Moving to Mars

[Captain_Nick]

http://www.news.com.au/technology/s...n-a-one-way-trip/story-fn5fsgyc-1225945124330


Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any information on how to volunteer. I hope NASA are taking applications from all interested parties, not just yanks. After all such a project should be done in the name of all the people on earth not just the Americans.

Anyway, if this project gets going in the next twenty or so year I sure as hell am signing up for it. It's an opportunity to stake a claim in the annals of human history. Perhaps in 200 years there will be a city named after me.

I have read much Australian history and I understand how to make a name for yourself. Opportunities to grab land are rare indeed. Blokes like Macarthur with insatiable appetites stole, squatted and grabbed any land they could get their hands on, and now they are immortalised in the history books and in the city they helped found. How frikking awesome would it be to have a suburb named after you? 'Nick Fields' has a nice ring to it

Macquarie had all sorts of things named after him - a street in Sydney's CBD, a university, a suburb .. he was a bold leader who had the guts and tenacity to turn his vision into a reality in spite of opposition from the opportunist McArthur.

I need to learn as much about living on planets other than Earth as I can so when I arrive I can occupy huge tracts of land and depasture sheep and cattle.

It would be an investment for the future as initially the market on Mars would be too small for me to make any significant financial gains.

As a colonist on Mars I would also represent my favourite football club. With luck Collingwood can claim to have the first Martian member in the league. I hope that they install the internet on Mars fairly soon as I don't want to miss out on any premierships.

Once this program gets underway and I am on board officially, I will contact the club president (hopefully still Eddie) and ask them for a flag which I can plant on the Red Planet, thereby staking Collingwood's claim to a little slice of red heaven. With luck it will piss off the Bombers and the Saints no end.

I also understand that as Mars has a little less gravity it will be possible to take more spectacular marks and bomb goals from outside seventy meters. You can bet that the first Aussie Rules ground on Mars will be named Victoria Park - the second will be named Nick's Paddock.

I CANNOT FRIKKIN WAIT TO GET TO MARS

Who's with me?

 

[MANT!]

Pipe Dream....

The USA's gonna be lucky to get back into orbit anytime soon...

Only if these guys pan out...

http://www.spacex.com/

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w3hPA4WpNE[/yt]

 

[T'Baio]

But there's no one there to raise your kids.

 

[Small White Car]

But there's no one there to raise your kids.

Also, I hear it's cold as hell.

 

[Captain_Nick]

I am given to understand that hell is quite warm.

 

[auntiehill]

All this science, I don't understand.

 

[scotpens]

I think somebody’s burnt out his fuse . . .

 

[RJDiogenes]

I think it's gonna be a long, long time.

 

[Roshi]

Get your arrrrss to Mars! Get your arrrrss to Mars! Get your arrrrss to Mars! Get your arrrrss to Mars!

 

[PlainSimpleJoel]

I think it's gonna be a long, long time.

My thinking also. Probably more than 20 years. But it would be very different living with the same group of people for several years.

 

[Jadzia]

With present day scientific knowledge, I fear that any trip to Mars would be a death sentence.

For a start, we can't get artificial biospheres to work properly on earth, and on Mars there's several different variables to contend with:

- 50% of the sunlight
- higher levels of UV rays that will degrade any manmade materials you have. It could also damage microbiology depending how much of the UV you are able to block out.
- the thin atmosphere will inhibit convective cooling of the biospheres, and create a pressure difference across the superstructure that's going to make it difficult to work on.
- low outside temperatures may cause problems if your biosphere isn't able to retain enough heat. Imagine water vapor condensing on cool/exposed patches of the biosphere, freezing and doing expansion damage.

When we build these things on earth, we don't grow all of the plants from seed. Mature trees and plants are used, which would be impractical to transport to Mars. When you populate a new biosphere, the ecosystem needs to be viable straight away, otherwise things will die very quickly.

A second problem is that your resources on Mars would be very limited, and you'd need lots of fuel to engineer things, which you'd have to be self sufficient in. One thing you'd need would be a forge for obtaining metals from the rocks, for repairing tools & machinery and repairing/expanding your biosphere superstructure. That's going to produce a lot of CO2, and your ecosystem needs to be able to handle those emissions.

We haven't yet managed to get a grasp of CO2 on earth. Here we can afford to be complacent (which we are). The sheer size of the earth gives us time to adapt. But in a Martian biosphere you'd have much less air to buffer any anomalies, and complacency could quickly lead to catastrophe.

