All life on earth, including you, came from single celled microbial life.
A biosphere in its infancy on another world, ripe for scientific analysis as it evolves (Which it would, VERY quickly. Microbes evolve terrifyingly fast!) would be a boon in ways your philosophy cannot even begin to comprehend.
As for "The right"-- What right do you have, as a human, to justify mass extinctions of far more complex lifeforms and whole biospheres, just so you can have a flatscreen TV?
Be careful there kettle. It's not wise to call the pot black bottomed.
Such pearls of wisdom, from a guy who cant look past his own lifetime to find value in doing something.
Having a living biosphere on venus, where currently there is none, would be one hell of an accomplishment. It does not matter if the resulting biosphere is incapable of supporting human life.
SpaceX has only been in BUSINESS for 12! While it has made extraordinary leaps in progress, it has been borrowing very heavily from already proven rocket technologies.
In 10 years, I would expect spaceX and pals to be at the level of service required to successfully ferry people to and from the ISS with reusable and inexpensive modules as a regular "ho hum" occurrence.
Wouldnt be for another 30 or so by my estimations that we would have significant interest in lunar based manufacturing. By then, economies of scale for orbital payload deliveries would have cut the costs of such a mission sufficiently that enough payload could be delivered to a target site to commence such a project.
It would then take another 10 years to have the site up to speed for anything other than a space curio.
Your assumption is that I think this could happen within my lifetime. I am not so naive. What I take exception to, is that you claim it will never happen at all. That's a pretty extraordinary claim in the face of prevailing events.
Even seeding venus with microbes would not make venus useful overnight. Fuck no. It would take hundreds of thousands of years, at least, for the process to pick up speed, and re-stabilize in a new thermal equilibrium. Look how long the oxygen catastrophe took to make critical mass in earth's fossil record-- We are talking something on THAT kind of geological timetable. Compare that with the current age of venus-- say, some 3+ billion years old -- and even that is a drop in the bucket, cosmologically speaking. Not a small accomplishment at all. (and the best part is that you wouldnt have to worry about it at all after the successful deployment of the germs into the atmosphere-- as opposed to a martian terraforming operation, which would have to add 1/3 of an earth in mass to the damned thing to get tectonic activity churning away in its core, to drive a global magnetic field. Venus, by comparison, appears to already have sufficient mass, but is simply too hot for convection currents to drive the core geomagnetic dynamo needed for one. Simply cooling the planet would make it happen though.)
Would a cooled down venus ever be more than a horrible desert world though? Fuck no. Not nearly enough hydrogen is left in the atmosphere, and the oceans that would result from the biological action on the world would be a thick syrup of complex hydrocarbons and sulfuric acid. Fun for the whole fucking family!
No, I am afraid you are proceeding from a faulted precondition:
1) Thinking that I believe that these things are even remotely possible within my lifetime
2) Believing that I am a programmer. I know how to program, but that is not my career.
To accellerate it toward mars? Not much-- you just need to slow it down a little, so that solar gravity can better work on it, causing it to spiral into the gravity well. The total transit distance will be very large, so a small thrust applied over the duration will be sufficient to control its descent into the well. (The energy exerted against the object does not "Go away"-- it is conserved in the momentum of the object.)
Getting there is the real problem. That's why I said it would require a radical departure from currently available thruster tech to get there, and specifically pointed out that the voyager probe is traveling too slowly, DESPITE being sped up by gravitational interactions by MULTIPLE gas giant encounters. You would need something really radical, like an orion thruster. Good luck getting the world's governments to let you put something like that into space though.:D
For the second scenario, you need something akin to a multi-warhead ICBM, just aimed into space, not on a ballistic re-entry tradjectory. You fire the vehicles into orbit, where the delivery stage decouples, and the payloads go different directions after an oberth type manouver.
Sadly, that would make many interests on earth's buttholes pucker, as the launch would have to account for possible launch failures of multiple devices, which could imperil many LEO satellites, which were not cheap to orbit, and any remaining debris from a failure would contribute to the growing problem with such debris in LEO.
