- cross-posted to:
- space@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- space@beehaw.org
If so, this should not preclude us from cleaning up our own planet first!
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@hedge, you’re asking if we should terraform Mars if we haven’t already cleaned up this this planet. It’s a good question but I don’t see a problem here.
Let me borrow a quote from Isaac Arthur, youtuber and president of the National Space Society(in USA), and I’m paraphrasing him: If we have the technology to truly terraform Mars, then lot of that technology will already have been used to stabilize the climate on earth. It’s by orders of magnitude easier to “fix” Earth, than make Mars habitable to humans without the need for Domes, or spacesuits to breathe outside.
So to continue the “cleanup” analogy, it’s like cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster (Chernobyl ) vs cleaning a few drops of water off your kitchen floor.
I think it’s unfortunately a bad idea for three main reasons (ignoring any practical issues with the terraforming):
- the low gravity can’t be changed, and can’t be ignored.
- the lack of a magnetic field means issues with radiation reaching the surface we’re shielded from
- the combination of these two would lead to any atmosphere we could create needing regular top ups, as it would be erroding constantly.
The magnetic field issue is a biggie, and would have to be addressed before any large-scale colonization efforts could begin, but is hypothetically solvable.
Do we even have the ability to terraform Mars?
No, not really. Mars has a very weak magnetosphere, so you need shielding against radiation. Also there is no atmosphere and any atmosphere we put on mars will quickly (in a geological timescale) get blown away by the charged solar winds because there is no magnetic field. So it’s an immense task, and probably a few hundred years out before we have the technology.
That’s what I thought. We would have to figure out a way first to either start Mars’s core spinning again or to artificially create a magnetosphere to be able to keep an atmosphere in place. Neither of which we have the capability to do.
