posted
1) Terraforming Luna gets a lot easier with artificial gravity.
2) The real reason Mars is still red in Star Trek is that, for the shot of the Utopia Planetia Shipyards, the CGI house used real photos of Utopia Planetia.
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posted
Mars should be spared because of it's "redness"? That's so funny I'll go write it down.
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posted
Have any of you read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars)? It's about the terraforming of Mars. Anyways, there's a group of persons in these novels who are against terraforming because they believe it's wrong for us to mess up Mars' original environment. Simply stated, they are against terraforming because Mars would no longer be red.
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Alpha Centauri
Usually seen somewhere in the Southern skies
Member # 338
posted
And not to forget religious and ethical aspects. Even if there is no life present on Mars, no matter how primitive, some people's ethics challenge Martian terraforming, because 'Mars was always like that, so why change it'? I'm really pissed off because of some people's poor ethics, occasionaly. The same for religious argument. Look, I'm not religious, and I'm totally disturbed if someone rejects things like genetic engineering, because 'God created it, and why would we modify it?'. The same might be for Mars terraforming, with Earth's population being majorly religious, they might question the whole idea by giving the argument 'God created Mars, it was what he wanted, and as creatures fabricated by His powers, we are not allowed to do anything about it'.
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posted
I don't think there was any time to terraform Mars. They started flying to Mars in the late 20th century in DY-ships. Then there probably wasn't spaceflight during WW3, and there was definately no budget for terraforming during Eugenics Wars, interbellum and WW3 (there was only budget to build a friggin' Millenium Tower ). Then, in 2063, Cochrane invented a warp ship on a sunny afternoon in his backyard. Earth all of a sudden had Vulcans and acces to other Class M worlds. There was no need and no budget to do a terraform project on Mars. When the UFP was formed and there was a budget, it became unlogical to terraform Mars. There where already people living on Mars, and BTW, they had their own Constitution, so they probably wouldn't even want no terraforming.
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Having virtually terraformed Mars in the past while playing SimEarth, I can tell you that--from a starship construction standpoint--it wouldn't be a good idea.
Why? Because terraforming adds things like oceans. And Utopia Planitia would become one. Yes, I KNOW it's primarily orbital yards, but there IS a ground facility as seen in "Parallels"...
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posted
The amount of money you put into terraforming is postively correlated with speed: the more you spend, the faster you can get finished. (At some point, I suppose, the terraforming becomes self-sustaining, sort of like the greenhouse effect. Shik, is this true?) So once the planet is colonized, it might be relatively painless to invest a small percentage of your money in terraforming, which can be done with a wide variety of strategies in a variety of price ranges: bacterial seeding, orbital mirrors, crashing ice asteroids, lasering the permafrost, changing albedo, manufacturing gases, etc. Aside from drowning all your low-lying areas, terraforming should make life easier by cutting down on solar radiation; raising atmospheric pressures, temperatures, and humidity; and cutting down on that damned dust. Of course, you don't have to terraform the planet to the level of oceans; perhaps enough to make the lower elevations (like low-lying planitia) more pleasant.
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Yeah, there's various ways of doing it in Simearth. They give you little O2, CO2, & N2 generators you can place around the planet...you can fiddle with albedo & all the other atmospheric stuff like heat retention. Y'need to crash ice meteors into the planet for water, though.
It does self-sustain, but you can overlook the oddest things; I had a fulling thriving planet complete with human populations (well, mammal populations--there's no species differential)...but while checking the air sample at one point, I noticed that the pressure was at about 480 atmospheres. Oops. Yet the little buggers never complained or died off or nothin'.
------------------ "Do you know how much YOU'RE worth??.....2.5 million Woolongs. THAT'S your bounty. I SAID you were small fry..." --Spike Spiegel
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Yup! I made robots! Even made them sentient. The problem with robots, though, is that they're like a plague; they literally spread everywhere & the only way t'get rid of the bastards is to nuke/volcano/meteor the entire planetary surface. Nice was to start over, though.
------------------ "Do you know how much YOU'RE worth??.....2.5 million Woolongs. THAT'S your bounty. I SAID you were small fry..." --Spike Spiegel
posted
Masao! Yes I've read the KSR Trilogy! Wow - they are the most AMAZING books... Have you read the follow up short story/anthology called "The Martians".
Andrew
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posted
I bought "The Martians" a few months ago but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. I'm afraid that I'll have forgotten any events referred to in the first or second book, since I read them quite a few years ago.
To all you others, I wholeheartedly and unreservedly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy!!!
------------------ When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
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