Because the alternative is extinction.
- You can not feasibly terraform Mars, even if it was pristinely sterile, and had a sign on it that said “Hey humans, come live here, Love God”
We have to breath, we need an atmosphere that contains a good deal of oxygen and one that at a similar range of atmospheric pressure.
If you dumped the contents of the galactic oxygen factory on Mars, it does not have the gravity to hang on to it and mimic the pressure\density AND his buddy Sol would simply strip the oxygen off anyways.
Also, we and much of the other life we are accustomed to are designed rather fragile in regards to certain kinds of radiation, we cool, burn, get cancer, suffer DNA damage etc.
Earth has it’s own force field to rival any in science fiction (because ours actually works for real) that takes care of that problem, and some others, working in combination with its complex atmosphere.
Mars? yea not so much.
And you can not just fix that with handwavium and woo.
- You can not just go someplace that technically does not belong to you anyways and eradicate something that is alive, regardless how how high or low a life form we presume it to be, it’s supposed to be a pretty important concept here, Yes i know we are actually hypocritical about it, it’s been fine to do it if your jewish, or native american or name your unwanted group of people here, so yea we have been just as cool with trying to extinct groups of people as we have plants and animals in the rain forest or name your place here etc.
If anything that probably disqualifies us as having the intelligence to make such a decision.
Again, At the edge of what?? Yes it matters
We have screwed the earth, now we are all gonna die?
So we broke our planet, and you want me to be cool with going someplace else and immediately breaking that planet so we can make it like our planet, which we broke in the first place?
If you can even remotely entertain terraforming Mars, you can fix when you screwed up here, and i might recommend taking the people who dont want to be part of the fixing, and jettison them out into space.
IF we are on the edge of the sun making its journey to red dwarf land, you can forget Mars, that wont help you in the least bit.
And IF you can airlift X billion people and god only knows how many tons of materials and equipment off world and terraform a planet to boot, then deflecting a pesky comet or asteroid should be less than worrying.
The thread was about “Could you terraform”, then it became “Should you” and “It’s our right because we are numero uno in the universe”
So extinction justifies any cost?
Is it ok if the shoe is on the other foot, or only ok if you’re the one surviving?
If i am going extinct and i am not human, but i can survive by replacing earths atmosphere with ammonia and methane, it is ok?
I am preventing my extinction, and i consider myself more important than that talking meat called humans, so it must be ok?
All things become extinct in time
My best guess.
>>> 50-100 years from now, space travel can improve by leaps and bounds. Right now it takes about a year to get to Mars, and the cost is very high.
However, if Anti-Gravity is figured out, it would be very easy to get things into say large space docking stations, to ship to Mars, and you’d have to assume by 2050, space ships will be much faster, making the trip to Mars say in as little a month or less. Another idea, proposed by the great sci-fiction writer AC Clarke is to get an elevator from a large space station anchored to a mountain for the transport up.
Mars based on its gravity, and likely water is on the short list, but I think life there would have to be in domed cities with earth soil for plants, and livestock. combined with a very small population in the dome is most likely.
2. Colonizing seems infinitely easier than Terraforming. Can you even Terraform AFTER colonization?
>>>Yes, you simply plant what makes oxygen. Genetic engineering of plants might be needed to survive a harsh climate but in theory it’s doable. There are plants now in the arctic, and desert.
- How many decades or centuries are humans away from having the ability to Terraform a planet? (I personally like to look at the technology available in 1917 and compare to 2017 as a belief that we may have the ability in 100 years).
>>> A hallmark of our species is pushing itself to the brink, then coming up with a solution just when we really need it the most. Yeah, 100 years or less sounds about right.
- What types of hypothetical technology would be needed that we do not have now to Terraform a planet and create an atmosphere? Is nuking polar caps REALLY feasible? It seems it would take 1000s or more nukes to even begin to create a real atmosphere and without a magnetic core, it would just get blown away by the Sun, right?
>>> Laser or plasma rays from space can do this. Right now the USA Navy has a laser that can set a small ship to fire instantly. In 50 years form now,expect a major increase.
- Under the best case scenarios and with probably uninvented technologies, could a planet be Terraformed to create a breathable atmosphere in 50 or 100 years?
>>>That would depend on what is in the atmosphere, the size of the planet or moon, and such. It could take thousands of years.
Moving underground where the temperature might be warmer, and the shielding us from radiation might make sense while planting the best oxygen plants and such in large cave-like areas. There is are tunnel machines 40 feet wide that can do this.
