Mars vs Arizona vs the Australian Outback

Post Reply New Topic

all true,

i simply find the notion that other (rock) planets should "look" "alien" bugs me,
they are all formed from the same laws and under the same sun, i have no idea what planets in other solar systems look like but i doubt a rock planet would look too different.

now if we talk the different classes of planets there is a true difference.

aesthetically i love the red sand one can find in various places, there is a beach on malta where the sand looks pink to the naked eye(it was hard to catch the color on camera)

Mercurey would be indistinguishable from the surface of the moon.

But Mars looks as "good" as the Atacama Desert, parts of the Sahara, or even parts of Nevada Ive seen.

It has enough of an atmosphere to have an earthlike sky and though it has moon like areas of just craters it does have other types of landscapes as we can see in the pictures.


So Mars does look like a thoroughly vegatation-free version of a terrestrial desert with an oddly close horizon (because its a smaller planet).

It would be cool to see a tourist-eye-view of some Mars features we can see only from above like Olympus Mons ( a volcano two and a half times the hieght of Everest but only six percent as tall as it is broad) or the edge of Valley Marinaris. The later is known popularly as the "Maritian Grand Canyon" thats a hundred times as big as our grand Canyon. Actually the Maritian "Canyon" was not created by water erosion like ours, but by a feable Maritian version of plate tectonics with a little added sculpturing by wind. Both in scale and in formation it is more akin to the Great Rift Valley of Africa ( both are dozens of miles wide and thousands of miles long) than it is to Arizona's Grand Canyon.

Quite, whereas for the planet Venus a trip to it would be nearly equivalent to Shake n' Bake. If high temperature electronics were developed, such that they didn't need refrigeration for the lead on the circuit boards not to melt, there is the possibility of having robotic probes last longer than 4 hours there, but no living thing would ever be able to survive that vacation. Mars however gets cold, but the cold of Mars is far more easily and safely dealt with than the 900°F of a planet sized convection oven called Venus.

i was trying to make the point that the actual look of a rock planet is pretty consistent it is the life of a planet that makes it unique,
of course there is actual differences but from an aesthetic point of view i think there is more variation here on earth than there is between non life rock planets.

we often end up in the colonization end of space discussion

high temperature electronics would only need to include the most basic electronics needed, any sophisticated electronics could be located in the cloud layer aboard control craft, that way that part of the equipment could even be used for many probes.
also one would probably use copper something that requires above 1000 degrees celsius to melt, the real issue is insulation and consistency of the electrical signals (temp change equals R change equals bad)

as for manned missions, wont happen till much later in the development of a "space infrastructure", when the risk and price is far less than that of today.

Unfortunately the environmentalists will never let humans colonize Mars.

There are not many countries with such stunning natural beauty as the US, Nepal comes to mind. But then to admire the beauty of the US one must contend with the general culture

But when it comes to seascapes OZ has the edge over most countries I have visited





Of course not forgetting the stunningly beautiful glass house mountains



@Rehhan, meh who cares if this has no relevance to PPR, we tend to hang out together here in this little corner of PPR so why not have a bit of fun enjoying some of the most beuatiful spots on this planet

You mean this one



Sad but true, in oz there was a craze of making 'Big' things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia's_big_things#List_of_.27big_things.27_.28by_state_.2F_territory.29 although technically this Uluru should not be include as this one is somewhat smaller than the original

That would depend on whether there's already life on Mars. I thought that environmentalists were concerned about eco-systems. I there are no eco-systems on Mars then why shouldn't we colonize it?

How can that stop a nation that is ready and willing to launch. How many battalions and divisions do the viros have?

ruveyn

If asked I'm sure they'd be willing to do a Project Steve to show how numerous they are, but of course it would be only in response to antagonists and not an argument in itself. Either way, if they were to be launched onto the surface of the sun they'd probably calm down with their bickering about anthropogenic global warming.

The only way we could colonize Mars is with detonations of atomic explosives to propel the ships. The environmentalists would never go for that.

Nope, that's the only way we'd get to Alpha Centauri. We only need conventional thrusters to get to Mars, perhaps ships built in orbit from lunar material also for mass colonization, but nuclear pulse propulsion is unnecessary for transportation to Mars.

One thing nice about Carl Sagans proposed Alpha Centauri mission is that it would be the only way to get rid of the entire worlds arsenal of nuclear weapons. The mission would be costly with a 1.5 trillion dollar price tag but infinitely cheaper than the destruction of nuclear weapons. Since the journey would take 40 years a generational starship would have to be built with very few of the original astronauts entering the new promised land if it exists.

I think that with a generational ship it would be possible for the offspring to be "homeschooled"/taught by their parents and they'd probably be better trained for it since they'd have not only the textbooks for confirmation of information but also the experience, encouragement, and guidance of their own parents. Make sure the people sent are on the upper end of the bell curve though and everyone of them having a vast general knowledge individually in addition to a vast library aboard.

with storage space becoming ever cheaper and quantum computers now in comercial production a compedium of all knowledge and the "greatest" 5000 authors(if all isnt possible) or so wouldnt be that large of a problem to fit aboard.

is there really a need for a generational ship perse? they would of course need offspring at some point but i wonder if a tin can between stars is the best place for it or if a more permanent colony could be established first (not as in a real colony more a habitat)

i havent heard anything new about suspended animation but there was a drug they were testing on monkeys while lowering core temp., supposedly it worked as intended (was 5 years ago or so i read the article)

wasnt sagans goal to reach around 0.5 C? if so what would be the dilation effects at that speed? (i reckon something along the line of 70-80% of the earths reference frame)

At 0.5 c, the gamma would be: Relativistic gamma = sqrt ( 1 - (v/c)^2) = sqrt ( 1 - (0.5^2)) = sqrt ( 1 - 0.25) = sqrt (0.75) = 0.87

So, for time dilation, the time aboard ship would equal the time it would travel according to the Galilean calculation multiplied by the relativistic gamma, such that for traveling to Alpha Centauri it would appear to an observer on Earth that we'd take 4.3 lightyears divided by 0.5 lightyears per year, or 8.6 years. The time aboard ship for that would be the 8.6 observed by observers on Earth times the gamma, or 8.6 years * 0.87 = 7.5 years.

However, if there are not any terraformable or artificially habitable worlds in the Alpha Centauri tri-star system, we'd have to go further out and that might require a generation ship. For as boring as it may sound to live aboard a ship, I would see it personally no different than living in an apartment or a submarine and I'd rather live with that than be put in some sort of experimental human freezer.