/sci/ - Science & Math

very good

>tactical cube

By atmosphere, I hope you mean mass, because that is what it would take.

>>3511997
>Venus 0.88Gs
>90x atmospheric pressure

>>3512007
:(

>>3512007
smash phobos on to mars

Mars is... huh... -50 degrees?
Just fill it with greenhouse gases

mass of Earth = 5.9742 × 10^24 kilograms

mass of Venus = 4.86900 × 10^24 kilograms

mass of Mars = 6.4191 × 10^23 kilograms

All it would take would be to add about 5.33229 × 10^24 kilograms to Mars, and then water would be able to condense on the surface.

I think Venus already has the mass, it's just too close to the sun.

>>3512017
It has all the greenhouse gasses it requires, with massive amounts of CO2 frozen into the soil.
It just needs a nudge in the right direction.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/04/mars-south-pole-holds-nearly-an-atmospheres-worth-of-co2
.ars

>>3512020
1) That would take assloads of energy.
2) Solar winds will blow away any atmosphere you create since mars has lolnomagneticfield

>>3512038

yeah, you'd need to increase Mars' mass AND heat up the core (which is no longer molten at this point) to generate a magnetic field

>>3512018

You completely fucking fail at adding indices

>>3512038
>>3512043

>implying the atmosphere would erode at a rate that was noticeable on human timescales.

>>3512009
What film is this?

>>3512038

>2) Solar winds will blow away any atmosphere you create since mars has lolnomagneticfield

Oh no, Mars will lose the atmosphere we released in another few million years, everyone panic!

>>3512059
wahhh wahhh wahhh wahhhh wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
WAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

>>3512038
>1) That would take assloads of energy.
Nothing automation for the creation of a *lot* of solar panels cannot fix.
>2) Solar winds will blow away any atmosphere you create since mars has lolnomagneticfield
Over millions and millions of years.
http://bigthink.com/ideas/24011
Answer: You are absolutely correct. Mars is a small planet, and hence it's gravitational field is not strong enough to permanently hold onto a dense atmosphere, but it is sufficient to hold onto an atmosphere for thousands to millions of years, which is enough for us. Once we terraform Mars, there will be enough of an atmosphere to take of all our needs for generations to come.

>>3512043
Magnetic fields don't have to only be produced by the innards of a planet. With advancing technology I reckon we'll have the know-how for creating an artificial magnetic field to the scale of Mars. But even if we cannot, remember that Mars gets 47% of the sunlight and solar wind Earth does, and therefore is not such a serious problem. Because of the lower gravity (0.376Gs) the atmosphere is not quite as squished, which provides a 2.5x thicker protective blanket from harmful particles from the sun.

>>3512059
Not only that, but solar wind is actually eroding the earth's atmosphere too. It'll almost be decreased by the time the sun annihilates all life on the planet anyway.

>>3512072
thousands of years is enough for humanity to figure out how to generate powerful magnetic fields without having to rely on the molten core.

>>3512106
...Yes... That's what I said.

>>3512053

If I terraform a planet, I damn well want it to stay that way.

as for the magnetic field, I say we find two large-ass asteroids, crash them HARD into Mars, giving it slightly more mass (c'mon, it's a dinky planet). The collision will cause the core to heat up again. Then, we can nudge it so it will settle into a nice field. Bing, bang, boom.

>>3512149
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_%28moon%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deimos_%28moon%29
>The collision will cause the core to heat up again.
No, it won't.

If you collide something massive enough to restart the core, you've just fucked over all the habitability and terraformable potential Mars had in the first place.

We have millions of years to construct an orbital planetary magnetic field capable of preventing Mars' atmosphere from being eroded away. Don't worry about it.

>>3512047
nope, you do, buddy

>launch lots of aligned ferromagnets into orbit (how many would you need?)
>put lots of ferromagnets on the ground, pointing 'north', at strategic locations
>iron oxide is partially magnetic. The Martian soil is full of it. Build machines to magnetise the soil!
>send nukes into the mantle to restore geological activity

'bout tree fiddy

>>3512160

oh, but where's the fun in that?!

There has to be a solution that nature provides that will allow it to be sustainable without costing billions-upon-billions of dollars worth of building and maintenance.

besides, I just want to smash a planet

>>3512178
Mars already has localized magnetic fields.

And sending nukes into the mantle Core-style won't work.

>>3512195
You can smash Venus gladly, we need that thick atmosphere gone.
It won't cost billions upon billions in building in maintenance as it would completely use automation and asteroid mining in order to create such colossal superstructures.

Lets just halve worlds population and live gladly here

>>3512217
I am following #AsteroidMisses on Twitter. Whenever I go on Twitter, I am informed of how fast, how large, and how close we came to being utterly buttfucked by a 2km wide asteroid traveling at 19.76km a second.

Perhaps we shouldn't all stay on Earth, hmmm?

