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#1 2005-04-08 23:50:27

Planet@lien
Banned
From: Duluth, MN
Registered: 2005-04-07
Posts: 25

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

So??


There are old astronauts, and there are bold astronauts, but there are no old bold astronauts
                                        Quote - Ben Bova

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#2 2005-04-08 23:59:32

srmeaney
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From: 18 tiwi gdns rd, TIWI NT 0810
Registered: 2005-03-18
Posts: 976

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

The Nanofungus Anthrax is the ideal terraformer in Methane environments. Of course we will probably want samples of Titan life before we start dumping that stuff on Titan.
Eventually we could bring the biological system up to cave fungus level, insects if we are lucky.

Terraforming will never be about anything other than creating the conditions for non human life to exist across the Universe.

Looking around at the Mushroom rainforest, Astronaut Phil Dern steps down from the Lander, crushing the only intelligent insect on the planet Titan. Apparently it came to meet the Space visitor. This act of agression culminates in Phil being stung by every insect on the Planet.

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#3 2005-04-09 12:25:00

Planet@lien
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From: Duluth, MN
Registered: 2005-04-07
Posts: 25

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

hmmmm......

We would have to add more greenhouse gases, but the methane would be very flammable once we added the oxygen, so what about ammonia?


There are old astronauts, and there are bold astronauts, but there are no old bold astronauts
                                        Quote - Ben Bova

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#4 2005-04-09 12:26:11

Planet@lien
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From: Duluth, MN
Registered: 2005-04-07
Posts: 25

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

We could use nanomachines, of course once they are devolped


There are old astronauts, and there are bold astronauts, but there are no old bold astronauts
                                        Quote - Ben Bova

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#5 2005-04-10 23:32:28

srmeaney
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From: 18 tiwi gdns rd, TIWI NT 0810
Registered: 2005-03-18
Posts: 976

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

The earth already produces nanomachines: bacteria and virus.

as to the ammonia, fungus food.

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#6 2005-04-11 16:12:20

Planet@lien
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From: Duluth, MN
Registered: 2005-04-07
Posts: 25

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Ok I guess you don't know what i am talking about....

Ok heres my best example:

Take an Atom Smasher and shrink it down to the point where it is made up of only a few atoms/molecules. Then give it the ability to reassemble the protons/neutrons/electrons to make certain atoms/molecules. Give the machines a built in computer. Not fungi or bacteria... machines. Give them claws for grabbing certain atoms. The nanomachines can be programmed for different reasons, one being to scavenge the body for problems, they could break up cancer cells, clear plaque in the blood vessels and repair damaged cells. They can break apart other atoms and molecules, whick could mean deadly to us because if these nanomachines were gotten into the hands of a terrorists they could be programmed to chew up carbon atoms wich would mean we are dead. They could assemble many things. For example, you could build a refridgerator out of the bare metals in the carpet. Although programming the nanomachines to do these things would take some time, there are endless possiblilities.

There you have a nanomachine


There are old astronauts, and there are bold astronauts, but there are no old bold astronauts
                                        Quote - Ben Bova

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#7 2005-04-12 18:24:22

srmeaney
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From: 18 tiwi gdns rd, TIWI NT 0810
Registered: 2005-03-18
Posts: 976

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Your talking area 51 stuff. The real world wont see that for at least a hundred years.

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#8 2005-04-13 10:22:49

Earthfirst
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From: Phoenix Arizona
Registered: 2002-09-25
Posts: 343

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Please stay away from titan, it is such a good moon. It is the only moon witha thicker atmosphere thans earths, it has a methan cycle of rain rivers and lakes. Why destory such a good place when the same resource can be easly found on near by astriods and moons. An way when the sun becomes a red gaint it will melt the ice crust of many moons. Because oif their low gravity they will loss their atmospheres they got from the thaw. But Titan for a few millions of years will bi one gaint water world. The same thing will happen to jupitors large 2 outer moons but only for a short while. Mars it self will warm up a lot before becoming an venus like place of hot temps and thick atmosphere. Towards the end of the suns red gaint stage the HZ will move all the way to Neptune and Uranus. Where the big planets will loss a lot of their hydrgen in their atmosphere, creating a huge water worl with atmospheres of He, N2, and O2. The moons like triton will thaw out too to mini water worlds. Pluto long in the dark will thaw when it crosses neptune orbit. The solar wind in the red gaint phase will be very strong small gas gaints heated up by the red sun will be unablle too hold on to hydrogen and will loss it. Life could develop in the new worlds of the red gaint sun.


