We’ll probably fuck up our own planet badly enough that we’ll never actually get the chance to try terraforming Mars
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 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.
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.
Kurzgesagt did a video on the topic. We just build a planet-sized sunshade to freeze the atmosphere, launch the excess CO2 into space, and import water from the ice moons of the gas giants. Simple, really.
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.
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:
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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?
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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.
The modern take on stock investment is to not give dividends, so the only way for shareholders to make money is to have the company grow indefinitely.
Obviously a capitalist won’t tell you that. My economy professor kept insisting that efficiency is always positive because it only concerns making a bigger cake, so there is more cake to be divided among the people involved, which he called surplus. In reality greater efficiency has a cost, and the cost is paid by people, while other people pockets the surplus. Fuck capitalists.
So making money in the stock market only works if the pie keeps on expanding? I think that’s a way to take advantage of the fact that our economy is expanding, but I don’t think that’s the definition of capitalism.
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Does that mean you’re for or against teroforming Mars?
I have nothing against the idea of terraforming Mars, I just don’t think terraforming is going to save us from ourselves.
Like I said I just don’t believe we’ll ever get to that point – because we’ll fuck things up on the only currently livable planet so badly that I doubt mass-scale industrial society will survive long enough for terraforming Mars to become relevant.
