I have been reading up on Mars colonization and terraforming possibilities

>meant to be
Who decided that?

>Who decided that?

>2016
>He still doesn't know about the Space Defense Front

>Anyone knows about this?
Well, in order to answer your question, we need to construct a model of Mar's atmosphere. We need to know how temperature and pressure vary with height, but most of all we need to use this information to construct a velocity distribution for gases of different mass. This is probably the hardest step to do (at least for me) because I don't have detailed data on Mars atmosphere and even if I did I have no idea how to fit it to a mathematical equation. I'm just not well versed enough in the programming and techniques used.

Anyway, the next step is to calculate how fast a particle needs to be going in order to escape the planet. As a general rule of thumb, astrophysicists use 6 times the escape velocity, because not all particles at escape velocity are on trajectory to escape. So now we look at the velocity distribution. We need to take an integral of the probability density for everything greater than 6 times the escape velocity. This gives the fraction of particles that will escape, but it still does not give a timescale. In order to do this we can use the velocity of the particle, and the distance it's travelled once you consider it "escaped."

When you finish your calculations, you know that after this amount of time the calculated percent above 6*v-escape will escape. This can be used as sort of a half-life formula, but instead of 1/2 it's whatever percentage you calculated from the integral. This I think is the simplest way to get a ballpark estimate for the timescales needed.

kys hippy

>Mars colonization would create a drive for technological advancement that doesn't exist today. We would all benefit from that.
Oh sweet naive child. Ignoring opportunity cost and assuming all technological advancements will be good for us, even "all" of us.

Nature.

Fusion reactors would become something a lot more people would have an interest in. Everyone would benefit from that.

>Nature.
I hope you live in the middle of a forest without using any technology, because nature certainly never "meant" for man to do what he's doing.

>We need to go to Mars in order to invent fusion reactors.
>Everybody benefits from X but X is somehow not worth doing unless we send shit to Mars.
Stupid, childish rationalizations.

>I hope you live in the middle of a forest without using any technology, because nature certainly never "meant" for man to do what he's doing.
I'm doing what's convenient for me, not what is moral. Mars colonization isn't even convenient. It will cost a lot of money AND be immoral.

Of course it would be more moral if we stopped having so many children and reverted the population to 50 million hunter-gatherers living in tune with nature. But it's not realistic. In contrast, omitting the humunguous cost to send shit to Mars is very realistic, since there isn't even a business drive or military use case for it.

It has been proven throughout history that necessity stimulates scientifical and technological advancements. I'm not sure how you can argue that. When certain technologies are a matter of life or death on Mars, or at the very least of uncomfortable and unsure life as opposed to comfortable and secure life, as well as possible monetary incentives (like selling Mars land, or using the planet as a platform for asteroid belt mining) advancements will be made.

>immoral
I don't care about what YOU (certainly not nature, I doubt you tlak in her stead) think is moral and no one esle does. You don't even have the excuse of "humans are ruining other life" because, if anything, humans would spread life to an unhinabitable place. So, the only one that could get its feelings hurt is Mars itself, which I doubt cares.

>let's make people unsafe to create artificial necessity
Ah yes, always with the rationalizations.

>I don't care about making Mars shitty, gibbe money plox.

Stupid, mindless children. Veeky Forums as its usual self.

>transforming mars from a dead, dry rock with no athmosphere or life into a green planet with athmosphere, oceans, plants and animals is making it shitty

Perfect logic. Nature meant it though so it's definitely better as it is.

Finally someone fucking gets it. I find it dumb to even attempt this investment because as stated the planet has no molten core that would spin and create a magnetic field that protects the atmosphere and the planet surface. Building dome cities would be the only option for a colony or just go underground to be safe from radiation. And yes first we should get our shit together on Earth before spreading our idiocy on the rest of the solar system.

>Simply create it
But it's not simple. At all.

Yes, it's not its natural state, forcing it to become like earth implies destruction of the Mars we know and love.

>Deorbit Phobos
>Crash it into Mars
>Heat up core
>Restart magnetosphere
>Create atmosphere

Now you have another habitable planet in solar system.

Could be managed in a spam of few thousands of years.

There is literally no actual core to speak of, Mars is one massive chunk of solid rock.

