Surface areas: Israel versus the planet Mars

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Vigilans
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17 Apr 2011, 12:26 pm

Oodain wrote:

Vigilans wrote:

@Oodain: we can't land on Venus, unfortunately- but good point about light metals on the Moon, that is worth it. I was just referring to the idea that the Moon would be good for iron mining, which I don't think it is

@simon_says: next year they'll be putting a plasma rocket into space for some initial tests. It takes the trip time to Mars down to about 2 1/2 months. The time is a lot nearer then you think

venus is quite possible to use but there would be no surface "dwellers" it would all comprice of cloud cities with short or automated trips to the surface, there are a lot of challenges but if nothing else venus has an interesting atmoshpere.

Processing Venus' atmosphere would yield carbon products and over time thin it out. Eventually Venus could be a target of terraforming, but the problem is it has almost no water...

As well, it orbits in retrograde, and its day is almost as long as its year

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17 Apr 2011, 12:30 pm

Quote:

@simon_says: next year they'll be putting a plasma rocket into space for some initial tests. It takes the trip time to Mars down to about 2 1/2 months. The time is a lot nearer then you think

Yeah, I follow this stuff closely but it's not that close. Certainly impossible on current funding before 2035-2040+.

And the VASIMR engine they are testing can't do that, it's an early version designed for station keeping. And to get the 2-3 month trip to Mars, you then need a space based nuclear reactor to power the improved version. That doesnt exist, is not being built, and would cost mucho money and time. The Russians have a design, but no money.

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17 Apr 2011, 12:32 pm

I don't hold my breath on anything NASA related at this point. I suspect VASIMIR will launch a new era in transportation, as it is just an initial test of the technology
. Either that or the Chinese will announce out of nowhere that their Mars mission is entering into Mars orbit and the first Humans on Mars will be walking there in a few days

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17 Apr 2011, 1:03 pm

Vigilans wrote:

Oodain wrote:

Vigilans wrote:

Processing Venus' atmosphere would yield carbon products and over time thin it out. Eventually Venus could be a target of terraforming, but the problem is it has almost no water...

As well, it orbits in retrograde, and its day is almost as long as its year

the day problem is nonexistent if using floating cities as they would be travelling on the venutian winds, even at the edge of the atmosphere they are pretty darn fast.
it is true it has no water to speak of besides the water vapor in the atmoshpere, but it does have plenty of heavy metals and i imagine there could be some very interesting geological features on venus.

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17 Apr 2011, 1:59 pm

Oodain wrote:

naturalplastic wrote:

Reread the last page of posts by the last half of a dozen posters.

Im not talking about living on asteroids. Im talking about stripmining them for their materials.
(although you could mine one first, and then use the hollowed out shell as a residential colony).

For that purpose asteroids have far more potential than full sized planets precisely because of their lack of gravity. Exporting pig iron from the moon is far more costly in energy than exporting it from an asteroid because even the moon has gravity to fight if your trying to send a bulk cargo of product back to earth.

So if for some reason industry on earth is forced to mine extratrerrestrial bodies for raw materials the asteroids would be the most cost effective places to exploit. Asteroids would be exploited before we would exploit even the relatively nearby moon for that purpose.

Further- if your goal is for humans to colonize the moon and mars etc then that goal would itsself likely require the mining of asteroids.

Exporting human civilization to mars, say, would require an infrastructure of orbiting interplanetary bases. We would end up creating an orbiting civilization of space colonies before it would be feasible to have much human settlement on the planet's surface.

To set up this interplanetary support infrastructure you would have to build alot of stuff in space itsself. To do that you need raw materials. To get the raw materials you would need to mine. The most cost effective place to mine would not be either the earth nor any other large bodies. It would be the asteroids. Thus exploitng full sized planets (and even the moon) would likely force us to go through an asteroid mining phase first.

Or, atleast thats my understanding of one vision of the future. The vision outlined in better detail than I can in the book "the High Frontier" by Gerard O'Neil. Though written in the late seventies it still the most thoroughly thought out and practical vision of space colonization that Ive ever run across.

sorry i meant what would make them important enough to "miss" them if we use them?

but i agree that asteroids hold great potential for mankind, i just mean they dont have much natural value as such if we leave them alone.

@vig
the moon, while not abundant in heavy metals, have a very high concentration of silicon at its surface, it would make silicon production very cheap, it also holds hydrogen and oxygen so it could be used for rocket fuel.

mercury sounds fascinating but i think venus would be a better candidate short term, as it would allow all the neccesary testing for mercury to be done somewhere remotely comparable.
i like the idea of moving closer to the sun as solar power would be able to power enormous devices, provided they can take the heat.

