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Kim Stanley Robinson Says Colonizing Mars Won't Be As Easy As He Thought
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from io9:
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy filled us all with hope that we could terraform Mars in the 21st century, with its plausible description of terraforming processes. But now, in the face of what we've learned about Mars in the past 20 years, he no longer thinks it'll be that easy. Talking to SETI's Blog Picture Science podcast, Robinson explains that his ideas about terraforming Mars, back in the 1990s, were based on three assumptions that have been called into question or disproved:
1) Mars doesn't have any life on it at all. And now, it's looking more likely that there could be bacteria living beneath the surface. 2) There would be enough of the chemical compounds we need to survive. 3) There's nothing poisonous to us on the surface. In fact, the surface is covered with perchlorates, which are highly toxic to humans, and the original Viking mission did not detect these. "It's no longer a simple matter," Robinson says. "It's possible that we could occupy, inhabit and terraform Mars. But it's probably going to take a lot longer than I described in my books."
1) Mars doesn't have any life on it at all. And now, it's looking more likely that there could be bacteria living beneath the surface. 2) There would be enough of the chemical compounds we need to survive. 3) There's nothing poisonous to us on the surface. In fact, the surface is covered with perchlorates, which are highly toxic to humans, and the original Viking mission did not detect these. "It's no longer a simple matter," Robinson says. "It's possible that we could occupy, inhabit and terraform Mars. But it's probably going to take a lot longer than I described in my books."
it could take longer than in his books, which, frankly, were interminable.
Welcome to adulthood. Every scify writer is living in a fantasy world as much as if they were doing swords and sorcery.
It just wouldn't be any fun if they had to live in the real world.
Just because flight was tougher than strapping a couple wings to our arms or summoning up a magic carpet doesn't mean it wasn't ultimately possible. There are new challenges to leaving earth. That's no reason to give up on it entirely.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Sisters?
That's why it's called Science Fiction and not Science Nonfiction.
Imagine if the Roanoke colonists decided Antarctica should be their goal. Well that's where Mars colonization plans are today. Of all the reasonable candidates, (Low earth orbit, the Lagrange points, the Moon, Mars, Asteroids) Mars is about the worst. It's at the bottom of the deepest gravity well outside of earth, except for the asteroids it has the longest travel time, and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.
What's it like to think colonizing Mars means having a soul?
Mars can NEVER be terraformed because it cannot hold an atmosphere.
Don't feed the troll.
Was he right with what he wrote? I'm pretty sure there's Plant Men, and Green Men, and Red Men and Princesses and Predator Cities.
Mars can NEVER be terraformed because it cannot hold an atmosphere.
Weirdly enough, it already has one
Plenty of people on this planet rarely if ever go outside; people live indoors, work indoors, shop indoors, and take much of their recreation indoors. So I don't really see the reasoning behind the assumption that we can't colonise another planet without terraforming it. Mars has no magnetic field to divert solar radiation, so even if you did terraform it pretty good, you'd still get fried; KSR solved that in his books by eventually genetically modifying the colonists to be able to self-repair the radiation damage, but who knows when such a solution will be feasible in reality. Build your colony underground as much as possible, and you gain protection from everything that is hostile about the Martian environment; the atmosphere, the temperature, the toxic stuff, and the radiation all become much more controllable. Sure, it's a bit harder building underground, but not nearly as hard as terraforming.
Oh no... it's the future.
You're misinformed. It can hold an atmosphere. It just can't hold it over geological timespans.
Well, a leisure society with a 10 hour workweek and a basic living income for all is also ultimately possible, and will help every single member of the species.
Here's the thing: flight was solved in the early 20th century by two bike mechanics with a home-made engine strapped to an over-sized box kite. It took two non-university educated people to silence the critics.
Space? It took the largest and most powerful empire in history, an entire decade, a presidential decree, and thousands of engineers just to get a handful of test pilots to go camping on the Moon, for a few weekends.
It's been almost half a century, and even with allllll this technology that you guys keep claiming got better and better, no one has been further than 0.1 planetary radii. And that's with governments and billionaires.
And we also know that space is vastly empty, deadly, and hostile.
It's over, zip up the body bag and put the tag on the Space Age.
Move on.
There are new challenges to STAYING on the Earth!
New science has shown it won't be as easy as he once thought. But even newer science could mean it's even easier than he dreamed. For example, if Lockheed-Martin delivers on the promise of compact fusion then all of these so called issues are washed away in a river of free energy.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Maybe because his characters were living hundreds of years and the engineering is not feasible today. Great lectures by the way ...
Van Allen Belt
It was too much effort to answer your question so I just gave up like a Earther.
I think it's obvious: do the moon first. We are _incredibly lucky_ to have this resource on our backyard.
Take your meds and calm down. It's been enough of a hassle getting you out of that Thai prison. Beside "she" being a "he", he was also underage.
Why transform a planet if we can build a better habitat in space that will use materials more efficiently? The key point being that the knowledge and effort required is on a greater scale than we would need to make very large space vehicles that were hardened enough to protect the crews fully. Living in 2D on the surface of huge lumps of rocks is such a waste of space and matter. The volume required to sustainably house 100 billion humans is actually reasonably compact in comparison, and that is allowing for it to be rotating so that the living areas are 1 G environments.
You learn in Sci Fi and in dull HS Science that you are a carbon based life form. Now this is a very coal based thing to say; one could also very well say we are nitrogen based beings (or hydrogen/Phosphorus/oxygen etc). There's a whole lot of carbon in the inner solar system in many extractable forms but Nitrogen is the fixer. Why is it that acquiring enough nitrogen from the 78% that is in the air happens to be the one of the rate limiting steps for life? That 0.04% CO2 is not limiting.
The outer solar system is different, fixed nitrogen ammonia is abundant. Titan, Europa, and possibly Ceres?
Mars on the other hand had its Nitrogen blown away by the solar wind and since it is an essential ingredient for you nitrogen based life forms it would not be my first choice to set up shop.
For that matter, why not truck water and ammonia from Ceres to the moon and live in a warm place with a great view?
There is no need to terraform the bulk of Mars until you have enough people there to justify it. Until then it makes much more sense to restrict the terraforming to the space underneath your habitat domes and arches.
Ideas that Mr. Robinson may not have been aware of also make colonizing easier. One is "Seed Factories" - self upgrading automation that grows from a starter kit, the way a tree grows from an acorn. The starter kit includes plans for the sequential addition of new machines, until you have a fully grown industrial capacity. Another is an improved space elevator system. The static ground-to-synchronous orbit elevator is not the lowest mass design by a long shot, and improved designs can be built with today's materials, rather than requiring "unobtainium".
Fiction book not actually true, claims report.
Film at 11.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The new world? It took the largest and most powerful empires of the times, several centuries, royal decrees, and hundreds of ships to get a handful of explorers to have establish colonies in the new world. When they got there, they found local indigenous populations that helped their efforts.
