Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating station on Venus. At least there you’d have the correct pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It’s just also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.
Another interesting one is Mercury. There is a latitude where the average ground temperature is comfortable for us. You simply need to dig in deep enough to put enough thermal mass above you to get that average rather than the swings. I don't know how deep that is on Mercury, on Earth 10 meters is enough. Real world, you'll want to go a bit farther towards the pole so your station is comfortable with the thermal load of whatever equipment you put in it.
Assuming they mean the ground acts as a heat sink, and sufficiently underground you’re not subjected to the above average heat of the day and below average cold of the night.
It is not (it has a 88d year, and a 58.65d.. day[0]) , we just had a post about it - if you travel at 4kph you can chase the sun.. A Mercury Rover Could Explore the Planet by Sticking to the Terminator (18 points, 1 week ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720941
Without massive terraforming all of Mars is very hostile.
But having solid ground is still nice.
A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground needs to be processed obviously.
Gravity kind of cuts both ways. Closer to that of Earth is nearly guaranteed to be better for long term human health, but there's a possibility that martian gravity is "good enough" when supplemented with excercise while also making heavy operations and getting back out of the planet's gravity well easier.
This is the thinking of someone on the timescales of a single life. If humanity persists another 1000 years on our current trajectory (US/world politics not withstanding), I think nothing is really a fantasy. Rather, it's all possible but maybe just not in our own lifetimes. But it is also terribly difficult for us to plan for tomorrow, let alone for a future where our descendants are at the helm.
I agree, it’s just a failure of imagination. Some folks correctly foresee not being able to continue what we’re doing now in the exact same way in some new context and conclude everything is impossible. Life isn’t this fickle, it’s adapted before and will adapt again. This is why great science fiction is so valuable, as some people are better at imagining new ways of being more than others, and can show the rest of us the possibilities.
The counterargument is a simple opportunity cost calculation:
There will never, ever, ever[1] be a scenario where if you weighed up the options of "expand into some less habitable area of the Earth" versus "expand to Mars", the latter is the better option either 1) financially, or b) quality of life.
Nobody[2] ever picks the dramatically more expensive and dramatically worse option!
Also, people that are desperate enough to even consider living in the least desirable -- but still just barely habitable -- parts of planet Earth are essentially by definition too poor to afford interplanetary travel.
And no, no amount future sci-fi technology can possibly overcome the simple energy costs of this! If someone can afford the hugely energy intensive interplanetary travel, and the up-front investment required to survive incredibly harsh environments, then by definition they could more productively invest that here on Earth! It's the cheaper and better option in every possible way, and always will be.
This will remain true even if it's standing room only on the entire planetary surface -- it'll be cheaper to build levels upwards while digging downwards.
Maybe our atmosphere will become horrifically polluted? Sure, okay, air filters are faaar cheaper than a full vacuum-capable space suit!
Etc, etc, etc...
[1] Okay, fine, maybe in a million years. Whatever ends up preferring Mars at that point will no longer be "human" by any sane classification.
[2] For some values of nobody. There are morons that buy overpriced branded handbags made of literal trash. I doubt idiots like that will make for a successful, self-sustaining colony.
The Madrid Protocol says you can't do anything fun with Antarctica. Can't have a mine, a garbage heap, or a farm. I suppose the world's militaries stand ready to capture any enterprising colonists and destroy their structures.
> If humanity persists another 1000 years on our current trajectory
It's unlikely that we can persist in our current trajectory for another 100 years without catastrophic climate events puttung a stop to all of these endeavours.
Venus seems like a wonderful place to live, relatively speaking.
At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."
Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
> Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem.
Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else, where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.
Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.
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.
That's exactly my point. We don't have the manpower, the materials, the industry.
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.
It's just that terraforming will require a lot of materials that will have to be brought over from Earth. And every tonne of materials to Mars requires many tonnes of fuel to launch from Earth.
I don't think it is possible to ever transport enough to make this happen.
I wouldn’t go that far. It was pretty clear a long time ago that humans spending so much time filling the internet with content was going to eventually enable neural networks to pretend to communicate.
The advancements required to arrive at modern LLMs and the tech needed to get humans safely to Mars or live safely on the Moon are orders of magnitude in difference.
If you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes it’ll happen on its own eventually, but you’d just be looking at generational time scales to do it.
Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.
How do we do that? I imagine dumping Earth life on Mars it will just die. What if we buried a terrarium at the Martian pole with a radio isotope and solar heater and controls so that it could try growing bacteria inside and controlled-leaking some outside into a nearby warm (liquid water) surroundings, and that could get many chances to evolve strains that could survive further away - analogous to ocean life around deep hydrothermal vents.
The closest thing I’ve heard of is genetically engineering some extremophile bacteria to seed some bacterial colonies with, and then building some domed habitats and dropping plants and fungi into it. And then you could allow some of that life to grow outside the dome and spread over time, slowly bulking up the oxygen levels. There are also proposals that you could have orbital focusing mirrors to beam additional heat at the planet and start to melt some of the water and frozen greenhouse gases.
Any effort is only temporary though, because Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, so the sun is constantly stripping atmosphere off it. It’s not a renewable resource there like it is here.
> In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal footing with alchemy
NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen" [1].
2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of water of the right depth will generate the force needed, the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.
Well, I did wrote "gives sunlight" and that is a valid reply to it. But ... I would need sunlight actually. That seems somewhat possible with light tubes, but the much nicer solution, a transparent dome to still see mars clouds at day and the stars at night, is indeed not possible with current materials.
floating colony on venus I heard was debunked, but that was also GPT 4.1 which was misaligned so I should seek a different source, from people, when I revisit this chain of thought
Sadly we underestimate the liveability of this Earth. Muskism makes people believe to the false premise that we can just buy a new planet, make it habitable with magical tech. Supported with pseudoscientific buzzwords like Terraforming etc. So we can recklessly consume this planet and jump to our new home when this one depletes. No need to care about our current home because it's a jumping board. Interesting as an old Sci-Fi fantasy so it attracts smart people, but if you really think about it's just lies and stupidity.
One of the worst things Musk did is link himself in peoples’ minds to things like space exploration and then linked these ideas to… other ideas I’m not going into on here.
All these ideas about space pre-date him by many decades.
Musk was also into the solar panels and EVs so it's not all trash the planet. Even if living on Mars or Venus isn't practical we might develop interesting tech trying.
Not exactly, it was a normal solar panel business started by Elon's cousins (SolarCity), but it wasn't going well, and in the end it was bought by Tesla for much bigger money than it was worth (let's say it was a bailout for Elon). Today Tesla solar panels are maybe 0.1%-1% of the business, they stopped giving any data on it years ago.
