Baloogan posted:

Tho obviously we would get to mars, terraform mars, civilization would collapse, and people on mars would lose space flight etc and be all confused in a thousand years and there would be no evidence of evolution so obviously they were divinely created on mars

rudatron posted:

you're also facing a number of other challenges:

your cities have to be bouyant, which is going to place massive limits on what they can look like/how much they cost
you have to do that while still dealing with weather
you have to harvest metal/metal ores to actually make anything, which means dealing with the surface and its conditions
you still have to escape the venutian gravity well to get back into space, which means launching back from ~1g (also you're launching from floating cities, totes safe right?)
you're going to need exotic materials to make the whole thing work, because you're essentially building a 'shorter' space elevator

compared to those problems, shielding from space rays & inertial gravity isn't that hard

Baloogan posted:

imo our orbital habitats will be drilling holes in a asteroid then spinning it up. why gently caress around with tin cans? live where the resources are. live IN the resources.

Baloogan posted:

find a dirty iceball or a icy asteroid and live there forever singing songs about how dumb earth is

Agean90 posted:

I want a concept album about hillbilly asteroid miners

Al! posted:

i got u fam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHOrpFeXUao

NASA posted:

Imagine their surprise when they opened a rarely-accessed service panel in Mir's Kvant-2 Module and discovered a large free-floating mass of water. "According to the astronauts' eyewitness reports, the globule was nearly the size of a basketball," Ott said.

Maduo posted:

Normal rear end earth air floats in the venusian atmosphere, so we just need a steel balloon full of that and we're good. We could probably figure a way out to make cloud cities here too but we don't really need them. Compared to mars venus is way easier to live on, but nothings ever gonna beat living on earth.

Although I guess the biggest problem with venus as a colony is we don't really 'get' anything from it other than living space. Except for what we skim from the clouds, all the resources are on the surface and we haven't made anything that survives THAT for more than a couple of minutes.

edit: also all those things rudatron said. Some of those are probably easier to overcome than they sound but eventually you either have to deal with getting to the surface or getting to space.

ElPez posted:

One issue of built orbital stations I don't see come up often is that of just keeping up with the gradual decay of the interior and the structure itself. Condensed water, particulates, microorganisms, etc. is going to build up everywhere and corrode stuff, especially in inaccessible places like ducts and the insides of machinery, so it needs to be easy to keep clean. Even so, modules would have to be continuously broken up and replaced when their maintenance stopped being cost-effective. And with a small, closed ecosystem and low organic diversity you're going to be facing the space version of algal blooms.


Simulated gravity, direct sunlight, clean air, downtime, etc: All luxuries. A space habitat is going to look (and presumably smell) something like this most of the time:



In general, I suspect there are big remaining challenges in a lot of relatively unglamorous fields like ecology, biology, industrial processes and modular design. The rocket stuff is mostly working, and it's just a tiny piece of the puzzle anyhow.

steinrokkan posted:

You seem to be awfully glib about the fact the atmosphere is saturated with sulphuric acid, which seems like something to account for when talking about the ease of maintaining a colony.

ElPez posted:

rudatron posted:

also heat is going to be a massive big problem, especially with stuff like foundaries and industry

space is cold but a perfect insulator, which is why even the iss, needs those little white things sticking out the side - those are radiators

Baloogan posted:

why can't we build sky cities on earth, what benefits does venus bring?

Concordat posted:

Personally I'm of the opinion that simulated gravity via rotation is not a luxury, but necessary to a permanent habitat in space. And when I say permanent, I mean people living entire lifetimes in it, not just a year or two.

steinrokkan posted:

You seem to be awfully glib about the fact the atmosphere is saturated with sulphuric acid, which seems like something to account for when talking about the ease of maintaining a colony.

