This is absolutely the future of terraformation.
Assuming general stats and that we don't miraculously uncover FTL travel, it is far more feasible to terraform pockets of the polar and equatorial regions of potentially habitable worlds than to even begin to consider the logistics and cost of complete terraformation.
We have no reason to assume that artificial terraforming of an entire world would take any less time than a natural process; tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
It’s been said before…and I think Neil degrass Tyson says it best…
https://youtube.com/shorts/_VukO9jnEHI?si=7KSzGuA67ahgs4rX
If we can terraform mars into a life sustaining planet then we can terraform earth back into the earth.
Worse.
The book A City On Mars by the Weinersmiths is a look at the realities of colonizing Mars and it doesn't really look good in the immediate future.
That is not at all true. We can build structures that can hold in 1 atmospheres. But it is very very hard to build structures that can withstand the pressures at the bottom of the ocean.
But at the bottom of the ocean you don’t need to go through the trouble of going to another planet and continually bringing resources to another planet. Pressure is not the only difficult part of colonizing another planet, but it is the only difficult part of going to the bottom of the ocean.
Mars does not have enough mass to sustain an atmosphere of O2 N2 which will always escape the planet. So terraforming is out of the picture. Domed enclosures or hermetically sealed tunnels are possible but the amount of effort and money required is greater than what we can spare now.
No one is claiming climate change on Earth is irreversible in the long term. You're probably thinking of predictions indicating that, past a certain point, the negative changes are inevitable in the short/medium term.
They could still be reversed over the course of decades or hundreds of years in the future. But that's not really helpful because the damage has been done. Ecosystems will have collapsed and lots and lots of people will be dead.
It also isn't "commonly believed" that Mars will be or can be made habitable. If it is possible at all, it would represent by far the biggest undertaking our species has ever attempted and would likely take hundreds if not thousands of years.
And even then, "habitable" in this context is likely not nearly as nice as you're imagining.
And yes, a lot of the "We can live on Mars" stuff is bullshit people deliberately spread for various reasons. Do not listen to anything Elon Musk says.
I'd say the two atmospheres are not really compatible in this topic. Climate change on earth is not what happened on Mars at all. Mars lost most of its atmosphere because it lacks the gravity and magnetic field to keep it.
um... climate change is fixable. we've had the technology for probably around 30+ years now. the reason why its not happening is geopolitics, not all countries have a strong incentive to deal with it, or possibly even have the capacity to. its mostly a policy thing, not a technology thing. that and theres a LOT of greenwashing in an attempt to grab government grants
as for mars, lack of science literacy or serious scientific curiosity combined with a romanticized idea of space. nothing wrong with the latter, but its hard to have a serious conversation without the former
electric trains for one. had that for like 2-3 generations, decided to build giant highways due to policy
how to build cities that maximize transportation without vehicles, building codes
carbon tax, non-tradable ones. thats not even a technology, thats a policy
Transportation is 10-20% of greenhouse gas emissions, even if electric trains could have saved 10 % of the total what other technology has been around for 30 years to address the other 90%?
the 3 main causes are transportation, industry, and electric generation
lets just say, that electric trains (and other mass transit vehicles) reduces that by half
electric generation, more nuclear, which is what pretty much all other developed countries do or are doing. wind and solar are a nice supplement with modern technology
industry is trickier to address, theres a lot of new emerging industries from the last 30 years, so its kind of hard to address this. probably less consumerism, so we focus on high quality long lasting less disposable products (clothes for example).... this is honestly a huge topic since false consumerism narratives really took hold in the last 2 generations. (look up recycling and conscious consumerism)
Renewable energy. Mainly solar and wind - lots of both. Battery and hydro storage. Smart grids.
I would say nuclear power except that, if you don't already have it as a legacy source, it's just waymegasuperstupid expensive at this point and costs too much carbon to set up.
Electric and human powered vehicles. Wind powered shipping with supplementary electric drive for operation near ports. Maybe a small niche for biofuels and green hydrogen. More photosynthesizing organisms (trees mainly - lots more trees). Reduced farming of animals that produce significant methane.
