Which company will achieve her goals before, SpaceX or Blue Origin?

[RDMM2081]

Is there any forum option to mute an entire thread?

[ZachS09]

Is there any forum option to mute an entire thread?

I wish there was.

[meekGee]

SpaceX’s goal is sorta kinda ultimately terraforming of Mars. A process that would take hundreds or thousands of years.

Your missing a few zeros on your numbers. Planets are WAY WAY bigger than people think they are. If its even possible, think millions.

Took us less than a century of global industrialization to affect Earth climate, and Earth with full atmosphere and biosphere has a lot more inertia.  And that was as a side-effect, not an intentional drive with climate change as its goal.

Planets are indeed large, but biology scales awfully fast. I would say "think hundreds" is about right.

[SpeakertoAnimals]

SpaceX’s goal is sorta kinda ultimately terraforming of Mars. A process that would take hundreds or thousands of years.

Your missing a few zeros on your numbers. Planets are WAY WAY bigger than people think they are. If its even possible, think millions.

Took us less than a century of global industrialization to affect Earth climate, and Earth with full atmosphere and biosphere has a lot more inertia.  And that was as a side-effect, not an intentional drive with climate change as its goal.

Planets are indeed large, but biology scales awfully fast. I would say "think hundreds" is about right.

Step 1: Calculate the mass of the elements of Earth's atmosphere and biosphere. Step 2: Scale down to fit Mars. Step 3: Look at the size of those numbers and say "F!%#, where do we get all that mass, and how do we get it to Mars?"

[Robotbeat]

Chris McKay and Robert Zubrin I’ve written papers on this topic and depending on what kind of terraforming you want, sometime between 50 years and 5000 are about right. If you are actually trying. That implies more than just waiting for biology to do your work for you.

[deadman1204]

Chris McKay and Robert Zubrin I’ve written papers on this topic and depending on what kind of terraforming you want, sometime between 50 years and 5000 are about right. If you are actually trying. That implies more than just waiting for biology to do your work for you.

There isn't the time to get into all the magic handwaving that these estimates have in them.

[meekGee]

Chris McKay and Robert Zubrin I’ve written papers on this topic and depending on what kind of terraforming you want, sometime between 50 years and 5000 are about right. If you are actually trying. That implies more than just waiting for biology to do your work for you.

When I mentioned biology I meant "human assisted" biology.  I think that's the only way to scale fast to planetary scale change, and 50-5000 sounds right.

[LouScheffer]

I was wondering why spring seems so green these days, and noticed that we have 33% more CO2 in the air than when I was a kid.  And that's entirely from from combining stuff that's already lying around - no imports or exports.  And with the vegetation (of which there is a lot) countering this effect by sucking up CO2.  Of course this is anti-terraforming (taking an Earth-like planet and making it uninhabitable) but the timelines should be similar.  A few millennia should do.

[SpeakertoAnimals]

Chris McKay and Robert Zubrin I’ve written papers on this topic and depending on what kind of terraforming you want, sometime between 50 years and 5000 are about right. If you are actually trying. That implies more than just waiting for biology to do your work for you.

When I mentioned biology I meant "human assisted" biology.  I think that's the only way to scale fast to planetary scale change, and 50-5000 sounds right.

You still have to have the elements for life to work with. Nitrogen is missing, carbon is scant, hydrogen is low, and you have to break loose the oxygen. Not sure where we are on the other vital elements.

[meekGee]

Chris McKay and Robert Zubrin I’ve written papers on this topic and depending on what kind of terraforming you want, sometime between 50 years and 5000 are about right. If you are actually trying. That implies more than just waiting for biology to do your work for you.

When I mentioned biology I meant "human assisted" biology.  I think that's the only way to scale fast to planetary scale change, and 50-5000 sounds right.

You still have to have the elements for life to work with. Nitrogen is missing, carbon is scant, hydrogen is low, and you have to break loose the oxygen. Not sure where we are on the other vital elements.

Well you have to break down the CO2 and H2O, there's no argument there.

And this will take a lot of energy, and the only realistic source is solar via photosynthesis.

Low efficiency but self-replicating, so can harvest in principle the entire solar input of the planet. Which is a LOT of energy. Much much more than nuclear power stations.

The problem is bootstrapping it and creating a stable environment.

If you're thinking about hundreds of years, it's not far fetched at all.  Doing it in 50 seems a bit much.

