Should we even consider terraforming Mars?

I’m talking about giving Mars a life-supporting atmosphere, water, habitable temperatures…

In the face of damaging and increasingly visible climate change on Earth—on which, except in our sci-fi-loving imaginations, we must all survive—I’d like us to that on this planet before we spend the time and money to do it on one 33.9 million miles away.

Q: Might it actually be easier to travel to an already habitable exoplanet in a nearby star system rather than try to make Mars habitable?

A: No. Just no.

Since we don’t have the technology, (or even the promise of technology) to do either one, we may be getting ahead of ourselves. If we could do them both, we probably should. If we could do either one, we probably should.

We would have to find a way to give Mars a magnetic field. Without a magnetic field, solar wind will just blow the new atmosphere away.

With our current space-propulsion technology any habitable exoplanet is centuries away, and our ability to keep a crew alive for that long in space is unproven (best case, the ISS).

Also, as @PhiNotPi points out, Mars lost most of what atmosphere it has had due to solar winds. If we make some more it will get carried away.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room may have the best idea, use what good terraforming ideas we have on our own planet to save it from our overuse.

It’s not possible.

I expect further insight to string theory to prove space travel much easier than currently believed. My belief is that a better understanding of how space “works” will reveal that space can be manipulated around a craft, something like a mole tunneling underground moving the soil. When that breakthrough happens, it will allow for travel requiring only a fraction of the fuel to travel many times the distance, and faster. We then may be able to explore some of these newly discovered Earth like planets.

If people think special interest is bad now, it will be 10,000 times worse should it even be possible, because the governments will never agree enough to do it, so the bucks to pull that off (if it were possible), would come from big business. And they won’t do so unless there was some commodity on Mars worth exploiting in a serious and profitable manner.

No we should terraform Titan fist.

Titan would be cool, but there would be only room for the Philippean evacuees. Boom, one exodus and we’d be shopping real estate again. They would be paying a bundle for heat.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room No argument there. Learning to control planetary conditions is one of the key steps in moving form a Type Zero Civilization to a Type I. Where better to practice than on a home-world that will soon be in desperate need of such technology?

@filmfann Neither is within the reach of present technology. However, neither is outside the reach of where technology is rapidly heading, assuming we don’t decide to launch Armageddon before we get there. So why the superficial “No.”?

@Jaxk Great answer. We actually do have the promise of the technology to do both. I’ll grant you they aren’t as close as sending a man to the moon and back was when that project was announced. But the Moon Shot was a good example of things getting done rather surprisingly fast once we set our minds to doing them. And if we want humanity to survive long term, we can’t keep all our eggs in one basket. There have been 5 mass extinction events on Earth in the last 500 million years. They occur every 50 to 100 million years. The last one was 65 million years ago, so if they maintain the past timing, the next could be 35 million years in the future, or later this year.

@PhiNotPi & @dabbler Guys—read the question details. I mentioned the solar winds and the fact they strip away atmosphere. I mentioned the need for a magnetic field. I even went further, and told you how Mars could be given such a field along with abundant water. What do you want me to do, fly out there and do it for you? I’m an old man now, You young people run along, now; and give Mars the water and mass of Earth and a molten nickel-iron core yourselves.

@Rarebear I don’t know how and it’s not possible are two very different things. There are no logical contradictions in the premise of terraforming Mars, so it’s not possible to prove the it’s not possible.

@Jonesn4burgers Wow! Great and thoughtful answer. Welcome to Fluther. If we do crack that puzzle, we’ll rapidly move up to a Type II or Type III Civilization.

@Hypocrisy_Central Such a task will NEVER be done by private, for profit enterprise. No company on earth has the sort of funds required. It would take their a world government of the cooperative guidance and funding of all the Earth’s developed nations to do something on the scale we are talking about here. The incentive to do it is that humanity will become extinct if we do not do it. Mars is made out of the same sorts of materials that Earth is made of. There is nothing to mine there that we can’t dig up right here.

@talljasperman Titan would be a fascinating moon to explore, but a terrible candidate for long-term survival. It could not be considered for that till we can exploit nearly all of the Sun’s energy and build devices capable of protecting it from impacts with massive asteroids of comets pulled into it by the massive gravity of Saturn. It’s low gravity would be a serious problem as well. But if you like “Drill baby drill.” then Titan would by like dying and going to heaven. There the hydrocarbons rain down out of the dense atmosphere and form massive lakes.

