New Mars Forums

Actually, if you are scouting to get "Ground Truth", I would recommend a rather small still which would use freezing and evaporation to minimize labor, and maximize results.

A brine ice "Pot" could be connected with a plastic tube to a vapor receiver pot.
The brine pot could be loaded with mined ice, and also some waste water.  It would use solar collection methods to achieve a higher average temperature than the receiver pot.  The receiver pot could be kept in the shadows, and also fabricated to be colder than the brine pot over average time.

The connecting tube could run horizontally between them and on it top portions have reasonable transparency.  On its bottom, a solar energy collecting opaque coloration.  The connecting tube could be made of a plastic which includes Fluorine chemistry for the plastic film.

The film would not block UV, but that is fine as you would not want critters growing in your still anyway, and such a plastic would have longer term stability under Martian conditions than other films.

The processing of water would  be batch.  You would fill the brine pot with mined water, or briny water from a RSL, you could also add recycle discard water to that.  That would constitute the largest amount of manual labor for this system other than moving it to another location.

The whole system could work under rather low pressures, not much higher than the atmospheric pressure on Mars, so that would reduce the rigors that the system would endure.

The two pots would have quick disconnect and reconnect fittings, being attached to the horizontal tube as required to do the process.

A liquid phase of water would not be required, but depending on location, it could occur within a narrow range of temperatures and pressures which might occur inside the device when it was fully deployed for desalinization.

The two devices which would "Overheat" would be the "Brine Pot" and the "Horizontal Tube".  They would "Overheat" during the days sunshine.

The "Receiver Pot / Condenser Pot would condense the vapors created by the overheated "Other" elements of the system, due to the arrangement to typically have it be colder than the other two elements, at least during the day.

The brine pot could be disconnected periodically, to scrape it clean of residual solids.  This could occur outside of the "Habitat".

The "Receiver Pot / Condenser Pot" could be disconnected, and brought into the habitat to thaw out, producing distilled water.  Distilled water is not the best water to drink, so additives would be brought from Earth, which would be a very small burden I think as it should not require much of it by weight.

When moving to another "Campsite", the Condenser Pot should be smaller than the Brine Pot, so that they will take minimum space, and the horizontal connecting tube should be foldable to go inside the condenser pot  to minimize volume consumed.

In addition, an inflatable bag should be attached, which would be deflated at night, but would inflate as the system pressurized due to solar heating.  The bags purpose would be to receive the volume of air in the system during the day, so that what would be in the heated sections would be more materials to process and steam.  This would help to reduce an "Air Bound" situation for the steam path, increasing efficiency.
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As for the minimization of my previous posts, I have to say, that when you first calibrate a device, you don't do it by "Fine Adjustments".
You might start by a coarse adjustment, then fine adjustments.

So, if you are setting up a first permanent base, you should consider what expansion in the future would look like, because it is not a good idea to expend a lot of effort to build a first permanent base that will not fit into the future.  Maybe there would be a reason to do so, but I suggest they it is a thing to ponder.

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Although I previously suggested vapor tubes for transport of bulk water from source to usage, I am also aware of ideas involving tossing ice blocks as sub-orbital transport from source to use, but of course your aim would need to be precise, or your habitat would get very serious damage.  I believe "Antius" suggested the projectiles. 

I would suggest a combination of methods.  Project the ice blocks to a nearby location, and use vapor tubes to complete the transfer to the usage site.  This would reduce the need for precision accuracy for the projectiles.  It might also be efficient, and helpful to reducing the investment in vapor transport tubes.

Ya, I should stop reading this stuff, it makes me return.

So, if you were to do the iron balls, I would suppose that that might be in many locations.  I support the use of the iron impactors for the reasons Elderchild mentioned.

Buy the dialog here made me wonder if you could also use an alternate impactor, composed of an iron or steel shell, and a reactive alkali metal core.  For the cases where you might want to further study evidence revealed by the iron impactors of a buried ice deposite.

I would expect that the iron or steel shell would break apart, or could be engineered to break apart in a specific way, and that would expose a metal like Sodium to the substances of Mars in the impact location.  I might think that a night side impact would be best for this, because you could hope to detect the flash, if there is one, and might analyze the light spectrum of that, to hope to determine what chemical reaction occurred.  I am open to rebuttal, if anyone feels that this is not a worthwhile thing to speculate on.

I will reply to this, although, I should be taking care of other things.

Just my notions, not enforceable in any way.

http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/

If American culture were to remain static, I would agree with you that when and if this reserve becomes viable as a resource, most likely it would be gifted out to the powerful, with very little return to the public.

