Order of Kilopi
Are you talking about Hop_David or cjameshuff? Because James was explicitly talking about freezing out Mars' atmosphere ("lunaforming"), scooping it up, shooting it offworld, and sending it to other locations. He described it in some detail.Originally Posted by Rhaedas
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
Established Member
That's not how I read the part both you and I quoted by cjameshuff, where he is talking about the waste of volatiles to use as "dead weight" as he puts it, to make atmospheric pressure, vs. actually using it for other things.
Order of Kilopi
Well, in the post about Ceres I wasn't responding to any one post, but to the main thrust of his argument.
As for the "it could be put to better use", isn't that the same argument people use about funding the space program? Better use is a matter of opinion.
If we reach the point where we have such unfettered access to space where we're building civilizations there and can even realistically consider terraforming, we'll have all the resources of the solar system essentially available. No need to be stingy when you have more than you could use in a thousand lifetimes.
We'll have to get used to thinking that way when we become a truly space-based society.
STARGAZING: All I see are the lights of a billion places I'll never go. --Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
Order of Kilopi
That picture looked like a bigger torus, one with a width around 2km and a diameter of maybe a couple dozen km, and thicker than a few meters of regolith, due to the exposed lower levels.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
You do realize that I and others are talking about the future, right? It will have whatever we put on it in the paraterraformed areas and in the areas outside that once the global conditions permit.
I'm referring to visible sky, as in Rayleigh scattering.Asteroids don't dwell in eternal night. Many get more insolation than Mars.
Not as much as you might think. Expandable habs are more likely since shielding can be made cheaply from material on site and because they can be laid out flat instead of needing to be rotated to create artificial gravity. For the same amount of floor-space, you'll need more mass.As for living in an RV, you have that right. At the outset you'd be living in small cramped artificial environments. Just like on Mars.
Not if outside of your habitat is a large, shared paraterraformed civil environment. And not once terraforming increases the pressure. On Mars there will be less radiation and less vacuum compared to a space-hab both now and later.Wrong. Outside your front door is radiation and vacuum. Going outside would be like an EVA. Not a paradise within easy reach -- repeating that false mantra doesn't make it so.
You and CJH have asked for differences, I gave them. It doesn't make me obsessed, it just means that the answer is still the same when you repeat the same questions. But if you ask an architect or psychologist, they may have something useful to say about interior design in this regard.Curved hallways are fine. Don't know why you're obsessed with straight lines. As for gravity, there's spin grav.
Again, we in this thread are talking about the future. There will be "mining and manufacturing and a transportation infrastructure". The atmosphere won't be "a hard, cold toxic vacuum". There will be a Home Depot, or it's equivalent in construction materials once industry makes those materials. And I doubt anyone will be using trees to construct log cabins for primary habitats, although museums and vacation parks may be an exception.Wrong. Mars is a hard, cold, toxic vacuum. There's no mining and manufacturing and transportation infrastructure. You can't go to Home Depot and buy building supplies. Nor can you chop down trees to build log cabins.
I never said 30 minutes, that's a strawman. I asked you to tell me how long you think you need. So, how much time do you need?There are many routine tasks where we constantly use sensory input as we execute the task. Given a 30 minute reaction time, a multitude of chores become very time consuming and difficult.
What's with the snark. Do I need to call a moderator or will you tone it down? I've asked you to tell me what sort of timeframes you need. You stated automated machines without specifying what type, their use or their environment. Constructing strawmen, or accusing me of doing so when I didn't, isn't helpful.Automated machines do repetitive tasks. Factory floors are a controlled, predictable environment. Even in ordinary earthly mines, the unexpected is always happening. Miners refer to this as Murphy's law. This will be even more true mining in an alien environment. That you believe factory floors are comparable to mines demonstrates you know little about mining.
It's worse for your space habs, and I plan to change Mars so that your claim no longer is true. That's the entire point of the discussion.3 millibars and no magnetic field like on earth. Spending too much time doing EVAs will be bad for your health.
