New Mars Forums

I suppose the little tiny brainchip human replica's and the notion of interstellar travel where out there.  Actually I was hopeing for an explaination of why this should not be done if it could be done.

I spoke of Lions.  In my view, the human race has exceded limits which have defined it's nature, and so like people who have an abundant food supply and no self control, unsightly consequences are possible and even likely.

The question is manipulation or adaptation.  I will confess, I lean towards a compromise of both, where most people here are all about manipulation, or mechanical adaptation.  However, if biology is a machine, that that is also mechanical adaptions.

To steer towards the topic as you have requested, I would say that at many stars have "Ice Giant Planets".  Many free floaters may be out there as well.  What to do with them if anything?  I think the notion of making them into Earths is not out of the question for very advanced life forms, but very advanced life forms would be what the decendants of humans would be, if the human race has a biological or perhaps even a mechanical continuation.

I would say that the adaptations for Neptune I suggested did include a manipulation, a tether system to collect energy.  That would be a starter.  Further manipulations would be options.  However I was making the point that those doing it are likely to have a altered nature and perhaps altered motivations.

But since you have requested orthydoxy, then I ask if GWJohnson's suggestion about a hemispheric fusion explosion to strip off the atmosphere could be used?

Beyond that I wonder if you could do that, might you indeed make Neptune or Jupiter work like a controlled star.  Drop a special type of Fusion bomb into it periodically to induce a fusion flash of the atmosphere or slushy oceans of whatever?

Then couild you construct a dyson sphere around Neptune?  (Free orbital eliments, not a big metal shell).

I have thought that perhaps if you did put a dyson sphere around Ice Giants or Gas Giants, perhaps the infared light reflecting back would raise the atmospheric temperature and cause the to glow at a shorter wavelength.  If we cold see down in the lower layers, I am sure it would glow in visible light.

Still I am not sure what that gets you.

However this is sort of a way to Soliform Neptune, not Terraform it.  I'm sorry.

The gravitation not being that much greater than Earth, and the spin being more (I believe) could it happen that a space elivator could give access to the thicker atmosphere, and that useful slushy materials from the deep down hot could be extracted and brought up to that space elivator, and moved to orbit, to construct a whatever, leaving behind a gass ball like Saturn?

Or just the reverse, could a process turn Neptune into a binary planet, one a gas runt, and the other a terrestrial?  Perhaps starting with a fusion kaboom, and blowing  knot of gas into orbit of Neptune, and if it would condense into a gas midget, then repeat the process?  Then the Hydrogen would be available for future use for energy production.

Anyway, perhaps that puts you closer to where you want the thread to be.  My appologies for the earlier deviation.

I want to participate, but it will be weird.  Just warning you.

One thing that is noticible is that most of the time when we speculate on the future, we leave out the probabable part where the humans change into something else.

Cyborg seems the most likely, so I will include that.

Supposing that the biological mush that composes our bodies and brains is to be kept alive by extrordinary methods.  Then there must be vastly expanded places to put people, and they must be provided at an economical cost, but to be moral in on sense the quality of life must be good.

So, for big planets, I propose that a human upon becomming very old, might have a modified biological body, one with the purpose of surviving in zero gee, and also for supporting itself off of sunlight power.  The body designed to run down deer, and escape from lions would be set aside.

An organic "Host" would be manufactured.  It would perhaps be created in part from the subjects own cell lines.  However photosynthis, or the ability to digest Hydrogen would be  added.  The host would be very large.

The subject might exist in the following ways. 
Case 1 -It could be entirely inside of the host, and needing no bones.  No calcium to loose.  The wole thing in a canister, the canister inside of a big "Transformer Robot".  I don't think it could be a car or a truck though.
Case 2 -It could be like a human body, but with bones replaced by artificial bones attachment to the host would be with an umbilicle, and this might limit mobility, unless the host moves with you.
Case 3 -It could be a detachable human like body, with a real human referbished brain, and would share blood with the host.  As disgusting as this might seem to others, drinking blood from the host, and the returning the blood to the host, is more moral than eating other organisms in my opinion.  I only say blood, because it would be a fluid containing hemoglobin.  Oxygen being the need to satisfy.  Many things would be modified.  No bowels, no feces.  No urine.  Just the exchange of fluid.
The host would of course recycle the materials passed back to it, producing sugars and so on.  This organism would be eaten by lions if their were lions in orbit of Neptune, but since the predator prey relationship we had in the past is gone, the shape of us may change.

