How To Colonize Other Planets

I created this thread as a general discussion on the possibilities of colonizing other planets within our solar system and my personal opinions as to how this could be achieved in every aspect to ensure realistic sustainable environments and colonies.
We're now capable of traveling to other planets and have perfected sciences to the degree that our materials and techniques are advanced enough to now bring us forwards with success to do just that with relative surety and a margin of safety.
I personally feel that Mars play's a major roll in our first attempt to colonize, due to its relative close proximity to earth, plus gravity and size, although there's really not much known about Mars due to the fact that we've only recently set foot mechanically on its surface "so they claim" that shouldn't matter because of techniques and materials that will be employed in advance of any human ever migrating to its surface.
With just basic modern rocket propellents as we are currently using and a technique of daisy chaining our launches in time sequences to ensure non stop equipment and material shipments, one could be up and running on the planet surface of Mars in little less than 5 years from our first launch.
If we design our spacecraft to be reusable materials that can be guided directly to the selected colony sites, we have CNC robotics that can be deployed to erect from its cargo and its hull material to begin assembly within hours of its safe landing, i think its just plotting a course and a location that would be satisfactory that's most important, somewhere within a mountain range that has a breaking affect on high winds and erosion.
Once enough equipment and material have been delivered and assembled and thoroughly tested you could then send a group of humans and animals to their new home to have a physical hands on in between cargo shipments, we already use chemical oxygen generators in submarines, aircraft and in space, so several in between shipments prior to during and continued will create an abundance of canned Oxygen, water, and food stores to ensure survivability, The ultimate goal is to create a self sustaining environment.
We know that oxygen and hydrogen creates water and if a generation and storage can be maintained and Expanded upon eventually there would be enough to sustain an entire thriving civilization.

What i know is, that if money was no consideration and an all out global effort to colonize was set into motion from this moment on, we could have our first 10 cargo sequences ready to launch within one year and that within 5 years or possibly less, we could have humans and animals in a habitable colony on the face of mars, organizing, activating and expanding operations for the next colonists and this would give us a step to the stars

So what your thoughts ideas and solutions???

My Thoughts: Your sir are a genius.

I really think there is no need to rush and do it now though. If there was a impending disaster or something then we should try and colonize with urgency. But I get your point. I can only hope I see settlement on other planets in my lifetime I think it's really cool.

But maybe we should be focused on the space station more than settling on a planet itself. There is no benifit to colonize on a planet over doing like the space station.

reply to post by EmperorXyn

I cant really see the space station as anything more than an observatory or a lab, possibly a launch station or something, but Mars is an entire Ecosystem with endless possibilities that needs to be worked with as practical application, and possibly indefinitely inhabited

Interesting thread.

I think your being a little bit too confident in your time tables though, personally at our level of technology and frankly the abrupt stall in America's space race I don't believe we will even return to the Moon for a number of years. Back a couple years ago G.W Bush set a goal to have human return to the moon by 2020, budgetary concerns are halting this plan though, in order to have enough money to return to the moon NASA would have to de orbit the ISS by 2016.

Mars is still far far away, my best prediction is we wont have a man on mars until 2035 or 2040, manned space flight is just that much at a halt. A space enthusiast such as myself and you can only hope that other countries (like china) take America's lead and further develop the human species' advancement in to space.

articles.latimes.com...

www.nytimes.com...

We just passed the launch window for a Mars trip, one big problem with setting up a serious life support systems on Mars is the launch window happens only for a month or two every 2 years. Of course autonomous cargo shipments could take longer trajectories we still need a faster way of getting there, for manned missions. Keep in mind most if not all landings of life support enclosures and supplies would require powered landings, and have to be relatively ready to use as they are, at least at first.

Trips to Mars still requires more research and solutions for radiation shielding, one prime research going on in the ISS. Moon missions lasted just 2 weeks, Mars missions may require exposure of 2 years. I think finding some kind of natural underground area safely under the surface of Mars will adequately shield radiation, but a 3 to 9 month journey to get there is the biggest hurdle. Why 3 to nine months? I think New Horizons passed Mars orbit in 3 months, Curiosity will take 9 months to get there. New Horizons passed the orbit of our moon in less than 10 hours.

reply to post by heyitsphil


Fortune favours the bold! Where do I sign up? I, for one, am a big fan of making goals that other people say are unreachable... if only to say "Shows what you know!"

But seriously... Why not send cargo now? Why not send out an automated system to make it easier for us to go there in person? We already have some experience with getting machines to work there...

I like this a lot. Let's do more of this!

reply to post by heyitsphil

Monetarily its seems a pretty big deal , but in reality its not so, we don't need to waste our time with the moon, we've been there done that, we have sent unmanned missions to Mars to snoop around a lil, but we need to truly go after the possibilities, i'm sure their are hundreds of thousands of willing people who would gleefully offer their lives for a once in a lifetime opportunity to go where no man has gone before, and me being on the first of the list

The technology is there, we have everything we need to make it happen, just do it until its been perfected, just like every other hurdle we've ever had to jump over in our progression of existence

I have been designing emergency survival pods and have concluded that with these designs, because of their shape and materials, they could be sent well in advance of any human and as a per-assembled package could be easily moved to any location above or below the surface of mars, so shielding and survivability would be more feasible at half the price

Originally posted by sweetnlow
reply to post by heyitsphil

 

Monetarily its seems a pretty big deal , but in reality its not so, we don't need to waste our time with the moon, we've been there done that, we have sent unmanned missions to Mars to snoop around a lil, but we need to truly go after the possibilities, i'm sure their are hundreds of thousands of willing people who would gleefully offer their lives for a once in a lifetime opportunity to go where no man has gone before, and me being on the first of the list

The technology is there, we have everything we need to make it happen, just do it until its been perfected, just like every other hurdle we've ever had to jump over in our progression of existence

Unfortunately you are incorrect.

