Also note that the headline is wrong. He is talking about planets outside the solar system. Terraforming Mars is quick and easy compared to flying to a more habitable planet.
Yeah, we just need to funnel excess CO2 from Venus to Mars and make both planets habitable in the process. Easy peasy. 2 million years tops.
I'd consider finding a fast method of travel and suitable planet detection to be much much simpler than terraforming Mars, Venus or any other planet in this system. It's just a sequence of directed findings, maybe would take 1000 years. That's incomparable to starting geological-level processes on another planet and getting it right.
Regardless of how much we fuck up Earth it would still be more hospitable than Mars.
If we have the technology to terraform Mars then we will have the technology to geoengineer earth back to a more hospitable state.
This isn’t an argument to continue to fuck up the planet but terraforming Mars is about as feasible as interstellar travel at this point in time and likely will be so for the next 5 generations if not longer.
Ironically the most realistic part of the Expanse is that Mars despite being settled by millions of people is still a lifeless rock outside of the domes people live in.
> It's super hard compared to fixing Planet Earth.
I don't think that's true. Most of Earth's problems are political, with humans in charge exercising their power on purpose to make pollution on Earth worse. On Earth you are fighting against rich and powerful people who want the pollution to get worse (because it temporarily 'enriches' them, ugh). This is happening at an accelerating rate.
There is no such challenge on Mars to overcome. Nobody is arguing (with any power) that we should not terraform Mars, but even the US President thinks that Earthly climate change is a 'hoax' invented by the Chinese to specifically harm America. THAT is what prevents progress here, not technological development.
We have technology to 'fix' Earth today and to 'terraform' Mars soon. The main issue on Earth is that the people with the power to do something good are choosing to bad instead.
What makes you think that on Mars there won't be politics? Once Mars is within reach politics will arrive with the first human settlers.
What the US president believes is not representative for what politicians in general believe. He's somewhat of an exception (fortunately). Unfortunately, he's doing a lot of damage but even if he weren't the problem would largely remain the same.
That's exactly how it'll go. At some point, humans on Mars will become tribal. Then we can watch history repeat from a distance (all the while it is repeating here anyway...)
I agree with you that the problem is largely political (though I think because of that the technology is lagging too). But even if we conduct huge engineering efforts to let humans 'live' on Mars, there are still several orders of magnitude between the pleasantness of life there and here.
Terraforming Mars is a gigantic project. We might be slow in fixing problems on Earth, but in general we do fix them. Even if we get to our senses in 2100 after a global nuclear war and when climate change has ran away in extreme levels, reverting it is still much easier than terraforming Mars.
The author isn't just talking about being hard or take a long time, as opposed to quick and easy. The scientist is suggesting that humans will never go; it seems to me that it's much too early into the history of spaceflight to make such a determination.
Not really, there are some pretty hard limits on interstellar travel and humans don't seem particularly suited to the task either in lifespan, general durability and ability to deal with boredom.
I like SF quite a bit but I'm well aware of what the 'F' stands for.
That's an overly literal reading of the statements quoted. The context of the statement is "when it comes to treating our planet well". That is, at the timescales at which we are currently threatening the integrity of the ecosystem (~centuries) interstellar space travel is irrelevant.
> ... compared to flying to a more habitable planet.
Ah, OK, right, agreed completely. Very good point.
And both are wildly misrepresented as to their difficulty.
Terraforming Mars is how many times more difficult than not destroying Terra? Billion? Trillion? Exillion?
"It's OK for us to destroy Terra, we can "simply" find another planet to live on and if not we'll simply Terraform a planet that is uninhabitable."
That's the philosophy this Laureate is speaking against, and it's clearly a delusional philosophy held by millions including the shyster sociopath Elon Musk and every last one of the fanatical devotees of his deranged and unscientific cult.
How can anyone believe they are going to travel vast distances to some hostile alien planet carrying a minimalist cargo to not just reboot civilization but terraform the planet to begin with, and succeed, when they have no ability to survive on a planet that in every way is completely dedicated and attuned to the optimal survival of their kind? What hubris and madness in such a belief. Comparably one might find they are incapable of living on a tropical island with fertile fruit trees and abundant fish and announce that they intend to move to Antarctica and transform it into a tropical paradise using vines and coconuts lashed together on a raft. It's utterly delusional. Believers in the madness should be committed to asylums for the insane, if they can take a moment away from their busy schedule of gulping down drugs and accusing cave rescuers in Thailand of being pedophiles.
