Well, the carbon can be exported or used in-situ. The Moon has most things, but fairly little carbon, and it is a vital part of any ecosystem. It can also be used as a raw material for a variety of uses.
Printable View
Well, the carbon can be exported or used in-situ. The Moon has most things, but fairly little carbon, and it is a vital part of any ecosystem. It can also be used as a raw material for a variety of uses.
The biggest reason, I think, is that Mars is Out, while Venus is In. Colonizing something further from Sol than Earth is seems like a bigger step, psychologically.
I think any serious attempt at terraforming would have to be based on starting a self-supporting chain reaction. But you would also have to work with the material you have on site and can't remove any in meaningful quantities. If you want to reduce atmospheric pressure on Venus to Earth level, you'd have to convert the gas into stable solid or liquid states, and given the amounts it would cover the entire surface in a quite substential layer of material.
Another advantage for terraforming Mars is that it is smaller, so less resources would be required.
So, add in that it would require less effort, and then less resources... Economically, it's the better choice.
Also, if my remember correctly, Mars will survive the Sun's expansion as it ages, whereas they can't be certain with the Earth. Venus on the other hand, would be destroyed before the Earth.
So, for the exceedingly long term, Mars is the better choice, again.
On the other hand ,the upper atmosphere of Venus is among the most Earth-like environment in the solar system besides, well, Earth.
There is a band where the temperature and air-pressure are approximately Earth-like, carbon can be used as a construction material, and oxygen becomes a lifting gas.
All that air above you makes dandy radiation protection as well.
How? It's already surrounded by the vacuum of space and it's not going anywhere. You'd have to bottle it and carry it out of the gravity well that currently contains it. That is ridiculously expensive and energy intensive. It's already under extreme pressure, so you wouldn't even be able to pack it into a smaller volume when you carry it out.
If you sequester it somehow (by turning it into some sort of solid, such as converting carbon dioxide to other organic molecules), it's going to take up a lot of space.
Basically, it comes down to this: Terraforming Mars is like setting up a survivable colony in Antarctica; terraforming Venus is like setting up a colony inside the magma dome of an active volcano on the bottom of the ocean.
Hmm. Venus has a crapton of Carbon Dioxide, yes? Plants convert COv2 into Oxygen(and starch for growth), yes? Perhaps a couple centuries of using Venus as a pre-Sol-Whip(sligshotting via Sun gravity, so going inwards rather than out, before going out) Oxygen refueling station could siphon off enough of the COv2 to lighten the atmosphere?
With regards to a question I saw earlier, I think it's a male thing. Just today on my way to work, a bunch of foreign kids went by, and my mind instantly went through a scenario where they either tried to snatch or destroy my handheld gaming device, which resulted in me causing grievous harm with bodies, and then going through a trial where my defense was that they had it coming for coming to my country and stealing from me. I think it's a holdover from older times where you had to think ahead in case your brilliant plan to trap the cave bear backfired/failed. Folks who didn't think ahead, usually didn't survive to pass on that trait.:smallconfused:
If you could engineer the plants to be biological balloons filled with oxygen, they could stay in the much more temperate upper atmosphere.
This would be real genetic engineering, creating new concepts rather than copy and pasting, and far beyond our present capability but not beyond possibility.
Why is rum the drink the dead like best?
I've seen several instances in popular media where mourners alternately drink and pour rum over a dead friend's grave. It seems like a death rite, but do you all know anything about its origin?
I've never seen that, but if it started, say, as a sailors tradition, it would make sense to use a sailors drink.
I know a few cultural references to pouring a glass of strong spirits to the ground, and remarking that it's being served to "the saint"; this can be either quipped in response to accidentaly dropping the contents of a glass to the floor (usually), or performed in the context of an offering, whenever one engages in the consumption of alcohol. I believe the practice, as well as the one-liner, has its origins in african religious practices.
Although that's as close to your example as I'm able to come up with. I've never heard of the practice you're describing, though rum is usually linked to pirates, and perhaps sailors, as pointed above.
As others have mentioned, there is creatures on Earth that survive quite acidic conditions.
Another way would be to use banks of linear accelerators on Mercury to send slugs of reactive material to Venus, magnesium, calcium, and/or iron are some possibilities, about a million cubic kilometres would do combine with and lock most of that carbon dioxide, the rest plants and/or blue-green algae could take care of.
Found a name for the general practice: libation. However, the only reference to rum is the "for the Saints" one.
Sometimes I'll do that, only the phrase we use in my circles is "One for the Dead".
@Atmosphere on Mars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#Atmosphere
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloniz...Mars#Radiation
Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere, meaning radiation gets through in pretty signifigant amounts. And it's difficult to shield. A single solar storm of any kind could cause pretty signifigant damage/harm.
Something that the robots we send there will have to deal with. I don't know if there is even a fix for that.
Our robots seem to be able to handle it.
Spirit:
Planned: 90 Martian solar days
Mobile: 1944 Earth days landing to final embedding
Operational: 2269 days from landing to last contact
Opportunity:
Current: 3011 days since landing
Viking 1:
2245 sols, until a faulty command sent by ground control resulted in loss of contact
Viking 2:
1281 sols
Yes, they can. It's rather expensive to shield them though, and I highly doubt that Viking 1 or 2 had to endure a solar storm of any kind. Humans aren't really shieldable. There are some cave systems and similar landing sites which hold some potential to keep people safe, which is good news. But plant life which needs sunlight? Yeah, thats going to be dodgy at best. Who wants radioactive tomatoes? And then there is water. It's absorbed rather a lot of radiation over the years, so until we test it we can't be sure if it is still drinkable.
As for propulsion... behold!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VASIMR
Not a launch vehicle, but once in space this baby should get going pretty quick they say. Perfect for sending satelites and robots mostly.
With an on-board nuclear reactor, it could even be useful for sending humans from planetary orbit to planetary orbit.
Shielding doesn't have to be inches of lead to be effective--the shielding on the Moon lander, for example, was a few sheets of foil, effectively! (OK, they deliberately launched those at times of low solar activity so they wouldn't have to survive a solar storm, but I imagine with 40+ years of development we've probably got even better shielding materials by now).