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Mad Science: Terraforming Mars and so forth

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    • CommentAuthorcjstevens
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008 edited
     (2464.1)
    This is in response to a post by Warren about being in support of utilising the red planet, investing in setting up a habitabl environment etc.
    I must say I agree 100% with his attitude towars this subject, dismissing naysayers who don't see it as worthwhile, but it got me thinking..What are our other options? I mean talk about all the eggs in 1 basket.

    I am not exactly an expert on current technolgy and scientific advancements (though I try to keep up with the news, New Scientist and stuff), but here is the point...
    What about orbitting space stations, gigantic artificial bases, with an integrated eco-system. Are these things being designed or considered? I would be relieved to know that the human race has some contingency, ( is there plans for a station somewhere with suitable living conditions, a stockpile of seed, DNA specimens, Information archvies etc, so that if that big volcano in Yellowstone decided to ejaculate a blazing death spray over our planet or China want to flex their nuclear love muscles, we have a tiny chance of holding out for another thousand years,conserving our basic discoveries and stuff.
    In summary
    WHAT IS PLAN B?
    IS THERE A PLAN B?!
    I have a horrible feeling it will involve Gates, Branson and possibly some royals and presidents floating through the crystal scattered abyss in a VIP Spacepod.
  2.  (2464.2)
    It's my understanding that there's a world seed bank in process in Svalbard to allow us to regrow all manner of plant life, with a focus on crops, in the event of a worldwide catastrophe. Let's just hope the meteor doesn't hit Svalbard.
  3.  (2464.3)
    As far as I'm aware, we won't be going to Mars in any significant numbers except via the moon, so plan A is actually the moon, leading to plan B Mars. I've heard some pretty cool stuff about space elevators that could be used in the process of hopping from Earth>Moon>Mars discussed here: Lagrange Points, and there's some more discussion on the practicalities involved here I think: Getting Around The Solar System.

    EDIT: and you mentioned Branson etc in a rather cynical tone, but one of the things we can do to speed up the exploration of space in a practical way is to encourage commercial space ventures that will fund themselves. Currently the major organisations heading into space are mostly reliant on government funding and donations.
    More economical competition could lead to faster and less restricted development in space travel.
    • CommentAuthorcjstevens
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008
     (2464.4)
    I agree that commercial space ventures will acclerate space developments, but I just have a feeling that if and when we get to that stage, it will be the wealthy and powerful individuals who will utilise and benefit the while the rest of us have to contend with the radioactive zombies.
    • CommentAuthorStefanJ
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008
     (2464.5)
    Stuff to think about.

    Salt. Iron oxides. Other crusty nasty minerals. Blowing around as fine dust and in the soil. It will corrode and gum up everything it can into. In moist places it will be worse, and as the planet warms up everywhere will be moist.

    Maybe you can get lichen to grow on it. Planting ground cover would be a good thing, if only to keep the dust down. But eventually you'll need to get rid of those minerals. Concentrate them or combine them in ways that they're inert.

    So. Either you roll machines that scoop up the soil and process it (requiring astonishing amount of energy and/or water) or you make a plant which concentrates the rotten stuff. Maybe makes a nice pod of minerals which you can pick and throw in a crevasse or throw in a smelter. They'll probably have a really weird metabolism. Big thick waxy leaves, probably dark black.

    So. For a long time Mars is going to have a sort of temporary, contrived ecosystem. The air will be as thick and most and chemically tailored so this ecosystem can run at maximum efficiency. This probably means no going out on the surface in shirtsleeves for centuries. (Well, you ALWAYS go out the surface in shirtsleeves. Once. For a very short amount of time.)

    The 1970s socialist-realist sales-brochure images of Martian settlement will look as quaint as those Worlds of If covers. It will turn out to be as odd and unsettling as "cyberspace" turned out to be.
    • CommentAuthorStefanJ
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008
     (2464.6)
    One of the things that would suck about deep-space habitats, factories, and such, and also settlements on small asteroids, is a lack of gravity. Yeah, yeah, spinning spheres and rings so people can live in model suburbs. But I'm not talking about gravity for people. You need gravity for industrial processes, from smelting to running your life support system to illicit brewing of skittlebrau. Also, it keeps your screws and spanners from floating away, and that's not a trivial concern.

    Mars would be good for industrialization because it has pretty stiff gravity and an atmosphere you can use as a sink for waste heat. And it has places you can dump waste and have it stay in place.
  7.  (2464.7)
    As Warren says, we don't have much of a choice. When mankind actually realizes how fucked this planet is, it'll be too late. That is, if we don't kill ourselves first with another World War. You actually think the people in power will ever be worried in fixing this planet before several cities are underwater or scorched beyond recognition? Think again. So where could we go besides Mars? Mercury, you either fry on one half of it or freeze in the other. Venus has an extremely thick atmosphere with insane greenhouse effect that would melt you in about half a second. All other planets after Mars are either mostly gas or ice.

