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Comment by peey | Hacker News Reader

"Mars Terraforming Not Possible Using Present-Day Technology"

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terrafo...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0529-6

And? Building bases on the moon, mars, or the asteroid belt doesn't require terraforming, anymore than living on an Antarctic base through winter requires the ability to farm for food, and wear a bikini.

We spent $700 billion a year on the defense budget, and $7 trillion on wars, $1 billion on inspiring stunts like moon landings or mars landings once a generation, are not really a waste, the money is mostly spent on earth, dual use technology comes out of it, and it opens the possibility of space tourism, not to mention just cheaper launch capabilities (driven by the need to send a million tons to Mars) also benefit building a better space-based asteroid/comet defense system too.

>We spent $700 billion a year on the defense budget, and $7 trillion on wars, $1 billion on inspiring stunts like moon landings or mars landings once a generation, are not really a waste

That's because they are framed as a more immediate existential threat. Humans are present biased and don't like to spend lots of money on low-probability events until they are unavoidable (see: attitudes towards pandemic preparations in 2019).

Actually we don’t fix stuff as a species until people start dying. How long it takes is how much bad PR is involved. Avoiding that bad PR instead of solving the problem is an art that we have become better at than solving problems.

Yup. Paul Krugman once said something to the effect that the human race would benefit from an Alien Invasion, because the way things are going, we don't invest in the planet, we don't unify and put aside petty grievances and selfishness, until there's a unified enemy.

If an actual high probability ELE asteroid collision was detected, people would get their shit together real quick. Or maybe not, the COVID crisis has shattered my faith. I'm sure a bunch of people would claim the asteroid prediction is a NASA scam to install socialism or something.

I share your cynicism. I'm not sure that's a comfortable position though but it's better to live in fear than ignorance I suspect.

Talking about terraforming is kind of off-topic, but I would note that the articles refer specifically to terraforming by increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, which has pros and cons. It would raise the temperature, but it wouldn't result in human-breathable atmosphere, if that was a goal.

Perhaps there aren't any better alternatives, but I'd think that orbital mirrors at least would be an option (like the soletta from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy), though the scale of construction would be beyond anything that's been done before even if it were extremely thin. Placing a million square miles of mylar into space doesn't sound like an easy problem, though something much smaller and specifically focused at, say, the equator or specific sites might be more practical.

If we can't even stop our own planet from warming...

It's not an either-or. This canard comes up a lot. The US federal government invests in an enormous number of things, think of it as a huge portfolio. NASA's budget is less than 0.5% of the federal budget, it's existence won't harm policies needed to mitigate climate change (e.g. carbon taxes), and indeed, a chunk of NASA's investment helps climate science.

Oh I didn't mean what you think I meant. I'm sorry I wasn't more clear.

I'm not one of those "why spend money on space when humans are starving on Earth" people.

My point was more about the actual technology required to terraform a planet. Why talk about terraforming Mars when our own would be saved by the same non-existent tech.

Oh sorry, my bad. I'm just triggered from seeing that argument so much. I agree, we need to terraform earth first. 1) stop the damage from getting worse 2) if it doesn't reverse itself, we may need geo-engineering, carbon capture, orbital mirrors, etc

And that's fine in the future maybe it's possible. Parent reply doesn't mention terraforming.

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