Category Archives: Terraforming Mars

Im old enough to have viewed the grainy TV images of the first Moon landings by Apollo 11 in 1969. I can never look at the Moon without recalling Neil Armstrongs One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind. It seems even more heroic in retrospect, considering how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment.

Once the race to the Moon was won, there was no motivation for continuing with the space race and the gargantuan costs involved. No human since 1972 has travelled more than a few hundred miles from the Earth. Hundreds have ventured into space, but they have done no more than circle the Earth in low orbit. In the mid-1960s, Nasa absorbed 4 per cent of the US federal budget; today its 0.6 per cent. If that momentum had been maintained, there would surely be footprints on Mars by now.

Space technology has, nonetheless, burgeoned in the past four decades. We depend routinely on thousands of orbiting satellites for communication, navigation, environmental monitoring, surveillance and weather forecasting. Space telescopes orbiting far above the Earths atmosphere have beamed back images from the remotest cosmos. They have surveyed the sky in infrared, UV, X-ray, and gamma ray bands that dont penetrate the atmosphere and therefore cant be observed from the ground. They have revealed evidence for black holes and have probed the afterglow of creation the microwaves pervading all space, whose properties hold clues to the very beginning, when the entire observable cosmos was squeezed to microscopic size.

Of more immediate public appeal are the findings from spacecraft that have journeyed to all the planets of the solar system. Nasas New Horizons beamed back amazing pictures from Pluto, 12,000 times farther away than the Moon. The European Space Agencys Rosetta landed a robot on a comet. These spacecraft took five years to design and build and then nearly ten years journeying to their remote targets. The Cassini probe spent 13 years studying Saturn and its moons and was even more venerable: more than 20 years elapsed between its launch and its final plunge into Saturn in late 2017. These missions used 1990s technology; its not too hard to envisage how much more sophisticated todays follow-ups could be just think how drastically smartphones have advanced in those decades.

During this century, the entire solar system planets, moons, and asteroids will be explored and mapped by fleets of tiny, automated probes, interacting with each other like a flock of birds. Giant robotic fabricators will be able to construct, in space, solar energy collectors and other giant lightweight structures. Just this week, we have seen the first images from the James Webb telescope, which was launched in December a big advance on the Hubble telescope in deepening our vision of the cosmos. It can probe 98 per cent of cosmic history, the genesis of galaxies, and can perhaps find evidence of life on planets orbiting nearby stars. The telescopes successors, with oversize mirrors assembled in zero gravity, will further expand our vision of exoplanets, stars, galaxies and the wider universe. Future (and still larger) generations of instruments will be assembled by robots, which may also be used for space mining.

If there were a revival of the Apollo spirit and a renewed urge to build on its legacy, a permanent lunar base would be a credible next step. It could be built entirely by robots, bringing supplies from Earth and mining some from the Moon. An especially propitious site for human habitation is the Shackleton crater, at the lunar south pole, 21km across and with a rim 4km high. Because of the craters location, its rim is always in sunlight and so escapes the extreme monthly temperature contrasts experienced on the rest of the Moons surface. Moreover, there may be a lot of ice in the craters perpetually dark interior crucial for sustaining a colony.

Hopefully, people who are alive today will walk on the Moon, and even on Mars. The future of human spaceflight lies not with governments, but with privately funded adventurers who will be prepared to participate in a cut-price programme far riskier than western nations could. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, or rival effort Blue Origin, bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, will soon offer orbital flights to paying customers.

These ventures bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by Nasa and a few aerospace conglomerates have shown its possible to recover and reuse the launch rockets first stage, presaging real cost savings. They have innovated and improved rocketry far faster than Nasa or ESA has done. The future role of the national agencies will become more akin to an airport than to an airline.

More importantly, private enterprises can be less risk-averse than Nasa and find volunteers who are willing to tolerate greater dangers than a western government could impose on publicly funded civilian astronauts. So its these cut-price ventures with private sponsorship that should be at the forefront of human space travel.

Later this century, courageous thrill-seekers in the mould of (say) Sir Ranulph Fiennes, or the early polar explorers may well establish bases independent of Earth. Elon Musk himself (now aged 51) says he wants to die on Mars but not on impact.

But what is the longer-range scenario? Musk and my late colleague Stephen Hawking envisaged that the first settlers on Mars would be followed by millions of others aiming to escape the Earths problems. But this is a dangerous delusion. Coping with climate change is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic, the top of Everest, or the ocean bed.

Because humans will be ill-adapted to Martian conditions, they will have a more compelling incentive than those of us on Earth to redesign themselves and this may not remain science fiction. Indeed, its surely on the cards that human beings their mentality and their physique may become malleable through the deployment of genetic modification.

For this to happen, two advances are needed: first, deep analysis of the human genome to determine which combination of genes optimise specific desired qualities; and second, the ability to synthesise a genome with these properties.

Optimists suspect that by the end of the century designer babies will become conceivable (in both senses of that word). One hopes that such techniques will be constrained, because they are risky: the genome is so complicated that attempts to modify it may have unenvisaged downsides that outweigh any benefits.

Another futuristic concept, more familiar from science fiction, is that our descendants could become cyborgs, their mental capacities being enhanced by linking the brain (or plugging it in) to electronic attachments. Its spacefaring adventurers, not those of us comfortably adapted to life on Earth, who will lead the post-human era evolving within a few centuries into a new species. This evolution, best described as secular intelligent design, could proceed on the timescale of technological advance, potentially thousands of times faster than Darwinian selection.

Moreover, there may be limits to the capacity of organic brains; perhaps humans are near this limit already. If our descendants make the transition from flesh and blood to fully inorganic intelligences, they wont need an atmosphere. And they may prefer zero-gravity, especially for constructing massive artefacts. So its in deep space not on Earth, nor even on Mars that non-biological brains may develop powers that humans cant even imagine.

Billions of years lie ahead. The Sun formed 4.5 billion years ago: its taken most of that immense time for life to evolve from its still-mysterious beginnings into the immensely complex biosphere of which were a part. Humans are not the culmination the top of the tree. We may in fact be nearer the beginning than the end of a cosmic process.

The Sun is still less than halfway through its life: it will survive six billion more years before its fuel runs out. And the expanding universe will continue far longer perhaps for ever. So even if intelligent life had originated only on the Earth, it need not remain a trivial feature of the cosmos: it could initiate a diaspora whereby ever more complex intelligence spreads through the whole galaxy. Interstellar voyages would hold no terrors for near-immortal electronic entities. Theres plenty of time ahead.

Even though we are not the terminal branch of an evolutionary tree, humans could claim truly cosmic significance for jump-starting the transition to electronic entities, spreading their influence far beyond the Earth.

This raises a further question: will our remote progeny be the first intelligences to spread through the galaxy? Or will they encounter aliens already out there, which originated from a planet around an older star where evolution had a headstart over us?

Perhaps the galaxy already teems with advanced life, and our descendants will plug in to a galactic community as rather junior members. On the other hand, Earths intricate biosphere may be unique and searches for aliens may fail. Our tiny planet this pale blue dot floating in space could be the most important place in the entire cosmos.

Either way, our cosmic habitat seems tuned to be an abode for life. Even if we are alone in the universe, we may be far from the final destination of this drive towards complexity and consciousness.