Trillions of dollars over hundreds of years isn't that much.I know, know. The trillions of dollars needed are no problem. The pay-off is centuries or even millennia in the future. Getting investors and/or taxpayers to support this is no problem.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
The article may be wrong, but my reference to it was correct. The scientist was quoted in the article as saying he thinks it may be ongoing today: "Yin thinks he has found solid evidence that plate tectonics carved out many of the landforms we now see on Mars, and may still be shaping the planet today." And "Yin thinks Martian plates were moving and grinding perhaps within the last 250,000 years, and even may be at it today." That's 250 thousand years ago, not 250 Million years ago, which means he think's it's much more recent than the last super-eruption of Yellowstone.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
That's definitely part of the plan. But paraterraforming is made easier with terraforming efforts that raise the pressure and temperature all around (it will vary depending on latitude and altitude, of course). A thicker atmosphere blocks more radiation and means less stress from a pressure differential between the paraterraform envelope and lower heating requirements if the outside air is close to what we want (although it could mean more heating is required depending on if it's a thermal sink).
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
And
I'm with Noclevername on this part. I don't want to speak for Cjameshuff, but I understood it the same way that he was talking about taking stuff from Mars for space habitats because he prefers the location for various reasons (some of which I disagree with). He was also against my using other asteroids to create atmospheric deadweight on Mars. Go back a few pages and check. I asked how much he needed and why he couldn't get it elsewhere, but I got little in the way of an answer.That's not how I read the part both you and I quoted by cjameshuff, where he is talking about the waste of volatiles to use as "dead weight" as he puts it, to make atmospheric pressure, vs. actually using it for other things.
I'm not sure what everyone else in this thread (other than Noclevername) is thinking of for habitats when they complain about using resources for terraforming Mars. If we develop the tech to go get stuff from the outer solar system or even from the asteroid belt, there's a lot of stuff there for a lot of astoundingly huge habitats for billions and billions of people, which is why I thought he was serious about an "Orbital"-class habitat. The amount of investment in energy and mass and technology for space habitat civilization on that scale dwarfs a Mars terraforming project by several orders of magnitude. Maybe in time we'll have that but I'm only looking down the road a few centuries.
This discussion isn't just about Terraforming Mars v. the status quo. Then, by the rules of debate, I would be the Affirmative team defending against the Negative team, who only need to shoot down my ideas. However, several people have presented counter-proposals, which means their own plans are now affirmatives that they must defend while attempting to compare them favorably to mine.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
Bear in mind that an 'Orbital class habitat', at least in the sense intended by Iain M Banks, requires unphysical materials to construct; so does a Ringworld. Better to make lots of smaller ones with real world materials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_%28The_Culture%29
Order of Kilopi
The problems with terraforming Mars are considerable, but a lot of work has been put into solving them. The problems are concerned with scale, time, and available energy; we can calculate exactly how much power it takes to divert an icy asteroid, for example. Nothing we can do will reduce the energy requirements for such a process, which are vast.
However the potential for biotenchology and genetic engineering is vast - with fully mature genetic engineering, we could potentially create living beings to order. Although it may never be possible to create living beings that could thrive on the surface of an unaltered Mars (personally I think that this would be possible, but just very, very tricky indeed), we should be capable of tailoring organisms so that they could thrive on a moderately altered martian surface.
One of the quickest and cheapest forms of terraforming was devised by the late Paul Birch; it uses rigs of focused statite mirrors around the planet to melt all the ices and liberate volatiles. However this results in a planet with an atmosphere mostly consisting of CO2, water vapour and oxygen, with only a little nitrogen. I would expect such a process to take at least a few hundred years, at the end of which time genetic engineering would probably be advanced enough to create a biology that could thrive in such conditions.
