Category Archives: Terraforming Mars

Planet-Sized X-Men #1 captivated me. It happened suddenly, without warning. Not only because the idea of mutants terraforming Mars tweaked all the right places in my nerdy climate scientist brain, but because it demonstrated that ambitious vision and cooperation were prerequisites to the creation of planet Arakko.

A hallmark of X-men comics tends to be the dissonant mutant voices and visions acting to foil one another, often before any significant or lasting progress can be achieved. Mutant shelters are historically either tenuous or outright dubious the Xavier school has been attacked and/or destroyed no less than seven times! The vision for a safe haven, as heralded and fought for by Magneto in the opening pages of Planet-Sized X-Men, brings sharp relief to the dichotomous rift in mutant philosophy: mutants are either conquerors or conquered, so they should choose victory.

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Magnetos pitch to create a new mutant home is met with sincerity, curiosity, and support. In less than a week, nearly the full cast of Omega-level mutants are recruited to be on hand during the Hellfire Gala. The team called to terraform Mars represent the full weight, power, and authority that Krakoas strategic resources can bring to bear, but despite their incredible powers, not one of them can do it alone; it takes a mutant circuit. And to form the comprehensive circuit takes committed and trusting resolve.

In contrast to the narrative ease with which its accomplished over 48 pages, terraforming Mars would be an extremely complex and difficult undertaking. Atmospheric temperatures and pressures must be raised to habitable levels for plants and animals. The planet needs a source of enough liquid water to support a healthy ecosystem. The concentrations of atmospheric and oceanic chemicals must be tuned to adequately maintain life. But even when those things are accomplished, there are still problems.

For starters, a whole new ecosystem needs to be developed and harnessed to regulate the atmosphere and local vegetation. Whats worse, Mars lacks a proper magnetic field, which is a prerequisite for maintaining that atmosphere and preserving ecological gains made over time. Its also needed to protect Martian residents from harmful, high-energy radiation.

At the scale needed on Mars, any one of these challenges would require technological advancements and resource aggregation not to mention focused ambition that would be staggeringly difficult to achieve today. Using their collective powers, though, the Omegas solve these challenges in just a handful of panels, and the depiction of these feats by Pepe Larraz and Marte Gracia is breathtaking.

Dont mind me, Im casually creating a magnetosphere. Did I mention you have new gods now? (Marvel Comics)

But beyond this (by no means exhaustive) list of physical science barriers, there are human dimensions of the terraforming problem that are arguably more difficult to solve. Even making space for technological advancements, it would likely take centuries of sustained effort and financing to complete the project. Sustained is an absolutely vital characteristic of the work that would be required to terraform Mars many generations over at least centuries (some estimates indicate multiple millennia) will need to prioritize turning the Red Planet blue. And we havent the space (nor do I have the expertise) to discuss the ethical questions terraforming might raise.

While our species has faced problems requiring long-term and cooperative solutions time and again, our track record on solving them is mixed. Our destruction of the ozone layer by manufactured chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was identified by scientists within years of its appearance, and in less than a decade an international treaty banned CFC use. The ban remains in effect, and today there are already clear signs that the ozone layer is recovering. But then, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, our will to sustain mitigation efforts over long periods of time (particularly if theyre seen as having little immediate personal gain) waxes and wanes, like Phobos in the Martian sky.

Climate change is the single most comprehensive and impactful challenge we face as a civilization today. Burning of fossil fuels emits greenhouse gasses into Earths atmosphere, which trap heat like a blanket, increasing the average temperature and changing the environment were familiar with. These changes disrupt the human systems weve built or adapted, including agriculture, coastlines, and weather. More precisely stated by the U.S. National Climate Assessment released in 2018, Climate change creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities across the United States, presenting growing challenges to human health and safety, quality of life, and the rate of economic growth.

Addressing climate change is an enormous and difficult endeavor. While weve understood the fundamental science of global warming since the mid-19th century (thanks in part to ground-breaking scientist Eunice Foote), its only in recent decades the world has agreed that international cooperation is required to solve it. Like the mutants terraforming Mars, no individual nation or person can solely end climate change. It will take sustained, multilateral, and multigenerational efforts to slow what weve already caused, and to move toward a future where our reliance on processes that produce greenhouse gas emissions is greatly reduced or eliminated.

Despite its ideal beginnings, the future of Arakko will not remain perfect, and conflict already stirs on the first mutant planet. It mimics our reality, pitting the authors of a planet against one another and external threats alike. With the release of X-Men Red #1, well no doubt find disagreements, doubts, and detriments in the story to come, threatening what mutants have worked so well together to build.

Its not quite that simple for us, Ororo. (Marvel Comics)

Our future as humans is not so different. Things wont always go smoothly. Our efforts and engagement will waver. We wont always agree. But we have an opportunity and a hope. We can find inspiration in the incredibly arduous terraforming of an alien world to fix our own. We can together combine knowledge, resources, and partnerships over generations to sustain our climate for generations to come.

