I’m not seeing why the same couldn’t be said for Mars, drop some mold spores and water bears down there, maybe some photosynthetic bacteria, slowly build a blanket of CO2 to warm the planet, melt/release the water from the surface, a thousand years gives a habitable planet, no asteroid steering required.
Comment on bro pls
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 10 months agoVenus would take longer, but would be vastly easier to terraform to a habitable world. The atmosphere should be able to be transformed into an earth like atmosphere by dumping a few comets and some bacteria in. Might take the bacteria a few thousand years, but they did it here in Earth caused the first mass extinction.
We might wanna check to see if any bacteria exist on Venus first, but honestly if there are, they haven’t made the evolutionary jump in the last 4 billion years, so I doubt it will happen just cause we add the necessary water.
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 10 months ago
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Mars is roughly a single order of magnitude larger than The Moon, in mass. It doesn’t have a magnetic field protecting it, and can’t unless we add a significant amount of metals to the planet. It also doesn’t have an atmosphere due to the two previous facts.
Meanwhile, Venus is roughly the size of The Earth at a scale of 4.8673 : 5.97222. It doesn’t have enough water though. It also doesn’t have a large iron core to create a magnetic field to protect the inhabitants. However, we could re-route several comets fairly easily to impact Venus giving it a small amount of mass, but also all the water that is needed to start the bacteria creating a Nitrogen rich atmosphere that has a large percentage of Oxygen, turning Venus into a tropical planet that will lose its atmosphere in a few billion years. To counteract this, as we throw 20-30 comets at Venus, we should also throw 100-200 Iron rich asteroids at Venus so that they will be absorbed into the molten core and form a magnetic field for Venus.
Now we have 2 Earth-like planets in a few thousand years.
To create such a gravitational well on Mars, so that we aren’t constantly losing both our normal skeletural muscles, but also more importantly, our organ muscles, you would have to create a stable black hole in the core of Mars, or you would have to bombard Mars, and its pathetic moons, with millions of asteroids.
To create a long term naturally stable, new earth, Venus is just closer to the masses that we actually need. By dropping just the comets onto Venus you just added a lot of mass, and that gets Venus even closer to being “Earth-like.” We will have to give Venus a comparative moon, but with asteroid mining, and starlifting, that shouldn’t be an issue.
Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m partial to the idea of converting Mercury into a star lifter / thruster / planetary shade. Blocking sunlight to Venus would cause the atmosphere to cool, then freeze and fall as snow. Then you can disassemble Venus too for more raw material. That’s a massive store of carbon, oxygen, and sulfur. Solar powered mass drivers operating out of a planetary vacuum cut costs of launching material into space.
I’ve watched a bunch of Isaac Arthur.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Don’t disassemble Venus. That planet is far too easy to terraform. Disassemble Mars, asteroids, and the various otherwise useless moons, comets, asteroids, and proto-planets in the heliosphere
Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well, I understand the argument for terraforming, but I’m more of an O’Neil Cylinder kind of guy. I prefer the idea of overwhelming surface area via orbital habitats rather than gravity wells. Considering the eons involved with stripping both inward planets down to the last bucketful though, I’m certainly in favor of a few millennia to fully explore and research them both beforehand.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A solar thruster doubles as a starlifting platform. Kurzgesagt has a video on is as well as PBS Spacetime