The same thing could be true for space. The local indigenous populations that help our efforts aren't necessarily beings, but could be as simple along the lines of nitrogen-fixing bacteria helping us on earth, or plants or other things we can eat, or help us with water, air, energy, etc...
Or space could be like Antarctica You never know until you get there.
I'm guessing space is going to be more like Antarctica, which doesn't mean you don't go there, it just means you don't colonize it right away, you just research it and see where it leads you...
Between global warming, tectonic plate movement, improved technology, open land exhaustion, and maybe even some ecological disaster (due to war or perhaps an asteroid collision), maybe we will actually colonize Antarctica someday, which seems like a reason to spend some time to better understand it today...
He's right. The rest of you who, like me, grew up reading science fiction, are wrong.
We run out of hydrocarbons of all types before this century is out. They become too expensive to be useful long before then. We use up the popular fissionables too. We have some hope of maintaining industrial scale electricity if we start developing thorium generators - like, yesterday. If we don't, you can pretty much kiss industrial civilization at the current scale goodbye before the century is out.
All of this information is available to anyone with google and a calculator. For the unusually lazy, start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... (and buy the book.).
Billions will starve by 2100. Ecological overshoot happens to all species eventually. It's happened to local populations countless times before. It just happens to be occurring on a global scale for the first time. After it's all sorted out, the remaining 250 million (or less depending on the number of nukes involved), will be unusually sensible.
It's not the end of the world, per se, but it's the end of the world we grew up in. The one we dream of, with FTL, space colonies and the like will be stillborn. We blew our resources on ipads, pet food and television, instead of large scale nuclear power, sustainable agriculture and social, political and economic systems that don't involve large numbers of nuclear weapons in the hands of testosterone soaked sociopaths.
Cheers!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Fix't it fer tha.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
[1] Cos if 'e dint like it, 'e could 'appen as mebbe bugger off. An hoo own'd t'hoos 'e liv'd in, eh?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
micro human are the solution, create micro human !!!!
What a truly bizarre reply. Thanks, I guess you thought it was entertaining and I appreciate the effort.
Mars is fine. It has water. It has gravity. You need both to live properly.
But you don't live on the surface. You live like ants, underground. Get Big Bertha and other tunnel boring machines to Mars, and start digging. 100+m deep shaft and then make tunnels. Then you can live and don't have to worry about surface conditions.
What's it like to have no soul?
Universally the case?
If you allow for geological timespans to terraform then it can be made to. With geologic timespan and heavy impactors from the meteor belt and kyper belt we could move the orbit of mars closer to the sun, beef up its mass, reignite its core, get a magnetic field going, seed it with water and nitrogen, let it cool and have a nicely terraformed planet similar to Earth in many more respects than anything we could do in short timescales. Clearly people today don't think or plan in geologic timescales, but that too could easily change over the course of geological timespans.
Better than having no sense.
I think it's obvious: do the moon first. We are _incredibly lucky_ to have this resource on our backyard.
The more I think of it if the Mars One people are going to make any pretence of being serious then why aren't they trying to colonize the moon? It has to be an order of magnitude cheaper, landing on the moon is something we've actually done before, it's not a one way journey, and it gives you a chance to learn how to build an off-world colony before going all-in on Mars.
It might even be a proposal you could take seriously.
I stole this Sig
Imagine if the Roanoke colonists decided Antarctica should be their goal. Well that's where Mars colonization plans are today. Of all the reasonable candidates, (Low earth orbit, the Lagrange points, the Moon, Mars, Asteroids) Mars is about the worst. It's at the bottom of the deepest gravity well outside of earth, except for the asteroids it has the longest travel time, and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.
Hang on there a second. How do you colonize low earth orbit or the Lagrange points? By your analogy, you're saying the Roanoke colonists should have "colonized" the Atlantic on a big floating platform or something. That isn't colonizing. The point in either the moon or mars is to extract and make use of resources to build habitations, create fuel, food, energy, etc. Hanging out in space in a tin can is not "colonizing" anything, no more than sitting in a raft in the middle of the Atlantic.
Better known as 318230.
“Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
- Voltaire, Candide (1759)
One of the worst things you can do to a man is to take away his purpose.
Of all the reasonable candidates, (Low earth orbit, the Lagrange points, the Moon, Mars, Asteroids) Mars is about the worst.
Reason everyone loves to talk about Mars is because the task to build hardware is deferred to smucks 20 years into the future (Mars is always 20 years away so it's easy to crank out papers, graphics, PDFs and PPTs). That's why nobody talks about the Moon unless you start building hardware now. Though things like a earth transfer stage and a lunar lander takes time but if you don't have something substantial to demonstrate in 10 years, your credibility will be very low.
mfwright@batnet.com
Boy is that wrong. It's extremely valuable and important.
I'm pretty sure the bit about the gravity well is incorrect: Venus has 3 times the gravity of Mars, so if you're referring to rocky worlds in our solar system, Venus would be the deepest gravity well. Mars I believe is #2.
However, I do agree that Mars seems rather premature, and that the Lagrange points and the Moon would be better candidates for offworld habitats in the near term, due to their proximity. One big problem with the Lagrange points (and also LEO) is that there's no gravity there, so people can't stay there for very long. We'd have to build big, rotating space stations, which probably are not a good idea in LEO, but would be great at a Lagrange point. The problem here, however, is that we don't have the technology to build such things yet: we need to be able to mine materials in space, and refine and manufacture things there too, to do such a thing, because the amount of fuel needed to build a big, liveable station (not a puny little thing like the ISS) at a Lagrange point would be prohibitively expensive with current launch technology since we haven't built a space elevator yet.
It seems to me what we should be working on is asteroid mining, then establishing a Lunar colony for mining, refining, and manufacturing of materials mined on asteroids or the Moon. Once we have a lot of capabilities in Moon's much shallower gravity well, we'll be able to do more stuff at Lagrange points or geosynchronous orbit. After that, human missions to Mars or beyond would be much more feasible and easier.
Note, however, that I am not an astrophysicist, so take this with a grain of salt.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, wouldn't it be easier to try terraforming Venus instead? At least it has 0.9g gravity, instead of Mar's lame 0.3, and it's already close to the sun so it's warm. And it actually does hold a substantial atmosphere; the trick is reducing its pressure and temperature and making it earth-like. Venus is Earth's sister planet; Mars is really too small and far away from the Sun.
The Moon has water and gravity too, and is theorized to have underground lava tubes already there, so you might not need TBMs. And it's only 3 days away in case you need more supplies or someone wants to go home.
We won't drop that Mars stick easily. But it's a lousy place to live.