    Some say, "oh, let's work on propulsion and find a planet outside the Solar System". You know the ODDS of finding a planet we can just land and live in? Oxygen is originally a toxic gas. Thing is, thanks to natural selection, one cell got some use out of it or something and lo and behold there's the human being. We evolved with basis on Earth's oxygen levels, hydrogen levels, etc. Finding a planet with these same settings or that can be converted to them within our flight reach in the next fifty years is just about impossible. Of course, according to Christian Fundamentalists, it's all magic and we were just made into being by an invisible old man. I just added this so you can laugh a bit. Aniway, it's better to do what we can with Mars than spend fifty years working on new engines. By the time we can fire ourselves out of the Solar System, Earth will probably be fucked already and if the mission goes shitty and such planet just happens to be six hundred lightyears away circling around Antares, we won't have time to restart research on Mars. So we better use Mars as a provisory planet until we find one more suited, because we might be closer to extinction than you think.

    I agree private companies should start doing their own space travels. Of course, this will land us in a ton of shit in the future, but hey, we already live eating shit from the big corporations, it won't make a difference. We cross that bridge when we come to it. First priority: finding a way of living on Mars.

    Also, about living on asteroids. Oh, that would be fun, wouldn't it? I'd love to see Michael Bay making "Armaggeddon II", but rather than an asteroid coming our way, it's we headed toward Earth. Actually, no I wouldn't and Michael Bay would be one of the first in my list of "people I'd love to see being ejected out of an airlock in Andromeda". We can make space stations on asteroids, I think, but building a way of life there? Forget it.

    I agree with everything Warren said. Fuck the martian bacterium, fuck this national park idea. Also, all the above was written with no research and just the knowledge off the top of my head at the moment, so if I made a scientifical mistake please tell me so.
  8.  (2464.8)
    I say we bomb Mars. With Science bombs.

    Say we drop all manner of fast adapting lichen and plant spores, some will work, some will fail, just be sure to engineer a way to kill them if they get off the rails. Start greening the planet that way, then start shipping over people to really get the process moving.

    Thinking underground, at least at first. Less radiation to worry about, more of a controlled enviornment (sandstorms) and we have plenty of earth-based experience with underground operations (mining and the like) to guide us. Course there will be unique challenges, but that's the whole point.

    I have no interest in people who want to make Mars a big red nature preserve.

    (Of course the Martian warlords, who breath carbon and live in lava will be waiting for us, but hey, that's half the fun)
    • CommentAuthordkostis
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008
     (2464.9)
    "WHAT IS PLAN B?
    IS THERE A PLAN B?!"

    I just wish there was a Plan A.
  10.  (2464.10)
    I just wish there was a Plan A.


    Plan A never works.
  11.  (2464.11)
    I've heard some pretty cool stuff about space elevators that could be used in the process of hopping from Earth>Moon>Mars

    Space elevators are a great idea in theory, but, put simply, the required technology does not and possibly never will exist. Also, space elevators come with a radiation cost -- the most optimistic estimates I've heard are that a single space elevator trip will give you one-sixth of an astronaut's lifetime REM limit.

    EDIT: and you mentioned Branson etc in a rather cynical tone

    Don't blame him. These space-tourism gigs are sub-orbital lobs -- slightly shallower in trajectory, if I recall, than Alan Shepard's 15-minute trip in 1961.
    • CommentAuthorcjstevens
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008
     (2464.12)
    To quote the Way of the Gun:

    'A plan is just a list of things that don't happen.'
    •  
      CommentAuthorCCosker
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008
     (2464.13)
    NASA just spent a billion dollars to replace the ISS's toilet pump. A billion dollars so that astronauts can shit.

    How much did the Mars rover cost?

    America alone is squandering its money on a needless, fruitless war that will leave its next generation in debt.

    What I'm saying is, where is the money going to come from? If NASA can't find the money or the gumption to put a man on Mars, do we really think the private sector--which is only starting to think about low-orbit spaceflight tourism.

    Mars isn't going to happen until it becomes economically feasible. Barring Bill Gates going schitzo and chanting "Mars! Mars! Mars!" while grinning furiously, I don't think it's going to happen, as cool as it would be.
  14.  (2464.14)
    NASA just spent a billion dollars to replace the ISS's toilet pump. A billion dollars so that astronauts can shit.

