Terra forming planets

[Jeb federation]

I don't know if this is already a something that's been talked about or if it even possible, but wouldn't it be cool if we could Terra form planets like Dres or Tylo. For example, machines that drill for subterranean water to produce atmospheres or shipping vital atmospheric components to planets like Duna or seeding vegetation. I'm sure there are more ways that have been proposed in real life on this subject that I'm not thinking of. Just something I thought would be interesting for the game.

[Hay]

I don't think this is a good idea, because a substantial majority doesn't want this. 

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

I don't know whether I am in the majority here, but I fully support this - Not in the stock game, but as DLC. Along with cities on the surface of the terraformed planets that you can build. And cities on Kerbin, dammit!

Edited April 10, 2017 by OrbitalBuzzsaw

[Razorforce7]

@Jeb federation Excuse me, but your on the wrong website.

You need a community dedicated to the game "Spore"
In there you can terraform until you collapse from the effects of Hypersomnia.

Happy terraformingmy apologies if this is not what your looking for. You sure won't find it here though.

[Jeb federation]

I was thinking maybe more along lines of a mod. Maybe I put this topic in the wrong spot. But I figured once someone conquered space travel then they could Terra form the planets. It would probably take many kerbal years to accomplish such a feet but that would be the point. Imagine hauling atmospheric equipment, seeds, or producing oxygen and eventually making the planet habitable. Like I said before, I don't know if this is possible.

[Razorforce7]

@Jeb federationThis is probably possible with a entire different game engine.

Planets in KSP are static in their appearance. This is true in terms of surface graphics and atmosphere. You can't mod a plugin that re-adjust these environments based on effort dedicated to terraforming because it simply isn't possible. A planet is just a statically rendered object in the game. They'd have to be precisely coded to a dynamic model based on your specific terraforming criteria. Which requires a different game engine and a vast effort by the developers of KSP.

Terraforming on any sophisticated level probably involves many, I say "many" megabytes of code. This is why a specific game genre is dedicated to one, perhaps a few smaller things. Terraforming seem a very big leap, I'd classify it to needing a whole new game to begin with. And that is just my opinion, the fact is that it isn't possible, end of story. If it were possible it would definitely be MOD and not stock worthy.

Terraforming is like doing what nature took billions of years and do it artificialy in a moment notice. I'm sure in our pinnacle of evolution that will one day be possible. But it doesn't match KSP and It's Not 10.000AD science and infrastructure.
Basically your making something on the basis of a theory that doesn't exist. Which I'm not neccesarily against. But doing something as profound and difficult as a terraforming mod that has no scientific basis on which to render your game models is quite vague, even for a mod. And like I said, impossible in KSP. How many game years is terraforming supposed to take anyway? It should atleast take a few thousand years I guess. You'll need better timewarp 4.0 for that one.

Edited April 10, 2017 by Razorforce7

[Jeb federation]

I think it would only take a few hundred years at the most if we leave evolution out of the equation. First off, evolution is the greatest failure of the human imagination and the greatest impediment to our knowledge of how the universe works not to mention it has no evidence to hold up in the court of law. Let's remember that it's the "theory" of evolution not fact, also Kerbals didn't evolve over millions of years on our desktops, did they? Obviously someone created them. That being said I think there is a way to Terra form planets and my theory is to pump billions of tons of water into orbit to created an ice canopy that would filter harmful rays from the sun but also  uniformly heat the planet's surface. If anyone has other ways to do this, then great! But if this is not possible for the game then I guess we'll just let this topic die.

Edited April 10, 2017 by Jeb federation

[Wjolcz]

14 minutes ago, Jeb federation said:

I think it would only take a few hundred years at the most if we leave evolution out of the equation. First off, evolution is the greatest failure of the human imagination and the greatest impediment to our knowledge of how the universe works not to mention it has no evidence to hold up in the court of law. Let's remember that it's the "theory" of evolution not fact, also Kerbals didn't evolve over millions of years on our desktops, did they? Obviously someone created them. That being said I think there is a way to Terra form planets and my theory is to pump billions of tons of water into orbit to created an ice canopy that would filter harmful rays from the sun but also  uniformly heat the planet's surface. If anyone has other ways to do this, then great! But if this is not possible for the game then I guess we'll just let this topic die.

Troll alert!

[Jeb federation]

4 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

Troll alert!

I was not intending to be a troll, but seeing as this could be a touchy subject I will not reply any more on this topic and let it die. And I did not mean to offend anyone.