Do we really have the right to try and create a life sustaining atmosphere of any type on Mars, after ruining the one on Earth?

@ETpro Well, I’m going by statistically highly improbable. If you look at possibility in the realm of probability, and put a little Bayesian analysis in it, then I’m sticking with “impossible”.

@ETpro Mars is a long way away. It will take 3 months to get there, and that is a long time to deal with food, water, and air.

The nearest star is Proxima Centari, and it is 4.2 light years away.

Mars is (optimally) about 4 light minutes away, and it takes 3 months to get there. Consider the difference.
Unless we develop Warp technology (and please don’t say we will, eventually), the stars are out of our reach.

@filmfann Proxima Centari is said to have a planet in the goldilocks zone. Sorry but I don’t have a link.

@Skylight I’d say we not only have the right, we have an obligation. It’s not like there is teeming life there that we might harm.

@Rarebear Bayesian analysis is only as good as the statistical assumptions fed into it. If past science has proved anything at all, it is that even the greatest scientists are utterly clueless about what will be discovered 25, 50 or 100 years from their day. Therefore, it is not space exportation and terraforming that are impossible, but Bayesuan analysis of the same.

@filmfann We don’t actually need warp drive to cover interstellar space. We can already freeze embryos and later implant them in a womb, where they will grow to be a perfectly ordinary baby. In test tubes, we are pushing the boundaries of the complex blend of proteins, petites, and hormones that control fetal development in the womb. When we reach the singularity, we can send androids along to care for the infants. In this way, a starship could travel for thousands of years and still deliver a human crew. This seems far more practical than generational starships.

Then again, if the postulates of String physics pan out, we may be able to travel at what would, to the outside observer, appear to be supernatural speeds.

@talljasperman Proxima Centauri is a Flare Star, meaning that magnetic field variances in it cause it to vary dramatically in brightness. It is also likely part of st 3-star system with Alpha Centauri A and B That would mean that the orbit of planets around it would likely be highly chaotic.

@ETpro Let me repeat your question:

Q: Might it actually be easier to travel to an already habitable exoplanet in a nearby star system rather than try to make Mars habitable?

Creating androids to implant embryos into an artificial womb, and journey over 1000 years, or build a ship that can take a human crew on a 3 month journey to the closest planet, and create livable conditions?
Sounds like it would not be easier. So, my answer remains No.

@ETpro http://xkcd.com/1132/

@filmfann Just getting to Mars is only the beginning of the task. You need to increase its total mass to something similar to that of earth, give in a molten, spinning nickel-iron core to generate a magnetic field, import a vast amount of water, build the oxygen content to the atmosphere and the atmospheric density to near earth levels, and establish an ozone layer in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. We’re probably further from knowing how to do that than we are from being able to send viable life to an already suitable exoplanet.

@Rarebear You get my drift. :-)

@ETpro Such a task will NEVER be done by private, for profit enterprise. No company on earth has the sort of funds required.
When I refer to big Business, I mean a cobble of private companies; I know no single company could possess enough money to do it. Even if big business cobbled together a consortium of businesses I think it will still take decades to complete. What minerals is there, Big Business would certainly be able to lock up being the 1st ones there. It may be nothing different that we know of, but they would control what was there.

@ETpro Here are assumptions that are not statistical, but real
1) No magnetic field therefore atmosphere is stripped
2) Plants won’t grow in dead soil.
3) No source of oxygen/nitrogen big enough to do an entire planet
4) Not enough mass to hold an atmosphere

Those are all facts, not assumptions. I can assume and guess from those facts that the statistical probability of being able to terraform Mars is so asymptotically close to zero to be negligible and in the realm of science fantasy. Just like FTL travel is science fantasy.

@Hypocrisy_Central Who’d be king of that mountain. Unworkable. What Moon Shot achievements do any for-profit consortia have to show for themselves? Feel free to search all of human history. There are exactly Zero.

@Rarebear I already dealt with all that. Read the question details. The whole premise is that it isn’t easy. That’s why I suggest that it might actually prove more feasible to colonize an already habitable extra-solar planet. That’s not exactly a cakewalk either.