Next thing you know you'll be saying we should explore the Zone of Avoidance or that we can not simply walk into the Mordor region Charon :) Though I wonder how many settlements on objects we named for gods of the underworld might have long internal debates about renaming themselves.
@InquisitorThomas Face your fears and keep your feet on- terra firma. Did you ever visit a place like the Grand canyon .dead man's fall's or devil's canyon.? I bet you wouldn't open an umbrella indoors...lol
Forget visiting "Fear" and "Terror", let's go visit this planet called "Paradise"! It just so happens to have Earth-normal gravity and atmosphere. I'm sure nothing bad could happen there! - some guy in a red shirt, probably
I remember an article in Future magazine circa 1978 called “Fun on Phobos” and it mentioned that the grqvity was so low you could knock a baseball into orbit around mars just by hitting it with a baseball bat. I was completely fascinated by that
We will do some experiments envolving plutonium, we can call it idk like '' the plutonia experiment '' or something and it would revolge around researching teleportation
Watching this was so gratifying because many years ago I've told my wife & others over & over again I _don't_ dream of going to Mars it's *_Phobos_* I'd want to live on because _that's_ where colonization will begin, it's where everything important about Mars will happen! Phobos & Deimos first, _then_ Mars! Most people don't understand that, I don't know why.
An underground base on one of Mars moons would be protected from cosmic radiation. People on the base could remote control teleprecsence machinery on Mars. This way we could avoid putting people on Mars until we have a functional base built there. We cannot directly remote control machinery on Mars due light speed lag but if the operators are nearby, it could work.
NASA did some paper studies on Marian Flybys. They were more interesting and useful than most would assume. The sell was that it was way easier to flyboy with leftover Apollo tech than it was to actually land. A flyby would be close enough to Mars to run r/c rovers in near-real-time, and if you had samples collected by a rover or whatever, you could launch them to be snagged by the flyby pretty easily, and study them almost in-situ for a year on the way back to earth
Deimos would be a great location for a base where people teleoperate machines on Mars itself. Communication lag would be less than a second and it would be line of sight for two and a half days at a time. You might not be able to juggle with such a robot, but you could certainly wield a rock hammer.
Starship had a largely successful flight this morning. Was cool to see every one of those 30-something Raptor engines light. Hot staging worked. They lit the Ship's Raptors. Propellant transfer test was performed during the glide. Didn't quite get the booster engines relit for controlled landing in the Gulf, and they lost the Ship at some point on reentry, but they got some rad footage of plasma buildup as it reentered, and presumably a lot of data. Tim Dodd thinks the hot gas thrusters iced over, preventing being able to get proper entry attitude. If that's all it was, that's an easy fix one way or another. Pretty crazy to think they could've deployed 150 metric tonnes with all that reusability hardware. Probably somewhat over 200 with a fully expendable version. Really feels now like they're going to get that system working. That will come in handy, however we do a Mars mission. That's just a shite-load of mass to orbit, and a whole lot of cargo volume.
Looking forward to this. I do think that these two are an excellent location for a "test run" crewed mission to the Mars area. Landing on these moons instead.
I have a strange question for you Would an object of sufficient size placed in an orbital body's Lagrange Point have its own usable LPs? Do we have a model on how daisy chaining LPs in this manor affect the wider system of this specific orbital body?
There are a possible 6 LP's in Mars orbit, at sixty degree intervals (e.g. L4 and L5 ) with respect to a moon any object between those Lagrange points would be perturbed out of that orbit Note:,,,Saturn's rings will at sometime in the future clump into moons. hope that helps
TY SFIA! I have to congratulate you on your sponsor for this episode. After all, we are living on a big blue marble. Your family seems to enjoy the game a lot. And I will recommend it to my family.
Having gateways and fuel depote is the only true way to develop permanency. In addition to the Aldrin cycler's Italian guarantee of future of going not only to Mars but to all stops and between. We really do need infrastructure to try to do this, including orbital tethers and rotonators.
Mr. Jason , This video puts much emphasis on the possibility of storing stable rocket propellants off-planet . The optimum fuel would appear to be Hydrazinidium , while the best oxidizer would be HydroPentoxide .These freeze at 32°F., essentially the same as water , and should be reasonably safe to handle in their frozen form . 🤓
That was a cool vid, watched it a few days ago on Nebula. The point about the moons eventually crashing on Mars is an excellent one. They are doomed, might as well.make use of them. The shielding from micrometeorites and rads was also a nice additionnal argument for why they make a good choice for a site to support our eventual space expansion.
They're doomed in the same way Earth is doomed. A long time in the future, and only if we don't do anything about it. Ok, ok, still doomed. But much, much further into the future.
Issac, I love the idea of multiple robotic refueling/mining depots staged throughout the solar system! I still want to go to Mars, but there's no reason we can't send unmanned Starships to various points to get things started before we actually land in 6 years. 😀 The whole process reminds me of that great book series, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Some of it didn't get the science right, but there's still so much they did get right, and he took the time to explore the humanitarian and cultural issues as well. Thanks for a great post!
I think they will eventually become prime real estate after they perfect micro black holes. I could see them becoming the wealthiest cities on the Martian colony, reserved for Ceo's of terraforming and space transport companies and the like.
Very good episode and timely release just after starship's IFT-3. I will bug you again with requesting an episode on colonizing Uranus and Saturn. They are great candidates for balloon worlds,which presumably should be easier than shellworlds with orbital rings. And on Uranus you have most of the mass for that effort on the planet and having "just" to carry the top layer of rocks from Miranda or Ariel.
