Ubermensch

Sunlight, the beach, the gym --it's beautiful. It really is. It's also my first summer uneclipsed by the spectre of having to go back to school. When August rolls around I shall laugh as the children resume their living nightmare. Though it's been my experience that being a student has nothing to do with being "alive." Florida is great. Of course, when Autumn rolls around, the country will once again be cast into division and turmoil in a Great Day of confusion and suffering. Jesse Jackson will pretend like it's The White Man's fault; Dubya will embarass himself and his nation; John Kerry will speak eloquently at length about nothing in particular; the Arabs will explode and the Jews will help them do so. The can't-vote state will be part of that. So I intend to get out of the country before November 2nd.

Free will. I wanted to talk science. So I went to Google. This site seemed superior on first inspection. So I signed up. There was no benevolent ghost or unseen force guiding my decisions. I was there. I made them. I know why.

On the one hand, I have little desire to post personal information on an internet forum. On the other hand, I do not wish to offend the locals by refusing to humor their customs. So I'll say this: ubermensch is the original language (German) for "overman."

An egoist. Which means, I like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand et al, but I'm a fan of me I think it's a shame that a man has to be chased around planet Earth because the US state department decided to be stupid in his general direction. Chasing Osama = good. Chasing Bobby Fischer = stupid. I can see why he doesn't like America very much.

Atmospheric numbers were calculated by me and my familiarity with college-level chemistry. The number "4e19 kg hydrogen" was picked up from multiple websites but affirmed by my calculations. The Bosch reaction and the resulting calculations were figured using chemistry. Information on the planetoid Chiron (mass, size, location, etc) can be found all over the internet. I looked at the calcs for solar-shades and have been meaning to do them myself. Till then I won't post any numbers. Note, though, that I've proposed a modest solar-shade that only casts Venus in its penumbra; a rough guess on a solar-shade big enough to cast all of Venus in its umbra is 15,000 km. Whether the calcs prove its 15,000 or 16,000 is irrelevant; in principle, a shade of that nature would need to be a circle with a greater diameter than the planet itself. Thus I recommend a smaller shade :3 No I haven't done the cooling rates. I still have more formulas to get my hands on before I do this sort of calc. As for the towers, they don't have the problem of space probes. Computer hardware needs to be protected against Venus' hellish conditions. The towers just need to not fall down. I was considering an outer layer of heat-shield stuff, followed by a layer of silver to reflect visible and some infrared heat transmission, then a thermos-like vacuum between the next layer (the inner walls of the tower). The lower ports would be of a material that reacts with the Venusian atmosphere: they survive entry and impact/implantation in the ground, then they melt away. They could be made of lead The upper chimney would only need to pop open as soon as the lower ports are open. At this point it's like siphoning gas out of a car, with the added effect that the super-hot gases at the bottom are impelled to rise because they are hot, and the +350 kph winds at the chimney cause a suction effect. As for insertion: three parts to the system. First, a several-kilometer-long spike as the base, attatched by tether to the tower, attached to tether to a parachute/balloon. The device enters the atmosphere, ejects its heat-shield, the tethers extend, the base penetrates Venus at a high rate, the tower settles onto its base lightly using the parachute. I agree. I mean, my choice is clear. The actual intelligent life-forms who terraformed Venus have clear property rights to Venus, superior to the potential primordial life-forms who just happened to have evolved on a planet engineered by others. But still, it's an intriguing notion: "if I leave this place alone, eventually life will evolve here." I just read some material that ran to the effect that Venus' greenhouse keeps the night-side temperature approximately equivalent to the day-side. Thus, the only way to cool the planet is to urn off the input to the system --a solar shade-- so the system will cool off. Once the planet is cool enough to allow liquid water to exist, we bomb it with ice asteroids. Not water, per se. The water will form as a result of converting the Venusian atmosphere. Vapor at first, until the pressure has dropped/water vapor has increased to the point where there are planetary rain-storms that last until all the hydrogen we have introduced into the system has reacted with all the CO2 in the system --that is, until Venus' greenhouse-atmosphere is converted into an ocean.

