Real Universe Traveller

[jtfc]

What makes the present-day Mars Habitable rather than Inhospitable? After all, its atmosphere its so thin that you need a vacc suit to live on its surface due to the low pressure, temperature, solar radiation and lack of oxygen; habitats on Mars would have to be pressurized like ones on any other non-Earth planet in our solar system.

I agree that Mars is a better candidate for colonization than Luna due to massive amounts of frozen (and possibly liquid in subterranean areas) water and higher gravity. But without terraformation it isn't much more habitable than Luna or Titan.

I certainly cannot say this with any authority, but it would not surprise me if you could live underground on Mars with an air compressor and a power source. While I agree the surface in uninhabitable for the reasons you mentioned (plus other ones like random meteorites and 250mph winds), you go just a few feet underground and radiation (and winds and meteorites) stops being a factor, and temperature and pressure are easily handled with 1980s technology.

The atmosphere on Mars is 95% carbon dioxide and 5% argon, with other traces. So for your neutral gas you freeze the atmosphere, throw out the dry ice, keep the argon. For the oxygen, well, grow some plants.

I think that we'll find Mars to be pretty easy to inhabit without teraforming, as long as we stay off the surface. In fact, it seems so conducive to life that I would be shocked if we didn't find life just a few feet below the surface.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

Well, just about any world is habitable if you include underground air-tight habitats. Given that criteria, Luna is just as good as Mars.

No, Mars should definitely be inhospitable.

 

[DaltonCalford]

Well, I am in the middle of doing the conversion of the latest data but I lost my original conversion data (not thinking I would do this again)

As it is, there are over 2000 systems that do not match the standard star criteria that I have for my lookup tables, so I am in the middle of performing the data cleaning.

If someone is interested in helping, send me a PM.

best regards

Dalton

 

[jtfc]

Well, just about any world is habitable if you include underground air-tight habitats. Given that criteria, Luna is just as good as Mars.

For Luna, you'd have to ship in atmosphere, water and other supplies. Mars, on the other hand, would easily be self-sustaining, because the base compounds you need (CO2, water, a neutral gas) are plentiful.

I think any place you could maintain and grow a population with TL8 technology and no outside help should be considered hospitable. In the Real Universe, even planets with that lenient a restriction are few and far between.

 

[DaltonCalford]

Hey Guys,

Sorry about the long time without an update.
I had a software update crash my system.
Now I am back to using Kubuntu and windows is off my computer, all is well in the world again.
I am also using the gimp for creating the final data.
I am going to be posting the work over at NBOS's wiki as well as here.

I have all the data in a openoffice spreadsheet (two pages as you can only have 65K lines in a page) as well as in a regular database.

Now, I have quite a few values calculated already, while others are from lookup tables.

The formula's are something like this

Luminosity = (10^0.4x(4.7-AbsMag))*(3.8x10^26)
MassStar=MassSun(LuminosityStar/LuminositySun)^(1/Alpha)
etc.

I have about 2000 entries in the table that do not have a clear cut stellar classification. Those are being edited by hand. (long process)