I love plants!

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#9 2005-04-14 01:00:56

Austin Stanley
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From: Texarkana, TX
Registered: 2002-03-18
Posts: 519
Website

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

I hate to bust your bubble, but nanomachines of the kind you describe are completely impossible.  You have to understand what the molecular/atomic relm is like.  At anything close to room temperature (much less the hell hole that is Venus) atoms are constatly moving, colliding, and vibrating in constant random brownian motion.  The idea of "claws" that could "grab" certian atoms and manuver them into position is impossible.  Molecules themselves do not hold a single stable shape but in most cases constatly fluctuate betwen a variaty of stable and unstable shapes and configurations.  Most models are only of their most common and stable configuartion/shape not their only one.  Indeed a great many chemical reactions call upon a chemicals ability to fluctuate from it's most stable configuration to one in which a chemical reaction can occur.

BTW, please use a more readable color for your posts!


He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.

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#10 2015-09-07 20:34:29

SpaceNut
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From: New Hampshire
Registered: 2004-07-22
Posts: 28,747

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Interesting way to start a topic by just the title and so where are we with this? oh just fixing another old topic....

Titans atmosphere is very large and will take a long time to work it into anything that we could breath....

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#11 2015-09-07 21:11:23

Tom Kalbfus
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Registered: 2006-08-16
Posts: 4,401

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

What if we start with inflatable towers?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg … -of-space/
Article%20Lead%20-%20wide999538806gj3l9iimage.related.articleLeadwide.729x410.gj3l2u.png1440041403422.jpg-620x349.jpg
Lets dot the surface of Titan with these towers, string cables from the tops of these towers, and then place a sheet on top of those cables, attach them to those cables, then inflate. Since these towers can extent 20 km towards space and Titan has 1/7th the gravity of Earth, that means the inflatable towers on Titan can be 140 km tall. We tent the whole Moon, using these towers as Tent poles, seal it off then place lamps at the tops of these towers facing downward fusion reactors power the lights which provide artificial sunlight for the surface of the Moon, it would then be easy to produce an Earthlike diurnal cycle.

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#12 2015-09-09 16:34:04

Antius
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From: Cumbria, UK
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Posts: 1,003

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Titan may be a useful environment just the way it is.  Those lakes of liquid methane would make superb heat sinks.  In space, the population density and size of habitats are both limited by the need to dump heat.  That requires massive radiators.  On Titan, you just pump liquid methane into heat exchangers and let it boil off.  Due to the atmospheric pressure, there would be less demand for full terraforming as practically any environment can be reproduced under non-pressurised tent domes. 

As a result it will be possible to build cities of unprecedented size, powered by low cost fast breeder reactors that generate at close to perfect efficiency.  Global warming as population increases would actually become a significant problem as temperatures exceed the triple point of methane.  Terraforming of the external environment would not be a desirable outcome.

Last edited by Antius (2015-09-09 16:44:52)

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#13 2016-10-08 20:02:55

Tom Kalbfus
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Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

I understand the Moon could hold onto an Earthlike Atmosphere for a matter of centuries.
512px-Solar_system_escape_velocity_vs_surface_temperature.svg.png
Titan has a higher escape velocity than our Moon, it you increased its temperature to that of out Moon, it would lose atmosphere much more quickly, but it would still be a matter of centuries to a millennium for it to lose its atmosphere.


Titan · Escape velocity



Titan · Escape velocity

8,658 feet/s (2,639 m/s)

Moon's Escape velocity (km/s)
2.38
The Moon's gravity is 0.165 of Earth.
Titan's is 0.14 of Earth.

Titan's Mass is
(1.3452±0.0002)×10^23 kg

Titan's orbit period is 15.945 days, in a 24 hour period Titan turns 360/15.945  = 22.578 degrees so in a 24 hour period an object which orbits over 360 degrees of its surface has to orbit a total of 360 + 22.578 = 382.578, that means its actual orbital period would be 24*360/382.578 = 22.584 Hours.

An orbit around Titan at a radius of 11455 km will produce an orbit period of 24 hours relative to Titan's surface, that means this artificial sun will rise and set and rise again as seen from a given location on Titan's surface in 24 hours. It is probably easiest to orbit this Sun over the equator and not have seasons, otherwise the seasonal cycle will last about 16 days without constant orbital correction. An artificial light source could instead vary its intensity instead to create seasons over the entire satellite. the radius of the Sun is 695,700 km, over a distance of 150,000,000 as seen from Earth.