One thing I enjoyed about college is that the PhD's I talked to never said this kind of thing. Implying your opponent is a moron is not an argument. Strawman. I am not talking about "all of science." I am not even talking about "all scientists." I am talking about "most scientists." Do not try to evade my point by talking about the conecpt when I am talking about the perception; do not try to evade my point by talking about "all" when I am talking about "most." Again' date=' an attempt to Strawman me. Pity. I miss my professors. #1) "Post modernism is bad" is a value-judgement that is automatic for anyone fond of science or with a fundamental respect for the human mind. IE, human beings, and any academics who might still be human. #2) My actual argument --not the one you have chosen to debate-- is that post-modernism has been accepted by the intellectual community, and that this is a bad thing. I presume nothing. That my existence has a purpose is a rational belief. All I have to do is answer the question "why" until I hit an axiom. If I were you I'd be more conserned about your own assumptions, specifically the popular post-modernism assumption that life has no purpose. Begging the question. The question you are trying to beg is that our lives "should" have some purpose. I am talking about what is, which is a question conserned with reality. The question is not "should the Sun exist," but "does it." The question is not "should human existence have a purpose," but "does it." The answer to this question is yes. Other chemical reactions do not maintain a consiousness that is aware that it exists, neither is a human being merely the sum of his bodies' chemical reactions. Both these points can be empirically proven. It is at this point that the discussion should segue into epistemology ("how do you know," "how do you prove," etc). Which means I dust off my objectivist epistemology to confront my audience's socially-programmed anti-objectivist (postmodernist) epistemology. And then my original point --that post-modernism's acceptance by scientists is a bad thing-- is proven.

This is demonstratably incorrect. The philosophy of tabla rasa states that people are born as a blank slate, and they get their knowledge from living on planet Earth. This can be proven. And by proof, I do not mean this silliness: This is not proof. A person can touch their nose with their eyes closed because #1) they know that they have a nose, #2) they have rudimentary hand-eye coordination, and #3) they know that reality exists whether their eyes are open or closed. The point at which an infant learns each of these three ideas is different for every infant but nevertheless is the subject of childhood psychololgy. That is: this "tabla rasa" business can be proven in a lab.

It's not me doing the tarring. It's not even me doing the pointing-out that they've tarred themselves. They --the postmodernist philosophers and the scientists themselves-- are the ones who write the books and publish the papers. It is not that they provide evidence, but when someone says outright "there is no such thing as philosophy," it's hard to take them at anything other than face-value. Like the Cultural Marxists whose books fed the student rebellion in the 60's: it's hard to argue those guys didn't want to destroy America; they did, they said as much, their books were instruction manuals how to do it, and those that acted on them did destructive things. The consensus of the intellectual community is clear and has been for the past century. This is the ugliness of postmodernism: it's ugly, it declares its ugliness very loudly, and it's hard for people to oppose the notion that postmodernism is ugly and loud. The consensus has been so complete and so clear that people find it difficult to conceive of philosophies that are different from those that are accepted by the intellectual community. Altruism, collectivism, mysticism --these are all taken for granted as the gospel truth. We, our parents and grandparents and their parents have lived in a scientific/philosophical environment where "the good" was considered to be equivalent with "self-less-ness," whereas "the evil" was equivalent with "selfishness." We have been "educated" in institutions soaked in postmodernist thought, where everything from politics to ethics to metaphysics to epistemology to the very fact of existence itself is considered to be "subjective" and up to the determination of one's "society" --which means a panel of scientists funded by the government. Every single policy and debate of our day is soaked in the follies and the dichotomies of postmodernism --that is why we have a two-party system: in every given debate, both parties swallow the poison of postmodernism, with the Democrats getting one side of the dichotomy and the Republicans getting the other side. *Giggles* "You clearly haven't put as much thought into this as you'd like to think you have," he says, to me *giggles*

Oh yes. The Bosch reaction we're interested in (not the one used for making nitrates, the other way 'round) goes like this: CO2 + 2H2 --> C + 2H2O The Venusian atmosphere is 92 bar pressure at surface, of which 96.5% is CO2 and 3.5% is nitrogen. This works out to 4.4e20 kg CO2 and 1.6e19 kg nitrogen. If you convert all that CO2 using the Bosch process, you will get 1.2e20 kg graphite sand dunes, an ocean of 3.6e20 kg water, and the remaining nitrogen (1.6e19 kg) will give an atmosphere of ~3.2 bar pressure. That's the pressure before the nitrogen atmosphere reacts with the planetary ocean according to Henry's law, which will cause the nitrogen to saturate the water in solution until the surface water pressure is in equilibrium with the surface air pressure. Once 210 mbar of oxygen is introduced alongside the 3.2 bar of nitrogen (that's all the oxygen humans need), that's an atmosphere of only 6% oxygen --despite its proximity to the sun, fires would be a thing of the past. Nothing is wrong with that much pressure, either --it's not even near the range where people would be susceptible to nitrogen narcosis (which is itself nothing bad, they just get high and do crazy stuff from nitrogen). At this point people could walk the graphite deserts of Ishtar and Aphrodite on the shores of a warm sea. Then the question will be, "do we introduce Earth-native life to Venus? Or shall we wait for things to crawl out of the new primordial soup we've cultured across the surface of an entire planet?"