Talk to geneticists (and I have) and they are doubtful; they see the massive problems that face anyone trying to achieve mastery over biotechnology as far too difficult to solve in any foreseeable timescale. I can sympathise with that; but the problems faced by biotechnology are problems that can conceivably be solved by the application of information technology; we have only just scratched the surface of the potential for biotechnology and information processing. However no amount of processing power will make it easier to move an asteroid, or to warm a planet to habitable temperatures.
Order of Kilopi
I revisited my resource too. I guess I figured they were the same (or at least related). I stand corrected.
I guess I'll leave my link as the mainstream view.
I will be interested to see how that pans out. He admits that his ideas are non-mainstream, which doesn't always mean it's unsupported. (Has it been peer reviewed yet?) But; I'd like to see how he resolves the lack of a fluidic layer to move upon.
Order of Kilopi
I'd like to see more research to figure it out too. I'd be interested to know if there can be a plastic layer at temperatures lower than would be expected for a dynamo in the core. Does the entire core need to crystallize or just enough to reduce convection currents that are needed for a global magnetic field? And if it's only limited to areas near volcanoes, then how long might that proposed tectonic area remain active without a global mantle conveyor or would it only need local convection from a hot-spot.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
What do you mean by vast? Zubrin's article suggested 80 nuclear reactor/engines units moving 20 ten gigaton icy objects for an initial timeframe of 50 years. That's certainly a lot, but is it vast? He also suggested a possible statite mirror, which I calculate to mass on the order of half a megaton (metric) and taking on the order of two decades for a single set of fabrication machines to supply.
I haven't been positing bioengineering. I leave it up in the air. While I suspect that we'll develop the techniques sooner rather than later, I'm interested in ecopoeisis, which means having a working ecosystem of interdependent, which may be harder to make than a single organism (we don't know yet). Thus, I've looked at adapting Mars to life instead of vice-versa.However the potential for biotenchology and genetic engineering is vast - with fully mature genetic engineering, we could potentially create living beings to order. Although it may never be possible to create living beings that could thrive on the surface of an unaltered Mars (personally I think that this would be possible, but just very, very tricky indeed), we should be capable of tailoring organisms so that they could thrive on a moderately altered martian surface.
One of the quickest and cheapest forms of terraforming was devised by the late Paul Birch; it uses rigs of focused statite mirrors around the planet to melt all the ices and liberate volatiles. However this results in a planet with an atmosphere mostly consisting of CO2, water vapour and oxygen, with only a little nitrogen. I would expect such a process to take at least a few hundred years, at the end of which time genetic engineering would probably be advanced enough to create a biology that could thrive in such conditions.
Talk to geneticists (and I have) and they are doubtful; they see the massive problems that face anyone trying to achieve mastery over biotechnology as far too difficult to solve in any foreseeable timescale. I can sympathise with that; but the problems faced by biotechnology are problems that can conceivably be solved by the application of information technology; we have only just scratched the surface of the potential for biotechnology and information processing.
That depends on what you mean by "easier". Using 4 nuclear reactor/engines to expend 8% of the mass of a 10 gigaton icy object to collide it with Mars 30 years later may be harder than setting up an nuclear powered extraction system and electromagnetic catapult to "Chunk-n-Chuck" it to Mars 100 metric tons at a time over a similar or shorter timeframe.However no amount of processing power will make it easier to move an asteroid, or to warm a planet to habitable temperatures.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
The nuclear-powered "Chunk-n-Chunk" system could work like this. A saw of some sort (physical hole saw (hot), or hot knife or laser) cuts a cylindrical chuck of frozen volatiles (ice) from a fairly large object that has low gravity. The cylinder could have a radius around 2.64 m (5.28 m diameter, 17.32ft), and if 5 m length (16.40 ft), then it holds about 109 cubic meters. If the density of volatiles in the outer solar system are about the same as listed for the solid phase on Wikipedia (standard water ice at 917kg/m3, ammonia at 817kg/m3) then you'd get about 100 tons of water ice or just under 90 tons of solid ammonia. A low-gee scale could verify mass via inertia. It's hoped that multiple hot knives and cranes could keep a steady supply of ice cylinders ready to go to average about one per minute during the launch windows. We'd want to excavate and ship from a body large enough not to be dramatically affected by the momentum exchange from shooting that much mass off into space, and with a slow enough rotation to allow long launching windows (variation of the catapult muzzle velocity might be able to make up for a little of that). Over time, the Excavator and catapult can move to different firing positions to cancel out any induced motion.