Great video as usual, Isaac! Way back in 1984 NASA conducted a proposal called the Phobos and Deimos (PH-D) project, which would have sent six to eight astronauts to Deimos where they would have operated multiple robotic rovers on the surface of Mars. Options would have included a brief two-person sortie to the Martian surface. The authors stated that it would be so much easier to land on Deimos than on Mars. In addition, since the signal delay from Deimos to Mars was negligible it would allow the crew to teleoperate the spacecraft on the Martian surface. Also, JAXA is planning to launch their MMX to Phobos in 2026. 🤞 That mission should (hopefully!) answer many of the questions you raised.
3:05 ooooh I wish this was written on the video as you were saying it lol comparing fractions with different denominators is very easy visually, but extremely difficult orally, even if you rewind 2 or 3 times. (7.5/10 is 75/100 in my head. Decimals of fractions aren't harnessing the abstraction if its a fraction of a fraction, so it's a different denominator at best or a dimension more expensive at worst imho)
I appreciate you addressing the mass to production issue! I do still question the usefulness of sheer mass vs the actual material you’d theoretically need to be producing, nor the materials to make the facilities.. I still question feasibility not possibility.. I can’t imagine the resources needed to produce operate and install a Dyson swarm or otherwise need to process the sheer volume of moons or asteroids even can’t be put to more direct practical use..🤷🏻♂️ or would not be made obsolete by the very discovery process that allows it to be possible
I noticed a possible error around 14:21. The audio says "A non-rotating skyhook hung down from Deimos" while the subtitles say "hung down from Phobos" instead. The rest of the surrounding lines are talking about Phobos too, so which moon is the skyhook hung down from?
12:55 I listened to this section three times. Once the first, once so I could tell the people around me that “Redundancy and backups are important. This message brought to you by Chief Miles O’Brien and the Department of Redundancy Department, which would like to remind you that redundancies and backups are important”, and once to find the timestamp and leave this comment.
As for water ice on Mars, we do know for certain now that there's really a huge amount of it in the mid latitudes. Massive ice, not disseminated crystals. Pretty clearly shallow, too -- unlike lower latitude deposits.
Sorry, Isaac, I'm still extremely fond of stationary orbital towers. Deimos will be slowed into a synchronous orbit first, to provide an anchor for a tower. Phobos will be boosted into another synchronous orbit, 120 degrees away. Not 180 degrees? No. An asteroid will eventually be moved into the third position and renamed Eris or Discordia after the third child of Mars, the demigoddess of confusion. I believe there are already asteroids with those names, and the asteroid we use will have a name of its own, but the names will be shuffled (possibly swapped), because how could they not be? As regards the Department of Redundancy Bureau, I would like to pass on the wisdom of my brother when our father asked him at the age of nine or ten whether redundancy was a good thing. He replied, "I guess it's okay, if you don't drive it into the ground."
Idk about discordia, but eris is the name of a dwarf planet! Eris is larger than Pluto, and its discovery is part of why Pluto is no longer considered to be a major planet!
There currently isn't an asteroid named Discordia, and I explained in my other reply why Eris is not an available name. The asteroid that would be renamed Discordia should be larger than Phobos to fit the pattern! I really hope that life extension technology is created within my lifetime so that I can participate in our wild future! I hope you and every other person in this comment section live to see this kinda stuff!!! ❤❤❤
@@moltendiamonds1567 Actually, I have reconsidered my thoughts. After Deimos is moved into a synchronous orbit, Phobos should be moved into a Solar orbit so it can become the first Aldrin cycler, orbiting between Mars and Earth, serving to transport people and supplies/manufactured goods/raw materials between Mars and Earth.
If you're up for episode suggestions. I'd love to hear one on giving Earth rings. Either in a "what natural phenomenon could give Earth rings" or "how much orbital infrastructure/what kind of orbital infrastructure could give Earth rings?"
This episode reminds me of reading "Red Planet Rising", a Sci-Fi novel published in the 1990s and set on Mars in the mid-22nd Century. Phobos and Deimos were only mentioned in passing, but Phobos was described as being the main military base for Mars, housing its fleet.
Honestly when it comes to colonizing the solor system I think building habitats around jupitor while mining its planets and moons will likely be the first finacially viable colony. Fuel from jupitor, water, metals, and other materials from the moons, with zero g factories that double as habitats makes the most sense when it comes to an actual industrilized space colony.
@@mpetersen6water in raidators or inflatable housing on the outside of the habitats would do it, and considering some of jupiters moons, particularly europa, it would not be difficult to find the water needed.
@@calebfielding6352 A number of years ago Scientific American had a series of articles on building a lunar base, possible space weapons etc. Yah, the days of print media. One idea for radiation protection involved electrical fields. Any space faring society that could venture into the outer Solar System (outside of Mars orbit) on a regular basis would have technologies we can speculate on. But far beyond yours today. One technology would be reliable and lightweight fusion reactors. One advantage a reactor in a vacuum would have is not having to establish the needed vacuum in the first place. Additionally to lightweight fusion reactors their propulsion systems would probably wring every thing possible in terms of delta vee out of every gram of propellant. They'd have to in order to get trip times down to acceptable travel times. The power sources needed to power these propulsion systems would be able to power any number of technologies that could be used to at least partially control the incoming radiation. Habitats located on any of the Jovian moons (1) would have plenty of mass available to provide radiation protection. But intentionally dragging around large amounts of extra mass when technology can do a better job it stupid IMO. 1) Just what is an acceptable trip time Earth or Mars to the Jovian Subsystem. Weeks? Months? Years? It would be rare for planetary alignments to allow for the minimum possible time for the delta vees that would be needed. Plus any space craft capable of reaching delta vees that get the travel times down to acceptable lengths is automatically a destructive weapons system. 2) Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Io is likely too tough a nut to handle.