So to power this, either solar concentrators, or tethers dipping into the atmosphere of Neptune.  The tethers, orbital motion would be a compromise between Magnetic field, and the motion of the atmosphere.  If the teather was part of a bigger system of a ring circling the entire planet geosynchronis, (Very big and star treck), it could conduct electricty from one part of the atmopshere to another, using the power.  It also could have windmills within the atmophere, perahaps Nano-Windmills on the tethers.  At the bottom ends of the tethers, substances in the atmosphere could be collected, and conveyed upwards to the orbital ring.  The needed products to conduct Fusion for instance.

So, not enough room on Earth for all the "People" living to be 300 years old?  Send them to orbit Neptune and other places.

Then some very bazarr inventions are needed to produce avatars that can function in whatever lies below.  That is if that can be done and has value.

So, a "Human" could have various avenues of mobility in orbit, and could also perhaps have an avatar deep down in Neptune.  However machines to do that would be completely different.  They would opperate in a much different way with different physical properties than anything we currently do.

Make it into an Earth?  Well go star treck go, but once the human race changes into something else, that is not needed.

I like the idea that you can expose a hand, but I am wondering if a compromise could be used to give some of the benefits of being bearhanded, while, risking less a repetive type injury.  In other words, I am thinking that repeatedly exposing hands to vacuum has unknown consequences, and I fear a accumulation of injury, and I think that a modified scheme might help.

Since we are generally "Handed", right or left, what if a right handed person, kept the glove on the left hand, using it for gripping only, and what if the right hand glove had open finger tips?  I think that the finger tips are the most important tactile feature of the hand.  What if in addition the right hand had a second outer glove you could pull over the fingertips from time to time.  It could be a counterpressure glove, but it might be easier to slide a pressurized container over that hand with the exposed fingertips to rest the fingertips.  Either an Apollo glove, or even a bit funny, a "Captain Hook" type prostesis.

The "Captain Hook" device would be a little canister your right hand could fit into with some type of sealing method.  Eather a metal flange scheme, or a torroidal sphincter at the wrist.  The canister would be pressurized by a device to compress Martian air into the right hand canister.  (You seem to have this person working in a workshop, so a little air compressor is not that far off base).  Then inside of the right hand canister would be a mechanical device which would allow the right hand to still do work squeezing the device to actuate a mechanical grip on the front of the canister, much like a person who has a prostesis can.

So in Mode 1: the person would have a left hand fully gloved, and a right hand partially gloved so that they could do tasks where the sense of touch and fingernails might matter.  In Mode 2: They would rest their dominant hand inside of the pressurizable canister, but still be able to use the dominant hand to grip things using a prostesis double hook type device.

A modification of this would be to have one finger and thumb exposed, and to keep the other fingers which are mostly for power anyway protected by a partial glove.

Not the fastest, agreed.
Not the cheepest?  What is? (Real question)

However what they show there is a interesting start to a situation where you don't go from point A to point B by the fastest method or the cheepest method, but it the spaceship is a world of it's own. 

Technologies keep changing also, for instance heated graphite mentioned in one of the threads here.  I would suppose that that might spew atmospheric gasses.

I wonder, does the existing concept of such propulsion include electric rockets and that efficiency, or advanced robotic resupply ships?  Further, if resupply is eventually from other sources than the Earth, does that change the economic balance.

The Moon, Ceres, Vesta, Demos, Phobos, the upper atmosphere of Mars, Callisto.

I'm reaching.

However for civilians cycling spaceships have an advantage.

