Beyond earth: pt 2 Terraforming Mars and Venus

At this point they can begin the terraforming process.  Earth can digitally send plans to build sulfur hexafloride plants the most powerful greenhouse gas known to science, breathing it actually has the opposite effect of helium, there are youtube videos on this.  With the planet warming the atmosphere will get a bit thicker since the CO2 won’t freeze into dry ice at night.   Ice caps will start melting, releasing water.  Wel will start growing lichen and then other drought tolerant plants and microbiota, using algae produced fertilizer to convert the soil to arable use.

We will have a factory dedicated to building balloons, that reflect heat back to the plan

et’s surface, as clouds will be rare in the beginning.  They will also act to replace the missing magnetic field and block absorb or reflect some of the harmful cosmic rays, using gamma or high energy light to power them, they will have material that traps protons, alpha and beta ray, stripped helium and electrons from solar winds and puts them back into the atmosphere to replace Hydrogen and Helium removed by solar winds removed 3-4 billion of years ago without a magnetic field.  I will guess that in the next 50 years, synthetic materials will easily be embedded with solar powered proton pumps and ion channels that bacteria have, to pull hydrogen and helium from the air when balloon pressure gets too low and eject it when the pressure gets too high.

  The martian ecosystem will be the biggest experiment in evolution ever seem.  Every animal we bring will be small.  Tiny dogs, cats, rabbits, pygmy goats, rodents, tea cup pigs, insects.  Once they become feral in their new tree filled forests and fields, we will see evolution pick up the pace and fill niches faster than we could have imagined.  Giantism in some species could evolve in a few 100 years if there was enough resources.   We may just put temporary suppressor genes or methylations though and create runt members of a species for transport and then suppress those suppressors working their way up slowly by generation so they can bear full sized offspring of their species.  At that small size we may also temporarily speed up their fertility and gestation rates to allow for a larger new stock population.

Humans may also have the first speciation event since Homo erectus or earlier.  1/3rd gravity may very well affect human fertility, and select for humans that can carry children to term in low gravity.   We may grow longer and with less muscle mass but larger cardiovascular systems for the thinner atmosphere that at full strength may still feel like a very high altitude .  A martian visiting earth will require a grueling workout routine before and on the way to earth just to be able to function in earth’s gravity and air pressure.

People will live on the equator, currently the equator has a high temperature of 80F, though that number will increase to 90 or 100. Small changes to equatorial temperatures causes extremely large temperature rises on the rest of the planet.  If we were able to collect enough hydrogen or just mine asteroids for water and hit the planet with ice, a giant ocean could exist on the north half of the planet and the entire equator would be tropical beachside property.

Of course the moon will be our first attempt to build these modules.  Although everything but the 2 bioreactors can work on the moon.  The bioreactors may have to be built on a carbon and water rich asteroid carried to circle the moon.  NASA is hoping to do so in the next ten to 20 years.  Space elevators will be even cheaper on the moon with such low gravity, so the oxygen and hydrogen from split water will easily get us from the asteroid to the space elevators cheaply with supplies and produced chemicals.  There will be little to no point in terreforming the moon, and the moon with stocks of helium 3 will be the best place to build antimatter plants.  We may terreform it in its tiny atmosphere to have a small amount more oxygen so getting stuck out on the surface won’t be as deadly, but thats the best we will be able to do without tech we are unaware of at the moment.

The we will move on to Venus, or once we have the modules built on the moon we may do them in tandem with mars.  the temperature and pressure on Venus is too dangerous to live on the surface, but a balloon filled with one atmosphere of air can float just fine among the clouds so we will set up balloon based outposts and colonies later on on Venus.  We will have to cart a few mineral rich asteroids into Venus’s orbit to provide metal that is too dangerous to reach the surface.    Rocket launches and landings will be similar to space ship one and 2 just without the white knight and replaced by ballloon/jet hybrids so the amount of fuel needed to get from Venus to and from the asteroid will be much less than it would be from the surface.

