User Panel
What about paraterraforming? Dome over valleys to contain atmosphere for growing food,and put every bit of space that doesn't require photosynthesis underground. Mine subterranean water for irrigation. Build mass drivers on the surface to further more exploration.
Do this to Mars after "practicing" on the moon. Use lunar resources to manufacture equipment/fuel for the Mars expeditions. After Mars, you get to loot the asteroid belt,then move into the Jovian system and eventually Saturn and Titan. |
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Titan , Europa , the moon or Ganymede first , Mars is more of a novelty right now more than anything.
Mars doesn't have a whole lot of stuff on it that i think would be useful, for self-supporting colonies, quite a few other bodies would be better. Heck , the colonization of Venus's upper atmosphere appears to be easier. |
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Definitely. But if Obama's not going to let us go, I say some private entity should head over and attempt to claim large swaths of real estate. Spacecraft group buy anyone?
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It might be a novel idea to get it done correctly here on good ole' Earth before we f*&k up another planet.
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First off, that would cost tons of money. It would be easier and cheaper to take over Canada and use all their unsettled land for expansion. Yes, it's all snow covered and deserted but we could label it Hoth and run with it.
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ETA: Hell, we can't even figure out what an extra few percent of CO2 will do on THIS planet, much less how to terraform another planet Actually, we can; won't do jack. CO2 as a greenhouse gas is a joke in terraforming science which is results-based. You need large quantities of custom-engineered super greenhouse gases to warm a planet. It's only a global cooker in climate change science, which is dogma-based. |
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>>Do you think Mars should be terraformed?
I think that you mean: Do you think Mars should be terraformed again? The first time around was a miserable failure. What leads you to believe that the second time will work any better than the first time did? |
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We should have been on Mars thirty years ago and already gotten started. What's happened to our space program is a fucking shame
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I support Manifest Destiny. I only hope that the green men will trade their land off for shiney trinkets and we don't end up giving them a monopoly on martian casinos a few hundred years from now.
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Wont work without active geology.
The idea of terraforming a planet is currently a bit far reaching, but the idea of creating an artificial magnetosphere is totally fucking absurd. If we were capable of artificially generating that kind of energy, we could do MUCH cooler shit that warm up a dead rock. |
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Locate a few big water asteroids in the belt. Put a solar sail on them. Aim well. 10 years later we have a good atmo. Sure it'll only last a few hundred years before we have to do it again but it will work.
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Absolutely. It should be terraformed so handle human population growth.
With superior medicine (unless the government ruins that) and a steady birth rate we'll need some space at some point. |
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Here is the issue though:
Human beings would be effected over generations by the different conditions on Mars and eventually the species would be very different. |
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Manifest destiny! Only problem is that there would be no noble enemy to subdue........ |
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Yeah; we fucking ruined this one, lets go to the next one!!! I disagree that this one is ruined, soiled slightly, but not ruined. |
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Only the rich could make it happen. Only the rich would be allowed to escape this rock when the time comes. Maybe a few peasants would be allowed to make the trip and be slaves on the new rock. |
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First off, that would cost tons of money. It would be easier and cheaper to take over Canada and use all their unsettled land for expansion. Yes, it's all snow covered and deserted but we could label it Hoth and run with it. 54-40 or fight! |
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Uh, how about we figure a way out to get Afghanistan into the 21st Century before we start trying to make life on Mars possible?
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I bet that place would smell like feet and ass after a couple years. |
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Not only do I say yes, but I think private groups should push to get there first, before some government does and declares the whole planet a historical zone or some shit.
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Hell yes. Unless an intelligent species inhabits a planet, it's fair game. "Nature" my ass. Dead hunks of rock don't get environmental protection... Damn hippies, that's just asinine wanting to preserve something as useless as Mars. ETA - Why oppose it for technical considerations when we don't have the technology to terraform yet anyway? WE are nature. |
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Build some bases there, send all the undesirables there, then sever contact with earth.
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Get your ass to Mars...
Get your ass to Mars... Get your ass to Mars... Get your ass to Mars... Get your ass to Mars... Get your ass to Mars... Get your ass to Mars... Get your ass to Mars... Get your ass to Mars... Get your ass to Mars... |
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Venus makes a lot more sense, but still no significant magnetosphere.
You could possibly craft an atmosphere thick enough to protect from radiation that is still breathable but it would be a very alien experience to life on Earth (Short of Seattle). If you were willing to live on a planet where it rained all the time, and it was constantly pitch black due to cloud cover, yeah then Venus would work. There is also the issue of shedding enough heat to be inhabitable. However that's a lot easier then building a magnetosphere. |
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Without a magnetosphere, further away from the Sun makes more sense.