    Yeah, don't conflate America with NASA. NASA has gone through phases of having a somewhat delusional institutional culture. Ten years ago, someone at NASA (whose name I forget) told me "you can't do anything with $40 billion." To NASA, that wasn't enough money to go to space.
    •  
      CommentAuthoriangil
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008
     (2464.15)
    Bill Gates going schitzo and chanting "Mars! Mars! Mars!" while grinning furiously

    would be the best salvation ever.
  16.  (2464.16)
    "What about orbitting space stations, gigantic artificial bases, with an integrated eco-system. Are these things being designed or considered"

    If you're talking about space colonies ala Islands in the Sky there's a fundamental technical problem which no-one has found a way around. Essentially all current materials including metals diffuse gases into a vaccuum (outgassing). So you need essentially a whole new atmosphere every year or so even if you have a closed ecological cycle. Mars missions will probably be able to take enough extra air with them. Moon bases will likely be mostly underground and Mars has just enough atmosphere to prevent this.

    But Babylon 5 size space stations are probably going to be impossible until there's some radical advance in materials science. (Of course with the current rate of progress with nanotech that could coem next week.)
  17.  (2464.17)
    We could probably make a start on terraforming Mars now if we wanted to.

    Go to the Atacama desert in the Andes, the Tibetan plateau and the Dry Hills region of Antarctica and collect a bunch of the most cold/dry/high altitude adapted lichens, algae and bacteria on the planet.

    Then drop a bunch of packets on the Martian equator in midsummer. Chances are something would survive and reproduce and start the process. Compared with current Mars missions it wouldn't even be all that expensive.

    The question is whether we should - because doing so would probably make it impossible to find evidence of Martian life.

    I'd like to know whether there is or was life on Mars before we totally fuck contaminate the data.

    If there's some Martian micro-organism, catalog it; gene-sequence it (assuming it has genes) and culture it in a lab somewhere.

    Then start the terraforming.

    Honestly though, Mars isn't that much more hospitable than the Moon so if we want to colonise somewhere ASAP the moon probably makes a lot more sense.
  18.  (2464.18)
    "What I'm saying is, where is the money going to come from? If NASA can't find the money or the gumption to put a man on Mars, do we really think the private sector--which is only starting to think about low-orbit spaceflight tourism."

    Don't be surprised if the first human on Mars is Chinese, Indian, Russian or from an EU country.

    Personally I'm hoping for a repeat of the ISS (only this time the Russians don't extort the other countries for $20 billion by withholding key components)
    •  
      CommentAuthorLinsterg
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008
     (2464.19)
    First off, there's the Google Lunar X-Prize, which might result in some interesting applications. Secondly, NASA's gotten very good at doing probes on the cheap - both rovers cost less than $300 million together. Manned spaceflight is another story, though, in part because NASA is very risk-averse about losing astronauts.

    The first people to go to the moon or Mars for permanent settlement are going to have a high expectation of premature death, which is not compatible with NASA's PR strategy. Those people will have come to terms with their very high likelihood of never returning to Earth. So when some commercial entity is able to send people to Mars - people who who understand that they're going to die there - we'll be good to go.
    •  
      CommentAuthorAriana
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2008 edited
     (2464.20)
    Main problem seems to be that we're not looking for new places to ship our poor folks, exiles, undesirables, and criminals anymore. </sarcasm>

    Seriously though, the socio-economics of the US -- no matter how much it might suck for the UK folks getting paid in USD -- make it very hard to make a case for sending hundreds (thousands) of settlers into space. I mean, most scenarios we're talking about here -- setting up a system where in twenty years a small camp of scientists go up to research to see if we can send ten or so more people in another twenty years, in the hopes that in fifty years we could set up a little area where maybe fifty whole scientists could possibly start thinking about bringing up their families, too... Where's the _drive_ there? Hell, I don't wanna fund that shit, either. And I fucking LOVE space.

    We used to, let's face it, fund preliminary expeditions to see if there was anything useful there, and then fling thousands of people at the wall in the hopes that 1% of them would survive and make someplace hospitable. And when we couldn't find volunteers, we sent prisoners.

    Lemme clarify: I'm not advocating emptying out prison system into space. That's more than a little problematic on several levels, morality aside.

    But until we've got enough people clamouring to move up there -- some reason other than "maybe we should think about expanding, possibly, y'know" -- until we give folks some reason to gather up the slightest bit of what they own, kiss their extended families goodbye forever, and fucking set forth to tame the wild planet against all odds, knowing that one in five will die within a year, and they're gonna need to just keep breeding until they STICK... we're not getting to Mars. You don't settle a new frontier by making it comfortable _first_. You go, and you beat the fuck out of it, and you tell it I BLED ON IT, I LIVE HERE NOW, and you dare it to argue.

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