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Comment by dsq | Hacker News Reader

Isnt terraforming a waste? After all, there's no need for open lakes and breathable air over the entire planet, even if it was feasible given the available water, which it isn't. Much better to concentrate resources to make human livable sealed communities with something like hydroponics for food.

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If we wanted a population of, say 100 million people, which of the following two projects would require more resources?

A.) Habitats and sealed communities along with all the heating, radiation mitigation, life support systems, etc. along with the infrastructure to support farming and all other necessary activities hardened for the harsh environment.

B.) Putting the correct mixture of gases into the atmosphere to warm the planet, protect against radiation, CO2 for plants to breathe and make the air pressure high enough to allow for liquid water.

I genuinely don't know. It seems to me like at a certain population it would be cheaper to do B rather than have an enormous population along with all the farms and whatnot they need in large steel and glass domes. For what it's worth Mars seems to have all the necessary raw ingredients for terraforming except for nitrogen or some other filler gas for the atmosphere.

Terraforming (B) would require more resources, probably by several orders of magnitude. It would be badass, though.

I think you vastly underestimate the amount of radiation and how hard it would be to build a colony that is protected enough and is "self sustaining".

Nice kurzgesagt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqKGREZs6-w

If we manage to terraform mostly using robots and bacteria that would be so much easier.

And I think you vastly underestimate how big a planet is. "Put the correct mixture of gases in the atmosphere"? Where from? At least if you're building small enclaves on a planet surface, you can repurpose mass that's already there.

In terms of the physical weight/volume of resources terraforming probably would be order of magnitudes more. But if terraforming involves mostly releasing frozen and underground stores of gasses, well that's potentially cheaper than building giant vacuum-sealed dome cities. And as a result you get the whole surface as a habitat (in the long run).

A is the only thing we'll be able to do in the next 500 years, if that helps.

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