Saw it in a movie thread.

[Kiljan Arslan]

Okay I know that scfi alot of times makes stuff up but sometimes the stuff you see actually could be possible, and heres where I think peolpe should ask iif what they saw in a sci fi movie is in fact possible, first me is the atmospheric converter on the planet the colony is on in Aliens possible?

[Chaigidel]

if you had the right raw matierials im sure anything is possible if you have also fusion power-- or some endless source of energy so you could break the chemicals and make them into what you wanted.

[Simetrical]

Could you describe how the device is supposed to work? I'm not familiar with it. It's entirely plausible, indeed almost certain, that a colony on a planet with a partially-suitable atmosphere (that is, substantial quantities of oxygen) would use some kind of device to extract oxygen from the local air for use by the colony. Someplace like Mars or the Moon with little to no atmosphere, you would probably get oxygen from rocks or something, at considerably more expense.

[Kiljan Arslan]

Basicly powered by either a plasma or nucleur reacto its about twice the size of the reso of the colony, and its one of several because it was planned to eventually settle more of the planet over a period of several centuries.

[GrnEyedDvl]

I always liked the idea in Total Recall where they created an atmoshpere on Mars by superheating the icy core with that big alien machine. Im sure you could release the oxygen that way but you would have to do something with the hydrogen and introduce a bunch of other stuff.

[Simetrical]

A device to extract oxygen from the atmosphere would not be so big, I think (what's a reso?). Or is it purifying the entire planet's atmosphere, so that airlocks and so on won't be needed in the colonies? That would be a job that would take a very, very long time with absolutely massive machinery, but it would work given sufficient resources. A few centuries seems to me a reasonably short timespan with powerful enough machines, although it's far beyond our present capacity.

Powering it with fusion is probably the obvious choice, if you have cold fusion. I don't think plasma can be used for any kind of power generation.

[Kiljan Arslan]

Purifying.

[Simetrical]

Yeah, that would take a lot of machinery, of one kind or another, but it's perfectly doable in theory. The rise of life did it to Earth, radically changing the atmosphere.

[Juvenal]

If you are looking for the potentially real, then you should stick to science fiction in book form. Movies exert a pressure on science fiction to make it simpler to understand, faster and more exciting. Books have time to explain how things (might) work while films have to constantly provide interesting things for you to look at.

As far as I am aware, the consensus on terraforming is that the most effective methods would be biological (well, at least until we have self-replicating nano-bots etc). See Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books for a good description of how Mars might be terraformed.

If you just want breathable air for a sealed colony, then with sufficient power you can crack oxygen out of rock (I would guess that we are planning to do this with the proposed NASA moon colony).

Science fiction comes in different flavours - you probably want to check out "hard" science fiction for believable future science and technology - but be warned, sacrifices are often made with characterisation and there won't be so many car/spaceship chases or explosions.

[Ulyaoth]

I saw on some show a while ago that they had a plan to terraform Mars by basically making giant pollution factories, pumping out cfcs or whatever those were. the cfcs would trap enough heat to raise the surface enough to melt the polar ice caps which are made of CO2 apparently, which would then trap even more heat, melting the water frozen in the poles and under the surface, which would recreate the oceans, at which point they could place plants down, and within 50-100 years they said I believe they could make the planet livable(though I believe they said Mars' gravity is too weak to hold onto Oxygen or Nitrogen so you'd still probably have to be in a bubble.

[Simetrical]

Mars' gravity is strong enough to hold onto an Earthlike atmosphere, I'm pretty sure: its gravity is only a third as strong as Earth's, but the Earth's atmosphere is not maximally dense by any means. Venus, with comparable gravity to Earth (10% less), has an atmosphere 40 times as dense as Earth's. Mars' atmosphere is very thin, only about 1% of an Earth atmosphere in pressure, but that's because it got blown away when the planet was young, not because its gravity is too weak to sustain a larger one. At least, I think so.

[Kiljan Arslan]

SOmeone else want to give a question?

[Gary88]

cold fusion, last i heard shrimps were almost doing it, and so were scientists with some wierd sonoluminesence experiments. anyone know much about the idea?

[Simetrical]

Nobody's yet found a viable method for cold fusion that's generally accepted. There's a lot of active research going into it, because it seems very likely to be possible, and if we discover a method to do it, we could be talking what amounts to unlimited free energy. A handful of gallons of water a year, if that, would satisfy the planet's power needs. The only pollution would be small quantities of oxygen, helium, deuterium, and tritium, easily sequestered somewhere if you don't want to release them into the atmosphere for some reason.

[Kiljan Arslan]

whats tritium?

[Trax]

A hydrogen isotope, 1 proton + 2 neutrons.

[Kiljan Arslan]

Hears a new one okay for those of you who don't go inot the art thread I'm a big star Wars fan and I wanna know is it possible for a planet that would be like HOth to exist?

[Ulyaoth]

Hoth's the frozen one right? Of course it's possible. It's probably just an extreme version of what earth was like during the ice ages.

[Kiljan Arslan]

Okay this wasn't so much from a movie as it was more mentioned in a video game, in the game Deus Ex they talk about a mining craft on the moon using mass drivers for propulsion is their anything that could show that thats possible?

[Simetrical]

Possible, sure. The major question is if it would be profitable. I don't know if mass drivers would be the best propulsion system, either, but it's possible in fifty years. A lunar mining colony might be too expensive to merit the resources it yields, but that all depends on technology.