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How humans may populate the universe in the billions of years ahead - The Spectator

Engineering the global environment of Venus to make it suitable for humans

The terraforming of Venus or the terraformation of Venus is the hypothetical process of engineering the global environment of the planet Venus in such a way as to make it suitable for human habitation.[1][2][3] Terraforming Venus was first proposed in a scholarly context by the astronomer Carl Sagan in 1961,[4] although fictional treatments, such as The Big Rain of The Psychotechnic League by novelist Poul Anderson, preceded it. Adjustments to the existing environment of Venus to support human life would require at least three major changes to the planet's atmosphere:[3]

These three changes are closely interrelated because Venus's extreme temperature is due to the high pressure of its dense atmosphere and the greenhouse effect.

Prior to the early 1960s, the atmosphere of Venus was believed by many astronomers to have an Earth-like temperature. When Venus was understood to have a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere with a consequence of a very large greenhouse effect,[6] some scientists began to contemplate the idea of altering the atmosphere to make the surface more Earth-like. This hypothetical prospect, known as terraforming, was first proposed by Carl Sagan in 1961, as a final section of his classic article in the journal Science discussing the atmosphere and greenhouse effect of Venus.[4] Sagan proposed injecting photosynthetic bacteria into the Venus atmosphere, which would convert the carbon dioxide into reduced carbon in organic form, thus reducing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, the knowledge of Venus's atmosphere was still inexact in 1961, when Sagan made his original proposal for terraforming. Thirty-three years after his original proposal, in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot, Sagan conceded his original proposal for terraforming would not work because the atmosphere of Venus is far denser than was known in 1961:[7]

"Here's the fatal flaw: In 1961, I thought the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus was a few bars... We now know it to be 90 bars, so if the scheme worked, the result would be a surface buried in hundreds of meters of fine graphite, and an atmosphere made of 65 bars of almost pure molecular oxygen. Whether we would first implode under the atmospheric pressure or spontaneously burst into flames in all that oxygen is open to question. However, long before so much oxygen could build up, the graphite would spontaneously burn back into CO2, short-circuiting the process."

Following Sagan's paper, there was little scientific discussion of the concept until a resurgence of interest in the 1980s.[8][9][10]

A number of approaches to terraforming are reviewed by Martyn J. Fogg (1995)[2][11] and by Geoffrey A. Landis (2011).[3]

The main problem with Venus today, from a terraformation standpoint, is the very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. The ground level pressure of Venus is 9.2MPa (91atm; 1,330psi). This also, through the greenhouse effect, causes the temperature on the surface to be several hundred degrees too hot for any significant organisms. Therefore, all approaches to the terraforming of Venus include somehow removing almost all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The method proposed in 1961 by Carl Sagan involves the use of genetically engineered algae to fix carbon into organic compounds.[4] Although this method is still proposed[10] in discussions of Venus terraforming, later discoveries showed that biological means alone would not be successful.[12]

Difficulties include the fact that the production of organic molecules from carbon dioxide requires hydrogen, which is very rare on Venus.[13] Because Venus lacks a protective magnetosphere, the upper atmosphere is exposed to direct erosion by the solar wind and has lost most of its original hydrogen to space. And, as Sagan noted, any carbon that was bound up in organic molecules would quickly be converted to carbon dioxide again by the hot surface environment. Venus would not begin to cool down until after most of the carbon dioxide had already been removed.

Although it is generally conceded that Venus could not be terraformed by introduction of photosynthetic biota alone, use of photosynthetic organisms to produce oxygen in the atmosphere continues to be a component of other proposed methods of terraforming.[citation needed]

On Earth nearly all carbon is sequestered in the form of carbonate minerals or in different stages of the carbon cycle, while very little is present in the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. On Venus, the situation is the opposite. Much of the carbon is present in the atmosphere, while comparatively little is sequestered in the lithosphere.[14] Many approaches to terraforming therefore focus on getting rid of carbon dioxide by chemical reactions trapping and stabilising it in the form of carbonate minerals.

Modelling by astrobiologists Mark Bullock and David Grinspoon[14] of Venus's atmospheric evolution suggests that the equilibrium between the current 92-bar atmosphere and existing surface minerals, particularly calcium and magnesium oxides, is quite unstable, and that the latter could serve as a sink of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide through conversion to carbonates. If these surface minerals were fully converted and saturated, then the atmospheric pressure would decline and the planet would cool somewhat. One of the possible end states modelled by Bullock and Grinspoon was a 43 bars (620psi) atmosphere and 400K (127C) surface temperature. To convert the rest of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a larger portion of the crust would have to be artificially exposed to the atmosphere to allow more extensive carbonate conversion. In 1989, Alexander G. Smith proposed that Venus could be terraformed by lithosphere overturn, allowing crust to be converted into carbonates.[15] Landis 2011 calculated that it would require the involvement of the entire surface crust down to a depth of over 1km to produce enough rock surface area to convert enough of the atmosphere.[3]

Natural formation of carbonate rock from minerals and carbon dioxide is a very slow process. Recent research into sequestering carbon dioxide into carbonate minerals in the context of mitigating global warming on Earth however points out that this process can be considerably accelerated (from hundreds or thousands of years to just 75 days) through the use of catalysts such as polystyrene microspheres.[16] It could therefore be theorised that similar technologies might also be used in the context of terraformation on Venus. It can also be noted that the chemical reaction that converts minerals and carbon dioxide into carbonates is exothermic, in essence producing more energy than is consumed by the reaction. This opens up the possibility of creating self-reinforcing conversion processes with potential for exponential growth of the conversion rate until most of the atmospheric carbon dioxide can be converted.

Bombardment of Venus with refined magnesium and calcium from off-world could also sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium and magnesium carbonates. About 81020 kg of calcium or 51020 kg of magnesium would be required to convert all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which would entail a great deal of mining and mineral refining (perhaps on Mercury which is notably mineral rich).[17] 81020 kg is a few times the mass of the asteroid 4 Vesta (more than 500 kilometres (310mi) in diameter).

Research projects in Iceland and the US state of Washington have recently shown that potentially large amounts of carbon dioxide could be removed from the atmosphere by high-pressure injection into subsurface porous basalt formations, where carbon dioxide is rapidly transformed into solid inert minerals.[18][19]

Other recent studies[20] predict that one cubic meter of porous basalt has the potential to sequester 47 kilograms of injected carbon dioxide. According to these estimates a volume of about 9.86 109 km3 of basalt rock would be needed to sequester all the carbon dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere. This is equal to the entire crust of Venus down to a depth of about 21.4 kilometers. Another study[21] concluded that under optimal conditions, on average, 1 cubic meter of basalt rock can sequester 260kg of carbon dioxide. Venus's crust appears to be 70 kilometres (43mi) thick and the planet is dominated by volcanic features. The surface is about 90% basalt, and about 65% consists of a mosaic of volcanic lava plains.[22] There should therefore be ample volumes of basalt rock strata on the planet with very promising potential for carbon dioxide sequestration.

Recent research has also demonstrated that under the high temperature and high pressure conditions in the mantle, silicon dioxide, the most abundant mineral in the mantle (on Earth and probably also on Venus) can form carbonates that are stable under these conditions. This opens up the possibility of carbon dioxide sequestration in the mantle.[23]

According to Birch,[24] bombarding Venus with hydrogen and reacting it with carbon dioxide could produce elemental carbon (graphite) and water by the Bosch reaction. It would take about 4 1019 kg of hydrogen to convert the whole Venusian atmosphere,[citation needed] and such a large amount of hydrogen could be obtained from the gas giants or their moons' ice. Another possible source of hydrogen could be somehow extracting it from possible reservoirs in the interior of the planet itself. According to some researchers, the Earth's mantle and/or core might hold large quantities of hydrogen left there since the original formation of Earth from the nebular cloud.[25][26] Since the original formation and inner structure of Earth and Venus are generally believed to be somewhat similar, the same might be true for Venus.

