/sci/ - Science & Math

>>4020201
There is no knowledge of whether life once existed on Mars, but we're pretty sure there were no plants as Mars had habitable conditions for a maximum of about 2 billion years. There are some unaccounted outgassings of methane, suggesting microbial life may still exist in warm, humid volcanic vents.

>>3986955
Private industry doesn't have billions of dollars on hand, except for a few notable corporations. Also, most of the time they don't want to spend millions on an invention or flight system that is millions of dollars. Do you honestly think that the free market will develop technologies for affordably getting to Mars within the next 25 years? SpaceX, maybe. But SpaceX is feeding on NASA grants.

>>3922530
>and the planets inside of Earth are not fun places to live.
...Wha?
>Well, neither are Mars
BLASPHEMER

>>3905331
>maybe mars is the future
Mars is totally our future.

>>3816970
>Couldn't we just send a fleet of ships to one of the nearby extra-solar earth-like planets? I mean, at the rate we're discovering new planets, the damn things are all over the place.
Unless we're astronomically (lol) lucky, those planets will also require terraforming to have lower levels of CO2, methane, chlorine or whatever the fuck.

>Even at our present ultra-low speeds, it will still be quicker and cheaper than terraforming mars.
Incorrect. It would take thousands of years with a ship so gargantuan to support a 10,000-strong human colony, that the technology required to make such a construction possible is the exact same needed to terraform Mars via orbital mirrors placed in Lagrangian points. The cost part is irrelevant, as the technology needed for both involves replication from asteroid materials and as such doesn't incur a huge monetary upkeep.

Don't worry OP, soon enough everyone will recognize Mars.

>>3511669
My plan requires minimal shipping of payload from Earth. using existing technology, we need to figure out how to create a compact plasma gasification unit to fit into a rocket, then about 50 robots ranging from asteroid rubble scraping to construction, and a LFTR with a supply of Th-232 for power.

The only thing I can see we would need to supply is circuit boards for the robots and control systems of extra PGUs, which brings down the payload price A LOT, seeing as everything else can just be recreated from asteroid material lying around Mars-side.

Oh, for those that don't know, a plasma gasification unit is a thing that uses vast amounts of electricity arcing from one point to another to create high temperatures which create anything inside it into a gas (running at temperatures of 12,000 to 15,000'C)

>>3299324
>I bet he really believes giving africans an equal standard of living would produce the same amount of innovation as in america and the west.

>implying America will secede from the Commonwealth of Britain
>implying they will become the world's next super power
>implying the Germans will go from ruins to the gates of Moscow in ten years
>implying the Japanese will ever create technological goods worth a damn, they're too shit
>implying the Chinese will ever get out of their communist impoverishment
Yeah, don't care.

>If it is a flawed and unattainable aim seriously pursuing it could be disastrous.
Such as?

>A lot of this space stuff seams like a distraction for a lot of people.
Less than a million out of 6.8 billion. Probably. I certainly don't encounter space nuts on a daily or weekly basis.

>The question on terraforming mars should be is it really worth it? Would it be a great benefit to humanity?
The most practical reason imaginable. Staying alive.
Oh, and an ENTIRELY NEW PLANET with a new geography, untapped mineral resources, closer proximity to the Asteroid belt, the sheer amount of investment and then return from trade between the two planets and the securing of our role as a multi-planet species with far less of a chance of dying out from a random meteoroid impact.

To be continued...

>>3261430
>It's much cheaper to get that stuff here on earth.
Not for long.
The technology:
http://techland.time.com/2011/04/06/spacexs-falcon-heavy-most-powerful-private-rocket-ever/
http://www.universetoday.com/73536/nasa-considering-rail-gun-launch-system-to-the-stars/
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article4799369.ece

Oh, perhaps I should've specified exactly how much we can gain:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining
>At 1997 prices, a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of 1 mile contains more than $20 trillion US dollars worth of industrial and precious metals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Objects#Near-Earth_asteroids
>As of May 2010, 7,075 near-Earth asteroids are known,[14] ranging in size up to ~32 kilometers (1036 Ganymed).[16] The number of near-Earth asteroids over one kilometer in diameter is estimated to be 500 - 1,000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%286178%29_1986_DA
>Asteroid 1986 DA achieved its most notable recognition when scientists revealed that it contained over "10,000 tons of gold and 100,000 tons of platinum", or an approximate value at the time of its discovery of "$90 billion for the gold and a cool trillion dollars for the platinum, plus loose change for the asteroid's 10 billion tons of iron and a billion tons of nickel."[3]

>World is not only about resources, it's about money, time and labour. Resources come only after that.
Your race is a dying breed.

It might be helpful to realize, that very probably the parents of the first native born Martians are alive today.

— Harrison 'Jack' Schmitt, Apollo 17 moonwaker.

How could we actually go about terraforming Mars?

I remember in SimEarth you just had to pump out CO2 to increase the temperature of the planet, then water vapour, seed the planet with some plants and take it from there. But it can't be that simple.

Also, would it be possible to terraform Venus or the Moon?