The Fourth Age had a video on how the WWII "Myth" is crumbling...a part of me can understand some of that--another part wants to hop in a deuce-and-a-half with the ghost of Steven Ambrose, Sgt. Rock and Rosie..and we're all out of bubble gum. Yeah--call the Greatest generation backwards while thinking fops with pantaloons and powdered wigs aren't dated. NUTS!
As interesting as this train of thought is, I again note it has nothing to do with the colonization of Mars; so it should split into its own topic, should anyone else care enough to submit a request for it.
What exactly ridiculous here? Solar shade is one method that might actually work.
The ridiculous part is how big the umbrella(s) would have to be.
Quite tiny. The idea is basically to have a bunch of big mylar baloons (or mesh) in L1 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, so they would intercept some SMALL percentage of sunlight. Mainly in the part of the spectrum that plants did not use.
It's an interesting proposition indeed
Yeah, it doesn't need to be one giant solid structure. Same for Mars; while you could build a single enormous solar sail to serve as a mirror, you don't need to.
X?Do you mean Elons son?
You realize that engineers and scientists worked on radiation protection for decades?
Oh, but it's the way mankind evolved - by doing things even if it didn't look like mkst reasonable idea at this moment)
futurism.com
I suspect because of antinuclear campaigns, radiation has become a boogeyman people assume is way too complex for us to tackle. While it has challenges, they’re solvable. The primary constraint is how much mass we’re able to add to a system in order to shield it. That’s as true on Mars as it is in space, and there are multiple ways of tackling radiation shielding.
Right. If we only did what was immediately and obviously useful, we’d probably be much poorer, and certainly less happy. Materialism doesn’t tend to think much of the arts, and many of our scientific discoveries have come by accident. There’s a tale about a guy in the Middle Ages who spends most of his time on projects the village needs, but sometimes he takes time to grind down glass into various shapes. The villagers complain that he should be spending all of his time helping them, but their lord protects the guy and says to let him work. They can’t see that one day being able to shape glass leads to glasses, telescopes, and more, only that he isn’t exclusively focused on what they want.
Interesting...
It's not exactly wrong, but a lot of details would have to change as well.
Nothing other than total surveillance and people being ready to jump on a potentially-suicidal hormonal idiot all the time.
Survival of societies like Eskimos means some cultures can have reliability rates high enough to sustain life in hash environments without much tech overmatch.
Humans survive when they have air, water, and food, but if you leave them at the bottom of an empty pool, they only last fifty hours.
Different planet, not a problem. The biggest thing needed to make Mars really into somewhere habitable is getting it either a magnetic field or finding a way to block the solar wind from stripping the atmosphere. Once you do that, the atmosphere will thicken and everything gets easier.
What we should do is send as much in the way of organisms that can live on Mars as it is there to start populating the planet with some sort of life.
I don’t think that’s a serious problem - the rate of atmospheric loss is well below the quantity of gases humanity is able to produce, and while yes, that won’t be the case on Mars for many generations, we can paraterraform much of the planet’s surface in the interim. No doubt someone will try to find a way to do one or the other regardless, but it isn’t strictly necessary.
It is a serious problem. Solar wind was responsible for stripping Mars of a much denser atmosphere.
www.nasa.gov