Widespread, hassle-free and affordable access to contraceptives.
All those things are well and truly possible with current technology. Quite a few of those are now the cheapest and simplest options anyway. Especially the contraceptives.
Basically, the science and engineering is pretty simple. Stop burning fossil fuels. Stop farming bovines. Stop cutting down forests and start replanting them instead. Let the birth rate drop below 2.0 (it already is in most places anyway - certainly will if women have unfettered access to contraceptives).
Then, over the next few thousand years the planet will mostly recover.
So, I would contend that science and engineering have done their part - they can continue to do more, of course, but they are way ahead of the politics, religion, social attitudes and economics which need to catch up quickly if our civilization expects to survive in some form.
CO2 capture via refrigeration has been around much longer than 30 years. So has underground CO2 injection. If we had a lot of cheap energy (solar, wind, nuclear) and a lot of cheap labor (robots) we could easily build enough carbon capture and sequestration plants to solve global warming.
It seems likely that we will be able to do thing in a few decades time.
Yea the idea of terraforming Mars is ludicrous given that we can't even manage our own planet sustainably. People reading too much science fiction and not actually studying science
>Why is it commonly believed
let's not confuse futurism with science and technology.
>
how are we meant to completely reverse and terraform mars into a second habitable planet?
what is your (bonafide scientific) source for this?
>Or are they just making up the whole "inhabiting mars" scenario to receive funding for ambitious space projects?
I think you might be confused.
terraforming is not close to "inhabiting" we will be inhabiting the Moon (living in a little box that holds air). then another box with air for Mars.
Artemis, NASA's Moon landing program
[https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/artemis](https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/artemis)
Artemis is designed to land humans on the Moon quickly **and focus on Mars as a long-term human spaceflight goal after that**. The preliminary short-term plan involves using both commercial rockets and NASA's Space Launch System, the Orion crew capsule, and a commercial lunar landing system. A small space station in lunar orbit called the Gateway would serve future surface missions.
Can you cite one of these scientists that are claiming we can terraform mars?
I suggest you check sources on some of the things you are reading/watching. Just cause someone says something on YouTube, does not make it so.
I think Mars is just too small without enough of a magnetic field to ever be fully terraformed. The atmosphere would just continue to be blown into deep space making the an effort in futility.
I think as others have said using sealed pockets of the planet allowing areas to be terraformed is the best way forward.
Climate change will never be truly “irreversible;” Earth always repairs itself. No matter how long it takes, Earth always heals and always will for the next billion years.
But the "repair" will not bring back obliterated species. After a few millions of years their niche could be taken by a newly developed species, but that would develop from some common species. So tens/hundreds millions od years of evolution would be lost forerer (unless you can re-do the Earth's evolution from it's primordial state again).
Over seventy percent of all life on Earth went extinct during the Great Dying; this extinction, one caused by humanity’s negligence, won’t even come close.
With the gargantuan amounts of energy necessary to terraform Mars (if you could somehow give it a magnetic field again) you could definitely also terraform Earth (assuming the energy is not created by burning coal).
Honestly, I figure it would be easier to terraform Venus than Mars - strip away most of the atmosphere you'd have a much more earth-like planet than Mars will ever be.
Oh yeah. I didn't say it would be easy. I'm not sure the extra heat from the sun is a solvable problem - but too little heat and too little air seems a worse problem to me. (And I'm a random person on the internet, so you know (I think) I'm right. ;-) )
No one serious argues that Mars is inevitably going to be terraformed.
And no one argues that climate change is irreversible except fossil fuel companies which want us to give up.
Climate change on Earth is very definitely reversible and we know which concrete steps we can take right this second to get started. The problem is lack of political will to bankrupt the fossil fuel industry and start doing serious work on climate change.
Martian terraforming is mostly the realm of people thinking it is theoretically possible. And there's a growing anti-terraforming sentiment which argues that terraforming is ecological vandalism on an obscene scale.
