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I’m not sure I understand why you think this would take 10’s of thousands of years to yield benefit. The most important benefit is shielding the planet surface

I’m not sure I understand why you think this would take 10’s of thousands of years to yield benefit. The most important benefit is shielding the planet surface from solar radiation and cosmic rays. This would be immediately beneficial to anyone living on the surface and would be essential in any terraforming effort of any duration, long or short. There are proposals that terraform mars in the span of a few generations (orbital solar powered large lasers evaporating the iron oxide and melting the ice for instance). But even without terraforming making the surface less hostile has immediate benefits.

Loughla 3y ago
All of the terraforming business always seems like just digging around in your belly button. We can't even fix the problems on our first planet. How (and why) can we even begin to think about another one?
- wiseowise 3y ago
  There’s a lot why’s to do that. How is the question.
- c22 3y ago
  I guess if we do develop terraforming technologies I'd rather we test them on Mars first.
- mortehu 3y ago
  We have solved countless problems on our planet. What are "the problems" you are thinking of?
  - sgu999 3y ago
    Green house gases emissions and the collapse of biodiversity are two reasonably conservative examples
    - simondotau 3y ago
      We have solutions for those problems on Earth, the difficulty is implementing the solutions. And that's a political and sociological problem, not an engineering and logistics problem. The engineers and logistics people can work on Mars while the politicians and sociologists work on Earth. (Not to mention that solving Mars problems are likely to yield novel solutions to Earth problems, ones which we might never discover without thinking about things with an unusual perspective.)
      - sgu999 3y ago
        Given the radical changes that a carbon neutral and eco-friendly modern civilisation would require, reducing that to technical problems in each field is really not helpful. By and large we know how a sustainable society could work, we are simply unable to implement it at the right scale. I wouldn't call that "solved".
        simondotau 3y ago
        Your second sentence is correct and invalidates your first sentence. We don't need any "radical changes," we only need to implement existing solutions at the right scale. Once we have enough solar panels, wind turbines and battery cells, a tipping point is reached where the cost of renewable energy plummets so hard that fossil fuel energy becomes catastrophically uneconomical. Economics will take care of the "radical change." These existing solutions are already on an exponential growth curve and cost decline. They have been for ages. We're on the right path right now; sadly most people find it difficult to see ahead beyond linear growth. --- [To be clear, here I am responding to the challenge of bringing greenhouse gases emissions to a level which ends the rise of global CO2. It's a solved problem with lag time. The collapse of biodiversity is the political and sociological problem I referred to in a previous post.]
        sgu999 3y ago
        > We don't need any "radical changes," we only need to implement existing solutions at the right scale Scale is the problem. > Once we have enough solar panels, wind turbines and battery cells, a tipping point is reached where the cost of renewable energy plummets so hard that fossil fuel energy becomes catastrophically uneconomical The radical change I'm referring to is the drastic cut in energy consumption to make renewables work at our current scale. I suggest you have a look at the latest IPCC report [0]: we won't be carbon neutral without reducing our energy consumption, not "simply" replacing a source by another for each use, reducing it. That means doing less things, which no one plans on doing. Not even to mention that some non negligible parts of our economy don't have a technical solution yet, the aviation industry for instance. > a solved problem with lag time I don't understand what you mean by that as it seems we are not on the right trajectory to avoid a catastrophic outcome... [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/
  - nayuki 3y ago
    I can think of a few: Petroleum replaced whale hunting, cars replaced horses pooping on streets, we finally eliminated lead in gasoline, we significantly reduced acid rain (NOx and SOx), we eliminated CFCs once they were shown to damage the ozone layer.
- bsder 3y ago
  > We can't even fix the problems on our first planet. How (and why) can we even begin to think about another one? For precisely this reason? We can't stop asteroid impacts. We can't stop a well-adapted plague, either (Ref: Covidiots). We have dictators with nuclear weapons that we can't stop. etc. Having a self-sufficient colony somewhere other than Terra is almost certainly the first step toward avoiding a "Great Filter" event.
- api 3y ago
  > We can't even fix the problems on our first planet. How (and why) can we even begin to think about another one? By this logic we never go. There will always be giant seemingly insurmountable problems. If we solve climate change there will just be another, and another, and another. Life is a never ending fight against entropy. There will never be a time when we have it all figured out. Secondly it’s entirely possible that the stuff we learn trying to survive off world will be applicable to making life here more sustainable. It could force us to figure out how to run industry efficiently with a very high percentage of material recycled, and how to run an economy without a lot of low entropy ecosystem to draw from. Also no fossil fuel. They don’t exist. We’d only have nuclear and solar really.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Because life deserves redundancy?

