that's just the thing though - they're not. they're specifically designed not to be. each plate is pretty much a big British countryside, only in space and without people from Yorkshire.

the only real difference between living in one of those and living on Earth is that if you looked up in the sky in one of those you'd see two other big world-slices, which would be kind of unsettling but eventually you'd get used to it. it wouldn't even be a "getting used to" thing, really, since the people living there would be bigwig scientists and physicists and ultra-smart best-of-the-best people and they'd have kids and their children would grow up never actually thinking it's particularly weird.

ed also i think there's bridges over those big windows so you can move between the world-plates, which would probably drive acrophobes completely insane.

Sigged for epicness.

:slap:

Hmm, well those systems, while possible, are completely ridiculous for a civilization like us to consider at the moment. It will be much easier for us to colonize and eventually terraform Mars, and while that is less efficient, it is much easier for us to do.

I'd also appreciate it if you could PM me a link to that topic you were talking about. Though as long as it isn't full of porm I'm pretty sure it's okay to link here.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Is it easier to create a stable and self-sustaining ecosystem on Mars or make a big-ass rotating space station?

Humanity has never, and still doesn't, care about going somewhere and destroying the native people and their culture to get whatever it wants out of the area. Any life we find would probably be some kind of microbe or whatever. And you can bet there will be no issues with disturbing or destroying it.

Well terraforming would certainly be a challenge but making habitable biodomes on Mars would be much much easier than making such an enormous space station.

One of the hardest things to do would be getting all of that material into space. Even if we got the materials from the moon, with our current technology it would cost a ridiculous amount of money to move something only a few tons heavy. Consider how long the ISS took to make. We had to send one or two rooms at a time over the course of years because it cost so much to send the rooms up into orbit.

At our current tecnological capabilities, building anything more than two or three times bigger than the ISS would be absolutely impossible. But a habitat on Mars is much easier to create.

Yes, it's much easier to get the required material safely to Mars than it is into orbit around Earth.

We're talking about Mars bio-domes vs giant space stations, no? Because if so, then yes, it is. We cannot build a big enough space station with our current technology, and don't even get me started on the fuel required to keep that thing from sinking back to earth from low-earth orbit. However, it is much easier to send one or two rockets to Mars carrying small habitats and vehicles before sending our astronauts there. And as we get more money, we can send more and more materials and eventually we'll start to have a small colony. Unlike the space station, we don't have to worry about keeping the colony safely in orbit and having them avoid debris, because they'll be safe on the Martian soil.

First he ninja's my epic quote I just read

Then two posts later he swipes my retort

Keep it up, veeno, just keep it up :swear:
:P

'kay, ditsyness aside and agreeing with the great mind that is dr. veeno
Near space colonisation will have to occure before planetary colonisation because a near earth orbital industry must be in place before serious colonisation of other planets like Mars can even be considered. For one, the spaceships for Mars colonisation and such would be assembled in space, and that means a work force.

Riight, where was I.. hey lookit here, a topic, lets hop back on that.
I'm kinda territorial when it comes to the yay or nay hands off to planets with life debate.. if it's in our solar system I'm actually leaning towards the
'our backyard, we were here first, tough cookies' in the truest sense of expanding life.

But there a limit to that as well. If it's out of the Petri dish, and seems to exibit signs of emerging intelligent life (starts rooting for the Chicago cubs for example), or actual sentient intelligence (cubs season ticket holders) then I uphold the prime directive thingy -especially if I can borrow the season tickets once and a while :hehe:





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an' Acky no longer want da greeny martian peoples to poke da probe thingy in me bum

That's what a moon base would be for. :shrug:

I thought that the lesson of that movie was that if you want to colonize a planet you need really big guns :mellow:

we ARE technologically capable of doing it, though. the specifics still need to be engineered, but that's more a matter of funding. dipping into politics for the briefest of seconds - if the bank bailout package had gone to space r&d we'd've been able to mine some asteroids and build a few colonies.

also, we wouldn't be building it on Earth and sending it into space - we'd be building it IN space, mining asteroids and working from the moon.

i don't get how you think it would be more cost-effective to send stuff to and from MARS than to send stuff to and from Earth's orbit.