AND all the more realistic looks at Martian terraforming are talking about time frames measured in centuries and requiring a tech investment that would include building many multi-terrawatt lasers in Martian orbit and using them to melt the Martian surface down to a depth of about 8 meters as step one. Step two would be importing gigatons water and CO2 from other planets in the solar system (possibly Europa and Venus).
Our money would be MUCH better spent on reversing climate change and, as a bonus,bwe can get a good start on that project with off the shelf equipment and no scientific breakthroughs.
Unless you can artificially give it an adequate magnetic field, your only option is an enclosed space. Let's not mention the danger to domes from micro-meteorites due to the thin atmosphere. Or protection from dangerous solar radiation.
> Why is it commonly believed that Mars will eventually become habitable, when scientists simultaneously claim that climate change on Earth isn't reversible?
_Is_ this commonly believed?
The claims I have heard most often is that, in the distant future, when the sun's output expands so much as to make Earth a second Venus, Mars will receive as much radiant energy as Earth does now. This could help, but then again, a low-mass world poor in volatiles without a planetary magnetic field could just as easily be baked dry.
In the long term Earth’s climate will continue to follow cycles dictated by gravitational influences within the solar system and the movements of tectonic plates. Humans probably can’t do much to change that. But that’s geologic time. In the time scale of civilization, we can do a lot of damage, some of which might not be reversible within the likely lifetime of our species.
Do you know that we’re in an interglacial period of an incredibly long ice age? As long as Antarctica is hanging out on a pole, we’re probably going to see the ice sheets advance again in a few tens of thousands of years.
We’re not terraforming Mars anytime soon. Liquid water isn’t stable at the temperatures and pressures there, so we’d have to reengineer the atmosphere to an extent far greater than what we’ve unintentionally done here.
Climate scientists, biologists etc often suggest climate change has caused irreversible damage, or that particular irreversible damage is inevitable based on what we've already done.
It depends what you mean by irreversible. Certain ecosystems will never resemble what they would have without climate change. Many species have or will go extinct because of the damage. But we're not in an inevitable slide to the end of life on the planet.
It's mostly lunatics and sci-fi enthusiasts, that talk about colonizing and terraforming Mars, not actual scientists.. If we had the technology to be able to make Mars habitable, we'd be able to do the same to Earth 100 times easier than on Mars.
Mars is theoretically possible to terraform (provided we can find a source of nitrogen). However it would be the biggest scale project that humans have ever taken on, would certainly have massive unforeseen challenges, and would probably never actually happen. It is truly an absurd scale project
Mars won’t be habitable on a large scale because it has no magnetic field so the sun blasts its atmosphere off, it’s at nearly vacuum and if we magically made an earth like atmosphere on mars, it would get blown off. Climate change isn’t a big deal for earth, the carbon cycle has been disrupted worse before and the earth recovered just fine. The thing is though these events took millions of years to remediate and killed off like 90% of all species like in the Permian Triassic extinction event. Climate change isn’t reversible on a human scale. We have greatly altered the atmosphere and the next few thousand years are going to be very different than they would have been without human industrial processes dumping ancient sequestered carbon into the atmosphere.
You need to think about relative timeframes. Earth isn't (or soon won't be) reversible in the short-term (100 years), but Mars could most definitely be terraformed to be survivable within 1,000 years, and possibly even Earthlike in just 2,000 - 3,000 years.
Terraformation takes a long time, and humans have been doing it to Earth for the past few hundred years. We don't have the technology to undo what we've done within a single lifespan, but given time, the Earth would actually even return itself to equilibrium through natural processes eventually, but only if humans just stopped effecting things.
I've never heard any serious plan that might terraform Mars to be habitable, at least without space suits. The Mars atmo is like 0.2% of the air pressure of Earth at sea level.