We can build millions of times more surface area in free space in rotating habitats everywhere but on gravity-bound terran-analog planets. There are more asteroids and comets than we can use up for centuries - and we just discovered a pool of water on Europa (yesterday I think) bigger than all the Earth's oceans and seas combined, which we can either railgun or pipe out into construction sites everywhere. We've got GREAT building materials waiting for us out there. And a hell of a lot easier than trying to make Mars habitable in a few hundred our thousand years. Mars will be a privately owned park/state/suburb/science station for sure, but it won't be the Big Hope for the human race, nor for the millions of other species we can save by either leaving in large numbers (meh, not for a long time) or transporting them into free space terraria where hard-nosed capitalists can't shoot, drown, poison, or eat them.
Now, with 3D printing tech and maybe some cool new ideas, we can do better than O'Neill and the others in building terraria. Giant blown steel bubbles? Spray metal and ceramic shielding over inflatable molds or gas jets? Magnetic molds? Oragami-like unfolded sections? Molten metal spun into shape like cotton candy? Spun metalic filaments, or ceramic/metal composite filaments 3D printed in place by crawlers or articulated arms on giant scale? Let's shake some dust here - any ideas? I'm serious - we've better tech and construction techniques than we had in the 70's. Building a giant aluminum/titanium bubble or cylinder with ceramic shielding should not be a problem in zero gravity. In the olden days, we pictured guys in construction shacks building it in pieces like the Enterprise in drydock. What can we do now?
It almost makes you think that the fy should actually be fi, like the first two letters of fiction.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Captain?
Major?
General(ly)?
What the hey, it's not like it's rocket surgery.
duh
because on Mars you may have reasonable gravity to live out your life without muscle waste. On the moon you do not.
How is it that a science forum has people on it that think SF is silly?
It's over, zip up the body bag and put the tag on the Space Age.
If that is true then we're doomed and the human race is finished...
Because sooner or later, we're going to nuke ourselves... maybe not in our lifetime, maybe so... but it will happen, it is human nature...
So why bother when the human race has no future?
Mars is about the worst. It's at the bottom of the deepest gravity well outside of earth
What's the problem there, if you're not planning to leave?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
because on Mars you may have reasonable gravity to live out your life without muscle waste. On the moon you do not.
We know humans can survive prolonged periods of weightlessness from space stations, and on the Moon we have the capability of switching out colonists within those time frames it if becomes necessary. No such possibility exists for Mars so I'd say muscle waste is a bigger concern on Mars for that very reason.
I stole this Sig
Because:
o the moon has a 28 'days' day and night cycle, which makes e.g. solar power a big challange
o the moon has only a trace atmosphere, you could call it 'no atmosphere at all' - but technically that would be incorrect
o the gravity on moon is even lower
o water, if it does exist, is only available in a few craters close to the poles
So bottom line, besides travel time, Mars is the easier target.
Likely it even can be terraformed.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Stop dreaming about Space Elevators
Nuclear thermal rockets would be a lot more practical in the short term.
We run out of hydrocarbons of all types before this century is out. They become too expensive to be useful long before then. We use up the popular fissionables too. We have some hope of maintaining industrial scale electricity if we start developing thorium generators - like, yesterday. If we don't, you can pretty much kiss industrial civilization at the current scale goodbye before the century is out.
Sure, there are some challenges but you're being way too pessimistic. Even if we had nothing but solar, wind and hydro we could maintain industrial civilization just fine. Sure, we'd have to make some fairly serious changes but it's all quite doable. I'm not recommending that, I'm just saying it's workable.
I thought Kim Stanley Robinson was dead. No really, I thought I read something a few years ago (maybe even here on Slashdot) that he had died and remember thinking "shit, he'll never get to see Mars."
Obviously, I'm remembering this wrong, and he's alive. Good. I'm glad. I really liked the Mars series, especially the first book.
So.. uh.. I wonder who that was, who died and I got mixed up with KSR. Whoever you are, you will be .. remembered? Oops.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
It wasn't a bizarre response in the least. First off, you're on Slashdot, so for you to come on here and make fun of "nerds" is completely hypocritical. You're a nerd too, son, no matter how much you deny it. That makes your entire post fall into the category of "stupid shit." So what you got from that AC was a stupid assed response to a stupid assed statement.
The big problem is that there is no economic or military argument for manned space travel and only an intellectual one for robotic space exploration. Thus, the resources expended on the problem tend to be small.
We need either some way to make money (unobtainium, anyone?) or a credible military threat to bump up the research and development.
I'm not saying it was aliens....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Because the moon is absolutely shit to be on? Look at rovers. We managed to put rovers on mars that worked for years. On the moon, you accept something like 20 days as more than reasonable because they will fail when night turns into day and there is a 200 degree Celsius differences in temperature.
Because:
o the moon has a 28 'days' day and night cycle, which makes e.g. solar power a big challange
Use Nuclear or go to a poll with permanent light.
o the moon has only a trace atmosphere, you could call it 'no atmosphere at all' - but technically that would be incorrect
So instead of wearing spacesuits and living in airtight protected habitats they'll need to wear spacesuits and live in airtight protected habitats
o the gravity on moon is even lower
Which gives you the option of taking back off.
o water, if it does exist, is only available in a few craters close to the poles
So settle on a crater close to the poll (same place you get reliable sunlight).
So bottom line, besides travel time, Mars is the easier target.
Yeah, except for the fact it's massively more difficult Mars is much easier.
Likely it even can be terraformed.
In hundreds of years by a mission completely unlike what Mars One is planning. Before planning to terraform an entire planet why don't we first try the project that's only ridiculously difficult.
I stole this Sig
Hi,
So thankfully you're wrong. Society won't collapse. The prices of solar and wind are falling very rapidly and we have about a century of oil (or two) in the ground left before we'll need to start charging car batteries from the grid or producing fuel cells. Solar and wind can provide for ALL of our energy needs even if you don't take energy storage into account (you'd just have to build more plants to cover the gaps in generation caused by night time/ windless days) but WITH storage (pumped hydro, compressed air, sodium thermal) then they just generate electricity 24/7 a day anyway. Here's the worlds first big Solar Sodium Thermal Power Plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... a 150MW plant. Costs for these types of plants are expensive now but will come down over time due to economies of scale and mass production. China already generates more power via wind than they do via Nuclear.
Here is some information on storage methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just wanted to update your information. My money's on the sodium thermal storage. Just giant containers of salt heated up and stored for when sunlight/wind is not available. Then when needed the heat from the sodium is used to boil water to turn a turbine.
Thanks
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The fission material on earth will last for hundreds of years if we start to process it instead of wasting it and storing it.
The only problem is starvation and overpopulation. And that is a problem mainly happening in third world so we have no way of solving it. That is the thing that will drag us all down. 4 billion can live comfortable on Earth. According to some UN figures we will be 20 billions in 2100 and then ALL will live in poverty.
Well I don't entirely disagree with you, sometimes it is truly amazing what you can accomplish when you set out to do so.
I'd much rather live an adventurous life than a dull and boring life like you describe.
Calm down there, Mr. Catastrophe.