>Mars terraforming and colonisation

This fucking thread, a-fucking-gain. It's a stupid idea, terraforming is so far beyond us.
>b...but we're terraforming the earth right now.

Haphazardly spewing out carbon dioxide is not terraforming. Mostly people seem to think that all you have to do is raise the temperature then an atmosphere would spontaneously form, not only does this presuppose some facts about Mars that we just don't know (the existence of certain types bacteria for example) but it also ignores the fact that no one has a full understanding of how the atmosphere on earth formed.

And even then, if we ignore all of that, by known mechanisms, it would take geological time scales for an atmosphere to form. So clearly no government or corporation is going to invest in it since they will never see a return.

>Colonisation
Literally why? Sure it would be cool but there's still a few technological problems, off the top of my head:

>Food and water
Regardless of what The Martian thinks, growing crops on Mars isn't going to be easy, growing them on a scale to feed a settlement is going to be even harder. Moreover water is, almost solely, in the north pole, so you'd need some way to mine the water. Which means you'll need some infrastructure, which means you'll need to supply the colony with water until they can be self sufficient.

>Power
You'll probably need something like an Radioisotope thermoelectric generator (it's long lasting, reliable) but they're really inefficient and don't generate that much power. Solar is probably out and I don't think there's that much else you could use.

>People
You'd have to keep them entertained. It sounds kind of childish, but boredom is an integeal part of the human condition, ignoring it would be a very bad idea and could lead to depression. Moreover depending on how long they occupy the settlement, might lead to undesirable consequences, consider tge psychological pressure you're putting someone under.

Mars have solid core.

Is it possible to use Mars's iron oxide deposits to produce breathable oxygen?

>So clearly no government or corporation is going to invest in it since they will never see a return.
B-But Elton Musk... ;_;

My point being, we can't just go and do the events of the movie Core to "recativate" the thing.

This is an example of something I don't think is feasible. A few thousand years? Even if it were possible, no one would care about it. No one would invest money and effort (and you'd need a lot for something liek that) to MAYBE have some results in "a few thousand years".

Source? I'm not an expert on this but from what I've read, mars still probably has a molten core

(first source with any merit I've found right now is

nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6843/full/412214a0.html

but the article is dated 2001 so maybe you know more recent finds?)

Not saying reactivating the magnetosphere would be easy either way. In fact I believe that if the time scale of athmosphere loss via solar winds is not too worrying, it could easily just be ignored.

If you care about the subject, I suggest you read the book "The case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin. It offers practical answers for all those questions, and more.

There are better ways to produce oxygen on Mars. if that's what you care about.

What are some better ways to produce oxygen on Mars?

>I suggest you read the book "The case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin

I might check it out, but I try avoid pop-sci.

It's doable to grow crops, they've had great success using martian soil simulations on earth, the key thing is dealing with those percholates first via washing them out, thankfully they have other uses once we extract them, such as being reducible to oxygen for fuels and breathing.

You know, I think people make a fundamental error about human behavior pretty often when they look at something like the effort to colonize mars, the first thing you hear is "What's the point?" and "It's so expensive!" and "it's fucking dangerous, why would anyone do this?", and these aren't bad points to make, but they miss the inherent drive inside of human beings to explore. There's a reason that SpaceX has thousands of brilliant people working like dogs, building rockets and tinkering in secret on an enormous new rocket that can send a massive interplanetary spacecraft into deep space to go to a barren little red rock, and it's not about money or fame,at least not mainly. It's about narrative. SpaceX doesn't sell rockets, it sells an idea, a vision-a human being, bold and strong and able, stepping forth onto a new world, seeing an alien horizon and feeling the ghostly fingers of a strange new wind through his suit, a feeling never felt before. It's selling a frontier, the first we've had on earth in a very long time. They're manipulating our ancient migratory primate urges to get their employees to buy into this narrative of exploration. Whether that's a goo thing or not, I don't know. I suspect it's just as valid as any other narrative, which is to say, illusory,but damn if I don't love the consequences of this mass delusion.

I didn't say drilling into the solid core but crashing Phobos into Mars.

>This is an example of something I don't think is feasible. A few thousand years? Even if it were possible, no one would care about it. No one would invest money and effort (and you'd need a lot for something liek that) to MAYBE have some results in "a few thousand years".