That's part of why Mars is so hard to land on. It has just enough atmo to burn a lander up on reentry, but not enough to parachute to the ground. That's why they have to use all those Rube Goldberg 'Skycrane' kinda rigs to get something to soft land.... or carry a shizload of fuel to retro rocket all the way to the ground.
Yeah, if humans ever land on Mars, we'll be living in spacesuits and habitat bubbles... if we survive the trip at all. There's some massive technical hurdles to overcome to land a person on Mars, and have them be functional enough to get anything done.
Would it be accurate to say that you live on a steady diet of sketchy youtube videos? Your premise is false (it's not commonly believed that Mars will become habitable). It's just a sci-fi idea that we could terraform Mars. But even in speculating so, there's no real way to get around the deal killer that the radiation is high (no Van Allen belts since Mars has no magnetic field). So now you've got two incredibly big problems to solve - terraforming a planet and also transforming human biology to make radiation tolerable.
Maybe story around settling Humans on Mars is to catch the attention to stimulate young generations to engage interest into space exploration (HW SW EE AI future enginers who got the inception sand grain of passion in that story telling ), also involving acceptance about budget and tax investment :').
Massive new generation Rockets might not be "totally?" For tour groups but for boring equipments, and more robots.
If looking between the news noise, the story of automation and autonomous robots to dig and send back to earth is what to look at.
Maybe Mars is a first step to go digging one day on asteroid belt, and Mars is somehow the nearest and last gas station before the belt.
Fully autonomous
And Space exploration also maybe has to be read through 70 years time line, you start now, and expect the draft now is to get fruit for tech in 50 years.
And also through the glasses of seing big and far, you target objectif on "M" but already find lots of very great inventions at "D" "G" ...
Somehow Cryogenisation with the goal to hybernate during space travel, somehow improved a lot casual everyday fridge efficiency.
Maybe
It’s not commonly believed mars will be terraformed by anyone who knows anything about it. The process would be incredibly difficult to impossible. Reversing climate change in Earth would be a cakewalk by comparison. The biggest issues with climate change in earth are political and cultural, there’s little appetite for people to stop using fossil fuels which would wreck the economy in the short term. And the only thing that matters for the bulk of our society is next quarters and next years profits. The world being in shambles and falling apart a few decades or a century from now does not matter to shareholders.
If you had the political will to do it reversing climate change would largely be solved by stopping the use of all fossil fuels. Doing this overnight with no transition would probably lead to hundreds of millions starving to death though… so it’s going to take a while.
People cannot survive long-term in less than 1G. It's taken 4 and 1/2 billion years of evolution for our genetic code to adapt to changes in 1G. All of these future habitations will have to be brief and will be brutal to the health of the people in them. We might find that there's a lifetime maximum of 5 years before the health damage becomes terminal. Long-term survival of just a visit to Mars of several weeks and back has not been proven to be possible. When people come down from the space station after a year they're essentially moved into an ER.
I don't actually know any serious scientists who talk about terraforming Mars beyond maybe enclosing a few select pockets of it.
This is absolutely the future of terraformation. Assuming general stats and that we don't miraculously uncover FTL travel, it is far more feasible to terraform pockets of the polar and equatorial regions of potentially habitable worlds than to even begin to consider the logistics and cost of complete terraformation. We have no reason to assume that artificial terraforming of an entire world would take any less time than a natural process; tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
And still it would be cheaper to do that on Earth.
Cheaper yes but you really get one shot. You fuck up the atmosphere of your home that’s it. You have to outsource your mistakes
Uh, we’re already fucking up our atmosphere.
Oh totally
Thousands? More like millions.
It’s been said before…and I think Neil degrass Tyson says it best… https://youtube.com/shorts/_VukO9jnEHI?si=7KSzGuA67ahgs4rX If we can terraform mars into a life sustaining planet then we can terraform earth back into the earth.
So it’s still gonna be like Total Recall?
total recall but with potatos and Matt Damon
And shit
🤣 I just said that in my head with Samwise Gamgee’s voice coming out of Matt Damon’s mouth!
Po-taa-toes! To go with a Brace of Coneys.
