ALL SCI-FI

[Gord Green]

From Ars Technica

Finally, someone has a realistic timeline for Mars colonization — the UAE
The ruler of Dubai said humans should aim to colonize Mars a century from now.
Eric Berger

NASA says it intends to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, but the space agency does not have a realistic budget to do so. SpaceX's Elon Musk says he will send the first human colonists to Mars in the 2020s, but his company also lacks the funding to implement its bold plans without a major government partner.

We can now add the United Arab Emirates to the list of those entities who want to see Mars colonized. However, even if it too lacks the space exploration budget or technology to do so at this time, the federation of seven Arab emirates appears to have a much more reasonable timeline for sending humans to the red planet — the year 2117, a century from now.
The ruler of one of the seven emirates, Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, announced UAE's colonization plan this week at the World Government Summit in Dubai.

Later, in a series of tweets, Sheikh Mohammad explained, "The project, to be named 'Mars 2117,' integrates a vision to create a mini-city and community on Mars involving international cooperation. We aspire in the coming century to develop science, technology, and our youth's passion for knowledge. This project is driven by that vision."

Musk's Mars moment: Audacity, madness, brilliance — or maybe all three. The UAE's space agency, which already has a partnership with French and British space agencies, envisions an international program. "The Mars 2117 project will develop an Emirati and international team of scientists to push the human exploration of Mars in years to come,"

Sheikh Mohammad said. "Mars 2117 is a seed we are sowing today to reap the fruit of new generations led by a passion for science and advancing human knowledge."

According to Dubai's media office, an Emirati team of engineers, scientists, and researchers has developed a concept for the first human city on Mars, which will be constructed by robots in advance of human habitation. This Martian city would have transportation, power production, food and — based upon some concept drawings released — modern-looking buildings.

This is all rather ambitious for a space agency that was formed just three years ago. However, the new goal does seem consistent with UAE's interest in Mars, as the Arab federation has previously announced a plan to launch an automobile-size probe named "Hope" to Mars in 2020 to study the planet's atmosphere.

What is perhaps most notable about Mars 2117 is that it represents a third major stakeholder interested in sending humans to Mars, alongside NASA and SpaceX. Most of the rest of the global space community, from Europe to Russia to China, have expressed far more interest in developing lunar resources rather than far more ambitious human missions to Mars.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/finally-someone-has-a-realistic-timeline-for-mars-colonization-the-uae/

[Bud Brewster]

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Robots will build the cities before the colonists arrive.

Interesting idea.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

I think the point of this is the international scope of the urge for Mars.
Mars in a few hundred years may be as diverse as the Earth.

[Bud Brewster]

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The idea of having very sophisticated robots (under the partial direction of controllers back on Earth) works very well with the fact that we're probably going to find it necessary to steer a few dozen large comets towards Mars and let them crash into it to add their water and other chemicals to the atmosphere.





Think of comets as giant atmosphere seeds we could use to speed up the terraforming of Mars. www.universetoday.com has this to say about the composition of comets.
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They are composed of rock, dust, ice and frozen gases such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia. Sometimes called dirty snowballs, recent studies have shown that the ice of a comet is covered by a crust. Comets also contain a variety of organic compounds as well as the gases already mentioned.
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The carbon dioxide and ammonia definitely suck, but the water ice is liquid gold, and the carbon dioxide is like Christmas morning for the future plant life!

On that note, I'm not sure whether the "organic compounds" are good news or bad news. Maybe they're just totally irrelevant. Those compounds might just get obliterated by the heat of the comet's impact when it bitch slaps the Red Planet.

The point of all this, of course, is that if an army of diligent droids are dashing around on Mars playing Bob the Builder and getting a colony ready for habitation, they can easily endure the occasional impact of a comet a few thousand miles away if they have plenty of warning from the Comet Moving Crew who pushes these things towards Mars to juice up that horrible atmosphere before the new inhabitants move in.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Brent Gair]

[Bud Brewster]

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Well now, let's see. America isn't doing any serious space exploration now, no other nation has ever done it before, and groups of nations can't work together to get a damn thing done.

I think the aliens of the galaxy are completely safe from human interference, now and forever. I'm sure they find that very reassuring.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)