That's true but having another planet in habitable zone with functioning magnetosphere in the same solar system as earth would be far more beneficial then building underground colonies on Mars.

Building colonies on Mars as it is now is pointless and if we actually do it, we would never consider terraforming mars properly by liquefying the core by crashing Phobos into it due to massive colonies that would eventually be build on it's surface.

But are we being irrational and overconfident?

>It's doable to grow crops

I never said it wasn't doable, I said it was going to be hard. However i would say that you're going to have to take fertiliser with you, so that's more expense, as well as putting a strict limit on the size of any colony.

I didn't read the rest of your post because it seemed both gay and something a used car salesman would try feeding me, much like a used car salesman it's big on ideas but short on facts.

How would crashing one of the moons into it help?

Far West Mars edition.
First you need to find some really rare and expensive in Mars then they will create a colonization station near that mine.Full colonization and terraforming is still far away unless you have some technology to control planet magnetosphere and gravity like in ARIA.

Gonna reply in a bit

It's very good though. It explains in detail why Mars is the best location for colonization (as opposed to the moon for example) and how you can deal with all the problems that skeptics have raised. It's not about bullshit, every claim it makes has graphs and data and calculations sustaining it, with a lot of proposed equipment being shit already in use or already tested and demonstated as working. It's a very pragmatic plan from someone who has worked for decades in the field.

The only doubt it left me is about terraforming, but terraforming is not needed even for extensive colonization of the planet. It would just be really fucking convenient, but humans can inhabit Mars without need for terraforming. And the colonization of mars would speed up research in that field by quite a bit I'm sure.

Sure it would be cool, but there would just be no interest do something that BIG to one day, thousands of year in the future, having a something coool happen.

>However i would say that you're going to have to take fertiliser with you
You don't. Mars soil is actually more rich in elements needed for plants than earth soil on average, except for a couple ones. If anything, Mars soil could even be more fertile than earth's. Water can be produced in situ.
Mars colony growth would have to be carefullly controlled to allocate resources, that's for sure, but that is doable.

I know it comes off an an almost dismissive answer, but nanomachines might make the process of terraforming somewhat more doable simply because you set them to work and then walk away and the process carries itself on until some external condition of overall temperature or pressure triggers it to end. Whether a technology like that is even possible remains to be seen,we are just now stumbling blind and clumsy into nanoscale engineering and this process would require extraordinary capable little machines capable of breaking down martian soil and water and rock in just the right way to release the right mix of chemicals at the right rare to have a strong effect on Mars's overall climate and atmosphere, which are centuries away if possible at all.

If anything, i'm being kind of hard on spacex in the part you called gay,I'm saying they're behaving in an almost cultish fashion and having their employees buy into their idea of a mars colony by manipulating their primal exploratory urges. Did you miss that I said that the people questioning the drive to explore mars and questioning the point of it and its danger had a point? I'm willing to admit to using flowery language poorly, but am i wrong? Is SpaceX not manipulating its employees and the public away from asking hard questions about danger and cost using psychological manipulation ?

Releasing enough energy to heat up the core?

That's assuming it goes with a high enough speed and force to reach the core. Both of those potato shaped moons are very small compared to Mars.
Phobos being 22.2 km diameter Deimos12.6 km diameter.
And considering that the meteor that killed the dinosaurs was around 10 km, and not even that reached the core of our planet. You'd have to attach high powered engines to the moon to speed it up.

Why not fucking colonize venus then? Its gravity is really close to earths (around 9 iirc) . Just Invest in fixing its fucked atmosphere

In the book I mentioned, the author suggests a series of chemical reactions to create rocket fuel on mars utilizing the martian CO2 athmosphere via the Sabatier reaction

CO2 + 4H2 => CH4 + 2H2O

Water is a byproduct of this reaction, which could be electrolyzed and transformed in hydrogen and oxygen. The Oxygen can be used for breathing and as oxydier for the return travel along with the CH4 as fuel. Part of the Oxygen can be used for breathing by people. If the propellant for the return travel is not needed, all the oxygen can be used on Mars and sustain quite a lot of people.

This process needs importing of Hydrogen from the earth but the quantity is not too big and will be recycled in the process.

