What is the Universe expanding into..

[vishal raju]

Kaffi . Your plan .? Enlighten us further .

 

[Galu]

"The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys." - Douglas Adams

 

[boswald]

These plans remind me of the American space program having trouble with their ball-point pens- they created a sealed, pressurized ball-point cartridge that could write upside down, and in weightless, unpressurized environments.


...............the Russians pulled out a pencil.

 

[Bonsai]

Ha ha. I’ve heard that one before. Like the Russian GPS system in a drone. It was a mobile phone screwed to the airframe with a camera pointing at the phone screen. There was even a tweet from an American official mocking them.

(Don’t know for sure if the pic was faked of course)

 

[KaffiMann]

Kaffi . Your plan .? Enlighten us further .

Brought up this subject a little while ago, just click the link to that post and there's a few posts after that about this.

Galu, I see one major fault with that space station. It looks boring. The old ones look a lot nicer.

Bonsai, yeah, I've been thinking and if we start assembling asteroids just outside of Mars we could do it remotely! A combined main system consisting of a solar array with scanner to sort which ones are made from what and a powerful laser for a bit of precision work, some mobile robots with grappling hooks for both maneuvering and moving asteroids. Perhaps a sorting and processing unit could work in tandem with the gathering robots and leave behind roughly sorted melted lumps of material, or perhaps even just 3d print bigger bits together.

We have all of this technology available today! No need to wait or send more useless humans into space, why expose people to risk and radiation when we could just make everything from stuff already in space.

Edit:
We could probably adapt mass into making both earth 2 and 3 before we'd have to get creative!

 

[Galu]

Even though the idea is a tad less ambitious that planet building, the enthusiasm for the mining of near-Earth asteroids seems to have waned over the last few years.

Does Commercial Asteroid Mining Still Have A Future?

As KaffiMann has implied, only the use of robots would make such a venture economically possible.

 

[KaffiMann]

I think it's really strange that they consider hauling matter to be further processed on earth, why could it not be a form of huge 3D printer out where the material can be mined?
Hauling matter around is an incredible waste if you can use it right there to make spaceships and infrastructure.
Make some liveable spacestations with spin gravity before sending a handful of techies out there.

Edit:
And forget about Mars for a while until it can be made into Earth2. Drill some deep holes and feed iron to the core, see if it's possible to push Phobos a bit more out and fatten it up.

 

[Bonsai]

Maybe just move lots of asteroids onto Mars as you say and 'fatten' it up.

 

[KaffiMann]

Yes, but it's easier to increase the core for the magnetic field when it's still small-ish, or we might have to wait a really long time for it to cool down. Just gently crashing down asteroids could lead to a millennium of cool down, if we're lucky.
Fill the core up gently, then do a bit of gentle crashing with ice and some asteroids, a few decades of waiting if we're careful.

 

[Galu]

The NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission launched successfully at 6.20 GMT today.

As described earlier in the thread, this mission aims to be the first to actually move an asteroid out of its current orbit.

Nasa Dart asteroid spacecraft: Mission to smash into Dimorphos space rock launches - BBC News

 

[tvrgeek]

Science fiction becomes science fact.

 

[Galu]

Watch out, Steve's about!

 

[Bonsai]

 

[system7]

People who follow events at diyaudio.com will be aware I have been indulging an old and rare talent for hacking computers recently. Many interesting discoveries made thanks to "The People's Operating System" known as Ubuntu Linux. Turns out the innocent looking Laptop Hard Drive I found hid many secrets. The affiliated P45 Motherboard or Intel E8400 Core2Duo Processor was broken and unfixable. But why the massive overkill on cooling fans?

Big clue was an install of a Windows utility known as GPU-Z, for overclocking graphics cards. Along with a notorious hacker's utility known as ATIFlash or WINFlash for making graphics cards more efficient, even to turn them into faster Radeon-Pro machines by a graphics bios upgrade. The giveaway was a very dubious batch file called mining.bat designed to make MS Windows 10 more focussed on certain tasks. Since the batch file turns off Windows Defender anti-virus protection, whilst being aware of the IP address of the downloader, it appears to be a pure Trojan Horse to me, designed to steal your hard-mined Crypto-Currency.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions. But I want nothing to do with such activities. I will wipe this hard-drive as quickly as possible and install the latest Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS.

Back to the Physics. I have become alarmed at the complete muddle that is Modern Particle Physics. Just when we thought we knew what a nucleus is, we find we don't even have a clue what a Proton is. A lot of Pions, for sure, but quite incalculable IMO. And what is inside a Quark? More stuff! It's looking like plum pudding all the way down.

 

[TNT]

I see it all now - Pete is describing the "Big Crunch".

TNT - you may be the "informed, intelligent" physicist he is looking for!

:-D

//

 

[TNT]

At least someone is smart enough to understand you can't maintain an atmosphere without one.

Someone else (smart?) said:

"Photoionization is the main process which Mars loses it’s atmosphere. A magnetic field will not stop that. A solar powered MRI placed at the L1 Lagrange point will be more powerful than Mars’ native magnetic field. But then there is the cost of maintaining it."

//

 

[system7]

As the World wakes up this morning from baffling events in Sweden...

No, we have no idea what went on.

Clearly the wrong Woman got elected. I would have gone for Malmo Detective Saga Noren.

Interestingly crazy. A Woman for all Seasons.

 

[Galu]

I have become alarmed at the complete muddle that is Modern Particle Physics. It's looking like plum pudding all the way down.

I must correct you regarding your labelling of the image "Rutherford atomic model aka The Plum Pudding Model"

As any Physicist worth his salt knows, it is J. J. Thomson who is associated with the Plum Pudding Model of the atom, while Ernest Rutherford is associated with the Nuclear Model of the atom.

 

[TNT]

Magda is hot!

//

 

[Galu]

Someone else (smart?) said:

"Photoionization is the main process which Mars loses it’s atmosphere. A magnetic field will not stop that. A solar powered MRI placed at the L1 Lagrange point will be more powerful than Mars’ native magnetic field. But then there is the cost of maintaining it."

We would need a reference, TNT, so that we can check the authority behind the statement "A magnetic field will not stop that."

Below, is a reference which describes the various mechanisms by which Mars loses its atmosphere.

How NASA's MAVEN Probe Will Investigate Mars Atmosphere Mystery | Space

"Sputtering, dissociation, photoionization, and Jeans escape: any of these mechanisms can cause loss in the ionosphere, or upper atmosphere. This in turns leads to the slow bleeding away of the lower atmosphere. In the absence of a protective magnetic field, these escape phenomena lead to atmospheric loss on a grand scale. Scientists think that Mars lost its planet-wide magnetic field about 3.8 billion years ago, and that the subsequent disappearance of its air and oceans have been largely driven by the sun."