Iron aerosol in the atmosphere will also be required for the reaction to work, and iron can come from Mercury, asteroids, or the Moon. (Loss of hydrogen due to the solar wind is unlikely to be significant on the timescale of terraforming.) Due to the planet's relatively flat surface, this water would cover about 80% of the surface, compared to 70% for Earth, even though it would amount to only roughly 10% of the water found on Earth.[citation needed]

The remaining atmosphere, at around 3 bars (about three times that of Earth), would mainly be composed of nitrogen, some of which will dissolve into the new oceans of water, reducing atmospheric pressure further, in accordance with Henry's law. To bring down the pressure even more, nitrogen could also be fixated into nitrates.

Futurist Isaac Arthur has suggested using the theorized processes of starlifting and stellasing to create a particle beam of ionized hydrogen from the sun, tentatively dubbed a "hydro-cannon". This device could be used both to thin the dense atmosphere of Venus, but also to introduce hydrogen to react with carbon dioxide to create water, thereby further lowering the atmospheric pressure.[27]

The thinning of the Venusian atmosphere could be attempted by a variety of methods, possibly in combination. Directly lifting atmospheric gas from Venus into space would probably prove difficult. Venus has sufficiently high escape velocity to make blasting it away with asteroid impacts impractical. Pollack and Sagan calculated in 1994[28] that an impactor of 700km diameter striking Venus at greater than 20km/s, would eject all the atmosphere above the horizon as seen from the point of impact, but because this is less than a thousandth of the total atmosphere and there would be diminishing returns as the atmosphere's density decreases, a very great number of such giant impactors would be required. Landis calculated[3] that to lower the pressure from 92 bar to 1 bar would require a minimum of 2,000 impacts, even if the efficiency of atmosphere removal was perfect. Smaller objects would not work, either, because more would be required. The violence of the bombardment could well result in significant outgassing that would replace removed atmosphere. Most of the ejected atmosphere would go into solar orbit near Venus, and, without further intervention, could be captured by the Venerian gravitational field and become part of the atmosphere once again.

Another variant method involving bombardment would be to perturb a massive Kuiper belt object to put its orbit onto a collision path with Venus. If the object, made of mostly ices, had enough velocity to penetrate just a few kilometers past the Venusian surface, the resulting forces from the vaporization of ice from the impactor and the impact itself could stir the lithosphere and mantle thus ejecting a proportional amount of matter (as magma and gas) from Venus. A byproduct of this method would be either a new moon for Venus or a new impactor-body of debris that would fall back to the surface at a later time.

Removal of atmospheric gas in a more controlled manner could also prove difficult. Venus's extremely slow rotation means that space elevators would be very difficult to construct because the planet's geostationary orbit lies an impractical distance above the surface, and the very thick atmosphere to be removed makes mass drivers useless for removing payloads from the planet's surface. Possible workarounds include placing mass drivers on high-altitude balloons or balloon-supported towers extending above the bulk of the atmosphere, using space fountains, or rotovators.

In addition, if the density of the atmosphere (and corresponding greenhouse effect) were dramatically reduced, the surface temperature (now effectively constant) would probably vary widely between day side and night side. Another side effect to atmospheric-density reduction could be the creation of zones of dramatic weather activity or storms at the terminator because large volumes of atmosphere would undergo rapid heating or cooling.

Venus receives about twice the sunlight that Earth does, which is thought to have contributed to its runaway greenhouse effect. One means of terraforming Venus could involve reducing the insolation at Venus's surface to prevent the planet from heating up again.

Solar shades could be used to reduce the total insolation received by Venus, cooling the planet somewhat.[29] A shade placed in the SunVenus L1 Lagrangian point also would serve to block the solar wind, removing the radiation exposure problem on Venus.

A suitably large solar shade would be four times the diameter of Venus itself if at the L1 point. This would necessitate construction in space. There would also be the difficulty of balancing a thin-film shade perpendicular to the Sun's rays at the SunVenus Lagrangian point with the incoming radiation pressure, which would tend to turn the shade into a huge solar sail. If the shade were simply left at the L1 point, the pressure would add force to the sunward side and the shade would accelerate and drift out of orbit. The shade could instead be positioned nearer to the Sun, using the solar pressure to balance the gravitational forces, in practice becoming a statite.

Other modifications to the L1 solar shade design have also been suggested to solve the solar-sail problem. One suggested method is to use polar-orbiting, solar-synchronous mirrors that reflect light toward the back of the sunshade, from the non-sunward side of Venus. Photon pressure would push the support mirrors to an angle of 30 degrees away from the sunward side.[2]

Paul Birch proposed[24] a slatted system of mirrors near the L1 point between Venus and the Sun. The shade's panels would not be perpendicular to the Sun's rays, but instead at an angle of 30 degrees, such that the reflected light would strike the next panel, negating the photon pressure. Each successive row of panels would be +/- 1 degree off the 30-degree deflection angle, causing the reflected light to be skewed 4 degrees from striking Venus.

Solar shades could also serve as solar power generators. Space-based solar shade techniques, and thin-film solar sails in general, are only in an early stage of development. The vast sizes require a quantity of material that is many orders of magnitude greater than any human-made object that has ever been brought into space or constructed in space.

Venus could also be cooled by placing reflectors in the atmosphere. Reflective balloons floating in the upper atmosphere could create shade. The number and/or size of the balloons would necessarily be great. Geoffrey A. Landis has suggested[30] that if enough floating cities were built, they could form a solar shield around the planet, and could simultaneously be used to process the atmosphere into a more desirable form, thus combining the solar shield theory and the atmospheric processing theory with a scalable technology that would immediately provide living space in the Venusian atmosphere. If made from carbon nanotubes or graphene (a sheet-like carbon allotrope), then the major structural materials can be produced using carbon dioxide gathered in situ from the atmosphere.[citation needed] The recently synthesised amorphous carbonia might prove a useful structural material if it can be quenched to Standard Temperature and Pressure (STP) conditions, perhaps in a mixture with regular silica glass. According to Birch's analysis, such colonies and materials would provide an immediate economic return from colonizing Venus, funding further terraforming efforts.[citation needed]

Increasing the planet's albedo by deploying light-colored or reflective material on the surface (or at any level below the cloud tops) would not be useful, because the Venerian surface is already completely enshrouded by clouds, and almost no sunlight reaches the surface. Thus, it would be unlikely to be able to reflect more light than Venus's already-reflective clouds, with Bond albedo of 0.77.[31]

Birch proposed that solar shades could be used to not merely cool the planet but to also reduce atmospheric pressure as well, by the process of freezing of the carbon dioxide.[24] This requires Venus's temperature to be reduced, first to the liquefaction point, requiring a temperature less than 304.128(15)K[32] (30.978(15)C or 87.761(27)F) and partial pressures of CO2 to bring the atmospheric pressure down to 73.773(30)bar[33] (carbon dioxide's critical point); and from there reducing the temperature below 216.592(3)K[34] (56.558(3)C or 69.8044(54)F) (carbon dioxide's triple point). Below that temperature, freezing of atmospheric carbon dioxide into dry ice will cause it to deposit onto the surface. He then proposed that the frozen CO2 could be buried and maintained in that condition by pressure, or even shipped off-world (perhaps to provide greenhouse gas needed for terraforming of Mars or the moons of Jupiter). After this process was complete, the shades could be removed or solettas added, allowing the planet to partially warm again to temperatures comfortable for Earth life. A source of hydrogen or water would still be needed, and some of the remaining 3.5 bar of atmospheric nitrogen would need to be fixed into the soil. Birch suggests disrupting an icy moon of Saturn, for example Hyperion, and bombarding Venus with its fragments.