We'd have to find out how stable the material is, but I'm hoping we can push it along an electromagnetic catapult (linear induction motor) at 10g (98 m/s/s) or faster if possible. If we use Zubrin's article as a cue and use a delta-v of 300 m/s, then a 10g catapult only needs to be 450 m in length. If we use a re-usable bucket to hold the ice cylinders, then we'll need some additional length for deceleration of the bucket. The bucket would have grooves to apply enough friction to hold the ice in place but may also allow it to impart a slight rotation to the cylinder as it leaves the bucket (or perhaps the bucket will attach to the sled with a short helical track that allows it to slightly spin as the sled decelerated before the ice cylinder leaves. This slight rotation could be useful for deploying or maintaining deployment of an aluminum foil umbrella that serves to both keep the sun from sublimating the ice and as a radar reflector for tracking. The rotation may be useful for maintain orientation to prevent tumbling which would help Laser platforms near Mars push it into the desired impact trajectories and/or break it up before entry if necessary (I hope that size is small enough to erode in the atmosphere and not impact the ground).
Of course, this is just back of the envelope calculations. If the object is in a gas giant's gravity well, we may need more delta-v and a longer or stronger catapult.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
Zubrin was talking about moving a relatively small amount of mass, and his statite mirror proposal was tiny compared to what Birch was proposing. Zubrin's proposal was extremely optimistic, and it basically would amount to making the atmosphere a little thicker - not what I would call terraforming. Birch was arguing for the heroic measures that would be needed if someone really wanted to terraform Mars on a reasonable timescale.
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Established Member
To get to your future we would need sustained, strong financial support over centuries. Where's the money coming from? The taxpayer? Have you watched Congressional support of NASA over the last 5 decades?
Your future isn't plausible.
Order of Kilopi
I suspect that colonisation of the Solar System will occur, but it will not be paid for by taxpayer's money. We are looking at the future from our current, early 21st century point of view; information technology and biotechnology promise to change our society completely, so much that current economical concepts will seem short-sighted. No-one today would dream of starting a project that would take a thousand years to see completion; but a biologically altered, long-lived individual might; so might an intelligent computer, which might think of itself as effectively immortal.
The problem with looking at space exploration from an early 21st century point of view is that we are tempted to ignore the other advances that technology will almost certainly make in the next few hundred years; thinking that the spacemen of the future will be essentially the same as ourselves is short-sighted. By the time we are ready to colonise Mars, the colonisers will be significantly different from today's humans.
Order of Kilopi
I was quoting eburacum, I don't know whose idea he was thinking of.
And terraforming means different things to different people. Some demand that it means making it exactly Earth-like, some mean making it merely more Earth-like. I've said over the course of several pages in this thread that I'd to get to the point of ecopoiesis as soon as possible, but one of the main main goals is creating a denser atmosphere so that paraterraforming is easier. When I say paraterraforming, I don't mean covering the entire planet in a glass ceiling, but large areas on the scale of cities and surrounding agricultural land, a few thousand square kilometers at a time, but compartmentalized, of course.
I don't think we know enough to be sure what measures we'd need to succeed. There's a large difference in the upper and lower estimates of the frozen atmosphere and the amount of water. And once we get space industry and a space infrastructure, we may be capable of doing more than we realize. As I wrote above, we could make enough aluminum foil for a Zubrin-esque mirror (125km radius) in less than 20 years from one roll milling machine. Divide that by the number of those machines we might have on the Moon if and when aluminum mining starts up on an industrial scale to supply all the other space industry and infrastructure needs. When we consider the damage done to the environment on Earth from aluminum extraction, the Moon might become the preferred source for the planet too.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
And yours is? We're talking possibility, not politics. Cjameshuff wanted to lunaform Mars, which is as big a project or bigger. You've mentioned space habitats. Do you think you'll get strong financial support for that?
