Terraforming Mars, The Noble Experiment?

Space Daily ^ | July 13, 2004 | Interview w/Robert Zubrin

[SunkenCiv]

Global warming is bunk. Period. There's no scientific basis for it whatsoever. It is strictly political demagoguery.

[SunkenCiv]

Not a bad place to exile liberals... particularly since occasionaly catastrophic failures of the balloons would dump whole cities worth of them into the spectacularly hot planet itself.

[SunkenCiv]

"Mercury's much higher orbital velocity"? Mercury moves more slowly than the Earth, just as Earth moves more slowly than Mars. The faster something moves around the parent body, the greater the distance.

[SunkenCiv]

Of the planets, Mars and Mercury are the only ones where humans will ever set foot. Mercury won't be a great destination for anyone, as far as permanent habitation, but then, neither is Antarctica. Eventually (generations hence) there will be a permanent human presence there.

I wholeheartedly agree with whoever said that the Moon's far side would be a great place to do astronomy. That's particularly true of radioastronomy, because the noise of Earth would be blotted out. Of course, the far side of the Moon faces the Sun fairly often, but the Sun requires study. A fiberoptic backbone (which is nice and quiet) reaching from the far side station to the Earth side station (antipodal relationship) would be a major civil engineering achievement I suppose.

As far as mining, I think John S. Lewis is onto something -- mine the asteroids, which don't have the disadvantage of overcoming a gravity well (not much of one anyway) and simultaneously remove the threat of a civilization-ending impact.

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Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment by John S. Lewis

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[mvpel]

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/glossary/orbital_velocity.html
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How fast a planet travels as it orbits around the Sun is called orbital velocity.

Planets that are close to the Sun have high orbital velocities because of Kepler’s second law of planetary motion. This means that Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, is the fastest moving planet in our solar system moving at about 48 km/sec! Earth is orbiting slightly more slowly at a speed of about 30 km/sec and poor Pluto, far from the Sun, travels less than 5 km/sec.

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[RockinRight]

Venus would require a lot more-solar shades and removing 98% of the atmosphere and taking the Oxygen out of the CO2...but in a few centuries, maybe. Even if we could accept a hotter planet to live on, we'd need shading on Venus otherwise we'd all sunburn like crazy since sunlight is double the intensity on Venus as here on Earth. On Mars it's half (44% actually) so that's another challenge.

[RockinRight]

Actually I did read that with an Earth-like atmosphere Venus would have a planetwide temperature of about 87 degrees (Earth is 59 or 60). Hot, but tolerable, especially at higher latitudes.

[RockinRight]

That is true, but I think a capitalistic economy with private property rights *could* develop, like this:

A few scientists and entrepreneurs explore and colonize Mars. As population grows, demand for other goods increases. A few people with the resources start trading and eventually open a branch or new business on Mars. This business wants property of it's own, which it takes. How did people get property when America was founded? Can't Martian settlers do the same thing? Basically as demand increases, and is met, it continues to exponetially increase over time.

[Liberal Classic]

"Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" -- Gerard K. O'Neill

Let's say Mars is terraformed. We've doubled the number of planets available to us. Great, but what then? After great expense and effort, we'd be back in the same boat in not too many more years later.

I think we should build space cities, like Babylon 5 from TV. We could mine the moon for the raw materials for the earlier ones, move on to mining the asteroid belt for more materials. The advantage is that our carrying capacity would not be limited to double that of the earth. Through building space habitats, we should be able to increase our carrying capacity by thousands, even millions of times. This is an important point, because the population will not stop growing when Mars reaches capacity.

Space settlements have other advantages over planets, as well. For one, easy access to zero gravity. Two, distributed population. No one natural disaster, such as a dinosaur-killer comet or asteroid, would be able to put an end to the human race.

[TMSuchman]

Sign me up! I volenteer to be the first Freeper to claim the planet in the name of the FreeRepublic!

[RightWhale]

The problem is there is no mechanism to get private property rights. It would be the cheapest thing the FedGov ever did, and as long as we are asserting primacy over the entire earth why not set up a land office for outer space property claims?

[RightWhale]

opinions on this concept

When developing my business model for asteroid mining I looked at using Mars for something or other if possible, but asteroid mining would actually be sidetracked by trying to incorporate any Mars operations. So, for asteroid mining, Mars is not part of the equation.

[Romish_Papist]

How would you increase a planet's rotational period?

[eagle11]

Yes. We'd still need artificial shade on Venus, but since Venus turns so slowly on its axis, we'd better get used to longer days and nights....

[Amish with an attitude]

Reserve Mars in its current state as a penal colony for the dregs of Earth's societies.

[Amish with an attitude]

"How would you increase a planet's rotational period?"

Tangentially placed rockets at the equator.

[RockinRight]

Yeah, if we use about a thousand rockets with the force of 100 H-bombs a piece...

...in theory it sounds feasible but imagine the energy that would take.

[Amish with an attitude]

Moving planets is serious stuff not to be taken lightly.

One false move and you could bounce right off a star, or fly right through a supernova...