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'X-Men Red': on terraforming, climate change, and collective will - AIPT

The astonishing launch of the Hope Probe, a car-sized spacecraft set for Mars, was a key moment in the history of Arab space flight.

Despite the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) only being in existence for seven years, the success of the mission made the UAE the first Arab country and the fifth on Earth to reach the Red Planet, and only the second to ever reach Mars orbit on its first attempt.

The success of the mission has set the UAE towards loftier goals. In 2028, a new Emirati interplanetary mission will make a close approach to Venus before journeying to the asteroid belt located 448 million kilometres from our Sun.

These missions open new possibilities for humanity to explore the stars, but the benefits for the UAE specifically are twofold: the idealism of space exploration gives the UAE the perfect rhetoric to attract more business, while terraforming the Red Planet could lead to technological revelations that could transform the desert that the country is built upon.

UAESA is not like other space agencies. Nasa was established in 1953 to compete with Kosmicheskaya programma SSSR, the Soviet space program that would officially become Roscosmos in 1992. The two nations battle over the cosmos during the Cold War is well known, but in the heat of the desert cities like Dubai were still developing only establishing its first telephone company and the first hotel in 1959.

In the 1960s, with the discovery of oil reserves, that would all change. The citys population grew by 300 per cent by 1975, and eventually develop it into the metropolis known today. The age of black gold cannot last forever, though. Climate change, the result of years of dependency on fossil fuels, will force us to change the way we harvest energy or die.

The UAE, conscious of the writing on the wall, now wants to diversify its economy and sees the pioneers of a new, privately-owned, space age as a key opportunity. The elevated dreams of space exploration and the slick marketing of global capitalism turn out to slot together neatly.

However, to encourage businesses to invest in space the UAE needs a dream to sell: it found one in what it calls Mars 2117. This program, announced in 2017, claims humans will have liveable environments, and 60,000-strong colonies, on Mars within the century.

If we are going to dream about Mars, lets not have a mediocre dream, lets dream big, and if we achieve 10 per cent of it, its going to be very impressive, Omar Al Olama, the UAE minister for AI and remote working, told The Independent. Many futurists, many studies prove that the coming economy is going to be a space economy and its a multi-trillion-dollar economy that will give us access to resources we know that we will have to play in it at one point of time? Why not start now?

Omar Al Olama, minister of state for artificial intelligence in the United Arab Emirates

(Adam Smith / The Independent)

The UAESAs philosophy, similar to SpaceX and Blue Origin, might be summarised by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs infamous motto move fast and break things. When developing the Hope Probe, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan gave specific requirements, Omran Sharaf, Emirates Mars mission project director recalls. It needed to reach Mars before December 2021, it needed to be built for $200 million, and it needed to be completed in six years.

In contrast, other nations generally build these missions over 10 to 12 years, with a larger budget, and with considerably more than zero experience in sending spacecrafts to Mars.

There was a last requirement, Mr Sharaf says he was told: that the job was not to deliver a mission around Mars. It was to lead a disruptive change that I would like to see in multiple sectors that are critical and core to the future of the UAE scientific and technical capabilities to address these [economic] challenges.

In this light, it is easy to view the UAEs interest in space as primarily an economic one. The Mars 2117 strategy is more about addressing challenges we have on Earth, especially more specific to the UAE. We talk about water security, food security, energy security, Mr Sharaf says. If you have a human living there, in that harsh environment, theres a lot of that technology you can actually use to serve your challenges here on Earth, especially on the desert.

The timeline for these endeavours is less clear, however. You cant come up and say, Ill come up with this discovery [by this date], its very difficult, Mr Sharaf said. You can predict certain trends and build on them, but to be very specific thats a very difficult thing to do. The uncertainty is reminiscent of Elon Musk, who predicted a Mars landing as early as 2024, revised it to 2026, and now suggests 2029 as a potential date.

The UAEs promotional website for the mission is more definite. It envisions that the city will be built by robots, that the first humans will land by 2037, the first settlement completed by 2039, and the first building constructed using only materials from Mars in 2064. Other experts remain sceptical. This is really beyond my time horizon, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Centre for Astrophysics, told The Independent when asked for his predictions on the project. I think you need a science fiction writer.

Omran Sharaf, the project director of the Emirates Mars Mission

(Adam Smith / The Independent)

But success will not be measured not by how close humans come to the stars; instead, it will be by the businesses that come to Dubai for this new push into space, and the young Arabs that are inspired to build businesses of their own.

With the Venus mission, and the asteroid belt, the success will be the startups. How much of those startups are able to work [and] gain capacity in the private sector, Mr Sharaf says. We want the future Elon Musk for the UAE, we want a future Bill Gates, we want a future [Warren] Buffett.

