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Usually the word "terraforming" associsates with and connotates to changing planetary conditions towards more Earthlike ones.
BUT,
but ...
"Earthlike" is a trap.
Earthlike as ... what.: the Everest peak at winter night? as Mariana trench? as Death valley or other high desert at its hottest?
I think it is worth to start talking just 'LANDMAKING", cause all the 'terraforming', paraterraforming etc, ideas and 'projects' are aimed towards making new land.
Habitable by standard humans without excessive protection.
Regardless whether the object of terraforming efforts is.: the dry valleys of Antarctica, the lava tubes and craters of the Moon, the North Pasific Gyre, the high deserts of Africa, the surface of Mars, the clouds of Venus, or mass-stream grids toposphere around various super-massive underbodies, or ... the inner surfaces of centrifuges ...
LAND = approx. 1G surface where humans put their homes and where the manufacture of all needed to go to and from these homes takes place.
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The issue for mars and moon is containment of the earth like water and air with artifical gravity following....
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Here is a cross section of a parabolic curve you can spin around the red axis, making a bowl shape. Toward the edges the g-forces approach Earth normal., as one moves toward the center, the g-forces diminish towards the native gravity of the world. A parabolic spinner for the Moon would approach these dimensions, a Martian version would be flatter. Now these things don't have to spin on a rotor, they could float in a rapidly spinning body of water. At this scale the edge of this parabola is moving at 70 miles per hour. I think a water flow of this speed is not unheard or impossible. he Martian centrifuge of this type would spin at the same rate but would be flatter than this lunar version.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2017-01-12 11:15:22)
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Karov said,
Usually the word "terraforming" associsates with and connotates to changing planetary conditions towards more Earthlike ones.
BUT,
but ...
"Earthlike" is a trap.
Earthlike as ... what.: the Everest peak at winter night? as Mariana trench? as Death valley or other high desert at its hottest?
I think it is worth to start talking just 'LANDMAKING", cause all the 'terraforming', paraterraforming etc, ideas and 'projects' are aimed towards making new land.
Habitable by standard humans without excessive protection.
Regardless whether the object of terraforming efforts is.: the dry valleys of Antarctica, the lava tubes and craters of the Moon, the North Pasific Gyre, the high deserts of Africa, the surface of Mars, the clouds of Venus, or mass-stream grids toposphere around various super-massive underbodies, or ... the inner surfaces of centrifuges ...
LAND = approx. 1G surface where humans put their homes and where the manufacture of all needed to go to and from these homes takes place.]
Well, that's pretty good I think. "Terraforming" would be similar to "Land Reclamation".
The Dutch changing shallow sea bed into farm "Land".
But some people make a living fishing the oceans/seas. They may not use land except as a perch to cling to when they are not fishing.
So, I would need to speculate that "Material Means to sustain physical existence is a phrase which is more universal". Land is included in that, and upon creating is a fact.
Terraforming is a process. But we have many languages, and even in the English/Globish sub parts, understanding ones views depends on understanding what their version of a language actually represents with words.
What I have just said, is just from my perspective of the dialect that I use.
Maybe I universal enough for us to have mutual understanding on this, maybe not.
When we build a house, we are terraforming, making and ideal tropical environment for ourselves, in a typically sub-standard (By our views environment).
This facilitates the survival of our bodies, and adds to our comfort, so that we can maintain relative sanity (Whatever that is).
That allows our brains to survive.
That allows for a house for our minds.
And then we try to communicate ideas.
Last edited by Void (2017-01-15 10:44:10)
I am starting to ask seriously "Why do I do this?"
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So what will the wall to hold back the poisonous atmosphere be made out of?
Insitu process via sent equipment?
Totally sent at first for a limited enclosure size?
Even after enclosing a limited area and on the equator it is still at an earth like energy deficet of 600 W m^2.
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The issue for mars and moon is containment of the earth like water and air with artifical gravity following....
Approx. 1G is ... 1G optimum and deviation around 1G of ... dunno how much.
0.1 to 2G?
But talking about landmaking ( thus terraforming comes naturally down to 'realty development' in wide sense of the word = human HABITAT REPLICATION , i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrolife … .27s_title ), we mustn't forget that human habitats, i.e. means for support of body functions is fractal and concentric. Scaled. Scalable... We have, the linear ranges of (roughly):
1m - clothing, furniture, ...
10m - housing
100m - garden
1000m - neighbourhood, vilage
10 000m - urban, municipal
100 000m - regional, hinterland, agri ...
1000 000m - we enter the megascale herewith, wilderness, outback, ...
