STEPHEN HAWKING: WE HAVE 100 YEARS TO LEAVE EARTH

I read the Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson, and while it was broadly supposing that a lot of water was trapped in subterranean aquifers, the whole process of habitation and settlement was based on geurilla terraforming practises. Interesting reading.

Yep, I agree, terraforming is a pipe dream in the next 100 years.
If we were actually able to terraform Mars we would certainly be able to fix the environmental problems here. I assume that is the basic reason why Hawking thinks we must leave within 100 yrs. Over population will fix itself either peacefully or otherwise.

The sub-urbia (great term) on Mars and its strict requirements would require a radically different culture which would be far more interesting to study than the physiological evolution that would occur.

Your friend let you drive the Slingshot? Getting ready to drive mine back to CO soon. Still not tired of it.

Whether or not one "terraforms" the issues of atmospheric pressure and radiation just won't go away. If you don't want a constant risk of your habitats blowing up, and also don't want to live underground, you're going to have to make the atmosphere much more dense--by many orders of magnitude. That somewhat ameliorates the second problem because it is not just the magnetosphere which protects Terra, but also the dense atmosphere.

Terraforming becomes attractive because of the propensity of life not simply to adapt, but to alter the environment. Critters which use oxygen were only possible after a sufficient amount of free O2 had been introduced into the atmosphere at a rate faster than it was removed by reaction to minerals on the surface (which lead to the first mass extinction). I suspect that if you let life loose on the surface, it will have the effect of changing conditions, but not at a rate that will please impatient mankind.

It is useless, though, to talk about doing anything, without a dense atmosphere. We can do that, but the expense would be very, very high. (Did you notice how I didn't use the term "astronomical?")

Just out of pure self defense, they will have to go underground and maintain a system that they can fall back to, even 500 years in the future, just in case. Then they can work above ground to their hearts' content.

even underground the residence areas will need to be either hyaline glassed or steel tubes. my means of creating oxygen ans iron (as a by product) will provide two important resources for the robot army to work with.

gases have a property that enables them to be manipulated as an atmosphere. That is we can insert all we ned in one spot and , even better than water, itll suspend and move about and mix with other carrier gases almost instantaneously (with a designed gas movement system)
So, we can generate minimal gas oressures as to support life and let the iron skin serve as a protection from catastrophic gas dispersion. Itll be like living in a bottle with another bottle reading pressures an supplying "make up" gases. The only reason they make subocean environments so dense in atmosphere on earth is to prevent implosion. Our problem pressures will be mostly outward If we generate an atmosphere 10% of what we have at sea level on earth, Ill bet itll suffice (as long as the main carrier gas is O2. The risk of onboard fire will always be there but Ill bet we can design something like a Nitrogen and argon mix to act as "fire extinguishers" and then we would need "Safety gates " to hermetically seal off any segment that may risk a fire.
These environments are going to need to grow to be huge over time so folks dont get claustrophobic (like living in an RV or a submarine).

A lot of our design minds are going to need to come up with shapes of halls and large
pasture" areas that ar strong and have shapes that relieve stresses from all sorts of environmental forces that mars has to dish out.

I was tooling around some of the mars "future think" ites and they ALL seem to dwell on terraforming. Your points on keeping an atmosphere conncted to the planet will be a huge problem without any mans to do it.
The tech search led me to some atmospheric data that stated that the entire reasonably manageable atmosphere may be less in elevation than a 40 story building. Atmosphere is connected to the surface by some chem bonding forces and some kind of "ground effect" . So maybe it will be possible if we pick our living areas carefulle.
Im gonna have to do some more reading about that aspect . Im still rather dubious about terrafoming .(I used to be a big fan until I read som more of my DALTONS LAW and UNIVESRAL GAS LAWS from p- chemistry)

Right now, the four giant volcanic cones of the Tharsis Plateau stick out into space--I suppose you can call the exovolcanoes. Of course, they are three times the elevation of Mt. Everest. This shows Olympus Mons--just off the northwest shoulder of the plateau--with the two largest moutains on earth in the foreground:



That's an artifact of the lower gravitational influence--.38 G as compared to earth. The Ecchus cliff has an elevation of more than 13,000 feet. Something like that on Terra would fall over from its own weight.

