Hacker News Reader

Comment by klmadfejno | Hacker News Reader

> The entire surface area of Mars is less than 5x that of Siberia plus the Sahara desert plus the Australian outback

This is such a weird statement. It's less than five times three very large areas combined... It leaves me with no idea how large it is. For those curious, it's about the same land surface area as earth has (removing oceans).

View on HN

Its three large areas we aren't putting effort into putting people and terraforming.

They've got the same challenges but are easier

Thats the first thought I always have when terraforming is discussed, we can't even fix earth, how would we fix another planet.

Earth has a lot of people living on it, and any effort at repair is just as likely to wreck it. You can't "colonize and terraform Siberia" without turning the US into a scorching desert.

Mars has 0 people living on it, and is already uninhabitable. We literally cannot make it worse for anybody, and are in no danger of wrecking anything we need to survive by trying.

I would much larger we try planet-scale geo-engineering on Mars, then try planet scale geoengineering on Earth (and we're already flirting with that because of climate change).

There is a wealth of information to be gained from attempting dramatic changes to a planet's condition, and establishing a biosphere, which would be extremely important for any attempt at large scale Earth biosphere repair.

> You can't "colonize and terraform Siberia" without turning the US into a scorching desert.

How does it work?

permafrost methane release

We could if we had the political will. There are terraforming-like approaches that would e.g. reduce global temperature, but good luck getting the political consensus to actually put them into practice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com