Again I had to seek this video out just to find it as YT refuses to place it in my recommended. Such a shame. YT sucks. Oh well, I know your schedule so no big deal for me but might become a problem for crossing that 1M threshold.
Isaac, you have some beautiful children, my friend. As for the video, always fascinating. Sounds like we need to land some rovers on Phobos and Deimos and determine exactly what's what.
I love channels like yours looking to such a promising future when we can't even stop arguing over imingary lines on paper that separates our world. It's scary to think how a boarder can cause such hatred and dispise for nothing more then the location on one tiny marble in the solar system. It's nice to sit back and think of a cooperation of humanity that reaches to new heights like our grandfather's dreamed of
A space elevator is a likely neded step in space development. It's not nearly the capacity of a system of orbital rings, but also nothing like as expensive to build, and the materials you need to develop for it are going to be very useful for many applications, including orbital rings. (The circular rings are subject to only local forces so they don't need super-strong materials, but if you want eccentric ones to bridge between the circular ones, you do need super-strong materials because they will be subject to forces from other parts of the ring.)
I keep thinking of Asimov's essay on Mars settlements where he warns we should study the early history of Jamestown carefully. Hopefully things go better so planning ahead is going to be ideal.
I know you tend to go for the far future and ultra-sci-fi stuff. But can you make a video about the changes in the next few years with the coming of android butlers, pet robodogs, actually smart gadgets and so on?
Deimos has such low gravity that you could jump off of it if standing on the long axis. Phobos is not much better. Any attempt at walking (or driving) on either will result in a massive leap (bounce) with uncontrolled tumbling before eventually settling to the ground.
I think we should melt down the "moons" of Mars and turn them into an orbital ring. Use the ring to give Mars a magnetosphere and as a space docking station. Then lower some skyhooks down into Mars.
Just want to mention how wonderful it is seeing you with your children. As a old viewer of SFIA, I still remember when long time ago you mentioned the idea very carefully in passing. Years later, lo and behold, you are a father! Congratz again, Arthur!
Thanks, on the one hand it seems like it took forever to make happen, and it was a long time in progress, though worth it, , yet I suppose in many ways it is a very recent think in a 43 year lifetime.
One word describes why this is a bad idea.....DOOM. just kidding I feel like there will be resource gathering facilities for orbital shipyards up there one day
Good to finally see someone promoting Mars moons for fuel production. If Zubrin had proposed going direct to the moons instead of direct to the the surface, we might have done it by now. But now unfortunately we'll probably never bother, as AI will soon be good enough to do the initial base, and by the time humans might go to that base, the robots will be good enough to do anything humans could do there.
What about sending up your reaction mass as all water, electrolyzing it on demand with PV cells or an RTG, and recombining it at the nozzle? Does that make Tsiolkovsky's numbers work better? I figure you can just enclose the ice in a thin balloon rather than LOX and H2 in cryo tanks, saving heaps of weight. You could inflate smaller balloons with ready-to-use pre-split oxygen and hydrogen for when you need to prep for a long duration burn that PV electrolysis can't keep up with, like when trying to use the Oberth effect at periapsis. Given the savings in cryo tank weight, you'd be in pocket even if some leaks out. Or you could have smaller cryo tanks to store on-demand fuel. It would be nice if we could redirect a comet to hang out in cislunar space and start mining it and doing large-scale feasibility studies in situ. I read something like this in SevenEves by Neil Stephenson, except they used a nuclear reactor to simply vaporize the ice into steam and used about 90% of the mass of a huge comet to redirect it and capture burn once it encountered Earth's SOI, using swarmbots to dynamically reshape the ice into a nozzle. Super inefficient but at the time the fate of humanity depended on getting a large amount of water ice into a place where it could realistically be retrieved. Bonus, you could use the water ice as shielding from high energy photons and subatomic particles, and it would be pretty easy to repair minor ablations with just a few bots with an augur and trowel and reaction control system or harpoons.
Isaac, I always appreciate the credit as LITE / Ian Long in the credits but I changed my channel name to Anthrofuturism a few years ago. Just Ian Long is fine enough though.
If I'm not mistaken, Phobos and Deimos were not the names of Ares' horses, they were the names of his sons. Although, there are so many versions of greek mythology floating around that one can't really be definitive about these things.
I have long pictured Deimos with a pair of O'Neill cylinders dug underground, being used as an Aldrin Cycler, traveling between Earth and Mars. It could simultaneously be constructed, while moving stuff between planets.
No, we will move Deimos and Phobos into synchronous orbits, eventually to be joined by a third moon, an asteroid renamed Eris after Mars's daughter, the goddess of disorder. All three will serve as the anchors for orbital towers which will carry traffic to and from the surface.
@@arcadiaberger9204 Do you really need three anchors, or is it only just to introduce the Daughter of Mars to the mix? You could always fetch another asteroid for an Aldrin Cycler I guess, but Deimos is already there, and its a good size for the job.
@@martythemartian99 Well, we have to slow Phobos to a synchronous orbit, and boost Deimos so it won't be constantly endangering the tower. I figured we should turn it into a second synchronous anchor, and since we had two, clearly we should have three so we'd have mmore complete coverage of the planet, yadda yadda.... But we really only need one (Earth probably only needs one, except for needing a second one as a backup), so yes, it makes more sense to boost Deimos all the way out of Mars' gravity well and use it as an Aldrin cycler. Deimos being a former moon of Mars will give it something of a cachet as it approaches Earth and then Mars on its route back and forth. I like it.