And it's not like everything has to be paid for by Earth financial systems. If there are people living on Mars with enough industry and agriculture to sustain the effort, they may do it themselves. All it takes is time and resources, money is merely a medium of exchange. And cost is relative, because economies of scale have a way of driving down cost and increasing revenue. Once a space industry and infrastructure are in place, the application of a part of it to terraforming Mars will be much more manageable.
And I wouldn't expect NASA or the US to do it. You're trying to use a 20th century paradigm to solve a 21st century problem.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
I don't think that's realistic. Humans will probably remain human for a very long time. Humans are fundamentally social animals and there is a high expectation of conformity and a high price for non-conformity. The kind of people who enjoy obvious body modification are not likely to be the people who learn how or are allowed to learn how or do the jobs for which genetic adaptation to other planets would be necessary if it were possible.
But I agree, about it not being paid for by tax-payer money. Initially, it may, but once space industry and infrastructure gets underway it will be self-supporting. Terraforming and habitats etc may be done by business, but I find it more likely that it would be done by societies. That is, groups of people who come together for a common purpose to create planned communities of one type of another, whether that be religious or politically motivated or just people interested in working on a project to say they did (like terraforming Mars). People donate their time for lots of charities or social organizations and causes. Cosmoquest is based on people donating time to scientific pursuits also. I can see people doing this in the future on a larger scale. Perhaps people forget that in the middle ages and before, people dedicated their lives to constructions that they would not see the end of. Likewise, even today, a lot of people are capable of taking the long view instead of the greedy and selfish what's-in-it-for-me and what-have-you-done-for-me-lately and the Veruca Salt-ish Don't-care-how-I-want-it-now short view.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
That's an interesting point. As a non-conformist myself, I tend to overlook the effects of a pressure towards conformity. But the effects of a pressure towards conformity might be very strange indeed if coupled with mature genetic engineering; the consequences of such a synthesis could be remarkable.
If humans decide to avoid self-modification and pantropy in the future, then they will be relegated to an increasingly irrelevant ecological niche; all the other available habitats will be occupied by non-biological robots or non-human biological constructs that do not share this resistance to change.
Order of Kilopi
Possibly, but the ecological niche of "overlord" is a pretty cushy job and what most humans have a longing for. And humans will still suffer regular evolution, just like other biological life forms. Which leads me to ask, what other "non-human biological constructs" do we know of that have access to genetic engineering to such an extent that their "resistance to change" has any relevance?
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
None. Yet.
I suspect that artificial organisms tailor-made to fit the environment will become commonplace in a few centuries. Or another way of looking at it, robots will likely be constructed partly or wholly from organic materials, allowing them to have the capability of self-repair and other advantages.
This might seem to be a thread hijack to some, but in fact it is the opposite; I'm trying to address the question in the original post. Will we part-terraform Mars, then redesign humans to live on the result? I think it is quite likely that we will; either that, or we'll design some other, non-human citizens who will live there in our place.
Established Member
And it's possible I could win the lottery and become stinking rich. But I'm not going to go out and buy a bunch of lottery tickets.
I would rather pursue the plausible.
Hate to break it to you, but humans colonizing Mars is wildly implausible, much less terraforming Mars. Again, look at NASA's declining budget. Look at some at the debates on space policy between presidential candidates. They are infrequent -- space exploration is just barely on their radar screen. The prevailing candidates aren't enthusiastic about this cause.
In my opinion, the best bet is private industry. If space resources can be made profitable, our presence in space will grow. But even this is a long shot. But it's more likely than taxpayer financed Mars colonies.
I'd place my bets on Planetary Resources. So far as financing and expertise go, they are the best contender. They hope to mine asteroids. A steep gravity well prevents profitable mining of Mars.