Humans (and every other critter on the planet) have been dying off in droves intermittently since the dawn of creation. Local populations and entire civilizations have run out of various resources, crashed and recovered (or morphed to new civilizations and societies) since the dawn of mankind. The Neanderthals and Desmonians got wipe out. Homo Sapiens somehow managed to pull through. There is pretty good evidence (from sequencing data) that we pulled through by the skin of our teeth at least once. So disaster has been our middle name for quite some time.
The 'new' disasters probably won't be global in scope - they will happen in Africa, Bangledesh, India - all those places that we tend to ignore anyway. There will be winners and losers galore. Yes, there will be global changes, but I don't see the complete collapse of Homo Industrialis unless we go full retard and dump every nuclear weapon we have into the planet. Even then there are going to be survivors.
It won't be the world we grew up into, it rarely is.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Likely it even can be terraformed.
How so? Are you planning on increasing its mass so that it can hold onto a breathable atmosphere? How many trips would it take, or hundreds of years to create a breathable atmosphere, even if you didn't worry about it disappearing into space?
Most of what is holding up large scale nuclear isn't capability to put it up, it's bureaucracy. If we need nukes, we'll be able to build them (for some value of "in time"), our desperation will suffice to get the controls relaxed sufficiently. If you have to put up 2,600 nuclear plants, you're going to get efficient at building nuclear plants.
Not saying that's a good way to go, and there certainly may be a resource war or two in the meantime. I hope no one thinks that we're going to see the end of that any time soon. As usual, some areas will suffer more than others.
None of that means we're done with space. Even if you cut the population down to a smaller number of people, they're not going to be back in the stone age permanently. I admit, that would mean we'd have to postpone that dream for decades or even centuries in the worst case, but while I may not be going to the stars, I think humans still are quite capable of doing it without oil.
illustrates the Dunning-Kruger effect on a planetary scale.
It's easy to get engineers and people with a largely physical science background to get optimistic about terraforming because in the broadest possible sense a biosphere is just nature converting sunshine into entropy. So simple, it happens on its own.
When you can get a soil ecologist optimistic about terraforming, then you'll be close.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The poles have not permanent sunlight.
There are only a few rims of some craters thatbhave permanent sun light.
A nuclear reactor would be needed to be built on the moon, you hardly can ship a ready made one from earth to there.
That implies manufactoring capabilities and mining for uranimum etc.
For that you need energy which puts you back to square one: how can we run a solar plant there.
The rest of your post makes pretty clear you never thought about the topic anyway ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
How do you colonize low earth orbit or the Lagrange points?
Park an ion drive or solar sail on a near Earth asteroid, move it into a convenient orbit, and mine it for colony materials.
Well two or maybe three things really.
Mars, as a larger body, is likely to have the gravity required, as well as other resources to make it more viable for long term habitation than the moon. Mars is still low gravity, but better than the Moon in that respect.
Secondly, and probably decisively, they're trying to push the program forward beyond a place we've already been. They have the thesis that it is possible, at least one way. They want to prove that. So, its a stretch goal.
And... not really on the list but possibly... they want a place that people will go and not have the hope of rescue to hold them back. If you go to the moon one way, there may be some in that colony who earnestly believe they could be saved. After all, they can see the Earth right there every day. On Mars. Earth is a blue dot, and they know there are there to stay, so they may as well get used to it.
I think you may well have a good point, but I think people might feel that a one way trip to a place we've already been there and back, may not feel justified. Been there and done that is less romantic.
Personally, I think it's a space suicide pact and I don't approve. That said, I also wouldn't try to stop anyone from going in any forcible way. If they make it, we could benefit. Hell, even if we were able to drop 20 frozen human corpses on the planet, it would be macabre, but still an achievement, assuming they managed to live most of the way there and sent back telemetry.
I would be more in agreement with starting with the moon. A moon colony could allow us to seriously build a microgravity infrastructure to make Mars travel much more feasible for our first attempt at it. Hopefully a there and back attempt.
I think being able to undertake rescue missions to the moon is no more likely than a rescue mission to Mars, realistically. They may want to avoid anyone thinking it is possible and get them to focus on making the best of it.
I think you're onto (on) something. ;)
The poles have not permanent sunlight.
There are only a few rims of some craters that have permanent sun light.
Rims which you can cover with solar panels.
A nuclear reactor would be needed to be built on the moon, you hardly can ship a ready made one from earth to there.
Why can't we ship them? We have small Nuclear reactors and the energy requirements of a base won't be huge.
The rest of your post makes pretty clear you never thought about the topic anyway ...
I got a bit chippy too so I'll let that go :)
I stole this Sig
Has there been any study of the long term effects of 1/6th G? Moon people might be fine.
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What's it like to have no soul?
Universally the case?
Try telling Marvin Gaye that.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Guys and girls in construction shacks.
For truly big things? Not as much as you seem to think. Seriously, there's a lot of tech in development (3d printing for example) and a lot of pie-in-the-sky tech (which you list)... but so far, there's pretty much nothing proven to scale much beyond the size of smallish house other than Joe (and Jane) Sixpack.
Well two or maybe three things really.
Mars, as a larger body, is likely to have the gravity required, as well as other resources to make it more viable for long term habitation than the moon.
In a thousand years sure, but right now the place you can viable go back and forth from is much more viable.
Secondly, and probably decisively, they're trying to push the program forward beyond a place we've already been. They have the thesis that it is possible, at least one way. They want to prove that. So, its a stretch goal.
Saying you'll get your lunar colony to have a permanent population of 100 people is a stretch goal, saying you're going to colonize Mars is a signal you're not being serious.
I think you may well have a good point, but I think people might feel that a one way trip to a place we've already been there and back, may not feel justified. Been there and done that is less romantic.
Well the Moon colony wouldn't have to be a one way trip. But I don't see what the Mars One project has going for it other than romanticism, and besides, a Lunar colony is still an unbelievably awesome idea.
I stole this Sig
And it is getting harder to get there with the ablation cascade upon us.
It's not as if there hasn't been enough money spent on it. Space is difficult, and many technologies have simply been pushed to the limit.
A rocket engine is basically worn out after one flight. Too much heat, too much pressure, too much vibration for any piece of gear no matter what material you made it from.
I just finished reading an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) of Robinson's latest novel "Aurora", not yet published, which is about a generation starship sent out to colonize a planet orbiting Tau Ceti. Mild spoiler - the colonists find it's much harder than anyone anticipated. I found it a bit of an odd take given Robinson's Mars trilogy (to be honest, I made it to about a third of the way through Blue Mars and gave up) which seemed far more optimistic. Now I know why. Unfortunately, pessimism doesn't sell as well as optimism, so I don't have great hopes for commercial success of Aurora. Oh, and if you weren't transfixed by Red/Green/Blue Mars, you probably won't care for Aurora either.