In the future l would expect that Phobus or Diemos will function as the Port of Entry and as a refueling and or a replenishment point for traftic between Earth and Mars. Just as l expect certain asteriods to become vital at some point in the future.
Getting stuck in an oxygen refinery on Phobos would be a very dreary assignment indeed. You would look on the dull, dead surface of Mars with envious eyes. Of course, having pleasant companions would ease the burden, but deep space mining companies are notorious for their cheapness and poor working conditions (remember the Nostromo). It would be a sh*t detail without even the comfort of any real gravity.
Something confuses me about the black hole in the center of planets to give them gravity. We often see futurists talk about Dyson spheres (the sphere not swarm) revolving around being unrealistic because a sphere surrounding a mass is unstable. So why then would a rocky body surrounding a black hole work just fine? Am I missing something? It seems inconsistent.
Hmm, a thought. A large sunshade, mirror, and/or magnetic deflector could very well serve a dual purpose and collect helium and hydrogen from solar wind
Captain: This is transit ship A3-44 incoming at 200 m/s relative velocity requesting harpoon catch in 10 minutes. Over. Phobis Base: A3-44 our harpoon officer is on his day off. No harpoons today. Over. Captain: If we dont get a harpoon, our next stop is Alpha Centauri in 200,000 years. Over. Phobos Base: Should we notify family? Captain: Yes, yours too. We will change course to land at Phobos Base directly at 200 m/s. Over. Phobos Base: Deputy harpoon officer is luckily on site and ready for harpooning...
Great video amd timing I was ready to discount these guys are being little better then captured astroids for my Risk like micro solar system table top game... But yeah given their location I'll have to give these guys the gas gaint big moon treatment of getting a single developed terror as apposed to the few Earth's moon gets and the miner fleets or the asteroid belt.
A topic that I find interesting would be how our society could Deal with the Problem If encryption technology is not able to Combat new decryption Tools and the Data Security of the Computers cannot be guaranteed in the Long Term?
might be better to bring a asteroid over even if the asteroid is 75 miles or 100 miles in diamater would be bigger then P&B moons and probably just as easy then building all them other structure on the moons
Commenting on this before finishing because I'll forget later, but does it truly matter if the moons have ice already? By the time we set anything major up, surely we would be capable of catching a comet and politely asking it to chill out on Phobos?
I don’t know Issac, I feel like settling the moons named “Fear” and “Terror” is just asking for trouble. I don’t want to get Franklin Expeditioned.
Next thing you know you'll be saying we should explore the Zone of Avoidance or that we can not simply walk into the Mordor region Charon :) Though I wonder how many settlements on objects we named for gods of the underworld might have long internal debates about renaming themselves.
Hey, that was lead solder on tincans that made them bonkers first...
@InquisitorThomas
Face your fears and keep your feet on- terra firma. Did you ever visit a place like the Grand canyon .dead man's fall's or devil's canyon.? I bet you wouldn't open an umbrella indoors...lol
@@keithsweet8840you know that was a joke right?
Forget visiting "Fear" and "Terror", let's go visit this planet called "Paradise"! It just so happens to have Earth-normal gravity and atmosphere. I'm sure nothing bad could happen there! - some guy in a red shirt, probably
I remember an article in Future magazine circa 1978 called “Fun on Phobos” and it mentioned that the grqvity was so low you could knock a baseball into orbit around mars just by hitting it with a baseball bat. I was completely fascinated by that
Rather remarkable how forgotten the Martian moons are in sci-fi and futurism discussions.
Informative as always, Isaac.
And not a single reference to DOOM?🤣
I propose that the first Phobos base should be codenamed E1M1
I second this.
@post_singularity
Doom reference.
@post_singularityBecause Doom is a legendary game, and the first map (Episode 1, Map 1) is situated on Phobos.
I was wondering when the Doom jokes would start 😊
@@wk8219 I wasn't even the first. @kyles8587 beat me to it with a UAC joke.
"As long as nothing supernatural happens, this should be easy..."
🤟😈
th-cam.com/video/BY1PX-peFJ8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=sa3wNB_jYn5jimbX
😳
We will do some experiments envolving plutonium, we can call it idk like '' the plutonia experiment '' or something and it would revolge around researching teleportation
Watching this was so gratifying because many years ago I've told my wife & others over & over again I _don't_ dream of going to Mars it's *_Phobos_* I'd want to live on because _that's_ where colonization will begin, it's where everything important about Mars will happen! Phobos & Deimos first, _then_ Mars! Most people don't understand that, I don't know why.
An underground base on one of Mars moons would be protected from cosmic radiation. People on the base could remote control teleprecsence machinery on Mars. This way we could avoid putting people on Mars until we have a functional base built there. We cannot directly remote control machinery on Mars due light speed lag but if the operators are nearby, it could work.
NASA did some paper studies on Marian Flybys. They were more interesting and useful than most would assume. The sell was that it was way easier to flyboy with leftover Apollo tech than it was to actually land. A flyby would be close enough to Mars to run r/c rovers in near-real-time, and if you had samples collected by a rover or whatever, you could launch them to be snagged by the flyby pretty easily, and study them almost in-situ for a year on the way back to earth
Deimos would be a great location for a base where people teleoperate machines on Mars itself. Communication lag would be less than a second and it would be line of sight for two and a half days at a time. You might not be able to juggle with such a robot, but you could certainly wield a rock hammer.
We should also use plutonium for the teleportation experiments, we can call it the Plutonia experiment.
Thank God it's Arthursday!
can you make a video that's like "how an isaac arthur video is made" ?