[Razorforce7]

@Jeb federationNot sure what evidence in the court of law has to do with the theory of evolution.
I respect all viewpoints on what one may believe. Many answers to how life came to be are unanswered.
But again, playing "creator" can be done in "spore" ironically as I have mentioned it earlier.
Also it's "Kerbal Space program" dedicated to being a analogue of current human space travel technologies.
If that is not the grandeur you are looking for the next thing to do is promote a game to it.
Or find one if it already exists.
 

Edited April 10, 2017 by Razorforce7

[W. Kerman]

1. This could be cool!

2. Guys be careful, as this thread could run afoul of regulation 2.2b on the forums if the evolution vs creation stuff gets too intense.

"Political, ideological or religious posts unrelated to Spaceflight, or of a nature deemed likely to result in behavior banned under rule 2.2d"

Hope this stays a cool thread about terraforming, bye! 

EDIT

@Razorforce7 I love Spore! That game was awesome!

Edited April 10, 2017 by W. Kerman
Noticed another cool game being mentioned.

[MinimalMinmus]

Well, the main problem is: terraforming is long. Excruciatingly so. It has been estimated it would take a millennium to terraform Mars, so it means that, suposing it started today, Mars would be colonized by my (great-)^30 grandchildren... not only you can't warp that long in a reasonable amount of time ( it is still 2,5 hours) but it would probably remove the WSoD about long lived kerbals.

Edited April 10, 2017 by MinimalMinmus

[Razorforce7]

@MinimalMinmus

I would love to add to this that the Mars terraforming project estimation of a millenium is based on...

Absolute and full global collective economical, labor, political, social, scientific and industrial direction over all global activities in a moments notice and to be maintained.
In fact, it is to be maintained at said effort for the duration of the longest living civlizations in history. A thousand years or more!
That is what the mathematical estimations are based on that portray those time scales. They don't take in estimation what Kim Yung Un, Basshar al Assad or Donald Trump will do tommorrow.
Whether we achieve said level of civilization for said duration that will maintain all summarized attention points and be executed with near maximum efficiency is very far fetched.
I believe it will take 100's of thousand years until all collective assets are in place to allow a venture such as planetary terraforming.

But theoreticaly it could be done quite fast. Which is not something I would expect whatever is theoretically possible. But I'm promoting all the way ofcourse.


 

[Cadet_BNSF]

2 hours ago, W. Kerman said:

Guys be careful, as this thread could run afoul of regulation 2.2b on the forums if the evolution vs creation stuff gets too intense.

"Political, ideological or religious posts unrelated to Spaceflight, or of a nature deemed likely to result in behavior banned under rule 2.2d"

Hope this stays a cool thread about terraforming, bye!

I am pretty sure @Jeb federationsaid that he wanted to let it die

 

2 hours ago, Jeb federation said:

I was not intending to be a troll, but seeing as this could be a touchy subject I will not reply any more on this topic and let it die. And I did not mean to offend anyone.

Just wanting to get that out there so that he doesn't get in trouble

[Combatsmithen]

2 hours ago, W. Kerman said:

1. This could be cool!

2. Guys be careful, as this thread could run afoul of regulation 2.2b on the forums if the evolution vs creation stuff gets too intense.

"Political, ideological or religious posts unrelated to Spaceflight, or of a nature deemed likely to result in behavior banned under rule 2.2d"

Hope this stays a cool thread about terraforming, bye! 

EDIT

@Razorforce7 I love Spore! That game was awesome!

 

You don't have to be religious to deny evolution. Because it is called the "theory" of evolution, and science is based on experiments, and so far there has been no experiments to prove evolution, so it is still a theory.

 

But do not jump on the religious hate train please. I am a Christian, and I love science, and space, Jeb Federation might not even be religious. Who knows.  

 

IT would take forever to manufacture an atmosphere though... So it's not really feasible in this game, and in real life it would be a very daunting project as well, and would probably take or thousand or more years to do, nevermind the material cost from the planet itself. Although there is that idea about using algae in the air or something on Venus but like I said before that would be a long long long term project

[W. Kerman]

24 minutes ago, Cadet_BNSF said:

I am pretty sure @Jeb federationsaid that he wanted to let it die

 

Just wanting to get that out there so that he doesn't get in trouble

The original poster can ask the moderators to lock their threads.

[Starman4308]

1 hour ago, Combatsmithen said:

Because it is called the "theory" of evolution, and science is based on experiments, and so far there has been no experiments to prove evolution, so it is still a theory.