The robot mining group the refinery and maybe the machining plant will be located on the asteroid to ensure the least amount of wasted material will have to be sent to Venus.   The balloons used to heat up mars will be built on overdrive to cool down Venus.   These balloon will be very long and thin and will turn sideways at night to allow heat to escape the planet, but block heat, radiation and solar winds from hitting the planet.  I calculated depending on how much Earth feels like spending, it could take 50 to 300 years to build enough balloons to cool venus to a livable temperature at the poles.  It may take 100 years or more to vent all of the trapped heat off, however I do not know the thermodynamics of planetary heat loss in this formula.  Terraforming Venus has a lot more advantages to terreforming mars.  Gravity is extremely close to that of earth requiring less body adjustment, and there a much larger area of land to live on.  The equator will be so hot and dry that living in the interior of the continent Aphrodite would be suicide, but once we’ve collected enough hydrogen from solar winds and re ocean it, along the beaches might be fine.    The Ishtar and Lada continents along the polls will be nice as well though they unfortunately will have the arctic-style nights long nights which will lead to some interesting evolution.

However there is the negative impact of a day lasting 2/3rds of an earth year and a year being even shorter than that, however by that time we will have had another 150 years of scientific exponential research under our belt and we may be able to use the geophysics to increase the spin of the planet, and get the core spinning again like in the really awful movie the core where they used 5 nuclear bombs but physicists calculated it would require around 120 of those bombs in different areas of the planet to work like that.   Complicate it more by the fact that Venus spins backwards and may have been slowed down and lost its spinning core by exchanging energy with the sun so we would have to reverse the spin then get it up to somewhere near earth day speed.  Until this happens  I can see species following the long night, eating the freshly thawed carrion of animals that either got old or tired and the night winter caught them.

I’ve been wanting to do a post on this subject for a while but it wasn’t until the ideas of self-replication modules for colonies that I felt I would have enough material.  I could go on and on about exciting futurism hundreds of year away but it can get into some serious tedium which is where I am at the moment.  So I hoped you enjoyed and got you to look forward to the future, even if life extension doesn’t materialize in our lifetime and we don’t get to see or experience it.  Take care!

Beyond Earth: Outpost vs Colonies.

Recently a speaker, on a ForaTV discussion, pointed out that the current one-way mission to mars that private companies are planning for 2018 will be hardly a martian Colony, it will be an outpost.  In an outpost, such as the Antarctic research base, people live there but nothing is made there.  Everything that keeps them alive comes from warmer areas.  On mars other than some 3-D printed repair parts from martian rock, and the plants and insects for food, the outpost will be completely dependant on long term unmanned deliveries from Earth.

    The discussion got me thinking, so what technology will be required for a true colony?  What will be required is a replicatable infrastructure on the planet to can be used to duplicate itself over and over again to achieve all of the inhabitant’s needs.  Until that happens, shipping anything will be too expensive to allow the people to live with comforts anywhere close to that of earth.  I calculated that 8 essential modules will be required to make a colony in the future.   The overhead for sending these will be massive, and they may require quite a few trips for each module  but once they are operational and working in tandem, they will be capable of replicating and never require that level of tech to be sent through space again.

So here are the list of modules we will need

1)    First and foremost will be a gas plant.  The gas plant, which is used on earth will collect atmospheric gases freeze then, separating them based on temperature levels where varying gases convert to liquids.  On mars where it gets cold enough to turn CO2 into dry ice at night, it may be a perfect time to collect gases.  While growing plants will convert most CO2 in martian air into breathable oxygen, we will need purified gases for the other modules.

2)

The second module will be an algae bioreactor plant that will take sunlight and produce many different things from sunlight and CO2 in the martian air.  Algae will produce many chemicals and many nutrients as well as oxygen.  That algae will fix the carbon in the air into biomass that can be converted into plastics.  Any chemical that the algae can’t produce will be created by way of number.

3)

The biochemical microbial plant

This plant will use nutrients produced by the algae and convert them into any chemical they need via genetically modified yeasts and bacteria.    With these, they will be able to produce medicines, chemical solvents, and basically any chemical they desire.

4)

The synthetic material plant.  This plant will convert biomass from algae using chemicals made in the biochemical plant into any plastic or synthetic material one could want.  Each one of these modules will be as compact and minimalistic as possible for transport with as limited of specialized output as possible, but once they start replicating they can make much larger modules and receive blueprints and recipes digitally from earth. No space travel required.

5)

Mining robot group

This module will mine, prospect and collect metals and rocks from mars that can be processed later.  At first their progress will be small as they will be tiny but as they collect enough, the robots can be built bigger and bigger.  Thanks to geological satellites circling Mars, GIS imaging will help these robots to easily prospect for materials needed.

