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Thread: Living on Mars?
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2017-12-22, 12:42 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2016
Re: Living on Mars?
While we're on the topic of superconstruction pipe-dreams, what if we generated power by building a massive coil around a rapidly spinning magnetar (turning it into a gigantic dynamo) and running a long wire of superconducting YBCO from it back to our own solar system. Once the decades required for the electricity to travel the lightyears of distance had passed we would have a nearly unlimited supply of power.
Also what if we launched a bakery into orbit so we could have actual pie in the sky
EDIT:
What kind of engine do you need to put a castle in the air?Last edited by Bohandas; 2017-12-22 at 12:45 PM.
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2017-12-22, 01:49 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2013
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- Bristol, UK
Re: Living on Mars?
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2017-12-22, 02:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
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Re: Living on Mars?
Those bodies are not very massive--they're mostly made of lighter materials like ice and are quite small. Eris is the most massive known Kuiper belt object at 0.0028x Earth mass, Pluto is a touch lighter, Haumea is less than 1/1000th Earth mass and I don't think Sedna's mass has been measured--so even if all four bodies were as massive as Eris (which they're not) the total would only be 0.0112 Earth masses, quite a bit less than WhatThePhysics' lower limit.
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2017-12-22, 05:20 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2012
- Location
- Hell
Re: Living on Mars?
Nudge them into eccentric orbits that bring them close to the Sun, then use the contained gases that'll form to insert the comets into Venusian, Terran, or Martian L4/L5 Points. Depending on the efficiency of the local fuel processing systems, they might need to loop around Sol a few times to get enough fuel. Once this is done, redirect them into the cyclical Hohmann transfer orbits, and you're good to go.
Mass produce probes, and have some of them be statites with collapsible solar sails. The latter group's sensory capabilities should be maximized due to the sails blocking solar radiation, and the units remaining stationary relative to obscurable stars.
The Structure of the Kuiper Belt: Size Distribution and Radial Extent.
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2017-12-26, 01:29 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2014
Re: Living on Mars?
Give directly to the extreme poor.
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2017-12-26, 02:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
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Re: Living on Mars?
I can see a couple of problems trying to cook a pie on the ISS. First is that you'll get bits of pastry, flour and who knows what else floating around in the microgravity and potentially causing issues. Secondly, I don't think conventional ovens work well in microgravity because there's no convection, so hot air tends to cluster around the heating elements--I suppose you could fix that one by using a fan-assisted oven, though.
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2017-12-26, 03:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
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- Near Giant Graffiti.
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Re: Living on Mars?
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2017-12-26, 06:17 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2017
Re: Living on Mars?
Who said you had to cook the pie on the ISS? Just ship it up there...
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2017-12-27, 02:23 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2011
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- Calgary, AB
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Re: Living on Mars?
They heat the air in the oven, which transfers heat to the food through conduction. Microwave ovens use resonant frequencies to increase the effectiveness of the energy delivered to specific parts of the food based on position, which is why they tend to do things like be frozen on the outside until you bite a piece of molten cheese. Neither is really radiative heat transfer the way it works outside of the atmosphere.
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2017-12-27, 02:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
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Re: Living on Mars?
A grill cooks things through radiation. Ovens do it via transferring heat from the heating elements (or the gas flame, if you have a gas cooker) to the air inside the oven, and thence to the food, as georgie_leech said. That's why fan ovens exist--they're more efficient at transferring the heat.
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2017-12-27, 05:01 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2012
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- Hell
Re: Living on Mars?
All this talk of pies, shipping, and fan ovens makes me wonder how much it'd cost to add a spin gravity module to the International Space Station.
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2018-01-01, 04:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2011
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2018-01-02, 03:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
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Re: Living on Mars?
I would have thought the bigger problem would be preventing friction in the bearings transferring the rotation of the centrifuge to the main body of the station.
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2018-01-02, 11:51 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2014
Re: Living on Mars?
You could probably compensate with microthrusters, but I thought the standard solution was having a counterweight spinning in the other direction?
Dunno how to fix the vibration problem, though. Could you just install some kind of floor-ventilation system to suck out all the flour and debris and create a crude proxy-gravity? There's a Nature paper in the making here, I just know it.Give directly to the extreme poor.