>>3512233

Modifying an asteroids orbit shouldnt be harder than modifying an earth like planet

Lol wut people? Mars is a desert with nothing in there. Venus is a toxic sludge of solar system - nothing useful either. All the "Europa" style moons of Jupiter and Saturn are pure freezers on surface that are utterly incapable to support any other life than hypothetical bacterial or viral - even that is very questionable. Mercury is too small and far away with no atmosphere to be of any use other then "let's build autonomous robots" there. Anything further then Mars is practically either a freezer or gas giant that will gladly nomnomnom anything you send there.

>>3512240
Solar flares.
Rather precise gamma ray bursts
All the other shit that could go wrong

We must become a multi-planet species.

All civilizations become spacefaring or extinct. - Carl Sagan

>>3512241
>Mars
>Venus
>nothing useful there

how about disregarding everything, resources and such.
It's still chaces of humanity survival multiplied by three

>>3512241
Mars is a desert because it has too thin of an atmosphere to sustain liquid water on its surface or retain heat. We know that Mars has massive amounts of frozen gases such as carbon dioxide frozen into the polar soils. All we have to do is give it a nudge in the right direction, and we could transform it into a lush garden world.

We will become gods. The creators of worlds.

>>3512252

Inspiring words, but it will be tough to drill these ideas into the minds of all people. I wish I could afford to be as optimistic as you are.

>>3512250
True if we neglect the commercial side of it though large number of huge space ships will still be a cheaper option. The only advantage of being on planet then on a larger ship built in space is that you have "unlimited" amount of solid materials. But you are also ludicrously heavy and you can't change your direction - you can but that far more advanced tech then building a space station. Space station is something like compact highly optimized version of a planet - talking about ships built in space not lifted from Earth but perhaps from Moon.

You can easily adjust appropriate temperature, minimize heat losses, give rotation to emulate gravity etc.

>>3512262
Actually I want to do it. Like, be on the terraforming team.
Just browsing /sci/ has exposed me to astonishing scientific advancements and discoveries. I want to meld this knowledge together to create affordable terraforming, as well as solve element scarcity through asteroid mining.
My optimism isn't entirely unfounded, in other words.

>>3512252
Mars doesnt have a molten core and therefore no magnetic field to protect us from radiation

there are no inhabitable planets near us, we're stuck on earth

it only took 100,000 years to go from monkeys to humans, if we stay alive for that long we'll go extinct simply by virtue of having evolved into something else

tldr, stay on earth, keep it safe

>>3512267
Not a zero-sum game. We can convert the entire mass of Vesta and Ceres into O'Neill cylinders and still have a terraformed Mars, Venus, and possibly Mercury and Luna.

>>3512252
What makes you think the molten gases and water vapor won't peril into space just like water did before due to simply low gravity? - I'm not very knowledgeable in terraforming so I might be missing something.

>>3512269
>Mars doesnt have a molten core and therefore no magnetic field to protect us from radiation
Magnetic field isn't what protects us from much of the harmful radiation, it's the atmosphere itself. Magnetic field prevents the solar wind and charged particles from creating aurora across all skies, as well as drastically slowing the rate of atmospheric erosion, as discussed earlier in this thread.
See >>3512072

>there are no inhabitable planets near us, we're stuck on earth
No planets that will sustain us currently WITHOUT technology. We can develop systems that allow vast numbers of humans to live and thrive on other worlds.

>it only took 100,000 years to go from monkeys to humans, if we stay alive for that long we'll go extinct simply by virtue of having evolved into something else
Babby's first nihilism

>tldr, stay on earth, keep it safe
One word: Dinosaurs.

>>3512273
>molten gases
What?

Mars' gravity isn't THAT low. it is slightly more than 37% Earth gravity. There will be a slow stripping of water vapour and martian atmosphere which will only become noticeable after hundreds of thousands of years with absolutely no human intervention.

>>3512283
37% is not that much actually. How dense is the atmosphere on Earth at a distance where the grav. field is 37% from the surface intensity? As far as I know even 30km height the atmosphere is already insufficient to support humans. - And at 30km height Earth atmosphere is surely much denser then Martian. - Correct me if I'm wrong. - Is there a graph of it somewhere?

>>3512297

>>3512297
The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars varies from around 30 pascals (0.0044 psi) on Olympus Mons's peak to over 1,155 pascals (0.1675 psi) in the depths of Hellas Planitia, with a mean surface level pressure of 600 pascals (0.087 psi), compared to Earth's sea level average of 101.3 kilopascals (14.69 psi), and a total mass of 25 teratonnes, compared to Earth's 5148 teratonnes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars

Mars____1 155Pa
Earth__101 300Pa

I believe you are right we can temporarily boost the atmospheric pressure by a factor of say 10 times but I'm not sure how long can we maintain it 100 times denser.

