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Planet Mars

Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby onlooker » Thu 01 Dec 2016, 13:51:57

Just in a connected aside, does anybody here believe in worm holes or warps, that theoretically could transport us to far off regions of space in very little time? Oh I think it also referred to as the Rosenberg bridge
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Thu 01 Dec 2016, 14:27:25

onlooker wrote:Just in a connected aside, does anybody here believe in worm holes or warps, that theoretically could transport us to far off regions of space in very little time? Oh I think it also referred to as the Rosenberg bridge

Even if real the nearest one is probably hundreds of light years away and we will never be able to drive through it and because it is (supposedly) a natural structure it would pop you out at some unknown place you had no control over and the return trip might not bring you back to your exit. They make for great scifi books and movies but that is all.
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby onlooker » Thu 01 Dec 2016, 14:34:51

Thanks V
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby DesuMaiden » Sat 03 Dec 2016, 09:07:56

Considering that we are at the highest point technology will ever reach in history, we are at the peak of industrial civilization, and no energy source will ever provide us with more bang-for-the-buck than fossil fuels, a manned mission to Mars is highly unlikely. Just because we sent people to the Earth's Moon over 40 years ago doesn't mean we will automatically progress to the next step, which is supposedly sending a person onto Mars' surface. Sure, we sent probes and machines to take pictures of Mars' surface, but that was already pushing our technology to the limit.

According to some people, we should have already sent someone to Mars by now since we already sent someone to the Moon nearly 1/2 a century ago. You wonder why we haven't sent anyone to Mars yet? Probably because it is impossible with our current technology, which is based almost entirely on fossil fuels.

Plus, let's consider the logistics of sending someone to Mars. Mars is over 100 times further from the Earth than the Moon is. Even with today's technology, sending someone to the Moon (and back to Earth safely) would push our fossil-fuel based technology to the limit.

Some people might say, "maybe it isn't possible to send someone onto Mars today, but we will eventually develop the technology to send someone to Mars, and other planets beyond that. Besides, our rate of technological innovation has been exponentially increasing in the past couple of decades, technological innovation is developing faster than any previous period in history, and will continue to do so into the future, so we might reach the technological capability to send a man on Mars sooner than you think".

Let's examine the parts saying "technological innovation is increasing exponentially" and
"technology is developing faster than any previous period in history". Yes, there has been considerable technological progress during the past couple of decades and last 2 to 3 centuries, but it is a folly to extrapolate into future solely based on past events. Just because there has been considerable technological development in the past couple decades doesn't mean there will also be more in the future. People typically expect the future to hold more of the same as the past and present.

But according to some more credible scientific sources, technological development has been minimial during the past couple of decades (from 1980 AD onwards) compared to major technological developments of the mid 18th to mid 20th century. Technological development was at its peak during the late 19th to early 20th century with the development of the internal combustion engine and electrification (which is basically the ubiquity of electricity in society) of industrial nations. Virtually all of the technological development since 1980 has been in the IT (Information Technology) and electronics industries which clearly had less of an impact on the lives of people than the internal combustion engine and electrification.

But more importantly, virtually all of the technological developments since 1860 AD (when petroleum first started to be exploited on a commerical scale) have been predicated on an edifice created by petroleum. Even our ability to send astronauts, space probes and other stuff into space is predicated on petroleum. In other words, if we didn't discover how to harnass fossil fuels, we would have never been able to send a man onto the Moon. As we deplete, peak and decline in our ability to use fossil fuels, we will also lose the ability to manufacture technological contraptions that are based on fossil fuels. And that includes loosing our ability to send people and things into space. And once economically extractable fossil fuels are gone, so is our ability to send people and things into space gone. So our ability to send anyone to the Moon--let alone Mars--becomes impossible.

Sure, humans have been able to send someone to the Moon, but that's the furthest we will ever be able to send anyone into space. Sending someone to Mars is nothing but a pipedream.
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby dissident » Sat 03 Dec 2016, 10:48:19

onlooker wrote:Just in a connected aside, does anybody here believe in worm holes or warps, that theoretically could transport us to far off regions of space in very little time? Oh I think it also referred to as the Rosenberg bridge


At the core such notions are nonsense. It is basically "free lunch" fantasy posing as science. There was a nice piece on the energies involved with wormholes (of any relevant size) in Scientific American several years ago. We are talking about super-massive black hole type structure levels of energy. There is no known formation mechanism for wormholes. Some believe that black holes are wormholes. That's cute but ridiculous since the agency that is needed to maintain them disappears (i.e. either the original accumulated mass is there or it isn't). And good luck crossing the event horizon in one piece. (BTW, beware of some loose language regarding event horizons, I have seen them called coordinate singularities. They are nothing of the sort and can be explicitly demonstrated to be coordinate invariant features so you cannot map them away.)

