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If 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 ago
The 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 ago
    Australia 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 ago
  we 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 ago
If 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 ago
  Why 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 ago
    Earth as vacant, rotting strip mall.
  - simonblack 4y ago
    If 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 ago
      This 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 ago
The 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)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
philipswood 4y ago
One 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 ago
That 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 ago
We 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 ago
Two 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).

Grimburger 4y ago

The 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 ago
  Australia 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 ago
we 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 ago

If 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 ago
Why 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 ago
  Earth as vacant, rotting strip mall.
- simonblack 4y ago
  If 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 ago
    This 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 ago

The 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)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

philipswood 4y ago

One 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 ago

That 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 ago

We 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 ago

Two 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).