... further ahead is the void where the habitat is nested.
The habitat scales are nested into each other as these russian dolls. And the outer makes the livability of the inner ones.
===
The size scaling naturally inputs definitions. Levels of 'terraforming'.
Unified system of definitions which disregards the 'toposphere' tech involved - natural planetary crust, supramundane shell, walls of a rotating cylinder ...
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It looks to me like expansion by the process of gradual growth and building.
So what would be the minimalist enclosure still being fully safe from the environment to base landmaking within for a man to actually be able to stick his toe's into the sand with?
I would assume that the first will be sent but the next are most likely no to be so...with more equipment to follow to be able to make it.
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It seems the islands sizes / areas can give as a (historic) base for grokking the scaling?
"Country-size" whatever that means poses the boundary between "house"/"town" and "world" levels.
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Life sustaining island land size, scaleable for a crew size of 1 to 100 and more.....The sustainable farming aspect makes for a variety of gardening methods to allow for the crew to survive but what is that fixed limit to number of people that it supports...Biosphere was a lower limit but as it was not Mars its numbers are marginal....So we know that we need a structure much larger tha that for even a small crew of 4 to 6 and that may stilll not be large enough....
This was the experiment and its quite large....
‘Biosphere 2’ was constructed from 1987 at the foot of the St. Catalina Mountains in Arizona. A feat of engineering in itself, the 3.14 acre glass building and its five ‘biomes’ were completed by Space Biosphere Ventures in 1991. On 16 June 1994 a crew of eight, four men and four women (including the two authors of the project), were sent to live inside Biosphere 2. With no comings, goings, or contact permitted between the ‘Biospherians’ and the outside world for a period of two years, these sole human occupants were to test if life within an artificial recontruction of Earth’s life-supporting environment could be sustained.
This 3.15 acre (1.28 hectares) miniature airtight world is sealed on the bottom by a stainless steel liner and on the top by a steel and glass space frame structure. Inside the laboratory is a 850-square mile coral reef (of which 682 miles is the area of water surface), a 450 square mile mangrove marsh, a 1,900 square mile Amazonian rainforest, a 1,300 square mile savannah grassland, a 1,400 square mile fog desert, a 2,500 square mile tropical agriculture system with farm and a human habitat with living quarters, kitchen, offices, and recreational spaces. Heating and cooling water circulated through the biosphere in independent piping systems, and electrical power was supplied to the Biosphere from a natural gas energy center, located outside Biosphere 2, through airtight penetrations.
http://biosphere2.org/visit/about-biosphere2/fast-facts
Biomes under Glass
Ocean with coral reef
Mangrove wetlands
Tropical rainforest
Savanna grassland
Fog desert
Ya Earth like gardens to walk through would be nice but really are long off in the future as far as man is concerned for starting a colony of sustainability....
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How much would it cost to build on the Moon? Oxygen could always be regenerated mechanically, food could be grown in greenhouses like that. We'd have to alter the design a bit to account for pressurization. the glass panels would have to be heavier and thicker, but if we had robotic telepresence on the Moon, we could begin building something like that.
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I would not trust a single layer of glass but we could go with a multi layer simular to the Cupolla onboard the ISS which has a very tough window design, as well keeping the sand storm metal window shutter would be a plus for protection under the extreems that we might face and makes it perfect for the application of the glass and framing construction.
http://materialsinspace.nasa.gov/MISSE_Materials.html
The glass used in the shuttle is also equally strong.
So what would be the step by step approach to creation of just that 3 acre enclosure.
window and framing materials:
Windows: Fused silica and borosilicate glass
Dome: Forged Al 2219-T851
MDPS shutters: DuPont Kevlar/3M Nextel sheets
NASA In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Capability Roadmap Final Report
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First find some silica and lime, or other materials, to make clear glass from. Only small amounts of contaminant such as iron oxide will result in poor light transmission, so you need it pretty pure.
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SpaceNut wrote:The issue for mars and moon is containment of the earth like water and air with artifical gravity following....
Approx. 1G is ... 1G optimum and deviation around 1G of ... dunno how much.
0.1 to 2G?
But talking about landmaking ( thus terraforming comes naturally down to 'realty development' in wide sense of the word = human HABITAT REPLICATION , i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrolife … .27s_title ), we mustn't forget that human habitats, i.e. means for support of body functions is fractal and concentric. Scaled. Scalable... We have, the linear ranges of (roughly):
1m - clothing, furniture, ...
10m - housing
100m - garden
1000m - neighbourhood, vilage
10 000m - urban, municipal
100 000m - regional, hinterland, agri ...
