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A machine capable of boring multiple explosive holes would speed things up a bit without requiring the complexity of a full TBM.
I cannot remember the name of the thing or find any references, but I will keep looking.
Our only example of life so far is a fairly complex nanotechnology.
Panspermia, especially accidental panspermia is highly unlikely, but currently seems more likely than a-biogenesis.
What we find on Mars or don't find will give us additional data points.
I like Terraforming.
I know what everyone is talking about.
I would zero the Martian calendar to match the Gregorian calendar.
However messing with clocks is easy. Daylight savings, February 29th, etc are commonly integrated into electronics.
More complex stuff is things like the NTSC video format. Where PAL countries play video at 25 frames per second, NTSC plays at 29.97 frames per second. The rule is drop one frame out of every thousand. Mostly because playing at 30 fps would be to easy.
Messing with how long a second is would be a mistake. Adding a 25th hour would be doable. Making every hour run for 65 minutes or so would work but could lead to a lot of mistakes and errors between equipment that hasn't been updated or correctly switched to Mars Time.
Be aware that we have no good abiogenesis theories at the moment.
The oldest fossil we have is a eurkaryote making it look like bacteria devolved from more complex organisms that arrived or were seeded from space.
That would be awesome.
Mars Colonisation? Oh yeah we have been there for fifty years now
No Sea Ice Cap?
Maybe they want to pay for an ISS module or something
A good bright long life light bulb is a complicated thing. Even then it is still going to be terribly inefficient and prone to failure. LED's are a basic component these days.
QFT = Quoted for Truth.
Why can't a god be insane?
By the time Mars manufacture and colonization becomes possible, light bulbs will be an extinct technology. They are also fragile and very energy inefficient
LED lights will probably be used.
QFT.
Propaane Ethane and Methane all have very low *freezing* points, just a few degrees above Oxygens boiling point. This means you can get away with a thinner bulkhead.
Here you actually want a nice thick high efficieny Solar Panel, to absorb as much enrgy as possible and pass as little as possible through.
Secondly, it could power itself and remote drilling equipment etc, and be used as auxillary power back the Hab.
If you put flood lights on the back of it then you have an itelligent mobile flexible lighting rig for those times when someone has to go fix a pump at 3am.
"OK we got the aspirin. That should do it!"
Pack some X Ray film too. Anybody needs to take a look inside, they just go stand in front of the reactor for a bit while some else holds up the film behind them
Ground Plants in RainForests receive very little light, so they have thin leaves with rough surfaces that are much more efficient at collecting light than canopy plants.
Also on Mars everything gets to bathe in CO2. Plants basically need large amounts of Water and C02. If they need more light then mylar mirrors can reflect the evening and morning sunlight into the green house greatly increasing insolation surface area.
You only need an overhead Sun Shade at Noon.
You need a Sunshade on a large manipulator, on a large trailer that you can hitch up to your rover.
It could have a Solar panel on it
Maybe Nasa expected the 'nauts to hose down and wax the Rovers on the weekends?
8 Gallons is a lot of water to go through everyday.
Won't the Centripetal force dampen oscillations in a flexible tether? The Neutral end will tend to find a stable rotation around the Hab as long as the Hab doesn't over-correct.
Time to go play in Mat-lab... :?
Nasa Deliberately lands in the deserts to avoid collisions on landing
Radiation is most serious only during the day.
A sturdy SunShade with Sandbags piled on should work just as well without pumping water all over the place.
You only need a toolset big enough to make a bigger toolset.
There is are pretty decent thread around here somewhere about taking the ISS to Mars and using stacked Solar Panels as heat shields among other things.
I'm a Yank if I can find it though.
If its thick enough to provide lift then is probably thick enough to burn you.
However instead of lift you might decrease speed enough to drop into a dynamic soaring mode for a while, skipping on the thick atmosphere. However it will still be pretty warm and I don't know what the next step would be.
What you really need are deflector fields.
It must be wonderul to be 15% underweight at this point.
I wonder how all the messing with The Orion/Las is altering the Stack Frequency?