The tech needed to terraform mars is thousands of years away. There isn’t enough water or O2 on Mars to terraform it. As well as a whole host of other issues that we currently have no idea how to fix. (The lack of a magnetosphere is a huge one)
Eh, maybe we figure out a way to mimic
one gigantic magnetic field with a sphere of small component fields. Maybe it’s a swarm of satellites each of which has its own little field and somehow they’re powering themselves with the momentum from the diverted solar wind. Like, the problem is too much kinetic energy input from the sun. And then the other problem is too little energy. All we gotta do is make sure the kinetic energy gets absorbed by the lithosphere, not the atmosphere. Ultimately that could be the swarm using gravity to transfer captured solar wind energy from orbit, through the atmosphere without interference, to the lithosphere.
Like, you know, people think of shit they didn’t think of before. Our engineering scales over time. It scales in scale. We’ll get it done.
First of all, “terraforming” means “to make Earth-like”; climate mitigation is one thing, but if we let things here get bad enough that we have to start thinking about terraforming Terra, we’ve pretty thoroughly screwed the pooch at that point. Ending up with an Earth that is no longer Earth-like would mean that things have gone sideways so badly that I doubt we’d have the industrial capacity or resources to deal with it.
Second, terraforming Mars involves a vastly different process than unfucking our climate and ecosystems. For example, Mars has a very thin atmosphere, which on top of being thin is mostly CO2 and doesn’t have more than trace amounts of oxygen. There’s also no magnetosphere to speak of because its “core dynamo” essentially died when its core cooled down and plate tectonics etc stopped being a thing, meaning that any atmosphere you do manage to generate is continuously getting blasted away by radiation.
Terraforming Mars essentially means pumping more energy and gases into its climate system via whetever method, while the problem here on Earth is that we’ve pumped too much energy into the climate system and we’d have to somehow get it “out” again.
Terraforming Mars essentially means pumping more energy and gases into its climate system via whetever method, while the problem here on Earth is that we’ve pumped too much energy into the climate system and we’d have to somehow get it “out” again.
So because one problem is too much X, and the other problem is too little X, those are distinct problems that don’t inform one another?
Terraforming Mars will be a first step to terraforming Earth. We’ll attempt to create a new biosphere and that will help us understand how ours works.
The tech needed to terraform mars is thousands of years away. There isn’t enough water or O2 on Mars to terraform it. As well as a whole host of other issues that we currently have no idea how to fix. (The lack of a magnetosphere is a huge one)
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Right so we give it a magnetosphere.
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Rather than restarting Mars’s internal magnetic field, could we build a solar or nuclear powered artificial magnetic field?
Nah man what we need is a solar wind-powered artificial magnetic field. Make the problem pay for its own solution.
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Something like a swarm of satellite drones at the Sun-Mars L1 point?
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Eh, maybe we figure out a way to mimic one gigantic magnetic field with a sphere of small component fields. Maybe it’s a swarm of satellites each of which has its own little field and somehow they’re powering themselves with the momentum from the diverted solar wind. Like, the problem is too much kinetic energy input from the sun. And then the other problem is too little energy. All we gotta do is make sure the kinetic energy gets absorbed by the lithosphere, not the atmosphere. Ultimately that could be the swarm using gravity to transfer captured solar wind energy from orbit, through the atmosphere without interference, to the lithosphere.
Like, you know, people think of shit they didn’t think of before. Our engineering scales over time. It scales in scale. We’ll get it done.
I definitely don’t agree with that take.
First of all, “terraforming” means “to make Earth-like”; climate mitigation is one thing, but if we let things here get bad enough that we have to start thinking about terraforming Terra, we’ve pretty thoroughly screwed the pooch at that point. Ending up with an Earth that is no longer Earth-like would mean that things have gone sideways so badly that I doubt we’d have the industrial capacity or resources to deal with it.
Second, terraforming Mars involves a vastly different process than unfucking our climate and ecosystems. For example, Mars has a very thin atmosphere, which on top of being thin is mostly CO2 and doesn’t have more than trace amounts of oxygen. There’s also no magnetosphere to speak of because its “core dynamo” essentially died when its core cooled down and plate tectonics etc stopped being a thing, meaning that any atmosphere you do manage to generate is continuously getting blasted away by radiation.
Terraforming Mars essentially means pumping more energy and gases into its climate system via whetever method, while the problem here on Earth is that we’ve pumped too much energy into the climate system and we’d have to somehow get it “out” again.
So because one problem is too much X, and the other problem is too little X, those are distinct problems that don’t inform one another?