Much like early earth before we started to use metals and minerals, mars has a lot of important minerals and metals just sitting out on the surface, making deep mining unnecessary hopefully for a decade or so.

6)

Metal Refinery

Once the robots get back with their finds, the minerals will have to be processed.  Gas from the gas plant will be used for deep heating to process the materials.  They may have a nanoprocessing system in them as well, though that may end up needing its own module.  I did not place it as essential because the refinery should be able to do it, but engineers may decide its needs its own.

7)

Factory/machine shop

This module will take the refined materials and shape them using 3D printers, 3D cutters and other forms or processing.  The machine shop will them finish and smooth the product and make modifications.  This may also have to be split into 2 modules depending.  A robotic assembly plant that can be built by the inhabitants will make their lives much easier once completed

But wait you ask, how is all of this powered?

That is what the final module will do.

8)

An integrated circuit plant.  This plant will print circuit boards as needed for computers and robots as new printers are beginning to show real promise in this field.  It will also print microfluidic boards used to make Gene sequencers and bioanalyzers.  And finally it will be able to print solar panels that will power all of their needs.  The factory will also be able to build wind turbines.  Initially Earth will have to send the bare basic number of solar panels to let the plant work at minimum operation.  Building more solar panels and turbines will be their initial top task to allow more and more output that will rise exponentially over time.   Printed batteries are becoming more and more viable as well these days for down time storage.

Once the plant is at full capacity and they have built vehicles to transport farther, the next phase of their mission will be to build an exact duplicate plant, because until they have more than one they are still dependant on the earth in case a critical part breaks.  Once they have replicated each of these modules once or twice they will be able to then call themselves an independent colony.   They will still exchange science research with each other and the Martian colony will provide extremely valuable science and experiments that would be impossible on earth.  They can set up a space elevator for cheap space travel as the gravity is 1/3rd that of earth.  All transport from the Earth will be for people, luxury items and small animals.  It will be the first human colony that starts out with solid high tech science, as opposed to one that starts living off nature and maturing into science.

ForaTV’s Colony talk

Science Muck pt 2 of 2

The non-entertainment area of Youtube and the internet in general is a group experiment in the raising of human consciousness and knowledge and we correct each other if we are open-minded to the gaps in our own knowledge.  I have grown a lot and learned not to trust myself as much.  My level of certainty has dropped.  I’ve become skeptical of my own book and want it fact checked by people in that field in that area before I ever publish it..

However there has been a group of youtubers who are skeptical but can be serious jerks about it.  Youtube is an area where ideas get exchanged and people learn from their mistakes.  I constantly rely on crowd sourcing to check and correct my facts.  A few who were right on issues were also very ungracious about it from the get-go until they realized that I was able to accept criticism and as much as it sucked I could change my mind.  Though the average person probably wouldn’t have.  These were on issues of IQ and sociopaths, concepts I believed were common knowledge in the psychological community, but were in fact actually up for debate in that field.   Every psychologists I had listened to or talked to accepted them as fact, so I was quite blindsided when I discovered these are actually hotly debated topics in psychology.

Had I not had respect for these people and a mid-level understanding of skepticism and my own bias to begin with I would have most likely either ignored them and continued in my ignorance or believed myself to be right and under attack.   Another person was recently insultingly attacked out of the gate by one of these people similarly like this out of the gate, and clung to the idea much longer than he probably who have if he had been approached with better communication skill, but instead he he felt personally attacked and stuck with it further making himself look like an idiot.

One of these skeptics recently attacked an internet meme claiming that this was a blatant and willful political agenda by the atheist community to relable deists in history as atheists.   Its a fucking facebook meme, tons of them are wrong most often through innocent confusion and ignorance.  Guess what things are wrong on the internet.  I rely strongly on crowdsourcing on facebook for debate and discussion.  If I had to deeply fact check everything I posted on facebook I would never post anything.  However crowdsourcing is extremely good at self-correcting, 90-99% of my posts are well sourced and people who follow my stream most of the time catch anything I may post that is false or badly sourced.

Carl Sagan had a definition for these skeptics who while probably being right are also unable to see the opportunity of inaccuracies as a teaching moment, and instead feel disgusted with the that they would dare to call themselves a skepic.  Her referred to them as skeptical curmudgeons.

“The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.”

