New Mars Forums

I read the site, very interesting, and it incorporates some of my ideas.

This one blocks all the natural sunlight reaching Venus, the outside is covered with Solar Collectors, the inside is covered with laser hologram projectors, The outer surface of this ring has more surface area than the planet below, it also has radiators on the outside to dump excess heat. In the inside are banks of lasers in seven different colors, red, orange, yellow, green blue, indigo, and violet, if you shine them into a prism with their beams converging at a certain angle, the prism will combine those beams, bending each wavelength by a different amount so that all seven beams exit the prism following the same path producing white light similar to sunlight, adjust the angles of these outgoing beams of light and they form an image of a white disk in the skies of Venus, it is a black featureless disk. (no sunspots) But who cares, it produces Earth day like levels of light, the only way you can tell it from natural sunlight is if you spit it with a prism, or wait for it to rain on a sunny day, the rainbow it produces would have 7 discreet colors instead of a continuous spectrum of colors as seen on Earth. You could add more lasers of course and there would be more colors in that rainbow, human eyes don't care when that light is combined, it is seen as white light, plants don't care much either. My shade idea is a temporary solution, it has to be maintained, if we want a more permanent solution we have to move Venus in its orbit and spin it up. I think the greater cost in energy would be to move Venus into an orbit that is further from the Sun. My preferred orbit is at 92,072,400 miles from the center of the Sun, since we are determining its orbit, we should make sure it is a very circular orbit at it stays at approximately this distance from the Sun, this would give Venus a 360 day year, advancing 1 degree in its orbit per day, and since we are doing this, spinning Venus up and giving it Earthlike seasons is a much smaller task than changing its orbit, as is importing all the hydrogen from Uranus to make oceans with. By the time Venus sits in its 360 day orbit, it should already have a 24-hour day, 90-day seasons, an ocean, and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.

You would want to hurl the asteroids outside this 24-hour ring, it would still pull on the planet below and on the ring itself. the center of mass for the ring is also the center of mass for the planet since the ring is centered on the planet, the ring and planet's gravity will pull on each asteroid as it passes in front of both in their orbit around the Sun, the gravity will bend the path of each asteroid, and the planet and rings will get accelerated slightly, and move into a slightly further out orbit from the Sun. if we keep on doing this with enough asteroids, then Venus and its occlusion ring will spiral outward into a wide orbit until it eventually reaches its 360 day orbit at 92,072,400 miles. We can do the same with Earth at the same time, giving our planet a 372 day year with months that are all 31 days long, and by the way help fight global warming as well! This keeps the minimum distance between planets are around 2,000,000 miles. If Earth were to be seen from Venus, its disk would appear as half the size as our Moon does in our skies, during this conjunction, the tidal influence it would have on Venus during this close pass would be similar to our own Moon at high tide, and no more, and this only during a conjection which would occur rarely. In fact lets calculate it. If Venus takes 360 days to go around the Sun and Earth takes 372 days, the difference is 12 days. 360 degrees divided by 12 days equals 30 years So every 30 Earth years, there would be a conjunction between Earth and Venus and both planets would experience high tides, Earth a little more since it has a Moon. Venus might have what's left over from Mercury after we use its reaction mass to move both planets. I figure we can create a moon sized body with the left over rubble and put it in orbit around Venus to give it a 30-day cycled of lunar phases just like the Earth has.

What about sending a tele-presence robot to the surface of the Moon? The robots at this level of technology can stand up and walk on the moon, without direct input from remote human operators. the controller simply tells the robot where to go, and the robot goes there as best as it can. The Moon varies in distance from 356,500 km to 406,700 km, the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second. Divide the lunar distance by the speed of light and you get 1.19 light seconds to 1.36 light seconds. The time delay that occurs when you send a command to a lunar robot and the time you see results is from 2.38 seconds to 2.72 seconds. My idea is you have a bipedal robot on the Moon, the operator on Earth is wearing a suit. The robot sends a 3-d picture of its surroundings, and the operator in his suit moves around in the virtual 3-d landscape, and indicates where he wants to go and what he wants to do, followed 2.38 to 2.72 seconds later by the actual robot, If the human operator moves in a certain direction and virtually picks up a rock, the robot interprets that as a command to move in that direction and pick up that particular rock, and it will use its own judgment on how to navigate the landscape and how to grip and pick up the rock the operator tried to pick up. The operator will always pause between actions to see how the robot does.

Mars is a symbol, it is a destination among many, it is low hanging fruit, it has characteristics similar to Earth in its day length which makes some adjustments easier.

