|
|
|
|
|
|
by GuB-42
62 days ago
|
|
|
To put it into perspective, we are effectively terraforming Earth today, though maybe not in a good way. We have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters? It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we need to build everything, starting from a hostile environment. |
|
|
For mars this just isn't happening unless we ship half of Earth's people and resources over there. Who will have to live on a toxic planet.
But we can't even ship all that stuff there because we don't have enough fuel to do that (it requires many times the payload in fuel) and all the launches would make earth uninhabitable. Terraforming mars is therefore science fiction unless we break a lot of barriers like clean fusion, space elevators etc. And even then the material question will remain a problem.
I think even reverting climate change on earth, a much easier problem than terraforming a remote planet, is a pipe dream. If we're going to be going carbon capture at that global scale, we're going to need to extract so much material, manufacture so much equipment, transporter it all, deal with all the captured carbon, maintenance, power etc all stuff that's not possible to do completely carbon neutral, that we're just polluting a lot more. Especially if we want to do it at a timescale where it still matters.