4974

The most efficient way to terraform Mars would be to crash one or more icy Centaur objects into it, which would destroy any colony there. So establishing a Mars colony would probably prevent the terraforming of Mars!

4975

Nobody is going to build a Mars colony in any permanent sense anytime soon. It will be like the ISS, an expensive pilot project that is nowhere near self-sufficiency and will be abandoned after a period. There’s no point to colonization anywhere outside of Earth’s atmosphere at this stage beyond honing the technologies for it.

4976

Why would it destroy the colony? Mar is a big place why couldn’t you crash the objects a long way from the colony?

4977

I mean… there is basically no way we can get an atmosphere on mars with current technology. The amount of water and carbon dioxide needed for this is so much more than what Mars has itself, so we would need to likely crash icy objects into mars to increase the amount of h2o and CO2

But that is not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is keeping the atmosphere. Mars lacks a magnetosphere, so it will constantly have the atmosphere stripped from it by the sun. Our options become, create a magnetosphere (no clue how that could be done) or shield mars from the Sun’s solar winds. This would require a massive orbit locked super-structure to divert solar winds away.

This is stuff that is thousands of years off.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming

Any sort of mars bases are going to be biosphere like pods for the foreseeable millenia.

This is why moon bases make a bit more sense, as they will have to be built the same way, it is a lot closer, a lot easier to land on… etc.

Additionally a moon base makes a really exciting location for launching missions to the rest of the solar system, as it takes a lot less fuel to get off of the moon than earth.

Now… let’s talk about Venus… I think that is the real prize in the goldilocks zone. We can get some bespin like cloud cities going there.

4978

There’s a game that’s all about terraforming Mars that a number of us have played quite a bit in the past year. I’m up to the task. Give me the ball, coach. I’ll just need a Super AI who is also losing her mind.

4979

You just gotta make the Quaid three finger hand thing jeez

4980

Lol

I wanted so much for a terraformed Mars to be a cool thing that would be doable, but I watched a lot of videos from some experts, NASA and ex NASA that were like… yeah… we are thousands of years away.

Venus though man, let’s go. It is so similar to earth in size, gravity… year length. Day length not so much. Big problem remains with a lack of a magnetosphere. … so… thousands of years away too. :(

Earth is pretty lucky there.

4981

We barely have the infrastructure to support life on Earth LOL

4982

No magnetosphere. That’s the real problem.

4983

Wouldn’t Mars losing the atmosphere to the solar wind happen on like a 10^7 year timescale? If we could crash icy bodies into in on 10^3 year timescale, that would give us a long time with a terraformed Mars.

4984

Y’all crazy. Living on Mars or the moon? Strictly a “until the stuff we brought with us runs out.” I mean, there’s a dead easy way to simulate this, just build a hermetically sealed habitat in the Antarctic, then build a bigger one around it that is a vacuum chamber. Until you can make that work, and doing so will take a thousandth of the cost of a Mars habitat, probably not worth it to look farther afield.

4985

I’d do it just to get away from crazy anti-vaxxers and Trumpers lol.

4986

I hear Greenland might finish their terraforming project soon.

4987

I suppose, but that would also probably require technology not available for thousands of years.

4988

Probably not that long, since we are already testing changing the orbit of asteroids: Double Asteroid Redirection Test - Wikipedia

4989

I mean, sure, but I was thinking more of the technology to find the number of asteroids we need, and target them in an effective manner not to hit people on planet. We are talking about a massive infrastructure that would need to be built, and if you are doing that… just build a solar shield.

4990
4991

Put humans in charge of terraforming Mars, and it’s more likely we zoom right past terraforming and wind up venusaforming, just like on earth.

4992
4993