[Robotbeat]

If you don’t care about fully breathable but just increasing the pressure to not require pressure suits, then 50 years is doable with sufficient effort for some parts of the planet.

Almost like I prefaced the 50 years with the phrase “depending on what kind of terraforming you want” or something…

But I’d have to assume people wouldn’t struggle so hard with reading comprehension that we’d have to pull the whole thread off course to clarify this brief and defensible statement.

[JCRM]

I was wondering why spring seems so green these days, and noticed that we have 33% more CO2 in the air than when I was a kid.  And that's entirely from from combining stuff that's already lying around - no imports or exports.  And with the vegetation (of which there is a lot) countering this effect by sucking up CO2.  Of course this is anti-terraforming (taking an Earth-like planet and making it uninhabitable) but the timelines should be similar.  A few millennia should do.

the mild changes seen in climate change are nothing compared to what is needed for terraforming.

However that we still have no method to stabilise the change should give some insight into the reality of our ability to terraform.

[Robotbeat]

I was wondering why spring seems so green these days, and noticed that we have 33% more CO2 in the air than when I was a kid.  And that's entirely from from combining stuff that's already lying around - no imports or exports.  And with the vegetation (of which there is a lot) countering this effect by sucking up CO2.  Of course this is anti-terraforming (taking an Earth-like planet and making it uninhabitable) but the timelines should be similar.  A few millennia should do.

the mild changes seen in climate change are nothing compared to what is needed for terraforming.

However that we still have no method to stabilise the change should give some insight into the reality of our ability to terraform.

One method, probably the cheapest but only fixes the temperature and causes other problems:
https://geoengineering.global/stratospheric-aerosol-injection/

Probably the best methods (as they solve both the CO2 concentration issue and the temperature), but also probably the most expensive and time-consuming (therefore not good in an emergency):
https://geoengineering.global/carbon-dioxide-removal/

This method is most applicable to both geoengineering to stabilize the climate of Earth AND to terraforming Mars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
In particular: "By using the solar radiation pressure on the mirrors as solar sails and tilting them in the right direction, the flyer will be capable of altering its speed and direction to keep in position.[6] Such a group of sunshades would need to occupy an area of about 3.8 million square kilometers if placed at the L1 point.[6] The deployment of the flyers is an issue that requires reusable rockets. With a 100t LEO rocket, a single launch per day would allow the release of the required number of sails within 20 years, at a goal of 1% reduction."

Starship is a 100ton reusable launch vehicle with a planned flightrate much higher than once per day. And as solar sails have their own unlimited propulsion, you could as easily fly them to Mars where they could be used to redirect sunlight onto the south pole. (The difference, however, is that you would need them to be flat enough to function as an effective mirror. Doesn't have to be flat enough for optical clarity, of course, but keeping them flat enough is harder than just the sunshade role for Earth geoengineering.)

Zubrin calculates on the order of 200,000 tons of such sails (depending on how thin you can make the sails and the mass performance of any required structure) to largely vaporize the South Pole ice cap, liberating CO2 and water vapor, which are both greenhouse gases. That would only require about 5-6 years of daily Starship launches to achieve. Or on the order of 25 years' worth of Starlink launches (if each Starlink v2.0 weighs 1 ton and the full 40,000 satellite constellation is replaced every 5 years). This wouldn't fully terraform Mars, but the Mars ice caps could potentially release up to 150mbar (probably a lot less, but we don't know to what extent the water ice in the Mars ice caps is in the form of a CO2-H2O clathrate). Only 27mbar additional pressure at the datum is necessary to reach the "Armstrong Limit" at the lowest point on Mars in the Hellas Basin (over 7km below the datum, about a factor of 1.9 greater pressure than the datum... there's also a +/- 14% change in average pressure due to the season, plus ANOTHER +/- 6% of daily pressure variation, so under the best conditions, a factor of 2.3x greater pressure than the annual average pressure at Mars datum "sea level"... so as little as 20mbar additional pressure at the datum might be enough to reach Armstrong Limit at the lowest point on Mars at the best time at the best day of the year). And even just a doubling of the current Mars atmospheric pressure would significantly increase habitability.

We have all kinds of methods of geoengineering the Earth's climate. Yours is a totally ignorant post. Might pass on Twitter, but not here.