Wormholes could have formed during the creation of the "universe" at the time of the Big Bang. This is at least plausible since they would be self-consistent and there would be a mechanism for their formation. In the initial moments of the Big Bang vast amounts of energy and mass were concentrated in a very small volume (this is why General Relativity, GR, fails to describe the early stage of the "universe" since we have a detonating black hole). Wormhole structures could have formed during this time and would have grown together with space-time as it expanded. The problem is that the observed "universe" is isotropic. This isotropy even requires the hyperinflation stage after the Big Bang to be explained. So it is highly unlikely that wormholes developed in the wake of the Big Bang. They are very non-isotropic features and there would be observational evidence of this heterogeneous texture of space-time in the CMB (cosmic microwave background) radiation.

Warps are a species of wormhole in the energetic sense. Some magical device is supposed to curve space-time enough to allow faster than light travel to remote regions. If you believe in GR then any warp bubble would not be able to propagate faster than light anyway. This does not mean that space-time cannot "flow" faster than light (e.g. that is what you have in the Painleve-Gullstrand metric solution) but that is a steady state limit and not something that can be forced on demand. And we are here dealing with mind-numbing energies that are beyond any human scale reactor to produce.
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby lpetrich » Sat 23 Jun 2018, 16:17:37

Capabilities & Services | SpaceX contains pricising for that company's booster rockets. The Falcon 9 costs $3,000/kg for low Earth orbit, and $15,000/kg for going to Mars. The Falcon Heavy has about half those numbers.

Furthermore, in all of the Solar System outside our planet, one needs to live in some enclosed habitat module with breathable air at a suitable pressure and temperature. All one's crop plants and farm animals will also need that. One will need a lot of launching from our planet, or else one will have to do a *lot* of manufacturing elsewhere in our Solar System, and some initial manufacturing machines will have to be launched from our planet.

So we are *not* going to solve overpopulation that way.
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sat 23 Jun 2018, 19:38:11

I never believed that we would solve our population problem by moving off the Earth. All that space colonies do is preserve our human species - and all our crop species and food animal species, during a deady period as the planet goes through a worldwide reset of the ecology, and rids itself of a surplus of humans.

It's like that famous calculation they challenged you with in grade school: If all the Chinamen were to march 100 abreast at 2 mph, how long would it take before they all pass by you the observer. The answer being, they never would, because they are reproducing faster than they can march by. Space travel is like that. You only need enough people to preserve the entire human genome and all the knowledge base, an estimated 3500 or so people, as long as they are the right 3500. I might suggest that you also sell tickets off the dying planet, the ability to make lots of money is an excellant survival trait. But everybody on the surface experiences the dieoff. If that process evolves humans better able to compete than the original versions in space, then they will deservedly replace them.

Realisticly, you can have 35,000 or more in modern LaGrange colony designs. Then you can have five colonies in the Earth/Moon LaGrange points, before you even need to venture into "deep space". We have been designing those colonies for decades, they should now be built, now that lift is relatively cheap, and the asteroids can be mined for materials.

Mars, indeed. Musk is a fool.
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 23 Nov 2018, 14:33:16

For those interested the next NASA Mars Probe, INSIGHT, is scheduled to land Monday the 26th a few hundred km north of the still operating Curiosity rover. INSIGHT is intended to de seismic studies to get a better idea of the internal structure of the planet.
On Monday, November 26th, following a six-month journey across hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, NASA's InSight spacecraft will arrive at Mars in suitably dramatic fashion, hitting the top of the planet's atmosphere at 12,300 miles per hour—several times faster than a speeding bullet—shortly before 12:00 pm PST (3:00 pm EST).

If all goes as planned, it will take InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) just seven minutes to decelerate completely and alight on Mars' surface. The planet's atmosphere will do a lot of the work, aided in turn by InSight's parachute, descent thrusters, and shock-absorbing legs. If NASA can pull it off, it will be the agency's eighth successful landing on the red planet.