The lowest large area on Mars is the Hellas Basin. It was formed when a planetesimal struck the planet, coming in low and from the east. (Most, but not all, objects in the solar system move from west to east.) It was a fair sized object, too--between 125 and 130 miles in diameter. The basin is a rough circle about 1250 miles in diameter. The Hellespontus Montes (Hellespont Mountains) are really gigantic shatter cones thrown up by the impact--they're all on the west side of the basin. It is believed (and has not been confirmed) that atmospheric pressures at the bottom of the basin are 18-20 millibars, as compared to the 10-12 on most of the surface of the planet. Tunneling into the walls of the basin to build habitats might be a good idea. It's in the southern hemisphere, so the winters are the coldest, and the summers the warmest--but before there's anything like a dense atmosphere, it's going to be as cold as a well digger's ass no matter well you set up. That's one hell of an impact crater.

Initially, one could set up in the Hellas Basin, and if the atmosphere were beefed up, it would be the first place where an animal hospitable environment could be created. Don't forget the giant insects, though.

In my pov the Moon first and in between developing the proper AI the proper robotics and with the experience gathered from a smaller more manageable moon base think about Mars 1 century onward. Right now aiming at Mars is not only premature but foolish.

your POV has already been discussed with suitable conclusions.
We must always keep short and long term goals in our sights, otherwise the moon becomes an end in itself and thats whats foolish from an engineering standpoint. It appears that China is gonna mine He on the moon AND test Mars configurations of various development infrastructure. Ill bet they do it with robotics.
Since "c" would require a 16 min round-trip for two way instructions to take effect, so there must be built in some "determinative" responses to findings on the planet.
Id seen a discussion in sigma xi where it isnt so much AI as it becomes lists of fixed responses to each step a mars tool takes. It turns out that the fixed responses come out of an "optional evolution" progrqm developed at MIT Lincoln Labs. This basically has the robots acting autonomously with an ability to interject and change along the way. The evo/devo program worked more from a standpoint of small populations in which natural selection is less the driver than genetic drift. It basically played evo-devo chess with (infinity-n) responses tht are played and assessed in nanoseconds .

wow, thats some blemish. is it active? if so its probably pumping NOx along with sulfitic ****. Sulfur can be separated and precipitated on the surface if we need to mine N for our home made atmosphere. Is it a matter of trqnsporting anything far to the Hellas Basin? How far from cone to depression?

I don't believe there has been active volcanism for a few million years now. The map below shows the entire planet, and the color coding refers to elevation--white the highest and purple the lowest. The four gigantic volcanoes are on the left, near the center. (The equator, in fact, runs across the south rim of the caldera of Pavonis Mons [Peacock Mountain], the center mountain in the string of three running southwest to northeast.) Hellas Planitia, the name Giovanni Schiararelli gave it, is the basin I referred to, and it runs from about 15 degrees south to 45 degrees south. Above it to the north-northeast is Utopia Planitia (planitia just means a plain), which is larger than the continental United States (Hellas is slightly larger than the Caribbean). It was recognized as an impact basin just last year, the first step in dragging the kicking and screaming international astronomers' community toward the Big Hit hypothesis.

Whatever nitrogen was released in the volcanic eruptions, which were billions of years after "Big Hit" was probably preserved in some manner, when it was a part of a low-lying pyroclastic flow, or a lava flow. But from the big four, the gases would have vented directly into space. All four calderas are above the atmosphere. Olympus Mons is about 100 times as massive as Mauna Loa, the largest shield volcano on Terra; Tharsis Tholus, which looks puny compared to its neighbor Olympus, is slightly larger. There are dozens and dozens of ancient volcanoes as large or larger than Mauua Loa, but which seem diminutive compared to the big four.

I agree, but you'll have to hurry--the Chinese plan to mine the moon.

I cant believe the chinese want to mine the moon

A point that puzzles me is: Musk has access to the same information as for instance the posters in this thread. Surely he has something in mind to address those problems?

I suspect Musk needs to pump up his bond value, period. Of course he knows that his Marsian plans are impossible.

Taking biology, other than just humans seems important. Living earthworms, perhaps? Freeze dried or frozen for future revival - bees, a few bugs, amphibians, lizards? Human embryos for genetic diversity? Just speculating.

Mars' Chasma Boreale and North Polar Ice Cap.

Hmm I thought Olympus Mons was still active. Not a tectonic driven volcano but one based on Rad decay. Oh well, gottq go on to Plan B

Nitrogen doesnt hang around Since theres no O2 on Mars atmosphere, chances agains NOx is pretty great too.