This is not only an attitude taken by the UAE. In the United Kingdom, which has not independently launched a satellite since 1971, the space industry has increased by 300 per cent since 2010 and generates an estimated 15 billionevery year. The global small satellite market alone is worth approximately 400 billion, and the UK is aiming to take 10 per cent of that market by the end of the decade.

For the Emirates, there is a sense that space is the next logical continuation for a country where the native people were merchants and manufacturers, where the next horizon to sail towards is in a ship that travels upwards. Would the country take the same approach if it did not have an environment so similar to Mars, but instead was wet and cold? I think our approach would be different because the priorities will be different, and when the priorities are different, the budgets are different, Mr Sharaf said.

Behind any idealism of an interstellar future for humanity, though, remains the practicalities of the work necessary to create it. In theory, every person and startup on Earth has access to a breathable atmosphere, accessible water, nourishing food, and a global economy ready to support them. In reality, nearly 2.37 billion humans do not have access to adequate food, 2.2 billion people do not have safely managed drinking water services, and more than 700 million people 10 per cent of the global population live in poverty.

In the UAE specifically, the multi-billion-dollar Expo 2020 which the country announced to attract global tourists and investors has been criticised widespread labour exploitation and racialdiscrimination, something the country has struggled with for years.

The way they treat the staff is like slaves, I mean modern day slavery, one unnamed Indian worker told London-based human rights group Equidem. The government has denied such allegations.

Building one grand carnival like Expo 2020 is absurdly miniscule compared to the challenge of terraforming a whole other planet. The sales pitch for going to Mars is that its going to be cramped, dangerous, difficult, very hard work and you might die, Mr Musk has said. Thats the sales pitch. I hope you like it. For too many, however, this is still the sales pitch for living on Earth and people have pushed back against what they see as joy-rides for the super-rich while everyday people still struggle to afford the basics.

The counterargument is that a rising tide lifts all ships. I read a very interesting article, Mr Al Olama says, that argues a middle class person anywhere on Earth today lives a better life than John D. Rockefeller lives in his prime he would have died to have a watermelon in the winter.

There are certain things you can enjoy today that to him was a dream. The future is always actually better off than the past. That divide is something that is a result of capitalism.

Similarly, the first passenger airline was not started until 1914; now there are tens of millions of flights every year. Space travel, currently restricted to the rich and powerful, may also become more common in the same way if people wait long enough.

But they might be waiting a long time. Britains standard of living has had the worst fall since the 1950s, and the share of global wealth owned by billionaires has risen from one per cent to over three per cent since 1995. In the space industry, and a world with international collaboration, governments are still unable to solve global crisis like the space debris that risks keeping us trapped on the planet, and legislation for other plants could still fall into the same pitfalls of those on Earth. The thing about a rising tide is that you can only survive it if you have a ship or a spaceship.

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The UAEs plan to terraform Mars could also transform its own desert nation - The Independent

Board games have been having a bit of a cultural moment. They experienced a resurgence of popularity at the beginning of the pandemic. A Statista report projected the total overall board game market might reach US$12-billion by 2023.

It makes sense that board games gained popularity during the pandemic. Board games can provide relatively affordable, reusable, home-based entertainment. Scrabble was designed by Alfred Mosher Butts during the Great Depression. Eleanor Abbott created Candy Land after her contracting polio and spending extended time in the hospital during the epidemic in the United States.

I have loved board games my whole life and in the last 10 years spent my time browsing shops for the newest releases, growing increasingly addicted to watching board game channels on YouTube and collecting games a collection which has taken over several rooms in my home.

I regularly noticed that these friendly local game shops were filled with mostly white men, often on their own, wandering the stacks. It made me wonder, why is board gaming so white and male?

As a doctoral student at X University and York University in their joint communication and culture program, I have noticed a lack of contemporary scholarship on board games, as most game scholarship focuses on video games.

To fill this gap, I decided to spend the last four years of my life delving into the industry.

Board gaming, like many other cultural spheres, has been socially shaped and constructed, with products being created for an imagined audience. The imagined audience for board games is, most often, a cis, straight, middle-class able-bodied white man.

The result of this social shaping has been that board gaming spaces have, over time, have become an exclusive preserve for this default, imagined audience. Sometimes, this kind of social shaping, intentionally or not, can create a vicious circle of exclusion for other identities.

As I talked to people in board gaming communities and examined the games themselves, I realized that there were big, systemic social, labour and economic issues that were limiting the wide-spread adoption of board gaming and market growth.

My research argues that one of the key factors facing board gaming is the homogeneity of the current board game design labour pool and limited representation on the products themselves.

I found that 92.6 per cent of the designers of the 400 top-ranked board games on BoardGameGeek were white men.

The cover art images on the boxes of the top-ranked 200 BoardGameGeek ranked games with games such as Gloomhaven (2017),Marvel Champions: The Card Game (2019), Terraforming Mars (2016) and Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (2015) skewed heavily toward white-presenting males. Of the total 1,974 figures analyzed during my board game cover art analyses, white male imagery was predominant.