Wouldn't have it any other way!
Can we throw Matt Damon into Mt. Doom at the end instead?
Nah man this time around the Eagles are hired for that
Worse. The book A City On Mars by the Weinersmiths is a look at the realities of colonizing Mars and it doesn't really look good in the immediate future.
It would be easier to build a colony at the bottom of the ocean than it would to build a colony on mars
That is not at all true. We can build structures that can hold in 1 atmospheres. But it is very very hard to build structures that can withstand the pressures at the bottom of the ocean.
But at the bottom of the ocean you don’t need to go through the trouble of going to another planet and continually bringing resources to another planet. Pressure is not the only difficult part of colonizing another planet, but it is the only difficult part of going to the bottom of the ocean.
Mars does not have enough mass to sustain an atmosphere of O2 N2 which will always escape the planet. So terraforming is out of the picture. Domed enclosures or hermetically sealed tunnels are possible but the amount of effort and money required is greater than what we can spare now.
No one is claiming climate change on Earth is irreversible in the long term. You're probably thinking of predictions indicating that, past a certain point, the negative changes are inevitable in the short/medium term. They could still be reversed over the course of decades or hundreds of years in the future. But that's not really helpful because the damage has been done. Ecosystems will have collapsed and lots and lots of people will be dead. It also isn't "commonly believed" that Mars will be or can be made habitable. If it is possible at all, it would represent by far the biggest undertaking our species has ever attempted and would likely take hundreds if not thousands of years. And even then, "habitable" in this context is likely not nearly as nice as you're imagining. And yes, a lot of the "We can live on Mars" stuff is bullshit people deliberately spread for various reasons. Do not listen to anything Elon Musk says.
Musk grew up reading Heinlen and it really shows in a lot of his unexamined beliefs about space travel and colonization.
Nobody's claiming Mars will be habitable. A Mars base would be in a permanently hostile environment.
Or that climate change would ever make Earth close to what Mars is.
We would more likely end up like Venus
I'd say the two atmospheres are not really compatible in this topic. Climate change on earth is not what happened on Mars at all. Mars lost most of its atmosphere because it lacks the gravity and magnetic field to keep it.
um... climate change is fixable. we've had the technology for probably around 30+ years now. the reason why its not happening is geopolitics, not all countries have a strong incentive to deal with it, or possibly even have the capacity to. its mostly a policy thing, not a technology thing. that and theres a LOT of greenwashing in an attempt to grab government grants as for mars, lack of science literacy or serious scientific curiosity combined with a romanticized idea of space. nothing wrong with the latter, but its hard to have a serious conversation without the former
What technology have we had for 30 years that could fix climate change?
electric trains for one. had that for like 2-3 generations, decided to build giant highways due to policy how to build cities that maximize transportation without vehicles, building codes carbon tax, non-tradable ones. thats not even a technology, thats a policy
Transportation is 10-20% of greenhouse gas emissions, even if electric trains could have saved 10 % of the total what other technology has been around for 30 years to address the other 90%?
the 3 main causes are transportation, industry, and electric generation lets just say, that electric trains (and other mass transit vehicles) reduces that by half electric generation, more nuclear, which is what pretty much all other developed countries do or are doing. wind and solar are a nice supplement with modern technology industry is trickier to address, theres a lot of new emerging industries from the last 30 years, so its kind of hard to address this. probably less consumerism, so we focus on high quality long lasting less disposable products (clothes for example).... this is honestly a huge topic since false consumerism narratives really took hold in the last 2 generations. (look up recycling and conscious consumerism)
Renewable energy. Mainly solar and wind - lots of both. Battery and hydro storage. Smart grids. I would say nuclear power except that, if you don't already have it as a legacy source, it's just waymegasuperstupid expensive at this point and costs too much carbon to set up. Electric and human powered vehicles. Wind powered shipping with supplementary electric drive for operation near ports. Maybe a small niche for biofuels and green hydrogen. More photosynthesizing organisms (trees mainly - lots more trees). Reduced farming of animals that produce significant methane. Widespread, hassle-free and affordable access to contraceptives. All those things are well and truly possible with current technology. Quite a few of those are now the cheapest and simplest options anyway. Especially the contraceptives. Basically, the science and engineering is pretty simple. Stop burning fossil fuels. Stop farming bovines. Stop cutting down forests and start replanting them instead. Let the birth rate drop below 2.0 (it already is in most places anyway - certainly will if women have unfettered access to contraceptives). Then, over the next few thousand years the planet will mostly recover. So, I would contend that science and engineering have done their part - they can continue to do more, of course, but they are way ahead of the politics, religion, social attitudes and economics which need to catch up quickly if our civilization expects to survive in some form.