I am expecting as I think everyone would that the first people who go to Mars will be exceptional people. Physically, with youth, and a good survival sense, and a energy level that can sustain abusive circumstances for a prolonged period.

Later they will be more towards average.

We seem to have a differnce in time scope.  I am less concerned about the original establishment than the most powerful outcome.

I trust that people like you will work out the details of the first "Dry" settlement.  It almost has to be such.

However, I am pleased to see that you innovated and added a potential water trap to your airlock.

The only way a first settlement would make sense in deep water is if a fision reactor were landed into a large body of ice, and melted into it, and if it then deployed methods to facilitate life, such as a Chemosynthis system, developing a pool of water filled with Oxygen and food.  Then the people would land, and have food, power and Oxygen.

However, I don't think it is a best way.

I think your methods are the best for the start.  However, I think that capturing and controlling the large bodies of ice at the poles and converting them to ice covered reserviors, are a very good objective to work towards.

I am not against greenhouse gasses.  My understanding is that the poles should contain enough CO2 for a 10 Millibar average pressure to exist.  Obviously this fits just fine with stabalizing the surface of cold ice, to decrease sublimination.

The pathway from First dry settlement to Polar Reservoirs might be decades long or longer.  It might involve artificial salty dry valley lakes in the temperate zones, before getting the poles under control.

After the poles were under controll, an economy where water is moved in canals is reasonable.  Particularly for the Southern Hemisphere.  I believe that that ice cap is at high elivations, and Hellas is very low, so, gravity flow is reasonable.  But you are correct this would be an action that a rather mature an powerful Martian society with millions or ever billions of people would be involved with.

As for the Vertical water column airlock.  I agree not for the original dry methods.  However, if you have a reservoir, and put a little dome on top of it you can pressurize it from 6-60 millibars as desired using outside atmosphere.  (I think 6 to 12 might be enough if it is fresh ice water.  6 would be enough if it is a very cold brine).

The dome would have a hatch you entered from the side, for access to the lake surface, and it would have a hatch on it's bottom for access to the lake. 

So at very maximum, if the dome pressurized to 50 millabars, it would take care of 1/20 of the pressure differential to 1 bar pressure inside the lake water column.  The water column would take care of 19/20 of the differential. 

If you used 11 milliabars for the pressurization, with the horizontal door closed and the floor hatch open (To ice water), then the dome would only carry 1/200 of the pressure differential. (More or less).

This mostly only makes sense if your object to access is inside of the lake.  Perhaps a stone building on the bottom of the lake, perhaps a tunnel enterance to a underground facility, an entrence with either an air lock or a trap like a sink trap.

I like the idea you communicated about a balloon to capture air lock air.

I decided to separate this out, because I am interested in it specifically.

What about air locks?  Can they be safe?  Over time with wear?

For Polar Conditions with abundant water:
Because of my decompression phobia, I have felt that for instance a person emerging from a shelter would be best off to enter a reservoir of water and to emerge upwards into a partial pressure chamber.  Perhaps 10-50 Millibars, depending on the temperature.  A "Lid" would then be closed on the vertical door that the person emerged through, and then the partial pressure chamber would be decompressed and a horizontal door would be opened allowing access to the outside.

For "Tropical" conditions with sparce water:
I have to say I imagine it could also be done with brine very cold, so that the "Partial Pressure" chamber could actually stay at ambient.  Instead of an air lock, it would be a "Vapor Lock".  The person would emerge up, and close the lid.  The the dry cold walls in the chamber would collect the moisture.  Then the horizontal door would be opened.  From time to time the "Vapor Lock would be heated up and the frost vaporized, and that being sucked into a compressor, to recapture the water.

The point of all this being that a water column does not require a pump so much, in the case of minimizing losses of O2 from the habitat.
I am aware that some very clever methods have been considered for baisically sheet metal doors that slide. But those imply dumping the contents of the airlock out.

I am also wary of the abrasive nature of the Martian environment as currently reported (These facts have a tendency to change over the years, so I am also aware of that).