Jupiter looks harder than it is, because of its high gravity. I believe an exoskeleton could be made which could give humans the freedom of movement they need in a Jovian environment, the "habitable" zone of Jupiter is around 3 atmospheres of pressure, I think I heard, where the temperature is around room temperature among the water clouds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Jupiter

3 to 7 bars of atmosphere isn't too bad, divers have survived that by breathing a mixture of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen. We would want to be at the water cloud level where the temperature is close to comfortable to minimize climate control requirements.

So imagine an existence where you have to wear an exoskeleton all the time, I think a person can lie down on a contoured couch, one could also immerse oneself in a bathtub and the water would distribute the weight. Things would fall faster under this high gravity, humans would have to get used to that!

Well you know, we can send astronauts back to the Moon and have them stay there for months at a time, and on the Moon's surface, we can simulate Martian gravity with a centrifuge. I think a centrifuge on Earth can simulate Jovian gravity, it would be a long time before we have any prospects of sending humans into Jupiter's atmosphere, much less of bringing them back, but perhaps we can test out an exoskeleton that would help such a person move about under Jovian gravity. I think 2.51-G is tolerable for people sitting in acceleration couches, but not for much else.

Well I see the threat from the other as motivation to go into space in order to survive, get off this "big blue marble." I often wondered what our political world would have looked like had Gerard O'Neill been right. What if there was a constellation of O'Neill habitats and solar power satellites.

See the dates up top? 200,000 to 20,000,000 people living in space! Still that is a small percentage of humanity. Probably there would have been a great deal of SPS construction going on during the last 8 years with the high price of oil and all. Perhaps a better shuttle design would have helped, something which actually would have revolutionized space travel. The trouble is space travel is still a big deal, it is a news item. SpaceX is moving in the right direction, I am hoping that in another 20 years space colonization becomes a reality rather than science fiction. I'm getting tired of living in the "extended 20th century!" A century should have only 100 years in it, not 116!

 
Well the problem is the Human race consists of around seven billions individuals, some of whom choose good and some of whom choose evil, and get evil results! I am not about to let the excuse that some of us are evil prevent us from colonizing space, that is a ridiculous argument! Are we going to let every barbarian on the planet hold us hostage and prevent us from colonizing space, to get away from these monsters!

There is ISIS, there is Iran, and there is North Korea and other uncivilized places and peoples, I think our civilization, the United States is quite advanced compared to the others, we are civilized, do not start wars like the others do. I don't see why we should wait on the rest of the Human race, particularly the Third World to catch up to us, before we can consider ourselves ready to colonize space, that just doesn't make sense to me. the Human Race isn't a collective, it isn't a "bee hive", we are all individuals making individual decisions for good and for ill, if that ever changes, we won't be human anymore! I would think developing a collective conscious, where everyone is "good" and no one is "evil" would be a giant step backwards for the human race. The Human race is all o one planet, and that is what's got to change! People like you saying we're all in this together as one collective whole! Well I don't want to be part of one collective whole. I want for one, to get away from certain members of the human race, such as terrorists and the like, that is why I want to travel in space, always have since I was a child. Little did I know back then that the Space Age was to be a non-participatory one, unlike previous technological revolutions, we all don't get to participate in this one. We can drive a car, we can fly in an airplane, but we don't get to fly in a spaceship, at least most of us don't! Even if we build that O'Neill colony of 3000 still most of us wouldn't, we need to build much more than that! I'm not in this to watch a television program from my nursing home in 2053, watching distant astronauts collecting rock samples from the Martian surface for the first time, something we should have been doing in the 1980s. We need to develop the economics of space travel.

What is the difference between the emulation of human intelligence and human intelligence. Suppose we created within a computer an emulation of a human being, lets say is a simulation of a human in a simulated house. Within that simulated house is a simulated video screen, and a real camera takes an image of us, and real microphones pick up sounds, and reproduce that image and sound in the simulated house so that the simulated person can hear in, so you can talk to him or her and she can talk to you. You can interact with one another through this interface. the only difference is the simulated person doesn't have a physical body, but she is quite intelligent, she can figure things out, can help you with your work, since her brain is being simulated in the computer, that simulated has that sim brain do things that real brains can do, and since thinking is a physical process that can be simulated by mathematics, as any other physical process can, such as weather, or stars going supernova, I think by the time we can do that, we'll have machines that can think, invent, and do science!