11,455km/150,000,000 km = 7.6366666666666666666666666666667e-5 Multiply this by 695,700 km and we get a radius of 53.12829 km for our artificial Sun. The surface temperature of the Sun is Photosphere (effective): 5,772 K. the boiling point of Tungstein is Boiling point: 5,555 °C or 5,828K You know what that means? That means Tungstein remains liquid at a temperature equal to the surface temperature of the Sun. So an artificial sun can be a ball of glowing molten tungstein that is 53.12829 km in radius, as seen from the surface of Titan, such a glowing ball would look exactly like the Sun as seen from Earth.

The density of liquid Tungstein is 17.6 g/cm3 or 17.6 tons/meter^3
Volume of the sphere is 628143703822703 meters cubed times 17.6 tons = 11,055,329,187,279,572.8 tons of Tungstein or 1.1e16 tons.
Now the question is what's the best way to heat this molten ball of Tungstein to the temperature of the surface of the Sun, the great thing about liquids is they hold their volume, rather than expand as a gas, in a condition of microgravity, surface tension will keep it to a ball of white hot liquid. So what's the best way to heat it? Perhaps a laser, a very powerful solar powered x-ray laser, target this ball with it, but avoid hitting Titan and this ball of molten metal and illuminate one hemisphere of Titan heating up its surface to Earth like temperatures. This leads to another problem. Much of the surface is ice, not only water ice, by dry ice, its nitrogen atmosphere will probably get a lot of carbon-dioxide as the dry ice on its surface sublimates, the water ice will eventually melt and form an ocean. The good news is there are a lot of carbon compounds in Titan's atmosphere and crust, through chemical rearrangement, they can be formed into artificial rock, to form a shell in the shape of the topography of this Moon.
titan-could-have-lakes-equator_54905_600x450.jpg

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#14 2016-10-09 03:31:42

karov
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From: Bulgaria
Registered: 2004-06-03
Posts: 953

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

The density of liquid Tungstein is 17.6 g/cm3 or 17.6 tons/meter^3
Volume of the sphere is 628143703822703 meters cubed times 17.6 tons = 11,055,329,187,279,572.8 tons of Tungstein or 1.1e16 tons.
Now the question is what's the best way to heat this molten ball of Tungstein to the temperature of the surface of the Sun, the great thing about liquids is they hold their volume, rather than expand as a gas, in a condition of microgravity, surface tension will keep it to a ball of white hot liquid. So what's the best way to heat it? Perhaps a laser, a very powerful solar powered x-ray laser, target this ball with it, but avoid hitting Titan and this ball of molten metal and illuminate one hemisphere of Titan heating up its surface to Earth like temperatures. This leads to another problem. Much of the surface is ice, not only water ice, by dry ice, its nitrogen atmosphere will probably get a lot of carbon-dioxide as the dry ice on its surface sublimates, the water ice will eventually melt and form an ocean. The good news is there are a lot of carbon compounds in Titan's atmosphere and crust, through chemical rearrangement, they can be formed into artificial rock, to form a shell in the shape of the topography of this Moon.
http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wp … 00x450.jpg

Orrrr, like in Karl Schroeder's writings the tungsten ball to be the tip of an electromagnetic tether anchored centrifugally to Saturn itself.

Orrrr, instead of heating a radially emitting wasting hot ball why not a WHITE or pseudo-white lasers?

I agree on the necessity of a 'bark' on top to protect the nice cryo-environment from thawing and melting down ...

At the end of the day at this gravity multi-mile high and thosands of sq.mi. enclosed domed environments possible, so most probably Titan and these cryo-worlds are as good as they are ...

As emphasized too many times by me terraforming is NOT about turning a planet into baseline human habitat, but about INSTALLING such on the 1G iso-gravitational curved surface. EVEN Earth is far away from maximizing habitat surface versus total 1G surface.

Last edited by karov (2016-10-09 03:37:45)

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#15 2016-10-09 23:19:28

Tom Kalbfus
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Posts: 4,401

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

I like simplicity, a ball of tungstein at the temperature of the Sun and the right distance is as simple as it gets, then all we have to do is worry about heating it. There are many ways to do this, one way is impact fusion on the far side of the ball of Tungstein, though this may cause a splash. the problem with fusion is that any fusion reactor that is brought close enough to heat this tungstein ball to the temperature of the Sun, will be vaporized, Impact fusion would add the kinetic energy of the pellets plus the nuclear energy of its atoms fusing to the heat of the tungstein ball, the linear accelerators stay a nice safe distance from this artificial sun, and the impacts always occur on the far side o the ball, the heat gets carried around to the near side, but the ball itself shields Titan from those gamma rays released by fusion, so we just have the visible light spectrum.