Paul Birch suggests that, in addition to cooling the planet with a sunshade in L1, "heat pipes" could be built on the planet to accelerate the cooling. The proposed mechanism would transport heat from the surface to colder regions higher up in the atmosphere, similar to a solar updraft tower, thereby facilitating radiation of excess heat out into space.[24] A newly proposed variation of this technology is the atmospheric vortex engine, where instead of physical chimney pipes, the atmospheric updraft is achieved through the creation of a vortex, similar to a stationary tornado. In addition to this method being less material intensive and potentially more cost effective, this process also produces a net surplus of energy, which could be utilised to power venusian colonies or other aspects of the terraforming effort, while simultaneously contributing to speeding up the cooling of the planet. Another method to cool down the planet could be with the use of radiative cooling[35] This technology could utilise the fact that in certain wavelengths, thermal radiation from the lower atmosphere of Venus can "escape" to space through partially transparent atmospheric windows spectral gaps between strong CO2 and H2O absorption bands in the near infrared range 0.82.4m (3194in). The outgoing thermal radiation is wavelength dependent and varies from the very surface at 1m (39in) to approximately 35km (22mi) at 2.3m (91in).[36] Nanophotonics and construction of metamaterials opens up new possibilities to tailor the emittance spectrum of a surface via properly designing periodic nano/micro-structures.[37][38]Recently there has been proposals of a device named a "emissive energy harvester" that can transfer heat to space through radiative cooling and convert part of the heat flow into surplus energy,[39] opening up possibilities of a self-replicating system that could exponentially cool the planet.

Since Venus has only a fraction of the water of Earth (less than half the Earth's water content in the atmosphere, and none on the surface),[40] water would have to be introduced either by the aforementioned method of introduction of hydrogen, or from some other intraplanetary or extraplanetary source.

Paul Birch suggests the possibility of colliding Venus with one of the ice moons from the outer solar system,[24] thereby bringing in all the water needed for terraformation in one go. This could be achieved through gravity assisted capture of Saturn's moons Enceladus and Hyperion or Uranus's moon Miranda. Simply changing the velocity of these moons enough to move them from their current orbit and enable gravity-assisted transport to Venus would require large amounts of energy. However, through complex gravity-assisted chain reactions the propulsion requirements could be reduced by several orders of magnitude. As Birch puts it, "[t]heoretically one could flick a pebble into the asteroid belt and end up dumping Mars into the Sun."[24]

Studies have shown that substantial amounts of water (in the form of hydrogen) might be present in the mantle of terrestrial planets.[41] It has therefore been speculated[42] that it would be technically possible to extract this water from the mantle to the surface even if no feasible method to accomplish this exists currently.

Venus rotates once every 243 Earth daysby far the slowest rotation period of any known object in the Solar System. A Venusian sidereal day thus lasts more than a Venusian year (243 versus 224.7 Earth days). However, the length of a solar day on Venus is significantly shorter than the sidereal day; to an observer on the surface of Venus, the time from one sunrise to the next would be 116.75 days. Therefore, the slow Venerian rotation rate would result in extremely long days and nights, similar to the day-night cycles in the polar regions of earth shorter, but global. The slow rotation might also account for the lack of a significant magnetic field.

It has until recently been assumed that the rotation rate or day-night cycle of Venus would have to be increased for successful terraformation to be achieved. More recent research has shown, however, that the current slow rotation rate of Venus is not at all detrimental to the planet's capability to support an Earth-like climate. Rather, the slow rotation rate would, given an Earth-like atmosphere, enable the formation of thick cloud layers on the side of the planet facing the sun. This in turn would raise planetary albedo and act to cool the global temperature to Earth-like levels, despite the greater proximity to the Sun. According to calculations, maximum temperatures would be just around 35C (95F), given an Earth-like atmosphere.[43][44] Speeding up the rotation rate would therefore be both impractical and detrimental to the terraforming effort. A terraformed Venus with the current slow rotation would result in a global climate with "day" and "night" periods each roughly 2 months (58 days) long, resembling the seasons at higher latitudes on Earth. The "day" would resemble a short summer with a warm, humid climate, a heavy overcast sky and ample rainfall. The "night" would resemble a short, very dark winter with quite cold temperature and snowfall. There would be periods with more temperate climate and clear weather at sunrise and sunset resembling a "spring" and "autumn".[43]

The problem of very dark conditions during the roughly two-month long "night" period could be solved through the use of a space mirror in a 24-hour orbit (the same distance as a geostationary orbit on Earth) similar to the Znamya (satellite) project experiments. Extrapolating the numbers from those experiments and applying them to Venerian conditions would mean that a space mirror just under 1700 meters in diameter could illuminate the entire nightside of the planet with the luminosity of 10-20 full moons and create an artificial 24-hour light cycle. An even bigger mirror could potentially create even stronger illumination conditions. Further extrapolation suggests that to achieve illumination levels of about 400 lux (similar to normal office lighting or a sunrise on a clear day on earth) a circular mirror about 55 kilometers across would be needed.

Paul Birch suggested keeping the entire planet protected from sunlight by a permanent system of slated shades in L1, and the surface illuminated by a rotating soletta mirror in a polar orbit, which would produce a 24-hour light cycle.[24]

If increasing the rotation speed of the planet would be desired (despite the above-mentioned potentially positive climatic effects of the current rotational speed), it would require energy of a magnitude many orders greater than the construction of orbiting solar mirrors, or even than the removal of the Venerian atmosphere. Birch calculates that increasing the rotation of Venus to an Earth-like solar cycle would require about 1.6 1029 Joules[45] (50billion petawatt-hours).

Scientific research suggests that close flybys of asteroids or cometary bodies larger than 100 kilometres (60mi) across could be used to move a planet in its orbit, or increase the speed of rotation.[46] The energy required to do this is large. In his book on terraforming, one of the concepts Fogg discusses is to increase the spin of Venus using three quadrillion objects circulating between Venus and the Sun every 2 hours, each traveling at 10% of the speed of light.[2]

G. David Nordley has suggested, in fiction,[47] that Venus might be spun up to a day length of 30 Earth days by exporting the atmosphere of Venus into space via mass drivers. A proposal by Birch involves the use of dynamic compression members to transfer energy and momentum via high-velocity mass streams to a band around the equator of Venus. He calculated that a sufficiently high-velocity mass stream, at about 10% of the speed of light, could give Venus a day of 24 hours in 30 years.[45]

Protecting the new atmosphere from the solar wind, to avoid the loss of hydrogen, would require an artificial magnetosphere. Venus presently lacks an intrinsic magnetic field, therefore creating an artificial planetary magnetic field is needed to form a magnetosphere via its interaction with the solar wind. According to two NIFS Japanese scientists, it is feasible to do that with current technology by building a system of refrigerated latitudinal superconducting rings, each carrying a sufficient amount of direct current.[48]

In the same report, it is claimed that the economic impact of the system can be minimized by using it also as a planetary energy transfer and storage system (SMES). Another study proposes the possibility of deployment of a magnetic dipole shield at the L1 Lagrange point, thereby creating an artificial magnetosphere that would protect the whole planet from solar wind and radiation.[49]

Originally posted here:

Terraforming of Venus - Wikipedia

Follow in the footsteps of Arnie in Total Recall, and get your butt to Mars with the Terraforming Mars board game, which is currently reduced to one of the lowest prices we've seen it at in the Amazon Prime Day sales.