Images of men and boys represented 76.8 per cent of the human representation on covers, or 647 images in games such as Great Western Trail (2016) and War of the Ring: Second Edition (2012), compared to 23.2 per cent of the images of women and girls, which represented only 195 of the images counted as in games with more gender representation like Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2016) and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015)

White imagery was found on 82.5 per cent of the images or 528 compared to BIPOC imagery which made up only 17.5 per cent of the images, or 112 total images.

A lack of representation sends a message to potential audiences. But does this lack of representation matter to current board gamers?

I conducted an online survey of 320 respondents in late 2020. In total, 70.7 per cent of respondents shared that they play board games at least once a week. More than half (53.5 per cent) of the sample have been board gaming for 11 years or more.

I tried to get a diverse sample through exhaustive recruitment efforts as I was looking to hear from voices that were not often heard from in other board game surveys.

I got back a set of respondents who were mainly from North America (73.8 per cent). The majority of survey respondents identified as women at 60.4 per cent, including trans women which represented 4.9 per cent. More than a quarter of my survey respondents identified as men at 25.3 per cent and 9.4 per cent identified as non-binary.

Most of the respondents were white (74.9 per cent), while 20.4 percent identified as BIPOC. More than half of the sample (52.8 per cent) identified as being part of the 2SLGBTQiIA+ community.

The survey respondents shared that gender and racial representation did matter to them, in fact it mattered a lot. Respondents agreed or strongly agreed (80.2 per cent) that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable gender representation in games design and 84 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable racial representation in games design.

Another overwhelming majority (83.6 per cent) agreed or strongly agreed that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable gender representation in board game artwork. Similarly, 84 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that board gaming has a problem with a lack of equitable racial representation in board game artwork.

The current reality? Despite straight white males making up roughly 25 per cent of the U.S. population the U.S. being one of the worlds largest consumer markets and straight white males being an even smaller portion of the global market they currently make up about 80 per cent or more of the representation in board games.

Do these realities the board game industrys persistent focus on a small demographic and its skewed representation on the products toward this small population create the necessary conditions for market growth and expansion of the board game industry?

The answer can only be no.

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Why is board gaming so white and male? I'm trying to figure that out - The Conversation

Scavenging for resources, keeping yourself fed and hydrated, crafting tools and building a base, and staying alive in a harsh environment is what survival games are all about. But what about altering that environment until it's not as harsh as you found it? What if you could turn a hostile desert planet into a green and leafy paradise through terraforming?

The Planet Crafter, now in Steam Early Access, drops you on a barren, arid world that looks a lot like Mars, and your job is not to merely survive but ultimately to make the planet habitable for other humans. As you explore and collect minerals and other resources, and keep yourself fed and oxygenated, you'll craft tools and gear, build a base, and fabricate machines and modules that can begin warming up the planet. Eventually you'll be able to create a breathable atmosphere and bring life to the world in the form of trees, plants, lakes, and even wildlife. You may start off growing crops in hydroponic tubes inside your base, but the end goal is to be able to farm them outside under a bright blue sky.

The Planet Crafter has an appealing Subnautica vibe to it, and there's a nice chunky sci-fi look to the base modules and other machines you build. And unlike many survival games where you spend a lot of time hunting animals for food or defending against attacks, The Planet Crafter is a non-violent game. There's plenty of challenges when it comes to surviving the elements and progressing through the higher stages of terraforming technology, but you won't have to kill anything to do it. Nice.

The sci-fi survival game will spend between one and two years in Early Access, according to the two-person dev team at Miju Games, though that may change based on player feedback, which so far is "Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam. There are plans to add small life forms, more environmental threats, a vehicle, and more story elements during its development.

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Terraform a planet in this survival game that looks like Subnautica on Mars - PC Gamer

[imagesource: SpaceX]

The possibility of life on Mars has really stretched peoples imaginations and skillsets as they try and figure out how to build a home on the inhospitable planet.

One does not simply pitch a tent and get on with life as we know it.

Nope, not with Mars gruelling temperatures, carbon dioxide-plagued atmosphere, radiation, and intensely low atmospheric pressure.

But still, engineers, scientists, astronomers, and generally aspiring Martians have been racking their brains for the past couple of years, thinking outside the box in order to take the human species beyond Earth.

Before we get the big ideas,CNEToutlined all the possible ways that we can die if we try to make life on Mars a thing right off the bat:

If you were teleported to Mars with just basic camping gear, youd eventually die of radiation poisoning or cancer. But youd freeze to death long before then, most likely on the first night when temperatures dip to Antarctic levels.

Before that, youd suffocate trying to breathe the atmosphere made up of mostly carbon dioxide. Butbefore even that, the very low atmospheric pressure on Mars would cause your blood to literally boil, regardless of the outside temperature.

At this rate, it would be safer to just stay on the spacecraft once it lands on Mars.

This is actually an idea that a substantial amount of people are leaning towards, initially at least.