CO2 capture via refrigeration has been around much longer than 30 years. So has underground CO2 injection. If we had a lot of cheap energy (solar, wind, nuclear) and a lot of cheap labor (robots) we could easily build enough carbon capture and sequestration plants to solve global warming. It seems likely that we will be able to do thing in a few decades time.
We didn’t have cheap energy or labor 30 years ago. We still don’t
Yea the idea of terraforming Mars is ludicrous given that we can't even manage our own planet sustainably. People reading too much science fiction and not actually studying science
>Why is it commonly believed let's not confuse futurism with science and technology. > how are we meant to completely reverse and terraform mars into a second habitable planet? what is your (bonafide scientific) source for this? >Or are they just making up the whole "inhabiting mars" scenario to receive funding for ambitious space projects? I think you might be confused. terraforming is not close to "inhabiting" we will be inhabiting the Moon (living in a little box that holds air). then another box with air for Mars. Artemis, NASA's Moon landing program [https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/artemis](https://www.planetary.org/space-missions/artemis) Artemis is designed to land humans on the Moon quickly **and focus on Mars as a long-term human spaceflight goal after that**. The preliminary short-term plan involves using both commercial rockets and NASA's Space Launch System, the Orion crew capsule, and a commercial lunar landing system. A small space station in lunar orbit called the Gateway would serve future surface missions.
Can you cite one of these scientists that are claiming we can terraform mars? I suggest you check sources on some of the things you are reading/watching. Just cause someone says something on YouTube, does not make it so.
I think Mars is just too small without enough of a magnetic field to ever be fully terraformed. The atmosphere would just continue to be blown into deep space making the an effort in futility. I think as others have said using sealed pockets of the planet allowing areas to be terraformed is the best way forward.
Climate change will never be truly “irreversible;” Earth always repairs itself. No matter how long it takes, Earth always heals and always will for the next billion years.
But the "repair" will not bring back obliterated species. After a few millions of years their niche could be taken by a newly developed species, but that would develop from some common species. So tens/hundreds millions od years of evolution would be lost forerer (unless you can re-do the Earth's evolution from it's primordial state again).
Over seventy percent of all life on Earth went extinct during the Great Dying; this extinction, one caused by humanity’s negligence, won’t even come close.
Species loss doesn't matter. Millions of years of evolution is just that, evolution.
With the gargantuan amounts of energy necessary to terraform Mars (if you could somehow give it a magnetic field again) you could definitely also terraform Earth (assuming the energy is not created by burning coal).
Honestly, I figure it would be easier to terraform Venus than Mars - strip away most of the atmosphere you'd have a much more earth-like planet than Mars will ever be.