NASA and others will be broadcasting news of InSight's approach, entry, descent, and landing all day long. Here are the best places to keep tabs on Monday's proceedings in person and online.

Watch in Person

From the NASDAQ Screen in Times Square, to the California Science Center in Los Angeles, to the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, live viewing parties will be taking place all over the world on November 26th. NASA has compiled a handy list of no fewer than 80 such events, complete with addresses and contact information. The agency is updating the list daily, so if you don't see anything near you today, be sure to check back in the days ahead. You can also check with your local museum to see if they'll be hosting a landing party. If you've never been to a watch party for a Mars landing, we highly recommend it. After all: They don't happen very often!

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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby Cog » Fri 23 Nov 2018, 14:56:49

A manned expedition to Mars faces some rather daunting challenges. A launch window opens up only once every 26 months when the Earth and Mars orbital alignment is favorable. Given current technology, a trip would involve nine months in space, three months exploring, and another nine month trip home. Now we know astronauts can survive at least a year in zero gravity because its been done on the space station.

But you have to carry everything you need. Food, water, fuel, consumables of all kinds. Take a long time to get all that mass into low earth orbit. Now I suppose if you could pre-stage fuel and supplies into Mars orbit or put it on the Mars surface itself, you could solve several of these issues. Still, this is not a 3 day trip to the moon. Very expensive undertaking when robots can do a lot of what we want on Mars.
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Fri 23 Nov 2018, 15:00:01

KaiserJeep wrote:I never believed that we would solve our population problem by moving off the Earth. All that space colonies do is preserve our human species - and all our crop species and food animal species, during a deady period as the planet goes through a worldwide reset of the ecology, and rids itself of a surplus of humans.

Being able to set up a colony in the short run (whether in space or on a nearby planet or moon), fed by a steady stream of supplies, replacement parts, etc. is one thing (like the space station, for example).

Being able to set up a colony that can be self sustaining for decades or even centuries while humanity destroys the biosphere of earth is quite another. I think we're at least decades away from that being realistic, IF lots and lots of resources were poured into the project to learn how to solve the myriad problems.

If we're going to do all that, I'd rather take a serious run at global warming mitigation. Not that either will be likely to happen with the needed funding or in the timeframe needed.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 24 Nov 2018, 09:18:01

Cog wrote:A manned expedition to Mars faces some rather daunting challenges. A launch window opens up only once every 26 months when the Earth and Mars orbital alignment is favorable. Given current technology, a trip would involve nine months in space, three months exploring, and another nine month trip home. Now we know astronauts can survive at least a year in zero gravity because its been done on the space station.

But you have to carry everything you need. Food, water, fuel, consumables of all kinds. Take a long time to get all that mass into low earth orbit. Now I suppose if you could pre-stage fuel and supplies into Mars orbit or put it on the Mars surface itself, you could solve several of these issues. Still, this is not a 3 day trip to the moon. Very expensive undertaking when robots can do a lot of what we want on Mars.


That is no longer exactly true. We are now close to two decades into the era of ion thrusters. We have also demonstrated in labs the ability to convert martian atmospheric gasses and hydrogen into a supply of liquid methane and liquid oxygen for rocket fuel and/or breathing gas. These are the two key technologies of the 'mars direct' program proposed even longer ago.

Just because the bureaucratic apparatus of NASA insists on planning everything with the same techniques as were in use in 1965 does not mean that is the only way to do things and everyone else will blindly comply with their nominative restricted thinking.

On the other hand it is not going to be easy or cheap, it will just be abundantly easier and cheaper than the NASA way of doing things.
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby lpetrich » Sun 25 Nov 2018, 21:19:51

Ion engines have indeed successfully flown, complete with several years for the Dawn mission. But existing ones have very low thrust. The Dawn spacecraft has 3 NSTAR engines, each one with 90 millinewtons of thrust.

VASIMR will have more thrust, but a VASIMR engine has yet to be flown. VASIMR uses superconducting electromagnets, and those must be kept supercold with liquid helium.


For a Hohmann minimum-energy trajectory, one will take about 8 1/2 months. But one will have to wait on Mars or in Mars orbit for a year and 3 months before one can return by that sort of orbit. When one returns, one has to wait a year and 7 months before one can go back to Mars.

