Now show me that moss growing in perchlorate-salted soil at 6 mbar oxygen-free CO2, say, at Mars equator, and you might have a story.
Theorists predict that a particular moss can survive on Mars. Scientists await the experimental opportunity to test that prediction.
We’ll probably fuck up our own planet badly enough that we’ll never actually get the chance to try terraforming Mars
I heard sometime interesting regarding that recently, if we have the ability to terraform Mars, we’ll have the ability to hear on earth. So why not just fix it here where it’s millions of times easier than doing it on Mars.
The solution for Earth isn’t going to be some pie-in-the-sky terraforming (which, I’d like to note, means “to make Earth-like”) project, but changing our psychotic economic system that depends on infinite growth and consistently elevates the worst of us into positions of power.
That’s why I think we’ll never manage to unfuck ourselves. There’s just way too much power invested in keeping things the way they are
Two things:
-
Who says capitalism depends on infinite growth? I often hear that criticism, but I don’t see where it’s coming from? I’ve not heard a capitalist say this, only anti-capitalists. What is it about capitalism that requires this growth?
-
Can you name anything, anywhere, which exists without growing? Doesn’t even have to be alive, just asking for any phenomenon that just exists without growing.
So I guess it’s one point expressed two ways: “Requiring constant growth” is not a valid criticism of our current economic system.
We won’t have the ability to terraform Mars until we try to terraform Mars.
Perhaps Mars’s greatest contribution to our civilization wont be that it hosts cities or future life, but rather simply that it gave us a place to experiment so we could test things once before implementing them here.
So why not just fix it here where it’s millions of times easier than doing it on Mars
¿Por qué no los dos?
Also, I’m not entirely convinced that the problems are analogous. Mars needs to be warmed up, Earth needs to be cooled down. I think a more appropriate challenge would be terragorming Venus.
If we can teraform Venus we can teraform the galaxy. The planet is inhospitable in every single way. We can’t even land spacecraft that last very long. If materials don’t melt from the heat and disintegrate from the atmosphere, then the volcanos ought to do the trick.
It’s also harder to get to Venus than it is Mars.
Why not both?
Although Mars is still a terrible candidate for terraforming. It’s at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, and even if you can solve the temperature, radiation, and atmosphere issues to create a viable ecosystem, it’s still going to cause problems for humans thanks to the low gravity.
Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere.
Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere
The cost would thousand of trillions at least, in fact it may cost more money to do something like that than currently exists. We can barely fund NASA.
Frankly if humanity ever could get together politically to allocate enough resources to do anything like this, Im fairly sure a few greedy billionaires would stick most of those public funds in their pockets, and we’d end up with nothing at the end.
Im sorry to say Im pretty pessimistic about us as a species getting anywhere. Hell we’re 80 year out from WW2 and still struggling to control fascism.
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)
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.
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?
Man, that title. They grew everything in sand. Regolith is filled with concentrated salts, and there’s no liquid water that we know of. At best, this experiment shows that if your inedible moss in a flower pot is briefly exposed to actual Martian conditions, it might survive when you bring it back inside.
