After having watched a programme on Discovery Science the other night about man terraforming and then living on either the moon or Mars, it made me wonder whether it actually could ever happen.

Scientists believe there's water on Mars. So after initiating a process similar to that of the green house effect here on earth, we could change the atmosphere of Mars to make it hospitable to humans. Can't remember the specifics of all the processes but it was all theoretically possible.

Ateroids could also be "mined" for minerals and iron and water. One guy thought that whoever could design a method for doing this could make a lot of money as being able to mine for basic materials in space would be cheaper than transporting them to the moon/mars from earth.

However, nobody seemed to mention about actually flying humans out there. Don't astronauts need to be very fit and to be able to cope with weightlessness and being confined in small spaces etc etc?

One scientist was convinced that humans would be living on mars or the moon, can't remember which, within 50 years! Seems impossible to me, but there you go. Also where would the millions if not billions of pounds/dollars/euros whatever to do this, come from?!

Any thoughts?

Originally posted by Lou
One scientist was convinced that humans would be living on mars or the moon, can't remember which, within 50 years!


Weren't scientists saying just that 50 years ago :blush:

Originally posted by Lou
Also where would the millions if not billions of pounds/dollars/euros whatever to do this, come from?!


Oh, they have ways ;)

Originally posted by Lou
After having watched a programme on Discovery Science the other night about man terraforming and then living on either the moon or Mars, it made me wonder whether it actually could ever happen.

Scientists believe there's water on Mars. So after initiating a process similar to that of the green house effect here on earth, we could change the atmosphere of Mars to make it hospitable to humans. Can't remember the specifics of all the processes but it was all theoretically possible.

Ateroids could also be "mined" for minerals and iron and water. One guy thought that whoever could design a method for doing this could make a lot of money as being able to mine for basic materials in space would be cheaper than transporting them to the moon/mars from earth.

However, nobody seemed to mention about actually flying humans out there. Don't astronauts need to be very fit and to be able to cope with weightlessness and being confined in small spaces etc etc?

One scientist was convinced that humans would be living on mars or the moon, can't remember which, within 50 years! Seems impossible to me, but there you go. Also where would the millions if not billions of pounds/dollars/euros whatever to do this, come from?!

Any thoughts?
Firstly, beyond the sheer exploration side of it - why live on the moon or mars at all? There's no atmosphere and everything is imported. Also they are still having problems creating sealed 'biomes' for people to live in.

Secondly Terraforming mars: It seems to me that if we go and try to terraform mars, 100 years later we are going to regret it as we discover we have wiped out the only extraterrestrial life yet discovered. Let's demonstrate to ourselves that we can handle one planet, before we go and wreak havoc on another.

Mining asteroids, however is a great idea, and doing so is very very simple. You just have to think big, and refine your metals using a process of fractional distillation.

Get a great, great big hard asteroid (mostly iron, maybe a few hundred kilometers accross and use shaped nuclear charges to drill a nice big hole in it, about 4-5 kms in diameter and 10-15kms deep. Then find a nice small asteroid, say about 2 or 3 kms in diameter, full of metals like gold and tantalum and aluminium. Back this asteroid up a good distance up from the big asteroid, say 500,000 km, aim it at the hole in the surface of the big one, and accelerate it using strap on motors.

When the little one flies down the hole in the big one and impacts at some mind bending speed, the whole little asteroid will be vapourised and the vapour will shoot out of the opening in the big asteroid. Different metals will cool at different speeds, and condense at different times.

All that is required now is some device to go chasing after these droplets of purified metal, all neatly separated from one another.

Do I win a prize?

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
Firstly, beyond the sheer exploration side of it - why live on the moon or mars at all? There's no atmosphere and everything is imported. Also they are still having problems creating sealed 'biomes' for people to live in.
It could help solve the population explosion crisis that will happen at some point in the future.

Originally posted by Sidla
It could help solve the population explosion crisis that will happen at some point in the future.

Why not raise the ocean floor or re-seed the deserts?

Do you not think doing this could affect the earth's climate?

Originally posted by Sidla
It could help solve the population explosion crisis that will happen at some point in the future.
no it would merely export the population crisis to another planet.

What irks me is that the history of mans exploration is littered with stupid mistakes that have irrevocably altered the ecologies and landscapes of the world, many for the worse. It strikes me that, knowing this, we should be a little more circumspect about blundering about in virgin territory than we have been in the past.

i think man may well set up a permanete camp on the moon in my lifetime,but as for getting to Mars,i doubt i'll see that,think it will be a long while till we get there.

Man will have walked on the Moon by 2010. You heard it here first.

By 2020 they'll have discovered that an intellegent alien race will have once lived there. Although I doubt... we'll know about it. No doubt the government will keep that one quiet.

A Manned mission to Mars is a very complex mission indeed.

