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#61
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Once We Have A Self Sustaining Mars Colony - Then What?
I've snipped most of the comment as having been either hashed up by
Mookie switching back and forth between inline responses and bottom responses or else just being Mookie being Mookie (and therefore merely stupid). William Mook wrote: On Monday, December 19, 2016 at 1:23:45 AM UTC+13, Fred J. McCall wrote: Skip to the bottom. Mookie once again flouts Usenet conventions by posting everything at the bottom rather than in line with the original discussion. big snip William Mook wrote: WIth an evergrowing population of ever wealthier individuals, it is doubtful that the Earth will long supply the material needs of humanity. For that reason it is imperative to develop the means to meet this ever growing need from resources found in interplanetary space. You and I will both be long dead by the time that even starts to look like a problem. Its a problem today. Water and steel prices are rising. We're paying vastly more for energy today than we were in the 1960s. Energy is about 20% CHEAPER now than it was in 1960. The same is true of steel and water. This is rather like the whole 'peak oil' thing. We're paying vastly more for energy today than we were in the 1960s. Prices fluctuate as as demand erodes. We are already past the peak. No, we are actually paying less in constant dollars for energy than we were in the 1960s. Peak oil has been predicted over and over. We haven't hit it yet and it currently looks like the whole idea of 'peak oil' is flawed. 'Proven reserves' has always been around 30 years worth for the last half century or so. That's because we find new sources and improve technology to be able to economically recover poorer deposits. You have forgotten that oil prices were over $100 per barrel for a time. What do you think happened then? That's right, those people who needed oil to be low cost to survive, WENT OUT OF BUSINESS. This is called erosion of demand. Once that demand is gone, it won't come back easily. When demand falls below supply because of energy intensive business going out of business, prices moderate, but they never return to earlier epoch and even minor increases in demand spike prices very rapidly. We are in the post peak world whether you want to admit it or not. I haven't forgotten anything. We're certainly not in a 'post-peak world' because we still haven't hit peak oil yet, despite numerous predictions about how we should have hit it already. What happened to drop oil prices? A financial slump reducing demand coupled with new recovery methods leading to vastly increased production is what happened. Oil will probably remain 'soft' for another year or two and then gradually recover as OPEC reduces production to decrease supply. ALL natural resources tend to work this way. You talk a lot about hematite on Mars, but the concentrations in your own citations are way too poor to be viable mining sources. Meteorites crashing into the surface create huge globs of iron that are sitting on the surface. You can mine iron efficiently with a broom and a magnet on Mars today. You cannot do that on Earth. Nope. Your own cite didn't show that. For it to work as you claim, there would have to be molten iron near the surface of Mars. There isn't. Your cite showed AN IRON METEORITE. That's iron that came from elsewhere and hit Mars, Mookie, and it's just the size of the meteorite. There is no massive flow of molten iron from inside Mars because Mars is cool. If items on Mars cannot be made and delivered to Earth more cheaply than Earth based resources, then there is no reason to ever go to Mars. Fortunately mass driver technology and power plant technology exists TODAY that make that possible. No reason in your tiny mind, anyway. So YOU should not go. You're the one who has a small mind if you cannot admit that the resources off world are vastly greater than remain on Earth. That is a very powerful and important reason to go to Mars and the other worlds of the solar system today. To make life better for everyone on Earth and bring about a trophic change in our environment. Sorry, but you are both ignorant and insane. Robots are transforming mining today But not the kind of robots your citation above was about. Nonsense. Mining robots mine materials. Nonsense. You think that by scrambling between in-line and bottom posting you can cloud what you said. I repeat - not the kind of robots your citation was about. http://fortune.com/2015/08/25/intern...ning-industry/ Big headline, no data. Talk about what they're "going to do". You have no idea what you're talking about. By the time Musk has colonists going to Mars, those colonists will have AI driven mining equipment, manufacturing equipment, and equipment to blast materials back to Earth cheaply to anyone who wants to pay for it. Yes, it will be a MookMagicalMars. Sure it will. Munch Massive MookMagical Maundering Heat shield rock - 98% iron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_re..._Meteorite.jpg 