Loughla 3y ago

All of the terraforming business always seems like just digging around in your belly button. We can't even fix the problems on our first planet. How (and why) can we even begin to think about another one?

wiseowise 3y ago
There’s a lot why’s to do that. How is the question.
c22 3y ago
I guess if we do develop terraforming technologies I'd rather we test them on Mars first.
mortehu 3y ago
We have solved countless problems on our planet. What are "the problems" you are thinking of?
- sgu999 3y ago
  Green house gases emissions and the collapse of biodiversity are two reasonably conservative examples
  - simondotau 3y ago
    We have solutions for those problems on Earth, the difficulty is implementing the solutions. And that's a political and sociological problem, not an engineering and logistics problem. The engineers and logistics people can work on Mars while the politicians and sociologists work on Earth. (Not to mention that solving Mars problems are likely to yield novel solutions to Earth problems, ones which we might never discover without thinking about things with an unusual perspective.)
    - sgu999 3y ago
      Given the radical changes that a carbon neutral and eco-friendly modern civilisation would require, reducing that to technical problems in each field is really not helpful. By and large we know how a sustainable society could work, we are simply unable to implement it at the right scale. I wouldn't call that "solved".
      - simondotau 3y ago
        Your second sentence is correct and invalidates your first sentence. We don't need any "radical changes," we only need to implement existing solutions at the right scale. Once we have enough solar panels, wind turbines and battery cells, a tipping point is reached where the cost of renewable energy plummets so hard that fossil fuel energy becomes catastrophically uneconomical. Economics will take care of the "radical change." These existing solutions are already on an exponential growth curve and cost decline. They have been for ages. We're on the right path right now; sadly most people find it difficult to see ahead beyond linear growth. --- [To be clear, here I am responding to the challenge of bringing greenhouse gases emissions to a level which ends the rise of global CO2. It's a solved problem with lag time. The collapse of biodiversity is the political and sociological problem I referred to in a previous post.]
        sgu999 3y ago
        > We don't need any "radical changes," we only need to implement existing solutions at the right scale Scale is the problem. > Once we have enough solar panels, wind turbines and battery cells, a tipping point is reached where the cost of renewable energy plummets so hard that fossil fuel energy becomes catastrophically uneconomical The radical change I'm referring to is the drastic cut in energy consumption to make renewables work at our current scale. I suggest you have a look at the latest IPCC report [0]: we won't be carbon neutral without reducing our energy consumption, not "simply" replacing a source by another for each use, reducing it. That means doing less things, which no one plans on doing. Not even to mention that some non negligible parts of our economy don't have a technical solution yet, the aviation industry for instance. > a solved problem with lag time I don't understand what you mean by that as it seems we are not on the right trajectory to avoid a catastrophic outcome... [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/
- nayuki 3y ago
  I can think of a few: Petroleum replaced whale hunting, cars replaced horses pooping on streets, we finally eliminated lead in gasoline, we significantly reduced acid rain (NOx and SOx), we eliminated CFCs once they were shown to damage the ozone layer.
bsder 3y ago
> We can't even fix the problems on our first planet. How (and why) can we even begin to think about another one? For precisely this reason? We can't stop asteroid impacts. We can't stop a well-adapted plague, either (Ref: Covidiots). We have dictators with nuclear weapons that we can't stop. etc. Having a self-sufficient colony somewhere other than Terra is almost certainly the first step toward avoiding a "Great Filter" event.
api 3y ago
> We can't even fix the problems on our first planet. How (and why) can we even begin to think about another one? By this logic we never go. There will always be giant seemingly insurmountable problems. If we solve climate change there will just be another, and another, and another. Life is a never ending fight against entropy. There will never be a time when we have it all figured out. Secondly it’s entirely possible that the stuff we learn trying to survive off world will be applicable to making life here more sustainable. It could force us to figure out how to run industry efficiently with a very high percentage of material recycled, and how to run an economy without a lot of low entropy ecosystem to draw from. Also no fossil fuel. They don’t exist. We’d only have nuclear and solar really.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Because life deserves redundancy?