Most of this group wouldn't believe it if they were there and could touch it. Press them on it. Ask them why the Apollo 1 astronauts died if the whole thing was a conspiracy. Most will tell you these guys were just hid away somewhere and lived out fine happy lives. Ask them why it was necessary to fake three deaths in a test, and how come no one there when it happened ever admitted the deaths were faked. They won't have any real answer, but they'll continue to believe it was faked. I wish it weren't so, but there is a sizable portion of people out there who want it to have been faked.
There are still folks out there who genuinely believe the earth is flat, and this is due to a desire for it to be that way not because they've never been told better. Simply watching a ship disappear over the horizon should prove this isn't so, but they'll choose to disbelieve their own eyes than admit the earht is a sphere.
I don't really believe that manmade global warming is that big of a concern, and even if it is I'm not certain it's that bad of an idea. I mean I think it's too hot already so making it hotter doesn't really make me feel worse off.
I've slowly been reading some of the books Rick over in the terraforming forum posted. They've further increased my feeling that humans should be releasing carbon into the atmosphere. I mean if we prove to be a long lived species we're going to have to sometime so why not do it now while there's some money and benefit in it aside from just freeing up carbon?
The point of this is that environmentalists seem to never worry about returning carbon in the atmospheric carbon cycle to the geological carbon cycle. This seems to me to be what they should be trying to do if they really think manmade global warming is happening and is a big problem.
Anyone know where Fred Thompson stands? Gingrinch has said he won't get in until sometime in September if he decides to, and if he waits that long I think Thompson will take what would have been Newt's base.
They really have fallen off schedule then. At least they have a lot of folks funding it to share the cost.
When I see solar sails depicted in books or on tv it's always a parachute with the spacecraft proper suspended between it and the star. This seems to me like its a waste of material. Why not place the sail between the spacecraft and the star? Sort of like an umbrella where the spacecraft has the place where the handle joins the folding part of the umbrella, and the solar sail extends out around it like the rest of the umbrella. This way the spacecraft itself takes up some of the solar sail body, and its a lot sturdier than a solar sail so at least that part you hopefully won't have to worry about being punctured. I don't know about this sort of thing though so there might be some obvious reason this can't be, but I was wondering about it the other day.
Does any of the stated research in preparation for Mars relate to food production?
Don't knwo if this is true or not. On another site someone said that Galileo was having problems. Anyone know if this is true?
That things going to look silly when it walks I bet.
Unpressurized surface rover is something like the Apollo rovers. Pressurized surface rover is for trips that are going to take long enough for the crew to need to sleep away from base. Surface mobility carrier is like a tractor.
Is that correct?
^Sounds like a plan.
Did they answer any? I fell asleep and didn't wake up until there was only about 30 minutes left.
Nonsense, its all a lie, a false illusion. Neighbors etc won't think its any more possible than winning the lottery, and the chances will be about as good.
If it gets as many folks interested as play the lottery then NASA'd have more public support than it has had since the Space Race.
More nonsense, the paperwork would be completely ruinous, tens of thousands of applications for a high-level skill job. It would require professional scientists and engineers to even read many of the resumes.
So you say there's not many qualified folks out there, but at the same time it'd take scientists and engineers to separate the wheat from the chaff? If the general public is as grossly unqualified as you say then anyone should be able to throw out 99% off the top.
And even then, with a small army of staff able to process dozens of applications daily, how do you decide? The pool of similarly applicants qualified "on paper" will still be large, so how do you pick? A lottery?
Why not? It wouldn't be the first job where those given the shot are chosen for dubious reason, and if you've already whittled the applicants down to those who meet your minimum standards then you should have an equal chance with whoever you choose.
And a little NASA office with a relatively small amount of support simply wouldn't be enough cash to buy votes in congress by any means, but I digress: the cost of NASA is too high. It would cost too much money to sift through the dead-tree deluge and there will be almost no benefit from it.
We're going to need a "small army of staff" to check out these resumes, but that's not really enough for anyone to notice?
Thats absolutionist thinking, and rejects the simple idea that there will still be a lot of people who make it through the preliminary paperwork, especially since it will be impossible to differentiate many of them, but we wouldn't know which of them are the superior candidates. So we should let all of them into astronaut training and space science?
Start with allowing a low number into training so you still have some slack from your chosen few of pilots and scientists. Increase the percentage of recruits from the general population over time until it comprises the entirety of each new training class. If an abnormal number of trainees wash out you can increase overall class size to compensate for it.
And so NASA should just assume that they might enjoy it?
Yes. Perhaps I'm overestimating the public's ability to decide what it would or would not like, but I'm of the mind that folks who have no interest in being in space aren't going to apply to be astronauts.
No! No no, this is exactly what I've been saying is untrue, chances are not just "low," they are ZERO.
Incorrect. If anyone from the general public goes up then there is a chance for someone from the general public to go up.
I think there's a word missing or misspelled in the second part of his second question, or I just stink at reading comprehension. Could someone explain it to me?
I thought Democrates were more intelligent than this:
There's your mistake.
Now as for the whole sovereignty issue so what? Just ignore what they said. If Minnesota doesn't like it then they can go without electricity. Don't count this out in a Democratic run state though. California banned nuclear power, stopped building power plants, and then whined and cried when they started having blackouts as a result. I mean this whole thing seems to be too silly to get mad about. Minnesota passed a law they can't hope to enforce. They look bad to have even tried, and they can't enforce it anyways so its not worth getting that mad over.