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Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

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Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#151

Post by yitchelle »

fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

I am surprised that as travel to Mars is becoming more of a reality, there are not a lot more folks trying to reach Mars for commercial gain.

I am correlating this back to when the Europeans are going around the globe and colonising every land mass they can land on. Why are should Mars be any different?

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#152

Post by majewsky »

yitchelle wrote: post #151
fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

I am surprised that as travel to Mars is becoming more of a reality, there are not a lot more folks trying to reach Mars for commercial gain. I am correlating this back to when the Europeans are going around the globe and colonising every land mass they can land on. Why are should Mars be any different?

Bringing a ton of gold to Europe from South America is waaaaaay cheaper than bringing a ton of anything to Europe from Mars.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#153

Post by pferde »

adrianN wrote: post #112
ur-whale wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Correct, but short-sighted. However much Earth has, we'll quickly gobble it all up. To quote Bartlett : "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett ) The only way out is up, and the first stepping stone is the Moon, next is Mars.

Neverending exponential growth is not possible through space colonization. We can grow at most as the surface area of a sphere that expands at the speed of light, realistically much slower.

In sufficiently long term, it is not entirely correct, because colonized planets will eventually start sending out colonizers themselves.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#154

Post by Symmetry »

fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

On the time frames we ought to be planning on I see Mars as a scientific research base and waystation on journeys further out. In the long run population growth is going to start back up again as the genes people who desire kids in the modern world prosper so it'd be nice as a source of living space, though really O'Neil cylinders are the real solution there.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#155

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

lmm wrote: post #101
fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

I can't see any path to colonising the galaxy that doesn't start with colonising the solar system. It's always going to be a long term project, there are always going to be things on earth that look like more immediate priorities, but I want humanity to spread among the stars, and if we don't start now then when?

Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with. When it comes time to think about colonizing other star systems, it's going to take a really, really long time to get to them and we'll have little idea what their worlds are like. Seems to me it'd be better to work on colonizing space itself, because you'll pretty much have to anyways to make interstellar travel viable, and once you've done it there really isn't a good reason to live on a planet instead unless it happens to be a lot like earth.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#156

Post by novaRom »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #56
Apocryphon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To echo the previous post, why Mars? Why not the moon? Why not the Lagrange points? Why not the upper atmosphere of Venus? I'm not saying no to Mars, but there's plenty of other frontiers we should be looking into, some of which are better candidates in terms of proximity or more similar gravity.

There are a lot of reasons. One of the biggest is that Mars has the greatest chance of being a self sustaining civilization in a fashion that's somewhat close to Earth standards. The major negatives on Mars are unbreathable low pressure air, and radiation dangers. Those are big negatives to be sure but outside of that: - Near identical day/night cycles to Earth, and it even has seasons. - Extremely calm weather. One…

Venus is not as cold and unprotected as Mars:

- Very dense rich atmosphere, carbon dioxide 96.5%

- The pressure at its surface is equivalent to that at a depth of nearly 1 km under Earth's oceans; while it is 20 times less dense than fluid water

- It is the closest planet to Earth and has similar mass and size

- It has stable constant surface temperatures everywhere at any time around 450 C

Most semiconductors will not work in this conditions. This is the problem we may need to solve first.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#157

Post by qubax »

fuscy wrote: post #99

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed. Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter. It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic r…

> I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed.

For the same reason in tech we have backup servers, HA clustering, disaster recovery sites, etc. A bit of redundancy helps in case something goes wrong.

> Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system

Currently, sure. But other planets, especially mars, can be terraformed and made habitable one day ( it would take hundreds or thousands of years ).

> It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic region, Cheyenne mountains or underwater than on Mars.

Sure but a terraformed mars can support more life eventually.

> Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system.

The same goes for siberia, alaska, canada, etc. There are far more hospitable places to live on earth than those places. But people still explored, migrated and settled. It's human nature.

Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted but if anyone is interested in a talk of mars colonization, here is an interesting TED talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9c7aheZxls

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#158

Post by novaRom »

wnkrshm wrote: post #124
verelo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, why fixate on turning one planet into “habitable” while we do the opposite to the one we are already on? I’d like to see us address those issues of society first before we spread our influence across the literal galaxy.

I always wonder why people think that there's so much money you can take away from space exploration R&D when the whole sector is basically really tiny and funded on a comparable magnitude of public broadcasting in some countries (e.g. NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR). The discussions ensuing about the usefulness of space exploration are always passiona…

> NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR

Please note, every household in Germany pays a special tax, so called "GEZ TV tax" which is approximately 250 USD per year per household. Additionally, every company, every small business in Germany pays 250-44000 USD per year (depends on how many people are employed by this business).

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#159

Post by lmm »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #155
lmm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see any path to colonising the galaxy that doesn't start with colonising the solar system. It's always going to be a long term project, there are always going to be things on earth that look like more immediate priorities, but I want humanity to spread among the stars, and if we don't start now then when?

Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with. When it comes time to think about colonizing other star systems, it's going to take a really, really long time to get to them and we'll have little idea what their worlds are like. Seems to me it'd be better to work on colonizing space…

> Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with.

I more-or-less agree with this much, but the most suitable place to start learning to colonize space rocks is probably Phobos.

Re: Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

#160

Post by adrianN »

pferde wrote: post #153
adrianN wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neverending exponential growth is not possible through space colonization. We can grow at most as the surface area of a sphere that expands at the speed of light, realistically much slower.

In sufficiently long term, it is not entirely correct, because colonized planets will eventually start sending out colonizers themselves.

That doesn't work. They'll only reach places already colonized.
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