Technically speaking, there were continents and moving oceans even before Rodinia. But so little has remained from the Hadean, that trying to tell its plate tectonic environment is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with half of the pieces missing.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanWhich is why I specifically qualified my statement by saying that it's after said period (implicit in said statement is that it's also long before the modern continents reached an arrangement that even remotely resembles the current one).
So, about the possibility of Mars having been significantly bigger in ancient times before a hypothetical impact with another celestial body...
edited 26th Dec '16 1:32:04 AM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.... I'm honestly not sure what you are referring to by "this" at the beginning of your post.
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.Then sorry to burst your bubble, but the basin is actually a lot older than Tharsis, which is incidentally mentioned in the Wikipedia article for the former.
edited 26th Dec '16 1:43:54 PM by MarqFJA
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.I feel that if Mars hit another celestial body in its distant past, it would be bigger than it is now or we'd see remains of the impact in the rest of the solar system. And afaik, we don't see that.
Like, it's likely that billions of years ago, Earth collided into another planet, and that's why our planet is the size that it is and why we have our moon.
edited 26th Dec '16 2:08:06 PM by BaconManiac5000
what do you mean I didn't win, I ate more wet t-shirts than anyone elseReaching back about a week, but as I was out of touch for the holidays...
For the bulk of Earth's history, the geography has been heavily southern-based.
When landmasses get biased towards the northern hemisphere, it's usually a case of continental break-up leading to a global, predominantly southern super-continent in a few hundred million years. Guess what's been happening since the Triassic?
edited 29th Dec '16 3:28:00 AM by Euodiachloris
Aye, that's what I'd think too, based on the delta-v requirements
. Then again, using lunar ice for water, oxygen and hydrogen could be advantageous for exploring beyond Earth's SOI- it depends on what you want the base for and what technology you're using.
![]()
Depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to do moon science, then obviously a lunar hab is going to be better. If you just want to have a bunch of people living in space, then something like an Island 3 colony at a Lagrange point is probably a better bet, though, yes.
Of course, the Island 3 design sort of presupposes an existing lunar hab, since much of the raw material going into its construction is meant to be taken from the moon.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Trojan asteroids are also a hell of a lot farther away than the moon or the lagrange points, though, which presents its own problems.
Although it just occurred to me that we might be talking about different things. With my initial post, I was referring to the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, not the Sun-Earth Lagrange points (which is where trojan asteroids hang out).
The benefit of building a space hab from scratch as opposed to building on one the moon or something is that space habs can be designed to mimic terrestrial conditions pretty damn closely through the use of Centrifugal Gravity, while building on the moon (or Mars, or in an asteroid, or whatever) means you're stuck with local gravity, which is (with few exceptions) really bad for human physiology long-term.
But if you're building something in space, the particular patch of space you build it in doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference, barring local weirdness like planetary radiation belts and the like. So there's no real advantage to building your space hab in the Sun-Earth Lagrange points compared to the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, and the disadvantage is the fact that it's way the hell farther away, which causes all sorts of logistical problems for both building the things and living in them.
edited 9th Jan '17 11:12:43 AM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Wouldn't a space hub just be a more modern version fo the ISS though?
Also the gravity situation could be an advantage, if we can study the impact that moon gravity has on people than it will help us when we come to building a mars base and need to ensure that the mars gravity doesn't screw our people over.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranWell, like I said, depends on what you want to do with it. A lunar base for the purposes of developing institutional knowledge that can be applied to a Mars base is an entirely legit thing, and obviously would need to be on the moon. But if you just want to have people living in space, not out of any attempts to do science or anything but just to have a place off of Earth for people to live, then a space hab is going to be a better bet.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Astronaut twin study hints at stress of space travel
From the lengths of the twins' chromosomes to the microbiomes in their guts, "almost everyone is reporting that we see differences," says Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. He and other project scientists reported the early results on 26 January in Galveston, Texas, at a meeting of scientists working in NASA's Human Research Program. "The data are so fresh that some of them are still coming off the sequencing machines," Mason says.
The challenge now is to untangle how many of the observed changes are specific to the physical demands of spaceflight - and how many might be simply due to natural variations. And because the Kelly twins are just two people, the results may not be generalizable to others.
This is fascinating.

Except Earth was not like that for most of its history; plate tectonics, remember? It used to be one supercontinent surrounded by a single world ocean, and that's after the primeval geological hell that was the Hadean Eon finally ended and its super-volcanism dialed down to much lower levels that allowed for life to exist in any recognizable form.
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.