I think that the first human mission to Mars will be to orbit the planet, and then return home. Landing there is too risky, because we have yet to test returning to orbit from the planet's surface. Other than the Earth, the most massive celestial body that we have ever successfully departed from is the Moon, and its surface-satellite orbit velocity is 1.7 km/s. Mars's is 3.5 km/s, and the Earth's 7.9 km/s. So a spacecraft like the Apollo Lunar Module's ascent stage would need the square of that stage's mass ratio to depart.

It's certainly possible to make fuel and oxidizer using what's available in Mars's atmosphere, but one will need a mini chemical factory for that, and a super reliable one that will need little or no maintenance. So one might have to build in a lot of redundancy, and that costs mass.
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Sun 25 Nov 2018, 22:02:35

Thruster types aside I think the most likely future will hold a series of robot missions to Mars where the increasingly sophisticated robots will do what exploration is needed and then build a human viable habitat using mostly materials mined by the robots from the planet itself. Only after that is in place and has proven itself will humans make the trip to colonize the planet.
Considering the lift weights and distances involved a first human resident on Mars might get there about 2150.
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Re: When will the mass dieoff begin? Pt. 5

Unread postby eclipse » Wed 25 Sep 2019, 19:38:02

I'm an environmentalist but also a fan of SpaceX and setting up a Mars township. I had someone challenge that we could ever make a Mars underground city work because we needed ecosystem services, and their backup evidence was Biosphere 2. Now, while I'm still optimistic for a Mars base and I'll share my reply to their challenge below, what I'm thinking through now is how exposed we are on Earth to failure of ecosystem challenges. What makes us especially vulnerable to ecosystem changes here on Earth when I think a Mars base is possible where there IS NO ECOSYSTEM? This is a thought project, and I'm just throwing it out there to see what happens. Is it that there are just so many of us, so badly deployed in the landscape in suburbia, and that our economies are structured around relying on the assumption of these services when on Mars every single structure will be around the most efficient way just to survive?

My pro-Mars reply to the Biosphere 2 challenge.


Don't be too quick to think of a moon or Mars colony as biosphere 2. There are fundamental differences!
1: Let's remember that Biosphere 2 was a seal and walk away deal! The scientists were meant to stay inside, cut off from the outside world and just live in a closed system for 2 years. That's the wrong analogy. Future "Moonies" or "Martians" would have the whole moon or planet to use! The moment they needed extra resources, they would send droids or even people suited up outside to go get them! EG: As the concrete dried in Biosphere2 it lowered interior oxygen to dangerous levels, nearly failing the whole Biosphere project then and there. But we know to look for this kind of thing now, and even if it happened on the moon we would go mine some more water and split it for extra oxygen, or just fire up a Martian Moxie unit and extract more oxygen from the Martian atmosphere itself! Where the Bionauts had to feed themselves, the first Moonies would be living off supplies that came with them for months or even years in the case of Mars. They'd have abundant military-grade rations, tasty and high energy for the high energy life of an early coloniser. (Some estimates say they'll burn 3000 calories a day, bare minimum!) Indeed, this approach could even apply to space stations in the asteroid belt. One large asteroid might be mined for decades, but as they grew and needed more resources, they could gradually propel the whole station over to the next asteroid a million km's away. They're in space. They've got 24/7 solar power, possibly directional solar sails, and all the time in the world.
2. One thing we learned from Biosphere, don't try and copy the entire earth's ecosystems from the get go! (D'uh!) Why build artificial deserts and rain-forests and other whole ecosystems when the most important thing we need is fresh air and water and food? Why waste resources? They would apply industrial farming techniques that maximise food, and work from there up. Sure one day they'd slowly plant out some seeds and grow a garden that in future might even qualify as a forest or ecosystem. But every activity at first would be geared around abundant oversupply and backup. Survival is the name of the game, not abstract ideas like growing a whole artificial ecosystem out on Mars! That might happen one decade, but slowly and incrementally as surviving gradually transitioned into thriving.
Summary: Moon, Mars, and even Asteroid mining space stations will have abundant and increasing material supplies and clear survival priorities. Biosphere 2 had fully enclosed separated limited resources and unclear, confused goals about enclosed ecosystems, wasting essential resources and colony food, fuel, and fibre space. Biosphere 2 was an interesting experiment, but is simply a bad comparison to a modern commercial or government space colony.
Try Isaac Arthur's "Moon Colonies" episode for starters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zaIy1TARPE
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Re: When will the mass dieoff begin? Pt. 5

Unread postby dohboi » Thu 26 Sep 2019, 00:42:34

Ummmm, maybe start your own thread if you wanna talk about SpaceX shit...err...stuff.