The more practical platform from which to launch such a mission is actually the moon-- not earth. More vehicles can be launched from there in a sensible way, and privatized space vehicle manufacturing companies have already expressed long term goals of developing manufacturing and launch systems on earth's natural satellite.
Using a "long haul" design, intended to make multiple payload deliveries to mars before retirement (Possibly using dust as a fuel to restock in-flight) launched from the moon, it may be possible to pull something crazy off like the OP suggests. But I doubt it would ever be considered fiscally responsible.
The indian mars orbiter, a vehicle with a lander module, and designed for interplanetary flight, cost less to manufacture and launch than the sandra bullock movie Gravity.
So, there's the cost of a suitable vehicle. About 74 million dollars.
Then we have the designer microbe end. Most designer microbes are intended for biofuel production, using fully synthetic biological pathways, designed by humans. http://www.hindawi.com/journal...
Microbes are tenacious things. Once cultured in the lab, and loaded into a delivery system, sending them to venus would cost about 80 million dollars.
Cost of R&D of modifying a suitable sulfur cycle microbe for venusian atmospheric conditions would cost around 100 to 200 million.
So, for around the 300 million dollar mark, we could be initiating the end of the hellish environment on venus-- OR-- we could pay for a few military airplanes.
For the combined costs of 1 sandra bullock movie, and the tuition of 5 college students, what I proposed can be done.
We have biotech scientists working on making artificial ribisomes, artificial cell walls, and fully synthetic genomes *RIGHT NOW*.
See your problem?
One of us is discounting the current reality, in favor of a preconceived world view. The other is not.
Designer microbes aren't nearly as expensive as you believe them to be, and the costs of sending a vehicle capable of interplanetary flight is less than you claim.
But I bet you would rather have the sandra bullock movie, because it has boobies.
In this case, the value of thrust applied does not change with the difference in the size of the circumference of the rotating body. While the same thrust applied at one circumference may not be suitable to cause significant delta of the object, it may well be at a different circumference, because the same energy is conserved over a longer period. Several years of constant low level thrust would be functionally equal to moments of very high thrust, when the full system energy is calculated.
But that goes against your preconceived notions that just because 1 newton of thrust/sec is insufficient to perceptibly alter the orbit of a moon sized object at earth orbit, that it would likewise be incapable of perceptibly altering the orbit of the same sized object at an oort cloud radiused orbit.
The total angle of momentum change is conserved, and there are more total seconds over which the 1 newton/sec thrust can be delivered at the larger orbit's angle slice than in the smaller orbit's angle slice. (To get the same change with the smaller orbit, the thrust would have to be increased!)
Now, show me your math that disproves this. I already filled in the blanks with your previous false equivalency shpeel, showing how the orbital energy of a 1g mass at oort cloud distance is considerably less.
Using kepler's third law, an object weighing 1 gram, at a distance of 100,000 AU (the oort cloud), orbiting a star with 1 solar mass, will have an orbital period of 316174 CENTURIES. (Or, 9.97786e+14 seconds)
We then need to know the total distance of the orbit, in order to determine the orbital velocity of this object.
Best current estimates for the location of the oort cloud is between 5,000 AU and 100,000 AU. We can use these as the semiminor and semimajor axes of the orbital elipse. This gives us a circumference of the orbital elipse of 222421.65 AU.
One AU is equal to 149,597,870,700 meters. This means the circumference of the orbit is 33,274,027,659,230,655 meters.
We can now use the page you linked to to get the kinetic energy of this 1g object at that distance, after we get its orbital velocity.
1) it's cherry picked. The premise stated by the calculation is that the object is in or near earth's orbital vicinity. To avoid being drawn into the sun, it will require a considerable inertial energy statistic. Items in the very deep solar system? Not so much, since gravity falls off with the inverse cube of distance between the center of mass of the two gravitating bodies.
That means that the object the OP referenced, an oort cloud object, need not have the orbital energy that the object referenced by your sample calculation requires to avoid falling into the sun.
EPIC FAIL.