Right now, you can get Terraforming Mars for just $38.55 at Amazon (opens in new tab), down from it's original price of $69.95. That's a massive 45% discount, saving you just over $31 on one of the best space board games in the known universe (We're covering ourselves here, aliens might have better board games than us.)

Set in the year 2400, Terraforming Mars sees two to five players working together to colonize the Red planet, while also competing to see how can do the best job. It's a cool part co-op, part competitive twist on the usual strategy game formula. You'll have to transform the barren planet and build human infrastructure to gain victory points.

While scientists don't think we're going to get to terraform the real Mars anytime soon, if ever, that doesn't mean we can't have a ton of fun transforming a fictional Mars with this surprisingly in-depth and science-focused game.

You play as one of several mega-corporations looking to get rich on this bold new frontier, collecting and spending resources to enact projects and transform the barren planet into a lush paradise. You're competing with the other players for the best places to build your cities, oceans and greenery.

There are tons of expansions for the game too, so once you've become a terraforming pro, you can take on new challenges like going to the hostile hellscape of Venus in the Venus Next expansion (opens in new tab).

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More space board game deals this Prime Day

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Colonize the Red Planet with the Terraforming Mars board game, now 45% off - Space.com

Do you want to develop the superpower of seeing decades, even centuries, into the future?

Then start hiking the High Sierra.

Thats the inescapable conclusion of a surprising new memoir from Californias greatest living science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, about how he has structured his life around backpacking in his states great mountain range.

The High Sierra: A Love Story is as sprawling and full of ups and downs as the Sierra Nevada itself, those majestic mountains defending more than 250 miles of Californias eastern flank. The 550-page memoir offers fast-paced and highly readable explorations of Sierra history, people, geography, geology and how the ranges rocks can shift your mind.

I knew that this granite world, holding me in its cupped hands as I lay on it, glowing luminously in the moonlight, was a magic place, he writes of one of his regular Sierra trips, which began when he was a UC San Diego student in 1973 and continue today from his home in Davis. To hike into the ranges highest places was to enter an open immense space unlike anything in my life below: an escape, a trudge up and into a higher realm. It was mind-boggling. It was as if I could choose to visit heaven.

But the book is most powerful for demonstrating how a mountain range, and its history, can inspire visions of the future. Robinsons science fiction novels and stories are acclaimed for their political and environmental plausibility, their scientific grounding, their literary polish and their optimism (even in describing future planetary catastrophes).

Reading his memoir, then, feels a bit like hearing a magicians secrets. The mountain range, as a world apart, has a lot in common with future worlds, and how they change with the climate.

The emotional sustenance and inspiration Robinson finds in his Sierra walks clearly informed the characters in his Three Californias trilogy of novels (about three different futures of Orange County, where he grew up). Those characters are repaired and changed by their own travel to Sierra settings, from Dragon Pass to Dusy Basin.

The clearest connection between Robinson the hiker and Robinson the writer is through climate change, a focus of his 2020 masterpiece, The Ministry for the Future, about the leader of an imagined U.N. agency that is supposed to represent future generations and an ecoterrorist who survives a heat wave in India that kills 20 million people.

His 2013 novel Shaman, which imagines how people live in an ice age, owes a debt to his snowshoeing trips in the range during winters. His 2007 novel, Sixty Days and Counting, about a president battling environmental catastrophe (including a deep freeze in Washington), imagines characters visiting the Sierras high meadows after they have been desiccated by climate change. His account of an attempted settlement on the moon in 2015s Aurora is inspired by Sierra landscapes, as are some of the scenes in the 2012 novel 2312, when human society has colonized other planets in the solar system.

In the memoir, he also cops to lifting accounts of walks in his famous Mars trilogy novels chronicling the settlement of the Red Planet over 200 years from notes hed taken in the Sierra.

In describing the Martian landscape as if it were the High Sierra, I was really fudging it, because only by terraforming Mars could I make that cold poisonous planet into a place anything like the Sierra, Robinson confesses. Reviewers who wrote things like, It almost seems as if Robinson has been to Mars, always made me laugh.

In The High Sierra, Robinson writes about the changing of the Sierra climate, the melting of its glaciers and the way the Arizona monsoon season has changed the summer climate of the mountain range. At one moment in the book, this utopian writer confesses to despair.

Higher temperatures are here already, and the Sierra glaciers will soon be gone. The high country will dry out. Back home, I found myself stricken by this realization. Of course people die; I myself will die, but not the Sierras! Not the Sierras. It was too much to bear. Anguish filled my mind like smoke. Later, a friend recounts the resilience of the Sierra, and Robinson, reassured, learns to see the mountains future with fearful joy.

Robinson, 70, expresses impatience with todays cultural and political arguments around the preservation of land and nature. He is especially critical of the now fashionable idea among progressives that the concept of wilderness and policies to preserve untouched spaces like national parks are just imperialist or colonial attempts to erase indigenous cultures.

The bad timing of this attack on wilderness is not a coincidence; it both displaces our historical culpability, and it shrinks our present responsibility, he writes. Pushing back against this current perspective, Robinson argues for the long view and for expanding those areas designated as wilderness.

The preservation of the Sierra and especially the unbroken wilderness from Tioga to the far south of the range is the sort of achievement that must be emulated, at a global scale, he writes. Near the books conclusion, he embraces movements for leaving a big portion of the Earths surface free of human impacts including the late biologist E.O. Wilsons proposal to leave half the Earth empty of human beings. Its the only way, argues Robinson, to save animals and plants and our own human descendants, who otherwise might be given a world wrecked by our ecocide.

Someday, Californias great futurist-novelist imagines, the Sierra could be a crucial link in the habitat corridors that eventually will stretch from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, as part of a worldwide network of protected land that will help to keep innumerable species from extinction this is beautiful.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zcalo Public Square.

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Want to know California's future? You can see it in the Sierra - San Francisco Chronicle

General Zod has humble origins. His first appearance wasn't even in "Action Comics" or "Superman," the two ongoing titles closely associated with the Man of Steel. Instead, it was in the pages of "Adventure Comics" #283. This was the title to feature the adventures of Superboy, and this issue marks his first encounter with the Phantom Zone. In an instance that would stretch the limits of plausibility if it wasn't occurring in a Silver Age DC story, aPhanton Zone projector falls from the sky and a fluke accident switches on its portal, causing an oblivious Superboy to stumble into the pocket dimension.