 
Biology is a physical process that can be simulated in a computer, once we capture and understand the biology that occurs in our brains, we can abstract it out, and get computers to simulate the thinking and learning that goes on in the brain, without the need to simulate every neuron. Right now the only barrier is that computers are too slow, but that won't remain the case for very long! As for the problem of colonizing space, I think the only reason we aren't doing it now, is because we aren't smart enough to figure out how to transport millions of human beings into space and keep them alive there cheaply. There is nothing about the Universe which suggests that it is impossible. This is a solvable problem, we just aren't clever enough to figure it out yet, so lets build something that is cleverer that we are, maybe a superhuman intelligence that we create can build these space colonies for is. As the progress in space travel is slow compared to the progress in computing speeds by computers!

 
Unless we can figure out a way to extend those lifetimes substantially, this in turn requires a more complete understanding of our biology and of what makes us age. if we can reverse that, we can live longer, there is nothing in the laws of physics that says this is impossible, so we either figure out how to establish perpetual youth or we build machines that can figure out how to do that.

You think the terrorists can stop us? I do not consider myself a part of the same human race as those terrorists!
I am not responsible for their behavior, they choose to be evil, I don't think we should let those miserable creatures prevent us from colonizing space, but I do know one thing, they aren't us!

 
How can I ever be satisfied with less than space travel for the whole human race, and not just a handful of us, who happen to have the "Right Stuff" to be selected for our government's elite astronaut program, whenever the taxpayer is feeling generous enough to fund it! So long as there is life, there is hope, and I'm still alive, and hopefully expect to live another couple decades or more!

You know why the Europeans colonized the New World, and not China, nor the Muslims to the South? China was united under one stupid Emperor that decided to burn all of his ships, the Muslims were more concerned about the hereafter rather than the here and now, but the Europeans, a factitious bunch compete against each other to settle the New World, not all the nations of Europe held hands and participated together to combine resources to colonize the New World, it was instead the Spanish competing against the Portuguese, and the French, the Dutch and the English that settled colonies in the New World. Europe as a collective whole did not! These little countries ran circles around the big Empires like China, and even managed to colonize the continent next door, Australia, right under their noses. o what do you think, do we follow the Chinese Model or the European one for colonization? Which one worked better?

Well they are cylindrical. Maybe if we had a B330 that was 100 meters in radius, we could spin it once every 20 seconds to create 1-G at the outer wall.

Probably would look a bit like this, except smaller. this is the Kalpana Cylinder, it is smaller that the Bernal Sphere, I think it houses about 3000 people, it is designed to be built in low Earth orbit unlike some of the others.

This is a view of the interior, as you can see the soccer/football field to give you a size comparison.

Here is another view.

A view of a patio.

A view of a lake and golf course. I think playing golf in this environment would be tricky.

Here's a view from one of the side ledges.

Here is a diagram of the various parts, it has power beamed to it from a separate Solar Power Satellite, since this one houses only 3000 people, the power requirements are smaller than for a big city such as New York. The sides are covered with a microwave rectenna, and there is a single radiator fin projecting out to regulate heat.

Why not rotate the radiation shielding? If a colony rotates as a piece, it is less complicated and requires less maintenance, and in this case the shielding is the floor.

However, you could rotate a colony this way. This drawing is not to scale, it is drawn this way only to show how the cylinder rotates. If we could build this in Geosynchronous Orbit, and connect it to Earth's surface with space elevators, the curvature at Geosynchronous orbit is only slight when compared to the width of this cylinder. The surface of the inside of this torus is for all practical purposes the same radius as the outside of this torus if it were drawn to scale with the Earth and the orbital distance. The length of the inside is only slightly shorter than the outside, and normal materials can stretch and compress to accommodate a "smoke ring" rotation inside and out as this diagram demonstrates. One can build a cylindrical space colony completely around the Earth with no end caps and rotate it as the red arrows indicate. Since there are no end caps, there can be no O'Neill mirror geometry to reflect sunlight within. The best alternative would be to place linear solar power satellites to either side of this cylinder as it rotates or perhaps cover the outside with solar panels, though I think you would need more surface area than is available on the outside of this ring cylinder to provide enough energy to reproduce sunlight artificially within, due to the inefficiencies of converting electricity to light. I think covering the outside with microwave receivers and of course attaching radiators on the outside to control temperature would be how this would be done.

I would suggest using holographic light panels in place of the Solars between the valleys, preferably a holographic image of the Sun produced at normal solar intensity. I wouldn't want to put a florescence tube in the center of the cylinder as it would get to hot as you got too close. With a holographic light panel, one could walk across the surface of it without getting burned by the light intensity. One could look down and the Sun would appear just as far away as if you were standing on the opposite valley and looking up at it.

