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?
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 think terraforming Mars won’t ever be used to create an earth like planet. We can dump water onto it (flinging ice asteroids at it should do it just fine) but without a magnetosphere, everything we add to make the atmosphere better will be blown away by solar winds.
We can still user Mars to experiment with the weather systems and the like, though. Right now, people are seriously suggesting stuffing our own atmosphere with sulfur compounds to correct for global warming instead of reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn (which will work, but will be undone almost instantly the moment we stop pumping these chemicals into the atmosphere).
That’s gonna be very difficult, restarting Mars’ dynamo is going to require some god-like amount of power. We don’t even know what powered the string dynamo it had 4 billion years ago; all we know is that there was a good magnetosphere, and then that collapsed and for a while a much weaker secondary dynamo took over, until that collapsed as well.
To get back an earth like dynamo, we’d need to do something crazy like re-melt huge parts of Mars’ insides in such a way to generate a flow structure that would remagnetise the planet.
I suspect it may very well be easier to cool down Venus than to restore Mars’ magnetic field when it comes to terraforming.
Planets are kind of big, that’d require lots of power in a very large area.
We’d probably be able to get more done by putting a few sattelites between Mars and the sun and generating the necessary repelling field there. Still requires a huge amount of energy, but doesn’t require it to also be distributed around a planet.
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.
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?
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 think terraforming Mars won’t ever be used to create an earth like planet. We can dump water onto it (flinging ice asteroids at it should do it just fine) but without a magnetosphere, everything we add to make the atmosphere better will be blown away by solar winds.
We can still user Mars to experiment with the weather systems and the like, though. Right now, people are seriously suggesting stuffing our own atmosphere with sulfur compounds to correct for global warming instead of reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn (which will work, but will be undone almost instantly the moment we stop pumping these chemicals into the atmosphere).
Right so we give it a magnetosphere.
That’s gonna be very difficult, restarting Mars’ dynamo is going to require some god-like amount of power. We don’t even know what powered the string dynamo it had 4 billion years ago; all we know is that there was a good magnetosphere, and then that collapsed and for a while a much weaker secondary dynamo took over, until that collapsed as well.
To get back an earth like dynamo, we’d need to do something crazy like re-melt huge parts of Mars’ insides in such a way to generate a flow structure that would remagnetise the planet.
I suspect it may very well be easier to cool down Venus than to restore Mars’ magnetic field when it comes to terraforming.
Rather than restarting Mars’s internal magnetic field, could we build a solar or nuclear powered artificial magnetic field?
Planets are kind of big, that’d require lots of power in a very large area.
We’d probably be able to get more done by putting a few sattelites between Mars and the sun and generating the necessary repelling field there. Still requires a huge amount of energy, but doesn’t require it to also be distributed around a planet.