As I said, profitable mining of asteroid resources is the better bet for a sustained revenue stream.
Mines are a much more unpredictable environment than a factory floor. The unexpected can and will happen. A.I. of plausible robots is not up to dealing with unforeseen problems.
With telerobots and telepresence, humans can be in the loop. Humans plus robots are a much more able team than robots alone.
You have labeled a reaction time in tens of minutes to half an hour a "straw man". Let me do a little math for you. An asteroid 1 A.U. away is 150,000,000 kilometers from earth. After sensory data travels to to a telerobot operator, the robot must wait until the operator's response comes back. The reaction time would be the time it takes light to travel 300,000,000 millions kilometers plus computer processing time. Light travels about 300,000 kilometers a second. 300,000,000 kilometers / (300,000 kilometers/second) = 1000 seconds = about 17 minutes.
An asteroid on the other side of the sun would be 2 A.U. or more distant. Reaction time would be at least 33 minutes.
There could be a financial incentive for having humans near an asteroid mine.
Chicken and egg. Wishful thinking won't bring about your chicken.
Order of Kilopi
I disagree, humans like to keep their creations under their finger, so I doubt they'd be given the ability to express agency. I'm not sure if you can engineer animal life-forms that could survive a modestly/partly terraformed Mars. The conditions would be incompatible with advanced life. When I refer to ecopoiesis, I'm thinking of very simple life-forms, like bacteria and maybe lichens and eventually some more advanced plants. A fuller ecology would come later once we get a lot more mass and a buffer gas in the atmosphere. At that point, there wouldn't be a need for engineered life-forms.
Besides, why would engineers even want to construct biological robots? They need energy even when they're not working and would require massy consumables (food and water) instead of easily distributed electricity. I'd rather have a robot slave that I can turn off if my nuclear energy supply gets low than one I'd have to kill if its competing with me for food.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
Getting the buffer gas is going to be a long and expensive process. Rather than an ecopoeisis involving simple organisms imported unchanged from Earth, I would expect an ecopoeisis where every introduced species has been specifically designed to fulfil a task; from relatively simple to quite complex organisms, and hybrid devices which are part biotechnology and part nanotechnology.
The purpose of such and artificial ecology might be to produce oxygen and food for unaltered humans living in domes and bubbles, or in the long run, the humans could be altered enough to come out of their bubbles, either in modified human bodies, or in bodies that are radically different.
If full terraformation of Mars will take a thousand years (probably an optimistic estimate), I'd expect engineered Martians of some kind before that time. Think of it as two intersecting curves; at some point the curve of the increasingly earthlike environment created by terraformation will intersect the curve of the increasingly competent biotechnology that would allow thinking beings to stand unprotected on the surface of that world. After that point of intersection is reached, the expensive process of terraformation would no longer be necessary.
Order of Kilopi
Do you think that the decision for a Mars colony/settlement/terraforming effort can only be made in the next couple years or never? I don't understand why you're using present issues to argue your point. We, in this thread, are talking about the future where the possibility is plausible, if not inevitable. Talking about doing it with the present paradigm, one where an economic depression and major deviation in finances and politics makes any solution to any problem difficult is a big strawman. Recall that just a few years before the deviation there was a political leader calling for the establishment of a moon base and a manned mission to Mars. Or are you suggesting that this decline will be permanent?
Possibly. I don't think that private activity precludes public activity, although public activity can very easily preclude private activity (e.g. ITAR, or the Outer Space Treaty). Indeed, if we use railroads, radio, television as an analogy, then providing scientific outposts and access to locations of non-commercial interest as a public service may be a requirement for doing business to exploit the "common heritage of mankind".In my opinion, the best bet is private industry. If space resources can be made profitable, our presence in space will grow. But even this is a long shot. But it's more likely than taxpayer financed Mars colonies.
