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http://iaxo.web.cern.ch/iaxo/the-experiment/physics/

OK, so there are maybe's.

Which direction would grant energy and which would consume energy?  Photon>Axion, Axion>Photon?

I think you indicated Axion>Photon.

Dark Matter apparently clings to matter gravitationally as a rule, or vice versa.  So, there would be fields of concentration if we were lucky enough to have a Axion dominated Dark Matter.  Too bad there would not be a way to funnel it into a magnetic field.

Stars might be doing this though, since they are magnetic to a degree?

http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/fo … rk-energy/

If I had make a speculation, I would say that more space is created by injecting energy into it.  But that is only guessing.  I am very poorly equipt for this subject.

If this were somehow true, then I would be looking for evidence that energy from hot baryonic objects is creating more space/dark energy.  Black Holes, Stars, hot planet cores?

That's baryonic of you?

Perhaps it expands dark energy when the virtual particles vanish and might carry extra energy with them?

Do hot planet cores, stars, black holes, radiate energy into dark energy, so causing it to expand and the universe to expand?  It might explain how energy stored in baryonic matter goes into black holes and perhaps exits as dark energy, and causes the universe to expand at an increased rate?  Maybe dark energy is a "White Hole".

Quack! Quack! I really don't have the capacity to argue against your points, but I am inclined to bet my money that there is more than baryonic matter.

Just a speculation.  Maybe I did not understand your reply well enough.  No offense was intended.

Hi guys, didn't notice your posts until now.

All right, I left myself some loopholes.  I did mention a possible rocket thruster added to the mix,  I was thinking a solid one that would ignite just before landing and keep the impact materials from becoming unrecoverable or contaminated by mixing with soil too much.  But I would prefer to find a hard lander method that would leave a recoverable/valuable material on the ground to retrieve.

Robert could be right, that is a complex machine, and I do have trouble figuring out what the rotors could be reused for.  Still I will not abandon it entirely, I will just like to hear more of alternate ideas.  My understanding would be that the rotors would act like a parachute.  I understand the parachutes are quite expensive.  I was hoping the rotors could be mass produced.  Actually, I was hoping that they could also be the heat shield to a degree.

I know I am out of your league both of you.  But if you dropped a spider from a high altitude on Earth, it can survive because of the surface area, the air drag being a large component of its character relative to it's mass.  If you dropped it on Mars it would splat, but if you felt a splattered spider was useful to you it would be available for recovery.

The flying saucer ballute thing just tested is also a potential variation.

I have seen ideas about landers that would be like sheets of paper.

Roberts idea might be best though.  I would like to get a low cost delivery of a needed solid state material  (No liquids or gasses).

I think this would be valuable during certain phases of development.

I have also thought of impacting the edges of dunes ice filled or not ice filled.  An angular impact.  However that requires extreme precision I think, and it might scatter the materials delivered too much.  I have also thought about a little bomb that fluidizes the ground before the device impacts (The bomb hits the surface first), so then you would
have a splash-down, but might get it burried too deep.  If it was a shallow deposit of sand on top of bedrock maybe that would be OK, but then you have to prep the site, and again your accuracy has to be very high.

If your stuff does splatter, perhaps a crater with walls would help.

The roton is rather complex I admit.  It was fun to think through it.

Scientific American "Secrets of the UNIVERSE Past, Present, Future".

Anyway, I risk very little.  Not planning to advance to anything that matters.

I am comfortable thinking that if a particle exists even only for a instant, and it has mass, and you can push on it an opposite reaction will occur.  The words significant, and useful apply though.

The effect may be insignificant related to the usage of resources to cause it.

But the truth is that Dark Matter and Dark Energy have not been sufficiently defined to even hope to develop machines around them, but discovery so far hints that there is a whole different reality that we have not been aware of.  It's kind of funny.  Might aliens, angels, and God be found in these other realities?  Certainly if Dark Matter and Dark Energy do exist, then they contain information about themselves, and perhaps an aware presence.

Many persons have looked at baryonic matter, and said "Man is all that we see as aware".  Therefore they have begun to think in terms of masters and slaves and have begun to frantically try to justify such a selfish attitude.  Horrible wars based on calculations based on insufficient information.  Practices of domination justified, thinking that a human can play God.

Vague understandings are now filtering down to the general population, which they can become aware of if they wish.  At that point, with more people who actually deal with non-theoretical science learning, the material and spiritual culture have an opportunity to change.  Inventions, perhaps, and perhaps a new awareness of the infinite, or what to us is the infinite.

I have noticed that a great deal of confusion comes from our time perspectives, and also the uncertainty of the facts on the ground.

