Extraterrestrial Humanity, 21st Century

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Xylene

Valued Senior Member
Over the course of the next century, Humans (for better or worse) are going to be terraforming Mars and probably Venus, and settling them. How is this going to affect us physically, emotianally and spiritually? How are we going to react when we encounter aliens for the first time, particularly isf they look very like us? How are our cultural boundaries going to be stretched by that contact and its aftermath?
 
when we encounter aliens for the first time
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thats a pretty strong statement. I think there is most certainly life in the universe, and maybe even intelligent life, but to think we will encounter them is a bit hard for me to see. we haven't even picked up any transmission from extraterrestrials yet. the bottom line is: how common is intelligent life? we can only guess, if intelligent life is rare, the universe may be uninhabitable long before we even contact them.

and probably Venus
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why Venus? I don't think it will have anything to offer us as settlers, in this millennium at least.
How is this going to affect us physically, emotionally and spiritually?
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I will leave these for others to get at.
 
Xylene, the answers you seek are already written in numerous books .....history books. We'll simply do what we've done in the past when humans encountered new places and new things and new people. Check a few history books, you'll find the answers.

Baron Max
 
venus would be too hot, mars would be too cold, am I right?



we could always ship masses of water and other materials into space if we built the space elevator.... we could get rid of some of the stuff under the earths crust like the useless magma, and make earth lighter? Our hearts would last longer then.
 
terraforming is used to create the right conditions for us humans to live.

I think nitrifying bacteria are sent to create nitrogen. Then de-nitrofying to create oxygen?

Im not too sure, i am sure some1 else will know.

What would acutally happen to terraform an environment??
 
Huwy said:
venus would be too hot, mars would be too cold, am I right?
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So? Send up some air conditioners or heaters! What the hell, why worry about something so simple as heat or cold?

Space elevators??? Huh? What the fuck is that?

Baron Max
 
mardener said:
What would acutally happen to terraform an environment??
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Well, some would say, and do say, that we're doing that right now to the Earth, right? ...rather damned slow about it, but we're doing it. and if we keep doing it, in a few years, man's lungs will evolve to be able to breathe pure smog!

Baron Max
 
Personally, I think we have the technological capacity to terraform the planets (Mars and even Venus) starting right now. Though I'd agree that it would take at least the rest of the millenium to complete the process. Kim Stanley Robinson goes into a lot of detail about it in his books on Mars, and as for Venus, there's the book 'Venus of Dreams' (can't remember the author's name), set 600 years in the future, which talks about the effort to terraform that world.
 
hmm, why drop dirt on the ice caps, we got nukes. find an asteroid that will pass close to mars and blow the hell out of it until it is on a collision course with the ice cap. you could also use a solar sail, but thats not as fun =). if you made the adjustments tens, or hundreds, of years before it passes mars, you could do it fairly easily. heck, it would be great practice for preventing earth/asteroid collisions.
 
The great volcanoes of Mars are mostly shield massifs, basaltic, like the Hawiian islands. They'd be riddled with lava-tubes, on a massive scale. Perhaps those tubes could be used as ready-built habitats, provided by Nature, while the terraforming goes on.
 
The great volcanoes of Mars are mostly shield massifs, basaltic, like the Hawiian islands. They'd be riddled with lava-tubes, on a massive scale. Perhaps those tubes could be used as ready-built habitats, provided by Nature, while the terraforming goes on.
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how cold is Mars' core? I thought it was pretty cold.
 
I just had another idea, if you could move an asteroid toward mars, maybe with a big enough one you could send one of mars' moons spiraling into it.
 
Why not just build a very large space station that we could keep adding to as time goes by. Why is it we need to put humans on Mars when we could use space stations to go to places then just orbit around them sending down explorers to see what's there?
 
Baron Max said:
So? Send up some air conditioners or heaters! What the hell, why worry about something so simple as heat or cold?

Space elevators??? Huh? What the fuck is that?

Baron Max
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you cant use current technology to cool an entire planet. fridges/air conditioners create heat in order to cool something down
 
vslayer said:
you cant use current technology to cool an entire planet. fridges/air conditioners create heat in order to cool something down
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Actually humans have the technology to build a giant heat shield to reduce the suns heat like an umbrella in space. The farther away from the planet you station it the smaller the shield would have to be. Depending on how much heat you want to dissapate and the types of wave lengths you want to reduce the shield could be engineered to those ecact specifications today and put into orbit.
 
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