Enderw24
Oh, thank you! Thank you! Thank you! [wiping tear as smile slowly wanes…]
One thing, though… Just how breathable will a Martian atmosphere be even with the right ingredients in it? Will Martian gravity hold an atmosphere of sufficient density, or will it be like the atmosphere of earth at, say, 60,000 feet up?
First, there’s no reason to suppose that Earth will be much more crowded in the future than it is now. Population growth is declining all over the world. We still have growth, but the growth rate is declining. Pretty soon most areas of the world are going to have negative growth rates. Already much of Europe does, so does Japan.
Anyway, even if Earth were extremely crowded, we’d need transportation costs many orders of magnitude lower to make it effective to transport people to Mars on a massive scale. And if you can do that, why not live in habitats?
If the Earth is so crowded and poor that we need to colonize Mars we won’t be able to do it. If we are rich enough and technologically advanced enough to do it, then we won’t need to do it. Mutually exclusive futures.
And my point about martian life being valuable. I wan’t commenting on the aesthetic value of martian life, which would admittedly be incredibly high, but on the scientific value. I imagine martian life would revolutionize the field of biology, especially if it has a radically different biochemistry than earth life. All earth life is pretty much the same when you get down to the biochemical level, and discovering a dissimilar biochemical basis for life would be revolutionary.
First of all, human population growth is slowing, but our lifespans are increasing, so while we might not be growing at the prodigious rate we once were, we’re living longer. There’s still going to be an awful lot of us by the time cheap space travel comes around. Which brings me to my next point.
Space travel is currently very expensive, but it won’t always be. The truth of the matter is that the main reason it is so expensive is that there’s only a handful of people out there building rockets and launching things. When the Chinese finally decide they’re going to enter the space age, and do it successfully, expect to the price of launches drop drastically. And if the folks leading the “X Prize” challenge have their way, we can expect relatively cheap launches to become commonplace.
As for the orbiting colonies (ala O’Neil), we no doubt will have them, but people will also want to live on a planet. That means Mars (and Venus as well) will no doubt have considerable appeal.
If someone ever invents a warp drive, or other FTL method of travel before terraforming takes hold on Mars or Venus, then they’ll probably be left alone. This, of course, raises other questions: What do we do about Mars/Venuslike worlds in other solar systems? Do we leave them pristine? And what about worlds in other systems that are habitable, but have life on them, do we move in? Perhaps, we’ll terraform worlds like Mars and Venus because we don’t want to interfere with the development of life on other Earthtype worlds.
As for us not going backwards, well… I’m old enough to remember the Apollo moon landings (Apollo 17 to be exact) and at the time I never thought we’d be abandoning the whole concept of going to the moon, but we did. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we go to Mars and then forget about the whole thing for another 50 years or so. 
Tuckerfan wrote:
Oh, sure, if we go zipping around from star system to star system, discovering a new Earthlike planet with a native population of humanoid aliens every other Wednesday, like they do on Star Trek.
I suspect that Earthlike planets are relatively rare. Marslike and Venuslike planets might be a little more common, but don’t forget all the weird things we’ve discovering orbiting around sunlike stars in the last 5 years (e.g. planets as big as Saturn, orbiting closer to their star than Mercury does to our Sun).
And be honest, would you want to evey try to colonize Venus? Bleah. That planet’s the poster child for the Global Warming alarmists. Just setting up a habitat that’ll keep out the 900 degrees Fahrenheit heat and the 90 atmospheres of air pressure on the surface will cost more than putting an entire 2001-sized O’Neil colony in low Earth orbit.
Yeah, but sooner or later we’re gonna run out of room for those O’Neil colonies (though perhaps at that point, we’ll start building a Dyson Sphere or a Ringworld), and besides, you wouldn’t build a habitat on Venus immediately. Didn’t you ever play SimEarth? You dump algae into the upper atmosphere and smack the planet with comets until it begins to cool down. (One might also send nanomachines in to help speed the process along.)
Well, we may run out of space at L4 and L5, but there’s plenty of room in solar orbit. The limiting factor in my opinion is how many volatiles are available from asteroids and comets to set up biosphere ecologies.
But population growth figures already take into acount increased longevity. That’s what caused the huge jump in population last century, that fewer people were dying. Now the birthrates all over the world have fallen drastically too, so we’re getting closer to zero growth. Already in Japan and Europe they are starting to worry about the lack of young people.