[DanClemmensen]

I was wondering why spring seems so green these days, and noticed that we have 33% more CO2 in the air than when I was a kid.  And that's entirely from from combining stuff that's already lying around - no imports or exports.  And with the vegetation (of which there is a lot) countering this effect by sucking up CO2.  Of course this is anti-terraforming (taking an Earth-like planet and making it uninhabitable) but the timelines should be similar.  A few millennia should do.

the mild changes seen in climate change are nothing compared to what is needed for terraforming.

However that we still have no method to stabilise the change should give some insight into the reality of our ability to terraform.

We need to reverse it, not stabilize it. We have a direct and immediate way to "stabilize the change" or reverse it. The unintended change is the result of overgrowth of a particular invasive species, so just kill off that species. This specific problem will not occur on Mars in the terraforming timeframe because that species' growth there would correlate with successful terraforming.

No, I do not advocate applying this solution, but it will apply itself via feedback unless we figure out a better way.

[meekGee]

I was wondering why spring seems so green these days, and noticed that we have 33% more CO2 in the air than when I was a kid.  And that's entirely from from combining stuff that's already lying around - no imports or exports.  And with the vegetation (of which there is a lot) countering this effect by sucking up CO2.  Of course this is anti-terraforming (taking an Earth-like planet and making it uninhabitable) but the timelines should be similar.  A few millennia should do.

the mild changes seen in climate change are nothing compared to what is needed for terraforming.

However that we still have no method to stabilise the change should give some insight into the reality of our ability to terraform.

First, on Earth climate change is an unintended consequence.  It's not like the entire industrial might of Earth had climate change as a goal.

Also, Earth's atmosphere and oceans have orders of magnitude more inertia.

The point here is that the claim of "planets are huge, it'll take millions of years" is demonstratably false.

As RB pointed out, the #1 priority is to increase pressure with CO2.  It'll solve many habitation structural issues, help w radiation, help w temperature, allow surface water, and enable planet-wide biosphere.

I think this is what the "50 year" estimates allude to.

Then there's oxygen generation, which will allow a full ecosystem.

But, getting the atmosphere to the point that it is "Earth like" will take a lot longer.  What we consider acceptable is a very narrow parameter space that our planet maintains and that we evolved into.

Once step at a time though.

[LouScheffer]

I was wondering why spring seems so green these days, and noticed that we have 33% more CO2 in the air than when I was a kid.  And that's entirely from from combining stuff that's already lying around - no imports or exports.  And with the vegetation (of which there is a lot) countering this effect by sucking up CO2.  Of course this is anti-terraforming (taking an Earth-like planet and making it uninhabitable) but the timelines should be similar.  A few millennia should do.

the mild changes seen in climate change are nothing compared to what is needed for terraforming.

This neglects the magic of compound interest.  33% in 50 years, if continued, is 300x in 1000 years, 90,000x in 2000 years, and 27,000,000x in 3000 years.  So what seems like slow changes to us can lead to huge impacts over historical time scales.

[JCRM]

I was wondering why spring seems so green these days, and noticed that we have 33% more CO2 in the air than when I was a kid.  And that's entirely from from combining stuff that's already lying around - no imports or exports.  And with the vegetation (of which there is a lot) countering this effect by sucking up CO2.  Of course this is anti-terraforming (taking an Earth-like planet and making it uninhabitable) but the timelines should be similar.  A few millennia should do.

We have all kinds of methods of geoengineering the Earth's climate. Yours is a totally ignorant post. Might pass on Twitter, but not here.

No, we currently have no ways of doing it. We have some ideas about how we might do it, but more research is needed to determine if they would actually work, and whether they would cause more problems than they would solve.

[Robotbeat]

I love the goal post moving.

“We have no method!!!”
*guy shows we have a bunch of methods, many that have already been demonstrated*
“Well we haven’t already deployed the solution at full scale to completely solve the problem! I will never acknowledge the point!”


When one can’t (or refuses to) engage in logical, quantitative, first principles arguments, one demands increasingly high bars to clear in order to even start the discussion.

(Also:!fix your quotes!)

[trimeta]

I can't help but wonder if this discussion of the challenges of terraforming Mars is perhaps in the wrong thread (and subforum).

[deadman1204]

I can't help but wonder if this discussion of the challenges of terraforming Mars is perhaps in the wrong thread (and subforum).

there isn't even any science in it, just "what looks nice". Wrong forum?