Kim Stanley Robinson Says Colonizing Mars Won't Be As Easy As He Thought 228
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."
Hard to Imagine (Score:5, Funny)
it could take longer than in his books, which, frankly, were interminable.
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it could take longer than in his books, which, frankly, were interminable.
I agree. After Red Mars I was so put off that, after previously being something of a fan, I never read another one of his books...
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Shaman [npr.org] is pretty good, if you're into that sort of thing.
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I found Red Mars a loooooong slog. But after I finished it, Green and Blue were a lot better. Red took so much effort to go through because it's the foundation for the other two.
That's why it's called Science Fiction (Score:5, Funny)
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The "fiction" is the aspect of science fiction which is the made-up part. The "science" part is, for the most part, not. The rule is, you get one or two freebie made-up items, but the rest has to hang together as science. Or you are doing fantasy, which, while it must obey rules, has rules which are based on the need for entertainment or plot. IE you make it all up.
KSR doesn't make up science, and SF isn't about making up science. Sci-fi(y), which is the Hollywood version of SF, makes up the science
At this point Mars is running before you can walk (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 c
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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.
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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.
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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?
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> 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 consc
Re: At this point Mars is running before you can w (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Has there been any study of the long term effects of 1/6th G? Moon people might be fine.
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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.
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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 entir
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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 ...
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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 :)
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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 li
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re:At this point Mars is running before you can wa (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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?
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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 c
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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.
Y
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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
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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... [wikipedia.org]
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
Why terraform? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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"Plenty of people" are also depressed, fickle and unbalanced, the solution to which is often spending more time outdoors experiencing nature.
No, it's not. Doing that would cut into the time we're supposed to be spending at work, slaving away for our corporate masters so we can afford to pay the rent.
Re:Why terraform? (Score:4, Insightful)
Plenty of people on this planet rarely if ever go outside
Yeah, but what percentage of people never go outdoors ever? And how healthy and mentally well-balanced are those people?
Not to mention the fact that if you're going to live your entire life inside a windowless room underground, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to do that on Earth, and outside of the heavier gravity, the experience is the same. Plus that way you retain the option of going outside if/when you finally are about to go insane from cabin fever.
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Yeah, but what percentage of people never go outdoors ever? And how healthy and mentally well-balanced are those people?
There's a lot of people in cold northern climates that almost never go outside in the winter months. -20F with a 20 MPH wind may not be as completely hostile as Mars, but you pretty much have to have all your exposed skin covered and wear heavy insulated clothing so you might as well be wearing a spacesuit.
Sure, there's a small percentage of people who are athletic and go outside in that
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His fonts are bright and shiny while yours are dull and generic.
You need to buff up your presentation a bit.
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Plate tectonics have nothing to do with ,oons.
Your claim is nonsense.
I doubt we know anyhing about plate tectonics on Venus or Mars.
I alos doubt that there is any fundamental difference in plate tectonics on any 'stone' planet. The only difference we know is that Mars and Mercure are now 'dead' in that regard.
Assuming that their plate tectonics was widely different to earth, when those planets where young, is completely idiotic imho.
Works both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
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hence the headline..."Kim Stanley Robinson Says Colonizing Mars Won't Be As Easy As He Thought" it will be easier :)
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Fusion creates felectrical energy by boing water into steam and driving turbines, which is bad for the wildlife in the water, for one thing. Second, inelegant, like creating a nuclear engine and using it to propel a horse on steam-powered roller skates. Best way to generate power is solid state, like solar or energy differentials in the ground. And, really, fusion ain't happening anytime soon. We need juice now. But to your point, he's not saying that we don't have the tech, which as he clearly outlined in
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Fusion creates felectrical energy by boing water into steam and driving turbines, which is bad for the wildlife in the water, for one thing.
Seriously, that's your main complaint with fusion power?
Nitrogen is Organic Chemistry (Score:3)
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?
Terraforming is Premature (Score:3)
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".
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Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars book. Read it, have your mind blown.