Elon Musk and space envision astronauts have thought of living out of SpaceX Starships at the start (see the image above) while planning and constructing a more permanent human settlement on Mars:

[Starships] are very valuable on the surface of Mars, said Paul Wooster, the companys principal Mars development engineer, in 2018 at a Mars Society convention.

Youd actually be having most of the ships stay and youd be operating using the various systems on them to support the activities there.

Next on the agenda would be terraforming, which is basically changing the planets environment to be more Earth-like and expanding the habitable bubble across the entire planet.

But first, one just needs to make it through the first night on Mars.

Any Martian home needs to consider shielding us from the intense radiation:

Former NASA physician Jim Logan estimatesputting our fragile, fleshy bodies behind or beneath about 9 feet (2.7 meters) of Martian soil should suffice.

Zubrin has also suggested using thick bricks made from Martian regolith to construct shelter, adding a uniquely medieval castle vibe to the more traditionally sleek and futuristic vision of a Mars outpost.

In the case of dust and solar storm sweeping across the planet, the old lava tubes and underground caves can make for good enough homes.

Otherwise, 3D printing a shelter is also something to consider:

NASA held a 3D printed habitat challenge in 2019, with New Yorks AI SpaceFactory (which bills itself as a multi-planetary architectural and technology design agency) winning the top prize for a system that built a lightweight but strong structure using autonomous robots requiring almost no human guidance.

Check out this Martian future proposal:

Going underground or within hardcore structures wont allow agriculture to flourish, a practice that will be essential to survival on the Red Planet.

Thats because plants need light:

Mechanical engineerAndrew Geiszler suggested at the 2015 Mars Society conventionthat geodesic glass domes could be the answer. Mars provides all the raw materials needed to create glass, plastic and metals that can then be turned into dome homes.

Ultimately were going to need to use native materials. Its very feasible. Theyre there for the taking.

Building a permanent base will require that we can harvest resources and materials from the rugged landscape, which is a whole other story:

Very little that pertains to living on Mars in the early years will involve off-the-shelf equipment and supplies from Earth, writes Stephen Petranek in his bookHow Well Live on Mars. Almost every tool or device in use on Mars will need to have been carefully thought out.

Finding water will be crucial, which will provide the ability to make oxygen, grow food, and produce fuel and other raw materials.

Apparently, some water molecules have been found in Martian soil, in trace amounts in the air, and present in significant amounts near and below ice deposits, but it is a matter of extracting enough of that to last a human lifetime or more.

Weighing up the factors, possible impacts, effects, situations, problems, challenges, et cetera, of bringing human life to Mars is staggering and overwhelming.

I mean, astronauts have even been found to lose about 1% of the mass of some bones per month spent in space.

They found a solution for that in a human parathyroid hormone (PTH) peptide-rich space lettuce, but still, it just goes to show how much there is to think about before packing up for interplanetary travel and living.

Not to mention how the chief aspiring Martian (Musk) seems more preoccupied with posting memes.

[source:cnet]

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All The Ways Living On Mars Could Kill You - 2oceansvibe News

Akira Toriyamas Dragon Ball Z has achieved a prolific level of popularity thats turned it into one of the most evergreen shonen anime of all time. Dragon Balls success has allowed its manga and anime to spin-off in many different directions and there are dozens of video games that are set within the beloved series. The most recent Dragon Ball Z video games have set a new standard for whats possible in an anime fighting game, but its also important to remember the series humble origins.

RELATED: 10 Best Genesis Games You Can Beat In One Sitting

The Sega Genesis was a crucial video game console during the 16-bit era and theres surprisingly only one Dragon Ball Z game for the system. 1994s Dragon Ball Z: Buyu Retsuden, also known as Dragon Ball Z: Fierce Bravery Legend, is a game that often gets forgotten even though it makes some creative decisions for a Dragon Ball fighting title.

Dragon Ball Z has celebrated many landmark fighting titles across different gaming generations, but the Super Butoden titles for the Super Famicom were some of the first 16-bit hits. Segas 16-bit alternative to the Super Nintendo didnt have any Dragon Ball games and the success of the Butoden releases had the Mega Drive eager for their own adaptation. Curiously, Segas Mega Drive was more successful in Europe than the Super Famicom, which also increased demand for a Genesis-exclusive Dragon Ball game. Development for Dragon Ball Z: Buyu Retsuden actually lasted longer than the Super Butoden series, but the game didnt perform as well.

Theres so much crossover between different Dragon Ball Z video games that one of the most important elements in a title is what stretch of the long-running franchise will receive representation. The Sega Genesis Dragon Ball Z game specifically keys into the Frieza and Cell Sagas, deciding to forego the introductory Saiyan Saga. The existing Super Butoden games already cover this material, but its still an exciting period to pull from for the Genesis fighter. Representation from both Dragon Ball Zs earliest and final episodes would be appreciated even though the title is creative with its character roster.

