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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

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

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