However I am a baby boomer.  Our psychology is to be spiritual, and not as concerned about material goods, since we grew up in a an era of relative plenty.  This was the legacy of the Hero generation which they set up.  They were on the winning end of WWII.  Their psychology did not tolerate cheaters, fanaglers, thieves and such.  They required each person to walk on two paws only.  They were very materialistic and not that spiritual.

Generation X followed the baby boomers, they are the equivalent of Nomads.  They are survivors, and very clever at it, having gown up in the aftermath of what the Artists and Babyboomers have left as a residual.  They probably tolerate jungle behaviors, but I don't think they like it.

Generation Y is the new Hero generation, if I don't have this screwed up.  They again will be materialistic, and not very spiritual, and they will hunt down cheaters like a pack of wolfs and without much mercy.  But they will walk on two paws.  At least this is my expectation from reading "The 4th turning".

Probably the reason that our monsters at the top are running wild just now, is that the old "Hero's" are mostly out of power by now.

The Hero's were the ones who set up labor unions, SSI, and Medicare, I believe.

As for the Oil Shale, if it ever is tapped, there are many ways to distribute that including taxes, and jobs, and business profits, so I would not expect a nationalized process.  (That would be just stupid).

You could be right about business interests making our social order remove all bans on exporting oil, but as I have said, the "Y's" are materialistic, and they will want a cut of the action, in terms of real wealth, as suggested in the following article.

http://www.cfr.org/oil/case-allowing-us … rts/p31005

But they will be labor oriented, and I expect they will want the advantage of cheaper oil and natural gas, to further encourage "Reshoring" in the North American economic sphere, and especially in the USA.  They are likely to howl and bite, if their energy costs are lifted up to fill the pockets of the few.

I myself remember am a baby boomer.  I've had my chances, and I seem to have enough, and as you get older other than medical costs, your wants go down, and cost you less.  So, I will watch from a distance, if I watch at all.

If somehow my biological clock gets set back to 24 by very advanced medicine, perhaps I will get a job again, but not a stressful job.  My needs would be small.  I'd be looking for easy, but useful.

As for recycling plastics, I suppose that would be the good way to go.  Then, indeed as it eventually will Oil will see a gradual sunset.  That does not trouble me at all.  But for now, I do believe that there is a whole world out there that wants it, and they also want similar to what we have.  So, for now, Oil and Natural Gas are big still.

And by the way, the old "Hero's" were the ones who put us on the Moon.  Therefore I have high hopes for generation "Y" to have the right values.  This should be very interesting to anyone on this board, I would think.

"Y" won't really start getting significant power, perhaps not for 15 years.

What you see in the power circles in the USA now are the dinosaurs, waiting for an asteroid to hit, and it is on it's way.
And they can't stop it, although they will try.

Hence Bernie and Trump.  (Not picking a favorite).  Clinton may be it this time, but you can be sure that what follows will not be like her.

Ok, still posting, hope to quit soon.

OIL SHALE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale

From my point of view, I would like to see an experiment in facking it like with shale oil, but using supercritical CO2 at high temperatures.
The high temperatures being generated by a solar power tower, I would hope.  The location where our Oil Shale oil is has good solar energy I believe, and a lack of water, so using supercritical CO2 seems like something to try.  Plus with horizontal drilling and fracking, it seems to me that you would be able to access Oil Shale which is very deep.  To help protect the environment, perhaps leaving a layer of rock untouched above it would be helpful.

Cleaning contaminants, and also adding Hydrogen would be helpful.

If Peter Zeihan is correct, then the price of oil long term will be low in North America, but is likely to rise high again elsewhere.

The North American public is likely to want a cut of the benefits from Oil Shale, Shale Oil, and Shale Gas.  I don't know how that would work out politically or economically, but I am going suggest that there is no reason to not sell oil and gas cheep here in the local markets, and then to sell it for a higher price in the international market, if in fact Peter Zeihan's thinking turns out to be correct.  Technically the government owns most of the Oil Shale, and in theory, so the American public owns it, but of course we are often more treated as if we are property these days, but I guess politically, it might be reasonable to deviate from a pure free market method, and impose a two market strategy, where local oil is less costly than international oil (If the international market allows it).  Then of course the companies allowed to access the oil would have to make a reasonable profit, or it could not happen at all.

So, it is not necessarily so that Oil Shale could not be marketed for a profit.

As a byproduct of adding Hydrogen to Oil Shale from Natural Gas, to upgrade it to a higher quality oil, CO2 would be produced, but that is a product which would be useful in Supercritical fracking of both Oil Shale and Shale oil, and it would be useful to rejuvenate oil traditional oil fields.

But in the end economics will rule, with some local interference from political concerns.