98% pure iron - created by a meteorite crashing into the iron rich surface of mars and spewing out pure iron. And here we see Mookie's problem. He just doesn't read very well. The cite is about AN IRON METEORITE. His last sentence above is simply wrong and has nothing to do with his cite. You are unaware of how the meteorite was formed. It was formed from an impactor impacting the iron rich surface of Mars and the energy blasting metal far and wide. Putting aside the formation of the chunk of iron and the far larger number of iron 'berries' found on the surface of Mars, ask yourself the following question; How many pure iron chunks like this exist on Earth? The answer is - none. How many pure iron chunks like this exist on Mars, well with only 4 rovers covering a grand total of 50 km with the horizon 3.4 km away - we've discovered one big one like the one I show in the figure, and thousands of smaller ones littering the landscape. So, like I said, with a broom and a magnet, you could sweep up 98% pure iron process it into steel and shoot it out of a General Atomics Rail gun at 14,000 mph and send over a billion dollars woth of steel back to Earth at virtually no added cost. Do you know what the word 'meteorite' means, you ignorant ****? The 'meteorite' *IS* the 'impactor'. And you're wrong about Earth. See Sudbury, for example. Yes, you may not get 'berries' because we have air, but so what? There is no iron close to the surface to flow out from a meteor strike on Mars. General Atomics - MHD Fission Reactor https://fusion.gat.com/pubs-ext/AnnS...ETC/A23593.pdf Do you have a point? I've known about MHDs for decades. The point is they're not in use on Earth for a variety of very good reasons. Those reasons don't apply on Mars. Supporting the notion that energy on Mars will be very cheap indeed. MHDs are not magically cheap. General Atomics - Rail Gun - fires a bullet fast enough to escape the moon's surface and hit Earth. Can be carried on the back of a truck, on a ship, or in a rocket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNLrQhn5nLo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygHN-vplJZg Mach 7 - 2.3 km/sec - exceeds the escape velocity of the Moon. So, this device carried to the Moon, and powered up, would easily be capable of driving a lot of mass to Earth dirt cheap. No. Yes. No. I've been to Dahlgren and know about this program. You obviously have not been read into the programme otherwise you'd keep your mouth shut about what you know first hand. You obviously have no idea how classified programs work. You apparently do not. I know what Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said about it. It achieves Mach 7 in Earth's atmosphere after exiting the barrel. That's 2.3 km/sec - lunar escape velocity. Now according to BAE CEO Jerry DeMuro the system is capable of attaining velocities in vacuo far higher. High enough to send projectiles from the Moon to Earth or from Mars to Earth. A well designed mass launcher would fit inside a 40 foot container and when deployed on Mars could send $1 billion a year worth of iron and other materials from Mars to any point on Earth. You are ignoring so much of reality that the preceding is mere fantasy. Energy isn't free. The 'barrel' certainly isn't free. How many payloads can take the deposition of energy entailed by the magnetic fields of a rail gun? How do you actually get the payloads to a destination, since just aiming and shooting won't work? snip Mook fantasies and insults Jesus, but you're a stupid ****, Mookie. -- "Ordinarily he is insane. But he has lucid moments when he is only stupid." -- Heinrich Heine |
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Once We Have A Self Sustaining Mars Colony - Then What?
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Once We Have A Self Sustaining Mars Colony - Then What?
Jeff Findley wrote:
Hell, John Deere is working on an all electric tractor ("full-sized", not some tiny sub-scale prototype) which will improve efficiency and overall reliability. And this is actually a great application for electrics if the thing isn't significantly more expensive than a regular tractor. It could plow or whatever all day at the usual slow tractor speeds, then go plug in and recharge at night. If it's autonomous and you can run it at night, you could buy an extra set of batteries and keep one set on charge while the other is being used. What makes electric cars impractical are the range issues and how long they take to charge. This is much less an issue with something like a tractor. -- "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw |
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Once We Have A Self Sustaining Mars Colony - Then What?
Lithium-6 Deuteride may be used to make a fission free nuclear explosive. By compressing the material to a high density before exposing it to a neutron flux very compact nuclear explosives can be made that release 270 billion joules per gram of material with no long-lived radioactive byproducts!
