Paraterraforming

JoshNH4H · 2008-01-24 15:42:07

For this topic, I'm not asking if we should paraterraform, merely asking how we should if we wanted too.

So there we go- How should we paraterraform?

I think that we should start with conventional terraforming. That is to say, we thicken the atmosphere, warm it etc. Then once the atmosphere is about 150 (or more if more is available) mb CO2, and as much water as is feasible, we start building domes. Domes will already have been built in some numbers, but I'm talking superdomes ( ) like all of hellas/ valles mareneris eventually. Not to mention possibly a bit of cyto/exo/areo/genoforming (http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5791) if it's feasible. The best part is that the domes wouldn't have to cover the whole planet.

Dome structure: The domes would be made of some hydrocarbon, polyethylene of some sort for shielding, transparency etc. I think it could be set up and prodiced with machines of some sort. Oh, did I mention, partially supported by pressure, and partially by carbon supports.

Antius · 2008-01-25 02:50:50

Paraterraforming will begin as soon we begin a long term presence on another planetary body, probably with the first Martian base. Immiediately, it will be neccesary to make use of sunlight to grow crops and inflatable domes are the obvious choice. As the need for food expands so will the domed areas. Eventually, people will want to live and work on the surface and domed cities will be built. By the time terraforming proper begins, large areas will already be paraterraformed under inflatable domes. Thickening the atmosphere will simplify and cheapen the process. Simple economics and timescales suggest that Mars will be heavily paraterraformed, long before it reaches anything like an Earthlike state.

cIclops · 2008-01-25 03:34:08

What's the difference between paraterraforming and terraforming?

Terraformer · 2008-01-25 06:00:20

Paraterraforming means terraforming parts using domes over them as opposed to conventional terraforming.

JoshNH4H · 2008-01-25 14:39:07

Paraterraforming will begin as soon we begin a long term presence on another planetary body, probably with the first Martian base. Immiediately, it will be neccesary to make use of sunlight to grow crops and inflatable domes are the obvious choice. As the need for food expands so will the domed areas. Eventually, people will want to live and work on the surface and domed cities will be built. By the time terraforming proper begins, large areas will already be paraterraformed under inflatable domes. Thickening the atmosphere will simplify and cheapen the process. Simple economics and timescales suggest that Mars will be heavily paraterraformed, long before it reaches anything like an Earthlike state.

That's exactly why I'm a fan of it. But instead of letting things happen, I think that we should purposely paraterraform it, instaed of dumping resourses into all at once planetary engineering (conventional Terraforming).

Take note terraformer- you might want to do this on ceres.

Terraformer · 2008-01-25 16:19:52

Lets see. On Ceres, with 2.4% of Earths gravity, we'll be able to build 40x as high and dig 40x as deep. That means a possiblity of up to a hundred Km high pillars supporting an asteroid produced greenhouse. It would allow for less atmosphere to be used, with the problem that no Aerobraking is possible. Possibly mitigated by valves that let spacecraft through. Though why that would happen when there would be a perfectly good space elevator...

Midoshi · 2008-01-25 19:14:17

I dunno if anyone else has ever heard of this project (it's not exactly new), but a somewhat inhospitable area of Earth has already been started to be "paraterraformed" :

Kazakhstan has unveiled a new architectural project for its capital Astana - a giant transparent tent that will contain an indoor city.
The 150m-high (500ft) dome, designed by UK architect Norman Foster, will be built in just over a year.
Astana lies in the very heart of the Central Asian steppe. Temperatures there often drop to -30C in the winter.
...in an area larger than 10 football stadiums, will be a city with squares and cobbled streets, canals, shopping centres and golf courses.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6165267.stm

So Mars gets a lot colder than -30°C and this "tent" probably isn't airtight, but I still think it's pretty cool.

noosfractal · 2008-01-25 22:40:04

Thank you for posting that. That is completely awesome.

More concept sketches (are they still sketches if they are computer generated?) ...

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=511231

warning: the images are quite large.

JoshNH4H · 2008-01-28 11:15:43

Thank you for posting that. That is completely awesome.

Imagine that! a real tent town on earth, the first step to one on mars, which can expand to a large paraterraformed area.