One of the important ideas expressed in Red Mars was the idea of using bacteria to do much of the work of terraforming. In 2013, bacteria which can live on perchlorates were discovered...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What, you never heard of Mars-Sim? Pity, as interesting as it may seem, I find the whole tenet laughable at best. This guy robinson must be a real moron. If I find any of his books on my hd I'll be sure to delete them.
I can remember all of those predictions of yours being made in the early 1970s, about the year 2000.
There may be extremophiles living in the rock, but they're nothing that would cause problems for us. There's plenty of the chemical substances we need for survival, just not enough for such an extraordinarily wasteful operation as terraforming the planet. And perchlorates are not "highly toxic"...the LD50 for potassium perchlorate is 2100 mg/kg. Compare to 3000 mg/kg for...table salt. Given a bowl full of pure potassium perchlorate, it would be extremely difficult to eat enough of it to be fatal.
Dealing with perchlorate only requires doing things we'd likely be doing anyway. Process the regolith a bit before turning it into soil for growing stuff in...it's eroded salt flat and sea bed material, you're going to do that anyway. Perchlorates are unstable and easy to decompose, so there's options for further soil treatment if necessary. Test occasionally or use supplements to make sure you're getting enough iodine (perchlorate does substitute for iodine, inhibiting uptake). Problem dealt with.
How is it not realistic? It's three days away! Yeah, if you need to get someone to a hospital within 6 hours they're toast, but 3 days isn't bad (6 days if you need to send a craft there first). It's certainly a lot better than 12-24 months (round-trip).
If we could build a lander module and command module to transport people from the Moon's surface back to Earth back in 1969, we can certainly build an emergency-return lifepod to launch someone from the Moon back to the Earth in 2020 or so, given the far better technology we now have.
It is closer.
There's no misunderstanding about where the habitat is going to be.
It doesn't have enough gravity to make getting things onto or off of it very hard.
It is a great place for a colony. Yeah, you're not going to turn the moon green because it won't hold an atmosphere. But if you dig down a few hundred feet and build some hydroponics facilities then who cares?
You're safe from the radiation down there, safe from the micro meteorites, there are no big temperature swings, and did I say you're safe from the radiation?
It is the way to go. We're not going to be turning other planets green.
And perhaps our very interest in that as a concept is transitory.
If we merge with our technology, alter our genes... then why do we need a traditional earth biosphere? It is much easier to change ourselves to suit the universe than it is to change the entire universe to suit us.
Once our selves and our technology operates more natively in what is likely typical in the universe at large... the entire universe becomes hospitable.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You must the same fucking idiot that runs around screaming about Tesla, Solar City, and SpaceX.
At a guess, you must be Gaetano Marino, or Michael J. Listner.
The problem here, however, is that we don't have the technology to build such things yet: we need to be able to mine materials in space, and refine and manufacture things there too, to do such a thing, because the amount of fuel needed to build a big, liveable station (not a puny little thing like the ISS) at a Lagrange point would be prohibitively expensive with current launch technology since we haven't built a space elevator yet.
We launched enough stuff to build a relatively sizable rotating station in earth orbit, but then we didn't bother: the orbiter main tanks. There was even a plan for doing it, not that anyone planned to implement it.
In theory, we could design some kind of launch vehicle whose structure itself would provide the bulk of the mass for the station.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One more for the list: 4) Carbon dioxide doesn't work like that.
Robinson's Mars books cheated on their terraforming. Terraforming Mars is a catch-22. To make it warm enough for humans to survive you need to add a lot of CO2, but adding all that CO2 makes the atmosphere toxic to humans. When I first read the Mars books I was looking forward to see how Robinson dealt with that paradox: I was disappointed to see that he didn't. He just let the plants suck up most of the CO2 to make oxygen while ignoring the cooling that would result, and then, realizing that getting rid of *all* the CO2 would be a problem, he waved a magic wand and genetically engineered all the humans to be CO2-tolerant. "Genetic engineering!" and "Nanobots!" are the science fiction equivalents of "Abracadabra!"
Anyway, CO2-tolerance would be such a massive evolutionary advantage to both predators and prey on Earth, if it were that easy to engineer, don't you think life would have figured out a way to do it by now?
There are ways to terraform Mars for realsies -- very large solar mirrors, or synthetic super-greenhouse gases like CFS -- but those have their own problems, and Robinson wanted to have his cake and eat it too.
He underestimates Moore's Law.
Looks like you stopped reading Kim Stanley Robinson and started up on Paolo Bacigalupi. I'm willing to bet our actual future lies somewhere in between.
Sure, we'd have to make some changes - like reverting to a largely agrarian society with very littlein the way of industrialization or machinery.
But other than that, we'd TOTALLY be a modern technological society.
Just minus all the technology.
And modernness.
I don't think you have ever looked at what Venus' atmosphere is made of. It is hot, not because of how close tot he Sun it is, but because of how thick the atmosphere is. More than 100x denser than on Earth. 200mph winds blow across the planet constantly. The average temperature is hot enough to melt lead. The only probe to ever attempt to land on Venus melted in a short amount of time. A day is actually longer than a year on Venus, which just compounds the problems.
Mars is a picnic compared to Venus.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
KSR's ruined whatever pretenses of a realistic economy on his Mars with insane crash of Mars space elevator and it's cable. Over the top creation of super-rare new post crash mining of elevator cable.
Don't land. Find a buoyant spot in the atmosphere, drop anchor for a heat engine, and crack atmospheric gases for carbon and the eventual arrival of human beings.
I don't see how Mars is a picnic, when you're talking about terraforming. It's a fraction of the size and gravity of Venus, and has no atmosphere to speak of, and no molten core. Venus has all these. It's a much easier prospect to figure out a way to strip Venus of much of its atmosphere than to figure out how to get Mars to develop one approaching 1atm of pressure (instead of 1/200atm).
Do you honestly think it's more difficult to strip off part of Venus's atmosphere (perhaps using microbes somehow to convert it into a liquid or solid), than to do all three of the following:
1) bombard Mars with large asteroids so it can have more mass so it can have something closer to earth-normal gravity (you're going to need to grab a moon from Jupiter to do this effectively)
2) move Mars' orbit closer to the Sun so it's warmer
3) melt Mars' core so it can have a magnetosphere and keep an atmosphere and protect humans from radiation
As for the day, who cares? Once the atmosphere is converted into an Earth-like one, colonists will just have to get used to it. If people can live in submarines for months on end, or near the poles where days last 6 months, they can certainly handle that.
Railgun frozen water into orbital trajectories. Didn't you read such proposals? Old stuff. Might be better ways. Think of some.
It's rare these days that a /. comment causes such a shift in my thinking.
Thank you quantaman. That makes so much more sense that trying to do Mars in one go.
Venus and Mercury are ruled out for a bunch of reasons. If Mars is running they would be running one minute miles.
Venus closely resembles hell currently and you would need to remake its atmosphere before even thinking about it. Mercury has heat and radiation problems.