Meh. After the decision to use the rockets, it becomes a question of when you want the ice-asteroid to hit Venus. I read about how four 5000 MWt nuclear rockets (the same kind of rockets used in the 60's in the NERVA program) could crash Chiron into Venus in 20 years. The curves are different for objects of different sizes further up the gravity well, but that's just physics. Yes, we've had nuclear thermal rockets for nearly 50 years now. Yes, even small prototypes are very powerful. Half the reason is that a nuclear rocket is really damn powerful. The other half is that the nature of the mission is that the rocket isn't limited by fuel; it's fuel is the ice of the asteroid itself. Not from the sun. Sure, they'll throw up a coma like a comet. But they won't melt in space. Now, when it comes to Venus, sure they'll melt. We can send the rockets to the ice asteroids while we build the solar shade. That way, Venus has a few decades to cool off before we try and make liquid water oceans on her surface. If we wanted to, we could even orbit Venus with the ice-asteroids we collect from the outer system until Venus is cool enough, then we can send them all down all over the planet at once.

/me points to the science forums and debate main page. There' date=' sir, "metaphysics" is in the same forum as "pseudo science." There, sir, it says that metaphysics is "a system of theories, assumptions, and methods erroneously regarded as scientific." Metaphysics is one of the five schools of philosophy. It's the set of concepts which are formed using an epistemology --a knowledge mechanism-- upon which are based a man's actions. A man's principles --his metaphysics-- is that set of abstract concepts which he has constructed by using his brain. Included in this school are "the assumptions of empiricism" --the philosophical principles that make science possible. This "science" forum considers the very ideas that make science possible to be "erroneous." It's a very common trend; ever heard of post-modernism? I'm not going to try and maintain the venerable fiction that all science does is display facts that speak for themselves. Science came from somewhere --an objective, testable, verifiable, [i']true[/i] philosophy-- and thus it is a mistake for scientists to condemn philosophy. I don't know how many times I've had a discussion with scientists in science forums or scientists in philosophy forums where the jokers have told me it's better to study "biology" or "any *real* science" than philosophy because philosophy is "irrelevant" and "useless" and "you can't tell anything from philosophy." Smart people say this crap. At least, smart like calculators.

Yes. If you're willing to wait a few centuries. I'm not. Even if they had an immortality serum. EDIT: No, actually. You could get up there using sails. But you couldn't get back. Solar, magsail, m2p2, it doesn't matter. The sun is really weak up there. It's ion engines --that have to haul their fuel with them-- or nuclear thermal rockets --which can use anything we may find up there for fuel.

The same way every satellite that has gone to the outer solar system has gone to the outer solar system. I wasn't talking about "sending a nuke." No bombs will be sent. Radioactive material' date=' yes. But that's not a new thing now is it? I mean, where do you think all those new pictures of Saturn are coming from? The space-probe Cassinni, with its own "nuke" onboard, if we're to use sloppy language. I'll say it again: I'm concerned with the science, not the politics. Certainly, I could put on my philosopher's hat and talk about the [i']philosophy[/i] of terraforming and how irrelevant the politics are on philosophic grounds. But you can't debate neurosis. You can't debate a mental disease that forces its victims to be locked in a constant state of anxiety over imaginary monsters and illusions. It is the most fundamental mistake. The most fundamental truth is "existence exists." The most fundamental error is to say this is incorrect. Politicians do not determine what exists --nobody does. It just is. And this --what is-- is what I am here to debate. I am not here to "debate" the arbitrary and capricious whims of third-world juntas or first-world mobsters or the sea of morons that elect them. The Madness of Mankind and the Army of Fools are large themes that distract from the intention of this thread --that being, a workshop on the terraforming of Venus. I wouldn't because A) you can't find them, B) you can't cost-effectively move them from the outer system to the inner system, C) you would need to move billions of them, D) we can break-up large ice-asteroids on the way, and E) Venus' atmosphere would evaporate them long before they got near the surface --that's why the planet has very few impact craters and no small craters.

