/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10754921
define comfortable

No.

>>10754921
No. Lower gravity means that everyone would have to live in orbit, on living quarters in a cylinder rotating about the axis of a satellite in order for the centrifugal force to simulate g. Your satellites better have some strong anti radiation shielding, because Mars has no magnetosphere.
Mars is essentially a less useful Moon.

>>10754921
Try Venus tbqh

>>10754921
AI Spacefactory seem to hope so.

>>10755180
Covering your facilities in frozen CO2 and a meter of Martian regolith prevents enough radiation to ensure colonisers can live long happy lives on Mars.

>>10755414
This is the better option for the technology we have now. Earth air floats on Venus, so we could literally just use the air around us for hot air balloons 50km above Venus' surface - or, we could use hydrogen, which would work even better than normal air and isn't combustible in Venus' atmosphere. With the tech level we have now, Venus is easier to colonise than Mars, but I feel like Venus' unique atmosphere means that we should try and establish technologies useful for living on the surface of a planet. The infrastructure on Venus would be more specialised and therefore less useful elsewhere.

>>10754921
no
/thread

>>10755473
>With the tech level we have now, Venus is easier to colonise than Mars
Good luck trying to EDL and rendezvous with your floating tuna can or launch from Venus's atmosphere with modern technology, retard. Venus has one mirage of an advantage and countless huge disadvantages compared to Mars.

>>10755478
>Good luck trying to EDL and rendezvous with your floating tuna can
We could simply use floating runways or pads for the spacecraft we send to Venus. We'd never have to go down to the surface ourselves if we didn't want to, so I don't exactly understand how EDL would be harder than colonising Mars.
>Launch from Venus's atmosphere
The very virtue of floating structures is that you can build vertically so easily you don't HAVE to launch from within the atmosphere, retard.
>countless huge disadvantages compared to Mars
List them

>>10754921
Yes its possible. Even so probable. But probably not in the next 5-10 years, and most likely in the next 2-3 decades. The first initial phase will be dry runs with rudimentary setup. Give it 50 years and proper infrastructure/investments buildup, and we'll see some type of Antartic city build up that maybe partially/fully enclosed for freedom of navigation.

>>10755473
>Covering your facilities in frozen CO2 and a meter of Martian regolith prevents enough radiation to ensure colonisers can live long happy lives on Mars.
Do you mean on the surface? Where the lower g makes human pregnancy result in miscarriage or malformation?

>>10755180
>Lower gravity means that everyone would have to live in orbit,

No dude. You increase the density of the atmosphere and then you make the best of low gravity. You could easily build flying fortresses with the decreased gravity. Or just strap some fake wings and flap your arms hard enough and you can fly like a bird. So long as you get the atmosphere dense enough it'll be possible.

>>10755473
I get the idea of psychological well being, but that looks like suburbia transplanted to Mars. All it's missing now is an astronaut food drive-thru and a rover for every pod. Why aren't the pods huddled up and connected to each other? Why aren't the pods connected to any other facilities? Are the pods actually sufficiently shielding against radiation and hardy against dust storms? And that's ignoring all the other hardships of life on Mars, like the lack of particular resources or Earth-like gravity.

>>10754921
No magnetic field. Radiation can vary from quite mild and harmless earth like levels to lethal levels abruptly.

>>10755829
You know we can make artificial gravity, right? Solar power doesn't cut it on Mars anyway so we'd have to bring nuclear power sources, and it's not like we don't know how to create artificial gravity on the surface. It's just a matter of getting the shit there, which we will also surely do over time. It's not tough to tell people not to conceive until they live in earth-like gravity unless they want to give birth to a deformed child. In fact, that would probably be law by the time the space habitat is set up. So yes, I mean the surface.

>>10755887
I don't think I can explain it any better than they do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnrVV0w2jrE

>>10755180
citation needed faggot, 1/3 earth gravity might work out to mean nothing all that important

>>10755897
We can deal with radiation, as I've said, by covering the habitats in a meter of ice and then regolith. That's not really too hard considering we're literally travelling to another planet. Plus, there are geological features on Mars such as Valles Marineris could provide more protection from radiation. Radiation only becomes a massive problem on another PLANET when you want to terraform it. Otherwise, there are workarounds; even if humanity does want to terraform it, we only have to put a massive magnet in front of Mars to block the solar radiation and create the same effect. It'd have to be massive, but if we're seriously considering terraforming it in a reasonable amount of time, we'd probably have the technology level to pull that off.

>>10755996
Maybe bring in a satellite moon with a similar proportion to mars as our moon to earth to generate tidal effects to reactivate the core.

>>10756029
Could also work, ya. This boils down mostly to "which one is the simplest to do technologically" since that's likely the one we'll discover first, and use foremost. That said, any civilisation giving this serious thought would have the technology level anyway, so it's a bit of a moot point.

So is terraforming even possible or is it just a pop sci meme. I know not in my lifetime or my grandkids but hundreds of years from now do you think it'd be possible?