Actually, I thought it was birth rates in “developed” countries that were falling, and those in the less developed countries had remained about the same. (Thus causing those countries to level charges of racism against the more developed nations.) India, IIRC, is due to overtake China in numbers sometime this century. Let’s not forget that, in general, projections of population growth have almost always turned out to be wrong. Either they overestimate or (more commonly, I believe), they underestimate. Hell, we can’t even come up with an accurate number for the people here now! What in God’s name makes us think that we can even guess right as to what the world’s population will be in, for example, another hundred years!?! As Buzz Aldrin, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others have pointed out, if we’re going to survive as a species, we’re going to have to get off the Earth. (Oooh! Here’s a thought, suppose one of those “dino killer” asteroids shows up and smacks an orbital colony and the Earth, while nobody’s looking. An unlikely scenerio, I’ll concede.)
Here’s my bet. We’ll build the orbiting colonies and terraform the planets, in that order. Why? Because sooner or later, one of those colonies will have some kind of malfunction that kills lots and lots of people (not necessarily all of them) and people will say, “Hey, I wanna live on a planet! At least there you don’t have to worry about breathing if Windows 3000 decides to crash!”
That’s why they’re going to run Linux. 
Seriously, though. People want land. Americans, in particular, want a lot of land. Not only will the population of Earth continue to rise due to medical advances, but as wealth spreads to more and more people, they will start using up more resources. It will eventually become necessary to explore space and to move people there permanently, as long as the laws of capitalism remain in effect. If there’s demand for property on Earth, and a supply of property in space, people will move from Earth to space.
What makes Mars particularly appealing is first of all, there is a lot of land there. Also, terrafroming Mars will probably, in the long run, cost less than building a comparable amount of property in the form of orbiting colonies. Finally, a terraformed Mars would offer a chance to build a much larger community than would a smaller colony, and it would give people more personal freedom. I feel that in a small colony, life would have to be fairly structured to make things work properly, and people don’t like that. On Mars, you culd just hang out.
Damn, i stopped getting notified…i guess you only get mail if the response is to your original post.
i’ll try and catch up…
once again, i go back to the north and south poles. That’s here on earth…there’s plenty of humidity and it’s still essentialy unlivable. ( i wish there was a spellchecker on this gizmo…my built in one is on the fritz)
i don’t think the research bases can really be called ecosystems…everything they need to survive is flown in.
That reminds me, has anyone read about the “trial-run” mars mission a private group is conducting in Greenland? They’ve built and had dropped by helicopter mars-type habitats and plan to live in them for a period of time. when they venture out, they will wear space suits. it’s very interesting…i think i read about it in SCIAM.
back to the debate…
now this sounds all good, but i just don’t think the “instant earth” plan will actually work. It took billions of years for earth to get into a state where we can survive unaided - even if we direct the process, how much do you really think we can shorten that span? Plus there’s the fact that we will make mistakes…i mean no-ones ever terraformed before…what makes us think that we will get it right on the first try?
I know this is kinda simplistic, but it may be a big hitch in terraforming plans:
venus, closer to the sun = too hot
mars, further from the sun = too cold
to keep either of these guys in a bearable temperature range, won’t it take some kinda HUGE maintainance project?
I WANT to live in beverly hills, but i HAVE to live in my crappy condo in the desolate suburbs of VA
Actually i think the majority of the expense is actually getting off the planet. Travel isn’t so expensive once you’re in space. From that point of view, once you get off a planet, why would you want to get back on one?
but unless the planet is completely terraformed, you will still be dependent on machines. (i.e a malfuntion in a planetary habitat would be just as disastorous as one in a space habitat)
bigfitty, gettng off planet is expensive currently, but it won’t be forever. Sooner or later, someone will come up with a cheaper way of launching something. It may take building Clarke’s “space elevator” or it might be something else. I read somewhere, that had the US continued with Saturn V rockets, the cost of them now would be ludicrously lower than what NASA was paying for them back in the '60s. Don’t know if that’s true or not, but its certainly possible as there really weren’t enough of them built for the efficientcies of mass production to kick in.
In any case, there’s a good argument for terraforming even if no one comes up with a cheap method of boosting things into orbit. A terraformed planet, in all likelihood, can handle a sudden increase in population easier than an orbiting colony can. If, after people move into an O’Neil colony, there’s a baby boom, its going to put a strain on the colonies resources rapidly. I can imagine that stringent population control laws would have to be put in place to keep the colonies growth down to a manageable level. On a freshly terraformed planet, you wouldn’t have that worry. (Now that I think about it, I can imagine the O’Neil colony’s leaders implimenting a population control policy just to encourage migration a terraformed world.) This doesn’t mean that people would actually want to have lots of kids, but that they want the right to have as many as they may choose.
I don’t think any habitat, whether in space or on a planet, ould depend ultimately on either people or computers.
At any rate, the question of life on mars/science versus colonization, damnit! is not the most pressing of issues. i say this because by the time we are able to even seriously suggest colonization we’ll know with a high degree of accuracy whether or not there is life on Mars. If there is, the question of colonization will fall away quickly since we wouldn’t know how they’d react to us, and wed react to them.
