Moontanman

Good morning!

 

Over coffee, I came up with the following.

 

I believe that Mars is quite a nice place for plants. The atmosphere is nearly pure CO2, which must sound like heaven for a plant if it had ears.

 

The pressure is 750 Pa (7.5 mbar). That means that the CO2 pressure is a lot higher than on earth (where we have merely 35 Pa CO2 pressure).

 

How difficult would it be to grow plants in the Martian atmosphere?

 

I know that the temperature is too low. Water, if available at all, is solid. But those two points can be solved with a simple solution: a greenhouse.

 

The point I'm trying to make is: a greenhouse could be really simple and low-tech. Just a plastic foil to create an insulation and raise the temperature to a little above zero Celsius.

 

Also, the additional vapor pressure from water would be no problem (at 5 deg C, we are talking about 6.5 mmHg (or, 8.5 mbar). That overpressure is perfect for keeping the greenhouse inflated.

 

The only high-tech piece of equipment you could need is a way to remove oxygen from the "air" inside the greenhouse. Venting it to the outside atmosphere would also cause the greenhouse to lose water.

 

Any thoughts?

Actually the main problem would be that water cannot be a liquid at the atmospheric pressure of Mars. It sublimes like frozen CO2 does on the earth.

I'd put money down that there is currently no life on mars.

I'll take that bet, I'd be amazed if there is no life on Mars, deep under ground their is almost certainly bacteria. Bacteria are found in the earth miles deep in places and under conditions that make Mars look like Paradise. Deep with in Mars there similar if not identical conditions. The real question is will we live long enough to collect on the bet one way or another?

The same way you can determine that a mountain has greater mass than an apple.

Size and mass are not interchangeable. It is possible for a object the size of an apple to be more massive than the mountain.

Refer to the parts in bold from my opening question, quoted below.

 

 

What I mean by virtual, is not a real mass gain per se, such as how we understand objects with greater and greater mass have more of a gravity pull, weight and size, eventually becoming a star and then a black hole.

It's my understanding that the mass increase is quite real.

So by virtual, I mean an object is treated as having the extra mass, but it doesn't have the associated gravity pull, size, or collapsing into nuclear fusion problems. Maybe it does have the weight though.

The object does have the extra mass, it come from the energy you put into accelerating the object to near light speed. The only visual effect would be the object or space craft being shortened along the axis of acceleration.

Will people who should know better stop speaking about a molten mantle. The mantle is not molten, except in small isolated pockets. This kind of inaccurate statement just plays into the hands of the pseudoscience extremists.

Ok you are correct, from the stand point of human time frames the mantle is not molten. It is like a very dense putty or hot plastic but in the time frame of geology it does indeed act as though it were molten and the continents do float on top of the denser mantel.

explain.

No problem, at one time all the land area of the earth was on Continent. A hot spot formed under this land mass caused by eh insulating properties of this land mass. all the animals at this time could walk anywhere (in theory) and mix with each other.

As the hot spot spread the continents apart these animals lost contact with each other but still show signs of being related. Also land bridges do occasionally come up to connect continents, like central America connecting north and south America and the land bride that existed from Siberia to North America at one time. The is no reason what so ever to propose an expanding earth to explain animals all around the world being related.

There is one thing that I can also address and that is the world wide ridge where the earth's crust spreads apart. On the coast of the Atlantic the continents are being spread away from the ridge at the center of the Atlantic. on the west coast the crust that was formed in the middle of the Pacific is being subducted under the north and south American plates.

The Rocky Mountains and the Andes Mountains are evidence of this. As this oceanic crust is subducted some of the continental crust is folded up and the subducted Pacific ocean crust also comes up through active volcanoes. Eventually either the Pacific plate will reverse the motion of the north and south American plates or those plates will be pushed into Asia.

The plates move because what we see as solid rock actually acts more like very stiff putty over the eons of times these plates need to move around. A good place to see this effect on a solid surface is arctic pack ice, this ice while solid to the touch acts like a thick putty over large areas in real time.

This particular movement of the plates from all jammed up into one Continent into several is the second or maybe even third time this has happened. the one before Pangaea was called Gondwanaland. It preceded the current land mass by more than 300 million years or so.

To appeal to the people who want some evidence for an expanding earth I am going to put down what I have found.

 

As you read through this I want you to take the evidences and try to see the big picture. Most of the things I have found don't prove anything on their own but as evidences are added a clear picture begins to come into view. I realize that many of the evidences I will point out will have alternate explications, but I want you to look at the big picture.

