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Our first terraforming goal should be the Moon, not Mars (bigthink.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/space@mander.xyz
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[–] 49 points 1 year ago* (10 children)

If we stopped terraforming Earth to become unlivable, we wouldn't need to terraform another planet at all for a while.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    And if we were capable of terraforming the Moon or Mars then we should be able to fix the problems we have here on Earth anyway.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    To be fair, terraforming those mostly involves doing what we are doing here, but on an even higher scale. The hard part is really just getting stuff from here to there.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    The next hard part is the dust. Lunar and Martian dust is a huge problem to overcome, and something we don't have to deal with here. Then there's radiation, although there's things we can do to lessen that problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    I am curious how solar winds would deplete any gasses we vent onto the surface of Mars when it doesn't have a magnetic field to stop or slow any of it. πŸ€”

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    My understanding is that solar winds stripping your atmo is so slow it's a problem on the scale of millions of years

    Let me check a source

    ...

    https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-mission-reveals-speed-of-solar-wind-stripping-martian-atmosphere/

    Okay 21k lb during an earth day does seem like a lot

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That's pretty insignificant on a planetary scale, earth loses atmo at TEN TIMES that rate πŸ˜„

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm just worried it's going to be expensive to keep the atmo replenished

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    A civilization that can add enough gases to Mars to create close to Earth's atmosphere isn't concerned with minor maintenance like that. A small comet body's worth every hundred years (if even that often), child's play.

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