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Old 08-01-2019, 02:24 AM   #11
dcarson
 
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Default Re: Aerogel martian habitats.

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Originally Posted by Prince Charon View Post
Stick one end of a wormhole in Venus's atmosphere, and the other end in the atmosphere of Mars, and you're in business - if you have the tech to pull that off, anyway. Was thinking of using that in a psi-tech setting, but it would be much harder to justify in TS.
Read a pulp era SF short story where they were bulldozing ice on Pluto into a gate that dumped it on Mercury and then the resulting river of boiling water flows through another gate to Mars.
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Old 08-01-2019, 07:07 AM   #12
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Default Re: Aerogel martian habitats.

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I think they wanted 1 bar so the surface temperature would reach 273K, not so the water wouldn't evaporate.
Mars' surface temperature occasionally exceeds 273K locally even under current conditions. If I recall correctly, it would reach an average of 273K well before 1 bar (500-600 mb?).
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Old 08-02-2019, 01:32 PM   #13
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Default Re: Aerogel martian habitats.

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What about getting rid of the sulfuric clouds?
More bioengineered bacteria for that, I think.
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Old 08-02-2019, 07:05 PM   #14
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Default Re: Aerogel martian habitats.

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Read a pulp era SF short story where they were bulldozing ice on Pluto into a gate that dumped it on Mercury and then the resulting river of boiling water flows through another gate to Mars.
I like it! A steam heated Mars.
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Old 08-02-2019, 07:07 PM   #15
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Default Re: Aerogel martian habitats.

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More bioengineered bacteria for that, I think.
I've read that platinum catalysts could be used somehow. But I'd go with biotech too.
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Old 08-02-2019, 07:11 PM   #16
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Default Re: Aerogel martian habitats.

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I've read that platinum catalysts could be used somehow. But I'd go with biotech too.
Catalysts make a reaction that would happen anyway faster (sometimes much faster), but mostly the way you neutralize acids is by combining them with a like amount of base.
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Old 08-04-2019, 01:05 AM   #17
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Catalysts make a reaction that would happen anyway faster (sometimes much faster), but mostly the way you neutralize acids is by combining them with a like amount of base.
Leaving the question of what to do with the salt, of course.

It's too early to get too excited about either an optimistic or pessimistic appraisal of terraforming prospects, or terraforming technologies. Maybe we'll discover there's more CO2 on Mars than we know about in some form or another, maybe we'll discover that Mars' gravity and mass are just too low to make it work CO2 or not. Maybe, by the time we're ready to try terraforming it, we'll have tech that looks like magic to us now. Maybe we won't.

Still, I've thought for a long time that SF tends to understate the difficulty and complexity of terraforming. A rule of thumb I use to remind myself of the scale of terraforming operations: imagine if someone put out a tender for a project to move the Atlantic Ocean somewhere else.

That helps put this stuff in perspective.
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Old 08-04-2019, 01:21 AM   #18
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Still, I've thought for a long time that SF tends to understate the difficulty and complexity of terraforming.
Well, realistic timescales wind up not being very interesting. I mean, it took about two billion years for Earth to go from the initial evolution of blue-green algae to having a breathable atmosphere.
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Old 08-04-2019, 08:36 AM   #19
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Default Re: Aerogel martian habitats.

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Well, realistic timescales wind up not being very interesting. I mean, it took about two billion years for Earth to go from the initial evolution of blue-green algae to having a breathable atmosphere.
That was the time needed for the oceans to rust. I kid you not. Billions of tons of dissolved Iron bound all the oxygen for a billion or so years.
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Old 08-04-2019, 11:07 AM   #20
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That was the time needed for the oceans to rust. I kid you not. Billions of tons of dissolved Iron bound all the oxygen for a billion or so years.
That was part of it, but a lot of it was just being slow.
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