On the other hand you could just attach the solar panels to the radiators on the outside of the cylinder. the panels can stick out and rotate with the cylinder, if they are strong enough to withstand several gravities of centrifugal force, that should be enough surface area to power the artificial sunlight holograms, and since the curvature is slight at that radius, the panels should grate against one another when they are on the inside of the torus.

This is a more to scale drawing of that same cylinder, the solar panels are also radiators and hang downward from the curved floor of this cylinder. This cylinder wraps all the way around the Earth at this orbital distance and so do the solar panels, some are always exposed to the sun and collecting energy even while others are in shadow.

Of course it would take a long time to build, I'm not disputing that, but we can start with a short segment and elongate.

Yeah, probably. I was thinking of the longer term, and the Juno probe is coming up, so Jupiter is on the mind of many people at this moment. One idea is to build a hab around an orbital tether, or a space elevator. Build enough space elevators and connect them with a planetary ring at geosynchronous orbit. Which is at 35,786 km. At this distance, you could wrap an extended Model 1 Space colony along this orbit, lets use a radius of 100 meters in this example. If it rotates 3 times per minute, it will produce 1-G of spin gravity. The circumference of this orbit is 224,850 km so we bend this cylinder into a circle and make it 224,850 km long and rotate it inside out through the ring it forms. Now at 35,786 km radius, this bending is barely noticeable. The surface of the rotating cylinder would have to stretch and compress with every rotation, but the amount of stretching and compression needed to make this happen is very small, and the momentum of the rotation would be greater than the energy needed to compress and stretch these surfaces every 20 seconds. I use the radius of 100 meters because this minimizes the differences in orbit radii, keeping it to 200 meters. So the surface furthest away from Earth is at 35,786,100 meters, and the surface closest is at 35,785,900 meters and the difference between these two radii and circumferences is 1.0000055887933515714289706280965, this is the number you get if you divide the larger radius by the smaller. this is a 0.00055887933515714289706280965% difference, I think even steel can stretch this much, but if your really concerned about it, we can segment it and include rubber expansion joints.

The amount of real estate this represents is 141,277,421,632 square meters,
or 34,910,271.52 US acres.

The inside of this hollow cylinder would seem fairly straight, one football field above ones head would be the center of the axis of rotation, look in either direction along the cylinder and it will seem to "diminish to infinity", the slight curvature of this orbit would not be apparent.

Now where would the space elevators go? You can have a counter-rotating segment which slides past the rotating cylinder surface, and use a plasma window to cover the gap to prevent too much air from leaking out into space, this air can always be replaced anyway by more air brought up from Earth.

Jupiter has Helium-3, it is probably the largest source of it besides the sun. Jupiter also rotates quite fast. It has an almost 10 hour day, and the orbital period for a low orbit is only three hours! At higher altitude it is 10 hours.
At Jupiter's radius (71,492 km) its 2.9641440306301296 hours for 1 orbit. At 160,000 km in radius, the orbit period is 9.924145125788737 hours. Jupiter rotates once every 9.925 hours, so the 160,000 km level is Jupiter's synchronous orbit. If one were to build a standard space elevator for Jupiter, one would start from there. But considering that there are two known moons orbiting within that distance the logical place to build a space elevator from would be from its innermost Moon Metis. Metis has an orbital period of 7 hours and 4.5 minutes, about 3 hours shorter than Jupiter's rotation which is 9.925 hours The end of the space elevator would be hanging in the atmosphere. Jupiter spins at its equator at 45,259 km/hour The end of the elevator within the atmosphere would be moving at 64,171 km/hour, the difference between the two velocities is 18,912 km/hour or 5.25 km/sec. At the end of the tether, you'd weigh only 2.075 times your Earth weight because of that rotation. To use the tether, a rocketship would first have to accelerate to 5.25 km/sec and then leap out of the atmosphere and catch onto the end of this tether, then it would climb the tether up to Jupiter's Moon Metis, and then continue up another tether extending from Metis's far side and use centrifugal force to fling to a higher orbit around Jupiter.

You could always heat the rocks to high temperatures using concentrated sunlight to break their chemical bonds.

Usually most materials are manufactured by chemical synthesis, just ask an appropriate engineer how its done, I am not one. the strongest material is carbon, and I'm pretty sure Jupiter's ring materials has carbon in it.