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How to Terraform Mars for $10b in 10 years
- cmarschner 4y agoIf we could terraform Mars with this little amount if money - wouldn’t that money be better spent terraforming Earth back to its state from 100 years ago?
- Grimburger 4y agoThe proposed solution in the article would not be pleasant for Earth. Also as someone who has seen firsthand the failed attempts at bioengineering a continent, I'm utterly terrified of what geoengineering could do to a planet. Humans are not good at foresight or the law of unintended consequences.
- ofrzeta 4y ago> the failed attempts at bioengineering a continent what is that?
- Grimburger 4y agoAustralia has a short but storied history of trying to modify it's own environment to be more "old world". Cane toads are probably the most famous case but there's a few dozen other animals that simply can't be taken away now. Rabbits, deers, camels, wild horses destroying native habitats, we've got it all mate :) There's honestly not enough talented hunters on Earth to legally eradicate them all as is the current government directive.
- immmmmm 4y agowe are already in fact: sulfur aerosols from ships is a quite huge negative radiative forcing. sulfur reduction technologies thus lead to an effective warming on top of the rest.
- simonblack 4y agoIf we can't terraform the Earth with all the necessary resources and energy available right on hand, how do we expect to be able to terraform Mars where we have no resources and no energy to do anything? (No matter what the article purports to say.) These schemes are wishful thinking.
- XorNot 4y agoWhy is demolishing an old house and building a new one cheaper then trying to renovate? Because you have no existing structure to preserve, it's a blank slate. It is literally impossible for anything we can do to Mars to make it less habitable. There are no moral dimensions, no existing interests, not even any risks due to failure.
- euroderf 4y agoEarth as vacant, rotting strip mall.
- simonblack 4y agoIf we reckon we can terraform a whole planet to produce a human-livable environment, it should be absolute chicken-feed to reduce the Earth's CO2 levels by about 100 parts per million. The fact that we are unable to do this minor job with all our resources on hand demonstrates that we are not capable of doing larger jobs, such as the Mars job, without resources.
- XorNot 4y agoThis is a fundamental misunderstanding of climate change, and an argument from incredulity [1]. Somewhere between 0 and about 1000 ppm CO2, humans can survive comfortably. Probably a good deal more actually: we're acclimatized to the current levels since they are what persist. Our entire civilization however is built on assumptions and historical patterns of climate and weather, agricultural land distribution, and population density for the current extant weather system. You cannot move millions of people over any less then multi-generational time frame and expect stable and productive society to persist. Economic systems don't know how to handle it: you sell your house for profit, or break even - you don't expect it's end of life to be a dead loss because the land is underwater, or now a desert, or the surrounding town has moved away because the increase in flooding made repairs and insurance in your area too expensive. Climate change is about the fact that human civilization is not sufficiently flexible at our current population level and structure to reasonably adapt to serious changes over a span of about 100 years. Our ancestors dealt with change, but they dealt with it over thousands of years. All of which is to say that there is a serious difference between making the sort of broad strokes, giant changes to a planetary atmosphere needed to terraform it where there are no existing occupants, arable land or other systems that need to be preserved - versus making targeted, collective-action based changes to an inhabited biosphere that must keep working. If Mars was even slightly habitable, and we had people living there...then yeah, the things we can do at relatively low expense we suddenly can't do at all. But Mars is dead. There isn't a historical climate, there's no traditional farmlands, there's no invested human infrastructure. Any change to those things is a good change - we can do giant uncontrolled modifications in roughly the right direction and any outcome is going to be a good one. On Earth, a giant uncontrolled change means you kill somewhere between millions to billions of people due to starvation. It is telling though, that the changes Mars needs in the early stages are also just things we already can do on Earth and are doing too much of. Mars needs to be warmed. Earth needs to not be - though as the article notes, the same solar sail technology would work to provide an effective sun-shade to mitigate the CO2 increase. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
- noselasd 4y agoThe terraforming proposed in the article here is extremely far from doing anything like restoring an existing biosphere on earth. (And it help there are no existing governments or billions of people on Mars to oppose such such a terraforming)
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- philipswood 4y agoOne could use these same sails to reduce incoming solar radiation on earth by using the shadows they cast. One could also use them to increase Earth's albedo by making clouds by heating large bodies of water. I figure this could be a workable solution to control Earth's climate.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThat assumes $10b buys you similar amounts of terraforming on Earth. I suspect that's not the case... and the cost of a mistake is more significant.
- panick21_ 4y agoWe are already spending trillions doing things on earth that Terraform it. And you certainty can't spend 10 billion doing a global impact project on a planet with billions of people on it.
- origin_path 4y agoTwo problems with this idea (and to some extent the proposal in the article), all related to this idea of engineering the climate: 1. The state of the Earth 100 years ago was just a decade before the "dirty 30s" dustbowl years: extended droughts for the whole decade across the USA and Canada. There's no particular reason to aim for that climate! 2. The way CO2 interacts with the climate is too poorly understood to aim for any particular target temperature by adding or removing it. This is true on Earth, at least, but Mars is hardly studied at all. Yes, some climatologists / journalists / politicians claim otherwise but read their papers and you'll find they don't agree on the function that maps CO2 levels to temperature changes: there are lots of different values for the key variable of climate sensitivity used in production models, those models tend to overshoot, observation-based values are lower than the modelling based values they often use and assumed ECS values have been getting wider over time instead of narrower. So if we don't know how to map CO2 changes to temperature changes on Earth, it seems kinda premature to assume we can predict the effects on Mars. Whilst in some senses the Martian atmosphere and climate is simpler than Earth's we don't really know how removing things like water clouds affects things (because we don't really understand their effects at home either).