The fighting genre has evolved in such drastic ways that its completely natural to have a roster of at least 50 characters. These expectations are pushed to the extreme with Dragon Ball games, which have hundreds of unique characters to pull from the anime and manga.

RELATED: Dragon Ball: 9 Video Games That Actually Told Original Stories

The Genesis Dragon Ball Z title comes from a more humble time where 11 playable characters still seemed impressive. Buyu Retsuden features several Dragon Ball staples, but its encouraging to also have members of the Ginyu Force as playable characters, as well as Frieza, Cell, and Android 18. Krillin even makes the cut before he was included regularly.

Many Sega fans were grateful to finally have a Dragon Ball Z fighting game at their disposal, but Dragon Ball Z: Buyu Retsuden didnt receive a North American release since Dragon Balls dub had yet to take off. However, the Genesis Dragon Ball Z game wasnt restricted to Japan and it received a surprising push in French and Spanish regions. In these regions, the game was released under the title Dragon Ball Z: The Call of Destiny. There was such interest in the title that Portugal even sold Japanese versions of the game that included a region converter so that it would work on European hardware.

The 16-bit gaming era containing many secrets for intrepid gamers and cheat codes that could be activated through specific button combinations was a frequent highlight. The Sega Genesis Dragon Ball Z game doesnt contain any unlockable characters or elaborate secrets, but theres still one extra feature that players can discover and experience. Theres a special Turbo Mode, which speeds up the gameplay. Its unlocked by holding down A and B while powering up the system, then pushing start when Gokus face first appears. An orange background on the title screen means that its been activated.

The Super Butoden video games on the Super Famicom were so popular that nobody would have questioned direct ports for the Mega Drive. Genesis versions of these classic games would have likely sold well, but Buyu Retsuden takes a much more interesting approach by adapting aspects of the first two Butoden games.

RELATED: 10 Fighting Games To Play If You Love Dragon Ball

Accordingly, the Genesis game reflects Butodens gameplay and popular mechanics like split-screen ki battles and the ability to fight on both land and air, but it still develops its own voice and ditches what previously didnt work.

Effective marketing is crucial in the video game industry, especially when games are adapting popular franchises and want to take advantage of the built-in fandom. The original box art for Dragon Ball Z: Buyu Retsuden is nothing special, but its appropriate for a fighting game that covers the Frieza and Cell Sagas. The release of Buyu Retsuden in Portugal resulted in three slightly different releases, all of which have become coveted collectors items as a result. The second version of the game, which was distributed by Ecofilmes, took Japanese versions of the game and replaced their covers with the art from a Dragon Ball Z VHS cassette.

It takes some time for the powerful Super Saiyan transformations to emerge in Dragon Ball Zs manga and anime, but they become a crucial component for combat. Dragon Ball Z video games manage Super Saiyan powers in different ways and some titles allow for in-battle transformations, while others delineate Super Saiyan forms as totally separate characters. The Genesis Dragon Ball Z game fully celebrates the Super Saiyan fad and it makes it the standard with its characters. Goku, Gohan, Vegeta, and Future Trunks are all Super Saiyans by default and dont fight in their base forms.

A common feature in modern Dragon Ball Z video games is hypothetical What If? storylines that push the franchises narrative in unexpected directions. This is a strong way to offer audiences something new rather than continually adapting the same storylines. Buyu Retsuden is way ahead of the curve in this department and its storylines for Android 18 and Krillin deviate from the animes plot. Minor changes, such as when Krillin and Android 18 are married and why he wants to defend her against Cell, hold a lot of weight.

Dragon Ball Z: Buyu Retsuden makes its mark in the grander scheme of burgeoning Dragon Ball video games, but the longevity of any fighting game also depends on how it compares to the other triumphs of the genre. Some people turned to Buyu Retsuden for the Dragon Ball connections, but others just want a good fighting game. Theres a strong and unique foundation in place, but Buyu Retsuden isnt as tight or varied as the Genesis other breakout fighter titles, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. The evergreen nature of these superior franchises ultimately hurt Buyu Retsuden.

NEXT: Nintendo: 10 More Genesis Games We Hope To See Added To Switch Online

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About The Author

Daniel Kurland is a freelance writer, comedian, and critic, who lives in the cultural mosaic that is Brooklyn, New York. Daniels work can be read on ScreenRant, Splitsider, Bloody Disgusting, Den of Geek, and across the Internet. Daniel recently completed work on a noir anthology graphic novel titled, Sylvia Plaths The Bell Noir: A Rag of Bizarre Noir and Hard Boiled Tales and hes currently toiling away on his first novel. Daniels extra musings can be found @DanielKurlansky on Twitter.