You are right about the habitat building for LEO and the Lagrange points, but the problems are very similar to what you have to do for the Moon, Asteroids, or Mars so it doesn't differentiate the difficulty.
> and will have the longest development time before it can return resources to the people that invest in it.
Oh I wouldn't say that. Aside from the Moon, it's the only other option with both decent gravity and a nice solid landmass to build on. Building things in microgravity is very hard compared to on the surface of a planetary body, which is one of the chief draws of Mars. I agree that the moon should be a bigger priority for a large number of reasons, but Mars does have an appeal in the human consciousness that the moon just can't match.
There's been talk about seeding the upper atmosphere of Venus with plant life and algae that, if properly developed, could thrive in the upper atmosphere and convert CO2 to O2, lowering the density and the greenhouse effect. And 2 HUGE advantages Venus has for terraforming are that nice thick atmosphere, and a molten core which generates a magnetosphere to protect from solar wind like ours on Earth. Mars has neither so you'd need to get the gas from somewhere (comets probably) and then you'd get to watch it slowly get blown back out into space by solar wind.
Mars lost its atmosphere because it did not have a magnetic field. I see no propsal to give Mars a magnetic field. This shit won't fly.
I agree about the TBM's but remember TBMs are one off. I think they may have more reusabilty in space, but still the TBMs you need on the moon are smaller. I think you can create a self-sustaining colony of 100000 on the Moon with TBM's and some seed materials ( oxygen, nitrogen, etc ... ) much more easily on the Moon.
Once such a colony is built there, then it can be used much more easily to build a colony on Mars.
It is technological possibly to produce all our energy requirements out renewables. It might be a more expensive. So what. Yes this means a new phone will cost more and cars must become more efficient. However, the biggest problem is not energy, but other limited resources. For that we must switch to a real circular economy which will most likely not be able to produce growth.
He's never heard of paragraphs, that's for sure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's easy for you to say, Daedalus...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You couldnt run a bath...the posts on here these days.
There are three reasons for humans to seek new horizons:
philosophical; e.g. curiosity.
economical; e.g. to look for a new source of materials.
survival; because there is a threat in the existing environment.
The first, curiosity, is not enough anymore, mainly because the cost of this curiosity is seen as a burden instead of an investment.
The second, economical, is directed to short term profits. Investing in research that might return a profit a century away is something very few organizations do.
The third, survival, is an individual drive. Mankind has no "race-survival" drive, so even if we "know" there's a inevitable Mass Extinction Event on our path, there's no drive to deal with that threat.
So why should we try to colonize another planet anyway?
- Many people think this curiosity costs too much, especially when the cost will include death and mayhem.
- There is no reason to think it's going to be economical to go out there to mine for materials in our lifetime or the next 5 generations.
- Sending a (very small) group of people to another planet where they would have the same (or even more) chance of being wiped out by a disaster is not a race-survival policy, that would be just silly.
As much as I would like to see heros and heroins out there, I don't think there are enough logical reasons for "us" to pay and for explorers to do it.
The only way I can think of to remove Venus' atmosphere is through freezing. But then you're stuck with a -80C planet.
As far as chemical means go, CO2 is incredibly stable. Even if you do find a way to convert it down to carbon and oxygen by spending inordinate amounts of energy on chemical processes you still end up lowering the pressure by only one third (since the other two thirds are oxygen) and you now have a planet where everything you bring down to the surface will go up in a fire immediately.
You could instead combine it into carbonates but you'd need huge amounts of cations for that and I'm not aware of any significant source of such ionized materials that aren't already combined into salts.
Physically removing it is out of the question because you'd need to find a way to accelerate the entire atmosphere to escape velocity. Just knocking a few asteroids into it won't help much because the gases will never leave Venus's sphere of influence and should return over the next years.
Mars isn't a rational colonization destination. I break my fingers into shards by explaining this over and over. Once you leave a gravity well and construct your own habitats (Bernal Spheres, O'Neill Cylinders, etc.), there's nothing economic about going down a planetary gravity well ever again. You'll instead manage an expanding technological civilization wholly in space, harvesting asteroids and comets, and starting the formation of a Dyson Structure around your home star. At first, disparate activity will naturally create a Dyson Swarm or Cloud... vast numbers of habitats and their industrial-farm solar mirrors for gathering sunlight. Later, it might make sense to start re-arranging the Swarm's industrial mirror arrays into a Dyson Ring around the home star.
But planets? That's economically stupid. It's akin to digging tunnels to plant seeds upward instead of just planting seeds by poking them downward from the surface.
Humans have an unwarranted planetary-surface chauvinism since we evolved on one. But it doesn't work for an expanding tech civ. The material wealth of our asteroid belt, inward-crossing comets and solar emissions is so huge that it's like giving everyone alive on Earth today their own continent full of industrial machinery and material resources.
That'd be early 19th ccentury, just FYI.
Blimps would be so sweet. Like steampunk on Venus.
Thought he 200mph winds might be a problem. Though are they not as fast at very high altitudes?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
What can we do now?
Steel cans in low Earth orbit. Things have not really change much since the 1975 in terms of scale.
If we're talking about the scale of space habitats, the two factors in the equation are:
1. Cost per unit of weight from Earth to orbit.
2. The ability to mine, refine and manufacture in space.
Increase one of those and things might get interesting.
The key with Venus is to not land, but build could cities about 50km up. At that altitude, you have an atmospheric pressure of about 1 atm, temperatures are a bit above freezing, you still have the Earth-like gravity, and due to the atmosphere being mostly CO2 (a heavy gas), a balloon filled with breathable air will float. You've also got plenty of solar energy (during the day, at least). It's about as close as earth-like as you're going to get without actually being on Earth. On the downside, you have the 200 MPH+ winds to deal with, the lack of a strong magnetic field, as well as the long day/night cycle.
Which is why we start thinking now. Scale is a bugaboo of terrestrial manufacturing - in free fall, it's mostly a problem of containment and "tidal" forces (large structures would have different bits moving at different speeds in orbit, a problem which can be utilized for stabilization, but causes problems with stress, at the very least). Spinning the terrarium can be done with mass drivers (railguns that recycle the cartridge that launches the ballistic pellets), but then there is access issues after spinup, which is done at holes at the poles - but I have a neat idea about that. Big issue is harmonics - something that is hard to compensate for. The damn things would ring like giant bells, constantly. You really don't want pulses or waves to harmonically reinforce, for instance. Most habitats are assumed to be cabled in the interior like an Escheresque suspension bridge in which all land is anchored to to the other land. Does it have to be so? Probably, but its been forty years - any new ideas?
The notion I'm putting forth here, and now will put up to the National Space Society for yak-yak, is that perhaps it might be far easier than we thought to build large structures, if we get away from the drydock-and-rivets methods we assumed would be used.