More concept sketches (are they still sketches if they are computer generated?) ...

:mrgreen:
I'd say so.

What do you think should be the first large area of mars to be domed?

I would suggest Melas chasma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melas_Chasma

This would be somewhat easier to dome/tent because of its lower elevation and smallish area (compared to hellas or isidis, or any other well defined area), but it provides a space about 550 by 250 km in an ovalish shape.

but some of the smaller northern craters would be good starting points.

Terraformer · 2008-02-01 14:16:00

Instead of the Mars Society funding simulated Mars missions in Antarctica, why don't they support instead a Paraterraforming project in the Tundra. Antarctica's ideal, as there are areas there that are dry, but extreamly cold. Like Mars.

robertwalker · 2013-05-08 14:14:22

It would breach the Antarctica Treaty to paraterraform Antarctica. You aren't allowed to introduce new lifeforms to Antarctica because of the scientific value of it as it is. Tourists even have to be careful about what they carry onto the land in the mud on their shoes.

Same for Mars - paraterraforming would breach the Outer Space Treaty especially the COSPAR guidelines. Also not likely to be changed in the near future as we know so little about Mars. Haven't even studied it on a microscopic level, just hand lens, and not dug deep below the surface where unchanged organic deposits probably exist unchanged for billions of years.

Landing humans on Mars at all right now indeed breaches the treaties. There is no way to sterilize a human occupied ship to COSPAR guidelines as it would kill the humans, also a hard landing would irreversibly contaminate Mars straight away.

I've got a blog post about it all here, where I argue that orbital missions to explore Mars by telepresence make much more sense than surface missions right now, cost less, more scientific return, and don't contaminate the surface. Yet you will be able to walk, run and drive quickly over the surface just as you do on Earth with modern telepresence rigs and omnidirectional treadmills. Even export materials from Mars eventually, all operated by telepresence.

http://robert-inventor.tumblr.com/post/ … a-terrible

Long term them paraterraforming might well make sense, but I'd argue that you might have to choose between paraterraforming and terraforming because terraforming might be a slower more careful process which you can't do if you introduce the wrong life forms too soon.

http://robert-inventor.tumblr.com/post/ … is-far-too

louis · 2013-05-08 18:27:26

JoshNH4H wrote:

For this topic, I'm not asking if we should paraterraform, merely asking how we should if we wanted too.
So there we go- How should we paraterraform?
I think that we should start with conventional terraforming. That is to say, we thicken the atmosphere, warm it etc. Then once the atmosphere is about 150 (or more if more is available) mb CO2, and as much water as is feasible, we start building domes. Domes will already have been built in some numbers, but I'm talking superdomes ( ) like all of hellas/ valles mareneris eventually. Not to mention possibly a bit of cyto/exo/areo/genoforming (http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5791) if it's feasible. The best part is that the domes wouldn't have to cover the whole planet.
Dome structure: The domes would be made of some hydrocarbon, polyethylene of some sort for shielding, transparency etc. I think it could be set up and prodiced with machines of some sort. Oh, did I mention, partially supported by pressure, and partially by carbon supports.

I think we should investigate the possibility of creating worlds within gorges. That seems feasible. We could also use light pipes to pipe in natural solar radiation. We have enclosed football stadiums with roofs spanning at least 300 feet I think. So we could take a gorge like that. Block it off at one end with regolith. And then pressurise. You might end up with a habitable space of maybe 100 metres by 1000 or more. That would be great!

JoshNH4H · 2013-05-09 09:12:40

Paraterraforming definitely has a lot of potential advantages, in the short and long run, in terms of the production of large amounts of habitable space. This biggest question to me is what we would need to do to make the paraterraformed interior radiation-safe.

louis · 2013-05-09 12:05:25

JoshNH4H wrote:

Paraterraforming definitely has a lot of potential advantages, in the short and long run, in terms of the production of large amounts of habitable space. This biggest question to me is what we would need to do to make the paraterraformed interior radiation-safe.

You could roof it with ice. With a gorge you could also hollow out living space at the bottom, so it is sheltered from radiation to a large degree. If you pipe the light in, you can just cover the roof with regolith - job done!