Do a google search on "Kuiper belt objects" and you'll find that there's several orders of magnitude more objects that have already been discovered than I need for this little project. I've got a map of them on my computer. There are plenty. Chiron is one such object. It's thought to be a Kuiper belt object because A) its orbit is unstable, and can't have lasted for more than a million years; B) it's not really a comet and not really an asteroid, thus its considered a "centaur"; C) the theory is that the outer planets will cause Kuiper belt objects to fall out of their high orbits and into the inner solar system. Right now Chiron is hanging out around Saturn, between ~9 and ~13 AUs, with a 50.7 year orbit. It's ~208km in diameter, with a mass of around 2e19 kg of mixed ices. The plan is to send some nuclear thermal rockets up there, affix them to Chiron, fuel them using the comet's own ices, and put it on a collision course with Venus. If we want to be picky and choose "pure" methane or pure hydrogen ice asteroids, and especially the smaller, mountain-sizes ones, we'll have to send a probe equipped to do just that to the outer solar system, followed by the nuclear thermal rockets.

NP. It's been a trend for a very long time, in education. People over-specialize. I don't just mean "engineers don't talk about engineering with biologists," as in your robot situation. But it's got to the point where certain kinds of engineers don't talk to other kinds of engineers; certain kinds of doctors don't talk to other kinds; etc. It's the balkanization of academia, and is a major problem when it comes to cross-disciplinary stuff. After all, life on earth is essentially "cross disciplinary." I think it's a shame that they --the brightest, most intelligent, the scientists and scholars-- can't look at a sunrise and enjoy it as an astronomer, a physicist, a chemist, a geologist, an artist, a historian, a poet and a philosopher. I can. It comes highly recommended. But not only the appreciation of beauty --but errors are caused simply because one particular boffin has been so sequestered from both reality and other scientists.

First we cool Venus to the point where liquid water can exist on the surface, or at least in the atmosphere. This is done with the solar shade and the towers before we hit it with ice asteroids. Eventually we will start hitting it with ice asteroids, and some time after that there won't be much more CO2. "Diminishing returns" does not apply: because CO2 is so heavy, it will float to the pyrite-covered surface and react with the imported hydrogen. As each ice-asteroid impacts the planet, more CO2 is converted to water, and there is less CO2 to greenhouse the planet. Global temperatures drop. The ocean forms. We introduce biota. The final part of the plan has to do with putting mirrors in the L2, L4 and L5 points that slowly rotate, giving Venus light on a 12-hour day/night cycle. Btw, here's a link to an article on the Bosch reaction.

When I said "regulate temperature" I was not talking about the greenhouse effect. I was talking about the transfer of heat around the planet. Marine environments on Earth are more temperate than land because land heats and cools much quicker than water, and it can't circulate around the planet or within itself as water does. I was never talking about transporting water to the surface of Venus. The idea is to cause a planet-wide Bosch reaction that will transform the majority of the Venusian atmosphere into a Venusian ocean.

Stephen Hawking and I disagree with you. #1) The "metabolism" argument is begging the question. All forms of life need something else to keep them alive. #2) I can turn you into a crystal. You're made of carbon, you'll do. In fact, there are merchants which sell this as a mortuary service. #3) As for the DNA hangup, forget it. The first life forms didn't have DNA, but used a more primitive system that became obsolete when DNA appeared.

Uhm, no. By observation, the Sun = 98% of the mass in this solar system. Jupiter = 1%, the assorted debris = 1% total. Thus, the stellar mass of the universe = 98% of the non-Dark mass of the universe. Gravitational calculations result in Dark Matter being as much as 75% of the mass of the universe. Thus, all the stars and black holes and white dwarves of the universe = 24% of the universe; the "planets, comets, assorted debris" is about 1%; and the Dark Matter is the rest.

Yeah, I get you admiral. I remember watching "In Search of Bobby Fischer" or whatever that movie was called back in the day. When I was in middle-school. I had the same response as you when I read it on slashdot. I hope he's not so old his brain is fried and he can't escape again ;_; I don't want him to be captured.