2) Due to the rather profound difference in gravitational attraction with the sun at these two orbits, and the very large travel distance that the oort cloud object has before it reaches the inner solar system, (and the "free" velocity change the object will get as the gravitational influence of the sun increases as this distance is reduced), the total energy required to de-orbit an oort cloud object will be considerably less than that needed to de-orbit an object of identical mass in the inner solar system.
EPIC FAIL AGAIN.
Now, if you would be so kind, show me an orbital computation that isnt a fucking orange when we are discussing apples, and I will happily relent.
Otherwise, quit making false equivalence based arguments.
The part where you invoke dozens of improbabilities and outright impossibilities?
And it's not a "professed" reality (nice religious term there), it IS reality.
Oh, so things like this simply can't ever work huh?
Nevermind that it is fully mathematically sound, and the only reason why it was never used was because of anti-nuke hysteria. No no-- your "reality" says things like this are simply not possible! (Since you seem to be so thick, I am using the scare quotes to point out that what you consider to be reality is a fiction of your own manufacture, which does not in any way hold with what is actually possible.)
"Since I am telling you how it COULD be done, and you are insisting that it cannot, "because orbital mechanics", the onus of proof is on you."
Nope, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Waving sci-fi around while yelling about "could be"s is not good enough, sorry. That's a religion.
No one's going anywhere, there won't be any robotic mining missions to the Oort cloud, no Mars colonies, no weekend cottages on the Moon, no jungle resorts on Venus either.
Funny how Venus isn't part of the Space Nutter repertoire anymore, eh?
Where's your blind trust in technology getting better and impossible physics breakthroughs when it's about Venus?
There is a sufficiently high concentration of suitable sulfur compounds in the upper venusian atmosphere, where it is a nice balmly 70 degrees Fahrenheit, for sulfur-cycle microbes to live perfectly happy, carefree lives-- shitting out aramid plastic non-stop should they be engineered to do so. Given that that the feedstock used to produce aramid plastic is an amine group and a carboxyl-halide group, this is a perfectly reasonable material to biosynthesize. (Biogenic amines are a staple of most terrestrial lifeforms in fact, and there is sufficient carbon dioxide and hard sulfuric acid vapor in the venusian atmosphere to allow sulfur cycle energy production, with carboxylic acid biproducts of celluar activity. Combined, it is not hard at all to imagine aramid being biologically synthesized, and falling to the venusian surface as the microbes die. This would result in accretion of a carbon-rich material that is thermo-stable at venus's existing surface temperature, which would puncture the greenouse effect of the planet.)
But of course, I TOTALLY never made posts about that in the past-- No sir-- that would fly in the face of your "reality", where "Space nutters" dont have interesting proposals about venus at all!
We couldnt let the actual reality that this is not true intrude at all. No sir.
Enlighten me-- what feature of your professed "reality" did I miss?
Oort cloud objects are so far away, that it takes them literally millions of years for them to reach our part of the solar system after they get nudged from their orbits by passing stars perturbing their orbits.
Rather than rely on stellar interaction, a mission to purposefully send robot drones into the oort cloud is theoretically possible, but as I pointed out, would require either FTL or a radical improvement in thrust technology to accomplish on human timetables. It took 70 years for voyager to reach the heliopause, AFTER it was gravitationally accellerated by several gas giants. The voyager probe was pretty small too, in comparison to what would need to be sent to the oort cloud to commence a mission of the magnitude the OP suggests. Getting something that heavy out that far before it's mission creators die of old age is a pretty significant bump. That's why I covered that bit by saying it would require, at the very least, a radical improvement in thruster technology.
Once out there though, all it would take is slow, but constant thrust on an object to dislodge its orbit. There would be considerable time for these objects to pick up momentum from their inward plunge. Again, a radiative heater aimed at the surface of the comet at strategic points, controlled by a computer guidance system, would allow for the comet to be steered into the appropriate entry window for mars collision.
It would just take a very, very, very long time. Last I checked, "Very long time" != "Can't be done".
