In this book by Kim Stanley Robinson is a story about the colonization of Mars. It takes place from the 2010's to the 2060's . It has many scientific aspects, which I'll tell you about.
The first instance of science is the Ares, the ship they travel to Mars in. It has a large shield for heat and radiation protection. The ship has eight cylinders, each bent into a hexagon, around the hub which projects from the backside of the shield. Each hexagon is called a Torus, and there are Toruses for gyms, gardens, eating, living, and scientific studies. They have as much room as a large city hotel. One instance of science is on the way to Mars where there is a solar flare, which is highly radioactive. The one hundred people on the ship must huddle in a tank that is closely surrounded by heavy metals and then water beyond that. The radiation is made of subatomic particles which can go between the two H's and the O in a water molecule. Thousands of them get through the shields and two or three of them hit a chromosome, and mutate it.
Another instance of science is when they arrive at Mars, and they must aerobrake to slow down enough to orbit Mars. They use Mars' atmosphere to slow down. They only have a small corridor of a 1 or 2 degree angle in which to hit the atmosphere or else they'll burn up or go flying into deep space.
Once they arrive on the surface, there are machines, tools, and robots of every type. They had been flown up from Earth earlier, in rockets. The most noticeable machines are air miners, which are dirigibles that mine the air for water, oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and carbon dioxide. The air miners are all full of these supplies, and their holding tanks are taken out for use and then they're replaced and they start mining again. Next, they got the robots going, and the robots built factories which made more robots, and so on. The alchemists began making metals, plastics, chemicals, and other substances from the regiloth, the cake-like ground. They also made a new calander, for Martian years. Then they formed aerogel, a transparent, flexible substance that allowed them to build huge dome cities with pressurized, breathable air inside.
On Phobos, a moon where about 12 of the crew had been stationed, they had a train that circumnavigated it, so the inhabitants could experience gravity because it went fast enough to make their feet press against the roof of the train. They also had a room where you could stand in a spot and be reflected millions of times.
Back on Mars, there was a great debate as to wether or not Mars should be terraformed. Terraforming is the process of making Mars an Earth-like ecosystem with liveable conditions. The U. N. decided it would be, and the terraforming began. First the windmills were placed. The scientists put thousands of them, which converted wind into heat, around the planet. The head scientist, Sax Russell, illegally planted hardy types of plants inside, to test if they could survive. First the windmills were placed. Then huge moholes were dug. They were huge circular pits one kilometer across and 7-20 kilometers deep. They added heat from the lithoshpere to the atmosphere. An hour from the mohole made as much heat as 20 years form the windmills. Then asteroids were rocketed into the atmosphere to thicken it. Then they put an organism on the northern polar ice cap that slowly melted it, to put water in the air. During this time, a storm started near a mohole. It gained power from the mohole's updraft, and became a great, billowing mass moving at up to 350 kph. This may seem like a hurricane, but with the thin atmosphere, it couldn't even knock you over. This storm lasted 2 M-years (4 Earth-years).
Eventually the transnationals, the mega-corporations who were more powerful than all but the 10 most powerful countries, got the U. N. to support a constant stream of round-trip ships to Mars. With the population and metal exportation influxes, they had to make a quick way to get things to and from the surface. The transnats funded the movement of an asteroid into aerosynchronous orbit over Pavonis Mons, a mountian. They put robots on it to mine the asteroid and manufacture an elevator to Pavonis Mons. It took about 10 years to manufacture the 37,484 kilometers of cable 10 meters across. Hundreds of elevators were on each side at one time.
In response to the population growth, rebels, called Bogdanovists, after Arkady Bogdanov, the revolution's leader, began puncturing tents, and killing many people. Then UNOMA (United Nations of Mars Association) Police began bombing towns on reports that some rebels were there. Then one day UNOMA Police fired on a town from Phobos and killed a fow of the First Hundred. Nadia Cherneshevsky, Arkady's wife, got so mad that she typed MANGALA on a radio transmitter. Since Arkady was the head of Phobos during the first years, he installed a special system on it. When she typed in the code, Phobos came crashing down towards Mars, and a few chunks of it narrowly missed her location.
Then one day later on, an explosion occured on Clarke, the asteroid which was anchored to the space elevator. Clarke went hurtling out into deep space, and the cable began a fall towards the planet. It started out slowly, but quickly gained speed as gravity worked on it. Near the end the cable was a glowing white slit in the sky, and it shattered on impact. It moved from horizon to horizon in less than a few seconds. It created sonic booms which knocked out towns within a ten kilometer radius. After that more explosions followed, but not many were known of, because the information Net was knocked out. Many explosions caused massive underground aquifers to discharge. These aquafirs were so powerful that their flow was 100 Amazons on the medium-sized ones. This could be sustained for months on end. As the river moved, it would freeze and then burst from pressure in a cycle. In the Nachoan Era there were floods that formed a 5,000 kilometer long canyon system called Valles Marineris. Then at the end of the book, a hidden colony is found under the southern polar ice cap. It is a dome 250 meters high and five kilometers in diameter with a lake.
The science I'll be discussing is biotechnology. Biotechnology is a collection of scientific techniques that use living cells and their molecules to make products or solve problems. In this case it is used to make biota for Mars' harsh conditions. It is used, also, to make an age treatment which has allowed the main characters to live until their 100's and still be highly active. The full potential hasn't been unveiled yet. It is also used to grow huge plants, which make large quantities of fruit.
Uses now include faded blue jeans from dye-cutting enzymes, laundry detergent, insulin, pregnancy tests from manipulating cells in the immune system, antibiotics, vaccines, and sewage treatment. They are used in almost every industry.
Biotechnology started in 1750 B.C. when the Sumerians brewed beer. In 500 B.C. the Chinese used the first antibiotic. From then until about the 1930's many things were discovered, like E. coli and chromosomes. Then people began to produce things like hybrid DNA-RNA, monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, and most recently, cloned multicellular organisms.
The dangers of biotechnology are: new toxins and allergens in food, contaminated water from crop spraying, creation of herbicide-resistant weeds, diseases over species barriers, disturbance in ecological balance, and potentially harmful side-effects that can never be recalled.
The uses of biotechnology would certainly be attainable if we had as much technical and biological knowledge as the people in the book. For instance, we are already creating big plants with lots of fruit on them, and organisms which can live in harsh environments. I believe we will be as far or farther in biotechnology by the 2050's than they were in the book.