JoshNH4H · 2013-05-10 06:17:10

But at some point that defeats the purpose of paraterraforming, which is after all to have a roofed in, open air environment. I would think that something more along the lines of a layer of water, combined with a thicker atmosphere (perhaps 100 or 200 mb of CO2, which is likely to evolve from the soil anyway upon heating) should be sufficient for radiation protection.

Terraformer · 2013-05-11 06:35:51

How about trialling it in Antarctica? Maybe even roof over a small valley, as a research base for investigating sustainability in both extreme Terran and offworld environments. See whether we can support a small community, maybe in the low hundreds, without relying on that many imports.

karov · 2013-05-11 11:06:59

1. Wind Dam

In Antarctica there are strong catabatic winds blowing from the interior's uplands.

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/imag … soM6MOt4jm

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0701055

Such wind-dam could be combined with Bolonkin inflatable dome https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/imag … c252O51A1w -- it won't need aditional power source cause part of the natural airflow could be compressed-warmed and redirected to keep the roof up.

2. Mars paraterraforming

A Storrs Weather_Machine -- does global foam of tiny smart reflecting bubbles counts for "paraterraforming" envelope / canopy?

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/peopl … r-machine/

on smaller world a "lased" form of such WM + some electromegnetic properties could be used for atmosphere retention, too.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/scalin … rds-j.html

Last edited by karov (2013-05-11 11:17:02)

Antius · 2013-05-14 04:59:38

Human living quarters can be quite compact; can make use of pressurised buildings or even underground structures without much engineering difficulty.
One could build quite aesthetically pleasing towns and villages underground, making use of sunlight pipes to bring limited sunlight into houses, small gardens and common areas.

Agriculture is a different matter – requiring large surface areas with high light levels. Whilst plants can tolerate lower pressures (50-100mbar) provision of large pressurised greenhouses and poly tunnels for agriculture will be expensive and each colonist is likely to need at least a few hundred square metres of agricultural area.

I would suspect that if conventional terraforming can raise atmospheric pressure to 50-100mbar, the cost of living on Mars will be dramatically reduced, with hardy crops raised in non-pressurised glass greenhouses and frames on the Martian surface.

louis · 2013-05-14 18:16:12

Antius wrote:

Human living quarters can be quite compact; can make use of pressurised buildings or even underground structures without much engineering difficulty.
One could build quite aesthetically pleasing towns and villages underground, making use of sunlight pipes to bring limited sunlight into houses, small gardens and common areas.
Agriculture is a different matter – requiring large surface areas with high light levels. Whilst plants can tolerate lower pressures (50-100mbar) provision of large pressurised greenhouses and poly tunnels for agriculture will be expensive and each colonist is likely to need at least a few hundred square metres of agricultural area.
I would suspect that if conventional terraforming can raise atmospheric pressure to 50-100mbar, the cost of living on Mars will be dramatically reduced, with hardy crops raised in non-pressurised glass greenhouses and frames on the Martian surface.

Sunlight pipes can also be used with agriculture as can artificial lighting.

karov · 2013-05-16 02:39:56

I think pretty soon agriculture will be made obsolete by tissue engineering / cell 3D printing of 100% replicas of edible PARTS of edible biological species.
Natural photosynthesis is relativelly inefficient ( under 1% of the incident light turned into potential chemical energy - and how much of it edible? ). Photovoltaics + food printing would have DOZENS of times bigger efficiency in terms of area and volume and energy density.
And starting with animal domestication, then the whole agriculture will be FORBIDDEN, leaving the nature out of the urban centers alone...
Matter of decades.

Antius · 2013-05-16 05:26:59

In the near term, algae may provide some nutritious additives to processed foods. They can achieve much higher photosynthetic efficiency than land based plants. One can imagine algae being grown in glass covered ponds on the Martian surface, maintained under just enough pressure to prevent boiling at 20C. Maybe the heat needed can be provided by solar collectors or nuclear waste heat.

I don't know how much of our food could be produced in this way. Maybe we can blend algae with other additives, or use fungi and bacteria to produce secondary products that approximate the real thing, i.e. Quorn, vegan cheese, etc.

