The meaning of getting to Mars? Your view?

@Setanta,

no I was just comparing distances v time at present velocities figuring many lifetimes itd take to achieve
I realize that we will target earth like planets in sol-like solar systems. All wed need to consider is more and larger ships with additional "Donor genomes" that have been pre-adapted to a limited few environmental conditions. Then we would be involved in doing our own ID , because wed be generating an entire population based on CRSPR type editing on stem cell products ready for insertion into receptors.

Sociologically speaking though, I see that, at the far future when we are required to move on, the varieties of governmental concepts that the home planet is now usd to will probably become irrelevant .

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@Setanta,

Quote:

we need a dense atmosphere there if we are to colonize the planet.

The atmosphere of a planet is kept in place by the planet's gravity. Mars gravity is weak. You could dump the N2 on Mars, but it won't stay.

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@Olivier5,

weve not been opting for terrafoming or "covering the entire planet" with an atmosphere. We would either be setting up in craters or be developing "suburban" villages like salt mines on earth (large open areas underground). In the future e may learn how to develop an internal dynamo utilizing Mars core, or not .

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@farmerman,

I'd rather use our resources to terraform earth. By that I mean to fight climate change, of course.

Sci fi aside, we only have one habitable planet, and we're busy rendering it unhabitable...

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@Olivier5,

again, what is the reason that we cannot do both?

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@farmerman,

Err... necessarily limited resources and capabilities? If we cannot keep the earth habitable, what makes you think we can make Mars habitable?

I love classic sci-fi too. It's technologically optimistic, full of rockets flying to new worlds... But the future is not necessarily how Ray Bradbury imagined it. It turns out that the next few centuries will present quite the challenge to civilization, way before anyone lives on Mars. It could well be that our capacity to terraform planets is going to be severely tested on planet Terra.

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@Olivier5,

So you are not of the belief that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We disagree. We had an entire industrial revoltion while we were still discovering the world.
As I said, its going to test more, our abilities to work as a species, not some bunch of Balkanized tribes.

Nothin against Ray Bradbury but most planning of big projects have many many more things to consider than just the final story.

He thought of space satellites before we had em and much more work was needed to even send up the first few. Weve now ceded our entire information gathering and planetary monitoring over to the space gizmos>(Which leads to other problems).

Weve been testing MArs as a possible place for the next steps out into space. Maybe the experience will help us clean up our act back home. I dont think of it as an either or decision.

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@farmerman,

The truth is that we are not controling climate change. We're failing at this task, and in doing so we cast a spell on our future as a species. So if you want to learn how to terraform planets, start at home.

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@Olivier5,

having been failing doesnt mean we are doomed to continue , does it?
Before we deforest Mars we have to first forest it.

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

Before we deforest Mars we have to first forest it.

I would start by reforesting our planet and moving us back within safe environmental bondaries. THEN you can forest Mars if you want to... Remember this headline?

Fix Earth's climate crisis instead of dreaming of other planets, urges Nobel prize-winning astronomer

'We're not built to survive on any other planet than this one. We'd better spend our time and energy trying to fix it,' says scientist

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

no I was just comparing distances v time at present velocities figuring many lifetimes itd take to achieve
I realize that we will target earth like planets in sol-like solar systems. All wed need to consider is more and larger ships with additional "Donor genomes" that have been pre-adapted to a limited few environmental conditions. Then we would be involved in doing our own ID , because wed be generating an entire population based on CRSPR type editing on stem cell products ready for insertion into receptors.

Sociologically speaking though, I see that, at the far future when we are required to move on, the varieties of governmental concepts that the home planet is now usd to will probably become irrelevant .

There was an article about mountain sheep who were reintroduced into their traditional habitat after generations of being rehabilitated as a species and the sheep had lost their cultural understanding of how to interact with the environment because it hadn't been passed on through being raised by the parents within the same environment.

In other words, it doesn't really work to just cultivate a biological-fit species and then introduce it into an unfamiliar environment. There has to be cultural continuity between generations and across environmental changes.

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@livinglava,

Quote:

it doesn't really work to just cultivate a biological-fit species and then introduce it into an unfamiliar environment. There has to be cultural continuity between generations and across environmental changes.