>>3512313
Nitrogen importation shuttles from Titan

>>3512319
Yes but if the importation is slower then the rate of loss then we might never reach the Earth's level. I mean it will probably take so much resources that if we just focus on building inhabitable space stations instead of massive nitrogen cargo ships then we might not even need Mars at all. The advantage of space stations is that the same amount of matter can provide life to many more living creatures. So space ship that would be able to support as much life as Mars will be of negligible scales as compared to Mars despite by practical functionality they will be equal.

>>3512327
If we figure out a way to use the materials from asteroids to replicate both factories for such ships and ships themselves, we effectively have an unlimited nitrogen shuttle number.

>>3512332
Why do you think dwelling onto planets is any good? So far it seems space ships can provide everything that planets can plus in addition heat losses will be much smaller and overall momentum is much smaller = higher mobility.
What life form cares about is only the planet's crust. Vast majority of Earth is not used at all (huge heavy molten fireball if we say it metaphorically).
Are there any advantages of planets over colossal spaceships (built from material already in space - so that the obvious and only temporal argument with lifting lot's of matter into space from a planet is neglected)?

>>3512348
I think both are good. We should use both.

Mars is kinda close to being able to support life, right?

That would mean that the chance of us finding life out in the universe is very high - think about it, if there's an "almost-able-to-support-life" planet just next to us, what are the chances of more of these planets around nearby stars?

>>3512319
Where are the pictures from anyway?

>>3512377
A long time of saving Mars-related pictures from /sci/.

>>3512376
http://news.discovery.com/space/milky-way-stuffed-with-50-billion-alien-worlds.html

Lets focus on visiting mars first, depending on the success of the mission we will have a chance of seeing Inurdaes wet dreams as a reality. Crossing fingers

I dont see why the moon isn't travelled to in order to inhabit there.
Once there the production of ships of much larger mass and size can commence, requiring less fuel to get off the moon and could use shuttles etc to go planets.

We would be much better in a space stations, choosing our destinations to find intelligent life to learn from.

>>3512403
We were supposed to visit Mars in 1981. We had the fucking technology. But now we have all these pussies backing off, 'Oh no, what if it fails? Bawwwww'

>>3512408
Less fuel and less money is needed to go from Earth - Mars than Earth - Moon - Mars

>>3512416

Time? Ease? Seriously, the moon is a much better option, it opens up possibility to create a much larger shuttles without as much worry of fuel consumption.

>>3512431
If you want large shuttles, fuck the moon altogether. Rope in a near earth asteroid and begin building whatever the fuck you want from that tiny gravity.

>>3512438

Yeah thats a good fucking idea. Lets go on a space rodeo and fucking wrangle me an asteroid that could take out half the life on the planet without prior experience.

Or lets use that giant lump of rock they call the moon that has been there, stable, since humans began.

Moon's escape velocity is not even 3km, but still, building a station in there will be tough

>>3512450

3km/s

>>3512444
Or lets use physics and simple celestial mechanics to slowly inch it into a stable orbit in the Trojan point opposite from the moon.

>>3512416
>>3512431
Perhaps if we can somehow crack/cut out of Mars via massive hydrogen bomb to get more matter into interstellar space so we can easily build space ships from space matter. It is a common misconception that there is plenty of matter in asteroids but they are mostly just pieces of small annoyingly dangerous rocks usually not worth it. While assuming that one massive explosion will be more energy efficient then lot's of small rockets (obviously it requires some calculation I might be wrong).

>>3512465
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_%28dwarf_planet%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Vesta
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Pallas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Juno

You're not scarring my precious Mars. Go fuck over Mercury.

>>3512465
wut
You're seriously talking about launching a significant fraction of Mars' material into Mars orbit using nukes?

This is less plausible than giving it a molten core again.

>>3512500
Why do you think so? - I mean is it just your guess or do you have a closer reasons to think it will be near impossible?

>>3512319
Why shuttles?
Why Titan?

We could build a small space elevator on a few icy moons, haul the solid volatiles into space, wrap them in reflective film and fling them, maybe with the end of a too-long elevator, into a transfer trajectory, ending up with them breaking up in the martian atmosphere.

>>3512516
Think of how hard it is to get 1,000,000 tonnes off Mars.

Now think of how hard it is to get 1,000,000,000,000 tonnes off Mars.

Now think of how hard it is to get 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes off Mars.

You're getting close.

>>3512520
Titan has a 96% Nitrogen atmosphere, and Mars is deficient in Nitrogen.

If there is not enough water to cover Mars roughly in half, I like the idea of launching massive amounts of cometary material in the direction of Mars, 3000: The Last Odyssey style.

>>3512520
"Total mass of atmosphere: ~2.5 x 10^16 kg"
reference:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html


Say you want to make it 100 times greater to push it from current ~1kPa into desired ~100kPa - That's a considerable amount of gas to be transported.

