Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
How about you start by terraforming the Sahara desert or shut the fuck up, Elon.
No. The deserts are not an empty void just waiting to be filled with more corn fields. There are species that are adapted to there, can only survive there, and would be driven to extinction if we eliminated all of Earth’s deserts. The total biosphere per acre is not high in deserts, but the species that do live there have just as much right to live as any other.
This really gets to the whole point of space colonization. The Earth is a jewel. Every inch of it is covered in life of a wondrous variety of forms. And every time we as humans shape a biome to our will, we degrade or destroy whatever species was there before.
The great thing about space is that it truly is empty real estate. Maybe Mars has some bacteria living miles beneath the surface, maybe. But it is for all intents and purposes a dead rock. We can colonize it to our heart’s content. We’re not stealing any land from any natives by colonizing there. We’re not wiping out native species by setting up vast agricultural plantations. It’s a place that we can let our technology loose to the limits of its abilities, and we can do so without destroying a biosphere so complex that you probably have to scour a thousand galaxies before you find its equal.
In the very long term, I hope humanity greatly decreases its impact on the Earth. My dream would be for Earth to return to a mostly wild state. Most people would live in space. The only people living on Earth would be either:
a) Living in very dense towering cities built to be incredibly environmentally efficient and sustainable. b) People practicing extremely low-impact lifestyles like the Amish or people who willingly choose to live as neo-hunter gatherers.
The vast majority of the human species, and all of our industry, would move off of Earth. Earth would essentially become one big nature preserve.
Bro. The Sahara desert is over 9 million square kilometers. Let’s say our wildest dreams could be realized and we managed to re-green half of the Sahara, it would still leave an area larger than all of India (~3.5 Mkm2) for your highly specialized mice and lizards. They’d be fine.
Now, let’s talk space. My point is - if you think that you could use the “empty real estate” on Mars, then why don’t you try it out on fucking Earth first, where you have shorter supply lines and access to manpower? A little demonstration of your incredible powers!
You know - if you think you can fly, don’t jump out of a window. Try taking off from the ground first. Test your wings in a safe environment.
Oh, what’s that, YOU FUCKING CAN’T? Okay then don’t talk shit.
Frankly, there’s no point. We already know how to green the Sahara. That fact is not in any doubt. You don’t actually prove anything or accomplish anything by doing so. We have all the technology; there’s just no economic reason to do so. Spam solar panels, desalination plants, and water pipelines. Technologically, it’s quite simple. Performing such a thing would prove nothing about our ability to settle Mars. The technical challenges are completely different. Whether we can actually settle Mars is a different question entirely. Settling somewhere on Earth does not provide any useful information on whether we can do so on Mars.
And ultimately, the point of expanding off Earth is so we don’t have all our eggs in one basket. You’re just proposing that we more heavily exploit our current basket, rather than expanding out to another one.
And terraforming is hardly the first step here. You don’t jump directly into something like that. You figure out how to build a city first. Once you have a billion people living on Mars, then you can consider something as grand as terraforming.
Lol okay no, there’s no reason to continue this exchange any further. You’d have a billion people holed up on a dead planet flr what, “science”? Get the fuck out of here with that Mengele nonsense.
Apparently if you terraform the Sahara, it’s bye-bye rainforest in South America. The Amazon rainforest needs the dust that lands over there from the Sahara.
Bye-bye is probably a bit of an overstatement. Yes plants need phosphorous, and some more than others, but I don’t think the Amazon would disappear without the phosphorous influx from the Sahara. Change - sure, probably - but there’s still plenty of nutrients and water for vast forests to continue existing there.
The soil itself is pretty barren in the Amazon. The vast majority of the nutrients and minerals in that biome are in the trees and plants themselves. Without the continual topping-up from the Sahara, the Amazon is on a ticking clock.
Gaze upon the Amazon River:
Consider its breadth and depth. A titanic quantity of water, enough to drain a continent, emptying in endless torrent into the abyss of the sea. Except it’s not just water. Look at the color of it. It’s not blue; it’s brown. Consider the amount of water in that river. Then think of how much soil and dead plant matter must be flowing with it in order to turn it to such a rich chocolate brown.