Then we come to the latter point I made-- objects in the asteroid belt between mars and jupiter. Objects in this area are much easier to get to, and could realistically be sent on collision courses with mars regularly with a fleet of automated vehicles. Ion thrusters are more than adequate for this latter kind of planetary engineering. Objects in the asteroid belt range from dust particles to things the size of mountains, to those the size of small moons. You dont need nor want the collossally huge ones. You dont want to destroy the target planet with a massive collision, after all. Sending objects the size of dump trucks or so to mars using controlled, vectored ion engine thrust over long timetables of several years is perfectly plausible.
Since I am telling you how it COULD be done, and you are insisting that it cannot, "because orbital mechanics", the onus of proof is on you.
No, calling me a "Space nutter" or other ad-hominem does not absolve you of this obligation.
Not with an 80 million year transit period it isn't.
A series of radiative heaters stuck to the surface with a computer control system would do the trick. (assuming some long lived power source, like a suitably large RTG)
The real trick then is getting probes into the oort cloud and attaching them to the nearest candidate objects at a human-sensible timetable. Without FTL of some sort, or at the very least, a significant improvement in thruster technology, this is a non-starter.
kuiper belt objects on the other hand, could theoretically be harvested within human timetables, and asteroid belt objects most certainly could.
Stone type asteroids contain a significant amount of bound elemental hydrogen and oxygen. That makes them attractive candidates.
MAVEN detected large spectrometry spikes for several metallic elements, and several non-metallic ones as well, which persisted for hours after the comet passed by.
More interesting to me, is that these nanotubes seem to replace the myelin sheath on white matter neurons. If these researchers can make suitably long tubes out of this material they could 3d print the entire neuroconnective tissue of a larger neural structure, then grow grey matter outside that, like a normal brain is wired up. The artificial interface would be in the guided whitematter formations.
This could theoretically be used for some very interesting research.
The IBM BIOS contained actual program instructions. This would be akin to saying "The high level mapping of what the interrupts in the vector table do cant be copyrighted."
EG, "INT13 handles disk IO"
What Phoenix Tech did was look at what INT13 actually *DID*, then make their own implementation that works basically the same way, so that software that hooks INT13 from the vector table does not know the difference.
This allowed clone manufacturers to build fully IBM compatible clones.
For real, being able to fully engineer a cell from the ground, all the way up, is fast leaving the exclusive realm of science fiction, and entering the realm of science fact.
And plants DO engage in carbon dioxide release type respiration. They do it at night, when they are not photosynthesizing, and are metabolizing stored sugars.
Your proposal still does not have 100% reliability. You will find that even crazy-expensive cloud appliances do not guarantee 100% availability and uptime. They offer "four 9s" of availability. 99.99%.
Network worms do not have fully dynamic programming, and even then, are not alive, because they don't eat.;P
Slashdot Mirror
All life on earth, including you, came from single celled microbial life.
A biosphere in its infancy on another world, ripe for scientific analysis as it evolves (Which it would, VERY quickly. Microbes evolve terrifyingly fast!) would be a boon in ways your philosophy cannot even begin to comprehend.
As for "The right"-- What right do you have, as a human, to justify mass extinctions of far more complex lifeforms and whole biospheres, just so you can have a flatscreen TV?
Be careful there kettle. It's not wise to call the pot black bottomed.
Such pearls of wisdom, from a guy who cant look past his own lifetime to find value in doing something.
Having a living biosphere on venus, where currently there is none, would be one hell of an accomplishment. It does not matter if the resulting biosphere is incapable of supporting human life.
10 years? Probably not, no.
SpaceX has only been in BUSINESS for 12! While it has made extraordinary leaps in progress, it has been borrowing very heavily from already proven rocket technologies.
In 10 years, I would expect spaceX and pals to be at the level of service required to successfully ferry people to and from the ISS with reusable and inexpensive modules as a regular "ho hum" occurrence.
Wouldnt be for another 30 or so by my estimations that we would have significant interest in lunar based manufacturing. By then, economies of scale for orbital payload deliveries would have cut the costs of such a mission sufficiently that enough payload could be delivered to a target site to commence such a project.
