Browncoats: Mars Needs You
POSTED BY: MarsOrBust
UPDATED: Saturday, May 13, 2006 01:45
VIEWED: 5954
PAGE 3 of 3
Quote:
Originally posted by citizen:
Gold is believed to be produced within stars, it’s concentrated by ‘hydrolic(hydraulic?) geologic’ processes, not created. There was liquid water on Mars so there’s no reason why there wouldn’t be enough gold to support industry, not a certainty, since we haven’t done geological surveys.
One of the nice things is that if we were starting a new civilization we could ignore the "precious" part of precious metals, so anything we found could be put to use.
Quote:
Do you have any concept how expensive it’s to put payload into orbit, let alone carry it to Mars? You want to pay that price for shit?
ROTFLMAO
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Well, you seem more interested in dissecting everything for the purpose of tearing down the actual concept of settling Mars with technologies that are cheaper and in many instance more reliable than much of the things we currently used that can be said to "over-teched"; technology for technologies sake.
First I never said that the partial terraform would be done with gas-light era technologies; perhaps i should have been clearer on that.
The intial partial terraform would have to be done prior to what I'm talking about by radical means that might involve the nuke idea that you mentioned but I have a feeling that the answer may in fact be in the use of self-replicating nanobots that would burrow and heat the subsurface. This capability may not be as far in the future as is most commonly believed.
Without getting too bogged down in arguments concerning the specifics; the philosophical thrust of Zubrin's text is that civilization is a result of a layering of technologies; starting with the basics; such as mining and the smelting of mineral ores into workable metals; fashioning those metals into basic tools which would be used to make better tools to better tap and manipulate Mars' resources.
As far as your statement about silane being a gas: yes, in ambient terrestrial temperatures silane is a gas. At current Martian ambient temperatures; silane is a semi-solid..so it wouldn't be a log..more like a paste(?) that could be pumped into a ignition chamber for the boiler. After partial terraform raises temps back to the point when silane is a gas, then steam power could give way to a silane combustion engine.
Something else that i should have prefaced my original post with is that this is something that would have to wait until there was substantial infrastructure in Earth/Moon space.
This is something that is pending as the US and China step into the undeclared 2nd Space Race for military supremacy. I strongly recommend anyone with an interest in Humanity's future in Space to read "The Future of War" by George and Meredith Friedmann.
I never meant to suggest that this is how things might look at the beginning. The Mars that I am imagining here is down the road.
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Here I will directly quote "The Case for mars".
"In a series of papers published in the late 1980's, engineer Bruce MacKenzie analyzed this problem in some detail and came to the conclusion that the optimum native material for building the first large structures on Mars is brick. This low-tech concept may seem somewhat suprising at first, but there's actualy quite a lot of merit to the proposal. Making brick on Mars is quite simple. For that reason some of the Earth's first cities were made of brick, and for the very same reason brick may be the literal building block of mankind's first settlements on Mars. To manufacture brick you simply take finely ground soil, wet it, put it into a mold under mild compression, dry it, and then bake it. High temperatures are not really required-in many departs of the world sun-baked bricks are still used-an oven temperature of 300 degrees C can produce pretty good bricks, especially if some scrap material such as torn parachute is mixed into the mud to add cohesion.
Even the 900 degree C kiln temperature needed to make first rate bricks can readily be produced on Mars, using either a solar reflector furnace or the waste heat of a nuclear reactor.
True, water is needed for the process, but if the oven is constructed correctly, nearly all the water used can be recovered from the steam produced as the brick is dried at 200 degrees C prior to baking.
On Mars, excellent raw material for brick manufacture is available nearly everywhere in the form of a finely ground, iron-rich clay-like dust that covers most of the surface to a depth of at least several tens of centimeters.
Mixed with water, the same ruddy dust can be used to produce mortar to make the bricks stick together. In fact, in experiments done at Martin-Marietta in the late 1980's with martian soil simulant( based on Viking data), chemist Robert Boydshowed that by simply wetting and drying martian soil, "duricrete"material could be created that is over half as strong as terrestrial concrete. Viking results show that Martian soil contains very high amounts of calcium (about 5%) and sulfur (2.9%), while anaylsis of SNC meteorites, which are known to have come from mars,has shown that thes are present in the form of gypsum.
On Earth, gypsum is the raw material used to make plaster, and it can be baked to produce lime. This can be added to the mortar to produce conventional Portland cement, with a resulting significant improvement in tensile strength.