1000 000m - we enter the megascale herewith, wilderness, outback, ...
... further ahead is the void where the habitat is nested.
The habitat scales are nested into each other as these russian dolls. And the outer makes the livability of the inner ones.
===
The size scaling naturally inputs definitions. Levels of 'terraforming'.
Unified system of definitions which disregards the 'toposphere' tech involved - natural planetary crust, supramundane shell, walls of a rotating cylinder ...
Speaking of which:
There is the Banks Orbital I one time thought up a banks orbital for the orbit of Venus, using the material of Venus to construct. If we construct a Banks orbital of the right dimensions and give it zero inclination of its spin to its orbit, then it will provide its own shading from the Sun.
I used this site to calculate the dimensions for a Banks Orbital that has 1-g of centripetal acceleration and a 24-hour day.
http://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/Sp … inCalc.htm
The Banks Orbital has a 24 hour rotation period, which means it rotates 360 degrees every 24 hours, which means it has an angular velocity of 0.00416666666666666666666666666667 degrees/sec.
These are the results spin calc gave me.
Radius (R) 1,854,336 kilometers
Angular Velocity (W) 0.0041666666666666666667 degrees/sec
Tangential Velocity (V) 134,851 meters/sec
Centripetal Acceleration (A) 1-g
I'll start with a width of 20,000 km, since that is the distance from Earth's pole to pole along it curvature.
The Sun covers 0.74 degrees of sky at the distance of Venus' orbit from the Sun, which is 108,200,000 km. The diameter of a Banks orbital is twice its radius at 3,708,672, which is 0.0343 of the distance to the Sun. The diameter of the Sun is 1,391,684 km.
108200000 km/1391684 km = 77.747534641484704861161010689208 Solar diameters.
3708672 km/20000 km = 185.4336 Banks Orbital widths.
0.74*77.74753/185.4336 = 0.31026293077414233450679919928211 degrees. Is that too wide or too narrow?
I'll have to draw a diagram, the Sun is continuously under partial eclipse by the far part of the Orbital. Of course there are structural requirements. There are engineering solutions involving a part of he structure which is not spinning. I could do a calculation of how much material this would need. We would basically use the planet Venus as building material to build it taking its surface area and dividing it by Earth's surface area, we get 456.8428 Earths worth of surface area.
Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2017-01-21 18:30:35)
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Now I'm ready to make an estimate of the mass of the Banks orbital, just for fun.
Earth and Venus. Image credit: NASA The mass of Venus is 4.868×10^24 kg. That is about 82% of the mass of Earth.
Reference: www.universetoday.com/22545/mass-of-venus/
Radius (R) 1,854,336 kilometers
Circumference of a circle (c)
c = 11,651,136.7097742 km
c = 11,651,136,709.7742 m
Width (w) = 20,000 km or 20,000,000 m
Thickness (h) = 100 m
Volume (v) = c * w * h = 23,302,273,419,548,400,000 m*3
Density of Venus = 5219 kg/m^3
total mass of Orbital = 121,614,564,976,623,099,600,000 kg
Mass of Venus = 4,868,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg
Venus has about 40 times the mass needed t build this orbital.
We could use a ratio of 3:1 nonspinning:spinning to a possible range of 38:1 nonspinning:spinning. Not sure how much tensile strength will be needed to hold this hoop together. Sounds pretty fantastical. I wonder what would be harder, terraforming Venus or building this? knowing that it would take thousands of years to terraform Venus and thus we would enjoy thousands of years of technological progress while doing it. Seems to me that if we take Venus apart, it would cool off much faster, since we're dealing with so much more surface area from which to radiate heat!
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Spacenut, throw me out of this topic if you like. I won't mind, but I am just marking time. Land seems to be an idea in peoples heads, I think.
Alright, how about wiki?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land
Quote:
Land, sometimes referred to as dry land, is the solid surface of the Earth that is not permanently covered by water.[1] The vast majority of human activity throughout history has occurred in land areas that support agriculture, habitat, and various natural resources. Some life forms (including terrestrial plants and terrestrial animals) have developed from predecessor species that lived in bodies of water.
Areas where land meets large bodies of water are called coastal zones. The division between land and water is a fundamental concept to humans. The demarcation between land and water can vary by local jurisdiction and other factors. A maritime boundary is one example of a political demarcation. A variety of natural boundaries exist to help clearly define where water meets land. Solid rock landforms are easier to demarcate than marshy or swampy boundaries, where there is no clear point at which the land ends and a body of water has begun. Demarcation can further vary due to tides and weather.
