Space - What is Out There?

By the way, that's why i think mining the asteroid belt would be a good idea--it might be an opportunity to get business on board. The Japanese would be good partners for that. Their corporations typically plan for decades to come, and most large Japanese corporations have set goals for where they wish to be in a century's time.

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I'm glad this is not a religious thread or no doubt somebody would be quoting stuff like this and saying alien visitors to earth have already been and gone.. Wink

ALIEN- "Jesus said: I am not of this world" (John 8:23)
STARSHIP -"Praise to the Lord, to him who rides the ancient skies above,
whose power is in the skies." (Psalm 68:33-34)
RADIATION SHIELDING- God said "When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by" (Exodus 33:22)
GENESIS PROJECT -"God made the worlds.." (Heb 11:3 KJV)
ORBITAL TRAJECTORY - "God sits on the circle of the earth" (Isa 40:22)
WARP FACTOR - "God rides upon a swift cloud" (Isaiah 19:1)
CLOAKING DEVICE - "God goes by me but I see him not" (Job 9:10)
TIME DILATION - "With God a thousand years are as one day" (2 Pet 3:8 )
MOTHERSHIP?- "I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north, the center of the fire looked like glowing metal...a creature approached...I fainted" (Ezekiel 1:4+)
STARGATE- Jesus said "Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it."(Matt 7:13)

"David looked up and saw the angel of the Lord standing between heaven and earth, with a drawn sword in his hand extended over Jerusalem. Then David and the elders, clothed in sackcloth, fell facedown" (1 Chron 21:15/16)

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g64/PoorOldSpike/dragonstar-space.gif~original

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

By the way, that's why i think mining the asteroid belt would be a good idea--it might be an opportunity to get business on board. The Japanese would be good partners for that. Their corporations typically plan for decades to come, and most large Japanese corporations have set goals for where they wish to be in a century's time.

Good idea. My late mother once told me that sometimes Japanese companies have difficulty organizing joint ventures with American companies because the latter aren't very good at long term thinking.

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@Brandon9000,

This might be one possible method for exploring outer space given the vast distances between stars and galaxies and our current speed limit (the speed of light):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship

"A generation ship or generation starship is a hypothetical type of interstellar ark starship that travels across great distances between stars at a speed much slower than the speed of light.
Since such a ship might take centuries to thousands of years to reach even nearby stars, the original occupants of a generation ship would grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue travelling."

"Such a ship would have to be almost entirely self-sustaining, providing energy, food, air, and water for everyone on board. It must also have extraordinarily reliable systems that could be maintained by the ship's inhabitants over long periods of time. Large, self-sustaining space habitats would be needed."

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@Jpsy,

Jpsy wrote:

This might be one possible method for exploring outer space given the vast distances between stars and galaxies and our current speed limit (the speed of light):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship

"A generation ship or generation starship is a hypothetical type of interstellar ark starship that travels across great distances between stars at a speed much slower than the speed of light.
Since such a ship might take centuries to thousands of years to reach even nearby stars, the original occupants of a generation ship would grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue travelling."

"Such a ship would have to be almost entirely self-sustaining, providing energy, food, air, and water for everyone on board. It must also have extraordinarily reliable systems that could be maintained by the ship's inhabitants over long periods of time. Large, self-sustaining space habitats would be needed."

It's one solution. Of course, you need to be pretty sure that your destination is inhabitable. It might be overtaken by a ship built later.

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@Brandon9000,

Brandon9000 wrote:

It might be overtaken by a ship built later.

I was also thinking about that last night. What a kick in the ass to get to a planet you were to be the first to colonize, and find a thousands of years old civilization which was started by colonists who left the solar system after you.

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Incidentally, "space colonies" are often in sci-fi films and books, but will they work in real life? For example here's a colony on one of Jupiter's barren lifeless moons. That means the humas who live in it will have to produce their own water, food, light and heat.
Of course, they'd bring water and food with them when they first set up the colony, but what will they do when it runs out?

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g64/PoorOldSpike/jupiter-colony800_zpsf89a2398.jpg~original

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@Romeo Fabulini,

Romeo Fabulini wrote:

Incidentally, "space colonies" are often in sci-fi films and books, but will they work in real life? For example here's a colony on one of Jupiter's barren lifeless moons. That means the humas who live in it will have to produce their own water, food, light and heat.
Of course, they'd bring water and food with them when they first set up the colony, but what will they do when it runs out?

Raise animals and grow vegetables.

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Romeo just wanted to post his pretty picture--he's an attention whore, which is to say, a troll.

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Obviously, Romeo fabulist doesn't have the slightest idea about science, let alone mineral processing.

Oxygen is present in many rocks outside the earth as is hydrogen.

Does he know about the combination of both?

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@Romeo Fabulini,

water is easy. Its in the rocks an in many of the chemicals we see from interstellar spectrographs. Ill bet most of the water will be gotten by putting tubes into the soil and pulling wet VAPORS which theyd berk into water and other possible useable chemicals like Methane from any planet with a warm to hot core.

Oxygen will be recycled and collected by heating the "rust" (t least on Mars). Energy will have to be a major concern so Id imagine MArs wouldbe based on a wind turbine/solar power energy budget.

I see that the Chinese got their lunar probe on the moon safely. They are now part of the " Major Space Nations". We oughta start getting them on board as a partner of a long visioned partnership.