We do need to waste our time on the moon, like previously stated in the thread we still need time to develop anti-radiation space craft and develop a better way of living in space and in a hostile environment like Mars. Just like the Apollo missions much time will be spent testing and perfecting the techniques we will have to use to send a manned team to Mars. We will start on the Moon again and continue to Mars. Im not saying exploring Mars with a manned mission shouldn't happen, Im saying if it does happen it needs to be done right and as little lives as possible lost. The road to Mars will be very similar to the road we took to the Moon.

Rockets are crap, they've been the worst means of space travel from the beginning.
We need a new and more efficient source of fuel or energy in order to make the trips less strenuous on... well, everything involved.

Originally posted by MrGrimm
Rockets are crap, they've been the worst means of space travel from the beginning.
We need a new and more efficient source of fuel or energy in order to make the trips less strenuous on... well, everything involved.

Fully agree.

Chemical rockets will simply not do it for long term manned space travel, too dangerous, and they require too much fuel for long trips. I think we will see Nuclear or Plasma engines beginning to be researched, personally, I like the Sun Sail idea, no propellant to carry, no reactor, just the suns rays.

We have many advanced fabrics,ceramics, alloys and coatings that are currently being used in every heat and radiation application on the planet, we have advanced propulsion systems that were developed and work according to their engineering for space travel, we have advanced life support systems that work flawlessly, the only thing we are lacking in this endeavor is the willpower to stop blowing the hell out of innocent people and raping the planet at every level.

It has been known for a long time that we have the capability to launch massive spaceships weighing literally any amount and size with the use of old tech atom bombs, and that even our newest developed non-nuclear explosive materials have the same energy as what was developed at trinity, so with this being known, only perfecting its techniques of use will allow us unlimited low cost launch and travel capability and proceed accordingly

i think the space station could be an important element in colonization of other worlds in our solar system.Think about it you build a decent sized one for research and more importantly a fuel station to take advantage of no gravity,and to get experience building space stations in zero g.That way when we get to mars we can try to build a station in orbit to act as a supply base and eventually a depot to facilitate longer missions or mining operations if the process could be automated it could potentially make colonization much easier.

As to actually terraform a world i dont think technologically we are anywhere near the point we need to be ,so i think it will be domes on the moon and mars first and eventually when the technology gets here we will start terraform all be it in limited ways .

getting back to the station issue (again if automated could be key) then we could finance further space projects with revenue from mining asteroids and or the moon and hopefully that wealth could then trickle down to other areas such as education and healthcare (we can hope right?). And once we get the launching of rockets or whatnot into space or ideally a station in orbit around the moon to take some of the risk of failed launches out of the equation least thats how i see it happening

edit to add: idealy we could then set up either setti or asteroid detection sattelites or bases far out in the system to give us some warning of impending asteroid strikes or to build big telescopes to search for life bearing worlds
science.howstuffworks.com... guess there is about 100 billion per person in wealth in the belt so yeah those asteroids are key

science.howstuffworks.com...

reply to post by sweetnlow


The atom bomb propulsion system you refer to is called Orion, and was put forward decades ago as a feasible means of space propulsion, I think the main thing preventing it from use is the nuclear non-proliferation treaties that ban the use of nuclear bombs in space, in my opinion this system would drastically cut the time needed to reach Mars and the other planets, and as a bonus it might deplete the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons!

All it would take would be someone with the vision and guts to get it going, financially it would initially be expensive, but the long-term benefits of fast travel to the planets would outweigh the initial costs over time.

Unfortunately, that person of vision and guts seems not to have been born yet!

science.nasa.gov...

In an unexpected reversal of fortune, NASA's NanoSail-D spacecraft has unfurled a gleaming sheet of space-age fabric 650 km above Earth, becoming the first-ever solar sail to circle our planet.

"We're solar sailing!" says NanoSail-D principal investigator Dean Alhorn of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. "This is a momentous achievement." from above source.

this is also promising in forms of propulsion as im sure we could use this on unmanned cargo pods or probes to explore a bit futher out so it does seem some breakthroughs in technology are still being made in the space area



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en.wikipedia.org... yeah i know wikipedia but there is some interesting stuff there

en.wikipedia.org... and i guess this was a bush era/possible obama plan that may be still in the works so we might just be building a moon base after all

en.wikipedia.org... : from source
Project Horizon was a study to determine the feasibility of constructing a scientific / military base on the Moon. On June 8, 1959, a group at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) produced for the U.S. Department of the Army a report entitled Project Horizon, A U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Military Outpost.":

so i guess we have been pondering this for a lot longer then last few decades also

en.wikipedia.org...:
The Lunex Project was a US Air Force 1958 plan for a manned lunar landing prior to the Apollo Program. The final lunar expedition plan in 1961 was for a 21-airman underground Air Force base on the Moon by 1968 at a total cost of $ 7.5 billion.":

i wonder how different our world would be had the usa had a air force(space force?) base on the moon since the late 60's....


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I've always liked the idea of solar sails, because not only does it move the spacecraft but can also be used as radiation shielding" depending where the sun is relative to your destination"..lol
but nasa has also developed piggy back space vehicles that can ride on the backs of large air force jets into the upper stratosphere then be released to to climb into space without the use of massive rocket boosters from launch sites, now this is where you could haul assembly components to the space station non stop and return, while the technicians at the station would assemble your Mars space surfer and all of its supplies, which would allow you to design manufacture and assemble lighter weight materials because of less stress on the airframe.

Originally posted by royspeed
reply to post by sweetnlow

 

All it would take would be someone with the vision and guts to get it going, financially it would initially be expensive, but the long-term benefits of fast travel to the planets would outweigh the initial costs over time.