We have some great minds on here and it'd be good if we collectively used them for good. As Mars is our next step to being a multi-planetary species, it requires significant terraforming to become habitable. Current estimates require several centuries to a millennia. With our current levels of science and understanding, how could we terraform Mars in our lifetime?Current steps include:* Establishing a magnetic field to protect from solar winds* Melt the icecaps to release CO2 from the dry ice* Bore holes to release more greenhouse gasses* redirect comets from the main asteroid belt to oxygenate the planet
the answer is "don't". Mars is Vesta with delusions of importance. More interested in shielding Venus, letting the CO2 rain out, and adding water.-central to the solar system-8.7 m/s2 gravity-regular Hohmann windows to Earth that are natural cyclers
>>17011750I think first it’s better to make Mars habitat rather than terraform Mars and then we can go on to terraform Mars if we want
>>17011761>More interested in shielding Venus, letting the CO2 rain out, and adding water.Aren't the problems harder to solve with venus? - Surface pressure is 92 atmospheres, equivalent to being almost 900 metres underwater.- Temperatures are hot enough to melt lead.- The atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide.- Clouds contain concentrated sulphuric acid.- Water is essentially absent.To terraform Venus, you would somehow need to:- remove or chemically bind roughly 1020 kg of CO2- cool the planet by hundreds of degrees- introduce enormous amounts of water- perhaps speed up its extremely slow rotationThose are civilisation-scale engineering problems.
>>17011796Maybe the solution to venus is terraforming mars. Hear me out. If we could transport the CO2 from venus, effectively cooling venus and helping to warm mars. Removing the CO2 and potentially neutralising the sulphuric acid in the atmosphere could reduce the surface pressure. Siphon heat from venus to warm mars
>>17011796Mars and Venus are roughly equal in the tech required to terraform them. Venus is larger job industrially speaking but it's just more shoveling vs coming up with a new way to shovel. Neither Mars or Venus can be terraformed within our lifetimes because we lack space based infrastructure required to even start something like that.
>>17011849Do I have this right>mars: a ton of redirected asteroids and a bunch of plants pumping something into the air>venus: superstructure at venus-sun L1 point for shade, a couple ice asteroids, then a bunch of plants scrubbing shit from the airYou could probably just compare total energy on moving around asteroids to find what is easier
I still don't think there's a way to do much about the fact that Mars' atmosphere is about 1000th the pressure of Earth's, because Mars is simply not massive enough to keep hold of a thicker one. Yeah you can melt the ice caps and boil off a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere or whatever but it's just going to escape into space like most of the atmosphere did millions of years ago.You don't need to terraform Mars anyway, just build decent habitats. Build big domes and pressurise them. Why do we want Mars to be another Earth? That's boring.
>>17011892We won't be significantly changing the spin of a planet for hundreds of years. Mars is the obvious choice. At least it has some water on it
>>17011898Atmosphere loss would take thousands of years. Also there is nothing wrong with the mass of mars just the fact that it has no magnetic field.
>>17011954Mars and Venus can both be solved (and easier travelled) by Birch rings in low orbit. Mars' Birch ring can double as a shield. Venus' Birch ring doubles as a shield and as a HEAT shield.Mars might be slightly easier here because it has a Phobos already. Material to build an orbital ecosystem at Venus must be imported.
>>17011892On Venus you have to eject most of the atmosphere after it's frozen or at least somehow bind it into some kind of carbonate or plastic or something. And yes you could essentially boil it down to energy cost of moving material and Venus would need more stuff moved but industrially the task is in the same magnitude because both would require space based energy and automation infra which makes the problem essentially a trivial one, you just have to bootstrap little longer for Venus.
>>17011998I've never come across birch rings before but it's fascinating. It removes all the challenges of terraforming by having artificial structures orbiting planets. In megastructure theory, there is no single structure called a "Birch ring." Instead, this refers to two distinct but related concepts proposed by British engineer Paul Birch: planetary-scale Orbital Rings used to engineer artificial worlds, and the theoretical Birch Planet (often called a Birch World), which is a gargantuan cosmic structure built around a supermassive black hole.1. Paul Birch's Orbital RingsIntroduced in 1982, an Orbital ring is a proposed megastructure encircling a planet.How it works: A massive ring of cables or streams of iron/steel orbits the planet slightly faster than orbital velocity. The resulting centrifugal force supports stationary platforms (or "skyhooks") above the surface.Applications: Because the ring doesn't touch the ground, materials can be launched into space much cheaper and faster than with traditional rockets, using electromagnetic acceleration.Planet Building: Birch proposed that by building multiple orbital rings side-by-side, civilizations could eventually build an entire artificial sphere or shell around a planet, star, or gas giant.2. The Birch Planet (Shell World)Coined by futurist Isaac Arthur, this theoretical superstructure is the largest possible artificial habitat compatible with the laws of physics.How it works: It is a massive, continent-sized shell world built around an ultramassive black hole. Instead of traditional gravity, it utilizes the extreme gravity of the black hole at its core to create Earth-like conditions on the surface.Scale: A Birch planet could theoretically reach a diameter of one light-year. To construct it, a civilization would have to disassemble hundreds of billions of stars to harvest enough material. It provides a surface area vastly larger than all naturally occurring planets in an entire galaxy combined.
