Seeding asteroids that have been thoroughly mined out/have no value? Perhaps Tiberium requires an atmosphere.
You'd get atmosphere, just not breathable atmosphere, if that's what you want. And wouldn't there need to be something at both ends?
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
- Location
- his hidden lair
I think you vastly over estimate the difficulties for us to profitably mine off of Venus if you are trying to compare it to the single largest mega project in the scope of this quest. For instance I think it's likely we will never touch making a TCN for Venus.
Moreover if you're operating on the assumption TCN destroys our entire Tiberium income fixating on the moon is just irresponsible. Unless we're aggressively strip mining it we're probably not going to get more than a few hundred RpT…. Meanwhile Venus is the most reasonably place we can find to justify using accelerators and Tiberium spikes that enhance growth. A world wherein we don't have constant insurgent attacks or a need to worry about preserving the environment too much.
We have materials that can handle 80 bars easily- especially with Scrin structural materials, and I bet you anything the corrosion resistance of T-Glass is literally out of this world. Space lift is probably going to be a bigger concern than Venus' environment. In terms of industrializing and exploiting space… I really don't see the moon as anything more than a proof of concept and convenient stepping stone. Treating it as the potential crutch to remove our dependency from Tiberium is just going to collapse our economy.
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cokerpilot
Here comes the rain.
That really depends on how our portals work. Even assuming we have an infante range with sufficient power how would keep the portals in place. The Mars one might not be too many issues to maintain but unless we can somehow project the portal from orbit maintaining a portal device in Venusus atmosphere (Or anything else for that matter) would be a pain in the ass.
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
Not after a breathable atmosphere no, just something for temperature and atmospheric stability. And I assume the portal would be two way, I don't see how it would work otherwise?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The amount of atmosphere we want on Mars is much much less than the amount of atmosphere that is present on Venus. Also this requires very very large and stable portals to have a useful effect, and the chemicals in the Venusian atmosphere are not necessarily the ones we want on Mars.
It would be more practical to open the portal from Venus to some point in the vacuum of interplanetary space.
Given that the Temple Prime explosion almost certainly knocked chunks onto the moon and there are no decade-old tiberium patches on the moon that we've noticed, you're probably right... but again, this would involve GDI, after tiberium disappears from Earth, deliberately seeding tiberium on celestial bodies that were previously uninfested.
It would not be a popular move, to put it mildly. I'd rather just have a thriving enough space industrial base that we can at least maintain "don't starve" levels of basic survival necessities.
My point is that in-character, if GDI believes that the TCN merely controls but does not destroy tiberium... then GDI will probably want to control the tiberium on Venus eventually, if at all possible.
The reason being that otherwise, sooner or later Venus, too, will undergo liquid tiberium explosions. That would be very bad. The explosions would potentially attract Visitors, potentially launch tiberium on trajectories back to Earth, and certainly endanger our mining operations which unlike those of the Visitors, probably can't just go out of phase to laugh off multi-gigaton explosions.
Therefore, GDI's plan would be something like "first things first, get tiberium under control on Earth with the aptly named TCN, THEN worry about doing it on Venus, which is harder and should be saved for later."
But GDI would not just ignore the question of "so, how do we control the Venusian tiberium," because if ignored, that problem would eventually cause a disaster, even if it's a disaster with a much longer time horizon, hopefully.
I mean, there's really nothing stopping us from aggressively strip-mining hundreds of square kilometers of lunar regolith for bulk materials. We totally could do that. The moon is not small.
The lunar mining operations you see in front of you are tiny compared to what could theoretically exist, because all the refining has to pass through a single space station of limited size. We could in principle build much larger smelting facilities, either on the moon or in space, once the infrastructure existed. We're not actually long-term capped by the capacity of Enterprise Phase 5 for purposes of determining our peak space industrial capacity and resource budget, any more than we're long-term capped by the population of Columbia Phase 5 for determining how many GDI citizens can live in space. Enterprise is the prototype of bigger and better things to come, in principle at least.
The real problem would be access to rare elements, which would actually be rare again.
What I am saying is that if we are forcibly, against our will, required to go "cold turkey" off of tiberium with little or no notice...
...That is to say, if hypothetically the TCN causes all tiberium to suddenly disappear...
Then we want to make sure we are prepared with at least some kind of viable non-tiberium option for keeping the lights on and the citizenry from starving to death while we figure out what the hell to do next.