But if we don’t see any evidence of life then colonization will, and should, go right ahead. Terraforming isn’t going to be a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” deal. Teams are going to have to go down to get the habitat set. More teams will come with supplies and more workers, depending on the task at hand. We’re talking a few generations of work before they throw the switch I think. I mean, how long does it take to build a simple particle generator for Eris’s sake?!? During this time geologists and whoever else can scrape up the grant.
And I do mean grant. The money and organization needed to successfully terraform a planet, under current economic standards, will only be achieved by a government, and most likely by a combination of governments. They don’t let companies get that big.
The first model for human life on Mars will be the Antarctic one: a planet for science, as Antarctica is a continent for science. No territorial claims will be recognized and no commercial endeavors will be allowed.
Cynics may observe human nature doesn’t work that way, and in the long term I’m sure they’re correct. But in the short-to mid-term, this model will be successful, as it has been in Antarctica for over forty years.
The assumption in this thread seems to be that any indigenous life on Mars is a “rare and beautiful flower.” I disagree; if there’s life on Mars as a result of the same abiogenesis that produced life on Earth, then it’s just an interesting cousin of ours, nothing more remarkable than that, and certainly not a bar to terraforming.
If there’s life on Mars and it is the result of a separate abiogenesis (this should be obvious at the microscopic level), then terraforming must not commence until we thoroughly understand the life forms and are certain we can preserve its ecosphere while we build our own.
But we don’t need life on Mars for there to be things worth preserving. My greatest sympathy for the Reds in Robinson’s novels came when he talked about what the hydration of the atmosphere was doing to Valles Marineris.
This is an enormous canyon east of Tharsis, as long as the United States is wide, with majestic walls as much as seven miles in height. When dry dirt gets wet it expands, so entire cliff faces exploded outward, turning stratified, geologically interesting beauty into blasted mudslides.
That can’t be good. Better, I think, to *para-*terraform: dome over craters and change them as much as you like (and on a much shorter time scale), but leave the rest of the place alone.
bigfitty, the model Mars base you’re thinking of is on Devon Island in far Northern Canada, not Greenland, and it’s a project of the Mars Society, of which I am a member.
Tuckerfan: I don’t know why you are positing a huge population explosion in space habitats. Presumably the same factors that keep birth rates low in developed countries will be even stronger in a space habitat. It would be more likely that the governments of the habitats would find it neccesary to encourage childbearing, like the government of Singapore is doing.
Stop being so wedded to the idea that population levels will require strict governmental solutions. Birth rates in developed countries have fallen dramatically, to below replacement levels. Birthrates in undeveloped countries are now falling. Population is still growing, but at a slower and slower rate. Authoritarian governmental solutions are counterproductive.
Fiver: I agree that if life on Mars can be shown to be related to life on Earth, then it is much less interesting. I imagine we’d want to do some research on whether life started first on which planet, or if both planets were seeded from some third source. But of course, a second abiogenesis event would be the real prize.
But the biggest objection to colonizing Mars is that it would be orders of magnitude easier to colonize northern Canada, Antarctica, or the open ocean.
Lemur866, I don’t know why you’d assume that the conditions which exist in modern societies which have caused the slowing birth rate in those parts of the world would apply as well to orbiting colonies. Colonies have traditionally had higher birth rates than the mother country. They’ve also had lower life expectancies. Even in a highly advanced society, daily living in a space station is going to be more likely to be fatal than life on the Earth. People will get careless with their space suits when they’re outside, or something else will get them.
And you’re right that it would be easier to colonize Antarctica and parts of Canada than to terraform Mars (or even to build an orbiting colony). But that doesn’t mean we’ll want to do that before moving off-Earth. We might want to preserve those areas, and leave them untouched. Or, we might colonize those areas, and then move off-Earth.
In any case, it really doesn’t matter. At some point, if we are going to survive as a species, we’re going to have to move off the Earth and into space. The sun isn’t going to last forever. (Though we humans might not make it long enough to have to worry about it.)
I think that humans will slowly drift into space in search of resources and raw materials, but the idea of it being an answer to population problems seems a little far fetched.
Getting off the planet earth will always take a lot of energy even if the rockets are cheap and reusable. Maybe some sort of teleportation will be developed but I’ve not heard of any reason of why that would be plausible. Moving enough people off the planet to make a dent in the population sounds pretty absurd. What would it take by then? A billion people? Four billion people? Cost aside,these numbers couldn’t be added to an experimental Mars colony in reasonable amount of time.
Condoms and high rises will always be much cheaper.
Maybe one day the population of humans off earth will be greater than those on it, but I think it will be through people actually being born off of earth.
If there is life on Mars, terraforming would be a tragedy. Otherwise, the geologist should get about 50 years of close up study and then to heck with it, let’s make a new home.