ElPez posted:

Kind of a shame about the radiation environment around Europa, but what about a colony on Enceladus? Just think of the view.

quote:

So, is the sound we're hearing originating from the 'Cube?" Not the Mecca Cube, but the real one on the North Pole of Saturn? What I hear is a match for the sounds I hear from Youtube's Saturn (north pole) videos. NASA now says life probably started from 'seed bursts' from the Saturn Moon Enceladus, which is obviously derived from the Sumerian, Enki, who was thought to be the R1A & R1B Y-Haplo creator. Demiurge on behalf of Saturn. Man, still having a hard time w/ the moon landing and now we're suppose to know how our soul (Sew EL = Righteousness) is manufactured? Supposedly spends time with the Father, then Mother, then here = children are little gods to be corrupted.

quote:

Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is looking better and better as a potential abode for alien life.

Chemical reactions that free up energy that could potentially support a biosphere have occurred — and perhaps still are occurring — deep within Enceladus' salty subsurface ocean, a new study suggests.

This determination comes less than two months after a different research team announced that active hydrothermal vents likely exist on Enceladus' seafloor, suggesting that conditions there could be similar to those that gave rise to some of the first lifeforms on Earth.

A salty ocean

Enceladus has an extensive water ocean under its icy crust, feeding water jets that emerge from near the south pole.

The satellite is covered by an icy shell, but it's geologically quite active, as evidenced by the powerful geysers that blast continuously from its south polar region. These plumes contain significant amounts of water, which scientists think originates from a subsurface ocean.

Previous studies have suggested that this ocean is in contact with Enceladus' rocky mantle, making possible all sorts of interesting chemical reactions. The new paper, published Wednesday (May 6) in the journal ‪Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, further supports that notion.

The researchers studied mass-spectrometry measurements of the gases and ice grains in Enceladus' plumes made by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. The team used this information to develop a model that estimates the saltiness and pH of Enceladus' plumes, and, by extension, the moon's underground ocean.

The scientists determined that the ocean is likely salty and quite basic, with a pH of 11 or 12 — roughly equivalent to that of ammonia-based glass-cleaning solutions, but still within the tolerance range of some organisms on Earth. (The pH scale runs from 0 to 14. Seven is neutral; anything higher is basic, and anything lower is acidic.)

Enceladus' subsurface sea contains dissolved sodium chloride (NaCl) — run-of-the-mill table salt — just as Earth's oceans do, researchers said. But it's full of sodium carbonate (Na2CO3), which is also known as washing soda or soda ash, as well.

So this alien water body is probably more similar to terrestrial "soda lakes," such as ‪Mono Lake in California, than it is to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, study team members said.

An energy source in the dark depths

Such inferences shouldn't dishearten astrobiologists; a variety of lifeforms thrive in Mono Lake, including brine shrimp and many different types of microbe. And the new study provides other reasons to be optimistic about Enceladus' life-hosting potential, researchers said.

For example, the team's model suggests that the subsurface ocean's high pH is generated by a process called serpentization, in which certain kinds of metallic rocks from Enceladus' upper mantle are transformed into new minerals (including serpentine, hence the name) via interactions with water.

In addition to raising pH, serpentization results in the production of molecular hydrogen (H2) — a potential source of chemical energy for any lifeforms that may exist in the underground sea, researchers said.

‪"Molecular hydrogen can both drive the formation of organic compounds like amino acids that may lead to the origin of life, and serve as food for microbial life such as methane-producing organisms," study lead author Christopher Glein, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, said in a statement.

"As such, serpentinization provides a link between geological processes and biological processes," he added. "The discovery of serpentinization makes Enceladus an even more promising candidate for a separate genesis of life."

Sunlight probably doesn't flow through Enceladus' underground sea, but any microbes that exist there may thus have access to two different sources metabolism-supporting energy sources — molecular hydrogen and the heat provided by hydrothermal vents.

Trumps Baby Hands posted:

Could we escape Donald Trump by building an underwater facility beneath the ice of Enceladus?

SpaceGoku posted:

nasa will become a useless husk of its former self because newt wants private space travel, not government space travel

the moon will be ruled by china