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Imagine that a significant number of people went, say, to Mars. Now they are there, and suddenly they want better conditions. Could it trigger crash program in

by avmich 2y ago

Imagine that a significant number of people went, say, to Mars. Now they are there, and suddenly they want better conditions. Could it trigger crash program in terraforming to improve the conditions, so that mere decades away Mars would be more hospitable? What money couldn't do here?

adastra22 2y ago
The framing of the question is odd. It makes the colonists seem passive spectators. What is holding back the terraforming of Mars is not money but human agency--people living there and doing the work. The people who want to go, want to take part in this endeavour. They're not going to go there and then sit on their behinds and lobby for better living conditions; they're going there to do the work themselves of building a 2nd garden of Eden.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  No, the thing stopping the terraforming of Mars is any realistic idea of how to do it. Maybe in a few hundred years we'll have the technology to terraform a barren, cold, almost atmosphere-less planet to make it livable to humans, but not before then. And it will still take 1000 years to reach a livable state after you start. And however this may be achieved, it definitely doesn't require humans living on Mars to do it. In fact, it is almost certainly going to only be possible if you don't have people there already, with life support systems adapted to the old status quo.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Terraforming has been well studied and we certainly have very good ideas for how to accomplish it. It is a centuries-long process, and no one is claiming otherwise, but not some impossible fever dream. The biggest gains are from rising temperatures, and global warming is something we actually have some experience with, after all. I don't see how you expect it to be accomplished remotely though, without people on-site to build things, repair things, and most importantly create and expand local infrastructure so as to not need imports from Earth.
    - piva00 2y ago
      Terraforming is a pipe dream, just the atmospheric pressure issue alone is way out of reach. How do you expect people to increase the atmospheric pressure of a whole planet by 80k Pascal? Do you have an idea of the scale that is, to bring all that gas into a whole planet's atmosphere and make it stay there without being blown away by solar winds since Mars doesn't have a magnetic field? It's not "well studied", there are a few studies on how it might be accomplished but all of it is unproven and untested, no one has ever done anything close to terraforming a planet, reality has a pesky way of getting in the way of untested proposals.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      No, terraforming is not well studied at all, to any extent. There are some fun papers on it, but that's it. Global warming on Earth is not comparable to terraforming a planet, it's like saying that we know how to heat the oceans of Titan, after all we can heat our baths every winter here. Even if we somehow fixed Mars' atmosphere (extremely difficult, but there are at least some ideas), we won't fix anything else. Mars is much farther away from the Sun, so it's always going to be much colder, whatever else happens to it. And it's covered in toxic dust and barren rock, that there is no realistic way to convert to livable useful soil. We should probably first "terraform" the deserts of Earth, as it will have much more value, and would be a good test. And of course, Mars has nowhere near enough water to sustain a significant human population + industry (the whole quantity of water ice is estimated to be similar to the great lakes). And most likely there is no natural water cycle that works at a human scale, due to the distinct lack of massive oceans. And related to the remote part: robots.

by avmich 2y ago

adastra22 2y ago

The framing of the question is odd. It makes the colonists seem passive spectators. What is holding back the terraforming of Mars is not money but human agency--people living there and doing the work. The people who want to go, want to take part in this endeavour. They're not going to go there and then sit on their behinds and lobby for better living conditions; they're going there to do the work themselves of building a 2nd garden of Eden.

tsimionescu 2y ago
No, the thing stopping the terraforming of Mars is any realistic idea of how to do it. Maybe in a few hundred years we'll have the technology to terraform a barren, cold, almost atmosphere-less planet to make it livable to humans, but not before then. And it will still take 1000 years to reach a livable state after you start. And however this may be achieved, it definitely doesn't require humans living on Mars to do it. In fact, it is almost certainly going to only be possible if you don't have people there already, with life support systems adapted to the old status quo.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Terraforming has been well studied and we certainly have very good ideas for how to accomplish it. It is a centuries-long process, and no one is claiming otherwise, but not some impossible fever dream. The biggest gains are from rising temperatures, and global warming is something we actually have some experience with, after all. I don't see how you expect it to be accomplished remotely though, without people on-site to build things, repair things, and most importantly create and expand local infrastructure so as to not need imports from Earth.
  - piva00 2y ago
    Terraforming is a pipe dream, just the atmospheric pressure issue alone is way out of reach. How do you expect people to increase the atmospheric pressure of a whole planet by 80k Pascal? Do you have an idea of the scale that is, to bring all that gas into a whole planet's atmosphere and make it stay there without being blown away by solar winds since Mars doesn't have a magnetic field? It's not "well studied", there are a few studies on how it might be accomplished but all of it is unproven and untested, no one has ever done anything close to terraforming a planet, reality has a pesky way of getting in the way of untested proposals.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    No, terraforming is not well studied at all, to any extent. There are some fun papers on it, but that's it. Global warming on Earth is not comparable to terraforming a planet, it's like saying that we know how to heat the oceans of Titan, after all we can heat our baths every winter here. Even if we somehow fixed Mars' atmosphere (extremely difficult, but there are at least some ideas), we won't fix anything else. Mars is much farther away from the Sun, so it's always going to be much colder, whatever else happens to it. And it's covered in toxic dust and barren rock, that there is no realistic way to convert to livable useful soil. We should probably first "terraform" the deserts of Earth, as it will have much more value, and would be a good test. And of course, Mars has nowhere near enough water to sustain a significant human population + industry (the whole quantity of water ice is estimated to be similar to the great lakes). And most likely there is no natural water cycle that works at a human scale, due to the distinct lack of massive oceans. And related to the remote part: robots.