Terraforming Mars, The Noble Experiment?

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

[NoClones]

Yes, it would take time to bleed off. But the trouble is that Mars just doesn't have the mass & is very far from the sun.

The idea of moving Venus is something that could have better long term possibilities but seems to be beyond our present technology.

The terraforming probably will be attempted, but I think the real future of Mankind is beyond the solar system. That will take the ability to do long-term projects lasting centuries or more. But then terraforming as described in the article, is a long-term project.

Great article!

[RightWhale]

July 13 article? Zubrin can take a vacation. He has earned it.

[fella]

With little hard knowledge of what's there, it just seems a little silly to be making detailed plans at this point in time.

[orionblamblam]

> How would Venusians handle agriculture?

Hydroponics. Quite possible on the *outside* of the colony. CO2 atmosphere and all... plus *abundant* sunlight. Might have a problem with plant mass increasing too fast.

> Venus, with her suspended mid-air cities, becomes the "blue" planet (the liberals).

Hardly. You'll have blimps and whatnot setting off on their own all the time.

> Mars, with its entrepreneurial, agriculturally friendly society...

There will be little difference. For a very, very long time, Martian agricutlure will take place in conditions much akin to Venusian ag... very controlled.

> Mars... becomes the "red" (conservative) planet!

Unlikely. At least not as we know it. Colonists will still be highly dependant upon "the social order" for mere survival. True freedom won't occur until a family can jsut decide to head off for the Kuiper belt or some such and homestead a comet.

[orionblamblam]

> Zubrin can take a vacation.

Heh. Trust me, he does. At least as of a few years ago, he was out of the office almost as much as in, flying around the world giving speeches and whatnot. Free travel and adulation...

That might have all slowed down now that most of the space advocates have had enough of him...


Do not confuse the message with the messenger.

[orionblamblam]

> Tho' I'm not sure I'd want to focus my efforts on a place where man would always have to live in an artificial environment.

You live in a house or an apartment, do you not? Or do you sleep out under the stars? Man has *always* lived in artificial environments.

[RightWhale]

Go ahead and develop Mars. I don't see the profit in that. For one thing there are no private property rights on Mars. For another, there is no economic incentive. And, furthermore, it seems like a low goal for someone who wants to develop outer space.

[elephantman96]

I think we should go to Mars, and I like the ideas presented to do so, such as offering funds to a commercial enterprise that takes up the effort. For example sending a crew of 5 to Mars and returning them and performing a variety of experiments. If you succeed you bet X billion dollars. Think of it as a glorified X prize, and think of what entrepreneurs could do with a few billion $'s. Look at Burt Rutan, he built SpaceShip One and its carrier jet and ran the entire program on $20 million. NASA should not be in the job of running such a program, but offering up the scientific research ideas, etc. Entrepreneurs can do space much more efficiently if they had the dollars to do so. In fact I think that is one of the greatest things Burt Rutan has contributed to the space race, he has demonstrated to commercial interests that 1) small business can play in the same arena of space with the big boys, and 2) there can be economic benefits to space exploration.

[orionblamblam]

>there are no private property rights on Mars

Not until someone gets there who can hold his property, no.

> it seems like a low goal for someone who wants to develop outer space.

It is *a* goal. There is no end-goal.

Complaints about various locations in space always amuse me. The Marsoids who go ape at the suggestion of lunar missions, for instance.

[DannyTN]

"if later they turn lefty, we float them off into space ..."

No we convince the leftists that due to global warming THEY must migrate to Mars as their only hope. We keep earth.

[RightWhale]

Nobody in the private sector is going to go to Mars without preexisting private property rights. There is no economic incentive to doing so. The public sector may send an expedition, but they won't set up a permanent colony except an Antarctica type science station.

[orionblamblam]

> Nobody in the private sector is going to go to Mars without preexisting private property rights.

As always, your rights to your property only exist insofar as you can keep someone from taking that property from you. Whether or not there's an Outer Space Treaty that would pretend to control such things is irrelevant.

In any event, the rules for Mars are the same as they are for asteroids, comets or even a prime spot in orbit.

[RightWhale]

your rights to your property only exist insofar as you can keep someone from taking that property from you

You can't. Only the state can do that.

[Lazamataz]

2. A half century producing fluorocarbon gases (like CF4) to warm the planet by ~10 C.

FINALLY!!!

A use for all those 1970's-era aerosol cans.

[trenton1776]

Sorry to rain on these "space dreams" parade, but I've been a space skeptic for quite a while. If there is a ID God, his first two commandments would be 1. Thou Shalt Not Leave the Earth 2. Thou Shalt Not Travel Fast. We can infer these commandments simply from the way the universe is made.

The first is due to the incredible difficulty of lifting anything off our planet. We all know that it can be done with gigantic bottle rockets, but the cost and danger are really great and only economically useful for lifting things such as glorified radios, cameras and weapons. All useful things I guess, but really, lifting more and different "things" a few hundred or thousand miles has already gotten old. Remember the microgravity "factories" we were going to have?