A micro-nuclear pulse engine may be built that creates an EMP with prompt radiation within a structure of the engine so that the expanding plasma is efficiently ejected, making efficient use of the energy. This basically solves the problem of space travel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEtaQpHBP4U A vehicle with a 99,196 ton take off weight, consists of 48,942 tons of inert propellant, 36.4 kilogams of lithium-6 deuteride pellets subdivided into 1 million pellets each 36.4 milligrams each. Each releasing the equivalent of 2.34 tons of TNT. Surrounding each pellet is 48.94 kg of inert propellant within a 46 cm diameter bottle - which is filled with sea water contained in four 28.6 meter diameter spheres. At full thrust (2 gees) the four nuclear pulse engines of this craft detonate 497 of these pulse units each second in each engine. The 99,196 ton vehicle carries 13,018 tons of payload, its structure is 37,235 tons, it carries 48,942 tons of inert propellant. With an exhaust velocity of 20 km/sec it attains 13.3 km/sec ideal delta vee, which when departing from Earth's surface, loaded with this payload is sufficient to travel to Mars. There are 250 passengers and crew on board. A little over 52 tons per person. 2 tons of consumables each. 50 tons of equipment each. On Mars the vehicle when loaded with 100,000 tons of payload and the same structure and propellant (this time drawn from available water ice on Mars) attains a speed of 6.1 km/sec - which when starting on the Surface of Mars is sufficient to bring the payload back to Earth. With material that's worth $3,000 per ton, this earns $300 million per synodic period, and brings back another 13,018 tons from Earth. Dividing by 2.15 years per synodic period and 250 people that's $558,140 per person per year. Of course a magnetic mass driver can send lower valued materials from Mars to Earth than rockets, merely by projecting it at 6.1 km/sec off Mars pointing in the right direction firing at the right speed at the right time. Shells are guided after departing the driver, so accuracy is important and improved upon since corrections can be applied mid flight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev0G49jXJX0 This cannon built for terrestrial use, shoots a 25 pound shell at a speed of 2.3 km/sec. Lunar escape velocity. Outside the atmosphere of Earth with a slightly longer cannon, but similar in every respect, this device can lob a shell at Mars escape velocity 36x per second! That's 1,620 tons per hour. During the 2,200 hour window each synodic period between Earth and Mars a single mass launcher like this transfer 3.56 million tons. 1.65 million tons per year. At $300 per ton this is another $495 million per year or $1.98 million per person per year. This structure fraction, and overall weight and size - matches that of an AFRAMAX tanker. New builds run less than $65 million. They're 245 meters long 34 meter beam and 30 meter depth. A 30 meter diameter tank on each 'corner' of the ship fills with water, each feeds its own 120 meter arm that is actuated and contains a nuclear pulse propulsion unit at its tip. The propulsion unit gimbals in any direction once fully deployed. A far larger version of something like this, but with nuclear pulse rockets on the tips, not rotors; http://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-folding-d...off-in-a-snap/ A dozen of these built for $780 million - $312,000 per person. Another $1,040,000 - or $2,000 per ton - pays for the equipment that is transported to Mars. $1,352,000 per peson. Water and iron, aluminum and other materials are easily available on Mars for return to Earth. Being able to earn $700,000+ per year one can see that people would arrange to go to Mars to earn substantial returns, or borrow money from others to achieve this, or arrange to send another to Mars to share in the value they can create there. So, a 5 year period earning say $3.5 million return - on a $1.4 million investment - a 20% annual rate of return compounded for five years! There are 12 million high net worth individuals in the world who have $46.2 trillion in disposable wealth. 1% of this population represents 120,000 per year and $462 billion per year. About 1,032 ships every synodic period.. 1,032 mass drivers operating across mars would deliver all the steel and needed on Earth and the ships 100 million tons per synodic period of higher value goods. Within five years with this approach the Earth's markets would be saturated and other opportunities would be developed. Delivering for example, power stations built on Mars and deployed in GEO to deliver power on Earth by laser beam. Farm satellites built on Mars and deployed in polar orbit to deliver food anywhere its needed on Earth in minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcO_BjXfhhc |
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Once We Have A Self Sustaining Mars Colony - Then What?
