we wont "need" planetary colonization until 400,000 years from now.
and civilization as we know it is only 4,000 years old.
and we're going to exhaust all raw materials in 400 years.
if climate change doesnt cause a catastrophe in 40 years.
meanwhile, why not "colonize" the Sahara or the antarctic. it has atmosphere, survivable temperature, no UV rays, water source. colonizing mars 395,000 years too early is a wasteful error.
Probably the amount of time it would take to terraform Mars so we can actually take a walk outside there without a suit.
Which raises another question, if we can terraform, why not keep earth habitable?.... the whole Mars thing is utter and complete bs even on its surface.
Thing is, you can't "terraform" Mars. You can try to change characteristics but this will never solve the issue Mars has in the first place.
There is a reason Mars is not habitable, and can't hold enough gasses to form a proper atmosphere, and that's because it's not heavy enough to have a gravity high enough.
Not amount of terraforming (short of creating an artificial gravitational force) is going to solve this.
That, plus Mars will have the same existential threats in the form of asteroids and other objects hitting it even if we could make it habitable with sci-fi tech. So you would want to protect it with some deflector system or another, same question, why would we ever focus that to protect Mars and not our current home to start with? And Mars second if at all.
Now, if we could only invent something to protect us from our own suns biggest farts, if that ever hits directly we be cooked anyway. Any Mars colony even more so with that shitty bit of gas calling itself a atmosphere.
Our own sun can end us with a big fart in our direction.
It takes millions of years for an atmosphere to dissipate.
Creating one is a problem well beyond our civilisation, but having it disappear is not a concern.
Weirdly giving mars a magnetic field is totally within our current civilisation's scale.
A ~4000km long superconducting MgB transmission line at medium latitude exactly like the (much shorter) ones used in various places on earth because they are cheaper than trying to demolish some houses for an aluminium one would give it a magnetic field strong enough to hold an atmosphere.
So we have no means to get to the point where this is a problem.
Even if we did, it wouldn't be a problem until 10-100x as long as it took to make the atmosphere had elapsed.
We totally have the means to build a machine which would solve it right now, although moving said machine is way out of budget -- requiring thousands of Saturn Vs. A mars civilisation could easily do the same well before they had self sustaining industry.
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u/telerabbit9000 1d ago
we wont "need" planetary colonization until 400,000 years from now.
and civilization as we know it is only 4,000 years old.
and we're going to exhaust all raw materials in 400 years.
if climate change doesnt cause a catastrophe in 40 years.
meanwhile, why not "colonize" the Sahara or the antarctic. it has atmosphere, survivable temperature, no UV rays, water source. colonizing mars 395,000 years too early is a wasteful error.