A google search of "space spinoffs" will find dozens of great sounding things we've gained from our trips straight up - except that they really have nothing to do with space. They are almost all things that came from trying to crack some engineering problem addresses by NASA. Things like "fireproof clothing" are useful, sure, but we could have lots more of them by forgetting about a wild ride in space and giving half the NASA budget to the new National Invention Bureau.

As for commandment number 2 - if our ID God wanted us to flit around the universe, he wouldn't have made it so big and designed it so that really high speeds can't be achieved. Just traveling to Mars (which is a paltry 40,000,000 miles away at its closest) is projected to take at least 2 years. Now think about a trip to the stars - it'll take decades or, more likely, centuries.

Sure, we MAY be able to populate far away places, but by the time they get there, get themselves established and decide to come home to enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner on their home world, who knows what they might be like? After a few thousand years of developing on an alien world with no contact with Earth at all, they might just be our worst nightmare - an invading force of humans totally unlike the ones on Earth. That is, of course, if any survive the trip.

The challenges presented by the two commandments are well known and yet most folks seem to think they can be overcome by some technological or scientific breakthrough that may appear in the future. Or that humans may overcome them by simple force of will - if we want to something bad enough, and are willing to spend enough capital and lives, we'll engineer a solution. This is the hope with something far out like terraforming Mars. Maybe we'll have the ability and the will - but likely not when the real costs are soberly considered.

Which brings us to Burt Ratan who is one of my favorite examples of what I call "space blindness". I don't know if he is the blind one or are those who believe the flight of SpaceShipOne heralds the beginning of some new space age. His ship managed to take off from a common airplane, burn its engine for 80 seconds and reach the lofty altitude of 66+ miles. It's about as historically impressive as gazing in wonder at someone who manages to travel all the way from New York to Philadelphia.

It would be impressive if it might lead to some great breakthrough, but as far as I can tell it is amazing simply because it was relatively cheap.

But even that is misleading since the cost was still very high. Now imagine him taking the next step and going a couple hundred miles into orbit. The cost will be many times what it was. It MAY still be cheaper than NASA, but it won't be cheap. And as far as I can tell, that's about it. His overall approach may be more efficient, but it really isn't any different from NASA.

Like all commandments, we are free to break our two space commandments, but the price is very high.

[RightWhale]

The third law is that a business needs an economic justification.

[orionblamblam]

> You can't. Only the state can do that.

Horsepuckey. That's nto true today, here, now.

Somebody breaks into my house to steal my cat, it won't be the State that prevents it. It'll be me. Or maybe my cat. The State's job would be to hunt the bastich down and punish him, and discourage similar acts by that punishment. But the Gubmint does not station cops outside my door. That's why I have a Tommygun. (BUAHAHAHAHAAAA!)

Similarly, if Microsoft starts a Mars base and the Chinese want to take it, the US gubmint won't be able to do diddly, whether or not there's a treaty.

[orionblamblam]

> It's about as historically impressive as gazing in wonder at someone who manages to travel all the way from New York to Philadelphia.

And tell me... how impressive would travelling from New York to Philly in just a few hours have been to the people who *founded* those cities?

I'm sure there were some similarly blindered people back then who thought that their Invisible Buddy In The Sky had commandments about not leaving town beacue of the difficulty and time in getting from one city to the next.

> Like all commandments, we are free to break our two space commandments, but the price is very high.

Indeed. We lose the myths of the past that tell us that some moldy imaginary god or other has commandments that say that we shouldn't go to new places.

[Modernman]

Move Venus into the spot exactly opposite the sun from the Earth, so that it is never visible (always on the other side of the sun). This creates a climatic advantage as it is the exact same distance from the sun as the Earth.

Hmm.... once we reach the point, as a civilization, where we can move planets, I doubt we'll really need to, unless we need material for a Dyson sphere or a ringworld.

[FierceDraka]

Can we do it? Absolutely. The question is whether or not we have the will to make a thousand year committment to the project.

Should we do it? If we want to ensure our long-term survival as a technological civilization, I would say so. It's simple common sense to not keep all of one's eggs in one basket, which is the case with humanity confined to one catastrophe-prone planet. A second human world would provide an "insurance policy" that our advanced civilization would survive even if Earth experienced a super-volcano eruption, an asteroid strike, a catastrophic solar flare, etc.

Anti-God? Unethical? Hardly. From a religious standpoint, I believe a very strong case could be made that we would be expanding and spreading the Creation beyond Earth, to the greater glory of the Kingdom.

Of course, there would be the usual cast of malcontents screaming about "despoiling" Mars by terraforming it. They could be shut down by telling them that the technologies developed from the Mars project would be applicable to reversing desertification and deforestation on Earth.

I could go on and on for hours on this topic, but I'll spare you that.

;-D