I'd place my bets on Planetary Resources. So far as financing and expertise go, they are the best contender. They hope to mine asteroids. A steep gravity well prevents profitable mining of Mars.
But the bigger problem is the focus on profits. Commercial ventures often want a short cycle, so I'm not so sure they'll invest in long-term planning for a Mars colony or terraforming. It would take other organizations with long views on human civilization to do that. That doesn't mean that businesses won't be involved, it just means that they'll have to be continuously incentivized.
What's the connection? How will mining revenue lead to construction of space habitats? I can think of some ways, and counter-arguments, but I'll wait for you to present your case.As I said, profitable mining of asteroid resources is the better bet for a sustained revenue stream.
What sort of mining, what sort of unpredictable environment and unexpected events? Once we know that, we can decide how to program robots to respond to it.Mines are a much more unpredictable environment than a factory floor. The unexpected can and will happen. A.I. of plausible robots is not up to dealing with unforeseen problems.
You still didn't answer the question of how much time do you need? Picking one timeframe just to say that's not long enough doesn't answer the question and makes the response a strawman. Once you answer the question of how much time you need and why, then we can figure out how close a human controller will need to be.With telerobots and telepresence, humans can be in the loop. Humans plus robots are a much more able team than robots alone.
You have labeled a reaction time in tens of minutes to half an hour a "straw man". Let me do a little math for you. An asteroid 1 A.U. away is 150,000,000 kilometers from earth. After sensory data travels to to a telerobot operator, the robot must wait until the operator's response comes back. The reaction time would be the time it takes light to travel 300,000,000 millions kilometers plus computer processing time. Light travels about 300,000 kilometers a second. 300,000,000 kilometers / (300,000 kilometers/second) = 1000 seconds = about 17 minutes.
An asteroid on the other side of the sun would be 2 A.U. or more distant. Reaction time would be at least 33 minutes.
There could be a financial incentive for having humans near an asteroid mine.
Who said anything about wishing? We've been exploring Mars with bots and there's been talk of sending a manned mission there for decades. Scientific Research may well drive the initial outposts and later colonies, which may then expand.Chicken and egg. Wishful thinking won't bring about your chicken.
Do you think we'll limit ourselves to mining NEOs? What about the moon? A lot of people suggest using an electromagnetic catapult or a space elevator to EML1. Those work for the moon, but they may also work for Mars. I may not have said it in this thread yet (I have elsewhere on this site), but I think exploiting Luna is the key to Mars because we can (perhaps need to) develop and establish similar technologies for Mars. A catapult might be put on Olympus Mons or elsewhere on the Tharsis bulge to avoid atmosphere and take advantage of the planet's rotational velocity and would only need to be ~76 km in length if it applied an acceleration of 10 g for ~40 seconds to reach Low Mars Orbit. Do you plan on using chemical rockets for all your mobility needs? I'm hoping that electromagnetic catapults (probably a Linear Induction Motor, or LIM) can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Not only would I put them on large objects, but I'd put them in orbit around objects with lots of traffic as the base structure of large space stations (that are transit oriented, so not necessarily as part of eco-habitats like a Stanford torus) and I'd use something similar (but smaller) as the basis for Earth-Mars cycler craft. The LIM system would be augmented with various energy-beam propulsion techniques. (Tethers/elevators might be used if they work, for moving raw materials but probably not for moving people.)
Certainly I expect near-Earth objects to be the first sources of exploitation, but it's not too far down that path that the mass and energy requirements and capabilities make it both possible and affordable to exploit Mars and start adjusting it's environment. As for profit, most mobility infrastructures don't make a profit but are strongly subsidized. The focus on profit is a red herring and ignores the history of rail, highway and airlines in the US and elsewhere.
This speech The Myth of Passenger Train Profitability by Amtrak Reform Council member James Coston in Philadelphia December 1, 2001 explains it well.
It's a long but useful read when it comes to transportation infrastructures, like we are.Profitability is not a reliable or trustworthy index of the effectiveness of a transportation system. Our highway and civil aviation systems are not profitable, nor do we expect them to be. Why then should we place this commercial burden on Amtrak?