In this story, General Zod isn't even introduced as a character Superboy meets in the present. Instead, young Clark sees a flashback to the crime that got Zod locked up in the Phantom Zone in the first place. Turns out the general made an army of robotic duplicates of himself that looked and talked a lot like Bizarro in order to conquer Krypton.Zod almost escapes in "Adventure Comics" #293, thanks to extraterrestrial Brain-Globes mind-controlling the Legion of Super-Heroes. He successfully escapes in "Action Comics" #297, which is also his first appearance in one of the main "Superman" titles. However, instead of Superman, he's defeated by Supergirl in a backup story. Zod and his cronies might have overcome the strength and cunning of Kara Zor-El if only they hadn't decided to double-cross Lex Luthor.

From that point on, Zod frequently escapes the Phantom Zone, but his intentions aren't entirely evil ... only mostly evil. Zod helps Superman in "Action Comics"#549 with his "Zod Squad" in opposition to the murderous Kryptonian enemies the Vrangs. Zod's final appearance prior to being retconned away by "Crisis on Infinite Earths"was in "DC Comics Presents"#97.

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The Untold Truth Of General Zod - Looper

Explore Mars, build and develop your cities, manage your resources, and transform the Red Planet into a Green Planet

Developed by Asteroid Lab and published by Goblinz Publishing, Terraformers is an ambitious new 3X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit but no eXterminate!) city builder in the form of a roguelike. Earth is colonizing Mars, and its up to you to ensure that the terraforming proceeds smoothly. In order to do so, you will have to make many critical decisions in managing your resources effectively and keeping your fledgling population happy while progressively increasing the habitability of the harsh, inhospitable planet.

First off, theres an undo button. Most actions other than exploration can be undone. This alone makes me want to give Terraformers a 9/10. Thankfully, the rest of Terraformers is just as indicative of its expert and wonderful design. It has all manner of clean and original art with a refreshing and vibrant style. Its music is beautiful and extremely fitting for this sort of optimistic sci-fi setting, though the logic for BGM selection could be improved. The UI is simple and mostly intuitive, although I would like to dock a point for what it is in its current early access form because it definitely could be better. Even the science of the sci-fi is mostly grounded and based on current tech, which definitely makes Terraformers approachable for space fanatics everywhere. But ultimately, the gameplay itself is deep, thought-evoking, addictive, and wonderfully satisfying, and I find myself glued to the seat until the end of every run.

Terraforming refers to the process in which a planet is made habitable for Earth-based lifeforms. The target planet in Terraformers is our friendly neighborhood red planet Mars, which has been long thought of as the first potential stepping stone for human civilization to become a space-faring species. In comparison to Earth, Mars is desperately lacking a breathable atmosphere, a water cycle, and a consistent livable climate, which are the cornerstones for life flourishing here on Earth. In Terraformers, your four terraforming parameters are temperature, oxygen, ocean level, and atmosphere. As you increase each parameter through their three tiers, the planet becomes more habitable for life, and life can be introduced to those zones that can support them.

Of course, no terraforming process would be complete without introducing life. Terraformers offers three types of lifeforms to be spread on the Martian surface: bacteria, plants, and animals. Bacteria have low requirements to survive and can offer some interesting utility, such as increasing temperature, or even generating resources such as titanium or tritium. Plants also generally provide oxygen or some other small benefits, but otherwise plants and animals are generally there to provide support to your population. All lifeforms also work on a prestige system, wherein the more they are spread, the more support they generate. If you ever wanted a planet just covered in grizzly bears and Arctic pine forests, this is your opportunity.

You are given many tools in order to raise those life-giving parameters and propagate life. Carbon dioxide factories can be built in order to create an atmosphere and increase planetary heat retention. Genetically engineered bacteria can be used to generate oxygen. Martian aquifers can be breached and extracted to contribute to the Martian oceans, which form the foundation of the water cycle. You can even turn to space for your terraforming needs, importing atmosphere or oceans from other nearby celestial bodies. All of these options and more are at your disposal, so long as you have the resources for it.

Naturally, any large scale project requires a considerable amount of resources, but given that were working on a different planet altogether, Martian problems require Martian solutions. Your terraforming efforts will be built on the foundation of resources that are gathered from the surface of the Red Planet.

In Terraformers, you begin with just a single city, a few buildings in your hand, and the resources to build a single mine. You also have the planets surface to yourself, which is covered in all manner of strange Martian features glittering crystal caves, wondrous rock formations, expansive lava tunnels, and dried basins that can be filled with oceans, all waiting to be discovered. Amongst the wonderful is also the mundane necessities of open pit mines for the countless amount of resources needed to fuel development.

While all resources can be found during the course of regular exploration, some resources (food, power, and research) are more regularly generated by buildings in cities, and others (water, nitrates, silicates, titanium, and tritium) are more regularly obtained from mines on the Martian surface. These materials are typically used for buildings within a certain type for example, water or nitrates are commonly found in food production buildings, silicates are typically used for research or high-tech, and titanium is used for all sorts of mundane tech. As you begin mining, you are able to trade those resources with Earth for others that are more urgently needed for your immediate development. For instance, food is used to either expand your population in a city, or to found a new city elsewhere; power is used every turn for exploration, as well as to construct mines.

Your defeat condition revolves around the resource known as support, which is the happiness level of your fledgling Martian population. It is generated by good city design, improving comfort of living, and can also be discovered via exploration, but as time passes, the amount of negative support generated by the population increases, meaning its a constant balancing act spending resources on economic development and support. On higher difficulties, there is a point in the mid-game where you are cruising along the razors edge, always within a few turns of defeat. Victory depends on whether you can pass a critical level of resource generation in that time to firmly establish your support production.

Unlike many other city-building or civilization-sprawling games, Terraformers allows you to develop your cities on both a local scale and a planetary scale.

A city has a limited number of plots for buildings, and those plots are arranged in different patterns for each city. There are ideal patterns to design certain elements of your city for example, housing always has adjacency bonuses for support, and selecting the right buildings for a residential cluster within a certain plot pattern can mean the difference in surviving just one more turn.

As far as planetary development goes, all development occurs on locations that are discovered through exploration. Locations can have specific features, such as terrain for city-building like craters, or high ground that can grant bonus yields to buildings such as solar panels. There is also low ground that will eventually be covered by the rising sea level, but dikes can be constructed to keep them dry. However, a city needs to be expanded to the location in order to utilize it, namely through increasing its population or constructing buildings like bus stations.

This dual layer of city development allows for considerable amount of interesting decision making as you juggle this complex development of a dozen cities per run with expanding your resource generation and trying to achieve the victory conditions.

Each step in the terraforming process is clear, but roguelike RNG forces a considerable amount of decision-making on every turn, and makes every run feel fresh and unique. You will never have two identical cities in a single run, and your developmental path for each run will be wildly different.

To begin with, city development does not occur like other city builder games rather than selecting buildings to construct based on your current technology level, you are able to choose one of several buildings to add to your hand every turn, and can choose to construct any building from your hand at any time. The offered buildings get progressively more advanced, and thus you are able to complete more ambitious projects as time goes on. There is a strict limit to how many cards you can have in your hand at once, which encourages you to play for the now, rather than saving forever for a future that may not come. It may be tempting to pick up a GMO lab to greatly ramp up food production, but if you do not have the adequate science production, that card might take up a precious slot in your hand for many turns, which can severely restrict your options. At the same time, the science resource is used in the building that increases your hand limit, which means youll have to decide between a greatly boosted food production or increasing the chances of obtaining another extremely valuable building the next turn, such a space telescope that can generate a ridiculous amount of science per turn. You will always be barely short of a particular resource, and while waiting to accumulate a sufficient amount, your attention will be ripped away towards another tantalizing new project that will completely derail all your previous plans.