Humans have been known to colonize and adapt to totally new environments in as few as two generations. Whenever weve colonized totally "human-free" zones weve flourished in quick times. Seems to counter your hypothesis.

Seems like humans dont merely adapt we take-over, we are the king of opportunists. Entirely new lands have provided us entirely new resources initially in unlimited amounts. Thats part of our problem.

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@Olivier5,

You shouldn't shoot your mouth off when you don't know what you're talking about. Gravity is not some big magnet. It is an expression (and an imprecise term, too) of the attractive nature of mass. It doesn't take that much mass to pin an atmosphere to a planet--or a moon such as Saturn's moon Titan, from which I have suggested we could get nitrogen. This is from NASA's Solar System Exploration page about Titan:

Quote:

As exotic as Titan might sound, in some ways it’s one of the most hospitable worlds in the solar system. Titan’s nitrogen atmosphere is so dense that a human wouldn’t need a pressure suit to walk around on the surface. He or she would, however, need an oxygen mask and protection against the cold—temperatures at Titan’s surface are around minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179 Celsius).

Titan’s dense atmosphere, as well as gravity roughly equivalent to Earth’s Moon, mean that a raindrop falling through Titan’s sky would fall more slowly than on Earth. While Earth rain falls at about 20 miles per hour (9.2 meters per second), scientists have calculated that rain on Titan falls at about 3.5 miles per hour (1.6 meters per second), or about six times more slowly than Earth’s rain. Titan’s raindrops can also be pretty large. The maximum diameter of Earth raindrops is about 0.25 inches (6.5 millimeters) while raindrops on Titan can reach diameters of 0.37 inches (9.5 millimeters), or about 50 percent larger than an Earth raindrop.

Titan has 0.0225 the mass of the Earth. Mars, by contrast, has about 11% the mass of Earth. Using the atmospheric pressure of Earth at mean sea level as a base line, that means that the atmospheric pressure on mean surface level on Titan is 1.45 atmospheres--much denser and heavier than our atmosphere.

You should take to heart the dictum that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

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@farmerman,

The main problem with going to Alpha Centauri (apart from Proxima Centauri) is that we don't know squat about the planets there. The same goes for Barnard's star. It is going to be a very long, long, long time before we can get probes to either destination and get usable data back.

Mars would be a good place to start to develop the systems we would need on any other planet of another star.

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@Setanta,

Titan is much further away from the Sun, and exposed to less sun wind. You should really try to listen to your betters rather than get all pissed whenever they tell you something.

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@Setanta,

Maybe I was not being clear. I was NOT proposing to do anything wrt a "weekend" to AC or PC, I was merely using them as a sesne of being a "mikepost" where we muct have a more speedy velocity setup in order to NOT require many generations of individuals who would be nothing more than "gene messengers" as they would never seee their homeland nor their destination.
I agree that e should have a really complete dossier on any of our destination solar systems and their planets

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@farmerman,

I liked Setanta suggestion on choosing a red dwarf like Barnard that can last 1000 times more than our regular Sun...on the other hand I hope we are not looking up to build a Dyson sphere or a Dyson swarm to capture huge amounts of energy in the far far distant future. Not that a red dwarf for our current standards doesn't release a huge amount of energy per second. It does but we never know how power-hungry "we" will be down the line. Personally as I am not the expansive type conquer the galaxy and be everywhere I would be fine with half a dozen of red dwarfs colonized.

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Isn't everybody massively jumping the gun here.

Titan, Alpha Centauri, Dyson sphere, even Mars.

Am I alone thinking our first option should be a colony on the moon, let's start there and see how we get on.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

a lot of stuff were discussing have roots in science fiction not necessarily experimental physics. nothing wrong with it, but lets also blend in stuff we now know.

think dyson rings fall into that realm.

I know we have can have problems with satellite based conveyances. Like "Using microwaves to transport energy to a planets surface" . That could be very exciting to those living on the planets surface.

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@eurocelticyankee,

There is at the moment a total of zero (0) rational reason why humans should try and colonize other planets. This thread is a sci-fi porn fest.

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The meaning of getting to Mars? Your view?

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