So, even though our oceans and seas and lakes and marshes can be life giving, we do not ever intend to spend our whole lives there do we?
The Inuit would spend some considerable time on ice pack, living off of seals in some cases. For them the ice pack was almost a land. That is the greatest deviation I can think of from the standard concept of land.
One factor of "Land" is that gravity exists and is allowed to pull our bodies down to it. Water is not the same, even though gravity exists. We might end up at the bottom of a lake, but we will not feel any significant weight I would think.
So, although the water supplies some of the things we might like, we retreat to "land" because the water cannot sustain us on a permanent basis. And so if we are off of Earth I suppose we could define "Land" as a place where we could hope to have life support longer term and not be threatened by death in the short term.
Even if we are on a ship on the ocean, we are on land which is not that alien, but the ocean itself is an alien environment.
You have mentioned "Glass" by which I suppose you intend a transparency which is a barrier between an environment which is not land and a place you might consider to be "Land".
Alright with all of that, I will suggest a life support method for space which will be in part not land, and part land by the previous definitions.
Shell #1, A "Glass" shell at > 6 mb, and => 0.1 degC.
Shell #2, Inside of Shell #1, a rotating pressurized habitat suitable for comfortable human living to the extent that a human could survive there for perhaps months or years.
Shell #1 in my opinion would not be land. Being in it would kill you quicker than being in the ocean, even the Antarctic ocean. However it could perhaps support cyanobacteria which could contribute to human needs.
Shell #2 would be land.
I am afraid they both might have "Glass", so I am going to have to voice my opinion that "Glass" does not necessarily provide "Land".
I'm done goofing off. Think I will watch a movie
Last edited by Void (2017-01-21 23:19:12)
I am starting to ask seriously "Why do I do this?"
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The easiest land to make is over the Ocean. There is a lot of empty ocean in the Southern Hemisphere.
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Aside from the basic specs generalized in the quoted above wiki article, I insist it is matter of size / scale.
pad/seat -> floor/deck -> plot -> land -> world ...
A ship or raft turns into piece of land when it is country size - it is subjective human-size criterion, though ... a country-size seems connected with the time to cross it on feet / walking?
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karov is talking about the oceans dead zones which habor the waste that goes down stream in our rivers.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/ocean-dead-zones/
http://www.rosemerena.org/home/2009/04/ … ary-62009/
Solar collection powered barge and net to scoop up the waste and then a solar furnace to melt it down a bit to form concentrated solids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pac … bage_patch
Here is the First of Its Kind Map Reveals Extent of Ocean Plastic
Our Plastic Trash Is Piling Up In The Oceans — This Map Shows Where
First-of-its-Kind Map Details Extent of Plastic in Five Ocean Gyres
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Just a little detail, not sure you would want to live on a undulating surface and getting seasick.
This is an ocean platform prison. Now I don't know why they put windmills on the landing strip, it might get in the way of aircraft trying to land.
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I did a little bit of art work in my spare time. These diagrams are what the Sun would appear as in the high noon position from the surface of my hypothetical Banks orbital made out of Venus, and from Earth. The orbital shades itself, and covers a 0.20 degree strip across the disk of the Sun. I had to reduce the width of he orbital to 12,900 km from 20,000 km, because the later was giving too much shade. To create seasons on this artificial world, there is solar powered cooling from solar panels on the underside and radiator fins on the bottom to sump excess heat into space, much as a refrigerator removes heat from the inside and dumps it out radiators out the back. At high noon the Sun here shines more brightly that Earth, but this compensates for morning and evening when they orbital strip is wider in front of the Sun because its closer.
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Just a little detail, not sure you would want to live on a undulating surface and getting seasick.
http://www.arch2o.com/wp-content/upload … son-03.jpg
This is an ocean platform prison. Now I don't know why they put windmills on the landing strip, it might get in the way of aircraft trying to land.
Tom,
Actually we ARE living on 'boats' - the slabs (1000s x 1000s mi linear sizes) of solider / ligher rock floating on top of softer / molten / denser rock beneath.
undulating, seasick - matter of phase-out wave tech, and/or size. Or earthquakes on terra 'firma'
What do you think on walk-commute timing criterion to distinguish between ship-n-island , between building-n-land?
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The difference between island and ship is more one of stability, I think. If you design your ocean platform to be stable, even whilst floating - perhaps by having it raised high above waves on submerged pontoons - then you can pretty much treat it as an island.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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A floating island made even large than a ship means more stability as the area that it covers is greater than the distances between waves....meaning the bigger the better for what floats....
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