That is where the Amazon’s phosphorous ultimately ends up. Nothing lives forever. Every plant and animal eventually dies. When it does, much of what it was gets recycled back into the plants and animals of the Amazon, but some doesn’t. A lot doesn’t.
Without the Sahara, the Amazon is on borrowed time.
Let’s say that if the nutrients of the Sahara were consumed by plants and animals in the Sahara, then the Amazon would be deprived. Let’s say the Amazon would disappear.
In turn, we’d get a forest in the Sahara that would be about 30% bigger than the Amazon. So a net win I guess?
Anyway, it’s not the point. I’m just saying it’s moronic to belive that we can terraform fucking Mars.
I would say that you should have more faith in your fellow human beings. We would have never accomplished anything if our ancestors had your poor misanthropic attitude.
Haha okay, I’m the misanthropic one for pointing out the normal course for allocating resources for scientofic efforts? I want science to continue to be directed toward tangible goals, with an emphasis on things that help people. That’s how it’s normally done. It has worked very well in the past and I see no evidence that we need some tween boy fantasy to improve upon a proven concept.
We could use Brawndo, it has electrolytes.
It’s what plants crave.
Interestingly, the Solar System as a whole also works this way. You sometimes hear futurists proposing that in the long term, humanity might use self-replicating robots to dismantle Mercury, and use the material to construct a Dyson swarm, allowing humanity to access untold levels of energy and matter.
The big downside to this is that you can’t just start taking apart pieces of the Solar System. While the planets aren’t in a true resonance pattern with each other, they do have a certain clockwork stability to them. The planets we have now were not the first generation of worlds in this star system. Multiple rounds of planet formation happened, sometimes with multiple terrestrial worlds forming in the same or similar orbits. The early inner Solar System had dozens of Mars-sized rocks in it. They kept forming, colliding, breaking, merging, and shattering until the system found a state that would be stable for billions of years. Simulations on the future of the Sol system show it to be dynamically stable for billions of years into the future. But if you remove any piece of the Solar System from that clockwork intricacy, that stability disappears. Then you have to worry about the planets slowly perturbing each other’s orbits, small nudges building up over millions of years until world’s are colliding or being ejected from Solar orbit entirely.
why would you want to disrupt the world ecosystem by terraforming the sahara.
The US dustbowl of the Great Depression was caused by human efforts to terraform the west.
While I would very much like to save the environment on Earth, people are not going to stop consuming the planet’s resources and allow that to happen. Equally as important, we don’t know how to save our environment. Do you know how to terraform the Sahara? I don’t. In fact, there are dozens of scientists with dozens of different ideas of things we can try that could help mitigate global warming and help restore natural environments. But doing so would amount to performing experiments on the Earth’s biosphere and we only have one biosphere to work with. If the experiments goes wrong, which any researcher can tell you is very likely, then we could do even more damage and maybe have no biosphere left at all.
A better plan is to go someplace like Mars and experiment there. Learn how to create and manipulate a biosphere someplace where a failed experiment won’t potentially wreck the biosphere we need live in.
Edit to add: Do you really want to let the Elon Musks of the world spread reflective dust in the ionosphere, or launch a giant sun-shade into orbit to block some of the sun’s light from hitting the planet? Wouldn’t it be better to do the experiments somewhere else?
Absolutely bizzarre logic.
We definitely know how to DESTROY the environment, and we can’t even stop doing that.
If you having trouble finding a comfortable sitting position, it could because the shoulder of an Exxon marketing executive is constantly in the way.
For the most part, the resources that we need to survive are renewable if we use them responsibly. And the things that aren’t renewable we can be quite economical about using and should last centuries if not millennia into the future, when hopefully we have better technology to give us alternatives.
We do not need to terraform the Sahara to save Earth. The point is that if you’re so gung-ho about terraforming things, how about you start with a smaller challenge that’s closer to supply lines and labor?
Going to Mars is just a bad plan, period. There’s nothing on Mars for us. Going to the Moon, fine, the low gravity and the Helium-3 and the short distance I can definitely see an argument being made for it. But Mars? There’s no reason whatsoever to go there.
it’s on earth, it doesn’t need terraforming, it’s already tera-form.
the rest of your ideas sound like musk fanboy fantasies.