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Why not just roll out some black blankets or plastic? Like the fabric or plastic folks put under landscaping to keep other plants from growing maybe. Just put some big rocks around the edge to keep it from blowing away.
These are probably silly and impossible ideas for power generation, but I'll throw them out there anyways.
1. Why not just implant a charging station in a person. Robots come in to fill up their batteries. Course can a battery be made that small? What kind of charge will it hold if it can? Then you'd have a temperature differential, just plug yourself into an outlet, or maybe make power like one of those wristwatches that generates power when you move around?
2. Just park on an arterial wall and stick out a turbine. Let your blood flow generate some power.
3. Maybe have them migrate to the surface of the skin and run your heat differential that way.
Feel free to tear these ideas to shreads. I don't care, and they're probably dumb anyways.
I think that it could work well if you can get high reproduction rates. I am not sure how fast they grow there. Considering that Giant tourists can live over 100 years it might not be as practical as one might think.
Yeah that's the thing isn't it? Mankind has traditionally avoided trying much agriculture on that sort of a time scale. Even most trees start bearing fruit in a fraction of that time I think. It's a bit like raising elephants except they don't cost as much to feed. On the upside if it is well managed after you get over that initial two decade or so hump you can harvest some every year, but at the same time by then your turtle farm has probably reached its carrying capacity in one way or another so you're going to be eating a lot of turtle eggs or young turtles to preserve your tortoises of reproductive age.
The freshwater turtles sound like the best option right now. It'd be on a more normal timescale for sure. Being from the mainland would increase the dangers of inbreeding though, but with the lighter weight you could probably bring several founder females and plenty of AI samples. I guess you'd want to choose based on clutch size, time to breeding age, and time to adult size. Any other qualifications or necessary traits that I'm missing?
Space isn't there just for tourists, if we want to get the best out of it we need our top scientists up there, you need fit/healthy people for long duration flight, best aircraft pilots, and these days there is a greater need for people schooled in medicine and science on spaceflight.
That's the way it works : it is not a popularity contest
I'm not advocating the average joes go along just as tourists. Surely there are some jobs anyone can be trained to do, but end up only getting done by scientists and pilots because they're the only folks to get the chance. Like some of these experiments on plant or animal growth that have been run in the past. Pretty much anyone can be trained to dole out the appropriate amount of food and water, do weight/height measures, draw blood, and that sort of thing. Once they're up it's not like the scientist is going to radically alternate the experiement, and the information it gathers will be analyzed back on earth. I'll give you the need for trained career pilots nowadays, and I'll even give you doctors and engineers for a more long term voyage than anything that has been so far. However, doesn't it seem likely that the majority of jobs in space just like on earth can be filled with average people with a littlre training?
Earth seems like the best sandbox we have right now for finetuning a planet. Maybe it won't be applicable for anything in the near future, but it could give ideas of what to try or not to try in the future to get things from being decent to being just right. State what you ideal climate and ecology would be for the area you're trying to change and how you'd accomplish it.
The moon's escaping. That's a pretty major object that earth hasn't cleared. Does that mean earth isn't a planet either?
give away seats to their citizens? It seems like a good way to drum up support to me. Looking at the US as an example why not have an annual or biannual or something drawing of social security numbers. Maybe 5 or 10 or more. Those who get picked and don't decline the chance get a shot at astronaut training. Make it through, get certified mentally and physically, and then you're put in the astronaut rotation with at least 1 assured trip into space. So sure you might not play an important role, but surely there are some experiments that anyone of average intelligence can be trained to run. It seems like you could get a lot more support from folks who don't have anything against manned space flight if they had the chance to get a free trip to space out of it.
Truthfully I don't know if turtle's white meat, red meat, or something else, but it is edible. Specifically I'm thinking about giant tortoises after watching Galapagos on National Geographic Channel a few days back. Apparently back in the day sailors would take them on ship and turn them on their backs to keep them out of the way. The tortoises could then live for months without eating or drinking. Thus it seems to me that on a journey to Mars you wouldn't even need to bring food or water along for the tortoises or at least not much. Bring along a male and female pair of breeding age or just some females with frozen sperm for artifical insemination. AI would allow you to build a large and diverse genetic base quickly, but on the other hand these giant tortoises tend to be from islands so inbreeding is a bit less of a worry as they've likely already done it before in the past due to low population thus removing a lot of the bad genes from the gene pool.
So why wouldn't a growing Mars colony want some tortoises around for food? One danger to my mind is that these tortoises are actually fairly powerful so you'd need to reinforce their pen or the walls of the place they're living. At the same time the things take about 25 years to sexual maturity if I remember correctly. Thus it could take a while even at a breakneck speed to get a large enough population to start eating more than say one or two a year. Of course given a lack of predators you should have a very high survival rate of hatchlings. I'm not real sure how much food and water they'd need. Given their slow reptilian metabolism though one would suspect it'd be less than a similarly sized mammal, but of course space will be at a premium for a very long time in any event. Perhaps they'd be amiable to eating plant parts humans can't or want which would cut down a space a bit.
Some side benefits. First it'd give the humans a pet, and given that they're going to be around for about 25 years anyways getting attached won't be as much concern as it would if you were raising cows and slaughtering them after a year or two. Second the shells could likely be fashioned into some low tech tools like bowls or shovels. Third the skin could perhaps be used to make leather goods.
Just an idea. I don't know much about this sort of thing so hopefully NASA, the ESA, or someone here hasn't aleady compiled a list of why this is a horrible idea.
Ha. I gave up on ever getting approved to join. Glad to be here. Hopefully I can contribute something?