Would it be possible to use the terrain to our advantage on the Moon or Mars? For instance, could a small crater on the moon be "capped" with a dome and serve as a habitat? Would it be possible to irradiate the lunar regolith and reduce the dust? Would it be possible to break down the O2 in the soil enough to make a biosphere in the dome? That way you do not have to "live indoors" all the time.What do you think?
If you insisted on having a dome type of structure, it would make more sense to make a giant inflatable sphere, the upper part clear, the whole thing resting in a crater. You could even make some sort of spherical girder like structure that you would inflate the sphere within to add some extra rigidity.
Quote from: dmeche on 06/25/2009 05:05 pmWould it be possible to use the terrain to our advantage on the Moon or Mars? For instance, could a small crater on the moon be "capped" with a dome and serve as a habitat? Would it be possible to irradiate the lunar regolith and reduce the dust? Would it be possible to break down the O2 in the soil enough to make a biosphere in the dome? That way you do not have to "live indoors" all the time.What do you think?I especially like Stickney crater on Phobos. The crater walls provide lots of protection. Phobos is tide locked with Mars, so Mars always hovers in the sky above Stickney's eastern wall. Since Mars is so close, it's large in the sky and also provides some protection.
Could there be a dome within a dome? The outer one in vacuum for radiation and particle hits, and translucent for some light. The inner one for atmosphere, securely anchored.
I ask again, is there hydrogen in the atmosphere of Venus? It's pretty essential for humans you know, and Mars has it.
But you have almost all the building blocks you need for plastics, composites, nanotubes, etc. You still need some source of metals, but likely far less than you'd need to import to get mining, refining, and processing going on some place like Mars or elsewhere. Think of it as a carbon-fiber composite (with sulfurcrete) city, with metal mostly being for wires, and things that have to be metal.~Jon
{snip}Making things small mostly means making them stupid, and who wants a stupid construction engineer?
Because that simply will not be the norm. You don't pay somebody to install an air conditioner when a robot can do it perfectly every time.
I see lots of attempts to "make-believe" robots will just go away and not change the workforce. Such thoughts are BS for if we don't use them China will.
The trouble with nanobots is their very limited energy. There's lots of fiction going back decades concerning nanobots building stuff. But you need to remember, they need to get their energy from somewhere and when it comes right down to it, moving so much material requires so much energy and you can't avoid this. Fact is machines built on the nanoscale are going to have serious power limitations. Getting one to lift and position a grain of sand intelligently is likely NEVER going to happen. Making things small mostly means making them stupid, and who wants a stupid construction engineer?