Structural materials have different kinds of strength, tensile and compressive, reflecting their ability to resist stretching and crushing, respectively. A rope or cable can have a great deal of tensile strength, but no compressive strength. A steel girder has plently of both kinds of strength.
Brick walls and columns, on the other hand, have plently of compressive strength but are quite weak in tension. Thet are very difficult to crush but are almost useless at holding things together.
Nevertheless, brick and mortar structures built three thousand years ago in ancient Egypt still stand today. Constructions made of brick can prove equally durable on Mars provided that martian architects adopt the central rule governing nearly all ancient architecture: keep brick structures in compression.
To build a pressurized structure out of bricks on Mars, you excavate a trench and then within it build a roman-style vault, or better yet, a series of roman-style vaults or even a roman style atrium. The vaults are covered with soil, therby putting a large downward load upon them, and only then are pressurized with breathable air.
How much soil covering needed depends upon how much air pressure is used. If we stick to a proposed standard of 5 psi (3.5 psi oxygen, 1.5 psi nitrogen; as in Skylab)the vaults will experience a pressure force trying to explode them upward at 3.5 tonnes per square meter. Assuming that Martian soil has an average density of 4 times that of water, this would mean that a layer of dirt2.5 meters deep on top of the vault would be enough to keep the whole structu
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Whatever, if you weren't interested in having a discussion on the topic maybe you can explain to me why you bothered posting to a forum in the first place?
Fact is given the cost benefit ratio of landing on Mars during the initial stages and the fact that in today’s society it would have to be private ventures that did much of the civilian settlement, I don't see the major obstacle as technological but economic. And no I don't believe we will be settling mars with 19th century technology because it's impractical, as picturesque as this 'Jules Verne' world may be.
There are reasons why we still don't use Steam engines and other examples of 19th century technology, and those reasons are not 'technology for technologies sake'.
Quote:Well you did kinda say that, but no matter.
Originally posted by MarsOrBust:
First I never said that the partial terraform would be done with gas-light era technologies
Quote:Self replicating nano-bots? We can't even build nano scale cogs that don't where out within seconds. All credible nano-tech research is aimed at material technologies, self replicating nano-bots are a long way off.
The intial partial terraform would have to be done prior to what I'm talking about by radical means that might involve the nuke idea that you mentioned but I have a feeling that the answer may in fact be in the use of self-replicating nanobots that would burrow and heat the subsurface. This capability may not be as far in the future as is most commonly believed.
Quote:Well this is nothing new, it's obvious but I don't see how it proves a damn thing in the specific circumstance of Mars.
Without getting too bogged down in arguments concerning the specifics; the philosophical thrust of Zubrin's text is that civilization is a result of a layering of technologies; starting with the basics; such as mining and the smelting of mineral ores into workable metals; fashioning those metals into basic tools which would be used to make better tools to better tap and manipulate Mars' resources.
Quote:Silane has a boiling point of ~-112c, so it's quite gaseous on Mars. In low pressure enviroments the boiling point would be lower.
As far as your statement about silane being a gas: yes, in ambient terrestrial temperatures silane is a gas. At current Martian ambient temperatures; silane is a semi-solid..so it wouldn't be a log..more like a paste(?) that could be pumped into a ignition chamber for the boiler.
Quote:The US already has the lead by quite some way, all they have to do is fund NASA properly while not making unrealistic demands, setting it up to fail, so to speak. Unfortunately there's an idiot evangelist in the White House who has a general disdain for all science, so setting NASA up to fail is exactly what he's done.
This is something that is pending as the US and China step into the undeclared 2nd Space Race for military supremacy. I strongly recommend anyone with an interest in Humanity's future in Space to read "The Future of War" by George and Meredith Friedmann.
Quote:We have many of the technologies required now to terraform Mars, we just can't realistically get there. I still don't see a 19th century approach though. For instance I'd trust an Air-Tight inflatable dome before I'd trust a porous brick building that has to be built underground to prevent explosive decompression. Such a thing might be the shanty towns of a partially terraformed Mars, but I'd be most surprised if it were the norm.
I never meant to suggest that this is how things might look at the beginning. The Mars that I am imagining here is down the road.
If your interested in these things you may like to read the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Mars ). It's fiction but interesting and a good read nonetheless. You'd probably like this site to: http://www.redcolony.com/
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
And as you know, these are open forums, you're
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