 

Here is a simple picture I put together illustrating what a perfectly rigid continent would look like on an expanded earth.

 

Please note two things. One thing is that the edges of the continent are lower then the center of the continents. Look at any continent and you will find that the centers of the continents are higher than the edges. The other is the angle formed between the continent edge and the ocean floor. Notice how the angle formed could be mistaken for a subduction zone.

 

Another thing about the curve, becuase continents cannot hold that shape becuase of the forces of gravity, the curve will collapse with the expansion of the earth. This is what forms mountains. For one thing it is a consistent explanation for every mountain range. This explanation for mountain forming is also very consistent with what can be observed with actual mountains. It is consistent with the fact that the Himalayas and the Rockies are roughly the same age. It is consistent with the fact that larger continents tend to yield larger mountain ranges.

 

Age of the seafloor

 

This is the age of the seafloor around the world. Please note the continuous ridge that circles the globe. Notice how the ridge matches with the outlines of nearby coastlines. Look at the ridge to the west of South America. Notice how well it follows the coastline of South America.

 

Also notice how the age range of the Pacific matches that of the Atlantic as well as every other ocean in the world. There is nothing on the ocean floor that is older than 180 million years old. The oldest of the crust is near the continental crust and new crust is being formed at the ridges everywhere on the globe. This data is a perfect match for an expanding earth. This data was discovered after the proposal of an expanding earth.

 

Look at the indent on the east side of South America then look at the outdent in Australia. Notice how they fit together. Just like South America and Africa fit together. Another thing about South America and Africa. If you try to piece them together, there is a spread. If you like up the top, but bottom doesn't connect. If you like up the bottom, the top doesn't. If they are curved to a smaller globe, they fit on the top and the bottom.

 

Take a look at this paper.

The trans-Pacific zipper effect.

It goes into matching outlines but it also addresses the fact that there are fossils that are found on either side of the pacific and nowhere else in the world.

 

Just like fossil evidence, matching outlines, and seafloor age data provides evidence for a closed Atlantic. This same evidence applies to the Pacific. 180 millions years ago the Pacific was closes, just like the Atlantic. Pangaea existed, it just wrapped around the entire earth when it was smaller.

 

Another insight fossil evidence offers is the larger size of creatures that existed millions of years ago. While most of them where not massive, the average size of creatures was larger than that of the average size today. Dragonflies, elephants, and crocodiles among other animals all have ancestors that are larger than their descendants today.

 

Another interesting thing to note is that Ganymede (Another Picture) and Mars both show signs of expansion. With Ganymede, just look at the edges of the dark areas and how they match up. Even better than the image of Ganymede is the one of Mars. The image I linked to show the elevation of mars. Notice how the higher crust has more craters. More craters means older crust. This means that the higher crust is older, just like earth.

 

All these small details all coherently fit together under the assumption that the earth is expanding. I don't need you to start telling me alternate explanations to what I outlined. Just read over this a few times and try to get the big picture.

Your little picture is cute but it doesn't even come close to describing reality. The continents are more like Ice floating in the ocean. Most of the continent is below with just a small amount of the lighter continental crust showing. Like an ice berg the continents are much thicker in the middle than they are at the edges.

The continents are light rocks floating in an ocean of denser rock. the Earths crust is very thin compared to the molten mantle the continents float on. As the crust spreads and is subducted the lighter parts of the molten mantle that come up and spread from the mid ocean ridges are separated out as they are subducted.

So in a very real way the Continental crust is getting larger and the oceanic crust is not really going any where any more than a rotating belt is going any where even though it's surface moves. the continental crust is moving on the belts of mantle material , they move and run into each other and get bigger as they collect lighter rocks from the mantle.

At one time almost all if not all of the earth was covered by ocean but the process of lighter rock coming to the surface of the heavier mantle has slowly produced continents. Over the last 4.5 billion years the continents have grown. No expanding Earth, just a moving active dynamic crust floating on a sea of molten mantle.

Try this:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_locomotion#Rolling

 

I think it must have been the caterpillar I read about.

Thanks, i wasn't aware of rolling in those contexts. I knew about the snake that supposedly turns it's self into a hoop and rolls but that is just a myth with no truth to it.

I grew up living in houses that used coal fire places. We would adjust the damper in the chimney to keep the fire from burning too fast and throw more heat into the room. I do miss a fire place, we cooked on a wood stove as well, always burned sycamore wood in the cook stove, it burns the cleanest. Oh yeah, we also had fire places that were made of thick blocks of stone, the stone would get hot and radiate heat all night long, way after the fire had gone out.

