61–70 of 105 posts
I highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Great scifi books about a vaguely realistic Mars settlement, and the cultural/biological changes that occur.
I highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Great scifi books about a vaguely realistic Mars settlement, and the cultural/biological changes that occur.
The idea of colonizing another planets is so surreal it makes me wish I would live another 100 years. Having mars as our launch pad, I wonder where we could go from there.
Living on Mars = living inside a crapped space your entire life and never being able to breathe fresh air, or take a walk outside. Maybe in 1000 years Mars will be nice. I think until then - nice for a short visit. Living in a box would get tiring very, very quickly.
Wouldn't terraforming take much, much longer than that? Assuming it were possible(which doesn't seem possible due to lack of a magnetic field, as another commenter pointed out)
Could Mars ever be terraformed to the point a human, or human derivative, could operate comfortably in the open atmosphere? It seems pretty cold, air pressure is low, and there's little-to-no protection from solar radiation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living on Mars = living inside a crapped space your entire life and never being able to breathe fresh air, or take a walk outside. Maybe in 1000 years Mars will be nice. I think until then - nice for a short visit. Living in a box would get tiring very, very quickly.
> Maybe in 1000 years Mars will be nice. Wouldn't terraforming take much, much longer than that? Assuming it were possible(which doesn't seem possible due to lack of a magnetic field, as another commenter pointed out)
The idea of colonizing another planets is so surreal it makes me wish I would live another 100 years. Having mars as our launch pad, I wonder where we could go from there.
Strictly speaking, it should be possible for humans to go interstellar using current technology. Practically speaking, it's not, due to the partial nuclear test ban treaty. Here's a good start to that Wikipedia hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion is a better article, since it talks about a variety of theoretical spacecraft. You'll note that almost every single application uses a unmanned craft in order to reduce mass and keep travel times down to about a century.
Charles Stross (cstross) has written on his blog about the difficulties of human interstellar travel multiple times:
- http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
- http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...
He also has written about the difficulties of radiation shielding on interstellar travel: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/08/san-trom...
> "Anyway, the point I'd like you to take away from this is that while it's really hard to say "sending an interstellar probe is absolutely impossible", the smart money says that it's extremely difficult to do it using any technology currently existing or in development. We'd need a whole raft of breathroughs, including radiation shielding techniques to kick the interstellar medium out of the way of the probe as well as some sort of beam propulsion system and then some way of getting data back home across interstellar distances ... and that's for a flyby mission like New Horizons that would take not significantly less than a human lifetime to get there."
A different question altogether, but interesting none the less, let's say Russia or China get to colonize Mars first, then let's say they find a safe way to thrive there. could they then by extension manage new colonization of Mars the same way we colonized earth? That is the colonizer could regulate who might get to further colonize Mars --ie require a kind of interplanetary visa (if we allow many people from many p…
There is the Outer Space Treaty [1]: > The treaty explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet.[3] Art. II of the Treaty states that "outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means". However, the State that launches a space object reta…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living on Mars = living inside a crapped space your entire life and never being able to breathe fresh air, or take a walk outside. Maybe in 1000 years Mars will be nice. I think until then - nice for a short visit. Living in a box would get tiring very, very quickly.
> Maybe in 1000 years Mars will be nice. Wouldn't terraforming take much, much longer than that? Assuming it were possible(which doesn't seem possible due to lack of a magnetic field, as another commenter pointed out)
My favorite idea to re-liquify the Martian core is to move Ceres into orbit around Mars. It'd take a very long time to do it, but you've got millions of years. But the point is, in the meantime, having a dense enough Martian atmosphere to walk around with just a gas mask is certainly attainable in a lifetime, so long as you have enough energy production to do it.
The idea of colonizing another planets is so surreal it makes me wish I would live another 100 years. Having mars as our launch pad, I wonder where we could go from there.
Living on Mars = living inside a crapped space your entire life and never being able to breathe fresh air, or take a walk outside. Maybe in 1000 years Mars will be nice. I think until then - nice for a short visit. Living in a box would get tiring very, very quickly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strictly speaking, it should be possible for humans to go interstellar using current technology. Practically speaking, it's not, due to the partial nuclear test ban treaty. Here's a good start to that Wikipedia hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...
Most of that article deals with interplanetary travel. The only reference to interstellar travel is in the "Theoretical Applications" section. If you look at the chart in that section, you will note that the two theoretical spacecraft are using 300 thousand or 30 million bombs. This is a problem, since estimates of current worldwide nuclear weapon stockpiles range between 10 to 15 thousand. I think https://en.wikiped…