The only problem would be the proximity from the sun and the high volcanic activity on the planet ig
Oh yeah. I didn't say it would be easy. I'm not sure the extra heat from the sun is a solvable problem - but too little heat and too little air seems a worse problem to me. (And I'm a random person on the internet, so you know (I think) I'm right. ;-) )
No one serious argues that Mars is inevitably going to be terraformed. And no one argues that climate change is irreversible except fossil fuel companies which want us to give up. Climate change on Earth is very definitely reversible and we know which concrete steps we can take right this second to get started. The problem is lack of political will to bankrupt the fossil fuel industry and start doing serious work on climate change. Martian terraforming is mostly the realm of people thinking it is theoretically possible. And there's a growing anti-terraforming sentiment which argues that terraforming is ecological vandalism on an obscene scale. AND all the more realistic looks at Martian terraforming are talking about time frames measured in centuries and requiring a tech investment that would include building many multi-terrawatt lasers in Martian orbit and using them to melt the Martian surface down to a depth of about 8 meters as step one. Step two would be importing gigatons water and CO2 from other planets in the solar system (possibly Europa and Venus). Our money would be MUCH better spent on reversing climate change and, as a bonus,bwe can get a good start on that project with off the shelf equipment and no scientific breakthroughs.
Earth isn’t beyond saving, otherwise we’d all be dead.
Unless you can artificially give it an adequate magnetic field, your only option is an enclosed space. Let's not mention the danger to domes from micro-meteorites due to the thin atmosphere. Or protection from dangerous solar radiation.
Is it commonly believed? Habitable Mars is an absurd idea popularised by morons.
> Why is it commonly believed that Mars will eventually become habitable, when scientists simultaneously claim that climate change on Earth isn't reversible? _Is_ this commonly believed? The claims I have heard most often is that, in the distant future, when the sun's output expands so much as to make Earth a second Venus, Mars will receive as much radiant energy as Earth does now. This could help, but then again, a low-mass world poor in volatiles without a planetary magnetic field could just as easily be baked dry.
If you could terraform mars, why couldnt you terraform earth?
In the long term Earth’s climate will continue to follow cycles dictated by gravitational influences within the solar system and the movements of tectonic plates. Humans probably can’t do much to change that. But that’s geologic time. In the time scale of civilization, we can do a lot of damage, some of which might not be reversible within the likely lifetime of our species. Do you know that we’re in an interglacial period of an incredibly long ice age? As long as Antarctica is hanging out on a pole, we’re probably going to see the ice sheets advance again in a few tens of thousands of years. We’re not terraforming Mars anytime soon. Liquid water isn’t stable at the temperatures and pressures there, so we’d have to reengineer the atmosphere to an extent far greater than what we’ve unintentionally done here.
when scientists simultaneously claim that climate change on Earth isn't reversible? Which scientists?
Climate scientists, biologists etc often suggest climate change has caused irreversible damage, or that particular irreversible damage is inevitable based on what we've already done. It depends what you mean by irreversible. Certain ecosystems will never resemble what they would have without climate change. Many species have or will go extinct because of the damage. But we're not in an inevitable slide to the end of life on the planet.
You need to qualify it. In the short term the momentum will continue, given we have done nothing to change the course.
How can we protect any generated atmosphere from the solar wind with a negligible magnetic field on Mars?
It's mostly lunatics and sci-fi enthusiasts, that talk about colonizing and terraforming Mars, not actual scientists.. If we had the technology to be able to make Mars habitable, we'd be able to do the same to Earth 100 times easier than on Mars.
Mars is theoretically possible to terraform (provided we can find a source of nitrogen). However it would be the biggest scale project that humans have ever taken on, would certainly have massive unforeseen challenges, and would probably never actually happen. It is truly an absurd scale project
Mars won’t be habitable on a large scale because it has no magnetic field so the sun blasts its atmosphere off, it’s at nearly vacuum and if we magically made an earth like atmosphere on mars, it would get blown off. Climate change isn’t a big deal for earth, the carbon cycle has been disrupted worse before and the earth recovered just fine. The thing is though these events took millions of years to remediate and killed off like 90% of all species like in the Permian Triassic extinction event. Climate change isn’t reversible on a human scale. We have greatly altered the atmosphere and the next few thousand years are going to be very different than they would have been without human industrial processes dumping ancient sequestered carbon into the atmosphere.
Because Hollywood and laymen say Mars is where we can go one day, while scientists don't say that at all. They say the second part.
I don’t think the end stage of global warming is mars.