More tradiational greenhouses could be built from adobe and rammed earth, with windows inset as skylights, balancing the internal pressure against the weight of the structure.

karov · 2013-05-17 04:34:49

Antius,

I'm talking about this: https://www.google.com/search?q=3d+prin … e&ie=UTF-8

but NOT about some kind of substitute, ersatz, compromise "food".
Food, yes, synthetic and "printed" but on par or better then the natural food.
Murderless ( or "motherless" ) meat.

The same tech which allows for indeffinite replacement of organs / body parts for human users ( NOT patients! ) printed out from their own cultured cells ( i.e. no immune reaction ), is THE showstopper for all animal husbandry - that means that very soon not only killing any animals would be forbidden, but keeping pets also would be outlawed...

Also printing human organs, animal fless ( meat ) is cellular printing. Plant and fungal food are cellular too. No reason when we print meat, to not print plant and other food biomass, too - incl. designer not only copy/paste template ones.

Why to grow strawberries when we do not eat its leaves, root system, etc. but only the fruits. Why to grow trees of hundreds of tonnes when we harvest miniscule share of eddible matter. Why to breed and kill pigs and cows and chicken when we eat only small part of it >>>??

About efficiency of natural photosynthetic agriculture, thermodynamically it is NIGHTMARE. This is the major environmental and economical incentive which shall bring forward the 3D printing into 100% of food industry - putting asside ethics, aesthetics, environmental issues ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

compared with ( vs.)

10-20%-40% efficiency of PV cheap under-developped electric systems... and virtually no losses in biochemical synthesis of cellular building blocks.

Multispectral nantennae could achieve literally almost 100% efficiency in turning EM radiation into electric current.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ … 051611.php

A square metre of such "feeding" a family?

With thousand TIMES higher areal and voluminous and energy density / efficiency, agriculture and farming shall be considered / condemned as TOTALLY morally / ethically / legally inacceptable.

NATURE shall be left alone to exist / evolve.

Yeah, Mars or other body - natural or artificial - terraformed, but 99.999...% of the terraformed area would be a giant, pure, un"supported" "wilderness" , natural park.

Even more natural then Amazon rainforrest which appears to be subject of vast and utter human "terraforming" anthropogenic activity ( for productivity increase ) in the last 10 000 years.

Ref.: "...apparently human-made supersoil, which still covers up to 10 percent of the Amazon Basin." !!! -- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news … mazon.html --
&
It seems that the usual "standard" for untouched nature appears to be: anthropogenic, product of "unnatural history", artifact of stone age deliberate "terraforming" ...

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#1 2008-01-24 15:42:07

Re: Paraterraforming

#2 2008-01-25 02:50:50

Re: Paraterraforming

#3 2008-01-25 03:34:08

Re: Paraterraforming

#4 2008-01-25 06:00:20

Re: Paraterraforming

#5 2008-01-25 14:39:07

Re: Paraterraforming

#6 2008-01-25 16:19:52

Re: Paraterraforming

#7 2008-01-25 19:14:17

Re: Paraterraforming

#8 2008-01-25 22:40:04

Re: Paraterraforming

#9 2008-01-28 11:15:43

Re: Paraterraforming

#10 2008-02-01 14:16:00

Re: Paraterraforming

#11 2013-05-08 14:14:22

Re: Paraterraforming

#12 2013-05-08 18:27:26

Re: Paraterraforming

#13 2013-05-09 09:12:40

Re: Paraterraforming

#14 2013-05-09 12:05:25

Re: Paraterraforming

#15 2013-05-10 06:17:10

Re: Paraterraforming

#16 2013-05-11 06:35:51

Re: Paraterraforming

#17 2013-05-11 11:06:59

Re: Paraterraforming

#18 2013-05-14 04:59:38

Re: Paraterraforming

#19 2013-05-14 18:16:12

Re: Paraterraforming

#20 2013-05-16 02:39:56

Re: Paraterraforming

#21 2013-05-16 05:26:59

Re: Paraterraforming

#22 2013-05-17 04:34:49

Re: Paraterraforming

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