What will man become? Extinct if we don't stop waffling and go and do it. Nuclear power is what we need, everything else is either pie in the sky or to expensive or too long range. If we use nuclear power to take us into space all these things can be well on their way by the turn of the next century.

Don't you think this is a sort of "god of the gaps" argument?

 

What you are saying is this:

 

1) Earth has limits on the useful extractable volumes of resources required for space expansion,

2) Something something something mumble cough cough,

3) Hey presto, a mining and recovery infrastructure throughout the solar system (or at least the interesting bits) which plugs those resources gaps.

Not at all, you are trying to obfuscate the situation. How long do you think it will take to start a significant process of exploitation of Space resources? If we really to this problem to heart it could be in decades. How long before we are unable to really mine necessary materials on the Earth? Nuclear powered space craft like the proposed "Nuclear Light bulb rocket" could speed up the exploitation of space resources considerably but even if we don't use nuclear power in that way the resources of space will not be thousands of years away or even hundreds of years. Decades at worst and maybe just a few years at best depending on how much of our resources we commit to the challenge.

While I don't doubt for a second that there will be abundant supplies of various elements and minerals throughout the solar system that will be very useful to us, we can't just make the assumption that they will ultimately be harvested.

Why not? Are the alien over lords going to come and stop us? There are no unsurmountable problems to keep us from exploiting these resources.

Consider what I was saying earlier: as time goes by, demand for the valuable materials with unique chemical properties goes up. Supplies go down. There is the very realistic possibility of crucial resources become so scarce that their paucity puts a block on the very technology we would need to mine them off Earth. This is what I meant by resources potentially placing a limit on space expansion, and that's even if we assume that everything we would need to harvest to keep expanding is actually where you expect to find it.

Only if we ***** foot around for a hundred years or so before we begin to exploit these space resources. Much of the infrastructure of mining space resources will be made in space from those very resources. It's not like we will have to continually mine the earth to go into space to get the stuff we are mining on the earth. Once we establish the beginning of the operations they can become self sustaining and use those very resources to build on. .

In a way it's a kind of race: can we put the necessary infrastructures in place before the critical materials become too scarce, or develop new technologies which rely on relatively more abdundant alternatives?

No, you are not thinking ahead, it will not be necessary to put a complete infrastructure in space. The infrastructure can be built in space from native materials. As this grows more and more can be bled off to the Earth or used to build self contained orbiting colonies in space. We will not have build an entire infrastructure in space from materials mined on the earth to mine these resources

I didn't think you were a fan of speculation in these threads, but regardless I tend to agree that confirmation of rich off-planet sources of those elements is an intriguing bit of news which deserves an optimistic response. There is of course the issue of whether or not we can mine or otherwise extract the materials we are interested in, but at least for now we know they are there.

There are already many proposals for mining in space, we need to get there to test out some of the more obvious ones. As i said there is no reason to think any unsurmountable engineering problems exist that will prevent us from mining the resources in space.

Quite possibly. If there is one thing we have learned from the history of expansionist material capitalist societies, it's that someone will at least try.

No someone will succeed, all we have to is have the will to try and not get bogged down in negative thinking.

You MAY still be asked if your a member (doubt) but would any gay person living in a union, say NO I am not. Then what authority (none) does the hospital have to check your statement. This is a ploy used by advocates....

Actually Jackson, this sort of thing happens all the time, there are many ways gays can be hurt by laws that support inequality.

One of the worst would be if your gay partner died, anyone who was a blood relation could come in and take away anything he had owned up to and including the house you lived in. Even in the best case scenario you would have to pay taxes on the house if it was left to you by your gay lover no matter how long you have together.

Can you imagine being with your lover for 30 years and then he dies and you are kicked out the house you paid for together because you can't pay the taxes on it or because his relatives want half or all of it?

If you had a gay child wouldn't you want him or her to have the same rights as everyone else?

Yes, that's all well and good when you are talking about copper, but if you consider other materials vital to complex technologies, such as platinum, iridium, osmium, and Greenockite, my point stands. I'm pretty sure I could go on with an extensive list of things we might like a great deal more of should we wish to expand beyond Earth.

 

I notice you chose to talk about copper, which is commonly known to be abundant, but ignored lead. With the current rate of increase in utilisation, lead production (which includes mining and recycling) will become insufficient in about 40-45 years. But perhaps when we want to send all those ships to other stars we will be able to collect up all the bullets and melt them down for the cause.

Exploiting the resources of space ie the asteroids would give us an almost unlimited amount of resources. Yes they can be brought to the Earth easily, it's taking back into space that is difficult.