So it's still basically a colony in Earth's orbit before a colony on another planet.

Two words.

Death
Star

No longer? [censored] [censored] [censored] [censored].

:D

Reality is much less fantastical as you're making it sound. Mining an asteroid? We haven't even landed a man on the moon since the 70's, and you want us to mine asteroids? Building a ship that could safely land on an asteroid, mine it, and haul it all back to Earth would cost an ungodly amount of money. Money which could better go to developing colonies on the Moon or Mars.

This is 2010, not 2100. Reality is that humans haven't left low earth orbit in decades, and we haven't even finished building the ISS yet despite all of the years we've been working on it. And in 2010, most space agencies see the future and envision Mars and the Moon, not low-earth orbit. It is much easier for countries to work together to land humans on Mars than it is to build them a nice little laboratory hovering over earth that will eventually just plummet back down again. Maybe in the future we'll be able to make something like a giant space station but civilization is not ready for that yet.



There's a gigantic difference between a base on a rocky body orbiting a planet and a base orbiting miles above a planet.

Couldn't we somehow use the Mass Relays to speed up the process?

the entire crux of your argument is "funding". space funding is virtually nonexistent. we haven't landed a man on the moon since the '70s not because it's particularly HARD but because it's expensive as hell.

asteroid mining is entirely feasible, relatively easy, and ridiculously lucrative. all it needs is investors. the smallest asteroid near Earth contains approximately US$20,000,000,000,000 worth of metal.

if you seriously think the cost of setting up a long-term asteroid mining operation outweighs the cost of building a temporary research base on Mars you're a very silly person!

ed also http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3208219.

ed2 stealing from that thread one last time - that $20tril is roughly ten times as much metal as has been mined and processed in the history of mankind.

ed3 should've been US$20,000,000,000,000 ($20 trillion)

Then you're still stuck with a double gravity well


I knew your doctors degree was deserved, sneaky observation

Best place for a near earth station would be the lagrange L5 area between earth and the moon.

After that in orbits above the poles because they would always get enough sun for the solar panels.

Third, the moon.

after that we're in a good place to put loads of peeps on ant other planet in the solar system we want..







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Err.. no longer, no more, no ever.. day hurts me bottoms an'' makes me undies shaff :blush:

Hmm. If we find life somewhere else we will most likely kill it off as we are doing so well on this planet or be decimated by the life force. Another planet to colonize would be good, seeing as we are rapidly running out of room here, but that will raise the question of "Who leaves and who stays?" although it will probably be split 50-50 among the population for what they want to do so it really wouldn't matter anyway.

I think we should focus more on colonizing deserts before we move onto other planets.

Yes, and there in lies the problem. Lots of things would be possible if funding was available, but funding isn't. You have to keep in mind that NASA and other space agencies are focused on science. And there's only so much you can do on a lab in low-earth orbit. But humans on Mars would provide TONS of scientific data. And that's why space agencies want to go there. For science. And we have probes to go to asteroids to do our science for us.

Serious asteroid mining isn't going to be in the agenda of any space agency of a government. Sure, commercial spacecraft can do it, but again, this is 2010, and no commercial spacecraft has even reached low-earth orbit yet, so I have this weird feeling that, well, they aren't exactly ready to mine asteroids just yet.

That's why I have stock options in these guys

http://www.virgingalactic.com/

http://www.thespaceshipcompany.com/

yay me :celebration:


edit:
actually, how can any right minded person not have a share in what is and will ever be in the history of man

"the first commercial spaceship building company"

right?


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uh-oh.. dis mean Acky gonna go up inna space thingy again

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_of_United_States_Human_Space_Flight_Plans_Committee thinks it's worth looking into, which means about as much as "i think we should build a base on Mars", so.

ed also i http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3208219! you should totally read it he explains things better than i can since he's actually involved in this kind of stuff and i'm just an angry unemployed neckbeard.

Where did it say that? It's 6 AM so I wouldn't be surprised if I missed it, but all I saw was them stressing how important Mars and the Moon were... which seems to be exactly what I was saying. It also says "It did not emphasize options such as asteroid mining."