4 ms·

The lack of tectonics would only be a problem if you want your terraforming to be 'one and done'. If you admit that terraforming, even after it's 'done', will

by eru 1y ago

The lack of tectonics would only be a problem if you want your terraforming to be 'one and done'. If you admit that terraforming, even after it's 'done', will require an ongoing maintenance effort, it's simple (but not easy). Eg you can use satellites to spin up an artificial magnetic field to shield against solar wind. However, I suspect terraforming planets is a waste. Far more bang for your buck to build habitats in space from scratch (eg out of asteroids), than to go down another gravity well. You can spin them for artificial 'gravity'. And you can situate them close to earth where logistics of resupply and communication and trade are much more favourable. Otherwise, Mercury is the planet to colonise, not Mars. Mercury gets extremely hot in the sun, and extremely cold at night. So if you dig a bit under the surface it all evens out. Pick the right latitude, and you can get basically any average temperature you feel like, including a comfortable 20C. (Otherwise, even on the surface it's easy to get comfy temperatures, if you bring retractable parasols. Just don't expect to stroll around outside the base.) Mercury has the benefit compared to Mars that solar power is extremely plentiful.

mixmastamyk 1y ago
The Moon has zones like you describe on Mercury, and is a lot closer to colonize. Lack of large magnetic field probably won’t matter as terraforming either is hopeless.
- eru 1y ago
  Yes, you can also do a similar strategy on the moon. You can in principle create artificial magnetic fields. But yeah, you are better off just staying indoors most of the time under a big fat layer of regolith.
kulahan 1y ago
It's worth mentioning that one of the more sane ways to terraform a planet is to redirect specific comets to crash into the planet. It would be "free" in the sense that redirecting an orbit is already actively being studied by NASA for planetary defense reasons. To actually terraform a planet in this method would be unreasonably affordable compared to anything else I've ever heard. edit: Plus, it's nice to split our eggs into multiple planetary baskets. And I suspect people would feel a bit happier living on the surface of a chilly Mars than to become mole people on Mercury, even if it is easier. Maybe summer and winter homes?
- woopsn 1y ago
  I didn't think reasonable really has a definition here. The rendezvous with these comets will take centuries or millennia even if we can get out there and kick them the right way (which is much harder than arranging a miss). Only then do we start terraforming, which takes thousands/millions of years in addition. Who/whatever we're preparing the planet for probably wouldn't be "people" anymore. :)
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Only then do we start terraforming, which takes thousands/millions of years in addition The methods we could realistically launch into in our lifetimes would take thousands of years, not millions (but also not hundreds) [1]. Projects of these timescales have precedent in human history, usually with a healthy dose of religious zeal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars
    - woopsn 1y ago
      My impression was that pulverized rock/iron is not actually "soil", so after forming the atmosphere you need lengthy biochemical processes playing out on the surface. I admit though, I don't know too much about this.
      - b112 1y ago
        I think that we should consider "the future". Yes, it's intangible but consider this; go back 2 centuries and ask someone if they could setup a business concern which produced millions of widgets a year. They'd think you daffy. Now beyond that, ask them to produce any manner of modern device with the precision and high consistency we have. Again, they'd think you mad, and think that such was impossible. Yet here we are. The next stage in our development via LLMs is not about AI helping humans. It's about robotics. Automated assembly. Robots (not Androids) able to interact with the environment and able to problem solve akin to say.. a mouse. Soon, entire factories will be entirely automated. Many almost are. We don't need Von Neumann machines to see this future, but we will certainly have robots capable of building entire factories, collecting resources and processing them, and further building machines to spec. And those machines will be able to self-drive, self-operat autonomously. Anyone playing typical resource games knows about bootstrapping, but once in the asteroid field we're basically resource infinite. Building engines to attach to asteroids, mining asteroids, building factories to create more robots and engines, all of it will be automated. We toil at self-driving cars, yet this same tech enables self-driving robotics of all types. So I honestly think that once we bootstrap in space, this sort of thing can happen fast, fast, fast. Decades to send hundreds of thousands of ice-rich resources to Mars. The soil? Ah, genetic engineering. Really, this is an entirely new field, and frankly is beyond the danger yet benefit of nuclear science. We have the bomb, yet we have nuclear energy and medicine. Well genetics can obviously be far more deadly, and research all over the world, and startups, are already working on employing bacteria and organisms as self-replicating machines to do our bidding. The dangers are in our face, but oh well! So if we presume survival, then once an atmosphere is produced we can seed the planet with organisms which can survive on rock and yet work with a mania to process it. It's OK if we immediately have moss like grass substitute everywhere. As long as it's working its magic, we get continued O2 production, and we can always create a rabbit pet or something that licks moss to survive. Or are tasty. My point is, there are indeed many barriers. But we need to view them with where we will be in decades, not where we are now.