I don’t think anyone is seriously proposing space colonization of any kind as a solution to overpopulation of Earth.
In the history of colonization, it has never been a significant drain on the population of the mother country.
Its main advantage in that regard is that it gets rid of the dreamers and malcontents who would make trouble back home…and who then, paradoxically, become great assets to the colonial world, due to their nonconformity. They’ve got the necessary mindset to dare great things.
And anyway, as others have pointed out, we don’t need to relieve population; it’s doing that on its own. Best guesses have the human population of Earth leveling off at about 10 billion mid-century, then falling steadily thereafter.
Space colonizationg to a large degree, and terraforming to an even larger one, will require socities in general to think bigger, especially in terms of time. In general, I think humanity learning to do this will be a good thing.
Terraforming itself I imagine will be a centuries-long affair at the least; the timeline happening in Robinson’s trilogy seemed rather optimistic. Of course it had the whole philosophical viriditas ax to grind, that once life gets a foothold it just explodes outward.
Another possibly-likely option as we expand outward (and I do think it’s inevitable, we do so or we go extinct) is something that doesn’t get mentioned as often as terraforming. I’ve heard it referred to as “pantropy”, instead of changing alien environments to fit us, we change ourselves to fit them. Using genetic engineering for example. Title and author forgotten, but I’ve read a decent novel that centered around the incipient revolution of people specifically tailored to live and work in zero-gravity. Legs are ungainly and useless things to lug around without a planet to walk on, so they were born with two additional arms in place of them.
That sort of thing touches on even more GD-able topics than terraforming alone does, and it would go hand-in-hand with it–Mars could get by with simply a thickened atmosphere with a lot of CO2 to take deliberate advantage of greenhouse effect, with inhabitants tailored to have lungs designed for it, with skin toughened against hard radiation, against heat loss, etc.
It might seem a little bit out there, but I think we’ll have the technology to resculpt people in reliable ways long before we’ll have the know-how necessary to resculpt planets as we see fit.
Why is migrating to an alien environment millions of miles away an imperative for our species? It seems to me that plenty of species have peacefully evolved into new ones right here on earth. Shouldn’t we learn how to live sustainably in our native environment first, before we go about building a new one? In fact, that seems like it’s almost a requirement. If we don’t have that sort of knowledge, the probability of making a successful environment from scratch seems remote.
I do think we will eventually be pushed into space by lifestyle choices that we’re making, but I don’t see us doing it for survival purposes.
There is the eventual death of the sun to be dealt with, but I doubt our progeny would be called human by then. Also, Mars would still be in our solar system and eventually face the same problems as earth. Interstellar travel and colonization would be an eventual goal of intelligent terran species down the road (on the scale of hundreds of millions of years from now), but not in the next few hundred years.
What would count as living sustainably? Mere passage of time? I’m taking it that that our stay thus far doesn’t count as “sustainably” in your opinion–what would satisfy that condition? A million years, two, ten, a hundred? Outlasting the cockroach? (If so, we’re in for a long grim race… )
I rather doubt that terraforming will ever be something as exact as the Magratheans, where every detail can be specified. More setting accelerated processes into motion and using both subtle and brute-force mega-engineering projects to sustain them, and seeing what surprising places they end up. Mars is simply likely to be one of our first learning experiences, and an ongoing and very large one. Several thousand years of bludgeoning the protoclimate this way then that, ecological crashes that take out centuries of growth in a year, and rebuilding again. After a couple millennia of that kind of thing, we’ll be a lot better at it.
Also, the experience of building a new environment, and all the things that can go wrong with it, will be very useful for that sustainability issue here. We can experiment in rather broader strokes with a planet without billions. Things go wrong, well, people continue living in domes there. It’s not like dome living will be an adjustment for Mars colonists for a long time coming.
But, survival. The odds of a comet or asteroid smacking into the planet are, day to day, very very tiny, but over the long run (perhaps even the sustainable test case), probably guaranteed. Perhaps we’ll be able to easily spot such incomings and stop them before we’ll be able to make colonization economical, though.
That’s extinction events beyond our control. Other possibilities; as technology advances, the class of mistakes possible with it tends to get more impressive. “Gray goo” events with nanotechnology, some “Ice-9” type mishap, and further out there, David Brin’s Earth involved an imminent catastrophe involving a breathrough allowing the creation of custom singularities having a horrible mishap, and a tiny but hungry black hole falling down into the core of the planet. All very much in what-if land, but it’s not a stretch for me to believe that advancements we can’t really imagine yet will occur, and will yield dangers that likewise we’re not imagining.
Basically, all eggs in one basket is simply riskier than more eggs spread out. Life’s sustainability is always a long-run crap shoot, for all the species that “peacefully” arose, many many others simply went extinct.