The technology needed would be substantially the same as for the moon mission, and of course it has greatly improved since 1969. The primary difference would be the much greater distance to cover. This might not necessarily involve more fuel. The basic technique used to propel craft in space is the 'slingshot', whereby the craft orbits a planet and uses some of its angular momentum to propel itself into space. The planet involved loses a small amount of its own momentum in the process, but this is imperceptible. I don't think that you could do it very effectively (or at all) using Earth, because the principle involves approching the planet from the opposite direction to the planets direction of travel (+- 90 degrees) and I think that is very difficult to achieve with a craft launched from earth. Another option is to possibly slingshot round the moon head back to earth and sling shot again but again I think you would have to be relying on lots of luck to use the moon at all due to all the angles. When you sling shot round something you come off at a reasonably specific angle that is related to your angle of attack (kind of like a bouncing a ball off a wall). You would have to hit the moon just right at just the right time to be sent off towards mars. Also since you have to hit the body involved from ahead of it's direction of motion you would not be able to take a direct route to the moon because you would end up hitting it more or less perpendicular to it's direction of motion for little effect. Each pass would have to be more and more precise. It might be possible to sling-shot off the moon (I don't intend on attempting any calculations) if you took the correct trajectory from earth but you certainly couldn't launch from earth, sling-shot off the moon and return to earth to get another sling-shot.

The end result is a one off visit just like the moon. What is the point in going there when it's this difficult? The natural counter argument is that space travel technology won't get any better unless we continually strive for better things.

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
[B]Firstly, beyond the sheer exploration side of it - why live on the moon or mars at all? There's no atmosphere and everything is imported. B]
I quite agree, why would we want to do it anyway? They went back to quoting Kennedy's speech in er, 1962 I think, about the race to get man on the moon and how he said, "We should try to fly man to the moon not because it is easy but because it is difficult" (or something very similar). Another scientist said "We owe it to the rest of the Universe for man to live on the moon". What a load of romantic rubbish. I'm sure the rest of the Universe doesn't give a monkey's whether man terraforms the moon or mars.
I know some of the money would come from taxes. I can't help feeling there are far better things to spend the money on.

Originally posted by Lickszz
A Manned mission to Mars is a very complex mission indeed.
The basic technique used to propel craft in space is the 'slingshot'... round the moon head back to earth and sling shot again but again I think you would have to be relying on lots of luck to use the moon at all ...have to hit the moon just right at just the right time to be sent off towards mars. Also since you have to hit the body involved from ahead of it's direction of motion you would not be able to take a direct route to the moon because you would end up hitting it more or less perpendicular to it's direction of motion for little effect.

Er to do any serious mars exploration a moon base would be an almost necessity.

Slingshot trajectories are used for unpowered satellites, for a manned mars mission, I would suggest a large, ship, constructed in moon orbit. with enough engine power to accelerate at 1g for half the distance and decelerate at 1g for the other half. That way you have gravity for the whole (very long) journey. Getting there is no problem providing you use the periodic window when mars is closest to earth, (like now).

Originally posted by Sidla
It could help solve the population explosion crisis that will happen at some point in the future.
We'd need an awful lot of transport ships to have any effect on the earth's population. Currently, the population of the planet is increasing at the rate of 40,000 a day (this may be a bit out but it's about that). To combat or reverse the increase we would need to house twice that, 80,000, in our newly created domes every day. Assume we can build transport ships as big as jumbo jets then that's 200 ships a day using squillions of gallons of precious fuel. Allowing 24 months for a ship to get to mars and back then we would need 200*365*2 ships to have a permanent flow of ships.

That's 146,000 ships.

I think the answer must lie somewhere else. Sigh, nice thought, back to the drawing board. :help:

Originally posted by Phanerothyme
Er to do any serious mars exploration a moon base would be an almost necessity.

Slingshot trajectories are used for unpowered satellites, for a manned mars mission, I would suggest a large, ship, constructed in moon orbit. with enough engine power to accelerate at 1g for half the distance and decelerate at 1g for the other half. That way you have gravity for the whole (very long) journey. Getting there is no problem providing you use the periodic window when mars is closest to earth, (like now).

What do we do when we get to Mars? Well, on the moon we collected a few rocks, marked it territorially and then left again. No attempt has been made to set up a permanent moon base, and this is discouraging. A similar base on Mars would have the disadvantage that its supply line to earth would be so much longer.

It is unlikely that such bases on Mars or the Moon would be anything more than scientific stations where people went for a specific period of time. The idea of people raising families on these bodies is just science fiction.

For an example look at Antarctica. This is uninhabited except for scientific and some military stations, where scientists and other specialists go for limited stints and are usually glad to leave. Yet Antarctica, hostile though it is, is far less hostile than the moon or Mars. At least you can breath the air, and walk around without a spacesuit, albeit with very warm clothing.

So if we can't use Antarctica for human settlement, then clearly it is out of the question on other planets.

On the issue of terraforming Mars, to make its environment more benign, this is plausible, but it would take many hundreds or thousands of years to achieve.

Seeing as how the Russians never went to the moon, what about considering the fact that no-one has actually ever been?

We have high powered telescopes that can see into the depths of space and satellites that can read a car's number plate, but conveniently nothing to view the surface of the moon for lunar rovers and remnants of space modules.