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#16 2016-10-16 02:00:30

karov
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From: Bulgaria
Registered: 2004-06-03
Posts: 953

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

[image]http://www.oocities.org/titanastrobio/titancomp.jpg[\image]

plus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nin … ty_sphere)

with warmed breathable air.

Titan's atmosphere ( its thicker part ) is 200+ km deep.

It can easily handle 10mi wide Cloud Nine Tensegrity Spheres.

Each comfortably housing millions of people.

How we 'measure' the habitability of an environment?

- by number of human lives supported?
- by square miles of 'territory'?
- by units of biomass?

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#17 2016-10-16 23:53:22

Tom Kalbfus
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Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

if you go outside and you die, then the world is not habitable. I like having an outdoors, other people, they like living in tunnels. I define terraforming as not needing a wall to keep inside your habitable environment. You can talk about domes all you want, but that is not really terraforming.

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#18 2016-10-17 13:37:51

Antius
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From: Cumbria, UK
Registered: 2007-05-22
Posts: 1,003

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

karov wrote:

[image]http://www.oocities.org/titanastrobio/titancomp.jpg[\image]

plus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nin … ty_sphere)

with warmed breathable air.

Titan's atmosphere ( its thicker part ) is 200+ km deep.

It can easily handle 10mi wide Cloud Nine Tensegrity Spheres.

Each comfortably housing millions of people.

How we 'measure' the habitability of an environment?

- by number of human lives supported?
- by square miles of 'territory'?
- by units of biomass?

I have often wondered if something like this could be built on Earth using superheated steam to provide lift.  If the shell is insulated with silica aerogel, power requirements can be substantially reduced.  A 1000m diameter sphere could lift over 400,000 tonnes at steam temperature of 300C.  Kind of like Star Wars cloud city.

Last edited by Antius (2016-10-17 13:38:24)

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#19 2016-10-17 14:12:34

karov
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From: Bulgaria
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Posts: 953

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

if you go outside and you die, then the world is not habitable.

Tom, I agree with you. So, what I'll note is not argument for the sake of the argument, but few ... suspicions of mine.

You can slip in your bathroom or stumble down your home's staircase and can die.
Is your home not habitable?
Or, ok, you go out on the street and.:
- get hit by a car
- minus 40 celsius beyond polar circle night without top clothes
- fall into a shallow lake just besides your $10m hunting lodge and get drowned...
Is your outside not habitable?


I like having an outdoors, other people, they like living in tunnels.

A balloon 10mi wide is no less 'outdoors' then land plot on Earth. The ceiling is even higher then the breathable height in Earth's troposphere.

A tunnel hundreds of meters wide is ... outdoors.

A few miles wide and long Stanford torus, Bernal sphere, O'Neill cylinder is outdoors.

In fact the difference between indoors and outdoors is matter of ... scale in respect with the average linear size of a human being.

Perhaps the threshold of outdoor-ness is few hundreds of times wider then human size.

The same way indoors-ness ( aka 'home' ) is thresheld into approx. an order of magnitude bigger then average human being size.

Everything which is big enough to contain enough spaced out from eachother homes ... is outdoors.

I define terraforming as not needing a wall to keep inside your habitable environment.

Even the most natural habitat has 'walls'.:

- high mountain ridges, steep slopes, water shorelines, glaciers ... the atmospheric thinning with height ...

You can talk about domes all you want, but that is not really terraforming.

Domes come of different sizes.

Spheroid 'para-terraformation' dome around , say, Ceres - with living area as big as EU or India - and 20mi high .. is it outdoors or is indoors?

...

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#20 2016-10-17 14:27:43

karov
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From: Bulgaria
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Posts: 953

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Antius wrote:

I have often wondered if something like this could be built on Earth using superheated steam to provide lift.  If the shell is insulated with silica aerogel, power requirements can be substantially reduced.  A 1000m diameter sphere could lift over 400,000 tonnes at steam temperature of 300C.  Kind of like Star Wars cloud city.

Yes, I believe it can.

It could be nuke-steampunk one even.

The giant bubble, could be closed-cycle radiator of a fission reactor powering the city.

http://www.flyingkettle.com/

In atmospheres like Titan's one - much-much bigger Cloud Nine cities, with higher lift on much lower temperature of 300-ish Kelvin and breathable air as lifting gas ... entire NYCs in the sky. With vast Babylonian hanging gardens. Singapore is roughly 40 x 20 km it houses as much people as say Sweden, and has plenty of livable outdoors, not thick concrete pile.