It would then take another 10 years to have the site up to speed for anything other than a space curio.
Your assumption is that I think this could happen within my lifetime. I am not so naive. What I take exception to, is that you claim it will never happen at all. That's a pretty extraordinary claim in the face of prevailing events.
Even seeding venus with microbes would not make venus useful overnight. Fuck no. It would take hundreds of thousands of years, at least, for the process to pick up speed, and re-stabilize in a new thermal equilibrium. Look how long the oxygen catastrophe took to make critical mass in earth's fossil record-- We are talking something on THAT kind of geological timetable. Compare that with the current age of venus-- say, some 3+ billion years old -- and even that is a drop in the bucket, cosmologically speaking. Not a small accomplishment at all. (and the best part is that you wouldnt have to worry about it at all after the successful deployment of the germs into the atmosphere-- as opposed to a martian terraforming operation, which would have to add 1/3 of an earth in mass to the damned thing to get tectonic activity churning away in its core, to drive a global magnetic field. Venus, by comparison, appears to already have sufficient mass, but is simply too hot for convection currents to drive the core geomagnetic dynamo needed for one. Simply cooling the planet would make it happen though.)
Would a cooled down venus ever be more than a horrible desert world though? Fuck no. Not nearly enough hydrogen is left in the atmosphere, and the oceans that would result from the biological action on the world would be a thick syrup of complex hydrocarbons and sulfuric acid. Fun for the whole fucking family!
No, I am afraid you are proceeding from a faulted precondition:
1) Thinking that I believe that these things are even remotely possible within my lifetime
2) Believing that I am a programmer. I know how to program, but that is not my career.
Don't worry. The rest of reality is not beholden to your views of it.
The real world will just move on without you. You can be as obstinate and stupid about it as you like.
To accellerate it toward mars? Not much-- you just need to slow it down a little, so that solar gravity can better work on it, causing it to spiral into the gravity well. The total transit distance will be very large, so a small thrust applied over the duration will be sufficient to control its descent into the well. (The energy exerted against the object does not "Go away"-- it is conserved in the momentum of the object.)
Getting there is the real problem. That's why I said it would require a radical departure from currently available thruster tech to get there, and specifically pointed out that the voyager probe is traveling too slowly, DESPITE being sped up by gravitational interactions by MULTIPLE gas giant encounters. You would need something really radical, like an orion thruster. Good luck getting the world's governments to let you put something like that into space though. :D
For the second scenario, you need something akin to a multi-warhead ICBM, just aimed into space, not on a ballistic re-entry tradjectory. You fire the vehicles into orbit, where the delivery stage decouples, and the payloads go different directions after an oberth type manouver.
Sadly, that would make many interests on earth's buttholes pucker, as the launch would have to account for possible launch failures of multiple devices, which could imperil many LEO satellites, which were not cheap to orbit, and any remaining debris from a failure would contribute to the growing problem with such debris in LEO.
The more practical platform from which to launch such a mission is actually the moon-- not earth. More vehicles can be launched from there in a sensible way, and privatized space vehicle manufacturing companies have already expressed long term goals of developing manufacturing and launch systems on earth's natural satellite.
Using a "long haul" design, intended to make multiple payload deliveries to mars before retirement (Possibly using dust as a fuel to restock in-flight) launched from the moon, it may be possible to pull something crazy off like the OP suggests. But I doubt it would ever be considered fiscally responsible.
!Fiscally responsible != impossible, though.
The indian mars orbiter, a vehicle with a lander module, and designed for interplanetary flight, cost less to manufacture and launch than the sandra bullock movie Gravity.
Source
http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/2...
So, there's the cost of a suitable vehicle. About 74 million dollars.
Then we have the designer microbe end. Most designer microbes are intended for biofuel production, using fully synthetic biological pathways, designed by humans.
http://www.hindawi.com/journal...
Other sources of interest are the biodegredation of toxic agents:
http://www.nature.com/nchembio...
And of course, Plastics.
http://garj.org/garjm/pdf/2013...