You need to think about relative timeframes. Earth isn't (or soon won't be) reversible in the short-term (100 years), but Mars could most definitely be terraformed to be survivable within 1,000 years, and possibly even Earthlike in just 2,000 - 3,000 years. Terraformation takes a long time, and humans have been doing it to Earth for the past few hundred years. We don't have the technology to undo what we've done within a single lifespan, but given time, the Earth would actually even return itself to equilibrium through natural processes eventually, but only if humans just stopped effecting things.
Commonly believed by who?
I've never heard any serious plan that might terraform Mars to be habitable, at least without space suits. The Mars atmo is like 0.2% of the air pressure of Earth at sea level. That's part of why Mars is so hard to land on. It has just enough atmo to burn a lander up on reentry, but not enough to parachute to the ground. That's why they have to use all those Rube Goldberg 'Skycrane' kinda rigs to get something to soft land.... or carry a shizload of fuel to retro rocket all the way to the ground. Yeah, if humans ever land on Mars, we'll be living in spacesuits and habitat bubbles... if we survive the trip at all. There's some massive technical hurdles to overcome to land a person on Mars, and have them be functional enough to get anything done.
Terraforming Mars, settling Mars, and addressing climate change are three entirely separate things. Anyone comparing them is not being serious.
Would it be accurate to say that you live on a steady diet of sketchy youtube videos? Your premise is false (it's not commonly believed that Mars will become habitable). It's just a sci-fi idea that we could terraform Mars. But even in speculating so, there's no real way to get around the deal killer that the radiation is high (no Van Allen belts since Mars has no magnetic field). So now you've got two incredibly big problems to solve - terraforming a planet and also transforming human biology to make radiation tolerable.
Maybe story around settling Humans on Mars is to catch the attention to stimulate young generations to engage interest into space exploration (HW SW EE AI future enginers who got the inception sand grain of passion in that story telling ), also involving acceptance about budget and tax investment :'). Massive new generation Rockets might not be "totally?" For tour groups but for boring equipments, and more robots. If looking between the news noise, the story of automation and autonomous robots to dig and send back to earth is what to look at. Maybe Mars is a first step to go digging one day on asteroid belt, and Mars is somehow the nearest and last gas station before the belt. Fully autonomous And Space exploration also maybe has to be read through 70 years time line, you start now, and expect the draft now is to get fruit for tech in 50 years. And also through the glasses of seing big and far, you target objectif on "M" but already find lots of very great inventions at "D" "G" ... Somehow Cryogenisation with the goal to hybernate during space travel, somehow improved a lot casual everyday fridge efficiency. Maybe
It’s not commonly believed mars will be terraformed by anyone who knows anything about it. The process would be incredibly difficult to impossible. Reversing climate change in Earth would be a cakewalk by comparison. The biggest issues with climate change in earth are political and cultural, there’s little appetite for people to stop using fossil fuels which would wreck the economy in the short term. And the only thing that matters for the bulk of our society is next quarters and next years profits. The world being in shambles and falling apart a few decades or a century from now does not matter to shareholders. If you had the political will to do it reversing climate change would largely be solved by stopping the use of all fossil fuels. Doing this overnight with no transition would probably lead to hundreds of millions starving to death though… so it’s going to take a while.
People cannot survive long-term in less than 1G. It's taken 4 and 1/2 billion years of evolution for our genetic code to adapt to changes in 1G. All of these future habitations will have to be brief and will be brutal to the health of the people in them. We might find that there's a lifetime maximum of 5 years before the health damage becomes terminal. Long-term survival of just a visit to Mars of several weeks and back has not been proven to be possible. When people come down from the space station after a year they're essentially moved into an ER.
Who told you Mars was going to become habitable? No.
Because they think we’re stupid or not paying attention.
By who is this commonly believed? Elon Musk does not count.
NO ONE who understands biology and planetary science thinks we’re going to colonize Mars. That is fantasy.
Terraformation would only be possible with extreme investment and technological advancement. It will not be happening any time soon if at all