Terraforming: Why the Moon is a better target than Mars | Hacker News Reader

Terraforming: Why the Moon is a better target than Mars

bigthink.com

30 pointsmooreds17 comments

I think the best target for off-world colonization is variously designed giant space stations in orbit around Earth and, later, sharing Earth's orbit (maybe lagrange points) around the Sun.

To create the best possible life for humans offworld, we'll need VERY close contact with Earth for a long time. I mean Amazon Prime delivery close. Coming down for family Thanksgiving close. Lots of sharing and experimenting as easily and cheaply as possible. We don't want to have to adapt to the random features of some other natural body that's far away and not very good. We should learn how to build an artificial body that has exactly the features we love and then, when we've learned how to make a great place for humans to live in space, replicate them, which will be easier if the whole thing was man-made to begin with.

I think a SS will be essential as a waypoint but the difference is we can't mine anything at scale in space but we can on the moon. A full scale Mars civilization is never happening without a major advance in propulsion and cost-effective materials. The moon is close enough that we can iterate and learn fairly quickly. There are so so many things we only think we know how to do but haven't really tried. Hopefully all these fake space flights can at least fun a moon colony. In the end though, humans are selfish and we won't take care of the next planet any better than we do this one.

> we can't mine anything at scale in space but we can on the moon

Huh. I thought we could mine asteroids in space pretty effectively? https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/mining-in-space-is-com... has some details.

Sorry, I wasn't clear in that statement. I meant that if we are on a space station in orbit somewhere we can't mine anything right there. We could go to an asteroid or whatever or we could go to the moon which is always right there.

Strictly speaking it is just our moon not "interplanetary" space travel. So from a marketing/technology perspective Mars is far more attractive and a greater engineering challenge. The moon is a "boring" enterprise three digits billionaires seem to dislike.

But yes, in a sober assessment - coming from someone from middle class - the better we are in appreciating and understanding the balances of our own earth inculding keeping societal peace (how many nukes are ready to strike in any second?) the greater our chances to become interplanetary, and the moon is a obvious neighborhood playground for the intermediary phase. But it really gets a bad rep; possibly because of human hybris and its sad history after 1969.

Even better candidate: Earth. Geoengineering gets a bad rap, but we're much close to accomplishing it than terraforming a hostile planet.

Geoengineering on our only home is extremely dangerous. YC proposed desert flooding for carbon sequestration http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/

Even if you assume the energy demands aren't an issue, and you could build these shallow pools, and find something to do with the captured carbon, you've probably just killed the Amazon by turning the Sahara into a series of ponds as the Sahara fertilizes the Amazon. You've probably also just caused insanely disruptive, and potentially catastrophic, changes to weather patterns by introducing obscene amounts of new moisture into the air over the Sahara which would almost certainly impact the entire planet's weather patterns.

Oh, you say you want to make a new tree that sequesters carbon better or is more ideal for reforestation? Like, oh, Maddie Hall is trying to do with Living cabron? Alright, great. But have you thought about the massive mycorrhizal networks that support forests, or the thousands of species per cubic meter of soil, or the fact that things that grow faster tend to fall over much easier and that the massive trees of the world are extremely slow growth, have you thought about how fast minerals might be stripped from fast growing trees, changes to weather, impact on the water table, did you just make a horribly invasive species, are you creating a tree that's a candy-filled playground for invasive insect species, is the species now outcompeting native ones that are necessary for any number of other species?

Etc., etc., so on and so forth.

In other words, humans aren't clever enough to engineer stable ecosystems that is slightly more complex than a fish tank.

In fact, humans aren't capable of predicting a chaotic system's outcome at all! It's the same for an economy - humans want to set policies for economic sustainability and growth, but every plan, every intervention and policy decision seems to have some negative externality not considered.

Geoengineering doesn't solve the single planet problem.

Does the moon really solve that problem? Can it become truly autonomous? How many millennium would this take?

I don't know how long it would take for the moon to become truly autonomous.

But I do know it would take less time to build a multi-planet civilization starting with the moon than trying to build a multi-planet civilization using geoengineering because the latter is by definition impossible.

Maybe the best approach is to forget about a multi-planet civilization at this point in time (we clearly lack the technology) and focus on preserving our one planet civilization for as long as possible.

Another comment above almost came out and said it, but stopped short. Rich people simply want their own planet. This has nothing to do with ‘the human species.’ They have trashed Earth and they will need to keep doing so in order to keep industry humming, so they want another planet where they can live a life decoupled from all the associated inconveniences of the logical conclusion of capitalism.

That's a very stretched argument.

And what's wrong with wanting a planet, if it is possible and economically feasible?

imagine you're stuck at a desert island, with limited fresh water.

You can either make it last as long as possible, but know that it will eventually run out (or the island sinks), or you strike out on the ocean by building a raft.

Personally, I'm using the available resources to try and catch some rain water. A lot less risky than the open ocean --- which will still leave you with a water problem.

Doesn’t anybody worry about the consequences of mining the moon? https://youtu.be/odrgDzciG6s

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