Feel free to order some of those researcher's samples!
Perhaps you would want some that are sporting a fully 100% human created genome?
http://www.jcvi.org/cms/press/...
Microbes are tenacious things. Once cultured in the lab, and loaded into a delivery system, sending them to venus would cost about 80 million dollars.
Cost of R&D of modifying a suitable sulfur cycle microbe for venusian atmospheric conditions would cost around 100 to 200 million.
So, for around the 300 million dollar mark, we could be initiating the end of the hellish environment on venus-- OR-- we could pay for a few military airplanes.
You are a delusional moron.
For the combined costs of 1 sandra bullock movie, and the tuition of 5 college students, what I proposed can be done.
We have biotech scientists working on making artificial ribisomes, artificial cell walls, and fully synthetic genomes *RIGHT NOW*.
See your problem?
One of us is discounting the current reality, in favor of a preconceived world view. The other is not.
Designer microbes aren't nearly as expensive as you believe them to be, and the costs of sending a vehicle capable of interplanetary flight is less than you claim.
But I bet you would rather have the sandra bullock movie, because it has boobies.
I know what angular momentum is.
In this case, the value of thrust applied does not change with the difference in the size of the circumference of the rotating body. While the same thrust applied at one circumference may not be suitable to cause significant delta of the object, it may well be at a different circumference, because the same energy is conserved over a longer period. Several years of constant low level thrust would be functionally equal to moments of very high thrust, when the full system energy is calculated.
But that goes against your preconceived notions that just because 1 newton of thrust/sec is insufficient to perceptibly alter the orbit of a moon sized object at earth orbit, that it would likewise be incapable of perceptibly altering the orbit of the same sized object at an oort cloud radiused orbit.
The total angle of momentum change is conserved, and there are more total seconds over which the 1 newton/sec thrust can be delivered at the larger orbit's angle slice than in the smaller orbit's angle slice. (To get the same change with the smaller orbit, the thrust would have to be increased!)
Now, show me your math that disproves this. I already filled in the blanks with your previous false equivalency shpeel, showing how the orbital energy of a 1g mass at oort cloud distance is considerably less.
Using kepler's third law, an object weighing 1 gram, at a distance of 100,000 AU (the oort cloud), orbiting a star with 1 solar mass, will have an orbital period of 316174 CENTURIES. (Or, 9.97786e+14 seconds)
We then need to know the total distance of the orbit, in order to determine the orbital velocity of this object.
Best current estimates for the location of the oort cloud is between 5,000 AU and 100,000 AU. We can use these as the semiminor and semimajor axes of the orbital elipse. This gives us a circumference of the orbital elipse of 222421.65 AU.
One AU is equal to 149,597,870,700 meters. This means the circumference of the orbit is 33,274,027,659,230,655 meters.
We can now use the page you linked to to get the kinetic energy of this 1g object at that distance, after we get its orbital velocity.
33274027659230655 meters / 9.97786e+14 seconds == 33.347859820874070191403767942224 meters/second
The page you cited states that the formula for determining kinetic energy is as follows:
E = (1/2) m v^2
We will simplify a bit, and say the 1 gram object is moving at 33.35 meters per second. Let's fill in some blanks.
E = (1/2)*(.001)*(33.35)^2
Simplifies to:
E = (.5) * (.001) * (1112.2225)
Which works out to
0.55611125 Joules
As you can see, this is RADICALLY different from the 450000 joules the same 1g object has in earth orbit!
APPLES are NOT ORANGES.
Issues with your calculation:
1) it's cherry picked. The premise stated by the calculation is that the object is in or near earth's orbital vicinity. To avoid being drawn into the sun, it will require a considerable inertial energy statistic. Items in the very deep solar system? Not so much, since gravity falls off with the inverse cube of distance between the center of mass of the two gravitating bodies.
That means that the object the OP referenced, an oort cloud object, need not have the orbital energy that the object referenced by your sample calculation requires to avoid falling into the sun.
EPIC FAIL.