On Sunday, December 11, 2016 at 8:54:09 AM UTC-5, Jonathan wrote:
I've been looking at some the incredibly expensive steps which are planned for a Mars colony. From the massive rockets, massive transports and things like droves of robots that will dig out an underground habitat and so on and so on and so on... Sounds like Trillions of dollars will be needed over several decades. Of course we all know that as time goes on and cost estimates steadily rise, the goals will shrink and shrink, until in the end we land a couple of astronauts for a couple of weeks. But even if a self sustaining colony of say a 100 people is established, what will the human race get in return for all this money and effort? Finding life on Mars? NASA has made it clear that's not a primary concern. The current MSL couldn't identify life is it was sitting in a field of moss. And the next rover won't be able to either, instead looking for signs of...ancient life, and identify samples for some....future sample return mission and to support some...future human habitation. THE MSL 202O CAN DO EVERYTHING.....EXCEPT DIRECTLY SEARCH FOR LIFE. http://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/news/w...ws&NewsID=1678 It's yet another rover that's meant to get a...sample return mission and colony instead of directly searching for life. That's just another self-serving deception on the part of NASA, at the expense of science and what the public wants. For the incredible cost of a manned landing, we could send a hundred much more ambitious rovers far faster and cover far more ground than a manned landing. Allow the human race to survive an impact? It's far cheaper and easier to spot, divert or destroy an asteroid than this colony. Inspiration? For what? Colonies around Jupiter? Again, for the same end, just more inspiration? For resources? What doesn't the Earth have that the moon or asteroids have? For national pride? Spending that money directly improving America would do far more in that respect. If an agency is going to spend Trillions of precious research money on a single project it needs to be thoroughly justified so as to be easily convincing. So far I only see 'planting the flag' as the only widespread appeal, and that's not enough. wonder what laser beams from space could do to our atmosphere? just wait till a aiming problem or isis hacker redirects the beam into a weapon |
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Once We Have A Self Sustaining Mars Colony - Then What?
On Monday, December 19, 2016 at 4:20:10 PM UTC+13, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Jonathan wrote: When fossil fuel costs become excessive then a truly useful commodity like space solar power can become practical and the free markets will have a new reason to build large structures in space. It's cheaper to build your solar power plant down here. Again, the cost of lifting all that stuff from Earth in the first place makes space-based solar far too expensive. Hell, Earth-based solar is too expensive right now and space-based costs at least an order of magnitude more. And why would a solar power satellite require people? -- "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw Inflatable concentrators that focus light on to thin disk solar pumped lasers that use conjugate optics to beam energy reliably and safely to Earth - produce 22 kW of useable power on the ground per kg of payload at GEO. A Falcon Heavy puts 18 tons into GEO sufficient to produce 400 MW of power continuously. The satellite costs $110 million. The Launch $90 million - $200 million altogether. At $0.11 per kWh a 400 MW power satellite operating 8,766 hours per year generats $385 million per year in revenue. |
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Once We Have A Self Sustaining Mars Colony - Then What?
bob haller wrote:
wonder what laser beams from space could do to our atmosphere? Nothing. just wait till a aiming problem or isis hacker redirects the beam into a weapon You probably believe nuclear reactors can be made to explode like bombs, too. -- "Ordinarily he is insane. But he has lucid moments when he is only stupid." -- Heinrich Heine |
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Once We Have A Self Sustaining Mars Colony - Then What?
William Mook wrote:
On Monday, December 19, 2016 at 4:20:10 PM UTC+13, Fred J. McCall wrote: Jonathan wrote: When fossil fuel costs become excessive then a truly useful commodity like space solar power can become practical and the free markets will have a new reason to build large structures in space. It's cheaper to build your solar power plant down here. Again, the cost of lifting all that stuff from Earth in the first place makes space-based solar far too expensive. Hell, Earth-based solar is too expensive right now and space-based costs at least an order of magnitude more. And why would a solar power satellite require people? Inflatable concentrators that focus light on to thin disk solar pumped lasers that use conjugate optics to beam energy reliably and safely to Earth - produce 22 kW of useable power on the ground per kg of payload at GEO. A Falcon Heavy puts 18 tons into GEO sufficient to produce 400 MW of power continuously. The satellite costs $110 million. The Launch $90 million - $200 million altogether. At $0.11 per kWh a 400 MW power satellite operating 8,766 hours per year generats $385 million per year in revenue. At the price point you give an SPS doesn't produce anything. Prices for SPS power are up around $3 or so, not 11 cents. -- "Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong." -- Thomas Jefferson |
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Once We Have A Self Sustaining Mars Colony - Then What?
William Mook wrote: In 1970 during the first oil crisis (perhaps you heard of it) That was 1973. rick jones -- oxymoron n, Hummer H2 with California Save Our Coasts and Oceans plates these opinions are mine, all mine; HPE might not want them anyway... feel free to post, OR email to rick.jones2 in hpe.com but NOT BOTH... |
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