I instantly remembered Unreal Tournament map "Phobos." Good times, just like watching SFIA. Good times.
There is nothing more satisfying than watching the redeemer chase a group of some poor suckers around a map 😂
@@TheLastStarfighter77 you're not wrong, but a close second is the flakk cannon point blank. Cheers!
ULTRA-KILL!!!!
Starship had a largely successful flight this morning. Was cool to see every one of those 30-something Raptor engines light. Hot staging worked. They lit the Ship's Raptors. Propellant transfer test was performed during the glide.
Didn't quite get the booster engines relit for controlled landing in the Gulf, and they lost the Ship at some point on reentry, but they got some rad footage of plasma buildup as it reentered, and presumably a lot of data. Tim Dodd thinks the hot gas thrusters iced over, preventing being able to get proper entry attitude. If that's all it was, that's an easy fix one way or another.
Pretty crazy to think they could've deployed 150 metric tonnes with all that reusability hardware. Probably somewhat over 200 with a fully expendable version.
Really feels now like they're going to get that system working. That will come in handy, however we do a Mars mission. That's just a shite-load of mass to orbit, and a whole lot of cargo volume.
Starship launch, pi day, Isaac Arthur uploads a video and it is Albert Einstein’s birthday today!! Wow this is a great day!!!
No, more school shootings in USA are needed
Why didn’t I get notified of this upload?? Yes yes, let’s gooo
"Department of Redundancy Department" .... HAHAHAHAHA
I prefer "Department of Redundancy Bureau", which I heave heard elsewhere.
Either one is acceptably appropriate and enjoyably amusing.
@@arcadiaberger9204 HAAHAHA
DOGE
Looking forward to this. I do think that these two are an excellent location for a "test run" crewed mission to the Mars area. Landing on these moons instead.
As long as the Union Aerospace Corp doesn't do anything shady we should be alright
Greek here and I love your show. Phobos and Deimos were Ares' sons not his horses. You are confusing him with Odin and his horses.
Sounds similar to how many people confuse the Kraken as part of Greek mythology when, in reality, it is part of Norse mythology.
@@jacobv3396yeah no large squids here.
@@konst80hum wouldnt that be leviathan? Or is that latin?
@@mrlakkie1612 Sorry Leviathan is definitively biblical.
Love the graphics !
I have a strange question for you
Would an object of sufficient size placed in an orbital body's Lagrange Point have its own usable LPs? Do we have a model on how daisy chaining LPs in this manor affect the wider system of this specific orbital body?
Great question. Following.
There are a possible 6 LP's in Mars orbit, at sixty degree intervals (e.g. L4 and L5 ) with respect to a moon
any object between those Lagrange points would be perturbed out of that orbit
Note:,,,Saturn's rings will at sometime in the future clump into moons.
hope that helps
Aw yissss , snow day for the kiddo, I’m off , new Isaac Arthur video & warm breakfast while I look outside at the snow n watch space shows
Taking a break to watch the starship launch, ill finish the episode after
very cool episode cheers from Toronto i love listening to your channel while i work at a factory assembling castors and wheels.
Ill get my snack! Thanks for making the vids!
TY SFIA! I have to congratulate you on your sponsor for this episode.
After all, we are living on a big blue marble. Your family seems to enjoy the game a lot. And I will recommend it to my family.
Having gateways and fuel depote is the only true way to develop permanency. In addition to the Aldrin cycler's Italian guarantee of future of going not only to Mars but to all stops and between. We really do need infrastructure to try to do this, including orbital tethers and rotonators.
Mr. Jason ,
This video puts much emphasis on the possibility of storing stable rocket propellants off-planet .
The optimum fuel would appear to be Hydrazinidium , while the best oxidizer would be HydroPentoxide
.These freeze at 32°F., essentially the same as water , and should be reasonably safe to handle in their frozen form . 🤓
The Myles O’Brien redundancy department thing had me going! Lol
That was a cool vid, watched it a few days ago on Nebula.
The point about the moons eventually crashing on Mars is an excellent one. They are doomed, might as well.make use of them.
The shielding from micrometeorites and rads was also a nice additionnal argument for why they make a good choice for a site to support our eventual space expansion.
They're doomed in the same way Earth is doomed. A long time in the future, and only if we don't do anything about it.
Ok, ok, still doomed. But much, much further into the future.
Issac, I love the idea of multiple robotic refueling/mining depots staged throughout the solar system! I still want to go to Mars, but there's no reason we can't send unmanned Starships to various points to get things started before we actually land in 6 years. 😀 The whole process reminds me of that great book series, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Some of it didn't get the science right, but there's still so much they did get right, and he took the time to explore the humanitarian and cultural issues as well. Thanks for a great post!
Im guessing we'll see a "Mars-to-orbit" system as a concept test of a in-situ fuel process.
I think they will eventually become prime real estate after they perfect micro black holes. I could see them becoming the wealthiest cities on the Martian colony, reserved for Ceo's of terraforming and space transport companies and the like.
Isaac Arthur for president of earth
Why settle for Earth? Issac Arthur for President of the Sol system!
Issac Arthur for god emperor
Lets start small, CEO of Mars corp
This episode, while smaller than your usual offerings was still content packed 💯🚀
Very good episode and timely release just after starship's IFT-3.
I will bug you again with requesting an episode on colonizing Uranus and Saturn. They are great candidates for balloon worlds,which presumably should be easier than shellworlds with orbital rings. And on Uranus you have most of the mass for that effort on the planet and having "just" to carry the top layer of rocks from Miranda or Ariel.