2) Due to the rather profound difference in gravitational attraction with the sun at these two orbits, and the very large travel distance that the oort cloud object has before it reaches the inner solar system, (and the "free" velocity change the object will get as the gravitational influence of the sun increases as this distance is reduced), the total energy required to de-orbit an oort cloud object will be considerably less than that needed to de-orbit an object of identical mass in the inner solar system.
EPIC FAIL AGAIN.
Now, if you would be so kind, show me an orbital computation that isnt a fucking orange when we are discussing apples, and I will happily relent.
Otherwise, quit making false equivalence based arguments.
*Yawn*
Oh, so things like this simply can't ever work huh?
Nevermind that it is fully mathematically sound, and the only reason why it was never used was because of anti-nuke hysteria. No no-- your "reality" says things like this are simply not possible! (Since you seem to be so thick, I am using the scare quotes to point out that what you consider to be reality is a fiction of your own manufacture, which does not in any way hold with what is actually possible.)
You mean, like this post I made last year?
Synthetic biology is closer than you realize sir.
Aramid plastic has a thermal decomposition temperature of 500c, which also happens to be the mean surface temperature of venus.
Aramid plastic
Venusian climate and atmospheric composition
There is a sufficiently high concentration of suitable sulfur compounds in the upper venusian atmosphere, where it is a nice balmly 70 degrees Fahrenheit, for sulfur-cycle microbes to live perfectly happy, carefree lives-- shitting out aramid plastic non-stop should they be engineered to do so. Given that that the feedstock used to produce aramid plastic is an amine group and a carboxyl-halide group, this is a perfectly reasonable material to biosynthesize. (Biogenic amines are a staple of most terrestrial lifeforms in fact, and there is sufficient carbon dioxide and hard sulfuric acid vapor in the venusian atmosphere to allow sulfur cycle energy production, with carboxylic acid biproducts of celluar activity. Combined, it is not hard at all to imagine aramid being biologically synthesized, and falling to the venusian surface as the microbes die. This would result in accretion of a carbon-rich material that is thermo-stable at venus's existing surface temperature, which would puncture the greenouse effect of the planet.)
But of course, I TOTALLY never made posts about that in the past-- No sir-- that would fly in the face of your "reality", where "Space nutters" dont have interesting proposals about venus at all!
We couldnt let the actual reality that this is not true intrude at all. No sir.
Enlighten me-- what feature of your professed "reality" did I miss?
Oort cloud objects are so far away, that it takes them literally millions of years for them to reach our part of the solar system after they get nudged from their orbits by passing stars perturbing their orbits.
Rather than rely on stellar interaction, a mission to purposefully send robot drones into the oort cloud is theoretically possible, but as I pointed out, would require either FTL or a radical improvement in thrust technology to accomplish on human timetables. It took 70 years for voyager to reach the heliopause, AFTER it was gravitationally accellerated by several gas giants. The voyager probe was pretty small too, in comparison to what would need to be sent to the oort cloud to commence a mission of the magnitude the OP suggests. Getting something that heavy out that far before it's mission creators die of old age is a pretty significant bump. That's why I covered that bit by saying it would require, at the very least, a radical improvement in thruster technology.
Once out there though, all it would take is slow, but constant thrust on an object to dislodge its orbit. There would be considerable time for these objects to pick up momentum from their inward plunge. Again, a radiative heater aimed at the surface of the comet at strategic points, controlled by a computer guidance system, would allow for the comet to be steered into the appropriate entry window for mars collision.
It would just take a very, very, very long time. Last I checked, "Very long time" != "Can't be done".
Then we come to the latter point I made-- objects in the asteroid belt between mars and jupiter. Objects in this area are much easier to get to, and could realistically be sent on collision courses with mars regularly with a fleet of automated vehicles. Ion thrusters are more than adequate for this latter kind of planetary engineering. Objects in the asteroid belt range from dust particles to things the size of mountains, to those the size of small moons. You dont need nor want the collossally huge ones. You dont want to destroy the target planet with a massive collision, after all. Sending objects the size of dump trucks or so to mars using controlled, vectored ion engine thrust over long timetables of several years is perfectly plausible.