So I am not wild about metal parts used over and over again for air locks.  High maintenance and high risk I am thinking.

This time I will put up with what I consider abusive dismissal, as long as you understand that I won't consider myself dismissed.

I baisically need to have an outlet for this, and perhaps an opportunity for update, and then I consider I will be retired from an obligation to promote these alternate ideas, and can move on to more current and pleasant ideas what ever they might be.

So, thanks, for the opportunity to talk and get it done.

The profit margin is what matters.

I have edited my first response.  I think I can do better.

It is a matter of prereferences.  You could put forward the "It's my or the highway" attitude, but I might say, that there are various places and conditions on Mars, and I am not an enemy of pressure suits, especially counter pressure suits.

However there will be two budgets.  One will be for maintainence, and one will be for expansion.

I really do not think that large money will be expended from either budget so that small children can hang out outside of the habitat.  It would be spent on suits, so that well prepaired adults could do real and necessary work needed for survival and profit.

If that society were to work it's children, I would expect their chores would be mostly indoors.

And I do believe that it is unwise to have children accumulate radiation exposure before they have been raised and have become old enough to have had their children.

Outside would best be reserved for rational adults past prime, and still physically fit.

And I do believe that the best future is avatar machines, with which all persons including children could experience the Martian surface, such as smelling it, and seeing it in ultra violet light, and so on.

I actually have notions on a radically different type of Robot/Avatar.  However it would be for heavy and crude work, but would compliment and also support the robots that NASA has been doing work on.  The logic of it's structure is quite different.

So, you see a person and a child person as well, could do work from within the habitat, perhaps running a avatar/robot, and it could be structured like a video game, and not made into some repugnant task.  (Although usually we make our own realitys a hell by our lack of perception of what truely matters).

And further, that child could in the same day swim in a diving bell filled with air at the bottom of an ice covered reservoir, and could in addition travel in a submarine, and could in addition run an underwater avatar, and could walk from one settlement to another in an underground tunnel lighted artificially, and filled with apple trees.

Not exactly being locked up in a tin can is it?

But returning to people working outside, the necessary work would be done by the most cost effective and morrally acceptable methods.

I didn't know that gloves could come off that way for up to 10 minutes at a time.  I bet if feels funny, and perhaps not all that good for you, but sometimes delicate work has to be done.  Thats something.

Well, your responses were far more kind and generous than I was expecting.

And hopefully you will not mind if I expand the conversation around this subject.

Here is a link to such a lake in Antarctica:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vanda

A nuclear reactor in the habitat at the bottom of the Lake would make sense, because if it were carfully managed, it could perhaps dump heat into the lake.
The lake would also be a direct solar collector.  However, Mars of course does not have the same solar flux, perhaps > 1/2 that of the Earth, and also subject to dust
storms.

I do make the point that extra heat could be dumped into the bottom of the lake by boiling water in solar concentrators distrubuted around the lake, and then turning
a turbine, and quenching the steam directly into the lake water.  So, the lake would serve the utility of being a part of a condensation process, and and also as a
energy storage, method, since during the nights, (And the terrible cold winters at higher lattitudes), the lake could serve as a source of heat to drive a different
boiling process where Ammonia might be boiled.  Of course this implies metal radiators to dissapate the heat, and recondese the ammonia at the surface.  However, I
have been contemplating cisterns inside of sheds filled with an Ammonia/Water mixed solution, to again quench the Ammonia steam.  The cisterns might actually be
hollows in the ground with stone/tile floors and walls, and inside of that bags suitable to tollerate the solution and also the temperatures.  The purpose of the
sheds would be to protect the bags from UV light during the day, and also to shade the condenser bags, and I suppose to keep the abrasive dust of the Martian
environment at bay to a degree.  The sheds might have an open wall though facing the polar direction, to allow heat to radiate out, or perhaps just a transparent
layer of "Plastic film". Whatever that would be, it would be desired that it had the minimum greenhouse effect and let heat radiate out of the bags.