Okay?
It's a Plan B, or maybe a Plan C. Plan A is to either stay on a tiberium economy indefinitely (using controlled tiberium that doesn't eat or blow up whole planets), or to make a smooth, graceful transition to a non-tiberium economy in a gradual, planned process spread out over decades.
Plan C is by nature not something we actually want to experience.
There would need to be something on Venus, built to withstand its hellish conditions.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
You wouldn't have to put the portal on the surface, in principle; you could hang it from a blimp at some arbitrary altitude and more manageable temperature/pressure combination. Of course, it'd take a lot longer to hoover up meaningful amounts of atmosphere that way because it wouldn't come roaring through at such insane pressure.
The trouble is, there is, again, roughly 100 times more atmosphere on Venus (to a rough order of magnitude) than you even WANT to transfer to Mars, if you even COULD and if it were beneficial to do so, which it arguably isn't.
You'd do much better to just portal the Venusian atmosphere into deep space where no one will care where it's gone, if you even had the kind of gigantic portals it'd take to do something like this.
The trouble is, there is, again, roughly 100 times more atmosphere on Venus (to a rough order of magnitude) than you even WANT to transfer to Mars, if you even COULD and if it were beneficial to do so, which it arguably isn't.
You'd do much better to just portal the Venusian atmosphere into deep space where no one will care where it's gone, if you even had the kind of gigantic portals it'd take to do something like this.
- Location
- USA
We probably have the raw tech to build one between myomers, Tib being a literally cheat button and some Scrin tech.
We won't because an orbital elevator is basically a flashing "Blow this up to start the next Tib War" for NOD.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
There's a good chance we'll see space elevators on the moon or Mars, but not on Earth unless we can protect them from Nod, yeah.
- Location
- Earth
The true answer for atmosphere transfer is both. Syphon enough atmosphere from Venus to create a Martian atmosphere, then when Mars is topped up send the surplus atmosphere into deep space (or one of the gas giants which won't have an impact).
At least get enough atmosphere on Mars such that a pressure suit isn't required on the surface. At a certain level of thickness the atmosphere will also block a good amount of radiation.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It would work, but you are underestimating the sheer MASS of an atmosphere. It would take decades of constant category 5+ storms near the portal ends to change the atmosphere on both ends by tiny amounts.
- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
Unless the portals somehow magically break conservation of gravitational energy, then that won't work because the Venusian atmosphere still needs to flow 100s of km uphill to get out the other side of the portal.
The surface of both Venus and Mars are a fair distance uphill from the surface of the Earth.
It is possible that the portal technology can compensate for the energy difference, but I expect we have to pay that energy difference, and that means firing the cargo at the portal with enough speed to make the potential energy jump to the other side.
- Location
- Earth
I'm not sure why you think it would need to flow upwards 100s of kilometers to go out of a portal. The portal bridges two locations together, so there no distance. And the location of the intake portal would be inside Venusian atmosphere with the output in space or Mars, where the pressure differential would be 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth. (Martian atmosphere is neglible)
Could you clarify what you mean by "The surface of both Venus and Mars are a fair distance uphill from the surface of the Earth" and "compensate for the energy difference"? Why is there an uphill to two points linked to a portal and from what reference location? What type of energy is the difference? The only thing I can think of the surface gravity of all three planets, but the other two have lower accelerations than Earth's 9.8 M/s^2. (Venus 8.87 m/s^2, Mars 3.721 m/s^2)
- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
The energy difference is the gravitational potential energy difference between the two ends of the portal. You know how we need big rockets to get things into orbit. If you put enough kinetic energy into something to give it escape velocity, it reaches orbit and stops. That is how much energy was needed to move the object from the ground to orbit.
If this energy cost can be magically bypassed, then you could drop an object from orbit, it will accelerate due to gravity as it falls and then you can use a portal to return it to orbit without it losing any energy. So basically, you can accelerate it infinitely creating energy from nothing.
That seems highly unlikely to be possible, and have fun with the air flow caused by the pressure differences.
So if energy is conserved, how could that work?
1: Contracted distance instead of zero distance. In which case, your portal appears to be a tunnel with steepness solving the different in potential energy from one side to the other. Object from the higher end can just slide down to the other end of the portal and you try to decelerate them without them smashing. To send things the other way, you have to launch them at the equivalent escape velocity to bridge the two. (Which wouldn't be that bad for Earth to Venus. However, Earth to Mars or the Moon would suck. Although maybe our grav drive could handle the Earth to Mars one?)