So why do you keep denying that humankind can use up all the available mass of a given element, if there is an "upper limit"? Isn't that pretty much what I have been talking about: the maximum potentially available mass of an element?

 

It's perfectly conceivable that we could use a trillion tonnes of Usefullium. A big number does not mean a number which cannot be reached.

 

 

"Inconsiderable" is relative, to borrow your own thinking from the end of that post. 10 million tonnes is not that much when shared among export countries in one year, and you are talking about it over 10,000 years as if it is a lot. That's 1000 tonnes a year, if you assume constant rate (which is very simplistic but let's not get too clever about this).

 

Let's take copper as an example, seeing as it's a recurring theme in this thread, and we know it's abundant so it should robustly stand up to being mined:

 

In 1900, we were producing half a million tonnes a year. This had risen to 15 million tonnes per year by the turn of the millenium. If you look at the current methods, we stand to run out of accessible copper in 20-60 years, depending on growth in the range 2% to 0.

 

 

Do you know which marine organisms need the lithium? Because if you don't, then you can't know how changes in the concentration will affect marine ecology.

Why is everyone assuming the Earth is our only source of raw materials? The solar system is at our disposal, the asteroids contain huge amounts of minerals most of which are reasonably easy to extract and even bring to the earth. Yes if we confine our efforts to the earth there will come a day when many elements will be too difficult to extract but way before we get to that point we should be exploiting the resources of the entire solar system.

You should have asked How do people drive worms out of the ground with electricity or why does electricity drive worms out of the ground, the Why is to use them in some way, you didn't ask for the reason behind the worms coming out of the ground.

So it's easier to collect them, put them into a container like an empty coffee can, and take them on the boat to bait the hook for fishin'.

You left out worm fritters:doh:

Hey, all this talk about anal sex and if it is easier to transmit STD's you guys left out the best one, oral sex, it is better worse or indifferent to STD's

I suppose that is possible. There is a worm that curls up into a wheel and rolls.

I hate to have to ask but I never heard of that one, can you provide a link?

Imagine the lake is full of dissolved silanes and silanes with hydrocarbons bonded to the silicon chains, at out temperatures such molecules would break up immediately but at the temps of titan they would be just stable enough to exist and build up over time, could life be in this lake?

I will do it for $50- nothing like competition in the market.

I'll do it for $10 but ten thousand people need to send me the $10 each. If there's not any more interest than that then let it come, global warming should really be going good by then and a nuclear type winter might do us some good......

Is it Theoretically possible to ignite certain gas giants or even create a large ball of gas in space that we could ignite to create something that might resemble a miniature sun?

If you think about it enough you can come up with a theoretical way to do almost anything, it's actual practice that is difficult. If you wanted to "ignite" Jupiter and could do anything but needed to keep it close to the same mass then drop in a large ball of neutronium, maybe a ball of neutronium a few meters in diameter should be enough to start fusion at the surface of the sphere once it's at the core of Jupiter (maybe not, it might take a lot more but the principle should work) of course this would make Jupiter more massive. In the book/movie 2001 a Space Odyssey part of the mass of Jupiter was turned into neutronium or something similar to ignite fusion at it's core. It probably wouldn't support fusion for more than a few million years but it would shine for a while.

Well since the pot is being stirred very hard already I will have to add something to the mix, Mirror Matter could be a small part of what we thing of as the missing mass. It would in all probability be about equal to the mass of regular matter in the universe.

currently the percentages are around these figures

73% Dark Energy

23% Dark Matter

3.6% Intergalactic gas

0.4% Stars, Planets, ect.....

Mirror matter could change this to

7.2% Intergalactic gas

0.8% Stars, planets, ect....

19% Dark Matter

73% Dark Energy

Not much of a change but it would preserve mirror symmetry in matter.

Damn, I think my brain just boiled, and I thought aneutronic fusion was pie in the sky

Originally posted by Moontanman

 

 

Ok so 10,000 years ago the early humans were CAVEMEN and did not know mathematics, engineering, and other stuff that could be considered as ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY perse'. Then about 3-4000 years later they built cities, ziggurats, towers, learned math, sciences, medecine, mold bricks, extract metals from the earth and other stuff that so absurdly they weren't ready for. HOW ON EARTH DID THEY ACCOMPLISHED SO MANY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IN A VERY SHORT SPAN OF TIME??????????

Please give me detailed explanation, because you claim that they are geniuses!