zahlman 1y ago
> So if you dig a bit under the surface it all evens out. Pick the right latitude, and you can get basically any average temperature you feel like It seems hard to believe that this would actually work, even though I understand why it should. Although you have to do the digging starting in extreme temperature conditions without an atmosphere.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> If you admit that terraforming, even after it's 'done', will require an ongoing maintenance effort The Earth hasn't always been hospitale to humans, much less technological civilisation. Chances are, we'll have to do similar "maintenance" at home, too. (Easiest to grasp: deflecting asteroids.) > I suspect terraforming planets is a waste. Far more bang for your buck to build habitats in space from scratch This comes down to how biology works in zero and partial g. One of the most useful set of experiments we could be doing right now, in terms of colonisation, is putting lots of rats and whatnot in tiny space stations and letting their life cycles play out.
- elcritch 1y ago
  Great, and rats will become super adapted to space. Then they'll become endemic to any space habitats humanity builds. Terraforming planets sounds more plausible than not ending up with rats and cockroaches.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > and rats will become super adapted to space That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too. I suspect, unfortunately, we'd have to iron out some kinks first [1]. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8675004/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8675004/
    - littlestymaar 1y ago
      > That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too. Animals in their natural habitat and humans (especially with modern healthcare) are responding very differently to environmental pressure: we would need to accept a high infant and child mortality rate to be able to evolve. And the humans having a much longer lifetime and a much smaller amount of descendant means that even without technology we would evolve orders of magnitude slower than rats.
  - eru 1y ago
    Rats can be pretty tasty. And: if rats can survive somewhere, it's a pretty small step to make it survivable for humans.
RajT88 1y ago
That is some out of the box thinking! I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast.
- eru 1y ago
  > That is some out of the box thinking! Thanks. I'm just parroting some lines I read a decade or so ago on a website that I didn't manage to dig up again. (I wonder if it's still online?) > I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast. Why? What are you afraid of? First, night lasts 88 (earth) days on Mercury. So if you start digging at dusk, you have plenty of time. Second, Mercury's daytime surface temperature is around 430C (~ 800F ~ 700K). We have plenty of materials, like steel, that can withstand these temperatures easily. Even aluminum only melts at 660C. So you make a parasol out of steel and span it over your equipment. Important: you make the parasol just big enough to shade your equipment, but otherwise let it see as much of the sky as possible. Mercury has no atmosphere. So during the day you normally have a small patch of the sky at around 5772K, the sun. The sun has about ~6.6 times the angular area on the sky as from earth. The rest of the sky looks as if it's about 3K in temperature, ie very cold. The effect averages out to Mercury's 700K surface temperature. The parasol itself will attain the same average temperature as the rest of Mercury's surface (because it's exposed to the same conditions). But for anyone in the shade under the parasol will replace a patch of sky at 5772K where the sun used to be with one at only 700K where the parasol now blocks the view. If your parasol is supposed to cover more than just a single point with its shadow, than it needs to be big. From the perspective of each shadow covered point, the parasol will have a bigger angular area than the sun it shades. So you not only replace some 5772K area with 700K, but also some of the previously 3K area with 700K. Overall, you can probably set up things so that you get something like a balmy 15C on average. > I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast. To come back to this: Mercury has lower gravity than earth, so I expect that 'soil' will probably not be as dense?
Melatonic 1y ago
Seems like Mercury could be a good opportunity for automated drones and research