Assume a habitat of about, oh, a thousand feet in diameter, a Bernal Sphere, named after the guy who thought up the shape (O'Neill names the cylinders). You assume lunar material is melted by mirrors in free fall, then somehow separated into elements or compounds, then piped into molds or sheets, then cut, moved, and welded into a hollow sphere over a period of months. We've been building giant structures on earth for centuries; size is not a problem, effort is. The idea is to get rid of effort/money/time as much as possible. The whole thing has to be covered with radiation shielding, which was assumed to be slag or just lunar soil packed around the sphere like insulation. Some proposed magnetic shields, which make my eyes bug out - I would not like that to fail. Computers and machines should be minimized in design - failure points. The whole thing is spun up and then filled with air, then landscaped and filled with whatever. People, certainly. Trees, dogs, cats, itty bitty creeks, river around the internal equator, the usual. Water, BTW, HUGE issue. Hard to come by. The lighter elements are not present on the moon. Comets yes, Europa sure, carbonaceous condrite asteroids, yep. But those are solvable - we can rendevous with one of the close by asteroids and get some, eventually.
But the behemoth terrarium could be built faster, more easily, and perhaps better if we didn't do it WW I style. Picture two anchor shacks, shaped like dinner plates, facing each other. A compression tower/strut runs between those. Run flexible titanium cable or composite shield/metal cable out in a cylindrical pattern on the circumferences of those plates between the two shacks. Think of the two plates running thousands of cables between themselves, effectively making a cylinder. Then spin them. The cables gain angular momentum, and the cylindrical cats cradle bow open into a sphere as the cable is played out. Perhaps then latitudinal threads can be shuttled into the cables to make a mesh, or that could be done before and during. Then what? plating? or perhaps a flexible metal/ceramic cloth first, which is then covered with a vapor-deposited titanium layer, then feet of lunar soil to create shielding, then another layer of metal, and then done.... the G force caused by spinning stabilizes the entire construct during the entire process.
Or a balloon of titanium cloth is woven into a spherical bag, then inflated, spun up, then filled with lunar soil from the axis like a powder rain (radiation shielding), then all that is sealed up with another sprayed on layer (can't breath lunar soil accidentally - needs to be sealed), then terraform the interior.
The idea is to automate and simplify the big stuff. Also makes it a hella cheaper than hundreds or thousands of people welding plates together in a pressurized shack.
Or something more awesome, as I said, like blowing the damned thing up like a glassblower makes a goblet.
Any ideas?
Venus doesn't have a magnetic field like the Earth does, whether due to lack of a molten core, lack of convection or the more likelihood that it is not spinning is currently unknown. This is one of the main reasons that Venus lost its hydrogen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
_may_ have reasonable gravity
(emphasis mine).
We don't even have much real data on whether Mars gravity might be good enough for humans (and other animals we might want to breed there). Thus it's stupid to spend billions of dollars and waste years or even decades[1] going to Mars when we're not even sure whether Mars gravity is good enough.
Trying to put humans on Mars is like trying to jump before we are able to stand.
We should be taking steps towards building a space station with artificial gravity (and other stuff like better radiation shielding). Steps like this: http://www.artificial-gravity....
Once we have stuff like that, then we can test whether Mars gravity is good enough or not.
But once we have stuff like that, we shouldn't be going to a gravity well like Mars where:
1) The gravity is wrong
2) The atmosphere is wrong
3) The pressure is wrong
4) The solar energy is interrupted beyond your control.
You need almost all the space station stuff just to live long term on Mars. And you can't adjust the gravity easily if it turns out to be too wrong.
There are many better places for colonies once we develop the space station tech. We might eventually colonize Mars, but that should be later.
[1] We are running out of time and resources. We're in an oasis (Earth) with millions of years of stored up solar energy (fossil fuels) surrounded by a "desert". If we waste too much time and fossil fuels on the wrong stuff (like wars, suicide expeditions to Mars or even burning it all up just to maintain our 7 billion population), we're going to be stuck in that oasis for a lot longer. And during that "a lot longer" time, a lot of other things could happen.
Venus is hot because the atmosphere is damned near 100% carbon dioxide. It demonstrates the greenhouse effect taken to the ultimate. LEAD is liquid on the surface. Hotter than Mercury.
There's been about 8 successful landings on Venus. True that they all failed in a short length of time due to heat and pressure.
I always liked the story of the first attempted landing, Due to not realizing just how thick the atmosphere was the probes batteries died before it landed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
No WAY were terraria were intended for LEO. Lagrange points are the stable places. LEO is not exactly a place to settle.
I'm a-going with working on #2. #1 is never gonna get cheap. And someone needs to talk to Musk about electrical launches - he thinks you need to accelerate the ship to 18000 mph at the launchhead! #1 could be immeasurable improved if we eliminated stage 1 with an electrical launch up a mountainside to get the bulk of the work out of the way before ignition of the actual engines to take it all the way.
We can build terraria long, long before we will ever build an elevator.
My favorite is the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe, a set of 4 little *atmospheric* probes. One continued sending data for over an hour after hitting the surface, despite not being designed as a surface probe...the atmosphere's just so thick that the terminal velocity was survivable.
We now have silicon carbide electronics that can operate at ambient surface temperature, and numerous other ways of dealing with high temperatures and harsh environments, so we could build Venus surface probes that would have indefinite operating lifetimes. RTGs would be a useful power source, the "cold side" temperature of RTGs that have to radiate waste heat in vacuum is similar to the surface temperature on Venus.
Well, ofc it is not impossible.
However a space shuttle could lift something like 30 tons, the Saturn V like 120 (no idea if so much was shot to the moon, I doubt it).
So bottom line you need a reactor small enough that you can _land_ it on the moon.
And as we are talking about colonization, not just a small base, you will need plenty of energy.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So give him a new one that isn't flipping your hamburgers. fuck you.
Oh please. We have 800+ years of coal globally. Nasty, gross coal wet, low BTU coal, but its there. People on average also use less energy per their occupied area than can be obtained by solar power. There is no energy problem, considering we could also dial back 90% without any change in lifestyle. Hope I didn't disrupt your prepping.
If it worked, the end point of this suggestion is a planet with a viciously toxic ~60 atm nearly-pure-O2 atmosphere, and a surface covered in a thick layer of explosively flammable algae dust. You would be explosively flammable as well, especially if your suit is at ambient pressure, which would require a breathing gas mix that's almost entirely hydrogen. Following the inevitable inferno, you would once again have a CO2 atmosphere.
It doesn't work though, because there's not enough water for plant life to lock more than a tiny fraction of the CO2 away in carbohydrates and lipids. You need to import hydrogen, lots of it...almost 10% of the mass of the current atmosphere in hydrogen. Then you have plenty of water, and get to work on the nitrogen problem...there's about 3 Earth atmospheres worth of it there.
Giving the exorbitant costs of getting people to the space station - and the private venture space tourism isn't even going that high - the idea that we would regularly rotate any significant number of people between the Earth and the Moon is laughable.
Basically no data.
We can reasonably assume that the effect is worse as gravity falls off, but there is no data to tell whether it is linear, sublinear or superlinear.