Or you set up some sort of elevator between the two exits and try not to think about what happens if the portal turns off.
2: Simplifying the situation and build the two ends of the portal at equal gravitational potential. Which means no interplanetary portalling, but you could get away with it from the orbit of one planet to another.
3: Maybe the portal isn't a direct spatial gate, but instead some sort of matter transmission across a threshold. In that case you just have to pay the difference in energy. That makes transport in the uphill direction expensive, unless you can bottle the energy coming from downhill transportation efficiently. I doubt we can do it efficiently for quite a while.
If this energy cost can be magically bypassed, then you could drop an object from orbit, it will accelerate due to gravity as it falls and then you can use a portal to return it to orbit without it losing any energy. So basically, you can accelerate it infinitely creating energy from nothing.
That seems highly unlikely to be possible, and have fun with the air flow caused by the pressure differences.
So if energy is conserved, how could that work?
1: Contracted distance instead of zero distance. In which case, your portal appears to be a tunnel with steepness solving the different in potential energy from one side to the other. Object from the higher end can just slide down to the other end of the portal and you try to decelerate them without them smashing. To send things the other way, you have to launch them at the equivalent escape velocity to bridge the two. (Which wouldn't be that bad for Earth to Venus. However, Earth to Mars or the Moon would suck. Although maybe our grav drive could handle the Earth to Mars one?)
Or you set up some sort of elevator between the two exits and try not to think about what happens if the portal turns off.
2: Simplifying the situation and build the two ends of the portal at equal gravitational potential. Which means no interplanetary portalling, but you could get away with it from the orbit of one planet to another.
3: Maybe the portal isn't a direct spatial gate, but instead some sort of matter transmission across a threshold. In that case you just have to pay the difference in energy. That makes transport in the uphill direction expensive, unless you can bottle the energy coming from downhill transportation efficiently. I doubt we can do it efficiently for quite a while.
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
I never expected this to be a quick project mind, and I'm not sure where we'd get the power for the portal to make it work- maybe turbines on both ends to take advantage of all the wind moving atmospheres around would generate? Like I said, it was a very out there question and I didn't expect it to be practical, especially since we don't know anything about the portal tech beyond the fact we have it. More of a thought exorcism to get away from the Steel Talon blame/anti-blame game, which I was partly responsible for.
Just a fun what if.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If portals worked like this they would be unusable because the change in velocity during transfer would rip apart or crush any object. I think more likely is that they "just work" ala Todd Howard and are only limited by what Ithillid wants them to be limited by.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
If portals don't break conservation of gravitational energy, then we're gonna have a problem because we've been talking about them as a way to evacuate colonists to the moon and it's not exactly feasible to railgun them through the portal at several kilometers per second.
If we do have to pay the energy difference, we can only hope that the energy difference is paid by the energy demands of the portal itself, in which case energetically speaking it's no different than a space elevator (electrical energy go in, machinery go brrr, yeeting of stuff into space come out).
Hypothesis One: This actually works. The Scrin being able to construct a perpetual motion machine is far from the most surprising or screwball thing about them, and tiberium already tells us that our conventional understanding of physics is at best an incomplete description of reality in-setting.
Hypothesis Two: This works, but there is no way to make it energetically favorable- maintaining the portals takes more active energy input than you can recover from the stream of rapidly falling matter.
Hypothesis Three: This works, but the 'bottom' portal in your arrangement has to actively do work, which must be supplied to the overall assembly in the form of electrical power input to the portal generating machinery.
If you're right about how to make this work, it would be relatively simple to construct an "elevator car" arrangement in which objects are hoisted up the 'uphill' path by a counterweight. You move a two-ton tram car loaded with people through a portal from the Earth to the Moon by correspondingly allowing a two-ton tram car loaded with rocks to pass through a corresponding portal from the Moon to the Earth.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Lol, so you mean yeeting a persons weight in lunar dirt down to Earth while beaming one person up?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I mean, it works for moving people in elevator cars up and down a building; the car's weight is at least partially counterweighted.
I'm not saying it's great, but if you have to move people through stable portals AND supply the gravitational potential energy somehow, it's worth considering.
- Location
- Wall Gazing
Its a very precise and sophisticated rock.
- Location
- Raleigh, NC
- Location
- Mobile, Alabama
A lever will probably be involved.