[ot] Mars colonization

[kenjib]

There are people (like me) who'd go to Mars just because it's there. These are the same sort of people who'd start long-term terraforming projects knowing they'd never see the end results. People like that who have money are liable to spend that money to hire others and create foundations who's mandate is to continue long-term terraforming projects.

In 2162 The Independent Republic of Gates celebrates it's second decade as sole sovereign body over all of Mars, having gotten in early and established an unshakable political monopoly. It now awaits the return of the Emperor, Bill, who was cryogenically frozen alive at age 60 with a terminal brain tumor, awaiting advances in nanotechnology.

 

[Zappo]

In 2162 The Independent Republic of Gates celebrates it's second decade as sole sovereign body over all of Mars, having gotten in early and established an unshakable political monopoly. It now awaits the return of the Emperor, Bill, who was cryogenically frozen alive at age 60 with a terminal brain tumor, awaiting advances in nanotechnology.

Heh.

Luckily, international treaties have declared all outer space as unclaimable by either privates or governments. That'll have to change somehow when we actually start colonizing it, but meanwhile we're safe.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Luckily, international treaties have declared all outer space as unclaimable by either privates or governments. That'll have to change somehow when we actually start colonizing it, but meanwhile we're safe.

- To my knowledge, China hasn't signed those treaties.

- The USA will ignore these treaties as soon as (a) they think some "strategic interest" of theirs will be limited by them, or (b) they just feel like it.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

The USA will ignore these treaties as soon as (a) they think some "strategic interest" of theirs will be limited by them, or (b) they just feel like it.

Hence the problem with expecting any corporate entity to step up to the plate.

Of course, this assumes that the USA is still a superpower in 50, 100, 200 years. (Which of course I think is a safe assumption, but opinions may differ.)


Wulf

 

[Airwolf]

Not that this has anything to do with Mars but it does apply to the moon. There is an organization that is currently selling parts of the moon. I believe in 1 acre sections. The web site claims to have the permission of the UN and the USA. If you want to check it out here is the site.

Lunar Embassy

Edit - I just noticed that this site is also selling parts of Mars.

 

[Zappo]

Not that this has anything to do with Mars but it does apply to the moon. There is an organization that is currently selling parts of the moon. I believe in 1 acre sections. The web site claims to have the permission of the UN and the USA. If you want to check it out here is the site.

Lunar Embassy

Edit - I just noticed that this site is also selling parts of Mars.

I've read about it several times, even on newspapers. It's basically a hoax. There is some fine print involved which states that you are actually just giving money to an organization which supports space exploration (though what actual support they have given is unknown to me), and that your certificate is just a souvenir.

 

[Xeriar]

Heh.

Luckily, international treaties have declared all outer space as unclaimable by either privates or governments. That'll have to change somehow when we actually start colonizing it, but meanwhile we're safe.

The United States, Russia and China do not officially acknowledge these treaties, including the one over Antartica. They respect their intent as long as it is diplomatically important to do so.

The issue with Mars, or even the Moon, is that once such a colony is self sufficient, there is little reason for it to remain attached to any Earthbound government (see Robert Heinlein)

 

[Number47]

There is one scenario for a corporation to make money establishing a colony offworld. By selling the dream of making it in a new frontier to poor saps (like me) here. The corporation doesn't have to actually produce anything viable in the new colony. Because the expense would be so high, transport might be given by lottery. I know I would invest at least a buck a week for the opportunity to live on Mars. Then the poor saps (like me) are pretty much on their own trying to scrape by to achieve self-sufficiency and find something to export in order to survive.

Somebody mentioned that optical telescopes will improve faster than spacetravel. I've had an idea for some time now, I wanna see if you think it's feasible. You know the Very Large Array in New Mexico? It uses a bunch of smaller radio telescopes arranged to form a "virtual" radio telescope of immense size. I want to have the same concept applied to optical telescopes on a grand scale. Imagine a series of space telescopes like the Hubble orbiting equidistant from each other around the Sun. Averaging the result of them all focusing on the same object should result in astounding resolution. Not to mention we can finally get some decent parallax reading and actually determine the distance to some things. Do you guys thing it's workable? How many would it take? For a smaller scale, would it work using just the Lagrange points?

 

[Storminator]

Somebody mentioned that optical telescopes will improve faster than spacetravel. I've had an idea for some time now, I wanna see if you think it's feasible. You know the Very Large Array in New Mexico? It uses a bunch of smaller radio telescopes arranged to form a "virtual" radio telescope of immense size. I want to have the same concept applied to optical telescopes on a grand scale. Imagine a series of space telescopes like the Hubble orbiting equidistant from each other around the Sun. Averaging the result of them all focusing on the same object should result in astounding resolution. Not to mention we can finally get some decent parallax reading and actually determine the distance to some things. Do you guys thing it's workable? How many would it take? For a smaller scale, would it work using just the Lagrange points? [/B]

You bet it would work! It's a tough problem computationally to determine the corrections for distance and time to combine the signals coherently, but there's nothing insurmountable about it.

The reason we use numerous earth bound collectors is that they are sooooo much cheaper to make and set (and calibrate). The basic premise of the VLA is that you get an effective collector size of the difference in spacing. If you collect data over a year, and process it all together, you get an effective collector size of the orbit of earth, which can be huge (if we're looking in the direction of the sun's north pole) or strangely lopsided (if we're looking in the plane of the orbit) but still quite large.

Pretty cool idea.

PS

 

[Fast Learner]

Self-Replication and Nanotechnology

but what does nimmen mean?

It's a pun based on a Spoonerism (a Spoonerism is where you exchange the first sounds of two or more words).

Mars Needs Women becomes Mars Weeds Nomen becomes Mars weeds nimmen (spelling changed to aid in pronunciation and not give away the joke too early).

Of course an explained joke is also known as a lousy story, but that's besides the point. I enjoyed the pun.

Now my actual point:

The key to sending very little to Mars or the moon while having great effect is, of course, self-replicating machines. Part of the difficulty of self-replication, clearly, is having the sent machines actually build mining facilities, smelting plants, factories, etc. Lots of complicated big things that would have to be built in a wide variety of places (to get all of the appropriate materials). Such plants don't scale very well (a smelting plant the size of a closet has a hard time doing any real smelting), so this idea has a lot of problems.

The solution, of course, is doing it on a much smaller scale, where you don't actually have to smelt anything (as an example), but rather you can simply disassemble and reassemble molecules, all via nanotechnology.

The naysayers, understandably, will say that nanotechnology is a pipe dream, or at best something we won't see for centuries. Fortunately humans have a very long and very poor history of estimating the advance of technology, both in direction and in speed, leaving me with plenty of hope.

My hope for reasonable terraforming and settlement is in nanotech. Wanna get more oxygen in the air? Molecular disassembly of CO2 will do the trick, and in the meantime you can assemble the extra carbon into nanotubes, buckyballs, diamonds for lasers, and what-have-you, including assembling it into additional nanomachines.

Ah, nanotech, make my fantasy come true.