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Thanks. That's true, though to be fair, the kind of changes needed to terraform Mars also normally happen on geological time scales. That's not to say it can't

Thanks. That's true, though to be fair, the kind of changes needed to terraform Mars also normally happen on geological time scales. That's not to say it can't be done faster, but as others have mentioned, plans to terraform the planet are incomplete if they don't address the issue of solar wind.

ryanmercer 8y ago
>the kind of changes needed to terraform Mars also normally happen on geological time scales. Not when humans are involved. All you need to do is raise the average temperature 5C to create a runaway greenhouse effect on Mars. While that's more than we've done on Earth, what we've done here was entirely on accident. With an actual effort... we could probably do that in a few decades with technology not much more advanced than what we have now. Just doing something like the Russian Znamya project (orbital mirrors), and a little bit of seeding the polar regions with carbon to help absorb sunlight, we could bathe the caps in sunlight 24:37 687 days a year. That combined with creation of 'designer' artificial greenhouse gasses could get you to the runaway process quicker than the natural human lifespan and if you kept generating your own greenhouse gasses/reflecting light to the surface/importing smaller comets (smaller so you're burning the bulk up in the slowly thickening atmosphere instead of impacting and throwing up dust), you could get it there in a few centuries and have the process largely, if not entirely, automated.