So, fantasy, then, eh?
Stranger
Cite?
Not necessarily, if we do exist in an ever expanding universe there is only 1-100 trillion years of star formation left, and it is very possible that most of the universe will be close to absolute zero within any “quadrillion” years.
If some speculative theories find some way to be experimentally tested or are more than just thoughts it is also possible that the areas of the universe with matter could still expand, and at some point the expansion will exceed the speed of light. At that moment it will be impossible for basic particle interactions to have and what we see as the arrow of time will no longer exist.
But we do know that once most of the Hydrogen Helium have gone through nucleosynthesis past Iron, which is no longer exothermic and the universe will go dark.
And someone will complain that it is their tomorrow and it’s too soon :smack:
That’s tautological, not explanatory.
Anyway, I don’t really see a big moral difference between:
Wiping out an alien sentient species on another planet, so humans can live there
and
Wiping out aboriginal humans on another continent, so Europeans can live there
(I mean, the second more or less already happened, and can’t be undone, but I feel like we should have learned it was morally wrong)
Not really.
You’re missing that we have no alternative except extinction.
I’m not missing anything. I just disagree with you.
I don’t agree that the threat of our own extinction makes it morally acceptable to solve the problem in a way that directly causes the extinction of another sentient race.
Agreed - that’s no different to saying “Sorry Lactobacillus casei, I’m hungry for cheese”
However, when we get to the other end of the scale (intelligent civilisation being wiped out), it’s morally equivalent to me asserting that I need your children’s kidneys more than they do.
It’s not the same and it’s something we already do. For example we exterminate rats on certain islands to preserve birds.
I’ll take Mangetout’s side here. There is a moral difference between killing birds vs. rats and killing humans.
e.g. I’d be fine with exterminating the rats on Pitcairn Island to preserve the birds there. I’d not be fine with exterminating the humans on Pitcairn Island to preserve the same birds though.
If we are dealing with aliens on more or less our own level, exterminating them is no better (also no worse) than exterminating us.
To be sure, we can bicker about exactly what “sentient” (or “sapient” or “intelligent”) means, how we’d score a truly alien life form by our standards, and how they’d score us by theirs.
But there’s clearly a line somewhere above, say, insects and below, say, humans where exterminating them is morally wrong. No matter how hard it might be to determine that line in practice.
The alternative to taking a moral stance vs. the aliens is to admit the decision criteria is simply might-makes-right. And then to hope we’ve got more might on our side than they do.
Yes, I agree, that’s not the same thing as anything I said.
Today? No, we can’t today.
It would…over time. Millions of years. So, assuming we could, somehow, create a thick atmosphere on Mars and get the mix of gasses right so that we could breathe it (two things we currently only have a very vague idea on how to do on a planetary scale), it would last for quite a long time before it was stripped away by solar wind. Maybe you get that, but I have the feeling you think it’s something that’s going to happen pretty quickly. It’s only quick on cosmic scales.
I believe you are referring to the Earths magnetic field and the fact that Mars doesn’t have one since it’s core has cooled to the point that it no longer spins enough to provide the same sort of protection, but it’s hard to say since you are trying to be clever at the same time…I guess. Yes, the Earth has a magnetic ‘shield’ that protects the Earth from solar and cosmic radiation that Mars doesn’t have. That has nothing to do with creating an atmosphere on Mars, though it will, of course, have an impact on life just running wild and free on Mars. It’s not a show-stopper, however, since at least in theory (at least as theoretical as terraforming Mars is in the first place), you could genetically engineer your proposed Martian life to have higher resistance to radiation. There are already life forms on the Earth that have higher tolerance to radiation, after all.
Sorry…but you can. Whether you SHOULD or not is another issue. But this sort of thing happens in real life all the time. Species move into a habitat on Earth from another area and either co-exist or they end up wiping our a life form (or life forms) in whatever niche they are taking over. No humans required, has happened basically as long as there has been life on this planet. This would be much the same.
It doesn’t really matter if the survival of the species is at stake. Perhaps it will matter to you, and the fact that humans were the cause will engender in you such pity for the poor microbes on Mars that you will voluntarily choose to go down with the good ship Earth (in reality, so will most everyone else, since we wouldn’t get very many people off the planet anyway), but to the species it’s a different story. Unless you become the God King of Earth, your opinion on this is only interesting in the abstract.
That’s fighting the hypothetical. Obviously, as per the OP, we can’t fix the planet. So, maybe it’s a big rock or some other cosmic disaster…or just something that our magical terraforming powers can fix here. Doesn’t really matter.