Great video as usual, Isaac! Way back in 1984 NASA conducted a proposal called the Phobos and Deimos (PH-D) project, which would have sent six to eight astronauts to Deimos where they would have operated multiple robotic rovers on the surface of Mars. Options would have included a brief two-person sortie to the Martian surface. The authors stated that it would be so much easier to land on Deimos than on Mars. In addition, since the signal delay from Deimos to Mars was negligible it would allow the crew to teleoperate the spacecraft on the Martian surface.
Also, JAXA is planning to launch their MMX to Phobos in 2026. 🤞 That mission should (hopefully!) answer many of the questions you raised.
Hi, my name is Rob Robertson and I'm the Managing Manager of the Department of Redundancy Department and I love my Job so I do it twice
Love Danny, such a great musician, and so nice and humble.
3:05 ooooh I wish this was written on the video as you were saying it lol comparing fractions with different denominators is very easy visually, but extremely difficult orally, even if you rewind 2 or 3 times.
(7.5/10 is 75/100 in my head. Decimals of fractions aren't harnessing the abstraction if its a fraction of a fraction, so it's a different denominator at best or a dimension more expensive at worst imho)
Please do videos for the Galilean moons as well! It's been a while since you visited them last! Btw love your content!
Colonizing Ganymede comes out in a little over a month ;)
@@isaacarthurSFIA Good Stuff!
"So Issac, how would we land on mars?"
"That's the fun part, you don't"
You can't just land on the surface of mars
@
One does not simply land in the surface of mars
Hell yeah I've been waiting for this Phobos episode since you mentioned it in one of my comments.
I appreciate you addressing the mass to production issue! I do still question the usefulness of sheer mass vs the actual material you’d theoretically need to be producing, nor the materials to make the facilities..
I still question feasibility not possibility.. I can’t imagine the resources needed to produce operate and install a Dyson swarm or otherwise need to process the sheer volume of moons or asteroids even can’t be put to more direct practical use..🤷🏻♂️ or would not be made obsolete by the very discovery process that allows it to be possible
I noticed a possible error around 14:21. The audio says "A non-rotating skyhook hung down from Deimos" while the subtitles say "hung down from Phobos" instead. The rest of the surrounding lines are talking about Phobos too, so which moon is the skyhook hung down from?
12:55 I listened to this section three times. Once the first, once so I could tell the people around me that “Redundancy and backups are important. This message brought to you by Chief Miles O’Brien and the Department of Redundancy Department, which would like to remind you that redundancies and backups are important”, and once to find the timestamp and leave this comment.
As for water ice on Mars, we do know for certain now that there's really a huge amount of it in the mid latitudes. Massive ice, not disseminated crystals. Pretty clearly shallow, too -- unlike lower latitude deposits.
Sorry, Isaac, I'm still extremely fond of stationary orbital towers.
Deimos will be slowed into a synchronous orbit first, to provide an anchor for a tower.
Phobos will be boosted into another synchronous orbit, 120 degrees away.
Not 180 degrees? No. An asteroid will eventually be moved into the third position and renamed Eris or Discordia after the third child of Mars, the demigoddess of confusion. I believe there are already asteroids with those names, and the asteroid we use will have a name of its own, but the names will be shuffled (possibly swapped), because how could they not be?
As regards the Department of Redundancy Bureau, I would like to pass on the wisdom of my brother when our father asked him at the age of nine or ten whether redundancy was a good thing. He replied, "I guess it's okay, if you don't drive it into the ground."
Idk about discordia, but eris is the name of a dwarf planet! Eris is larger than Pluto, and its discovery is part of why Pluto is no longer considered to be a major planet!
There currently isn't an asteroid named Discordia, and I explained in my other reply why Eris is not an available name. The asteroid that would be renamed Discordia should be larger than Phobos to fit the pattern! I really hope that life extension technology is created within my lifetime so that I can participate in our wild future! I hope you and every other person in this comment section live to see this kinda stuff!!! ❤❤❤
@@moltendiamonds1567 Actually, I have reconsidered my thoughts.
After Deimos is moved into a synchronous orbit, Phobos should be moved into a Solar orbit so it can become the first Aldrin cycler, orbiting between Mars and Earth, serving to transport people and supplies/manufactured goods/raw materials between Mars and Earth.
@@arcadiaberger9204 interesting!
i can picture how people cause accidents and build an entire horror mythos arround thr moons just cause human things
If you're up for episode suggestions. I'd love to hear one on giving Earth rings. Either in a "what natural phenomenon could give Earth rings" or "how much orbital infrastructure/what kind of orbital infrastructure could give Earth rings?"
I've played enough Doom to know I don't want to go anywhere near Phobos and Deimos.
Not even if you had a plasma rifle?
@@Metallic-Sun You have to be on the shores of hell to get it, so hardly optimal.
Finally get to listen. Happy Arthursday
Such wonderful science fiction.
6:21. Is there a figure in the rocket. 🤔
This episode reminds me of reading "Red Planet Rising", a Sci-Fi novel published in the 1990s and set on Mars in the mid-22nd Century. Phobos and Deimos were only mentioned in passing, but Phobos was described as being the main military base for Mars, housing its fleet.
Honestly when it comes to colonizing the solor system I think building habitats around jupitor while mining its planets and moons will likely be the first finacially viable colony. Fuel from jupitor, water, metals, and other materials from the moons, with zero g factories that double as habitats makes the most sense when it comes to an actual industrilized space colony.
After finding a way to deal with radiation levels around Jupiter.
@@mpetersen6water in raidators or inflatable housing on the outside of the habitats would do it, and considering some of jupiters moons, particularly europa, it would not be difficult to find the water needed.