Oh gawd!
I wasted all that time responding!
Well- I was being a a bit faceatous. You know- something we now think of as a danger might dissappear on its own simply because of the ever rising scope of human rapacity. An asteroid that might have flatten manhatten ends up as a bunch of beercans in a landfill in manhatten. Although its not impossile that future generations would view mountains adrift in space the way we view mountains on earth-as spectables of beauty to behold for tourists.

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17 Apr 2011, 3:16 pm

@naturalplastic yeah sorry i should have been more clear the first time.

you do make many excellent points though.

even if we removed most asteroids from the solar system there would still be a few around though i can kinda see your point.
bbut i find even that prospect unrealistic, even if we could i dont think all asteroids are worth the effort.

as for stuff ending in landfills, we really need a solution far more than we need spacetravel (alltough space could be a solution, fake asteroid belts made of scrap anyone??)

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Vigilans
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17 Apr 2011, 3:21 pm

Oodain wrote:

Just shoot garbage into the sun. Its a giant incinerator just waiting for our refuse.

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17 Apr 2011, 3:48 pm

Vigilans wrote:

Oodain wrote:

Just shoot garbage into the sun. Its a giant incinerator just waiting for our refuse.

true,
havent thought of that.

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17 Apr 2011, 3:50 pm

Oodain wrote:

Vigilans wrote:

Oodain wrote:

Just shoot garbage into the sun. Its a giant incinerator just waiting for our refuse.

true,
havent thought of that.

Naturally, some sun-worshiping Pagans will raise an outcry about dumping garbage on their God. You just can't win!! :lol:

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17 Apr 2011, 3:52 pm

well as long as we dont dump enough to disturb the fuel cycle we should be safe.
mind you that would be several planets worth but i firmly believe that the human capacity for pollution is only limited by our access to raw material.

if we really have to consider every religious view we wouldnt be able to do anything.
i even think there is a cult of the star beetlegeuse somehwere, just waiting for the supernova.

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17 Apr 2011, 4:26 pm

Oodain wrote:

mercury sounds fascinating but i think venus would be a better candidate short term, as it would allow all the neccesary testing for mercury to be done somewhere remotely comparable.
i like the idea of moving closer to the sun as solar power would be able to power enormous devices, provided they can take the heat.

The surface and atmosphere of Venus makes Mercury look habitable in comparison. Only one space probe ever survived the decent to Venus' surface and the planet destroyed it in something like 15 minutes.

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17 Apr 2011, 5:01 pm

John_Browning wrote:

Oodain wrote:

it was 20 minutes but yes venus is almost impossible to be on at the surface, cloud cities however would be possible without doubt and new advances in material science might make "dumb-bots" a reality for mining, a dumb bot is a sheltered mechanical husk with all the electronics located safely in the skies, buyoncy would be able to take the bots up for maintenance and cargo drop off, not saying its easy or even viable but it is definately not impossible.
carbon naotube in and of themselves might even make it a possibility if they were cheap enough to produce, high melting point and one of the strongest materials known to boot, it can also be doped with many different materials giving it some very interesting properties.

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John_Browning
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17 Apr 2011, 11:59 pm

Assuming you come up with the technology to do that, you still have to find a way to construct your city and make it habitable despite it floating in a thick cloud of sulfuric acid.

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18 Apr 2011, 12:03 am

John_Browning wrote:

Assuming you come up with the technology to do that, you still have to find a way to construct your city and make it habitable despite it floating in a thick cloud of sulfuric acid.

There is actually a layer of Venus' atmosphere that has ~1 bar pressure and is above the corrosive cloud layer. With breathing apparatus it would be possible to live there without even a pressure suit

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18 Apr 2011, 12:11 am

Vigilans wrote:

John_Browning wrote:

Assuming you come up with the technology to do that, you still have to find a way to construct your city and make it habitable despite it floating in a thick cloud of sulfuric acid.

That would be rather precarious though, since Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system. It would be better for the rest of the solar system to be colonized and industrialized while more and better technology for making Venus non-lethal is developed, in my opinion at least.

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18 Apr 2011, 12:22 am

Its hottest beneath the cloud tops, however; in reality Venus is at the extreme inner edge of the habitable zone. At that elevation the temperature is quite comfortable. But I agree, there are better short-term targets that can have more immediate benefit. What I see for Venus is a string of small cities, with mostly automated technology, processing the atmosphere and making carbon products out of it for export elsewhere in the system. After hundreds, or thousands, of years, perhaps this will thin the atmosphere appreciably
Venus' lack of tectonics leads to it doing one massive resurfacing every few hundred million years through extreme supervulcanism (or so the theory goes) so it might actually be a dangerous place to terraform in any case. Then there's the whole year = 1 day problem. I don't know how plants could adapt to that. I suppose through extensive genetic engineering

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