At the start of every run, you are also prompted to select a leader. There are many leaders that each have special active abilities and a special passive ability, and you will be able to perform one action with them per turn. However, you are only able to choose from two randomly selected leaders at a time, and they retire after 10 turns, though their passive ability will remain with you for the rest of the run. Each leader will specialize in a particular area, whether it is resource generation, exploration, population support, or directly improving your terraforming parameters.

While the full release will offer additional game modes such as the highly anticipated endless mode, currently in Early Access, Terraformers offers a selection of victory conditions, and you choose one as an end-goal for your forthcoming run. For instance, you can choose to raise all four terraforming parameters to a certain level, or you can choose to propagate a certain amount of lifeforms. Each run then becomes a race to complete the objective as soon as possible, and you are scored based on your speed and performance. However, the run ends as soon as the objective is complete, which is a bit disappointing for prospective players who are looking to make an entirely green planet.

Currently, Terraformers is playable in an early access build, and additional features and content are planned to be included in the full release. This includes some modern staples such as an in-game wiki and the aforementioned endless mode (which is actually a fully featured custom mode), as well as a new feature known as Technologies, which are played like space projects but only require the science resource.

There is also a roadmap for all the updates up until release, which include a considerable amount of gameplay content and features. The roadmap can be viewed below.

As a lover of roguelike and simulation games, and as a general enthusiast about space and sci-fi, Terraformers has definitely left a considerable impression on me. Its wonderfully addictive gameplay loop is wrapped in an immersive and lovingly crafted package that delivers on all fronts. While its undeniable that it is currently in an unfinished early-access state, the developers communicate frequently with the community and have shown several glimpses into the finished product, which show immense promise. Many of the issues that Ive had with Terraformersare UI-related, but it appears that the UI, among many other aspects of the game, are due for a final layer of polish that will truly propel this game into greatness.

Terraformers was released for Early Access on Steam and GOG on April 21, 2022. There is no set date for full-release, but is expected to be within the next 6 months. Terraformers currently has localization for English, French, German, Spanish, and Russian.

There is a Discord available for the game, where the community can interact with the developers directly to learn more about the game, discuss development, and report issues.

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Terraformers Early Access Review One of the Finest Martian Games on Earth - The Workprint

This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine's "Moon Issue." To get a copy, visit our store.

BLOCK HEIGHT: 4,830,001

(c. Year 2100 in old terminology)

Greetings from the deep future! It is block height 4,830,001, and we have just had an interplanetary 23rd halving party. It is the year 2100, or as we now know it, the year 91 AB (After Bitcoin). Luckily for all of you, time travel has been discovered, and I can share the good news with all of you! The first half of the 21st century was beset by financial crises, war, poverty, inequality, environmental destruction and a COVID-19 pandemic, which caused international rolling lockdowns for over a decade, until the collapse of the global fiat economy necessitated a move away from lockdownism, profligate spending and inflation, and a return to monetary and economic, and hence, environmental, sustainability. To start, Ill give you a decade-by-decade look at how we arrived at our halving party.

While the worlds major economies were busy destroying themselves in the 2020s, smart money started migrating to Bitcoin, which created tremendous opportunities for Bitcoin miners, leading to more miners entering the market, increasing competition, and importantly, dramatically increasing innovation. By the end of 2029, every semi-industrial Bitcoin miner in the world was using low-energy cooling technologies, with just one 40-foot container full of immersed and overclocked mining rigs able to provide 5 megawatts (roughly one-third of an exahash) of portable, profit-generating electrical load, anywhere on the planet. By the end of the 2030s, all of the worlds flared gas was piped into Bitcoin containers, and customers were found for all of the worlds curtailed energy. Inflation was going at around 20% a year since the time youre reading this, so the $5.65 Big Mac you ate in 2021 would set you back about $300 in 2039. Luckily for you, bitcoin was worth $5,000,000, and fiat death was only about a decade away at this point. Unfortunately for billions of people on Earth, however, wage inflation was only 2%, and many hundreds of millions of people died due to famine and scarcityinduced conflict and social collapse in impoverished locations waiting for the fiat system to collapse under its own weight in 2050. Anyone who saved some sats during the 2020s and 2030s were themselves saved when economic judgment day arrived.

Further, the 2030s and 2040s saw the Bitcoin mining industry being the go-to buyer of first resort to prove remote nuclear fusion, solar, wind, hydroelectric and geothermal projects. While fusion had famously been 30 years away for a century at that point, thanks to Bitcoin, fusion was finally proven by 2049. Thanks to Bitcoin, a sustainable energy revolution took place, and humanity finally succeeded where international governments and agencies like the United Nations (UN) and World Economic Forum (WEF) failed consistently on their targets for several generations. The end of the 2040s was marked by mega-mergers between the worlds largest publicly listed energy companies, semiconductor design and manufacturing companies, and Bitcoin mining, consumer product and service companies.

In 2050, these quadrillion-dollar mega entities could design and build their own ASICs, mass-manufacture them, mine at large scale with energy they produced, and also offer customers the full suite of Bitcoin hardware, software and financial services. There were around 10 of these international megacorps that served about 80% of the market, with a booming open-source ecosystem of thousands of private, free, decentralized options serving the other 20% of the market. Competition in the Bitcoin mining space at this point was summed up as absolutely cut-throat with profit margins approaching zero, where the only way to remain alive was by competing on either cost or innovation.

With the price of bitcoin in 2050 being around $10,000,000, and now only growing at around 3% per annum due to its maturity and market saturation, silly novelties like physical metals have been completely demonetized. That $300 Big Mac you ate in 2039 was a cool $1,000 now, too. While gold was performing strongly at $10,000 per ounce in 2040, about 10 Big Macs, smart investors were growing impatient still holding gold over bitcoin after missing 1,000,000% upside over the past 30 years. People started becoming offended at being offered jewelry instead of satoshis.

As a result, by 2050, gold, and all other precious metals were selling by the tonne rather than the gram or ounce, which allowed humanity to take advantage of the miracle of gold, silver, platinum and others as building and industrial materials. Previously prohibitively costly technologies and innovations were unlocked due to plummeting material costs. Due to golds specific durability and anti-radiation properties, we could finally look to space. While most people were accustomed to a 10 Gbit/s internet connection in 2050, 1 Mbit/s satellite internet was free and ubiquitous around the world by then.

While the Bitcoin blockchain was now about 3 terabytes in size, the largely Bitcoin-driven revolution in semiconductor manufacturing meant that you could be up and running with your own synced up Bitcoin full node for the cost of a Big Mac. The Bitcoin-driven energy revolution also meant that at-home fusion reactors were now only 30 years away from proving out at this time. The EU, U.S. and China have collapsed, alongside the UN, and there are now 2,000 independent states, that compete for the worlds best talent through responsible policy. War is not possible under a finite monetary system, and world peace has been achieved.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. A hundred years on from JFKs famous speech and several of the worlds free independent states have established bases on the moon. Due to the sheer amount of satellites and relays in space, moon miners were not at a large disadvantage, and all energy not dedicated to terraforming the moon is going toward Bitcoin mining. On Earth, 25% of the worlds energy is dedicated to mining bitcoin, and due to the largely Bitcoin-driven intense competition in the energy markets, regular people effectively had access to very low-cost, if not free, energy. By the end of the 2070s, no one on planet Earth was without energy or electricity, and its all cheap and clean, thanks mainly to Bitcoin. The energy revolution enabled unprecedented opportunities for individual sovereignty and self-sufficiency, and major advancements in 3D printing and materials over the past half a century has made the Star Trek replicator dream one step closer to reality. Who ended up building the roads? Thanks to the Bitcoin monetary stack, micro and nano payments enabled a road network where users can pay competing private road operators for road use, even in per meter traveled increments, and even allow payments between vehicles themselves. This may sound strange but paying a few extra sats for all of your services still ends up being far, far cheaper than suffering through inflation and paying income, sales and land taxes.