At a high latitude such as a glacier in the Hellas Basin, an abundance of water seems available and resupply perhaps assured.  But the seasonal climate is unfriendly.
At a lower latitude, then water would have to come from the soil, be baked out.  I suggest a migration method.

Robotic rovers, and stripped down landers.  Rover robot technology is being demonstrated on Mars as we now exist.  That should be continued and expanded into more rugged and capable devices, once humans can obtain materials on Mars.  As for the landers, if you strip off the heat shield, and reposition the canted engines, perhaps they could serve to migrate humans between a summer base at a higher latitude, and a winter base at a lower latitude. Twice a year, until the high latitude base was a safe and useful place to keep humans in year around.

An abundance of water is necessary for any civilization, so, the lower latitude base would only be for survival until the higher latitude base had been built up enough for humans to safely winter over, and be able to do useful work year around.

I have mentioned hard landers in another thread.  One activity of robotic rovers could be to retrieve pieces from a junk yard created by hard landing some device.  Ideally, the device would not require a parachute or rockets.  Hellas offers the best chance of that, but it would be a long way from the low latitude base, so I would suggest two junk yards,
one each near but not too close to each base.  The rovers at the low latitude base might focus on collecting water from the soil.  Microwaving the top layer, and vacuuming
the vapors with a pump, compressing the vapors into a liquid, bringing it back.  Also collecting iron and nickle particles, and also perhaps retrieving parts from a crash junkyard.

The high latitude base should not require it's rovers to collect water.  But retrieving junk and collecting iron and nickle particles would be useful.

I don't know if it would pay to have the rovers migrate between bases, likely not.

Solar panels might power each base to a degree, at first with electricity.  In off peak times, they might supply electric power to split CO2 into CO and O2.  Concentrating mirrors where a device in the focus would provide a heated cavity.  Into the heated cavity could be injected CO, and H20.  That should provide hydrocarbons and waste gasses.
A vacuum would have to collect that product, to compress it a bit and a cooling process would be desired.

I suppose that a similar process could just heat the CO2 of the atmosphere up in a cavity, and with a catalyst, perhaps split it into CO, and O2, but I don't have many facts on such a dry process.  The only think I have heard of is a spinning disk which splits water by being heated and cooled, I think it was some type of iron.  It absorbs Oxygen from the water, and expels it when heated, the disk would have one part heated and one part exposed to water vapor I suppose that is cool.

Anyway, if you can't get your Oxygen surplus by splitting CO2 or H20, or from plants, I guess going to Mars is pointless.

Returning to the process that splits CO2 into CO and O2, and then a second process that combines CO with H20 under a mirrors focus, if at the high latitude base the collected hot gasses could be cooled in a melt water puddle, serving multiple purposes.  Heating the water, cooling the gasses, and providing a habitat for chemically driven plankton.  The plankton could be fed Hydrocarbons and Oxygen, or CO and Oxygen.  The mirror process would have amplified the energy level of the chemical, but maybe the hydrocarbons would be too valuable to use that way.

If desired, the puddle could be given a low pressure transparent shell covering, allowing light in.  I suggest bubbles of plastic.  Plastic pillows so to speak.  With skirts around their perimeter.  The soil over the ice would be cleaned off, and a pillow placed down to make a window, and soil and rocks placed over the skirt to hold the device down.
creating a solar window.  Then in addition to chemosynthisis, photosynthisis might occur.  But this would be the process of building up the high latitude base. As vapors migrated under the skirt, they would tend to condense, as the soil temperatures would be rather frigid.  This would reduce but not eliminate water losses.  So a second pool would be necessary, where it's volume would be sacrificed over time, the provide make up water for the pool with the bubble windows.

That is enough for now.  I look forward to various criticisms, and will try to justify myself with more if the inhabitants of this site like.

Thats a fair question.

Yes, if a needed material can be obtained in an easier fashion, why do it?

I am only think of steps.

In step1, I presume that needed cargo is delivered to the first humans on Mars before they land, and after they land as needed.  If the device I described could be competitive with already planned methds, then use it.

In step 2, I would presume that the landing site would have been choosen for access to materials needed, but more than likely would not have the full spectrum of useful materials availible in a form that could be used at that level of industrial developement.  So, I choose Copper, but it may be that the landing site would have that mineral, but I am betting it won't have it in a form that is easily converted to useful metal, not unlil the infrastrucure has been better developed.  If not Copper, maybe Gold or Silver, rare Earth metals or something else.  So, economics would determine it.  If you had the material and the tools, and the labor force (Ability to manipulate a raw material into a finished material), then absolutely why do the roton thing?  But I have heard talk of hard landers before for certain materials, here is a hard lander (Maybe), and maybe it would work better than other designs for hard landers.

