/sci/ - Science & Math

terraforming mars are you retarded or something?

>>3087920

fly to an earth-like planet.
I mean You didn't said that we have to fly fast, we can do that slow and steady. sure it would take a few thousand years or more but who cares?

current technology? both are impossible in any kind of timeframe that humans can expect to exist in.

Note: if we could terraform Mars, we could just fix Earth

>>3087935
I think there's no way a generation ship could fly that long without a fatal hardware failure.

>>3087944
who said anything about passengers?

>>3087941
we should start terraforming mars now cause by the time its ready we may need the extra room. there's no reason we cant start sending unmanned rockets with supplies, even if its just a small start, cause it will take 500 years.

>>3087941
we should start terraforming mars now cause by the time its ready we may need the extra room. there's no reason we cant start sending unmanned rockets with supplies, even if its just a small start, cause it will take 500 years.

>>3087920
Definitely terraforming mars; could easily make it habitable for terrestrial life in a few hundred years, and with advances in life extension it might just be possible that humans alive today could live to see that.

also inb4 no magnetosphere, a good atmosphere shields from most solar radiation. And it would take hundreds of millions of years for the atmosphere to bleed off into space from solar wind. Enough time for us to either invent an artificial magnetosphere, or just gradually replenish the atmosphere with low-level, constant terraforming processes.

pic related

>>3087946
Still, hardware failure. You can harden electronics to cosmic rays for a while, but not forever.

If you're going to another star, the CPU of the probe would need to be complex enough to make a LOT of decisions, and powerful enough to send a signal back, and that's a lot of power. You couldn't reprogram it at all once it got past the ort cloud.

It would still need lots of fuel and power, and solar cells wouldn't do shit outside our solar system.

Can you imagine a battery made out of -anything- that could last 100 years?

Better aimiing to venus. Mars has too little mass to sustain an atmosphere like ours.

We should smash Mars into Venus, then use Mercury for a moon.

>>3088064
Mars already has an atmosphere, albeit a thin one. We know it had a much thicker atmosphere in the past, but it was gradually eroded away by the solar wind. Venus would take a shitfuckton more time and resources to terraform then mars; It's certainly possible, but we should start with mars first.
Mars's gravity has little to do with it's atmosphere retention; Titan has gravity about half that of mars, yet has an atmosphere 1.5 times denser then earth.

>>3088115

I recognize how utterly stupid this is, but... All the same, that actually sounds kind of cool.

>>3088138
Smashing would play a big role in any hypothetical terraforming of Venus. We'd have to smash it with chunks of ice over and over again to introduce enough water.

I think the REAL fun (for the biochemist that is me) of terraforming is trying to create a biosphere. What microorganisms do you introduce? What are your decomposers? What fungi do you introduce? Do you introduce potentially pathogenic microorganisms? Moving onto plants and animals, what do you choose for the biosphere? You know the rough temperature and moisture gradients in a given area so now you construct whole ecosystems.

Coral reefs or kelp forests? Reptiles or mammals? Do we bother introducing sharks and other top predators? Do we make this biosphere human-centric and pleasing or do we go for raw utility?

>>3088182

There's a difference between ice bombardment and just hurling Mars into it. The former doesn't turn the entire planet into a big ball of magma and vent off atmosphere into space, along with all the other problems that would cause ("In other news, Paris is no more. The city of lights was snuffed out today, as...").

Still, Venusian biospheres would be interesting. The surface temperature for a terraformed Venus would likely be quite warm, after all, and we all know what warm, wet environments do for biodiversity.

And there isn't even a reason for "one or the other". Venus will likely be a very watery planet once its atmosphere condenses, with lots of islands and archipelagos (and we can always make more once it's established). That means a LOT of potential ecosystems.

>>3088029
You don't understand, with any kind of current means, I didn't mean it will take a long time as in a couple generations, I meant millions of years.

>>3088251
I'm not the guy that recommended smashing Mars into it. I'm well aware of how disastrously retarded that would be.

Yeah, I was really referring to any planet in the habitable zone of a star system.

Lots of reefs and kelp forests, make decomposers and algal blooms bioluminescent, introduce beautiful but not all that dangerous sharks. If we can terraform, we can introduce engineered organisms into the ecosystem. All the insects are colorful and averse to human scent, the crabs grow enormous legs and claws for delicious meat, and colorful reptiles roam on land... that sort of thing.