The 2080s and 2090s saw a fairer global wealth distribution than that presented by Credit Suisse in its "2021 Global Wealth Report. Back then, the top 1.1% of the population held 45.8% of global wealth, with the next 11.1% holding another 39.1%, and the bottom 55% only owning 1.3%. Now, the top 1% only hold 20% of the wealth, with the bottom 80% holding a far healthier 20%. Although this isnt necessarily equal, this is far more in line with natural power laws (i.e., the 80-20 rule). Indeed, with the ending of the fiat delusion of finite resources, infinite money and the market- and society-distorting practice of mass money printing, humanity was able to return to a more natural path. In the old fiat days, the top 1% could gamble, get bailouts from the government if the bet went sour, and off to the casino they went again. Now, the people who sell or spend their bitcoin know just how difficult they are to earn back. Once its spent, its spent forever. No reprints. Importantly, with terraforming of the moon well underway, and Mars also becoming a tourist destination, the worlds people were culturally ready to usher in a new century of reaching for the stars.

And finally we arrive to now, the year 2100. There are still 10 megacorps that provide 80% of the mining hash rate, products and services, but none of the 10 megacorps that were around in 2050 are still in business. Competition is so fierce that it is unlikely that the current crop of Bitcoin megacorps will survive this century. The worlds wealthy are now mining at home on their own fusion mini-reactors, and at-home mining is generally responsible for 20% of the hash rate. A third of the worlds energy is dedicated to mining, and the worlds grid is emissions free. Of note is that humanity now uses a full 50 times more energy than we did a century ago all clean. Although people generally know what Bitcoin is, there are now so many layers and abstractions, bitcoin is just money to Earth- and moon-bound people. Almost no individuals use baselayer Bitcoin to transact, and very few even use Layer 2 either, with most people using Layer 3 or above for day-to-day activities. Unfortunately though, the speed of light is too slow, and Bitcoins 10-minute block time is too fast, for bitcoin to be an effective money across the entire universe. The Martians have bootstrapped their own local proof-of-work-based monetary system, and a healthy UnEx (universal exchange) Market is forming. Although we still have another 40 years or so before the mining reward ends, the not enough fee revenue risk failed to materialize. Base-layer blocks are full, 24/7, just under a million transactions per day, with each of these million transactions themselves settling hundreds of thousands of other transactions per day on higher layers. While a base-layer transaction costs the equivalent of $1,000 in 2021 money, the total value settled per transaction is closer to $10 million, making the effective fee rate 0.01%.

Some parting advice from deep into the future: Take good care of your keys and hold onto them for dear life. Now it's time for me to head back to the future. I have a lunch date with my grandfather, The Friar himself, at a fighting-fit 114 years old, who's fresh out of hospital with a new set of 3D-printed stem-cell lungs. He's on his second 3D-printed heart, and third 3D-printed liver indeed, HODLing was not easy.

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Bitcoin Mining In The 22nd Century - Bitcoin Magazine

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Thank FOC It's Saturday Planned to coincide and cover the demands of Final Order Cut Off at Diamond Comic Distributorson Monday. And nowLunar Distribution and Penguin Random House on Sunday as well. So here's this week's comics product coming through that may need adjusting as demand slips and slides with the emerging economic bubble. Or somesuch. Traditionally FOC is the date when retailers have a last chance to amend their advance orders for comic books without penalty. A final opportunity for publishers to promote books while orders can still be added. A time for credits to be amends, new covers to be revealed, and a final push given. This is an attempt to sift through them all and find the most relevant items. But no DC this week, they are giving it a miss.

Sign up below, and we'll see what Thank FOC It's Friday brings next week on time possibly.

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Sins Of The Black Flamingo Thank FOC It's Saturday, 4th of June 2022 - Bleeding Cool News

Prime members will get full access to a new lineup of popular games on the Prime Gaming Channel beginning June 1, including Moving Out, Lumines Remastered, Beach Buggy Racing 2: Hot Wheels Edition, BloodRayne 2: Terminal Cut, and Far Cry 4.

You must be an Amazon Prime member to receive free Prime Gaming June 2022 games, however ... these games are still available for free with a trial account.

To obtain all of the games listed above, simply sign up for FREE for Amazon Prime (which includes Prime Gaming, formerly known as Twitch Prime). After the free trial period (which you can cancel at any time), Amazon Prime costs between $2.99 and $12.99 per month, depending on your location. If you intend to "snatch games and terminate the subscription," remember to unsubscribe.

Claim the games from theAmazon Prime Gaming page.

Free to grab: Borderlands 3 free on Epic Games Store - 05/19/2022 06:23 PMThe classic shooter-looter returns with a slew of new weapons and a mayhem-filled adventure! This week, Epic is giving you this PC game for free! It is free till May 26th, 2022....

Free to grab: Prey at Epic Games Store - 05/13/2022 09:17 AMPrey, a sci-fi shooter RPG by Bethesda, is being given away for free by Epic Games for the next week, starting today and running through May 19th, 2022....

Free to grab: Terraforming Mars - 05/06/2022 08:38 AMTerraforming Mars, (digital board game) in which you change Mars into a habitable planet, is being given away for free by Epic Games....

Free to grab: Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory on Steam - 04/27/2022 09:08 AMWolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a World War II first-person multiplayer shooter, is now available for free on Steam....

Link:

Free to grab: Far Cry 4 and more games with Amazon Prime Gaming - guru3d.com

Ars Technica

Update (5/30/22 10:55 am ET): We've updated our roundup of recommended Memorial Day deals for the holiday proper, crossing out expired offers and adding new discounts on Nintendo's Switch Pro Controller, Roomba robot vacuums, Roku streamers, and Xbox Series S bundles, among others.

Original post (5/28/22 2:30 pm ET):It's Memorial Day weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of good tech deals from around the web includes all the best offers we could dig up from this weekend's crop of holiday sales. While Memorial Day promotions generally focus on home goods, appliances, and mattresses more than electronics, we've still found a few gadget deals of note for those who can't wait for more tech-centric sales events like Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day.

Beyond that, our roundupincludesseveralongoing deals on PlayStation games and gear, including a rare discount on PlayStation 5 controllers, plus lower-than-usual prices on Bose's highly comfortable QuietComfort 45headphones, Google's Nest Hub smart display and Nest Audio smart speaker, well-reviewed laptops from Lenovo and HP, an excellent LG OLED TV, tons of PC games, and some 4K Blu-rays for a few movies we like. You can peruse our full curated list of Memorial Day deals below.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post throughaffiliate programs.

Corey Gaskin

Jeff Dunn

Corey Gaskin

Lee Hutchinson

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The best Memorial Day sales we can find on gadgets, games, and tech gear [Updated] - Ars Technica