So, the nuclear power might be an small part of the power sourcing, but desired, in case of a major fault on the solar driven power system.

So, with much electricity, it becomes reasonable to think about a large industrial infrastructure.  I suggest that this would be implemented in tunnels in sandstone
or other rather soft rock, under the lake.  Of course some processes would work better on the surface in buildings built there.

I think that such tunnels would actually be a good place to grow fruit trees under artificial light.  The artificial lights would be modulated in accordance with
power availablity, since trees are used to illumination variance due to clouds and  changing seasons.  Thus this would be a load leveling method, a method to utilize
scrap power, when there was an excess of power.  The interesting thing is if it was apple trees, you could let the tunnels cool down and perhaps put in very little
light during the winter.  However, I am not sure what the apple trees humor would be about having seasons twice as long.  This would then be food, and wood, and also
"Parks" for people to spend leisure time in.  So this could have significant value.

In the end my dream would be to fill the entire Northern basin back up with an ice covered sea.  However the transformation to this situation would be long and hard.
I could mention several impediments to that.  Such as the likelyhood that there is not enough water available to fill that flat baisin to 100 feet deep, and there
is no certainty that it would be a salty body of water.  If it were to be, then the salt would have to exist under the soil, a remnant of the ocean that existed
Billions of years ago.

However if achieved, then the point northern condensation would be captured, and any ice and snow condensation would be melted from below, the solar concentrators ubiquitous on top of the ice layer.  In such a case, I would presume terraformation at that point would have created an atmospheric pressure of at least 10 to 20 millibars.  The need to shield the ice from sublimation would be reduced or eliminated, since you would have a continuous source of make up water from the condensation on the surface of the north pole, which would be continuously melted from below.

The I would expect a lesser sized ocean covered with ice, and likely not as salty as I would prefer.  However, it would be easy to dyke off "Polders" to fill with properly salty water, to allow for bottom water of 23 C (73 F) and more.

Trucks that were partially boyant but traveled under the ice would be an option.  They actually could run on roads on the bottom of the Ocean/Sea/Lake, or perhaps
could be very boyant, and connect to rails, under the ice, attached to the bottom of the ice surface.  Subs? Yes.

I like it.

OK,

I will add to that:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-gal … anets.html

So, in any discussion of human travel from one star to another, it seems only reasonable to add as a very important precursor, the ability to find, and utilize these objects.  I think that between the various views expressed there is some real options to expand into such a collection of objects, particularly if some of them are magnetic, and have moons, or have materials available to make large concentrating mirrors, or if Fusion or something else are available as an energy supply.

I am inclined to favor trying to find a Jupiter, because if it had an IO, then it would have boiled off it's water and exposed silicate materials to use.  Also a Jupiter with a moon or two has energy available from the inertia of those moons, and also the tidal energy captured as heat in the moons in some cases.

Of further interest could be an "Earth", or "Venus" cast out of it's solar system.  Having a hot core still, and likely a magnetic field (Venus would convect if it cooled off in the outer solar system?), Plate Tectonics would likely expose hot rock at the points where oceans spread, if it could spread faster than cold ice could flow over it.  This also could be an energy source for starting a civilization on such a planet.

My best attempt to create an inducer would be to put orbital objects in the same orbit, spaced at even intervals, and then to create a hot cathode to boil off electrons towards the next orbital object.  Each orbital eliment would serve as a anode to the cathode of the other.  To create a circuit, they would all have to be in action.  The circuit would be an electron current passing between the collection of orbital objects.  The field produced should have a field pointed at the north and south Martian poles, presuming that this "Circuit" of orbital objects were to orbit at the equator.  If in the Martian interior there existed the convection of a fluid having magnetic properties, then perhaps some induced effect would occur, but I am quite out of my league in this, just grasping at straws, due to the nature of your request which is made with limited scientific information on what is the process inside of Mars.
That is not against you, but to say that I sort of have a notion, but notions at this level are usually wrong, but might be next door to something worth thinking about.

It is not required that the objects would orbit the equator.