The Oil sources which are currently taken off market are deep water projects, and Venezuela, Nigeria and the like.

Again, while some persons do not like producing any CO2, if other countries burn coal because they cannot get high grade oil or natural gas at a price, then they may and do very well resort to coal, and high Carbon oils.  So from a global perspective, and global warming if it is real is such a perspective, producing large quantities of lower Carbon oil is a service to the global situation.  (And it might help North Americans have many economic benefits).  Perhaps a win win thing.

I know that many want to go to alternative energy, and that's fine with me, as it becomes real.  But you still have to make plastics and so on.

Oh, and when you are done fracking, you might have an excellent underground solar storage facility, where high heat can be stored in the rocks, to produce a "Hydrothermal" energy generating process.

And this whole thing goes hand in hand with storing CO2 underground.

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And another thing.  Are members aware that due to the elevated amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, plants around the globe do not have to open their stomata as much as before to get the Carbon they want?  This then causes them to require less water, because they do not have to sacrifice as much water through their stomata in order to get Carbon.

Not everything about elevated CO2 is bad.

Now I will stop posting for a while, I hope.

As for your YODA picture, actually the presenters in a previous post, Liz Parrish, and Bill Andrews, for a joke I suppose say they want to change Betty White to 24 years old, and perhaps they might be able to if she lives long enough for treatments.

I will add something I stumbled on recently:
This one is interesting as well:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/288515.php
But this one is the one I was thinking of:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/05/1 … eases.html

Although this article does not mention it there are negative side effects, particularly for women.
Acne, I think is one of the problems, and hair growth, and other things.

Still, it suggests that science may not be that far away from finding a way to lengthen telomers for the normal population.

This is desired, of course so they can put me back into the work force, and I can pay taxes

I am a pest no doubt.

Anyway if you are going to use freezing as a step to purify brine to fresher water here is a way to make a power source in association with that process:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=el … ORM=VRDGAR

I think this is just one version in a family of developing processes, but it suggests a direction to take.
Some of these schemes also can use waste water as the fresh component.

Doing this however could introduce chemicals which might not entirely be pushed out of the freezing ice, so I would suggest that a simple heating process be used to produce distilled water as well.  I would think that a very low pressure steam produced in a simple solar thermal collector would do this well.

Sublimating the surface of an already processed top of a ice sheet would actually require a lot of energy, since you would be going from solid to vapor, but the source of the energy would be simple, reliable, and very available during normal days.

I am not sure to what degree brine would help to eliminate some micro-organisms emitted by the human body and also industrial processes, but that might be a helpful effect as well.

Then there is the small amount of O2 and CO in the Martian atmosphere.  If you had a somewhat extreme brine at the bottom of the process, you might support extreme micro-organisms in that brine which would process organic materials introduced by waste water.  I believe there is 2 times as much O2 as CO, so there should be enough extra Oxygen to achieve that.

And the electrical source should work around the clock.

As for chipping ice from the top, that is not forbidden, as for some purposes, it would be pure enough.

Karov,

Glad that you suggest that at least one form of Vacuum Balloon is worth trying.

As for the four planets to swell, I was thinking more of the internal heat, and an insulating weather machine.  I see that you dismiss it fairly strongly, that's OK, but I was also thinking about a very advanced civilization using such methods to mine such worlds.  I just wanted to get a vague notion of the dimensions of the problem.

Now I think if it were to even be possible, it would have to be your soap bubble vacuum balloons, perhaps constructed by nano-technology (Haven't seen a lot about that for a while).  I believe a vacuum balloon would have to be rigid.  But perhaps an electron or proton filled balloon could be flexible (I am not too serious about that one, so don't pull your tail feathers out over it).  Another alternative would be possibly a gas filled balloon which existed much farther down in the atmospheric column.  But I don't know if there is a location on any planets where the reward/problem situation would be favorable to the effort.

Then there is the problem of what happens to the Moons, if you did it.  I suppose they could be mined in that way.

I do think perhaps a vacuum balloon would be easier to implement in the atmosphere of Titan than that of Venus, for a number of reasons.

Using Hydrogen, is better lifting, but I fear permeability of the bubble walls.  But maybe that can be solved with some uber material some time.

If so, then I have another question for Karov.

We have two gas giant planets, and two ice giant planets.  I believe that their was a suspicion long ago, that the synchronous orbit of either Uranus or Neptune was in it's atmosphere.

