Manned mission to Venus

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It's probably the poisonous atmosphere making them cranky.

Junk DNA has been an obsolete term for years. Much of it plays a role in transcription/regulation of gene activity. It's essential for it to be there as a structural support now anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA

thanks for elaborating
more reading to do

Often when I hear the term 'Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars', I chuckle to myself with the knowledge that Venus is a hellish planet with a crushing atmosphere, somewhat predictable cycles of periodic super-volcanic resurfacing events (~once every billion years), poisonous air, and corrosive sulfuric acid rain... Almost all the surface features are also named after famous women. Mars may be cold and radiation bathed, and geologically inert, but with some effort could be made into an Earth-like planet... Needless to say, when I told my girlfriend about this I got a cold stare, ate leftovers for dinner and slept on the couch that night (just kidding- except about the cold stare part)

How? Mars has no more magnetic field to protect against solar flares and not enough gravity to hold an atmosphere.

ruveyn

Long explanation. But it certainly won't be an easy process. And I said 'could', though most of the literature on the subject leads me to think it is possible given the time and technology. Perhaps if not the whole planet then just some of the lower elevation areas. There would need to be some kind of megastructure involved to create an artificial magnetic field around Mars, I imagine. Definitely not happening tomorrow

ah...@#$%^...my avatar for the first couple of years was 'Life on Venus- the first half-second', showing a burning, dissolving, red hot flaky astronaut leaning into a hundred-mile-an-hour wind...
Can't find it now, but you know what I mean...
They did find an alien ship on Venus, haven't you heard of the HeeChee?...

On the other hand, it would make a great supermax prison planet, once you dug down far enough...

There are two chances of terraforming Mars: Slim and None.

We can't even terraform our own planet.

ruveyn

That's not what many very intelligent space advocates seem to think. And we can terraform our planet, we've pretty much accidentally stumbled upon the secret to changing a climate. Organisms are fully capable of changing planetary ecology, its been happening almost since the beginning of life on Earth. If not for the first anaerobic single celled organisms terraforming our planet with their oxygen waste products, we would not be having this discussion here today

The reasons why chances are so low for terraforming Mars someday are not technical, but more financial. It's not that we can't do it, it's that nobody cares enough to do it. What we need to do is find gold on Mars or some other valuable mineral, and then watch the gold rush as everyone flocks to space to be rich.

I'm more in the technical difficulty-feasibility camp, as most of the costs with such ventures are exaggerated. One method that would bring financial gain and also help with warming Mars would be moving much of the heavy GHG polluting industry there. Mars has .39 Earth gravity so its easier to get goods off of the surface, and easier to build a space elevator to do this even cheaper. At this point in time nobody is willing to do it, because we haven't even put Humans there yet. There are many other reasons Mars would bring gain to Earth- one being the prospect of lessening the population burden on Earth. And it is also one of two places in the solar system that have potential to grow plants (including Earth), and therefore food- Mars would be a more logical place to grow food for export elsewhere in the system's industry/colonization drive, as the cost of lifting it off the surface is significantly less. There is also a lot of water on Mars that could be used in a similar manner

Fiddling biology can have unintended consequences. Consider the project to mate the African Bee with the European Honey Bee. The hope was to get very big honey producing bees. What we got were the Killer Bees that produced no honey and a lot of fatal stings.

ruveyn

That's true. But at least it won't be on our planet, right? Its not a bad idea to test out genetic engineering on a place that isn't Earth

fiddling biology has been done for way longer than written records have been kept.

but i do think the more extreme fiddling would be better done somewhere offworld.

Cross killer bees with locust. It would solve a lot of problems.

Mars would be a good place to raise spiders. With .39 G, they would grow huge. Two meter Scorpions could feed on the spiders.

On a good day Mars is slightly above frozen.

New Orleans has unstoppable Formosa Termites, Fire Ants, Nutria, all imports, all destructive. Florida has Burmese Pythons. I have been waging war on an ornamental vine in my yard, so far it has taken over six lots, Roundup does not kill it. Digging it out slows it.

Salt Cedar. Asian ornimental, has taken over the Rio Grande, other western rivers, in less than a hundred years. It kills everything by making the ground salty. It also continues to grow while on fire and under water, producing billions of seeds.

These are the ones we can see. Soil microbes are doing the same.

Cattle and mono cropping have changed the soils, producing desert and drought. A 150 years ago a rich grassland supported 90,000,000 buffalo for thousands of years, we improved that.

We also killed the oceans.

Main Home World systems are failing, fix that first.

The oceans are teeming with living things. We have not yet got the technology to kill the oceans.

If the eruption of the Siberian Traps could not kill the oceans (one million years of lava eruptions and poison gas in the atmosphere and water) then nothing humans have can do it.

ruveyn