Creating an Underwater Society?

I think Mars is a somewhat better bet if Earth gets messed up.

I'd like to experience a slice of life either underwater, or on Mars. If Earth goes into another long ice age regardless of its starting point, than the oceans could be come too cold to inhabit, even at a very low depth. For all we know a asteroid strike could tilt Earth's axis so that it becomes a big snow ball. No matter what happens on Earth, a Martian colony wouldn't be affected, assuming that they are self-dependent.

We should reach out to Mars, and begin to terraform it because I believe it is humanity's destiny to slip the bonds of Earth and expand into the rest of our solar system, and eventually galaxy. This will hinge itself on weather or not there is a monetary gain that can be taken from the planet itself. For more on Martian colonization, you can look under the Astronomy thread that is titled Mars. It may be in the archives.

 

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Reasons for moving out.

Dilution of the population of earth into the space environment and into other worlds should be a long term goal. One as was mentioned is that we are vulnerable, as a species, within this one ecosystem. If it dies, for whatever reason, so do we. There are a few scenarios that would drive such to happen.

1. The asteroid impact scenario.
   It is not likely at the present stage of our development that we would discover an on course asteroid more than a few weeks at best. Several in past years have managed to come within days of near impact before discovery.
   
2. The polluted environment scenario.
   That earth becomes so polluted as to not be able to support life with any real meaning to quality of life or quantity. This is within our means to control at present. That does not mean it will always be so.
   
3. The nuclear winter scenario.
   War on it’s most dreaded scale. Total devestation of our way of life. Prehaps we would survive on some small scale afterwards, who is to say? But the effects would be around far longer than we as a species have any right to expect to exist if past history has any relevance.
   
4. The superbug.
   One of the great fears I have is that some military research project escapes. To put it into the words of one Rush Limbough(?) “The military exists for two purposes, to break things and kill people”. A tailored germ/virus to eliminate the human species. Ideally it would effect only the enemy. But in the design/tailoring stage it is likely the bug would have an affinity for all peoples. And there is always an enemy that could have your tailor made bug.
   

This could be broken on down to multitudes of subcatorgies but I’m sure you get the gist.

 

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Only too well, I'm afraid.

Any other speculations?

 

Attack of the Killer tomatoes. Since I'm sure you don't mean the movie, prehaps a question is in order.

How would you go about such a thing? Ship the product to the local grocery store? Would you load such into the fruit/vegetable? What would the shelf life of such be before the "product" is unusable?

If I had it in for, say France, (the French have never done anything to me, but losing all that competion for the home girls might be an idea), would the preferable senerio be to load the water supply, food supply, some warehouse of material to be sold to the general public, or prehaps even a hospital? A hospital seems like a good place to start. After all the victum was sick and had a relapse.

And would my bug be genetic? With prehaps the possibility of transferring by touch? Air transmission?

 

The Benign Bug

Interesting, as always.

A super predator of super bugs. Which would have to be tailored to exacting standards. Most bugs, it would seem would be looking for some specific receptor site to lock on to. Sooo, the predator would have to be looking for those attachment keys/codes.

This brings to mind the Virus Attacks on computers which seems to be a cat and mouse game of catch up. The virus strikes, the antivirus is keyed to look for the identifing signature to neutralize the attack. So this brings the medical field to the same level. If you neutralize one, leaving the opponent without a strike ability, natuarlly they are going to modify/change the bug, which leads to the next round.

So do you expose your knowledge of the opponets' weapon and your research into it or do wait until use to prevent esclation ahead of time?

 

While having wandered a good bit from the orginal topic of the thread it has been, shall we say, educational.

I wonder if this solar sail technology will assist in the traveling to Mars and the setup of a colony?

I also wonder if there is some new medicine awaiting our discovery in the ocean? I would think that if we did have a underwater habitat we might come closer to finding such. Spending more time in direct contact with the enviroment would allow more observation time. One of the keys to discovery.

 

underwater

Nobody remembers atronaut Scott Carpenter's participation in Sealab, a Navy sponsored habitat in the Bahamas? Sealab was operating back in the late 1960's. The project was expensive because of the surface support vessels which provided power hookups as well as oxygen. Astronauts don't have to do any sort of saturation to avoid the 'bends', but divers do. The physiology of diving is often more hazardous than space flight.

A better simulation for deep space flights are submarines, or remote terrestial locations such as antarctica. Data from these are what NASA uses to project living conditions for trips to Mars. Also don't forget MIR. Cosmonuats stayed in orbit longer than a round trip to Mars would take.

 

I echo kmguru's welcome. Here is a chair sit and be welcome.

I am somewhat familiar with divers and their needs. But let me make it clear that I am around it occasionally, not a diver. I have seen the equpitment needed to house the divers on a long term basis for underwater jobs. They live in that can for several weeks under the pressure that they will work under when not actually at work. It has a harzarous job with a short term future much like atheletes.

The Mars exploration simulation is running at present. Yesterday they were to set up to run geophones but the weather got in the way and hampered the transportation to and from their supposed site. (They never actually made it there)

 

I disagree...

Space is a lot more dangerous than the water. A paint fleck in earth's orbit travels at 18,000 mph. The single fleck hit the Space Shuttle's windshield and cracked the bullet resistant glass. There are thousands of items that are flying around, and if you got hit you'd be dead. Space has lots of radiation that currently we can only be in for a few hours without shielding of another planet. I still think its wiser to colonize another planet, i.e. Mars, because whatever happens on Earth, the Martian colony won't be affected. Underwater, or outer space will require an financial incentive or it won't be worth going to. I would like to see a colony on Mars first, and an underwater one second.

 

No one can argue that they both have their dangers. The paint fleck is valid for as far as it goes. Once outside the orbit of the earth then things thin down and there are not as many. This is not to say that there are not other hazards. And radiation being one of them. Sooner or later we will have to clean up the neighborhood. And this includes the nuts, bolts, ejecta material, and yes paint flecks. One such idea that has been sponsored by Australia after the Mir crash/splash down was the Orion.

The idea behind Orion was radar tracking and aiming device. The rest of it was a pulse laser (if I remember correctly) which would keep zapping objects until they were nudged into a degrading orbit or until they were destroyed. Don't ask me how long this would take. Depends on the size of the laser, the density of the target, and what its rotational speed might be amongst other things.

Now I am certainly an advocate for a colony. And I won't be choosy to start. It can be anywhere outside this gravity well. But it must be far enough away so that we have to venture to it and they need to be as self-sufficient as possible.

 

Correction

sader,

Re. Your comment:

The following is exerpted from STS-104 Mission Status Report #11:

Just thought you'd like to know.

Re. The submarine analogy: That's why I decided to do subs; figured it was the closest I'd get to a spaceship. Glad I did it, quite the experience.

 

underwater

Ah, quite so. Thank you for the clarification. The Engineering is here, the technology is here, and the people willing to go are here. What is needed is the mandate from something to say "Do it".

 

It is called leadership. In this we are sadly lacking direction.