And once an atmosphere was built up, solar wind stripping, and UV cracking water into free Hydrogen that floats off into space will take hundreds of thousands... millions of years to become serious. As long as there is a technical space-faring civilization on Earth, Mars, or elsewhere in the Solar System, dropping a few comet hunks, or some ice from Saturn's rings would be trivially easy as compared to the terraforming itself. And as to Mars' lower gravity, you could build "spin cities". Big shallow cone shaped pits that spin, with the buildings angled inward to keep the angle "down" like an airliner today making a constant-G turn to keep the passengers comfortable. Through a combined vector sum of Mars' gravity, and the centripetal force from the rotating city, 1 Earth gravity could be maintained. The commute, or stepping off the edge into the suburbs would be damn interesting though. |
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The earth has an active core, according to some, due to radioactive decay.
We have a problem with radioactive waste, according to some, due to its radioactive decay. Solution: Drill a hole into the center of Mars, and dump our radioactive waste. Two problems, one stone. |
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Uh, how about we figure a way out to get Afghanistan into the 21st Century before we start trying to make life on Mars possible? I think even 19th century is wildly optimistic. |
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The earth has an active core, according to some, due to radioactive decay. We have a problem with radioactive waste, according to some, due to its radioactive decay. Solution: Drill a hole into the center of Mars, and dump our radioactive waste. Two problems, one stone. LOL... Even if you accept that the majority of the Earth's core heat is from radioactive decay, and not residual heat from the Earth's accretion from the protoplanetary disk, and if ALL the Earth's radioactive waste were up to the task, it would take millions... billions of years for the decay to actually heat up Mars' core. Quoted:
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Uh, how about we figure a way out to get Afghanistan into the 21st Century before we start trying to make life on Mars possible? I think even 19th century is wildly optimistic. What most of the world has now, economically, and technologically, is in one way or another the product of European expansion and colonialism into the "New World". And this time there are no natives to oppress/kill/enslave or pawn off into running the Casinos on reservations. Resource exploitation of the Solar System would have immesurable economic and technological benefits back here on Earth. Afghanistan would probably still be a shithole by 22nd century standards, but it will be a much nicer shithole if Earth as a whole is wealthy with all the energy and metals it will ever need from Solar System exploitation and expansion. |
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Terraform Mars, then populate it with dinosaurs. It would be an awesome hunting paradise. We could feed hippies to the velociraptors.
T-Rex wall mount FTW. |
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Venus makes a lot more sense, but still no significant magnetosphere. You could possibly craft an atmosphere thick enough to protect from radiation that is still breathable but it would be a very alien experience to life on Earth (Short of Seattle). If you were willing to live on a planet where it rained all the time, and it was constantly pitch black due to cloud cover, yeah then Venus would work. There is also the issue of shedding enough heat to be inhabitable. However that's a lot easier then building a magnetosphere. Venus is not like Earth or Mars. Where do I start? Sulfuric acid rain. 920 degrees in the shade. Entire continental plates upending under you into magma every now and then. No light. Thousands of pounds PSI air pressure. No water. No oxygen. In short: Venus is Hell. We will *never* live there. |
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Quoted: Why wait? Let's start sending liberals there now. They can sure bring a lot of hot air with them to help warm up the atmosphere |
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Quoted: >>Do you think Mars should be terraformed? I think that you mean: Do you think Mars should be terraformed again? The first time around was a miserable failure. What leads you to believe that the second time will work any better than the first time did? Uhh explain that to me... I think I may have MISSED that day in history. When has Mars been terraformed before? |
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IIRC Mars doesn't have a significant barrier against the Sol's solar wind. They are what turned it into the dust bowl that it is today. Earth has a very active core. Mars does not. It produces a field that deflects the solar wind, thus keeping it from stripping our atmosphere down to almost nothing. This, unfortunately. Domes or death. |
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If we get all kinds of crazy and horrific diseases just by going to new areas of our own planet, I wonder what we'll contract by going to other post-terraformed planets
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If we get all kinds of crazy and horrific diseases just by going to new areas of our own planet, I wonder what we'll contract by going to other post-terraformed planets They won't be local bugs as there is no life already there but we could accidentally make mutated Earth bugs. Space Herpes! |
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I think they should work on a space vehicle that can achieve light speed before we mess around with teraforming. There is more to space than just mars. I like to see what else is out there.
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Quoted: I'm not talking right now, but in like 50 years. So if we could do it, should we do it? Poll Inbound I think it should be involuntarily colonized with North American liberals and illegal immigrants. |
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Liberals don't actually like the advancement of science so I don't think it will happen in 100 lifetimes.
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People have a hissy fit about disturbing "native species" when you bring a plant from one state to the next. They show how your entire county gets changed because some boater forgot to wash off his prop or something. They can't even begin to fight any invasive weeds, yet aren't willing to let "nature take it's course" b/c they're worried about the damage inflicted.
People are going to be okay with this until we get Martian bacteria. And heaven help us if it takes a liking to human cells! /we don't know enough yet to take care of our own planet without panicking and pulling out our hair. //we shouldn't expand beyond our capabilities. |
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Why wait? Let's start sending liberals there now. Great idea. They can produce all the CO2 needed to change the atmo, just by talking about their bullshit politics. |
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Why wait? Let's start sending liberals there now. A-HA! I think you just found out why Obongo has shitcanned the entire space program - they figured out your master plan! |
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