>>3512516
Hate to say it, but unless we somehow suddenly manage to produce cheap anti-gravity generators or something, braking up a planet is going to be nearly impossible.

But more importantly, it's completely unnecessary.
There's enough small NEOs to build smaller stations and enough larger bodies in the asteroid and kuiper belts to quench your thirst for space megacities.

If you do want to dismantle a planet, possibly the easiest way is to increase it's spin until it either breaks up or turns into a toroid.

Ok, Mars' core is not solid. That's an antiquated theory from the 60s to explain why the Mariner missions didn't see a global magnetic field. Mars' core probably has too much sulfur to freeze right now, even after +4 billion years of cooling (S depresses the freezing point of Fe/Ni like salt does for water). A planet seems to need that core freeze out to release latent energy to generate a dynamo, so Mars' core is actually too HOT to produce a magnetic field right now. If we started pulling geothermal heat out, it would help cool the core and restart the magnetic field. This seems to have already happened at one point in Martian history during a period of relatively strong volcanism.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030307071457.htm
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mars-039-Molten-Core-Will-Solidify-56159.shtml

Oh yeah, and the loss of atmosphere to space thing is overstated. Venus, Earth, and Mars all and currently loose atmospheric material to space at about the same rate (Earth is the only one with an internal dynamo). This may not have been the case in the past when solar weather was different, but people are reevaluating the need for an instrinsic magnetic field to shield a planet.
http://www.space.com/11187-earth-magnetic-field-solar-wind.html

>>3512526
I just read about some of the asteroids impacts and it really seems unfeasible way of lifting matter (though it is arguable since asteroids are impacting towards a planet not from it. If the explosion was underground it would have been more efficient in lifting matter).

Anyway I never wrote to destroy a whole planet - but rather only cut a piece of it so it's not necessarily the amount you wrote.

>>3512582
>so Mars' core is actually too HOT to produce a magnetic field right now. If we started pulling geothermal heat out, it would help cool the core and restart the magnetic field. This seems to have already happened at one point in Martian history during a period of relatively strong volcanism.
Astonishing! Thanks!

Mars is too small to hold an earthlike atmosphere. If we wanted to terraform it, we would need to constantly produce atmospheric gases to compensate for the loss.

>>3512632
Please read the thread.

>>3512072

>>3512632
And now I suggest you read the thread so you understand how your comment has been made and debunked several times.

Then you can re-acquaint yourself with the Delete Post-button.

>>3512605
Asteroid impacts were never suggested as a way of getting matter OUT of Mars, as far as I can tell ITT.

>>3512605
Why would it be necessary to launch material from Mars, when there is already plenty of material available in the asteroid belt and in the smaller orbiting moons?

>>3512654
Someone ITT suggested that the asteroids would be insufficient material. Possible, considering the entire asteroid belt is only a small fraction the mass of the Moon, but whatever, it's the low-hanging fruit.

>>3512651
I know but I wanted to know what orders of magnitude are cosmic energies. Because if something of the order of 1G ton tnt would be sufficient to lift at least something then we would be able to use it. But it seems that the mentioned 1G ton would lift mostly scattered matter - not really any bigger useful chunks. It will only act as a meteorite generator (will probably only contaminate Mars's orbit with lot's of fast moving harmful pebbles).

I suggested the nuclear crack lift as an option - if it's not feasible then I'm obviously willing to say it's useless option.

>>3512675
It would be much easier, simpler, and safer to use mass drivers to launch payloads into orbit.

>>3512252
pls googlenews for nasa+mars+water

comeback smarter

>>3512681
What do you mean by "mass drivers"?

>>3512687
Large railguns.

>>3512687
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver

>>3512691
Well the reason I initially suggested nukes is that we can easily make 1G ton tnt bomb (Soviets did 50M while planned/constructed 100M as well + thought of even more powerful once). That's in 1960' I suppose today we can make them as well and even more powerful - not because it would have been efficient just because nuclear energy in explosions is very cheap so we can afford to put a lot of it.

The disadvantage of impulse projectiles is that in the beginning their velocity is very large so the friction is insanely high. Whereas rockets have a more gradual distribution of velocities and I guess can therefore be more efficient.

>>3512718
Nuke wouldn't be good at lifting material into orbit. For instance, very little material would acquire enough lateral momentum (tangent to the planet's surface) to achieve a stable orbit. Possibly none.

>>3512411
no one will use their precious money in space research. at least in near future. they rather use it in their country's own interests

>>3512718
>>3512731
I'm hating it that you or anyone else hasn't mentioned that while using a one huge nuke to orbit anything would be foolishness of the highest order, using one gigatonne WORTH OF nukes in an orion drive could easily orbit a city. Whole. It could probably also not only put it in Earth orbit, but also take it all the way to obit some other planet altogether.