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Ed Regis writes in the New York Times that today we an witnessing an outburst of enthusiasm over the literally outlandish notion that in the relatively near future, some of us are going to be living, working, thriving and dying on Mars. But unfortunately Mars mania reflects an excessively optimistic view of what it actually takes to travel to and live on Mars, papering over many of the harsh realities and bitter truths that underlie the dream. "First, there is the tedious business of getting there. Using current technology and conventional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars would be a grueling, eight- to nine-month-long nightmare for the crew," writes Regis. "Tears, sweat, urine and perhaps even solid waste will be recycled, your personal space is reduced to the size of an SUV., and you and your crewmates are floating around sideways, upside down and at other nauseating angles." According to Regis every source of interpersonal conflict, and emotional and psychological stress that we experience in ordinary, day-to-day life on Earth will be magnified exponentially by restriction to a tiny, hermetically sealed, pressure-cooker capsule hurtling through deep space and to top it off, despite these constraints, the crew must operate within an exceptionally slim margin of error with continuous threats of equipment failures, computer malfunctions, power interruptions and software glitches.
But getting there is the easy part says Regis. "Mars is a dead, cold, barren planet on which no living thing is known to have evolved, and which harbors no breathable air or oxygen, no liquid water and no sources of food, nor conditions favorable for producing any. For these and other reasons it would be accurate to call Mars a veritable hell for living things, were it not for the fact that the planet's average surface temperature is minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit." These are only a few of the many serious challenges that must be overcome before anyone can put human beings on Mars and expect them to live for more than five minutes says Regis. "The notion that we can start colonizing Mars within the next 10 years or so is an overoptimistic, delusory idea that falls just short of being a joke."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday September 22 2015, @05:09PM
> A cool engineering project to piss off the paleoconservative "must never change anything" environmentalists, would be to move the moon out of earth orbit into a solar orbit opposite the earth and terraform it.
Yeah, I'm sure all those hippy-dippy moon-huggers would make a big unnecessary fuss when you completely destroy the lunar tidal system that stirs the oceans and influences Earth's global weather system. They'd probably also complain when the tidal halt causes the bottom to fall out of the oceanic food-chain that underpins all life on Earth. Crybabies.
> I suppose you could soft-ish land asteroids until the moon was as big as the earth.
Not really. All the asteroids in the inner solar system combined (including Ceres & Vesta) wouldn't add much more than a pimple to the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt [wikipedia.org]
I suppose you could start raiding the Kuiper belt, but you'd be looking at thousands, if not millions of years to transport all that shit in. It's a long way away.
Oh, and there's the minor issue ofmoving the freaking moon. Quite apart form the fact that's it's beyond impractical with any technology we currently have or could dream of having in the next thousand years, one slight miscalculation and you have a massive lump of rock big enough to turn the entire planet Earth into molten slag floating about in a very dangerous Earth-like orbit. I'd love to see the OSH risk assessment on that project summary.
Maybe you can hand-wave these objections away, but honestly what's the point? If you have the tech and disposable energy to move that much material that far with such precision, it's probably easier just to build some kind of gigantic artificial habitat [wikipedia.org] That would house more people in a more efficient way. When you think about it, in terms of the material:living space ratio, planets are hugely inefficient. How many thousands of miles of rock are beneath your feet right now, just to provide you with appropriate gravity and atmosphere?
> Sure {mercury} might be hot as hell for humans and not permanently inhabitable, but your average robotic assembly line wouldn't really care, and even a minor effort at technological active cooling would help quite a bit over "dumb rock" passive cooling.
Actually, Mercury might not be all that bad, because it's tidally locked. Sure the face that's permanently pointing at the sun would be too hot, and the side that's in permanent darkness would be too cold, but there's probably a thin strip of land along the terminator that would be at a fairly comfy and consistent temperature. Cooling can be handled relatively easily by exploiting the temperature difference between the hot side and the cold side. More of an issue would be low availability of useful life-supporting elements like hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and so on. A small colony could probably survive there, with abundant solar power for local use and a carefully managed/recycled supply of largely imported volatiles, but I'm not sure what such a colony would have to offer the rest of the solar system in terms of exports. I guess if the moon has been re-orbited off and terraformed, we wouldn't be able to get our Helium-3 from there, so maybe we'd have to mine it on Mercury.
> I wonder if we could breed / engineer crops that take advantage of Mercury level light intensity to grow a whole season of wheat in a couple days.
Heat would be your enemy. Plants on Earth run at such low efficiency (they use only a fraction of the heat that reaches them) simply to avoid overheating. By the time you've added an appropriate cooling system to your greenhouse, well you're just using extra energy. Then you have to use more energy to shift your crops up out of Mercury's gravity well and up the Sun's gravity well to wherever. That's a big overhead for the sake of growing crops a little quicker. Cheaper and easier to spend the energy to simulate Mercury conditions elsewhere in the solar system.
> If I were more motivated, I could calculate a pattern of solar panels and windows such that in a Mercury orbit you'd get a smokin amount of electricity and the little windows or gaps between the panels would pass earth normal light levels. So you could have a combined greenhouse / solar plant.
Reducing Mercury's solar capture to Earth-normal still wouldn't let you keep an atmosphere there, and there's precious little to build an atmosphere out of anyway. Bear in mind that only half of Mercury gets any sunlight at all.
If you're thinking orbital solar, you might as well just put them in Earth orbit as Mercury. The extra light intensity you gain from putting them in Mercury orbit isn't worth the effort of heading down in to the gravity well and transmitting the power back home. In fact, I suspect you'd run into engineering limits on your solar capture tech that would cause the extra light/heat to be wasted anyway, just like with the plants.
You think big though, I like that.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday September 22 2015, @05:21PM
> A cool engineering project to piss off the paleoconservative "must never change anything" environmentalists, would be to move the moon out of earth orbit into a solar orbit opposite the earth and terraform it.
Yeah, I'm sure all those hippy-dippy moon-huggers would make a big unnecessary fuss when you completely destroy the lunar tidal system that stirs the oceans and influences Earth's global weather system. They'd probably also complain when the tidal halt causes the bottom to fall out of the oceanic food-chain that underpins all life on Earth. Crybabies.
Tides do not only effect bodies of water. The gravitational force of the moon also causes the solid earth and rock under your feet to bob up and down as much as a foot twice a day. Moving the moon would likely cause severe outbreaks of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, etc., quite possibly in areas not currently experiencing them as well as in the usual areas, probably destroying life on earth, or at least any higher life.