Terraforming Mars: why? we can do better than that (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re: Terraforming Mars: why? we can do better than (Score:2)
I think you're onto (on) something. ;)
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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 b
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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 spinu
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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.
Well, this is embarrassing (but good) (Score:2)
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.
So this is what is behind "Aurora" (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Perchlorates (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Perchlorates? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The moon is a better idea anyway (Score:2)
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 fro
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The moon is a trap. There's nothing good there to mine or explore; it takes less rocket fuel to land on Mars than the Moon; and the moon's surface is a horrible horrible place. You propose to solve that problem by living hundreds of feet underground, but if you're going to live that way, why not do it beneath the Earth instead?
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As to it taking less fuel to get to mars then the moon... How? Just explain how that is possible.
I'm quite certain you could "throw" things from the moon to the earth. So the return trip wouldn't even take fuel. You could literally just give it a push. And the moon is quite a bit closer than mars... so why does that take less fuel?
As to the surface being a horrible place... so is mars. The Marian atmosphere is a joke. There is basically just enough there in the words of JPL that "you have to deal with it or
Re:The moon is a better idea anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Aerobraking. The vast majority of your spacecraft's fuel and cost is spent getting out of Earth's gravity well. If you've burnt enough fuel to get into a lunar transfer orbit, it takes just a little bit more to escape Earth entirely and go to Mars. But to *land* on the Moon, you need to spend more fuel to slow down and stop on the surface. To land on Mars, you just need a heat shield, because Mars has an atmosphere you can use to slow down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]
So that's reason #1 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
Unless you can throw things at 2.4 kilometers per second, no. The Moon's gravity is less than the Earth's, but it's still serious business. You need quite a bit of fuel to take off from the Moon. You need fuel to take off from Mars too, but Mars's atmosphere has carbon dioxide: bring a little hydrogen with you (or use the local water) and a source of energy (solar panels or a reactor) and you can synthesize methane and oxygen fuel while you're there. No need to carry fuel for the trip home!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/... [geoffreylandis.com]
Reason #2 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
Oh, but it is. Mars's atmosphere is thick enough to shield radiation about as well as several inches of concrete, reducing radiation exposure by a factor of 2-3. It's also further from the Sun than the Moon, which reduces solar radiation by a factor of 2. Neither of these effects are enough on their own: you're right that Mars habitats will have to be underground too. But going outside is noticeably safer.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/... [usra.edu]
Reason #3 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
Mars's atmosphere doesn't provide complete radiation shielding, but it does provide complete protection from meteorites up to about 1-2 meters in diameter.
https://janus.astro.umd.edu/as... [umd.edu]
Reason #4 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
And finally, the Moon has craters and lava flows and that's all. Mars has those, plus volcanoes and canyons and ice caps and wind and clouds and storms and snow and glaciers and sand dunes and landslides and groundwater and river valleys and maybe an ancient ocean and maybe, once upon a time, life. Why? Because Mars has an atmosphere.
Reason #5 -- the most important one -- why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.
It was a rhetorical point, not a serious proposal. I'm saying that if you're going to spend your whole life hiding in a sterile burrow, does it really matter that you're on another planet?
For the record, none of these ideas are my own. I'm quoting chapter and verse from "The Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin. Zubrin's got his problems -- he's a little too casual about the radiation dangers, for instance -- but IMO it's a good starting point for any serious discussion of colonizing the solar system.
http://www.amazon.com/Case-Mar... [amazon.com]
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what do you say to using gravity assist to slow the craft down? I looked it up and apparently that is a pretty common trick.
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You can't use gravity assist at a planet to change your orbit with respect to that same planet. So for instance, the Galileo spacecraft couldn't use Jupiter to change its orbit around Jupiter, but it could (and did) use Jupiter's moons. Same for Cassini at Saturn. Sadly, neither the Moon or Mars have any useful moons. (Mars's moons are way too small.)