>>10756054
Depends on if you believe that technology is going to keep advancing at the exponential rate it has been, because we would need way more advanced tech than we currently have to pull of something that huge. Especially because of economic reasons (it would be INSANELY expensive)

>>10755996
>>10756029
It looks like the magnetic shield idea will be easier; someone ran the math, and it turns to be on the edge of doable with existing tech, granted it will need a 57 tons of copper for the electromagnet, and a full size nuclear power plant, but if we develop enough lift capacity to seriously settle Mars, we will also be able to put something like that in orbit.

https://medium.com/our-space/an-artificial-martian-magnetosphere-fd3803ea600c

>>10756054
>So is terraforming even possible
Sure, it's possible. It's just such a pain in the ass long scale project that it would be hard to get anyone to organize and maintain it.
Ultimately unless the world is super close to having an earth like atmosphere I don't know that it's worth it.
If you can move a colony across the stars you've already figured out how to engineer structures and life support that can reliably last long enough to travel between planets/stars, so making stationary habitats near exploitable resources should be trivial.
At some point it should also become easier just to modify Humans and other organisms to adapt to the environment than the other way around.

>>10755829
>Where the lower g makes human pregnancy result in miscarriage or malformation?
Citation? Last time I looked, we had pretty much zero experience with living things going through a reproductive phase in 1/3 g.

>>10755996
>we only have to put a massive magnet in front of Mars to block the solar radiation

You were doing so well up until then, too.

Also,
>which side of Mars is the front?

>>10756176
Do you have a source on that?

Source?

A source. I need a source.

>>10756125
Wow, that's actually... super easy, given the circumstances. Duly noted, thanks anon.

>>10756177
>You were doing so well up until then, too.
Read >>10756125, apparently this concept isn't as sci-fi and distant in the future as we thought. A full size nuclear power plant and 57 tons of something in orbit isn't completely impossible, given we use the right technology (mass drivers are way more effective on Mars and this will be, mark my words, the way we transport materials on other planets). Still, I'll take a compliment when I get one.
>Also, which side of Mars is the front?
The side facing the sun is the only side we'd need to shield, but L1 orbit means that it's not going to move around the planet and will remain locked between the gravity of Mars and the Sun.

>>10755845
The only reason flying things work is the atmosphere, without it they just don't.

>>10756204
Source?

>>10756207
I mean... it's basic science. We can only generate thrust when there are air particles to move around. No atmosphere means no air. No air means nothing to lift off from with wings, really.

That said, Titan's atmosphere and weak gravity allow for a normal person to fly around with wings strapped to their arms, given they got enough of a run-up and had large enough wings.

>>10756230
>We can only generate thrust
*lift through flight, I mean.

>>10756125
>>10756202
If we could find copper on mars it would be ideal then to create this magnetic shield in situ and lift it off of mars.

>>10754921
Depends on if they clamped your umbilical cord.

>>10756204
That anon mentioned increasing the density of the atmosphere. Flying fortresses aside, the Martian atmosphere is already thick enough for some reasonable lift.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPL_Mars_Helicopter_Scout

>>10756236
Copper can be found at the bottom of underground magma chambers on Mars (heavier molten metals sink to the bottom). We know where these chambers are so we'd probably get 57 tons pretty quick. Because there's less gravity these chambers are deeper on Mars, but if we do find magma chambers near the surface, we know they'd have to be big (so we just look around volcanoes). This way we could mine fewer of them for the same amount of resources.

>Colonising other planets with different gravity/atmospheres means we get to rediscover the best habitation/transport methods just like the pioneers modern technology today did
Fuck that makes me rock hard.

>>10756249
What about rocket fuel?

>>10756278
There are large deposits of ice on the polar caps of Mars, which can be turned into hydrogen and oxygen (hydrogen is rocket fuel, we breathe oxygen). In fact, there are deposits of ice in places all over Mars, so we can mine them too.

>>10754921
Mars' umbilical cord was clamped.

>>10754921
No, and it never will be.

>>10756295
Read the thread bro we've gone over this

>>10756260
fuck man I want it so bad. just give me 128kb internet connection and I'm good. Each request would be 6 minutes round trip but that's worth it.

>>10756302
Yep, literally switched degrees this year to go into stem because I was looking at all the stuff going on regarding space travel and decided I didn't want to miss out (and I was studying ENGLISH before). No fuckin way I'm sitting on the sidelines of the biggest chapter in human history yet.

>>10756308
Yuup. Next chapter in human history, sending niggers to Mars so they either die or somehow survive and ruin an entire planet. Keep me updated, anon.

>>10756316
Enjoy being consumed with bitterness while the future is so promising.

>>10756316
>>>/pol/

>>10756316
>niggers

It's like nobody ever considers that CRISPR exists.

>>10756193
if something sounds too good to be true...

its time to double check it

>>10755180
assumptions about the how 38% gravity of earth affecting human health aside, lets not forget that there are already several methods proposed on how to create an artificial magnetosphere or even jump start the old one, and dont pretend anti radiation wont be trivial, expensive sure, but not a hard problem to solve

>>10757391
Anti radiation is literally just meters of stone.