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10 Things You Didnt Know About The Sega Genesis Dragon Ball Z Game - Verve Times

Exclusively on the Marvel Unlimited app, MOON KNIGHT: WELCOME TO NEW EGPYT INFINITY COMIC is the Infinity Comics adaptation of MOON KNIGHT (2016) #1-7, and is designed to be read on phone or tablet. Creators Jeff Lemire, Greg Smallwood, and Jordie Bellaire will plunge you into the hidden mindscape of Marc Spector (and his multiple identities), a mired place of truths and lies. As the mercenary Moon Knight, Spector has been fighting criminals and keeping New York City safe for years... or has he? When he wakes up in an insane asylum with no powers and a lifetime's worth of medical records, his whole reason for being is called into question. Something is wrong, but is that something Marc Spector himself? The answers await in New Egypt.

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Moon Knight Faces His Greatest Test... The Truth - Marvel.com

Can we terraform other planets so that the human race can spread around the Solar System? Xander, aged 14, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Of the eight planets in the Solar System, we live on Earth, and for good reasons. It has the perfect conditions for life.

Right now, though, we are sculpting Earths surface by deforestation, and changing its atmosphere by adding carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. These changes have resulted in global warming, which might lead us to worry that in the future, Earth may not be such a good place for us to live.

Curious Kids is a series by The Conversation that gives children the chance to have their questions about the world answered by experts. If you have a question youd like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.com and make sure you include the askers first name, age and town or city. We wont be able to answer every question, but well do our very best.

Perhaps this ability to change a planet could make somewhere else in the Solar System suitable for us to live. This planet engineering is called terraforming.

In our Solar System, the most similar planets to Earth are Mars, which is a bit further from the Sun, and Venus, which is a bit closer to the Sun. However, they are still very different to Earth.

There are a lot of ways in which these planets are different to Earth. One is the gases that are in the atmosphere. Both the atmosphere of Mars and that of Venus are mainly made of carbon dioxide. Neither planets atmosphere contains any amounts of oxygen to speak of, which means that right now, we wouldnt be able to breathe on either planet.

Mars is generally considered the most promising planet to terraform. However, as well as being made mostly of carbon dioxide, the atmosphere on Mars is very thin. It doesnt press down on the planet with the same weight that the atmosphere on Earth does.

This pressure from the atmosphere is what keeps water on Earth liquid so we can drink it, and plants can use it to grow. Nearly all of the water on Mars is ice, except for a bit of water vapour in the atmosphere.

In order to create an atmosphere that we could breathe in, and to create enough pressure to keep water liquid, we would need to pump a lot of air into Mars atmosphere a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen until the atmosphere was about as heavy as Earths.

It might be possible to find this nitrogen and oxygen on Mars, which has soil that has been found to contain significant amounts of nitrate a molecule of one nitrogen and three oxygen atoms.

But there would be problems with doing this, including taking nutrients out of the soil that might be needed to grow plants.

Mars is also a very cold place, with an average temperature of about -60.

To change this, we would need to help its atmosphere trap heat. This is called the greenhouse effect. We could do this by pumping more carbon dioxide and methane into it (methane has been found on Mars). This would warm Mars and melt much of its ice, creating a water cycle like in Earths climate. Mars would have seas, rivers and rainfall like Earth.

Alternatively, we could think about terraforming Venus. The gravity of Venus is quite similar to that on Earth, but for reasons not fully understood it has an atmosphere almost a hundred times heavier than Earths. The weight of the atmosphere pressing down on us would crush us.

To reduce the weight of the atmosphere on Venus to be more like Earths atmosphere, we would need to remove the carbon dioxide and some of the nitrogen.

Unfortunately, if we knew how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on such massive scale, we would be better off doing that on Earth in order to slow down global warming.

Mars and Venus have reached a natural state that differs from Earths. If we turn them into Earth-like planets it means taking them out of balance. Left alone, they would change again. A terraformed Mars or Venus would require constant effort to maintain.

It would be far simpler and easier to build an artificial space colony, big enough to hold a whole ecosystem made up of plants, animals and other forms of life. We could then even possibly travel to another star system, where we might find a planet more like Earth. But we do not have the ability to do this, yet.

Until then, the best kind of terraforming would be to reduce humankinds imprint on Earth.

Originally posted here:

Curious Kids: could we change other planets in the Solar System so we could live on them? - The Conversation UK

Of the eight planets in the Solar System, we live on Earth, and for good reasons. It has the perfect conditions for life.

Right now, though, we are sculpting Earths surface by deforestation, and changing its atmosphere by adding carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. These changes have resulted in global warming, which might lead us to worry that in the future, Earth may not be such a good place for us to live.

Perhaps this ability to change a planet could make somewhere else in the Solar System suitable for us to live. This planet engineering is called terraforming.

In our Solar System, the most similar planets to Earth are Mars, which is a bit further from the Sun, and Venus, which is a bit closer to the Sun. However, they are still very different to Earth.

There are a lot of ways in which these planets are different to Earth. One is the gases that are in the atmosphere. Both the atmosphere of Mars and that of Venus are mainly made of carbon dioxide. Neither planets atmosphere contains any amounts of oxygen to speak of, which means that right now, we wouldnt be able to breathe on either planet.