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2018-01-02, 03:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
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2018-01-02, 05:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2008
Re: Living on Mars?
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2018-01-02, 05:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
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Re: Living on Mars?
Last edited by Leewei; 2018-01-02 at 05:49 PM.
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2018-01-02, 07:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2011
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- Calgary, AB
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Re: Living on Mars?
Specifically Venus, as supposedly the temperature will help offset the energy input by the comet slamming into the planet, which supposedly is being done to correct the direction of rotation? Because... I can't actually follow why that's supposed to be necessary, so because reasons?
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2018-01-02, 09:41 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2012
- Location
- Hell
Re: Living on Mars?
Darn, I guess we'll just need an ISS 2, then.
Ravens_cry has the right idea, though the probes don't need to be massive or large to be useful, which would make the initial comets capable of providing more than enough resources. If each probe has a mass of 1 megagram, something like Halley's Comet could possibly be converted into 220 billion probes. If the Kuiper Belt is a torus with a 50 AU major radius and 30 AU minor radius, its volume is about 400,000 cubic AU. If each probe's effective sensor field is a hemisphere with a 1 AU radius, and you ignore hemisphere packing issues, the Kuiper Belt could constantly be monitored by a minimum of roughly 200,000 probes.
You don't slam the comets into Venus. You place them into cyclical Hohmann transfer orbits between Venus and Mars to: alter Venus's atmospheric composition and rotation, provide Mars with an atmosphere and hydrosphere, and ship goods and people between the two planets.Last edited by WhatThePhysics; 2018-01-02 at 10:58 PM.
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2018-02-02, 07:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2016
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2018-02-03, 01:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2011
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- Calgary, AB
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Re: Living on Mars?
Partly. But the reason why relatively weak radiation is able to heat food uses both resonant frequencies, and patterns of constructive interference. It's why most microwaves rotate meals; certain areas within the microwave will be warmed faster than others, so rotating the food should ensure a more even cook. In theory at least. In practice, pockets of molten cheese continue to sit beside Frozen bits in our hot pockets
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2018-02-03, 01:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
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Re: Living on Mars?
There's another reason for that behaviour--microwaves basically work by heating the water in the food, but they're not very good at heating ice. Since the heating is also uneven, as you say, and the clumps of ice are of differing sizes, you will tend to get bits that melt first and then heat very quickly while the other bits are still frozen and not absorbing microwaves very well. This is why you're supposed to stir frozen things partway through cooking, or else leave them to stand for a couple of minutes to allow the hot parts to melt the still-frozen bits.
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2018-02-03, 11:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
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- Near Giant Graffiti.
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2018-02-03, 07:37 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Nov 2008
Re: Living on Mars?
The amount of current we can get through the wire without superconductivity breaking down is proportional to the cross-section of the wire.
Multiply that cross-section by the several thousand lightyears to the closest magnetar and you have a LOT of wire.
That means you need a lot of energy to position it. Simply dropping it off from a moving rocket isn't good enough, the wire needs to be stationary.
In fact, it's probably more energy than you could ever hope to transfer even in millions of years of operation.
Once you have the wire in place, you still need to worry about things like galactic drift, objects passing through the space occupied by the wire etc. so it's unlikely you could actually keep the wire in place for millions of years without needing to re-string it.
Oh, and the dynamo might not work as well as you want it to because superconductivity also breaks down in intense magnetic fields.Last edited by Bucky; 2018-02-03 at 07:38 PM.
The gnomes once had many mines, but now they have gnome ore.
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2018-02-04, 12:25 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2007
Re: Living on Mars?
Avatar by Mr. Saturn
3DS Friend Code: 4742-9573-4652
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2018-02-04, 02:11 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2007
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- Manchester, UK
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Re: Living on Mars?
Using a super-long wire to transport power in that situation would not be practical. The relative motion of the magnetar and Sol would render it impossible. Likewise, transmitting power through some other means (say, a honkin' great laser) wouldn't work because your aim point would keep changing--you're essentially trying to hit a target moving at several hundred metres per second from information you have from several thousand years ago!
It has to be said, though, once we're at a point in our development where we could reasonably consider such a thing, we'd have to be a galaxy-spanning civilisation anyway, so send the power to somewhere much closer where we can make better use of it.