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That doesn't seem to hold up empirically. We have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet (namely, Mars), yet we don't have the ability to triviall

by 0x44 16y ago

That doesn't seem to hold up empirically. We have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet (namely, Mars), yet we don't have the ability to trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization.

njharman 16y ago
>trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization. What? They're called "houses". See also, desert irrigation, slash/burn farming, terrace farming, and Lapplanders & Inuit peoples. Edit: But yes, parent's comment that Mars is trivially terraformed is as bonkers as your post.
- sprout 16y ago
  I thought it was clear from my post when I said "Mars-like" that excluded Mars. (Since the subject of debate is extrasolar planets.) And I was speaking in reference to traveling to that planet, which is virtually impossible with current technology. And to expand a little more, I would say a generation ship of some sort would be required to get even to Alpha Centauri, so creating a self-sustaining ecosystem from whole cloth is a prerequisite for traveling to extrasolar planets. Now, you could make an argument that some magic FTL technology will appear, but I still think that terraforming is a trivial problem by comparison.
- 0x44 16y ago
  Houses aren't terraformed colonies, and they're definitely not closed cycle. Anything we would set up on Mars (or a Mars-like planet) would necessarily have to be, because the planet lacks a human friendly biosphere and volatiles with which we could support them. We can't terraform the Sahara into something 200 people could live in for any extended period of time.
  - mdisraeli 16y ago
    Teraforming an entire planet would, in many respects, be simpler than safely teraforming just the Sahara and nothing else at the same time. We don't even need to make Mars better than the Sahara. The primary objective would be to raise the pressure to that at which a pressure suit wouldn't be needed, and the temperature such that that too would meet what we currently can handle on earth. Once we've got that, the rest would be fairly straightforward (I'd argue that atmospheric manipulation is harder than getting life to colonise the regolith).

by 0x44 16y ago

njharman 16y ago

>trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization. What? They're called "houses". See also, desert irrigation, slash/burn farming, terrace farming, and Lapplanders & Inuit peoples. Edit: But yes, parent's comment that Mars is trivially terraformed is as bonkers as your post.

sprout 16y ago
I thought it was clear from my post when I said "Mars-like" that excluded Mars. (Since the subject of debate is extrasolar planets.) And I was speaking in reference to traveling to that planet, which is virtually impossible with current technology. And to expand a little more, I would say a generation ship of some sort would be required to get even to Alpha Centauri, so creating a self-sustaining ecosystem from whole cloth is a prerequisite for traveling to extrasolar planets. Now, you could make an argument that some magic FTL technology will appear, but I still think that terraforming is a trivial problem by comparison.
0x44 16y ago
Houses aren't terraformed colonies, and they're definitely not closed cycle. Anything we would set up on Mars (or a Mars-like planet) would necessarily have to be, because the planet lacks a human friendly biosphere and volatiles with which we could support them. We can't terraform the Sahara into something 200 people could live in for any extended period of time.
- mdisraeli 16y ago
  Teraforming an entire planet would, in many respects, be simpler than safely teraforming just the Sahara and nothing else at the same time. We don't even need to make Mars better than the Sahara. The primary objective would be to raise the pressure to that at which a pressure suit wouldn't be needed, and the temperature such that that too would meet what we currently can handle on earth. Once we've got that, the rest would be fairly straightforward (I'd argue that atmospheric manipulation is harder than getting life to colonise the regolith).