Also, going from a flyby trajectory into orbit around a planet requires a *lot* of orbital change in a very short amount of time, and gravity assists aren'
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The moon has its own gravity, enough to accelerate an object dropped from a large distance to around 2.4 km/s by the time it reaches the surface. It is also in a circular orbit around Earth, and anything reaching it from Earth will be either have a much lower orbital velocity at the high end of an elliptical orbit, or be on a high energy trajectory that has a similar orbital velocity in a quite different direction. And no, it is not possible to slow down a trip to the moon. If you're not going fast enough,
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Is there an opposite of the sling shot maneuver? Can't you do some sort of gravity breaking?
If I can use an orbit to accelerate myself away from a body, then can't I use one to slow me down?
I'm actually a little perplexed as to how the sling shot maneuver works since my understanding would be that you'd lose whatever energy you got leaving the gravity well that you got out of it by diving into it.
In any case, if you can steal some momentum from a body you can certainly deposit it.
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"If I can use an orbit to accelerate myself away from a body,"
You can't. The speed relative to the gravitating body in a "slingshot" maneuver is exactly the same on the way out as it was on the way in. The maneuver is useful because it allows for a change of direction and because depending on the approach, the change of direction can mean adding or subtracting the motion of the gravitating body relative to a third body. Slingshotting around the moon can put you in a higher or lower orbit around Earth or all
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I looked it up, apparently you can do it. It is used extensively by space probes.
I can provide links if you want. I don't know how much you could slow something down that went from the earth to the moon... but apparently you can use the process to slow something down.
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Space probes use assists *by planets* to adjust their velocity around *the sun*. The maneuver can not be used for changing the speed relative to the object it's being done around. You can not slingshot around the moon and reduce your velocity relative to the moon. If you are on a trajectory that intersects the lunar surface, your kinetic energy will reach a maximum and potential energy a minimum at impact.
You could use gravitational assists around the moon to adjust the orbit around Earth into one that make
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You're thinking farther along in the colonization process than I am: I'm imagining the difficulty of the first steps, when megastructures like a railgun aren't available.
That said, electromagnetic launch is totally doable on Mars. Atmospheric pressure is already 300 times less than Earth's, and if that's not enough, just build your space cannon on the slopes of your favorite volcano, reducing atmospheric pressure by another factor of 10.
Robinson cheated. (Score:3)
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.
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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?
Fish can do it. We can put fish genes in a tomato. Why not in a person, eventually?
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Can you cite a source? Not aquarium owners' street smarts, something that includes actual numbers. Gills and water are very different from lungs and air, so the important measurement is whether fish can tolerate much higher CO2 concentrations *in their blood* (corresponding to much lower blood pH) than humans.
A terraformed Mars requires something like 100x as much CO2 in the atmosphere as on Earth. Can any vertebrate survive that kind of CO2 concentration in their blood?
mars till won't have magnetic field. (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, really? (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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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....
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Fix't it fer tha.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... [wikipedia.org]
[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?
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“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.
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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?
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Stop dreaming about Space Elevators
Nuclear thermal rockets would be a lot more practical in the short term.
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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.
Re: Yeah, really? (Score:2)
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.
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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, compre
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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.
Re:Yeah, really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 a
Re:Yeah, really? (Score:4, Informative)
I can remember all of those predictions of yours being made in the early 1970s, about the year 2000.
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Looks like you stopped reading Kim Stanley Robinson and started up on Paolo Bacigalupi. [amazon.com] I'm willing to bet our actual future lies somewhere in between.
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What's it like to have no soul?
Universally the case?
Try telling Marvin Gaye that.
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Yeah, it was really foolish to send all those Apollo astronauts to the moon when they kept dying on the way, huh?
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As I understand it, during the Apollo lunar missions, exposure to radiation from the Van Allen Belt wasn't too bad because of the short transit time. Much more ionizing radiation was received from solar wind sources when outside the earth's magnetic field during the mission.
It remains to be seen if solar/galactic radiation can be mitigated to allow us to transit beyond the moon and live to tell about it, but at least the VA belt is of relatively small concern...
Coincidence? I think not. (Score:5, Insightful)
It almost makes you think that the fy should actually be fi, like the first two letters of fiction.
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How is it that a science forum has people on it that think SF is silly?