@@calebfielding6352
A number of years ago Scientific American had a series of articles on building a lunar base, possible space weapons etc. Yah, the days of print media. One idea for radiation protection involved electrical fields. Any space faring society that could venture into the outer Solar System (outside of Mars orbit) on a regular basis would have technologies we can speculate on. But far beyond yours today. One technology would be reliable and lightweight fusion reactors. One advantage a reactor in a vacuum would have is not having to establish the needed vacuum in the first place. Additionally to lightweight fusion reactors their propulsion systems would probably wring every thing possible in terms of delta vee out of every gram of propellant. They'd have to in order to get trip times down to acceptable travel times.
The power sources needed to power these propulsion systems would be able to power any number of technologies that could be used to at least partially control the incoming radiation. Habitats located on any of the Jovian moons (1) would have plenty of mass available to provide radiation protection. But intentionally dragging around large amounts of extra mass when technology can do a better job it stupid IMO.
1) Just what is an acceptable trip time Earth or Mars to the Jovian Subsystem. Weeks? Months? Years? It would be rare for planetary alignments to allow for the minimum possible time for the delta vees that would be needed. Plus any space craft capable of reaching delta vees that get the travel times down to acceptable lengths is automatically a destructive weapons system.
2) Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Io is likely too tough a nut to handle.
9:35 when did Frank Borman die
Phobos and Deimos would allow for Launches with Cargobikes
Love your videos
Again I had to seek this video out just to find it as YT refuses to place it in my recommended. Such a shame. YT sucks. Oh well, I know your schedule so no big deal for me but might become a problem for crossing that 1M threshold.
Isaac, you have some beautiful children, my friend.
As for the video, always fascinating. Sounds like we need to land some rovers on Phobos and Deimos and determine exactly what's what.
I love channels like yours looking to such a promising future when we can't even stop arguing over imingary lines on paper that separates our world. It's scary to think how a boarder can cause such hatred and dispise for nothing more then the location on one tiny marble in the solar system. It's nice to sit back and think of a cooperation of humanity that reaches to new heights like our grandfather's dreamed of
Yes, in years to come, we will argue over imaginary lines drawn in the void.
Oh, well...a change is as good as a rest.
A space elevator is a likely neded step in space development. It's not nearly the capacity of a system of orbital rings, but also nothing like as expensive to build, and the materials you need to develop for it are going to be very useful for many applications, including orbital rings. (The circular rings are subject to only local forces so they don't need super-strong materials, but if you want eccentric ones to bridge between the circular ones, you do need super-strong materials because they will be subject to forces from other parts of the ring.)
[Doom music intensifies]
[puts on E2M1 music with Gravis Ultrasound patches]
"Dept. of Redundancy Dept. " That was awesome.
Do the aluminum foil thing. Keep Earth fresh.
I keep thinking of Asimov's essay on Mars settlements where he warns we should study the early history of Jamestown carefully. Hopefully things go better so planning ahead is going to be ideal.
I know you tend to go for the far future and ultra-sci-fi stuff. But can you make a video about the changes in the next few years with the coming of android butlers, pet robodogs, actually smart gadgets and so on?
Deimos has such low gravity that you could jump off of it if standing on the long axis. Phobos is not much better. Any attempt at walking (or driving) on either will result in a massive leap (bounce) with uncontrolled tumbling before eventually settling to the ground.
Well, IFT-3 was a real success, and what I've seen so far bodes well for IFT-4 to happen fairly soon. Step by step, inch by inch...
I think we should melt down the "moons" of Mars and turn them into an orbital ring.
Use the ring to give Mars a magnetosphere and as a space docking station.
Then lower some skyhooks down into Mars.
Just want to mention how wonderful it is seeing you with your children.
As a old viewer of SFIA, I still remember when long time ago you mentioned the idea very carefully in passing. Years later, lo and behold, you are a father!
Congratz again, Arthur!
Thanks, on the one hand it seems like it took forever to make happen, and it was a long time in progress, though worth it, , yet I suppose in many ways it is a very recent think in a 43 year lifetime.
Love redundancy
there is a game called Dyson Sphere that may be up you ally. You are part of the reason I'm so hooked on it
One word describes why this is a bad idea.....DOOM. just kidding I feel like there will be resource gathering facilities for orbital shipyards up there one day
Good to finally see someone promoting Mars moons for fuel production. If Zubrin had proposed going direct to the moons instead of direct to the the surface, we might have done it by now. But now unfortunately we'll probably never bother, as AI will soon be good enough to do the initial base, and by the time humans might go to that base, the robots will be good enough to do anything humans could do there.
What about sending up your reaction mass as all water, electrolyzing it on demand with PV cells or an RTG, and recombining it at the nozzle? Does that make Tsiolkovsky's numbers work better? I figure you can just enclose the ice in a thin balloon rather than LOX and H2 in cryo tanks, saving heaps of weight. You could inflate smaller balloons with ready-to-use pre-split oxygen and hydrogen for when you need to prep for a long duration burn that PV electrolysis can't keep up with, like when trying to use the Oberth effect at periapsis. Given the savings in cryo tank weight, you'd be in pocket even if some leaks out. Or you could have smaller cryo tanks to store on-demand fuel.
It would be nice if we could redirect a comet to hang out in cislunar space and start mining it and doing large-scale feasibility studies in situ. I read something like this in SevenEves by Neil Stephenson, except they used a nuclear reactor to simply vaporize the ice into steam and used about 90% of the mass of a huge comet to redirect it and capture burn once it encountered Earth's SOI, using swarmbots to dynamically reshape the ice into a nozzle. Super inefficient but at the time the fate of humanity depended on getting a large amount of water ice into a place where it could realistically be retrieved.