Mars is generally considered the most promising planet to terraform. However, as well as being made mostly of carbon dioxide, the atmosphere on Mars is very thin. It doesnt press down on the planet with the same weight that the atmosphere on Earth does.

This pressure from the atmosphere is what keeps water on Earth liquid so we can drink it, and plants can use it to grow. Nearly all of the water on Mars is ice, except for a bit of water vapour in the atmosphere.

In order to create an atmosphere that we could breathe in, and to create enough pressure to keep water liquid, we would need to pump a lot of air into Mars atmosphere a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen until the atmosphere was about as heavy as Earths.

It might be possible to find this nitrogen and oxygen on Mars, which has soil that has been found to contain significant amounts of nitrate a molecule of one nitrogen and three oxygen atoms.

But there would be problems with doing this, including taking nutrients out of the soil that might be needed to grow plants.

Mars is also a very cold place, with an average temperature of about -60 degrees Celsius.

To change this, we would need to help its atmosphere trap heat. This is called the greenhouse effect. We could do this by pumping more carbon dioxide and methane into it (methane has been found on Mars). This would warm Mars and melt much of its ice, creating a water cycle like in Earths climate. Mars would have seas, rivers and rainfall like Earth.

Alternatively, we could think about terraforming Venus. The gravity of Venus is quite similar to that on Earth, but for reasons not fully understood it has an atmosphere almost a hundred times heavier than Earths. The weight of the atmosphere pressing down on us would crush us.

To reduce the weight of the atmosphere on Venus to be more like Earths atmosphere, we would need to remove the carbon dioxide and some of the nitrogen.

Unfortunately, if we knew how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on such massive scale, we would be better off doing that on Earth in order to slow down global warming.

Mars and Venus have reached a natural state that differs from Earths. If we turn them into Earth-like planets it means taking them out of balance. Left alone, they would change again. A terraformed Mars or Venus would require constant effort to maintain.

It would be far simpler and easier to build an artificial space colony, big enough to hold a whole ecosystem made up of plants, animals and other forms of life. We could then even possibly travel to another star system, where we might find a planet more like Earth. But we do not have the ability to do this, yet.

Until then, the best kind of terraforming would be to reduce humankinds imprint on Earth.

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Curious Kids: Could we change other planets in the solar system so we could live on them? - The Indian Express

If there is any concept from her books that Palmer hopes will catch on, like robot and cyberspace did for other authors, it is a model of living called a bash'. The word is derived from a Japanese term, ibasho, which means a place where you can feel like yourself. A bash' is any combination of peopleadults, children, friends, couples, polyculeswho have decided to live together as a chosen family. Historically speaking, the nuclear family is a very recent invention, which makes it, in Palmer's view, an unstable isotope. The family of the future, she thinks, will include a far more diverse set of molecular arrangements.

Late last year, in a moment when the pandemic seemed to be ebbing, Palmer invited me to stay at her real-life bash'house, a ninth-floor apartment on a leafy block in Chicago's Hyde Park. When her building was constructed, in the 1920s, the units were pitched as bungalows in the skya vision of modern family living cut short by the stock market crash. An elevator deposited me directly into the apartment, where Palmer greeted me with a stiff hug. She was tall and slightly stooped, with brown hair down to her waist, her presence both monumental and demure, like a weeping angel presiding over a cemetery.

The room we were standing in, which Palmer calls the library, could have been a wing of a Florentine villa. It was flooded with an inviting golden light that illuminated the ripple of thick spines on shelves and the profiles of Grecian busts. At its center was a nest of monitors and servers, a pandemic setup that seemed borrowed from the pages of Palmer's books, where people do futuristic work amid cluttered domesticity. One bash'mate typed away at her computer there. Down the hallway, another practiced trumpet.

Palmer led me to a neighboring room, where the manga, board games, and anime figurines appeared to be quarantined. She reclined on a lumpy chaise draped in Totoro blankets. She looked over my shoulder at a multitiered aquarium and worried aloud about a recent water change. Her father kept dozens of fish tanks, and she had learned just how difficult it is to manage the balance of species, chemicals, and greenery. I'm playing plants on hard mode, she said.

Palmer had spent recent weeks mostly in this recumbent position and would not stray far from it during the next 24 hours. Her blood pressure was chronically low, she explained, and she felt dizzy whenever she stood up. She had just filed the paperwork to take a medical leave from the university. But lying down, her brain worked just fineas you can see, she declared to me later, after a few hours of talking about Norse metaphysics.

Palmer speaks in complete paragraphs and occasionally what feel like complete lectures. (She was happy that I was recording, she said at one point, because it would save her the trouble of writing everything down.) Her voice is like the sound of an English horn, nasal and resonant, a breathy h forming when she says while or where. When she grows excited, pantomiming this or that haughty misreading by an old fogy of some ancient text, it rises in pitch, culminating in an incredulous laugh.

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Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress - WIRED