 

[Deckerd]

There would probably be lots of volunteers right up until they realise that they're going to be stuck in a small bubble with a lot of other weirdos for the rest of their lives, which will most likely be shortened by the low gravity.

 

[Holdfast]

One thing you'd need would be a forge for obtaining metals from the rocks, for repairing tools & machinery and repairing/expanding your biosphere superstructure. That's going to produce a lot of CO2, and your ecosystem needs to be able to handle those emissions.

To begin with, that would be really good for Mars wouldn't it? In fact, it wouldn't be anywhere near enough. We'd need to churn out vast quantities of greenhouse gases to warm the place up a bit and kickstart terraforming. Plus, loads of CO2 would be great for any plantlife we want to try growing there.

In a way, Mars is the ideal place to screw around with the biosphere, given that it doesn't really have a particularly viable one at the moment. Since any colonists are going to be in domes anyway for a long, long time, might as well play around with the atmosphere outside to speed the terraforming process up.

 

[Jadzia]

What I mean is, wouldn't we want to hold onto all of our Carbon Hydrogen Nitrogen and Oxygen, because it's the basis of our ecosystem's biomass?

If we're producing solid fuel (presumably from wood to charcoal), then would we want to hold onto that carbon as it's burned in the forge with the pulverised rocks? If we're ejecting it outside of the biosphere, can we afford to lose oxygen and hydrogen (in the CO2 and water vapor) from our ecosystem too?

I'm also saying that if we do hold onto it, we'd need to be sure that our biosphere's ecosystem can handle that sudden injection of CO2 gas, and can heal itself before we do our next lot of smelting.

 

[Holdfast]

I see what you're getting at but it would be centuries before a Mars ecosystem would be in any sort of equilibrium anyway. So in the meantime, it strikes me that rather than try to aim for a slow, steady sustainable improvement in a roughly equilibrated ecosystem (something we probably lack the tech to do anyway), we should go all out to achieve one aspect of habitability at a time, and then let the whole thing equilibrate itself at the end. That would probably be quicker, and given that the starting point is already uninhabitable, we'd have nothing to lose by going all out for speed.

So first, warm the place up intensively by pouring out as much CO2 and H2O as possible (melt some underground aquifers and the poles, to start with. Must be loads of trapped CO2 and water somewhere there. Use reflecting solar lenses or some other fancy device to do this rapidly). Once the temperature starts to rise, alongside CO2 and water levels, dust as much of the planet as you can with moss and lichen and plankton which can grow rampantly and begin to fix the carbon. In fact, you could most of this remotely, without even needing to have too many people on the planet.

I'm no planetary engineer (ha, no shit, right!) so have no idea if that would be the best way to actually go about it, but it seems a potentially rapid way to get things moving down the road to terraforming. And if it doesn't work, no real loss, since you're still in domes anyway. Try again on another planet. If it does work, brilliant, quick (well, relatively-speaking) new home.

 

[Sector 7]

It is a little more complicated than that. Introducing a new, alien ecosystem to Mars is a tricky business. It would need to be a balanced, self-sustaining ecosystem. Rather than domes above ground, it would be safer to dig out underground caves/tunnels to block the higher doses of UV radiation. Because sunlight is only half that of Earth, it would be practical to use land to harvest sunlight with a solar energy farm (acres of solar panels and cells) to provide energy for the colony. These are just a few of the many considerations in colonization of Mars- or any other planet.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Get your arrrrss to Mars! Get your arrrrss to Mars! Get your arrrrss to Mars! Get your arrrrss to Mars!

What is it, the Pirate Planet?

I think it's gonna be a long, long time.

My thinking also. Probably more than 20 years. But it would be very different living with the same group of people for several years.

Yeah, the way things are going a lot more than twenty; unless the private sector really takes off.

Once the temperature starts to rise, alongside CO2 and water levels, dust as much of the planet as you can with moss and lichen and plankton which can grow rampantly and begin to fix the carbon. In fact, you could most of this remotely, without even needing to have too many people on the planet.

They would never do this without demonstrating that there's no life there already (and they shouldn't), but I would love to see what would happen if they seeded the Martian equator with some of our hardier lichen.

 

[Captain_Nick]

I like the idea of underground bunker mansions, but I am not clear on where the electricity will come from. Do you think that internet will be connected to Mars? I want to catch all the Collingwood games. Plus it would be really cool to post on this forum from Mars. I would be the first Martian on TrekBBS.

 

[RJDiogenes]

You think the board response time is slow now.....

 

[Cheapjack]

I've already been there. I've just come back.