Bonus, you could use the water ice as shielding from high energy photons and subatomic particles, and it would be pretty easy to repair minor ablations with just a few bots with an augur and trowel and reaction control system or harpoons.
Isaac, I always appreciate the credit as LITE / Ian Long in the credits but I changed my channel name to Anthrofuturism a few years ago. Just Ian Long is fine enough though.
Sorry, I'll switch to that going forward :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA thank you no worries!
If I'm not mistaken, Phobos and Deimos were not the names of Ares' horses, they were the names of his sons. Although, there are so many versions of greek mythology floating around that one can't really be definitive about these things.
Done correctly you might not need to farm potatoes with your own poop after getting left behind.
" There's a star man.... Waiting in the sky..."
I have long pictured Deimos with a pair of O'Neill cylinders dug underground, being used as an Aldrin Cycler, traveling between Earth and Mars.
It could simultaneously be constructed, while moving stuff between planets.
No, we will move Deimos and Phobos into synchronous orbits, eventually to be joined by a third moon, an asteroid renamed Eris after Mars's daughter, the goddess of disorder.
All three will serve as the anchors for orbital towers which will carry traffic to and from the surface.
@@arcadiaberger9204 Do you really need three anchors, or is it only just to introduce the Daughter of Mars to the mix?
You could always fetch another asteroid for an Aldrin Cycler I guess, but Deimos is already there, and its a good size for the job.
@@martythemartian99 Well, we have to slow Phobos to a synchronous orbit, and boost Deimos so it won't be constantly endangering the tower. I figured we should turn it into a second synchronous anchor, and since we had two, clearly we should have three so we'd have mmore complete coverage of the planet, yadda yadda....
But we really only need one (Earth probably only needs one, except for needing a second one as a backup), so yes, it makes more sense to boost Deimos all the way out of Mars' gravity well and use it as an Aldrin cycler.
Deimos being a former moon of Mars will give it something of a cachet as it approaches Earth and then Mars on its route back and forth.
I like it.
@@arcadiaberger9204 All we need to do now, is raise the money. 😁
In the future l would expect that Phobus or Diemos will function as the Port of Entry and as a refueling and or a replenishment point for traftic between Earth and Mars. Just as l expect certain asteriods to become vital at some point in the future.
Getting stuck in an oxygen refinery on Phobos would be a very dreary assignment indeed. You would look on the dull, dead surface of Mars with envious eyes. Of course, having pleasant companions would ease the burden, but deep space mining companies are notorious for their cheapness and poor working conditions (remember the Nostromo). It would be a sh*t detail without even the comfort of any real gravity.
Micro gravity would be a pain, put the controls on Mars
@@duanebouchard8736Of course the place would be automated but that's not as good a story.
Didn't we have a whole game series on why we shouldn't do this? :) (Hehehe, fr though, great video as always!)
I think Deimos should be mined in its entirety since it’s so small in the Martian sky that anyone who might live on mars wouldn’t lose much in the sky
Something confuses me about the black hole in the center of planets to give them gravity. We often see futurists talk about Dyson spheres (the sphere not swarm) revolving around being unrealistic because a sphere surrounding a mass is unstable. So why then would a rocky body surrounding a black hole work just fine? Am I missing something? It seems inconsistent.
Niven and Pournelle wrote stories about micro black holes
and at the back of the book often wrote about the science involved
@@duanebouchard8736that doesn't seem to address my question.
If we ever put a rotating sky hook on Phobos, I can easily picture it growing to a giant metropolis and a center of trade for the Martian hillsphere.
To Isaac Arthur standards, this is a very unambitious endeavour 😊 No Kardashev 3 civilization stuff this time
Hmm, a thought. A large sunshade, mirror, and/or magnetic deflector could very well serve a dual purpose and collect helium and hydrogen from solar wind
Mars Direct planned having fuel makers land ahead of the manned mission.
What a nice moon to settle on, I just hope nothing anomylous happens.
Captain: This is transit ship A3-44 incoming at 200 m/s relative velocity requesting harpoon catch in 10 minutes. Over.
Phobis Base: A3-44 our harpoon officer is on his day off. No harpoons today. Over.
Captain: If we dont get a harpoon, our next stop is Alpha Centauri in 200,000 years. Over.
Phobos Base: Should we notify family?
Captain: Yes, yours too. We will change course to land at Phobos Base directly at 200 m/s. Over.
Phobos Base: Deputy harpoon officer is luckily on site and ready for harpooning...
we alto build a moon by stripping mining both mars moons to nothing...who knows the larger artificial moon might help restart mars core spin
What would you call people native to Phobos and Deimos?
Fearies and Terrorists?
Phobians and Demians
Great video amd timing I was ready to discount these guys are being little better then captured astroids for my Risk like micro solar system table top game... But yeah given their location I'll have to give these guys the gas gaint big moon treatment of getting a single developed terror as apposed to the few Earth's moon gets and the miner fleets or the asteroid belt.
The first man on phobos should be Corporal Flynn Taggart just to be safe.
A topic that I find interesting would be how our society could Deal with the Problem If encryption technology is not able to Combat new decryption Tools and the Data Security of the Computers cannot be guaranteed in the Long Term?
might be better to bring a asteroid over even if the asteroid is 75 miles or 100 miles in diamater would be bigger then P&B moons and probably just as easy then building all them other structure on the moons
Commenting on this before finishing because I'll forget later, but does it truly matter if the moons have ice already? By the time we set anything major up, surely we would be capable of catching a comet and politely asking it to chill out on Phobos?
Cluros and Thuria 😁