One of the proposed approaches to terraforming is the use of bacteria, which would produce greenhouse gasses like ammonia and methane. They're like nanomachines, except they already exist and are easy to obtain! The drawback is that you first need to thicken the athmosphere a bit to allow them to survive on mars.

Venus is just too close to the hotter edge of the habitable zone and overheating would be a massive issue there if we ever managed to cool the planet down.

So we nuke it!

untrue

if you move earth to where venus is global temp would rise by about 30F

venus could still be habitable but its 99% carbon dioxide, and the nightmare greenhouse effect is what keeps the planet so hot, not its distance to the sun

And what released that excess CO2? The extra heat that warmed the planet more and more spiraling it into the hellpit it is now. So yes, distance does matter.

Perhaps we could start cooling venus using a cloud of self-relicating robots that build themselves out of asteroids and reduce the amount of sunlight falling onto venus by a large amunt, and then when the temperature drops somewhat we could put engineered bacteria there that metibolically process its atmosphere down into some kind of sludge

As much as I like the sound of nanobots doing this and that, let's be realistic and leave the world of Metal Gear please. We are nowhere near to even have one working nanobot, let alone a slef replicating one.

You're not wrong, who know if that's even doable at all.

Mars is 95% carbon dioxide and far far colder

And twice as far from the Sun which means there is nothing to heat up the place thus the CO2 can't become a greenhouse effect causing element. Proximity still matters.

Venus is just fucked
In the last 16 years its rotation has slowed by almost 7 minutes and continues to slow. Its practically stand still now.

That's a bit misguiding. Percentages don't say much. Venus has 90 athmospheres of pressure while Mars has like a few mbars.

CO2 is still a greenhouse gas, it's just a bit Mars being further, but a lot what I wrote above. if Mars had 90 athmospheres of CO2 you bet it would be really fucking hot.

It'll be around 60 million years at least before it's tidally locked

>the Mars we know and love

kek. I'm sure you have a very intimate knowledge of and feelings for Mars, since you've spent so much time living on it.

Anyway, talking about nature's intent in terms of not spreading life is absolutely retarded. When it comes to life, nature clearly intended it to propagate as much as it can. So it is completely natural for us to spread life to Mars if we are able.

Where would you rather live op?

are these magnetic fields?

No, they are purple lines can't you see

Yea, marks one is dead, got fucked in early formation.

The spots where there are magnetic fields is 15 - 40 times weaker than earth.
Cosmic radiation would mark any life there in time.

Yes.

That's why you use domes.

Good idea.

But mars would be nothing more than a space station, vacation center.

And if we can do it and in time with the advancement of technology it becomes more cheaper to do it... and we can do it so why not.

Yeah you know those bloody pilgrims should have never screwed with north america, nothing came out of it! And Cristopher Colombus should have left america untouched, we could have lived happily ever after in Europe for the rest of our human existance. Bloody homosapiens moving from Africa to Europe and Asia! They could have improved their living conditions in Africa before even thinking about moving to other continents through thousands of generations.
Humanity expands user, it's in our nature. We will never be satisfied with what we got and we will always strive for more. Be it whatever is behind that mountain range to whatever is inside that other solar system, we will want to find out, even if it means leaving the safeness of home.

Don't forget Jello babies due to low gravity.

terraforming is

Mars' gravity could be enough to not cause harm to humans. We don't know yet, we'd have to study that more and we can't if we don't send people on there.

advance technology and create a new form of life that has no problem surviving on mars

This.

Do people not understand the difference between lower gravity and no gravity? The "the omg bones will be too weak to survive!!1!" is starting to sound like a meme; almost as bad as the terraforming meme.

>2. no magnetosphere. Solar winds would gradually strip way whatever athmosphere you put on the planet

You set up a large super conducting ring in orbit of the planet to create your B-field.

kys

...

Doesn't that violate international law?

AFAIK there's a global treaty that no one can own the other planets. They are a part of the natural commons and are meant to be preserved for all mankind.

Colonization or terraforming attempts would clearly violate that treaty.