Now the question:  If you could accomplish vacuum bubbles as the multiple elements of a Hall weather machine, without Hydrogen infiltrating the interior of the bubbles at any harmful rate, could you then insulate any of those four planets sufficient to cause their atmospheres to swell large enough where their synchronous orbits would be inside their atmospheres?  Additionally, could you also arrange favorable temperatures at that synchronous orbit (If an atmospheric synchronous orbit was possible)?  Even could the luminosity of the lower layers of the planet "Shine" to the synchronous orbit, without over heating the synchronous orbit (Maybe another hall weather machine below which passes visible light, but insulates against the heat????

Maybe this if fun for you, I hope.

Robert Dyke,

I think that in later videos, Peter Zeihan has a more negative notion of the future of the tar sands, and so I presume he does not think that Canada will deal with an Alberta problem.

GW Johnson,

I was very confused on the issue at first, but with my obsessive curiosity, I found out that their is;

1) Shale Oil: Tight oil that did not migrate, and therefore is not contaminated by Sulfur, or toxic metals.
Estimate of supply is 30 years at least for oil, 70 for Natural gas.  It is the highest quality oil.

2) Oil Shale: Hydrocarbon which did not process even as much as Shale Oil.
An Estimated 6 Trillion barrels of oil exists, but most of it will be hard to access.  An Estonian firm is starting up a pilot project in Utah at this time, on private land.  The Estonians have been working with it for about 100 years I think.

Two different things.

3) Another topic of interest is Oil E.O.R.  (EOR)  Various schemes exist, where old fields still likely have as much oil to extract as was originally taken from them.  Typically utilizing CO2 injection, or from the Russians, a method to use sound waves to reopen the pores in the rock.

While I appreciate the environmentalist movements efforts to keep the industry honest, I stop that support when their behaviors approach the level of psychotic fetish, or when they are being used as a fifth column.

Of course it could occur that I was deceived, but I think that most of the negative press on Shale Oil is Fifth column actions.
The parties who could be involved would be;
Coal industry
Persian Gulf countries, & other such parties.  In other words, the competition.
Big Oil importers in this country.

As for the use of fresh water, apparently, that has mostly stopped, since, they have found a layer of brine water they can tap from their drilling.  As for the fracking chemicals, they are now relatively biologically non-toxic.  You apparently could actually drink the stuff, but of course probably not a good idea to do more than once.

As for contamination of the water table, I understand that in the worst case, their is 1/2 mile of rock between the fracking fluids, and the bottom of the water table.  This supposedly makes it very unlikely to contaminate the ground water supply.

As for the news you might read about water tables being contaminated, this is very likely where their might have been a spill of fluid on the surface, through negligence, or I suppose pipelines do break, but so do oil pipelines sometimes.

Two things I am not sure of are the earthquakes, and possibly the contamination of well water with Methane out east.  I am just not sure about that.

However about the quakes, when I was in school, I lived near iron mines, and every once in a while they would get their blasting wrong, and the school would shake.   So, I guess it depends on how severe those disturbances are as to if it is worth it.  Those iron mines gave us pay, and subsidized our taxes, and schools.  I guess you could argue that agriculture is a severe disturbance of the environment, as a reference for what trade-offs are worth it.  I don't know how severe those quakes are.  If they are bad (Damage to property, injuries), then indeed perhaps that particular fracking should not occur.

It seems that for Shale Oil the cost of production is going down every year, maybe I am correct to say it may be approaching $35.00/barrel now.  Some think the production costs will go down to $15.00/$20.00 which is directly competitive with the highest quality Persian Gulf oil I believe.  (Maybe).

As for flared gas, I believe that Peter Zeihan says they are only allowed to do it for one year, otherwise the are financially penalized heavily.
By waste gas, I believe he is primarily referring to them selling the gas at a loss, so that they can get the oil, which is were their profits are.

In addition, the USA has been gearing up to sell liquid Natural Gas, but the Russians are working hard to keep them out of the European markets.

The USA is now selling very large amounts of Natural Gas to Mexico, as he said, but I think also now to Eastern Canada.

I don't know exactly why Keystone was so feverishly blocked, but if it were me running it, I would have wanted to import the stuff, on the condition that a technology could be invented where Hydrogen from our Natural Gas could be used to turn the Tar Sands oil into light crude ideally using thermal solar energy in my opinion.

The Carbon Dioxide extracted from that process could then be used to conduct EOR on the old oil fields, to extract high quality oil from them.

The intention then would be to generate a very light liquid oil which could be sold to East Asia and Europe, which would accomplish two thing favorable to us, paying down our national debts, and being of use to our allies (And so keeping them allies).

This could have very large cost savings on the process of natural security/military spending, also helping to pay down our national debts.

Now as for the environment, it is not good that the Europeans and perhaps Asians are tilting towards higher Carbon fuels, if you believe in global warming, when in fact we might supply them with lower Carbon fuels instead, and pay down our national debts.

  I wish!