Dozens of billions of population in few thousand floating cities over one of the most interesting pristine cryo-Outbacks ... fully preserved, cause the bubble-cities could hover say 100km over the solid surface and the waste heat to be directed upwards in-space.

IF we really terraform Titan ... and ideally have all its surface turned into prime real estate land - no deserts, no big seas, no oceans, no ice caps ... I believe that still there won't be more then few thousands of big cities on the 2D curved 'classical' surface.

SO, that's why I asked - how we measure the habitability?

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#21 2016-10-17 14:59:52

karov
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From: Bulgaria
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Posts: 953

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Two quotes from Charles Stross' "Accelerando" .:

lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible sphere in Saturn's upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas bag above. It's one of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the Society for Creative Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds' Fair.

The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a bubble), but in only a couple of decades, exponential growth will have paved the stratosphere with human-friendly terrain. Of course, the growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant's turbid depths, but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually Saturn — cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second squared — will have a planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed this will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun's burned down.

&

The lily-pad habitats have proliferated, joining edge to edge in continent-sized slabs, drifting in the Saturnine cloud tops: ... The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. ...

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#22 2016-10-19 07:55:55

Tom Kalbfus
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Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Now we get to the idea of terraforming Saturn. Saturn has a rotational period of 10.2336 hours, it has gravity nearly equal to Earth, and at some latitudes, exactly equal to the Earth due to the planet's rotation, and I don't think that could be said for any other planet in the Solar System. So we build an artificial sun, place it in orbit around Saturn in the direction of the planet's rotation. So Saturn rotates 360 degrees in 10.2336 hours, so how many degrees will it rotate in 24 hours? 24*360/10.2336=844.2777 degrees Subtract 360 degrees from that, and we need an object which orbits 484.2777 degrees in a 24 hour period, from the "surface" of Saturn, this Sun will appear to rise, set, and rise again in 24 hours, its distance would be defined by its orbital period. So if this Sun requires 24 hours to orbit 484.2777 degrees, its actual orbit period would be 360*24/484.2777=17.841 hours for an orbit. This orbit's radius would be 158,300 km, about the orbit distance of Epimetheus which is about 138 km in diameter. Clearly not big enough for this job. We need to generate 95.181 times the sunlight tat falls on the Earth to cover Saturn, we need an object that is large enough to appear the size of the Sun seen from Earth, how big would that be? The Sun is 150,000,000 km from Earth, and the orbit in question is 1000 times closer to Saturn. Since our Sun is 1,391,400 km in diameter, our artificial Sun will have to be 1,400 km in diameter to appear about the same size as our Sun. It seems that Rhea will do as it is 1530 km in diameter.
rhea-moon.jpg
This is Rhea, looks round enough, it is bigger than we need, and this is good, since we are going to move it closer to Saturn and heat it up to the temperature of the Surface of the Sun, much of it is water ice, strip off the hydrogen and use it to fuel a fusion reactor. Heat up the rest of rhea to incandescence, and we have ourselves a Sun for Saturn, which at the distance of 158,300 km rises and sets on a 24-hour schedule.

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#23 2016-10-20 21:05:06

Void
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Posts: 6,976

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

Tom, I feel the need for proficiency, efficiency, and harmony.
Harmony is a process that supposedly the Chinese are specially adapt to.
Western not so much.
Sometimes one is good sometimes another.

I see what your desires are, and do not criticize your desires, but note that continuation of pattern is all.  If you only believe that pattern is of the flesh, baryonic matter traveling through time, or if you believe that a "Spiritual" aspect of pattern exists, or some other aspect of pattern, still pattern is all we are or will ever be.  The memory of what we are, flowing through time and warping into variations of pattern.

Efficiency matters.  Waste, is sometimes a shameful thing.  Gluttony is related to waste.

Lets not demand too much from the universe, without seeking proficiency, and efficiency.

Still, you are needed, to try to expand the bubble of what we might hope to intend to do.  You have stimulated very interesting conversations.

Karov provided: (In post #16 of this thread)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Nin … ty_sphere)
Alright, I will suggest such activity on Titan, and in the atmosphere of Saturn itself.

I know that you are a fan of robots Tom, so how about floating robots in the atmosphere of Saturn, which harvest energy, from wind, and also the thermal differences in altitude in the atmosphere of Saturn.  Robots, which then beam energy to Titan either Laser or Microwave.