It'd be very pleasant to live on a Venusian island in an archipelago where you can dive into the water to spearfish your dinner while monitor lizards roam your property searching for prey. A very intelligent hawk/parrot (they're pretty closely related phylogenetically) entertains guests at your thatch roof tiki-bar while you gaze out onto the glowing bioluminescent glory of the ocean at night.

>>3088182

More like we make our own microorganisms that are super efficient at converting gas A into gas B (CO to O2+CO2?). I'm sure we're a bit away from just ordering bioengineered lifeforms, but it certainly could be a possibility in the relatively near future.

What if we mass planted moss on Mars? The atmosphere is like over 90% carbon dioxide, and guess what moss does.

>>3088304
Oh hell yes. Let the "bugs" do the real heavy lifting of creating a livable atmosphere. I'm talking about human habitation. The opportunity to design an ecosphere specifically catering to human sensibilities of beauty would be amazing... moreso given that you would likely have very advanced genetic engineering at your disposal.

>>3088311

I heard this posited by some astrophysicist before, it sounded like an awesome idea. They also said that if we wanted to thicken the atmosphere of Mars, we could just do what we do on Earth, pollute! The difference is on Mars we would do it on purpose, here it's just an unfortunate byproduct to inefficient combustion reactions.

>>3088327
Problem is getting enough greenhouse gases to Mars. There aren't exactly fossil fuels to burn and transporting LOADS of super greenhouse gases to Mars would still prove a challenge.

My money would be on mirrors flinging sunlight onto the poles. If we can release enough water vapor into the atmosphere, we've done quite a bit of the work as far as starting a greenhouse effect... now we just have to keep it going.

>>3088319

Yup, and once the atmosphere was sufficiently thickened, we release a virus that kills off the organism that we've been using, and replace it with a new organism that maintains the atmosphere, bioengineering truly is the future of mankind.

>>3088344
>bioengineering truly is the future of mankind

And my "Venus Eagle" voices his agreement. He'd also like to let you know that his master is a lazy ass that drinks and smokes weed all day while expecting him to catch fish for his cookouts.

>>3088283
it wouldn't take millions of years to terraform mars. just a few hundred, maybe a thousand. and we do have the technology to start, just a lack of funding.

The next earth-like planet may be 'only' 20 lightyears away in Gliese 581 system (planet Gliese 581D, check from wiki or google it). If it turns out to be habitable (or there are other habitable planets within similiar ranges), it's most certainly going to be easier to travel to an earth-like planet than to terraform mars, as many people don't seem to have even heard of Project Orion or nuclear pulse propulsion. It's doable NOW and it was doable 50 years ago (did'nt get off due to ban on atmospheric nuclear bomb tests, secrecy enforced by government etc. bullshit) and with current thermonuclear bombs, a ship could theoretically reach maximum speeds around 0.1-0.2c. In case of Gliese 581d, while journey would take decades, it would still be far more quicker (and likely cheaper) than terraforming Mars, which would in most optimistic visions take many centuries.

And if Heim Theory is proven to be correct even in some of it's predictions (hopefully soon, unless it has already been proven in black projects and is implemented in machines we call UFO's), the universe may truly open to us, in very near future.

>>3088405

At 0.2C that's 100 years. And not fast enough for time dilation to make that a survivable timeframe.

At that point you're talking generational ship.

Or we'd need to send people with massivly extended lifespans, but the way that looks to be working, they'd have to be here every 30 years for a 'top-up' treatment to continue living. And it's the result of new research, so we'd have to either send a group of incredibly good geneticists with materials we don't know we'd need yet, or just do the full cyborgification thing to the crew of the ship.

We need faster stardrive, or a better terraforming solution.

terraform mars, but flying to another system would be less expensive

>>3088045
dude it could take less than that. we could have it ready in a century if everyone pitched in, but it would never happen

>>3088395

I'm not sure if by terraforming you mean 'setting up a self contained settlement or biodome type setup' or actually creating a livable atmosphere on the planet. I'm not sure what you're basing the 'hundreds/thousands of years' on, I'm basing my millions of years statement off of What a NASA climatologist said in an interview last Sunday.

>>3088462
nvm, just read this article that kinda says we're both right.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763/index.php?page=mars04
but i still think we could figure out how to do it in hundreds of years, otherwise its kind of pointless.

>>3088568

Haha, 1000 to a million years? I thought my first year physics lab error margins were big...

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned it is pointless. and either of the situations in OP are for all intents and purposes impossible.