The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, recently noted that no passenger rail operation in the world operates at a profit. Sen. Hollings was correct, but he didn't go far enough. He made it sound as if passenger trains are unique in being unable to make a profit. In fact, all forms of intercity commercial passenger transportation are money-losers-if you calculate all of their costs in the same way we calculate the costs of passenger trains.
Let me tell you about Warren Buffett. I hope most of you know who Warren Buffett is. He's America's most successful investor. He became one of the nation's ten richest people by picking investments shrewdly and risking his money with companies he felt were poised for strong growth. Well, here is how Warren Buffet was quoted in the October 21 Chicago Tribune:
"The airline business, from the time of Wilbur and Orville Wright through 1991, made zero money net."
I didn't say that. America's most successful investor did.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
Possibly. I think the applications are limited, unless you're trying to create a new biosphere just for the heck of it. How expensive will it be to run a bio-engineering lab and farm? How many jobs will it create? Terraforming Mars may provide lots of jobs and so it may continue past that intersection point you mention simply because lots of people will be invested in the process and the result. Just because one mad scientist has an idea for a new animal doesn't mean that people will want it instead of using domesticated animals and other wild animals they already prefer. I can see some non-morphological GMO changes occurring, if they're safe, such as radiation adaptation. Other adaptations may simply be natural but non-genetic morphological responses to different stimuli, such as more gracile appendages possible in lower gravity.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
Order of Kilopi
With a (presumably) completely vanilla planet like Mars we have the opportunity to create a completely new ecology from scratch. one which is entirely dedicated to profit humans if that seems desirable. It might not be much like the ecology on Earth, but, hey, it is a very different planet.
Yep; and that is just the start.I can see some non-morphological GMO changes occurring, if they're safe, such as radiation adaptation. Other adaptations may simply be natural but non-genetic morphological responses to different stimuli, such as more gracile appendages possible in lower gravity.
As I've suggested in earlier posts, organisms suitable for survival on a terraformed Mars would probably need to be tolerant of higher CO2 levels and lower N2 levels, the end result of both Birch's and Zubrin's strategies. Humans would need to tolerate such an atmosphere too, unless they always wear breathing gear while outside.
Actually, this might not be so bad; rather than genetically modifying humans (and stock animals) to be tolerant of this non-Earthlike atmosphere, we could probably develop hi-tech scuba gear that would be comfortable and unobtrusive to wear. If we have mature biotechnology by that time (as I suspect we will), such gear might even take the form of a symbiotic biotech organism of some sort.
Pantropy, the process of adapting sophonts to the environment rather than the other way around, will probably take many forms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantropy
Order of Kilopi
That sounds much more plausible to me. As much as I'd like to terraform Mars to be suitable for earthlike organisms such that we can pick them up here and drop them off there, I realize that may never happen and I'm not even sure it's possible to get that close to Earth-like. I'd expect to have a combination of paraterraforming in some areas that will be suitable for unaltered organisms and then a larger biosphere outside of that in which we may achieve ecopoiesis with extremophile microbes and GMO microbes and some simple plants initially. After ecopoiesis, I'm not sure where it may go or can go or where I'd want it to go. The data seems to suggest getting to that point is plausible but I'm not sure there's enough data to conclude what may be plausible beyond that point.
You may be right in the long run, but I can't see people planning for Pantropy right now. Humans are often considered the "Paragon of animals" and so pride may make us think that we have achieved the perfect form already and that technological expedients are acceptable because we are at our core tool-users. If we look at religious issues on body-freedom, allowing people to modify their bodies in such ways may prove problematic and create a major backlash that might prove disastrous. Adapting a planet by manipulating the solar system is much more appealing and acceptable to human hubris, I think, and fulfills a need to be a "steward" or gardener. Indeed a great quote would fit in here.
Et tu BAUT? Quantum mutatus ab illo.
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