These skeptical curmoudgens are more happy to snub, jump on and insult you, than get the gratification that someone now is more informed.   They are like elitists and less like teachers.  Often its not until they have made an enemy do they switch to a teaching role.  They also look down on people for not knowing about things they see as common knowledge and call people lazy or uninformed for not knowing something.  They fail to remember that our entire structure of science in general relies on division of labor because there is just too much stuff out there to know and people who are brilliant at one thing may be completely incapable of knowing that there is well documented science out there on the subject already, or there are multiple points of view on the subject and not just accepted fact.  These people also often have free and easy access to scientific papers and have privilege that they had a good foundation in skepticism and logic while many of us lived in intellectual poverty and had to drag ourselves up to the level we are now.  They are rarely wrong because they don’t say anything or share ideas themselves, they just pwn people who are wrong.

Youtube skepticism needs to be a neutral zone of ideas people can toss around and not feel threatened by if they are wrong.   When I started here on youtube I got a lot of my ideas out, some were widely accepted some were shaped and molded by others who disagreed and the people who disagreed were fairly cordial about it to begin with.   These days I feel like making videos isn’t worth it as much not just the attacks from the dissenters which I’m fine with but from people whose opinions you respect and expect to be on your side treating you like scum if you say one thing wrong about something you may have never been able to know you were ignorant on because there is just too much to know about everything.    Their motto is if you don’t know enough then never post anything to youtube or you are a lazy ignorant moron.  If you don’t write a scientific peer reviewed paper than you should just shut the hell up.   Even though these self-viewed guardians of skepticism attacking someone using charged language straight out of the gate is hardly scientific and would be immediately rejected from publication if they tried to print it in a scientific journal.   For fucks sake this is youtube we are talking about, stop taking it so seriously!  So much content is uploaded every day the impact of someone uploading something in ignorance to the web is minimal especially if they are corrected and correct the people you accidentally misinformed.

If you posted something, you tried something, you broke out an area of your understanding and made yourself vulnerable to change.  That takes a lot of courage in and of itself.   I tell people that everything I know I learned from mistakes.  If you don’t make mistakes you can’t learn from them and the more safe a place you can make mistakes in without ridicule the more you will be able to learn if you are will.   I feel my mind has stagnated without that sandbox area of mistakes on youtube to play in.    Youtube skepticism was also a tiny subset of the youtube atheist community, some nurturing like Sagan and some bitter and insulting like Hitchens thinking thats how you be a skeptic.   Insults and ridicule should only occur when all other options are exhausted.  However the level of extreme certainty from the non-skeptical atheists or certainty scientists is enough to drive any skeptic to anger and poo flinging, but you must restrain yourself or instead of increased education and skepticism, it will just be a shouting match making you both just look like children slap fighting.

Science Muck pt 1 of 2

Science muck

Science is a methodology that is used to counter our own natural biases, to eliminate what is wrong in current or hypothetical thinking, and to get as close to the truth as we possibly can by way of designing and running tests, standardized and meticulous observations of what we find in nature, in the sky or the ground.   It is a collection of highly trained individuals trying to poke holes in each others ideas, and people trying to poke holes in their own ideas preemptively to prevent their ideas from looking bad.

However science is not perfect.  It is made up of individuals.  Some may be lazy, some may have power or esteem and the politics of the institutions makes it difficult to challenge them or move forward ideas or projects until after that person dies.  Until the internet, it required journal publishing that really only felt like publishing the more groundbreaking studies and not ones that replicated or countered other studies unless it was very ground breaking.  Boring but necessary was not in.  We are slowly working to fix that, and thanks to online journals it has made it easier to publish the boring stuff.

However often because of that slowing, some will take it to the other extreme and take their ideas to the public without proper merit.   This is called pop science.  Pop science is wonderful in the fact that it creates science enthusiasts which we need to help get the government on our side and move us forward as a species, but at the same time its a great area for people to go out of their depth and write books and articles that sound brilliant and exciting, creating a framework to better understand reality with and put it all into a neat little package.  Its freeing and liberating to think that we understand this and are part of this knowledge along with the scientists in their fields..

The problem with science is it is the most exciting and at the same time boring thing in the world.  It has to be boring in how you write about it or your own biases get in the way but at the same time you have to make it exciting and amazing or no one will be interested and money for science will drop.   Its always a fuzzy line of complexity that hounds science.  Take for example when you should and shouldn’t trust science and when you can decide for yourself.