Musk fanboys showing their true antisocial nature. Be grateful we allow this anonymous place where you can threaten and harrass people without real-life backlash. But don't think it will not have consequences for your evil little projects.

give me your adress bitch imma knock yo door with ma niggaz and our tech9s to blow yo white ass out the window
#MUSKSQUAD

>Doesn't that violate international law?
Actually yes.

Nations made that law. If nations want to colonise Mars they just have to cancel it.

It took millions of years for Mars to lose its atmosphere

The lack of a magnetic field isn't a problem cause we can replace the atmosphere at a fast rate than is lost

There is watter on the surface, or north mountain have some... But what if we keep atmosphere as it is and make some underground there?? Dont you think termitess living there will eat us? Or that flare spotted by curiosity? What was that?

...

I have no problem with space colonization, but terraforming is idiotic.

You don't get to make that claim after saying "leave Mars alone" and "zero costs". You wouldn't leave Mars alone by exploring it, and it wouldn't have a cost of zero.

Your post was shit, and you should feel ashamed of it instead of defending it and leave it at that.

We do NOT need to terraform all of Mars. We can enclose a couple hundred square miles and terraform in there. A City of 50 million people could be surrounded by lush farmlands and abundant fishing lakes. If more people come then repeat the process again, each city in its own protective enclosure.

why is having a city on mars such a big deal? we could much more easily make cities in barren places on earth like antarctica or the sahara, or under the ocean

Just look at how many people are lining up as potential Mars colonists and how virtually no one wants to colonize said barren places on earth. Now think for a moment or two about the reason.

>why is having a city on mars such a big deal?
Because 65 million years ago a "human extinction" sized meteor hit earth. By having a large number of humans off earth the specie's chances of survival GREATLY increase.

It would take several million years for the atmosphere to be stripped away by solar winds

I guess that makes sense

Something isn't right here. Global warming peddlers always insist that even a 1 degree increase is huge. Here you are saying a 30 degree increase is nothing.

It can't be both.

>crash something into it to heat up the core

Doesn't work that way, and even if you did something like that the surface would basically be untouchable for 10000+ years.

Life on mars is most efficient and doable via use of domed environments

This isn't known, obviously musk and crew will be doing a fuck load of never conducted tests on the planet. Obviously anyone who thinks babies are going to get born within the first 50 years of testing shit on mars is a fucking idiot and is thinking way too far into the future.

> everything seems pretty doable, including terraforming
False. You need to find more honest sources, not people who substitute wishful thinking for science.

> for 2 reasons:
3. The regolith will absorb oxygen much faster than you can create it.

But really, getting it to retain an atmosphere isn't an issue unless you can first create one, which itself is many orders of magnitude beyond our capabilities.

It'll be sooner if they can show that centrifuge sessions being done during the pregnancy and early childhood induce enough stress to keep bone growth normal enough for the kidlington to survive. A big, slightly tilted horizontal ring spinning at the right rate could easily boost felt gravity up to maybe around 1.2 g, if need be we could have pregnant women sleep on this so the developing fetus gets a nice strong dose of gravity a lot of the time.

More likely and mostly a short term solution would be a space station to provide some G's. If for nothing else to provide temp G force for martians to rebuild some bone and muscle

>Mars soil is actually more rich in elements needed for plants than earth soil on average, except for a couple ones.

Not according to NASA:
>There may not be the right amount of nutrients depending on where astronauts land on the Red Planet, so fertilizers may need to be added to the soil.
>nasa.gov/feature/can-plants-grow-with-mars-soil/

Perhaps if we built a giant magnet of some sort we'd be able to kill 2 birds with one stone on the "leaking oxygen and nitrogen" and "low gravity" thing.

>just leave mars alone!
>leave it alone

! i'm all for mars colonisation, but with current ESA/NASA funds i don't see it happen soon.

Because bringing life to a sterile place on another world is more exciting, more challenging, and offers an opportunity in which humanity would inevitably develop a truly culturally unique branch.

Colonizing Antarctica, the Sahara desert or the oceans etc. either fails to do those things, or does them to a much lesser degree, and in the process fucks up an existing environment. Not to mention the political issues that would arise from trying to build cities in places that are either designated for scientific use only, or considered international waters; in space those issues are moot because nobody has the ability to enforce them.....on Earth it could lead to wars.

Your argument is tired, and stupid.