>>17011750Terraform mars
>>17011761I agree, Mars is a shithole and current projections for terraforming it well enough to not have to rely on loads of tech put it way later than we will have the leave the galaxy. Best to just extract whatever we can. Someone may come up with a way to simulate the galaxies conditions and keep the stars burning eventually but for now the pan is leaving
>>17011750We don't, because Mars colonizers are retarded. Terraforming it is pointless in practice. Building habitats on it is 10x pointless. Mars isn't gonna be self-sufficient, a cataclysm or war on Earth will kill Mars colony. Any terraforming processes will take centuries even if we assume 100% energy efficiency (just calc how much energy will be needed to get atmos on the entire planet, or to grow enough biomass for it to become self-sustainable). All of that will have to be provided by Earth. Any equipment failures will require crap to be shipped from Earth because good luck setting up heavy self-sufficient industry there. We don't even know what we can and can't dig up on Mars and getting geological data will take decades with bots even if we spam them.Terraforming can be done on Earth (Sahara etc). There are vast habitable areas that have very little population (Siberia). Any resources can be gained by drilling deeper easier and cheaper than wasting energy on achieving escape velocities and screwing with asteroids/comets. Any water problems are easier to solve via desalinisation. Any cataclysms are easier to survive in shelters on Earth than in shelters on Mars (and it's gonna have to be habitats, because see above, no terraforming).There is no resource shortage. The Earth is not overpopulated. The Earth is undermanaged, and sending people on Mars won't solve anything.
>In or lifetimeAs a first step, Invest in life extension and age reversal. Vastly easier than terraforming an entire planet.Now the parameters of the hypothetical become more favorable.However,I'll slightly twist your goal and say just stripmine Mars and build a huge number of space habitats out of it, like O'Neill cylinders. Simply better and more efficient by multiple metrics. Humanity would be more decentralized and distributed so harder to wipe out is some of them.
>>17011796At least it has surface pressure, and a terraformed Venus would have some advantages over the Earth like copious amounts of solar energy. Mars is just a distant turd without an atmosphere. As far as building livable habitats outside the Earth goes though, the first thing we should do is build a livable habitat on the moon. It's almost the same as settling Mars except it's close enough that it's actually feasible to start right now.
>>17011750You need 3d metal/nonmetal liquid droplet printers that can print out of martian materials.You need to make a design that can print itself and self replicate given the labor energy and materials are supplied.You need a 'worker' unit, some type of robot built using the printed parts. Use that robot to collect resources, assemble more bots from printed parts, and scale the printing operation across the surface of the planet.Print solar cells and thermal heatsinking structures and materials all across the surface of the planet.If you are really smart you come up with a robot that has the 3d printer built into itself, and can collect resources needed to self replicate while terraforming.Then you make a 4d virtual map of mars, and plot out the robot actions through space and time. You can queue instructions ahead of the transmission delay between earth and mars if you require human interactivity to accomplish the goals. Train a generation of gamers to build the perfect mars colony on your behalf, and use them to start the initial colonial effort. Then you pivot towards more and more ai directed robotic activity as you collect training data from the human operators. Pay out a credit based on peoples capabilities to produce value within the network, and give passive income incentives from successfully automating supply chain industrialization tasks to programmers and ai trainers.Once successful on Mars, you replicate the whole process across every moon in our solar system, and become a quadrillion.
I could do it with AI
>>17011750Everyone forgets how a few generations of living in a iow G environment are going to affect the muscle mass, bone density and circulatory systems of the new MartiansReturning to Earth would probably be debilitating
>>17013152My theory is that Mars is going to be a prison planet. Someone doing time there for a year is not going to be a fair fight for an Earther or a military interplanetary Chad training in simulated Earth gravity (those prison guards on a station at Deimos).
>>17011750Step 1 is just a tiny bit more difficult than the rest
>>17011750>restart core (electromagnetic conduction probably required)>terraform newly imported or generated retained atmosphere>Import sea>Seed with life>???profitOne lifetime is completely out of the question without massive amounts of energy/instantaneous travel and transport of water. It's way too impractical unless humans cooperate on a scale never before imagined. Short answer to that is to kill all browns (incompatible with intelligent polite society, obviously) and segregate on basis of legitimate interests, working out resources and settling on responsible logistics concerning acquisition and processing as well as waste management.Wake me up when that happens
>>17014198*upon a second thought, induction would be a clumsy method with a much higher energy draw than needed. Resonance would be a much better method with lower barrier to entry for such a goal.
>>17011892The energy and time requirements to terraform Venus are enormous, far beyond what our species can dream of right now. Much easier to colonize the habital zone in the upper atmosphere, Earth-like gravity gives it a big advantage over Mars.As for Mars itself, the challenge would still be enormous, and the low gravity has no known solution, but it would take less time and energy overall.Radiation is a more solveable issue, but even then Venus is superior as its atmosphere will do most of the work even high up.
>>17011750reignite mars inner core
planets lol
>>17014257I'd rather take a planetoid like Ceres and plug it with a dozen O'Neill Cylinders
>>17011750by turning earth into a wasteland?