OK?
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Re: When will the mass dieoff begin? Pt. 5

Unread postby eclipse » Thu 26 Sep 2019, 02:46:16

Wouldn't the greatest act of conservation being to get some ecosystems off world and establish them in O'Neil cylinders or even on a terraformed Mars?
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Re: When will the mass dieoff begin? Pt. 5

Unread postby Ibon » Thu 26 Sep 2019, 08:10:05

eclipse wrote:Wouldn't the greatest act of conservation being to get some ecosystems off world and establish them in O'Neil cylinders or even on a terraformed Mars?


You are looking for solutions in the external in its most extreme, colonizing space.

When the solution is in front of you the whole time. It is internal. in the inner space of each individual cultivating the humility to tread lightly on the planet framed in laws and regulation that enhance this humility instead of the current state of affairs that seems to be focused on the arrogance of dominating the external...... as in your idea of colonizing space.

We need to colonize the inner space of humility.
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Re: When will the mass dieoff begin? Pt. 5

Unread postby asg70 » Thu 26 Sep 2019, 15:23:56

eclipse wrote:Wouldn't the greatest act of conservation being to get some ecosystems off world and establish them in O'Neil cylinders or even on a terraformed Mars?


Can you say...magical thinking?

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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby eclipse » Thu 26 Sep 2019, 20:32:13

Not magical thinking, just very large scaled industrial thinking with tech we already have. Just on a different scale.
EG: We can already build steel battleships and aircraft carriers.
With more of the same, we can build large O'Neil Cylinders 8 km in diameter, 32 km long and spun up for artificial spin-gravity.
That's an area of 256km square, and if constructed like an onion a number of floors deep, there could be an agricultural layer, city layer, and inner wilderness layer all powered by abundant baseload solar power from massive solar sails connected up outside.
Park them in a nice orbit and they have all the solar power they need.
Being out of the gravity well, they'll send out probes and ships to gather resources from asteroids, and maybe gradually replicate themselves?
But I guess my interest is on the viability of the ecosystems we set up in the inner layer, if speaking from a conservation point of view.

I guess one answer to the Mars habitat conundrum I put above is that the only reason a Martian city might survive in such a harsh place is that it's the amount of resources dedicated to each person. Such an outpost will initially only be the place for the pinnacle of an industrialised society, as the resources-per-person would be obscene to anyone from the developing world. We are in an ecological crisis here on earth, but I also think we have the technology to turn IPAT not into a multiplier of harm, but divider of impact. The better the T, the less the P and A multiply the harm. I=PAT either multiplies or divides, depending on the T, much faster than the A and P! EG: We might all switch to energy efficient light bulbs and drive EV's and gradually rebuild our suburbs into New Urbanism to walk more in the first place, but none of that will reduce our A (Affluence / consumption) fast enough to really stop global warming. But if society deployed nuclear power as fast as Dr James Hansen wants at 115 GW of nuclear reactors a year (which is slower on a reactors / GDP ratio than the French already achieved in the 1970's Mesmer plan), then we could provide a low T world of abundant clean energy for a world of 10 billion by 2050.

The bottom line? Poorer nations are vastly more subject to changes in ecosystem services than richer nations, even though richer nations still depend on regular rainfall etc to run their agricultural sectors. (Climate change may devastate American farming with dustbowl conditions.) However, if the new wave of agricultural tech kicks in with algae to vat-grown meat sectors coming, then who knows how far we will be able to decouple our agricultural impacts from destroying natural ecosystems, and live 'off the grid' of the natural world, freeing up vastly more space for nature to thrive?
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Re: Planet Mars

Unread postby asg70 » Thu 26 Sep 2019, 23:54:02

eclipse wrote:Such an outpost will initially only be the place for the pinnacle of an industrialised society


No kidding. Look, if any of this happens, leave to Elon Musk. He's working on it. I just think his space dreams could very well go up in smoke the first time one of his rockets (probably the BFR, since it's really experimental and people think the pore-based cooling system is stupid) blows up or burns up with people on board. I think he's got a good architecture going with Falcon 9/Heavy but beyond that I am really skeptical.

eclipse wrote:if the new wave of agricultural tech kicks in with algae to vat-grown meat


Plus the New York Times trying to warm us all up to the idea of eating insects...again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/scie ... phagy.html

I'm sorry I can't look at these things as anything but stair-step moves towards Soylent Green.

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