Since I am telling you how it COULD be done, and you are insisting that it cannot, "because orbital mechanics", the onus of proof is on you.
No, calling me a "Space nutter" or other ad-hominem does not absolve you of this obligation.
Not with an 80 million year transit period it isn't.
A series of radiative heaters stuck to the surface with a computer control system would do the trick. (assuming some long lived power source, like a suitably large RTG)
The real trick then is getting probes into the oort cloud and attaching them to the nearest candidate objects at a human-sensible timetable. Without FTL of some sort, or at the very least, a significant improvement in thruster technology, this is a non-starter.
kuiper belt objects on the other hand, could theoretically be harvested within human timetables, and asteroid belt objects most certainly could.
Stone type asteroids contain a significant amount of bound elemental hydrogen and oxygen. That makes them attractive candidates.
MAVEN detected large spectrometry spikes for several metallic elements, and several non-metallic ones as well, which persisted for hours after the comet passed by.
Hang on, I will dig up a source.
http://www.universetoday.com/1...
Bam. There you go.
Which is good enough if you are wanting to build hybrid wetware robots, like the rather famous "ratbot" from 2002.
http://www.technologyreview.co...
More interesting to me, is that these nanotubes seem to replace the myelin sheath on white matter neurons. If these researchers can make suitably long tubes out of this material they could 3d print the entire neuroconnective tissue of a larger neural structure, then grow grey matter outside that, like a normal brain is wired up. The artificial interface would be in the guided whitematter formations.
This could theoretically be used for some very interesting research.
and that would seem to be on the money...
Imagine the reaction of a hypothetical future smart-AI responding to the niggling bullshit of a spambot...
You mean Phoenix technology, and IBM's BIOS--
And NO.
The IBM BIOS contained actual program instructions. This would be akin to saying "The high level mapping of what the interrupts in the vector table do cant be copyrighted."
EG, "INT13 handles disk IO"
What Phoenix Tech did was look at what INT13 actually *DID*, then make their own implementation that works basically the same way, so that software that hooks INT13 from the vector table does not know the difference.
This allowed clone manufacturers to build fully IBM compatible clones.
Not the same thing at all.
This is the internet we are talking about.
Do you honestly expect professional standards? ;P
Thankfully for you, the internet is FILLED with people that like to microwave dangerous things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
fully synthetic biology is closer than you realize.
This is from 2 years ago-- Researchers succeed in creating fully artificial cell membranes
This from about 4 years ago-- First fully reproducing bacterium with fully synthetic genome
This is from last year-- Creating synthetic ribisomes
For real, being able to fully engineer a cell from the ground, all the way up, is fast leaving the exclusive realm of science fiction, and entering the realm of science fact.
No, ALL plants move. Some move more perceptibly than others. The two examples I gave were "Very noticeable movement", but even grass moves.
There are several mechanisms by which a plant may be able to move. The most common is "Phototropism", but there are other forms of plant movement, including those responding to tactile stimulous, and many others
Your argument is what needs work.
Sunflowers.
Named, because they move their flowers to track the sun.
Then there is the dodder vine..
Plants move all the damn time.
http://www.biology-online.org/...
Already covered for some time.
And plants DO engage in carbon dioxide release type respiration. They do it at night, when they are not photosynthesizing, and are metabolizing stored sugars.
They also excrete through structures called stomata, found on the undersides of leaves, and in the grooves of stems.
place a lit candle into the microwave, set it on high, then press start.
You will observe "fire", an exothermic reaction involving carbon and oxygen, evolve into a plasma energy phenomenon.
Evolution is a process. The presence of evolution does not itself indicate life.
Your proposal still does not have 100% reliability.
You will find that even crazy-expensive cloud appliances do not guarantee 100% availability and uptime. They offer "four 9s" of availability. 99.99%.
Network worms do not have fully dynamic programming, and even then, are not alive, because they don't eat. ;P
Stargate "replicators" ate-- network worms dont.