It strikes me that it has to do with nitrogen. The blue color, you know. The more nitrogen, the deeper the blue color. That is: if you're in the center of a local high-pressure area, the sky will be cloudless and deep blue; and if you're in the center of a local low-pressure area, the sky will be cloudless and light blue; and if you're not in the center of either, the sky will be cloudy and an intermediate blue caused by a decrease in pressure and water vapor in the air.

Don't laugh, I know how hard it's supposed to be to do this. Wanted to know if anyone had any ideas other than "haha you idiot mars is easier." Because frankly, I've been doing the math and it strikes me that Mars is not easier, and will in fact take much longer, and its biosphere would be much more fragile. My hope is that the idea will intrigue someone who may want to help with the math as a bizarre hobby :3 That’s not to say I haven’t done a lot of math already >_< *brain pain. The Goal: Transform the Atmosphere The Venusian highlands shine in the radio spectrum because of high compositions of pyrite (iron sulfide, FeS2). These two massive continents are the iron catalyst necessary for a Bosch reaction on a planetary scale. All that is required is the introduction of 4e19 kg of hydrogen from of ice asteroids (ammonia, methane, water, or pure hydrogen are all candidates). The introduction of this quantity is enough to transform the CO2 of the Venusian atmosphere (95% composition) into a planetary ocean. This ocean will cover 80% of the planet's surface, yet will be only 10% the mass of Earth's ocean. So we will have a planetary temperature-regulator, without too much greenhouse-inducing water-vapor. Ocean mass will be 3.6e19 kg; remaining atmosphere will be 1.6e19 nitrogen (~3.2 bar), much of which will dissolve into the ocean, raising sea-level and reducing atmospheric pressure according to the Henry’s Law. Hedging My Bets: Auxiliary Techniques Two secondary techniques: a small solar shade to reduce the heat input to Venus, and towers to reduce the heat already inside Venus. The shade would only work to keep the sun-facing side of Venus in its penumbra. The towers are basically 50 km chimneys that take advantage of the Venusian greenhouse in the lower atmopshere and high wind speeds (+300 kph) in the upper atmosphere to become a planetary air-conditioner. My recommendation for living quarters for the terraformers is to take advtantage of the thick, non-flammable atmosphere with hot-hydrogen balloons. Think "cloud city" from Star Wars

The robot-builders should really get with the biologists if they want to build robots that emulate life. It doesn't strike me as a very difficult conclusion. The conclusion being "I should ask the people that study living things if I want to design a machine that copy-cats living things." For instance, when it comes to your gyro-less walking robot, the robot-builders would confront a question that has been studied in anthropology and other sciences: "how to humans stay upright when they walk?" The answer has to do with the lower brain and the inner ear. The lower brain has been keeping primates erect for the past four million years. It contains the "logic" that allows the muscles to respond in such a way as to keep us erect. "Respond to what" is the next question, which is answered by "sensory data from the inner ear." Now, humans have a metacognitive ability your machines cannot emulate. That is: even if a human has an inner-ear problem, he can compensate, and can still walk upright. But that is a bit much to ask of a robot. The robot-builders must construct #1) a sensory device like the inner ear, #2) a set of logic circuits like the lower brain, and #3) a dizzying array of muscle-equivalents that can react to balance the robot. As they haven't yet done these things, it either means A) they have not asked these questions (ie, they're not too clever) or B) it's hard to manufacture those three things. The latter is most likely.

One of those universal questions that everybody must confront in their lives is the meaning of life. Being able to calculate thermodynamic stresses will not help the poor scientists here. Their whole lives, the scientific consensus has declared philosophy irrelevant and amateurish. Yet here they are, they have finally come to meet it, face to face with the mortal questions that have occupied the frontal lobes of ever human from them and their fathers to the first man-ape to scream his name into the sun on the savannah ten-thousand centuries ago. The great questions of existence stood like a black monolith before the infant minds of the first men. Those same questions still stand before the scientists of today, questions that can only be answered --can only be asked, can only be formed-- by that one rejected word, "philosophy." It is a great and powerful philosophic achievement to have discovered the meaning of life. I say "great" because it takes enormous self-education --no one can know these things for you. I say "powerful" because it is life-changing. The meaning of life is life. For a human being it means that his mind and his actions are to be employed to his own benefit. That he is to enjoy the fruit of his own labor. In other words: I am the Means and the End, the Reason and the Power, the Pride and the Glory of my own existence. This is a superior answer to the middle-school bogus wisdom "the meaning of life is to screw."