The Most Insane Real Plans For Conquering Space

Writer, genius, and all around good guy Douglas Adams once said that "space is really big." In space, the room exists for humanity to stretch out its legs and reach our true potential. On a completely unrelated note, there's a lot of really valuable stuff up there that no one technically owns. With that being said, a lot of very smart and possibly insane individuals have some pretty unconventional ideas about the best way to go about getting their hands on all of those valuable resources that are just sitting up there ... waiting.

The ample land and relatively close proximity to Earth makes Mars an ideal spot for human colonization. Unfortunately, the long-range weather forecast for Mars predicts another several million years of temperatures ranging between negative 220 and negative 76 degrees Fahrenheit. In layman's terms, Mars is really freaking cold. Luckily, mankind has developed a talent over the last couple of centuries when it comes to heating up a planet. One of the more unconventional ideas for heating up Mars involves deploying a series of 500-square-foot-wide mirrors in planetary orbit.

The plan, which has received attention and funding from NASA, is to cluster these mirrors together in orbit. The Voltron-like grouping of mirrors will collect and focus solar energy toward small patches of Martian real estate, and the temperature will hopefully rise in those areas. Once the temperature rises, frozen water deposits will become more accessible, a bonus for colonists hoping to avoid dying of thirst. Also, warmer temperatures would let colonists wear less cumbersome spacesuits that would allow for more ambitious construction.

There are a lot of moving parts to this plan, and we sincerely hope that someone remembers to perform a proper psychological evaluation on the person put in charge of the giant orbiting death mirrors.

As far as sites in the solar system for colonization go, Mars gets all of the attention, funding, and pop culture accolades, while Venus is, quite ironically, the redheaded stepchild of the solar system that everyone politely ignores during Thanksgiving dinner. Venus has a lot going for it as a potential colonization site. Venus is closer to Earth than Mars is, it has an atmosphere, its magnetic field would aid terrestrial navigation, and with a little terraforming work, it would make a fine summer home for humanity. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of Venus is just a tad corrosive to human flesh, average temperatures are a balmy 800 or so degrees Fahrenheit, and the atmospheric pressure tends to crush everything we send to the surface into tiny specks of very expensive dust.

But even though surface conditions on Venus suck, that's no reason whatsoever for humanity to ignore our closest neighbor. Upper atmospheric conditions of the planet are slightly more tolerable for human life, and because of that, the upper atmosphere of Venus is where colonization most likely will begin. Taking a page from steampunk aficionados, NASA scientists working on the innocently named project HAVOC hope to place a series of high-altitude blimps in the upper atmosphere of Venus. These blimps will be covered in solar panels and designed to laugh off the few hundred lightning strikes that will hit them on a daily basis. Scientists living on these floating blimps will then spend a few generations working on various terraforming projects to change the surface of the planet till it will hopefully look more like southern California and less like the cover art for a Dethklok album.

Earth's atmosphere is pretty cool. Despite our best efforts to destroy the darn thing, it keeps thousands of pieces of space debris from crashing into the surface on a daily basis, while giving us something to breathe. On the flipside of the coin, the atmosphere is one big giant inconvenience when it comes to space travel. The majority of the fuel used by a spacecraft is burned off when reaching orbit. One idea, which was originally theorized in the 1800s, would replace those clunky rockets with a giant space elevator.

The idea is to construct an elevator that would to run a 15-mile cable from the surface to a facility in geostationary orbit. Objects, like components for a battle station capable of destroying rebelling planets, would be attached to this cable. Theoretically, the objects would use a combination of motors and some borrowed centripetal force from the Earth to create lift while using a fraction of the energy that a conventional rocket would use.

NASA, SpaceX, and a few other spacefaring concerns are giving some serious thought and funding to the idea. One civilian group has been crowdfunding their elevator for the last several years. A Canadian firm, Thoth Technology, has secured a US patent for their space elevator design, in what is no doubt part of Canada's long-range plan to finally act on its imperialistic desires. Time to study up on how hockey works.

One annoying necessity of launching a spacecraft from the surface is the need for heat shields. Heat shields allow for a relatively flimsy spacecraft, composed of parts built by the lowest bidder, to withstand the entry and exiting of Earth's atmosphere. They're an important design element of a spacecraft, but if a craft was built in orbit with the intention of never having to enter an atmosphere, that expensive dealership option could be tossed out of window. This still creates the problem of how to build a spacecraft in orbit.

Rather than shuttling up into orbit a bunch of terrestrially manufactured components, it might be a little easier just to put a giant 3-D printer into orbit and print spacecraft. The good people at NASA thought the idea might have merit and have begun looking into the idea. Placing a giant 3-D printer in space is not as crazy as it sounds. Without gravity getting in the way, a 3-D printer could fabricate an item many times larger than itself. Supplying dense blocks of raw materials to a printer in orbit would take fewer deliveries than supplying more conventional construction materials. An orbital 3-D printing facility would also mean fewer human workers would be put in danger during construction. Once mankind gets past its nagging fear of giving machines the ability to reproduce, we could all be cruising around in officially licensed and fully functional Millennium Falcons.

Agencies and individuals that rely upon taxpayer funds are always quick to point out their accomplishments. PBS likes to show how multiple generations of children learned to read because of Sesame Street, the Social Security Administration has saved many of our grandparents from poverty, and Al Gore created the Internet that many of us rely on to simulate workplace productivity. The United States Air Force is able to keep the doors open because of government funding yet for some reason is a little secretive when it comes to their most badass accomplishment: the X-37B, an autonomous space vehicle that the Air Force only recently acknowledged existed.

Built by Boeing and costing the GDP of a small nation, the X-37B is indeed impressive. The craft is entirely autonomous, and the thing is landed by remote—when landing a space shuttle, a pilot is flying a mid-sized office building toward a runway while having almost no ability to make a course correction, and the X-37B does this by remote! The craft recently broke a record for the longest time spent in orbit for any spacecraft, manned or otherwise. As of this moment, the thing has been in orbit for 678 days doing something. While it is probably orbiting the planet at 18,000 miles per hour doing something benign like intelligence gathering, we like to think that the X-37B is up there for a more interesting purpose like defending Earth from reptilian invaders or taking high-resolution photos of Haulover Beach during Spring Break.