In step 3, the infrastructure would be built up sufficiently that such devices would seldom or never be used again.

But you are right to question it.  I am only proposing a supposed machine that might be a useful tool.  There is no proof yet that it is a useful or preferred tool.

OK, correct, if in a boat, on a water only world, you might drift to any place in accordance with the force of surface currents of water and wind.

It is sad to see how little activity is happening here.  I hope I am not the cause of that.

Anyway, I have done some thinking about minimal water worlds around "M" type stars, that is red dwarfs.  And just a little about "G" type yellow stars.

I speculated that an Earth with twice the water perhaps, at an orbit between Mars and the Asteroid belt, and with a reasonable amount of a Nitrogen atmosphere, could support a sun pointing sea, if the planet was gravitationally locked.  Most of the planet would be ice, but there would be a sea pointing at the star.

I have speculated that if life were there and if evolution were actually a acting fact, guided by a higher mind or by rules of physics, perhaps microbes in the sea.

Then fishes.  Then flying fishes, to escape predators.  Eventually flying warm blooded fishes.  Eventually birds sort of.  To nest, the warmer ice shelves would be a good place to brood young, away from predators.  Then deposits of guano on the ice, then plants?  Then a strange form of tree, where they are interlocked to hold against the wind, and they are on stilts, and not roots, where the stilts, grow from the plant and then push against the ground.  Symbiosis, where the "Birds", bring fertilizer to the trees, and the trees shelter and perhaps even feed the birds.  This would occur at the edges of the sea, on the ice shelf.

While seasons would not exist, oscillations in the weather would.  At times fierce frigid winds would blow off of the dark side discharging thermal differential, and at other times, the winds would be still, allowing the temperatures to climb in the constant sun.  Some melting would occur.

The Mona Loa bug exists in below freezing temperatures in Hawaii.  It has antifreeze.  Tibet has an insect with antifreeze as well that operates in below freezing temperatures.

Perhaps you can speculate on a world around a "G" type star.  Would it have a significant moon?

The first effort would be to use terraforming methods to prohibit the condensation of CO2, and to release the permanent CO2 in the south ice cap.

Having that I would expect that river systems would try to form in the southern hemisphere.  Later if they become significant, hydroelectric power would be an option.

By force melting the northern ice cap in particular, and also as a side concern, parts of the south ice cap, ice covered reservoirs would hasten the release of gasses from the flooded soils, which upon release from the waters into the atmosphere would universally contribute to a greater greenhouse effect, warming all the exposed soils and ice surfaces to some smaller degree.  It is a happy convergence that an expanding ice covered body of water at each pole could have concentrating mirror type solar power plants that would generate electricity seasonally, and could quench their steam into the waters below the ice.  By doing that the thickness of the ice could be kept to a desired minimum to allow the ice covered reservoirs to collect some solar energy as well. 

In the northern hemisphere, the desire would be an ice covered ocean that expands until filling the maximum possible area, hopefully being able to fill the Mariner Rift Valley,

In the southern hemisphere, an initial pool would have outlets and perhaps natural rivers, and in some cases created channels, that would cause it to conduct the melt water to lower latitudes to help support a biosphere, and evaporation, biasing the collection of water to the northern hemisphere.  That would have to wait until the atmosphere and greenhouse gasses were sufficient to cause a general melting of at least some of the seasonal condensation in the southern hemisphere.

So solar power in the south would be hydro-electric, in low latitudes could be solar panels, and in the north concentrating mirrors, and a semi-natural process where the ice covered sea is also a solar collector.  This all tied together in a string like grid running north and south at a particular longitude.

For the northern sea it should be preferred that the ice pack be held fast to the north protruding lands, and that at least in the Mariner Rift Valley there would be open water.
This is more possible on Mars than on Earth, since Mars has only tiny moon tides, its northern hemisphere will continue to be colder, and if the atmosphere is thinner, a wind process for breaking up the ice pack will be weaker.  Also on Earth, the oceans have a lot of tropical area to generate warm currents to warm the northern polar seas, it would not be so much on Mars.

But there is no reason not to poke holes in the ice with solar energy from orbital mirrors at locations desired.  In particular, I would not object to bringing the average solar flux of the Mariner Rift Valley up to Earth levels, or even higher, to facilitate conversion of CO2 to O2, and Hydrocarbon materials sinking to the bottom of the sea, and to make one place on Mars even more Earth like.

The objective would be to speed up the terraforming process, and to also integrate humans into it fully, and make its processes facilitate the survival and comfort of humans.

I have cross linked to my post on Radiotrophic organisms, since my answer is the same.

http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=7107