Who said anything about getting billions off the planet? I doubt in the compressed timeline given by the OP anything like that would be possible, even if we stretch the definition of ‘possible’ to ridiculous levels. Again, you are fighting the hypothetical…the discussion you and I were having is whether humans should (assuming they could) terraform Mars if that meant the potential extinction of Martian microbes. I’m saying if humanity could they should in this case. You seemed to be disagreeing.
Well, that’s your strawman. I didn’t say we were ‘numero uno in the universe’…I said that if it’s species survival (and it would be multiple species wrt life on the Earth), that if we could terraform something like Mars where there were possible microbes that we would do so…should wouldn’t really factor in. As for your hypothetical aliens, the same probably holds for them…if their survival is on the line and the Earth is the only place they could go, they probably would, and not worry too much about should.
World war II, the race to the moon, Global warming if you believe in it.
Any number of inventions.
None of these pushed humanity “to the brink”. The notion that some magic pixie dust technology will save us from our shortsightedness is not a rational or empirically supported position.
Stranger
'Zactly.
When cornered, we’ll do what we do best. Which is act stupidly, pray to various nonexistent gods who supposedly hate each others’ followers, and fight each other to the death over the dwindling craps of our civilization or our planet.
Doing something smart demands the luxury of time and space for there to be an opportunity for reason to crowd out stupidity, ignorance, and base emotionality.
No, not today, never in the foreseeable future of us.
Not in the really real world.
No, it wouldn’t, not over 14 billion years.
Mars lacks a few key things you need for a human atmosphere
GRAVITY is a big one.
We have such lovely volumes of oxygen here because we have sufficient gravity for it to stay here on earth and exist at the pressures/densities that it does.
Mars simply does not.
Secondly, Mars has no ‘Force Field’ against the constant barrage the sun is throwing out, even earths gravity alone is not enough to keep everything here.
Earth has a large internal dynamo that generates a planetary magnetosphere.
“Weak” as it is as far as picking up cars in a junk yard, it is very large and of sufficient strength to fend off the sun, otherwise the earth would be bled of certain elements. Hydrogen would get stripped off, which would eventually lead loss of water, Oxygen would get stripped off and either lost entirely or greatly reduced, other elements would be lost also.
And as an added bonus, walking on the surface in daylight would become nearly as dangerous as space walking with no radiation shielding.
The sun burps up waves of stuff that would rip the atmosphere right off a unprotected planet this close to it, if earth did not have its natural means of combating this, earth would probably look like a larger version of mars by now.
And as far as genetically re-engineering humans to be radiation tolerant, i’m not sure you could really do that too well? I mean the life forms that are highly tolerant are very different from us Mammals, i dont even know how they came about their tolerance?
Genetics is too complicated for me to figure out, but does not seem fundamentally feasible? Seems you’d almost have to create a new life form? But again to me genetics is complicated
Simply plays on words.
I tell you i think i am going to take up murdering and or raping little children.
You tell me “No, you can’t do that, it’s wrong” and you are correct.
I can still physically go out and do it, but that does not make you incorrect, if anything it makes me incorrect.
Dont mix up different events.
Life does have it’s own orchestrated play and balancing act yes, each within their own stage.
But dont confuse that with where humans have screwed up the play and unbalanced things.
Made up Example…
Human from europe goes on a boat, finds australia.
Said human has a carnivorous rat on his boat that also carried a virus that marsupials have no immunity to.
Rat takes over australia displacing marsupials.
Life did not do that, it was not part of the play, that is not the way life works, there is no balance in that.
There is a big difference.
What would being God King do? I know how humanity works. If you put humanity in a you or it situation, it will pick the “you” no matter what the “it” is.
IT could be microbes, baby seals, bambi the deer, ET, or a planet full of something resembling 2 year old children, outcome would be the same, we would launch the genesis device (Stealing from star trek) and find words to justify it later.
Not that this quite fits in here, but that creates a whole lot of ugly of a different nature
unless you can keep an enormous secret, which should probably be its own topic
But you do, or i should say “We” do
We are of the mind that our species, and its continuation, takes precedence over any other and would justify any means.
Highly doubtful, off world Noah’s Ark sounds great, but it’s probably only for stories
The reality is, you’d probably take only certain kinds of plant life for a lot of reasons that those here more scientifically inclined than i would do more justice explaining.
The only sentient life form on the ark would probably be us, but that’s a different thread entirely kind of.