For all we know 0.9G my be a serious problem or lunar gravity may be just enough...
A mass driver has severe limitations in reachable orbits and imposes very strict limits on payload mass and volume. It also means higher accelerations, which makes it a poor fit for launching people. It is also still less efficient, even the highest mountain is far deeper in the atmosphere than first stage separation, so the mass driver is limited to lower velocities. SpaceX would have needed to build several of them in order to launch to all the orbits the Falcon 9 can reach, and it would have needed to rebuild them for the Falcon 9 v1.1. The Falcon Heavy would have been impossible, that payload increase would have needed a completely new, much larger mass driver. And many of the payloads they've launched simply wouldn't have survived mass driver accelerations. And of course, there's the little issue of not having a conveniently located mountain to put those mass drivers on.
Mass drivers are a complex, expensive, difficult, limited, and impractical way of reducing the size of the first stage. SpaceX is taking the much simpler approach of just recovering and reusing the first stage. They have already made drastic reductions in launch costs and are making steady progress on further reductions...all without a single megastructure. Musk seems to know what he's doing.
Some people won't identify as either man or woman, some are in transition, whatever. Whatever word one uses, a correction will follow."guys" was a gender neutral term when I was growing up, mostly because one-syllable tends to win the usage game.
Most nuclear reactors produce electricity through basic heat engines so you need a heat sink. Probably need a whole new design. This would be true for the Moon and Mars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You do realize there's a long, difficult process between getting the ore and manufacturing spacecraft out of it?
The point of colonizing something is to stay there, not to switch out everyone every so many months.
I finished them. But they did kinda feel longer than they needed to be.
How does that feel?
The Mars Trilogy does not dwell and it does not ramble. There is a larger portion of casual dialogue and thought than most other authors use, save Niven perhaps. The books span some 200 years' events, and some one or something is always on the move. There is very little useless dialogue, though the topic does wander at times. In sheer density of material covered these books are formidable. The ratio of human drama to hard science is pretty much equal to actual life, even among scientists. (Side read: Madam Curie tarnishes the reputation of her deceased husband! )
The weight and page-span of books being what it is from the moment you first pick them up... there seems to be the sentiment that there's some tipping point at which a criticism of total word-count becomes valid, even to where it is the only criticism offered.
I just do not understand this.
It seems to be borrowed from movies, where an arduous and perilous series of edits achieves the hour-and-a-half movie formula with maybe 5-15 minutes of throwaway cuts, so TV can stuff in more commercials. A three hour movie without intermission can be an arduous ordeal, as the aisles filled with people taking unsynchronized bathroom breaks and the expense of pop€orn and $oda approaches the down payment on a car. But these are social outings within time-slots. Books live in the personal elastic moment. The time we give them is the time it takes.
Perhaps there is a certain sense that at its ending, a book has 'wasted' [a tangible percentage of] your time. Its central theme undoubtedly kept your interest, but at a price. Perhaps it ends badly or dangly, the author's style changes abruptly (seen in works where the writer had set it aside and the publisher gives them a time ultimatum). Perhaps there are things or persons in it you just don't give a hoot about. This is natural.
As a young child I devoured the Hobbit and started into the Ring Trilogy and found myself enthralled with Frodo's quest, but started skimming it to sprint past the minutiae of politics and war. I felt a measure of guilt to do this, but I just wanted to wander in this new land, take in the sights and vistas, and be chased across Middle Earth. Then in my teens I spotted Tolkien on the shelf and experienced a dismissive sense of, "been there done read that". And another voice, the one that had supplied that wordless guilt years before, whispered, "actually... you haven't really" Upon which I dove into the four books again, this time the entire thing, and was left with a sense of wonder and discovery.
This been there done that seen that too long too boring too talky too thinky too rambly thing so often reflects the level of personal distraction, phase of life or judgmental sentiment of the moment. We change, and by re-reading familiar works over time, especially those we felt lukewarm about, we can gain a sense of how much we have changed. The stories set into books are like sundials of the mind --- as fixed and unvarying as stone. As our shadow drifts with the season, so do we glimpse our evolutions of thought and the added insight (and hopefully concentration and patience) that years may bring.
So books we have finished that were 'too long'...? Maybe we're just not mature or attentive enough to grasp them wholly. They deserve a second reading, some day. But not if they suck. Some books do suck.
Mars Trilogy does not suck.
Just what goes through my mind whenever I hear some one say, "that book went on too long". It takes awhile to go through all this, it's why people think I spend half my life just staring at the wall.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Stop dreaming about Space Elevators and proselytizing about the end of the world, and start building a backyard garden and build long-term green communities right here.
Spoken like a dinosaur perched directly on the KT Boundary some 66 million years ago. They had a really thriving green community going. CO2 ~ten times what it is now but creatures of the Mesozoic were chilll about it. Those creatures are now part of that curious layer of ash. It's good stuff, plants love it!
Will someone some day be fertilizing the garden with us?
Space travel and habitation is really our only hope for long term survival. I realize that NASA is re-tooling to weather an era of robotic exploration and many think we can just sling a bunch of missiles anywhere, but sit down and watch Deep Impact again. Pay attention to Morgan Freeman as he says, "Our missiles have failed." Read his lips. Yes, it is possible that missiles could fail, or some Earthly shot-wad interception effort would miss the target or run short on megatons or time.
Therefore, the greatest assurance of continuance for Earth would be the presence of many humans, ships and capability already out there in space, who could quickly launch a coordinated effort to divert an asteroid's course, with enough time to keep trying.
Parent modded Troll, flamebait? Once again childish moderators are gainsaying one another, as if moderation is some way to one-click express your own opinion. Amazon patent pending. Parent post is deftly written and is a valid point of view, though bitter. Read it again, this time asking yourself --- if even some of this is true, wouldn't its author have the right to express bitterness?
If you simply disagree with it, ignore it or at least use your words. Don't try to make it disappear. Of course, once you speak up you will undo the mods. What a better world this would be if that happened.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
We need to send lots of phylogenetic organisms to Mars to eat the perchlorates, which will produces inert chloride and oxygen.
This is the NASA party line and why they will never, ever get to Mars. Each special interest (ISS, asteroid and moon mission) all want their pet project funded as a "stepping stone" to Mars. Crashmarik must work for a NASA contractor.
Zubrin's Mars Direct bypasses all the pork and goes right to Mars.
So why bother when the human race has no future?
Presumably for the same reason you get up and go to work every morning, in spite of the fact that you're going to die someday.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Not at all the same...
I do that because my children have a future, and their children have a future... that is the legacy that I'll leave...
I do many things for my kids, not for myself... but if my kids also have no future, then really it becomes pointless...
Yes this means a new phone will cost more and cars must become more efficient.
The changes would be a lot more significant than that and would probably mean the end of having a middle class, I was just saying that it's technically feasible not that it's desirable.