by eru 1y ago

mixmastamyk 1y ago

The Moon has zones like you describe on Mercury, and is a lot closer to colonize. Lack of large magnetic field probably won’t matter as terraforming either is hopeless.

eru 1y ago
Yes, you can also do a similar strategy on the moon. You can in principle create artificial magnetic fields. But yeah, you are better off just staying indoors most of the time under a big fat layer of regolith.

kulahan 1y ago

It's worth mentioning that one of the more sane ways to terraform a planet is to redirect specific comets to crash into the planet. It would be "free" in the sense that redirecting an orbit is already actively being studied by NASA for planetary defense reasons. To actually terraform a planet in this method would be unreasonably affordable compared to anything else I've ever heard. edit: Plus, it's nice to split our eggs into multiple planetary baskets. And I suspect people would feel a bit happier living on the surface of a chilly Mars than to become mole people on Mercury, even if it is easier. Maybe summer and winter homes?

woopsn 1y ago
I didn't think reasonable really has a definition here. The rendezvous with these comets will take centuries or millennia even if we can get out there and kick them the right way (which is much harder than arranging a miss). Only then do we start terraforming, which takes thousands/millions of years in addition. Who/whatever we're preparing the planet for probably wouldn't be "people" anymore. :)
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Only then do we start terraforming, which takes thousands/millions of years in addition The methods we could realistically launch into in our lifetimes would take thousands of years, not millions (but also not hundreds) [1]. Projects of these timescales have precedent in human history, usually with a healthy dose of religious zeal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars
  - woopsn 1y ago
    My impression was that pulverized rock/iron is not actually "soil", so after forming the atmosphere you need lengthy biochemical processes playing out on the surface. I admit though, I don't know too much about this.
    - b112 1y ago
      I think that we should consider "the future". Yes, it's intangible but consider this; go back 2 centuries and ask someone if they could setup a business concern which produced millions of widgets a year. They'd think you daffy. Now beyond that, ask them to produce any manner of modern device with the precision and high consistency we have. Again, they'd think you mad, and think that such was impossible. Yet here we are. The next stage in our development via LLMs is not about AI helping humans. It's about robotics. Automated assembly. Robots (not Androids) able to interact with the environment and able to problem solve akin to say.. a mouse. Soon, entire factories will be entirely automated. Many almost are. We don't need Von Neumann machines to see this future, but we will certainly have robots capable of building entire factories, collecting resources and processing them, and further building machines to spec. And those machines will be able to self-drive, self-operat autonomously. Anyone playing typical resource games knows about bootstrapping, but once in the asteroid field we're basically resource infinite. Building engines to attach to asteroids, mining asteroids, building factories to create more robots and engines, all of it will be automated. We toil at self-driving cars, yet this same tech enables self-driving robotics of all types. So I honestly think that once we bootstrap in space, this sort of thing can happen fast, fast, fast. Decades to send hundreds of thousands of ice-rich resources to Mars. The soil? Ah, genetic engineering. Really, this is an entirely new field, and frankly is beyond the danger yet benefit of nuclear science. We have the bomb, yet we have nuclear energy and medicine. Well genetics can obviously be far more deadly, and research all over the world, and startups, are already working on employing bacteria and organisms as self-replicating machines to do our bidding. The dangers are in our face, but oh well! So if we presume survival, then once an atmosphere is produced we can seed the planet with organisms which can survive on rock and yet work with a mania to process it. It's OK if we immediately have moss like grass substitute everywhere. As long as it's working its magic, we get continued O2 production, and we can always create a rabbit pet or something that licks moss to survive. Or are tasty. My point is, there are indeed many barriers. But we need to view them with where we will be in decades, not where we are now.

zahlman 1y ago

> So if you dig a bit under the surface it all evens out. Pick the right latitude, and you can get basically any average temperature you feel like It seems hard to believe that this would actually work, even though I understand why it should. Although you have to do the digging starting in extreme temperature conditions without an atmosphere.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> If you admit that terraforming, even after it's 'done', will require an ongoing maintenance effort The Earth hasn't always been hospitale to humans, much less technological civilisation. Chances are, we'll have to do similar "maintenance" at home, too. (Easiest to grasp: deflecting asteroids.) > I suspect terraforming planets is a waste. Far more bang for your buck to build habitats in space from scratch This comes down to how biology works in zero and partial g. One of the most useful set of experiments we could be doing right now, in terms of colonisation, is putting lots of rats and whatnot in tiny space stations and letting their life cycles play out.

elcritch 1y ago
Great, and rats will become super adapted to space. Then they'll become endemic to any space habitats humanity builds. Terraforming planets sounds more plausible than not ending up with rats and cockroaches.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > and rats will become super adapted to space That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too. I suspect, unfortunately, we'd have to iron out some kinks first [1]. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8675004/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8675004/
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    > That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too. Animals in their natural habitat and humans (especially with modern healthcare) are responding very differently to environmental pressure: we would need to accept a high infant and child mortality rate to be able to evolve. And the humans having a much longer lifetime and a much smaller amount of descendant means that even without technology we would evolve orders of magnitude slower than rats.
- eru 1y ago
  Rats can be pretty tasty. And: if rats can survive somewhere, it's a pretty small step to make it survivable for humans.

RajT88 1y ago

That is some out of the box thinking! I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast.

eru 1y ago
> That is some out of the box thinking! Thanks. I'm just parroting some lines I read a decade or so ago on a website that I didn't manage to dig up again. (I wonder if it's still online?) > I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast. Why? What are you afraid of? First, night lasts 88 (earth) days on Mercury. So if you start digging at dusk, you have plenty of time. Second, Mercury's daytime surface temperature is around 430C (~ 800F ~ 700K). We have plenty of materials, like steel, that can withstand these temperatures easily. Even aluminum only melts at 660C. So you make a parasol out of steel and span it over your equipment. Important: you make the parasol just big enough to shade your equipment, but otherwise let it see as much of the sky as possible. Mercury has no atmosphere. So during the day you normally have a small patch of the sky at around 5772K, the sun. The sun has about ~6.6 times the angular area on the sky as from earth. The rest of the sky looks as if it's about 3K in temperature, ie very cold. The effect averages out to Mercury's 700K surface temperature. The parasol itself will attain the same average temperature as the rest of Mercury's surface (because it's exposed to the same conditions). But for anyone in the shade under the parasol will replace a patch of sky at 5772K where the sun used to be with one at only 700K where the parasol now blocks the view. If your parasol is supposed to cover more than just a single point with its shadow, than it needs to be big. From the perspective of each shadow covered point, the parasol will have a bigger angular area than the sun it shades. So you not only replace some 5772K area with 700K, but also some of the previously 3K area with 700K. Overall, you can probably set up things so that you get something like a balmy 15C on average. > I would say the key thing with Mercury is the ability to dig fast. To come back to this: Mercury has lower gravity than earth, so I expect that 'soil' will probably not be as dense?

Melatonic 1y ago

Seems like Mercury could be a good opportunity for automated drones and research