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Area of Circle = Pi r^2 (area receiving radiation)
Area of Sphere = 4 Pi r^2 (area radiating to space)
If the dark side were insulated with a foot or more of styrafoam, then heat escaping would be greatly reduced.
In addition, if baffles were placed on the sunlight side to reduce radiation escaping, we could have a tropical climate ?
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Radiation is proportional to T^4. Then there are exponential decays and thermal mass to figure out. Anyone guess likely temperature ?
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I think styrofoam is brutal, but here you are s.t. which I`ve already proposed in not so general and 'distiled' form in other posts: The planetary atmosphere temperature depends not only how much heat the planet receives/retains, but as you point, how fast it releases it...
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Imagine baloon 10 cantimeter wide. The bottom half of it is mirror, the upper is black or transperant, but the inner bottom half black - overaly semi-transperant. THe baloon flies several km high in , say already thickened to ~100 mBars Martian atmosphere. This baloon is designed to contract when heated ( hence loosing some buoyancy when heated and thus effectivelly transfering heat from above to the lowee layers). The dark upper side retains more heat - thus lowering the planetary albedo significantly, the reflecting down side turns back the trying to escape longwave IRs - blancketing the troposphere... These baloons number as much as it is necesary. Specially designed self-replicating machines can put them in place and after that to replenish the loses. Reverse the baloons -- and you cool the planet. Such tech can significantly expand the habitable zone arround any star both inwards and outwards - allowing terrraforming of seemingly impossible now worlds as Mercury, Gallileans... BTW, such balloon layer could serve as artificial thermopause, to prevent loses of hydrogen from terraformed significantly smaller than Earth bodies...
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Yes, an answer is imaginative ways to rearrange energy flow.
http://www.imagineeringezine.com/e-zine … .html]Mars available solar power = 595 watts/ square meter
= 55.3 watts/ square foot
Earth available solar power = 1,380 watt/ square meter
= 128 watts/ square foot
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http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~smyers/courses … L3.html]At 300 K energy radiated 459 W m-2
So the 595 watts/m^2 will be able keep sunlit surfaces warm.
Just need to insulate very well at night.
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The best way to insulate mars at night is with a thicker atmosphere. Even .50 bar would make a big difference, coulds and oceans also would prevent the rapid drop in temp at night on mars. On earth desert have 20f day to night temp changes, on cloudy days it just 5-10f changes. Near the ocean or tropics the change might just be 1f form night to day. So what mars really needs to be more earth like is to be more earth like its self. So Terrafroming to different degrees will inprove the insulations on mars.
I love plants!
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The best way to insulate mars at night is with a thicker atmosphere. Even .50 bar would make a big difference, coulds and oceans also would prevent the rapid drop in temp at night on mars. On earth desert have 20f day to night temp changes, on cloudy days it just 5-10f changes. Near the ocean or tropics the change might just be 1f form night to day. So what mars really needs to be more earth like is to be more earth like its self. So Terrafroming to different degrees will inprove the insulations on mars.
Yes. Clouds of nano- or micro-machines smart dust, should make it even much better --floating in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, changing colour and transperancy for different wavelenghts, manipulating the albedo, serving as greenhouse dynamical roof, condensational or evaporation cores for water cycle drive... I don`t know what are the theorethical limit for such meteorological "utility fog", but it should be much greater than of pure water. It even could in principle provide so steep thermal tropopause, that to prevent from escaping volatiles, from low gravity worlds...
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Clouds of nano- or micro-machines smart dust
On Earth, a weather baloon is used to measure weather conditions.
On Mars, weather baloons would make the weather.
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Clouds of nano- or micro-machines smart dust
On Earth, a weather baloon is used to measure weather conditions.
On Mars, weather baloons would make the weather.
Correct. But the more important thing is that UtilityFog-ed atmosphere is aplicable for terraforming un-terraformable with classical gaia-biospherical or crude macro-tech methods. For example, a smartized-atmosphere created around say Pluto or Sedna, can do all the tasks to keep the supercold mini-world provided with ~300 K/ ~1 bar brethable air around it -- retention via mechanical, electromagnetic and eletrostatical means of slowing down the trying to escape molecules, gradual extension of the UF-envelope to multi-hundreds of thousands km wide photon-collector+manipulator... whatever necessary... I`ll develop the theme/idea in separate topic soon.
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