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Comment by miika | Hacker News Reader

Yea, also, maybe we should try to make Sahara green before attempting to terraform Mars? :)

On Earth there are numerous second and third order effects to consider. For example, Sahara is considered a very important source of phosphorus for the Amazon rainforest [0] and making Sahara green could have a huge negative impact on it. Meanwhile on Mars impact of terraforming mistakes on population is much smaller because it would be already shielded heavily from external environment.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_dust

We're entirely capable of that already, and have done so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafilalt

We didn't make that hospitable though. We found a hospitable place in an otherwise barren landscape. That's very different to Mars.

Mars is more like the rest of the desert, but with the addition of deadly levels of radiation and no breathable atmosphere.

What are we supposed to be seeing here? It's still a barren desert on Google Satellite imagery.

And even if it wasn't, this town's area is minuscule compared to the area of the Sahara.

> What are we supposed to be seeing here?

Life thriving in an inhospitable place.

> And even if it wasn't, this town's area is minuscule compared to the area of the Sahara.

As will the first couple hundred/thousand years worth of Mars bases. We'll be building oases first.

> Life thriving in an inhospitable place.

It's an oasis. Far from an inhospitable place. Certainly an order of magnitude more hospitable than Mars.

> As will the first couple hundred/thousand years worth of Mars bases.

Do you also intend to live forever to see the exponential leaps in technology required for this?

> It's an oasis. Far from an inhospitable place.

The presence of water makes an otherwise inhospitable place attractive. The same is likely to be true on Mars - colonies will be sited near ice for the same reason.

Do I intend to live forever? No. I think humans should make plans that benefit future generations, not just our own.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson made the point quite a while ago that if we had the ability to terraform another planet, we'd have the ability to fix our own.

That's not necessarily true, though. There are things you can do with a fresh slate, empty planet that aren't feasible on Earth. It also misses the redundancy aspect of colonizing another planet.

Short-term Mars plans aren't "terraform it so you can live outside"; it's stuff we can already likely accomplish in the Sahara or Antarctica if we really felt like it. Oases already exist in the Sahara; humans have permanent inhabitation in the Antarctic.

Another comment mentioned turning the Sahara green. This is] within our capacity. But the Sahara, as presently composited, is home to myriad life. It is a cultural edifice for bordering civilizations. And its modification would have repercussions for every other person on the planet.

This baggage doesn't exist on Mars. (To the degree it does, it's de minimus compared with Earth's.) We can close off a canyon, pressurize it and call it a city. Try doing a tenth of that here without going bankrupt on the back of CEQUA challenges.

Yeah, but slamming ice asteroids into Mars is also wholly impractical on current timescales.

Perhaps developing that technology on another planet is a good idea?

I don't know about you but I hate developing on the production system. It's just too high stress.

And that is intellectually dishonest. If, as we are finding, it is easier to heat up a planet, then we can both terraform Mars and not fix Earth.

> it is easier to heat up a planet, then we can both terraform Mars and not fix Earth

That's not the only challenge with terraforming Mars, e.g. you also have to remove perchlorates and install a healthy soil microbiome etc. Those are fertile ground (pun not intended) for earthly applications.

I'd say the challenge on earth is political. I'm not sure if changing the minds and actions of billions of humans is easier than removing all the perchlorates from Mars.

Good thing there won’t be any “politics” involved in the colonization of mars then right?

Or master a self-sustaining community on Antarctica, which would be a lot less challenging than Mars.

I'd expect to see people living in Antarctica before large numbers of people move to the Moon/Mars. Living conditions are a lot easier if you don't have to worry about pressure or oxygen.

...or excessive radiation, or multibillion dollar resupply missions, or...

Why? It’s much easier to leave Antarctica than it is to leave Mars.

You can die in either place.

Or on, in or under the oceans.

Why?

"Don't do the hard thing, easier things exist" is always true. Why not do the harder thing? Marathon runners don't typically go "man, it'd be better if I just did a 5K", right?

That's actually a great analogy because being able to run 5km is actually a prerequisite for being able to run 42km.

Sure, but that doesn't mean you have to complete a 5K race before you're allowed to do a marathon. A marathon can be your first competitive race.

We can similarly go to Mars before we grow crops in Antarctica, even if the resulting tech would also have the side benefit of being useful there. They needn't even be mutually exclusive; some prospective techs for a Mars or Moon base already get tested in places like Antarctica.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea But as sibling comments said, this will likely have devastating effects on other ecosystems.

Nature does that every 5000 or 20000 years, iirc or maybe they haven't fully determined the cycle times yet. But there is evidence that it has been grassland and grazed upon

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