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@timur,

Water ya talkin' about?

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Quote:

Farmerman said: water is easy. Its in the rocks...Oxygen will be recycled and collected by heating the "rust" (t least on Mars)

Thanks but what about food? And anyway water from rocks will run out eventually.
What I should have said is how long would a fully-enclosed self-contained colony be able to support itself without tapping into the environment, so let me re-phrase the question-

In the film 'Silent Running', huge spaceships have got domes full of living edible plants and animals. But suppose the earth was destroyed and the ships had nowhere to land, could they exist out there in space FOREVER as new generations of humans, plants and animals keep being born?
Can water and oxygen be recycled forever?
And won't generations of plants eventually suck all the nutrients out of the soil, making the soil useless for growing anything further?

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g64/PoorOldSpike/Silent_running-1.gif

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@Setanta,

These artists "conceptions" are usually testimonies to CGI and illustration techniques thn science.
Id think that most colonies on, say, MARS , would be designed more to guqrd and use THE WINDS. I had my kids do a "concept" of a colony on Mars using Geologic savvy and geomorphological features. Most of the kids wound up with "dug-in" cities (one kid called his " Mars Suburbia")
But one kidth a creative solution that translated the cities structures into what we call "Barchan Dunes" His buidings and dwellings would align at right angles to prevailing winds and would be a chain of concave triangular shaped rifge-like buildings that would allow sands and debris to overshoot the "dunes" and grqdully build up series of shallow covered "wind lee" dune structures which could be used for oxygen and CO2 collection (which would be converted to O2 by severl means including growing C3 plants)

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@farmerman,

Found an example of a Barchan dune. I shoulda said CONVEX toward the wind.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Star-dune.jpg

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@Romeo Fabulini,

Quote:

Can water and oxygen be recycled forever?

Pretty much. Its done naturally in the "Water cycle" nd photosynthetic cycle.
Even so, Im sure that much of the O2 and water will be "mined".
Many minerals are "hydrated salts"
We see that there are huge deposits of gypsum and natron on Mars. These hve a few added water molecules combined (with weak force) to the main molecule.
On earth,We make hydrated lime and plaster boqrd by driving off the water from lime and gypsum.
If we get huuge colonies on Mars, water will have to be mined from the polar deposits (much of that ice is, I understand, froaen CO2 with water)

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@Setanta,

Quote:

I was also thinking about that last night. What a kick in the ass to get to a planet you were to be the first to colonize, and find a thousands of years old civilization which was started by colonists who left the solar system after you.

That's one of the conlusions that drove me to the "Gametes in SPace" ideas.

It turns out (unless Im wrong), that with rapidly advancing technology, the first colonists will only be sperm donors and wombs . So why not cut out the "chicken" nd mail the eggs (or the ingredients for the eggs).
NOW, having said that technology will make it so, Ive failed to mention that an "Artificial womb" hs been only shown to be possible in much lower order animals. AND one really big problem is inducing natural immune systems to emplace themselves within the embryos without a "mother's epigenetic mDNA).

They managed it with lower animals wherein their life cycles are short enough that the "artificial life forms" can mate and re- establish normal hybrid vigor. We aren't so lucky.

I assume we can freeze and tore huge tankfuls of colostrum harvested at hospitals or wet nurse clinics.
I don't know squataall about colostrum and how it works but we use it to establish immune systems in lambs whose mothers die during lambirth.

Maybe it aint a big deal and its only ignorance that makes me worry about this but Ive seen lmbs without strong immune systems die after a few months of life and all from some damned hit like CD enterotoxemia or scours.

Maybe cowdoc knows best.

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As I think I mentioned in another thread a long time ago, we will probably have to "evolve" our colonization practices and tools out of our other endeavors.

For example, I see asteroid mining as a likely way to end up creating "generation ships". As asteroids are mined for their minerals in profit making ventures, they will be slowly hollowed out with interior tunnels and equipment and processes for living there because the colony miners will have been living there for years if not generations already. Any one of those asteroids could eventually be fit with ion drives and simply nudged into a deep space run which no expectation or need for a successful landing anywhere.

Is see this as an "evolution" to the stars rather than a "mission" to the stars. Moons like Phobos might be broken out of orbit at some point (with limited impulse engines) and flung back and forth between the planets ferrying large cargos and releasing them at specific times to take advantage of gravitational slingshot effects to keep the process going. Eventually a final fling might just send it out to the next star system to start the process all over again in different solar system.

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@rosborne979,

If we mine and refine, the best thing is to refine the more common metals because, if we started mining and refining stuff like gold r platinum, the values of those noble metals will plummet when the supply goes to some percentage of the present reserves.

Most asteroids are Ni/Fe and that's got use, as does Ti. Ti is an associate mineral and , from the prospectus of the company tht GUMP started , they estimated that theres about 20 Billion worth of Ti in every cubic km on an asteroid

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@rosborne979,

One way to "nudge" an asteroid into a launch position would be electro-magnetic propulsion. This is already in use. One could just fit out rods wired up for the electro-magnetic pulse to the ass-end of the asteroid, and begin shooting the "slag" of mining out, and use that to propel the asteroid into a position above the plane of the ecliptic from which it could launch on its journey trajectory.

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