In the case of Microwave energy in a case like this, tidal locked moons are quite good, as you can have your receivers on the Saturn facing side, and your habitats on the other side.  This would yield safety and energy.

I am not saying that no humans could exist on or in these Saturn atmosphere robots, but that the preferred environment for humans would be orbital, and that Titan might be especially preferred because of it's atmosphere dominated by Nitrogen.

The primary anxiety I have about this plan, is the presumed loss of metals, and silicates over time.  Could they be obtained from the atmospheric environment of Saturn somehow?  Plastics of course would reduce the need for metals and silicates, but still it would be a concern.  Mining Saturn to supply these robots with those substances would certainly be a desire, but I am not sure how to do it.  Is the atmosphere of such gas giants / ice giants ever populated by dust?

And about Titan itself, I guess if you do this, eventually the Moon will heat up, with questionable results.  Could you use Karovs weather machine to promote a precipitation cycle to help it cool itself?

What would be the precipitation?  Methane?  Or would the Moon be come so warm that it melts, puffing up the atmosphere massively.

If so, would humans capture that atmosphere for good use, before it is lost to space?

Doing all of that would you be dealing with an open water ocean moon, and water liquid as your precipitation? 

Then cities floating in the sky of Titan, and world wide ocean below?

Then could you do this scheme for all the moons of Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune?

Of course no atmospheres for those other moons, but ice covered oceans?  Per recent works revolving around Antius?
Some worlds might get energy this way, if they orbit a gas giant or ice giant?
(Linked here):
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7508

And what about planet 9?  If it is of a thick atmosphere of Hydrogen and Helium.  It also?

A fair amount of fun with this I feel smile

As for artificial suns, why not a directional panel of LED's?  More efficient perhaps?  Possibly providing a sufficient illusion of what you want, with much less waste heat.

Last edited by Void (2016-10-20 21:30:00)


Done.

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#24 2016-10-20 21:46:26

Void
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Registered: 2011-12-29
Posts: 6,976

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

And a tiny little voice asked "What ever could we do with brown dwarf's and their cold planets?".

What about fusion reactors in such floating robots?????????

Last edited by Void (2016-10-20 21:59:15)


Done.

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#25 2016-10-21 06:30:48

Antius
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From: Cumbria, UK
Registered: 2007-05-22
Posts: 1,003

Re: Titan Terraformation - Is it possible?

You don't need to turn Rhea into a star.  Fusion reactors could simply be hung from balloons in Titan's atmosphere.  That way 100% of the heat produced goes into the atmosphere.  And you can cool the reactors by convection, which means better power density and better economics.

Still the wrong philosophy in my opinion.  Titan is not Earth and is fundamentally different to the Earth in ways that cannot be reconciled with an Earth like environment.  It is a ball of ice, ten times further from the sun than the Earth is.  Its surface is cryogenic.  Attempting to turn it into an Earth-like place using classic terraforming would require enormous energy and resources and you rapidly end up talking in terms of ridiculous levels of planetary engineering trying to build an Earthly environment: artificial stars, artificial surface, giant heat pumps to prevent the ice from melting, etc.

Instead, you could simply accept the place for what it basically is, and turn its attributes to your advantage.  It has 1bar surface pressure, so habitats do not need pressure shells.  Its atmosphere is cold and dense, so buoyant lift is easy.  It has seas of liquid methane, probably the best heat sinks in the solar system.  The last attribute means that habitats can be volumetric, you can put many layers of habitable land into a single habitat.  In free space or on worlds without atmosphere, this is extremely difficult to achieve because of the amount of heat that needs to be removed from volumetric habitats.  On Titan, liquid methane provides an excellent heat sink that can simply be pumped through heat exchangers and boiled off.  You could conceivably create huge amounts of land this way.  Solid ice can be used as the construction material for the outer shell.  It can be melted and cast into the shapes we need.  A habitat could start as an inflatable double walled polyethylene sphere.  Fill the double wall with warm water heated to melting point using a nuclear power source and voila, you have very cheaply provided a habitable volume.  Heat losses to the Titan atmosphere will prevent it from melting.  Divide it into decks 10m apart, and a 1km diameter ice shell will support 52km2 of internal land.  Enough for a city of millions of people, trees, lakes, whatever you want.

Global warming of Titan would eventually become an unwanted outcome, since temperature rises would compromise the great natural advantages that the place has to offer.

Last edited by Antius (2016-10-21 07:19:10)

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