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- misja111 4y agoThe title says TerraForm Mars but the article itself only proposes a solution for directing more sunlight to the planet's surface. That is a very, very long way from terraforming. To really terraform Mars, it would for instance need an atmosphere with a decent amount of oxygen in it. And there's a slight problem with that: Mars doesn't have a strong magnetic field like Earth does. Which is the reason that Mars' atmosphere was blown away in the first place*. How to solve that? Nobody knows, and this article doesn't even attempt to come up with a solution. * https://eos.org/research-spotlights/how-marss-magnetic-field-let-its-atmosphere-slip-away https://eos.org/research-spotlights/how-marss-magnetic-field...
- zoba 4y agoSome folks at NASA think we can just park an MRI machine's worth of magnetic shield a million miles in front of Mars to fix the issue. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...
- L_226 4y agoYes - exactly this. A very large RTG or even fission powered electromagnet parked at L1.
- WJW 4y agoWouldn't the solar wind continuously impart some momentum on the field generating station, eventually pushing it out of L1? I don't doubt we could generate a good enough field, but the continuous station keeping might be tricky.
- L_226 4y agoProbably, but I can imagine a converted starship being useful here - just keep refueling it every 5 years or whatever.
- 4y ago
- L_226 4y agoA crazy idea I had once to terraform Venus is to basically shoot cyanobacteria laden probes through the atmosphere to seed it, then wait for a few decades. You could probably even engineer the cells to be specifically suited to the environment, temperature etc.
- rwmj 4y agoThis was proposed by Carl Sagan in the 1960s: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1961Sci...133..849S/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1961Sci...133..849S/abstra... https://www.jstor.org/stable/1706530 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1706530
- L_226 4y agoDamn, oh well. Thanks for the link!
- rwmj 4y agoUnfortunately the full article is annoyingly still paywalled (61 years after publication).
- codewithcheese 4y agoGoogle offers this download link for the PDF, works for me: https://canvas.harvard.edu/files/1871005/download?download_frd=1&verifier=n8I9I7C16PlT92wU2zsMNTKAkaugmNTRue9ba4AL https://canvas.harvard.edu/files/1871005/download?download_f...
- bloopernova 4y agoMy crazy Venusian terraforming idea is to attach mass drivers to millions of kuiper and oort cloud objects, and send them hurtling past Venus multiple times. The gravity drag would slowly but surely spin Venus up to a 24 hour day. Once that is achieved, the asteroids and comets would be used to create a moon for Venus, large enough to cause tides. While that is happening, create a large shade between the Sun and Venus. This will freeze the planet's atmosphere onto the ground, allowing processing factories to gather up all the chemicals and start creating soil, water, rivers, oceans, etc etc. It would probably take a while for the vulcanism to die down, but the whole process would take millennia. Like I said, utterly crazy and I'm sure wouldn't work for some flaw I'm not considering. I'd still like to try though!
- rwmj 4y agoAmongst the many problems with this, wouldn't you need to periodically replace the old sails? They would degrade quite quickly from UV exposure and the harsh environment of space.
- timst4 4y agoHow about we find a way ti stop our atmosphere from turning into Mars’ first?
- eloff 4y agoWe're in no danger of that even over ridiculous timescales.
- incrudible 4y agoIt is just a thought experiment. Terraforming earth is the primary objective of that company.
- ben_w 4y agoThe atmosphere of Mars is approximately what would happen if you took the atmosphere of Earth and then systematically removed every atom and molecule that isn't CO2. Not "replaced", removed. That isn't what we've been doing to our atmosphere.
- jacknews 4y agoSo wait, you can put a 1000m2 solar sail at Mars L2 for $2100? Sign me up. Cash on delivery.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoFull marks for ambition, but what's the economic argument for this, or indeed any other teraforming plan. I know it's a civilization saving idea, but in the absence of some killer asteroid on it's way, who's going to pay for this.
- incrudible 4y agoElon Musk. In all seriousness, I do not believe you can achieve the goal in this article with only ten billion dollars, but if you could, the money would be there.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoThe only way Elon Musk would take a punt on it would be if someone else was actively trying it already, i.e., prestige and ego-driven competition to be first. That's what got Mercury, Gemini and the Apollo programs going. Not going to argue that their applications had enormous economic benefits in the end, but that wasn't the original driver. Ten or a hundred million dollars might be enough for a private ego-driven thing, but 10 billion?
- BurningFrog 4y ago$10b is under $2 per person. We could easily pay for it with a GoFundMe.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago$2 is a full days wage for some people in the developing world who have more interest in sorting out their own local environment over some moon shot
- BurningFrog 4y agoYou don't literally have to demand each human donates $2. It just has to get that much on average.
- 4y ago
- DonHopkins 4y agoThe Earth is our mother, but we treat her like Dirt.
- srgpqt 4y agoMaybe if we renamed Earth to something less dirt-sounding, people would start treating it better than dirt? Hmm
- fnordpiglet 4y agoMagnetosphere
- leto_ii 4y agoEvery time I come across posts like this one I think the respective author has spent too much time reading Kim Stanley Robinson and got carried away. I mean, even in the Mars trilogy, which is SF, KSR imagined it would take a few generations to terraform Mars. Doing it in a decade is simply comical...
- fuzzythinker 4y agoHonest question on feasibility. How about killing 2 birds with 1 stone? We need to cool off earth and heat up mars, so why not build dish mirror satellites to redirect just the right amount of sunlight to mars so earth's temperature maintains a 1-2 degree drop from recent years and mars warm enough for it to start the terraform process?