For the record: that is one of the least correct statements ever uttered about evolution.

There have been experiments directly testing for evolution. Numerous techniques in biological research depend on evolution. Antibiotic resistance is a consequence of evolution. Theodosius Dobzhansky summed it up well: nothing in biology makes sense except when viewed in the light of evolution.

Now, if you're thinking about the origin of life, that's abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is fuzzier, with a lot less known about how life may naturally have come about; it doesn't help that the vast majority of the original physical evidence has long since been destroyed by plate tectonics. Still, when it comes purely to evolution, you either have to assume it's correct, or that somebody went through a staggering amount of effort to make sure it looked like it's correct.

Back to terraforming:

Not practical. Certainly not within the frame of a human life. Even given ridiculously optimistic assumptions, it'd still take on the order of a thousand years for algae to produce the same amount of oxygen as is present in Earth's atmosphere... and Mars/Duna doesn't even have enough CO2 in the atmosphere to convert to O2.

Also, while probably possible from a coding standpoint... possible does not mean "practical" or "I would want to be the one to do all that hard work".

Edited April 11, 2017 by Starman4308

[RatchetinSpace]

There would need to be some serious coding to get something like this to work with the way planets currently work.

I'm with Razorforce7, if you want to terraform planets, play spore. KSP isn't really a game that fits terraforming. Terraforming a real celestial body would not be the effort of a space program but the industrial power of the entire Earth. It would also involve large structures, kilometres in size (say, a giant mirror) built by hundreds or even thousands of spacecraft over a long period of time. I don't care how much free time you have, no mortal human could play that much KSP.

I'm not saying terraforming isn't impossible IRL, but KSP is about spacecraft and space exploration, and adding terraforming to KSP would be a bit like adding a fighter pilot mode to surgeon simulator.

[MiffedStarfish]

It's obvious kerbals were created by these: 

As for terraforming, I don't think it would work in ksp. Even if it were possible to code in the engine, it wouldn't fit in with the game, everything would become repetitive logistics as opposed to creativity and exploration. Not to mention that orbital mechanics, the thing the game does best, would become the most boring part as you would have done it before tens of times.

...Small scale permanent colony's though, that's an idea...

 

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

On 4/11/2017 at 1:30 AM, Combatsmithen said:

You don't have to be religious to deny evolution. Because it is called the "theory" of evolution, and science is based on experiments, and so far there has been no experiments to prove evolution, so it is still a theory.

Wrong! Very, very wrong. The corpus of experiments on evolution numbers over six thousand.

On 4/11/2017 at 2:58 AM, Starman4308 said:

Not practical. Certainly not within the frame of a human life. Even given ridiculously optimistic assumptions, it'd still take on the order of a thousand years for algae to produce the same amount of oxygen as is present in Earth's atmosphere... and Mars/Duna doesn't even have enough CO2 in the atmosphere to convert to O2.

That is true, but what do you think those ice caps are made of? Obviously not water ice.

Edited April 12, 2017 by OrbitalBuzzsaw

[Spartwo]

Be interesting for a series of contracts to crash asteroids into the polar regions to raise Duna's surface pressure, contracts pretend other agencies are doing it too to not have a ridiculous number of contracts. But I agree that this is something best left to mods or a small expansion than as a base feature.

Edited April 12, 2017 by Spartwo

[Starman4308]

6 hours ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

That is true, but what do you think those ice caps are made of? Obviously not water ice.

For Mars: mostly water ice, with a thin layer of CO2 permafrost. From what Wikipedia says, there should be about 2.4*10^15 kg of CO2 locked up in the ice caps, which gets you 16.6 kg of CO2 per square meter of Mars. Convert that to O2, it's down to 12.1 kg/m^2.

Seeing as how a 1 m^2 column of Earth atmosphere masses ~10200 kg, of which ~2150 kg is oxygen... the Martian ice caps are not nearly enough, nor is the Martian atmosphere (which is far, far thinner than Earth's).

For Duna... maybe. Duna's ice caps are significantly larger, and its atmosphere incomparably thicker than Mars's. I was thinking exclusively of Mars when I made that comment, but there's probably enough available CO2 to support life when provided with enough water and temperature.

Of course, right up until real-world physics kicks in, and everything explodes because it's way too dense, but I think we're all ignoring that one out of non-explodey convenience.

EDIT: Also, still with the caveat that it would take an absurdly long time to convert enough O2 to support metazoan (animal) life.

Edited April 12, 2017 by Starman4308