Re: Dust Storm brewing up on Mars, right now.
Posted by Uncle Al on Dec 18, 2003 at 10:17
(68.5.243.16)Re: Dust Storm brewing up on Mars, right now. (Mike Kremer)
Remember the Christian Crusade, er, war against the Taliban in Afghanistan? No matter where the pictures were taken or how wide the panoramas, all one saw was blasted dead dirt and rotting buildings. It is inconceivable that any amount of money could render that landscape into something acceptable, even at the urban Washington, DC level of achievement. Ditto the indigenous population.
Mars is worse.
Mars is utterly valueless real estate. It is too cold, even at its Equator. It is too dry. It has a surface atmospheric pressure of 7 - 10 torr, as opposed to 760 torr at terrestrial sea level. (The vapor pressure of water in torr is about equal to its temp in degrees C near room temp). It is riddled with UV and particulate radiation. The planetary dust storms are messy. Any manned diddling with Mars could have its budget spent colonizing the moon - with some real hope of ass-tronaut survival.
The sum of Mars exploration is political posturing. We have gone so far as to name individual rocks. To what end?
Just one: CO2 in the Martian high atmosphere is continuously pumped into population inversion by sunlight. It is within engineering imagination to construct a low-orbital terawatt-continuous CO2 laser. Incredible volumes of Mars' atmosphere can be weaponized. For real.
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
(Do something naughty to physics)
Follow Ups:
- Feo: Dust Storm brewing up on Mars, right now. Feo Amante 18/12 16:51 (0)