The average person is told to always think for themselves and question, but then they are told we should trust the scientists to figure it out as that is not our field of knowledge.   We know that if we were to go through the training and had the money we could go and replicate the experiment and see if we get the same results, and that people do that often.   The problem is we can’t if we want to do other things so we have to trust the system.  And the system is the collection of scientist not individuals.  And here’s where it comes to a head.  There are many writers with PhD’s that people are trying to trust that are being bad scientists who go outside of their fields.

Well established people who create breakthroughs will often get very addicted to being right and start going down rabbit roles of unscientificness outside of their field and then feel threatened when their ideas are attacked.   Many great scientists went on to have really wrong ideas later in life including Einstein and Tesla as once they achieved god-like status people stopped questioning and disagreeing with them as much and it became easy to live in a bubble of yes-people who would never question them or do so on a much weaker basis in fear of angering their hero or superior.

Heimlich, who’s maneuver bears his name is a clear example of this.  After saving millions of lives with his amazingly simple maneuver he felt himself a god among men.  With all the letters coming in thanking and praising him for the lives he was saving, he started trying to figure out the next great life saving thing and seriously started to go down the rabbit hole into obscure ideas lacking evidence and dwelling in the realm of conspiracy and hidden agenda such as a cure for AIDs and cancer using another potentially deadly pathogen.  He was also very vocal about something that was not in his field and probably ended up hurting a lot of people with pseudo-science.

A year or two after graduating I was loaned a book that changed my outlook on much of reality.  It was called the third chimpanzee by Jarod Diamond, many of you have probably heard of and probably admire.   However Jarod Diamond I am finding out is not an anthropologist he is a physiologist and a geographer. And while this much education requires you to have a toe dipped into many fields with a lot of tenure his but are about 50% scientific and the rest is personal ideas, one-sided claims, and anecdotes he uses.  Its just sciency enough that everyone, including scientists outside of anthropology love his work, but inside the anthropology society they are frustrated at him.  For one thing he states as fact things that are up for debate in the anthropology community as if it is settled and agreed on by the majority. He stated flatly that the megafauna in North America and Australia were killed off by man, !One of the 2 big arguments I had with my gf for the first 2 years viewing him as an expert in the field.   Even at that time the science community was debating it and nothing was solid and now we are finding that may have been true about a minority of species but not about most of them, it was climate change and other factors we are finding more and more paleontological evidence in the past 20 years.

And his books are just filled with these one sided claims that drawing off of that he makes other inferences off of to make other certain or semi-certain claims.  This is the biggest reason why the evolutionary psychology community is not taken very seriously or held at arms length.   Science is slow and conservative for a reason.  Mostly because if they have to change they want people to know that yes we knew we weren’t very certain beforehand and this new development while surprising and exciting wasn’t completely unexpected.    If they had been blindsided by the complete change in complete course on an idea, the general public would begin to question things that are the bedrock of science.  Why the certainty used in American science news is so damaging to the credibility of science as the average person thinks, “scientists dont know anything they keep changing their mind”, while science itself has degrees of certainty and new research and discoveries are hardly certain but very interesting and exciting.

This hybrid of science and pseudoscience or maybe we should call it certainty science, has leaked over into youtube and the general public.  Without the basic understanding of the scientific process.  As some may remember, I made it out of college with a BS in microbiology without a clue as to how the scientific process works.  In hard sciences in the US they are so busy cramming you with facts and techniques, many students don’t actually run into the scientific process and peer review until they get into their masters program.   The softer sciences and some rare good high schools are the only areas where it is mandatory to know this.   I believed as a scientist that I could learn a fact about science from a study that unknown to me was not an established fact it was a paper that needs more research, and then from that fact infer other things.   Each preceding layer has to be established and tested first before you can state anything higher level as fact.

This form of certainty and pseudo-science has disseminated its way all over youtube and the internet.   If the average American had a firm foundation in skepticism, the basics of how science works and critical thinking, we would all be in a better place, but sadly most of that is self taught for a lot of us, and as Mitch Headberg said, I taught myself how to play guitar, but I was a shitty teacher because I did not know how to play.

Heimlich

http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2013/mar/05/heimlich/

Great mistakes

http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/05/17/2013/when-great-scientists-got-it-wrong.html