Did you not read my post or are you just being obtuse? I didn't say our ancestors were cave men 10,000 years ago, i said people ten to think our ancestors were stupid and living under rock over hangs. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If you want cave men go back a few more tens of thousands of years.....

UFO are an invention of the US Military as a cover for testing experimental aircraft.

 

Aliens capable of space travel are too intelligent to come here.

Now that's the smartest thing I've heard so far

Hold a magnet near a AC transformer, you can feel the magnet vibrate.

This is something I kind of call "Sherlock Syndrome" when trying to find answers:

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

 

The problem is that often, the simplest, most brilliant methods are the ones that are the easiest to miss. Very few people have been urged to solve the problem of moving such heavy blocks with primitive tools since the advent of cranes, but as has been mentioned here, there are some very clever ways of doing so.

 

It is just too easy to dismiss something as impossible by available means when it really is, possible.

 

It doesn't rule out that aliens visited our ancestors, but it does seem more probable that we've overlooked a simpler explanation than aliens traveling across light years to help us move some rocks.

People tend to think of our ancestors as dumb naked people living on the edge of rock over hangs eating raw meat and picking their noses for fun. Ancient people were very bit as smart as we are and in some ways maybe even smarter. They might not have had the great technology we do but they had their brains and they used them, probably much more than we do. When you have huge population of people willing to do almost anything for the people in power almost anything is achievable. Roll blocks of stone up dirt ramps that are later removed, build a pyramid, similar techniques can be used to build large objects, even huge stones apparently suspended in impossible places. Given time and labor I wouldn't fault them for anything.

Differentiating the water can be done two ways. The first way is labor intensive and requires examining each situation, independently. The other way is to develop some broad based principles that can treat the water affect in a more broad based way. This is less resource intensive but has the requirement of redefining some existing chemistry.

 

Over the years I have developed a number of approaches but many involved theories that required basic research before you could even get started. Recently I made a simple observation that should allow us to get up to steam much quicker. It represents a way to define the potential that can be stored in water and hydrogen bonding.

 

To begin, the following reaction defines the range of energetics within the living state. O2 + H2 <=> 2H2O

 

This is typically written as a forward reaction. I show it as a reversible reaction since life can work within the potential range of this equation in both directions. The production of H2 by life was discovered during research for alternative energy, making H2 gas with bacteria. It is not clear if these bacteria can also eat H2. Most of life uses intermediate reduction and oxidation states, within this energy range, with C-H and N-H as the reduced state since it is easier to store than H2. This energy value is stepped down, with enzymes, all the way to H2O, if O2 is present. Life can go the other way with plants able to make O2 and most of life able to make highly reduced states of C such as saturated lipid material and methane.

 

The area of this equation this is of most interest for the water is the reaction H20 + H2O <=> H2O...H2O. This is just a way of representing hydrogen bonding. If you look at this closely, what happens when a hydrogen bond forms, the H is able to share extra electron density. What that means is the hydrogen bond in water reduces the hydrogen, relative to the zero state of an isolated water molecule. The oxygen is also oxidized relative to this same zero state. One way O shifts this back toward the oxidation of H, is the pH affect, which generates H+ or H3O+.

 

Putting aside the pH affect, liquid water defines an equilibrium between high and low density zones, depending on how the hydrogen bonding is arranged. Relative to the above observation and definition, this can be correlated to each zone defining a different reduction potential, i.e, how well the H is able to share the electron density of water, with the O trying to oxidize this affect. We tend to lump and average this but this average exists within a bandwidth of reduction potential, slightly to the left of the water in the H2 + O2 <=> 2H2O equation. What this means is everything in the cell is assisted by a slight reduction potential in the water, which can be tweaked locally and globally, around this bandwidth depending on how the bio-materials impacts the local and global water.

Yes there are organisms that use hydrogen to combine with carbon to make hydrocarbons and I still don't see your point. Just because we don't have an example of life with out water doesn't make water special or even necessary to any life but our own and that is easily explained by life evolving in water. Of course water has had an effect on life, if the solvent was HF it too would have an effect on the evolution of life. I'm not trying to be obtuse i just don't see the point of pointing out the painfully obvious.

No - because the evidence indicates that dark matter doesn't clump in small distance scales.

True, dark matter doesn't clump but if there is Mirror matter in the universe it should be an amount equal to the amount of matter. this would mean that most of the matter in the Universe would still be something we still do not know. I can't remember off hand what the actual percentage is but if matter comprises 5% of the universe then mirror matter should also make up 5% of the universe. Which would of course be 10% leaving the rest to dark matter and dark energy.